Joseph Stalin

When his Father Confessor asked Narvaez on his deathbed, "General, have you forgiven your enemies?" the General answered, "I have no enemies. I had them shot." So Joseph Stalin might have answered, too, had he believed in deathbed confession for himself, as he did for his victims. Yet one cannot have all one's enemies shot, for they grow by a chain reaction: each gap filled by tens and hundreds who knew, loved, believed in, or identified themselves with the executed. This was doubtless one of the reasons for the six hours and ten minutes of silence of Stalin 's heirs before they announced his death.

What debates and deals went on in those terrifying six hours we can only conjecture. But the announcement, when it came, was not so much a lamentation as an anxious call to collective leadership, orderly succession, monolithic unity, the avoidance of razbrod i panika , "confusion and panic." The earliest post- Stalin issue of the party's leading organ of theory, Kommunist (No. 4, March 9, 1953), declared that the party's greatest strength lay in "collective work, collective leadership and monolithic unity." And on April 16, Pravda invoked some of Stalin 's own words to denounce leaders who "decide important questions individually, without consulting members of the bureaus." Thus, even before his corpse was cold, the orphaned sons of the Father of the Peoples began to wrestle with his ghost. But laying a ghost is not so simple, especially when the exorcists are his accomplices, and his heirs.

A party congress is supposed to be the "supreme body" of the Com-munist party. It picks the executive, lays down the line, exacts responsibilities. But even in Lenin's day, the congress had been drained of its sovereign powers.

Though Lenin always kept up some consultation with others ("collective leadership"), he was possessed of a selfless egoism which enabled him at all times to identify his own views with the correct line and the truth. In the years of exile abroad, he personally selected a little group of followers, usually two, to form a troika. With them he laid down the line, edited the central organ, directed the groups abroad and the underground inside Russia. Whenever these triumvirs disagreed with him, he excommunicated them, or if need be seceded himself, to set up a new troika. Wherever two or three were gathered together with Lenin, there was bolshevism.

His devotion to centralism and his theory of an elite party both precluded any real devolution of power. A leadership of classless professional revolutionaries was to set up a guardianship over the working class, then take power in its name. Since anything done by his "vanguard" party in the name of the workers was, according to his theory, done by the workers themselves, it became all-important to him that no other party be permitted to call itself "proletarian." That explains the fury with which he branded every other Socialist party as "bourgeois" or "petit-bourgeois," as he did such factions in his own party as the Workers Opposition, which challenged his line and methods in the name of the working class itself.