On the evening of 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. When mobilization was declared, the whole nation rallied to the tsar. Plekhanov expressed a strong desire to defend the fatherland, and even Trotsky, who was not a defencist, wrote in the Paris newspaper Nashe slovo (Our Word) (formerly Golos, The Voice) that to preach the defeat of tsarist Russia made no sense, since that would mean advocating the victory of reactionary Germany. Only Lenin sensed intuitively the improbable, fantastic chance of achieving his hopes.
As patriotism sank in the mud and blood of the trenches, and hopes for victory faded, Lenin grew confident that neither Tsar Nicholas nor Kaiser Wilhelm would emerge from the war without a revolution. The intelligentsia, both in Russia and Germany, cursed the war and called for peace. But while each side hoped that its own army would not be defeated, only Lenin saw the war as an indispensable ally.
Unlike the peasant in his soldier's cloak, enduring gas attacks, or the prisoner of war in Saxony, or the impoverished family in the city, Lenin observed the war from the Russian émigré's grand circle, at first in Poronino and Vienna, and then in the neutral comfort of Berne and Zurich. How did the leader of the future Russian revolution fill the time during its prologue? Did he prepare himself for the rôle he was to play? Was he confident of the outcome? Until the February revolution, he led the quiet life of a man used to living far from home and not very much concerned with domestic cares. Life for Lenin in those years meant writing hundreds of letters to a relatively limited circle of people, among them his close Bolshevik associates Alexander Shlyapnikov, Alexandra Kollontai, Karl Radek, Grigory Pyatakov, S. Ravich, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, and his friend and benefactor Maxim Gorky. A large part of his correspondence was with Inessa Armand, he being in Zurich, she in Clarens on Lake Geneva near Montreux. It was an emotionally charged exchange between two very close people who, though they discussed revolutionary matters, tried to give each other something more than routine reports, more than confirmation of the posting of books or organizing links between Russia and Scandinavia.
Lenin spent a lot of time studying the works of Hegel, Aristotle and Lassalle, as well as Napoleon and Clausewitz, he read Victor Hugo's poetry and occasionally took Krupskaya to the local theatre. They were able to relax at a moderately priced spa in the mountain resort of Flums in St Gallen. When he was not writing letters, resting, holding meetings, travelling or rowing with his opponents, Lenin wrote articles, pamphlets and more substantial works such as ‘Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism’. Since the post from Russia was slow, he got his news from The Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Le Temps, and he gained the growing impression that an earthquake was approaching in Russia. The nation's weariness of the hardships imposed by the war and constant defeats was reaching a critical point, although what lay beyond even Lenin did not suspect.
In early January 1917 he gave a lecture at the People's House in Zurich on the twelfth anniversary of the 1905 revolution. The audience, mostly students, was sparse, and the lecture was boring, prolonged and largely descriptive. Lenin emphasized the fact that in 1905 the scale of civil unrest had been insufficient to topple the autocracy: ‘The peasants burned up to 2000 estates and divided the livestock among themselves … Unfortunately, this was only one-fifteenth of what they ought to have destroyed … They did not act with sufficient aggression, and that is one of the main causes for the failure of the revolution.’ He rushed on speedily through his notes, expressing the view that 1905 would remain ‘the prologue to the approaching European revolution’. He did not mention Russia as the scene of imminent rebellion, and also declared that the revolution would not come soon, concluding: ‘We old folks may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.’1
Democratic February
The two chief causes of the February revolution were the unsuccessful progress of the war and the weakness of the regime. Ostensibly, the Russian state collapsed suddenly, but its foundations had been eroded long before. As for the war, despite strategic failures, Russia's position was not hopeless. The front had been stabilized far from the Russian capital and other vital centres. A breakthrough by General Brusilov in the summer of 1916 had given the people hope in the possibility of an honourable outcome. Far-sighted politicians saw that Germany could not win, especially as the United States seemed likely to enter the war on the Allied side.
To be sure, Social Democratic agitation had its effect on the war-weary army, and the Germans managed to get Bolshevik-style propaganda into the Russian trenches, which would help the Kaiser rather than Russia. President of the Duma Rodzianko wrote in his memoirs that ‘the symptoms of the army's disintegration could be felt already in the second year of the war …Reinforcements from reserve battalions were arriving at the front with a quarter of the men having deserted … Sometimes, echelons bound for the front would halt because they had nothing left but officers and subalterns. Everyone else had scattered.’2 Socialist agitation among the peasants who were unwilling to fight was extremely effective, and the Bolsheviks were making their own independent contribution to the disintegration of the Russian army. On the whole, however, Russia had not yet exhausted her material and human resources on a war that came to seem increasingly just as the German occupation of her territory endured, especially since it was Germany that had started the war.
But the regime proved incapable of governing in a critical situation. Nicholas II's decision on 6 August 1915 to assume the post of Supreme Commander did not help. Almost the entire cabinet of ministers had protested that the tsar's decision could threaten both him and the monarchy.3 Nicholas was adamant, however, and departed for Staff Headquarters, leaving the capital to the hostile and venal groupings that had formed in his own entourage. In a country accustomed to one-man rule, the ‘domestic peace’ proclaimed by the Duma when war broke out soon evaporated.
Events in the capital developed their own momentum. On 27 February (12 March New Style) 1917, crowds broke into the Tauride Palace, where a Provisional Committee of the Duma was meeting. By the evening of the same day another claimant to power had emerged, namely the Soviet of Workers' Deputies, hastily convened by the Party organizations. Paul Milyukov, the leader of the Constitutional Democrats, and soon to become Foreign Minister in the post-tsarist government, later wrote: ‘The soldiers appeared last, but they were the masters of the moment, even if they did not realize it themselves.’ They did not behave like conquerors, but rather like men fearful of the consequences of having disobeyed orders and killed their commanding officers. ‘They were even less sure than we that the revolution had succeeded. They wanted recognition and protection.’4
In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a ‘long fatigue’ began which finally knocked away the foundations of the state, social stability and national unity. The main question was who would exploit the new situation. The dominant thought in the public mind was that only drastic measures of a revolutionary character could provide an outcome. Some figures close to the tsar believed that the situation had arisen out of weakness on the part of the regime. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich had written bitterly to the tsar less than one month before his abdication: ‘We are present at the unprecedented spectacle of a revolution from above, not from below.’5
Isolated in Zurich, Lenin had no feel for the nuances of the situation, and when on 2 (15) March he heard that the revolution had succeeded, he was amazed. He first heard of it from Moisei Bronsky, a quiet, retiring Polish Social Democrat from Lodz. Bronsky did not know much himself, except that telegrams had come from Russia. With Bronsky, Lenin wandered all around Zurich trying to find out something more definite, but all they heard was that there'd been a revolution in Petrograd, the ministers had been arrested and crowds were packing the streets. Lenin returned home in a state of excitement: he must do something. Pacing restlessly up and down, he exclaimed to Krupskaya, who was sitting quietly in her old armchair: ‘It's staggering! Such a surprise! Just imagine! We must get home, but how? It's so incredibly unexpected! Amazing!’ When he had calmed down somewhat, he wrote his first letter after hearing the news. It was to Inessa Armand, telling her what he had heard and describing the general state of agitation in Zurich. ‘If the Germans aren't lying, it has happened. Russia must have been on the brink of revolution for the last few days. I'm so excited I cannot possibly go to Scandinavia!!’6 Having only two months earlier predicted a long wait for such events, Lenin was now possessed of perfect hindsight, and like so many politicians, felt no need to recall what he had recently asserted.
He cabled Zinoviev in Berne suggesting he come to Zurich immediately, and simultaneously wrote to his most trusted agent, Yakov Ganetsky: ‘We must at all costs get back to Russia and the only possible plan is as follows: find a Swede who looks like me. But as I can't speak Swedish he'll have to be deaf and dumb. I'm sending my photo, in any case.’7 It was an order almost as tall as starting the world revolution, and was soon dropped in favour of a more practical one.
Meanwhile, the news from Petrograd was more and more staggering. The tsar had abdicated on 2 (15 New Style) March 1917, and so had his brother Michael, having first called on the people to submit to the Provisional Government, which had been ‘initiated by the State Duma and invested with full powers’ until a Constituent Assembly could be convened to determine the nature of government according to the will of the people.8 When Lenin read the list of names in the Provisional Government, he remarked sarcastically, ‘the bourgeoisie has managed to get its arse onto ministerial seats’. He had no doubt that these liberals were not one whit better than the tsar, and he regarded their adherence to democratic ideals as nothing better than an attempt ‘to make fools of the people’. In his first ‘letter from afar’ Lenin, accurately from the Bolshevik point of view, caught the flavour of the moment: apart from the Provisional Government there had emerged another ‘plaything’ of the regime, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, headed by N.S. Chkheidze, A.F. Kerensky and M.I. Skobelev. Only two Bolsheviks, Shlyapnikov and P.A. Zalutsky, were members of its executive committee. Lenin, however, saw in the existence of the two centres of power a unique opportunity for the Bolsheviks. In his view the Soviet was the prototype of the future dictatorship of the proletariat, while the Provisional Government, which might have introduced the principles of bourgeois democratic popular power, he saw as nothing other than the target of his frenzied attacks.
Less than a week after it had been formed, and without the slightest idea of what was happening in Petrograd and Russia, Lenin pronounced: ‘The government of Octobrists and Kadets, of the Guchkovs and Milyukovs …cannot give the people peace, bread or liberty.’9 The Octobrists had taken their name from the tsar's October 1905 Manifesto, and had been the political party most committed to attempting reform within the limits permitted by the tsar, rather than in constant opposition. The Kadets, that is the KDs, or Constitutional Democrats, were a fairly broad coalition of liberals, ranging from former Marxist revolutionaries to moderate reformers, who had spearheaded the criticism of the tsar's handling of the war effort and were effectively the dominant successors to the old regime. To attack the Provisional Government would undermine the possibility of a peaceful alternative to further revolution. It was therefore consistent for Lenin to tell the Bolsheviks, as they departed for Russia: ‘Our tactics are complete distrust, no support for the new government; we especially suspect Kerensky; we arm the proletariat as the only guarantee; we call for immediate elections to the Petrograd city council; we make no friendships with other parties.’10 It was a typical reaction: mentally Lenin had applauded the revolution, as his letter to Inessa Armand had shown, but power was in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and there were moderate socialists—Mensheviks—heading the soviets. None of this suited Lenin, who had shown he was incapable of compromise with such people. The only way forward was to arm the proletariat. Since the Bolsheviks had played no noticeable part in the February revolution, he had to change the scenario.
Before leaving Zurich, on 27 March Lenin made a speech in which he declared, with evident satisfaction, that ‘the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war in Russia has begun’.11 The February revolution was merely the first stage. ‘The unique historical situation of the present moment is as a moment of transition from the first stage of the revolution to the second, from the uprising against tsarism to the uprising against the bourgeoisie …’12 He ended his speech by declaring, ‘Long live the revolution! Long live the world proletarian revolution that has begun!’
In his first ‘letter from afar’ Lenin had described the present moment in Russian political life as ‘a bloodstained bundle’. But it was the Provisional Government that believed, rightly as it turned out, that remaining loyal to the Allies, rather than consciously assisting in the defeat of its own army, would cause less loss of Russian life. It would be hard to find a precedent in history when a political party, for the sake of gaining power, worked as consistently and as zealously for the defeat of its own country as the Bolsheviks were to do. It was, however, an essential link in the chain: the collapse of the state through military defeat would be followed by the seizure of power. The democratic forces of February were not capable of withstanding such a plan.
More surprising than Lenin's cynicism and anti-patriotism was the fact that he gained enough supporters to achieve his plan in so short a time. Whether he dreamed up the idea of a separate peace with Germany in Zurich, or whether he was entirely preoccupied with the question of getting back to Russia, or whether uppermost in his mind was how to exploit the ardent desire for peace of millions of people, it is not possible to say. With the imagination of the creative writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has suggested, probably rightly, that all these thoughts were jumbled together in Lenin's mind in the days following February and before his return to Russia in April.13 During that time, most politicians in Russia felt that February had opened up a great new chapter in their history, a chapter of democracy. Lenin, however, was convinced that if the country remained at that stage, he and his party would at best occupy an insignificant place among the opposition in the forthcoming Constituent Assembly. All the shrill revolutionary speeches of his followers would be seen as nothing but the sort of extreme leftism to which Western parliaments had become blithely accustomed. If the February revolution were to stick to the aims proclaimed by its leaders, there would be an opening for Lenin's old rivals, the Mensheviks, and that was unacceptable to him. He must get to Russia. Having invented and nurtured a tribe of ‘professional revolutionaries’, he now intended to make use of them. The chance might not come again, and he was already forty-seven.
Parvus, Ganetsky and the ‘German Key’
Lenin wrote urgently to his most trusted agent, Yakov Ganetsky in Stockholm, to find a way for him out of his Swiss blind alley. He asked Robert Grimm, a Swiss socialist, to test the possibility of travelling through Germany, but there was no rapid response there. Ganetsky, meanwhile, expeditious and resourceful as always, sent five hundred roubles for the journey,14 but there was still no plan, and Lenin began to wonder if he had missed the train of history. He wrote to Inessa: ‘It looks as if we won't get to Russia! England won't let us. [The idea of] going through Germany isn't working.’15 It is possible that the journey might indeed not have taken place at all, since Lenin was frankly afraid of either being arrested in England or sunk by a German U-boat. Perhaps, had he remained in Switzerland writing his ‘letters from afar’, the October revolution would never have happened. Trotsky was to write that without Lenin, October was inconceivable.
Besides the Bolsheviks, however, the German High Command was also interested in getting Lenin back to Russia. For some time they had not only been watching the Bolsheviks with interest, they had also been giving them substantial financial help through various front-men. German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg had been encouraged to do so both by the General Staff and some German Social Democrats, but in particular by Alexander Helphand, then the publisher of Die Glocke. In conversation with the German ambassador in Copenhagen, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Helphand insisted that there was danger in a separate peace with Russia, for the tsar would survive to stamp out the revolution. Only a German victory was acceptable. Helphand did not know that Lenin would soon state publicly that he had always been opposed to a separate Russo—German peace. In an article entitled ‘Where is the Regime and Where is the Revolution?’, published in July 1917 in Listok Pravdy, Lenin stated categorically that he had ‘always and unconditionally repudiated separate peace with Germany in the most decisive and irrevocable way!!’16 As we have seen, Lenin wanted the defeat of Russia and a civil war. It was a position the German High Command found deeply sympathetic, for their own ‘defeatists’ were hardly to be heard. As First Quartermaster General Erich von Ludendorff, the ‘military brain of the German nation’, was to write of this episode: ‘In helping Lenin to travel to Russia, our government accepted a special responsibility. The enterprise was justified from a military point of view. We had to bring Russia down.’17 The Bolshevik revolution, when it came, would offer Germany a unique opportunity to win the war. Ludendorff would declare frankly that the Soviet government ‘exists thanks to us’. It is worth noting that in May 1920, when the Politburo discussed the publication in Russian of Ludendorff's memoirs, it was unanimously decided that ‘only those sections dealing with the Brest negotiations should be translated and published’.18 Being in power, the Bolsheviks were not especially afraid of exposure, but it would nonetheless be embarrassing. Having secured the defeat of Russia, they had not only served their own interests, but also those of German militarism.
The ‘German factor’ in the Russian revolution has been extensively treated, especially in non-Soviet literature. The Russian Marxists preferred to say nothing, following Lenin's request (which curiously was not published immediately) ‘again and again to all honest citizens not to believe the dirty slander and dark rumours’.19 The Bolsheviks never attempted to disprove the accusation that they had made a deal with the Germans to ‘bring Russia down’. While the financial connections had evidently been indirect, it was impossible to deny the call for Russia's defeat. It was best either to say nothing, or simply ‘Don't believe the slanderers.’
The question that remains to be answered is whether there was a Bolshevik-German understanding on ‘peace propaganda’, as the Germans preferred to refer to this touchy question. Did the Bolsheviks receive German money for the revolution? The historian S.P. Melgunov claimed that one should look for the ‘German golden key in the pocket of Parvus [Helphand], who was connected both to the socialist world and the [German] foreign ministry and representatives of the German General Staff’, and that this explained the extraordinarily rapid success of Lenin's propaganda.20 The matter is one of the many secrets surrounding the revolution, and although I have examined a vast number of hitherto inaccessible documents, it is still far from clear. Much was decided within a small circle of Bolsheviks by word of mouth, many documents were destroyed after the revolution, and Lenin was very good at keeping secrets.
In order to lift the veil further, we must concentrate on two figures. The first is Alexander Lazarevich Helphand (also known as Parvus and Alexander Moskovich). The second, who is even more obscure, is Yakov Stanislavovich Fürstenberg (also known as Ganetsky, Hanecki, Borel, Hendriczek, Frantiszek, Nikolai, Marian Keller, Kuba …). In 1917 these two shadowy figures played the rô;le of unseen levers. They did not agitate the masses: their rôle was to help Lenin and his group secure the funds needed to do so.
Helphand was born three years before Lenin to a Jewish artisan in Berezicho in the province of Minsk. He went to school in Odessa and university in Berne, where he obtained a doctorate in philosophy. In the West he made the acquaintance of such grandees of the revolutionary movement as Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich, Zetkin, Kautsky and Adler, and he met Lenin and Krupskaya before the 1905 revolution. He acquired a reputation for great erudition, a paradoxical turn of mind, radical judgments and bold predictions. In a series of articles published in 1904 under the tide ‘War and the Revolution’, he forecast Russia's defeat at the hands of Japan, which duly came to pass the following year, and, as an inevitable consequence, a revolutionary conflagration at home. Lenin had long kept an eye on Parvus, but always kept his distance. He might have been thinking of Parvus (or perhaps himself?) when he said to Gorky: ‘the clever Russian is almost always a Jew or has Jewish blood in him.’21 Kautsky introduced Parvus to journalism, a profession at which he excelled.22 Trotsky was captivated by him, and fascinated by his theory of ‘permanent revolution’. After leaving Russia, Parvus joined the German Social Democrats and for a long time edited the Dresden paper Arbeiter Zeitung.
Like Trotsky, Parvus played a prominent part in the 1905 revolution—unlike Lenin, who was little more than an extra. Both Trotsky and Parvus were arrested in St Petersburg and exiled, separately, to Siberia, whence they both escaped, first to St Petersburg and then abroad. Despite his talent as a writer, Parvus left only a small literary record, including a book of recollections of his spell in the Peter-Paul Fortress after the defeat of the 1905 revolution. Most of his time was taken up with his favourite occupation, commerce, in which he did extremely well. He was Gorky's literary agent, and also represented his financial interests in Germany, where at one time his play Lower Depths was playing to full houses. According to Gorky, Parvus took his agreed twenty per cent of the profits for himself, dividing the rest one quarter to Gorky and three quarters to the German Social Democratic Party. Parvus amassed some 100,000 marks, but instead of sending Gorky his money, he wrote to him frankly admitting that he had spent it on a trip to Italy with a female companion. Gorky, who thought ‘it must have been a very pleasant holiday’ to have consumed only his quarter of the earnings, complained to the Central Committee of the German Social Democratic Party. A Party court made up of Kautsky, Bebel and Zetkin condemned Parvus morally, and he left Germany for Constantinople. There he became an advisor to the Young Turk movement, and carried on highly successful commerce between Turkey and Germany.23
When the war began, Parvus, now a rich man, became consumed by the idea of helping Germany by bringing about revolution in Russia, although there was more to his idea than this. In January 1915, Parvus explained his plan to Wangenheim, the German ambassador in Constantinople: ‘The interests of the German government are identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries. The Russian Democrats can only achieve their aim by the total destruction of Tsarism. On the other hand, Germany would not be completely successful if it were not possible to kindle a major revolution in Russia. However, there would still be a danger to Germany from Russia, even after the war, if the Russian empire were divided into a number of separate parts.’24 Here lay the essence of the German interest in the revolution, and its coincidence with Lenin's desire for revolution via the defeat of Russia. While it is clear that the plan existed and that the Germans were interested in it, it is not clear quite how the German government intended to carry it out, or how the Bolsheviks would achieve their part of it without losing face.
Western historians have asserted that Lenin met Parvus in Zurich or Berne in May 1915. David Shub claims that ‘at first Lenin listened attentively to Parvus's plan, but gave him no definite reply. To maintain contact with him, however, he sent Ganetsky-Fürstenberg to Copenhagen with orders to work in Parvus's Institute and to keep him systematically informed about Parvus's activities.’25 The official Soviet chronicle of Lenin's activities in May 1915 states that he ordered from Berne Library a guide-book of resorts and The Influence of High-Mountain Climate and Mountain Excursions on Man, but says nothing about a meeting with Parvus. For his part, however, Parvus described their meeting in detail in a pamphlet entitled, ‘In the Struggle for the Truth’, confirming that it took place in Zurich. Shub asserts, on the basis of Parvus's own testimony and other documents, that Parvus arrived in Switzerland in the company of Yekaterina Groman and took up residence in the most luxurious hotel. Through Groman, Parvus distributed largesse among needy Russian émigrés. One day in May he unexpectedly entered a restaurant where émigrés ate, and went straight to a table where Lenin, Krupskaya, Inessa Armand and Kasparov, another close friend, were sitting. After brief conversation, Lenin and Krupskaya accompanied Parvus to their apartment, where they talked until evening.
Parvus wrote of this meeting: ‘I told Lenin my views on the social-revolutionary consequences of the war and also drew his attention to the fact that, as long as the war was going on, there would be no revolution in Germany: revolution was possible only in Russia which would blow up as a result of a German victory.’ The meeting was confirmed by the Bolshevik, Arthur Zifeldt, who saw Lenin and Parvus leaving the restaurant together.26
Parvus made it known that he was setting up a new institute in Copenhagen to study the causes and effects of the war, and he succeeded in recruiting a number of Russian Social Democrats, among them some Mensheviks and some Bolsheviks, including, most notably, Yakov Ganetsky, Lenin's most trusted agent.27 Parvus had frequent meetings with another of Lenin's close associates, Karl Radek, who in 1924 wrote a sketch of him, based on personal recollections. Radek quoted Parvus saying of himself: ‘I'm Midas in reverse: whenever I touch gold it turns into garbage.’ Twenty years after the events, in an article entitled ‘Parvus—Lenin—Ganetsky’, Kerensky wrote: ‘The Provisional Government firmly established that Ganetsky's “financial affairs” with Parvus were continued in Petrograd by the Bank of Siberia, where in the name of a relative of Ganetsky called Madame Sumenson, and also the not unknown Kozlovsky, very large sums came from Berlin via the New Bank in Stockholm through the mediation of the same Ganetsky.’ Kerensky could rightly claim that the first historical research into Bolshevik—German links was carried out by his government.
Materials in the Special Archive frequently record that in 1916 a special section was created in Berlin under the name ‘Stockholm’, headed by a certain Trautmann, who maintained contact with Parvus and Radek through Ganetsky. The archives also hold the addresses in Copenhagen where Parvus and Ganetsky lived not far from each other.28 An Austro-Hungarian diplomat in Copenhagen, one Grebing, also recalled that ‘Parvus and Fürstenberg-Ganetsky carried on trade between Scandinavia and Russia with German help. The export of German goods into Russia went regularly and in significant quantities through the firm of Parvus-Ganetsky in the following manner: Parvus would receive goods from Germany, including surgical instruments, medical and chemical products, contraceptives, and clothes which were needed in Russia, and Ganetsky, as the Russian agent, would forward them. None of the money realized from the sale of these goods in Russia was, however, paid to the Germans, but was instead used to finance Lenin's propaganda from the first day of the revolution.’29 The system worked superbly to screen the financial connections. Similarly, Bolshevik abuse of Parvus as a ‘renegade’, ‘social chauvinist’ and ‘revisionist’ also provided intermittent camouflage and an impression of their distance from him.
Commentaries in the Special Archive show that Parvus's political activity was based on an extremely broad range of commercial speculation: ‘His deals in Denmark, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia in food, grain, coal, medicines, his participation in German propaganda, his supplying the German General Staff with both Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik literature, speculation on freight contracts in Scandinavia, all brought Parvus capital worth several tens of millions, which he deposited in Zurich banks.’30
Although Lenin was not personally involved in any of these dealings, he was well informed about them. Moreover, they could not take place without his agreement, although in the event of their public failure, he would have remained in the clear. Among a collection of purely financial documents, showing the delivery of goods and payments to Madame Sumenson from Ganetsky (the majority having long been destroyed),31 are various cables of summer 1917 to and from Lenin on such issues as the planned International Socialist Congress in Stockholm (which did not take place).32 The cables themselves are often couched in enigmatic language, obviously coded to screen a hidden purpose.
The money, meanwhile, was much needed. A former tsarist counter-intelligence agent, recruited by the Provisional Government to investigate Bolshevik links with the Germans, found that one of the channels for financing the Party on the eve of the revolution ran from Ganetsky to Sumenson.33 Evidently this channel functioned uninterrupted for a long time—one cable informing Ganetsky that Sumenson had deposited 100,000 roubles is numbered ‘90’.34
The historian Sergei Melgunov, who did not know of the existence of these documents, was nevertheless able to assert that Yevgeniya Mavrikevna Sumenson had a large account with the Bank of Siberia: ‘Financial experts later ascertained that there was about one million roubles in this account, of which about 800,000 was removed on the eve of the revolution … Kozlovsky would go round the banks in the morning, taking out money in some and opening new accounts in others.’35
When on 8 July 1917 Sumenson was arrested by the Provisional Government's counter-intelligence service, she confirmed all these facts, and more. The handwritten notes made by the assistant chief of the counter-intelligence branch of the Petrograd military district show that in all ‘two million thirty thousand and forty three roubles’ had passed between Ganetsky and Sumenson,36 a huge sum for the time. Sumenson also declared that on Ganetsky's orders she had ‘given Mecheslav Yulyevich Kozlovsky money as soon as he asked for it (without taking any receipts from him), as he was [Ganetsky's] first deputy …’ The documents also show that she ‘transferred 230,000 roubles to a firm in Switzerland via the Azov-Don Bank’. She stated that she had received 288,929 roubles for the first delivery of medicines sent from Stockholm by Ganetsky in December 1915.37 Whether or not this was connected with Lenin's meeting with Parvus in Switzerland in May, the fact is that in July 1915 von Jugow of the German foreign ministry requested the treasury to transmit five million marks to intensify revolutionary propaganda in Russia, and the request was granted on 9 July.38 It seems reasonable to conclude that the ‘German money’ began to work actively for the Bolsheviks in 1915, after the meeting in May.
When the Provisional Government's investigator interrogated Ganetsky's brother Vikenty in August 1917, it emerged that Ganetsky had suddenly become rich and was running a big business. Vikenty resisted all attempts to determine the nature of this ‘business’: ‘Every time I began talking about his brother's wealth and his enterprises, [Vikenty] immediately tried to change the subject … During our conversation, the lawyer Kozlovsky came in; they spoke very quietly … Vikenty also revealed that among the family his brother would talk only about politics, but “we never found out anything about his commercial affairs”.’39 This was quite a significant admission. Ganetsky was a ‘professional revolutionary’, and therefore capable of keeping a secret, especially one that involved the entire Party, even if it was known only to a handful of people. Lenin valued Ganetsky, and in the summer of 1917 defended him from attack in the Central Committee and the Politburo over the government's accusations in connection with the German money. In June 1918, in a letter to Adolf Ioffe, his emissary in Berlin, Lenin emphasized that ‘Krasin and Ganetsky, being businesslike people, will help you and everything will be all right’.40
The Provisional Government's investigation was disorganized, and clearly the case was beyond it. As Kerensky later claimed, ‘all further events in the summer of 1917, indeed the entire history of Russia, would have been different had the commission managed to complete the difficult task of exposing Lenin completely, and had it been possible to prove with documents in a court of law the monstrous crime, which no one wanted to believe, precisely because it seemed so utterly unlikely psychologically’. Kerensky himself believed the link between the Bolsheviks and the Germans went as far as complete understanding, ‘far beyond payment of money for the collapse of Russia, as some saw it, and the achievement of social revolution, as others saw it’.41 Kerensky was correct in assuming such an ‘understanding’ existed. The Bolsheviks, indeed, came to an understanding with the Germans over several issues. For example, in late August 1918, in a handwritten note to Vorovsky, the Soviet envoy in Sweden, Lenin, speaking of a supplementary treaty just signed with the Germans, declared: ‘Nobody ever asked the Germans for “help”, but we had an understanding about when and how they, the Germans, would carry out their plan to attack Murman and [General] Alexeev. There was a coincidence of interests. We would have been idiots not to have taken advantage of it…’42
Lenin did not deny the possibility of coming to an understanding with the Germans. If they could agree to exploit the fact of a German attack on General Alexeev's forces in August 1918, they could have had an ‘understanding’ about a joint effort to bring down tsarism a year earlier.
The huge rise in Bolshevik publications after the February revolution did not come about by chance. By July 1917 the Party was bringing out forty-one newspapers with a daily circulation of 320, 000, twenty-seven of them in Russian and the remainder in Georgian, Armenian, Latvian, Tatar, Polish and other languages. Ninety thousand copies of Pravda alone were printed each day. Membership fees could never have sustained such a volume of publication. After February the Party paid 260, 000 roubles for a press,43 and the Party leaders were receiving their salaries, even if irregularly. The Bolshevik coffers were not empty.
When some meagre information supplied by Alexinsky, Yermolenko, Burtsev and others raised a furore in the press over Bolshevik links with the Germans, Lenin published an article in Listok Pravdy entitled, ‘Where is the Regime and Where is the Counter-Revolution?’. Dismissing the accusations laid by Alexinsky, a former member of the Second Duma, as ‘slanderous filth’, he advanced two arguments which, he believed, would demolish the ‘shoddy work of the newspaper slanderers’. First, Ganetsky ‘was recently given free entry into Russia and allowed out again’.44 This, however, had taken place before the furore arose, and, more important, since Ganetsky travelled on several different passports, he could have arrived under any one of his many aliases. On this point Kerensky recalled that all the facts relating to Lenin's financial connections with the Germans had been collected by the commission in early May, and that although they were of a very serious nature from the security service's point of view, they would not have stood up in court. The case was to be incontrovertibly confirmed by the anticipated arrest of Ganetsky at the border. The publication of some of this material in the press, however, ‘put the Bolshevik headquarters on guard. Ganetsky's trip was postponed and the government lost the opportunity to prove with documentary evidence the chief facts compromising Lenin and Co.’45
Lenin's second argument was intended to be the main one: ‘Ganetsky and Kozlovsky are not Bolsheviks, but members of the Polish Social Democratic Party … The Bolsheviks have received no money whatsoever from either Ganetsky or Kozlovsky. It's all lies, lies of the crudest kind.’46 In ‘Reply’, an article Lenin published in Rabochii i soldat on 26 and 27 July 1917—that is, after the government had issued the decree for his arrest and when he was already in hiding in Finland—he wrote that Parvus had employed other émigrés besides Ganetsky. ‘The prosecutor is playing on the fact that Parvus is linked to Ganetsky and Ganetsky is linked to Lenin! But that is a dirty trick, as everyone knows that Ganetsky had financial dealings with Parvus, while we had none with Ganetsky.’47
Who was telling the truth? Whose tricks were ‘dirty’? Lenin's assertion that Ganetsky and Kozlovsky were not Bolsheviks was entirely untrue. When Ganetsky was arrested in 1937, his interrogator noted that he had been ‘a member of the Bolshevik Party since 1986’.48Leaving aside the fact that the Party did not come into existence until 1898, the point was that Ganetsky had been involved in Russian revolutionary politics almost as long as anyone. In fact, he had been a prominent figure in both the Polish and Russian revolutionary movements at the same time. He was a delegate at the Second, Fourth and Fifth Congresses of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, and at the Fifth this ‘non-Bolshevik’ was elected to the Party Central Committee, while in 1917 he was a member of the Party's Foreign Bureau, in effect its central committee abroad. Much the same could be said of Kozlovsky, who in 1917 was a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. And what are we to make of Lenin's assertion that he had no financial dealings with Ganetsky, and still more, of his claim that ‘everyone knows’ that Ganetsky had financial links with Parvus?
After the February revolution, Lenin's correspondence with Ganetsky was exceded in quantity only by that with Inessa Armand. At the beginning of March he cabled Ganetsky that he was about to send him ‘an important letter’.49 A further cable of 15 March referred to Lenin's planned return to Russia, and in the following weeks, until his return, Lenin sent cables or letters to Ganetsky almost every day, including one with instructions ‘to set aside two or three thousand crowns for the journey from Switzerland to Russia’.50 He would soon inform Inessa that the money had been received from Stockholm,51 adding a little later that ‘we have more money for the journey than I'd thought’,52 which suggests there may have been more than one remittance from Ganetsky. Why, then, did he declare that he had never had any financial relations with Ganetsky? He knew Ganetsky had money at his disposal when he asked him to send it. How could he accuse the Provisional Government of ‘dirty tricks’?
The decision to travel through Germany was taken quickly. Parvus involved not merely the German High Command and foreign ministry in the affair, but the Kaiser himself, and the Germans were perfectly frank in their intentions. The German ambassador in Copenhagen, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, advised the foreign ministry to ‘back the extremist elements, as this … would lead more quickly to some conclusion. In all probability, we should, in about three months' time, be able to count on the disintegration having reached the stage where we could break the power of the Russians by military action.’53
French counter-intelligence, not to be left out, reported in the spring of 1917 that Lenin, together with Angelica Balabanova, a Swiss socialist called Mueller and Henri Guilbeau, the French editor of the journal Demain, met a representative of the German embassy called Dallenvach at Scioppa's restaurant in Berne. The meeting concerned Lenin's forthcoming journey through Germany to Russia.54
Lenin was well aware that the Germans were just as interested in allowing Russian revolutionaries to pass through Germany as he was, and through the Swiss socialist Fritz Platten he set certain conditions which he hoped would provide the Bolsheviks with a political and historical alibi. He strengthened his own cover by refusing to meet Parvus in Stockholm. Parvus recalled the incident: ‘I was in Stockholm when Lenin was passing through. He refused a personal meeting. Through a mutual friend I conveyed to him that the main aim now was peace, and hence the conditions for peace. I asked what he intended to do. Lenin replied that he was not involved in diplomacy, his business was social revolutionary agitation.’55 Not suprisingly, once he had achieved his aim, Lenin rejected Parvus with contempt. The deed was done. The machine, started by Parvus, required no further personal contact.
Finally, Lenin established his alibi by giving pride of place on the journey to Mensheviks. In ‘How we Arrived’, published simultaneously in Pravda and Izvestiya on 18 April 1917, he wrote that it had been Martov's idea to travel through Germany.56 The problem for Lenin had been a simple one: he wanted to get to Russia, all other routes were closed to him, he was concerned about what his enemies would say, and he knew the Mensheviks would be unable to attack him if their leader also returned by the same route.57
When their Swedish ferry docked at Trolleborg, Lenin was met by Ganetsky, who travelled with the party on to Malmö and Stockholm, where Lenin managed to find time to buy footwear and a pair of trousers. Ganetsky provided the Bolsheviks with everything they needed, including tickets for the rest of the journey. Yet Lenin would later insist he had had no financial dealings with Ganetsky.
The press and the Swedish social democrats took a great interest in Lenin during his stopover in Stockholm. A dinner in his honour was held in the Hotel Regina, he was filmed, gave press interviews, and was welcomed by the mayor, K. Lindhagen. Feeling that he was entering a phase for which he had waited and worked all his life, he spoke like a leader, like the brain and nerves of the revolution. And he was impatient to move ahead: socialism was no longer a distant Utopia.
On the way to the Russian border he sent a cable to Karpinsky in Geneva, expressing satisfaction with the way the Germans had observed the agreed conditions. He also cabled Petrograd, suggesting his arrival be announced in Pravda: he was not returning like an ordinary émigré, but like an instant leader.
When Lenin's connections with the Germans were being investigated by the Provisional Government, and the order for his arrest was issued in July 1917, no less than twenty-one volumes of evidence were collected. But the case fizzled out because Kerensky thought the main threat to his regime was coming from the right, and that he needed support from the left, including the Bolsheviks. After the seizure of power, Lenin at once set about dealing with all this compromising evidence. He took personal charge of finding, confiscating and apparently destroying it. On instructions from Trotsky, as foreign commissar, on 16 November 1917 F. Zalkind and E. Polivanov reported that the materials of the incomplete investigation had been confiscated. They reported as follows:
To the Chairman of the Soviet of People's Commissars: In-accordance with the resolution passed by … Comrades Lenin,Trotsky, Podvoisky, Didenko and Volodarsky, we have done the following:
1. In the Ministry of Justice archives, from the files on ‘the treason’ of Comrades Lenin, Zinoviev, Kozlovsky, Kollontai and others, we have removed German Imperial Bank Order No 7, 433 dated 2 March 1917 authorizing payment of money … for peace propaganda in Russia.
2. We have examined all the books of the New Bank of Stockholm … opened on order No. 2, 754 of the German Imperial Bank …58
The materials collected by the Provisional Government include a number which mention the Bolshevik leaders, but their authenticity cannot be established beyond doubt. They are surveys prepared by the investigators. The instructions to finance individuals engaged in peace propaganda are too flagrant to take seriously. It has been shown that a large number of documents disappeared without trace, and it would be surprising if the Bolsheviks had not taken such steps to destroy compromising material.
The investigation was intended to show that Lenin and his comrades had simply been bought by German intelligence, but this does not seem likely. A more realistic picture emerges from the circumstantial evidence. Parvus, and possibly also the Estonian Kesküla, with the agreement of the German foreign ministry and General Staff, ‘fed’ the firm of Ganetsky, Sumenson and Kozlovsky in their commercial ventures. Without Parvus's German help Ganetsky would never have been able to start his ‘business’. According to his brother, in 1914 he had been so poor he couldn't afford to buy milk for his child.59
A significant part of the money handled by Ganetsky reached Bolshevik coffers by various routes. As the historian of the ‘Russo-Scandinavian revolutionary connection’, Michael Futrell, has concluded: ‘Surveying [Ganetsky's] previous career, it is difficult to imagine that he would devote himself to money-making for any other principal purpose than aiding the revolutionary cause.’60 This seems a reasonable assumption. Ganetsky engaged in commerce because it answered Lenin's political needs. Before and after the revolution, millions of roubles and a vast quantity of valuables passed through his hands. For instance, he engaged in lengthy negotiations with the Poles over reparations following the Riga Peace Treaty in 1920, and he was deputed by the Politburo to sell huge quantities of the tsar's diamonds, gems, gold and jewellery abroad. Yet when he was arrested in 1937, all that was found in his apartment was two dollars, and not a single valuable object.61 Either nothing had ‘stuck to his fingers’, or it is still salted away in Swiss accounts, or it all went into Party funds. As Lenin himself said, Ganetsky was a man of intellectual conviction. Commerce was his Party job.
After the revolution, one of the first to try to unravel the secret of the German money was the German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein. In 1921, he published an article in the Party newspaper, Vorwärts, in which he stated that it was known, and had been confirmed by General Hoffmann, that the Kaiser's government had allowed Lenin and his comrades to pass through Germany so that they could carry on their agitation in Russia. ‘Lenin and his comrades received vast sums of money from the Kaiser's government for their destructive agitation.’ Bernstein wrote that he had known about this in December 1917, and that it had been confirmed by someone who knew about it because of his job. Bernstein did not know the amount of money Lenin had received, nor who the contacts between Lenin and the government had been. He went on: ‘From absolutely reliable sources I have now ascertained that the sum was very large, an almost unbelievable amount, certainly more than fifty million gold marks, a sum about the source of which Lenin and his comrades could be in no doubt. One result of all this was the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. General Hoffmann, who negotiated with Trotsky and other members of the Bolshevik delegation at Brest, held the Bolsheviks in his hand in two senses, and he made sure they felt it.’62
A week later Bernstein published a second article in Vorwärts in which he challenged the German Communists and Russian Bolsheviks to take him to court if they thought he had libelled Lenin. The Central Committees of both parties, however, maintained their silence, virtually confirming Bernstein's assertions. The question arises of whether the German funds were as great as was suggested. Bernstein seems to have been referring to all the money transferred since 1915. On 3 December 1917 German State Secretary Richard von Kühlmann reported to the German Military High Command: ‘It was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels and under different labels that they were in a position to be able to build up their main organ, Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda, and appreciably to extend the originally narrow base of their party … It is entirely in our interest that we should exploit the period while they are in power, which may be a short one, in order to attain firstly an armistice and then, if possible, peace. The conclusion of a separate peace would mean the achievement of the desired war aim, namely a breach between Russia and her allies.’63
Similarly, on 3 June 1918—a month before he was assassinated—Count Mirbach, the German ambassador in Moscow, cabled that he needed three million marks a month, and maybe more, to counter Allied propaganda in Russia. A few days later Counsellor Trautmann of the German Foreign Ministry informed the Treasury that Mirbach had been spending large sums to counter Allied propaganda: ‘The fund which we have so far had at our disposal for acquisitions in Russia is exhausted. It is therefore essential that [the Treasury] put a new fund at our disposal. In view of the conditions set out above, this fund will have to amount to at least forty million marks.’64
While the documents show many varied figures from both the German and Russian sides participating in this affair, Lenin stood in the wings and watched while the play, created with his involvement and agreement, was performed. He was very cautious, made very few slips, such as claiming that he'd had no financial dealings with Ganetsky, and left few traces on the affair. Having approved this enormously important anti-Russian operation, he made the maximum use of the opportunities presented by the Germans. They both sought the defeat of tsarism, and they were both satisfied.
The Bolsheviks did not want to expatiate on the ‘German key’, although they never let any mention of it pass without exploiting it. At the end of January 1919, for instance, Foreign Commissar Chicherin cabled Trotsky: ‘The radio has just reported that the Paris newspaper Le Populaire is carrying a report from the New York evening Times to the following effect: the legend about contacts between the Bolshevik leaders and the German empire has finally been refuted. In January 1918 Russian counter-revolutionaries sent Colonel Robbins a number of documents showing there was a link between the German government and Lenin and Trotsky. Robbins conducted an investigation and questioned Galperin who admitted that many of the documents had been in the hands of the Kerensky government and are obvious forgeries … The former publisher of Cosmopolitan Magazine, Versta Sisson, agreed with Robbins, but later changed his mind. After being passed around for a long time, the documents were finally sold to the Americans for 100,000 [probably US dollars].’65
After the Bolshevik seizure of power, Parvus decided to test himself again in the arena of revolution, as he had in 1905. In mid-November 1917, he met Radek in Stockholm and asked him to pass a personal request to Lenin, namely to give him permission to return to Russia to do revolutionary work. He had experience, a good brain, plenty of money, and he still had his strength. He added that his reputation had been stained by collaborating with ‘social patriots’, and Lenin had called him a ‘chauvinist’, but everything he did had been for the success of the revolution in Russia. In wishing for a German victory, he had wanted to bring the Russian revolution closer. He was even prepared to face a Party court. Three weeks later, Radek returned to Stockholm with Lenin's reply: ‘The cause of the revolution must not be sullied by dirty hands.’ Parvus was deeply disappointed. Were the Bolshevik hands that had taken his money any cleaner? His name, however, could only compromise Lenin. His appearance in Petrograd would only confirm the accusation of treason against the Bolsheviks.
The German government also cooled towards Parvus, and cut off his credit for new commercial ventures, upon which Parvus demanded a million marks not to publish compromising documents. Whether or not the blackmail worked or the contretemps was resolved some other way, there was no scandal.66 He then set out to write a large book of memoirs, and he had plenty to say. The last two decades had been tumultuous: women, wine, audacious financial operations and fantastic plans. After October 1917, now grossly overweight, Parvus continued to live as if he was still thirty, but the fountain of youth was rapidly petering out. In December 1924, ten months after Lenin's death, Parvus's heart failed, and what had been said at the notorious May 1915 meeting died with him. His memoirs were never written.
Although Parvus's son, Alexander Gnedin, officially condemned his father's political position, it did not save him. He was arrested in 1939, and amazingly survived sixteen years in the camps. In 1977 he published a book dealing chiefly with his long-drawn-out effort—on the orders of the Soviet government—to acquire his father's estate on behalf of the USSR.67 But Parvus had been surrounded by clever individuals who had ensured that his money should go elsewhere. Gnedin did, however, manage to retrieve his father's library and some of his papers, both of which had first been ‘examined’ by Chekists, in accordance with normal procedure. Naturally, they left nothing that could compromise Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
Ganetsky's fate was more tragic. He did not die, like Parvus, in his own bed. At first, thanks to Lenin's patronage, he held important posts in the commissariats of finance and trade and the economy. Lenin often gave him delicate and sometimes personal missions. In April 1921 he asked him ‘to be so kind as’ to buy items on a list for Krupskaya, and in May he asked him—‘using the Swiss money I gave you’—to buy ‘flour (rye, if possible), sausage, canned goods (but not delicatessen), meat and fish …’ And on another occasion, shoelaces for Krupskaya and French bread rolls.68
The dozens of documents signed or seen by Lenin and associated with Ganetsky are almost invariably about money. For instance, Ganetsky reported that they had received 83,513 Danish kroner from Karl Moor, a Swiss Social Democrat of German nationality. What was he to do with the money? Lenin could not recall why they had received it. Zinoviev had a suggestion: ‘I think it should be handed over to Comintern. After all, Moor will only drink it up.’69
Lenin knew Moor well. As a member of the cantonal parliament and government in Berne, he had issued residence permits to Lenin and Krupskaya, as well as to Inessa Armand. What Lenin did not know, and what only became known after the Second World War, was that Moor was also a paid agent of Berlin. Under the name of Baier, he had been sending regular reports on Bolshevik activities and intentions to the German embassy in Berne. And he was well informed, since he knew Lenin, Radek, Shklovsky, Zinoviev and other revolutionaries. In September 1917 he suddenly decided to give the Bolshevik Central Committee a large sum of money. He explained that he had unexpectedly inherited a substantial estate. In fact the estate had come to him in Germany in 1908, and the money he now wanted to give the Bolsheviks came from the German High Command. His paymasters hoped that by this move Moor would earn the special trust of the Bolshevik leadership. To be sure, the Central Committee had its doubts about the source of the money, and as there was unease about the Provisional Government's investigation of Bolshevik links with Berlin, it decided to decline the ‘gift’. Ganetsky told the Central Committee that the 83,513 Danish kroner was in fact ‘the remainder of the money already received from Moor’.70
Moor was just one of the channels by which German money entered Bolshevik coffers. He remained in Soviet Russia and continued to inform Berlin about the Bolshevik leadership. He met Lenin several times, and despite the suspicions that existed about him, he managed to carry on as Baier. When he died in Berlin on 14 June 1932, aged almost eighty, Radek wrote an obituary in Izvestiya in which he made the unexpected admission that Moor had helped the Bolsheviks financially. Only a few people, including Radek, knew that this money had come from the German General Staff.
After Lenin's death, Ganetsky disappeared into the shade, though he continued to work in the middle ranks of government. In 1935 he was appointed director of the State Museum of the Revolution, his last job. On 18 July 1937, together with his wife, Giza Adolfovna, and son Stanislav, he was arrested as a German and Polish spy. Books and pamphlets by the now-disgraced Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Bukharin and Shlyapnikov, seventy-eight works in all, were found in his apartment, providing ample evidence of his ‘treachery’. During the search he managed to write to the chief of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, with a pencil that kept breaking: ‘nightmarish tragic accident has occurred: they have arrested me tonight! They're already calling me an enemy! What's going on? How could such a ghastly mistake be made? I ask you, I beg you: 1) Stop all repression against my family. 2) Tell them to interrogate me at once. Summon me yourself and you'll see what an obviously horrible misunderstanding it is!’ At the top of the page he scrawled feverishly: ‘I ask for this to be delivered at once!’71 It was a cry in vain.
The charge against Ganetsky was that, during a visit to Poland on Stalin's orders on 20 September 1933 to retrieve a Lenin archive, he had held a number of unauthorized meetings with Polish military intelligence officers. The NKVD naturally concluded he had been engaged in espionage. His interrogator also informed him that he had been a German spy since the war—which was not far from the truth. Ganetsky could not mention his work for Lenin, as he feared that it would bring instant punishment, and instead he counted on Stalin's intervention. Unlike the Provisional Government, which sought hard evidence, the NKVD simply assumed that anyone who had had so much contact with foreigners must be a spy. Moreover, anyone who knew as much as Ganetsky was regarded as dangerous. Before the fate of such people was decided, however, Stalin was always consulted. As in this case, he usually gave the laconic response ‘Liquidate.’72
At Ganetsky's trial one witness, the Bolshevik Maximilian Gustavovich Valetsky (executed in September 1937, i.e. immediately after giving evidence), testified that Ganetsky had been a close companion of Parvus, itself an incriminating circumstance. Valetsky accurately described their operations in 1916-17, adding that they had been helped by Kozlovsky and Sumenson. During his own interrogation, Ganetsky reminded his torturers that the reason he had gone to Poland in 1933 was to retrieve a Lenin archive, but it did not help. As he wriggled to save himself, another witness, his assistant Petermeier, stated that when he had travelled to Berlin he had collected German marks from a certain Mr Senior on Ganetsky's instructions.73
Despite appalling torture, Ganetsky did not break, and never confessed to spying. Few were as tough. In a ‘trial’ lasting precisely fifteen minutes, from 11 to 11.15 a.m. on 26 November 1937, he was condemned to death as a spy and Trotskyist by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, chaired by Nikitchenko. His last words to the court were ‘I consider myself guilty of nothing.’ The record shows that he was shot the same day, as were his wife and son.74 His surviving daughter, Hannah, was later informed that he had died of heart disease on 21 January 1939, that her mother had died of stomach cancer on 29 December 1938, and that her brother Stanislav had died of pneumonia on 24 November 1941.75
Thus ended the life of one of Lenin's most trusted agents, the man who knew too much about the Bolsheviks' secret financial links with the ‘merchant of revolution’ for his own good.
Lenin and Kerensky
Alexander Kerensky was born in Lenin's birthplace, Simbirsk, on 22 April 1881. His father, Fedor, was the headmaster of the high school where Alexander and Vladimir Ulyanov were educated. Kerensky obtained his secondary education in Tashkent, Central Asia, where his father became head of the educational administration, and subsequently graduated from St Petersburg University with a degree in law. In 1905 he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which retained an element committed to terrorism, and it was this aspect of the Party's activities Kerensky had hoped to promote. He was, however, arrested, and spent a short time in prison and exile between 1905 and 1906, before returning to St Petersburg to set out on his career as a defence lawyer. He acquired a considerable reputation as a successful advocate in political cases.
In 1912 he was elected to the State Duma as a member of the Labour Group (Trudoviks) of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The popular press had blossomed in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution and the considerably widened margin of freedom granted by the tsar, and soon Kerensky, a brilliant and imaginative orator, had a popular following among the working class. At informal meetings of the Duma opposition, where Russia's bleak fortunes in the war were the subject of endless debate and plotting, he called for the assassination of the tsar. When the tsar abdicated in March, Kerensky became Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government that came to power. He was responsible for abolishing ethnic and religious discrimination and also the death penalty.
Like many socialists, Kerensky often had the French Revolution in mind. The Provisional Government chose ‘The Marseillaise’ as its national anthem, it appointed ‘revolutionary commissars’, planned a ‘Constituent Assembly’, and before long there would be talk of ‘Russian Marats and Robespierres’. Somewhere between the left and right in his political disposition, and a man of compromise, Kerensky had contacts across a wide political spectrum, from conservative to liberal to socialist. Just before the February revolution he had become secretary of an important branch of the Russian political Freemasons, and it was on the basis of this network that many of his political alliances were founded.
Shortly after Lenin's arrival in Petrograd in April 1917, Kerensky expressed a desire to see him. Meeting Lenin, he felt, might reinforce support from the left. The executive secretary of the Provisional Government, Vladimir Nabokov—father of the writer—noted in his memoirs that Lenin was hardly ever mentioned at government sessions. ‘I remember Kerensky, in April after Lenin had returned, saying that he'd like to meet and have a chat with him and, in reply to the puzzled questions that followed, explaining that the Bolshevik leader was “living in a completely isolated atmosphere, he knows nothing and sees everything through the lens of his own fantasies, and he has no one to help him get his bearings on what's going on”.’76 Kerensky believed he was the one to help Lenin ‘get his bearings’. Through intermediaries, Lenin declined a meeting. He had dismissed Kerensky as nothing more than the hero of the moment, and would make no compromises with him. Kerensky had no future.
In a sense, Lenin was right: Kerensky did not want to unite openly either with the Bolsheviks or the White generals. He always imagined there was a ‘third way’. While the civil war was raging, he wrote: ‘Social justice, liberty and free men have all been trampled by Red and White sergeant-majors alike. But a decisive third force will yet prevail against them.’77 The third force he had in mind was the people's democracy, or people power, born in February. Throughout all the subsequent years he spent as an émigré, Kerensky claimed that the tsarist generals were the counter-revolution of the right and the Bolsheviks the counter-revolution of the left.
Kerensky remained either inside Russia in hiding or in nearby Finland throughout the civil war, and in 1922 he left for Berlin and subsequently Paris. When France fell in 1940 he left for New York, where he remained until the mid-1960s, when he moved to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He died in New York in 1970, at the age of eighty-nine.
Russia indeed lost a historic opportunity when the February revolution was demolished. For Kerensky the rule of law was paramount. Even when the Provisional Government, pressed by public opinion, issued orders in the summer of 1917 to arrest Lenin and others suspected of links with the Germans, Kerensky stressed that ‘they must face the law. Only the law.’ Yet history was not kind to him. After eight months in government, he was confined, chiefly but not exclusively by Soviet historians, to the margins of history as a political lightweight. Even the code name given to him by the NKVD was ‘The Clown’.78
Lenin was merciless towards Kerensky. In his so-called Complete Works he mentions him no less than two hundred times, inventing more and more colourful epithets, dubbing him ‘the braggart’ and linking him with ‘the idiot Romanov’ as the men most responsible for bringing ruin and disorder to Russia.79 Lenin had never been tolerant towards his political opponents. In Paris in 1911, he growled, ‘One should push such people up against the wall, and if they still don't give in, trample them into the mud.’80Such expressions often substituted for political argument. Kerensky abstained from replying in kind. Even as an old man, knowing how savagely Lenin had dismissed him, he refrained from abusing the man who had cast him into oblivion, leaving it to history to make the final judgment.
For Kerensky, Bolshevism was ‘the socialism of poverty and hunger’, and there could be no socialism without democracy; social liberation was ‘impossible in a state that did not respect the personality of man and his rights’.81 It was a view he extended to the former monarch. He wrote that Nicholas should not be made a martyr. At the Moscow Soviet on 20 March 1917, he responded to cries of ‘Death to the tsar, execute the tsar,’ by saying, ‘this won't happen as long as we're in power. We have taken responsibility for the personal safety of the tsar and his family. We will bear this responsibility to the end. I will take him to Murmansk [en route to England] myself.’82 The British government, however, refused to receive the royal family, and the Provisional Government transferred them instead to Tobolsk, which was regarded as the safest place in Russia.
The balance Kerensky tried to maintain between left and right during the eight months of the Provisional Government's life was ultimately tipped in the Bolsheviks' favour by General Kornilov, commander-in-chief of the government's own forces. Kerensky was aware that his generals wanted to restore order, and even welcomed this, as long as control remained with the government. But he wavered and manoeuvred, and then, on 27 August 1917, when he read a proclamation by Kornilov, he realized the general intended to ‘save Russia’ without the government, and without him. Kornilov declared that ‘the Provisional Government, under pressure from the Bolshevik majority in the Soviets, is acting in complete accordance with the plans of the German General Staff’, and that it was his, Kornilov's, firm intention, after winning the war, to bring the people to the Constituent Assembly, where they themselves would decide the future structure of the new state.83 When Kerensky heard that Kornilov was taking full military and civil powers into his own hands, and already moving his troops on the capital, he ordered that they be halted and returned to their previous positions. Kornilov refused to obey, and ordered his troops to continue.
Kerensky's orders had failed, but the Bolsheviks and units under their influence intervened. Their Central Committee, together with other socialist bodies, appealed to the soldiers and workers to repel Kornilov. The generals' revolt was not unlike that of August 1991, especially in relation to the country's leaders. In 1917 Kerensky lost all his influence at once, just as Gorbachev would seventy-four years later. The balancing act that may be required at certain moments cannot serve as the basis of a long-term policy. After the Kornilov movement was extinguished with Bolshevik help, Kerensky issued orders for Generals Kornilov, Denikin, Lukomsky, Markov and others to be brought to justice. The attempted coup was a life-saver for the Bolsheviks, and after it their prestige rose, while Kerensky's fell. His Military Commissar later recalled that, when he returned from GHQ to Petrograd in early October, the Prime Minister struck him as ‘empty, strange, uncharacteristically calm. He was not surrounded by the usual crowd of people, there were no delegations or spotlights … He now had a lot of strange free time, so that I could converse with him for hours, revealing in him a strange unhurriedness.’84
As long as the February revolution was on a rising tide, Kerensky enjoyed glory, popularity and influence, but once the tide began to turn, all his expressiveness, impulsiveness and feverish activity drained from him, and he even began to lose his self-esteem. He had got on badly with the generals, who treated him with ironic condescension, and when he visited the front he had felt their unfriendly gaze on him. He had a last chance in late October, when he had already fled the capital. This time he relied on General Krasnov, commander of the 3rd Cavalry Corps. Kerensky ordered the cavalry to ride on Petrograd with the aim of regaining power, but again the Bolshevik agitators did their work when the troops were still far from their objective. The Bolsheviks arrested Krasnov, then released him once he had given his word that he would not engage in politics. In fact he carried on the fight, ending up in Germany, where he published a novel called From the White Eagle to the Red Banner. According to General Yepishev, who heard it from Stalin's aide, Poskrebyshev, Stalin described this novel as ‘Shit, just like the general himself.’85Krasnov, then aged seventy-eight, was captured by the Red Army in 1945, and ordered by Stalin to be tried in Moscow for collaboration. During the trial, conducted by the Chairman of the Soviet Supreme Court, V. Ulrikh, Krasnov was reminded of his early collaboration with Kerensky, and he responded with a detailed account of the events. He was sentenced to be hanged on 16 March 1947. He did not ask for clemency, and the sentence was duly carried out the next day.86
Kerensky wrote prolifically in exile. In the early 1930s he published Dni (Days), a Russian-language weekly in Paris, and at the end of the decade a journal called Novaya Rossiya (New Russia), in which he published the views of a wide range of former politicians, writers, philosophers and ordinary citizens. Stalin always wanted to know what Kerensky was up to and whether it was possible to use him in some way. First Yagoda and then Beria ordered their special agents to ‘work on the Clown’, and in 1942, at the height of the war, Beria instructed Fitin and Sudoplatov, head of the NKVD's partisan administration, to ‘get the low-down on the group around Kerensky and Chernov’ in the USA. Agent ‘Alligator’ reported to Moscow that Kerensky was supported by his elder son, an engineer, and the Czechoslovak government, while his journal was funded by a wealthy Jewish woman called Benenson. Kerensky frequently visited England, where his former wife, Baranovskaya, lived with their two sons. He occasionally toured the European capitals to lecture in support of democracy and against dictatorial regimes. According to ‘Alligator’, Kerensky enjoyed great support among the Jews, who never forgot April 1917, when the Provisional Government gave them equal rights.87 After the war, Gusakov, a senior NKVD officer, wrote on one of the reports: ‘Kerensky's coming to the fore again. We must think of a way to render him harmless.’ Nothing was done, however, and Kerensky was allowed to live to a ripe old age.
Interestingly, in June 1930 Kerensky raised an important question in one of his speeches, namely, ‘Is Russia threatened by disintegration?’ By this time, on Lenin's initiative, the Bolsheviks had long altered the face of the country. As early as 1919 they had proclaimed provinces and districts ‘obsolete’.88 No one then could have imagined that by artificially creating the new national formation, they were planting a mine of devastating power under the country. The Politburo passed a resolution on 22 June 1920 according to which ‘Russian kulaks must be smashed and deported from Turkestan. All former members of the police, gendarmes, secret police and tsarist civil servants are to be deported from Turkestan to concentration camps in [the Russian Federation].’89 In a similarly arbitrary fashion, the Politburo decided in 1923 to transfer more than a dozen districts to Belorussia, to create the Tatar Republic, to dispose of ‘Bashkir affairs’, and so on.90
The Bolsheviks drew a new political map which they called a Union, but which was in fact no less a unitary state than the Russian empire had been. Paradoxically, in this unitary society the national feeling of the Russians was suppressed, and the build-up began of the centrifugal forces that would one day smash the Union that Lenin had created and that had been held together by the Party-state. The abolition of the provinces and the formation of artificial national units, given the absence of democracy, could only lead to the build-up of national discontent and the eventual break-up of the Union.
While he was the head of the Provisional Government, Kerensky had advocated ‘supra-tribal unity, the voluntary unification of the peoples not on an ethnic, but on an economic, geographical, administrative and political basis’. The Bolshevik coup of October 1917 effectively put an end to such ideas, which, with many others generated by the February revolution, might have spared the country much suffering.
The July Rehearsal
Among the slogans Lenin contrived in the weeks after his return, one of the most simple was that all that was needed was ‘to expropriate a couple of thousand banking and industrial big-shots … and break the resistance of a few hundred millionaires’.91 He knew that the idea of expropriation would appeal to the semi-literate, exhausted and confused masses as a simple solution to age-old problems. Slowly but steadily the Bolsheviks consolidated Lenin's strategy in the space created by the dual power, the gap between the Provisional Government and the Soviets, for only they were prepared to promise immediate and certain peace, land and liberty.
While he offered the ‘revolutionary masses’ the opportunity of undermining the government, personified by ‘banking and industrial big-shots’, Lenin continued to attack the Soviets for their lack of revolutionariness: ‘All the blame for the crisis, for the approaching catastrophe, rests on the Populist and Menshevik leaders, for they are the present leaders of the Soviets.’92 When the Socialist Revolutionary S. Maslov condemned the unauthorized seizure of land by peasants, Lenin defended them, declaring that estate land ‘should be handed over to the local peasants at once … The Bolsheviks want to give the land to the peasants without mortgages, without any payment.’93 This simple message immediately made the soldier-peasants the allies of the Bolsheviks. At the First All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies in May 1917, Lenin drew an idyllic picture of future agricultural life: ‘It will be a Russia in which free labour will work on free land.’94 When the Leninist Politburo set about realizing Lenin's cooperative plans in 1930, however, the picture was less than idyllic. ‘Counter-revolutionary’ kulaks were to be incarcerated in concentration camps, or to be executed in the case of physical resistance; rich and ‘semi-landowner’ kulaks were to be deported to remote areas; while the least of the kulaks were to be resettled on new land beyond the limits of the collective farm areas.95 The Bolsheviks would not mention ‘free labour’ once they had gained power.
Equally, Lenin's calls for peace found an enthusiastic echo among the war-weary. He proposed a simple solution at the First Congress of Soviets on 22 June 1917: ‘How in fact do we see a way out of this war? We say the only way out … is through a revolution … When people say we want a separate peace, that's not true. We say: no separate peace.’96 Revolution in the midst of war meant, of course, the defeat of the country. As for a separate peace, within a few months the Bolsheviks would have concluded just that. Who could have known that, after making their separate, defeatist, peace, the Bolsheviks would start liquidating not several hundred millionaires, but hundreds of thousands of private owners, middle and upper bourgeoisie, and intellectuals. This would lead to the civil war which the Bolsheviks had also planned. Before October, however, Lenin's calls for peace and the ‘free land’ promise lit a fire of hope, visible to the weary traveller from a distance.
It seems unlikely that the Bolsheviks gave any thought to the fact that giving a promise while in opposition is a different thing from fulfilling it as a government. On every point—peace, land, liberty, Constituent Assembly, freedom of the press and all the rest—their promises rapidly changed into coercion, limitation, alteration, a different ‘reading’, or outright denial. Even the land, which they did give, they made undesirable by confiscating everything it produced. In other words, although Lenin labelled his opponents ‘demagogues’, it was he who used demagogy as a way to achieve popularity, making maximum promises to a population which had very low political awareness.
Liberty was especially hard hit. Soon after the seizure of power, Lenin's government pointed to ‘special conditions’, ‘the civil war’, ‘the threat of counter-revolution’, and soon also intervention by Allied forces, as excuses to install a regime of terroristic dictatorship. Inevitably, those with most to lose responded with force. Lenin's preference for extreme measures (embodied in the Cheka, a name derived from the first two initials—che-ka—of the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-revolution) quickly led to police control of the new state. When, in June 1917, the Provisional Government, alarmed by rumours of an impending attempt by the Bolsheviks to seize power, banned all demonstrations for three days, Lenin at once protested that ‘in any constitutional country organizing such demonstrations is the incontrovertible right of every citizen’.97 In a few months he would have forgotten the meaning of ‘citizens' rights’, and any meeting or collective activity would require the permission of the political police.
In June 1922, on Lenin's initiative, the Politburo examined the question of anti-Soviet groups among the intelligentsia, and produced a ruling reminiscent of the medieval Inquisition. ‘Screening’ was to be introduced for university applicants, meaning that there were to be ‘strict limits on the admission to university of students of nonproletarian background and there should be police evidence of political reliability’. All printed publications were to be carefully vetted, ‘no congress or All-Russian meeting of specialists (doctors, agronomists, engineers, lawyers, and so on) may be convened without NKVD permission’, while local meetings would require the authorization of the equivalent local organs, and ‘existing specialist sections of trade unions should be specially registered and put under special observation’.98 The contrast with Bolshevik tactics in 1917 could not have been more striking or cynical.
On 11 June 1917, the day after a Bolshevik demonstration had failed to take place, Irakli Tsereteli, one of the Menshevik leaders, told the assembled delegates of all the factions of the Congress of Soviets that ‘the counter-revolution can come through only one door, namely the Bolsheviks. What they are engaged in now is not propaganda, it is a plot. The weapon of criticism [of the government] is being replaced by criticism with the aid of a gun.’99 Tsereteli was not exaggerating: on the same day, Lenin was telling the St Petersburg Committee of his Party—the Social Democrats rejected the change of the capital's name in 1914 to Petrograd as a nationalistic reflex—that ‘the days of peaceful demonstrations are over’, and that ‘the workers should soberly consider the fact that there can be no more talk about such demonstrations’.100
Despite the horrific loss of men at the front since the outbreak of the war, and the fact that hideously maimed soldiers crowded the streets of the capital, and despite the rising tide of agitation in favour of an early end to the conflict, Kerensky and the Provisional Government, which now included a number of other socialist (Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary) ministers, believed that a way out of their domestic weakness lay in a large-scale offensive at the front in June. Galicia was the chosen area, no doubt because there the Russian army was facing the half-hearted troops of Austria-Hungary, rather than the more vigorously led Germans. As Minister of War, Kerensky dropped everything in the capital and toured the front. Dubbed ‘supreme persuader-in-chief’, he harangued the troops until he was hoarse, and proclaimed that the fate of the revolution depended on the forthcoming offensive.
His claims, however fragile, were not unrealistic, and were widely shared. A victory at the front could well have altered the position in the government's favour in the capital, if not elsewhere in the country. The army was in no condition to accomplish major operational and strategic tasks, but it could have achieved partial success. Before the offensive, however, regiments which had been influenced by the Bolsheviks held long meetings, demanded conditions from their commanders and presented ultimatums. One resolution, for instance stated that ‘we will occupy the Austrian trenches if half the regiment is given two weeks' home leave’. Colonel Stankevich recalled that at one regiment Kerensky was met by the fierce resistance of a Bolshevik called Captain Dzevaltovsky, who cleverly demolished every one of his arguments. ‘Some of the soldiers applauded Dzevaltovsky, and no fewer applauded Kerensky, but the majority listened in silence, thinking their own thoughts.’101
Despite its disorganized state, the army scored an initial tactical success. The Austrians and Hungarians—barely better led than the Russians—fell back without offering serious resistance. News of this advance aroused a burst of rejoicing in Petrograd, but it was not consolidated. The soldiers' committees demanded leave and a change of commanders, among other ultimatums. The Germans transferred a few corps to the south-western front and mounted a strong counter-attack, which led to the rapidly escalating retreat of the demoralized Russians. The Bolsheviks could once again assert that the main enemy was not in the German trenches, but in the seat of government. The army had now completely disintegrated, and thousands of deserters flooded in crowds to the rear.
After the collapse of the Galician offensive the political weathervane turned sharply left. It seemed there was no other way out of the war and the crisis than those offered by the Bolsheviks. Seeing his life's goal approaching, Lenin worked harder than ever. Articles appeared in Pravda almost every day, and he had meetings with members of the Central Committee's military organization and soldiers' and sailors' deputies from Kronstadt, the island fortress off Petrograd. Still, most of his work was on paper, a virtual propaganda conveyor-belt, preparing the Party for the coup d'état.
In his speeches to the First Congress of Soviets in the second half of June 1917, Lenin had totally dismissed the path of ‘reformist democracy’, acknowledging only ‘revolutionary democracy’. He explained what he meant: ‘It has been said here that there is no party in Russia which would say it was ready to take power entirely by itself. I answer: There is! No party should refuse this, and our party does not refuse: we are ready at any minute to take power entirely.’102 His words were greeted by the thin applause of the 105 Bolsheviks and the hollow laughter of the remaining nine hundred deputies. But Lenin had not concealed his cards: he was ready to take power at any minute, and since no one was about to hand it to him on a silver dish, he made his intentions perfectly clear. First, he must strengthen his influence in the factories, among the troops and on naval ships.
Every night for a month, hardly bothering to undress, he fell into an exhausted, troubled sleep. Brief naps no longer refreshed him. He had been used to a more free and easy life, unburdened by routine, but he had to make an effort now. Every day he was writing articles and making speeches at countless venues. He would wake with a dull headache, but would nonetheless take up his pen to write yet another article, and then go through the morning post. Finally, on 12 July, he took family advice and set off, with his sister Maria and two trusted workers, for a five-day rest beyond the revolutionary tumult of Petrograd, in the nearby village of Neivola, near Mustamyaki. He stopped to see the poet Demyan Bednyi on the way, and also stayed with the Bolshevik Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. Recalling the visit, Bonch-Bruevich wrote that Lenin ‘was suffering from headaches, his face was white, and his eyes showed great fatigue’.103 Lenin sat for long periods on the verandah, staring at the blue sky, while the peaceful countryside and lush foliage of the surroundings had their customary beneficial effect.
News of the defeat of the Galician offensive aroused first despair and then anger towards a government which seemed utterly incompetent. Lenin and his entourage at once sensed a change in the public mood, and he decided to speed things up. Pravda fiercely castigated the government for ‘throwing thousands of men into the meat grinder’. Bolshevik influence grew rapidly. The Party Central Committee agreed that what was needed was a powerful, mass action that would force the Provisional Government to resign in favour of the Soviets, where the Bolsheviks stepped up their efforts to gain control. The idea quickly caught on in factories and among troops who did not want to go to the front, and therefore supported the Bolsheviks. ‘Taking power’ in the capital was far more appealing than the filthy trenches and the lice.
On the night of 16 July, M.A. Savelyev, a staff member of Pravda, travelled to see Lenin at Neivola. Awoken early in the morning, Lenin heard what the messenger had to say, and set off for Petrograd at once, where he began organizing the tens of thousands of workers who had been called out to demonstrate. All Soviet textbooks say of this event that Lenin's main object was to turn the demonstration into a peaceful expression of labouring Petrograd. But he had declared two weeks earlier that peaceful demonstrations were ‘a thing of the past’, and had said so much more than once.
Meanwhile, workers were streaming into the centre of the city, along with sailors from Kronstadt and soldiers from the numerous barracks of the garrison. As the liberal leader Paul Milyukov recalled, the government's weakness was so obvious that ‘one could understand the temptation to try something more than the postponed demonstration of 10 (23) June’. Thus, the events of 17 July could, in Milyukov's words, be called the first real attempt at revolution by the Bolsheviks: ‘Lenin was already on his notorious balcony at Kshesinskaya's house and was welcoming the soldiers and giving them instructions. The entire military intelligence of the Bolshevik Central Committee was there; military units came and went from there. In a word, it was the military headquarters of the uprising.’104
Oddly enough, of all the countless speeches he made, the one from the balcony does not appear in any edition of Lenin's collected works, even though he had notes for it in his hand. The fact is that it was after the dispersal of the demonstrators, many of them armed, that the authorities launched their case against the Bolsheviks, and against Lenin personally, accusing him of incitement to armed insurrection. His speech was later described by the Bolshevik press as peaceful. The Socialist Revolutionary Nikolai Sukhanov, who kept a detailed diary of events, wrote that it was not likely that the Bolsheviks had a detailed plan, ‘but the chances of an uprising and revolt were quickly raised’. It was simply that the Bolshevik leadership wavered. ‘Lenin's speech on the balcony was extremely ambiguous. It seemed as if he was not demanding any concrete action from the impressive force assembled before him; he did not even ask his listeners to continue their street demonstrations, even though they had just shown their readiness for battle by their cumbersome procession from Kronstadt to [Petrograd]. Lenin merely criticized the Provisional Government and the “Soviet of social traitors” and called for the defence of the revolution and loyalty to the Bolsheviks.’105
Lenin later claimed that the demonstration had been an attempt to take power by peaceful means, but who could have expected the government to lay down their authority merely in response to a request? Moreover, Sukhanov noted that disorder was breaking out in the city. Lenin watched as events unfolded. Crowds of armed soldiers were looting and raiding liquor stores; Shooting was heard in various districts around midday. Messages were coming in of chaotic clashes and unorganized confrontations, of troops loyal to the government being deployed at strategic points. There was growing talk of robberies, searches, pogroms. Lenin realized that a half-spontaneous action was not capable of bringing down even a weak regime. There was the desire to seize power, but not the organization. Having brought out half a million people, the Bolsheviks had acted without a clear plan or precise direction. Lenin decided it was best to terminate the action and retire with the minimum of political losses. He had to protect both his social ammunition and his revolutionary face. The ‘July Days’ served as an indicator of the unstable balance, with a microscopic advantage to the government.
On 23 July Lenin wrote that the Menshevik and SR leaders in the Soviet had betrayed the revolution and that it was now time for the Bolsheviks ‘to gather their forces, reorganize them and firmly prepare for armed uprising’.106 He sensed that if he slipped now he would not reach the ‘second stage’ of the revolution. One piece of bad news after another was coming in: Pravda had been closed, the government was bringing back troops from the front, activists in the July events were being arrested, the press was full of ‘evidence’, ‘documents’ and announcements about the ‘espionage’ activities of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. What had happened at the front could now be understood: there were spies in the capital! Expecting to be arrested at any moment, Lenin decided to go underground. The government was indecisive, having issued the order to arrest him and a number of others only on 20 July.
The same day, accompanied by Yakov Sverdlov, Lenin and Krupskaya left their in-laws, the Yelizarovs, and began migrating from one ‘safe’ Petrograd apartment to another: to that of a certain S.L. Sulimov, where they spent less than a day before moving on to that of a local worker and Bolshevik, V.N. Kayurov, and from there to the guardhouse at the Russian Renault factory, then to the dwelling of the Bolshevik N.G. Poletaev, and finally for a stay of two or three days at the apartment of an old revolutionary called S.N. Alliluev. It was there that Stalin first saw the high-school girl Nadezhda Allilueva, whom he would marry in 1919. There also Lenin heard that he was being hunted as a state criminal. At first he declared he would give himself up if the Executive Committee of the Soviet decided he should stand trial. But he knew that would not happen. Then he held a meeting with his Bolshevik comrades V.P. Nogin, G.K. Ordzhonikidze, Yelena Stasova, Stalin and Yakov Sverdlov to discuss his position. None of them trusted in the impartiality of a court, and they came to the unanimous decision that Lenin must leave the capital for a safe hiding place.
Lenin was in his element. All the Russian revolutionaries loved the secrecy and conspiratorial atmosphere of the ‘underground’. Even Plekhanov, who spent most of his life in the safety of Europe, used a number of aliases: Beltov, Valentinov, Volgin, Kamensky, Ushakov. Sometimes a pseudonym was replaced by a nickname: Fotieva was ‘Kiska’, Bauman was ‘Ballerina’, Krasin ‘the Horse’, Essen ‘the Beast’, and so on. But no one could compare with Lenin for the sheer number of pseudonyms and nicknames he dreamed up. Besides ‘Lenin’ itself, he was also ‘Peterburzhets’, ‘Starik’, ‘Ilyin’, ‘Frei’, ‘Petrov’, ‘Maier’, ‘Iordanov’, ‘Richter’, ‘Karpov’, ‘Mueller’, ‘Tulin’, and still more. The tradition was even carried on long after the revolution. During the Korean War, Stalin used the names ‘Filippov’ and ‘Fyn Si’ when corresponding with Mao Tse-tung and Kirn II Sung respectively.
In any case, the question of Lenin appearing in court was purely academic: he had decided to go into hiding even before the arrest order was written. On 21 July he wrote an article, not published until 1925, entitled ‘On Whether the Bolshevik Leaders Should Appear in Court’, in which he asserted that had there been a Constituent Assembly, ‘a proper government, and a proper court’, it would have been possible to talk about an ‘appearance in court’.107 Instead, he claimed, there was a ‘military dictatorship’, a resounding phrase he himself cannot have believed. Nor did anyone else. Addressing the Sixth Party Congress in August 1917, Stalin proposed (in Lenin's absence) that Lenin should appear in court if guarantees of his personal security were given. ‘At the moment,’ he added, ‘it is not clear who holds power’.108 Hardly the description of a military dictatorship.
Perhaps the court would not have been impartial. The government's authority was waning fast. But it was not the charges associated with the ‘July Days’ that Lenin feared most, it was the consequences of the allegations being printed by Alexinsky and Pankratov in Zhivoe Slovo (The Living Word) about Bolshevik ‘espionage’. As we have seen, there is evidence suggesting that Lenin did not know the extent of the government's information about the Bolsheviks' financial links with the Germans. One point he would not have been able to refute was the existence of a strategy to help bring about the defeat of Russia in the war and its transformation into a civil war. The evidence was there in countless articles and speeches and proclamations.
Lenin called upon the people to man barricades and to revolt, but he himself stayed well away. Unlike other Social Democrats, he was not seen marching at the head of a column of demonstrators, he did not visit the trenches or battleship crews. He exercised his ‘leadership from afar’ via the pen. The literary facet was perhaps his strongest feature. Even when he was moving from one apartment to another in early July he managed to write three articles rebutting the accusations of his financial connections with the Germans.
Nobody ever saw Lenin frightened, depressed or confused. Enraged, irritated, excited or surprised, certainly, but in general he was able to control his emotions, even when he felt everything was hanging by a thread. This was true in August 1918, when an attempt on his life almost succeeded, and also earlier that year when the Germans launched their advance deep inside Russia. He may have experienced fear when he went into hiding in the summer of 1917; certainly he wrote to Kamenev with the request that ‘if I am bumped off’ his comrade should ensure the publication of his blue exercise books, containing chapters of his State and Revolution.109 Trotsky recalled meeting Lenin on 4 or 5 July. ‘The offensive had been repelled’—Trotsky had no qualms in calling the Bolshevik action an offensive. ‘Lenin said, “Now is the best time for them to shoot us down.” He was thinking we should beat a retreat and if necessary go underground.’ Later, in 1919, Lenin told Trotsky: ‘We committed a lot of stupidities in July.’ Trotsky went on: ‘It is quite likely that had the army officers managed to capture Lenin soon after the July demonstration, they would have dealt with him the way the German officers dealt with Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin wanted to make the assault with a sound plan: take the enemy by surprise, seize power and then see what happens.’110 (In 1919, Sverdlov kept 108,525 gold roubles, jewels and seven passports, including his own, in a fireproof safe, discovered in 1935 and consigned to the archives. Lenin and his closest aides were prepared to re-emigrate in the event of a White victory.)
Lenin in the heat of 1917 was a gambler—‘seize power and then see what happens’. He was not a god. He was capable of hoping, of deluding himself, of making mistakes, suffering and simply experiencing the normal human sense of fear, though he managed to curb it. Fear helped him escape danger. He rarely took risks. Neither when he returned to Russia via Germany and Scandinavia, rather than England, where he would have risked arrest and the German U-boats in the North Sea, nor when Denikin's White forces were within a breath of Moscow—too much of a risk to go to the front. Nor would he appear in the Provisional Government's court, although Trotsky gave himself up in order to use it as a platform for refuting the charges and making propaganda. Lenin's personal safety came first, and great care was taken to protect him, especially following the attempt on his life in August 1918. Several times, Stalin placed ‘guaranteeing the security’ of the leader on the Central Committee's agenda.111 Seventeen bodyguards were assigned to protect Lenin, according to the Cheka official who after the attempt reported on the errors committed by R. Gobalin, Lenin's head of personal security. Stalin insisted the number be increased.112
The events of July 1917 turned out to be an unintentional rehearsal for the coup d'état. Lenin had to leave the political scene for a while, but although he called Kerensky's government a ‘military dictatorship’, he knew the regime was weak. He had to prolong the period of this weakness, of the army's disintegration and the discredit of the parties in the government. The moment might come when the state power of the once great empire, which had been taken over by liberals and democrats, would, in Trotsky's words, simply be lying on the streets of the capital. Then Lenin's hour of triumph would come.
October and the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’
We have noted that Lenin found his inspiration in the French Revolution. ‘The example of the Jacobins,’ he wrote in his article ‘The Enemies of the People’, ‘is instructive. It is not obsolete, but needs to be applied to the revolutionary class of the twentieth century, the workers and semi-proletarians. The enemies of the people for this class are not monarchs, but landowners and capitalists, as a class.’113 And the ‘égalité’ of the famous trinity emerged in Soviet Russia soon after the Bolsheviks had seized power, when Lenin decreed that ‘one warm blanket and one warm item of clothing (either a jacket, or felt boots, gloves, warm underwear, warm socks, or a scarf) should be requisitioned from each rich apartment in Petrograd’.114 For the time being, it was only warm clothing. Soon everything that could be taken would be, while the burzhuithemselves—the bourgeoisie—would be sent off to clear snow from the railway tracks, dig ditches, cut firewood. The burzhui were being thrown out of their apartments, or packed in with others, and deprived of their ration cards as early as 1917. This practice continued for several years. On 20 April 1921 the Politburo again determined to ‘improve the life of the workers at the expense of the bourgeois element’.115 It was not that the Bolsheviks were repeating the past; rather that, like the Blanquists and Babouvists and Jacobins of the French Revolution, they believed that power could only be taken by force, and that it was not possible to make the people happy without using coercion.
On the night of 22 July, soon after publication of his arrest order, Lenin set off for Razliv on the Gulf of Finland, where he hid in the now famous fisherman's hut with Zinoviev, disguised as Finnish farmworkers. Rebuilt in granite in 1927, the site became a shrine for the Soviet masses. Propagandists recited the story of Lenin, as he prepared the October revolution, working day and night on the Marxist theory of the state. Indeed, it was here that he completed the major work he had begun two years earlier in Switzerland, State and Revolution, a study as utopian as any by Owen, Saint-Simon or Fourier.
Lenin and Zinoviev—one of the people who had become closest to him—would spend whole evenings sitting in their hut, talking and reminiscing. They spent one evening talking about Roman Malinovsky, who had also once been close to Lenin but had later been suspected of working for the police. A Party commission had been formed under Ganetsky to investigate the charges, and Lenin had declared that Malinovsky was ‘a politically honest man’. Later, when Malinovsky turned up as a prisoner of war in German hands, Lenin corresponded with him, sending him warm clothes and encouraging him to agitate among the other prisoners. After the October coup, Okhrana archives would reveal that Malinovsky had indeed been a police agent, and that Lenin was expected to give evidence. After returning from German capitivity in 1918, Malinovsky was arrested.
He was interrogated for nine days and then tried in closed court. No transcript of the trial has been found, but parts of it were reproduced either in the press of the day or in subsequent memoirs.116 In a six-hour speech, Malinovsky claimed he had been blackmailed into becoming a provocateur by the police, and that Lenin must have known of his dual rôle. He plainly expected that the Bolshevik leader would intervene and save him. It appears that Malinovsky wrote to Lenin from prison, requesting clemency, but the letter has not been found. Lenin is said to have attended the trial briefly, but gave no evidence, and left muttering ‘What a swine he was!’ Malinovsky was executed on 6 November 1918.
During the time at Razliv, Lenin was visited by several Bolshevik organizers. Periodically a woman worker, A.I. Tokareva, would come out with a trunk full of clean laundry, food and newspapers, which Lenin would read carefully, sending back new articles in reply to his opponents' or ‘orders’ to his comrades. The rest of his time he devoted to State and Revolution.
For many years this work, of no more than 120 pages, was regarded as a masterpiece. In the USSR alone it was published in more than seven million copies and forty-seven languages, while Communist parties abroad made it a best-seller. The editors of Volume 33 of Lenin's Complete Works assert that ‘this work, in which for the first time the Marxist teaching on the state is fully and systematically expounded, represents a scientific illumination of the theory of the state which is unsurpassed in its depth and complexity’.117 The revolution ‘prevented’ Lenin from writing the final chapter on the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and he noted in the Afterword, ‘it is pleasanter and more useful to create the experience of revolution, than to write about it’.118
Why did this book become the bible of Russian Bolshevism for so many years? The answers are very simple. The entire work is an extended commentary on equally extended quotations from Marx and Engels. It is a panegyric on class war, the dictatorship of the proletariat and anti-parliamentarism. It claims, by referring to the works of Marx and Engels, that the highest form of democracy is the dictatorship of the proletariat, that it is essential to smash the old state machine, that violent revolution is inevitable, that classes will disappear and that following the revolution the state will wither away. Lenin completely ignored the humanitarian aspects of Marx's early works. For him, democracy itself was a form of violence. It was ‘an organization for the systematic violence of one class over another, by one part of the population over another’. He continued: ‘Only when the state has disappeared can we speak of liberty.’119 Unlike Marx, who used the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ only a few times, Lenin regarded it as the foundation of the universe: there were only workers and the bourgeoisie.
State and Revolution described the Communist utopia in a most convincing way. Citing a number of unquestionably true propositions—which were well known before Lenin ‘discovered’ them—about the rise of the state and its functions at different periods, he came to conclusions which, however ‘unsurpassed in their depth’, were scholastic, contrived and detached from life. En route he demolished all his real and potential opponents, asserting that the workers of ‘advanced’ parliamentary countries ‘had come to loathe their “socialist” leaders’.120
Had this work simply been the fruit of theoretical exercise by a man researching anti-worlds, anti-societies, anti-humans, and been known only to a small group of bibliophiles, no harm would have been done. Unfortunately, whole generations were raised on such books, millions of ‘builders of Communism’, many of whom took Lenin's propositions literally. For example: ‘When the majority of the people begin to produce independently … the monitoring of capitalists (converted into office-workers) and gentlemen intellectuals, who haven't lost their capitalist ways, will become genuinely universal, general, nationwide, and it will be impossible to escape from it in any way, there will be nowhere to hide.’121 There would indeed be nowhere to hide, neither from the sort of intellectual nourishment provided by such works as State and Revolution, nor from the ubiquitous police presence, from being shadowed, from ‘Party influence’, from the clutches of the bureaucracy.
From his Helsinki hiding place in the summer of 1917, Lenin continued to influence the course of events, as usual, ‘from afar’. Meanwhile, the search for him was still on. A rumour circulated that he was hiding on the battleship Zarya svobody (Dawn of Freedom), and the Petrograd prosecutor ordered a search of the ship.122 Newspapers carried reports that he was hiding in the capital, and the chief of the city police circulated a secret instruction to all commissars ‘to capture V.I. Ulyanov (Lenin) and deliver him to the authorities’.123
At the end of September Lenin moved from Helsinki to Vyborg (Viipuri), close to Petrograd on the Baltic coast, to facilitate contact with the Central Committee and other local Party bodies. Having survived the Kornilov threat, when he felt compelled to support Kerensky, he was now becoming impatient, and was convinced that the critical moment for seizing power was fast approaching. At the end of August the issue had emerged in stark clarity: who would Russia follow, Kornilov, Kerensky, or Lenin? Kornilov would mean a military dictatorship, police, army, the Cossacks and the Kadets who supported them in practical terms; Kerensky would mean the supremacy of the parties Lenin called compromisers or appeasers, the SRs and the Mensheviks. The defeat of Kornilov had brought the greatest gains to the Bolsheviks, and their influence had grown extremely fast. As Lenin produced one article after another and a stream of letters, he conveyed to the Central Committee his growing confidence that an uprising would succeed. He demanded that a headquarters be organized at once, without losing another minute, that the General Staff and government be arrested, that the workers be mobilized and the post offices occupied. ‘We will take all the bread and all the boots from the capitalists. We'll leave them only crumbs and we'll give them felt boots to wear … There's a ninety-nine per cent chance that the Germans will at least give us an armistice. And an armistice now would mean winning the entire peace.’124 As Lenin knew, the Germans had assisted the Bolsheviks precisely in order to take Russia out of the war, so enhancing their own chance of victory on the Western Front. Only three months earlier he had sworn that the idea of a separate peace would never enter his head, and yet now he was fully confident that he could achieve it. He was pragmatic to the marrow of his bones. Nothing was sacred beyond the revolution and power. As Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, ‘we know from experience that great affairs have only been achieved in our time by those who have not striven to keep their word, once given, and were able when necessary to twist others round their fingers’.125
Lenin was in a nervous and excitable state, and the indecisiveness of his partners was irritating him, as a long article entitled ‘The Crisis is Ripe’ shows. Written at the end of September in Vyborg, it declared that the whole world was ready for revolution. ‘Mass arrests of the Party leaders in free Italy, and especially the start of army risings in Germany, are unmistakable signs of the great turning point, signs of the eve of revolution on a world scale.’126 As for Russia, ‘the crisis is ripe. The whole future of the revolution is on the cards … The whole future of the international workers' revolution is on the cards. The crisis is ripe.’127 As for the opinion of the country, the Provisional Government had already agreed to hold elections for the Constituent Assembly, but Lenin was not willing to wait for that. Nor would he rely on the Congress of Soviets: ‘To wait for the Congress of Soviets is lunacy, for the Congress will do nothing, it cannot do anything! First beat Kerensky, then convene the Congress.’ He had a plan: ‘The Bolsheviks are now guaranteed victory in an uprising: we can (if we don't “wait” for the Congress of Soviets) strike suddenly from three points, from Peter [Petrograd], Moscow and the Baltic Fleet … we're ninety-nine per cent sure to win with fewer casualties than on 3-5 July, because the troops won't oppose a government of peace’. If the Central Committee refused to accept his plan, Lenin threatened to resign from it. He commented that he had already detected in the committee's response ‘a subtle hint to keep one's mouth shut, and for me to drop my proposal’.128
The last part of the article was intended for the Central Committee's eyes only. In early October, Lenin asked for the figures on Party membership nation-wide. When the Finnish Bolshevik E. Rahja delivered them to him, they were an inspiration: 23,000 in February 1917, 100,000 in April, 240,000 in August, and 350,000 at the beginning of October. Entire army units and factory workforces were on their side, the government was paralysed; their time had come, they must not miss it. Sukhanov noted in his diary that the administration had ceased to exist, on the local no less than the central level. Meanwhile the people were demanding a government. ‘Even the debate on land has come to a standstill at the top, while the discontent of the lower orders has reached fever pitch. In St Petersburg we have gone beyond the point where famine would start with all its consequences … If not today, tomorrow the army will begin its headlong escape from the front … The situation on the railways is threatening. All the newspapers … are loudly crying out about an impending economic disaster.’129
The Central Committee read Lenin's shrill letters, nodded their heads, but did nothing more than agree to discuss tactics ‘soon’. His letters went no further. The Central Committee was shocked by his radicalism. Moreover, they resolved to destroy all his letters dealing with the uprising, except one.
On 14 September Kerensky, to show his solidarity with the left-wing parties and to appease their impatience for peace, unilaterally and without waiting for the Constituent Assembly proclaimed the Russian Republic. On 27 September the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet convened a Democratic Conference of all socialist and liberal parties which led to the formation of the fourth and last coalition Provisional Government, including ten socialist and four liberal ministers. The Democratic Conference also agreed to establish a Provisional Council of the Russian Republic, or ‘Pre-parliament’, which would express the views of the parties until the Constituent Assembly met.
All these measures had the effect of cooling the ardour for an armed uprising among some of the leading Bolsheviks: perhaps, they thought, their chance was coming through non-violent means. This infuriated Lenin. Merely by taking part in the Democratic Conference, he wrote, ‘the Bolshevik leadership has blunted the growing revolution by playing at spillikins’.130
Slowly but surely the Central Committee was driven to a radical position by Lenin. They let his threat to resign pass in silence. Excessively militant paragraphs or sentences were deleted from some of his articles before publication. Lenin felt he ought to be in Petrograd, among the Central Committee members who were really holding the Party reins, as well as those of other mass organizations. He had the Central Committee's permission to return, but he did not want to take risks. He paused to survey the possibilities, and carefully worked out a route and a way to return with Rahja. They considered every possible detail and circumstance that might wreck the operation.131 Lenin continually reminded his escorts that they should have a fall-back plan for a rapid departure from the capital, preferably to Finland, should he be threatened with arrest.
In something of an anti-climax after the excitement generated by all this elaborate planning, he finally decided to take the suburban train, and duly arrived at the apartment of the woman Bolshevik M.V. Fofanova in the Vyborg district of Petrograd.
Here the security was maximized, as Lenin wanted to exclude the slightest mistake on the eve of the decisive event. When it suited him, he would proclaim such maxims as: ‘To be successful, an uprising must not rely on a conspiracy or a party, it must rely on the leading class.’132 But what he was planning was precisely a gigantic conspiracy, concealed and masked with difficulty, and not organized in the manner of the plotters in the French Revolution, but using more perfected methods. This emerges from the confidential passages of his letters to the Central Committee. His instructions about creating headquarters for the uprising, on the deployment of forces, the arrest of the government, neutralizing the Caucasian ‘Savage Division’ of the army and so on, were all basic Blanquist tactics for organizing an uprising in a conspiratorial manner.133
On his arrival in Petrograd, Lenin insisted the Bolsheviks withdraw from the Pre-parliament ‘in order not to sow illusions’ among the masses. He was determined not to yield his main trump—the promise of immediate peace—to anyone else. Judging correctly that there were no viable arguments against his position, he recognized that it was not the Bolsheviks the people would follow, but the promise of peace, in which they saw the cure for all their present miseries. No one wanted to see that Germany was on the brink of defeat, and that peace might be more quickly achieved by the combined efforts of the Allies. The idea of immediate peace had been so deeply etched into the public mind by the Bolsheviks that the question of what would happen after it was achieved was left unasked.
Lenin's pressure for an immediate uprising began to tell, and a closed session of the Petrograd Party Committee on 5 October approved his proposal, followed two days later by the Moscow Committee.134 In a letter to the Central Committee, written on 8 October but not published until 7 November 1920, Lenin formulated a new slogan: ‘The transfer of power to the Soviets now would in fact be an armed uprising’. Of course, there was still a need to occupy the post offices, railway stations, bridges and so on, but a new feature was Lenin's attitude to the price to be paid. He wrote that after the strategic targets had been seized, the slogan ‘We may all perish, but the enemy shall not pass’ should be broadcast.135
An armed uprising will always cost lives, but the extremism of Lenin's dictatorial instruction is striking: the goal must be attained, no matter the cost. This attitude to human life became the hallmark of Bolshevik practice. Reading what Lenin wrote in October 1917, one is inevitably reminded of Stalin's calls during the Second World War ‘to spare no forces and not to halt whatever the casualties’.136
On 10 October, soon after Lenin's return in the capital, at his insistence an extremely important session of the Central Committee was held to discuss the uprising. By a chain of accidental circumstances, the meeting took place at the apartment of the Menshevik and chronicler of the revolution N.N. Sukhanov-Gimmer, whose wife, G.K. Flakserman, was a Bolshevik working in the Central Committee secretariat. Sukhanov himself was not at home that evening. Of the twenty-one members of the Central Committee, twelve were present, including Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Uritsky, Dzerzhinsky, Alexandra Kollontai and Sverdlov, who was chairman. Discussion of the uprising was concealed on the agenda under the heading ‘the present moment’.
In his report, Lenin asserted that ‘the matter was politically fully ripe’, and that they had only to discuss military preparations. Lenin knew he could not count on support from the majority of the population: ‘To wait for the Constituent Assembly, which will obviously not be on our side, is senseless, and just means complicating our task.’137 He condemned those who thought that preparing for an uprising was some sort of political sin, though he was indulgent towards those who were made uncomfortable by the conspiratorial nature of his plan. He made plain the anti-democratic character of the uprising when he said the Constituent Assembly would ‘obviously not be on our side’.
He waited for objections, but most of those present accepted his proposal to begin preparations and to carry out the coup as soon as possible. Only Zinoviev and Kamenev voted against. Their arguments, which were already known, were that the Bolsheviks had little support in the provinces, and that they might win more through the Constituent Assembly than by a military coup. By referring to the Constituent Assembly, Zinoviev and Kamenev were in effect proposing a parliamentary path, although they showed some inconsistency after the meeting by declaring publicly that ‘the Party has not been asked. Such questions are not settled by ten people.’ Next day they stated: ‘It is said 1) we already have the majority of the people of Russia with us and 2) we also have the majority of the international proletariat. Alas, neither is true, and that's the whole trouble.’ When Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested and tried in 1936, the court reminded them of their ‘sins of October’, their ‘villainous treachery’. In any case, they ‘confessed’ to ‘espionage and terroristic’ and ‘subversive’ activities, as well as their ‘anti-Leninist behaviour’ in 1917. Once they had been sentenced to death they appealed to the Central Executive Committee, where they knew any decision would be taken by Stalin, who had secretly promised them clemency if they made full confessions.
Their appeals were brief, and are worth reproducing in full. Zinoviev wrote: ‘I told the proletarian court everything about my crimes against the Party and the Soviet regime. They are well known to the presidium of the Central Executive Committee. I hereby appeal to the presidium of the Central Executive Committee for clemency.’138 Kamenev's appeal was equally short: ‘Deeply repentant for the most serious crimes I have committed against the proletarian revolution, I ask the presidium to save my life, if it does not think this conflicts with the future cause of socialism, the cause of Lenin and Stalin.’139 Their appeals were turned down the same day by Kalinin and Unshlikht, as everything had already been decided by Stalin. The resort to unbridled violence had boomeranged and struck the creators of the revolution themselves. As Potresov commented earlier in his ‘Notes of a Publicist’: ‘it had always seemed to … Lenin that the end sanctified the means … But it was not the end that sanctified the means in the present case: the means has demolished the end without trace.’140
The meeting of 10 October 1917 also formed a Political Bureau (Politburo) of the Central Committee, consisting of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov, but since the management of the planned coup was in the hands of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet, under Trotsky's leadership, the new body was in effect the shell of the supreme authority it would become after the Eighth Congress in March 1919. In October 1917 it was a group of the people closest to Lenin and holding most influence in the top echelons of the Party.
Nevertheless, within a couple of days Lenin sensed that, despite the decision to prepare the uprising, the Party committees were still wavering. Some said the matter should be left to the Congress of Soviets, while others even wanted to wait for the Constituent Assembly. Lenin was beside himself, and demanded another session of the Central Committee. An enlarged session took place on 16 October at a house on Bolotnaya Street in the Vyborg district. The argument went on until morning, and the minutes of Lenin's speech, which he took himself, and the debate on it, show that nothing new was said. As Trotsky would write in his memoirs, in essence three distinct groupings had crystallized in the Central Committee: there were the opponents of an armed uprising—Zinoviev and Kamenev; there was Lenin, who was frenziedly demanding an uprising before the Congress of Soviets; and there were those, led by Trotsky, who wanted to obtain a mandate for the uprising from the Congress.141 For now, Lenin got his way, adding to the resolution that the Central Committee would indicate a ‘suitable moment’ for the start of the uprising.
Lenin's notes show the task he faced in changing opinions at the meeting: members were saying ‘we dare not win’; Zinoviev claimed ‘the fatigue among the masses is obvious’; others feared that ‘the central committee of the Party has replaced the Soviets’; and Nogin urged that ‘we find a solution by political not military means’.142 Lenin spoke three times. It was clearly not easy for him to defend the policy of armed uprising. The Petrograd Soviet had already formed its Military-Revolutionary Committee and controlled the garrison of 150,000 men. To it would be added the Military-Revolutionary Centre, created by the Central Committee.143 The original purpose of this committee, chaired by the Left Socialist Revolutionary P.Y. Lazimir, was to mobilize the population to defend the city. Instead, the Bolsheviks used it as the headquarters of the coup, or, as they put it, for preparing the uprising: they were ‘arming themselves against a counter-revolution’. The headquarters of the uprising was thus in effect created legally on 12 October, but was controlled illegally by members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, notably Trotsky.
During the last ten days before the uprising Lenin stayed in close touch with the heads of the military organization, VA. Antonov-Ovseenko, V.I. Nevsky and N.I. Podvoisky, urging them to speed things up. But most of the time he spent writing notes and endless letters to the Central Committee. After the meeting of 16 October he wrote a twenty-page ‘letter to the comrades’, in which he said nothing new, but simply repeated his arguments for an early uprising over and over again. It had become, in Melgunov's words, an obsession, and it was not surprising that many of these letters, written ‘in a paroxysm of irresponsibility’, were burnt by the Central Committee. Leaders of mass movements of Lenin's type, Melgunov wrote, ‘who are generally fanatics, rather than prophets of genius, lack a sense of historical perspective and moral responsibility for their actions’. And Lenin's mood gradually infected the rest of the leadership.144
While he was in hiding in Petrograd, Lenin wrote two letters, one to the members of the Party, the other to the Central Committee, which contained devastating attacks on Zinoviev and Kamenev, accusing them, among other things, of ‘swindling’, ‘slanderous lies’, ‘endless dirty tricks’ and ‘shamelessness’. He demanded their expulsion from the Party, declaring, ‘I no longer consider them as comrades’.145 The cause of these outbursts was a statement by Kamenev, published in Novaya zhizn' (New Life), disagreeing with the Bolsheviks' tactics of trying to come to power by means of a coup. Lenin regarded this as treachery, as one of the cardinal rules of the revolutionary conspiracy is total secrecy. Lenin himself, however, had said on 16 October that since ‘the uprising is ready, there is no need to talk of conspiracies’.146 And Trotsky, addressing the Petrograd Soviet on the Military-Revolutionary Committee, had declared: ‘They say we are setting up a headquarters for the seizure of power. We make no secret of it.’147 At mass meetings, however, the Bolsheviks took a different line. Speaking on 21 October to Cossacks stationed in the capital, Trotsky said: ‘They're telling you the Soviet is planning some sort of uprising on 22 October, that there's going to be a fight with you, shooting on the streets and a blood-bath. The people who say so are scoundrels and provocateurs.’148
On the eve of the coup, as the Provisional Government sat late into the night, Kerensky hurried from the Pre-parliament to the headquarters of the military district and back to his residence in the Winter Palace, trying to gather support and mobilize any available force to help suppress the impending Bolshevik uprising. His power was by now a ghost of its former self. Had his government succeeded months earlier, or even as late as October, in finding an end to the war, and sought a separate peace with Germany, the uprising might have been averted. Some timid efforts were made in this direction, but Kerensky was unwilling to renege on the Allies. Had he done so, he might have preserved his regime and its democratic achievements, as well as deprived Lenin of his main trump card, and thus spared Russia decades of suffering.
Leaders in transitional times, like Kerensky and Gorbachev, are often only suited to the beginning of the new phase, and seldom to carrying the venture through to its end without disasters. They are heroes of the moment, but their contribution should not be underrated for that. Kerensky stumbled over the question of peace, while Gorbachev could not free himself from his idealization of the October coup. He made the false assertion that ‘the choice between socialism and capitalism was the chief social alternative of our era, that it was impossible to go further in the twentieth century without rising to a higher form of social organization, to socialism’.149 Gorbachev was incapable of seeing that it was anachronistic to divide societies into capitalist and socialist. Far deeper levels of change create the movement from bureaucratism and totalitarianism to democracy and civilized values. Neither Kerensky nor Gorbachev could step outside their time, and each in his own way made momentously important contributions: Kerensky did not destroy tsarism, and Gorbachev did not destroy Stalinism, but neither of them prevented the self-destruction of those systems.
There are moments in history when it seems that future development may depend on one man. Trotsky was certainly right when, in exile, he asserted that had Lenin not been in Petrograd in October 1917, the coup would not have taken place.150 There was, however, another individual whose part in these events has been neglected, but who might have made a difference. This was Pavel Nikolaevich Malyantovich, who from 25 September to 25 October 1917 served as Minister of Justice and Chief Prosecutor for the Provisional Government.
As we know, following the unsuccessful attempt by the Bolsheviks to seize power in July, the government launched an investigation into the affair. P.A. Alexandrov, an investigator ‘for especially important cases’, signed an order for the arrest of Lenin on the grounds of his ties with Germany and as an enemy of Russia in the war. As Alexandrov told the NKVD when he was interrogated in 1939, ‘counter-intelligence put a number of cupboards full of documents and correspondence at our disposal’.151 In November 1917, after the Bolsheviks had been through these documents, only twenty-one volumes remained, and successive inspections and ‘weedings’ up to 1940 reduced the contents still further.152 Thus the evidence establishing Lenin's links with the Germans remains circumstantial, however substantial.
Having been appointed Minister of Justice in September 1917, Malyantovich cabled all prosecutors that the order to arrest Lenin for the armed uprising of 3-5 July was still active and must be carried out.153 He had, however, underestimated Lenin's skills as an underground operator, and in any case by this time the steam had gone out of the investigation. As Alexandrov testified in 1939, they were expecting Lenin to turn up personally to refute the ‘slander’ of his secret German connections, as he had said he would. ‘Prosecutor Kadinsky,’ Alexandrov said, ‘told me to show up on a certain day and time, in the evening, to interrogate Lenin, having said that Lenin himself would appear, in secret so as to avoid trouble. Lenin did not appear and so not only was he not arrested but also not questioned.’154 Lenin, meanwhile, was busy preparing the coup.
Malyantovich was arrested several times by the Soviet authorities. On 10 May 1931 he was sentenced by the OGPU to ten years' imprisonment, reduced to three years' exile thanks to the intervention of Maxim Gorky and a small group of senior Party officials. The last time he was arrested was in 1937 together with his sons Georgi and Vladimir. The chances of his escaping Stalin's meatgrinder were minimal, but his son Vladimir had hastened the dénouement when he incautiously told a group of close friends: ‘The Provisional Government ministers made a big mistake. There was only one brave man among them who acted decisively, even if it was too late, and that was my father … who wanted to arrest Lenin. If he'd done it, there wouldn't be all these horrors.’155Inevitably, his words were immediately reported to the ‘organs’, and the Malyantoviches were arrested.
To his credit, Malyantovich, then aged seventy, resisted the long interrogations and physical torture with unusual courage. When on 10 November 1937 he was asked about the struggle he had waged ‘against the proletariat, the Bolshevik Party and its leaders’, he replied: ‘Yes, as a Menshevik I entered the Provisional Government, accepted the post of Minister of Justice and Chief Prosecutor, being an implacable enemy of the Bolshevik Party and the proletarian revolution. I, Malyantovich, published the decree, made arrangements, signed the telegram to all prosecutors to arrest Lenin, so that the order to arrest him which had been issued long before should be carried out. By this step I wanted to decapitate the workers' and soldiers' rising that was aimed at seizing power by the proletariat.’156
The investigator seems to have recorded Malyantovich reasonably accurately, especially his words about ‘decapitating’ the rising, and in any event Malyantovich signed the deposition. Two years or so later, when at last he was put on trial—lasting less than an hour—his final words were that he had sanctioned Lenin's arrest on the orders of the government so as to avert the armed uprising, which was entirely unnecessary as the Constituent Assembly had already been scheduled. Malyantovich understood the situation he was in, but was unwilling to distort history: the arrest of Lenin in the summer or autumn of 1917 would have changed the course of the Russian drama, for Lenin was of fundamental importance to the Bolsheviks. He was their brain and their mainspring.
A military court consisting of Orlov, Romanychev, Detisov and a secretary, Mazur, sat briefly on 21 January 1940—the anniversary of Lenin's death, as it happened—and handed down the usual sentence of the time: execution by firing squad. The sentence was carried out the next day. No account was taken of the fact that before the revolution Malyantovich had acted as defence counsel for Russian Social Democrats in countless cases; in 1906 he had played a major part in the Bolshevik cause, as a result of which they received 100,000 gold roubles from the estate of S.T. Morozov; nor was he saved by his friendship with Gorky, Lunacharsky and Krasin, all long dead. The Bolsheviks could plainly not forgive the man who had tried to halt the course of events in the autumn of 1917. But why had his trial been delayed for over two years? From circumstantial evidence, it appears that Stalin was hoping proof would be found that efforts had been made in 1917 to arrest him as well, thus enhancing his own revolutionary image.
Malyantovich's family were to share his tragedy. His son Vladimir was savagely tortured in an effort to make him inform on his father. While Malyantovich was under investigation, his wife, Anzhelika Pavlovna, did everything she could to improve his situation, and finally, after countless petitions, she managed on 7 March 1940 to gain entry to the reception room of the Military Collegium, where she was told that ‘on 21 January 1940 her husband had been sentenced under Article 58 to ten years' exile in the Far East camps without the right of correspondence’.157 She died in December 1953, having waited in vain for thirteen years for news from her husband, unaware that he had been shot in January 1940. Not until August 1991, when Malyantovich was finally rehabilitated, did his grandson K.G. Malyantovich learn the truth.
Lenin was insisting not only on an armed uprising, but also that it be timed not to coincide with the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets. Trotsky remarked that ‘as in June, when Lenin … expected “them” to shoot us down, so now he thought the best thing from the [government's] point of view would be to take us by surprise, disorganize the revolution and then smash it piece by piece. As in July, Lenin overrated the enemy's shrewdness and determination, and possibly also his material possibilities.’158 The day before the coup, when he heard from Trotsky that the garrison troops were obeying the orders of the Military-Revolutionary Committee, Lenin ‘was in ecstasy, laughing and rubbing his hands with joy. Then he fell silent, paused and said: “That's fine, as long as we take power.”’ For Trotsky, this was the moment when Lenin finally accepted that they would seize power not by a conspiracy, but through the ostensibly democratic means of the Congress of Soviets.159 Yet the tone of Lenin's last letter to the Central Committee was desperate: ‘The government is wobbling. We must smash it whatever the cost! It would be death to wait.’160
Kerensky had left the capital on 25 October (6 November) to rally armed resistance. The small force of Cossacks he managed to muster was, however, soon disarmed by local Bolshevik troops, and Kerensky himself just managed to escape capture.
Meanwhile, back in Petrodgrad, the signal was given for the bombardment of the Winter Palace, where Kerensky's ministers were awaiting his return. About thirty shells were fired from the Peter-Paul Fortress, but only two landed, one of them on a cornice. No one was even wounded.161 The cadets were disarmed, and the regime appeared completely incapable of response. Even the ineffectual bombardment and symbolic siege had paralysed the will of the Palace's defenders.
It was not a revolutionary cohort of the Bolshevik army that burst in, but a raggle-taggle mob who behaved in the violent and outrageous way of such mobs.162 At 2 a.m. the Winter Palace was in the hands of the insurgents, and government ministers were in the hands of the commander of the Military-Revolutionary Committee, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko. There was no resistance. As Sukhanov recorded, beginning at 2 a.m. small groups of troops gradually took over the stations, bridges, power stations, post offices and telegraphs. ‘It was more like the changing of the guard … The city was completely quiet. The centre and the suburbs were sleeping soundly, quite unaware of what was happening in the silence of this cold autumn night.’163 Kerensky failed to find any help among ‘loyal troops from the front’, and the regime lay prostrate on the boulevards of Petrograd.
At a special session of the Soviet at midday on 26 October (8 November), Trotsky took the chair: ‘In the name of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet I announce that the Provisional Government no longer exists. Some ministers are under arrest, the rest will follow in the next days or hours.’ Interrupted by loud applause and cries of joy, Trotsky concluded by saying, ‘in our midst is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was unable to appear before owing to various circumstances. Long live Comrade Lenin who has returned to us!’ Sukhanov recorded of this moment: ‘When I entered the hall, there was a bald, clean-shaven man I didn't know standing on the podium and talking excitedly in a rather hoarse, stentorian voice, somewhat guttural and with a very particular emphasis at the end of his phrases. Ha! It was Lenin.’164
That evening, at 10.40 p.m., the Second Congress of Soviets opened in the Smolny Institute. More than sixty per cent of the delegates were Bolsheviks, reflecting the changes that had taken place in the country. New Bolshevik and SR faces appeared on the platform. Martov, supported by the SR Mstislavsky and the Bolshevik Lunacharsky, demanded that a new government be created without force or military action. It looked as if a unique moment of compromise might be at hand at this crucial turning-point in Russian history. But the moment passed. The Right SRs and the Mensheviks read out a joint declaration demanding that the Bolshevik coup be condemned and that immediate talks take place with the Provisional Government on the question of forming a new democratic government. The hall erupted.
The democratic wing of the Social Democratic Party then made a false step: they left the Congress, or, more precisely, conceded the political scene to the Bolsheviks and their supporters among the Socialist Revolutionaries. Sukhanov noted: ‘We left not knowing where or why, cutting ourselves off from the Soviet, getting mixed up with elements of the counter-revolution, discrediting and debasing ourselves in the eyes of the masses … Moreover, in going, we left the Bolsheviks a totally free hand and complete masters of the situation.’165 Lenin was too overcome with emotion to enter the meeting during the first session. Instead, he and Trotsky lay on blankets thrown on the floor in an adjoining room and talked quietly. Lenin smiled with fatigue and said: ‘The move from the underground to power has been too fast. My head is spinning.’166
When Lenin appeared at the evening session, he was greeted enthusiastically as the personification of the new regime. Since February the Soviets had represented the workers, soldiers and peasants throughout the country in what had had to pass for a democratic process, given the chaos and the absence of formal institutions. The voice of the Soviets in the capital had been the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, or VTsIK. Now, having seized power from the Provisional Government in the name of the Soviets, one of Lenin's first tasks was to replace that VTsIK with a body that would reflect Bolshevik policy. The Congress elected a new VTsIK in which the Bolsheviks had sixty-two seats, the Left SRs twenty-nine, the Mensheviks six (which they refused to take up), and Ukrainian Socialists three. The new Executive Committee became the supreme legislative (and for a time also administrative) body in Russia, and would remain so, under various names, throughout the entire Soviet period, until the demise of the USSR in December 1991. Its task would in fact be to rubber-stamp decrees issued either by Lenin's Council of People's Commissars or, in due course, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party. In other words, the Soviets were retained by the Bolsheviks as an ostensibly democratic tool of the Party.
Lenin read his decrees on land and peace, and his new government was established as the Council of People's Commissars under his chairmanship. He could now proceed to realize all the abstract plans he had based on the ‘founding fathers of Marxism’. Russia was to undergo an experiment that was unprecedented in its scale and its consequences. What had taken place had not been a classic conspiracy. The Bolsheviks were prepared to seize power by any means—peaceful, conspiratorial, or by mass uprising. Reading the situation correctly, they saw that a conspiracy was not required. Lenin had been putting the components of a conspiracy in place as a safeguard: if a rising did not succeed, the conspiracy would be mobilized, but it would be a conspiracy of the ‘united’. Unity had come to play the decisive rôle. What had been a small clutch of illegals in February 1917 had swollen to a mighty force by October.
Lenin did not yet know if the defeated elements would accept the position. They were demoralized and disoriented, but three days after the coup, he was delighted to read in Rabochaya gazeta (The Workers' Newspaper) of the dying gasp of the Pre-parliament, which until its dispersal had been meeting in the Mariinsky Palace: ‘To the citizens of Russia! The Provisional Council of the Russian Republic, yielding to the pressure of bayonets, was forced to disperse and temporarily cease work on 25 October (7 November). With “freedom and socialism” on their lips, the insurgents are resorting to casual violence. They have arrested members of the Provisional Government, including the socialist ministers, and imprisoned them in a tsarist casemate. Blood and anarchy threaten to overwhelm the revolution, to drown liberty and the Republic, and to culminate in the restoration of the old order … This regime should be seen as the enemy of the people and the revolution …’167 At the same time the Chief of the General Staff, General Dukhonin, appealed to the army to remain loyal to the Provisional Government and to put an end to Bolshevik violence, calling for the Constituent Assembly as the only body capable of saving the country.168 This was the first breath of the civil war for which Lenin had agitated.
Commissars and the Constituent Assembly
Terms such as ‘commissars’ and ‘plenipotentiaries’ now entered Russian life, and soon commissars and Cheka officials came to embody the Soviet regime itself.
Once the government had been formed, Trotsky recalled, the question arose of what to call its members. ‘Not ministers,’ Lenin stipulated: ‘that's a vile, worn-out title.’ Trotsky suggested: ‘Maybe commissars, though there are too many of them right now.’ He then proposed ‘supreme commissars’, but discarded that, then came up with ‘People's Commissars’, which Lenin liked. As for the name of the government itself, Trotsky proposed ‘Soviet of People's Commissars’, to which Lenin replied enthusiastically: ‘It smells of revolution.’169
The first political crisis to strike the new government came after only a few days. Representatives of the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Railwaymen's Union (Vikzhel), in which the Mensheviks and SRs were dominant, demanded a ‘homogenous socialist government’, that is, one made up of all the socialist parties, to be called the ‘People's Soviet’. This demand was supported by four Bolshevik People's Commissars: Milyutin, Nogin, Rykov and Teodorovich, as well as by some members of the Party Central Committee, which had been elected at the Sixth Congress in August 1917. At the same time, the Mensheviks and SRs were making it a condition for their entering the Soviet of People's Commissars that it first rid itself of the ‘organizers of the military conspiracy’, Lenin and Trotsky, and replace them with the SRs Chernov and Avksentiev, both of whom had been associated with the Provisional Government and were therefore seen as more genuinely ‘coalition-minded’.
On 1 (14) November Lenin summoned a meeting of the Party Central Committee. With some support, Kamenev, who was heading the talks with Vikzhel, proposed a compromise, permitting further talks. Lenin would brook no opposition: ‘Kamenev's policy must cease forthwith. We will not talk to Vikzhel now … They are on the side of the Kaledins and Kornilovs.’170 In protest against their leader's undemocratic ways, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Milyutin and Nogin left the Central Committee, and Milyutin, Nogin and Teodorovich also resigned as People's Commissars. Lenin and the rest of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) then sent an ultimatum to the protesters, accusing them of conciliationism and disorganizing tactics, and warning them that ‘the fate of the Party and the revolution’ depended on their accepting his demands.171 He wanted a purely Bolshevik government, and by exerting personal pressure he managed to persuade the protesters to give up the fight.
At first, Lenin plunged into the work of government with enormous enthusiasm. The Sovnarkom met almost daily, and Lenin enjoyed chairing government meetings, which sometimes lasted five or six hours. He was a stickler for keeping to the allotted time for speeches, and would cut off anyone who overran. Sometimes he would scan the hall with a hand shielding his eyes as if he were looking for someone. He would send notes to participants, request information, clarify details, ask for advice and propose decisions. Those who worked for him soon found him to be strict, though he had a ready smile. He had to have the room kept at a cool temperature, and if it was very warm he would gasp for breath. He did not like soft chairs, and preferred sending notes to using the telephone. He spent more time working on the political content of documents than on their literary style, with the result that his orders were often rough and clumsy, as were his letters in general. He worked hard, but as soon as he felt tired he dropped everything and went for a rest. It would be difficult to count all the holidays he took during his six years in power.
Unused as he was to the demands of a working routine, Lenin's physical strength soon began to flag. But he never let the cares of government prevent him from writing for the Party press. As a result of overwork, he began quickly to wear himself out and to age visibly. The rôle of leader had turned out to be prosaic, bureaucratic and thankless. From 27 July 1918 until his death, out of 173 Sovnarkom sessions he attended only seven.172
The Bolsheviks set out to build a socialist society, detailing, monitoring, ordering and regulating the widest possible spectrum of the great state's activities themselves. In November and December 1917 alone the People's Commissars examined about five hundred questions of state, social and economic life. They started with the confiscation, division and distribution of assets, the revolutionary court and the fight against sabotage. After breaking the resistance of the SRs and their own democratically-minded comrades, on 4 (17) November the Bolsheviks on the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets (VTsIK)* managed to pass a special resolution giving Lenin's ‘cabinet’, the Sovnarkom, not only executive, but also legislative powers.173 In effect, it was the Party Central Committee that ran the new administration, and decrees originating in the Sovnarkom were enacted with extraordinary speed, the only significant criterion being ‘revolutionary expediency’.
Lenin had never worked in industry or state administration, and his experience of agriculture had been minimal. Despite an exceptional mind and broad theoretical knowledge, his knowledge of the various functions of state was superficial, and many of his orders and counsels were confused and obscure. Addressing deputies from the Petrograd garrison on restoring order in the city, he said: ‘Our task, which we never lose sight of, is the universal arming of the people and the dispersal of the regular army. If the working population can be involved, the work will be easier. The comrades' proposal to assemble every day is a practical one … Each unit must work together with the workers' organizations to make sure everything required for this war of yours is stocked up, without waiting for orders from above. This task should be begun this very night independently.’174 This puzzling speech was published in Pravda.
A letter from Ioffe to Trotsky confirms that many of Lenin's judgments were based on lack of experience combined with a reliance on commissars whose zeal far outweighed their abilities: ‘The day after Krasin had been appointed Transport Commissar, a post for which, despite his many qualities, he was entirely unsuited, I happened to be leaving the city and went to see Vladimir Ilyich before doing so. He asked me when I was leaving. I replied that I didn't know when the train was departing. “Call up Krasin,” he said. In his view, a Transport Commissar was supposed to know the entire railway timetable, even if he'd only been given the job the day before and had never had anything to do with railways. It was the same with everything else.’
Ioffe went on: ‘On the financial question, if you please, Krestinsky was asked, but since when was he a financier? And Chicherin for foreign affairs, though everyone knows what sort of diplomat he is. Perhaps this is the way it should be in a “well-endowed” state, but with one prerequisite, namely that only specialists in a given field should be appointed, as used to be the case in tsarist times, where the finance minister would be someone who had earned his haemorrhoids in a finance department; the foreign minister someone who had knocked on the doors of all the foreign embassies, first as an attaché, then as envoy and finally ambassador and so on. With us, when they appoint someone straight “from the plough”, so to speak, or some Lutovinov is made a Member of the Collegium of the People's Commissariat of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, it isn't because he knows something about the Inspectorate or was ever interested in it, it is only because his job is either to shut mouths or “workerize”* the Inspectorate.’175
Ioffe's letter is an eloquent illustration of the way class considerations took precedence over professionalism in Lenin's government. Lenin himself rarely gave reports at Sovnarkom sessions, restricting his rôle to speaking on the most crucial political matters, giving general guidance and ensuring that the government's actions bore the clearest possible signs of its revolutionary direction. At a meeting of the Sovnarkom on 28 November 1917, for instance, he proposed a decree on ‘the arrest of the most prominent members of the central committee of the party of the enemies of the people [i.e. the Constitutional Democrats], and their trial by Revolutionary tribunal’.176 The only member of the government to oppose this measure was Stalin, perhaps in an effort to establish an autonomous presence.
Sovnarkom meetings usually took place in the morning and evening, and sometimes ran on beyond midnight. Items were not debated extensively, as Lenin usually pushed decisions through in a hurry, demanding members be brief, interrupting the garrulous and admonishing latecomers. He even introduced sanctions: lateness by half an hour would incur a fine of five roubles, lateness by up to an hour ten roubles. ‘Only People's Commissars who give proper notice and reasons for being late will be excused the fine.’177He also introduced a scale of punishment for absenteeism and lateness in all government institutions: ‘Lateness by ten minutes for a meeting without good reason will incur a reprimand; a second such offence, loss of one day's pay; a third time, a reprimand in the press … Arriving more than fifteen minutes late will incur a reprimand in the press or compulsory labour on days off.’178
In this way the leader of the revolution tried to oil the huge machine of administration. He would be sharp with anyone whispering during meetings, or scribble a ‘barbed note’ to them. On 2 December 1917, for instance, when L.A. Fotieva, one of his own secretaries, muttered an explanation to the stenographers, Lenin was so irritated that he sent her a note saying: ‘If you're going to chatter, I swear I'll throw you out.’179 On another occasion, Fotieva was absent when Lenin needed her, and he wrote angrily: ‘To Fotieva: I'm giving you a reprimand. You're not to sleep, but organize things so that everyone can easily locate you and always [underlined three times] when it has to do with me.’180
An abbreviated agenda and account of decisions taken during the session of 19 November 1917 reads:
1) Draft decree on civil marriage, to be passed to Justice Commissariat; 2) Draft decree on divorce, as above; 5) Stalin's report on trade with Finland and Finnish currency, ask Pyatakov to explain question of Finnish currency; 8) Stalin's proposal to delay elections to Constituent Assembly, postpone this matter to 20 November 1917; 9) Stalin's report on Ukraine and the Rada [the Ukrainian government], instruct Stalin to convene a special commission by 20 November; 11) Special request from mining and metallurgical workers of Zenteev district for 500,000 roubles, pass to interdepartmental commission for review; 13) Inquiry to Stalin about credits for commissariats. If it transpires employees have received pay up to January 1918, they are to return it forthwith: arrests and revolutionary tribunal not excluded; 15) Proposal by Ulyanov [Lenin] to appoint Comrade Essen Temporary Deputy People's Commissar for State Control, [agreed]; 18) Request from extraordinary Peasants' congress for 200,000 roubles out of the funds allocated for expenses, issue 200,000 roubles, the remaining 250,000 to come from Pre-parliament money; 21) Report by Glebov on rise for post and telegraph employees (grant of 500,000 roubles); 25) Report by Trotsky on war ministry (a secret order for purging the ministry and discharging officers from Latvian regiments …); 26) Inquiry to Petrovsky about arrests in Ministry of Internal Affairs, arrest them if Petrovsky agrees; 27) On ‘purging’ the ministries, all People's Commissars are to compile a daily report on the ‘purge’ of their ministries.
Signed V. Ulyanov (Lenin).181
Even in abbreviated form, this agenda gives an idea of Lenin's work as chairman of the government. The main task of the People's Commissars was to distribute resources, delegate work, arrest people and carry out ‘purges’. Anything requiring action was given to the commissariats, commissions and committees to do. The old state machine had been broken and the new one was primitive, inefficient and from its very inception markedly bureaucratic. Perhaps even Lenin did not then realize that the new structures being erected were in fact the foundations of a vast totalitarian system. He ceaselessly preached that the state must be run by the people, yet increasingly he himself regulated and limited the autonomy of the social and state agencies of everyday life which arose spontaneously. He had always seen, and would until the end of his days see, state, social and workers' control as the panacea of all ills.
Such a view of the virtues of control quickly led to the creation of a police state. As early as 26 October (8 November) Lenin personally penned a draft decree on workers' control in which ‘negligence, the concealment of supplies, accounts and so on will be punished by the confiscation of all property and up to five years' imprisonment’.182 He also introduced special control of the press, and by December 1917 many non-Bolshevik publishing houses had been closed down, and Lenin had authorized the Cheka to exercise ‘preliminary censorship of the periodical and non-periodical press, photography and cinematography, blueprints, illustrations … correspondence of the posts and telegraph’.183 This only months after he had been lamenting the severity of the police regime of the tsarist autocracy and the bourgeoisie. The sole argument he employed to justify the lawlessness and arbitrary rule of his own regime was that it was ‘in the interests of the masses’ and was being carried out by the ‘most advanced class’, the proletariat.
Lenin felt entitled to alter or supplement the Sovnarkom's instructions at will. For instance, he added in his own hand the following amendments to a Sovnarkom decree entitled ‘The Socialist fatherland is in danger!’:
2) All members of the rich classes are to supply themselves immediately with a work book in which weekly reports will be entered showing whether or not they have performed the allotted amount of military or administrative work … Work books will cost the wealthy 50 roubles each; 3) Non-possession of a work book or incorrect and especially false entries are to be punished under martial law; anyone in possession of firearms must obtain new permission, a) from their house committee, b) from their institution … Possession of firearms is prohibited unless both permissions are obtained; punishment for breaking this rule is execution. The same punishment applies to the concealment of supplies.184
Of course a regime subjected at its inception to the pressures of a civil war such as that faced by the Bolsheviks will seek and find rationalizations for its harsh policies. The question is, how clearly did Lenin and his followers distinguish, in their own minds, between the force and coercion required to combat their armed enemies, and that which they used against their purely political foes, real and potential? The promise to create a new society without oppression, police rule and terror, so adamantly expressed by Lenin as late as the summer of 1917 in State and Revolution, was swallowed up by the imperatives of Bolshevik survival, and never retrieved. On the contrary, the new government depended on special, ‘extraordinary’, punitive commissions. Those with eyes to see at once perceived the terrible threat. Gorky, who did not ‘accept’ the revolution straight away, was quite direct: ‘Lenin, Trotsky and their fellow-travellers are already intoxicated by the foul poison of power, as they show by their disgraceful attitude to freedom of speech, the person and to all the rights for which the democracy fought … The workers must not let the adventurers and madmen heap shameless, senseless, bloody crimes on the heads of the proletariat, crimes for which it will not be Lenin who will pay, but the proletariat itself.’185
It was not only intellectuals and academics who sensed that a terrible new regime had come to power. Lenin received letters from ordinary people who complained of spiritual suffering. A certain Yemelyan Pavlov wrote that the commissars, ‘all the people in leather jackets who worship you, are doing their best to put you onto a pedestal so high that you won't see anything but will be seen by the people as an unattainable god’.186 In another letter written at the same time, a certain N. Vorontsov wrote: ‘All your reforms have boiled down to the following: 1) universal hard labour with the typical marks of a regime which abolishes the right of free movement, brings in a system of permits, coercive feeding and teaching and so on; the ultimate perfection of the Security Section (Cheka) and its spread to cover all citizens: a system of general search and the absence of courts.’ The writer ended by predicting that ‘they'll tear your corpse apart on the streets of Moscow, like the Pretender’. *187 There is no evidence that these letters were actually seen by Lenin, but they do show that, from the very outset, many ordinary people were horrified by the prospect of life under the Soviets.
Occasionally Lenin resorted to populist measures in order to increase the authority of the new regime. He set new wage scales for members of the government, fixing the salary of a People's Commissar at five hundred roubles a month plus one hundred roubles for each non-working member of the family.188 This was probably about the wage of a skilled worker, since it was Party policy to remunerate its officials at roughly that rate. It was, however, no more than a part of a commissar's income. Commissars were given special rations, in Moscow they soon took over the country villas of the bourgeoisie, and they had access to their own special physicians. As early as 1918 the practice of going abroad for medical treatment and rest had been instituted, and top Party officials would not let such privileges slip through their fingers. In any case, after 1918 money quickly lost all meaning, as galloping inflation rendered it worthless. The only transactions of value were conducted by barter, and the only wages of value were those received in kind.
Although the government had proclaimed that the army was to be replaced by a people's militia, a regular army, it turned out, was still needed, and had to be created, fed, clothed and led. Within a few days in November 1917, Lenin signed a number of orders concerning the army. All ranks, titles, medals and officers' organizations were abolished with the proclamation that ‘the army of the Russian Republic now consists of free and equal citizens who bear the honourable title of soldier of the revolutionary army’.189
Simultaneously, another decree introduced the elective principle and prescribed the organization of power in the army, underlining that the army was subordinate to the will of the people as embodied by the Sovnarkom, that all power in the army was vested in soldiers' committees, and that commanders, (i.e. officers) and all other officials were to be subject to election.190
As he pursued his abstract schemes, Lenin succeeded in destroying what remained of the old military organization, something he could not have contemplated had he not come to power with the intention of leaving the war. Having no notion of the peculiarities of military hierarchy, with the principle of single command, Lenin's commissars brought chaos to the regiments and naval ships. The Bolsheviks did, however, quickly master the arts of terror and requisitioning. If a complaint was received that a certain unit was badly supplied, a decree would be issued increasing soldiers' rations, quickly followed by an order ‘to confiscate the resources from the rich by revolutionary means’.191 Within a short time the new regime would, however, turn its attention to rebuilding military force, and the Red Army would be the result.
On 30 November 1917, at the suggestion of Trotsky and Bonch-Bruevich, the Sovnarkom issued a decree requisitioning gold, with a reward of one per cent of its market value for anyone who ‘discovered’ any.192 In signing such decrees, Lenin was encouraging social disorder, spreading corruption, pushing the dispossessed towards organized resistance and igniting local beacons of a civil war that would soon spread into one fearful conflagration. He was assisted in these ‘initiatives’ by the Left SRs, to whom, after debate in the Central Committee, he decided to give several portfolios. The matter was reviewed by the Sovnarkom on 9 December, and the decision was taken to make it a condition that the Left SRs ‘must follow the general policy of the Sovnarkom’, that is, the Bolshevik Central Committee. After a night of negotiation between Sverdlov and Left SR representatives, it was announced at the Sovnarkom that ‘full agreement’ had been reached. Agriculture was given to A.L. Kollegaev, Justice to I.Z. Shteinberg, Posts and Telegraph to P.P. Proshyan, Local Self-Government to V.Y. Trutovsky, State Property to V.A. Karelin, and V.A. Algasov was made People's Commissar without portfolio but with voting powers.193 Most of these—if they did not, like Proshyan, die of typhus or other affliction of the civil war, or emigrate, like Shteinberg—were dealt with as enemies of the people in the mid-1930s.
Although the Left SRs were hardly less radical than the Bolsheviks themselves (they tended to stress peasant interests), this interval in Soviet history represented a rare moment of socialist pluralism and, had the Mensheviks also been invited to join the government, it is just possible that a measure of moderation might have taken root. To be sure, despite Lenin's claim at the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918 that ‘after two months of working together, I can definitely say that most of the issues we dealt with were settled unanimously’,194 friction occurred straight away. Shteinberg was demanding that his commissariat be given control of the Cheka and the investigation commission of the Revolutionary Tribunal, but Lenin turned him down flat. Trutovsky wanted to retain local institutions, which the Bolsheviks saw as a stronghold of the old ways. In the course of their brief cohabitation, the two parties were in conflict more than a dozen times. It is nevertheless possible that over a period of years the coalition could have led to mutual restraint, which might in due course have mitigated the worst features of totalitarianism. There was, it is true, a moment when the Left SRs wanted to merge with the Bolsheviks, but, as Trotsky recalled, Lenin decided to ‘let them wait’.195
But, for a time, the collaboration was a fact. Of the twenty members of the Cheka Collegium, seven were Left SRs, including Dzerzhinsky's deputies Alexandrovich and Zaks. In April 1918 the Left SRs helped the Bolsheviks to crush the Anarchists (who were splintered into a host of groupings, some of them supporting the Bolsheviks, most opposed to Lenin's strong, centralized form of government), and also helped to spread Bolshevik influence in the countryside by supporting the infamous decree of 13 May 1918 which legitimized the confiscation of grain from the peasants. Before the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, force was virtually the sole means employed by the regime to bring the peasants under its control.
It soon became clear, however, that the Bolsheviks did not want to share power with any party. When the Left SRs opposed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, under which Lenin withdrew from the war at huge cost, and resigned from the government, the Bolsheviks heaved a sigh of relief, and smashed them as a party on 6-7 July 1918 by mass arrests and deportations to prisons and concentration camps.
Lenin was less concerned with unstable allies like the Left SRs and drop-outs from Vikzhel than he was with the impending Constituent Assembly. He had already stated on 10 October 1917 that ‘to wait for the Constituent Assembly, which will obviously not be with us, is senseless and will only make our task harder’.196 His warning had gone unheeded: the Assembly was still some way off, and if the Bolsheviks seized power its fate would be uncertain. Now power was indeed in their hands, yet the Constituent Assembly, given the chance, would take it away from them. Despite his promise of land, Lenin knew that the peasants would not vote for the Bolsheviks, but would support the Socialist Revolutionaries as the more familiar party. Perhaps he also recalled Thomas Carlyle's comment to the effect that any assembly consisting of twelve hundred people was good for nothing but agitation and self-destruction. Indeed, seven decades later, a Congress of People's Deputies, in its way a Constituent Assembly, would destroy the Union Lenin had created. A vast gathering of ambitious people, standing above parliament, the regime and the courts, is more likely to act destructively than constructively.
For Lenin, it was not important that the Constituent Assembly might begin the process of creating a representative and capable parliament which could have put the country onto the path of civilized development. What mattered to him was that the Constituent Assembly could deprive him of the prize he had sought for so long. He would not have been Lenin had he reconciled himself to such an outcome, and he was resolved to throw this relic of ‘dead bourgeois parliamentarism’ out of the revolutionary train. And yet in January, while still in Switzerland, he had called for the Constituent Assembly ‘to be convened immediately’, and in April he had exclaimed indignantly: ‘They say I am against the earliest possible convening of the Constituent Assembly!!! That's what I call “delirium”.’197 (He was referring to Plekhanov's comment on the position he had taken on his return to Russia in April 1917.)
Until the beginning of October, the Bolsheviks continued to parade as supporters of the Constituent Assembly, and the day after the coup Pravda proclaimed: ‘Comrades! With your blood you have ensured that the master of the Russian land, the Constituent Assembly, will be convened on time.’ The Provisional Government had determined that elections would take place on 17 (30) September 1917 and that the Assembly would convene on 30 September (13 October). The decree had been signed on 14 June, and six million roubles had been allocated to cover the costs of the election. Later, under Kerensky's prime ministership, the election had been postponed until 12 (25) November and the Assembly for 28 November (10 December), and the scale of representation had been determined by September.198
It was not possible to complete the election in one day—in some places it took the entire month of December. 703 deputies were elected, of whom only 168 were Bolsheviks. The SRs won 299 seats, the Left SRs 39, the Mensheviks 18, the Popular Socialists 4, the Kadets 17, and 158 were elected from various national groups.
Trotsky recalled that Lenin raised the issue of the Assembly ‘days, if not hours’ after the coup. ‘We have to put off the elections,’ he said. ‘We have to have the opportunity to renew the electoral lists.* Our own lists are no use whatever, they include a lot of intellectuals who got on by accident, whereas we need workers and peasants. We have to declare Kornilovites and Constitutional Democrats outside the law.’ There were objections that this was not a good moment to postpone the election, that it would be seen as the liquidation of the Constituent Assembly, especially as the Bolsheviks had accused the Provisional Government of delay. ‘Rubbish!’ Lenin retorted. ‘Why isn't it a good moment? What if the Constituent Assembly turns out to be a Kadet—Menshevik—SR one, will that suit us?’ Trotsky added that Lenin, isolated in his view, kept repeating, ‘It's a mistake, an obvious mistake for which we shall pay dearly. It could cost the revolution its head.’ On balance, Lenin was for dispersing the Assembly, and his only concern was how the Left SRs would react. They, however, agreed with him, yet Lenin was not content: ‘It's an obvious mistake: we have already won power, and yet we have to take military measures to win it all over again.’199
The ‘military measures’ in question were the transfer of one of the most loyal Bolshevik Latvian regiments to the capital. Should the Assembly prove ‘disobedient’, force was to be used. On 23 November, the very eve of the elections, the electoral commission was meeting, as usual, in the Tauride Palace. At midday the palace commandant, Prigovorovsky, walked in and announced that he had been empowered to arrest the ‘Kadet-defencists’. Blind to their protests, he marched the professors, lawyers, doctors and politicians into an empty room and locked it. They were held there for four days without food, water or beds, and threatened with worse. Their crime had been to publish a statement ten days earlier to the effect that, despite the disruption of the electoral process caused by the ‘attempt to seize power’, the Provisional Government had determined not to delay further and was announcing the date of the Constituent Assembly as 28 November (10 December).200 It was this ‘arrogance’ that prompted Lenin to liquidate the commission and to appoint Mikhail Uritsky as commissar for the election.
A number of the commissioners who were still at large burst in on Stalin and demanded to know why their colleagues had been arrested: ‘Isn't it because the Commission doesn't recognize the People's Commissars?’ M.M. Dobranitsky asked.
‘We don't care what the commission thinks of us,’ Stalin replied. ‘The matter is more serious. You've been engaging in forgery and falsification.’
‘That's a lie!’
‘Can you be so sure,’ Stalin retorted, ‘that the Kadets and defencists haven't been having meetings and keeping them secret from you?’ He ended the meeting with: ‘We won't allow the counter-revolution to use the Constituent Assembly as a smokescreen for its own ends.’201
The arrest of the commission was a challenge to the whole democratic process, and on 28 November the liberal Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) and Right (i.e. moderate) Socialist Revolutionaries staged a demonstration at the Tauride Palace. There was an attempt to break in and ‘open’ the Assembly, but with the help of armed sailors the Bolsheviks dispersed the demonstrators. That evening the Sovnarkom discussed a report by Trotsky on the events. He defined what had happened as an attempt at an armed uprising and the Kadet leadership as a permanent source of counter-revolution. Lenin proposed they be arrested as ‘enemies of the people and put before a revolutionary tribunal’.202 The commission was arrested next day and, where elections had yet to be held, Uritsky was put in charge. When the remaining members of the commission refused to disperse on Uritsky's orders, the Sovnarkom decreed the commission's liquidation.
As deputies had by now been elected, the VTsIK passed a decree recalling deputies who ‘had not earned the trust of the people’, i.e. all those who did not accept Bolshevik authority. In a noisy campaign, orchestrated by the Bolsheviks, many deputies at congresses of peasants and soldiers were denounced as ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ and deprived of their mandates.
Lenin went still further. The Bolshevik section, which was to represent their interests at the Assembly, and which included the ‘Vikzhel rebels’, whom Lenin had not forgiven, declared that the Constituent Assembly was an important stage in the socialist revolution. It too was swept away.
In mid-December Lenin radically revised the Bolshevik line on the Assembly, arguing that the Soviets were not merely ‘a higher form’, they were the ‘only form of democracy’, and that the results were outdated, since the population had not yet had time to assess the Bolsheviks' achievements on the questions of peace and land.203 If Lenin thought the elections had not reflected the ‘new disposition of class forces’, it was open to him to correct the position by democratic means, i.e. new elections. But the Bolsheviks had lost in the November elections, and they would have lost in new ones. Lenin's decision was therefore to convene the Assembly and propose that it approve the fundamental decrees agreed by the Bolsheviks. Knowing that the Right SRs and Mensheviks would resist, there would be nothing more to do than close the Assembly down. As Lenin told Trotsky: ‘Of course, it was taking a risk, a big risk, not to put off the date of the Assembly. But in the end it was for the best. The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly by the Soviet regime is the full and open liquidation of formal democracy in the name of the revolutionary dictatorship.’204
The Bolsheviks therefore decided to observe the formalities and convene the Assembly on 5 (18) January, setting a quorum of four hundred.205 They even went through the motions of allocating government funds: ‘71,000 roubles for salaries, 8,000 for typists, couriers and guards, 10,000 for couriers' journeys, 5,000 for the restaurant … A round sum of 233,000 roubles.’206 The campaign against the Assembly began in December. Trotsky proposed a motion at the Sovnarkom ‘to intensify the watch on the bourgeois press for foul insinuations and slander against the Soviet regime’. Petrovsky was instructed to set up a special body at the Commissariat of the Interior to do this.207 Here was the embryo of the future censorship, the ideological roadblock on the road to truth in the Soviet Union.
The Assembly, which bore the hopes of so many, finally opened to the accompaniment of public demonstrations of support on 18 January 1918. The Bolsheviks were prepared, and their troops barred the way to the Tauride Palace. There were clashes, and blood flowed. Meanwhile, 410 deputies had assembled. The meeting was opened by one of the oldest of them, S.P. Shevtsov, but no one heard his short speech, for the moment he began, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs struck up a cacophony, banging their desks, stamping their feet, whistling and whooping. ‘Lenin,’ the Menshevik Vishnyak, who was secretary of the Assembly, recalled, ‘who was sitting in a box to the left of the chairman, at first listened, then sank back into his chair apathetically and finally disappeared altogether.’ The leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Viktor Chernov, gained most votes for the position of chairman, but was prevented from taking his seat by the tumult. Vishnyak recalled Bukharin declaring: ‘The dictatorship is laying the foundations for the life of mankind for a thousand years.’208
Sverdlov proposed that the Assembly approve the decrees issued by the Soviet regime. The SR majority rejected this as arrogance, at which the Bolsheviks, following Lenin's plan, left the hall, followed by the Left SRs. Vishnyak remembered that ‘the sailors and Red Army men in the hall now lost their restraint. They leapt into the boxes and pushed deputies towards the exits with their rifle-butts, and swirled up into the balconies where the public was close to panic. The deputies meanwhile remained stationary in their seats, tragically silent. We had been isolated from the world, just as the Tauride Palace had been isolated from Petrograd and Petrograd from the rest of the world.’209 The remaining deputies attempted to preserve the forum, and continued making speeches, despite the physical threat. At five a.m. the Bolsheviks simply proposed that the deputies leave.
In a twenty-minute speech at the All-Russian Executive Committee of Soviets on the night of 19 January 1918, Lenin stressed that civil war was an inevitable accompaniment of the socialist revolution. To loud applause, he went on: ‘The people wanted us to convene the Constituent Assembly and we did. But now the people know what it represents.’210 This despite the fact that no newspaper or other source of information had reported its proceedings, even in the capital. It was, in other words, the Bolsheviks who expressed the will of the people.
Like many other members of the Assembly, if they did not perish in the civil war, Chernov, its chairman, was to spend the rest of his life in exile looking back on 5 (18) January 1918 as a great opportunity missed. Referred to as ‘The Gypsy’, he was tailed throughout his life by the OGPU—NKVD, and his every move was reported back to Moscow. Agent ‘Lord’ stole some of his papers from his residence in Prague, including the original minutes of the opening session of the Assembly.211
Trotsky later wrote derisively: ‘In the form of the SR [Assembly] the February revolution had the occasion to die a second time,’ adding, ‘Chernov followed the old revolutionary intelligentsia tradition, while Lenin completed and overcame it fully.’212 He ought to have said ‘distorted, repudiated and destroyed it fully’. The old Russian intelligentsia, bearing the cross of spiritual rebellion, had a conscience. It was honest and idealistic. Lenin ‘overcame’ these ‘weaknesses’ and revealed himself as the new intellectual of the Marxist type, a utopian fanatic, believing himself to have the right to perform any experiment so long as the goal of power was served. Chernov, Martov, Dan and other Russian socialist intellectuals differed from Lenin in that they wanted to attain a better world for mankind without the use of force, and by learning from the experience of democracy elsewhere. Lenin was not thinking about ‘mankind’, but the mass, for whom he wanted to build a life of communism conceived in his head.
In 1918 Vladimir Medem, the Bundist, wrote: ‘There are impatient people who think that without the Constituent Assembly it will be easier and quicker to make everyone happy. But no one has ever been made happy by forced.’213
The story of Lenin's part in the sad history of the Constituent Assembly might have ended here, except that in the autumn of 1918 Karl Kautsky wrote a pamphlet, which Vorovsky sent Lenin from Scandinavia, entitled ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. In it Kautsky wrote frankly about the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks. Lenin was indignant; he had never been able to accept personal criticism. He was quite comfortable lashing out at all and sundry, but he could not bear jibes at himself, especially if they were justified. Kautsky's analysis, balanced and well-argued, exposed the deeply anti-democratic nature of Bolshevism and of Lenin himself, and Lenin could not let it pass. Battles might be raging on all fronts, the Soviet regime might be under real threat, the Republic suffering severe famine, banditry, terror, but the insult must be answered. Lenin, pushing aside the endless tasks of government, set about writing a reply, ‘The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky’.
The hundred-page work is typical of Lenin's ‘scientific’ style: pragmatic and categorical in its judgments, attuned to politics rather than theory, accompanied by such abuse as to make one wonder if this really was a Russian intellectual who was writing. Kautsky, one of the most revered figures of international socialism, is repeatedly called ‘the Judas Kautsky’, ‘renegade’, ‘swindler’, ‘blind puppy’, ‘sycophant of the bourgeoisie’, ‘swine’, ‘yes-man of scoundrels and bloodsuckers’, ‘philistine’. Lenin accuses him of ‘despicable tricks’ and ‘foul lies’, and describes him as fit for the ‘cesspit of renegades’.
* Not to be confused with the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, the VTsIK was ostensibly the supreme organ of Soviet government.
* i.e. Maximize the number of officials of working-class origin.
* The death of Tsar Boris Godunov in 1605 had triggered a period of strife, foreign intervention and anarchy, known as the Time of Troubles, lasting until 1613, when the first Romanov ascended the throne. Dmitri, who claimed to be Ivan the Terrible's murdered son, captured Moscow in 1605 and was murdered the following year.
* The electoral law passed by the Provisional Government in July 1917 had given the right to vote to all citizens, male and female, over the age of twenty (excepting convicts, deserters, the insane and the royal family).