1917
Page 18
Lenin impatiently refused. They would go together or not at all. The revolution was calling. So, she relented, saying good-bye to Frau Kammerer, whom she had always liked. The Swiss landlady expressed concern about Nadya’s going off to Russia, “that insecure country at such an uncertain time.” Nadya shrugged. “You see, Frau Kammerer, that’s where I have work to do.” Lenin’s parting words to his landlord were: “So, Herr Kammerer, now there will be peace.”15 The words were not meant to be reassuring. What he meant was that the current war would end so that the war of the working class against the rest could begin.
The news of Lenin’s departure exploded across the expatriate community, and not just the Russians. “Pandemonium broke out” at the Pfauen Café, a favorite haunt of writers, journalists, and hangers-on, when they learned he would be traveling under the protection of the German government. The reaction was close to fury at what they saw as Lenin’s betrayal of the socialist movement. Lenin had invited the French writer Romain Rolland to join him on the journey to Russia; Rolland contemptuously refused, and showed the telegram Lenin had sent him around the café. One of the writers there, a tall Irishman with thick spectacles, shrugged when he saw it. The Germans “must be pretty desperate,” he remarked sourly; “sounds like a Trojan Horse to me.” That, at least, was James Joyce’s view on Lenin’s mission.16
Lenin did not care. He was going regardless of what other socialists, even his fellow Bolsheviks, thought. The night before he left, he spoke to a gathering of Russian exiles in Bern. “We have before us a struggle of exceptional gravity and harshness,” he said. “Let us go into the battle fully conscious of the responsibility we are taking. We know what we want to do. The law of history imposes our leadership, because it is through us that the proletariat speaks.” They were words that brooked no dissenting voices.17
That morning, Lenin and his followers gathered at the Volkshaus in Bern. Then, suitcases packed and blankets and pillows ready for sleeping on the train, the procession of thirty-two would-be revolutionaries walked from the Zähringer Hof hotel to the Zurich rail station. A gaggle of socialists and other exiles met them at the station and berated Lenin and the others for resorting to help from the hated German government.
Lenin ignored them. He was standing on the platform, a knapsack full of books and papers on his back; he nervously checked his watch from time to time. At last the group boarded the train. There was a brief fracas when Lenin threw off one of the passengers, German socialist Oscar Blum, fearing he might be a police spy. Then Lenin stood at the window for a few minutes, answering questions in German from the crowd gathered on the platform. As the doors closed and the train began moving, he shook hands with one last onlooker. “Either we’ll be swinging from the gallows in three months,” he said sardonically, “or we shall be in power.” Then the train pulled out of the station.18
Their first train ride was also the shortest, to Schaffhausen, on the edge of the German frontier. There the train that Romberg and Ludendorff had arranged for them was waiting. Later, it would be described, wrongly, as a sealed train. It was true that two German officers would stay in the rear of their carriage, behind a line drawn in chalk, to separate the Russian passengers from the rest of the train, and that three of the four doors to the carriage were affixed with special seals; but the fourth was left unlocked. Also, far from being isolated, the Russian passengers met and spoke to other passengers during their journey. The Polish socialist Karl Radek even tried to talk to some railway workers who got on the train, encouraging them to start a revolution of their own in Germany.19 He was met only with stony stares.
What most struck Lenin and the other passengers, however, as they sped across the German countryside was the absence of adult men. At every station, and in the fields and streets they passed, they saw women, children, and elderly men, but no young or middle-aged men; they were all at the front. It was Lenin’s first exposure to what the war meant to the world outside Switzerland and his tiny circle of exiles and revolutionaries. It was perhaps his first inkling, too, that if he indeed brought Russia out of the war, desperate people in the other countries, including Germany, might be inclined to follow.
As the train rumbled on, however, the Bolshevik leader’s nerves grew tauter. What if he and his group were spotted and shadowed by police agents, who would have them arrested the minute they set foot in Russia? At the last minute, Lenin had arranged for his Swedish contact to get Nikolai Chkheidze, the Menshevik leader and now president of the Petrograd Soviet, to agree to admit the exiles into Russia, since their number included several Mensheviks—a good example of Lenin’s willingness to beg favors from someone he despised personally and ideologically. Yet there was no guarantee that Chkheidze would keep his word, or that others would keep it for him. There was always the possibility, especially as they were technically in enemy country, that the Germans would renege on their word and have them all arrested.
All these worries and others plagued Lenin’s mind, making him irritable as the journey wore on—as did the lack of sleep, since none of the passengers had sleeping berths, and rest was limited to catnaps in the overcrowded and stuffy compartments. When the neighboring compartment, where Radek; Grigory Safarov; Safarov’s wife, Olga Ravich; and Lenin’s French admirer and on-and-off-again mistress, Inessa Armand (whom Nadya warily tolerated), traveled together, got too boisterous one night—its occupants were singing and laughing at Radek’s incessant jokes—Lenin completely lost his temper. He rushed to the compartment and grabbed Olga Ravich’s arm with a painful wrench, in an effort to throw her out into the corridor. The other passengers, however, stood up to him and forced him to back down. He returned to his compartment to sulk.20
Then there was the matter of the toilet paper. Smoking in the compartments was strictly forbidden, out of consideration for the other passengers, so the regular smokers, including Radek, took their puffs in the toilet. This meant the toilet was often locked when others needed to get in there for more urgent reasons. As a result, long lines of resentful fellow passengers formed outside a toilet marked “Engaged” while someone in it was finishing a cigarette or cigar.
So, Lenin finally put his foot down and instituted a system of toilet rationing. He cut up some paper strips and issued them to the other exiles as tickets. One type of ticket was for using the toilet for normal purposes; the other was for having a smoke. Since there were fewer tickets for smoking than for handling bodily functions, the long lines soon disappeared. And so, it was official: the first act of Lenin’s revolutionary justice (based, after all, on Marx’s dictum “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need”) was the rationing of toilet use.21
It wasn’t until the train reached Stockholm on April 13 that the party encountered its first friendly reception. The city’s mayor, Carl Lindhagen, threw a celebratory breakfast, while a local socialist paper, Politiken, published a piece on the returning émigrés, with a photograph of Lenin. He was for the first time emerging as an international celebrity.22
But Lenin refused to stop and rest in Stockholm. The next day, the group crossed the Swedish-Finnish frontier on horse-drawn sleighs. Russian authorities in Finland stopped Radek and Fritz Platten, who had been with them all the way, from going any farther. Nowhere before had there been any sign of soldiers; now, suddenly, they were everywhere. There were soldiers on the railway platforms, soldiers on the train, soldiers squeezing into their train compartments. Lenin had no time to panic; he was reading copies of Pravda he’d picked up in Helsinki, and he was deeply unhappy with what he read. A comrade leaned out the window and yelled, “Long live the revolution!” The soldiers on the platform, their rifles slung, bayonets fixed, stared in puzzlement. Then the train and the exiles were gone.
The train stopped at Beloostrov, twenty-four miles north of Petrograd and the entrepôt at the Russo-Finnish border. There, time was spent sorting out passports and doing customs checks. A delegation was there to meet Lenin: Joseph Stalin, Lev Kamenev,
and Lenin’s sister Maria. All Lenin’s attention was focused on Kamenev and Stalin, then editors of Pravda, and he poured his vial of accumulated wrath on both of them as the train sped along for the Finland Station, in Petrograd. “What have you been writing in Pravda?” he kept shouting at them. “We’ve seen a few copies and have called you all kinds of names!” Both Kamenev and Stalin had been calling for support for the new Provisional Government. Lenin intended to nip that in the bud the minute they reached Russia. Glumly Kamenev and Stalin took their verbal punishment in silence.
Then, as the train eased toward the Finland Station, Lenin became nervous again. At any moment, he was thinking, he would be arrested. A chastened Kamenev assured him he was wrong, and Kamenev turned out to be right.
The train pulled into a shabby stucco station, colored putty gray and flamingo pink, where a strange delegation had gathered to receive the Bolshevik leader. It was 11:10 at night on April 16, yet standing on the platform was Chkheidze himself, next to a man carrying a large bouquet of flowers: Nikolai Sukhanov, a nonparty socialist who had decided that Lenin’s return to Russia represented a turning point he could not miss. What kind of turning point, he could not say as yet—nor could anyone else.
Chkheidze, meanwhile, was launching into a standard speech of welcome. Lenin completely ignored him and instead addressed the assembled crowd of Bolshevik adherents and general curiosity seekers with the words: “Dear comrades, soldiers, sailors, and workers, I am happy to greet you in the victorious Russian revolution, to greet you as the advance guard of the international proletarian army.”
He went on: “The war of imperialist brigandage is the beginning of civil war in Europe. The hour is not far when the people will turn their weapons against their capitalist exploiters . . . Not today, but tomorrow, any day, may see the collapse of European capitalism. The Russian revolution you have accomplished has dealt it the first blow and has opened a new epoch . . . Long live the International Socialist Revolution!”23
He left the station. On the platform, a single Russian army officer raised his arm in salute. Lenin, almost against his instinct, saluted back. Then the officer signaled to a detachment of sailors, who presented their arms in salute, while a band started playing “La Marseillaise.” Lenin said some words of support for the revolution, and the soldiers and sailors carried him out of the station on their shoulders while searchlights scanned the sky. He boarded an armored car that the Provisional Government had forbidden to appear directly at the station; the searchlights were from the Peter and Paul Fortress, which was Petrograd’s “Bastille” and the city’s main military citadel.
The next day, the German government’s agent in Stockholm sent a jubilant telegram to Berlin: “Lenin’s entry into Russia successful. He is working exactly as we wish.”24
PETROGRAD, APRIL 17
TO THE OTHER exiles arriving with him, it must have seemed as if Lenin were poised to take a commanding position, if not the commanding position, in the new Provisional Government or the Petrograd Soviet. But he had no interest in either. His first remark to the sailors who had greeted him was that they had been betrayed by the Provisional Government.25 That would become his chief message: no one should cooperate with the new revolutionary government or its chief organs. A workers’ revolution led by the Bolshevik Party, and no one else, was Russia’s and the world’s only future.
It was a stunning letdown for those who had been in Russia during the war years and the tumult that followed, which Lenin had completely missed. The doubters included Kamenev and Stalin, who had written that as long as Germany waged war on Russian soil, the Russian soldier “must stand at his post, and answer bullet with bullet and shell with shell.” Even Nadya wondered if her husband was on the wrong track and was preaching a revolution that could never happen or, if it did, would totally destroy all the progress that Russia had made in the weeks since the revolution began.26
Still, Lenin was adamant. Later, he would write, “I did not arrive in Petrograd until the night of April 3 [Old Style; April 16 New Style], and therefore at the meeting on April 4[,] I could, of course, deliver a report on the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat only on my own behalf . . . The only thing I could do to make things easier for myself—and for honest opponents—was to prepare the theses in writing.” These were the theses he had written during the long train trip from Switzerland. They contained his political strategy for the next several months, which he revealed, first, at a meeting with his Bolshevik supporters and, then, at a larger meeting of both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks—Lenin’s first step in driving a permanent wedge between his minority faction and the Social Democratic majority who still claimed to speak for Marxism in Russia.
The key to what happened next, in Lenin’s mind, was, first, to give up on the war. It had nothing to do with Russian patriotism and was “a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of the government,” which stood as an obstacle to a truly revolutionary war launched by a “class-conscious proletariat.”
The second was to abandon all support for the Provisional Government. “The utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear . . . This government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.”
Third, even though “in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in the minority . . . the masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government.” In the meantime, “as long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticizing and exposing errors” and preaching “the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.”
These lessons, as inculcated by the Bolshevik deputies, included the abolition of the police, army, and bureaucracy; confiscation of all estates; nationalization of all lands in the hands of “the local Soviets of Agricultural Laborers’ and Peasants’ Deputies”; and the collectivization of all banks in the country into a single national bank.
Above all, there could be no parliamentary republic. To embrace the existing Provisional Government as the real government of Russia would be, in Lenin’s words, “a retrograde step.” Instead, the Bolshevik Party must now embrace his agenda, which was to collapse the two revolutions into one while overthrowing the Provisional Government.27
All this Lenin laid out in a speech on April 17 in Room 13 at the Tauride Palace, now home to both the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government following the collapse of the czarist regime. Those who heard Lenin’s words and then read his article “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution” in Pravda a few days later were aghast. Lev Kamenev was convinced that Lenin had finally lost his mind.28 Other Bolsheviks just hoped that their leader would eventually come around and recognize reality. The Russian Revolution was off and leaving the station. The best they could do as a political party was what Chkheidze and the Mensheviks were doing: hitch a ride and hang on while hoping that an opportunity would arise when they could press their Marxist agenda on a fully formed democratic-socialist government.
Lenin wasn’t listening. He had his own vision of how a Marxist revolution would happen in Russia, and where it would lead. He also had no doubt that it would happen. He was willing to wait for the February Revolution to collapse. And in the next few months, he would have a powerful if unwitting partner in undermining what Miliukov, Kerensky, and the others were trying to create.
That partner would be Woodrow Wilson.
7
RUPTURES, MUTINIES, AND CONVOYS
Firepower kills.
—GENERAL PHILIPPE PÉTAIN
PARIS AND CHEMIN DES DAMES, APRIL 9–MAY 2
THE FIRST WORLD WAR presents a strange paradox. In most wars, prolonged stalemate on the battlefield encourages the participants to look for a compromise to end the fight. In the Great War, however, stalemate produced the exact opposite. With the exception of Austria-Hungary, all the m
ajor combatants in 1917, Germany, Britain, France, and even Russia, felt a profound desire for a fight to the finish, à outrance—no matter the cost, especially if it was before the Americans appeared on the scene.
At the start of the year, the Germans had fastened on unrestricted submarine warfare as the way to achieve decisive victory. In much the same mood, Britain’s prime minister, David Lloyd George, was gearing up his country for total war. This included plans for one final big push along the front that had been the scene of virtual stalemate since the end of 1914—the front along the Ypres Salient near the Belgian border, the graveyard of hundreds of thousands of dead on both sides.
But it was the French who sprang their plan on the ground first, in mid-April—after Wilson’s declaration of war but well before the Americans could make their full presence felt on the battlefield. The so-called Nivelle Offensive was the last time the French High Command would insist that the British act as their subordinates in supporting a major French operation. It was also the last time the French government was able to act as a Great Power as it had under Napoleon or even Louis XIV. In so doing, it would also destroy France as a Great Power once and for all.
If some of the tragedies of the coming century were the result of French politicians and others acting as if France were still a first-rate power when it was in fact a second-rate one, from the outbreak of World War II and Vichy to Algeria and Vietnam, the 1917 Nivelle Offensive was where it all started.