Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Things became increasingly muddled. The station they had happened upon, Dibuny, was under guard by a corps of army cadets. Lenin and Zinoviev hid in a ditch and, as the train finally arrived, at around 1 a.m., the ‘guides’ went to look around. One of the soldiers grew suspicious of Yemelyanov, whom he didn’t believe was a local. He was placed under arrest. Another cadet thought there was something odd about Shotman’s behaviour. While they were being interrogated, the other three slipped past the distracted guards and into one of the compartments at the rear of the train. It had not been part of any plan, but a piece of luck. Eventually they got to Udelnaya, many hours late.

  The next day Zinoviev returned to Petrograd. Lenin changed into stoker’s overalls and in the evening mounted the engine cab of Locomotive 293, driven by Hugo Jalava, heading across the border to the seaside town of Terijoki. His mood had lifted, though he still had the tricky matter to negotiate of crossing into Finland. Jalava had been told that Lenin was a journalist writing a piece about steam trains. He didn’t altogether believe the story but allowed Lenin on board anyway and noted that his passenger seemed to enjoy ‘keeping himself busy feeding wood into the furnace…clambering between logs’.

  At the border post at Beloostrov, where four months earlier Lenin had been given a hero’s welcome when he returned to Russia, there were more militiamen on the station platform than usual. The government still believed that Lenin was hiding somewhere in Finland. The train halted for more than twenty minutes as passports were checked, but the soldiers didn’t look in the locomotive cab.

  Lenin stayed for two days with Rakhia’s relatives in a small village near Terijoki, but he felt isolated. He was determined to reach Helsingfors, where he could establish good communications with Bolsheviks in Petrograd – and, as he thought, he would be close enough for him to direct the Party.

  He stayed in a series of safe houses organised by Shotman. Apart from the short periods when he was on the move, under a variety of disguises, he never stepped outside onto the streets. One night he was billeted at the home of the veteran Finnish socialist Karl Wiik, during which, he later told Nadya, he reread Jules Michelet’s vivid, beautifully written account of the Terror during the French Revolution. He often saw the Jacobins as an inspiration for the Bolsheviks.*1 But for most of his time in the Finnish capital Shotman put him up with one of his close friends, Gustav Rovio, an ardent Bolshevik who also happened to be the Helsingfors police chief. There was a price on Lenin’s head, but he was hiding in the safest place in the city. ‘Our people will laugh their heads off when I go back to Petrograd and tell comrades where I lodged Lenin…No one from Kerensky’s people will have thought of looking for Vladimir Ilyich there, with a policeman.’4

  * * *

  The hate campaign against Lenin and the ‘traitor Bolsheviks’ reached a crescendo in August. Newspapers loyal to the government were running salacious stories claiming that when he had been in Petrograd he had moved into Kshesinskaya’s ornate boudoir, where the Bolsheviks held decadent orgies. Cartoons depicted Lenin on the gallows (though one of the first things the Provisional Government had done was to abolish the death penalty). In the press he was public enemy number one. But in reality the police were only going through the motions of searching for him; most of the 800 or so ‘subversives’ arrested after the July riots were freed within a few weeks. Kerensky was far less worried about Lenin than by threats from the Right. The Kadets, some monarchists and reactionary newspapers were demanding ‘an end to anarchy’ and he feared a counter-revolution led by the army.

  Kerensky possessed no real power. His government was just about surviving day to day. He was in many ways a decent man, unable to control the great sweep of events unfolding in Russia. But his real weakness was vanity: the appearance of power went to his head. When he became premier, he signalled that he was aiming to sideline the Petrograd Soviet by moving it to the Smolny Institute. The government returned to the traditional seat of administration, the Winter Palace. Much of the Petrograd literary world still adored Kerensky – people like Stanislavsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Dmitry Merezhovsky and Zinaida Gippius. He began to live in the Winter Palace and took over the suite of Alexander III. He slept in the late Tsar’s bed and moved his mistress in with him. He had a picture taken of himself behind Alexander’s immense desk, which he sent to admirers. He had Nicholas II’s billiard table, which had been in a packing case since the abdication, placed back in one of the state rooms. He kept a retinue of servants as large as the Tsar’s. When he came and went the flag on the palace roof was raised and lowered, as it had been for Nicholas.

  Kerensky believed that the Right was planning a coup against the Provisional Government and to install as dictator the popular General Lavr Kornilov, a genuine war hero from the early days of the fighting in 1914–15 and, since the February Revolution, commander of the Petrograd Military District. There are various interpretations of the Kornilov Affair even decades later; many still hold to the view the Soviet historians had for generations that the general had ambitions to be a dictator. It is clear, though, that Kornilov was never planning to topple the government, but wanted to force Kerensky to act more firmly against the Bolsheviks and to bypass the Soviet – ‘a council of rats and dogs’, as he called it. Yet Kerensky saw him as a serious rival. Kornilov, a wiry, forty-seven-year-old Cossack, was politically naïve and not the most intelligent of operators: ‘he has the heart of a lion, but the brains of a sheep’, according to his former commander, General Alexeyev. He had surrounded himself with a group of pro-monarchy advisers and oddball charlatans who were using him in their own power play. When in mid-August Kornilov made a series of political demands to toughen Kerensky against the Left, the Prime Minister seized his opportunity and plotted the general’s downfall. He accused Kornilov of mounting a coup attempt, fabricated the evidence to ‘prove’ it, and ordered the general’s arrest on treason charges. Foolishly, Kornilov reacted by declaring martial law and sending troops to Petrograd to ‘support the government and stiffen its resolve’. Kerensky appealed to the Left – the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs – for help and the Bolsheviks enthusiastically answered the call.

  The so called Kornilov coup was over without a shot being fired; loyal troops found the general, arrested and jailed him. But Bolshevik mythmaking for the next seven decades claimed that they had been the decisive factor in defeating a serious attempt to take over the government. They had sent a few Red Guards to mount a defence of the Winter Palace if need be. They manned some roadblocks. That was the extent of their militant action. Yet the Kornilov Affair turned into a propaganda victory for Lenin, who spun it to appear that the Bolsheviks had ‘halted’ a counter-revolution and the return of the Tsar. It was yet another disaster for Kerensky. Now he was totally isolated. The Right and moderate liberals didn’t trust him. They saw him as weak. Lenin was biding his time for the opportunity to overthrow him.

  —

  Lenin was becoming increasingly frustrated that he was stuck in Helsingfors, while the ‘revolutionary moment is ripening in Russia’, as he told Kamenev. He was maintaining contact two or three times a day with secret couriers from Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had organised a safe route that was never given away to Kerensky’s intelligence agents. He was seeing the papers on the morning they were published. Yet Lenin felt isolated and impatient that he was not in Petrograd to dictate events.

  In Petrograd, each coalition the Provisional Government formed was weaker than the last, the food queues were getting longer, and crime on the streets was an epidemic – ‘government has come to a standstill at the top and locally’, said Sukhanov. Inflation was climbing dangerously. The government was printing money at an unprecedented rate – 429 million paper rubles in April, 729 million in June, 1.1 billion in July. Prices of some basic foodstuffs had quadrupled between February and September. More than 500 factories in Petrograd and Moscow had closed down and over 100,000 workers had lost their jobs in the capital since February. A series of strikes
were called for the end of September. Desertions from the army had ‘become a headlong escape by soldiers from the Front’, as Brusilov put it.

  Lenin was not as isolated as he was made to appear. Bolshevik Party membership had risen to more than 350,000. On 1 September the Bolsheviks, for the first time, won a small majority on the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets. ‘This is a big advance and will mean a lot…the masses are listening to us,’ Lenin told Shotman, who was one of his regular liaison men from the Party headquarters in Petrograd.

  Kerensky was nominally in charge of the government and he made a good show of holding power. But after the Kornilov Affair even some of his long-standing admirers among the intelligentsia began to despair of him. ‘Kerensky continues to fall and already the Bolsheviks are masters in the Soviet. Trotsky is chairman,’ Zinaida Gippius wrote in her diary. ‘Exactly when the slaughter, the cannonades, the uprising, the pogrom in Petersburg will start is still not certain. But it will come.’

  —

  From mid-September Lenin became convinced that the time to strike against the government would be soon and if the Bolsheviks missed their chance another may not come again for years, when he would no longer be alive to see it. He still believed Kerensky could make a peace deal with the Germans – or move the government to Moscow, far from the Front and the army garrisons. Either would have made mounting a Bolshevik insurrection more difficult.

  From his Finnish hideout he wrote a series of ever more desperate letters to the comrades in Petrograd, demanding insurrection now. On 12 September: ‘We must at once begin to plan the practical details of a second revolution. The majorities…[on the Soviets] show that people are with us if we immediately promise bread, peace and land.’

  The next day he was more shrill. ‘There is no reason to wait for events such as the Congress of Soviets [scheduled for 25 October]. To wait is lunacy for the Congress will do nothing. It cannot do anything. First, we must beat Kerensky, then convene the Congress. As Marx said, insurrection is an art…It would be naïve to wait for a formal majority for the Bolsheviks. No revolution ever waits for that. History will never forgive us if we do not take power now.’

  The other Bolsheviks in the leadership ‘were aghast, stunned’, said Bukharin. They decided to burn every copy of the letters – except one;*2 officially all they did was ‘note Comrade Lenin’s views’. Since July, in Lenin’s absence, the rest of the Party leadership had been following a more conciliatory line. They had even taken part in joint meetings with Kerensky’s aides to work out legislation for the Constituent Assembly elections planned for November and December. If the government or the Kadets obtained evidence that Lenin was planning an imminent coup they could destroy the Bolsheviks.

  The next few weeks showed Lenin’s great skills as a leader. If anything disproves the Marxist idea that it is not individuals who make history but broad social and economic forces it is Lenin’s revolution. He dragged his reluctant and frightened comrades with him towards an uprising most of them did not want. He used a mixture of guile, logic, bluster, threats and calm persuasion to impose his will on them. ‘The rest of the leadership has blunted the growing Revolution by playing spillikins…they’re miserable traitors to the proletarian cause,’ he told Nadya. Without Lenin driving them, most of the others would have been content just talking about revolution, said Trotsky.

  He tried one more time with another ‘letter from afar’, as he called it. ‘The Bolsheviks are guaranteed victory in an uprising…if we suddenly strike from three points: Peter [Petrograd], Moscow and the Baltic Fleet. We have the technical capability and the armed support. If we seize the Winter Palace, the General Staff, the telephone exchanges, the railway stations…it is ninety-nine per cent certain that we will win with few losses…it is my profound belief that if we wait and let the present moment pass, we shall ruin the Revolution [Lenin’s italics].’

  He told comrades in the leadership that if they didn’t approve his plan he would resign from the Central Committee and take his ideas ‘to the membership’. That threat made them think again: ‘another leader at that time was inconceivable, for us and the membership’. At the same time he demanded that they let him go back to Petrograd so he could lead them in person. They refused. His safety was too important. But they allowed him to move to a closer hiding place, in Vyborg, a small town still in Finland, but only ninety kilometres from Petrograd.5

  *1 ‘The example of the Jacobins is instructive,’ he wrote in The State and Revolution, ‘but the Jacobins of the twentieth century would not set about guillotining the capitalists; following a good model is not the same as copying it. It would be enough to arrest 50–100 magnates and queens of bank capital, the main knights of treasury-fraud and bank pillage; it would be enough to arrest them for a few weeks so as to uncover their dirty deeds…to show all the exploited people who really needs the war.’

  *2 None of the letters surfaced until 1925, the year after Lenin’s death.

  36

  Revolution – Part Two

  ‘Lenin didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought.’

  Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938)

  ‘I tell you what to do with people such as Lenin. We shoot them.’

  Colonel Alfred Knox, British Military Attaché to Petrograd, 21 October 1917

  With Lenin in hiding for three months, Trotsky’s was the public face of the Bolsheviks, though technically he had only just become a Party member. He was far better known than Lenin inside Russia and hugely enjoyed the limelight: ‘While Lenin needed an office, Trotsky needed a stage,’ it was said. After his release from jail in mid-August, Trotsky appeared several nights a week to full houses at the enormous Cirque Moderne on the outskirts of Petrograd, which seated 2,500 people. He fascinated and terrified the middle classes; he was ‘the very incarnation of the revolutionary…his huge forehead surmounted by great masses of black wavy hair…lips heavy and protruding…he was all temperament, an individual artist’. He caused a sensation.

  He had a sharp, somewhat rasping, high-pitched voice. But on his day he was a brilliant performer – funny, direct, imaginative and inspiring.*1 Sukhanov, a Menshevik who went out of curiosity, was among listeners at Trotsky’s first appearance after coming out of prison. ‘The mood was one of excitement throughout the hall. The hush of the audience indicated expectation. They [were] mainly soldiers and workers, though the crowd consisted of a few bourgeois, male and female. Trotsky at once began to heat up the atmosphere…He depicted with extraordinary force the suffering of soldiers in the trenches…Trotsky knew what he was doing. Soviet power, he said, was destined not only to put an end to the suffering of the soldiers at the Front. It would provide land and stop internal disorder. “The Soviet government will give everything the country has to the poor and to the soldiers. You, bourgeois,” he would point to the well-dressed people in pricier seats. “You own two coats? Give one to the soldier freezing in the trenches. You have warm boots? Stay at home. Your boots are needed by a worker.” The mood around me verged on ecstasy. It seemed that the mob would at any moment spontaneously burst into some kind of religious hymn. “We will defend the cause of the workers and peasants to the last drop of our blood,” he said. “Who is in favour?” The crowd…raised its hands as one. I saw the uplifted hands and burning eyes of men, women, adolescents, workers, soldiers, peasants. They agreed. They vowed. I watched this truly grandiose spectacle with an unusually heavy heart.’1

  —

  Lenin was determined to force the pace and reach Petrograd as soon as possible. He argued that ‘the leader should be where the great issues are decided’. But his comrades again refused permission. Shotman reported their decision and was the butt of Lenin’s anger. ‘I will not leave it at that, I assure you. The traitors…they have not heard the last of this.’

  First he had to find a way out of the Finnish capital. He went with the police chief Rovio to a theatrical costumier to find a bespoke wig made to measure for him. But he was told that could take we
eks and he needed a disguise immediately. There was only one ‘ready to wear’ hairpiece that fitted him, a grey one that made the forty-seven-year-old revolutionary look like a sixty-seven-year-old retired office worker. At first the shopkeeper didn’t want to sell it as it made Lenin look so uninspiring; eventually he gave in and Lenin took it. On 30 September he left for Vyborg, lodging with some friends of Rovio. His guide was Eino Rakhia, whom Lenin liked from his dramatic July journey to the Finnish capital. From Vyborg he would make secret plans for getting to Petrograd – without his comrades’ approval. He bought another wig, acquired a jacket with a dog collar and black hat, and disguised himself now as a Lutheran pastor from Finland. He took the afternoon Petrograd train on 7 October. This time he crossed the border without incident on travel documents he had used before. He never left Russia again.

  Few people knew he was back in the city: Nadya, Yakov Sverdlov, the Party Secretary, Lenin’s sisters and Anna Ulyanova’s friend Margarita Fofanova, who had agreed to put him up in her apartment near the Finland Station. The next day the rest of the leadership found out he had returned and were insisting on an immediate meeting. At first several of the inner circle of the Party were reluctant. But Lenin bullied them into agreeing to meet in two days’ time, late at night.

  He was not an easy house guest, according to Fofanova. ‘He told me to obtain every day, not later than 8.30 in the morning, all the Petrograd newspapers, including the bourgeois ones. Exact times were laid down very firmly for breakfast and lunch –“it will be difficult in the first week; everything will fall on you”, he told me.’ He was right. Lenin did not leave the apartment for the first three days. Nadya visited him daily, careful not to be followed. He continually raged against his comrades: ‘they are wavering, with dread of the struggle for power’.2