The main question was: “Will we be able to enter the main stream and direct its course, or will we drown in this new flood?” Voronsky’s literary alter ego Valentin is overcome with doubt. “Visions of the northern forests under the spell of ancient dreams, the long and gloomy halls of the seminary, the summer nights on the Tsna, the attics of Trans-Moskva, and the straight avenues of Petrograd kept appearing and disappearing before his mind’s eye…. What a strange feeling…. I spent the last ten years of my life as a wanderer, in prisons and exile, doing secret work, waiting for searches and arrests, losing friends. I used to be followed by traitors and spies. None of that exists anymore…. What will become of us all?” The answer was to enter the stream and take charge of its course by saying the “warmer words”—words that would not sink without a trace, words that would connect the Bolshevik truth to the happy intoxication of the crowd. The reward was omnipotence and, possibly, immortality.13
Arosev never slept. “The daily speeches in the streets and the barracks in front of the workers and soldiers, the heated arguments with those who were trying to betray our revolution, the feverish reading of leaflets and newspapers, of everything that screamed ‘revolution’ or smelled of revolution never seemed to tire me out, amazingly enough, but, instead, inspired me to work even harder.” Voronsky’s Valentin never slept, either: “He was warmed by the crowd, by its body, breath, movement, and murmur. These people … were now listening to him eagerly, their eyes glowing with the light of hope. They kept shaking Valentin’s hand, watching out for him, warning those who accidentally jostled him, hurrying to offer him matches, asking if it was too cold or windy. This shared, solicitous human warmth absorbed him, subdued him, made him a part of itself, and he, as never before, found himself thinking its thoughts and feeling its feelings…. It was the highest happiness that one could have on earth.”14
The most tireless and, by most accounts, most inspiring Bolshevik speaker was Trotsky, who seemed to talk continuously as he whirled around in the vortex of people and events:
I would make my way to the podium through a narrow trench of human bodies, occasionally being lifted above them and carried along…. Surrounded on all sides by tightly squeezed elbows, chests, and heads, I seemed to be speaking out of a warm cave of human bodies. Each time I made a broad gesture, I would brush against someone, and a grateful movement in response would intimate that I should not get upset or distracted, but should continue speaking. No exhaustion, no matter how great, could withstand the electric tension of that impassioned human throng. It wanted to know, to understand, to find its path. At certain moments it almost seemed I could feel on my lips the eager intensity of the crowd that had melded together to become one. At such moments, all the words and arguments prepared beforehand would wither and recede under the irresistible pressure of that sympathy, and other words and other arguments, new to the speaker but necessary to the masses, would emerge ready to do battle. It often felt as if I were standing a little to one side, listening to that speaker, unable to keep up with him and worried that he might fall off the edge of the roof, like a sleepwalker distracted by my promptings.15
Trotsky’s self-consciousness was a version of Sverdlov’s “habit of self-analysis” and Arosev’s and Voronsky’s attempts to reconcile their private selves with their Party-nicknamed doppelgängers. This could be a good thing—a form of “putting books to the test of life and putting life to the test of books”—but it could also be “intelligentsia weakness” leading to inaction. More pressing, in the spring of 1917, was another form of sectarian dialectic: free will versus predestination and the consciousness of historical necessity versus popular spontaneity. The Bolsheviks were the most exclusive and imminentist of the Russian millenarians, most suspicious of the swamp of daily routine and “appeasement,” and most willing “to fight not only against the swamp, but also against those who are turning toward the swamp.” The question now for all socialists, but especially for the Bolsheviks, was how much of the swamp had flowed into the sea. How close was life to the books? Was the stream clear enough, and was it flowing in the proper direction? Who was right—Trotsky the speaker, who threw away the script under the irresistible pressure of popular sympathy or Trotsky the prompter, who stuck to prepared arguments taken from books that put life to the test?
On the day Voronsky’s Valentin experiences the highest human happiness of being absorbed by a shared human warmth, he is asked to talk to a crowd of soldiers who have surrounded the local police station with the intention of lynching everyone inside. On the way over, Valentin looks up at the stars and thinks: “We are walking toward our children’s country, toward the faraway promised land. We are walking in the dark, without miraculous portents or burning bushes, with faith in ourselves only. Will we get there?” He does rescue the policemen (by arresting them “in the name of the revolution”), but is not happy with the speech he makes on the occasion.16
This is not how he had imagined his first address to the people after their liberation from the autocracy. He had been dreaming endlessly about this incomparable moment in prisons, exile, and attics. This hour had appeared to him again and again in a wondrous revelation. He was going to find words that would burn with the flame of the true dawn. He would say all the things he had been forced to conceal. The powerful “hosanna” escaping his breast would merge with the shouts of victory. And now the hour had come, and he stood before the exhausted, disease-ravaged people who only yesterday had been sitting in the trenches, with death behind their backs. What better, more noble audience could a revolutionary hope for during the days of the first victories? And yet something was missing. What could it be?17
The answer came on Easter Monday, when Lenin entered Petrograd on a train and declared that the time had come; the prophecy had been fulfilled; and the present generation would not pass away until all these things had happened. Life had passed the test of books, and books had passed the test of life. As for those “appeasers” (soglashateli) who had ears but did not hear, Lenin knew that they were neither cold nor hot, and so, because they were lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—he was about to spit them out of his mouth. Any non-Bolshevik, anyone who compromised with Babylon, was an appeaser.
The challenge of organizing a welcoming reception in the midst of Easter celebrations fell to the head of the Bolshevik Military Organization, Nikolai Podvoisky, the son of a priest and a former seminarian. Podvoisky, who saw the event as “the end of the agonizing search for the right course of the revolution,” managed to assemble a large crowd and procure an armored car. After being delivered to the Bolshevik headquarters in Krzesinska Palace, Lenin gave the good news to his bewildered followers. “It was so new to us,” wrote one of Lenin’s most loyal disciples and the secretary of the Central Committee, Elena Stasova, “that, at first, we simply could not get our minds around it.” Some Bolsheviks, according to Podvoisky, “were frightened by Lenin’s intolerance of the appeasers and the perspective of an immediate and complete split with them. Especially new and incomprehensible was his demand for the transfer of power to the soviets. There were those who were in total shock from Lenin’s words.”18
By the next morning, when Lenin unveiled his message to a packed joint meeting of all the Social Democrats in Tauride Palace, most Bolsheviks, according to Stasova, “perceived it as something absolutely sacrosanct and truly their own,” the source of “a firm conviction that from now on [they] were walking down an unerring path.” According to Podvoisky, “Vladimir Ilich began his speech by unmasking the appeasers as the lackeys of the bourgeoisie and its secret agents in the ranks of the working class…. Lenin’s words drove the Mensheviks into a frenzy, provoking jeers, furious swearing, and threats. With each new comment by Lenin, the hostility grew. Lenin’s statement that there could be no union between the Bolsheviks and Menshevik appeasers was met with rabid howling and roaring.”
Finally, Lenin got to his main point, the immediate takeover of power. “The appeasers leapt out of t
heir seats. They began to whistle, scream, bang madly on their desks, and stamp their feet. The noise rose to a defeaning pitch. The Menshevik leaders—Chkheidze, Tsereteli, and other presidium members—became deathly frightened. In vain did they try to restore order, addressing their desperate pleas to the right, where their supporters were, and to the left, where the Bolsheviks sat. This continued for about ten minutes. Then the storm died down. It flared up again.” And so it continued, in response to every one of Lenin’s April Theses, until the end of the speech. “Amid all the raging elements, Lenin remained unperturbable. One had to see the incredible strength and serenity in his face, his whole figure, in order to understand Lenin’s true role and significance at that crucial moment…. He stood there like the helmsman of a ship during a terrible storm—full of inner peace, clarity, simplicity, and majesty because he knew where to steer.”19
Podvoisky’s and Stasova’s memoirs follow the Soviet hagiographic tradition, but there is no doubt that Lenin was the only socialist who knew where to steer. He was a true prophet who could both lead his people through the parting waves and attend, one way or another, to their every petulant complaint. “The agonizing search for the right course” was finally over.
■ ■ ■
“The peculiarity of the current situation in Russia,” wrote Lenin in his April Theses, “consists in the transition from the first stage of the revolution, which has given power to the bourgeoisie owing to the insufficient consciousness and cohesion of the proletariat, to its second stage, which must give power to the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasantry.” The power, in other words, was to be handed to those who lacked sufficient consciousness or cohesion to recognize their inheritance. “I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people.” “If only they were wise and would understand this and discern what their end will be!”20
The solution was to find the words that would align the people’s wishes with the prophecy’s fulfillment. According to Podvoisky,
Vladimir Ilich explained to us the surest and fastest way to convince the soldiers who did not have much consciousness, found themselves under the influence of the agents of the bourgeoisie, or had a poor understanding of their complex environment.
“They don’t need long speeches,” Lenin told us. “A long speech touches on too many things, and the soldier’s attention dissipates. He can’t absorb it all. You won’t satisfy him, and he will be unhappy with you. You should talk to him about peace and about land, and there’s not much you need to say about that: the soldier will know what you are talking about right away.”…
And who did Vladimir Ilich recommend as the best agitators among the soldiers? He said that during the February Revolution the sailors (along with the workers) had played one of the most prominent roles. And this meant that they should be the ones sent to the soldiers!21
The strategy seemed to work. “Revolution” was universally understood to mean the end of the old world and the beginning of a new, just one. The longer the delay in the coming of the new world and the more acute the sense that the “provisional” government was becoming, in some sense, permanent, the greater the attraction of the Bolshevik message. And the message was, indeed, simple: the desirable and the inevitable were one and the same; all that was needed was for the exhausted and disease-ravaged to make one final push.
Later that same spring, Voronsky’s Valentin went to a rally on the Western Front. The first speaker was Comrade Veretyev from the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who had spent the previous ten years in Siberian prisons. A pale man with a goatee, flaxen hair, a “high clear forehead,” and “intelligent eyes,” Veretyev talked about the sanctity of democratic freedoms, the special duty of the soldiers at the front, and the unrealistic promises made by irresponsible people. “He would sometimes pause and make a motion with his right hand; his nervous fingers fluttered, imparting a peculiar expressive mobility to his words and whole figure. The wind from the meadow ruffled his hair. One lock kept falling over his right eye, and Veretyev would throw it back with a quick, impatient movement.”
The next to speak was a sailor from the Baltic Fleet, who said that soldiers covered in “piss, shit, dirt, and lice” do not care about rights and freedoms and that all they wanted was peace and bread and land, right away, as the Bolsheviks kept saying. He got some of his Bolshevik lines wrong, but he was saved by the “power of a newly converted zealot” and the “wild, passionate force” of his words. Veretyev stood next to the sailor, looking down at his feet and fumbling with his hat. “He looked like a man sentenced to death.”
What was happening was a tragedy for him. An old populist, he had worshipped the people and suffered for them. And now he was standing before the freed people, and they did not accept him and did not understand him…. And the person who reminded the soldiers of that was not an old political prisoner but a semi-literate sailor who had barely mastered the ABCs of revolutionary struggle. Verily, “you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children”!…
According to the biblical legend, God showed Moses the Promised Land from a remote mountain in the Land of Moab. Moses was luckier than Veretyev. History brought him to Canaan, the Land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but Veretyev did not recognize it.22
Moses was luckier, but not by much: he was shown the promised land from a distance, but not allowed to cross the Jordan because he had broken faith with God in the presence of the Israelites at the waters of Meribah Kadesh in the Desert of Zin. After his death, the people he had led out of captivity were able to enter the land of their inheritance but did not find it flowing with milk and honey and “prostituted themselves to the foreign gods.”23
The power of Lenin’s conviction persuaded most Bolsheviks, and at the April Party conference his views prevailed. Some doubters continued to waver, but, as Podvoisky put it, “the party ship, guided firmly and confidently by its helmsman, set out on a new course.” The person who did more than anyone to help Lenin with the practicalities of translating convictions into votes was Sverdlov, who returned to Petrograd as head of the Urals delegation and stayed on as Lenin’s executive plenipotentiary. At the conference, (according to Stasova) “he called meetings if agreement was needed on a controversial issue, organized and put together commissions on various questions, and drew up lists of Central Committee members to be discussed, among other things. Whatever needed to be done, Yakov Mikhailovich was tireless in making sure it was taken care of. It was amazing how he managed to be everywhere at once and still chair all the countless meetings and conferences.” One of the things he did was to remove Stasova’s name from the Central Committee list and replace her as head of the Central Committee Secretariat, which she had been running with the help of Tatiana Slovatinskaia, Stalin’s former friend and correspondent and Valentin Trifonov’s wife.24
As the Party prepared for the coming revolution, it had two central tasks. One was administrative and organizational: objectives had to be defined, personnel assigned, weapons stockpiled, followers trained, contacts maintained, accounts kept, funds distributed, conferences organized, and meetings chaired (and manipulated). Sverdlov presided over most of these things, with the help of several women, including Polina Vinogradskaia, who remembered his notebook “filled with hieroglyphs that only he could understand. It was a magic notebook! With a quick glance, Sverdlov could tell you everything you needed to know about a comrade: where he was working, what kind of person he was, what he was good at, and what job he should be assigned to in the interests of the cause and for his benefit. Moreover, Sverdlov had a very precise impression of all the comrades: they were so firmly stamped in his memory that he could tell you all about the company each one kept. It is hard to believe, but true.”25
Sverdlov continued to live with the Egon-Bessers. He got Kira a job in the editorial offices of the Soldiers’ Truth newspaper, next to his secretariat in Smolny Palace (the new House of Revolution, as far
as the Petrograd Bolsheviks were concerned). After a few weeks, however, Kira’s parents insisted on moving her to the countryside for health reasons (her “protests notwithstanding”), and in early July, Sverdlov’s wife and children arrived from Siberia. Novgorodtseva joined the Central Committee Secretariat, and the children were sent to their grandfather in Nizhny Novgorod. Some sections of the Secretariat and the Bolshevik publishing house, The Surf, were moved into the building of an Orthodox confraternity, with crosses over the main entrance and a back door leading into the church. It became known as “the place under the crosses.”26
The Bolsheviks had always been good at administrative and “technical” work. The party’s raison d’être was “fighting the enemy, not stumbling into the nearby swamp”; its self-description was “a fighting army, not a debating society”; and its organizational principle was “democratic centralism,” not the other way around. Now, on the eve of the real day and under Sverdlov’s supervision, they redoubled their efforts. “As the frequency and intensity of rallying subsided,” wrote Arosev, “the center of gravity of the work of the soviets moved to their executive committees, and along with them, naturally enough, to record keeping.” And when it came to record keeping, it was, naturally enough, the Bolsheviks who, “even during the most romantic revolutionary days, … distinguished themselves as ‘apparatchiks.’” The Moscow Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was run by its Bolshevik secretary, Arkady Rozengolts, and the only room assigned to the Soldiers’ Soviet, which was dominated by the SRs, was occupied by its Bolshevik faction. “In those days, people acquired positions of power by being active and presenting the world with a fait accompli. The Bolsheviks, as the most active element, found themselves in almost all the administrative jobs.”27
The Party’s second task was “agitation,” which consisted of making speeches at large rallies and writing articles in Party newspapers. The speeches revolved around concise slogans; the articles provided specific links between the changing slogans and the general prophecy. One of the most skillful and prolific Bolshevik “dialecticians” was Bukharin, who could offer instant sociological analysis in the light of both the foundational texts and immediate tactical objectives. “Because the proletarian masses proved insufficiently conscious and well-organized,” he wrote in May 1917, echoing Lenin’s April Theses, “they did not proceed immediately to the establishment of state power by the revolutionary lower classes.” But, as they became more conscious and better organized, and as the true interests of the proletariat prevailed over those of its peasant allies, the soviets would take over power and clash openly with the imperialist bourgeoisie. The efforts of the enemy were both doomed and dangerous: “consequently, what was needed was feverish work everywhere without exception.”28
The House of Government Page 19