Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  In 1905–06 more than 3,000 Jews were slaughtered in pogroms from the Baltic states to the Crimea. Most were perpetrated by extremists calling themselves the Black Hundreds, the armed wing of the Union of the Russian People. The authorities didn’t organise the pogroms, but they did nothing to stop them. The worst was at Odessa in the days immediately after the October Manifesto. More than 800 Jews were killed, 5,000 injured and 100,000 were made homeless when Jewish homes were burned down.*4 A few days after the slaughter in Odessa the Tsar sent a telegram to Alexander Dubrovin, the leader of the Black Hundreds. ‘May you be my trusty support, serving for all and in everything as an example of lawfulness and a face of civic order.’

  As is common among anti-Semites, he blamed the pogroms on the Jews themselves. He wrote to his mother on 27 October: ‘The situation in Russia is still very difficult and serious. In the first days that followed the Manifesto the bad elements in the population raised their heads very high but quickly a strong reaction set in and the whole mass of the loyal people made themselves known. The result was understandable and what one might expect here. The people are indignant at the insolence and audacity of the revolutionaries and socialists and since nine-tenths of them are Jews all the hatred is directed against them. Hence the pogroms against the Jews. It is astonishing with what unity and how simultaneously these occurred in all cities in Russia and Siberia. In England, naturally, they write that these disorders were organised by the police. But this is…a fable. Not only have the Jews suffered – but also engineers, lawyers and all other kinds of bad people. What has happened in Tomsk, Simferopol, Tver and Odessa clearly shows what can happen in a storm of fury – the houses of the revolutionaries were surrounded and set on fire. Those who were not burned to death were killed as they emerged. I have received very touching telegrams from everywhere with thanks for the gift of liberty but also with clear declarations that they wish autocracy to be preserved.’5

  The Black Hundreds often turned their attention on socialists. Many were beaten up in street brawls similar to those launched by the Nazi Brown Shirts during the 1920s.

  As usual, where the violence was, Lenin wasn’t. Once again his personal bravery was put in question. In his circle of confidants and the Party leadership it was axiomatic that he was too important to the Revolution to take risks with his safety. But others were more critical. ‘He would never have gone onto the streets to fight on the barricades, or stand in the line of fire,’ remarked Valentinov. ‘Not he but other, humbler people were to do that…Lenin ran headlong from émigré meetings which seemed likely to end in a scuffle. His role was to “get away while the going was good” – to use his own words – meaning from any threat of danger. During his stay in Petersburg in 1905–06 he so exaggerated the danger to himself and went to such extremes in his anxiety for self-preservation that one was bound to ask whether he was not simply a man without personal courage.’

  Tatiana Alexinsky, wife of one of the most senior Bolsheviks in St Petersburg, was deeply disappointed when she saw him flee from a peaceful demonstration that was suddenly attacked by Tsarist cavalry and a group of Black Hundreds in the suburbs of the city in the summer of 1906. ‘I’d rather not recall the encounter. Lenin had seemed to me a legendary hero…assumed he was a revolutionary without fear or blemish. Not when we saw him up close…It wasn’t his appearance that made a disagreeable impression on me…but his behaviour at the demonstration. When someone in the crowd, spotting some cavalry, shouted “Cossacks!” Lenin was the first to run. He jumped over a barrier. His bowler hat fell off, revealing his bare skull perspiring and glistening. He fell, got up again and continued to run away. I had a peculiar sensation. I realised there was nothing else for any of us to do…but still, he was the leader…’6

  *1 Nadya loathed Stalin from very early on and told Lenin so, urging him not to trust the Georgian. Occasionally she would share her feelings with other comrades, though she naturally grew more circumspect the higher he rose in the Party and the more influence he gained with Lenin. She did once complain to a trusted emigrant, the writer Viktor Shklovsky, about Stalin’s coarseness and that it seemed to her that some senior Bolsheviks were selected ‘at random…there are undesirables – like Stalin who does us dirt [will betray us]’.

  *2 Lenin didn’t believe in individual murders and targeting particular officials of the regime for assassination; he argued they were pointless forms of ‘single combat’. He didn’t argue on principle but on practical results: ‘Do they help attain our desired ends – or on the contrary divert from them?’ The Bolsheviks were responsible for very few assassinations, though some officials were killed at demonstrations that turned into riots.

  *3 Despite the general brutality of ‘these years of reaction’, some prisoners were remarkably well treated. The most famous of socialist prisoners was Trotsky, arrested after the St Petersburg Soviet was broken up in early 1906. He was incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress, by repute the most rigorous dungeon in the Russian empire. He recalled later that conditions were lenient. ‘The cells were not locked during the day and we could take our walks all together. For hours at a time we would go into raptures over playing leapfrog. My wife came to visit me twice a week. The officials on duty winked at our exchange of letters and manuscripts. One of them, a middle-aged man, was particularly well disposed towards us. At his request I presented him with a copy of my book and my photograph with an inscription – “My daughters are all college students,” he whispered to me when I gave it to him. I met him later [after the Revolution].’ Trotsky managed to write most of his history of the St Petersburg Soviet in jail, and when he was released he ‘felt a tinge of regret’.

  *4 An inquiry ordered by Witte, in one of his last acts as Prime Minister, established that the police armed and supplied the crowd with weapons and vodka and helped Black Hundred thugs to locate Jews. A police HQ printing press produced anti-Semitic leaflets. ‘The Jews are trying to destroy Russia…kill them. Tear them to pieces.’ When Witte called for the police chief responsible to be charged and tried the Tsar intervened to protect him.

  19

  ‘Expropriate the Expropriators’

  ‘Yes we steal…But we steal what has already been stolen.’

  Lenin, London, May 1907

  Lenin: ‘In order to take power every means must be used.’

  Angelica Balabanova: ‘What…even dishonest ones?’

  Lenin: ‘Everything that is done in the interests of the proletarian cause is honest.’

  Conversation in London, May 1907

  While some critics were accusing Lenin of cowardice in the face of the enemy, other revolutionaries were branding him a ‘robber’, little better than a ‘common thief’ and a ‘gangster’. If there were few serious political differences or issues of principle between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, there were plenty of sharp disagreements about tactics.

  The Party couldn’t rely entirely on donations from millionaire magnates – Russian oligarchs of a bygone age – to finance the Revolution. Money had to be found in other ways and Lenin built what was in effect a criminal gang to steal on the Party’s behalf, perhaps an original model of the Russian mafia. He didn’t directly order any of the raids himself and he called them, in an echo of Marx, ‘expropriations’, but whatever the euphemism he chose, this was banditry. Lenin appointed Leonid Krasin head of the ‘technical committee’. Krasin chose as his chief ‘fixer’ and right-hand man Stalin, who planned and took part in a number of ‘expros’, all within the Russian empire. The various gangs they employed robbed banks, stole a large sum in cash and gold from the safe aboard the steamship Nicholas I moored in Baku harbour and attacked post offices and state railway ticket offices. Krasin planned a major operation to print counterfeit money on a clandestine press but he couldn’t find a skilful enough forger.

  Martov, Plekhanov and the Mensheviks were appalled and didn’t want ‘to be connected to criminal acts – for obvious moral reasons and practical ones; t
hey could have serious repercussions on any of us. We don’t want to be regarded as thieves.’ Lenin was contemptuous. He told Martov, ‘you don’t make revolution wearing kid gloves’.1

  The dispute reached a head at the Fifth Party Congress in the spring of 1907, again in London. Originally it was to be held in Copenhagen, but the Danish authorities, after initially permitting it, changed their minds and banned the Congress from Denmark when most of the 303 delegates had already arrived. It was hastily moved to London and was fractious from the start. ‘The meetings were protracted, stormy, crowded and chaotic,’ said Trotsky. Angelica Balabanova, an émigré whom Lenin regarded highly and would later make first Secretary of the Communist International (Comintern), found the whole atmosphere ghastly and was depressed ‘by the all-absorbing, almost fanatical spirit of factionalism’.

  Lenin had invited Gorky to attend as a special guest and when they met the day before the first session on 1 May he told the author: ‘Oh, I am so glad that you have come. I have heard you enjoy a good scrap. We will have a fine old scuffle here.’ He was right.*1 The debates were as bitter and full of vitriol as they had been at the London Congress four years earlier when the Party split had emerged. Several times the proceedings were adjourned when fist fights looked like beginning between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Many delegates just walked out and left, as did Gorky after a few days, complaining that ‘the festive mood at the start soured quickly…the fury of the disputes chilled my enthusiasm’.

  The most divisive issue was Lenin’s ‘expropriations’, which Martov called ‘Vladimir Ilyich’s thefts…designed to raise money solely for the Bolsheviks for use against us’. Lenin was derisive in reply: ‘When I see Social Democrats proudly and smugly declaring “We are not anarchists; we are not thieves and robbers, we are above all that” I ask myself what these people are really saying?’ He challenged them with the question of what they were prepared to do for the Revolution. ‘Partisan groups and “combat groups” should be free to act…but with the least harm to the safety of ordinary citizens, and with the maximum harm to the personal safety of spies, the police, troops, the navy and so on and so forth…the authorities generally.’

  He came up with convoluted and contradictory arguments to justify the robberies. At one point Maxim Litvinov, among the most intelligent of the early Bolsheviks and invariably a trusted supporter of Lenin, asked him, ‘Starik, you always preach that it’s right to “expropriate the expropriators”. Tell me, if you met Rothschild on the street carrying a heavy purse, would you rob him yourself, threaten him with a revolver and take his purse?’ Lenin laughed and replied, ‘I don’t think so. But if we come to power I would have no hesitation in ordering the nationalisation of Rothschild’s banks and his property. But this has to be done legally…by the victorious people and their government. As long as the state exists – the proletarian state included – the rule of law is necessary or else everything will crumble and the most primitive instincts will be let loose.’ Prophetic words.2

  —

  Outside the meeting hall, the Congress received the kind of attention from Fleet Street’s finest that the Russian revolutionaries had never encountered before. The Daily Mail labelled the emigrants ‘the alien menace…a nameless army from Russia’ and called the gathering ‘the Congress of Undesirables’. It calculated, more or less accurately as it turned out, that between them the delegates had served well over 650 years in jail, labour camps and Siberian exile. The Daily Mirror described the arrival of one delegate as ‘a Princess…who has assassinated several provincial governors in Russia and always carries a bomb in her muff’. Photographers were keen to take pictures, and delegates turned up in fake beards and other disguises or covered their faces. A reporter who naïvely asked why they did this was told by a Bolshevik that ‘the Russian police have long ears and, you see, at some point we will be going back to Russia’. Nevertheless the snappers continued to arrive every day for nearly two weeks of the Congress, most of which was held at the Anarchist Club in Jubilee Street.*2

  The main problem was to find accommodation for so many delegates at the last minute. Several were forced to stay at a doss house in the East End, sharing a cramped hovel with London’s drunks, vagrants, criminals and down and outs. Litvinov and Stalin stayed there for two days – at sixpence a night, in a cubicle with a mattress on hard boards – until they found somewhere more salubrious. It was an experience neither forgot.

  The move to London had cost so much that the Congress almost had to be wound up early for lack of money. Some wealthy Social Democrat sympathisers suggested that the Party leaders should attend a fundraising dinner for philanthropic industrialists and bankers at the Chelsea studio of the then fashionable society portrait painter Felix Moscheles. Lenin loathed the very idea of the evening, which took place on Sunday 13 May. He described it later as ‘almost unendurable…a stupid affair’. Neither he nor Gorky had evening clothes, but at least they managed to look relatively smart. Plekhanov, as usual, was impeccably well dressed. Lenin sat through the dinner with millionaires either side of him, barely concealing his ill grace and contempt. His English was rusty and according to audience members he was sometimes difficult to understand. So he spoke in Russian. He told the ‘bourgeois and capitalists’ who had gathered there that they were his ‘class enemies’, but nevertheless they should welcome and ‘support our revolution in Russia against Tsarism’ out of self-interest as well as altruism – ‘you will be able to export more goods to a more cultured and free Russia’.

  Most of the other Bolsheviks there, some of them in correct evening attire, struck the well-heeled diners as ‘wild beasts in a zoological garden’. But one of them came away deeply impressed by Lenin. Constance Garnett, the brilliant and well-connected translator of Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky among others, recalled later that she thought the Bolshevik leader was clearly ‘a man of tremendously strong character’, though the other Russians at the dinner and the Congress ‘were a set of self-righteous crooks’. The dinner raised barely a penny and Lenin vowed that he would never humiliate himself again by pleading for money from capitalists – a pledge he would break only a very few times over the following years.*3

  The failure of the dinner meant Lenin had to find money from somewhere to settle the mounting costs of the Congress and to raise the cash to get the delegates home. The German SDLP gave £300, but a generous benefactor unexpectedly turned up. The German-born American soap magnate and philanthropist Joseph Fels, who had lived in London for much of the 1900s, offered to help but wanted to see the Congress in action before he would hand over the large amount of £1,700 to bail out the RSDLP. He wasn’t by any means a socialist, but he was highly impressed by seeing Lenin speak – ‘this man has a future in Russia,’ he declared – and he agreed to loan the Party the money. Lenin gave Fels a personal guarantee it would be paid back.*4

  —

  The most dramatic of the ‘expropriations’ was masterminded by Stalin in July 1907, just a few weeks after the London Congress expressly prohibited them and Lenin pledged that he would no longer sanction them. A huge shipment of cash in a bank stagecoach was held up in broad daylight in the centre of the Georgian capital Tiflis (now Tbilisi). The plan was Stalin’s and he was watching in the background while his team, led by the bandit Bolshevik Kamo (real name Simon Arshaki Ter-Petrosian), seized money destined for Russia’s State Bank in the centre of the city. Fifty innocent bystanders were killed in bomb blasts and from gunshot wounds, and around fifty more were seriously injured. It was by far the biggest of the Bolshevik-inspired thefts and caused a huge stir internationally and within revolutionary parties throughout Europe, but it was one of the least lucrative. In the long run the cost was high. The State Bank was never entirely sure how much the robbers got away with. It thought anything between 250,000 and 340,000 rubles – an enormous sum at the time: the latter estimate was worth something over US$4 million at 2016 values. The problem was that most of the cash was in large-denomi
nation notes, which were either marked or their serial numbers were known to the police.

  Lenin publicly distanced himself from the crime. But privately he had known all about it before it happened and had approved it. As with the proceeds from other robberies, Stalin handed some of the money personally to Lenin – Kamo presented him with another cache in Geneva – and it was the Bolshevik leader who proposed the idea of using loyal Party members to cash the banknotes in various European cities. The plan backfired spectacularly: the notes were traced and within a few weeks a dozen or so Party activists were arrested, including Kamo.*5

  Less bloody but equally squalid and morally dubious was the Schmidt Affair. Lenin came up with a plan to swindle two teenage girls out of their inheritance – and, quite possibly, to break their hearts in the process. It is a story that shows Lenin at his most unscrupulous. While in personal financial affairs he was a pillar of rectitude and not at all greedy, in politics he was prepared to lie, steal, cheat and kill for money to further Bolshevik interests. ‘Everything that is done in the interests of the proletarian cause is honest,’ he told Angelica Balabanova.

  Lenin’s most generous financial backer, the millionaire Savva Morozov, had had a long history of depressive illness and killed himself in May 1905. Although he had left the RSDLP a sizeable legacy in his will, Lenin had his eye on a still bigger share of the magnate’s fortune. Morozov bequeathed much of his money to his nephew, Nikolai Pavlovich Schmidt, whose family owned a profitable piano factory in Moscow. Schmidt also possessed plenty of money of his own: his father had died in 1902 and he came of age, and in control of his inheritance, in 1904 when he was twenty-one. He was also a supporter of the Social Democrats, though not specifically the Bolsheviks.