Was Revolution Inevitable? Turning Points of the Russian Revolution

Nabokov reached Millionnaya Street just before 3 p.m. After briefing him, Prince Lvov explained that 'the draft of the Act had been outlined by Nekrasov, but the effort was incomplete and not entirely satisfac­tory, and since everyone was dreadfully tired . they requested that I undertake the task'.

With the original manifesto lost Nabokov argued that they could manage without it since the whole country knew what it said; however, he agreed with Matveev that they could not proceed without the Code of Laws and that it was essential that they had the Fundamental Laws in front of them. The man they could count on for those was the con­stitutional jurist Baron Nolde in nearby Palace Square. He arrived ten minutes later.

As they retreated into a bedroom, the immediate problem which confronted the two lawyers was precisely that which had exercised Michael on first learning that he had been named emperor: was Nich­olas's abdication manifesto lawful?

Nabokov and Nolde did not need any prompting on that issue: both recognised from the outset that Nicholas's manifesto contained 'an incurable, intrinsic flaw'. Nicholas could not renounce the throne on his son's behalf and as Nabokov would say, 'from the beginning Michael must necessarily have felt this'. Rightly, he judged that 'it sig­nificantly weakened the position of the supporters of the monarchy. No doubt it also influenced Michael's reasoning.'

That said, Nabokov and Nolde were left in the same position as eve­ryone else: the political fact was that Alexis had been bypassed and could not be restored in any practical sense. There would be civil war, and the collapse of any responsible government.

When Nabokov and Nolde began their task, handing out drafts of the manifesto to Matveev for perusal and approval by Michael, they began with the same preamble used by Nekrasov: We, by God's mercy, Michael II, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias ... They started off therefore on the premise that Michael was lawful emperor, and that in abdicating he 'commanded' the people to obey the authority of the Provisional Government in which he was vesting his powers until a Constituent Assembly determined the form of government.

This formula gave legitimacy to the new government, which oth­erwise was simply there by licence of the Soviet. No one had elected the Provisional Government which represented only itself, and in that regard it had arguably less authority than the Soviet which could at least claim to have been endorsed by elected soldier and worker delegates.

Michael could make the new government official and legal, as no one else could, and therefore it was important that his manifesto be issued by him as emperor. If he was not emperor, he had no power to vest, and no authority to 'command' anyone. Of political necessity the new government needed Michael to give up the throne, but first they needed him to take it.

However, it was not going to be that simple. Michael was clear in his own mind about the position in which he had found himself. He had not inherited the throne. Alexis had been unlawfully bypassed and Michael proclaimed emperor without his knowledge or consent. He had not willingly become emperor and Nicholas had no right to pass the throne to him. At the same time, there was nothing that could be done about that. The wrong could not be righted; it was far too late. The only issue therefore was how best to salvage the monarchy from the wreckage Nicholas had left in his wake.

That the government were demanding his abdication in order to appease the Soviet was a serious complication, but even so, he was not going to abdicate. Besides, if he did, who was going to succeed him? The throne 'was never vacant' - the law said that - and it fol­lowed therefore that if he abdicated, someone else would immediately become emperor in his place. The next in line, the Grand Duke Kirill?

Nobody that morning seemed to have thought of it, but Nabokov and Nolde understood perfectly his argument. The problem was how to express all of it in a manifesto. Tearing up their first draft, and thereby consigning Nekrasov's manifesto to the dustbin, they started again, with Michael darting in and out of the schoolroom to make sure that their new draft stayed in line with his wishes.

There was not much time, but fortunately they were both very good lawyers, and with Matveev they worked as a team that knew the differ­ence between the small print and the telescope to the blind eye. The result was a manifesto which would make Michael emperor without it saying that he had accepted the throne; that as emperor he would vest all his powers in the new Provisional Government; and with that done he would wait in the wings until a future Constituent Assembly voted, as he hoped, for a constitutional monarchy and elected him. Mean­while, he would not reign, but neither would he abdicate.

Despite the intense pressure on Michael and the lawyers in Million- naya Street as evening drew in that day, his final manifesto said exactly what he wanted it to say, and it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the manifesto which Nekrasov had drafted that morning and which he had handed over after lunch. It said:

A heavy burden has been thrust upon me by the will of my brother, who has given over to me the Imperial Throne of Russia at a time of unprecedented warfare and popular disturbances.

Inspired like the entire people by the idea that what is most important is the welfare of the country, I have taken a firm decision to assume the Supreme Power only if such be the will of our great people, whose right it is to establish the form of government and the new basic laws of the Russian state by universal suffrage through its representatives in the Constituent Assembly.

Therefore, invoking the blessing of God, I beseech all the citizens of Russia to obey the Provisional Government, which has come into being on the initiative of the Duma and is vested with all the pleni­tude of power until the Constituent Assembly, to be convoked with the least possible delay by universal suffrage, direct, equal and secret voting, shall express the will of the people by its decision on the form of government.

MICHAEL

By this manifesto Michael made clear that the throne had been 'thrust upon me' not inherited, and that he was passing all his powers to the new Provisional Government until the future status of Russia was decided by a democratically elected Constituent Assembly. He had changed the imperious word 'command' in the first version to 'beseech' and had removed all use of the imperial 'We', as well as the description of him as 'Emperor and Autocrat', but he had signed with the imperial Michael, rather than the grand ducal Michael Alexandrovich.

There was no precedent for a manifesto in these terms, and the Code of Laws, seemingly so essential a few hours earlier, had been closed and put aside as irrelevant to the necessity of the moment. But as Nabokov later commented, 'we were not concerned with the juridical force of the formula but only its moral and political meaning'.

In so saying, the credit for that went to Michael and his refusal to do what he was told by the new government. As for the 'abdication manifesto' itself, curiously, for those who took the trouble to read it carefully, of the 122 Russian words meticulously written by Nabokov 'in his beautiful handwriting' the one word which did not appear, unlike Nicholas's manifesto, was 'abdicate'.

The final manifesto, as Nolde would recall, 'was in essence the only constitution during the period of existence of the Provisional Govern­ment'. Nabokov also recognised it as 'the only Act which defined the limits of the Provisional Government's authority'. When the British ambassador later asked Milyukov where the government derived its authority, he replied: 'We have received it, by inheritance, from the Grand Duke.' No, not the grand duke but the emperor, since only an emperor was empowered to act as he did.

Nabokov, as Michael came into the room and took up the pen, thought he was 'under a heavy strain but he retained complete self- composure'. Nolde was also impressed, declaring Michael to have 'acted with irreproachable tact and nobility'. Shulgin thought to himself 'what a good constitutional monarch he would make'. The theatrical outburst, predictably, was left to Kerensky. 'Believe me,' he cried out, 'that we will carry the precious vessel of your authority to the Constitu­ent Assembly without spilling a drop of blood.' In fact, he would spill it all, but that no one could then foresee.

It was only after the delegation returned to the Tauride Palace that the arguments began over the meaning of the manifesto. At Millionnaya Street there had been no time to study it. Professor Lomonosov had turned up from the transport ministry, belatedly bringing with him the original Nicholas manifesto hidden there; the intention was that it be published jointly with Michael's. But should these be presented as Acts of two Emperors? Since the word 'abdicate' was missing from Michael's, how was his manifesto to be described?

Because it was a political rather than a legal document, at midnight there was still no clear answer to the question. However, Milyukov and Nabokov argued that the answer was obvious. Since the major­ity who wanted it said that Michael had abdicated then that in itself meant he had been emperor. At 3.50 a.m. Nabokov's final manifesto was taken away to the printers. But since it did not mention 'abdicate' the Provisional Government gave it that meaning by claiming it as an abdication. That was simple. It said so in the newspapers. People could understand that, and one of them that evening was Michael's brother in Mogilev.

He had just returned from Pskov when Alexeev came in with Rodzyanko's wired version of what had happened in Millionnaya Street. Afterwards, Nicholas wrote in his diary: 'Misha, it appears, has abdicated. His manifesto ends up by kowtowing to the Constituent Assembly, whose elections will take place in six months. God knows who gave him the idea of signing such rubbish.'

Given the wreckage that he had mindlessly left behind him and the impossible position in which he had placed his brother, his effrontery had an epic quality about it. Certainly, when he said much the same to his brother-in-law Sandro a few days later, Sandro confessed himself to be 'speechless'.

Nicholas would never understand what he had done - that the con­sequence of his 'father's feelings' - his own explanation for removing Alexis - would destroy the Romanov dynasty itself. No one, including the Soviet, had expected that, nor demanded it. 'Historical inevitabil­ity'? After all, as history itself knows only too well, Nicholas doesn't deserve that as his excuse.

ENTER LENIN

April-July 1917 sean mcmeekin

The [Germans] transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia

Winston Churchill.¹

_T

HE OUTBREAK OF THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION found V. I.

Lenin in Zurich, where he and his wife Krupskaia had lived, in a single-room apartment in the Spiegelgasse across the street from a sausage factory, since February 1916. While Lenin's wartime residence in Zurich is widely known - his presence even features in a Tom Stop- pard play, Travesties (1974) - not everyone knows the reasons he was there. When war between Russia and the Central Powers opened in 1914, Lenin had been living in Vienna, where he was arrested on 8 August (along with Grigory Zinoviev) as an enemy alien. Nine days later, however, Lenin was released on the express orders of the Austro- Hungarian military, on the grounds that he had endorsed Ukrainian independence - one of the key war aims of Vienna and Berlin. On 1 September 1914, Lenin and Krupskaia were sent to the Swiss border aboard an Austrian military mail train, in an eerie foreshadowing of the famous 'sealed train ride' under German military escort in 1917.²

Lenin had not wasted his time in Switzerland. Like dozens of other political exiles disgusted by the 'betrayal of 4 August [1914]', which had seen socialist and labour parties in Belgium, Britain, France,

Germany and Austria-Hungary vote for war credits in violation of pre-war pledges to sabotage any 'imperialist war', Lenin participated in the peace congresses held at Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916). Unlike most other delegates, Lenin had opposed the majority resolu­tions penned by Trotsky (then still a Menshevik) and others, which expressed a principled opposition to the war and summoned 'the working class' to 'begin the struggle for peace' - without specifying how this might be done. Lenin's 'Zimmerwald Left' fraction argued that, rather than opposing the war on pacifist grounds - counselling draft resistance and the like - socialists should flood the armies with socialist recruits who could later use the weapons given them to 'turn the imperialist war into civil war'. Further, Lenin articulated the belief, in his treatise on Socialism and War (1915), that true socialists should root for their own countries to lose the war so as to weaken the ruling regime, a doctrine known as 'revolutionary defeatism'.³ Although these views were seen as divisive by other Marxists, Lenin was arguably closer to the spirit of Eugene Pottier's socialist anthem 'Internationale', which openly endorsed army mutiny.⁴[1] It was to promote his new strat­egy of 'turning the armies red' - that is, encouraging young socialists across Europe to volunteer for service, Trojan-horse-style - that Lenin moved from Bern to Zurich in 1916, where he began collaborating with Willi Munzenberg, secretary of the Socialist Youth International. So far from expecting a revolution to break out that winter, Lenin told Munzenberg's youth socialists, at a meeting in the Zurich Volkshaus on 22 January 1917 (4 February New Style), that 'we old-timers may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution'.⁵

The news of the February Revolution came as just as much a sur­prise to Lenin as to everyone else in Europe: he read about in the Zurich papers only on 2 March 1917 after Order No. 1 had already been issued by the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet (Ispolkom). But this is not to say that he was unprepared to take advantage of it. Lenin had been quietly receiving subsidies from the German Imperial Government since 1916 at least (for this we have unimpeachable docu­mentary evidence) and probably since 1915, when the socialist agent Alexander Israel Parvus-Helphand had first advised Berlin to give Lenin and his Bolsheviks financial support.⁶ Lenin's apologists later made a meal out of the agonies he supposedly went through before 'allowing' the Germans to send him back to Russia. As Munzenberg dubiously recalled, Lenin told him that he had finally resolved to return to his homeland even if forced to travel 'through hell itself' (i.e. Germany). But this was balderdash. In fact, the initiative came from the German Foreign Office, with the express authorisation of German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. After some brief and not terribly contentious negotiations over terms, Berlin appropriated five million gold marks to finance Lenin's journey and initial operations in Russia. Five days later, Lenin boarded a train at Zurich's Hauptbah- nhof bound for the German Baltic port of Sassnitz, accompanied by Krupskaia, Radek, Zinoviev, Fritz Platten, as well as Lenin's long-time mistress, Inessa Armand. After a brief stopover in Stockholm, Lenin's party arrived at Petrograd's Finland Station on 3 April 1917 just past 11 p.m., in a train car now encased in glass to commemorate the historic moment.⁷

It did not take long for Lenin to make an impression. Whisked away to Bolshevik headquarters, he launched into a fiery speech denouncing party backsliders who had foolishly offered support to the Provisional Government, outlining a revolutionary programme so extreme that the Bolshevik party organ Pravda initially refused to print it. This programme, later revised into the so-called 'April Theses', is best remembered for the slogan 'All Power to the Soviets' (meaning that the party should offer no support to the Provisional Government, nor any elected parliamentary regime to follow) but it was equally extreme on foreign policy, disavowing any support for the war against Germany and advocating the abolition of the tsarist army (along with the police and state bureaucracy). Little wonder Nikolai Sukhanov, a Menshevik member of Ispolkom who had gone to listen to Lenin's speech, recalled the experience as akin to being hit by 'lightning ... it seemed as if all the elemental forces had risen from their lairs and the spirit of universal destruction ... circled above the heads of the enchanted disciples'.⁸ A bit more soberly, Georgy Plekhanov, the founder of the Russian Social Democratic Party and now an elder Menshevik statesman, penned a wry response 'On Lenin's Theses and Why Deliriums Are Occasionally Interesting'.⁹

Still, we should be careful not to exaggerate the impact of Lenin's arrival on Russian politics, at least in the short run. As an exile, Lenin had been free to devise a policy line unconstrained by concern for comity with fellow Russian socialists or any other practical considera­tions, unlike those Bolsheviks already in Russia, like Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin. Kamenev, speaking for the Bolshevik Central Commit­tee, said that it would defend the current party platform, which offered qualified support for the Provisional Government and the war, 'against the demoralizing influence of "revolutionary defeatism" and against Comrade Lenin's criticism'.¹⁰ Stalin denounced Lenin's 'down with the war' slogan as 'useless' in the pages of Pravda.¹¹ The April Theses were voted down soundly in the Petrograd Committee on 8 April 1917 by 13 to 2 against. Despite his later reputation for infallibility, Lenin had not won over his own party yet, and remained unable to do so for months afterwards, losing votes in the Central Committee in October 1917 (on a resolution to overthrow the government without the pretext of a gathering of the Soviets, 10 to 2) and in a national party conference in January 1918 (on whether to sign a separate peace immediately with the Germans, 48 to 15).¹²

Nevertheless, Lenin had laid down an unmistakable declaration of intent that could not be ignored. Unlike the Mensheviks led by Nikolai Chkeidze, who chaired Ispolkom, and the Social Revolutionaries of

Alexander Kerensky, who commanded the loyalty of most Russian peasants, the Bolsheviks now had a spokesman (if not yet a leader) willing to abandon the world war altogether in order to further the revolution. With the Western allies - including now, after 6 April 1917 (19 April New Style), the United States as an 'associated power' - expecting Russia to stay in the war and carry out her promised diver­sionary strike on the eastern front before summer, Lenin's anti-war stance had potentially explosive political and strategic implications. True, he was not alone in this stance: Viktor Chernov, the SR party leader in exile who had arrived in Petrograd just five days after Lenin, took a similarly uncompromising (though not identical) line on the war. It was Chernov, not Lenin, who first singled out the liberal Kadet foreign minister, Pavel Milyukov, for abuse over his refusal to renounce Russia's imperialist war aims - including, especially, the conquest of Constantinople and the Ottoman Straits - at a press conference on 22 March 1917 (4 April New Style). Denouncing the 'saturnalia of preda­tory appetites' expressed in the 'secret treaties', Chernov called for Milyukov's head.¹³ (As Milyukov explained his own view in a private letter to a friend, 'it would be absurd and criminal to renounce the biggest prize of the war . in the name of some humanitarian and cos­mopolitan idea of international socialism'.¹⁴) Chernov was, however, no Lenin. Instead of declaring war on the Provisional Government, he went to work for it as agriculture minister in May 1917, allowing Lenin to appear as the leader of the anti-war opposition, untainted by any connection to the Provisional Government.

The Milyukov crisis was the first test of Lenin's mettle after he arrived in Russia, and deserves a closer look. The issue of war aims was arguably the political question opened up by the February Revolution, even if it had been initially obscured in the popular euphoria over the fall of the tsar and his secret police. For what purpose, after all, were all those millions of wretched muzhiks fighting, bleeding and dying on fronts stretching from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea? While few in Russia, or anywhere else, yet suspected the full extent of the secret Ottoman partition plans agreed between then-foreign minister Sergei

Sazonov, Mark Sykes and Georges Picot in 1915-16, rumours were running hot, and getting hotter all the time. On 2 December 1916, then- chairman of the Council of Ministers A. F. Trepov, to quiet the usual mob of hecklers that had greeted his first Duma address, had revealed publicly for the first time that Britain and France had promised Russia Constantinople and the Straits.¹⁵ Realising the political potency of the issue, Kerensky had reportedly rifled through the Foreign Minis­try archives after the tsar had abdicated in March for copies of these 'secret treaties', and then instructed the Provisional Committee of the Duma to 'Hide them!' Suspecting that the Provisional Government was indeed hiding something, Bolshevik factory committees in Petro­grad had issued a series of resolutions demanding the publication of the secret treaties.¹⁶

The Bolsheviks were not wrong to be suspicious. Back on 24 December 1916, Tsar Nicholas II had authorised the creation of a special amphibious 'Black Sea division', crowned by a 'Tsargradsky regiment', to spearhead the conquest of Constantinople ('Tsargrad' being the name favoured by Russian chauvinists for the Ottoman capital).¹⁷ As late as 21 February 1917, before the February Revolution broke out, the last foreign minister of tsarist Russia, N. N. Pokrovsky, had submitted a memorandum to Stavka recommending a Bospho- rus strike be carried out as soon as possible, to ensure that Russia not be deprived of her prize by her allies if the war ended later that year.¹⁸ On 26 February 1917, at the height of the revolutionary chaos, Russia's chief of army staff, Mikhail Alexeev, huddled with political advisers, including ex-foreign minister Sazonov and former chairman of the Council of Ministers Boris Sturmer, to discuss Pokrovsky's request in light of the disturbing news from Petrograd. Sturmer, who knew all about popular mobs after being demonised for his German name, expressly advocated that the seizure of Constantinople was now 'essential in order to calm public opinion in Russia'.¹⁹ One day after this, the French government solemnly reaffirmed its commitment to 'settling at the end of the present war the question of Constantino­ple and the Straits in conformance with the age-old vows of Russia'.²⁰

On the very day Milyukov first got in hot water over his refusal to renounce these war aims - 22 March 1917 - a squadron of Russia's Black Sea fleet arrived at the mouth of the Bosphorus in 'grand style', comprised of 'five or six destroyers', two battle cruisers and three sea­plane carriers. Although news of this reconnaissance probe was little reported in politics-obsessed Petrograd, there were real dogfights in the air, as the Germans and Turks scrambled seven of their own sea­planes into action to send Russian pilots back to their carriers before they could surveille the city's defences.²¹ The very next day, undaunted by the firestorm of opposition stirred up by his press conference, the diplomatic liaison at Russian military headquarters reported to Milyu- kov that two full divisions would be ready to sail for the Bosphorus by mid May, and, hopefully, a third by later that summer.²² More even than the Bolsheviks knew, Milyukov was dead serious about conquer­ing Constantinople.

Lenin, for his part, was just as serious that Russia's 'imperialist war' must be stopped in its tracks. Shortly before he had returned to Russia, Milyukov had been pressured by Kerensky and the Petrograd Soviet, on 27 March 1917, into issuing a revised 'declaration of war aims' which stated that 'the purpose of free Russia is not domination over other nations, or the seizure of their national possessions or forcible occupa­tion of foreign territories, but the establishment of stable peace on the basis of self-determination of peoples' - while also pledging Russia, in a glaring contradiction, to observe fully 'all obligations assumed towards our Allies'.²³ In an interview with Morgan Philips Price of the Manchester Guardian, Milyukov had been similarly equivocal, hinting that Russia might be willing to renounce her sovereign claim on the Ottoman Straits, so long as she retained 'the right to close the Straits to foreign warships', which was 'not possible unless she possesses the Straits and fortifies them'.²⁴ To clear up the resulting confusion Mily- ukov had then, on 11 April, declared that, while he understood the appeal of a 'peace without annexations', Russia and her allies remained committed to projects such as 'the reunification of Armenia' (i.e. the ongoing carve-up of Ottoman Asia Minor by the Russian Army of the

Caucasus) and the 'reunification of Poland' and 'the gratification of the national aspirations of the Austrian Slavs' (i.e. the Russian con­quest of Habsburg Galicia). Livid, Lenin published these remarks in Pravda on 13 April 1917 while exhorting all 'comrades, workers and sol­diers' to 'read this statement of Milyukov at all your meetings! Make it understood that you do not wish to die for the sake of secret con­ventions concluded by Tsar Nicholas II, and which are still sacred to Milyukov!'²⁵

The battle for the soul of Russian foreign policy now came to a head. On 13 April 1917, the same day Lenin was calling proletarians to the barricades against Milyukov in the pages of Pravda, Kerensky tried to placate the Bolshevik opposition by announcing that the gov­ernment was preparing a note to Russia's allies in the spirit of the 9 April 1917 statement on war aims, now referred to generally (though inaccurately) as the 'peace without annexations' declaration. This was untrue, but it did force Milyukov's hand. Under ferocious pressure, the beleaguered foreign minister agreed to hand over to Entente dip­lomats the 9 April declaration, with a note appended to it reaffirming Russia's intention to stay in the war against the Central Powers and 'fully to carry out [her] obligations' to her allies. It is still not clear whether Kerensky, in arranging this compromise, meant to save Mily- ukov or destroy him. In the event, it was partly the timing that did in the foreign minister. The two 'notes to the Allies' were cabled to Russian embassies abroad on 18 April 1917 - that is, on May Day, still celebrated by most Russian socialists according to the western Grego­rian calendar.²⁶

Their blood now up, the Bolsheviks moved in for the kill. Although both Lenin and his party handlers later took great pains to deny that he advocated toppling the government during the 'April Days' rioting of 20-21 April 1917, the circumstantial evidence we have suggests that he must have done so at least tacitly. The two surviving party resolutions passed between 18 April and 22 April, of which Lenin's authorship was later confirmed, both denounced the Provisional Government in no uncertain terms; the first called for power to pass to the Soviets, and the second advocated fraternisation with the Germans at the front.²⁷ Whether on Lenin's cue or spontaneously, Bolshevik agitators fanned out across Petrograd and Moscow carrying banners that read 'Down with the Provisional Government', 'Down with Milyukov' and 'All Power to the Soviets'. In Petrograd, the rioting grew quite serious on 21 April after N. I. Podvoisky, head of the Bolshevik Military Organi­sation, summoned sailors of the Kronstadt Soviet, widely known as enthusiastic street brawlers, into town. When the Bolshevik agitators approached the Kazan cathedral, shots were fired (to this day it is unknown by whom), and three people were killed. Once the failure of the putsch (if that is indeed what it was) had become clear, the Bolshe­vik Central Committee disowned further anti-government agitation in a resolution passed on 22 April. Lenin himself stayed mostly indoors during the rioting, uncertain, as he put it in his own postmortem, 'whether at that anxious moment the mass had shifted strongly to our side'.[2] Whatever Lenin's real role in the April Days, the pro-govern­ment counter-demonstrators had few doubts who was responsible, as many of their banners read 'Down with Lenin!'²⁸

In scarcely two weeks, Lenin had utterly radicalised the Russian political landscape. To be sure, Chernov and other Social Revolu­tionaries shared Lenin's opposition to the 'imperialist war', and there were plenty of labour and socialist radicals who remained wary of the Provisional Government and Milyukov in particular. But until Lenin's arrival on the scene, these sentiments had remained inchoate and largely unexpressed. Whether or not activists and politicians agreed with him, Lenin's uncompromising views had become impossible to ignore. Judging by the aftermath of the April Days, which saw both Milyukov and Alexander Guchkov, the minister of defence, resign their posts, the Leninist opposition had established a kind of veto power over Russian foreign policy, if not yet outright control. Lenin was not alone responsible for the fall of Russia's liberals in May 1917, but he had a lot to do with it. In terms of political marketing, Lenin had estab­lished a powerful brand as the leader of the anti-war, anti-government opposition. All he had to do was stand firm on principle, and wait for Russia's leaders to flounder while prosecuting an increasingly unpopu­lar war.

It was no easy task to square the circle of a post-imperialist foreign policy - certainly not with Lenin waiting to pounce on any mistake. In a new declaration of war aims dated 5 May 1917, the revamped, post-liberal cabinet vowed to 'democratise the army' and disowned imperialist war aims, while also asserting, a bit less convincingly, that 'a defeat of Russia and her Allies would be a great misfortune for all peoples, and would delay or make impossible a universal peace'.²⁹ On 15 May 1917, the post-Milyukov Foreign Ministry tried to reconcile the Ottoman partition terms of Sazonov-Sykes-Picot with the Soviet's 'peace without annexations' principle. As if to confirm that the ghosts of Russian imperialism were not easily buried, the new statement of revolutionary Russia's war aims referred to 'provinces of Asiatic Turkey taken by right of war' before asserting, in an apparent contra­diction, that the former Ottoman vilayets of Van, Bitlis and Erzurum would be 'forever Armenian'. Trying to blend together the old imperi­alist paternalism with the new idealism, the memorandum stipulated, awkwardly, that these 'Armenian' provinces would be administered by Russian officials, who would help repatriate Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish refugees.³⁰

All across the lands of the former tsarist empire in May and June 1917 and especially on the military fronts, furious and fractious debates were conducted over the war and whether to pursue it, over war aims and their meaning, and over Lenin himself. Alexander Keren- sky, Guchkov's successor as minister of war, went on a barnstorming tour of the European fronts prior to the planned Galician offensive ofJune, trying to rally troops behind the idea that they were the van­guard of a new Russia, fighting no longer for the wretched tsar and his secret treaties but for democracy and the allies, socialism and the people. Most accounts seem to agree that these pep talks were well received, although the effect 'evaporated as soon as Kerensky left the scene'.[3] In Tiflis, headquarters of the Army of the Caucasus, which had dealt Turkey a series of near-death blows in 1916, mutinous sen­timent was virtually non-existent. 'The membership of the soldiers' committees,' reported the new commander-in-chief Nikolai Yudenich (who had replaced the Romanov Grand Duke Nicholas), resolved 'to conduct the war to a victorious end'.³¹ In the Black Sea port from which Russia's amphibious operations against the Bosphorus were to be launched, morale had likewise remained generally robust after the February Revolution. 'Of course there are extremists here as well as in other parts,' G. W. Le Page, a British naval liaison officer, reported from Sevastopol on 29 April 1917, 'but the general feeling is that the war must be pushed on until the military power of the Central Powers is crushed.'³² In mid May, the sailors' soviet of Sevastopol debated the question of whether to invite Lenin - already notorious for his advocacy of ending the war immediately - to town. The vote was 342 to 20 against.³³

A closer examination of the Black Sea fleet provides a fascinating case study of the impact of Lenin's doctrine of revolutionary defeat­ism on the Russian Revolution. While mutiny had spread through the ranks here as elsewhere after the proclamation of Order No. 1, costing the lives of about twenty naval officers in all, fleet commander Alexan­der Kolchak claimed to have restored discipline by the end of April.⁺ While a more egalitarian ethos prevailed on shore, with the saluting of 'bluejackets' frowned upon, once on board most men obeyed orders.

Even as chaos was spreading through the armies, Russian warships continued operating with impunity up and down the Black Sea litto­ral. As late as 10 and 14 August 1917, Russian squadrons landed troops ashore on Turkey's northern coastline near Trabzon. Right up to the Bolshevik seizure of power, what remained of a functioning officer corps at Black Sea command continued planning for a major amphibi­ous landing at Sinop.³⁴

By contrast, after the Bolsheviks seized power in October, what remained of Russia's Black Sea fleet - two (below-strength) dread­noughts, the Volya and the Svobodnaia Rossiya, five destroyers, some transports and torpedo boats, a few submarines - was sent to anchor at Sevastopol. Within weeks these ships had been rendered all but useless, as any officers opposed to Bolshevism had been lynched. By early April 1918, German intelligence estimated that its striking power had been reduced by 99 per cent.³⁵

In the armies on the European fronts, the destructive wages of Len­inism were felt more quickly than in the Ottoman theatre. Much, to be sure, still remains murky about the mutinies and desertions that ensued in the wake of the February Revolution, beginning with the scale of both. According to Russian military files, between March and May 1917, the Northern Army (facing the Germans) and the Western (facing the Austro-Hungarians in Galicia and Romania) saw about 25,000 desertions apiece, of which roughly three quarters occurred in rear areas. Plenty of eyewitnesses reported seeing 'AWOL' soldiers milling about the towns of European Russia in large numbers, suggest­ing that the official numbers may be low. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the vast majority of front-line troops stayed loyal (and even some of those who 'deserted' later returned to their units). As late as June 1917, prior to the so-called 'Kerensky offensive' launched in Galicia, the Russian armies in Europe remained largely intact.³⁶

The drumbeat of Bolshevik propaganda, however, was beginning to take its toll. Soldatskaia Pravda, aimed at the army, and Okopnaia Pravda, distributed directly to front-line troops, ramped up to a combined print-run of some 100,000 in May and June 1917, enough to 'supply one Bolshevik daily per company,' even while Soldatskaia Pravda churned out some '350,000 pamphlets and broadsheets'.³⁷ Con­temporaries had no way of knowing - as we do today - that funds for this anti-war propaganda came from the German Foreign Office, wired in to Petrograd by way of Olof Aschberg's Nya Banken in Stockholm (the record of at least one of these wires was preserved on the Russian side; German sources are voluminous and entirely backed up by Asch­berg's own confessions both under interrogation and in his memoirs) .³⁸ Still, it was obvious to everyone that, as Allan Wildman wrote in The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 'Bolshevik publications ... were now reaching the front in massive quantities.'³⁹ It is impossible to know pre­cisely what effect this propaganda had on the men, but letters from troops on the Galician front, collected by military censors, suggest that it may have gravely undermined Kerensky's famous barnstorming tour prior to the June offensive.⁴⁰

On 16 June 1917, Russia's armies opened a two-day artillery barrage against the Austrians in Galicia. Diversionary offensive feints were opened on German positions further north. The bombardment was effective, at least in Galicia. Austrian positions were quickly aban­doned: Russian troops marched forward for nearly two days without encountering resistance. But the Russian advance stopped even before any serious counter-attacks commenced, because most of the men - whether out of exhaustion or the effects of Bolshevik propaganda - had no desire to see combat, certainly not of the offensive variety. As soon as German reinforcements arrived, the Russian advance turned into headlong flight. There is an extraordinary photograph of Russian soldiers fleeing after they learned that the Germans were in Galicia. The original caption, as published in the Daily Mirror, tells the story elegantly: 'Soldiers running away, leaving their arms. The enemy was still 12 miles distant.'⁴¹

Whether or not Lenin's peace propaganda had played any role in Kerensky's ill-fated offensive, the Bolsheviks lost no time in capitalis­ing on the fallout. To shore up faltering morale in Galicia, the First Machine Gun Regiment, largest unit of the Petrograd garrison, was ordered to the front on 30 June. Unbeknownst to Kerensky and the generals, this unit had been powerfully infected with Bolshevik defeat­ist propaganda. Its men refused to obey the summons, instead holding a series of protest meetings.

Capitalising on the disarray, the Bolsheviks denounced the govern­ment and Kerensky's Galician offensive. Curiously, Lenin was nowhere to be found (it emerged later that he had gone into hiding in Finland). Instead, Trotsky, who had recently arrived from New York City and converted to Lenin's cause (although he had not yet formally joined the Bolshevik party), led the charge. The Bolshevik boss from the naval base of Kronstadt, the appositely named Raskolnikov, rallied radical sailors (many of them anarchists) behind the slogan 'Beat the bourgeois'. Kronstadt provided the striking power for the impending coup: some 5,000 armed men, who disembarked in Petrograd at 11 a.m. on 4 July (17 July New Style). Pro-Bolshevik factory workers and mutineers from the First Machine Gun Regiment surrounded the Tauride Palace, which housed the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin now surfaced, almost certainly to take personal command of the putsch. Raskolnikov's sailors marched down Nevsky Prospekt before turning on to Liteinyi Street - into a hail of gunfire. Raskolnikov's men hit the ground; some were killed, in the first violence in the capital since the February Revolution. Behind the scenes, the Bolsheviks drew up a shadow cabinet for their would-be government. Teams of 'ten to fifteen men in trucks and armored cars lorded it over the city', seizing whatever buildings, bridges and strong- points they felt like taking. Several anti-Bolshevik newspapers were forcibly shut down, including the old pre-revolutionary Novoe Vremya. Thus far only Raskolnikov's Kronstadt brawlers had met serious resist­ance: but they recovered to seize the Tauride Palace, seat of both the Provisional Government and Ispolkom, just past 4 p.m. With most of the city already in the control of pro-Bolshevik factions of one kind or another, and with the combined forces of the Provisional Government and Ispolkom amounting to about six outmatched bodyguards, all eyes turned to Lenin.A petition, signed by Bolshevik factory committees, had already been prepared demanding that the Petrograd Soviet take power.

Demonstrators outside the Tauride Palace were growing impatient; one even shouted at Chernov, the Left SR agriculture minister, 'Take power, you son ofa bitch, when it's given you!' Would Lenin mount the rostrum to announce as promised, 'all power to the Soviets'?⁴²

He never did. Curiously, Lenin lost his nerve just as history's stage beckoned, making only a few brief remarks to the Kronstadt sailors before disappearing from view. To this day we do not know why Lenin backed down in what appeared to be his moment of political triumph: was it stage fright? Cowardice? Or his analysis of the balance of forces, which suggested that the Bolsheviks had not yet won over enough sol­diers and workers in Petrograd to legitimise a putsch? Or was it - as Richard Pipes has suggested - Lenin's fear of being caught in an overt act of treason, now that rumours were swirling that the government would publish a dossier of his dealings with the Germans? ⁴³

Lending credence to Pipes's argument was the fact that Pavel Pereversev, Kerensky's minister of justice, published the first bit of treasonous evidence against Lenin on the afternoon of 4 July 1917, even as the final showdown was brewing at the Tauride Palace. Although Pereversev, ostensibly in order to hold back his 'smoking guns' for an upcoming treason trial, released only the least damaging material in the government's possession, the revelation was still enough to 'elec­trify' the Petrograd garrison. Regular army troops rapidly blanketed the capital, throwing Bolshevik forces into disarray. The Tauride Palace was retaken by government loyalists, mutineers from the First Machine Gun Regiment were disarmed, the Pravda printing plant was destroyed, and some 800 insurrectionists - including Trotsky and Kamenev, though not Lenin - were arrested.

Next day, the government ordered Lenin's arrest for 'high treason and organizing an armed uprising'. 'Now they are going to shoot us,' Lenin told Trotsky - before shaving his beard and fleeing for Finland. The Justice Ministry began preparations for a show trial to discredit Bolshevism for ever. It seemed that Lenin's moment had come and gone. Politically, the Bolsheviks, as suspected German agents, appeared to be finished.⁴⁴

Lenin was, however, fortunate in his enemies. For his own mysteri­ous reasons, Kerensky never went ahead with the treason trial against the Bolsheviks, and most of those arrested had been released by the end of summer. Lenin, from the safety of Finland, was thus left free to flood the armies with more defeatist propaganda while he plotted the next Bolshevik attack on the government. In a kind of backhanded compliment to Lenin, Kerensky, who now took over as prime minis­ter (he was also war and naval minister), ordered the removal of the Romanov crown jewels from Petrograd after the attempted Bolshe­vik putsch, shipping them to Moscow to be hidden in the Kremlin armoury.⁴⁵[4] He also decreed the deportation of the Romanovs from Tsarskoe Selo to Tobolsk in Siberia on 7 July 1917, for similar reasons of security.

In the three months following his German-sponsored return to Russia, Lenin had utterly radicalised the Bolshevik party line, engin­eered two abortive putsches against the Provisional Government, and put such a scare into its outstanding figure that Kerensky had evacu­ated the Romanov family, and its illustrious treasures, from Petrograd to keep them from falling into Bolshevik hands. These were consider­able achievements. But Lenin was just getting started.

What might the Russian political and strategic landscape have looked like in July 1917, without Lenin's arrival? If the Germans, that is, had not sent Lenin, Krupskaia, Radek, Zinoviev et al. to Russia in April - nor wired funds from Stockholm to Petrograd for Leninist propa­ganda? While it is impossible to know for sure, certain key factors call out for attention. First, without German funds the Russian armies in Europe would not have been bombarded with anywhere near the level of defeatist propaganda they were that fateful spring. While mutinous sentiment in the Petrograd garrison, which reached critical levels by the end of February, developed largely independently of Germano- Bolshevik influence, the mood at the front seems to have been far less poisonous at the time of the February Revolution, and might have remained so. Without the April Days rioting, mainstream liberal figures like Milyukov and Guchkov might have remained at the helm through June and possibly July, taking some of the political pressure off Kerensky as he tried to alleviate the worst tensions surrounding Order No. 1 and square the circle between the Petrograd Soviet and the army. Had a Galician offensive still been ordered in June, it is likely that Russian morale would still have cracked as soon as German reinforce­ments arrived, with a concomitant political crisis back in the capital. The man of the hour, however, would likely have been Chernov instead of Lenin: and Chernov was not a wrecker. With Chernov's mediation, some kind of compromise could have been reached, with the Soviet accepting a restoration of officers' authority in exchange for a pledge from Alexeev, Brusilov or Kornilov - or whoever emerged as the most acceptable commander-in-chief to the men - not to order more futile offensives. The disintegration of the Russian army would then have fol­lowed the French model following the Chemin-des-Dames mutinies of May 1917, which saw Philippe Petain emerge as a man ordinary sol­diers trusted not to waste their lives unnecessarily.

Because Russia was a far less cohesive country and society than France, we should not be overly optimistic about her political pros­pects in this counterfactual. Still, without a towering personality like Lenin to channel anti-war sentiment in the most nihilistic possible direction, it is easy to imagine a less destructive course in 1917.

Much would still have depended on the Germans. Not having Lenin wreaking havoc behind the front line, the German high command might have resumed the offensive more quickly on the eastern front, dealing Russia a decisive blow and discrediting the mainstream poli­ticians - Milyukov, Guchkov and Kerensky - who had chosen to continue the war. Still, at some point the Germans would have stopped in order to impose their peace terms and free up forces for the west. Had statesmen of the calibre of Milyukov been involved, it is not hard to imagine a much less harsh treaty than Brest-Litovsk, which, because not negotiated by reputed German agents like the Bolsheviks, would also have had a better chance of being accepted as legitimate by the Western powers. Armistice talks in the east might even have turned into the general peace conference the Germans desperately wanted Brest-Litovsk to be. Without the 'poisoned chalice' of a Bolshevised Russia tempting them into prolonging the world war into 1918 with vistas of eastern 'Lebensraum', the Germans might even have accepted mediation from the United States (still an aloof 'Associate Power' whose troops had not yet seen combat) to broker a compromise peace. Russia would still have lost a great deal of territory in the post-war set­tlement and forfeited any chance at conquering Constantinople. But this would have been a small price to pay for avoiding all the horrors to come.

THE KORNILOV AFFAIR: A TRAGEDY OF ERRORS

August 1917 richard pipes

_T

he incident known in Russian history as the 'Kornilov affair' - the feud between the prime minister, Alexander Keren- sky, and the head of the armed forces, General Lavr Kornilov, in August 1917 - virtually assured the success of the Bolshevik coup two months later. But it also had a deeper significance. It demonstrated that critical historical events could be caused not only by determination and force but also by confusion and misunderstanding. None of the participants in this affair desired what turned out to be its outcome. Yet they made it all but inevitable.

In early July 1917, after some hesitation, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd attempted to take advantage of the mutiny of a Machine Gun regiment whose men refused to go to the front, to seize power in the name of the Soviet. The attempt failed after the government released information about Lenin's dealings with the Germans. This intelligence angered the troops and ended their mutiny. Many Bolsheviks were arrested and Lenin once again had to flee. The challenge to the Provisional Govern­ment from the left seemed contained.

It was replaced by a challenge from the right that Kerensky consid­ered to be far more dangerous. As he would write after the events, 'It was only from that quarter [the right] that we faced any real danger at that time.'¹ Indeed, then and afterwards, he was absolutely convinced that the military were involved in a 'conspiracy' to remove him from power and install a dictator.² This judgement, based on no evidence, was to prove a fatal miscalculation. It led to a needless conflict with General Kornilov that opened to the Bolsheviks the door to power.

Kornilov, who was forty-seven years old at the time, was born into a family of Siberian Cossacks. In 1915, while commanding a division, he was wounded and taken prisoner by the Austrians. He managed to escape and make his way back to Russia. A man oflegendary courage, he watched with dismay the disintegration ofRussia's armed forces and the helplessness of the Provisional Government in dealing with it. In late summer 1917 he concluded that this government had become a captive of socialist internationalists and enemy agents planted in the Soviet.

Although he was not a political man, this judgement made him receptive to suggestions that he assume dictatorial authority.

After the abortive Bolshevik putsch, Kerensky turned to Kornilov to restore discipline in the armed forces. On 19 July he offered him the post of commander-in-chief. Kornilov, however, wanted major reforms before he would accept the appointment: restoration of army disci­pline, reintroduction of the death penalty for desertion or mutiny, the imposition of discipline in defence industries. These conditions placed Kerensky in a quandary for he was dependent on the Soviet, which was unlikely to consent to these stipulations. Kornilov informed Ker- ensky on what conditions he would be prepared to accept command over Russia's armed forces: (1) he would owe responsibility only to his conscience and the nation; (2) no one would interfere with his operational orders or command appointments; (3) the disciplinary measures which he had mentioned would apply also to the troops in the rear; and (4) the government would accept his previous requests.³

Kerensky was so incensed by these demands that he considered withdrawing his command offer to Kornilov but then thought better of it, attributing them to the general's 'political naivete'. In fact, Kornilov's demands were directed at the Soviet and its Order N0. 1, which gave it the authority to countermand military instructions. The negotiations between the two parties dragged on and Kornilov assumed command only on 24 July, after receiving assurances that his conditions would be met.

Unfortunately, Kerensky could not keep his promises to Kornilov. For one, he was entirely dependent on the Executive Committee of the Soviet, which regarded all attempts to restore military discipline, especially in the rear, as 'counter-revolutionary'. To carry out his prom­ises to Kornilov would have forced him to break with the socialists, his principal supporters. Furthermore, he came to view the general as a rival who wanted to replace him. So, instead of cooperating with Kornilov by honouring his pledges, he steadily retracted them: on 7 August he stated that he would not, under any circumstances, agree to introducing the death penalty for soldiers serving in the rear of the front. And eleven days later the Soviet passed by a virtually unanimous vote a resolution proposed by the Bolsheviks to abolish the death penalty for front-line troops.

In the person of the prime minister and the general, two Russias confronted each other: the Russia of international socialism and the Russia of patriotism. There could be no conciliation between them.

On 3 August, Kornilov came to Petrograd to brief a closed cabinet meeting on the military situation. While he was describing the balance of forces, Kerensky leaned over and in a whisper warned him to be careful. Kornilov assumed that the warning concerned the minister of agriculture, V. M. Chernov.

This incident had a shattering effect on him for he interpreted it to mean that at least one minister was suspected of leaking military secrets. He came to regard the Provisional Government as disloyal and incompetent.

On 6 or 7 August, Kornilov ordered three badly undermanned divi­sions to move up to a position roughly equidistant between Moscow and Petrograd. When asked to explain this order he said that he wanted these troops to be in a position to suppress a potential Bolshevik coup in either city, with or without the government's consent. Russia, he felt, desperately needed 'firm authority'. 'I am not a counter-revolutionary,' he explained,

I despise the old regime, which badly mistreated my family. There is no return to the past and there cannot be any. But we need an author­ity that could truly save Russia, which would make it possible to end the war honorably and lead her to a Constituent Assembly ... Our current government has solid individuals but also those who ruin things, who ruin Russia. The main thing is that presently Russia lacks authority and that such an authority must be created. Perhaps I shall have to exert some pressure on the government. It is possible that if disorders break out in Petrograd, after they had been suppressed I will have to join the government and participate in the establishment of a new, strong authority.⁴

On 8 August, the Ministry of War presented Kerensky with two lists, one of left-oriented persons, the other of right-oriented ones, all of whom should be arrested. Kerensky agreed to the arrest of all con­servative politicians but hesitated to sign the list of radical ones.⁵

On 14 August, Kornilov made an appearance at the State Confer­ence, which Kerensky had convened in Moscow to rally public support. When Kornilov turned up at the Bolshoi Theatre he was cheered and carried aloft by the crowd; the right-wing delegates gave him a riotous welcome. Kerensky felt thoroughly threatened by this reception of his rival. As he testified subsequently 'after the Moscow conference it was clear to me that the next attempt at a blow would come from the right and not from the left'.[5]⁶

In mid August, Boris Savinkov, the man in charge of the Ministry of War, received from French intelligence information that the Bol­sheviks were planning at the beginning of September an all-out effort to seize power. Kerensky disbelieved this information but he realised that it could be useful in neutralising Kornilov. So he asked Savinkov to proceed to Mogilev, the locale of the military headquarters, in order to liquidate the suspected officer conspiracy and to despatch the Third Cavalry Corps to Petrograd for the purpose of imposing martial law and defending the Provisional Government from any and all assaults, and, in particular, the assault of the Bolsheviks, who had rebelled on 3-5 July and who, according to information from foreign intelligence, were once again preparing to rise.⁷

Later, Kerensky would accuse Kornilov of sending the same cavalry corps, commanded by General Alexander Krymov, to the capital in order to unseat him.

Savinkov arrived in Mogilev on 22 August and stayed there for two days. He told Kornilov that the government had information of an impending Bolshevik putsch and that in order to deal with it Kerensky wanted to withdraw Petrograd and its suburbs from the Petrograd Mil­itary district and place it under his personal command. Kornilov was not pleased with this proposal but consented. Then Savinkov added that the prime minister wanted the Third Cavalry Corps to be moved to the capital where it would also come under government control. If necessary, he added, the government would carry out a 'merciless' operation against the Bolsheviks and, should it side with them, also the Petrograd Soviet. All this was prevarication for, as mentioned, Keren­sky did not believe the Bolsheviks would act. Kornilov responded as follows:

I must tell you that I no longer believe in Kerensky and the Provi­sional Government. In the Provisional Government serve such people as Chernov and such ministers as Avksentiev. The only salu­tary measure for the country is firm authority. This the Provisional Government is unable to provide ...As concerns Kerensky, he is not only weak and indecisive but also insincere.⁸

Kornilov took the prime minister's instructions at face value. As they were parting, he told Savinkov that he supported Kerensky because the country needed him.⁹

Following Savinkov's departure, Kornilov issued the following order to General Krymov:

In the event that you receive from me or directly on the spot informa­tion that the Bolshevik uprising had begun, you are to move without delay with the Corps to Petrograd, occupy the city, disarm the units of the Petrograd garrison that have joined the Bolshevik movement, disarm the Petrograd population, and disperse the Soviet. ¹⁰

This instruction implemented Kerensky's order. Savinkov reported to Kerensky on 25 August that all his commands would be carried out.

At this point a well-meaning but bumbling individual threw a monkey wrench into a situation already teeming with misunderstand­ing. He was Vladimir Nikolaevich Lvov, a man of burning ambitions but few talents with which to realise them. A member of the Duma as a conservative Octobrist, he had served for several months after the February Revolution as Procurator of the Holy Synod but in July 1917 Kerensky dismissed him from this post. In August, he joined a group of conservative intellectuals in Moscow who were eager to save Russia from collapse. He and his friends believed that the Provisional Govern­ment needed to be strengthened with the inclusion of representatives of business as well as the armed forces.

According to Lvov's recollections, in mid August he heard rumours of conspiracies at Kornilov's headquarters to proclaim the general dic­tator. He felt it his duty to alert Kerensky to these rumours, and duly met with him on 22 August. Kerensky paid attention to what Lvov told him, namely that it was necessary to include in the cabinet persons enjoying close relations with the military, but later denied that he had authorised him to travel to Mogilev and negotiate with Kornilov. Lvov nevertheless interpreted Kerensky's interest in his opinions as giving him licence to act as an intermediary between the prime minister and the command­ing general. He travelled to Mogilev, arriving there on 24 August, just as Savinkov was about to leave.

According to Kornilov's testimony given shortly after the event, Lvov announced to him 'I am coming to you from Kerensky with a commission.' He said, in Kerensky's name, that if in Kornilov's opinion Kerensky's further participation in the government was undesirable then Kerensky was prepared to resign.

Every word of this of course was an outright lie. ¹¹ Carelessly, without asking for Lvov's credentials, Kornilov entered with him into a highly sensitive conversation. According to Kornilov's testimony, he responded that the only escape from the difficult situ­ation in which the country found itself was the introduction of a dictatorship and placing the country under martial law. He further said (according to Lvov's testimony given on 14 September 1917):

It is expected that between August 27 and September 1, the Bolshe­viks will act. Their plan is to overthrow the government, to install themselves in its place, at once to conclude a separate peace and to disclose it to the front in order to demoralise the army and to deliver to Germany the Baltic fleet ... During the Bolshevik uprising there will occur a clash of all ... forces, there will take place incredible bedlam in the course of which the Provisional Government, without a doubt, will collapse.¹²

Kornilov further said that he was not striving for power and would subordinate himself to a dictator but if the Provisional Gov­ernment were to offer him dictatorial powers he would not refuse. He asked Lvov to warn Kerensky that since the Petrograd Bolsheviks were making preparations for a rising his life was at risk and hence it would be prudent for him to come to the headquarters. Once there, Kornilov intended to discuss with him the reorganisation of the government.¹³

The interview over, Lvov left for Petrograd. On 26 August, he met with Kerensky. As in the interview with Kornilov he had pretended to represent the prime minister, so he now affected the role of an agent of the general. He told Kerensky that Kornilov demanded dictatorial powers. According to Kerensky, on hearing this, his first reaction was to burst into laughter. But laughter soon yielded to alarm. He asked Lvov to put Kornilov's demands in writing. This is what Lvov wrote down:

General Kornilov proposes:

That martial law be proclaimed in Petrograd.

That all military and civil authority be transferred into the hands of the commander-in-chief.

That all ministers, not excluding the Prime Minister, resign and that provisional executive authority be transferred to deputy ministers until the commander-in-chief had constructed a cabinet.

Petrograd, August 26, 1917 V. Lvov ¹⁴

None of which, in fact, Kornilov had demanded.

As soon as he had read these words, Kerensky recalled, everything became clear: a military coup was in the making. But to make abso­lutely certain that this was indeed so, he decided to contact Kornilov directly by telegraph and invited Lvov to come to the office of the min­ister of war at 8 p.m. to participate in the conversation. Lvov was late and after half an hour's wait, Kerensky initiated the discourse in the course of which he would impersonate Lvov. The following is the com­plete text of the exchange as recorded on the telegraphic tapes:

Kerensky: Prime Minister on the line. We are awaiting General

Kornilov.

Kornilov: General Kornilov on the line.

Kerensky: How do you do, General. V. N. Lvov and Kerensky

are on the line. We ask you to confirm that Kerensky can act in

accordance with the information conveyed to him by Vladimir

Nikolaevich [Lvov].

Kornilov: How do you do, Alexandr Fedorovich. How do you do, Vladimir Nikolaevich. To confirm once again the outline of the situation in which, I believe, the country and the army find themselves, an outline of which I sketched out to Vladimir Nikolaevich with the request that he convey it to you, let me declare once more that the events of the last few days and those already in the offing make it imperative to reach a completely definite decision in the shortest possible time. Kerensky [impersonating Lvov]: I, Vladimir Nikolaevich, am inquiring about this definite decision which has been taken, which you have asked me to inform Alexandr Fedorovich strictly in private. Without such confirmation from you personally, Alexandr Fedorovich hesitates to completely trust me. Kornilov: Yes, I confirm that I asked you to transmit my urgent request to Alexandr Fedorovich to come to Mogilev. Kerensky: I, Alexandr Fedorovich, take your reply to confirm the words reported to me by Vladimir Nikolaevich. It is impossible for me to do that and leave today, but I hope to leave tomorrow. Will Savinkov be needed?

Kornilov: I urgently request that Boris Viktorovich [Savinkov]

come along with you. What I said to Vladimir Nikolaevich applies

equally to Boris Viktorovich. I would beg you most sincerely not to

postpone your departure beyond tomorrow ...

Kerensky: Are we to come only if there are demonstrations,

rumours of which are circulating, or in any event?

Kornilov: In any event.

Kerensky: Goodbye. We shall meet soon.

Kornilov: Goodbye.¹⁵

The two men were talking at cross purposes. Kerensky now was certain that Kornilov wanted him at his headquarters in order to place him under arrest and proclaim himself dictator. But it is known from eyewitnesses that when their conversation was over Kornilov heaved a sigh of relief, interpreting Kerensky's agreement to come to Mogilev to mean that he was willing to work jointly on the formation of a new and strong government.

On the basis of such flimsy evidence, Kerensky decided on an open break with Kornilov. When Lvov belatedly turned up, he had him arrested. Later that night he convened a cabinet meeting. After telling the ministers what had transpired, he asked and obtained full dictatorial powers to deal with the emergency. The cabinet resigned, never to meet again: the Provisional Government, in effect, ceased to exist. Next, Kerensky sent a wire to Kornilov in which he dismissed him from the post of commander-in-chief and ordered him to report at once to Petrograd. The dismissal, according to Savinkov, was unlaw­ful, because only the Provisional Government had the right to issue such an order.¹⁶

Kornilov, ignorant of Kerensky's interpretation of their telegraphic exchange, proceeded to help the government suppress the anticipated Bolshevik power grab. At 2.40 a.m. he cabled Savinkov:

The [Cavalry] Corps is assembling in the environs of Petrograd toward evening August 28. Request that Petrograd be placed under martial law August 29.¹⁷

The receipt on the morning of 27 August of Kerensky's cable dismiss­ing Kornilov threw the generals into utter confusion.

Their initial reaction was to treat it as a forgery not only because it made no sense in terms of the conversation the two men had had the previous night but also because it was improperly formatted. On second thoughts, the generals decided that the cable was perhaps genuine but sent under duress, possibly because the prime minister was a prisoner of the Bolsheviks. Kornilov, therefore, decided to ignore the cable's orders and commanded General Krymov to accelerate the advance of his cavalry corps to the capital.

That afternoon Savinkov contacted Kornilov who told him he was convinced that Kerensky's order dismissing him had been issued under the pressure of the Soviet: he further said that he would not leave his post and asked to meet Kerensky and Savinkov to clear up what he called a 'misunderstanding'.

Kerensky, in the meantime, issued to the press a communique over his signature of the following contents:

On August 26, General Kornilov sent to me Duma Deputy Vladimir Nikolaevich Lvov to demand that the Provisional Government transfer to General Kornilov full civil and military authority with the proviso that he himself, at his own discretion, would appoint a new government to administer the country. The authority of Duma Deputy Lvov to make such a proposal was subsequently confirmed to me by General Kornilov in a direct wire conversation.¹⁸

Kerensky's accusation threw Kornilov into uncontrollable rage. After reading it, he no longer thought of the prime minister as a captive of the Bolsheviks but as the initiator of a despicable provoca­tion intended to discredit him and the armed forces. He responded by sending to all front commanders a counter appeal:

The telegram of the Prime Minister ... in its entire first part is an out-and-out lie. I did not send Duma Deputy Vladimir Lvov to the Provisional Government - he came to me as a messenger from the Prime Minister . Thus, there occurred a grand provocation which gambles with the destiny of the Fatherland ... Russian people: our great homeland is dying! The moment of death is near!

Compelled to speak out openly, I, General Kornilov, declare that the Provisional Government, under pressure from the Bolshe­vik majority in the Soviet, acts in full accord with the plans of the German General Staff...

I, General Kornilov, the son ofa Cossack peasant, declare to each and all that personally I desire nothing but to save Great Russia. I swear to lead the people through victory over the enemy to the Constituent Assembly, where it will decide its own destiny and choose its new political regime.¹⁹

This, at last, was open mutiny. Kornilov later stated that he had decided on an open break with the Provisional Government because this gov­ernment had accused him of rebellion.

Kerensky responded to this challenge by enjoining military com­manders to ignore orders from Kornilov and by lying about the reason the Third Cavalry Corps was approaching Petrograd, namely that he himself had requested it. He ordered Krymov to stop his advance - an order which the general obeyed because he realised that the capital was not in Bolshevik hands. Kerensky invited him to a meeting during which Krymov explained that he had moved his cavalry units to help him: as soon as he had learned of a misunderstanding between the government and headquarters he ordered his men to halt. Kerensky went into no explanations. Refusing to shake hands with the general, he ordered him to report to a military-naval court. Krymov instead went to a friend's apartment and put a bullet through his heart.

During the days that followed, Kornilov tried but failed to rally public support for his cause. Confused by disinformation spread by Kerensky, which depicted the general as a mutineer and traitor, the public ignored his pleas. On 29 August, Izvestiia reported that Pavel Milyukov, the leader of the liberal Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), offered his services as an intermediary between Kerensky and Kornilov but the prime minister rejected this offer on the grounds that 'there can be no talk of reconciliation'.²⁰

Despondent, Kornilov did not resist when he was placed under arrest. He escaped his prison and helped found the Volunteer Army. Half a year later, in April 1918, he was killed by an artillery shell that struck his headquarters. When the Bolsheviks occupied the region where he was buried they dug out his corpse, dragged it on the streets and then tossed it on the local dump.

Was there a Kornilov 'conspiracy'? All the evidence indicates that there was none. The term implies secrecy and Kornilov did every­thing above board. Rather there was a Kerensky 'conspiracy' whose aim was to discredit the popular general and elevate the prime min­ister to a position of unrivalled popularity. The source of the problem was Kerensky's obsessive conviction that the threat to his regime and democracy in Russia came from the right, not the left. As he would tell a commission appointed to investigate the Kornilov affair on 8 October 1917, that is, some two weeks before the Bolsheviks would seize power in Petrograd, and which they would hold for most of the century, 'I knew for sure there would be no Bolshevik campaigns [vystuplenia]'.²¹ This commission exonerated Kornilov. It concluded that Kornilov's military initiatives had been intended not to topple the Provisional Government but to defend it from the Bolsheviks. The commission accused Kerensky of 'deliberately distort[ing] the truth in the matter of Kornilov from lack of courage to admit guilt for the grandiose mistake' he had committed.²² This author may add his opinion that, had Kerensky retired and bestowed dictatorial powers on his commander-in-chief, there is a good chance Kornilov would have crushed the Bolshevik coup of October.

There is no evidence that Kornilov craved personal power: he was prepared to serve Kerensky or assume authority, whichever would save Russia from the Germans and their Bolshevik allies. In the words of an English journalist who observed these events at first hand:

[Kornilov] wanted to strengthen the Government, not to weaken it. He did not want to encroach upon its authority, but to prevent others from doing so . He wanted to emancipate it from the illicit and paralyzing influence of the soviets. In the end, that influence destroyed Russia, and Kornilov's defiance of the Government was a last desperate effort to arrest the process of destruction.²³

Peter Struve, an outstanding Russian intellectual who over the course of his career progressed from socialism to liberalism, and from liberalism to conservatism, in a speech delivered in Prague on the fifth anniversary of Kornilov's death had this to say:

With criminal thoughtlessness [the Provisional Government], instead of supporting the only force capable of joining the battle

against Bolshevism, repelled and repulsed him, to face alone the Bol­sheviks and its own weakness. The accusation that Kornilov and his associates were guilty of state treason was not only singular infamy but also the grandest political stupidity.²⁴

What is incontrovertible is the fact that Kerensky's quarrel with his commander-in-chief made the Bolshevik seizure of power all but inevitable.

THE 'HARMLESS DRUNK': LENIN AND THE OCTOBER INSURRECTION

October 1917

orlando figes

on the Vyborg side of Petrograd disguised in a wig and worker's cap with a bandage wrapped around his head. Accompanied by the Finnish Bolshevik, Eino Rakhia, he set off for the Smolny Institute, the Soviet headquarters, to urge his party comrades to launch an insurrec­tion before the Soviet Congress the next day. Lenin rode through the Vyborg district in an empty tram. He badgered the conductress with questions on the latest situation in the capital, where Red Guards and soldiers were fighting for control of the railway stations and the streets. Discovering that she was a leftist, he harangued her with advice on revolutionary action. From the Finland Station the two men contin­ued their journey on foot. Near the Tauride Palace they were stopped by a government patrol, but Kerensky's policemen mistook Lenin for a harmless drunk and let him pass.[6]

' around 10 p.m. on 24 October 1917, Lenin left his hiding place

Lenin reached the Smolny shortly before midnight. The building was ablaze with lights. Trucks and armoured cars rushed to and fro laden down with troops and munitions. Machine guns had been set up outside the gates, where Red Guards on alert for 'counter-revolution­ary forces' loyal to Kerensky's government checked the passes of thoseentering. Without a pass, Lenin only succeeded in gaining entry by squeezing past the Red Guards in a crowd. He went at once to Room 36, where the Bolshevik caucus to the Soviet Congress met. He bullied them into convening a meeting of the Central Committee, which gave the order for the insurrection to begin.

What might have happened if the government patrol had arrested Lenin on his way to the Smolny? Counterfactual ('what if?') history is only really meaningful if it hinges on a single chance event that could demonstrably have changed the course of history. That is clearly the case here. Had Lenin been arrested, we can say with reasonable cer­tainty that the Bolsheviks would not have launched an insurrection on 25 October; that Soviet power would have been proclaimed by the Congress; and a government of all the parties in the Soviet would have been established as a consequence. In the following weeks and months there would no doubt have been bitter conflicts between the social­ists. Soviet power would have been opposed by military forces on the right. But not for long: the Soviet forces would have been too strong. There would not have been a military conflict on the vast scale of the Civil War that engulfed Russia in the four years after October 1917 - a civil war that shaped the violent culture of the Bolshevik regime under Lenin and Stalin.

There was no need for an insurrection to establish Soviet power. Kerensky's power had collapsed. 'Nobody wants the Bolsheviks, but nobody is prepared to fight for Kerensky either,' wrote his firmest sup­porter, the poet and salon hostess Zinaida Gippius in her diary on 24 October.² After the Kornilov fiasco, bourgeois and rightist groups would have nothing more to do with the Provisional Government, and even welcomed its demise. Many preferred to let the Bolsheviks take power in the belief that they would bring the country to such ruin that all socialists would be discredited, whereupon the rightists would impose a military dictatorship. The Western Allies, who had backed Kerensky in the summer, also turned against him after the Kornilov crisis, partly based on rumours that he was about to make a separate peace with Germany.

With the MRC in control of the Petrograd garrison, Kerensky had lost effective military control of the capital a full five days before the armed uprising began. Belatedly, on the evening of the 24th, he tried to summon loyal troops from the northern front. His order was despatched with the forged signature of the Soviet leaders, because Kerensky feared the soldiers would not recognise the authority of the Provisional Government. By the following morning, there was still no sign of the troops, so he resolved to go off in search of them. With the railways in Bolshevik hands, he was forced to travel by car. But such was the utter helplessness of the Provisional Government that it did not have one at its disposal. Military officials had to seize a Renault from outside the American Embassy, which later launched a diplomatic protest, while a second car was found at the War Ministry, although it had no fuel and more men had to be sent out to 'borrow' some from the English Hospital. At around 11 a.m. the two cars sped out of the Winter Palace and headed out of the city. Kerensky was seated in the second car, flying the Stars and Stripes, which helped him past the MRC pickets already forming around Palace Square.

Meanwhile the Soviet delegates were arriving for the opening of the Congress in the Great Hall of the Smolny. From their composition it seemed highly likely that there would be a solid majority in favour of Soviet power. Following the Kornilov affair, there had been a sharp leftward turn in the mood of the soldiers and workers. The mass of the soldiers suspected that their officers had supported Kornilov. For this reason there was a dramatic deterioration in army discipline from the end ofAugust. Soldiers' assemblies passed resolutions calling for peace and Soviet power. The rate of desertion rose sharply: tens of thousands left their units every day. Most of the deserters were peasants, eager to return to their villages, where the harvest season was now in full swing. Armed and organised, these peasant soldiers led the attacks on the manors that became more frequent as of September.

In the big industrial cities there was a similar process of radicali- sation in the wake of the Kornilov crisis. The Bolsheviks were the principal beneficiaries of this, winning their first majority in the Petro­grad Soviet on 31 August - adding to their control of the Soviets in Ivanovo-Voznesentsk (the 'Russian Manchester'), Kronstadt, Eka­terinburg, Samara and Tsaritsyn. The Soviets of Riga, Saratov and Moscow itself fell to the Bolsheviks soon afterwards. The rising for­tunes of the Bolsheviks were due mainly to the fact that they were the only major political party that stood uncompromisingly for 'All power to the Soviets'.

This point bears emphasising, for one of the most basic misconcep­tions about the October Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were swept to power on a tide of mass support for the party. They were not. The October insurrection was a coup d'etat, actively supported by a small minority of the population, but it took place in the midst of a social revolution, which was focused on the popular ideal of Soviet power. After the Kornilov crisis there was a sudden outpouring of resolutions from factories, villages and army units calling for a Soviet government, by which they understood a social revolution of their own making, led by all the parties in the All-Russian Soviet. It was to be a govern­ment specifically without the parties of the bourgeoisie, the Kadets in particular, which had been discredited by their involvement in the Kornilov movement. But almost without exception these resolutions called on all the socialist parties to participate in a Soviet government.

On the evening of 24 October, it looked as if an all-socialist gov­ernment would come into being at the Soviet Congress the next day. While Lenin was making his way towards the Smolny, Kamenev was rushing round inside trying to win the support of the other socialist parties for a resolution calling on the Congress to form a Soviet gov­ernment. The SRs and Mensheviks, whose congress delegates met late into the night, were coming round in favour of the plan.

Until Lenin's arrival on the scene, the Bolshevik leaders planned to wait for the Soviet Congress, arming their supporters on the streets to make sure it convened by defending it, if necessary, against any 'counter-revolutionary' forces attempting to close it down. Trotsky, who in Lenin's absence had effectively assumed the leadership of the party, repeatedly stressed the need for discipline and patience. On the morning of the 24th, when Kerensky ordered the closure of two Bol­shevik newspapers, Trotsky refused to be drawn by this 'provocation': the MRC should be placed on alert; the city's strategic installations should be seized as a defensive measure against any further 'counter­revolutionary' threats; but, as he insisted at a meeting of the Bolshevik Congress delegates in the afternoon, 'it would be a mistake to use even one of the armoured cars which now defend the Winter Palace to arrest the government ... This is defence, comrades. This is defence.' Later that evening, in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky declared - and had good reason to believe - that 'an armed conflict today or tomorrow, on the eve of the Soviet Congress, is not in our plans'.³

г

An insurrection had not been in the Bolsheviks' immediate plans at any point since July. The uprising of 3-4 July had ended in disaster for the party, with hundreds of Bolsheviks arrested and Lenin forced into hiding in Finland rather than face trial for high treason in the courts. But Lenin disagreed with his comrades. In his view these repres­sions showed that the Provisional Government had been taken over by the 'military dictatorship' - the Civil War had started - and that meant that the party was obliged to fight or die in an armed uprising for the seizure of power. 'It is not a question of "the courts", but of an episode in the Civil War ... All hopes for a peaceful development of the Russian revolution have vanished for good,' he wrote on 8-10 July.⁴

After the Kornilov crisis, when the Mensheviks and SRs both moved to the left, Lenin was prepared to consider the idea of a compromise with them. Not that he gave up on his basic aim of a Bolshevik dictatorship. 'Our party,' he wrote in his article 'On Com­promises' on 1 September, 'is striving after political domination for itself.'⁵ The leftward move of the Soviets - in which the Bolsheviks were rapidly becoming a dominant force - opened up the pros­pect of moving once again towards Soviet power through peaceful agitation, as Lenin had proposed before the July Days. During the fortnight leading up to the opening of the Democratic Conference, on 14 September, when the power question was to be resolved, Lenin supported Kamenev's initiative to persuade the Mensheviks and SRs to break with the Kadets and join the Bolsheviks in a socialist gov­ernment based on the Soviets. If the SR and Mensheviks agreed, the Bolsheviks would renounce an armed uprising and compete for power within the Soviet movement itself. But Lenin's implication remained clear: if the Soviet leaders refused, the party should prepare for the seizure of power.

The Democratic Conference failed to break the coalition of the Mensheviks and SRs with the Kadets. On 24 September, Kerensky named a new cabinet, which looked much like the old one of July- August, with the socialists technically holding a majority of the portfolios but the Kadets in several key posts. With Kamenev's plan for a socialist coalition undermined by the outcome of the Democratic Conference, Lenin reverted to his campaign in the party for an imme­diate uprising.

He had already begun to advocate this in two letters to the Central Committee written from Finland on the eve of the Democratic Con­ference. The Bolsheviks, Lenin had argued, 'can and must take state power into their own hands'. Can - because the party had already won a majority in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets, which was 'enough to carry the people with it in any civil war', provided the party in power proposed an immediate peace and gave the land to the peasants. Must - because if it waited for the convocation of the Con­stituent Assembly, 'Kerensky and Co.' would take pre-emptive action, either by giving up Petrograd to the Germans or by delaying the con­vocation of the Constituent Assembly. Reminding his comrades of Marx's dictum that 'insurrection is an art', Lenin concluded that 'it would be naive to wait for a "formal" majority for the Bolsheviks. No revolution ever waits for that . History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.'⁶

These two letters reached the Central Committee on 15 September. They were, to say the least, highly inconvenient for the rest of the Bol­shevik leaders since the Democratic Conference had just begun and they were still committed to Kamenev's conciliatory tactics. It was decided to burn all but one сору of the letters, lest they fall into the hands of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks and spark a revolt. The Central Committee continued to ignore Lenin's advice and printed instead his earlier articles, in which he had endorsed the Kamenev line. Lenin was beside himself with rage. Afraid to return to Petrograd (Kerensky had ordered his arrest at the Democratic Conference), Lenin moved from Finland to the resort town of Vyborg, eighty miles from Petrograd, to be closer to the capital. He assaulted the Central Committee and lower-level party organisations with a barrage of impatient letters, full of violent and abusive phrases heavily underlined, in which he urged them to start the armed insurrection at once. Lenin condemned the 'parliamentary tactics' of the Bolshevik leaders and welcomed the prospect of a civil war, which they were trying to avert on the false assumption that, like the Paris Communards, they were bound to lose. On the contrary, Lenin insisted, the anti-Bolshevik forces would be no more than those aligned behind the Kornilov movement, and they were bound to win.

On 29 September, at the high point of his frustration, Lenin scribbled an angry tirade against the Bolshevik leaders, in which he denounced them as 'miserable traitors to the proletarian cause'. They had wanted to delay the transfer of power until the Soviet Congress, whereas the moment was already ripe for the seizure of power and any delay would merely enable Kerensky to use military force against them. The workers, Lenin insisted, were solidly behind the Bolshe­vik cause; the peasants were starting their own war on the manors, thus ruling out the danger of an Eighteenth Brumaire, or a 'petty- bourgeois' counter-revolution, like that of 1849; while the strikes and mutinies in the rest of Europe were 'indisputable symptoms ... that we are on the eve of a world revolution'. To 'miss such a moment and "wait" for the Congress of Soviets would be utter idiocy, or sheer treachery', and if the Bolsheviks did so they would 'cover themselves with shame and destroy themselves as a party'. As a final ultimatum, he even threatened to resign from the Central Committee, thereby giving himself the freedom to take his campaign for an armed uprising to the Bolshevik rank and file, scheduled to meet at a party conference on 17 October. 'For it is my profound conviction that if we "wait" for the Congress of Soviets and let the present moment pass, we shall ruin the revolution.'⁷

Returning to Petrograd, where he lived under cover in the flat of a Bolshevik activist in Serdobolskaya Street on the Vyborg side, Lenin convened a secret meeting of the Central Committee on 10 October. The decision to prepare for an armed uprising was taken at this meeting, which, ironically, was held in the apartment of the Menshevik memoirist Nikolai Sukhanov, whose wife, Galina Flakser- man, was a veteran Bolshevik. Of the twenty-two Central Committee members only twelve were present (the most important resolution in the history of the party was thus taken by a minority of the Central Committee). By ten votes against two (Kamenev and Zinoviev) they recognised 'that an armed uprising [was] inevitable, and the time for it fully ripe', and instructed party organisations to prepare for it as 'the order of the day'.⁸

An armed uprising had thus been put on the Bolsheviks' agenda.

But a date for it had not been set. 'The resolution of 10 October is one of the best resolutions the Central Committee has ever passed,' declared Mikhail Kalinin, 'but when the uprising will take place is uncertain - perhaps in a year.'⁹ The ambivalent mood of the streets was the leaders' main concern. It was not at all clear whether the Petrograd workers and soldiers would 'come out' for an uprising. Many remembered the failure of the July uprising and the loss of workers' jobs and repressions that had followed it; they were reluctant to risk another defeat. The Bolshevik Military Organisation, which favoured an uprising, warned that the workers and the soldiers were not yet ready to come out on the party's call, though they might take to the streets if the Soviet was in danger from a 'counter-revolutionary' threat.

The same conclusion was suggested by the evidence presented to a meeting of the Central Committee on 16 October. The representatives of the Bolshevik Military Organisation, the Petrograd Soviet, the trade unions and factory committees who attended this meeting all warned of the risks involved in staging an uprising before the Soviet Congress. Krylenko stated the view of the Military Organisation that the sol­diers' fighting spirit was weakening: 'they would have to be stung by something, such as the break-up of the garrison, to come out for an uprising'. Volodarsky from the Petrograd Soviet confirmed the 'general impression . that no one is ready to rush out on to the streets but that everyone will come out if the Soviet calls'. Massive unemployment and the fear of dismissal held the workers back, according to Shmidt of the trade unions. Shliapnikov added that even in the metalworkers' union, where the party's influence was dominant, 'a Bolshevik rising is not popular and rumours of this even produce panic'. Kamenev drew the logical conclusion: 'there is no evidence of any kind that we must begin the fight before the 20th [when the Soviet Congress was due to convene]'.¹⁰

But Lenin was insistent on the need for immediate preparations and saw no reason to hold back in the cautious reports on the mood of the Petrograd masses: in a military coup, which is how he conceived of the seizure of power, only a small force was needed, provided it was well armed and disciplined enough.[7] Such was Lenin's domination of the party that he got his way. A counter-resolution by Zinoviev prohibit­ing the actual staging of an uprising before the Bolshevik delegates to the Soviet Congress had been consulted was defeated by 15 votes to 6, though the closeness of the vote, compared with the 19 to 2 majority in favour of Lenin's vaguer call for an uprising in the immediate future, suggests that several Bolshevik leaders had serious apprehensions about the wisdom of an insurrection before the Soviet Congress, albeit not enough to make an open stand against Lenin. Only Kamenev and Zinoviev found the courage to do that.

At the end of the meeting Kamenev declared that he could not accept its resolution, which in his view would lead the party to ruin, and submitted his resignation to the Central Committee in order to make his campaign public. He also demanded the convocation of a Party Conference, which Lenin had managed to get postponed: there was little doubt that it would oppose the call for an uprising before the Congress. On 18 October Kamenev aired his views in Gorky's news­paper, Novaia zhizn. 'At the present,' he wrote, 'the instigation of an armed uprising before and independent of the Soviet Congress would be an impermissible and even fatal step for the proletariat and the revo­lution.' This of course was to let the cat out of the bag: rumours of a Bolshevik coup had been spreading for weeks, and now the conspiracy had finally been exposed. Trotsky was forced to deny the rumours in the Petrograd Soviet, but for once his performance was less than con­vincing. Lenin was furious and, in a sign of the sort of purges to come, denounced Kamenev and Zinoviev in the Bolshevik press. 'Strike­breaking', 'betrayal', 'blacklegs', 'slanderous lies' and 'crime' - such terms were littered throughout the angry letters he sent on 18 and 19

October. 'Mr Zinoviev and Mr Kamenev' (this was the ultimate insult - they were no longer even 'comrades') should be 'expelled from the party'.¹¹

With the Bolshevik conspiracy public knowledge, the Soviet leaders resolved to delay the Soviet Congress until 25 October. They hoped that the extra five days would give them the chance to muster their supporters from the far-flung provinces. But it merely gave the Bolshe­viks the extra time they needed to make the final preparations for an uprising. Moreover, it lent credibility to Lenin's claim that the Soviet leaders were planning to ditch the Soviet Congress altogether. He had always based his argument for a pre-emptive seizure of power (before the Soviet Congress) on the danger - which he either overestimated or (more likely) invented - that the Provisional Government might not allow the Congress to convene. All the local party reports had made it clear that, while the Petrograd workers and soldiers would not come out on the call of the party alone, many would do so if the Soviet were threatened. The postponement of the Congress was the provocation he needed.

3

Why was Lenin so insistent on the need for an armed uprising before the Soviet Congress? All the signs were that time was on the side of the Bolsheviks: the country was falling apart; the Soviets were moving to the left; and the forthcoming Congress would almost certainly endorse the Bolshevik call for a transfer of power to the Soviets. Why run the risk of civil war and possible defeat by staging an uprising that party activists in Petrograd believed was premature? Other senior Bolsheviks stressed the need for a transfer of power to coincide with the Soviet Congress. This was the view of Trotsky and many other Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet executive, and since they were closely informed about the mood in the capital and would have to play a leading role in any uprising, their opinion was important. While these leaders doubted that the party had enough mass support to justify an insurrection in its name, they thought that it might be successfully carried out in the name of the Soviets. Since the Bolsheviks had conducted their campaign on the slogan of Soviet power, it was said that they needed the Congress to legitimise such an uprising and make it appear as the work of the Soviet as a whole rather than of one party. By taking this line, which would have delayed the uprising by no more than a few days, Lenin could have won widespread support in the party against those, such as Kamenev and Zinoviev, who were flatly opposed to an uprising. But Lenin was adamant - the seizure of power had to be carried out before the Congress.

Lenin justified his impatience by the notion that any delay in the seizure of power would enable Kerensky to organise repressive meas­ures against it. Petrograd would be abandoned to the Germans. The seat of government would be moved to Moscow. The Soviet Con­gress would be banned. This of course was nonsense. Kerensky was quite incapable of such decisive action and, in any case, as Kamenev pointed out, the government was powerless to put any counter-revo­lutionary intentions into practice. Lenin was exaggerating the danger of a clampdown by Kerensky to strengthen his own arguments for a pre-emptive insurrection. There were rumours in the press that the government was planning to evacuate the capital. These no doubt reinforced his conviction that a civil war had begun, and that military victory would go to the side that dared to strike first. 'On s'engage et puis on voit.'

But there was another motive for wanting the insurrection before the Soviet Congress, quite apart from military tactics. If the transfer of power took place by a vote of the Congress itself, the result would almost certainly be a coalition government made up of all the Soviet parties. The Bolsheviks might gain the largest share of the ministerial places, if these were allocated on a proportional basis, but would still have to rule in partnership with at least the left wing - and possibly all - of the SR and Menshevik parties. This would be a resounding political victory for Kamenev, who would no doubt emerge as the central figure in such a coalition. Under his leadership, the centre of power would remain with the Soviet Congress, rather than the party; there might even be a renewed effort to reunite the Bolsheviks with the Menshe- viks. As for Lenin himself, he ran the risk of being kept out of office, either on the insistence of the Mensheviks and SRs or on account of his own unwillingness to compromise with them. He would thus be consigned to the left-wing margins of his own party.

On the other hand, if a Bolshevik seizure ofpower took place before the Congress, then Lenin would emerge as the political master. The Congress majority would probably endorse the Bolshevik action, thereby giving the party the right to form a government of its own. If the Mensheviks and SRs could bring themselves to accept this for­cible seizure of power, as a fait accompli, then a few minor places for them would no doubt be found in Lenin's cabinet. Otherwise, if they could not accept an armed seizure ofpower, they would have no choice but to go into opposition, leaving the Bolsheviks in government on their own. Kamenev's coalition efforts would thus be undermined; Lenin would have his Dictatorship of the Proletariat; and although the result would inevitably be to plunge the country into civil war, this was something Lenin himself accepted - and perhaps even welcomed - as a part of the revolutionary process. Civil war, in Lenin's view, was a necessary and vital phase in any social revolution, the deepening of the 'class struggle' in a military form. Since July he had been arguing that the Civil War had been started by the forces of the right, and that the seizure of power should be seen as the joining of the fight by the proletarian side. The 'class struggle' could not be resolved by political means. Russia was split into warring camps - the 'military dictator­ship' and the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' - and it was a question of which side would prevail. 'Kto kogo,' as Lenin liked to say.

In this Leninist scenario the armed insurrection was a provoca­tion to the Mensheviks and the SRs. It was as much against the other Soviet-based parties - and those in his party who would compromise with them in a Soviet government - as it was against the Provisional Government.

ч

Lenin's arrival at the Smolny had a decisive effect. In Room 36 the mood changed dramatically, according to the Bolsheviks who were present. From defence they shifted to the offensive, issuing the order for the insurrection to begin, and getting out the maps to plan the main lines of attack. By lunchtime they had seized control of the railway stations, the post and telegraph, the state bank, the telephone exchange, police stations, and the central zone around the Winter Palace and St Isaac's Square. But the assault on the Winter Palace, where the remnants of Kerensky's cabinet were bunkered without hope of salvation in the Malachite Hall, was delayed by technical problems and postponed until 3 p.m., then 6 p.m., whereafter the MRC ceased to bother with any set deadlines at all. For Lenin these delays were infuriating: it was vital for him to have the seizure of power completed before the opening of the Soviet Congress. At around 3 p.m. he told a packed session of the Petrograd Soviet that the Provisional Government had already been overthrown. It was of course a lie but that was not the point: the fact of the seizure of power was to be so important to his political strategy over the next few hours that he was prepared to invent it. As afternoon turned into evening, he screamed at the MRC commanders to seize the Winter Palace without delay. Podvoisky recalls him pacing around in a small room in the Smolny 'like a lion in a cage. He needed the Winter Palace at any cost ... he was ready to shoot us.'¹²

The assault began with a signal blast from the guns of the Baltic cruiser Aurora anchored in the Neva River near the Winter Palace. Just as the bombardment was getting under way, at 10.40 p.m., the Soviet Congress finally opened in the Great Hall of the Smolny. The majority of the delegates were workers and soldiers in their tunics and great­coats; their unwashed and dirty look contrasted sharply with the clean suits of the old executive members, the Mensheviks and SRs, seated on the platform for the final time. Sukhanov remarked that the 'grey fea­tures of the Bolshevik provinces' had a clear preponderance among the Congress delegates.¹³ The Bolsheviks did not have an absolute major­ity, although with the support of the Left SRs they could push through any motion they liked. The Credentials Committee reported that 300 of the 670 delegates were Bolsheviks, 193 SRs (of whom more than half were Left SRs), while 82 were Mensheviks (of whom 14 were Interna­tionalists). The mandates of the delegates showed an overwhelming majority in favour of a Soviet government. It was up to the Congress to decide how this should be formed. Martov proposed the formation of a united democratic government based upon all the parties in the Soviet: this, he said, was the only way to stop civil war. The proposal was met with torrents of applause. Even Lunacharsky was forced to admit that the Bolsheviks had nothing against it - they could not abandon the slogan of Soviet power - and the proposal was immedi­ately passed by a unanimous vote.

But just as it looked as if a socialist coalition was about to be formed, news arrived of the violent storming of the Winter Palace and the arrest of Kerensky's ministers. Denouncing this 'criminal venture', which they said was bound to throw the country into civil war, a large number of the Menshevik and SR delegates walked out of the hall in protest, while the Bolshevik delegates stamped their feet, whistled and hurled abuse at them. Lenin's planned provocation - the pre-emptive seizure of power - had worked. By walking out of the Congress, the Menshe­viks and SRs undermined all hopes of reaching a compromise with the Bolshevik moderates and of forming a coalition government of all the Soviet parties. The path was now clear for the Bolshevik dictatorship, based on the Soviet, which Lenin had no doubt intended all along. In the charged political atmosphere of the time, it is easy to see why the Mensheviks and SRs acted as they did. But it is equally difficult not to draw the conclusion that, by their actions, they merely played into Lenin's hands. Writing in 1921, Sukhanov admitted as much:

We completely untied the Bolsheviks' hands, making them masters of the whole situation and yielding to them the whole arena of the Revolution. A struggle at the Congress for a united democratic front might have had some success ... But by leaving the Congress, we ourselves gave the Bolsheviks a monopoly of the Soviet, of the masses, and of the Revolution. By our own irrational decision, we ensured the victory of Lenin's whole line.¹⁴

The effect of their walkout was to split the opposition forces, leaving Martov and the other left-wing advocates of a Soviet coalition isolated against Lenin's drive towards dictatorship. Martov made one more des­perate appeal for an all-democratic government. But the mood in the hall was changing. As the mass of the delegates saw it, the Mensheviks and SRs had proved themselves to be 'counter-revolutionaries' by walking out of the Congress. They were now ready to follow the lead of the Bol­sheviks in opposing the whole idea ofa compromise with them. Trotsky seized the initiative and, in one ofthe most often-quoted speeches ofthe twentieth century, denounced Martov's resolution for a coalition:

The masses of the people followed our banner and our insurrection was victorious. And now we are told: Renounce your victory, make concessions, compromise. With whom? I ask. With those wretched groups who have left us or who are making this proposal ... No one in Russia is with them any longer. A compromise is supposed to be made between two equal sides . But here no compromise is pos­sible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we say: You are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out; go where you ought to go - into the dustbin of history.¹⁵

In a moment of rage, which he must have agonised over for the rest of his life, Martov shouted, 'Then we'll leave!' and walked out of the hall - and into the political wilderness. It was past two o'clock in the morning and it only remained for Trotsky, who was now clearly doing the work of Lenin, to propose a resolution condemning the 'treacher­ous' attempts of the Mensheviks and SRs to undermine Soviet power. In effect, this would be to give a Soviet stamp of approval to a Bolshe­vik dictatorship. The mass of the delegates, who probably did not grasp the political import of what they were doing (weren't they in favour of Soviet power?), raised their hands in support of Trotsky's resolution.

There was one more chance to force Lenin to accept a united govern­ment based on all the parties in the Soviet. On 29 October (11 November New Style), as forces loyal to Kerensky's government fought against the Red Guards on the outskirts of Petrograd as well as in the centre of Moscow, the leaders of the railwaymen's union (Vikzhel) issued an ultimatum demanding that the Bolsheviks begin talks with the other socialist parties to form an all-socialist government, threatening to bring the railways to a halt if they did not. Lenin's government could not survive if food and fuel supplies to the capital were cut. It depended on the railways for its military campaign against Kerensky's forces in Moscow and Petrograd. Without victory in Moscow, even Lenin rec­ognised that the Bolsheviks could not stay in power on their own. The inter-party talks would have to go ahead. Kamenev was authorised to represent the party in the negotiations on the basis of Soviet power, as passed at the Congress. The right wings of the Menshevik and SR parties were unlikely to accept this, and confident that the Bolshevik regime could not last long, set exacting terms for their involvement in any government: the release of Kerensky's ministers; the abolition of the MRC; the transfer of the Petrograd garrison to the control of the Duma; and the involvement of Kerensky in the formation of the government, which was to exclude Lenin. They softened their position when Kerensky's offensive in Petrograd collapsed, offering to take part in a coalition with the Bolsheviks, provided that the leadership of the Soviet was broadened. Kamenev agreed, suggesting, in a moment of naive credulity, that the Bolsheviks would not insist on the presence of Lenin or Trotsky in the cabinet.

Lenin and Trotsky had different ideas. They had always been opposed to the Vikzhel talks: only the prospect of military defeat had brought them to negotiations. With the defeat of Kerensky's troops, and the fight for Moscow moving towards victory for the Bolsheviks, they set out to undermine the inter-party talks. At a meeting of the Central Committee on 1 November Trotsky condemned the com­promise agreed by Kamenev and demanded at least 75 per cent of the cabinet seats for the Bolshevik party. There was 'no point organis­ing the insurrection if we don't get the majority,' he argued.¹⁶ Lenin advocated leaving the talks altogether and demanded the arrest of the Vikzhel leaders as 'counter-revolutionaries' - a provocation meant to wreck the talks. Despite the objections of Kamenev, Zinoviev and others, the Central Committee agreed to present Trotsky's demand as an ultimatum to the inter-party talks and abandon them if it was rejected. The Mensheviks and SR would never accept this, as Lenin and Trotsky knew only too well. The seizure of power had irrevocably split the socialist movement in Russia, and no amount of negotiation could hope to bridge the gap. The Vikzhel talks broke down.

Perhaps there had never been much chance of a coalition Soviet government. There was a brief period in the wake of the Kornilov crisis when that might have been achieved - if only the Mensheviks and SRs had broken off emphatically from the Kadets. This was a time when Lenin was prepared to go along with Kamenev's conciliatory politics towards the other socialists. But that chance did not last long. From the middle of September Lenin was determined to seize power in an insurrection whose ulterior motive was to drive a wedge between the Bolsheviks (as the defenders of 'the Revolution') and those social­ists who opposed them (as 'counter-revolutionaries') along with the Kadets, the monarchists and the White Guards.

Without an insurrection by the Bolsheviks, Martov's resolution would have stood and a government made up of all the parties in the Soviet would have been established on 25 October. Bitter polit­ical differences between the socialists would have made this coalition unstable and difficult. No doubt there would have been many conflicts over the relationship between the Soviet government, the Constitu­ent Assembly, and other democratic bodies such as the Dumas. Lenin would have been opposed to any coalition with the Right SRs and Mensheviks, which might have split the Bolsheviks. In all probability, there would still have been a civil war, albeit one not on the scale of the military conflict that engulfed Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1921. While Kerensky and the White Guards were bound to organise a military force against a Soviet government, their resistance was unlikely to last long.

From the October insurrection and the establishment of a Bol­shevik dictatorship to the Red Terror and the Civil War - with all its consequences for the evolution of the Soviet regime - there is a line of historical inevitability. But Lenin's victory on 25 October was itself the outcome of an accident. For if that 'harmless drunk' had been recognised by the government patrol, history would have turned out differently.

THE SHORT LIFE AND EARLY DEATH OF RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY: THE DUMA AND THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

January 1918 tony brenton

THE BACKGROUND

Russia does not have a rich democratic tradition. The 'Mongol Yoke' (1237-1480) imposed thoroughgoing despotism on the Russian lands even while contemporary Western Europe saw the emergence of embryonic consultative and representative institutions. The most cited example of a medieval Russian city whose civic liberties approached those of its Western analogues, Novgorod the Great, lost those lib­erties as soon as it fell under the sway of Muscovy in 1478 (and the city's still insufficiently subservient inhabitants were then massacred a century later by Ivan the Terrible). Throughout the tsarist period the full title of the ruler began 'By the grace of God, Tsar and Autocrat of all the Russias This was no mere verbal flourish. Russian Tsars exer­cised genuinely autocratic authority. They had, and used, the power of life and death unmediated by any independent judicial or legislative authority. Early Western visitors of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen­turies were astonished at the readiness of the most powerful aristocrats to abase themselves before their ruler. Those who wanted to modernise

Russia, notably Peter the Great, saw autocracy as the means to do it. Peter made the peasants serfs and the nobility state servants. Society became a barracks, the Orthodox Church a department of state. Even Catherine the Great, an enlightened modern-minded German prin­cess, abandoned her thoughts of constitutionalism with the weary observation 'I will be an autocrat; that is my job. The Good Lord will forgive me; that is his.'¹ The prevailing metaphor, right up to the end of the regime, was of the tsar as father to his often unruly and in need of discipline, but essentially loving, children.

Russia's official ideology for much of the nineteenth century was explicitly 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality'. Only in the middle of that century was the 'Liberator Tsar', Alexander II, able to abolish the system under which the vast majority of Russians were directly owned either by the state or by the land-holding class, and to introduce a limited form of representative local government. In one of history's more fascinating might-have-beens, he was also in 1881 moving towards introducing a very limited representative element into Russian central government. He had no compunction about describing this plan as a 'constitution' - implying real legal limits on the tsar's power. But his assassination that year cut the initiative off, and confirmed his succes­sor in the view that autocracy was the only way to rule Russia. Thus, when Alexander's grandson, Nicholas II, became tsar in 1894, he inher­ited the title and power of 'Unlimited Autocrat'. His war minister nicely summarised the regime view of the world when he wrote, 'Only before God and History are sovereigns responsible for the paths they choose to take for the wellbeing of their people.'²

As the nineteenth century progressed however, the rising demand throughout Europe for more representative government and rights for the people threatened to infect Russia too. But while elsewhere these demands made some progress, in Russia they met deep regime resistance born of the autocratic principle. Russia had Europe's tough­est regimes of censorship (through which, interestingly, all the great works of Russian literature had to pass) and political control. There was an extensive repressive apparatus that dealt out copious Siberian exile and occasional execution. The result was the extreme radicalisa- tion of the opposition, for which the country was to pay dearly in 1917. A deeply disaffected intelligentsia became hostile to the regime and all it stood for, and a small proportion of them turned to terrorism. It was in fact the terrorist movement 'Narodnaya Volya', which assassinated Alexander II in 1881, that began the call for an 'All People's Constituent Assembly', a freely elected body of representatives of all the people which would create a democratic constitution for Russia. The model, as with so much else through the Russian Revolution, was explicitly drawn from the French revolutionary assemblies of 1789-91.³

The idea of such an assembly became common currency among the opposition in the last years of the nineteenth century, even ifwith some nuances. The liberal right were more willing to see gradual evolution towards parliamentary government in cooperation with the monarchy, while the extreme left (notably the early Marxist leader Georgy Plekh- anov) made it clear that such an assembly was only justified as long as it supported the cause of the socialist revolution (thus providing a text from which Lenin subsequently preached).

It was on 'Bloody Sunday' that the demand for a Constituent Assembly became talismanic for those seeking change. Russia had seen a growing political crisis over the past year. Military defeat by Japan, hunger in the countryside, and appalling working conditions for the growing industrial labour force came together to give real force to demands for reform, including for some representational element in the way Russia was governed. In December 1904, Nicholas turned this demand down saying to one of his ministers 'I shall never, under any circumstances, agree to a representative form of government because I consider it harmful to the people whom God has entrusted to my care.'⁴ A few days later, on Sunday 9 January 1905, a huge demonstra­tion by unarmed workers and their families, many of them dressed in their Sunday best, gathered in St Petersburg. They carried banners asserting that they were 'suffocating in despotism' and demanding a Constituent Assembly. Government troops, unprepared for the size and determination of the crowd, opened fire and killed hundreds.

At that moment the image of Nicholas as the 'father of his people' took a blow from which it never recovered. In the eyes of many he became no more than a cruel tyrant. At the scene, the leader of the demonstration (a priest) declared 'There is no longer a God. There is no Tsar.'⁵ Hundreds of thousands went on strike. The universities had to be closed down. There were uprisings in Poland, peasant violence in much of the countryside and, more ominously for the security of the regime, mutinies in the armed forces. Nicholas was forced into major concessions. The censorship was abolished. Personal and political rights were guaranteed. And, as a surrogate for the Constituent Assem­bly, Russia was given its first-ever national representative assembly, the State Duma.

THE DUMA

Russia's first experiment with giving the people a voice in government faced huge difficulties from the start. The gap between the reformers and the regime was almost impossibly wide. Nicholas was determined to concede none of his prerogatives. The 'Fundamental Law' estab­lishing the Duma described him as 'Supreme Autocrat', and carefully avoided the explosive word 'constitution'. In his view the very exist­ence of the Duma depended on his autocratic whim. While the Duma did notionally have some serious powers, notably over government finance, the tsar retained control over the appointment of ministers, the power of veto, the power to dissolve the Duma, and the power to pass emergency laws while it was not sitting. Moreover, the electoral arrangements were rigged to produce a supportive assembly with one gentry vote worth that of forty-five workers or fifteen (supposedly more loyal) peasants. Nevertheless shrewd commentators attached real hopes to it. Sergei Witte, Nicholas's most able minister (who indeed had pushed the tsar into agreeing to the Duma on the grounds that otherwise there would be revolution), confidently expected to see it evolve over time into a genuine Russian legislature.⁶

The elections took place in April 1906. They were boycotted by the left-wing parties, which did much to encourage regime expectations of an acceptable result. The outcome was a huge shock. More than half the members of the new body were 'semi-educated' peasants, rough, rude and showing none of the class deference which the smooth Petersburg bureaucracy had confidently predicted. One horrified aris­tocratic observer described them as 'A gathering of savages. It seemed as if the Russian land had sent to St Petersburg everything that was barbarian in it, everything filled with envy and malice.'⁷ And the Duma, instead of focusing on government business as intended, devoted its time to demands for radical reform including wholesale expropriation of non-peasant land, control of the government, and universal male suffrage. These demands fed into a countrywide atmosphere of crisis, including an upsurge in rural violence and terrorism. In late June even the nation's elite regiment - the Preobrazhensky Guards - mutinied. Many concluded at this time that the regime was doomed. On 8 July Nicholas sent in the troops to close the Duma down. It had sat for seventy-two days. At the same time he appointed the 'authoritarian moderniser', Stolypin, as prime minister.

After reimposing civil order by extensive use of 'Stolypin's neckties', the gallows, Stolypin set about the fundamental reform of Russian agriculture, which he saw as the key to modernising Russia. For this he felt he needed wider political support to keep the unreliable and easily swayed tsar on board. He also needed the international finan­cial confidence in Russia that had been shaken by the dissolution of the first Duma. He accordingly arranged for the election of a second Duma in February 1907, and worked hard to influence the result. He failed. This time the radical parties did not boycott the poll. They were elected in large numbers on the explicit programme of making the Duma unworkable so as to clear the way towards a proper Constitu­ent Assembly. In what became known as 'Stolypin's coup' this second Duma was dissolved in June 1907 after sitting for just three months. In a clear breach of Nicholas's own Fundamental Law a new franchise was introduced two days later, still further tilting the electoral process in Nicholas's, and Stolypin's, favour.⁸

The third Duma, elected in 1907 on this much more restrictive franchise, was entirely dominated by gentry and landowners (and was thus dubbed the 'Duma of Lords and lackeys'). It nevertheless briefly played a more significant role in formulating policy than either of its two intransigent predecessors. Stolypin, not least through bribery and press manipulation, set out to generate support in the Duma to offset the influence of reactionaries in the regime. In the early days this tactic proved successful, and helped him carry through a range of reform measures. But later attempts at reform bogged down among rival regime factions. And Stolypin's appeal to a body that many around Nicholas believed should never have been created at all, and certainly should be conceded no real power, played a large role in his loss of influence with Nicholas before his assassination in 1911.⁹

After Stolypin's death, efforts to use the Duma to influence govern­ment policy ended. The third Duma (which ran its full five-year term to 1912) and the fourth (which immediately succeeded it) drifted into a role of grumbling subservience. They obediently passed the govern­ment bills that were sent to them while engaging in (widely reported) debate on the deficiencies of the tsarist regime. It was, for example, a Duma debate following a massacre of strikers in Siberia in 1912 that helped provoke a nationwide wave of protests that May Day. In this period there was active discussion around Nicholas of closing the Duma down or making it purely consultative - ideas not followed through because of fears of popular disturbances. Even at this unpro­ductive time, however, the Duma did play one crucial (and ultimately disastrous) role. Its steady drumbeat of patriotic and anti-German rhetoric helped build the public atmosphere of aggressive national­ism that was the background to Nicholas's decision to go to war with Germany in August 1914. The Duma then underlined its role as loyalist eunuch by proroguing itself so as not to burden the tsar with 'unneces­sary politics'.¹⁰

The war both made and ultimately destroyed the Duma as a real force in Russian government. There was plenty to criticise in the way Russia's inadequate and backward administration managed the needs of modern war. As the months passed without the promised quick victory, so the volume of Duma attacks rose. The body was briefly reconvened in 1915 to approve the budget, and then swiftly dissolved to curb such criticism. But as the year proceeded, and the news from the front got worse, so it became clear that the regime needed wider political support to remedy the problems of manufacturing and supply that were a large part of the weakness of the Russian military effort. Accordingly, in July 1915 a number of boards were set up, including Duma members, to tackle these problems. The government seemed finally to be on a route to accepting the Duma as a legitimate, even useful, part of Russian governance.

At the same time, however (19 July 1915), Nicholas decided to reconvene the whole Duma. This brought the roof down.¹¹ The Duma was united in its criticism of the regime's inability to conduct the war effectively, and in its determination to take a greater grip on matters itself. It demanded (and on this had the support of most of Nicholas's ministers) that Nicholas appoint a 'Ministry of National Confidence' answerable to the Duma. Nicholas, crucially influenced by Alexandra (who detested the Duma, and endlessly insisted that he should assert his autocratic authority), dismissed the Duma in September. Now things slid badly downhill. In one of his worst decisions (there is a rich choice) Nicholas had taken himself off to the front to command the army, leaving government in the hands of the 'German' tsarina under the shadowy influence of Rasputin. Rumours of treason at the top, and worse, proliferated. Government was a shambles. The period of 'Tsarina Government', September 1915 to February 1917, saw four prime ministers, five ministers of the interior and three ministers each of foreign affairs and of war. Rasputin was said to be taking huge bribes and debauching all the upper-class womanhood of Petrograd. The most lurid of the rumours were of course false, but deeply corrosive of support for the regime.¹²

By November 1916 the situation was so bad that Nicholas felt obliged to let the Duma reconvene. The result was a storm in which Pavel Milyukov, leader of the Duma liberals, famously demanded to know whether official policy was 'treason or stupidity' and the Duma, in the most substantial display of teeth of its whole existence, forced the resignation of the prime minister.¹³ Indeed, the Duma had now taken on many of the aspects of a real parliament. Its members were protected by guarantees of parliamentary immunity, so it was able to become the public echo chamber for criticism of the Romanov regime, entirely subverting the tsar's credibility among the elite, the public and the armed forces. Nicholas made minor concessions, such as appointing a few ministers from among the Duma membership, but nowhere near enough to stem the growing torrent of demands for change.

The final collapse came in mid February in Petrograd. A bread short­age (largely caused by very cold weather) led to street demonstrations on 13 February. Coincidentally the Duma reconvened on 14 February and renewed its assaults. Over the next three days the situation deterio­rated dramatically. The demonstrations grew larger and turned violent. For the first time since Bloody Sunday, twelve years before, the troops were ordered to fire on the crowds. Nicholas (far away in army HQin Mogilev) declared the Duma dissolved. Then on 28 February much of the army garrison in Petrograd mutinied and joined the rioters. A huge crowd gathered outside the Tauride Palace, where the Duma met, demanding in effect that it take over the government.

This was the moment when the Duma as an institution met its destiny. It had come a long way from its inauspicious and neutered start. In the course of the past six months it had become the cockpit of national debate and had acquired real authority over the actions of the government. It now faced a historic test. Would it pick up the reins of national authority so visibly no longer held by the distant Nicholas, or would it leave them for others to seize?

This was a test it only half passed. With the mob gathered outside, Duma moderates prevaricated. Their formal reasoning was that since the tsar had dissolved the Duma they could take no further action without his permission. But the reality was sheer fear in the face of the drunken 'dark people' on the rampage outside. Radical members of the

Duma on the other hand, led by the brilliant left-wing lawyer Alexan­der Kerensky, insisted that this was their moment. The Duma should defy the tsar and lead the revolution. The upshot was an untidy com­promise; the coming together, without formal Duma endorsement, of a 'Provisional Committee of Duma members for the Restoration of Order in the Capital and the Establishment of Relations with Indi­viduals and Institutions' - a body whose very name underlines the hesitations of many in the Duma leadership, paralysed as they were by fear of the street, about taking on governmental responsibility.

Kerensky, much later in exile, wrote that the Duma 'wrote its own death warrant at the moment of the revolutionary renaissance of the people . The Duma died on the morning of 28 February, the day when its strength and its influence were at their highest.'¹⁴ Kerensky, who became the last leader of pre-Leninist Russia, of course had his own axe to grind about the course events took between February and October 1917. But there is a real counterfactual lurking here. If the Duma had indeed convened and declared itself in charge on the evening of 27 February how might events have gone?

It is not entirely impossible that, courageously and cunningly led, the Duma leadership could indeed have placated the Petrograd street long enough to establish an effective claim to national authority on the grounds that they were the only institution left with any basis for such a claim. They had one important advantage; precisely because of their unrepresentative make-up they were trusted by the officer class and bureaucracy. The key reason why the army chief of staff, Alexeev, did not obey Nicholas's command on 1 March to send troops into Petrograd to put down the rising is because the chairman of the Duma, Rodzyanko, assured him that they would inherit power.¹⁵ And if indeed the Duma had been able to establish such a claim to authority the subsequent history of Russia would undoubtedly have been very different.

But there are strong reasons for doubting that any such claim to Duma authority would have survived very long. Already, as the Duma havered, a serious competitor for power was emerging in the form of the 'Petrograd Soviet', a chaotic and ad hoc assembly of representatives from local factories and regiments, powerfully fuelled by class anger, revolutionary venom, and (among the soldiers) aversion to being sent to the front. The Soviet was dominated by an assortment of left-wing parties, with the initially outnumbered Bolsheviks rising in influence as the only party demanding immediate peace. It of course had no real democratic legitimacy, but had one crucial source of power. In the anarchic months after February, it represented, and where neces­sary deployed, the fearsome Petrograd mob in a way the respectable bourgeois of the Duma could not. The Duma leadership didn't have the backbone to come out on top in any sustained tussle with these forces. A sympathetic commentator later described it as a struggle that set 'those public elements that were sensible and moderate but - alas - timid, unorganised, accustomed only to obeying and incapable of commanding' against 'organised rascality with its narrow-minded, fanatical and frequently dishonest ringleaders'.¹⁶

In fact, fearful of the mob, the Provisional Committee felt the need to negotiate the terms of its assumption of power with the Soviet, and thus visibly placed itself in a position of dependence on it. The upshot was the creation on 2 March of the 'Provisional Government' of mostly liberal Duma politicians - 'provisional' because it was seen as a tem­porary arrangement until something more legitimate could be brought into being. And indeed right from the start it faced two huge disabili­ties. The real power on the streets in Petrograd and other population centres lay with the Soviet and its analogues (which swiftly sprang up all over Russia). And the Provisional Government had little formal legitimacy. It was the irregularly born child of a thoroughly unrepre­sentative and now dissolved Duma (which, in Rodzyanko's words, now simply 'faded away' because its members were 'unprepared for energetic resistance'¹⁷). When Prince Lvov was announced as Head of the Government a soldier in the crowd shouted 'You mean all we've done is exchange a Tsar for a Prince?'¹⁸ And when the new minister of foreign affairs appeared before the crowd he met the demand 'Who elected you?'¹⁹

THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

The response to this question lay in the eight-point programme the Provisional Government had hammered out with the Soviet. All parties agreed that Russia needed a properly elected basis for legiti­mate government as soon as possible. So point four of the programme called for 'immediate preparations for the convocation of the Constit­uent Assembly, to be elected on a universal, secret, direct and equal ballot'. The thirty-year-old dream of an assembly to endow Russia with a proper modern democratic constitution looked at last as if it was about to be realised.

The central role anticipated for the Constituent Assembly very quickly became clear. Over the past few days, while the real power politics of the future of Russian governance was being played out in Petrograd, a rather sad sideshow had been underway at various railway stops in western Russia. The Tsar, blocked by transport dislocations from getting back to his capital, and in only imperfect contact with it, was on 2 March advised by Rodzyanko that he had to abdicate. His key generals swiftly endorsed this advice, leaving him little choice. The legal heir was his twelve-year-old haemophiliac son, Alexis. But Nicholas, caring family man and obtuse politician to the end, was worried about Alexis' health and instead settled the crown on his own brother, Michael Alexandrovich. While the shakily installed new rulers in Petrograd might have gone along with the throne falling to the legal heir, a sickly boy, his arbitrary replacement by a mature, militarily expe­rienced Romanov prince was a very different prospect. And there was a very real question as to whether the mob was in any mood for the mon­archy to survive at all. Michael quickly decided to dodge the bullet, and on 4 March issued a manifesto putting off all decisions on the future of the Romanov dynasty, including who, if anyone, should wear the crown, to the Constituent Assembly.

From the start, preparation for the Constituent Assembly was seen as both central to the work of the Provisional Government and urgent. Major governmental decisions were either themselves deemed provi­sional or simply put off until the Assembly convened. The head of the

Provisional Government described the establishment of the Assembly as 'our essential sacred task',²⁰ and at an early coordination meeting between the Soviet and the Provisional Government both sides underlined the need for the earliest possible meeting of the Assembly. In the 'March mood' of euphoria after the February Revolution there was huge enthusiasm for the Assembly with all political parties press­ing for work to be speedily carried forward. The hope at that stage was that the Assembly could be convened in three to four months. That is by June.

But political and organisational complexities were already making themselves felt. In a vast country, still at war, simply compiling an elec­toral law, putting together a voting register, and organising polling - all on the basis of organs of local government which were themselves being radically reformed - were a sufficiently formidable challenge. And all of this offered pretexts for delay to political factions which themselves had reasons for wanting to put things off. The Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) who principally represented the peasants did not want elections until the autumn when the harvest would be over. Meanwhile the right-wing parties were happy to see some delay to allow the 'raging sea of revolution' to calm down. Ironically, in view of subsequent events, it was the Bolsheviks who pressed most stri­dently for early progress, accusing the other parties of going slow on democracy.²¹

So things bogged down. It took until May for the political parties to agree on general principles for organising the elections (secret ballot, proportional representation, universal suffrage). But they then set up an extraordinarily cumbersome, almost parliament-sized, special council of lawyers to turn all this into electoral law. The timetable, set in June, was for elections to take place on 17 September and for the Assembly to meet on 30 September. But, as a newspaper noted in June under the headline 'The Last Chance': 'Two principles are struggling here: the principle of the greatest possible perfection and the principle of the greatest possible speed. Two months ago the first principle was undoubtedly prevailing. Now the prevalence apparently is leaning towards the second one.'²² As the February Revolution slid increasingly into the past, and crisis succeeded crisis on the Petrograd political scene, so popular enthusiasm for the Assembly faded. At the same time another newspaper was expressing the worries of many when it asked, 'Will the ship of state reach the port of the Constitu­ent Assembly? Will the Provisional Government, together with the Democracy, succeed in maintaining the unity of the state before the arrival of the Master?'²³

The so-called 'July Days', in which the Provisional Government very nearly fell to a Bolshevik uprising, both set back progress and gave added urgency to convening the Assembly. The government responded in mid July by pressing the various bodies to redouble their efforts to meet the timetable, and indeed the Socialist parties demanded that the elections be accelerated. But by now it was becoming apparent that even this timetable was impossible. The sequence of getting local elections out of the way and then publishing the electoral list forty days before the Assembly elections, as required by the emerging draft statute, simply couldn't be done by mid September.²⁴ The liberals were relatively relaxed about this as the growing radicalism of the revolution made it clearer and clearer that they would not do well in the elections whenever they were held. The Socialist parties took more persuad­ing, but on 9 August finally, fatally, agreed that the elections should be put back to 12 November, with the Assembly due to convene on 28

November.²⁵

The Provisional Government, having staggered from crisis to crisis over the eight months of its existence, and seen its authority increasingly leach to the Soviet, was finally put out of its misery by the Bolshevik coup on 27 October. It was replaced by an entirely Bolshevik 'Soviet of People's Commissars' (Sovnarkom), headed by Lenin, whose author­ity at the start looked very precarious. For the opposition parties the coup reinforced the significance of the forthcoming elections to the Assembly as the moment when there would be a democratically elected body able to take authority from the unelected Bolsheviks. Among the Bolsheviks themselves there had, prior to the coup, been some debate about their attitude to the Assembly - with Lenin in par­ticular very clear that maintenance of Soviet power must always take priority over 'bourgeois democracy'.²⁶ But their public position had always been firm support for the Assembly, and indeed an insistence that only they could be relied upon to convene the Assembly in a way that the 'counter-revolutionary' Provisional Government could not. Conscious of the precariousness of their situation, the Bolsheviks, despite some opposition from Lenin, maintained this position after the coup. Sovnarkom in fact decreed that it would only hold authority until the Assembly was convened.

So preparations for the elections went ahead, while the Bolshevik regime gradually consolidated its hold on power. The elections started on 12 November. Due to the size of the country the voting took the next two weeks. There were some minor irregularities and the occu­pied territories could not vote (the country was still at war). But it was a remarkably clean and well-organised procedure. It was the first free national election in Russian history, and the last for the next seventy years. More than forty million voters (about 50 per cent of those quali­fied) turned out.

Following the October coup many of the opposition parties tried to turn the election into a referendum on the Bolshevik regime. To the extent that they succeeded, it was a referendum that the Bolsheviks lost. They took about a quarter of the votes (although a huge prepon­derance in some key places: in particular more than 70 per cent of the military vote in both Moscow and Petrograd). The big winners, unsur­prisingly given the social make-up of the country, were the peasants' party - the SRs - who got 40 per cent. The big losers were the right- leaning liberals, the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), who got less than 8 per cent, but were seen by the Bolsheviks as a key threat because of the relatively large numbers they gained in the cities.

The Bolshevik regime now faced a real problem. The Constituent Assembly would have the democratic legitimacy they lacked. Having barely arrived in power were they now on the way out? They certainly weren't going to go quietly. Already, before the count was complete,

Sovnarkom announced the indefinite postponement of the opening of the Assembly (due on 28 November) and demanded an investigation into electoral 'abuses' that could serve as a basis for 're-elections'. The vast majority of the non-Bolshevik opposition responded by setting up a 'Union for the Defence of the Constituent Assembly'. On the originally planned opening day, 28 November, they organised a large demonstration, and staged a symbolic opening of the Assembly in the Tauride Palace, its intended home.

The Bolsheviks responded brutally. The Tauride Palace was closed off with troops. The demonstrations were denounced as counter­revolutionary. And, in a foretaste of a lot that was to come, the leading right-wing party, the Kadets, was banned, its leaders arrested, and its printing presses smashed. It is no coincidence that at this time (in fact 7 December) the 'Cheka' was established - the Soviet secret police - which operated entirely outside the law and which was the direct antecedent of the KGB.

But this did not solve the problem of what to do about the Assem­bly, which, in the words of a contemporary observer, was to the Bolsheviks 'like a bone in the throat'.²⁷ The Bolsheviks were still too precariously placed (and internally divided) to set aside the product of more than thirty years of expectation and forty million votes. Lenin came up with his solution on 12 December. He claimed that the elec­tions were invalid. Popular opinion had shifted since they took place. The counter-revolutionary nature of support for the Assembly must be stamped on. The Assembly could meet but its members would be subject to recall by their local Soviets (a licence for opposition depu­ties to be gradually excluded). A quorum was set of 400 out of 800 members (which meant that, now that the Kadets had been banned, the Bolsheviks could render the Assembly inquorate by withdrawing). And it could only pursue policy lines set out for it by the (Bolshevik- dominated) Soviets.²⁸

The day for convening the Assembly was set for 5 January 1918. The preceding four weeks saw intense propaganda campaigns by both the supporters of the Assembly and its opponents. The Union for the

Defence of the Constituent Assembly agitated in the barracks and the factories and turned out leaflets and newspapers by the hundreds of thousands underlining the democratic credentials of the Assembly and arguing that it was not anti-Soviet. The Bolsheviks headlined the danger of the Assembly being taken over by counter-revolutionaries and, more practically, placed Petrograd under martial law and made sure they had sympathetic troops in place for 5 January.

On 5 January Petrograd was like an armed camp. In particular the area around the Tauride Palace was swarming with troops. Supporters of the Assembly had organised a large demonstration whose members began to march towards the Palace but quickly found themselves under fire - the first time the Bolsheviks turned troops on unarmed demonstrators. Meanwhile Lenin - described by a colleague as 'excited and pale like a corpse . his eyes distended and a flame burning with a steady fire'²⁹ - was in the Palace directing operations. Once it was clear that the demonstration had been dispersed he allowed the Assembly to convene. The atmosphere was close to chaotic. The Bolshevik deputies unitedly jeered anyone else who spoke. The corridors and balconies swarmed with soldiery, often drunken, who for amusement regu­larly pointed their guns at the speakers. The Bolsheviks introduced a resolution which would in effect have made the Assembly subject to the Soviets, and, when it failed, walked out (making the Assembly inquorate). The Assembly was nevertheless allowed to run on with interminable speeches from respectable revolutionaries until the small hours. At 2 a.m. Lenin, satisfied that he had the situation under control, left. At 4 a.m. the commander of the guard approached Chernov, the chairman of the Assembly, and told him to close the session 'because the guard is tired'.³⁰ Meanwhile additional contingents of menacingly armed men were arriving. Chernov managed to struggle on for twenty minutes and then adjourned the Assembly until the following day. But the following day the Palace was closed and surrounded by troops. The single fully democratic body in all of Russia's history up to that point had lasted for less than thirteen hours.

This was not quite the end of the story. Opposition members of the

Assembly reconstituted themselves in the cities of first Samara, then Omsk, claiming to be the rightful government of Russia. The ultimate inglorious fate of this so-called 'Komuch' is recounted by Evan Mawd- sley in this volume. But the reality was that the long-standing dream of a democratically elected assembly to decide the government of Russia died (or was murdered) in Petrograd on 5/6 January 1918. A prominent historian has argued that this, rather than the October coup, was the real turning point of the revolution.³¹ This was the moment when the unscrupulous, brutally repressive and anti-democratic character of the Bolshevik regime came fully into view. Russia was now on the road to Stalinism.

How did they get away with it? Enthusiasm for the Assembly on close examination was very much an elite phenomenon. The vast majority of Russia's population, the peasants, had achieved their revo­lution. They had their local soviets and were busy seizing land. Why worry about what was going on in distant Petrograd? Even in the cities, popular support was lukewarm. At the symbolic launch on 28 Decem­ber a leading socialist ruefully noted that 'the people were certainly not as convinced of the Constituent Assembly's power of salvation as its supporters had reckoned'.³² The demonstrations that day and on 5 January were much smaller and more middle class than had been anticipated. The Petrograd proletariat after ten months of continu­ous insecurity and turmoil were not about to take on men with guns in pursuit of yet another political innovation, however theoretically

desirable.³³

The real failure was on the part of the elite, particularly the non- Bolshevik socialists who won the elections. The sad fact is that it was their very virtues that undid them. They believed in democracy, due process and the rule of law. Confronted with the gangster tactics of the Bolsheviks they had no answer. Yes, they had the support of most of the people, but not with the degree of commitment that would have enabled them to take back the streets. Indeed, in the course of the 'July Days' six months earlier, when the Bolsheviks had come close to subverting the whole authority of the Soviet, the other socialists, unbelievably, had made real efforts to protect them in the subsequent clampdown. The SRs and Mensheviks had spent so many years bat­tling the autocracy arm in arm with their Bolshevik comrades that they simply could not see them as the menace they really were - only beatable by turning their own ruthless tactics against them. In fact, fol­lowing the suppression of the Assembly, the SR leadership rejected military offers of support; civil war was to be avoided at all costs. Accordingly, in Trotsky's famous phrase, they disappeared into the 'dustbin of history'. Maybe Anton Chekhov caught a deep truth in his portrayal of the ineffectually of the Russian intelligentsia. Or maybe no civilised political class in whatever country could have stood up to the unexampled cynicism and ruthlessness of Lenin's Bolsheviks.

HISTORICALLY INEVITABLE?

Finally, we are left with one huge 'what if'. It took eight months from the February Revolution for the Assembly to be elected, and ten for it to be convened. By that time the Bolsheviks were in power and it was doomed. But in roughly comparable circumstances in France in 1848 it took two months to convene an assembly, and in Germany in 1918 four. We have seen the widespread understanding, after Febru­ary, of the urgent need to convene the Assembly before it got bogged down in nitpicking arguments about electoral arrangements and all the rest. Suppose the Provisional Government had been able to maintain the momentum, and the elections for the Assembly had taken place either as originally hoped by June or as subsequently timetabled by September?

History would certainly have been different. The interesting ques­tion is by how much. Petrograd between April and July saw three Bolshevik-prompted insurrections on the streets. The first, in April, was suppressed by order of the Soviet executive - in effect the non- Bolshevik socialist parties who at this point also joined the Provisional Government, leaving the Bolsheviks as the only active opposition. The second, in June, was pre-empted by essentially the same forces. The third, the 'July Days', could in fact have taken control of Petrograd, but failed through a last-minute (and entirely uncharacteristic) loss of nerve by Lenin. So the Bolsheviks would certainly have had it in their power to take control of the city at the time the Constituent Assembly might have convened.

But the political circumstances would have been very different. The Assembly would, at least initially, have enjoyed a legitimacy and breadth of political support that the Provisional Government never achieved. The winners of the elections to the Assembly would certainly have been, as actually happened in November, the non- Bolshevik socialist parties, notably the SRs. This by itself would have sucked political vitality and support out of the Soviet, which had been the principal pretext for the mayhem the Bolsheviks had been able to cause over the period March to September (the key Bolshevik slogan from April on had been 'All power to the Soviets'). The Bol­sheviks, not being in power, would not have been able to cripple and constrain the Assembly in the way they actually did in December/ January. And those nice gentlemen who led the Mensheviks, SRs and so on, and who were astonishingly tolerant of the Bolsheviks even when faced with the outrages of the July Days, may well have been ready to be much tougher in support of the flagship institution for which they had all been working for decades. Lenin, for all his fanati­cism, was a careful and shrewd reader of the odds. He would surely have held his hand for at least the first few weeks of the Assembly's existence.

A lot then depends on how the Assembly performs. This was a large (800 members) parliamentary body led by exactly the same ineffec­tual politicians who in February had submitted their authority to the whims of the Soviet, and, as actually happened in January, had gone quietly when faced with an armed Bolshevik mob. This was not the body, and these were not the men, to steer Russia through a destructive war, rural anarchy, imperial dissolution and a complete collapse of the apparatus of the state. Even countries with much stronger experience than Russia in 1917 of the give and take of representative politics have, when confronted with such crises, moved to some form of 'strong man' rule (Gaullist France, Civil War America, Second World War Britain, for example) with, at best, some form of democratic legitimation. And, as we have noted, Russia's historical experience up to that point was almost exclusively of rule by an autocrat. The bulk of the Russian governing class then, as now, were much more comfortable obeying orders than giving them.

Given his ruthless single-mindedness it is thus not impossible to imagine Lenin's moment coming in another form. He could, at least early on, take over the streets, and he controlled a quarter of the votes in the Assembly itself. Indeed, it is fair to ask why, given that in actuality he disposed of the Assembly with remarkably little difficulty, he should not have been able to do so in this alternative universe as well. The answer is that he might have done, but that the odds were worse. Lenin would not have been in even partial control of the formal machinery of the state. The Assembly would have had longer to establish itself. It might well have earned some credibility by taking on (as it tried to do in its aborted 5/6 January session) the key issues of 'land and peace', which the Provisional Government had not been able to tackle. The Assembly, or the government it appointed, would at the very least have had the time and standing to look for the military support which it entirely lacked in the short moment which history actually gave it. And the Assembly, particularly if it came into existence before the disastrous Kornilov affair in August, would have had a key ally in Alex­ander Kerensky, who for all his operatic faults was one of the most able and influential politicians of the age. Bolshevism remains a possible outcome, but a significantly less likely one.

What was the alternative? History suggests (as all the Russian revolutionaries were uncomfortably aware) that Russia's strong man was much less likely to come from the left than from the right - the wing of Russian politics with the bulk of effective armed force at its disposal. The next months could well have seen an Assembly unavail- ingly and wordily struggling to grapple with Russia's huge problems as real authority slid in the direction of a 'Russian Napoleon'. Right-wing dictatorship would undoubtedly have been a bitterly disappointing outcome to Russia's first genuine stab at democracy. It would also have materially affected European history outside Russia (one of the key factors driving Hitler's rise was his opposition to Soviet Communism). But it has to be questionable whether it could have been worse than what Russia actually experienced.

RESCUING THE TSAR AND HIS FAMILY

July 1918 edvard radzinsky

_T

he tsar and his family could have been saved.

The first time this could have happened was in Tobolsk.

The imperial family arrived in Tobolsk at the peak of their unpopu­larity. A weak tsar under the heel of his wife, with the illiterate peasant Rasputin controlling the royal couple - that was the people's portrait of the dynasty on the eve of the revolution. And if they despised the weak tsar, they hated the empress.

Through the whole course of the revolution it is impossible to over­state the impact of Alexandra Federovna. Against the background of the defeat of the Russian army - hundreds of thousands killed and maimed - there were consistent rumours of the treason of the 'German Tsaritsa' and of her lover Rasputin, most probably through the selling of military secrets. One of the leaders of the opposition, Milyukov, said in a widely reported speech to the state Duma 'from province to prov­ince creep torrid rumours of betrayal and treachery. These rumours climb high and spare no one ... The name of the Empress is more and more repeated together with those of the adventurists who sur­round her ... What is this - stupidity or treason?' Denikin wrote in his memoirs, 'Rumours of treason played a fatal role for the attitude of the army to the dynasty.' And one of the leaders of the Duma's monarchist faction, Purishkevich, to enthusiastic applause from the Duma, called the empress 'the evil genius of the Tsar and of Russia, an unalterable German on the Russian throne, alien to the country and its people'.

The dynasty, once it had lost all authority, fell unbelievably fast and easily. Nicholas's attempt to transfer the throne to the Grand Duke Michael would only have ended in bloodshed. Michael hastily refused the dangerous offer.

The country blew away its 300-year-old monarchy like fluff off a sleeve.

After Nicholas's abdication all that was left for the imperial family was to quit Russia and to do so as quickly as possible. To this end the Provisional Government opened contacts with the government of Great Britain. The British throne was occupied by the tsar's relative and friend, George V, who bore a striking resemblance to Nicholas (in the past they had swapped uniforms to fool those around them). After Nicholas's abdication George had sent sympathetic telegrams to his old friend. Nicholas was a true ally of the English to the point where, while the tsar in Russia bore the modest rank of colonel, in England he was an admiral and a field marshal. The tsar, having voluntarily abdi­cated, saw departure for England as entirely natural.

But the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies gathered in Petro- grad, and, heavily dependent on the forces of the Petrograd garrison, demanded that the tsar be put on trial. The tsar was arrested. The Inves­tigatory Commission of the Provisional Government started work. Was it possible for Britain, intending to continue the war in alliance with the new Russia, to accept the family which Russian society had rejected and which stood accused of treason? 'We truly hope that the British Government has no intention of giving asylum to the Tsar and his wife ... that would deeply and rightly offend the feelings of the Russians who have been compelled to make a great revolution because they have been repeatedly betrayed to our current enemy,' wrote the Daily Telegraph. Finally, George was compelled to refuse his hospitality.

The imperial family was now living under arrest in Tsarskoe Selo. The 'Citizen Colonel', as they dubbed yesterday's autocrat, was con­stantly exposed to the open hostility of the soldiers of the guard. Nor at this time could there even be talk of efforts to escape. During the French Revolution Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been in a similar situation, imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace. But then certain foreigners - Marie Antoinette's lover, the Swedish Count Fersen, and the Russian Baroness Korf - had risked organising the escape of the royal family. The attempt of course ended in failure because the whole country was against them. And the honorary president of the Russian Historical Society, Nicholas II, knew the whole story well.

But, three months after the abdication, on 4 July 1917, Zizi Nar- ishkin, former maid of honour to the empress, wrote in her diary 'Princess Palei [wife of the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich] has just left. She secretly told me that a group of young officers has put together a mad project to take them in an automobile by night to one of the ports, where an English ship would be waiting. I felt unbeliev­able alarm...'

Why such alarm? Because the project was 'mad'? Both Zizi and Palei knew that, given present attitudes to the family, if they didn't get to the port they would be seized and killed on the road. Moreover, there was of course no English ship, nor any plot. There was just the drunken boastfulness of young officers.

At this time influence in the capital was shifting in the direction of radicals demanding the punishment of the tsar and tsarista. The great poet Alexander Blok wrote, 'the tragedy has not yet begun. Either it will never begin or it will be terrible when they [the family] stand face to face with the enraged people.' But Kerensky, now the leader of the Pro­visional Government, did not want to become the executioner of the unfortunate family who were more and more becoming a dangerous card in the struggle between the Soviet and his weakening Provisional Government. So he tried to rid himself of them.

Such was Kerensky's fear that the Soviet would refuse permission for their departure that it was in circumstances of unusual secrecy, at dawn, under a Japanese flag, that a train with shuttered windows set off from Petrograd to take the family away. Some 330 riflemen under the command of Colonel Kobilinsky accompanied and guarded them.

In order to maintain popular calm the place chosen for exile was Siberia - the same place to which Russian tsars had previously exiled revolutionaries.

The city of Tobolsk lies lost in the vastness of Siberia. In this provin­cial capital the arrested family lived like Noah in his ark. Here resided the emperor and empress of a vanished empire, the Adjutant General of a vanished suite, and the Head Chamberlain of a vanished court, all addressing each other by vanished titles. But so far, the revolution had not come to Tobolsk. The spiritual leader in the region was Arch­bishop Hermogen. Once he had been a zealous supporter of Rasputin, and then his avowed enemy. At the initiative of the empress, the Synod had exiled him for this to a distant monastery. Now the Provisional Government had appointed him archbishop in Tobolsk.

But Hermogen had forgotten his oppressions, and was ready to serve the Anointed of God. He saw this service as his foreordained destiny. Indeed, the name 'Hermogen' went back to the very origin of the Romanov dynasty. In the 'time of troubles' in the seventeenth century, a patriarch called Hermogen had launched the call to drive the Poles out of Russia. For this he had suffered a martyr's death. And now, 300 years later, an archbishop with the same name, Hermogen, here in Tobolsk, could help the last Romanov regain his freedom. It was precisely of this that Nicholas's mother, the widowed empress, wrote to him - 'Your Worship ... you bear the name of the Saint Hermo­gen. This is predestined.' She expected fateful steps from the fateful archbishop.

At this time, in order finally to reconcile the revolutionary com­mittee to the exile of the tsar, Kerensky sent Commissar Pankratov to Tobolsk. Pankratov was a revolutionary who had spent fourteen years as an imprisoned convict in the Shlisselburg Castle on the order of the overthrown tsar. He was thus an outstanding symbol and a guarantee of strict supervision. But Pankratov had forgiven the tsar for the lost years of his life. For him, the tsar was simply the father of a large family subjected to an incomprehensibly awful new life. He presented no real threat of escape. But the soldiers of the guard were suspicious of the good-natured State Commissar. So at this time they took orders only from their commandant, Colonel Kobilinsky.

Kobilinsky had been appointed to Tsarskoe Selo by General Kornilov. His chief qualification was as a committed supporter of the February Revolution. But over his time spent with the tsar the colonel had much changed. Nicholas's despair, his gentleness and delicacy; those delightful daughters; and the empress, defenceless in her unhappy arrogance, had together transformed Kobilinsky from the family's jailer to its friend. 'I surrendered to you, Your Highness, that most valuable thing, my honour,' he, entirely rightly, said afterwards to Nicholas.

Thus, in this quiet little town where the only military force is the 330 riflemen guarding the family, their commander becomes close to Nicholas. And the majority of the guard - 'good soldiers' as Nicholas calls them - receive endless presents from the family. And indeed at that time the guard could have helped them escape. Tatiana Botkina, daughter of the doctor Evgeny Botkin, who shared the family's captiv­ity in Tobolsk, remembered 'in these months [that is from August to the October Revolution] the family could have escaped'. But where could they escape to?

Up until the Bolshevik seizure of power, as we have already said, there was no place for the tsar in Russian politics. In fact, the only people contending against the revolutionary power of the Provisional Government were the Jacobin Bolsheviks. The Whites, the movement to rebuild a strong sovereign power, had only just been born. If the tsar fled, all he could do was quit the country. But to do that he would have had to cross half of Russia. Nicholas couldn't risk the lives of those closest to him.

In the middle of November the terrible news reached Tobolsk of the storming of the Winter Palace, the sacking of the palace of the tsar's ancestors, and of the Bolshevik seizure of power. The tsar wrote in his diary on 17 November, 'it is sad to read the description in the newspa­pers of what happened two weeks ago in Petrograd and Moscow ... This is much worse and more shameful than the events in the time of troubles.'

It was not in vain that Nicholas in Tobolsk had read Quatre-vingt- treize by Victor Hugo, a book about the Jacobins. The tsar understood that that was what had come to power. And as Gilliard subsequently recalled 'Nicholas more and more regretted his abdication'.

The Civil War started. The White movement against Bolshevik power came into existence. Now Nicholas could contemplate fleeing to the Whites. And now the riflemen and their commander could help. But the most important factor was Hermogen. The powerful arch­bishop had in his control distant monasteries like fortresses, where it would be possible to stop peacefully by, rivers with hidden boats ... all of this could facilitate a successful escape.

But Alexandra hesitates. The whole thing depends on Hermogen. Alexandra cannot entrust the fate of her family to the avowed enemy of Rasputin.

Indeed, how happy it made Alexandra when a certain Boris Soloviev, married to the daughter of Rasputin, appeared in Tobolsk. Soloviev said that he had come to organise their escape. And Alexandra of course saw a great sign in this; the name of the 'Monk', as always, carried her into a familiar world of fantasy. Her Grigory, from beyond the grave, was bringing a 'Mighty Host' in order to help her. She believed in Solo­viev with her whole soul. So the normally thrifty Alexandra generously pours out to him royal treasures and money for their liberation. All this time in St Petersburg the empress's friend Vyrubova is working on her behalf. She sends to Tobolsk both money and Sergei Markov, an officer of the Crimean cavalry regiment whose commander had been the empress herself. And again the romantic Alexandra believes this is a sign. The emissary of the Monk and the emissary of the valiant Russian officers had come together! After a regular communication from Soloviev she began to rave about '300 officers who have already gathered,' as Soloviev wrote to her, 'near Tiumen'. And Alexandra even more generously poured out tsarist treasures to Soloviev. In reply Soloviev writes to Alexandra with his notions on 'mobile groups of officers' that had already been set up all along the road from Tobolsk to Tiumen, where the railway started. They would hand the imperial family on from one to another at the time of the escape. He told her that he controlled the telephones of the Bolshevik Soviet itself. The time of liberation was approaching! Alexandra infects Nicholas with her belief. Even the heir's guardian, the sensible Swiss Gilliard, decides 'to hold himself ready for all possible events'.

Indeed, in March 1918 on Freedom Street the bells began to ring as armed men arrived in brave, tinkling troikas with whoops and whistles. Alexandra, looking out of her window, whispered with delight 'what good Russian faces'. They had come. The Mighty Russian Host, the '300 officers' about whom Soloviev, the emissary of the Monk, had just written to her. But in reality what arrived on that day was a detach­ment of Red Guards from Omsk, sent to establish Bolshevik power in Tobolsk. This was the day when the idyllic period of their deten­tion came to an end. With tinkling, whoops and whistles a new world burst upon Tobolsk. Soon the Bolsheviks were to drown Archbishop Hermogen in the river, and flight from Tobolsk became impossible. In fact, as Tatiana Botkina wrote in her memoirs 'there were no groups of officers to liberate the imperial family'. Soloviev, 'Rasputin's emissary', turned out to be one of the many adventurers in which the revolution­ary era was so rich.

Thus Rasputin, even after his death, brought destruction on the imperial family.

But every month of Bolshevik rule made life in the country less and less bearable. As happens with regimes that have seized power by force, everything began to disappear. Food disappeared, and fuel. Winter came. There was no heat in the cities. Apartments were trans­formed into caves. Broken lanterns didn't burn. The streets at night saw theft and murder. And by degrees people began to think back to the 'accursed tsarist regime'.

And now Bolshevik Russia found itself surrounded in a ring of intervention and revolt. The Civil War was under way.

The White movement was headed by tsarist generals. None of them drew attention to the unpopular tsar. But ... but ... could the tsarist idea rise again from the ashes? Especially since the act of abdication had been cunningly contrived. At the right moment it could be declared illegal. The tsar had no right to abdicate on behalf of his heir. His son did not belong to him. By law Alexis belonged to Russia.

These ideas crossed the Bolsheviks' minds as well. So they decided to speed matters up - to stamp out the smouldering fire. Trotsky, second in command of the revolution, planned to set up a People's Court for the tsar on the model of the courts of the French Revolution. He got Lenin's agreement to transfer the family to Moscow, now the capital of Bolshevik Russia.

Commissar Myachin (whose Bolshevik pseudonym was Yakov- lev) was sent to Tobolsk. His job was to transfer the tsar to Moscow. But transferring the whole family was impossible - the heir was ill. So Moscow ordered Yakovlev to bring the tsar on his own. And despite all protests, leaving the heir in the care of three grand princesses, Yakov­lev carried the tsar off to Moscow. The tsaritsa decided to go with her husband, as did their daughter Maria.

But Yakovlev's train was stopped in Omsk. In the Urals there were rumours that he had absolutely no intention of taking the imperial family to Moscow. The Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks agreed with the Omsk Bolsheviks to arrest Yakovlev, shoot him, and to hold the imperial family under strict guard in the capital of the Urals, Ekaterinburg. The commissar was only saved by a telegram from Moscow confirming his mission. But of course Moscow heard about the arguments concerning Yakovlev in Ekaterinburg. He was ordered to hand the family over to the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks, and himself to return to the capital.

Myachin/Yakovlev, commissar and former bold Bolshevik fighter, was a dangerous man. His biography included assaults on banks, bomb­ings and the killing of officials. 'A bullet, and noose around my neck, followed at my heels,' he proudly wrote in his memoirs. So when the uprising of the Czechoslovak legion broke out at the end of May, Yako­vlev was placed in command of one of the Bolshevik armies in the Ufa and Orenburg regions. But then Commissar Yakovlev abruptly quit the Bolshevik forces and fled to Ufa, which was occupied by the Whites. Here he announced that he had 'abandoned the idea of Bolshevism', and moved over to the side of the Whites. He also appealed to his former colleagues themselves to join the Whites.

There will, further on, be many more sharp turns in the astonishing life of Yakovlev/Myachin. This was a high-risk gambler, playing com­plicated games throughout his life, pursuing the most unbelievable adventures. So it is perfectly possible that the story heard in Ekat­erinburg - that Commissar Yakovlev had absolutely no intention of taking his train to Moscow - was true. In fact, on the whole trip he had been notably kind and respectful towards his prisoners. An interesting passage turns up in the diary of the tsaritsa:

'16 April on the train. The Omsk soviet of deputies is not letting us travel through Omsk because of fears that they want to take us on to Japan.'

Maybe there is truth in this half hint? Maybe it was only to her - the real head of the family - that the secretive commissar hinted at his true aim. If so, this was the first attempt that might have culminated in the liberation of the tsar and the tsaritsa.

So now the tsar, tsaritsa and Maria were held in Ekaterinburg in a house that had previously belonged to a merchant named Ipatiev. Soon the remainder of the family joined them there.

Even in Ekaterinburg the imperial family could have been saved.

In May 1918 the former Nikolaevsky General Staff College had been moved to Ekaterinburg. Up until June 1918 the college numbered 300 students, 14 professors and 22 state tutors. The senior class of the college comprised 216 students. Just 13 of these would subsequently fight on the side of the Bolsheviks. The overwhelming majority of the students considered the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, which the Bolshe­viks had just agreed with the Germans, as an act of treachery; and the Bolsheviks as German agents.

So the college, along with its students - professional tsarist offic­ers who hated the Bolsheviks - was now situated right alongside the arrested imperial family. This worried the leadership of the Urals Soviet. The head of the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks, Isai Goloshchekin, informed Moscow that the presence in Ekaterinburg 'of an organised nest of counter-revolutionaries under the name of a college' was entirely unacceptable.

At the end ofMay the situation in Ekaterinburg deteriorated sharply. On 28 May Nicholas wrote in his diary: 'Attitudes to us have changed in recent days. Our jailers are trying not to speak to us, as if they are not quite themselves, and as if they feel some kind of alarm or danger around them. Hard to understand!'

But outside the walls of the Ipatiev house there was no problem understanding. In the middle of May the Czechoslovak legion, for­merly prisoners of war of the tsar, had risen up against the Bolsheviks. Cossack units then joined up with the Czechoslovaks. Chelyabinsk fell. The Czechoslovaks and the Cossacks were moving on Ekaterinburg. Kyshtym fell. Zlatoust fell - just 130 versts from Ekaterinburg. On 14june all the Communists and workers from the Sysertovsky, Nizhny Tagilsky and Alapaevsky factories departed for the front.

The college nestling within Ekaterinburg now constituted a real threat to Bolshevik power. By Trotsky's order the college was swiftly transferred to Kazan. But its students declared themselves 'neutral'. Less than half of the complement in fact went to Kazan. So about 200 model professional soldiers remained in Ekaterinburg - a city now gripped by panic.

On 28 May there were street disorders in Ekaterinburg. On the eve of these, Ensign Arbatov, along with his unit, defected to the W hites. The only remaining support for the Bolsheviks left in the city was the Upper Isetsky Workers Detachment under the command of Pyotr Yermakov. Every other workers' detachment was at the front. A huge crowd of citi­zens shouting anti-Bolshevik slogans gathered on the cathedral square. Yermakov with his detachment, and Commissar Goloshchensky with the Chekists, with difficulty dispersed the mutinous crowd. They simply didn't have enough Red Guards. Meanwhile Red Guards fit for the front were guarding the 'tyrant' and his family. Louder and louder, voices were saying 'take them from their posts'. In other words, finish off the family.

The college was situated not far from the Tikhvinsky monastery at the heart of the city. It was from the Tikhvinsky monastery that milk, cream and eggs were delivered to the imperial family. It would not be difficult for the professional officers to establish links with the detainees. And the Ipatiev house was protected by men who, up until yesterday, had been workers, many of whom had never fired a gun. What about an attack? In the fear, panic and confusion that had seized the town such an attack had every prospect of success.

Meanwhile the Bolsheviks had decided to hasten matters. They already understood what the consequences of the Tsar's liberation could be in current circumstances. Trotsky wrote precisely of this straight after the execution of the imperial family. In his diary he quotes his discussion with Sverdlov - Lenin's right hand man. Trotsky, just back from the front, asks Sverdlov;

Where is the tsar?

He has been shot of course, Sverdlov replies.

And the family?

The family with him.

All of them?

All of them.

And who made the decision?

We decided here. Ilyich reckoned that we should not leave them as a living symbol, especially in our difficult situation.

From the end of May the Bolsheviks were preparing to destroy the 'living symbol'.

Three days after the disturbances in the town Nicholas wrote:

31 May. Today, for some reason they didn't let us out into the garden. Avdeev came and had a long conversation with E. S. [that is, Botkin]. According to him, both he and the Regional Soviet fear the interven­tion of the anarchists. So we may have to make a rapid departure, probably to Moscow. He asked that preparations be made for depar­ture. Packing quickly began, but, at Avdeev's particular request, quietly so as not to attract the attention of the guard. At about eleven o'clock in the evening he came back and said that we would be staying for a few more days. Finally after dinner Avdeev, slightly tipsy, informed Botkin that the anarchists have been captured, the danger has passed, and our departure had been put off. After all these preparations it has now become very dull.

If only Nicholas, as he listened to the worried locals planning his journey to Moscow, had known what had happened the previous night; what 'journey' had already taken place. But up until his death he knew nothing.

At the beginning of that night, at a house previously belonging to the merchant Korolev in Perm, three unknown men had appeared. They showed a Cheka order and took the tsar's brother, the Grand Duke Michael, and his secretary Johnson away. In the forest attached to Motovilikhi village both were shot. The chairman of the Motovi- likhi Soviet, Myasnikov, the chief of the militia, Ivanchikov, and three subordinates took part in the operation. The Bolsheviks announced that Michael and his valet had been 'seized by persons unknown and carried off in an unknown direction'.

In this way they eliminated the second in line to the throne, an important component of the 'living symbol'. Plainly such a 'journey' had also been prepared for the imperial family. Why had they decided to postpone it? Whereas it had been decided that Michael's disappear­ance was to be silent, that of Nicholas was to make more noise. The press were to be informed. But before doing this Moscow decided they needed proof that shooting him was unavoidable. They intended to obtain 'proof of a White Guard conspiracy aimed to free the Tsar'. Had there been such a conspiracy it would indeed have necessitated the swiftest possible execution of Nicholas II.

It was also decided to liquidate the remainder of the family, but to announce that they 'had been carried off to an unknown place'.

So the false conspiracy was put together in the Cheka. Half a century later the participants spoke about it. In it, the alleged conspirators were exactly those who might genuinely have conspired - the students of the Nikolaevsky College. Food was brought to the imperial family from the Novotikhvinsky monastery and with the milk in one of those monastery bottles the tsar began to find letters:

'The hour of liberation is approaching and the days of the usurp­ers are numbered. Whatever happens, the Slovak army is approaching closer and closer to Ekaterinburg. They are a few versts from the town... Do not forget that the Bolsheviks even at the last moment will be ready to commit any crime. The time has come, it is vital to act... An Officer.'

Nicholas enters into correspondence with this 'Officer'. He dili­gently describes the dispositions around him: how many guards, where the two machine guns are, and so on.

And finally he writes in his diary 'we prepared ourselves to be abducted by certain committed persons'.

Now the diary of the tsar, which the guards read while the prisoners were out walking, contained the words that were necessary. Now the Bolsheviks had proof of a conspiracy.

The imperial family was doomed, all of it.

Indeed, the question of the destruction of the whole imperial family was settled by Lenin, the Jacobin, even before the revolution.

In the journal 30 Days (no. 1, 1934) Bonch-Bruevich recalled some words of the young Lenin. Lenin had been delighted by a success­ful answer given in Dostoyevsky's The Devils by the revolutionary Nechaev, the main hero, whom Lenin had dubbed 'a revolutionary titan' and 'one of the blazing revolutionaries'.

As recalled by Bonch-Bruevich, the answer of Nechaev that had so pleased the young Lenin was as follows. To the question 'who should be destroyed from the ruling house?' Nechaev gave the crisp reply 'All the Great Ektenia' (the prayer for the ruling family, which lists all its members). 'Yes, the whole Romanov House - so simple that it amounted to genius,' said the delighted Lenin of Nechaev's answer.

And Lenin accomplished Nechaev's dream; the list of Romanov martyrs destroyed by the Bolsheviks was to be long.

But the most brutal massacre was to be the shooting of the imperial family at the Ipatiev house. There, four unwed girls, a sick adolescent, their mother and their father, were all murdered, one with another.

On the eve of the killing of the imperial family a circle of advancing Czechoslovak and Cossack units was tightening around Ekaterinburg - but slowly, as if the attackers were waiting for something. How awful to write this - as if they were waiting while the imperial family was disposed of. Is it possible that the liberation of the former Supreme Commander together with the authoritarian empress could have been deeply uncomfortable for the Whites' current commanders?

As for the students of the college, in the aftermath there would be many stories of secret groups of officers organised to liberate the imperial family - stories put about by the Cheka.

'A certain N attracted 37 student officers but fearing that the Bolshe­viks were on their trail they all fled to the advancing Czechoslovaks.' 'A certain Captain Bulyagin sent by the mother of the Tsar was arrested on the road to Ekaterinburg.' And so on.

These are all splendid post facto myths. The gentlemen officers had not forgiven the tsar and tsaritsa their failed war and the collapse of all order. The attitude of most officers towards the tsar is best of all char­acterised by an entry in the diary of Lt Gen. Baron Alexei Pavlovich von Buler (minister of war in the Russian government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak). He described the requiem mass that took place on 17 July 1919, a year after the murder of the imperial family:

They held a requiem mass for the imperial family in the cathedral. The democratic choir refused to sing. Nuns from a neighbouring monastery were invited, and alone made possible the solemnity of the service. The Archpriest conducted the mass well, including the proclamation oftitles.

Opposite the cathedral was the Archbishop's house where about ten assorted senior clergy live having cast off their pastoral role. Of these, none dared to come and pray for the departed soul of the man who for them was not only Tsar but also the Anointed of God. Senior officials at the requiem included me, Rozanov, Khreshatitsky, and the Urals General Khorotkin. The remainder made an effort to forget

the requiem so as not to compromise their democratic credentials.

After the requiem some elderly fellow looking over those gathered

in the cathedral (a few dozen, mostly old officers) loudly declaimed

'Ha, there aren't many decent people in Omsk.'

Meanwhile the Bolsheviks were right. The tsar could have become a living symbol, and above all a unifying symbol. The White movement had become subject to a law originally formulated by the eighteenth- century aristocrat Artemy Volinsky: 'We Russians don't need bread. We eat one another and thus are satisfied.'

The White leaders, generals, determinedly hated one another; Vrangel, Denikin; Denikin, Vrangel; neither of them liked Yudenich, and none of them Kolchak.

There was just one person who had the right to stand above them: God's anointed tsar. Only he could bind the movement together, damp down the generals' haughtiness, and become that unifying symbol.

Dark semi-literate Russia, where peasants not too long ago were christened on the tsar's passing train, could well have seen a revival of the belief ofwhich Archbishop Hermogen had written in 1918: 'Accord­ing to the sacred writings, former Emperors, Kings and Tsars who have lost power in their country do not lose their rank. That is granted to them by God . Thus an abandoned church is still a church, an over­thrown idol is still God.'

The tsar did a lot of thinking in his captivity and humiliation. He saw with pain that the most important thing in the forthcoming blood and savagery was to be able to forgive it. His daughter wrote in one of her last letters 'the sovereign asks that he not be revenged. He forgives all.'

'Pray gently for your enemies.' This is the last line of a poem left in a book found after their murder in the Ipatiev house. It remained as their testament.

Such a tsar was necessary for a maddened nation washed in the blood of civil war.

But he was not needed by history.

So he was not saved.

FANNY KAPLAN'S ATTEMPT TO KILL LENIN

August 1918

martin sixsmith

the flight of a bullet is among the slimmest. An inch to the left and a man dies; to the right, he lives. And when the target is Vladimir Lenin, an assassin's aim can change the fate of the world.

Few in the West are aware that on 30 August 1918 a volley of bullets, fired at close range, came within inches of ending Lenin's life. Fewer still are aware that the plot may well have been staged by agents of British intelligence.

In 1918 Soviet Russia was in its infancy, fragile and struggling to survive. The Bolshevik regime was beset by enemies within and without. Western troops and White armies were battling to bring it to its knees; Soviet power hung in the balance.

If Lenin had died, depriving the socialist state of his iconic leader­ship, the whole enterprise could have foundered; the twentieth century would have taken a different course. Conversely, had the assassination attempt never happened, some of the worst excesses of the Red Terror might have been averted - hundreds of thousands of people might not have lost their lives in the horrors of the Gulag.

hen the slim margins of history's what-ifs are measured,

So, what are the facts? While much else might be in dispute, the medical bulletin is not.

On the evening of 30 August, Lenin was driven from the Kremlin to the Zamoskvorechie district of Moscow to address the assembled workers of the Mikhelson (Hammer and Sickle) engineering factory. It was a hotbed of revolutionary fervour and Lenin had already spoken there at least four times. Originally built in the mid nineteenth century by an Englishman called Hopper, the factory is nowadays known as the Vladimir Ilyich Electromechanical Plant. It has commemorative plaques recording the occasions on which Lenin visited the build­ing. The plaques make no reference to the dramatic events of 1918, but when I turned up at the site in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the guards at the gate were happy to regale me with stories of 'the day Lenin nearly died'.

The Soviet leader, they said, had finished his speech and was leaving the building; they showed me the door from which he would have emerged into the factory's inner courtyard. His car was waiting nearby with the engine running, but Lenin paused to talk to some Bolshe­vik activists about the bread shortages that were plaguing the country. When a woman called out to him from the crowd he turned to face her, unaware she was clutching a Browning revolver under the folds of her cloak. Lenin had only a moment to glimpse his assailant's face before she fired three rapid shots. The first missed him, passing through the collar of his overcoat and wounding a bystander; the second lodged in his shoulder; the third punctured his left lung. Lenin's bodyguards rushed forward as he slumped to the ground, bundling him into the car and rushing him back to the Kremlin. He was unconscious and seem­ingly close to death. The woman was seized by angry members of the public, roughed up and handed over to the police.

The guards' stories were dramatic. They were told with genuine passion. But they were very much the product of official history, the version that decades of Soviet propaganda had inculcated in public opinion. Victors' history has held sway for nearly a century, but it hasn't removed the uncertainty that continues to cloud the events of autumn 1918.

I knew the guards' account was the official version because I had seen it in the cinema. Lenin in 1918, a black and white biopic from 1939, was one of the most widely viewed Soviet films, directed by Mikhail Romm, an artist feted by the Kremlin and a five-time winner of the Stalin Prize. It was the sequel to Romm's earlier Lenin in October, which told the story of the Bolshevik leader's role in the 1917 revolution, and it is undoubtedly the version the Kremlin wanted people to believe. It shows Lenin delivering a rousing speech to the factory workers, then stepping outside. Gunshots ring out and with a heroic look on his face Vladimir Ilyich clutches his chest. At this point the camera cuts to a menacing-looking woman skulking amid a crowd of people. Romm's movie shows the would-be assassin to be a disenchanted Socialist Rev­olutionary named Fanny Kaplan, who is arrested, tried and deservedly executed by an impartial Soviet judiciary.

But was this really how it all happened? Secrecy and doubt sur­rounded the aftermath of the assassination attempt; the regime was not slow to shape the story to its own political ends; and some histor­ians now question whether Kaplan pulled - or was even capable of pulling - the trigger.

Fanny Kaplan was born Feyga Chaimovna Roitblat on 10 Febru­ary 1890 in a Jewish settlement in what is now western Ukraine. Her childhood coincided with the upsurge in state sponsored anti-Semi­tism that sparked waves of deadly pogroms across the tsarist empire and prompted a mass exodus ofjews from Russia. Young Feyga didn't emigrate, but instead poured her resentment of the status quo into rev­olutionary activity, joining the Socialist Revolutionaries in her early teens.

Inspired by the socialist thinker Alexander Herzen, the SRs were the leading opposition force in the years before 1917. They were com­mitted to toppling tsarism and were prepared to use violence to do so; but their aim was a democratic socialism that would enfranchise the peasantry and rely on the ballot box as well as the revolver and the bomb. In the maelstrom of competing factions that emerged among the revolutionaries as 1917 transformed the political landscape, the SRs were to be eclipsed and destroyed by the messianic zealots of

Bolshevism, who had no time for either the peasants or democracy. In 1906, when Feyga Roitblat adopted the revolutionary pseudonym of Fanya - or Fanny - Kaplan, that split was yet to happen; but it would ultimately seal her fate.

Fanny Kaplan's first revolutionary act had been to take part in a plot to blow up the tsarist governor of Kiev, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, who had used the military to put down strikes and demonstrations in the city. Still aged only sixteen, Kaplan was romantically involved with the anarchist Viktor Garsky, the driving force behind the plot. As they were preparing the bomb in their room at the Commercial Hotel on Volosh- skaya Street, they dropped it and it exploded. Garsky was unscathed, but Kaplan received severe injuries to her hands and face, and for a time it seemed she would be permanently blind. In the ensuing chaos, Garsky ran away. Unable to see and barely able to walk, Kaplan was quickly arrested. At her trial on 5 January 1907 she was sentenced to death, but was spared execution because of her youth. Condemned instead to life in jail, she was transported later that year to the tsarist labour camps of Nerchinsk in Siberia. In the Maltsev prison she was stripped naked and flogged. With bomb fragments still lodged in her body, partially deaf and almost completely blind, she spent months in the prison hospital suffering constant pain. She recovered some of her sight, but she would experience excruciating headaches and extended periods of blindness for the rest of her days.

By early 1917, Kaplan had spent over a decade in captivity and the tsarist regime was falling apart at the seams. The February Revolution brought the socialists and liberals of the Provisional Government to power in Russia, committed to political reform and a democratically elected national parliament. The leader of the Provisional Govern­ment, Alexander Kerensky, had been a Socialist Revolutionary, just like Kaplan, and one of his first acts was to order the release of all polit­ical prisoners.

In early March Fanny Kaplan returned to Moscow. She benefited from the new government's generosity towards veterans of the revo­lutionary struggle with an official pass to stay at a health clinic in