Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  He was never ‘taught’ kingship or anything much about administration. His principal tutor, General Grigory Danilovich, believed that ‘mysterious forces emanating during the sacrament of coronation provided all the practical data required by a ruler’. His law and history tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostev, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, was not impressed by his royal charge. He once said that the main thing he could remember about Nicholas was that ‘he seemed completely absorbed picking his nose’.1

  His father, Alexander III, a huge bear of a man with vast appetites for food and the bottle, treated ‘Nicky’ badly, giving him no role whatsoever in running his empire. When Count Sergei Witte, then the Finance Minister, suggested a minor position for Nicholas with a seat on the Trans-Siberian Committee planning the railway, the Tsar looked puzzled: ‘Have you ever tried to discuss anything of consequence with His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Tsarevich? Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed the Grand Duke is…an absolute dunce.’

  When Alexander died of kidney disease in November 1894, his eldest son burst into tears, not from sorrow for his father but pity for himself. Between sobs, in his father’s death chamber, he cursed his fate and asked his cousin Sandro (Sergius), ‘What will happen to me and all of Russia? I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling.’*1

  He was not a complete simpleton. He was fluent in English, German and French and had decent Italian too. It was said of him that ‘he could speak several languages impeccably but had nothing intelligent or interesting to say in any of them’.*2 Others who knew him were more generous. ‘He was the best-bred person I’ve ever met,’ said Witte. He had some fine qualities – he was dedicated to duty and hard work and was devoted to his family – ‘yet his capabilities were limited by the tremendous parochialism of his education and outlook’. Even many ultra-royalists were disappointed in him. ‘He understands the significance of only one fact at a time without connecting it to any others,’ said Pobedonostev. ‘He sticks to the unimportant…has a petty point of view.’2

  Nicholas spent inordinate amounts of time on trivial matters which a junior civil servant could have handled – ordering repairs to an agricultural college for example, personally appointing provincial midwives, approving railway timetables. But as his tedious and unilluminating diaries show, he barely thought about the bigger picture and the great affairs of state. He played ministers off against each other and routinely treated them shabbily rather than trying to unify them as a team under his leadership. There were some clever and able administrators in government – Count Witte and Pyotr Stolypin stood out – but he never trusted them. At a time when a huge and still-growing empire needed efficient and creative ‘technocrats’, people who knew what they were doing, he relied for advice on a small coterie of reactionary courtiers.

  When, a decade into his reign, he did make a big decision it was a disastrous mistake which added momentum to the revolutionary whirlwind that would topple him. He began a war with Japan for control of the South China Sea, in a bid to increase Russian power in the East. The Russians, with the customary racial superiority of European imperialists, assumed they would score a swift victory that would give them a bigger toehold in Manchuria and the Korean peninsula – after all it was, as Nicholas said, only ‘yellow men, not entirely civilised’ that they were taking on. But the Russian military was woefully ill-prepared and barely considered that Japan was modernising fast and had military abilities to match its imperial ambitions. Russia suffered a humiliating defeat and lost almost its entire Pacific fleet. It had to sue for peace. Nicholas felt crushed. If he had possessed the imagination, he might have realised how perilous was his hold on the throne.3

  Historians have on the whole been rather kind to Nicholas II, mainly because of the grisly manner of his death and the murder of his family. But he was largely responsible for his own destruction. He was not a well-intentioned figure who was swept away by tides of history. If at the start of his reign Nicholas II had made any efforts to establish a constitutional monarchy, introduce liberal reforms and allow political activity to flourish, as elsewhere in Europe, he might have saved Russia from catastrophe – and the lives of himself and his family. He deserved his place, as the Marxists phrase it, in the dustbin of history.

  * * *

  In Geneva, at around 9.30 a.m. on Monday 10 January 1905, Lenin and Nadya ‘were on our way to the library when we met the Lunacharskys, who were coming to see us. Lunacharsky’s wife*3 was so excited she could not speak, only managing to wave her muff at us…We went to the Lepeshinsky émigré restaurant. We wanted to be together. The people gathered around there hardly spoke a word to one another, they were so excited.’*4

  The Russians devoured the news from St Petersburg, where the previous day an entirely peaceful protest in the centre of the city had turned into a massacre. ‘We were stunned,’ Nadya said. ‘Hardly a word was spoken the entire morning. We began to sing the revolutionary funeral march “You Have Fallen in the Struggle” with grim-set faces. It dawned on everyone in a wave that the Revolution had begun, that the shackles of faith in the Tsar had been torn apart.’4

  The reports from Russia were shocking. A series of strikes since the beginning of the year had closed several St Petersburg factories, though they never crippled the city or at any point looked like an insurrection. The strike leader was a charismatic priest, Father Georgy Gapon, who believed that if the Tsar was told about the harsh lives of Russian workers and was directly appealed to, he would intervene to force industrial employers to improve factory conditions and raise wages. It was hopelessly naïve, but showed the faith the public appeared to have in the Tsar. Gapon called on the strikers and their families to demonstrate on Sunday 9 January. He wrote a petition they planned to present to Nicholas. It was humble, simply put and, as things turned out, full of tragic pathos. ‘SIRE: We the workers and inhabitants of St Petersburg, of various estates, our wives, our children and our aged, helpless parents, come to THEE O SIRE to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished; we are oppressed, overburdened with excessive toil, contemptuously treated…we are suffocating in despotism and lawlessness…we have no strength left and our endurance is at an end. We have reached that terrifying moment when death is better than prolongation of our unbearable suffering.’

  On the Friday before the planned march Gapon was ordered to call off the demonstration or expect ‘resolute measures’.*5 Various dignitaries – from a few liberal ministers to Maxim Gorky – urged the government to talk to the protestors. But Nicholas left St Petersburg for Tsarskoe Selo and ordered the military to disperse the crowds if they reached government buildings.

  It was a beautiful winter morning with a sharp frost. The sun shone ‘brilliantly from a pale-blue sky upon the white expanse of the Neva and the snow-covered roofs and streets’. The main body of the unarmed march was led by groups of women and children, ‘dressed in their Sunday best’. Father Gapon was at the front of one of the columns ‘wearing a long white cassock, carrying a crucifix. Directly behind him there was a big picture of the Tsar.’ When the procession reached the Narva Triumphal Arch they were charged by a troop of cavalry with sabres. Most of the marchers scattered. But some continued towards a line of infantry – and were mown down. Gapon fell to the ground but got up, looked at the snow turned blood-red around him and was heard to shout repeatedly, ‘There is no God any longer…there is no Tsar.’5

  Some demonstrators made it close to the Winter Palace. One eyewitness saw troops firing at them, ‘bringing down little boys perched on the trees in a neighbouring garden…A sleigh drove swiftly up the Nevsky followed by half a dozen workmen running with bare hands and crossing themselves, some weeping. In the sleigh sat a youth holding in his arms a student, dead, his face one gaping wound. Three or four Cossacks came galloping up on horseback, pulled rein, looked at the sleigh, then rode on with a jeering laugh.’

  Gorky, amid the demonstration at the Troitsky Br
idge, saw an officer kill one young demonstrator: ‘The dragoon circled around him and shrieking…waved his sabre in the air. Swooping down from his horse, he slashed him across the face, cutting him open from the eyes to the chin. I remember the strangely enlarged eyes of the worker and…the murderer’s face, blushed from the cold and excitement, his teeth clenched in again and the hairs of his moustache standing up on his elevated lip. Brandishing his shaft of steel, he let out another shriek and…spat at the dead man through his teeth.’6

  As the evening wore on the mood turned from shock to anger. British reporter Harold Williams saw ‘the faces around me and detected neither fear nor panic…but hostility and hatred. I saw these looks of hatred on every face, young and old, men and women. The Revolution was born. The popular ideal – myth or not – of a Good Tsar, which had sustained the regime for centuries, was suddenly destroyed.’ In truth the army had often been used over several hundred years by the Tsars to maintain their rule, but now, in the twentieth century, it struck loyal supporters of the regime as a barbaric excess.

  It was different to former atrocities in other ways. It took place in Russia’s capital where international journalists were on the scene, and the speed of communications meant the news was on the front pages around the world by the next day. Foreign governments were worried by the prospect of chaos in Russia. The American Ambassador, Robert McCormick, reported to Washington three days later: ‘The events…weakened if [they] did not shatter, that unswerving loyalty and deep-seated reverence which has characterised the subject of The Tsar of all the Russias. I have had evidence of this from the highest to the lowest classes and it finds expression in a letter I received…from Mr Heenan, our Consul in Odessa, who writes: “In all the eighteen years I have spent in Russia, I never knew the Russian public so united…All classes condemn the authorities and, more particularly, the Emperor. He has lost absolutely the affection of the Russian people and whatever the future for the dynasty, the Tsar will never be safe in the midst of his people.” I accept Mr Heenan’s view: the emperor will never be able to re-establish himself in his former unique position.’7

  The official figure from the government put the number of dead at around 200 with 800 wounded, but the real figure was much greater – probably four times higher. In Geneva, a thousand miles from the action, Lenin was convinced that Bloody Sunday was the beginning of the end of Tsarism – and that the end would not be too far away.

  * * *

  Lenin had predicted an uprising against the monarchy in theory. A fortnight before Bloody Sunday he wrote a piece in the new socialist paper he had launched, Vyperod (Forward). ‘A military collapse [in the Japan war] is inevitable, and with it will come a tenfold increase of unrest, discontent and rebellion…For that moment we must prepare with all our energy. At that moment one of these outbreaks…will develop into a tremendous popular movement. At that moment the proletariat will rise to take its place at the head of the insurrection.’*6, 8

  But when ‘the moment’ came Lenin was taken entirely by surprise and was woefully unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with it. So were nearly all the Marxist and Socialist Revolutionary leaders. He would call the 1905 Revolution the Dress Rehearsal, as though it had all been planned and scripted. Later, Communist rewriting of history gave Lenin’s RSDLP a leading role in the events. But the Party played almost no part in the initial strikes and unrest. A mere handful of Party members were there at the demonstration on Bloody Sunday – and they were right at the back of the march, placed there almost as an afterthought.

  Lenin barely uttered a word throughout the day at Lepeshinsky’s nor, according to Nadya, afterwards at home. The next morning he did what he normally did: he went to the Geneva Central Library. For the next few days he read everything he could find about guerrilla warfare and military tactics in historic uprisings, particularly the 1870 Paris Commune. He wrote fiery letters to comrades in Russia demanding that armed units of revolutionaries should be formed, ‘with rifles, revolvers, bombs, knives, knuckledusters, rags soaked in petrol, ropes or rope ladders, shovels for building barricades, dynamite cartridges, barbed wire, tacks against cavalry…’. It was totally unrealistic advice, written by a journalist not a commando, gleaned from the books he had just read, typical of an armchair general. ‘Give every company short and simple bomb formulae…they must begin military training immediately in direct connection with practical fighting actions. Some will immediately kill a spy or blow up a police station. Others will organise an attack on a bank in order to confiscate funds for the uprising.’ At no point in his life did he have any direct experience of fighting, yet that did not stop him from writing in bloodcurdling fashion as though he were a military expert.9

  Sporadic fighting between workers and army units went on for five days in St Petersburg, and with more ferocity in Moscow, where scores of civilians were killed. Strikes continued for months amid an atmosphere of government paralysis and political crisis unknown in Russia for a century.

  From the safety of Geneva, Lenin continued his calls for violence against the regime. A few weeks after Bloody Sunday he wrote an article headlined ‘The arming of the people has become an immediate task’. Plekhanov, who had trained as a soldier, told Lenin plainly that ‘people should not have taken up arms’ – it was a mistake and it would be workers who suffered the most. Lenin replied, ‘nonsense, on the contrary. They should have been more resolute, energetic and aggressive…those who do not prepare for armed uprising must be ruthlessly cast out of the ranks of the supporters of the Revolution and sent back to the ranks of its enemies as traitors or cowards. An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to obtain arms, deserves to be treated as slaves.’*7, 10

  Lenin’s cynicism was mind-boggling. At this point there was absolutely no chance that an armed uprising could succeed and he knew it. He was expecting sacrifices – possibly death – from his supporters. For a start, there were far too few of them to make any difference. In 1905 the Bolsheviks were weak inside Russia: the split had demoralised the Party. Members could not understand what the arguments were about and were desperate for the leadership, in safe overseas exile, to set aside personal differences and unite against the real enemy – the Tsarist regime.

  In December 1904, just a few weeks before Bloody Sunday, Maxim Litvinov, one of Lenin’s most senior lieutenants, on a clandestine visit to St Petersburg, sent a grim report back to Geneva. He said that inside Russia the Bolsheviks ‘have virtually no strength…On the periphery, people if not everywhere against us are almost nowhere for us. The mass of Party workers continue to regard us as a handful of “disorganisers” with no support of our own. No kind of conference, let alone a secret one, will change this widely held view. I repeat, our situation is impossibly rickety and precarious…The [Mensheviks] are incomparably better off…they have thirty to forty young women from abroad, true and dedicated to the point of hysteria.’ Sergei Gusev, at that time the highest-ranking Bolshevik inside Russia, said that when the 1905 Revolution began there were 215 Bolshevik members in the capital, 109 of whom were students. ‘Only now can we understand the full disorganisation of the Party,’ he told Lenin. ‘The St Petersburg Party is…helpless in the face of…the workers’ protest. You only have to go out onto the streets to see how weak we are. And what can we do? Put out a few hundred leaflets, which will be unnoticed, and send out a few speakers.’

  Lenin was undeterred. He kept clamouring for more action. ‘It horrifies me – I give you my word – it horrifies me, to find that there has been talk about bombs for months, yet not a single one has been made. Form fighting squads everywhere,’ he told St Petersburg Bolsheviks.

  A young activist who had seen much bloodshed in his home town of Kazan – a city Lenin knew well – arrived in Geneva and asked what Party members should do, as it looked like the uprising was finished. ‘Well, that’s simple,’ said Lenin. ‘Prepare for an armed rising again.’ ‘But Vladimir Ilyich, there’s so little chance of victory.’�
�‘Victory? That, for us, is not the point at all. What do we care about victory? We should not harbour any illusions. We are realists and let nobody imagine that we have to win. For that we are still too weak. The point is not about winning, but about giving the regime a shake and attracting the masses to our movement. The uprising is what matters. To say that because we can’t win we should not stage an insurrection – that is simply the talk of cowards.’

  Later in 1905, Moscow workers went on strike. Soldiers from the crack Semenovsky Guards were sent to force them back to work. They surrounded the militants in a working-class district of the city, killing dozens. Field guns shelled the area for three days, leaving hundreds dead, including eighty-six children. Lenin’s comment was not to mourn the deaths. He said the important thing was that revolutionaries had fought in the streets and their defeat would teach them to hate their enemies: ‘the one who has been whipped is worth two who have not’.11

  * * *

  There was a wave of arrests following Bloody Sunday. Gorky was picked up two days afterwards and charged with organising a conspiratorial revolution, though all he had done was witness the massacre and write about it. The multimillionaire Savva Morozov increased his subsidy to the Party and other industrialists also began giving money to socialist and liberal groups – ‘it became fashionable to do so and if it helped their consciences, we didn’t mind the help’, said Leonid Krasin, the Bolsheviks’ money man and technical expert who handled many of the ‘donations’. He admitted it was a kind of inverted snobbery to support a cause so fundamentally inimical to their personal interests. ‘At the time it was regarded as a sign of bon ton in…radical or even liberal circles to contribute money to revolutionary parties – and among those who regularly paid dues of between 5 and 25 rubles…[a month] were not only prominent attorneys, engineers and physicians, but also directors of banks and officials from government institutions.’ A big error of the Tsar’s was to make enemies of wealthy business magnates such as Morozov, Pavel Ryabushinsky and Alexander Guchkov. He thought it beneath him to deal with people in ‘trade’ and didn’t see how important they would be. Much of the business world threw their support behind liberals who wanted Western-style reforms. One of the richest Russian industrialists of them all, Alexei Putilov, who employed 27,000 people at his vast engineering works on the outskirts of St Petersburg – and manufactured a large proportion of the weapons for the Russian army – said, ‘Tsarism is lost, it is beyond hope.’*8, 12