BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
"I think that a few dozen workers, added to the CC [Central Committee], can deal better than anybody else with checking, improving, and remodeling our state apparatus."

This proposal, made by V.I. Lenin in December 1922 to the approaching 12th congress of the Communist Party in Russia, captures the essence of the last political struggle waged by the central leader of the Russian revolution and the Soviet government in its early years.

Lenin's Final Fight, just published by Pathfinder, presents the record of that battle in Lenin's own words. In it, fighting workers, farmers, and youth will discover a gold mine of revolutionary politics and the real political legacy of the Bolshevik-led revolution.

Five years after the victory of the October 1917 revolution in Russia, Lenin was fighting to maintain the communist course along which the Bolshevik party had led millions of workers and peasants to take power over the landlords and capitalists, defeat invading imperialist armies, and begin to build a workers state.

This Pathfinder edition makes available the speeches, articles, letters, and other writings in which Lenin took up the battle inside the Bolshevik party that opened in September 1922. It compiles everything Lenin is known to have written from Dec. 21, 1922, until his last letter of March 6, 1923, addressed to Georgian communist leaders.

Previously scattered documents
While much of this material was already available in the English-language edition of Lenin's Collected Works published in Moscow in the 1960s, it was scattered among several volumes. By putting all these documents together and in chronological order, including a few published for the first time, Lenin's Final Fight makes for powerful reading.

Readers will find it hard to put down this book as they follow Lenin's struggle week by week, sometimes day by day, taking up political issues that remain vitally relevant today. The chronology, detailed index, explanatory notes, and descriptive chapter divisions are a valuable aid to the reader.

Lenin discusses some of the burning questions of that day, including the need to forge a union of workers and peasants republics, to defend the rights of oppressed nationalities and combat Great Russian chauvinism, and to strengthen the alliance between the working class and the peasantry. He takes up the New Economic Policy and its place in the world struggle for socialism, and defends the state monopoly of foreign trade.

These questions, as the book's introduction notes, "deal with the most decisive piece of unfinished business in front of those who produce the wealth of the world and make possible culture: they deal with the worldwide struggle, opened by the Bolshevik-led revolution nearly eighty years ago, to replace the dictatorship of a tiny minority of exploiting capitalists families with the dictatorship of the proletariat," that is, a workers state. Today, these questions are especially relevant to the socialist revolution in Cuba - the first since the Bolsheviks to be led by a proletarian leadership.

The revolutionary government that came to power in October 1917 was based on councils of workers', peasants', and soldiers' delegates called soviets, the Russian word for council.

It mobilized peasants to expropriate the big landlords' estates and distribute the nationalized land to be worked by the tillers. It freed oppressed peoples who had been under the tsarist boot of Russian oppression from Ukraine to Mongolia, and guaranteed their right to national self- determination - the first government in the world to do so.

The Bolshevik leadership organized workers to expropriate capitalist property in industry, banking, and wholesale trade, and established a state monopoly of foreign trade. It fought to draw workers into taking increasing control of industry and on that basis advance toward workers' management, making it possible to begin economic planning to meet social needs.

The Bolsheviks also launched an international communist movement to aid fellow workers and farmers around the world in emulating their struggle.

New Economic Policy
Lenin's Final Fight opens with a speech to the 11th Communist Party congress in March 1922, where Lenin takes up the main challenges facing the Soviet government. In refreshingly clear class terms and mincing no words, he evaluates the results of the past year under the New Economic Policy (NEP).

Lenin describes the NEP, dictated in large part by the economic and social devastation caused by the 1918-20 civil war and imperialist intervention, as a retreat aimed above all at preserving the worker-peasant alliance - the backbone of the revolution.

Under the NEP, among other measures, the Soviet government ended the requisitioning of peasants' grain surpluses and replaced it with a tax in kind, based on a sliding scale favoring small peasants and those producing most efficiently. A private agricultural market was authorized and foreign capitalists were encouraged to invest in nationalized factories under strict government control.

In the first year, modest advances were made in regaining the confidence of the peasants and reviving industry.

In several speeches and letters in this collection, Lenin emphasizes the proletarian foundations of the revolution that made the retreat possible and the limits that must be placed on this retreat in face of the inevitable strengthening of capitalist and capitalist-minded layers of society, including among thousands of functionaries in the state and party apparatus. "The fight against capitalist society has become a hundred times more fierce and perilous, because we are not always able to tell enemies from friends," he points out in the March 1922 speech.

Calling for a halt to aspects of the retreat once its purpose had been achieved, Lenin says, "We now have a different objective, that of regrouping our forces." One of the measures advocated by the communist leader along these lines is dealt with in a later article, "On Cooperation," written in January 1923. There Lenin argues forcefully for encouraging peasants - most of whom tilled small family plots - to form cooperatives under the leadership of the working class to advance the building of socialism.

In his November 1922 speech to delegates at the fourth congress of the Communist International, Lenin explains the broader relevance that the NEP experience in Russia has for the worldwide struggle to overthrow capitalist rule and begin the transition to socialism.

Dispute over Georgia
In September 1922, just a few months before the stroke that finally debilitated him, Lenin launched a political fight around the question of the Georgian republic and of the voluntary union of Soviet republics.

In a letter to the party's Political Bureau and addressed to Bolshevik leader Lev Kamenev, Lenin criticizes the proposal by Joseph Stalin, the CP's general secretary, to incorporate five independent Soviet republics - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belorussia, Georgia, and Ukraine - into the Russian Federation as "autonomous republics." The book reprints the text of Stalin's initial plan.

Lenin proposes a completely different approach: that Russia join with the other republics "on an equal basis into a new union, a new federation, the Union of the Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia."

This stance was crucial, given the strong pro- independence sentiments of working people in Georgia and other Soviet republics in the Caucasus because of Russian tsarist domination in the past. The Georgian Communist Party had rejected Stalin's "autonomization" plan and favored remaining independent as part of a Soviet federation.

Lenin's Final Fight documents how Lenin waged a political debate to win other members of the Bolshevik leadership to a proletarian internationalist stance on this question. This fight was based on one of the major conquests of the October 1917 revolution: the right of oppressed peoples to national self-determination.

The appendix to the book includes several 1921 letters by Lenin on the national question. One, of particular interest today given events in the former Soviet Union, is addressed to communists in the Soviet republics of the Caucasus - including the Mountaineer Republic, which included what is now Chechnya.

Through the efforts of Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was founded as a federation of equals at the end of 1922. But Lenin felt compelled to "declare war to the death on dominant nation chauvinism," as he put it in an October 6 memo to the party's Political Bureau.

In a series of notes addressed in December 1922 to the upcoming 12th party congress, Lenin makes some of his sharpest and most concise statements on the national question. Referring to the argument by some Russian Communist leaders that a single government is needed to rule over all the Soviet republics, he states, "Where did that assurance come from? Did it not come from that same Russian apparatus which-we took over from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil?"

Opposes Great Russian chauvinism
He adds that without a conscious approach of preferential treatment toward the historically oppressed nations - an affirmative action policy - all talk of a voluntary federation "will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is."

Lenin condemns Stalin for his "spite against the notorious 'nationalist socialism.' " Stalin had accused the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party of "nationalist deviations," saying these should be "burned out with a red-hot iron."

Lenin's concern about Great Russian chauvinism was well- founded. Stalin and Grigory Ordzhonikidze, another Central Committee member, resorted to strong-arm tactics to try to ram through their policies on the national question. In protest, the Georgian CC resigned. The conflict flared up in late November when Ordzhonikidze struck one of the dissident Georgian communists during a verbal confrontation. This fact came to light through an investigation by a Political Bureau-appointed commission, headed by Russian CC member Feliks Dzerzhinsky.

Over the final months of 1922, Lenin's doubts about the conduct of Stalin and his allies around the Georgian question mounted. Lenin organized three of his personal secretaries to carry out a separate investigation in February and March 1923 to verify the Dzerzhinsky commission's account. They reported to Lenin that Dzerzhinsky had basically whitewashed the abusive policies of Ordzhonikidze and Stalin.

This report - kept secret by Moscow until the collapse of the Stalinist apparatus in the former USSR in 1991 - appears in this volume for the first time in any language.

The book also includes two letters Lenin sent in the last days of his political life. One, to Leon Trotsky, asked the Bolshevik leader "that you should undertake the defense of the Georgian case in the party CC. This case is now under 'persecution' by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, and I cannot rely on their impartiality." Trotsky immediately agreed to defend their shared views on this question.

The last letter Lenin is known to have written, dated March 6, is addressed to Polikarp Mdivani and other Georgian communist leaders. In it he pledges his full support to their fight.

Fight for the foreign trade monopoly
Lenin's Final Fight also recounts the political battle the Bolshevik leader waged around another life-and-death question for the workers and farmers government: the foreign trade monopoly, under which all exporting and importing activity was centralized in the hands of a state agency.

Several party leaders had made proposals to relax the state monopoly. Nikolai Bukharin, Gregory Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin raised various arguments, including that the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade and other state agencies were inefficient and contributing to "incalculable losses."

In an Oct. 13, 1922, letter addressed to Stalin, published in this volume, Lenin vigorously opposes the Central Committee's adoption of a package of measures - in his absence - that "wrecks the foreign trade monopoly" by giving foreign capitalists greater leeway to export and import products without control by the Soviet government.

Such a move, he argues, would allow Nepmen (the disparaging term for petty traders and swindlers who took advantage of the NEP for their enrichment) to flourish, diverting funds away from the revolutionary government. Even worse, it would increase the political influence of the Nepmen over the small peasants.

Lenin points to the foreign trade monopoly and the peasant cooperatives as important pillars of the fledgling workers state and the fight to maintain the alliance between peasants and the working class.

In a December 13 letter to Stalin, Lenin rejects Bukharin's arguments for weakening the state monopoly and partially replacing it with a system of protective tariffs. "No tariff system can be effective in the epoch of imperialism when there are monstrous contrasts between pauper countries and immensely rich countries," he writes.

"In practice, Bukharin is acting as an advocate of the profiteer, of the petty bourgeois, and of the upper stratum of the peasantry in opposition to the industrial proletariat, which will be totally unable to reconstruct its own industry and make Russia an industrial country unless it has the protection, not of tariffs, but of the monopoly of foreign trade."

In several letters to Trotsky, Lenin proposes that "at the forthcoming [CC] plenum you should undertake the defense of our common standpoint on the unconditional need to maintain and consolidate the foreign trade monopoly." Trotsky agrees.

After the December 18 CC meeting rescinds its previous decision and reaffirms the state monopoly, Lenin sends a congratulatory message to Trotsky and proposes they "continue the offensive" at the upcoming congresses of the party and the soviets.

Drawing workers into administration
In waging these struggles, Lenin keeps pressing to draw more workers into the leadership of the party and the government, and to cut down on bureaucracy. In his December 1922 Letter to the Congress, he proposes increasing the party CC to 100. "The enlistment of many workers to the CC will help the workers to improve our administrative machinery, which is pretty bad," he states.

As part of this campaign, Lenin calls for reorganizing the Workers and Peasants Inspection, which had become poorly organized and ineffective. This body had been initiated in 1920 to involve both party and nonparty workers and peasants into greater inspection and control of the state and party apparatus.

Lenin takes up this question in his March 2, 1923, article titled "Better Fewer, But Better," He proposes to recruit carefully selected communist workers into the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate and other bodies.

These vanguard workers, he states, must lead a fight for millions of workers and peasants to increase their training and education in order to learn, slowly but surely, how to run the government and economy. This includes, Lenin stresses, learning to apply the best techniques and organizational methods from the capitalist world.

One of Lenin's many proposals, reflecting this political approach, is his recommendation that the Russian navy be cut back and that the freed-up funds be used to expand the school system.

Tied to the fight for culture and working-class leadership in the Soviet Union is Lenin's emphasis on the international prospects for socialist revolution.

This theme runs throughout the speeches in this volume, from his address to the Moscow soviet to his speech to the fourth congress of the Communist International in November 1922.

In the articles, letters, and speeches in this book, readers can see how Lenin functioned as part of a broader Bolshevik leadership team, a team he had assembled over a quarter century of party-building and five years of the world's first dictatorship of the proletariat.

Among these were leaders like Zinoviev, Bukharin, Trotsky, and Karl Radek, who together with Lenin are portrayed on the book's cover (taken from a painting, by Malcolm McAllister of New Zealand, that is part of the Pathfinder Mural in New York). These five leaders, who all served on the Executive Committee of the Communist International, held a range of views on the various disputed issues covered in Lenin's Final Fight.

Lenin's conclusions about Stalin
At that time, Stalin did not figure qualitatively more prominently in these disputes than many other Central Committee members. In the course of his fight, however, Lenin drew very damning conclusions about Stalin's character and capacity for political integrity.

Experiences like the Georgian conflict convinced him that Stalin, as the party's general secretary, was not qualified for such central leadership responsibility in the party and state, especially under the intensifying class pressures confronting the revolution.

In his Letter to the Congress, Lenin states, "Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary." He proposes removing Stalin from that post.

Lenin was permanently incapacitated by a stroke on March 10, 1923, that ended his political life. His recommendation to remove Stalin and other proposals were not taken up.

Instead, a political struggle developed within the leadership of the Communist Party over whether the course charted under Lenin would be maintained or eroded and eventually reversed. Over the years, an increasingly privileged bureaucratic caste established its hold on the state and party apparatuses.

This petty-bourgeois caste carried out a political counterrevolution against the workers and peasants.

Trotsky and others led the communist opposition to return to the proletarian course charted under Lenin's leadership. The caste, however, consolidated its rule, with Stalin emerging as its dictatorial arbiter. His brutal regime murdered thousands of communist workers and much of the central leadership of the Bolshevik party.

The bureaucratic regime also suppressed many of the writings contained in this book. Most of these were not published in the Soviet Union until after Stalin's death in 1953.

A book for the new generation
For today's new generation of workers and other fighters, Lenin's Final Fight comes alive with rich political lessons. Among the growing numbers of youth who are repelled by the prospect of fascism and war that capitalism offers, Lenin presents a convincing case - through argument and practice - for the perspective of joining the worldwide struggle for a communist future.  
 
 
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