Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  —

  At 10 p.m. on Wednesday 10 October, still in his disguise as a priest, Lenin arrived at a smart Petrograd apartment block, 32 Karpovka, overlooking the river. He knew the third-floor flat he was about to visit would be safe: it was the home of the prominent Menshevik journalist and strong critic of the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Sukhanov; this was the last place Kerensky’s spies would think to look. Sukhanov’s wife, though, Galina Flaxerman, was a loyal Bolshevik and had suggested to her husband, affectionately, that perhaps that night he should sleep somewhere near his office, as he occasionally did, rather than make the tiresome nine-kilometre journey at night when the tram service was unreliable.*2

  History can be dramatic and full of exciting, rousing action on battlefields and barricades – and sometimes it can be made in committee meetings. There were twenty-one Bolshevik Central Committee members, but only twelve sat at the round table beneath a single lamp in Sukhanov’s living room where the decision was made to trigger the Russian Revolution. It was a minority of an already small minority.

  Lenin spoke for an hour and repeated his demands that a coup should be mounted immediately. He was impatient and constantly on the verge of anger, but as Trotsky said later, ‘he was obviously restraining himself’.

  Occasionally he banged his fist on the table to emphasise a point. ‘Since the beginning of September there has been a certain indifference to the idea of insurrection,’ he began. Then he outlined clearly and in detail why ‘we must seize power now and not wait for the Soviets, or any Congresses…The time is right now and the moment of decision has arrived. The masses are tired of words and resolutions. The majority are now with us. The success of the Russian and the world revolution depends on two or three days’ struggle.’

  The argument ran on for seven and a half hours. Occasionally there was a short break when Flaxerman made tea or served spicy sausages, and to give the taker of the minutes, a young office clerk named Varvara Yakovleva, a break. At midnight the lights went out, as was usual in Petrograd at that time; the current was on for just a few hours a day. They continued by the light of an oil lamp and candles.*3

  Lenin had convinced most of the doubters. Originally Trotsky had wanted to wait until after the Congress of Soviets – which he chaired – had met. But Lenin persuaded him that would be too late. ‘By that time the Congress will be up and running and it is difficult for a large, organised body of people to take swift, decisive action. We must act on the 25th, the day the Congress meets, so that we may say to it “Here is the power! What are you going to do with it?” ’

  Only Lenin’s oldest comrades, Kamenev and Zinoviev, held out. They were against a coup on principle and for practical reasons. ‘There is no demand by the people for an uprising,’ said Kamenev. There was everything to be gained by ‘waiting a few weeks for the Constituent Assembly where we have an excellent chance of winning a big legal majority. Comrade Lenin’s plan means to stake on one card the fate not only of our Party, but the fate of the Russian and world revolution.’ Zinoviev agreed and said simply that if they failed, ‘we will all be shot’.

  Almost at dawn a vote was taken. It went Lenin’s way ten to two, with only Zinoviev and Kamenev voting against. Lenin reached across the table and picked up a pencil. There was no paper so – famously – he scrawled on a child’s exercise book the biggest decision the Bolsheviks took: ‘Recognising that an armed uprising is inevitable and the time perfectly ripe, the Central Committee proposes to all the organisations of the Party to act accordingly and to discuss and decide from this point of view all the practical questions.’3

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  The decision did not remain a secret. Kamenev and Zinoviev went public with their opposition. Within days they distributed to Party members in Petrograd an address that stated: ‘Before history, before the international proletariat, before the Russian Revolution and the Russian working class, we have no right to stake the whole future at the present moment upon the card of armed insurrection.’

  Together they wrote a blistering letter in Gorky’s paper Novaya Zhizn, though it was signed only by Kamenev. ‘Not only Zinoviev and I, but also a number of practical comrades, think that to take the initiative in an armed insurrection at the present moment…is an inadmissible step ruinous to the proletariat and the Revolution. To stake everything on insurrection in the coming days would be an act of despair. And our party is too strong, it has too great a future before us, to take such a step.’

  Lenin was furious and called them ‘traitors’. A cardinal rule among conspirators was supposed to be secrecy, and here were two leading, long-standing cadres ‘swindling their comrades with endless slanderous lies…this is worse than strike-breaking’. He wanted them thrown out of the Party: ‘From now on I no longer consider them comrades.’

  Trotsky agreed, but then he seldom supported anything his brother-in-law, Kamenev, did. Stalin recommended a milder reaction – a reprimand, as long as they promised to say no more. Finally Lenin calmed down and left their punishment as a ticking-off.

  All of Petrograd was talking about an imminent coup. Novaya Zhizn speculated on the date, predicting, almost correctly, 20 October. Kerensky was as out of touch and complacent as the Tsar had been and actively welcomed the insurrection attempt. He told the British Ambassador, Buchanan, a few days before the uprising, ‘all I want them to do is act…then I will crush them’. On 20 October he told Nabokov that if and when the insurrection began, it would ‘be like July again…I am prepared to offer prayers for a rebellion. I have greater forces than necessary. They will be utterly defeated.’ On 21 October, after speaking to the Prime Minister, the American Ambassador Francis cabled the State Department. ‘Beginning to think the Bolsheviks will make no demonstrations; if so shall regret as believe sentiment is turning against them and…[now] opportune moment for giving them wholesome lesson.’ Some leading personalities on the far Right relished a coup. The steel and metals industrialist Stepan Liazonov – ‘The Russian Rockefeller’ in the popular press – told John Reed that a Bolshevik insurrection would not last a day. ‘The government would declare a state of siege…the military commanders can deal with those gentlemen without legal formalities.’

  So the government made no effort to prevent the coup. They arrested no Bolsheviks. They didn’t try to seize the Smolny Institute. They didn’t reinforce the defences of the Neva bridges or any communications centres. They didn’t believe the Bolsheviks could win.*4

  Trotsky, officially named head of the Bolsheviks’ Military Revolutionary Committee on 12 October, made little secret about what it was up to. One of the first things it did was to issue a ‘mission statement’ – rather strange for a conspiratorial revolutionary group about to plot a putsch. ‘In the interests of the defence of the Revolution and its conquests against attacks by counter-revolution, commissars have been appointed by us in military units and at strategic points in the capital and its environs. Commissars as representatives of the Soviet are inviolable. Opposition to the commissars is opposition to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The Soviet has taken all measures to protect revolutionary order against attacks by counter-revolutionaries.’

  On 21 October he made one of his most dramatic appearances at the Cirque Moderne. He whipped up the audience into a near-frenzy. After a fiery speech he demanded: ‘If you support us without hesitation…and want to bring the Revolution to victory, if you give the cause all your strength…let us all swear our allegiance to the Revolution. If you support this sacred oath we are making then raise your hands.’ The entire audience rose and shouted, ‘We swear.’4

  Kerensky was now loathed by the people who had idolised him a few months earlier. On 24 October, the eve of the Revolution, Zinaida Gippius wrote in her diary: ‘Nobody wants the Bolsheviks. But nobody is prepared to fight for Kerensky either.’5

  *1 Despite nearly a decade and a half of mutual mistrust and hostility, Lenin relied heavily on Trotsky in the weeks running up to the Revolution – and
afterwards. They were never personally close but both acknowledged that politically there were few differences between them. Trotsky said that he found it difficult ‘to surrender to Lenin’s Party’ until he saw that Lenin’s was the only plausible path to power. Angelica Balabanova, who hated Trotsky, once asked Lenin what had kept them apart from 1903 to 1917. ‘Now don’t you know? Ambition, ambition, ambition.’ He meant Trotsky’s ambition, not of course his own.

  *2 Later, Sukhanov saw the joke that one of the most important meetings in Russian history took place at his apartment while he was elsewhere, sleeping. It was very likely one of the biggest stories ever missed by a journalist so close to the event. ‘Oh, the novel jokes of the merry muse of history,’ he said when he realised.

  *3 The eleven others around the table were the trade unionist Andrei Bubnov, Felix Dzerzhinsky, who later became the feared head of the Cheka intelligence agency, Kamenev, Kollontai, Georgy Lomov, the Bolshevik chief in Moscow, Grigory Sokolnikov, joint editor of Pravda, Stalin, Sverdlov, Trotsky, Moisei Uritsky, who would become another Soviet spy chief, and Zinoviev.

  *4 At this point there was a last-gasp effort by some ministers to explore the possibility of looking for a separate peace with Germany – which might, even at this stage, have saved the Provisional Government. On 20 October the Minister for War, General Alexander Verkhovsky, told Kerensky that the army was ‘unfit to fight’ and recommended that the best way of counteracting the Bolsheviks would be to at least begin talks with the Germans – ‘and cut the ground from under the extremists’. Kerensky dismissed the idea – and fired Verkhovsky.

  37

  Power – At Last

  ‘Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit. It has its own organic life; it develops finally into a disease…blood and power intoxicate.’

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead, 1862

  ‘First we must seize power. Then we decide what to do with it.’

  Lenin to Trotsky, 24 October 1917

  From the first moment, Sovnarkom – the name for the Council of People’s Commissars which Lenin thought ‘smelled like revolution’ – felt insecure. Lenin knew that power could slip away at any time, which explains so much of the seventy-four-year history of the Soviet State. From 25 October 1917, having achieved power illegitimately, Lenin’s only real concern for the rest of his life was to keep it – an obsession he passed down to his successors. Throughout its existence the Soviet Union identified itself with the founder of the State, alive or dead. The regime he created was largely shaped by his personality: secretive, suspicious, intolerant, ascetic, intemperate. Few of the more decent parts of his character found their way into the public sphere of his Soviet Union.

  Throughout his life as a revolutionary Lenin was absorbed in the study of one subject above all others: the nature of power, how it is grasped and used, how it changes those who possess it and those who don’t. He wanted power for its own sake, as egotists do. But he genuinely believed that he was going to use it to improve the lives of the majority of people. It is how he justified the lies, the deceit and terror that followed: everything was acceptable in pursuit of the socialist dream. As Angelica Balabanova, who respected him and admired him but grew to fear and loathe him, put it, Lenin’s ‘tragedy was that, in Goethe’s phrase, he desired the good…but created evil’.

  He wasn’t interested in the trappings of power and didn’t enjoy them. His aim was to impose his ideas and personality on others; to bend people to his will. He disliked ostentatious display and lived modestly with Nadya in dull, bourgeois style. Gorky once said that this simplicity, in such a dictatorial man, was an example of Lenin’s ‘narcissism’. Martov thought likewise, though at the same time he often said ‘there was no vanity in Lenin’ – a paradox apparent in few powerful men.

  Lenin did not want power for luxury, money or sex. Inessa was his only known romantic interest outside marriage. He enjoyed power, but he didn’t enjoy violence personally. He was not a sadist. He never wore anything resembling a military uniform, as so many dictators favoured. He was usually in a shabby suit and tie. He knew the Bolsheviks would use terror and accepted it, always justifying it as necessary. But he never witnessed an execution and had no interest in hearing about one. He saw only three dead bodies in his life: his father, his sister Olga and his mother-in-law. To Lenin, the blood he would spill was largely theoretical.

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  Nobody in Petrograd believed the Bolsheviks would survive for long. It was a ‘government of journalists and pamphleteers’, who had no idea how to run an administration, according to the journalists on one liberal newspaper. A witty headline in another paper on the morning after the coup described the Bolsheviks as ‘Caliphs for an hour’. The leading Menshevik, Tsereteli, gave them ‘no more than three days’. Gorky, who had been out on the streets the day before, watching the Revolution with a heavy heart, said Lenin would last two weeks at the most, though he soon revised that opinion. Vladimir Nabokov, out of a job when the government was overthrown but not under arrest like the ministers he had worked for, ‘refused to believe for one minute in the strength of the Bolshevik regime…expect its early demise’. Zinaida Gippius said, ‘this government by a bunch of swindlers can’t last long’. Some foreign embassies were rashly telling their governments the same. An aide to the British Ambassador cabled the Foreign Office within a few days that ‘it can be taken for granted that the Bolshevik Government is already on its last legs’. The American Ambassador, having told the State Department that a Bolshevik coup would never happen, now called the takeover ‘a disgusting thing’ and assured Washington that the Bolsheviks would soon be ousted.1

  Some of the senior Bolsheviks felt no more confident. Bonch-Bruevich said they lived ‘sitting on suitcases’, so they could flee at any moment. Lunacharsky wrote to his wife just four days after his appointment as People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, a grandiloquent title chosen by himself to cover the portfolios of education and culture: ‘Things are so unstable. Every time I break off from a letter I don’t know if it will be my last. I could at any moment be thrown into jail.’ The ever-practical Sverdlov had laid his hands on more than 100,000 gold rubles, some jewels and seven false passports – including one for himself, Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks – which he had placed in a fireproof safe in case they were forced to make a quick getaway. Nadya told comrades, in candour, that Lenin’s fear was that ‘power may slip away from his fingers…and for that reason was determined not to be too lenient’.2

  That explained one of his first actions as Chairman of Sovnarkom, on the afternoon after the coup. Just as dawn broke following his appearance at the Smolny, when he knew the Winter Palace had been seized and Petrograd was in Bolshevik hands, he went to Bonch-Bruevich’s apartment to try to get some rest. He could sleep for no more than two or three hours and soon returned to the Smolny, which would be the seat of power in Russia for the next five months. In Lenin’s few hours’ absence Kamenev had been in charge, as temporary Sovnarkom Chairman. He had decreed an end to capital punishment for troops at the Front, which the Kerensky government had reintroduced in the summer. Lenin’s reaction was predictable – and Kamenev told comrades later that he had predicted it, but announced the decree anyway. Lenin sought out Kamenev and said, ‘Nonsense. How stupid. This would be a serious mistake, an unpardonable weakness. How can you make a revolution without firing squads? If you believe that we can win without executions…to get our way, you are under a naïve delusion. What other means of repression do we have? You don’t understand the serious difficulties we are going to encounter.’ According to Trotsky, he proposed rescinding the decree straight away, but ‘someone said it would create a bad impression on the first day of the Revolution so he thought for a moment and said “yes…it would be better simply to resort to a firing squad when it becomes obvious there is no other way, but not to shout about it” and
the matter was quietly dropped’. From his first few hours as leader of Russia he laid the ground for rule by terror. ‘Many times a day, from the start, he would say things like, Well, what sort of dictatorship is this, show it to me,’ said Trotsky. ‘Vladimir Ilyich was under no illusions.’

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  On day two he began to censor the press and threatened to close down opposition newspapers. As the Romanovs had done, so would the Bolsheviks. A few weeks earlier, on 15 September, in one of the Party papers, Rabochii Put (The Workers’ Path), Lenin called censorship ‘feudal…Asiatic’ and praised a free press ‘as much more democratic in principle than any alternative’. He promised ‘incomparably more press freedom’ if the Bolsheviks had their way. On 27 October Lenin wrote a Decree on the Press which established a system of censorship run by his Party apparatchiks. ‘Any organ of the press may be…[closed down] for inciting resistance to the Decrees of Sovnarkom…or if found to be sowing confusion by means of obviously defamatory distortion of the facts.’ The measures were supposed to be ‘temporary’ against ‘clear counter-revolutionaries…emergency measures must be taken to stop the torrent of filth and slander against the new authority. As soon as the new order has been firmly established all administrative measures affecting the press will be lifted and the press will be granted full freedom.’

  The State would take over ownership of the presses and all the newsprint. The new government would allot the resources ‘equitably’. Political parties would be given a share and any groups of citizens would be guaranteed access to a nationalised printing plant if they were able to collect a given number of signatures for a newspaper of their own. ‘This will provide real freedom of the press for all and not just for the rich. It will act for the people’s enlightenment and not for their stultification and deception.’ When there were murmurs of dissent among his clique he said, ‘there’s a unanimous chorus from those jackals. Aren’t we going to bridle this rabble? The bourgeois press is a weapon no less dangerous than bombs or guns aimed at us. Why should we place it in their hands?’ Around the same time he shocked Emma Goldman by telling her that ‘free speech is a bourgeois prejudice, a soothing plaster for social ills. In the workers’ republic, economic well-being talks louder than speech.’3