In Europe

piece by a man badly disappointed by the course ‘his’ revolution had taken. He came back again and again to the problem of Russia's backwardness, and seemed in hindsight even to be in agreement with the Mensheviks: the country was, indeed, not ready for socialism. Lenin did not spare any of his old comrades, but his verdict concerning his intended successor was nothing less than damning. ‘Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings between communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary. For this reason I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post and replace him with someone who has only one advantage over Comrade Stalin, namely greater tolerance, greater loyalty, greater courtesy and consideration to comrades, less capriciousness, etc.’
    But it was too late. Three months later Lenin lost the ability to speak. He died on 21 January, 1924. During the last ten months of his life, he was able to utter only a few syllables:
vot-vot
(here-here) and
syezd-syezd
(congress-congress).
    Stalin went immediately for his former rival Trotsky. Apart from all their political differences, the two men also held each other in immense personal contempt. During the civil war, Trotsky had reprimanded his subordinate Stalin on a number of occasions, and Stalin had never forgivenhim for that. In January 1925, Trotsky was discharged as commander of the Red Army. A campaign of slander against the ‘Trotskyite schismatics’ followed. In July 1926 he was dismissed from the Politburo; Kamenev and Zinoviev followed in October.
    Eighteen months later, on 7 November, 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev made a final attempt to stop Stalin: they issued a public call for mass demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad. The secret police beat the demonstrators back, both organisers were thrown out of the party, and only their great fame kept Stalin from liquidating them on the spot. Trotsky was dragged kicking and screaming from his apartment and put on a train for Almaty. From there he was deported to Turkey in 1929, and by way of France and Norway finally ended up in Mexico in 1936. There, at Coyoacán, he spent his last years, a prisoner in his own house, watched over by Mexican policemen and a handful of followers, waiting for Stalin's death-sentence-by-default to be carried out. On 20 August, 1940, an NKVD agent fatally wounded him with a blow of an ice-axe to the head. He died the next day.
    What effects did all these events have on daily life in an average Russian village?
    In 1997, the former editor of the
New York Times’
desk in Moscow, Serge Schmemann, published a detailed history of daily life in Sergiyevskyo, also known as Koltsovo. The village lay about 130 kilometres south of Moscow, not far from the city of Kaluga, and Schmemann came there because his mother's family had once owned an estate nearby. The Great Revolution had reached the village in autumn 1918, when an ad hoc committee of farmers seized the estate. Schmemann's family got up from the breakfast table, left everything where it was, packed a few clothes and left.
    The name of the village was considered too feudal, so a few months later it was given a new one: Koltsovo, after the writer Koltsov – who, incidentally, had never set foot in the area. A group of Bolshevik officials came to Koltsovo. They set up a commune on the abandoned estate, consisting of two widows with their children and a number of outsiders. The chairman was a veteran of the revolution from Moscow, a former printer. The farmers saw the group primarily as a gang of thieves: theyconfiscated cows, horses, pigs and machinery everywhere, in the name of the revolution.
    Schmemann found the minutes of a meeting held in a neighbouring village in 1919. ‘Kulaks shouted “Godless coercion!”, “Down with the Communists!”, “You were given 1,500 hectares, give us bread!” Some threw stones.’ Ten years later the farmers were still refusing to take part in the kolkhoz, but now the chief troublemakers among them were labelled enemies of the people. Seven ‘kulak families’ from Koltsovo were sent into exile, their possessions went to the kolkhoz. On the heels of revolutionary enthusiasm, Stalin's revolutionary coercion crept into the village.
    This growing repression had everything to do with the first five-year plan launched in October 1928. The plan was intended to make of the Soviet Union a ‘second America’, and