Order of Lenin for US Millionaire¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter excoriates the Kremlin’s decision to award the Order of Lenin to Joseph E. Davies, the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union and a millionaire capitalist. The core argument is that this honour constitutes a deliberate insult to the legacy of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, and a self-condemnation of the Stalinist regime. By rewarding Davies, Stalin gives official approval to the ambassador’s published account of the Soviet Union, which systematically contrasts the revolutionary Russia of Lenin and Trotsky with the bureaucratic, nationalist, and capitalist-oriented system that had emerged under Stalin.
The digest draws heavily on Davies’s own book, Mission to Moscow, to substantiate its polemic. Key claims extracted from Davies’s text include the assertion that the Russia of the Bolshevik Revolution no longer exists, having been replaced by a system of “state socialism, operating on capitalistic principles” that is “steadily and irresistibly swing to the right.” Davies is quoted describing the destruction of the idea of a classless society in practice, with the government bureaucracy exhibiting all the “indictia of a class” through special privileges and higher living standards. The chapter reproduces Davies’s correspondence with Cordell Hull and Steve Early, in which he remarks on commissars treating themselves well and owning country dachas. The digest also highlights Davies’s observation that the idea of world proletarian revolution had been replaced by a nationalist Russian idea, and that practically all original Bolshevik leaders except Stalin, Kalinin, and Voroshilov had been banished, liquidated, or shot. A Belgian minister’s opinion, recorded in Davies’s diary, is cited to reinforce the point: communism “won’t work” and the government, while professing left ideas, projects rightist methods. The chapter concludes with a telling anecdote about state-owned flower shops selling bouquets at prices equivalent to two weeks’ wages for an average workman, presented as a significant indication of the regime’s drift away from Marxian socialism.
The historical context is the Moscow Trials and the Great Purge, during which the Old Bolsheviks were slandered and liquidated. The polemic is directed squarely against the Stalinist bureaucracy, which the chapter accuses of betraying the principles of the Bolshevik Revolution and of actively collaborating with world capitalism by demonstrating that Stalinism posed no threat to the capitalist system. The award to Davies is framed not merely as a diplomatic gesture but as a political endorsement of a reactionary, anti-revolutionary trajectory.