The chief resource of the “revolutionary dictatorship” was Lenin's iron will. “The greatest inward mobilization of all his forces…made him the greatest revolutionary of history,” said Trotsky. He was abstemious, sitting at his desk on a plain wooden chair, dining with his wife and sisters on soup and black bread which Krupskaya carried from the Kremlin restaurant. “He worked from morn till night, and out of great anxiety he could not sleep,” recalled Krupskaya. “He would awake in the middle of the night, get out of bed, and begin to check by telephone: had this or the other of his orders been carried out? think up some kind of additional telegram to send.”
The old machinery of government had been smashed. Existing law in Russia was abolished. Lenin built a new apparatus from the ground up, or rather, from himself down. All authority owed from him—or from the committees that he dominated, which amounted to the same thing. He fined cabinet members for coming late to meetings. His orders, even on small administrative matters, were sent in a blizzard of telegrams all over the vast expanse of Russia. Yet the British philosopher Bertrand Russell found him “entirely without a trace of hauteur. If one met him without knowing who he was, one would not guess that he is possessed of great power or even that he is in any way very eminent.” Angelica Balabanoff, who served as secretary to the Comintern in its early days, wrote that even though Lenin was “intoleran[t] of any deviation from his way of thinking,” he “avoided everything that might…lead toward the establishment of a personality cult.” Anatole Lunacharsky, the commissar of education, explained the apparent contradiction: “He does his work imperiously, not because power is sweet to him but because he is sure that he is right and cannot endure to have anybody spoil his work.”
Alas, he had so little to work with. His regard for his followers was always laced with contempt. His so-called “testament,” a deathbed missive to the Central Committee, read like a painstaking catalogue of each of their faults. During the years of exile he had repeatedly had to fortify them against the temptation of compromise with other factions, and then during October he had had to goad them on to the seizure of power. No sooner was it theirs, than many were wavering once again. Fearing that their party could not succeed on its own, several Bolshevik leaders endorsed the proposal of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries for a governing coalition of all socialist parties.
Lenin would not hear of it. To him, the others were “petty bourgeois” and had to be treated as a part of the “class enemy.” He called for “ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them!” and “Hatred and contempt for the parties which defend them—the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and today's Left Socialist-Revolutionaries!”
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