Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  When the ministers met in the Malachite Room of the Winter Palace towards midday they refused to surrender and decided to hold out for as long as they could; ‘doomed people, lonely and abandoned, we walked around the huge mousetrap’, Pavel Malyanovich, the Minister of Justice, wrote in his diary.

  Lenin was given to furious, intemperate ‘rages’, as his wife Nadya often said. They became more frequent as his health declined and the insomnia and headaches which had always plagued him got worse. He was in a fury much of this day as his military planners seemed to be bungling. He put off his appearance at the Congress of Soviets from midday to 3 p.m., but if he had to delay much further, his entire political strategy might fall apart. It was vital to present the coup as a complete success, a job well done.

  In Room 10 of the Smolny, he barked orders to his aides and Red Guard commanders and fired off dozens of notes pleading for speedier action to take over the palace. The pleas soon turned into demands, and then threats. He paced around the room ‘like a lion in a cage’, recalled Nikolai Podvoisky, one of the Military Revolutionary Committee’s most senior officials. ‘Vladimir Ilyich scolded, he screamed. He needed the Palace at all costs. He said he was ready to shoot us.’5

  The ministers were holding out in the vast but gloomy symbol of Imperial Russia, which had been the Provisional Government’s home since July. Much of Tsarist imperial history had been played out among the palace’s 1,500 rooms, spread out over a quarter-mile-long building fronting the Neva. Kerensky had moved into the third-floor suite that had once belonged to the Emperor, with picture windows overlooking the Admiralty Spire. Most of the building was now being used as a military hospital for war wounded, with around 500 patients on this day. In the huge courtyard at the rear of the building were hundreds of horses belonging to the two companies of Cossacks charged with defending the government. Along with the Cossacks, there were 220 officer cadets from the Oranienbaum Military School, forty members of the Petrograd Garrison’s bicycle squad and 200 women from the Shock Battalion of Death.*4 From an armed force of nine million Russians, this was all the Provisional Government could muster to protect the capital – and themselves.

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  The ‘storming of the Winter Palace’ – centrepiece of the Russian Revolution – was so sloppy that the American journalists John Reed and his wife Louise Bryant were able to stroll into the building during the afternoon without being stopped. Palace servants in their Tsarist blue uniforms took their coats as usual and some of the cadets from the Military School showed them around. On the ground floor ‘at the end of the corridor was a large ornate room with gilded cornices and enormous crystal lustres,’ wrote Reed. ‘On both sides of the parqueted floor long rows of dirty mattresses and blankets, upon which occasional soldiers were stretched out; everywhere was a litter of cigarette butts, bits of bread, clothes and empty bottles with expensive French labels. Soldiers moved about in a stale atmosphere of tobacco smoke and unwashed humanity. One had a bottle of white Burgundy evidently filched from the cellars of the palace. The place was a huge barrack.’

  At 3 p.m. Lenin could delay no longer. He appeared before the Congress of Soviets at the Smolny and brazenly declared a victory, though the government had not yet fallen, the ministers were not arrested, nor was the Winter Palace in Bolshevik hands. This was the first big lie of the Soviet regime. He read a statement he had prepared early that morning when he thought the coup’s success was already complete.

  ‘To the Citizens of Russia. The Provisional Government has been deposed. State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which heads the Petrograd proletariat and the garrison.

  ‘The cause for which the people have fought – namely, the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of landed proprietorship, workers’ control over production, and the establishment of Soviet power – has been secured.

  ‘Long live the revolution of soldiers, workers and peasants!’

  Declaring that the Bolsheviks had taken power was so important to his plan that he was prepared to invent it.6

  When he returned upstairs Lenin could not contain his rage. He ordered the bombardment of the palace from the Peter and Paul Fortress, but the tragi-comedy and absurdity of the siege was only beginning. The clockwork timekeeping of the coup slipped further and further and, as the day went on, there ceased to be any deadlines at all. The Bolshevik gunners were complete incompetents. There were five heavy field-guns at the fortress, but they were museum pieces which hadn’t been fired in years or cleaned in months. Some lighter training guns were found and dragged into position, but no one could find the right three-inch shells for them. Then it turned out that the guns did not have sights. In the late afternoon the commissars worked out that the original guns simply needed cleaning.

  Things became more surreal for the insurgents. Even the straightforward task of raising a red lantern to the top of the fortress flagpole – the signal for the bombardment and a ground assault to begin – was beyond them. No red lantern could be found. The Bolshevik commander of the fortress, Georgy Blagonravov, went out into the city to look for a suitable lamp but got lost and fell into a muddy bog. He came back, though with a purple lantern which he couldn’t fix to the flagpole. The rebels abandoned any idea of giving a signal.

  At 6.30 p.m. the Bolsheviks, who had been in control of the nearby naval base at Kronstadt for the last few days, ordered the battlecruisers Aurora and Amur to steam upriver and halt opposite the Winter Palace. Ten minutes later they sent an ultimatum: ‘Government and troops must capitulate. This ultimatum expires at 7.10 p.m. after which we will immediately open fire.’

  The ministers rejected the ultimatum. At 6.50 they sat down to dinner – borscht, steamed fish and artichokes. By this point the defenders were ready to give up and bow to the inevitable. ‘The soldiers just wanted to smoke, get drunk and curse their hopeless situation,’ one of their officers recalled. Most peeled off as the evening wore on. The majority of cadets went off to look for some dinner, some of the women’s battalion left. The Cossacks, the only ones with any military training, stalked off ‘disgusted by the Jews and wenches inside’. Fewer than 250 remained. The Red Guards could have walked in easily at any time.

  The ‘government’ continued to pronounce edicts and reshuffle Cabinet posts; the minister left in charge by Kerensky earlier in the morning decided they had to discuss appointing a ‘dictator’ in Russia. Dictator of what, beyond the Malachite Room and its grand columns, ornate fireplaces and huge table vases, he never made clear. They decided to brave things out for as long as possible, arguing that when they were overthrown by force the Bolsheviks would be condemned.7

  Most people in Petrograd did not know a revolution was happening. The banks and shops had been open all day, the trams were running. All the factories were operating as usual – the workers had no clue Lenin was about to liberate them from capitalist exploitation. That evening Chaliapin was appearing in Don Carlos before a full house at the Narodny Dom, and Alexei Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan the Terrible was playing at the Alexandrinsky Theatre. Nightclubs and concert halls were open. Prostitutes were touting for business in the side streets around Nevsky Prospekt as on any normal Wednesday evening. The restaurants were packed. John Reed and a group of other American and British reporters were dining at the Hotel de France, close to the Palace Square. They returned to watch the Revolution after the entrée.

  In Soviet mythology for decades to come, the Revolution was portrayed as a popular rising of the masses. Nothing could be further from the truth. Contemporary photographs show a few isolated spots around the city where a handful of Red Guards were milling about casually. There were no big crowds anywhere, no barricades, no street fighting. It is impossible to know how many people took part in the few isolated parts of the city which mattered during the insurrection. Trotsky estimated ‘no more’ than 25,000, but by that he meant the number
of Red Guards he could have called out. The real number was far fewer – probably 10,000 at most, in a city numbering nearly two million.

  There was no ‘storming’ of the palace, as depicted in Sergei Eisenstein’s epic, cinematically brilliant but largely fictional 1928 film October. Many more people were employed as extras than took part in the real event.*5, 8

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  At 9.40 p.m., at last, the signal was given to begin the bombardment with a blank shot fired from the Aurora, which had moored by the English Embankment opposite the palace. The ministers dropped to the floor; the entire company of the women’s Shock Battalion were so scared they had to be taken to a room at the rear of the building to calm down.

  Twenty minutes later the guns from the Peter and Paul Fortress began firing live ammunition. A barrage of three dozen were fired but only two hit the palace, chipping some cornices. One shell managed to miss the 1,500-room target by several hundred metres.*6 Podvoisky and Antonov-Ovseyenko, whom Lenin had threatened to shoot a few hours earlier, led a small group of sailors and Red Guards into the building and quickly realised when they began to search through the rooms that they faced almost no opposition. In the Malachite Room, ‘fear gripped us like the onslaught of poisoned air’, Justice Minister Malyanovich said later. ‘It was clear the end was at hand.’

  At around 2 a.m. a little man with long, wavy red hair wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a floppy red tie bounded into the room – ‘an armed mob was behind him’. He didn’t look like a soldier but he shouted in a shrill, jarring voice, ‘I am Antonov-Ovseyenko, a representative of the Military Revolutionary Committee. I inform all you members of the Provisional Government that you are under arrest.’

  They were marched to the Peter and Paul Fortress through jostling groups of Red Guards shouting ‘Run them through’ and ‘Chuck them in the river’. Antonov warned that anyone who tried to harm them would be shot. Throughout the day the casualty count was half a dozen dead and fewer than twenty injured, all of whom were caught in crossfire.

  The Military Revolutionary Committee’s problem now was controlling their own Bolshevik troops. Room after room in the palace was filled with packing cases containing some of the former Tsar’s treasures, which were about to be despatched to Moscow for safekeeping. The Red Guards had different ideas. ‘One man went strutting around with a bronze clock perched on his shoulder,’ said Reed, who accompanied them. ‘Another found a plume of ostrich feathers, which he stuck on his hat. The looting was just beginning when someone cried, “Comrades! Don’t take anything! This is the property of the People! Stop. Put everything back!” ’ Many hands dragged the spoilers down. Damask and tapestry were snatched from the arms of those who had them; two men took away the bronze clock. Roughly and hastily the things were crammed back into the cases. Through corridors and up staircases the cry could be heard growing fainter and fainter in the distance, ‘Revolutionary discipline. Property of the People.’

  Others headed straight for the Tsar’s wine cellar, one of the finest in the world. It contained cases of Tokays from the age of Catherine the Great and Château d’Yquem 1847, Nicholas II’s favourite. ‘The matter of the wine…became critical,’ recalled Antonov. ‘We sent guards from picked units. They got drunk. We posted guards from Regimental Committees. They succumbed as well. A violent bacchanalia followed.’

  He called the Petrograd fire brigade to flood the cellar with water, ‘but the firemen…got drunk instead’.9

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  The real drama was happening at the Smolny. That was where the Revolution was won. The Congress of Soviets convened again at 10.30 p.m. and there was seething anger in the smoke-filled ballroom. Lenin’s hope was that the coup would be rubber-stamped, but it was denounced by many delegates. Even a few Bolsheviks objected. Lenin’s opponents played right into his hands. The other socialist groups said they would ‘have nothing to do with this criminal takeover’ and walked out of the Soviet, never to return to any position of influence in Russia. They might have made Lenin’s position difficult if they had remained a strong opposition force united against the Bolsheviks. They might even have prevented Lenin from building his dictatorship. Walking out of the chamber was a fatal mistake, as many admitted soon afterwards. ‘We made the Bolsheviks masters of the situation,’ said Sukhanov, an opponent of Lenin. ‘By leaving the Congress we gave them a monopoly on the Soviets. Our own irrational decisions ensured Lenin’s victory.’

  At around 5 a.m., with the opposition about to stage their walkout into oblivion, the Bolsheviks’ most spellbinding orator, the brilliant, vain and ruthless Trotsky, made one of the most famous speeches of the twentieth century. The uprising ‘needs no justification’, he said. ‘What has happened is an insurrection, not a conspiracy…The masses of the people followed our banner. But what do they [pointing to the other socialists] offer us? We are told: renounce your victory, make concessions, compromise. With whom?, I ask. To those who have left us we must say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out. Go where you ought to go – into the dustbin of history.’

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  Two hours later Lenin appeared at the Congress. Now certain of victory, and no longer in disguise, he beamed. There were no rhetorical flourishes from him. He read out the Decree on Peace he had written that morning, promising an end to the war, and the Decree on Land pledging to take over the landowners’ farms. He was greeted with tumultuous applause. Some old Bolsheviks, hard men and women who never believed this moment would come, were weeping. To those who encountered him for the first time he did not seem like a revolutionary who would create a new kind of society and transform history, said John Reed. ‘He was a short, stocky figure, with a big head set down on his shoulders, bald and bulging little eyes, a snubbish nose, wide generous mouth, and heavy chin. Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers were much too long for him. Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob…A strange popular leader – a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colourless, humourless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies – but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms. And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.’

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  Soon after the ‘glorious October’ Lenin said that taking power had been a simple thing, ‘as easy as picking up a feather’. He was being mischievous, misleading. In fact it had been a long, hard road.10

  *1 Trotsky was often asked later if he was absolutely sure that a famously militant atheist like Lenin really had crossed himself at this solemn moment. He replied that he was surprised to see it but it was hardly a thing he would forget, or invent. Trotsky was equally surprised that when Lenin said he felt dizzy he very deliberately used the German expression ‘Es schwindelt’ – presumably for added emphasis.

  *2 Both Lenin and Trotsky had studied the French Revolution with great care and took inspiration from it. This was a deliberate echo of the Jacobins’ ‘Commissaires’, supposedly protectors of the people. The word comes originally from the Latin commissarius, meaning the plenipotentiaries of a higher power – in this case the citizens.

  *3 Neither the owner, US diplomat Sheldon Whitehouse, nor the driver could work out how to remove the Stars and Stripes flag from the bonnet. The loan of the car led to a formal diplomatic protest to the US government by the Bolshevik regime – the first of many over the following decades.

  *4 Despite their bloodcurdling title, they were mostly girls from the provinces and not at all happy to be part of the last-ditch effort to prop up the Provisional Government, which they did not support. They were marked out by their size, and with their close-cropped hair resembled young boys. The photographers who took pictures of them for the press the day before the coup noticed how small they looked compared to the Cossacks with them. They were scared – and not only of the Bolsheviks. ‘At night, men knocked at our barracks and cried out with blasphemies,’ said one of the young girls in the battalion. When they had been ordered to the palace they were told they would be taking part
in a regimental parade. They were not prepared to shoot fellow Russians. The besieging Bolsheviks were worried about their presence at the palace, too: ‘People will say we shoot at Russian women,’ one of them said.

  *5 And even more took part in the re-enactment of the palace seizure on the fifth anniversary of the Revolution in 1922.

  *6 The explosions startled Vladimir Nabokov, the eighteen-year-old son of the Cabinet Secretary, the senior civil servant to the Provisional Government, at his home on the Morskaya, right next to the palace. He was trying to write a poem at the time.

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  A Nest of Gentlefolk

  ‘Don’t worry about Lenin. The man is not dangerous.’

  Prince Georgy Lvov, the first post-imperial Prime Minister of Russia

  All of the most important relationships in Lenin’s life were with women. He had very few close male friends and nearly without exception he lost those he made, or they fell by the wayside, because of politics. Men had to agree with him wholesale and bend to his will or be dropped from his inner circle. As a confidant for many years in exile recalled: ‘I began to separate myself from the revolutionary movement…and thus completely ceased to exist for Vladimir Ilyich.’ By the time he was thirty-three the only man he addressed by the intimate Russian ‘ty’ rather than the formal ‘vy’ was his younger brother Dmitry.1

  For most of his life Lenin was surrounded by women – his mother, sisters, his wife of a quarter of a century, Nadya; and his mistress Inessa Armand, with whom he had a complex romantic attachment, as well as a close working relationship, that waxed and waned in intensity over many years. During a decade and a half of exile, in various cramped lodging houses throughout Europe, he lived in easy, friendly familiarity with his mother-in-law, a woman of strong opinions that differed markedly from his own.