Young Stalin

38. 1917 Spring: Floundering Leader

Soft fluffy snow was falling,” says Vera Shveitzer. “As soon as we stepped off the train, we felt a gust of the political and revolutionary gale in the capital.” Stalin, CC member, was back, his lifelong dreams come true. Yet there was no welcome party at the Nicholas Station. Soso and Vera let the excitement carry them into the streets: “Flowing together with the city crowd, we walked along Nevsky Prospect.”

Stalin no longer needed to fear arrest or search for an old acquaintance to rescue him as he strolled the boulevards. The shooting, rioting and exhilaration of the February Revolution had completely changed the capital: it was now almost the freest city in Europe. Limousines, including requisitioned grand ducal Rolls-Royces, and armoured cars, raced around the city, honking horns, filled with workers, barely dressed girls and soldiers, waving flags and brandishing guns. Presses poured out newspapers to represent every political view while pamphlets of explicit pornography recounted the lubricious lesbian nymphomania of the fallen Empress and her orgies with Rasputin. The hated police—the pharaohs—were gone; the double-headed eagles had been smashed, but the class struggle had not truly started. The swaggering armed workers of the great factories threatened a nervous bourgeois, the burzois, yet the theatres still played—Lermontov’s Masquerade was on at the Alexandrinsky—and the smart restaurants were opening in the wake of the streetfighting.

“There were meetings[157] and speeches everywhere,” remembered Molotov, “the first experience of freedom in the full sense.” Even the whores and thieves held meetings and elected soviets. Everything was reversed: soldiers had their caps on back to front and wore a fancy-dress shop of uniforms; women borrowed military headgear and breeches. People felt suddenly unrestrained in this febrile carnival: “Sexual acts, from kissing and fondling to full intercourse,” writes Orlando Figes, were “openly performed on the streets in the euphoria.”^{228}

Stalin and Vera headed directly to the centre of power. “While chatting with us, Comrade Stalin without realizing it reached the Taurida Palace,” where they bumped into Elena Stasova and Molotov. That night, Stalin, Molotov, Vera Shveitzer, Stasova and the Russian Bureau discussed the situation. No one was sure about the next move.

“Russia was an Empire” but “what is she now?” The political system they discovered functioning at the palace was, wrote Duma deputy Vasily Shulgin, “neither a republic nor a monarchy—a state formation without a name.” Prince Lvov, the decent Premier, presided over a cabinet of conservatives and liberal “Kadets,” Constitutional-Democrats. The Soviet, led by Chkheidze and containing Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and SRs, was as powerful as the government. Kerensky alone straddled both Soviet and government: “Only Kerensky knew how to dance upon the revolutionary quagmire.” But actually he did not know how; so far, no one did.

When the Tsar abdicated, the big beasts of the SD jungle were abroad—Trotsky and Bukharin in New York, Lenin and Martov in Switzerland. The bewildered Bolsheviks in Petrograd were led by the junior Alexander Shlyapnikov, a worker aged thirty-three, and the twenty-seven-year-old Molotov.[158] There were fewer than 25,000 Bolsheviks in the whole of Russia and only about 1,000 veteran activists.

Days earlier Lenin had confessed that the Revolution “might not happen in our lifetime.” When they heard, Krupskaya wondered, “Perhaps it’s another hoax.” “It’s staggering,” exclaimed Lenin. “Such a surprise!” He started to send instructions to Molotov and Shlyapnikov: the war must be stopped; the Provisional Government opposed. But now, at the meeting of the Bureau, Stalin, aged thirty-eight, and Kamenev, just thirty-four, wished to take control and overrule Lenin, temporarily willing to support the Provisional Government provided it fought a defensive war and established essential civic liberties.

There was a “row.” The Bureau totally rejected Kamenev, demanding an explanation for his betrayals, and only agreed to co-opt Stalin “in an advisory role… in the light of certain personal features which are basic to him.” His egotism, rudeness (and possibly his sexual adventures) were notorious.^{229}

When Anna Alliluyeva came home to the family apartment, now in the suburbs, reachable only by a small suburban train, she found some comrades talking there (Yenukidze had been an early arrival), but “I looked at the hat-stand and didn’t recognize the black coat and long striped scarf on the table.”

“Who’s here?” she asked.

“Stalin’s back,” said one. “From exile. Just arrived!” She ran in to greet him—“We were expecting him!” He was pacing up and down. Anna was amazed how he had changed. “The clothes were the same—the black suit and blue shirt,” but “his face had changed, not only was he tired, thin, hollow-cheeked, but he seemed older. Only the eyes were the same, that mocking smile.”

“See! I found you!” said Stalin. “I got the train and I thought I’d never find you! How are you? How’s Olga, Sergei, Pavel, Fedya? And where is Nadya?” Sergei managed a power station; Olga worked as a nurse; Pavel was at the front; Fyodor was studying; Nadya at a music lesson.

“Are you hungry?” asked Anna, lighting the samovar—just as their father got home. The men exchanged news in “agitated voices.” Then Nadya, black-eyed, intense and exuberant, appeared in coat and hat. “Josef is here.” The parents and children greeted and surrounded Stalin, who found himself the hero of a cosy Chekhovian family living in middle-class comfort, something he had never known.

“Everyone was laughing” as “Stalin mimicked the provincial orators speaking at stations on his return from exile.” Anna and Nadya laid the table as he dashingly recounted his adventures in exile. He agreed to spend the night, bedding down in the dining-room beside Sergei.

“What time do we get up in the morning? Tomorrow morning I’ve got to go to Pravda.”

“We wake up early,” said Olga. “We’ll wake you.” Olga and her daughters retired next door, but they could not sleep—especially when Nadya started repeating Soso’s stories about the speakers. “It was so funny we burst out laughing,” said Anna. “We tried to stop but couldn’t help ourselves, laughing louder and louder.”

“Shut up, you youngsters!” called their father.

“Leave them, Sergei,” intervened Stalin. “They’re young, let them laugh!”

In the morning, they caught the train for the city, telling Soso they were inspecting a new apartment on Tenth Rozhdestvensky Street. As he jumped off the tram, Stalin called: “That’s good—but make sure you keep a room for me…”^{230}

Stalin staked his claim to leadership, not at the Taurida Palace but at the Bolshevik headquarters, which now occupied the sin-drenched mansion of “that Tsarist concubine” Mathilde Kseshinskaya.[159] “This den of luxury, spurs and diamonds located opposite the Winter Palace,” in Trotsky’s words, was strategically vital, close to the Peter and Paul Fortress as well as the Vyborg factories.

In the ballerina’s boudoirs and ballrooms, Stalin reasserted himself, overturning the whippersnapper Molotov and the Russian Bureau. On 15 March, Stalin and Kamenev assumed control of Pravda and joined the Presidium of the Bureau. “I was thrown out,” said Molotov. “Stalin and Kamenev delicately but skilfully expelled me because they had more authority and were ten years older, so I didn’t resist.” Appointed as a Bolshevik representative to the Executive Committee of the Soviet, Stalin was welcomed at the Taurida Palace by his fellow Georgians Chkheidze and Iraki Tsereteli, its star orator. Stalin was exhilarated by the new politics, but even in those dizzy days he saw life as a Manichean struggle between light and darkness. “The chariot of the Russian Revolution,” declared Stalin, “is advancing with lightning speed,” but “glance around and you will see the sinister work ofdark forces going on incessantly.” He was quiet and vigilant. “In the work of the Soviet,” recalls the Menshevik diarist Nikolai Sukhanov, “the impression made on me… was that ofa grey blur.”

In faraway Switzerland, Lenin was vainly attacking the Provisional Government and demanding immediate peace with Germany, but in Petrograd, Stalin and Kamenev swung rightwards towards mild conciliation, hoping to lure radical, internationalist Mensheviks into the Party—hardly a foolish idea, especially since they insisted on a radical foreign policy.[160] But they “created confusion and indignation among Party members,” grumbled Shlyapnikov. Molotov relished being correct in opposing “their defensist line, a big mistake, Stalin’s mistake.” Kamenev and Stalin, sneered Trotsky, had turned the Bolsheviks into “a behind-the-scenes parliamentary group for putting pressure on the bourgeoisie.”

Yet Stalin’s critics exaggerated his folly. He was certainly cautious and colourless during those ten days, but his policies were sensible, realistic and tactical in their moderation. Trotsky admits that Stalin “had been giving expression to the hidden convictions of many Old Bolsheviks”—and of most Mensheviks. Even Krupskaya, on hearing Lenin’s extremist ranting, muttered, “It seems Illich is out of his mind.” The Bolsheviks then had no hope of overthrowing the Provisional Government—Lenin was audacious but out of touch. Besides, Lenin himself did not stick to his radical programme: he immediately made retreats and compromises before returning to it at the end of the year.

In Swiss exile, Lenin exploded while reading a speech by Chkheidze about conciliation with the Bolsheviks. “It’s simply shit!” he shouted.

“Vladimir, what language!” replied Krupskaya. “I repeat: shit!”

Lenin started to scribble out his Letters from Afar to correct Kamenev’s and Stalin’s folly. Stalin’s articles were being published almost daily.

Then on 18 March, Stalin stopped writing for a week, perhaps to reassess his policies: Lenin was coming.^{231}

39. 1917 Summer: Sailors on the Streets

On 27 March 1917, Lenin, Krupskaya, Zinoviev and Stalin’s Georgian patron Tskhakaya boarded their famous Sealed Train. Almost a month after the February Revolution, Lenin had finally found a way to return to Russia. In the interim, he had entertained fantasies of taking a train pretending to be a deaf-and-dumb Swede or hitching a ride on a rickety biplane across central Europe. “We must get home,” he said. “But how?” Fortunately, the German High Command believed that the clinical insertion of Lenin and his revolutionary bacillus might infect Russia with the virus of pacifism, thereby knocking her out of the war.^{232}

Lenin dominated the Sealed Train as he would Russia herself: he would have approved the smoking-bans of our era and insisted on dictating the smoking rules and lavatorial visitation rights of the entire train—in preparation, the Bolshevik Karl Radek joked, “for assuming the leadership of the Revolutionary Government.” Smokers were allowed to light up only in the lavatory, whereas non-smokers were issued with special “first-class” lavatory passes that gave them priority access.

On 3 April, they stopped at the Beloostrov Station on the Finnish-Russian border in what Krupskaya grandly called “those dear wretched little third-class railroad cars.” Stalin’s friend Ludmilla Stal welcomed Krupskaya with a delegation of women. Kamenev blithely climbed aboard to greet Lenin, but got a shock.

“What the hell have you been writing?” barked Lenin. “We’ve read a few issues of Pravda and we cursed you roundly.”

The train steamed into Petrograd’s Finland Station. Stalin boarded the carriage to greet “the Old Man,” who was still only forty-six. With his Homburg hat, tweed suit and bourgeois umbrella, this bald little man was a stranger to Russia, new and old. Yet this was an angrier Lenin, more violent, merciless and impatient than the man who had gone into exile a decade earlier: if he lacked Soso’s vindictive personal malice, he more resembled Stalin than the gentle fatherly image later peddled by Soviet propaganda. “I can’t listen to music too often,” he said after hearing Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. “It makes me want to say kind stupid things and pat the heads of people. But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.” Lenin was buzzing with this next battle. “One fighting campaign after another,” as he told his sometime mistress Inessa Armand. “That’s my life.” Stalin would have said the same things. Hailing from such different worlds—one with the manners of a nobleman, the other those of a peasant—they shared the same sentiments and favoured identical methods.

We do not know what Lenin said to him in the carriage,[161] but virtually as soon as they met, Stalin abandoned the “flabby” Kamenev and backed the Old Man.

Just before midnight, Lenin “alighted from the carriage with Stalin,” observed Molotov, who was present. The famous yet mysterious Lenin found Finland Station in revolutionary fiesta. A military band burst into “The Marseillaise;” searchlights scanned the avid crowds. Lenin reviewed an honour guard of revolutionary sailors from the Kronstadt Base, 2,000 Putilov plant workers, a crowd waving red banners and an array of armoured cars.

A phalanx of Red Guards—armed Bolshevik workers—escorted Lenin into the station’s Imperial Lounge, where he was greeted by the Soviet chairman, Chkheidze. But Lenin bounded onto an armoured car, telling the crowd (including Molotov, Voroshilov and Alliluyev) that the Provisional Government, with their “sweet speeches and great promises, are deceiving you just as they are deceiving the entire Russian people.” The speech, writes one witness, “shook and astonished the Faithful… like a clap of thunder.” The Bolsheviks must overthrow the government, end the “predatory imperialist war” and immediately transfer power to the soviets.

Many thought the Old Man was mad and out of touch. “Lenin is a has-been,” the Menshevik Skobelev told Prince Lvov. Yet even his opponents could only marvel at his raging certainty: “Lenin,” says Sukhanov, “displayed such amazing force, such superhuman power of attack.”

Lenin rode his armoured car through the streets, surrounded by the blaring band, and the workers and soldiers, towards the Kseshinskaya Mansion, where, in the ballerina’s white-columned drawing-room, he harangued incredulous Bolsheviks. The next morning, he addressed them in Room 13 of the Taurida Palace. “Everyone was dumbfounded,” said Molotov. At first, only Alexandra Kollontai supported him unreservedly. The Bolsheviks, said Trotsky, “were as unprepared for Lenin as they had been for the February Revolution.”

Lenin’s tour deforce won over Stalin, who confessed: “Many things became clearer.” The people longed for peace and land, but the well-intentioned government insisted on honouring the Tsar’s promises to fight on against Germany and foolishly delayed settling the land question until the election of a Constituent Assembly, months away. Lenin alone grasped that this interval was his unique opportunity to seize Russia. After 6 April, Lenin and Stalin started working closely together at Pravda.^{233}

On 18 April, Lenin was helped by the blunder of Foreign Minister Milyukov, who issued a diplomatic note informing Britain and France that Russia intended to annex Ottoman territories, an imperial war without an emperor. The Soviet had backed the Provisional Government only providing it waged a defensive war. A wave of revulsion shattered the fragile ministry. Prince Lvov formed a new coalition with Kerensky as Minister of War.

Radical Bolsheviks called for an armed uprising. Lenin, in the first of many such retreats after arriving with all ideological guns blazing, had to restrain his own hotheads: the uprising was “incorrect… at present.” When the Bolshevik Conference started on 24 April in Kseshinskaya’s ballroom, Lenin “entered like an inspector coming into a classroom.” Until Lenin’s arrival, thought Ludmilla Stal, “all comrades wandered in the darkness.” Stalin was firmly out of the darkness. When Kamenev attacked Lenin, Stalin mocked his erstwhile ally. He was a Leninist again—but that did not mean they agreed on everything.[162]

Stalin gave the report on the national question. He won the debate, but he was still best known for Caucasian banditry, and needed Lenin’s support. “We’ve known Comrade Koba for very many years,” Lenin declared. “We used to see him in Cracow where we had our Bureau. His activity in the Caucasus was important. He’s a good worker in all sorts of responsible work.” Molotov remembered Lenin explaining the essence of Stalin’s attraction for him: he was a “commanding figure—you could assign Stalin any task.”

On 29 April, Stalin came third with ninety-seven votes in the CC elections, just after Lenin and Zinoviev, a result that showed his standing in the Party. Stalin now spent most of his time at the Soviet, editing Pravda or working at the Central Committee with Lenin. The Central Committee chose Lenin, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev as a decision-making Bureau for the first time, a precursor of the all-powerful Politburo.^{234}

On 4 May, Trotsky finally arrived from America and immediately dazzled Petrograd, speaking almost nightly at the “packed-out” Cirque Moderne, where “he was often carried to the stage” by the crowd. He was, noticed Sukhanov, “intoxicated with his popularity.”

Lenin recognized Trotsky’s worth and courted him, inviting him to join the Bolsheviks a week later. The only thing that divided them, said Lenin, was “ambition.” Stalin must have resented the return of this revolutionary star. He was to write more than sixty articles in 1917, but Trotsky sneered that he just produced “dull comments on brilliant events.” When Lenin appointed a delegation to negotiate with Trotsky, Stalin was understandably left out.

Unlike Trotsky, Stalin did not make his mark in 1917. He put it best himself: “Before the Revolution, our Party led an underground existence—a secret Party. Now circumstances have changed”—and they did not really suit him. He flourished in the shadows.

Nineteen-seventeen was really Stalin’s only experience of open democratic politics, hardly the ideal environment for someone trained in the cutthroat clan intrigues of the Caucasus. He spoke quietly with a comical Georgian accent. “I didn’t make out much of what he said,” reports a witness, “but one thing I noticed: all of Stalin’s sentences were sharp and crisp statements distinguished by clarity of formulation.” A worker who saw him speak thought that “what he said sounded all right, understandable and simple, but somehow one couldn’t remember his speech afterwards.” He “avoided making speeches at mass meetings,” but the plain, modest delivery of his anti-oratory proved to be surprisingly impressive and convincing for the many who distrusted showy intellectuals.

When Lenin seized power and, beleaguered on all sides, ran his government like a conspiratorial camarilla, Stalin was again in his element.

On 3 June, Soso’s young fans Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva came to admire their hero at the First Congress of the Soviets in the Military School on Vasilevsky Island. “Stalin and Sverdlov attended the opening sessions—they were the first to arrive with Lenin. I saw the three of them enter the empty hall,” reports Anna Alliluyeva, who was working for the Party. “We had not seen Stalin for many days and his room in the flat stood empty.”

“We must call on him,” whispered the schoolgirl Nadya. “Perhaps he’s changed his mind about coming to live in our apartment.” Next day, they witnessed the most dramatic moment of the Congress.

“There’s no party in Russia that dares say, ‘Just place power in our hands,’” boomed the Menshevik Tsereteli.

At this, Lenin leaped out of his chair and shouted: “There is such a party!”

Vereshchak, Stalin’s Bailovka cell mate, noticed that “Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were the main speakers” but “Sverdlov and Stalin silently directed the Bolshevik Faction—the first time I realized the full significance of the man.”

Stalin impressed Trotsky, whose description reveals why he lost their struggle for power. “Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes,” he wrote. “He did have the knack of convincing the average run of leaders, especially the provincials.” He “wasn’t regarded as the official leader of the Party,” says Sagirashvili, another Georgian Menshevik in Petrograd throughout 1917, but “everyone listened to what he had to say, including Lenin—he was a representative of the rank and file, one who expressed its real views and moods,” which were unknown to émigrés like Trotsky. Soso was the “unquestioned leader” of the Caucasians. Lenin, says Sagirashvili, “felt that behind him stood countless leaders from the provinces.”[163] While Trotsky was prancing on the stage at the Circus, Stalin was finding new allies such as the young man he had unceremoniously kicked off the Buro, Molotov.^{235}

Stalin moved in with Molotov, who lived at a spacious flat on Shirokaya Street, across the Neva on the Petrograd side, with three other comrades. “It was like a kind of commune,” said Molotov. Stalin, unusually, apologized to Molotov for what the latter called “Stalin’s big mistake.” “You were the nearest of all to Lenin in the initial stage in April,” confessed Stalin. The two became friends. Besides, Molotov, who had not been elected to the Central Committee in April, was in need of a patron. They were opposites: the sturdy, stammering and bespectacled Molotov was ponderous, correct, rather bourgeois. But they shared Marxist fanaticism, a head for boozing, a Robespierrean belief in Terror, a vindictive inferiority-complex—and a beliefin Stalin’s mastery.

Stalin had been constantly moving home, working at night and then grabbing sleep at friends’ places. He often slept where he worked at the Kseshinskaya Mansion. Tatiana Slavatinskaya worked there as an assistant at the Central Committee under Sverdlov and Stasova. Ludmilla Stal helped edit Rabotnitsa (Working Woman) and manage relations with the Kronstadt sailors: they must have seen each other. It was said that Stalin reheated his romance with Stal. If so, she was not the only one.

Stalin did not just avail himself of Molotov’s political fidelity and domestic residence. “He stole my girl, Marusya,” Molotov laughed. Marusya was not the last woman whom Molotov would sacrifice to Stalin’s will.

Early one evening, Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva arrived at Pravda to see him. “The offices were crowded and filled with cigarette smoke.” An aide told them that “Stalin was busy,” says Anna, so “we sent a message saying we’d like to see him and he came out to meet us.”

“Well, hello,” said Soso, smiling affectionately, “I’m glad you’ve come. How are things at home?”

“Your room’s waiting for you,” said the girls.

“How kind, but I’m terribly busy,” he said. “But keep that room for me.”

Then “someone came up to him and Stalin hurriedly shook hands with us”—and rushed back to work.^{236}

Nineteen-seventeen was, to paraphrase Lenin, a game of two steps forward, one step back. During June, the radicals in the armed wing of the Bolshevik Party—the Military Organization, which now claimed the allegiance of 60,000 troops—demanded an armed demonstration. The date was set for this accidental revolution: 10 June. At a Party meeting, Lenin supported them. It was “wrong to force matters, equally wrong to let the opportunity slip,” opined Stalin, who helped plan the demonstration and wrote its proclamation: “At the sight of armed workers, the bourgeois will take cover.” Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed it.

On 9 June at the Soviet, the Mensheviks read out Stalin’s appeal and Tsereteli railed against “the Bolshevik conspiracy to seize power.” Lenin needed Soviet support—he hoped to use its legitimacy as cover for his Bolshevik coup. Instead the Soviet banned the demonstration. After hours of panic, Lenin agreed to call it off: “One wrong move on our part can wreck everything.” He now became as cautious as Kamenev and Stalin had been in March. On the eleventh, Stalin, criticizing this “intolerable wavering,” threatened to resign.

The Soviet defiantly held its own demonstration on 18 June, but the Bolsheviks hijacked it, with Stalin publishing his proclamation in Pravda. It was a propaganda triumph. “Bright sunny day,” reported Stalin the next day, “the column of demonstrators is endless. From morn to eve, the procession files towards the Field of Mars, a forest of banners… a steady roar from the crowd… the Marseillaise and Internationale gave place to ‘You Have Fallen Victims.’” There were “cries of ‘All power to the Soviets!’… but not a single regiment or factory displayed ‘Confidence in the Provisional Government!’” Meanwhile in the continuing war against Imperial Germany, Kerensky, War Minister, ordered an offensive that he hoped would bolster the government. The offensive, Russia’s last of the war, was a disaster.^{237}

Lenin was exhausted; suffering headaches, he retreated to sunbathe at a lakeside villa in Finland. Then the government faltered again: Kerensky’s offensive ground to a halt while Finland and Ukraine moved towards independence. The Kadet ministers resigned in protest.

In Lenin’s absence, his Military Organization[164] decided to seize power. The “night sky was lit up so brightly by the Aurora Borealis,” writes Sagirashvili, “that one could read a newspaper outdoors. Men didn’t sleep and some unknown force drew them out of doors to roam the streets. They could raise their eyes to this heavenly spectacle. A grandiose struggle of Darkness and Light.”

On 3 July, masses of soldiers, sailors and workers, toting machine-guns with bandoliers of ammo criss-crossing their chests, marched on the Taurida Palace, the Bolshevik First Machine-Gun Regiment in the vanguard. Cars were held up at gunpoint and requisitioned. As armoured cars and trucks full of gunmen raced around the streets, some of the troops started firing haphazardly at burzoi shoppers on Nevsky Prospect. Gunfights broke out. Out at the Kronstadt naval base, Bolshevik sailors rose up, murdered 120 officers, including their admiral, and then demanded that Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev give them their orders to take the capital. When they received no answers, they telephoned Stalin, sitting at his Pravda desk with the Bolshevik bard Demian Bedny: should they march with their guns?

“Rifles?” replied Stalin. “You comrades know best… As for we scribblers, we always take our guns, our pencils, everywhere with us, [but] as for you and your arms, you know best!” Stalin had half encouraged this semi-accidental coup, asking, “Did the Party have the right to wash its hands and stand apart?” Trotsky was probably right that Stalin was one of the organizers of the July uprising: “Wherever a fight started, whether on a square in Tiflis, in Baku Prison, on a Petrograd street, he always strove to make it as sharp as possible.”

The gun-toting mob seethed around the Taurida Palace, expecting the Soviet to seize power as in Lenin’s slogan: “All Power to the Soviets.” But inside, Chkheidze and the Soviet, discussing the formation of a new ministry, did not want power. They feared it. The mob was inflamed by the Soviet’s reluctance. Meanwhile Stalin’s ambiguous answer had worked: the Kronstadt sailors were on their way.

At the Kseshinskaya Mansion, Stalin and the Central Committee suddenly lost their nerve and summoned Lenin back from holiday. “We could have seized power,” Stalin said, “but against us would have risen the fronts, the provinces, the Soviets.” Stalin rushed to the Taurida to reassure Chkheidze and the Soviet—but the genie was out of the bottle.

Lenin was on the train bound for Petrograd when Stalin heard that Justice Minister Pavel Pereverzev was about to accuse the Bolshevik leader of treason, revealing that he had been funded by Imperial Germany. This was partly true, but Stalin returned to the Taurida Palace and appealed to his Georgian compatriot Chkheidze to suppress the story. Chkheidze agreed, but it was too late.

In the early hours of 4 July, Lenin rushed to the mansion. “You should be thrashed for this!” he yelled at the Bolshevik hotheads.

In the overcast morning, 400,000 workers and soldiers ruled the deserted streets, soon joined by 20,000 heavily armed sailors who landed in a flotilla of boats. They had no plan: the cock-of-the-walk sailors with brass bands playing were more interested in parading their girlfriends through the boulevards and terrorizing the burzois: “Sailors with scantily dressed and high-heeled ladies were seen everywhere.” The streets, recalled Stalin, “were scenes of jubilation.” The sailors gathered outside the Kseshinskaya Mansion to demand some leadership: where was Lenin? He tried to hide in the mansion before emerging sheepishly to give a short speech that settled nothing.

The sailors, boosted by another 20,000 Putilov workers, headed for the Taurida Palace to sort out the diffident Soviet whose members had disappointed them. There were ugly scenes[165]—but at 5 p.m. the heavens opened: rain doused the accidental revolution. The crowds dispersed. The loyal Izmailovsky Guards relieved the besieged Soviet, now exposed as a toothless talking-shop. Lenin and the dispirited Bolshevik Central Committee retreated pathetically. The July Days were over.

The government, strengthened by Kerensky’s growing popularity, decided to destroy the Bolsheviks. Despite Stalin’s pleading, Justice Minister Pereverzev published evidence of Lenin’s German financial backing. Many of the soldiers were swayed by this talk of treason.

At dawn on 5 July, government troops raided Pravda, just missing Lenin who was smuggled out by Stalin only minutes earlier. Overnight, howitzers and eight armoured cars took up positions to storm the Kseshinskaya Mansion, but the Bolsheviks had no will to defend their strongholds. Stalin speeded to the Bolshevik stronghold, the Peter and Paul Fortress, “where I managed to persuade the sailors not to accept battle;” shuttled between the soldiers and the Kseshinskaya Mansion to avoid a massacre; then asked Chkheidze and Tsereteli at the Taurida Palace for a guarantee of no bloodshed if the Bolsheviks surrendered the mansion and the fortress. Tsereteli agreed: “Stalin gave me a puzzled look and left.” On 6 July, the 500 Bolsheviks inside the ballerina’s mansion gave themselves up. Then Stalin returned to the Peter and Paul Fortress to oversee its surrender.

Lenin appreciated Stalin’s tireless troubleshooting. But, “as a result of their disastrous failure,” wrote John Reed, a socialist journalist from Portland, Oregon, “public opinion turned against them. Their leaderless hordes slunk back into the Vyborg Quarter, followed by a savage hunt of the Bolsheviki.”

The thirty-five-year-old Kerensky, the only man who could unite left and right, assumed the premiership. Ironically the son of Lenin’s headmaster in Simbirsk, he was a speaker of “burning intensity”—“the sudden fits and starts, the twitching of lips and the somnambulistic deliberation of his gestures make him like one possessed.” Kerensky’s Justice Minister ordered Lenin’s arrest.[166]

The Bolsheviks were on the verge of destruction. Lenin was on the run. Stalin took charge of his safety.^{238}

40. 1917 Autumn: Soso and Nadya

Stalin moved Lenin five times in three days as Kerensky hunted down the Old Man. Trotsky and Kamenev were arrested, but Lenin, escorted by Stalin, returned to the underground. The police raided the house of Lenin’s sister. Krupskaya hastened to Stalin’s and Molotov’s place on Shirokaya Street to learn where Lenin was.

On the night of 6 July, Stalin rustled Lenin to his fifth hiding-place, the Alliluyevs’ smart new apartment, at Tenth Rozhdestvenskaya Street, where they had a uniformed doorman and a maid.

“Show me all the exits and entrances,” said Lenin on arrival, even checking the attic. “We gave him Stalin’s room,” said Olga. Lenin was surprisingly cheerful, staying for four tense days. Anna Alliluyeva came home to find her apartment full of unknown, nervous people. “I immediately recognized the person to whom I was first introduced.” Lenin sat on the sofa “in his shirtsleeves, wearing a waistcoat and a light-coloured shirt with a tie.” In the “unbearably stuffy” room, Lenin cross-examined her: what had she seen on the streets?

“They are saying you’ve run off to Kronstadt and you were hiding on a minesweeper.”

“Ha-ha-ha!” laughed Lenin with “infectious gaiety.” Then he asked Stalin and the others: “What do you think, comrades?”

Lenin spent his days writing. Stalin visited daily. He quietly took the political pulse at the Taurida Palace, where he bumped into Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Both were worried that “many prominent Bolsheviks took the view that Lenin shouldn’t hide but should appear [to stand trial]. Together,” wrote Sergo, “we went to see Lenin.” The government demanded Lenin’s surrender. At the Alliluyevs’, Lenin, Stalin, Sergo, Krupskaya and Lenin’s sister Maria debated what to do.

Lenin at first favoured surrender. Stalin disagreed. He initially believed that Lenin and Zinoviev should wait and hand themselves in only when their safety could be guaranteed, but his visit to the Taurida convinced him that this was impossible. “The Junkers[167] want to take you to prison,” he warned, “but they’ll kill you on the way.” Stasova arrived to report that more evidence of Lenin’s treason was being published. “A strong shudder ran over his face and [Lenin] declared with the utmost determination that he would have to go to jail” to clear his name at a trial.

“Let’s say goodbye,” Lenin said to Krupskaya. “We may never see each other again.”

Stalin and Sergo were despatched back to the Taurida Palace to seek a “guarantee that Illich wouldn’t be lynched by the Junkers.” The Mensheviks, Stalin reported back, “replied that they couldn’t say what will happen.”

Stalin and Sergo were now sure that Lenin would be murdered if he surrendered. “Stalin and the others urged Illich not to appear,” says Krupskaya. “Stalin convinced him and… saved his life.” Stalin was right: an ex—Duma member, V. N. Polovtiev, encountered the officer assigned to arrest Lenin. “How should I deliver this gentleman, Lenin?” the officer asked. “Whole or in pieces?”

The debate went back and forth. Suddenly Sergo drew an imaginary dagger and shouted like a Georgian bandit: “I’ll slice up anyone who wants Illich to be arrested!”

That seemed to clinch it. Lenin had to be smuggled out of Petrograd: Stalin “undertook to organize Lenin’s departure.” A worker named Emelianov[168] agreed to hide Lenin in his shack in Razliv, to the north of Petrograd.

Olga and Anna Alliluyeva bustled around their guests, making sure that Lenin and Stalin were eating properly.

“What are you feeding Stalin?” asked Lenin. “Please, Olga, you must watch him, he’s losing weight.”

Stalin meanwhile checked that Lenin was being fed properly: “Well, how’s the situation with provisions? Is Illich eating? Do the best you can for him.” Sometimes Stalin turned up with extra food.

Lenin and Stalin cautiously studied the escape plans. On 11 July, “Stalin arrived before the departure and everyone gathered in Lenin’s room to devise ways of disguising him.” Olga tried bandaging Lenin’s head, but that did not work. No one suggested drag.

“Wouldn’t it be better if I shaved,” suggested Lenin. “A moment later, Lenin sat with his face covered in soap” in front of the round shaving-mirror next to the portrait of Tolstoy in Stalin’s bedroom. Soso personally “acted as barber,” shaving off Lenin’s beard and moustache.

“It’s very good now.” Lenin admired himself in the mirror. “I look just like a Finnish peasant, and there’s hardly anyone who’ll recognize me.”

On the 12th, Stalin and Alliluyev escorted Lenin to Primorsky Station for his disappearing act: he hid at Razliv before moving to a barn in Finland. Travelling back and forth, Stalin became his main contact with Petrograd. “One of my sons used to bring Stalin to the shack [where Lenin was hiding] by boat,” remembered Emelianov.

In a barrage of articles, Stalin denounced Kerensky’s “new Dreyfus Affair,” the “vile calumnies against the Leader of our Party,” and the “pen pirates of the venal press.” He specially mocked the Menshevik “blind fools” for acting as patsies. Kerensky, he wrote, would drown them “like flies in milk.”

Hand over the Bolsheviks? he had the Mensheviks asking Kerensky in a rare example of Stalinist satire. “At your service, Messieurs the Intelligence Service.” Disarm the Revolution? “With the greatest of pleasure, Messieurs Landowners and Capitalists.”

Stalin acted as Bolshevik leader—and moved house: it was to change his life.^{239}

“No one’s watching the building,” Olga Alliluyeva reassured him when he dropped in one day. “You’d better live with us, rest and sleep properly.”

Stalin moved out of Molotov’s apartment and into the Alliluyevs’. The rooms were airy, light and comfortable; the kitchen, the bathroom, even the shower, were modern and state of the art; the maid, living in a tiny room, cooked the meals. Stalin took Fyodor’s bedroom (formerly Lenin’s), which boasted a real bed, a round mirror on a wooden shaving-table, an ornate desk and a portrait of Lord Byron. At breakfast next day, he said he had not slept so well for a long time.

Soso was often alone with Olga. Sergei ran his power station; Nadya was on summer holiday in Moscow; Anna worked for the Party. Olga looked after him: she bought him a new suit. He asked her to sew in some thermal pads, two high vertical velvet collars and buttons up to the neck because his sore throat made a collar and tie uncomfortable.[169]

Soso’s life remained chaotic: he would buy his food on the way home—a loaf of bread and some fish or sausage from a street kiosk. He worked tirelessly editing Pravda, writing so much at his desk with a golden bear standing on the pen set that he developed calluses on his fingers. Sometimes he came home, sometimes not, once sufficiently exhausted to fall asleep in bed with a lit pipe, almost burning the place down.

In late July, he moved out again during the Sixth Congress, covertly held in a monastic building on Sampsonevsky Boulevard, in case of a police crackdown.^{240} As acting leader, Stalin gave the main report, exhorting the 300 delegates to concentrate on the future: “We must be prepared for anything.” After delivering another report “on the political situation,” he insisted that Russia create her own revolution and stop believing “that only Europe can show us the way,” a precurser of his famous slogan, “Socialism in One Country.” Stalin’s second report was probably written by Lenin or at least drafted with him, but his real partner in rebuilding the Party was Sverdlov, with whom he was finally reconciled.

“The report of Comrade Stalin has fully illuminated the activity of the CC,” declared Sverdlov. “There remains for me to limit myself to the narrow sphere of the CC’s organizational activity.”

Stalin was chosen chief editor of the Party press and member of the Constituent Assembly, but when the Cental Committee was elected he appeared below Kamenev and Trotsky. The Bolsheviks were still at a low ebb, but Stalin predicted that the Provisional Government’s “peaceful period is over. Times will be turbulent, crisis will follow crisis.”^{241}

He returned to the Alliluyevs’. Nadya’s summer holidays were over. She came home, ready for school.

That summer, Stalin lay low with the two sisters in the Alliluyev apartment, where he became the life and soul of the party. “Sometimes Soso did not come for days,” writes Anna Alliluyeva. Then he suddenly arrived in the middle of the night to find the girls asleep, and bounded into their room. They were living in intimate proximity: Stalin’s bedroom and Nadya’s were linked by a door. From his bed or desk, he could see her dressing-table.

“What? Are you in bed already?” he roused the girls. “Get up you sleepy-heads! I’ve bought you roach and bread!” The girls jumped up and skipped into Soso’s bedroom, which “immediately became carefree and noisy. Stalin cracked jokes and caricatured all the persons he met that day, sometimes in a kindly way, sometimes maliciously.”

The autodidact seminarist and the well-educated teenagers discussed literature. He was playful and funny with their friends. He entertained them with stories of his adventures in exile, of Tishka the Siberian dog. He read them his favourite books—Pushkin, Gorky and Chekhov, particularly the latter’s stories “The Chameleon” and “Unter Prisibeev,” but he especially adored “Dushenka,” which he “knew off by heart.” He would often talk about women. “She’s a real Dushenka,” he would say of feather-headed women who lived only for their lovers with no independent existence. He teased their servant, the country girl Panya, and he gave them all nicknames. “When he was in a particularly good mood,” says Anna, “he addressed us as ‘Yepifani-Mitrofani,’” a joke on the name of his landlord in exile. “Well, Yepifani, what’s new?” he greeted the girls. “Oh you’re a Mitrofani, you are!” Sometimes he called them “Tishka,” after the dog.

He talked politics with Sergei and the girls: they were members of the Bolshevik family. Nadya was so proud to be a Bolshevik that she was teased about it at school. Her godfather Yenukidze, Kalinin, Sergo and Sverdlov were already like uncles. Lenin had hidden in their home.

In September, recounts Anna, “Stalin brought home a Caucasian comrade… squarely built with smooth black hair and a pale lustreless face… who shook hands with us all shyly, smiling with his large kind eyes.” “This is Kamo,” said Stalin. “Listen to him—he’s got plenty of interesting stories!” The girls were rapt: “This was Kamo,” who regaled them with “his half-fantastical life.” The psychopathic daredevil had been in Kharkov Prison for five years, released by the Revolution. He had planned to escape, like the Count of Monte Cristo, as a dead man in a coffin until he discovered that the jailers smashed the skulls of every cadaver taken out of the prison with a hammer—just in case. “Kamo spoke a lot about Stalin and then his calm, quiet voice became exalted.” Kamo had come to Petrograd looking for a new mission, but his connection with the Alliluyevs would lead to tragedy.

The day after Nadya returned, she started to clean the apartment, shoving around the chairs so loudly that Stalin, working on some article, stormed out of his room. “What’s happening here?” asked Soso. “What’s all the commotion? Oh it’s you! Now I can see that a real housewife has got down to work!”

“What’s up? Is that a bad thing?” retorted the highly strung teenager.

“Definitely not,” answered an amused Soso. “It’s a good thing! Bring some order, go ahead… Just show the rest of them!”

Nadya the schoolgirl was, observed her sister, Anna, “very vivacious, open, spontaneous and high spirited.” Yet her upbringing in this nomadic and bohemian family, disrupted by constant visitors and by her mother’s promiscuity, had caused her to develop a serious and puritanical streak, a craving for order and security.

“Papa and Mama are muddling along as usual,” Nadya wrote to a friend. She came to despise her mother’s dependence on fleeting sexual affairs. “We children are grown up,” she wrote a little later, “and want to do and think what we please. The fact is she [Olga] has no life of her own and she’s still a healthy young woman. So I’ve had to take over the housework.” Perhaps she regarded her mother as a “Dushenka” like the heroine of Chekhov’s story.

Gradually, in the course of that long, eventful summer, Stalin and Nadya became closer: she already admired him as the family’s Georgian friend and Bolshevik hero. “They spent the whole summer of 1917 shut together in one apartment. Sometimes alone,” says Nadya’s niece, Kira Alliluyeva. “Nadya saw the romantic revolutionary in Josef. And my mother said he was very attractive. Of course Nadya fell in love with him.” He nicknamed her “Tatka;” she called him Soso, or Josef.

Stalin, only child of a driven single mother, must have missed the laughter, playfulness and flirtation of family life. He had enjoyed this in exile, and it was now a decade since his marriage to Kato Svanidze. He had always liked the sort of girl who could cook, tidy and look after him like Kato—and his mother. Indeed, the Svanidzes said that Stalin fell for Nadya because she reminded him of Kato.

“Slowly Stalin fell in love with her,” says Kira Alliluyeva. “A real love match.” Soso could have been her father—his enemies would claim he actually was. The dates do not fit, but Nadya must have known that Soso had probably had an affair with her oversexed mother in the past. Was there competition between mother and daughter for their Georgian lodger?

“Olga always had a soft spot for Stalin,” wrote Nadya’s and Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana. But Olga “disapproved” of Nadya’s relationship, “doing her best to talk her out of it and calling her ‘silly fool.’ She could never accept that alliance.” Was it because she knew Soso’s nature or because she had had an affair with him herself—or both? However, “silly fool” Nadya was already in love with Soso. A few months later, she proudly told a confidante: “I’ve lost so much weight people say I must be in love.”

Stalin later talked about how he chose Nadya over her elder sister: “Anna was somewhat pedantic and tiresomely talkative,” while Nadya was “mature for her age in her thinking” and “stood with both feet on the ground. She understood him better.” He was right about Anna, who was to irritate him for the rest of his life, but he had missed something about Nadya.

The teenager was, in her way, as neurotic, damaged and dark as he, perhaps darker. Nadya’s strictness appealed to Stalin, but it would later clash disastrously with his own bedouin informality and wilful egotism. Worse, her sincere intensity masked the family’s mental instability, a bipolar disorder that would ultimately make her anything but the placid homemaker. “But he got a taste of her difficult character,” says Kira Alliluyeva. “She answered back and even put him in his place.” The defiance of this pretty, devoted schoolgirl with the flashing Gypsy eyes must have then seemed attractive to Stalin. But ultimately theirs would be a fatal and ill-fated combination.

We do not know exactly when they became lovers. They became a public couple ten months later. But the relationship probably started at this time.^{242}

The Bolsheviks were on the verge of a surprising recovery: its architect was not Lenin or Stalin, but a right-wing would-be military dictator. Kerensky promoted a new Commander-in-Chief, General Lavr Kornilov, a Siberian Cossack with slanting Tartar eyes, a shaven pate and a winged moustache, who emerged as a potential Russian “man on a white horse” to purge Petrograd of Bolsheviks and restore order. But Kornilov was as vain as Kerensky—he had a special bodyguard of scarlet-clad, sabre-rattling Turkomans—and not as clever: he was said to have “the heart of a lion, the brains of a sheep.” Nonetheless Kornilov seemed the man of the moment, and he started reading books on Napoleon, always a bad sign in men of the moment.

Kerensky tried to regain the momentum, holding an all-party Moscow conference, away from the turbulent capital. “Petrograd,” wrote Stalin in one of his religious metaphors, “is dangerous; they flee from it… like the devil from holy water.” He was right: in Moscow, the General stole Kerensky’s limelight. But the two men agreed that Kornilov should march frontline troops to Petrograd to restore order. Then Kerensky, who also fancied himself as the Russian Bonaparte, suspected the General of planning a coup. There was a dangerous surplus of Napoleons. Kerensky dismissed the General, who decided to march on Petrograd anyway.

The capital waited anxiously. Kerensky, appointing himself Commander-in-Chief, found he was without military support and was forced to rely on the Soviet, which remobilized the Bolshevik Red Guards. The General was arrested, but the Cabinet fell apart. Kerensky thereupon anointed himself the dictator of a five-man Directory. He had survived but, like Mikhail Gorbachev after the August coup of 1991, as a busted flush. Sustained by cocaine and morphia, he reigned, but no longer ruled, from the splendour of Alexander III’s suite in the Winter Palace.

“We have at last a ‘new’ (brand new!) five-man Government,” joked Stalin on 3 September, “chosen by Kerensky, endorsed by Kerensky, responsible to Kerensky.” Bolshevik strength surged in the factories, and among soldiers and Kronstadt sailors. “The army that rose against Kornilov,” wrote Trotsky, “was the army-to-be of the October Revolution.”^{243}

Stalin’s short reign as Bolshevik leader revealed the overbearing arrogance that had always been his trademark. The Central Committee brought the Military Organization under firm control. Stalin rudely appropriated their funds and took over their newspaper Soldat in an “unprincipled style, violating the most elementary principles of party democracy.” They appealed to the Central Committee. In an early description of Stalinism, they criticized his “outright system of persecution and repression of an extremely strange character.” Stalin hauled the Military Organization before a Party trial.[170] His allies Sverdlov and Dzerzhinsky cleared up his mess.^{244} But Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev now reemerged from hiding and prison. On 4 September, Trotsky joined Stalin on the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets and on Pravda. Stalin was again overshadowed. The limelight belonged to Trotsky.

Stalin often bumped into his old Menshevik acquaintance David Sagirashvili in the corridors of the Smolny Instituted.[171] When Sagirashvili accused him of propagating anti-Menshevik lies in his Pravda, “he would grin in a seemingly good-natured way” and explain, in a pre-Orwellian dictum, that a “lie always has a stronger effect than the truth. The main thing is to obtain one’s objective.” As Stalin later told Molotov, “Truth is protected by a battalion of lies.”

At last, both the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets fell into Lenin’s hands, but the Bolsheviks were still divided on what to do next. It was Lenin, by sheer force of will, who drove them to the October Revolution: sometimes one individual does change the course of history. Yet Kamenev now threatened to reroute history himself—the mild Bolshevik offered a completely different path. On 14 September, he began trying to negotiate a coalition with the Mensheviks and SRs at the Democratic State Conference in the Alexandrinsky Theatre.

The Old Man, hiding in Helsinki, was appalled and frustrated. On 15 September, he sent the Central Committee a letter ordering them to seize power on behalf of the Bolsheviks alone.

“History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now!” wrote Lenin. But Kamenev and Zinoviev feared losing everything. It was April all over again: they were not the only ones who thought Lenin was wildly misguided. “We were aghast!” admitted Bukharin. At the ensuing CC, attended by Trotsky, Kamenev, Sverdlov and Shaumian, up from the Caucasus, Stalin backed Lenin and proposed that the letter be distributed secretly to key Party organizations. The Central Committee refused by a vote of six to four, an extraordinary result just a month before the October Revolution that reveals the popularity of Kamenev’s way. Yet the two ultra-radicals, Stalin and Trotsky, seeing no need for any Menshevik alliance, supported Lenin. At the CC on 21 September, Stalin and Trotsky demanded a boycott of the coming pre-parliament, where Kamenev hoped to continue his coalition-building, but they were again decisively defeated. Lenin ranted that Kamenev and Zinoviev were “miserable traitors!”

On 25 September, the Bolsheviks took control of the Soviet Executive Committee. Trotsky, returning as Soviet chairman after thirteen years of arrest, exile and emigration, started to assert Soviet command of the military. He and his Inter-Borough Party had only just joined the Bolsheviks but, while Lenin remained in hiding, Trotsky continued to perform nightly at the packed Cirque Moderne.

Lenin bombarded Kamenev and the Bolsheviks with a barrage of articles and secret letters, arguing that time was short, with Kerensky starting another crackdown, and that the second Congress of Soviets had been summoned to Petrograd. Thus they must seize power first—or they would have to share power in a coalition, “and cover themselves with eternal shame and destroy themselves as a Party!”

Lenin secretly moved back from Finland to hide in the comfortable apartment of Margarita Fofanova in Vyborg, whence he continued to spew forth his radical bile. “The success of the Russian and world revolutions just depends on two or three days’ fighting,” he declared, fearing that Kamenev’s view could prevail. “Better to die a man than let the enemy pass!” When the Central Committee recoiled, he submitted his resignation. These letters were “written with extraordinary force,” wrote Bukharin, “and threatened us with all sorts of punishments.” In his brilliant rage, Lenin was beginning to sound almost deranged. Indeed Stalin, editor of the Party newspaper Rabochii Put (Workers’ Way), actually censored Lenin’s more outrageous ravings, publishing instead an earlier, more moderate piece.

Sometimes the ranting prophet broke free of his confinement. “One morning just before the October Revolution,” recalls Anna Alliluyeva, “there was a ring at the door. I saw a smallish man dressed in a black overcoat and a Finnish cap on the threshold.”

“Is Stalin at home?” he asked politely.

“Good Lord, you look just like a Finn, Vladimir Illich,” Anna exclaimed to Lenin. “After a brief conversation, Stalin and he left together…”

Just days later, these scruffy, diminutive figures, who now walked the streets of Petrograd disguised and unrecognized, seized the Russian Empire. They formed the world’s first Marxist government, remained at the peak of the state for the rest of their days, sacrificed millions of lives at the pitiless altar of their utopian ideology, and ruled the imperium, between them, for the next thirty-six years.^{245}

41. 1917 Winter: The Countdown

Petrograd in October 1917 seemed calm, but beneath the glossy surface the city danced in a trance of last pleasures. “Gambling clubs functioned hectically from dusk till dawn,” reported John Reed, “with champagne flowing and stakes of 20,000 roubles. In the centre of the city at night, prostitutes in jewels and expensive furs walked up and down and crowded the cafés… Hold-ups increased to such an extent that it was dangerous to walk the streets.” Russia, wrote Ilya Ehrenburg, later one of Stalin’s favoured writers, “lived as if on a railway platform, waiting for the guard’s whistle.” Aristocrats sold priceless treasures on the streets, the food shortages worsened, queues lengthened, while the rich still dined at Donon’s and Constant’s, the two smartest restaurants, and the bourgeois vied for tickets to hear Chaliapin sing.

“Mysterious individuals circulating around the shivering women in lines for bread and milk, whispering that the Jews had cornered the food supply… Monarchist plots, German spies, smugglers hatching schemes,” observed Reed. “And, in the rain, the bitter chill, the great throbbing city under grey skies rushing faster and faster toward… what?” Trotsky answered Reed’s question, responding to the baying crowd at the Cirque Moderne: “The time for words has passed. The hour has come for a duel to the death between revolution and counter-revolution.” In the lonely magnificence of the Winter Palace, Kerensky waited, wasting the embers of his power in tokes of morphia and cocaine.

At 10 p.m. on the dark, drizzly night of 10 October 1917, Lenin seized his chance to convince the Central Committee: the eleven high Bolsheviks slipped one by one out of the Smolny to rendezvous at 32 Karpovka Embankment, a street-level apartment in the Petrograd District. It belonged to Galina Flakserman, the Bolshevik wife of the Menshevik scribe Sukhanov. “Oh the novel jokes of the merry muse of History,” he reflected. “This supreme and decisive session took place in my home… but without my knowledge.”

Some of the eleven were in disguise: a clean-shaven Lenin, who, Krupskaya thought, “looked every bit like a Lutheran priest,” sported an ill-fitting curly wig that kept sliding off his bald pate. As Lenin started to address Stalin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky in a hot room with a blanket covering the window, Galina Flakserman provided salami, cheese and black bread, brewing up the samovar in the corridor. But no one ate yet.

“The political situation is fully ripe for the transfer of power,” declared Lenin, but even then the Bolsheviks argued against him. Minutes were not taken, but we know that Stalin and Trotsky backed Lenin from the start. Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had grown a beard and cropped his locks as his disguise, remained unconvinced. The argument was “intense and passionate,” but Trotsky wrote that no one could match Lenin’s “thought, will, confidence, courage.” Gradually Lenin overcame “the wavering and the doubtful,” who now felt a “surge of strength and resolve.” In the early hours, there was a loud banging on the door. Was it Kerensky’s police? It was Galina Flakserman’s brother Yury, come to help serve the sausages and man the samovar. The Central Committee voted on a vague resolution for an uprising. “No practical plan of insurrection, even tentative, was sketched out that night,” recalls Trotsky. Nine supported Lenin against Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were “deeply convinced that to proclaim an armed uprising now means to gamble, not only with the fate of our Party, but with that of the Russian and international revolution.”

Ravenous and punch-drunk, the winners fell upon the sausages, and teased Zinoviev and Kamenev.^{246}

Five days later, on 16 October, at another secret meeting at the Lesnoi District Duma on the northern outskirts, Lenin, backed by Stalin and Sverdlov (Trotsky being absent at the Soviet), again berated the doubters. “History will never forgive us if we don’t take power now!” he cried, resetting his precarious wig.

“We don’t have the right to take the risk and gamble everything at once,” retorted Zinoviev.

Stalin stood with Lenin: “The date must be chosen expediently.” The Central Committee must, said the former seminarist who saw his Marxism as a quasi-religion, have “more faith… There are two lines here: one holds a course for victory of revolution… the other doesn’t believe in revolution and counts merely on staying as an opposition… Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s proposals… give the counter-revolution the chance to get organized,” Stalin warned. “We’ll go on endless retreat and lose the entire revolution.”

Lenin won ten votes to two. The Central Committee elected Stalin, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky and two others to a Military-Revolutionary Centre “to become part” of Trotsky’s Military-Revolutionary Committee at the Soviet. The organ that would seize power had not yet been decided. The bewigged Lenin scuttled back into hiding as Kerensky sensed danger and raised the stakes: Petrograd was in danger from the advancing Germans. He announced the recall of loyal regiments from the front. There was no time to lose.

Then on 18 October Kamenev published an attack on the “ruinous step” of an uprising in Maxim Gorky’s journal, Novaya Zhizn. It is an irony of 1917 that, for all Lenin’s iron will, Kamenev, always “sodden with sentimentality,” in Trotsky’s words, was the only truly consistent Bolshevik. “Kamenev and Zinoviev have betrayed the CC!” Lenin exploded. “I demand the expulsion of both the strike-breakers.” But Zinoviev insisted, in a letter, on continuing the debate in secret. Stalin, as chief editor of Rabochii Put, published the letter.[172]

At a confrontational CC meeting on 20 October, Trotsky attacked Stalin for this. Stalin sulkily offered his resignation. It was refused, but this marked the first clash between the two Bolshevik titans. Trotsky called for the expulsion of the “strike-breakers;” Stalin countered by proposing that they “be required to submit but kept in the CC.” Kamenev tried to resign from the Central Committee, but was merely removed from the leadership. Stalin prepared the public for the rising in an article that declared: “The Bolsheviks have issued the call: be ready!”[173]

The Bolsheviks were getting ready themselves. In a third-floor office of the Smolny, Trotsky and Sverdlov held the first organizational meeting of the Military-Revolutionary Committee (MRC): it was secretly Bolshevik but had the advantage of operating under the aegis of the Soviet. This, not Stalin’s Centre, would be the uprising’s headquarters: he was not a member.[174]

On the twenty-first, the MRC declared itself the legitimate authority over the Petrograd garrison. Stalin, at the political centre of the Party, drafted the agenda for the second Congress of Soviets, assigning himself to speak on “nationalities,” Lenin on “land war and power,” and Trotsky on “the current situation.”^{247} On the twenty-third, the MRC took command of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Everything was ready: even myopic Molotov practised pistol-shooting in his Smolny office. “The existing government of landlords and capitalists,” reported Stalin that day, “must be replaced by a new government of workers and peasants… If all of you act solidly and staunchly, nobody will dare to resist the will of the people.”

At dawn on Tuesday, 24 October, Kerensky raided Stalin’s newspapers at the Trud Press. As Stalin watched, the troops smashed the presses, seized machinery and set guards over the offices. He now had to prise the Bolshevik press machine back into operation: just as modern coups always seize the television station, in 1917 a revolution without newspapers was unthinkable. Stalin called Red units for reinforcements while he managed to circulate the already printed papers. The Volkynia Regiment sent a company. By midday, Stalin had regained control of his presses. Later that day, he said the newspapers were “being set up again.” But he had missed the CC meeting where the tasks were handed out for the coup. Trotsky accused him of “dropping out of the game” because he was not on one of the lists of assignments:

Bubnov: railways

Dzerzhinsky: post and telegraph

Milyutin: food supplies

Podvoisky [changed to Sverdlov]: surveillance of the Provisional Government

Kamenev and Vinter: negotiations with Left SRs [the radical wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries]

Lomov and Nogin: information to Moscow

This list of second-raters proves nothing: Lenin, in hiding, and Trotsky, who also missed the meeting, were not even mentioned, while the “strike-breaker” Kamenev is included. Historians habitually follow Trotsky’s (totally prejudiced but superbly written) version of events in asserting that Stalin “missed the Revolution,” but this does not stand up to scrutiny. He was not the star of the day, but he missed a military assignment because he had his hands full at the raided newspapers, not because he was politically insignificant. Far from it: even Trotsky admits that “contact with Lenin was mainly through Stalin,” hardly an unimportant role (though he cannot resist adding, “because he was the person of least interest to the police”).

Stalin’s “missing the Revolution” was no more than a few daytime hours of the twenty-fourth, while the coup actually stretched over two days. He was at the newspapers all morning. Then he was summoned by Lenin: Margarita Fofanova reveals that Stalin intended to give a speech that day at the Polytechnical Institute but suddenly “we had to hand him a note from VI.” Lenin was twitching with fury at the Fofanova apartment. If Stalin had rushed to him, he would have found him ranting, “The Government is tottering! It must be given the deathblow at all costs… We mustn’t wait! We may lose everything!”

Stalin arrived at the Smolny Institute, where he, along with Trotsky, addressed the Bolshevik delegates, just arrived for the Congress of Soviets, presenting the coup as a reaction to the government suppression of the Bolsheviks, not as an uprising.[175] “At the front they’re coming over to us,” Stalin explained. “The Provisional Government’s wavering. The [cruiser] Aurora has been asked to fire on the bridges—in any case the bridges will be ours. There are mutinies among Junkers and troops. Rabochii Put is being set up again. The telephone system’s not ours yet. The Post Office is ours…” Red Guards and Bolshevik troops were on their way.

“I met Stalin on the eve of the Revolution at midnight in the Smolny,” reports Sagirashvili. Stalin was so excited that, “contrary to his usual solemnity and secrecy, he revealed the die had been cast.” That night, the eve of Glorious October, Stalin popped home to the Alliluyevs. “Yes, everything’s ready,” he told the girls. “We take action tomorrow. We’ve got all the city districts in our hands. We’ll seize power.”^{248}

Stalin kept Lenin informed. The Old Man sent almost hourly notes to the MRC to energize them before the Congress opened. It was set for the next day but Lenin insisted it be brought forward. “What are they afraid of?” he wrote in one note. “Just ask if they have a hundred trustworthy soldiers or Red Guards with rifles. That’s all I need!”

It is no wonder that Lenin was frustrated. The October Revolution would become one of the iconic events of the twentieth century, mythologized by Soviet propaganda, romanticized in John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, immortalized by Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpiece October and made ridiculous by Stalin’s vainglorious exaggerations. But the reality of October was more farce than glory. Tragically, the real Revolution, pitiless and bloody, started the moment this comedy ended.

Still stuck at Fofanova’s apartment, Lenin could not understand the delay. “Everything now hangs by a thread,” he wrote that night. “The matter must be decided without fail this evening!” He paced the floor. Fofanova begged him not to emerge and risk arrest. Finally at 10:50 p.m., Lenin could stand it no longer.

42. Glorious October 1917: The Bungled Uprising

I have gone where you didn’t want me to go,” Lenin scribbled to Fofanova. “Illich asked for Stalin to be fetched,” recorded Lenin’s bodyguard, Rakhia. “Then he realized this would waste time.” He glued on his curly wig, set a worker’s cap on his head, wrapped a bandage around his face and put on some giant spectacles. Then he and Rakhia set off into the night.

Lenin boarded a tram. He was so tense that he breathlessly cross-examined the bemused ticket-collector before giving her a lecture on revolutionary strategy. It is unclear if she ever discovered the identity of this bewigged, bandaged, bespectacled loon, but there were probably many madmen loose in the city that night. Near the Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny, a mounted government patrol actually stopped him, but released him as a harmless drunk. He was sober—but far from harmless.

At around midnight, Lenin reached “great Smolny”—“bright with lights,” says Reed, it “hummed like a gigantic hive.” Red Guards, “a huddled group of boys in workmen’s clothes, carrying guns with bayonets, talking nervously together,” warmed their hands round giant bonfires; the motors of armoured cars whirred, motorcycles revved, but no one recognized Lenin. He had no papers, so the Red Guards at the gates refused to allow him access.

“What a mess!” shouted Rakhia. “I’m a delegate [for the Congress] and they won’t let me through.” The crowd supported him and pushed the two of them inside: “Lenin came in last, laughing!” But when he doffed his cap, his glue-stiffened wig came off too.[176]

The Smolny was a campsite. While the Soviet met in the splendid ballroom, newspapers, fag-ends and bedding covered the floors. Soldiers snored in the corridors. The reek of smoke, sweat and urine blended with the aroma of boiled cabbage from the refectory downstairs. Lenin hastened through the corridors, holding on to his wig, trying to hide his identity. But the Menshevik, Dan, spotted him.

“The rotters have recognized me,” muttered Lenin.

In the early hours of Wednesday, 25 October, Stalin, donning his leather jacket and cap, joined Lenin in Room 36 at the Smolny for an emergency CC meeting. Even Zinoviev and Kamenev were invited. Lenin insisted on accelerating the revolt. The Congress delegates were gathering in the very same building.

Lenin began to draft the key decrees on land and peace—still in disguise, “rather a strange sight,” mused Trotsky. The coup was in motion. The Central Committee remained in constant session for two days in a “tiny room round a badly lit table with overcoats thrown on the floor,” remembers a Bolshevik assistant, Sara Ravich. “People were continually knocking at the door, bringing news of the uprising’s latest successes. Among those present were Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin.” Messengers arrived; orders were sent from the MRC in Room 10 and Lenin and the Central Committee in Room 36; both “worked at furious speed, engulfing and spitting out panting couriers, despatching commissars with power of life and death, amidst the buzz of telegraphs.”

Stalin “hurried from one room to another,” observed Sagirashvili, who was in the Smolny. “I’d never seen him in such a state before. Such haste and feverish work were very unusual for him.” Gunfire crackled over the capital, but there was no fighting. The electric power station, the main post office and the Nicholas Station were won. They secured all the bridges except the Nicholas Bridge beside the Winter Palace. At 6 a.m. the State Bank fell, at 7 a.m. the Central Telephone Exchange, at 8 a.m. the Warsaw Station.[177] But the vital Baltic sailors were late. The government continued to function—or at least survive—throughout the day.

Kerensky was at General Staff HQ absorbing the bad news. At 9 a.m., he finally realized that only the troops at the front could save Petrograd, and that only he could rally them. But he could not find a car until his men requisitioned a Renault from the American Embassy and a bulky Pierce Arrow touring limousine. Leaving his government in emergency session in the Winter Palace, Kerensky raced out of the city.

At the Smolny, the Congress prepared to open—but the Winter Palace had not yet fallen or even been surrounded. The palace remained the seat of government, guarded by 400 adolescent military cadets, a Women’s Shock Battalion and some squadrons of Cossacks. A photographer persuaded some of these women to pose on their barricade. “It all had an operatic air and a comic one at that,” said the American Louise Bryant, one of many journalists who were spectating that day. Outside, with surprising slowness, the Bolsheviks gathered their forces. Inside, the ministers were, sensed Justice Minister Maliantovich, “doomed men abandoned by everyone, roaming around inside a giant mousetrap.”

Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Yenukidze and young Molotov, among others, began to discuss the new government after the formal CC meeting: first they had to decide what to call it. Lenin wanted to avoid the taint of capitalistic “ministries”—“a foul, worn-out term.” He suggested “commissars.”

“We’ve too many commissars already,” said Trotsky. “How about ‘People’s Commissars’? A ‘Council of People’s Commissars’ with a Chairman instead of a Premier.”[178]

“That’s wonderful!” exclaimed Lenin. “It has the awesome smell of revolution.”

Even at this moment, there were games of tactical modesty, ascetic denial being part of the Bolshevik culture. Lenin proposed Trotsky as Premier. But a Jew could not be Premier of Russia. Trotsky refused, insisting it be Lenin. It was probably Lenin who proposed Stalin as People’s Commissar of Nationalities. He, too, modestly refused, insisting he had no experience and was too busy at the Central Committee, happy just to be a Party worker, Yenukidze later told Sagirashvili. Perhaps it was to Stalin that Lenin replied with peals of laughter: “Do you think any of us has experience in this?” Lenin persisted, whereupon Stalin accepted his first real job since his days as a weatherman at the Tiflis Observatory seventeen years before. It did not seem real: some of the CC members treated this Cabinet making as a bit of a joke.

When the doors of the Bolshevik headquarters opened, “a blast of stale air and cigarette smoke rushed out” and John Reed “caught a glimpse of dishevelled men bending over a map in the glare of a shaded electric-light…” But the palace was still not taken.^{249}

Lenin was beside himself. Trotsky and the MRC ordered the Peter and Paul Fortress to prepare to bombard the Winter Palace, just across the Neva, but found there were only six guns available. Five had not been cleaned for months; only one was operative. The officers told the Bolsheviks that the guns were broken. The commissars, not realizing that the guns just needed a clean, ordered the sailors to drag some small 3-inch training guns into position, but then discovered that there were no 3-inch shells, and that the guns lacked sights. It was late afternoon before they worked out that the original guns merely needed cleaning.

Back at the Smolny, Lenin, as usual, was raging. The building’s “massive façade [was] blazing with lights… An enormous elephant-coloured armoured automobile, with two red flags flying from the turret, lumbered out with a screaming siren… The long barely illuminated corridors roared with the thunder of feet, calling, shouting,” soldiers “in rough dirt-coloured coats,” armed workmen “in black blouses.” Occasionally, a leader such as Kamenev was spotted bustling down the staircases.

Kerensky’s Cabinet still reigned at the Winter Palace, but Lenin could no longer delay his first appearance at the Soviet. At 3 p.m. Trotsky introduced him. Lenin claimed power. When he returned to Room 36, the palace still had not fallen.

Lenin paced his small office “like a lion in a cage. V. I. [Lenin] scolded, he screamed. He needed the Winter Palace at any cost,” recalls Nikolai Podvoisky of the MRC; “he was ready to shoot us!” When some military officers were captured, “certain comrades in the Smolny,” almost certainly Lenin, wanted to shoot them in order to discourage the others. He was always eager to start the bloodletting.

By 6 p.m. that evening, inside the palace, the military cadets, who had not eaten all day, decided to abandon ship to find some dinner. The Cossacks left too, disgusted by the “Jews and wenches” inside. Some of the Women’s Shock Battalion floated away.

The comedy of Bolshevik errors had not run its course: the signal for the storming of the palace was a red lantern hoisted to the top of the flagpole of the Peter and Paul Fortress, but now that the big moment had come, no one could raise such a lantern because no one could find one. A Bolshevik commissar had to go out in search of this rare item. He eventually discovered a lamp, but it was the wrong colour. Worse, he then became disorientated in the darkness and fell into a bog. When he emerged, he could not raise the lantern, red or otherwise. The signal was never given.

Finally at 6:30 p.m. on the twenty-fifth, the Bolsheviks ordered the cruisers Aurora and Amur to steam upriver. They sent in an ultimatum: “Government and troops to capitulate. This ultimatum expires at 7:10 after which we will immediately open fire.” The ultimatum duly ran out.

Nothing happened. The storming was delayed by a quixotic bid to stop the Bolshevik Revolution, despite the frenzied orders of Lenin and Trotsky.

The mayor of Petrograd, the white-bearded Grigory Shreider, who had been debating at the City Council how to prevent the bombardment of the palace, suddenly pledged to defend the government himself. The city councillors backed him. Thus it was that the venerable mayor, the councillors and the minister of food, Prokopovich, well-dressed bourgeoisie wearing velvet-collared cloaks, frock coats and fob-watches, marched out, four abreast like penguins on parade. Each was unarmed except for an umbrella, a lantern and a salami—dinner for the defenders of the palace. First they proceeded to the Smolny, where they were received by Kamenev, who seconded Molotov to accompany them to the Winter Palace. This parade of salamis and umbrellas, accompanied by the ponderous Molotov, headed down Nevsky Prospect singing “The Marseillaise,” until they were stopped by a Red checkpoint outside Kazan Station.

The mayor demanded that the Red Guards make way, or shoot unarmed citizens, according to John Reed, who recorded the dialogue.

“No, we won’t shoot unarmed Russian people,” said the commander of the checkpoint.

“We will go forward! What can you do!” Prokopovich and Shreider insisted. “What can you do?”

“We can’t let you pass,” mused the soldier. “We will do something.”

Then a laughing sailor thought of something. “We will spank you!” he roared, destroying the dignified aura with which the marchers had surrounded themselves. “We will spank you.”

The rescue attempt ended in guffaws, but still the palace held out, even though its defenders were becoming increasingly drunk on the contents of the Tsar’s superb wine-cellar. Meanwhile cars were crossing the bridges, trams rumbling along the streets, and that night Chaliapin was singing in Don Carlos at the Narodny Dom. “Up the Nevsky the entire world seemed to be promenading.” The hookers, who, like rats on a ship or canaries in a coal mine, were the test of imminent danger, still silkily patrolled the Prospect. “The streets,” says Sagirashvili, “were overflowing with all sorts of riffraff.”

Finally at 9:40 p.m., the Aurora fired a blank shell: signal for the assault. Inside the palace, the Women’s Shock Battalion were so alarmed by the boom that many of them went into the wrong sort of shock and had to be calmed down in a backroom. Outside the palace, the Bolshevik commanders, Podvoisky and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, whom Lenin had wanted to shoot for their ineptitude, had amassed overwhelming force.

The gunners at the Peter and Paul Fortress managed a barrage of three dozen 6-inch shells. Only two hit the palace, but they succeeded in terrifying the defenders. Armoured cars raked the walls with machine-gun fire and small groups of sailors and Red Guards discovered that the palace was not only undefended but that the doors were not even locked. “The attack,” admits Antonov-Ovseenko, “had a completely disorganized character.” At about 2 a.m., they entered and started to work their way through the rooms.

In the Smolny’s chandeliered hall, pervaded by a “foul blue cloud of smoke” and the “stifling heat of unwashed human bodies,” the opening of the Congress, comprised (in Sukhanov’s words) of “primitive… dark provincial” Bolsheviks, could not be delayed any longer. But the Kerensky ministry still reigned in the palace, so Lenin could not yet appear. Instead Trotsky took the stage for the Bolsheviks. When Martov and the Mensheviks attacked Lenin’s “insane and criminal action,” Trotsky, “his thin pointed face positively mephistophelean in its malicious irony,” replied with one of history’s most crushing dismissals: “You are pathetic bankrupts! Go where you belong. Into the dustbin of history!”

“Then we’ll leave,” retorted Martov. The Mensheviks foolishly walked out of the hall—and into history: they never returned to the portals of power. Sagirashvili, a Menshevik who “didn’t agree with the boycott,” despondently roamed the Smolny corridors until “Stalin put his hand over my shoulder in the most friendly manner and started to talk to me in Georgian,” trying to recruit him to the Bolsheviks. Sagirashvili refused, but various ex-Mensheviks like Vyshinsky were to become some of Stalin’s most loyal retainers.[179]

On the boulevards and bridges near the palace, the thunder of the big guns finally dispersed the promenading thrill-seekers. “Even the prostitutes,” Sagirashvili noted, “disappeared from Nevsky Prospect where they once flocked like birds.”

Kerensky’s ministers, at their baize table in the gold and malachite room with crimson brocade hangings where Nicholas II and his family had dined before 1905, still debated whom to appoint as “Dictator.” Suddenly they gave up the charade and decided to surrender.

Just then the door opened.

43. Power: Stalin Out of the Shadows

A little man flew into the room, like a chip washed up by a wave under the pressure of the crowd that poured in behind him… He had long rust-coloured hair and glasses, a short trimmed reddish moustache and a small beard,” reported Maliantovich, Justice Minister. “His collar, shirt, cuffs and hands were those of a very dirty man.”

“The Provisional Government is here,” said Deputy Premier Konovalov. “What is your pleasure?”

“In the name of the Military-Revolutionary Committee,” replied Antonov-Ovseenko, “I declare all of you… under arrest.”

It was about 1:50 a.m. on 26 October. The new masters of the Winter Palace started to pillage, “pulling out carpets, curtains, linen, porcelain, plates.” One soldier stuck some ostrich feathers in his cap, while the old palace retainers, still in their blue, red and gold uniforms, tried to restrain the looters. There was no storming of the Winter Palace: more people were hurt filming the storming scene in Eisenstein’s movie. “The Neva,” Sagirashvili observed, “washed away Kerensky’s government.”

As the ministers were carted off to the Peter and Paul Fortress, Antonov-Ovseenko lost all control inside the palace, and some of the girls of the Women’s Shock Battalion were raped. “The matter of the wine-cellars became especially critical,” he recounts. Nicholas II’s cellars boasted Tokay from the age of Catherine the Great and stocks of Château d’Yquem 1847, the Emperor’s favourite, but:

the Preobrazhensky Regiment… got totally drunk. The Pavlovsky, our revolutionary buttress, also couldn’t resist. We sent guards from other picked units—all got utterly drunk. We posted guards from the Regimental Committees—they succumbed as well. We despatched armoured cars to drive away the crowd, but after a while they also began to weave suspiciously. When evening came, a violent bacchanalia overflowed.

Exasperated, Antonov-Ovseenko called the Petrograd Fire Brigade. “We tried flooding the cellars with water—but the firemen… got drunk instead.” The Commissars started smashing the bottles in Palace Square, but “the crowd drank from the gutters. The drunken ecstasy infected the entire city.”

Finally Lenin’s Council of People’s Commissars appointed a special Commissar of the Winter Palace with the highest authority, but, Antonov-Ovseenko notes drily, “This person also turned out not to be very reliable.”

At the Congress of Soviets, it was Kamenev, who, in spite of himself, announced that the Winter Palace had finally fallen. It was only then that Lenin removed his wig, washed off his makeup and emerged as the leader of Russia.^{250}

Meanwhile Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva, keen to see the opening of the Congress, had walked to the Smolny and slipped into the great hall itself: “Judging by the excitement and cheers, we guessed something important had happened and there suddenly, in the crowd streaming towards us, we saw Stalin,” who beckoned them over.

“Oh it’s you! Delighted you’re here. Have you heard the news? The Winter Palace has fallen and our men are inside!”

The Bolsheviks almost collapsed with exhaustion. “At the time of the October [uprising],” explains Fyodor Alliluyev, Anna’s and Nadya’s eldest brother and Soso’s new assistant, “Comrade Stalin didn’t sleep for five days.” Sometimes they ate, sometimes they grabbed a catnap on the floor.

“The city was quiet, probably never so quiet in its history,” wrote John Reed. As the news arrived at Smolny that the city was finally in Bolshevik hands, Lenin began to relax, cracking jokes (at Kamenev’s expense) and reclining on newspapers on the floor. “The corridors were still full of hurrying men, hollow-eyed and dirty,” but in committee-rooms “people lay sleeping on the floor, guns beside them.”

The Bolshevik high command slept where they sat or bedded down on the floors of their Smolny offices. “Crushed by tiredness,” Stalin stayed awake drafting the Appeal to the People, until “he finally fell asleep while sitting in a chair behind his table,” says Fyodor Alliluyev. “The enraptured Lunarcharsky [People’s Commissar of Culture] tiptoed up to him as he slept and planted a kiss on his forehead. Comrade Stalin woke up and jovially laughed at A. V. Lunarcharsky for a long time.”

Lenin and Trotsky bedded down beside one another on a pile of newspapers. “You know,” sighed Lenin to Trotsky, “it makes one’s head spin to pass so quickly from persecutions and living-in-hiding to power!”^{251}

At 6 a.m. on 26 October, as “a faint unearthly pallor [was] stealing over the silent streets, dimming the watchfires, the shadow of a terrible dawn grey-rising over Russia,” the “day broke on a city in the wildest excitement and confusion.” The streets quickly returned to normal. “The bourgeoisie,” notes Shlyapnikov, “from Guards officers to prostitutes,” reemerged onto the streets. As the Congress was supposed to meet at 1 p.m., the delegates started gathering first thing, but by 7 p.m. Lenin had still not appeared.

Finally, at 8:40 p.m., he arrived to uproarious applause—“this short stocky figure with a big head set down in his shoulders, bald and bulging, little eyes, a snubbish nose, a wide generous mouth, a strange popular leader,” reported Reed, “a leader purely by virtue of intellect, colourless—humourless, uncompromising and detached.”

“We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order!” declared Lenin simply. He spoke with one foot characteristically off the floor. “I noticed a hole in his shoe,” reports Molotov.

At 2:30 a.m., Kamenev[180] read out the new government on the stage of the Congress of Soviets. Soso appeared on the list as “J. V. Djugashvili-Stalin.” He was still not well known to the public nor admired by the Bolsheviks who had been in emigration. His obscurity in 1917 would always remain an embarrassing bruise on a very thin-skinned man, and he tried to correct it by a mendacious cult of personality. But in fact Lenin and an array of high Bolsheviks had long appreciated his ruthless competence.

“In those days,” says Fyodor Alliluyev, with such candour that his memoirs were never published, “Comrade Stalin was genuinely known only to the small circle of people who had come across him… in the political underground or had succeeded… in distinguishing real work and real devotion from chatter, noise [and] meaningless babble.”

The entire Soviet government now worked round the clock, in one room, at one table. “After the victory Stalin moved into the Smolny,” recalls Fyodor Alliluyev. “For the first three days, we didn’t leave,” says Molotov. “There was me, Zinoviev and Trotsky, then opposite were Stalin and Kamenev. We tried by fits and starts to picture the new life.” When Kamenev and Trotsky decided they wanted to abolish capital punishment in the army, recalled Stalin later, Lenin overheard them. “What nonsense!” he barked. “How can you have a revolution without shooting people?” Lenin meant it.

The coup had been surprisingly easy, but the life-and-death struggle to keep power started immediately. Lenin did not wish to share his government with the Mensheviks and SRs, but Kamenev insisted on opening negotiations to do just that. When these failed, he resigned. Meanwhile, Kerensky rallied Cossack forces on the Pulkovo Heights outside the city and the Menshevik-led railwaymen went on strike, demanding a coalition. Stalin, along with Sverdlov, Sergo and Dzerzhinsky, organized the defence of Petrograd.

Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin formed an inseparable troika in those first months in power. Besieged from outside and within, undermined by compromisers, bunglers and windbags inside his own Party, Lenin divided his grandees into “men of action” versus “tea-drinkers.” There were too many “tea-drinkers.” Had the Soviet Republic settled into peaceful stability, the tea-drinking tendency, represented by men like Kamenev and Bukharin, might have given it a very different direction. But it was not to be. Lenin spent almost every hour together with his grittiest henchmen. In these first hours, Lenin dictated an undated decree that reveals Stalin’s and Trotsky’s special place as follows:

Then before the typed names of Lenin’s personal assistants is written in handwriting that is probably that of Lenin himself:

“Lenin could not get along without Stalin for even a single day,” wrote Stanislaw Pestkovsky, the Polish Bolshevik who now became Stalin’s chief assistant at the Commissariat of Nationalities. Lenin sometimes asked Stalin to countersign his Sovnarkom decrees. “Our Smolny office was under Lenin’s wing. In the course of the day, he’d call Stalin an endless number of times and would appear in our office and lead him away.” Once, Pestkovsky found both men up ladders examining maps together.

Stalin’s two Caucasian gangsters, Kamo and Tsintsadze, came to Petrograd. “I found Stalin alone in a room,” says Tsintsadze. “We were so happy to see one another.” But just then, Lenin wandered into the room.

“Meet Kote Tsintsadze,” Stalin said to Lenin (who already knew Kamo), “the old bank robber—terrorist of the Caucasus.”

Yet Stalin communicated with his assistant Pestkovsky only in “grunts,” and was too moody and taciturn to gossip with him, unlike the other loquacious Bolshevik magnates.[181]

On 29 November 1917 the Central Committee created the core leadership Bureau—the Chetverka, the Foursome, with Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Sverdlov as the most powerful men in Russia, authorized “to decide all emergency questions.” But Sverdlov, who became nominal head of state (Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet), spent his time running the Party Secretariat. As a result, as Trotsky recalls, “The Four became a troika.”

Lenin drove ahead with his radical and repressive measures: “Peace, Land, Bread!” He opened peace talks with Kaiserine Germany. When Trotsky, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, reported on progress, Lenin replied: “I’ll consult with Stalin and give you my answer.” On 27 October, opposition press was banned. At the Central Committee on 2 November, Lenin effectively created the dictatorship of the Bolshevik oligarchs. On the fourth, Sovnarkom gave itself the power to rule without the Soviets. The MRC initially acted as Lenin’s enforcers, but on 7 December he created an All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counter-revolution and Sabotage, known by its acronym “Cheka,” with Dzerzhinsky as Chairman. The Cheka, precursor of the OGPU, NKVD, KGB and today’s FSB, had absolute supralegal power over life and death.

“In that case why should we bother with a People’s Commissar for Justice?” Isaak Shteinberg, a Left-SR, challenged Lenin. “Let’s honestly call it the Commissariat of Social Annihilation!”

“Well said!” replied Lenin. “That’s exactly how it’s going to be!”

He told another acquaintance: “We’re engaged in annihilation. Don’t you recall what Pisarev said: ‘Break, beat up everything, beat and destroy! Everything that’s being broken is rubbish and has no right to life! What survives is good.’” Lenin’s handwritten notes demanded the shooting, killing, hanging of “bloodsuckers… spiders… leeches.” He asked, “How can you make a revolution without firing-squads? If we can’t shoot White Guard saboteurs, what kind of revolution is this? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush!” He demanded they “find tougher people.” But Stalin and Trotsky were tough enough. “We must put an end once and for all,” said Trotsky, “to the Papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.” Stalin showed a similar taste for Terror. When Estonian Bolsheviks proposed liquidating “traitors” in the earliest days of the Revolution, he replied swiftly: “The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.”

He “began to feel more sure of himself,” writes Trotsky. “I soon noticed Lenin was ‘advancing’ Stalin, valuing his firmness, grit, stubbornness and slyness as qualities necessary in the struggle.”[182] Molotov, who loathed Trotsky, judges that “it was not without reason that Lenin recognized Stalin and Trotsky as the leaders who stood out from the rest as the most talented.” Soon even Sukhanov understood that Stalin “holds in his hands the fate of the Revolution and state.” The Georgian, says Trotsky, “became accustomed to power.”

Yet Stalin was never inevitable. The brains, confidence, intellectual intensity, political talents, faith in and experience of violence, touchiness, vindictiveness, charm, sensitivity, ruthlessness, lack of empathy, the sheer weird singularity of the man, were in place—but lacking a forum. In 1917, he found the forum.

He could not have risen to power at any other time in history: it required the synchronicity of man and moment. His unlikely rise as a Georgian who could rule Russia was only made possible by the internationalist character of Marxism. His tyranny was made possible by the beleaguered circumstances of Soviet Russia, the utopian fanaticism of its quasi-religious ideology, the merciless Bolshevik machismo, the slaughterous spirit of the Great War, and Lenin’s homicidal vision of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Stalin would not have been possible if Lenin had not, in the first days of the regime, defeated Kamenev’s milder way to create the machinery for so boundless and absolute a power. That was the forum for which Stalin was superbly equipped. Now Stalin could become Stalin.

Within months of October, Lenin and his magnates used that power to fight the Civil War. It was then that Stalin, along with his cohorts, experienced that unrestrained power to wage war and change society by random killing. Like boys on their first foxhunt, they were blooded by the exhilaration and swagger. Stalin’s character, damaged yet gifted, was qualified for, and fatally attracted to, such pitiless predations. Afterwards, the machine of repression, the flinthearted, paranoid psychology of perpetual conspiracy and the taste for extreme bloody solutions to all challenges, were not just ascendant but glamorized, institutionalized and raised to an amoral Bolshevik faith with messianic fervour. In a colossal bureaucracy run like a nepotistic village, Stalin showed himself a master of personal politics.[183] He was the patron of these brutal tendencies but also their personification: he was right when he blasphemously declared in 1929 that “the Party has made me in its own image.” He and the Party had developed together, but this creature of covert but boundless extremism and brooding, malevolent darkness could always go further still.

He grew up in the clannish Caucasus; he had spent his entire maturity in the conspiratorial underground, that peculiar milieu where violence, fanaticism and loyalty were the main coinage; he flourished in the jungle of constant struggle, drama and stress; he came to power as that rare thing—both man of violence and of ideas, an expert in gangsterism, as well as a devout Marxist; but, above all, he believed in himself and in his own ruthless leadership as the only way to govern a country in crisis and to promote a mere ideal to a real utopia.

In a limitless government run as a giant conspiracy of bloodletting and clan patronage, who was the most qualified to prosper?

The dance of power between Trotsky and Stalin started at the very beginning, at the first meeting of the new government, a historic occasion at which the personal peccadilloes and political wheeler-dealering clashed with the sanctity of dialectical materialism.

The first Cabinet—the Sovnarkom in Bolshevik acronym—was held in Lenin’s office in the Smolny, which was still so makeshift and amateurish that the only link with his new empire was a “cubby-hole for his telephone girl and typist” behind an unpainted wooden partition. It was surely no coincidence that Lenin’s two outstanding magnates, “Stalin and I,” writes Trotsky, “were the first to arrive.”

Then, from behind the wooden partition, the two of them overheard seductive and affectionate sighs: “a conversation of a rather tender nature” in the “thick basso of [People’s Commissar of the Navy] Dybenko, a blackbearded sailor, twenty-nine years old, a jolly and self-confident giant” who had recently “become intimate with Alexandra Kollontai, a woman of aristocratic antecedents approaching her forty-sixth year.” At this epoch-making moment, Stalin and Trotsky found themselves eavesdropping on Kollontai’s latest scandalous affair, about which “there’d been much gossip in Party circles.”

Trotsky and Stalin, two arrogant self-annointed Marxist messiahs, two magnificent administrators, deep thinkers, murderous enforcers, rank outsiders, a Jew and a Georgian, looked at each other. Stalin was amused, but Trotsky was shocked. “Stalin came up to me with a kind of unexpected jauntiness and pointing his shoulder towards the partition said, smirking: ‘That’s him with Kollontai, with Kollontai!’”[184] Trotsky was not amused:

“His gesture and laughter seemed to me out of place and unendurably vulgar especially on that occasion and in that place.”

“That’s their affair!” snapped Trotsky, at which “Stalin sensed he’d made a mistake.”

The amazing and unthinkable had happened: Stalin, the Georgian cobbler’s son, was close to the peak of a Russian oligarchical government, and almost instantly Trotsky was his natural rival.

Stalin, says Trotsky, “never again tried to engage me in conversation of a personal nature. Stalin’s face changed. His yellow eyes flashed with the glint of malice.”^{252}