October

by China Miéville

  On the last two days of July, after a protracted debate, as per Lenin’s analysis and plea, the Bolsheviks dropped the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’. They began to plot a new course. A course that was predicated not on the strength and potential of the Soviets, but on direct seizure of power by the workers and the party.

  8

  August: Exile and Conspiracy

  In those late days of summer, as the right ruminated a cleansing, there flourished a millennial indulgence. Bands and all-night dances, stained silk dresses and cravats, flies circling warming cake and vomit and spilt drink. Long days, warm orgiastic nights. A sybariticism for the end of a world. In Kiev, said the Countess Speransky, there were ‘suppers with gypsy bands and chorus, bridge and even tangoes, poker and romances’. As in Kiev, so across the cities of Russia, among the dreaming rich.

  On 3 August, the Sixth Russian Social Democratic Workers Party Congress – the Bolshevik Congress – unanimously passed a resolution in favour of a new slogan. It was a compromise between the impatient ‘Leninists’, who saw the revolution entering a new post-Soviet phase, and the moderates, who still thought that they might be able to work with the socialists to their right to defend the revolution. Nonetheless, the symbolic importance of the shift in phraseology was immense. The lesson shook out, the calls changed. July had done its work. No longer did the Bolsheviks call for ‘All Power to the Soviets’. Instead they aspired to the ‘Complete Liquidation of the Dictatorship of the Counterrevolutionary Bourgeoisie’.

  The Soviet relocated as required. The Smolny Institute was built in the early 1800s, a grandiose neoclassical edifice in the Smolny district east of the city centre, by the Neva. A building of cavernous corridors, white floors, watery electric light. On the ground level was a great mess hall, between hallways lined with offices full of secretaries and deputies and fractions of the parties of the Soviet, their military organisations and committees and conclaves. Piles of newspapers, pamphlets, posters covered the tables. Machine guns protruded from windows. Soldiers and workers packed the passages, sleeping on chairs and benches, guarding gatherings, watched by empty gold frames from which imperial portraits had been cut.

  Until just before the revolution, the institute had been a facility for the education of daughters of the nobility. An erstwhile guarantor of state power, the Soviet was demoted to squatting a finishing school. When the full Soviet met, it did so in what had been the ballroom.

  On the 3rd, Kornilov came to meet Kerensky, and again made several demands of the man who was technically his boss. These included, in a hardening of his previous attitude, the strict curtailing of the soldiers’ committees. Though they broadly accepted its substance, Kerensky, Savinkov and Filonenko would together rework the document Kornilov presented, so as to disguise its inflammatory contempt. The general’s disgust at the government only increased when, as he prepared to brief the cabinet on the military situation, Kerensky quietly advised him not to be too specific with details. Some of the cabinet’s Soviet members, he insinuated, particularly Chernov, might be security risks.

  During their meeting, Kerensky asked Kornilov a curious question.

  ‘Suppose I should withdraw,’ he said, ‘what will happen? You will hang in the air; the railways will stop; the telegraph will cease to function.’

  Kornilov’s reserved response – that Kerensky should remain in position – was less interesting than the question itself. The point behind its melancholy is opaque. Was Kerensky seeking reassurance that Kornilov would support him? Was he, perhaps, tentatively sounding out the possibility of a Kornilov dictatorship?

  We are all legion, and Kerensky was more legion than most. His plaintive query may have expressed both horror at and hope in the idea of giving up, of surrendering to the tough-talking commander-in-chief. A political death drive.

  Hatred for the war still waxed. From around the country came scores of reports of soldiers resisting transfer.

  A propaganda battle intensified around Kornilov, reflecting the growing split between the hard right in the country, to which the Kadets were gravitating, and the dwindling power of the moderate socialists. On 4 August, Izvestia hinted at plans to replace Kornilov with General Cheremisov, a relative moderate who believed in working with soldiers’ committees. To which, on the 6th, the Council of the Union of Cossack Troops responded that Kornilov was ‘the sole general who can recreate the power of the army and bring the country out of its very difficult situation’. They in turn hinted at rebellion if Kornilov was removed.

  The Union of Cavaliers of St George gave Kornilov their support. Prominent Moscow conservatives under Rodzianko sent him gushing telegrams, intoning that ‘in this threatening hour of heavy trial all thinking Russia looks to you with hope and faith’. It was a civil war of words.

  Kornilov demanded from Kerensky command of the Petrograd Military District. To the delight of a coup-hungry right, he ordered his chief of staff, Lukomsky, to concentrate troops near Petrograd – this would permit their speedy deployment to the capital.

  The background to this manoeuvering was not only the catastrophic and worsening economic and social situation, but a conscious and deliberate ratcheting of tensions by sections of the punitive right. At a gathering of 300 industrial and financial magnates in early August, the opening speaker was Pavel Ryabushinsky, a powerful textile businessman. ‘The Provisional Government possesses only the shadow of power,’ he said. ‘Actually a gang of political charlatans are in control … The government is concentrating on taxes, imposing them primarily and cruelly upon the merchant and industrial class … Would it not be better in the name of the salvation of the fatherland to appoint a guardian over the spendthrifts?’

  Then came a sadism so startling it stunned the left. ‘The bony hand of hunger and national destitution will seize by the throat the friends of the people.’

  Those ‘friends of the people’ he dreamed into the grasp of predatory skeletal fingers were socialists.

  It was not only from the right, however, that pressure piled on. Also on the 6th, in Kronstadt, 15,000 workers, soldiers and sailors protested at the arrest of the Bolshevik leaders, of Steklov and Kamenev and Kollontai and the rest. In Helsingfors, a similarly large gathering resolved for a transfer of power to the soviets. Of course that demand was now outdated as far as many Bolsheviks were concerned, but it represented a leftward shift for most workers. Pushed by the Bolsheviks and the militant Left SRs, the next day, the workers’ section of the Petrograd Soviet criticised the arrest of leftist leaders, as well as the return of the military death penalty. They won the vote. Mensheviks and SRs began to complain of defections to their left – to their own maximalist sections, or beyond.

  Such signs of left recovery were patchy and uneven: on 10 August, in Odessa elections, for example, the Bolsheviks won only three out of over 100 seats. But in Lugansk municipal elections in early August, the Bolsheviks won twenty-nine of seventy-five seats. In elections in Revel (now Tallinn) they took over 30 per cent of the vote, very nearly the same in Tver, a little later, and in Ivanovo-Vosnessensk their tally was double that. Over the territory of the empire, the trend was definite.

  Huddled in his hut, on a day of heavy rain, Lenin was startled by the sound of cursing. A Cossack was approaching through the wet undergrowth.

  The man begged shelter from the downpour. Lenin had little choice but to stand aside and let him in. As they sat together listening to the drumbeat of water, Lenin asked his visitor what brought him to this out-of-the-way spot.

  A manhunt, the Cossack said. He was after someone by the name of Lenin. To bring him back dead or alive.

  And what, Lenin asked cautiously, had this reprobate done?

  The Cossack waved his hand, vague about the details. What he did know, he stressed, was that the fugitive was in some way ‘muddled’; that he was dangerous; and that he was nearby.

  When the skies lightened at last, the visitor thanked his temporary host and set out through the sodden grass
to continue the search.

  After that alarming incident, Lenin and the CC, with which he remained in secret communication, agreed that he should move to Finland.

  On 8 August, Zinoviev and Lenin abandoned their hut in the company of Yemelyanov; Alexander Shotman, a Finnish ‘Old Bolshevik’; and the flamboyant, extravagantly moustached activist Eino Rahja. The men set out through the lakeside swamp for a local station, on a long, wet, arduous trek punctuated by wrong turnings and ill feeling, hauling themselves out at last by the railway at the village of Dibuny. Their troubles were not over: there on the platform, a suspicious military cadet challenged and arrested Yemelyanov. But Shotman, Rahja, Zinoviev and Lenin swiftly made it onto an arriving train headed to Udelnaya, in Petrograd’s outskirts.

  From there, Zinoviev continued into the capital. Lenin’s travels were not yet done.

  The next day, train 293 for Finland arrived at Udelnaya Station. The driver was Guro Jalava, railwayman, conspirator, committed Marxist.

  ‘I came to the edge of the platform,’ he later recalled, ‘whereat a man strode from among the trees and hoisted himself up into the cab. It was, of course, Lenin, although I hardly recognised him. He was to be my stoker.’

  The photograph in the fake passport with which Lenin – ‘Konstantin Petrovich Ivanov’ – travelled has become famous. With a cap perched high on a curly wig, the contours of his beardless mouth unfamiliar, wryly upturned, his deep small eyes are all that is recognisable.

  Lenin rolled up his sleeves. He set to work, so enthusiastically that the train spewed out generous plumes of smoke. His driver recalled how Lenin shovelled with gusto, feeding the engine, making it run fast, bearing him away on the ties and rails.

  When he alighted at last, Lenin the stoker still had a circuitous clandestine journey ahead of him. It was not until 11 p.m. on 10 August that Lenin arrived at a small, homely apartment at 1 Hakaniemi Square, in the north of Helsingfors. This was the Rovio residence. With his wife away visiting family, Kustaa Rovio, an activist for the Social Democrats, had agreed to shelter the Russian Marxist.

  A large, imposing man, Rovio’s career had taken a staggeringly unlikely turn. A socialist of long standing, he was also now the head of the Helsingfors Police.

  Quite how he came to square this role with his revolutionary commitment is unclear. Of the guest who had, a few years previously, advocated stockpiling ‘bombs and stones, etc., or acids’ to drop on his colleagues, police chief Rovio said: ‘I have never met such a congenial and charming comrade.’

  Lenin’s sole demands – and on these he was adamant – were that Rovio should procure him the Russian newspapers every day, and arrange the secret delivery of letters back to his party comrades. This his host did even when, due to the imminent return of Mrs Rovio, Lenin relocated to the apartment of a socialist couple, the Blomqvists, in nearby Telekatu.

  Taking her own hazardous routes, hiking on foot through a forest over the border, Krupskaya more than once visited her husband. Lenin himself strolled Helsingfors with remarkable freedom. ‘It is necessary to be quick, Kerensky,’ he declared with relish at the Blomqvists’ kitchen table, reading of the government’s hunt for him, ‘in order to catch me.’

  Above all, throughout August, as he had in July and as he would in September, Lenin wrote. Messages and letters and instructions to comrades, and another, longer work. The very first day he lodged with him, Rovio found Lenin asleep at a desk, his head in his arms, a closely written notebook before him. ‘Consumed with curiosity,’ Rovio reported, ‘I began turning over the pages. It was the manuscript of his book The State and Revolution.’

  This is an extraordinary, sinewy negotiation of remorseless anti-statism with the temporary necessity of ‘the bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie’, under the proletariat. The historic text, described by Lucio Colletti as ‘Lenin’s greatest contribution to political theory’, was composed on a log by a mosquito-ridden lake, and then on a policeman’s table. It would not yet be quite finished when circumstances changed, and Lenin made his way back to Russia. The text closes with a legendary truncation: ‘It is more pleasant and useful to go through the experience of the revolution than to write about it.’

  The same day that Lenin arrived at the Rovios’ flat, on 10 August, Kornilov went again to meet Kerensky in Petrograd, at Savinkov’s insistence. They were to discuss the general’s new demands: now he wanted control of the railways and war industries. He asked, too, peremptorily, for the right to employ extraordinary repression as he considered necessary, including relocating slacking workers to the front.

  Mistrust between prime minister and general was such that Kornilov arrived with a substantial and provocative bodyguard. This was a body of Turkmen fighters from the so-called Savage Division of volunteer soldiers from across the Caucasus – heavily mythicised figures, chosen to intimidate. As Kerensky watched in alarm from the Winter Palace, the red-robed warriors came jogging into view down the wide streets, surrounding Kornilov’s car, brandishing scimitars and machine-guns. They took up positions around the palace door like enemies preparing for a parlay.

  The meeting was icy. Kornilov had heard rumours that he might be replaced, and he menacingly advised Kerensky against any such step. When Kerensky would not commit to everything he wanted, Kornilov insisted on meeting with the cabinet to put his case; but Kerensky would only convene an informal group, excluding the Kadets, that agreed in principle to most of Kornilov’s demands but were vague about the time frame, and continued to oppose the militarisation of railways and industries. The general left in a severe temper.

  In fact, the desperate Kerensky was not altogether opposed even to those rejected measures, given the context of social collapse. He was, however, understandably fearful of the reaction such moves would provoke in the Soviet and beyond. His strategy of ‘balance’ now had him provoking the fury of those to his left and those to his right.

  In a strained effort to reconcile widening social divisions, the Provisional Government scrambled to put together a symbolic, consultative gathering. Almost 2,500 delegates would attend the Moscow State Conference, representing trade unions, Dumas, commerce and the soviets. The event was to take place in the splendid neoclassical edifice of the second city’s Bolshoi Theatre, between 12 and 14 August.

  Through their membership of the Soviet and VTsIK, the Bolsheviks qualified for delegates. Initially they planned to make a scornful declaration followed by an ostentatious walkout, but Chkheidze got wind, and refused to permit any such thing. The party decided that they would stay away altogether.

  The hard-left Bolshevik Moscow Regional Bureau called a one-day strike as the conference opened. The Moscow Soviet, where the mainstream SRs and Mensheviks had a small majority, opposed the move, if narrowly, but after debates and battles in the city’s factories, in a sign of Bolshevik strength, most of the workers stayed out. Delegates descended to streets where streetcars did not run and restaurants were closed. The buffet of the theatre itself was shut: the strike forced the attendees of this showcase of national and cross-class unity to prepare their own food. And to do so in the dark: the gaslights were unlit.

  It must be allowed, the Moscow Soviet’s Izvestia wrote, ‘that the Bolsheviks are not irresponsible groups but one of the elements of the organised revolutionary democracy behind whom stand the broad masses’.

  Such grudging acknowledgement came amid an unusual degree of Menshevik–SR–Bolshevik cooperation. Not revolutionary collaboration, exactly: it might rather be described as grudging counter-counterrevolutionary collaboration. The moderate socialists were canny enough to understand that, whatever their arguments with those to their left, were the restless reactionaries to triumph in the country the Bolsheviks might be first in the firing line – and that might not even be a metaphor – but they themselves would not be spared.

  The fact was that rumours about the intentions of Kornilov and the right had grown so deeply alarming that the Moscow Soviet felt obliged to form a Provi
sional Revolutionary Committee to defend the government and the Soviet, mobilising the vigilant grassroots. And to it, alongside two Mensheviks and two SRs, it appointed the prominent Bolsheviks Nogin and Muralov. In an astonishing acknowledgement of the limits of its persuasive power compared to theirs, it even gave the party – even so recently after the July Days – temporary access to the Moscow garrison barracks, to argue for this defence.

  This was the context of political fear in which the conference set out to smooth tensions between right and left. In this it was not merely unsuccessful: it was grotesquely counterproductive.

  The Moscow State Conference opened to a house literally, visibly divided. On the right of the hall, slightly numerically preponderant, were the elite – industrialists, Kadets, business people, career politicians, high-ranking soldiers. On the left were the moderate socialist intelligentsia, Menshevik lawyers and journalists, trade union organisers, lower-ranking officers and privates. And there, sitting with owlish precision exactly in the middle, was Kerensky.

  ‘Let everyone who has already tried to use force of arms against the power of the people know that such attempts will be crushed with blood and iron,’ he declaimed, and at that broadside against the Bolsheviks, for the first and last time, the whole hall applauded. ‘Let those who think the time is ripe to overthrow the revolutionary government with bayonets’, he continued, ‘be even more careful.’ At this warning to Kornilov, it was only the left who clapped.

  For two hours, Kerensky rambled tremulously, hammy and overwrought, transporting himself. ‘He appeared to want to scare somebody and to create an impression of force and power,’ Milyukov reported in contempt. ‘He only engendered pity.’

  A naive observer hopeful for social peace might see moments to strike optimism, as when Tsereteli made a point of reaching out to shake hands with the prominent industrialist Bublikov. But they were few and unconvincing. When the Kadet Maklakov demanded that the government ‘take the daring steps necessary … [because] the judgement day is approaching’, the right cheered and the left sat mute. When Chkheidze read out VTsIK’s platform, the left applauded and the right scowled. One side clapped, the other sat like stone. The other cheered, the one booed.