"Lenin's Last Testament"
Letters to the Congress
by Vladimir Lenin
This Edition First Published 2012
Copyright © Bretwalda Books 2012
Published by Bretwalda Books at Smashwords
Copyright © 2012 Bretwalda Books
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ISBN 978-1-907791-66-6
Contents
Granting Legislative Functions to the State Planning Commission
The Question of Nationalities or "Autonomisation"
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These letters, and those that follow, make up the last of Lenin's works which are equivalent to an outline programme for the future of the Soviet government.
In these letters Lenin emphasises the need to make changes to the Soviet government and warns of potentially disastrous consequences if the necessary but difficult steps are not taken.
Most of these documents were written in late 1922 and early 1923. By this date the Communist Revolution that Lenin had led was firmly established in Russia. The horrific civil war that may have cost up to six million deaths was staggering towards its conclusion and only a few skirmishes remained to be fought. Lenin was turning his mind from the struggle to obtain power to the problems of what to do with power now that it had been won. These, his final writings, concentrate on the conflicts between orthodox Communist ideology as it should be implemented in an ideal world and the practical realities of the nascent Soviet Union as it emerged from civil war, famine and revolution.
We do not know what more Lenin was intending to write, but these documents had been completed when in March 1923 he suffered his third and most serious stroke. Lenin was left almost paralysed and unable to speak coherantly. His wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, hoped for an at least partial recovery and kept these writings secret in the meantime. When Lenin died in January 1924 she showed the documents to the leadership of the Communist Party and demanded that they be made public.
The Party leadership, composed then of Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and Georgy Pyatakov was deeply alarmed by what they read. Lenin's writings were critical of most of them, and of Stalin in particular. They also made recommendations that the leaders had no intention of carrying out. Stalin wanted the documents destroyed, but the others were still in awe of Lenin and believed that the Party as a whole would not tolerate such brutal censorship. Moreover, the leadership were even then engaged in a power struggle to see who would take over from Lenin. That struggle would eventually be won by Stalin, but this was as yet unclear when Lenin's Last Testament was announced by his widow.
In the end it was decided that the document would be made public, but only under very tight conditions. They were to be read out once, and once only, to the regional soviet delegations gathering for the XIII Party Congress. The taking of notes would be banned. The documents were not to appear on the Congress agenda and referring to them in debate was banned.
Once Stalin had gained undisputed power he authorised a limited printed edition of these papers, but only after they had been heavily edited to remove passages critical of Stalin. A full version had meanwhile found its way to the USA and was published in 1926. This version was denounced as a capitalist forgery by the Soviet Union - and that remained the official position until 1956 when Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, published the full text in Russia.
This edition is taken from the original shorthand records.
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I would urge strongly that at this Congress a number of changes be made in our political structure.
I want to tell you of the considerations to which I attach most importance.
At the head of the list I set an increase in the number of Central Committee members to a few dozen or even a hundred. It is my opinion that without this reform our Central Committee would be in great danger if the course of events were not quite favourable for us (and that is something we cannot count on).
Then, I intend to propose that the Congress should on certain conditions invest the decisions of the State Planning Commission with legislative force, meeting, in this respect, the wishes of Comrade Trotsky- to a certain extent and on certain conditions.
As for the first point, i.e., increasing the number of C.C. members, I think it must be done in order to raise the prestige of the Central Committee, to do a thorough job of improving our administrative machinery and to prevent conflicts between small sections of the C.C. from acquiring excessive importance for the future of the Party.
It seems to me that our Party has every right to demand from the working class 50 to 100 C.C. members, and that it could get them from it without unduly taxing the resources of that class.