Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  From 28 October Kadet papers were closed down. Red Guards smashed some of their presses and linotype machines and confiscated the others. A few editors and prominent journalists were arrested. The best-selling SR newspaper Volya Naroda (The People’s Will) was shut down. It appeared the next day with a new masthead as Volya, and the following day, after the editor was jailed, as Narod – just as used to happen in banned newspapers during Tsarist times. When it finally died its farewell editorial echoed Marx: ‘History repeats itself…’

  When the socialist paper Den (Day) was banned it turned into an evening publication Night, then Midnight, then Darkest Night. The opposition press was driven underground.

  Some press criticism was permitted – reluctantly and for a short while. Gorky wouldn’t be silenced. Day after day until his newspaper was closed down the following summer, he warned with prescience in his column ‘Untimely Thoughts’ about the Bolsheviks’ intentions. Immediately after the Press Decree he wrote: ‘Lenin and Trotsky do not have the slightest idea of the meaning of freedom or the Rights of Man. They and their fellow travellers are already intoxicated by the foul poison of power, as they show by their disgraceful attitude to free speech, to the person, and to all rights for which the democracy struggled…The working class cannot fail to understand that Lenin is only performing a certain experiment on their skin and on their blood…Lenin is not an omnipotent magician but a cold-blooded trickster, who spares neither the honour nor the lives of the proletariat.’

  A few days later: ‘Lenin is one of those people who possess a quite exceptional strength of character…he is a man of many gifts and he has all the qualities of a “leader” – especially the complete lack of morality essential for such a role, and the aristocrat’s contempt for the masses. Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin. He does not know the masses. He has never lived among them, but he found out from books how to raise the masses onto their hind legs, how to enrage their instincts easily. To Lenin, the working class is like iron ore to a metalworker. Is it possible, given present circumstances, to cast a socialist state out of this ore? Evidently not. But why not try? What does Lenin risk if his experiment fails?…I am mistrustful of Russians in power – recently slaves themselves, they will become unbridled despots as soon as they have the chance to be their neighbours’ masters.’4

  Lenin did not hide his ambition to close down the opposition press. A few weeks after the coup, at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, he complained about press criticism and a Menshevik stood up and heckled to loud applause: ‘What do you mean, criticism. Which papers? Where? You’ve closed them all.’

  ‘No not yet,’ Lenin replied. ‘But we soon will.’

  —

  The Old Left was shattered. The venerable father of Russian Marxism, Georgy Plekhanov, now sixty-one and in poor health, had broken with Lenin years ago but was horrified that his erstwhile comrade had taken power for himself and his Party, sidelining other socialists. The day after the coup he wrote an open letter to the Petrograd working class saying that the Bolshevik ‘revolution is the greatest historic calamity, which will turn back the clock from all the gains made in Russia since February’. The next day soldiers and sailors burst into his Petrograd apartment when he was taking tea with his wife, Rozalia Markovna. A soldier drew a pistol and pressed it towards his chest, demanding, ‘You, scum, hand over your weapons. We are going to search. If we find any we’ll shoot you on the spot.’ Plekhanov drew himself up to his full 184cm height and replied, ‘You will probably do it anyway. Go on…but I haven’t got any weapons.’ They roughed up the apartment and left him unharmed, but Plekhanov went into hiding.*1 A week after the Revolution Vera Zasulich, sixty-eight, told a comrade in despair: ‘I feel as though everything I struggled for, everything that was so dear to me my entire life, has crumbled to dust.’5

  —

  Kerensky fled to the Front and tried to raise an army to recapture the capital and return in triumph. But most of the army refused to support him and all he could muster were a few hundred Cossacks under the 3rd Cavalry commander General Pyotr Krasnov. On 28 October they captured Gatchina, forty-five kilometres south of Petrograd, a strategic base from which they could seize the city. Lenin was seriously worried that they would march on Petrograd and he would be toppled after just three days. At around midday he went to the Petrograd military headquarters and took personal command of the defence. He closely questioned every order given by members of his Military Revolutionary Committee, most of them, apart from Trotsky, ex-soldiers. So haphazard had been the coup – even though it had succeeded – that he distrusted all the information given to him.

  He got on to the Hughes wire, an early prototype of a telex machine, which he had never used before. He didn’t announce his name or title. The conversations showed how uneasy and tense he was.

  First he contacted Alexander Sheinman, Chairman of the Helsingfors Soviet. ‘Can you move the greatest possible number of destroyers and other warships to Petrograd at once?’ he asked. Sheinman said he would have to ask the Baltic Fleet commander as he didn’t know. ‘This is a naval matter. What’s the news in Petrograd?’

  ‘The news is that Kerensky’s troops are on the move and have taken Gatchina…it is imperative that we have the strongest reinforcements as soon as possible.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  He received a typical Lenin answer. ‘Instead of your question “Anything else?” I expected to hear you say you were ready to set out immediately and fight.’

  Sheinman: ‘It seems to me useless to repeat that. We have made our decision and…everything will be done.’

  Lenin: ‘Have you stocks of rifles and plenty of ammunition to help us?’

  Then Ivan Mikhailov, head of the Helsingfors Soviet’s military section, came on the line. ‘How many men do you need?’

  ‘As many as possible but only loyal men who are ready to fight.’

  He was promised 5,000 within twenty-four hours – ‘and they are ready to fight’.

  ‘Can you provide food for them?’

  ‘Yes. We have plenty of provisions. We also have thirty-five machine guns. We can send them and their gun crews without any detriment to our position here, and a few field guns.’

  ‘On behalf of the Government of the Republic I urgently request you to begin sending these forces immediately. Are you aware a new government has been formed? What is the attitude of your Soviet to it?’

  ‘Yes, we heard from the newspapers. People here are enthusiastic about power passing into the hands of the Soviets.’

  ‘I take it the forces will start off immediately.’

  Finally Nikolai Izmailov, the Baltic Fleet representative on the Soviet, came on the line. He said he would despatch the battleship Republic and two destroyers. They should arrive in Petrograd within eighteen hours. Lenin said he wanted the vessel in the Ship Canal as close to the shore as possible. Izmailov, who had been a naval officer, told Lenin impatiently that the ship couldn’t be anchored near the shore and in any case ‘its guns have a range of twenty-five versts… In short, let the sailors and their commanders handle this.’

  Lenin asked for all available stocks of rifles and ammunition. ‘Goodbye, good luck,’ he said.

  ‘Goodbye. Will you tell me to whom I was speaking?’

  ‘Lenin.’

  ‘Goodbye…We are setting everything in motion now.’

  Lenin did not seem relieved by this news and wasn’t convinced the reinforcements would arrive.

  He had a big problem persuading the Petrograd garrison soldiers to move against Kerensky’s forces. Later that evening Nikolai Podvoisky, the former army officer who had played a major part in planning the coup, had an uncomfortable meeting with Lenin. ‘The Volinsky and other trusted regiments are simply refusing to leave…we can’t get a single army unit to go,’ he explained.

  ‘Then you must get them out,’ Lenin replied. ‘They must go this very moment, at whatever the cost.’

  ‘But there’s
nothing we can do with the regiments.’

  According to Podvoisky, ‘Lenin went into a terrible rage. His features became unrecognisable. He fixed his eyes on mine and, without raising his voice, though he seemed to be shouting, he said, “You will answer personally to the Central Committee if the regiments don’t leave the city immediately. Do you hear me? At this very moment.” ’

  Podvoisky managed to raise a few men, but only after he told them what Lenin would most likely do to them if they were determined to stay in barracks.6

  —

  If Krasnov’s few Cossacks had moved quickly on the city from Gatchina that day they might have taken power back for Kerensky. But they were as unwilling to fight as the garrison troops were. Trotsky – as much as Lenin – played a part in defending the city. He said that if troops were going to be unreliable, the Bolsheviks would arm workers. Throughout the day he toured factories making impassioned speeches urging workers to ‘turn Petrograd into a fortress’. At the Soviet that evening he called on everyone to march to the Front to save the Revolution. A rough voice interrupted him: ‘Why aren’t you there yourself with the Red Guards?’ He replied, dramatically, ‘I’m going now’ – and left the platform. It was exactly the right revolutionary gesture, as John Reed, who was there, described it. But there was no need for the garrison troops, the battleships from the Baltic Fleet or a workers’ militia.

  It was bribery and deception that saved the Bolsheviks from defeat. On 30 October Kerensky’s forces reached the heights of Pulkovo, twenty-five kilometres outside Petrograd. There had been no major battles, only a few small skirmishes in heavy rain. Late that night Pavel Dybenko, a dashing former naval officer and now Navy Commissar in the new regime, was smuggled into their camp and negotiated a deal promising the Cossacks safe passage to the Don and autonomy over their part of the steppe. They saw no reason to fight for Kerensky and surrendered to the Bolsheviks, who kept their side of the bargain and let them go. Trotsky arrived on the scene late at night on 31 October and agreed the terms of the agreement.*2 At 2 a.m. he despatched a cable to Lenin: ‘This night…will go down in history. The attempt to move counter-revolutionary troops against the capital of the Revolution has been decisively repulsed. Kerensky is retreating; we are advancing. All the country from now on will be convinced that the power of the Soviets is no ephemeral thing, but a fact. There will be no return to the past. Before us are struggles, obstacles and sacrifices. But the road is clear and victory is certain.’*3, 7

  —

  Late on the afternoon of 29 October the new People’s Commissar for Social Welfare, Alexandra Kollontai, arrived at her ministry in a grand neo-classical building in Kazan Street. She was greeted by a picket line of office workers. An elderly footman in full livery refused to let her in, telling her he had no idea who she was. She told him her title and demanded to see the most senior official in the building. The footman said that petitioners were allowed in only between 1 and 3 p.m. and as it was now past 5 she had better leave and return another day. When she tried to force her way through, he slammed the door in her face. She returned early the following morning with an escort of soldiers, but she found a picket line outside and the building inside almost empty. The entire civil service which had worked for the Tsarist regime and the Provisional Government had gone on strike in mass protest against the new government. Only the cooks, cleaners, doormen, porters and support staff were working as normal.

  Kollontai went down to the picket line and threatened to arrest them all unless one of them found the keys to her office safe. As she had feared, the safe was empty; her predecessor, the Kadet Countess Sophia Panina, had taken the ministerial funds with her and refused to pay any of the money back until told to do so by the Constituent Assembly due to be elected the following month.*4

  On the same day Shlyapnikov, Commissar for Labour (and Kollontai’s former lover), tried to enter his office. The janitor told him that only some of the cleaners were in the building, everyone else was on strike. He went back to the Smolny, where Bolshevik Party officials and clerks were still working. He tried to recruit some staff from one of the commissariats, so he could set up an office. A mid-level civil servant came to see him: ‘Well you won’t find one – certainly not for you. What, a trade unionist all your life and now you are recruiting blackleg scabs. You should be ashamed.’

  It was nearly two weeks before Trotsky tried going to his assigned office as Foreign Affairs Commissar. He turned up smartly dressed early on the morning of 9 November at the grand General Staff building opposite the Winter Palace. Some curious officials who wanted to see the famous revolutionary leader went to meet him, as one recalled. ‘The new “minister” arrived and said, “I am Trotsky, the Commissar.” He was greeted with ironic laughter. To this he paid no attention at all and just told all of us to get to work. We left – but to our homes, with the intention of not returning to our offices while Trotsky was head of the ministry.’ Trotsky took it in his stride. As he told a friend when he returned in good humour to the Smolny later that morning, what foreign relations would the Bolsheviks need anyway? ‘All I’ll do is issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the foreigners and then shut up shop.’ He had gone to the commissariat only for one purpose: to find copies of the so-called secret treaties that the Tsarist government had signed with the Allies to enter the war. He couldn’t find them and was told that a secretary in the Provisional Government had taken them the day before the Revolution.*5, 8

  —

  Lenin called the strikes ‘sabotage…nothing but blackmail’ and issued repeated orders for the civil servants to return to work. He was not too concerned about most of them, though. He knew that for the time being the Revolution could live without officials from the Foreign or Welfare Commissariats. But it needed money immediately. If the Bolsheviks couldn’t pay supporters, buy supplies or requisition food there was no way it could survive for any length of time. Lenin told Vyacheslav Menzhinsky – who was given the job of Finance Commissar largely because years earlier he had briefly worked as a lowly bank clerk – ‘without money we are helpless. The wages of railway workers, telegraph workers and the like have to be paid.’

  They had to return to bank robbery in order to get it. On the first day after the Revolution Lenin personally, and Sovnarkom formally, asked the head of the National Bank, Ivan Shipov, to release ten million rubles to the government. He refused, saying it would be illegal. He didn’t recognise the Bolshevik regime or the Soviet as a legitimate government; the National Bank employees had joined the civil servants’ strike. Three days later Lenin demanded the money again and once more was turned down. Couriers sent from the Smolny with drafts signed by the commissars were rejected and soon Sovnarkom would be starved of funds. And starved of anyone who knew how the banking system worked. ‘There were some people among us who understood…from books and manuals,’ one Party worker admitted. ‘But there was not a single…[person] who knew the technical procedures of the Russian State Bank.’

  On 7 November Menzhinsky, accompanied by a squad of Red Guards and a small detachment of soldiers, arrived at the bank, which was deserted apart from Shipov and a few of his closest aides. They were given an ultimatum. Unless the cash was forthcoming in twenty minutes all ‘white-collar’ employees above the position of clerk would lose their jobs and their pensions and all men of military age would be drafted into the army and sent to the Front. They still held firm. Shipov was placed under guard and locked up in the Smolny, in Menzhinsky’s room the commissar had to share with his deputy.

  Lenin was furious with Menzhinsky and three days later ordered the Deputy Commissar, Nikolai Gorbunov, and the newly appointed State Bank Commissar, Nikolai Osinsky, to ‘go and take the money, at least five million, and don’t dare come back without it’.

  Red Guards surrounded the bank while the two Bolsheviks entered the building and ordered junior clerks, at gunpoint, to open the vaults. Five million rubles were hastily stuffed into sacks – as in a heist movie. Gor
bunov and Osinsky carried the bags over their shoulders, got into a waiting armoured car and took them directly to Lenin’s office. He was not there; the pair transferred the money into red velvet bags and kept guard over the swag. Osinsky was holding a cocked revolver throughout the procedure. When he returned, Lenin was beaming. The bags were put in an old wardrobe in an adjoining office and a sentry stood permanent guard. This was the first Soviet Treasury.9

  *1 He was admitted, secretly under an assumed name, to a clinic in Petrograd and later fled to Finland, where he died in a village near Terijoki on 30 May 1918. He was soon rehabilitated politically, though. During the Soviet years his attacks on Lenin and the Bolsheviks were censored, but his philosophical works on Marxism were admired – even by Lenin – and were taught in schools as a compulsory subject up until the collapse of the USSR.

  *2 But the Don Cossacks were cheated of their ‘independence’ not long afterwards. Despite the promises they were subsumed into the highly centralised USSR, as eventually were all the so-called autonomous regions.

  *3 Kerensky remained in hiding inside Russia or in Finland throughout the Civil War that followed, hoping for a triumphal return to Petrograd. Eventually he accepted it would be unlikely to happen and left for Berlin in 1922, and subsequently Paris – the route taken by hundreds of thousands of Russian émigrés. When France fell to the Germans in 1940 he left for the US. He lived in New York, making a good income on the speaking circuit. Then he went to California and joined the Hoover Institution. He died in 1970, aged eighty-nine.