Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 7

1918: DADA AND LENIN

Let us try for once not to be right.

Samuel Rosenstock, aka Tristan Tzara (“sad in my country”), a Jewish Romanian poet, “Dada Manifesto” 19181

Lunacharsky was clutching his head, his forehead against the window-pane, standing in an attitude of hopeless despair.

Kremlin commandant Pavel Malkov, August 30, 19182

FEW STREET CELEBRATIONS had accompanied or immediately followed the October Bolshevik coup, in contrast to the giddy days during and after February-March 1917, but within a week Lenin was posing for sculptors. And yet, few thought this crazy putsch would last even before it had happened. Throughout the summer of 1917, Russia’s press, nearly across the political spectrum, had spread the idea (as Paul Miliukov recalled in 1918) that “the Bolsheviks either would decide not to seize power as they lacked hope of retaining it, or, if they did seize it, they would endure only the shortest time. In very moderate circles, the latter experiment was even viewed as highly desirable for it would ‘cure Russia of bolshevism forever.’”3 Many on the right had openly welcomed a Bolshevik coup, imagining that the leftists would quickly break their own necks, but not before first clearing away the despised Provisional Government.4 When the coup happened, it still surprised. Then Lenin opted for a cabinet government rather than abolishing the state and the Second Congress of Soviets—at least those who remained in the hall—approved the formation of the all-Bolshevik government. Admittedly, the Council of People’s Commissars was made up not of “bourgeois” ministers but “commissars,” a name derived from the French commissaire and originally the Latin commisarius, signifying plenipotentiaries of a higher authority (in this case, from “the people”).5 But would it last? The “provisional” men of February who had dared to replace the tsar (Miliukov, Kerensky) had been pushed aside.6 Top army commanders had fallen to incarceration or despair, such as Lavr Kornilov and Mikhail Alexeyev, the longest-serving and most successful chief of staff in the war (who was compelled to arrest Kornilov). Would-be political replacements among non-Bolshevik socialists, such as Victor Chernov and his socialist revolutionaries and Yuly Martov and his Mensheviks, appeared to have been trampled underfoot. But in 1918—which as a result of a calendar change in February from the Julian (eastern orthodox) to the Gregorian (western) was the shortest year in Russia’s thousand-year history7—the Bolsheviks, too, looked destined for oblivion.

The would-be “regime” consisted, at the top, of just four people: Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin, each of whom had a criminal record for political offenses and none of whom had any administrative experience. (The fifteen members of the Council of People’s Commissars had spent a collective two centuries in tsarist prison and exile.) Ensconced in the stale air of Smolny, the eighteenth-century finishing school for girls of noble lineage, they commanded a few tables and ratty couches. Opposite Lenin’s small, dirty room was a larger space where members of the Council of People’s Commissars came and went; initially they held no formal meetings. The room had an unpainted wooden partition to conceal a typist (the chancellery) and a cubbyhole for a telephone operator (the communications network). The former headmistress still occupied the room next door. A sailor, designated by Sverdlov as the new Smolny commandant, hastily organized a perimeter around the campus and began to purge the building room by room.8 But Lenin’s first official car, a magnificent Turcat-Mery of 1915 make (formerly belonging to the tsar), was stolen from Smolny by members of a fire brigade looking to profit by selling it in Finland. (Stepan Gil, a first-class auto professional and conversationalist, who had driven the tsar and became Lenin’s principal driver, led a hunt that managed to retrieve the vehicle).9 “Nobody knew Lenin’s face at that time,” Krupskaya would recall. “In the evening we would often stroll around Smolny, and nobody would ever recognize him, because there were no portraits then.”10 The thirteen commissars set up “offices” inside Smolny and attempted to visit and assert authority over the ministries they sought to supersede.11 Stalin, announced as the commissar for nationalities, had no tsarist or Provisional Government ministry to try to take over.12 His deputy, Stanisław Pestkowski—part of the Polish Bolshevik contingent that had seized the central telegraph during the October coup—stumbled across an empty table in Smolny, over which he tacked up a handwritten sign: “People’s Commissariat of Nationalities.”13 According to Pestkowski, the room was close to Lenin’s, and “in the course of the day,” Lenin “would call Stalin an endless number of times and would appear in our office and lead him away.”14 Lenin, perhaps preferring to remain behind the scenes, is said to have offered the chairmanship to Trotsky, who refused.15 Instead, Trotsky became “foreign affairs commissar” and got a room upstairs, the quarters of a former “floor mistress” for the girls. Sverdlov continued to oversee Bolshevik party matters.16

That such lowly beginnings would soon become one of the world’s strongest dictatorships is beyond fantastic. Lenin was essentially a pamphleteer. In 1918 he was identified as “Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and journalist,” and earned more money from publication honoraria (15,000 rubles) than from his salary (10,000 rubles).17 Trotsky was a writer as well, and a grandiloquent orator, but similarly without experience or training in statecraft. Sverdlov was something of an amateur forger, thanks to his father’s engraving craft, and a crack political organizer but hardly an experienced policy maker. Stalin was also an organizer, a rabble-rouser, and, briefly, a bandit, but primarily a periodicals editor—commissar of nationalities was effectively his first regular employment since his brief stint as a teenage Tiflis weatherman.

Now, these four products of autocratic Russia issued a torrent of paper decrees: “abolishing” social hierarchy in law, civil ranks, and courts; declaring “social insurance for all wage workers without exception, as well as for the city and village poor”; announcing the formation of a Supreme Council of the Economy and a determination to enforce a state monopoly in grain and agricultural implements. The decrees were suffused with terminology like “modes of production,” “class enemies,” “world imperialism,” “proletarian revolution.” Published under the name Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin—and signed for him by Stalin, among others—the decrees were proclaimed to have the “force of law.”18 In the meantime, the regime had no finances or functionaries. Trotsky failed in multiple efforts to take over the ministry of foreign affairs’ building and personnel.19 His first arrival there, at Palace Square, 6, on November 9 was greeted with derision, followed by mass desertion. True, his minions eventually found some petty cash in the ministry’s safe, and Stalin, to fund his own “commissariat,” had Pestkowski sponge 3,000 rubles from Trotsky.20 Pestkowski soon let on that he had studied some economics in London and was decreed “head of the State Bank.”21 The employees laughed him away, which is how he instead ended up working for Stalin.

The decree naming the unemployed Pestkowski as central bank governor, and many similar pronouncements, had an absurdist quality reminiscent of the provocations of the new performance art known as Dadaism. A perfectly apt nonsense term, Dada had arisen in neutral Switzerland during the Great War, largely among Jewish Romanian exiles, in what they called the Cabaret Voltaire, which, coincidentally, lay on the same street in Zurich (Spiegelgasse, 1) as Lenin’s wartime exile apartment (Spiegelgasse, 14). Tristan Tzara, a Dada poet and provocateur, and Lenin may have played chess against each other.22 Dada and Bolshevism arose out of the same historical conjuncture. Dada’s originators cleverly ridiculed the infernal Great War and the malevolent interests that drove it, as well as crass commercialism, using collage, montage, found objects, puppetry, sound poetry, noise music, bizarre films, and one-off pranks staged for the new media they mocked. Dada happenings were also transnational, and would flourish in Berlin, Cologne, Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Tiflis. The Dada artists—or “anti-artists” as many of them preferred to be known—did not conflate, say, a urinal repurposed as a “fountain” with a new and better politics.23 Tzara composed poems by cutting newspaper articles into pieces, shaking the fragments in a bag, and emptying them across a table. Another Dadaist read a lecture whose every word was purposefully drowned out by the shattering noise of a train whistle. Such tactics were a world away from the pedantic, hyperpolitical Lenin: He and his decrees about a new world order were issued without irony. But Bolshevik decrees were also issued into Dada-esque anarchy.

If the collapse of the tsarist order was a revolution, the revolution was a collapse. The immense vacuum of power opened up by the tsar’s wartime abdication had stunned the Provisional Government like a blow to its professorial head. “General Alexeyev characterized the situation well,” a Provisional Government finance official wrote in his diary on the eve of the Bolshevik coup. “The essence of the evil lay not in the disorder but in the absence of political authority [bezvlastii].”24 After October, organizations claiming broad authority proliferated, just as before, but the “absence of authority” worsened. Bolshevism, too, roiled with deep internal fractures, riotousness, and turnover, and Lenin’s superior political instincts—when compared with other leaders of Russia’s revolution—could not overcome the functional equivalent of the Dadaist’s deafening train whistle: namely, the man-made destruction and chaos that brought the Bolsheviks to nominal authority. Some powerful groups, notably the railway workers union, would insist on a government without Lenin and Trotsky; Germany, militarily victorious on the eastern front, looked to be on the verge of completely conquering Russia; the chief of the new Bolshevik political police would be taken hostage in a near leftist coup against Bolshevism; and an assassin would pump two bullets into Lenin. By summer 1918, armed insurrection against the regime would open on four fronts. And yet Lenin and his inner circle of Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin had already managed to assert a Bolshevik political monopoly.

The Bolshevik dictatorship was not an utter accident, of course. Russia’s political landscape had become decisively socialist, as we have seen. The right-wing ranks of the army and officer corps were weaker in Russia than in every other predominantly peasant country, and unlike everywhere else, Russia lacked a non-socialist peasants’ party, a circumstance partly derived from the intransigence and sheer daftness of the old rightist establishment on the land question. Russia’s other socialist parties, moreover, contributed mightily to the Bolsheviks’ opportunities to monopolize the socialist cause. Lenin was not a lone wolf among political sheep. He sat atop a large, centrally located Bolshevik political base in the biggest cities and the Russian heartland. That said, the Bolsheviks’ dictatorship did not arise automatically, even in the parts of imperial Russia that nominally fell under their jurisdiction. The dictatorship was an act of creation. That creation, in turn, was not a reaction to unforeseen crisis, but a deliberate strategy, and one that Lenin pursued against the objections of many top Bolsheviks. The drive for dictatorship began well before the full-scale civil war—indeed, the dictatorial drive served as a cause of the armed conflict (a fact universally noted by contemporaries). But in no way should any of this be taken to mean the Bolsheviks established effective structures of governance. Far from it: the Bolshevik monopoly went hand in hand with administrative as well as societal chaos, which Lenin’s extremism exacerbated, causing an ever-deepening crisis, which he cited as justification for his extremism. The catastrophic collapse of the old world, however debilitating for millions of real people, was taken as progress by the Bolsheviks: the deeper the ruin, the better.

One would think the bedlam would have been more than enough to topple the playacting government. Food supply problems alone had helped precipitate the autocracy’s downfall and revealed the Provisional Government’s hollowness. But monopoly and anarchy proved compatible because the Bolshevik monopoly entailed not control but denying others a role in presiding over chaos.25 Bolshevism was a movement, a capacious, freewheeling, armed anarchy of sailors and street squads, factory hands, ink-stained scribes and agitators, would-be functionaries wielding wax seals. Bolshevism was also a vision, a brave new world of abundance and happiness, a deep longing for the kingdom of heaven on earth, accompanied by absurdist efforts at enactment. In 1918, the world experienced the pointed irreverence of Dada as well as an unintentionally Dada-esque Bolshevik stab at rule, performance art that involved a substantial participatory audience. At the center, Lenin persisted in his uncanny determination, and Stalin hewed closely to him. Stalin assumed the position of one of Lenin’s all-purpose deputies, prepared to take up any assignment.

MONOPOLY

Marxism’s theory of the state was primitive, affording little guidance beyond the Paris Commune (1870–71), which Marx had both praised and denigrated. The Commune, which lasted all of seventy-two days, had inspired the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat (in the 1891 preface to a reissue of the Civil War in France, Engels had written, “Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”).26 The Commune also afforded inspiration because of its mass participatory character. Still, Marx had noted that the Communards had “lost precious time” organizing democratic elections when they should have been busy gathering forces to finish off the “bourgeois regime” in Versailles, and had failed to seize the French National Bank to expropriate its vaults; the money was moved to pay for the army in Versailles that crushed the Commune.27 Lenin, at a gathering in Geneva in 1908 on the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Commune, and the twenty-fifth of Marx’s death, had reiterated Marx’s point that the Commune had stopped halfway, failing to extirpate the bourgeoisie.28 Nonetheless, its romantic allure persisted. In 1917 and into early 1918, Lenin imagined a “state of which the Paris Commune was the prototype,” with “democracy from below, democracy without an officialdom, without a police, without a standing army; voluntary social duty guaranteed by a militia formed from a universally armed people.”29 This, too, constituted a part of the unintentional resemblance to Dadaism. As late as April 1918, Lenin would be urging that “all citizens must take part in the work of the courts and in the government of the country. It is important for us to draw literally all working people into the government of the state. It is a task of tremendous difficulty. But socialism cannot be implemented by a minority, by a party.”30 Once the sense of siege set in that the Bolshevik coup had itself precipitated, however, Lenin ceased to uphold the Commune as inspirational model, and that episode became solely a cautionary tale about decisively eliminating enemies.31 And there was no end to enemies.

Behind their winning slogans about peace, land, bread, and all power to the Soviets, and their machine guns, Lenin and the adherents of Bolshevism felt perpetually under threat. On the morning of the coup during the Second Congress of Soviets on October 25, 1917, Alexander Kerensky, nominally aiming to return with reliable units from the front, had fled Petrograd in a pair of automobiles, one “borrowed” from in front of the nearby U.S. embassy.32 “Resist Kerensky, who is a Kornilovite!” Bolshevik appeals proclaimed; in fact, at the front Kerensky found only a few hundred Cossack troops of the Third Cavalry Corps of Lieutenant General Krymov—the very Kornilov subordinate whom Kerensky had accused of treason and who, after a conversation with Kerensky, had committed suicide.33 On October 29, in combat outside Petrograd, at least 200 were killed and wounded—more than in either the February or October revolutions—but the demoralized remnant cavalry proved no match for the several thousand motley Red Guards and garrison soldiers mustered by the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee.34 Kerensky narrowly evaded capture and fled again, into foreign exile.35 Other anti-Bolsheviks had rallied military school cadets in the capital who seized the Hotel Astoria (where some top Bolsheviks resided), the State Bank, and the telephone exchange, but the schoolboys, too, were easily beaten back.36 Still, the Bolsheviks never stopped fearing “counterrevolution,” on the example of the French Revolution, especially the episode in August 1792 when external aggression appeared to facilitate internal subversion.37 “I can still remember,” recalled David Sagirashvili, “the anxious faces of the Bolshevik leaders . . . whom I saw in the corridors at the Smolny Institute.”38 That anxiety only deepened.

Despite the formation of an all-Bolshevik Council of People’s Commissars, a majority of Russia’s socialists continued to favor the formation of an all-socialist government, a sentiment also evident among many Bolsheviks. Lev Kamenev, a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, had become the new chairman of the Soviet central executive committee, the standing body of the Congress of Soviets, in whose name power had been seized. During the coup, Kamenev had sought to bring the most left-leaning Socialist Revolutionaries and possibly other socialists into a revolutionary government, and he continued to do so afterward, fearing that a Bolshevik-only regime was doomed. The latter prospect heightened on October 29, when the leadership of the Union of Railroad Employees laid down an ultimatum, backed by the threat of a crippling strike, demanding an all-socialist government to prevent civil war.39 This occurred during the uncertainty of a possible Kerensky return. A rail strike had paralyzed the tsarist authorities for a time in 1905 and it would stymie Bolshevik efforts to defend themselves. At a meeting of garrison troop representatives, also on October 29, Lenin and Trotsky rallied support against “counterrevolution” from the twenty-three units that were represented that day (out of fifty-one).40 But Kamenev, joined by Zinoviev and other top Bolsheviks, formally agreed to allow Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks into the Council of People’s Commissars.41 While the Menshevik Central Committee agreed to negotiations for an all-socialist government with Bolsheviks in it by a single vote, the railway union insisted on a government entirely without Trotsky and Lenin. Kamenev and his allies proposed to the Bolshevik Central Committee that Lenin would remain in the government but yield the chairmanship to someone like the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary party, Victor Chernov. The Bolsheviks would keep only minor portfolios.42

Lenin appeared to be losing his grip on the party. On November 1, 1917, the lead editorial in a Bolshevik-controlled newspaper announced “agreement among all factions” across the socialist left, adding that “the Bolsheviks” always understood “revolutionary democracy” to mean “a coalition of all socialist parties . . . not the domination of a single party.”43 Kamenev stood ready to yield what, in Lenin’s mind, were the fruits of the October coup. But Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin enabled Lenin to beat back the challenge. Also on November 1, at the autonomous Petersburg Committee of Bolsheviks—which, unusually, was attended by Central Committee members—Lenin condemned Kamenev’s efforts to ally with the SRs and Mensheviks as treasonous, saying, “I can’t even talk about this seriously. Trotsky long ago said such a union was impossible. Trotsky understood this and since then there hasn’t been a better Bolshevik.” Lenin had once divided the Social Democrats, and now threatened to divide the Bolsheviks. “If there is to be a split, let it be so,” he said. “If you have a majority, take power . . . and we shall go to the sailors.”44 Trotsky proposed negotiating only with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries, who were in the process of splitting off to form a separate party, and could be junior partners to the Bolsheviks. “Any authority [vlast’] is force,” Trotsky thundered. “Our authority is the force of the majority of the people over the minority. This is unavoidable, this is Marxism.”45 That same day, at a follow-up meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee—with Moscow still not in Bolshevik hands but with the threat (more apparent than real) of a Kerensky-led Cossack march on Petrograd having subsided—Lenin exploded at Kamenev for carrying out coalition negotiations in earnest, rather than as cover to send military reinforcements to seize power in Moscow. Lenin demanded that the negotiations cease altogether, and that the Bolsheviks appeal directly to the masses. Kamenev retorted that the railway union had “huge power.” Sverdlov argued against breaking off the negotiations, from a tactical point of view, but also recommended arresting members of the railway union leadership.46 (Stalin did not attend the November 1 meeting; he did appear later that night at a delayed meeting of the Soviet’s central executive committee, where the battle continued.)47

Lenin’s uncompromising stance was strengthened on November 2, 1917, when pro-Bolshevik forces definitively seized the Moscow Kremlin in the name of “soviet power.” The back-and-forth week-long armed clashes in the central district of Moscow involved a tiny fraction of the overall population, perhaps 15,000 on each side; the Bolshevik side lost 228 killed, more than in any other locale, while government defenders lost an unknown number. “Artillery fire directed on the Kremlin and the rest of Moscow is not causing any damage to our troops but is destroying monuments and sacred places and is bringing death to peaceful citizens,” observed their cease-fire proclamation, which amounted to surrender.48 The next day, back in Petrograd, Kamenev and Zinoviev got the Soviet’s central executive committee to endorse continued negotiations on an all-socialist government, but with Kerensky turned back and Moscow in hand, Lenin met individually with Trotsky, Sverdlov, Stalin, Dzierzynski, and five others, getting them to sign a resolution denouncing as “treason” the efforts of a Bolshevik Central Committee “minority” to relinquish monopoly power.49 Accusing close comrades who had spent years in the underground, prison, and exile of treason over policy differences was typical Lenin.

History might have been different had Kamenev called Lenin’s bluff and told him to go to the sailors. But instead of denouncing Lenin as a deranged fanatic, seizing control over the Central Committee, and himself trying to rally the factories, streets, local Bolshevik party organizations, and other socialist parties in behalf of the overwhelmingly popular idea of an all-socialist government, Kamenev yielded his place on the Bolshevik Central Committee. Zinoviev and three others resigned as well.50 Several Bolsheviks resigned from the Council of People’s Commissars, including Alexei Rykov (interior affairs commissar). “We stand for the necessity of forming a socialist government of all soviet parties,” they declared. “We submit that other than that, there is only one path: the preservation of a purely Bolshevik government by means of political terror.”51 And so, Lenin’s Bolshevik opponents ceded two key institutions—the Central Committee and the government—to him.

There was still the Petrograd Soviet central executive committee, which Kamenev chaired and which many saw as the new supreme body: Lenin himself had drafted a resolution, approved by the Second Congress of Soviets in October 1917, subordinating the Council of People’s Commissars to the Soviet.52 But on November 4, Lenin went to the Soviet central executive committee to tell its members they did not legally have jurisdiction over the Council of People’s Commissars. The vote to decide the matter was set to go against Lenin, but suddenly he insisted that he, Trotsky, Stalin, and one other people’s commissar in attendance would also vote. The four people’s commissars voted yes, on what was essentially a vote of confidence in their own government, while three moderate Bolsheviks abstained, allowing Lenin’s motion to pass 29 to 23.53 Thus did the all-Bolshevik government free itself from legislature oversight. Lenin was not finished: on November 8, at the Bolshevik Central Committee, he forced Kamenev to resign as chairman of the Soviet’s central executive committee.54 (That same day, Zinoviev recanted and rejoined the Bolshevik Central Committee. Before the month was out, Kamenev and Rykov would also recant, but Lenin would not accept them back right away.) Lenin quickly maneuvered to have Sverdlov nominated as the new Soviet chairman; Sverdlov won the critical post by a mere five votes.

Sverdlov emerged more than ever as the indispensable organizational man. He now served simultaneously as secretary of the Bolshevik party and chairman of the Soviet central executive committee, and deftly transformed the latter into a de facto Bolshevik organ, “orienting” its meetings to obtain the desired results.55 At the same time, Sverdlov managed what Kamenev had been unable to do: he coaxed the Left Socialist Revolutionaries into a Bolshevik-controlled Council of People’s Commissars, in a minority role, with the aim of dividing the anti-Bolshevik socialists.56 The meteoric rise of the Left SRs between the end of 1917 and early 1918 was perhaps second only to that of the Bolsheviks in summer and fall 1917. The reason was obvious: the imperialist war continued, and so did the lurch toward ever more radical leftism. There were even rumors in December-January that some leftist Bolsheviks wanted to join the Left SRs in a new coup, arrest Lenin and form a new government, perhaps under the Left Communist Grigory “Yuri” Pyatakov. The Left SR entrance into the Council of People’s Commissars robbed the railway workers union of a united front opposed to Bolshevik monopoly, and its efforts to force a genuine all-socialist coalition fizzled. The Left SR entrance into the central government also buttressed the Bolshevik position in the provinces.57 The Bolsheviks essentially had had no agrarian program when they lifted that of the SRs in October 1917; Sverdlov flat out admitted that prior to the revolution the Bolsheviks had “conducted absolutely no work among the peasantry.”58 In this context the Left SRs offered not just immediate tactical advantage but far-reaching political promise.59

Most Left SRs recognized themselves as junior partners, not as members of a genuine coalition, and they largely occupied positions in the Cheka (All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage) or as military commissars in the army. Lenin’s monopolistic political offensive, meanwhile, continued unabated, targeting the public sphere. Before the October coup, he had denounced censorship as “feudal” and “Asiatic,” but now he deemed the “bourgeois” press “a weapon no less dangerous than bombs or machine guns.”60 Lenin bullied shut some sixty newspapers in late October and November 1917. True, in a cat-and-mouse game—as Isaiah Berlin quipped—Day, the liberal newspaper, was shuttered, briefly reappeared as Evening, then as Night, then Midnight, and finally Darkest Night, after which it was shuttered for good.61 Recognizably leftist newspapers were also targeted. “History repeats itself,” complained the Right Socialist Revolutionary newspaper the People’s Cause, which had been closed down under tsarism.62 Some Left SRs also joined the cries of outrage at Bolshevik press censorship. According to the Bolshevik decree, the repressions were “of a temporary nature and will be removed by a special degree just as soon as normal conditions are reestablished,” but, of course, “normal” conditions never returned.63

STATELESSNESS

Trotsky would unabashedly recall that “from the moment the Provisional Government was declared deposed, Lenin acted in matters large and small as the Government.”64 True enough, but even as Lenin maniacally imposed political monopoly in the Petrograd neighborhood containing Smolny and the Tauride Palace, authority in the wider realm fragmented still further. The coup accelerated the empire’s disintegration. Between November 1917 and January 1918, chunk after chunk of imperial Russia broke off like an iceberg collapsing into the sea—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan. The conversion of these former borderland provinces into self-declared “national republics” left a truncated “Soviet Russia” in uncertain relation to most of the realm’s most developed territories. Stalin, as nationalities commissar, was drawn into trying to manage this dissolution, signing, for example, a treaty fixing a border with newly independent Finland (the frontier ran precariously close to Petrograd). Inside the Russian heartland, too, provinces declared themselves to be “republics”—Kazan, Kaluga, Ryazan, Ufa, Orenburg. Sometimes, this was pushed from above, as in the case of the Don Soviet Republic, which, it was hoped, would forestall German assertions of military intervention on the basis of “self-determination.”65 Whatever their origins, province republics hardly ruled their nominal territories: counties and villages declared themselves supreme. Amid the near total devolution, copycat “councils of people’s commissars” proliferated. A Moscow “council of people’s commissars” showed no intention of subordinating itself to Lenin’s Council of People’s Commissars and claimed jurisdiction over more than a dozen surrounding provinces. “Due to parallel commissariats, people and [local] offices do not know where to turn and have to do business with the two levels simultaneously,” one observer complained, adding that petitioners “regularly appeal to both province and central commissariats, accepting as legal whichever decision is more beneficial.”66

While basic governing functions were taken up by very local bodies—or not at all—the nominal central authorities hunted for money. Already on the afternoon of October 25, and multiple times thereafter, Wiaczeysław Mezynski, another Polish Bolshevik (normally Russified as Menzhinsky), had taken an armed detachment over to the Russian State Bank.67 Mezynski, who had for a time worked as a bank teller for Credit Lyonnais in Paris, was the new “people’s commissar for finance ministry affairs”—as if there would be no enduring financial commissariat in the new order, just confiscations. His actions prompted finance ministry and Russian State Bank personnel to strike.68 Private banks shut their doors, too, and, when forced by armed threats to reopen, refused to honor checks and drafts from the Bolshevik government.69 Mezynski finally just robbed the State Bank and laid 5 million rubles on Lenin’s table in Smolny.70 His heist inspired Bolshevik officials—and impostors—to seize more bank holdings. Holders of deposit boxes, meanwhile, under threat that their valuables would be confiscated, were compelled to appear for “inventories,” but when they showed up with their keys, their valuables were confiscated anyway: foreign currency, gold and silver, jewelry, unset precious stones.71 As of December 1917, bond interest payments (coupons) and stock dividends essentially ended.72 By January 1918, the Bolsheviks would repudiate all tsarist internal and external state debt, estimated at some 63 billion rubles—a colossal sum, including about 44 billion rubles in domestic obligations, and 19 billion foreign.73 Whatever the ideological fulminations, they were wholly incapable of servicing the debt.74 Shock waves hit the international financial system, the ruble was removed from European markets, and Russia was cut off from international financing. The country’s financial system ceased to exist. Credit to industry was shut off.75 A paper money “famine” soon plagued the country.76

All the while, Russia’s hundred-million-plus peasants were engaged in a redistribution of lands owned by gentry, the imperial household, the Orthodox Church, and peasants themselves (beneficiaries of Stolypin’s reforms, many of whom were now expropriated).77 Boris Brutzkus, a contemporary Latvian-born economist in Russia, deemed the 1917–18 peasant revolution “a mass movement of an elemental fury, the likes of which the world has never seen.”78 On average, however, peasants seem to have acquired a mere one extra acre of land. Some showed canny skepticism regarding the new strips, keeping them separate from their previous holdings, in the event someone came to take them away. (Sometimes they had to travel such distance to work the new allotments that they gave them up on their own.)79 Still, peasants ceased paying rent and had their debts to the peasant land bank canceled.80 Overall, the upheavals strengthened the redistributive commune and the ranks of middling peasants who neither hired others nor sold their own labor.81 How much credit the Bolsheviks received for the land redistribution remains uncertain, even though Lenin had expediently lifted the popular Socialist Revolutionary Land Decree. (The SRs, serving in coalition with the Cadets in the Provisional Government, had essentially abandoned their plank for immediate land redistribution.) The Bolshevik agriculture commissar, pronouncing the Land Decree in “the nature of a battle cry intended to appeal to the masses,” revealingly added that “the seizure is an accomplished fact. To take back the land from the peasants is impossible under any condition.”82 The decree was trumpeted in all the newspapers and published as a booklet (soldiers returning to native villages were given calendars with their copies, so that they would have something other than the Land Decree for rolling cigarettes).83 But the greatest concentrations of private land in the Russian empire were in the Baltic areas, the western provinces, Ukraine, and North Caucasus, all of which fell outside Bolshevik control. It would take a lot more than paper decrees to push the peasants toward Bolshevism.

Rural tumult and violence worsened the already severely war-disrupted urban food supply. Petrograd, which lay distant from the main farming regions, and even Moscow were forced onto starvation rations, some 220 grams of bread per day.84 Fuel and raw materials started to vanish altogether, prompting workers to go from helping run their factories to taking them over (“workers’ control”), if only just to try to keep them operating, acts that more often than not failed. The entire proletariat—dwindling from its peak of perhaps 3 million—was dwarfed by at least 6 million internal refugees, a number that ballooned to perhaps 17 million when counting soldier deserters and POWs.85 This immense transient population frequently morphed into armed bands that pillaged small towns as well as the countryside.86 In the cities, Red Guard irregulars and garrison troops continued to incite public disorder—and Bolshevism had no police force, other than the Red Guards. Frontline soldiers were supposed to receive around 5 rubles per month, while Red Guards were paid 10 rubles per day, about the daily wage of factory workers, but many factories had closed and ceased paying wages. And so the ranks of Red Guards—factory workers who were handed rifles or just looted arsenals—swelled.87 With or without red armbands, looters targeted the wine cellars of the capital’s countless palaces; some “suffocated and drowned in the wine,” an eyewitness recorded, while others went on shooting sprees.88 On December 4, 1917, the regime announced the formation of the Commission Against Wine Pogroms under a tsarist officer turned Bolshevik, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. “Attempts to break into wine-cellars, warehouses, factories, stalls, shops, private apartments,” the Soviet’s newspaper threatened, “will be broken up by machine-gun fire without any warning”—a stark indication of the uninhibited violence.89

But the regime discovered a greater threat: the functionaries of the old regime were rumored to be plotting “a general strike.” Many holdover officials were already on strike, as were telephone workers, even pharmacists and schoolteachers; mostly just cleaning people and doormen were showing up for work at ministries.90 On December 7, the Council of People’s Commissars created a second emergency force, the “temporary” All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage, known by its Russian acronym as the Cheka, and headquartered at Gorokhovaya, 2. “It is war now—face to face, a fight to the finish, life or death!” the Cheka head, Felix Dzierzynski, a Polish Bolshevik of noble lineage, told the Council of People’s Commissars. “I propose, I demand an organ for the revolutionary settlement of accounts with counterrevolutionaries.”91 Dzierzynski (b. 1877) had endured eleven years in tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, emerging with few teeth, a partially paralyzed face with a lopsided smile, and a burning passion for justice.92 Within its first two weeks, the Cheka arrested some thirty alleged plotters said to belong to a “Union of Unions of State Functionaries” and used their confiscated address books to make additional arrests. Other functionaries—whose wages, apartments, food rations, and freedom were on the line—reconsidered their opposition to the new government.93 The Bolsheviks then spent much of January debating whether to allow these “tools of capitalism” and “saboteurs” to resume their state positions.

Most of Russia’s revolutionaries, even many hard-core Bolsheviks, found the new political police anathema.94 Many unscrupulous types, including criminal elements, joined the Cheka and they often became preoccupied not solely or exclusively with political repression. The Cheka had added combating “speculation” to its mandate, but the agency itself emerged as a grand speculator.95 “They looked for counterrevolutionaries,” wrote an early eyewitness to Cheka raids, “and took the valuables.”96 Warehouses filled up with goods seized as “state property,” coercively acquired without recompense, which were then distributed as favors to officials and friends or sold. In mid-May 1918, a Cheka was established in Bogorodsk, a center of the tanning industry on the Volga with a population of 30,000, but on May 29 an attack destroyed the Cheka building. A detachment from Nizhny Novgorod, the provincial capital, arrived and conducted executions. “We confiscated two hundred thousand rubles’ worth of gold and silver articles and one million rubles’ worth of sheep wool,” the Cheka reported. “The factory owners and the bourgeoisie are in flight. The Commission decided to confiscate the property of those who fled and sell it to workers and peasants.”97 (“Workers and peasants” could include party bosses and police officials.) When the Cheka and the Bolshevik authorities were accused of looting, they often issued blanket denials, although Lenin hit upon the convenient slogan, “We loot the looters.”98

The Cheka was far from alone in wheeling and dealing. “Everyone who wished to ‘nationalize’ did so,” recalled one official in the new Supreme Council of the Economy.99 The chaos of seizures and speculation in some ways proved more destabilizing than any genuine plots of counterrevolution. The Cheka’s role in providing security, meanwhile, remained doubtful. Back in January 1918, Lenin’s car was strafed from behind (two bullets passed through the windshield) and Smolny was subjected to bomb scares.100 By February, the Cheka proclaimed the power of summary execution against “the hydra of counter-revolution”—a declaration that looked like panic, as much as contempt for “bourgeois” liberties.101 A secret mid-1918 Cheka self-assessment would observe that “we did not have the strength, ability, or knowledge, and the [Extraordinary] Commission’s size was insignificant.”102

BALLOTING

Such was the Bolshevik monopoly in the stateless anarchy: idle factories, gun-toting drunks and marauding Red Guards, a deliberately shattered financial system, depleted food stocks, an ambiguous junior partnership for the Left SRs, and an ineffectual secret police busy with property theft and the very speculation it was supposed to combat—and on top of it all, the Provisional Government, just before its death, had finally set elections for a Constituent Assembly to begin on November 12, 1917.103 The ironies would be rich: Russia’s Constitutional Democrats had hesitated to allow democratic elections to go forward, fearing the consequences of a vote by peasants, soldiers, sailors, and workers, but now the dictatorial Lenin decided to let the democratic elections proceed.104 The prospect of a pending constitutional convention would blunt some of the fiercest socialist opposition to the all-Bolshevik Council of People’s Commissars and, anyway, not a few top Bolsheviks imagined they might win. The party certainly tried, suppressing the propaganda of other contenders and, in their own press, ripping into the alternatives, denouncing the Socialist Revolutionaries (“wolves in sheep’s clothing”), the Menshevik Social Democrats (“slaves of the bourgeoisie clearing the path for the counterrevolution”), and the Constitutional Democrats (“capitalist pillagers”). The stage seemed set for mass intimidation and fraud. Incredibly, however, Russia experienced its first ever genuine universal-suffrage elections.

Work to organize the vote proved to be immense, perhaps the largest civic undertaking in the realm since the peasant emancipation half a century before. A genuinely independent sixteen-member All-Russia Election Board oversaw the process, with local supervision performed by regional, county, and communal boards staffed by representatives of the judiciary, local government bodies like tsarist-era zemtsvos but also the soviets, as well as by members of the voting public. The town, township, and county election boards drew up lists of voters: everyone, male and female, above twenty years of age.105 Around 44.4 million people voted by secret paper ballot, across vast distances, during wartime, in seventy-five territories, as well as at the front and naval fleets (nearly 5 million soldiers and sailors voted). No voting took place in territories under German occupation (tsarist Poland, Finland, the Baltic littoral), or in woefully undergoverned Russian Turkestan, and returns from some regions ended up lost. As of November 28, 1917, the original date for convocation, the balloting remained incomplete, so the announced opening was postponed, which provoked defenders of the Constituent Assembly to march that day on the Tauride Palace. Lenin responded by proposing a decree to arrest the main Constitutional Democratic politicians as “enemies of the people” (a term that Bolshevik opponents had first applied to Lenin’s gang) even before they had taken up their seats.106 Lenin’s resolution against the Cadets on November 28 was supported by every member of the Bolshevik Central Committee except one—Stalin.107 Stalin’s reasons remain obscure. Be that as it may, the next day the Bolshevik Central Committee—characteristically using a secret decree—formalized the new political order by awarding Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin the right to decide “all emergency questions.”108 And what was not an emergency?

Despite the repression and assertion of dictatorial powers, however, the election produced an expression of popular will.109 To be sure, taking in the full measure of Eurasia, beyond the two capitals, one scholar has argued that through mid-1918 most people remained far more committed to particular institutions (soviets, soldiers’ committees, factory committees) than to specific parties.110 This was changing, however, for in the voting the populace was presented choices of parties. The four fifths of the population who lived in the countryside, and who had no non-socialist farmers’ party to vote, cast their ballots for the peasant-oriented Socialist Revolutionaries in a strong plurality, just under 40 percent of the total ballots recorded, nearly 18 million, while another 3.5 million voted for the Socialist Revolutionaries of Ukraine. Another 450,000 voted for Russia’s Left Socialist Revolutionaries (they had split off only after the electoral lists had been formed). The overall SR vote proved strongest in the most fertile agricultural territories and in villages overall, where turnout proved extraordinarily high: 60 to 80 percent, versus around 50 percent in cities. The SRs won their highest percentage in Siberia, a land of farming and little industry.

The SRs had won the election. But the split in the SR Party showed the strong trend moving still more toward the radical socialist variant (the SRs in Ukraine were already further left than their counterparts in Russia). The Social Democratic vote was substantial, too, though not for the Menshevik wing; only the Georgian Mensheviks did well, amassing 660,000 votes (30 percent of the ballots in the Caucasus); Russia’s Mensheviks won just 1.3 million votes, under 3 percent of the total vote. By contrast, around 10.6 million people voted for the Social Democrat‒Bolsheviks—24 percent of the votes counted. Eight provinces voted more than 50 percent Bolshevik. The Bolsheviks and SRs split the military vote, each taking about 40 percent, but tellingly, the Black Sea fleet, distant from Bolshevik agitation, voted 2 to 1 SRs over Bolsheviks, while the Baltic fleet, reached easily by Bolshevik agitators, went 3 to 1 Bolshevik. The Bolsheviks overwhelmingly won the Western Army Group and the Northern Army Group, as well as the big urban garrisons, reaching 80 percent among the soldiery stationed in Moscow and in Petrograd. Thus, the votes of soldiers and sailors (peasants in uniform) in and near the capital saved Bolshevism from an even more overwhelming defeat by the SRs, as Lenin himself later admitted.111

The non-socialist vote came in at only 3.5 million, some 2 million of which went to the Constitutional Democrats. That put the Cadets under 5 percent. Significantly, though, almost one third of the Cadet vote was recorded in Petrograd and Moscow—around half a million ballots. The Bolsheviks garnered nearly 800,000 votes in the two capitals, but the Cadets came in second there (while besting the Bolsheviks in eleven of thirty-eight provincial capitals). Thus, the supreme strongholds of Bolshevism were also strongholds of the “class enemy,” a source of unrelenting Bolshevik anxiety about imminent “counterrevolution.”112 And perhaps the most important fact of all: organized right-wing politics were nowhere to be seen. Amid the atmosphere of “revolutionary democracy,” land redistribution, and peace, Russia’s electorate overwhelmingly voted socialist—socialist parties of all types collectively garnered more than 80 percent of the vote.113

Bolshevism did better than non-Bolsheviks expected. In one sense, around half the former Russian empire voted for socialism but against Bolshevism: the electorate seemed to want people’s power, land, and peace without Bolshevik manipulation. In another sense, however, the Bolsheviks had secured an electoral victory in the strategic center of the country (Petrograd and Moscow), as well as among crucial armed constituencies (capital garrisons and Baltic sailors). For Lenin, that was sufficient. Other parties and movements remained slow to take his full measure, and even more important, this mass political power of Bolshevism (already visible at the front in summer 1917). “Who cannot see that what we have is nothing like a ‘Soviet’ regime, but is instead a dictatorship of Lenin and Trotsky, and that their dictatorship relies on the bayonets of the soldiers and armed workers whom they have deceived,” the Socialist Revolutionary Nikolai Sukhanov lamented in November 1917 in the newspaper he edited, New Life, which Lenin soon shut down.114 But it was not primarily deception, even though Bolshevik prevarication and legerdemain were bountiful. In fact, Lenin’s dictatorship shared with much of the mass a popular maximalism, an end to the war come what may, a willingness to see force used to “defend the revolution,” and an unapologetic class warfare of the have-nots against the haves—positions that were divisive, but also attractive. Lenin drew strength from the popular radicalism.115

On January 5, 1918, at 4:00 p.m., the long-awaited Constituent Assembly opened in the old White Hall of the Duma’s Tauride Palace, but in a menacing atmosphere. The Bolsheviks had flooded the streets with armed loyalists and artillery. Rumors spread that the electricity would be turned off—Socialist Revolutionary delegates had come with candles—and of paddy wagons en route. Inside, the spectators’ gallery overflowed with raucous sailors and provocateurs. Ear-splitting heckling, clanking rifle bolts, and snapping bayonets punctuated the speechifying.116 Close to 800 delegates had won seats, including 370–380 for Socialist Revolutionaries, 168–175 for Bolsheviks, another 39–40 for Left SRs, as well as 17 each for Mensheviks and Constitutional Democrats, but the latter were outlawed and not seated, and many of the Mensheviks did not attend.117 Crucially, the Ukrainian SRs stayed away. Because of these no-shows and arrests, actual attendees numbered between 400 and 500.118 Lenin observed from the curtained seclusion of the former government box.119 On the floor, the Bolshevik caucus was led by the thirty-year-old Nikolai Bukharin, well described by John Reed as “a short red-bearded man with the eyes of a fanatic—‘more left than Lenin,’ they said of him.”120 The delegates elected SR party chairman Victor Chernov as Assembly chairman; the Bolsheviks backed the Left SR Maria Spiridonova, a renowned terrorist, who won an impressive 153 votes, 91 fewer than Chernov. A Bolshevik motion to limit the scope of the Constituent Assembly failed (237 to 146). Lenin had one loyalist, the leader of the Baltic sailors, announce that Bolshevik delegates were walking out; the Left SR delegates, including Spiridonova, walked out later.121 Some twelve hours in, around 4:00 a.m., a sailor of the Baltic fleet mounted the stage, tapped Chernov’s shoulder (or pulled his sleeve) and bellowed that the Bolshevik navy commissar “wants those present to leave the hall.” When Chernov answered, “That is for the Constituent Assembly to decide, if you don’t mind,” the sailor responded, “I suggest you leave the hall, as it’s late and the guards are tired.”122 Chernov rushed through snap votes on laws and adjourned at 4:40 a.m. Later that afternoon (January 6), when delegates arrived to resume, sentries refused them entry.123 Russia’s Constituent Assembly ended after a single day, never to meet again. (Even the original of the meeting protocols would be stolen from Chernov’s emigre residence in Prague.)124

Bolshevik threats had been no secret.125 “We are not about to share power with anyone,” Trotsky wrote of the Constituent Assembly before it opened. “If we are to stop halfway, then it wouldn’t be a revolution, it would be an abortion . . . a false historical delivery.”126 The Socialist Revolutionary Party had carried the Southwestern, Romanian, and Caucasus fronts decisively, yet the SR leadership failed to bring troops to the capital or even to accept an offer of armed aid from the Petrograd garrison.127 Some SR leaders abjured the use of force on principle; most fretted that attempts to mobilize willing soldiers to defend the elected legislature would serve as a pretext for the Bolsheviks to close it down, which the Bolsheviks did anyway.128 No imperative to defend the Constituent Assembly was felt in the countryside, where the peasant revolution had helped sweep away the full panoply of tsarist officialdom, from provincial governors to local police and the land captains, who were replaced by peasant self-governance.129 In the capital, tens of thousands of protesters, including factory workers, marched to the Tauride Palace to try to save the Constituent Assembly, but Bolshevik loyalists fired on them.130 This was the first time civilians in Russian cities had been gunned down for political reasons since February and July 1917, but the Bolsheviks got away with it.

The Petrograd Soviet’s existence helped diminish popular attachment to a Constituent Assembly.131 Lenin characterized the Bolshevized Soviet as a “higher form” of democracy, not the procedural or bourgeois kind celebrated in Britain and France, but the democracy of social justice and (lower class) people’s power. This view resonated widely in Russia, even if far from everyone accepted Lenin’s tendentious equation of the overwhelmingly socialist Constituent Assembly with “bourgeois” democracy.132 Reinforcing the point, the Sverdlov-dominated central executive committee of the Soviet had prescheduled a Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets for January 10, which happened to be immediately after the Constituent Assembly would be dispersed.133 Many of the delegates boycotted the gathering in protest, but those present retroactively legalized the forced closure of the Constituent Assembly.134

TROTSKY’S FAILURE

Peace! Immediate, universal peace, for all countries, for all peoples: Bolshevism’s popularity had been propelled, above all else, by a promised extrication from the hated war. At the Second Congress of Soviets, however, Lenin had suddenly equivocated. “The new power would do everything,” he promised, “but we do not say that we can end the war simply by sticking our bayonets in the ground . . . we do not say that we shall make peace today or tomorrow.”135 (Newspaper accounts of his remarks omitted these words.) The “Decree on Peace”—which mentioned England, France, and Germany, but not the United States, “as the mightiest powers taking part in the present war”—by the congress had invited all belligerents to observe a three-month armistice and negotiate a “just democratic . . . immediate peace, without annexations and without indemnities.” (Other Bolshevik proclamations invited citizens of those belligerents to overthrow their governments.)136 Lenin and Stalin radioed instructions to Russia’s troops—hardly necessary—to desist from fighting. Lenin sent German military headquarters an uncoded offer of unconditional cease-fire, knowing that the Entente, too, would receive the message (when they did, they felt confirmed in their belief he was a German agent). Britain and France refused to recognize the Bolshevik regime and did not respond either to the Peace Decree or to formal notes from Trotsky. The Entente did send communiques to Russia’s military field headquarters.137 A sailor working for Trotsky, meanwhile, was rifling Russian foreign ministry vaults and located the secret annexationist tsarist war treaties with Britain and France; Trotsky published the documents damning the Entente, referred to as “the imperialists.”138 (Newspapers in the Allied countries almost universally failed to reproduce the exposed texts.)139 What, if anything, could be done about the ever more proximate German army remained unclear.

Russia’s high command at Mogilyov, 400 miles southwest of Petrograd, had taken no part in the October coup, but they had been devastated by the revolution they had accelerated with their request in February 1917 for the tsar’s abdication. On November 8, 1917, Lenin and Trotsky had radioed Russia’s acting supreme commander, forty-one-year-old General Nikolai Dukhonin—Kornilov’s former chief of staff—to enter into separate peace negotiations with the Germans. Dukhonin refused the order to betray Russia’s allies. Lenin had the correspondence distributed to all units to show that the “counterrevolution” wanted to continue the war. He also dismissed Dukhonin in favor of thirty-two-year-old Nikolai Krylenko, who heretofore had held the lowest rank in Russia’s officer corps (ensign). 140 On November 20, 1917, he arrived at Mogilyov with a trainload of pro-Bolshevik soldiers and sailors. Dukhonin duly surrendered to him.141 Having chosen not to flee, Dukhonin had nonetheless not prevented the escape of General Kornilov and other top tsarist officers who had been held in the nearby monastery prison since they had surrendered to Kerensky’s people (in September 1917). Upon discovering the escape, furious soldiers and sailors shot and bayoneted Dukhonin while he lay face down on the ground, and then for several days used his naked corpse for target practice.142 Krylenko was either unable or unwilling to stop them. Unlike generals Alexeyev and Brusilov before him, the ensign did not tour the full battlefields. But he got the picture nonetheless: the Russian army was not demoralized; it effectively no longer existed.

Germany also had reasons to seek accommodation, however. Self-negotiated cease-fires between German and Russian soldiers began to spread up and down the eastern front. Some experts were predicting food shortages and civil unrest on the German homefront that winter of 1917–18, troubles that loomed even more gravely for Austria-Hungary. The ferocious battles against France and Britain on the western front continued, now with the United States having joined the Entente. Ludendorff had decided to gather all his forces for a great spring offensive in the west—and troops that were, presumably, released from the east would come in handy. All of these considerations, and a desire to consolidate its immense gains on the eastern front, induced the Central Powers on November 15, 1917 (November 28 in the West) to accept the Bolshevik offer of armistice as a prelude to negotiations.143 Although the Bolsheviks had advocated for a general, not a separate, peace, the Entente repeatedly refused to participate in talks, and that same day Trotsky and Lenin announced that “if the bourgeoisie of the Allied countries force us to conclude a separate peace [with the Central Powers], the responsibility will be theirs.”144 For the site of negotiations, the Bolsheviks had proposed Pskov, which remained under Russian control (and where Nicholas II had abdicated), but Germany chose the Brest-Litovsk fortress, in a tsarist territory now serving as a German command site.145 The armistice was quickly signed there on December 2 (December 15 in the West). (In immediate violation of the terms, Germany moved six divisions back to the western front.)146 One week later the peace talks opened.

Upon arrival, the Bolshevik Karl Radek—born Karl Sobelsohn in Habsburg Lemberg (Lwów)—had hurled antiwar propaganda out the train window at rank-and-file German soldiers, urging them to rebel against their commanders.147 Seated across the table from the German state secretary for foreign affairs, Baron Richard von Kuhlmann, and the chief of staff of German armies in the East, Major General Max Hoffman, Radek leaned forward and blew smoke. At the opening dinner in the officers’ mess, one member of the Russian delegation, a Left SR, kindly reenacted her assassination of a tsarist governor for the meeting’s host, Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria. The head of the Bolshevik delegation, Adolf Joffe—whom the Austrian foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, pointedly noted was a Jew—observed that “I very much hope that we will be able to raise the revolution also in your country.”148 Thus did the leftist plebes of the Russian Pale of Settlement and Caucasus square off against titled German aristocrats and warlords of the world’s most formidable military caste.149 After some initial misunderstandings, it soon became evident that the Bolshevik demand for “peace without indemnities and annexations” would never be met; the German and Austrian delegations, invoking “self-determination,” demanded Russian recognition of the independence of Poland, Lithuania, and western Latvia, all of which the Central Powers had occupied in 1914–16.150 The Bolsheviks’ only salvation appeared to be waiting for war strains to precipitate revolution in Germany and Austria-Hungary (if the war did not cause the Entente homefronts to collapse first).151 For a second round of “negotiations,” Lenin sent Trotsky to grandstand and stall.152 The Bolsheviks had gotten the Germans to permit publicity about the talks, which encouraged much public posturing, and Trotsky’s performance at Brest-Litovsk catapulted him to international renown. Smiling through a long German diatribe about Bolshevik repression of political opponents, Trotsky, at his turn, unloaded: “We do not arrest strikers but capitalists who subject workers to lock-outs. We do not shoot peasants who demand land, but arrest the landowners and officers who try to shoot peasants.”153

Trotsky soon telegrammed Lenin to advise that the talks be cut off without a treaty. “I’ll consult with Stalin and give you my answer,” Lenin cabled. The answer turned out to be a recess in early January 1918, during which Trotsky returned to Petrograd for consultations.

The Bolshevik Central Committee met on January 8 to discuss Germany, two days after the forcible dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and right after an official report, delivered by Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, the brother of Lenin’s fixer Vladimir, warning that “the onset of total famine in the army is a matter of the next few days.”154 Back when Lenin had pushed for a coup he had insisted that Germany stood close to revolution, but now he changed his tune: the world revolution remained a dream, he observed, while Russia’s socialist revolution was a fact; to save the latter, he urged accepting whatever terms the Germans offered.155 Trotsky countered that Germany would not resume fighting, obviating any need to capitulate. But a self-styled leftist Bolshevik group led by Nikolai Bukharin and including Dzierzynski, Mezynski, and Radek, argued for a Russian resumption of hostilities. They deemed Lenin’s position defeatist. Thus the Central Committee split three ways: capitulation (Lenin); stall and bluff (Trotsky); revolutionary partisan warfare to accelerate revolution in Europe (Bukharin). Of the sixteen voting Central Committee members present on January 9, only three—most prominently Stalin—sided with Lenin.

Stalin objected that “Trotsky’s position is no position,” adding “there is no revolutionary movement in the West, nothing exists, only potential, and we cannot count on potential. If the Germans begin an offensive, it will strengthen the counter-revolution here.” He further noted that “in October we spoke of a holy war, because we were told that merely the word ‘peace’ would provoke a revolution in the West. But this was wrong.”156 Bukharin, by contrast, came around to conceding that “Trotsky’s position”—waiting for the workers in Berlin and Vienna to strike—“is the most correct.” Trotsky’s proposal (“end the war, do not sign a peace, demobilize the army”) carried the day, 9–7.157 After the meeting, Lenin wrote that the majority “do not take into consideration the change in conditions that demand a speedy and abrupt change in tactics.”158 That was Lenin for you: rabidly against any concessions whatsoever to moderate Russian socialists, but demanding the Communists make abject concessions to German militarists.

A Third Congress of Soviets assembled on January 10, 1918 (lasting until the eighteenth), with Bolshevik delegates in a slight majority (860 of 1,647 by the end, as more delegates kept arriving). Meeting at the Tauride Palace, it passed a resolution to erase all references in any future compendia of Soviet decrees to the recently dispersed Constituent Assembly. Stalin gave a report as commissar of nationalities, and the congress formally established the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Commenting on the Constituent Assembly, Stalin concluded, “In America they have general elections, and the ones who end up in power are attendants of the billionaire Rockefeller. Is that not a fact? We buried bourgeois parliamentarism, and the Martovites want to drag us back to the period of the February Revolution. (Laughter, applause.) But as representatives of the workers, we need the people to be not merely voters but also rulers. The ones who exercise authority are not those who elect and vote but those who rule.”159 Trotsky reported on Brest-Litovsk. “When Trotsky ended his great speech,” one British enthusiast reported, “the immense assembly of Russian workmen, soldiers and peasants rose and . . . sang the Internationale.”160 Despite a mood for revolutionary war, however, the congress avoided a binding resolution one way or the other. Trotsky returned to Brest-Litovsk on January 17 (January 30 in the West) to stall further.

In Petrograd the next day, the Bolshevik Central Committee argued over whether to summon a party conference to discuss a possible separate peace. “What party conference?” Lenin snapped. Sverdlov deemed it impossible to organize a full party conference quickly enough and proposed consulting with representatives of the provinces. Stalin lamented the lack of clarity in the party’s position, and, reversing himself somewhat, suggested that “the middle view—the position of Trotsky—had given us a way out of this difficult situation.” Stalin proposed to “give the spokesmen for different points of view more chance to be heard and call a meeting to reach a clear position.”161 Trotsky had a point: Russia’s war effort was not the only one disintegrating. The Central Powers, too, were under colossal strain: in Germany a strike wave was suppressed, but mass deprivation from a British blockade persisted; Austria was begging Germany, and even Bulgaria, for emergency food.162 In the meantime, however, the Germans turned up a trump card: a delegation from the Ukrainian government, known as the Central Rada—socialist but non-Bolshevik—had showed up at Brest-Litovsk. The lead German civilian politican called the group of people in their twenties “young ladies” (Burschchen), but on January 27 (February 9 in the West), Germany duly signed a treaty with them.163 Never mind that, by this point, Red Guards from Russia had deposed the Central Rada in Kiev.164 The Central Rada representatives promised Germany and Austria Ukrainian grain, manganese, and eggs in exchange for military assistance against Bolshevik forces and the establishment of a Ruthenian (Ukrainian) autonomous region in Austrian Galicia and the Bukovina. (Austria’s Czernin called it the Bread Peace.)165 Whatever the aspirations of Ukrainian intellectuals and political figures, independent Ukraine, for Germany, was a tool to subdue Russia and support the Reich’s war effort in the West.166

With Ukraine seemingly in their pocket, the German delegation felt triumphant. The next day (January 28, February 10 in the West), Trotsky arrived to deliver a long indictment of “imperialism,” which the German delegation took as a windy prelude to Bolshevik capitulation. It had been some fifty days since the Brest-Litovsk talks commenced; the Russian army had essentially evaporated. But instead of bowing before these realities, Trotsky ended his speech by proclaiming a policy of “neither war, nor peace.” That is, Russia was exiting the war while refusing to sign a treaty. After a silence, German Major-General Hoffmann, architect of the great victory at Tannenberg, muttered, “Unheard of.”167 The Bolshevik delegation exited to board a train. “On the return trip to Petrograd,” Trotsky recalled, “we were all under the impression that the Germans would not start an offensive.”168 An ambiguous telegram from Brest about “peace” to the Soviet capital had sparked telegrams from Petrograd to the front, where soldiers broke out in song and ceremonial firing of guns, to celebrate “the peace.”169 Trotsky arrived back at Smolny amid jubilation on January 31, 1918. (The next day in Russia would be February 14, thanks to the introduction of the Western Gregorian calendar.) A skeptical Lenin wondered if Trotsky might have pulled off a magician’s trick. A diplomatic cable from Brest-Litovsk to Vienna prompted preparations for a victory celebration in the exhausted Habsburg capital: huge crowds filled the streets and bunting started to go up.170

But the Germany brass insisted that they would never get the promised Ukrainian grain without a military occupation. At a German war council on February 13—the same day that Trotsky had arrived back at Smolny—Field Marshal Hindenburg pointed out that the armistice had failed to result in a peace treaty and therefore no longer held; he urged a policy to “smash the Russians [and] topple their government.” The kaiser agreed.171 Some 450,000 Central Power troops entered Ukraine, with the deposed Central Rada’s permission. (Angry riots erupted among Polish speakers over the promises to Ukraine in Galicia; Polish troops entering Ukraine under Habsburg command broke off into their own armed force.)172 A parallel German force (fifty-two divisions), beginning on February 18—eight days after Trotsky’s coup de theâtre—would waltz 125 miles through northern Russian territory in two weeks, capturing Minsk, Mogilyov, and Narva, putting the Germans on an unobstructed path to Petrograd. “This is the most comic war I have experienced,” Hoffmann noted of his operation (named Thunderbolt). “One puts on the train a few infantry with machine guns and one artillery piece, and proceeds to the next railroad station, seizes it, arrests the Bolsheviks, entrains another detachment, and moves on.”173

QOQAND MASSACRE

Events elsewhere on the former Russian imperial space followed a dynamic dictated neither by the geopolitics of Germany versus the Entente nor by the acrimonious duets of Trotsky and Lenin. The Soviet in Tashkent, comprising primarily Slavic colonists and garrison troops, had succeeded in seizing power on its second try on October 23, 1917, even before the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd. In mid-November, a local Congress of Soviets gathered essentially without any indigeneous members.174 “The soldiers sent thither from the interior provinces of Russia, the peasants settled therein by the old regime on the lands confiscated from our people, and the workers accustomed to regard us haughtily from above—these were the people who were at this moment to decide the fate of Turkestan,” recalled Mustafa Choqai-Beg, a Muslim leader.175 The Tashkent Congress of Soviets voted 97 to 17 to deny Muslims governmental posts.176 Muslim scholars who composed the ulama and who took it for granted that they spoke for the mass, were gathering simultaneously in their own congress, in another part of Tashkent, and, being accustomed to petitioning the colonial authorities, voted overwhelmingly to petition the Tashkent Soviet to form a more representative local political body, given that “the Muslims of Turkestan . . . comprise 98 percent of the population.”177 At the same time, a different group of Muslims, self-styled modernists known as the Jadid, saw an opportunity to outflank the traditional ulama and, in early December 1917, assembled in Qoqand, a walled city that had been captured by the Russians only thirty-four years earlier. With nearly 200 representatives, including 150 from the nearby populous Ferghana valley, this congress resolved on December 11 to declare “Turkestan territorially autonomous in union with the Federal Democratic Russian Republic,” while vowing to protect local national minorities (Slavs) “in every possible way.”178 They constituted a Provisional Government and elected a delegation to the Constituent Assembly, reserving one third of the seats for non-Muslims. The congress also debated whether to seek an alliance with the anti-Bolshevik steppe Cossacks, a proposition that divided the delegates but seemed inescapable as the only path to continuing to import grain: local farmers had almost all been switched by the tsarist regime to growing cotton.

Qoqand Autonomy representatives went to Tashkent on December 13 to announce their existence on the Soviet’s territory. It was a Friday (the Muslim holy day) and, as it happened, Muhammad’s birthday. Tens of thousands of men, many wearing white turbans and carrying green or light blue flags, marched toward the Russian quarter of the city. Even many ulama joined, as did some moderate Russians. The marchers demanded an end to household searches and requisitions, and stormed the prison, freeing the inmates incarcerated by the Tashkent Soviet.179 Russian troops fired at the crowd, killing several; more died in a resulting stampede.180 The prisoners were recaptured and executed.

Dominated by Muslim intellectuals educated in imperial Russia, the Qoqand Autonomy’s leaders petitioned the Bolshevik authorities in the Russian capital “to recognize the Provisional Government of autonomous Turkestan as the only government of Turkestan” and to authorize the immediate dissolution of the Tashkent Soviet, “which relies on foreign elements hostile to the native population of the country, contrary to the principle of self-determination of peoples.”181 Stalin, as nationalities commissar, issued the reply. “The soviets are autonomous in their internal affairs and discharge their duties by relying on their actual forces,” he wrote. “Therefore, it will not behoove the native proletarians of Turkestan to appeal to the central Soviet authority with petitions to dissolve the Turkestan Council of People’s Commissars.” He added that if the Qoqand Autonomy felt that the Tashkent Soviet had to go, “they should themselves dissolve it by force, if such force is available to the native proletarians and peasants.”182 Here was naked admission both of the central Bolsheviks’ powerlessness and of the role of force in determining revolutionary outcomes. But, of course, the Tashkent Soviet commanded the arms inherited from the tsarist-era colonial garrisons. The Qoqand Autonomy tried but failed to form a people’s militia (it managed three score volunteers). It lacked the wherewithal to levy taxes and its diplomatic missions to the steppe Qazaqs and the emirate of Bukhara yielded nothing. After the Bolsheviks’ dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, Qoqand tried to coax the Tashkent Soviet into convening a Turkestan Constituent Assembly—which, of course, would have returned an overwhelming Muslim majority. On February 14, the Tashkent Soviet mobilized local garrison troops, other soldiers from the Orenburg steppes, Armenian Dashnaks, and armed Slavic workers to crush the “counterfeit autonomy,” setting siege to Qoqand’s old city. Within four days they breached the walls and set about massacring the population. An estimated 14,000 Muslims were slaughtered, many of them machine-gunned; the city was looted, then burned.183 The Tashkent Soviet used the moment to step up requisitions of food stocks, unleashing a famine, in which perhaps 900,000 people would perish, as well as mass flight toward Chinese Turkestan.184 Stalin and the Bolsheviks would have their work cut out in marrying the revolution and the anti-colonial question in practice.

CAPITULATION

No reliable Bolshevik forces stood in the path of Major General Max Hoffmann’s eastward-marching German army. “For us, as well as from the international socialist point of view, the preservation of the [Soviet] republic stands above all else,” Lenin argued at a Central Committee meeting on February 18, the very day Hoffmann had renewed the German advance.185 For Lenin, ceding territories that the Bolsheviks did not rule anyway—and, in his mind, ceding them only temporarily, until the world revolution—constituted a price worth paying. Initially, however, Lenin again failed to muster a Central Committee majority. Stalin stood by Lenin once more. “We want to talk straight, go straight to the heart of the matter,” Stalin said at the Central Committee on February 18. “The Germans are attacking, we have no forces, the time has come to say that negotiations must be resumed.”186 This statement constituted an unambiguous repudiation of Trotsky’s position. Trotsky, throughout, had been the swing figure, and he remained so now. Sometime before he had returned to Brest-Litovsk in mid-January, Lenin had held a confidential tête-à-tête with him; each man evidently held to his arguments, but Lenin pointedly asked Trotsky what he would do if in fact the Germans did resume their offensive, and no revolutionary uprisings in Germany’s rear broke out. Would the capitulatory peace have to be signed? Trotsky had evidently agreed that if those circumstances were to come to pass, he would not oppose Lenin’s call for accepting a punitive peace on German terms.187 And now, Trotsky kept his word, rescinding his no vote. This gave Lenin a 7 to 5 majority (with one abstention) for immediate capitulation, against the advocates for “revolutionary war.”188

A radiogram under the signatures of Lenin and Trotsky agreeing to the original terms was dispatched to the Germans.189 But the Germans did not respond; and Major General Hoffmann continued his march. On February 21, German forces began intervening in the Finnish civil war, where the October coup had split officers of the imperial Russian army. (German troops would help nationalist Finns led by General Carl Gustav Mannerheim rout Red Guards and overthrow a Bolshevik-backed Finnish Socialist Workers Republic.)190 The failure to have accepted German terms immediately now looked like a far larger gamble. Aside from Ukraine and the southern Cossack lands (4.5 million people), “Soviet power” had everywhere seemed triumphant, but the silence out of Berlin made the February 18, 1918, resumption of a German military attack on the eastern front seem a potential turning point in the socialist revolution.191 This proved to be among the bloodiest single episodes of the war in per capita terms. More desperate than ever, Lenin had Trotsky put out feelers to the Entente, trying to appeal to French imperialists to save the socialist revolution from German imperialists.192 “We are turning the party into a dung hill,” Bukharin, in tears, exclaimed to Trotsky.193 “All of us, including Lenin,” Trotsky recalled, “were of the impression that the Germans had come to an agreement with the Allies about crushing the Soviets.”194 For that, both Trotsky and Bukharin would have borne the responsibility.

Finally, on the morning of February 23, the German response to the Bolshevik capitulation arrived by courier: It took the form of an ultimatum whose terms were far more onerous than before Trotsky’s posturing of neither war, nor peace. That same afternoon the Central Committee grimly assembled. Sverdlov detailed the German conditions: Soviet Russia would also have to recognize the independence—under German occupation—of the breadbasket of Ukraine, as well as the oil of the Caspian Sea and the strategic Baltic ports of Finland and Estonia, all to be dominated by Germany. Further, the Bolsheviks would have to disarm all Red Guards, decommission their navy, and pay a colossal indemnity. In other words, the Germans were continuing to place a large bet on Bolshevism, while at the same time containing it and extracting advantage. To accept, the Bolsheviks were given forty-eight hours, much of which had already passed while the German document was in transit. Lenin stated that “the terms must be accepted,” otherwise, he would resign, a threat he put in writing (in Pravda).195 Sverdlov backed Lenin. But Trotsky and Dzierzynski urged rejection. So did Bukharin. Another hard-line leftist called Lenin’s bluff, stating, “There is no reason to be frightened by Lenin’s threat to resign. We must take power without V.I. [Lenin].” Even Stalin—among Lenin’s staunchest allies throughout Brest-Litovsk—blinked. He suggested that “it’s possible not to sign, but to begin peace negotiations,” adding that “the Germans are provoking us into a refusal.” This could have been a breakthrough moment, when Stalin tipped the balance, breaking Lenin’s hold on power. But Lenin countered that “Stalin is mistaken,” and repeated his insistence on accepting the German diktat to save the Soviet regime. Stalin’s brief vacillation ended. Partly that was because Trotsky swung Lenin’s way. Trotsky pointed out that the terms “were best of all when Kamenev made the first trip [to Brest-Litovsk] and it would have been better if Kamenev and Joffe had signed the peace” back then. Anyway, “now things were quite clear.” Thanks to four abstentions—including, crucially, Trotsky—Lenin, supported by Sverdlov and Stalin, won the Central Committee vote: 7 to 4.196

Over at the Tauride Palace, where the central executive committee of the Soviet was in session and included non-Bolsheviks such as a large Left SR faction and some Mensheviks, the arguments resumed late at night and continued into the morning of February 24, when the German ultimatum would expire at 7:00 a.m. Jeers of “Traitor!” greeted Lenin when he mounted the dais. “Give me an army of 100,000 men, an army which will not tremble before the enemy, and I will not sign the peace,” he replied. “Can you raise an army?” At 4:30 a.m., capitulation to the German diktat passed 116 to 85, with 26 abstentions: the Left SRs provided much of the opposition.197 Lenin hurried to have a note dispatched to the Germans from the special radio transmitter at Tsarskoe Selo.198 Neither Trotsky nor anybody else in the inner circle wanted to return to Brest-Litovsk to sign the humiliating treaty. The task fell to Grigory Sokolnikov, who had evidently suggested Zinoviev and then was himself “volunteered.”199 The Bolshevik delegation arrived back in Brest-Litovsk, but had to cool their heels while the German army seized Kiev on March 1–2, 1918, reinstalling the Central Rada government, and presented new Turkish demands for still more Russian territorial concessions in the Caucasus. The signing took place on March 3. “It is your day now,” Radek snapped bitterly at Major General Hoffmann, “but in the end the Allies will put a Brest-Litovsk treaty upon you.”200 Radek was right: the Allies did become convinced, largely as a result of Brest-Litovsk, that imperial Germany was incapable of moderation and a negotiated peace, and needed to be defeated.

Trotsky—too clever by half—had miscalculated, and he now resigned as foreign affairs commissar (Lenin would appoint him commissar of war instead). But Lenin had been the one who had maniacally pushed for the October coup, and he was the one now vilified for the captiulatory peace.201 Russia was compelled to renounce 1.3 million square miles of territory—lands more than twice the size of Germany, and lands imperial Russia had spilled blood and treasure to conquer over centuries from Sweden, Poland, the Ottoman empire, and others. The amputation removed a quarter of Russia’s population (some 50 million people), a third of its industry, and more than a third of its grain fields.202 Germany now sat in titular command of a vast eastward wedge, stretching from the Arctic to the Black Sea. Equally spectacular, subjects of imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary received exemptions from Bolshevik nationalization decrees, meaning they could own private property and engage in commercial activities on Soviet Russian soil, and German nationals who had lost property from tsarist confiscations were now owed compensation. The Bolsheviks became duty bound to demobilize their army and navy and cease international propaganda (the Germans considered Bolshevik propaganda far more dangerous than any Russian troops).203 No Russian government had ever surrendered so much territory or sovereignty.

Doom enveloped Petrograd. A year had passed since the heady days of Nicholas II’s abdication, on March 2, 1917, when the tsar had pointedly asked two Duma representatives, “Would there not be consequences?” A mere five months had lapsed since Boris Avilov, a Menshevik Internationalist, had stood up on October 27, 1917, at the Second Congress of Soviets during the Bolshevik coup and predicted that an all-Bolshevik government could neither solve the food supply crisis nor end the war, that the Entente would not recognize a Bolshevik-monopoly government, and that the Bolsheviks would be compelled to accept a separate and onerous peace with Germany. That day had come. On top of everything, Russia’s wartime allies now instituted a de facto economic blockade, and soon would seize Russia’s assets abroad.204

Lenin’s party was divided and demoralized.205 At the 7th (Extraordinary) Party Congress in the Tauride Palace on March 5–8, 1918, a mere 46 delegates turned up (compared with the nearly 200 at the last Party Congress in the summer of 1917). The self-styled Left Communists, who had been among the strongest supporters of Lenin’s putsch in 1917, rejected Brest-Litovsk. Bukharin and other leftist Bolsheviks even established a new periodical, Communist, expressly to denounce the “obscene” treaty, and at the congress took the floor to urge “revolutionary war” against imperial Germany. Lenin put through a name change from Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Bolsheviks) to Russian Communist party (Bolsheviks) and pleaded for party acceptance of Brest-Litovsk. The recriminations raged over three days. Lenin pointed out that his opponents had caused the catastrophe by refusing to accept the initial, better German offer. He won the vote 30 to 12, with 4 abstentions (including, again, Trotsky).206 And yet, this vote was in many ways merely an exercise in affirming the leader’s authority: Lenin insisted on signing the treaty, but he had already ceased to believe that even the Brest-Litovsk concessions would be enough to halt the German advance on Petrograd. On February 24, the day Lenin telegrammed acceptance of German terms, Major General Hoffmann seized Pskov, 150 miles southwest from, and on the direct rail line to, the Russian capital. On February 26, Lenin had approved a secret order to abandon the capital of Russia’s revolution. It was a rich irony. After Kerensky’s Provisional Government had decided to relocate from Petrograd to Moscow for safety in early October 1917, the Bolshevik newspaper Workers’ Path—edited by Stalin—had accused Kerensky of treason for surrendering the capital to the Germans.207 Kerensky had backed down.208 But now—again, just as Lenin’s accusers had long predicted—he had not only handed the Germans everything but was preparing to desert the Russian capital.

FLIGHT AND ENTRENCHMENT

Bolshevik evacuation preparations, rumored on newspaper front pages for months, could not be concealed. Already in late February 1918, the American and Japanese diplomatic missions had relocated for safety to Vologda, while the French and British sought to exit Russia entirely via Finland to Sweden: only the British got through; the French ended up stranded at Vologda, too (where Stalin had been in exile). Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, chairman of the government’s “intelligence operations”—a room in Smolny—used ruses to ensure Lenin’s security: freight stamped “Council of People’s Commissars” was loaded in plain sight at a central passenger station, while under cover of darkness, at a derelict depot south of Petrograd, a train of former imperial carriages was secretly assembled. Bonch-Bruevich sent two teams of agents unknown to each other (okhranka style) to maintain surveillance on the disused spur, eavesdrop on nearby “tea” houses, and spread rumors of a train being prepared for doctors heading to the front. Some cars were loaded with wood fuel, typewriters, and telephones; flatbeds were added for automobiles. Bonch-Bruevich had also filled two cars just with Bolshevik party literature (not including his own personal library).209 On the evening of Sunday, March 10, the secret train—carrying Lenin, his sister and wife, the poet Yefim Pridvorov (aka Demyan Bedny), Sverdlov, Stalin, Cheka head Dzierzynski with a single briefcase, and a detachment of guards—departed with the lights off. Two trains carrying the Soviet’s central executive committee (many of whom were not Bolsheviks) followed at a distance, not knowing what was in front of them. Anxiety was high: seventy-five miles southeast of Petrograd, Lenin’s train was delayed when it unexpectedly crossed paths with a train carrying demobilized armed troops. Only when Lenin’s train pulled within three station stops of Moscow did Bonch-Bruevich alert the Moscow soviet of the train’s existence. Arriving at 8:00 p.m. on March 11, Lenin was greeted by a small party of “workers,” addressed the Moscow soviet, and took up residence in the gilt National Hotel, where an accompanying team of telegraphists was also billeted.210

What arrived on the main train was the “state” as of March 1918: Lenin’s person, a handful of loyal lieutenants, Bolshevik ideas and some means to spread them, an armed guard.

The armed guard was especially unusual. A desperate call to form a defense force “from the class-conscious and best elements of the working classes” had been issued in mid-January 1918, during the Brest-Litovsk talks, when the Germans were marching eastward without obstacle, but nothing came of the summons.211 On the train escorting the revolution to the new capital of Moscow were the Latvian Riflemen of the tsarist army. Before the Great War, the Russian imperial army had refused to countenance expressly national units; only in 1914–15 had the authorities permitted Czechoslovak, Serbo-Croatian, and Polish volunteer “legions,” made up of POWs who wanted to return to fighting to help liberate their compatriots under Habsburg rule. Finns were denied such permission, but in August 1915, Russia allowed all-volunteer Latvian brigades, aiming to exploit their antagonism to Germany. By 1916–17, the two Latvian brigades had ballooned to some 18,000 troops in eight regiments (eventually ten), each named for a Latvian town, but also including ethnic Hungarians, Finns, and others. After heavy casualties in winter 1916–17 fighting, they had turned against the tsarist system. Most were landless peasants or small tenant farmers, and they leaned heavily Social Democratic. By 1917, their homeland had broken off from Russia, under German occupation. Still, it was the decision of their authoritative commander, Colonel Jukums Vacietis (b. 1873), the sixth son among eight children of a landless peasant family from tsarist Courland, whose Russian teacher had been a radical student Populist, to bring the soldiers over to the Bolshevik side.212 The Latvians guarding Lenin’s train were the only disciplined, all-purpose force standing between Bolshevism and oblivion.

Other trains to Moscow hauled storehouses of valuables: the naval staff took files, maps, office equipment, furniture, curtains, rugs, mirrors, ashtrays, stoves, kitchen appliances, dishes, samovars, towels, blankets, and holy icons—1,806 enumerated items in all.213 A foreign affairs commissariat train carted off “gold goblets, gilt spoons, knives and the like” from the imperial vaults.214 But what Moscow held in store remained to be seen. “Bourgeois circles are gleeful about the fact that by a strange twist of fate we are realizing the Slavophiles’ timeless dream of returning the capital to Moscow,” Zinoviev remarked. “We are profoundly convinced that the change of capital will not last long and that the difficult conditions dictating its necessity will pass.”215 The Moscow Council of People’s Commissars was taking no chances, having promptly declared its “independence” the day the Petrograd government arrived. Lenin appointed a commission of himself, Stalin, and Sverdlov to take down what they called the parallel “Muscovite Tsardom.”216

In the meantime, an armed quest for usable property drew in all. Moscow resembled an overgrown village, with narrow, dirty streets of rough cobblestone—nothing like the straight, wide avenues of baroque Petrograd—and lacked an accumulation of administrative edifices.217 The Moscow soviet central executive committee had already claimed the Governor’s Mansion; the Moscow soviet itself was left to fight for the once grand, now dilapidated Hotel Dresden (across the street from the Governor’s Mansion). Some members of the soviet’s central executive committee moved into the National Hotel (rechristened the House of Soviets No. 1), but more ended up at the Hotel Lux, on Moscow’s main artery Tverskaya Street.218 Most state agencies found themselves widely dispersed: the new Supreme Council of the Economy, set up to counteract anarchosyndicalist tendencies in industry, would claim eighty structures, virtually none of them originally built as offices.219 The war commissariat took over the unluxurious Hotel Red Fleet, also on Tverskaya Street, but additionally claimed the Alexander Military School, the Trading Rows on Red Square, and prime spaces in Moscow’s Kitaigorod, the walled inner merchant ward near the Kremlin. The Trade Union Council got an eighteenth-century neoclassical foundling home out along the Moscow River as well as some plush reception space in Moscow’s former Nobility Club. The Cheka appropriated the property of two private insurance companies, Yakor (Anchor) and Lloyd’s Russian branch, on Bolshaya Lubyanka.220 Predictably, the scramble was shameless: When members of the Moscow party committee went to occupy a facility they had obtained in a barter deal, they discovered that the kitchen equipment and phone cables had been ripped from the walls, and the lightbulbs were gone.

Moscow’s grandest hotel, the Metropole, was an art nouveau jewel that had originally been intended as an opera house. The structure was commissioned by the railway industrialist and arts patron Savva Mamontov (1841–1918), but he was jailed on fraud charges, after which the project changed, resulting in the hotel that opened in 1905. The war altered it nearly beyond recognition and with the revolution, the property was nationalized, rechristened the Second House of the Soviets, its 250 rooms overrun by new regime parvenus. The entrance was barricaded by guards and a pass system was initiated; the interior crawled with bed bugs and higher ups, along with their relatives, cronies, and mistresses. Yefraim Sklyansky, Trotsky’s top deputy at the war commissariat, had commandeered several apartments on different floors for his “clan.” Bukharin lived here, as did his future lover Anna Larina, then a child (they met when she was four and he, twenty-nine). Foreign Affairs Commissar Georgy Chicherin and many foreign affairs personnel were particularly well ensconced; many had offices here, too. The commissariat of trade got a two-room junior suite with bathtub. Yakov Sverdlov had his public reception for the Soviet central executive committee upstairs, while formal sessions of that body took place in the disused banquet hall‒restaurant. Amid the darkness and severe cold of a capital without fuel, the former opulent hotel degenerated into a filthy wreck. Child residents relieved themselves on the luxury runners in the hallways, on which adults threw lit cigarette butts. The toilets and grand baths were particularly execrable. Fierce scrums broke out over the irregularly distributed state food packets (payok) for the elite residents. Packets could include clothes, even coveted overcoats. The “administration” of the Second House of the Soviets, meanwhile, stole everything removable.221 An opera house it had belatedly become.

But the center of power formed elsewhere. To accommodate the Council of People’s Commissars, among the options considered were a hostel for patrician women near the city’s medieval Red Gate, or the medieval Kremlin, which, however, had been neglected, physically and politically—the clock on the Savior Gate Tower overlooking Red Square was still chiming “God Save the Tsar” every hour.222 Whatever the Kremlin’s associations with ancient Muscovy or its disrepair, it had high walls and lockable gates, and a unique central location. After a week in the National Hotel, Lenin moved his operations into one of the Kremlin’s masterpieces. Catherine the Great had commissioned a residence for the times she was in Moscow; the resultant neoclassicial structure, instead, was built for the Imperial Senate (the Russian empire’s highest judicial body), whose spacious, luxurious offices were later given over to the Courts of Justice. Lenin, a lawyer manque, set up shop on the upper (third) floor in the former suite of the state procurator.223 The riding stable (manege) just outside the Kremlin gates became the government garage, though most officials made their way in sledges and droshkies commandeered from the populace.224 The Smolny commandant, Pavel Malkov, a Sverdlov protégé, became the new Kremlin commandant and set about clearing out the nuns and monks from the monastery and nunnery just inside the Savior Gate. Malkov also furnished Lenin’s office, found a tailor to clothe the regime, and began stockpiling foodstuffs.225 For living quarters, Lenin got a two-room apartment in the Kremlin’s Cavalry Building in the former residence (now divided up) of the cavalry commander. Trotsky and Sverdlov, too, moved into the Cavalry Building. “Lenin and I took quarters across the corridor, sharing the same dining room,” Trotsky later wrote, bragging that “Lenin and I met dozens of times a day in the corridor, and called on each other to talk things over.” (They dined on suddenly plentiful red caviar, whose export had ceased.)226 By the end of 1918, some 1,800 new people (including family members) would obtain Kremlin apartments.

Stalin also took part in this struggle over space. For his nationalities commissariat, he schemed to seize the Grand Siberian Hotel, but the Supreme Council of the Economy had squatted in the building. (“This was one of the few cases,” Pestkowski gently noted, “when Stalin suffered defeat.”)227 Instead, Stalin secured a few small, private detached houses, after the Cheka had left them for the insurance buildings. Right before the relocation to the capital, meanwhile, in late February or early March, he appears to have married sixteen-year-old Nadezhda “Nadya” Alliluyeva, the daughter of the skilled worker Sergei Alliluyev, who in the prerevolutionary years had long sheltered Stalin in Tiflis and St. Petersburg.228 She was still a girl, and remarkably earnest. (“There’s real hunger in Petrograd,” she wrote to the wife of another Bolshevik on the eve of her wedding to Stalin. “They hand out only an eighth of a pound of bread every day, and one day they gave us none at all. I’ve even cursed the Bolsheviks.”)229 Her relatives observed the couple quarreling already during the initial “honeymoon” phase of the marriage.230 Stalin addressed her in the familiar (“ty”); she used the formal (“vy”). He hired her as his secretary in the commissariat (the next year she would shift over to Lenin’s secretariat and join the party).231 The couple obtained a Kremlin apartment, for some reason not in the Cavalry Building with Lenin, Trotsky, and Sverdlov, but in an even more modest three-story outbuilding that serviced Moscow’s Grand Kremlin Palace. Their rooms on the second floor of the servants’ quarters, in the so-called Frauleins’ Corridor, with three opaque windows, carried the new address Communist Street, 2.232 Stalin complained to Lenin about the noise from the communal kitchen and the vehicles outside, and demanded that Kremlin vehicles be banned from driving beyond the arch where the residential quarters began after 11:00 p.m. (a sign, perhaps, that Stalin was not yet the insomniac he would become).233 Stalin also acquired a government office inside the Imperial Senate building, like Lenin and Sverdlov, but the Georgian was rarely there.

CRUELEST MONTHS: SPRING 1918

Ten days after Brest-Litovsk nominally ended hostilities on the eastern front, the German army captured Odessa, way down on the Black Sea coast. Beginning the next day, March 14, the Fourth All-Russia Congress of Soviets convened in Moscow to ratify the treaty. The Soviet’s central executive committee had voted to recommend approval—amid shouts of “Judases . . . German spies!”—only thanks to Sverdlov’s manipulations, and even then, just barely (abstentions and noes constituted a majority).234 At the congress, ratification was also fraught. “Suppose that two friends are out walking at night and they are attacked by ten men,” Lenin tried reasoning with the delegates. “If the scoundrels isolate one of them, what is the other to do? He cannot render assistance, and if he runs away is he a traitor?”235 Running from a fight hardly seemed persuasive. Still, of the 1,232 voting delegates—including 795 Bolsheviks and 283 Left Socialist Revolutionaries—784 voted in favor of ratification, 261 against, with the remainder, some 175, abstaining or not voting.236 The Left Communists were the ones who abstained. But the Bolshevik junior partner Left SRs voted no en masse, declaring their party “not bound by the terms of the Treaty” and quitting the Council of People’s Commissars (which they had joined only two months earlier). And Lenin had not even dared to divulge the full treaty provisions before the vote. “We are asked to ratify a treaty the text of which some of us have not seen, at least neither I nor my comrades have seen it,” complained the Menshevik leader Yuly Martov. “Do you know what you are signing? I do not. . . . Talk about secret diplomacy!”237 Martov did not know the half of it: Unbeknownst to the Congress of Soviets delegates, Lenin had authorized Trotsky to conspire with American, British, and French representatives in Russia to obtain pledges of Entente support against the Germans, for which Lenin had promised to sabotage ratification of Brest-Litovsk.

Still viewing Lenin and Trotsky as German agents, Entente governments failed to respond to the offer.238 But a British Navy squadron, a token force, had landed at the port of Murmansk, on Russia’s northwest (Arctic Ocean) coast, on March 9, with the express aim of countering German and Finnish forces threatening Russia’s Murmansk Railway as well as military storehouses. More broadly, the British and French wanted to prevent Germany from transferring eastern front divisions to the western front by reviving an eastern front. This desire was vastly heightened as the Central Powers began to occupy and extract the riches of Ukraine. The British, in other words, were intervening initially not to overthrow Bolshevism but to mitigate the Central Powers’ newfound war advantages.239 But what had started out largely as a preemptive move to deny Germany Russian military stores would become, over time, an underfunded campaign against the supposed threat that Communism posed to the British empire in India.240

Lenin and Trotsky, for their part, had welcomed the Entente’s military landing on Russian soil as a counter to Germany. Stalin, at a Council of People’s Commissars meeting on April 2, 1918, with the Germans about to capture Kharkov, proposed shifting policy to seek an anti-German military coalition with the Ukrainian Central Rada, which the Bolsheviks had overthrown just two months before, and which Germany had restored one month before.241 Stalin’s proposal was complementary to Trotsky’s about-face negotiations with agents of the Entente to help organize and train a new Red Army, along with railroad operators and equipment. Three days later, Japanese troops, on the pretext of “protecting” Japanese nationals, landed at Vladivostok. Lenin and Trotsky vehemently objected—this was a military intervention they did not invite.

Germany, which was eager to break Japan’s alliance with Britain, had encouraged the Japanese intervention against Russia, a landing that raised the prospect of a west-east flanking occupation, based on a common interest, to reduce Russia to a colonial dependency. Lenin, notwithstanding all the fog of his class categories, well understood the possibility of a German-Japanese alliance, just as he had grasped the antagonism of state interests between Germany and Britain on the one hand and, on the other, Japan and the United States.242 But Lenin struggled to induce Britain and France, let alone the far-off United States, to align with Communist Russia against Germany and Japan. Despite the 1917 rupture, Soviet Russia’s strategic position bore resemblance to imperial Russia’s. A big difference between past and present, however, was that parts of imperial Russia had broken off, and they could be used by hostile foreign powers against Russia.

Stalin was busy with these lost territories. On March 19, 1918, he wrote to Caucasus Bolsheviks urging them to strengthen the defenses of Baku, and a week later an article of his appeared in Pravda denouncing non-Bolshevik leftists (“South Caucasus Counter-Revolutionaries under a Socialist Mask”).243 On March 30, Stalin spoke on the Hughes apparatus to the head of the Tashkent Soviet about developments in Turkestan. On April 3–4, Pravda carried an interview with him on a draft constitution on which he was working, based upon a proposed federal structure and new name for Soviet Russia—the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR).244 On April 9, Stalin dispatched a message, published in Pravda, to the soviets of Kazan, Ufa, Orenburg, and Tashkent, indicating that the principle of self-determination had “lost its revolutionary meaning” and could be overridden. On April 29, the Council of People’s Commissars appointed Stalin RSFSR plenipotentiary to negotiate a peace treaty with the Ukrainian Central Rada. That same day the Germans, further improvising in the East, betrayed their Ukrainian Central Rada treaty partners, installing a puppet Ukrainian “Hetmanate,” a deliberately archaic name, under General Pavlo Skoropadskyj. But his misrule, alongside the Austro-German occupation, provoked peasant insurrections and a many-sided armed conflict.245 “When the German forces entered Ukraine they found absolute chaos,” a German official reported. “Not infrequently, one came across neighboring villages surrounded by trenches and fighting each other for the land of the former landlords.”246 The promised grain stocks that had lured a nearly half-million-man German occupation army failed to materialize.

Stalin had no better success organizing pro-Bolshevik actions on the territory of Ukraine, but in a sign of his increasing visibility and importance—and of Yuly Martov’s frustration at Lenin—Martov revived accusations of Stalin’s complicity in the spectacular 1907 Tiflis mail coach robbery and the 1908 robbery of a steamship, writing in a Menshevik periodical that Stalin “had been expelled by the party organization for his involvement in expropriations.”247 Stalin sued Martov for slander in a Revolutionary Tribunal and, on April 1, denied the charges in Pravda, stating “that, I, Stalin, was never called before the disciplinary committee of any party organization. In particular, I was never expelled.” He added—in exquisite irony—that “one has no right to issue accusations like Martov’s except with documents in one’s hand. It is dishonest to sling mud on the basis of mere rumors.”248 The tribunal convened on April 5 before a full house. Martov was denied a shift to a civil court with jury trial, but he went on the offensive, requesting time to produce documents, explaining that for conspiratorial purposes, no written party records had been kept, but witnesses could back up his claims, and so he would gather affidavits from Georgian Bolsheviks such as Isidor Ramishvili, who had headed the disciplinary body for Stalin’s case in 1908, regarding Stalin’s participation in a 1908 steamship armed robbery and the near-fatal beating of a worker familiar with Stalin’s murky past. Stalin objected that there would be insufficient time to wait for the witnesses. Still, the court postponed its proceedings against Martov for a week and, by some accounts, the Menshevik Boris Nicolaevsky went to collect testimony in the Caucasus, returning with affidavits from Ramishvili as well as Silva Jibladze and others. Once back in Moscow, however, Nicolaevsky is said to have discovered that all other records of the case had vanished. Sverdlov as well as Lenin—who admired Martov, for all their differences—had helped to close out the inquiry.249 On April 18, 1918, the tribunal found Martov guilty of slander, but only assessed him a reprimand; before the month was out the verdict had been annulled.250 On May 11, Sverdlov, who oversaw the Martov case from behind the scenes, did have the Soviet’s central executive committee approve closure of the Menshevik newspaper for generally printing false information.251 But Stalin’s bandit past would never go away.252

CZECHOSLOVAK LEGION REVOLT

General Alexeyev, Nicholas II’s former chief of staff and then supreme commander, had formed a clandestine network of officers after February 1917; following the Bolshevik coup, he summoned them to constitute a Volunteer Army among the Don Cossacks at Novocherkassk.253 The Volunteer Army began with a mere 400 to 500 officers. Among them was Kornilov, himself of Cossack pedigree, who, upon release from the prison near Mogilyov, traveled south disguised in peasant rags with a forged Romanian passport.254 Because the sixty-one-year-old Alexeyev had cancer, he assigned the military command to the forty-eight-year-old Kornilov, even though the two never really got along. Kornilov’s forces—former tsarist officers, Cossacks, military school cadets (teenagers)—came under heavy assault from mid-February 1918. He sought sanctuary, marching a few thousand Volunteers southeastward toward the Kuban through heavy snow and barren steppes with little shelter or food other than what they plundered. Volunteers taken prisoner had their eyes gouged out—and they responded in kind. (“The more terror, the more victories!” Kornilov exhorted.)255 After the frightful “ice march,” 700 miles in eight days, wearied survivors arrived near Yekaterinodar, the Kuban capital, only to discover it was held not by the Cossacks but by Reds in superior numbers. One general (Kaledin) had already shot himself. Kornilov was killed when a shell struck his headquarters in a farmhouse on April 12, 1918, and buried him under the collapsed ceiling. “A cloud of white plaster streamed forth,” one staff officer recalled of Kornilov’s room; when they turned the general over, they saw shrapnel lodged in his temple.256 The Whites quickly decamped, and pro-Bolshevik units exhumed his shattered body, dragged it to Yekaterinodar’s main square, and burned it on a rubbish pile.257 “It can be said with certainty,” an elated Lenin boasted, “that, in the main, the civil war has ended.”258 Russia’s civil war was about to begin.

Kornilov’s was not the only notable death that month: Gavrilo Princip passed away at the Habsburg’s Terezin Fortress prison (the future Nazi Theresienstadt), where he was serving 20 years for the murder of the Austrian heir. The tubercular Princip, weakened by malnutrition, disease, and blood loss from an amputated arm, weighed eighty-eight pounds and was 23 years old. The 700-year-old Habsburg empire would outlive him by just a few months.259

As for Russia’s civil war, it was precipitated from utterly unexpected quarters. In the Great War, Russia had captured around 2 million Central Power prisoners, mostly Austro-Hungarian subjects.260 Later in the Great War, in anticipation of gaining a new Czechoslovak homeland in an Entente victory, the Czechoslovak Legion, which came to comprise some 40,000 POWs as well as deserters, served the tsar and took part in Kerensky’s June 1917 offensive. In December 1917 they had been placed under French command.261 Trotsky schemed to use the Legionnaires (who leaned Social Democratic) as the nucleus for a new Red Army, but Paris insisted that the Legionnaires be transferred to France, on the western front.262 Russia’s closest port in the west, at Arkhangelsk (750 miles north of Petrograd), was ice bound in March, so the armed troops were sent via Siberia to Vladivostok, whence they were supposed to sail to France.263 But Germany had demanded that the Bolsheviks halt and disarm the Czechoslovak Legion, an obligation inserted into Brest-Litovsk. The Entente, for its part, requested that the troops who had not yet reached Omsk, in Western Siberia, be turned around and sent northwest to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk after all, to fight off the Germans nearby. The Japanese suddenly refused to transport Legionnaires from Vladivostok on boats for the west, assisting the Germans and keeping Siberia for themselves. The Legionnaires, for their part, wanted only to fight the Austrians and Germans, and were understandably wary about the meaning of all the back and forth. Amid suspicions, trouble broke out in Chelyabinsk (eastern Urals) on May 14, 1918, when a Russian train with ethnic Hungarian POWs of Austria-Hungary pulled up alongside a train of the Czechoslovak Legion troops. Insults flew. A Hungarian threw a metal object, wounding a Czech; the Czechs assaulted the other train and strung up the Hungarian object thrower. The Chelyabinsk soviet detained several Czechs and Slovaks in an investigation. On May 25, Trotsky cabled: “Every armed Czechoslovak found on the railway is to be shot on the spot.”264 That stupid order could never have been carried out. Still, suspecting the Bolsheviks intended to turn them over to Germans, the Czechoslovak Legion seized Chelyabinsk and then one town after another: Penza (May 29), Omsk (June 7), Samara (June 8), Ufa (July 5), Simbirsk (July 22), and so on, until they held the entire Trans-Siberian Railway as well as much of the Volga valley, more than two thirds of the former Russian empire.265 They conquered more territory than anyone else in the Great War.266

The Czechoslovak Legion had harbored no special desire to fight or overthrow the Bolsheviks, but in the vacuum opened up by their self-defense conquests, more than a dozen anti-Bolshevik movements, from late May through June 1918, proclaimed their existence throughout the Volga region and Siberia.267 Governments also sprouted in the tsarist lands under German occupation and those not under German occupation, including the Caucasus, where the British landed an expeditionary force near the oil fields. With the Germans in possession of Ukraine; the Czechoslovaks, Western Siberia; the Cossacks, the Don; and the Volunteer Army, the Kuban, the heartland of Russia, where the Bolsheviks were ensconced, had run out of food—and the fall harvest remained a long way off. On May 29, the Council of People’s Commissars appointed Stalin a special plenipotentiary for South Russia to obtain food for the starving capitals Moscow and Petrograd. “He equipped an entire train,” recalled Pestkowski. “He took with him a Hughes apparatus, airplanes, cash in small notes, a small military detachment, some specialists. I accompanied him to the station. He was in a very jolly mood, fully confident of victory.”268 On June 6, Stalin arrived in Tsaritsyn, on the Volga. If anti-Bolshevik forces captured Tsaritsyn, they could cut off all food and establish a united front from Ukraine through the Urals and Siberia.269 The assignment would entail a vast expansion from his managing contacts with the various non-Russian nationalities, and a transformation of his role in the Bolshevik regime. But in the meantime, with the Czechoslovak Legion revolt, and the absence of any genuine Bolshevik army, the regime’s survival seemed ever more in doubt.

NON-COUP

Alone among the powers, Germany recognized the Bolshevik regime and maintained a real embassy in Moscow in a luxury private residence once owned by a German sugar magnate, on a quiet lane near the Arbat. On April 23, 1918, the forty-seven-year-old Count Wilhelm Mirbach (b. 1871), who had been in Petrograd to negotiate prisoner exchanges with the Bolsheviks and had worked at the embassy in the tsarist period, arrived back in Moscow as ambassador with a mission to ensure that no Russian rapprochement with the Entente took place. Mirbach had been reporting that the Bolshevik regime was “not for long,” and that all it would take to sweep it away would be “light military pressure” by German forces sent via Estonia. The count openly courted monarchist groups as Bolshevik replacements, and behaved as if Moscow were already under German occupation.270 Most Bolsheviks responded in kind. “The German ambassador has arrived,” Pravda wrote, “not as a representative of the toiling classes of a friendly people but as plenipotentiary of a military gang that, with boundless insolence, kills, rapes, and pillages every country.”271 On May 1, International Workers’ Day, German troops reached the Sevastopol naval base in Crimea, headquarters of the Black Sea fleet. On May 8, the Germans seized Rostov, in the Don River basin, where they abetted the gathering anti-Bolshevik forces. Pro-Bolshevik forces had to evacuate; they managed to transfer to Moscow confiscated gold coins, jewels, and other valuables that filled three wooden crates, one metal container, and six leather pouches.272 Two days later, at a Central Committee meeting attended by a mere half a dozen members, Grigory Sokolnikov, signatory of Brest-Litovsk, argued that Germany’s post-Brest offensive had violated the treaty and urged a renewed Anglo-French formal alliance.273

Germany occupied seventeen former tsarist provinces as well as tsarist Poland. Amid rumors of secret clauses in Brest-Litovsk and of Germans dictating Soviet government policies, newspapers warned of an imminent German conquest of Moscow and Petrograd. In fact, the German high command did consider a narrow thrust for the two capitals feasible. At this point, however, mid-May 1918, when they stood fewer than 100 miles from Petrograd (at Narva), and 300 miles from Moscow (at Mogilyov), the Germans stopped advancing.274 Why? Lenin’s continued appeasement of Berlin played a part. Equally important, German ruling circles deemed an invasion superfluous: Bolshevism seemed doomed. Mirbach, received by Lenin in the Kremlin on May 16, reported that same day to Berlin that the Bolshevik leader “continues to maintain his inexhaustible optimism,” but, Mirbach added, Lenin “also concedes that even though his regime still remains intact, the number of its enemies has grown. . . . He bases his self-confidence above all on the fact that the ruling party alone disposes of organized power, whereas the other [parties] agree only in rejecting the existing regime.” On Mirbach’s May 16 report of Lenin’s difficulties, Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote: “He is finished.”275

In this context Yakov Sverdlov sought to drive a revival of the Communist party, which appeared to be atrophying. On May 18, 1918, he circulated a resolution that urged “the center of gravity of our work be shifted somewhat towards building up the party,” and stipulated that “all party members, irrespective of their employment or their positions, are obliged to participate directly in party organizations and must not deviate from party instructions issued by the relevant party center.”276 Subordination to the center, however, remained elusive. In the meantime, Lenin’s strategy was to impress a cost-benefit analysis on Berlin. “If the Germans-merchants take economic advantages, comprehending that via war they will get nothing from us, that we will burn everything, then your policy will be successful,” he instructed the new Soviet envoy to Berlin, Adolf Joffe, on June 2, 1918. “We can supply raw materials.”277 But for the German government, which had already claimed Ukraine’s breadbasket, the grand prize remained Paris. The German embassy in Moscow warned Berlin on June 4 that the Bolsheviks might tear up the Brest-Litovsk agreement (“These people’s actions are absolutely unpredictable, particularly in a state of desperation”), yet the embassay’s chief message was that Bolshevism was at the end of its rope (“famine is encroaching upon us. . . . Fuel reserves are waning. . . . The Bolsheviks are terribly nervous, probably feeling their end approaching, and therefore the rats are beginning to flee from the sinking ship. . . . It may be they will attempt to flee to Nizhny Novgorod or Yekaterinburg. . . .”).278 German diplomats were contacting political has-beens of both the tsarist regime and the Provisional Government about a restoration.279 On June 25, in another note to Berlin, Mirbach again predicted Bolshevism’s imminent demise.280

Mirbach’s high-handed antics in Moscow, meanwhile, were more than matched by the Bolsheviks in Berlin. Thanks to Brest-Litovsk, the hammer and sickle flew on Unter den Linden, 7, the old tsarist embassy. Joffe, the son of a rich merchant and himself a firebrand Left Communist, had refused to present his credentials to the kaiser, held dinners on embassy territory for the Spartacus League and other German leftists, and funneled money to German Social Democrats, openly aiming to bring down the imperial German regime. The Soviet embassy amassed a staff of several hundred, including agitators listed as attachés who fanned out to meetings of German socialist organizations. Joffe spread weapons, too, often imported via diplomatic pouch.281 General Ludendorff, for his part, on June 28 again urged that the Bolsheviks be cleared out of Russia so that Germany could set up a puppet regime. Never mind that the Germans lacked reserves even for the western front. A more sober-minded German foreign ministry argued against such cockamamie recommendations: the Bolsheviks already supported Brest-Litovsk, what more did Berlin need? And, the foreign ministry personnel added, the various anti-Bolshevik forces inside Russia did not conceal their sympathy for the Entente. What was Ludendorff’s alternative for a pro-German group with which to replace the Bolsheviks? The kaiser declined Ludendorff’s pleadings and even permitted the Bolsheviks to redeploy many of their Latvian Riflemen against internal enemies to the east, in the Volga valley.282 Lenin’s German loyalties paid off.283 But in Moscow people knew nothing of the kaiser’s decision to rebuff Ludendorff against an invasion to finish off Bolshevism. What people in Moscow saw was the imperious Mirbach, physical symbol of detested partnership with German militarism—a circumstance that provoked the Left Socialist Revolutionaries to action.

The Left SRs had resigned over Brest-Litovsk from the Council of People’s Commissars, but not from their perches in the Cheka or from the Soviet’s central executive committee. On June 14, 1918, the Bolsheviks had expelled the handful of elected Mensheviks and Right Socialist Revolutionaries from the central executive committee, and shuttered their newspapers. “Martov, swearing at the ‘dictators’, ‘Bonapartists’, ‘usurpers’, and ‘grabbers’ in his sick, tubercular voice, grabbed his coat and tried to put it on, but his shaking hands could not get into the sleeves,” recalled one Bolshevik eyewitness. “Lenin, white as chalk, stood and looked at Martov.” But a Left SR just burst into laughter.284 The splinter party claimed a relatively robust membership in excess of 100,000.285 This was considerably less than the Bolshevik membership of more than 300,000; both were microscopic in a country of some 140 million. Despite the Bolshevik numerical advantage, however, many contemporaries hoped, or feared, that the Left SRs—on the basis of their increasingly resonant anti-Brest-Litovsk stance—might command a majority of the elected delegates to the upcoming Fifth Congress of Soviets, scheduled to open June 28. Was there an option on the radical socialist left besides the Bolsheviks?

The Left SR Central Committee resolved to introduce a resolution at the congress denouncing Brest-Litovsk and calling for (quixotic) partisan war, such as was under way in Ukraine against the German occupation.286 On June 24, Sverdlov delayed the congress’s opening until early July while he manufactured more Bolshevik delegates. (On a pretext, Sverdlov had also expelled all Mensheviks and Right SRs from the Soviet’s central executive committee.) The Left SRs held their 3rd Party Congress June 28 to July 1, and resolved to fight against German imperialism and for Soviet power by eliminating Councils of People’s Commissars, so that Soviet executive committees could rule.287 Meanwhile, Sverdlov, chairman of the central executive committee, did produce hundreds of suspicious soviet delegates, beyond the already extra weight afforded to worker voters over peasants (the Left SRs constituency). When the congress opened at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater on the evening of July 4, there were 1,035 voting attendees, including 678 Communists, 269 Left SRs, and 88 mostly unaffiliated others.288 (Non-voting delegates, some 200 each for Left SRs and Communists, brought the attendees to 1,425, of whom two thirds were between twenty and thirty years of age; collectively, the attendees had spent 1,195 years in prison for political reasons.)289 The evident fraud was hardly the only source of anti-Bolshevik anger: delegates from Ukraine, Latvia, and South Caucasus described the terrors of German imperialism’s occupation and exploitation of their resources. “Down with Mirbach!” “Down with Brest!” Left SRs shouted with Germany’s ambassador seated as an honored guest in a front box. Provocatively, Trotsky countered that all “agents of foreign imperialism” who were trying to provoke renewed war with Germany “be shot on the spot.”290

Maria Spiridonova, the Left SR party’s highest profile leader, had been a strong proponent of coalition with the Bolsheviks, but for her the last straw had already come in June 1918, when the Bolsheviks sent armed detachments to villages to “requisition” grain. She rose to denounce Bolshevik policies.291 Lenin flat out stated that “we probably made a mistake in accepting your socialization of the land in our law [decree] of October 26 [1917].”292 When the fraud-enhanced Bolshevik majority voted down the Left SR resolution to renounce the treaty with imperial Germany, Lenin baited the Left SRs: “If these people prefer walking out of the Congress, good riddance.”293 But he was in for a surprise: The Left SR leadership, knowing that their anti-Brest resolution might fail, had resolved to arouse the masses and provoke a breach in German-Soviet relations by terrorist acts “against high-profile representatives of German imperialism.”294 Thus did the occasion of the Fifth Congress of Soviets serve as the motivation for Left SR action, just as the Second Congress had for a Bolshevik coup.

Spiridonova, on the evening of July 4, had tasked twenty-year-old Yakov Blyumkin with assassinating German ambassador Count Mirbach.295 The son of a Jewish shop assistant in Odessa, Blyumkin had arrived in Moscow in April 1918 and, like many Left SRs, had worked in the Cheka, one of about 120 employees at that time (including chauffeurs and field couriers).296 He served in counterintelligence and among his responsibilities was the German embassy. On July 5, Spiridonova took the stage at the Bolshoi, accused the Bolsheviks of murdering the revolution and, with Lenin audibly laughing behind her, vowed she would “take up again the revolver and the hand grenade,” as she had in tsarist times.297 Pandemonium! A grenade exploded in one of the Bolshoi’s upper tiers, but Sverdlov, presiding, kept the hall from stampeding for the exits.298

The next day, with the Congress of Soviets scheduled to resume later that afternoon, Blyumkin arrived at the German embassy accompanied by Nikolai Andreyev, a photographer, with credentials signed by Felix Dzierzynski authorizing them to request an urgent meeting with the ambassador. At the embassy, First Secretary Kurt Riezler, a noted philosopher as well as a diplomat, indicated he would meet with them on the ambassador’s behalf. (Riezler had been among the key German foreign ministry personnel who had handled the secret negotiations to send Lenin in the sealed train back to Russia in 1917.)299 Mirbach, however, came down to meet the pair; Blyumkin removed a Browning from his briefcase and opened fire three times—missing. As Mirbach ran, the photographer shot at the ambassador from behind, evidently striking the back of his head. Blyumkin hurled a bomb and the two assassins leaped out a window to a getaway car. Mirbach died around 3:15 p.m.300

Spiridonova and the Left SRs expected the political murder would provoke a German military response, forcing the Bolsheviks back into the war. With the congress set to resume at 4:00 p.m., and Lenin strategizing with Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin, the telephone rang at the Kremlin. Bonch-Bruevich transmitted the news about an attack at the German embassy; Lenin ordered him to the scene.301 Radek, the new foreign affairs commissar Georgy Chicherin, and Dzierzynski also went. The Germans demanded Lenin. The Bolshevik leader arrived with Sverdlov around 5:00 p.m., learned details of the murder, and offered condolences. The German military attache thought Lenin looked frightened.302 Perhaps Germany would respond with a military assault?

Lenin now learned that the very organization established to protect the Bolshevik revolution, the Cheka, was involved in a conspiracy against them. Blyumkin had left behind his credentials, and Dzierzynski, without a guard detail, drove to the Cheka military barracks on Grand Three-Holies Lane where Blyumkin had previously been seen. There the Cheka leader discovered the entire Left SR leadership, who made clear that Blyumkin had acted on their orders. “You stand before a fait accompli,” they told Dzierzynski. “The Brest Treaty is annulled; war with Germany is unavoidable. . . . Let it be here as in Ukraine, we will go underground. You can keep power, but you must cease being lackeys of Mirbach.”303 Dzierzynski, although he had opposed Brest-Litovsk at the Bolshevik Central Committee, ordered them all arrested; instead, they took him hostage.304

At news of the capture of the Cheka head, Lenin “turned white as he typically did when he was enraged or shocked by a dangerous, unexpected turn of events,” according to Bonch-Bruevich.305 Lenin summoned the Chekist Martinš Lacis, a thirty-year-old Latvian born Janis Sudrabs, to take Dzierzynski’s place.306 When Lacis showed up at the main Cheka headquarters on Bolshaya Lubyanka—guarded, as always, by the Left SR–controlled Cheka Combat Detachment—the sailors wanted to shoot him. Only the intercession of the Left SR Pyotr Alexandrovich Dmitrievsky, known as Alexandrovich, a deputy to Dzierzynski, saved Lacis’ life.307 Had Lacis, and perhaps Dzierzynski as well, been shot “on the spot”—in the words of Trotsky’s outburst from two days before—the Bolshevik regime might have been broken. As it was, Lenin and Sverdlov contemplated abandoning the Kremlin.308

Spiridonova went to the Bolshoi, for the evening resumption of the Fifth Congress of Soviets, to announce that Russia had been “liberated from Mirbach.” Dressed in black, she wore a scarlet carnation upon her breast and carried a small steel Browning pistol in her hand.309 The opening was delayed, however, and confusion reigned. Around 8:00 p.m. that night (July 6), the entire Left SR faction, more than 400 people, including guests, moved upstairs to discuss the situation, amid rumors that armed Latvians had surrounded the Bolshoi. The Bolshevik faction retreated to other quarters (some may have been let out of the theater).310 “We were sitting in our room waiting for you to come and arrest us,” Bukharin told one Left SR. “Since you did not, we decided to arrest you instead.”311 The Left SRs in the Cheka, for their part, had sent sailors out into the streets to take Bolshevik hostages, grabbing more than two dozen from passing automobiles, and still held Dzierzynski and Lacis. Lenin discovered that the Moscow garrison was not going to defend the Bolsheviks: most soldiers either remained neutral or sided with the anti-German Left SRs. “Today around 3 p.m. a Left SR killed Mirbach with a bomb,” Lenin telegrammed Stalin at Tsaritsyn. “The assassination is clearly in the interests of the monarchists or of the Anglo-French capitalists. The Left SRs . . . arrested Dzierzynski and Lacis and started an insurrection against us. We are about to liquidate them tonight and we shall tell the people the whole truth: we are a hair’s breadth from war” with Germany.312 Stalin would write back the next day that the Left SRs were “hysterics.”313 He was right.

But the counterattack was not assured. Many of the few reliable Red units had been sent eastward to counter the Czechoslovak rebellion. Around midnight on July 6–7, Lenin summoned the top Latvian commander, the squat, stout Colonel Jukums Vacietis. “The Kremlin was dark and empty,” Vacietis recalled of the Council of People’s Commissars’ meeting room, where Lenin finally emerged, and asked, “‘Comrade, will we hold out until morning?’ Having asked the question, Lenin kept staring at me.”314 Vacietis was taken aback. He sympathized with the Left SRs and could have decided, at a minimum, to be neutral, thereby perhaps dooming the Bolsheviks. But his own experience fighting the Germans during Christmas 1916 had produced colossal casualties, and resuming the war held no appeal. (There was, in any case, no Russian army to do so.) Furthermore, he expected the imperial German regime to collapse from the war, just as Russia’s had, so why sacrifice men for nothing? What Vacietis did not know was that Lenin did not even trust him: a half hour before receiving him that night, Lenin had called in the two political commissars attached to the Latvians to get reassurances about Vacietis’s loyalties.

Nor was it clear that the Latvian rank and file would fight for the Bolsheviks. The Left SRs had been waiting, on July 6 for the arrival of Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Muravyov (b. 1880), an ethnic Russian militant Left SR and another commander of the Latvian Rifles, but he failed to show in the capital.315 Still, although Vacietis’s counterassault on the Left SRs was planned to begin a few hours after he saw Lenin, in the wee hours of July 7, to take advantage of the darkness, this happened to be St. John the Baptist’s Day, a Latvian national holiday, and the riflemen had decided to celebrate with an outing to Khodynka Field on Moscow’s outskirts.316 No Latvians, Red Guards, or, for that matter, anyone mustered at their jumping-off points.317 The attack would have to wait, instead, for daylight. The Cheka military units were under command of a Left SR former Baltic sailor Dmitri Popov; lodged in Moscow’s inner walled Kitaigorod, they numbered 600 to 800 men total, mostly sailors. Against them, Vacietis later claimed to have assembled perhaps 3,300 men (fewer than 500 of them Russians).318 The Latvians would recall that Popov’s unit was better armed than they were, with heavy guns, scores of machine guns, and four armored cars. “The Popovites had seized a row of houses,” Vacietis explained, “and fortified them.” In fact, Popov, whose unit included many Finns as well as sailors, had been busy trying to recruit more fighters to his side, and expected the Bolsheviks to negotiate. Instead, Vacietis ordered a 152 mm howitzer brought in to reduce the Popov-Cheka stronghold to rubble—even with Dzierzynski inside.319 When the shelling started to wreck the building, as well as its neighboring structures, Popov and his men began to flee (they left Dzierzynski behind). Sources conflict on the duration of the skirmish (perhaps many hours, perhaps forty minutes). The two sides sustained around ten fatalities and about fifty wounded. Hundreds of Left SRs were taken into custody.320 Thirteen or so, including Spiridonova, were transferred to prison cells in the Kremlin. At 4:00 p.m., the Council of People’s Commissars confidently pronounced “the uprising . . . liquidated.”321

The Cheka initiated an immediate countercoup against the Left SRs, solidifying the Bolshevik monopoly.322 The Cheka raided the editorial offices and smashed the printing facilities of non-Bolshevik periodicals.323 Blyumkin escaped to Ukraine. But many Left SRs in Bolshevik custody, including Alexandrovich—the savior of Lacis—were executed immediately without trial; the Bolsheviks publicly announced that some 200 had been shot.324 The vast majority of Left SRs across the country simply switched to the Bolshevik party. In the meantime, without the Left SR delegates, the Congress of Soviets resumed on July 9, and Trotsky regaled the delegates with details of “the Uprising.”325 In fact, one Left SR, Prosh Proshyan, had gone to the Central Telegraph Office around midnight on July 6 and proclaimed, “We killed Mirbach, the Council of People’s Commissars is under arrest.” Proshyan—who briefly had been commissar of posts and telegraph—dispatched a series of confused telegrams around the country, one referring to the Left SRs as “the presently governing party.”326 But this individual initiative aside, there had been no Left SR coup. The Left SR leadership had made plain many times, before and during the events, that they were prepared to defend themselves with force but not to seize power: theirs was an uprising on behalf of Soviet power “against the imperialists” (Germany), not against the Bolsheviks.327

The Left SR episode put in sharp relief Lenin’s coup seven months earlier in October 1917. Just as in 1917, so in summer 1918, power was there for the seizing: The Left SRs enjoyed no worse prospects against Lenin and the Bolsheviks than Lenin had had against Kerensky. The Left SRs served in and had seized full control over the Cheka, won over much of the garrison by agitation, and possessed Kremlin passes, including to the Imperial Senate, where Lenin had his office.328 But the Left SRs lacked something critical: will. Lenin was fanatically committed to seizing and holding power, and his will had proved decisive in the Bolshevik coup, just as its absence now proved decisive in the Left SR non-coup.

Lenin had relentlessly pursued personal power, though not for power’s sake: he, too, was moved by visions of social justice via revolution, as well as an allegedly scientific (Marxist) conviction in his rightness, even as he continued to strike many contemporaries as mad.329 But all along, Lenin had gotten lucky with his socialist opponents: Victor Chernov of the populous Right SRs, who had shrunk from offers of force by the capital garrison to protect the Constituent Assembly; Yuly Martov of the Mensheviks, who had clung to the “bourgeois phase” of history even without a bourgeoisie; Lev Kamenev, who had opposed the Bolshevik coup and tried to displace the Bolshevik monopoly with an all-socialist coalition government, then begged to be readmitted to the Bolshevik Central Committee. And now, Maria Spiridonova, who also proved no match for Lenin.330 Spiridonova, just thirty-four years old in 1918 but the only widely known Left SR leader, happened to be the only female head of any political force in 1917–18, and as such, was long subject to condescension (“a tireless hysteric with a pince-nez, the caricature of Athena,” one German journalist remarked).331 But she certainly did not lack gumption. At age twenty-two, in 1906, she had shot a tsarist police general for suppressing a peasant rebellion in 1905, for which she received a sentence of lifetime penal labor in Eastern Siberia. In prison and in transit, she suffered beatings and sexual assault, the least of which involved cigarettes extinguished on her bare breasts. She possessed courage. She could also be politically clear-eyed: unlike the vast majority of Left SRs, and the self-styled Left Bolsheviks, Spiridonova had supported Brest-Litovsk. “The peace was signed not by . . . the Bolsheviks,” she had shrewdly noted, but “by want, famine, the lack of desire of the whole people—suffered out, tired—to fight.”332 But time and again, Lenin and Sverdlov had manipulated her earnestness. Now, in July 1918, she unexpectedly had them in her grasp, but did not evolve her initial strategy and seize the opportunity.

The Bolshevik counterassault on the Left SRs, meanwhile, would culminate in a secret “trial” against the party. Spiridonova would be sentenced to just one year, and then amnestied.333 But a once powerful political force was now neutered.334 Without the Left SRs, the Congress of Soviets, on its final day (July 10), approved a constitution declaring that “all central and local power belongs to soviets” and calling for “abolition of all exploitation of man by man, the complete elimination of the division of society into classes, the ruthless suppression of the exploiters, the establishment of a socialist organization of society, and the victory of socialism in all countries.”

ASSASSINATION AND NEAR ASSASSINATION

The Romanovs were still alive—and offered a potential rallying point, whether for the Bolsheviks in a public trial or for the anti-Bolsheviks to spring free. Nicholas’s brother Grand Duke Mikhail had been arrested by Kerensky and later deported by the Bolsheviks to a prison in the Urals (Perm). There, in the wee hours on June 13, 1918, five armed men of the Cheka, led by an old terrorist who had served time in tsarist prisons, staged an escape of the grand duke in order to execute him. Mikhail’s bullet-ridden body was burned in a smelter. The Bolsheviks shrank from admitting the execution, and circulated rumors Mikhail had been freed by monarchists and vanished.335 As for Nicholas, the Provisional Government had decided to exile him and his family abroad, but the Soviet had objected, and in any case, British king George V—who was a cousin to both Nicholas and Alexandra—rescinded an offer to shelter them.336 So Kerensky had sent the Russian royals to house arrest in the Tobolsk governor’s mansion (Nicholas’s train was disguised as a “Red Cross mission” and flew a Japanese flag).337 The symbolism of Siberian exile resonated. But as rumors spread of the ex-tsar’s comfortable existence and of monarchist plots to free him, the Urals soviet resolved to bring Nicholas to Yekaterinburg. But in April 1918, Sverdlov sent a trusted agent to fetch him from Tobolsk to Moscow. As the train for the former tsar traveled through Yekaterinburg, Urals Bolsheviks kidnapped him and placed him in the requisitioned mansion of a retired army engineer, Nikolai Ipatyev, around which they erected a palisade, and kept a large guard detail. In Moscow, Lenin had minions gather materials to put Nicholas on trial, a development mooted in the press, but the trial kept being “postponed.”338 “At the time,” Trotsky wrote of the closely held trial discussions, “Lenin was rather gloomy.”339

By July 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion was advancing on Yekaterinburg and the Bolshevik military commissar of the Urals went to Moscow to discuss the Urals defense and presumably, Nicholas and his family. On July 2, the Council of People’s Commissars appointed a commission to draft a decree nationalizing Romanov family property. Two days later, the newly formed Yekaterinburg Cheka displaced the local soviet as the royal family’s guards. Nicholas lived in evident bewilderment; he discovered the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic tract forged in imperial Russia about a global Jewish conspiracy, which he now read aloud to his German wife and daughters; perhaps Communism was a Jewish conspiracy?340 Soon the Cheka forged a crude monarchist letter in French purporting to be a conspiracy to free and restore the tsar. On this pretext, in the dead of night July 16–17, 1918, without formal charges, let alone a trial, a “sentence” of death by firing squad was carried out against Nicholas, Alexandra, their son, Alexei (aged thirteen), their four daughters (aged seventeen to twenty-two), the family physician, and three servants. Yakov Yurovsky, the eighth of ten children of a Jewish seamstress and a glazier (and suspected thief), led the eleven-person execution squad. Their hail of pistol bullets ricocheted off the brick walls around the half basement, and burned the executioners (some would become deaf). Alexei survived the barrage—he let out a moan—but Yurovsky went up and shot him point blank. Some of the daughters, whose bodies held concealed jewels that repelled the bullets, were bayoneted to pieces. Yurovsky’s squad buried the bodies off a dirt road at a village (Koptyaki) twelve miles north of Yekaterinburg. They poured sulfuric acid over the corpses to disfigure them beyond recognition, and burned and separately buried the corpses of Alexei and a daughter mistaken for Alexandra. That same day, July 19, Yurosovky left for Moscow to report.341 The central Bolshevik government never admitted its responsibility, and the act was attributed to the Urals Bolsheviks.342 The day the Bolshevik government published an announcement of the tsar’s death—falsely reporting the survival of Alexei and Alexandra—it also published the decree nationalizing Romanov family property (approved six days earlier).343 “There was no sign of grief or sympathy among the people,” noted ex-tsarist prime minister Vladimir Kokovtsov, who on the day of the announcement rode in a Petrograd tram. “The report of the Tsar’s death was read aloud, with smirks, mockeries, and base comments.” Some passengers said, “High time!”344

The Romanovs’ summary execution, and the failure to mount a public political trial, indicated desperation. The Bolsheviks had no military force capable of genuine combat, and the attempts to form some sort of army floundered, as soldiers scattered in search of food, turning into robber bands. Even the reliable Latvians were looking for other options. “At the time it was believed that central Russia would turn into a theater of internecine warfare and that the Bolsheviks would hardly hold on to power,” recalled Vacietis, the Latvian commander, of the summer of 1918. He feared for the “complete annihilation of the Latvian Rifles” and entered into secret talks with the irrepressible Riezler, the deceased Mirbach’s temporary replacement as charge d’affaires. Riezler, fearing the Bolsheviks would fall and be replaced by a pro-Entente regime, secretly urged a coup to install a government in Moscow similarly friendly to Berlin by bringing in a battalion of German grenadiers to “guard” the embassy.345 Lenin refused to allow them (he did consent to the arrival of some Germans in small groups without uniforms).346 In any case, Riezler’s superiors at the German foreign ministry in Berlin saw no need to abandon Lenin, who had paralyzed Russia and remained loyal to Germany.347 Still, Riezler hoped to undo the Bolsheviks by obtaining the defection of the Latvian Riflemen, whose units guarded the Kremlin, and he found a receptive group eager to return to their homeland, which was under German occupation. If the Latvians were repatriated, Vacietis promised they would remain neutral in any German-Bolshevik showdown.348 General Ludendorff, however, undercut Riezler’s negotiations, arguing that Latvia would be contaminated by Bolshevik propaganda if the Rifles were repatriated. The Reichswehr helped save Bolshevism, yet again.

The Czechoslovak Legion and anti-Bolshevik forces seized Yekaterinburg on July 25, 1918, less than a week after Nicholas had been buried there.349 “The Entente has bought the Czechoslovaks, counter-revolutionary uprisings rage everywhere, the whole bourgeoisie is using all its strength to sweep us out,” Lenin wrote the next day to Klara Zetkin, the German revolutionary.350 In August 1918, the British, against Bolsevik wishes, shifted from Murmansk (where the Bolsheviks had invited them to land) to the larger port of Arkhangelsk, as a better base of operations, hoping to restore an eastern front against Germany by linking up with the Czechoslovak Legion. Rumors spread that Entente forces would march on Moscow, 750 miles to the south.351 Panic erupted on the jerry-built northern railroad. “Among us no one doubted that the Bolshevks were doomed,” wrote an agent (sent to Moscow by former tsarist General Mikhail Alexeyev) who had managed to get himself appointed deputy trade commissar. “A ring had been established around Soviet power, and we were sure that the Bolsheviks would not escape it.”352 To the north were the British and soon the Americans (with different agendas); to the east, the Czechoslovak Legion and other anti-Bolshevik forces, who captured Kazan (August 7); to the south, anti-Bolshevik forces aided by Germany and advancing on Tsaritsyn, poised to link up with the anti-Bolshevik forces in the east. And to the west stood the Germans, who occupied Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic littoral, and kept a force in Finland at its government’s request. Lenin and the inner circle contemplated abandoning Moscow for Nizhny Novgorod, in the deeper interior.353 Bolshevik officials also began requesting diplomatic passports and travel documents for Germany for their families; money was transferred to Swiss banks.354

Might Lenin go back whence he came? “The Bolsheviks were saying openly that their days were numbered,” reported a new German ambassador, Karl Helfferich (appointed above Riezler), who was urging Berlin to break off relations with the doomed Bolsheviks, and who for safety reasons did not venture out of his Moscow residence.355

Lenin, however, came up with his boldest, most desperate maneuver yet. The same day that the British landed the expeditionary force at Arkhangelsk, where a local coup put a non-Bolshevik figure in power, he dispatched his foreign affairs commissar to the German embassy to request what the Bolshevik leader had long feared—a German invasion toward the Russian imperial capital of Petrograd. “In view of the state of public opinion, an open military alliance with Germany is not possible; what is possible is parallel action,” Georgy Chicherin told Helfferich. The people’s commissar asked the Germans not to occupy Petrograd but to defend it, by marching on Murmansk and Arkhangelsk against the Entente forces. Furthermore, in the south, Chicherin requested that the Germans stop supporting the anti-Bolshevik forces and instead move troops in to attack them. “Chicherin,” Helfferich reported to Berlin, “made clear that the request for German troops in the north and in the south came directly from Lenin.356 Despite inconclusive wrangling over whether the Germans could, or could not, occupy Petrograd itself, the upshot would be a new, even more oppressive treaty, “supplementary” to Brest-Litovsk, signed in Berlin on August 27, 1918. Lenin agreed to renounce Estonia and Livonia (Lithuania); sell Germany 25 percent of the output of the Baku oil fields; afford Germany use of the Black Sea fleet; and make reparations of 6 billion marks, half in gold reserves. Germany promised to send coal, rifles, bullets, machine guns, and evacuate Belorussia, promises from a depleted Germany not worth the paper on which they were printed.357 Three secret clauses—never mind the Bolshevik condemnation of capitalists’ “secret diplomacy”—provided for German action against Allied forces on Russian soil in the north and in the south, and expulsion of the British from Baku, a task for which Germany obtained the right to land there.358

Lenin clung to imperial Germany like sea rust on the underside of a listing ship. If during the wild rumors of 1914–17, the imagined treason of the tsarist court to the Germans had never been real, in 1918, the abject sellout to the Germans by the Bolsheviks was all too real. The August 27 treaty was a worse capitulation than Brest-Litovsk, and one that Lenin voluntarily sought. He was bribing his way to what he hoped was safety from German overthrow as well as the right to call upon German help against attempted Entente overthrow. “There was a coincidence of interests,” Lenin wrote by hand—avoiding secretaries—to the Bolshevik envoy to Sweden. “We would have been idiots not to have exploited it.”359 The Germans, for their part, were no less cynical, determined, as the foreign secretary expressed it, “to work with the Bolsheviks or to use them, as long as they are in the saddle, to our own best advantage.”360 The Bolsheviks’ first installment of promised payment, 120 million gold rubles, was remitted in August (more payments would be made in September).

Colonel Vacietis, the Latvian commander, had been dispatched to the city of Kazan to help clean up the Red mess and salvage the situation. On August 30, 1918, Lenin wrote to Trotsky that if the city of Kazan was not retaken, Vacietis was to be shot.361 Later that evening, a Friday, the Bolshevik leader went to the Mikhelson Machine Factory in the heart of Moscow’s worker-saturated factory district to give a speech. Fridays were “party day” in Moscow and officials dispersed around town to address mass meetings of workers and soldiers in the evenings. Lenin addressed some 140 such meetings in Moscow and its immediate environs between his arrival in March and July.362 He went to Mikhelson, his second public speech of the day, without a guard detail, aside from his chauffeur (who remained with the car). The idea of assassinating top Bolsheviks crossed many a mind. In 1918, members of the British Secret Service Bureau evidently asked a Russian-born British spy to invent a pretext for an interview with Stalin in order, once inside, to assassinate him (the Brit claimed he refused the request).363 On that morning of August 30, the head of the Cheka in Petrograd, Moisei Uritsky, yet another former Menshevik who had thrown in his lot with the Bolsheviks, was assassinated in the old tsarist general staff headquarters on Palace Square (the square would be renamed after him). Dzierzynski departed Moscow to oversee the investigation.364 Lenin had spoken at Mikhelson four times previously. That evening, the venue—the hand grenade shop—was jammed. But Lenin was running very late and at 9:00 p.m. two hours after the scheduled start, a substitute speaker was finally sent out to the crowd. Some forty-five minutes later Lenin’s car pulled up and he took the stage immediately. “Comrades, I won’t speak long, we have a Council of People’s Commissars meeting,” he began, then delivered an hour-long harangue on the theme of “Bourgeois Dictatorship versus Proletarian Dictatorship.” The audience had many tough questions (submitted as per custom in written form), but Lenin claimed no time to answer them. “We have one conclusion,” he summed up, calling them to take up arms to defend the revolution. “Victory or Death!”365

Lenin made his exit, but just before entering his waiting vehicle, he fell to the ground, shot in the chest and the left arm (the bullet passed into his shoulder). His driver, Stepan Gil, and some members of the factory committee placed him in the backseat of his car. Lenin was white as a sheet, blood still pouring out despite tourniquets; he also suffered internal bleeding.366 They drove to the Kremlin. When the call came in to the Kremlin, Commandant Malkov gathered pillows from the tsars’ collection at the Grand Kremlin Palace and took them over to Lenin’s apartment in the Imperial Senate, where the wounded leader had been brought. No one knew how to stop the bleeding, and Lenin passed out from blood loss and pain.367 The head of the Kremlin garage rushed out to find oxygen tanks: one tank was rented from the A. Bloch and H. Freiman pharmacy on nearby Tverskaya Street for 80 rubles, another at a different pharmacy farther down for 55 rubles. (The automobile department head, in his report, wrote that “since the money was paid out of my own pocket, I would ask that it be returned to me.”)368 The first person a prostrate Lenin asked for was Inessa Armand, his former mistress, who arrived with her daughter.369 Bonch-Bruevich ordered the Kremlin guard to high alert.370 Sverdlov summoned a famous doctor; meanwhile, Bonch-Bruevich’s wife, Vera, a doctor, checked Lenin’s pulse and injected him with morphine.371

Back at Mikhelson, a fleeing Feiga Roidman (aka Fanya Kaplan) had been detained at a nearby tram stop as the presumed shooter.372 A twenty-eight-year-old Right Socialist Revolutionary, she confessed at her initial interrogation and insisted no one else had been involved, although she was nearly blind and it was dark where Lenin had been shot. (The would-be assassin may have been an accomplice, Lidiya Konopleva, an Anarchist SR and a Kaplan rival, or someone else.)373 Sverdlov, in the name of the Soviet central executive committee, denounced the Right SRs as “hirelings of the British and French.”374 Bonch-Bruevich sent telegrams to Trotsky (then at the southeastern front, in Sviyazhsk) concerning Lenin’s temperature, pulse, and breathing.375 Trotsky rushed back to Moscow immediately. On September 2, 1918, he addressed the Soviet central executive committee, calling Lenin not merely “the leader of the new epoch” but “the greatest human being of our revolutionary epoch,” and while admitting that Marxists believed in classes, not personalities, acknowledged that Lenin’s loss would be devastating. Trotsky’s speech would be published in the press and as a widely distributed pamphlet.376 The same day, the regime declared the formation of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, headed by Trotsky. The next day Sverdlov ordered Kremlin commandant Malkov to execute Kaplan, which he did, then burned the body in a metal drum in the Kremlin’s Alexander Garden.377 On September 4, Vacietis, instead of facing a firing squad, was promoted to Red commander in chief. The rank-and-file Latvian Riflemen were becoming disillusioned over Bolshevik dictatorial behavior.378 Vacietis again approached the Germans seeking repatriation of his men to Latvia, but he was again rebuffed.379

• • •

FROM THE OUTSET, the survival of the Bolshevik escapade had been in doubt, even as the new regime set about ripping tsarist insignia off buildings and taking down old statues, such as Alexander II inside the Kremlin and Alexander III outside Christ the Redeemer Cathedral. Lenin and others, using ropes, ceremoniously pulled down the large Orthodox cross inside the Kremlin for Grand Duke Sergei (Romanov), the Moscow governor general assassinated in 1905.380 In their place would go up statues to Darwin, Danton, Alexander Radishchev, and others in the leftist pantheon. “I am exasperated to the depths of my soul,” Lenin wrote to enlightenment commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky on September 12, 1918, days after having been shot. “There is no outdoor bust of Marx. . . . I scold you for this criminal negligence.”381

The Bolsheviks had begun renaming Moscow’s streets: Resurrection Square would become Revolution Square; Old Basmannaya Street, Karl Marx Street; Prechistenka, Kropotkin Street; Grand Nikita Street, Alexander Herzen Street.382 That year of 1918, on Moscow’s grandest artery, Tverskaya, at the junction between Bolshoi and Maly Gnezdnikov Lanes, Cafe Bim-Bom buzzed with freneticism. It belonged to the founding member of the clown pair Bim and Bom, Iwan Radunski (who at this time was teamed with Mieczysław Staniewski as Bim). The celebrated duet dated to 1891 and specialized in biting satire accompanied by musical numbers. Bom’s cafe was a crazy anthill in the new Bolshevik capital, frequented by all types, from the political (Menshevik leader Yuly Martov, a young Left SR Yakov Blyumkin) to the artistic (writer Ilya Ehrenburg, performing clown Vladimir Durov). Inevitably, the cafe also attracted Moscow’s criminal element, including one figure who had pocketed the proceeds from the sale of the former Moscow governor-general’s mansion, which was located on the same street as the cafe, by pretending the property was his own residence. When the irreverent satirists began to mock the new Bolshevik regime, however, Latvian Riflemen in the audience shot up the premises and began to chase Bim and Bom. The audience laughed, assuming it was part of the act. The clowns would be arrested.383

Despite such reflexive repression and the grandiose plans, the would-be regime had hit a nadir in 1918. Rumors flew around Moscow that Lenin had died and been buried in secret. Zinoviev spoke of Lenin in a public speech on September 6, 1918, as “the greatest leader ever known by humanity, the apostle of the socialist revolution” and compared Lenin’s famous What Is to Be Done with the Gospels, sacralizing imagery, that, intentionally or not, sounded ominous.384 Bonch-Bruevich hastily arranged to film Lenin—against his wishes—outside on the Kremlin grounds, the first ever documentary of him, which proved he was alive.385 At the same time, the Bolsheviks proclaimed a Terror “to crush the hydra of counter-revolution.”386 Zinoviev, for effect, would announce that 500 “hostages” had been shot in Petrograd, executions of imprisoned former tsarist officials that were staged in public places.387 There were at least 6,185 summary executions in the Red Terror of 1918—in two months. There had been 6,321 death sentences by Russian courts between 1825 and 1917, not all of them carried out. To be sure, executions in tsarist Russia are not easy to calculate: the repression of the Polish uprising in 1830, for example, was often outside the judicial system, while the courts-martial of 1905–6 were generally not counted in the “normal” statistics. Still, the magnitude of the Red Terror was clear.388 And the public bragging of its scope was designed to be part of its effect. “The criminal adventurism of Socialist Revolutionaries, White Guards, and other pseudo-socialists, forces us to reply to the criminal designs of the enemies of the working class with mass terror,” Jekabs Peterss, deputy chief of the Cheka, thundered in Ivzestiya. The same issue carried a telegram from Stalin calling for “open, mass, systematic terror against the bourgeoisie.”389

Bolshevism’s core convictions about capitalism and class warfare were held to be so incontrovertible that any and all means up to lying and summary executions were seen as not just expedient but morally necessary. The demonstrative Red Terror, like its French precedent, would make an indelible impression, on enemies and (newfound) supporters of the Bolsheviks alike.390 Faced with extinction, the Bolsheviks wielded the specter of “counterrevolution” and the willingness of masses of people to risk their lives defending “the revolution” against counterrevolution in order to build an actual state. What in summer and fall 1918 looked for all the world like political Dadaism would soon become an enduring, ambitious dictatorship.391