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In Every Happy Day. Not even Communist historians are sure how Lenin's regime managed to survive the invasion by allied armies from all sides, the civil war, the total economic chaos resulting from Lenin's belief that "any cook can run a state." He had made literally no plans for governing. He told his Bolshevik high command, "Try to nationalize the banks, and then see what to do next. We'll learn from experience."
In 1921, the sailors of Kronstadt, who had helped to bring about the revolution and to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, rose against the Lenin regime, crying: "Enough shooting of our brothers!" Lenin crushed the revolt. By conservative estimate, 5,000,000 died in the first few years of his rule. But Lenin realized that the time had come for changes. Politically, the regime stayed as dictatorial as before, but he instituted the New Economic Policy, a right turn toward partial capitalism that gave groaning Russia a brief respite. It was to be among Lenin's last official acts, for in 1922 he was incapacitated by a series of strokes that left him paralyzed and partly speechless until he died in 1924.
Such the career, such the accomplishments, of the leader whom both Moscow and Peking fervently claim as their own, and of whom Russian schoolchildren sing:
Lenin is always alive,
Lenin is always with you.
In sorrow, hope and joy
Lenin is with you in your spring.
In every happy day
Lenin is within you and within me.
Cleared Smoke. The triangular division that Marxism is so prone to became evident even before Lenin's death in 1924. The right wing of the Central Committee was led by Bukharin, who wanted an even wider application of the NEP; the center was dourly controlled by Stalin; and the left followed Trotsky and the flamboyant Zinoviev. When the smoke cleared, Trotsky was again in exile, Zinoviev and Bukharin were dead, and Stalin was in power.
Before he died, Lenin carefully considered the man who was to succeed him. Joseph Stalin had risen to the post of first party secretary from his beginnings as a terrorist and holdup man for party funds. In his political testament, Lenin warned in vain against making Stalin his successor, because he considered him too rude and too ambitious.
And yet Stalin had as much right as Khrushchev to claim Lenin's heritage, perhaps more. Although he added his personal despotic flourishes, Stalin had learned about terror, about dictatorship, about the total disregard of human life or ordinary human decency, from his master Lenin. In one important respect, Stalin did greatly enlarge upon a force present in Lenin's life only embryonically—Russian nationalism.
In purging Trotsky, Stalin sounded much like Khrushchev attacking Mao. Trotsky, like Mao, talked about an immediate drive for world revolution; Stalin countered with repetition of Lenin's concept of "socialism in one country" and the idea that Mother Russia must be developed first as a guide and model for the world revolution. For the sake of Soviet foreign policy, he calmly sacrificed the interests of foreign Communist parties—notably including the Chinese party itself. In all this, Khrushchev closely resembles Stalin, even though he took the momentous step of denouncing Stalin's oppressive form of dictatorship.