1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  Yet, for almost a week, with communication broken down everywhere, rumors continued to swirl that Kerensky might be headed back to Petrograd at the head of an armed column. Lenin and Trotsky held back from taking any major steps toward consolidating their power and destroying their rivals, in case Kerensky led a government advance and they needed help from the Mensheviks and others to repel it.

  Lenin and Nadezhda were now living in the Smolny Institute, the former girls’ academy with its elegant Palladian facade, in a two-bedroom apartment on its ground floor. It was hardly a domestic sanctuary. Trotsky and his family lived in the apartment opposite, which meant the two leaders could regularly get together for nonstop strategizing at every hour of the day or night. Troops of people’s commissars and Red Guards trudged up and down the corridor outside, their boots ringing in the tiled hallway.

  Lenin’s office on the second floor in the north wing, No. 81, was also a scene of unending commotion, as he was regularly besieged by visitors and his Bolshevik colleagues, to whom he enjoyed making an impromptu speech in the anteroom. His meals were spartan, sometimes only a heel of bread and a plate of pickled herring, when he ate at all. His health was also increasingly precarious, with bouts of headaches and insomnia.

  But he was living on the fumes of revolution, and sitting astride the main artery of power in Petrograd and Russia. The Bolshevik Central Committee, the Military Revolutionary Committee, the Petrograd Soviet, and the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets (the Council of People’s Commissars, of which he was chairman)—all were a short stroll away.19

  Besides, the Smolny Institute was a defensible position in case fighting broke out, or Kerensky came back with reinforcements. But Kerensky did not come back. He had managed to rally enough troops to take Tsarskoye Selo, the czar’s former palace, but they were crushed by Red Guards the next day at Pulkovo, and Kerensky narrowly escaped. Now it was Kerensky, not Lenin, who was the hunted man, on the run and fleeing for the border. And once it became clear that there was no Kerensky on the way, no armed column coming to rescue the government, Lenin and Trotsky felt relaxed enough to impose their own brand of revolution on Petrograd and the rest of Russia, with the Bolshevik-dominated soviets around the country as their tool for enforcement—the first true totalitarian regime in history.

  On November 11, a meeting of the Military Revolutionary Committee mentioned the need to fight against the “enemies of the people.” On November 26, the MRC decreed that “high-ranking functionaries in state administration, banks, the treasury, the railways, and the post and telegraph offices are all sabotaging the measures of the Bolshevik government. Henceforth, such individuals are to be described as ‘enemies of the people,’ ” and they would be named in newspapers and public places. The war on “enemies of the people,” whether the case was proved or not, had begun—and it had likewise begun on those suspected of “sabotage, speculation, and opportunism.”20

  At the same time, the MRC was going through a transformation, from a committee dedicated to coordinating military defense of the capital into a bureaucratic apparatus for state security across Russia. In no time, it had an established network of more than one thousand commissars installed in military units, local soviets, government agencies, and even neighborhood communities, to enforce political loyalty to the regime and ideological solidarity with its Marxist goals—what would come to be called “political correctness.” The MRC was originally made up of sixty members, forty-eight of whom were dedicated Bolsheviks. Later, the MRC’s head, Pavel Lazimir, turned control over to his most trusted assistant, a forty-year-old perennial political prisoner who knew the ways of the czar’s Okhrana secret police almost as well as its own agents did. His name was Felix Dzerzhinsky, and he had been instrumental in planning and executing the MRC’s initial coup on November 6.

  Dzerzhinsky understood better than anyone else that the MRC, in its new role, could serve as “the iron fist of the proletariat,” in Lenin’s phrase, crushing any and all opposition—the predecessor of the Cheka and the KGB.21

  On November 17, Lenin organized his first purge of those people’s commissars who still held out for cooperation with other political parties. He forced the resignation of Kamenev from the Central Executive Committee; Alexei Rykov and three other people’s commissars were pushed out, as well as several lower-level deputy commissars. Together they penned a protest, calling for a Soviet government that would embrace all existing parties of the left, including the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. “We believe that there is only one alternative to this” inclusive Soviet regime, they wrote, “the maintenance of an exclusive Bolshevik Government by means of political terror. This is the path taken by the Council of People’s Commissars. We cannot and do not want to go this way.”22

  But Lenin did, and now this was all that mattered—and political terror was exactly what he had in mind.

  That same day, he and the remaining people’s commissars spawned the Food Committee, to seize food needed at Petrograd and the front. This would be the standard leverage for the new Bolshevik regime, with a brutally simple choice: obey or starve.

  That night, Trotsky proposed laws reining in freedom of the press, in the name of the proletariat. “The monopoly of the press by the bourgeoisie must be suppressed,” he told a skeptical Petrograd Soviet. “Otherwise it isn’t worthwhile for us to take the power . . . The power of the Soviets should confiscate all print shops.” When there was grumbling about this unexpected restriction—“Confiscate the printing shop of Pravda,” someone bawled out—Lenin stepped in to clinch the argument.

  “The civil war is not yet finished,” he declared in a calm, unemotional voice, his brow deeply furrowed; “the enemy is still with us: consequently it is impossible to abolish the measures of repression against [the] press.” He added menacingly that “to tolerate the bourgeois newspapers would mean to cease being a Socialist.” Already everyone knew what that meant. The Central Executive Committee approved Lenin’s proposal 34 to 24. Many resigned in protest; but as with the resignation of Rykov and the others from the Council of People’s Commissars, the disappearance of opposition only sharpened the point of the Leninist spear.23

  On November 23 came the creation of a Military Investigation Commission to root out “counterrevolutionary” officers and government officials accused of “sabotage”—words that would echo and haunt Russia for the next two decades.24 Then, on December 20, Lenin authorized the setting up of a separate Emergency Committee, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, to root out individuals and groups trying “to undermine the measures the government is taking with a view to a socialist transformation of society,” as Lenin put it. It was from that moment that the Cheka (so called from the Russian pronunciation of its acronym), later the OGPU, and still later the KGB, the most infamous secret police in the world, were born.

  Yet all these steps were only part of a much larger and more important process. This was the concentration of all executive and legislative authority in the hands of a single party, the Bolshevik Party—soon to become the Communist Party. This was done not by substituting the party organization for the government, or by imposing party authority over the government, but by combining the two and making sure that everyone occupying the highest rungs of authority, such as the Council of People’s Commissars, also held the highest offices inside the Bolshevik Party. To be part of government required being a ranking member of the party; likewise, being a member of the party meant having direct access to the leading executive, legislative, and judicial posts in the country.

  As historian Richard Pipes notes, this arrangement is often described as a one-party state; a better term might be dual state, in which the government is a mirror image of the dominant political party in terms of office and personnel, and vice versa.25 Lenin’s Russia was the first. Mussolini’s Italy soon followed; then Hitler’s Germany. The dual-state model persists today in Communist China, North Korea, and Castro’s Cuba. It is the essential foundatio
n of the totalitarian state. In the months of November and December 1917, therefore, Lenin blazed a trail that would be followed and built upon by many others.

  All the same, there was one obstacle to the consolidation of the Bolshevik Revolution that even Lenin had not yet stopped: the elections for the Constituent Assembly in the last week of November.

  With every part of Russia participating, including women (something that couldn’t yet happen in Woodrow Wilson’s America or Clemenceau’s France or Lloyd George’s Britain), it was the biggest democratic election in history. Almost three times more Russians voted in November 1917 than Americans in the 1916 presidential election.26 And the results were devastating for the Bolsheviks.

  The Socialist Revolutionaries, Kerensky’s old party, gained 38 percent of the vote; the Bolsheviks, less than 25 percent. Combined with the Mensheviks, Constitutional Democrats, lesser socialist and nonsocialist parties, plus the Ukrainian nationalists, who were mainly SRs, the opponents of the Bolshevik Revolution were poised to command 56 percent of the votes in the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks had exactly 175 of 715 seats—hardly a position from which to dominate the proceedings.27

  Yet Lenin took some comfort in the results. The Bolshevik delegates would come overwhelmingly from the major cities, industrial areas, and military garrisons (although in Petrograd and Moscow, the conservative Kadets ran a close second, gaining 26.2 percent and 34.2 percent, respectively). If power truly comes from the barrel of a gun, to borrow a phrase from a later master of the dual state, Mao Zedong, Lenin still had his finger on the trigger, especially in the capital. His best bet, however, was to defuse the authority of the Constituent Assembly before it even met.

  The first tactic was to delay the Assembly’s opening. The official date was to be December 11; after several votes and inquiries, the Council of People’s Commissars ordered the Constituent Assembly’s electoral commission to hand over its records, on the grounds that there had been electoral “abuses.” The commission refused; its members were arrested.

  In the end, the first meeting of the Assembly was put off until early January, but not before Lenin had its most conservative party, the Kadet Party, outlawed as “enemies of the people.” At the same time, the Kadets’ two newspapers were stormed by Bolshevik mobs and shut down. Lenin ordered the leading Kadet politicians arrested as “leaders of civil war against the Revolution.”28

  Neither the Mensheviks nor the SRs made any protest at this clearly repressive political action—even though they could well have been next. Lenin did not care either way. Their time would come later; for now, his message had been broadcast loud and clear. No one, absolutely no one, would be allowed to stand in the way of his vision for the revolution in Russia—not the political opposition, not the Constituent Assembly, and not the Russian people themselves. “In times of revolution,” he had written back in July, it “is not enough to ascertain the ‘will of the majority’—no, one must be stronger at the decisive moment at the decisive place, and win.”29 They were words Wilson at his most critical moments would have endorsed, but not under such circumstances. Nonetheless, Lenin was staking everything to win, and starting in December 1917, everything holding up the Bolshevik regime depended on a single desperate roll of the political dice.

  That came on December 2, when representatives of the Bolshevik government arrived at the Polish fortress town of Brest-Litovsk, to meet with representatives from Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and Turkey to arrive at a final peace treaty.

  Back in the spring, Lenin had been savage in his denunciation of the Provisional Government for its “Petrograd formula” and its offer to reach a separate peace with Germany. Now he realized that unless he signed an armistice with the Central powers, his chances of holding on to power were nearly zero. Formal opposition to the Bolshevik regime was still nascent, but its roots ran deep in rural Russia and in the literally thousands of peasant communities from Ukraine to Siberia. The vote for the Constituent Assembly showed that if a determined leader such as Kerensky or Kornilov decided to rally patriotic feeling across the country, that feeling could turn against the German invader as well as Lenin’s Bolshevik accomplices. Lenin had to bring about peace, at any price, before it was too late for the rest of his program to take root.

  His offer to Germany to reach an agreement had gone out on November 21; for the Germans, this moment was exactly what they had been hoping for. Their master plan to send Lenin to Petrograd to take Russia out of the war was paying off even better than they had imagined. But they had their own reasons for seeking an end to the fighting on the Eastern Front. Industrial unrest was growing; starvation was looming. An immediate peace in the east would mean not only being able to shift German armies west, for a final knockout offensive before the Americans truly arrived, but also gaining access to the rich agricultural lands of the Ukraine, if Lenin was willing to deal. No wonder Berlin replied to the offer to meet in Brest-Litovsk by saying Germany would consider any terms Lenin felt comfortable enough to advance.30 The reaction in London and Paris to the news of Brest-Litovsk was predictably incandescent. But before December 2, the British and French had other things to think about, as did Woodrow Wilson. This was Lenin’s fault, and Trotsky’s.

  As they set to work turning Russia upside down, they had decided it was time to blow up Russia’s international relations, in preparation for the world revolution both Lenin and Trotsky were counting on.

  It took two steps to light the fuse. The first came on November 15, when Lenin and his henchman Stalin released their Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which granted Russians “free self-determination, including the right of separation and the formation of an independent state.” It was a domestic as well as a diplomatic bombshell, imposed with no consultation with any government body. With astonished eagerness, one former province of the Russian Empire declared its independence. Finland started the flight for the exits, on December 6; Lithuania was next, on December 11. Latvia, Ukraine, Estonia, Transcaucasia (on April 22, 1918), and Poland (on November 3 of that year) followed suit. In a few months starting in December 1917, the future northeastern Europe took geographic shape, looking largely as it does today.

  What in the world was Lenin thinking? Many in and outside Russia must have wondered, including members of the Council of People’s Commissars, which was not consulted. Yet there was a method to Lenin’s madness, or what seemed like madness at the time: allowing the Russian Empire to fall to pieces. His initial goal was to speed up the process of disintegration of the old Russian system and the status quo; if Faust’s Mephistopheles was right and “everything that exists deserves to be destroyed” (Karl Marx’s favorite quotation), then the destruction of the Russian Empire as the Bolsheviks inherited it had to be the top priority.

  There was a larger, hidden agenda for Lenin, though. Since the earliest days of the revolution, he had seen separatist nationalism, such as that of the Irish Easter Rebellion, as a tool for promoting chaos and world revolution. His hope was not that setting free the non-Russian peoples of the empire would lead to a new regional order; he foresaw that it would lead to a new disorder, to riots, wars, uprisings, and massacres, which would smash the existing capitalist system beyond recognition. The weaker that system was, the stronger the Bolsheviks would become. Out of the resulting chaos would come opportunities for the new government in Petrograd that would extend and consolidate its power—at the expense of everyone else.

  The Declaration also threw down the self-determination gauntlet to the other Allied powers. You speak of self-determination of peoples, Lenin and Stalin were saying to them and to Woodrow Wilson. We are actually daring to do something about it. In that sense, it was the perfect complement to the other gauntlet the new regime threw down, on November 22.

  This move was pure Leon Trotsky. As commissar for foreign affairs, he had access to the recent archives of the czarist Foreign Ministry, including its relations with the other Entente powers. As he leafed through the doc
uments in his spare time, Trotsky realized that they contained political dynamite.

  There were copies of the secret Treaty of London, signed in 1915 in order to entice Italy to join the war against its former allies of the Central powers, with promises of land to be taken from Austria-Hungary and given to Italy, with whole non-Italian populations in the Tirol and Balkans to be transferred to rule by Rome. So much for self-determination.

  There was a secret agreement among the Entente powers to give Constantinople to Russia along with the Dardanelles Strait. There was also the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, by which Britain and France had agreed to break up the Turkish Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and Arabian Peninsula, without a single word of consultation with the peoples living there—another egregious violation of the principle of self-determination, all with the knowledge of both the czar and Kerensky’s Provisional Government.

  There were other secret agreements, diplomatic cables, and memorandums that no one except the authors had known about. Trotsky asked himself what to do with them. At last he decided he would publish them, make them available to the Russian public and publics around the world, including those of the signatories, so that everyone could see the shameless backdoor dealings that constituted the alliance that advertised itself as the forces of civilization.

  “In publishing the secret diplomatic documents from the foreign policy archives of Tsarism and of the bourgeois coalition Governments of the first seven months of the revolution, we are carrying out the undertaking which we made when our party was in opposition,” Trotsky wrote in his introduction to the published secret treaties.