1917
Page 16
Alekseev’s telegram was the final blow. If any adviser carried weight with Nicholas, it was Alekseev (who was also privy to the doom and gloom Ruzskii and Rodzianko had exchanged in a series of private telegraph conversations that military intelligence had forwarded on to their acting commander in chief). It was as if a bomb had hit the railway carriage, as men rushed to the czar’s side in a state of near hysteria. Grand Duke Nicholas fell to his knees and begged his cousin to step down. Aleksei Brusilov and the other generals had to agree. Cables were arriving from other fronts urging the same—Alekseev had sent his bleak message calling for the czar to step down to the other Russian brass, including commanders of the Russian fleet.
There was a brief pause. Then Nicholas crossed himself and said he was ready to abdicate. He disappeared into his dressing room and, fifteen minutes later, emerged with the text of a telegram to both Alekseev and Rodzianko, stating that “there is no sacrifice that I would not make for the sake of the true well-being and salvation of our Mother Russia,” and that therefore he was renouncing the throne in favor of his son the czarevich, with his brother Grand Duke Michael as regent.
It was clear to everyone present that, in the words of historian Richard Pipes, Nicholas “chose to give up the crown to save the front.” But in a few hours, he decided that even this was not enough. After another round of tense discussions, he said that his son’s health was too precarious to risk putting him on the throne, and that he would abdicate in favor of his brother instead.
Many then and later thought this a mistake. Around the country, Czarevich Alexei enjoyed a popularity born in part from sympathy over his tragic illness, hemophilia. Also, everyone knew he was too young to have any connection with recent political events. “A beautiful myth could have been created around this innocent and pure child,” one of the czar’s supporters later wrote; “his charm would have helped to calm the anger of the masses”—and perhaps served to rally those Russians who, whatever their feelings about Nicholas and Alexandra, were not yet prepared to plunge the country into full-scale revolution.32
Be that as it may, the fact remained that the czar had renounced his throne. A three-hundred-year-old political system had come to an end. Moreover, Russia now had no legal national government except the Duma, which, in the formal telegram he sent at 3:05 p.m. on March 15, Nicholas had specifically named as a partner in shaping Russia’s future constitutional order. No one, though, least of all Nicholas, had any clear idea of what that constitution might be. Yet never in history, past or present, had an autocratic regime handed over power with so little upheaval or bloodshed. The old order was dead; the new order had yet to be born.
It was after midnight when the imperial train finally pulled out of Pskov and made the sad, dismal journey back to Mogilev and then to Tsarskoye Selo, which Nicholas had last left as czar of all the Russias and would now return to as Nicholas Romanov, private citizen. In his diary, he wrote, “Left Pskov at 1 a.m. with oppressive feeling about events. All around treason and cowardice and deception.” A feeling of regret, bitterness, and betrayal had followed the sense of having to accept necessity the day before—perhaps naturally in a person as insecure and weak as Nicholas Romanov. On the train the next morning, he said, he read “a great deal about Julius Caesar.” The question “Et tu, Brute?” was clearly much on his mind.33 But it was too late to reverse course.
Back in the capital, the members of the Provisional Committee received the czar’s telegram with a sense of shock. No one had anticipated a move like this. Their first instinct, in fact, was to keep the news secret, in order to prevent fresh rioting. Their second was to send a delegation to Grand Duke Michael so that he might begin to take steps to form a new government.
The grand duke was Nicholas’s brother, the youngest son and fifth child of Alexander III. He had stirred court circles by taking a married woman, Natalia Wulfert, as his lover. This led to a major court scandal that forced him and Natalia to live in virtual exile abroad, first in France, then in England, and—ironically, given the similarity of this fate to Lenin’s—finally in Switzerland.
The declaration of war in 1914, however, had brought Michael back to Russia to take command of a cavalry regiment and then a division. His bravery during fighting in 1915 in the Carpathian Mountains won him Russia’s highest military honor, the Order of St George. Conscientious, unconventional, intelligent, and popular with the military, Grand Duke Michael was a natural choice to take over the future of the Romanov dynasty—and unite a divided Russia in time of war.
It was Alexander Kerensky who cut this plan short. He agreed they should send a delegation to Michael, but only to persuade him to renounce the imperial throne altogether. The time had come for no more czars. Russia was on the verge of violent revolution; only a complete break from the past, Kerensky insisted, would persuade the masses that a new, more just future was dawning, and that the forces of despotism were now yielding to the forces of freedom.
Kerensky won the argument. The next morning, at the residence of Prince Putianin, where Grand Duke Michael was staying, a tense debate broke out in the grand duke’s presence between the leader of the conservative Kadet Party, Miliukov, who argued that “without a monarch, the Provisional Government [is] liable to sink in the ocean of mass unrest,” and Kerensky as spokesman for that Provisional Government.
“Miliukov is wrong,” he exclaimed. “By accepting the throne you will not save Russia! Quite the contrary. I know the mood of the masses . . . [T]he monarchy now is deeply resented . . . I beg of you, in the name of Russia, to make this sacrifice.”34
Michael was convinced. He had been caught off guard by his older brother’s move anyway, and resented being put on the spot with no prior warning or consultation. He therefore agreed to abide by the will of the Provisional Government and step aside. Kerensky was ecstatic. “Your Highness!” he cried. “You are a most noble person. From now on, I shall say this everywhere!”
Kerensky had won. Russia’s future course was set: no more czars. A new government elected by the people (albeit by a tiny sliver of the people), for the people, and of the people was taking shape. “That which only the day before appeared as a distant dream came true so suddenly and so very completely,” Kerensky would write later. Russia was poised to enter the modern era at last, like its counterparts in the West, and Kerensky had no doubt that he would be the man to lead it toward those bright new democratic headlands.35
In retrospect, it would be a mistake to underestimate Kerensky’s talent for emerging as the George Washington of the new Russia—or at least its key Founding Father. A brilliant and passionate orator; a handsome, charismatic presence on the speaker’s rostrum or in a committee room; a politician who combined a lawyer’s attention to detail with a would-be revolutionary’s instinct for seizing the moment—Kerensky was only thirty-six years old but was already the dominant personality of the new Provisional Government. He also had considerable physical courage. During the tumultuous days of March 12–14, he had personally saved members of the czar’s government, including the hated interior minister Alexander Protopopov, from being lynched by angry mobs. “The Duma sheds no blood,” Kerensky had sternly proclaimed—and he meant it, as he stared the rioters down.36
He also had a unique advantage over the other members of the new Provisional Government. He was deputy chairman of the Petrograd Soviet as well, and although he soon stepped down from that official position, he remained a powerful and influential figure in the Ispolkom. When the other members, for example, tried to remove him altogether on the grounds that he had accepted the portfolio as minister of justice in the Provisional Government, soldiers and sailors had rushed the building and, carrying Kerensky on their shoulders up the stairs to the Ispolkom conference table, insisted that their hero be immediately reinstated.
Certainly, if any one person was poised to lead the Duma in its new constitutional role while also handling the revolutionary crowds milling in Petrograd’s streets and squares, it
was Kerensky. He was deeply committed to Russia’s continuing the war—one reason the other Entente powers should have been eager to support him. But Kerensky did have one weakness that would ultimately prove fatal. As Russia was headed on its revolutionary course from autocracy to constitutional democracy, Kerensky fully expected there would be those who would try to derail its new destiny—but he assumed they would come from Russia’s pro-czarist right, not from his supposed allies on the left. All his reading of history, especially the history of the French Revolution, had led him to this conclusion: what revolutions had to fear most was counterrevolution by those trying to reverse direction.
In the coming months, this would keep him from realizing two things: First, those who seemed to be trying to stop further revolution might actually be allies in preserving it. Second, the real threat would come from someone who until now had been entirely removed from events, and who had the smallest political following of anyone in Russia, namely Lenin.
ZURICH, MARCH 16
“DON’T YOU KNOW anything? Revolution has broken out in Russia.”
These were the words an astonished friend of Lenin’s, M. G. Bronski, spoke when he arrived breathlessly at Spiegelgasse 14. Lenin had just finished lunch and was preparing to go as usual to the Zurich public library, where he always had a seat by 2:00 p.m. Bronski told him briefly what had happened back home, and Lenin and Nadya both sprinted down to the lake, where newspaper headlines were regularly posted on public display.
Sure enough, there it was, in black and white, in French and German: revolution had come to Russia. The czar had abdicated; the government was now in the hands of the Duma and a Provisional Committee. Russia’s future was up for grabs, as was the course of the revolution that had started without Lenin but that he now desperately wanted to put himself at the head of, by any means necessary.
He and Nadya spent the rest of the day, March 16, meeting with their fellow émigrés, all of whom were in a state of almost uncontrollable excitement. Yet, even as they embraced, shook hands, and sang revolutionary songs—Lenin was a powerful and sonorous baritone—the leader of the Bolshevik Party, however tiny and fragmented, never lost sight of his larger goal. That same day, he fired off a telegram to the Central Committee in Petrograd via his mistress, Alexandra Kollontai, who was then living in Oslo.
In no way should they allow these amazing events to distract them from their policy on Russia and the war, Lenin told them. The Bolsheviks should in no way approve of “the defense of the motherland” in the name of the new government, however tempting it might be to become part of the current action. Any effort to form an alliance with the Mensheviks, even a temporary one—that, too, should be avoided at all costs. The goals should still be “international proletarian revolution and the seizure of power by Soviets of workers’ deputies,” not by the bourgeois members of the Duma.37
Then there was the question of what Lenin himself could do. He was determined not to repeat the mistake he had made in 1905, when he arrived in Russia too late. But how was he going to get there? Every route passed through enemy or hostile territory. The Germans and Austrians would arrest him the minute he tried to cross their borders. Heading south through the Mediterranean to reach the Black Sea meant crossing territory held by Turkey, also Russia’s enemy. Trying to go to France and finding a freighter to take him to Petrograd via the North Sea would require the cooperation of the French and British, which would never happen.
In every direction Lenin looked, he was blocked. In his frustration, he even came up with a scheme to disguise himself as a deaf-mute Swede and chance taking a train across Germany to Denmark, in the hope of finding his way from there to Finland and then Petrograd. Nadya had to persuade him to give up the idea.
“You’ll fall asleep,” she warned him, “and see Mensheviks in your dreams, and you’ll start swearing and shouting, ‘Scoundrels, scoundrels,’ and give the whole game away.”38
In those heady days of mid-March 1917, when Russians were celebrating and dancing in the streets across their country and the rest of the world was agog at what was happening in the former Romanov Empire, Lenin was a desperately unhappy man. A man frozen in time and place by events, while the historical destiny he had planned for himself and his country sped further and further away from his grasp.
That is, until another man took up Lenin’s cause with enthusiasm, for his own very special reasons—a man sitting at a desk in Berlin, at the Foreign Ministry. He was Arthur Zimmermann. Just as he had taken one action that was changing the course of the war, not to mention world history, he was about to take another that would have the same momentous effect, this time on Russia—one that would enable Lenin’s great vision to forge ahead just as Wilson’s was doing that same week.
6
PRESIDENT WILSON GOES TO WAR; LENIN GOES TO THE FINLAND STATION
The law of history imposes our leadership, because it is through us that the proletariat speaks.
—LENIN, APRIL 7, 1917
WASHINGTON, MARCH 20–APRIL 2
THE NEWS FROM Russia had filled Woodrow Wilson with a sense of buoyancy he hadn’t felt for weeks. He told the Cabinet that the new Russian government must be a good one; it was headed by a professor—this was Miliukov, who had once been invited to lecture at the University of Chicago. On March 20, Wilson ordered the American embassy to recognize the new Provisional Government as the official government of Russia.1
The events in Petrograd, however, could not distract him from the more immediate issue at hand: what to do about Germany. That same day, March 20, he had his fateful meeting with his Cabinet to decide on a course of action. After the news on March 18 about the sinking of the Vigilancia, the City of Memphis, and the Illinois, none of them had any hesitation about the necessity of war. Every member, without exception, recommended declaring war. “Well, gentlemen,” Wilson said in a strangely distinct, unemotional voice, “I think there is no doubt as to what your advice is. I thank you.” The meeting was over. Yet, as the Cabinet members, including Secretary of State Lansing and Secretary of War Newton Baker, left, none had any idea what Wilson would do.2
Nor did anyone else, not even Mrs. Wilson or his aide Colonel House. Wilson did release a statement the next morning, calling Congress into extraordinary session on April 2, to receive “a communication concerning grave matters of national policy.” The president’s desk piled up with neglected letters and other documents, a sure sign that Wilson was focused on a major decision. Still, it was not until March 28 that he told his staff he was going to lock himself in his study and should not be disturbed by anyone.3
No one knows what thoughts were going through Wilson’s mind as he sat clacking away at his typewriter two days later—the White House staff, meanwhile, were walking on tiptoe and speaking in whispers—but the big change in Russia had to be one of the paramount issues. Until now, the struggle unfolding in Europe had involved the clash of two Great Power alliances whose war aims, so it seemed to Wilson, were mirror images of each other. Now the conflict had taken on a new dimension. On one side were Germany, Austria, and Turkey, all autocracies under one-man rule. On the other, however, were three democracies: two more mature, Britain and France; and the third, Russia, just beginning to bud. A new way of thinking about the war, and America’s possible involvement in it, was taking shape in Wilson’s mind. As he wrote and wrote on into the evening and until the next day, Saturday, a speech of truly historic proportions was forming on the page.
In a strange way, he was doing exactly what another man, Lenin, was doing on the other side of the Atlantic at exactly the same time. Both men were struggling to transform events (the world war for Wilson, the Russian Revolution for Lenin) in ways that would make those events consistent with their larger vision, instead of contradicting or correcting that vision. Both men were obsessed with the power of mind over matter, and held the belief that by sheer force of will, one could send physical events in a certain direction simply by insisting that history dictate
d such a course of action. This belief would become one of the moral diseases that would afflict the twentieth century until its end. Here, in April 1917, was where it would start with Lenin and Wilson. And whereas Lenin had Marx to encourage him in this conviction, Wilson had Hegel and his own belief in an omniscient providential God.
Both were now ready to put their visions into action. The only person who knew the contents of Wilson’s coming address was Colonel House; even Cabinet members remained in the dark.4
On the evening of April 2, President Wilson left the White House in a driving rain to head for the Capitol, carrying in his pocket a speech that would transform the war and the United States—while Lenin was about to be launched on the enterprise that would transform events in Russia into an earth-shattering cataclysm almost as destructive as the world war itself.
COPENHAGEN, APRIL 2
THAT SAME DAY, even as Wilson was mounting the steps of the Capitol Building, the German ambassador in Copenhagen had a bright idea. He suggested to the Foreign Ministry that the best way to use the Russian Revolution to take Russia completely out of the war was to encourage its political extremists, especially those in exile, to return and spread chaos in their home country.
The man at the head of everyone’s list was Lenin.
In fact, the German ambassador to Switzerland, Gisbert von Romberg, had been aware of Lenin’s activities for some time, especially his desire to see Russia taken out of the war. Romberg had been made aware of Lenin’s presence and activities through Alexander Helphand-Parvus, a German businessman who was also a Marxist (a not uncommon phenomenon, then or later), who kept the embassy informed of the goings-on among Russian exiles in Switzerland. According to Lenin’s biographer Robert Service, there is strong circumstantial evidence that Romberg had even taken the extraordinary step of providing secret financial assistance to Lenin and the Bolsheviks in exile in Zurich, through Helphand-Parvus and a series of financial intermediaries.5 If true, that bit of information might have ruined Lenin with his fellow revolutionaries—although, in Lenin’s mind, taking secret subventions from German businessmen and imperialists was just a variation on Marx’s well-worn dictum that the capitalist will sell you the rope you use to hang him with.