*4 The two women had known each other since childhood – and loathed each other, though the Countess did acknowledge once that Kollontai ‘dressed very well – for a revolutionary’. Panina, in whose palace Lenin had in 1906 caused a sensation as a speaker, was arrested and charged with embezzling 93,000 rubles from the ministry/commissariat. On Lenin’s orders, in early December she appeared in the first Soviet ‘show trial’ before a Revolutionary Tribunal. The proceedings were a farce, with the verdict decided by the Bolshevik Party and Sovnarkom – as would become so familiar in the Soviet years. She was ordered to pay back the money, refused and was jailed in the Peter and Paul Fortress. She was released only when some of her rich friends raised the cash to bail her out. She was allowed to leave Petrograd and joined the Whites in the Civil War, escaping to Germany and then to the US. She died in New York in 1956, aged eighty-four.
*5 They turned up later and when Trotsky published them, as we will see, it caused a major diplomatic incident.
38
The Man in Charge
‘There was nothing in Lenin’s personal appearance to suggest even faintly a resemblance to the super-man…he looked at first glance more like a provincial grocer than a leader. Yet in those steely eyes there was something that arrested attention, something in that quizzing, half-contemptuous, half-smiling look which spoke of boundless self-confidence and conscious superiority.’
Robert Bruce Lockhart, meeting Lenin, spring 1918
‘The fact that all his…[Lenin’s] powers and energies are concentrated upon one thing makes it easy for him to appear extraordinary in the eyes of the masses and become a leader, in the same way that those who really concentrate on God become saints and those who live only for money become millionaires.’
Ignazio Silone (1900–1978)
Almost every evening until the following new year Lenin and Nadya went for a walk – as had been their routine in exile. ‘Nobody knew his face at that time, so we would often stroll around the Smolny,’ she said. It took several weeks for his beard to grow back and even people who might have recognised him were confused. Petrograd was a lawless place in the first months of Bolshevik rule and random crimes were commonplace. But Lenin never needed intervention by the one bodyguard who followed a discreet distance behind him.*1
Lenin and Nadya were given a two-room apartment, with a kitchen, on the first floor of the Smolny. It was comfortable, if far from luxurious. For Lenin the important thing was its security: it backed onto a corridor leading to a courtyard through which he could flee quickly if necessary – and he told Nadya it might be necessary at any point. Nobody was allowed to enter without a special pass signed by Lenin. Nadya liked the accommodation and enjoyed her time at the Smolny. ‘Our room had once been occupied by an upper-class lady. It had a partition screen on one side of which stood the bed…one had to enter via the washroom.’
For years Nadya had worked for him as his secretary and she held a position as a Party official as well as personal confidante. Now he had all the help he needed. The change was difficult for her and, as she told friends, she desperately needed some work to be useful. Lunacharsky gave her a job as one of his deputy commissars. Her one regret was that she was no longer there to look after Lenin, and to watch out for his health. He ate badly – grazed on food, ‘living from hand to mouth’ and not taking enough care. ‘He was in a neglected condition. Zheltyshev [Yuri, his bodyguard] fetched him lunch – bread, which was laid down as his ration. Sometimes Maria Ilyinichna [Lenin’s sister] brought him food of some sort from her home, but I wasn’t at home a lot of the time and there was no concern for his diet.’ Predictably, he was soon complaining about stomach pains, indigestion and insomnia.1
—
‘Each session of the Sovnarkom represented improvisation on a grand scale,’ Trotsky told one of his chief aides after a few days as Foreign Affairs Commissar. ‘Everything was in its beginning…everything had to be built anew. There is no use looking for precedents because history hasn’t supplied any.’ Lenin repeatedly said, ‘we have to destroy everything…everything, to create the new’ and at first the regime appeared like an extension of the revolutionary underground, where conspirators met, holed in the corner, while a couple of armed plotters kept watch for police spies. Despite the efforts of a secretary to impose some semblance of solemnity, ‘we could not help feeling that we were attending another sitting of a…revolutionary committee’, said one long-time Party activist who sat in on a few early sessions. ‘For years we had belonged to various underground organisations. All the commissars remained seated in their topcoats or greatcoats…[in case they had to escape in a hurry]…many wore the forbidding leather jacket.’2
Soon Lenin’s sense of order prevailed and meetings were much more structured. He was obsessive about secrecy and the big, difficult, more squalid decisions were often taken by a small clique of his trusted lieutenants. At the beginning he relied most on Sverdlov and Trotsky, who were careful to leave no paper trail. But Lenin was fussily insistent that the bulk of the formal Sovnarkom business must be conducted as he instructed. Meetings usually began at around 5 p.m., often lasted six or seven hours with barely a break, and for the first month Lenin was present at every one.
Meetings were in a surprisingly small and dingy room on the third floor, ‘dark even on sunny days’, recalled one regular visitor. ‘Light struggled to get through, and it was difficult to draw the curtains. A few armchairs rested against the walls. The furniture was ill assorted, gathered from various places around the building. A worn, faded carpet covered the floor. It was like the reception room of a provincial lawyer.’
Lenin loathed anyone being late and instituted a system of fines for unpunctuality. Typically, he wrote the rules himself. Any commissar or official who was late by up to half an hour was fined five rubles, which rose to ten for anyone late by an hour. ‘Only People’s Commissars who give proper notice and reasons for being late will be excused the fine.’ He instituted similar regulations for all government bodies. ‘Lateness by ten minutes for a meeting without good reason will incur a reprimand; a second offence, loss of one day’s pay; a third time a public reprimand in the press…Anyone more than fifteen minutes late will incur a reprimand in the press or compulsory labour on days off.’
He limited time for speakers rigorously, referring to a pocket watch he kept on a green-baize table in front of him. Most of the commissars had been writers, agitators, trade union organisers, ‘conspirators’. Very few knew anything about administration and Lenin’s claim that ‘any worker can learn how to run a ministry in a few days’ was immediately put to the test. He realised that of course it was nonsense. As Trotsky admitted, often the commissars knew next to nothing about complex subjects. ‘The discussion was always concise. The speaker…had no more than five to ten minutes and yet Lenin, somehow gropingly, always found the right line along which to steer the debate. When there was a meeting at which many people were present, among them specialists or people unknown to Lenin, he resorted to his favourite gesture: he would put his right hand over his forehead and eyes and look through between his stretched fingers. Thus, playing peek-a-boo, he observed the speaker and the participants very intently and attentively and saw exactly what he needed to see. He would watch a speaker from under his hand, as if he were feeling him out and weighing every word; it was a special look of interrogation. He kept one eye on the watch…and would occasionally remind the orator that time was up.’
He took notes throughout, or wrote them furiously to be handed to a speaker requesting information or making an observation. Often they were angry complaints if he saw anyone whispering at meetings or appearing not to be concentrating hard enough. He fired off a message to one of his favourites, Lidia Fotieva, his loyal and efficient personal secretary for many years, when he saw her talking to one of the stenographers. ‘If you’re going to chatter, I swear I will throw you out.’ On another occasion a couple of weeks later he couldn’t spot her when he wanted her t
o find something for him. ‘I’m giving you a reprimand. You are not to sleep but to organise things so that everyone can easily locate you [his italics] and always [underlined three times] when it is to do with me.’ He was extremely fond of using italics and underlinings for emphasis.
Lenin was given a small private office on the first floor of the building, along the corridor from his apartment – Kollontai thought it was ‘cramped…a desk was shoved tight against a wall under a single lamp, and there was little space’. By the second day after the Revolution he became infuriated that so many people he didn’t know, including those with no urgent business, barged in without knocking or being announced. In pencil he drafted instructions to the chief doorman of the building with his own hand: ‘Admit members of the “Cabinet” if the attendant recognises them; if not, demand to see their identification. All others must write their names and purpose of their visit in no more than two words on a piece of paper. The attendant must bring that piece of paper to the Chairman [Lenin] without whose permission nobody is allowed into the office. If the office is empty, keep the door open so one of the secretaries can answer the telephone. If someone is in the chairman’s room, always keep the door closed.’3
—
Appointments to responsible posts were haphazard, often given to totally inexperienced people for political reasons and to those who happened to be in the right place at the right time. One day, during the stand-off between the new regime and the State Bank, a relatively minor Bolshevik activist, Mikhail Peskovsky, was chatting to the Finance Commissar Menzhinsky, an old colleague. He casually mentioned that he had been a student in London some years earlier and one of his subjects for a few months, among other things, had been finance. ‘Menzhinsky looked at me and said, “Well, in that case we must appoint you as Director of the State Bank.” I was frightened and told him that I had no desire for that position, it was not my job and I wouldn’t suit it. Menzhinsky…asked me to wait and he left the room. After a while he came back with a piece of paper. Under the signature of Ilyich my appointment to the position was confirmed and I asked Menzhinsky to revoke the appointment but he remained unmoved.’*2
Nikolai Gorbunov, twenty-five, who for many years held the key position of Secretary of Sovnarkom and was a personal assistant to Lenin, had a similar experience. An engineer by training, he had caught the eye of Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, head of Lenin’s private office. BB, as he was called, asked him into the Smolny at the beginning of November – ‘and I was taken to see Lenin, who told me I was given the job’. He had no experience of any administrative work, ‘and to start with I was given no instructions about what my duties were. I had not the slightest idea about the work, or secretarial duties in general. I couldn’t type, but somehow I confiscated a typewriter, on which I managed to bang out documents using two fingers, as for a long time no typists could be found.’ On one occasion he had to take detailed minutes of a Sovnarkom meeting, having no shorthand of any kind. Lenin was ‘a stern taskmaster…he let very little slip and was extremely demanding. He used to say “work in my secretariat is real drudgery – no rest, no holidays” and he was right.’ But Lenin did take a close interest in those who worked near to him. He told his staff this wasn’t ‘softness’ on his part. It was colder, more calculating than that. ‘Those of you who work at Smolny are State material…valuable State property.’4
Lenin showed his own inexperience. In general he was shrewd about appointing talented and efficient people for the top positions, whom he picked on ability as well as political nous and status in the Party. But he didn’t always know what the jobs entailed. Adolph Joffe, one of the cleverest of the early revolutionaries, whom Lenin appointed to the key position of Ambassador to Germany – and later a roving diplomat for the Soviets – was surprised by a conversation with Lenin at the Smolny a few days after the Revolution, as he explained in a letter to his good friend Trotsky. ‘The day after Leonid Krasin was named Transport Commissar, a post for which despite his many great qualities he is entirely unsuited, I was leaving Petrograd. I went to see Vladimir Ilyich before I went. He asked me when I was leaving and I told him I didn’t know exactly when the train was departing. “Call up Krasin,” he said. In his view the Transport Commissar was supposed to know the entire railway timetable, even if he had only been in the job a day and had never had anything to do with the railways before. It was the same with everything else.’5
Lenin, though, was smart to pick Yakov Sverdlov as the man to oversee the apparatus of government, technically with the title of Chairman of the Central Committee Executive. He was a brilliant organiser, ruthlessly efficient, notoriously unsentimental and a fast learner. Aged thirty-two, he had served seven years in the Tsar’s jails or in Siberian exile, during which time he voraciously read everything he could lay his hands on. He possessed a photographic memory accompanied by exhaustive curiosity. Short, wiry, with dark good looks, he had a mop of thick black hair, piercing hazel eyes, a goatee beard and pince-nez. He habitually wore the commissar’s leather coat, but often added something raffish of his own – a floppy Bohemian black cravat. He had a deep, booming voice which some people found attractive, others, when he was in a dark mood, terrifying. ‘He was like a diamond,’ according to Lunacharsky, that had been ‘chosen for its absolute hardness to be the axis of some delicate, perpetually revolving piece of mechanism’. If Lenin was the mastermind of the Revolution, the theoretician, and Trotsky its showman and orator, Sverdlov was its chief operating officer. Lenin said, simply, ‘Sverdlov…he is indispensable…it would take six men to replace him.’6
—
During his first few days as Russia’s leader Lenin ruled by decree. Dozens of them came from the Smolny in a flurry, most written by Lenin himself. Apart from the Decree on the Press, there were decrees on Peace, which promised a swift end to the war, on Land, which set out a vast agrarian reform that gave peasants rights to own and run estates, and on Workers’ Rights, which assured ‘freedom from capitalist exploitation’ and control over factories. A separate decree guaranteed an eight-hour working day – something for which the trade unions had been struggling for decades. All the nations of the Russian empire, from Armenia to the Baltic states and Poland, were given the right to independence. Women were ensured equal rights in work, marriage and over family property. Russians were assured freedom of religion. Under the old regime the Orthodox Church was the established religion, many others had been banned, and there were still ecclesiastical courts which had considerable power. Decrees nationalised the banks and major industries.
When Lenin wasn’t chairing meetings he was furiously writing these decrees, many of which read as though they had been dashed off with little thought. Others were merely ‘exercises in propaganda, not government’, as one of Lenin’s old comrades charged with implementing them admitted. From the start, the decrees showed two characteristic aspects of his rule that stood out: a dictatorial tone, and the way Lenin could be sidetracked by small things. The man who often thought in a grand historical sweep and believed he was starting a world revolution could be obsessed by trivia. For example, when it was touch and go whether his revolution would survive, food stocks were running out in Petrograd and Russia was still at war, he spent hours on a subject close to his heart, but still a matter that could have been handled by a mid-level official. He wrote in his own spindly hand a Decree on Libraries; its hectoring tone was typical: ‘1. The Public Library [formerly the Imperial Library] must immediately arrange the exchange of books with all the libraries in Petrograd and the provinces and also with foreign libraries (Finland, Sweden etc.). 2. No charge must be made for sending books from one library to another. 3. The reading room in the Library must be open every day, not excluding Sundays and holidays, from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. This is the procedure in private libraries and reading rooms used by the rich in civilised countries. 4. An appropriate number of employees must be immediately transferred to the Public Library from the Commissariat of Enlightenment…and employing t
he services of women more widely, since the men are being drafted into the army…nine-tenths of the present personnel in the ministry being engaged in work which is not only useless but harmful…’ He goes on for a further few clauses in a similar fashion.7
The frenetic pace of the decrees was partly Lenin’s determination to move forward with speed. But the main reason was prompted by insecurity: if his regime didn’t survive he wanted the evidence of his decrees to remind history of the things he intended to achieve. The decrees were agreed by Sovnarkom, but hardly even discussed by the Soviets in whose name he had taken power. Quickly the Soviet became the rubber-stamp body it would remain for the next seven decades – ‘a sorry parody of a revolutionary parliament’.
A few Bolsheviks rebelled, but Lenin saw them off. A week after the Revolution Kamenev and Zinoviev attempted to bounce Lenin into agreeing to a coalition government with other socialist parties – the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. It seems scarcely conceivable that, having worked closely with Lenin for the last fifteen years, only now did they suddenly realise that he really did intend to create a one-party state. More likely, they thought Lenin would be swept aside and they could take leadership of the Bolsheviks when he was gone.
On 4 November they threatened to resign from the government, and when Lenin called their bluff they walked out of Sovnarkom and the Central Committee of the Party with three other commissars, Nikolai Milutin, Viktor Nogin and Alexei Rykov. They went public – a heinous offence in Lenin’s eyes. ‘We believe that only the formation of all the Soviet parties will be able to consolidate the results of the heroic struggle of the working class and the Revolution,’ they wrote in Izvestia, the paper controlled by the Soviet. ‘There is only one alternative to this: the maintenance of an exclusively Bolshevik government run by means of political terror. We cannot and do not want to go this way…we cannot assume responsibility for this fatal policy, pursued in opposition to the will of the majority of workers and soldiers, which…would lead to the establishment of an irresponsible regime and to the destruction of the Revolution and the country.’ Lenin called them ‘traitors and deserters…two of whom even before the insurrection acted as strike-breakers’. But he did not worry; they did not represent a significant split in the Party or a threat to himself. He let them go into isolation, temporarily. Sure enough, within weeks they submitted and returned to the fold.
Lenin Page 44