The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  On April 1 (NS), Platten transmitted Lenin’s terms to the German Embassy. Two days later, he was advised they were acceptable. At this time the German Treasury approved a request from the Foreign Ministry to allocate five million marks for “Russian work.”27 What the Germans were doing in regard to Russia was part of a pattern:

  For each of their enemies, France, Britain, Italy, and Russia, the Germans had long since worked out a scheme for treason from within. The plans all bore a rough similarity: first, discord by means of the parties of the far left; next pacifist articles published by defeatists either paid or directly inspired by Germany; and, finally, the establishment of an understanding with a prominent political personality who would ultimately take over the weakened enemy government and sue for peace.

  28

  For Britain, they used the Irishman Sir Roger Casement, for France, Joseph Caillaux, and for Russia, Lenin. Casement was shot, Caillaux imprisoned, and only Lenin justified the moneys spent on him.

  At 3:20 P.M. on March 27/April 9, thirty-two Russian émigrés left Zurich for the German frontier. While a full list of passengers is not available—the agreement stipulated that the Germans would not inquire into who traveled in the train—it is known that among them were nineteen Bolsheviks, including Lenin, Krupskaia, Zinoviev with his wife and child, Inessa Armand, and Radek, as well as six members of the Bund and three followers of Trotsky.29 Having crossed the border at Gottmadingen, they transferred to a German train, made up of two cars, one for the Russians, the other for their German escort. Contrary to legend, the train was not sealed.30 Traveling thrpugh Stuttgart and Frankfurt, they arrived in Berlin in the early afternoon of March 29/April 11. There the train was held up for twenty hours, surrounded by German guards. On March 30/April 12 they departed for the Baltic port at Sassnitz, where they boarded a Swedish steamer bound for Trälleborg. On arrival, they were welcomed by the mayor of Stockholm. They then proceeded to the Swedish capital.31

  Parvus was among those who awaited them there. He asked to meet with Lenin, but the cautious Bolshevik leader refused and passed him on to Radek, who, by virtue of being an Austrian subject, was not at risk of being accused of treason. Radek spent a good part of March 31/April 13 with Parvus. What transpired between them is not known. When they parted, Parvus dashed off to Berlin. On April 20 (NS), he met in private with the German State Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann. This encounter also left no record. He then returned to Stockholm.32 Although documentary evidence is lacking—as is usual in matters involving high-level covert operations—in the light of subsequent events it seems virtually certain that Parvus worked out with Radek, on behalf of the German Government, the terms and procedures for financing Bolshevik activities in Russia.*

  The Russian Consulate in Stockholm had entry visas ready for the arrivals. The Provisional Government seems to have hesitated over whether to allow entry to the anti-war activists, but changed its mind in the hope that Lenin would compromise himself politically by having traveled across enemy territory.33 The party left Stockholm for Finland on March 31/April 13, reaching Petrograd three days later (April 3/16) at 11:10 p.m.†

  Lenin arrived in Petrograd on the final day of the All-Russian Bolshevik Conference. Many Bolsheviks from the provinces were on hand and they prepared a welcome for their leader that in theatricality surpassed anything ever seen in socialist circles. The Petrograd Committee rallied workers to the Finland Station; along the tracks it deployed a guard of soldiers and a military band. When Lenin emerged from the train, the band struck up the “Marseillaise” and the guard sprang to attention. Chkheidze welcomed the arrivals on behalf of the Ispolkom, voicing the hope that socialists would close ranks to defend “revolutionary freedom” from both the domestic counterrevolution and foreign aggression. Outside the Finland Station, Lenin mounted an armored car and, illuminated by a projector, delivered some brief remarks, after which he rode to Kshesinskaia’s followed by a crowd.34

  Sukhanov has left us an eyewitness account of the proceedings at the Bolshevik headquarters that night:

  Below, in a fairly large hall, were assembled many people: workers, “professional revolutionaries,” and ladies. Chairs were in short supply, and half of those present had to stand uncomfortably or spread themselves out on tables. Someone was chosen chairman, and greetings in the form of reports from the localities got underway. This was, on the whole, monotonous and long-winded. But now and then there crept in what I thought were curious and characteristic features of the Bolshevik “style,” the specific mode of Bolshevik Party work. And it became obvious with absolute clarity that all Bolshevik work was held in the iron frames of its foreign spiritual center, without which the party’s members would have felt themselves utterly helpless, of which, at the same time, they were proud, of which the better ones among them felt themselves to be devoted servants, like the Knights of the Holy Grail. Kamenev, too, said something nondescript. Finally, they remembered Zinoviev, who was faintly applauded but said nothing. Finally, the greetings in the form of reports came to an end.…

  And then, the grand master of the order rose to his feet with his “response.” I cannot forget that speech, like lightning, which shook up and astonished not only me, a heretic accidentally thrown into delirium, but also the true believers. I aver that no one had expected anything like it. It seemed as if all the elemental forces had risen from their lairs and the spirit of universal destruction, which knew no obstacles, no doubts, neither human difficulties nor human calculations, circled in Kshesinskaia’s hall above the heads of the enchanted disciples.

  35

  The thrust of Lenin’s ninety-minute speech was that the transition from the “bourgeois-democratic” to the “socialist” revolution had to be accomplished in a matter of months.* This meant that barely four weeks after tsarism had been overthrown, Lenin was publicly sentencing its successor to death. This proposition ran so contrary to the sentiments of the majority of his followers, it seemed so irresponsible and “adventurist,” that the remainder of the night, until the meeting broke up at 4 a.m., was spent in tempestuous debate.

  Later that day Lenin read to a group of Bolsheviks and then separately to a joint meeting of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks a paper which, anticipating resistance, he presented as reflecting his personal opinions. Subsequently known as the “April Theses,” it outlined a program of action that must have appeared to his audiences as totally out of touch with reality if not positively mad.36 He proposed no backing for the ongoing war; immediate transition to the “second” phase of the revolution; refusal to support the Provisional Government; transfer of all power to the Soviets; abolition of the army in favor of a popular militia; confiscation of all landlord property and nationalization of all land; the fusion of all banks into a single National Bank under Soviet supervision; Soviet control of production and distribution; creation of a new Socialist International.

  Pravda’s editorial board refused to print Lenin’s “Theses” on the pretext of a mechanical breakdown at its printing plant.37 A meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on April 6 passed a negative resolution on them. Kamenev insisted that Lenin’s analogy between the situation in contemporary Russia and the Paris Commune was faulty, while Stalin found the “Theses” “schematic” and short on facts.38 But Lenin and Zinoviev, who had in the meantime joined the editorial board of Pravda, forced the issue, and the “Theses” appeared on April 7. Lenin’s article was accompanied by an editorial comment by Kamenev which disassociated the party’s organ from it. Lenin, Kamenev wrote,

  proceeds from the premise that the bourgeois-democratic revolution has been completed and counts on the immediate transformation of that revolution into a socialist one.

  But, he went on, the Central Committee thought otherwise and the Bolshevik Party would be guided by its resolutions.* The Petrograd Committee met on April 8 to discuss Lenin’s paper. Its verdict was also overwhelmingly negative, two voting in favor, thirteen against, with one abstention.39 The reaction in the pro
vincial cities was similar: the Bolshevik organizations in Kiev and Saratov, for instance, rejected Lenin’s program, the latter on the grounds that the author was out of touch with the situation in Russia.40

  Whatever the Bolsheviks’ opinion of their leader’s pronouncements, the Germans were delighted. On April 4/17, their agent in Stockholm cabled to Berlin: “Lenin’s entry into Russia successful. He is working exactly as we wish.”41

  Lenin was a very secretive man: although he spoke and wrote voluminously, enough to fill fifty-five volumes of collected works, his speeches and writings are overwhelmingly propaganda and agitation, meant to persuade potential followers and destroy known opponents rather than reveal his thoughts. He rarely disclosed what was on his mind, even to close associates. As supreme commander in the global war between classes, he kept his plans private. To reconstruct his thinking, it is necessary, therefore, to proceed retroactively, from known deeds to concealed intentions.

  On general issues—who the enemy was and what was to be done to him—Lenin was frank enough. The objective—the “program”—broadly defined, he made public; it was the tactics that he kept hidden. And herein lies the difficulty of divining Lenin’s intentions. For as Mussolini, himself no mean expert in the art of the coup d’état, confided to Giovanni Giolitti, “a State has to be defended not against a program of the revolution but against its tactics.”42

  Lenin rejected the Menshevik-SR doctrine of a two-stage revolution and its corollary, dvoevlastie or dyarchy; he meant to topple the Provisional Government as soon as practicable and seize power. His remarkably keen political instinct—the flair possessed by every successful general—told him this could be done. He knew the liberal and socialist intelligentsia for what they were: “vegetarian tigers,” to borrow a phrase from Clemenceau, who for all their revolutionary cant were deathly afraid of political responsibility and incapable of exercising it even if handed to them. In this respect, he judged them like Nicholas II. He further realized that underneath the appearance of national unity and universal support of the Provisional Government there seethed powerful destructive forces which, fanned and properly directed, could bring down the ineffective democracy and carry him to power: shortages of goods in the cities, agrarian unrest, ethnic aspirations. To accomplish their objective, the Bolsheviks had to set themselves clearly apart from both the Provisional Government and the other socialist parties as the sole alternative to the status quo. In line with this reasoning, after returning to Russia, Lenin compelled his followers to abandon the conciliatory attitude toward the Provisional Government and any thought of merging with the Mensheviks.

  In view of the immense popularity of democratic slogans, Lenin could not openly claim power on behalf of the Bolshevik Party: no one outside Bolshevik ranks, and very few within them, would have found this prospect acceptable. For this reason, with one brief interlude, throughout 1917 he called for power to be transferred to the soviets. This tactic may appear puzzling in view of the fact that until the fall of 1917 the Bolsheviks were a minority in the soviets, so that, on the face of it, the implementation of this program would have transferred power to the Mensheviks and SRs. But the Bolsheviks felt confident the latter would not stand in their way. Tsereteli, who of all the Menshevik leaders had the fewest illusions about their rivals, wrote that the Bolsheviks believed they would have little trouble wresting national power from the soviet majority.43 From Lenin’s point of view the Provisional Government, for all its incompetence, was a more dangerous enemy than the democratic socialists because it had at its disposal a large armed force and because it enjoyed a certain measure of support from the peasantry and the middle class: by appealing to nationalism it could rally powerful forces against him. As long as the Provisional Government stayed in power, however nominally, the danger always existed of the country veering to the right. With the soviet as the locus of authority, it was a relatively simple matter to keep on radicalizing the political atmosphere and pulling the irresolute socialists along by frightening them with the specter of a “counterrevolution.”

  Lenin pursued his objective—seizure of power—in a manner that was rooted in the study of military history and military science. Genuine politics, even in its authoritarian form, entails some sort of accommodation both with other contenders for power and with the population at large, which leaves the governed scope for free initiative. But Lenin, for whom politics was always class war, thought in Clausewitzian terms: its purpose, as that of military strategy, was not accommodation with the opponent but his destruction. This meant, first and foremost, disarming him, in two senses: (1) depriving him of an armed force and (2) smashing his institutions. But it could also mean his physical annihilation, as on the field of battle. European socialists routinely talked of “class war,” but they meant by it a struggle waged mainly with non-violent means, such as industrial strikes and the ballot box, which might, at a certain point, culminate in barricades. Lenin and he alone understood “class war” in the literal sense to mean civil war—warfare with every available weapon for the purpose of strategic destruction and, if need be, extermination of rivals that left the victor with unchallenged mastery of the political battlefield. Revolution in this view was war waged by other means, the difference being that the combatants were not states and nations but social classes: its battle lines ran vertically rather than horizontally. In this militarization of politics lay a critical source of Lenin’s success, for those whom he designated as enemies could not conceive of anyone seriously treating politics as combat in which quarter was neither given nor expected.

  This outlook on politics Lenin drew from the inner depths of his personality, in which the lust for domination combined with a patrimonial political culture shaped in the Russia of Alexander III in which he had grown up. But the theoretical justification for these psychological impulses and this cultural legacy he found in Marx’s comments on the Paris Commune. Marx’s writings on this subject made an overwhelming impression on him and became his guide to action. Observing the rise and fall of the Commune, Marx concluded that until then all revolutionaries had committed a cardinal mistake in that they took over existing institutions instead of destroying them. By leaving intact the political, social, and military structures of the class state and merely replacing their personnel, they provided a breeding ground for the counterrevolution. Future revolutionaries would have to proceed differently: “not transfer from one set of hands to another the bureaucratic-military machine, as has been done until now, but smash it.”44 These words etched themselves deeply in Lenin’s mind: he repeated them at every opportunity and placed them at the heart of his principal political treatise, State and Revolution. They served to justify his destructive instincts and provided a rationale for his desire to erect a new order: an order all-encompassing in its “totalitarian” aspiration.

  Lenin always viewed revolution in international terms; the Russian Revolution was for him a mere accident, a fortuitous snapping of “imperialism’s” weakest link. He was never interested in reforming Russia, but only in subjugating it so as to have a springboard for a revolution in the industrial countries and their colonies. Even as dictator of Russia he never ceased to view 1917 and its sequel from an international viewpoint: for him it was never the “Russian Revolution,” but the worldwide revolution that happened to have had its start in Russia. In his farewell address to the Swiss socialists, delivered the day before he left for home, he made this point with great emphasis:

  It has fallen to the Russian proletariat to have the great honor of

  beginning

  a series of revolutions.… It is not its special qualities but the special historical conditions that have made the Russian proletariat, for

  a specific, perhaps very brief time

  , the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat of the whole world.

  Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backward in Europe. It is

  not possible

  for socialism to triumph there
<
br />   directly, presently

  . But the peasant character of the country …

  can

  lend a vast sweep to the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia and make our revolution a

  prologue

  to the worldwide socialist revolution, a

  step

  toward it.

  45

  Lenin’s secretiveness about a worldwide socialist revolution was due in part to the desire to keep his opponents in the dark about his intentions and in part to the advantage that secrecy gave him of being able to avoid the stigma of failure if things did not work out as planned: whenever this happened, he always could (and in fact did) deny having had a plan. Even so, from the directives he issued in the spring and early summer of 1917, when he personally led the Bolshevik forces, one can form a general picture of his battle plan.

  The experience of February seems to have persuaded Lenin that the Provisional Government could be brought down by massive street demonstrations. To begin with, the soil had to be prepared, as had been done in 1915–16, by a relentless campaign to discredit the government in the eyes of the population. To this end it had to be blamed for everything that went wrong: political disorders, shortages, inflation, military setbacks. It had to be charged with conspiring with the Germans to surrender Petrograd while pretending to defend it and of collaborating with General Kornilov while charging him with treason. The more preposterous the accusations, the more the politically inexperienced workers and soldiers were likely to believe them: why should an incredible reality not have incredible causes?