The World полностью

As Atatürk and Reza shaped their new states, the third creator, Lenin, was forging a new Russia, unafraid of the human cost. ‘A revolution without firing squads is meaningless,’ he said, and in his orders to henchmen he frenziedly demanded mass killings. Now he devised a state, ruled by himself as chairman of the council of people’s commissars (premier), controlled exclusively by a small Communist Party and actually governed by a tiny cabal of leaders. The cabinet, known as the Political Bureau (Politburo), dominated by the talented Trotsky and Stalin, assumed a quasi-sacred prerogative of omniscient decision-making on behalf of the people that Lenin called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. As Lenin temporarily instituted a soft capitalism to cope with a country ruined by war, he and Stalin debated its ethnic shape with a view to keeping Ukraine and controlling what they called the ‘limitrophes’ (border-countries from Roman limitrophus). Stalin, a Georgian, proposed a Russian Soviet federation; the Ukrainian, Georgian and other ethnic Bolsheviks wanted independence from Russia. Lenin, who loathed ‘Great Russian chauvinism’, agreed with them. He aimed to keep Ukrainians in and Poles out, proposing a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Europe and Asia in which the four main peoples had their own republics. This was designed to satisfy the aspirations of Ukrainians and Georgians who had supported the revolution to escape the tsarist ‘prison of nations’. Its genius was that technically the peoples could ‘check out’ any time they liked, but they could ‘never leave’. Its flaw was if the Party was ever weakened, the republics could seize theoretical independence and become ready-made countries. But no one considered that. It was never likely to happen.^*

The effort had broken Lenin. In May 1922, resting at a dacha outside Moscow, he suffered a stroke, leaving him half paralysed and unable to speak. At the Bolshoi Theatre, on 28 December, Stalin oversaw the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in which national cultures such as the Ukrainians or Georgians were encouraged within their republics. When Lenin returned to the Kremlin, he had another stroke. Like all leaders, he believed he was irreplaceable: he appointed Stalin, his high-handed but self-deprecating Georgian henchman, as general secretary, to balance the haughty, flashy Trotsky, war commissar. Now he begged Stalin to give him cyanide so he could commit suicide. Stalin refused. Yet while Trotsky did little to create a faction, Stalin, sociable, accessible and modest, cultivated allies among the tough provincial praktiki who preferred his dourness to Trotsky’s arrogance. Besides, the Russians would never support a Jewish leader. When Stalin’s coarse will to power emerged, the paralysed Lenin tried to remove him, but it was too late. While Trotsky and other hifalutin ideologists continued to underestimate Stalin, he was already making decisions: in January 1923, he supported Sun Yat-sen who, after thirty years, finally found a backer who could deliver.

THE SONG SISTERS: SUN, CHIANG AND MAO

Sun and his young wife Qingling Song had lived for five years see-sawing between power and disaster. In 1917 Sun, backed by the Germans, seized power in Guangzhou and declared himself grand marshal, but he was swiftly deposed. As Lenin fell ill, Sun returned to Guangzhou as president, until in June 1922 one of his generals tried to assassinate him. Sun fled for the port, ruthlessly leaving his young pregnant wife Qingling as bait to cover his escape: it was ‘a life-and-death struggle’, she recalled; ‘we were literally buried in a hell of constant gunfire’, after which ‘I disguised myself as an old countrywoman with a guard disguised as a pedlar …’ She suffered a miscarriage, but she and Sun were reunited and protected by a young KMT general, Chiang Kai-shek, who arranged their sanctuary in Shanghai as Sun appealed to Moscow.

Soon after Lenin’s coup, Sun had telegraphed his admiration to the ‘great man’. There was something about Sun and Lenin that was similar. ‘Do you know,’ said Meiling Song, ‘I’ve noticed the most successful men are usually not the ones with great powers as geniuses but the ones who had such ultimate faith in their own selves that invariably they hypnotize others as well as themselves.’ Lenin had ordered the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, but it was tiny: Moscow backed Sun.