When war did begin he miscalculated again. He was sure that the German Social Democratic Party – the oldest in the world and the biggest, the party which most Marxists believed would spark and lead the world revolution – would vote against the war in the German parliament. ‘They cannot support an imperialist and dynastic war…they are not such rascals,’ he told Zinoviev a few days before the German socialists, carried on a wave of nationalism, voted to grant the government as much money as it needed to pursue the conflict. The equivalent parties in France, Austria and Britain did the same and Lenin was furious. ‘They have betrayed socialism…From this moment I cannot call myself a Social Democrat. I am a Communist.’*1
—
Early in the afternoon of 7 August 1914, six days after the Austrians declared war on Russia, the police arrived to search Lenin’s house in Poronin. A hysterical ‘spy mania’ swept through Galicia, even in the remote region of the Tatra foothills where Lenin, Nadya and the Zinovievs had removed themselves for the summer. Previously they had been popular among the locals. Now the neighbourhood Catholic priest stirred up the villagers to be wary of the ‘Muscovite gang’ amid them. In one sermon he warned that the Russians might try to poison the water wells. One villager told a gendarme that he had spotted Lenin seated on the top of a hill ‘writing in a notebook – just like a spy would be doing’. The servant girl Nadya had hired to clean the house had been gossiping about them in the village. She was fired and given a train ticket to go and see her family in Kraków.
Lenin was far too complacent about the threat of arrest. He had not even bothered trying to hide an old Browning pistol – unloaded – before the police went through his possessions. They also found notebooks full of densely written statistics and figures, research material for an article he was writing about grain production in Russian farming communes. The police confiscated them as suspected evidence of espionage. Lenin was told to appear early the next morning at the police station in the nearby town, Nowy Targ, ‘for questioning’. Over the course of the day he, Nadya, Zinoviev and his friends saw that the danger was potentially serious. He found a local doctor who was prepared to stand bail for him. He wrote to government officials and the chief of police in Kraków, using his real name, which he did very rarely. He made plain that he was a bitter enemy of the Russian regime. ‘The local police at Nowy Targ suspect me of espionage. I lived in Kraków for two years…I personally gave information about myself to the commissary of police in Zwierzyniec…[the area where he lived]. I am an emigrant, a Social Democrat. Please wire Poronin and Mayor of Nowy Targ to avoid misunderstandings…V. I. Ulyanov.’
When he arrived the next morning at the Nowy Targ police headquarters there was a menacing-looking crowd outside to catch a glimpse of ‘the Russian spy’.
He was put in jail with an assortment of petty thieves, drunks and vagrants. This was the fourth time he had been in prison so the conditions did not disturb him. He quickly impressed the other inmates. Though he couldn’t speak Polish and wasn’t qualified as a lawyer in the Habsburg lands, he tried to help them with their cases – he was ‘popular, and a real bull of a fellow’, one of his cellmates recalled later.
There were increased demands for his release, including requests to the local police from officials in Kraków. But the Nowy Targ gendarmes resisted the pressure and Lenin languished in a provincial jail.*2
Zinoviev and other Bolshevik activists in Galicia advised Nadya to seek the help of Victor Adler, the veteran leader of the Austrian socialists, whom Lenin had met a few times at various conferences over the years, and the distinguished Social Democrat member of the Austrian parliament, Hermann Diamand. Adler, a venerable figure on the European Left, had profound disagreements with Lenin, who was far too extreme for his liking; but he went to see the Interior Minister in Vienna, Karl, Baron Heinold, and argued that releasing the Bolshevik leader would be in Austria’s best interests. ‘Ulyanov is no ordinary Russian citizen and certainly no spy. He is a determined opponent of Tsarism and a man who has devoted his whole life to the struggle against the Russian government. If he appeared in Russia they would arrest him straight away.’ ‘But are you sure,’ the minister asked, ‘that this Ulyanov is an enemy of the Tsarist government?’ ‘Oh yes,’ Adler replied, ‘a more implacable enemy even than your Excellency. He was an enemy of Tsarism when Your Excellency was its friend. He is its enemy now. And he will be its enemy when Your Excellency may again be its friend.’
Lenin was released on 19 August after eleven days in jail and allowed to pass through Austria to Switzerland. He and Nadya, with an increasingly frail Elizaveta Krupskaya, decided against settling in Geneva for a third time and opted for Berne. As usual, within days he was calling his new base ‘a hole’. He told his sister Maria, ‘It’s a dull little town, but better than Galicia and the best there is now. Never mind, we’ll adjust ourselves.’3
* * *
To the Tsar, and especially to the Empress, 1913 seemed the high point of their reign. It was the 300th anniversary of the rule of the Romanov dynasty and eager crowds greeted the royal couple as they toured the country. The Jubilee celebrations fooled those willing to be fooled about the permanence of the monarchy and the popularity of the ruler: ‘Now you can see for yourself what cowards those state ministers are…[who] constantly frighten the Emperor with threats of revolution and here, you can see for yourself, we need merely to show ourselves and at once their hearts are ours,’ Empress Alexandra wrote to one of her ladies-in-waiting towards the end of the year. The Tsar had been told that in fact the crowds were nowhere near as big or as enthusiastic as the court had expected; the Okhrana reported many disturbances and anti-regime outbursts at Jubilee events. But the Emperor and his court believed the anniversary had shored up the monarchy.*3
Foreigners were equally convinced. A note from the British Foreign Office to the Cabinet in the summer of 1913 said confidently that ‘nothing could exceed the affection and devotion to the person of the Emperor displayed by the population wherever His Majesty appeared. There is no doubt that in this strong attachment of the masses to the person of the Emperor lies the great strength of the Russian autocracy.’ In February 1913 The Times of London had carried a special edition on the anniversary in Russia and predicted that ‘no hope seems too confident or too bright’ for Tsar Nicholas and his country.4
Just when he imagined he was at the zenith of his dynasty’s power, the Emperor made the most catastrophic of all his poor decisions – the mistake that as much as anything cost him his throne and his life. The war was a disaster for Russia far greater than for any of the other combatant nations. As Lenin acknowledged, if not for the war, ‘Russia might have gone on living for years, maybe decades, without a revolution against the capitalists.’
Even some historians who have little sympathy with Tsar Nicholas have argued there was little he could have done to prevent war in August 1914, that the rush towards a conflict had a momentum of its own. This seems simplistic. Surely the point of an autocracy – or at least one that functions properly – is that the autocrat is responsible, at the time and in history, for his decisions. Nicholas had an alternative. He could have decided not to go to war, saved his life and his country from a century-long catastrophe.
Many of his advisers warned against war. Count Sergei Witte told the Tsar that Russia ‘cannot afford to risk defeat because the army is the mainstay of the regime and may well be needed to preserve order at home’. He was thanked – and told to stop being so negative. Witte then told Maurice Paléologue, the French Ambassador to Russia, that a war between Russia and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey would be ‘madness for us…it can only have disastrous results’.
In February 1914 the Interior Minister, Pyotr Durnovo, an extreme right-winger who as Police Director had ordered the destruction of entire villages after the 1905 Revolution, wrote a prescient memorandum to Nicholas warning that Russia and the monarchy were too weak to withstand a long war of attritio
n that would be likely in a conflict with Germany. He predicted with remarkable accuracy what was likely to happen: ‘The trouble will start with the blaming of the government for all disasters. In the legislative institutions a bitter campaign against the government will begin, followed by revolutionary agitation throughout the country, with socialist slogans, capable of arousing and rallying the masses, beginning with the division of the land and succeeded by a division of all valuables and property. The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of the primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralised to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the intellectual opposition parties, lacking real authority in the eyes of the people, will be powerless to stem the popular tide, aroused by themselves, and Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy; the issue of which cannot be foreseen.’ The Tsar’s favourite mystic, Grigory Rasputin, whom the Tsarina trusted more than anyone as ‘Our Friend, sent from God’, warned against war and predicted that if a conflict with Germany broke out, ‘it will be the end for all of you’. Even he was ignored.5
—
In Russia the war started on a wave of patriotic fervour, as it did in all the belligerent countries. The Tsar was wildly cheered from the Winter Palace balcony when the declaration of war was made in St Petersburg, whose name had been changed to Petrograd to make it sound less German. The pan-Slavic nationalists and jingoistic press had for long been clamouring for battle. They were convinced it would be short, ‘over by Christmas’, and end in victory – with Russia in control of the Balkans and having achieved the long-cherished Romanov ambition of seizing Constantinople from the Turks.
The opening offensives went well for the Russians. They quickly took swathes of Galicia from Austria-Hungary. But the moment they came up against the well-trained, professional German army sent to reinforce its Austrian ally they were entirely outmatched and suffered defeat after defeat. They lost an entire army corps at the Masurian Lakes, more than 120,000 men killed and wounded. The Battle of Tannenberg, just four weeks after the start of the war, was one of the worst ever defeats in Russian history: the entire 2nd Army was wiped out, with casualties of over 160,000. The winning general, Paul von Hindenburg, said later that ‘we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting Russian waves. Imagination may try to reconstruct the figure of their losses, but an accurate calculation will remain for ever a vain thing.’ The defeated general, Alexander Samsonov, went into the woods behind his command post and shot himself. Within three months the Russians had lost any real chance of waging an offensive war and were fighting to survive.6
Lenin was not a military man, but he acutely described the Russian army as ‘a beautiful apple rotten at the core’. In the nineteenth century the Russian empire had expanded eastwards and southwards in the Caucasus; it had performed well in the Balkan Wars in the 1900s, less so against the British and French in the Crimea and poorly against the Japanese in 1904–05. Its tactics had barely changed since the time of Napoleon; the army was entirely unprepared for a war of attrition.
Russian casualties were staggering, far greater than anyone expected, and there were so few reserves that the army was soon forced to send untrained men from the second levy to the Front. By the end of October 1914 Russia had lost 1.2 million men, killed, wounded or missing, a high proportion of whom were trained junior officers and professional NCOs. The commander of the 8th Army, General Alexei Brusilov, who would later become supreme army commander, said that the Battle of Przemys´l that October was the last in which he commanded ‘an army that had been properly taught and trained before the war…After hardly three months of war the greater part of our regular, professional officers and trained men had vanished, leaving only skeleton forces which had to be hastily filled with men wretchedly instructed who were sent to me from the depots…From that period onwards, the professional character of our forces disappeared…many could not even load their rifles. Such people could not really be considered soldiers at all…the regular army vanished, replaced by an army of ignoramuses.’ The reserves in the rear were the men who ‘were the breeding ground for mass desertion, discontent and finally mutiny which created the Revolution’. These were the men who would become Lenin’s willing accomplices.7
The army ran out of equipment quicker than it ran out of soldiers. There were 6.5 million men under arms in October 1914, and only 4.6 million rifles issued. When war broke out the entire Russian army had just 679 motor cars and two motorised ambulances. Equipment, including heavy artillery, senior officers and wounded soldiers, was moved around from the railheads on peasant carts over muddy roads. The primitive state of communications was at the root of the military disaster. Along Russia’s long Western Front there were just twenty-five telephones and a few Morse coding machines, and telegraph communications constantly broke down. Commanders and their aides had to move around on horseback to find out what was happening at the Front – rather as in the days described in War and Peace.
Industry was not producing enough ammunition, including shells for heavy guns, partly because the Tsar and the court nobility objected to business people making too much money from war. The generals thought there would be enough for the short war they were assured of and made no contingencies for weapons manufacture after a few months of combat. Many battalions had no ammunition after just a few weeks of fighting. By mid-October 1914 some soldiers were ordered to limit themselves to firing just ten rounds a day during battle. In many cases, when German heavy artillery bombarded their trenches Russian gunners were forbidden to return fire. At the Battle of Przemys´l Russian troops charged the Germans practically with their bare hands, and when they were mown down unarmed troops in the rear would fill the gaps, with orders to take the weapons from the fallen men. ‘They were flung into the firing line armed with a bayonet in one hand and a kind of bomb/grenade in the other.’
Morale sank quickly, which the Bolsheviks used to their advantage. Brusilov said that after the professional soldiers had been wiped out in the first weeks of the conflict, most of his reserves could see little further than their village or province and had no idea why the war was being fought. ‘The new drafts arriving from the interior of Russia had not the slightest notion of what the war had to do with them,’ he said.8
Vast numbers of Russian soldiers preferred being taken prisoner to fighting. In the first year of the war four and a half times as many Russians were captured than were killed in action – 1.2 million to 270,000. In the British army that number was reversed, with the dead outnumbering POWs by around five to one. As the war progressed Russian prisoners outnumbered the dead by sixteen to one. ‘Threatening signs of growing demoralisation are becoming more and more evident,’ General Alexei Polivanov, Minister of War, told the Tsar a little more than six months into the conflict. Some of the top commanders knew that a disaster was in the making, but could do nothing about it.9
In Swiss exile, Lenin saw the unpopularity of the war as a great opportunity to spread Bolshevism in the Russian army. But he was fighting battles of his own. For him the war that really mattered was not in the trenches and battlefields of Galicia and western Ukraine. He was more or less indifferent to the bloody conflicts in which millions of young working-class men were being butchered. Lenin’s war was for the leadership of the revolutionary movement.
*1 And he meant it. One of the first things Lenin did when he seized power in Russia was to change the name of the RSDLP to the Communist Party.
*2 The main support for him locally came from Galician Jews, who saw in Lenin an important enemy of the Tsar. He had become friendly with the owner of the general store, Mendel Singer, who raised money for his legal defence. They retained the services of a respected local attorney, Dr Bernard Cohen, and gave the money to Nadya. In spring 1918 Singer was surprised to receive a letter with a Moscow postmark. ‘Please accept my apologies for leaving wit
hout paying you in 1914, owing to certain difficult circumstances. The money is enclosed.’ In 1920 Lenin sent a couple of Soviet officials to locate documents and books he and Nadya had left in Poland. They found a stash of Lenin’s papers carefully stored away in Singer’s attic.
*3 The celebrations required very heavy policing and the army provided most of it. In some places the royal couple were due to tour, crowds were often banned in case they turned into anti-government demonstrations. In St Petersburg there were soldiers everywhere. ‘The city was literally turned into an armed camp,’ said the Chief of the Corps of Gendarmes. The autocrat was unsafe in his own capital.
25
In the Wilderness
‘How laughable and disappointing. Look at my fate. One fighting campaign after another – against political stupidities, banalities, opportunism…It has been like this since 1893. And so has the hatred of the vulgar people in payment. But I still would not exchange this fate for “peace” with the philistines and vulgarisers.’
Lenin Page 29