I was often asked, and even now I still am asked: “How could you lose power?” In most instances, the question covers a naive conception of letting some material object slip from one’s hands, as if losing power were the same thing as losing a watch or a notebook. But as a matter of fact, when the revolutionaries who directed the seizure of power begin at a certain stage to lose it, whether peacefully or through catastrophe, the fact in itself signifies either a decline in the influence of certain ideas and moods in the governing revolutionary circles, or the decline of revolutionary mood in the masses themselves. Or it may be both at the same time. The leading groups of the party that emerged from underground were inspired by the revolutionary tendencies which the leaders of the first period of the revolution were able to formulate clearly and to carry out completely and successfully in practice. It was exactly. Thus that made them the leaders of the party, and, through the party, leaders of the working class, and, through the working class, leaders of the country. It was thus that certain individuals had concentrated power in their hands. But the ideas of the first period of the revolution were imperceptibly losing their influence in the consciousness of the party stratum that held the direct power over the country.

In the country itself, processes were shaping themselves that one may sum up under the general name of reaction. These extended, in varying degree, to the working class as well, including even its party. The stratum that made up the apparatus of power developed its own independent aims and tried to subordinate the revolution to them. A division began to reveal itself between the leaders who expressed the historical line of the class and could see beyond the apparatus, and the apparatus itself — a huge, cumbrous, heterogeneous thing that easily sucked in the average communist. At first this division was more psychological than political in character. Yesterday was still too fresh in mind, the slogans of October had not had time to vanish from the memory, and the authority of the leaders of the first period was still strong. But under cover of the traditional forms, a different psychology was developing. The international prospects were growing dim. The everyday routine was completely absorbing the people. New methods, instead of serving the old aims, were creating new ones and, most of all, a new psychology. In the eyes of many, the temporary situation began to seem the ultimate goal. A new type was being evolved.

In the final analysis, revolutionaries are made of the same social stuff as other people. But they must have had certain very different personal qualities to enable the historical process to separate them from the rest into a distinct group. Association with one another, theoretical work, the struggle under a definite banner, collective discipline, the hardening under the fire of danger, these things gradually shape the revolutionary type. It would be perfectly legitimate to speak of the psychological type of the Bolshevik in contrast, for example, to that of the Menshevik. An eye sufficiently experienced could tell a Bolshevik from a Menshevik even by his outward appearance, with only a slight percentage of error.

This doesn’t mean, however, that a Bolshevik was always and in everything a Bolshevik. To absorb a certain philosophic out look into one’s flesh and blood, to make it dominate one’s consciousness, and to co-ordinate with it one’s sensory world is given not to every one but to only a few. In the working masses, a substitute is found in the class instinct, which in critical periods attains a high degree of sensitiveness. But there are many revolutionaries in the party and the state who come from the masses but have long since broken away from them, and who, because of their position, are placed in a separate and distinct class. Their class instinct has evaporated. On the other hand, they lack the theoretical stability and outlook to envisage the process in its entirety. Their psychology retains many unprotected surfaces, which, with the change of circumstances, expose them to the easy penetration of foreign and hostile ideological influences. In the days of the underground struggle, of the uprisings, and the civil war, people of this type were merely soldiers of the party. Their minds had only one string, and that sounded in harmony with the party tuning-fork. But when the tension relaxed and the nomads of the revolutions passed on to settled living, the traits of the man in the street, the sympathies and tastes of self-satisfied officials, revived in them.

Quite frequently I heard isolated remarks of Kalinin, Voroshilov, Stalin or Rykov with alarm. Where does this come from? — I asked myself — from what well does it gush? When I came to a meeting and found groups engaged in conversation, often they would stop when they saw me. There was nothing directed against me in those conversations, nothing opposed to the principles of the party. But they showed an attitude of moral relaxation, of self-content and triviality. People began to feel an urge to pour out these new moods upon each other — moods in which the element of philistine gossip came to have a very prominent place. Heretofore they had realized the impropriety of this sort of thing not only in Lenin’s or my presence but even with one another. On occasions when vulgarity showed itself — for example, on the part of Stalin — Lenin, without even lifting his head from his papers, would look around as if trying to find some one else who was repelled by the remark. In such cases, a swift glance, or an intonation in the voice was enough to reveal indisputably to both of us our solidarity in these psychological appraisals.

If I took no part in the amusements that were becoming more and more common in the lives of the new governing stratum, it was not for moral reasons, but because I hated to inflict such boredom on myself. The visiting at each other’s homes, the assiduous attendance at the ballet, the drinking-parties at which people who were absent were pulled to pieces, had no attraction for me. The new ruling group felt that I did not fit in with this way of living, and they did not even try to win me over. It was for this very reason that many group conversations would stop the moment I appeared, and those engaged in them would cut them short with a certain shamefacedness and a slight bitterness toward me. This was, if you like, a definite indication that I had begun to lose power.

I am here limiting myself to the psychological aspect of the matter, and disregarding its social basis, that is, the changes in the anatomy of the revolutionary society. In the final reckoning, it is, of course, these latter changes that decide. But in actual life it is their psychological reflection that one encounters directly. The inner events were developing rather slowly, facilitating the molecular processes of the transformation of the upper stratum, and leaving no opening for contrasting the two irreconcilable positions before the masses. One must add that the new moods were for a long time, and still are, disguised by traditional formulas. This made it all the more difficult to determine how far the process of metabolism had gone. The Thermidor conspiracy at the end of the eighteenth century, prepared for by the preceding course of the revolution, broke out with a single blow and assumed the shape of a sanguinary finale. Our Thermidor was long drawn out. The guillotine found its substitute — at least for a while — in intrigue. The falsifying of the past, systematized on the conveyer plan, became a weapon for the ideological re arming of the official party. Lenin’s illness and the expectation of his return to the leadership made the temporary situation indefinite, and it lasted, with an interval, for over two years. If the revolution had been in the ascendancy, the delay would have played into the hands of the opposition. But the revolution on the international scale was suffering one defeat after another, and the delay accordingly played into the hands of the national reformism by automatically strengthening the Stalin bureaucracy against me and my political friends.

The out-and-out philistine, ignorant, and simply stupid baiting of the theory of permanent revolution grew from just these psychological sources. Gossiping over a bottle of wine or re turning from the ballet, one smug official would say to another:

“He can think of nothing but permanent revolution.” The accusations of unsociability, of individualism, of aristocratism, were closely connected with this particular mood. The sentiment of “Not all and always for the revolution, but something for oneself as well,” was translated as “Down with permanent revolution.” The revolt against the exacting theoretical demands of Marxism and the exacting political demands of the revolution gradually assumed, in the eyes of these people, the form of a struggle against “Trotskyism.” Under this banner, the liberation of the philistine in the Bolshevik was proceeding. It was because of this that I lost power, and it was this that determined the form which this loss took.

I have said before that Lenin, from his deathbed, was preparing a blow at Stalin and his allies, Dzerzhinsky and Ordzhonikidze. Lenin valued Dzerzhinsky highly. The estrangement began when Dzerzhinsky realized that Lenin did not think him capable of directing economic work. It was this that threw Dzerzhinsky into Stalin’s arms, and then Lenin decided to strike at him as one of Stalin’s supports. As for Ordzhonikidze, Lenin wanted to expel him from the party for his ways of a governor-general. Lenin’s note promising the Georgian Bolsheviks his full support against Stalin, Dzherzhinsky, and Ordzhonikidze was addressed to Mdivani. The fates of the four reveal most vividiy the sweeping change in the party engineered by the Stalin faction. After Lenin’s death, Dzerzhinsky was put at the head of the Supreme Economic Council, that is, in charge of all state industries. Ordzhonikidze, who had been slated for expulsion, has been made the head of the Central Control Commission. Stalin not only has remained the general secretary, contrary to Lenin’s wish, but has been given unheard-of powers by the apparatus. Finally, Budu Mdivani, whom Lenin supported against Stalin, is now in the Tobolsk prison. A similar “regrouping” has been effected in the entire directing personnel of the party and in all the parties of the International, without exception. The epoch of the epigones is separated from that of Lenin not only by a gulf of ideas, but also by a sweeping overturn in the organization of the party.

Stalin has been the chief instrument in carrying out this overturn. He is gifted with practicality, a strong will, and persistence in carrying out his aims. His political horizon is restricted, his theoretical equipment primitive. His work of compilation, The Foundations of Leninism, in which he made an attempt to pay tribute to the theoretical traditions of the party, is full of sophomoric errors. His ignorance of foreign languages compels him to follow the political life of other countries at second-hand. His mind is stubbornly empirical, and devoid of creative imagination. To the leading group of the party (in the wide. circles he was not known at all) he always seemed a man destined to play second and third fiddle. And the fact that to-day he is playing first is not so much a summing-up of the man as it is of this transitional period of political backsliding in the country. Helvetius said it long ago: “Every period has its great men, and if these are lacking, it invents them.” Stalinism is above all else the automatic work of the impersonal apparatus on the decline of the revolution.

Lenin died on January 21, 1924. Death was for him merely a deliverance from physical and moral suffering. He must have felt it intolerably humiliating to be so utterly helpless, and especially to lose his power of speech while he was still fully conscious. He grew unable to endure the patronizing tone of the doctors, their banal jokes and their false encouragements. While he was still able to speak, he casually put test questions to the doctors, caught them unawares in contradictions, insisted on additional explanations, and dipped into the medical books himself. In this case as in everything else, he was striving most of all for clarity. The only medical man he could endure was Fyodor Alexandrovich Guetier. A good physician and a good man, unsullied by the traits of a courtier, Guetier was attached to Lenin and Krupskaya by a genuine affection. During the period when Lenin would not allow any other doctor to come near him, Guetier continued to visit him. Guetier was also a close friend and house-physician to my family during all the years of the revolution. Thanks to him, we always had most trustworthy and intelligent reports on the condition of Vladimir Ilyich, to supplement and correct the impersonal official bulletins.

More than once, I asked Guetier whether Lenin’s intellect would retain its power in case of recovery. Guetier answered me in this strain: the tendency to fatigue would increase, there would not be the former clarity in work, but a virtuoso would remain a virtuoso. In the interval between the first and second strokes, this prediction was confirmed to the letter. Toward the end of the meetings of the Politbureau, Lenin gave one the impression of being a hopelessly tired man. All the muscles of his face sagged, the gleam went out of his eyes, and even his formidable forehead seemed to shrink, while his shoulders drooped heavily. The expression of his face and of his entire figure might have been summed up in a word: tired. At such ghastly moments, Lenin seemed to me a doomed man. But with a good night’s sleep he would recover his power of thought. The articles written in the interval between his two strokes hold their own with his best work. The fluid of the source was the same, but the flow was growing less. Even after the second stroke, Guetier did not take away all hope. But his reports continued to grow more pessimistic. The illness dragged on. Without malice or mercy, the blind forces of nature were sinking the great sick man into a state of impotence from which there was no way out. Lenin could not and should not have lived on as an invalid. But still we did not abandon hope for his recovery.

In the meantime, my own indisposition lingered on. “At the insistence of the doctors,” writes N.I. Sedova, “L.D. was moved to the country. There Guetier visited the sick man, for whom he had a tender regard. Politics did not interest him, but he suffered deeply for us without knowing how to express his sympathy. The persecution of L.D. caught him unprepared. He did not understand it, and was waiting and worrying. At Archangelskoye, he spoke to me excitedly about the necessity of taking L.D. to Sukhum. In the end, we decided to take the step. The journey, which was long in itself — via Baku, Tiflis, and Batum — was made still longer by the snowdrifts that covered the tracks. But the travelling had a soothing effect. The farther we went from Moscow, the more we broke away from the depression that we had found there of late. But in spite of it all, I still had the feeling that I was accompanying a very sick man. The uncertainty tried one ’s patience: what sort of life would there be at Sukhum? Would we have enemies or friends about us there?”

January 21 found us at the station in TiFlis, on our way to Sukhum. I was sitting with my wife in the working half of my car, with the high temperature that was the usual thing at that time. There was a knock on the door, and my faithful assistant, Syermuks, who was accompanying me to Sukhum, entered. From his manner as he walked in, from his livid-gray face as he handed me a sheet of paper, looking past me with glassy eyes, I sensed a catastrophe. It was the decoded telegram from Stalin telling me that Lenin had died. I passed it to my wife; she had already guessed it.

The Tiflis authorities soon received a similar telegram. The news of Lenin’s death was spreading in ever-widening rings. I got the Kremlin on the direct wire. In answer to my inquiry, I was told: “The funeral will be on Saturday, you can’t get back in time, and so we advise you to continue your treatment.” Accordingly, I had no choice. As a matter of fact, the funeral did not take place until Sunday, and I could easily have reached Moscow by then. 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, and later on they could always find an explanation. I must recall the fact that the news of Lenin’s first illness was not communicated to me until the third day. This was a system. The object was to “gain time.”

The Tiflis comrades came to demand that I write on Lenin’s death at once. But I knew only one urgent desire-and that was to be alone. I could not stretch my hand to lift my pen. The brief text of the Moscow telegram was still resounding in my head. Those who gathered at the train waited for a response. They were right. The train was held up for half an hour, and I wrote the farewell lines: “Lenin has gone. Lenin is no more.” The few handwritten pages were transmitted to the direct wire.

“We arrived quite broken down,” writes my wife. “It was the first time we had seen Sukhum. The mimosa were in full bloom — they are plentiful there. Magnificent palms. Camellias. It was January; in Moscow the cold was bitter. The Abhazians greeted us on our arrival in a friendly manner. In the dining-room of the rest-house, there were two portraits on the wall, one — draped in black — of Vladimir Ilyich, the other of L.D. We felt like taking the latter one down, but thought it would look too demonstrative.”

At Sukhum I spent long days lying on the balcony facing the sea. Although it was January, the sun was warm and bright. Between the balcony and the glittering sea there were huge palms. With the constant sensation of running a temperature were mingled thoughts of Lenin’s death. In my mind I went through all the stages of my life: my meetings with Lenin, our disagreements, polemics, our renewed friendliness, our fellowship of work. Individual episodes emerged with the vividness of a dream. Gradually all of it began to assume increasingly sharp outlines. With amazing clarity I saw those “disciples” who were true to their master in the little things, and not in the big. As I breathed the sea air in, I assimilated with my whole being the assurance of my historical rightness in opposition to the epigones.

January 27, 1924. Over the palms and the sea reigned silence, sparking under the blue canopy. Suddenly it was pierced by salvos of artillery. The cannonading was going on somewhere below, on the seashore. It was Sukhum’s salute to the leader who at that hour was bein............