Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Accompanied by Radek to the most upmarket department store in Stockholm, Bergström’s, he bought a smart new suit and some decent black shoes. ‘Most likely it was the decent appearance of our stolid Swedish comrades that was evoking in us a passionate desire for Ilyich to resemble a human being,’ said Radek. Lenin also bought a bowler hat, and an entirely new item he had never worn before – a dark-grey workman’s peaked cap. It would soon become his trademark headwear.14

  Shortly after 6.30 that evening Lenin’s group met to take the overnight train to Finland, on the last leg of the journey to the Russian empire. A hundred or so people were at the station to see them off and this time they were armed with bouquets of flowers and baskets of fruit, not the brickbats and abuse they had encountered in Zurich. ‘Lenin was the centre of everyone’s attention,’ one of the Swedes who was there that evening said. He was smiling and beaming, waving from the carriage window as the train departed.

  —

  The British had a chance to prevent Lenin entering Russia and thought hard about taking the opportunity. They considered exerting pressure on neutral Sweden to refuse him an exit visa and detain him at the border. The British Minister in Stockholm, Sir Esmé Howard, wrote later: ‘For a hectic moment the Allied Ministers discussed whether they could, naturally with the help of the Swedish authorities, hold up the arch-revolutionary on his way through. But the plan seemed impossible. It looked as if it might make the problem worse…so far had the Revolution gone in Russia by that time that it seemed wiser to let things take their course rather than interfere.’15

  But the British Foreign Office did wire Kerensky, then Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government, wondering whether ‘a mistake had not been made in permitting Lenin to return’. They received a speedy reply insisting that Russia’s new government ‘rested on a democratic foundation…Lenin’s group should be allowed to enter’. It was the British who controlled the out-of-the-way border crossing point towards which Lenin was heading: Tornio, in a bleak area of swampy marshland which, for many hundreds of years, history had passed by. Now it was a busy railhead and the principal supply route that the Western Allies used to send vital war materiel and military advisers to Russia. The area was teeming with British troops, traders making dubious business deals – and spies from various countries.

  The railway journey from Stockholm took two days on a circuitous route around the Gulf of Bothnia. But at least Lenin and Nadya had a couchette-style sleeping compartment, which they shared with Inessa and a young Bolshevik from Georgia, David Suliasvili. Lenin couldn’t sleep. He was in a highly anxious state, still wrestling with his April Theses and apprehensive that the British would not let him cross the border, or, if he was allowed through, worried that the Provisional Government would arrest him as soon as he entered Finland. And he was furious with the latest news of what the Bolsheviks in Petrograd had been up to without him to lead them. He had got hold of some Russian newspapers and had read the last few issues of Pravda. The Bolsheviks’ paper had been legalised the first day after the February Revolution and jointly edited by Kamenev and Stalin, who were freed from exile at the same time. Lenin flew into ‘one of his rages’ and stayed that way for most of the journey according to Nadya, when he saw that the paper – on behalf of the Party – had argued that the war should continue. ‘Those idiots may ruin everything,’ he said. It took him several hours to calm down.16

  The most pressing concern was getting into Russia. The end of the railway line on the Swedish side was Haparanda. Lenin’s party had to get off the train and transfer to a horse-drawn sleigh, two by two, for the last kilometre and a half across a frozen river to Tornio. Lenin waved a red scarf tied around an alpenstock as his sledge reached the border post, which, as he had suspected, was manned by British troops who had been alerted that a dangerous revolutionary was on his way. The soldiers’ orders were to let them through, but to give them a grilling, and an uncomfortable, humiliating time.

  A young British control officer, Harry Gruner, was one of the MI5 team on duty. On a freezing night, he detained them at the post for hours while they were strip-searched one by one. Zinoviev’s wife Zina never forgot the humiliation. ‘We were undressed to the skin,’ she recalled. ‘My son and I were forced to take off our stockings…All our documents, as well as children’s books and toys my son had brought with us, were taken.’ Lenin was searched and interrogated. Quite what information an inexperienced young intelligence officer thought he could obtain from a man like Lenin remains a mystery. The whole party’s belongings were meticulously searched; eventually Gruner had no alternative except to wave them through. For years afterwards he was teased by his colleagues for letting ‘Lenin, the most dangerous man in the world, free’. They would say to him, ‘You’re a bright lad, locking the stable door after the horse was out, or rather in.’*3

  The tension eased the moment they crossed the border. Lenin was smiling and beamed as he entered the third-class carriage on a Finnish train that had been despatched to Tornio by Shlyapnikov. As the train pulled away he stood up, raised his right hand, clenched his fist and addressed his companions. ‘We are on home territory now. We will show them we are the worthy masters of the future.’ 17

  *1 Almost no contemporary accounts mention Inessa’s presence on the train and the Soviets later clumsily tried to censor the fact that she was there. Official histories in the Soviet Union until the 1970s did not mention her on the passenger list. Though the ‘sealed train’ idea had originally been Martov’s, he declined to go with Lenin. He wanted to wait until he had received a formal invitation to return from the Petrograd Soviet and an assurance that he would be allowed back into Russia. It was a slow and cumbersome process. He got there a month later. Plekhanov had returned a week earlier, through France and England, and received a hero’s welcome in Petrograd.

  *2 There has been much speculation about why the train was held up for so long in Berlin. The obvious answer is that during the war the entire German railway system was severely congested – it was devoted to ensuring that troops and equipment were moved efficiently, and many trains were delayed. But various historians have claimed that the real reason was to enable Lenin to hold a secret meeting with German officials. It has been said that he met high-ranking generals and ministers overnight at the German Foreign Ministry at Wilhelmstrasse, and was handed millions of marks in gold. There is no evidence that this meeting ever took place and it seems highly unlikely. The Germans certainly gave money to the Bolsheviks, but did so using subtler methods and go-betweens. And Lenin, surely, would never have risked meeting German officials, having gone to such lengths to keep German help ‘deniable’.

  *3 The writer William Gerhardie, a colleague, suggested – only half facetiously – that Gruner alone may have held the responsibility for having brought about the Bolshevik Revolution. ‘Were he a Japanese he would have committed hara-kiri.’

  29

  To the Finland Station

  ‘People who imagined that they had made a revolution always saw next day that they did not know what they had been doing, and that the revolution which they made was nothing like the one they had wanted to make.’

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)

  ‘Everything is so terribly good and so Russian,’ Nadya enthused to one of her fellow travellers as the train sped through the familiar birch forests, lakes and small towns of Finland – Tammefors, Kuokkala, Terijoki, all places she and Lenin knew well. For more than six hours they were in a ‘shabby, uncomfortable compartment’ with wooden slat seats, but they were happy – ‘almost home, our faces were glued to the windows’. They shared a carriage with a contingent of Russian soldiers and Lenin began lecturing them about the ‘predatory’ war and how a socialist revolution would bring peace – ‘as he argued the merits of “defeatism”, the soldiers gaped at the strange philosopher with open mouths’. It was Easter Monday, 3 April, by the Gregorian calendar and many of the passengers were eating paska, the traditional Russian E
aster cake, which most of the exiles hadn’t tasted in many years.

  In late-afternoon drizzle they reached the railway junction of Riihimäki, and changed trains for the main Helsingfors-Petrograd line. They still had one final obstacle in front of them before they were truly ‘home’. In an hour or so they would be reaching the frontier into Russia proper and it was still possible that the Provisional Government would have the Bolshevik émigrés arrested. It seemed less likely now, but Lenin was still nervous and ‘clearly looked under strain’, remarked Radek.1

  But instead of government soldiers or police, Lenin was greeted at the border town of Beloostrov at about 9 p.m. by a welcoming committee of scores of cheering locals and some high-ranking Bolsheviks. His sister Maria had come from Petrograd to meet him. Shlyapnikov, Lev Kamenev and Fyodor Raskolnikov, a young officer from the Kronstadt naval base who had mutinied in the Revolution and was the leading Bolshevik agitator in the navy, had joined her. Alexandra Kollontai presented Lenin with a bouquet of sodden and wilting flowers. She was supposed to give a speech but – strange for her, she was usually a highly accomplished speaker – she was nervous, became tongue-tied and froze. Instead, she planted a kiss on his cheek; Lenin drew back and looked startled.

  While passport and customs officials checked the returning émigrés’ documents, a big red flag and revolutionary bunting decorated Locomotive 293 of the Finnish State Railway. It would be a short hop of an hour or so before the train reached Petrograd. Lenin might have used the time to reflect on an extraordinary, dramatic week in his life and think with satisfaction that he had not been marched off to jail. Or he might have tried to relax. Instead he sought out Kamenev and began berating him for the articles he had been publishing in Pravda which appeared to show Bolshevik support for the war. ‘What idiocy,’ he said. Kamenev looked pale and apprehensive when Lenin drew attention to one particular piece in which he had written: ‘The slogan “Down with the War” is absolutely impractical. When army stands against army, it would be the most stupid policy to propose that one of them should lay down arms and disperse…that would not be a policy of peace, but of slavery. As long as the German army obeys the orders of the Kaiser, the Russian soldier must stand firmly at his post, answering bullet with bullet, shell for shell.’ Lenin told Kamenev ‘that when we read that rubbish we really swore at you. It’s nonsense. Our priority is ending the war…whatever it takes.’2

  It was typical of Lenin that the first thing he did on returning home after almost seventeen years in exile was to abuse one of his lieutenants for being politically out of line.

  —

  In Petrograd the Bolsheviks organised a fanfare welcome for Lenin. In later years citizens in Communist states became used to big orchestrated ceremonies and mass rallies on the high days and holidays of socialist rule – May Day, for example, and the anniversary of the October Revolution. They were a major part of the Soviet way of life. Even when some Communist regimes proved to be useless at organising virtually everything else, they could always mount a good parade. This, the return of Lenin, the Leader across the water, was the prototype and the early Bolsheviks were determined to get it right. All day, from early morning, Party activists had been touring the barracks and working-class districts of Petrograd putting up posters: ‘Lenin arrives today. Meet him.’ The factories were closed for Easter, it was a public holiday, and many people may have been tempted by a false rumour going around the city that anyone who turned up would receive free beer. Nonetheless it was strange that so many people went to the Finland Station at a late hour, in the freezing cold, to welcome him – especially as so few people had any idea what Lenin looked like. His picture had never appeared in a Russian paper, not even Pravda.

  But from 9.30 p.m., on a bitterly cold and damp night, thousands turned up at the unprepossessing Finland Station, a dull-looking provincial building at the time rather than the great hub of international travel fit for a modern capital. ‘The throng in front of the station blocked the whole square, making movement almost impossible and scarcely letting trams through,’ recorded Nikolai Sukhanov, a leading Petrograd Menshevik whose irrepressible energy and great contacts made him a superb historian of the Revolution. There was a regimental band playing music in the ‘imperial waiting room’ and three armoured cars were mounted on the concourse. Giant red flags were draped around the station. For dramatic effect, the Bolsheviks had persuaded the garrison at the Peter and Paul Fortress to loan them a giant mounted searchlight which had been switched on at dusk and gave the whole scene spectacular lighting.

  Lenin’s train drew in at 11.10 p.m. An honour guard from the Kronstadt naval base wearing their red and blue uniforms and caps with red pompoms were ready to greet the dignitary. The band struck up the ‘Marseillaise’, not knowing yet how to play the ‘Internationale’. But at first few of the sailors and soldiers – or the workers and assorted curious onlookers milling about the station – recognised the stocky man in a threadbare coat, pointed beard and bowler hat who stepped down to the platform. When after a few moments word spread about which of the returning exiles was Lenin, a chorus of cheers rose, but it was a delayed reaction. Nadya said later that all Lenin ‘really wanted was a cup of tea’. But the excitement of the occasion got to him.

  He was formally welcomed by Nikolai Chkheidze, the Menshevik Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, but Lenin pointedly ignored him. Neither could stand the other. Lenin thought the Menshevik ‘a loathsome opportunist’; his rival regarded Lenin as a dangerous extremist and ‘a mischief maker’. Chkheidze made a rambling speech about the need for co-operation between socialists. Lenin fidgeted with the lapel of his coat and looked bored throughout. At some point he had changed headgear, discarding his bowler hat and donning the peaked cap he had bought in Stockholm.

  He climbed onto a chair one of the soldiers had found for him, began speaking and disregarded everything the moderate Chkheidze had just said. This was no time for compromise and diplomatic phrases, he declared. It was time to move towards building a socialist state. ‘The piratical imperialist war is the beginning of civil war throughout Europe…The hour is not far distant when the people will turn their arms against capitalist exploiters. The worldwide revolution has already dawned. Germany is seething…Any day now the whole of European capitalism may crash. I still don’t know if you have faith in all the promises of the Provisional Government. What I know for certain, though, is that when they make sweet promises, you are being deceived in the same way that the entire Russian population is being deceived. The people need peace. The people need bread and land. They give you war and hunger – and the landowners still have all the land. Sailors, comrades, we have to fight for a socialist revolution, fight to the end. Long live the worldwide socialist revolution.’ Most of the crowd cheered enthusiastically, but Sukhanov heard a small group of soldiers complaining angrily. ‘Ought to stick a bayonet into a man like that,’ muttered one of them. ‘If he came down here we’d show him. Must be a German,’ said another.

  It was nearly midnight before Lenin managed to leave the station. A group of sailors lifted him atop an armoured car, and with its headlights blazing raced him through the Petrograd streets to Bolshevik Party headquarters.3

  —

  Someone with a fine sense of irony in the Provisional Government had assigned the Bolsheviks the lavish Kshesinskaya Mansion as their base. The talented ballerina Mathilde Kshesinskaya had been Nicholas II’s mistress before he married and was crowned Tsar. Since then she had made do with a succession of Grand Dukes, including her present admirer, the Emperor’s cousin Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich. The Tsar had given her an enormous neo-classical villa in the centre of the city and she had decorated it in the height of Russian bling of that era – velvet curtains, frescoed ceilings, chandeliers in the shape of swans, huge mirrors and plenty of gilt. Most of the furniture had been removed when the government commandeered the mansion ‘in the name of the Revolution’ and replaced it with functional chairs and some ugly plain
tables. But, as Shlyapnikov acknowledged, it was still an incongruous meeting place for radicals. ‘It would have been better for the exercise of Kshesinskaya’s profession than for the transaction of Bolshevik Party business – it was full of bathrooms, pools and suchlike,’ he said. Trotsky hated the mansion. He said that even when scores of Bolshevik workers and soldiers were inside, it smelled ‘like the satin nest of a court ballerina’.*1, 4

  Lenin hadn’t slept for two days on the last leg of his journey. He was, as Nadya said, too nervous, but adrenaline must have kept him going. He took supper of tea and sandwiches with sixty of the leading Petrograd Bolsheviks and some hangers-on. At around 1 a.m., in the vast ground-floor reception room, he stood at the marble fireplace with its gilded blackamoor supports and launched into a two-hour-long speech arguing the case for the Soviets to seize power immediately. It was an extraordinary performance – a clear, unyielding statement of Bolshevik aims in which the idea of compromise and negotiation did not feature once. Peasants should seize land in the countryside without waiting for permission, he said; armed workers should patrol the streets and mete out ‘revolutionary justice’ against the exploiting class; Russian troops should bring about peace by fraternising with German soldiers at the Front. ‘We don’t need a bourgeois democracy. We don’t need a parliamentary republic. We don’t need any government except by the Soviets of the Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.’