Revolutionary Pairs: Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, Gandhi and Nehru, Mao and Zhou, Castro and Guevara 9780813179193, 9780813179452, 9780813179469

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Books by author
Dedication
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
BIbliography
Index

Citation preview

REVOLUTIONARY PAIRS

Ceplair CS20.indb 1

4/15/2020 9:14:54 PM

Ceplair CS20.indb 2

4/15/2020 9:14:54 PM

REVOLUTIONARY PAIRS MARX AND ENGELS, LENIN AND TROTSKY, GANDHI AND NEHRU, MAO AND ZHOU, CASTRO AND GUEVARA

LARRY CEPLAIR

Ceplair CS20.indb 3

4/15/2020 9:14:54 PM

Due to variations in the technical specifications of different electronic reading devices, some elements of this ebook may not appear as they do in the print edition. Readers are encouraged to experiment with user settings for optimum results. Copyright © 2020 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8131-7919-3 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8131-7945-2 (pdf) ISBN 978-0-8131-7946-9 (epub) This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America Member of the Association of University Presses

Ceplair-Revolutionary Paris_FM_CS20_iv.indd 4

4/17/20 3:26 PM

Also by Larry Ceplair The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (with Steven Englund) Under the Shadow of War: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Marxism, 1918–1939 The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Nonfiction Reader A Great Lady: A Life of the Screenwriter Sonya Levien The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical

Ceplair CS20.indb 5

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

To Christine, with all my heart and soul

Ceplair CS20.indb 6

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

Contents Introduction 1 1. Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  6 2. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940) 49 3. Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) 98 4. Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  136 5. Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967) 170 Conclusion 205 Acknowledgments 211 Notes 213 Bibliography 243 Index 255

Ceplair CS20.indb 7

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

Ceplair CS20.indb 8

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

Introduction There have been many revolutions during the course of world history. Until what I would call “the age of revolution,” or the “short” twentieth century (1905–1991), those were the work of collective bodies (Puritans in England, Sons of Liberty in the British North American colonies, and Girondists and Jacobins in France). But in my designated age of revolution, paired revolutionaries is the key phenomenon. Each of the four most significant and influential revolutions during this period were led by a pair: Vladimir I. Lenin and Lev D. Trotsky (Russia); Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru (India); Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai (China); Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (Cuba). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the godfathers of three of those revolutions, participated in one revolution but in their lifetimes did not witness the successful revolutions they had worked so hard to inspire. The members of each pair were completely dissimilar, save for their devotion to their causes. Only two of the pairs (Marx-Engels; Mao-Zhou) stayed together until the natural death of one member. Gandhi was assassinated shortly after the revolution in India succeeded, while Nehru governed India until his death. Guevara voluntarily left Cuba to participate in other revolutions, and he was killed in Bolivia; Castro remained in power until his voluntary retirement in 2008. Lenin and Trotsky’s was the shortest coupling (seven years), followed by Castro and Guevara (eleven years), Gandhi and Nehru (twenty-five years), and Marx and Engels (forty years). At fifty years, Mao and Zhou had the longest pairing. Joshua Wolf Shenk, in a different context—scientific and artistic—has called this phenomenon “the power of the creative pair.” As he explains it, this “primary creative unit” comprises two people who oppose and support each other at the same time. The closest Shenk comes to a politically revolutionary pair is his very brief discussion of Martin Luther King Jr.–Ralph Abernathy and his brief mention of Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony. Thus, his stages of creative-pair development do not neatly fit my revolutionary pairs, and I will not use them as explanatory devices. Rather, by 1

Ceplair CS20.indb 1

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

2  Revolutionary Pairs

transforming them, I will use them to frame the individual discussions. In “Converging Paths,” or what Shenk calls the meeting state, I shall examine the circumstances that brought the pair together. In the “Bonded Stage” (what he calls the dialectics stage), I will examine what held them together. Finally, I will combine his distancing and interruptions stage into “Diverging Paths” (their separate spheres of operation and their rifts).1 My pairs did not, like Shenk’s, develop “joint identity” or “couple identity”; they did not coordinate their cognitive functions; they did not secede from the rest of the world; nor did they have private languages. All five pairs did, however, exhibit “the potential of negation, combined with affirmation, opposition with coordination, competition with cooperation.” In each, there was a superior alpha (Marx, Lenin, Gandhi, Mao, and Castro). The other was a subordinate alpha, who deferred only to his partner “and, even then [with the exception of Engels] with the odd, bottled energy of someone acting decidedly out of character.”2 In each case, the superior alpha took the lead in creating the revolutionary ideology and the revolutionary vehicle. These relationships were very distinctive. Marx and Engels loved each other and communicated constantly, and Engels supported Marx financially. They had no apparent political or ideological differences. And Engels seemed content to give much more than he received. Lenin and Trotsky did not like one another and were, in fact, political enemies for fourteen years. They were generationally, personally, and politically different. Twice (1903 and 1917– 1921) Lenin tried to protect Trotsky from the criticism his style evoked from others, but in each instance Trotsky responded by failing to support Lenin’s position or wishes. However, during the first years of the Bolshevik Revolution, they complemented each other brilliantly: Lenin provided the strategic and organizational elements; Trotsky provided its tactical and dynamic qualities. Though Gandhi and Nehru were very fond of each other, much like an uncle and a nephew, they did not spend a great deal of time together. There were major generational, stylistic, and ideological differences between them, and they agreed only on the goal of independence. Gandhi gave the movement charisma, Nehru a statesman-like face. Though Zhou had for eleven years been higher in the party hierarchy than Mao, in 1935, he deliberately subordinated himself, and he maintained that posture for forty years, because he subscribed to Mao’s revolutionary theories and strategy, respected his force of will, and feared his ruthlessness. Mao became the driving force of the Chinese Revolution and Zhou its balance wheel, providing the steadiness and constancy that Mao eschewed. Castro and Guevara did not have many years

Ceplair CS20.indb 2

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

Introduction 3

together, but they were perfect complements as revolutionaries, in the manner of Lenin and Trotsky, though they were personally much closer. But while Castro proved able to harness his revolutionary energy into building and maintaining the revolutionary state, Che quickly grew restless with statebuilding and sought new revolutionary arenas in which to operate. Three of the pairs were virtual contemporaries and enjoyed roughly equal status within their respective movements: Marx (b. 1818) and Engels (b. 1820), Mao (b. 1893) and Zhou (b. 1898), Castro (b. 1927) and Guevara (b. 1928). The other two were mentor-mentee relationships: Lenin (b. 1870) and Trotsky (b. 1879) at the beginning and Gandhi (b. 1869) and Nehru throughout (b. 1889). Only two controlled their revolutionary parties: Lenin and Castro. Others built the Indian National Congress, and neither Gandhi nor Nehru ever fully controlled it. Others also built the Chinese Communist Party; Mao’s supremacy came late, between 1935 and 1945.3 During the conception, research, and writing phases of this project, I regularly asked myself whether my notion of revolutionary pairs is more than an intriguing phenomenon. Paired revolutionary synergy, after all, cannot be predicted; it can only be analyzed in retrospect. While we can accurately narrate what brought these pairs together and held them together, it is difficult to dissect the bonds, the paired synergy. In fact, I may have to be satisfied with the banal conclusion that each person uniquely complemented the other. A second vital question is more clearly answerable from the historical record: what made them greater than the sum of their parts, or, to put it differently, what was the emergent property of their relationship? Each man had an intuitive feeling of the unique value of the other; each knew he could not have succeeded without the other. Though this focus on revolutionary personalities (and revolutionary ideology) is currently unfashionable, I think it adds a crucial dimension to the current structural, socioeconomic, and critical-factors approaches. Revolutions, after all, are made by people, and people are motivated by ideas. Without the appropriate personalities and ideologies, the various short- and long-term causes and structural dysfunctions will go begging. There must be, that is, personalities armed with ideologies primed to exploit those preconditions. The historian of revolutions, therefore, needs to combine the social, economic, ideological, and personal elements. Without the latter two, the elements roused by the former two will lack a guiding concept as to means and ends. Revolutions are not simply impersonal events that occur at various historical conjunctures. Jonathan Israel states this principle well: “Revolutions,

Ceplair CS20.indb 3

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

4  Revolutionary Pairs

then, are not shaped by sociability or general attitudes but by organized revolutionary vanguards marshaling their own distinctive political language and rhetoric, including apt slogans, as a means of capturing, taking charge of, and interpreting the discontent generated by social and economic pressures.”4 Unfortunately, there have been very few efforts focusing directly on the role of revolutionary personalities, and those have been confined to the revolutionaries of France and Russia respectively: R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Committee of Public Safety during the Terror (1941) and Bertram Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (1948).5 The one attempt to provide a cross-cultural analysis, E. Victor Wolfenstein’s Revolutionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi (1971), uses a psychoanalytic model of analysis, derived from Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson.6 This model is problematic, because revolutionaries cannot be put on the couch, their historical record has many gaps, and different analysts can arrive at different conclusions based on the same data.7 Further, Wolfenstein’s main theme, that during their childhood and adolescence, each of his subjects “carried a burden of guilt he had been unable to relieve in the context of his family,” does not distinguish a paternally challenged revolutionary from a paternally challenged nonrevolutionary.8 Though he admits that he is only constructing a hypothesis and not trying to test its validity, his model can only be persuasively used—persuasive, that is, to those who accept Freud’s and Erikson’s theories—in individual case studies. It is not useful as tool of comparison from revolutionary to revolutionary and culture to culture. My approach to the subject of revolutions is far distant from the two current trends. The mainstream, inaugurated by Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), relies on impersonal forces.9 Brinton concluded that the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions were fevers that climbed and then spiked. This notion of impersonal forces was carried forward in the work of Barrington Moore Jr., abstract variables; Theda Skocpol, state structures; and Charles Tilly, traffic jams.10 One of the problems with this method is that the preconditions for revolution may exist for decades or even, as in the case of the Ottoman Empire, for centuries, before being triggered. The editors of a collection of articles on a current approach, “scripting,” agree with Jonathan Israel: “Preconditions are not conditions; a sufficient number of individuals must decide that the time is right and be prepared to act.” These actors employ a script based on their reading of previous revolutions, “a frame in which a situation is defined and a narrative projected; the narrative, in turn, offers a series of consequent situations, subject positions,

Ceplair CS20.indb 4

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

Introduction 5

and possible moves to be enacted by the agents within that frame.”11 In other words, a personality meets and is captured by an impersonal script. A script, however, is simply a means of describing one aspect of a unique revolutionary’s ideology, strategy, and tactics. There are too many scripts, they are too easily altered, and they vary too widely in operation, to serve as a meaningful measure of comparison. This approach tells us nothing about the success of the last three of my pairs and highlights only aspects of the ideologies of the first two but not their behavior. Even when scripting is applied to revolutionary parties, it is not a determining or persuasive mode of comparison. My approach, to rely on detailed historical and biographical information to trace the careers of the selected revolutionaries, is, therefore, an effort to illustrate cross-cultural and cross-temporal similarities and differences without employing preconceived models of behavior. As Francis Fukuyama has noted, it is useful for historians to look “across time and space in a comparative fashion.”12

Ceplair CS20.indb 5

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

1

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) For all that I contributed—at any rate with the exception of my work in a few special fields—Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved. Marx stood higher, saw further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us. — Friedrich Engels

Marx and Engels were by far the closest of the five revolutionary pairs I include in this study. Indeed, they were like brothers, and it is clear that they loved each other. Franz Mehring called theirs a friendship “without equal in history, which can show many cases of famous friendship,” and Marx’s daughter Eleanor stated: “The life and work of these two men are so closely associated that they cannot be separated.” Marx privately expressed gratitude for Engel’s financial support and praised his writing, but he did not publicly praise him, though had he outlived him, he might have. Engels, however, apotheosized Marx and reduced himself. One year after Marx died, Engels wrote to Johann Becker, “In Marx’s lifetime I played second fiddle, and I think I have attained virtuosity in it and I am damned glad that I had such a good first fiddle as Marx.” And two years after that, Engels noted that while he “had a certain independent share” in the founding and elaboration of their revolutionary theory, “the greater part of its leading basic principles— especially in the realm of economics—are his,” as is “their final trenchant formulation” Engels could have added that he had brought to their cause his knowledge of the workings of global capitalism and his experience “of factory life, slum living, armed insurrection and street-by-street politicking.”1 During the forty years of their friendship, they lived in the same city only about thirteen years, though they regularly visited each other and carried on a voluminous correspondence. Nevertheless, they only wrote two of their 6

Ceplair CS20.indb 6

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  7

four major collaborations, “German Ideology” and “The Great Men of the Exile,” a satirical exposé of the post-1848 German political exiles in England, together. Neither was published. Engels wrote a version of The Holy Family and one of the Communist Manifesto and sent each to Marx, who substantially rewrote both. Engels did, however, write many of the newspaper articles that appeared under Marx’s byline. Their goal as partners, according to Eric Hobsbawm, was to help shape the labor movement into a class movement and then turn it into an independent working-class party, aimed at the conquest of political power and the replacement of capitalism by communism.2 Though they were hugely successful theorists of revolution, they were not successful revolutionary activists. That is, their efforts during the revolutions of 1848–1849 did not have much of an impact on events, and they were bystanders to the Communard revolution of 1871. Nor did they establish any lasting revolutionary organizations or leave behind a well–thought out revolutionary strategy or set of revolutionary tactics. Their writings, of course, inspired all but one (Gandhi and Nehru) of the pairs examined in this book as well as thousands of other revolutionaries in other countries. Marx made by far the stronger impression on those who met them both. Friedrich Lessner, “an old communist,” who met Marx in November 1847, described him as “of medium height, broad-shouldered, powerful in build and energetic in his deportment. His brow was high and finely shaped, his hair thick and pitch-black, his gaze piercing. His mouth already had the sarcastic line that his opponents feared so much.” He was, Lessner continued, “a born leader of the people. His speech was brief, convincing and compelling in its logic. He never said a superfluous word; every sentence was a thought and every thought was a necessary link in the chain of demonstration. Marx had nothing of the dreamer about him.” The Russian literary memoirist P. V. Annenkov, who met Marx in Brussels in 1847, described him as a man of “energy, will power, and invincible conviction. . . . All his motions were awkward but vigorous and self-confident, all his manners ran athwart conventional usages in social intercourse but were proud and somehow guarded, and his shrill voice with its metallic ring marvelously suited the radical pronouncements over things and people which he uttered.” And yet, as Louis Menand noted, “for most of his career, Marx was a star in a tiny constellation of radical exiles and failed revolutionaries (and the censors and police spies who monitored them) and almost unknown outside it.”3 Lessner described Engels as “slim, agile, with fair hair and moustache, . . . more like a smart young lieutenant of the guard than a scholar. . . . He was a man

Ceplair CS20.indb 7

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

8  Revolutionary Pairs

you respected and loved once you knew him intimately.” Annenkov described him as “tall and erect . . . with his British air of dignity and gravity.” George Harney, a British radical, who met Engels in 1843, recalled “a tall, handsome young man, with a countenance of almost boyish youthfulness, whose English . . . was even then remarkable for its accuracy. . . . There was nothing of the ‘stuck-up’ or ‘stand-offishness’ about him.”4 But Engels, like Marx, was intolerant of “fools” and feuded regularly with political rivals. He was a dedicated student of foreign languages, military science, and natural science, known mainly to a small audience on the left for his articles on war and military matters. Marx was an indifferent earner and profligate spender. He had only two real jobs in his lifetime, as the editor of a series of short-lived periodicals and as a newspaper correspondent for a few New York journals. His main work was research, writing, and organizing political groups. In the words of Tristram Hunt, Engels “was a textile magnate and fox-hunter, member of the Manchester Royal Exchange and president of the city’s Schiller Institute. He was a raffish, high-living, heavy-drinking devotee of the good things in life”5 Marx was married with children and endeavored to live a bourgeois existence; Engels lived, in succession, with two working-class Irish sisters. In the estimation of Gareth Stedman Jones, Engels did not possess sufficient intellectual persistence and deductive power to be a rigorous political theorist, and his theoretical essays tended to be remarkable more for their boldness than their finality. But he was open to new impressions, consistently radical in temperament, quick to perceive and comprehend, and possessed “a daring intuition and an omnivorous curiosity about his surroundings.” He “wore lighter armour” than Marx, wrote Mehring, and “he was able to move more quickly,” but “he did not penetrate deeply enough to see all the pros and cons of the matter at once.”6 Thus, the two men were very different types, sharing a burning zeal for just social and economic conditions, Young Hegelian ideological roots, and belief in a materialist theory of history. They were equally arrogant and ungenerous toward their rivals, “exceedingly scornful of well-meaning thinkers who appeared to them to be in a hopeless metaphysical muddle, or to be animated by mere goodwill without any understanding of the forces by which social development was actually shaped.”7 As a result, neither was successful as a popular leader or organizer. They joined groups organized by others and weakened many by their polemical attacks on rivals. In their respective “confessions”—answers to a semi-jocular questionnaire that was very popular in England during the 1860s—the two men

Ceplair CS20.indb 8

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  9

wrote responses that mirrored the above differences. Marx stated in April 1865 that his chief characteristic was “singleness of purpose,” his idea of happiness “to fight,” and his idea of misery “to submit.” His maxim was “nihil humani a me alienum puto” (nothing human is alien to me), and his motto was “de omnibus dubitandum” (doubt everything). In his response (written in April 1868), Engels stated that his chief characteristic was “knowing everything by halves” and his idea of misery was “to go to a dentist.” His maxim was “not to have any” and his motto was “to take it easy.”8 Marx was the better formally educated of the two, but he wrote slowly and did not complete his major theoretical works. One of his coeditors, Arnold Ruge, recalled: “He finishes nothing, breaks off everything and plunges himself ever afresh into an endless sea of books.” In fact, Marx left behind a large number of unfinished manuscripts. Though he was able to meet deadlines as a journalist, pamphleteer, and organization secretary, his larger works, dependent as they were on intricate reasoning and masses of primary sources, were few. Engels was by far the better writer. In Mehring’s words, he “wrote easily and with a light touch and his prose is so limpid and clear that at all times one can see through the running stream his word to the very bottom.”9 He wrote rapidly and finished whatever he started, including preparing for publication the last two volumes of Marx’s Capital. On his own, Marx might have succumbed to poverty and not produced his great work, Capital; on his own, Engels would probably not have produced any startlingly new general theories. Together, they created the basis for what was later termed Marxism.

Converging Paths Marx, the son of a liberal Jewish lawyer who had converted to Lutheranism, was born in the west-German city of Trier, then part of Prussia. He was, Isaiah Berlin noted, “one of the rare revolutionaries who were neither thwarted nor persecuted in their early life.” The summer before entering college, he wrote that the chief guide that must direct one in the choice of a profession “is the welfare of mankind and our own perfection.” These two interests are not in conflict, because “man’s nature is so constituted that he can attain his own perfection only by working for the perfection, for the good, of his fellow men.” He attended the Universities of Bonn (1835–1836) and Berlin (1836– 1841), studying law, philosophy, and history. In November 1837, in a lengthy letter to his father, he discussed his intellectual activities. During his first year

Ceplair CS20.indb 9

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

10  Revolutionary Pairs

Fig. 1.1 Karl Marx

at university in Bonn, he had broken off “all hitherto existing connections, made visits rarely and unwillingly, and tried to immerse myself in science and art.” Because he was courting Jenny von Westphalen, “lyrical poetry was bound to be [his] first subject, at least the most pleasant and immediate one.” But poetry could only be “an accompaniment; I had to study law and above

Ceplair CS20.indb 10

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  11

all felt the urge to wrestle with philosophy.” He had posed for himself a very difficult project: “to elaborate a philosophy of law covering the whole field of law.” Using Hegelian terminology, he wrote that he had found an “opposition between what is and what ought to be” and that “the rational character of the object itself must develop as something imbued with contradictions in itself and find its unity in itself.” But, he added, in the search for philosophic ideas one must look not to the heavens but to earth. However, news that Jenny was gravely ill, combined with his disgust with what he called his “vain, fruitless intellectual labours,” made him “ill.” While he convalesced, he read Hegel extensively and joined the Doctors’ Club. At its meetings, he “became ever more firmly bound to the modern world philosophy,” but he did not become politically active.10 After he completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Jena, a comparison of the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus, he was unable to attain a university teaching position, and in 1841, he began writing articles for the Deutsche Jahrbücher and Rheinische Zeitung, becoming editor of the latter in October 1842. One of the financial backers of the Rheinische Zeitung described him as “domineering, impetuous, passionate, full of boundless self-confidence, but at the same time deeply earnest and learned.” Moses Hess, a German socialist and fellow editor at the Rheinische Zeitung, six years older than Marx, called him a phenomenon who made on me a most deep impression. Be prepared to meet the greatest, perhaps the only real philosopher living now. When he will appear in public (both in his writings as well as at the university) he will draw the eyes of all Germany upon him. . . . He will give the final blow to all medieval religion and politics; he combines deepest philosophical seriousness with cutting wit. Can you imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel combined— not thrown together—in one person? If you can, you have Dr. Marx.11

Marx was not yet a revolutionary; he was a radical republican and Hegelian idealist. Freedom, he declared is the “essence of man.” He defended the rational state against its falsifications, but he called on the government to realize the desires of people deprived of their rights. He wrote about Prussian censorship, freedom of the press, and the poverty of wine growers in the Moselle. In one article, he stated that the Rheinische Zeitung, while it “does not admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical

Ceplair CS20.indb 11

4/15/2020 9:14:55 PM

12  Revolutionary Pairs

reality, and therefore can still less desire their practical realisation, or even consider it possible, will subject these ideas to thoroughgoing criticism.” But his main tropism was toward philosophical critiques of the historical school of law and of religion.12 In March 1843, Marx announced his departure from the Rheinische Zeitung, citing government censorship, but he later stated that he had eagerly withdrawn “from the public stage to my study,” to immerse himself in French socialism. In October, he moved to Paris, where he began an intensive investigation of socialist and communist literature. The following months were, according to David McLellan, “decisive for Marx’s ideas.” He read extensively in politics, history, and philosophy—notably the French socialists, the French Revolution, and Ludwig Feuerbach—and he began a close, critical examination of Hegel’s theories. In the course of those studies, he arrived at what he later called “the guiding principle” of his studies: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitute the economic structure of society, the real foundation, out of which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”13 He and Arnold Ruge, another young Hegelian, planned to publish a newspaper, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbüche. In a letter to Ruge, Marx noted that their task was to “expose the old world to the full light of day and shape the new one in a positive way.” They must avoid raising “any dogmatic banner” and try to help the dogmatists, including communists, to clarify their propositions for themselves.” Their motto must be “reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analyzing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form.”14 Critical analysis motivated Marx’s work and mode of thinking between 1843 and 1848. He could not allow ideological errors to go unrefuted, especially in Germany, where “stupidity itself reigns supreme.” A “new gathering point,” a “new world” could only be found via criticism of the old. Since religion and politics arouse predominant interest in contemporary Germany, worldly philosophers must not only criticize them but also identify their criticism with “real struggles.” In his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” he introduced his notion of “practical activity” (revolution) and proclaimed the role of the proletariat, a class “which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a part of civil society, a class which

Ceplair CS20.indb 12

4/15/2020 9:14:56 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  13

is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general. This dissolution of a society, as a particular class, is the proletariat.”15 Engels, a scion of a well-to-do, pietistic textile family, graduated from secondary school and was sent to Bremen to be trained in business. There, he worked as an unsalaried clerk, continued to study on his own, and began writing newspaper articles. In 1841, to postpone a decision about joining the family firm and to connect with the Young Hegelians, he joined the Household Artillery of the Prussian army, stationed in Berlin. He served there for one year, attended lectures at the University of Berlin, attached himself to the Young Hegelians, and turned his attention to economic conditions. Unlike Marx, who came to Hegel via his philosophical education, Engels used Hegel as an antidote to his pious and industrial upbringing. He did not, as would Marx, ever subject Hegel to a rigorous critical analysis. He wrote a series of “Letters from Wuppertal,” for the Telegraph für Deutschland, which detailed “the depressed, drunken, demoralized region” and provided “a magnificently brutal critique of the human costs of capitalism.” In the spring of 1842, he turned his hand to political events. Favoring a program of “radical, progressive patriotism,” he joined a liberal society, The Free. (Marx had broken with the group in 1842, labeling its writings as “pregnant with world revolution, empty of ideas and salted up with atheism and communism.”) In July, Engels wrote to Ruge: “I have taken the decision to renounce all literary activity for some time and instead to study all the more. The reasons for this are obvious. I am young and autodidact in philosophy.”16 In November, he traveled to Manchester, pushed by his father and pulled by his desire to observe firsthand what he saw as the blossoming revolutionary conditions there. On his way, he stopped in Cologne, where he and Marx met for the first time, and Marx treated him coldly. Engels also met with Moses Hess, who described Engels, on his arrival, as a shy, naive, “first-year” revolutionary of the Montagnard type but one who departed as “an extremely eager communist.” In Manchester, Engels attended workers’ meetings and met many working-class leaders. He was impressed with their “clear understanding on political, religious and social affairs” and with their movement, Chartism.17 While in Manchester, Engels wrote a series of articles for German and English periodicals that were mainly concerned with socialism and

Ceplair CS20.indb 13

4/15/2020 9:14:56 PM

14  Revolutionary Pairs

Fig. 1.2 Friedrich Engels

Chartism. In one, he let his enthusiasm get the best of him, stating that the “portent of a great revolution has probably never been so clearly expressed and so sharply delineated as now in England.” And a few months later, he proclaimed that people in England, France, and Germany “have all come to the conclusion that a thorough revolution of social arrangements, based on community of property, has now become an urgent and unavoidable necessity.” Helped immensely by Georg Weerth, a fellow émigré, and Mary Burns, who was working as a mill hand in his father’s textile factory, Engels undertook an extensive investigation of the conditions of Manchester’s workers. Burns took Engels to see the tenements and meet with members of the Irish immigrant community who lived in them. He later said: “In Manchester it was forcibly brought to my notice that economic factors . . . play a decisive role in the development of the modern world. I learned that economic factors were the basic cause of the clash between different classes in society.”18

Ceplair CS20.indb 14

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  15

His most significant article, the one that caught Marx’s attention, was sent to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher at the end of 1843. In it, titled “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” Engels labeled political economy as a “science of enrichment born of the merchants’ mutual envy and greed” that “bears on its brow the mark of the most detestable selfishness.” It does not even question “the validity of private property.” He scorned the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Ramsay McCulloch, and James Mill, and he labeled so-called free trade as “legalised fraud,” which, “by dissolving nationalities . . . has done its best to universalize enmity, to transform mankind into a horde of ravenous beasts . . . who devour one another.” Engels then extensively analyzed value and competition. He focused not on the class struggle but on the competitive “struggle of capital against capital, of labour against labour, of land against land.” Competition was the great scourge. It “has penetrated all the relationships of our life and completed the reciprocal bondage in which men now hold themselves. Competition is the great mainspring which again and again jerks into activity our aging and withering social order, or rather disorder; but with each new exertion it also saps a part of this order’s waning strength.” He did not discuss the factory system, but he planned “to expound in detail the despicable immorality of this system.”19 Jones states that Engels found his distinctive authorial voice in Manchester, as well as his role as an analyst of social conditions: he “was the first to identify the revolutionary possibilities of modern industry, to highlight the place of the factory worker and to dramatize for German socialists the character of modern industrial class struggle.” Although Marx had arrived partly at the same conclusion—that communists must abolish private property in favor of common property—Engels’s article strengthened the ideas Marx was addressing during 1843 and 1844.20

The Bonding When Marx learned, in the summer of 1844, that Engels would be passing through Paris on his way home to Germany, he suggested that they meet again. They conversed steadily for ten days, and Engels wrote, in the first of his letters to Marx: “Goodbye for the present dear Karl, and write very soon. I have not been able to recapture the mood of cheerfulness and goodwill I experienced during the ten days I spent with you.” Marx, the brilliant theorist, well on his road to communism, and Engels, the keen observer, already there, found in each other compatible believers in revolution. Years later,

Ceplair CS20.indb 15

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

16  Revolutionary Pairs

Engels clearly understated the bonding that occurred, remarking that it “was obvious that we were in complete harmony as far as theoretical matters were concerned. From that time our working partnership can be dated.” Isaiah Berlin credited Engels, who “possessed a quality essential for permanent intercourse with a man of Marx’s temperament, a total uncompetitiveness in relation to him, absence of all desire to resist the impact of that powerful personality, to preserve and retain a protected position of his own.” In return, Marx “found a devoted friend and intellectual ally, whose very pedestrianism restored his sense of perspective and his belief in himself and his purpose. Throughout the greater part of his life his actions were performed with the knowledge that this massive and dependable man was always at hand to support the burden in every contingency. For this he paid him with an affection, and a sense of pride in his qualities, which he gave to no one else besides his wife and children.”21 After that extraordinary meeting, Engels returned to Germany to write The Condition of the Working Class in England. He also engaged in organizing “public meetings all over the place to set up societies for the advancement of the workers.” In the speeches he was delivering in Elberfeld, one can hear the Communist Manifesto presaged. “Present-day society,” he said, “which breeds hostility between the individual man and everyone else, thus produces a social war of all against all.” He laid the basis for the promise of a communist future on “the course of development of all civilised nations” and “the swiftly advancing dissolution of all hitherto existing social institutions.” One week later he prophesied, “One day the proletariat will attain a level of power and of insight at which it will no longer tolerate the pressure of the entire social structure always bearing down on its shoulders, when it will demand a more even distribution of social burdens and then—unless human nature has changed by that time—a social revolution will be inevitable.” That revolution would be “the unavoidable result of our existing [competitive] social relations, under all circumstances, and in all cases.” Having reached the brink, however, he pulled back, warning that if a social revolution were the necessary result of existing conditions, “then we will have to concern ourselves above all with the measures by which we can avoid a violent and bloody overthrow of social conditions. And there is only one means, namely, the peaceful introduction or at least preparation of communism. . . . We must apply ourselves seriously and without prejudice to the social problem; then we must make it our business to contribute our share towards humanising the condition of our modern helots.”22

Ceplair CS20.indb 16

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  17

Marx, meanwhile, was putting their criticism of their former Young Hegelian colleagues into written form. He later stated that this work was “directed against the ideological mysticism of Hegelian and, in general, speculative philosophy.” When he saw the first draft, Engels wrote: “The fact that you enlarged the Critical Criticism to twenty sheets surprised me not a little. But it is all to the good, for it means that much can now be disseminated which would otherwise have lain for heaven knows how long in your escritoire. But if you have retained my name on the title page it will look rather odd since I wrote barely 1½ sheets.” The following month, Engels began what would be a thirty-year undertaking: keeping Marx financially afloat. Marx had been expelled from Paris, and when he heard the news, Engels opened “a subscription list” and offered to turn over to Marx “my fee for my first English piece.” He again expressed his surprise that Marx had put Engels’s name first in the announcement for their critical work, now titled The Holy Family. “Why?” Engels asked. “I contributed practically nothing to it and anyone can identify your style.”23 The Holy Family is a historical materialist–based critique of the “critical criticism” of the Young Hegelians, intended to eliminate a rival form of critical Hegelianism. “Real humanism,” Marx wrote, “has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism.” The purpose of “this polemic,” he continued, is as “a preliminary to the independent works in which we—each of us for himself, of course—shall present our positive view and thereby our positive attitude to the more recent philosophical and social doctrines.” In this book, their materialist dialectic and their focus on the proletariat began to take shape. In the realm of material production, they noted, private property and the proletariat are antithetical. While private property is compelled to maintain itself and the proletariat, the proletariat “is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property.” And the proletariat is conscious of its condition: “They are most painfully aware of the difference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage-labour and the like are no ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement and that therefore they must be abolished in a practical, objective way for man to become man not only in thinking, in consciousness, but in mass being, in life.”24 When Engels received Marx’s massive revision, he both praised and criticized it. It was “too long”—the contemplated thirty-page critique had grown to three hundred pages. Engels also pointed out two major problems with the

Ceplair CS20.indb 17

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

18  Revolutionary Pairs

manuscript: “The supreme contempt we two evince towards the Literatur Zeitung is in glaring contrast to the twenty-two sheets we devote to it. In addition most of the criticism of speculation and of abstract being in general will be incomprehensible to the public at large nor will it be of general interest.”25 Marx spoke more directly about economic matters in his unpublished critique of Friedrich List’s book Das Nationale System der Politischen Ökonomie. In it, he foreshadowed a key passage of the Communist Manifesto: “The nationality of the worker is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is labour, free slavery, self-huckstering. His government is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is capital. His native air is neither French, nor German, nor English, it is factory air. The land belonging to him is neither French, nor English, nor German, it lies a few feet below the ground. Within the country, money is the fatherland of the industrialist.”26 Meanwhile, in Condition, Engels provided the necessary complement to the critical philosophical underpinning of their revolutionary theory, mixing the communist theory he had learned from Hess with what he had observed in Manchester. It was, Franz Mehring states, “an epoch-making work, the first great document of scientific socialism.” Engels wrote in the preface: “A knowledge of proletarian conditions is absolutely necessary to provide solid ground for socialist theories, on the one hand, and for judgments about their right to exist, on the other; and to put an end to all sentimental dreams and fancies pro and con.” Such knowledge is particularly important for German socialists and communists, who have been working, more than any other nationalities, “from theoretical premises.” The condition of the workers, Engels wrote, is destitution, which provokes a “deep wrath of the whole working-class, from Glasgow to London, against the rich, by whom they are systematically plundered and mercilessly left to their fate, a wrath which before too long a time goes by, a time almost within the power of man to predict, must break out into a revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution, the year 1794, will prove to have been child’s play.” However, he concluded this book using the same wishful notion he had expressed in his Elberfeld speeches: “The revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution; but it can be made more gently than that prophesied in the foregoing pages. This depends, however, more upon the development of the proletariat than upon that of the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, will the revolution diminish in bloodshed, revenge, and savagery.”27

Ceplair CS20.indb 18

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  19

In the spring of 1845, Marx and Engels moved next door to each other in Brussels. By then, Marx had, according to Engels already arrived at “the main aspects of his materialist theory of history.” Here, again, Engels downplayed his own significant contribution, noting that the theory is “in its essence the work of Marx, while I played in the matter only a very insignificant role.” Jones terms this account “truly misleading.” They did find common ground on several matters, “but their intellectual trajectories had been different and the differences between them persisted.” Further, Marx was endeavoring not to develop a “materialist theory of history” but rather “to construct a philosophical system that reconciled materialism and idealism, and incorporate nature and mind without assigning primacy to one or the other.”28 In eleven crystalline paragraphs in his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx consolidated his thinking on materialism and revolutionary practice. He emphasized the need for “‘revolutionary,’ of practical, critical activity.” He insisted that men must “prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the thissidedness” of their thinking in practice. It is men who change circumstances and “the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice.” And he concluded: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”29 Still convinced of the need to critically undermine all rival socialist ideas, Marx proposed that he and Engels publish a library of socialist thinkers, but they decided instead to write “a polemic against German philosophy and contemporary German socialism . . . to prepare the public for the basis of [Marx’s] economic work, which is wholly opposed to previous studies in Germany.” When their plans to publish it fell through, Marx wrote that they “abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose—self-clarification.” The manuscript they abandoned was not, according to Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, a completed work titled German Ideology. The document carrying that title is, rather, “a literary collage constructed by editors from an odd collection of manuscripts decades after they were produced.” Only three small parts of that collection were published during their lifetimes. In fact, the surviving manuscripts “are essentially ‘preparatory work’ for later (and published) writings”; they should be regarded as “work in progress.” In their reproduction of the printer’s sheets of this work, Carver and Blank state that the rough manuscript fragments of the Feuerbach chapter “give us a picture not of some decisive ‘break’ or even ‘breakthrough’ as a before/after moment of ‘self-clarification,’

Ceplair CS20.indb 19

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

20  Revolutionary Pairs

but rather they show us some degree of discursive struggle over quite difficult issues.” The manuscript provides, in their words, “easy access to a collaborative ‘laboratory’ in which Marx and Engels worked actively together—sometimes sparring with one another—to find a new way of answering questions.” They invite their readers “to enter a kind of workspace where the two authors are writing together, making mistakes, debating corrections, spilling out their thoughts (sometimes rather literally), and from all accounts having a lively time of it.” Carver and Blank see “a certain sense of contingency and experimentation” at work in the joint venture.30 In retrospect, German Ideology seems a dress rehearsal for the Communist Manifesto. Both contain a history of economic and social relations, both contain a critique of “true socialists,” both vaunt the role of the proletariat and the communists. At the same time, German Ideology looks backward, with its lengthy polemical treatment of a seemingly unimportant thinker: 350 of the 450 printed pages are devoted to a critique of Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. The intent of this manuscript was to liberate humans “from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings” before which they are bowing down and under the yoke of which they are pining away. It was frankly polemical, aiming at “uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing that their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; that the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to ridicule and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation.” These and other German idealists have failed to “inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the connection of their criticism with their own material surroundings.”31 In the section titled “Feuerbach,” Marx and Engels clearly distinguish the materialist from the idealist outlook. In a crossed-out paragraph that originally opened the section titled “Ideology in General, German Ideology in Particular,” they wrote: “We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist.” They then delve into the premises of the materialist conception of history, making their well-known observation: “It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.” The premises of

Ceplair CS20.indb 20

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  21

materialism “are men, not in any fantastic isolation and fixity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions.” The task for the “practical materialist, i.e., the Communist,” is to revolutionize the existing world and practically to come to grips with and change existing conditions. “The communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure,” and, hence, the necessity of overthrowing the existing state of things. The real struggles within society are class struggles, and “every class which is aiming at domination, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, leads to the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination in general, must first conquer political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which in the first moment it is forced to do.” For the authors, communism is “not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself.” For them, communism was “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” A few pages later, they refer to the proletarian revolution as “a practical movement.”32 In 1845, they helped found the German Workers Educational Society. The group published a series of pamphlets, subjecting, in Marx’s words, “the mixture of French-English socialism or communism and German philosophy . . . to a merciless criticism, establishing in its stead the scientific understanding of the economic structure of bourgeois society as the only tenable theoretical foundation. We also explained in popular form that our task was not the fulfillment of some utopian system but the conscious participation in the historic process of social revolution that was taking place before our eyes.” The group strongly advocated the establishment, by force if necessary, of a bourgeois government, based on liberal democracy, as the necessary prelude to a proletarian-run state.33 The two men also established a Communist Correspondence Committee, to instill communist principles into French and German liberal reform groups, and they inaugurated a correspondence with the London branch of the League of the Just. In Brussels, they clashed memorably with Wilhelm Weitling, one of the league’s most prominent members, rejecting what they called his generalities and utopianism and urging instead the creation of a political organization of the working class, to gain a full bourgeois democracy as a prelude to the establishment of a communist society.34 Marx and Engels regularly exposed people who claimed they were “communists,” made strict demands on those they considered true Communists, and called on German

Ceplair CS20.indb 21

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

22  Revolutionary Pairs

Communists to emerge from their isolation and establish firm links with one another. In their effort to purge oppositional elements from the Communist Correspondence Committee, they tried and failed to win the leading French socialist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, to their side. Marx had met Proudhon in Paris in late 1844, and Marx and Engels devoted twenty-two pages of The Holy Family to defending him against Edgar Bauer’s criticism.35 Then, when Proudhon produced his own critique of political economy, The Philosophy of Poverty in October 1846, followed by a German translation in May 1847, Marx devoted six months to penning a polemical rejoinder, The Poverty of Philosophy, which made little impact. His conclusion, however, rehearsed some of the key elements of the forthcoming Manifesto of the Communist Party: “The condition of the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes, just as the condition for the emancipation of the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was the abolitions of all estates and all orders. The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.”36 In the spring of 1847, Engels traveled to Paris to promote the creation of a Communist Correspondence Committee there, but he did not succeed. Despite this failure, the Brussels committee urged its London correspondents to call for an international congress of communists, to “bring force and unity into our propaganda.” According to Marx, he and his group did so because the “antiquated and objecting” elements of the league “could only be counteracted by our personal collaboration.”37 The congress met in London in June, but only Engels attended. The group’s official name was changed to League of Communists, and the first article of its new statute read: “The aim of the League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the domination of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society based on class antagonisms, and establishment of a new society without classes and without private property.”38 The delegates proclaimed: “Working men of all Countries, Unite!” In August, Marx transformed the Brussels Correspondence Committee into a branch of the Communist League, with himself as president. He was also elected vice president of the International Democratic Association, formed in Brussels, in September. In the months after the congress, a fierce debate arose in the branches over the “confession of faith” drafted by the congress delegates and the one drafted by two German members. The Paris branch mandated Engels to write

Ceplair CS20.indb 22

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  23

a new draft. It was, in effect, a compromise document, in the form of twentyfive questions and answers, and it included material that Marx and Engels had used in The Holy Family and “German Ideology.” Meanwhile, Marx and Engels participated in the League of Communist’s second congress, held in November and December 1847. Under their direction, the congress adopted a new set of statutes, which advocated “the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the domination of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society based on class antagonisms and the establishment of a new society without classes and without private property.” Marx was mandated to write a new confession of faith, which would become the league’s official program. Engels submitted his draft to Marx, advising him “to drop the catechistic form and call the thing a Communist Manifesto. As a certain amount of history will have to be brought in, I think the present form is unsuitable.”39 The first fifteen of Engels’s questions were definitional (What is communism? What is the proletariat?) and historical (What were the results and consequences of the industrial revolution?). Question 16 asked whether private property could be abolished by peaceful methods. That would be greatly desired, Engels wrote, because “Communists know only too well the futility and, indeed, the harmfulness of conspiratorial methods. They know all too well that revolutions are not made deliberately and arbitrarily. . . . But they also perceive that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries is violently suppressed, and that in this way opponents of communism are working full force to create a revolution.” Question 18 asked what course the revolution would take. Engels answered that it would immediately draw up a democratic constitution “and by means of this establish directly or indirectly the political rule of the proletariat.” In his answer to the next question—Can such a revolution occur in one country alone?—Engels simply said “no.” When it came to alliances with other political parties (question 25), Engels told the communists that they must “always rally to the support of the liberal bourgeois party in its struggle with the governments. But they must ever be on their guard least [sic] they should come to believe the self-deceptions of the bourgeoisie or their misleading assurances that its victory will in any way bring solace to the proletariat.”40 In the Manifesto, Marx eliminated the question/answer format and divided the document into four parts. Marx penned most of the memorable phrases, and the driving energy of the text is his. He made extensive use of Engels’s answer to question 11 (What were the first results of the industrial revolution and the division of society into bourgeoisie and proletariat?),

Ceplair CS20.indb 23

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

24  Revolutionary Pairs

expanded on Engels’s commentary on the differences between socialists and communists, and utilized Engels’s categories in describing the position of communists in relation to other opposition parties. Marx’s description of the course of the revolution is much stronger than Engels’s: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production.” The Manifesto was published in February 1848, but it did not have any effect on the revolutions that soon erupted, and neither man mentioned the Manifesto in the newspaper articles they wrote during the revolution.41 Marx was not optimistic about the possibility of a successful democratic revolution, while Engels thought it was inevitable. (Engels was much more of a determinist than Marx.) They agreed that a successful revolution required the mobilization of the masses, but they were not clear which class or party would direct them. Both, however, demonstrated their enthusiasm for the manner in which events were proceeding on the continent and in Britain. They both spoke at a meeting in London, celebrating the seventeenth anniversary of the Polish uprising of 1830 and calling for an international brotherhood of the proletariat. Engels wrote several articles on the banquet campaign for liberal reforms in France and on the Chartist movement. And in an article reviewing events in Germany, he proclaimed that the bourgeoisie were making stupendous progress. Though Communists are no friends of the bourgeoisie, he wrote, “we do not grudge the bourgeoisie their triumph. . . . Nay more. We cannot forebear an ironical smile when we observe the terrible earnestness, the pathetic enthusiasm with which the bourgeoisie strive to achieve their aims. They really believe that they are working on their own behalf!” The Communists, however, say straight-forwardly to them: “They are working in our interest,” and though they are, they cannot stop. “They must conquer [overthrow the absolute monarchy, the nobility, and the clergy]—or already now go under.” He was rhapsodic about the February events in France, noting the “brilliant success by the Paris proletariat.”42 At first, the revolutionary events of 1848 promised to bring bourgeoisdemocratic governments into effect in several countries. Marx and Engels threw themselves into the events in France and Germany. For one year, mainly in Germany, they were active revolutionaries, in the thick of insurgent

Ceplair CS20.indb 24

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  25

events, speaking, writing, and organizing, and, in Engels’s case, actual insurrectionary activity. Expelled from Brussels in March, Marx went to Paris. He was given the power to establish the office of the Central Authority of the Communist League there, with full discretionary power to direct it. He also cofounded and served as secretary for a German Workers’ Club, the members of which were dispatched to Germany to organize in various cities. Marx and Engels were the principal authors of “The Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,” issued by the league’s executive committee in March. This document consisted of seventeen radical reform points, including universal suffrage, universal arming of the people, abolition of right of inheritance, universal and free education, and steeply graduated taxes. The document called for the support of the proletariat, petite bourgeoisie, and small peasantry, and it advocated the formation of workers’ associations by league members, to be united in a national federation.43 In June, Marx moved to Cologne, where he and his associates founded the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He and Engels wrote most of the articles for this newspaper, Engels concentrating on military matters and nationalities, Marx on politics. Though Marx sharply criticized domestic events, particularly the debates in the Constituent National Assembly at Frankfurt, he said remarkably little about political groups and parties. In one significant article, Engels clearly stated: “The final act of constitution cannot be decreed, it coincides with the movement we have to go through. It is therefore not a question of putting into practice this or that view, this or that political idea, but of understanding the course of development.”44 The newspaper attained a national readership, though Marx’s direct influence was mainly confined to Westphalia. They also joined the Democratic Society, which spoke publicly of liberal reform goals but harbored proletarian demands. It was dwarfed in membership by a Workers’ Association, focusing on alleviating workers’ grievances. In addition, Berlin, not the Rhineland, was the main theater of events in Germany. Finally, Marx managed to antagonize some of his allies. Carl Schurz, who attended a congress of Rhineland democrats in Cologne, which Marx arranged, recalled: “I have never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and intolerable. To no opinion which differed from his own did he accord the honour of even condescending consideration. Everyone who contradicted him he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives him who had advanced it.”45

Ceplair CS20.indb 25

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

26  Revolutionary Pairs

Though the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung pushed the masses toward a showdown with the state, they opposed premature confrontations, because, they argued, revolutions developed from revolutionary conditions not revolutionary wills, nor did they “put forward any utopian demand for the immediate establishment of a German Republic.” Conditions, however, were lacking for the creation of their version of a north-German mass party, and they had few followers outside of Cologne. As it happened, by September, the forward thrust of the revolutionary force in Germany had begun to dissipate. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels both found victory in defeat. For Marx, events in France had stripped away “all the delusions and illusions of the February revolution” and split France “into two nations, the nation of owners and the nation of workers.” Writing about the defeat in Frankfurt, Engels stated: “Every victory of our opponents was as the same time a defeat for them.”46 In October, Engels was expelled from Germany, and he went on a walking tour of France and Switzerland. In December, he attended the First Congress of German Workers’ Associations and Democratic Organizations of Switzerland and was elected to the Central Commission. Marx continued to edit the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and to participate in various committees. As a result, he faced two trials in February 1849. After a ringing defense of freedom of the press, he was acquitted of the charge of using the Neue Rheinische Zeitung to calumniate government officials. The following day, he and two other members of the Rhenish District Committee of Democratic Associations were found not guilty of incitement to revolt. As a result of his experience in Germany, Marx had lost faith in the liberals as a revolutionary force and began to develop an independent strategy for the workers. He also dropped any belief in a revolution led by a resolute elite. Raising the consciousness of the proletariat became his mission. In April, he and four members of the Rhenish District Committee of Democratic Associations issued a joint statement of resignation, written by Marx: “We consider that the present organisation of the Democratic Associations includes too many heterogeneous elements for any possibility of successful activity in furtherance of the cause. We are of the opinion, on the other hand, that a closer association of Workers’ Associations is to be preferred since they consist of homogeneous elements.” He also composed an essay titled “Wage, Labour and Capital,” which was printed in five parts. The time had come, he wrote, “to deal more closely with the economic relations themselves on which the existence of the bourgeoisie and its class rule, as well as the slavery of the workers, are founded.” He presented the topic in three large sections: “1) the relation of wage labour to capital,

Ceplair CS20.indb 26

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  27

the slavery of the worker, the domination of the capitalist; 2) the inevitable destruction of the middle bourgeois classes and of the peasant estate under the present system; 3) the commercial subjugation and exploitation of the various European nations by the despot of the world market—England.” At the end of the fifth part, he predicted that capitalists, “as they are compelled .  .  . to exploit the already existing gigantic means of production on a larger scale and to set in motion all the mainsprings of credit to this end,” will provoke a corresponding increase in the number and size of “earthquakes” (economic crises), which will become “more frequent and more violent.”47 In May 1849, the Prussian government labeled Marx an undesirable alien and expelled him from the country. The final issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, printed in red ink, warned the people of Cologne not to revolt: “In the military situation obtaining in Cologne you would be irretrievably lost. You have seen in Elberfeld that the bourgeoisie sends the workers into fire and betrays them afterwards in the most infamous way. A state of siege in Cologne would demoralise the entire Rhine Province, and a state of siege would be the inevitable consequence of any rising on your part at this moment. The Prussian will be frustrated by your calmness.” The editors bid the people of Cologne farewell. “Their last word everywhere and always will be: emancipation of the working class.”48 The two friends went from city to city, trying to buoy the losing struggles for an imperial constitution, but they were unsuccessful. Engels joined an armed revolt in Elberfeld, but he was asked to leave, “since his presence could give rise to misunderstanding as to the character of the movement.” He and Marx then went to Baden, but they were not welcomed there. They were arrested in Hesse and transported to Frankfurt, where they were separated. Engels then went to Offenbach, to fight for the revolution there. He participated in a series of battles in July, but the effort collapsed. Marx severed his ties with the Communist League and co-founded a Committee of Cologne Democratic Unions. However, his followers’ attempt to take control of the Cologne Workers’ Association was an abject failure; the workers were not amenable to his anti-Prussian rhetoric. Marx then left Germany for Paris, but Engels had one more go at insurrection, joining an armed revolt in Kaiserslautern. This time, he earned wide praise for his efforts.49 During those months of revolutionary activity, the personal relationship between Marx and Engels deepened. At the end of the year, Marx wrote Engels regarding a misunderstanding in the remittance of some money: “To suppose I could leave you in the lurch for even a moment is sheer fantasy. You

Ceplair CS20.indb 27

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

28  Revolutionary Pairs

will always remain my friend and confidant as I hope to remain yours.” Several months later, he wrote: “I have suffered a great deal of anxiety on your account and was truly delighted when yesterday I received a letter in your own hand.”50 Marx moved to Frankfurt and then London, where, with Engels’s assistance, he helped found and raise money for the Committee to Support German Refugees and reestablish the Communist League and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The new version, Neue Rheinische Revue, however, published only six issues. In their announcement for the newspaper, Marx and Engels wrote: “A time of apparent calm such as the present must be employed precisely for the purpose of elucidating the period of revolution experienced, the character of the conflicting parties, and the social conditions which determine the existence and struggle of these parties.”51 Marx brilliantly realized the first of those goals in his Class Struggles in France, which appeared in the first three issues. When it was published as a pamphlet, however, it had a very small readership. Building on their belief that another revolution was brewing, they tried to transform the Communist League into a pure workers’ party. Their circular to that effect, “The Central Authority to the League,” congratulated the members for having proved themselves in the two revolutionary years 1848 and 1849 but criticized them for allowing the movement to “come completely under the domination and leadership of petty-bourgeois democrats. An end must be put to this state of affairs, the independence of the workers must be restored.” Any type of union with the democratic petty bourgeoisie must be “decisively rejected,” and league members must “establish an independent secret and public organisation of the workers’ party.” In addition, the workers “must be armed and organised.” And if they are not able to block revivals of the old civic militia, the workers “must try to organise themselves independently as a proletarian guard with commanders elected by themselves and with a general staff of their own choosing and to put themselves under the command not of the state authority but of the revolutionary municipal councils set up by the workers.” Three months later, Marx and Engels sent out another address detailing the situation in each country, reiterating the need for “a strong secret organisation of the revolutionary party throughout Germany.”52 But Marx did not control the organization, and, in fact, he provoked a schism in the ranks when he accused his opponents of replacing “critical observation with dogmatism, a materialist attitude with an idealist one.” They tell the workers “that they must seize political power at once or abandon all hope,” whereas Marx’s followers tell “the workers that they must go

Ceplair CS20.indb 28

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  29

through fifteen, twenty, perhaps even fifty years of war and civil war” to alter existing conditions and prepare themselves to take power.53 He and Engels and their followers resigned from the German Workers’ Educational Society in September and formed the Social Democratic Relief Committee for German Refugees. They did not, however, join either of the two international groups that had formed in Britain. They repudiated the European Central Committee, because it had no connections to the workers and bourgeoisie in France and England and it was led by people from a political stage of development that had passed. The other, the United Socialist Democrats of Germany and France, did comprise workers’ groups, but Marx and Engels were neither invited to join the group nor welcomed, having alienated its organizers.54 Thus, during and immediately after the revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels had not achieved the stature of outstanding national revolutionary leaders. They were not spoken of in the same breath as Giuseppe Mazzini, Louis Kossuth, or Louis Blanqui. Marx “was virtually unknown outside Cologne, and remained so throughout the 1850s and 1860s. His followers during this period amounted at most to a few dozen.”55 Nor did Marx and Engels emerge from their revolutionary experiences with a coherent theory and practice of revolution. This failure was not for lack of trying. They analyzed the revolutions in three significant works. In the first, The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850, Marx carefully delineated the role the proletariat played and the limits facing it. Though the proletariat had played a significant role in overthrowing the July Monarchy and forcing the establishment of a republic, it could push no further than a bourgeois republic. The proletariat was not yet a class “in which the revolutionary interests of society are concentrated.” Thus, it did not find, “directly in its own situation the content and the material of its revolutionary activity: foes to be laid low, measures, dictated by the needs of the struggle, to be taken.” But, like every national proletariat, the French proletariat was “conditioned by the development of the industrial bourgeoisie,” and only “bourgeois rule tears up the roots of feudal society and levels the ground on which a proletarian revolution is alone possible.” Thus, the mistakes of the proletariat were “pardonable,” their choices understandable. He also initiated the victory-in-defeat notion that became a permanent possession of Marxist analysis of failed uprisings. This particular revolution had not been defeated. Rather, the revolution marked the defeat of “the prerevolutionary traditional appendages, results of social relationships, which had not yet come to the point of sharp class antagonisms—persons, illusions, conceptions, projects.”56

Ceplair CS20.indb 29

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

30  Revolutionary Pairs

Next, Engels wrote twenty articles on “Revolution and CounterRevolution in Germany” for the New-York Daily Tribune, which appeared under Marx’s byline. Together they put forth a lucid account of events but drew no lessons, save some general statements about action. At one point, Engels asserts that “in revolution, as in war, it is always necessary to show a strong front, and he who attacks is in the advantage; and in revolution, as in war, it is of the highest necessity to stake everything on the decisive moment, whatever the odds may be.” The problem with that admonition is that “decisive” moments are frequently only perceivable in hindsight. A few pages later, he returns to that theme: “Insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain laws of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them.” He lists two rather obvious rules: “Never play with insurrection unless you are fully prepared to face the consequences of your play”; once entered into, “act with the greatest determination, and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed uprising.”57 Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, also written in 1851– 1852, could have been the occasion for a critical review of the activities of what he called “the proletarian party,” but that group makes only a brief, generalized appearance. Though it impressed its stamp on the provisional government that emerged from the February events, it did so only “as an appendage of the petty-bourgeois democratic party.” And, while it “reveled in the vision of the wide prospects that had opened before it and indulged in seriouslymeant discussions on social problems,” it could not prevent the regrouping of the “old powers of society” and its alliance with “the mass of the nation, the peasants and petty-bourgeois.” When this new class alliance established a bourgeois republic, the proletariat responded in June with an insurrection, which Marx called “the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars.” But it was easily suppressed, and the proletarian party did not challenge Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état, in December 1851.58 The prospects for socialist movements or socialism darkened during the 1850s. As for revolutions, though Marx wrote that they are only possible when “the modern powers of production are in collision with the bourgeois mode of production,” he and Engels predicted revolutionary possibilities in every political and economic crisis that occurred, but they seriously underestimated the staying power of Louis Napoleon. The French working-class movement remained under the influence of Proudhon, and in Germany there was no movement to speak of. None of his works were published in Germany

Ceplair CS20.indb 30

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  31

between 1851 and 1859, and Marx did not have a trusted emissary there until 1862. The new socialist thought that emerged during that decade “was for the most part singularly untouched by Marx’s influence.” By the end of 1850, because of the growth of production and trade unions there, Marx had come to focus on Great Britain as the locus of a new European revolution, and he concluded that continental upheavals would lack ultimate significance unless they reacted on Britain, the center of “the bourgeois cosmos.” Eight years later, he evinced the same pessimism, noting, in a letter to Engels, the revolution on the continent “is imminent and will immediately assume a socialist character,” but “will it not of necessity be crushed in this little corner, since over a much vaster terrain the movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant?”59

Their Paths Diverge Geographically and Vocationally For the next two decades, Marx and Engels would live in separate cities, corresponding voluminously and occasionally visiting. Settled in London, Marx began to write more regularly. He resumed his economic studies, working at the British Museum ten hours a day, but that intense study ended early in 1852 and did not resume for four years. His financial situation was dire, with much more money going out than coming in. Lacking any marketable skills and with only a cursory grasp of English, he could not find any remunerative position. A Prussian spy reported on his situation: “He lives in one of the worst and so one of the cheapest neighbourhoods in London. He occupies two rooms. . . . There is not one clean or decent piece of furniture in either room, but everything is broken, tattered and torn, with thick dust over every­thing. . . . On entering Marx’s room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water.”60 The Marxes’ insistence on maintaining a middle-class lifestyle contributed to their financial problems (as well as to their coldness toward Mary Burns, the Irish worker in Manchester who had become Engels’s mistress). Engels, meanwhile, faced dire consequences of another sort: “The middle decades of Engels’s life were a wretched time. He was exiled back to Manchester, humiliatingly forced to return to Ermen & Engels, and the twenty years he then spent in the cotton trade was an era of nervous, sapping sacrifice. . . . To support Marx, Marx’s growing family and, most importantly of all, the writing of Das Kapital, Engels willingly offered up his own financial security,

Ceplair CS20.indb 31

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

32  Revolutionary Pairs

philosophical researches and even his good name.” Hunt estimates that Engels contributed somewhere between £3,000 and £4,000 to the Marx family’s maintenance; to do so, he had to assume a position, exploiter of the surplus value of the working class, that he was theoretically dedicated to abolishing. He was also forced to set up two separate homes, one for the maintenance of bourgeois propriety, the other for housing Mary Burns and her sister.61 He did, however, carve out a space of his own: in response to the military’s role in crushing the revolutions of 1848–1849, he began to immerse himself in military history and science. And he produced his own version of historical materialism in The Peasant War in Germany (1850). Marx repeatedly turned to Engels for explanations of military actions he needed for his articles. In several instances, he acted as Engels’s research assistant. They did not, however, come up with a formula or model of revolutionary war. In 1848, they had believed that war could be the progenitor of revolution, and that a popular military rising, such as occurred in France in 1793, could advance the revolution. Though they lived through two decades of almost constant war, between 1851 and 1871, they did not discover a reliable means of linking war with revolution. Sometimes a war seemed desirable; other times, it did not.62 In early 1851, Engels wrote Marx about their enforced leisure: “At long last we have the opportunity—the first time in ages—to show that we need neither popularity, nor the SUPPORT of any party in any country, and that our position is completely independent of such ludicrous trifles. From now on we are only answerable for ourselves and, come the time when these gentry need us, we shall be in a position to dictate our own terms. Until then we shall at least have some peace and quiet. A measure of loneliness too, of course.” As it turned out, Marx kept them both very busy writing newspaper articles. In Mehring’s words: “Not only did Engels drudge for his friend during the day in his office and on the Stock Exchange, but he also sacrificed the greater part of his leisure hours in the evening, often working far into the night.”63 In desperate need of money, Marx became a correspondent for the NewYork Daily Tribune, and he asked Engels either to translate his articles into English or to provide him with articles in English on conditions in Germany. Engels agreed, asking Marx to “write and tell me soon what sort of thing it should be—whether you wish it to stand on its own or be one of a series, and . . . what attitude I should adopt. . . . Also, any other available information that may help me find my bearings.” Marx gladly received the article, titled

Ceplair CS20.indb 32

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  33

“Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany,” and seventeen others on the same subject followed, but the two did not discuss the question of payments, making it seem as though Marx would keep the fees. Engels also translated articles Marx wrote. Starting in the second half of 1852, Marx began writing the articles himself. In those, he commented on politics and economics, closely searching for any evidence of a crisis. For four of those years, 1853–1857, he focused on the Crimean War, British imperialism in Asia, and the recession of 1857. During the period 1853–1862, he wrote for six different newspapers, receiving payment for 487 articles.64 He was also beginning to consolidate his economic research. Marx’s fondness for Engels shone through in two letters written in late 1851. In the first, not having received an expected letter, he wrote: “You’re so meticulous about writing that your silence disturbs me.” And, one month later, he addressed Engels for the first time as “Dear Frederick.” Engels urged Marx to “once again make a public debut with a substantial book” to keep his name before the public. He advised Marx to write a “harmless” history of Germany.65 Much of their correspondence during the next year focused on the articles Engels was writing for Marx. Marx regularly implored Engels to write something immediately, and Engels usually complied. At one point, he complained about the amount of work he was facing, but Marx did not waste much sympathy: “If your time is very much taken up, you would certainly do better writing for [Charles Henry] Dana [editor of the New-York Daily Tribune] than for [Ernest] Jones [editor of Notes to the People, a British radical newspaper].” For his part, Engels told Marx: “You must really stop making your articles so long. Dana cannot possibly want more than 1½ columns, it would be too much for one number.” (According to one estimate, Engels wrote one-fourth of the nearly five hundred articles that appeared under Marx’s name, as well as fifty-one of the sixty-seven articles published in The New American Cyclopedia.)66 Tragedy intervened in April, when Marx’s daughter Franziska died. Engels blamed himself: “If only there were some means by which you and your family could move into a more salubrious district and more spacious lodgings! I would gladly have sent you more money, but while in London I spent so much more than I had anticipated that I shall be pretty short myself. . . . I wish I had known beforehand how things stood in London, for in that case I should have foregone what was au fond a quite superfluous trip there.” Three years later, when Marx’s surviving son, Edgar (a younger son

Ceplair CS20.indb 33

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

34  Revolutionary Pairs

had died in 1850), died, Engels again offered his support. Marx wrote: “I cannot thank you enough for the kindness which you have worked in my stead, and for the sympathy you have shown toward the child.” A few days later, he noted: “I shall never forget how much your friendship has helped to make this ghastly time easier for us.” And on April 12, Marx returned to the subject of Engels’s friendship: “Amid all the fearful torments I have recently had to endure, the thought of you and your friendship has always sustained me, as has the hope that there is still something sensible for us to do together in the world.”67 In late 1852, at Marx’s suggestion, the London District of the Communist League disbanded, and branches on the Continent also disappeared. Years later, he wrote to a friend that after the dissolution of the Communist League, he “never belonged to any society again, whether secret or public.” Instead, during the subsequent years, he mocked and condemned the “emigration’s democratic humbug and revolution-mongering,” and he became politically isolated. Engels, meanwhile, kept up his connections with several former Chartists.68 Marx visited Engels several time in 1855 and 1856, and when, in January 1857, he wrote to Engels about his perilous economic straits, Engels immediately sent him £5 and promised to continue doing so each month, even if it meant taking on more debt. Indeed, he apologized for having bought a horse the previous month. Two months later, Marx expressed his sorrow about this situation: “I must continue to depend on you.”69 When Marx learned in late May that Engels was ill, he sent five letters expressing his concern and urging Engels to go to the seashore to recover. In July 1858, Marx hit rock-bottom financially and poured his heart out to Engels about his condition. Marx knew that Engels could not relieve him of his debts, but he sought his friend’s advice on what he should do. “I would not wish my worst enemy to have to wade through the QUAGMIRE in which I’ve been trapped for the past two months, fuming the while over the innumerable vexations that are ruining my intellect and destroying my capacity for work.” Engels was only able to provide some of the money needed, and he advised Marx to ask his family for the rest. Learning that Engels was ill, Marx, in turn, expressed his embarrassment at having “annoyed” Engels.70 Meanwhile, despite his financial and health woes, Marx had completed what is known today as the Grundrisse (eight hundred–plus pages) and readied for publication A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. At Marx’s

Ceplair CS20.indb 34

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  35

urging, and with great reluctance, Engels anonymously reviewed the Contribution. It is an odd piece, barely mentioning Marx and hardly praising the work’s quality. It was published in two parts. In the first, Engels talked only about the history of political economy in Germany and mentioned the book only in the last sentence. In the second, he, unlike Marx, dwelt on the need to find the proper “scientific method” by which to analyze political economy. He then offered a very short overview of the book’s two sections, promising a discussion of its economic content in a third article, which was not published.71 In any event, it was the only positive review, and the book did not attract the attention Marx had anticipated. The 1860s were a decade of momentous disruptions in all parts of the world, especially in Europe, where the national unifying movements in Italy and Germany radically altered the shape of things. The civil war in the United States also captivated their attention, and they kept a close watch on the 1863 uprising of the Polish people against their Russian overlords. Spurred by these upheavals, the partners turned their attention to building a Marxist party. Marx was fairly well known among British working-class leaders, and he had resumed his connection with the German Workers’ Educational Society in Britain. He was also in regular contact with key German leaders, notably Ferdinand Lassalle and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Indeed, in March 1860, Lassalle invited Marx to come to Berlin and coedit a new radical newspaper. After stalling for a year, Marx traveled to Berlin the following March. For a variety of personal and political reasons, not least his dislike and distrust of Lassalle, Marx decline the offer. Two years later, Lassalle formed the General German Workers’ Association (1863). Despite the encouragement of Engels and others, Marx steadfastly refused to criticize Lassalle in public. Perhaps he did not wish to harm the nascent movement. But privately, Marx and Engels sharply criticized Lassalle’s strategy of separating the working-class movement from the liberals and creating a mass movement to pressure the Prussian government into granting universal suffrage and aiding producers’ cooperatives. They saw him as a Prussian nationalist who refused to do anything about oppressed rural workers in the eastern part of the country and rejected any agitation against the nobility.72 But while he lived, they could not hope to match his influence among German workers and socialists. What was curious during these years was Marx’s seeming indifference to Engels’s personal travails. In the extant letters, Marx did not offer condolence to Engels on the death of his father or the serious illness of his mother. And in his letters to Engels, he hardly ever mentioned Mary Burns. When Marx

Ceplair CS20.indb 35

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

36  Revolutionary Pairs

learned of her sudden death, his callousness was startling. On January 7, 1863, Engels informed him that Mary had died: “I simply can’t convey what I feel. The poor girl loved me with all her heart.” On the following day, Marx wrote: “The news of Mary’s death surprised no less than it dismayed me. She was so good natured, witty and closely attached to you.” He then went on at length about his own financial problems, acknowledging: “It is dreadfully selfish of me to tell you about horreurs at this time. But it’s a homeopathic remedy. One calamity is a distraction from the other. . . . Instead of Mary, ought it not to have been my mother, who is in any case a prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life . . . ? You can see what strange notions come into the heads of ‘civilised men’ under the pressure of certain circumstances. He added a postscript: “What arrangements will you now make about your ESTABLISHMENT?”73 Six days later, for the first time in their friendship, Engels expressed anger: “You will find it quite in order that, this time, my own misfortune and the frosty view you took of it should have made it positively impossible for me to reply to you any sooner. All my friends, including philistine acquaintances, have on this occasion, which in all conscience must needs afflict me deeply, given me proof of greater sympathy and friendship than I could have looked for. You thought it a fit moment to assert the superiority of your ‘dispassionate turn of mind.’ Soit! [so be it]” Engels then, in a turn of extraordinary generosity, addressed Marx’s finances. Marx decided to allow a week to lapse before responding apologetically: “It was very wrong of me to write you that letter, and I regretted it as soon as it had gone off. However, what happened was in no sense due to heartlessness. As my wife and children will testify, I was a shattered when your letter arrived (first thing in the morning) as if my nearest and dearest had died. But, when I wrote to you in the evening, I did so under the pressure of circumstances that were desperate in the extreme.” And he, again, listed them all. Engels proved remarkably forgiving: Thank you for being so candid. You yourself have now realized what sort of impression your last letter but one had made on me. One can’t live with a woman for years on end without being fearfully affected by her death. I felt as though with her I was burying the last vestige of my youth. When your letter arrived she had not yet been buried. That letter, I tell you, obsessed me for a whole week: I couldn’t get it out of my head. NEVER MIND. Your last letter made up for it and I’m glad that, in losing Mary, I didn’t also lose my oldest and best friend.74

Ceplair CS20.indb 36

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  37

Marx replied with a bit of the feeling that had been lacking in the previous letters: “I can tell you now, too, without beating about the bush that, despite the straits I’ve been in during the past few weeks, nothing oppressed me so much as the fear that our friendship might be severed. Over and over again, I told my wife that the mess we were in was as nothing compared with the fact that these bourgeois pinpricks and her peculiar exasperation had, at such a moment, rendered me capable of assailing you with my private needs instead of trying to comfort you.” But he then shifts the blame for his behavior to his wife and then veers off to a discussion of machinery.75 Starting in 1864, Marx opened his letter to Engels with a “Dear Fred” salutation; Engels wrote “Dear Moor.” In terms of political success and publishing achievement, the ensuing years (1864–1871) would be some of the best of Marx’s life. He was completing his magnum opus, Capital, which would, he thought, “deal the bourgeoisie a theoretical blow from which it will never recover.” Marx also became a member of the General Council of the Workingmen’s International Association, and his early letters on the subject ring with excitement. The crowded first meeting indicated to Marx, “THERE IS NOW EVIDENTLY A REVIVAL OF THE WORKING CLASSES TAKING PLACE.” Though trade unions, not political parties, catalyzed this revival, Marx intended to take this movement as he found it, build its strength in daily struggle for partial reforms, and trust he could lead it toward revolutionary ideology and practice.76 To do so, he would have to fight on several fronts, notably against the followers of Proudhon, Mazzini, and Mikhail Bakunin. Given the divisions in the new organization, it is a credit to Marx’s leadership that it endured as long as it did, eight years, and that it attracted members from all the major European countries. The participants at the first meeting had resolved to found a Workingmen’s International Association governed by a General Council, seated in London, “to ‘intermediate’ between the workers’ societies in Germany, Italy, France, and England. A provisional committee, including Marx, was appointed. It set up a subcommittee to draft a declaration of principles and a set of provisional rules. After reading them, Marx took control and rewrote both. In place of the principles, he penned an inaugural address, and he reduced the number of rules from forty to ten. The General Committee enthusiastically received his work. In the address, Marx adopted a moderate, reformist tone, eschewing all revolutionary rhetoric. After summarizing the deleterious effect on the working class of the defeats of the 1848 revolutions, Marx pointed out two significant victories that had since occurred: the passing of the Ten Hours Act in the United Kingdom and the cooperative factory movement. He concluded by calling on

Ceplair CS20.indb 37

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

38  Revolutionary Pairs

the workers to form an international brotherhood and, in particular, to counteract Europe’s upper classes, “to combine in simultaneous denunciations [of the upper classes of Europe], and to vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations.”77 In his work for the International, Marx saw himself as representing himself and Engels: “It was very difficult to frame the thing so that our view should appear in a form that would make it ACCEPTABLE to the present outlook of the workers’ movement. . . . It will take time before the revival of the movement allows the old boldness of language to be used. We must be fortiter in re, suaviter in modo [powerful in deed, pleasant in manner].”78 It is also worthy of note that Marx drafted the rules in such a way as not to deter any organization that wanted to affiliate, and he praised Mikhail Bakunin, who would become his greatest rival for control of the International. Marx viewed the association as an international means of linking the organized labor groups of Western Europe, not as a socialist or revolutionary organization. He took care to publicly align himself with the British trade unionists, even though he was critical of them in private. They were, he informed Joseph Weydemeyer, in St. Louis, “the worker-kings of London.” According to Gareth Stedman Jones, Marx had shifted his outlook from the desirability of a violent takeover to a belief that the process of transition from the capitalist mode of production had already begun. That is, he was now focusing on the process of social-democratic pressure from without rather than a revolutionary event.79 Engels’s enthusiasm for the association fell far short of Marx’s. The former expressed disdain for the people involved but was pleased that “we are again making contact with people who do at least represent their class, which is what really matters ultimately.” And six months later, he wrote: “I had always expected that the naive fraternité in the INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION would not last long if there were an active political movement among the workers here, just the same SPLITS would occur. It will pass through a lot more such phases and will take up a great deal of your time.” He also wrote that “it was quite out of the question” for him to form a branch in Manchester. He saw no one there with whom he could broach that sort of thing.80 From his seat on the General Council and his position as corresponding secretary for Germany and Belgium, Marx wielded immense influence over the association, but he preferred to do so behind the scenes. He could not, however, do it unobtrusively, given that the association was riven with

Ceplair CS20.indb 38

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  39

conflict from the beginning. He was especially wary of the Proudhonistes, the Mazzinians, and the “men of letters, members of the bourgeoisie or semiliterary people.” His most immediate problem, however, was that members of the General Association of German Workers were writing polemical articles about the International. Marx wanted Engels to coauthor a statement, preparing the ground for the two of them “to reoccupy” their “‘LEGITIMATE’ position” in the German workers’ movements. Engels agreed about the necessity for the statement, but he told Marx that he would have to write it alone, because Engels was fully occupied composing a pamphlet: The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party.81 Instead of the planned statement, which was to be conciliatory in tone, Marx decided that the time for an open break had arrived, and he composed a letter to that effect to the Sozial-Democrat. He and Engels, did not, however, give up the prospect of establishing contacts with workers in the Rhine area. But as he was trying to complete Capital and keep the association on a Marxian path, his financial situation again became dire. He reported the facts to Engels: “I assure you that I would rather have had my thumb cut off than write this letter to you. It is truly soul-destroying to be dependent for half one’s life. The only thought that sustains me in all this is that the two of us form a partnership together, in which I spend my time on the theoretical and party side of the BUSINESS.” Engels rapidly remitted £50. When a mutual friend suggested to Marx that Engels should help arrange a loan to alleviate Marx’s debts, Marx responded: “You misunderstand how things stand between myself and Engels. He is my closest friend. I keep no secrets from him. If it had not been for him, I would long ago have been obliged to start a ‘trade.’ In no circumstances, therefore, would I wish any third person to intercede with him on my account. There are also, of course, certain limits to what he can do.”82 In December 1865, Marx wrote Engels that the association and all it entailed has been “weighing down on me like an INCUBUS, and I would be glad to be able to get rid of it. But that is impossible, least of all at the present time. . . . If I resigned tomorrow the bourgeois element . . . would have the upper hand . . . . [But], on the other hand, since I have so little time just now, it is no trifle for me.” When he was not dealing with association problems, he was working on Capital. He completed the first volume in early 1867, and while he was in Germany, attending to its printing, he wrote to Engels: “Without you, I would never have been able to bring the work to a conclusion, and I can assure you it always weighed like a nightmare on my conscience that you

Ceplair CS20.indb 39

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

40  Revolutionary Pairs

were allowing your fine energies to be squandered and to rust in commerce, chiefly for my sake, and, INTO THE BARGAIN, that you had to share all my petites misères as well.” Marx sent the proof sheets to Engels. In a note attached to the second batch, Marx wrote: “I hope you are satisfied with the 4 sheets. That you have been satisfied with it so far is more important to me than ANYTHING the rest of the world MAY SAY OF IT.”83 Engels offered to supervise the English translation, and he wrote an anonymous review of the volume. He also pushed his German colleagues to arrange for reviews.

Their Paths Reconverge At about this time, Engels became much more involved in helping Marx with the business of the association. He and Marx discussed all the important issues and personalities, and Marx regularly sent him drafts of resolutions. In addition, Engels promoted the association and his and Marx’s policies to his German correspondents, and he defended the association’s positions in the press. However, he was characteristically modest about what he was doing. He told one correspondent, who had complimented him on his work: “The compliments you have so undeservedly paid me shame me all the more since, unfortunately, in the last 18 years, I have been able to do as good as nothing directly for our cause, and have had to devote all my time to bourgeois activities.”84 In September 1867, Marx reported to Engels, “our Association has made great progress. . . . And when the next revolution comes, and that will perhaps be sooner than it might appear, we (i.e., you and I) will have this mighty ENGINE at our disposal.”85 Before that could happen, however, they had to deal with rival elements in the association, particularly the French Proudhonistes and the Swiss Bakuninists; he had to bring the German parties on board; and he had to prevent a schism with the British members, who were not as radical on the Irish question as he was. In all these matters, he had to proceed cautiously, so as not to alienate the other nationality groups. In November 1868, out of the blue, Marx received wonderful news from Engels, who announced that he was terminating his partnership in his textile firm. When the prospective buyout occurred, he proposed to provide Marx with a yearly stipend of £350. “I am quite,” Marx responded, “KNOCKED DOWN by your too great kindness.” In June, Engels completed the sale of his share of the business and declared himself “a free man.” He invested his profits in stocks and bonds, and, in September, he and Lizzy Burns, Mary’s

Ceplair CS20.indb 40

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  41

sister, moved to London. Engels joined the General Council in 1870, as corresponding secretary for Italy and Spain. He became, in Hunt’s words, “the global hub for every manner of Machiavellian procedural manoeuvre” against the Bakuninists. In the process, he exacerbated the differences between the revolutionary Marxists and the moderate trade unionists. He had a poor opinion of the latter, did not treat them as equals, and lacked understanding and tact in his dealings with them. Marx, at least in his letters, was equally contemptuous of the leaders of the French and German workers’ movements.86 The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 exposed the cracks in Marx’s concept of transnational worker unity. Indeed, he and Engels, for separate reasons, favored a German victory. Marx believed that would shift the center of gravity of the worker movement from France to Germany and speed the organization of the German working class. Engels was openly nationalist: he formed a patriotic committee of Germans in Manchester and proclaimed the conflict a people’s war, for the honor and independence of Germany. This news dismayed the Social Democrats in Germany, who had condemned both countries as aggressors.87 During these years of their revolutionary partnership, Marx soared far beyond Engels. The addresses he wrote in the name of the General Council, especially the third, provided the template for revolutionaries in the years ahead, notably Lenin. He and Engels did cowrite several letters to editors and agendas for conferences and congresses, but only in their attack on Bakunin did their work achieve a high plateau. Engels, meanwhile, wrote a long series of articles, more than sixty, about the military aspects of the war, which Marx, in a turnabout, placed in the Pall Mall Gazette. The pair wrote to the German Social-Democratic Workers’ Party’s, reminding its members that they had a historic role to play, given the war’s simplification of the state of affairs in the Germanies. “This war has shifted the centre of gravity of the continental labour movement from France to Germany. This means that greater responsibility now rests with the German working class.”88 In his second address on behalf of the General Council, following the Prussian victory at Sedan, the capture of Napoleon III, and the replacement of the Second Empire by the Third Republic, Marx cautioned the French working class not to act rashly. “Any attempt at upsetting the new Government in the present crisis, when the enemy is knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly.” He urged every section of the International to

Ceplair CS20.indb 41

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

42  Revolutionary Pairs

“stir the working classes to action. If they forsake their duty, if they remain passive, the present tremendous war will be but the harbinger of still deadlier international feuds, and lead in every nation to a renewed triumph over the workman by the lords of the sword, of the soil, and of capital.” He told one of his correspondents: “However the war may end, it has given the French proletariat practice in arms, and that is the best guarantee of the future.”89 When, in March 1871, the Paris National Guard rebelled against the new government and established the Commune of Paris, Marx faced a dilemma. He knew the Commune was doomed, and he was critical of its failure to grasp its limited opportunities, but he did not want to say this publicly, nor did he wish to raise false hopes. In an April letter, he called it “the most glorious deed of our Party since the June [1848] insurrection in Paris.” Five days later, he wrote: “The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new phase with the struggle in Paris. Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of worldhistoric importance has been gained.” In his third address to the association, on May 30, 1871, which would be published as “The Civil War in France,” Marx termed the Commune “the glorious working men’s Revolution” and a “proletarian revolution.” He used its defeat to draw revolutionary lessons for the future. The Commune, by breaking “the modern state power,” signified to the working class that it “cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” The existence of the Commune was its “great social measure. . . . Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people.” (Ten years later, Marx told a correspondent that the Commune “was merely the rising of a city under exceptional circumstances, the majority of the Commune was in no way socialist, nor could it be.”)90 Marx’s writings on the civil war in France had, according to Arthur Rosenberg, “an extraordinary historical significance: for by this bold step Marx annexed the memory of the Commune. It is only since then that Marxism has possessed a revolutionary tradition in the eyes of mankind. . . . It is only since 1871 that Marxism has been clearly associated with the labour revolution.” But by associating the International with the Commune, Marx damaged its long-term prospects, especially with the English trade-unionists.91 With the crushing of the Commune in May, London became overrun with refugees. The General Council raised funds for them and tried to find them jobs, but it received little assistance from the English workers’ organizations. Given British labor’s strong reaction against the Commune, the

Ceplair CS20.indb 42

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  43

threat of the Bakuninists, and the undependability of the German Social Democrats, Marx decided that the association could no longer be the motivating force behind a new revolution, and he did not wish to be part of an organization that simply held congresses, issued proclamations, and distributed pamphlets.92 Because conditions on the continent were not propitious for a congress, the General Council convened a conference in London in September. In the resolutions they prepared for the conference, Marx and Engels stated clearly that “the constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to insure the triumph of the social Revolution and its ultimate end—the abolition of the classes.” When the conference met, Marx expressed his belief in the limitations of trade unions to effect change. He advised workers to run for seats in legislatures. “The governments are hostile to us. We must answer them by using every possible means at our disposal, getting workers into parliament is so much gaining over them, but we must choose the right men.” In sum, Marx believed the bargaining power of labor inadequate unless supplemented by political pressure. “The English have all the material resources for the socialist revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalisation and revolutionary fervour. Only the General Council can provide them with this (and) can thus accelerate the truly revolutionary movement here, and in consequence elsewhere.”93 In what would be their last dual battle for their version of revolution, Marx and Engels began to marshal their case against Bakunin. They prepared a circular, titled Fictitious Splits in the International, to be printed for private circulation within the ranks of the International. It is a lengthy history of the Bakuninist Alliance and its “intrigues,” an indictment of Bakunin, and a strong defense of the General Council. Central to their case was Marx’s critique of socialist utopianists and sects. They were not, like the association, a “genuine and militant organisation of the proletarian class of all countries united in their common struggle against the capitalists and the landowners, against their class power organised in the state.”94 Once he had defeated Bakunin, Marx determined to resign from the General Council. The work for it, he wrote Paul Lafargue, “impinges too greatly on my time” and, were it not his conviction that his presence was still needed—to deal with Bakunin—he would “have withdrawn long since.” After the Hague conference, scheduled for September, he said, his “slavery” will be over, he will become “a free man again,” and he would accept no further administrative functions. The Hague congress, he wrote, “will be a

Ceplair CS20.indb 43

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

44  Revolutionary Pairs

matter of life or death for the International; and, before I resign, I want at least to protect it from disintegrating [Bakuninist] elements”95 Marx and Engels carefully prepared for the Hague congress of the International. They submitted their key resolution on September 6, proposing the transfer of the General Council to New York City (far away from the reach of the Bakuninists). It passed by a narrow margin, 26–23, with nine abstentions. They also submitted a long list of other resolutions, the most important of which was the addition of Article 7a to the Rules: “In its struggle against the collective power of the propertied classes, the working class cannot act as a class except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes. This constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to insure the triumph of the social revolution, and of its ultimate end, the abolition of classes.”96 After the congress, they composed a lengthy public pamphlet, The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association, recapitulating their private circular, Fictitious Splits. Both agreed on the historical relativity of the association. Engels said that it belonged to the period of the Second French Empire, when “the common cosmopolitan interests of the proletariat” came to the fore. But following the suppression of the Commune, all the latent differences emerged and could not be resolved. Marx wrote that the “international activity of the working classes does not in any way depend on the existence of the International Working Men’s Association. This was only the first attempt to create a central organ for that activity; an attempt which had a lasting success on account of the impulse which it gave but which was no longer realisable in its first historical form after the fall of the Paris Commune.”97 Ironically, his work extolling the Commune made Marx a much more widely known revolutionary than he had previously been, but his influence was only felt in Germany. However, Das Kapital was translated into Russian in 1872, and a French translation was published in 1875. But the strain and overwork of the years 1871–1873 had taken their toll. Marx suffered a physical breakdown in 1873, and when he recovered, he did very little writing. In fact, after Marx died, Engels was astonished to learn how little work Marx had done on the second volume of Capital. Instead, Marx had become an advisor and consultant, intervening in the German and French labor movements, meeting with Russian revolutionaries, and commenting frequently on the prospects of a revolution in Russia. He even learned to read Russian.

Ceplair CS20.indb 44

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  45

He did write two significant short documents, a criticism of the German socialists—Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)—and a circular letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, and others (1879). In the first, he sharply criticized the program Liebknecht and colleagues had prepared for the congress convened to unify their party with the Lassalleans. He noted that they did not understand the meaning of the phrases labour, instruments of labour, and emancipation of labour; the international aspect of a socialist program; and the role of the state. Workers should not, Marx stated, strive for a “free state.” One must, rather, contrast the present-day state with the future, transitional one: “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”98 He did not, however, define what he meant by a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. In the circular letter he and Engels wrote, they objected to what they saw as the reformist (revisionist) bent of the Social Democratic Party: its renunciation of violent revolution and its effort to appeal to all classes.99 The addressees immediately sent two representatives to London to convince Marx and Engels that the class struggle was not being neglected. Marx and Engels accepted their representations, and Engels agreed to write for their newspaper; Marx, however, was too weakened by the catarrh that would soon kill him. Engels remained active and productive, and he continued to provide his friend financial support. Prior to submitting his Anti-Dühring manuscript for publication, Engels read the entire work to Marx. Though Marx had helped Engels with the economic section, there are, Hunt stated, “no recorded responses or revisions by Marx to the substance of Engel’s work.” In fact, Marx explicitly attributed this work to Engels and never indicated that it represented a collaboration. When Paul Lafargue translated three of the chapters for a pamphlet titled Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Marx wrote a preface but was not identified as its author. In the prefaces to Anti-Dühring he wrote after Marx’s death, Engels associated his own systematic approach with that of Marx and Engels together. The anti-Dühring section tediously replicates the extensive polemic of The Holy Family and German Ideology; the socialism part is the Communist Manifesto redivivus. Though Engels referred to the work as a “sour apple,” it became, according to Jones, “the formative book of the most influential leaders of the Second International.”100 Perhaps of greater significance for the future of socialist revolutions in Europe was the preface Engels wrote for the Russian edition of the Communist

Ceplair CS20.indb 45

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

46  Revolutionary Pairs

Manifesto (1882), which spoke to the matter of Russian exceptionalism: “The question is can the Russian obschina [peasant commune], though greatly undermined, yet a form of the primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?” The only answer possible today is this: if the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.101 In a letter to Eduard Bernstein, written the day Marx died, March 14, 1883, Engels reflected: “The value of the man in the theoretical field, and at decisive moments also in the practical, can be gauged only by one who was constantly with him. His wide horizons will disappear with him from the scene for many years. These are things still beyond the ken of the rest of us.” And at Marx’s funeral, Engels captured his friend’s place in history. Marx “was above all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element, and he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival.”102 The following year, Engels wrote his Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. He referred to it as “the execution of a bequest, . . . a meagre substitute for the work Marx had intended to write, and for which he had written extensive notes.” He prepared for the press volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, completing the latter; oversaw the translation of volume 1 into English; and wrote introductions to new translations of The Manifesto of the Communist Party. But he could only do so much, and, when, two years before Engels died, a Russian philosophy student inquired about publishing all the early works of Marx and Engels, Engels asked him what was the more important task: “to spend the rest of his life publishing old manuscripts from publicistic work of the 40’s or to set to work, when Book III of Capital came out, on the publication of Marx’s manuscripts on the history of the theories of surplus value.” Engels also planned to write a biography of Marx, a history of the German socialist movement from 1843 to 1863, and a history of the International from 1864 to 1872.103

Ceplair CS20.indb 46

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)  47

After Marx’s death, Engels undertook a study of the physical sciences and the application to them of the dialectical method. His conclusions diverged from Marx’s in three important ways. First, Marx had made no predictions about the collapse of capitalism. He had spoken of circumstances in which it might be shaken, but in his edited version of the third volume of Capital, Engels substituted collapse. Second, after Marx’s death, Engels made an effort to associate the thinking of Marx and Charles Darwin, but Marx had objected to the lack of teleology in Darwin’s theory of change. Third, in Leszek Kołakowski’s neat summation, “Engels adopted a different standpoint as regards the cognitive and ontological link between man and nature,” propounding “a theory which subjects humanity to the general laws of nature and makes human history a particularization of those laws, thus departing from the conception of man as ‘the root’ (in Marx’s phrase) and of the ‘humanization’ of nature.” George Lichtheim calls this development in Engels’s thought the non-Marxian notion of “scientific socialism.” A causally determined process, and comprehensive worldview, dialectical materialism, replaced critical theory as the hallmark of socialism.104 In spite, or because, of these differences, Engels became the paterfamilias of European socialists. George Bernard Shaw referred to him as “a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran.” According to Jones, Engels exerted an “immense and lasting influence . . . on the definition of Marxist socialism at the point at which it first began seriously to be adopted by the European socialist movement” in the 1880s. Gregory Elliott states that Engels was “the true founder of the Marxism bequeathed to the Second International.” His efforts, E. J. Hobsbawm concluded, “constitute the first stage in the formation of the main tradition of Marxism.” As Geoff Eley points out, on Marx’s death “socialist organisations barely existed in Europe,” and they were “fragile growths, subject to persecution. Yet by the time Engels died, twelve years after Marx, socialist parties existed in all of Europe’s main regions. For the first time, one can speak of an institutionalized Marxism, orchestrated by Engels, who “made the popularization of Marx’s thinking the mission of his final years.” In addition, he “managed an extraordinary network of international socialist contacts” and deeply influenced those socialists who founded the Second International. However, Rosenberg notes: “The conception of a revolution as a practical political possibility was gradually forgotten by the Continental labour parties. They were concerned only with daily, legal activities. The idea of a socialist state vanished into a nebulous future. For the

Ceplair CS20.indb 47

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

48  Revolutionary Pairs

European socialists, participation in the daily struggles of the workers against employers, emphasis on the specific class position of the proletariat, participation in parliamentary elections, and rejection of false anarchist doctrines were considered identical with ‘Marxism.’”105 It was only in Russia that the Marxist concepts of revolution and a socialist state took deep root. Marx’s economic writings, particularly volume 1 of Capital, made a significant impact on Russian revolutionaries. Ironically, the country against which Marx had raged for thirty years became the home of some of his most fearless and intelligent followers.

Ceplair CS20.indb 48

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

2

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940) Not even the most detached, impartial and well-documented evaluation by contemporaries and witnesses of these two revolutionists “who shook the world” would yield a precise answer as to which of the two was more important in the conquest and consolidation of Bolshevik power in Russia and its consequences for the entire world. — Angelica Balabanoff

Lenin and Trotsky were not friends or even companions. For most of their relationship, they were bitter rivals. Though they came to respect and admire each other, during and after the revolution of 1917, they continued to clash for the remainder of Lenin’s life, and when Lenin tried to lean on Trotsky, Trotsky backed off. They bonded for only a few months, between July and October 1917, when they led the forces that overthrew the Russian Empire and established a Communist regime. And they worked together for the next six years. Lenin had built the Bolshevik Party, the revolutionary organization, while Trotsky became its field commander. After the revolution, Lenin headed the new government, while Trotsky led the Red Army to victory over the counterrevolution and Allied intervention. Their partnership ended with Lenin’s premature death, as did the prospects for Trotsky’s continuing as a Soviet leader. I hesitate to use the murky phrase “they completed one another,” but no other words will do in this situation. Between July and October 1917, Lenin and Trotsky melded as no other revolutionary pair did. Each was magnified by the presence of the other. Given their history, theirs is one of the most astonishing episodes of unified work in history. Together they accomplished what each might not have been able to do alone. Trotsky’s street smarts, 49

Ceplair CS20.indb 49

4/15/2020 9:14:57 PM

50  Revolutionary Pairs

arousing and leading what he called “the revolutionary masses,” and Lenin’s organizing skills, building a revolutionary party, meshed perfectly during those months. Aside from their polemical exchanges between 1903 and 1917 and his last written pieces, Lenin did not say much about Trotsky. Trotsky, however, wrote extensively about Lenin, especially after Lenin’s death. Though Trotsky knew Lenin for twenty-two years and deeply appreciated his political skills, he did not really know Lenin as a human being. Lenin, however, seemed to understand Trotsky’s human strengths and weaknesses very well. Just prior to his death, he wrote: “Comrade Trotsky . . . is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C. C. [Central Committee], but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.”1 Many of Trotsky’s articles about Lenin were “written hurriedly,” and Trotsky did not, for obvious reasons, remind his readers about what had occurred during the years 1903–1917. In Trotsky’s memoir and in his books about the Russian revolutions, written while he was in exile, Lenin, of course, is writ large and positively. For Trotsky, the essence of Lenin’s greatness was his will, his single-minded dedication to the revolution. In his commentary on Maxim Gorky’s postmortem portrait of Lenin, Trotsky wrote: Gorky is right when he says that Lenin is the extraordinary and perfect embodiment of a tense will striving toward the goal. This tension toward the goal is Lenin’s essential characteristic. . . . The very essence of Lenin, all his most inward worth, consists precisely in this: that always and everywhere he was pursuing his unique goal, the importance of which he felt so deeply that it became as if organically his, it became part of himself—he was at one with the aim he was pursuing, and there was no means of drawing a line between his person and his purpose.

Several years later, in 1930, the now-exiled Trotsky wrote: “Lenin became the leader of the most revolutionary party in the world’s history because his thought and will were really equal to the demands of gigantic revolutionary possibilities of the country and the epoch. Others fell short by an inch or two, and often more.” His chief strength “lay in his understanding the inner logic of the movement, and guiding his policy by it. He did not impose his plan on the masses; he helped the masses to recognize and realize their own plan.” He

Ceplair CS20.indb 50

4/15/2020 9:14:58 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  51

was not “a demiurge of the revolutionary process, . . . he merely entered into a chain of objective historical forces.”2 They shared the same goal: making a Marxist revolution in Russia, though both broke from the Marxist tradition in their basic revolutionary theories: Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and Trotsky’s The Permanent Revolution. Neither had a single grand plan; both operated on their general assumptions about the revolutionary process. Both were perfectly comfortable cutting ties and going it alone. Anatoly Lunacharsky wrote that Lenin was the greater innovator and opportunist: “Lenin is both masterful and creative in the realm of political thought and has very often formulated entirely new lines of policy which subsequently proved highly effective in achieving results. Trotsky is not remarkable for such boldness of thought.” Lenin was also, he went on, “much more of an opportunist, in the profoundest sense of the word. . . . I am referring to that sense of reality which leads one now and then to alter one’s tactics, to that tremendous sensitivity to the demands of the time which prompts Lenin at one moment to sharpen both edges of his sword, at another to place it in it sheath.”3 Lenin had far greater insight into his colleagues than Trotsky, and he alienated far fewer party comrades. Lenin was “friendly, but only up to a point. . . . He always kept a distance between himself and his followers,” but he had a “gift for establishing personal relations of confidence.” With a few exceptions (Lenin and Julius Martov before 1903 and Trotsky and Alexander Helphand after 1903), neither had close personal relationships. Balabanoff, the Italian socialist who knew both men well, noted that Lenin “was free from egocentricity, absolutely indifferent to what might be said or written about him.” He was completely unselfish and self-abnegating. “He avoided everything that might either lead or seem to lead toward the establishment of a personality cult.” Trotsky’s ego, however, was vast. “He wanted every action, every thought of his to carry his personal mark: Trotsky said it, Trotsky wrote it. The manner and the form in which he presented an idea was important to him, and he was not indifferent to what might be said about him, even after his death.” Lenin was always a party person; Trotsky was so only intermittently. As Edmund Wilson noted, Lenin’s “whole object is to build a party; and his critical activity is confined to what he regards as indispensable for whipping his party into shape,” whereas Trotsky spent most of his life as “an independent Marxist with a few devoted followers but no real popular constituency behind him.”4 Lunacharsky described Lenin as “a cruel political opponent, exploiting any blunder [his enemies] made and exaggerating every hint of opportunism. . . .

Ceplair CS20.indb 51

4/15/2020 9:14:58 PM

52  Revolutionary Pairs

He never dabbled in intrigue, although in the political struggle he deployed every weapon except dirty ones.” Even when Lenin sharply disagreed with key Bolsheviks, he always tried to keep a connection with them, recognizing that they might be useful in other circumstances. Trotsky, though, was openly scornful and dismissive of those he believed incompetent or inferior. Trotsky possessed, Lunacharsky wrote, a “colossal arrogance and an inability or unwillingness to show any human kindness or to be attentive to people, the absence of that charm which always surrounded Lenin, condemned Trotsky to a certain loneliness. . . . Trotsky had little talent for working within political bodies; however, in the great ocean of political events, where such personal traits were completely unimportant, Trotsky’s entirely positive gifts came to the fore.” Otherwise, he “was clumsy and ill-suited to the small-scale work of Party organization [and he] was hampered by the very definite limits of his own personality. Trotsky as a man is prickly and overbearing. However, after Trotsky’s merger with the Bolsheviks, in his attitude to Lenin, Trotsky always showed . . . a tactful pliancy which is touching. With the modesty of all truly great men he acknowledges Lenin’s primacy.”5 Max Eastman, who knew Trotsky well, echoed Lunacharsky: What Trotsky lacks is a sense of the feelings of the other man—an immediate sense that is not a matter of reflection. . . . When Trotsky triumphs, it always has a “triumphant look.” When Lenin triumphs, it is just the truth, and nobody is disturbed. Trotsky is too full of himself— not in a vain way, although many people mistakenly think so—but he is too full of his own will and his own passion to orient himself tactfully in a group. For that reason, while he is great as a commander and inspirer—and also as a thinker—he is not great as a leader of men.6

Both men were ambitious, but neither was vain. Lunacharsky stated that Lenin’s “ambitiousness stems from his colossal certainty of the rectitude of his principles and too, perhaps, from an inability . . . to see things from his opponent’s point of view.” Trotsky, in contrast, treasures his historical role and would probably be ready to make any personal sacrifice, . . . in order to go down in human history surrounded by the aureole of a genuine revolutionary leader. His ambition has the same characteristic as that of Lenin, with the difference that he is more often liable to make mistakes, lacking as he does Lenin’s almost infallible instinct, and being a man of choleric temperament he is liable,

Ceplair CS20.indb 52

4/15/2020 9:14:58 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  53 although only temporarily, to be blinded by passion, whilst Lenin, always on an even keel and always in command of himself, is virtually incapable of being distracted by irritation.

But in certain ways, Trotsky “incontestably surpasses” Lenin: “He is more brilliant, he is clearer, he is more active. Lenin is fitted as no one else to take the chair at the Council of People’s Commissars and to guide the world revolution with the touch of genius, but he could never have coped with the titanic mission [building and running the Red Army] which Trotsky took upon his own shoulders, with those lightning moves from place to place, those astounding speeches, those fanfares of on-the-spot orders, that role of being the unceasing electrifier of a weakening army, now at one spot, now at another. There is not a man on earth who could have replaced Trotsky in that respect.” They were, Lunacharsky concluded, “two of the strongest of the strong.”7

Converging Paths Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in 1870, in Simbirsk (renamed Ulyanovsk in 1924), a city 550 miles east of Moscow. He came from a respectable middle-class family, and yet three of the children became revolutionaries. His older brother, Alexander, was executed in 1887 as a “terrorist.” Lenin never spoke about how this event affected him, but as the brother of a convicted terrorist, he became guilty by association and was sent down from the University of Kazan. At that point, he began reading radical literature, mainly of a populist sort, joined a populist group, and read the first volume of Capital. He then devoted himself to reading other Marxist books and studying for the law. By 1892, he had gathered a nascent revolutionary circle. He also took the time to research and write a study of agrarian economic statistics, in order to analyze the conditions of Russian peasants. In 1893, he moved to St. Petersburg where he became part of a budding movement with international ties. During his years there, he made, for the first time, close contacts with workers’ groups. He continued to work on his economic study and launched a series of attacks on the populist movement. Like Marx and Engels, he insisted on the need to expose the errors of competing groups and theorists. His reputation as an accomplished Marxist theorist rose, he helped organize the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, and he traveled to Europe in 1895, to meet Russia’s leading

Ceplair CS20.indb 53

4/15/2020 9:14:58 PM

54  Revolutionary Pairs

Fig. 2.1 Vladimir Lenin

Marxist theorist, Georgi Plekhanov. Plekhanov and the other exiled Marxists emphasized the leading role of the proletariat in the coming democratic revolution and insisted on the role of the intelligentsia in bringing to the proletariat knowledge of the political situation and organization. At first, Lenin idolized Plekhanov as Trotsky would later, also at first, idolize Lenin. On his

Ceplair CS20.indb 54

4/15/2020 9:14:58 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  55

return to Russia, Lenin, along with Julius Martov, oversaw the transition from the strategy of using workers’ study groups to raise consciousness to entering directly into workers’ strikes, to what they termed “agitation.” But he was also focused on moving from economic struggles to a political struggle for democracy. In 1897, he urged the formation of a cohesive all-Russian socialist party.8 The founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) was held at Minsk in March 1898, but the participants were quickly arrested, and Lenin was exiled to Shushenskoye. Worried by the increasing fragmentation of Russian socialists and by the emergence of a strong current of revisionist thinking, centered on promoting the bread-and-butter economic demands of the workers, Lenin wrote a series of pamphlets and articles sharply criticizing what he termed economism. In 1899, he completed The Development of Capitalism in Russia, which Neil Harding calls “the fullest, best-documented and best-argued examination” by a Marxist of the process of economic transition from feudalism to capitalism.9 In July 1900, Lenin and Martov left Russia in order to found a newspaper, Iskra. It was to be more than a journal; it was intended, Lenin wrote, as “a collective organizer,” its distribution necessitating “the establishment of a network of local agents.  .  .  . This network will form the skeleton of that organization we need: large enough to encompass the entire country; sufficiently broad and many-sided to ensure a strict and detailed division of labour.” In his pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (1901–1902), Lenin clearly delineated his ideas about organization, breaking ranks with European socialdemocratic orthodoxy, proclaiming that only a secret, carefully selected, centralized “organization of revolutionaries” could “guarantee the energy, stability, and continuity of the political struggle.” That select group, organized around Iskra, would “guarantee the flexibility which is necessary for a militant SocialDemocratic organization.”10 Even as a young revolutionary, Lenin was referred to as the “old man.” Alexei Potresov wrote that Lenin “was young only according to his identity document. Face to face you would not be able to give him anything below thirty-five or forty years. The pallid face, the baldness that covered his whole head except for some spare hair around his temples, the thin reddish little beard, the screwed-up eyes that looked slyly at people from under his eyebrows, the old and harsh voice. . . . We often joked that Lenin even as a child had probably been bald and ‘old.’” He “tended towards an orderly life, free from all excesses. He wanted it to be regular, with precisely fixed hours for

Ceplair CS20.indb 55

4/15/2020 9:14:58 PM

56  Revolutionary Pairs

meals, sleep, work, and leisure. He did not smoke or drink, and looked after his health, doing physical exercises every day. He was order and neatness incarnate.” “There is no other man,” remembered Pavel Axelrod, “who is absorbed by the revolution twenty-four hours a day, who has no other thoughts but the thought of revolution, and who, even when he sleeps, dreams of nothing but the revolution.”11 Even his political rivals could not help but recognize his greatness, and friend and foe alike focused on the power of his will. Potresov said that Lenin “represented that rare phenomenon in Russia, a man with an iron will, indomitable energy, who poured fanatical faith into the movement and the cause, and had no less faith in himself.” Lenin’s dominating trait, wrote Lunacharsky, “the feature which constituted half his make-up, was his will: an extremely firm, extremely forceful will capable of concentrating itself on the most immediate task but which yet never strayed beyond the radius traced out by his powerful intellect and which assigned every individual problem its place as a link in a huge, world-wide political chain.” “Through his will,” wrote Balabanoff, “he was able to subject to his plan [for revolution] all men and all things.” N. N. Sukhanov, a political rival, described Lenin as “an extraordinary phenomenon, a man of exceptional intellectual power; he is a first-class world magnitude in caliber.” Josef Stalin, however, was disappointed in his first encounter with Lenin in 1905: “I expected to see the mountain eagle of our party, a great man,” but “I saw the most ordinary individual, below average height, distinguished from ordinary mortals by, literally, nothing.”12 But some believed that Lenin possessed a darker side. Potresov noted: “Behind these great qualities, however, there lurked great deficiencies, negative qualities, more appropriate perhaps in a medieval or Asiatic conqueror.” Balabanoff professed herself surprised at Lenin’s “habit of accusing notoriously honest and disinterested people of treason, dishonesty, or bribery.” When she questioned him about it, he replied: “Everything that is done in the interest of the proletarian cause is honest.” He was “implacable” to opponents, enemies, and Bolsheviks who angered him. “He was unjust to them and knew it; he even resorted to slander, guided by his maxim: ‘The end justifies all means; keep on slandering, something will stick in the end.’” Impersonally, “he attacked, derided, and ground the adversaries to dust, resorting to methods and expressions which were not always justifiable and often inadmissible.” Historian Richard Pipes labeled Lenin “a thoroughgoing misanthrope.”13

Ceplair CS20.indb 56

4/15/2020 9:14:58 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  57

This man of many parts took up residence in London in April 1902. Trotsky arrived on his doorstep very early one morning in 1903, awakening the household, “impelled by the force” that had set him on his journey of escape and exile.14 Lev Davidovich Bronstein (b. 1879) was raised on a farm in the small Ukrainian village of Yanovka. His parents were Jewish. Bronstein was sent to Odessa for his education, and he moved to Nikolayev in 1896, where he helped organize the South Russian Workers’ Union. The group was arrested in 1898, and Bronstein spent two years in prison, awaiting trial. During his incarceration, he read Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia and became a Marxist. Sentenced to four years’ exile in Siberia, he read Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and associated himself with the revolutionary wing of the RSDLP, then began writing for its journal, Iskra. He escaped from Siberia in the summer of 1902, assumed the name “Trotsky” from one of his jailers and made his way to Lenin’s house in London, where he was greeted with “‘The Pero [Pen] has arrived!’”15 As well as writing for Iskra, he also began to give lectures in London and on the continent. Though Trotsky’s articles for Iskra were often inferior to those he had penned in Siberia, his lectures and speeches were highly regarded. Lenin, though, evidenced concern about Trotsky’s debating style. On one occasion, when Lenin and the other editors planned to criticize a position of Plekhanov’s, Lenin told Trotsky: “‘Let Martov speak. He will smooth it over, whereas you will hit straight from the shoulder.’”16 Seeking to secure a dependable majority on the editorial board of Iskra, Lenin nominated Trotsky, who had “the ‘sense’ of a party man, of a man of action,” who would profit from his participation on the board. Lenin acknowledged Trotsky’s “defects of [literary] style” but added: “He will outgrow them. At present he accepts ‘corrections’ in silence (and not very readily).”17 Plekhanov, who had developed an irrational hatred of the young man, refused to acquiesce in the appointment. Trotsky lived with two of the other editors, Vera Zasulich and Julius Martov, and he did not see much of Lenin, who “led the life of a family man, and every meeting with him, aside from the official meetings, was a small event.” In retrospect, Trotsky applauded that aspect of Lenin which would, in a few months, divide them for fourteen years: Lenin’s “whole being was geared to one great purpose, and he would make use of any circumstance and disregard all formalities in straining toward his goal.” He was “the only one to personify the future: its grave tasks, its cruel struggles and innumerable

Ceplair CS20.indb 57

4/15/2020 9:14:58 PM

58  Revolutionary Pairs

Fig. 2.2 Leon Trotsky

victims. . . . It was Lenin’s impressive singleness of purpose which allowed him to embark upon his task and to conclude it.”18

Divergence In July and August 1903, fifty-two delegates of the RSDLP gathered, first in Brussels, then, to escape harassment by the Belgian police, in London. They met to discuss the party’s principles and future organization. To increase the

Ceplair CS20.indb 58

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  59

party’s effectiveness, Lenin intended to reshape it into one of professional revolutionaries, subordinate the Russian-based Central Committee to the editorial board of Iskra, and remove three members from the editorial board. He was prepared for walkouts and splits, but he did not want to alienate Martov and Plekhanov. In contrast to Lenin’s smooth orchestration of his agenda, Trotsky, who seemed blithely unaware of the undercurrents of contention that had gone into arranging the congress and preparing the party program, “was jumping up and speaking on every point.”19 At first, there was no divergence, and Trotsky supported all the tactics to silence or waylay the opposition. He considered himself a centralist, but as the congress progressed, Lenin’s manner of centralizing began to disturb the young protégé. The first clash came over Lenin’s draft resolutions defining a party member as “one who accepts the Party’s programme and supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of its organisations.” Martov proposed an alteration in the last clause: “work under the control and direction of one of the Party organisations.” In a speech defending this narrower organization against Martov’s more elastic proposal, Lenin said, “In the period of Party life that we are now passing through it is just this ‘elasticity’ that undoubtedly opens the door to all elements of confusion, vacillation, and opportunism. . . . The need to safeguard the firmness of the Party’s line and the purity of its revolutionary principles has now become particularly urgent.” Trotsky, siding with Martov, argued that the party should not “put a statutory exorcism on opportunism.”20 Though Martov’s position won a majority of the votes, Lenin did not consider it a significant defeat. Then, in response to Lenin’s proposal to subordinate the Russian Central Committee to the editorial board of Iskra, Trotsky expressed his disapproval, because this could lead to “a complete dictatorship of the editorial board.” Lenin replied that since Iskra “is the stable center” of the party, it should be in control. “But doesn’t that mean complete dictatorship by [Iskra]?” Trotsky retorted. Lenin responded: “What is bad about that? In the present situation, it cannot be otherwise.” Though Lenin had made a strong effort to win Trotsky to his side, Trotsky was repelled by the “unceremonious” manner of Lenin’s third tactic, the reduction of the editorial board to three persons. In Trotsky’s mind, “the ideas of a split within the board seemed nothing short of sacrilegious.” My whole being seemed to protest against this merciless cutting off of the older ones when they were at last on the threshold of an organized party. It was my indignation at his [Lenin’s] attitude that really led to

Ceplair CS20.indb 59

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

60  Revolutionary Pairs my parting with him at the second congress. His behavior seemed unpardonable to me, both horrible and outrageous. . . . My break with Lenin occurred on what might be considered “moral” or even personal grounds. But this was merely on the surface. At bottom, the separation was of a political nature and merely expressed itself in the realm of organization methods.21

This time, with several delegates having walked out of the congress, Lenin’s proposal secured a majority of the votes of those who remained. Trotsky, fearing that such callousness might one day be turned against him and angry at the rupture of what had become a comfortable nest, sided with the Mensheviks, even though all of his “political instincts lay at the opposite extreme of the spectrum” from the Menshevik leaders. “Hardly any Menshevik writer attacked Lenin with so much personal venom,” Isaac Deutscher noted. It was, he continued, one of Trotsky’s characteristic flaws that he could not separate ideas from men. Trotsky accused Lenin of being a party disorganizer, a caricature of Maximilien Robespierre, trying to establish a pseudo-Jacobin dictatorship over the party. What he labeled as Lenin’s “egocentralism” would one day, Trotsky accurately predicted, result in the party organization taking the place of the party itself, the Central Committee taking the place of the organization, and a dictator taking the place of the Central Committee. Lenin, in turn, criticized Trotsky for failing to prove his contention that opportunists do not abound in the party and for “completely” misinterpreting what Lenin had written about party organization in What Is to Be Done? Looking back, Trotsky wrote: The second congress was a landmark event in my life, if only because it separated me from Lenin for several years. As I look back now on the past, I am not sorry. I came to Lenin for the second time later than many others, but I came in my own way, after I had gone through and had weighed the experience of the revolution, the counter-revolution and the Imperialist war. I came, as a result, more surely and seriously than those “disciples” who, during the master’s life, repeated his words and gestures . . . but, after his death, proved to be nothing but helpless epigones and unconscious tools in the hands of hostile forces.22

Trotsky’s defection did not loom as large for Lenin, who rarely mentioned him in the year after the Congress. Lenin was much more perturbed by his break with Martov. He constantly referred to it in his letters, carefully

Ceplair CS20.indb 60

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  61

explaining that it was Martov, not he, who caused the schism. In an introspective letter, unusual for him, Lenin wrote: “And so I ask myself: over what, in point of fact, would we be parting company as enemies for life? I go over all the events and impressions of the Congress. I realise that I often behaved and acted in a state of frightful irritation, ‘frenziedly’; I am quite willing to admit this fault of mine to anyone, if that can be called a fault which was a natural product of the atmosphere, the reaction, the interjections, the struggle, etc.” But after all his reflections, he could detect nothing in his tactics that was harmful to the party “and absolutely nothing that is an affront or insult to the Minority [Mensheviks].” And he was stunned that the plan to exclude some people from a central body should have caused a split.23 Several months later, in November, when Plekhanov unilaterally brought four of the old editors back to the editorial board, Lenin resigned, and Plekhanov became another target. Lenin moved to Geneva, where he founded a newspaper named Vperëd (Forward). Between February and April 1904, while writing his account of the congress, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Lenin, reported Nikolai Valentinov, “underwent a startling change. . . . He became thin, with yellow, sunken cheeks. His eyes, which were usually so lively, sly, and mocking, became dull and at times even quite dead.” When he finished the book, “he was depressed, and completely exhausted.”24 Though he had become the leader of a very small faction, during the next thirteen years he steadfastly resisted Trotsky’s, and Russia’s calls for reunification and reconciliation; he scorned that path as one of “compromise.” Trotsky broke with the Mensheviks in September 1904 and founded his own newspaper, also named Vperëd, and formed an intellectual partnership with Alexander Helphand, also known as Parvus. While Lenin devoted most of his written work to party building, Trotsky focused on the process of revolution and the revolutionary potential of the masses. In one important article, written in 1904, Trotsky does not mention either the RSDLP or any of its factions. Rather, when discussing leadership or direction of the revolution, he talks about “we,” the “thinking revolutionary forces of the country.” “We ought to be able to call them [the revolutionary proletarian masses] into the streets at a given time; we ought to be able to unite them by a general slogan . . . , to “summon all the revolutionary forces to simultaneous action.”25 Perhaps because Trotsky was a nonsectarian Marxist, loyal to no party program or vision, he was among the first of the Russian exiles to understand what was occurring in Russia in 1905. When he heard, in January, about Father Gapon’s march on the Winter Palace and its bloody reception, he said

Ceplair CS20.indb 61

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

62  Revolutionary Pairs

that “a dull, burning sensation seemed to overpower me. I could not stay abroad any longer.” He urged “the revolutionary masses” to adopt “revolutionary tactics. A simultaneous action of the proletariat of all Russia must be prepared.” What must the political leaders do? “A few very simple things: freedom from routine in matters of organization; freedom from miserable traditions of underground conspiracy; a broad view; courageous initiative; ability to gauge specific situations; courageous initiative once more.” Seeming to foresee the soviet, he admonished the social-democratic leaders to be open to the creation of “a flexible revolutionary organization which would be able to give the masses a slogan, to lead them into the field of battle, to launch an attack all along the line and bring the revolution to a victorious conclusion.” For this, a party was needed, and despite its errors and blunders, its weak links to the masses, its “primitive techniques,” only the social-democratic party was a revolutionary party, only it was connected to the masses. He pleaded: “Let us close our ranks, comrades! Let us unite, and unite the masses!”26 According to Abraham Ascher, none of the revolutionary groups planned or directed the urban strikes or the disorders in the countryside. The efforts of twelve hundred Mensheviks and three hundred Bolsheviks to organize mass meetings and street demonstrations failed miserably, and the RSDLP managed to establish close links with only a small proportion of the industrial workforce. The two factions held separate conferences, though on the ground they frequently cooperated. They differed in that the Bolsheviks placed much greater emphasis on armed struggle, an alliance with the peasantry, and their attitude toward the soviet: the Mensheviks were enthusiastic supporters from the outset, while the Bolsheviks at first attacked it.27 Trotsky returned not long after “Bloody Sunday” and issued a torrent of articles. Since he was one of the first of the exiles to arrive, he saw no one from whom he could learn. “On the contrary, I had to assume the position of teacher myself. . . . I was confident in the face of events. I understood their inner mechanism, or at least so I believed. I visualized their effect on the minds of the workers, and envisaged its main features, the next day to come.” Fearing arrest, he went to Finland in May, but he returned to St. Petersburg during the October strike. He was immediately elected to the Executive Committee of the newly formed Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, “the only revolutionary Marxist of any prominence to play an important role in the Soviet.” “In October,” he wrote, I plunged headlong into the gigantic whirlpool, which, in a personal sense, was the greatest test for my powers. Decisions had to be made under fire. . . . Without thinking about it—there was too little

Ceplair CS20.indb 62

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  63

time left for self-examination—I organically felt that my years of apprenticeship were over.” He quickly became the “moving spirit” of the Soviet and managed to bring the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks closer. Lunacharsky recalled that Trotsky, “showed himself, despite his youth, to be the best prepared. Less than any of them did he bear the stamp of a certain kind of émigré narrowness of outlook . . . . Trotsky understood better than all the others what it meant to conduct the political struggle on a broad, national scale. . . . Trotsky stood then in the very front rank.” A major factor in Trotsky’ success in 1905 was his oratorical skills. Lunacharsky regarded him “as probably the greatest orator of our age.”28 Lenin, however, stayed in Europe. Adam Ulam speculates that he postponed returning until he was sure that the uprising had legs. He feared that a spontaneous insurrection, undirected by a party, would lead to a disastrous outcome. He spent hours in the library, studying military science. He issued a stream of instructions to his followers in Russia to arm the proletariat. His one original contribution was his plan for “revolutionary army contingents,” who must arm themselves as best they can and lead the masses, and who must, when circumstances are favorable, kill spies, policemen, and gendarmes, blow up police stations, and steal government money. At one point he called for a unified RSDLP; at another, he convened his exiled followers and urged a complete break with the Mensheviks. In short, as Ulam has concluded, Lenin lacked a coherent program of action. He seemed to realize this, writing in one letter, “From this cursed distance naturally one does not trust himself to take a definite position.”29 When the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was established in St. Petersburg, Lenin, still abroad, hailed it as “the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government. I think the Soviet should proclaim itself the provisional revolutionary government of the whole of Russia as early as possible, or should set up a provisional revolutionary government (which would amount to the same thing, only in another form).” This government should include “the representatives of all the revolutionary parties and all the revolutionary democrats.” But he also called for an additional entity, a vaguely defined “all-Russian political centre, a fresh, living centre that is strong because it has struck deep roots in the people, a centre that enjoys the absolute confidence of the masses, that possesses tireless revolutionary energy and is closely linked with the organized revolutionary and socialist parties. Such a centre can be established only by the revolutionary proletariat.” Lenin rejected any notion of a labor, proletariat, or socialist government. He favored, rather, a democratic

Ceplair CS20.indb 63

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

64  Revolutionary Pairs

government by the vast majority of the Russian people, the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” which would include the democratic sections of the bourgeoisie. At the heart, however, of all his writing on this subject, was the predominance of his party. It would take the lead and provide direction. It and the soviet “are alike absolutely indispensable.”30 In his account of the events of 1905, Trotsky sharply criticized Lenin’s theory of revolutionary government. Trotsky and Parvus argued that only the workers could accomplish a successful insurrection. Thus political power must necessarily pass into their hands, and they would have to adopt a working-class government set of policies. Trotsky also, in direct antithesis to Lenin, promoted the soviet as a substitute for parties; the soviet was “an organization which was authoritative, and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of thousands of people, while having virtually no organizational machinery; which united the revolutionary currents within the proletariat; which was capable of spontaneous initiative and self-control—and, most important of all, could be brought out from the underground in twenty-four hours.”31 When Lenin arrived in Russia in November, he remained in the background. He did not take an active part in the Soviet, attended only a few sessions of the Executive Committee, and did not address it. His main focus was on reorganizing the RSDLP, maintaining the secret apparatus and developing a new, legal one. He delivered only one public speech during that revolution, and, according to Lunacharsky, was relatively ineffective. In fact, he did not spend much time in the city, shuttling between it and Finland, and he did not seem to grasp the dynamics of what was actually taking place in front of him. He wrote rather than participated. He did not mention Trotsky but later, speaking of the esteem accorded Trotsky for his leadership of the St. Petersburg soviet, said: “‘Well, Trotsky has earned it by his deserved and brilliant work.’”32 Trotsky had worked closely with the city’s Bolsheviks and at the same time had assumed leadership of the local Menshevik group. When the first issue of Nachalo, the Menshevik newspaper, appeared, featuring an article by Trotsky on the October strike, the Bolshevik journal Novaya Zhizn hailed Trotsky’s “brilliant description” of that event. He stated that the strike “was a demonstration of proletarian hegemony in the bourgeois revolution,” and he urged the workers to organize the peasantry and establish contact with soldiers. Above all, the workers must arm themselves—“that is the simple and main conclusion the proletariat must draw from the October struggle and October victory.” A

Ceplair CS20.indb 64

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  65

few weeks later, Trotsky wrote: “The law of self-preservation dictates to the proletariat a program of permanent revolution. The proletariat accomplishes the fundamental tasks of democracy and then, at a certain moment the logic of its struggle to consolidate its political power confront it with problems that are purely socialist. Revolutionary permanency is established between our minimum and maximum programs.”33 When several leaders of the Soviet were arrested, on November 26, Trotsky and two others were elected to a new presidium. They immediately issued a call to prepare for an armed uprising. One week later, the Executive Committee and two hundred deputies were arrested. Though the remaining deputies reestablished the Soviet and called for a general strike, the workers did not respond in large numbers, and the strike was cancelled.34 A general strike in Moscow, organized by the Bolsheviks of that city, was ruthlessly crushed. During his fifteen months in prison, Trotsky wrote continuously. At his trial, he told the court that only the soviet could undertake the leadership of the masses and bring discipline into their ranks. It was “neither more nor less than the self-governing organ of the revolutionary masses.” Sentenced to deportation for life, he escaped en route. Exiting Russia via Finland, he met with Lenin, who spoke approvingly of his prison writings but chided him for continuing to stay aloof from the Bolsheviks.35 Trotsky believed the experience of 1905 had made a break in his life, made him more mature and confident. That confidence is evident in his “Prospects of a Labor Dictatorship,” written early in 1906, in which he broke, in several ways, with classical Marxist thinking. First, he stated that “the day and hour . . . when political power should pass into the hands of the working class, is determined not by the degree of capitalist development of economic forces, but by the relations of class struggle, by the international situation, by a number of subjective elements, such as tradition, initiative, readiness to fight.” Second, he leapfrogged over the bourgeois phase of the revolution, stating that the coming Russian revolution would create conditions “whereby political power can (and, in case of a victorious revolution, must) pass into the hands of the proletariat before the politicians of the liberal bourgeoisie would have occasion to give their political genius full swing.” Third, he insisted that “revolutionary representatives of non-proletarian groups may not be excluded from the government” and that the dominating proletarian group would “recognize all changes made by the peasants in agrarian relations (seizures of land).” Later on in the book, though, he wrote: “The intervention of the proletariat in the organization of agriculture ought to express itself not in

Ceplair CS20.indb 65

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

66  Revolutionary Pairs

settling individual laborers on individual lots, but in organizing state or communal management of large estates.” Fourth, though political power in a less capitalistically developed country like Russia might pass into the hands of the proletariat, “without direct aid from the European proletariat the working class of Russia will not be able to retain its power and to turn its temporary supremacy into a permanent Socialist dictatorship.” In sum, Trotsky’s most significant original idea was that of permanent revolution, which progresses seamlessly “from the liquidation of absolutism and civic bondage to a socialist order through a series of ever growing social conflicts, uprisings of ever new masses, unremitting attacks of the proletariat on the political and economic privileges of the governing classes.”36 Looking back two years later, Trotsky apotheosized the St. Petersburg Soviet. It was not, like the social democratic parties, an organization among the proletariat but rather an organization of the proletariat, whose aim was to fight for revolutionary power. It was “an organized expression of the will of the proletariat as a class”; “the organized power of the masses themselves over their component parts.” He admitted that it had a major weakness: “the weakness of a purely urban revolution.” It had lacked the time necessary to convene an all-Russian conference. But he was certain that “the first new wave of the revolution will lead to the creation of soviets all over the country,” that an all-Russian soviet will be established, and that it will assume the leadership of all the local elective organizations of the proletariat.”37 Trotsky attended the RSDLP congress in London in 1907. At least as regarded the role of the peasantry and proletariat in a future revolution, he and Lenin were in agreement. In October, he and his family moved to Vienna, where they would spend the next seven years. But he was a man without a party and a revolutionary situation. Wrote Deutscher, he “was out of his element and his strength sagged”; he was “equal to Herculean, not to lesser, labours.” Deutscher calls the years 1907–1914 “The Doldrums.” Both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks derided and attacked Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.38 Though Trotsky and Lenin both sought a unified party, their definitions of unity differed: Trotsky wanted it to include all currents of socialdemocratic thought; Lenin wanted it under the control of the Bolsheviks. Lenin, able to avoid arrest, took heart from the general strike proclaimed by the Moscow soviet in December. He advised his followers to launch hitand-run attacks on government installations and to steal state and private funds. But he did not consult or collaborate, and few of his followers could keep up with “his sudden shifts, his frequent and complete reversals of his pre-

Ceplair CS20.indb 66

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  67

vious position.” They continually had “to be whipped into the new line.” He was, Ulam concludes, “virtually alone in his politics.” When, in the months after the Stockholm Unity Congress, Lenin sharply criticized a group of Mensheviks who had responded to one of his tactics by walking out of a city convention, the party put him on trial. He told his judges: “When a split has taken place it is one’s duty to wrest the masses from the leadership of the seceded section. . . . I shall always act in that way whenever a split occurs. . . . Against such political enemies I then conducted—and in the event of a repetition and development of a split shall always conduct—a fight of extermination.”39 Lenin voluntarily left Russia in November 1907, resettling in Geneva. He then spent three and a half years in Paris. This “emigrant life,” he wrote Maxim Gorky, “is now a hundred times more difficult that it was before the Revolution of 1905.” He was sure he would die an exile. His ranks dwindled. “Spy-ridden, riven by dissension, the Bolshevik party was a broken reed,” and Lenin had great difficulty keeping the party newspaper in St. Petersburg in line with his thinking. It constantly veered toward legality and unity with other socialist groups. These years were, Ulam writes, Lenin’s “supreme test of endurance. To many he appeared at times a pathetic, discredited figure.” He seemed a man “with no political future.” Deeply pessimistic about the effect of the oppression in Russia, he became a little desperate, countenancing a series of Bolshevik-led robberies and extortions. He wrote at length, hurling polemics against the liberals and those he called the “liquidationists” (socialists who try to instill bourgeois influence into the proletariat). In his view, they were mainly Mensheviks, whose organizational ideas would, if allowed to germinate and spread, weaken the professional revolutionary party he was leading.40 Trotsky, convinced by the events of 1905 that factional differences had proved trivial and artificial in a time of actual revolution, spent the years between 1907 and 1917 sharply criticizing both factions. But his non-factional position attracted few adherents. And he, too, was a lonely political figure, made lonelier by his decision to live in Vienna rather than in the Russian émigré communities in Switzerland and Paris. He earned a living as a correspondent for Kievskaya Misl, “a legal journal with a socialist tinge. He wrote on literary subjects, German and Austrian Affairs, economics and politics.”41 In February 1908, the editorial board of Proletary, on which Lenin sat, invited Trotsky to contribute. According to Lenin: “We wrote him a letter, proposing and outlining a theme. By general agreement we signed it ‘the Editorial board of Proletary,’ so as to put the matter on a more collegial

Ceplair CS20.indb 67

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

68  Revolutionary Pairs

footing.  .  .  . Whether there was something in the form of the letter that offended Trotsky, I do not know, but he sent us a letter, not written by him,” informing us that he was too busy. Lenin saw this as “mere posturing. At the London Congress, too, he acted the poseur.” A few months later, Lenin accused Trotsky of behaving “like a despicable careerist and factionalist” and called him a “scoundrel.” Two years later, he referred to Trotsky as a “windbag.” And when Trotsky did not agree to join Lenin’s effort to form a bloc with Plekhanov and his followers, Lenin accused him of joining the “liquidators” and concluded “nothing can be done with” him. In one of his longest diatribes against him, he associated Trotsky with the Mensheviks, pointing out “how hollow” were his “ringing phrases.” He labeled Trotsky a “matchmaker,” a “conciliator” with a false notion of unity, and a hopeless, wretched point of view.42 When, Trotsky accused the Bolsheviks of factionalism after the 1910 Copenhagen Congress of the Second International, Lenin, according to his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, exploded: “Ilyich simply could not stand this diffuse, unprincipled conciliationism, with anyone and everyone, which was tantamount to surrendering one’s position at the height of the struggle.” But Robert Service believes “Lenin was the single greatest obstacle to unity among Russian Marxists,” because “the most important thing in Lenin’s eyes was to have a party, however minuscule, of indoctrinated revolutionaries who could spread the word.”43 In early 1911, Trotsky ceased replying to the political articles in Lenin’s newspaper, but when he and some other non-Bolshevik factions planned a unity conference, Lenin predicted, “A collapse of principle is there inevitable. Nothing even resembling Party work can result from this bloc. . . . We Bolsheviks have resolved on no account to repeat (And not to allow a repetition of) the error of conciliationism today.” And he accused Trotsky of being a lackey of the Menshevik liquidators. In response, Trotsky wrote: “The entire edifice of Leninism at the present time is built on lies and falsifications and carries within itself the poisonous inception of its own dissolution.”44 By 1912, the RSDLP was in splinters, torn apart by factional polemics. Lenin’s schismatic and expulsionist tendencies were at their peak. In January 1912, he convened an “all-party congress” in Prague. It was, actually, a gathering of the Leninist faction, numbering twenty. Lenin controlled the invitations, excluding any group that might disagree with him. It elected a new Central Committee, composed entirely of Bolsheviks. In effect, Lenin’s faction had seized control of the RSDLP label. Trotsky was invited, but he did

Ceplair CS20.indb 68

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  69

not attend. By then, Lenin had taken to calling him “little Judas Trotsky.” In response, Trotsky called a conference of the excluded groups. He told the delegates: In a large Marxist community embracing tens of thousands of workmen, it is impossible that divergences and discords should not exist. Every member of the community has not only the right but the duty of defending his point of view on the basis of the common program. But in fulfilling that duty none should forget that he is dealing with differences among a band of brothers.  .  .  . Discipline and cohesion in the struggle are inconceivable without an atmosphere of mutual esteem and confidence, and the man who fails to observe these moral principles, whatever may be his intentions, is undermining the very existence of Social Democracy.

However, very little of substance held this August bloc together, and it began to crumble almost immediately. In 1914, Trotsky formed a new supra-factional group and established Borba, a short-lived “non-factional journal for workers,” which attacked all the other social-democratic groups.45 Lenin responded in kind, calling this non-factionalism “the worst representatives of the worst remnants of factionalism.” In fact, “under the flag of ‘non-factionalism,’ Trotsky is upholding one of the factions abroad which is particularly devoid of ideas and has no basis in the labour movement in Russia.” Lenin concluded by labeling Trotsky a “liquidationist.” Then, for the benefit of the younger generation of workers, he traced Trotsky’s shifts, wavering, and vacillations between 1903 and the present.46 During the two years before the outbreak of the Great War, Lenin lived in Kraków, while Trotsky spent many of those months covering the wars in the Balkans. There he developed an appreciation for the military science that would flourish in the Russian civil war. In the summer of 1914, when the Great War commenced, Trotsky’s spirit and activity soared. He hurriedly departed Vienna for Zurich, where he composed The War and the International. He criticized all of the belligerent powers and the socialists who supported the war, and he demanded the founding of a new international. In November, Trotsky crossed into France, where he became one of the leading spirits of socialist internationalism. Lenin, also in Zurich, advanced a much more radical position on the role of socialists than did Trotsky. He believed the war had provided all the

Ceplair CS20.indb 69

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

70  Revolutionary Pairs

conditions required for a socialist revolution in Europe, and the task for socialists was to establish a new revolutionary international to engineer the overthrow of the imperialist governments. He strenuously advocated the military defeat of Russia as the only clear path to revolution: “From the point of view of the laboring class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its army.” This call for the defeat of his own country left him in a tiny minority among European socialists, including the Russians, and they rejected his call to turn the world war into a revolutionary war. To further this goal, he devoted a great deal of time to writing Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and Imperialism and the Split in Socialism. Since this war made manifest the economic connection between the imperialist bourgeoisie and socialist opportunists, revolutionary socialists must break with socialist opportunists and devote themselves to educating the masses for revolution and forming organizations suited to the revolutionary situation that currently existed. He identified the modern army as one such new organization because of its flexibility; it is able “to give millions of people a single will.”47 Both men attended the September 1915 antiwar conference held at the small Swiss village of Zimmerwald Setting off from Berne, the delegates “joked about the fact that half a century after the founding of the first International, it was still possible to seat all the internationalists in four coaches.” It was a stormy conference, divided between the revolutionary defeatists, led by Lenin, and the socialist pacifists. Lenin argued, “The only correct proletarian slogan is to transform the present imperialist war into a civil war,” the “only truly revolutionary working-class tactic.” According to Trotsky, on many questions, Lenin was “in a minority of one.” Trotsky wrote and secured a consensus for the Zimmerwald Manifesto, which called on the international working-class movement “to take up simultaneously in all countries an active struggle . . . for a peace without annexations or war indemnities.” Afterward, neither man was fully satisfied: Lenin criticized Trotsky’s dalliance with the European pacifists, while Trotsky critiqued Lenin’s obsessive attachment to old quarrels. Here again, Lenin accused Trotsky of failing to realize “that any idea of conciliationism and unity was unthinkable at that moment.”48 Trotsky did not attend the second Swiss antiwar conference, held at Kienthal in April 1916. There, Lenin pressed hard on his revolutionary point: “Unless the proletarian revolution overthrows the present governments and the present ruling classes of the belligerent ‘great’ powers, there is absolutely no chance of any peace other than a more or less short-term armistice between

Ceplair CS20.indb 70

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  71

the imperialist powers.”49 He did not persuade the delegates to discard the Zimmerwald Manifesto, but they did agree to sharply criticize the socialist pacifists and to state that wars will not be ended until the working classes take power and abolish private property. The French government deported Trotsky in 1916, and he ended up living in the Bronx. When he heard about the February Revolution, he had no doubts about its significance: “The streets of Petrograd again speak the language of 1905. . . . We are witnessing the beginning of the Second Russian Revolution.” (At the outbreak of war, because the old name seemed too German, the Russian government changed the name of the capital city.) He predicted that a new soviet would emerge, which would be in open conflict with the “liberal bourgeoisie temporarily at the head of the government.” He called on the revolutionary proletariat to “set up its own organs, the Councils of Workingmen’s, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies” and use it to confront the Provisional Government and to “unite about itself the rising masses of the people, with one aim in view—to seize governmental power.”50 He said nothing about the competing revolutionary parties. He left the United States at the end of March but was detained for one month in a British concentration camp in Halifax. He did not get back to Russia until May 1917. Lenin, meanwhile, chafed over the lack of direct communication between him and party members in Russia and his inability to sway party members in Europe to accept his repeated call for the defeat of the tsarist monarchy. When news of the February Revolution reached Lenin, he discovered that all the routes to Russia were blocked, so he arranged with the German government to allow his entourage to pass through Germany in a sealed train.

Reconvergence: The Bolshevik Seizure of Power A fantastic quality marked every event in Russia after the February Revolution, from the unity between Lenin and Trotsky after fourteen years of enmity, to the Bolshevik seizure of power, to the creation of a functioning government from the chaos, to victory in the civil war. Whichever perspective one uses, the probability of a Bolshevik-led revolution seemed virtually nonexistent. Indeed, Lenin, in his farewell address to the workers of Switzerland, stated that the “Russian proletariat cannot, by its own exertions, successfully complete a socialist revolution.”51 When Lenin arrived in Petrograd in early April, Russia had two improvised, competing governments: the Provisional Government, established by

Ceplair CS20.indb 71

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

72  Revolutionary Pairs

the Duma, and the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The Bolsheviks in Russia had no intention of launching an independent struggle for power. Rather, they planned to play the role of a leftist opposition. Unlike in 1905, Lenin immediately called for “all power to the soviet,” even though in the early months of the revolution the Bolsheviks were a very small minority. But he met resistance in the party. A month after Lenin returned, the editors of Pravda promised to support the Provisional Government, if it fought reaction and the counterrevolution and kept Russia in the war. By the force of his personality, he soon won a large portion of the party to his calls to end the war and to transform the February Revolution into a proletarian socialist revolution. His voluminous writings demonstrated that he had learned much about tactical flexibility from the 1905 revolution. He also spoke publicly much more frequently. Sukhanov regarded Lenin as a “very good” orator, of enormous impact and power, breaking down complicated systems into the simplest and most generally accessible elements, and hammering them into the heads of his audience until he took them captive.” Lunacharsky was “deeply impressed by that concentrated energy with which he spoke, by those piercing eyes of his which grew almost sombre as they bored gimlet-like into the audience, by the orator’s monotonous but compelling movements, by that fluent diction so redolent of will-power.” Trotsky found “no trace of posturing, not a tinge of rhetorical inflections in his voice, but in the whole figure, in the position of the head, in the tight lips, the high cheekbones, the slightly hoarse voice there is unshaken confidence in the correctness of his acts and the justice of his cause.”52 On April 4, Lenin presented his theses on the revolution to a meeting of Bolshevik delegates to the All-Russia Conference of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. He called for an end to Russian involvement in the war unless it became a revolutionary war, administered by the proletariat and peasants aligned with the proletariat; he renounced all annexations; he demanded a complete break with all capitalist interests and the Provisional Government. “The Soviet of Workers Deputies is the real government,” he stated, which we must work through, even though we are in a minority. It alone is a step toward socialism. Many Bolsheviks, however, had adopted a conciliatory attitude toward the Provisional Government and the Mensheviks, and, according to Nikolai Podvoisky, some Bolsheviks “were frightened by Lenin’s intolerance of the appeasers and the perspective of an immediate and complete split with them. Especially new and incomprehensible was his demand for the transfer of power to the soviets. There were those who were in

Ceplair CS20.indb 72

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  73

total shock from Lenin’s words.” As a consequence, Lenin had to wield all his influence to rally party members behind his theses. In fact, the editor of Pravda held off several days from publishing the theses and, when he did, he appended an editorial distancing the party from Lenin.53 And then, in the midst of rapidly changing circumstances and the maelstrom of a revolution, Lenin took the time and expended the energy to research and write The State and Revolution, a lengthy discussion of the theoretical history of the state and a speculation on the future communist society. It is a curious undertaking, leading one to wonder what he was thinking: Did he actually think he would find space within a rapid-paced event like a revolutionary maelstrom to install a theoretically correct dictatorship of the proletariat? According to Trotsky, Lenin could not do otherwise: “For him theory is in actual fact a guide to action.” Lenin thought it was crucial “to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state.” His problem was that Marx and Engels had not gone into much detail about the postrevolutionary state and, Marx had only briefly mentioned the dictatorship of the proletariat in his analysis of the Paris Commune. Lenin conflated the two, stating that the proletariat would replace the state with an entity based on “the extremely instructive material furnished by the Paris Commune,” which he called “the first attempt of a proletarian revolution to smash the bourgeois state machine.” He called the Commune the political form “by which the smashed state machine can and must be replaced.” In fact, Lenin, for all his hardheaded realism, harbored a simplistic notion about how new revolutionary states function. “Accounting and control—that is the main thing needed to achieve the ‘smooth working,’ the correct functioning of the first phase of communist society. . . . The accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the extreme and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations—which any literate person can perform—of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts.”54 Another interesting point about The State and Revolution is the section on “The Higher Phase of Communist Society.” For the first and only time, Lenin leaves the plain of facts, logic, and polemics and becomes utopian, almost mystical. The Communist society, he wrote, would follow the rule, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” all members will learn how to administer social production, and “the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of all human community life will very soon become a habit.”55 Conspicuously missing from this pamphlet is the role of the Bolshevik Party in this process. Would it, one wonders, as the

Ceplair CS20.indb 73

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

74  Revolutionary Pairs

state, wither away under communism? In any event, the pamphlet was not published until after the Bolsheviks seized power. When Trotsky reached Petrograd in early May, he immediately regained his influence over the soviet and his popularity among the masses. He immediately made clear his main revolutionary idea, telling the Petrograd Soviet the day after his arrival: “The next step should be the handing over all power to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Only with authority concentrated in one hand can Russia be saved.” His life became a whirl of mass meetings. . . . I was hardly ever out of the ranks. Meetings were held in plants, schools, and colleges, in theatres, circuses, streets, and squares. I usually reached home exhausted after midnight; half-asleep I would discover the best arguments against my opponents, and about seven in the morning, or sometimes even earlier, I would be painfully pulled from my bed the hateful, intolerable knocking on the door, calling me to a meeting in Peterhof, or to go to Kronstadt on a tug sent for me by the navy boys there.56

The British representative, R. H. Bruce Lockhart, remarked on Trotsky’s “wonderfully quick mind” and “rich, deep voice. With his broad chest, his huge forehead, surmounted by great masses of black, waving hair; his strong fierce eyes, and his heavy protruding lips, he is the very incarnation of the revolutionary of the bourgeois caricatures.” Lockhart was also impressed with Trotsky’s physical courage, recalling how he dove into the midst of a group of angry, armed sailors and lashed them “with a withering blast of invective.” Balabanoff remarked that in 1917 Trotsky abandoned his fast delivery and adopted a slow-paced style, pronouncing every word clearly and distinctly. This adaptation was astonishing to his audience, the Russian soldiers, who were peasants for the most part. He wanted to save them any effort of grasping his meaning, he meant his words to become orders the moment they were uttered. Without the listeners’ awareness his words reached their conscience and their ears at the same time. Firm and sonorous, his voice seemed to echo the footfall of a marching column, his words the rhythm of the peasant crowd. At that time I realized how great a speaker he was.

An anonymous observer wrote: “He is a mephisto who throws words like bombs to create a war of brothers at the bedside of their sick mother. . . . His

Ceplair CS20.indb 74

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  75

voice is the voice of a prophet, a preacher.” And Sukhanov described how he affected an audience during a speech on October 22: “Trotsky at once began to heat up the atmosphere. . . . All around me the mood verged on ecstasy. It seemed as if the crowd would on its own accord break into some religious hymn.” After Trotsky proposed a short resolution, “The thousand-strong crowd raised their hands to a man. . . . Were they in a trance? . . . Trotsky went on speaking, the vast crowd still held their hands aloft.”57 Trotsky did not, however, join the Bolshevik Party. Indeed, in February and March he had been consistently critical of its aimlessness, and he was scornful of the manner in which party members had greeted Lenin’s April Theses. Trotsky preferred, he wrote, “a direct, and so to say empirical, orientation, not only in the fundamental forces of the revolution, in the moods of the workers and soldiers, but also in the groupings and political shadings of the ‘educated’ society.” He decided instead to form, with Lunacharsky and David Riazanov, the Interdistrict Committee, a party of all groups seeking the overthrow of the Provisional Government. Lenin, however, remembering Trotsky’s role in 1905, actively sought an association with him, but key members of the Bolshevik Party were opposed to those overtures.58 Trotsky remained aloof from the Bolsheviks until June, when he supported their call for a massive demonstration, even though the First AllRussian Congress of Soviets had condemned it. It is interesting to note that Lenin had abstained on the crucial vote scheduling the demonstration and did not criticize its cancellation. One week later, following a demonstration by workers and soldiers, Lenin urged caution: “It is necessary to give the proletariat instructions to the effect that all organization of its strength, in the final analysis, is for an armed uprising if not in days, if not in the coming weeks, then in any event in the near future.”59 Following that demonstration, the Provisional Government cracked down hard on the Bolsheviks, issuing arrest warrants for Lenin, Grigori Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev and shutting down the party’s presses. On July 23, Trotsky wrote an open letter to the Provisional Government, telling it that he should have been included in the arrest warrant: “The fact that I am not connected with Pravda and am not a member of the Bolshevik Party is not due to political differences, but to certain circumstances in our party history which have now lost all significance. . . . There can be no doubt in your minds that I am just as uncompromising a political opponent of the Provisional Government as the above named comrades.” Three days later, the members of the Interdistrict Committee and a few other revolutionaries

Ceplair CS20.indb 75

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

76  Revolutionary Pairs

formally joined the Bolshevik Party. “The balance,” Trotsky wrote, speaking in the third person, “was here struck to years of disagreement and factional struggle. He came to Lenin as to a teacher whose power and significance he understood later than many others, but perhaps more fully than they.” Fyodor Raskolnikov, one of the old Bolsheviks, later wrote: Trotsky’s attitude to Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin) was one of enormous esteem. He placed him higher than any contemporary he had met with, either in Russia or abroad. In the tone in which Trotsky spoke of Lenin you felt the devotion of a disciple. . . . The echoes of their disagreements during the pre-war period were completely gone. No difference existed between the tactical line of Lenin and Trotsky. Their rapprochement, already noticeable during the war, was completely and unquestionably determined from the moment of return of Lyev Davidovich (Trotsky) to Russia. After his very first speeches all of the old Leninists felt that he was ours.60

Actually, many of the old Bolsheviks disliked and resented Trotsky. But, according to Balabanoff, at first, Lenin “silenced all resentments, factional animosities, and his personal dislike of Trotsky’s behavior to put at the service of the Bolshevik regime not only his unusual gifts but also his weaknesses, which Lenin knew how to exploit.” Trotsky “was highly flattered by the honor that came to him from the omnipotent ex-enemy Lenin.” He became for Lenin “the irreplaceable Bolshevik, unequaled in his tireless, manifold activity and his boundless devotion to the cause.”61 Trotsky grew to be a highly partisan Bolshevik. But he saw himself as joining a special type of party, one that had “the most precious fundamental tactical quality in its unequalled aptitude to orient itself rapidly, to change tactics quickly, to renew its armament and to apply new methods, in a word to carry out abrupt turns.” That is, he conflated the party’s tactical capabilities with Lenin’s “genius” and “Leninism,” which is “courageously free from conservative retrospection, from being bound by precedent, purely formal references and quotations.” As a result, the entire tone of Trotsky’s public evaluation of Lenin altered. Trotsky devoted several acclamatory chapters of his History of the Russian Revolution to Lenin. Throughout, the main theme is that Lenin and, of course, Trotsky were miles ahead of the other Bolsheviks when it came to planning and carrying out the October insurrection against the Provisional Government. Trotsky also took pains to point out that Lenin did not always trust the other Bolshevik leaders. Though Trotsky’s profile

Ceplair CS20.indb 76

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  77

of himself in this work is relatively low, he periodically emphasizes the similarity of his prerevolutionary ideas to Lenin’s post-February statements; indeed, they were so close that “the April theses of Lenin were condemned as Trotskyist.”62 In fact, by this time, very little separated the two men on the best means to advance the proletarian revolution, with one important exception: Trotsky wanted the Bolsheviks to stage the uprising via the soviet, while Lenin wanted the Bolsheviks to act on their own initiative. Trotsky argued that the soviet was a more effective vehicle to set the masses in motion, while Lenin worried that decision-making would be much slower in the soviet than in the Central Committee. While Lenin had to find places to hide, to avoid arrest as a German spy, and was often at a distance from events on the ground, Trotsky quickly became one of the party’s leaders as well as the driving spirit of the Petrograd Soviet. From exile, Lenin continued to exhort the Bolsheviks to act. On September 12, in a letter to the Central Committee, he wrote: “It would be naïve to wait for a ‘formal’ majority [in the soviet] for the Bolsheviks.” One day later, in another letter to the Central Committee, he warned against making long speeches as the upcoming All-Russian Democratic Conference, convened to reorganize the provisional government, and demanded that the Bolsheviks declare “the immediate transfer of all power to revolutionary democrats, headed by the revolutionary proletariat.” Lenin raged at the failure of the Bolsheviks to walk out of the Democratic Conference and their decision, against Trotsky’s admonitions, not to boycott the Pre-Parliament established by the conference. Instead of participating in these “despicable talking-shops,” the Bolsheviks should go to the soviets, the trade union, and the masses in general. “Trotsky was for the boycott. Bravo, Comrade Trotsky!” On October 1, he wrote that “procrastination is becoming positively criminal. . . . To wait for the Congress of Soviets would be a childish game of formalities, and a betrayal of the revolution. If power cannot be achieved without insurrection, we must resort to insurrection at once.” One week later, he equated “proletarian revolutionary power” with “Bolshevik power,” and he called for “a simultaneous offensive in Petrograd, as sudden and as rapid as possible.” In other words, for Lenin, an active, aggressive revolutionary party did not require majority support and could orchestrate a mass uprising. But Trotsky, in the thick of Petrograd’s masses and institutions, had a much better feel for the relations between the Bolshevik Party, the Soviet, and the masses: “Lenin’s bold plan had the indubitable advantages of swiftness and unexpectedness, but it laid the party too bare, incurring the risk that within certain limits it would not

Ceplair CS20.indb 77

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

78  Revolutionary Pairs

set itself over against the masses. Even the Petrograd Soviet, taken unawares, might at the first failure lose its still unstable Bolshevik majority.”63 At the Third Petrograd City Conference, held October 7–11, Lenin publicly endorsed Trotsky for the first time. In the theses he wrote for the conference, he sharply criticized the manner in which the Central Committee had compiled its list of delegates to the Constituent Assembly. In particular, he stated: “No one would contest the candidature of, say, Trotsky, for, first, upon, his arrival, Trotsky at once took up an internationalist stand; second, he worked among the mezhraiontsi [Interdistrict Committee] for a merger; third, in the difficult July days he proved himself equal to the task and a loyal supporter of the party of the revolutionary proletariat. Clearly, as much cannot be said about many of the new Party members entered on the list.”64 Their two approaches merged on October 10, 1917, at a Bolshevik Central Committee meeting, to which Lenin came “in wig and spectacles without a beard.” Trotsky fully supported his proposal for an immediate uprising. The vote was 10–2 in favor. Sukhanov later wrote: “I don’t know to what degree Lenin himself valued this fact [Trotsky’s support], but for the course of events it had incalculable significance.”65 The delegates also called for the creation of a Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet, a Permanent Committee of the Garrisons, and a Red Guard, to arm the workers. The Military Revolutionary Committee, presided over by Trotsky, sent commissars to the most important military units and directed the activities of the Red Guard. According to Sukhanov, the Soviet, under Trotsky’s leadership, “was a latent potential revolutionary force, gathering together the elements for a general explosion.” In mid-October, Trotsky indefatigably began setting the charges. Sukhanov described his whirlwind activity: “Trotsky, tearing himself away from work on the revolutionary staff, personally rushed from the Obukhovsky plant to the Trubochny, from the Putilov to the Baltic works, from the riding school to the barracks; he seemed to be speaking at all points simultaneously. His influence, both among the masses and of the staff, was overwhelming. He was the central figure of those days and the principle author of this remarkable page of history.”66 Lenin weighed in on the morning of October 18, with the first installment of his “Letter to the Comrades.” It was, wrote John Reed, “one of the most audacious pieces of political propaganda the world has ever seen. In it Lenin seriously presented the arguments in favor of insurrection.” “We must,” he said, “either abandon our slogan, ‘All Power to the Soviets,’ or else we must make an insurrection. There is no middle course.” Trotsky, who by now was

Ceplair CS20.indb 78

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  79

pulling the strings, hardly left soviet headquarters in the Smolny Institute. “The decisive moment was close at hand. It was obvious that there could now be no turning back.” Over and over he told the commissars in the field: “If you fail to stop them [government forces] with words, use arms. You will answer for this with your life.” As it happened, the Military Revolutionary Committee, not the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, directly launched the October Revolution. Beginning on October 20, it substituted its representatives for the government representatives in all key military units, and it mandated that no order be followed that was not countersigned by the committee. “In effect, the Provisional Government was disarmed without a shot being fired.”67 Lenin came out of hiding on October 21, to speak to the Bolshevik Central Committee: “November sixth [October 24] will be too early. We must have an all-Russian basis for the rising; and on the sixth all the delegates to the [All-Russian] Congress [scheduled to open on October 25] will not have arrived. . . . On the other hand, November eighth will be too late. . . . We must act on the seventh, the day the Congress meets, so that we may say to it, ‘Here is the power! What are you going to do with it?’” Two days later, Trotsky told the Soviet: “At last the moment has arrived when the power must fall into the hands of the Soviets. This transfer of power will be accomplished by the All-Russian Congress. Whether an armed demonstration is necessary will depend on . . . those who wish to interfere with the All-Russian Congress.” He contemptuously answered those who spoke in opposition: “His thin, pointed face was positively Mephistopholean in its expression of malicious irony.”68 The Military Revolutionary Committee ordered the garrisons of Petrograd to obey orders issued only by the committee, and on October 24, in the name of the committee, Trotsky issued Revolutionary Order Number 1: “The Provisional Government is deposed. The State Power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison. The cause for which the people were fighting: immediate proposal of a democratic peace, abolition of landlord property rights over the land, labour control over production, creation of a Soviet Government—that cause is securely achieved.” Trotsky then called an emergency meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, to announce that the Provisional Government no longer existed. That night, Lenin came out of hiding and joined Trotsky at the Smolny Institute. He briefly outlined the program of

Ceplair CS20.indb 79

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

80  Revolutionary Pairs

the revolution and proclaimed that it would lead “to the victory of socialism.” The two spent the night together, making the final dispositions for the revolution. Trotsky recalled, “somebody spread two sheets on the floor and placed two cushions on them. We [Lenin and I] were both resting, lying down side by side.” One year later, Josef Stalin wrote: “All the work of practical organization of the insurrection was conducted under the direct leadership of the President of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. It may be said that the swift passing of the garrison to the side of the Soviet, and the bold execution of the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the Party owes principally and above all to Comrade Trotsky.”69 On the opening day of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks had a majority of delegates, 390 out of 650, and when a considerable number of them called for the creation of a joint all-Socialist government, “Lenin, with Trotsky beside him, stood firm as a rock” in opposition. In fact, Trotsky stood front and center. Lenin still wore his wig and spectacles; he “was in no hurry to appear publicly. He preferred to look round a little and gather the thread into his hands while remaining behind the scenes.” When the parties to the right of the Bolsheviks walked out and Martov demanded that the Congress be suspended until an agreement had been reach with all the socialist parties, Trotsky answered: What has taken place is an insurrection, not a conspiracy. An insurrection of the popular masses needs no justification. We have tempered and hardened the revolutionary energy of the Petersburg workers and soldiers. We have openly forged the will of the masses to insurrection and not conspiracy. . . . Our insurrection has conquered, and now you propose to us: Renounce your victory; make a compromise. With whom? I ask: With whom ought we to make a compromise? With that pitiful handful who just went out? .  .  . Are the millions of workers and peasant represented in this congress . . . are they to enter a compromise with these men? No, a compromise is no good here. To those who have gone out, and to all who make like proposals, we must say, “You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the rubbish-can of history.”70

Lenin finally took the floor. After the applause died down, he said: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” “There was,” John Reed wrote, “something quiet and powerful in all this, which stirred the souls of

Ceplair CS20.indb 80

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  81

men. It was understandable why people believed when Lenin spoke.” Later that evening, Trotsky rose to speak, “calm and venomous, conscious of power, greeted with a roar.” As the Congress proceeded, the Military Revolutionary Committee “never stopped working for an instant.” It received couriers, dispersed commissars, dictated orders, and issued credentials.71 The Bolshevik Central Committee decided to form a government solely comprising Bolsheviks. During the next week, Lenin made it clear that the revolution would be ruthless. On October 29, he said: “We wanted to settle the matters without bloodshed. But now that blood has been spilled there is only one way— pitiless means. . . . We’ve won the power; now we must keep it!”72 The Bolsheviks immediately put into effect two of their biggest promises: withdrawing from the war and calling for an armistice, negotiations, and an honest and democratic peace; ratifying the land seizures by the peasantry. Instead of turning the factories over to the workers, the Bolsheviks enacted a series of nationalization decrees. The delegates to the now-governing Soviet gave the management of the state to commissions, the presidents of which formed a collegium. It was Trotsky’s idea to call this new governing institution the Council of People’s Commissars. Lenin proposed that Trotsky be appointed as chairman, but Trotsky refused. Lenin became head of the council, and Trotsky accepted the post of commissar of foreign affairs. Along with Stalin and Yakov Sverdlov, they were the key administrators. From that point on, Lenin deliberately struck a balance between Trotsky and Stalin. Lenin appreciated their respective strengths, and he regularly advanced both men into prominent positions. At the same time, he refused to allow Trotsky’s demands or Stalin’s machinations to succeed in displacing one or the other. Lenin was closest personally and professionally with Sverdlov, who wielded almost as much power as he did. Sverdlov headed the Central Executive Committee and the Party Secretariat (and he would substitute for Lenin as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, in August 1918, while Lenin recuperated from a would-be assassin’s bullet). On the occasion of Sverdlov’s premature death, Lenin delivered a deeply felt eulogy.73 When oppositional delegates protested the formation of a government composed only of Bolsheviks, accusing it of isolating itself from the revolutionary masses, Trotsky responded: “No, it is not we who are isolated, but the [Provisional] government and the so-called democrats. With their wavering, their compromisism, they have erased themselves from the ranks of the authentic democracy. Our great superiority as a party lies in the fact that we have formed a coalition with the class forces, creating a union of the workers;

Ceplair CS20.indb 81

4/15/2020 9:15:00 PM

82  Revolutionary Pairs

soldiers and poorest peasants.” Five Bolshevik members of the Central Committee and five Bolshevik commissars resigned over Lenin’s refusal to countenance a coalition, but Lenin stood firm. He told a meeting of St. Petersburg Bolsheviks: “I can’t even talk about this seriously. Trotsky long ago said that such a union was impossible. Trotsky understood this and since then there hasn’t been a better Bolshevik.”74 During the early days of the October Revolution, Lenin, as chairman of the council, was, according to Trotsky, the government, “all the time and everywhere Lenin ruled by decisions, decrees, and orders in the name of the government.” He did not, as Sheila Fitzpatrick has pointed out, use his position in the party’s Politburo, nor did he even maintain an office at party headquarters. When the Socialist revolutionaries outpolled the Bolsheviks almost 2–1 in the elections for the Constituent Assembly, Lenin demanded it be dissolved, “in the name of the proletarian dictatorship,” to openly and finally put an end to formal democracy. He also wanted to censor the opposition newspapers: “‘Aren’t we going to bridle this rabble [opposition newspapers]?’ Lenin kept asking at every opportunity. ‘Well, excuse me, what sort of dictatorship is this?’” He advocated the inevitability and necessity of terror “at every suitable opportunity,” and he constantly harped on the ruthless nature of a dictatorship.75 Trotsky was no less adamant in his discussion of terror and censorship. In his Terrorism and Communism, written in early 1920, he wrote that terror is “helpless” if employed by the reactionary classes, but it can be “very efficient” against a reactionary class. He compared revolution to war: both kill individuals and intimidate thousands. Unlike the forces of the tsar, which throttled the workers, the revolution’s All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka) “shoots landlords, capitalists and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist order.” That is a “quite sufficient” distinction for “us Communists.” “The man who repudiates terrorism in principle—i.e., repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed counter-revolution—must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship.” As for censorship of the press, Trotsky noted that the Bolsheviks “are fighting a life-and-death struggle. The press is a weapon not of an abstract society, but of two irreconcilable armed and contending sides. We are destroying the press of the counter-revolution, just as we destroyed its fortified positions, its stores, its communication, and its intelligence system.”76 Trotsky clearly admired Lenin’s strength, which, he wrote, “lay, in great measure, in the richness of his realistic imagination. The tense and concen-

Ceplair CS20.indb 82

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  83

trated manner in which he pursued his aim always had in it this element of concreteness, of reality; otherwise it would never have been so purposeful.” He had the capability of discerning, in a complex chain of political acts, the main, central link in order to seize it and impart to the whole chain the desired direction. . . . During the most critical periods, when he was faced with tactical decisions involving a high degree of risk or exceptional responsibility, Lenin was able to set aside all that was irrelevant, and all that was secondary, all that was inessential and could be deferred. . . . In the most critical moments he became as if deaf and blind to all that went beyond the cardinal problem which absorbed him. . . . His talent to mobilize to the utmost degree all his inner forces . . . made of him the greatest revolutionary in history.77

Lenin’s admiration for Trotsky’s abilities was equally clear, but he always had reservations about Trotsky’s style and political sense. Certainly, between July and October Trotsky had been more in accord with Lenin than with any of the old Bolsheviks. And after October, Lenin relied on Trotsky to negotiate an honorable peace treaty with the Germans and to lead the Red Army. In several places in My Life, Trotsky emphasizes the closeness and intimacy of their relationship, how they communicated constantly during the day. But they clashed repeatedly. According to Deutscher, “the relationship between Lenin and Trotsky was one of mutual confidence, cordiality, and respect, though not of personal intimacy. . . . Underneath their concord there was still a discord in temperament and habit.” Balabanoff wrote that while, for the moment, Lenin considered Trotsky “the irreplaceable Bolshevik, unequalled in his tireless, manifold activity and his boundless devotion to the cause,” he still, to a degree, did not see Trotsky as “an orthodox Bolshevik” and worried that once normal conditions resumed, Trotsky’s “menshevism” (his propensity to conciliate to avoid schism) would resurface. Trotsky later claimed that Lenin “generally considered occasional differences of opinion with me as not worth mentioning.”78

Fighting the Counterrevolution The Bolsheviks were the first successful Marxist-driven revolutionaries to confront the un-Marxist prospect of transforming a peasant-based country into a socialist state. They, like their successors in China and Cuba, faced one severe contradiction and two major problems. The contradiction involved the

Ceplair CS20.indb 83

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

84  Revolutionary Pairs

Party’s need to gain the support of the peasantry to quell the counterrevolution and feed the workers and soldiers versus the party’s ideological distrust of the peasants and its ideological propensity for a centralized, industrial state. The problems were that the leaders were unschooled or naïve about economics and there was a dearth of skilled and experienced managers. One year prior to the revolution, Lenin seemed to understand those problems: “We all agree that the most important of the steps to be taken must be such measures as the nationalization of the banks and syndicates. Let us first realize this and other similar measures and then we shall see. Then we shall be able to see better; for, practical experience, which is worth a million times more than the best of programmes, will considerably widen our horizon.”79 However, the unexpected force of the counterrevolution caught Lenin by surprise and led him to alter his strategy. The principal task, he now stated, was that of administration, practical organizational work. To achieve economic recovery, he called for a suspension of the war against capital, because the revolution will only succeed by sound administration not violent suppression, and it will need the guidance of experts. Nevertheless, Lenin, still not in full control of the party, was met with an angry set of theses, prepared by the so-called Left Communists, condemning his proposals to end nationalization and expropriation, seek accommodation with big capital, and institute “state capitalism.” Faced with what Stephen F. Cohen has called the “most powerful Bolshevik opposition in the history of Soviet Russia,” Lenin backed down. He raised a cry of “grave danger” as regards food and hoisted the specter of “a great ‘crusade’ . . . against the grain profiteers, the kulaks, the parasites, the disorganizers and bribetakers. . . . Teams of advanced workers must be sent to every center of production of grain and fuel, to every important center of supply and distribution.”80 Within the space of eight months, some four hundred of these “food detachments” had left Moscow and Petrograd. Trotsky concurred in what has since been labeled “war communism.” War communism was both a necessary and ideologically driven response to the counterrevolution. In the words of Alec Nove, it was “a siege economy with a Communist ideology.” According to Barrington Moore Jr., it was regarded as a major step in the direction of achieving Bolshevik goals, and there was no indication that the measures adopted were temporary expedients. All who have analyzed those years agree that they were a time of utter administrative confusion, that war communism helped defeat the counterrevolution and caused a catastrophic decline in production and consumption. In February 1920, Trotsky became the first Bolshevik leader to accept pub-

Ceplair CS20.indb 84

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  85

licly the need to abandon compulsory food deliveries. Lenin, however, demanded even more severe decrees. Only in February 1921 did he realize that a change of line was necessary. And he began to think and speak along two new lines: a new economic policy and a new approach to state-building. And yet, besieged by events surrounding the Tenth Congress, in March 1921, Lenin sharply opposed what he called the “free trade” elements in Trotsky’s “Basic Questions on Food and Agrarian Policy,” which aimed at reducing grain confiscation. In October 1921, however, Lenin admitted that the Bolsheviks had miscalculated, that they had relied on the waves of political and military enthusiasm to accomplish economic tasks. “We expected—or perhaps it would be truer to say that we presumed without having given it adequate consideration—to be able to organize state production and the state distribution of products on communist lines in a small peasant country directly as ordered by the proletarian state. Experience has proved that we were wrong.” Marking his second attempt at securing an economic breathing space, Lenin urged the Bolsheviks to modify the proletarian state into “a cautious, assiduous and shrewd ‘businessman,’ a punctilious wholesale merchant,” otherwise it will not succeed economically. Three days later, initiating a “strategic retreat,” he acknowledged that the revolutionary state had “sustained a severe defeat” in its attempt to go over directly to Communist production and distribution.81 He repeated this theme of retreat in his speeches at the Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party in April 1922; the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in November 1922; and a plenary session of the Moscow Soviet, the same month. The new line, the “New Economic Policy,” was an admission of the failure of war communism as an economic policy. It was, in effect, a peace treaty with the peasantry and small industrialists, instituting a tax in kind replaced compulsory seizures, legalizing private trade, and revoking the decree nationalizing small-scale industry. Lenin called this effort—“the transition, in a series of gradual stages, to large-scale, socialized mechanized agriculture”— “one of the most difficult tasks of socialist construction.” Coinciding as it did with a series of peasant uprisings and the Kronstadt rebellion, the new line also became the occasion for a ban on all other political parties and factions within the Bolshevik Party.82 It also marked a new direction in Lenin’s concept of state building. Beginning in August 1921 and continuing to his death, he issued a series of statements about correcting the course of the revolution. In August, he said: “Let us get down to work, to slower, more cautious, more persevering and persistent work.” In March 1922, he stated, “Our

Ceplair CS20.indb 85

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

86  Revolutionary Pairs

Party is not proletarian enough.” In fact, the party’s so-called proletarian policy was determined by “the enormous undivided prestige enjoyed by the small group which might be called the Old Guard of the Party.” He feared that if that group were divided by conflict, its prestige would be weakened or even destroyed.83 Though Trotsky and Lenin were as one on the need for coercion and compulsion, Lenin was more attuned to the politics of his decrees and less rigid in his advocacy of them. While Trotsky adamantly supported one-man management and the militarization of labor, Lenin straddled the extremes in both cases. As a result, those issues remained unresolved. Trotsky later wrote: “Lenin’s support [for me] was not unconditional. Lenin wavered more than once, and in several instances made grave mistakes.”84

New Divergences Lenin and Trotsky went head to head over the question of peace negotiations with Germany. They represented two poles of a party split into three factions: Lenin strongly advocated peace at any price; the left wing of the party advocated revolutionary war; and Trotsky, who believed that the revolutionary government could both achieve an end to the war and foment a revolution in eastern and central Europe. Rather than sign an annexationist peace with Germany, he advocated stalling negotiations as long as possible. That is, he formulated the tactic of neither war nor peace. And yet, in April Lenin had voiced similar thoughts about the Bolshevik revolution provoking revolutions in central Europe, especially in Germany. And in November, at the opening of the Constituent Assembly, Sverdlov stated: “The October Revolution has kindled the fire of the socialist revolution not only in Russia, but in all countries. . . . We have no doubt that the sparks from our fire will spread all over the world.” Bukharin echoed that incendiary statement: “The revolutionary fire is about to set the whole world aflame.” And Aleksandr Voronsky spoke of “a worldwide revolutionary fire.” By December, Lenin was prepared to modify this view to fit the situation confronting the new state, but on January 21, his position received only fifteen votes in the Central Committee. Thirty-two members voted for revolutionary war, and sixteen voted for Trotsky’s proposal. Lenin and Trotsky met on January 24, to try to resolve their differences, and, though Trotsky held firm to his position, he promised Lenin that he would never support the proponents of revolutionary war. Later that day, the Central Committee approved neither war nor peace. When the Germans called the Russians’

Ceplair CS20.indb 86

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  87

bluff in February and launched a new military offensive, Lenin told the Central Committee he would resign from the government and the committee if it voted to meet the renewed offensive with a revolutionary war. His motion to sign an immediate, unconditional peace with Germany passed by a vote of 7–4, with Trotsky and three others abstaining.85 Trotsky refused to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and resigned as commissar of foreign relations. Lenin had gambled and won a major victory. And though behind the scenes he had been sharply critical of Trotsky’s belief in a pending German revolution, he did not publicly scorn him. At the Seventh Party Congress, in March, Lenin, in Trotsky’s words, decided “to touch upon the position of Comrade Trotsky,” to put his diplomatic strategy in perspective: “When he began negotiations at Brest, splendidly utilizing them for agitation, all of us were in agreement with Comrade Trotsky. . . . Trotsky’s tactic in so far as it aimed at procrastination was correct. It became incorrect when the state of war was declared to be terminated while peace had not been signed. . . . But since history has swept this aside, it is not worthwhile to recall it.”86 Though Trotsky’s reputation within party circles had suffered a sharp blow, he did not remain long without a key assignment. With counterrevolutionary offensives and foreign interventions blossoming in all parts of the new state, he was appointed commissar of war and president of the Supreme War Council. He had to overcome the chaotic demobilization, disintegration, and anarchy in the ranks of the army inherited from the prior regime and build a regular army from the Workers and Peasants Army. It had to be placed in absolute subservience to the Bolshevik Party and made, thereby, a fit instrument to serve the dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotsky centralized military and political control over the fighting forces and pushed them to victory, but in the process, he made many enemies, opposed both to his arrogance and his methods. Perhaps his most important step was to recruit ex-tsarist officers and noncommissioned officers. He adopted the slogan “exhortation, organization and reprisals,” and he did not hesitate to use the death penalty against deserters and mutineers. He also demanded and secured the complete independence of the army’s political organs from control by the civilian party machine, though he regularly inserted dedicated party members into the ranks of weak or wavering units.87 His first crisis was the potential collapse of the eastern front. He traveled to the Kazan area in August, and, according to Larissa Reissner, “by a show of calculated brutality and by furious attention to detail,” he quickly brought the Red Army units in that area to a state of combat readiness. Trotsky’s

Ceplair CS20.indb 87

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

88  Revolutionary Pairs

train, she wrote, arrived in the village of Svyazhsk, where the “most classconscious” of the retreating troops had gathered. “Here all of Trotsky’s organization genius was revealed. He managed to restore the supply lines, got new artillery and a few regiments through to Svyazhsk on railways that were being openly sabotaged; everything needed for the coming offensive was obtained.” In addition, he mobilized the entire personnel of his train, anyone able to bear a rifle. The counterrevolutionary forces (or White Russians), fearing an entire division had gathered to confront them, retreated from Kazan. In the aftermath, Trotsky ordered the execution of twenty-seven deserters, including a few Communists. Reissner extolled Trotsky’s fidelity to the revolution: “In him the revolutionist was never elbowed aside by the soldier, the military leader, the commander. And when, with his inhuman, terrible voice he confronted a deserter, we stood in fear of him as one of us, a great rebel who could crush and slay anyone for base cowardice, for treason not to the military but the world-proletarian revolutionary cause.”88 The correspondence between Lenin and Trotsky during this phase of the revolution reveals two impatient men: Lenin constantly urging more action and greater speed; Trotsky demanding enhanced discipline, increased supplies, and better organization of the military infrastructure. Only one personal moment intervened: On September 1, 1918, following the attempt on Lenin’s life, Trotsky wrote him, asking about his health. That letter has not been found. Lenin responded: “Many thanks; my recovery is getting on fine.  .  .  . Cordial greetings.” Trotsky told Lunacharsky “When you realize that Lenin might die it seems that all our lives are useless and you lose the will to live.”89 Trotsky was not in the least intimidated by Lenin’s impatience. In late August, Lenin wrote: “I am astonished and alarmed at the slowing down in the operations against Kazan; what is particularly bad is the report of your having the fullest possible opportunity of destroying the enemy with your artillery. There must be no question of taking pity on the town and putting matters off any longer, as merciless annihilation is what is vital once it is established that Kazan is enclosed in an iron ring. The enemy’s artillery is no weaker than ours.” Trotsky calmly responded: “The supposition that I’m sparing Kazan is unfounded. But the enemy’s artillery is slightly weaker than ours. The enemy’s gunners are better than ours. Hence the delay. Now, thanks to a substantial superiority in strength, I hope to bring matters swiftly to a head.” A few months later, Lenin expressed his dismay that Trotsky might have become “absorbed in the Ukraine to the detriment of over-all strategic

Ceplair CS20.indb 88

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  89

task . . . launching a rapid, determined and general offensive against [Pyotr] Krasnov [leader of the Don Cossacks].” Trotsky, who had a much better perspective, agreed on the necessity of clearing the Krasnov bands from the Don. But he added, “We cannot . . . leave events in the Ukraine to pursue their spontaneous course. . . . Our policy in relation to the Ukraine must proceed, above all, from the need to forestall the possibility of an advance by the Anglo-French forces from the South.”90 At the end of May 1919, Lenin, having learned of a breakthrough of what he termed “almost catastrophic proportions” by the enemy in the Millerovo sector, wrote to Trotsky: “I am amazed at your silence at such a moment as this.” Trotsky explained that the breakthrough “is by no means of a catastrophic nature.” And he reminded Lenin that countermeasures required time, and in the steppes, “which have turned into a sea of mud and in which I have been floundering for four days on end, time has to be measured in days not hours.” Following another peremptory message the following day—“I am extremely surprised and, to put it mildly, distressed”—Trotsky replied: “Reproaches are unfounded.”91 Though Lenin tried to respond swiftly to Trotsky’s demands for more and better matériel, he was slow to acquiesce to Trotsky’s insistence on using non-Communist army officers and to his “categorical insistence” that Stalin and his cronies be recalled from the front. Trotsky won on one front, when the Central Committee finally agreed to use former tsarist officers but to place political commissars at their sides. And the committee refused to allow Trotsky to employ “strict, formal discipline” against Communists in the military. As to the hostility between Trotsky and Stalin, Lenin generally tried to placate and defend both. Finally, in July, after a plenum of the Central Committee overruled him on three issues and Lenin refused to support Trotsky’s decision on command positions on the eastern front, Trotsky, in a daring and shocking move, resigned all his offices. Lenin convinced the Politburo to reject the resignation, and he directed the Central Committee to issue a statement to that effect, on July 5: “After examining Comrade Trotsky’s statement and after giving it thorough consideration, the Orgburo and Politburo of the C. C. have come to the unanimous decision that they are totally unable to accept Comrade Trotsky’s resignation or grant his application. The Orgburo and the Politburo will do all in their power to provide for the work on the Southern Front . . . which Comrade Trotsky chose for himself, to be so arranged as to best suit Comrade Trotsky and to yield the greatest benefit to the Republic.” He was granted full power to take whatever actions he deemed suitable.92

Ceplair CS20.indb 89

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

90  Revolutionary Pairs

Lenin could have had Trotsky arrested and executed for desertion, but he understood Trotsky’s thin skin and impetuosity, and he knew that those faults did not undermine Trotsky’s obvious abilities. But Trotsky’s manner alienated many people, and complaints about him flowed to Lenin. At the Eighth Party Congress, in Trotsky’s absence, Lenin defended Trotsky against the “military opposition,” and he supported Trotsky’s military theses. But when the time came to elect the new Central Committee, Trotsky received by far the largest number of negative votes. After the Congress, Lenin told Maxim Gorky: “Show me another man able to organize almost a model army within a single year and win the respect of military specialists. We have such a man.” And Karl Radek later said that only “a man who works like Trotsky, a man who spares himself as little as Trotsky, who can speak to the soldiers as only Trotsky can—it was only such a man who could be the standard bearer of the armed working people. . . . Without him the creation of the Red Army and its victories would have demanded infinitely greater sacrifices.”93 In mid-October, 1918, with the counterrevolutionary forces threatening Petrograd, Trotsky was immediately dispatched there to take charge of the defense of the city. At first, Lenin opposed Trotsky’s plan for the defense of Petrograd, but he soon changed his mind and gave Trotsky a free hand. However, Lenin admonished him: “Petrograd is to be defended to the very last drop of blood, not a single yard of ground yielded and fighting carried on in the streets.”94 Trotsky successfully defended Petrograd. Trotsky was now, according to Deutscher, “at the summit of his political and military achievement.” No one, Victor Serge recalled, speaking of Trotsky’s performance at the Third Congress of the Communist International, June–July 1921 “ever wore a great destiny with more style. He was forty-one and at the apex of power, popularity and fame.  .  .  . He outshone Lenin through his great oratorical talent, through his organizing ability, . . . and by his brilliant gifts as a theoretician. . . . His bearing was superbly martial, with his powerful chest, jet-black beard and hair, and flashing eyeglasses.” And yet, though they admired him, Serge and his fellow “critical Communists” realized that there was “something authoritarian” about Trotsky. They found him stern, insistent on punctuality, inflexibly correct in his demeanor, and dictatorial in his character.95 When Trotsky, at the pinnacle of his power, rejoined the government in Moscow, he stumbled. “He acted,” Deutscher wrote, “against his own principle and in disregard of a most solemn commitment.  .  .  . He shattered the ground on which he stood,” by ceasing to uphold proletarian democracy. He

Ceplair CS20.indb 90

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  91

had, that is, become a “substitutionist,” one who substituted the party for the proletariat. He began to display a relentlessly disciplinarian attitude, within and without the Party.”96 In his effort to apply military methods to labor discipline and transport, he aroused the hostility of different groups within the party, thereby driving his opponents into Stalin’s camp. During the next few years, Trotsky and Lenin repeatedly clashed over issues. And yet, in their 1920–1922 correspondence, there is a clear, albeit formal, cordiality, and Lenin repeatedly asked Trotsky to undertake a large variety of tasks, in both the domestic and the international spheres. It must also be recalled that Lenin was regularly impatient and angry with everyone who did not adhere to his notion of competency and alacrity and that Trotsky was a constant critic of government and party errors. Nevertheless, Trotsky admitted that their disagreement over the treatment of trade unions “clouded our relationship for some time.” But, as Adam Ulam points out, Lenin was as fed up with the concept of workers’ control as Trotsky was, and he chose to allow Trotsky to make his usual frontal attack, while playing the role of moderator between the two factions. “Lenin spent as much time denouncing Trotsky’s ‘thesis’” to subordinate the trade unions to the state and install a military-style discipline, as he did those of the Workers’ Opposition. As a result, within the party “Trotsky now became a sort of lightning rod attracting to himself the charges of authoritarianism and military thinking and allowing Lenin to play the role of a broad-minded conciliator.”97 They also criticized each other ferociously over Trotsky’s call for a partial repeal of grain-requisitioning, and Lenin at first opposed Trotsky’s call for comprehensive planning and for the enlargement of the powers of Gosplan, the central planning agency. In August 1921, Trotsky pointed out that the state lacked “a real economic centre to watch over economic activity, conduct experiments in the field, record and disseminate results and co-ordinate in practice all sides of economic activity and thus actually work at a co-ordinated economic plan.” He wanted Gosplan to be completely reorganized in terms of its makeup and methods, and he advocated that large-scale nationalized industry be installed as the pivot of the new economic plan. Trotsky returned to this point in April 1922, demanding that Gosplan “be made into a lever for putting the economy in order,” and the following August he asked how the party, without a central planning organ, could promote efficiency and proper accountability, minimum stability of operation, or “even a rough, short-term” economic plan. In December, Lenin came around, agreeing with Trotsky “in all essentials,” save perhaps one sentence, and requesting that he

Ceplair CS20.indb 91

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

92  Revolutionary Pairs

assume the defense of their common position at the upcoming session of the plenum of the Central Committee.98 A similar course of events occurred when Trotsky criticized the Stalin-led Commissariat for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, pointing out that it was “filled chiefly with persons who had failed in other spheres.” At first, Lenin stated: “Comrade Trotsky is radically wrong.” Trotsky then wrote directly to Lenin noting that, given the New Economic Policy, such an organization “is the most absolute and total rubbish, and accounting is everything.” Lenin replied that he was in “complete agreement” and told Trotsky to announce “our solidarity at the Plenum.” Lenin reiterated this new mindset in his “Testament.”99 Stalin was the one key issue that divided them until Lenin’s death. Lenin had a high regard for the man and regularly defended him against Trotsky’s criticisms, because he thought Trotsky was “acting from personal animosity or from that ‘individualism’ which had led him to oppose the Politburo on so many occasions.” And it is Deutscher’s contention that Lenin either prompted Stalin to frame a Politburo resolution accusing Trotsky of dereliction of duty or at least had consented to it.100 Again, in his “Testament,” Lenin acknowledged that Trotsky had been correct about Stalin. In the foreign policy realm, Trotsky did not support Lenin’s plan to invade Poland. Trotsky wanted to negotiate, because he thought that the civil war had exhausted the army and the populace. Lenin insisted that the defeat of Poland could advance the revolution in Europe. After the Poles won, Lenin acknowledged that the Red Army had suffered “an enormous defeat” and that the decision to undertake this conquest had been “a political mistake.”101

Reconvergence of a Sort Publicly, Lenin and Trotsky continued to be mutually complimentary. On the occasion of Lenin’s fiftieth birthday, Trotsky delivered a powerful encomium, comparing Lenin to Marx as a creative revolutionary thinker, one who brought to revolution “that deep creative force which we call intuition: the ability to judge events rapidly, at a glance, to distinguish the essential from the trivial, to fill up imaginatively the missing parts of the picture, to think out other people’s thoughts to the end, and in the first instance the enemy’s thoughts; to combine all these disparate elements into one totality and to strike a blow straightaway while the ‘idea’ of the blow was still shaping itself in one’s mind. This is the intuition of Lenin. This is what we call in Russia true sagacity.”102

Ceplair CS20.indb 92

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  93

Lenin “repeatedly indicated to the party and the International his regard for Trotsky as an interpreter of Marxism; and he lent wholehearted support to the outstanding influence Trotsky exercised on Russia’s cultural life.” In addition, on several occasions Lenin asked Trotsky to assume the post of his deputy, but Trotsky always declined. This “did much to cloud relations” between them. In March 1921, an exasperated Lenin revealed his frustration with Trotsky’s latest resignation from a government position: “Trotsky is a temperamental man with military experience. He is in love with the organization, but as for politics, he hasn’t got a clue.” At both the Tenth and Eleventh Party Congresses, Lenin omitted Trotsky’s supporters from the slate of candidates for the Central Committee, and at the Eleventh Congress, Lenin named Stalin to be general secretary of the party.103 Trotsky’s future position in the party further suffered at the Tenth Congress (March 1921), when Lenin, concerned about the demands of the Workers’ Opposition, the Kronstadt revolt, the unprecedented number of different platforms proffered at the Congress, and the worsening political situation in Russia, “insisted on a sharp delineation between discussion as such and the formation of separate factions, in dispute with one another and capable of splitting the Party.” His resolution, “On Party Unity,” stated that the “unquestionable necessary criticisms of Party shortcomings” may not be submitted by “groups formed on the basis of some ‘platform’ or other” but only by individual party members. It called for the immediate dissolution of all such groups. And the Central Committee was empowered to expel from the party any member who engaged in factionalism.104 Stalin and his cohorts would later effectively wield the “factionalism” weapon against the “Trotskyists.” By mid-1921, Lenin’s health was in drastic decline. Concerned about the direction the revolution was taking and finally awake to the problem posed by Stalin, he repeatedly turned to Trotsky, but Trotsky, lacking Lenin’s common sense and political instincts, failed to appreciate what Lenin was trying to do for him. At arguably the most significant turning point of his life, Trotsky was politically oblivious. For example, in March 1922 Lenin made an “earnest request” that Trotsky undertake the defense of the Georgian case in the Central Committee. “The case is now under ‘persecution’ by Stalin and [Felix] Dzershinski, and I cannot rely on their impartiality. Quite the contrary.” (Local Georgian Bolsheviks wanted to maintain Georgia as an autonomous republic, whereas Stalin and the Moscow-based Georgians wanted to amalgamate Georgia into a Transcaucasian Republic. They employed brutal tactics to overcome the local opposition.) Trotsky replied that he was ill and could not do so. He

Ceplair CS20.indb 93

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

94  Revolutionary Pairs

asked for the materials Lenin had in his possession so that he could read them if his health permitted. In fact, Trotsky was merely suffering from a cold and was preoccupied with a report he was writing on industry. In turn, when Trotsky, that same month, wrote a memorandum to the Politburo suggesting that the party should relinquish “the functions of direct administration and management” of the economy, as a means to “cleanse the party of bureaucratism and the economy of undiscipline,” Lenin peremptorily dismissed it.105 When a stroke felled Lenin in May 1922, Trotsky did not visit him during his recuperation at Gorki. He claimed that he was not told for several days and that he “did not stop to think about” the delay. This was the first of several key instances where Trotsky displayed amazing obtuseness. In fact, Kamenev and Zinoviev were maneuvering to oust Trotsky from his offices. When Lenin heard about this effort, he wrote to Kamenev: “Throwing Trotsky overboard . . . is the height of stupidity.” And yet, when Lenin nominated Trotsky to serve as deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Trotsky “categorically” refused the office.106 In December 1922, Lenin dictated a series of papers that have come to be known as his “Testament.” He wrote to Trotsky: “I earnestly beg you to take it upon yourself to defend at the forthcoming plenary session [of the Central Committee] our common view about the imperative need to preserve and reinforce the monopoly of foreign trade.” In a letter to the upcoming party congress, he advocated an increase in the number of members of the Central Committee, because it would increase the stability of the party, and asked the congress to “invest the decisions of the State Planning Commission with legislative force, meeting, in this respect, the wishes of Comrade Trotsky.” The following day, Lenin returned to the subject of his fears about a schism in the Central Committee, urging it to take what measures it could to prevent a split. “I think that from this standpoint the prime factors in the question of stability are such members of the C. C. as Stalin and Trotsky. I think relations between them make up the greater part of the danger of a split, which could be avoided” by increasing the size of the Central Committee by fifty or a hundred members. Following a paragraph critical of Stalin, Lenin wrote: “Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the C. C. on the questions of the People’s Commissariat for Communications has already proved, it distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C. C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.” Lenin also urged party members not to hold against

Ceplair CS20.indb 94

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  95

Trotsky his prerevolutionary disagreements with Bolshevism.107 It is clear that in this document Lenin was trying to prevent a competition to replace him and, by pointing out the deficiencies of each likely contestant, was hoping that a collective leadership would emerge. The most interesting section of Lenin’s “Testament” was the one on nationalities. He began with a stunning statement of apology: “I am, it seems, strongly to blame vis-à-vis the workers of Russia for having failed to intervene sufficiently energetically and sufficiently incisively in the notorious question of the ‘Autonomisation,’ officially, it seems, termed the USSR.” He concluded with another stunning admonition, that it was “better to lean over towards being flexible and gentle vis-à-vis national minorities than the reverse.” In January, Lenin in effect handed Trotsky a loaded pistol, with an article in Pravda sharply criticizing the work of the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate, headed by Stalin. He also addressed the larger problem of the state apparatus, calling it an imposing, difficult, extremely urgent problem for the party, one far from being solved.108 In sum, Deutscher writes, “Lenin went a very long way to ‘meet Comrade Trotsky’ on further issues which had separated them.” But Trotsky failed to reciprocate. Ulam labels his behavior as “unheroic” and called it a “display of fantastic political blundering.” Trotsky’s conduct at the end of Lenin’s life is difficult to explain. Although he had explosive material at hand, sufficient to damage his enemies, he did not use it. Instead, his old conciliationist tendency awakened (as Lenin had predicted), and he met with them. Of course, they gave him all the assurances he sought. In his report to the Central Committee, recording his reception of the Lenin’s communication, he acted unLenin like. Referring to how he should have handled Lenin’s article on the Georgian question, he said: “Since Comrade Lenin had not formally expressed his wishes on this matter, it had to be decided on the principle of political feasibility. It stands to reason that I could not personally assume responsibility for such a decision and therefore I referred the matter to the Central Committee.” I think two factors were at work. First, Trotsky did not have a base in the party. He had a few close colleagues, but he had managed to alienate the majority. Second, the revolution was his home, his nest, just as the old Iskra had been, and he was, once again, loathe to destroy it. He simply did not understand the personal nature of the campaign against him. He classified the battle against Trotskyism as “a fight against the ideological legacy of Lenin,” as a “revolt against the exacting theoretical demands of Marxism and the exacting political demands of the revolution.”109

Ceplair CS20.indb 95

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

96  Revolutionary Pairs

Trotsky wrote steadily and brilliantly during 1923, advocating his perspective on the development of the revolution. His work paralleled Lenin’s critiques and was equally prescient. While Lenin focused on the lack of specialized skills necessary to administer the state in an effective socialist manner and the backwardness of “proletarian culture,” Trotsky concerned himself with “bureaucratism” and the gap it had opened “between the old cadres and the majority of the members who came to the party after October.”110 He feared that the leaders were becoming detached from the masses and were concentrating “their attention solely upon questions of administration, of appointments and transfers, of narrowing their horizon, of weakening their revolutionary spirit.” He called on the cadres to heed “the voice of the broad mass party” and not consider every criticism “as a manifestation of factional spirit.” The attempt to prevent factions by diktat is “gross ‘organizational fetishism’” and “profoundly bureaucratic.” He also promoted his version of Leninism and criticized his opponents’ use of the term Old Bolshevism every time “objective conditions demand a new turn, a bold about-face, creative initiative.” By doing so, they transformed “Leninism from a method demanding for its application initiative, critical thinking and ideological courage into a canon which demands nothing more than interpreters appointed for good and aye.” Leninism, he warned, “cannot be chopped up into quotations suited for every possible case.” It is, rather, “genuine freedom from formalistic prejudices, from moralizing doctrinalism, from all forms of intellectual conservatism attempting to bind the will of revolutionary action.” Like Lenin, Trotsky proposed that the revolution slow down, take stock of itself. Both believed that the workers and the peasants must undergo a long education process. Neither believed in the doctrine of “proletarian culture.” Both believed it would take a long time to lay the new foundations of communist culture. Whereas Trotsky talked in terms of the revolutionary culture absorbing and assimilating the positive elements of the old culture, Lenin advocated developing the new culture in a revolutionary manner.111 All of Trotsky’s critical efforts and his effort to assume the mantle of Leninism served only to increase the ranks of Trotsky’s opponents. In January 1924, he hammered another nail in his coffin, when, on his way south to recover from an “indisposition,” he received the news that Lenin had died. Party leaders informed him that he would be unable to reach Moscow in time for the funeral, and he made no effort to do so. When he later learned that he could have returned in time, he wrote: “Incredible as it may appear, I was even deceived about the date of the funeral. The conspirators surmised correctly that I would never think of verifying it.”112

Ceplair CS20.indb 96

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940)  97

From there, it was all downhill for Trotsky. He systematically was stripped of all his trappings of power and status, then exiled. In exile, he rose from the ashes as the most incisive critic of the Stalinist regime and of fascism. His Fourth International, however, revealed, once again, his weakness as an organizer and handler of followers. But his very existence, as a revolutionary critic of Stalin and his regime, ultimately doomed him. On August 20, 1940, on Stalin’s orders, Trotsky was assassinated. Lenin, of course, was embalmed in word and deed. According to the party’s official statement of his death, Lenin “founded our party of steel” and “planted the banner of October throughout the land.” “Like a giant,” Bukharin wrote, “he walked in front of the human flood, guiding the movement of countless human units, building a disciplined army of labor, sending it into battle, destroying the enemy, taming the elements, and lighting, with the searchlight of his powerful mind, both the straight avenues and the dark alleys, through which the workers’ detachments marched with their rebellious red flags.” This titan, this embodiment of the party and the state, could not, of course, be buried, hidden from the adoring eyes of the masses. His heart and brain were removed and given to the Lenin Institute. In March, the Funeral Commission announced that it would take all “measures available to modern science to preserve the body for as long as possible.” His mausoleum, in Red Square, was opened to the public on August 1, 1924.113

Ceplair CS20.indb 97

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

3

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) [Nehru] reinterpreted the vital elements of Gandhi’s message to India and the world in terms of concepts and categories which could be understood by the modern intelligentsia in India and outside. . . . On the other hand, without Gandhi’s impact, Nehru would have been . . . unaware of the permanent elements of Indian civilization and . . . a stranger to India’s village-dwelling peasant masses. — P. C. Joshi

Of the pairs studied here, Gandhi and Nehru were the furthest apart in age, background, and belief systems (Gandhi was deeply religious, Nehru unabashedly secular). And they were distinct types of revolutionaries. Neither favored violence, but Gandhi’s civil disobedience centered on specific, unpredictable actions at key points and times, whereas Nehru was an advocate of predictable, constant pressure. Despite those differences, they were the second-closest personally, like uncle and nephew. The two did not spend much time together, they only occasionally met, and they rarely worked together, but they corresponded regularly, and Gandhi considered himself a part of Nehru’s family. There were many people closer to and more intimate with Gandhi than Nehru. Indeed, according to Ian Desai, Gandhi “was, in essence, an exceptional entrepreneur who relied on a tight-knit community of coworkers . . . to support him and his work.” His “real magic” was his “deft ability to recruit, manage, and inspire a team of talented individuals who worked tirelessly in his service.” Nehru was more of a loner, who regularly had difficulty getting along with those who opposed him or his ideas. He wrote Gandhi: “I have been taught self-restraint about my personal feelings and emotions and the habit of confessing to people or taking them into one’s 98

Ceplair CS20.indb 98

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  99

confidence is totally alien to me. I live a lonely personal life and the only person who could occasionally peep into it was Kamala [his wife].” That said, Gandhi and Nehru had a special and distinctive bond. They were bound by political calculation and emotional affinity.1 Nehru had, Gandhi said, “made me captive of his love.” And perhaps this love clouded Gandhi’s judgment about Nehru’s intentions. Nehru, Gandhi stated, “says what is uppermost in his mind, but he always does what I want. When I am gone he will do what I am doing now. Then he will speak my language.” In fact, as Madhu Limaye noted, “Jawaharlal possessed unexampled skill to manipulate Gandhi. He knew as no one else knew how to play on Gandhi’s heart strings. . . . He kept his irritation, annoyance and exasperation to himself or at worst confided these feelings to the pages of his prison diary. The public expression of his disagreement with Gandhi was extremely moderate.”2 An intellectual gulf divided them, and they had serious differences on several occasions, but Nehru never allowed those to precipitate a rupture nor foment an intra-party opposition. At times of crisis in their relationship, the two seemed to be engaged in a jujitsu match, testing each other’s equilibria. Gandhi was by far the most charismatic of the revolutionaries discussed here. No other had his mass appeal. But that was a two-edged sword: it drew millions to him, but it made his leadership of the independence movement arbitrary, inconsistent, unpredictable, and ambiguous. It was not easy to be his follower. For the most part, he saw his way clear, but he was frequently incapable (or, at times, even unready) to communicate his motives and goals. His political life was a compound of lofty demands, unfulfilled visions, shattering halts, and veers between unshakable certainty and helplessness. The vast gulfs dividing Hindus from Muslims, Hindus from Hindus, social class from social class, caste from caste, and the British from the Indians induced Gandhi to see himself as the indispensable bridge between parties, and, as such, led him to make compromises that regularly angered Nehru. For Gandhi, however, compromise offered a nonviolent way to avoid conflict and find common ground with one’s opponent. He failed, though, to find an enduring combination of nationalism and localism, nationalism and Hinduism, and the personal and the political. There was always an ad hoc element in Gandhi’s path to Indian independence. And yet, even when Gandhi seemed to have miscalculated, even in the face of a series of seeming defeats, he kept the allegiance of the masses and forced the British to find new ways to deal with him. The most generous look at Gandhi requires one to see him feeling his way through a labyrinth, not zigging and zagging for personal or political gain. “Gandhi explained that it

Ceplair CS20.indb 99

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

100  Revolutionary Pairs

was never his aim to be consistent with his previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with the truth as it appeared to him at a given moment so he that he could grow from truth to truth. . . . ‘I am not a visionary,’ he said. ‘I claim to be a practical idealist.’” As Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph note, one must look beyond a simple toting up of Gandhi’s political successes and failures and perceive what he accomplished for the Indians subjectively, “repairing wounds in self-esteem inflicted by generations of imperial subjection, restoring courage and potency, recruiting and mobilizing new constituencies and leaders, helping India to acquire national coherence.” Nehru stated that much of what Gandhi said was only partially accepted, and if it was accepted at all, was a secondary phenomenon. Gandhi’s essence was his fearlessness and his devotion to truth.3 And yet for all his revolutionary thinking about securing independence, Gandhi was deeply conservative culturally. In Hind Swaraj, he extolled the ancient civilization of India, “the best the world has ever seen.” And in his quarrel with Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar about separate electorates for untouchable voters, he insisted that separate elections “will create a division in Hinduism which I cannot possibly look forward to with any satisfaction whatsoever,” one he was willing to resist with his life. When he learned that the British government had decided to award separate electorates, Gandhi initiated what he called a “fast unto death.” As a result, Ambedkar was forced to compromise and accept reserved seats.4 Gandhi also rejected a federalist solution that took power from the princely states. A second contradiction or paradox involved his concept of democracy. In his thinking and speaking, he was a true democrat, who brought millions of peasants into political life, favored the weak over the strong, and advocated equality between people of color, race, creed, and sex. At the same time, especially in his relations with Congress, he frequently acted in a dictatorial fashion.5 According to Perry Anderson, Gandhi distinguished himself by the combination of his charismatic mobilization of popular feeling, organizing, fundraising, mediating, and communication skills. In addition, no other revolutionary had Gandhi’s social focus, his deep concern with the poor and downtrodden. Certainly no other revolutionary spent the amount of time with them that Gandhi did. He was alone in his fidelity to nonviolence and his religiosity. Indeed, religion mattered more to Gandhi than politics. He was, however, a unique Hindu, determined to revolutionize key elements of Hindu culture and near-mystical in his political aspirations. His Hinduism,

Ceplair CS20.indb 100

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  101

according to B. R. Nanda, consisted of a few basic beliefs: “the supreme reality of God, the unity of all life and the value of love as a means of realizing God.” True religion was a lived phenomenon, a matter of the heart, not of the intellect. It served as an ethical framework for the conduct of daily life. His single aim in life was to attain moksha (release from the cycle of death and rebirth), and, when that occurred, when he became a “perfect being,” he would, he believed, “have simply to say the word and the nation will listen.”6 Gandhi’s religiosity was the cause of many of his differences with Nehru, but that came later. At the beginning, Nehru had fallen, in his words, “under the spell of Gandhi . . . , at a time when he [Nehru] had few political ideas of his own.” Anderson sees in this relationship a degree of “psychological dependence” and a “quasi-filial infatuation.” “The depth of parental affection—withheld, often with extraordinary harshness, from his own children—Gandhi felt for Nehru was unique. Mingled with these emotional bonds were calculations of mutual interest. So long as he operated in the ambit of Congress, Gandhi could count on Nehru never taking overt political issue with him, while as Gandhi’s favourite, Nehru could count on prevailing over rivals to head Congress, and after independence, to rule the country.”7 In the eyes of one of his most ardent admirers, Nehru stood high in terms of “nobility of nature, . . . modernity of outlook,” mental and physical endurance, chivalry, humanity, and “consistency of vision.” It was he who laid the basis for India’s secularism, socialism, and democracy. He had many facets: “a lover of sports, a rider, a glider, a gardener,” a world traveler, a scientist, and a writer. He also worked long and hard at the labors of independence and state building. He had his faults, chief among them, according to Anderson, his lack of “intuitive contact with the masses” and his tone-deafness on the Muslim issue. According to one of his colleagues, Nehru’s temper “is absolutely uncontrollable. He is honest, desperately honest, but he lives in a world of his own.”8 Nehru lacked Gandhi’s charismatic hold over the masses, his social focus, and his spirituality. He did, however, reshape and reinterpret Gandhi’s message to attract the active support of India’s “revolutionary middle-class intellectuals.” Nehru was not, like Gandhi, a self-made man. Rather, he rose to prominence in Congress on his father’s coattails and Gandhi’s patronage. Nehru was assailed by many doubts and questions about nonviolence: “He could not accept what he called its ‘metaphysical’ assumptions. He said that ‘the final emphasis must necessarily be on the end and goal in view,’ although means were also important.”9 He failed, however, to develop a distinctive revolutionary ideology or strategy. And he lacked tactical vision. He espoused

Ceplair CS20.indb 101

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

102  Revolutionary Pairs

vague notions of socialism and industrialization, but when faced with a road forward for Congress through the thickets of the independence process, he regularly called on Gandhi and his nonviolent method. Whereas Nehru was an unqualified advocate of modernization and industrialization, Gandhi filtered those developments through his views on personal autonomy and ethics. If modernization and industrialization did not address the needs of individuals in their actual lives, Gandhi was opposed. He agreed that some modern technological developments, railroads and hospitals, for example, were necessary evils, but he hoped to make people aware of their costs. Given that his vision of independence was an India in which the people ruled themselves, he wanted to make sure that modern technology did not replace the British as a dominating overlord.10 The similarities between Gandhi and Nehru outweighed their differences. Western ideas significantly shaped both their ideologies. Gandhi was directly inspired by Henry David Thoreau, Edward Carpenter, G. K. Chesterton, Leo Tolstoy, and John Ruskin, and Nehru imbibed Western liberalism and socialism. Both were committed to India’s freedom and unity, to a pluralist polity, and to peaceful methods for the resolution of conflicts. They denounced religious and linguistic fanaticism, caste exclusiveness, and untouchability. Politics was a means to serve society, not to gain power: “They did not pander to the masses; their speeches and writings were a healthy mixture of exhortations and warnings.”11

Paths to Convergence Gandhi’s Education Mohandas K. Gandhi was the son and grandson of highly placed civil servants who lived and worked in Gujarat. The family belonged to the Vaishyas, a trading caste. His mother was deeply religious; she fasted frequently and practiced other austerities. By his own account, he endured an unhappy childhood, portraying himself as a timid, weak, fearful, and guilt-ridden child. “I was a coward. I used to be haunted by the fear of thieves, ghosts and serpents. I did not dare stir out of doors at night. Darkness was a terror to me.” Others, however, commented on his enormous energy and considerable independence. His father was a London-trained barrister, and he followed the same route, seeking a legal education at the Inns of Court in London. But to get there, this “timid” person rejected his caste’s ban against overseas travel.

Ceplair CS20.indb 102

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  103

Once in London, his worldview changed significantly. He became a part of what could be called London’s counterculture. He joined the Vegetarian Society of London, and he attended meetings of the Esoteric Christian Union and the Theosophical Society. He was introduced, in English translation, to one of his culture’s greatest texts, the Bhagavad Gita, which he came to regard “as the book par excellence for knowledge of truth.” The Sermon on the Mount also deeply affected him; it “went straight to my heart,” he wrote. Finally, “the ideas imbedded within British law, administration, and political values” impressed him and gave him a deep respect for correct procedure, evidence, and rights12 When he returned to India in 1891, he could not find remunerative work as a lawyer: He knew little Indian law and was petrified when he had to speak in a courtroom. When the opportunity arose to take on a legal matter in South Africa, he jumped at it. He left India in 1893 and did not permanently return until July 14, 1914. In South Africa, he found himself in an Indian community composed mainly of merchants or indentured laborers. One of the few skilled professionals among them, he discovered himself, in E. Victor Wolfenstein’s words: “a man of superior talents,” one who was vivified, not intimidated, by the indignities he suffered. He learned how to do public work; he found his political vocation and his public voice. It became the locus of his intense religiosity and a laboratory for what he termed his “Experiments with Truth.” There, he synthesized his London ideas with his reading of Leo Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God Is within You) and John Ruskin (Unto This Last) into “an austere, vegetarian, sexually abstemious, prayerful, back-to-theearth, self-sustaining” ideology.13 He began his public work on behalf of upper-class Indian Muslims, but by the time he left South Africa he was working for all the suppressed people of color there. He founded two experimental farms, Phoenix in 1904 and Tolstoy in 1910. These served a double purpose—as cooperative commonwealths and as places to sustain the families of the imprisoned protesters. His first eight years in South Africa, however, were barren of significant results, but when he returned to India in 1901, he found neither financial success nor satisfaction. He returned to South Africa, where he established the British Indian Association, took over a newspaper, Indian Opinion, and launched his first passive resistance campaign, to protest an act requiring Indians to register in the Transvaal. He traveled to the United Kingdom to present the Indian case to the government. Though the officials to whom he spoke seemed sympathetic, they had already decided to give the Boers the

Ceplair CS20.indb 103

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

104  Revolutionary Pairs

authority to maintain the color legislation. Gandhi felt betrayed. On his return, he organized a series of mass meetings to urge Indians not to register. At first, it seemed successful, but as the arrests mounted, the support faded. Gandhi met with the Transvaal colonial secretary, Jan Smuts, to arrange a face-saving compromise. In exchange for the release of prisoners, Gandhi promised that the Indians would agree, voluntarily, to be fingerprinted. It was not a popular move. A second resistance effort against the registration act also failed. In 1909, he returned to London to see what he could rescue from the ruins. There, two important events occurred. He came face to face with, and publicly repudiated, the violent side of Indian nationalism, and he read books strongly advocating the value of mass nonviolent resistance to British rule. He composed a fifteen-point Confession of Faith. The twelfth point read: “India’s salvation consists in unlearning what she has learned during the past fifty years. The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors, and such like have all to go, and the so-called upper classes have to live consciously, religiously, and deliberately the simple peasant life, knowing it to be a lifegiving true happiness.”14 On the ship returning him to South Africa, he wrote his most original political work, Hind Swaraj, a powerful argument for Indian self-rule. In it, he extolled ancient Indian civilization, delivered a sharp critique of modern Western (industrial) civilization and its railroads, doctors, and lawyers, and advocated soul-force as the only worthy means of achieving independence. He decided he would no longer wear Western clothing, but only homespun Indian garments. When he arrived back in South Africa, he launched his third nonviolent resistance effort, opposing new anti-immigration legislation and a judgment against the immigration of Hindu and Muslim wedded couples. It did not succeed, and his support noticeably shrank. But, in 1913, as if by divine inspiration, he latched on to a campaign on behalf of indentured Indian servants that transformed him and his sense of the possible. He called for a national strike against the imposition of a £3 tax on every indentured servant. Over the course of a month, what began as a strike of indentured coal miners became a virtual general strike of Indian workers. The response was huge, and the government responded brutally, arresting Gandhi and invoking a wave of unfavorable world opinion. The South African government, searching for a face-saving way out of the strike and an end to satyagraha, released Gandhi from prison and appointed a judicial commission. Gandhi dressed himself in the clothes of the indentured, vowed to eat only one meal a day until the struggle ended, and boycotted the commission. Instead, he entered into nego-

Ceplair CS20.indb 104

4/15/2020 9:15:01 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  105

Fig. 3.1 Mohandas Gandhi with Jawaharlal Nehru during a meeting of the All India Congress, Bombay, India.

tiation with Jan Smuts, now minister of interior and mines. Smuts agreed to abolish the tax and recognize the marriage rights of Muslims and Hindus. The Indian Relief Act, however, stopped far short of the legal equality Gandhi had once sought. Indeed, Joseph Lelyveld writes: “the situation of Indians in South Africa got worse, not better,” after Gandhi returned to India.15 Though the indentured-servant campaign became his prototype for effective political action, its mass aspect handed Gandhi a double-edged weapon when he returned to India: it had great potential for winning demands, but in a country as large and varied as India, large groups of

Ceplair CS20.indb 105

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

106  Revolutionary Pairs

protesters would be difficult to control and they could easily become violent. Though he avowed his “boundless” faith in the people and called on the leaders of the independence movement to trust the people, he cautioned against yielding to the rule of the mob. The masses, he said, were unreliable, and one had to walk a thin line between confusing the mass mind and appearing to be “truckling to the multitude.” For the present, he wrote, “it is better to be ‘dubbed’ obstinate and autocratic than even to appear to be influenced by the multitude for the sake of its approbation.” Leaders who want to avoid mob law and achieve ordered progress “must act contrary to the mass of opinion if it does not commend itself to their reason.” Another problem with mass demonstrations was that at some point they had to end in a negotiated settlement. Given Gandhi’s propensity for compromising, for trusting the authorities to carry out their word, his followers, who thought they had made great sacrifices, often believed they had sacrificed in vain. This problem would follow him to India, where he invariably advocated what seemed modest demands or accepted what were considered modest gains. He understood, as his critics did not, that small demands and concessions ate away at racism and empire and the institutions that supported them and that big, enduring movements could only be sustained by small, intense activities. As a result, he did not urge the subjects of the princely states to struggle with their leaders; he did not attempt to rouse the peasants against their landlords. He deliberately refrained from calling on the masses to correct India’s social and economic problems. He believed that education, a constructive program, and political freedom would correct those evils.16

Gandhi’s Doctrine Gandhi brought much more to the revolutionary table than did Nehru, and Gandhi’s way of thinking about revolution was more original, less derivative, than that of all the post–Marx-Engels revolutionaries under discussion here. It also had a distinctive source. As a result of the work he did in South Africa, he later wrote: “the religious spirit within me became a living force. . . . I felt that God could be realized only through service.” Since he believed “Truth is the right designation of God,” he believed that single-minded devotion and indifference to all other interests in life was the only way to realize the Truth he sought. Gandhi told Louis Fischer: “I think my influence is due to the fact that I pursue the truth. That is my goal. . . . Truth is not merely a matter of words. It is really a matter of living the truth.’ And the basis of his search for

Ceplair CS20.indb 106

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  107

truth was ahimsa (nonviolence), “not merely a negative state of harmlessness but . . . a positive state of love, of doing good even to the evil-doer. But it does not mean helping the evil-doer to continue the wrong or tolerating it by passive acquiescence. On the contrary, love, the active state of ahimsa, requires you to resist the wrong-doer by dissociating yourself from him even though it may offend him or injure him physically.” The political practice of ahimsa, noncooperation, thus, “is an intensely active state,” but it must not be punitive or vindictive in intent nor based on “malice, ill-will or hatred.” The strength to practice noncooperation effectively comes not from physical capacity but from “an indomitable will,” from “the strength of the spirit.”17 Gandhi called this practice of truth-seeking and ahimsa satyagraha, but he vaguely defined it as “holding on to Truth, hence Truth-force. I have also called it Love-force or Soul-force.” Politically, satyagraha consisted mostly of “opposing error in the shape of unjust laws,” by violating them openly and civilly. But spiritually, when one takes the satyagraha pledge, he or she must not do so “with a view to produce an effect on outsiders.” One must take the pledge independently of others, and the pledger must be true to that pledge, no matter what others do. “The struggle to achieve satyagraha resolves itself into an incessant crucifixion of the flesh so that the spirit may become entirely free.” Gandhi acknowledged that the path to self-purification “is hard and steep. To attain to perfect purity one has to become absolutely passion-free in thought, speech and action; to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion.” Without self-purification, the modern state could not be overcome. It “has everywhere grown to be a most formidable engine of tyranny and repression, organised violence and plunder, by which a few persons govern and exploit the many.” Reform campaigns fail because they are a compromise with evil. Violence fails because evil can never be overcome by evil. Gandhi was convinced that an independent India could not rise “without being purified through the fire of suffering. . . . Progress is to be measured by the amount of suffering undergone by the sufferer.”18 Gandhi’s nationalism incorporated his concepts of discipline and Truth, and it was unique among Indian independence advocates. His vision of swaraj— self-sufficiency of person and nation—could only be won if its advocates regarded Hindus of all castes, including, untouchables, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Protestants as their brethren, and learned the moral value of the charkha (spinning wheel) and khaddar (homespun cotton cloth). “They will not do all these things after Swaraj, if they will not do them now. They must be taught to know that the practice of these national virtues means Swaraj.”19

Ceplair CS20.indb 107

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

108  Revolutionary Pairs

As part of his effort to keep the independence movement pure and nonviolent, Gandhi regularly (seventeen times) employed public fasts, thereby provoking consternation among his followers, who did not always understand his reasoning. For him, fasting was a form of personal penance, the only way he could communicate to those who lapsed while under his tutelage, his distress “and the depth of their own fall.” A fast is, he wrote, “the last weapon of a Satyagrahi. That is the last duty which it is open to him to perform.” Though he did not conceive of fasting as a coercive weapon, his opponents and followers perceived his fasts as having a coercive edge. He admitted that this might be the case: “The fact is that all spiritual fasts always influence those who come with the zone of their influence.” But he consoled himself with the belief that a fast has a purifying influence if the object of the fast is to attain an unselfish goal.20

Nehru There was little remarkable in the early years of Jawaharlal Nehru. The Nehrus were Kashmiri Brahmins who migrated to Delhi in the early eighteenth century. Jawaharlal was raised in a world of material privilege. His father, Motilal, was a hugely successful lawyer, mainly handling cases for large landowners. Two trips to Europe, in 1899 and 1900, made Motilal more Western-oriented and less amenable to caste proscriptions. According to one of his biographers, he did not have a religious temperament. Rather, he was a free-thinking rationalist.21 Motilal attended his first Congress meeting in 1888, but he did not become politically active for another twenty years. Jawaharlal, his only son, was born in 1889. Motilal was reputed to be an affectionate but not indulgent father. He sent his son to Great Britain to be educated at Harrow, Cambridge, and the Inner Temple. Jawaharlal claimed that in childhood he was “filled with resentment against the alien rulers” of India. He had only “hazy notions” of religion, which he perceived as “a woman’s affair,” but for a while he was “powerfully” taken with theosophy. While studying in England, he partook of “a vague kind of Cyrenaicism [sensual hedonism].” He also developed an interest in science and became increasingly radical in his political views. But he was not politically active and made no effort to become a public speaker. Nor did he read or think deeply on intellectual matters. When he returned to India, he wrote, “I was a bit of a prig with little to commend me.” He did not believe he fit in professionally or socially, and, Judith Brown claims, he was “always a profoundly lonely person.”22 Like Gandhi, he did not find the practice of Indian law exciting. He

Ceplair CS20.indb 108

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  109

attended the Bankipore congress in 1912, but he was unimpressed with what he saw and heard. He joined two home-rule leagues but criticized their leaders for talking too much and doing too little. Gandhi’s return to India drastically changed the lives of both father and son. Motilal had followed Gandhi’s activities in South Africa, and Jawaharlal had collected funds to assist the satyagraha campaigns there.

Convergence During his first few years back in India, Gandhi had been feeling his way toward melding his personality, style, and practice of satyagraha with an established political party. Following the advice of Congress leader G. K. Gokhale, Gandhi decided not to involve himself in public affairs until he had reacquainted himself with India. He toured the country in 1915 and 1916, working with groups that were not represented in Congress: Muslims, low-caste Hindus, and commercial men. Village uplift and untouchability were two main themes. He said: “If it was proved to me that it [untouchability] is an essential part of Hinduism I for one would declare myself an open rebel against Hinduism itself.” He did not, however, attack the caste system. “It is not caste that made us what we are. It was our greed and disregard of essential virtues which enslaved us. I believe that caste has saved Hinduism from disintegration.”23 At the end of that first year, he determined that to achieve independence, the masses of India needed to be awakened, their mental outlooks transformed. “Without any impertinence,” he said, “I may say I understand the mass mind better than anyone amongst the educated Indians.” In fact, he did not. He knew how to rally millions behind his campaign for independence (swaraj), but he failed to find a way to educate the masses to practice his four pillars of independence: an unbreakable alliance between Hindus and Muslims; acceptance of untouchables; disciplined nonviolence; and homespun yarn and handwoven fabrics as the basis of a self-sustained textile cottage industry (swadeshi). Swadeshi was the heart of his constructive program and one of the essential planks of noncooperation. It required “the creation of a most perfect organization in which every part works in perfect harmony with every other.” Spinning should be taught in every school, and every village carpenter should build spinning wheels. The “progress of hand-spinning means the greatest voluntary cooperation the world has ever seen.” Without the selfsufficiency of swadeshi, the Indian peasant is doomed. To promote these ideals, he founded an ashram outside Ahmedabad in May 1915, and two years

Ceplair CS20.indb 109

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

110  Revolutionary Pairs

later he moved it to Sabarmati. They were based on strict discipline and selfabnegation, and their goal was “to learn how to serve the motherland one’s whole life.” They offered places for spiritual practice, as well as training in satyagraha, social service, rural uplift, elementary education, and the removal of untouchability.24 Against strong opposition, he invited an untouchable married couple to join. Jawaharlal Nehru first laid eyes on Gandhi in December 1915, at the Lucknow congress. At their first meeting, Jawaharlal was, in his own words, “simply bowled over by Gandhi straight off,” and he turned his back on the legal profession, simplified his life, gave up smoking, turned vegetarian, and began to read the Bhagavad Gita regularly. He also condemned socialism: “Life under socialism would be a joyless and soulless thing, regulated to the minutest detail by rules and orders framed by the all-powerful official Cortes [Spanish parliament].”25 In a July 1917 letter to a newspaper, Nehru condemned protest meetings as a vehicle of change and called for more radical measures: “Ours have been the politics of cowards and opium-eaters long enough and it is time we thought and acted like men. . . . Everyone who holds an honorary position under the Government should resign it and refuse to have anything to do with the bureaucracy.” But, he queried, what else should we do to “pull India out of this quagmire of poverty and defeatism which sucked her in?” And that same year, Gandhi launched his first satyagraha campaigns. “Here at last,” Nehru thought, “was a way out of the tangle, a method of action which was straight and open and possibly effective.” Nehru also appreciated Gandhi’s speaking style: “He was humble but also clear-cut and hard as a diamond, pleasant and soft-spoken but inflexible and terribly earnest. His eyes were mild and deep, yet out of them blazed a fierce energy and determination.” He became “the symbol of India’s independence and nationalism, the unyielding opponent of all those who sought to enslave her. . . . The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth and action allied to these, always keeping the welfare of the masses in view.”26 Gandhi’s first satyagraha campaign, on behalf of indigo plantation laborers in Champaran, was as much about social and cultural backwardness as about exploitation of the indigo growers. “What I did,” he explained, “was a very ordinary thing. I declared that the British could not order me around in my own country.” The campaign eventually won the growers increased compensation and control. Deciding that the time had come to become a full-time political activist, he acquired two newspapers (Young India [English] and Navajivan [Gujarati]), and he joined the All-India Home Rule League and

Ceplair CS20.indb 110

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  111

Congress. The party was, at that time, controlled by a coalition of rich farmers, traders, and urban professionals, and its policies reflected those interests. It was a creaky vehicle, but the only one at Gandhi’s disposal, and many of his decisions were designed to hold it together. Thus he could not allow unruly demonstrations or radical economic or social-class demands, and his seemingly erratic moves from agitation to suspension of agitation to parleys with the British and Muslims reflected his effort to balance mass civil disobedience with the demands of the vested interests. Occasionally, he separated himself from Congress and acted independently of it. Congress, however, could not permanently separate itself from Gandhi, and its members regularly turned to him to bridge party divisions and devise a strategy to jumpstart the stalled independence process. In late 1941, Gandhi noted: “The bond between Congressmen and me seems to me unbreakable. They may quarrel with my conditions but they will not leave me or let me go. They know that however unskilled a servant I may be, I will neither desert them nor fail them in the hour of need. And so they try, often grumblingly, to fulfill my conditions. I must then, on the one hand, adhere to my conditions so long as I have a living faith in them and, on the other, take what I can get from Congress.”27 His next nonviolent project, at Kaira, in his home state of Gujarat, involved farmers demanding tax relief from the government. The district commissioners eventually agreed to suspend payments for some of the poorest farmers, albeit the central government refused to lower the overall assessment. He then moved to the defense of striking textile workers in Ahmedabad. When both sides refused to budge, the mill workers’ enthusiasm dwindling and the prospect of rowdyism increasing, Gandhi had a vision: “One morning—it was at a mill-hands’ meeting—while I was still groping and unable to see my way clearly, the light came to me. Unbidden and all by themselves the words came to my lips: ‘Unless the strikers rally,’ I declared to the meeting, ‘and continue the strike till a settlement is reached, or till they leave the mills altogether, I will not touch any food.’”28 The two sides then settled. Finally, that year, he organized an ambulance corps to aid the British war effort. He had organized ambulance corps in South Africa during the Boer War and the war with the Zulus. In all three cases, he had to explain the apparent contradiction between participation in war and ahimsa. Part of it was political calculation, a means of currying favor with the British, by not exploiting England’s vulnerability, “that it was more becoming and far-sighted not to press our demands while the war lasted.” Part of it involved his struggle to achieve clarity about ahimsa, the problem of acting compassionately during

Ceplair CS20.indb 111

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

112  Revolutionary Pairs

complex events. Thus, those who cannot stop a war or resist it effectually “may take part in war,” while wholeheartedly trying to free themselves, their nation, and the world from war.29 In 1919, Gandhi undertook his first national protest, to address what he saw as a national wrong: the oppressive Rowlatt Act, which allowed judges to convict suspected terrorists or subversives without a jury and to intern some suspects without trial. In February 1919, Gandhi telegraphed the viceroy urging withdrawal of the act, and he called for a nationwide hartal (strike) and fast in a spirit of “searching and prayerful self-examination,” as part of a process of “purification and penance.” Jawaharlal was “afire with enthusiasm” and wanted to join Satyagraha Sabha (those taking an oath to disobey the act and be arrested) immediately, but his father was dead set against the new idea. Neither was prepared to give in, but at Motilal’s instance Gandhi intervened and counselled young Nehru to be patient. When the British responded to a peaceful meeting with the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and martial law, Gandhi publicly admitted to having made a “Himalayan miscalculation” about the readiness of Indians to pursue nonviolence and called off the campaign. Incredibly, he questioned those who had gathered in the Bagh and criticized them for running away from and turning their backs on the firing guns. “If the message of non-violence had reached them, they would have been expected when fire was opened on them to march towards it with bare breasts and die rejoicing in the belief that it meant the freedom of their country. Non-violence laughs at the might of the tyrant and stultifies him by nonretaliation and non-retiral. We played into General Dyer’s hands because we acted as he had expected.”30 Motilal and Jawaharlal worked alongside Gandhi on the Congress Inquiry Committee that was investigating the massacre, and Motilal defended gratis dozens of those victimized by martial law. During the summer of 1920, Jawaharlal had his first political experience. A few hundred peasants had marched from the countryside to Allahabad to call attention to their grievances. They importuned Jawaharlal to visit their district. This was probably his first exposure to the abject poverty of most Indians and the first time he felt confident as a public speaker. Though Motilal remained skeptical about the melding of Congress and nonviolence, Jawaharlal was a complete convert. He spent as much time as he could with Gandhi, from whom he received “extraordinary consideration and affection.” At the end of 1920, Motilal, who frequently asked his son about Gandhi’s thinking, announced that he would not seek election to the 1919 Government of India Act’s reformed legislatures,

Ceplair CS20.indb 112

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  113

wound up his legal practice, and radically altered his lifestyle.31 From that point forward, the Nehrus and Gandhi worked closely together, but they differed over several key elements. It is impossible to overestimate the impact Gandhi had on the independence movement during the last four months of 1920. He had traveled extensively; reorganized Congress and brought into it the lower classes; and, by gaining the acceptance of the principle of satyagraha, opened the way to noncooperation, civil disobedience, hartals, and the acceptance of prison sentences for resisters. He had also made emphatic public declarations on behalf of Hindu-Muslim unity and against untouchability. On both these issues, he and the Nehrus diverged.

Divergences From his earliest organizing in South Africa, Gandhi had been a strong advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity. He had advised Hindus to stop opposing concessions to Muslims, believing that if the Muslims could gradually learn to trust the Hindus, “brotherliness would be the outcome.” Following his return to India, he became an ardent advocate of the khilafat movement (in opposition to the overthrow of the Ottoman sultan/caliph [khalifa]). In November 1919, he cochaired, with a Muslim, a khilafat conference in Delhi. There he advocated noncooperation with the British if the caliphate was dissolved. He then wrote a letter to the viceroy, demanding that the government give definite assurances about the fate of the postwar Islamic states. He urged Hindus to “realize that the Khilafat question overshadows the reforms and everything else,” and he stated that he “would gladly ask for postponement of Swaraj activity if thereby we could advance the interest of the Khilafat.” Fear and distrust of Muslims, he added, puts Hindus on the side of the British and prolongs their slavery. “If we are brave and religious enough not to fear the Mussulmans [Muslims], our countrymen, and if we have the wisdom to trust them, we must make common cause with the Mussulmans in every peaceful and truthful method to secure Indian independence.” His concept of swaraj must be, he wrote, “an impossible dream without an indissoluble union between the Hindus and Muslims of India.” And though he was leading the national noncooperation movement, he could not pretend to represent Muslim opinion. “I can only try to interpret it. I could not stand alone and expect to carry the Mussulman mass with me. . . . No amount of sacrifice on my part will produce in the Mussulman world the spirit of Non-cooperation, i.e.,

Ceplair CS20.indb 113

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

114  Revolutionary Pairs

sacrifice in a matter of religion. The Mussulman leaders will have to show it in their own persons before the masses evolve it.”32 This part of Gandhi’s independence plan never resonated with the Nehrus. Motilal did not much care for pan-Islamic objectives, nor was he sympathetic with the religiosity of Muslims. He told his son: “There are many things nearer home . . . which we have to attend to.”33 In any event, this issue did not become a sore point, given that most Muslim leaders of note broke away from Gandhi’s civil disobedience project after the Sultan was exiled in 1922, and the caliphate definitely ended in 1924. Sporadic violence on both sides occurred in 1923, climaxing in the killing of 155 people in Kohat, in the Northwest Frontier Province and the mass evacuation of the Hindus living there. Gandhi undertook a twenty-one-day fast in response. The Nehrus were not pleased, but, then, they were not pleased with any of Gandhi’s fasts. It is safe to say that Jawaharlal did not display much thoughtfulness re the Hindu-Muslim problem. Limaye concluded from a review of his writings and speeches on the subject: “His approach was often impulsive and superficial.” As late as 1938, with communal violence flaring, he said that he did not consider the communal issue one of the major problems facing India. He constantly dismissed the Muslim League and its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, claiming, foolishly, that he, Nehru, had greater contact with the Muslim masses. United work among the Muslim masses, not Hindu-Muslim coalitions, was the best course to end poverty for both religions and to achieve a rapprochement. In a letter of March 30, 1937, he wrote: “I am personally convinced that any kind of pact or coalition between Congress and the Muslim League will be highly injurious. It will mean that we almost lose our right to ask the Muslims to join us directly.”34 Instead, he urged Congress to concentrate on enrolling Muslim members. Jawaharlal accurately accused Jinnah, the unquestioned leader of India’s Muslim movement, of encouraging “extreme communalism.” But he overstated the case when he claimed that Indian politics were for Jinnah “just a background for individuals, notably himself. I do not think he has any conception of principles or the big issues at stake.” He employs “unscrupulous methods .  .  . sheer religious fanaticism and a campaign of unlimited violence.” When, in 1938, Gandhi and Jinnah agreed to meet, Nehru resolutely opposed it. But the two met in April and Gandhi, unsuccessfully pleaded with Jinnah to be more conciliatory. When Jawaharlal read the notes of Gandhi’s conversation with Jinnah, he wrote to Gandhi: “I think Jinnah’s demands are preposterous and cannot be acceded to.”35

Ceplair CS20.indb 114

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  115

Looking back, it is difficult to see what any member of Congress could have said or done to satisfy Jinnah. He was determined on separatism, and he did his level best to block any scheme that did not serve that goal. His subsequent “direct action” campaigns did more than any other events to exacerbate the communal division and harden the communal lines. Gandhi’s fasts to advance his goals for the untouchables also proved divisive. The first commenced in March 1932, when the British government unilaterally announced that it was awarding separate electorates for the untouchables. Gandhi, who believed that such a move would shatter Hindu solidarity, vowed to fast to the death. He wrote Sir Samuel Hoare, the secretary of state for India: “For me the contemplated step is not a method, it is part of my being. It is a call of conscience which I dare not disobey, even though it may cost whatever reputation for sanity I may possess.” The fast led to a series of discussions between Gandhi and the untouchables’ leader, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, which resulted in the Pact of Poona, allowing reserved seats to the untouchables. That is, Gandhi accepted the lesser evil of reserved seats to the worse of a separate electorate, but he believed the agreement “marked a religious transformation, a psychological revolution. Hinduism was purging itself of a millennial sickness.” Jawaharlal, who had not approved of the fast, extolled the agreement, writing to his daughter, Indira: “Bapu is an extraordinary man and it is very difficult to understand him. . . . It is amazing how he conquers his opponents by his love and sacrifice. By his fast he has changed the face of India and killed untouchability at a blow.”36 Jawaharlal changed his mind when Gandhi transformed his fast against special electoral arrangements for untouchables into a fast against untouchability itself. This fast provoked a long series of letters between them regarding Gandhi’s methods. In a telegram dated September 25, Nehru agreed that no sacrifice was too great on behalf of the “suppressed downtrodden classes,” but he feared that Gandhi’s focus on the untouchables obscured other important goals (i.e., independence) and opportunists might exploit his methods. Several months later, Nehru wrote that he was following “with great interest” Gandhi’s campaign against untouchability,” but, he continued: “Not being a man of religion, my interest is largely confined to the social aspect and to the wider issues involved.”37 In February 1933, Gandhi founded Harijan Sevak Sangh, replaced Young India with the new daily Harijan (his name for the untouchables), and began writing My Soul’s Agony. In that book, an apologia for his fasts, he wrote: “I draw no hard and fast line of demarcation between political, social,

Ceplair CS20.indb 115

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

116  Revolutionary Pairs

religious and other questions. I have always held that they are interdependent and that the solution of one brings nearer the solution of the rest.” Though removal of untouchability may produce great political consequences, it is not a political movement. “It is a movement purely and simply of purification of Hinduism.” Fasting to promote this campaign is the last resort, that of selfsacrifice, for one “who is pledged to non-violence in thought, word and deed.” For him, fasting was a moral act. In May he began another fast, to rally public opinion behind his harijan campaign. He wrote Nehru: As I was struggling against the coming fast, you were before me as it were in flesh and blood. But it was no use. How I wish I could feel that you had understood the absolute necessity of it. The Harijan movement is too big for mere intellectual effort. There is nothing so bad in all the world. . . . I want you to feel, if you can, that it is well if I survive the fast and well also if the body dissolves in spite of the effort to live. . . . But I won’t convince you by argument, if you did not see the trust intuitively. I know that even if I do not carry your approval with me, I shall retain your precious love during all those days of the ordeal.38

Nehru responded by telegram: “What can I say about matters I do not understand. I feel lost in strange country where you are the only familiar landmark and I try to grope my way in the dark but only stumble. Whatever happens my love and thoughts will be with you.” He followed with a long letter: “I feel utterly at a loss and do not know what I can say to you. Religion is not familiar ground for me, and as I have grown older I have definitely drifted away from it. . . . Religion seems to me to lead to emotion and sentimentality and they are still more unreliable guides.” He agreed that the Harijan situation “is bad, very bad, but it seems to me incorrect to say that there is nothing so bad in all the world.”39 This fast produced in Nehru an emotional crisis regarding Gandhi’s leadership. On the one hand, he told himself: “Bapu had a curious knack for doing the right thing at the psychological moment, and it might be that his action—impossible to justify as it was from my point of view—would lead to great results.” On the other hand, though “Congress at present meant Gandhi,” no one in Congress knew what Gandhi would do next. Nehru ultimately decided that he had to trust Gandhi’s revolutionary personality: “He was a unique personality, and it was impossible to judge him by the usual standards, or even to apply the ordinary canons of logic to him. But, because

Ceplair CS20.indb 116

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  117

he was a revolutionary at bottom and was pledged to political independence for India, he was bound to play an uncompromising role till that independence was achieved. And in this very process he would release tremendous mass energies and would himself, I half hoped, advance step by step toward the social goal.”40 Equally frustrating to Nehru was Gandhi’s propensity to end civil disobedience campaigns in the face of unexpected violence. After the December 1921 Ahmadabad congress, where he was elected the sole executive authority for Congress, Gandhi chose the muncipality of Bardoli as a place to test how a united, unrestrained, self-disciplined group of peaceful noncooperating people could impress on the British the unpardonable error of government by massacre and induce them to grant India a fuller measure of independence.41 The campaign commenced at the end of January, but ten days later, hearing the news of violence in Chauri Chaura (renamed Uttar Pradesh in 1950), Gandhi suspended it. He acted, he wrote, in response to words from God, who had warned him “that there is not yet in India that truthful and nonviolent atmosphere which, and which alone, can justify mass disobedience, which can be at all described as civil which means gentle, truthful, humble, knowing, willful yet loving, never criminal and hateful. . . . God spoke clearly through Chauri Chaura.” The message was twofold: first, that satyagrahis “have to go through much greater and stricter discipline. We have to understand the exact, I was almost going to say, the spiritual value of obedience to laws and discipline which may be irksome and even repugnant to us”; and second, “I must become a fitter instrument able to register the slightest variation in the moral atmosphere about me. My prayers must have deeper truth and humility about them.”42 This decision shocked many of Gandhi’s followers, notably his Muslim allies and the Nehrus, who were both serving prison terms. Motilal was furious, and Jawaharlal was dispirited by Gandhi’s response to Chauri Chaura. The whole episode dissipated Jawaharlal’s zeal for nonviolence, and he later described how he and the other young leaders in jail with him felt about the decision to allow “a remote village and a mob of excited peasants in an outof-the-way place” to put an end to the national struggle for freedom. If this was the inevitable consequence of a sporadic act of violence, then surely there was something lacking in the philosophy and technique of nonviolent struggle. For it seemed to us impossible to guarantee against the occurrence of some such untoward incident. Must we train the

Ceplair CS20.indb 117

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

118  Revolutionary Pairs three hundred and odd millions of Indians in the theory and practice of nonviolent action before we could go forward? . . . If this was the sole condition of its function, then the nonviolent method of resistance must always fail. . . . If Gandhi’s argument for the suspension of civil resistance was correct, our opponents would always have the power to create circumstances which would necessarily result in our abandoning the struggle.

Even if one gave Gandhi the benefit of the doubt that his decision to end the campaign had been the correct one, still “the manner of it left much to be desired and brought about a certain demoralization.” Clearly, Nehru spoke for many members of Congress, who had concluded that “the nonviolent method was not, and could not be, a religious or an unchallengeable creed or dogma. It could only be a policy and a method promising certain results, and by these results it would have to be finally judged.”43 When Gandhi learned about their response, which he called “a freezing dose,” he explained that it was not Chauri Chaura alone that moved him. He had been receiving reports from many places of violent activity. With all this news in my possession and much more from the South, the Chauri Chaura news came like a powerful match to ignite the gunpowder, and there was a blaze. I have been leading not a nonviolent struggle but essentially a violent struggle. . . . The cause will prosper by this retreat. The movement had unconsciously drifted from the right path. We have to come back to our moorings, and we can again go straight ahead. You are in as disadvantageous a position as I am advantageously placed for judging events in their due proportion.44

Thirteen years later, Gandhi again called off a civil disobedience campaign, because he had learned of the imperfect practice of satyagraha by a member of his ashram. In an interview about it, Gandhi stated: “More than the imperfection of the friend whom I love, more than ever it brought home to me my own imperfections. The friend said he had thought that I was aware of his weakness. I was blind. Blindness in a leader is unpardonable.” A shocked Nehru wrote to him: When I heard that you had called off the civil disobedience movement, I felt unhappy. Only the brief announcement reached me at first. Much later I read your statement and this gave me one of the biggest shocks I

Ceplair CS20.indb 118

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  119 have ever had. I was prepared to reconcile myself to the withdrawal of civil disobedience. But the reasons you gave for doing so and the suggestions you made for future work astounded me. I had a sudden and intense feeling that something broke inside me, a bond that I have valued very greatly had snapped. I felt terribly lonely in this wide world. I have always felt a little lonely almost from childhood up. But a few bonds strengthened me, a few strong supports held me up. The loneliness never went, but it was lessened. But I felt absolutely alone, left high and dry on a desert island.

In a long diary entry, he wrote: As I watched the emotional upheaval during the fast I wondered more and more if this was the right method in politics. It is sheer revivalism and clear thinking has not a ghost of a chance against it. . . . I am afraid I am drifting further and further away from him mentally, in spite of my strong emotional attachment to him. His continual references to God irritate me excessively. His political actions are often enough guided by an unerring instinct but he does not encourage others to think. And even he, has he thought out what the objective, the ideal, should be. Very probably not. The next step seems to absorb him.

He contrasted Gandhi’s manner of leadership with “the dialectics of Lenin & Co.! More and more I fell drawn to their dialectics, more and more I realize the gap between Bapu & me and I begin to doubt if this way of faith is the right way to train a nation. It may pay for a short while, but in the long run?” Nehru complained that Gandhi’s “sweet reasonableness deludes people and befogs their minds.” When he wrote about this incident in his autobiography many years later, Nehru sharply criticized Gandhi’s leadership: “The reasons which he afterward adduces to justify his action are usually afterthoughts and seldom carry one very far.” In this case, the reason he gave for the suspension seemed “an insult to intelligence and an amazing performance for a leader of a national movement.” What right did Gandhi have to apply his ashram rules and expectations to Congress? “Why should we be tossed hither and thither for, what seemed to me, metaphysical and mystical reasons . . . ? Was it conceivable to have any political movement on this basis?”45 Gandhi and Jawaharlal publicly clashed on independence at the December 1927 Madras congress. Jawaharlal had recently returned from a twentyone-month sojourn in Europe. He had attended the Congress of Oppressed

Ceplair CS20.indb 119

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

120  Revolutionary Pairs

Nationalities, joined the League against Imperialism, and visited the Soviet Union. As a result of these activities and his extensive reading and thinking, independence, as an immediate goal, had taken greater hold of him, and he decided that economic and international elements must be added to Congress’s political approach. Though he disliked the violence and suppression he witnessed in the Soviet Union, he noted that there was no lack of violence and suppression in capitalist societies. At least, he told himself, the violence in the Soviet Union “aimed at a new order based on peace and co-operation and real freedom for the masses. . . . While the rest of the world was in the grip of the depression and going backward in some ways, in the Soviet country a great new world was being built up before our eyes.” But that country’s successes or failures did not affect the soundness of the theory of communism: “Russia apart,” he continued, “the theory and philosophy of Marxism lightened up many a dark corner of my mind. History came to have a new meaning for me. . . . It was the essential freedom from dogma and the scientific outlook of Marxism that appealed to me.” Marxism alone explained to Nehru the causes of and the solution for the Great Depression, and it gave him a perspective he had been missing: I was filled with a new excitement, and my depression at the nonsuccess of civil disobedience grew much less. Was not the world marching rapidly toward the desired consummation? . . . There was no stagnation. Our national struggle became a stage in the longer journey, and it was as well that repression and suffering were tempering our people for future struggles and forcing them to consider the new ideas that were stirring the world. We would be the stronger and the more disciplined and hardened by the elimination of the weaker elements. Time was in our favor.46

The big question for him was how or, indeed, whether, communism could be applied to India. Filled with these new ideas, Jawaharlal introduced a resolution to the Madras congress demanding full independence for India. It forced Gandhi to reveal that his ambition for India was much higher than independence, that his focus was on the means (nonviolence), not the end (dominion or independence). Gandhi watered down the resolution, and he told an angry Nehru that he was prepared for an open break over the question. They exchanged a remarkable series of letters on the subject, completely unlike any recorded

Ceplair CS20.indb 120

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  121

communications between the other pairs. Gandhi began the correspondence with a letter criticizing Nehru’s impatience but prefacing it with a declaration of their mutual love: “I feel that you love me too well to resent what I am about to write. In any case I love you too well to restrain my pen when I feel I must write.” You are going too fast. You should have taken time to think and become acclimatised. Most of the resolutions you framed and got carried out could have been delayed for one year. . . . But I do not mind these acts of yours so much as I mind your encouraging mischief-makers and hooligans. I do not know whether you still believe in unadulterated nonviolence. But even if you have altered your views you could not think that unlicensed and unbridled violence is going to deliver the country. If careful observation of the country in the light of your European experiences convinces you of the error of the current way and means, by all means enforce your own view but do please form a disciplined party. . . . In every struggle bands of men who would submit to discipline are needed. You seem to be overlooking this factor in being careless about your instruments.47

Nehru also offered a qualifying preface—“You are always very careful with your words and your language is studiously restrained”—before launching into his counterattack: “It amazes me all the more to find you using language which appears to me wholly unjustified.” You have judged on hearsay evidence. The resolutions were not hastily conceived, nor thoughtlessly passed. He then, after avowing his once strong belief in Gandhi as a leader of the earlier noncooperation campaigns, denigrated Gandhi’s books and subjected his current methods to a strong critique: Since you came out of prison something seems to have gone wrong and you have been very obviously ill at ease.  .  .  . I have asked you many times what you expected to do in the future and your answers have been far from satisfying. . . . You say nothing. You only criticise and no helpful lead comes from you. . . . Reading many of your articles in Young India—your autobiography, etc.—I have often felt how very different my ideas were from yours. And I have felt that you were very hasty in your judgements, or rather having arrived at certain conclusions you were over-eager to justify them by any scrap of evidence you might get. . . . You misjudge greatly I think the civilisation of the West and attach too great an importance to its many failings. You have stated

Ceplair CS20.indb 121

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

122  Revolutionary Pairs somewhere that India has nothing to learn from the West and that she has reached a pinnacle of wisdom in the past. I entirely disagree with this viewpoint.

Nehru accused Gandhi of underestimating the value of industrialism, which was inevitably coming to India; of failing to understand that under capitalism capital and labor must be in conflict; for not criticizing the “the semifeudal zamindari system which prevails in a great part of India or against the capitalist exploitation of both the workers and the consumers.”48 Gandhi did not take offense. He understood that his criticism of Nehru’s resolutions had delivered Nehru “from the self-suppression” under which he had been apparently laboring for so many years. “Though I was beginning to detect some difference in viewpoint between you and me, I had no notion whatsoever of the terrible extent of these differences. . . . I see quite clearly that you must carry on open warfare against me and my views. For, if I am wrong I am evidently doing irreparable harm to the country and it is your duty after having known it to rise in revolt against me.” Having given Nehru full rein, Gandhi then began to reel him back. The differences between you and me appear so vast and radical that there seems to be no meeting ground between us. I can’t conceal from you my grief that I should lose a comrade so valiant, so faithful, so able and so honest as you have always been; but in serving a cause comradeships have to be sacrificed. The cause must be held superior to all such considerations. But this dissolution of comradeship—if dissolution must come—in no way affects my personal intimacy. We have long become members of the same family, and we remain such in spite of grave political differences.49

Nehru took the bait: Your letter came as a bit of a shock and was painful reading. Painful because with relentless logic you had contemplated certain eventualities which I had not considered possible or even thought of in their entirety. . . . I have no particular banner to unfurl nor had I thought of the possibility of any warfare between you and me. I had certainly thought of differences of opinion which may be fundamental, and of my following a line of action in regard to certain matters which may not meet with your approval. But I felt that you would certainly desire me

Ceplair CS20.indb 122

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  123 to follow that line, even though you disagreed with it, if you thought that I was quite clear about it in my own mind. And even if there were possibilities of conflict on some points, there appeared to me absolutely no necessity for this difference or conflict to spread to the many other points on which I presumed there would be considerable ground for common action.

In the aftermath of this exchange, Nehru “registered, for the first and perhaps the only time, his act of defiance by forming an independent body, the Independence for India League.” It was not, by his own admission, very effective.50 In the spring of 1929, Gandhi asked Nehru to assume the presidency of Congress for the next year. Nehru reluctantly acceded, but during the following months he continued to express his doubts. Gandhi wondered if he had been putting undue pressure on Nehru, and he told him: “I have always honoured your resistance. It has always been honourable.  .  .  . Resist me always when my suggestion does not appeal to your head or heart. I shall not love you the less for that resistance.” Nehru did, in fact, respond negatively to Gandhi’s Delhi Manifesto, offering to cooperate with the British, provided the government of India adopted a policy of general conciliation. Nehru expressed his fundamental difference with the manifesto, because “I am afraid we differ fundamentally,” Nehru responded, continuing, “I shall only say that I believe the statement to have been injurious and it was “a wholly inadequate reply” to the British government’s position on independence. He feared that the manifesto injured the cause of independence: “I think that we have shown to the world that although we talk tall we are only bargaining for some titbits.” When Gandhi appealed to the principle of party discipline, Nehru reluctantly decided to sign the manifesto, but he voiced concern about that principle: “Your appeal to me on the ground of discipline could not be ignored. I am myself a believer in discipline. And yet I suppose there can be too much of discipline. . . . I have other capacities and other allegiances. . . . What shall I do with the allegiance I owe to these and other movements I am connected with? . . . In the conflict of responsibilities and allegiances what is one to do except to rely on one’s instincts and reason?”51 At the Lahore congress, December 1929, Gandhi persuaded Congress to elect Jawaharlal as president, hoping thereby to close the gap between the older and younger generations of leaders. In his presidential address, Nehru

Ceplair CS20.indb 123

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

124  Revolutionary Pairs

proclaimed himself a socialist and a republican. Gandhi, meanwhile was pondering the shape of the next scheme of civil disobedience. “I have not,” he wrote Jawaharlal, “seen my way clear as yet. But I have come so far that, in the present state of the Congress, no civil disobedience can be or should be offered in its name and that it should be offered by me alone or jointly with a few companions even as I did in South Africa.” Though he intended to proceed strictly according to his own vision, he urged Nehru to criticize him freely. “I want to do nothing that would cross your purpose or thwart your plans, if you have conceived any independently. . . . I cannot conceive a more favourable opportunity for me for making my experiment than when you are the helmsman of the Congress.”52 One month later, however, they were again at cross purposes, following Gandhi’s enunciation of an eleven-point program to test the good faith of the British government. It included release of political prisoners, total prohibition of alcohol, abolition of salt tax, protective tariff against foreign cloth, decrease of land revenue, and halving military expenditures and salaries of civil servants. Nehru objected: I do not know how you square them with independence being our immediate objective. Indeed they fall far short of even dominion status. Important as some of them are, they are after all individual reforms and they do not touch many vital problems. . . . I have no doubt that your eleven points will not be conceded but I am afraid they will give a shock to many people. They will think that the talk of independence was mere eyewash and not seriously meant. The British will think that you are out to bargain only.

Gandhi professed himself surprised that Nehru had missed the importance of his eleven points, and they met on February 12 to discuss them. Nehru had come to believe that an economic program of “radical betterment of the masses” was the “only solid basis for a revolutionary movement,” and he wanted the large estates to be diminished not by confiscation but via heavy taxes and compensation. The “ultimate ideal should be large nationalized farms, and peasant proprietors cultivating their own farms but without the right of alienation.” He also criticized the notion that Congress should concentrate on what Gandhi called “constructive work.” Such work “means in plain language not doing any dangerous work.” Congress members must be aggressive, defiant, daring, and challenging. In sum, they must do “destructive” work.53

Ceplair CS20.indb 124

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  125

When Gandhi announced his plan for a salt march to challenge the government’s monopoly, the Nehrus were skeptical. Jawaharlal acknowledged his bewilderment; he could not envision how common salt could promote a national independence movement. When the march proved a huge success, mobilizing thousands in a national challenge to British authority, Nehru, from his prison cell, wrote to Gandhi: “May I congratulate you on the new India that you have created by your magic touch.” Though he admitted he had become a greater convert to nonviolence than ever before, he remained “somewhat of a protestant regarding your 11 points.”54 When Nehru left prison in 1933, after a twenty-month stay, “he seemed overcome by a vast ennui and exhaustion.” He was not sure what he or Congress should do, and he fretted regularly over Gandhi’s methods. At an informal conference at Poona, called by Gandhi to discuss the suspension of the civil disobedience campaign, Nehru was “surprised and distressed by lack of any real discussion of the existing conditions and our objectives.” For his part, Nehru wanted to turn the Indian public’s attention to “socialistic doctrines and the world situation” and to spread his brand of Marxist socialism in Congress. (Shashi Tharoor described Nehru’s socialism as a “curious amalgam” of idealism, romanticism, Gandhian principles, distrust of Western capital, and planning.”) Nehru did not, however, approve of the formation of the Congress Socialist Party, formed in the spring of 1934, because he thought it would sharpen and crystalize opposition to socialism in Congress. Rather, he wanted to clarify the goals of Congress’s reform agenda, particularly the improvement of the economic conditions of the masses and the reduction of the privileges and special treatment of the vested interests. He also wanted to connect Indian independence with what he called “the vital international problems of the world.” Gandhi did not favor any of those measures. In a letter responding to Nehru’s wish list, Gandhi argued against the necessity of clearly stated goals. The clearest possible definition of the goal and its appreciation would fail to take us there if we do not know and utilise the means of achieving it. I have, therefore, concerned myself principally with the conservation of the means and their progressive use. I know that if we can take care of them, attainment of the goal is assured. I feel too that our progress towards the goal will be in exact proportion to the purity of our means. . . . We do not seek to coerce any. We seek to convert them. This method may appear to be long, perhaps too long, but I am convinced it is the shortest.55

Ceplair CS20.indb 125

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

126  Revolutionary Pairs

Gandhi had little faith in long-term programs, those that could only be implemented after achieving power; he favored those that could be implemented immediately. When he read the program of the Congress Socialist Party, he wrote Nehru: “Your concrete programme is still in the melting pot. . . . You have no uncertainty about the science of socialism but you do not know in full how you will apply it when you have the power.” Though Gandhi claimed he welcomed the rise of the socialist elements in Congress, he did not like their program. “It seems to me to ignore Indian conditions and I do not like the assumption underlying many of its propositions which go to show that there is a necessarily antagonism between the classes and the masses or between the labourers and capitalist such that they can never work for mutual good.”56 In a letter to Aldous Huxley, Nehru noted another important disagreement with Gandhi. “He wants, as far as possible, to decentralize industry, to have small units and not large ones.” But Nehru, the majority of Congress members, and the national movement disagreed. They believed that widespread cottage spinning, though it might result in a small measure of improvement for those who adopt it, “helps to prop up a land system and an economic structure which are indefensible and which are in process of breaking down.” Nehru’s whole outlook on life and its problems was “a scientific one.” He expressed his faith in machinery and its rapid spread, albeit a socially controlled spread. He wanted, that is, “socialism and a widened industrialism.”57 In September 1933, Nehru told an interviewer from the Pioneer newspaper: I am convinced that the days of capitalism and the privileged classes are over and that a new structure of society is inevitable . . . along the lines of the Russian conception. The alternative is fascism, to which even England seems to be inclined more readily than is realised . . . . I am satisfied that the future prosperity of the masses in India lies in a complete reconstruction of society on a new basis. That means the division of profits and property from the ‘bosses’ to the ‘have-nots’ and it cannot be supposed that vested interest will ever voluntarily agree to that.

He told another interviewer that he wanted a more detailed economic program for the masses, and he wanted to find a way to organize society “on a scientific basis so that poverty should be wiped out and the wealth and good things of the world should be evenly distributed.”58

Ceplair CS20.indb 126

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  127

When Gandhi counselled the members of Congress to “learn the art and beauty of self-denial and voluntary poverty,” including personal handspinning and hand-weaving and purification, Nehru felt “a vast distance” opening between them: “With a stab of pain I felt the cords of allegiance that had bound me to him for many years had snapped.” Though Gandhi saw these differences as disparities of temperament, Nehru had begun to think they were solid oppositional ones.59 Again, Nehru was torn. On the one hand, he reminded himself of Gandhi’s greatness as a man and a leader, of the tremendous debt he owed him personally. On the other, Gandhi might be hopelessly in the wrong in many matters. What, after all, was he aiming at? In spite of the closest association with him for many years, I am not clear in my own mind about his objective? I doubt if he is clear himself. One step is enough for me, he says; and he does not try to peep into the future or to have a clearly conceived end before him. Look after the means, and the end will take care of itself, he is never tired of repeating. Be good in your personal individual lives, and all else will follow.

But Nehru had decided that that was not “a political or scientific attitude, nor is it perhaps even an ethical attitude. It was narrowly moralist, and it begged the question: “What is goodness? Is it merely an individual affair or a social affair?” And Gandhi’s stress on character over intellectual training also raised a question: “What is character without intellectual development. How, indeed, does character develop?” Whatever the answers to these questions may be, “vagueness in an objective” seemed deplorable. Again and again, Nehru pointed out the distance between Gandhi and modern ideas, conditions, experiences, and methods. He also noted that most of Congress’s leaders did not accept Gandhi’s premises—the deliberate and voluntary restriction of wants. For his own part, Nehru acknowledged that he disliked Gandhi’s praise of poverty and suffering and he did not appreciate the ascetic life as a social ideal or the idealization of the simple peasant life. “Gandhiji is always thinking in terms of personal salvation and of sin, while most of us have society’s welfare uppermost in our minds. I find it difficult to grasp the idea of sin, and perhaps it is because of this that I cannot appreciate Gandhiji’s general outlook. He is not out to change society or the social structure; he devotes himself to the eradication of sin from individuals.” Publicly, however, he

Ceplair CS20.indb 127

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

128  Revolutionary Pairs

affirmed his complete loyalty to Gandhi: “I feel that the methods he has taught us to follow are fundamentally right for us and we must continue to pursue them till we gain that objective and that for those methods his leadership is essential.” A few days later, he told an interviewer: “In all important matters . . . Gandhi is the only possible leader of the Indian struggle, and I am happy to be one of his numerous soldiers.”60 As war in Europe and Asia loomed, Nehru emerged as Congress’s premier spokesperson, and he was chosen to draft the Working Committee’s statements on the war. Congress, however, divided over how to deal with the British. Gandhi perceived no difference between Hitlerism and British imperialism. He believed both countries were engaged in an unholy duel, and the difference between them was only one of degree. Nehru was much more antifascist, and he feared Japanese imperialism. In 1937, following Japan’s invasion of China, Nehru pushed the All India Congress Committee to pass a resolution condemning the Japanese and calling for a boycott of Japanese goods. Gandhi, though, believing that the Axis powers would defeat the United Kingdom and that Japan would occupy India, advocated coming to an agreement with Japan through negotiation. Nehru, however, objected to what he characterized as Gandhi’s pro-Japanese rhetoric, on the ground that it would alienate the democracies fighting against fascism.61 At the end of 1939, the Working Committee voted against aiding Britain and instructed Congress’s provincial ministers to resign but it decided not to align Congress with Gandhi’s nonviolent opposition. In July 1940, over Gandhi’s disapproval, the Working Committee decided to offer the British a pledge that an independent India would throw its full weight behind national defense. He categorically refused to assent to Congress taking responsibility for a violent war effort. “He felt so strongly,” Nehru later wrote, that he broke from Congress. But when the British rejected Congress’s overture, the Working Committee asked Gandhi to lead a resistance against participation in the war. Gandhi called on individuals, whom he had selected, to defy the official ban on propaganda against the war, and he told Nehru: “There is no turning back. Our case is invulnerable. There is no giving in. Only I must be allowed to go my own way in demonstrating the power of nonviolence when it is unadulterated.” His campaign, however, ebbed in the spring of 1941, “and there were signs of disquiet, disillusion and some defections from Congress ranks.” Nehru expressed his concern that by focusing on the personal aspects of nonviolence, Gandhi was deflecting people from the real issues.62

Ceplair CS20.indb 128

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  129

Gandhi and Congress continued to differ. Gandhi agreed that conditions were not propitious for mass action against the war, but he was convinced that civil disobedience in the form of speaking out against the war was an absolute necessity and should be carried out by select individuals. Then, when Gandhi insisted on complete nonviolence and Congress demurred, Gandhi announced that he was officially disconnecting himself from Congress. He named Nehru as his successor, called on members of Congress “to become soldiers of peace, to give all their spare time to the promotion of peace,” and urged them to rebuild the party “from the bottom,” to go back to the villages and decentralize production and distribution.63 The British government then sent to India a delegation that offered, in return for Indian war support, elections and dominion status after the war ended. But the proposal did not allow for negotiation or amendment. Nehru wrote: “I remember when I read those proposals for the first time I was profoundly depressed. . . . There were so many limitations, and the very acceptance of the principle of self-determination was fettered and circumscribed in such a way as to imperil our future.” But the Working Committee could not agree on what to do next. At a press conference, Nehru said: “Passivity on our part at this moment would be suicidal. . . . It would destroy and emasculate us.” Gandhi wrote to a friend: “Jawaharlal now seems to have completely abandoned ahimsa. . . . His speech reported today seems terrible.”64 Suddenly, Gandhi experienced a vision, what he called an “original idea,” which arose from the “crushed hope” attending the offer of the British delegation: “Suppose I ask them [the British] to go?” Nehru was dubious, and Gandhi wrote him, in April: “I do not think it necessary to give arguments in support of the [Quit India] resolution. If you do not like my resolution I really cannot insist. The time has come when each of us must choose his own course.” In May, Gandhi revealed the radical element of his plan to London’s Daily Chronicle: “Under my proposal, the British have to leave India in God’s hands—but in modern parlance to anarchy, and this anarchy may lead to internecine warfare for a time or to unrestrained dacoities [banditry]. From these a true India will rise in place of the false one we see.”65 In May and June 1942, Gandhi and Nehru had a long series of talks on Quit India. Gandhi later said: “I argued with him for days together. He fought against my position with a passion I have no words to describe.” According to V. T. Patil, Gandhi feared that a long period of inactivity during the coming war would debilitate the independence movement. He wanted

Ceplair CS20.indb 129

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

130  Revolutionary Pairs

to create “a strong spirit of resistance to aggression against India, . . . to mobilize the enthusiasm and vitality of the masses thereby creating a powerful resurgent India which could bring about the achievement of freedom sooner than later.” He saw it as a way to cut the ground from under the moral basis of British rule, to allow the contending groups in India to collide openly. For the first time, he openly supported violence, stating that bloodbaths could evoke heroism. The ensuing disorder would have immense value to Indians. Even a million deaths would be better than the current “woeful cowardice.” Nehru, however, did not think 1942 was a good time to launch a civil disobedience movement, though he did believe some kind of action was necessary “to convert the sullen passivity of the people into a spirit of non-submission and resistance.” There was, however, too little time to mobilize and control an effective mass movement. Of one thing he was certain: Congress could not remain a single united organization without Gandhi’s leadership.66 The two men spoke again in June, and Nehru discerned a “new urgency and passion” in Gandhi’s speeches and writings. By the end of the following month, Nehru had changed his mind about Quit India. He had decided that Gandhi once again represented the nation’s prevailing sentiment. In addition, and probably of greater import, Nehru realized that Gandhi’s decision in favor of large-scale action was inevitable, and once “Bapu’s mind was fixed and determined, .  .  . further argument was not useful. I had to make my choice. There was no difficulty about that choice. It was inconceivable to me to remain aloof from such a movement. Facts as well as the urges of my own nature were too strong for me. Having so decided, then it followed that whatever action was to be taken must be whole-hearted.” He also said: “I hate anarchy and chaos but somehow in my bones I feel some terrible shake up is necessary for our country. Otherwise we shall get more and more entangled in communal and other problems, people will get thoroughly disillusioned and will merely drift to disaster.”67 At an August 7 meeting of the All India Congress Committee, both spoke in favor of the Quit India resolution, and it passed by a large majority. The plan called for “the starting of a mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale, so that the country might utilize all the non-violent strength is has gathered during the last 22 years of peaceful struggle. Such a struggle must inevitably be under the leadership of Gandhiji and the Committee requests him to take the lead and guide the nation in the steps to be taken.” Gandhi then spoke for over two hours. He said he wanted “freedom immediately, this very night, before dawn, if it can be had. . . . Congress must

Ceplair CS20.indb 130

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  131

win freedom or be wiped out in the effort.” He vowed that he would tell the viceroy, “Nothing less than freedom,” and offered a short mantra: “‘Do or Die.’ We shall either free India or die in the attempt: we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery. . . . Take a pledge with God and your own consciences as witness, that you will no longer rest till freedom is achieved and will be prepared to lay down your lives in the attempt to achieve it. He who loses his life will gain it; he who will seek to save it will lose it. Freedom is not for the coward or the faint-hearted.”68 Gandhi did not intend for the campaign to begin immediately. He planned to meet with the viceroy to plead with him for the acceptance of the Quit India resolution. Early the next morning, however, the government arrested most of Congress’s leadership. Weeks of violence ensued. The brutal response of the authorities drove the movement underground. Gandhi told the Central Directorate in Bombay that he was not prepared to condemn the underground, and he did not want its organizers to surrender. They should, he advised, concentrate on mass strikes and sabotage of the British war effort. Congress’ leaders spent the rest of the war in prison, leaving the field free for the Muslim League to cozy up further to the British. Some commentators think that Congress paid a very high price for the Quit India decision. Others believe it focused the people’s attention on the goal of independence and kept it there during the war. The question is whether Congress could have done otherwise. Though in retrospect it is clear that Gandhi had based Quit India on two misconceptions (the importance for the British government of having a “willing ally” cooperating in the defense of “true democracy”; the size of the threat Nazi Germany and Japan represented to the United Kingdom), he also clearly understood that revolution was a dynamic process and that one could not predict the future (a four-year war that would end with a victorious but financially exhausted empire). To have cooperated with the British war effort on British terms would have depleted the dynamic, and, at war’s end (a war that might have strengthened British resolve to hang on to the empire), it might have been difficult to restart it. Gandhi and Nehru reasonably concluded that a risky plan of action outweighed a safe plan of inaction.69 After the war, Nehru played a central role in the independence process, while Gandhi stayed on the periphery. At the end of 1945, according to Kanji Dwarkadas, friends described Gandhi as “ill, confused, depressed, pessimistic and defeatist.”70 Nehru, however, was making a series of impassioned speeches about independence, and with Gandhi’s support, he was elected president of Congress in 1946, thereby becoming the leader in waiting of an

Ceplair CS20.indb 131

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

132  Revolutionary Pairs

independent India. (A few months later, Archibald Wavell, the new viceroy, appointed Nehru as vice president of the newly formed interim government.) But the Working Committee was seriously divided on the path forward, and Gandhi and Nehru put forth diametrically opposed visions of an independent India. Gandhi thought, as he had written in Hind Swaraj, that it must be built on villages: I believe that if India, and through India the world, is to achieve real freedom, then sooner or later we shall have to go and live in the villages. . . . I have not the slightest doubt that, but for the pair, truth and nonviolence, mankind will be doomed. We can have the vision of that truth and nonviolence only in the simplicity of the villages. . . . You will not be able to understand me if you think that I am talking about the villages of today. My ideal village still exists only in my imagination.

Nehru questioned that vision: “I do not understand why a village should necessarily embody truth and nonviolence.” India must, instead, develop a modern infrastructure. “I do not think it is possible for India to be really independent unless she is a technically advanced country. . . . It is many years since I read Hind Swaraj and I have only a vague picture in my mind. But even when I read it 20 or more years ago it seemed to me completely unreal.” After they had met and discussed this issue, Gandhi concluded that there was not much difference in their outlooks or the way they understood things. But he added: “If in the end we find that our paths are different, then so be it. Our hearts will still remain one, for they are one.” The two did agree that British troops should be immediately withdrawn and that a constituent assembly should immediately be convened. They believed that only an Indian government-building process could solve the current communal crisis.71 Jinnah, however, fanned the flames of that crisis, declaring, on behalf of the Muslim League, a direct-action day to be held August 16, to force acceptance of an independent Muslim state. Intercommunal violence spread across the subcontinent. In November, Gandhi traveled to the Noakhali district (Bengal). He spent forty-three days as resident in a village with a Muslim majority, addressing a meeting every night. He resumed his walking tour in January 1947. Two months later, he moved to Bihar, to help quell the violence there. Nehru pleaded with Gandhi to come to Delhi, to deal with the city’s violence. “I know,” Nehru wrote, “that we must learn to rely upon ourselves and not run to you for help on every occasion. But we have got into this bad

Ceplair CS20.indb 132

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  133

habit and we do often feel that it you had been easier of access our difficulties would have been less.” Gandhi demurred: “I know that if I were free I could take my share in trying to solve the various problems that arise in our country. But I feel that I should be useless unless I could do something here.” Nehru iterated his summons ten days later: “We are drifting everywhere and sometimes I doubt if we are drifting in the right direction. We live in a state of perpetual crisis and have no real grip of the situation.” He was concerned about the rapidly deteriorating economic and labor situation as well as the state of Congress. Again Gandhi demurred, and on February 24, Nehru replied, with some asperity: “Your advice at this critical moment would help us greatly. But you are too far away for consultation and you refuse to move out of East Bengal. Still if you could convey to us your ideas on the subject, we would be very grateful.”72 Gandhi made clear that he was opposed to a partition of the subcontinent on communal grounds and to the two-nation theory. Nehru informed him that an immediate partition of the Punjab was necessary, and he again invited Gandhi to come to Delhi, to meet with Lord Mountbatten, the new viceroy. Gandhi arrived in early June, and after talking with Nehru he said that the gulf between them “in the thought world is deeper than I had feared.” He also concluded that a huge gulf separated him and the members of the Working Committee: “I feel that my presence is unnecessary even if it is not detrimental to the cause we all have at heart. May I not go back to Bihar in two or three days?” From that point forward, Gandhi took no further part in the deliberations, and he was no longer consulted. When Nehru announced the agreement to partition the subcontinent, Gandhi told a prayer meeting: “He is our King. But we should not be impressed by everything the King does or does not do. If he had devised something good for us we should praise him. If he has not, then we shall say so.”73 Gandhi returned to Calcutta in August 1947. When news arrived of the massacres in Punjab, a Hindu mob raided his residence and threatened him. He undertook a new fast, to be broken only when the violence in the city ended. When Nehru implored him to go to Punjab, Gandhi at first agreed, but when the time assigned for his departure arrived, violence had recurred in Calcutta, and Gandhi told Nehru that he had decided to stay there: “If the fury did not abate [in Calcutta], my going to the Punjab would be of no avail. I would have no self-confidence. . . . Therefore my departure from Calcutta depends solely upon the results of the Calcutta fast. Don’t be distressed or angry over the fast.” Gandhi visited forty-seven East Bengali villages in

Ceplair CS20.indb 133

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

134  Revolutionary Pairs

fifty-seven days, walking barefoot 116 miles. During these months, there was far less interethnic violence there than in any other major province. Martin Green concluded: “There has been nothing, not even independence, which is so truly wonderful as his victory over evil in Calcutta.”74 Gandhi undertook his last fast, in January 1948, to protest the Indian government’s decision to withhold a large settlement payment due to Pakistan until the Kashmir problem was solved. Gandhi called this decision “the first dishonourable act” of the new government. As usual, Nehru expressed doubts about the wisdom of the fast. Unlike Gandhi’s previous fasts, he wrote, this one “is less easy for the general public to understand; and in fact there are sections of them, more particularly among the refugees, who do not sympathize with it and are in a sense antagonistic to it.” Nehru also noted that most Hindus resented Gandhi’s entire approach to the communal violence. As far as Nehru was concerned, however, Gandhi’s approach “is not only morally correct, but it is also essentially practical. Indeed it is the only possible approach if we think in terms of the nation’s good, both from the short- and long-distance. . . . It displays a degree of heroism of which Ghandiji is capable.” The fast lasted five days, and the cabinet reopened the payment question.75 Gandhi then traveled to Delhi, where, on January 30, he was assassinated by a Hindu extremist. Ironically, his death accomplished what his activity could not: the interethnic hatred and violence began to abate. Nehru spoke about the dead Gandhi in words equivalent to those Engels used for Marx: “A glory has departed and the sun that warmed and brightened our lives has set and we shiver in the cold and dark. . . . We have been moulded by him during these years: and out of that divine fire many of us also took a small spark which strengthened and made us work to some extent on the lines that he fashioned.” In the foreword to a selection of his writings on Gandhi, published a few months after Gandhi’s assassination, Nehru attempted to assess the nature of Gandhi’s presence: This little man has been and is a colossus before whom others, big in their own way and in their own space and time, are small of stature. In this world of hatred and uttermost violence and the atom bomb, this man of peace and good will stands out, a contrast and a challenge. In an acquisitive society madly searching for new gadgets and new luxuries, he takes to his loincloth and mud hut. In man’s race for wealth and authority and power, he seems to be a nonstarter, looking the other way;

Ceplair CS20.indb 134

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)  135 and yet that authority looks out of his gentle but hard eyes, that power seems to fill his slight and emaciated frame, and flows out to others. Wherein does his strength lie, wherein this power and authority? Has he drunk somewhere from the secret springs of life which has given strength to India through the ages?76

Nehru served as prime minister of India until his death. He was a steadying factor in India’s transition from colony to independent nation, and he became an international force behind nonalignment, negotiation, and conciliation. In international relations, he endeavored to follow Gandhi’s precepts, advocating nonalignment and nonviolence as the means to solve peacefully national differences. Though he was a skilled diplomat, he could be stubborn and arrogant, and his foreign policy was not uniformly successful. His interventions in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts were positive, but he failed miserably with Pakistan and China. His economic vision for an independent India proved faulty, and he failed, in P. C. Joshi’s words, “to create new instruments with which to implement the social programmes of national development and social change. . . . Nehru failed to create a new social force capable of bringing about a social revolution and economic transformation.”77 Without perhaps intending to do so, he also founded a governing dynasty that, along with Nehru’s economic policies, led India far, far from the ideals and hopes of Gandhi.

Ceplair CS20.indb 135

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

4

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) [Their partnership] was unexampled in [Chinese Communist] Party annals as to length, intimacy and historical importance. It lasted forty years, was frank but creative, and was surely the most vital single factor in the birth and survival of the People’s Republic. — John McCook Roots One cannot separate Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai—make one into a bad guy, the other into a good guy; make one into a muddle-headed person, the other into someone with a clear mind; and say that one is wrong while the other is right. — Wang Li

This pair of revolutionaries is the most unusual of those discussed in this volume. No other duo has received such bipolar treatment by historians. Mao’s reputation has swung from Edgar Snow’s near worship to the thuggish portrait drawn by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Nikita Khrushchev wrote that Mao “suffered from the same megalomania Stalin had all his life. He had the same diseased outlook on other people. . . . [He] never recognized his comrades as his equals.” For his part, Zhou has been characterized as a lickspittle by Chang and Halliday and as “one of the three great men I met and knew and in whose presence I had near total suspension of disbelief or questioning of judgment” by Theodore H. White. Zhou also earned the plaudits of people as diverse as Martha Gellhorn, George Marshall, Nikita Khrushchev, Pierre Mendes-France, Richard M. Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Jawaharlal Nehru (in the mid-fifties). Frank Dikötter has a low opinion of both men. In his books on the great famine (1958–1962) and the Cultural Revolution, he assigns Mao the blame for the mass deaths of the first and the massive upheaval of the second. As for Zhou, he “had a talent for landing right side136

Ceplair CS20.indb 136

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  137

up .  .  .  . Before the Communist victory the nationalists used to call him Budaoweng, the Chinese name for a weighted toy tumbler . . . that always lands upright.”1 They did not like each other, they rarely interacted outside of their official positions, and they never personally bonded. Gao Wenqian labeled them an “odd couple,” though not in the domestic comedy sense. Zhou’s selfeffacement, his gift for “self-abnegation and the deft and artful way that he had of cleaning up a nasty mess aggravated Mao, the master, and piqued his pride. . . . On some level, Mao hated his servant, . . . and he always kept his eyes half-open for the chance to humiliate him. Zhou Enlai was the master tactician. It was this quality that Mao hated the most in him and the feature that of all others he relied upon in Zhou and also prized Zhou.”2 Their revolutionary years reveal a repetitive pattern of divergences. Pulled together by their devotion to the revolution, they were constantly divided by Mao’s jealousy. Among those discussed in this study, Mao was the revolutionary personality most wary of rivals. He was constantly torn by his need for competent partners and his fear of them; he worked assiduously to keep them unbalanced and dependent. No sooner had one moved into the position of potential successor than Mao began to undermine him. Zhou and Zhu De alone managed to survive, but just barely. Zhou’s survival was due to his strategy of avoiding open disagreements and factions, not advertising himself, and being ready and willing to engage in bouts of self-criticism. Because of that willingness for public self-effacement and -abasement, and because Mao needed Zhou’s administrative competence and diplomatic skills, Zhou maintained his party and government positions in the People’s Republic of China until his natural death. Their exact relationship is unclear. After 1935, Zhou was publicly undeviatingly devoted to Mao, whereas Mao, according to Harrison E. Salisbury, never, not once, went out of his way to speak well of Zhou; he never paid the man a personal compliment nor thanked him for any achievement. They seemed to have been engaged in a perennial kung fu match, constantly testing the other’s defenses. Of course, Zhou’s probes had to be deft and subtle, whereas Mao could deliver broadsides. An example of Zhou’s maneuvering for space can be seen in an ostensibly kowtowing letter he wrote to Mao’s secretary during a particularly scathing period of Mao’s criticism. Zhou had written a long piece of self-criticism, and he asked the secretary to use his discretion in handing it to Mao: “Make sure that you only read it to him when he is feeling good and relaxed, has a full stomach, and has had a good sleep.

Ceplair CS20.indb 137

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

138  Revolutionary Pairs

Be sure not to read it to him when he is tired. Please, please.”3 This letter can also be read as a tongue-in-cheek description of Zhou’s recognition of, and derision toward, Mao’s irritability. We probably know less about Zhou as a person than any of the others in this book. He is also the most enigmatic: was he an opportunist or a pragmatic realist? He never consented to give a first-person account of his revolutionary career, and though he gave occasional interviews, he refused to go into detail about his personal life. He clearly placed the health and survival of the revolutionary party and his position in it over all other considerations and acted as though he believed in the dictum of Louis XIV: “Après moi, le déluge.” Zhou was an excellent organizer and administrator. He never thirsted for power, and in 1927–1935, when he enjoyed supremacy over Mao in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he did not attempt to oust or degrade him. In fact, Zhou openly appreciated Mao’s military skills and aided, or at least made no effort to block, his climb to power.4 Zhou, like Engels, preferred to remain in the background, in this case deferring to his partner’s force of will rather than his genius. Chang and Halliday say Zhou “served his Party with a dauntless lack of personal integrity.” According to them, he possessed “a mortal fear of disgrace” and, as a result, “slavishness” became one of his outstanding qualities. Simon Leys, however, appreciated Zhou, calling him the “the ultimate survivor. There was no limit to his willingness to compromise. . . . He combined utter fluidity with absolute resilience, like water, which takes instantaneously the shape of whatever container it happens to fill, and simultaneously never surrenders one atom of its own nature—in the end it always prevails.” Maurice Meisner credits Zhou with providing whatever continuity and stability the People’s Republic enjoyed during his and Mao’s lifetimes. The memoirist Chen Chen has written admiringly of Zhou’s integrity and discipline. He maintained, she wrote, a true concern for the interests of the people, while Mao and his cohort “progressively cocooned themselves behind the walls of an imperial compound.” And David W. Chang has described Zhou as “a unique and flexible intellectual, free of ideological dogmatism” and “a pragmatic communist.”5 Mao, if one accepts Chang and Halliday’s portrait, was little more than a thug, the most accomplished brute in a gang of criminals, who believed in nothing but his immortal supremacy. They characterize him as a rank, powerhungry opportunist who believed in no person, social class, or organization.

Ceplair CS20.indb 138

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  139

Mao attempted to build “a completely arid society devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically follow his orders.” By refusing to examine Mao’s writings, however, Chang and Halliday regularly conflate means with ends, and their utter loathing for him has resulted in a distorted image. They neglect to mention his excellent military skills and theoretical acumen. Simon Leys, a more judicious critic, believes that power mattered most to Mao—“how to obtain it, how to retain it, how to regain it. In order to secure power, no sacrifice was ever too big—and least of all the sacrifice of principle.” Leys portrays Mao as a failed artist, one with an idealistic, subjectivist, voluntarist vision: “This visionary quality accounts for most of the unexpected, dazzling victories of Mao’s maturity; unfortunately, it was also at the root of the increasingly erratic, capricious and catastrophic initiatives of his later years.”6 Mao was by far the most exalted and self-exalting of the personalities discussed here. Robert Jay Lifton concludes from his psychological study of the man that few political leaders matched him “in the superlatives used, the number of celebrants, or the thoroughness with which the message of glory has been disseminated. Even more unique has been the way in which the leader’s words have become vehicles for elevating him, during his lifetime, to a place above that of the state itself” or the party. The cause and effect of this glorification was Mao’s obsession with what Lifton labels “revolutionary immortality.” For Mao, “the overwhelming threat is not so much death itself as the suggestion that his ‘revolutionary works’ will not endure.” He was, writes, Frederic Wakeman Jr., “as much myth-maker as politician. In his mind, he embodied the revolution,” and, as a result, he feared anything or anyone he thought might “corrupt the revolutionary purity of his comrades.” The ultimate instrument of socialist transformation was the revolutionary struggle; he believed that mass conflict was a force of nature, and he prioritized will over intellect. Will “was the essence of personality—an immortal core that was fully realized when directed toward social improvement.”7 His will to be in control, to determine events, likely surpassed that of any other revolutionary discussed in this book. Though Mao wrote at great length about revolutionary ideology and strategy, he was not an orthodox Marxist. In fact, he turned Marxism upside down with his advocacy of the peasants as a revolutionary force. Zhou did not leave behind any significant theoretical writing, and he did not contribute to Mao’s ideas. Mao was ultra-concerned with doctrinal illnesses and likened

Ceplair CS20.indb 139

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

140  Revolutionary Pairs

correcting errors to curing a disease, combining, in Stuart Schram’s words, “the illness metaphor with the most extreme and inappropriate Marxist diatribe.” Chang thinks Mao had greater vision than Zhou and was more eager to experiment creatively with his revolutionary ideas. “His whole life was dominated by will-power and egotistic confidence. His sense of urgency to create a better world led him to pioneer and to experiment with ideas at a much higher risk, which his followers often abhorred.” Zhou, however, “preferred tactical reconciliation to violent struggle whenever possible” and peaceful transformation to revolutionary disruption. Theirs “is the story of two men who needed each other, and enabled each other, to survive.”8

Converging but Asymptotic Paths Two Americans who met Mao during the 1930s professed a high regard for him. Agnes Smedley found him a “strangely erudite man given to profound speculation.” And Edgar Snow described him as “a gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure, above average height for a Chinese, somewhat stooped, with a head of thick, black hair grown very long, and with large, searching eyes, a high-bridged nose and prominent cheekbones. My fleeting impression was of an intellectual face of great shrewdness.” Snow continues: Mao seemed to me a very interesting and complex man. He had the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant, with a lively sense of humor and a love of rustic laughter. His laughter was even active on the subject of himself and the shortcomings of the Soviets—a boyish sort of laughter which never in the least shook his faith in his purpose. He was plain-speaking and plain-living, and some people might have considered him rather coarse and vulgar. Yet he combined curious qualities of naïveté with incisive wit and worldly sophistication. I think my first impression—dominantly one of native shrewdness—was probably correct. And yet Mao was an accomplished scholar of Classical Chinese, an omnivorous reader, a deep student of philosophy and history, a good speaker, a man with an unusual memory and extraordinary powers of concentration, an able writer, careless in his personal habits and appearance but astonishingly meticulous about details of duty, a man of tireless energy, and a military and political strategist of considerable genius.9

Snow then devotes fifty-plus pages to Mao’s story of his life, the only memoir Mao produced, titled “Genesis of a Communist.”

Ceplair CS20.indb 140

4/15/2020 9:15:02 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  141

Fig. 4.1 Mao Zedong

Mao was born in Shaoshan, Hunan Province. His father, once a struggling peasant farmer, had become a wealthy landowner. He was a strict disciplinarian. His mother was a devout Buddhist. Mao left school at age thirteen to work on his father’s farm. Unhappy with his father’s heavy hand, the sixteen-year-old Mao borrowed money from relatives and left his home to enroll at a higher primary school. He attended a series of other schools and at age eighteen enlisted

Ceplair CS20.indb 141

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

142  Revolutionary Pairs

in the Hunan revolutionary army. He soon concluded “that it would be better for me to read and study alone. . . . [I] arranged a schedule of education of my own, which consisted of reading every day in the Hunan Provincial Library. I was very regular and conscientious about it.” He did this for six months then returned to school, attending First Teachers Training School, where he read deeply in moral philosophy, joined the student union and mobilized it to demand reforms from the school administration and to protest Japanese intimidation, and initiated a night school for workers.10 He then put an advertisement in newspaper inviting young men interested in patriotic work to contact him. He gradually built up a group of students who also became ardent physical culturalists (members of this health and strength-training movement). He initiated a wide correspondence and in 1917 cofounded the New People’s Study Society. “At this time,” he recalled, “my mind was a curious mixture of ideas of liberalism, democratic reformism, and utopian socialism. I had somewhat vague passions about ‘nineteenthcentury democracy,’ utopianism, and old-fashioned liberalism, and I was definitely anti-militarist and anti-imperialist.” He became increasingly radical during the seven months from mid-1918 to early 1919 he spent in Beijing, where he worked as an assistant to Li Ta-chao at the Peking University Library. Li was the first Chinese Marxist, and he adumbrated some of the key elements of what would become Mao’s revolutionary thinking: his populism and nationalism, the role of the peasantry, and the positive advantages of China’s economic backwardness. Nevertheless, Mao left Beijing “still confused, looking for a road, as we say.” He read some pamphlets on anarchy and liked many of its aspects. In a three-part article he wrote in 1919, “The Great Union of the Popular Masses,” he did not propose violent means of change, advocating instead the building up of basic groups, which would ultimately be engaged in a “great shout together.”11 In December that year, he helped organize a student strike against the governor of Hunan. When it failed, he fled to Beijing, where he taught Chinese literature, read the Manifesto of the Communist Party, and converted to Marxism. Unlike many other young revolutionaries, Mao chose not to go to France to study, and he did not participate in the May Fourth Movement, an anti-imperialist crusade spearheaded by students to protest the Treaty of Versailles’s award to Japan of Chinese territories. When he was able to return to Hunan, he resumed teaching at the primary school of the First Teachers Training School, resurrected the United Students Association, opened a Young People’s Library and Cultural Bookstore, and joined the Socialist Youth Corps. In May 1921, Mao traveled to

Ceplair CS20.indb 142

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  143

Shanghai, to attend the founding meeting of the CCP. Thirteen delegates represented fifty-seven party members, few of whom were well versed in Marxism.12 Mao was appointed province secretary for Hunan and head of the province’s labor secretariat. There, he taught school, organized trade unions, and led a series of workers’ strikes. In April 1923, he was again forced to flee the province to avoid arrest. Meanwhile, Sun Zhongsan (Sun Yat-Sen), the head of the Guomindang (GMD), and Adolf Joffe, the Comintern representative in China, who was acting on behalf of the CCP, signed an agreement to lead a national revolution in China. That summer, at the CCP’s Third Congress, Mao was appointed to the Central Committee. He also attended the GMD congress and was elected to its Central Executive Committee. He became editor of the GMD’s Political Weekly and second in command of its propaganda department. He was also appointed director of the CCP’s Peasant Department. He used all those positions to advance the united front policy as well as organize the peasantry. And when, in late 1926, GMD leader Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek) turned his troops against the CCP, Mao alone retained his position in the GMD, becoming director of the sixth class of the Peasant Institute.13 That autumn, the CCP sent Mao to Hunan, to study peasant unrest there. “I was,” he told Snow, “very dissatisfied with the Party policy then, especially toward the peasant movement.” He investigated conditions in five counties and in March 1927 submitted his “Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan.” In it, he put forward a daring alteration in party strategy, declaring, “The peasant question is the central question in the national revolution,” and he called on party leaders to correct the “erroneous measures” currently in place. “Only thus can any good be done for the future of the revolution.” He also displayed his apocalyptic bent, predicting: “In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a tornado or tempest, a force so extraordinarily swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it. They will break all trammels that now bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation.”14 The consensus of scholarly opinion is that Mao’s concept of peasant militancy as a revolutionary force did not come from his reading of Marxist theorists. According to Stuart Schram, Mao’s general level of understanding of Marxist theory was “by no means very high” in 1926–1927, when he wrote his report on the Hunan peasants. The following year, again without any Marxist basis, he focused on the military as the means of generating an armed

Ceplair CS20.indb 143

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

144  Revolutionary Pairs

insurrection of the popular masses, which would be accompanied by a cultural revolution. Arthur A. Cohen sees nothing creative in Mao’s effort to develop a Communist revolutionary doctrine, though he does credit Mao with making a distinctive strategic contribution—waging revolution from self-sustaining rural bases—and one tactical contribution: guerrilla warfare. (Cohen attributes the military tactics to Zhu De.) In Maurice Meisner’s estimation, “Mao’s faith in the future was not based upon any real Marxist confidence in the determining, objective forces of sociohistorical development. For Mao, the essential factor in determining the course of history was conscious human activity and the most important ingredients for revolution were how men fought and their willingness to engage in revolutionary action.” Brantly Womack, however, thinks the Marxist contribution to Mao’s thought during the years 1923–1927 is very clear, that it had provided him with a theory of social dynamics and a model for a professional revolutionary organization. Womack does, however, acknowledge Mao’s un-Marxian attitude toward the unlimited power of the masses and the human will.15 Because of his faith in the power of the great union of the popular masses, Mao’s trust in the Communist Party was, unlike Lenin’s, never complete. Between 1927 and 1935, he was in perpetual conflict with the Moscowcontrolled party leadership and the Comintern representatives. He accused them of being dilatory in the establishment of soviets, and they accused him of being a “right opportunist,” one who deviates from the party line in a reformist direction. He ignored the party leaders’ order to rely on the peasant masses rather than regular military forces for a planned uprising. The uprising began September 8 and disintegrated ten days later. Mao expected the workers to rise and assist the peasants, but they did not. The Comintern repudiated his strategy and tactics, blamed him for the mistakes the Hunan Provincial Committee made, and removed him from the committee and the Politburo. “There is no evidence,” John E. Rue writes, “that Mao ever acknowledged his political errors during this period.”16 Undeterred, Mao began to formulate an integrated political, economic, and military effort based on mobilization of the peasantry. In the Jinggangshan base area, he created a Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies, and he and Zhu De formulated the basic core of the future Maoist line, an agrarian policy propelled by the party’s army and founded on the building of soviet bases. “The existence of a regular Red Army of adequate strength,” he later wrote, “is a necessary condition for the existence of the Red political power,” because local Red Guard contingents will not be able to deal with the

Ceplair CS20.indb 144

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  145

regular troops of the White (GMD) Army. In 1928, however, he was deprived of all his party positions for a few months. When he regained a few of them, his authority was severely limited. Nevertheless, he managed to reestablish his control of the army and the party in that area. The CCP’s lack of infrastructure made Mao’s intermittent autonomy possible. As Ross Terrill points out, the members seldom met together, party headquarters in Shanghai was far away, and letters, the only means of communication, traveled slowly.17 In May 1928, Mao and Zhu De combined their armies, and at the first Maoping Conference they formed an alliance with other like-minded party members to establish a soviet area and to use it as a base for expansion. Six months later, Mao told the Central Committee that both the party and the masses had to be placed on a war footing, that an “independent régime must be an armed one.” Eighteen months later, at a party conference, Mao criticized “the failure of the Party’s leading bodies to put his plans into operation and wage a concerted and determined struggle” against the “various incorrect ideas in the Party organisation in the Fourth Army . . . and to educate the members along the correct line.”18 The delegates agreed that the Red Army alone offered a revolutionary solution for the deepening poverty and subjection of the masses. The problem of “correct” revolutionary leadership loomed large for Mao in those years, and he constructed a methodology that stressed investigation among the masses, objective appraisal of the situation, avoidance of elitist habits, and political education. He equated effective leadership with effective mass mobilization. He also promoted democracy (i.e., democratic centralism) as a tool of political education: “The Red Army is like a furnace in which all captured soldiers are transmuted the moment they come over. In China not only do the workers and peasant masses need democracy; soldiers need democracy even more urgently.”19 By early 1931, Mao dominated the Central Bureau for the Soviet Areas. But his considerable strength was continually eroded by the maneuvering of the party leadership, the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks, who had moved to Jiangxi to better fight the “right deviation [opportunism]” there and to reform and replenish the leading bodies. They had identified Mao as the leading right deviationist, and at the November 1931 party conference they criticized Mao’s guerrilla tactics and his land policies. Nevertheless, later that month, at the First All-China Soviet Congress, Mao was elected chair of the Central Executive Committee and retained his position as chief political commissar of the First Front Red Army.20 But the next four years would be difficult ones for Mao, not least because of Zhou Enlai’s opposition.

Ceplair CS20.indb 145

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

146  Revolutionary Pairs

Edgar Snow’s chapter about Zhou is titled “The Insurrectionist.” Snow, who met Zhou in 1936, described him: “Slender and of medium height, with a slight wiry frame, he was boyish in appearance despite his long black beard, and he had large, warm, deep-set eyes. A certain magnetism about him seemed to derive from a combination of personal charm and assurance of command. His English was somewhat hesitant and difficult.” Snow thought that Zhou possessed “a cool, logical, and empirical mind” and “charm.” Zhu De described Zhou as “a slender man of more than average height with gleaming eyes and a face so striking that it bordered on the beautiful. Yet it was a manly face, serious and intelligent. . . . Chou was a quiet and thoughtful man, even a little shy.” In 1927, men called him “the man of iron.”21 Zhou was born on March 5, 1898, to a gentry family in Huaian, Jiangsu province. He was the eldest son of a ne’er-do-well father and a strong mother. He was raised by three strong women, his mother, an aunt, and his wet nurse, until he was ten, when he came under the tutelage of his uncles. In 1911, he moved to Manchuria, which, he later wrote, “was the key to the transformation of my life and thought.” He learned there about Sun Zhongsan, the depredations of the Japanese, and how to deal with teasing and bullying by the other students. He recalled: “I had no choice; I had to come up with my own strategies. These essentially consisted of efforts to befriend whomever I could and employ my new allies in counterattacks.” One of his biographers writes: “Zhou’s need to take care of other family members and to survive in the Zhou clan, with all its internal strains, gave him the opportunity to acquire a deft subtlety in dealing with different people under the most difficult circumstances. [In addition], he was reared in a disciplined household that fostered his strong sense of family duty and loyalty and also a personal sense of humility.”22 At Nankai School, in Tianjin (1913–1917), he “learned the importance of moral integrity, public-mindedness, and nationalist commitments.” He became exposed to Marxism during a 1918–1919 stay in Japan. On his return to China in 1919, he enrolled at Nankai University (Tianjin), where he founded a newspaper, Nankai Student Union Alliance News, to promote the May Fourth Movement. He joined with other student activists to form the Awakening Society, an underground group. In January 1920, as the leader of a protest march, he was jailed for six months. In jail, he delivered lectures on Marxism, and he later said his revolutionary conscience was born there.23 At the end of 1920, he traveled to Europe to commence what he intended as an academic venture. But, in the spring of 1921, he joined a Chinese Com-

Ceplair CS20.indb 146

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  147

Fig. 4.2 Zhou Enlai, 1998 stamp

munist cell in Paris and became a full-time organizer and newspaper editor. In 1922, he cofounded the Chinese Youth Communist Party in Europe. In essays written in 1921 and 1922, he “expressed his preference for experimental methods and the evolutionary approach to social improvement,” but by the end of 1922 he had converted to the Leninist method of party building and organization. Finally, in 1923, he started work on the Comintern’s united

Ceplair CS20.indb 147

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

148  Revolutionary Pairs

front policy by joining the Guomindang. In Kuo-kang Shao’s estimation, “Marxism-Leninism was, for Zhou, fundamentally a practical solution to China’s urgent social and economic problems, rather than a pure doctrine.” Above all, he valued Lenin’s pragmatism. Simon Leys thinks that during these European years, Zhou “seems to have identified once and for all the salvation of China with the victory of Communism. We know nothing more of his spiritual evolution.”24 By the time Zhou returned to Canton in 1924, he was a devoted Communist. He was appointed secretary of the Guangdong CCP provincial committee and deputy director of political indoctrination at the GMD’s Whampoa Military Academy. At Whampoa, he secretly recruited cadets to the CCP and League of Military Youth and set up a special Whampoa branch of the party. Some eighty cadets would regard him as their mentor. He held the highest post of any Communist in the GMD’s military forces. He was deputy party representative, director of the political department of the First Army, member of the organization department, and commander of cadre recruitment and promotion.25 Along with many other Communists, he was purged from the GMD in 1926. He organized workers’ unions in Shanghai and Wuhan, and he led abortive worker takeovers of both cities. He also failed in his attempted takeovers of Nanjing and Shantou, and forces under his command suffered major defeats at Chaoshan and Haiku. Years later, he said: “I was responsible for leading the armed revolts, but I lacked experience and was weak in understanding political dynamics. I am an intellectual with a feudalistic family background. I had had little contact with the peasant-worker masses because I had taken no part in the economic process of production. My revolutionary career started abroad, with very limited knowledge about it, obtained from books only.”26 Because he was a Comintern stalwart who still believed in the concept of urban insurrection, he, unlike Mao, was not severely criticized or demoted. Zhou spent part of 1928 in Moscow. There, at the CCP Sixth Congress, he was put in charge of the party’s military department and ordered to win over the masses, build an army, and establish more local soviet regimes. He was also assigned to head the organization department, rebuild the party, and establish a secret police. His main task was to close the breaches that had opened between party leader Li Lisan and Mao and between Li and the Comintern. In fact, one of his first jobs was to put a halt to the purge Mao had proactively launched against Li’s forces.27

Ceplair CS20.indb 148

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  149

Change of Dominance Zhou’s trajectory was much smoother than Mao’s, and until 1935, Zhou was superior within the party. Mao resented this, and the two men clashed on several occasions. In Gao Wenqian’s estimation, these incidents “drove Mao Zedong into fits of rage against Zhou Enlai. He never let himself forget these wounds to his ego.” In the first, on orders from the Comintern, Zhou told Mao and Zhu De to disperse their forces throughout the countryside. When that move proved disastrous, Mao was blamed and excoriated as patriarchal and autocratic, and he was stripped of his leadership of the Fourth Army. And in July 1929, at the Fourth Army Congress, he was not reelected as secretary of the Front Committee. Suffering from depression, he took a sick leave. Zhou dropped his criticism and accepted a portion of the blame. He admonished Mao to stop retreating when matters did not go his way and to stop maligning the prospects for a revolution. The Central Committee then restored Mao to the Front Committee.28 In early summer 1930, Zhou traveled again to the Soviet Union. At the Comintern’s Third Plenum, he criticized the CCP Central Committee for having made “exaggerated and incorrect estimates of the speed and degree of development of the revolution,” and he criticized himself for having made mistakes. More importantly, he praised Mao’s peasant-oriented strategy and criticized Li Lisan. At the CCP’s Fourth Plenum, in January 1931, the delegates deposed Li Lisan but kept Zhou in charge of military affairs. Zhou then issued a resolution in the name of the Central Committee, condemning Mao, because his action “created fear and suspicion among the party ranks and reduced our comrades to living under abnormal strain.” Mao was accused of placing his Political Security Bureau above the party and its regular political authority. Such a move could not be tolerated. Later that year, the CCP Politburo sent to the rural soviet a directive attacking Mao’s rural policy and the concept of guerrilla warfare and once again urging the Red Army to occupy large cities. Though Zhou had advised the Politburo to appoint Mao as political commissar of the First Front Army, Zhou wavered when the Politburo criticized Mao’s peasant strategy. He tried to hold the middle ground: paying lip service to the Politburo while striving to protect its critics.29 In December 1931, Zhou was sent to Jianxi to bridge the gap between the Comintern and the Red Army (and to watch over Mao). The two clashed, and Mao rejected Zhou’s bridging efforts. Zhou kept his distance, cold-shouldering Mao. In a January 1932 report, Zhou characterized Mao’s resolute action to

Ceplair CS20.indb 149

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

150  Revolutionary Pairs

suppress a series of revolts against the soviets as “completely correct,” but, he added, “mistakes were committed in recognizing the true nature of the antiBolshevik group and in selecting a proper method to deal with it.” Then, when Zhou supported a resolution calling for Red Army seizure of major cities in Kiangsi Province, Mao argued that the party should first consolidate the existing soviet base. Though they worked together in planning the assaults, “it was an unhappy and unfortunate collaboration,” and the attacks failed. At a Central Committee meeting in August 1932, Zhou’s concept of positional warfare and capturing cities prevailed, Mao was removed from the Revolutionary Military Council, and Zhou subsequently replaced him as political commissar of the Red Army. Mao was relegated to purely government work.30 In October 1932, at the Ningdu Conference Zhou again tried to bridge the differences between the party leaders and the battlefront personnel, and he criticized Mao’s leadership style. However, he refused to approve any more drastic measures against Mao, and party leaders criticized him for his measured criticism of Mao. After Mao was removed from the Military Affairs Commission, Zhou proposed that Mao become his assistant, to carry out the operational direction of the fighting, but the party leadership and Mao both refused. The Politburo then began to depose the “right-wing Maoists,” diminished Mao’s role in the soviet government, and repudiated his peasant policy. Mao told Snow that for the next two years he devoted his time almost exclusively to work with the soviet government, leaving the military command to Zhu De and others. He did not, that is, engage in a power struggle, and there is no evidence that when his power began to erode he fought for his ideas or his position. For two years, he was left alone. Zhou made a point of avoiding Mao altogether, giving him a cold shoulder, and allying himself with another leader. “For this, Mao never forgave Zhou. For his part, Zhou regretted his actions.”31 In January 1934, at the Second All-China Soviet Congress, Mao launched a comeback. He strongly defended himself, criticized the leadership’s bureaucratic methods, and praised those who had been using guerrilla tactics against the GMD troops. But once again he was stymied. That summer, he was put on probation, excluded from party meetings, and either imprisoned or placed under house arrest. His followers were purged from party positions. When Mao recommended an attack on Nanjing, the Comintern representative demurred and chose to follow Zhou’s plan for an evacuation. Zhou was placed in charge of the withdrawal, but during the retreat he regularly asked Mao for advice.32

Ceplair CS20.indb 150

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  151

One year later, without consulting the Comintern representative, Zhou convoked a party conference at Zunyi. He again admitted making a series of errors, and Mao sharply criticized the party leaders and the Comintern representative. All the other Chinese speakers approved Mao’s speech, and Mao was appointed chairman of the Politburo and the Military Affairs Commission. Zhou was appointed the top military leader, but he did not want to be on the battlefield, and he left Mao in charge of military matters. Within six months, Mao had moved his supporters into leadership positions and seized the top military post. He began issuing orders without consulting Zhou, whom he tried to push out of military affairs altogether. Though the other leaders resisted, Zhou agreed to Mao’s continuation as top military leader and chairman of the military committee. Zhou probably based this decision on two considerations: Mao’s military skills and understanding of the peasantry far surpassed his own, and Zhou could not match Mao’s ambition and ruthlessness nor did he want to continue fighting him. In sum, Zhou acted for the good of the CCP and his own peace of mind. As a result of these successive leadership crises, Zhou, in Simon Leys’s estimation, “developed methods that made him unsinkable: always exert power by proxy; never occupy the front seat; whenever the opposition is stronger, immediately yield.”33 When the commander of the Fourth Communist Corps refused to recognize the election results and offered an opposing military strategy, Mao secretly left the conference with his whole force and the Central Committee to march northward toward Shensi. “This was the time,” Franz Michael writes, “when Mao Tse-tung created his own leadership team and concurrently established himself as the ideological leader of the Chinese Communist party. One by one, Mao removed competitors and opposing factions.” He also opposed the Comintern’s line for a united front of the CCP and GMD to fight Japan, advocating instead the independence of the Communist forces and a united front with non-GMD groups. Eventually, however, he had to yield publicly to Moscow’s directive, though he remained only in token compliance.34 Zhou was not a key factor in the Long March (October 1934–October 1935), the Red Army’s epochal move to escape Jiang’s campaign to destroy the CCP. Mao, however, displayed his tactical brilliance in leading the depleting force fifty-six hundred miles, over the course of 370 days, traversing twenty-four rivers and eighteen mountain ranges. It represented a major defeat and a huge loss of men, but it created a powerful myth. Edgar Snow called it “an odyssey unequaled in modern times.” The march separated the

Ceplair CS20.indb 151

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

152  Revolutionary Pairs

Chinese Communists from both GMD assaults and Comintern directives, and, according to Maurice Meisner, it reinforced Mao’s “voluntaristic faith that men with proper will, spirit, and revolutionary consciousness could conquer all material obstacles and mold their reality in accordance with their ideas and ideals.”35 The post–Long March years were, according to Meisner, “Mao’s most productive period as a Marxist theoretician as well as revolutionary strategist.” He focused his strategy on building a national resistance to Japan in league with the GMD, while building CCP strength. In a December 1935 report, Mao acknowledged that “the counter-revolutionary forces in China and throughout the world are still stronger than the revolutionary forces,” and as a result, the CCP had to “boldly give up closed-door sectarianism, form a broad united front and curb adventurism.” In addition, the party must widen the base of its government to include the members of all other classes who are willing to take part in the national revolution and change the workers’ and peasants’ republic into a people’s republic. At the same time, he insisted that the Communists must maintain their distinct political and economic program, “never abandon their ideal of socialism and communism,” and use the “bourgeois-democratic revolution” as the vehicle for establishing a communist state.36 However, Mao did not address the question of how a proletarian party, almost totally separated from the urban proletariat, and based entirely on the support of peasants who were not inclined to socialism, could engineer a socialist revolution in China. In fact, this was a problem he never solved theoretically, and in 1939, he posed it in a contradictory manner. In the same document he wrote both that the peasants “are the main force of the revolution” and that “the Chinese proletariat is “the basic motive force of the Chinese revolution.” He also introduced novel, often unexplained, terms for the party’s work, calling the current stage of the revolution “not proletarian-socialist but bourgeois-democratic” and characterizing the bourgeois-democratic revolution as a new type, nationalist, democratic, and socialistic at the same time: “an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal revolution of the broad masses of the people under the leadership of the proletariat.”37 Zhou, meanwhile, was building the party organization. He created the New China News Agency and an International Propaganda Bureau, and he began a national effort to recruit intellectuals and students as a fellowtraveling force. In addition, he was placed in charge of the Committee on Liaison with Friendly Forces, and he made overtures to the GMD for the ces-

Ceplair CS20.indb 152

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  153

sation of the civil war and joint resistance to Japan. Jiang Jieshi resisted, and in December 1936, he was captured by two Manchurian leaders who opposed Jiang’s continued war against the CCP. The CCP leadership decided to work for his release and sent Zhou to Xi’an to negotiate. Then, in addition to his CCP positions, Zhou was appointed to the Presidium of the Extraordinary National Congress of the GMD and made vice minister of the Political Training Board of the National Military Council. In the summer of 1939, Zhou traveled to Moscow, where he explained in great detail Mao’s strategy. But when he returned, he and Mao differed on several issues, and Zhou was forced to undergo a six-week self-criticism.38 By 1940, the Red Army had grown exponentially, to four hundred thousand members, and the CCP had multiplied its membership five-fold. Within Mao’s base area, there lived 50 million people. A cult of worship began to grow up around him. Mao changed noticeably: his sense of mission and his vanity increased, and an authoritarian personality emerged. He “laid down rigid dogmas and orthodoxies in political and cultural life, suppressed dissent, and harried those who failed to conform.” He inaugurated a rectification campaign to root out sectarianism, subjectivism, and stereotyped writing and to purge the pro-Comintern faction. In September, during an expanded meeting of the Politburo he railed about the “errors” and “mistakes” of the “Stalinists,” who, along with Zhou, were demoted. The new three-person leadership group: Mao, Liu Shaoqi, and Ren Bishi, ordered Zhou to return to Yan’an. Zhou responded by publicly and effusively proclaiming his loyalty and subordination to Mao: The Party’s 22-year history has proved that the views of Comrade Mao Tse-tung were formed and maintained with historical perspective. . . . Through him, and after his effort to develop it and use it, Communism has gone beyond being a mere body of ideology suitable to China; it has become rather an ideology that is indigenous and has grown roots in the soil of China. Comrade Mao Tse-tung has integrated Communism with the movement of Chinese national liberation and the movement of improving the livelihood of the Chinese people. . . . Because of his leadership, the strength of the Party has attained an unprecedented height.39

But that oath of fealty was not enough for Mao, who found himself in the throes of a dilemma with Zhou: he needed Zhou to manage the party’s institutions and enterprises, but he harbored an irrational fear that Zhou was

Ceplair CS20.indb 153

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

154  Revolutionary Pairs

positioning himself as a contender for power. Thus, Mao believed he had to keep Zhou off balance. In the autumn of 1943, Mao forced Zhou to deliver, over a span of five days, a series of self-critical speeches. Zhou admitted to a series of political crimes and labeled himself a “political swindler” who suffered from enormous personal vanity, selfishness, and a lack of principles, caused by his roots in a “run-down, feudal aristocratic family.” He blamed his pampered upbringing for making him overly obedient and too willing to compromise. He also admitted to a fear of offending people and too carefully weighing gains and losses. David W. Chang is especially harsh in his assessment of Zhou’s actions during those years, accusing Zhou of becoming “a self-abasing slave to Mao,” acting “with a dauntless lack of personal integrity” and “a mortal fear of disgrace.”40 And yet, in terms of policy, the two agreed on most important issues, notably the strategy to employ against the Japanese, the GMD, and foreign powers. During those years, Mao was cautious in his employment of the Red Army and the Communists’ relations with the other contending powers in China. This caution fitted Zhou’s pragmatism, and he skillfully executed Mao’s directives. During the war, Mao argued, against the advice of most of the military leaders, that the Communists should accept a long period of “strategic stalemate,” during which the army should avoid direct confrontations with the Japanese army, relying instead on guerrilla tactics, because during a national war of resistance, the class struggle must temporarily “be subordinated to, and must not conflict with, the interests of the War of Resistance.”41 To prepare for that war, Mao took steps to strengthen and expand the CCP and create a disciplined regular army. (The GMD also tried to avoid engaging the Japanese army in a major battle.) As the war wound down, Mao tried to balance united-front diplomacy with the expansion of Red Army military operations in the southeast and Manchuria, expanded party work in the cities, and created CCP fronts (federation of trade unions and a People’s Assembly of the Liberated Areas). At the Seventh Party Congress, in April 1945, a new constitution was adopted, adding the thought of Mao to Marxism and Leninism as the doctrinal guides for Chinese communism. Stalin’s name was notably absent. Liu Shaoqi mentioned Mao’s name 105 times in his speech and praised Mao for raising “our national thinking to an unprecedented height.”42 Mao also declared that the CCP must gain control of cities and expand into the areas controlled by the Japanese. When the war ended, in August 1945, the CCP controlled approximately 10 percent of China. And yet Mao did not position the Red Army to fight a

Ceplair CS20.indb 154

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  155

full-scale civil war with the GMD. Rather, he clearly hoped that Soviet assistance would be forthcoming to strengthen the CCP’s position. But on August 14, much to his chagrin, the Soviet government signed a Treaty of Friendship and Alliance with the GMD, which awarded the Russians several key concessions in northern China. As a result, Stalin cut off assistance to the CCP and insisted that Mao negotiate with Jiang. Further complicating the situation was the United States’ intervention, via the presence of a large armed occupying force and U.S. special envoy George Marshall’s effort to create a coalition government. Caught between the military leaders’ demand for more extensive fighting and Zhou’s admonitions for more concessions and more aggressive propaganda, a physically ill Mao, simply withdrew from the controversy. According to James Reardon-Anderson: “No documents written [by Mao] during the first three months of 1946 appear in the Selected Works. Mao made no public statements and refused to see foreign journalists.” Thus, the CCP continued its two-pronged strategy of negotiation with and warfare against the GMD. On the one hand, as a member of the main mediating group, the Committee of Three (with Marshall and Chang Chen of the GMD), Zhou worked assiduously to implement the Marshall-imposed ceasefires; on the other, he was ordered to drag his heels on the process of integrating the two armies.43 Mao bided his time for the next two years. He allowed the Red Army to launch an offensive in Manchuria, but he also ordered Zhou to continue negotiating with the GMD and Marshall. In autumn 1948, when the tide of battle turned in favor of the Red Army, Mao came off the fence, declaring that the Chinese revolution was aimed against the GMD and the US imperialists as part of a united Communist front led by the Soviet Union. But this turn was equally ambivalent: though he praised Stalin highly in public, in private Mao was frequently critical of what he considered the Soviet leader’s overcautious and lukewarm approach to the Chinese revolution. He thought Stalin was intimidated by the United States and not fully appreciative of the value of a people’s revolution in Asia.44 And yet, until Nikita Khrushchev’s speech about Stalin in February 1956, Mao felt constrained by the limitations the Soviet model of socialist development and China’s need for Soviet aid placed on him and the Chinese revolution. Indeed, it is arguable that Mao’s first major gamble, the Great Leap Forward, was the result of the release of long stifled ill feelings about Stalin’s mistrust, greed, parsimony, and control. In 1949, on the eve of victory, Mao substantively altered the concept of the united front. In his pamphlet On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, he

Ceplair CS20.indb 155

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

156  Revolutionary Pairs

advocated a joint democratic dictatorship by a four-class coalition of workers, peasants, urban petite bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie. And he stated that the method by which to construct the people’s state “is democracy, the method of persuasion, not of compulsion.” However, as Arthur A. Cohen points out, Mao was actually describing neither a united front nor a coalition government but “a totalitarian dictatorship” dominated by the worker-peasant based Communist Party, with the others as window dressing. Zhou, meanwhile, was drawing up a Common Program to be put into place after Jiang had been defeated. It called for a mixed economy and a gradual pace toward socialism. In May 1949, he told the cadres: “You must not regard Mao as a chance leader, a born leader, a demigod. . . . If you do, . . . it will be empty talk. . . . Our leader is born of the Chinese people, born of China’s revolution.”45

Diverging Paths in the People’s Republic The CCP victory of October 1949 was a world-shaking event. It extended communism into the largest country in Asia; it demonstrated the value of cadre-led guerrilla warfare to advance national liberation; it altered the dynamics of the Cold War. Victory was the result not, however, as Mao had once envisioned, of a popular peasant uprising but of superior military organization and strategy, Mao’s persistence and resilience, a poorly led opposition, and, after some delay, huge deliveries of military equipment from the Soviet Union. It offered a new model of revolutionary success: a small, wellorganized party built an army, asserted control over the areas it occupied, won over the peasantry with land reforms and punishment of landlords, built alliances with the other classes, and then, via a protracted civil war, fought its way to power. This was very different from the Bolshevik experience. In addition, the CCP enjoyed several major advantages over the Bolsheviks in 1917: it did not have to extract itself from a world war; it did not face the political and civil chaos that confronted the Bolsheviks; the democracies did not attempt to overthrow the revolution by invasion; and the indigenous counterrevolutionary forces were much less threatening. At the same time, the economy was in at least as bad a state, and the country was much less developed.46 As chairman of the CCP and of the Republic, Mao was the country’s effective ruler. Zhou was named premier of the Government Administration Council and minister of foreign affairs. In mid-December, Mao traveled to the Soviet Union, where he spent two frustrating months trying to complete economic and military assistance

Ceplair CS20.indb 156

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  157

pacts. In February, Zhou was summoned to Moscow to conduct the actual negotiation and sign the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. Shortly after their return, the CCP launched an all-out drive to transform Chinese society, starting with the Agrarian Reform Act and a counterrevolutionary suppression campaign. In September 1951, Zhou initiated the Study Campaign for Ideological Reform. He told the assembled teachers that they must learn “the ideology of the progressive elements of the working class, that is to say, the revolutionary theories of Mao Tse-tung,” which were a product of Marxism-Leninism and the actual practice of the Chinese revolution.47 Sinologists disagree about the quality of Mao’s leadership in the early years of the revolution. Frederick C. Teiwes states that Mao’s thinking was “marked by a basic optimism and confidence.” He was “relatively restrained,” advocated “detailed, methodical leadership,” placed a high priority on technical competence, and remained strongly tied to the Soviet model of Communist development. Only in 1958, when he had lost confidence in the Soviet model, did he shift his attention to class struggles and mass mobilizations. Michael, however, argues that Mao lacked patience with administrative routine and progressive development from the outset, that he had always harbored the idea of constant struggle and social disequilibrium.48 At first, the new government moved slowly. It advocated a “patriotic movement” for increasing agricultural and industrial production and graded penalties for those convicted of corruption and waste (“Three-Anti’s” and “Five-Anti’s” struggles)—“leniency for the majority and severity for the minority; leniency for those who make a clean breast of their wrongdoings and severity for those who resist; leniency for those in the industrial sector and severity for those in the commercial sector.” Mao remained especially concerned about “bureaucratism and commandism” in the party, and he admonished the leadership to be hypervigilant about those violations. And, as a likely foreshadowing of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao warned against the “five excesses” of party and government organizations in rural areas: an excess of assignments, meetings and training courses, documents, reports, and statistical forms, organizations, and extra duties for activists.49 Though he paid lip service to the contradictions of bureaucracy, Zhou was very comfortable with bureaucratized institutions and routinized procedures. In his capacity as minister of foreign affairs, Zhou quickly became the international face of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). When the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea invaded the Republic of Korea in mid1950, Zhou became deeply involved. He advised Kim Il Sung on military

Ceplair CS20.indb 157

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

158  Revolutionary Pairs

tactics, met with Soviet representatives, and issued warnings to the United States. He strongly supported Mao’s decision to send Chinese troops into Korea, traveled to Moscow to secure military aid, and served as general commander of the PRC forces in Korea. After the armistice, he emerged as one of the world’s most omnipresent diplomats, helping China maintain—at least for a few years—good relations with India, various Communist countries, and many Asian and African countries. He was a significant presence at the 1954 Geneva Conference, to settle the First Indochina (official French title) or Anti-French Resistance (Vietnamese title) war and the Bandung Conference of Asian and African countries, where he advocated friendly cooperation among those nations. His was a constant voice of reason and flexibility. At home, Zhou and Liu Shaoqi continued to speak on behalf of the New Democracy and careful progress toward socialism, but at the All-China Conference on Financial and Economic Work, in June–August 1953, Mao sharply criticized those party leaders who continued to espouse the New Democracy line. Liu and Zhou felt obliged to engage in a bout of self-criticism and to accept the first five-year plan, calling for a rapid industrial buildup and the collectivization of agriculture. Those who were understood to be in opposition, especially intellectuals, were purged.50 Even so, several party leaders, Zhou and Liu among them, continued to believe in the need to move cautiously in agriculture and industry. A new constitution, promulgated at the end of 1954, established two leading posts: chairman of the Republic (Mao, obviously) and chairman of the State Council (Zhou, nominated by Mao). Mao was now chair of the National Defense Council, Supreme State Conference, and Central Committee, and head of the Politburo. Unhappy with the development of the rural economy and fearing the development of capitalist forces in the countryside, he announced that 1955 was the “year of decision in the struggle between socialism and capitalism,” and he intervened to overthrow the second fiveyear plan and set in motion a voluntarist policy designed to put the PRC on the road to his version of agrarian socialism. It was not the peasants who were backward, he charged, but the party. He believed the party should revolutionize, not stabilize.51 It is not clear what exactly provoked this radical change in Mao’s attitude. Schram attributes it partly to Mao’s “military romanticism,” his belief that war was “the supreme adventure and the supreme test of human courage and human will,” as well as “the warlike quality of his temperament and

Ceplair CS20.indb 158

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  159

imagination.” Once he decided on a course of action, he pushed ahead “on the assumption that revolutionary enthusiasm and ideological purity could make up for the lack of technical competence and material means.” It is also possible that Mao harbored an irrational fear of counterrevolution and visualized capitalism as the Antichrist. Whatever the cause, Mao began to demand more rapid advances in the economy and shifted his emphasis from objective conditions to subjective efforts. His intolerance to opposition sharply increased, and he called for a renewed struggle in the countryside.52 He announced that full collectivization would be achieved at the end of the fiveyear plan, and he decreed the full nationalization of industry. In April 1956, Mao, prompted by Zhou, embarked on a plan to mobilize non-party intellectuals for his mass agricultural and industrial plans and to revitalize the CCP. He circulated his “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend” manifesto, and the following February he fully endorsed the movement. It was officially launched on May 1, but it ended five weeks later, when what Mao intended as a limited intra-party debate became a public critique of the state and the party. The party responded by purging nonparty personnel in the government. According to Han Suyin, “Mao had suffered a setback, a defeat. He had supported the Premier [Zhou], and the results were a humiliating loss of face. . . . The relations between the two men deteriorated almost to the point of no return.”53 Party opinion, however, was trending away from Mao’s program. Taking heed of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s February 1956 criticism of Stalin and the resulting campaign of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union, CCP leaders began to talk about a domestic policy of “peaceful coexistence”; they admitted that wrongful arrests had been made and innocent people executed. They advocated persuasion and coexistence instead of violence and encouraged the recruitment of intellectuals or experts to promote socialist construction and industrialization. Zhou stated: “Certain unreasonable features in our present employment and treatment of intellectuals and towards intellectuals outside the party have to some extent handicapped us in bringing the existing power of the intelligentsia into full play.” The Eighth Party Congress, in September, approved the Soviet model of economic development, proclaimed the proletarian-socialist revolution victorious, removed the phrase “guided by the thought of Mao Tse-tung” from the party constitution, and stressed the importance of collective leadership. Mao did not deliver any of the major reports. He had effectively lost control of policy making, and the Hundred Flowers movement was suppressed.54

Ceplair CS20.indb 159

4/15/2020 9:15:03 PM

160  Revolutionary Pairs

He did not long remain on the sidelines. In February 1957, his speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” proclaimed that the main contradiction facing the party was that between leaders and those being led, requiring that the former be exposed to the criticism of the latter. A new type of class struggle had emerged, between opposing class ideologies; and a new class enemy had appeared, espousing incorrect ideas. Mao, as the selfdesignated people’s representative, vowed to lead the struggle and identify the incorrect ideas. A few weeks later, he specifically called for a new rectification campaign, to alter “our thinking style and our work style.” The urgency of rectification was reflected in a document circulated to party cadres in May, in which he declared that the “poisonous weeds” of rightist ideology must be rooted out. In the following month, the struggle against the rightists (moderates who downplayed contradictions and supported non-struggle methods) became “a great battle”; “a great political struggle and ideological struggle.” He likened it to the setting of fires and stated that the party should “‘set fires’ regularly,” at least two in every five-year plan. In October, he broadened the rectification campaign to include struggles against “subjectivism, bureaucratism, and factionalism” and said that it should last until May 1, 1958, using “great contending, great blooming, great arguing, great debates, and big-character posters.” This campaign, writes Schram, marked a major turning point in Mao’s thought, giving him a radicalized obsession with class struggle. John K. Leung and Michael Y. M. Kau see in this campaign the inception of a pattern that would endure for the rest of Mao’s life: he “would observe political and ideological tendencies that were not in keeping with his own idea of how the Chinese revolution ought to develop”; he would label them as “deviationist” political lines within the party; and he would then launch campaigns from outside the party to rectify “both the Party and the course of the Chinese revolution as he himself saw it.” Continual revolution within the revolution, achievement via the ongoing transformation of the consciousness and will of the people of China, became his mode of operation. In addition, the new campaign provided him an implicit rejection of the de-Stalinization campaign in the Soviet Union, which denied the primacy and permanence of contradictions. There was now a Chinese path to modernization, “with a heavy reliance on the concept of continued, or uninterrupted, revolution.”55 One can see a clear divergence growing between Mao and Zhou. Though Zhou also warned about the problem of “bureaucratism” and “commandism,” he argued that the party must “place true trust in the intellectuals and give them support so that they can work with bold initiative,” and he advocated

Ceplair CS20.indb 160

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  161

“free, scientific discussions” as well as an expanded democracy.56 He had also proposed a second five-year plan that was designed to correct the ambitious growth expectations of the first. Mao, however, following his summer 1957 trip to Moscow, where he had clashed with Khrushchev, planned to challenge Khrushchev as leader of the world’s Communist movement and make China independent of Russian help. To do so, Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward, a “rather fantastic attempt to move China directly to the stage of communism through a superhuman effort of organization.” It had three clearly stated goals—enhanced economic growth, radical economic and social change, and wholesale rejection of the Soviet model—but it lacked detailed planning. It was Mao’s version of the “permanent revolution,” and it was based on his fear of backsliding and revisionism in the Chinese revolution and his deep faith in voluntarism and the peasant masses to forestall those occurrences. He said in April 1958 that the peasant masses have two remarkable peculiarities: “They are, first of all, poor, and secondly blank. Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.” In other words, in Marxian terms, Mao downgraded the importance of the forces of production (advanced industrialization) and upgraded the relations of production, based on collectivization of the peasantry via the people’s communes.57 When he saw Mao’s plan, Zhou, who had recently been replaced as minister of foreign affairs, was horrified. He told the Third Plenum May 1958: “This is haste, . . . adventurism, . . . this is guerrilla tactics, quite incompatible with the running of complex modern industrial plants.” His warning was not heeded, and, as he predicted, Mao’s great economic leap caused a massive social upheaval and a severe economic crisis. Zhou worked quietly behind the scenes to mitigate the damages, and, in the aftermath, to right the economy. The two men clashed at a November–December 1958 work conference. Zhou stated that “unreliable figures are being quoted” about agricultural gains. Mao said that the higher cadres squeezed these figures out of the lower cadres, and he blamed the transport problems on Zhou.58 But the higher cadres agreed with Zhou, and a few weeks later, Mao had to resign his position as chairman of the Republic. It was announced that he had voluntarily relinquished the post to Liu Shaoqi but that he had retained his position as chairman of the CCP, and henceforth he was known as Chairman Mao. Mao used the party conference at Lushan, held in the summer of 1959, to reassert his hegemony. He sharply attacked Defense Minister Peng Dehuai,

Ceplair CS20.indb 161

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

162  Revolutionary Pairs

who had openly criticized the Great Leap Forward, and he threatened to go back to the provinces and reorganize his guerrilla army if he was opposed. After this conference, according to party apparat Wang Bingnan, “the whole Party shut up. We were all afraid to speak out.” Zhou fell into line, delivering a speech stating that Peng had been disloyal to Mao. But he later said about the Great Leap: “There were certain shortcomings and errors made in the course of drawing up and implementing the 1959 national economic plan and during the upsurge of the great leap forward: the main ones were that production targets were set rather too high, the projected scale of capital construction was bigger than it should be, and the increase in the number of workers and staff a bit excessive.” He did not, however, blame anyone; he simply called for a readjustment. But at the 7,000 Cadres Conference, held in January 1962, with Mao firmly reseated in power, Zhou absorbed much of the blame for what had gone wrong in the Great Leap Forward: “This is my mistake.’” The problems occurred because we had “contravened the general line and Chairman Mao’s precious instructions.”59 Mao was determined to punish anyone who disagreed with him and to regard only his own ideas as the standard of orthodoxy—everything else was subversion. He had learned three important lessons during the reactions of the cadres to the Hundred Flowers movement and the Great Leap Forward: the progress of the revolution was not inevitable; regression and revisionism were real threats; and the party had ceased to be an instrument of revolutionary social change. Starting in January 1962, he began to lay the groundwork for a new revolution within the revolution. He said, at the Enlarged Central Work Conference, January 30, 1962: “Both inside and outside the Party, there must be a full democratic life. . . . We must conscientiously bring questions out into the open, and let the masses speak out.” Eight months later, he stated that it was necessary to “acknowledge the existence of a struggle of class against class.” When Mao and Liu openly clashed at the Tenth Plenum, Zhou tried to mediate. Mao accused Zhou of being a “middle-of-the-roader” and a threat to the party’s revolutionary spirit.60 Try as he might, though, Mao proved incapable of devising a strategy to inculcate the lessons he had learned. He groped for a new direction, but he provided little in the way of concrete policy proposals, and he distrusted most of the old cadres. As a result, it became increasingly difficult to understand him and please him. He began by initiating a socialist education movement, to regain authority over the cadres from Liu. He called for the shortening of the period of formal schooling and declared “there is too much studying.”

Ceplair CS20.indb 162

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  163

Students do not have enough time for labor or military service; they do not see how workers work, peasants till the fields, or businesses operate. Moreover, their health is being ruined. Following the January 1965 publication of his “Twenty-Three Articles,” which took direct aim at the “capitalist-roaders,” he began sending work teams to local areas to investigate local abuses. When the state and party bureaucracies successful foiled this campaign, Mao embarked on a six-month tour of the provinces, and he decided to use the People’s Liberation Army to undermine the party and the administration. He demanded that the Central Committee criticize what he called “capitalist” and “reactionary” thought. When it refused, he retreated from the capital. From Hangchow, he opened a campaign to win control of the media, which began to propagate his thought. He then mobilized high school and college students to assault the party and government organizations in the provinces.61 Instead of the admonitory approach Zhou used to counter the problems of the ideological backsliding of party members, “bureaucratism,” and the emergence of “Khrushchev’s revisionism” in China, Mao decided to expose party members to mass criticism. He believed that “the mass line best aroused and channeled collective social enthusiasm, unifying the proletariat’s energies by removing the barrier that separated cadres and masses.” At the most basic level, Mao was motivated by his colleagues’ negative response to the Great Leap Forward; his fear that he, like Stalin, might be denounced after his death; the danger of a capitalist restoration; and his desire to regain the political power he had lost. Frank Dikötter’s assessment is far more negative: “Behind all the theoretical justifications lay an ageing dictator’s determination to shore up his own standing in world history.” He wanted to leap over the Soviet Union, to become “the historical pivot around which the socialist universe revolved.” While doing so, he combined a grandiose idea about his own historical destiny with an extraordinary capacity for malice. “The Cultural Revolution, then, was also about an old man settling personal scores at the end of his life. . . . He was cold and calculating, but also erratic, whimsical and fitful, thriving in willed chaos.”62 During the Cultural Revolution, loyalty to Mao’s person rather than his policies became his focus, disorder his aim. At one point, he said that “one could learn to make revolutions only by making revolutions.” And later on, he stated: “It is all right to act first and submit a memorial to the throne later.” Though he did not explicitly sanction violence, his public statements did not show disapproval of it, and he regularly told the Red Guards to “seize power!”

Ceplair CS20.indb 163

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

164  Revolutionary Pairs

Periodically, Mao realized that matters had gone farther than he anticipated, and he pulled back and tried to restore some sort of balance. Unlike Stalin, he did not order the mass liquidation of senior colleagues who had fallen out of favor. He did, however, approve their humiliation, degradation, and occasional torture. His preferred methods were purges and self-criticism sessions. At his seventy-third birthday party, on December 16, 1966, Mao offered a toast: “To the unfolding of nationwide all-around civil war!” The following month, he declared open war on the government apparatus: “You don’t necessarily need ministries to make revolution.” He told the Military Affairs Commission: “The thing to do is seize power first and then deal with the rest later.” He also announced: “Don’t be afraid of people making trouble. The bigger the trouble gets, the longer it lasts, the better. Trouble again and again, on and on—something is bound to come out of it!”63 In August 1966, the Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee officially approved the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). Zhou supported it at a mass rally in Tiananmen Square, and he participated in the December meetings that planned the destruction of party leaders. Zhou was appointed to head an ad hoc Central Caucus to run day-to-day affairs. He oversaw the drafting of key documents and the work of the Central Cultural Revolution Group, the campaign headquarters of the GPCR. Not surprisingly, given the stress of that workload, Zhou’s health began to fail. He suffered from cardiac arrhythmia, shortness of breath, and fainting spells. In brief, the GPCR was a confused, erratic movement, wreaking untold havoc on the country and its denizens. The key problem is to ascertain the behavior of Mao and Zhou and their interactions. Mao was in full control of key decisions, but he had little control over the manner and scope of their implementation. He was continually trying to rein in a wild bull he had set loose, without breaking its spirit. Though he occasionally intervened to check major excesses, he never surrendered his belief in the movement. Zhou did what he could to protect the party and state apparatuses and the cadres without running afoul of Mao. But he had to pick and choose his interventions, and as a result, his successes were limited. Several times he bodily protected party leaders targeted by Red Guards, but when he was given a list of names of people to be executed, he signed without demur. Yang Shangkun, former chief of the CCP General Office, recalled that Zhou “could not oppose Mao directly in the Cultural Revolution,” because he would have been removed from power and the damage done to the country would have been much worse.64

Ceplair CS20.indb 164

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  165

When the Red Guards began attacking public property, Zhou prepared a list of protected establishments. Then, when Mao vetoed the document, Zhou prepared a ten-point list of rules restricting the Red Guards’ behavior. During the first year of the GPCR, Zhou used almost every public occasion to call for the insulation of the economy from the Cultural Revolution’s worst excesses. He tried to prevent conflicts between Red Guards sent from Beijing and the workers’ and peasants’ groups in the provinces, but he deemed it too dangerous to support his colleagues from the State Council and army who were targeted by the Red Guards, even though he had known some of them for many years and fully agreed with them on the basic issues. He constantly tried to find a middle path, to moderate the ideology and language of the Red Guards. At the same time, he gave full-throated public approval to the GPCR. He urged everyone to “raise high the red banner of Mao Zedong thought and unite with Mao into the eternal future.” In late August 1966, Zhou told a Central Committee Work Conference: “It’s no big deal if we make some mistakes. We should all get rid of them. We should all raise the banner of Mao Zedong Thought and stride right ahead. . . . When the masses struggle against you, criticize you, and have nothing good to say about you, this is very serious, and you must learn how to take it. It’s the only way to emerge from this struggle as a good pupil of Mao Zedong.” In October, he said: “The fact is that few of us had the experience or the mental preparation for this Cultural Revolution. But Chairman Mao sees everything very clearly and understands where we are going. And so if anyone is unsure about the nature or course of this movement, fear not, because Chairman Mao is there for all of us to follow and none of us should falter.”65 Although Zhou tried to stay on good terms with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, the most vocal of the Gang of Four radicals propelling the GPCR, she turned sharply against him in the spring of 1967. His daughter was arrested, and she died in prison. During the summer, he was continually harassed. Perhaps realizing that matters were close to escalating out of control, Mao heeded Zhou’s advice to take a stand, to issue instructions to halt the chaos. Mao ordered the arrest of two GPCR leaders, and he chose Zhou to chair their trial.66 Mao also intervened to protect Zhou when some Red Guards and Jiang Qing turned on Zhou. Mao further retreated in late 1968, when the People’s Liberation Army leaders blocked his attempt to carry the Cultural Revolution into its ranks, and Soviet troops moved to the Chinese border. He purged Liu and rewrote

Ceplair CS20.indb 165

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

166  Revolutionary Pairs

the party constitution. Zhou regained the foreign ministry and began to restructure the party and government, recalling many of those who had been cashiered. He was then sent abroad to mend international fences. He met with Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin, traveled to Pyongyang, and attended a conference of Communist leaders of Southeast Asia. He never once publicly criticized the GPCR. In fact, in a July 1971 interview, Zhou publicly praised the revolution, stating that it was necessary “to make it possible for Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s thought to be grasped by the broad masses of the people.” And now that that “stage of struggle, criticism, and transformation” was over, “the time has come for us to study in a deeper way Marxism-Leninism–Mao Tse-tung thought.”67 Deng Xiaoping later said: “Without the premier [Zhou,] the Cultural Revolution would have been much worse. Without the premier the Cultural Revolution wouldn’t have dragged on for such a long time.”68 In 1981, five years after Zhou’s death, a party resolution on the history of the CCP explicitly criticized Mao’s poor political judgment during the Cultural Revolution and stated that Zhou “managed to minimize the damage caused by the lunatic ultra-left.”69 Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals pose the crucial question: “Would China have been better off if the premier had used his immense prestige and influence in the CCP and the PLA to rally his colleagues in an effort to stop the Cultural Revolution in its tracks early on?” 70 Perhaps, but forty years of bowing before the force of Mao’s personality had inured Zhou against such an act. Zhou’s greatest accomplishment during the early 1970s was to institute a new foreign policy based on national sovereignty, peaceful coexistence, and friendly relations between states with different social systems.71 This approach coincided with US interests and led to Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing to plan, with Zhou, President Richard Nixon’s February 1972 trip to the PRC. Though Zhou had never put himself forward as Mao’s successor or “second in command” of the PRC, by the end of 1972, Mao, fearing Zhou might outlive him, decided that he had to take steps to counterbalance Zhou’s prominence. Mao recalled Deng Xiaoping, who had been demoted during the GPCR, and he allowed Jiang Qing and her cohorts to launch an assault on Zhou, using the “Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius” campaign. However, when Lin Biao openly began to position himself as Mao’s successor, Mao sought the support of Zhou and his rehabilitated cadres. Though Zhou leaned slightly toward Lin, he never openly defended him and took care to propitiate

Ceplair CS20.indb 166

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  167

Mao’s new favorite, Zhang Chunqiao. The evidence indicates that Zhou did very little to block Lin’s attempted escape from China. In fact, Zhou’s leadership position was enhanced after Lin’s death: he was now in charge of domestic, foreign, and party affairs. But Mao believed that Zhou went too far in his anti-leftist—anti-Lin—polemic, and in December 1972 Zhou was forced to engage in extensive self-criticism. The following year, Mao took umbrage at Zhou’s analysis of the US-USSR relationship and Zhou’s handling of the visits of Henry Kissinger, accusing him of making “right-deviationist errors.” Extensive self-criticism followed.72 By this point, both men were declining physically. Mao suffered from congestive heart issues, while Zhou was diagnosed with bladder cancer and suffered a major heart attack. Zhou entered a hospital in 1974 and only left it on special occasions. He did not exercise significant authority during 1975, the year of Deng’s ascendency and demotion. Mao never visited him. In a wry March 1975 letter to Mao, Zhou displayed his ironic touch. After detailing his maladies, he wrote: “Because I realize how concerned Chairman is about my illness, my having to report this new mishap makes me sorrowful, for I am adding to your concern. Please, though, do not worry.”73 At his last public appearance, at the National People’s Congress in January 1975, Zhou detailed the economic accomplishments of his administration, stressed unity over conflict, and, for the first time, publicly took the initiative by advancing Deng Xiaoping as his successor. In February he notified his colleagues that he was withdrawing from active politics. A few days before his death, which occurred on January 8, 1976, Zhou received nearly all the district military commanders. He told them: “Our country may face new ambitious persons like Lin Biao. They want to take over the party and the government. Their methods are either flatter or threat, distortion or manipulation. Their final objective is to eliminate several old comrades in the party and in the government and take over the power themselves. You have heavy responsibilities of your own: do not become the tools of these ambitious careerists. You must stand firm in unity. Their backstage support is more powerful than you are. Please be on the alert.” He urged them to defend the fatherland, remain loyal to the party, support Deng Xiaoping, maintain control of the People’s Liberation Army newspaper, and keep the General Political Department in good order. He feared that his death would likely mean Deng’s destruction.74 The year 1976 was a cataclysmic one for the PRC: its three greatest leaders—Zhou, Zhu De, and Mao—died within nine months of each other,

Ceplair CS20.indb 167

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

168  Revolutionary Pairs

and on July 28, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake occurred near Tangshan, in the northeast, killing nearly 250,000 people. According to Gao Wenqian, Zhou’s death had the largest impact “on the political situation in China: the entire nation sank into a sea of deep sorrow, and markets nationwide sold out of black mourning clothes. . . . People were overwhelmed with a growing anxiety about the current political situation.” An ailing Mao did not go to Zhou’s funeral, and he did not issue a eulogy. He allowed only a brief radio announcement and only a select crowd of forty thousand was allowed to see the body lying in state. No mourners were allowed to travel to Beijing, and all public signs of mourning were forbidden. A Beijing resident said: “They wouldn’t let us mourn him. . . . We couldn’t even wear black armbands. . . . A directive came that we weren’t even to hold our own memorial meetings in our own work units.” While no public viewing of Zhou’s body was allowed, thousands lined the route along which his body passed to the crematorium. Under public pressure, the party leaders placed his ashes in the Workers Cultural Palace for three days, after which they were, according to his wishes, scattered across China. As Zhou anticipated, Deng Xiaoping was relieved of his duties as vice premier, after he delivered Zhou’s eulogy. But the Chinese people rebelled. On March 19, a primary school group laid a memorial wreath in Tiananmen Square. Four days later, a man from the provinces laid another. Both were quickly removed. On March 25, a middle school group left a wreath, and, five days later, members of the Peking Municipal Labor Union and a group of soldiers did likewise. None of those were removed. When, on April 4, a large group of wreaths were laid in Tiananmen Square in memory of Zhou, the government ordered them removed. Over a hundred thousand people protested in Beijing, and there were similar demonstrations in other parts of the country.75 Then, on the weekend of Qing Ming, a day to remember revolutionary heroes, nearly a million people ignored official directives and gathered at the square to place more wreaths and read poems. It was the largest spontaneous demonstration in China’s history. To Beijing’s citizens, Zhou “had come to stand in symbol and practice, for all that was civilian, civil, and orderly in China, for what was literate, cultured, and refined, for what was good and kind. . . . He had come to stand for much of what had collapsed in China in the decade preceding his death.” It was an expression of both collective grief and collective anger, the latter directed mainly against Jiang Qing. That night, under cover of darkness, a fleet of trucks was dispatched to remove the wreaths. On the following day, Monday, a different, smaller crowd arrived in the square, to protest the removal. A newly formed Committee of the People

Ceplair CS20.indb 168

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)  169

for Commemorating the Premier issued a set of demands, including the right of the masses to commemorate Zhou. The government forcibly cleared the square and two days later mobilized millions of people in the square to voice their support for Mao.76 Mao died eight months later, during his final balancing act—between his increasingly unpopular wife, Jiang Qing, and the need to put a moderate face on the government. Popular reaction to his death “was muted.”77 A mass memorial meeting was held in Tiananmen Square, attended by 1 million people and broadcast live on television and radio. To bolster his position, Hua Guofeng, Mao’s choice as his successor, had a colossal mausoleum with a crystal sarcophagus erected in Tiananmen Square. He also assumed the editorship of the remaining volumes of Mao’s Selected Works. The next month, the Gang of Four was arrested; however, Deng later pushed Hua aside. It is interesting to note that Zhou is still referred to as “beloved leader Zhou,” while Mao’s reputation has taken a large hit. Andrew G. Walder concludes his analysis of Mao’s rule by saying that he “left China in a quiet crisis, an unsettled state and society very much in flux.” On his obituary of Mao, Simon Leys wrote: “If he had died a few years after the Liberation, he would have gone down in history as one of China’s most momentous leaders. Unfortunately, during the last part of his life, by stubbornly clinging to an outdated utopia, by becoming frozen in his own idiosyncracies and private visions, less and less attuned to the objective realities and needs of a new era, he became in fact a major obstacle to the development of the Chinese revolution.”78

Ceplair CS20.indb 169

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

5

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967) Fidel’s passion for Cuba and Guevara’s revolutionary ideas ignited each other like wildfire, in an intense flare of light. One was impulsive, the other thoughtful; one emotional and optimistic, the other cold and skeptical. One was attached only to Cuba; the other, linked to a framework of social and economic concepts. — Lucila Velázquez

Fidel and Che are two of the most elusive of the personalities discussed in this volume. Zhou Enlai surpasses them, but only because he chose to keep a low profile. Fidel and Che, however, both spoke and wrote voluminously. And yet both personalities are difficult to analyze, as is the particular nature of their relationship. We have all manner of descriptive phrases but little depth. This partnership banded together two men from different countries, who were together a relatively short time, Che departing voluntarily from the revolution he had helped make. Their closeness and mutual admiration and the lack of significant divergences between them was equaled only by Marx and Engels. In his 1965 farewell letter to Fidel, Che wrote of the “magnificent days” he had spent at Fidel’s side and his pride “of having followed you without hesitation, of having identified with your way of thinking and of seeing and appraising dangers and principles.” In his eulogy to Che, delivered on October 18, 1967, Fidel waxed even more eloquent: Tonight we are meeting to try to express, in some degree, our feelings toward one who was among the closest, among the most admired, among the most beloved, and, without a doubt, the most extraordinary of our revolutionary comrades.

170

Ceplair CS20.indb 170

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  171 Che’s extraordinary character was made up of virtues that are rarely found together. He stood out as an unsurpassed man of action, but Che was not only that—he was also a person of visionary intelligence and broad culture, a profound thinker. That is, the man of ideas and the man of action were combined within him.

Several years later, Fidel laid on more accolades: “He was, in addition, a person without any desire to exercise authority. He did not have the slightest ambition, he was not self-centered in any way. He was instead a person who became inhibited if anyone contradicted him.  .  .  . He thought of nothing but duty and sacrifice, with the most absolute purity and with the most complete selflessness.” And in one of his autobiographies, Fidel spoke of their personal relationship: “He was always very affectionate with me, very respectful; he always accepted my decisions. I didn’t impose them on him. I certainly never ‘pulled rank,’ as they say. . . . I admired him a great deal, and I loved him.1 The two were very different. Fidel was a pure Cuban nationalist, Che a dedicated internationalist. As Christopher Hitchens noted, “of mixed nationality to begin with, Guevara married a Peruvian woman and took Mexican citizenship for his children. He was awarded, and later renounced, Cuban nationality.” Jonathan M. Hansen and his colleagues offer a persuasive contrast: “Castro was loud, boisterous, extroverted, gregarious, Guevara quiet, reserved, judgmental, circumspect.” Prior to their meeting, Che had traveled extensively, while Fidel only left Cuba on two occasions. While Fidel was a master maneuverer and manipulator, keeping his cards very close to his vest, Che lacked diplomatic skills; he was a straight-ahead man, seemingly incapable of hiding his true feelings. The two were, Jon Lee Anderson writes, “natural opposites. At twenty-eight, Castro was a consummate political animal, overflowing in self-confidence.” His ego far surpassed those of his associates. He always had to be the leader. He was political to the core. He sought power. For Che, in comparison, “politics were a mechanism for social change, and it was social change, not power itself, that impelled him.” But they had, Che said in 1963, “a more or less vague idea of solving problems which we clearly saw affected the peasants who fought with us and the problems we saw in the lives of the workers.” When they first met, Che recalled: “I knew he was not a Communist but I believe I knew also that he would become a Communist, just as I knew then that I was not a Communist, but I also knew that I would become one within a short time and that the development of the Revolution

Ceplair CS20.indb 171

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

172  Revolutionary Pairs

would lead us all to Marxism-Leninism. I cannot say that it was a clear or conscious knowledge but it was an intuition.”2 Fidel was less theoretical and ideological and more a stylist. He was, that is, a “Fidelista,” which Maurice Halperin describes as “the product of shrewd calculation and reckless plunging, of a disarming informality and a compulsive idealism, of an impish sense of humor and a great reservoir of personal courage, of an intense patriotism and an irrepressible urge to make history, and above all of a supreme confidence in one’s own judgment.” He had one all-consuming vision: a sovereign and independent Cuba led by him. And he hated to lose. According to Gabriel García Marquez, “his attitude toward defeat, even in the minimal acts of daily life, seems to obey a private logic. He doesn’t even admit defeat, and he will not have a minute of peace as long as he is unable to invert the terms of the situation and convert defeat into a victory.” Fidel was unique among the successful revolutionaries discussed in this book: he ruled alone and directly, conversing with the Cuban people “in an incessant flow of extemporaneous and voluminous discourses.” Philip W. Bonsal, the last US ambassador to Cuba, noted: Castro’s major talent—and it is a major one indeed—is manifest in the dialogue he has carried on over the years with hundreds of thousands of Cubans. I use the word dialogue advisedly though only Castro speaks. His speeches represent a process, emotional much more than intellectual, in which his hearers participate. These speeches do not give the impression of having been prepared in any serious sense.  .  .  . Castro seems rather to be reacting emotionally and vocally to ideas, facts, and notions of facts in a process in which the minds and hearts of his hearers participate.

In fact, Fidel’s collected works are mainly his collected speeches.3 Che did not speak as frequently or as lengthily as Fidel, but he possessed a fiery intensity that held his audiences’ attention. They were charismatic revolutionaries, and they inspired mass devotion. Though they bonded like no other pair covered here save Marx and Engels, several observers noticed a tension between them. Bonsal concluded that their association “was not an easy one for either man; they shared a sense of continental mission that made Cuba a crowded spot when both were there.” Carlos Franqui thought Che’s influence on Fidel “was not real but merely potential” and that Fidel was uneasy with Che’s independent spirit.

Ceplair CS20.indb 172

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  173

Fidel thought Che was “ungovernable.”4 But together they led to victory the most unusual, unpredictable revolution in the twentieth century. It occurred in by far the smallest country, in size and population, of the countries under discussion, in the Western Hemisphere, 330 miles from the United States. It only required five years of preparation, and it lacked a well-organized political party and a coherent ideology. Its leaders were very young. And yet, its impact on the world was large, and Fidel made a virtue of its extemporaneous processes, telling a general meeting of intellectual and cultural people in Havana on June 30, 1961: “We are just like the revolution, that is, we have improvised quite a bit. This revolution has not had the period of preparation that other revolutions have had, and the leaders of this revolution have not had the intellectual maturity that other leaders of other revolutions have had.”5

Converging Paths Fidel Castro was born on August 13, 1926, the third child of the second marriage of a relatively well-to-do landowner who fathered seven children. The family lived in Oriente Province, in a Cuba dominated economically and militarily by the United States. He would, he later said, grow into the “direct philosophical and political heir” of Jose Martí, Cuba’s most celebrated freedom fighter. According to his own testimony, he was always violent, given to tantrums, devious, manipulative, and defiant of all authority. Tad Szulc has concluded that “his determination to excel and to distinguish himself knew no limits.” He expected to be the best at everything he attempted. He claimed that his social consciousness was born when he was young, when he studied and played with the children of the poor: “We lived among poor people . . . . They were my friends and comrades in everything.  .  .  . I didn’t belong to another social class.” Well educated, first at a Jesuit high school, he lacked interest in Cuban and world politics. He learned to shoot; he loved to hike in the mountains; he was an outstanding athlete. He claimed that he did not have a mentor, that he solved his problems and overcame his difficulties alone, via his trials, conflicts, and rebellions.6 He first began to question the Cuban society and economy following his enrollment in Havana University’s law school in October 1945: “I began to think of different forms for the organization of production and of property, although in a completely idealist way without any scientific basis. You might say that I had begun to transform myself into a kind of utopian socialist.” He plunged into politics and sought public exposure, but as a political loner, and

Ceplair CS20.indb 173

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

Fig. 5.1 Fidel Castro

Ceplair CS20.indb 174

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  175

he was not a great success, winning only one elective post. He later said: “My impetuosity and my determination to stand out led me to combat,” and “my frank character made me enter rapidly into conflict with the milieu, the venal authorities, the corruption, and the system of [student] bands that dominated the university environment.” When he became familiar with Marxist ideas during his third year, he concluded that Marx and Martí resembled each other greatly, and the revolutionary strategy he developed was a synthesis of Martí’s ideas and those of Marxism-Leninism. It meant carrying out “a deep social revolution—but gradually, by stages,” based on “the broad, rebellious, discontented masses.” Although The Manifesto of the Communist Party had opened Fidel’s eyes to the nature of human society, the historic process, and class divisions, he was not tempted to join the Cuban Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular), because, he said, “I understood that the Communist party was very isolated and that it was very difficult to forge ahead from the ranks of the Communist party with the revolutionary plan I had conceived. . . . I had to opt between turning into a disciplined Communist militant or building a revolutionary organization that could act under Cuban conditions.” He did, however, join the Anti-Imperialist League and the Committee for the Independence of Puerto Rico.7 On November 26, 1946, Fidel delivered his first significant political speech, in which he invoked Martí and called on the Cuban people to hold their government accountable to them. The following year, he cofounded the youth section of the newly formed Partido Ortodoxo, “orthodox” in its adherence to Martí’s principles. Within the party, Fidel created a group called the Orthodox Radical Action, dedicated to change via revolutionary rather than electoral means. That summer, he volunteered for an invasion of the Dominican Republic, to oust the Trujillo dictatorship. The volunteers trained for two months. When the invasion was cancelled, Castro’s battalion sailed anyway. The Cuban navy intercepted it, and Castro dived overboard and swam to safety.8 By 1948, he was obsessed with revolution and outspokenly anti-United States. In early April, he attended a congress of anti-imperialist student leaders in Bogotá, where he was the spokesman for the Cuban contingent. “I was,” he later said, “quixotic, romantic, a dreamer, with very little political know-how, but with a tremendous thirst for knowledge and a great impatience for action. . . . The dreams of Martí and Bolívar, as well as a kind of utopian socialism, were vaguely stirring with me.” When a student leader was assassinated, an urban revolt exploded. It lasted five days, and Fidel was in the heart of it.9

Ceplair CS20.indb 175

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

176  Revolutionary Pairs

After graduating Havana University in September 1950, with doctor of law, doctor of social sciences, and doctor of diplomatic law degrees, he wrote newspaper articles, delivered radio speeches, organized among the poor, and planned to run for congress. This last notion came to naught when Fulgencio Batista seized power on March 10, 1952. The coup changed everything for Fidel. “My idea then became, not to organize a movement, but to try to unite all the different forces against Batista.” Single-handedly, starting from zero, Castro “began to organize the first combatants, the first fighters—the first cells—within a few weeks. First, I tried to set up a small, mimeographed newspaper and some underground radio stations. . . . At the beginning, that movement had one professional cadre: me.” His ten original compadres recalled that he ran the movement “like a military organization,” exercising constant control over the members. In late 1952, convinced that the Cuban army must be destroyed to clear the ground for his revolution, he devised a plan to seize the Moncada army fortress, believing that it would spark a popular uprising in the eastern portion of Cuba. Fidel told his troops: “Comrades, tomorrow we may win or we may lose, but in the end this movement will triumph. If we win, tomorrow will fulfill what Martí aspired to. If we don’t, the gesture will have set an example for the people of Cuba.” The attack, which occurred on July 26, 1953, lasted less than two hours and was a colossal failure. He managed to escape and planned to set up guerrilla operations in the mountains, but he was soon captured.10 At his trial, he displayed at great length (four hours) his eloquence and loquacity. He labeled himself “a Cuban prisoner of war in the hands of an implacable dictatorship that abides by no code of law.” He considered his most important mission in this trial “to totally discredit the cowardly, malicious and treacherous lies that the regime has hurled against our fighters; to reveal with irrefutable evidence the horrible, repugnant crimes they had committed against the prisoners; and to show the nation and the world the infinite misfortune of the Cuban people who are suffering the cruelest, the most inhuman oppression in all their history.” His movement was a struggle on behalf of the oppressed Cuban people, “the vast unredeemed masses, those to whom everyone makes promises and who are deceived by all; . . . the people who yearn for a better, more dignified and more just nation.” When the movement succeeded, it would immediately cleanse “the different institutions of all venal and corrupt officials,” resolve the land problem, solve the housing problem, and undertake a thorough reform of the education system. He swore that his “voice will not be stilled—it will rise from my breast even

Ceplair CS20.indb 176

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  177

when I feel most alone, and my heart will give it all the fire that callous cowards deny it.” “Condemn me,” he told the court. “It does not matter. History will absolve me.”11 Sentenced to fifteen years on the Isle of Pines, Fidel grew in revolutionary fervor, and he read voluminously. In particular, he “studied Marxism with a dedication he did not exercise in his other readings.” He expressed admiration both for Maximilien Robespierre’s management of the reign of terror during the 1789 French Revolution and the New Deal reforms of former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also began to construct the nucleus of a new rebel army. He admonished his followers outside the prison walls to heighten their propaganda efforts, “because it is the heart of the struggle . . . is no longer concerned with setting up revolutionary cells so as to have a few more men available—that would be a fatal mistake. What we must do now is to get public opinion behind us, make our ideas known, and win the support of the masses.” As well, the veterans of the 26th of July must organize themselves “into an unbreakable front” and build a propaganda and organizational machine “strong enough to crush anyone who tries to form factions or cliques or schisms, rebels against the movement. Our platform should be comprehensive, concrete, and courageous in dealing with the serious social and economic problems facing our country, so that the masses will be offered a truly new and hopeful program.”12 After he received amnesty in March 1955, he issued a manifesto telling Cubans that his war of revolution was just beginning and created the 26th of July Movement. He then departed for Mexico, to organize and train his rebel force. He wrote to a friend: “All doors to a peaceful political struggle have been closed to me. Like Martí, I think the time has come to seize our rights instead of asking for them, to grab instead of beg for them. . . . There is no going back possible on this kind of journey, and if I return, it will be with tyranny beheaded at my feet.” Carlos Franqui, a major player during the revolution and its early years in power, who subsequently broke with the regime, referred to the 26th of July Movement as “a state of mind, amorphous and undefined. The people understood it in terms of entities and individuals.” As for Fidel, Franqui later said: “I kept wondering what Fidel was thinking. No one knew. . . . He never calls meetings to discuss what is to be done. He improvises and never shares power.” Franqui claimed that neither he nor anyone else knew Fidel’s real ideas, that he eschewed any kind of written program.13 In Mexico, Fidel was an exacting disciplinarian. He wrote to a colleague: “If our work is to succeed not a single cog of the organization must be allowed

Ceplair CS20.indb 177

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

178  Revolutionary Pairs

to slip, and the ways and means of communication, coordination, and replacement must improve day to day.” He professed “great faith, not religious but rational and logical faith, because in this time of tremendous confusion we are the only ones who have a line, a program, and a goal—and the will to carry them through or die in the effort!” But he warned: “We must impose absolute discipline now that we are the sole vanguard of the revolution; those who join us will have to respect our standards unconditionally.” He made it clear to all of his followers that the revolution “must have only one leader if it is to remain whole and not be defeated.” Alberto Bayo, who trained the volunteers, recalled his first meeting with Fidel: “The young man was telling me he expected to defeat Batista in a future landing that he planned to carry out with men ‘when I have them,’ and with vessels ‘when I have the money to buy them,’ because at the moment he was talking to me, he had neither a man nor a dollar.” Nevertheless, on August 8, 1955, Fidel issued “Manifesto No. 1 to the People of Cuba.” This open call for revolution listed a fifteen-point program, including land reform, workers’ rights, state-sponsored industrialization, housing, electricity, nationalization of public services, education reforms.14 At approximately that time, Fidel met Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Hilda Gadea, Che’s first wife, recalled that at their first meeting the two talked continually for ten hours. Che told her, after the meeting, that Fidel was “a great political leader in a new style, modest, who knew where he was going, master of great tenacity and firmness. . . . He will make the revolution. We agreed profoundly. . . . Only a person like him would I be disposed to help in everything.” Castro later said: “Che wasn’t Che then. He was Ernesto Guevara.” This Ernesto “had a gift for people. He was one of those people that everyone immediately cares about—it was his naturalness, his simplicity, his sense of comradeship and all his virtues.” He asked only one thing of Fidel: “When the Revolution triumphs in Cuba, you not forbid me, for reasons of state, from going to Argentina to make a revolution there.” “Agreed,” Fidel said to him, and there was no need for another word on the subject. They did not, Fidel claimed, discuss their respective political ideologies. Fidel acknowledged that Che possessed a greater revolutionary development, ideologically speaking: “From the theoretical point of view, he was more formed, he was a more advanced revolutionary.” They discussed the fight against Batista, the plan for landing in Cuba, and guerrilla warfare. “And in that situation it was Che Guevara’s combative temperament as a man of action that impelled him to join me in my fight.”15

Ceplair CS20.indb 178

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  179

Che Guevara came later to revolutionary activity than any of the others under discussion in this volume. He was born in 1928 and raised in a small resort town at the foot of Sierra Chica, in the north-central region of Argentina. His parents were members of the upper class but were increasingly cash poor. He was the oldest of five children, and he suffered all his life from asthma. He displayed a powerful determination to overcome it, engaging in a variety of physical activities. One of his closest friends at that time recalled: “In spite of his asthma, Ernesto was an athlete, a rugby player. While he was still very young, he was known for his courage and decisiveness. Sometimes he left the field to use his vaporizer. His asthma choked him.” He was also an avid reader. Though his parents were strong proponents of the Spanish popular front, anti-Nazi, and anti-Perónista (Juan Perón served as president of Argentina from 1946 to 1955), Che was politically disinterested. He later said: “I had no social preoccupations in my adolescence and had no participation in the political or student struggles in Argentina.” Instead, he wrote poetry, kept philosophical notebooks, and studied medicine. He very much admired Nehru’s The Discovery of India, and during the early 1950s, he developed a deep-seated hostility to the United States.16 After graduating high school, in 1946, he enrolled in the medical program at the University of Buenos Aires. He later wrote: “When I began to study medicine, the majority of the concepts I hold today as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideals.” In 1949, restless and seeking adventure, “particularly jaded with medical school, hospitals and exams,” he embarked on a motorcycle trip through northern Argentina. Two years later, he dropped out of school to go on a nine-month trip around South America with a close friend. Travel, he believed then, was his destiny. His record of the second trip should have been titled The Motorcycle and Hitchhiking Diaries, because he and his companion had to abandon the motorcycle partway into their journey. His political comments indicate that he had not matured in that regard, but he felt deeply the plight of the sulfur miners he encountered in Chile, who ruined their health “in search of a few meager crumbs that barely provide their subsistence. . . . One would do well not to forget the lesson taught by the graveyards of the mines, containing only a small share of the immense number of people devoured by cave-ins, silica and the hellish climate of the mountain.” He returned to school determined to become a doctor who served the poor. At the same time, his interest in Marxism deepened. After he received his medical degree in 1953, he joined two friends traveling to Guatemala to witness a leftist revolution. Along the way, he had

Ceplair CS20.indb 179

4/15/2020 9:15:04 PM

180  Revolutionary Pairs

Fig. 5.2 Che Guevara

a “revelation”: “I will be with the people, and I know it because I see it etched in the night that I, the eclectic dissector of doctrines and psychoanalyst of dogmas, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or trenches, will bathe my weapon in blood, and, mad with fury, will slit the throat of any enemy who falls into my hands.” During a short stop in Costa Rica, he met

Ceplair CS20.indb 180

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  181

two exiled Cuban survivors of the Moncada attack. In Guatemala City, fully expecting an attempt to overthrow the Jacobo Árbenz government, Che joined the health brigades, the youth brigades, and an armed militia organized by the Communist Youth. After the success of the US-planned invasion, Che took refuge in the Argentinian embassy. There, his closest affinity was with the Communists. Though he was already an ardent defender of the Soviet Union, he still had little knowledge of Marxism.17 When he was able to leave the embassy, he went to Mexico, arriving there in September 1954. There, he met more Cuban exiles, mainly nationalists, but a few undeclared Marxists, including Raúl Castro. The following summer, he met Fidel.

Bonding In his Reminiscences, Che noted that in the beginning, Fidel appeared to him “as an authentic leader of the leftist bourgeoisie, although his image is enhanced by personal qualities of extraordinary brilliance that set him above his class.” His best quality was his “personal attitude . . . toward the people he esteems.” That “is the key to the absolute devotion which is created around him; loyalty to the man, together with an attachment to principles make this Rebel Army an indivisible unit.” From the outset, he felt linked to the man “by a tie of romantic adventurous sympathy, and by the conviction that it would be worth dying on a foreign beach for such a pure ideal.” They differed only on one issue: Whereas Che had openly declared his Marxism-Leninism, Fidel continued to deny that he was a Communist. According to Franqui, “No one thought Fidel was a Communist. I mean no one.”18 Guerrilla training began in earnest in early 1956. Approximately sixty fighters concentrated on physical fitness and rifle training. While fully participating in the training exercise, where he received very high grades in marksmanship, Che intensified his study of economics. Some of the Cubans resented his nationality, but Fidel quelled that. Che wrote his parents: “My future is linked with that of the Cuban Revolution. I either triumph with it or die there.” Che did not play a significant role in the debates over strategy. Jorge Castañeda thinks that he “was fighting for an ideal of his own, and to be with Fidel, rather than for the Movement’s actual program or even the eventual transformation of Cuban society.” What the principal leaders lacked in coherence of viewpoint, they compensated with a powerful subjectivist mentality: “blind confidence in a rapid popular explosion, enthusiasm and faith in being

Ceplair CS20.indb 181

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

182  Revolutionary Pairs

able to destroy Batista’s might by a swift uprising combined with spontaneous revolutionary strikes, and the subsequent fall of the dictator.”19 On November 25, 1956, the yacht Granma, loaded with eighty-two men and many arms, left Mexico. The crossing was nightmarish, and after miscalculating the landing point, the fighters were forced to leave behind their heavy weapons and stores. With no food, minimal armament, and no contact with the movement, they headed for the Sierra Maestra. Of the original eighty-two, only twenty-one made it there. The basis of their recovery and ultimate victory “is the story of the extraordinary support” they received from the peasants. It is also the story of Fidel’s rigid discipline and his capacity for public relations. Hugh Thomas writes that Fidel, who had only a handful of followers at the beginning of 1957, had within weeks enthralled many thousands, who believed he could do no wrong. He operated as much as a politician seeking to influence public opinion as he did a guerrilla leader seeking territory. He had made himself “a battle standard of opposition, a point of reference around which the opposition in the rest of the country and in exile could rally.”20 Raúl Castro and Che quickly emerged as the principal leaders under Fidel. In Szulc’s estimation, though the brother was personally closer, “intellectually, it was Che who had the greatest kinship with Fidel, with his erudition, fine irony, and quick mind. Both were superb chess players and masters of the mental rapier.” At first, Che experienced frustration with Fidel’s leadership style. Unwilling to compromise his revolutionary principles, he tried to make himself the conscience of the revolution. He regularly challenged Fidel over ideological matters, criticized the moderate and constitutional elements of Fidel’s early public statements and denounced the “subjectivist mentality” of the early days of the invasion. Che was not as politically astute as Fidel, and he did not see, as Fidel did, that revolutions were not strictly rational affairs.21 Fidel had high regard for Che’s soldierly qualities. “When we were still a very small group, whenever a volunteer was needed for some job, the first to volunteer would always be ‘el Che.’ . . . I had to make an effort to save him, because if I’d let him do everything he wanted to do, he’d never have survived.” Che “was very daring. . . . Che was intrepid, but he also sometimes took too many risks. Che wouldn’t have come out of that war alive if some control hadn’t been put on his daring and his tendency towards foolhardiness.” Indeed, in January 1958, Fidel strictly forbade him “to assume the role of a combatant,” ordering him to concentrate on the indispensable task of leading the men well, because he was an “exemplary” leader, one who “had

Ceplair CS20.indb 182

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  183

great moral authority over his troops, great leadership . . . a model for the revolutionary man.” As the war proceeded, Che spent many months apart from Fidel, who gave him a free hand, providing he was careful. Che proved a decisive and skilled leader as well as a social engineer. In the areas his guerrillas controlled, he established schools; clinics; ovens; small workshops and hospitals; a newspaper, El Cubano Libre; and a radio station, Radio Rebelde.22 He was a demanding leader, one who pushed new recruits hard and punished cowards severely. There was, Anderson writes, “a Calvinistic zeal evident in Che’s persecution of those who had strayed from the ‘right path.’” Jorge Castañeda agreed: Che was intolerant of the weaknesses of those he commanded. When they committed errors, he scolded, insulted, and punished. And yet the soldiers he commanded respected him highly. One wrote: “He demanded more of himself, so he demanded more of them, too. Each sanction he meted out came with an explanation, a sermon about the importance of self-sacrifice, personal example, and social conscience. He wanted them to know why they were being punished, and how they could redeem themselves.” “Our situation was not,” Che wrote, “a happy one in those days. The column lacked cohesion. It had neither the spirit which comes from the experience of war nor a clear ideological consciousness. . . . The physical conditions of the struggle were very hard, but the spiritual conditions were even more so, and we lived with the feeling of being continually under siege.” In addition, his asthma regularly kept him from moving rapidly or, on occasion, even moving at all. He harbored also a complex about being a foreigner, and, for several months after he was promoted to comandante, he refrained from exerting his full authority with his new recruits.23 According to Franqui, Che “made himself into a guerrilla leader through force of will, talent, and sheer audacity. He made sick men with broken weapons into the second guerrilla force in the Sierra. He carried out the first raids into the lowlands. He created the first free zone in Hombrito and changed the war into one of positions instead of the nomadic guerrilla fighting of the earlier phase. . . . He raised the level of the war, even if it was all a bit premature.” And Castañeda remarked on Che’s “sense of order, his punctuality and formality, his respect for the rules, his insistence on honoring promises and commitments.” Che became Fidel’s “chief confidant as well as his de facto military chief of staff. When they were apart, he kept up a constant stream of notes to Che, confiding military plans, financial matters, political machinations, and, like an enthusiastic youth, recounting experiments with new weapons from the armory.” Though Fidel chastised Che on a few occasions, Che was

Ceplair CS20.indb 183

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

184  Revolutionary Pairs

regularly spared Fidel’s outbursts of rage, even when, on one occasion, he openly disagreed with one of Fidel’s plans of attack. 24 That said, Fidel clearly masterminded the movement. He ensured the success of the resistance by maintaining a near-obsessive control over troop and matériel movements and all major decisions and by never losing sight of the bigger political picture. He did most of the overall planning and maintained contact with the movement in the cities. Yet, he constantly downplayed his control. In one letter, he wrote: “I’m tired of having my feelings misinterpreted. I’m not meanly ambitious. I do not believe I am the boss, nor do I want to be, nor am I irreplaceable or infallible. All the honors and responsibilities don’t mean a thing to me.” In another letter, he complained: “I am the supposed leader of this Movement, and in the eyes of history I must take responsibility for the stupidity of others, and I am a shit who can decide on nothing at all. With the excuse of exposing caudillism, each one attempts more and more to do what he feels like doing.”25 The movement and Fidel received a huge publicity boost from Herbert Mathews, a New York Times reporter who visited the encampment in the early part of 1957 and wrote a lengthy, approving article for the newspaper. Mathews reported that the regime’s army was fighting losing battles and could not possibly hope to suppress the rebels. He waxed eloquently on Fidel: “This was quite a man—a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced, with a straggly beard.” His personality is “overwhelming, and he “is a great talker. His brown eyes flash; his intense face is pushed close to the listener and the whispering voice, as in a stage play, lends a vivid sense of drama.” (The group spoke in very low whispers, to avoid detection.) Che was not mentioned. In fact, only two other rebels were briefly noted. Finally, Mathews described the movement’s program as “vague and couched in generalities.”26 Clearly, Fidel was making tactical decisions on an ad hoc basis. As a result, he was more willing than Che to sign unity pacts if they had shortterm value to his movement and did not interfere with his control of it. For example, “The Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra,” published on July 12, 1957, called for a “politically militant but socially moderate coalition” to overthrow Batista and avoid alarming the United States. The Partido Socialista was not a signatory, though Fidel’s movement periodically worked with party members. When he first heard about the manifesto, Che thought Fidel had undergone a radical change in his basic ideas. “It had seemed impossible, and I later found out that it was—that is, that the intentions of someone who is an authentic leader and the sole motivating force of the Movement could be

Ceplair CS20.indb 184

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  185

altered that way and I thought things that I am ashamed of having thought.” At the same time, Che heartily approved Fidel’s rejection of the “Document of Unity of the Cuban Opposition to the Batista Government,” which called for the establishment of a provisional government, headed by Felipe Pazos, a cosigner of the Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra. In an open letter to the signers, Fidel criticized the manifesto and demanded sole authority to nominate the future president of Cuba and to maintain order after the overthrow of the Batista regime.27 They also persistently divided over Fidel’s refusal to acknowledge his growing connection with the Communists. Che, in contrast, openly proclaimed his Marxist ideas and welcomed Communists into his ranks. According to Castañeda, he considered himself “a communist with a small c,” one who supported the international struggle for socialism led by the Soviet Union. He did not identify as a Communist with a capital C—a member of the Cuban Partido Socialista, mainly because it did not support guerrilla warfare. Unlike Fidel and Raúl, Che had a very clear vision of what he wanted to achieve for the revolution: he wanted a socialist country, joined to the Soviet bloc, and clearly was a foe of United States imperialism. Fidel later said that during his years in the Sierra Maestra, he did not consider himself a Marxist-Leninist or a Communist. In a late 1957 letter, he wrote: “Because of my ideological background, I belong to those who believe that the solution of the world’s problems lies behind the so-called iron curtain, and I see this Movement as one of the many inspired by the bourgeoisie’s desire to free themselves from the economic chains of imperialism.” In May 1958, in his reply to the Venezuelan press, he wrote: “On the international level, I seek absolute sovereignty for the country . . . , solidarity with people oppressed by dictatorships or assault by powerful countries, and in the strengthening of our ties with our fellow Latin Americans. . . . I am an adherent of civilian rule.” In a May 1958 interview, he stated that his movement was democratic and denied he was a Communist or that he intended to socialize or nationalize industry. “That’s just a stupid fear people have about our revolution. From the first day of our struggle, we have declared that we favor the full application of the Constitution of 1940, whose bylaws establish guarantees, rights, and obligations for all elements that participate in production. This includes free enterprise and invested capital, as well as many other economic, civil, and political rights.”28 By late 1958, the rebel army consisted of about three thousand people, with maybe fifteen hundred to two thousand carrying arms. It had built a

Ceplair CS20.indb 185

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

186  Revolutionary Pairs

large administration for the control of the freed territories, consisting of a secretariat and subsections dealing with justice, health, education, and industry. But it lacked a coherent ideology. There have been many ex post facto attempts to endow Fidel and Che with such an ideology, but all of them are synthetic and unconvincing. They made it up as they went along—and in Fidel’s case never arrived at the destination. What Fidel considered an evolving process, others labeled tactical opportunism. Che downplayed the role of ideology in making the revolution. “One can,” he wrote in October 1960, “make a revolution if historical reality is interpreted correctly and if the forces involved are utilized correctly, even without knowing theory. . . . It is clear that if the leaders have adequate theoretical knowledge prior to taking action, many errors can be avoided, as long as the adopted theory corresponds to reality.” 29 Nevertheless, victory followed victory, the liberated territory expanded, and the Cuban army began to collapse. In August, following the failure of Batista’s major offensive against the insurrection, Fidel ordered Che and Camilo Cienfuegos to launch an offensive to cut the island in two and commence the march on Havana. Che’s mission was to leave the mountains, cross miles of enemy territory with a relatively small force, and coordinate with the other revolutionary organizations in the province. In the process, he disrupted the national elections, and his and Raúl’s columns advanced on Havana, while Fidel’s took Santiago de Cuba. But in an interesting decision, Fidel ordered that the column led by Camilo Cienfuegas should take the lead in the advance on Havana, backed by Che’s column. Castañeda thinks Fidel may have had three thoughts in mind when he made this decision: Che was a foreigner; Che would have gained even greater stature; Che had an agenda of his own. Prior to his decision about Havana, Fidel had expressed discontent with Che’s forging an alliance with the left-wing Student Directorate in Las Villas. “I don’t understand why we’re getting into the very same difficulty that I sent both you and Camilo there to resolve. Now it turns out that when we could finally overcome it, we’re only aggravating the situation.”30 On the eve of victory, Fidel proclaimed his faith in the people: “I have the greatest satisfaction in the knowledge that I believe so deeply in the people of Cuba, and in having inspired my compañeros with this same faith. This faith is more than faith—it is total confidence in our people. The same faith that we have in you is the faith we hope that you will always have in us.” Both men promised elections. Che told an Argentinian journalist: “We are democratic men, our movement is democratic, of liberal conscience, and interested in allAmerican cooperation. . . . Within a year and a half a political force will be

Ceplair CS20.indb 186

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  187

organized with the ideology of the 26 July Movement. Then there will be elections and the new party will compete with all these other democratic ones.” Fidel said elections would be held in a space of fifteen months, more or less, but there would be no need to elect a constituent assembly, because the constitution of 1940 simply needed to be adjusted. Nor need the people fear that the revolutionaries were trying to make the 26th of July Movement into a totalitarian party. A few weeks later, he said that the rebel army was the “vanguard of the Cuban people, . . . the primary instrument of struggle.” On January 21, he called the revolution a “people’s revolution.” Thomas classifies the Fidel of January 1959 as “a radical nationalist, willing or anxious to use ‘revolutionary’ methods to obtain his ends, but uncertain of the precise nature of those ends, of their practicality and of the wisest way of going about realizing them.”31 Neither man offered the outline of the new government. The only official position Fidel held was commander in chief of the rebel army, but it was clear he enjoyed a strong personal hold over the Cuban masses. Fidel claimed that he did not plan to occupy any government positions, but in the course of events, that is, within a few weeks of the victory, it turned out that he could not possibly stay out of office, “not because I didn’t want to or wasn’t inclined to,” he said disingenuously, “but because factors conspired to place me in a position where all problems came to rest upon me, inevitably, no matter how much I tried to evade responsibility.” This power, he said at the time, was not “one manufactured by a governing class which could unlawfully hold onto that power. This power was created from the very beginning for the sake of and in close relation with the great majority of the people. They are really the masters and creators of that power, as well as those who really constitute it.”32 Fidel was a new type of leader, in Theodore Draper’s phrase, “a caudillo with a need to justify his power ideologically.” Insofar as one can speak of “Castroism” or “Fidelismo” it is a mélange of elements. He was a man of action, not a thinker. He possessed “great gifts of popularization, demagogy, and dissimulation, with a contagious sense of mission and jefatura, with the physical attributes of a warrior-hero,” but, Draper added, he lacked political substance and stability. Maurice Halperin, who worked in the government for six years and became steadily disillusioned with the revolution, attributed a large part of the regime’s economic dysfunction to Fidel, who “carried the government right in his pocket, the whole government in his side pocket. He had his fingers in everything.” Probably paraphrasing what Halperin told him, his biographer writes that the system “often ignored Cuban realities in favor of theories that were devised for other conditions and that then pressed

Ceplair CS20.indb 187

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

188  Revolutionary Pairs

the logic of centralization to the absurd extreme of leaving virtually everything to the supreme leader.” In sum, Fidel had made an extreme leap from believing, accurately, that he had led the revolution, to believing that he was the revolution.33 The 26th of July Movement had a significant advantage over the other successful revolutionary groups discussed in this book: the revolutionary army had not fought an extended major war, with set-piece battles, nor a counterrevolutionary civil war, nor had there been a violent partition of the country. The movement took over an economy that had not been severely damaged. Granted, it was a one-crop economy, but it was a functioning onecrop economy. Rather than building on that, from the first day of victory, Fidel set out to destroy every vestige of the old social order, end Cuba’s underdeveloped condition, and transfer all effective power into his hands. To avoid awakening premature opposition and confrontation with the United States over charges of Communist influence, he deliberately gave Che and Raúl very low public profiles, and he established a hidden government, the Office of Revolutionary Plans and Coordination, to plan the socialist revolution. Behind the scenes, however, Raúl and Che worked secretly to cement ties with the Cuban Communist Party and to strengthen Fidel’s power base in the armed forces. Raúl sent a representative to Moscow to ask for Soviet assistance to consolidate his control of the military. Che directed the planning group’s secret discussions from Tarará, where he was recovering from his latest asthma attack. There, the members of the group created a secret police and sketched a plan for land reform, a new army, and sending revolutionary expeditions to other countries.34 When it came to getting things done, Fidel regularly turned to Che, whom he had appointed chief of the Department of Training of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and supreme prosecutor of the country’s “war criminals.” When the revolution needed a president for the Banco National, Fidel appointed Che. “What was needed at that moment,” Fidel said, “was a revolutionary. And because of our trust in Che’s talent, discipline, abilities and integrity, he was made director of the Banco National. . . . Whenever Che was given responsibilities, he discharged them extremely well. I’ve mentioned his determination, his will. Anything you gave him to do, he was capable of doing.” And he extolled Che’s later performance as minister of industry: “What a job he did—excellent! What discipline, what devotion, how studious he was, how self-sacrificing, how exemplary, how austere! Any job you gave him, he’d throw himself into body and soul.” But Che did not, as we

Ceplair CS20.indb 188

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  189

shall see, perform wonders. And he knew his shortcomings. In a televised speech a little over one year into the revolution, after his appointment as head of the national bank, he said he was simply “a military man of the people. . . . I do not pretend to be an economist. Like all revolutionary fighters, I am simply in this new trench where I have been assigned, and I have to worry, as few others do, about the fate of the national economy, since the future of the revolution depends on it.” (In fact, he and his aides ran into serious problems keeping the factories functioning.) The one office without portfolio he was most suited for was promoting regional revolutions. He summoned prospective revolutionaries from around the hemisphere seeking Cuban sponsorship for their own revolutions, and he helped establish a secret agency within the state security apparatus to lead the way in organizing, training, and assisting foreign guerilla ventures.35 According to Castañeda, the relationship between Fidel and Che grew closer during the opening months of the new regime. But, he adds, their styles were too dissimilar for them to avoid occasional friction. “Fidel talked incessantly, while Che was extremely reserved. Fidel was a politician who carefully calculated his myriad, oratorically torrential public declarations; Che expressed openly and publicly his sporadic utterances. Fidel lived in a continual, luxuriant chaos, while Che was highly organized, disciplined, and austere. Che believed in well-defined political goals; Fidel was always pondering his course and was able to adjust, qualify, or reverse it at a moment’s notice.” Carlos Franqui later said that it was clear to everyone that Fidel was “the undisputed caudillo of the revolution. . . . Power was concentrated in his hands.” The problem was that no one knew what he was thinking. “As far as ideology was concerned, nothing was clear, and Fidel was the greatest enigma of all.” He was an improviser, and he rarely told his compadres what he was thinking. 36 In his speeches and articles, Che never said a negative word about Fidel, and he defended Fidel against the caudillo charges. Fidel’s critics, he said, confuse “the great merits of the revolutionary leader and his undeniable talent of commanding, with an individual whose only concern was assuring the unconditional support of his followers and establishing a caudillo system.” And Che extolled Fidel’s bond with the people: “In the big public meetings, one can observe something like the dialogue of two tuning forks whose vibrations summon forth new vibrations each in the other. Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate in a dialogue of growing intensity which reaches its culminating point in an abrupt ending crowned by our victorious battle cry.”37

Ceplair CS20.indb 189

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

190  Revolutionary Pairs

But Che thought more deeply about the revolution and its aftermath than did Fidel. He believed strongly in the need to educate the Cuban people to be socialists. He wanted them to embrace the revolution, to make sacrifices for it, to respond to moral, not material, incentives. One of his major proposals was voluntary work, which he labeled “a school for communist consciousness.” He participated in it and advocated it tirelessly. It can become, he wrote, “a vehicle to foster ties and understanding between our administrative and manual workers, to pave the way toward a new stage of society where classes will not exist, and therefore where there can be no difference between a manual worker and an intellectual worker, between worker and peasant.” Though not an economist, Che attempted to craft an economic program that solved the problems of unemployment and underemployment via land reform and industrialization. To accomplish these goals, he urged Cuban workers to produce, save, and fully contribute to the revolution, the people, and the working class itself. The “new attitude toward work” he intended to inculcate required self-criticism and dialogue between the leaders and the masses about the experience of work under the new regime. He envisioned the Cuban worker as “in a certain sense, the vanguard of the world proletariat, part of a broad battlefield with many vanguard positions.” Work is the “daily battlefield,” and workers must be disciplined and make sacrifices. He told aspiring Young Communists that they “have to build a future in which work will be man’s greatest dignity, a social duty, a pleasure given to man, the most creative activity there is.” Without work, “there is nothing.” Without it, nothing can exist. The government of the revolution “intends to turn our country into one big school where study and success in one’s studies become a basic factor for bettering the individual, both economically and in his moral standing in society, to the extent of his abilities.” The reality was that neither the movement members nor the workers were disciplined at the outset, and the workers did not understand how the economic apparatus ought to function. Therefore, as Che reported, the revolutionaries “had to take drastic measures to definitively reestablish discipline and establish the principle of authority, of central responsibility in state administration.”38 Like Lenin, Trotsky, and Zhou, all builders of a highly centralized apparatus, Che was scathingly critical about the bureaucracy he had helped establish. When the rebels seized power, he later said, there were no cadres [people of ideological and administrative discipline, who know and practice democratic centralism and who know

Ceplair CS20.indb 190

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  191 how to overcome the contradictions in current methods] to carry out the enormous number of jobs that had to be filled in the state apparatus, in the political organization, and on the entire economic front. . . . We all performed our roles as well as we could, but not without problems and embarrassments. Many errors were committed in administrative areas on the central executive. Enormous mistakes were made by the new administrators of enterprise. . . . We also committed big and costly errors in the political apparatus.

Turning the critical spotlight on himself, he said, “We must never forget that the revolution’s economic management is responsible for the majority of bureaucratic ills.”39 Among the new government’s first items of business were arrests and retribution. By January 10, regular tribunals had been established, and within three weeks, more than 200 men had been shot. Fidel acknowledged that around 550 members of the old regime had been executed. Szulc assures his readers that these deaths bore no resemblance to the “bloodbaths” that followed the revolutions in Russia, India, and China. Radical measures followed in short order. On February 7, by vesting all legislative power in itself, the cabinet basically abrogated the constitution. Fidel was named prime minister, and he appointed Raúl as commander in chief of the armed forces. In March, rents were cut for those paying less than $100 a month; the National Savings and Housing Institute was granted immense powers over vacant lands; the government nationalized the telephone company; the property of former government personnel was confiscated. Fidel personally launched a large land distribution project in Pinar Del Río and announced that elections were going to be delayed for two years.40 And yet, when Fidel traveled to the United States in April, he behaved, in Halperin’s words, as “a paragon of moderation and good behavior.” He denied that the revolutionaries were Communists; he stated their opposition to dictatorships of any type; and he declared that Cuba would provide a haven and full moral support for Latin American exiles opposed to dictatorships but would not intervene in other Latin American countries. At a speech in New York’s Central Park, he stated: “Our revolution practices the democratic principle and is in favor of humanist democracy.” In early May, shortly after his return, he said that the revolution was “entirely democratic,” and he explicitly denied that he had anything to do with communism. He also directly countered several statements Che had made praising the Communists as revolutionaries,

Ceplair CS20.indb 191

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

192  Revolutionary Pairs

advocating diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and putting forward the notion of creating a militia of part-time soldiers to defend the revolution. Che was both humiliated and furious.41 Though Fidel publicly maintained his distance from the Partido Socialista, he quietly sought a tacit alliance with it, to “allow him to neutralize and incorporate any opposition from the left.” To him the Partido likely appeared to be among the few reliable and available groups, albeit only in the short term, because Fidel planned to dismantle it, create a new party, and declare it politically and ideologically independent from other national Communist parties. For the present, the movement’s “fairly small number of cadres” required Fidel to choose “an experienced member of the Communist Party when we had to designate someone for a political task that required a cadre who was absolutely trustworthy.” The party “provided cadres who were very useful.”42 One week after he returned from his trip—as part of his plan to establish a regime different from capitalism, “which kills by hunger,” and communism, which suppresses those liberties “so dear to man”—Fidel announced an agrarian reform law, to be implemented by the Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA), with himself as president. It immediately became the main agency of the new government: expropriating and redistributing land and organizing road-building, health, education, and housing. It also directly ran the farms taken from Batista and his supporters.43 That summer, following a series of bomb explosions in Havana, continued enmity from the United States, and murmurings of discontent from liberals in the government, Fidel began to criticize anticommunists and further radicalize the government. He began by forcing the resignation of President Manuel Urrutia. In September, several moderate cabinet members were dismissed. While these measures were being taken, Fidel, perhaps to sideline Che and his critical comments, sent him on a three-month trip (June–August) to visit Yugoslavia and countries in the Middle East and Asia, to advertise Cuba’s independence and revolutionary identity. During that trip, Che wrote to his mother: My old dream of visiting all countries is now coming true. . . . A sense of the big picture as opposed to the personal has been developing in me. I am still the same solitary person who continues to seek his path without any help, but now I have a sense of my historical duty. I have no house, wife, children, parents, or brothers; my friends are friends as

Ceplair CS20.indb 192

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  193 long as they think like me, politically, and yet I am happy, I feel important in life—not only a powerful inner strength, which I always felt, but also an ability to influence others and an absolutely fatalistic sense of my mission which frees me from all fear.

He told the Soviet ambassador in Japan that a rapprochement with the world’s Communist countries would have to be gradual, so as not to provide the revolution’s enemies a pretext to mobilize against a Communist threat in Cuba.44 On his return, apparently returned to Fidel’s good graces, Che was named head of INRA. As the US policy makers’ hostility grew, Fidel decided to challenge the beast in its lair. During a September 26 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, he spoke at length about US colonization of Cuba, accused the United States of favoring governments in Latin America based on force, and listed the huge social and economic problems faced by the Cuban revolution. What, he wondered, “has the revolutionary government done? What crime has been committed by the revolutionary government to warrant the treatment we have been given here? Why do we have such powerful enemies?” Why had the US government committed so many “unfriendly acts,” promoted and encouraged “subversion in our country,” and continued to maintain the naval base at Guantanamo? “It is a base that was imposed by force, that is directed against Cuba and its people, that is a constant threat and a constant cause of concern for our people.” The case of Cuba, he asserted, was the case of all underdeveloped nations and “an example of the problem of Latin America.”45 After his return to Cuba, realizing that the revolution needed Soviet aid and expertise, Fidel, began his turn toward the Soviet Union, carefully, in fits and starts. According to Franqui, production was falling rapidly and “the rebel army began to seize farms, to imprison landowners, and to kill off breeding bulls just for fun. A class war had begun in the countryside. On one side, the owners began to sabotage production, and on the other, the rebels disrupted what production there was.” A representative of the German Democratic Republic noted that the new government had alienated the middle layers, and Fidel was too often making decisions in a “partisan manner.” Aleksandr Alekseev, a Soviet foreign ministry official, posing as a journalist, arrived in Havana in autumn 1959. He met first with Che, whom he considered “almost a Communist.” The two found themselves in substantial agreement about the state of the world, and Che arranged for him to meet Fidel.

Ceplair CS20.indb 193

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

194  Revolutionary Pairs

Fidel and Alekseev agreed that Soviet deputy prime minister Anastas Mikoyan would soon visit Cuba. Alekseev credited Che with being “the principal architect of Soviet-Cuban economic cooperation.” In February 1960, the two countries signed an economic agreement, and commercial agreements with Yugoslavia and China quickly followed. The Cuban government, in turn, became increasingly authoritarian and more openly radical. It established the Asociación de América Latina Libre to disseminate revolutionary propaganda to Latin America.46 In March, Che gave a speech predicting an economic war with the United States. In April, following a bombing attack by Cubans flying US airplanes, Fidel ordered the arrest of anyone who could be counted as a supporter of an impending invasion. In May, following the opening of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, opposition newspapers were suppressed, and in the following weeks, the three largest foreign-owned oil refineries were nationalized, and Soviet advisors helped organize a secret police force. In July, Fidel traveled to the Soviet Union to receive a large package of military aid. The closer Cuba and the Soviet Union became, and the greater the assistance the latter offered, the more open Fidel became about declaring Cuba a socialist country. In the autumn, Committees for the Defense of the Revolution were created and tasked with capturing saboteurs and opposition groups. In December, twelve indoctrination schools of “revolutionary instruction” were established to train cadres for a united party. Communists were deeply involved in these new institutions, and Fidel explained that they were chosen over 26th of July veterans because they were completely trustworthy and experienced as a cadre. In the First Declaration of Havana, adopted by the National General Assembly of the Cuban People on September 2, 1960, the delegates welcomed “the unsolicited offer of the Soviet Union to aid Cuba if our country is attacked by imperialist military forces,” calling it a “clear act of solidarity . . . offered to Cuba in the face of an imminent attack by the Pentagon.” Though Cuba had made the decisive turn toward the Soviet Union, Thomas believes that there was “as yet no ideological identification between Castro and the Communists. The furthest that any of Castro’s friends had gone in this direction was Guevara’s argument that the Cuban revolutionaries were discovering Marxist laws by the practice of government: ‘We, practical revolutionaries, initiating our struggle, merely fulfil laws foreseen by Marx the scientist.’”47 Though Che always brought a clear goal and a disciplined method to his various tasks, he cannot be deemed a successful minister. He lacked knowledge of Cuba and the Cuban people, his Marxist economic ideas were rudi-

Ceplair CS20.indb 194

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  195

mentary, and his ideals and hopes consistently outpaced real conditions and possibilities. As well, in his greatest dream, exporting the revolution, he “wrongly extrapolated the supposed lessons of Cuba to other latitudes, and ignored one central point: what happens once can rarely be repeated.” In 1960, when he published, his manual on guerrilla warfare, in which he blazed a new, Cuban path to revolution, he angered the dogmatic Communists (most of them) around the world, and he also angered Fidel. In fact, when the preface was published in Revolución, early that year, Fidel telephoned the editor and demanded that he not print the rest of the document. Che accepted that decision, and the full text was not published until later that year. He stated up front that the Cuban revolution had “contributed three fundamental lessons to the conduct of revolutionary movements in America”: first, “popular forces can win a war against the army”; second, “it is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolutions exist; the insurrection can create them”; and third, “in underdeveloped America the countryside is the basic area for armed fighting.” In other words, a traditional Communist party was not necessary. The struggle “must begin in small conspiratorial movements of secret members acting without mass support or knowledge.” It starts, that is, “from a wellconsidered act of will.” Absolute secrecy is the primary element, followed closely by careful selection of the guerrilla band’s members. The guerrilla band “is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people,” and the guerrilla fighter “is a social reformer, who takes up arms in response to the angry protests of the people against their oppressors and fights “in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.” While they are fighting, the guerrilla band will be laying the foundation of the future social structure with changes in land ownership. But it must be well led, and Che extolled Fidel’s leadership: “It is to his vision that we owe our voyage, our struggle, and our victory.”48 In sum, Che placed enormous emphasis and hope on “the struggle,” assuring his readers that it would produce the necessary leaders and strategy. He was silent on the necessary conditions. During his visit to the Soviet Union in October 1960, Che’s economic naivety astounded his Russian hosts. Nikolai Leonov, a KGB officer who knew Che well, recalled that all the Soviet technicians opposed his plans to transform Cuba into an industrialized state: “They said it was economic folly, that there is no coal or iron ore in Cuba, that everything has to be shipped there and that makes iron production much more expensive. Besides, Cuba does not have a skilled labor force.” Che was unconvinced. He was completely focused on his goal, and he ignored the economic realities. Unsurprisingly,

Ceplair CS20.indb 195

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

196  Revolutionary Pairs

Che was dissatisfied with what he observed in the Soviet Union: “He was really indignant about the treatment that the elite received compared to the situation that he saw of the great mass of people.”49 In April 1961, in the midst of these sweeping changes, Cuban dissidents, sponsored by the US government, launched the Bay of Pigs invasion. As Halperin sees it, the invasion’s defeat had two significant consequences. First, Cuba’s international prestige skyrocketed. Second, the defeat “created the conditions leading to the kind of rapid and total restructuring of Cuban society which he [Fidel] himself had not anticipated.” Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali think the failed invasion ensured the growth of an internal security apparatus dominated by the Soviet Union. In the month following the failed invasion, twenty thousand people were arrested as counterrevolutionaries, and on May 1, Fidel unveiled his plan for a socialist constitution. It would not be “a bourgeois constitution, not a constitution corresponding to the rule of an exploiting class over other classes. What we need is a constitution corresponding to a new social system, one without the exploitation of one human being by another. That new social system is called socialism, and this constitution will therefore be a socialist constitution.” One month later, in a speech to intellectuals, he made the “revolution” the standard for what could be written or depicted in Cuba. He promised that the revolution would only oppose those writers, artists, and intellectuals “who are incorrigible reactionaries, who are incorrigible counter-revolutionaries.” It would create a space for artists and intellectuals “who are not genuine revolutionaries,” allowing them “the opportunity and freedom to express their creative spirit within the revolution.” But he drew a very clear line: “Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing. Against the revolution, nothing, because the revolution also has its rights, and the first right of the revolution is to exist, and no one can oppose the revolution’s right to exist.” A National Council of Culture was established to draw the necessary lines.50 In July, the 26th of July Movement merged with the Partido Socialista and the Revolutionary Student Directorate into a new party—Organizaciónes Revolucionarias Integradas (IRO). The following month, Che attended an economic conference of the Organization of American States, held at Punta del Este, convened to learn about the Kennedy administration’s Alliance for Progress. He sharply criticized the conference for being “conceived against Cuba, and because it has been conceived to counter the example that Cuba represents throughout Latin America.” He described the Cuban revolution as “an agrarian, anti-feudal, and

Ceplair CS20.indb 196

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  197

anti-imperialist revolution,” which, “under the imperatives of its internal evolution and of external aggressions became transformed into a socialist revolution,” and which “declares itself as such before all the Americas.” If, he warned, the alliance did not help the economies of the region grow, “a phenomenon called Castroism will come, which will be dreadful for the United States.” He assured the delegates that Cuba wanted to be a part of the Latin American family but that it cannot stop exporting its example, “because an example is something intangible that crosses borders. What we do guarantee is that we will not export revolution. We guarantee that not one rifle will be moved from Cuba.” He ended by declaring the Cuban revolution as “invincible.”51 At the behest of the United States, Cuba was expelled from the organization. On December 1, Fidel announced to the world: “I am a Marxist-Leninist and I shall be a Marxist-Leninist until the day I die.” Soviet leaders were surprised at the timing of Fidel’s announcement. The head of the KGB, for example, told the Soviet Communist Central Committee that Castro had proceeded “without sufficient preparation of the laboring classes, thus intensifying the class struggle in Cuba and alienating from the revolution a significant portion of the petty bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, the backward portions of the working class, and the peasantry, and also a series of Castro’s revolutionary fighters, who were not ideologically ready for these changes.”52 That same month, Cuba’s first five-year plan was published, the ministry of labor began to regulate workers and work conditions, and the educational system underwent a massive overhaul. However, the imposition of a total economic blockade by the United States put an immediate check on the projected year of economic planning. Fidel lashed out at the United States for its open and unbridled intervention “in the internal politics of the countries of Latin America” and called on the people of Latin America to raise the battle cry “for liberation from the most powerful world imperialist center, from the strongest force of world imperialism.” But his fiery words could not hide the impending economic disarray. Fidel admitted to Alekseev: “We are primarily responsible for the current economic difficulties. We have allowed agriculture to drift, and because of a lack of experienced cadres, we really can’t mount a distribution system for goods and necessities.” He was forced to institute rationing, even though he realized it would diminish the regime’s popularity, and he replaced Che as the head of INRA. Halperin, however, blames Fidel for the economic mess: Fidel exercised an “enormously disruptive” impact on the economy’s day-to-day functioning. Virtually no area of the economy was immune to his sudden interventions and unharmed by his short attention span. “Fidel’s

Ceplair CS20.indb 197

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

198  Revolutionary Pairs

compulsive urge for personal control of whatever undertaking struck his fancy, at any level that he chose, was not motivated by a mere lust for power but by the great mission which destiny had entrusted to him and the conviction that he was especially endowed with the wisdom for fulfilling the mission.” He was also part of the bureaucratic problem: his “disorganized work habits and monopoly of decision-making” affected all the lower layers.53 In March, Fidel was forced to tell the Cuban people that the country faced a food-supply crisis, and he announced a permanent system of national rationing. He blamed it on the US blockade, but Che pointed to the revolutionaries: “We made an absurd plan, disconnected from reality, with absurd goals, and with supplies that were totally a dream.” Fidel used the economic crisis to initiate his long-conceived plan to assert greater control via a new governing party. He accused the overly ambitious Aníbal Escalante, the Communist leader of the IRO; his followers; and his Soviet proponent, Ambassador Sergei Kudryatsev, of “sectarianism.” Fidel and Raúl took control of the ORI. By the standards of traditional purges in Communist countries, this one was controlled and bloodless, and many Communists retained their government positions. A few months later, the IRO was converted into the Partido Unido de la Revolución Socialista. It was not, as Halperin points out, the traditional type of ruling party that existed in other Communist states but, rather, a party that carried out Fidel’s policies. Sheldon B. Liss puts a different perspective on it, arguing that Fidel “came to understand the need for a party, which orients but does not govern on all levels. To him the Party exists to build revolutionary consciousness, to serve as a link to the masses, to propagate socialist education, to encourage people to work, and to supervise and defend the revolution.”54 Fidel then took another giant step, installing Soviet missiles in Cuba. He wanted to make it public, but Khrushchev refused to allow this. When the United States discovered the impending placement, a fuming Fidel was sidelined during the negotiations between Kennedy and Khrushchev. He became increasingly overwrought, and in a letter to Khrushchev, he seemed to be calling on the Soviets to launch a missile attack on the United States if it invaded Cuba. Russian leaders criticized Fidel’s behavior during the crisis as “shouting and unreasonable.” First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan advised the Kremlin to take into consideration Fidel’s extraordinary emotional and irrational nature and his sharp pride, characterizing his leadership as thoughtless and impressionistic. In his public remarks on the Missile Crisis, Fidel assured the Cuban people that despite the differences that had arisen between

Ceplair CS20.indb 198

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  199

Cuba and the USSR, “there will be no breach between the Soviet Union and Cuba.” A few years later, Fidel noted that the Cuban leadership had advocated keeping the missiles and was affronted by the manner in which Khrushchev conducted himself, but to have disagreed with Khrushchev’s decision to remove the missiles would have come “at the cost of a complete break with the Soviet Union, and that would have been really absurd on our part.”55 In the aftermath, Fidel moved closer to Che (and further from the Soviet Union and regional Communist parties) in his remarks about revolution in Latin America. He now strongly advocated armed struggle over peaceful transition, claiming that the objective conditions for revolution already existed in Latin America. All that was lacking to launch them was a subjective condition—the revolutionary will of Communist party leaders. But during a visit to the Soviet Union in April–May 1963, he was forced to retreat from that position. In a joint statement, the two parties agreed that “the question of the peaceful or non-peaceful road toward socialism in one country or another will be definitely decided by the struggling people themselves, according to the practical correlation of class forces and the degree of resistance of the exploiting classes to the socialist transformation of society.” In other words, the path to be chosen was the concern only of the people of each country.56 Che was not happy with that agreement, but for six months he endeavored to adhere to it, conceding that in special situations a peaceful transition might occur. But he did not stick to that position, telling an Italian newspaper correspondent in January 1964: “I maintain that the war of liberation will necessarily assume a violent form in almost every” Latin American country. “There is no better way. Violence is the only form in which their [the people’s] political will can manifest itself.” That September, following the electoral defeat of the Chilean popular front, Fidel swerved again, approving “the inevitable road of armed revolutionary struggle.”57

Divergence During those difficult years, Fidel seemed to be able to tolerate only Raúl and Che, and he regularly expressed concerns about Che’s health. By the end of 1963, however, he seemed to have decided that Che had become an impediment. The economy, over which Che had a powerful influence, was performing badly. In what Halperin labels “The Great Debate,” Che came off second best in a series of periodical articles about the best type of financial system for Cuba. Fidel remained aloof from the debate, but probably leaned toward

Ceplair CS20.indb 199

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

200  Revolutionary Pairs

Che’s opponents, who followed the Soviet model. In this episode, Halperin finds insight into the relationship between Fidel and Che. There was a genuine mutual admiration, but also an underlying tension between them. There was no question about Che’s complete loyalty to Fidel, but it was also common knowledge in higher government and party circles that Che was the only person in the ruling elite who in private discussion would dare challenge Fidel when he did not agree with his views. Being highly allergic to anything that smacked of criticism, particularly by his subordinates, Fidel considered Che to be “difficult”; and, of course, the feeling was mutual. . . . Che was at this time an asset that he would be loath to dispense with, nor could he easily find a formula by which this could be done without seriously damaging the image of the Cuban Revolution.58

A significant contributing factor to the divergence was Fidel’s installation of a Soviet-style bureaucracy in Cuba and his increasing closeness with, and dependence on, the Soviet Union, whose leaders were sharply critical of Che’s internationalism and his incessant calls for armed struggle. Che had been overseeing a campaign to recruit and train guerrillas from other Latin American countries, and he had tried and failed to launch an insurgency in Argentina. The Communist parties in the other Latin American countries were strongly opposed to guerrilla-type revolutions, and Soviet leaders tied future economic aid to the condition that Cuba cease supporting or instigating revolutions in the third world. Che’s speech, demanding that the Soviet Union should subsidize the underdeveloped world with interest-free loans, was not well received in Cuba. As a result, according to Anderson, by the summer of 1964 Che had resolved to leave Cuba and return to the revolutionary battlefield. He “remained convinced that in the long term, Cuba’s independence depended not on Soviet subsidies but on the success of the Latin American revolution.” Cuba’s political atmosphere was becoming claustrophobic. He had new enemies at home and abroad. In addition, Che’s new inclination toward the People’s Republic of China, currently in conflict with the Soviet Union, cast a further pall over his work in Cuba and his dealings with some of his closest comrades, such as Raúl Castro. His industrial policies were being openly challenged. He was uncomfortable with the emphasis on mass sugar production. He was Argentine. He was becoming aware of his age. And he was being pushed to the margins. During that year, Castañeda writes, Che

Ceplair CS20.indb 200

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  201

“lost both friends and battles” and discovered two indisputable facts about his role in the revolution: “One was that Castro held him very dear, indeed; he would back him in all his projects for Argentina, Algeria, Venezuela, and now Africa. . . . But Guevara also understood that Fidel, consummate politician that he was, did not really commit himself to Che’s stances. He had to wage his own battles, and suffer his own defeats. . . . Castro never extended Che Guevara his full consent. At times, he even sided with his opponents.”59 Whatever the factors, Che began his international odyssey, going first to the Congo. The war in Vietnam and US efforts to topple the Congo government had led Che and other Cuban leaders to think that in Africa they could attack US imperialism at its roots. They planned to construct a Third World alliance of all those opposed to US imperialism. In October 1964, a highlevel Cuban delegation attended a conference of nonaligned states in Cairo, where President Ben Bella of Algeria, who had received arms from Cuba, and President Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt announced that they would supply arms to the Congolese opponents of the new government. On December 11 of that year Che strongly urged the United Nations General Assembly to confront directly the imperialistic aggression of the United States and its empty talk of peaceful coexistence. It was not Cuba that intervened in the affairs of other countries, he declared, but the United States. Southeast Asia was an example of imperialism in action as was “the tragic case of the Congo.” He called on “free men throughout the world” to avenge the crime in the Congo. He concluded by proclaiming the advent of a new will of commitment in Latin America, “made manifest in the cry proclaimed daily by our masses as the irrefutable expression of their decision to fight and to paralyze the armed hand of the invader. It is a cry that has the understanding and support of all the peoples of the world and especially of the socialist camp, headed by the Soviet Union. That cry is: Patria o muerte!”60 Meanwhile, Fidel was brokering another compromise. He agreed that he would support the Moscow-oriented Communist parties of Latin America in their conflict with the Maoist factions in their respective countries in exchange for being given a free hand to aid guerrilla movements in several specified countries. He then sent Che on a tour of Africa, where he visited Algeria, Egypt, and the other states that were supporting the Congolese rebels. In February 1965, Che flew to Beijing. From there, he traveled back to Cairo, then to Tanzania, then back to Cairo. When he told Nasser that he planned to join the struggle in the Congo, Nasser warned him not to become “another Tarzan, a white man among black men, leading them and

Ceplair CS20.indb 201

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

202  Revolutionary Pairs

protecting them. . . . It can’t be done.” But Che was sure he had found his opportunity to build a new, Cuban-led international anti-imperialist alliance. He met with many African leaders, but he was disappointed in the revolutionaries he met, and the Congolese did not approve of his plans for a Cubanled grand foco in the eastern part of the country.61 In Algiers in February, he criticized the development efforts of the Socialist bloc. He spoke of the need for an alliance between the underdeveloped peoples and the socialist nations “against imperialism. The socialist countries must help pay for the development of countries now starting out on the road to liberation,” and the socialist countries must institute a change in consciousness, build “a new fraternal attitude toward humanity, both at an individual level, within the societies where socialism is being built or has been built, and on a world scale, with regard to all peoples suffering from imperialist oppression.” How, he asked, “can it be ‘mutually beneficial’ [for the Soviet Union] to sell at world market prices the raw materials that cost the underdeveloped countries immeasurable sweat and suffering, and [for the underdeveloped countries] to buy at world market prices the machinery produced in today’s big automated factories?” Socialist countries “have the moral duty to put an end to their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West.” That speech did not go down well in Moscow or Havana, and when Che returned to Havana in March 1965, Fidel and Raúl met him at the airport and subjected him to a forty-hour reprimand. Hurt and angry, Che withdrew completely from public view.62 He did, however, decide to head one of the training camps for 150 black Cubans that had been established while he was on his trip. His presence was to be a heavily guarded secret. A few months later, he wrote to his parents: “Nothing has changed in essence, except that I am much more aware, my Marxism has taken root and become purified. I believe in the armed struggle as the only solution for those peoples who fight to free themselves, and I am consistent with my beliefs. Many will call me an adventurer—and that I am, only, one of a different sort—one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.”63 The Congo venture, his attempt to Cubanize the Congolese, Che later wrote, was “a failure.” The Congolese rebels rejected his advice to train incountry by means of actual warfare, and none of the rebel leaders agreed with his statement that they “were talking not of a struggle with fixed frontiers, but of a war against the common enemy.” Nor could he overcome the divisions in the Congolese ranks. His powerful faith in a guerrilla struggle kept him going, but in the end, he had to admit, the Cubans failed. And he concluded:

Ceplair CS20.indb 202

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967)  203

“If the liberation struggle is to be successful in the present conditions in Africa, it is essential to bring some of the Marxist analytic schemes up to date.” Ten years later, Fidel authorized Gabriel García Marquez to write a sanitized version of Che’s Congo adventure, designed, according to Halperin, “to associate the image of the incorruptible Che with a military incursion of an entirely different order [Cuban intervention in the Angolan civil war] and thus bolster Castro’s claim that Cuban involvement in Africa had always been motivated by a high moral purpose.” Che had, Marquez concluded, “planted a seed that no one could uproot.”64 Following his withdrawal from the Congo, Che’s life turned dreary. He spent several months in a tiny room in the Cuban embassy in Dar es Salaam, trying to establish his next venture. Che wanted to leave immediately for Argentina, but Fidel, fearing he would be killed there, insisted he return to Havana. Che finally agreed to go to Prague to plan the next phase of his life. The months he spent there were, Castañeda writes, the worst of his life: “dark and solitary, permeated with uncertainty.” Meanwhile, Fidel was negotiating with various South American movements to accept Che’s services, to no avail. Finally, he negotiated an arrangement of sorts with the leader of the Bolivian Communist Party, but it seems that there was a mutual misunderstanding of what exactly had been agreed to. Che wanted to go immediately. “He was impatient,” Fidel said later. “What he proposed to do was very difficult. So then, because of our own experience, I told Che that better conditions could be created. We suggested that he needed more time, not to get impatient. . . . I did not want him to go to Bolivia to organize a tiny group, I wanted him to wait until a larger force had been organized.” He was a strategic leader; he should not have gone to Bolivia until a sufficiently solid, proven force had been established.65 Finally, begrudgingly, Che agreed to return to Havana. He arrived there in July 1966, where he was met by Raúl Castro and taken to a remote refuge. He plunged into planning for the Bolivian venture. Since there was no functioning guerrilla movement in place, Che had to find a means of initiating one. A training camp was established, and he handpicked the recruits. According to Castañeda’s sources, at their last meeting, in March 1966, Fidel was vehement and Che was sullen and withdrawn. Fidel tried to dissuade Che from embarking on the Bolivian venture, by listing all its shortcomings. “Both finally stood up, gave each other several slaps on the back: less than blows, more than a hug. . . . They sat down again for a long while, in silence. After a while, Fidel got up and left.” It is difficult to know exactly what Che

Ceplair CS20.indb 203

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

204  Revolutionary Pairs

was thinking or hoping. In any case, he had engaged himself and his Cuban contingent in a desperate gamble, and it failed miserably. He arrived in Bolivia in November. Several months later, he wrote his last significant message to world revolutionaries: “Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams.” In it, he basically declared war against the United States, the head of world imperialism, on behalf of the exploited peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. He urged them “to launch a constant and firm attack in all fronts” and to carry the war “into every corner the enemy is found,” and he called for the creation of a “proletarian internationalism.”66 In October 1967, Che was captured by Bolivian authorities and executed. When they learned about Che’s intervention, Soviet leaders became infuriated. They accused Fidel of having violated previous agreements regarding revolutionary adventurism in South America and of failing to consult with them first. The Cuban government replied that the Soviet Union was responsible for the weakening of revolutionary possibilities in the hemisphere. At the end of July, Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin arrived in Havana, where he was met with a frigid reception. Fidel did not greet him at the airport and only agreed to see him under enormous pressure from the Soviet embassy. This was no meeting of the minds, and, according to Castañeda, relations between the two countries continued to decline.67 In his eulogy, Fidel accurately captured Che’s legacy: “Che was an incomparable soldier. Che was an incomparable leader. Che was, from a military point of view, an extraordinarily capable person, extraordinarily courageous, extraordinarily combative. If, as a guerrilla, he had his Achilles’ heel, it was this excessively combative quality, his absolute contempt for danger.”68 Fidel remained in control of Cuba until his voluntary retirement in 2008. In the interim, the country became increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union and suffered greatly from its collapse. The economy never functioned according to plan, and the regime became increasingly oppressive. At the same time, the health and education of the Cuban people radically improved. Raúl Castro succeeded his brother, but his reforms have been minimal. The détente with the United States, orchestrated by Raúl and President Barack Obama has been reversed by President Donald Trump.

Ceplair CS20.indb 204

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Conclusion A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance. — Jawaharlal Nehru

For four of the pairs in this book, the moment in which one steps from the old to the new came in the form of a revolutionary regime. Two of the revolutions—in China and in Cuba—resulted from armed movements that toppled the old regimes. One—Russia’s—resulted from a mix of revolutionary crowds, a highly disciplined party apparatus, and a divided opposition. Another—in India—resulted from the pressing demands of the independence movement and the exhaustion of the colonial occupier. Marx and Engels never had their national revolutionary moment, but their work strongly influenced three of the national revolutions discussed here. Each of these pairs worked together and affected each other differently. Without Engels, Marx would have accomplished much less between 1850 and 1870. Indeed, it is difficult to see how he could have survived financially. Without Marx, Engels would probably have become a first-rate journalist but remained a second-rate thinker. What came to be labeled Marxism would not have been the same without the pairing. Lenin and Trotsky were the only pair to unite in what could be called a historical moment; the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 would not have occurred without them. Their fusion provoked a chain reaction that exploded on October 25. Without either one, the Provisional Government likely would have been overthrown by a sovietbacked socialist coalition, dominated by the Socialist Revolutionaries. Had there been no Nehru, Gandhi would have selected and curried another young member of Congress to be his front. Nehru was one among several bright young stars in Congress; he was not an indispensable element in Indian independence. It is difficult to imagine that the outcome would have been very

205

Ceplair CS20.indb 205

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

206  Revolutionary Pairs

different had he been on the sidelines. On the surface, Zhou seems completely dispensable; revolutionary events would have unfolded pretty much as they did had he been killed or imprisoned during the 1920s, 1930s, or 1940s—except that he was the one uniquely placed party leader who recognized and acted on Mao’s importance to the revolutionary process. Without Zhou’s intervention in 1935, Mao may have continued to be sidelined by the Comintern and his CCP opponents. Che’s importance is difficult to measure, given Castro’s charisma and organizational strengths. Castro’s movement would likely have succeeded even if Che had decided to practice medicine in Argentina. Given these very different examples, we see that pairs can be a necessary, but not a sufficient, cause of revolutions. In fact, we seem to have reached the end of the era of movements dominated by revolutionary personalities. The revolution Ruhollah Khomeini orchestrated and accomplished in Iran in 1979 was the last of this type. All the other post-Cuban revolutions have been sponsored by other regimes, as in Southeast Asia; came from military coups, those in sub-Saharan Africa; were spontaneous eruptions, in eastern Europe, Tunisia, and Egypt; or, as in the Soviet Union and Union of South Africa, resulted from unexpected radical change from within. We have, however, learned a very important lesson about twentiethcentury revolutions: personalities mattered. It is difficult to imagine any of the four post-Marx revolutions occurring without Lenin and Trotsky, Gandhi, Mao, and Castro. While it is abundantly clear that revolutionary personalities and their ideologies are key components of a successful revolution and the maintenance of postrevolutionary power, it is equally clear that the will energizing those revolutionary drives and ideologies is inadequate to provide the people with the outcomes the revolutionaries promised them. Of the eight successful revolutionaries examined here, only Nehru delivered an independent, democratic, reforming state, albeit one that fell far short of the social and economic ideals that Gandhi propounded. We have also learned much about the revolutionary personality and in doing so, have to a significant extent replicated aspects of the great-man theory of history. It is hardly a coherent school of thought, being primarily the works of four disparate thinkers—Georg Hegel, Thomas Carlyle, Georgi Plekhanov, and Sidney Hook—but, for my purposes, it is suggestive. According to Hegel, world-historical individuals are those whose own “particular purposes contain the substantial will of the World Spirit.” They, of course, are

Ceplair CS20.indb 206

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Conclusion 207

not conscious of promoting this spirit: “They are practical and political men. But at the same time they are thinkers with insight into what is needed and timely. They see the very truth of their age and their world.”1 It is worth noting that Trotsky hailed Lenin in a Hegelian manner, remarking on his “practical intervention in historic events on a world scale”; stating that he is “the epitome” of Russian history; and calling him “the embodiment of the courageous thought and revolutionary will of the proletariat.”2 Four years later, the British radical Thomas Carlyle, without precisely defining the term hero, delineated six categories of heroism and provided examples for each. For our purpose, his sixth type, “The Hero as King. Cromwell, Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism,” is relevant. For Carlyle, conventional revolutionaries, those who simply create disorder, are not heroes. The heroes are those who impose order, by subordinating the wills of others to their own.3 Our heroes, like Cromwell and Napoleon, both contributed to the old disorder and imposed a new order. The Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov offered a variation on the two above theories. His great men can considerably influence the fate of a society, but “the possibility of exercising this influence and its extent, are determined by the form of organization of society, by the relation of forces within it. The character of an individual is a ‘factor’ in social development only where, when, and to the extent that social relations permit it to be such.”4 Nevertheless, he posits a general trend or outcome that will occur whether or not a great individual appears. For example, he states, even if Maximilien Robespierre had been killed in January 1793, or if Napoleon had been killed at the Battle of Arcole in 1796, events in France and Europe would have taken the same course. That is, other, less great, individuals would have, in a lesser fashion, met the needs of the time. Given his animosity to Lenin and Trotsky, one wonders what he would have said about the October Revolution had he revised his text in 1918. Sidney Hook, a Marxist theoretician in the thirties who became a zealous anticommunist at the end of that decade, tacitly disagreed with Plekhanov’s last point. Hook defined the hero as “the individual to whom we can justly attribute preponderant influence in determining an issue or an event whose consequences would have been profoundly different if he had not acted as he did.” It is he who, whatever the social forces at work, whenever alternate types of action are open, will fill the need “to initiate, organize, and lead.” Hook examines the Russian Revolution as a test case and concludes that “without [Lenin] there would have been no October Revolution.”5

Ceplair CS20.indb 207

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

208  Revolutionary Pairs

The revolutionary personalities examined here are similar and great in the sense that they accomplished immense deeds, but they cannot be easily categorized or generalized. They are distinct, yet comparable because they share several traits:







1. They loom larger, during and after their lifetimes, than nonrevolutionary types. 2. They are dedicated to the point of fanaticism. 3. They are rarely pessimistic. (Lenin said in 1913: “At no turn of history do we get depressed.”6) 4. They are ascetic—save Engels during his Manchester years and Trotsky during his Vienna years. 5. They are capable of outstanding leadership and organizational feats, although their attitudes toward their revolutionary parties varied, ranging from Lenin’s belief that a highly organized and disciplined party was the sine qua non of revolutions to Gandhi’s that Congress was just a means to an end. 6. They are creative strategists and flexible tacticians. 7. They are compelling speakers or writers. 8. With the exception of Gandhi, they are very comfortable using violence as a political instrument for gaining and retaining power, and most are unmoved by mass deaths. They believe that the political struggle is violent but that the nature and extent of violence must be adjusted during the revolutionary process. However, as Faisal Devji has pointed out, Gandhi was tolerant of the violence elicited by his nonviolent strategy and the suffering it entailed. “Nonviolence, therefore, was meant not to provide some alternative to violence but instead to appropriate and, as the Mahatma often said, sublimate it.”7 9. They are fairly good at spotting historical forces, but they are not accurate predictors of revolutionary conjunctures. As Lenin noted in 1906, “nobody can predict the moment when the revolution will come to a head” or how events will unfold. And Trotsky stated: “Whether the future course of events would create the conditions for a complete victory of the proletariat could not, with absolute certainty, be foreseen.”8 Indeed, Marx and Engels repeatedly misjudged preconditions, Lenin and Trotsky did so in 1905, Gandhi and Nehru in 1939, Mao and Zhou during the 1930 and 1940s, and Castro at Moncada and with the Granma voyage. 10. All were ignorant of national economics and finances.

Ceplair CS20.indb 208

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Conclusion 209



11. No matter what they said prior to their revolutions, six of the personalities examined here proved incapable of progressing slowly and pragmatically toward their goals. (Gandhi died before an independent Indian state emerged, but it is inconceivable that he would have approved of Nehru’s state-building; Che clearly preferred toppling states to constructing them.) Faced with the revolutionary dynamic of rapid and forceful change and looming enemies, Lenin, Trotsky, Nehru, Mao, Zhou, and Castro become intoxicated with the narcotic of state coercion. Holding in their hands the all-powerful states they had fought and polemicized against for years, they quickly realized how useful it would be to maintain their grip on power and defeat the enemies of the revolution. Of course, the range of enemies broadened quickly to include anyone who did not fully agree with the victors’ programs and methods. Together, manifest hostility and the legitimate feeling of being besieged established in the minds of the revolutionaries the necessity of extreme measures to preserve the revolution. The Russians, Chinese, and Cubans were, of course, ideologically prepared to wield the revolutionary state in a coercive way, given their enforcement of party discipline during their years in the wilderness. Nehru is distinct. He was the unchallenged leader of a one-party state, but he did not use his political position to eliminate his opposition or undermine its democratic principles. 12. Charisma is an important but not essential component of the revolutionary personality. Trotsky’s flair with crowds played a significant role in the Bolshevik revolution; Gandhi’s saintliness rallied millions of Indians behind his efforts. Mao, Zhou, Castro, and Guevara did most of their revolutionary work in the provinces, so rallying urban populations did not figure in their successes. Mao’s charisma was based solely on his leadership of the revolution. And it was only after the Cuban revolutionaries assumed power that Castro’s and Guevara’s charisma as speakers played a significant role. They did not share one notable trait: they were not all nationalistic. Marx and Engels famously argued that the workers had no country, although Engels at least seemed partial to Prussian goals during the revolutions of 1848. Lenin and Trotsky did not wish to recreate the Russian Empire, and Lenin was willing to concede large portions of it. They promoted war as a means of spreading the revolution rather than of aggrandizing Russia. Gandhi and Nehru hoped to keep India intact, and Nehru used force to hold on to various parts of the newly independent country. Castro and Guevara only wanted to

Ceplair CS20.indb 209

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

210  Revolutionary Pairs

expand the revolution. Mao alone was nationalistic, intent on reestablishing the borders of the old Chinese empire. With the October 1950 invasion of Tibet, the Red Army had regained all but Taiwan and Hong Kong. Similar but different, then, these five pairs decisively shaped the modern revolutionary tradition. And they did so as complementary pairs; they were bonded by their goals, and they more or less agreed on their methods. Together they proved able to surmount the personal tensions of their relationships and transform them into positive revolutionary energy.

Ceplair CS20.indb 210

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to Anne Dotson for her dedication to getting this book published. I am also indebted to the two anonymous readers of the original manuscript for their constructive criticism. As always, the staff of the University Press of Kentucky has done a magnificent job. I particularly want to acknowledge the work of Hayward Wilkerson, the jacket designer. Finally, I wish to thank Erin Holman for her meticulous copy editing.

211

Ceplair CS20.indb 211

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Ceplair CS20.indb 212

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Notes Introduction 1. Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), xxii–xxiv. 2. Ibid., 27–42, 150, 192. 3. In Russia, there was a third significant, albeit, for most of the time, junior partner: Josef Stalin. In China there were three: Zhu De, Liu Shaoqi, and Lin Baio. Stalin was the same age as Trotsky (b. 1879), but he was subordinate to both Lenin and Trotsky during Lenin’s lifetime. Following Lenin’s death, however, he easily outmaneuvered Trotsky to assume full control of the party and the state. Of the Chinese junior partners, only Zhu did not seek to enhance his position. Liu and Lin did, and the former was ousted, while the latter died a mysterious death. 4. Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 14. 5. R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Committee of Public Safety during the Terror (London: Oxford University Press, 1941); Bertram Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (New York: Cooper Square, 1948). 6. E. Victor Wolfenstein, Revolutionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). 7. For example, see the distinctly different psychological analyses in Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York: John Day, 1956) and Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: Twenty-Eighth President of the United States: A Psychological Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). 8. Wolfenstein, Revolutionary Personality, 100. 9. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Norton, 1938). 10. Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1966); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). In his chapter on the Russian Revolution, Tilly briefly mentions Lenin three times and Trotsky once. European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993). For a 213

Ceplair CS20.indb 213

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

214  Notes to Pages 4–9 critique of the impersonal forces approach, see Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Terence Emmons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 302–16. 11. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelman, introduction to Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 2, 3, 7. 12. Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), xiv.

1. Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) The epigraph is from Friedrich Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy [1886],” Marx-Engels Collected Works, 50 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 26:382n1 (hereafter cited as CW ). 1. Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (London: George, Allen & Unwin, 1936), 231; Sozialdemokratische Monatsschrift, November 30, 1890, Engels to Becker, October 15, 1884, and Friedrich Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach,” all in Institut Marksizma-Leninizma, Reminiscences of Marx and Engels (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1970), 349, 188–89, 131–32; Tristram Hunt, The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Allen Lane, 2009), 7. 2. Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Marx, Engels and Politics,” in The History of Marxism: vol. 1, Marxism in Marx’s Day, ed. Eric J. Hobsbawm (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1982), 237. 3. Friedrich Lessner, in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, 153; P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade: Literary Memoirs, ed. Arthur P. Mendel and trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 167–68; Louis Menand, “He’s Back: Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today,” New Yorker, October 10, 2016, 92–93. 4. Lessner and George Harney, in Reminiscences, 153, 192–93; Annenkov, Extraordinary Decade,168. 5. Hunt, Frock-Coated Communist, 1. 6. Gareth Stedman Jones, “Engels and the History of Marxism,” in Hobsbawm, History of Marxism, 303; Mehring, Karl Marx, 233. 7. G. D. H. Cole, Socialist Thought: Marxism and Anarchism, 1850–1890 (London: Macmillan, 1954), 309–10. 8. “Confession,” in CW, 42:567–68, 43:541. 9. Arnold Ruge, quoted in Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections, ed. David McLellan (London: Macmillan, 1981), 8; Mehring, Karl Marx, 233. For a psychological discussion of Marx’s publishing history and unfinished manuscripts,

Ceplair CS20.indb 214

4/15/2020 9:15:05 PM

Notes to Pages 9–16 215 see Jerrold Seigel, Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 363–86. 10. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, 5th ed., ed. Henry Hart. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 31; Marx, “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession,” August 1835, and Marx to his father, November 10–11, 1837, both in CW, 1:8, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19. 11. Gustav Mevissen, quoted in Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections, 3, Moses Hess quoted in Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 14–15. 12. Marx, “Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung,” October 15, 1842, and Marx, “Debate on Liberty of the Press,” Rheinische Zeitung, May 12, 1842, Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” Rheinische Zeitung, October and November 1842, and “Communal Reform,” Rheinische Zeitung, November 8, 12, 13, 1842, all in CW, 1:220, 24, 31, 262, 273; Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 108; 13. Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 20; David McLellan, “The Materialistic Concept of History,” in Hobsbawm, History of Marxism, 31–32. 14. Marx to Ruge, March, May, September 1843, all in CW, 1:134, 137, 141, 142–43, 144. 15. Marx to Karl Ruge, printed in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February 1844, reprinted in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972), 7–10; Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law [Right],” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbüche, February 1844, in CW, 1:182, 186. 16. Jones, “Engels and the History of Marxism,” 301; McLellan, “Materialistic Concept of History,” 38; David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (New York: Praeger, 1969), 30–31; Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton, Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983), 23. 17. Hunt, Frock-Coated Communist, 77, 92–95. 18. Engels, “Letters from London,” Schweizerischer Republikaner, May 16, 1843, and Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” New Moral World, November 4, 1843, both in CW, 1:380, 392; O. W. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels, 2 vols. (London: Cass, 1976), 1:26. 19. Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1844, in CW, 1:418, 419, 423, 424, 431, 435, 443. 20. Jones, Karl Marx, 182, 186; Carver, Marx and Engels, 32, 36, 41. 21. Engels to Marx, October 1844, in CW, 38:6; Engels, “History of the Communist League,” in Birth of the Communist Manifesto, ed. Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 156; Berlin, Karl Marx, 95–96.

Ceplair CS20.indb 215

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

216  Notes to Pages 16–24 22. Engels to Marx, November 19, 1844, February 8, 15, 1845, all in CW, 38:10, 40:248, 255, 257, 262, 263. 23. Marx to Nikolai Danielson, October 7, 1868, Engels to Marx, January 20, February 22–March 7, 1845, all in CW, 43:123, 38:18, 25. 24. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company, in CW, 4:7, 8, 36–37, 53. 25. Engels to Marx, March 17, 1845, in CW, 38:28. 26. Marx, unpublished review of Friedrich List, Das Nationale System der Politischen Ökonomie, in CW, 4:280. 27. Mehring, Karl Marx, 107; Friedrich Engels, Condition of the Working Classes in England, in CW, 4:302–3, 322–23, 581–82. 28. “History of the Communist League,” 156; Jones, Karl Marx, 191, 193. 29. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in Marx-Engels Reader, 107–9. 30. Carver, Marx and Engels, 68; Marx, preface, 21; Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, Marx and Engel’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach Chapter” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1, 2, 29, 30; Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2, 79, 140–41. 31. Marx and Engels, German Ideology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 29, 30, 36. 32. Ibid., 34, 42, 43, 44, 47, 52–53, 57, 60, 65. 33. Marx, Karl Vogt, in Birth of the Communist Manifesto, 149; Hunt, FrockCoated Communist, 135. 34. Birth of the Communist Manifesto, 54; Annenkov, Extraordinary Decade, 169. 35. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, in CW, 4:23–54. 36. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in CW, 6:212. 37. Marx, Karl Vogt, 149. 38. Ibid., 160. 39. Engels, “Catechism”; Struik, Birth of the Communist Manifesto, 58–61; McLellan, Karl Marx, 166–77, 179–80. 40. “Principles of Communism,” in Birth of the Communist Manifesto, 169–89. 41. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Birth of the Communist Manifesto, 87–125; Jürgen Herres, “Rhineland Radicals and the ’48ers,” in The Cambridge Companion to The Communist Manifesto, ed. Terrell Carver and James Farr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 27. 42. Marx and Engels, “On Poland,” November 9, 1847, Engels, “The Movements of 1847,” Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, January 23, 1848, Engels, “Revolution in Paris,” Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, February 27, 1848, all in CW, 6:388–90, 527–28, 558.

Ceplair CS20.indb 216

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 25–32 217 43. Marx and Engels, “The Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,” in CW, 7:3–4. 44. Engels, “Programmes of the Radical-Democratic Party and of the Left at Frankfurt,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, June 7, 1848, in CW, 7:51. 45. Carl Schurz, quoted in Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections, 15. 46. Arthur Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism: A Contribution to the Political History of the Past 150 Years, trans. George Rosen (New York: Knopf, 1939), 112–13; Marx, “The June Revolution,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, June 28, 1848, Engels, “The Uprising in Frankfurt, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, September 20–21, 1848, both in CW, 7:144, 444. 47. Marx, “Statement,” April 14, 1849; Marx, “Wage, Labour and Capital,” April 5 and 11, 1849, all in CW, 9:282, 197, 198, 228. 48. Editorial Board of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, “To the Working Class of Cologne,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May 19, 1849, in CW, 9:467. 49. Engels, “Elberfeld,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May 17, 1849, in CW, 9:449; Martin Berger, Engels, Armies, and Revolution: The Revolutionary Tactics of Classical Marxism (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 32–33, 35–37; Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York: Liveright, 2013), 228; Hunt, Frock-Coated Communist, 179. 50. Marx to Engels, ca. early November 1848, ca. late July 1849, both in CW, 38:179, 207. 51. Marx and Engels, “Announcement of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politische-Ökonomische Revue,” December 15, 1849, in CW, 10:5. 52. Marx and Engels, “Address of the Central Authority of the League,” March 24, 1850 and June 1850, 10:277–83, 371. 53. Quoted in Mehring, Karl Marx, 206. 54. Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, 134–42. 55. Jones, Karl Marx, 302. 56. Marx, Class Struggles in France (1848–1850) (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 33, 42–43. 57. Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, first published in New-York Daily Tribune, October 1851–October 1852, in CW, 11:68, 85–86, 88. 58. Marx, The Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Marx-Engels Reader, 442–43, 456, 512–13. 59. Quoted in Cole, Socialist Thought, 2, 11–12, 15, 71; George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1965), 135, 139. 60. Quoted in Berlin, Karl Marx, 180. 61. Hunt, Frock-Coated Communist, 182–83, 195, 206. 62. Berger, Engels, Armies, and Revolution, 46, 49, 50, 86–88, 127. 63. Engels to Marx, February 13, 1851, in CW, 38:289; Mehring, Karl Marx, 235.

Ceplair CS20.indb 217

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

218  Notes to Pages 33–39 64. Marx to Engels, August 8, 1851, Engels to Marx, August 11, 1851, both in CW, 38:409, 419; Sperber, Karl Marx, 294–95, 302. 65. Marx to Engels, October 25, 1851, Marx to Engels, November 24, 1851, Engels to Marx, November 27, 1851, all in CW, 38:485, 490, 494. 66. Marx to Engels, February 18, 1852, Engels to Marx, October 18, 1852, both in CW, 39:37, 212; Seigel, Marx’s Fate, 258–59. 67. Engels to Marx, April 20, 1852, Marx to Engels, March 30, April 6, 12, 1855, all in CW, 39:81, 530, 533. 68. Marx to Engels, April 30, 1852, Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath, February 29, 1860, both in CW, 39:93; 41:81, 84. 69. Engels to Marx, January 22, 1857, Marx to Engels, March 24, 1857, both in CW, 40:96–97, 111. 70. Marx to Engels, July 15, 1858, Engels to Marx, July 16, 1858, Marx to Engels, August 8, 1858, all in CW, 40:328–31, 331–33, 335. 71. Engels, review of Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Das Volk, August 6, 20, 1859, reprinted in Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 218–27. 72. Sperber, Karl Marx, 339, 341–45, 354; Lichtheim, Marxism, 93, 95; Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, 159. 73. Stephan Born reported that Jenny Marx “declined in the most rigorous manner to make the acquaintance” of Mary Burns, quoted in Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), 209; Engels to Marx, January 7, 1863, Marx to Engels, January 8, 1863, both in CW, 41:441, 442–43. 74. Engels to Marx, January 13, 1863, Marx to Engels, January 24, 1863, Engels to Marx, January 26, 1863, all in CW, 41:443, 444–45, 446–47. 75. Marx to Engels, January 28, 1863, in CW, 41:448–49. When Engels began a relationship with Mary’s sister, Lizzie, the Marxes, perhaps having learned a lesson in courtesy, proved much more amenable and gracious. Sperber, Karl Marx, 482. 76. Marx to Engels, January 11, 1860, November 4, 1864, both in CW, 41:4, 42:17–18; Cole, Socialist Thought, 88, 92. 77. Marx, “Address of the Working Men’s International,” October 1864, in Marx-Engels Reader, 379–81. 78. Marx to Engels, November 4, 1864, in CW, 42:17–18. 79. Marx to Weydeymeyer, November 29, 1864, Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, November 29, 1864, both in CW, 42:44, 45; Jones, Karl Marx, 467–68. 80. Engels to Marx, November 7, 1864, April 12, May 12, 1865, all in CW, 42:20, 141, 156. 81. Marx to Engels, December 10, 1864, February 3, 1865, Engels to Marx, February 5, 1865, all in CW, 42:55, 75, 77.

Ceplair CS20.indb 218

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 39–45 219 82. Marx to Engels, July 31, 1865, Marx to Kugelmann, November 8, 1866, both in CW, 42:172, 330. 83. Marx to Engels, December 26, 1865, May 7, 1867, Marx to Engels, June 22, 1867, in CW, 42:206–7, 371, 383. 84. Engels to Friedrich Lessner, April 4, 1869, in CW, 43:252. 85. Marx to Engels, September 11, 1867, in CW, 42:424. 86. Engels to Marx, November 29, 1868, Marx to Engels, November 30, 1868, Engels to Marx, July 1, 1869, Marx to Engels, September 10, 1870, all in CW, 43:169–71, 299, 44:69; Hunt, Frock-Coated Communist, 259; Henderson, Life of Friedrich Engels, 2:520, 529; 87. Marx to Engels, July 20, 1870, in CW, 44:3–4; Sperber, Karl Marx, 375. 88. Marx and Engels, letter to the Committee of the Social-Democratic Party, late August 1870, in CW, 22:261–62. 89. Marx, “Second Address to the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War,” September 9, 1870, Marx to Kugelmann, December 13, 1870, both in CW, 22:269–70, 44:93. 90. Marx to Kugelmann, April 12, 17, 1871, Marx, The Civil War in France, Marx to F. Domela-Nieuwenhuis, February 22, 1881, all in CW, 44:131–32, 37, 22:322, 323, 328, 330–31, 333, 339; 46:66. 91. Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, 204–5; Berlin, Karl Marx, 242–43. 92. Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, 206. 93. Marx and Engels, Resolutions of the Conference of Delegates of the International Working Men’s Association, September 1871, “Record of Marx’s Speech on the Political Action of the Working Class,” September 20, 1871, in CW, 22:427, 617; remarks on England, quoted in Henderson, Life of Friedrich Engels, 2:502. 94. Marx and Engels, Fictitious Splits in the International, January–March 1872, in CW, 23:106–7. 95. Marx to Paul Lafargue, March 21, 1872, Marx to César de Paepe, May 28, 1872, Marx to Kugelmann, July 29, 1872, all in CW, 44:346–47, 387, 44:413. 96. Proposal on the Transfer of the Seat and on the Composition of the General Council for 1872–1873, September 6, 1972, Resolution of the General Council Held at The Hague, September 2–7, 1872, both in in CW, 23:240, 243. 97. Engels quoted in Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement: Years of the First International (London: Macmillan, 1965), 281; Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, May 1875, quoted in MarxEngels Reader, 391. 98. Jones, Karl Marx, 540; Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, in MarxEngels Reader, 395. 99. Marx and Engels, Circular Letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke, and others, September 17–18, 1879, in Marx-Engels Reader, 405.

Ceplair CS20.indb 219

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

220  Notes to Pages 45–52 100. Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels: Classical Marxism, 1850–1895 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), 9, 122– 28; Jones, “Engels and the History of Marxism,” 293. 101. Engels, preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, Birth of the Communist Manifesto, 132. 102. Engels, remarks at Marx’s funeral, and Der Sozialdemokrat, March 22, 1883, both in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, 343, 349. 103. Hunt, Frock-Coated Communist, 13; A. Voden, “Talks with Engels,” in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, 330. 104. Cole, Socialist Thought, 303, 311; Jones, Karl Marx, 565–68; Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1978), 181; Lichtheim, Marxism, 235–37, 245–47; see also Berlin, Karl Marx, 250. 105. George Bernard Shaw, preface to the German edition of “The Perfect Wagnerite,” quoted in Fintan O’Toole, Judging Shaw: The Radicalism of GBS (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2017), 207; Jones, “Engels and the History of Marxism,” 292; Gregory Elliott, Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson (London: Pluto Press; Toronto: Between the Lines, 2008), 28; Hobsbawm, preface, History of Marxism, xxi–xxii; David McLellan, “Materialistic Concept of History,” 37; Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 33, 41–42; Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, 225.

2. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) and Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940) The epigraph is from Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, trans. Isotta Cesari (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 119. 1. Lenin, letter to the Congress, December 22, 1922, Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 36:594–95 (hereafter cited as CW ). 2. Trotsky, “The True and the False,” Pravda, October, 7, 1924, in Lenin: Notes for a Biographer, ed. Bertram D. Wolfe, trans. Tamara Deutscher (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 7, 166–69; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Max Eastman, 3 vols. in 1 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 1:324, 326, 329. 3. Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, trans. Michael Glenny (London: Allan Lane, 1967), 66–67. 4. Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 142; Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), 452, 501, 506; Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, 2, 4, 5, 122–23. 5. Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 44, 62, 66.

Ceplair CS20.indb 220

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 52–61 221 6. Max Eastman, Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth (New York: Greenberg, 1925), 165–66. 7. Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 67–69. 8. Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought: vol. 1 of 2, Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1981), 49–50, 113, 131. 9. Ibid., 107, 139, 144. 10. Lenin, “Where to Begin,” quoted in Jonathan Frankel, introduction to Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism, 1895–1903, ed. Jonathan Frankel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 50; Lenin, What Is to Be Done? trans. S. V. Utechin and Patricia Utechin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 126, 132, 162, 175, 185. 11. Quoted in Service, Lenin, 105; quoted in Bertram Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (New York: Stein & Day, 1984), 229. 12. Quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography, ed. and trans. Harold Shukman (New York: Free Press, 1994), 81; Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 39; Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, 2; N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917, ed. and trans. Joel Carmichael (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 290; Stalin quoted in Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (New York: Penguin, 2014), 81. 13. Quoted in Volkogonov, Lenin, 81; Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, 7, 96–97, 120; Richard Pipes, introduction to The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, ed. Richard Pipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 11. 14. Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (New York, Pathfinder, 1970), 142. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 155. 17. Ibid., 153. 18. Ibid., 146; Trotsky, “Lenin and the Old Iskra,” March 5, 1924, in Lenin, 41, 46, 71. 19. Adam Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 188–89. 20. Lenin, “Draft Rules of the R. S. D. L. P.,” Lenin, “Account of Second Congress of R. S. D. L. P.,” Lenin, “Second Speech in the Discussion on the Party Rules,” August 2 (15), all in CW, 5:474, 6:27, 5:500. For Lenin’s detailed analysis of the Congress, placing the blame for the split on Martov, see One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in Our Party), also in CW, 6:201–423. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 241. 21. Trotsky, My Life, 157, 161, 162; Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 244. 22. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 75–83, 93, 97; Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 253; Lenin, “Second Speech,” in CW, 5:500; Trotsky, My Life, 164. 23. Lenin to A. N. Potresov, September 13, 1903, in CW, 34:164, 166.

Ceplair CS20.indb 221

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

222  Notes to Pages 61–67 24. Nikolai Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin, trans. Paul Osta and Brian Pearce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 104, 111. 25. Trotsky, “The Proletariat and the Revolution,” in Our Revolution: Essays on Working-Class and International Revolution, 1904–1917, ed. and trans. Moissaye J. Olgin (Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1973), 30, 39, 41–42, 43. 26. Trotsky, My Life, 167; Trotsky, “The Events in Petersburg,” in Olgin, Our Revolution, 57–58, 60, 61. 27. Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 183, 184, 187, 190, 219. 28. Ibid., 219–20; Trotsky, My Life, 184; Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 126, 131, 137; Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 60–61, 65. 29. Ulam, Bolsheviks, 219, 227; Lenin, “Tasks of Revolutionary Army Contingents,” October 1905, in CW, 9:420–24; Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 287. 30. Lenin, “Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies,” November 2–4, 1905, in CW, 10:15, 21–23; Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 290–92. 31. Trotsky, 1905, trans. Anya Bostock (New York: Random House, 1971), 104–5, 314–15. 32. Lenin, “The Reorganisation of the Party,” Novaya Zhizn, November 1905, in CW, 10:30; Ascher, Revolution of 1905, 289–90; Service, Lenin, 176; Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 45; Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 92. 33. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 323; Ascher, Revolution of 1905, 285–87. 34. Ascher, Revolution of 1905, 300–301. 35. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 333; Trotsky, My Life, 200. 36. Trotsky, “Prospects of a Labor Dictatorship,” in Our Revolution, 84, 85, 92, 98, 111, 135, 136–37. 37. Trotsky, “The Soviet of 1905 and the Revolution (Fifty Days),” in Our Revolution, 152, 155, 157–59, 160–61. 38. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 177; Ulam, Bolsheviks, 248. 39. Ulam, Bolsheviks, 236, 253–54; Lenin’s Speech for the Defence (or for the Prosecution of the Menshevik Section of the Central Committee) Delivered at the Party Trial, February 1907, in Selected Works, 3 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 3:491. 40. Lenin to Maxim Gorky, February 13, 1908, in CW, 34:385–86; Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 84; Ulam, Bolsheviks, 270. As of spring 1907, the Bolsheviks claimed to have fifty-eight thousand members, while the Mensheviks had about forty-five thousand. But by the following year, due to severe governmental measures, the total number of RSDLP organizations fell from 260 to 109. S. A. Smith, Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 73, 74.

Ceplair CS20.indb 222

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 67–74 223 41. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 491. 42. Lenin to Maxim Gorky, February 13, 1908, Lenin to G. Y. Zinoviev, August 24, 1909, Lenin to Maxim Gorky, April 11, 1910, Lenin to G. L. Shklovsky, October 14, 1910, all in CW, 34:385–86, 399, 422, 430; Lenin, “Notes of a Publicist,” May 1910, in Selected Works, 4:39–40, 42–43, 47. 43. N. K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), 211, 330; Service, Lenin, 207. 44. Lenin, “The State of Affairs in the Party,” July 1991, in CW, 36:181, 184; Service, Trotsky, 120, 129. 45. Ulam, Bolsheviks, 283; Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 489, 532, 533. 46. Lenin, “Violation of Unity under Cover of Cries for Unity,” May 1914, in Selected Works, 4:188, 192, 206–8. Seven years later, Trotsky admitted that Lenin had been “unreservedly correct” in his attitude toward factions. Trotsky to Mikhail Stepanovič, December 6, 1921, The Trotsky Papers, 1917–1922, ed. and annot. Jan M. Meijer, 2 vols. (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), 2:643–45. 47. Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought: vol. 2 of 2, Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1981), 6, 15, 19, 20, 37; Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 636; Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International,” May–June 1915, in CW, 21:258. 48. Trotsky, My Life, 249; Lenin, “On the Slogan to Transform the Imperialist War into a Civil War,” in CW, 41:337; Service, Trotsky, 145–46, Trotsky, “The Zimmerwald Manifesto,” in The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology, ed. Isaac Deutscher (New York: Dell, 1964), 82; Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, 334. 49. Lenin, “On the Initial Variant of the R. S. D. L. P. Proposal,” in CW, 41:370. 50. Trotsky, “On the Eve of a Revolution,” and Trotsky, “The Growing Conflict,” both in Our Revolution, 181, 185, 203. 51. Quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), xxvii. 52. Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. and trans. Charles Malamuth (London: Hollis & Carter, 1947), 186–87; Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 280; Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 39; Trotsky, “Lenin on the Rostrum,” in Lenin, 140–47. 53. Lenin, “Report at a Meeting of Bolshevik Delegates,” in CW, 36:434, 438, 439, 440, 442; Kotkin, Stalin, 191. 54. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 3:125; Lenin, The State and Revolution (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1976), 1–3, 8, 40, 68, 122–23. 55. Lenin, State and Revolution, 121, 124. 56. Speech to the Soviet, May 18, 1917, Deutscher, Age of Permanent Revolution, 97; Trotsky, My Life, 294.

Ceplair CS20.indb 223

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

224  Notes to Pages 75–82 57. R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent: Being an Account of the Author’s Early Life in Many Lands and His Mission to Moscow in 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1974), 226, 253–54; Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, 124–25; “Trotzky on the Platform,” in Trotsky, Our Revolution, 215, 216, 217. 58. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 1:482; Service, Trotsky, 164,167; Service, Lenin, 277. 59. Alexander Rabinowich, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 84, 115. 60. Reprinted in Deutscher, Age of Permanent Revolution, 99; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 2:310. 61. Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, 127, 135. 62. Trotsky, The New Course, trans. Max Schactman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 51, 53; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 1:319. 63. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 289–90; Lenin, Letter to the Central Committee and the Petrograd and Moscow Committees of the R. S. D. L. P. (B.), September 9–12, 1917, Lenin, Letter to the Central Committee of the R. S. D. L. P. (B.), Lenin, “The Mistakes of Our Party,” September 22, 1917, Lenin, Letter to the Central Committee, the Petrograd and Moscow Committees and the Bolshevik Members of the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, October 1, 1917, Lenin, “Advice of an Onlooker, October 8, 1917, all in CW, 26:21, 3:26, 57, 140–41, 3:179–80; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 3:286. 64. Lenin, “Notes to Theses on ‘the List of Candidates for the Constituent Assembly,’” in CW, 41:447. 65. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 346; Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 557. 66. Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 528, 578, 584. 67. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919; repr., New York: Penguin, 1977), 59; Trotsky, My Life, 323, 324; Alexander Rabinowich, “The October Revolution,” in Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 88. 68. Reed, Ten Days, 73, 77, 85. 69. Ibid., 105; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 3:239; Trotsky, “The Uprising,” in Lenin, 98; Trotsky, Stalin, 236, 291. 70. Reed, Ten Days, 126; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 3:305–6, 311. 71. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 3:321–23; Reed, Ten Days, 132, 135. 72. Reed, Ten Days, 189, 239, 242. 73. Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 158, 164, 165. 74. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 3:338; Kotkin, Stalin, 234. 75. Trotsky, “The Business of Government,” Trotsky, “The Dispersal of the Constituent Assembly,” both in Lenin, 121, 113, 120–21, 123–24; Sheila

Ceplair CS20.indb 224

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 82–89 225 Fitzpatrick, “Tomb Raiders: The Afterlives of Lenin,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2017, 92. 76. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (London: Verso, 2007), 26, 58–59, 61. 77. Trotsky, “Business of Government,” 128–30. 78. Trotsky, My Life, 341, 352, 355, 356, 392, 461; Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 341; Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, 135. 79. Quoted in Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 34. 80. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York: Knopf, 1973), 63, 70; Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” April 28, 1918, Lenin, “On the Famine,” May 24, 1918, and Lenin, “Theses on the Current Situation, May 26, 1918, all in CW, 27:245–48, 396–97, 407. 81. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. (London: Penguin, 1969), 74, 76, 78; Barrington Moore Jr., Soviet Politics—The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 91; Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 672; Sergei V. Iarov, “The Tenth Congress of the Communist Party and the Transition to NEP,’ in Acton, Cherniaev, and Rosenberg, Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 123; Lenin, Speech on the Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution, October 14, 1921, and Lenin, Report to the Second All-Russia Congress of Political Education Departments, October 17, 1921, both in CW, 33:58, 62, 63. 82. Lenin, Theses for a Report on the Tactics of the Russian Communist Party, presented to the Third Congress of the Communist International, June 22–July 12, 1921, Selected Works, 639. 83. Lenin, “New Times and Old Mistakes in a New Guise,” Pravda, August 28, 1921, Lenin to V. M. Molotov, March 26, 1922, both in CW, 33:29, 256–57. 84. Trotsky, Stalin, 277. 85. Slezkine, House of Government, 143, 144, 148; Richard K. Debo, Revolution and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1917–18 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 78–80, 142–43. 86. Trotsky, My Life, 392. 87. John R. Erickson, The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918–1941, 3rd ed. (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001), 21, 28, 38–39, 42, 43. 88. Ibid., 53; Larissa Reissner, “Svyazhsk,” The Front, reprinted in Joseph Hansen et al., Leon Trotsky: The Man and His Work, Reminiscences and Appraisals (New York: Merit Publishers, 1969), 114, 116, 118. 89. Trotsky to Lenin in Trotsky Papers, 1:121; Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, 43. 90. Lenin to Trotsky, ca. August 21, 1918, Trotsky to Lenin, August 21, 1918, Lenin to Trotsky, January 3, 1919, Trotsky to Lenin, January 4, 1919, all in Trotsky Papers, 1:91, 101, 237 241, 243.

Ceplair CS20.indb 225

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

226  Notes to Pages 89–94 91. Lenin to Trotsky, May 30, 1919, Trotsky to Lenin, June 1, 1919, Lenin to Trotsky, June 2, 1919, Trotsky to Lenin, June 3, 1919, all in Trotsky Papers, 1:485, 499, 517. 92. Trotsky to Lenin, October 10, 1918, Trotsky to Yakov Sverdlov, January 10, 1919, Trotsky to Lenin, January 11, 1919, Trotsky to Central Committee of Russian Communist Party, March 1919, Trotsky to Lenin, January 11, 1919, all in Trotsky Papers, 1:135, 249, 251, 331–33, 335, 591–93. 93. Kotkin, Stalin, 321–22, 329; Karl Radek, “Organizer of Victory,” Fourth International, August 1944, reprinted in Hansen et al., Trotsky, The Man and His Work, 119, 122. 94. Minutes of the Meeting of the Politburo of the C. C., October 15, 1919, Lenin to Trotsky, October 17, 1919, both in Trotsky Papers, 1:691, 693, 695. 95. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 412–46; Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, trans. Peter Sedgwick and George Paizis (New York: New York Review Books, 2012), 164–65. 96. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 486–87; Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 30–32. 97. Trotsky, My Life, 462; Ulam, Bolsheviks, 470. 98. Trotsky to the Plenum of the Central Committee, August 7, 1921, Trotsky to Politburo, April 18, 1922, Trotsky to Deputy Chairman of the Council of Labour and Defence and Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, August 23, 1922, Lenin to Frumkin and Stomonjakov, December 12, 1922, all in The Trotsky Papers, 2:579–83, 735, 747, 775. 99. Trotsky to Politburo, April 18, 1922, Trotsky to Lenin, December 13, 1922, Lenin to Trotsky, December 15, 1922, all in Trotsky Papers, 2:731, 785, 787, 795; Trotsky, Stalin, 346–47. 100. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 48, 51, 66. 101. Political Report of Central Committee RKP(b) to Ninth All-Russian Conference of Communist Party, September 20, 1920, in Pipes, Unknown Lenin,106, 107. 102. Trotsky, “Lenin’s National Characteristics,” Pravda, April 23, 1920, in Lenin, 152–55. 103. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 56, 35; Lenin to the Conference of Delegates to the Tenth Congress of the RKP(b)—Supporters of the Platform of Ten, March 13, 1921, in Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 124; Kotkin, Stalin, 390, 411. 104. Iarov, “The Tenth Congress of the Communist Party and the Transition to NEP,” 121; Lenin, “On Party Unity,” March 16, 1921, available online at Marxists Internet Archives, www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/partycongress/10th/16.htm. 105. Yuri Buranov, Lenin’s Will: Falsified and Forbidden (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994), 53; March 10, 1922, Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin, 148–49. 106. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 35, 56.

Ceplair CS20.indb 226

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 95–100 227 107. Lenin, Letter to the Congress, December 22, 1922, in CW, 36:593, 594–95. On December 30, Lenin dictated a much more severe critique of Stalin (36:606). Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 67, 68, 70. 108. Lenin, “Testament,” December 31, 1922, in Trotsky Papers, 2:805, 807; Lenin “How We Should Reorganize the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection,” Pravda, January 23, 1923, in CW, 33:481; Erickson, Soviet High Command, 140. 109. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 68; Ulam, Bolsheviks, 571; Trotsky, Stalin, 363 (my emphasis); Trotsky, My Life, 488, 505. 110. Quoted in Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, 2:274, 281, 285, 287, 289, 297; Lenin, “Pages from a Diary,” Pravda, January 4, 1923, in CW, 33:462– 63; Trotsky, New Course, 14. 111. Trotsky, New Course, 14, 16, 18, 19, 25, 29, 33, 36–37, 54–56, 90, 93; Trotsky, Problems of Life, trans. Z. Vengerova (London: Methuen; and New York: George H. Doran, 1924), 3, 7, 108; Trotsky, Class and Art: Problems of Culture under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, speech delivered May 9, 1924, trans. Brian Pearce (London: New Park Publications, 1924), 7, 13, 21; Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, ed. William Keach, trans. Rose Strunsky (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2005), 217, 224; Lenin, “Our Revolution,” January 16–17, 1923, in CW, 33:478. 112. Trotsky, My Life, 508. 113. Slezkine, House of Government, 212–17.

3. Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) The epigraph is from P. C. Joshi, “Gandhi and Nehru: The Challenge of a New Society,” in B. R. Nanda, P. C. Joshi, and Raj Krishna, Gandhi and Nehru (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), 39. 1. Ian Desai, “Gandhi’s Invisible Hands,” Wilson Quarterly (Autumn 2010), http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/essays/gandhis-invisible-hands; Nehru to Gandhi, July 24, 1941, Together They Fought: Gandhi-Nehru Correspondence, 1921–1948, ed. Uma Iyengar and Lalitha Zackariah (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 419; B. R. Nanda, “Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru,” in Nanda, Joshi, and Krishna, Gandhi and Nehru, 1–4. 2. Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (New York: Vintage, 2012), 308–9; Madhu Limaye, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru: A Historic Partnership: vol. 2 of 4, 1916–1948 (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1989), 2:95, 96. 3. Reba Som, Gandhi, Bose, Nehru, and the Making of the Modern Indian Mind (New York: Penguin, 2004), 144; Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 3; Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946), 361–62.

Ceplair CS20.indb 227

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

228  Notes to Pages 100–108 4. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7; Subhamani N. Busi, Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb Ambedkar: Crusaders against Caste and Untouchability (Hyderabad: Saruja, 1997), 174, 383. 5. Pankaj Mishra, “The Great Protester: Gandhi for the Age of Post-Truth Politics,” New Yorker, October 22, 2018, 85. 6. Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology (New York: Verso, 2013), 17; B. R. Nanda, Gandhi and His Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 5–6, 19, 72. 7. Anderson, Indian Ideology, 49–51. 8. M. Chalapathi Rau, Gandhi and Nehru (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1967), 44–45, 47; Anderson, Indian Ideology, 57, 89, 91; Judith M. Brown, Nehru: A Political Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 116. 9. Frank Moraes, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 14; Limaye, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 2:13–24 10. Ronald J. Terchek, Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 94, 114, 124. 11. B. R. Nanda, In Search of Gandhi: Essays and Reflections (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 170. 12. Rudolph and Rudolph, Gandhi, 18–19, 21, 25, 28; Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. Mahadev Desai (1927; repr., Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1948), 33, 90, 92; Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (New York: Bantam, 2008), 78–79. 13. E. Victor Wolfenstein, The Revolutionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky, and Gandhi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 148–49; Lelyveld, Great Soul, 3, 19, 13. 14. Lelyveld, Great Soul, 152–58, 172–74. 15. Ibid., 21–22, 105, 127, 130. 16. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 33, 42, 71, 209; Nanda, Gandhi and His Critics, 134–35. 17. Gandhi’s Autobiography, 165, 197, 337; Louis Fischer, A Week with Gandhi (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942), 96; Gandhi, Young India, 1919– 1922, 2nd ed. (New York: Huebsch, 1924), 247–48, 260, 261. 18. Gandhi, Young India, 12, 224–27, 231–32, 616, 661; Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, trans. Valji Govinda Desai (1928; repr., Stanford, CA: Academic Reprints, 1954), 105, 107. 19. Gandhi, Young India, 950. 20. Ibid., 418–19; Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha) (New York: Schocken, 1961), 314, 319. 21. B. R. Nanda, The Nehrus: Motilal and Jawaharlal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 43. 22. Ibid., 62; Brown, Nehru, 30–36, 39; Nehru, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (New York: John Day, 1942), 21, 23, 33, 44, 46.

Ceplair CS20.indb 228

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 109–115 229 23. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 127, 131, 146; Gandhi, Young India, 470, 480. 24. Gandhi, Young India, 139, 142, 154, 513, 515, 519, 545; Lelyveld, Great Soul, 146; Nanda, Gandhi and His Critics, 74. 25. Nanda, Nehrus, 158; Nanda, “Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru,” 4; Madhu Limaye, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru: A Historic Partnership, 1916– 1948: vol. 1 of 4, 1916–1931 (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1989), 83. 26. Nehru, letter to the editor, Leader, July 21, 1917, in The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal, ed. Nehru, S. Gopal and Uma Iyengar, 2 vols. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1:201 (hereafter cited as EW ); Som, Gandhi, Bose, Nehru, 115; Nehru, Toward Freedom, 53; Nehru, Discovery of India, 360–61, 367. 27. Statement to the Press, October 28, 1941, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 vols. (New Delhi: Publications Division of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1958), 75:58 (hereafter cited as CW ). 28. Judith M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics, 1915–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 175–76, 188, 198, 247; Herman, Gandhi and Churchill, 230–31; Gandhi, Young India, 527. 29. Gandhi, Young India, 425–28. 30. Limaye, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1:42, 43; Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance, 57. 31. Nanda, Nehrus, 180, 183–85. 32. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 57; Gandhi, Young India, 145,182–84, 197–201, 404. 33. Limaye, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1:35, 39; Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, 108. 34. Limaye, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 2:195–98, 205; Nehru, “For Congress, Freedom for India,” Hindustan Times, January 3, 1938, in EW, 1:146–47; Nehru, Talk to Muslims at Sarai Aghamir, Lucknow, March 11, 1937; statement to the press, Purnea, January 10, 1937; speech at a meeting of Muslims, Ahmedabad, September 17, 1937, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 8:39, 121, 178. 35. Nehru to Dewar Chaman Lal, September 30, 1937; Nehru to Gandhi, September 30, 1937; Nehru to Dewar Chaman Lal, October 7, 1937; Nehru to V. K. Krishna Menon, November 11, 1937, all in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 8:180, 182, 184, 197; Nehru to Gandhi, May 23, 1938, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 334. 36. Judith M. Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics, 1928–34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 313; Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 320; Nehru to Indira Nehru, October 3, 1932, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 5:410. 37. Nehru to Gandhi, September 25, 1932, January 5, 1933, both in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 168, 170.

Ceplair CS20.indb 229

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

230  Notes to Pages 116–125 38. My Soul’s Agony: Being Gandhiji’s Statements Issued from Yeravda Prison on the Removal of Untouchability among Hindus (Bombay: Bombay Provincial Board, Servants of Untouchables Society [1933?]), 20, 52, 64, 65, 74; Gandhi to Nehru, May 2, 1933, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 180. 39. Nehru to Gandhi, May 5, 1933, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 181. 40. Nehru, Toward Freedom, 223–24, 233. 41. Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 197. 42. Gandhi, Young India, 983, 987, 994, 999. 43. Nehru, Toward Freedom, 80, 82, 83. 44. Gandhi to Nehru, February 19, 1922, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 4, 5. 45. Quoted in Herman, Gandhi and Churchill, 310; Nehru to Gandhi, August 13, 1934, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 222; Nehru, Prison Diary, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 5:478–79; Nehru, Toward Freedom, 310. 46. Nehru, Toward Freedom, 230–31, 299–30. 47. Katherine Tidrick, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 157, 217; Gandhi to Nehru, January 4, 1928, Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 44, 45. 48. Nehru to Gandhi, January 1, 1928, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52. Zamindars were holders of vast tracts of land, and they wielded vast powers over the peasantry. 49. Gandhi to Nehru, January 17, 1928, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 55, 56. 50. Nehru to Gandhi, January 23, 1928, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 57; Som, Gandhi, Bose, Nehru, 37. 51. Gandhi to Nehru, November 4, 1929, Nehru to Gandhi, November 4, 1929, both in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 99, 97, 98, 99. 52. Gandhi to Nehru, January 10, 1931, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 103, 104. 53. Nehru to Gandhi, February 3, 1930, Gandhi to Nehru, February 6, 1930, both in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 113, 114; Nehru, An Agrarian Programme for the Congress, 1930, Nehru, “Defining Congress Attitude,” December 1930, both in EW, 1:358, 363. 54. Nehru, Toward Freedom, 156–57; Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience, 123, 148–49; Nehru to Gandhi, July 28, 1930, Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 123–24. 55. Moraes, Jawaharlal Nehru, 221; Nehru, Toward Freedom, 247; Shashi Tharoor, Nehru: The Invention of India (New York: Arcade, 2003), 167; R. P. Dube, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Study in Ideology and Social Change (Delhi: Mittal, 1988), 108; Nehru to Gandhi, September 13, 1933, Gandhi to Nehru, September 14, 1933, both in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 189, 190, 193–94.

Ceplair CS20.indb 230

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 126–133 231 56. Gandhi to Nehru, January 21, 1934, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 218; Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 331. 57. Nehru to Aldous Huxley, September 1, 1933, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 5:511–13. 58. Nehru, interview with the Pioneer, August 31, 1933, Nehru, interview with the press, September 17, 1933, both in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 5:507–8, 537. 59. Nehru, Toward Freedom, 311–12. 60. Ibid., 313–16; Nehru, statement to the press, and Purnea, January 10, 1937, both in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 5:532, 538. 61. Speech at Sevagram, October 12, 1941, Gandhi to Agatha Harrison, October 22, 1941, both in CW, 75:10, 37; Dube, Jawaharlal Nehru, 225; V. T. Patil, Gandhi, Nehru, and the Quit India Movement: A Study in the Dynamics of a Mass Movement (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1984), 7–9, 28. 62. Nehru, Discovery of India, 443–44; Gandhi to Nehru, October 24, 1940, Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 417; Brown, Nehru, 145. 63. Statement to the Press, October 28, 1941, “Peace Organization,” January 9, 1942, both in CW, 75:56, 60–61, 211–12. 64. Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 382; Limaye, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 2:391. 65. Fischer, Week with Gandhi, 103; Gandhi to Nehru, April 24, 1942, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 436. 66. Nanda, “Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru,” 21; Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptations of Violence (London: Hurst, 2012), 154–57; Patil, Gandhi, Nehru, 15–17, 23–24, 28. 67. Nehru, Discovery of India, 481; Limaye, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 400. 68. Patil, Gandhi, Nehru, 70; K. K. Chaudhari, Quit India Revolution: The Ethos of Its Central Direction (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1996), 77–78. 69. Chaudhari, Quit India Revolution, 171; Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1914–1948 (New York: Knopf, 2018), 559. 70. Kanji Dwarkadas, Ten Years to Freedom, 1938–1947 (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1968), 129. 71. Gandhi to Nehru, October 5, 1945, Nehru to Gandhi, October 9, 1945, Gandhi to Nehru, November 13, 1945, all in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 449, 450, 452, 453, 456–57. 72. Nehru to Gandhi, January 30, 1947, Gandhi to Nehru, February 6, 1947, Nehru to Gandhi, February 10, 24, 1947, all in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 476, 478, 480–81, 484. 73. Gandhi to Nehru, March 20, 1947, Nehru to Gandhi, March 25, 1947, Gandhi to Nehru, June 7, 1947, draft of letter to Nehru, June 9, 1947, all in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 489–90, 496, 498; Moraes, Jawaharlal Nehru, 336.

Ceplair CS20.indb 231

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

232  Notes to Pages 134–138 74. Gandhi to Nehru, September 2, 1947, in Iyengar and Zackariah, Together They Fought, 515–16; Martin Green, Prophets of a New Age: The Politics of Hope from the Eighteenth through the Twenty-First Centuries (New York; Scribner’s, 1992), 211. 75. To Chief Ministers, January 17, 1948, in EW, 1:486, 487. 76. Quoted in P. C. Alexander, “Complementarity of Gandhi and Nehru,” in The Complementarity of Gandhi and Nehru: Its Relevance, Today and Tomorrow, ed. N. Radhakrishnan and R. Subramanian (Madras: Gandhigram Rural Institute, 1990), 19; Richard Walsh, introduction to Nehru on Gandhi: A Selection Arranged in the Order of Events from the Writings and Speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru, ed. Richard J. Walsh (New York: John Day, 1948), ix. 77. Nanda, “Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru,” 29; Rena Fonseca, “Nehru and the Policy of Nonalignment,” in The Diplomats, 1939–1979, ed. Gordon A. Craig and Francis L. Loewenheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 371–97); Joshi, “Gandhi and Nehru,” 49.

4. Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) The epigraphs are from John McCook Roots, Chou: An Informal Biography of China’s Legendary Chou En-Lai (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 156; and Wang Li, quoted in Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 345. 1. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Knopf, 2005); Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, ed. and trans. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 274; Theodore H. White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 118; Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (New York: Walker, 2010), 18. 2. Gao Wenqian, Zhou En Lai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary, a Biography, trans. Peter Rand and Lawrence A. Sullivan (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 3, 4. 3. Harrison E. Salisbury, quoted in Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics during the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972–1976 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), 3. 4. Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China: A History of the People’s Republic (New York: Free Press, 1977), 72–73, 79, 81. 5. Chang and Halliday, Mao, 70–71, 143; Simon Leys, The Burning Forest: Essays in Chinese Culture and Politics (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985), 155; Meisner, Mao’s China, 71; Chen Chen, Come Watch the Sun Go Home: A Memoir of Upheaval and Revolution in China (New York: Marlowe, 1998), 65, 96–97; David W. Chang, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping in the Chinese

Ceplair CS20.indb 232

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 138–145 233 Leadership Succession Crisis (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 1–5. 6. Chang and Halliday, Mao, 488; Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), 384–85. 7. Robert Jay Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York: Random House, 1968), 63, 14–15; Frederic Wakeman Jr., History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), xii, 4, 163, 202, 295. 8. Stuart Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3–4, 36–37, 39; Chang, Zhou Enlai, 46–47, 63. 9. Agnes Smedley, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu The (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 176; Edgar Snow, Red Star over China, 1st rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Grove, 1968), 90–93. 10. Ross Terrill, Mao: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 32–33. 11. See Maurice Meisner, Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Snow, Red Star over China, 144–52; Brantly Womack, The Foundations of Mao Zedong’s Political Thought, 1917–1935 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1982), 21. 12. Terrill, Mao, 56. 13. Ibid., 78. The GMD had been founded in 1911 by six revolutionary parties, led by Sun. Originally the Nationalist Party, it was renamed Guomindang of China in 1919. Jiang, the superintendent of the Whampoa Military Academy, controlled the GMD’s military forces and assumed its leadership in 1926. 14. Snow, Red Star over China, 161; Mao, “Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” in Mao, Selected Works, 4 vols. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 1:21–22. 15. Schram, Thought of Mao Tse-tung, 3–4, 37, 39 46, 56, 61–62, 70, 84; Arthur A. Cohen, The Communism of Mao Tse-Tung (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 52–53, 57; Meisner, Mao’s China, 41; Womack, Foundations of Mao Zedong’s Political Thought, 32–33, 35, 27, 30, 31, 198. 16. John E. Rue, Mao Tse-tung in Opposition, 1927–1935 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), 75–77, 79, 80–81, 117, 137, 182, 184–85, 188, 216. 17. Mao, “Why Can China’s Red Political Power Exist? (originally “Political Problems and the Tasks of the Party Organisation in the Border Area, as part of the resolution written for the Second Party Conference of the Hunan-Kiangsi border area), October 5, 1928, in Selected Works, 1:66; Rue, Mao Tse-tung, 83, 84, 93, 108, 109; Terrill, Mao, 102. 18. Mao, “The Struggle in the Chingkang Mountains,” report submitted to Central Committee of CCP, November 1928, and Mao, “On the Rectification of Incorrect Ideas in the Party,” Ninth Conference of the Party organization of the Fourth Army of the Red Army,” December 1929, both in Selected Works, 1:79, 100.

Ceplair CS20.indb 233

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

234  Notes to Pages 145–152 19. Mao, “On the Rectification of Incorrect Ideas in the Party,” 105. 20. Rue, Mao Tse-tung, 246–48. The “Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks” or “returned students” had been educated at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. The stay-athome Communists were convinced that the returnees had only a scholastic understanding of Marxism and very little practical revolutionary experience. They were bitterly resented by those, like Mao, who had been on the firing line in China during the previous years. Lyman P. Van Slyke, Enemies and Friends: The United Front in Chinese Communist History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 35. 21. Snow, Red Star over China, 68, 71, 76; Smedley, Great Road, 152, 199. Zhou does not loom large in this book. 22. Chae Jin-Lee, Zhou Enlai: The Early Years (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 24; Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 27. 23. Chae-Jin Lee, Zhou Enlai, 72; Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 34–5; Kuo-kang Shao, Zhou Enlai and the Foundations of Chinese Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 4, 9, 12–17, 51–53. 24. Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 19, 56, 57, 62; Leys, Burning Forest, 156. 25. Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 51, 53–4. 26. Quoted in Shao, Zhou Enlai,75–76. 27. Kai-yu Hsu, Chou En-Lai: China’s Gray Eminence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 81, 83, 85. 28. Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 60, 69–71. 29. Ibid., 89, 92, 94; Han Suyin, Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), 115. 30. Kai-yu Hsu, Chou En-Lai, 106, 109–11. 31. Suyin, Eldest Son, 117; Snow, Red Star over China, 178–79; Chang, Zhou Enlai, 66–68, 71–88; Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 72–75, 77. 32. Stephen Uhalley Jr., A History of the Chinese Communist Party (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1988), 45–48; Rue, Mao Tse-tung, 251, 253, 257, 259, 262, 263; Womack, Foundations of Mao Zedong’s Political Thought, 144, 185; Suyin, Eldest Son, 119–20, 124. 33. Suyin, Eldest Son, 127–28; Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 81–84; Leys, Burning Forest, 154. 34. Franz Michael, Mao and the Perpetual Revolution, ed. I. E. Cadenhead Jr. (Woodbury, NY: Barron’s, 1977), 41–42, 46, 50, 58. 35. Snow, Red Star over China, 177; Meisner, Mao’s China, 34. 36. Meisner, Mao’s China, 34; Mao, “On the Tactics of Fighting Japanese Imperialism, Conference of Party Activists, Wayaopao, Northern Shensi [New Stage of Chinese Revolutionary History],” December 27, 1935, Mao, “The Tasks of the Chinese Communist Party in the Period of Resistance to Japan,” report at national conference of CCP, Yenan, May 1937, both in Selected Works, 1:158, 164, 165, 168, 170, 266, 269–70.

Ceplair CS20.indb 234

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 152–159 235 37. Mao, “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party,” December 1939, in Selected Works, 2:317, 318, 326–27. 38. Kai-Yu Hsu, Chou En-Lai, 145; Van Slyke, Enemies and Friends, 94; Suyin, Eldest Son, 119–20, 124. 39. Terrill, Mao, 149, 161, 163; Meisner, Mao’s China, 50; Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 86–87; Roots, Chou, 89. 40. Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 87, 93, 94; Chang, Zhou Enlai, 70, 143, 263. 41. James Reardon-Anderson, Yenan and the Great Powers: The Origins of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 12. 42. Terrill, Mao, 174. 43. Odd Arne Westad, Civil War and Revolution: Soviet-American Rivalry and the Origins of the Chinese Civil War, 1944–1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 127–28; See Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945–1947 (New York: Norton, 2018); ReardonAnderson, Yenan and the Great Powers, 144. 44. Reardon-Anderson, Yenan and the Great Powers, 159, 161; Gordon H. Chang, Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–1972 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 26–28. 45. Mao, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” June 30, 1949, in Selected Works, 4:419; Cohen, Communism of Mao Tse-Tung, 86; Suyin, Eldest Son, 208. 46. Thomas P. Thornton, “The Emergence of Communist Revolutionary Doctrine,” in Communism and Revolution: The Strategic Uses of Political Violence, ed. Cyril E. Black and Thomas P. Thornton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 69; Meisner, Mao’s China, 59, 82. 47. Michael, Mao and the Perpetual Revolution, 83–95. 48. Frederick C. Teiwes, Leadership, Legitimacy, and Conflict in China: From a Charismatic Mao to the Politics of Succession (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1984), 16–20; Michael, Mao and the Perpetual Revolution, 214–15. 49. Directive, January 26, 1952, Intra-Party Directive on Rectification, January 5, 1953, and Resolve the Problem of the “Five Excesses,” March 19, 1953, all in The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976, ed. Michael Y. M. Kau and John K. Leung, 2 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), 1:237–38, 314, 335, 336. 50. Alexander V. Pantsov with Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 396–98. 51. Quoted in Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-tung (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967), 280; Meisner, Mao’s China, 149; A. James McAdams, Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 357. 52. Schram, Thought of Mao Tse-tung, 110–13, 115, 117, 196, 293–94. 53. Meisner, Mao’s China, 172, 174; Suyin, Eldest Son, 264. 54. Wakeman, History and Will, 33; Pantsov with Levine, Mao, 433; Meisner, Mao’s China, 184.

Ceplair CS20.indb 235

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

236  Notes to Pages 160–166 55. “On Correctly Handling Contradictions among the People,” February 27, 1957, Speech at the National Congress on Propaganda Work, March 12, 1957, “The Situation Is Changing,” May 15, 1957, “Organize Our Forces to Counter the Reckless Attacks of the Rightists,” “Repel the Attacks of the Bourgeois Rightists,” July 9, 1957, Speech at the Conclusion of the Third Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee, October 9, 1957, Speech at Supreme State Conference, October 13, 1957, all in Writings of Mao Zedong, 2:330, 382, 552, 563, 622, 706, 726; Schram, Thought of Mao Tse-tung, 125–28; John K. Leung and Michael Y. M. Kau, introduction to Writings of Mao Zedong, 2:xxiii, xxvii. 56. Political Report delivered at the 2nd session of the Second National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, January 30, 1956, “Report on the Question of Intellectuals,” January 1956, Zhou, Report on the Work of the Government, delivered to the 4th session of the First National People’s Congress, June 26, 1957, all in Quotations from Chou En-Lai (Melbourne: Paul Flesch, 1969), 16, 25, 30, 13–14. 57. Wakeman, History and Will, 121, 123; Shu Guang Zhing, “In the Shadow of Mao: Zhou Enlai and New China’s Diplomacy,” in The Diplomats, 1939–1979, ed. Gordon A. Craig and Francis L. Loewenheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 362; Cohen, Communism of Mao Tse-Tung, 169. 58. Suyin, Eldest Son, 265, 272, 277. 59. Zhou, Report on Adjusting the Major Targets of the 1959 National Economic Plan and further Developing the Campaign for Increasing Production and Practising Economy, August 26, 1959, in Quotations from Chou En-Lai, 53; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, 134, 136. 60. Schram, Thought of Mao Tse-tung,134; Mao, Speech at Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee, September 24, 1962, in Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters, 1956–1971, ed. Stuart Schram (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 160, 189; Suyin, Eldest Son, 315. 61. Teiwes, Leadership, Legitimacy, and Conflict in China, 21, 23, 40–41; Speech at the Spring Festival on Education, February 13, 1964, and Speech at Hangchow, December 21, 1965, both in Chairman Mao Talks to the People, 203, 236; Salisbury, New Emperors, 225–26. 62. Wakeman, History and Will, 302, 304; Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), x–xiv. 63. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 12–13, 142, 155, 157, 158, 161, 163, 168, 180, 184 155, 206. 64. Salisbury, New Emperors, 270, 274, 281, 313. 65. Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 106, 117, 119, 123, 133, 137, 139, 142, 150, 162. 66. Suyin, Eldest Son, 336; Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 194, 196, 229, 230, 232. 67. Thomas W. Robinson, Chou En-Lai: A Statement of His Political “Style,” with Comparisons with Mao Tse-Tung and Lin Paio (Santa Monica, CA: Rand

Ceplair CS20.indb 236

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 166–173 237 Corporation, 1970), 185–86; interview, Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars Friendship Delegation, China, July 19, 1971, in Quotations from Premier Chou En-Lai (New York: Crowell, 1973), 81. 68. Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 162. 69. Shu Guang Zhing, “In the Shadow of Mao,” 365. 70. Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 162; Shu Guang Zhing, “In the Shadow of Mao, 365; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 416. 71. Meisner, Mao’s China, 363. 72. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 366; Wenqian, Zhou, 189, 197, 207, 221; Teiwes and Sun, End of the Maoist Era, 85–86, 132. 73. Quoted in Suyin, Eldest Son, 401. 74. Chang, Zhou Enlai, 165–66. 75. Wenqian, Zhou En Lai, 305–6, 308–9; Kai-Yu Hsu, Chou En-Lai, 198– 200, 210; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 422. 76. Anne Thurston, Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of the Intellectuals in China (New York: Knopf, 1987), 3–23. 77. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 441. 78. Andrew G. Walder, China under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 341; Leys, Hall of Uselessness, 388.

5. Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967) The epigraph is from Lucila Velázquez, quoted in Jorge G. Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (New York: Knopf, 1997), 84. 1. Ibid., 287, 315–22; Che: A Memoir by Fidel Castro, ed. David Deutschmann (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1994), 101, 105–7; Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel Castro: My Life, a Spoken Autobiography (New York: Scribner, 2006), 300–307. 2. Christopher Hitchens, “Che Guevara: Goodbye to All That,” in And Yet . . . : Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 7; Jonathan M. Hansen, Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 274; Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove, 1997), 171–77; Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1048–49. 3. Maurice Halperin, The Rise and Decline of Fidel Castro: An Essay in Contemporary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 18, 19; Philip W. Bonsal, Cuba, Castro, and the United States (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 55–56. 4. Bonsal, Cuba, Castro, and the United States, 109; Carlos Franqui, Family Portrait with Fidel: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1984), 23, 159.

Ceplair CS20.indb 237

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

238  Notes to Pages 173–182 5. Castro, “Words to Intellectuals,” June 30, 1961, Fidel Castro Reader, ed. David Deutschmann and Deborah Shnookal (New York: Ocean Press, 2007), 215. 6. Tad Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait (New York: Morrow, 1986), 93, 109, 116–17, 133; Hansen, Young Castro, 78; Castro, Fidel and Religion: Castro Talks on Revolution and Religion with Frei Betto, trans. Cuban Center for Translation and Interpretation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 122, 138, 146–47. 7. Lee Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel (New York: Vintage, 1969), 155; Szulc, Fidel, 135, 136, 138,141, 144, 149–50; Castro, Fidel and Religion, 142–43. 8. Hansen, Young Castro, 92; Szulc, Fidel, 147–48, 150, 154–57. 9. Castro, interview with Carlos Franqui, in Carlos Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Georgette Felix et al. (New York: Viking, 1980), 9; Szulc, Fidel, 165, 176–77. 10. Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, 158; Szulc, Fidel, 193, 215, 218, 219, 222–23, 226–28, 236, 241–42; Volker Skierka, Fidel Castro: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004), 32–33; Melba Hernandez and Jesús Montané quotation, and “A Witness,” both in Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 51, 53, 57. 11. Castro, “History Will Absolve Me,” October 16, 1953, Fidel Castro Reader, 46, 48, 54, 66–67, 71–72, 105. 12. Castro, letters from Oriente Prison, April 15, 17, June 18, 19, and August 14, 1954, all in Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83–84; Franqui, Family Portrait with Fidel, 154. 13. Castro to Franqui, June 7, 1955, Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 90; Franqui, Family Portrait with Fidel, 5, 8. 14. Castro to Franqui, July 24, August 1, 24, 1955; Franqui commentary; Castro to Frank País, January 1957. All in Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 91, 92, 94, 105, 136; Szulc, Fidel, 325–27, 331–32. 15. Szulc, Fidel, 336; Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 173, 174; Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, 162–63. 16. Alberto Granados, quoted in Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 19; Anderson, Che Guevara, 33, 34, 51, 52. 17. Guevara, “A Child of My Environment,” August 20, 1960, reprinted in The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey (North Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2004), 33, 45, 78, 81, 167; Anderson, Che Guevara, 124, 148, 151; Castañeda, Compañero, 72. 18. Che to René Ramos Latour, December 14, 1957, in Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 269; Guevara, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, trans. Victoria Ortiz (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), 38–39; Franqui, Family Portrait with Fidel, 149. 19. Szulc, Fidel, 339, 347, 348; Skierka, Fidel Castro, 42; Anderson, Che, 191; Castañeda, Compañero, 97–98. 20. Szulc, Fidel, 380; Thomas, Cuba, 1037–39. 21. Szulc, Fidel, 396–97, 402–3: Anderson, Che, 217.

Ceplair CS20.indb 238

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 183–189 239 22. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro,176, 193; Castro to Guevara, [ca. February 1958], Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 285; Castañeda, Compañero, 112. 23. Anderson, Che, 230, 241, 341; Castañeda, Compañero, 119–20; Guevara, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 65, 81, 88, 139. 24. Franqui, Family Portrait with Fidel, 158–59; Castañeda, Compañero, 122; Anderson, Che, 323. 25. Castro to leaders in Santiago, January 13, 1958, and Castro to Celia Sánchez, April 16, 1958, in Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 280, 300–301. 26. Herbert Mathews, “Cuban Rebel Is Visited in Hideout,” New York Times, February 24, 1957, 1, 34. 27. Skierka, Fidel Castro, 60–61; Guevara to Daniel [René Ramos Latour], December 14, 1957, in Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 269; Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 65, 120–21. 28. Castañeda, Compañero, 127, 129; Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, 162; Guevara to Daniel, December 14, 1957, and Castro reply to the Venezuelan press, May 1958, both in Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 269, 326. 29. Thomas, Cuba, 1042–43; Guevara, “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution,” October 1960, in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution: Writings and Speeches of Ernesto Che Guevara, ed. David Deutschmann (Sydney: Pathfinder/Pacific and Asia, 1987), 133. 30. Anderson, Che, 390; Castañeda, Compañero, 139; Fidel to Che, December 26, 1958, in Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 471; Fidel interviewed by Franqui, 498. 31. Speech at Céspedes Park, January 2, 1959, in Fidel Castro Reader, 131; Thomas, Cuba, 1054–56, 1078, 1083, 1084, 1086, 1090; Halperin, Rise and Decline of Fidel Castro, 21. 32. Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, 175, 180. 33. Theodore Draper, Castroism: Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger, 1965), 49, 50; Don S. Kirschner, Cold War Exile: The Unclosed Case of Maurice Halperin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 229, 233, 238. 34. Szulc, Fidel, 463, 464, 467, 468, 471; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1997), 11; Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 78–79; Castañeda, Compañero, 139, 146–53. 35. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 248, 249; Guevara, “Political Sovereignty and Economic Independence,” March 20, 1960, in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, 93; Anderson, Che, 376, 384, 386, 394–96. 36. Anderson, Che, 157; Skierka, Fidel Castro, 73, 74. 37. Guevara, “Building a Party of the Working Class,” introduction to The Marxist-Leninist Party Havana: National Directorate of the United Party of the

Ceplair CS20.indb 239

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

240  Notes to Pages 189–198 Socialist Revolution 1963, in Guevara, in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, 192; Skierka, Fidel Castro,158, 160. 38. Guevara, “Planning and Consciousness in the Transition to Socialism,” Nuestra Industria, Revista Económica, February 1964; “Voluntary Work Is a School for Communist Consciousness,” El Mundo and Hoy, August 16, 1964; “The Responsibilities of the Working Class in Our Revolution,” June 18, 1960; “What a Young Communist Should Be,” speech, October 20, 1962; “Against Bureaucratism,” Cuba Socialista, February 1963, “A New Attitude toward Work,” speech, August 21, 1962, all in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, 117–18, 181, 183, 200, 213, 223, 161, 163, 166, 167. 39. Guevara, “The Cadres: Backbone of the Revolution,” Cuba Socialista, September 1962, and “Against Bureaucratism,” Cuba Socialista, February 1963, both in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, 169–73, 198. 40. Szulc, Fidel, 483; Thomas, Cuba, 1201–5. 41. Halperin, Rise and Fall of Fidel Castro, 46–47; Thomas, Cuba, 1211, 1214; Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 17, 18. 42. Skierka, Fidel Castro, 76; Halperin, Rise and Decline of Fidel Castro, 16; Castro, Fidel and Religion, 205. 43. Thomas, Cuba, 1217–21. 44. Quoted in Castañeda, Compañero, 166; Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 21. 45. Castro, “At the United Nations General Assembly,” September 26, 1960, Fidel Castro Reader, 143, 145, 151, 163, 165, 169, 171–72. 46. Skierka, Fidel Castro, 82; Castañeda, Compañero, 173, 175; Thomas, Cuba, 1252, 1266 47. Thomas, Cuba, 1313–14, 1319; Skierka, Fidel Castro, 86, 87, 94, 114–15; The First and Second Declarations of Havana: Manifestos of Revolutionary Struggle in the Americas Adopted by the Cuban People, ed. Mary Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder, 2007), 28. 48. Castañeda, Compañero, 141, 190; Guevara, “Guerrilla Warfare,” 1960, in Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, 3rd ed., ed. Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davis Jr. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997), 50, 51, 54–55, 72, 153. 49. Castañeda, Compañero,184; Kirschner, Cold War Exile, 219. 50. Halperin, Rise and Fall of Fidel Castro, 86; Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 99, 134; Castro, “Proclamation of the Socialist Character of the Revolution,” April 16 and May 1, 1961, “Words to Intellectuals,” June 30, 1961, all in Fidel Castro Reader, 205, 216, 220, 223–25. 51. Guevara, “The Real Meaning of the Alliance for Progress,” August 8, 1961, in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, 267, 268, 275, 296–97, 298. 52. Skierka, Fidel Castro, 117, 120. 53. Castro, “Manifesto of the Liberation of the Americas: The Second Declaration of Havana,” February 4, 1962, Fidel Castro Reader, 247, 250, 261, 265;

Ceplair CS20.indb 240

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Notes to Pages 198–207 241 Halperin, Rise and Fall of Fidel Castro, 123; Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 162; Maurice Halperin, The Taming of Fidel Castro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 86, 88. 54. Skierka, Fidel Castro, 117, 121–23; Halperin, Rise and Fall of Fidel Castro, 132; Sheldon B. Liss, Roots of Revolution: Radical Thought in Cuba (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 180. 55. Halperin, Rise and Fall of Fidel Castro, 136–37, 142; Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 296; Castro, “On the Missile Crisis, November 1, 1962, Fidel Castro Reader, 271; Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, 223, 225. 56. Draper, Castroism, 42–43. 57. Ibid., 43–47. 58. Halperin, Taming of Fidel Castro, 78–85. 59. Ibid., 166–67; Simon Reid-Henry, Fidel and Che: A Revolutionary Friendship (New York: Walker, 2009), 264–66, 273, 292, 304; Anderson, Che, 595–98; Castañeda, Compañero, 275. See also, Halperin, Taming of Fidel Castro, 93, 99, 103. 60. Speech to General Assembly of the United Nations, December 11, 1964, in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, 321–36. 61. Halperin, Taming of Fidel Castro, 116; Anderson, Che, 611, 621, 623. Focoism is a revolutionary strategy focused on small, mobile paramilitary groups stirring up revolutionary unrest against an oppressive regime. 62. Guevara, speech at the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity, February 24, 1965, in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, 338, 339; Halperin, Taming of Fidel Castro, 170–71. 63. Guevara, speech at the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity; Halperin, Taming of Fidel Castro, 170–71; Guevara, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 286. 64. Guevara, African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Grove, 2000), 1, 7, 235, 236; Halperin, Taming of Fidel Castro, 130–31. 65. Castañeda, Compañero 326–29, 331, 332, 335; Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 297–98. 66. Castañeda, Compañero, 337, 339, 344–45; Che Guevara Reader, 350–64. 67. Castañeda, Compañero, 382–84. 68. Castro, Che, 101.

Conclusion The epigraph source is quoted in Shashi Tharoor, Nehru: The Invention of a Nation (New York: Arcade, 2003), 158. 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (1837; repr., Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 39–40.

Ceplair CS20.indb 241

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

242  Notes to Pages 207–208 2. Trotsky, “Lenin’s National Characteristics” and “Lenin Wounded,” in Lenin: Notes for a Biographer, edited by Bertram D. Wolfe, trans. Tamara Deutscher (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 144, 194. 3. Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship (1841; repr., Chicago: Homewood, 1900), 274. The British sociologist Herbert Spencer called Carlyle’s hero idea “utterly incoherent.” But the American psychologist William James refuted Spencer, advancing the notion of the “power of individual initiative” to change history. Herbert Spencer, Study of Sociology (London: Henry S. King, 1873), 31; William James, “Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1880, 44–59. 4. George Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History (1898; repr., New York: International Publishers, 1940), 41. 5. Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (New York: Humanities Press, 1943), 13, 153, 203. 6. Quoted in Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953), 240. 7. Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (London: Hurst, 2012), 8. 8. Quoted in Leites, Study of Bolshevism, 77; Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 3 volumes in 1, trans. Max Eastman, (1932; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 2:343.

Ceplair CS20.indb 242

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Bibliography Primary Sources Annenkov, P. V. The Extraordinary Decade: Literary Memoirs. Edited by Arthur P. Mendel and translated by Irwin R. Titunik. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968. Balabanoff, Angelica. Impressions of Lenin. Translated by Isotta Cesari. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964. Carlyle, Thomas. Heroes and Hero Worship. 1841. Reprint, Chicago: Homewood, 1900. Castro, Fidel. Che: A Memoir by Fidel Castro. Edited by David Deutschmann. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1994. . Fidel and Religion: Castro Talks on Revolution and Religion with Frei Betto. Translated by the Cuban Center for Translation and Interpretation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. . Fidel Castro Reader. Edited by David Deutschmann and Deborah Shnookal. New York: Ocean Press, 2007. Castro, Fidel, and Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel Castro: My Life, a Spoken Autobiography. New York: Scribner, 2006. Chen Chen. Come Watch the Sun Go Home: A Memoir of Upheaval and Revolution in China. New York: Marlowe, 1998. The First and Second Declarations of Havana: Manifestos of Revolutionary Struggle in the Americas Adopted by the Cuban People. Edited by Mary Alice Waters. New York: Pathfinder, 2007. Fischer, Louis. A Week with Gandhi. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942. Franqui, Carlos. Diary of the Cuban Revolution. Translated by Georgette Felix, Elaine Kerrigan, Phyllis Freeman, and Hardie St. Martin. New York: Viking, 1980. . Family Portrait with Fidel: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1984. Gandhi, Mohandas K. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. 100 vols. Delhi: Publications Division of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1958. . Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Translated by Mahadev Desai. 1927. Reprint, Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press 1948. 243

Ceplair CS20.indb 243

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

244 Bibliography . Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Edited by Anthony J. Parel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. . My Soul’s Agony: Being Gandhiji’s Statements Issued from Yeravda Prison on the Removal of Untouchability among Hindus. Bombay: Bombay Provincial Board, Servants of Untouchables Society [1933?] . Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha). New York: Schocken, 1961. . Satyagraha in South Africa. Translated by Valji Govinda Desai. 1928. Reprint, Stanford, CA: Academic Reprints, 1954. . Young India, 1919–1922, 2nd ed. New York: Huebsch, 1924. Gandhi, Mohandas K., and Jawaharlal Nehru. Together They Fought: GandhiNehru Correspondence, 1921–1948. Edited by Uma Iyengar and Lalitha Zackariah. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. Guevara, Ernesto Che. The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo. Translated by Patrick Camiller. New York: Grove, 2000. . Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution: Writings and Speeches of Ernesto Che Guevara. Edited by David Deutschmann. Sydney: Pathfinder/Pacific and Asia, 1987. . Guerrilla Warfare, 3rd ed. Edited by Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davis Jr. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997. . The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey. North Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2004. . Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War. Translated by Victoria Ortiz. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968. Hansen, Joseph, et al. Leon Trotsky: The Man and His Work, Reminiscences and Appraisals. New York: Merit Publishers, 1969. Hegel, G. W. F. Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Translated by Robert S. Hartman. 1837. Reprint, Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1953. Institut Marksizma-Leninizma, Reminiscences of Marx and Engels. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1970. Krupskaya, N. K. Reminiscences of Lenin. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959. Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. Edited and translated by Strobe Talbott. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. Lenin, V. I. Collected Works. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. . Selected Works. 3 vols. New York: International Publishers, 1934. . The State and Revolution. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1976. . What Is to Be Done? Translated by S. V. Utechin and Patricia Utechin. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963. Lockhart, R. H. Bruce. Memoirs of a British Agent: Being an Account of the Author’s Early Life in Many Lands and His Mission to Moscow in 1918. London: Macmillan, 1974.

Ceplair CS20.indb 244

4/15/2020 9:15:06 PM

Bibliography 245 Lunacharsky, Anatoly Vasilievich. Revolutionary Silhouettes. Translated by Michael Glenny. London: Allan Lane, 1967. Mao Zedong. Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters, 1956–1971. Edited by Stuart Schram. New York: Pantheon, 1974. . Selected Works. 4 vols. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965. . The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976. 2 vols. Edited by Michael Y. M. Kau and John K. Leung. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1986. Marx, Karl. Class Struggles in France (1848–1850). New York: International Publishers, 1934. . A Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Maurice Dobb. New York: International Publishers, 1970. . Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections. Edited by David McLellan. London: Macmillan, 1981. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Birth of the Communist Manifesto. Edited by Dirk J. Struik. New York: International Publishers, 1971. . Collected Works. 50 vols. New York: International Publishers, 1975. . The German Ideology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998. . The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1972. Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. New York: John Day, 1946. . The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru. Edited by S. Gopal and Uma Iyengar. 2 vols. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. . Nehru on Gandhi: A Selection Arranged in the Order of Events from the Writings and Speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru. Edited by Richard J. Walsh. New York: John Day, 1948. . Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. Edited by S. Gopal. 32 vols. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1972. . Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru. New York: John Day, 1942. Pipes, Richard, ed. The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Plekhanov, George. The Role of the Individual in History. 1898. Reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1940. Reed, John. Ten Days That Shook the World. 1919. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1977. Serge, Victor. Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Translated by Peter Sedgwick and George Paizis. New York: New York Review Books, 2012. Smedley, Agnes. The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu The. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Snow, Edgar. Red Star over China. First revised and enlarged edition. New York: Grove, 1968. Sukhanov, N. N. The Russian Revolution, 1917. Edited and translated by Joel Carmichael. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Ceplair CS20.indb 245

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

246 Bibliography Trotsky, Leon. The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology. Edited by Isaac Deutscher. New York: Dell, 1964. . Class and Art: Problems of Culture under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Translated by Brian Pearce. London: New Park Publications, 1924. . History of the Russian Revolution. 3 volumes in 1. Translated by Max Eastman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957. . Lenin: Notes for a Biographer. Edited by Bertram D. Wolfe and translated by Tamara Deutscher. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1971. . Literature and Revolution. Edited by William Keach and translated by Rose Strunsky. Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2005. . My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography. New York, Pathfinder, 1970. . The New Course. Translated by Max Schactman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965. . 1905. Translated by Anya Bostock. New York: Random House, 1971. . Our Revolution: Essays on Working-Class and International Revolution, 1904–1917. Collected and translated by Moissaye J. Olgin. Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1973. . Problems of Life. Translated by Z. Vengerova. London: Methuen; and New York: George H. Doran, 1924. . Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence. Edited and translated by Charles Malamuth. London: Hollis & Carter, 1947. . Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky. London: Verso, 2007. . The Trotsky Papers, 1917–1922. Edited and annotated by Jan M. Meijer. 2 vols. The Hague: Mouton, 1964. Valentinov, Nikolai. Encounters with Lenin. Translated by Paul Osta and Brian Pearce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Zhou En-lai. Quotations from Chou En-Lai. Melbourne: Paul Flesch, 1969. . Quotations from Premier Chou En-Lai. New York: Crowell, 1973.

Secondary Sources Acton, Edward, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg. Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Anderson, Jon Lee. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Grove, 1997. Anderson, Perry. The Indian Ideology. New York: Verso, 2013. Ascher, Abraham. The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Baker, Keith Michael, and Dan Edelman, eds. Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.

Ceplair CS20.indb 246

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Bibliography 247 Berger, Martin. Engels, Armies, and Revolution: The Revolutionary Tactics of Classical Marxism. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977. Berlin, Isaiah. Karl Marx. 5th ed. Edited by Henry Hart. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Black, Cyril E., and Thomas P. Thornton, eds. Communism and Revolution: The Strategic Uses of Political Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964. Bonsal, Philip W. Cuba, Castro, and the United States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971. Brinton, Crane. The Anatomy of Revolution. New York: Norton, 1938. Brown, Judith M. Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics, 1928–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. . Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics, 1915–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. . Nehru: A Political Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Buranov, Yuri. Lenin’s Will: Falsified and Forbidden. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994. Busi, Subhamani N. Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb Ambedkar: Crusaders against Caste and Untouchability. Hyderabad: Saruja, 1997. Carver, Terrell. Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship. Brighton, Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983. Carver, Terrell, and Daniel Blank. Marx and Engel’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach Chapter.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. . A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology Manuscripts.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Carver, Terrell, and James Farr, eds. The Cambridge Companion to The Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Castañeda, Jorge G. Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. New York: Knopf, 1997. Chae Jin-Lee, Zhou Enlai: The Early Years. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Chang, David W. Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping in the Chinese Leadership Succession Crisis. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. Chang, Gordon H. Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–1972. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Chang, Jung, and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story. New York: Knopf, 2005. Chaudhari, K. K. Quit India Revolution: The Ethos of Its Central Direction. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1996. Cohen, Arthur A. The Communism of Mao Tse-Tung. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

Ceplair CS20.indb 247

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

248 Bibliography Cohen, Stephen F. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938. New York: Knopf, 1973. Cole, G. D. H. Socialist Thought: Marxism and Anarchism, 1850–1890. London: Macmillan, 1954. Collins, Henry, and Chimen Abramsky. Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement: Years of the First International. London: Macmillan, 1965. Craig, Gordon A. and Francis L. Loewenheim, eds. The Diplomats, 1939–1979. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Debo, Richard K. Revolution and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1917–18. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. . The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Devji, Faisal. The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptations of Violence. London: Hurst, 2012. Dikötter, Frank. The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. . Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962. New York: Walker, 2010. Draper, Theodore. Castroism: Theory and Practice. New York: Praeger, 1965. Dube, R. P. Jawaharlal Nehru: A Study in Ideology and Social Change. Delhi: Mittal, 1988. Dwarkadas, Kanji, Ten Years to Freedom, 1938–1947. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1968. Eastman, Max. Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth. New York: Greenberg, 1925. Eley, Geoff. Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Elliott, Gregory. Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson. London: Pluto Press; Toronto: Between the Lines, 2008. Erickson, John R. The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918– 1941, 3rd ed. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001. Farber, Samuel. The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Fischer, Louis. The Life of Lenin. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. . The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950. Frankel, Jonathan, ed. Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism, 1895–1903. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Freud, Sigmund, and William C. Bullitt. Thomas Woodrow Wilson: TwentyEighth President of the United States: A Psychological Study. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

Ceplair CS20.indb 248

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Bibliography 249 Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011. Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Norton, 1997. George, Alexander L., and Juliette L. George. Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study. New York: John Day, 1956. Green, Martin. Prophets of a New Age: The Politics of Hope from the Eighteenth through the Twenty-First Centuries. New York; Scribner’s, 1992. Guerra, Lillian. Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Halperin, Maurice. The Rise and Decline of Fidel Castro: An Essay in Contemporary History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. . The Taming of Fidel Castro. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Hansen, Jonathan M. Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019. Harding, Neil. Lenin’s Political Thought. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1981. Henderson, O. W. The Life of Friedrich Engels. 2 vols. London: Cass, 1976. Herman, Arthur. Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age. New York: Bantam, 2008. Hitchens, Christopher. And Yet . . . : Essays. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Hobsbawm, Eric J., ed. The History of Marxism. Vol. 1, Marxism in Marx’s Day. Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1982. Hook, Sidney. The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility. New York: Humanities Press, 1943. Hsu, Kai-yu. Chou En-Lai: China’s Gray Eminence. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968. Hunt, Richard N. The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels: Classical Marxism, 1850–1895. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984. Hunt, Tristram. The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. New York: Allen Lane, 2009. Israel, Jonathan. The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. James, William. “Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment.” Atlantic Monthly, October 1880, 441–59. Jin-Lee, Cahe. Zhou Enlai: The Early Years. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Jones, Gareth Stedman. Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. Kirschner, Don S. Cold War Exile: The Unclosed Case of Maurice Halperin. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Kołakowski, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.

Ceplair CS20.indb 249

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

250 Bibliography Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928. New York: Penguin, 2014. Kurtz-Phelan, Daniel. The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945–1947. New York: Norton, 2018. Leggett, George. The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981. Leites, Nathan. A Study of Bolshevism. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953. Lelyveld, Joseph. Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. New York: Vintage, 2012. Leys, Simon. The Burning Forest: Essays in Chinese Culture and Politics. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985. . The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. New York: New York Review Books, 2013. Lichtheim, George. Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study, 2nd ed. New York: Praeger, 1965. Lifton, Robert Jay. Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. New York: Random House, 1968. Limaye, Madhu. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru: A Historic Partnership, 1916–1948. Vol. 1 of 4, 1916–1931. Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1989 . Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru: A Historic Partnership, 1916– 1948. Vol. 2 of 4, 1932–1942. Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1989. Liss, Sheldon B. Roots of Revolution: Radical Thought in Cuba. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Lockwood, Lee. Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel. New York: Vintage, 1969. MacFarquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Malia, Martin. History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World. Edited by Terence Emmons. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Malle, Silvana. The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. McAdams, A. James. Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. McLellan, David. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. . The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx. New York: Praeger, 1969. Mehring, Franz. Karl Marx: The Story of His Life. Translated by Edward Fitzgerald. London: George, Allen & Unwin, 1936. Meisner, Maurice. Mao’s China: A History of the People’s Republic. New York: Free Press, 1977. Michael, Franz. Mao and the Perpetual Revolution. Edited by I. E. Cadenhead Jr. Woodbury, NY: Barron’s, 1977. Moore, Barrington Jr. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon, 1966. Moraes, Frank. Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1958.

Ceplair CS20.indb 250

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Bibliography 251 Moore, Barrington Jr.. Soviet Politics—The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in Social Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950. Nanda, B. R. Gandhi and His Critics. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985. . In Search of Gandhi: Essays and Reflections. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. . The Nehrus: Motilal and Jawaharlal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Nanda, B. R., P. C. Joshi, and Raj Krishna, Gandhi and Nehru. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979. Nove, Alec. An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. London: Penguin, 1969. O’Toole, Fintan. Judging Shaw: The Radicalism of GBS. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2017. Palmer, R. R. Twelve Who Ruled: The Committee of Public Safety during the Terror. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. Pantsov, Alexander V., with Steven I. Levine. Mao: The Real Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012. Patil, V. T. Gandhi, Nehru, and the Quit India Movement: A Study in the Dynamics of a Mass Movement. Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1984. Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1991. Rabinowich, Alexander. Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. Radhakrishnan, N., and R. Subramanian, eds. The Complementarity of Gandhi and Nehru: Its Relevance, Today and Tomorrow. Madras: Gandhigram Rural Institute, 1990. Rau, M. Chalapathi. Gandhi and Nehru. Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1967. Reardon-Anderson, James. Yenan and the Great Powers: The Origins of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Reid-Henry, Simon. Fidel and Che: A Revolutionary Friendship. New York: Walker, 2009. Robinson, Thomas W. Chou En-Lai: A Statement of His Political “Style,” with Comparisons with Mao Tse-Tung and Lin Paio. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1970. Roots, John McCook. Chou: An Informal Biography of China’s Legendary Chou En-Lai. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978. Rosenberg, Arthur. Democracy and Socialism: A Contribution to the Political History of the Past 150 Years. Translated by George Rosen. New York: Knopf, 1939. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, and Lloyd I. Rudolph. Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Rue, John E. Mao Tse-tung in Opposition, 1927–1935. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966. Schram, Stuart. The Thought of Mao Tse-tung, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Ceplair CS20.indb 251

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

252 Bibliography . Mao Tse-tung. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967. Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Service, Robert. Lenin: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. . Trotsky: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Shao, Kuo-kang. Zhou Enlai and the Foundations of Chinese Foreign Policy. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Shenk, Joshua Wolf. Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Seigel, Jerrold. Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Skierka, Volker. Fidel Castro: A Biography, Translated by Patrick Camiller. Malden, MA: Polity, 2004. Slezkine, Yuri. The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Smith, S. A. Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Som, Reba. Gandhi, Bose, Nehru, and the Making of the Modern Indian Mind. New York: Penguin, 2004. Spencer, Herbert. Study of Sociology. London: Henry S. King, 1873. Sperber, Jonathan. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. New York: Liveright, 2013. Suyin, Han. Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China. New York: Hill & Wang, 1994. Szulc, Tad. Fidel: A Critical Portrait. New York: Morrow, 1986. Teiwes, Frederick C. Leadership, Legitimacy, and Conflict in China: From a Charismatic Mao to the Politics of Succession. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1984. Teiwes, Frederick C., and Warren Sun. The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics during the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972–1976. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. Terchek, Ronald J. Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Terrill, Ross. Mao: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Tharoor, Shashi. Nehru: The Invention of India. New York: Arcade, 2003. Thomas, Hugh. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Thurston, Anne. Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of the Intellectuals in China. New York: Knopf, 1987. Tidrick, Katherine. Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006. Tilly, Charles. European Revolutions, 1492–1992. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993.

Ceplair CS20.indb 252

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Bibliography 253 Uhalley, Stephen Jr. A History of the Chinese Communist Party. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1988. Ulam, Adam. The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Van Slyke, Lyman P. Enemies and Friends: The United Front in Chinese Communist History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967. Volkogonov, Dmitri. Lenin: A New Biography. Edited and translated by Harold Shukman. New York: Free Press, 1994. Wakeman, Frederic Jr. History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tsetung’s Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Walder, Andrew G. China under Mao: A Revolution Derailed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Wenqian, Gao. Zhou En Lai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary, a Biography. Translated by Peter Rand and Lawrence A. Sullivan. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Westad, Odd Arne. Civil War and Revolution: Soviet-American Rivalry and the Origins of the Chinese Civil War, 1944–1946. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. White, Theodore H. In Search of History: A Personal Adventure. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Wilson, Edmund. To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972. Wolfe, Bertram. Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History. New York: Cooper Square, 1948. Wolfenstein, E. Victor. Revolutionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. Womack, Brantly. The Foundations of Mao Zedong’s Political Thought, 1917–1935. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1982.

Ceplair CS20.indb 253

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Ceplair CS20.indb 254

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Index Abernathy, Ralph, 1 Africa, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206 Agrarian Reform Act (China), 157 Agrarian Reform Institute (Cuba), 192, 193, 197 Ahimsa, 107, 111, 129 Ahmadabad, 109 Alekseev, Aleksandr, 193, 194, 197 Algeria, 201, 202 Allahabad, 112 All-China Conference on Financial and Economic Work, 158 All-China Soviet Congress, 150 Alliance for Progress, 196 All-India Home Rule League, 110 All-Russian Democratic Conference (1917), 77 All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. See Cheka Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 100, 115 Anatomy of Revolution, The (Brinton), 4 Anderson, Jon Lee, 171, 183 Anderson, Perry, 100, 101 Annenkov, P. V., 7 Anthony, Susan B., 1 Anti-French Resistance War (Vietnam), 158 Anti-Imperialist League, 175 Árbenz, Jacobo, 180 Arcole, Battle of, 207

Argentina, 178, 179, 181, 186, 200, 203 Ascher, Abraham, 62 Asia, 33, 128, 155, 166, 192, 204 Asociación de América Latina Libre, 194 August Bloc, 69 Austria, 67 Awakening Society, 146 Axelrod, Pavel, 56 Axis powers, 128 Baden, 27 Bakunin, Mikhail, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44 Balabanoff, Angelica, 49, 51, 56, 73, 76 Balkans, 69 Banco National (Cuba), 188 Bandung conference, 158 Bankipore, 109 Bardoli, 117 Batista, Fulgencio, 176, 178, 182, 184, 185, 186, 192 Bauer, Edgar, 22 Bayo, Alberto, 178 Bay of Pigs, 196 Bebel, August, 45 Becker, Johann, 6 Beijing, 142, 166, 168, 201 Belgium, 38 Bella, Ben, 201 Bengal, 132, 133 255

Ceplair CS20.indb 255

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

256 Index Berlin, 9, 13, 25, 35 Berlin, Isaiah, 9, 16 Berne, 70 Bernstein, Eduard, 46 Bhagavad Gita, 103, 110 Bihar, 132 Blank, Daniel, 19 Blanqui, Louis, 29 Bloody Sunday (1905), 61, 62 Boers, 103, 111 Bogotá, 175 Bolívar, Simón, 175 Bolivia, 1, 203 Bolsheviks, 2. 49–90 passim, 150, 156, 205, 209, 222n40 Bombay, 131 Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon. See Napoleon III Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon I Bonn, 9 Bonsal, Philip W., 172 Borba, 69 Born, Stephan, 218n73 Brahmins, 108 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 87 Brinton, Crane, 4 British. See England British Indian Association, 103 British Museum, 31 British North American colonies, 1 Bronstein, Lev Davidovich. See Trotsky Bronx, 71 Brown, Judith, 108 Brussels, 7, 19, 21, 22, 58 Buddhism, 141 Bukharin, Nikolai, 97 Burns, Elizabeth, 40 Burns, Mary, 14, 32, 35–36, 40, 218n73 Cairo, 201 Calcutta, 133, 134

Ceplair CS20.indb 256

Cambridge University, 108 Canton, 148 Capital. See Das Kapital Carlyle, Thomas, 206, 207, 242n3 Carpenter, Edward, 102 Carver, Terrell, 19 Castañeda, Jorge, 181, 183, 185, 189, 200, 203 Castro, Fidel, 1, 2, 3, 170–204, 206, 208, 209; arrest and imprisonment, 176–77; building the new state, 187–89; compared to Che, 170–73; coolness toward Soviet Union, 204; creates 26th of July Movement, 177; disillusionment with Che, 198–204; early years and education, 173–75; economic problems, 197–98; establishes base in Sierra Maestra, 182; eulogy for Che, 204; first trip to United States, 191; goes to Mexico, 177–78; growing strength of movement, 185; his communism, 181, 185, 197; installation of Soviet missiles, 198–99; leadership of movement, 184, 187–88; meets Che, 178; political organizing, 176; promoting revolutions in Latin America, 198; relations with Che, 188–89; relations with Partido Socialista, 192; returns to Cuba, 182; speech to United Nations, 193; turn to Soviet Union, 193–94; unveils socialist constitution, 196; victory, 186–87 —writings and speeches: First Declaration of Havana, 194; “Manifesto No. 1 to the People of Cuba,” 178

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Index 257 Castro, Raúl, 181, 182, 185, 186, 188, 191, 198, 200, 202, 203, 204 Central Committee Workers Conference (China), 165 Central Cultural Revolution Group (China), 164 Champaran, 110 Chang Chen, 155 Chang, David W., 138, 154 Chaoshan, 148 Charkha, 107 Chartism, 13, 14, 24, 34 Chauri Chaura, 117, 118 Cheka, 82 Chen Chen, 138 Chesterton, G. K., 102 Chiang Kai-shek. See Jiang Jieshi Chile, 179, 198 China, 1, 83, 128, 135, 136–69, 191, 194, 200, 205, 209, 234n20 Chinese Communist Party, 3, 138, 143–69 passim Chinese Youth Communist Party in Europe, 147 Cienfuegos, Camilo, 186 Civil War in France, The (Marx), 42 Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850, The (Marx), 28, 29 Cohen, Arthur A., 144, 156 Cohen, Stephen F., 84 Cologne, 13, 25, 26, 27, 29 Comintern, 85, 90, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152 Commissariat for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (USSR), 92 Committee for the Independence of Puerto Rico (Cuba), 175 Committee of Cologne Democratic Unions, 27 Committee of the People for Commemorating the Premier (China), 168–69

Ceplair CS20.indb 257

Committee of Three (China), 155 Committee on Liaison with Friendly Forces (China), 152 Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (Cuba), 194 Committee to Support German Refugees, 28 Commune (Paris), 7, 42, 44, 73 Communist Correspondence Committee, 21, 22 Communist Manifesto. See Manifesto of the Communist Party Communist Youth (Guatemala), 181 Condition of the Working Class in England, The (Engels), 16, 18 Confucius, 166 Congo, 201, 202, 203 Congress Inquiry Committee (India), 112 Congress of Oppressed Nationalities, 119–20 Congress party. See Indian National Congress Congress Socialist Party, 125, 126 Constituent Assembly (Russia, 1917–18), 78, 82, 86 Constituent National Assembly (Frankfurt), 25 Copenhagen, 68 Costa Rica, 180 Council of People’s Commissars (Russia), 53, 81 Crimean War, 33 Cromwell, Oliver, 207 Cultural Bookstore, 142 Cyrenaicism, 108 Daily Chronicle (newspaper), 129 Dalits, 100, 109, 115, 116 Dana, Charles Henry, 33 Dar es Salaam, 203 Darwin, Charles, 47, 53

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

258 Index Das Kapital (Marx), 9, 31, 37, 39, 44, 46, 47 Delhi, 113, 132, 133, 134 Delhi Manifesto, 123 Democratic Society, 25 Democritus, 11 Deng Xiaoping, 166, 167, 168 Department of Training of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (Cuba), 188 Desai, Ian, 98 Deutscher, Isaac, 60, 66, 83, 90, 92, 95 Deutsch-Französische Jahrbüche (newspaper), 12 Deutsche Jahrbücher (journal), 11 Devji, Faisal, 208 Dikötter, Frank, 136, 163 Doctors’ Club, 11 Document of Unity of the Cuban Opposition to the Batista Government, 185 Dominican Republic, 175 Don Cossacks, 89 Draper, Theodore, 187 Dwarkadas, Kanji, 131 Dyer, Reginald, 112 Dzershinski, Felix, 93 Eastman, Max, 32 economism, 55 Egypt, 201, 206 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The (Marx), 30 Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 80 Eighth Party Congress (China), 159 Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (Stirner), 20 Elberfeld, 16, 18, 27 El Cubano Libre (newspaper), 183

Ceplair CS20.indb 258

Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 85, 93 Eleventh Party Plenum (China), 164 Eley, Geoff, 47 Elliott, Gregory, 47 Engels, Friedrich, 1, 2, 3, 6–48, 53, 73, 106, 138, 170, 172, 205, 208, 209; battles against Bakunin, 38–44; begins political career, 16; compared to Marx, 6–9; creating Marxism, 47–48; death of Mary Burns, 35–36; early life, 13–15; financially supporting Marx, 34–35; and Franco-Prussian War, 41–42; helps edit and publish Das Kapital, 39–40; late writings, 45–47; meets Marx, 15–16; moves to London, 40; political organizing with Marx, 19–23; post-revolutionary analyses, 32–33; resettlement in Manchester, 31; revolutions of 1848, 24–30; Workingmen’s International Association, 40–44 —WRITINGS: Anti-Dühring, 45; Condition of the Working Class in England, 16, 18; “Letters from Wuppertal,” 13; The Peasant War in Germany, 32; The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party, 39; Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, 46; “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” 15; “Revolution and CounterRevolution in Germany,” 30, 33; Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 45

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Index 259 —writings with marx: “Address of the Central Authority to the League” (March and June 1850), 28; The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association, 44; Circular Letter to German Social Democrats (1879), 45; “The Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,” 25; Fictitious Splits in the International, 43; “German Ideology,” 7, 19–20, 45; The Holy Family, 7, 17–18, 22, 23, 45; Manifesto of the Communist Party, 7, 16, 20, 22–24, 45, 46, 70, 142, 175 England (and Great Britain), 13, 14, 18, 27, 29, 31, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 71, 99, 108, 110, 111, 113, 115, 117, 123, 128, 129, 131, 132 English Revolution, 4 Enlarged Central Work Conference (China), 162 Epicurus, 11 Erikson, Erik, 4 Ermen & Engels, 31 Escalante, Anibal, 198 Esoteric Christian Union, 103 Europe, 35, 38, 45, 47, 53, 63, 70, 71, 86, 92, 108, 119, 128, 146, 147, 206, 207 European Central Committee, 29 Fascism, 126, 128 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 12, 19 Finland, 62, 64, 65 First All-China Soviet Congress, 145 First All-Russian Congress of Soviets (1917), 75 First Congress of German Workers’ Associations and Democratic Organizations of Switzerland, 26

Ceplair CS20.indb 259

First Front Army (China), 148, 149 First Indochina War. See Anti-French Resistance War First Teachers Training School (China), 142 five-year plans (China), 158, 160, 161 focoism, 241n61 Fourth Army (China), 145, 149 Fourth Communist Corps (China), 151 Fourth International (Trotskyist), 97 France, 1, 14, 18, 21, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32, 37, 40, 44, 69, 142, 297 Franco-Prussian War, 41 Frankfurt, 25, 26, 27, 28 Franqui, Carlos, 172, 177, 181, 183, 189, 193 Free, the, 13 French-Indochina War. See AntiFrench Resistance War Freud, Sigmund, 4 Front Committee (China), 149 Fukuyama, Francis, 5 Fursenko, Alekxandr, 196 Gadea, Hilda Gandhi, Mohandas K.: 1, 2, 3, 7, 98–135, 205, 206, 208, 209; and ambulance corps, 111; on the approach of World War II, 128–29; assassinated, 134; avoiding independence negotiations, 131; Bardoli nonviolent resistance campaign, 117; Champaran nonviolent resistance campaign, 110; compared to Nehru, 98–102; divergence with Jawaharlal over meaning of independence, 120–24; divergence with Jawaharlal over nonviolent campaign strategy, 117–19; divergence with Nehrus over

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

260 Index Hindu-Muslim unity, 113–15; divergence with Nehrus over untouchables, 115–17; his doctrine, 106–9; double-edged sword of mass nonviolent resistance, 105–6; his education, 102–3; efforts to calm inter-ethnic violence, 132–34; fasts, 108, 114, 115–17, 134; insistence on a village economy, 132; Kaira nonviolent resistance campaign, 111; opposition to socialism, 125–26; Quit India, 129–31; return to India, 109–10; Rowlatt Act, 112; salt march, 125; South African campaigns, 103–5 —writings: Confession of Faith, 104; Hind Swaraj, 100, 104, 132; My Soul’s Agony, 115 Gadeo, Hilda, 178 Gao Wenqian, 137, 149, 168 Gapon, Georgy Apollonovich, 61 García Marquez, Gabriel, 172, 203 Gellhorn, Martha, 136 General Association of German Workers, 39 Geneva, 67 Georgia, 93, 95 German Democratic Republic, 193 “German Ideology,” 7, 19–20, 23 German Social Democrats, 193 German socialists, 15 German Workers’ Associations and Democratic Organizations of Switzerland, 26 German Workers’ Club, 25 German Workers Educational Society, 21, 29 Germany, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 67, 71, 77, 86, 87, 131

Ceplair CS20.indb 260

Girondins, 1 Glasgow, 18 Gokhale, G. K., 109 Gorki, 94 Gorky, Maxim, 50, 67, 90 Gosplan (State Planning Commission), 91, 94 Government Administration Council (China), 156 Government of India Act, 112 Granma, 182, 208 Great Britain. See England Great Leap Forward, 155, 162, 163 Great man thesis, 206–7 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 157, 162–66 Green, Martin, 134 Grundrisse, 34 Guangdong, 148 Guatemala, 179, 180 Guantanamo, 193 Guevara, Che, 1, 2, 3, 170–204, 206, 209; begins international odyssey, 201–2; Bolivian venture, 203–4; building the new state, 187–88; compared to Fidel, 170–73; Congo venture, 202–3; criticizes Fidel’s strategy and his distance from communism, 184–85; criticizes Soviet bloc, 202; death of, 204; in the doldrums, 202–3; early years, 179; Fidel’s evaluation of, 182–83; his first trip abroad, 192–93; goes to Mexico, 181; meets Fidel, 178, 181; medical school, 179; as military leader, 183; problems with Fidel, 198–200; relations with Fidel, 188–89; his revolutionary ideology, 190–91; sails for Cuba, 187; Sierra Maestra, 182–83; his speech at Punta del

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Index 261 Este, 196–97; trains as guerrilla, 184; travels in Central America, 179–81; victory, 186–87; his visit to the Soviet Union, 195 —Writings: “Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams,” 204; Guerrilla Warfare, 195; Motorcycle Diaries, 179; Reminiscences, 181 Gujarat, 102, 111 Guomindang, 143, 145, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 233n13 Hague conference of Workingmen’s International Association, 43–44 Haiku, 148 Halifax, 71 Halliday, John, 136, 138, 139 Halperin, Maurice, 172, 187, 191, 196, 198, 199, 200 Hansen, Jonathan M., 171 Harding, Neil, 55 Harijan (newspaper), 115 Harijans. See Dalits Harijan Sevak Sangh, 115 Harney, George, 8 Harrow, 108 Hartal, 112, 113 Havana, 186, 192, 193, 202, 203, 204 Hegel, G. W. F., 11, 12, 13, 17, 206, 207 Heine, Heinrich, 11 Helphand, Alexander (Parvus), 51, 61, 64 Hess, Moses, 11, 13, 18 Hesse, 27 Hindus, 99, 100, 104, 105, 107, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116, 134 Hitchens, Christopher, 171 Hitlerism, 128 Hoare, Sir Samuel, 115 Hobsbawm, Eric, 7, 47

Ceplair CS20.indb 261

D’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry (Baron), 11 Holy Family, The (Marx and Engels), 7, 17–18, 22, 23 Hombrito, 183 Hong Kong, 209 Hook, Sidney, 206, 207 Hua Guofeng, 169 Huaian, 146 Hunan, 141, 142, 143, 144 Hundred Flowers campaign, 159, 162 Hunt, Tristram, 32, 41, 45 Huxley, Aldous, 126 Independence for India League, 123 India, 1, 98–135, 158, 191, 205, 209 Indian National Congress, 3, 101, 108–33 passim, 205, 208; Ahmadabad congress (1921), 117; All India Congress Committee, 128, 129; Bankipore congress (1912), 109; Lahore congress (1929), 123; Luknow congress (1915), 110; Madras congress (1927), 119; Working Committee, 128, 129, 132, 133 Indian Opinion, 103 Indian Relief Act, 105 Inns of Court, 108 Interdistrict Committee, 74, 78 International Democratic Association, 22 International Propaganda Bureau, 152 Iran, 206 Iskra (newspaper), 55, 57, 59 Isle of Pines, 177 Israel, Jonathan, 4 Italy, 37, 41 Jacobins, 1, 60 Jallianwala Bagh, 112 James, William, 242n3

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

262 Index Japan, 128, 131, 142, 146, 153, 154, 193 Jena, 11 Jews, 107 Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), 143, 151, 153, 154, 233n13 Jiang Qing, 165, 166, 168, 169 Jiangsu, 146 Jianxi, 145, 149 Jinggangshan, 144 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 114, 115, 132 Joffe, Adolf, 143 Jones, Ernest, 33 Jones, Gareth Stedman, 8, 15, 19, 38, 47 Joshi, P. C., 98, 135 Jung Chang, 136, 138, 139 Kaira, 111 Kaiserslautern, 27 Kamenev, Lev, 75 Kashmir, 108, 134 Kazan, 87, 88 Kazan, University of, 53 Kennedy, John F., 196, 198 KGB, 195, 197 Khaddar, 107 Khilafat campaign, 113–14 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 206 Khrushchev, Nikita, 136, 155, 159, 163, 198, 199 Kiangsi, 150 Kienthal, 70–71 Kievskaya Misl (newspaper), 67 Kim Il Sung, 157 King, Martin Luther Jr., 1 Kingdom of God Is within You, The (Tolstoy), 103 Kissinger, Henry, 136, 166, 167 Kohat, 114 Kołakowski, Leszek, 47 Korea, 135, 157, 158

Ceplair CS20.indb 262

Kossuth, Louis, 29 Kosygin, Aleksei, 166, 204 Kraków, 69 Krasnov, Pyotr, 89 Kronstadt, 85, 93 Krupskaya, Nadezhda, 68 Kudryatsev, Sergei, 198 Kuo-kang Shao, 148 Lafargue, Paul, 43, 45 Lahore, 123 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 35 Las Villas, 186 Latin America, 193, 194, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 204 League against Imperialism, 120 League of Communists, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 34 League of the Just, 21 League of Military Youth, 148 League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, 53 Left-Communists (Russia), 84 Lelyveld, Joseph, 105 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 1, 2, 3, 41, 49–97, 119, 144, 190, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 213n3; Bolshevik-Menshevik split, 59–60; clashes with Trotsky, 82–83, 91–92; combating the counter-revolution, 84, 88–90; compared to Trotsky, 49–53; death of, 96; declining health, 93–95; early years, 53; establishing the new state, 81–83; February Revolution, 71; founds Iskra, 55; memorialized, 97; 1905 revolution, 63–64, 66–67; overseeing the civil war, 87–90; overturning the Provisional Government, 78–80; party building, 61–3;

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Index 263 polemics with Trotsky, 67–69; political organizing, 53–55; rebuilding the party, 67–69; his “Testament,” 92, 95; Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 86–87; World War I, 69–71 —Writings: April Theses, 72–73, 74, 77; The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 55, 57; Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 70; Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, 70; One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, 61; The State and Revolution, 72–73; What Is to Be Done?, 51, 55, 57, 60 Leninism, 76, 96, 147, 154 Lenin Institute, 97 Leonov, Nikolai, 195 Lessing, Gottfried, 11 Lessner, Friedrich, 7 Leung, John K., 160 Leys, Simon, 138, 139, 151, 169 Lichtheim, George, 47 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 35, 45 Lifton, Robert J., 139 Li Lisan, 148, 149 Limaye, Madhu, 99, 114 Lin Baio, 166, 167, 213n3 liquidationism, 67, 68, 69 Liss, Sheldon B., 198 List, Friedrich, 18 Li Ta-chao, 142 Literatur Zeitung (newspaper), 18 Liu Shaoqi, 153, 154, 158, 162, 213n3 Lockhart, R. H. Bruce, 73 London, 18, 22, 24, 28, 31, 33, 43, 57, 58, 66, 102, 104 Long March, 151–52 Louis XIV, 138 Lucknow, 110 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 51, 52, 53, 56, 63, 64, 72, 88

Ceplair CS20.indb 263

Lushan, 161 Lutheranism, 9 MacFarquhar, Roderick, 166 Madras, 119, 120 Manchester, 8, 13, 14, 15, 18, 31, 38, 41 Manchuria, 146, 154, 155 Manifesto of the Communist Party, 7, 16, 20, 22–24, 45, 46, 70, 142, 175 Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra, 18 Maoism, 201 Maoping Conference, 145 Mao Zedong, 1, 2, 3, 136–69, 206, 208, 209, 210, 234n20; beginning of Mao cult, 153; building the new state, 156–58; clashes with Zhou, 149–50; clash with party leaders, 144–45; compared to Zhou, 136–40; continued attacks on Zhou, 166–67; death of, 169; early years, 140–43; Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 164–66; launches comeback, 150–51; launches rectification campaign, 160–61; lays groundwork for a cultural revolution, 162; Long March, 151–52; organizes first soviet, 145; plans Great Leap Forward, 159; theory of peasant revolution, 143–44; united front strategy, 152–55; war with Guomindang, 155; war with Japan, 154 —Writings and speeches: “The Great Union of the Popular Masses,” 142; “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend,” 159; “On the Correct Handling

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

264 Index of Contradictions among the People,” 160; On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, 155–56; “Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” 143; Selected Works, 155, 169; “Twenty-Three Articles,” 163 Marshall, George, 136, 155 Martí, Jose, 173, 175, 176, 177 Martov, Julius, 51, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 80 Marx, Edgar, 33 Marx, Eleanor, 6 Marx, Franziska, 33 Marx, Jenny, 10, 218n73 Marx, Karl, 1, 2, 3, 6–48, 53, 73, 92, 106, 170, 172, 175, 205, 209; battles against Bakunin, 38–44; compared to Engels, 6–9; death of, 46; death of Mary Burns, 35–36; demise of Workingmen’s International Association, 43–44; early journalism, 11–13; early life, 9–11; founding of the Workingmen’s International Association, 37; last years, 44–46; leads General Council, 37–44; journalism and research in 1850s and 1860s, 34–35; political organizing with Engels, 19–23; resettlement in London, 31–34; revolutions of 1848, 24–30; response to Commune, 42–44 —Writings: Capital, 9, 31, 37, 39, 44, 46, 47; The Civil War in France, 42; The Class Struggles in France (1848–1850), 28, 29; A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, 34–35; “Contribution to the Critique

Ceplair CS20.indb 264

of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 12; critique of Friedrich List, Das Nationale System der Politischen Ökonomie, 18; Critique of the Gotha Program, 45; Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 30; Grundrisse, 34; “[Joint] Statement [of Resignation],” 26; The Poverty of Philosophy, 22; Theses on Feuerbach, 19; “Wage, Labour and Capital,” 26–27 —Writings, with Engels: “Address of the Central Authority to the League” (March and June 1850), 28; The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association, 44; Circular Letter to German Social Democrats (1879), 45; “The Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,” 25; Fictitious Splits in the International, 43; “Germany Ideology,” 7, 19–20, 23, 45; The Holy Family, 7, 17–18, 22, 23, 45; Manifesto of the Communist Party, 7, 16, 20, 22–24, 45, 46, 70, 142, 175 Marxism, Marxist, 9, 51, 53, 55, 57, 61, 62, 65, 68, 69, 83, 95, 120, 125, 142, 143, 144, 146, 154, 160, 175, 177, 179, 181, 185, 194, 202, 205, 234n20 Marxism-Leninism, 157, 172, 175, 181, 185, 197 Mathews, Herbert, 184 May Fourth Movement, 142, 146 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 29, 37, 39 McCulloch, John Ramsay, 15 McLellan, David, 12 Mehring, Franz, 6, 8, 9, 18, 32 Meisner, Maurice, 138, 144, 152

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Index 265 Menand, Louis, 7 Mendes-France, Pierre, 136 Mensheviks, 60–72 passim Mexico, 171, 177, 181 Michael, Franz, 151, 157 Middle East, 192 Mikoyan, Anastas, 198 Military Affairs Commission (China), 150, 151, 163 Military Revolutionary Committee (Petrograd, 1917), 78, 79 Mill, James, 15 Millerovo, 89 Minsk, 55 Moncada, 176, 208 Moore, Barrington, Jr., 4, 84 Moscow, 53, 84, 90, 144, 148, 151, 153, 157, 188, 201, 202, 234n20 Moselle, 11 Mountbatten, Louis, 133 Muslim League, 114, 131, 132 Muslims, 99, 103, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114, 132 My Life (Trotsky), 83 Nachalo (newspaper), 64 Naftali, Timothy, 196 Nanda, B. R., 101 Nanjing, 148, 150 Nankai School, 146 Nankai Student Union Alliance News (newspaper), 146 Nankai University, 146 Napoleon I. 207 Napoleon III, 30, 41 Nasser, Gamel Abdel, 201 National Council of Culture (Cuba), 196 National Defense Council (China), 158 National General Assembly of the Cuban People, 194

Ceplair CS20.indb 265

National People’s Congress (China), 167 National Savings and Housing Institute (Cuba), 191 Navajivan (newspaper), 110 Nehru, Indira, 115 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 1, 2, 3, 7, 98–135, 136, 179, 205, 206, 208, 209; and the approach of World War II, 128–29; becomes politically active, 112; becomes president of Congress, 123–24; compared to Gandhi, 98–102; divergence with Gandhi over benefits of poverty, 127–28; divergence with Gandhi over HinduMuslim unity, 113–15; divergence with Gandhi over meaning of independence, 120–24; divergence with Gandhi over nonviolent campaign strategy, 117–19; divergence with Gandhi over untouchables, 115–17; eulogy for Gandhi, 134–35; on industrialization of and socialism for India, 125–26; leading the way to independence, 131–35; meets Gandhi, 110; his personality and education, 108–9; as prime minister, 135; and Quit India, 129–31; rejects Gandhi’s vision of a villagebased India, 132; turn to Marxist socialism, 120 Nehru, Kamala, 99 Nehru, Motilal, 108, 109, 112, 113, 117, 125 Neue Rheinische Revue (newspaper), 28 Neue Rheinische Zeitung (newspaper), 25, 26, 27, 28 New American Cyclopedia, The, 33 New China News Agency, 152

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

266 Index New Economic Policy (Russia), 85, 92 New People’s Study Society (China), 142 New York City, 44, 191 New-York Daily Tribune (newspaper), 30, 32, 33 New York Times (newspaper), 184 Nikolayev, 57 Ningdu Conference, 150 Nixon, Richard, 136, 166 Noakhali, 132 Northwest Frontier Province, 114 Notes to the People (newspaper), 33 Novaya Zhizn (journal), 64 Nove, Alec, 84 Obama, Barack, 204 October Revolution, 79, 82, 86, 206, 207 Odessa, 57 Offenbach, 27 Office of Revolutionary Plans and Coordination (Cuba), 188 Organizaciónes Revolucionarias Integradas, 196, 198 Organization of American States, 196 Oriente Province, 173 Orthodox Radical Action, 175 Ottoman Empire, 4, 113 Pall Mall Gazette (newspaper), 41 Palmer. R. R., 4 Paris, 15, 22, 25, 27, 42, 67, 147 Partido Ortodoxo, 175 Partido Socialista Popular, 175, 184, 185, 188, 192, 194, 196 Partido Unido de la Revolución Socialista, 198 Patil, V. T., 129 Pazos, Felipe, 185 Peasant War in Germany, The (Engels), 32 Peking University Library, 142

Ceplair CS20.indb 266

Peng Dehuai, 161 People’s Assembly of the Liberated Areas (China), 154 People’s Commissariat of Communications (China), 94 People’s Liberation Army, 163, 165, 1666, 167 Permanent Committee of the Garrisons (Petrograd, 1917), 78 Permanent Revolution, The (Trotsky), 51 Perón, Juan, 179 Peru, 171 Petrograd, 71, 73, 77, 79, 84, 90 Philosophy of Poverty, The (Proudhon), 22 Phoenix Farm, 103 physical culture, 142 Pinar del Río, 191 Pioneer (newspaper), 126 Pipes, Richard, 56 Plekhanov, Georgi, 54, 57, 59, 61, 67, 206, 207 Podvoisky, Nikolai, 72 Poland, 24, 92 Political Security Bureau (China), 149 Political Training Board of the National Military Council, 153 Political Weekly (newspaper), 143 Poona, 125 Poona, Pact of, 115 Potresov, Alexei, 55, 56 Poverty of Philosophy, The (Marx), 22 Prague, 68 Pravda (newspaper), 72, 73, 75, 95 Pre-Parliament (Russia, 1917), 77 Proletary (newspaper), 67 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 21, 30, 37, 39, 40 Provisional Government (Russia, 1917), 71, 72, 74, 76, 79, 81, 205 Prussia, 27, 31, 41, 209

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Index 267 Punjab, 133 Punta del Este, 196 Puritans, 1 Pyongyang, 166 Qing Ming, 168 Quit India, 129–31 Radek, Karl, 90 Radio Rebelde, 183 Raskolnikov, Fyodor, 76 Reardon-Anderson, James, 155 Red Army (China), 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 209 Red Army (Russia), 49, 53, 87, 92 Red Guard (China), 144, 163–65 Red Guard (Petrograd, 1917), 78 Red Square, 97 Reed, John, 78, 80 Reissner, Larissa, 87–88 Ren Bishi, 15 Revolución (newspaper), 195 Revolutionary Military Council (China), 150 revolutionary personalities, 3–4 Revolutionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi, The (Wolfenstein), 4 Revolutions of 1848, 7 Rheinische Zeitung (newspaper), 11, 12 Rhenish District Committee of Democratic Associations, 26 Rhineland, 25, 27, 39 Riazanov, David, 74 Ricardo, David, 15 Robespierre, Maximilien, 60, 177, 207 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 177 Roots, John McCook, 136 Rosenberg, Arthur, 42, 47 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11 Rowlatt Act, 112 Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Susanne Hoeber, 100

Ceplair CS20.indb 267

Rue, John E., 144 Ruge, Arnold, 9, 12, 13 Ruskin, John, 102, 103 Russia, 1, 44, 45–46, 47, 49–97, 191, 205, 207, 209, 213n3 Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 68, 222n40 Sabarmati, 109 St. Louis, 38 St. Petersburg, 53, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 82 Salisbury, Harrison E., 137 salt march, 125–26 Santiago de Cuba, 186 Satyagraha, 107, 108, 113, 117, 118 Satyagraha Sabha, 112 Schiller Institute, 8 Schoenhals, Michael, 166 Schurz, Carl, 25 Schram, Stuart, 140–143, 158, 160 scripting, 4–5 Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets (Petrograd, October 1917), 79 Second International, 68 Selected Works (of Mao Zedong), 155, 169 Service, Robert, 68 Serge, Victor, 90 Sermon on the Mount, 103 7,000 Cadres Conference (China), 172 Seventh Party Congress (CCP), 154 Seventh Party Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 87 Shanghai, 143, 145, 148 Shantou, 148 Shaoshan, 141 Shaw, George Bernard, 47 Shenk, Joshua Wolf, 1–2

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

268 Index Shensi, 151 Shushenskoye, 55 Siberia, 57 Sierra Chica, 179 Sierra Maestra, 182, 185 Simbirsk, 53 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, 157 Skocpol, Theda, 4 Smedley, Agnes, 140 Smith, Adam, 15 Smolny Institute, 79 Smuts, Jan, 104, 105 Snow, Edgar, 136, 140, 143, 146, 150, 151 Social Democratic Relief Committee for German Refugees, 29 Socialist Revolutionaries, 82, 205 Socialist Youth Corps (China), 142 Sons of Liberty, 1 South Africa, 103–6, 111, 113 Southeast Asia, 201, 206 South Russian Workers’ Union, 57 Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (Petrograd, 1917), 72, 73, 77, 79, 80 Soviet of Workers’ Deputies (St. Petersburg, 1905), 62–66 Soviet of Workers,’ Peasants,’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (China), 144 Soviet Union, 120, 149, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 165, 185, 188, 192, 193–202 passim, 204, 206 Sozial-Democrat (newspaper), 39 Spain, 41 Spencer, Herbert, 242n3 Stalin, Josef, 56, 80, 89, 91, 92, 93. 94, 95, 97, 136, 154, 155, 159, 160, 163, 164, 213n3 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1 State and Revolution, The (Lenin), 72–73 Stirner, Max, 20

Ceplair CS20.indb 268

Stockholm Unity Congress (RSDLP), 67 Student Directorate (Cuba), 186, 196 Study Campaign for Ideological Reform (China), 157 Sukhanov, N. N., 56, 72, 74, 78 Sun Yat-Sen. See Sun Zhongsan Sun Yat-sen University, 234n20 Sun Zhongsan, 143, 146, 233n13 Sverdlov, Yakov, 81, 86 Svyazhsk, 88 Swadeshi, 109 Swaraj, 107, 113 Switzerland, 25, 40, 67, 71 Szulc, Tad, 173, 182, 191 Taiwan, 209 Tanzania, 201 Tarará, 188 Teiwes, Frederick C., 157 Telegraph für Deutschland (magazine), 13 Ten Hours Act, 37 Tenth Party Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 85, 93 Tenth Party Plenum (China), 162 Terrill, Ross, 145 Tharoor, Shashi, 125 Theosophical Society, 103 Third International. See Comintern Third Party Plenum (China), 161 Third Petrograd City Conference (October 1917), 78 Thomas, Hugh, 182, 187, 194 Thoreau, Henry David, 102 Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (Wolfe), 4 Tiananmen Square, 168, 169 Tianjin, 146 Tibet, 209 Tilly, Charles, 4 Tolstoy, Leo, 102, 103

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

Index 269 Tolstoy Farm, 103 Transcaucasian Republic, 93 Transvaal, 103, 104 Trier, 9 Trotsky, Lev Davidovich, 1, 2, 3, 49–97, 190, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 213n3; BolshevikMenshevik split, 59–60; building and leading the Red Army, 87–90; clashes with Lenin, 82–83, 91; combating the counter-revolution, 84–85; compared to Lenin, 49–53; critique of the revolutionary state, 96; death of, 97; his downfall after Lenin’s death, 96–97; early years, 57; establishing the new state, 81–82; exile and escape, 57; failure to back Lenin, 93–95; February Revolution, 71; further disagreements with Lenin, 90–93; London and Iskra, 57–58; man without a party, 61; man without a party again, 67; 1905 revolution, 61–63, 65; overturning the Provisional Government, 78–80; polemics with Lenin, 67–69; political organizing, 57; theory of permanent revolution, 51, 65, 66; Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 86–87; trial/exile/escape, 65–66; World War I, 69–71 —Writings: “Basic Questions on Food and Agrarian Policy,” 85; History of the Russian Revolution, 76; My Life, 83; Permanent Revolution, 51; “Prospects of a Labor Dictatorship,” 65–66; Terrorism and Communism, 52; The War and the International, 69

Ceplair CS20.indb 269

Trujillo, Rafael, 175 Trump, Donald, 204 Tunisia, 206 Twelve Who Ruled: The Committee of Public Safety during the Terror (Palmer), 4 Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks, 145, 234n20 26th of July Movement, 177, 187, 188, 194, 196 Ukraine, 57, 88, 89 Ulam, Adam, 63, 67, 91, 95 Ulyanov, Vladimir Ilyich. See Lenin Ulyanovsk, 53 Union of South Africa, 206 United Nations, 193, 201 United Socialist Democrats of Germany and France, 29 United States, 71, 155, 158, 172, 175, 179, 181 185, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 201, 204 United Students Association, 142 University of Berlin, 9, 13 University of Buenos Aires, 179 University of Bonn, 8, 10 University of Jena, 11 Unto This Last (Ruskin), 103 untouchables. See Dalits Urrutia, Manuel, 192 Uttar Pradesh, 117 Vaishyas, 102 Valentinov, Nikolai, 61 Vegetarian Society of London, 103 Velázquez, Lucila, 170 Venezuela, 185, 201 Versailles, Treaty of, 142 Vienna, 66, 67, 208 Vietnam, 135, 201, 204 Voltaire, 11 Voronsky, Alexander, 86 Vperëd (newspaper), 61

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM

270 Index Wakeman, Frederic Jr., 139 Walder, Andrew G., 169 Wang Bingnan, 162 Wang Li, 136 war communism, 84–85 Wavell, Archibald, 132 Weerth, George, 14 Weitling, Wilhelm, 21 Westphalen, Jenny von. See Jenny Marx Westphalia, 25 Weydemeyer, Joseph, 38 Whampoa Military Academy, 148, 233n13 What Is to Be Done? (Lenin), 51, 55, 57, 60 White, Theodore, 136 Wilson, Edmund, 51 Winter Palace, 61 Wolfe, Bertram, 4 Wolfenstein, E. Victor, 4, 103 Womack, Brantly, 144 Workers and Peasants Inspectorate (Russia), 95 Workers’ Association, 25 Workers Cultural Palace (China), 168 Workers’ Opposition (Soviet Union), 91, 93 Workingmen’s International Association, 37–44, 70 Wuhan, 148 Xi’an, 153 Yan’an, 153 Yang Shangkun, 164 Yanovka, 57 Young Hegelians, 8, 12, 13 Young India (newspaper), 110, 115, 121

Ceplair CS20.indb 270

Young People’s Library, 142 Yugoslavia, 192, 194 Zasulich, Vera, 57 Zhang Chunqiao, 167 Zhou Enlai, 1, 2, 3, 136–69, 170, 190, 208, 209; advancement through the ranks, 147–48; advocates pragmatic policies, 160; building the new state, 156; compared to Mao, 135–40; death of, 168; declining health, 167; early clashes with Mao, 149–50; early years, 146; efforts to minimize damage of Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 162–66; Great Leap Forward, 161–62; Hundred Flowers campaign, 159; implementing the united front policy, 152; joins Communist Party and Guomindang, 146–47; more criticism from Mao, 166–67; named Premier and Minister of Foreign Affairs, 156, 157–58; national mourning for, 168–69; recruiting intellectuals, 152, 159; self-criticism, 153–54; subordinates himself to Mao, 150–51; war with Guomindang, 155; war with Japan, 154 Zhu De, 137, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 167, 213n3 Zimmerwald, 70, 71 Zinoviev, Grigori, 75 Zulus, 111 Zunyi, 151 Zurich, 69

4/15/2020 9:15:07 PM