Lenin Faulted on State Terror, And a Soviet Taboo Is Broken
By BILL KELLER, Special to the New York Times
Published: June 8, 1988
MOSCOW, June 7— A leading Soviet journalist, breaking a major remaining taboo of the glasnost era, has written that Lenin personally justified the systematic use of terror in managing the Soviet state.
The journalist's article, in the latest issue of the monthly magazine Novy Mir, is the first in the Soviet press to implicate Lenin in the system of forced labor camps and brutal collectivization of agriculture developed after his death by Stalin.
Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state and still the most sacred icon of Soviet Communism, is attacked obliquely. Neutral citations from his own writing are used, and the author, Vasily Selyunin, says that Lenin ''was quick to understand'' before he died that an economy based on terror would not work.
But Mr. Selyunin leaves little doubt that Lenin himself set the stage for what followed him. Secret-Police Founder Criticized
The historian also criticizes another idol of the revolution, Feliks E. Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Lenin's secret police, who has previously remained beyond attack.
Dzerzhinsky is portrayed as a champion of using ''concentration camps'' to extract work from those who do not fully cooperate with the state's plan to reorganize the economy.
''So we see that the limits of the use of force are expanded without limits,'' Mr. Selyunin writes, implying strongly that Lenin himself had no quarrel with Dzerzhinsky's approach. ''First it was used to suppress the opponents of the Revolution, then shifted to potential opponents, and finally it became a means of solving purely economic tasks.''
Throughout the three-year expansion of public debate under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, Lenin has remained virtually untouchable, although other former leaders like Stalin and Brezhnev have been criticized.
Mr. Gorbachev's version of Soviet history is that after some necessary tough behavior during the 1917 Revolution, Lenin began in the 1920's to loosen the reins of centralized power and move toward greater economic and political freedom. After Lenin's death, according to currently approved accounts, Stalin perverted Communism into a cruelly authoritarian system.
Mr. Gorbachev often explains his own program of social and economic restructuring as a return to ''Leninist principles'' that were sidetracked by Lenin's death in January 1924.
The article by Mr. Selyunin is the second in recent months to suggest that the current problems of the Soviet system began with Lenin himself.
In April, the historian Nikolai P. Popov wrote in Sovetskaya Kultura that the concentration of excessive power in the hands of the Communist Party started under Lenin, and that this paved the way for Stalin's creation of ''the perfect totalitarian state.''
Like Mr. Selyunin, Mr. Popov said that Lenin recognized the danger of this tendency but that a lingering illness and the intrigues of his fellow Bolsheviks prevented him from changing course before his death.
Western historians, like Robert Conquest, portray the Soviet founding father as essentially ruthless and contend that his adoption of more liberal policies in 1921 was merely a temporary expedient.
Mr. Selyunin, of the nation's most prominent economics writers, has written several groundbreaking articles on economic themes since Mr. Gorbachev came to power. Warning Against Dictatorship
His article in Novy Mir is an ardent call for a more rapid introduction of economic and social freedom than has been carried out under Mr. Gorbachev.
He warns that unless radical changes are made by the mid-1990's, the country is likely to revert to a dictatorship: ''Our economy would fall apart with all the consequences flowing from that - social, foreign policy, military and so on. It will be too late then to talk about democracy.''
The article, called ''Sources,'' traces the origins of a centralized system that relies on compulsion instead of incentives.
He finds the roots in the founders of the Revolution, and the basic justification in the Marxist-Leninist principle that the state itself must own the means of production.
Under such a system, he writes, ''it is quite acceptable to view a person as merely a cog in a giant machine that produces future happiness for all.'' No Economic Incentive to Work
The problem, Mr. Selyunin says, is that early Marxists never quite figured out how to make workers do their jobs without economic incentives.
During the period of ''war communism,'' from the end of the Revolution until the more liberal New Economic Policy began in 1921, the Bolsheviks' alternative was to severely punish those who pursued ''disgraceful profit.'' Under the New Economic Policy, widely known as N.E.P., private farming and trade and individual economic initiatives were permitted.
In November 1917, a few days after the Revolution, profiteers were branded ''enemies of the people,'' Mr. Selyunin reports.
''Three months later, in a decree written by Lenin, an unequivocal instruction is given: 'The profiteers are to be shot at the place of the crime.' It's clear that, under the poorly organized state trading system, any selling of food was considered profiteering.''
Relatively well-to-do peasants, who had enough food to sell outside the state system, were called ''kulaks.'' They were sent to prison and their goods confiscated. Mr. Selyunin says the confiscations caused widespread famine, contrary to the traditional Soviet stance that they were needed to prevent hunger.
While recent historical works blame these events on Stalin, ''The facts prove that the liquidation of the kulaks took place during the years of war communism, not at the end of the 1920's and 1930's.''
Discussing the birth of the secret police, then known as the Cheka and now called the K.G.B., Mr. Selyunin generally agrees with Lenin that a ruthless police force was initially necessary.
But he describes how, under Dzerzhinsky, this power was expanded into a tool of labor discipline. He quotes Dzerzhinsky calling for a system of concentration camps for ''violators of labor discipline, parasites and people whom we suspect of counterrevolutionary activities but whom we do not have enough evidence to punish by court, and whom any court, even the strictest, would almost invariably acquit.''
In 1920, he continues, Trotsky proposed a much vaster system of forced labor camps. While official party history says this idea was rejected, Mr. Selyunin says that its thrust was approved at a party congress where Lenin would have been a leading figure.
By 1921, he concludes, ''Lenin was quick to understand the erroneous nature of the economic policy of war communism.''