Kris Khaira

This is a snippet from an article published in The American Socialist. It’s called Lenin’s Last Dilemma and it was written by Isaac Deutscher.

Emphasis mine

On his sick bed, while he was struggling with his paralysis, Lenin decided to speak up and denounce the dzierzhymorda, the big brutish bully, who was in the name of revolution and socialism, reviving the old oppression. But Lenin did not absolve himself from responsibility; he was now a prey to remorse, which was extinguishing the feeble flame of life left in him but which also aroused him and gave him strength for an extraordinary act. He decided not merely to denounce Stalin and Dzerzhinsky but to make a confession of his own guilt.

On December 30, 1922, cheating his doctors and nurses, he began to dictate notes on Soviet policy towards the small nations, notes intended as a message to the next party congress. “I am, it seems, strongly guilty before the workers of Russia”: these were his opening words, words the like of which had hardly ever been uttered by any ruler, words which Stalin subsequently suppressed and which Russia was to read for the first time only after thirty-three years, after the Twentieth Congress. Lenin felt guilty before the working class of his country because, so he said. he had not acted with sufficient determination and early enough against Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, against their Great Russian chauvinism, against the suppression of the rights of the small nations, and against the new oppression, in Russia, of the weak and the strong. He now saw, he continued, in what “swamp” of oppression the Bolshevik Party had landed: Russia was ruled once again by the old Czarist administration to which the Bolsheviks “had given only a Soviet veneer”; and once again the national minorities “were exposed to the irruption of that truly Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist who is essentially a scoundrel and an oppressor as is the typical Russian bureaucrat.”

For thirty-three years this message was to be concealed from the Soviet people. Yet I think that in these words: “I am, it seems, strongly guilty before the workers of Russia”—in his ability to utter such words—lay an essential part of Lenin’s moral greatness.