Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Unrest continued – in the factories and on the land, where scores of estates were burned down and their owners attacked. Many gentry landlords, or the intelligent ones, said the most significant thing about the 1905 ‘troubles’ was that the attitudes of the peasants ‘seem suddenly to have changed’. The owner of a large estate near Samara, not far from Alakayevka where Maria Alexandrovna once had an estate, said that ‘instead of the previous courtesy, friendliness and humility, there was only hatred in their faces and the manner of their greetings…underlined their rudeness’. Another big landlord in Tula Province, one of the most agriculturally rich in Russia, noted that ‘externally everything appeared to be normal. But something essential, something irreparable had happened in the people. A general feeling of fear had undermined all trust. After a lifetime of security – nobody had bothered to lock their doors and windows in the evening – the nobles concerned themselves with weapons and personally made the rounds to test their security measures.’13

  Some émigrés returned from European exile, including Martov, Vera Zasulich and, sensationally, Trotsky, who immediately on his return from Austria in the spring threw himself into political activity, making a name for himself as a brilliant speaker and – more surprisingly – an organiser. He was the face behind the St Petersburg Soviet, which briefly flickered as a powerful symbol of opposition to the regime until it was closed down towards the end of the year.*9

  Many Bolsheviks tried to persuade Lenin to return to lead the Revolution from inside Russia. But instead of going to St Petersburg, he went to London to organise another Party Congress – ‘a talking shop’ as some Mensheviks called it – to work out a line to take on Bloody Sunday. Thirty-eight delegates turned up at the beginning of May for probably the most pointless of all the various leftist conferences before 1917. Soon after it was over the Tsar bowed to mounting pressure from the liberals – and advisers in his civil service – and granted some of the reforms he had previously maintained he never would: political parties were legalised for the first time and a kind of parliament – the Duma – was established; the Tsar relaxed censorship and there was a freer, though hardly an entirely free, press. The regime kept its hold on real power – and the Dress Rehearsal had reached its second act.

  *1 Louis XVI, whose fate was so similar to that of Nicholas, said something of the same kind when he was told of his father’s death: ‘What a burden. And I have been taught nothing! The entire universe is about to fall on me.’

  *2 His English was so perfect that from his early teens Alexander III got him to write his personal letters to Queen Victoria. He was an Anglophile in some ways – in particular, he was related to their royals – but in truth he didn’t like the British much, and certainly not, as he told advisers, their politics or ‘civilisation’. He frequently told Prime Minister Witte that ‘the English are just like the Yids’, which for him was a term of abuse.

  *3 This was Anatoly Lunacharsky’s first wife, Anna Malinovkaya, the sister of the Bolshevik philosopher and long-time intellectual sparring partner of Lenin, Alexander Bogdanov. Soon after the 1917 Revolution, middle-aged and in power as Commissar for Public Enlightenment, he left her for Natalya Rozenel, an actress less than half his age.

  *4 A new café recently opened by Lenin’s friends and fellow exiles in Siberia, Panteleimon and Olga Lepeshinsky, which the Bolsheviks now frequented while the Mensheviks still favoured the rear room of the nearby Landolt.

  *5 Gapon, as much a conman as spiritual leader or political activist, had been an Okhrana agent and became head of a semi-legal, trade union movement, created secretly by the police to challenge the socialist movements. Such was the conspiratorial, looking-glass world of Russian politics, where nothing was as it appeared. Gapon, though, went rogue and double-crossed his police handlers by inspiring the march that led to Bloody Sunday. Soon afterwards he escaped from Russia and headed to Europe, where he was given refuge in Paris by French leftists, in London by the anarchist Prince Kropotkin, and in Geneva, where Lenin met him. Lenin was interested in the priest and made overtures to recruit him to the Bolshevik cause, but Gapon threw in his lot with the Socialist Revolutionary Party instead. In early 1906 he returned to Russia and rekindled his contacts with the Okhrana, but his double role was soon discovered. In March 1906 he was murdered by the SR leaders he was planning to betray.

  *6 No longer involved with Iskra, which became a Menshevik organ and did not survive much longer after the Party split, Lenin started Vyperod with the generous financial help of Gorky. But it was an altogether less influential paper, did not have the organised ‘agents’ to smuggle copies into Russia and circulated mainly among Russian émigrés in Western Europe.

  *7 Lenin came up with apparently harebrained military schemes from his Geneva drawing board. One dramatic moment in the 1905 Revolution was the mutiny by sailors aboard the battleship Prince Potemkin in the harbour at Odessa. Lenin tried to persuade a twenty-two-year-old Bolshevik student activist, with no military training, to board the ship and persuade the crew ‘at whatever cost’ to join the workers’ revolution, bombard government buildings and help local peasants to take over nearby estates. There was no indication the sailors were interested in the Party; they simply loathed their brutal naval officers. Undeterred, Lenin insisted that ‘afterwards we must get the fleet in our hands…the majority of the ships will rally to the crew of the Potemkin. But you must act boldly and resolutely.’ The young man went back to the Crimea, at some risk on a fake passport, as instructed, but by the time he got there the Potemkin had left Odessa, and what existed of the local Party was no longer in the mood for insurrection. The next time Lenin would try to foment mutiny in the navy, in 1917, he prepared the ground more thoroughly and it was an essential part of Bolshevik victory.

  *8 On the eve of the First World War, he predicted with some accuracy what would happen in Russia. There would be a bourgeois revolution led by moderates ‘thinking they are saving Russia…but they will be swept away amid interminable anarchy and the revolution will be taken over by workers and peasants’.

  *9 This was the first use of the word ‘Soviet’ – which simply means ‘council’ in Russian – in the revolutionary context in which it became so well known: as a group of workers’ representatives. Trotsky became a great draw in St Petersburg high society in 1905 as a witty orator. He described the first time he was asked to speak at a grand house. ‘The butler waited for my visiting card but, woe is me, what card should a man with a cover name produce?’ He received rapturous applause when he told the audience of ‘nobles, bejewelled ladies and Guards officers that it was their duty to hand over the arsenals to the people’.

  18

  Back Home

  ‘Tsarism is no longer able to suppress the Revolution; the Revolution is still unable to destroy Tsarism.’

  Lenin, Novaya Zhizn, 1905

  When he thought it was safe, Lenin finally returned to Russia. One of the concessions the Tsar had made in his 17 October Manifesto on the Improvement of State Order was to grant an amnesty for some, but not all, political prisoners. Lenin thought he was taking no risks when he went back ‘home’ a month later, and although he was legally allowed to stay in Russia he entered on false papers under the name William Frey – old conspiratorial habits died hard. He and Nadya travelled to St Petersburg separately via Germany, Sweden and Finland. She returned ten days after him, with her mother, and after they were reunited they first stayed with a friend of Lenin’s sister Maria, and later rented an apartment on Nevsky Prospekt.

  From the moment Lenin got off the train at the Finland Station on 18 November he was followed by the Okhrana, who made it obvious they were tailing him. He registered with the local police, but political work was impossible with that level of surveillance. Under the so-called new liberal dispensation Okhrana activity was in fact stepped up. Every time Lenin left the apartment he was in danger of leading the police to ‘wanted’ comrades or undercover operatives who were still on the run. Len
in and Nadya went underground – first in a series of safe houses in St Petersburg, and then in various small villages in Finland – on false papers. He was, successively, Dr Weber, Irvin Weyhoff and Vladimir Karpov.

  It was under the alias Karpov that Lenin met Stalin for the first time, on 25 December 1905. Both attended the First All Russian Bolshevik Conference in the Finnish city Tammefors (Tampere). Stalin, a Caucasian representative, was eager to grease up to Lenin and showed the ‘old man’ articles he had written in underground journals which supported him against the Mensheviks. Stalin was expecting to meet someone more obviously charismatic: ‘I was hoping to see the mountain eagle of our Party. I was hoping to see a great man, great not only politically but, if you will, physically, for in my imagination I had pictured Lenin as a giant, stately and imposing. What, then, was my disappointment to see a most ordinary-looking man, below average in height, in no way, in literally no way, distinguishable from ordinary mortals. It is the accepted thing for “a great man” to come late to meetings so that the assemblage may await his appearance with bated breath; and then, just before the great man enters, the warning goes up “Hush!” “Silence!” “He’s coming!” This rite does not seem to me superfluous because it creates an impression, inspires respect. What then was my disappointment to learn that Lenin had arrived at the conference before the delegates, had settled himself somewhere in a corner and was unassumingly carrying on a conversation, a most ordinary conversation, with the most ordinary delegate…I will not conceal that at that time this seemed to me to be rather a violation of certain essential rules.’1

  Lenin later saw the point of Stalin and would refer to him as ‘the wonderful Georgian’. But the younger man (by seven and a half years) made almost no impression on him at their first meeting. Stalin, at this time, was just one of the underground aliases of the future Soviet dictator – others included Soso, Koba and Ivanovich. When they next met eighteen months later Lenin couldn’t remember any of them.*1

  There was another important first meeting while Lenin was living underground. Lenin was difficult and domineering and always knew he was right. But he also knew how to lay on the charm and flatter others when it mattered. He had been corresponding with Maxim Gorky for several years. The author and playwright had been a generous donor to the Social Democrats and had some rich contacts who possessed fat chequebooks. They had a complex relationship which itself went through revolutionary changes. For years Lenin was the supplicant and needed Gorky’s financial help and his political support: Gorky’s fame as a writer and his reputation on the Left were immense. Over the years they became genuine friends, though Gorky maintained that he liked Lenin as a person but loathed him as a politician. After Lenin seized power, Gorky became a critic of the Bolsheviks, but a frequent supplicant of Lenin personally; he used to plead on behalf of other writers, artists and academics who had fallen foul of the Soviet authorities. In the week Lenin returned to Russia at the end of 1905 Gorky and his long-time mistress, the actress Maria Andreyeva, launched the first legal Bolshevik newspaper, Novaya Zhizn (New Life). Lenin wrote regularly for the paper, and some of his best journalism was produced in these few months, including a scathing attack on ‘Nicholasha’s cosmetic reforms’, a call to continue the Revolution through insurrection and a piece on why the Bolsheviks should boycott the ‘undemocratic Duma’.2

  He occasionally turned up in St Petersburg incognito. It was six months before he spoke in public inside Russia at anything apart from secret Bolshevik Party meetings. When he did, on 9 May 1906, it was in front of the biggest audience of his life so far. Giving his name as ‘Karpov’, he appeared before 3,000 people at the St Petersburg palace of Countess Sofia Panina, the philanthropist and hostess of a well-known ‘progressive’ salon of mainly liberals and moderate socialists. He was ‘very excited and nervous’ when he began, according to Nadya. ‘For a minute he stood silent, terribly pale, and it seemed as though all the blood had flowed to his heart.’ But then he launched into a fiery address attacking the ‘bourgeois Kadets’ (a coalition of centre-right Constitutional Democrats) and the ‘bogus Duma’ and soon ‘the excitement of the speaker was being communicated to the audience’. While he was speaking, the rumour spread throughout the Countess’s ballroom that ‘Karpov’ was in fact the Bolshevik Lenin and he was given rapturous applause. Immediately afterwards, concerned for his security, he left the city and headed back to Finland.3

  He made a few visits, in disguise, to see his mother, who was living in a small village outside St Petersburg. In late July he and Nadya spent a long weekend with Maria Alexandrovna and his sisters at Sablino, near the city, where there was a lake and a dramatic waterfall. ‘Volodya went swimming, and we sat beneath an arbour and talked and ate,’ said Anna. ‘They had intended to spend the week with us but he found the newspapers so interesting on Monday morning that he and Nadya packed and left.’

  * * *

  The Tsar never intended to keep commitments which he said ‘have been forced on me by duress’. Strikes and demonstrations continued – as did assassinations of officials by, mainly, Socialist Revolutionaries. There were around 2,500 of them in the two years after the October Manifesto.*2 The regime used extreme measures to suppress unrest at a time when some civil servants were claiming that the government was introducing something akin to parliamentary order. In the seven months between the Manifesto and the opening of the Duma more than 15,000 people were killed, at least 70,000 were arrested and 45,000 exiled to Siberia, though official figures put the number of dead at around 1,200. ‘Terror must be met by terror,’ said Nicholas.

  The Tsar fired Count Witte, the liberal Prime Minister who had persuaded him to sign the October Manifesto, blaming him for the continued unrest. He was replaced by Pyotr Stolypin, a clever and able administrator, who combined the first serious economic reforms in generations – he introduced radical plans to extend private ownership of land among peasants – with stern police measures against ‘subversive troublemakers’. Thousands were hanged by ‘Stolypin’s necktie’, as it became known, after ‘field courts’ held in the open air condemned them to death without any proper trial. In the middle of 1906, eighty-two of Russia’s eighty-seven provinces were under martial law. Uncounted numbers were taken away to exile by ‘Stolypin’s wagons’. Whole villages were razed to the ground – ‘the Tsar went to war against his people’, as the spurned Witte put it. ‘It’s a total Bacchanal, of arrests, searches, raids,’ said Stalin, who knew about such things. The Interior Minister, Pyotr Durnovo, told provincial governors: ‘Arrests alone will not achieve our goals. It is impossible to judge hundreds of thousands of people. I propose to shoot the rioters and in case of resistance to burn down their homes.’

  Nationalist risings in the Baltic republics, the Caucasus and Ukraine were brutally put down. There were many examples of the Tsar encouraging bloody reprisals from which even his military shied away. General Vladimir Bekman reported on 14 December 1905 that he had decided against burning the town of Tukums, in Latvia, to the ground, as other Baltic areas had been. The inhabitants had assured him they had driven the rebels out and would hand over all the weapons they possessed to him. He was short of ammunition in any case and had ordered his men not to attack. The residents had greeted his men with the usual ‘bread and salt welcome’, and turned over sixty-two rifles and forty-five revolvers. The Tsar read the report, underlined the general’s explanations and wrote in the margin: ‘This is no reason. The city should have been destroyed.’ When the Tsar was given further reports about the punitive expeditions against rebellious peasants that winter, he told courtiers ‘Cela me chatouille’ (this tickles me).*3, 4

  Years before Mussolini and Hitler’s fascist thugs fought street battles with opponents after the First World War, Nicholas encouraged extremist nationalist groups to support him against democrats, liberals and socialists. He was an enthusiastic backer of the newly formed Union of the Russian People, which rallied to the support of ‘Tsar, Faith and Fatherla
nd’. He invited its leaders to his palace at Tsarskoe Selo, wore its insignia on his uniforms and subsidised its newspapers. By 1906 it had 300,000 members, nearly a hundred times more than Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

  If at this stage Nicholas had any ideology it was anti-Semitism, a common, besetting sin throughout the Russian empire. But the Tsar’s hatred of Jews was visceral, imperial in its scope and reach – from casual anti-Semitic remarks at dinner to encouraging full-scale pogroms. It ran far deeper than in a typical European aristocrat of the time and he deliberately used anti-Semitism as a way of uniting ‘loyalists’ to the throne. He thought it hilarious, as he told his mother, when ‘a courtier amused us with funny Jewish stories – wonderfully good at imitating Jews and even his face suddenly looks Jewish’. He defined a newspaper as ‘a place where some Jew or other sits…making it his business to stir up the passions of people against each other’.