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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.100: History Never Ends

10.100. I am just laughing at the absurdity of all this. We are a long ways from wherever I started this podcast back in 2013. 12 to 15 episodes a series, I said. It’ll be simple, I said. I really want to switch gears and not do anything as insanely large as the History of Rome, I said. Now even after I let the genie out of the bottle and the French Revolution ran for 55 episodes, it did not even remotely occur to me that I would approach that many episodes ever again, let alone blow past it so long ago, I can’t even see it in the rearview mirror. We have been doing the Russian Revolution series for three years now — three calendar years — which is just about as long as I expected the entire podcast to run, all series combined, when I first launched the show almost a decade ago. This is truly insane, thanks very much for sticking around. But, uh, let’s start bringing this mother in for a landing, shall we?

Now, one of the great lessons I hope you’ve taken away from this series — the whole of Revolutions and the whole of the History of Rome if you listened to that — is that history just keeps happening. Things just keep happening one after the other in an unbroken continuum. Crises, conflicts, accomplishment, setbacks. Old people retire and die, new people are born and replace them. Any random historical year could appear in one biography in the final pages, covering the final days and death, in another biography, in the first pages, covering birth and early childhood. Historical causes produce historical effects that then become historical causes of the next historical effects. As World War I originated in the Franco-Prussian War, which came from 1848, which gained from the Napoleonic Wars, which came from the French Revolution. Drawing invisible lines to divide up eras and periods in ages is an absolutely artificial exercise, as one day simply follows from the next in a seamless transformation from one day to the next. History passes one day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time, one moment at a time. And there’s never a break. There’s never a pause. It’s just the relentless passing of time since the beginning of time.

Now, because history is always happening, there is always something happening. Something to deal with. Something exploding, something imploding, something beginning, something ending. But there’s always, always, always something that comes along and derails carefully laid plans and forces people into that place that humans eternally live, but are eternally trying to escape; that place where we must scramble and improvise responses to unexpected events. Ever since October 1917, for example, Lenin and his comrades had been aiming for this thing they called “the breathing spell,” the moment of relative peace, tranquility and regularity where they would be able to implement their program free of mortal threats to the Soviet regime. This was the logic behind the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: make peace at enormous cost because we need a breathing spell. This was the great prize to be wondering the Civil War: if we defeat all our enemies, we shall be able to finally work in peace.

But this breathing spell they yearned for was a mirage. And it’s always a mirage. We all know from our own daily lives, that fabled next week or next month or next year when we will finally be able to do all the things we have to put off today, because we’re too busy, too harried and dealing with too many other emergencies big and small — sudden deadlines that force us to drop everything, unexpected events that just upend our lives. Except when we get to that next week, and next month, and next year, we find the same set of unexpected emergencies, often the same type and category that have stalked us throughout our lives, and we are forced back into our natural state of scrambling a reaction and improvising a response. And despite this, never quite being able to give up the fantasy that next week, next month, or next year, it will be different. That we’ll finally get that breathing spell.

But there’s never going to be a breathing spell. That’s not how life works. That’s not how history works.

If historical breathing spells existed, by all rights the Russian Communist Party should have been long into one in the summer of 1923. By 1921, they had survived the end of World War I, the Civil War, and every other uprising, invasion and crisis that had threatened their new regime. But instead, it just continued to be one damn thing after another. There was a catastrophic famine, an economic crisis, conflict within and between nationalities and classes and political factions. And now here in 1923, it was just more of the same. Always, always more of the same. And stop me if you’ve heard this before, but in 1923, the conditions endured by the industrial working classes of Russia, in their factories and mines and railroads, were becoming intolerable and threatening violent upheaval. There was a broader economic crisis sweeping central Europe that might open the door for the long hoped for worldwide communist revolution. And along with this, there stood poised the real possibility that Russia was about to be dragged back into a war between the Great Powers, a war that should have been unthinkable as they were all just five years removed from the Great War, but which was somehow a very live possibility by the fall of 1923.

So, there’s no breathing spell. There’s never going to be a breathing spell. There was only history over and over and over again forever.

So, yeah, unrest in the industrial sector? It’s been a constant companion of our series going back to the days of the Witte boom in the 1890s. As I mentioned a few times over the past several episodes, since the beginning of World War I, the Russian working classes have been absolutely battered. When the war came, the ranks of the proletariat practically doubled overnight, as every factory in Russia turned to cranking out coats and boots, guns, trains, equipment, and munitions. Russian peasants flocked to the cities to fill jobs. The urban population grew exponentially through 1914, 1915, and 1916.

But then, it all came crashing down. By the dawn of 1917, scarcity and inflation produced a rolling social crisis that smashed through the industrial economy, and then smash right through the tsar. No fuel and no resources meant factories shut down and workers were laid off. Inflation meant their wages were worthless. Crop failures and the destruction of the railroads meant there was no food to buy anyway. So the explosive growth of the proletariat since the 1890s — and then especially after 1914 — popped like a bubble. And when it popped, the factories went idle, the workers fled back to their villages, depopulating the cities and leaving behind only the demoralized and shellshocked remnants of the industrial working class, often families who simply had nowhere else to go.

Now, I’m not saying there’s a causal relationship here. But one cannot help but notice the ironic demographic correlation to the great Communist revolution of October 1917. As outlined by Marx, this revolution was meant to be driven by the inexorable transformation of agricultural peasants into industrial workers. But since October 1917, the opposite has occurred. Workers are turning back into peasants.

What was left of the Russian working class was so demoralized and exhausted that their angry convulsions in the spring of 1921, convulsions that had sparked the Kronstadt Rebellion, feebly dissipated in a matter of days. They were no longer able to sustain the kind of energy that had driven 1905 and 1917. Afraid of this briefest of flickers, the Communist Party leadership then set to work making sure it never happened again. Leadership jobs and all the labor unions went to loyal members of the Party; those were among the key patronage positions now doled out by General-Secretary Stalin. The job of the union bosses were to keep the workers working, not press their claims for abuse, mistreatment, and exploitation. Meanwhile, the Ban on Factions issued by the 10th Party Congress had been specifically aimed at the so-called Workers’ Opposition, that nascent faction inside the Party that wanted to advance and defend the working classes against the policies of a Central Committee that seemed totally divorced now from the proletariat it claimed to represent.

As if to drive home the point that the Communist Party was no longer in any sense the party of labor, the signature economic reform initiated to grapple with the great economic dislocations caused by a decade of war and conflict, the NEP, was specifically designed to favor the peasants over the workers. It was meant to favor the bosses over the workers. The bourgeoisie over the proletariat. The turn to market economics led the Soviet regime to expand their policy of leasing state owned factories, mines, or railroads to private operators. The idea was that these operators were the ones with the technical knowledge and experience to run the factories, mines, and railroads efficiently and productively. In practice, it meant they were inviting back the same set of engineers and managers who had run everything before the revolution. So much so that by the spring of 1923, the revolution itself appeared to be a cruel joke. In 1917, the revolution had promised control of the factories would be handed to the worker soviets. This was the very essence of workers owning and controlling the means of production. But this promise had been forgotten ages ago. And the reality was, they were abused, exploited, and controlled by the same old bosses, now working in profitable partnership with the grandees of the Communist Party. On the factory floor, in their canteens, and in their depopulated and dilapidated working class neighborhoods, the urban labor force of Soviet Russia bitterly referred to the NEP as the New Exploitation of the Proletariat.

So two years after the unrest of 1921, the griping of the workers in Moscow, Petrograd, and other cities once again gave way to active agitation. Opposed by the Communist Party and the union leaders the party appointed, working class dissidents took matters into their own hands. In many cases, these leaders were themselves longstanding Party members. They weren’t reflexively anti-Communist outsiders. A few of them had joined the Bolshevik faction way back in 1905, their membership cards older than all but a few of Lenin’s closest followers. But they did not come from the intelligentsia set who ran the Party, and they fumed at the hard turn away from representing worker interests. This was meant to be a revolution by and for the proletariat. Workers of the world, unite! All power to the Soviet! Does anyone even remember these slogans?

All the senior leaders could do is offer the deeply unsatisfying assertion that because the Communist Party was the party of the workers, they must be… the party of the workers or something.

As Zinoviev wrote in an article in 1923, “A party can be a workers’ party in its composition, and yet not be proletarian and organization, program, and policy.” Uh huh. And how’s that again?

So, despite the Ban on Factions, clandestine groups formed to press the interests of the forgotten proletariat. One called the Workers’ Group and the other called Workers’ Truth. In July and August 1923, they organized wildcat strikes, labor shutdowns, opposed and condemned by official union leadership. This was all incredibly vexing for the leaders of the Communist Party, because at that same moment, they were watching a similar rise in worker unrest over in Germany and concluding it meant that revolution was in the air. And if such conditions meant that a revolution loomed over Germany, what did it mean for Russia?

Now, since we’re here, let’s pop over to Germany, because 1923 was a year of major crisis for the young Weimar Republic, even more so than the young Soviet regime. Reparations payments under the Versailles Treaty compounded the devastation wrought by World War I, leaving the German economy in shambles. As we’ve seen, the British tried to ease the punitive burdens in the interest of general peace and stability — and the interests of the British economy — but the French government adamantly opposed any changes. Their economy was also a devastated shambles and it required German money and capital and manufactured goods to rebuild. Plus, there was the unspoken belief that these reparations payments were simply repayment, plus interest, of the reparations Germany had imposed on France after the Franco-Prussian War. Which, as you’ll recall, was an amount calculated by Bismarck to be identical to the amount Napoleon had imposed on Prussia in 1807, because this is all just one unbroken continuity of history. Causes becoming effects becoming causes becoming effects.

Anyway, by the end of 1922, the Germans fell behind their scheduled obligations. The official reparations commission created by the Versailles Treaty declared Germany in default, leading the French and Belgian armies to move in and occupy the Ruhr Valley in January 1923. Both as punishment and as guarantee for future payment.

As the Ruhr Valley contained something like three quarters of German iron, steel, and coal production, the occupation triggered the collapse of the German economy, a crisis of political legitimacy for the German government, and an international diplomatic crisis that might turn into the guns of August all over again. It was among the several triggers for the infamous run of hyperinflation that rocked the very shallow foundation to the Weimar Republic. And by hyperinflation, we mean hyper inflation. German marks weren’t hit by five, ten, or twenty percent inflation. Not even a hundred percent. That’s nothing. We’re talking about thousands of percent, millions of percent, infinity of percents. By the end of 1923, it took literally billions of German marks to get back one single U S dollar. This was an economic apocalypse that triggered a massive social and political crisis, and revolutionaries on both sides, right and left, licked their lips hungrily.

So in the same summer of 1923 when workers in Moscow and Petrograd were launching small wild wildcat strikes, a massive strike wave broke across Germany, including somewhere between three and three and a half million people. It forced the government to resign, caused European leaders to fret about total systemic collapse, and led radical groups across the political spectrum to arm and mobilize. Including, for example, a small clique of cartoonishly second rate reactionary clowns down in Bavaria.

For the self-proclaimed leaders of the international Communist revolution in Moscow, events in Germany seemed like a golden opportunity to finally harpoon their great white whale. Ever since Marx and Engels had Written The Communist Manifesto back in 1848, industrial Germany had been considered the epicenter of the proletarian revolution. As we’ve discussed at length, all the Russian Marxists going back to Plekhanov, Axelrod, and Zasulich assumed any hypothetical Russian revolution would be a precursor to, or an ancillary project of, the main event in Germany. Nearly all European socialists thought like that. As the German SPD took the lead in the Second International, it was practically axiomatic that the proletarian revolution would be a German-speaking revolution. The failure of the German revolution to materialize during and after World War I had forced the Bolsheviks to improvise new policies, but it never led them to give up hope that in the end they were just holding ground until the real revolution broke out in Germany. With the French occupation of the Ruhr Valley and the massive strikes exploding in the summer of 1923, all the disheartening setbacks since the Spartacist Revolt in 1919 seemed to be on the verge of a dramatic reversal.

As the head of the Comintern, the Third International, Comrade Zinoviev was all in on staging what he referred to as a German October. Now, not all his comrades were as eager as he was — they were skeptical of the supposed strength of the German Communist Party and the supposed weakness of their enemies — but Zinoviev pushed the Party to send money, agents, and all manner of support to stage a revolution in Germany. For Zinoviev, the possible benefits of a German revolution were enormous: as Lenin faded towards death, someone was going to wind up filling his shoes, and Zinoviev saw no reason why it should not be… Zinoviev. If the revolution truly widened beyond the borders of Russia, his role as chairman of the Comintern would make him the preeminent Russian Communist, far more than possible rivals like Trotsky and Stalin. Plus, if Zinoviev daringly and forcefully pushed for a successful revolution in the face of skepticism and doubt, he could at least partially shake the heavy weight he had born since opposing the October Revolution back in 1917 — opposition Lenin had just reminded everyone in the Politburo about with his dictated testament. Not that they ever needed reminding. And so in the summer of 1923, Zinoviev pushed and pushed for a German October.

Now while they were all discussing how to harness angry worker [energy] in Germany, the leaders of the Communist Party wanted to repress it at home, Now back around the trial of the SRs, the Cheka had rebranded itself as the State Political Directorate and was now known as the GPU, but they were still essentially the same operation led by the same people and staffed by the same people. They were still tasked with internal political security and served as the regime’s Secret police. Now ordered to root out the causes of the workers’ strikes, the GPU first tried to prove links to the Mensheviks or the SRs, But, one of the consequences of so thoroughly purging the Mensheviks and the SRs was that no links could be found, because no links existed. One of the drawbacks of crushing all your enemies is that they are no longer around to blame for all your problems. So, agents of the GPU followed leads into the Workers’ Group and Workers’ Truth, and found most of them, as I said, were long standing members of the Communist Party. The GPU struggled to find anyone willing to turn them in, and found many party members even in the middle rungs of the leadership unwilling to help the GPU root them out. It was one thing to use the secret police to target monarchists and liberals and SRs; quite another to turn them on our own people.

But in September 1923, the GPU finally pinpointed their culprits, and carried out a police sweep to lock up the leadership of both groups. Their ultimate punishment, however, was mild: mere expulsion from the party. Gulags and midnight executions had not yet come to the party itself.

Amidst the debates about what to do about encouraging the workers in Germany to revolt while discouraging the workers in Russia from revolting, the leadership of the Communist Party found itself in a novel position: for the first time ever they had to grapple with major political dilemmas without Lenin. They had always argued and bickered and disagreed both among themselves and with Lenin, but Lenin had always been their undisputed leader. But now Lenin is laying out at the Gorki Estate, immobile and non-verbal, and he could not lead them anymore. They had to figure all this out for themselves. And that meant not just settling matters of policy administration and governance, but also figuring out how to get along with one another without Lenin’s presence. As mutual resentment and conflicting ambitions ran them headlong into one another, Lenin was not there to be the ultimate authority that they all acknowledged, the arbitrator of all debates.

So for example, Trotsky listened to and respected Lenin, but he exhibited habitual contempt for his other comrades in the Politburo. And the feeling was mutual. Trotsky had never really been one of them. Lenin’s not unjustified insistence that Trotsky was irreplaceable had both been Trotsky’s greatest protection inside the Party, and also a major source of ongoing resentment. You know, daddy likes him best, even though he’s a stepchild. Trotsky, for his part, remained ever aloof, and did not deign to hang out with his Politburo comrades socially. And as I’m sure you all know, if a bunch of coworkers get together to drink, gossip, and talk shit, which members of the Politburo routinely did, you’re probably the one they’re going to gossip and talk shit about if you’re not there.

Now, if you know even a little bit about Russian politics in the early 1920s, you know that what’s about to happen is that Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin are about to form a unified triumvirate. A troika, in Russian parlance, to the explicit and purposeful exclusion and marginalization of Trotsky. But this troika was just one temporary alliance organized within the long game that would decide who among them would claim Lenin’s mantle as the preeminent leader of the party. During this long game, which got going in earnest here in 1923, everyone believed they were using everyone else, and alliances would form, dissipate, and realign as circumstances dictated, and each played their own hand. It was not inevitable that the first move would be against Trotsky. In the summer of 1923, it actually looked like Stalin would be the first to go. Krupskaya handed Zinoviev a copy of what they were now referring to as ‘Ilyich’s letter about the secretary,’ which was tantamount to Lenin, using his dying breath to say get rid of Stalin. As the letter circulated, the other members of the Politburo discussed doing just that. There were a bunch of clandestine meetings and exchanges of very passive aggressive correspondence that seem to be moving against Stalin. But probably because Zinoviev ultimately disliked and feared Trotsky more than he disliked and feared Stalin, instead of taking the poison dagger Krupskaya had given him and using it to slit Stalin’s throat, he instead got together with Stalin and Kamenev to form a working majority inside the Poliburo, specifically at Trotsky’s expense.

In September 1923, the Central Committee of the Party met for a full session to discuss the German question. After being briefed on the readiness of the German communists and the state of Russian national defenses — as the Allied Powers might invade in the event of a Russian backed revolution in Germany — the Party approved plans to launch a communist insurrection in Germany on November 9th, the anniversary of the German revolution of 1918. A small group of senior party officials was dispatched to Germany to oversee preparations and coordinate the uprising. But after discussing this, a motion then followed to revamp the Military Revolutionary Committee, which had been chaired by Trotsky since the October Revolution, and which was understood by everyone to be one of his bases of power. The motion would enlarge the council, and put Stalin on the board.

Stalin (error: Trotsky) took this as a direct and unexpected attack on his dignity and authority. He dramatically responded by announcing his resignation from all posts in both the Party and the state, and demanding that he be allowed to decamp for Germany to serve as, as he put it, “a soldier of the revolution.” But after discussing the matter, the Politburo, now controlled by the troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin, rejected both his resignation and his request to go to Germany. If Trotsky left all his leadership posts, he might become an uncontrollable loose cannon. Trotsky’s greatest asset by far was his popular appeal. His oratory soared above everyone, and his powerful biting words had made him a great champion of the people both in 1905 and 1917.

Now it’s unlikely Trotsky would have tried to rally the people against the Soviet regime as he had once rallied them again Tsar Nicholas and Alexander Kerensky, but still. It was better to keep him muzzled by party rules prohibiting leaders from unauthorized speechmaking than just letting him wander around free. And as for Germany, if Trotsky went to Germany and led a second great revolution, there’d be no stopping him. So they stopped him. The Troika refused his resignations and refused to allow him to go to Germany. At a meeting of the Politburo shortly thereafter, Zinoviev crowed right to Trotsky’s face, “Can’t you see you’re in a ring? your tricks no longer work. You’re in a minority. You’re in the singular.”

Trotsky could see that he was being boxed in, and that his situation prevented him from launching public broadsides against the party. So instead, he sent a fiery internal memo on October the eighth that opened his new period as leader of an amorphous and purposely ill-defined opposition to the Troika. Turning sharply on his former defense of rigorous discipline and top-down chains of command, Trotsky now attacked the increasingly bureaucratic spirit of the party. He said functionaries are being appointed from on high who just mindlessly carry out orders. The old spirit of open debate and collective decision making was giving way to a rigidly calcified apparatus that couldn’t think for itself and was thus losing its spontaneity, creativity, and adaptability.

Now one need not struggle too hard to see Trotsky’s turned from defender of labor armies and one party dictatorship to more open democratic decision-making coincides with him being pushed off the topmost rung of the Party. Throughout his life, Trotsky’s single most consistent position was that he was right and everyone else is wrong, and so he had no problems switching procedural forms to ensure that his voice was always heard loud and clear. Because he was right, and everyone else was wrong.

Within days of Trotsky’s letter, another letter followed. Now this one was not technically signed by Trotsky, but his fingerprints are all over it. This is the so-called Declaration of the Forty-Six, which was signed by you guessed it, Forty-Six members of the Communist Party, who critiqued the Politburo and the Central Committee. The declaration opened with an absolute broadside, saying:

The economic and financial crisis beginning at the end of July this year, with all the political consequences flowing from it, including those within the Party, has mercilessly revealed the inadequacy of the Party leadership, both in the economic realm, and especially in the area of inner party relations.

They then proceeded to attack the Politburo on two fronts. First picking up the banner of the angry workers, the declaration attacked the industrial policy of the NEP, saying it was insufficiently committed to Communist principles. What Russia needed was not markets and bosses, but more rational planning. But second, echoing Trotsky’s letter, they attacked the Central Committee for allowing one small faction to dominate all offices and appointments, and then declare themselves immune from criticism in the name of Party unity. They said,

If the situation which has developed is not radically changed in the very near future. The economic crisis in Soviet Russia and the crisis of the fractional dictatorship within the Party will strike heavy blows to the workers’ dictatorship in Russia and to the Russian Communist Party. With such a burden on its shoulders, the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia and its leader, the Russian Communist Party, cannot enter the field of the impending new international shocks in any other way than with the perspective of failure, along with the entire front of proletarian struggle.

The authors of the Declaration of the Forty-Six cleverly tried to turn the question of factionalism back around on the Politburo, saying, you are actually the ones engaging in factionalism, not us. But this cleverness was no match for the stark reality of the Party rules they had all proved back at the 10th Party Congress. The Central Committee had total discretion to determine what counted as unauthorized factionalism and what did not. The Central Committee was controlled by the Politburo, which was in turn now controlled by the Troika. At a session of the Central Committee at the end of October, which was packed by Stalin with allies, Trotsky and the other Forty-Six were all denounced for their heretical factionalism. The Ban on Factions, and the rules enforcing it would be unchanged and upheld. Forever after, this would be the method of purging internal enemies of whoever happened to control the Politburo.

But the Troika was not yet a totally monolithic force, and Trotsky, the Forty-Six, and others who found themselves on the wrong side of the Troika, would continue to try to dislodge them. We’ll talk more about this next week when we discuss the rise and fall of the so-called Left Opposition.

As this was all playing out, Moscow got heavy news from abroad. The agent sent to Germany to organize and lead the revolution reported that the situation was far worse than they had been led to believe. There were not nearly as many Communist Party members or groups or weapons as had been supposed. Those forces loyal to the government probably outnumbered them twenty to one. The Bolsheviks had won in October 1917 because nobody was willing to fight for Kerensky’s government, and so a handful of guys with machine guns could pull it off. But that was not the case in Germany in 1923. In fact, a state of emergency had already been declared, local police had been forced to give way to the w, which had no love at all for any kind of left radicalism. On October 23rd, the leaders of the group sent in to lead the revolution pulled the plug on the revolution. They sent backward to Moscow saying the whole thing has to be postponed.

Now one small communist group in Homburg did wind up trying to move forward, but they were quickly and easily crushed. There would be no German October. It turned out to be just another miserable failure as the white whale swam away.

It was only small comfort that their enemies on the right fared no better. In that same November of 1923, that small clique of cartoonishly second rate reactionary clowns in Bavaria got together in a Beer Hall and tried to copy Mussolini’s March on Rome. They too failed miserably and were all arrested in what turned out to be a dismal fiasco. Tossed in jail, exposed as a bunch of cartoonishly second rate reactionary clowns, they were, thankfully, never heard from again.

As I said before, when it comes to history, the beginning of one biography often overlaps with the end of another. One person’s start line is another person’s finished line. And for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the end was now at hand.

The third stroke in March 1923 had knocked him completely out of commission. There were no more arguments about whether he was trying to work too hard. He wasn’t able to work at all. He could communicate now only by gesturing and was confined to a wheelchair on days when he felt able to get up and move around. Daily victories were simply staying alert and happy, eating and drinking while listening to Krupskaya or his sister read him books. Bad days were full of vacant depression where he seemed more dead than alive. The only real hope left to him and his family was simply that he would recover enough to control his own body and speak his own thoughts clearly.

But as the weeks and months passed, there were more bad days than good. And the truth was, he was slipping away. In October 1923, as his comrades intrigued against each other and the ever elusive German revolution was pronounced ever elusive, Lenin insisted on traveling the ten miles up to Moscow one last time. He didn’t tell anyone he was coming, he had no meetings with any of the old Bolsheviks, he just toured the Kremlin one last time and went back to Gorki, exhausted but satisfied.

After New Years, his doctors tentatively suggested he might actually be getting better, but Krupskaya was more attuned to him and more pessimistic. Starting on Thursday, January 17th, she wrote:

I began to feel something terrible was coming. He looked horribly tired and tormented. He was closing his eyes frequently and went pale. But the main thing was that somehow the expression on his face changed. His gaze became somehow blind.

On January 21st, 1924, Bukharin happened to be at Gorki visiting, and described what he saw:

Lenin. [he said] was propped up on a pillow in a sleigh and watched while a group of workers on the estate went out hunting. He was in good spirits, clearly enjoying himself. There were a few things he enjoyed more than a hunt. When a retriever brought back a bird to one of the workers near the sleigh, Lenin, raised his good hand and managed to say, “Good dog.”

But that night after returning to his quarters and drinking some broth, Lenin started to slip into unconsciousness. Krupskaya wrote, “… at first I held his hot, damp hand and then just watched as the towel beneath him turned red with blood and the stamp of death settled on his […] face.”

He had suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage and died just before seven o’clock on January 21st, 1924. Lenin was dead.

More than any of the other leaders of any of the other political parties or factions that we’ve talked about in this series — that includes Tsar Nicholas, Alexander Kerensky, Victor Chernov, Pavel Milyukov, Sergei Witte, Pyotr Stolypin, his old mentor, Plekhanov, all of whom had enormous personalities that filled every room they stepped foot in — none of them defined their political parties and factions the way Lenin defined his. Above and beyond any defining ideology or policy or worldview of the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks were the party of Lenin. So much so, that in the days after the infamous Second Party Congress in 1902, the difference between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks could be described almost entirely by one’s own personal feelings about Lenin. Those who continued to support his leadership were Bolsheviks, those who thought he was far too dictatorial, bullying, and close-minded were Mensheviks. Very little else separated them at the time of the first rupture. It was the thing that ruptured them.

Lenin’s stamp on his party meant that his party resembled his own personality. The Bolsheviks were hard, disciplined, sarcastic, blunt, and dismissive, but they were also ever practical, flexible, and adaptable. But Lenin’s domineering personality meant that the whole party structure was designed to fit the leadership of a domineering personality.

Now as we’ve seen, Lenin was not a straight up dictator inside of his party. His particular brand of megalomania was of a peculiar sort. Inside the party, he got his way through the force of persuasion, strong arming people, insisting, very occasionally wooing and coaxing. And if on occasion he lost votes to his comrades in the Central Committee on a matter of policy, he gave way — as for example, when they decided to boycott the elections to the Duma when he thought they should run candidates. But as the years passed, those who disagreed with Lenin typically fell out of favor and out of the Party. And mostly all that was left in the end were those whose deference to Lenin was a matter of habit. And we should note that in the end the Bolsheviks did run candidates for the Duma.

Thus deference to a strong leader was ingrained in the Bolshevik Party, now the Communist Party, from the beginning. As was the way Lenin built the party on the basis of Congress’s elections and committees and yet always seeming to get his way, by manipulating those votes or packing the committees with people who voted the way he wanted. Trotsky noted this from the very beginning, and just after the split in 1902, observed of Lenin’s methods, “In the internal politics of the party, these methods lead to the Party organization substituting itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organization, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee.”

He wrote this way back in 1902, but it describes almost perfectly the Troika’s move to take over the Communist Party now that Lenin was fading, dying, and then dead. For good or ill, the Bolshevik Party was Lenin’s party. And even though Lenin was now gone, the party he had built remained ever the same.

Now the Russian Revolution was not the work of a single man. It was obviously an impossibly convoluted set of events that sprawled across decades and swept up literally millions of people great and small, who all contributed to how the revolution unfolded. But we can for sure say this: more than any other single person, the Russian Revolution was defined by Lenin. There are few moments in history when you can really say, oh yeah, that one person caused this particular massive historical event. But the October Revolution is that way. The October Revolution does not happen without Lenin. He was absolutely going out of his mind, pushing his comrades to do it, to take power, even in the face of heavy doubt from those comrades and nervous resistance from the rank and file of his party. Now, obviously, even the October Revolution is work of tons of people, but the core drive to do it, the engine that produced the October Revolution — not the February Revolution, mind you, but the October Revolution — came from Lenin. And had he died or been arrested or been detained coming back from Finland, the October Revolution does not happen. And so love him or hate him, revere him or loathe him, Lenin’s singular impact on world history can never be doubted.

But now Lenin is dead and gone. And next week, the Communist Party, the USSR, the international communist revolution, will have to move on without their indispensable man, who has now gone to that graveyard that is full of indispensable men. Next week will be the first of our three final wrap-up episodes, and it will revolve around the great duel between Stalin and Trotsky for control of the Communist Party, the USSR, and the international communist revolution. Because even though we are ending this and drawing a line in the sand that says over there is revolution and over there is early Soviet history, there never is a break in history. There’s never a pause. It just keeps going one day after the next.

And so even though the revolution is ending and Revolutions is ending, history never ends.