Entre nous: if they bump me off, I would ask you to publish my notebook, ‘Marxism on the State’ (it’s held up in Stockholm). A navy-blue bound folder. There’s a collection of all the citations from Marx and Engels as well as from Kautsky against Pannekoek.
At the end of February 1917 the political eruption took place that Lenin had long predicted. Revolution came to Petrograd. Industrial strikes had been occurring for some days, starting with action by women textile workers. The trouble had quickly spread to the labour-force of the Putilov metallurgical plant and the police proved incapable of keeping control. When the guards regiments were called out, the revolutionary groups in the capital – Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries – were reluctant to organise street demonstrations. The Okhrana had crushed strikes in late 1915 and late 1916, and there seemed no reason why this would not happen again.
But the popular mood was implacable. Workers were aggrieved by the deteriorating conditions in the factories and by the food shortages. The government, moreover, could no longer rely upon the troops in the capital’s garrisons to suppress political protest. Gradually the revolutionaries regained their confidence. Down the Nevski Prospekt in the centre of Petrograd marched the demonstrators: no one any longer dared to oppose them. Out of the shadows came the leaders of the Fourth State Duma, which had recently been prorogued by Nicholas II; they formed a confidential committee and hoped to be able to exploit events before they ran out of control. Nicholas II was not in Petrograd but at military headquarters in Mogilëv and all this information threw him into panic. The Mensheviks meanwhile re-formed a Petrograd Soviet and campaigned for a republic. By then the socialist parties sensed that the moment of Revolution had arrived. The Emperor tried to abdicate in favour of his haemophiliac son Alexei; but it was not to be. On 2 March he saw that the game was up and abdicated in favour first of his son and then of his brother Mikhail. This concession was inadequate for the rebels and power passed to the leaders of the dispersed State Duma. The Romanov dynasty which had ruled Russia since 1613 had been overthrown.
When the news about the seriousness of the situation came through to Zurich, it took the Russian emigrants by surprise. The reports from Petrograd had been turning a spotlight upon the troubles in their country, yet it was impossible for revolutionaries abroad to judge whether the final crisis of tsarism had arrived. Lenin was no different from his fellow émigrés; he waited patiently to see what would happen. Thus it came about that he was prepring to set off for the library in the normal fashion after lunch, leaving Nadya behind to clear the table and do the washing up.1
Hotfoot to 14 Spiegelgasse came a comrade, M. G. Bronski, who had read in the Swiss newspapers that Revolution – the Revolution, the long-awaited Revolution, the glorious Revolution against the Romanovs – was occurring. The telegrams had arrived that morning. Bronski was astonished that the Lenins had not yet heard: ‘Don’t you know anything?!’ Lenin and Nadya hastened to the side of the lake where they would be able to check Bronski’s story against the contents of newspapers pasted on boards for public display. Perhaps, they surmised, Bronski had been exaggerating. All the emigrants wanted a revolutionary eruption so badly that they guarded themselves against casually believing that it was occurring. But this time the story was true. Both the Swiss newspapers and the telegrams from Petrograd had the same message. Stunned and delighted, Lenin and Nadya read the reports several times to themselves.2 There really could be no doubt: Revolution had occurred. This time there were not merely the signs of a monarchy under pressure; the monarchy had been blown away. Nicholas II, whose father had shown no clemency towards Lenin’s brother Alexander and whose whole family was detested by Lenin, had become citizen Romanov.
The rest of the day was spent in a hubbub of meetings with fellow emigrants in Zurich. Hands were shaken, congratulations were exchanged, revolutionary songs were sung – and Lenin loved to exercise his baritone voice on such occasions. Nadezhda Konstantinovna lost herself in the celebrations to such an extent that she could remember nothing about them.
Sharing in the delight, Lenin wanted to supply what leadership he could to the Bolsheviks at work in Russia. This could not be done directly: he had to dispatch messages through Alexandra Kollontai in Oslo, who maintained links with the Central Committee in Petrograd. On 3 March 1917 he composed a telegram affirming the need for Bolsheviks to stick by their old slogans. Lenin warned against any change of party policy on the war. On no account should socialists allow themselves to approve of ‘the defence of the fatherland’. Reunification with the Mensheviks should be rejected. The Bolsheviks needed their own separate party. The objective should be ‘international proletarian revolution and the conquest of power by “Soviets of workers’ deputies”’. He did not fail to mention that no compromise was tolerable with Kautsky.3 This was quite a political summons; it was a gauntlet thrown at the feet of the Provisional Government. Lenin was not going to accept the right of Milyukov, Guchkov and Kerenski (who he had predicted a year previously would try to form a governmental coalition) to govern Russia. His language was unmistakably insurrectionary. Let the soviets assume power! Let the Revolution spread beyond Russia! Let every true socialist promote the revolutionary cause across Europe!
Lenin did not bother to consult with the other Bolshevik emigrants. More than that: he wrote without any detailed knowledge of what was happening in Russia. Quite wrongly, he thought that Nicholas II was organising a counter-revolution; and his preoccupation with Kautsky showed how out of touch he was with the wishes of Petrograd workers. But Lenin was a leader. He offered whatever guidance he could, and Kollontai telegraphed by return of post with a request for further directives. Steadily he clarified his intentions in his messages to her and to the Bureau of the Central Committee, even though he had no idea how they were being received in Russia.
He did not intend to repeat the mistake of 1905, when he had returned to Russia months after the revolutionary turmoil began. But this time a war cut through the central zone of Europe. He could not cross to Russia through France and the North Sea without the permission of the Allies, and this would never be forthcoming. To have tried to enter Russia via the Mediterranean was similarly unfeasible. The Turks were unpredictable and Russian revolutionaries might not have been allowed free transit. And so Lenin had to contemplate alternatives. His most imaginative thought was to dress up as a deaf-and-dumb Swede and take the train across Germany to Denmark and then make his way to Finland and eventually to Petrograd. Nadya dissuaded him, pointing out that he would inevitably blabber about the Mensheviks in his sleep and be discovered. His other ideas were equally madcap. At one point, for example, he proposed to charter a plane – then an unreliable mode of transport – to the other side of the eastern front. But he would not drop the plan until someone mentioned that no flying machine could yet travel such a distance and that anyway the artillery of the Central Powers would shoot him down.
Yet sound alternatives were few, and indeed there was only one that was worth exploring. This was the idea put forward by Martov that the Russian socialists in Switzerland should seek permission from the German government for their passage across Germany in return for the Russian Provisional Government releasing an equal number of German and Austrian nationals interned in Russia. Robert Grimm negotiated with the German consul in Bern, Gisbert von Romberg, on behalf of the Russians. Quickly Grimm gained a positive response from Berlin. The only further requirement was the Provisional Government’s formal approval, but the problem was that Russian Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov objected. Martov declined to implement the plan until such time as the Petrograd Soviet had pressed Milyukov into conceding permission.
But Lenin would not be put off. Quite unfairly blaming Grimm for incompetence, he turned to one of Grimm’s Swiss far-left socialist opponents, Fritz Platten, for help. Platten agreed to go and see Romberg with a proposal formulated by Lenin and Zinoviev. Romberg immediately secured his Foreign Ministry’s sanction for any number of Russian political emigrants to cross Germany by train and for such a train to have extraterritorial status during the journey; he also confirmed that his government would make no demand for the release of German prisoners-of-war in exchange.4 Lenin was ecstatic and immediately planned the details with Zinoviev. Thirty-two travellers would make the trip and Lenin and Zinoviev stipulated that all of them should pay their own fares: no subsidy from the Germans would be allowed. The trip would not be restricted to Bolsheviks. For example, a female leading member of the Jewish Bund was welcomed as a passenger with her four-year-old son Robert. The schedule called for the travellers to make their way to Zurich and assemble at the Zähringerhof Hotel on 27 March. From there they would take a local train up to the border. Such was Lenin’s appreciation of Platten’s intervention with Romberg that he asked him to act as the travelling party’s intermediary for the entire journey. Thus Lenin would have no need to talk to a single German between Switzerland and Denmark.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna argued that he would have to travel ahead of her. How, she asked, could she possibly do everything in time? She knew that it would be her responsibility to pack the Bolshevik correspondence archive, gather their suitcases of belongings, organise their bank accounts and make arrangements for people to keep in touch with them in Russia. She was also upset at having to leave her mother’s ashes, and wanted to wait until she had collected them.5 But Lenin would have none of this. Nadezhda Konstantinovna, he insisted, should come along with him. The Revolution awaited them. The main thing was to get on to the train with their basic possessions as well as pillows and blankets for the journey in the traditional Russian fashion. In the meantime the travellers should ignore the jibes made at them by other emigrants.
The day came, and Lenin and the rest of the travellers walked from the Zähringerhof Hotel to Zurich railway station. Then followed the trip to Schaffhausen on the Swiss side of the border. The German train already stood there for them. After getting on board, they travelled on to the customs point at the hamlet of Thayngen. There they were deprived of some of the food they had brought with them since the amount was greater than the legal limit; the Swiss officials allowed them to send the confiscated chocolate and sugar to relatives and friends. Thereafter they moved across the Alps and over the border to Gottmadingen in Germany. The train halted there and an order was given for the Russian emigrants to be isolated from the rest of the travelling public and escorted to a waiting room. Two German army officers introduced themselves before instructing the Russian emigrants to form separate groups of men and women. The emigrants panicked at this, thinking that something awful was about to happen to the men. A protective ring was formed around Lenin as the Bolshevik leader. But German officers explained that they simply wished to accelerate the business of form-filling before the train could leave the station.6 The travellers then boarded the train and took their reserved places in the II–III-class carriage, and the train left Gottmadingen on its momentous journey.
The protocol for the journey had been drawn up beforehand. The two German officers were instructed to stay in the rear of the carriage behind a line drawn in chalk dividing ‘German’ from ‘Russian’ territory. Seals were affixed to three of the doors to the carriage; but the fourth, which was adjacent to the sleeping compartment of the German officers, was left unlocked. Thus the passengers were not really barred off from the world as they travelled and the famous ‘sealed train’ is a misnomer. Indeed they spoke to people who came into the train en route. This happened because Platten got off in Frankfurt to buy beer and newspapers and asked some soldiers to take them on board for him. Several railway workers joined the soldiers, and the irrepressible Radek had a rare old time inciting them to make a revolution in Germany. What was less acceptable to Lenin was the permission given by the German government for the German trade union leader Wilhelm Janson to get on board in Stuttgart. The emigrants held a brief discussion and told Platten to tell Janson that they would not meet him. They had taken quite enough risks already and did not want reports to reach Russia that they had spoken to enemy citizens on enemy territory.7
All this increased the tension. Lenin’s nerves – never very relaxed at the best of times – were tautened by the behaviour of his fellow passengers. He and Nadya had been prevailed upon to take a separate coupé so that he could get on with his writing. The problem was that the neighbouring coupé was occupied by Radek, Grigori Safarov, Olga Ravich (Safarov’s young wife) and Inessa Armand. The din they made was incessant. When they were not singing, they were laughing at Radek’s jokes. Lenin could bear it no longer and, late into the night, burst into their coupé and hauled out Olga Ravich.8 This was the first case of Bolshevik revolutionary injustice in 1917, for the real noise-maker was not Ravich but Radek. But Lenin could pick on her with greater licence because of her youth, gender and lack of political influence; and it is no surprise that he refrained from laying hands on Inessa: too many deep waters of emotion would have been disturbed. Anyway, Lenin had overstepped the mark: the coupé’s occupants defended Ravich and Lenin had to back off.
Lenin refused to retreat, however, on the question of toilet usage. Radek and the other cigarette smokers avoided lighting up in their compartments out of consideration for fellow passengers who did not smoke. They smoked instead in the toilet. This had the effect of creating a queue down the corridor and, to put it delicately, induced considerable physical discomfort. On Lenin’s initiative a system of rationing was introduced for toilet access. For this purpose he cut up some paper and issued them as tickets on his authority. There were two types of ticket, one for the normal use of the toilet and the other for a discreet puff on a cigarette. This compelled smokers to limit the number of times they smoked, and quickly the disputes in the queue subsided. It was a comic little episode. Yet, without overdoing the point, we might note that Lenin’s intervention was typical of his operational assumptions. He thought that the socialist way of organising society required above all a centrally co-ordinated system of assessing needs, allocating products and services and regulating implementation. Lenin after the October Revolution went further and banned those activities of which he disapproved. But on the journey across Germany he reined himself back. Smokers could indulge themselves so long as they did it rarely and confined themselves to the toilet.
Another feature of the episode was Lenin’s imposition of order on his colleagues. Radek drew attention to this, suggesting that it proved that Lenin had it in him to ‘assume leadership of the revolutionary government’.9 As the train rolled on to Berlin and halted in sidings for a whole day, this prognosis seemed far-fetched.10 Then on 30 March, six days after leaving Switzerland, the emigrants reached the northern port of Sassnitz. Yet another set of forms had to be filled in. As a precaution and on Lenin’s suggestion, the travellers should invent fresh pseudonyms for themselves. This was an absurd overreaction since the Germans already had detailed information about the Russians in their care. The German authorities accepted the forms without making a fuss. This had the comical result that, when Lenin’s trusted helpmate Hanecki telegraphed from Trelleborg in Sweden with an enquiry as to whether a Mr Ulyanov was present among the passengers, he at first received a negative reply from the Germans.
Eventually the Bolshevik leader admitted his true identity and tickets were purchased for the ferry Queen Victoria to convey them from Sassnitz to Trelleborg; they all set sail the same day. The crossing was a rough one and most of the Russians were violently seasick. According to Radek and Zinoviev, only three passengers – Lenin, Radek and Zinoviev – endured the journey without vomiting. They may have been boasting. Or perhaps the story is true because the three of them spent their time on deck arguing furiously about politics, which may well have distracted them from feeling sick. Hanecki treated them to a celebratory banquet on their arrival in Trelleborg. The passengers threw themselves upon the several courses – all the passengers save for Lenin, who concentrated on eliciting information about Russia from Hanecki. Next day the travellers took the train to Stockholm. Again they were fêted. Indeed this was the first occasion in Lenin’s career he was given recognition by official foreign leaders. The mayor of Stockholm, Karl Lindhagen, laid on a breakfast to welcome the Russians. The newspaper Politiken carried a piece on the returning émigrés and – yet again for the first time – a photograph of Lenin was published. This brief Swedish sojourn marked a stage in the Bolshevik party’s transition to prominence.
Radek understood that this required Lenin to present himself rather differently. He put this with typical tartness:11
Probably it was the decent appearance of our stolid Swedish comrades that was evoking in us a passionate desire for Ilich to resemble a human being. We cajoled him at least to buy new shoes. He was travelling in mountain boots with huge nails. We pointed out to him that if the plan had been to ruin the pavements of the disgusting cities of bourgeois Switzerland, his conscience should prevent him from travelling with such instruments of destruction to Petrograd, where perhaps there anyway were now no pavements at all.
Lenin was marched off to a department store where clothes were bought for him. Thus refitted, he was judged appropriately dressed to lead the struggle against the Russian Provisional Government.
On 31 March, the passengers boarded the evening train from Stockholm northwards to Finland while Hanecki, Radek and V. V. Vorovski stayed behind to look after Bolshevik affairs abroad. This time Lenin and Nadya had no compartment to themselves. Georgian Bolshevik David Suliashvili, who took the bunk opposite Lenin, watched as he ‘rapidly devoured the newspapers with his eyes’. While reading the Russian press, Lenin could not contain his annoyance with the Mensheviks: ‘Ach, the scoundrels!… Ach, the traitors!’12 Several hours and dozens of ill-tempered exclamations later, the train reached the border with Finland at Harapanda. There the passengers got off and hired sleighs across the road bridge into the town of Tornio. They were briefly searched by Russian border guards before getting on yet another train for Helsinki. In Tornio Lenin had picked up recent copies of Pravda. He took himself off to a corner of the waiting room and studied the contents. This gave him two unpleasant shocks. The first was that Malinovski had been proved beyond peradventure to have been an Okhrana agent. Lenin went white with astonishment. Zinoviev sketched the scene: ‘Several times Ilich, staring eyeball to eyeball, returned to this theme. In short sentences. More in a whisper. He looked straight in my face. “What a scoundrel! He tricked the lot of us. Traitor! Shooting’s too good for him!”’13 The second shock was the news that the Bolshevik Central Committee, led by Lev Kamenev and Iosif Stalin since their release from Siberian exile, had adopted a policy of conditional support for the Russian Provisional Government. Already disgusted with the Mensheviks, Lenin was infuriated by leading Bolsheviks.
From Helsinki the émigrés took the Finland Railway to Petrograd. The train went at a steady speed, never reaching forty miles per hour, and the passengers grew impatient. At Beloostrov, twenty miles north of the capital, their train halted at the Russo-Finnish administrative border for the regular passport and customs checks. The Bolshevik Central Committee had sent ahead none other than Lev Kamenev to greet the returning leader and discuss the reception awaiting him. Lenin received him with something less than hospitality: ‘What have you been writing in Pravda? We’ve seen a few copies and have called you all sorts of names!’
Lenin was also getting nervous again. As the train drew near to the capital late into the night on 3 April, he fretted lest he should be arrested on arrival despite the reassurances of Kamenev. In fact Kamenev was right. The Bolshevik leadership had arranged a welcome at the Finland Station in the Russian capital. Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries from the Petrograd Soviet also turned out. Twenty minutes before the train’s arrival, two sailors’ units assembled on the platform as a guard of honour for Lenin. The naval officer expected him to say a few words of greeting to them. It was almost midnight. Nikolai Chkheidze, a Menshevik leader and Petrograd Soviet chairman, turned up to greet the returning Bolshevik leader. Outside the station building a crowd of workers and soldiers had gathered, just as had happened at the Kursk Station when leaders of the various socialist parties had arrived from Siberian exile. Eyes were fixed on the railway line to the north, and at last the lights of the train were glimpsed in the darkness. The locomotive wound its way towards the station like a fiery snake. Steam hissed from the pistons. The crowd, most of whom had never previously seen Lenin, started to push towards the building. The train rumbled to the side of the platform. He had arrived. After a decade abroad Lenin stepped down from the carriage on to Russian soil.
Then the celebrations started to go awry as Lenin refused to join in the spirit of comradeship. Improvising a speech to the sailors of the guard of honour, he told them that they had been deceived by the Provisional Government.14 He was starting as he meant to go on. Followed by Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Kamenev, he strode through to the reception rooms formerly reserved for the Imperial family. Chkheidze greeted him as a respected emigrant and appealed for cooperation among all socialists, but Lenin barely looked at him and replied with a summons for ‘world socialist revolution’. He then walked out of the station and clambered on top of an armoured car brought to the Finland Station by local Bolsheviks. From this position he could survey the crowd of thousands. His message to them was that capitalism had to be brought down in Russia and the rest of Europe, and that genuine socialists should withhold all support for the Provisional Government.
Lenin’s words disconcerted practically everyone who heard them that night; many listeners – or at least those who were close enough to hear him – thought he had gone off his head. Kamenev and other leading Bolsheviks were baffled, and hoped that once he had got over his long separation from Russia in Switzerland he would come to his senses. Even Nadezhda Konstantinovna seems to have doubted his sanity.15 Just a few colleagues were pleased by what he had said at the Finland Station. Among these were Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapnikov. A lot of Bolsheviks of a lesser standing in the faction agreed, having been appalled by the agreement of most Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries and indeed many Bolsheviks to lend conditional support to the Provisional Government. Lenin had returned to a fluid situation. There was a chance – a chance that was bound to grow larger with time – to build a separate anti-governmental party. The man who had stood high on the armoured car in dead of night had not been a lone wolf; he was part of a pack that would get noisier and stronger. Bolshevism was finding its confidence again. A leader had returned to Petrograd who would give clarity to Bolshevik ideas and add resolve to Bolshevik practical campaigns.
In the trains between Switzerland and Russia he had busied himself by sketching his proposed strategy. These he was to call his April Theses. He gave them a polish between Beloostrov and Petrograd, keeping his phraseology short and punchy. There were ten theses. Some were chiselled with attention to detail, others were offered in lapidary slabs. Lenin wrote his April Theses deliberately so as to appeal to all far-left socialists who were uneasy with the Provisional Government’s stance. He wanted to convince his own Bolsheviks; his desire was also to attract recruits from the other parties.
There is much confusion in scholarly writings about the April Theses. Most of it results from the assumption that Lenin was a politician averse to verbal fudging. This is quite wrong. Lenin had to operate in a specific legal environment and, although he wanted the Bolsheviks to seize power, it would have been dangerous to say this directly. He had not travelled to Petrograd to offer himself as a martyr. His purposes were evident even though they were couched in oblique terms. Essentially he was taking his wartime thought a little further and explicitly redefining Bolshevism. And this constituted a rejection of the traditional Russian Marxist notion that a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution should be consolidated in Russia before any attempt at a further revolution, involving a social and economic eradication of capitalism, should be made. In April 1917 he demanded the abandonment of ‘the old Bolshevism’ and the reduction of the two stages of the revolutionary process to one. Even so, Lenin’s demand was not made explicitly. He may have disliked acknowledging a strategic change of mind; or perhaps he did not want to get involved in a doctrinal dispute at a moment when his priority was to secure assent to a practical policy. Above all, the Provisional Government had to be replaced. Lenin in his April Theses argued that only by this means would there be a fundamental solution for the Russian Empire’s political, economic and social problems and an end to the Great War with a peace that would be unoppressive for all the belligerent peoples.
There had been grave questions about Lenin’s strategy since 1905 when he had aimed to make a ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’ by setting up a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. He had never successfully countered the charge that his ideas, if implemented, would establish an oppressive, arbitrary regime and very probably set off a civil war. His April Theses were even less capable of addressing these questions. And yet, although an oppressive, arbitrary regime was built into his new strategy, he refused to recognise the fact. He used logical flourishes but did not bother with consistent logic; he would not be fussed about niceties. The time had come, he stated boldly, to begin the advance on power.
Few Bolsheviks could believe their ears when he addressed them at a couple of meetings on 4 April. The first meeting occurred in the premises of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee in the early hours of the morning. This was the large town-mansion on Kronverski Boulevard previously occupied by the ballerina Matilda Kseshinskaya, Nicholas II’s former mistress. Showing no tiredness, Lenin delivered a diatribe against the Bolshevik Central Committee’s caution. He raged like a bull. Everything about him reflected impatience and determination. There was a clarity of intent that no one else in his party possessed. Indeed very few politicians in the other parties had quite the self-belief of Vladimir Lenin. Politics in Russia were turbulent and unpredictable, and most leaders had a degree of doubt about their policies; they naturally tended to seek support for the actions and to have their close colleagues tell them that what they were doing was right. There were exceptions to this. Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov had no need for his party members to bolster his commitment to basic liberal concepts; and Socialist-Revolutionary Alexander Kerenski’s confident understanding of the political possibilities inured him to criticisms by his fellow party leaders. Milyukov and Kerenski felt they could, if permitted by circumstances, act as the embodiment of the Revolution in Russia. Lenin felt the same, but, unlike these rivals, he did not see it as his task to modify the policies of the Provisional Government. Lenin aimed to make another Revolution.
He had yet to settle himself into the extraordinary environment. Arriving in Petrograd, he had no idea where he and Nadya would stay the night. But his family had thought about this on his behalf. Anna Ilinichna and her husband Mark Yelizarov were then living at 48 Broad Street, a multi-storey tenement built at the turn of the century in the Petrograd Side district to the north-east of the city’s centre. Younger sister Maria lived in the same apartment. After the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee meeting, Volodya and Nadya proceeded to Broad Street.
As they tried to make sense of developments, they were certain about one thing: the days of emigration were over for good. Nadya put this into her memoirs:16
When we were left alone, Ilich scanned the room: it was a typical room in a Petersburg apartment; there was an instant sense of the reality of the fact that we were now in Piter [Petrograd’s popular nickname] and that all those Parises, Genevas, Berns and Zurichs were already something genuinely in the past. We exchanged a couple of words on this subject.
There was no time for a longer conversation since it was late into the night and an important day awaited them. Lenin and Nadya slept separately. Gora Lozgachëv, the adoptive son of Anna and Mark, had pinned a notice over the two beds: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’17 It was a fitting scene. Lenin and Nadya were not paying heed to their marriage; their minds were fixated on the political tasks ahead. The opportunity to have a daily influence on Russian politics had been snatched from them in 1907. Now it had been restored and each was going to grasp it.
Lenin had one private duty to perform before he could dive into the political torrent. After breakfast, he asked Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich – friend of the Ulyanov family and a fellow Bolshevik – to obtain a car for his use. Together with Bonch-Bruevich, he visited the graves of his mother and his sister Olga in the Volkovo Cemetery. Lenin controlled his emotions at the graveside. Bonch-Bruevich, who was more typically Russian than Lenin in his emotional reactions, had expected him to weep, but this was not how the Ulyanovs had been brought up to behave.
Lenin enjoyed living again with his sisters. Dmitri Ilich was still serving as a doctor in Crimea and Lenin did not meet him for another two years. Lenin liked to play with young Gora. Anna Ilinichna ran the domestic regime according to strict rules and frightened any children who displeased her; she also stopped her husband from indulging their adoptive son.18 But she never dared to order Vladimir Ilich about and had only to leave the room and the noise would start. Gora and he engaged in every sort of horseplay. It was nothing for them to set the chairs flying in the sitting room. Lenin also played tricks on Gora. This involved a considerable amount of teasing at poor Gora’s expense. Nadya objected to the ‘inquisitorial’ aspect of Lenin’s behaviour: ‘Volodya! Well, now that you’ve completely tormented him, leave the child in peace! Look what you’ve done – you’ve broken the table.’19 On this occasion Lenin had lunged so suddenly at Gora that the two went tumbling over the table. A horrified Anna Ilinichna returned to ascertain what was happening.20 If her husband Mark had been responsible, he would have earned the lash of his wife’s tongue. But Lenin was different. Lenin could be forgiven everything. He was the family’s darling; he could be gently reproved, very gently; but no one was allowed to thwart him. It was all right to ‘spoil’ Lenin.
Anna Ilinichna had transferred her sisterly affection from Alexander to Vladimir after Alexander’s execution. Vladimir the writer and public figure embodied her ideal. But she idolised him also because the traumas of the family’s past could somehow be salved by Vladimir’s career. Her brother Vladimir was bent on eradicating the old regime which, in her opinion, had treated the Ulyanovs brutally. He was a fighter in a noble cause.
We do not really know how much Lenin thought about Sasha’s execution, and certainly he had a propensity for clinical political judgement. But beneath the cool, analytical surface he was also a man of passion. Whatever his precise feelings about the Romanovs, he raged against the entire social order of tsarism. He detested the nobility, the industrialists, bankers. For Lenin, moreover, liberals were as bad as conservatives and outright reactionaries. Unlike other political leaders, he saw the Provisional Government not as the embodiment of a new regime but as a newer form of the old. His version of Marxist theory propelled him in the direction of denouncing the ‘capitalist ministers’ and their supporters. But so, too, did his family’s experience. He recalled – and no doubt the visit to the Volkovoe Cemetery reminded him forcibly – how his family had been ostracised in Simbirsk after Alexander’s execution. He felt no impulse to forgive and forget. Lenin had spent his adult life denouncing non-socialists as being no better than the regime they purported to oppose. Lenin, without saying this explicitly, wanted to settle some scores. He wanted revenge, and the surviving members of his family – as well as others in his own party (and in the general population) – felt the same.
It was in this spirit that he returned from the cemetery and went to his second political meeting of 4 April. This took place in room no. 13 of the Tauride Palace. This was the building which had formerly housed the State Duma and which, since the February Revolution, had contained both the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. The large parties were allowed to hold meetings there. A gathering of Bolsheviks from all over the country was held there in advance of a conference of the country’s soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Lenin astounded practically everyone who had not yet heard his proposals. Without naming names, he attacked those who offered reconciliation with the Mensheviks. The contents of the April Theses were revealed and explained. Most Bolsheviks could hardly believe their ears. Notable exceptions were Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapnikov. The rest were aghast. Kamenev in particular believed Lenin to have taken leave of his senses. Most of Lenin’s friends hoped that he would calm down once he had had a chance to acquaint himself with the realities of the contemporary situation in Russia. Surely, they asked, this madness could not long continue?
Lengthy debate was impossible, however, because Lenin had already spoken for an hour and a half and his presence was awaited at a third meeting downstairs where the State Duma had once held its proceedings. This was to be a unificatory session of all Marxist delegates to the conference of the country’s soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Mensheviks went up to room 13 to press the Bolsheviks to bring their leader along with them.
The chairman of the session was Nikolai Chkheidze, and Lenin was again given the platform. His lengthy journey had left no mark on him. Pacing up and down, he was like a liberated animal. Having rehearsed his ideas twice already, he had a clear head – and he made a stormy declaration of revolutionary intent. But this time the response was critical. First of all, Irakli Tsereteli as Menshevik leader of the Petrograd Soviet made a plea for a unified Marxist party and argued that an early seizure of state power would lead to disaster. Mildly he suggested that eventually he would be able to co-operate with Lenin. Getting to his feet, Lenin instantly disillusioned him: ‘Never!’21 Former Bolshevik I. P. Goldenberg compared Lenin with the mid-nineteenth-century anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin, who had polemicised with Marx himself:22
The throne is now occupied which has been empty for thirty years since the death of Bakunin. From this seat the banner of civil war has been unfurled in the midst of revolutionary democracy. Lenin’s programme is sheer insurrectionism, which will lead us into the pit of anarchy. These are the tactics of the universal apostle of destruction.
After such a denunciation there was no chance of a rapid reconciliation between Bolshevik and Menshevik leaders. Other speakers continued the attack on Lenin. As the rowdy session broke up, the chairman Chkheidze permitted himself the jibe that ‘Lenin will remain a solitary figure outside the revolution and we’ll all go our own way.’23
Yet Lenin did not remain alone. He was pleased with his first day’s work in Petrograd and wished to consolidate it over the following weeks. On every possible occasion he harangued the Provisional Government, harangued the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries for supporting the Provisional Government, harangued Bolsheviks who sympathised with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. He spoke at open mass meetings. He wrote for Pravda. He attended and guided the Bolshevik Central Committee. He talked with visitors to Petrograd in order to get information about the provinces. He scoured the non-Bolshevik press for further news. He kept in touch with Radek in Stockholm and stayed abreast of the military and political situation elsewhere in Europe. He was aflame with zeal. Everything he did was undertaken so that the April Theses might become the foundation of Bolshevik revolutionary strategy.
But he was not inflexible. In the April Theses he had had the tact to recognise that not all the people who supported the Provisional Government were out-and-out imperialists. He knew that most workers and soldiers retained a patriotic will to defeat Germany. He had to persuade them carefully to come over to Bolshevism. For this to happen, moreover, the Bolsheviks had to obtain majorities in the soviets and other mass organisations: there could be no lasting possession of power unless the party had secured widespread popular support. The Bolsheviks therefore had to secure their opportunity to operate legally. Propaganda in the press and at open meetings would be crucial, and Lenin did not wish to create difficulties for the party by the open advocacy of activity that would invite repression by the Ministry of the Interior. On arrival in Petrograd he also learned that his own slogans were problematic. Most listeners were deeply disturbed by his talk of the need to turn the ‘imperialist war into a European civil war’. Nor did workers, soldiers and peasants in general warm to the prospect of a ‘revolutionary war’ or a ‘dictatorship’. As for his demand for Europe’s socialists to campaign for the defeat of their respective governments, this was a notion which simply offended Russian public opinion at all levels.
Lenin quickly dropped such slogans in his articles for Pravda and his speeches to heavily attended open meetings. He did not cease to believe in the slogans; he remained convinced that they alone were adequate to the epoch of socialist transformation which, according to him, had already arrived. But he was adjusting himself to practical needs and was sensible enough, for the present, to hearken to the warnings given to him by Kamenev. And even when modified, his slogans offered a massive contrast with the programme of the Provisional Government. He called for rule by the soviets. He demanded the nationalisation of large-scale industry and the banks. He urged the governmental expropriation of agricultural land. He advocated the cause of peace throughout Europe and argued that only a socialist administration, constituted by the soviets, could achieve this.
Constantly he declared that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were at best fools and at worst renegades in espousing co-operation between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government. He rejected their entire argument, which once he had shared, that Russia was at altogether too low a point of industrial and cultural development for the beginning of ‘the transition to socialism’ to be feasible. He denied that the country was best protected against military conquest by a political alliance of all social classes, and he scoffed at the suggestion that the primary task of the moment was to protect the gains of the February 1917 Revolution (even though he acknowledged that Russia had become ‘the freest country in the world’). His refrain was that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were the subordinate partners of the Kadets and that an ‘imperialist’ government had been established. Lenin pointed to the fact the Pavel Milyukov, who espoused the expansion of Russian territory at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, was Foreign Affairs Minister. This, he said, was proof that the replacement of Nicholas II by the Provisional Government had changed nothing essential in the orientation of official policy in Petrograd.
Events ran in his favour when it became known that Milyukov had notified the Allies that the government stood by Nicholas II’s war aims. On 20–21 April there was a protest demonstration in the capital against this. Bolsheviks joined in enthusiastically. Milyukov and Guchkov were compelled to resign from the cabinet and Prince Lvov had to put together a new coalition, including Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries as ministers. Ostensibly the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries acquired great influence at the apex of the state. In reality they became tarred with the brush of the Provisional Government’s continued failures to deal with the multiplicity of crises in the country.
At the Party Conference held by the Bolsheviks in the Kseshinskaya mansion from 24 April, Lenin seized his chance. The ‘Milyukov Note’, he declared, had proved that the Provisional Government was not to be trusted. Vacillating Bolshevik organisations had come over to his side. Few Bolsheviks who had disapproved of the April Theses were elected as delegates to the Conference. Many of the anti-Leninists, indeed, had already deserted the Bolsheviks. By moderating his language in public, furthermore, he allayed the doubts of leaders such as Kamenev who had attacked him in the Central Committee; and he agreed that, for the moment, the emphasis should be on propaganda rather than insurrection. Then, behind the closed doors of the Conference in the Kseshinskaya mansion, Lenin demanded the establishment of a socialist dictatorship. This alone, he maintained, would give land to the peasants, bread and employment to the workers, national self-determination to the non-Russians and peace to everyone. Objections were made that he had scrapped Marxist orthodoxy about stages in historical development. But most delegates had no patience with such niceties and Lenin’s call for Bolsheviks to play their part in the imminent revolution in Russia and the rest of Europe carried the day. On the ‘national question’ and on ‘the agrarian question’ too he was victorious. Bolshevism was back in his firm grasp once again.24
His rhetoric and imposing presence had made the best of a situation in the party that was already propitious. And both he and the Conference as a whole saw that the situation in the country was also turning in favour of the socialist far left. The difficulties facing the new government were almost intractable in current conditions. The dislocation of industry and commerce was worsening. The food-supplies crisis was becoming acute. On the war fronts there was no good news. The framework of state administration, already somewhat creaky, was tottering dangerously. The abolition of the monarchy had opened politics to open public discussion and organisation, and the workers, soldiers and peasants expected much from the Provisional Government. Its ministers would find it extremely hard to satisfy them.
Lenin had won over his party; his task now was to convince those of his fellow citizens to whom his party wished to appeal. It had not been difficult to convince the leaders and activists who attended the Party Conference. Much trickier would be the task of tossing the net of propaganda and organisation beyond the ranks of committed Bolsheviks. There was no certainty of success. If ‘Soviet power’ was to become a reality, very large sections of the Imperial population had to be brought over to Bolshevism.
Lenin aimed his slogans at workers, soldiers, sailors and peasants and he also tried to win over the non-Russian nationalities. The principal culprits for the country’s woes, he stated, were the industrialists, the bankers and the agricultural landlords. According to this analysis, on one side were ‘the people’, the exploited majority; on the other were the parasitical few. Although Lenin claimed to be offering policies based on unsentimental, scientific premises, his language was highly emotive and moralistic. It was also remarkably selective. Throughout these months Lenin strove to avoid giving offence to elements in the population that might otherwise have rallied to an anti-Bolshevik cause. Thus he made no overt threat to small-scale entrepreneurs, shopkeepers and self-employed artisans. He said nothing untoward about priests, mullahs and rabbis. He did not criticise officials and clerks in the various administrations of government, public services and business. Lenin wanted a clear field for the main political struggle, which he saw as being a contest between the ‘proletariat’ and the ‘bourgeoisie’. Whenever he wrote or spoke, he declared that the bourgeoisie was already on the offensive; he put forward his party as the only possible defender of the working class.
Lenin insisted that the Provisional Government was imperialist in intent and obedient to the interests of Russia’s robber capitalists. The people, he declared, were being tricked:1
Ruin is imminent. Catastrophe is on its way. The capitalists have brought and are bringing all countries to destruction. The sole salvation is revolutionary discipline, revolutionary measures taken by the revolutionary class, the proletarians and semi-proletarians, the transition of all state power into the hands of this class that will be able in reality to introduce such control, in reality to carry through victoriously ‘the struggle against the parasites’.
Lenin’s language was a curious mixture. His Marxist jargon was uncompromising: ‘proletarian’ was unusual enough, ‘semi-proletarian’ even more so to most of his fellow citizens. Yet there was also a punchy thrust in his writings. Ruin, catastrophe and destruction ran like a red thread through his vocabulary. When he got up on a platform, the audience was transfixed. He paced up and down. He fixed the crowd with a piercing gaze. He pinned his thumbs in his waistcoat like a schoolteacher, which added to the impression he gave of purveying genuine knowledge. He was not a conventionally brilliant orator. His enunciation was imperfect since he still failed to say his rs properly. He also took time to settle into a rhythm in the course of his speeches. But this did not matter to his audiences. The very opposite was the case: the awkwardness of his stocky, unprepossessing figure on the platform conveyed the impression of passion and willpower. In any case, it was often difficult to hear exactly what he was saying at the open public meetings, and the audiences were attracted as much by what they saw – an uncompromising militant leader speaking for the people’s cause – as by the precise verbal content of his oratory.
Also of some significance was the fact that Lenin began to dress differently from before 1917. Since leaving Sweden he had a new suit, shoes and cap, which had been bought at Karl Radek’s insistence. Consequently he no longer traipsed aroung in heavy, worn-down mountain boots. But it was the cap that his audiences remembered (and which has gone down in sartorial history as a ‘Lenin cap’). Commentators have usually contended that his new headwear was typical of the Russian working man of the period. Really his cap, bought in Stockholm, was the floppy sort worn around the turn of the century by painters.2 The result was to lend a touch of raffishness to Lenin’s appearance. Although he wore a smart suit like other politicians, his cap distinguished him from them and their solemn Homburg hats. his devil-may-care policies added to the effect. Lenin, in contrast with rival politicians in other parties, was visibly enjoying the Revolution. He relished every moment, and wished Russians to do the same. Lenin wanted them to abandon their inhibitions and seize the opportunities for self-emancipation with enthusiasm.
Thus Lenin rubbed shoulders comfortably with the factory labourers and garrison soldiers attending his meetings. He loved frequenting such a milieu; he was finding fulfilment as a Marxist in company with the working class and was in a mood of constant excitement. He confided to Nadya, when he joined her in the Ulyanov apartment at 48 Broad Street, that he had found himself politically at last.3 This adaptation required much effort. At one of his early meetings he sat on the platform with Alexandra Kollontai. At the last moment he panicked and asked her to deliver the speech on his behalf. Kollontai was astounded. She thought of Lenin as a confident party leader. She herself liked holding forth to large audiences, and persuaded Lenin that there was nothing very much to oratory. Lenin took heart and repaid her faith in his ability. He never again needed his inner belief to be enhanced by her or anyone else.4
Lots of people who disliked his policies confessed to being enthralled by his speeches. Many readers of his newspaper articles registered the same effect. He had an unrivalled ability to set out his arguments and lay out a militant case. His aggressive descriptions of his enemies and their policies gave everyone the feeling that here was a man who could wield governmental power. Provisional Government ministers were tame by comparison. Kadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had to compromise with each other; but Lenin treated compromise as a dirty word. He wanted dynamic, ruthless, correct measures to be taken, and contended that only a standpoint based upon ‘class struggle’ would suffice. He wrote a great deal: forty-eight pieces appeared in Pravda in May 1917 alone. As the Bolshevik central newspaper, Pravda was the main conduit of his ideas to the party, and no one’s name appeared in its pages more often than Lenin’s. He was in his element. He thought, wrote and acted as if he and the party were interchangeable. The country’s other newspapers had the same opinion that Lenin embodied the sole alternative to the political status quo.
He made public appearances too, delivering twenty-one speeches in May and June. Some of his speeches were short contributions to closed party meetings; others were disquisitions that included a couple of tirades to the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets. But he reserved most of his energy for Pravda. Lenin was a politician of the printed word; he was the brilliant gimnazia student who had turned into a Marxist scholar – and it had been he who developed the theory for Russian Marxists that the best instrument to establish a clandestine party was a newspaper, Iskra. He could adapt his style, but only up to a point. Words in print were still his revolutionary touchstone and he badgered colleagues who spent their time speaking at mass meetings rather than writing.5 The conventional wisdom that he was the master of all the political skills between the February and October Revolutions is unconvincing.
Yet Lenin enjoyed his politics. Petrograd was a place of great cultural effervescence in 1917. The world-famous bass Fedor Shalyapin was giving concerts. There were shows of paintings. Previously banned books were appearing. Street carnivals were organised. Symphony concerts were frequent. But Lenin kept his distance from them. Later he explained himself to Maxim Gorki:6
But often I can’t listen to music. It acts on my nerves. It makes one want to say a lot of sweet nonsense and stroke the heads of people who live in a filthy hell-hole and yet can create such beauty. But you can’t stroke anyone’s head today – you’ll get your hands cut off. The need is to beat them over the head, beat them mercilessly even though we, as an ideal, are against any coercion of people. Hm, hm… it’s a hellishly difficult necessity.
These words came from a man who knew he could not trust his emotions if he was to succeed at Revolution – a man who was willing to contemplate merciless violence not only against the party’s enemies but against just about anyone. Not that he had to try very hard to suppress his more generous impulses. He did it very easily, and did it with ever greater facility over the course of his career. The political task at hand was all that mattered.
But, before any heads could be beaten, Lenin had to have power. The Bolshevik party needed to overthrow the Provisional Government and set up a new revolutionary administration. The soviets and other ‘mass’ organisations, in Lenin’s vision, ought to become the basis of governmental authority. Thus would the ‘transition to socialism’ be undertaken.
With this purpose in mind it was vital for the Bolshevik party to enter the soviets without delay. Bolsheviks should campaign in elections and get themselves into leading soviet posts at the expense of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Accused of wanting to lead his small party into a coup d’état, he replied in Pravda: ‘We shall be for the transition of power into the hands of the proletarians and semi-proletarians at such a time when the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies come over to the side of our politics and want to take this power into their own hands.’7 Thus he affirmed that he would not seize power regardless of popular opinion and that the priority for the Bolsheviks was to obtain a majority in the soviets. The Provisional Government had come into existence only through the acquiescence of the Petrograd Soviet, and ministers ignored the policies of the soviets at their peril. Furthermore, an All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was scheduled for June. The soviets were about to set up a national administrative framework parallel to the Provisional Government, and Lenin urged his party to get ready to use this framework as an instrument to rule the country.
He himself was willing to modify policies further in the light of popular demands. In the April Theses he had called for ‘land nationalisation’. But, after a survey of peasant opinion undertaken by the Socialist-Revolutionaries indicated hostility to any such nationalisation, Lenin dropped the slogan. Several of his Bolshevik adjutants, notably Stalin, had long argued that it would be hopeless to try to take agricultural land into state property once the peasantry had launched a violent campaign against their landlords. Lenin by August was willing to alter his stance. He would need the consent of the peasantry if he was to consolidate a revolutionary regime. The Bolshevik Central Committee announced a new slogan, ‘land socialisation’, which gave the peasants virtually a free hand to dispose of the land. He preferred nationalisation, but the greater good – from his standpoint – was served by the acquisition of the peasantry’s support.
Another change of policy occurred when he learned that workforces in Petrograd were beginning to institute ‘workers’ control’ in their factories. Just as previously he had objected to peasant communes being allowed to control the villages, so he had never liked the idea of workers taking over their respective factories without direction from the party. But this was a revolutionary situation and, Lenin urged, workers had to be encouraged to make revolution. Their ‘creativity’ and ‘initiative’ had to be fostered. The Bolshevik party leadership would do what it could to guide the revolution from above, but ‘the masses’ had to participate; they had to undertake their revolution from below. And so the Bolshevik leaders had to learn to listen to the voices of workers, soldiers and peasants. Bolshevism in 1905–6 had been too doctrinaire, and Lenin had been exasperated at his fellow activists’ distaste for becoming involved in the soviets, trade unions and other mass organisations. There should be no repetition of this blunder in 1917. The Bolshevik party had to be dynamic and flexible within the broad lines of its policies. Consequently it was to be welcomed if workers in Petrograd aspired to institute supervision over factory managements in order to keep their factories in operation.
In May and June 1917 most of the policies were fairly clear. The Bolshevik Central Committee and Pravda stood for the revolutionary transfer of governmental power to the soviets. They advocated a general peace in Europe, preceded by an armistice on the eastern front. They called for the nationalisation of large-scale industry and banking, for workers’ control in the factories, for the transfer of agricultural land to the peasantry, for national self-determination and for intensified cultural development. The vanguard of this political movement would be the Bolshevik party, which would guide the lower social orders to their destiny: socialist Revolution. Revolution in Russia would quickly be followed by fraternal revolutionary seizures of power elsewhere in Europe. What Russian workers could easily do, he asserted, would be accomplished with still greater ease by the workers of the more advanced industrial powers.
Such a prospect appealed to his party, and over the same months the joint organisations of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks went their separate ways. The Bolsheviks became a genuinely separate political party for the first time. Nor was there any doubt about who led the Bolshevik party. It was Lenin. Initially he was able to keep Nadezhda Konstantinovna working at his side. But she was the first to recognise that the arrangement could not last:8
In the meantime I did not entirely succeed in handling matters in the Secretariat. Of course, it was more difficult by far for Ilich to work without a personal secretary such as I had previously been for him; but now it caused inconvenience since I had to attend both the [Pravda] editorial board and Central Committee meetings. Ilich and I talked it over and decided that I should give up the secretaryship and go off and do educational work.
Her self-description as Lenin’s personal secretary was too embarrassing to be printed until the late 1980s: Lenin was officially meant to have no particular privileges at home or at work. At any rate the other Bolshevik leaders evidently resented the additional influence accruing to Lenin from her presence at his side, and formal respect for the equal rights of Central Committee members was restored. First Yelena Stasova, then Yakov Sverdlov ran the Secretariat. Lenin did not approve. But he backed down and to his relief he found that both Stasova and Sverdlov were his political admirers no less than was his wife.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna was not telling the full story. While she worked briefly in the Central Committee Secretariat, her sister-in-law Maria Ilinichna was the editorial secretary of Pravda. Rivalry for his attention had often arisen among Lenin’s women and Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s culinary incompetence continued to provoke ribaldry. She did not mind too much since she never claimed to be a chef. But she could have done without Maria Ilinichna making such a song and dance about Lenin’s enthusiasm for her chicken dishes. It was hardly surprising that Lenin enjoyed the change of diet since he and Nadya had had to eat horsemeat too often for their liking in Switzerland. (Russians, like the British, tend to be squeamish about eating the horse.) In any case Maria knew how to needle her sister-in-law. Refusing to continue this domestic competition in the central party offices, Nadya took herself off and settled down to political work as party organiser and educator in the Vyborg industrial district.
She was still bothered by Graves’s disease, and her cardiac instability was still troubling her, but she was determined to play a part to her fullest ability in the Revolution. She was also the daily provider of emotional succour to the Bolshevik leader. The frantic political pace put him under unrelieved pressure. Headaches and insomnia returned. Maria Ilinichna said that his lifestyle abroad had caused his problems because he had never had a regular, healthy diet. But the disruption of routine got worse in Petrograd; and the fact that he had to attend Central Committee and Pravda editorial sessions at which most of his colleagues chainsmoked was an additional irritation. He was constantly exhausted. It is possible that he was already suffering the minor heart attacks that certainly took place within the next two years. But, if attacks occurred, he kept quiet about them. He had lived for the Revolution, and the historic moment of Revolution had arrived. Lenin needed no second thoughts: he could not allow the moment to pass him by – and he had the arrogance to assume that the Revolution might crash if left to itself.
Nadya did what she could to help, but this was difficult. At party meetings and in front of the crowds Lenin had to perform:9
On 1 May, Vladimir Ilich gave a speech at the Field of Mars. This was the first May holiday since the overthrow of tsarist power. All the parties turned out. May Day was a festival of hopes and aspirations connected with the history of the world-wide labour movement. On that day I lay flat on my back and did not hear Vladimir Ilich’s contribution; but when he arrived home he was not happily excited but rather tired out.
He used to get very tired at that time, and consequently I held back from quizzing him about work. Things turned out badly with our walks too. Once we went out to Yelagin Island, but it turned out to be so crowded and bustling there. We strolled over to sit by the Karpovka embankment. Then we took up the habit of walking around the empty streets of Petrograd Side.
No Alpine air. No vigorous striding up mountain paths. No trips on his bicycle. Just a quick little stroll around the block from Broad Street.
But increasingly Lenin could leave important party functions to others in the Bolshevik Central Committee. Sverdlov was a brilliant administrator in the Secretariat. Kamenev did regular work in the Petrograd Soviet. Stalin was adept at handling most jobs given to him. Zinoviev was a captivating orator. The party also started to attract other Marxists who had previously not accepted Bolshevism. One such was Felix Dzierżyński, a Polish leader who had worked closely with Rosa Luxemburg. But perhaps the most surprising new Bolshevik adherent was none other than Trotski. Lenin courted him once Trotski had made his way back from North America in May 1917. For his part Trotski thought Lenin’s decision to go for immediate socialist revolution to be a tacit espousal of Trotskyism. Trotski was therefore keen to enter the only large party that was unconditionally hostile to the Provisional Government: he gave up entirely on the Mensheviks. But years of vituperation between Trotski and the Bolshevik faction were not easily expunged from the minds of other leading Bolsheviks, and Lenin had his work cut out persuading his less calculating comrades to welcome the dazzling literary, oratorical and organisational skills of their former enemy. But Lenin succeeded, and Trotski joined.
It was as well for Lenin that he could depend on such a team since there were limits to his influence inside and outside his party. Few people knew what he looked like. Contemporary Russian newspapers carried no pictures of him; and unlike Alexander Kerenski, the real master of the modern technology of politics in 1917, Lenin had no opportunity to have newsreels taken of him. Moreover, Pravda was a dour newspaper and commissioned no cartoons of him, and posters of Lenin were not made until after the October Revolution. Contrary to the conventional impression about them, the propaganda techniques of the Bolsheviks in 1917 were not very imaginative, and it was the newspapers of the other political trends that pioneered pictorial representation. Even so, such newspapers did not popularise Lenin’s image with anything near to accuracy. For example, the caricaturists in the Kadet newspaper Rech portrayed him as a great bear of a man rather than the squat, stocky fellow that he was – and, as often as not, without his moustache and with more hair than he had since his early twenties.
Lenin did not stray from Petrograd on political campaigns; he turned down every invitation to visit the rest of Russia after his long journey from Zurich. What he knew about the country came through visitors to Petrograd and from the newspapers. There was obvious irony in this. He was credited by the Provisional Government and the anti-Bolshevik parties with almost miraculous power (and this reputation has not vanished in our day). Yet the Bolshevik party was not the well-oiled machine of command that would have made this possible. Its committees in the provinces were reluctant automatically to toe the line drawn by the Central Committee. Organisationally the party was as anarchic as any other contemporary political party. It was also equally subject to the vagaries of the post and telegraph services. Messages from Petrograd arrived slowly or not at all. And the party’s central newspaper Pravda had a typical print-run of only ninety thousand copies for a population of 160 million people,10 and half of these copies were kept for distribution in the capital. The link that Lenin wanted between himself and the general populace was pretty weak in practice.
Yet the enemies of the Bolshevik party identified him as the greatest single threat to political stability. Liberals and conservatives treated his trip by special train across Germany as proof that he was a German spy. Less respectable newspapers played the anti-semitic card, claiming that Lenin was pursuing the interests of the Jews. The press campaign against him stirred up passions that threatened his personal safety. On one occasion a couple of upper-class Russian women burst into the Pravda offices and announced: ‘We have come to beat up Lenin!’ Luckily for him, this was an isolated episode; it might have been different if, instead of two ladies, a group of Cossacks had come to get him. Nevertheless the Bolshevik Central Committee took the precaution of assigning several party members to go round with him.
His recurrent concern was to keep probing the defences of the Provisional Government. For this purpose there was no better method than a large political demonstration, preferably involving armed soldiers and sailors. He had no elaborate plan for insurrection, or any plan whatsoever; but he was constantly on the look-out for any weaknesses that might be exploited. He had tried this in the protest demonstration against the Milyukov Note in April. He tried the same again in June, when the Central Committee organised a demonstration to coincide with the opening of the First Congress of Soviets. The demonstration was to be an armed affair, and unsurprisingly the Provisional Government foresaw trouble. Ministers consulted the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Petrograd Soviet, who were equally worried. The Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet decided to ban the Bolshevik-led demonstration and the Petrograd Soviet held its own demonstration in support of the First Congress of Soviets, a demonstration that would include Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks. Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries prided themselves on a bomb deftly defused. At the Congress of Soviets, lasting from 3 to 24 June 1917, they celebrated victory and proceeded to establish a Central Executive Committee to co-ordinate all the country’s soviets until the next Congress.
The great leaders of the Petrograd Soviet – Tsereteli, Chkheidze, Dan and Liber – paraded their achievements since the February Revolution. They highlighted the concordat between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government on civil freedoms and national defence. They boasted that, when Foreign Minister Milyukov tried to wriggle out of this, the Petrograd Soviet had forced his resignation and the creation of a government coalition involving several Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders claimed that all this had been beneficial for the socialist cause in Russia.
Lenin spent his energies denouncing this co-operation as a fundamental betrayal of socialism. His words were aimed at people who were very well known to him: Chernov, Dan, Tsereteli and Martov. He had polemicised with them over many years. This had not stopped him from having coffee with one or other of them if he happened upon them in a foreign coffee-house; mutual political exasperation had not prevented social contact. This changed irreversibly in 1917. For Lenin, the behaviour of his Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries after the February Revolution put them beyond the pale. He did not engage them with a detailed refutation of their policies. In some measure this was because he was so disgusted with them. But it was also because he did not want to draw unnecessary attention to the strength of their case. For a start, it was entirely reasonable for them to deny that conclusive evidence existed that Europe was on the brink of a general socialist revolution. They worked hard to convoke a conference of Europe’s anti-war socialists in Stockholm; but they argued, too, that it would be irresponsible to forget that Russia should be defended against the Central Powers. They also touched a raw nerve when they mentioned that Lenin himself had until recently scoffed at the idea that the Russian Empire was yet industrially and culturally equipped to progress towards socialism.
As ministers, too, they were having an impact. Viktor Chernov as Agriculture Minister gave peasant-led ‘land committees’ the right to take uncultivated land into their control despite the protests of gentry farmers. Mikhail Skobelev, overriding the protests of employers, used the Ministry of Labour to introduce schemes for compulsory health insurance, for safety at the work-place and for the arbitration of industrial conflict. Tsereteli’s post as Minister of Posts and Telegraphs did not inhibit him from insisting that greater autonomy should be accorded to non-Russian regions such as Finland and Ukraine.
Yet the clock was ticking against the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Every concession they wrenched from the hands of the Kadets was small alongside the problems bearing down on the Provisional Government. Monetary inflation was meteoric and industrial production plummeted. Wages, which had risen after the fall of the Romanov monarchy, failed to maintain their real value. Food supplies to the towns ran short. The central state administration steadily disintegrated. Regions, provinces and cities ran their affairs without regard for the Provisional Government. Elective sectional organisations, especially the soviets, began to act as if they wielded formal state power. The workers’ control movement began to spread beyond Petrograd. Peasants in Russia and Ukraine were illegally pasturing their cattle and chopping down landlords’ timber – and there was an increase in expropriations of landed estates. Soldiers were deserting the eastern front in their thousands. Refugees in their millions roamed Russia’s cities. The Provisional Government was seen to support the interests of the propertied elites, for it refused to undertake basic reforms until after the end of the Great War – and the end of the Great War was not in sight. Such a situation was primed for Lenin and the Bolshevik party to exploit.
This is not to say that the Provisional Government acted with consummate skill. Alexander Kerenski, its Military Affairs Minister, opted to abide by Nicholas II’s commitment to resuming a Russian offensive on the eastern front. No doubt the Provisional Government felt that it needed to show the Allies that it was not a broken reed. It also wanted to deflect Russian public criticism by means of a swift victory against the Austrians.
Yet ministers had been confident as they accounted for their activities to the First Congress of Soviets. In their view there was no realistic alternative. Tsereteli at the inaugural session on 3 June had asked whether his audience could imagine any party ‘taking the risk’ of taking power alone in revolutionary Russia. Lenin sat impassively. But Tsereteli had offered him the opening he craved. Next day he was given the platform for fifteen minutes:
At the moment a whole range of countries are on the brink of destruction, and those practical measures that are said to be so complicated that they’d be hard to introduce and are in need of special elaboration – as was stated by the previous speaker, the citizen Minister of Posts and Telegraphs – those same measures are entirely clear. He said that that no political party exists in Russia that would express a readiness to take power wholly upon itself. My answer is: ‘There is! No single party can refuse this, and our party doesn’t refuse this: at any moment it is ready to take power in its entirety.’
His Bolsheviks applauded on cue. The greater part of the audience, however, could not take seriously this severe little politician with the rasping voice and the schoolmasterly gesticulations. A wave of laughter swept through the Congress hall.
But it was not long before mockery gave way to fear. Two self-inflicted problems confronted the Provisional Government. The first was military. The long-awaited offensive was started on 18 June. It was a frightful gamble. For, after initial success, the Russian forces were held up by a spirited defence bolstered by German reinforcements. Kerenski handed propaganda material to Lenin on a plate. The worse the military situation, the better for the Bolshevik party. The second problem was political: the Kadet ministers were so incensed by the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary plan to confer regional autonomy upon Ukraine that the last fortnight of June was spent in intense dispute. The governmental coalition was about to break apart.
Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee itched to put the Provisional Government to a further test. A grand political demonstration was the most obvious technique. Prevented from organising an armed demonstration of their own during the First Congress of Soviets, they aimed to try again at the end of the month. The idea for this did not originate with Lenin. By then the Bolshevik party had plenty of radical far-left activists who wondered impatiently whether the Central Committee would ever let them take on the Provisional Government on the streets. The main central body in the party where such activists were to be found was the Bolshevik Military Organisation, which co-ordinated the propaganda and organisation of the party in the armed forces. Outside the party there was a growing amount of support for violent mass action. The sailors of the naval garrison on Kronstadt Island, not far from Petrograd, seethed with hostility to the Provisional Government. Soldiers in Petrograd, too, were turning towards the Bolsheviks. More and more factory workers were doing the same. Their calls were frequent for the Bolshevik Central Committee to put its slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ into action.
Lenin hearkened to this mood. He talked with such ordinary workers, soldiers, sailors and peasants as came his way. In contrast with 1905, he was not marooned in Switzerland. He could see things for himself, and combine his observations with his capacity for intuitive judgement. He had a knack for weighing up the pros and cons of a political gamble. Unlike his party’s enemies, Lenin was incapable of being indecisive. He well understood, moreover, the need to keep a close eye on events as they abruptly developed. It was in this spirit that he came to the Bolshevik Central Committee and upheld the proposal to organise an armed political demonstration. His precise rationale was not committed to paper. Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Kadets nevertheless heard of what he had sanctioned and concluded that his thoughts were focussed on nothing less than a violent seizure of central state power. Such a rationale cannot be excluded. But there is no need to assume that a clear-cut set of plans existed in Lenin’s head. More likely by far is that he was improvising and that he was testing the waters with the aim of discovering the strength of force and determination that the Provisional Government retained.
This is not to say that he would have been hostile to trying to overthrow the cabinet if sufficient popular support was forthcoming on the streets of Petrograd. Some Bolsheviks felt this unambiguously. Sergo Ordzhonikidze referred to the demonstration as ‘the first serious attempt to finish with the power of the coalition government’;11 and the Military Organisation was behaving like a law unto itself in the Bolshevik party. A conference of the Military Organisation had taken place on 16–23 June. Lenin gave a speech urging that risky adventures should be avoided.12 ‘We must’, he stated, ‘be specially attentive and careful not to succumb to provocation… One false step on our part can bring the whole cause to perdition.’13 But he knew that his words were not taken completely to heart. It was an extremely tense political situation. Anything could have happened.
Yet it was precisely then that Lenin, for the first time since he had arrived at the Finland Station in April, took himself away from Petrograd. He was exhausted, and looked forward to having a break in the countryside. For this purpose he accepted the long-standing invitation of Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich to join him and his wife at their dacha in the Finnish village of Neivola near to the Finland Railway a dozen miles north-west of Terijoki. Lenin had been complaining of ill health for weeks. At the First Congress of Soviets he was designated by the Bolshevik fraction to reply on its behalf to Chernov’s report on the agrarian question. Two hours before Lenin was scheduled to speak, he was phoned by Nikolai Muralov to remind him. In breach of party etiquette Lenin advised Muralov to do the job himself, and put down the phone.14 On 29 June he set off from the Finland Station with his sister Maria and the Bolshevik poet Demyan Bedny, who led the way from the little country railway stop to Neivola village. Nadya did not come along; she no longer operated at Lenin’s elbow and was enjoying her involvement in the politics of the Vyborg district.15 Their marriage had been loosened by his relationship with Inessa, and Nadya did not need the holiday – and the fact that the terrier-like Maria would be accompanying him was not exactly an attraction for her. Having walked to Neivola and surprised the Bonch-Brueviches with the sudden visit, Lenin spent the following days relaxing. They walked, took saunas and swam. Steadily Lenin’s health was being restored.
His decision to take a holiday has led to the accusation that he was trying to cover himself in the event of a failed uprising.16 This is not impossible, but it was not in Lenin’s personality to let important things happen without his guidance, and Neivola was only a couple of hours from Petrograd by train. Yet no evidence has been produced to demonstrate that he went there with such a conspiracy in hand. Perhaps he should have conquered his lassitude and pain for the duration of the growing crisis. But he did not do this. Probably he was genuinely exhausted. This had happened before, in summer 1904, when Lenin went on vacation despite the probability that his rival V. A. Noskov would take political advantage; he needed above all to put his mental and physical faculties back in order.
He was all the more astounded early on Tuesday morning, 4 July, when awoken by an emissary from the Bolshevik Central Committee. Out to Neivola by train had come Maximilian Savelev, who worked on the Pravda editorial board and was closely linked to the Bolshevik radicals of the Military Organisation. Savelev broke the news that the demonstrations against the Provisional Government were about to get out of hand and that ministers were planning stern counter-measures. Whatever his state of health, Lenin would have to terminate his holiday and return to Petrograd. There might well be an insurrection, and it might well be a fiasco. Bloodshed was almost inevitable. Lenin’s place was not in Finland but alongside his Bolshevik Central Committee comrades. Bags were quickly packed and the little group – Lenin, Maria Ilinichna, Savelev and Bonch-Bruevich – took the first train back across the Russo-Finnish administrative border at Beloostrov and on to the Finland Station. They were travelling on legal passports and Bonch-Bruevich worried lest they run into trouble with fellow passengers; but there was no incident. From the Finland Station they hurried to the Kseshinskaya mansion to join the Central Committee around midday.
The strikes and demonstrations had been taking place for a couple of days; a crowd of workers, soldiers and sailors had frequently gathered outside the mansion in expectation that the Central Committee would instigate a decisive push against the Provisional Government. The same happened shortly after Lenin’s return. He was asked to come out on to the balcony to address the crowd. At first he demurred, but local Bolshevik leaders from Kronstadt prevailed upon him. By then he was in no doubt that the crisis was becoming overheated and that the Military Organisation leaders had been acting irresponsibly. Turning to those of them who were in the Kseshinskaya mansion, he exclaimed: ‘You ought to be given a good hiding for this!’17 Out on to the balcony he went, and told the crowd to stay calm. He asserted that the anti-governmental demonstration should above all be peaceful. This did not go down well. The crowd had assumed that Lenin, who had written powerfully about the necessity of removing the Provisional Government, would be on the side of immediate, violent action. But his judgement held sway, and in the early hours of 5 July the Bolshevik Central Committee completed its retreat by calling off the demonstration that had been planned for later in the day.
Yet the crisis was not over. The Provisional Government had sanctioned lengthy enquiries into the sources of the Bolshevik party’s finances, and the Counter-Espionage Bureau had reason to believe that the Bolsheviks were in receipt of a subsidy from the German government. Some of the Bureau’s materials were passed to newspapers despite the wish of most ministers to wait for conclusive proof. The Petrograd garrisons were also informed. On 5 July the newspaper Zhivoe slovo duly denounced Lenin as a German spy.18 The offensive against Bolshevism was in full spate. A raid on Pravda’s offices took place the same morning. A similar action against the Kseshinskaya mansion was carried out next day. The Bolsheviks had to lie low throughout the capital.
Through all these days, fortuitously, the Provisional Government had been buffeted by internal dispute over Ukrainian regional autonomy. Prince Lvov had resigned as premier, and on 7 July his place was taken by the Socialist-Revolutionary Alexander Kerenski. An official investigation was ordered into the events of 3–4 July and into the degree of responsibility for the trouble to be assigned to members of the Bolshevik Central Committee and its Military Organisation. Arrest warrants had been issued for Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev on 6 July, and a detachment of troops had gone in quest of Lenin at the apartment of Mark and Anna Yelizarov. Although he had already fled, the apartment was thoroughly searched. Nadezhda Konstantinovna, Maria Ilinichna and Mark Yelizarov were at home at the time and were asked about Lenin’s whereabouts. Krupskaya let slip that he had been staying at Neivola.19 But this did not matter since by then he was hiding in Petrograd: first he stayed with M. L. Sulimova, then with N. G. Poletaev. The search was anyway pretty incompetent. The soldiers mistook Yelizarov for Lenin and took him and Krupskaya into custody. Yelizarov was tall and bulky; his brief detention was yet another sign that Lenin was not visually familiar to the general public.
There was every reason for Lenin to keep things this way. He and his comrades decided that he should not give himself up to the authorities. Initially he had not been unwilling to sit in prison, and Bolshevik leaders negotiated with the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets about the terms under which he might surrender himself.20 Several party figures felt that a trial was the sole means whereby the party could clear its name. The personal danger to Lenin should not in their opinion take precedence. This horrified Maria Ilinichna, who thought that no risk should be taken with the party’s leader and that he should be spirited away to Sweden.21
Opinion then turned against Lenin’s surrender since the Central Executive Committee gave only weak assurances. Moreover, the atmosphere of vengefulness thickened as most newspapers picked up the allegation that the Bolshevik party had carried out the commands of the German government. The possibility arose that Lenin might be assassinated, and he resolved to stay in hiding and to damn the consequences. Poletaev’s flat was thought inappropriate: too many visitors came to the building.22 Another safe-house had to be found with urgency. Lenin and Grigori Zinoviev, accompanied by Zinoviev’s wife Zinaida Lilina but not by Nadezhda Konstantinovna, moved secretly again on 7 July. This time their haven was provided by the veteran Bolsheviks Sergei and Olga Alliluev in their comfortable apartment on Tenth Rozhdestvenka Street – it even had a smartly dressed concierge. The Alliluevs had only just rented the place and so the police were unlikely to look for Lenin there. Lenin moved into the room being readied for their regular lodger Stalin; he stayed in contact with the Central Committee members by scribbling notes that Sergei Alliluev and others conveyed. Most of the time he worked in his own room. The Alliluev children remembered the noise of a ‘scraping of the pen day and night’ behind his door.23
But Lenin and Zinoviev wanted to get out of Petrograd, if only temporarily; to both of them it seemed best to leave for the countryside and wait on events. They had to let others decide where they might best find refuge. No longer were Lenin and his companion the makers of a revolutionary situation.
Lenin and Zinoviev were secretly escorted out of Petrograd on 9 July by Bolshevik activists supplied by the Central Committee. For reasons of security they travelled without their wives. Just before the trip, Lenin decided that he needed to change his appearance. Olga Allilueva, who had recently qualified as a nurse, wrapped his face and forehead in a bandage. But when Lenin looked in the mirror, he knew that he would attract rather than evade attention. He might not even get past the concierge of the apartment block.
His own idea was simpler: he would shave off his moustache and beard. For some reason he decided that he would not do this himself. Instead Stalin, who was visiting the flat, lathered up the soap and performed the task.1 ‘It’s very good now,’ said Lenin, ‘I look like a Finnish peasant, and there’s hardly anyone who’d recognise me.’2 Just to make sure, however, he borrowed Sergei Alliluev’s coat and cap instead of his own.3 And so people who had seen him in the suit and headwear that he had bought in Stockholm at Radek’s instigation would have no clues to who he was. Then, leaving the Alliluev flat, Lenin made his way on foot to the Sestroretsk Station together with Zinoviev and the Bolshevik metalworker Nikolai Yemelyanov. This station was the terminus of the little coastline railway running along the Gulf of Finland from Petrograd to Sestroretsk. It was the peak of the summer season and the trains were packed with middle-class passengers leaving the capital and going off to enjoy the seaside and the fresh air. Lenin, Zinoviev and Yemelyanov planned to get off the train before Sestroretsk and stay at the village of Razliv, where Yemelyanov owned a house and land and could offer his roomy and comfortable hayloft as a hiding place.
The three Bolsheviks arrived at Razliv late at night and went straight to bed. Next day Lenin got back to work; his first task was to expound his strategic ideas for the benefit of the Central Committee. The armed demonstration in Petrograd had been suppressed. Kerenski had become the Minister–Chairman of the Provisional Government and, although he was trying to include socialists in his cabinet, his police were rounding up leading Bolsheviks. Already Trotski, Kollontai and Kamenev were behind bars. Since the party’s acceptance of the April Theses, Lenin had suggested that his comrades should be engaged mainly in getting Bolsheviks elected to the soviets and in denouncing the Provisional Government and the Mensheviks and Socialist–Revolutionaries who had served in it. But what now? What precisely should the Bolshevik Central Committee adopt as its strategy of survival and advance?
Obviously Lenin’s flight from the capital was not going to stop him from trying to impose his ideas upon comrades in the Central Committee. Absence made him still more strident than usual. Sketching out his strategic notions, he stated: ‘All hopes for the peaceful development of the Russian revolution have definitively disappeared.’ Kerenski, according to Lenin, had established a ‘military dictatorship’ and the soviets had become ‘the figleaf of the counter-revolution’. Lenin urged Bolsheviks to withdraw the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ and dedicate themselves to the organisation of an ‘armed uprising’ and the formation of a revolutionary government.4 The problem was that he was asking for the overturning of a policy that had been at the core of party strategy since April 1917. Lenin had insisted on this and Bolsheviks had got used to the notion that when they seized power, they would rule through the agency of the soviets. The Central Committee was aghast at his latest thinking. Lenin had not even taken the trouble to explain how the party’s activists could set about justifying the change in policy in their propaganda to workers and soldiers.
A lengthy meeting of the Central Committee started in Lenin’s absence on 13 July and was resumed next day. The Bolshevik leaders had much to sort out. The ‘July Days’ in Petrograd had brought the party near to disaster and a debate on strategy was urgently required. But the result was never in serious doubt: Lenin’s July theses were firmly rejected.5 Lenin responded furiously with an article ‘On Slogans’, but the Central Committee would not budge. Stalin summarised its position as follows: ‘We are unambiguously in favour of those soviets in which we have a majority, and we shall try to establish such soviets.’ The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ was retained. Absence from Petrograd was already weakening Lenin’s influence on the central leadership of his party.
The hayloft was safe only as a temporary refuge and Lenin and Zinoviev took up Yemelyanov’s idea of moving two miles to the far side of the lake from the village. There he had a hayfield and a thatched, wooden hut. Couriers could still reach them regularly from the capital, bringing the daily Petrograd newspapers and Central Committee business; indeed leading Bolsheviks also visited the fugitives in the hours of darkness. Lenin tried to make the best he could of things. In particular, he resumed his work on Marxist political theory, later to be published as The State and Revolution. He had always been able to calm himself by reading and writing, and he had plenty of material with him in the hut. For relaxation, Lenin and Zinoviev helped Yemelyanov to mow the hay. They also went swimming. Life near Razliv was quite uneventful until Zinoviev foolishly went hunting in a prohibited area and bumped into Mr Axënov the gamekeeper, who ordered him to hand over his rifle. Zinoviev pretended to be a Finn and to be unable to understand Russian. Mr Axënov was taken in by this act and, luckily for Zinoviev, relented. Afterwards Zinoviev sensibly refrained from shooting expeditions.6
Meanwhile the insects were making conditions unbearable in the hut, as Yemelyanov was to remember:7
A kitchen was erected alongside: a pot was hung from stakes and tea was boiled in it. But at night things were insufferable; the insatiable mosquitoes gave absolutely no respite. It didn’t matter how you hid from them, they would always get to where they wanted and they would frequently eat you. But there was nothing that could be done about it: you simply had to submit.
Relief came only when it rained, and the summer of 1917 was a very wet one. But the storms also brought hardship because the water poured through the roof. Lenin and Zinoviev could not promote Revolution while they were sodden and cold, and decided to change plans.8 Zinoviev was less worried than Lenin about being arrested and chose to risk returning incognito to Petrograd. Lenin, however, still thought he might be hanged if ever he was put on trial; he therefore asked the Central Committee to arrange for him to travel to a safe-house in Finland. The two refugees, Lenin and Zinoviev, would leave Razliv together.
They were provided with wigs. Kerenski’s Ministry of the Interior had hoped to prevent this kind of subterfuge by banning the hire and sale of wigs without proof of special need. But the Petrograd Bolshevik Dmitri Leshchenko pretended to need wigs for a railwaymen’s amateur theatrical troupe to which he belonged. The next step was to obtain formal travel papers. It was necessary to have these when crossing the Russian–Finnish administrative border.9 Lenin and Zinoviev had to be photographed in this new disguise and Leshchenko trudged out with the bulky equipment from the rail-stop to the hut on the other side of the lake. The job had to be done soon after dawn so as to minimise the danger of Lenin and Zinoviev being seen and recognised by passers-by. The whole process was a palaver. Having no tripod, Leshchenko had to crouch so as to hold the mirror-chamber while taking the picture. This meant that Lenin and Zinoviev too had to kneel. Only after taking several pictures did Leshchenko feel confident that he had a satisfactory image. Then he travelled back to Petrograd to print the negatives and fix the photograph to the forged papers.10
Several of the negatives came out badly, but one of them was good enough and a scheme was devised for Lenin and Zinoviev to leave in the first week of August. Accompanied by Yemelyanov and the Finnish Bolsheviks Eino Rahja and Alexander Shotman, they were to make for Levashevo, a small station situated halfway between Petrograd and Beloos-trov on the Finland Railway. From there it was intended for them to take a train back in the direction of Petrograd, to Udelnaya, where they would stay overnight in the flat of the Finnish factory worker Emil Kalske. Thereafter Zinoviev would make his way back to Petrograd and take his chances there in safe-houses provided by the Bolshevik Central Committee. Lenin, who was still the Ministry of the Interior’s most wanted man, would not take the risk; instead he would head north for Finland.
From Razliv, Lenin and Zinoviev were committing themselves to an expedition of seven miles through the woods in an easterly direction from the lake. On their way they would have to cross a large peat bog and a bridgeless river. Lenin soon regretted that he had not supervised the planning. The expedition was a farce. The first thing to happen was that Yemelyanov got them lost in the woods. Then they had to cross a large area of peat which the owner had set on fire and which was still smouldering. Worse was to follow. Shotman had packed only three baby cucumbers; he had not even brought a bread-roll. Hours later, the walkers, hungry and tired, heard a distant train-whistle. Their pleasure melted away when they discovered that they had reached not Levashevo but Dibuny. Lenin was furious with Shotman:11
Vladimir Ilich must be given his due: he cursed us with extreme savagery for the bad organisation. Surely it had been necessary to obtain a detailed local map? Why hadn’t we studied the route in advance, and so on? We also caught it over the ‘reconnoitring’: why did it only ‘seem’ to be the right station? Why didn’t we know precisely?
But at least Dibuny had a railway station and was situated on the Finland Railway. Things, hoped Lenin, might be about to get better.
Unfortunately, things got worse. Yemelyanov and Shotman stood around at the station while Lenin, Zinoviev and Rahja loitered in hiding. As they waited for the next train to Udelnaya, an army officer grew suspicious of Yemelyanov and took him into custody. Then a youth armed with a rifle spoke to Shotman, who distracted attention by getting on the train without Lenin, Zinoviev and Rahja. Shotman planned to warn the Bolsheviks in Udelnaya about the difficulties that had arisen at Dibuny. But he was such a bundle of nerves that he alighted three miles down the track at Ozerki instead of at Udelnaya. It was three o’clock in the morning when he finally reached Kalske’s flat in Udelnaya.
But the luck of the other travellers had begun to change some hours earlier. From Levashevo they took a train to Udelnaya and stayed overnight in the home of Finnish factory worker Emil Kalske, who lived half a mile from the station. Next day Lenin was given a stoker’s clothes to put on, and in the evening he joined train no. 293 driven by Hugo Jalava across the Russo-Finnish border bound for Terijoki. Accompanying him were Shotman, Rahja and a third Finn, Pekka Parviainen. Jalava played out a charade with Rahja:
‘Where are you going at such a time?’ I exclaimed so as to distract attention. Comrade Rahja replied: ‘Home to my dacha, to Terijoki.’
And then, pointing to Ilich, he asked me to take a comrade on board the steam engine, explaining that he was a journalist wanting to acquaint himself with steam engine travel. I agreed. Ilich grabbed hold of the handrail and clambered up into the engine while comrade Rahja went into the empty wagon. I explained to my assistant that they were local dacha owners. So as not to get in the way of work during the stoking of the fuel, Ilich retreated to the tender and loaded timber into the box.
The trick worked. At Terijoki, after a journey of twenty-five miles from Udelnaya, they left the train and took a carriage to Jalkala, nine miles into the Finnish interior.
In the morning they moved on by train to Lahti. This journey, too, proved hectic. The problem was the disguise adopted by Lenin in Jalkala. Its main feature was an adhesive face-mask. The glue started to melt before the travellers reached Lahti and Lenin hurriedly had to remove the mask without the aid of Vaseline or water before getting off the train.12 Lenin wrote about the ‘art of revolution’. Demonstrably he himself was no master of revolutionary cosmetics.
On the platform at Lahti he and his companions were worried that station employees might take an interest in him because of his face, which was still smarting from the glue’s removal. But no one was so inquisitive, and Lenin’s party calmed down. Shotman went ahead to organise Lenin’s secret arrival in Helsinki (Helsingfors). For many years Finnish Marxists had warmly co-operated with the Bolshevik faction because of its appreciation of ‘the national question’.13 They were past masters at deceiving the Russian governmental authorities and, unlike Yemelyanov, did not need maps to get around their own country. Lenin reached Helsinki on 10 August, and over the ensuing weeks he stayed at various safe-houses. One of them belonged to Gustav Rovio. Lenin could hardly have been more securely looked after since Rovio was the Finnish capital’s elected police chief. It was an astonishing situation. While the Russian Minister of the Interior in Petrograd was offering a reward of 200,000 rubles for the apprehension of Lenin, his formal subordinate in Helsinki was hiding Lenin from arrest.14
Lenin settled himself to a rhythm of work while couriers established a line of contact with both Petrograd and Stockholm. There were two differences from his years as an emigrant. The first was that Lenin was physically distant from the central party apparatus. The second was the absence of Nadya. It is true that she visited him twice after obtaining a passport from ‘the old woman Atamanova’ and disguising herself as a worker. Yet he could not encourage her to stay; considerations of security even stopped him chaperoning her back to Helsinki railway station.15
Meanwhile Lenin remained angry with the Central Committee for rejecting his proposals on slogans. Literary activity offered a little consolation. He had plenty of books and got down properly to the treatise on The State and Revolution. He had already been filling a dark-blue notebook on the subject before he left Switzerland. This contained his jottings from the works by Marx and Engels he had read there. Indeed his notes already contained a preliminary sketch of the book he wanted to write, and he believed that his ideas, if only he could get them into print, would be recognised as his masterpiece. He wrote to Kamenev about this, asking him to take responsibility for this if ever it should happen that he was arrested and executed: ‘Entre nous: if they bump me off, I would ask you to publish my notebook, “Marxism on the State” (it’s held up in Stockholm). A navy-blue bound folder. There’s a collection of all the citations from Marx and Engels as well as from Kautsky against Pannekoek.’16 With rising excitement he wrote up the chapters in Helsinki. He looked forward to publishing them and demonstrating that his idiosyncratic general interpretation of Marxism was the only authentic one.
So why has Lenin been charged with monumental insincerity in relation to the book? The main reason lies in the contrast between the predictions made in The State and Revolution and the reality of Bolshevism in power. The State and Revolution described an imminent future when the working class would become the ruling class and ordinary workers themselves take the crucial decisions of state and society. Things turned out very differently after October 1917, when the Soviet state quickly became a one-party dictatorship that used force against industrial strikes and political protests by workers. A long shadow of doubt was cast over his intentions when he wrote The State and Revolution.
Now it must be conceded that Lenin, a power-hungry politician, was often disingenuous and deceptive. His criterion of morality was simple: does a certain action advance or hinder the cause of the Revolution? Although he seldom lied through his teeth in politics, he had unrivalled proficiency in evasion of truthfulness. He was notorious for manufacturing statements that deliberately misled his enemies. But in 1917 he was attacked for going far beyond this. Not only was he charged with having always known that Roman Malinovski was an Okhrana agent but he himself was accused of operating as a paid German agent. In the liberal and conservative newspapers he was accused of treason to his country. Until the February 1917 Revolution it had been possible for him to deny that Malinovski had belonged to the Okhrana service; but the opening of the Ministry of the Interior’s files destroyed this illusion. Lenin had a case to answer and had had to attend the official hearing in the early summer. In self-defence he had simply argued that the Okhrana and Malinovski had fooled everyone. And he succeeded in persuading the hearing that the Bolsheviks before 1917 had never knowingly acted in concert with the tsarist monarchy’s secret police.
Less easy to shrug off was the charge that the Bolshevik Central Committee since the February Revolution had acted as Germany’s conscious puppets. There was much circumstantial evidence that the Bolsheviks were in receipt of money from Berlin. The Russian CounterEspionage Bureau released the story to Petrograd newspaper editors on 4 July when the government was dealing with the trouble being caused by the Bolshevik party and its supporters in the centre of Petrograd.
The Counter-Espionage Bureau’s investigators believed it plausible – but could not quite prove – that the money was transmitted to the Bolshevik Central Committee by Jakub Hanecki, who received it from the German intermediary Alexander Helphand-Parvus. Apparently Hanecki, an official of the Foreign Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee in Stockholm, secretly moved the funds by bank credits and by courier. It is now known that the German authorities made millions of marks available for the purpose of enabling Russians to conduct pro-peace propaganda. It can scarcely be a coincidence that the Bolsheviks, despite having only a minority of places in the soviets and other mass organisations after the February Revolution, rapidly set up a large number of newspapers. How much Lenin knew in detail about the German subsidy is unlikely ever to be discovered; but he was a politician who liked to be in control. It stretches credulity that he did not know what was going on. It so happened that the investigators were close to catching Hanecki himself red-handed on the frontier at Tornio. They were frustrated, however, by the premature disclosure of some of their findings by Petrograd daily newspapers.
Lenin took a lawyerly approach to the accusation. He could easily repudiate the slur that he was acting on the instructions of the German government. He was also safe in denying that he had talked to Helphand-Parvus, and he could ridicule the suggestion that he had taken money into his personal possession from Hanecki. In this way he did not have to tell the direct lie that, under his general supervision, the Bolshevik leadership had accepted no money from Russia’s wartime enemy. Lenin’s evasiveness would have been explored aggressively if he had been in the Provisional Government’s custody. But he was living in Helsinki police chief Rovio’s house and he could wait for the storm about ‘the German gold’ to blow itself out.
As he pressed forward with The State and Revolution, the task took longer than he had imagined – and he had not completed the final chapter before the October Revolution. He had very practical motives for wanting to write fast. He saw the book as a vital contribution to his party’s ability to deal with the current political situation in Russia. More generally, he aimed to explain the most appropriate strategy for Bolsheviks in Russia and far-left socialists elsewhere to establish a socialist state. He enjoyed asserting himself as a theorist. The argument of State and Revolution was that the other socialist parties, notably the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in Russia and the German Social-Democratic Party, had an inadequate strategy for the achievement of socialism. Lenin heaped the blame on Karl Kautsky, whom he treated as the originator of the basic ideas of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries; and he dedicated half the book to an examination of the political transformation predicted by Marx and Engels and already realised to some extent by the Russian soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies in the direction of European socialist revolution.
Lenin made several fundamental assertions. Marx, he said, had assumed that usually it would take a campaign of violence for socialists to come to power. The middle classes held all the advantages under capitalism; they would use their education, money and any maleficent methods that came to hand in order to ward off Revolution. Socialists should therefore recognise violence as the necessary midwife to historical change. Furthermore, the revolutionary socialist regime would not long survive unless it continued to deploy violent methods. It should therefore fight to set up a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. In the early period of the socialist Revolution there should be an administration based unequivocally on principles of ‘class struggle’. The former upper and middle classes should lose their civic rights. Rule would be imposed by the working class, which steadily would infuse society – not just in Russia but in the entire industrialised world – with socialist reforms.
Laboriously Lenin adduced the legacy of Marx and Engels and tried to show that they had invented a specific series of stages whereby the perfect community – known as communism – would be attained around the world. This series, he proposed, would develop as follows. Capitalism would be overthrown by a violent revolution that would be consolidated by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Such a dictatorship, at first ruthless, would steadily impregnate the institutions, practices and ideals of socialism. The need for class-based discrimination would gradually diminish as the remnants of the old upper and middle classes ceased to constitute a threat. Socialism, as it matured, would facilitate enormous progress beyond capitalism. The lower social orders would get accustomed to running the administration, and the economy, liberated from the constraints of capitalism, would be expanded in those sectors bringing benefit to people’s general objective needs. Nevertheless socialism would still involve a degree of political and social inequality and would still necessitate the existence of a state. Lenin stressed that the raison d’etre of states was to use coercion to favour the interests of the ruling classes as they sought to dominate the other classes. Under socialism it would be the ‘proletariat’ that ruled.
Yet Marxism’s ultimate goal, as Lenin emphasised, had always been to achieve a society without oppression and exploitation. This would be the very last stage of historical development. Under communism the principle would at last be realised: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. There would be no distinction of material reward. Each individual in society would have the fullest opportunity to develop potential talent. A person could do both manual and mental labour. The whole people would engage in its own administration; and the need for a professional political stratum, professional bureaucracy and professional armed forces would lapse. According to Lenin, a kitchen maid would be entrustable with decisions previously undertaken by ministers. The need for the state would disappear. As communism approached, there would be a ‘withering away’ of the state.
Lenin represented himself as the humble excavator of the foundations of Marxism buried by a generation of interpreters, especially Kautsky, who had rejected not only the need for violent socialist Revolution but also the commitment to the ultimate communist goal of a stateless society. But Kautsky and Martov quickly raised questions about the cogency of Lenin’s case. They pointed out that Marx had used the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ only infrequently and had not discounted the possibility of a peaceful socialist transformation. They also indicated that Marx in his later years had acknowledged that advanced capitalist societies were not polarised between a tiny capitalist class and a vast impoverished working class but increasingly included intermediate groups of experts: engineers, teachers, scientists and administrators. Kautsky and Martov criticised his sociology. Did he not understand that any proletarian dictatorship would inevitably involve oppression by a class that was itself a demographic minority? Did he not comprehend that advanced capitalist societies stood in permanent need of training and expertise? Was Lenin not more akin to the nineteenth-century authoritarian revolutionaries opposed by Marx and Engels: Wilhelm Weitling, Louise-Auguste Blanqui and Pëtr Tkachëv?
All such revolutionaries had espoused terrorist campaigns, and yet in The State and Revolution Lenin had avoided a discussion of state terror. Indeed he wrote only glancingly about it in the rest of the year. Thus he compared Russia in 1917 with France in 1793:17
The Jacobins declared as enemies of the people those who ‘assisted the schemes of the united tyrants against the republic’.
The example of the Jacobins is instructive. Even today it has not become outdated, but we need to apply it to the revolutionary class of the 20th century, to the workers and the semi-proletarians. The enemies of the people for this class in the 20th century are not the monarchs but the landlords and capitalists as a class…
The ‘Jacobins’ of the 20th century would not set about guillotining the capitalists: following a good model is not the same as copying it. It would be enough to arrest 50–100 magnates and queens of bank capital, the main knights of treasury-fraud and bank-pillage; it would be enough to arrest them for a few weeks so as to uncover their dirty deals, so as to show to all the exploited people exactly ‘who needs the war’.
There must be scepticism as to whether he really expected his projected government’s use of terror to be as soft and short-lived as he was claiming in Pravda. Lenin was capable not only of lying and deceiving: he could also produce phrases of egregious political fudge.
From this it is clear that Lenin in 1917 did not, as is widely supposed, offer a libertarian vision of socialism.18 He used words such as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ pejoratively. He ridiculed concepts such as the division of power among legislative, executive and judicial authorities. Even the public life as such is despised: Lenin expected the socialist Revolution to move society away from ‘politicking’ towards ‘the administration of things’. ‘Parliamentarism’ for him was a tainted objective. He had no time, therefore, for inter-party competition, for cultural pluralism or for the defence of the interests of various social minorities. Individual citizens’ rights were of no concern to him; he wanted his dictatorship to judge everything by criteria of ‘class struggle’. Civil war held no dread for him. He regarded such conflict as a natural and desirable outcome of the advance of the socialist cause. The State and Revolution has been described as dispiriting because of its failure to recognise the benefits of liberal-democratic values of government. This is true as far as it goes. But the analysis can go further: we have also to recognise that the book contains not merely a failure to propound universal civic freedom but in fact a definite, deliberate campaign against such freedoms.
It was experienced Marxists in Russia and Europe whom he was trying to rally to his side. The State and Revolution was an impenetrable forest of citation and argument for most of the reading public, and anyway the book was not published until 1918. But it reflected his basic strategic assumptions in the making of Revolution. These were assumptions that he shared to a greater or lesser extent with his comrades in the Central Committee, and The State and Revolution helped to narrow the discrepancies between one leading Bolshevik and another and to reinforce the primacy of Lenin’s ideas in the definition of Bolshevism.
While writing the book, he also contributed to the party press. Thus his influence reached beyond the Central Committee, and his fellow Bolsheviks across the country were kept aware that Lenin remained active. In July and August he went on demanding that policies should be changed. He based his analysis on a French historical analogy; allegedly Alexander Kerenski, Prince Lvov’s successor as prime minister, was trying to become the Bonaparte of the Russian Revolution, playing off one class against another and rising above the fray to establish a personal despotism. Kerenski’s cabinet, set up on 25 July, had a majority of socialist members; but Lenin argued that there was nothing socialist about the policies. The Provisional Government was a bourgeois class dictatorship. In fact Lenin overstated the cohesion and ‘counterrevolutionary’ nature of the Russian state as run by Kerenski. Nevertheless the cabinet undoubtedly wished to prevent another such outbreak as had occurred on 3–4 July, and among its priorities was the restoration of law and order in the armed forces and in civilian public life. Capital punishment was reintroduced for desertion and other serious military disobedience. The new Commander-in-Chief, Lavr Kornilov, arranged with Kerenski for the imposition of the government’s authority over the soviets, trade unions and factory-workshop committees.
When the Bolshevik party secretly held its Sixth Congress from 26 July to 2 August, Lenin could not attend. There was too great a chance that the Provisional Government might have caught him. It was a chance for the party to take stock of the situation. Several leading Bolsheviks pondered whether European socialist Revolution was imminent, whether a revolutionary war was practicable and whether the economic decline was quickly reversible. Nevertheless Lenin’s insistent optimism had not faded, and his specific current recommendations of policy were starting to have an impact. In particular, the Congress agreed to drop the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’. After a lengthy debate about slogans, it was decided to replace it with ‘All Power to the Proletariat Supported by the Poorest Peasantry and the Revolutionary Democracy Organised into Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies’. A clumsier slogan can hardly be imagined. Perhaps his Bolsheviks needed the absent Lenin more than they recognised.
His advice to them in August was angry and impatient. The Kerenski cabinet, he expostulated, had acted as he had always predicted. It was fighting the war to the bitter end. It was silencing opposition in the armed forces and threatening disruptive urban soviets with dissolution. It was keener to rally support from the Kadets and the high command than to make concessions to the socialist parties (and Viktor Chernov resigned in disgust over this). And yet still the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries refused to throw Kerenski out on his heels. The left-wing Menshevik Yuli Martov had the idea of calling for a socialist administration, based on the parties represented in the soviets, to take power, but his colleagues ignored him. The collusion of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries with Kerenski’s ‘military dictatorship’ was complete. Lenin made further progress as the difficulties for Kerenski mounted. Peasants were seizing land, soldiers were deserting the eastern front, workers were taking over factories. Industrial production was dislocated and food supplies sharply declined. And on 21 August the German armies advanced along the northern sector and took the city of Riga. Repeatedly Lenin asked the Bolshevik Central Committee why it was allowing the Provisional Government to survive.
Then came the ‘Kornilov Affair’. Kerenski and his Commander-in-Chief Kornilov had an agreement for Kornilov to move troops into Petrograd to impose order on the soviets. But Kerenski, noting Kornilov’s popularity in right-wing political and military circles at the State Conference held by Kerenski himself in Moscow on 12 August, became wary of him. Relations between the two men were made worse by the meddling of their aides. On 28 August Kornilov was ordered to put off the agreed movement of frontline troops to Petrograd. Kerenski feared a coup d’état. In the increasing confusion Kornilov concluded that Kerenski was not fit to govern and decided to disobey him. The Provisional Government was at Kornilov’s mercy. Kerenski turned in panic to the parties of the soviets, including the Bolsheviks, to support him by sending out agitators to persuade Kornilov’s troops to obey the Provisional Government and allow Kornilov to be detained in custody. This was duly accomplished, but at the price of the readmittance of the Bolshevik party to the open political arena.
Lenin was delighted. On 1 September he began an article, ‘On Compromises’, reinstating the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ and suggesting that a peaceful transition to a socialist government was possible. Kerenski was having to be more considerate towards the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, especially as the full extent of secret Kadet encouragement to Kornilov became public knowledge.19
It is only in the name of this peaceful development of the revolution – in the name of a possibility that is extremely rare in history and extremely valuable, an exceptionally rare possibility – it is only in its name that the Bolsheviks, supporters of world-wide socialist revolution and supporters of revolutionary methods, can and must in my opinion proceed to this compromise.
The ‘compromise’ he had in mind was that the Bolsheviks would stick to non-violent political procedures so long as the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries formed a government ‘wholly and exclusively responsible to the soviets’ and permitted the soviets in the provinces to constitute the official administration while the Bolsheviks would be guaranteed ‘freedom of agitation’.20 These conditions were hardly likely to be fulfilled, and probably he knew this. He wrote an addendum on 3 September in which he stated that recent events meant that the historic compromise was impracticable.21 He was referring to Kerenski’s formation of a five-person Directory and to the reluctance of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries to break ties with the Kadets. The Directory was obviously counterposed to ‘All Power to the Soviets’.22
He did not cease justifying his case in subsequent articles, but this changed abruptly on 12 September when he started a letter to the Bolshevik Central Committee, the Petersburg Committee and the Moscow Committee. By then the Bolsheviks had majorities in both the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, and Lenin urged: ‘Taking power immediately both in Moscow and in Piter [Petrograd] (it doesn’t matter who goes first: perhaps even Moscow can do it), we will absolutely and undoubtedly be victorious.’23 Central Committee members had a right to feel that he was being irresponsible about the party’s security. On 13 September, before receiving this letter, they decided to put the basic notions of Lenin’s article ‘On Compromises’ into the party’s general declaration to be read out at the so-called Democratic Conference of all parties to the left of the Kadets on 14 September. His strategic somersaults were becoming insufferable. He was evidently out of touch with possibilities in Russia and ought to be ignored. But this time Lenin kept undeviatingly to his line. On 13 September he began a second and longer letter, headed ‘Marxism and Insurrection’, in order to drive home his argument. He contrasted the situation of 3–4 July with the current circumstances. The working class was at last on the party’s side. The popular mood was in favour of revolution and the political enemies of the Bolshevik party were trapped by their indecision. Insurrection was crucial.24
The Central Committee considered Lenin’s letters on 15 September in the presence of Trotski and Kamenev, who had been released from prison. Most members were appalled by what they read. There was no telling what Kerenski might do if he learned of the contents of the letters. The Central Committee agreed to burn all but one copy of the letters.25 Little doubt can exist that the Bolsheviks would have met with disaster if they had complied with Lenin’s demand for an immediate insurrection. Most soviets remained in the hands of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and there would have been intense armed strife if the Bolsheviks had taken to the streets. An attempted seizure of power by the Petrograd Soviet would have provided Kerenski with a marvellous pretext for the elimination of the Bolshevik party from public life.
But Lenin would not be thwarted, and he knew that there were elements in the party, among garrison soldiers and among the working class, that he would be able to call upon. Maria Ilinichna, ever loyal to him, flouted the Central Committee’s orders and conveyed Lenin’s letters to the Petersburg Committee.26 Lenin wanted to be directly involved, and asked Shotman to get the Central Committee to permit his return to Petrograd. The Central Committee overruled the request. Lenin furiously retorted: ‘I will not leave it at that, I will not leave it at that!’27 Shotman found his utopian political thought almost as unacceptable as his insurrectionary impatience, and argued that socialist Revolution was a complex business. Lenin flared up at him:28
Rubbish! Any workers will master any ministry within a few days; no special skill is required here and it isn’t necessary to know the techniques of the work since this is the job of the bureaucrats whom we’ll compel to work just as they make the worker–specialists work at present.
Throughout 1917 he implied that the coming socialist Revolution would be an easy one, and he stressed that most workers, peasants and soldiers would support the party. Shotman experienced this directly. Leaning towards to him and squinting with his left eye, Lenin asked: ‘Who will be against us then?’29
Although he exaggerated for effect, he probably meant what he said at least in a general fashion. We cannot be absolutely sure about this since he seldom confided his innermost calculations to anyone. And obviously he wanted to reassure his party that all would be well after power had been seized. Perhaps, furthermore, other possibilities were already taking shape in his mind. Like other Bolshevik leaders, he had read a lot about the French Revolution and was always looking for French precedents for contemporary Russian developments. He admired Robespierre, the Jacobins and their forceful efforts to consolidate the revolutionary regime even though they were ultimately unsuccessful. It is hard to believe that it never crossed his mind that, if his own party seized power, the international and domestic resistance might result in protracted carnage. Indeed there is documentary evidence that he deliberately downplayed this admiration in public for fear of weakening the party’s popularity. For example, he was furious with Trotski for threatening the opponents of Bolshevism with the guillotine. But he did not object to terror as such. His notion instead was that ‘the guillotine should not be joked about’.30 And yet simultaneously he reassured himself that a Bolshevik-led socialist revolution would be unlike any previous revolution. The mass of the people would be on its side, at first in Russia and then in Europe as a whole. Repression, then, would not have to last so long or cut so deep.
Undoubtedly Lenin did not care that the middle classes would oppose the Bolshevik party. He thought that Russia faced a choice between two extremes: a bourgeois dictatorship and a proletarian dictatorship. For the first period since his return from Switzerland he wrote openly of his dictatorial intentions in the central party press. The country, he declared, was simply ungovernable by the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Kadets. Their strategy had been exposed as irremediably frail by the putsch attempted by Kornilov. Now it was time to agree on the supreme priority: the insurrection against the Provisional Government.
Disregarding party discipline and bypassing Alexander Shotman, Lenin turned to Gustav Rovio for help with arranging a safe-house for him in Vyborg, the Finnish town near the Russo-Finnish administrative border. A farce took place with the fitting of a new wig. Rovio took him to a theatrical specialist, who required several weeks to make up an item for any customer. Lenin asked for a ready-made item that would fit his head even approximately. The only such wig was silvery grey and the wigmaker was reluctant to sell it since it made his customer look to be in his sixties. Lenin, naturally, did not reveal that he wanted a wig not to adorn but precisely to disguise his appearance.31 At last the transaction was made, and Rovio produced a false passport and found him a place to stay in Vyborg with yet another Finnish comrade.32 Arriving there at the beginning of the last week in September, he immediately sought ways to proceed to Petrograd. Within a few days he was off. Again he bypassed Shotman. Again he commissioned a wig, this time adopting the disguise of a Finnish pastor of the Lutheran Church.33 Lenin the militant atheist returned to Petrograd as a man of God. His travelling companion was the metalworker Eino Rahja; the train driver was the same Hugo Jalava who had carried him in the opposite direction across the Russo-Finnish border in August.34
He stayed in Petrograd with a young Bolshevik agronomist Margarita Vasilevna Fofanova, who lived in Serdobolskaya Street overlooking the Finland Railway in the Vyborg district. Fofanova had to comply with ‘his firm regime’:35
He told me to obtain on a daily basis, no later than at half-past eight each morning, all the newspapers appearing in Petrograd, including the bourgeois ones. Times were laid down for breakfast and lunch. Then Vladimir Ilich added: ‘It will be difficult for you, Margarita Vasilevna, in the first week. Everything will fall on you.’
Rahja helped with the errands; the only other visitors to the apartment were Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna. Lenin spent most days locked inside while Fofanova was out.
But he still needed to argue his case directly at the Central Committee if he was to secure its assent to an immediate armed uprising. On 10 October a session was organised, in the Petersburg Side flat of Galina Flaxerman, who was married to the left-wing Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov. Sukhanov discreetly spent the night in his office: such were the inter-party politesses of the period. Flaxerman brewed up tea in the samovar and kept the participants supplied with biscuits. The meeting began around ten o’clock in the evening. In the chaotic revolutionary conditions, when communications and transport were unreliable, only twelve Central Committee members managed to be present. What they heard was to have a gigantic influence over events. The main item on the agenda was the question of the party’s seizure of power. It took the rather obscure form of a ‘report on the current moment’ by Lenin. The room was softly lit. For most participants this was the first occasion they had seen Lenin for months. It was quite a surprise for them since he was still dressed as a Lutheran pastor. Unfortunately he had not learned the knack of stopping the wig from falling off, and had developed the nervous habit of smoothing it down with both hands. His fellow leaders found his mannerisms comic.
Yet their hilarity was of short duration. After Sverdlov had given a survey of current developments, Lenin spoke passionately for a whole hour in favour of insurrection. Every listener witnessed his anger and impatience. He declared that the Central Committee had shown ‘a kind of indifference to the question of insurrection’. Now the moment for decision had arrived. If the ‘masses’ were apathetic, it was because they were ‘tired of words and resolutions’. According to Lenin, ‘the majority are now behind us’. The peasants might not be voting Bolshevik, but they were seizing the land and this was disrupting the authority of the Provisional Government, which he accused of scheming to surrender Petrograd to the Germans. The debate was lengthy and spirited. No one could fail to recognise the danger of following Lenin’s line. But he won over the Central Committee. As dawn broke on 11 October, his motion was ratified by ten votes to two.36
This meant that the Central Committee had committed itself to focusing its energies on ‘the technical side’ of planning insurrection.37 Lenin was pleased with the result and returned in triumph to Fofanova’s apartment. He had not got everything his own way. In particular he had argued that the Northern Congress of Soviets, scheduled to meet in Minsk on 11 October, should be ‘used for the start of decisive actions’.38 This proposal did not appear in the final resolution. The Central Committee, on the proposal of Trotski and others, strove to make the future insurrection look less like the seizure of power by a single party. For this purpose they were coming to the conclusion that the transfer of power should be delayed until the All-Russia Congress of Soviets in Petrograd later in the month.39 Lenin’s idea was completely impracticable; he had left things far too late. If his urgings had been hearkened to, moreover, the party might have put itself at risk by exposing its intentions before it had a chance to organise action in the capital. Although he had spoken eloquently on the need to treat the making of insurrection as an art, he had not practised what he preached. And yet the strength of his conviction was huge. He had proved himself a leader.
The problem for Lenin was that his two main opponents during the night had been Kamenev and Zinoviev, who were in the front rank of the party leadership. Disinclined to let Lenin’s victory stand, they sent a jointly written letter to the party’s various major committees. Their argument was that popular opinion would shortly compel the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries to form a government and include the Bolsheviks in the coalition. They denied that workers would support a violent assumption of power by the Bolsheviks. They pointed out, too, that Lenin’s faith in an imminent European socialist revolution was empirically unverifiable.40
Another Central Committee meeting was held on 16 October to settle the dispute. Members gathered on the northernmost outskirts of the capital. The venue was the picturesque wooden building of Lesnoi district Duma, which by then was under the leadership of the Bolsheviks. As a precaution, the meeting took place at night. Representatives from the Petersburg Committee, the Military Organisation, the Moscow Committees and other major party bodies attended. Potential supporters of Kamenev and Zinoviev who had been absent at the earlier session had arrived. Lenin was in combative mood. He was late in getting to the building since he had had to take the usual conspiratorial precautions. By the time he started speaking, he was angry and impatient:41
The situation is plain: either a Kornilovite dictatorship or a dictatorship of the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasantry. It’s impossible to be guided by the mood of the masses. For it’s changeable and can’t accurately be gauged; we must be guided by an objective analysis and evaluation of the revolution. The masses have put their trust in the Bolsheviks and are demanding from them not words but deeds…
And as the debate ensued, he had to listen to many local speakers, who otherwise would love to have supported him, explaining that workers and soldiers did not wish to take part in an uprising. Kamenev and Zinoviev re-expressed their doubts and Lenin pulled off his wig in frustration.42 But support for his critics ebbed in the night. When the vote was taken, nineteen members were with him and only two were against – with four abstentions.
The only remaining question for most participants was whether the Bolsheviks should go out of their way to instigate a clash with the Provisional Government. Nothing specific was decided. Instead Lenin’s successful motion affirmed ‘complete confidence that the Central Committee and the [Petrograd] Soviet would at the right time indicate the propitious moment and the appropriate methods of the offensive’.43
This vagueness gave Lenin what he needed to sanction rapid action. Back to Fofanova’s apartment he went. Politically he was pleased, but he was still in a grumpy mood. The problem was tiredness. Although the meeting had broken up at 3.00 a.m., it took him a couple of hours to trudge home. According to Lenin, his escort was incompetent. Moreover, it had been windy as well as rainy; both his hat and wig had been blown off and become muddy.44 Fofanova had to wash them in hot, soapy water. But she failed to calm him down. Lenin felt he could not assume that the Bolshevik Central Committee would do as agreed. Through the following days he bombarded its members with notes. Yet the Central Committee did not see fit to invite him to its three sessions between 20 and 24 October. It is reasonable to conclude that his fellow members thought he lacked the close knowledge and temperamental stability required for the necessary planning to be undertaken. They would organise the insurrection, but they would do it in their own fashion through the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet; they would time the armed action to coincide with the opening of the All-Russia Congress of Soviets.
By 24 October 1917 Lenin was at fever pitch. Fofanova spent the whole day running errands for him; each time she got back to the apartment, he had another message for her to deliver. He begged permission from the Central Committee to come and join his leading comrades. He extracted what information he could from Fofanova about the situation on Petrograd’s streets. What he heard was highly agitating. The bridges in the city were being raised: evidently the Provisional Government still had some fight left in it. The Central Committee infuriated Lenin: ‘I don’t understand them. What are they afraid of?’45
He wrote a letter to its members in the evening and upbraided them as follows:46
There can be no delay!! Everything may be lost!!…
Who must seize power?
This is now unimportant: let it be seized by the Military-Revolutionary Committee or ‘another institution’ that will announce that it will hand over power only to the genuine representatives of the people’s interests, the army’s interests (the immediate proposal of peace), the peasants’ interests (the land must be seized immediately and private property abolished), the interests of the starving.
He promised Fofanova that he would wait until 11.00 p.m. for her return. But Rahja arrived at the flat in the meantime and Lenin could no longer contain himself: ‘Yes, it must begin today.’47 They drank a cup of tea and took something to eat. Then Lenin fixed his wig and wrapped a bandage around his head for additional disguise. He left a brief note for Fofanova: ‘I’ve gone where you wanted me not to go. Goodbye, Ilich.’48 They slipped out at 8.00 p.m. to catch a tram. On the way to the Smolny Institute, where the Petrograd Soviet had been based since the beginning of August, Lenin could not resist enquiring of the conductress what had been happening in the centre that day. Alighting at the tram stop, they picked their way through Kerenski’s army patrols.
Rahja’s presence was crucial since he had no fear when confronted by inquisitive, boisterous soldiers. Lenin did not need to do much talking. On they walked towards the Smolny Institute. The leaders of the Bolshevik Central Committee and the Military-Revolutionary Committee were unaware that he was coming; they were busily preparing themselves for the agreed coup against the Provisional Government. Reaching the building, Rahja pulled out two forged admittance tickets. Throughout the building the lights were on. At about the same time Fofanova was travelling back to her apartment in accordance with what she and Lenin had agreed. She was going to be late, so she took a horse cab. She arrived on time at 11.00 p.m. to find the brief note from Lenin explaining his absence. By then Vladimir Ilich Lenin was in room no. 71 of the Smolny Institute and was persuading, convincing, prodding, urging and haranguing his comrades to accelerate the locomotive of Revolution. Power – state power – was in sight of attainment. This was the moment, the historic moment, to which he had dedicated the three decades of his adult life. The moment of socialist Revolution had arrived.
Sporadic violence took place on Petrograd streets on the night of 24–25 October. The Military-Revolutionary Committee ordered its loyal garrison soldiers and the armed worker-volunteers known as the Red Guards to control a list of places. When Kerenski had closed down Bolshevik newspapers and raised the bridges over the river Neva, Trotski was able to claim to be defending the soviets against harassment. The Military-Revolutionary Committee was intent on ensuring that the Second Congress, when it met on 25 October, could declare the overthrow of the Provisional Government as a fait accompli.
Lenin exerted pressure for an uprising as soon as he arrived at the Smolny Institute. Not a few observers felt it to be an incongruous scene. Before 1917 the building had been a secondary school belonging to the Society for the Upbringing of Well-Born Girls. It had been constructed to a plan by the Italian architect Quarenghi. The façade of Grecian pillars and the generously proportioned main hall were symbols of an age of privilege, tradition and power. Now it was the workshop of Revolution as Lenin arrived to play his part. On arrival, he was spirited into room no. 71, where he perched himself on the edge of a table. The situation was chaotic in anticipation of the Second Congress of Soviets. Congress delegates were coming and going through the night and the place was a bustling, noisy, ill-kempt and smoke-filled hive of activity. Everyone knew that the decisions taken at the Congress would be decisive for the course of the Revolution and that the Provisional Government’s fate hung on what happened in the Institute. The Bolsheviks, at the very time they were seizing power, operated in the same building as Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who wished to prevent this. As Lenin sat with his comrades, into the room wandered the Menshevik Fëdor Dan, the Socialist Revolutionary Abram Gots and the Bundist Mark Liber, all of them major figures in their parties. One of the three had left his overcoat hanging there and had come to retrieve a bag of bread, sausage and cheese to share with his companions. Lenin sat tight, thinking that his wig and facial bandage would disguise him. But Dan and his friend were no fools; they recognised him immediately. And they quickly fled the room.1
Dan, Gots and Liber had a sense of what might be called revolutionary decorum: they wanted to confront adversaries across a Congress hall and not in a private verbal brawl. Lenin split his sides laughing. Already his presence was having its effect on his Bolshevik comrades; he could afford a moment of jollity. At 2.35 p.m. there was an emergency meeting of the Petrograd Soviet in the main hall of the Institute. The introductory speaker was Trotski, the soviet chairman. There was, unusually, total silence. Trotski’s announcement was historic: ‘Kerenski’s power has been overthrown. Some of the ministers have been arrested. Those who remain unarrested will soon be arrested.’2
To applause from the Petrograd Soviet, Trotski went on to explain that a socialist administration would be assuming power. Then he announced that a speech would be given by none other than Lenin. The ovation lasted several minutes.3 Once it had died down, Lenin spoke triumphantly:4
Comrades! The workers’ and peasants’ revolution, which the Bolsheviks have all this time been talking about the need for, has been accomplished.
What is the significance of this workers’ and peasants’ revolution? Above all, the significance of this coup [perevorot] consists in the fact that we’ll have a Soviet government as our own organ of power without any participation whatever by the bourgeoisie. The oppressed masses themselves will create their power. The old state apparatus will be destroyed at its roots and a new apparatus of administration will be created in the form of the soviet organisations.
Lenin was exaggerating. In fact the Provisional Government had not yet been eliminated and the struggle in Petrograd had only just begun. But yet another stage in Lenin’s advance on power had been attained: the caution of the Bolshevik Central Committee and the Military-Revolutionary Committee had been surmounted and the Petrograd Soviet had been convinced that the decisive struggles of the socialist seizure of power had already largely been won.
The left-wing Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov entered the hall halfway through Lenin’s speech, and was stupefied:5
As I entered, there was on the platform a bald, shaved man who was unknown to me. But he spoke with a strangely familiar hoarse, loud voice, with a throaty quality and very characteristic stresses on the end of his sentences… Bah! It was Lenin. He made his appearance that day after four months of an underground existence.
The Bolshevik leader had taken hold of his party and of the Revolution.
Power could now be presented as a fait accompli to the Congress of Soviets. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries might object to the Provisional Government’s overthrow, but they could not reverse what had happened. This was a first concern that could now be forgotten. A second had also become less acute. This was the possibility – feared especially by Lenin – that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries themselves might turn against the Provisional Government and demand Kerenski’s removal. The Pre-Parliament had passed a vote of no confidence in him late on 24 October and called for peace to be concluded immediately on the eastern front and for the landed estates of the gentry to be distributed to the peasantry. Lenin had no intention of sharing power with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. He had cunningly refrained from spelling this out to the Bolshevik Central Committee before the insurrection had started. If he had done so, the Central Committee would probably have refused to support armed action altogether. Consequently it remained a priority for him on the night of 24–25 October to keep the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries at arm’s length, and he strove to manufacture a situation in which the Bolsheviks would have the dominant role in forming the next government. Thus power had to be seized without the slightest delay.
Lenin knew much needed to be done to establish his government. The battleship Aurora, loyal to the Bolsheviks, moved up the river Neva towards the Winter Palace. The State Bank, the post and telegraph offices and the rail terminals were occupied by the insurgents. Kerenski arranged his escape through the cordon around the Winter Palace in order to rally forces outside the capital.
The Bolshevik Central Committee met in the early hours and took decisions about the general complexion of the government. This was done on the initiative of V. P. Milyutin and not Lenin. The fact that Milyutin, who had not slept for several nights and was also associated normally with the right wing of Bolshevism, had instigated such a discussion indicates that not everything done in the early hours of 25 October was the work of Lenin’s hands. He was back among a group of revolutionaries who knew that they had gone too far to turn back. If there was going to be a revolution, then let it be undertaken efficiently. But, of all the participants in the Bolshevik Central Committee in room no. 36, Lenin was the least exhausted, and it was he who was asked to write a proclamation on behalf of the Military-Revolutionary Committee. He passed it to one of its leading officials, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, for publication at 10 a.m. It ran as follows:6
To the Citizens of Russia:
The Provisional Government has been overthrown. State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Military-Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.
The cause for which the people has struggled: the immediate proposal of a democratic peace, the abolition of the gentry’s landed property, workers’ control over production, the creation of a Soviet Government – victory for this cause has been secured.
Long live the revolution of the workers, soldiers and peasants!
By asserting that the Military-Revolutionary Committee was acting as the government, Lenin knew that he would infuriate the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries when he came to address the Congress of Soviets.
The Congress was scheduled to start at 2 p.m., but the Bolshevik central leadership wanted to achieve the occupation of the Winter Palace beforehand. This took longer than expected by the Military-Revolutionary Committee. Lenin gave vent to his anger: ‘Why so long? What are our military commanders doing? They’ve set up a real war! What’s it all for? Encirclement, transfers, linkages, expanded deployment… Is this really a war with a worthy enemy? Get on with it! On to the attack!’7 But the Military-Revolutionary Committee refused to commit its forces to an unconditional offensive. Kerenski had escaped and there was no significant military threat. The siege continued throughout the day around the last remaining stronghold of the Provisional Government in the capital.
At 10.35 p.m. the organisers of the Congress could wait no longer. On behalf of the Central Executive Committee, Fëdor Dan rang the bell in the assembly hall for proceedings to be started. There were 670 delegates. Three hundred Bolsheviks constituted the largest group. They would have to rely on the other delegates in order to make up a majority. Fortunately there were plenty of these to hand. The left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party had already decided to form a separate party, and this new party – like the Bolsheviks – wanted to transfer land to the peasantry. There were also dozens of delegates to no party whatsoever who wished for a government based on the soviets. The other hope for Lenin was that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, offended by the events of the previous night, would walk out of the Congress. To this end he had bent his efforts. But he did this quietly and avoided making any public appearance or signing any public declarations in the course of the day. Nor did he turn up to the first session of the Congress. Trotski rather than Lenin headed the group of Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries who took the leading position on the platform in reflection of the strength of their Congress delegations.
Martov from the floor cried out for negotiations to be started for a peaceful end to the current crisis. The Congress overwhelmingly endorsed his proposal. But there followed Menshevik, Socialist-Revolutionary and Bundist criticisms of the violence elsewhere in Petrograd – and to the delight of Lenin, who still held himself in the background, the large anti-Bolshevik socialist parties stalked out. At this point it became harder for Martov to proceed, and he and his group of Menshevik-Internationalists also walked out. Trotski condemned them. Lenin was delighted that events were so strongly running his way and that he could rely upon Trotski in this matter.
He continued to handle himself carefully. In the eyes of his party’s enemies he embodied the most extreme political intransigence and destructiveness – and even many Bolsheviks retained reservations about his combative style of comportment. Furthermore, there was a strong body of opinion in the Bolshevik party as a whole and especially in the Central Committee that welcomed the formation of a government coalition of all socialist parties. Kamenev had returned to the Central Committee once the uprising had begun and Lenin ignored the attempt by Kamenev and Zinoviev to forestall the October Revolution. And so Kamenev became useful as the moderate face of Bolshevism while the Bolshevik leaders tried to present themselves as the people’s defenders against the oppressive Provisional Government. Most Bolshevik delegates had acquired mandates from their local constituencies on this same assumption. It is consequently possible that Lenin’s Central Committee colleagues judged it impolitic to let him loose as its main spokesman on 25 October 1917. Or perhaps he made this assessment for himself without pressure being brought to bear. At any rate he focussed his energies upon cajoling his associates in the Military-Revolutionary Committee and the Bolshevik Central Committee and to discussing what kind of government and policies should be announced next day.
Films were made of the October Revolution, novels written, songs sung and even ballets danced. In practically all of them a misleading image of Lenin was disseminated. There he is, with his fist raised, mouth tensed and a bearded chin. In fact, on that historic day of 25 October 1917 he spoke only briefly. He was not the Revolution’s great orator. He did not even look like his normal self because it took several further weeks before his moustache and beard grew back to their normal appearance – and indeed he would not agree to being photographed until January 1918. Contrary to conventional accounts, then, Lenin’s importance was not as a speaker in the Congress hall but rather as a strategist and inspirer behind the scenes – and in this role his contribution to the Revolution’s success was crucial.
At any rate he could afford to leave the Smolny Institute by the evening of 25 October. The management of the insurrection, he could at last concede, was in secure hands. His job next day would be to present not just slogans but actual decrees. At that time it would no longer be sufficient to castigate Kerenski: the new government would have to offer something different of its own. Lenin had snatched only the odd hour of sleep on 25 October. He badly needed some rest, and Bonch-Bruevich suggested that he should come home and sleep at his nearby flat. (He also gently pointed out that Lenin no longer needed his wig.) The Winter Palace was evidently on the brink of capture by the besiegers some time after midnight – and this duly came to pass. Accompanied by a large bodyguard, Lenin left the Institute for Bonch-Bruevich’s flat. He became drowsy in the car; he was obviously exhausted. Bonch-Bruevich gave Lenin the bedroom while he himself slept on the sofa in the living room. Even so, Lenin could not get to sleep. Once Bonch-Bruevich seemed to have drifted off into unconsciousness, Lenin crept back into the living room and drafted the decrees he had to present to the Congress of Soviets on 26 October.8
He did not mind how hard he drove himself so long as he was serving a higher purpose. But there was another impulse at work too. The Central Committee had asked him, at the meeting of 21 October which its members had banned him from attending, to prepare various ‘theses’ for use at the Congress of Soviets. He had done nothing to comply with this injunction until that night in Bonch-Bruevich’s flat. He had been suffused by the fear that the insurrection might not take place at all; perhaps he even suspected that the Central Committee’s request for theses had been a way of keeping him busy – and keeping him out of the way in Fofanova’s flat. Now he could at last concentrate properly on the theses and have them ready in rough form for the morning.
Both his Decree on Peace and his Decree on Land were of large significance for twentieth-century world history. Lenin knew this. The proclamation of a new government and a socialist revolution were only part of his brief. He needed also to propound a set of policies that contrasted entirely with those of Nicholas II, Prince Lvov and Alexander Kerenski. He did not want merely to take office. He wanted to wield power in Russia on different principles from those espoused by his predecessors. And he was determined that the message would go quickly beyond the Congress of Soviets in Petrograd. He told his host Bonch-Bruevich not only to publish little booklets of the decrees but also to go and buy up the remaindered copies of 1917 calendars on sale at a discount at the Sytin bookshop on the Nevski Prospekt. This strange request disconcerted Bonch-Bruevich. But Lenin explained that workers and soldiers lacked wrapping paper for their cigarettes. If booklets of decrees were handed out, people would simply roll them around twists of tobacco. Lenin’s scheme was meant to provide the Bolshevik party’s supporters with paper sufficient to allow them to avoid the need to do anything other than use the booklets for their intended political purpose.9
Although Bonch-Bruevich and Lenin had not had the rest they needed, they hastened back next morning to the Smolny Institute. Lenin greeted everyone he met with words of congratulation on the birth of the socialist Revolution. Already a manifesto had been released in the name of the Congress of Soviets. Anatoli Lunacharski had read it out to the Congress, but it was Lenin who had composed it. Inside the Institute he completed his work on the Decree on Peace, the Resolution on the Formation of a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government and the Decree of Land. Interspersed in his editorial work were meetings, both with particular delegates to the Congress and with the entre Bolshevik fraction and the Bolshevik Central Committee. An appeal was issued to the Left Socialist Revolutionaries to join a governmental coalition with the Bolsheviks. They refused, and Lenin without further ado resolved on a one-party government. He at last came before the Congress of Soviets, to tumultuous applause, at 9 p.m. By then it had been decided that he would be the government’s leader and that he would be described as the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (which was known by its acronym, Sovnarkom).
The session of the Congress of Soviets continued through the night of 26–27 October. Lenin went on consulting with his central party colleagues – Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir Milyutin and Lev Trotski – about his wording. He drafted a Decree on Workers’ Control, which was not published for several days. He also drafted a Decree on the Press, accepted and printed on 27 October. The point was that he gave literary expression to the October Revolution and that his various decrees were the clearest statement of his purposes. Lenin announced his government’s intention to be unlike any other in world history. Supposedly the people would know in full about its government’s internal discussions, and transparency of deliberation and decision would be complete.
Not once did Lenin mention Marxism in his various speeches of 25–27 October. He referred to ‘socialism’ only very fleetingly. Nor did he explain that his immediate objective was the establishment of a class-based dictatorship and that ultimately he aimed at the realisation of a communist, stateless society as described in his The State and Revolution. He was keeping his political cards close to his chest. He was a party boss, and wanted Bolshevism to be attractive to those workers, soldiers, peasants and intellectuals who had not yet supported it. And so terms such as dictatorship, terror, civil war and revolutionary war were yet again quietly shelved. He also continued to leave aside his lifelong imprecations against priests, mullahs and rabbis, against industrialists, the landed gentry and kulaks, against liberal, conservative and reactionary intellectuals. His emphasis was skewed more sharply in favour of a revolution ‘from below’ even than in The State and Revolution. His every pronouncement was directed towards encouraging the ‘masses’ to exercise initiative and engage in ‘autonomous activity’ (samodeyatel’nost’). His wish was for the Bolsheviks to appear as a party that would facilitate the making of Revolution by and for the people.
Sovnarkom, the new Soviet government, was announced to acclaim at the Congress on 26 October. Lenin was Chairman: he eschewed a title such as Premier or President. His People’s Commissar for External Affairs was Trotski. Stalin was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities Affairs. Bolshevik Central Committee members accepted governmental posts with enthusiasm and turned up in the next few days at the old ministries to implement the policies of the October Revolution. They thought – and they fended off every Menshevik and Socialist – Revolutionary criticism of their naivety – that the Russian revolutionary example would be followed within hours by working classes elsewhere in Europe. If not within hours, then within a few days. If by some extraordinary mishap not within days, then certainly within months.
The person who had given the most vivid expression to this way of thinking was Lenin. His speeches and decrees were rousing by any standards. The Decree on Peace, which he personally presented to the Congress on 26 October, was carefully formulated inasmuch as it did not overtly demand ‘European socialist revolution’; Lenin appealed not only to the peoples of the belligerent states but also to their governments (even though he had been condemning these governments as irredeemably ‘imperialist’). But the Decree’s gist was a practical summons to revolution:
The [Soviet] government proposes to all the governments and peoples of all the warring countries to conclude a truce immediately, while for its own part it considers it desirable that this truce should be concluded for no less than three months, i.e. for such a time that would entirely facilitate the completion of negotiations on peace with the participation of representatives of all peoples and nations without exception that have been dragged into the war or compelled to take part in it, as well as the convocation of plenipotentiary assemblies of popular representatives of all countries for the definitive confirmation of peace conditions.
These words were astonishing after three years of war. Hostilities on the eastern front were instantly suspended.
The Decree on Land was the other great reform of policy Lenin personally introduced to the Congress. Dismay at his dilatory approach to producing it had led the Central Committee to ask Vladimir Milyutin – the leading Bolshevik economist after Lenin and the newly appointed People’s Commissar of Agriculture – to get together with Yuri Larin to draft a decree. But Lenin took over and finished the job. He also took over the list of peasant demands as compiled in June by the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries as the detailed clauses of his decree. But the lengthy preamble was Lenin’s. It was not written in his most exciting language. Dryly he announced the abolition of landed property of the gentry, the Imperial family and the Church. Nor was it a work of legislative coherence. There was uncertainty about which institute was to dispose of the expropriated land: land committees, peasant communes or peasants’ soviets. The terminology, too, was vague. It was specified that the land of ‘rank-and-file peasants’ should be inviolable. But no definition was given of such peasants. And it was simultaneously laid down that private property in land, presumably including land owned by peasants, should be abolished in perpetuity.
Yet legal niceties were of no interest to Lenin. He wanted the Decree to have a ‘demonstrative’ effect and to foster the advance of Revolution. His general intent was anyway clear enough: the peasantry was invoked to take collective action to seize and cultivate all land not currently owned by peasants. Only in cases where large-scale advanced agriculture was practised did Lenin aspire to preventing a break-up of landed estates. He expressed unbounded faith in the peasantry. His speech to the Congress of Soviets spelled out his rationale:10
A crime was committed by the government that has been overthrown and by the conciliationist parties of the Mensheviks and SRs when on various pretexts they postponed the resolution of the land question and thereby brought the country to ruin and to a peasant uprising. Their words about pillage and anarchy in the countryside echo with falsehood and cowardly deceit. Where and when have pillage and anarchy been provoked by sensible measures?
Lenin, of course, was not genuinely the peasants’ champion. He thought that, if they took over the land, they would soon start competing with each other within the framework of a capitalist market economy – and eventually, he hoped, the Soviet government would be able to intervene on behalf of the ‘rural proletariat’ and nationalise the land. And so his ultimate objective remained to set up socialist collective farms.
He did not intend to let the October Revolution stand or fall by virtue of democratic consent. In those very first days at the Smolny Institute he tried to browbeat Sverdlov and other Central Committee members into announcing the postponement of the Constituent Assembly elections. Sverdlov refused. Bolsheviks had been saying that only they could be trusted to convoke the Constituent Assembly on time: they could not immediately postpone the elections. Lenin’s cynicism was rejected, at least initially.
Less controversial in the Bolshevik Central Committee was Lenin’s requirement that the resistance to the Soviet government should be ruthlessly quashed. Troops were sent out to oppose the Cossack detachments assembled by Kerenski; and the units of the Military-Revolutionary Committee continued to patrol the city. On 27 October, furthermore, a Decree on the Press was issued with Lenin’s signature. This was the first governmental instruction enabling the establishment of censorship. Any ‘organ of the press’ was liable to closure for inciting resistance to Sovnarkom. Indeed a newspaper could be put out of operation simply for being deemed to have ‘sown confusion by means of an obviously defamatory distortion of the facts’. Despite having campaigned in earlier months for the principle of ‘freedom of the press’, the Bolsheviks were not slow to arrogate to themselves powers enabling them to monopolise the information available through the media of public communication. The Decree mentioned that Sovnarkom regarded this as a temporary measure. But again it is open to doubt whether Lenin truly believed in this provisionality; he had said repeatedly in 1917 that ‘freedom of the press’ was a principle that played into the hands of the bourgeoisie. He was unlikely to alter this assumption in the heat of revolutionary struggle.
The immediate threat, however, came not from conservative and liberal newspapers but from Kerenski; and this situation widened the scope for sympathisers of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries to put political pressure on Sovnarkom to establish a broad socialist coalition. Kamenev and other right-wing Bolsheviks thereby also acquired a leverage on Lenin and Trotski. The All-Russia Executive Committee of the Railwaymen’s Union (Vikzhel) warned that it would go on strike unless a coalition was formed. Kamenev was empowered by the Bolshevik Central Committee to negotiate with Vikzhel and Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary representatives. Lenin had to stay out of the way. He recognised this, but he did not trust Kamenev. In the circumstances it is remarkable that he kept the lid on his impatience and intransigence. For Kamenev on 30 October consented to a plan for an all-socialist governmental coalition that would exclude Lenin and Trotski.11
But by then Lenin was uninhibited by questions of internal party diplomacy. Sovnarkom’s security had increased. It had become improbable that the railwaymen would obey a call for a strike and the Cossacks of General Krasnov were defeated on the Pulkovo Heights. Lenin could safely attack Kamenev again. At the Bolshevik Central Committee on 1 November there was a decisive confrontation. Lenin and Trotski held to the opinion that an ultimatum should be delivered to the other parties declaring that a coalition would be entertained only if Bolshevik policies were pre-agreed as the basis of the government’s. This was really a way of breaking off negotiations without appearing to do so. The Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders with their long experience of Lenin had never been optimistic about the possibility of collaborating with him. His ideas on dictatorship and terror as well as his despotic personal behaviour were anathema to them. Nor did they approve of his closure of Kadet newspapers – and they saw signs of even greater trouble ahead when it became clear that Sovnarkom had prohibited right-wing Menshevik newspapers from operating. Lenin struck at Kamenev in the Bolshevik Central Committee on 2 November, and the policy of no compromise with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries was resumed.
There was a further tremor on 4 November when Kamenev and four colleagues resigned from the Bolshevik Central Committee and several People’s Commissars announced either their resignation from Sovnarkom or their disapproval of Lenin’s refusal to negotiate sincerely in pursuit of an all-socialist coalition. But Lenin did not yield and Trotski stood by him. Together with Central Committee Secretary Sverdlov and People’s Commissar for Nationalities Affairs Iosif Stalin they were determined to proceed with revolutionary political consolidation. The inner core of the Bolshevik Central Committee was rock-hard. Its members were aware that their infant regime had not yet faced its greatest trials. Every day that Sovnarkom lasted, they thought, was a major accomplishment. But at the very least they wanted to leave a mark on the history of Russia and Europe in the event that they were forced to flee from Petrograd in defeat. Decrees, proclamations, instructions and summonses flowed out from the Smolny Institute. Nerve and faith were required. Lenin and his associates had taken a vast gamble with the politics of their party and their country, and it was by no means certain that they had laid a sound bet.
After that first fortnight of political insurrection, armed defence and inter-party negotiation there was a need for them to consolidate their position. This required three main achievements. Firstly, they had to spread their administrative authority to other parts of the country. Secondly, they had to complete the promulgation of their revolutionary decrees. Thirdly, they had to deal with the Central Powers on the eastern front. It was an awesome task – and most of their enemies in the country were already convinced that they would fail. Surely they had already made too many grievous errors of anticipation? Their assumptions had been infantile. They thought that the armies of the Central Powers would be dissolved by the corrosive effects of fraternisation with Russian soldiers. They believed, too, that workers in Russia who had voted for the Bolsheviks would constantly support them. They trusted that the rushing decline of the economy could quickly be reversed by means of governmental restrictions on capitalism. They had little sense of the grip of age-old traditions upon popular consciousness, traditions of religion, social deference and political indifference. Their enemies depicted Lenin and his associates as ill-educated, reckless semi-intellectuals at best. Among the most reactionary political elements there was another dimension: they asserted that Lenin was a Jew, a cosmopolitan and an anti-Russian in league with Russia’s national enemies.
But few people in Russia at the time had a presentiment that Lenin’s regime might last for years, far less that it might stretch to seven decades of existence. The supreme Bolshevik leaders were not entirely convinced either. They had a phrase for their condition: they lived by ‘sitting on their suitcases’. How long could they last out? In such a situation it was natural for the very highest stratum of the party to try and find succour in leadership. Increasingly it seemed to the metropolitan provincial party leaders that Lenin, despite his occasional strategic and tactical lapses, was a reliable guide. He was, furthermore, a willing leader. Even if they survived the current political crisis, they would need a leader. Lenin was such a leader.
He did not experience any impulse to question what he was up to. He knew, at least in broad terms, his purposes. Bolsheviks, he repeatedly argued, had to face up to the consequences of the October seizure of power. He had told them – even if he had kept it secret from the workers who voted for the Bolsheviks – that a government of firm, even authoritarian purposes was crucial. In April, Lenin had told his Bolsheviks to prepare themselves to take power. Most observers had mocked him. But he had ignored the ribaldry and steeled his party to hold its nerve, and against widely expressed expectations the Bolsheviks had succeeded in taking power. Now the party’s critics laughed at him on the ground that he expected that the October Revolution would succeed in fulfilling his strategic analysis. But he no longer took Kadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries seriously. He had not done so for a dozen years; and unlike other revolutionaries, he did not experience second thoughts about his analysis when others considered it eccentric. He had never minded singing as a soloist. Now that he was in power there was still less of a temptation to cramp his vocal cords, and he hymned the Revolution with all his passion.
Lenin liked to explain his strategy in dualistic terms. He wanted a revolution from above and a revolution from below; he wanted both dictatorship and democracy. He aimed at authoritarian imposition and liberation. His writings in 1917 had combined these polarities. And yet, however much he toyed with such dualism, he raged to impose Sovnarkom’s authority and would let nothing get in his way. Coercion steadily assumed prominence at the expense of persuasion. Lenin instructed and commanded and he sanctioned violence, including outright state terror.
In the first few days he wrote up or edited the various decrees he had not yet submitted. Among them, on 29 October, was a Decree on the Eight-Hour Day. At last the founder of the working-class dictatorship took up the specific interests of the working class. On the same day a Decree on Popular Education committed Sovnarkom to the provision of universal, free, secular schooling for children. Then on 2 November came the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which assured every citizen that Sovnarkom opposed every vestige of national and religious privilege. National self-determination, even to the point of secession, was offered to the nations of the former Russian Empire. The Declaration was co-signed by Lenin and Stalin. On 14 November, the Decree on Workers’ Control – which Lenin was meant to have written earlier – was issued. This was the scheme whereby the workers of a given enterprise should be given the right through an elected committee to supervise the enterprise’s management. Still the decrees kept coming. On 1 December, Sovnarkom established a Supreme Council of the National Economy to take proprietorial and regulatory authority over industry, banking, agriculture and trade. All banks were nationalised on 14 December and steadily in the ensuing weeks a number of large-scale factories were taken into the hands of the state. Sovnarkom was carrying through the programme it had promised in the months when the Bolsheviks were advancing on power.
Not every decree had been adumbrated in public before the October Revolution. Lenin had tried to strike a jovial tone in saying how the Bolsheviks might try to emulate the Jacobin Terror in the French Revolution. But, as soon as he took power and had seen off the prospect of an all-socialist coalition, his true harshness was displayed again. He it was who came to Sovnarkom to make the case for the re-establishment of a secret political police. The October Revolution, he argued, had to be efficiently protected. Thus there would be created an Extraordinary Commission. Its head, on Lenin’s recommendation, would be Felix Dzierżyński, and its powers in ‘the struggle against counter-revolution and sabotage’ were left deliberately vague and were kept free of interference even from Sovnarkom. It was called the Extraordinary Commission mainly because even Lenin believed that the need for such an organisation would be only temporary; and it must be mentioned, too, that Lenin did not at this stage call for a campaign of extensive mass terror.
But it was a fateful step. Not being someone who believed in legality, Lenin felt comfortable with a political police untrammelled by niceties of written procedure – and the Extraordinary Commission’s charter allowed him and Dzierżyński to expand its range of functions at will. He was forever talking and writing about bourgeois bloodsuckers. Class war was congenial to him. A conversation took place about the Bolsheviks’ intentions between Lenin and the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Isaak Shteinberg. ‘In that case,’ asked Shteinberg, why should we bother with a People’s Commissariat of Justice? Let’s honestly call it the Commissariat for Social Annihilation and we’ll get involved in that!’ Lenin responded as follows: ‘Well said!… That’s exactly how it’s got to be… but it can’t be stated by us.’12 It cannot be proved that Lenin held the total physical liquidation of the middle classes as a party objective. But cases of abuse towards the rich, the aristocratic and the privileged certainly failed to arouse pity. His resentment against the old ruling elites, which he had felt acutely after the hanging of his brother Alexander in 1887, was never far from the surface of his thinking.
He thought back to the political writings of the Russian radicals of the previous century. Talking to an old acquaintance, he said: ‘We are engaged in annihilation, but don’t you recall what Pisarev said? “Break, beat up everything, beat and destroy! Everything that is being broken is rubbish with no right to life. What survives is good…”’13 Although the conversation cannot be independently verified, it has the ring of plausibility. Lenin wished to annihilate every vestige of the old regime and to use every available weapon in the struggle.
It remained unclear how far he would go in assuaging his wish for revenge, a wish that was given an intellectual veneer in the form of his version of Marxism. The three first months of the October Revolution had solved nothing as yet. Soviets in industrial towns had gone over to Sovnarkom’s side and had declared themselves the local governmental authority. The peasantry of Russia and Ukraine were taking up the injunctions of the Decree on Land. Non-Russians, especially the Finns, were welcoming the scope provided for national self-expression. And German and Austrian diplomats were sitting down with representatives of the Bolsheviks to discuss what should happen after the truce on the eastern front came to an end. The Bolsheviks even managed to entice the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries into becoming junior partners in a Sovnarkom coalition, and they began to take their places on 9 December. All this was to the good. But could it last? Could it lead to the general popular socialist Revolution in Russia, Europe and the rest of the world that Lenin had believed when he wrote out his April Theses and his State and Revolution?
Questions about the spread and survival of the Revolution were bothering Lenin. Although other members of Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee were thinking about them, most of them concentrated on their institutional functions. Only Trotski gave as much attention to general policy as Lenin did. Lenin did not particularly welcome Trotski’s contributions since they sometimes contradicted his own thoughts. He preferred to do the thinking himself and to encourage his leading comrades to get on with the business of running their People’s Commissariats. The Bolsheviks lacked prior experience of large-scale administration, and several of them were embarrassed about this. Lenin’s reply was emphatic: ‘But do you think that any of us has that?’1
The mood among Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries remained utopian. They were confident that European socialist Revolution was imminent and that Russia’s revolutionary transformation would be swift and easy. Trotski was as hard-headed as any other Bolshevik leader, but on arrival at the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs to take over as People’s Commissar he thought that his job would be strictly ephemeral. He would enter the building, publish the secret treaties between Nicholas II and the Allies and then simply ‘shut up shop’. Thus Trotski underestimated the will of the Central Powers to crush the Russian forces on the eastern front. Other Bolshevik governmental officials were equally intoxicated. Nikolai Osinski, Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, spent days elaborating charts and statistics for the perfection of the structures of industry and agriculture while the economy itself went to rack and ruin. Nikolai Podvoiski was absorbed in his plans to reorganise the armed forces at a time when most soldiers were jumping on trains and returning to their villages. Yuri Larin, it seemed to Lenin, constituted the most absurd case. Hardly a week passed without Larin composing a proposal for fundamental reconstruction of this or that People’s Commissariat.
Lenin too was a utopian thinker, but he was able to adjust his policies in the interests of political survival. It is true that he did not always use this capacity and that he had often stuck to doctrinal positions when his party might have helped itself by being more flexible. But he had revised many policies in pursuit of power in 1917, and afterwards it became axiomatic for him that the October Revolution had to be protected at all costs. Indeed Lenin felt in his element. He derived pleasure from his historic responsibility to work out a programme of measures that would save the October Revolution and enhance its achievements.
Several things worried him. Even while seizing power in October 1917, he had anticipated that the Bolsheviks and their allies would not win the Constituent Assembly elections. He was also alarmed about economic conditions. He began to query whether the urban working class had the discipline and commitment necessary for a proper socialist revolution. He was equally concerned about the progress made among the non-Russians. The promise of national self-determination had failed to give rise to a socialist seizure of power in Ukraine and Finland. Worse still, there were no insurrections in Germany, Austria, France and the United Kingdom. The ‘European socialist Revolution’ had stalled, and Lenin learned from Trotski on his trips back to Petrograd from Brest-Litovsk that the Central Powers were bent on invasion if Russia rejected their terms. Lenin had argued, in the teeth of opposition among Bolsheviks in April 1917, that socialist Revolution would be an easy business. He had scoffed at the dire predictions about Bolshevism made by Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Now his job was to persuade Bolsheviks that the tasks of Revolution would be harder than he had convinced them it would be.
Lenin could at last take the measure of things on the streets of Petrograd by going for walks near the Smolny Institute. From 10 November 1917 he and Nadezhda Konstantinovna had a two-room flat on the first floor. The period of separation was over, at least for the next few months. The flat itself was small but comfortable, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna remembered it fondly:2
At last Ilich and I settled down in the Smolny [Institute]. We were allocated a room there that had once been occupied by an upper-class lady. It was a room with a partitioning screen on the other side of which stood the bed. One had to enter via the washroom. No one could get along to the couple’s flat without a special permit signed by Lenin.
Not that Lenin and Krupskaya spent much time there. His office was room no. 81 on the second floor in the north wing, and when Lenin was not in his office he was usually in the reception room opposite the office where officials waited to have a word with him. There was always a queue of them and the reception room got packed out. He loved to talk with them and often took the chance to deliver a short speech on current issues.3 The flat of Lenin and Krupskaya was not a genuine domestic sanctuary. The neighbouring large room was used for Sovnarkom sessions; and Trotski and his family lived in the flat opposite to that of the Lenins. People’s Commissars and their various deputies and assistants bustled up and down the corridor. In the English phrase, Lenin and Krupskaya ‘lived over the shop’. Krupskaya had been appointed as Deputy Commissar of Popular Enlightenment and had to get out and about; she could not, and was not asked to, attend to her husband. It was not just his Revolution: it was also hers; and in any case his colleagues in the Central Committee had firmly refused to have her back in a secretarial capacity. Lenin and Krupskaya were political colleagues, but colleagues in separate institutions; they no longer had an intimate working relationship.
Lacking a woman to organise his domestic affairs, Lenin – according to Krupskaya’s memoirs – lived from hand to mouth:4
Ilich was in a pretty neglected condition. [His bodyguard] Zhëltyshev fetched Ilich his lunch, bread, that which was laid down as his ration. Sometimes Maria Ilinichna brought him food of some sort from her home; but I wasn’t at home and there was no regular concern for his diet.
Perhaps Krupskaya was trying to stress her importance to Lenin’s well-being and his sister Maria’s inadequacy. Be that as it may, his women had their own political commitments and left him largely to his own devices. The result was that he forgot to eat at the normal times of day and sauntered along to the communal cafeteria to grab a piece of pickled herring and some bread.5 His health deteriorated; headaches and insomnia returned.6
When Lenin and Krupskaya did have time together, they took a walk – usually unaccompanied by Zhëltyshev. On one occasion a dozen housewives standing outside the Institute screamed at them. In fact the women had not recognised Lenin: they were abusing everyone they spotted coming out of the building.7 Thus Lenin and Krupskaya could go around incognito even though his name was in the newspapers every day.
In fact denunciations of his dictatorial regime were frequent. The tone was strident and direct, but occasionally there was an attempt at satire. The most notable occurred in the Socialist Revolutionary newspaper Delo Naroda, when the writer Yevgeni Zamyatin wrote a sequence of short pieces ridiculing Lenin in the guise of a certain Theta. In case the reader missed the point, Zamyatin mentioned that Theta was treated as a son by Ulyan Petrovich – a verbal glance at Lenin’s family name. Theta is a person without a home. He is a pathetic, bald little man whose usefulness to Ulyan Petrovich is that he can fill in forms for him at the local police station. He has odd habits such as drinking ink while at work. But Theta is also casually unpleasant; in particular when he visits the countryside to investigate reports of cholera, he simply bans the disease and orders corporal punishment of a villager who catches it. The villager, however, ‘antigovernmentally died’. In the end Theta’s powers wane to such an extent that he turns into an ink stain and passes away.8
Zamyatin had put his finger on the harmful dottiness of much governmental activity and language. But such satirical exposures became increasingly rare as the Bolsheviks closed down the critical political press. Lenin was not personally offended; he simply wanted to put a stop to criticism of all types outside the Bolshevik party. He was a cheerful repressor and his regime grew much more severe than Zamyatin could have imagined it would.
Even so, Lenin was already showing signs of physical and mental strain. The workload in Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee was enormous and evidently was unlikely to diminish in the foreseeable future. After all, a government had seized power which was committed to comprehensive penetration of every aspect of political, social and cultural life. Nadezhda Konstantinovna could see the effects and on his health and, whereas in earlier years they would have chatted about politics on their walks, now she sought to enable him to get relief from the tensions of the Smolny Institute. If they spoke about politics, it would usually be in connection with her work in the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment – and even then it would be at Lenin’s instigation rather than hers. Their marriage had become a coupling of comfort, and the comfort was unidirectional: Krupskaya supported her husband and coped with her own difficulties without telling him.9 Her role was of considerable importance to him because his sisters Anna and Maria paid only fleeting visits to the flat; and Krupskaya, like every Bolshevik, sensed that the party and its leader were lighting up a dawn in the history of humanity.
Gradually their routines at home and at work became more settled. Lenin took on Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich and Nikolai Gorbunov as his personal assistants. He also acquired a personal chauffeur, Stepan Gil, who drove him around the city in a limousine. He had Margarita Fofanova and other young Bolshevik women as secretaries. He and Krupskaya had their own maid, paid for by the state, and Lenin began to eat much better than in Finland when he had cooked on a little kerosene stove.
It was their physical security that drew Lenin and Krupskaya to live in the Smolny Institute. They genuinely wanted to stay there because the Institute was the heart of the great Revolution and they had no plan to return to a flat in the city’s tenements. Apart from their occasional strolls near the Institute they spent little time in the city. Naturally Lenin gave speeches to large meetings at the Putilov Works and other principal locations of the Bolshevik party’s activity, but he did not venture out very often. Politics had always dominated his social life; even when he took summer holidays, he talked, read and wrote about party affairs – and Krupskaya suggested that he dreamed about them when asleep. And so it was a true delight for him, at least in the first weeks after the October Revolution, to live, work and rest in the Institute. Here Lenin met visitors from ‘the localities’, which meant anyone who was not living in Petrograd. One of the defining moments in his career had occurred in 1905 when he and Father Gapon had closeted themselves together day after day. Now Lenin could see and chat with any worker, soldier or peasant in the capital. And all the great revolutionary institutions were based within its walls. Here was the Bolshevik Central Committee, the Military-Revolutionary Committee, Sovnarkom, the Petrograd Soviet and the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets.
On each of these institutions he had a direct, steady influence. It was a welcome change after those months in hiding in Razliv and Helsinki, when he was dependent upon others to carry his written messages to fellow party leaders. And what a relief after the émigré years of faulty postal links, factional strife and police infiltration!
High politics were concentrated in a single building and never more than a short stroll away from Lenin. He felt that he had been made for this moment, for this Revolution, for this beginning of an epoch in the world history. He communicated his contentment to his comrades in the Institute. When events turned out not quite as predicted by him, he would dredge one of his learned proverbs from memory. Quoting Goethe, he said: ‘Theory is grey but life is green.’ For a man who had chronically divided his party on questions of Marxist dogma this was not a little paradoxical. But Lenin had never been a one-dimensional politician; intuition and improvisation had always been his characteristics. He put this, in his portentous fashion, at the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets: ‘Socialism is not brought into existence by commands from above. State-bureaucratism is alien to it; socialism that is living and creative is the creation of the popular masses themselves.’10 But he was not going to leave everything to those ‘popular masses’. Moving from room to room in the Smolny Institute, he ensured that the central state and party institutions imposed whatever degree of authority they could in the turbulent conditions of revolutionary Russia.
As he quickly discovered, this required that a degree of authority should be imposed on the institutions. He had plenty to do. The Bolshevik Central Committee was fairly orderly, but its members had only the task of setting down general guidelines and were anyway subject to party discipline. The new state institutions were a different matter. The Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets held noisy meetings that sprawled over days and was rarely able to get on rapidly with its legislative work. Although a Presidium was formed under the chairmanship of Sverdlov, the chaotic conditions were not eliminated. Sovnarkom was little better. Long, self-indulgent speeches and endless discussion of trivial practical matters were the norm.
Lenin introduced a set of formal procedures. In particular, he gave People’s Commissars a maximum of ten minutes to present their reports.11 He interrupted them whenever a report looked likely to be extended into a doctrinal exposition: he wanted practical policy, not oratory. He reprimanded and even fined those of them who were late for meetings; he simply could not stand it if they chatted during the proceedings. He himself stuck to the rules and expected others to do the same. A problem for him was that People’s Commissars were often so laden by duties that they had to send one of their deputies to put the Commissariat’s case for them. Sovnarkom was becoming a social entertainment for many participants. Several of them were not even Bolsheviks but Left Socialist-Revolutionaries or their various sympathisers. And yet Sovnarkom had to take decisions swiftly and imposingly, and few but Lenin had an appropriate sense of responsibility to deal with the situation. Even if he had not seen colleagues for months, he refrained from holding up proceedings but instead would pass them a written note of greeting. Always he was trying to hurry things up. And to delineate policy and check that it was being carried out.
Among the regular troublemakers was Cheka Chairman Felix Dzierżyński. Although Dzierżyński was an enforcer of discipline throughout the revolutionary regime, he defied the ban on smoking at Sovnarkom meetings. Most of the People’s Commissars smoked and found it difficult to get through a meeting without a puff or two. Dzierżyński made up any number of excuses to wander away from the long green-baize table and when he thought he was out of Lenin’s sight he lit up a cigarette next to the chimney-breast.
It was in this disorderly environment that Lenin was trying to sort out his thoughts. As a communist he wanted a transformation of state and society throughout the world, but increasingly he concluded that some of the party’s policies were hindering the advance towards communism. Everything on his short, peripatetic outings near the Smolny Institute suggested to him that changes needed to be made. In 1918 he reversed many policies. The transformation was so rapid and so drastic that there was talk at the time and subsequently that everything Lenin did was the result of a long-laid plan to deceive his way to power by disguising his true intentions. This would mean that the maker of the October Revolution was a world-historical cynic. According to such an interpretation, Lenin had always intended much harsher measures in government than he had espoused in opposition. Some of his critics attributed this to his megalomania. Others traced it to the secret subsidy forwarded to the Bolshevik Central Committee by the German Imperial government; their contention was that it was the Germans who dictated the party’s foreign policy, in particular after the October seizure of power.
And yet, while Lenin was cunning and untrustworthy, he was also dedicated to the ultimate goal of communism. He enjoyed power; he lusted after it. He yearned to keep his party in power. But he wanted power for a purpose. He was determined that the Bolsheviks should initiate the achievement of a world without exploitation and oppression. In 1917, while his party received money from Berlin, he did not regard himself as a German agent any more than the German authorities felt that they had bought him on a permanent basis. Each side was confident that it had tricked the other.
Lenin was ready to contemplate a lengthy period for the consolidation of the European socialist Revolution. There might be civil war – in fact there almost certainly would be such wars. There might be wars between socialist and capitalist states. Indeed there might even be a Second World War if the European socialist Revolution did not occur and inter-imperial capitalist rivalries persisted. Lenin could not stand it when his fellow Bolsheviks failed to understand that such setbacks were only to be expected. Unlike him, they could not grasp that politics was always messier than the prescriptions of doctrine. The few who had this understanding had caused him problems in the recent past. Kamenev and Zinoviev had warned that the October seizure of power would be followed by political catastrophe, and several of the People’s Commissars who resigned their posts were of similar mind. Stalin, despite sticking by Lenin throughout the crisis, had never believed that the European socialist Revolution was imminent. It was crucial for Lenin to bring these figures back to his side and let bygones be bygones. He needed their help to face down the other party leaders – by far the largest number – who resented his proposed reversals in Bolshevik policy; they had agreed to the April Theses because they had accepted Lenin’s argument that Revolution would be easy in Russia and easier still in Germany.
One proposal by Lenin, however, had become uncontroversial among Bolsheviks. Since the first day of the October Revolution he had urged them in vain to postpone the Constituent Assembly elections for fear that the party would not win them. His prediction was fulfilled in November, when the Bolsheviks achieved only a quarter of the votes. Opinion started to turn in favour of ignoring the result of the elections. Even Bolsheviks who had wanted an all-socialist governmental coalition agreed on this. The same was true of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Thus Lenin secured Sovnarkom’s agreement to breaking up the Constituent Assembly after it met in Petrograd in January 1918.
Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries would not let the revolutionary transformation in Russia and Europe be jeopardised by a Constituent Assembly election. Neither the Bolsheviks nor the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had a basic commitment to electoral procedures, and, having seized power, they did not intend to relinquish it. They were revolutionaries first and democrats only insofar as democracy strengthened the revolutionary cause. The also argued that the arrangements for the Constituent Assembly elections, inherited from the Provisional Government, put them at an unfair disadvantage. The list of the Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries had been drawn up before the split with the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries in November. The result was that the peasants who supported the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries’ approval of Lenin’s Decree on Land could not vote specifically for the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Equally irksome was the fact that the elections took place in mid-November, long before most people in the country had had time to become acquainted with Lenin’s innovations in policy. The Sovnarkom coalition thought that it could have pulled off a victory in the Constituent Assembly elections if only the arrangement had been delayed a few months.
Lenin made this point while plotting the destruction of the Constituent Assembly. His plan was insidiously clever. The Assembly’s elected members would be allowed to meet at the Tauride Palace, where Sovnarkom’s representatives would demand that the Assembly’s main party – the Socialist-Revolutionaries – accede to the basic policies decreed by Sovnarkom and to the form of government provided by the soviets. If the Constituent Assembly refused, its members should be locked out of the building next day. The beauty of the plan would be that it would involve little bloodshed.
The other great change of policy contemplated by Lenin was a lot more contentious within the Sovnarkom coalition. This was his suggestion that a separate peace should be signed with the Central Powers. The Bolsheviks had always argued that the Great War was imperialist in motivation and that there was only one way to end it: socialist revolutions across Europe. They thought that propaganda and fraternisation among soldiers would do the trick. If such an outcome did not occur, the Bolsheviks expected to instigate a ‘revolutionary war’ to carry socialism into Europe on the points of their bayonets. But they were optimists and assumed that ‘revolutionary war’ would not be necessary. The notion of a separate peace on the eastern front was inconceivable to them, as indeed it was to every other Russian political party. It was against this logic, which he himself had helped to establish, that Lenin began to make a stand. Signs appeared on 17 December, when he ordered the issuing of a questionnaire on Russian military preparedness. His questions were brutally searching. Was it really possible for a German attack to be repelled? Was it wise to continue to put the case for ‘revolutionary war’? Would soldiers in fact prefer the signature of a separate peace? The replies confirmed whatever worries he already possessed: the Russian armed forces barely existed in strength on the eastern front and such soldiers who remained were largely in favour of peace at almost any price.12
There has always been speculation that Lenin’s questionnaire was a feint to disguise the fact that he was complying with the instructions of his paymasters in Berlin. Those who believe ‘German gold’ paid for the October Revolution contend that the separate peace on the eastern front was the price exacted in exchange.13 This is pretty implausible stuff. Whatever promises or intimations Lenin gave to German diplomats, he was not a man to stick to his word, a word given to a rapacious, imperialist government. Indeed perhaps the greatest work he did for the German military cause had already been accomplished on 26 October when he published his Decree on Land and his Decree on Peace. He would have introduced these measure regardless of his financial relationship with Berlin. Their result, anyway, was the degradation of the ability of the Russian forces to wage war because the soldiers on the eastern front flooded back to their villages in order to get their share of the land that was being redistributed. But the Central Powers wanted more: they demanded that Sovnarkom should formally disclaim any sovereignty over Poland, Latvia and Belorussia. They demanded the signature of a treaty. Lenin’s willingness to come to terms was dictated not by financial indebtedness but by the fear that, if Sovnarkom did not give way, the demands of the Central Powers might become still more grievous – as in fact happened in January 1918.
As his worries about the eastern front became acute, Lenin was also troubled by the gamut of Soviet economic and social policies. The easy Revolution predicted by him for Russia had not been realised, and he had to reformulate strategy in order to maintain the regime’s impetus. But for this he also needed a break from the daily routine of Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee. Ill health and overwork were dragging him down. Apart from his brief walks around the Smolny Institute, he had no chance to relax. Just two months after re-entering the public gaze at the Second Congress of Soviets, he decided to slip away from the Smolny Institute for a brief holiday.
On 24 December he set off with his wife Nadya and his sister Maria for the Finland Station to meet Eino Rahja, whose train would take them along the familiar track to the north. Their destination was the tuberculosis sanatorium at Halila near the Finnish village of Uusikirkko, forty-five miles north of the Russian capital. Lenin badly needed to restore himself. Central Committee member Jan Berzins and his family were already convalescing there. The snow was crisp and deep, the air was fresh and Lenin was able to go out for walks in the countryside. It was one of those odd moments in his life. Lenin was the premier of the Russian state and had recently granted independence to Finland. By going to Uusikirkko, he was from a legal standpoint crossing a state border without permission. But he thought less about the implications of his own legislation than about his earlier experiences as a fugitive in the Finnish countryside in 1907 and 1917. Unconsciously he started to talk in a low voice so as not to be overheard by potential agents of the Ministry of the Interior! He forgot that it was now he who controlled the secret police. Another problem was that the daylight hours were even shorter, that far north, than in Petrograd. He spent most of his time stuck indoors writing – writing and fretting.
Even in Halila he had no peace from his colleagues in Sovnarkom. Hardly had he got there than Stalin wrote asking him to return to the Smolny Institute by midday on 28 December. Stalin needed his advice on relations with Ukraine.14 Lenin held on until 29 December, but not surprisingly he hardly felt he had had a proper holiday. He brought back several draft articles with him, but their contents were so pessimistic that he did not hand them to Pravda. The reason for this was not the dark midwinter in Uusikirkko but his own presentiment that, unless Sovnarkom became firmer in its imposition of order in Russia, the days of the October Revolution were numbered.
In those drafts, preserved in Lenin’s archive, he called for soviets and other popular organisations to hold fewer open meetings. Too much time was being wasted. According to Lenin, moreover, workers had become excessively self-indulgent. The striking printworkers should be treated as hooligans and, if their withdrawal of labour continued, put under arrest. The Soviet regime had been altogether too soft. Lenin expostulated that comprehensive ‘registration and supervision’ were urgently overdue, explaining:
The objective of this registration and supervision is clear and universally understandable: that everyone should have bread, go about in sturdy footwear and decent clothing, should have a warm dwelling and should work conscientiously; that no scoundrel (including anyone who shirks doing any work) should be free to roam about but should be held in prison or should work off his sentence in forced labour of the heaviest kind; and that none of the wealthy, evading the rules and laws of socialism, should be able to evade the same fate as the scoundrel – the fate that in justice ought to become the fate of wealthy people.
From this it was clear that Lenin intended to give no mercy even to the sections of society that had once supported the Bolsheviks enthusiastically.
What he was doing, without being properly aware of it, was facing up to the consequences of the October Revolution in the light of the political and economic setbacks. Authoritarianism had always pervaded his thought; it now became more evident and extreme. Writing in Uusikirkko, he jotted down the theme of another article he wanted to write soon: ‘First vanquish the bourgeoisie and then fight the bourgeoisie abroad.’15 This implied a will to prioritise political consolidation in Russia and to wait awhile before spreading revolution to other industrial countries. And his various drafts show that the struggle to vanquish the Russian bourgeoisie would be accompanied by massive intimidation of ‘the masses’. Lenin’s hard heart was hardened further.
Inside the Smolny Institute, he conferred with Sverdlov to finalise preparations for the reversal of the first (and until 1993 the last) remotely free universal-suffrage elections in Russia’s history. Lenin and Trotski had not made a secret of their hostility to the Constituent Assembly. All through December they had argued that such elections were not a true gauge of the people’s interests, and they had the entire membership of the Bolshevik and Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committees on their side. Violent suppression was openly contemplated, if not in Pravda then certainly on the streets. Sverdlov made the necessary military dispositions. Sovnarkom could rely upon having several units including both the Latvian Riflemen and the Red Guard on its side. The socialist opponents of the Sovnarkom coalition – Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bundists – had no serious counter-force. Lenin made a show of nonchalance and on 1 January 1918 he took a two-mile trip in his official limousine from the Smolny Institute to the Mikhailovski Manège in central Petrograd. With him were Maria Ilinichna, Fritz Platten and Nikolai Podvoiski. Lenin had made many such trips to meetings in November and December. Security precautions were few: Lenin wanted to show that he was a popular politician at the head of a popular revolution. In any case he was enjoying himself.
Having delivered a rousing speech at the Mikhailovski Manège, he started back around seven o’clock in the evening with his companions. His speech had been well received by party members and by the workers they had brought with them. The little group were looking forward to having supper in the Smolny Institute. It was already very dark but they were being carefully watched by two armed men. The car had barely left the Manège and reached the Simeon Bridge when the men stepped off the pavement, took aim and fired at the limousine. At the sound of shots, Platten instinctively threw himself across Lenin’s body. It was an incompetent attempt at assassination, but it had very nearly succeeded. Platten suffered worst. His act of courage left him with a hand wound. The limousine carried on to the Smolny Institute and Dzierżyński began a search for the attackers. A few days later it became clear that they had been monarchists. But in the interim a pretext was given to Sovnarkom to charge the socialist parties outside the governmental coalition with complicity in terrorism. The aim was to tar the majority parties in the forthcoming Constituent Assembly with the brush of anti-popular violence.
Lenin had often been accused of physical cowardice. He had gone out of his way to evade the police forces of both Nicholas II and the Provisional Government at times when others in his party took personal risks. But from 25 October 1917 his approach had changed. He had led a revolution. He knew that he would go down as a figure in the history books. Every day that the Soviet regime lasted was another page added to the annals of Lenin and Bolshevism. He joined other Bolsheviks in facing further danger, knowing that he had already survived for the event that meant most to him in his life: the Revolution.
But he did not seek martyrdom, and while he was alive, he knew that much needed to be done to enhance the prospects of Revolution. For him, this always meant that things had to be done rapidly and ruthlessly. His ideology and his temperament pushed him in the same direction. Probably his ill health did too: he felt that he had no time to waste. Lenin wanted to get on with the Revolution. Nothing was to stand as an obstacle. Over the next few days, he concentrated on the arrangements for the Constituent Assembly in the Tauride Palace. He could barely begin to discuss the subject temperately. The first session was scheduled for 5 January 1918 and he was already very tense when he arrived at the Tauride Palace. He knew that his intended action – the Assembly’s forcible closure – was of historic importance. As the proceedings began, Lenin was white as a sheet. Lacking armed support, the Socialist-Revolutionaries under Viktor Chernov could not resist the Bolsheviks. Chernov was subjected to catcalls and threatening gestures. But it was Sverdlov who spoke for the Bolsheviks. Lenin confined his contribution to permitting himself to be seen scoffing at the proceedings. By putting up Sverdlov instead of himself, Lenin was showing contempt for more than his old adversary Chernov. He was despising free and universal-suffrage elections as a mode of political struggle.
Quite how to stop the first session of the Constituent Assembly had not been worked out by Sovnarkom. Chernov looked as if he would the proceedings indefinitely. Yet again Lenin urged direct action upon his party and after some dispute his line was accepted. The Assembly would be closed and would not be permitted to resume work next day. Lenin’s plan nevertheless involved a degree of finesse. On his orders, the Assembly guard under the anarchist–communist Anatoli Zheleznyakov announced to the flabbergasted Chernov that the ‘guard was tired’ and that the building ought to be cleared. Chernov had no option but to comply and the Tauride Palace was emptied.
Since the Constituent Assembly had not approved all the Sovnarkom decrees, Lenin felt that he had acquired more than enough excuse to go to the Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies to secure agreement that the Assembly had outlived its usefulness. Subsequently the fount of legitimacy for the regime would be the Congress itself, and the Cheka – the new political police established in December – could freely hunt down the enemies of the Sovnarkom coalition. Lenin had got what he wanted. He had done this without having to harangue either the Constituent Assembly or the Congress of Soviets. He was the acknowledged leader of the October Revolution but he did not act alone. His Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Sovnarkom coalition had been moving in the same direction. The point was becoming obvious. Once Sovnarkom had taken power, it needed to use force to maintain itself. Not every party leader had recognised this before the October Revolution; but all of them did by 5 January 1918. It was a fateful process of learning. If they had known this in advance, they might not have sanctioned the seizure of power. But they had acceded to Lenin’s insistence on the Provisional Government’s overthrow in the fashion and at the time he demanded. Now they were getting used to living with the consequences, and to living with them without blaming him.
The huge task facing Lenin after the Constituent Assembly’s dispersal was to get Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to accept the separate peace pushed under their noses by the Central Powers. It was the fiercest struggle of his career. On his return from Switzerland, his April Theses had tipped the balance of Bolshevik party opinion. In October 1917 he had thrust the party towards overturning the Provisional Government. But on the question of war and peace Lenin faced a massive impediment. His Bolshevik party, having carried out the October Revolution and issued the Decree on Peace, would not accede to the signature of a peace with the imperialist governments of Berlin and Vienna.
Steadily the scale of the military threat on the eastern front was disclosing itself. In the last weeks of 1917, Trotski as People’s Commissar for External Affairs returned from the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, the town nearest to the trenches, still believing that he could endlessly prolong the truce. At any time, he thought, Revolution could erupt across Europe. On 7 January 1918 he returned in a more sombre mood, bringing news that the Central Powers had presented an ultimatum. Lenin instantly argued for agreeing to the German demands for fear that the terms of the ultimatum might soon get even worse, but Trotski demurred and proposed that the negotiations be dragged out by means of a tactic of ‘neither war nor peace’. At that point Lenin took his case to the central and local leaderships of the Bolshevik party. At the Third Congress of Soviets on 8 January, he presented his ‘Theses on the Question of a Separate and Annexationist Peace’. Members of the Bolshevik fraction, after getting over their astonishment at his volte-face, turned him down flat even though most of them recognised that ‘revolutionary war’ was impracticable; they gave preference to Trotski’s policy of ‘neither war nor peace’. Lenin remained defiant: ‘In any event I stand for the immediate signature of peace; it is more secure.’
At the Central Committee next day, he made no secret of the distaste he felt for his own policy:1
Undoubtedly the peace that we are currently compelled to conclude is an obscene peace; but, if war begins, our government will be swept aside and peace will be concluded by another government… Those who stand on the side of revolutionary war point out that by this very step we will be engaged in a civil war with German imperialism and that thereby we’ll awaken revolution in Germany. But look! Germany is only pregnant with revolution, and a completely healthy baby has been born to us: the baby that is the socialist republic, which we shall be killing if we begin a war.
Lenin argued that the ‘socialist fatherland’ had to be protected in the short term but that nevertheless the Bolsheviks had to stay in readiness to spread revolution to Europe.
His chances of convincing his party with such thoughts were small and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries would not even listen to them. He had been in such situations in the past, before 1917; but in those years he could afford to take the risk of isolating himself: in 1918 he was leader of a governing party and the state was going to stand or fall in consequence of the decision taken about the separate peace proposal. It was not entirely helpful that among his main supporters in the Bolshevik Central Committee were figures who had had their doubts about his revolutionary strategy in 1917: Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Stalin went about asserting that ‘there is no revolutionary movement in the West’. Lenin genuinely believed that the ‘European socialist Revolution’ would eventually take place, and had to distance himself from Stalin’s position. And steadily Lenin began to exert an influence on the Bolshevik Central Committee. He worked to undermine the confidence of his opponents and focussed upon Bukharin. This was astute. Bukharin had never thought it possible for Russia to wage a successful war on German capitalism; he simply assumed that ‘revolutionary war’, if ever Trotski’s policy of ‘neither war nor peace’ should prove ineffective, would be the party’s sole alternative with ideological justification. This was the opinion of most leading Bolsheviks.
Already some of Lenin’s opponents could no longer assent to ‘revolutionary war’ as a practical option. Lenin himself, speaking at the Central Committee and at open public meetings in Petrograd, stressed his commitment to ‘European socialist Revolution’. He got his supporters in the Secretariat, Sverdlov and Stasova, to disseminate information on his behalf to the party in the provinces. As the arrangements were laid for the Seventh Party Congress, he reverted to his old method of providing mandates to activists known to be loyal to his policies. He also let it be known that, if the decision went against him, he would resign from the Central Committee and campaign throughout the party for the signature of a separate peace.
As he had predicted, the Central Powers grew impatient. On 10 February 1918, Trotski was given another ultimatum at Brest-Litovsk; he was told that an invasion would take place unless the Soviet authorities did as demanded by the governments in Berlin and Austria. The weakness of Trotski’s policy of ‘neither war nor peace’ was exposed. Trotski made the best of a bad job by announcing to the negotiators of both sides that Russia was simply withdrawing from the war. But by 16 February the patience of the Central Powers was exhausted. Unless peace was signed, they warned, their offensive on the eastern front would be resumed within two days. The Central Committee met on 17 February in Trotski’s presence; and Lenin issued a questionnaire to fellow members to discover what each of them would do in certain contingencies:2 he wanted to ensure that they, like he, felt personally responsible for whatever decision was taken. Decisiveness was his supreme quality and he aimed to make his colleagues understand that they should expect to live by the consequences of their recommendations. And yet he could not get his way in the Central Committee: a narrow majority yet again accepted Trotski’s policy of calling the bluff of the Central Powers.
Lenin was becoming frantic, and so were all his comrades: any option they chose would have repercussions on the eastern front and on the Great War as a whole. Political life was lived on a knife-edge. On 18 February, the day of the threatened invasion, the Central Committee met again. Lenin implored fellow members:
Yesterday there was an especially characteristic vote when everyone recognised the need for peace if a [revolutionary] movement in Germany weren’t to supervene and an offensive were to occur. Doubt exists whether the Germans want an offensive with a view to overthrowing the Soviet government. We stand before a situation where we must act!
But his plea was turned down. This time the German high command organised a vast advance along the Baltic littoral. By the afternoon its troops had travelled virtually unopposed through to Dvinsk. They were within four hundred miles of Petrograd. The Central Committee reconvened in haste and Lenin declaimed: ‘History will say that you gave away the Revolution.’
At last his argument hit home and by a slim margin of seven votes to five, he defeated Bukharin. Lenin gained the support of Trotski, who later said that he did not wish to opt for war unless he could do so with a united Bolshevik party. Even so, Trotski had hardly left the Central Committee before he set about enquiring whether the Soviet government might get emergency aid from the Allies if it refused to sign the peace treaty with Germany and Austria–Hungary. He won favour for this idea in the Central Committee on 22 February. Again the Central Powers were intransigent and demanded that Sovnarkom should disclaim sovereignty not only over Poland and the various Baltic provinces but also over Ukraine. This was the final ultimatum; failure to comply would result in a massive military invasion. On 23 February the weary members of the Bolshevik Central Committee hauled themselves along to hear Sverdlov’s report on the German ultimatum to the effect that Sovnarkom was given until seven o’clock next morning to confirm its acceptance of the Central Powers’ terms. This was the crucial meeting and Lenin spelled out its significance: ‘These terms must be signed. If you don’t sign them, you are signing the death warrant of Soviet power within three weeks.’3
Lenin kept nagging his antagonists. Among those who announced his continued opposition was Karl Radek. Lenin was furious and retorted that Radek was deluding himself:4
You’re worse than a hen. A hen can’t decide to cross the line of a circle drawn in chalk around it, but at least the hen can say in self-justification that someone else’s hand had drawn that circle. But you drew your formula around yourself with your own hand and now you’re gazing at the formula and not at reality.
Lenin’s imagery was always richer when he was trying to intimidate an opponent.
Still the dispute was not at an end. Lenin’s critics in his presence considered excluding him from Sovnarkom and starting a revolutionary war. Even Stalin wondered whether it was yet right to come to terms with the Central Powers. But most Central Committee members had no stomach for such a fight. And Lenin was like a rock and held firm while others in the room trembled. Yet again he indicated that, if his opponents won the day, he would resign from Sovnarkom – he would not need to be forced out – and resume his campaign for a separate peace treaty. And he got what he wanted; by a vote of seven to four with another four abstentions, the Bolshevik Central Committee resolved that the treaty should be signed. This decision had been taken in the nick of time to forestall the German invasion. If Lenin had not won the debate, there is little doubt that the Central Powers would have concluded that the Bolsheviks were no longer of any use to them. The result would have been the occupation of the Russian heartland and the collapse of the October Revolution.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March. The Central Powers by and large stood by its contents and refrained from invading Russia once Sovnarkom had delivered up Poland, the Baltic provinces and Ukraine to their armies. Half of the industrial and agricultural resources of the Russian Empire were situated in this vast area as well as a third of the population. Furthermore, the German high command was enabled to transfer army divisions from the east to the west in order to attempt a final concentrated campaign against the French and the British forces. The decision taken in the Smolny Institute in the presence of fifteen Bolsheviks on 23 February had consequences that were quickly appreciated around the world.
In Russia the broader picture of international relations was ignored in the Bolshevik party press, and the party’s control over the press meant that the other parties knew little directly about what was happening elsewhere in Europe. But Lenin was sure that he had done the right thing. Immediately he set about persuading his party that it could exploit the ‘breathing space’ given by the peace Treaty. There was a tussle in the Bolshevik Central Committee about who should be deputed to go out to Brest-Litovsk to put his pen to the document. The obvious person would have been Lenin; but he arranged things so that his candidacy was not discussed. Members of the group who had carried out the negotiations refused to carry out the task, and it was obviously senseless to ask anyone who had supported Trotski or Bukharin. Grigori Sokolnikov therefore performed the unenviable role. This was not the last time that Lenin stayed aloof from decisions that might pollute his future reputation. No party in Russia, apart from the Bolsheviks, approved of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. If things did not work out, Lenin might pay dearly for his gamble in international relations. His instincts told him to minimise the personal damage.
Yet the political struggle in Petrograd was not over. The Bolshevik Party Congress, too, had to be persuaded to sanction the turnabout; and it was not definitively clear that the Congress would agree. Worse still, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had no internal strife about ‘revolutionary war’: all of them were intensely opposed to Lenin’s policy. For this reason Lenin adopted a step-by-step approach. First he dealt with his own party’s Congress. Proceedings began on 6 March and were introduced by Lenin:5
A country that is petit-bourgeois by nature, disorganised by war and dragged down by it to an unbelievable condition has been placed in extraordinarily heavy circumstances: we have no army and yet we have to live side by side with a robber who is armed to the teeth. He still remains and will remain a robber, whom it was impossible, of course, to get at through agitation about peace without annexations and indemnities. A peaceful domestic pet has been lying side by side with a tiger and trying to convince him of the need for peace without annexations and indemnities while such a peace was obtainable only by attacking the tiger.
Lenin’s sarcasm contrasted with the performance of the other side led by Bukharin. On point after point Bukharin gave ground. He admitted that a revolutionary war was impossible and that he had no principled objection to a separate peace with the Central Powers.
And so the clash between Lenin and the Bolshevik left was onesided. Lenin knew that he would triumph and was willing to let Bukharin’s supporters vilify him uncontested on the Congress floor. He could remain calm while Zinoviev and Trotski had a tiff about the usefulness of the previous policy of ‘neither war nor peace’. Indeed he proceeded to a debate with Bukharin on the contents of the Party Programme, and politely entreated his opponent not to carry out his threat to refuse to serve in the next Bolshevik Central Committee. In short, he could show magnanimity in victory.
Lenin had succeeded through his skills and determination. He was also helped by the fact that the internal party opposition lacked both tactical confidence and cunning. The Bolshevik left – or the Left Communists as they called themselves – did not really believe that a ‘revolutionary war’ would be feasible. Wherever they tried to rally mass support among workers likely to be conscripted in the event of such a war, they encountered hostility, and they were aware that the peasants who had filled the ranks of the Imperial Army had already voted with their feet on the question of war or peace: most of them either had deserted or had been demobilised. Yet they did not consciously recognise this, and they went on grumbling about the separate peace. Initially they withdrew from the Bolshevik Central Committee and Sovnarkom. So, too, did the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin railed against what he saw as their political puerility; but he tried to be diplomatic. He needed all the People’s Commissars he could get his hands on, and they for their part were prevailed upon to give support to the revolution of the workers and peasants. One by one they returned to their posts on an unofficial basis.
The danger from the German forces had not been expunged. Having signed the Treaty, Sovnarkom could not be confident that the Germans would not keep moving on Petrograd. Lenin and his fellow People’s Commissars reluctantly accepted the need for them to shift the seat of government to Moscow. The decision had a practical motive. The Central Powers were conquering areas virtually unopposed; and although it had been Sovnarkom’s intention since the previous month to form a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, the units were small in number and primitive in training: they were plainly no match for the troops of Germany and Austria–Hungary. And so on 10 March the government’s main personnel embarked on the night train from Petrograd to Moscow.
Initially most of the personnel were lodged in the Hotel National on Okhotny Ryad three hundred yards from the northern wall of the Kremlin. Lenin shared a makeshift apartment with his wife Nadezhda and his sister Maria. There were just two rooms together with a bathroom, and the hotel staff cleaned his shoes and generally looked after all of them.6 In later years there was a suggestion that he did not avail himself of the services of the staff; but Nadezhda Konstantinovna remonstrated against such saccharine idealisations: she liked to idealise him, but not in regard to his personal habits.7 Outside the Hotel National there was always noise. Okhotny Ryad was full of market stall-keepers throughout daytime hours. Students and other revolutionary enthusiasts were constantly arguing, canvassing and pasting up posters. The Bolshevik party leadership positioned loyal military units throughout the area. The Latvian Riflemen were especially welcome to Sovnarkom. But Lenin was a person who liked his settled routines. Ignoring the noise, he rose from his bed in mid-morning as he had always done in London, Zurich and Paris. He was going to make Revolution on his personal terms.8
It is true that Lenin saw people of all sorts every time he left the Hotel National, and increasingly received visitors from the provinces. Thus he was never without information about the condition of ordinary people in Soviet Russia. But he did not live the lives of those people. Eating and sleeping in the Hotel National and working in the Kremlin, he always had a refuge from the harsh realities of misrule, hunger and war; and when people talked about such things, he pressed their information through the filter of his own ideas and only altered policies when the very existence of the Soviet regime was menaced.
The stay in the sumptuous Hotel National was meant to last only until such time as the Kremlin had been got ready for Sovnarkom. It was not a task that Lenin relished. He had never liked Moscow because it was so much less Westernised than Petrograd. Physically and culturally Moscow embodied traditional Russian values. For Lenin, this was no recommendation at all. He wanted a Russia that abandoned all tsarist nostalgia, Orthodox Christianity and peasant aspirations. He had never retracted his remark of 1898 that Moscow was ‘a foul city’.9
Indeed Moscow was more like a great conglomeration of villages than a metropolis. Foreigners – and Lenin was a bit like a foreigner himself – noted that lots of inhabitants still wore traditional peasant smocks and shoes made out of straw rather than leather. Few streets had pavements. The thoroughfares were extremely muddy in spring 1918, shortly after Sovnarkom arrived. In contrast with Petrograd’s rectilinear design, Moscow stretched out in a higgledy-piggledy sprawl, and Muscovites were proud of the difference. Each resident social stratum, from industrialists and bankers down to street-hawkers, felt that the unplanned, exuberant diversity of Moscow, which had been the capital of the country until Peter the Great started to build St Petersburg at the beginning of the eighteenth century, expressed something essential about Russia. Moscow’s factory owners were the foremost advocates of Russian nationalism. They had built magnificently in the past twenty years in a style that mixed traditionalism and explorative modernity. They had textile factories aplenty. They had strong connections with the countryside, and some of them were Old Believers. They thought that Petrograd’s elites had betrayed the national interest to foreign capitalist powers, and they judged Moscow to be the genuine capital of Mother Russia.
Perhaps it served Lenin right, then, that he encountered a number of practical problems in the Kremlin. When trying to enter by the Trinity Gate with Bonch-Bruevich a day after the train trip from Petrograd, he was refused admission by a guard who did not recognise him. The guard was a Bolshevik supporter, but took some minutes before convincing himself of Lenin’s identity and allowing him admittance.
Once inside the walls of the Kremlin, even Lenin was struck by the magnificence of the buildings. The inner precinct left a lasting impression. The Kremlin is a great triangular fortress in the city’s centre, standing 130 feet above the river Moskva. The walled perimeter is a mile and a quarter long and inside it there is a dazzling collection of ancient buildings. Chief among them was the Great Kremlin Palace. Next to the Palace was the Uspenski Cathedral; it was there that the tsars had been crowned until Peter the Great’s construction of St Petersburg. There was the Senate built by Catherine the Great. There were bells, bell-towers, golden cupolas, gigantic cannons, barracks, an armoury and spacious squares. On each tower there was a two-headed eagle, symbol of the glory and power of tsarism. From the top of the highest bell-tower it was possible to see across to a horizon twenty miles away. Everywhere he looked, Lenin saw the physical embodiment of a history that he had come to power in order to eliminate.
But the Kremlin was in a mess. The neglect had set in with the monarchy’s downfall in February 1917 and fighting had occurred between Red Guards and monarchist officers at the end of the year. A dispiriting scene confronted Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich. The Senate Building, where it was proposed to base Sovnarkom and to assign Lenin an apartment, remained a shambles. The horse manure lay uncollected. There was hay, filthy bandages, broken paving and – when the spring came – the mud, mud, mud. Temporarily Lenin, Trotski and other Bolshevik leaders were put up in the Cavalry Corpus of the Great Kremlin Palace. Some of Nicholas II’s servants had remained at their posts. One elderly waiter, a certain Stupishin, was a stickler for traditional propriety. When Lenin and Trotski dined together in the evenings, Stupishin served their suppers on Imperial crockery. Stupishin would not allow them to start eating until he had ensured that the double-headed eagle symbol on the plates faced each person at the table. Lenin endured the fuss with amusement. In truth, not all the meals were fit for a tsar. Sometimes the diners had only buckwheat porridge and thin vegetable soup.
Yet Lenin did not obtain permanent accommodation for Sovnarkom and for himself and his family until the end of the month, and then only after demanding to know the names of those ‘guilty’ for the delay.10 Bonch-Bruevich had put aside a comfortable apartment for Lenin, Nadya and Maria Ilinichna on the first floor of the old Senate Building. There were three main rooms and a hallway, a kitchen, bathroom and a maid’s room. Next door were the administrative bureaux of Sovnarkom, and from Lenin’s office a door led directly to the hall in which the meetings of Sovnarkom were held.
The Senate Building apartment became his home. He had wandered around for so much of his life that it is doubtful whether he was capable of feeling at home anywhere by 1918. The fact that he lived in his place of work can hardly have produced an atmosphere of homeliness. Both Nadya and Maria, furthermore, were nearly as busy as he was with political affairs. All three of them lived on the run, grabbing food and sleep as and where they could. They could not care less about money and Lenin formally reprimanded Bonch-Bruevich for raising his salary as Sovnarkom Chairman without his sanction.11 What he wanted was a clean and quiet flat and an office well stocked with books. One of his first actions on occupying the premises was to demand a set of Vladimir Dal’s Russian dictionary and a map of the former Russian Empire. He put up a portrait of Karl Marx on the wall, and later added a bulky picture of the populist terrorist Stepan Khalturin. His daily needs no longer detained either his wife or his sister. A maid had been hired, and the chauffeuring was done by Stepan Gil. Meals were cooked for the inhabitants. Lenin and Nadya acquired a cat. They adored the animal, and Lenin was often seen carrying it along the corridor to the Sovnarkom meeting room. The cat knew how to look after itself. In the meeting room, it would snuggle down in Lenin’s armchair in the knowledge that no one would dare to disturb it. Nadya and the maid fed the cat, and, whenever the maid had a day off, Nadya asked a Sovnarkom secretary to take over the duty. She did not trust Lenin to lay out the food as was necessary.
In fact Lenin was dependable in his care of their cat even if he was not always punctual in putting a plate in front of it.12 Most of the time both he and Nadya were preoccupied by their political tasks. The apartment was a place where they slept and ate. From the Kremlin, Lenin could order books from any library in Russia. He was able to phone any political functionary in the capital or the provinces, and meet the visitors who thronged to the Kremlin to meet him. He could buttonhole People’s Commissars as they emerged from their own apartments into the precinct and most of his main Bolshevik comrades – Trotski, Sverdlov, Kamenev and Stalin – were within easy reach together with their families. And he was able to organise receptions for party officials or for groups of peasants petitioning him on some matter.
From the great walled precinct Lenin set out on trips to meetings at factory gates elsewhere in the city. He also visited Nadezhda Konstantinovna when she convalesced in the Sokolniki district on the northeastern outskirts. But, except when he himself spent periods of recuperation at the village of Gorki twenty miles from Moscow, he stayed in the central parts of the new capital. He had every opportunity to go to other towns and cities, but his only brief forays were to Petrograd in 1919 and 1920. Not even his frequently expressed nostalgia for the Volga region drew him back there. His place remained at the centre of revolutionary politics.
While he demanded orderliness as Sovnarkom sought to consolidate the regime and its policies, his comrades exasperated him. Late at night he would switch off his office light in the full knowledge that his economical attitude to electricity was not a defining characteristic of other Bolsheviks. Sovnarkom’s Chairman paced down the corridors switching off the lights left on by his comrades.13 None of them would ever be quite like him. No doubt they left their pencils unsharpened, their buttons unsewn, their books unreturned to libraries. How could you make the Revolution with such people? But, whatever the irritation he experienced, he got over it. He was cheered by the thought that the October 1917 Revolution had already lasted longer than the eleven weeks of the 1871 Paris Commune. This was the nearest he came to overt sentimentality unless we take into account his enthusiasm for the working class. Nadezhda Konstantinovna was uncomfortable about this. As they rode by car through Moscow, she noted the rising amount of vandalism: windows smashed, wooden walls and roofs broken up and stolen. To her it was obvious that delinquent workers should be punished for such behaviour; and she told her husband severely that he should smarten up his thinking. There could be no socialism while such behaviour remained condoned by default.
This marital dissension, which was kept from view by the Soviet censorship authorities, failed to induce Lenin to change his stance. It never did. He had fixed his mind on a strategic orientation that included the need for the working class to establish its dictatorship. He painted with a broad brush. He wanted to encourage revolutionary initiative and toss aside any considerations of ‘bourgeois morality’ for some years ahead. Yet there was much that had changed in his thought since the October Revolution. At every point of tension between elitist authoritarianism and mass self-liberation, Lenin’s priority was to secure his regime’s position – and this usually meant an increase in authoritarianism.
Indeed his measures began to cause consternation among the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Initially the Sovnarkom coalition partners had got on reasonably well. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were already delighted with Lenin’s Decree on Land, were equally pleased in February 1918 when he signed the Basic Law on the Socialisation of the Land which – with the vigorous support of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries – ratified the transfer of agricultural land to the peasants. But he also wanted local soviets to get the necessary food supplies into the towns. He repeatedly asserted that there was an abundance of grain in the countryside and that the greed of the better-off peasants, or kulaks as he called them, was responsible for the low rations provided by central and local government. There was no time for shilly-shallying. Even before the Brest-Litovsk Treaty Lenin had believed that ruthless measures ought to be taken. He was committed to the maintenance of the state monopoly of the grain trade and in the longer term he wanted to take land ownership away from private persons, including peasants, and to give it to the state. All this complicated the already difficult relations with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who had joined the Sovnarkom on the specific premise that they would be able to look after the interests of the peasantry.
Lenin’s way of consolidating the regime, however, was no longer subject to compromise. Already on 14 January 1918 he had drafted a Sovnarkom decree that minced no words:14
[Sovnarkom] proposes to the All-Russia Food Supplies Committee and the Commissariat of Food Supplies to intensify the dispatch not only of commissars but also of numerically strong, armed detachments for the most revolutionary measures for the movement of loads, the collection and distribution of grain, etc., and also for a merciless struggle with speculators right through to the proposal for local soviets to shoot discovered speculators and saboteurs on the spot.
His bleak inclinations of the past few weeks were taking shape as policy. Although it was not yet an open theme in his speeches, the movement towards ever greater severity was unmistakable.
Sovnarkom had no compunction in spring 1918 about suppressing the many soviets in the provinces that elected Menshevik majorities. The Cheka and the new Red Army contingents were deployed to prevent effective resistance. The regime no longer limited itself to hunting down its declared enemies: the Kadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries; it was starting also to persecute those groups in society on whose support it had relied in order to come to power. Lenin had assumed that, once the working class had begun to favour the Bolsheviks, it would never return to the enemies of Bolshevism. But his faith in ‘the proletariat’ had always been conditional even in 1917; and in 1902 his booklet What Is to Be Done? had asserted the total inadequacy of the workers to adopt revolutionary policies unless firmly and correctly guided by the Marxist intelligentsia. At best he had been an ideological paternalist. Now he felt uninhibited about overturning the civic rights of the working class: the supremacy of the regime was not permitted to be challenged. Even at the work-place there should be no concession to indiscipline, and Lenin indicated that he wanted to introduce the time-and-motion principles of the same American theorist, F. W. Taylor, whom he had once excoriated as an advocate of capitalist interests.
Dictatorship, he thought, was crucially desirable. Reviewing the party’s strategy in April 1918 in his booklet The Current Tasks of Soviet Power, he acknowledged that external threats to the country’s security persisted and that there were massive and growing internal difficulties increased in food supplies, transport, industrial production and administrative efficiency; and he insisted: ‘But dictatorship is a big word. And big words should not simply be thrown up into the wind. Dictatorship is iron authority, authority that is revolutionarily audacious as well as rapid and merciless in its suppression of both exploiters and hooligans.’15 He followed this assertion with an analysis that shocked many of his closest associates of earlier months. Lenin declared that ‘guilt for the torments of hunger and unemployment is borne by all who break labour discipline in any factory, on any farm, in any enterprise’. The solution was the application of truly dictatorial methods. He explained that it was ‘necessary to learn how to discover those guilty of this and to hand them over to the courts and punish them pitilessly’.16
The Constituent Assembly’s dispersal and the signature of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk’s confirmed Lenin’s will to stay in power even if every other political party, group and individual in the country remained opposed. The Bolshevik party under his leadership had driven even the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries away. This was not the only result. The movements and clarifications of governmental policy had done much to alienate broad sections of opinion in society. Workers and, when they heard about the October Revolution, peasants had welcomed Sovnarkom’s decrees; but, as Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee developed policy, they encountered hostility in many quarters. Equally importantly, they met with apathy. The Bolsheviks were ruling what was left of the Russian Empire, which was mainly the Russian-inhabited regions, as a beleaguered political minority. And their awareness of this led them to harden their attitudes. They felt that the best way to deal with trouble was to get tougher rather than offer compromises. This common attitude brought Lenin and the Bolshevik Left Communists back together even though, after Brest-Litovsk, they could not flaunt their growing collaboration.
Their rapprochement was assisted by the way Lenin stiffened the element of state ownership and regulation in industry and agriculture. An increasing segment of public opinion called on Sovnarkom to scrap the state grain-trade monopoly and allow the peasants to sell their produce on the open markets. There was plenty of evidence that the peasantry was hoarding grain. In order to resuscitate economic exchange between town and countryside it was widely proposed that concessions to private trade were vital. The Kadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Provisional Government had approved and maintained the state grain-trade monopoly. Out of office, as the economic collapse reached the abyss, they urged that a drastic reversal of policy was required.
But the Bolshevik leaders would not contemplate this; they had made a ‘socialist revolution’ and would not countenance removing the anti-capitalist elements in policy that even a ‘government of capitalists’ – the Provisional Government – had consolidated. Indeed the internal differences of Bolsheviks on the measures needed to stave off utter economic disintegration were steadily disappearing. For some months after Bukharin, Osinski and their associates had criticised Lenin for his caution in organising the rapid transformation of the entire economy along socialist lines; they demanded the total nationalisation of industry, agriculture, trade, finance, transport and communication. Some of them believed that this was also Lenin’s requirement; but if they had carefully read his work between the February and October Revolutions, they would not have misled themselves. Certainly Lenin had argued that Russia was ready for and indeed badly needed a ‘transition to socialism’, and he postulated that all power should be transferred to class-based mass organisations such as the soviets. But, despite wanting a complete immediate transformation of politics, he urged that the economy should be handled more cautiously. According to Lenin, only those enterprises ought to be nationalised which were already run on large-scale capitalist lines.
In Russia this would mean the banks, the railways, the biggest factories and mines and some of the landed estates; but it should not involve the rest of the economy – and, although he had not spelled this out, the rest of the economy in fact involved most of the country’s working population. Russia was a country of peasants, artisans and stallholders. The bank, the large factory and the intensively cultivated estate were still the exceptions among the tens of thousands of enterprises in the general economy.
Consequently Lenin wanted Sovnarkom to expropriate only the most ‘advanced’ enterprises. The remainder needed to be organised into larger units and equipped with up-to-date technology before they were to be nationalised; and Lenin believed that this task would best be undertaken by capitalism. The revolutionary socialist state would have to protect private sectors in industry and agriculture and foster their growth. He referred to this symbiotic relationship of Bolshevik politics and capitalist economics as ‘state capitalism’. It was a phrase that satisfied his wish to stay within conventional Marxist notions about the necessary stages of economic development (even though he had abandoned those notions as regards political development). But of course it offended those many Bolsheviks – probably most of them – who had made the October Revolution with a view towards turning the world upside down. Lenin’s stipulation that capitalism should be widely maintained was simply incomprehensible to them. Nor was their anger mollified by his insistence that his scheme was a method of exploiting capitalism. They wanted a more direct and uncompromising revolutionary strategy. Bukharin and his friends wanted to take not only banks and metallurgical plants but also workshops, market stalls and peasant plots into governmental ownership.
They put their arguments against Lenin in terms of doctrine: in their opinion, he was offering a strategy that made too many compromises with capitalism. What they omitted to mention was that his strategy was simply unworkable. Lenin had announced that his intention was to exploit capitalists and then get rid of capitalism. Already he had nationalised banks and many factories and mines; he had introduced a system of heavy state regulation of foreign trade; he had repudiated his government’s obligation to pay its debtors at home and abroad. He had abrogated the civic rights of the wealthier citizens and established the Cheka. He had established a class dictatorship. In such circumstances it is surprising that he was able to find any industrialists who would agree to have dealings with him. One such man of business, V. P. Meshcherski, was discovered. But negotiations quickly broke down; the terms of Leninist ‘state capitalism’ proved altogether too socialistic for Meshcherski.
By then all Lenin’s instincts were pointing him away from compromise. As he came to appreciate the enormity of the difficulties ahead, he was already inclined to tip the balance in his thought ever more heavily on the side of state command and control. He had not come to power in order to lessen the degree of intervention by the public authorities in the economy or any other aspect of social life. If difficulties existed, they had to be tackled by increasing the intensity of regulation. His theory of Revolution before 1917 had been marked by inconsistencies and contradictions. In power, he had to resolve this tension by practical means: he had to make his abstract formulae operational. This entailed an ever greater accentuation of the themes of dictatorship and violence. Also important, as his thought became clarified, was his commitment to centralism, hierarchy and discipline. Lenin essentially wanted the state to act, under the Bolshevik party’s control, as an engine of co-ordination and indoctrination. He still saw it as being important to release popular initiative; but the increasingly unpopularity of his party had jolted him into assuming that, if it came to a choice, he preferred to prescribe and impose policy rather than to let others – whether the entire people or a section such as the working class – take a course of action that annoyed him.
Not that the social bias in Lenin’s thought had disappeared. Far from it. He continued to stress the need to build up a state that gave favour to the working class. Enhanced opportunities for workers to be promoted to administrative office had to be guaranteed – and the assumption remained that the prime task facing the regime was the establishment of an efficient administration. His socialism was also avowedly and unashamedly urban in orientation. Villages had to be industrialised, peasants had to be turned into labourers and managers of collective farms. Small organisational units, furthermore, had to be phased out generally in society. Activity on a large scale with a huge number was regarded as inherently superior. Big was thought indisputably beautiful.
The essence of socialism, Lenin repeated ad nauseam, was ‘account-keeping and supervision’. For this purpose it was essential to concentrate on raising much higher the general standards of literacy, numeracy and punctuality. Absent from this vision, however, was a will to nurture altruism, kindliness, tolerance or patience. More fundamental to Leninist ideology was the emphasis on class struggle and civil war. Mercy was adjudged an inexcusable sign of sentimentality. The ruthless pursuit of the party’s aims was thought the supreme task. This had to be carried out dynamically. Leninism placed a high value upon the need for pressure to be exerted on institutions, groups and individuals to achieve its aims. Lenin accepted a great deal intellectually from the heritage of capitalism. Unlike the Left Communists, he thought that it would be helpful to maintain the old ‘specialists’ in their posts in factory, farm, bank and army regiment. ‘Bourgeois’ expertise had to be emulated before the ‘bourgeois’ experts themselves could be sacked. Lenin also accepted that the principle of competition, basic to capitalism, ought to be retained during the ‘transition to socialism’. Ways had to be found to put institution against institution in the fulfilment of the central state organs’ objectives.
Lenin was far from suggesting that the socialist Revolution would succeed merely through functionaries acting according to books of carefully framed rules. He demanded action, frenetic action. Procedural regularity was scoffed at. The ends justified the means in his thought, and there need be no moral criterion but whether a particular action helped or hindered the Revolution; and it was asserted that the Bolsheviks were equipped with scientific knowledge of what needed to be done. And so Lenin claimed unrivalled correctness for his ideology and was uninhibited in aspiring to indoctrinate the whole society with his prescriptions. He had no concept for arbitrariness because his mode of rule was itself essentially arbitrary by nature. His formal philosophy expressed contempt for any absolute commitment to universal goals such as democracy, social fairness and justice.
For many observers, then and later, this was a strange sort of socialism. Initially there were few books analysing the Soviet regime, since the potential writers were too active in political life. But soon they caught their breath and responded studiedly to the October Revolution. Most of the classical works of socialist theory not only in Russia but throughout Europe had started from the premise that socialism’s introduction would involve an immediate expansion of political participation, mass creativity, democratic and legal rights and practices, popular consultation and industrial democracy. Before 1917 there was already plenty of reason to question whether Lenin, the eulogist for dictatorship, was properly categorised as a socialist. He was not the only self-styled socialist who evoked such objections; similar criticism had been made of the whole tradition of advocates of dictatorship: Louis-Auguste Blanqui in France, Wilhelm Weitling in Germany and Pëtr Tkachëv in Russia. But, unlike them, Lenin had come to power; and the castigation of him was all the fiercer. In the eyes of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries at home and most socialists abroad, his Sovnarkom had unjustly called itself a ‘socialist’ government and had besmirched the name of ‘socialism’.
Lenin had also introduced huge confusion into general understandings about politics. Whereas his enemies tried to deny his membership of the fraternity of world socialism, he refused to accept that they were genuine socialists; and in order to demarcate himself from them he got the Bolshevik Seventh Congress in March 1918 to rename the Bolsheviks as the Russian Communist Party. Thus he hoped to point out to everybody that Bolshevism was aiming to achieve the ultimate goal: a communist society. But this had the effect of baffling most people. They noted that this ‘communist’ leader continued to call himself a socialist and to refer to the need to promote the ‘European socialist Revolution’. For those who were willing to read The State and Revolution, which had finally appeared (albeit in unfinished form since Lenin did not have time to write the last chapter before the October Revolution), a solution to this perplexing matter was available. Lenin had argued that socialism was the first great stage in the post-capitalist advance towards communism. It was possible, according to Lenin, to be both a socialist and a communist simultaneously. Such a conflation mortified non-Leninist socialists since it resulted in conservatives and liberals everywhere claiming that the inevitable consequence of any conceivable socialist government would be the sort of political, social and economic oppression that characterised Lenin’s Russia.
In 1918 Lenin liked to remind people of the Bolshevik party’s achievements:1
And so this policy, this slogan of ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ implanted by us in the consciousness of the broadest popular masses, gave us the opportunity in October [1917] to win so easily in Petersburg [and] turned the last months of the Russian Revolution into a single total triumphal procession.
The civil war has become a fact. What we predicted at the start of the revolution and even at the start of the war was greeted by a significant segment of socialist circles with distrust and even ridicule: the transformation of the imperialist war into civil war. On 25 October 1917 it became a fact for one of the largest and most backward countries taking part in the war. In this civil war the overwhelming majority of the population proved to be on our side and consequently victory came to us extremely easily.
In his estimation, the ideas inspiring the Petrograd seizure of power had been vindicated.
Once the party entered government, Lenin ceased to be as coy about those aspects of his thought that might annoy workers, soldiers and peasants – and indeed his party members. He publicly rehearsed his favourite topics: dictatorship, terror, civil war and imperialist war. He was still confident; it remained his premise that the amount of armed violence needed to protect the Revolution at home would be small. This assumption strikes us as peculiar only because we know what was about to occur: the Civil War. But Lenin’s mistake has to be understood in relation to his assumptions about socialist Revolution. Like other revolutionaries, he had read about the civil wars in Britain in the mid-seventeenth century and in France at the end of the eighteenth; but his interest was always in how the armies represented the interests of contemporary social classes. Civil war, for Lenin, was a more or less intensive class struggle. The ‘civil war’ he most studied was the large political struggle initiated in 1871 by the Paris Commune. In Lenin’s opinion, the Commune offered a rudimentary model for popular self-administration; repeatedly he expressed admiration for what it had achieved before being suppressed by the government forces of Adolphe Thiers.
Lenin in his simplistic way judged that the Paris Commune had come to grief mainly because it failed to impose a tight internal regime and to organise adequate military contingents. From this he drew the cheering conclusion that, if the ‘toiling classes’ of Russia avoided the Commune’s error, their numerical and organisational superiority would guarantee victory. And he persuaded himself that the period of ‘civil war’ that followed the October Revolution was coming to an end.
The odd little trouble spot survived. ‘But, in the main,’ he suggested:2
The task of suppressing the resistance of the exploiters was already resolved in the period from 25 October 1917 to (approximately) February 1918 or to the surrender of Bogaevski.
Next on to the agenda there comes… the task – the task that is urgent and constitutes the peculiarity of the current moment – to organise the administering of Russia.
Who was this Bogaevski? His name is recorded only in recondite accounts of the military actions in southern Russia in 1918–19. Afrikan Bogaevski was a Cossack commander who fought the Bolshevik-led forces, was captured after a minor engagement, but was allowed his freedom on condition that he refrained from further military activity. Lenin’s assessment was hugely amiss. He utterly failed to anticipate the intensity of the fighting about to engulf Russia. Even in southern Russia the Civil War was not ending but beginning as a Volunteer Army was being readied for action by Generals Alexeev and Kornilov, and this Volunteer Army was just one of three large forces being assembled by self-designated White officers pledged to overthrow the government in Moscow.
These were not the only groups aiming at the overthrow of Bolshevism. The Socialist-Revolutionaries, after the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, had reconvened in the city of Samara in the river Volga region and had founded an administration claiming to be the rightful government of all Russia. This administration called itself Komuch (which was the acronym of the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly), and was socialist in orientation. Elsewhere even the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were contemplating uprisings against Sovnarkom. Massive armed conflict was on the point of exploding across Russia. Lenin was famous for his strategic intuition in advance of the October Revolution. He had no such instincts about the Civil War.
In May 1918 he went on applying his general policies to the shattered economy. Chief among these was the imposition of what he called a Food Dictatorship, which rationalised the various local measures already being taken to procure food supplies for the towns. At Sovnarkom sessions he pressed his plans with urgency. When the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the National Economy seemed to hinder a coordinated approach by the Soviet state to industry and agriculture, Lenin was furious with Presidium leader V. P. Milyutin. Going home in a condition of shock, Milyutin confided to his diary:3
Sovnarkom issued a reprimand to the Presidium. Ilich even declared that ‘it would be worth putting the Presidium in prison on bread and water for a week, but because of our weakness let’s limit ourselves to a reprimand…’; and that while it was possible to put us on to water and even to plunge us into water, it was sheer utopia to put us on bread and that even the People’s Commissariat of Food Supplies wouldn’t permit such a luxury.
The fact that Milyutin was one of the few leading Bolsheviks who had supported Lenin in the Brest-Litovsk dispute gained him no relief. Lenin was on the rampage.
Lenin’s economic priority was the collection of grain from the countryside. Civil war was the last thing on his mind. He told Trotski, who was assembling a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army in his new role as People’s Commissar of Military Affairs, to devote nine-tenths of the Army’s efforts to the procurement of food supplies. He told Sovnarkom that the secreting of grain should become the most heinous crime. He urged that hoarders be treated as ‘enemies of the people’ and that the state should ‘wage and carry through a merciless and terrorist defence and war against the peasant bourgeoisie and any other bourgeoisie holding on to grain surpluses’.4 The clumsy phrasing gives a sense of the forceful emotions powering Lenin. Sovnarkom preferred a more temperate formulation, but on the substance of policy he easily got his way: most Bolshevik leaders were itching to augment state control. As the Food Dictatorship was inaugurated, Lenin secured the establishment of a new institution: committees of village poor (kombedy). When the government’s commissars reached the countryside, they were empowered to liaise with these committees so as to discover the identities of the better-off peasants engaged in the hoarding of grain. Any hoarded grain was to be weighed out on the spot and a portion was to be distributed to the village’s poorer members before the remainder was taken on to the towns.
Lenin had much greater difficulty with a further economic priority. By summer 1918 it was obvious that his proposal for collaboration with Russian industrialists such as Meshcherski would not work. Instead, to his colleagues’ amazement, he urged the conclusion of commercial deals with German businessmen. This second proposal was so contentious in later years that it was kept secret in the Sovnarkom archives. And it is easy to understand why. The Bolsheviks were critics of other socialists who failed to struggle for the overthrow of the ‘European bourgeoisie’. Lenin had spent the Great War denouncing Kautsky for avoiding a confrontation with Germany’s Imperial government and the magnates of German financial and industrial might. Now he wanted to deal commercially with those same magnates.
But then again Lenin had made the October Revolution on the premise that Russia would make its ‘transition to socialism’ with help from capitalists. He had hoped to get this from Russian capitalists. If this proved impracticable, why not try to appeal to German capitalists? Ever the tactician, Lenin could not see why his party was not capable of being as flexible as himself.
Yet his desire to make overtures to the capitalists of Germany did not signify a permanent accommodation to ‘German imperialism’. Lenin was still Lenin. He wished to exploit capitalist Germany while he could; but he still expected that such a Germany would not long endure. ‘European socialist Revolution’ remained high on his agenda. He had no doubt that far-left socialists abroad would triumph sooner or later. Justifying the Brest-Litovsk Treaty to the Fourth Congress of Soviets in March 1918 he had asserted: ‘We know that [Karl] Liebknecht will be victorious one way or another: this is inevitable in the workers’ movement.’ Lenin acknowledged that the Treaty gave no absolute guarantee of a ‘breathing space’ in Russia until such time as Liebknecht got going:5
Yes, the peace we have come to is unstable in the highest degree and the breathing space we’ve received can be broken any day from both east and west: there’s no doubt about it; our international situation is so critical that we must strain every nerve to survive as long as possible until the Western revolution matures, a revolution that is maturing much more slowly than we expected and wanted; it is feeding and covering ever more and more combustible material.
There were terrible moments for him. The worst was the declaration by Central Committee member Sokolnikov, the very man who signed the Treaty at Brest-Litovsk, that the Germans were no longer to be trusted and that the Treaty had been a mistake. He attacked the Treaty at the Central Committee on 10 May, and it was only Lenin’s fierce counter-offensive that saved Russia from going to war again.
Worse was to follow. At the end of the month there was one of those small military incidents that were occurring all over Russia: a group of soldiers rebelled against Soviet authority. But this incident was not easily dealt with. It involved Czech former prisoners-of-war captured by the Russian Imperial Army who, under an agreement with the Allies, were travelling across Siberia to North America so that they could fight on the western front against the Central Powers. The mutual distrust of the Soviet authorities and this Czech Legion was profound; and when Trotski tried to have them disarmed, a confrontation took place in May. The 35,000 Czechs, stronger than any military force that Sovnarkom could put against them, turned their trains back towards central Russia and indicated their readiness to fight on behalf of Komuch in Samara for the overthrow of Lenin and his fellow People’s Commissars.
Responsibility for dealing with the crisis was left to Trotski: even at this point Lenin did not sense the vital threat posed by the Czech Legion. He was preoccupied with the Fifth Congress of Soviets, which was scheduled to meet within the next few weeks. The two former partners in the Sovnarkom coalition, the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, eyed each other nervously throughout June 1918. The Congress opened on 4 July and such was the tension that each party placed a guard over its delegations. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were the first to act. On 6 July, while the Congress was debating, one of their leaders Yakov Blyumkin mounted an operation designed to blast the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk into oblivion. Blyumkin worked for the Cheka and had obtained a pass to visit the German embassy in Moscow. Once inside the building, he asked for a meeting with Ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach, in the course of which he pulled out a revolver and shot him before dashing outside. Mirbach was mortally wounded, and it was Blyumkin’s hope to provoke a diplomatic incident that would end with the Bolsheviks starting a revolutionary war with Imperial Germany.
The news was relayed to Lenin and Dzierżyński. Lenin perceived what Blyumkin had been calculating and sought to forestall a German invasion by suppressing the entire Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party. He also paid a visit to the German embassy to express condolence on behalf of Sovnarkom. The government in Berlin had to be reassured that the Soviet authorities desired to maintain friendly relations. Dzierżyński was instructed to take reliable Cheka units to the Left Socialist-Revolutionary headquarters on Trëkhsvyatitelski Lane and arrest the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee.
The operation was carried with Bolshevik military ineptitude. Arriving at the Left Socialist-Revolutionary headquarters, Dzierżyński was himself taken into custody. Lenin was at his wits’ end. If he could not rely on Dzierżyński, who could he turn to? (One answer might have been Trotski. But he was busy with the Czech Legion, and anyway he did not inspire total confidence at this stage.) The only thing for it was to assume personal control. Now he had two major tasks: the arrest of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee and the liberation of Dzierżyński. For this he would still need a further agency of enforcement. His only option was to approach the leader of the Latvian Riflemen, General I. I. Vacietis, to head the attack. Lenin told him that Sovnarkom might not survive till morning. He may have been exaggerating in order to raise Vacietis’s feeling of pride. More probably, he had an acute sense of the danger to the regime in the capital. If a poorly organised group had been able to seize power in October 1917, another such group might repeat the feat. To Lenin’s relief, Vacietis agreed to the assignment.
Things began to improve. The visit to the German embassy went as well as could be expected, and Vacietis’s troops did their violent job with efficiency. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary headquarters was captured on 7 July. Their leaders were arrested and Dzierżyński was found unharmed. Lenin and Dzierżyński decided that, although proof was not available of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee’s complicity in the assassination, a member of their Central Committee should be executed. Thus the Germans would be shown that the Bolsheviks meant business in protecting the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Bolsheviks were not discomfited by the thought of killing other socialists. On 9 July 1918, Dzierżyński in person undertook the task and shot Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee member V. A. Alexandrovich.
The Cheka’s inefficiency during the Mirbach crisis continued to rankle with Lenin. He was also intrigued by how the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had organised their armed action against the Bolsheviks, and on 7 July he decided on the spur of the moment to pay a visit to their former headquarters in Trëkhsvyatitelski Lane. Stepan Gil as usual was the chauffeur. As they made their way, a group of armed men sprang on to the road and shouted at them to stop. Lenin instructed Gil to comply, but the armed men started to fire at them before they stopped. Luckily the men turned out to be Bolshevik supporters, and Lenin let them off with a rather schoolmasterly admonishment: ‘Comrades, you mustn’t casually fire at people from behind corners without seeing who you’re firing at!’6 This was the least he might have said in the circumstances. But the travails of that day were not yet over. Lenin’s car was stopped again after the visit to Trëkhsvyatitelski Lane. A semiofficial patrol of youths demanded to see his identity papers and decided that the document indicating that he was Sovnarkom Chairman was invalid. He was arrested and taken to the nearest police station. At least on this occasion he was not threatened with gunfire, and the police officer and he felt able to laugh about the incident.7
Even then his day’s tutorial in life’s dangers in the Soviet republic had not been brought to a close. Shots were fired at their car on the journey back from the police station.8 The shots missed. Gil put his foot down hard on the accelerator and the two men arrived more exhausted than infuriated at the Kremlin. Their little trip around Moscow had several times brought them close to death.
Lenin had not obtained much additional knowledge about the affair. Nor did he have an opportunity to acquire it in subsequent weeks. A still more serious military emergency was taking place in the Volga region. Komuch, having acquired a military force in the form of the Czech Legion, was ready to mount an offensive into the central region of Russia. From Samara they marched unopposed on Kazan before any defence could be assembled. Trotski as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs rushed to the Volga and, to general astonishment, the new Red Army succeeded in holding off the Komuch troops at the battle of Sviyazhk. As the Bolsheviks consolidated themselves in south-eastern Russia, there were growing problems in the north. The British had landed troops at Archangel and Lenin was concerned lest this be followed by a march on Petrograd. Recognising Sovnarkom’s military weakness, he secretly appealed to Germany for assistance. It was a highly sensitive option since Lenin could not be sure that the German forces themselves would not occupy Petrograd en route to Archangel. In fact the crisis faded and military collaboration between Sovnarkom and Ludendorff was not needed. But it had been a close-run thing. ‘Soviet power’ and the Bolshevik one-party state were under constant threat of collapse.9
All the while Lenin was in a rage. Nothing could quite satiate his appetite for revenge against those elements from Imperial Russian society that he despised. Some he simply hated. He had a personal score to settle with the descendants of Alexander III, the emperor who had refused to spare the life of his elder brother Alexander. Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their family had been held since 30 April in the Ipatev House in Yekaterinburg. There was a constant possibility that anti-Bolshevik forces might break through to the Urals and rescue the Imperial family. For months the Bolshevik Central Committee had secretly pondered what to do with Nicholas II.
A line of communication was in place for the Bolshevik regional leadership in the Urals to give information and receive orders. Nicholas II, at the time of his abdication in the previous year, had been the object of nearly universal contempt. Sympathy began to grow for him when he became simply citizen Nikolai Romanov. But Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee were implacable. The Romanovs had at the very least to be neutralised as a force in public life, and Trotski recommended that Nicholas should be brought back to Moscow and put on trial for the abuses committed by him and in his name before 1917. For a while Lenin demurred. Probably he did not like to associate himself directly with the judicial killing of Sovnarkom’s enemies. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee member V. A. Alexandrovich had been executed in secret and Lenin kept his distance from the event. But as the military encirclement of the Soviet-held territory continued, he hearkened to the argument for drastic steps to be taken. Nothing was more drastic than the event in the early hours of 18 July 1918. The former Emperor and his family were woken from their beds, taken down to the Ipatev House cellar, lined up against the wall and shot.
It was among the most gruesome massacres of the Revolution. The victims included not only Nicholas and his wife but also their four daughters and their haemophiliac son together with several servants. In captivity, Nicholas had spent his time reading the Old Testament and Russian nineteenth-century classic novels. He and his family diverted themselves by putting on playlets for each other. Nicholas acted nobly as the paterfamilias and Alexandra proved herself an able manager of the family’s very restricted domestic budget. The Bolshevik leaders hardly appear in the last records they left behind. Alexandra’s diary in 1918 mentions Lenin only once. The Imperial couple’s main worry was that Nicholas should be put under duress to co-sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. How little they knew their Lenin. Neither Lenin nor any other Bolshevik leader would have dreamed of using the Romanovs in order to lend legitimacy to the Soviet regime. But about one thing they were absolutely right: that Lenin had the power of life or death over them. Empress Alexandra wrote on 4 June 1918: ‘I had a bath at 10. Lenin gave the order that the clocks have to be put 2 hours ahead (economy of electricity) so that at 10 they told us it was 12. At 10 strong thunderstorm.’10 Like most Russians, the Romanovs were disoriented by the changes made by the Bolsheviks. They were devout, perplexed and very middle-class in their habits. For them, Lenin was the Antichrist.
He exterminated the Romanovs because they had misruled Russia. But he also turned to such measures because he enjoyed – really enjoyed – letting himself loose against people in general from the ancien régime. He hated not only the Imperial family but also the middling people who had administered and controlled Russia before 1917. He had never forgotten the ostracism undergone by the Ulyanovs after the conviction of Alexander Ilich. Landlords, priests, teachers, engineers and civil servants had treated them as pariahs. Why should he protect them now?
There was a contradiction here. In The State and Revolution, at the height of his optimism about the working class, Lenin had argued that middle-class ‘specialists’ in the various professions would need to be kept in employment until such time as ordinary workers could be trained to take their place. But by mid-1918 he was fomenting the maltreatment of‘the bourgeoisie’; and, if he had given even the slightest attention to what this meant in practice, he would have known that this would have grievous consequences for those much needed ‘specialists’. And yet this does not mean that he definitely and positively wanted scientists, teachers, accountants and writers to suffer. It is more likely that he allowed his angry zeal for class struggle, including terror, to dominate everything in his thought. Politics had become viciously violent. Bolsheviks were not only purveyors of terrorism: they also were the targets of terrorist actions. Lenin indeed had nearly been assassinated in January 1918, and a leading member of the Party City Committee in Petrograd, V. Volodarski, was killed in June. The violence in Russia was largely the product of the October Revolution, and was to a considerable extent the fault of Lenin. But once the cycle of violence had started rolling he was no longer the only person responsible for applying it. He was transfixed by his concern to terrorise every conceivable opponent of Sovnarkom.
The old problems with his health – headaches and insomnia – agitated him throughout spring and summer. From April to August his distraction was such that he published no lengthy piece on Marxist theory or Bolshevik party strategy. This was hardly odd behaviour in the case of most politicians. But it was highly uncharacteristic of Lenin. Nadezhda Konstantinovna noticed that his illness was stopping him from writing.11 His inability to sleep at nights must have left him in an acutely agitated condition; he never had the chance of calm consideration of public policy. Everything was done in panic. Everything was done angrily.
Lenin’s choleric intensity is obvious from a letter he sent to the Bolsheviks of Penza on 11 August 1918:12
Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because ‘the last decisive battle’ with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated.
1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.
2. Publish their names.
3. Seize all their grain from them.
4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday’s telegram. Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucking kulaks.
Telegraph receipt and implementation.
Yours, Lenin.
Find some truly hard people.
These words were so shocking in tone and content that they were kept secret during the Soviet period. The lax definition of victims – ‘kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers’ – was a virtual guarantee that abuse would occur. The entire message invited such abuse. Persons were to be judicially murdered simply for belonging to a social category.
Indeed Lenin was treating whole areas of Penza province as ‘kulak districts’. By his extravagant language he increased the hazard of armed units marching into villages and treating everyone as kulaks. He wanted to intimidate the whole rural population, not just the rich minority – and he was reckless of the negative impact this might have on his own policy of creating ‘committees of the village poor’. It is the vicious relish in exemplary terror that is so disgusting. Not even just a firing squad and a quick death. No, Lenin demanded a public hanging. Knowing that not all Bolsheviks would have the stomach for this, he told the Penza comrades to go out and find some sufficiently hard types to carry out the measures. This kind of message was not the exception but the rule. Throughout summer 1918 and the rest of the Civil War, Lenin ranted in the same manner. He urged that the city of Baku should be razed to the ground in the event of its being attacked and that public announcement of this should be posted around Baku so that collaborators might be discouraged.13 He reverted the practices of twentieth-century European war to the Middle Ages. No moral threshold was sacred.
And whenever he heard about Komuch and the Volga region his rage was awesome. Was this a geographical coincidence? Possibly Lenin in some subconscious fashion was taking revenge on the Volga region for the ostracism of the Ulyanovs after his brother’s arrest. What is clear is that he was taking a very detached approach to his regime’s murderous imposition. His first cousin Vladimir Ardashev, with whom he had spent summers on the family estate of Kokushkino, had worked as a lawyer. Lenin as a youth had spent much time with the Ardashevs and there had been visits to him abroad by members of the Ardashev family. In summer 1918 the news came through to Lenin in Moscow: Vladimir Ardashev, an innocent professional person, had been shot by Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg as belonging to the undesirable category of the ‘bourgeoisie’.
But Lenin was barely disconcerted. Cousin Ardashev had been caught on the wrong side of the growing Civil War. He had been inactive in politics, and he had done nothing to deserve his execution; he was a decent human being, but the logic of events forced a choice upon all Russians: for or against the ‘proletarian dictatorship’. Family ties were subordinate to politics. It never occurred to Lenin to ask what kind of Revolution was worth while that condoned the physical elimination of well-meaning, competent and honest people like his cousin. Lenin kept himself out of range of the Revolution’s carnage. This was the behaviour of a bookish fanatic who felt no need to witness the violent actuality of his Revolution. He knew what he wanted in abstract political terms, and treated the death of innocent individuals as part of the unavoidable messiness of historical progress. And so he did not mind having blood on his hands. When he made those disgusting demands for mass terror along the river Volga, many of the victims would inevitably include people such as his deceased cousin. But this did not bother Lenin.
Meanwhile the emergencies of the Moscow summer had not come to an end. Lenin had been caught unawares by the Mirbach assassination on 6 July and been shocked by the Left Socialist-Revolutionary rising. He had been put in danger when he travelled around the capital with Stepan Gil on 7 July. Even worse was to befall Lenin in the following month.
It happened on 30 August 1918. Lenin’s sister Maria Ilinichna pleaded with him not to leave the Kremlin that day. There had already been reports of the assassination of the Petrograd Cheka chief. But neither Maria Ilinichna nor Bukharin could adduce anything concrete to put him off his programme.14 Lenin laughed and announced he would go ahead with things as he had agreed several days ago. This was set to include two short open-air speeches. The first was to be at the Corn Exchange two miles to the east of the Kremlin, in Basmanny district, before he swept down to the south. Lenin was on good form; he did not take his bodyguard, but set off alone with his chauffeur Stepan Gil.15 He was acting true to the party’s ethos. The Bolsheviks as a party downplayed the political importance of individuals and discouraged leaders from acting as if they were indispensable. Lenin’s foolhardiness at least disproves the allegation that he was a physical coward. There had been a suspicion of this in July 1917 when he had fled Petrograd rather than defend himself before the law against charges of being a German agent. But his activity in 1918 had been very different. Daily he was taking his chances along with fellow Bolshevik leaders in open public view in Moscow.
At the Corn Exchange he roused the audience: ‘Let every worker and peasant who is still wavering on the question of power just take a look at the Volga, Siberia and Ukraine, and the reply will come back on its own, clear and definite!’16 He gave another such speech at the Mikhelson Factory. He told his second audience that ‘democracy’ was an abused term in contemporary political parlance. Like a religious zealot trying to cleanse the lexicon of faith, Lenin declared: ‘The place where the “democrats” rule is where you’ll find genuine, unvarnished robbery!’ All agreed that Sovnarkom’s Chairman had been on good form.
As he made his way back to the car by the Mikhelson Factory yard, Lenin was approached by a couple of women complaining about the official barrier detachments that prevented peasants from coming into Moscow to trade their grain. He agreed with them that the detachments were not operating as they should.17 Gil revved up the engine in anticipation of the trip back to the Kremlin. Lenin had reached just three paces from the car when several shots were fired. The target was Lenin; and on this occasion the assassins were more accurate than their predecessors in January 1918. Lenin was hit twice and was bleeding profusely. Uproar ensued in the yard and the Bolshevik party activists tried to surround their leader and grab the suspects. The priority, however, was to bundle Lenin into the car. When Lenin began questioning him about what was happening, Gil told him abruptly to keep quiet. Gil took control. He decided not to drive to a hospital in case a further group of killers lay in wait but to make straight for the Kremlin. Medically this could have been disastrous since at this stage no one knew the nature of Lenin’s wounds. But, in the light of the summer’s events in Moscow, Gil was correct that the Kremlin was the only safe refuge.18
On arrival at the Kremlin, Lenin himself acted with complete disregard for common sense. He had been hit twice. One bullet had pierced his left shoulder-blade and gone through to near the collar-bone on his right side. The other was lodged on the left at the base of his neck. Although the blood was pouring from him, he rejected Gil’s offer to carry him upstairs to his apartment. (It would have been sounder to avoid any movement whatsoever.) Lenin stumbled upstairs. He lurched into his bedroom and slumped on to a chair. Maria Ilinichna got up to see what was happening, and was horrified. There was no surgeon on duty. The Kremlin precinct was restricted to Bolshevik leaders, their families, servants and security personnel.
And so an urgent word was put out for Bolsheviks in the Kremlin who had some medical training. Two were found: these were Vera Velichkina (wife of Lenin’s personal assistant Bonch-Bruevich) and Vera Krestinskaya (wife of Bolshevik Central Committee member Nikolai Krestinski). Maria looked around for some food for Lenin while Bonch-Bruevich and Krestinskaya examined him. There was in fact no food in the apartment. So much for Maria’s greater skill at housekeeping! Then Nadezhda Konstantinovna, arriving back from a meeting at Moscow University, was told by Alexei Rykov what had happened.19 Her first thought was that he might be about to die. It had already been discovered that he had a punctured lung. What else might be found out? Nobody said much to reassure her. The Latvian maid was so terrified that she locked herself away. Panic was growing. Meanwhile Maria Ilinichna wanted to send someone out to the nearest grocer’s shop for a lemon. But she stopped herself when the thought occurred to her that the grocer, too, might be a collaborator of the assassins and might be plotting to purvey poison to the Kremlin. Lenin’s four female carers – Maria, Nadya and the two Veras – limited themselves to sending out to the nearest pharmacy for medicine.20 Why chemists should have been politically more reliable than grocers was not considered.
Things calmed down as prominent hospital surgeons were summoned to attend, and Professors Vladimir Rozanov and V. M. Mints arrived in the early hours of 31 August.21 A pot was already on the boil in the next room for the sterilising of the bandages. Rozanov and Mints disrobed the patient and staunched his wounds. Lenin’s arm was raised on a hoist.22 At last Lenin recognised the seriousness of his injury: ‘Is the end near? If it’s near, tell me straight so that I don’t leave matters pending.’23 The doctors reassured him that his condition would soon be stabilised.
By 1 September he was fit enough to be X-rayed.24 Lenin told his doctors that he felt no great discomfort from the puncture wounds and it was thought best to leave the bullets alone.25 Rozanov and Mints wanted to prevent their patient from exerting himself too quickly. The arm-hoist was invaluable for this purpose. Lenin was immobilised for as long as it was in place. He was also persuaded to take a lengthy period of convalescence outside Moscow: anything was better than the hoist in the Kremlin. By chance a large mansion house had come into the hands of the government in the previous week. It lay outside the village of Gorki, twenty-two miles to the capital’s south.26 It could be reached by road or by train to the little rail-stop of Gerasimovka. The house already had electricity, a telephone and central heating. It was also conveniently empty; the previous owners General and Mrs Reinbot had not lived there for years. It was readily convertible to use as a sanatorium. Lenin was passed fit for the journey and driven by road to Gorki on 25 September 1918.
Few Russians and even fewer foreigners had predicted that Lenin’s party would get its hands on power in the first place. Had it not been for the Great War, there would have been no October Revolution. Lenin had been given his chance because of the wartime economic dislocation, administrative breakdown and political disarray. And he had adjusted his thought and behaviour to the opportunities on offer. In particular, he had handled his party with perceptiveness, determination and daring. Without Lenin there would still have been problems for the Provisional Government. Almost certainly the Provisional Government would have fallen. But Lenin’s activity ensured that the manner of its collapse led to a political order of extreme authoritarianism. It also made civil war inevitable. Lenin had blustered, bullied and gambled. He had made extraordinary mistakes. He had pretended to a scientific attitude belying his intuitive approach to politics. He had tugged Marxism round to the kind of revolution he desired. He had split socialism in Russia and Europe into antagonistic camps and had set about building a world with the instruments of ideological polemic, political struggle and civil war. He had yet to show that his general prognosis was realistic. In the heat of armed conflict, as a variety of forces were concentrating their efforts to overthrow Sovnarkom, Lenin hoped and expected to justify himself.