Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The Left SRs had resigned over Brest-Litovsk from the Council of People’s Commissars, but not from their perches in the Cheka or from the Soviet’s central executive committee. On June 14, 1918, the Bolsheviks had expelled the handful of elected Mensheviks and Right Socialist Revolutionaries from the central executive committee, and shuttered their newspapers. “Martov, swearing at the ‘dictators’, ‘Bonapartists’, ‘usurpers’, and ‘grabbers’ in his sick, tubercular voice, grabbed his coat and tried to put it on, but his shaking hands could not get into the sleeves,” recalled one Bolshevik eyewitness. “Lenin, white as chalk, stood and looked at Martov.” But a Left SR just burst into laughter.284 The splinter party claimed a relatively robust membership in excess of 100,000.285 This was considerably less than the Bolshevik membership of more than 300,000; both were microscopic in a country of some 140 million. Despite the Bolshevik numerical advantage, however, many contemporaries hoped, or feared, that the Left SRs—on the basis of their increasingly resonant anti-Brest-Litovsk stance—might command a majority of the elected delegates to the upcoming Fifth Congress of Soviets, scheduled to open June 28. Was there an option on the radical socialist left besides the Bolsheviks?

  The Left SR Central Committee resolved to introduce a resolution at the congress denouncing Brest-Litovsk and calling for (quixotic) partisan war, such as was under way in Ukraine against the German occupation.286 On June 24, Sverdlov delayed the congress’s opening until early July while he manufactured more Bolshevik delegates. (On a pretext, Sverdlov had also expelled all Mensheviks and Right SRs from the Soviet’s central executive committee.) The Left SRs held their 3rd Party Congress June 28 to July 1, and resolved to fight against German imperialism and for Soviet power by eliminating Councils of People’s Commissars, so that Soviet executive committees could rule.287 Meanwhile, Sverdlov, chairman of the central executive committee, did produce hundreds of suspicious soviet delegates, beyond the already extra weight afforded to worker voters over peasants (the Left SRs constituency). When the congress opened at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater on the evening of July 4, there were 1,035 voting attendees, including 678 Communists, 269 Left SRs, and 88 mostly unaffiliated others.288 (Non-voting delegates, some 200 each for Left SRs and Communists, brought the attendees to 1,425, of whom two thirds were between twenty and thirty years of age; collectively, the attendees had spent 1,195 years in prison for political reasons.)289 The evident fraud was hardly the only source of anti-Bolshevik anger: delegates from Ukraine, Latvia, and South Caucasus described the terrors of German imperialism’s occupation and exploitation of their resources. “Down with Mirbach!” “Down with Brest!” Left SRs shouted with Germany’s ambassador seated as an honored guest in a front box. Provocatively, Trotsky countered that all “agents of foreign imperialism” who were trying to provoke renewed war with Germany “be shot on the spot.”290

  Maria Spiridonova, the Left SR party’s highest profile leader, had been a strong proponent of coalition with the Bolsheviks, but for her the last straw had already come in June 1918, when the Bolsheviks sent armed detachments to villages to “requisition” grain. She rose to denounce Bolshevik policies.291 Lenin flat out stated that “we probably made a mistake in accepting your socialization of the land in our law [decree] of October 26 [1917].”292 When the fraud-enhanced Bolshevik majority voted down the Left SR resolution to renounce the treaty with imperial Germany, Lenin baited the Left SRs: “If these people prefer walking out of the Congress, good riddance.”293 But he was in for a surprise: The Left SR leadership, knowing that their anti-Brest resolution might fail, had resolved to arouse the masses and provoke a breach in German-Soviet relations by terrorist acts “against high-profile representatives of German imperialism.”294 Thus did the occasion of the Fifth Congress of Soviets serve as the motivation for Left SR action, just as the Second Congress had for a Bolshevik coup.

  Spiridonova, on the evening of July 4, had tasked twenty-year-old Yakov Blyumkin with assassinating German ambassador Count Mirbach.295 The son of a Jewish shop assistant in Odessa, Blyumkin had arrived in Moscow in April 1918 and, like many Left SRs, had worked in the Cheka, one of about 120 employees at that time (including chauffeurs and field couriers).296 He served in counterintelligence and among his responsibilities was the German embassy. On July 5, Spiridonova took the stage at the Bolshoi, accused the Bolsheviks of murdering the revolution and, with Lenin audibly laughing behind her, vowed she would “take up again the revolver and the hand grenade,” as she had in tsarist times.297 Pandemonium! A grenade exploded in one of the Bolshoi’s upper tiers, but Sverdlov, presiding, kept the hall from stampeding for the exits.298

  The next day, with the Congress of Soviets scheduled to resume later that afternoon, Blyumkin arrived at the German embassy accompanied by Nikolai Andreyev, a photographer, with credentials signed by Felix Dzierzynski authorizing them to request an urgent meeting with the ambassador. At the embassy, First Secretary Kurt Riezler, a noted philosopher as well as a diplomat, indicated he would meet with them on the ambassador’s behalf. (Riezler had been among the key German foreign ministry personnel who had handled the secret negotiations to send Lenin in the sealed train back to Russia in 1917.)299 Mirbach, however, came down to meet the pair; Blyumkin removed a Browning from his briefcase and opened fire three times—missing. As Mirbach ran, the photographer shot at the ambassador from behind, evidently striking the back of his head. Blyumkin hurled a bomb and the two assassins leaped out a window to a getaway car. Mirbach died around 3:15 p.m.300

  Spiridonova and the Left SRs expected the political murder would provoke a German military response, forcing the Bolsheviks back into the war. With the congress set to resume at 4:00 p.m., and Lenin strategizing with Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin, the telephone rang at the Kremlin. Bonch-Bruevich transmitted the news about an attack at the German embassy; Lenin ordered him to the scene.301 Radek, the new foreign affairs commissar Georgy Chicherin, and Dzierzynski also went. The Germans demanded Lenin. The Bolshevik leader arrived with Sverdlov around 5:00 p.m., learned details of the murder, and offered condolences. The German military attache thought Lenin looked frightened.302 Perhaps Germany would respond with a military assault?

  Lenin now learned that the very organization established to protect the Bolshevik revolution, the Cheka, was involved in a conspiracy against them. Blyumkin had left behind his credentials, and Dzierzynski, without a guard detail, drove to the Cheka military barracks on Grand Three-Holies Lane where Blyumkin had previously been seen. There the Cheka leader discovered the entire Left SR leadership, who made clear that Blyumkin had acted on their orders. “You stand before a fait accompli,” they told Dzierzynski. “The Brest Treaty is annulled; war with Germany is unavoidable. . . . Let it be here as in Ukraine, we will go underground. You can keep power, but you must cease being lackeys of Mirbach.”303 Dzierzynski, although he had opposed Brest-Litovsk at the Bolshevik Central Committee, ordered them all arrested; instead, they took him hostage.304

  At news of the capture of the Cheka head, Lenin “turned white as he typically did when he was enraged or shocked by a dangerous, unexpected turn of events,” according to Bonch-Bruevich.305 Lenin summoned the Chekist Martinš Lacis, a thirty-year-old Latvian born Janis Sudrabs, to take Dzierzynski’s place.306 When Lacis showed up at the main Cheka headquarters on Bolshaya Lubyanka—guarded, as always, by the Left SR–controlled Cheka Combat Detachment—the sailors wanted to shoot him. Only the intercession of the Left SR Pyotr Alexandrovich Dmitrievsky, known as Alexandrovich, a deputy to Dzierzynski, saved Lacis’ life.307 Had Lacis, and perhaps Dzierzynski as well, been shot “on the spot”—in the words of Trotsky’s outburst from two days before—the Bolshevik regime might have been broken. As it was, Lenin and Sverdlov contemplated abandoning the Kremlin.308

  Spiridonova went to the Bolshoi, for the evening resumption of the Fifth Congress of Soviets, to announce that Russia had been “liberated from Mirbach.” Dressed in black, she wore a sc
arlet carnation upon her breast and carried a small steel Browning pistol in her hand.309 The opening was delayed, however, and confusion reigned. Around 8:00 p.m. that night (July 6), the entire Left SR faction, more than 400 people, including guests, moved upstairs to discuss the situation, amid rumors that armed Latvians had surrounded the Bolshoi. The Bolshevik faction retreated to other quarters (some may have been let out of the theater).310 “We were sitting in our room waiting for you to come and arrest us,” Bukharin told one Left SR. “Since you did not, we decided to arrest you instead.”311 The Left SRs in the Cheka, for their part, had sent sailors out into the streets to take Bolshevik hostages, grabbing more than two dozen from passing automobiles, and still held Dzierzynski and Lacis. Lenin discovered that the Moscow garrison was not going to defend the Bolsheviks: most soldiers either remained neutral or sided with the anti-German Left SRs. “Today around 3 p.m. a Left SR killed Mirbach with a bomb,” Lenin telegrammed Stalin at Tsaritsyn. “The assassination is clearly in the interests of the monarchists or of the Anglo-French capitalists. The Left SRs . . . arrested Dzierzynski and Lacis and started an insurrection against us. We are about to liquidate them tonight and we shall tell the people the whole truth: we are a hair’s breadth from war” with Germany.312 Stalin would write back the next day that the Left SRs were “hysterics.”313 He was right.

  But the counterattack was not assured. Many of the few reliable Red units had been sent eastward to counter the Czechoslovak rebellion. Around midnight on July 6–7, Lenin summoned the top Latvian commander, the squat, stout Colonel Jukums Vacietis. “The Kremlin was dark and empty,” Vacietis recalled of the Council of People’s Commissars’ meeting room, where Lenin finally emerged, and asked, “‘Comrade, will we hold out until morning?’ Having asked the question, Lenin kept staring at me.”314 Vacietis was taken aback. He sympathized with the Left SRs and could have decided, at a minimum, to be neutral, thereby perhaps dooming the Bolsheviks. But his own experience fighting the Germans during Christmas 1916 had produced colossal casualties, and resuming the war held no appeal. (There was, in any case, no Russian army to do so.) Furthermore, he expected the imperial German regime to collapse from the war, just as Russia’s had, so why sacrifice men for nothing? What Vacietis did not know was that Lenin did not even trust him: a half hour before receiving him that night, Lenin had called in the two political commissars attached to the Latvians to get reassurances about Vacietis’s loyalties.

  Nor was it clear that the Latvian rank and file would fight for the Bolsheviks. The Left SRs had been waiting, on July 6 for the arrival of Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Muravyov (b. 1880), an ethnic Russian militant Left SR and another commander of the Latvian Rifles, but he failed to show in the capital.315 Still, although Vacietis’s counterassault on the Left SRs was planned to begin a few hours after he saw Lenin, in the wee hours of July 7, to take advantage of the darkness, this happened to be St. John the Baptist’s Day, a Latvian national holiday, and the riflemen had decided to celebrate with an outing to Khodynka Field on Moscow’s outskirts.316 No Latvians, Red Guards, or, for that matter, anyone mustered at their jumping-off points.317 The attack would have to wait, instead, for daylight. The Cheka military units were under command of a Left SR former Baltic sailor Dmitri Popov; lodged in Moscow’s inner walled Kitaigorod, they numbered 600 to 800 men total, mostly sailors. Against them, Vacietis later claimed to have assembled perhaps 3,300 men (fewer than 500 of them Russians).318 The Latvians would recall that Popov’s unit was better armed than they were, with heavy guns, scores of machine guns, and four armored cars. “The Popovites had seized a row of houses,” Vacietis explained, “and fortified them.” In fact, Popov, whose unit included many Finns as well as sailors, had been busy trying to recruit more fighters to his side, and expected the Bolsheviks to negotiate. Instead, Vacietis ordered a 152 mm howitzer brought in to reduce the Popov-Cheka stronghold to rubble—even with Dzierzynski inside.319 When the shelling started to wreck the building, as well as its neighboring structures, Popov and his men began to flee (they left Dzierzynski behind). Sources conflict on the duration of the skirmish (perhaps many hours, perhaps forty minutes). The two sides sustained around ten fatalities and about fifty wounded. Hundreds of Left SRs were taken into custody.320 Thirteen or so, including Spiridonova, were transferred to prison cells in the Kremlin. At 4:00 p.m., the Council of People’s Commissars confidently pronounced “the uprising . . . liquidated.”321

  The Cheka initiated an immediate countercoup against the Left SRs, solidifying the Bolshevik monopoly.322 The Cheka raided the editorial offices and smashed the printing facilities of non-Bolshevik periodicals.323 Blyumkin escaped to Ukraine. But many Left SRs in Bolshevik custody, including Alexandrovich—the savior of Lacis—were executed immediately without trial; the Bolsheviks publicly announced that some 200 had been shot.324 The vast majority of Left SRs across the country simply switched to the Bolshevik party. In the meantime, without the Left SR delegates, the Congress of Soviets resumed on July 9, and Trotsky regaled the delegates with details of “the Uprising.”325 In fact, one Left SR, Prosh Proshyan, had gone to the Central Telegraph Office around midnight on July 6 and proclaimed, “We killed Mirbach, the Council of People’s Commissars is under arrest.” Proshyan—who briefly had been commissar of posts and telegraph—dispatched a series of confused telegrams around the country, one referring to the Left SRs as “the presently governing party.”326 But this individual initiative aside, there had been no Left SR coup. The Left SR leadership had made plain many times, before and during the events, that they were prepared to defend themselves with force but not to seize power: theirs was an uprising on behalf of Soviet power “against the imperialists” (Germany), not against the Bolsheviks.327

  The Left SR episode put in sharp relief Lenin’s coup seven months earlier in October 1917. Just as in 1917, so in summer 1918, power was there for the seizing: The Left SRs enjoyed no worse prospects against Lenin and the Bolsheviks than Lenin had had against Kerensky. The Left SRs served in and had seized full control over the Cheka, won over much of the garrison by agitation, and possessed Kremlin passes, including to the Imperial Senate, where Lenin had his office.328 But the Left SRs lacked something critical: will. Lenin was fanatically committed to seizing and holding power, and his will had proved decisive in the Bolshevik coup, just as its absence now proved decisive in the Left SR non-coup.

  Lenin had relentlessly pursued personal power, though not for power’s sake: he, too, was moved by visions of social justice via revolution, as well as an allegedly scientific (Marxist) conviction in his rightness, even as he continued to strike many contemporaries as mad.329 But all along, Lenin had gotten lucky with his socialist opponents: Victor Chernov of the populous Right SRs, who had shrunk from offers of force by the capital garrison to protect the Constituent Assembly; Yuly Martov of the Mensheviks, who had clung to the “bourgeois phase” of history even without a bourgeoisie; Lev Kamenev, who had opposed the Bolshevik coup and tried to displace the Bolshevik monopoly with an all-socialist coalition government, then begged to be readmitted to the Bolshevik Central Committee. And now, Maria Spiridonova, who also proved no match for Lenin.330 Spiridonova, just thirty-four years old in 1918 but the only widely known Left SR leader, happened to be the only female head of any political force in 1917–18, and as such, was long subject to condescension (“a tireless hysteric with a pince-nez, the caricature of Athena,” one German journalist remarked).331 But she certainly did not lack gumption. At age twenty-two, in 1906, she had shot a tsarist police general for suppressing a peasant rebellion in 1905, for which she received a sentence of lifetime penal labor in Eastern Siberia. In prison and in transit, she suffered beatings and sexual assault, the least of which involved cigarettes extinguished on her bare breasts. She possessed courage. She could also be politically clear-eyed: unlike the vast majority of Left SRs, and the self-styled Left Bolsheviks, Spiridonova had supported Brest-Litovsk. “The peace was signed not by . . . the B
olsheviks,” she had shrewdly noted, but “by want, famine, the lack of desire of the whole people—suffered out, tired—to fight.”332 But time and again, Lenin and Sverdlov had manipulated her earnestness. Now, in July 1918, she unexpectedly had them in her grasp, but did not evolve her initial strategy and seize the opportunity.

  The Bolshevik counterassault on the Left SRs, meanwhile, would culminate in a secret “trial” against the party. Spiridonova would be sentenced to just one year, and then amnestied.333 But a once powerful political force was now neutered.334 Without the Left SRs, the Congress of Soviets, on its final day (July 10), approved a constitution declaring that “all central and local power belongs to soviets” and calling for “abolition of all exploitation of man by man, the complete elimination of the division of society into classes, the ruthless suppression of the exploiters, the establishment of a socialist organization of society, and the victory of socialism in all countries.”

  ASSASSINATION AND NEAR ASSASSINATION

  The Romanovs were still alive—and offered a potential rallying point, whether for the Bolsheviks in a public trial or for the anti-Bolsheviks to spring free. Nicholas’s brother Grand Duke Mikhail had been arrested by Kerensky and later deported by the Bolsheviks to a prison in the Urals (Perm). There, in the wee hours on June 13, 1918, five armed men of the Cheka, led by an old terrorist who had served time in tsarist prisons, staged an escape of the grand duke in order to execute him. Mikhail’s bullet-ridden body was burned in a smelter. The Bolsheviks shrank from admitting the execution, and circulated rumors Mikhail had been freed by monarchists and vanished.335 As for Nicholas, the Provisional Government had decided to exile him and his family abroad, but the Soviet had objected, and in any case, British king George V—who was a cousin to both Nicholas and Alexandra—rescinded an offer to shelter them.336 So Kerensky had sent the Russian royals to house arrest in the Tobolsk governor’s mansion (Nicholas’s train was disguised as a “Red Cross mission” and flew a Japanese flag).337 The symbolism of Siberian exile resonated. But as rumors spread of the ex-tsar’s comfortable existence and of monarchist plots to free him, the Urals soviet resolved to bring Nicholas to Yekaterinburg. But in April 1918, Sverdlov sent a trusted agent to fetch him from Tobolsk to Moscow. As the train for the former tsar traveled through Yekaterinburg, Urals Bolsheviks kidnapped him and placed him in the requisitioned mansion of a retired army engineer, Nikolai Ipatyev, around which they erected a palisade, and kept a large guard detail. In Moscow, Lenin had minions gather materials to put Nicholas on trial, a development mooted in the press, but the trial kept being “postponed.”338 “At the time,” Trotsky wrote of the closely held trial discussions, “Lenin was rather gloomy.”339