Robert Service on Lenin, Trotsky & Stalin

Andrew Roberts: Former professor of Russian history at Oxford and presently senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Robert Service has written 17 books on Russia, including biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky. Bob, back in July 2021, so seven months before the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin wrote an essay, somewhat pompously and entitled On the Historical Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian Peoples.

Quite apart from its use as propaganda, how does it stand up as history?

Robert Service: Very, very poorly. The problem with it is that he tries to deny that the Ukrainian territorial entity ever existed before Lenin created a federation called the Soviet Union, and gave Ukraine a republican identity.

But that's complete rubbish, absolute, total rubbish. In 1917, the provisional government accepted the reality of Ukraine and allowed the formation of Ukrainian armed units in order to win the war against imperial Germany. And thereafter, after the October 1917 revolution, when the communists came to power, again, there were Ukrainian governments who spread their network of governance over the whole of roughly what we would call Ukraine.

At the end of that civil war, in the whole of the former Russian empire, the decision had to be taken, should there be a place that they would call Ukraine? And Lenin decided that there should be, because somehow the communists had to hold on to the loyalty, or at least the acquiescence essence, of the ethnic Ukrainians who numbered many millions and who had gone through such terrible times.

And many of them had fought against the Reds, against Lenin's own communists.

Andrew Roberts: In that essay, Putin refers to Lithuania no fewer than 17 times. Do you think if Ukraine were to lose this war, that he would start thinking about on the historical unity of the Russian and Lithuanian people?

Robert Service: I think that the Baltic States, generally, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, have a good reason to fear for the future if the war is lost in Ukraine. And, in fact, Putin was talking about the artificiality of the Estonian frontier with Russia back in 1991. So this is not a new way of thinking for him.

Andrew Roberts: And in some of those Baltic States, there are large ethnically Russian populations, aren't there?

Robert Service: There are populations that got bigger after the Second World War, when Stalin wanted to make sure that he held on to them after annexing them at the end of the Second World War.

So that is a population, a Russian resident population that he has long wanted to appear as the protector of the interests of, and it would be the pretext for a further incursion into the Baltic States.

Andrew Roberts: Are those populations actually loyal to the Baltic States that they're part of, or could they be seen a little analogous to the German Subteens?

Robert Service: I think most Russians living in what we used to call the Baltic States, and still do, I suppose, most of them want peace, want peace and quiet. They're not as prominent in those states as they were in the communist period. Many, many of the Russians in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are at the bottom of the social pile.

But a good number of them appreciate that they've got more freedom under Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian rule than they would have back in the much more chaotic and dangerous society that Russia is today.

Andrew Roberts: How do you see the war in Ukraine at the moment? How do you see it progressing as well?

Robert Service: Well, it would be foolish to think that the Ukrainians are doing as well now as they were doing a year and a half ago. It's absolutely crucial, I think that the weaponry needed by the Ukrainian armed forces is given to them by the west, short of provoking a catastrophic nuclear war.

I think as long as the Ukrainians want to go on fighting, then they should be given the wherewithal to do that.

Andrew Roberts: You mentioned nuclear war, in your studies of Putin, do you see him as the kind of person who might start one?

Robert Service: I think he has a certain brittleness of temperament, a domineering attitude to his subordinates, which has been increased by being in power for two decades and being able to put in positions of responsibility whoever he wants to.

So he was very volatile when he met Tony Blair in the early 2000s and barked at him at press conferences. So that's always been there. I think generally, though, he is restrained by the knowledge that a nuclear war would be an absolute catastrophe for Russia. Anyone who lived through the last days of the Soviet Union remembers very well what happened at Chornobyl and how the winds can blow nuclear dust west, but it can also blow it east.

And the other factor, I think is that the Chinese have warned him, do not touch the nuclear button. So I think that there's a good deal of bluster, but as we've seen with a lot of other dictators in the world. When it comes to a crisis, the will to retain power can provoke decisions that are much more dangerous than those dictators might consider desirable in other times, in more peaceful times.

I don't think he's looking for a nuclear war, no.

Andrew Roberts: In the year 2000, you wrote a superb, definitive life of Vladimir Lenin, what made him tick?

Robert Service: Well, he was a Marxist fanatic, he was a brilliant intellectual, unrestrained by.

Andrew Roberts: The training of the mind that would have allowed him to see the downside of what he was proposing.

I don't think that he imagined that he would set up a totalitarian dictatorship before he sees power. But he very readily descended into totalitarianism once the difficulties of governing a state where most people believed in God, where most people worked on the land, weren't living in a Marxist industrial utopia.

Where most people wanted to be able, even the people who had voted for the communists in 1917, most of them still wanted the freedom to trade their personal assets and keep their personal assets, have private property. So I don't think he had the imagination. Because he was such a committed Marxist, had the imagination to think it would be a really difficult job to govern a society where most people didn't share the fundamental assumptions that he had.

So what made him tick was, I'm gonna make this happen, I'm really gonna make this happen. And he had a burning conviction that he embodied the revolutionary imperative. So if people inside the communist party disagreed with him, he treated them as what he called ballast, he didn't mind if they left.

And he treated some of the greatest intellectuals that Russia ever produced as quote scum unquote, and deported them to Germany in 1922. Really, I think that's when the totalitarian system was completed, 1922, within a year or two after the Civil War. When Russia became hermetically sealed off by the will of the communist leadership from the rest of the intellectual world in which they had lived in it.

Robert Service: The leaders had lived in Berlin, or London, or Paris, or Munich, Geneva before 1914. They weren't sealed off, except by dint of what they actually did to themselves while they lived in these Marxist communities. This is the difference, I think, between far left socialism in Russia before 1914.

And far left socialism in the other countries, where the socialists were much more permeated by the influences of the broader society. With these exiles, ideas got baked hard inside their minds, so that they reacted after they had power in October 1917, much more as willful experimenters than they would have been.

And the prime cases of this are Lenin and Trotsky.

Andrew Roberts: And one of the ideas that the Bolsheviks had was that they could actually change human nature itself.

Robert Service: Yeah.

Andrew Roberts: Talk about that a little.

Robert Service: They assumed that under capitalism, human nature was channeled in a particular direction that could be rechanneled when they had power in their own hands.

And they assumed that this-, I mean, Trotsky talked about how there had only been one Dante in history, one Shakespeare in history, soon there would be tens of thousands. Because through communist education, a whole new potential of humankind would be release. And the communalism inherent in every human being would be released.

And that would lead to a different sort of society, and the next generation would be brought up differently and would think differently and act differently, so they were utopians. They didn't accept that some things about the society which they had essentially conquered through the so called Russian civil war.

Because it was an Ukrainian civil war, a Georgian civil war, an Uzbek civil war, they didn't accept that some things about that society were deeply embedded. And let me put it this way, after 1991, instead of there having been a communist civilization in Russia, lots of trends rose up to the surface that had been suppressed for seven decades being pushed into the underground, religion, dissident literary culture.

And ideas about the privacy of the family, ideas that say to me anyway, that actually communism never truly, utterly conquered Russia. And that's why we see such a diverse society now.

Andrew Roberts: They admired the French Revolution, didn't they? They look back to it a good deal, because the concepts such as abolishing Christianity and setting the entire calendar and ten day working weeks, and these ideas that seem pretty strange to us.

Now actually worked because of their very revolutionary context, was something that the Bolsheviks sort of looked back to with admiration, didn't they?

Robert Service: They did and they-

Andrew Roberts: And the terror, I suppose.

Robert Service: And the terror, yeah. And they knew they were doing something dangerous. They knew that there was a strong possibility of a counter revolution.

So every day that they survived after October 1917, they almost pinched themselves. They had a phrase that they were living on their suitcases, they were ready to make a run for it. They wanted to last at least as long as the Paris commune of the 1870s and in fact, of course, they lasted for seven decades.

Yeah, but you're right, they did think a lot about the French Revolution. They were constantly comparing themselves with it and they were proud of having gone beyond it. They were proud of having rethought things learnt from the French Revolution, but gone on to say, next time we're gonna try to make to avoid some of the mistakes.

Of course, some of the mistakes they didn't recognize as mistakes mass terror. They truly believed that holding ex policemen, former aristocrats, priests, Mullahs in prison, killing them, would shorten the schedule for the pathway to communism. So they didn't see the terror of the French Revolution as counterproductive. They thought this was the way forward I mean, it's a terrifying way of thinking.

But as the civil war went on, those Bolsheviks who didn't envisage using terror came around to thinking, this is the only way that you deal with enemies. So totalitarian thinking came late to some of the communists, but it became deeply embedded in their mentality. And this made it more difficult for the communists, who were later hostile to Stalin to have the intellectual and practical cautionary attitude to prepare themselves to resist an even worse terror in the late 1930s.

Andrew Roberts: Which, of course, they could have learned from the French revolution and the emergence of Napoleon ten years after the outbreak of the French revolution. There it was the historical precedent was there for Stalin, wasn't it?

Robert Service: Yeah, indeed when I was doing my biography of Trotsky, I was constantly torn between thinking, this is a man who is about to have an ice pick plunged into the top of his head, whose family is going to be persecuted.

The family that he left behind in the the bits of his family that he left behind in the Soviet Union, they're going to be persecuted. On the other hand, this is a man who wrote a book on terror in the civil war, endorsing its use as a way of communizing a society.

Well, how sorry do you feel for him that he'd been such an idiot? Well, worse than an idiot.

Andrew Roberts: There are people on the left, aren't there? The late Christopher Hitchens was one who essentially argued that had Trotsky defeated Stalin in the internecine Bolshevik struggle in the Politburo after Lenin's death, that somehow communism would have been humanized.

We know of the purges the collectivization, the Ukrainian famine and so on. What do you think about this argument that somehow, essentially, Trotsky was a good communist, whereas Stalin was a bad one?

Robert Service: There are Trotskyists still today, they have a romantic view of the man, they're almost in love with him.

They don't appreciate either what he did when he was in power, their excuse is because a civil war was being fought. But they don't note, for example, that he made very little comment, very little comment indeed, about the atrocities committed during agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s, early 1930s, when millions and millions of innocent peasants were bludgeoned into joining collective farms.

And there was famine and mass executions all over Ukraine and southern Russia, Kazakhstan. So the idea that things would have been hunky-dory under Trotsky is completely beyond belief. And not just because he behaved very brutally during the Russian civil war, immediately after the October 1917 revolution. But also because he said so little in sympathy for the peasants, whom Stalin even more brutally bludgeoned into joining the collective farm system in the late 1920s, early 1930s, when Trotsky was out of power.

Now he had the opportunity to say then, this is absolutely atrocious behaviour, this is inhumane as a policy but he said almost nothing about it. He said much more about the exile or firing from their posts of the members of the left communist opposition, of which he had been the leader.

So if he had come to power, he intended to collectivize the peasantry himself, he claimed he would do it by, quote, persuasion, unquote. But what would he have done if the peasants had said, no, we don't want these collective farms, we don't want to give you the grain quotas that you demand.

This was a man who had used force all the years when he had been in power. I think it's a failure of the imagination on the part of Trotskyists, some of whom still exists today, to answer these questions. And when my biography came out over ten years ago, I had meetings and talks disrupted by them in London and even worse, we had to have police protection in Berlin.

It's so offensive to them but. They really have to face up to this. And I did debate with Christopher Hitchens actually in this building 20 odd years ago. He who had ceased to be really a self-described trotskyist, still had a romantic image of his former idol.

Andrew Roberts: And by the time Trotsky died in 1940, he had endorsed the invasion of the Baltic States by Stalin, the invasion of Poland from the east by Stalin.

I think he also didn't denounce the Nazi soviet pact, did he?

>> Robert Service: He had a very curious way of dealing with Stalin's policies. So he chose the policies and emphasized the policies on which he disagreed with him. And I agree with what you're saying, Andrew, that one should look at the things he didn't much emphasize or aren't much emphasized by his supporters now.

The overlap, in other words, the overlap between Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky is bigger than the discrepancies between the three of them. This is the key to understanding soviet history, I think. That we shouldn't just look at the points at which these leaders disagreed with each other, we should look at the points at which they massively overlap.

And they agreed about the one party state, the one ideology state, the retention of terror as an instrument of rule. The imposition of a single way of thinking, and the intrusion of the state into the privacy of the home, and the mind of the individual. All of these things were common to them.

Andrew Roberts: And the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Robert Service: And the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Andrew Roberts: Which, of course, neither Lenin nor Trotsky came from the proletariat and yet they worshiped this strata of this class from which they didn't hail but which they idolized. Did they understand the working classes?

Robert Service: I don't think they did, no. I don't think they did. I think they thought they did. And I think they thought that by talking at conferences and congresses to Marxist activists who came from the working class that was enough. Because they had a vision of society that had them as the uppermost stratum along with those workers who were clever enough, trained enough to think the same way as they thought.

And they thought that everyone below that who didn't share those values and that background could eventually be brought up to the top of the pyramid. I mean, it was a utopian and an extremely dangerous and pernicious way of thinking.

Andrew Roberts: You were a great friend and colleague of the late, great Robert Conquest.

Robert Service: Yeah.

Andrew Roberts: And who also, of course, worked in this building here in the Hoover Institution. He was, of course, a giant in Russian studies and he pointed out that Stalin had essentially started the Cold War. Today, there's a big revisionist movement, especially amongst historians of the left, to try to blame the west for the Cold War.

How do you feel the debate is going at the moment?

Robert Service: Well, I think that there is a diversity of opinion about all of these questions concerning the origins and the course of the first World War. But Robert conquest was a very, very astute observer of the cracks inside the soviet politburo.

What attracted me to his way of thinking was, he was always looking for ways in which actually, this apparently monolithic system could one day literally fall apart. And his first book on the anti-party group of 1957, was an absolutely tremendous contribution. And then the book on the Great Terror, which did more than anyone else had done to say, this is a whole system of punishing dissent and even non-dissent.

It's a way of running an entire society. And that book, I mean, I remember going to Sunday school in the 50s and reading a book called the Long Walk by a Pole who escaped from the soviet gulag called Ravitch. These books had an impact on public opinion in the 1950s, but Robert Conquest systematized the whole study, a huge effort.

So that book was a pillar of sensible investigation. When others were saying at the time, they're not really saying it now, and they haven't repented for saying it. Were saying, well, poor old Stalin, he was trying to run a rather unruly political milieu, and he wasn't as vengeful or as violent as people imagine.

And that hasn't totally gone.

Andrew Roberts: Well, until recently, you had people like Eric Hobsbawm arguing that. And Bob Conquest, of course, had the most terrible trouble. I mean, you yourself did with your Trotsky book. But his book, the Great Terror, was denounced in all the Bien Pence Magazines and literary outlets and so on, until it was proved to be absolutely right.

And if anything, actually slightly underestimating the number of people in Starling Guild.

Robert Service: You're right. I mean, one of the things I always thought about him after meeting him in the early 2000s was how jovial he was about the idiots who had said, against all the evidence that there was no reason to think that Stalin was an enthusiastic mass murder.

I mean, there were a few people who said this about Hitler, but a lot more who said this about Stalin.

Andrew Roberts: Anna Reid has written a book recently about the Russian Civil War in which she essentially denounces Winston Churchill a good deal. What Winston Churchill tried to do was to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle in his words.

Considering that communism went on to kill 100 million people in the 20th century and beyond, wasn't Churchill right to try and strangle it?

Robert Service: Yeah, he used very florid language, didn't he? I think that it wouldn't have been a wonderful result for the people of the former Russian Empire if the whites had won the civil war.

But as you say, a massive terroristic dictatorship was not in their minds.

Andrew Roberts: And they probably, the whites, although they were vicious anti-Semites and pretty loathsome, they probably wouldn't have lasted 70 years in the same way that the communists did in Russia.

Robert Service: I think that's absolutely right.

For a start, they were incompetent. It's hard to see how any of those white commanders would have established a workable state system, committed to the ideas and capable of carrying them through for very long if they had won the war. Churchill certainly saw in his gut that this was an iniquitous regime in the making.

And I think he also understood how weak the Bolshevik regime was. The Bolsheviks, the communists were the luckiest regime in a great power to conduct a revolution, they had everything on their side. The Germans would have hanged Lenin and Trotsky by the lamp posts if they had won the First World War, luck number one.

Luck number two, the western powers didn't complete their intervention in the former Russian Empire. Luck number three was the utter collapse of the economy and the administration in Russia prior to the October Revolution of 1917. Those were circumstances that suddenly made these Switzerland based scribblers, Lenin and Trotsky, capable of attempting what they did.

Andrew Roberts: Is there anything to the argument that Russians needers are, that the size of the country, the natural sort of brutality, the lack of liberalism, means that there's no hope for liberalism in the Russia? And the only moments that we've seen are a few months in 1917 and a couple of years at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that basically Russian history tells you that they need a strongman.

Robert Service: I don't go along with all of that. I think I'd put it the other way that in the 20th century and into the 21st, Russia has had such a lot of fundamental economic, social and political traumas that most Russians just want a peaceful life. And I fear that this is the key to why so many Russians sustain in popular opinion polls, a positive image of Putin.

I know we can't trust those opinion polls, but still there is a feeling that as long as I'm not being conscripted into a war, I've got a more manageable life. Or my son or daughter is conscripted, I've got a more manageable life now than I had in the 1990s, when all was utter chaos and immiseration, or in the late 1980s, when things were going from bad to worse for most people.

So, I think if we take that into account, it's not surprising that Russians are currently content with a great leader, with a so-called great, and rather oppressive leader rather than go back to the chaos of before, or the chaos of any earlier period, including 1917. So, I don't think, I don't totally lose faith in the mentality of Russian people.

Although I feel frustrated that somehow our own western media outlets have not been able to cut through the barriers of Putin's own TV propaganda, which is what most Russians listen to.

Andrew Roberts: Here in Hoover, we've got the most fantastic archive, haven't we? The Soviet Archive, you mentioned the early 1990s, the Hoover Institution took great advantage of that sort of wild west period in Russian history to essentially buy the soviet archives, is that it?

Robert Service: Yeah.

Andrew Roberts: You've worked there, of course, for many, many years, tell us about those.

Robert Service: Well, I think they're the richest soviet archives outside the old Soviet Union. And until recently, and to some extent still today, some Russians have chosen also to give their archives to the Hoover Institution on the simple ground that if they hand them over to the Moscow archives, it wouldn't necessarily be an opportunity for people to use them.

So I've been using diplomatic archives about them for my next book on the late Gorbachev, early Yeltsin period, on the 1990s. And a lot of those archives were freely given on that simple ground that they're more accessible here to people, including to Russians. They're so rich, there are newspapers, journals, documentary collections.

Andrew Roberts: When do they stretch back to?

Robert Service: Well, Herbert Hoover himself set them up after the first world war. I mean, he was a real visionary. For example, here we have not just original versions of Trotsky's many books. We've got his bus tickets, we've got his passports. I mean, you must feel this, you've done this.

Andrew Roberts: That's the exciting thing, isn't it?

Robert Service: Sure, sure. I mean, to actually, you get a feel for the life of the man. Actually, you get a feel for the life of the man if he keeps his bus tickets. There's something very, it tells you something about him.

Andrew Roberts: Now, tell me, I ask all my guests, what book or biography are you reading at the moment?

Robert Service: Well, slowly I have been reading for the last month and a half Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Andrew Roberts: Have you?

Robert Service: Yeah.

Andrew Roberts: How interesting, what a delight. I last did them at school for A level, so I didn't really remember terribly much, but what pleasure are you getting from them?

Robert Service: They are. Go back to them, Andrew. Go back to them. I mean, I've never read them even at school. There's such a wide diversity of people. There is such a wide diversity of attitude, of thoughts about what could be done with a neighbor, what shouldn't be done with a neighbor, what the price of things was and the magic of the language.

I've been here a month now and concentrating on soviet archival things, and I slowed down. But it's a wonderful book, wonderful.

Andrew Roberts: Marvelous. What's your what if, your historical counterfactual?

Robert Service: Well, I've been thinking about this over the morning. I suppose what would have happened if Lenin had died of a heart attack in 1917-

Andrew Roberts: Or shot as he gets off the train at the Finlands.

Robert Service: Yes, if somebody had been crawling over a roof.

Andrew Roberts: Yeah.

Robert Service: Yeah, it could easily have happened. I mean, he could have been arrested and put out of the way in the middle of 1917. I think that this is where leadership comes in, I know you're interested in leadership too.

I think very often academic historians downplay the importance of leadership. There are, of course, all sorts of other factors that are important in history. But at certain critical points in the movement of events, what one person with sufficient will and sufficient charisma can do has gigantic consequences. If he had been rubbed out in 1917, I think the Bolshevik leadership might well have turned towards compromise with the Menshevik leadership.

In other words, there might have been an all socialist party coalition in the government that followed that of the Kerensky government.

Andrew Roberts: Could the Kerensky government have survived itself if say, he'd stepped off the train, Kerensky had arrested him and Trotsky, you'd have needed to arrested them both, sent them to the Peter and Paul fortress and then continue?

Do you think there's a chance that Kerensky could have continued in power?

Robert Service: I tried to do this in my recent book on the Russian Revolution to show that he gave it his best shot, tried to do it with as few shots as possible, actually. The cardinal difficulty he had was that he had a principled commitment to go on fighting the war.

And I think that whoever took power in Russia in 1917 had somehow to get the country out of the war, even if it was by affecting a ceasefire on the eastern front. I can't see how any government could have gone on fighting that war in those conditions. And it's clear to me that the western powers were right, that if they poured more resources into the eastern front, they would be wasting their resources when they needed them on the western front.

Andrew Roberts: What if Kerensky had signed a sort of Brest Lutovsk pact a year before the actual one was signed?

Robert Service: If he'd done that, he would have been condemned by the Bolsheviks themselves as selling out the interests of the country. So he was in an invidious position, almost an impossible position, and by October 1917, he ruled not even Russia within the former Russian Empire, not even Petrograd.

It was only the little area around the winter palace. So I think in these circumstances, we can honestly say that the Lenin line of 1917 to 1918 had a huge amount of luck on its side. It needed to sustain that luck because the Germans did not intend to leave him alone if and when they won the battles on the western front.

He was a gambler, it was a terribly risky maneuver to sign the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in 1918, as Trotsky told him. And Trotsky was trying to hold him back from signing that treaty. It was like the release of wild atoms spinning around in a vacuum flask. Anything could have happened.

The Bolsheviks survived by the skin of their teeth, but amazingly, they consolidated their totalitarian despotism into a regime that lasted seven decades.

Andrew Roberts: Robert Service, thank you so much for coming on Secrets of Statecraft.

Robert Service: Thank you.

Andrew Roberts: Thank you, Bob. On the next Secrets of Statecraft, my guest will be Paul Gregory, who's a professor of economics at Harvard.

But we'll be discussing a friendship he had in his early 20s with a man called Lee Harvey Oswald.

Presenter: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition. For more information about our work, or to listen to more of our podcasts or watch our videos, please visit hoover.org.