A New Look at the Soviet "New Look"

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THE men who have been ruling the Soviet Union since Stalin's death are epigoni, "sons," after-comers. They owe their power to an apostolic succession and style themselves disciples of Lenin and comrades-in-arms of Stalin. The structure and dynamics of their rule is dictated by the same philosophy, incorporated in the same single-party-police state; it continues to be totalitarian in scope and aim, it is engaged in the same unending war on its own people, the same drive to reshape and control the globe. Still, they are new men, younger men, men with different formative backgrounds, and their régime has a new look.

Lenin's Marxism was so different from that of the West European, nineteenth century Marx that one of Lenin's admirers dubbed it marxisme à la tartare. Lenin's associates, Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Bukharin, ten to fifteen years younger than he, still belonged to the generation that had made the revolution. After a period of feigned subordination to a "collective leadership," Joseph Stalin established his claim to be "the best disciple of Comrade Lenin." He perfected Lenin's organization machine and monopoly of the organs of persuasion and force, suppressed some of Lenin's doctrines, dogmas and hopes, retained and enlarged others, propounded some of his own. He killed off all of Lenin's close associates, surrounding himself with new and younger men, none of whom had been in Lenin's inner circle. Thus he became at one and the same time father image and voice of the epigoni: his Leninism became different from Lenin's even as the latter's Marxism had been different from that of Marx...