Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 6

KALMYK SAVIOR

Some comrades said it is utopian to advance the question of the socialist revolution, because capitalism is weakly developed with us. They would be correct if there were no war, if there were no disintegration, if the foundations of the economy were not shattered.

Iosif Stalin, Bolshevik Party Congress, late July 19171

Save Russia and a grateful people will reward you.

A shout-out to General Lavr Kornilov, supreme commander, by a Constitutional Democrat, August 19172

“IT’S STAGGERING!” exclaimed one exiled revolutionary at the newspaper reports of the February downfall of the monarchy in Russia. “It’s so incredibly unexpected!”3 That exile was forty-seven years old and named Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. For nearly seventeen years straight he had been living outside Russia. After tsarism’s coercive and corrupt rule, its narrow privilege and pervasive poverty, and above all its relentless denial of human dignity, hope for new horizons understandably soared. The entire empire, while at war, became embroiled in one gigantic, continuous political meeting, with a sense anything might be possible.4 The removal of tsar and dynasty during the monumental war, it turned out, would exacerbate nearly every governing problem it had been meant to solve. The downfall of any authoritarian regime does not ipso facto produce democracy, of course. A constitutional order must be created and sustained by attracting and holding mass allegiance, and by establishing effective instruments of governance. The Provisional Government, which replaced the tsar, would achieve none of that.

As both anarchy and hope erupted in the war-torn land, new and transformed mass organizations proliferated.5 These included not just revolutionary movements, such as the Bolsheviks and others, and not just grassroots soviets and soldiers’ committees but, even more basically, the army and navy. In 1914, imperial Russia’s population of 178 million had been dispersed across 8.5 million square miles of territory, but the war recruited some 15 million imperial subjects into a mass organization—the Russian “steamroller.” This unprecedented concentration would permit, once the tsar had vanished, an otherwise unattainable degree of political activity, right up to full-fledged congresses of elected deputies at the front itself. In mid-1917, some 6 million troops were at the front. Additionally, 2.3 million thoroughly politicized soldiers were deployed in sprawling rear garrisons, in almost every urban center of the empire.6 To these millions, the February Revolution meant “peace”—an end to the seemingly endless Great War—and the dawn of a new era.

Well before 1917, ordinary people readily accepted the idea of an irreconcilable conflict between labor and capital, but rather than speak of classes per se, they tended to speak of light versus darkness, honor versus insult. A trajectory of suffering, redemption, and salvation was how they made sense of the struggle with their masters, not capital accumulation, surplus value, and other Marxist categories.7 This would change as languages of class came to suffuse all printed and spoken public discourse in revolutionary Russia, from farms and factories to the army, fleet, and corridors of power. Even the classically liberal Constitutional Democrats, who strove to be above class (or nonclass), fatally accepted the definition of February as a “bourgeois” revolution.8 This step conceded, implicitly, that February was not in itself an end, but a way station to an eventual new revolution, beyond liberal constitutionalism. As 1917 saw the mass entrance into politics of soldiers and sailors, brought together into a giant organization, Russia’s army would steamroll not Germany but the country’s own political system.

Given the role that the army had played in 1905–6 in saving the regime, and given the role it could be expected to have to play again, the tsar’s decision to roll the iron dice had been an all-in gamble on the masses’ patriotism. The fatal flaw of the tsarist regime had proven to be its inability to incorporate the masses into the polity, but the widespread politicization of the masses by the war meant that the constitutional experiment of 1917—if it was to have any chance whatsoever of surviving—needed to incorporate not just any masses, but mobilized soldiers and sailors. But if the Great War in effect restructured the political landscape, vastly deepening social justice currents that had already made visions of socialism popular before 1917, the Provisional Government proved no match for that challenge. On top of its feeble governing structures, its entire symbolic universe failed miserably, from the use of a tsarist eagle, uncrowned, as state symbol to its new national anthem, “God Save the People,” sung to the Glinka melody of “God Save the Tsar.” Caricatures of the Provisional Government were accompanied by popular pamphlets, songs, and gestures that discredited all things bourgeois, attacking the educated, the decently dressed, the literate, as fat cats, swindlers—even Russia’s Stock Market Gazette poked fun at the bourgeoisie.9 At the same time, in 1917, far more even than in 1905–6, Russia’s constitutional revolution was deluged by a multifaceted leftist revolutionary culture enacted in evocative gestures and imagery: the “Internationale,” red flags and red slogans, and a vague yet compelling program of people’s power: “All Power to the Soviets.” The potent hammer-and-sickle symbol appeared in spring 1917 (well before the Bolshevik coup), and it would soon capture the linkage—or the hoped-for linkage—between the aspirations of urbanites and the aspirations of country folk, joined in possibilities for social justice (socialism). The political mood in 1917, as one contemporary observer rightly noted, was characterized by “a general aspiration of a huge mass of Russians to declare themselves, no matter what, to be absolute socialists.”10

How “socialism” came to be Bolshevism, and how the Bolsheviks came to be Leninist, are separate questions. Lenin and the Bolsheviks neither invented nor made broadly popular in Russia European socialism’s long-developing symbolic repertoire, to which the war and then the February Revolution added profound extra impetus. But if the Russian empire experienced a mind-and-spirit mass socialist revolution—in the city streets and villages, at the front and in the garrisons, in the borderlands and even in adjacent regions beyond the state border—well before the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, the Bolsheviks in 1917 (and beyond) would manage to claim the socialist revolutionary repertoire, indeed, relatively quickly, almost to monopolize it. “The revolution” came to Lenin, and he proved ready to seize it, even against much of the Bolshevik inner circle.

Stalin’s role in 1917 has been a subject of dispute. Nikolai Sukhanov (Himmer), the ubiquitous chronicler of revolutionary events who was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and had a Bolshevik wife, forever stamped interpretations, calling Stalin in 1917 “a grey blur, emitting a dim light every now and then and not leaving any trace. There is really nothing more to be said about him.”11 Sukhanov’s characterization, published in the early 1920s, was flat wrong. Stalin was deeply engaged in all deliberations and actions in the innermost circle of the Bolshevik leadership, and, as the coup neared and then took place, he was observed in the thick of events. “I had never seen him in such a state before!” recalled David Sagirashvili (b. 1887), a fellow Social Democrat from Georgia. “Such haste and feverish work was very unusual for him, for normally he was very phlegmatic no matter what he happened to be doing.”12 Above all, Stalin emerged as a powerful voice in Bolshevik propaganda. (For all the talk, most of it negative, about his involvement in expropriations during the wild days of 1905–8, in the underground, from the very beginning, he had really been an agitator and propagandist.) On May Day 1917, he noted that “the third year approaches since the rapacious bourgeoisie of belligerent countries dragged the world into the bloody slaughterhouse”—one of his typically incendiary editorials.13 To party circles as well as public audiences, he delivered speech upon speech, many of which were published in the press. Stalin wrote often in the main Bolshevik newspaper, while editing and shepherding into print far more.14 Between August and October—the critical months—he authored some forty lead articles in Pravda and its temporary replacements Proletariat or Workers’ Path.15 This outpouring—a sharp contrast to his silence during the first nearly three years of the war—stressed the need to seize power in the name of the soviets, which to Lenin meant in the hands of the Bolsheviks.

The reestablishment of functional institutions and a new authority to fill an immense void was a staggering task, which the ongoing war made still vaster, narrowing the possible political options. All this might appear to have rendered the onset of a new dictatorship a foregone conclusion. But countries do not descend into dictatorship any more than they burst into democracy. A dictatorship, too, must be created, and sustained. And modern dictatorship—the rule of the few in the name of the many—requires not only the incorporation of the masses into a polity but a powerful symbolic repertoire and belief system, in addition to effective instruments of governance and well-motivated repression.16 Amid the kind of state breakdown Russia underwent in 1917, the idea—or fear—that a strong modern dictatorship would be created out of the rampant chaos could only seem farfetched. One key to Bolshevik power, however, lay in the Russian establishment’s tireless search for a savior. Diverse efforts to stave off the triumph of Bolshevism, particularly those centered on Supreme Commander General Lavr Kornilov, would end up having the perverse effect of decisively strengthening Bolshevism. The outcome of the mass participatory process after February 1917 remained dependent on the war and the fundamental structure of soldiers’ moods, but also the specter of counterrevolution, analogized from the French Revolution after 1789. For the Bolsheviks, the idea of counterrevolution was a gift.

FREEDOM VERSUS FIRM AUTHORITY

Russia’s constitutional revolution got a second chance, this time, unlike 1905–6, without the autocrat. Mishap and illegitimacy, however, shadowed the Provisional Government from its birth. Nicholas II had agreed to abdicate in favor of thirteen-year-old Alexei and to name Grand Duke Mikhail, his brother, as regent. The high command and Duma president Rodzyanko—monarchists all—counted on the cherubic Alexei to rally the country, while affording them a free hand. But the tsar, conferring once more with his court physician, heard again that hemophilia was incurable and that once the fragile boy took the crown, Nicholas would have to part with him and go into exile, and so, the fatherly tsar impetuously renounced Alexei’s right to the throne, too, naming Mikhail outright.17 By the 1797 succession law, however, a tsar could be succeeded only by his rightful heir, in this case Nicholas II’s firstborn son, and a minor such as Alexei had no right to renounce the throne.18 Beyond the illegality of naming Grand Duke Mikhail, no one had bothered to consult him; on March 3, a hasty summit took place with him in Petrograd. Paul Miliukov, leader of the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), argued for retention of the monarchy, stressing tradition and the need to preserve the state; Alexander Kerensky, then a Duma deputy of the left, urged Mikhail to renounce, stressing popular moods.19 Mikhail listened, mulled, and decided not to accept unless a forthcoming Constituent Assembly (or constitutional convention) summoned him to the throne.20 Thus, what the generals had started—Nicholas II’s abdication—the politicians finished: namely, Russia’s de facto conversion into a republic. Two jurists hastily drafted an “abdication” manifesto in which Mikhail transferred “plenary powers” to the Provisional Government, even though the grand duke had no such authority to convey. In the chaos of regime change, the “abdication” manifesto of non-Tsar Mikhail Romanov provided the only “constitution” that would ever undergird the unelected Provisional Government.21

Revolution, by definition, entails violation of legal niceties. But in this case, eleven men—essentially handpicked by the fifty-eight-year-old Miliukov, who took the foreign ministry—replaced not just the hollowed-out autocracy but also the Duma, whence they emerged.22 This was not because the Duma had become illegitimate. Among most frontline troops as of March 1917, acceptance of, if not confidence in, the Duma remained.23 The Duma, for all its flaws, had earned some stripes by clashing with the autocracy over the years. After being prorogued, some members had convened in defiance of the tsar. But a draft protocol of the Provisional Government’s first session (March 2) indicates that the group of assembled men contemplated resorting to the infamous Article 87 of the tsarist Fundamental Laws to rule without a parliament, a move for which the constitutionalists had viciously denounced Stolypin. The first meeting protocol also specified that “the full plenitude of power belonging to the monarch should be considered as transferred not to the State Duma but to the Provisional Government.”24 In fact, the Provisional Government laid claim to the prerogatives of both legislature and executive: the former Duma (the lower house) as well as the State Council (the upper house, abolished by government decree); the former Council of Ministers (the executive, dismissed by Nicholas II’s order of abdication) and, soon, the abdicated tsar. Initially, the Provisional Government met in the Duma’s Tauride Palace but quickly relocated to the interior ministry and then settled in the gilded imperial Mariinsky Palace, where the Council of Ministers and the State Council had held formal sessions. Poorly attended “private” meetings of the Duma (with Mikhail Rodzyanko still president) would continue through August 20, 1917, and from time to time, ministers of the Provisional Government would trek over to the Tauride to chat privately with members of the aimless Duma. But there was no legislature. Duma members pleaded to have the legislature legally reinstated, but Miliukov and the rest of the Provisional Government refused.25

What was this? The Provisional Government was not a well-intentioned but hapless bunch that would be undone by unprecedented economic collapse and Bolshevik sedition. The rebellious old-regime insiders had long claimed to want a constitutional monarchy with a “responsible” government, by which they meant a government rooted in parliamentary majorities, but in their great historical moment, they immediately created another central government suspended in the air. When Miliukov had first publicly announced the membership of a Provisional Government in the Tauride Palace’s columned Catherine Hall on March 2, one person had interjected, “Who elected you?” “The Russian Revolution elected us,” Miliukov answered, and vowed to step aside “the moment representatives, freely elected by the people, tell us they wish to give our places to others more deserving of their confidence.”26 No one had elected them, and, crucially, no one would be given the opportunity to un-elect them. To be sure, the self-assigned government did promise the “immediate preparation for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal, equal, direct and secret ballot, which will determine the form of government and the constitution of the country.” The government added that it had not “the slightest intention of taking advantage of the military situation to delay in any way the realization of the reforms and measures.” Such a universal-suffrage Constituent Assembly—which is what rendered their government “provisional”—might seem to have made the Duma superfluous.27 But over the eight months of the Provisional Government’s existence, through four iterations (March, May, July, September), it would fail to bring a constitutional convention into being. Difficult circumstances cannot account for this failure. (In 1848, when France’s July Monarchy fell, a Constituent Assembly was convened within four months.) Rather, Miliukov and the Cadets deliberately stalled on elections for the Constitutional Assembly, privately fearful of the votes by “war-weary” soldiers and sailors, to say nothing of the peasant mass.28 The constitutionalists, who had no constitution, avoided the ballot box. The February Revolution was a liberal coup.

All through the war, some classical liberals in Petrograd as well as Moscow had been clamoring to take power for themselves—and now they had it, or so it seemed.29 The one socialist in the initial Provisional Government, the thirty-six-year-old Kerensky—who served as justice minister, then war minister, and finally prime minister, having held no significant executive office before 1917—would later write that “with abdication of the emperor all the machinery of apparatus of Government was destroyed.”30 True, but Kerensky had been the keenest inside proponent for an end to the monarchy. In addition, the Provisional Government deliberately abetted the Russian state’s disintegration. On March 4, 1917, rather than try to salvage a police force out of the dissolving tsarist police, whose offices in the capital had been ransacked, the Provisional Government formally abolished the Department of Police and okhranka, while reassigning Special-Corps-of-Gendarmes officers to the army. But the newly formed “citizen militias” that were supposed to replace the police failed miserably: looting and social breakdown spread, thereby hurting the poor as much as the rich, and staining the cause of democracy.31 (Some militias, predictably, were headed by former convicts who escaped or were released from prison in the chaos.) On March 5, 1917, the Provisional Government dismissed all governors and deputy governors, almost all of them hereditary nobles, in an attack on “privilege” and preemption of “counterrevolution.” Some of these provincial executives had resigned of their own accord and some had been arrested locally. Still, most governors had participated in ceremonies to inaugurate the new Provisional Government, only to be treated as, ipso facto, disloyal.32 The Provisional Government never acquired local branches, and the “commissars” it dispatched to local governing bodies could be ignored. Those local bodies, meanwhile, took time to get up and running, then often succumbed to economic and governance chaos. The sole major institutions of the “old regime” to survive were the ministerial bureaucracy and the army. But the influence of central state functionaries cratered and, under Kerensky, the Provisional Government would fatally wreck the all-important army, too.33

The new Russia had one organizing principle that could not be ignored and was up for grabs: the lodestar of “the revolution.” Miliukov’s decision not to root the government in the Duma invited the elected Petrograd Soviet to fulfill that crucial parliamentary role. The Soviet, whose reemergence had prompted the Provisional Government into existence, came to occupy more and more of the rooms in the Tauride, symbol of opposition to tsarism and of elected representation.34 And yet, as a hybrid of both representative and direct democracy (like a Jacobin club), the Soviet—eventually with more than 3,000 members—struggled mightily, and, as we shall see, ultimately unsuccessfully, to live up to its popular mandate amid ever more radicalized expectations.35 Indeed, even before the announcement of the Provisional Government’s formation, garrison soldiers, when ordered by the Duma’s Military Commission to return to their nearby barracks and submit to discipline, had stormed into a session of the Soviet on March 1, 1917, and laid out demands. The angry garrison soldiers had first tried to present their case to the Duma, but were rebuffed.36 “I don’t know whom to deal with, whom to listen to,” one soldier deputy to the Petrograd Soviet complained of military authority that day. “Everything is unclear. Let’s have some clarity.”37 What became known as Order No. 1 authorized “committees of representatives elected from the lower ranks” to adjudicate relations between soldiers and their officers, effectively terminating formal discipline in the army. De facto, such a state of affairs already obtained in the rebellious garrison, but now soldiers and sailors at the front, de jure, would have to obey their officers and the Provisional Government only “to the extent that” orders were deemed not to contradict decrees of the Soviet.38 On March 9, the new war minister, Alexander Guchkov, one of the two monarchist Duma representatives sent to obtain Nicholas II’s abdication, had been asked by the tsar whether such abdication would have consequences. Now, Guchkov learned of Order No. 1 for the army only upon its publication. He telegraphed General Alexeyev at front headquarters, reporting that “the Provisional Government has no real power of any kind and its orders are carried out only to the extent that this is permitted by the Soviet,” which controls “the troops, railroads, postal and telegraph services.” Guchkov suggested that the government resign en masse to acknowledge its lack of authority.39

The Provisional Government would last all of 237 days, 65 of which were spent trying to form a cabinet (that was more time than any of its four different cabinets would last). Here was the further rub: the effective authority of the Soviet, too, was widely overestimated. Soldiers’ committees did not see themselves as subordinate to the Soviet. On March 5, the Provisional Government and Soviet had jointly issued Order No. 2, expressly denying the rumored right to elect officers and reaffirming the necessity of military discipline—to no avail.40 Trotsky would famously dub this situation “dual power,” but it more resembled “dual claimants to power”: a Provisional Government without a legislature or effective executive institutions, and a Petrograd Soviet amounting to an unwieldy quasi-legislature that was not legally recognized as such.

A third grouping existed as well: the political right, which initially accepted the head-turning Provisional Government’s replacement of the failed autocracy but which lived in fear as well as hope.41 Around 4,000 officials of the “old regime” suffered arrest during the February Revolution, many turning themselves in to escape being torn to pieces by the crowds. In fact, bloodshed had been relatively minor: perhaps 1,300 wounded and 169 deaths, mostly at the naval bases of Kronstadt and Helsinki, where the rank-and-file lynched officers (amid rumors of their treasonous activities). Still, the post-February press stepped up the vilification of rightist organizations, and revolutionaries assaulted the offices of the most notorious far right group, the Black Hundreds. (The Petrograd Soviet seized some rightist printing presses for its own use.) Within weeks of Nicholas II’s abdication, Vladimir Purishkevich—cofounder of the 1905 right-wing Union of the Russian People, and coassassin of Rasputin—had allowed in a pamphlet, which circulated widely in typescript, that “the old regime cannot be resurrected.”42 By July 1917, however, the extreme right would regain its footing, and Purishkevich would be pointedly listing Russia’s revolutionary Jews by their real names and demanding dissolution of the Petrograd Soviet as well as a “reorganization” of the “cowardly” Provisional Government.43 Over on the less radical right, many believed, with cause, that they had played a significant role in the downfall of Nicholas II and ought to have a place in the new order, but the varied associations of nobles and landowners, business elites, church officials, tsarist state functionaries, rightist military officers and self-styled patriots of all stripes had grave difficulty being accepted into the new order after February 1917. On the contrary, merely for exercising their legal right to organize, traditional conservatives were subjected to charges of “counterrevolution.”44 These accusations against an establishment mostly desirous of continuing to support the February Revolution but essentially not allowed to do so would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And then there was the empire. Upon the removal of the multinational institution of the tsar, many of the imperial borderlands declared themselves national units (not provinces) with “autonomy in a free Russia,” but their streams of urgent telegrams to the Provisional Government in the capital often went unanswered, and the borderlands began edging toward de facto independence—Finland, Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Baltics. “Everybody agrees,” wrote Maxim Gorky in June 1917, “that the Russian state is splitting all along its seams and falling apart, like an old barge in a flood.”45

Of course, to many people this weakening was liberating. Between May 1 and 11, 1917, the Muslim caucus of the defunct Duma convened the first All-Russia Congress of Muslims, an act of religious and communal solidarity, with some 900 attendees (double the number expected) from across the country and political spectrum—only the tiny handful of Bolshevik Muslim activists refused to attend. It opened with recitation of a verse from the Qu’ran, then Professor S. A. Kotlarevsky, head of the foreign religions bureau in the Provisional Government’s interior ministry, made a speech promising freedom of conscience and national educational development, while calling for a single, unified country, rather than federalism based upon ethnoterritorial units. Many Muslim delegates expressed disappointment. Some, especially Tatars, advocated for a single state for all Turkic peoples (under Tatar domination); a few pan-Turkic delegates refused to speak Russian, although no single Turkic language was intelligible to all the delegates. The final resolution on state organization entailed a compromise: “The type of governmental structure that will serve the best interests of the Muslim peoples of Russia shall be a united (federal) republic based on territorial autonomy; for Muslim peoples with no territorial claims, a people’s republic based on national cultural autonomy shall be secured.” Although more than 200 delegates signed a petition of protest over the vote for women’s equal right to inheritance and against polygamy, it passed—making Russia the first country with a large Muslim population to do so.46

Certainly the freedom was intoxicating.47 All the subjects of imperial Russia had broken through to an unprecedented degree of civic liberties that were independent of social station: freedom of association and the press, equality before the law, universal suffrage elections to local bodies, rights that the Provisional Government, dominated by lawyers and intellectuals, fixed in obsessive legal detail.48 Kerensky would jubilantly proclaim Russia the “freest country in the world”—transformed from Europe’s last autocracy to its “most democratic government”—and he was right.49 But freedom without effective governing institutions is, ultimately, not enduring. It is an invitation to all manner of adventurists and would-be saviors.50 February’s delirium of freedom, in just a few months, metamorphosed into a desperate longing for “firm authority.”51 By summer 1917, many prominent classical liberal Constitutional Democrats would join figures on both the traditional right and the radical right in seeing a redeemer in General Lavr Kornilov, the Russian army’s supreme commander.

Kornilov, forty-seven years old in 1917, though very short, thin, and wiry, with Mongol facial features, had much in common with the medium-height, thick-set thirty-nine-year-old Jughashvili-Stalin. Kornilov, too, was a plebeian—in contrast to the minor nobles Lenin and Kerensky—and Kornilov, too, had been born on the imperial periphery, in his case in Ust-Kamenogorsk (Oskemen) on the banks of the Irtysh (a tributary of the Ob). His father was a Cossack, his mother a baptized Altai Kalmyk (a mix of Turkic, Mongol, and other tribes conquered by Mongol overlords); he was raised an Orthodox Christian among the nomad-herders of the empire’s Qazaq steppes. But whereas Stalin sought to downplay his full Georgianness and blend into his Russian environment, Kornilov, who was half Russian, played up his exoticism, surrounding himself with red-robed Turkmen guards who wore tall fur hats, carried curved swords, and called their leader Great Boyar in Turkic (a language Kornilov spoke fluently). In further contrast to Stalin, Kornilov had attended the Russian empire’s military schools. He, too, was an excellent student, and, after postings on the border with Afghanistan—whence he led expeditions to Afghanistan, Chinese Turkestan, and Persia—Kornilov graduated from the General Staff Academy in St. Petersburg. In 1903–4, when Stalin was in and out of Caucasus prisons and Siberian exile, Kornilov was posted to British India, where, under the pretext of language study, he prepared a sharp-eyed intelligence report on British colonial troops. During the Russo-Japanese War, when Stalin was raising hell in Georgian manganese mines, Kornilov was decorated for bravery in land battles in Manchuria, after which he served as Russia’s military attache in China (1907–11). There he again traveled widely on horseback in exploration and met the young Chinese officer Jiang Jieshi, better known as Chiang Kai-shek, who later would unify China after a failed constitutional revolution and rule for some two decades. Intelligent and brave, Kornilov appeared cut from the same cloth as Chiang Kai-shek. During the Great War, Kornilov commanded an infantry division and was promoted to major general. While covering for Brusilov’s retreat in 1915, Kornilov fell captive to the Austro-Hungarian forces, but in July 1916, he managed to escape and return to Russia, to wide acclaim and an audience with the tsar. “He was always out front,” Brusilov noted of his subordinate on the battlefield, “and in this he won over his men, who loved him.”52

Kornilov’s star rose in inverse relation to Kerensky’s. The latter’s family hailed from Simbirsk, in central Russia, the same town as the Ulyanov family. “I was born under the same sky” as Lenin, Kerensky wrote. “I saw the same limitless horizons from the same high bank of the Volga.” Kerensky’s father was a schoolteacher and briefly headmaster at the high school where Lenin and Lenin’s brother Alexander studied; Lenin’s father, in turn, was a school inspector for the province and knew Kerensky pere, before the latter moved his family to Tashkent.53 But whereas Lenin looked set to follow in his father’s footsteps, studying for a law degree (Kazan University) to become a state functionary, only to drop out, Kerensky, eleven years Lenin’s junior, finished his law degree (St. Petersburg) and obtained a real job, serving as legal counsel to victims of tsarist repression in 1905, when he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In the Provisional Government, Kerensky, almost alone, did not fear the masses. He bred a monarchist-like cult of himself as the “leader of the people” (vozhd’ naroda), a kind of citizen king. “In his best moments he could communicate to the crowd tremendous shocks of moral electricity,” wrote Victor Chernov. “He could make it laugh and cry, kneel and soar, for he himself surrendered to the emotions of the moment.”54 The kneeling soldiers and others kissed Kerensky’s clothing, cried, and prayed.55 He took to wearing semimilitary attire—the style Trotsky and Stalin would adopt—yet Kerensky likened himself not to Napoleon but to Comte de Mirabeau, the popular orator who had sought a middle way during the French Revolution. (When Mirabeau died of illness in 1791, his burial inaugurated the Pantheon; by 1794, however, he was disinterred and his tomb given over to Jean-Paul Marat.) But as Russia descended into anarchy, Kerensky, too, began to speak of the need for “firm authority.” Under him, the Provisional Government would begin to backtrack on civil liberties and release and reengage many of the arrested tsarist interior ministry officials, but “firm authority” remained elusive.56 Hence the spiking fascination with Kornilov. The talk of a “man on horseback,” the Napoleon of the Russian Revolution, alighted upon the Kalmyk savior.57 In the event, the idea of a military “counterrevolution”—an expression of hope on one side, dread on the other—would prove more potent than its actual possibilities.

LENIN’S HELPMATES

Lenin’s faction of Bolsheviks showed themselves in 1917 to be a disorganized yet tough street-fighting group.58 The Bolsheviks now claimed some 25,000 members, a number impossible to verify (membership was often not formalized), but hard-core activists numbered closer to 1,000, and the top insiders could fit around a conference table (if they were not in exile or jail). Still, after February, Bolshevism had become a mass phenomenon in the capital: in the armaments and machine factories along Petrograd’s Lesser Neva River, in the huge Franco-Russian shipyard, in the sprawling Putilov Works, in the Petrograd neighborhood known as the Vyborg side, there were large concentrations of industrial workers and they fell under a barrage of Bolshevik agitation. Workers’ radical moods, in other words, were tied to radical stances of the Bolshevik Party. The Vyborg district especially became, in effect, an autonomous Bolshevik commune.59

Bolshevik party headquarters, where Stalin was also holed up, was initially established at a “requisitioned” art nouveau mansion whose chandeliered interiors and excellent garages were perfectly situated—not only close to the Vyborg district, but right across from the Winter Palace. The compound had been seized from the Polish-born prima ballerina of Russia’s Imperial Mariinsky Theater, Matylda Krzesinska, who had acquired the property thanks to her lovers, Nicholas II (before his marriage), and then, simultaneously, two Romanov grand dukes.60 (She later claimed to have spotted the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai in the mansion’s garden wearing her left-behind ermine coat.)61 Such house seizures were illegal but difficult for the policeless Provisional Government to reverse. The Federation of Anarchist-Communists, sprung from prison, seized the former villa of the deceased Pyotr Durnovó in a beautiful park abutting the factories of the Vyborg side.62 Beyond Vyborg, Bolshevism developed key strongholds in the Baltic fleet, stationed in Helsinki and Kronstadt near Petrograd and accessible to Bolshevik (as well as anarchist-syndicalist) agitators. Where Bolshevik agitators did not reach—factories in Ukraine, the Black Sea fleet—the socialist-leaning masses did not identify with the party. In the vast countryside, Bolshevism achieved little presence through most of 1917 (of the 1,000 delegates to the First All-Russia Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, perhaps 20 identified as Bolsheviks).63 And in 1917 there were between one and two dozen Muslim Bolsheviks in all of Russia.64 Still, Bolshevik strongholds were strategic—the capital, the capital garrison, and the front near the capital.

The Bolsheviks had to earn their standing, and in pockets they did so. For those within earshot of the message that Stalin and others were tirelessly propagating, Bolshevism possessed nonpareil recruiting tools: the absolutely hated war and the all-purpose explanation of class exploitation of haves and have-nots, which resonated beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. That said, the war did not inevitably provide for Bolshevik triumph. The Provisional Government, as we shall see, chose not just to remain in the war but to launch a catastrophic offensive in June 1917.65 This decision became an opportunity for those most radical, and Lenin had set up the Bolshevik party to benefit from it.

In exile, living in Zurich, in a single room, near a sausage factory, Lenin had been calling for the defeat of his own country in war, but suffered no legal consequences. On the contrary, he fell under the Provisional Government’s March 1917 general amnesty for victims of tsarism. But he had no official permission to return and, in any case, was trapped behind German lines.66 To get back to Russia he quietly solicited Germany’s help through intermediaries, thereby risking charges of being a German agent—the devastating accusation that had fatally punctured the tsarist autocracy.67 Berlin was showering money on Russia’s radicals, especially the Socialist Revolutionaries, in order to overturn the Provisional Government and force Russia out of the war on German terms, and was sold on assisting the fanatical Bolshevik leader, too—referred to as “a Tatar by the name of Lenin.”68 Both sides, however, aimed to blunt accusations of serving the enemy Germans and so Lenin traveled through German lines to Russia on what has been called a sealed train—that is, his carriage was locked and neutral Swiss intermediaries handled all contact with German authorities en route. The train departed Zurich on March 27, 1917 (by the Russian calendar), for Berlin and then the Baltic coast with thirty-two Russian emigres, nineteen of them Bolsheviks (including Lenin, his wife, Nadzehda Krupskaya; his onetime French mistress, Inessa Armand; and Zinoviev with wife and child) as well as other radicals.69 The Menshevik Social Democrats Martov and Axelrod chose not to risk treason charges by accepting a German deal without having obtained the permission of the Provisional Government (the Mensheviks ended up traveling on a later train).70 Lenin’s only obligation in the bargain was to agitate for release of Austrian and German civilians held in Russia. He had no compunction about availing himself of imperial Germany’s logistical assistance and finances in order to subvert Russia; he anticipated revolution in Germany, too, as a result of the war. Lenin never admitted the truth about receiving German money, but he was not a German agent; he had his own agenda.71 Lenin had the Bolsheviks discuss how they would conduct themselves in the event they were taken into custody at the Russian border on orders of the Provisional Government and subjected to interrogation, fears that did not materialize.72 (Karl Radek, who held an Austro-Hungarian passport, was denied entry into Russia as a subject of an enemy country.) The worried ambassador of France, Russia’s ally, listening to Foreign Minister Miliukov—who could have blocked Lenin’s return—saw the Bolshevik leader’s arrival as a radical new danger.73 But Lenin was not arrested at Petrograd’s Finland Station (in the Vyborg district “Bolshevik Commune”), where he arrived at 11:10 p.m. on April 3, 1917, the day after Easter Sunday. Lenin climbed atop an armored vehicle, illuminated by specially wheeled-in spotlights, to speak at the station to a sizable crowd of workers, soldiers, and sailors, who were seeing him for the first time.

In the vast expanses of the Russian empire very few had any knowledge of Lenin.74 Many of the hundreds of thousands of villages had not learned of the February Revolution until April and the spring thaw. Lenin’s April 3 return coincided with the onset of mass land seizures in Russia, a phenomenon unknown in the French Revolution of 1789. On the eve of the Great War, Russia’s peasants had owned roughly 47 percent of the empire’s land, including forests and meadows, having purchased land from nobles in the four decades following emancipation, often as a collective (commune), sometimes individually, especially beginning with Stolypin’s 1906 reforms.75 But if gentry holdings had been reduced to roughly equal that of peasant holdings, the peasantry still composed 80 percent of the population, the gentry a mere 2 percent.76 Peasant expectations of a total land redistribution were intense, and the wartime tsarist government had helped spur them, confiscating land from ethnic Germans living in imperial Russia, which was supposed to be redistributed to valiant Russian soldiers or landless peasants. The army, on its own, promised free land to winners of medals, spurring rumors that all soldiers would receive land at war’s end.77 Total tsarist government confiscations of agricultural land during the war—which was seized with minimal or zero compensation from some of the empire’s most productive farmers, and contributed to the severe shortage of grain in 1916 and the bread riots in 1917—amounted to at least 15 million acres.78 Now, the peasants began to follow suit, seizing crop lands, draft animals, implements, in what they called the Black Repartition. The Provincial Government tried to resist, arguing that decisions on land reform had to await the forthcoming Constituent Assembly. Indeed, even after the seizures became a mass phenomenon, and even though it could never muster the force to prevent or reverse such seizures, the Provisional Government refused to accede to uncompensated peasant expropriation of land.

Years of colossal peasant effort to realize Stolypin’s dream of a stratum of independent, well-off yeoman on large enclosed farms vanished nearly overnight in 1917–18, without resistance; on the contrary, many peasants deliberately reduced the size of their farms.79 Even smaller enclosed farms underwent redistributions. The commune reasserted itself.80 Even as peasants engaged in illegalities, they employed a vocabulary of rights and citizenship.81 Gentry-owned estates were the main targets. They had in many cases survived during the Great War only because of an ability to call upon the labor of 430,000 prisoners of war and, in peasant logic, after February 1917, if an estate had been deprived of peasant labor and was idle, its takeover was legitimate.82 Indeed, many of the land seizures did not occur in one fell swoop; rather, peasants spoke of “excess” gentry lands and of putting “idle” land to the plow—and took more and more. But because most peasant land seizures were carried out collectively, as a village, in which all shared responsibility and all divided up the plunder into their carts, the assembled peasants usually became as radical as the most radical members present. Invariably, the radicals urged their country folk to carry off still more and even to burn down the valuable manor houses. Harvesters and winnowing machines were too big to cart off and were left behind, sometimes vandalized. As for animals, often peasants heated the oven, butchered the sheep, geese, ducks, and hens, and laid on a feast.83 But in the end, far from all peasants ended up with their own dreams fulfilled: around half of peasant communes gained no land at all from the revolution, while much of the land peasants did “obtain” they had already been leasing. One scholar has estimated that around 11 percent of gentry landowners would remain into the 1920s, tending remnants of their lands.84 Still, that means the vast majority were expropriated. Peasants stopped making payments to the big landowners, and collectively expropriated around 50 million acres of gentry land.85

Compared with this immense upheaval—the peasants’ own revolution—Lenin was a single person. And yet, his role in 1917 was pivotal. Marxist theory held that history moved in stages—feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism—such that before advancing to socialism, it was necessary to develop the bourgeois-capitalism stage. Almost all Bolsheviks expected that the revolution would move toward socialism eventually, but the issue was when: they argued vehemently about whether the “bourgeois” or “democratic” revolution phase was complete or had to go further in order to prepare the way for the socialist revolution. Lenin was not proposing an immediate leap into socialism, which would have been blasphemy, but an acceleration of the move toward socialism—what he would call “one foot in socialism”—by not waiting for the full development of the bourgeois revolution and instead seizing political power now.86

In Petrograd, the Bolshevik Russia Bureau—“Russia” as opposed to foreign exile (Lenin)—was led by the thirty-two-year-old Alexander Shlyapnikov and the twenty-seven-year-old Vyacheslav Molotov, and they (especially Molotov) had been dismissive of the Provisional Government as counterrevolutionary. By contrast, Stalin and Kamenev called for conditionally supporting the “democratic” revolution, meaning the Provisional Government, in order that the democratic revolution would go through to the end. When the pair had returned from Siberia to Petrograd on March 12, 1917, neither was invited to join the Russia Bureau, although Stalin was offered “advisory status.” (He was rebuked for “certain personal features that are basic to him,” evidently negative personal behavior toward fellow Siberian exiles.)87 The next day Molotov, an early and lifelong hard-liner, like Lenin, was elbowed out, and Stalin became a proper member of the Russia Bureau, while Kamenev became editor of Pravda.88 Kamenev and Stalin immediately turned Pravda away from absolute repudiation of the Provisional Government toward opportunistically working with it, arguing that it was doomed but in the meantime had significant historical work to carry out. This provoked Lenin’s ire from afar. His first angry missive was printed in Pravda with distorted editing, his second was suppressed entirely.89 But then he showed up.

Lenin had greeted Kamenev at the border in smiling rebuke: “What’s this you’re writing in Pravda?”90 Even now, the Bolshevik organ refused to publish its own leader’s theses. An April 6, 1917, Bolshevik Central Committee meeting outright rejected Lenin’s theses. After all, the bourgeois-democratic revolution had only just begun, the country needed land reform, an exit from the war, economic reform, and how would the proletariat, by overturning the Provisional Government, advance all that? (As one Bolshevik commented, “How can the democratic revolution be over? The peasants do not have the land!”)91 Kamenev especially pointed out that the bourgeois classes in the towns and the better-off peasants had a great deal of historical work still to bear on behalf of the socialist revolution, by carrying the bourgeois-democratic revolution through to the end.92 Stalin deemed Lenin’s theses “a schema, there are no facts in them, and therefore they do not satisfy.”93 Pravda finally published the ten “April Theses” (some 500 words) on April 7, under Lenin’s name, but accompanied by an editorial note by Kamenev distancing the party from its leader.94

If the top Bolsheviks had not been inclined to force a seizure of power, the same was even truer of the Petrograd Soviet. Before Lenin’s arrival back in Russia, in late March, representatives of the Soviet had gathered to establish a new seventy-two-person All-Russia central executive committee, as well as various departments for food supply, the economy, foreign affairs, thereby asserting the Petrograd Soviet’s writ over the whole of Russia. The Soviet also pledged conditional support for the “bourgeois” Provisional Government (about half the Bolshevik delegates voted in favor).95 At the Finland Station on April 3, Nikoloz “Karlo” Chkheidze, the Georgian Menshevik Social Democrat who had become chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, had greeted Lenin on behalf of that body in the former tsar’s reception room. Outside, after Lenin denounced the Petrograd Soviet’s cooperation with the Provisional Government, concluding “Long live the world socialist revolution!,” he had ridden the armored vehicle to Bolshevik HQ at the Krzesinska mansion. There, well after midnight, he gave a “thunder-like speech” to about seventy members of his faction, arranged on chairs in a circle.96 The next day, at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet in the Tauride Palace, he reiterated his radical “April Theses,” arguing that the pathetic Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying through its historical tasks, which compelled Russia to accelerate from the bourgeois-democratic toward the proletarian-socialist revolution.97 One Bolshevik took the floor to liken Lenin to the anarchist Bakunin (who had fought bitterly with Marx). Another speaker called Lenin’s theses “the ravings of a madman.”98 Even Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who had known him since 1894, observed according to a friend that “I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy,” one reason perhaps that he ceased to use her as his principal secretary.99 Yet another Bolshevik advised that “after Lenin becomes acquainted with the state of affairs in Russia, he himself will reject all these constructions of his.”100 When Irakli Tsereteli, the chairman of the Soviet’s central executive committee (and a Georgian Menshevik), offered a reasoned refutation of Lenin’s views while extending an olive branch—“however irreconcilable Vladimir Ilich may be, I am convinced we’ll be reconciled”—Lenin leaned over the balustrade and shouted, “Never!”101

Lenin browbeat his inner circle relentlessly, while also occasionally addressing outdoor crowds from the Krzesinska mansion balcony. By the end of April 1917, at a Bolshevik party conference, a majority voted for Lenin’s resolutions, thanks partly to the voices of the sometimes more radical provincials who were brought to the fore, as well as to other loyalists who supported their leader.102 Despite Lenin’s formal policy victory in late April, however, the Bolshevik inner circle remained divided over when, and even whether, to push for soviet power as opposed to completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution. As Lenin continued to press his views for embracing the moment, he insisted that the Bolshevik Central Committee lagged far behind the masses. (That would prove true: the mobilization of the masses did mobilize would-be elites, including the Bolshevik leadership.)103 Meanwhile, Stalin, initially an ally of Kamenev, emerged as a crucial ally of Lenin.

Stalin has wrongly been dismissed as the man who “missed” the October Revolution. True, he does appear to have missed Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station (perhaps because he was at a meeting trying to convert left-wing Mensheviks to the Bolshevik side.)104 Also, Stalin initially resisted Lenin’s heretical April 3 radicalism (for which he would publicly apologize in 1924).105 But at the late April conference, Stalin gave his first-ever political report to an official Bolshevik gathering and broke with Kamenev and sided with Lenin. “Only a united party can lead the people to victory,” Stalin wrote of the April conference in Soldiers’ Pravda.106 Stalin did not buckle under abjectly, however: whereas Lenin sought land nationalization, Stalin insisted the peasantry get the land—a position that eventually won out.107 Stalin also rejected Lenin’s slogan of turning the “imperialist war” into a “European civil war,” reasoning that besides land, the masses desired peace—and Lenin, too, now called for an immediate peace.108 Thus Stalin managed to become loyal to Lenin while defending positions that he, among others, held to. When Stalin’s candidacy for a new nine-member party Central Committee came under criticism from Caucasus comrades who claimed to know him well, Lenin vouched for him. “We’ve known Com. Koba for very many years,” Lenin told the voting delegates. “We used to see him in Krakow where we had our Bureau. His activity in the Caucasus was very important. He’s a good official in all sorts of responsible work.”109 In the Central Committee elections, Stalin claimed the third most votes, 97, behind only Lenin and Zinoviev (both of whom would soon become fugitives). Stalin also replaced Kamenev as editor of Pravda.

As editor and pundit, Stalin revealed a talent for summarizing complicated issues in a way that could be readily understood. He evidently apologized to Molotov for stabbing him in the back in March—“You were nearest of all to Lenin in the initial stage”—and then took advantage of their communal-style living arrangements to steal Molotov’s girlfriend.110 Soon, though, Stalin would move into the apartment of the Alliluyev family, bringing all his worldly possessions: his typewriter as well as books and some clothes in the same wicker suitcase with which he had returned from Siberia. The Alliluyev daughter Nadya had turned sixteen, and she returned to the apartment in late summer 1917 for the pending school year. Stalin had known the Alliuluyevs since 1900 (Tiflis days), the year before Nadya was born. He treated her like a daughter, reading stories by Chekhov (“Chameleon,” “Dushechka”) to her, her sister Anna, and their friends.111 Charming the girls right through their nightshirts, Stalin turned the boredom, loneliness, and despair of his Siberian exile into dramatic tales of revolutionary exploits. They called him Soso, and he reciprocated with nicknames for them. Their mother, Olga Alliluyeva, was fond of Stalin—they may have had a liaison—but not fond of her teenage daughter falling for the thirty-eight-year-old widower.112 Nadya could be defiant, including to Stalin, but she was also, he noticed, attentive to housework. Within ten months, their courtship would become public.113 All that was in the future, however. For now, Stalin had become a proto-apparatchik and defender of the Leninist line. Even Trotsky would allow, later, that “Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes in preparing the [Bolshevik] fraction for balloting,” adding, condescendingly, that “he did have the knack of convincing the average run of leaders, especially the provincials.”114

Alongside Stalin, though, another Central Committee figure emerged that April: the thirty-two-year-old Yakov Sverdlov, whom Lenin had finally met in person on April 7, 1917, and began to assign various tasks, which Sverdlov managed handily. Born in 1885, wispy, with a scraggly goatee and glasses, he had joined the Russian Social Democrats in 1902 in Nizhny Novgorod and taken part in the 1905 events while in the Urals. In 1917, Sverdlov, even more than Stalin, remained almost entirely behind the scenes. Not an orator, he nonetheless possessed an authoritative basso voice, and a steely demeanor. Lenin placed him in charge of a small “secretariat” formally created at the April 1917 party conference.115 During Sverdlov’s years in tsarist jails or Siberian exile (1906–17), he had proved able to memorize the real names, noms de guerre, locations, and characteristics of scattered fellow exiles, putting nothing incriminating to paper. He had also twice shared quarters with Stalin (in Narym and Kureika), which resulted in sharp personal conflicts and a certain rivalry.116 Now, however, the two worked side by side. In fact, the younger Sverdlov provided a kind of school in party building for Stalin as they left the speechifying to the orators, such as Zinoviev. With a mere half dozen female clerks at the Krzesinska mansion, Sverdlov, assisted by Stalin, worked to coordinate far-flung party organizations. He received a parade of visitors and, in turn, sent emissaries to Bolshevik committees in the provinces, to jump-start local periodicals and membership, demonstrating a deft touch with provincials. Sverdlov obsessed over details, forcing everything to come to his attention, while placing a premium on concrete actions. Of course, like all political movements in 1917, Bolshevism incarnated bedlam. The organizing was not—and could not have been—directed at producing a centralized, let alone “totalitarian,” party in the conditions of 1917, but at effecting majorities at the gatherings of party representatives in the capital on behalf of Lenin’s positions. In other words, through manipulation of rules, suasion, and favors, Sverdlov showed his helpmate Stalin how to organize a loyal Leninist faction.117

ZEALOTRY

Lenin’s zealotry became an instant (and everlasting) legend, but nearly everyone on Russia’s political scene lived under the tyranny of idées fixes. Miliukov, having fought tooth and nail in the Duma against the autocracy’s poor conduct of the war, mulishly clung to the notion that the February Revolution signified a universal desire to conduct the war more successfully. He therefore opposed land reforms and convocation of a constituent assembly before military victory, and even refused to allow revision of tsarism’s imperialist war aims, which secretly entailed annexation of Constantinople and the Turkish Straits, German and Austrian Poland, and other foreign territories. The damage from this zealotry proved as severe as the damage from his March 1917 ditching of the Duma. Leaders of the Menshevik wing of the Social Democrats, for their part, stubbornly stuck to the notion that the Revolution was “bourgeois” in character and therefore they refused to push for socialism, despite insistent prodding from the broad masses they supposedly represented. The Mensheviks soon joined the Provisional Government, in coalition with the Cadets, as did the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the party that added the most members in 1917. Theory alone did not motivate them. Partly the crushing defeat in 1905–6 hung over the moderate socialists, a cautionary tale against provoking “counterrevolution” with radicalism.118 But the Menshevik leadership adhered to the core Marxist idea whereby socialism had to await the full development of Russian capitalism, for which a “bourgeois revolution” was necessary.119 They zealously clung to the “bourgeois revolution” and supported the “bourgeois” Provisional Government even as their propaganda often hammered “the bourgeoisie.”120

Russia’s political figure who most embodied the moderate socialist line from the start was Kerensky, who aimed to bridge Russia’s “bourgeois” and “proletarian” revolutions, to stand above parties, to balance left and right by tilting one way, then the next. Straining to be indispensable to each side, he came, predictably, to be seen as anathema to both.121 Bolshevik propaganda spread rumors that Kerensky was addicted to cocaine and morphine, dressed in women’s clothing, embezzled from state coffers—a smear campaign that would come to seem plausible (and that took in the British War Office).122 It bears recalling, however, that initially Kerensky had attracted widespread praise from diverse quarters, including Romanov grand dukes and leaders of the Soviet.123 Kerensky’s political failing in 1917 was partly personal but partly structural: he had thrown in his lot not with the Petrograd Soviet but with the Provisional Government and, as the Provisional Government’s impotence became ever more brutally exposed, his own authority disintegrated.124 Thus did Kerensky acquire a reputation as spineless, a professional “windbag,” in the mocking phrase of his nemesis, Lenin, who had little contact with the high-profile leader. Lenin and Kerensky met for the first and only time at the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets (June 3–24, 1917) at a military school in Petrograd. Kerensky showed himself to be under the spell, if not the tyranny, of the French Revolution.125 “How did 1792 end in France? It ended in the fall of the republic and the rise of a dictator,” Kerensky said in response to Lenin at the Congress of Soviets, referring to the episode of Robespierre’s self-defeating terror and the rise of Napoleon. “The problem of the Russian socialist parties and of Russian democracy is to prevent such an outcome as there was in France, to hold on to the revolutionary conquests already made; to see to it that our comrades who have been released from prison do not return there; that a Lenin, who has been abroad, may have the opportunity to speak here again, and not be obliged to flee back to Switzerland. We must see to it that historic mistakes do not recur.”126

ROLLING THE IRON DICE

Kerensky could certainly feel confident. In the elections to the June 1917 First Congress of Soviets, the Bolshevik party won a mere 105 of the 777 delegates with a right to vote, versus 285 by Socialist Revolutionaries and 248 by Mensheviks.127 Only something extremely dramatic could have possibly reversed Bolshevik fortunes. But just such a head-spinning turnabout transpired right in the middle of that First Congress of Soviets: namely, a Russian military offensive.

Perhaps the central riddle of 1917 is why the Provisional Government decided in June to attack the Central Powers. Russia’s towns overflowed with the maimed; the countryside had begun to suffer starvation in places from the disorganization of agriculture, the incomprehensible sacrifice of so many males, and grain requisitions. One might think that for Provisional Government officials, especially classical liberals like the Cadets who sincerely believed in liberty, the use of state power for soldier conscription and coercive grain extraction to feed the army would have been abhorrent.128 But one would be wrong. Nor did the Provisional Government’s relentless invocation of democracy entail following soldiers’ antiwar sentiment, which had been universally on display since the downfall of the tsar and “Order No. 1.” Still, one would expect that the politicians would at least heed careerist self-interest. Paul Miliukov had been forced on May 2 to quit the Provisional Government that he himself had named (leaving Kerensky preeminent in the cabinet) just for stating that Russia “has no desire to enslave or degrade anyone” in the war but would nonetheless “fully stand by its obligations to our allies.”129 Even the most successful allied offensive of the entire war, Brusilov’s in 1916, had ultimately failed. And the German high command planned no new military actions on the eastern front in 1917. How did anyone in their right mind imagine that the Russian army should—or could—undertake an offensive in 1917?

No small part of the offensive’s rationale had been inherited. Back in November 1916, at a meeting in France, the Western Allies had, once again, pressured the government of the tsar to commit to an offensive, in this case for spring 1917, to relieve pressure on the western front.130 Nicholas II had agreed, and the Provisional Government, which shared the values of and indeed looked up to the rule-of-law Allies, resolved to honor this commitment. By now, however, the French themselves were no longer capable of an offensive: in late May 1917, following a failed attack on the German lines, the French army suffered a full-scale mutiny, affecting 49 infantry divisions out of 113. General Philippe Petain, the newly appointed commander, restored discipline, but he recognized that the French rank and file and field officers would continue to defend the homeland, but no more.131

Even without the incongruous Allied pressure, however, Kerensky would likely have gone forward. Just before France’s mutinies, Russia’s supreme commander Mikhail Alexeyev—who had pushed to make Kerensky war minister—toured his own front, finding a collapse of discipline, with desertions running at more than 1 million (out of 6–7 million).132 But Alexeyev, underscoring Russian obligations to its allies, also wrote in a confidential memorandum summarizing the views of the top commanders, which he shared, that “disorder in the Army will have no less a detrimental effect on defense than on offense. Even if we are not fully confident of success, we should go on the offensive.”133 Kerensky nonetheless dismissed Alexeyev as a “defeatist” and replaced him with General Brusilov, the hero of 1916, but then Brusilov toured the front and found the selfsame demoralization.134 To be sure, hope springs eternal. Russian intelligence surmised that the Austro-Hungarian army was highly vulnerable, and that even the German army could not survive another winter, so a knockout blow might be possible. And if that was true, Russia did not want to be left out of the presumed Central Powers defeat, in order to have a say in the peace: a good Russian show on the battlefield would force the Allies to take Russia’s diplomatic notes more seriously.135 Still, Kerensky’s chief motivation appears to have been domestic politics: he as well as some Russian generals thought—or hoped—that an offensive would restore the collapsing army and squelch the domestic rebellion. In other words, the very collapse of Russia’s army served as the key rationale for the offensive.136 “War at the front,” went the saying, “will buy peace in the rear and at the front.”137

Thus did the Provisional Government willingly make the tsar’s fatally unpopular war its own. Kerensky, then merely the war minister, departed for the front, to rally the army like Nicholas II had done, making himself hoarse with harangues of the troops about the offensive for “freedom.” More than one soldier interjected, “What’s the point of this slogan about land and freedom if I have to die?” Lenin’s Bolshevik agitators swarmed the regiments at the front, along with some thirty urban garrisons, to undermine the army but also to trump their main targets: Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary agitators. Bolsheviks flooded highly receptive soldiers and sailors with easily digested radical materials characterizing the war as a sacrifice of Russian blood for English and French moneybags.138 “A single agitator,” lamented one Russian frontline general, “can set back on its heels an entire regiment with the propaganda of Bolshevik ideals.”139 And where Bolsheviks did not reach, German propaganda did. “The English,” one Russian soldier read aloud from a Russian-language German newspaper, the Russian Messenger, “want the Russians to shed the last drop of their blood for the greater glory of England, who seeks her profit in everything.”140 Not just the horrendous war, which had precipitated the downfall of the autocracy, but the military offensive enabled the Bolsheviks to associate their party with the moods in the country’s single biggest mass organization, the 6–7 million soldiers at the front, achieving a spectacular breakthrough to “trench Bolshevism.”141

It would be easy to pin all the domestic blame on Kerensky. His insistence on a military offensive against the external foe in order to defeat the internal foe rendered him, the “revolutionary democrat,” no better than the tsar and the “reactionaries” who had begun the slaughter in 1914. No less stunning, however, the Petrograd Soviet, controlled by a Menshevik-Socialist Revolutionary bloc, as well as even the elected soldiers’ committees, supported the June military offensive, and did so against the wishes of the soldiers and sailors they claimed to represent. Irakli Tsereteli, the Georgian Menshevik, had risen to the top of the Soviet by putting forward a position he had called “revolutionary defensism”: if Russia’s army would (somehow) continue to fight, the Soviet would (somehow) organize a negotiated peace “without annexations” by pressuring the public in the Allied countries.142 Victor Chernov, head of the Socialist Revolutionaries, signed on, and so did prominent Mensheviks in the Soviet (though not the skeptical Yuly Martov). But a proposed international conference in Stockholm of socialists for peace in June 1917 failed to take place: Britain and France had no interest in a “democratic” peace, they wanted Germany defeated.143 Without the “peace” part, Tsereteli’s position, despite his repudiation of annexations, amounted to a continuation of the war, the same policy as the Provisional Government’s. Pravda relished publishing figures for the wartime profits of privately owned factories and placing the Soviet alongside the Provisional Government as “executive organ” of “Messieurs capitalists and bankers.”144 To the masses, the position of the Petrograd Soviet and the soldiers’ committees became incomprehensible: the war was imperialist yet should continue?145 But worse, a majority in the Soviet agreed that Russia ought to attack? The moderate socialists clung to the principle of cooperating with “the bourgeois revolution,” that is, with the Provisional Government and Constitutional Democrat Party. Partly, too, in their minds the offensive would help increase Russia’s bargaining power vis-à-vis recalcitrant Britain and France.146 The non-Bolshevik socialists were lethally wrong.

Because the Allies refused to negotiate an end to the meat-grinder war short of an elusive decisive victory, a posture of strategic defense was the only survivable policy for both the Provisional Government and the Soviet. Simultaneously, the Russian government could have stolen the thunder of the extreme left by attempting to negotiate an acceptable separate peace with Germany. If such an effort failed, the Germans would have been blamed, buying the government some legitimacy for nominally staying in the war. But even if a consensus in the Russian establishment could not be reached to break with the Allies and approach Germany separately, a threat of doing so could have been wielded as a bargaining chip to force the Allies to accept the Provisional Government’s belated desire, as publicly professed at least, for a formal inter-Allied conference to discuss and perhaps redefine war aims.147

Back in September-October 1916, after the momentum of the Brusilov offensive had been broken, tsarist Russia and Germany had held secret talks for a separate peace in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Kovno (a territory of imperial Russia under German occupation). Britain and France, after catching wind of the Russo-German talks, had moved to sign new financial agreements with Russia, finally conceding some long-standing Russian requests.148 Russia depended on its Allied partners for finance and materiel, but Russian leverage was perhaps even greater in 1917. Be that as it may, a strictly defensive posture would have allowed a wait-and-see respite while the U.S. entry on the western front got into high gear.

Instead, the lunatic gamble of the Kerensky-Soviet offensive commenced on June 18 (July 1 in the West) with the greatest artillery barrage in Russian history to that point: two nonstop days, drawing on a colossal supply of heavy guns and shells produced by Russia’s working classes (80 percent of whom worked in war production). Despite some initial success, especially by troops under General Kornilov’s command, many Russian units refused to advance; some sought to kill their commanders, while others held meetings to discuss how to escape the inferno.149 The main Russian thrust aimed at the “soft target” of Austria-Hungary—a lesson from the 1916 Brusilov offensive—but the awakened beast of the German army counterattacked mercilessly.150 Russia’s gratuitous offensive drew the Germans much farther onto Russia’s territory—Germany seized Ukraine—while tearing Russia’s army to pieces.151 The offensive also shattered the authority of the moderate socialist representatives in the Soviet and the soldiers’ committees.152 In trying to cajole soldiers to obey orders and return to battle, members of the Soviet Executive Committee were beaten and taken into custody, including Nikolai Sokolov, one of the drafters of Order No. 1. “The whole of 1917,” one historian has aptly written, “could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing revolution to an end.”153

KERENSKY’S FIRST FAILED COUP

In the spring of 1917, after he had arrived back in Russia, Lenin occupied the fringe in Russia’s politics—the fringe of the left—sniping at Kerensky, badmouthing the other Marxists in the Soviet, but the June 1917 offensive—launched by Kerensky, supported by the Soviet—vindicated Lenin’s extremism, which was no longer extreme. Tellingly, even the talented Lev Trotsky signed on.

Trotsky was a shooting star. Nearly Stalin’s exact contemporary, he hailed from a different corner of the empire—southern Ukraine, in the Pale of Settlement, 200 miles up from the Black Sea port of Odessa. His father, David Bronstein, was illiterate but by dint of hard work had become such a successful farmer that by the time his son was born, the family owned 250 acres outright and leased another 500.154 Trotsky’s mother, Aneta, also a loyal subject of the tsar, was a cultured woman who chose the life of a farmer’s wife and imparted a love of learning to her four children (survivors of eight births). The young Leib—Lev in Russian—had been sent to a heder, a Jewish primary school, even though he did not know Yiddish, but he was switched to a German school attached to a Lutheran Church in Odessa, where he studied at the top of his class, despite being suspended for a year as a result of a student imbroglio with a French teacher from Switzerland. At his next school, in the city of Nikolayev, he devoted himself to literature and mathematics; eyewitnesses recalled him having no close friends. “The fundamental essence of Bronstein’s personality,” explained G. A. Ziv, who knew him then, “was to demonstrate his will, to tower above everyone, everywhere and always to be first.”155 Around age seventeen, Bronstein became a revolutionary. Like Stalin, he was arrested when still a teenager (in 1898) and exiled to Siberia. In 1902 he adopted the family name of one of his jailers, becoming Trotsky, and escaped, meeting Lenin and Martov, then allies, in London as a twenty-three-year-old. The next year, at the fateful 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Trotsky sided with Martov in the controversy over party organization and soon blasted Lenin in print. Still, Trotsky never drew especially close to the Mensheviks: he had kept his distance from all groups. For long stretches he lived in Europe, where he contributed to German Social Democrat periodicals and enjoyed the company of the Marxist pope, Karl Kautsky, whom he called “a white-haired and very jolly little old man,” and with whom he famously polemicized on the necessity of terror (“Terror can be a very effective weapon against a reactionary class that does not want to leave the scene”).156

By chance in New York when the tsar fell, Trotsky had set off for Russia in April 1917, was released from arrest en route in Canada—thanks to then‒foreign minister Miliukov—and arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station on May 4, a month later than Lenin.157 Immediately, the muscular, spirited, intransigent Trotsky, with pince-nez, became a sensation, making the rounds of the biggest factories as well as the garrison barracks, ending up most nights at the capital’s Cirque Moderne, across the river from the Winter Palace, electrifying huge crowds with political oratory. The “bare, gloomy amphitheater, lit by five tiny lights hanging from a thin wire, was packed from the ring up the steep sweep of grimy benches to the very roof—soldiers, sailors, workmen, women, all listening as if their lives depended upon it,” wrote John Reed, the former Harvard cheerleader.158 Trotsky recalled that “every square inch was filled, every human body compressed to its limit. Young boys sat on their fathers’ shoulders; infants were at their mothers’ breasts. . . . I made my way to the platform through a narrow human trench, sometimes I was borne overhead.”159 One Social Democrat commented at the time, “Here’s a great revolutionary who’s arrived and one gets the feeling that Lenin, however clever he may be, is starting to fade next to the genius of Trotsky.”160 In fact, on May 10 Lenin had asked Trotsky to join the Bolsheviks.161 Having mocked Lenin mercilessly for years, and during the war grown intellectually further apart from him, in summer 1917 Trotsky agreed to join the Bolsheviks, converting to Leninism—that is, to an immediate transfer of power to the soviets.

Underlying structural shifts were still more momentous. The splintering off of large parts of the Russian imperial army accelerated, with the formation of de facto national armies—especially Ukrainian and Finnish, but also Estonian, Lithuanian, Georgian, Armenian, Crimean Tatar—thereby prefiguring the empire’s dissolution.162 The Provisional Government had become even more of a shell. The Petrograd Soviet and especially soldiers’ committees had been deeply discredited. But in July 1917, even as the political scene continued to move swiftly toward Lenin, the Bolshevik party was almost annihilated. The Constitutional Democrats resigned from the coalition Provisional Government on July 2; between July 3 and 5, amid rumors that the capital garrison would be deployed to the front, a confused uprising took place in Petrograd involving a machine-gun regiment and Kronstadt sailors. The soldiers and sailors, working with radical lower-level Bolsheviks under the slogan “All Power to the Soviets,” managed to seize key junctions in the capital. Hundreds were killed or wounded. Kerensky was at the front. On July 4, a huge crowd at the Tauride Palace demanded a meeting with a leader of the Soviet; when the Socialist Revolutionary Party leader Victor Chernov emerged, a sailor shouted, “Take power, you son of a bitch, when it’s handed to you.” The rebels took Chernov into custody and he had to be rescued.163 But an early evening blinding downpour dispersed the crowds.164 Top Bolsheviks had hesitated to seize the moment, and Kerensky swiftly counterattacked, charging them with treason for the armed insurrection and for receiving funds from a foreign enemy. It was a brilliant move, taking advantage of a situation he did not create.

That the Bolsheviks were receiving smuggled German funds is beyond doubt. Somehow, the party managed to publish newspapers with a combined print run of more than 300,000 per day; Pravda alone circulated 85,000 copies. Compared with the bourgeois press (1.5 million per day in the capital), or the combined SR-Menshevik press (700,000), Bolshevik publications could look like small change, but the party also published scores of pamphlets and hundreds of thousands of leaflets, which required financing.165 Documents showing Lenin and other Bolsheviks in the pay of the Germans appeared on July 5 in Russian newspapers. “Now they are going to shoot us,” Lenin told Trotsky. “It is the most advantageous time for them.”166 On the morning of July 6, the Provisional Government’s Counter-Espionage Bureau smashed Pravda’s editorial offices and printing presses. Russian troops raided the Bolshevik “fortress” (Krzesinska’s mansion) where some 400 Bolsheviks, despite being heavily armed inside, surrendered. Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief of the citizens’ militia in central Moscow—and Stalin’s future hangman judge in the terror—signed arrest warrants for 28 of the highest-level Bolsheviks, including Lenin.167 Tipped off, Lenin fled, slipping away to the Alliluyev family flat with Stalin’s assistance, then on to Russian Finland with Zinoviev. The folklore has it that Stalin personally shaved Lenin’s beard so he would look like a Finnish peasant.168 Lenin requested that his notebooks be brought to him, and in this sanctuary he wrote State and Revolution; he would complete the text in August-September 1917. It argued that all states were instruments for the domination of some classes over others, so that any new class power (like the working class) needed to create its own state form—“the dictatorship of the proletariat”—to suppress the remnants of the old ruling classes and distribute resources during the transition.169 Meanwhile, two agencies of the Provisional Government gathered volume upon volume of case materials in preparation for a public trial of Lenin and his comrades for treason.170

Thus, notwithstanding the disaster of War Minister Kerensky’s military offensive, July 1917 looked like a turning point, thanks to Kerensky’s offensive against the Bolsheviks. He was going to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Altogether, nearly 800 Bolsheviks and radicals would be imprisoned, including Kamenev, who was nearly lynched, but not Stalin (for reasons that remain unclear).171 On July 6, the war minister returned from the front to the capital, amid the publicized arrests, and the next day took over the entire government when the nominal prime minister, Prince Georgy Lvov, resigned. Lvov observed that “in order to save the country, it is now necessary to shut down the Soviet and shoot at the people. I cannot do that. Kerensky can.”172

Lvov, who disappeared into a Moscow sanitorium, was wrong, however: Not Kerensky’s but Lavr Kornilov’s moment had arrived. On July 7, Kerensky promoted Kornilov to command the southwestern front. On July 12, Kerensky announced the restoration of the death penalty at the front for indiscipline, and two days later the tightening of military censorship. Who might enforce these measures remained unclear, but on July 18, Kerensky sacked General Brusilov and proposed Kornilov as army supreme commander. Before accepting Kerensksy’s offer, Kornilov consulted the other generals. Back in March 1917, when Kornilov had replaced the arrested Sergei Khabalov as Petrograd military district commander, it had fallen to him to implement the order to arrest the tsaritsa Alexandra, but in April 1917, when Kornilov tried to use troops to quell disturbances in the capital, the Soviet forced him to reverse his order, claiming sole right to command the garrison; disgusted, Kornilov had requested a transfer to a command at the front. There, enlisted men issued demands to their officers, and his June 1917 success in punching a hole through the Austrian lines vanished when Russian troops refused to advance. Resorting to terror at the front against Russia’s soldiers had spiraled into looting, atrocities against civilians, and even greater indiscipline.173 Nonetheless, Kornilov now put forward demands to emasculate the soldiers’ committees and reinstitute the death penalty in the rear garrisons. Kerensky had already heard similar demands even from moderates on the general staff at a conference at headquarters on July 16.174 Kornilov further demanded complete autonomy in military operations and in personnel decisions, as well as a war mobilization plan for industry, just as General Ludendorff had in Germany.175 On July 21, Kornilov’s ultimatum-like terms were leaked to the press—and his popularity on the political right soared.176 Verbally, Kerensky assented to Kornilov’s conditions, so the latter took over supreme command, but when the war ministry drew up the documents to meet Kornilov’s conditions, Kerensky delayed signing them, dragging the process into August, raising Kornilov’s ire and suspicions, even as Kerensky’s own fears of the man he had promoted escalated.177

The Bolsheviks convoked a Party Congress between July 26 and August 3, 1917, their first since 1907. (It was the sixth overall, counting the founding Russian Social Democrat Party Congress in Minsk in 1898, which had been the last to take place on Russian territory.) Some 267 attendees, including 157 voting delegates, many from the provinces, assembled under threat of arrest in the sanctuary of Petrograd’s factory-laden Vyborg district. With Lenin and Zinoviev in hiding and Kamenev and Trotsky in prison, Sverdlov, assisted by Stalin, organized the gathering. They did yeoman work, turning out representatives from nearly thirty front-line army regiments and ninety Petrograd factories and garrison units, whose moods were radical. Stalin gave the opening greeting and the main political report, the highest profile assignment. “He had on a gray modest jacket and boots, and was speaking in a low, unhurried, completely calm voice,” noted one eyewitness, who added, of Stalin’s Georgianness that another comrade in the same row “could not suppress a slight smile when the speaker uttered a certain word in a somehow especially soft tone with his special accent.”178 Stalin admitted the severe damage done by the “premature” July uprising. Defiantly, however, he asked “What is the Provisional Government?” and answered, “It is a puppet, a miserable screen behind which stand the Constitutional Democrats, the military clique, and Allied capital—three pillars of counterrevolution.” There would be explosions, he predicted.

On the final day of the congress, in the discussion of the draft resolution following from his report, Stalin objected to a proposal by Yevgeny Preobrazhensky that they include a reference to revolution in the West. “The possibility cannot be excluded that Russia will be the country that blazes the trail to socialism,” he interjected. “No country has hitherto enjoyed such freedom as exists in Russia; none has tried to realize workers’ control over production. Besides, the base of our revolution is broader than in Western Europe, where the proletariat stands utterly alone face to face with the bourgeoisie. Here the workers have the support of the poorest strata of the peasantry. Finally, in Germany the machinery of state power is functioning incomparably better than the imperfect machinery of our bourgeoisie. . . . It is necessary to give up the antiquated idea that only Europe can show us the way. There is dogmatic Marxism and creative Marxism. I stand by the latter.”179

This remarkable exchange evidenced a level of astuteness almost always denied to Stalin. His argument carried, and an amendment on the victory of socialist revolution in Russia “on condition of a proletarian revolution in the West” was voted down.

Thanks to Stalin’s shrewd analysis as well as his generally high regard for Russia, which Lenin did not share, Lenin’s militancy was ascendant even in his absence.180 Lenin still faced the threat of a trial, however, and when Stalin had told the congress delegates that under certain conditions Lenin along with Zinoviev might submit to the courts, he was roundly rebuked. But the promised trial of the Bolsheviks would never materialize. Kerensky allowed his duel with Kornilov to eclipse his battle with Lenin.181

KERENSKY’S SECOND FAILED COUP

In mid-July, Kerensky had put out the call for a state conference for mid-August in Moscow, the ancient capital, with invitations to industrialists, landowners, all former Duma representatives, local governing bodies, higher education institutions, representatives of soviets and peasant bodies, and the military brass—some 2,500 participants, who met inside the Bolshoi Theater.182 And grand theater it was. Kerensky’s opening-day speech onAugust 12 made a powerful impression, seeming to confirm his authority. He appears to have intended the conference to “consolidate” Russia’s political forces, although newspapers half-joked that he arrived in Moscow, site of tsarist coronations, “to crown himself.” The newspaper of the Soviet, employing class markers, complained that “morning coats, frock coats, and starched shirts predominate over side-fastening Russian [folk] shirts.”183 But the Soviet, for its part, had excluded the Bolsheviks from its allotted delegation for the latter’s refusal to promise to abide by the Soviet’s collective decisions (including whether or not to walk out). Moscow workers defied the Soviet, undertaking a one-day wildcat strike on opening day, for which the Bolsheviks claimed credit.184 “The trams are not running,” Izvestiya reported, “coffee shops and restaurants are closed”—including the buffet inside the Bolshoi. Gas workers struck, too, and the city went dark.185

Kornilov arrived in the light of day from the front on August 13, a Sunday. At the Alexandrovsky (later Belorussian) Station, his red-robed Turcomans leapt out onto the platform with sabers drawn, forming eye-catching rows. Amid a sea of smart-looking military cadets and Russian tricolor flags, the diminutive Kornilov emerged in full-dress uniform and was showered with flowers. Like a tsar, he received waiting ministers, soldiers, dignitaries, after which his twenty-sedan motorcade—the general in an open car—paraded through the city, sparking ovations, including when he stopped to pray to the Mary, Mother of God, icon at the Iverskaya shrine (as all tsars had done). In the evening, a further cavalcade of well-wishers—former chief of staff and supreme commander General Alexeyev, Cadet leader Miliukov, far right-wing leader Purishkevich—were received by Russia’s ethnic Kalmyk supreme commander.186

The moment was riveting: a state assembly of Russia’s entire battered establishment, representatives of the left who themselves had ostracized the Bolsheviks, a motherland in genuine danger of foreign conquest, and rival would-be saviors.

At the August 14 session, Kerensky, in the chair, invited the supreme commander to the rostrum. An intentionally inflammatory speech by a Kornilov Cossack ally had been staged to make Kornilov appear eminently reasonable.187 “We have lost all Galicia, we have lost all Bukovina,” the Kalmyk savior told the hall, warning that the Germans were knocking at the gates of Riga, on a path to the Russian capital. Kornilov demanded strong measures.188 The right-side aisles in the Bolshoi exploded in ovation, while the left kept silent or made catcalls. This could have been the opportunity to reverse Russia’s slide and consolidate the establishment: Some industrialists wanted the State Conference to become a permanent body. Members of the Soviet supportive of order and authority could have been targeted for co-optation and a split of the left. Back on August 9, Stalin, writing in the periodical Worker and Soldier, had warned that “the counter-revolution needs its own parliament,” a bourgeois-landowner organ, formed without the peasant vote and intended to displace the still-unsummoned Constituent Assembly, “the single representative of the entire laboring people.”189 Four days later, on the opening day of the Moscow State Conference, Stalin had written that “the saviors’ make it seem that they are calling a ‘simple gathering,’ which will decide nothing, . . . but the ‘simple gathering’ little by little will be transformed into a ‘state gathering,’ then into a ‘great assembly,’ then into . . . a ‘long parliament.’”190 Kerensky, however, had no strategy for the Moscow State Conference other than three days of speechifying.191 Nothing institutional endured.

Even symbolically it failed. Instead of a show of patriotic unity, the State Conference (as Miliukov would observe) confirmed “that the country was divided into two camps between which there could be no reconciliation.”192 Worse, not just Stalin but the entire leftist press—observing the display of assembled nobles, industrialists, and military men—sounded even more hysterical alarms over a supposedly heightened threat of imminent “counterrevolution.” Kerensky, the person behind the gathering, drew the same conclusion. “After the Moscow Conference,” he would recall, “it was clear to me that the next attempt at a coup would come from the right, and not the left.”193

Kerensky had himself to blame for raising expectations for bold solutions that were instantly dashed. A full collapse at the front continued to threaten the very survival of the Russian state, and many constitutionalists—Miliukov, Lvov, Rodzyanko—leaned toward a military coup by Kornilov, even if they worried he lacked mass popular support and ignored the practical aspects of power. The idea, or fantasy, was to have Kornilov “restore order” by force, possibly with a military dictatorship and, later, to summon a constituent assembly under favorable conditions.194 Similar thoughts of imposing order had occurred to General Alexeyev, Vice Admiral Alexander Kolchak (commander of the Black Sea fleet until June), and others who were in conversations with Kornilov. The latter certainly contemplated a coup against both the Provisional Government and the Soviet in order to suppress an anticipated Bolshevik coup, hang Lenin and his associates, disband the Soviet, and maybe install himself in power, at least temporarily.195 But this appeared to be a worse option. A would-be military conspirator had no secure communications: chauffeurs, orderlies, telegraph operators would report suspicious activities to the soldiers’ committees and the Soviet.196 So Kornilov worked with the Provisional Government. The latter, he rightly concluded, was incapable of mastering the situation. Still, Kerensky did tell Kornilov he wanted a “strong authority,” and working with the government allowed the legal movement of troops. Back on August 6–7, with Kerensky’s approval, Kornilov had ordered Lieutenant General Alexander Krymov, commander of the Third Cavalry Corps, to relocate his troops from the southwest (Romanian front) up to Velikie Luki (Pskov province). Krymov’s troops, some of whom were known as the Savage Division, included Muslim mountaineers from the North Caucasus (Chechens, Ingush, Dagestani) who were viewed as the most reliable in the whole army, and had been used for political enforcement at the front.197 On August 21, Riga fell—just as Kornilov had warned at the Moscow State Conference—and Kerensky authorized Kornilov to move the frontline troops near Petrograd to defend the capital and suppress an anticipated coup by the Bolsheviks, presumed agents of the Germans. This action remained secret.

The moderate socialists were still arguing for neither/nor: neither truck with the extreme right counterrevolution, nor truck with the extreme left seizure of power.198 But the Bolsheviks embraced the polarization as welcome and inevitable. “Either, or!” Stalin wrote on August 25, 1917. “Either with the landlords and capitalists, and then the complete triumph of the counterrevolution. Or with the proletariat and the poor peasantry, and then the complete triumph of the revolution. The policy of conciliation and coalition is doomed to failure.”199

The movement of Krymov’s troops, at Kornilov’s command, with Kerensky’s apparent approval, in order to preempt a presumed Bolshevik coup and strengthen political authority in the name of the hopelessly limp Provisional Government, erupted in a showdown between Kerensky and Kornilov. From the moment it was under way, between August 26 and 31, 1917, and ever since, analysts have divided over two ostensibly opposed interpretations.200 First, that it was a putsch by Kornilov to make himself dictator, under the guise of protecting the Provisional Government. Second, that it was a monstrous provocation by Kerensky to oust Kornilov and make himself dictator. Both interpretations are correct.201

Around midnight on Saturday, August 26—after a series of very convoluted messages, messengers, and pseudo-messengers between Kerensky and Kornilov—the prime minister called an emergency cabinet meeting and requested “full authority [vlast’]” to fight off a counterrevolutionary plot. The Provisional Government ministers all resigned.202 Right about then, on Sunday, August 27, at 2:40 a.m., Kornilov telegraphed the government to the effect that to put down the anticipated Bolshevik rising in the capital, as agreed, Lieutenant General Krymov’s army “is assembling in the environs of Petrograd toward evening August 28. Request that Petrograd be placed under martial law August 29.”203 At 4:00 a.m., Kerensky telegraphed Kornilov, dismissing him. At headquarters, the general staff viewed the order either as a forgery or a sign that Kerensky had been taken hostage by extreme leftists. Kornilov had Krymov speed up. In the capital, various naïve personages sought to mediate the “misunderstanding,” but Kerensky rejected them. On August 27–28, the newspapers published special editions with an accusation of treason on the part of the supreme commander signed by Kerensky.204 Enraged, Kornilov telegrammed all frontline commanders, branding Kerensky a liar who was acting under Bolshevik pressure “in harmony with the plans of the German general staff.” The public counterappeal by Kornilov pointedly called himself “the son of a peasant Cossack” and asserted a desire “only to save Great Russia. I swear to lead the people through victory over the enemy to the Constituent Assembly, where it will decide its own destiny and choose its new political system.”205 Kerensky turned to the Soviet to muster forces to subvert the “counterrevolution.” On the rail lines, workers and specially dispatched Muslim agitators harassed Krymov’s Savage Division forces. Trotsky would write that “the army that rose against Kornilov was the army-to-be of the October Revolution.”206 In fact, no fighting took place.207 Krymov entered Petrograd by automobile on the night of August 30–31 under a guarantee of personal safety from Kerensky, and answered a summons by the prime minister, who told him to report to a military court. Krymov then went to a private apartment and shot himself.208

Stalin rejoiced at the “breaking of the counter-revolution,” but warned that its defeat remained incomplete. “Against the landowners and capitalists, against the generals and bankers, for the interests of the peoples of Russia, for peace, for freedom, for land—that is our slogan,” he wrote on August 31. “The creation of a government of workers and peasants—that is our task.”209 In captivity, the ex-tsar Nicholas II privately expressed disappointment in the failure of Kornilov to establish a military dictatorship. “I then for the first time heard the tsar regret his abdication,” recalled the court tutor Pierre Gilliard.210 In any attempted coup, even many on the inside remain confused and uncertain, and support mostly materializes if and when the coup begins to appear successful.211 The entente, on August 28, indicated it would support efforts in Russia to “unify” the country as part of the joint war effort; Russian business interests would have backed Kornilov. But Kornilov never even left front headquarters at Mogilyov.212 It was an odd military coup that depended on the cooperation of Kerensky, who effectively betrayed Kornilov before Kornilov had any chance to betray him.213 But Kerensky’s August move against Kornilov constituted his own second failed coup, following his aborted July coup against Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Whether a genuinely mass movement on the right existed in summer 1917 to be galvanized and perhaps eventually consolidated can never be known. Still, some insight about the masses may lie in the story of a rightist periodical, the Little Newspaper (for the “little” or ordinary person), founded in 1914 and published by Aleksei A. Suvorin (Poroshin), the son of a famous conservative Russian pundit. A vulgar and grammatically challenged broadsheet that delivered brilliant real-life chronicles in real-life prose, the Little Newspaper won a mass following among Petrograd’s lower orders: workers, soldiers, war invalids, the jobless, those lacking rent money, those shortchanged by traders—in short, much of the wartime capital. Bringing readers to tears of laughter over sketches of quotidian life, but also skewering political cowardice among elites, the Little Newspaper opposed Russia’s socialist parties and demanded Lenin’s arrest before the Provisional Government had issued a warrant. It hammered the Provisional Government and Kerensky for ineptitude and gutlessness, blustered about even bolder war annexations and demanded that government leadership pass to strongmen (especially Vice Admiral Kolchak). It also published the percentages of Jews in soviets, using familiar code like “Rabinovich.” The Petrograd Soviet deemed the Little Newspaper a “pogrom-publication” and urged print workers not to print it. But by June 1917, the Little Newspaper’s circulation rose to 109,000, more than Pravda’s, and reached readers in the capital’s garrison, nearby naval bases, and factories. That said, it remains impossible to know whether its popularity derived primarily from its scurrilous entertainment or its calls for a “strong hand.”214

After the Kornilov flameout, the broadsheet lost its popularity. Even before then, however, the Little Newspaper had started to label itself “socialist,” almost like proto-national socialists, albeit without much conviction in terms of the socialism. This telling, if halfhearted embrace demonstrated that any aspiring movement on the right now had to be “socialist.” Socialism in some form was an unavoidable structure in the political landscape. Socialism was also one of the prime evils that motivated Kornilov and others on the political right, however. The war that helped make the aspiration for socialism nearly universal vastly narrowed the Russian right’s options. And the very instrument that Kornilov wanted to use to restore order—the army—was now more than ever the key instrument of socialist revolution.215

THE VANISHING ACT

Unhappy Kerensky. Despite comprehending the dire necessity of strengthening central authority, he had played a double game that forced him into a devil’s choice: embrace either the general staff (indispensable to prevent a leftist coup) or the democratically elected Soviet (meaning, in his mind, the masses, whose favor he so craved).216 With his embrace of the Soviet and disgracing of Kornilov, however, establishment figures abandoned the Provisional Government for good; a few even began to hope for a foreign intervention to save Russia.217 Two generals at frontline headquarters declined Kerensky’s urgent requests to replace the dismissed Kornilov. The utterly bankrupt prime minister—without even his own government, let alone a parliament—was compelled to direct the Russian army to obey Kornilov’s orders. “A Supreme Commander, accused of treason,” Kornilov observed of himself, “has been ordered to continue commanding his armies because there is no one else to appoint.”218

Some insiders urged Kerensky to resign in favor of General Alexeyev. Instead, the thirty-six-year-old lawyer appointed himself military supreme commander and named General Alexeyev—whom Kerensky had recently dismissed as “defeatist”—to the position of chief of staff. This was the same arrangement that had obtained under Nicholas II. Alexeyev took three days to assent to Kerensky’s request; nine days after appointing Alexeyev, Kerensky sacked him.219 The original eleven-man suspended-in-the-air Provisional Government had narrowed to just one man. Kerensky appointed himself head of a new Council of Five, evoking the five-person Directory of the French Revolution (1795–99) that had aimed to occupy the political middle against far right and far left; Russia’s pretend “Directory” would nominally last a few weeks.220 Kerensky’s actions beginning in June 1917, particularly his military offensive, and now in August 1917 had shifted the entire political landscape, pulverizing the right, energizing the left, and helping to shove the entire left much further leftward.

Back in July, Bolshevism had sunk to a low ebb.221 The newly minted Bolshevik Trotsky, like Kamenev, was in prison, while Lenin, like Zinoviev, was in a Finnish barn. That left Sverdlov and Stalin. Whether this duo—without the hiding Lenin and the imprisoned Trotsky—could have led the Bolshevik party to power seems doubtful. Stalin wrote for and edited Workers’ Path, the Bolshevik mouthpiece that had replaced the shuttered Pravda, while Sverdlov worked to keep an organization together, cajoling provincials to submit concrete examples of their party work (copies of leaflets, membership details), then sending them instructions.222 But leading the entire revolution, which was a street and trench phenomenon?

There could be no doubt about the policital direction of events. Despite the successful staging of the 6th Party Congress in late July and early August, the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” had been shelved, but then—poof: the long-anticipated “counterrevolution” had suddenly materialized in late August.223 The slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” was reinstated in a summons to change the class power. The ruling classes were said to be failing to drive the bourgeois-democratic revolution (necessary for socialism); on the contrary, they were now openly counterrevolutionary. Generals would not bring peace. Bankers would not bring economic reforms. Landowners would not bring land redistribution. The bourgeoisie was turning out to be too weak. Class power would have to be seized, or all the gains, the entire revolutionary process, would be lost. Workers and peasants would have to lead the revolution.224 The leftmost wings of the Socialist Revolutionaries and even of the Mensheviks, for the first time, now accepted this program, too. “In the days of Kornilov,” Workers’ Path, edited by Stalin, would explain, “power had already gone over to the soviets.”225

The Kerensky-Kornilov debacle completely reversed the Bolshevik slide.226 Even as Kornilov and many other high-ranking officers submitted to arrest at Mogilyov headquarters, virtually all imprisoned Bolsheviks who did not break out on their own were freed, including, most crucially, Trotsky (released on 3,000 rubles’ bail on September 3). On September 25—the same day that Kerensky’s ridiculous “Directory” idea was retired—Trotsky became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. This ascension, from prison to the top of the popular organ, reflected the stunning newfound Bolshevik majority in that body. (The Bolsheviks also achieved a majority of delegates in the Moscow soviet.) No less striking, a great many of the 40,000 guns Kerensky had ordered distributed to resist Kornilov went to factory workers—before this, workers by and large had not been armed—and many of these “Red Guards” would now end up on the Bolshevik side. Stalin, writing on September 6, 1917, publicly acknowledged the gift of the Kerensky-Kornilov affair: “Marx explained the weakness of the 1848 revolution in Germany with the absence of a powerful counter-revolution that might have whipped up the revolution and strengthened it in the fire of battle.”227 In Russia, Stalin underscored, the appearance of counterrevolution in the person of Kornilov had confirmed the need for “a final break with the Cadets,” meaning the Provisional Government. On September 16, in yet another lead editorial, Stalin issued a full-throated demand for the immediate transfer of all power to the soviets. “The fundamental question of revolution is the question of power,” he explained. “The character of a revolution, its path and outcome, is completely determined by which class is in power,” so in the name of the proletariat class, the socialists ought to seize the direction of Russia’s revolution.228

After the bitter failure of the “July Days,” after which Bolsheviks had been subjected to mass arrests, many lacked confidence in any sort of insurrection, fearing possible complete destruction. From hiding in Finland, however, Lenin sent manic directives demanding an immediate coup, arguing that “a wave of real anarchy may become stronger than we are.”229 Russia’s stock market had crashed. Deserters and criminals pillaged. “In Rostov the town hall is dynamited,” explained one Moscow newspaper that fall. “In Tambov province there are agrarian pogroms. . . . In the Caucasus there are massacres in a number of places. Along the Volga, near Kamyshinsk, soldiers loot trains. . . .”230 Long queues reappeared for bread, as in February 1917.231 Food supply officials discussed demobilization of the army, because they could not feed it.232 Kerensky, along with a nominally revived Provisional Government cabinet of ministers, relocated to the more secure setting of the Winter Palace, availing himself of the former apartments of Alexander III, sleeping in the tsar’s bed and working at his desk; his personal affectations became subject to still greater ridicule, and not just by the livid right, which spread false stories of his Jewish origins and clandestine work for the Germans.233 Soon there were also rumors, Rasputin style, of an affair between Kerensky and one of Nicholas II’s daughters. (Kerensky had separated from his wife.) All this incited Lenin. “We have thousands of armed workers and soldiers in Petrograd who can seize at once the Winter Palace, the General Staff building, the telephone exchange and all the largest printing establishments,” he insisted again on October 7. “Kerensky will be compelled to surrender.”234 Stalin reproduced Lenin’s message for public audiences, hammering on the point that the workers, peasants, and soldiers had to expect a new Kerensky-Kornilov strike. “The counter-revolution,” Stalin urged in an article published on the morning of October 10, “is mobilizing—prepare to repulse it!”235

The Central Committee was stalling, however, and Lenin risked the trip from Finland to Petrograd sometime between October 3 and 10; on the latter day, in a safe-house private apartment, wearing a wig and glasses, and without his beard, he attended his first meeting with the Central Committee since July. Of its twenty-one members, only twelve were present. Sverdlov gave the report, citing supposedly widespread popular support for an insurrection. After nearly all-night browbeating, Lenin won the votes of ten of the twelve for an immediate coup; Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed. Stalin joined Lenin in voting for the resolution, written with pencil on a sheet of paper torn from a children’s notebook, to the effect that “an armed uprising is inevitable and the time for it is fully ripe.” No date was set, however. (“When this uprising will be possible—perhaps in a year—is uncertain,” Mikhail Kalinin would note on October 15.)236 On October 18, Zinoviev and Kamenev, in a small-circulation newspaper, published word of their opposition to a coup—essentially revealing one was being planned.237 Lenin wrote a furious letter, calling them “strike breakers” and demanding their expulsion.238 Stalin, in the main Bolshevik newspaper he edited, allowed Zinoviev to publish a conciliatory response, and appended an editorial note. “We, for our part, express the hope that with the declaration by Zinoviev . . . the matter may be considered closed,” the anonymous note stated. “The sharp tone of Lenin’s article does not alter the fact that, fundamentally, we remain of one mind.”239 Zinoviev and Kamenev were perhaps potential allies to counteract Trotsky’s newfound power.

Lenin had no telephone at his hideaway, the apartment of Madame Fofanova, although Krupskaya went back and forth with Lenin’s paper and oral messages pressuring the Central Committee.240 Between October 10 and 25, Lenin would see Trotsky only once, on October 18, in the private apartment where he was hiding, but that once was enough; Trotsky, at the Central Committee on October 20, harshly condemned Stalin’s attempt at internal party peacemaker, and the members voted to accept Kamenev’s resignation. Trotsky, even more than the Central Committee, became the key instrument of Lenin’s will. Kerensky, for his part, had expelled the Bolsheviks from the Krzesinska mansion (“the satin nest of a court ballerina,” in Trotsky’s piquant phrase). They had taken up residence in a finishing school for girls of the nobility, Smolny Institute, even farther out on the eastern edge of the capital than the Tauride Palace. The Soviet, expelled from the Tauride, had relocated to Smolny as well. There, the Soviet’s central executive committee had approved—by a single vote (13 to 12)—the formation of a defensive Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), which the full Soviet approved on October 12.241 The rationale for the armed body—originally proposed by the Mensheviks—was to calm the roiling garrison and defend the capital against a German attack. But Trotsky, urged on by Lenin, would use the MRC on behalf of the Bolsheviks to shunt aside the carcass of the Provisional Government. Now, everything broke Lenin’s way.

The Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets had been scheduled for October 20—a colossal stroke of lucky timing, and Trotsky hatched the brilliant idea of having a seizure of power simultaneously with the congress, appropriating a source of critical legitimacy while imposing a fait accompli on all other socialists.242 Many delegates seemed unlikely to make it to Petrograd on time, and on October 17–18, moderate socialists forced the Soviet’s central executive committee to postpone the congress until October 25—crucial for the Bolsheviks, who gained time to undertake coup preparations.243 (The Military Revolutionary Committee only held its first meeting on October 20.)244 “The Soviet government will annihilate the misery of the trenches,” Trotsky told an audience of soldiers and sailors on October 21, according to the eyewitness Sukhanov. “It will give the land and it will heal the internal disorder. The Soviet government will give away everything in the country to the poor and to the troops in the trenches. If you, bourgeois, have two fur coats, give one to a soldier. . . . Have you got a warm pair of boots? Stay at home. A worker needs them.” Sukhanov added: “A resolution was proposed that those present stand for the workers’ and peasants’ cause to their last drop of blood. . . . Who’s in favor? As one, the thousand-man audience shot their hands up.” A similar scene took place the next day, at the Cirque Moderne, where Trotsky enjoined the crowd to swear an oath of allegiance: “If you support our policy to bring the revolution to victory, if you give the cause all your strength, if you support the Petrograd Soviet in this great cause without hesitation, then let us all swear our allegiance to the revolution. If you support this sacred oath which we are making, raise your hands.”245 On the eve of the Second Congress of Soviets, on October 23, the Trotsky-led MRC asserted its exclusive claim to command the capital garrison and, through its commissars posted to garrison regiments, ordered them “to combat readiness.”246 Still, the MRC remained uncertain as to its next moves.

Stalin, on the afternoon of October 24, informed a gathering of Bolshevik delegates who had arrived for the congress that two possible courses of action divided the MRC: one held that “we organize an uprising at once”; the other advised “that we consolidate our forces.” A party Central Committee majority, he indicated, tilted toward the latter, meaning wait and see.247 Kerensky came to the rescue, again, ordering the arrests of top Bolsheviks—people he had released following the Kornilov debacle—and shuttering two Bolshevik newspapers: Workers’ Path and Soldier (two rightist papers were also to be closed, in a balancing act). On October 24, in Stalin’s presence, a handful of military cadets and citizens’ militia destroyed the freshly printed newspaper copies and damaged the presses, but Stalin’s staff ran to Smolny with news of the attack and the MRC dispatched forces and got the presses rolling again.248 Preparations for defense of the revolution became offense. Rumors of “suspicious” troop movements in the city—“Kornilovites!”—goaded the Red Guards to occupy the rail stations, control the bridges, and seize the telegraph. When the government disconnected the phone lines to Smolny, the MRC seized the telephone exchange, had the lines reconnected, and disconnected the Winter Palace. When the lights in Smolny seemed to be experiencing trouble, Red Guards seized the electricity generating station. Trotsky would later quip that “it was being left to the government of Kerensky, as you might say, to insurrect.”249

In fact, the Bolsheviks would have laid claim to power anyway—nothing stood in their way. They managed to be thoroughly confused and still seize power because the Provisional Government simply vanished, just as the vaunted autocracy had vanished.250 Red Guards—described as “a huddled group of boys in workmen’s clothes, carrying guns with bayonets”—met zero resistance and by nightfall on October 24 already controlled most of the capital’s strategic points.251 During that night, Kerensky sacked the commander of the Petrograd military district, Colonel Georgy Polkovnikov, but the latter ignored his own dismissal and used military channels to wire the general staff at headquarters: “I report that the situation in Petrograd is menacing. There are no street demonstrations or disorders, but systematic seizure of institutions and railroad stations, and arrests are going on. No orders are being carried out. The military school cadets are abandoning their posts without resistance . . . there is no guarantee that attempts will not be made to capture the Provisional Government.”252 The colonel was right, but just how many garrison troops and irregulars the Bolsheviks mustered that night remains unclear, perhaps as few as 10,000.253 General Alexeyev would later claim he had 15,000 officers in Petrograd, of whom one third were immediately ready to defend the Winter Palace, but that his offer was not taken up. (In the event, the officers got drunk.)254 The Petrograd garrison did not participate en masse in the Bolsheviks’ coup, but more important, they did not defend the existing order.255 General V. A. Cheremisov, commander of the nearby northern front, hounded by a military revolutionary committee formed near his headquarters, rescinded the orders previously given to the reinforcements who were supposed to relieve the Winter Palace.256 All that the hollow Provisional Government managed to muster in its defense were women and children: that is, an all-female “Death Battalion” (140 strong) and a few hundred unenthusiastic young military cadets, who were assisted by a bicycle unit; some stray Cossacks; and forty war invalids whose commander had artificial legs.257

LENIN AND TROTSKY

In October 1917 Russia counted 1,429 soviets, including 455 of peasant deputies, a formidable grassroots movement, but their fate to a great extent rested in the hands of two men. Lenin had headed for Smolny around 10:00 p.m. on October 24—in violation of a Central Committee directive to remain in hiding—donning a wig with fake bandages around his face. A military cadet patrol stopped him and his lone bodyguard, but, looking over the deliberately rumpled Bolshevik leader, decided not to detain what appeared to be a drunk. Without a pass, Lenin had to sneak his way into Smolny; once inside, he started screaming for an immediate coup.258 He was wasting his breath: the putsch was already well under way. But the next night, the Second Congress of the Soviets was delayed while Military Revolutionary Committee forces sat on their hands outside the largely unguarded Winter Palace; the congress could not wait any longer and finally opened at 10:40 p.m. Smolny’s colonnaded hall, formerly used for school plays, had filled up with between 650 and 700 delegates, who were barely visible through the haze of cigarette smoke. Somewhat more than 300 were Bolsheviks (the largest bloc), along with nearly 100 Left SRs, who leaned toward the Bolshevik side. More than 500 delegates recognized the time had come for “all power to the soviets,” but, confronted with a Bolshevik fait accompli, many were angry, especially the moderate socialists.259 A frail and awkward Yuly Martov, leader of the Mensheviks, in a trembling and scratchy voice—signs of his tuberculosis (or the onset of cancer)—offered a resolution calling for a “peaceful solution” and immediate negotiations for an inclusive “all-democratic government.” Martov’s resolution passed unanimously, amid “roaring applause.”260 But then vociferous critics of Bolshevism rose to condemn their conspiracy to arrest the Provisional Government “behind the back of the Congress” and foment “civil war,” thereby prompting most Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary delegates to demonstrate their disapproval of the Bolsheviks by walking out. “Bankrupts,” Trotsky shouted at their heels. “Go where you belong—onto the trash pile of history.”261

“Martov walked in silence and did not look back—only at the exit did he stop,” recalled his fellow Menshevik Boris Nicolaevsky. A young Bolshevik firebrand from the Vyborg district stunned the Menshevik leader by saying, “And we among ourselves had thought, Martov at least will remain with us.” Martov replied: “One day you will understand the crime in which you are complicit,” and waved his hand as he departed the hall in Smolny.262

After months of open discussion in newspapers, barracks, factories, street corners, and drawing rooms, the Bolshevik putsch was over and done before the vast majority of the population knew it had happened. On October 25, trams and buses in Petrograd operated normally, shops opened for business, theaters put on their productions (Fyodor Chaliapin sang Don Carlos). Around the empire, whether in Kiev or Vladivostok, people had little or no inkling of events in the capital. Still, the flow of power to the soviets had long been unmistakable: already in summer 1917, the Kronstadt naval base had become a de facto minirepublic ruled by a soviet. The Tashkent soviet, while refusing to accept Muslims (98 percent of the local population) as members, had seized power before the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd.263 By September 1917, at the very latest, the issue was never the survival of the ghostly Provisional Government, but what would replace it in the capital? One contender might have been the August 1917 Moscow State Conference, a potentially (unelected) Constituent Assembly of the establishment, but such an opportunity, to the extent it had existed, was squandered. This left replacement by the Petrograd Soviet. In that regard, the critical issue was who would wield the upper hand at the Soviet? There, the climb in Bolshevik fortunes had been stunning. In Petrograd, as in most other towns with huge wartime garrisons, Kerensky’s suicidal June offensive, and his August encouragement and then betrayal of Kornilov, delivered the Soviet to the Bolsheviks. That meteoric political gain was consolidated by Trotsky’s idea to use the recently formed Military Revolutionary Committee to present the Second Congress of Soviets with the fait accompli of a Bolshevik seizure of power.264 But the socialist opponents of the Bolshevik coup unwittingly did the rest in their abandonment of the congress hall.265

Later, much would be made of the “art of insurrection,” especially by Trotsky. Sometime after 2:00 a.m. that first night of the Congress of Soviets (October 25–26)—at a parallel special session of the Petrograd Soviet held during the congress—he announced that forces of the Petrograd Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee had finally located the Provisional Government ministers inside the Winter Palace, seated around a table waiting to be arrested. (Kamenev—the Bolshevik opponent of the Bolshevik coup—would inform the Congress of Soviets of the arrests.) Lenin had written out a proclamation on the transfer of power (signed “Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet”), which the grandiloquent Anatoly Lunacharsky read aloud to the congress, while repeatedly being interrupted by riotous cheers. After discussion the Left SRs in the hall agreed to support the decree with a minor change; a delegate of the Menshevik Internationalists, who had returned to the hall, asked for an amendment calling for a government of the broadest possible elements, but he was ignored. Around 5:00 a.m., the primarily Bolshevik and Left SR delegates remaining in the hall overwhelmingly approved the transfer of power: just 2 voted against, and 12 abstained.266 Around 6:00 a.m., some seven hours into the opening session, the delegates adjourned to get some rest. There was no functioning government. The MRC Bolsheviks had frog-marched the ex-ministers into the damp cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress, which until the Kornilov-Kerensky affair had been full of Bolsheviks.267 Red Guards, however, had never actually “stormed” the Winter Palace: they, finally, had just climbed unopposed through unlocked doors or windows, many going straight for the storied wine cellars, history’s most luxurious.268 Each new Red Guard detachment sent to prevent a ransacking instead got drunk, too. “We tried flooding the cellars with water,” the leader of the Bolshevik forces on site recalled, “but the firemen . . . got drunk instead.”269

Crucially, however, Kerensky’s vainglorious relocation of himself and the ersatz “ministers” into the Winter Palace forever linked the Provisional Government with the seat of oppressive tsarism. This symbolic link would facilitate depictions of the October Bolshevik coup—via tales of a mythical storming of the Winter Palace—as a continuation of the overthrow of the old regime, thereby eliding the February and October revolutions.

Lenin had still not even appeared at the Congress of Soviets. He finally emerged—to thunderous applause—around 9:00 p.m. on the night of October 26, after the opening of the second (and last) session, still in the ragtag disguise he had used to evade capture while crossing the capital to Smolny. (As part of his disguise, Lenin had taken to donning a worker’s cap, which he never relinquished, even as he continued to wear “bourgeois” suits.)270 “Lenin—great Lenin,” recorded John Reed. “A short, stocky figure with a big head set down on his shoulders, bald and bulging . . . dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers too long for him.”271 He was not widely recognized. Lenin was predominantly an ethnic Russian, but had German, Jewish, and Kalmyk ancestry as well. Born the same year as Kornilov, Lenin by now was solidly middle-aged. He “is short, broad-shouldered, and lean,” the St. Petersburg writer Alexander Kuprin observed. “He looks neither repellant, militant, nor deep-thinking. He has high cheekbones and slanting eyes. . . . The dome of his forehead is broad and high, though not as exaggerated as it appears in foreshortened photographs. . . . He has traces of hair on his temples, and his beard and moustache still show how much of a fiery redhead he was in his youth. His hands are large and ugly. . . . I couldn’t stop looking at his eyes . . . they are narrow; besides which he tends to screw them up, no doubt a habit of concealing short sight, and this, and the rapid glances beneath his eyebrows, gives him an occasional squint and perhaps a look of cunning.”272 Gleb Kryzanowski, a Bolshevik, recorded a similar impression of Lenin’s short stature and eyes (“unusual, piercing, full of inner strength and energy, dark, dark, brown”), but found his visage startlingly distinct, “a pleasant, swarthy face with a touch of the Asiatic.”273 Not as Asiatic in appearance as the diminutive Kornilov, nor as wiry, Lenin’s face was nonetheless partly Mongol.

Lo and behold: here was Russia’s Kalmyk savior.

The Bolshevik zealot read out a decree on immediate peace “to peoples and governments of all the warring powers,” interrupted by stormy applause and a singing of the “Internationale.”274 Lenin also read out a decree on land endorsing the peasants’ private and collective land seizures, instead of a state nationalization. To objections that the land decree contradicted the long-standing Bolshevik platform and had been lifted from the Socialist Revolutionaries—no longer present in the hall—Lenin replied, “Who cares who drafted it. As a democratic government we cannot ignore the feelings of the lower orders [narodnye nizy] although we do not agree with them.”275 The land decree was adopted without discussion.

Lev Kamenev, the chairman of the Soviet’s central executive committee, had deftly withdrawn Trotsky’s sharply worded resolution condemning the Mensheviks and SRs for walking out at the first session of the congress. Before Lenin’s appearance, in between the first (October 25–26) and second (October 26–27) sessions of the Congress of Soviets, Kamenev strenuously worked to agree a coalition government with the Left SRs, but the latter had balked at the exclusion of all the other socialists. And so, near the very end of the Congress of Soviets’ second and final session, around 2:30 a.m. (October 27), Kamenev announced the formation of a “temporary” exclusively all-Bolshevik government. Boris Avilov, a Menshevik Internationalist, stood up and predicted that an all-Bolshevik government could neither solve the food supply crisis nor end the war. He further predicted that the Entente would not recognize a Bolshevik-monopoly government and that the latter would be compelled to accept a separate and onerous peace with Germany. Avilov proposed inviting back those elected Soviet delegates who had walked out and, with them, forming an all-socialist democratic government. Avilov’s proposal failed, garnering only a quarter of the votes (150) of those present in the hall (600), despite considerable sympathy for this stance even among many Bolsheviks.276 It was Trotsky who most vehemently spoke against a deal with the “traitors.”277

Trotsky cut an inordinately dashing figure—the shock of wild dark hair and the blue eyes, the pince-nez of an intellectual, and the broad shoulders of a Hercules—but he wielded his public charismatic power on behalf of Lenin. Lenin’s power was uncanny. “I felt somewhat surprised that a person who—irrespective of one’s views of his ideology—had had such a far-reaching influence on the fate of his huge fatherland should make such a modest impression,” remarked one Finnish visitor to Smolny. “His speech was very simple and unforced, as was his manner. If one did not know him, one could never have been able to comprehend the strength that he must have possessed. . . . The room was in no way different from any of the other rooms in Smolny. . . . The walls were painted white, there was a wooden table and a few chairs.”278 Lenin’s political instruments were not imposing architecture, a bureaucracy, a telephone network. They were ideas and personality. “The whole success of Lenin . . . to assume dominion over a hundred and fifty millions,” an acute foreign observer would note, “is plainly due entirely to the spell of his personality, which communicated itself to all who came into touch with him.”279 Lenin in 1917 was rarely a physical presence. Alexander Shlyapnikov, the head of the Bolshevik party inside the country at the time of Lenin’s return in spring 1917, spent the entire period before, during, and immediately after the October coup in the hospital (he had been hit by a tram); he had no effect on events. But Lenin did have an effect, even though he did not visit crews on board battleships or troops in trenches in 1917; most sailors and soldiers nonetheless knew his name. He had sometimes delivered public speeches, such as from the Krzesinska mansion balcony, or harangues at the Petrograd Soviet, and in May, militant workers held banners that proclaimed, “Long Live Lenin!” But having arrived in Russia on April 3, 1917, after an absence of nearly seventeen years, the Bolshevik leader had soon been forced to seek refuge in tsarist Finland.

From early July 1917, when the warrant had been issued for his arrest, Lenin remained underground, hiding, for almost four consecutive months, right through October 24.280 During that crucial period, he almost never even met the Bolshevik inner circle face to face, let alone the masses. Here was the equivalent of a catacomb Christian who, in a single lifetime, would suddenly emanate from the caves to become pope. Most political figures who succeed on a dizzying trajectory almost always do so by cobbling broad coalitions, often with very unlikely bedfellows, but not Lenin. He succeeded despite refusing cooperation and creating ever more enemies. Of course, he cultivated allies among the class of professional revolutionaries, loyalists such as Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin. Lenin’s torrent of polemical theses further enhanced his power, first among revolutionaries, who in turn popularized Lenin’s intellectual as well as political standing among the mass. Lenin proved a master of the abusive, pithy phrase, and of the crude, sweeping analysis of developments and rationale for revolution.281 But whatever Lenin’s charisma and encapsulation talents, much of his power would derive from events going his way. Again and again, he stubbornly insisted on what appeared to be a crazy course of action, which then worked to his advantage. Lenin seemed to incarnate political will.

Later, Trotsky, for all his Marxist invocation of the supposed laws of history, would feel constrained to admit that without Lenin, there would have been no October Revolution.282 Lenin, for his part, never made explicit that the same held true for his indispensable handmaiden Trotsky. But others did so. “I tell you what we do with such people,” the despairing military attache of liberal Britain, General Alfred Knox, had said of Lenin and Trotsky to an American Red Cross official. “We shoot them.” This was on October 20, the eve of what turned out to be the predicted Bolshevik coup. The Red Cross official, ostensibly wiser, had replied, “But you are up against several million. General, I am not a military man. But you are not up against a military situation.”283 In fact, the Red Cross official was wrong: he confused the assumption of power by the Second Congress of Soviets, which had become unavoidable, with the assumption of power by the Bolsheviks alone. The Bolshevik putsch could have been prevented by a pair of bullets.

• • •

“THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION,” observed Rosa Luxemburg, “is the mightiest event of the world war.”284 Whether a prewar transition to a constitutional monarchy—from constitutional autocracy—would have been enough to incorporate the masses into a stable polity can never be known. What we do know is that the long, stubborn refusal, not just of Nicholas II but of almost the entire Russian establishment, to abandon the autocracy in order to save the monarchy ensured that the dysfunctional autocracy’s downfall would precipitate a disintegration of state institutions as well. Freedom and state breakdown became synonymous and, in that context, the classical liberals got their chance. The February 1917 liberal coup, nominally against the autocracy but really against the Duma, presaged the Bolshevik October 1917 coup, nominally against the Provisional Government but really against the Soviet. Each appeared to spearhead the mass sentiment of the moment; each brought a far narrower group to power than mass sentiment preferred. That mass sentiment, moreover, did not stand still: the world war vastly accelerated the radicalization of popular mood. To be sure, the history of revolutions indicates that an inevitable failure to satisfy millenarian hopes naturally radicalizes the populace. The surprise in Russia, if there was one, lay not in the deepening popular radicalization but in the debilitating weakness of the establishment and upper military.285

Russia had always been a police state that relied predominantly on the army for its heaviest policing, but not only had Russia lost its police in March 1917, after that it lost its army as well. “The Seizure of power by ‘force’ in a modern State,” noted the historian Adrian Lyttelton, apropos of Italy, but equally applicable to Russia, “is never possible, except when the army or police carries out the coup, unless the will to resist of the Government forces has been undermined.”286 The world war, and especially the 1917 military offensive, did more than hasten popular radicalization: it also defanged the army as a force of order. Wartime radicalism in the army and fleet—from Vyborg and Helsinki to Pskov, which the Provisional Government called the “rotten triangle”—served as the indispensable scaffolding for Bolshevism. “October may have been a ‘coup’ in the capital,” one historian has written, “but at the front it was a revolution.”287 The politicized armed forces were made up predominantly of peasants, and whether they served in the army or not, they carried out their own revolution. “A country of boundless territorial expanse, with a sparse population, suffered from a shortage of land,” the Constitutional Democrat Duma representative Vasily Maklakov would remark in hindsight. “And the peasant class, elsewhere usually a bulwark of order, in Russia in 1917 evidenced a revolutionary temper.”288 But whereas the revolution of the soldiers and sailors consciously linked up with Bolshevism, the peasant revolution only happened to coincide with it. Soon enough, the peasant revolution and Bolshevism would collide.

Inside the Bolshevik party, the way that the Petrograd coup had unfolded would have lasting repercussions. The opposition to the coup by Kamenev and Zinoviev was a stain they would bear for the rest of their lives. When Stalin’s mediation efforts were slapped down by Trotsky, Stalin’s resentment at the upstart, high-profile intellectual Trotsky boiled over. Stalin, in a huff, had announced his intention to quit as editor of the party newspaper. “The Russian revolution has overthrown not a few authoritative types,” Stalin wrote with disdain on the day of his proffered resignation. “The revolution’s power is expressed in the fact that it has not bowed before ‘famous names,’ but has taken them into service or, if they refused, consigned them to oblivion.”289 The Central Committee rejected his resignation, but even after the successful coup, the bitterness would rankle.290 Later, in exile, Trotsky would call Sverdlov “the general secretary of the October insurrection”—a poke in the eye of (by then) General Secretary Stalin. Trotsky would also defend Kamenev, the opponent of the putsch, for having played a “most active part in the coup,” pointedly adding that Stalin had played no noticeable role.291 This was patently false. To be sure, Trotsky, Kamenev, Lenin, and Lunacharchy all spoke at the historic Second Congress of Soviets, while Stalin did not. But Stalin gave a speech to the Bolshevik delegates to the Soviet before the congress met, on October 24, demonstrating clear familiarity with the military and political preparations for the coup. Throughout 1917, moreover, his punditry and editorial work were prodigious, especially in the summer and fall.292

Stalin’s publications explained the revolution in simple, accessible terms, including during the Congress of Soviets. “In the first days of the revolution the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ was a novelty,” he wrote in Pravda (October 26, 1917), referring to the period beginning in April 1917. “At the end of August the scene changed very radically” with “the Kornilov Rebellion. . . . The soviets in the rear and the soldiers committees at the front, which were in a moribund state in July-August, ‘suddenly’ revived and took power in their hands in Siberia and the Caucasus, in Finland and the Urals, in Odessa and Kharkov. . . . Thus, ‘Soviet power’ proclaimed in April by a ‘small group of Bolsheviks in Petrograd’ obtains almost universal recognition of the revolutionary classes at the end of August.” He differentiated the move to Soviet power from the endless changes in the Provisional Government that had brought socialists into the cabinet. “Power to the Soviet means the thorough purging of every government office in the rear and at the front, from top to bottom. . . . Power to the Soviet means the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary peasantry . . . open, mass dictatorship, exercised in the eyes of all, without ploys and behind-the-scenes work; for such a dictatorship has no reason to hide the fact that no mercy will be shown to the lock-out capitalists who have intensified unemployment . . . or to the profiteering bankers who have increased the price of food and caused starvation.” Certain classes brought on the misery; other classes would bring salvation. “This is the class nature of the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets.’ Events at home and abroad, the protracted war and the longing for peace, defeat at the front and defense of the capital, the rottenness of the Provisional Government . . . , chaos and famine, unemployment and exhaustion—all this is irresistibly drawing the revolutionary classes of Russia to power.” How “classes” exercised power remained to be seen.

Stalin’s Georgian Social Democrat compatriot David Sagirashvili had known him since 1901, when Sagirashvili was fourteen and the future Stalin twenty-three. His upbringing had been similar to Stalin’s—absent father, immersion in tales of Georgian martyrs and national poets, loathing for imperial Russian administrators and soldier-occupiers, admiration for Georgian outlaws who fought for justice, and membership in a circle of revolutionaries—but he had become a Menshevik. Still, when Sagirashvili, after the coup, refused to join his Menshevik colleagues in boycotting the Bolshevik-dominated Soviet, Stalin, in a Smolny corridor, “put his hand over my shoulder in a most friendly manner and [began] to talk to me in Georgian.”293 The Georgian Jughashvili-Stalin from the Russian empire’s periphery, the son of a shoemaker, had become part of a new would-be power structure in the capital of the largest state in the world, thanks to geopolitics and world war, to many fateful decisions and multiple contingencies, but also to his own efforts. On the list of Bolsheviks voted to a new Soviet central executive committee, Stalin’s name appeared fifth, right before Sverdlov, and after Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev.294 Still more pointedly, Stalin was one of only two people whom Lenin gave permission to enter his private apartment in Bolshevik headquarters at Smolny, a proximity and confidence that would prove pivotal.