Stalin, Volume 1
Page 40
By July 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion was advancing on Yekaterinburg and the Bolshevik military commissar of the Urals went to Moscow to discuss the Urals defense and presumably, Nicholas and his family. On July 2, the Council of People’s Commissars appointed a commission to draft a decree nationalizing Romanov family property. Two days later, the newly formed Yekaterinburg Cheka displaced the local soviet as the royal family’s guards. Nicholas lived in evident bewilderment; he discovered the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic tract forged in imperial Russia about a global Jewish conspiracy, which he now read aloud to his German wife and daughters; perhaps Communism was a Jewish conspiracy?340 Soon the Cheka forged a crude monarchist letter in French purporting to be a conspiracy to free and restore the tsar. On this pretext, in the dead of night July 16–17, 1918, without formal charges, let alone a trial, a “sentence” of death by firing squad was carried out against Nicholas, Alexandra, their son, Alexei (aged thirteen), their four daughters (aged seventeen to twenty-two), the family physician, and three servants. Yakov Yurovsky, the eighth of ten children of a Jewish seamstress and a glazier (and suspected thief), led the eleven-person execution squad. Their hail of pistol bullets ricocheted off the brick walls around the half basement, and burned the executioners (some would become deaf). Alexei survived the barrage—he let out a moan—but Yurovsky went up and shot him point blank. Some of the daughters, whose bodies held concealed jewels that repelled the bullets, were bayoneted to pieces. Yurovsky’s squad buried the bodies off a dirt road at a village (Koptyaki) twelve miles north of Yekaterinburg. They poured sulfuric acid over the corpses to disfigure them beyond recognition, and burned and separately buried the corpses of Alexei and a daughter mistaken for Alexandra. That same day, July 19, Yurosovky left for Moscow to report.341 The central Bolshevik government never admitted its responsibility, and the act was attributed to the Urals Bolsheviks.342 The day the Bolshevik government published an announcement of the tsar’s death—falsely reporting the survival of Alexei and Alexandra—it also published the decree nationalizing Romanov family property (approved six days earlier).343 “There was no sign of grief or sympathy among the people,” noted ex-tsarist prime minister Vladimir Kokovtsov, who on the day of the announcement rode in a Petrograd tram. “The report of the Tsar’s death was read aloud, with smirks, mockeries, and base comments.” Some passengers said, “High time!”344
The Romanovs’ summary execution, and the failure to mount a public political trial, indicated desperation. The Bolsheviks had no military force capable of genuine combat, and the attempts to form some sort of army floundered, as soldiers scattered in search of food, turning into robber bands. Even the reliable Latvians were looking for other options. “At the time it was believed that central Russia would turn into a theater of internecine warfare and that the Bolsheviks would hardly hold on to power,” recalled Vacietis, the Latvian commander, of the summer of 1918. He feared for the “complete annihilation of the Latvian Rifles” and entered into secret talks with the irrepressible Riezler, the deceased Mirbach’s temporary replacement as charge d’affaires. Riezler, fearing the Bolsheviks would fall and be replaced by a pro-Entente regime, secretly urged a coup to install a government in Moscow similarly friendly to Berlin by bringing in a battalion of German grenadiers to “guard” the embassy.345 Lenin refused to allow them (he did consent to the arrival of some Germans in small groups without uniforms).346 In any case, Riezler’s superiors at the German foreign ministry in Berlin saw no need to abandon Lenin, who had paralyzed Russia and remained loyal to Germany.347 Still, Riezler hoped to undo the Bolsheviks by obtaining the defection of the Latvian Riflemen, whose units guarded the Kremlin, and he found a receptive group eager to return to their homeland, which was under German occupation. If the Latvians were repatriated, Vacietis promised they would remain neutral in any German-Bolshevik showdown.348 General Ludendorff, however, undercut Riezler’s negotiations, arguing that Latvia would be contaminated by Bolshevik propaganda if the Rifles were repatriated. The Reichswehr helped save Bolshevism, yet again.
The Czechoslovak Legion and anti-Bolshevik forces seized Yekaterinburg on July 25, 1918, less than a week after Nicholas had been buried there.349 “The Entente has bought the Czechoslovaks, counter-revolutionary uprisings rage everywhere, the whole bourgeoisie is using all its strength to sweep us out,” Lenin wrote the next day to Klara Zetkin, the German revolutionary.350 In August 1918, the British, against Bolsevik wishes, shifted from Murmansk (where the Bolsheviks had invited them to land) to the larger port of Arkhangelsk, as a better base of operations, hoping to restore an eastern front against Germany by linking up with the Czechoslovak Legion. Rumors spread that Entente forces would march on Moscow, 750 miles to the south.351 Panic erupted on the jerry-built northern railroad. “Among us no one doubted that the Bolshevks were doomed,” wrote an agent (sent to Moscow by former tsarist General Mikhail Alexeyev) who had managed to get himself appointed deputy trade commissar. “A ring had been established around Soviet power, and we were sure that the Bolsheviks would not escape it.”352 To the north were the British and soon the Americans (with different agendas); to the east, the Czechoslovak Legion and other anti-Bolshevik forces, who captured Kazan (August 7); to the south, anti-Bolshevik forces aided by Germany and advancing on Tsaritsyn, poised to link up with the anti-Bolshevik forces in the east. And to the west stood the Germans, who occupied Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic littoral, and kept a force in Finland at its government’s request. Lenin and the inner circle contemplated abandoning Moscow for Nizhny Novgorod, in the deeper interior.353 Bolshevik officials also began requesting diplomatic passports and travel documents for Germany for their families; money was transferred to Swiss banks.354
Might Lenin go back whence he came? “The Bolsheviks were saying openly that their days were numbered,” reported a new German ambassador, Karl Helfferich (appointed above Riezler), who was urging Berlin to break off relations with the doomed Bolsheviks, and who for safety reasons did not venture out of his Moscow residence.355
Lenin, however, came up with his boldest, most desperate maneuver yet. The same day that the British landed the expeditionary force at Arkhangelsk, where a local coup put a non-Bolshevik figure in power, he dispatched his foreign affairs commissar to the German embassy to request what the Bolshevik leader had long feared—a German invasion toward the Russian imperial capital of Petrograd. “In view of the state of public opinion, an open military alliance with Germany is not possible; what is possible is parallel action,” Georgy Chicherin told Helfferich. The people’s commissar asked the Germans not to occupy Petrograd but to defend it, by marching on Murmansk and Arkhangelsk against the Entente forces. Furthermore, in the south, Chicherin requested that the Germans stop supporting the anti-Bolshevik forces and instead move troops in to attack them. “Chicherin,” Helfferich reported to Berlin, “made clear that the request for German troops in the north and in the south came directly from Lenin.356 Despite inconclusive wrangling over whether the Germans could, or could not, occupy Petrograd itself, the upshot would be a new, even more oppressive treaty, “supplementary” to Brest-Litovsk, signed in Berlin on August 27, 1918. Lenin agreed to renounce Estonia and Livonia (Lithuania); sell Germany 25 percent of the output of the Baku oil fields; afford Germany use of the Black Sea fleet; and make reparations of 6 billion marks, half in gold reserves. Germany promised to send coal, rifles, bullets, machine guns, and evacuate Belorussia, promises from a depleted Germany not worth the paper on which they were printed.357 Three secret clauses—never mind the Bolshevik condemnation of capitalists’ “secret diplomacy”—provided for German action against Allied forces on Russian soil in the north and in the south, and expulsion of the British from Baku, a task for which Germany obtained the right to land there.358
Lenin clung to imperial Germany like sea rust on the underside of a listing ship. If during the wild rumors of 1914–17, the imagined treason of the tsarist court to the Ge
rmans had never been real, in 1918, the abject sellout to the Germans by the Bolsheviks was all too real. The August 27 treaty was a worse capitulation than Brest-Litovsk, and one that Lenin voluntarily sought. He was bribing his way to what he hoped was safety from German overthrow as well as the right to call upon German help against attempted Entente overthrow. “There was a coincidence of interests,” Lenin wrote by hand—avoiding secretaries—to the Bolshevik envoy to Sweden. “We would have been idiots not to have exploited it.”359 The Germans, for their part, were no less cynical, determined, as the foreign secretary expressed it, “to work with the Bolsheviks or to use them, as long as they are in the saddle, to our own best advantage.”360 The Bolsheviks’ first installment of promised payment, 120 million gold rubles, was remitted in August (more payments would be made in September).
Colonel Vacietis, the Latvian commander, had been dispatched to the city of Kazan to help clean up the Red mess and salvage the situation. On August 30, 1918, Lenin wrote to Trotsky that if the city of Kazan was not retaken, Vacietis was to be shot.361 Later that evening, a Friday, the Bolshevik leader went to the Mikhelson Machine Factory in the heart of Moscow’s worker-saturated factory district to give a speech. Fridays were “party day” in Moscow and officials dispersed around town to address mass meetings of workers and soldiers in the evenings. Lenin addressed some 140 such meetings in Moscow and its immediate environs between his arrival in March and July.362 He went to Mikhelson, his second public speech of the day, without a guard detail, aside from his chauffeur (who remained with the car). The idea of assassinating top Bolsheviks crossed many a mind. In 1918, members of the British Secret Service Bureau evidently asked a Russian-born British spy to invent a pretext for an interview with Stalin in order, once inside, to assassinate him (the Brit claimed he refused the request).363 On that morning of August 30, the head of the Cheka in Petrograd, Moisei Uritsky, yet another former Menshevik who had thrown in his lot with the Bolsheviks, was assassinated in the old tsarist general staff headquarters on Palace Square (the square would be renamed after him). Dzierzynski departed Moscow to oversee the investigation.364 Lenin had spoken at Mikhelson four times previously. That evening, the venue—the hand grenade shop—was jammed. But Lenin was running very late and at 9:00 p.m. two hours after the scheduled start, a substitute speaker was finally sent out to the crowd. Some forty-five minutes later Lenin’s car pulled up and he took the stage immediately. “Comrades, I won’t speak long, we have a Council of People’s Commissars meeting,” he began, then delivered an hour-long harangue on the theme of “Bourgeois Dictatorship versus Proletarian Dictatorship.” The audience had many tough questions (submitted as per custom in written form), but Lenin claimed no time to answer them. “We have one conclusion,” he summed up, calling them to take up arms to defend the revolution. “Victory or Death!”365
Lenin made his exit, but just before entering his waiting vehicle, he fell to the ground, shot in the chest and the left arm (the bullet passed into his shoulder). His driver, Stepan Gil, and some members of the factory committee placed him in the backseat of his car. Lenin was white as a sheet, blood still pouring out despite tourniquets; he also suffered internal bleeding.366 They drove to the Kremlin. When the call came in to the Kremlin, Commandant Malkov gathered pillows from the tsars’ collection at the Grand Kremlin Palace and took them over to Lenin’s apartment in the Imperial Senate, where the wounded leader had been brought. No one knew how to stop the bleeding, and Lenin passed out from blood loss and pain.367 The head of the Kremlin garage rushed out to find oxygen tanks: one tank was rented from the A. Bloch and H. Freiman pharmacy on nearby Tverskaya Street for 80 rubles, another at a different pharmacy farther down for 55 rubles. (The automobile department head, in his report, wrote that “since the money was paid out of my own pocket, I would ask that it be returned to me.”)368 The first person a prostrate Lenin asked for was Inessa Armand, his former mistress, who arrived with her daughter.369 Bonch-Bruevich ordered the Kremlin guard to high alert.370 Sverdlov summoned a famous doctor; meanwhile, Bonch-Bruevich’s wife, Vera, a doctor, checked Lenin’s pulse and injected him with morphine.371
Back at Mikhelson, a fleeing Feiga Roidman (aka Fanya Kaplan) had been detained at a nearby tram stop as the presumed shooter.372 A twenty-eight-year-old Right Socialist Revolutionary, she confessed at her initial interrogation and insisted no one else had been involved, although she was nearly blind and it was dark where Lenin had been shot. (The would-be assassin may have been an accomplice, Lidiya Konopleva, an Anarchist SR and a Kaplan rival, or someone else.)373 Sverdlov, in the name of the Soviet central executive committee, denounced the Right SRs as “hirelings of the British and French.”374 Bonch-Bruevich sent telegrams to Trotsky (then at the southeastern front, in Sviyazhsk) concerning Lenin’s temperature, pulse, and breathing.375 Trotsky rushed back to Moscow immediately. On September 2, 1918, he addressed the Soviet central executive committee, calling Lenin not merely “the leader of the new epoch” but “the greatest human being of our revolutionary epoch,” and while admitting that Marxists believed in classes, not personalities, acknowledged that Lenin’s loss would be devastating. Trotsky’s speech would be published in the press and as a widely distributed pamphlet.376 The same day, the regime declared the formation of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, headed by Trotsky. The next day Sverdlov ordered Kremlin commandant Malkov to execute Kaplan, which he did, then burned the body in a metal drum in the Kremlin’s Alexander Garden.377 On September 4, Vacietis, instead of facing a firing squad, was promoted to Red commander in chief. The rank-and-file Latvian Riflemen were becoming disillusioned over Bolshevik dictatorial behavior.378 Vacietis again approached the Germans seeking repatriation of his men to Latvia, but he was again rebuffed.379
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FROM THE OUTSET, the survival of the Bolshevik escapade had been in doubt, even as the new regime set about ripping tsarist insignia off buildings and taking down old statues, such as Alexander II inside the Kremlin and Alexander III outside Christ the Redeemer Cathedral. Lenin and others, using ropes, ceremoniously pulled down the large Orthodox cross inside the Kremlin for Grand Duke Sergei (Romanov), the Moscow governor general assassinated in 1905.380 In their place would go up statues to Darwin, Danton, Alexander Radishchev, and others in the leftist pantheon. “I am exasperated to the depths of my soul,” Lenin wrote to enlightenment commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky on September 12, 1918, days after having been shot. “There is no outdoor bust of Marx. . . . I scold you for this criminal negligence.”381
The Bolsheviks had begun renaming Moscow’s streets: Resurrection Square would become Revolution Square; Old Basmannaya Street, Karl Marx Street; Prechistenka, Kropotkin Street; Grand Nikita Street, Alexander Herzen Street.382 That year of 1918, on Moscow’s grandest artery, Tverskaya, at the junction between Bolshoi and Maly Gnezdnikov Lanes, Cafe Bim-Bom buzzed with freneticism. It belonged to the founding member of the clown pair Bim and Bom, Iwan Radunski (who at this time was teamed with Mieczysław Staniewski as Bim). The celebrated duet dated to 1891 and specialized in biting satire accompanied by musical numbers. Bom’s cafe was a crazy anthill in the new Bolshevik capital, frequented by all types, from the political (Menshevik leader Yuly Martov, a young Left SR Yakov Blyumkin) to the artistic (writer Ilya Ehrenburg, performing clown Vladimir Durov). Inevitably, the cafe also attracted Moscow’s criminal element, including one figure who had pocketed the proceeds from the sale of the former Moscow governor-general’s mansion, which was located on the same street as the cafe, by pretending the property was his own residence. When the irreverent satirists began to mock the new Bolshevik regime, however, Latvian Riflemen in the audience shot up the premises and began to chase Bim and Bom. The audience laughed, assuming it was part of the act. The clowns would be arrested.383
Despite such reflexive repression and the grandiose plans, the would-be regime had hit a nadir in 1918. Rumors flew around Moscow that Lenin had died and been buried
in secret. Zinoviev spoke of Lenin in a public speech on September 6, 1918, as “the greatest leader ever known by humanity, the apostle of the socialist revolution” and compared Lenin’s famous What Is to Be Done with the Gospels, sacralizing imagery, that, intentionally or not, sounded ominous.384 Bonch-Bruevich hastily arranged to film Lenin—against his wishes—outside on the Kremlin grounds, the first ever documentary of him, which proved he was alive.385 At the same time, the Bolsheviks proclaimed a Terror “to crush the hydra of counter-revolution.”386 Zinoviev, for effect, would announce that 500 “hostages” had been shot in Petrograd, executions of imprisoned former tsarist officials that were staged in public places.387 There were at least 6,185 summary executions in the Red Terror of 1918—in two months. There had been 6,321 death sentences by Russian courts between 1825 and 1917, not all of them carried out. To be sure, executions in tsarist Russia are not easy to calculate: the repression of the Polish uprising in 1830, for example, was often outside the judicial system, while the courts-martial of 1905–6 were generally not counted in the “normal” statistics. Still, the magnitude of the Red Terror was clear.388 And the public bragging of its scope was designed to be part of its effect. “The criminal adventurism of Socialist Revolutionaries, White Guards, and other pseudo-socialists, forces us to reply to the criminal designs of the enemies of the working class with mass terror,” Jekabs Peterss, deputy chief of the Cheka, thundered in Ivzestiya. The same issue carried a telegram from Stalin calling for “open, mass, systematic terror against the bourgeoisie.”389