Doom enveloped Petrograd. A year had passed since the heady days of Nicholas II’s abdication, on March 2, 1917, when the tsar had pointedly asked two Duma representatives, “Would there not be consequences?” A mere five months had lapsed since Boris Avilov, a Menshevik Internationalist, had stood up on October 27, 1917, at the Second Congress of Soviets during the Bolshevik coup and predicted that an all-Bolshevik government could neither solve the food supply crisis nor end the war, that the Entente would not recognize a Bolshevik-monopoly government, and that the Bolsheviks would be compelled to accept a separate and onerous peace with Germany. That day had come. On top of everything, Russia’s wartime allies now instituted a de facto economic blockade, and soon would seize Russia’s assets abroad.204
Lenin’s party was divided and demoralized.205 At the 7th (Extraordinary) Party Congress in the Tauride Palace on March 5–8, 1918, a mere 46 delegates turned up (compared with the nearly 200 at the last Party Congress in the summer of 1917). The self-styled Left Communists, who had been among the strongest supporters of Lenin’s putsch in 1917, rejected Brest-Litovsk. Bukharin and other leftist Bolsheviks even established a new periodical, Communist, expressly to denounce the “obscene” treaty, and at the congress took the floor to urge “revolutionary war” against imperial Germany. Lenin put through a name change from Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Bolsheviks) to Russian Communist party (Bolsheviks) and pleaded for party acceptance of Brest-Litovsk. The recriminations raged over three days. Lenin pointed out that his opponents had caused the catastrophe by refusing to accept the initial, better German offer. He won the vote 30 to 12, with 4 abstentions (including, again, Trotsky).206 And yet, this vote was in many ways merely an exercise in affirming the leader’s authority: Lenin insisted on signing the treaty, but he had already ceased to believe that even the Brest-Litovsk concessions would be enough to halt the German advance on Petrograd. On February 24, the day Lenin telegrammed acceptance of German terms, Major General Hoffmann seized Pskov, 150 miles southwest from, and on the direct rail line to, the Russian capital. On February 26, Lenin had approved a secret order to abandon the capital of Russia’s revolution. It was a rich irony. After Kerensky’s Provisional Government had decided to relocate from Petrograd to Moscow for safety in early October 1917, the Bolshevik newspaper Workers’ Path—edited by Stalin—had accused Kerensky of treason for surrendering the capital to the Germans.207 Kerensky had backed down.208 But now—again, just as Lenin’s accusers had long predicted—he had not only handed the Germans everything but was preparing to desert the Russian capital.
FLIGHT AND ENTRENCHMENT
Bolshevik evacuation preparations, rumored on newspaper front pages for months, could not be concealed. Already in late February 1918, the American and Japanese diplomatic missions had relocated for safety to Vologda, while the French and British sought to exit Russia entirely via Finland to Sweden: only the British got through; the French ended up stranded at Vologda, too (where Stalin had been in exile). Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, chairman of the government’s “intelligence operations”—a room in Smolny—used ruses to ensure Lenin’s security: freight stamped “Council of People’s Commissars” was loaded in plain sight at a central passenger station, while under cover of darkness, at a derelict depot south of Petrograd, a train of former imperial carriages was secretly assembled. Bonch-Bruevich sent two teams of agents unknown to each other (okhranka style) to maintain surveillance on the disused spur, eavesdrop on nearby “tea” houses, and spread rumors of a train being prepared for doctors heading to the front. Some cars were loaded with wood fuel, typewriters, and telephones; flatbeds were added for automobiles. Bonch-Bruevich had also filled two cars just with Bolshevik party literature (not including his own personal library).209 On the evening of Sunday, March 10, the secret train—carrying Lenin, his sister and wife, the poet Yefim Pridvorov (aka Demyan Bedny), Sverdlov, Stalin, Cheka head Dzierzynski with a single briefcase, and a detachment of guards—departed with the lights off. Two trains carrying the Soviet’s central executive committee (many of whom were not Bolsheviks) followed at a distance, not knowing what was in front of them. Anxiety was high: seventy-five miles southeast of Petrograd, Lenin’s train was delayed when it unexpectedly crossed paths with a train carrying demobilized armed troops. Only when Lenin’s train pulled within three station stops of Moscow did Bonch-Bruevich alert the Moscow soviet of the train’s existence. Arriving at 8:00 p.m. on March 11, Lenin was greeted by a small party of “workers,” addressed the Moscow soviet, and took up residence in the gilt National Hotel, where an accompanying team of telegraphists was also billeted.210
What arrived on the main train was the “state” as of March 1918: Lenin’s person, a handful of loyal lieutenants, Bolshevik ideas and some means to spread them, an armed guard.
The armed guard was especially unusual. A desperate call to form a defense force “from the class-conscious and best elements of the working classes” had been issued in mid-January 1918, during the Brest-Litovsk talks, when the Germans were marching eastward without obstacle, but nothing came of the summons.211 On the train escorting the revolution to the new capital of Moscow were the Latvian Riflemen of the tsarist army. Before the Great War, the Russian imperial army had refused to countenance expressly national units; only in 1914–15 had the authorities permitted Czechoslovak, Serbo-Croatian, and Polish volunteer “legions,” made up of POWs who wanted to return to fighting to help liberate their compatriots under Habsburg rule. Finns were denied such permission, but in August 1915, Russia allowed all-volunteer Latvian brigades, aiming to exploit their antagonism to Germany. By 1916–17, the two Latvian brigades had ballooned to some 18,000 troops in eight regiments (eventually ten), each named for a Latvian town, but also including ethnic Hungarians, Finns, and others. After heavy casualties in winter 1916–17 fighting, they had turned against the tsarist system. Most were landless peasants or small tenant farmers, and they leaned heavily Social Democratic. By 1917, their homeland had broken off from Russia, under German occupation. Still, it was the decision of their authoritative commander, Colonel Jukums Vacietis (b. 1873), the sixth son among eight children of a landless peasant family from tsarist Courland, whose Russian teacher had been a radical student Populist, to bring the soldiers over to the Bolshevik side.212 The Latvians guarding Lenin’s train were the only disciplined, all-purpose force standing between Bolshevism and oblivion.
Other trains to Moscow hauled storehouses of valuables: the naval staff took files, maps, office equipment, furniture, curtains, rugs, mirrors, ashtrays, stoves, kitchen appliances, dishes, samovars, towels, blankets, and holy icons—1,806 enumerated items in all.213 A foreign affairs commissariat train carted off “gold goblets, gilt spoons, knives and the like” from the imperial vaults.214 But what Moscow held in store remained to be seen. “Bourgeois circles are gleeful about the fact that by a strange twist of fate we are realizing the Slavophiles’ timeless dream of returning the capital to Moscow,” Zinoviev remarked. “We are profoundly convinced that the change of capital will not last long and that the difficult conditions dictating its necessity will pass.”215 The Moscow Council of People’s Commissars was taking no chances, having promptly declared its “independence” the day the Petrograd government arrived. Lenin appointed a commission of himself, Stalin, and Sverdlov to take down what they called the parallel “Muscovite Tsardom.”216
In the meantime, an armed quest for usable property drew in all. Moscow resembled an overgrown village, with narrow, dirty streets of rough cobblestone—nothing like the straight, wide avenues of baroque Petrograd—and lacked an accumulation of administrative edifices.217 The Moscow soviet central executive committee had already claimed the Governor’s Mansion; the Moscow soviet itself was left to fight for the once grand, now dilapidated Hotel Dresden (across the street from the Governor’s Mansion). Some members of the soviet’s central executive committee moved into the National Hotel (rechristened the House of Soviets No.
1), but more ended up at the Hotel Lux, on Moscow’s main artery Tverskaya Street.218 Most state agencies found themselves widely dispersed: the new Supreme Council of the Economy, set up to counteract anarchosyndicalist tendencies in industry, would claim eighty structures, virtually none of them originally built as offices.219 The war commissariat took over the unluxurious Hotel Red Fleet, also on Tverskaya Street, but additionally claimed the Alexander Military School, the Trading Rows on Red Square, and prime spaces in Moscow’s Kitaigorod, the walled inner merchant ward near the Kremlin. The Trade Union Council got an eighteenth-century neoclassical foundling home out along the Moscow River as well as some plush reception space in Moscow’s former Nobility Club. The Cheka appropriated the property of two private insurance companies, Yakor (Anchor) and Lloyd’s Russian branch, on Bolshaya Lubyanka.220 Predictably, the scramble was shameless: When members of the Moscow party committee went to occupy a facility they had obtained in a barter deal, they discovered that the kitchen equipment and phone cables had been ripped from the walls, and the lightbulbs were gone.
Moscow’s grandest hotel, the Metropole, was an art nouveau jewel that had originally been intended as an opera house. The structure was commissioned by the railway industrialist and arts patron Savva Mamontov (1841–1918), but he was jailed on fraud charges, after which the project changed, resulting in the hotel that opened in 1905. The war altered it nearly beyond recognition and with the revolution, the property was nationalized, rechristened the Second House of the Soviets, its 250 rooms overrun by new regime parvenus. The entrance was barricaded by guards and a pass system was initiated; the interior crawled with bed bugs and higher ups, along with their relatives, cronies, and mistresses. Yefraim Sklyansky, Trotsky’s top deputy at the war commissariat, had commandeered several apartments on different floors for his “clan.” Bukharin lived here, as did his future lover Anna Larina, then a child (they met when she was four and he, twenty-nine). Foreign Affairs Commissar Georgy Chicherin and many foreign affairs personnel were particularly well ensconced; many had offices here, too. The commissariat of trade got a two-room junior suite with bathtub. Yakov Sverdlov had his public reception for the Soviet central executive committee upstairs, while formal sessions of that body took place in the disused banquet hall‒restaurant. Amid the darkness and severe cold of a capital without fuel, the former opulent hotel degenerated into a filthy wreck. Child residents relieved themselves on the luxury runners in the hallways, on which adults threw lit cigarette butts. The toilets and grand baths were particularly execrable. Fierce scrums broke out over the irregularly distributed state food packets (payok) for the elite residents. Packets could include clothes, even coveted overcoats. The “administration” of the Second House of the Soviets, meanwhile, stole everything removable.221 An opera house it had belatedly become.
But the center of power formed elsewhere. To accommodate the Council of People’s Commissars, among the options considered were a hostel for patrician women near the city’s medieval Red Gate, or the medieval Kremlin, which, however, had been neglected, physically and politically—the clock on the Savior Gate Tower overlooking Red Square was still chiming “God Save the Tsar” every hour.222 Whatever the Kremlin’s associations with ancient Muscovy or its disrepair, it had high walls and lockable gates, and a unique central location. After a week in the National Hotel, Lenin moved his operations into one of the Kremlin’s masterpieces. Catherine the Great had commissioned a residence for the times she was in Moscow; the resultant neoclassicial structure, instead, was built for the Imperial Senate (the Russian empire’s highest judicial body), whose spacious, luxurious offices were later given over to the Courts of Justice. Lenin, a lawyer manque, set up shop on the upper (third) floor in the former suite of the state procurator.223 The riding stable (manege) just outside the Kremlin gates became the government garage, though most officials made their way in sledges and droshkies commandeered from the populace.224 The Smolny commandant, Pavel Malkov, a Sverdlov protégé, became the new Kremlin commandant and set about clearing out the nuns and monks from the monastery and nunnery just inside the Savior Gate. Malkov also furnished Lenin’s office, found a tailor to clothe the regime, and began stockpiling foodstuffs.225 For living quarters, Lenin got a two-room apartment in the Kremlin’s Cavalry Building in the former residence (now divided up) of the cavalry commander. Trotsky and Sverdlov, too, moved into the Cavalry Building. “Lenin and I took quarters across the corridor, sharing the same dining room,” Trotsky later wrote, bragging that “Lenin and I met dozens of times a day in the corridor, and called on each other to talk things over.” (They dined on suddenly plentiful red caviar, whose export had ceased.)226 By the end of 1918, some 1,800 new people (including family members) would obtain Kremlin apartments.
Stalin also took part in this struggle over space. For his nationalities commissariat, he schemed to seize the Grand Siberian Hotel, but the Supreme Council of the Economy had squatted in the building. (“This was one of the few cases,” Pestkowski gently noted, “when Stalin suffered defeat.”)227 Instead, Stalin secured a few small, private detached houses, after the Cheka had left them for the insurance buildings. Right before the relocation to the capital, meanwhile, in late February or early March, he appears to have married sixteen-year-old Nadezhda “Nadya” Alliluyeva, the daughter of the skilled worker Sergei Alliluyev, who in the prerevolutionary years had long sheltered Stalin in Tiflis and St. Petersburg.228 She was still a girl, and remarkably earnest. (“There’s real hunger in Petrograd,” she wrote to the wife of another Bolshevik on the eve of her wedding to Stalin. “They hand out only an eighth of a pound of bread every day, and one day they gave us none at all. I’ve even cursed the Bolsheviks.”)229 Her relatives observed the couple quarreling already during the initial “honeymoon” phase of the marriage.230 Stalin addressed her in the familiar (“ty”); she used the formal (“vy”). He hired her as his secretary in the commissariat (the next year she would shift over to Lenin’s secretariat and join the party).231 The couple obtained a Kremlin apartment, for some reason not in the Cavalry Building with Lenin, Trotsky, and Sverdlov, but in an even more modest three-story outbuilding that serviced Moscow’s Grand Kremlin Palace. Their rooms on the second floor of the servants’ quarters, in the so-called Frauleins’ Corridor, with three opaque windows, carried the new address Communist Street, 2.232 Stalin complained to Lenin about the noise from the communal kitchen and the vehicles outside, and demanded that Kremlin vehicles be banned from driving beyond the arch where the residential quarters began after 11:00 p.m. (a sign, perhaps, that Stalin was not yet the insomniac he would become).233 Stalin also acquired a government office inside the Imperial Senate building, like Lenin and Sverdlov, but the Georgian was rarely there.
CRUELEST MONTHS: SPRING 1918
Ten days after Brest-Litovsk nominally ended hostilities on the eastern front, the German army captured Odessa, way down on the Black Sea coast. Beginning the next day, March 14, the Fourth All-Russia Congress of Soviets convened in Moscow to ratify the treaty. The Soviet’s central executive committee had voted to recommend approval—amid shouts of “Judases . . . German spies!”—only thanks to Sverdlov’s manipulations, and even then, just barely (abstentions and noes constituted a majority).234 At the congress, ratification was also fraught. “Suppose that two friends are out walking at night and they are attacked by ten men,” Lenin tried reasoning with the delegates. “If the scoundrels isolate one of them, what is the other to do? He cannot render assistance, and if he runs away is he a traitor?”235 Running from a fight hardly seemed persuasive. Still, of the 1,232 voting delegates—including 795 Bolsheviks and 283 Left Socialist Revolutionaries—784 voted in favor of ratification, 261 against, with the remainder, some 175, abstaining or not voting.236 The Left Communists were the ones who abstained. But the Bolshevik junior partner Left SRs voted no en masse, declaring their party “not bound by the terms of the Treaty” and quitting the Council of People’s Commissars (which they had j
oined only two months earlier). And Lenin had not even dared to divulge the full treaty provisions before the vote. “We are asked to ratify a treaty the text of which some of us have not seen, at least neither I nor my comrades have seen it,” complained the Menshevik leader Yuly Martov. “Do you know what you are signing? I do not. . . . Talk about secret diplomacy!”237 Martov did not know the half of it: Unbeknownst to the Congress of Soviets delegates, Lenin had authorized Trotsky to conspire with American, British, and French representatives in Russia to obtain pledges of Entente support against the Germans, for which Lenin had promised to sabotage ratification of Brest-Litovsk.
Still viewing Lenin and Trotsky as German agents, Entente governments failed to respond to the offer.238 But a British Navy squadron, a token force, had landed at the port of Murmansk, on Russia’s northwest (Arctic Ocean) coast, on March 9, with the express aim of countering German and Finnish forces threatening Russia’s Murmansk Railway as well as military storehouses. More broadly, the British and French wanted to prevent Germany from transferring eastern front divisions to the western front by reviving an eastern front. This desire was vastly heightened as the Central Powers began to occupy and extract the riches of Ukraine. The British, in other words, were intervening initially not to overthrow Bolshevism but to mitigate the Central Powers’ newfound war advantages.239 But what had started out largely as a preemptive move to deny Germany Russian military stores would become, over time, an underfunded campaign against the supposed threat that Communism posed to the British empire in India.240
Lenin and Trotsky, for their part, had welcomed the Entente’s military landing on Russian soil as a counter to Germany. Stalin, at a Council of People’s Commissars meeting on April 2, 1918, with the Germans about to capture Kharkov, proposed shifting policy to seek an anti-German military coalition with the Ukrainian Central Rada, which the Bolsheviks had overthrown just two months before, and which Germany had restored one month before.241 Stalin’s proposal was complementary to Trotsky’s about-face negotiations with agents of the Entente to help organize and train a new Red Army, along with railroad operators and equipment. Three days later, Japanese troops, on the pretext of “protecting” Japanese nationals, landed at Vladivostok. Lenin and Trotsky vehemently objected—this was a military intervention they did not invite.
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