First to slither back, predictably, was Zinoviev, who told Lenin, with weasel words: ‘We prefer to make mistakes together with millions of workers and soldiers and to die together with them rather than to stand apart at this decisive, historic moment.’
Lenin wasn’t a dictator at this point, and would face considerable opposition and monumental challenges in the next few years, but, as Trotsky put it, ‘from the moment the Provisional Government was deposed, Lenin acted in matters large and small as the government’.8
*1 But he was the victim of crime within a few days of the Bolshevik coup. His first official car, a luxurious and beautiful Turcat Méry which had been made in 1915 for the Tsar, was stolen when it was parked outside the Smolny. A group of firemen took it and planned to sell it for a large sum to a private buyer in Finland. Stepan Gil, who had been one of Nicholas II’s chauffeurs but became a loyal Bolshevik and Lenin’s driver, led a search for it and found it before the car left Petrograd.
*2 Eventually he managed to persuade senior comrades that he really wasn’t up to the task and he returned to obscurity in another commissariat, but he was famous for a day or two.
39
The Sword and Shield
‘In every revolutionary there is a hidden gendarme.’
Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, 1869
A secret decree written by Lenin set up the Cheka, the main building block for the Soviet police state. There were numerous name changes over the years – the GPU, GPRU, NKVD, MGB and finally, in its best-known incarnation, the KGB. Whatever it was called, its tasks remained the same: to protect the Party and its leadership from any perceived threat of subversion, and to dispense ‘revolutionary justice’.*1 It was, in Lenin’s words, ‘the Party’s sword and shield’, and the two images formed its emblem. Most operatives called themselves Chekists, up to the day it was disbanded in the 1990s. The Russian President a hundred years after the Revolution, Vladimir Putin, a long-serving KGB officer until the collapse of the USSR, used to say he had been a Chekist. So did thousands of people who worked for the imitation agencies the Cheka spawned throughout the Communist world – the East German Stasi or the Securitate in Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s Romania.*2
It was set up on 7 December 1917 as the Extraordinary Commission (Chrezhvychnaya Komissiya) for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage. Officially the Cheka was supposed to work hand in hand with a separate commission established three days earlier to combat the ‘wine pogroms’ – people who were looting the cellars of the Tsar and the rich who had either been arrested or fled Petrograd. ‘Attempts to break into wine cellars, liquor stores, warehouses, shops and private homes will be broken up by machine gun fire without any warning.’ But the Cheka’s remit was always intended to be wider.
In Lenin’s words, the Cheka’s job was to ‘investigate and liquidate all attempts or actions connected with counter-revolution or sabotage, no matter from whom they come, throughout Russia’. But its functions and powers were not made public until the mid-1920s, and from the first it operated outside the law under top-secret protocols with virtually no political accountability. The Soviet had no control and neither, over the years, did Sovnarkom. It answered only to Lenin.
Soon the Cheka became the most feared of the State ‘organs’, and its chief the most hated man in Russia. Lenin said the Cheka needed ‘a staunch proletarian Jacobin’ in charge, though the forty-year-old ‘ruthless, cold, shy and deeply puritanical’ Felix Dzerzhinsky wasn’t exactly a proletarian. He came from a wealthy landed Polish family which, like Lenin’s, had a claim to nobility. He was referred to as ‘Iron Felix’ or ‘the Iron Count’.
Born in Vilna, he went to one of Poland’s best Gimnasia schools before being expelled in his teens for persistently speaking Polish to classmates – a seriously seditious activity under the Tsars. He loathed the Romanov regime and the Russian bourgeoisie with a deep hatred that never left him. For Dzerzhinsky, the Revolution was personal. He was a founder member of the first Marxist revolutionary group in Poland and almost immediately afterwards was arrested, aged twenty. He was tortured and kept in solitary confinement for a year. He spent two periods of exile in Siberia, but managed to escape both times. Soon after he married fellow RSDLP member Zofia Muszkat she was arrested for smuggling subversive literature; he was left alone with a baby son. In 1912 he was arrested again and this time was treated with extreme brutality. He was beaten regularly and held for long periods in manacles – his wrists and ankles were permanently scarred. He was released from jail when the Tsar fell.
He moved awkwardly – ‘slender and haggard, with long dark wavy hair, a face abnormally thin and angular, he had a jutting moustache and a satanic pointed beard’, as one Sovnarkom colleague described him. ‘He had very correct manners and in speech he was quiet…formidably focused…without a single ray of humour in his character.’ He was grimly fanatical and entirely incorruptible. Józef Piłsudski, the future military dictator of Poland, remembered Dzerzhinsky from schooldays as ‘tormented…but he was a person who did not know how to tell a lie’. A comrade who knew him well loathed his prudish asceticism: ‘he couldn’t understand or tolerate moral weakness in others’. He didn’t always know where to find it, though. Under his nose, but not to his knowledge, for more than two years the organisation that was supposed to combat profiteering and ‘speculation’ became one of the country’s biggest speculators. Warehouses were full of goods taken from the ‘bourgeois’ as State property but sold to officials or friends of officials. ‘They looked for counter-revolutionaries, but took the valuables,’ the saying went.1
Dzerzhinsky at first tried to turn down the Cheka post and told Lenin he was not qualified for it. Lenin attempted persuasion, and when that didn’t work ordered him to take the job. The Bolshevik leader soon knew he had made a wise choice, from his point of view. Dzerzhinsky was utterly loyal, but not a lackey. He was prepared at times to argue with Lenin, though they agreed on the big things, in particular on the need for vigilance to save the Revolution and terror against enemies, perceived or real.
At the meeting in which the Cheka was established Dzerzhinsky was clear about his task ‘to fight a merciless war against all enemies of the Revolution. We need to send to that front – the most dangerous and cruel of fronts – determined, hard and dedicated comrades ready to do anything in defence of the Revolution. I do not seek forms of justice. We are not in need of justice. It is war now – face to face, a fight to the finish. Life or death.’
At first the Cheka had fewer than forty staff, based in a ramshackle office on the fourth floor of a scruffy building on Gorokhovaya, not far from Nevsky Prospekt. Dzerzhinsky kept what files the Cheka possessed in his briefcase and placed a notice on a wall close to the door: ‘Death to the Bourgeoisie’.*3 Within three months there were 600 staff, excluding its own blue-uniformed security troops, which numbered around 300 by the spring of 1918. Originally, according to Lenin’s decree, ‘the Commission will carry out only a preliminary investigation in so far as this is necessary for preventive purposes’. But almost immediately it went far beyond these powers and, without legal authorisation, moved from investigation to execution. The Cheka could easily do so because it had Lenin’s protection, and virtually nobody knew what its powers were. Its officials could make them up as they went along. Soon, it was a state within the State.
Dzerzhinsky became in many ways Lenin’s right hand, as close to him in the early days of the Red regime as Sverdlov and Trotsky. Accurate figures are still hard to come by as to how many people were murdered by the Cheka immediately after the October Revolution. Dzerzhinsky reported 884 executions to Sovnarkom between December 1917 and June 1918, but it is certain there were far more.*4
Lenin kept a close eye on the Cheka and always defended it. When in its early days critics in the Bolshevik leadership were concerned that it was behaving like a law unto itself, he said, ‘without such an institution the workers’ regime could not exist’. There were effo
rts by some commissars after the Revolution to limit its powers, but he would always ensure the Cheka was accountable only to him, and his successors did the same. He told Dzerzhinsky a few months after the Cheka was established: ‘What astonishes me is that so few [critics] are able to estimate the work of the Cheka broadly…You must act firmly, quickly and loyally. When I place its achievements beside its mistakes the latter sink into insignificance…For us the important consideration is that the Cheka has made the dictatorship of the proletariat a living reality…its work is priceless. There is only one way to free the masses and that is to crush the exploiters. This is the task of the Cheka, and for this it deserves the gratitude of the proletariat.’
The Cheka was more ruthless than the Okhrana, but it is a question of degree and not a category difference. In many ways they were a mirror image of each other. The Okhrana had operated as a private police force of the Crown, the Tsar’s sword and shield. The Cheka’s role was similar and so were its techniques. Most of the early Bolsheviks had long experience of the Okhrana’s methods and the Cheka copied many of them, such as infiltrating opposition groups, using agents provocateurs and recruiting double agents. While the Red Army would later enrol former Tsarist officers in its ranks, the Cheka did not do the same with former Okhrana agents. Dzerzhinsky, Lenin, Sverdlov and Stalin all argued that they simply couldn’t be trusted. The Cheka had to start from scratch and learn how to organise an espionage agency. Marx and Engels had left no blueprint; the Okhrana had.
Lenin was interested in the technical details of its operations. It was he, in a note to Dzerzhinsky soon after the Cheka was set up, who suggested that ‘it would be useful to carry out arrests at night’. The knock at the door in the small hours became the classic modus operandi of ‘the organs’ throughout the Communist years.2
*1 As he said he would, Lenin – unilaterally – changed the Party’s name in March 1918 from the Social Democratic and Labour Party, which despite all the various splits it had been since 1895, to the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik).
*2 The present-day FSB, Russia’s much-feared replacement of the KGB, retains the sword and shield motif as its ‘logo’.
*3 The Russian secret police will for ever be identified with the building the Cheka moved into the following March in Moscow – the former headquarters of the All-Russia Insurance Company at 22 Lubyanka, an address that would very soon become one of the most feared prisons in the world. It was – and is – a vast building occupying practically an entire city block. Dzerzhinsky told colleagues that one of the main reasons he chose it was the vast size of the cellar space, where noise could easily be muffled. And so it proved. The slogan about the bourgeoisie was later written in bigger lettering in the interrogation rooms when the Cheka moved to Moscow.
*4 Including Lenin’s first cousin, Viktor Ardashev, who was arrested and shot by the Cheka in Ekaterinburg in January 1918. The killer was almost certainly Yakov Yurovsky, one of the men who murdered the Tsar and his family a few months later. Lenin found out about Ardashev’s murder only when he asked an aide to send greetings to his cousin but was told that he had been executed. He liked Ardashev, with whom as a child he had spent summers in Kokushkino, though it is unlikely the affection was returned. He had been a well-known Kadet, a lawyer who had helped to organise the civil service strike in Ekaterinburg.
40
War and Peace
‘Without peace, and soon, the Revolution cannot survive.’
Lenin to Trotsky, 7 November 1917
The war had not ended. Lenin knew he had to deliver on his promises of peace to avoid the fate of Kerensky. He was prepared to make peace at almost any price.
His first tactic – on the day of the Revolution – was to appeal for a general peace between all the belligerent nations. He demanded an immediate conference to end the conflict: ‘We have thrown down a challenge to the imperialist plunderers of all countries,’ he said. He never expected his call to work, and predictably all sides rejected the proposal out of hand.
Next, Lenin sued for a separate, temporary truce with Germany, and he tried to play for time. He genuinely believed that his revolution would spark immediate uprisings in Western Europe and advance the world revolution – an article of faith among Bolsheviks. With each small-scale army mutiny or strike in Germany, Britain and France he expected an insurrection among workers, inspired by the Bolsheviks, that would bring down their governments. All he had to do was wait – and encourage the workers of the world to unite. Trotsky as Foreign Commissar was making daily speeches calling ‘on workers everywhere to rise up against their masters and stop the war’.
Russia’s separate peace with Germany caused the first collision between the Western powers and Lenin’s regime – the original Cold War with the Soviets. ‘Disgusting!’ the American Ambassador David Francis wired back to Washington. Two days later he reported to the State Department: ‘I have a strong suspicion that Lenin and Trotsky are working in the interests of Germany; but whether that is correct or not, their success will unquestionably result in Germany’s gain.’ He wrote in his diary the day after the Revolution, ‘of course we could not, and I would not, recognise any ministry of which Lenin is Premier and Trotsky Minister of Foreign Affairs’.*1 President Woodrow Wilson was more emollient and said he hoped ‘we may be privileged to assist the people of Russia to attain their hopes of liberty and ordered peace’. But he added that the ‘government in Petrograd was established by force and not recognised by the Russian people. It cannot of course be recognised…[by the US] particularly if it pursues a separate peace with Germany.’
Robert Cecil, the second-ranking minister in the British Foreign Office, said: ‘The actions of the extremists in Petrograd would be a breach of the agreements between us…it would put them practically outside the pale of the ordinary councils of Europe. There is no intention of recognising such a government.’ The French were equally adamant. ‘What? Talk with Lenin…after he has broken the treaties with us? After abandoning us in the middle of war? Never…’ said Gustave Hervé, one of the leading socialist politicians in the country. The French Foreign Minister, Stéphen Pichon, pointed out that ‘whatever Lenin does, we shall carry on fighting’.*2
There were advisers in all the Allied countries who told the governments that the best way of dealing with the new regime was to negotiate with Lenin. Bruce Lockhart advised the British government to do so and there were members of the Cabinet who wanted to talk with the Bolsheviks. But it is unlikely that this would have succeeded; Lenin needed to end Russia’s war as his first priority, and soon it became politically impossible for the Western governments to deal with the Bolsheviks.
Separate peace talks were bad enough. But the Allies were appalled and embarrassed when Trotsky published the ‘secret’ treaties the Tsar had signed with Britain and France before the war began. They showed deals were made to divide the post-war spoils when Germany was defeated: the Middle East would be carved up, Russia would get Constantinople – the dream of the Romanovs for three centuries – and France would get Alsace-Lorraine back. For Lenin these proved that the war was ‘an imperialist adventure all about colonies and plunder’. For the Allies the revelations put a stop to any agreement with the Bolshevik leader.*3
The British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, said he had wanted to talk to Lenin – but not after the treaties were leaked. Afterwards, he admitted, ‘the difficulties…in persuading certain members of the government to have any dealings with Petrograd which would involve recognition of the Bolsheviks were considerably enhanced’.1
—
The Russian-German peace talks began on 1 December at the grim and ugly town of Brest-Litovsk, in what was then Byelorussia (now Belarus) on the border with Poland. It had been repeatedly shelled by both sides during the war and much of it was destroyed. The daily sessions, in a military fort, were extraordinary – ‘worthy of some great historical painter’, as one of the Russian delegates recalled. On the Central Powers’ side, ‘b
lack-coated, much be-ribboned, exquisitely polite old-style gentlemen in morning coats’, most of them a count or a baron, at the very least a ‘von’. On the other side sat scruffy revolutionary Communists, many of whom had recently come out of jail or Siberian exile and spent their lives fighting the aristocratic order.
Prince Max von Baden recalled the formal opening dinner: ‘My cousin Prince Ernst von Hohenlohe was placed next to Madame [Anastasia] Bitsenko, who had qualified for her place in the talks by killing a minister. On 5 December 1905 she had assassinated the general, and former War Minister, Viktor Sakharov.’
General Max Hoffman, commander of the German army on the Eastern Front, left an entertaining personal account. ‘I shall never forget that first dinner with the Russians. I sat between [Adolph] Joffe and [Grigory] Sokolnikov [editor of Pravda and from March 1918 Finance Commissar]. Opposite me sat a worker who was obviously amazed by the large amount of silverware on the table. He tried to catch this and that on his plate with various bits of cutlery but he used the fork exclusively for the purpose of cleaning his teeth. Directly opposite me…sat Madame Bitsenko and directly opposite her a peasant, [Roman] Stashkov, a thorough Russian phenomenon with long grey locks and a huge beard. The orderly couldn’t hide a smile when he asked Stashkov whether he wanted red or white wine with one course. “Which is the stronger?” he asked.’*4
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