The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  *On him, see Michael Futrell in St. Antony’s Papers, No. 12, Soviet Affairs, No. 3 (London, 1962), 23–52. The author had a unique opportunity to interview this Estonian but, unfortunately, chose to accept his testimony rather uncritically.

  †Futrell in Soviet Affairs, 47, states that this was his only encounter with the Bolshevik leader, but this seems most unlikely.

  ‡It is reproduced in a cable from the German Minister in Berne, Count Romberg, to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in Berlin, dated September 30, 1915: Werner Hahlweg, Lenins Rückkehr nach Russland, 1917 (Leiden, 1957), 40–43 (English translation in Zeman, Germany, 6–7).

  *Hans Steinwachs of the Political Section, German General Staff, to Minister Diego von Bergen of the Foreign Office, in Zeman, Germany, 17. The language of this document indicates that Kesküla misinformed Futrell when he intimated that he had obtained such reports by infiltrating Lenin’s organization in Sweden: Futrell in Soviet Affairs, 24.

  *Lenin, Sochineniia, XIX, 437. “And objectively who profits by the slogan of peace?” Lenin wrote at this time. “Certainly not the revolutionary proletariat. Not the idea of using the war to speed up the collapse of capitalism.” Citing these words, Adam Ulam comments: “He overlooked the fact that the lives of millions of human beings also could have ‘profited’ by the ‘slogan of peace’ ”: The Bolsheviks (New York, 1965), 306.

  10

  The Bolshevik Bid for Power

  In terms of modern opinion, the way to turn people into followers is to persuade them that in following your scheme, they are being active, critical, rebellious and free-spirited; behaving otherwise is passive and servile. The sheep were those who got hopelessly entangled in this set of confusions.

  —Kenneth Minogue

  Although it is common to speak of two Russian revolutions in 1917—one in February, the other in October—only the first merits the name. In February 1917, Russia experienced a genuine revolution in that the disorders that brought down the tsarist regime, although not unprovoked or unexpected, erupted spontaneously and the Provisional Government which succeeded gained immediate nationwide acceptance. Neither was true of October 1917. The events that led to the overthrow of the Provisional Government were not spontaneous but plotted and executed by a tightly organized conspiracy. It took these plotters three years of civil war and indiscriminate terror to subdue the majority of the population. October was a classic coup d’état, the capture of governmental power by a small minority, carried out, in deference to the democratic conventions of the age, with a show of mass participation, but without mass engagement. It introduced into revolutionary action methods more appropriate to warfare than to politics.

  The Bolshevik coup went through two phases. In the first, which lasted from April to July, Lenin attempted to take power in Petrograd by means of street demonstrations backed by armed force. It was his intention to escalate these demonstrations, on the pattern of the riots of February, into a full-scale revolt that would transfer power initially to the soviets and immediately afterward to his party. This strategy failed: the third attempt, in July, nearly resulted in the destruction of the Bolshevik Party. By August, the Bolsheviks recovered sufficiently to resume their drive for power, but this time they used a different strategy. Trotsky, who took charge while Lenin was hiding from the police in Finland, avoided street demonstrations. Instead, he disguised preparation for a Bolshevik coup behind the façade of a spurious and illegitimate Congress of Soviets, while relying on special shock troops to seize the nerve centers of the government. In name, the power seizure was carried out provisionally and on behalf of the soviets, but, in fact, permanently and for the benefit of the Bolshevik Party.

  The outbreak of the February Revolution found Lenin in Zurich. Cut off from his homeland since the outbreak of the war, he had thrown himself into Swiss socialist politics, injecting into them an alien spirit of intolerance and contentiousness.1 His log for the winter of 1916–17 reveals a pattern of frenetic but unfocused activity, now given to pamphleteering, now to intrigues against deviant Swiss Social-Democrats, now to the study of Marx and Engels.

  News from Russia reached Switzerland after a delay of several days. Lenin first learned of the disorders in Petrograd nearly a week late from a report in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of March 2/15. The report, datelined Berlin, inserted on page two between bulletins from the theater of war, said that a revolution had broken out in the Russian capital and that the Duma had arrested the tsarist ministers and assumed power.2

  Lenin decided he had to get back to Russia at once: he now reproached himself for not having “risked” a move to Scandinavia in 1915 when it had been possible.*3 But how? The only point of entry into Russia was through Sweden. To reach Sweden, one had either to transit Allied territory, by way of France or England and Holland, or to cross Germany. Lenin requested Inessa Armand to explore, with utmost discretion, the chances of obtaining a British visa, but he placed little hope in this prospect because the British, aware of his defeatist program, were almost certain to refuse. He next conceived a fantastic scheme of traveling to Stockholm on a forged passport: he requested his agent there, Fürstenberg-Ganetskii, to find a Swede whose papers he could use, with the proviso that the man not only resemble him physically but also, since he knew no Swedish, be both deaf and dumb.4 None of these plans had any realistic chance of success. Lenin, therefore, seized on a scheme proposed by Martov in Paris on March 6/19 to a group of socialist émigrés: the Russians would ask the German Government, through a Swiss intermediary, for transit rights across its territory to Sweden in exchange for German and Austrian internees.5

  While raging in Zurich, in the words of Trotsky, like a caged animal, Lenin did not lose sight of the political situation at home. He was concerned that his followers in Russia adopt a correct political course until he appeared on the scene. He was particularly anxious that they not emulate the “opportunistic” tactics of the Mensheviks and SRs of supporting the “bourgeois” Duma government. He outlined his policy in a telegram dispatched on March 6/19 to Petrograd by way of Stockholm:

  Our tactics: complete mistrust, no support for the new government. We especially suspect Kerensky. The arming of the proletariat provides the only guarantee. Immediate elections to the Petrograd [Municipal] Duma.

  No rapprochement with the other parties

  .

  6

  When Lenin cabled these instructions to his followers the Provisional Government had been in office only one week and had hardly had the opportunity to reveal its political physiognomy. In any event, far away from the scene and dependent on second- and third-hand accounts from Western news agencies, Lenin could not have known the intentions and actions of the new government. His insistence that it be treated with “complete mistrust” and denied support, therefore, could not have been due to disapproval of its policies: rather it reflected an a priori determination to remove it from power. His demand that the Bolsheviks not cooperate with the other parties indicated that he was bent on filling the ensuing power vacuum exclusively with the Bolshevik Party. This laconic document indicates that barely four days after he had learned of the February Revolution, Lenin was contemplating a Bolshevik coup d’état. His order to “arm the proletariat” suggests that he envisaged the coup as a military insurrection.

  The Bolshevik Party in March 1917 was hardly in a condition to carry out such an ambitious plan. Police arrests during the war, culminating in those of February 26, 1917, when the party’s most important entity, the Petrograd Committee, was taken into custody7 had decapitated its apparatus: its leading figures were either in jail or in exile. In a report to Lenin in early December 1916, Shliapnikov described Bolshevik activities in some factories and garrison units during the preceding months under the slogans “Down with the War” and “Down with the Government,” but he also had to admit that the Bolsheviks were so infiltrated by police informers that illegal party activity had become virtually impossible.8 Subsequent Bolshevik claims of having inspired
and even organized the February Revolution are, therefore, entirely spurious. The Bolsheviks rode the coattails first of the spontaneous demonstrators and then those of the Mensheviks and their soviets. Their following among the mutinous military units was close to nil and among the industrial workers at this time they had far fewer adherents than either the Mensheviks or the SRs. During the February days their role was limited to issuing appeals and manifestos: at most, they may have had a hand in preparing the revolutionary banners carried by workers and soldiers in the demonstrations of February 25–28.

  The Bolsheviks, however, made up for what they lacked in numbers with organizational skills. On March 2, the Petrograd Committee of the party, freshly released from prison, set up a three-man Bureau consisting of Shliapnikov, V. M. Molotov, and P. A. Zalutskii.9 Three days later this Bureau brought out, under Molotov’s editorship, the first issue of the revived party organ, Pravda. On March 10 it established a Military Committee (later renamed Military Organization) under N. I. Podvoiskii and V. I. Nevskii, to conduct propaganda and agitation among the troops of the Petrograd garrison. For their headquarters, the Bolsheviks chose the luxurious Art Nouveau villa of the ballerina M. F. Kshesinskaia, rumored to have been a mistress of the young Nicholas II. This building they “requisitioned” with the help of friendly troops, ignoring the protests of its owner. Here, until July 1917, officiated the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, as well as its Petrograd Committee and Military Organization.

  During March 1917, the Bolsheviks in Russia, cut off from their leader, pursued a course that hardly differed from that of the Mensheviks and SRs. A resolution of the Central Committee passed that month described the Provisional Government as an agent of the “large bourgeoisie” and of “landowners,” but did not advocate that it be opposed. On March 3 the Petrograd Committee, the most powerful of the Bolshevik organizations, adopted the Menshevik-SR position calling for support of the government postol’ku-poskol’ku—that is, “to the extent that” it advanced the interests of the “masses.”10 Both in theory and in practice the leading Bolsheviks in Petrograd followed a line diametrically opposed to that of Lenin. They could not have been pleased, therefore, with Lenin’s advice contained in the telegram of March 6, which reached them after a delay of one week: the published minutes of the Petrograd Committee meetings do not record the discussion that followed its receipt.

  This pro-Menshevik orientation was strengthened with the arrival in Petrograd from exile of three members of the Central Committee, L. B. Kamenev, Stalin, and M. K. Muranov, who, by virtue of seniority, assumed direction of the party and the editorship of Pravda. In their articles and speeches, the three rejected the position Lenin had taken at Zimmerwald and Kiental: instead of turning the war between nations into a civil war, they wanted the socialists to agitate for the immediate opening of peace negotiations.11 On March 15 or 16, the Petrograd Bolsheviks held a party conference; the fact that neither its minutes nor its resolutions have been published strongly suggests that many participants adopted an anti-Leninist position on the critical issues of the attitude toward the government and the war.12 It is known, however, that on March 18, at a closed meeting of the Petrograd Committee, Kamenev argued that although the Provisional Government was unmistakably “counterrevolutionary” and destined to be overthrown, the time for that lay in the future: “the important thing is not to take power: it is to hold on to it.”13 Kamenev spoke in the same vein at the All-Russian Consultation of Soviets at the end of March.14 At this time the Bolsheviks gave serious thought to reunification with the Mensheviks: on March 21, the Petrograd Committee declared that it was both “possible and desirable” to merge with those Mensheviks who accepted the Zimmerwald and Kiental platforms.*

  Given these attitudes, it is understandable that the Petrograd Bolsheviks reacted with shock and disbelief when Alexandra Kollontai appeared before them bearing the first and second of Lenin’s “Letters from Afar.” Here, Lenin elaborated on his telegram of March 6/19: no support for the Provisional Government, arming the workers.15 The program struck them as utterly fantastic, thought up by someone out of touch with the situation in Russia. After hesitating for several days, they printed in Pravda the first “Letter from Afar” but without the passages in which Lenin attacked the Provisional Government.16 They refused to publish the second installment and those that followed.

  At the All-Russian Conference of Bolsheviks held in Petrograd between March 28 and April 4, Stalin introduced and the delegates approved a motion calling for “control” over the Provisional Government and cooperation with the other “progressive forces” for the purpose of combating the “counterrevolution” and “broadening” the revolutionary movement.† The “un-Bolshevik” behavior of the Bolsheviks when on their own and their rapid shift after Lenin’s arrival demonstrates that their conduct was based, not on principles that the members could assimilate and apply, but on their leader’s will: that the Bolsheviks were bound together, not by what they believed, but in whom they believed.

  The Germans had their own designs on the Russian radicals. The war was going nowhere and they had come to realize that their one remaining chance of winning was to break up the enemy alliance, preferably by forcing Russia out of the war. In the fall of 1916 the Kaiser mused along these lines:

  From the strictly military point of view, it is important to detach one or another of the Entente belligerents by means of a separate peace, in order to hurl our full might against the rest.… We can organize our war effort, accordingly, only insofar as the internal struggle in Russia exerts influence on the conclusion of peace with us.

  17

  Having failed in 1915 to eliminate Russia from the war by military means, the Germans now resorted to political steps, exploiting the internal divisions inside revolutionary Russia. The Provisional Government was totally committed to the Allied cause: so much so that some Germans believed the February Revolution to have been engineered by the British.18 The pronouncements of Foreign Minister Miliukov on Russia’s war aims gave the Central Powers little grounds for optimism. The only hope of breaking Russia away from the alliance, therefore, lay in supporting radical extremists who were opposed to the “imperialist” war and wanted it transformed into a civil war: in other words, the Zimmerwald-Kiental left, of which Lenin was the undisputed leader. Back in Russia, Lenin could give the Provisional Government no end of trouble by inciting class antagonisms, playing on the people’s war-weariness, and perhaps even grasping for power.

  The strongest advocate of the “Lenin card” was Parvus. He had made one approach to Lenin in 1915: on that occasion, Lenin had refused to cooperate, but the situation was different now. In 1917 Parvus lived in Copenhagen where, as a cover for his intelligence activities, he operated an import company. He also had a spurious scientific institute from which to conduct espionage.19 His business agent in Stockholm was Jacob Ganetskii, Lenin’s trusted associate. Familiar with Russian émigré politics, Parvus placed high hopes on extremists like Lenin. He assured the German Ambassador to Denmark, Count V. Brockdorff-Rantzau, that if let loose, the anti-war left would spread such anarchy that after two or three months Russia would find it impossible to remain in the war.20 He singled out Lenin for particular attention as “much more raving mad” than either Kerensky or Chkheidze. With uncanny foresight he predicted that once Lenin returned to Russia he would topple the Provisional Government, take over, and promptly conclude a separate peace.21 He understood well Lenin’s lust for power and believed he would strike a deal in order to be able to cross German territory to Sweden. Under Parvus’s influence, Brockdorff-Rantzau cabled to Berlin:

  We must now unconditionally seek to create in Russia the greatest possible chaos.… We should do all we can … to exacerbate the differences between the moderate and extremist parties, because we have the greatest interest in the latter gaining the upper hand, since the Revolution will then become unavoidable and assume forms that must shatter the stability of the Russian state.

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  The German envoy in Switzerland, G. von Romberg, gave similar advice on the basis of information obtained from local experts on Russian affairs. He called Berlin’s attention to the fact that the followers of “Lehnin” caused discord in the Petrograd Soviet with calls for immediate peace negotiations and the refusal to cooperate with both the Provisional Government and the other socialist parties.23

  Won over, the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, instructed Romberg to initiate talks with the Russian émigrés about transit to Sweden. These talks were carried out in late March and early April (NS) with the assistance of Swiss socialists, initially Robert Grimm and then Fritz Platten. Lenin acted on behalf of the Russians. It is symptomatic of the myopia of the Germans that in venturing on these dangerous political waters they did not bother to inform themselves about either Lenin or his program: all that mattered to them was that the Bolsheviks and other adherents of the Zimmerwald-Kiental position wanted Russia out of the war. A historian who has inspected the German archives found in them no document to indicate interest in the Bolsheviks: two issues of Lenin’s journal, Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata, forwarded to Berlin by the Berne embassy, lay in the archive forty years later, their pages uncut.24

  In negotiating transit across Germany, Lenin took great pains to ensure that the émigrés would not lay themselves open to charges of collaborating with the enemy. He insisted that the train enjoy the status of an extraterritorial entity: no one was to enter it without the permission of Platten and there would be no passport controls.25 The fact that a penurious refugee felt in a position to pose terms to the German Government indicates that he had a good appreciation of the services which he could render to it.

  On the German side, the negotiations were carried out by the civilian authorities, with the active support of the Foreign Office, especially its chief, Richard von Kühlmann. Although subsequently it came to be believed that the driving force behind Lenin’s return to Russia was Ludendorff, in fact the general played a marginal role, his contribution being confined to providing transport.26