At the Zurich Volkshaus on 22 January 1917 he spoke on the lessons of the 1905 Revolution to a group of Swiss students and young workers. ‘The coming years, precisely because of this predatory war, will lead to popular risings by the working class…and these upheavals will lead to the victory of socialism. We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution. But I can express the confident hope that the youth, which is working so splendidly in the socialist movement, will be fortunate enough not only to fight but to win this revolution.’ He was asked by the young Romanian leftist Valeriu Marcu when he thought that a revolution in Russia might begin. He answered, ‘Perhaps in two, perhaps in five, at the latest in ten years.’ Revolution had been his main thought every day for the last two decades, but when it finally came just a few weeks later, he was totally unprepared for it and as surprised as anyone.
*1 Nadya was negotiating a commission with a publisher to write a popular pedagogical dictionary about child development and teaching methods. But no deal was ever finalised before she and Lenin returned to Russia.
*2 It was the building next door to the boarding house where the playwright Georg Büchner wrote Woyzeck.
*3 The local authorities seemed more concerned with the group of Dadaist poets and artists who had congregated in Zurich during the war. The avant-garde painter and early film-maker Hans Richter said the police believed ‘we were capable of perpetrating some new enormity at any moment to shock the provincial sensibilities of the Swiss. All the quiet and studious Russians were doing, in an unostentatious little way, was planning a world revolution.’
27
Revolution – Part One
‘And over Russia I see a quiet far-spreading fire consume all.’
Alexander Blok (1880–1921)
‘We danced the Last Tango on the rim of trenches filled with forgotten corpses.’
Vasily Shulgin (1878–1976)
In Petrograd, the well-off were partying like there was no tomorrow – which, for so many of them, there wouldn’t be. This was at the tail end of the so-called Silver Age in Russian culture, an extraordinary flowering of art, literature, music, design and science. Amid the raw creative energy of the revolutionary moment writers like Alexander Blok and Nikolai Gumilev wrote their finest poetry, and Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall and Kazimir Malevich were producing remarkable paintings. The great tenor Fyodor Chaliapin was at the height of his powers; Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes amazed audiences throughout Europe. Sergei Rachmaninov, Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev were in varying ways revolutionising music. Russian scientists like the chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev and the pioneer of modern psychological research Ivan Pavlov were winning Nobel Prizes. But the reverse side of the coin was a ‘senseless ennui’, as the writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky put it, and a pervasive air of impending doom. In a famous poem, Anna Akhmatova captured the spirit:
We are all winners, we are all whores
How sad we are together.
The epic, thoughtless scale of the bacchanal, the drinking and promiscuity, went beyond decadence. It was part hysteria, part statement of hopelessness. ‘To what state have the Romanovs brought us? To the fifth act of a tragedy played in a brothel,’ said Merezhkovsky, whose politics were of the Right. His wife Zinaida Gippius, a fine poet, wrote in her diary, ‘Russia is a very large lunatic asylum. If you visit an asylum on an open day you may not realise you are in one. It looks normal enough but the inmates are all mad.’1
Vodka had been banned since the start of the war, though wine and liqueurs were not, which didn’t lead to harmony between the classes.*1 The poor resorted to home-made or black-market hooch to drown their sorrows; the rich binged on vast quantities of wine and champagne. Huge fortunes were gambled away overnight, while food shortages hit average families and inflation rocketed. The price of most foods, including the Russian staple, bread, rose 500 per cent between summer 1914 and January 1917. Inflation in medicines was higher still: a kilo of aspirin cost two rubles in 1914, by the end of 1916 it was 200. The price of quinine rose from four rubles a kilo to 400. Speculation and crude profiteering were rife. There had been long queues outside food shops since the autumn of 1915 and they were getting longer as the war went on. Camps with beds had been established outside some big bakeries and butchers. In January 1917 an average working woman in St Petersburg would put in a ten-hour shift – and spend forty hours a week queuing for food.
Shows of vulgar excess during wartime shocked foreigners and the middle classes at home. Sir Samuel Hoare, the British intelligence chief in Petrograd, grew to hate the Russian upper classes: ‘their wealth and the lavish use they made of it dazzled me after the austere conditions of wartime England’. One guest at an extravagant reception given in Petrograd for a visiting Japanese prince reported ‘too much glare, silver and plate, food and music, too many flowers and servants’. The suicide rate in Russia tripled during the war years – an epidemic that affected mainly young people under twenty-eight.
There was sexual licence on a previously unprecedented scale, and among the rich, divorce – rare until around 1910 – became common. The millionairess Madame Zimin played bridge every Sunday at her palatial Petrograd apartment with her ‘three husbands – two ex and one real’. Alexander Blok chased women frenetically, and his actress wife Lyuba was only slightly less promiscuous. ‘I have had a hundred women – 200 – 300 (maybe more?),’ he wrote. ‘But really only two: one is Lyuba; the other – all the rest.’2
Morale in the army had sunk. Five million soldiers had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner by the end of 1916. They were deserting in droves. The President of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, told friends that ‘the symptoms of the army’s disintegration could already be felt in the second year of the war…Reinforcements from reserve battalions were arriving at the Front with a quarter of the men having deserted…sometimes echelons bound for the Front would halt because they had nothing left but officers and subalterns. Everyone else had scattered.’ Officers overstayed their leave, often by many weeks, and spent their time at the gambling halls and smart restaurants. ‘Hotels thronged with officers who should be at the Front. There is no disgrace in being a shirker or in finding a sinecure at the rear.’3
The soldiers were increasingly weary of the war. This was the recruiting ground for the Bolsheviks and other radical groups. By tradition there had always been a large garrison of troops in Petrograd, principally in case they were needed to quell potential revolt. Senior generals were worried that far too many soldiers were crammed into the city – more than 250,000 of them – and many ‘were looking dangerous and menacing’, as one general said. ‘It is putting kindling wood next to a powder keg.’ He noted that 4,000 men from the crack Preobrazhensky Regiment were shoehorned into barracks built for 1,200. ‘If God does not spare Russia a revolution…it will be started not by the people but the army.’4
—
Predictions of imminent revolution were on the lips of everyone in the intelligentsia, among Russia’s upper classes and the more acute foreigners. ‘More and more every day the signs of trouble multiplied – and yet nothing was done to avoid the inevitable crisis,’ Meriel Buchanan, the daughter of Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador to Russia, confided in her diary. The British Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, formerly Chief of the Imperial General Staff, spent most of January and early February 1917 in Petrograd, Moscow and the Eastern Front as head of an Allied mission looking at how the other Entente powers could aid Russia. He reported to London that ‘opinion prevails…[here] that the Emperor and Empress were a danger to the country and would very likely be assassinated’. His diary entry for 16 February reads: ‘It seems as certain as anything can be that the Emperor and Empress are riding for a fall. Everyone – officers, merchants, ladies – talk openly of the absolute necessity of doing away with them.’*2 There was a more sanguine view from the British Cabinet Minister Lord Milner, visiting Russia separately around the same time. He told h
is ministerial colleagues at the beginning of February that ‘I have formed the opinion that there is a great deal of exaggeration in the talk about revolution’.5
The Okhrana was aware of the public mood and repeatedly sent warnings to the highest levels of the government. A report to the Interior Minister, Alexander Protopopov, in October 1916 stated in stark terms that it wasn’t the revolutionary groups the regime should be worried about: ‘it is the people’. The agent said that ‘now anger is not directed against the government generally but against the Tsar’. The report told the minister, if he didn’t already know, that invariably Alexandra was called ‘the German woman’ and scandalous sex rumours were rife about the relationship between her and Grigory Rasputin ‘which are extremely damaging to the government’. It did not matter whether the stories were true – they certainly were not – but they were widely believed. The country was on a precipice ‘beside which 1905 was child’s play. The alarming mood grows stronger by the day. It penetrates through all levels of the population and there is the very strong threat of great turbulence, brought about…principally by economic factors, hunger and the unequal distribution of food and the monstrous price increases in articles of prime necessity. Until now this discontent has had an economic basis and has not been connected with a political movement. But it only needs something concrete and specific to take on a political expression. If bread becomes more scarce this will touch off the strongest kind of disorders…and endless street riots.’
A few weeks later an Okhrana report from agents who had infiltrated front-line troops and reserves warned army chiefs that if ‘there is a revolution it would be supported by two-thirds of…active soldiers’.
On 5 January 1917 the Petrograd Okhrana was reporting to the Interior Ministry that there were plots to topple the Tsar by members of the royal family and senior centre-right figures in the Duma, who argued that ‘we have to save the monarchy from the monarch’. It said that ‘the mood in the capital had taken on an exceptionally threatening character. The wildest rumours are circulating in society that the government intends to take various reactionary steps…the population openly, on the streets, in the streetcars, in the theatres and in shops, expect some sort of extraordinary action, a crisis, initiated by one side or another.’6
At their decadent, wild parties the intelligentsia knew things could not continue as they had. ‘We know something is coming,’ Zinaida Gippius said. ‘But will it be “the Revolution”, or some monstrosity with an unknown name?’7
—
In Zurich, early on the afternoon of 2 March, Lenin was preparing to return to the Central Library after lunch with Nadya. She was washing the dishes, he was putting on his coat, when they heard footsteps running up the stairs to their room. Breathless, the young Polish Bolshevik Party member Mieczysław Bro´nski blurted out: ‘Haven’t you heard the news? There has been a revolution in Russia.’ Lenin at first didn’t believe him. ‘We’ve heard this sort of rumour before. It might be German propaganda.’ But all three went to the Bellevue Platz on the lake shore, where the newspapers could be read on wall posters. The news was confirmed by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Züricher Post and some foreign papers, though the reports from Petrograd provided few details. Lenin knew that there had been a wholesale mutiny in the army, a Provisional Government had taken power in Russia and there were riots on the streets of the capital and in Moscow. It wasn’t clear at that stage that the Tsar had abdicated. As in 1905 Lenin was entirely unprepared for the news, though he grasped the significance of the events straight away.
The first person he contacted was Inessa, who was staying for a few days at a health resort in Clarens, near Montreux. He wrote to her from a nearby café: ‘We are in a state of great agitation today. I am beside myself that I cannot go to Scandinavia. I will never forgive myself [Lenin’s italics] for not risking the journey in 1915…Russia must have been on the brink of revolution for days…I am so excited.’8
Then he worked out a political line to adopt. He had not expected the fall of the ancien régime so soon but, as he repeatedly said, ‘revolutionaries don’t wait for a revolution…they make the revolution’. This might be his only opportunity for power – and he was determined to seize it. Immediately he outlined how the Bolsheviks should deal with the new rulers in Russia. Within a few hours of hearing about the Revolution he wired Alexandra Kollontai in Norway, the most senior Bolshevik in Scandinavia. ‘These are our tactics. 1) No trust or support for the new government. 2) Alexander Kerensky is especially suspect. 3) Arm the proletariat as the only guarantee of their protection. 4) Immediate elections to the Petrograd City Council. 5) Make no rapprochement of any kind with other parties. Telegraph this to Petrograd.’ Essentially this was the policy that he would pursue until his coup brought him to power seven months later: no compromises; no recognition of ‘the government that supports an imperialist war’; no deals with other socialist parties, especially the Mensheviks. It seemed extreme to most of his supporters in exile and in Russia, out of step with the mood of the times. But he was right and they were wrong. Lenin’s reputation as a master of timing and as a super-skilful tactician, his understanding of the nature of power, would rest on how he would act over the next few months.9
This time, unlike in 1905, he was desperate to return to Russia as quickly as possible, but he faced great obstacles. How could he get there? ‘From the moment the news of the Revolution came…he didn’t sleep at night and all sorts of incredible plans were being made: we could go by airplane! But such things could be thought of only in the delirium of the night. One had only to speak of it to realise how impractical they were,’ said Nadya.
One idea was to get a forged Swedish passport, easy enough to obtain. But Lenin could speak no Swedish. ‘Nadya, surely I could learn a few words easily enough?’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You will fall asleep at some point and see Mensheviks everywhere in your dreams, start swearing and shout “scoundrels” or something and give the whole game away.’
Plans were becoming more and more absurd. He wrote to Ganetsky in Stockholm: ‘It is impossible to wait any longer. All hopes of a legal journey are vain. Find a Swede who looks like me. But as I know no Swedish he will have to be a deaf mute. In any event I will send the photograph.’ He told Vyacheslav Karpinsky, the chief Bolshevik in Geneva, to ‘take out papers in your name for travelling through France, the Netherlands and England, which I will use. I will travel on them through Holland and England and then on to Russia. I will put on a wig, go to the consulate in Berne with your papers, but wearing the wig, and they can photograph me.’ Adopting that ruse, it is unlikely he would have got out of Switzerland. 10
A group of revolutionaries were discussing their plight at a café a few days after the Revolution. One respected Bolshevik, Olga Ravich, Zinoviev’s first wife and a brave woman who had been arrested and jailed for trying to pass one of the 500-ruble notes that had been stolen from the Tiflis bank robbery, said that she could marry a Swiss man, get a passport and travel through Germany to Russia. ‘A brilliant idea,’ Lenin replied, ‘but not of much use to me.’*3
He continued to explore the idea of going by way of England, though it was a remote and risky proposition. He telephoned Inessa at Clarens and asked her to go to London on his behalf and find out from the British government whether they would grant him passage. She refused to go: she was feeling unwell and the chances of success were so slim that she didn’t see the point of trying. That evening he wrote her an angry letter. ‘I must say I am keenly disappointed. In my opinion everybody these days should have a single thought: to get to Russia as fast as possible. I was certain you would rush off to England, as only there could you find out how to get through and how great the risk is.’ A few days later he wrote again. ‘My nerves naturally are overstrung…No wonder! To just sit here on tenterhooks…’11
—
The Revolution had begun almost exactly as the Okhrana warnings had predicted. The 1916–17 winter in Russia was the coldes
t of the century so far, a significant and often underrated factor in what was about to happen. Temperatures in Petrograd throughout the end of January and most of February averaged minus 15 degrees Celsius. Transport links to the cities, including the railways, were almost at a standstill and no grain or other food supplies were getting to Petrograd or Moscow. The capital’s mayor, A. P. Balk, reported on 19 February that in the previous week the city had received just 5,000 poods of flour (an ancient Russian measure of weight, amounting to around 16 kilograms) compared to the usual 30,000 poods and the city’s bakers were allowed to use only 3,500 poods of flour rather than the normal 9,000. Thousands of women – and it was mostly women – were queuing all night for bread. Then on 23 February the Arctic weather broke ‘and the temperatures were an almost balmy 5 degrees’. That is when a wave of strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd began – 130,000 or so people on the 23rd, International Women’s Day, more than 180,000 the following day. By the afternoon of the first big street protests people were no longer shouting ‘We want bread’ and ‘We are hungry’ but ‘Down with the Tsar’, ‘Give us peace’ and ‘Damn the German woman’. The police couldn’t contain the crowds, and the troops refused to fire on civilians. Mobs lynched police – they stoned the Chief of the Petrograd Gendarmerie to death – and began to take over government buildings. They ‘liberated’ the Peter and Paul Fortress and released the few prisoners inside, most of whom had been arrested only in the previous few days. Much of the city was in the hands of the protestors.*4
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