Introduction
Mr. Isaac Deutscher concluded his controversial biography of Joseph Stalin, published in 1949, by classing the Soviet ruler as a "great revolutionary despot" like Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte. It was a historical verdict which many, as unfamiliar with Stalin as they were with Cromwell and Napoleon, accepted. A few months ago, Stalin's successor and former "close comrade-in-arms," Nikita Khrushchev, provided the evidence to place Stalin in a class by himself, beyond Caligula, Philip II of Spain and perhaps even Adolf Hitler.
Khrushchev's indictment is a healthy antidote to 30 years of pro-Stalinist apologetics; at the same time, it does less than justice to Stalin's predecessors and successors. To understand the dictatorship of Stalin, as it is described by Khrushchev, one must also understand the dictatorship of Lenin and of Khrushchev and his colleagues.
The Communist party came to power in Russia by force, overthrowing an eight-month democratic regime which had made Russia (in Lenin's own words) "the freest country in the world." The coup d'état of November 7, 1917, actually led by Leon Trotsky, was quickly followed by repression of democratic parties and institutions. In December 1917, the Communist terror apparatus, known as the Cheka, was set up, and it has continued to function ever since—under the successive names of OGPU, NKVD and MVD-MGB. Nevertheless, three weeks after the Communist coup, 36 million Russians voted in free elections for an All-Russian Constituent Assembly, gave only a fourth of their votes to the Communists and a clear majority to the agrarian, democratic Socialist Revolutionaries. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and their associates dispersed the Assembly by force on January 19, 1918.
For more than two years, Russia was engulfed by civil war, which crushed the democrats and socialists and ended as a battle between Communists and reactionary militarists. Trotsky's Red Army was victorious, despite sporadic foreign intervention, but the Communist regime continued to meet
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