Trotsky cut an inordinately dashing figure—the shock of wild dark hair and the blue eyes, the pince-nez of an intellectual, and the broad shoulders of a Hercules—but he wielded his public charismatic power on behalf of Lenin. Lenin’s power was uncanny. “I felt somewhat surprised that a person who—irrespective of one’s views of his ideology—had had such a far-reaching influence on the fate of his huge fatherland should make such a modest impression,” remarked one Finnish visitor to Smolny. “His speech was very simple and unforced, as was his manner. If one did not know him, one could never have been able to comprehend the strength that he must have possessed. . . . The room was in no way different from any of the other rooms in Smolny. . . . The walls were painted white, there was a wooden table and a few chairs.”278 Lenin’s political instruments were not imposing architecture, a bureaucracy, a telephone network. They were ideas and personality. “The whole success of Lenin . . . to assume dominion over a hundred and fifty millions,” an acute foreign observer would note, “is plainly due entirely to the spell of his personality, which communicated itself to all who came into touch with him.”279 Lenin in 1917 was rarely a physical presence. Alexander Shlyapnikov, the head of the Bolshevik party inside the country at the time of Lenin’s return in spring 1917, spent the entire period before, during, and immediately after the October coup in the hospital (he had been hit by a tram); he had no effect on events. But Lenin did have an effect, even though he did not visit crews on board battleships or troops in trenches in 1917; most sailors and soldiers nonetheless knew his name. He had sometimes delivered public speeches, such as from the Krzesinska mansion balcony, or harangues at the Petrograd Soviet, and in May, militant workers held banners that proclaimed, “Long Live Lenin!” But having arrived in Russia on April 3, 1917, after an absence of nearly seventeen years, the Bolshevik leader had soon been forced to seek refuge in tsarist Finland.
From early July 1917, when the warrant had been issued for his arrest, Lenin remained underground, hiding, for almost four consecutive months, right through October 24.280 During that crucial period, he almost never even met the Bolshevik inner circle face to face, let alone the masses. Here was the equivalent of a catacomb Christian who, in a single lifetime, would suddenly emanate from the caves to become pope. Most political figures who succeed on a dizzying trajectory almost always do so by cobbling broad coalitions, often with very unlikely bedfellows, but not Lenin. He succeeded despite refusing cooperation and creating ever more enemies. Of course, he cultivated allies among the class of professional revolutionaries, loyalists such as Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin. Lenin’s torrent of polemical theses further enhanced his power, first among revolutionaries, who in turn popularized Lenin’s intellectual as well as political standing among the mass. Lenin proved a master of the abusive, pithy phrase, and of the crude, sweeping analysis of developments and rationale for revolution.281 But whatever Lenin’s charisma and encapsulation talents, much of his power would derive from events going his way. Again and again, he stubbornly insisted on what appeared to be a crazy course of action, which then worked to his advantage. Lenin seemed to incarnate political will.
Later, Trotsky, for all his Marxist invocation of the supposed laws of history, would feel constrained to admit that without Lenin, there would have been no October Revolution.282 Lenin, for his part, never made explicit that the same held true for his indispensable handmaiden Trotsky. But others did so. “I tell you what we do with such people,” the despairing military attache of liberal Britain, General Alfred Knox, had said of Lenin and Trotsky to an American Red Cross official. “We shoot them.” This was on October 20, the eve of what turned out to be the predicted Bolshevik coup. The Red Cross official, ostensibly wiser, had replied, “But you are up against several million. General, I am not a military man. But you are not up against a military situation.”283 In fact, the Red Cross official was wrong: he confused the assumption of power by the Second Congress of Soviets, which had become unavoidable, with the assumption of power by the Bolsheviks alone. The Bolshevik putsch could have been prevented by a pair of bullets.
• • •
“THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION,” observed Rosa Luxemburg, “is the mightiest event of the world war.”284 Whether a prewar transition to a constitutional monarchy—from constitutional autocracy—would have been enough to incorporate the masses into a stable polity can never be known. What we do know is that the long, stubborn refusal, not just of Nicholas II but of almost the entire Russian establishment, to abandon the autocracy in order to save the monarchy ensured that the dysfunctional autocracy’s downfall would precipitate a disintegration of state institutions as well. Freedom and state breakdown became synonymous and, in that context, the classical liberals got their chance. The February 1917 liberal coup, nominally against the autocracy but really against the Duma, presaged the Bolshevik October 1917 coup, nominally against the Provisional Government but really against the Soviet. Each appeared to spearhead the mass sentiment of the moment; each brought a far narrower group to power than mass sentiment preferred. That mass sentiment, moreover, did not stand still: the world war vastly accelerated the radicalization of popular mood. To be sure, the history of revolutions indicates that an inevitable failure to satisfy millenarian hopes naturally radicalizes the populace. The surprise in Russia, if there was one, lay not in the deepening popular radicalization but in the debilitating weakness of the establishment and upper military.285
Russia had always been a police state that relied predominantly on the army for its heaviest policing, but not only had Russia lost its police in March 1917, after that it lost its army as well. “The Seizure of power by ‘force’ in a modern State,” noted the historian Adrian Lyttelton, apropos of Italy, but equally applicable to Russia, “is never possible, except when the army or police carries out the coup, unless the will to resist of the Government forces has been undermined.”286 The world war, and especially the 1917 military offensive, did more than hasten popular radicalization: it also defanged the army as a force of order. Wartime radicalism in the army and fleet—from Vyborg and Helsinki to Pskov, which the Provisional Government called the “rotten triangle”—served as the indispensable scaffolding for Bolshevism. “October may have been a ‘coup’ in the capital,” one historian has written, “but at the front it was a revolution.”287 The politicized armed forces were made up predominantly of peasants, and whether they served in the army or not, they carried out their own revolution. “A country of boundless territorial expanse, with a sparse population, suffered from a shortage of land,” the Constitutional Democrat Duma representative Vasily Maklakov would remark in hindsight. “And the peasant class, elsewhere usually a bulwark of order, in Russia in 1917 evidenced a revolutionary temper.”288 But whereas the revolution of the soldiers and sailors consciously linked up with Bolshevism, the peasant revolution only happened to coincide with it. Soon enough, the peasant revolution and Bolshevism would collide.
Inside the Bolshevik party, the way that the Petrograd coup had unfolded would have lasting repercussions. The opposition to the coup by Kamenev and Zinoviev was a stain they would bear for the rest of their lives. When Stalin’s mediation efforts were slapped down by Trotsky, Stalin’s resentment at the upstart, high-profile intellectual Trotsky boiled over. Stalin, in a huff, had announced his intention to quit as editor of the party newspaper. “The Russian revolution has overthrown not a few authoritative types,” Stalin wrote with disdain on the day of his proffered resignation. “The revolution’s power is expressed in the fact that it has not bowed before ‘famous names,’ but has taken them into service or, if they refused, consigned them to oblivion.”289 The Central Committee rejected his resignation, but even after the successful coup, the bitterness would rankle.290 Later, in exile, Trotsky would call Sverdlov “the general secretary of the October insurrection”—a poke in the eye of (by then) General Secretary Stalin. Trotsky would also defend Kamenev, the opponent of the putsch, for having played a
“most active part in the coup,” pointedly adding that Stalin had played no noticeable role.291 This was patently false. To be sure, Trotsky, Kamenev, Lenin, and Lunacharchy all spoke at the historic Second Congress of Soviets, while Stalin did not. But Stalin gave a speech to the Bolshevik delegates to the Soviet before the congress met, on October 24, demonstrating clear familiarity with the military and political preparations for the coup. Throughout 1917, moreover, his punditry and editorial work were prodigious, especially in the summer and fall.292
Stalin’s publications explained the revolution in simple, accessible terms, including during the Congress of Soviets. “In the first days of the revolution the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ was a novelty,” he wrote in Pravda (October 26, 1917), referring to the period beginning in April 1917. “At the end of August the scene changed very radically” with “the Kornilov Rebellion. . . . The soviets in the rear and the soldiers committees at the front, which were in a moribund state in July-August, ‘suddenly’ revived and took power in their hands in Siberia and the Caucasus, in Finland and the Urals, in Odessa and Kharkov. . . . Thus, ‘Soviet power’ proclaimed in April by a ‘small group of Bolsheviks in Petrograd’ obtains almost universal recognition of the revolutionary classes at the end of August.” He differentiated the move to Soviet power from the endless changes in the Provisional Government that had brought socialists into the cabinet. “Power to the Soviet means the thorough purging of every government office in the rear and at the front, from top to bottom. . . . Power to the Soviet means the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary peasantry . . . open, mass dictatorship, exercised in the eyes of all, without ploys and behind-the-scenes work; for such a dictatorship has no reason to hide the fact that no mercy will be shown to the lock-out capitalists who have intensified unemployment . . . or to the profiteering bankers who have increased the price of food and caused starvation.” Certain classes brought on the misery; other classes would bring salvation. “This is the class nature of the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets.’ Events at home and abroad, the protracted war and the longing for peace, defeat at the front and defense of the capital, the rottenness of the Provisional Government . . . , chaos and famine, unemployment and exhaustion—all this is irresistibly drawing the revolutionary classes of Russia to power.” How “classes” exercised power remained to be seen.
Stalin’s Georgian Social Democrat compatriot David Sagirashvili had known him since 1901, when Sagirashvili was fourteen and the future Stalin twenty-three. His upbringing had been similar to Stalin’s—absent father, immersion in tales of Georgian martyrs and national poets, loathing for imperial Russian administrators and soldier-occupiers, admiration for Georgian outlaws who fought for justice, and membership in a circle of revolutionaries—but he had become a Menshevik. Still, when Sagirashvili, after the coup, refused to join his Menshevik colleagues in boycotting the Bolshevik-dominated Soviet, Stalin, in a Smolny corridor, “put his hand over my shoulder in a most friendly manner and [began] to talk to me in Georgian.”293 The Georgian Jughashvili-Stalin from the Russian empire’s periphery, the son of a shoemaker, had become part of a new would-be power structure in the capital of the largest state in the world, thanks to geopolitics and world war, to many fateful decisions and multiple contingencies, but also to his own efforts. On the list of Bolsheviks voted to a new Soviet central executive committee, Stalin’s name appeared fifth, right before Sverdlov, and after Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev.294 Still more pointedly, Stalin was one of only two people whom Lenin gave permission to enter his private apartment in Bolshevik headquarters at Smolny, a proximity and confidence that would prove pivotal.
CHAPTER 7
1918: DADA AND LENIN
Let us try for once not to be right.
Samuel Rosenstock, aka Tristan Tzara (“sad in my country”), a Jewish Romanian poet, “Dada Manifesto” 19181
Lunacharsky was clutching his head, his forehead against the window-pane, standing in an attitude of hopeless despair.
Kremlin commandant Pavel Malkov, August 30, 19182
FEW STREET CELEBRATIONS had accompanied or immediately followed the October Bolshevik coup, in contrast to the giddy days during and after February-March 1917, but within a week Lenin was posing for sculptors. And yet, few thought this crazy putsch would last even before it had happened. Throughout the summer of 1917, Russia’s press, nearly across the political spectrum, had spread the idea (as Paul Miliukov recalled in 1918) that “the Bolsheviks either would decide not to seize power as they lacked hope of retaining it, or, if they did seize it, they would endure only the shortest time. In very moderate circles, the latter experiment was even viewed as highly desirable for it would ‘cure Russia of bolshevism forever.’”3 Many on the right had openly welcomed a Bolshevik coup, imagining that the leftists would quickly break their own necks, but not before first clearing away the despised Provisional Government.4 When the coup happened, it still surprised. Then Lenin opted for a cabinet government rather than abolishing the state and the Second Congress of Soviets—at least those who remained in the hall—approved the formation of the all-Bolshevik government. Admittedly, the Council of People’s Commissars was made up not of “bourgeois” ministers but “commissars,” a name derived from the French commissaire and originally the Latin commisarius, signifying plenipotentiaries of a higher authority (in this case, from “the people”).5 But would it last? The “provisional” men of February who had dared to replace the tsar (Miliukov, Kerensky) had been pushed aside.6 Top army commanders had fallen to incarceration or despair, such as Lavr Kornilov and Mikhail Alexeyev, the longest-serving and most successful chief of staff in the war (who was compelled to arrest Kornilov). Would-be political replacements among non-Bolshevik socialists, such as Victor Chernov and his socialist revolutionaries and Yuly Martov and his Mensheviks, appeared to have been trampled underfoot. But in 1918—which as a result of a calendar change in February from the Julian (eastern orthodox) to the Gregorian (western) was the shortest year in Russia’s thousand-year history7—the Bolsheviks, too, looked destined for oblivion.
The would-be “regime” consisted, at the top, of just four people: Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin, each of whom had a criminal record for political offenses and none of whom had any administrative experience. (The fifteen members of the Council of People’s Commissars had spent a collective two centuries in tsarist prison and exile.) Ensconced in the stale air of Smolny, the eighteenth-century finishing school for girls of noble lineage, they commanded a few tables and ratty couches. Opposite Lenin’s small, dirty room was a larger space where members of the Council of People’s Commissars came and went; initially they held no formal meetings. The room had an unpainted wooden partition to conceal a typist (the chancellery) and a cubbyhole for a telephone operator (the communications network). The former headmistress still occupied the room next door. A sailor, designated by Sverdlov as the new Smolny commandant, hastily organized a perimeter around the campus and began to purge the building room by room.8 But Lenin’s first official car, a magnificent Turcat-Mery of 1915 make (formerly belonging to the tsar), was stolen from Smolny by members of a fire brigade looking to profit by selling it in Finland. (Stepan Gil, a first-class auto professional and conversationalist, who had driven the tsar and became Lenin’s principal driver, led a hunt that managed to retrieve the vehicle).9 “Nobody knew Lenin’s face at that time,” Krupskaya would recall. “In the evening we would often stroll around Smolny, and nobody would ever recognize him, because there were no portraits then.”10 The thirteen commissars set up “offices” inside Smolny and attempted to visit and assert authority over the ministries they sought to supersede.11 Stalin, announced as the commissar for nationalities, had no tsarist or Provisional Government ministry to try to take over.12 His deputy, Stanisław Pestkowski—part of the Polish Bolshevik contingent that had seized the central telegraph during the October coup—stumbled across an empty table in Smolny, over which he
tacked up a handwritten sign: “People’s Commissariat of Nationalities.”13 According to Pestkowski, the room was close to Lenin’s, and “in the course of the day,” Lenin “would call Stalin an endless number of times and would appear in our office and lead him away.”14 Lenin, perhaps preferring to remain behind the scenes, is said to have offered the chairmanship to Trotsky, who refused.15 Instead, Trotsky became “foreign affairs commissar” and got a room upstairs, the quarters of a former “floor mistress” for the girls. Sverdlov continued to oversee Bolshevik party matters.16
That such lowly beginnings would soon become one of the world’s strongest dictatorships is beyond fantastic. Lenin was essentially a pamphleteer. In 1918 he was identified as “Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and journalist,” and earned more money from publication honoraria (15,000 rubles) than from his salary (10,000 rubles).17 Trotsky was a writer as well, and a grandiloquent orator, but similarly without experience or training in statecraft. Sverdlov was something of an amateur forger, thanks to his father’s engraving craft, and a crack political organizer but hardly an experienced policy maker. Stalin was also an organizer, a rabble-rouser, and, briefly, a bandit, but primarily a periodicals editor—commissar of nationalities was effectively his first regular employment since his brief stint as a teenage Tiflis weatherman.
Now, these four products of autocratic Russia issued a torrent of paper decrees: “abolishing” social hierarchy in law, civil ranks, and courts; declaring “social insurance for all wage workers without exception, as well as for the city and village poor”; announcing the formation of a Supreme Council of the Economy and a determination to enforce a state monopoly in grain and agricultural implements. The decrees were suffused with terminology like “modes of production,” “class enemies,” “world imperialism,” “proletarian revolution.” Published under the name Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin—and signed for him by Stalin, among others—the decrees were proclaimed to have the “force of law.”18 In the meantime, the regime had no finances or functionaries. Trotsky failed in multiple efforts to take over the ministry of foreign affairs’ building and personnel.19 His first arrival there, at Palace Square, 6, on November 9 was greeted with derision, followed by mass desertion. True, his minions eventually found some petty cash in the ministry’s safe, and Stalin, to fund his own “commissariat,” had Pestkowski sponge 3,000 rubles from Trotsky.20 Pestkowski soon let on that he had studied some economics in London and was decreed “head of the State Bank.”21 The employees laughed him away, which is how he instead ended up working for Stalin.
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