Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Lenin’s tactics were to string out the talks for as long as possible – and he knew just the man who could obfuscate for ages. At first Joffe led the Russian delegation. After a few days he was replaced by Trotsky. Nobody could make longer speeches going nowhere than Trotsky. Lenin told him before departing to Brest: ‘We need someone to do the delaying…and you will do it better than anybody. String out the talks until there is a revolution in Germany – or as long as possible.’

  Trotsky went and, master of blather as he was, talked endlessly. For one whole day he gave a long lecture to the assorted German and Austrian diplomats on the first volume of Marx’s Capital. On another he went through every clause in a potential treaty in German and Russian insisting upon two separate interpreters, doubling the time involved. The Germans were getting bored and suspicious, though the elaborate dinners and social events went on. Trotsky reported at one point in mid-December that he thought ‘time might be running out at the talks’ and, in a postscript, asked Lenin whether he should wear evening dress at one of the receptions. ‘Go in a petticoat if you want to, only get us peace.’

  The Germans tired of the Russians’ delaying tactics and just before Christmas offered a peace on their terms. They insisted on keeping the lands they had occupied: Poland, Lithuania, Courland and most of Western Ukraine. At the end of December Trotsky sought an adjournment and went back to Petrograd for talks with Lenin and the other commissars.

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  The peace deal with Germany was the first big test of Lenin’s position as leader of the Revolution. It opened a split within the Party that almost toppled him and might have destroyed the Bolshevik regime after just a few weeks. Lenin wanted to accept the German terms. But he wasn’t – yet – a dictator within his own Party and to begin with he was in a minority. He had to fight hard to get his way. At first most of the comrades refused to approve an abject, humiliating peace. The opposition against him was led by Bukharin, but included Kamenev, Kollontai and Dzerzhinsky. Only Stalin and Zinoviev were entirely behind him. Inessa was living in Moscow but had a high position on the Soviet there and sent him messages begging him to think again before making ‘a disgraceful peace’. They wanted to fight a ‘revolutionary war’ against Germany which they argued was the likeliest way of sparking an uprising in Western Europe. ‘We must look at the socialist republic from the international point of view,’ Bukharin said at a dramatic meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 11 January 1918. ‘Let the Germans strike, let them advance another hundred kilometres, what interests us is how it affects the international movement.’

  Lenin said the idea of a revolutionary war was ‘suicidal’ and hopelessly naïve. The army was ‘zero as a fighting force. It barely exists. We might not last more than a few days. I’m prepared to yield territory to the present victor to gain time, obtain a breathing space. That’s what this is all about and only that. Signing a treaty in defeat is a way of gathering strength. If we were to wage a revolutionary war, as Bukharin wants, it would be the best way of getting rid of us right now. For us, as well as from the international point of view, the preservation of the Soviet republic stands above all else.’

  He said there was no point in risking the Revolution on the possibility of an uprising in Germany, which he was beginning to doubt was imminent. ‘Germany is only just pregnant with revolution, while we have already given birth to a completely healthy child.’ He did not persuade the others.

  Trotsky came up with a different formula that sounds nonsensical but was accepted by the others. His tactic was to play for yet more time under the attractive-sounding slogan ‘Neither war nor peace’. He would return to the talks, declare the war at an end, but refuse to sign ‘an annexationist peace’. If the Germans invaded, which Russia couldn’t prevent in any case, it would appear to the world that the Germans were committing an act of aggression against a ‘peaceable country’.

  Lenin told him that the issue was the survival of the Revolution. ‘We can restore the balance of the Party later,’ he said. ‘We can save the Revolution only by signing the peace terms. Better a split than being overthrown…Let’s admit your plan is accepted and we refuse to sign the peace treaty. The Germans attack at once. What will you do then?’ ‘We will sign the peace terms under bayonets,’ Trotsky said. ‘Then the picture will be clear to the workers of the world.’ Lenin called Trotsky’s idea ‘international showmanship’ but he had to go along with it, knowing it would fail. As Nadya said later, Lenin was in ‘a shattered state’, in constant rages, hardly sleeping, looking ill and seriously worried that his dreams for the socialist Revolution would be wrecked by his own comrades’ stupidity.

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  The Germans had decided that they would countenance no more delays. While the talks were adjourned, back in Berlin army chief Ludendorff asked Hoffmann, ‘Tell me, is it really possible to negotiate with these people?’ Hoffmann said, ‘Yes, for now. Your Excellency needs troops on the Western Front and this is the quickest way to get them.’

  Trotsky returned to Brest-Litovsk and tried playing for time again with his ‘Neither war nor peace’ tactic. After a few days Hoffmann had had enough. ‘This time the Comrades will simply have to swallow what’s put before them,’ he said in his diary. On 9 February he told Trotsky that if the deal was not signed by the next day, the Germans would invade Russia. When the time expired Trotsky declared the Russians were ‘leaving the war’ but refused to sign a peace treaty – a new concept in diplomacy. There was a silence. The Germans seemed not to understand and had no idea what to make of it. Eventually Hoffman stood up and loudly but simply declared, ‘Unerhört’ (unheard of).

  A week later the Germans announced they would resume hostilities against Russia on 18 February. Even then most of the Bolshevik leadership refused to agree the peace terms. Lenin’s motion at Sovnarkom to sign immediately was defeated by six votes to five.

  Five days later the Germans issued a final ultimatum: the Russians were given until 7 a.m. on 24 February to accept the terms or face an overwhelming invasion. Lenin told his comrades: ‘We must sign. If you don’t, you are signing the death warrant of Soviet power within three weeks.’ He threatened to resign as head of the government and from the Bolshevik Party altogether – a tactic he had used before. Nobody was prepared to call his bluff.

  Within three days the Germans advanced and captured more territory than in the previous three years of the war. Lenin thought that they would march on Petrograd.*5

  There were three more meetings on 18 February. Lenin made a final appeal: ‘I understand our impulse is to resist this shameful, robber peace. Our reason will tell us in our calmer moments the plain truth: Russia can offer no resistance, we are exhausted after three years of war. There may be people who will be willing to fight in a great cause. But they are romantics who would sacrifice themselves without any prospects of real advantage. Wars are not won nowadays with enthusiasm.’ Trotsky finally swung round to Lenin’s position and turned the vote seven to four Lenin’s way. But there was anger against him. At a broader party meeting four days later Lenin was greeted by shouts of ‘Traitor’ and ‘German spy’ even among his closest comrades. The debate was heated and tempers were short. At one point Karl Radek rose from his seat and shouted at Lenin, ‘If we had five hundred courageous men in Petrograd we would put you in prison.’

  Lenin smiled and answered wearily: ‘Some people may indeed go to prison after this but if you will calculate the probabilities you will see that it is much more likely that I will send you rather than you send me.’

  At midnight on 23 February Lenin personally sent the telegram to Berlin accepting the peace terms. By then the Germans had made much tougher demands. The Russians should have accepted the deal offered in December. Now, as Lenin told his ‘Cabinet’, the peace was even more of a ‘partition, enslavement, humiliation’. Apart from the territory they had already lost they were forced to give up the Baltic states, Finland and nearly all Ukraine to the Central Powers and the
ports of Kars, Andalan and Batum to the Turks – 1.8 million square kilometres, sixty-two million people, around 32 per cent of its best agricultural land, 54 per cent of its industry and 89 per cent of its coalmines.

  Already facing an enormous economic disaster, they had to pay a huge ‘indemnity’. Around 120 million gold rubles were shipped to Germany. The price of peace was high.

  The treaty was eventually signed on 3 March. None of the Bolshevik leaders wanted to put their names to such a ‘shameful peace’. Trotsky moved himself out of contention by resigning as Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Joffe flatly refused, as did the new Foreign Affairs Commissar, Georgy Chicherin. Sokolnikov proposed Zinoviev should go and Zinoviev proposed Sokolnikov, who first said he wouldn’t do it, but then was ordered to go by Lenin. He signed, as he would say later, with self-disgust.2

  *1 Francis, en route back to Washington a few weeks after the Revolution, was one of the guests at a lunch given by George V at Buckingham Palace. The King asked him what should be done about Russia and the Bolsheviks and he replied, ‘We should topple Lenin.’ The King said, ‘Well…I agree, but your President doesn’t seem to think so.’

  *2 Unofficially, though, all the Allied governments despatched agents to talk with the Bolshevik regime in an effort to persuade Lenin and Trotsky to stay in the war. Britain used Robert Bruce Lockhart as a go-between, the Americans sent Raymond Robins under the guise of Chairman of the American Red Cross Committee, but in reality Woodrow Wilson’s secret conduit to the Bolsheviks with a direct line to Lenin, who spoke to him often and admired him – ‘an honest and decent man…I always liked him,’ he said later. The French used the spy Captain Jacques Sadoul, who blunted the purpose of his mission when it turned out that he was a fanatical Communist and fervent Lenin supporter. The British, as has been proven beyond doubt, did more than spy on the Bolsheviks and try to influence them. Various secret agents plotted with opposition groups to bring down Lenin’s regime because it was making peace with Germany (see Giles Milton’s excellent Russian Roulette and Robert Service’s Spies and Commissars).

  *3 Kerensky knew these treaties were potentially explosive. When he became Prime Minister in the summer of 1917 and saw them for the first time he ordered officials to ‘hide them’. That is why Trotsky couldn’t immediately find them when he became Foreign Commissar and had to send a team of trustworthy agents to search for them.

  *4 Stashkov was only there by accident, according to Joffe. The leaders of the delegation realised at the last minute that there was no peasant representative with them among the workers and soldiers and Party apparatchiks. This was typical of the Bolsheviks’ mentality – but potentially embarrassing for the ‘Workers’ and Peasants’’ regime. As they were driving from the Smolny to the Warsaw Station, Joffe and Kamenev suddenly saw an old man in a typical peasant’s coat carrying a pack on his back. Kamenev ordered the car to stop, got out and asked the old man where he was going. ‘To the station, barin, I mean tovarisch [comrade].’ ‘Get in,’ said Kamenev. ‘We’ll give you a lift.’ At first the peasant was delighted, but then he realised they were not heading to the Nikolaevsky Station, where trains left for central Russia and his home village. He asked the two Bolsheviks to let him out, but Kamenev said, ‘there’s no need for you to go to your village…come with us to make peace with the Germans’. He had no idea where Brest-Litovsk was, or what was happening there. But when he was offered some remuneration he agreed to go. That is how he became a delegate and ‘plenipotentiary representative of the Russian peasantry’ at the talks.

  *5 This was when he decided that if he survived in power he would move the capital to Moscow as soon as he could.

  41

  The One-Party State

  ‘Nobody has ever been made happier by force.’

  Vladimir Medem (1879–1923)

  ‘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.’

  Maxim Gorky, Novaya Zhizn, 17 November 1917

  Russia’s first freely elected parliament – the Constituent Assembly – survived for about twelve hours. There would not be another for nearly seventy-five years.

  The introduction of a representative democracy was the single biggest promise made by the Provisional Government after the Tsar was overthrown. Originally the date for the elections was set for September; then it was pushed back to October and finally to mid-November. Polling would be staggered over two weeks because of the size of the country and the huge logistical task of counting the votes.

  Each time the elections were postponed the Bolsheviks complained that the government intended to ‘strangle democracy’ and was planning to cheat people of the ‘free parliament they have struggled for’. But Lenin in power had no intention of allowing a free parliament. He may on occasions in the past have written in praise of elections. But he didn’t believe in ‘bourgeois democracy’ on principle and certainly not in practice for a revolutionary state. The dictatorship of the proletariat and the authority of the Soviet were ‘not only a higher form of democracy…[but] the only form of democracy’.1

  On the first day after the coup, within hours of seizing power, Lenin wanted to postpone the elections indefinitely. ‘We have to put them off,’ he told his circle of comrades. ‘They may cost the Revolution its head. We must have the chance to renew the electoral lists. On our own side the candidate lists are of no use whatsoever. They include a lot of intellectuals who got on by accident whereas we need workers or peasants.’ And he didn’t want the right-wing parties to be allowed to stand at all. ‘We have to make the Kadets illegal.’

  Virtually his entire entourage opposed him – not only the usual suspects, but hardliners like Dzerzhinsky and Sverdlov, as well as occasional waverers such as Stalin was in those days. Sverdlov said simply, ‘We can’t, it’s the wrong time…it would look very bad.’ At first Lenin was not convinced. ‘Why isn’t it a good moment?’ he asked. ‘That’s nonsense…rubbish. What if the Assembly turns out to be a Menshevik-Kadet-SR one? Will that be good for us? It is a mistake, an obvious mistake…We have already won power…now we will have to win it all over again, probably by military measures.’ Reluctantly, though, he caved in and allowed the elections to go ahead.

  Immediately he regretted it. Lenin knew the Bolsheviks would not do well. But they did even worse than he expected and won fewer than ten million votes, around 24 per cent of the total, which made a nonsense of the claim that they were supported by the masses. The Socialist Revolutionaries won by far the most votes – 39 per cent, though their success was complicated because they split into two before the campaign began. It was seldom clear to voters during the campaign whether a candidate was a ‘Right’ SR, which was opposed to the Bolsheviks, or a ‘Left’ SR, which was friendlier to them and at the beginning of December became the only coalition partner allied to Lenin’s Party. The Mensheviks got only 3 per cent of the vote and the Kadets 5.

  Lenin delayed the opening of the Assembly, while he plotted ways of abolishing it altogether. He calculated that most people didn’t care about it. Intellectuals were interested, he said, but the majority of workers and peasants were concerned about peace and bread – the food shortages were becoming as serious as a year ago when the Tsar was toppled.

  Lenin prepared his strategy first with a decree firing the neutral electoral commissioners, whose job was to oversee practical arrangements for running the Assembly, and putting the Bolshevik Party hack Uritsky in their place.

  On 27 November, the day the Assembly was supposed to have met for the first time, Lenin issued a decree banning the Kadet Party. He declared its members ‘enemies of the people’ and Red Guards arrested every prominent Kadet they could find – dozens of people, many of whom had just been elected to the Assembly. When opponents objected that this wasn’t legal he responded: ‘It is senseless even to discuss the question of legality…The Kadet Party, brandishing the weapon o
f democracy…constitutes the general staff of the civil war against the exploited class.’ Meanwhile Trotsky warned bluntly what was likely to happen. ‘We are not about to share power with anybody. If we stop halfway it wouldn’t be a revolution but an abortion…a false historical delivery.’2

  Lenin could put off the day no longer. On 5 January 1918 the Assembly gathered at the Tauride Palace. Petrograd was ‘in a state of siege’ from early in the morning. The government had declared martial law and flooded the city with troops and Red Guards. Demonstrations had been banned, but at noon around 40,000 workers, students and civil servants defied the order and began to march the two kilometres from Mars Field to the Tauride Palace on a bitterly cold and snowy day. When they reached Liteiny Prospekt, Red Guards, hidden from rooftops, opened fire. The protestors scattered and two huge banners they had been carrying – ‘All Power to the Assembly’ – lay trampled in the slush. At least ten people were killed and seventy seriously wounded.

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  Tempers were frayed when the chamber filled and proceedings started at 4 p.m. Many of the Assembly members had been at the demonstration outside, which had been dispersed by machine-gun fire – the first time troops had shot at an unarmed crowd since the February Revolution. There were armed guards scattered throughout the hall and several of the deputies had weapons with them too. Carl Lindhagen, the Mayor of Stockholm, who met Lenin nine months earlier during the ‘sealed train’ journey, in Petrograd as an observer, said, ‘It’s going to be a Wild West show today…everyone’s carrying a gun.’ Lenin had arrived an hour or so earlier – by the back door, surrounded by bodyguards. He was watching from a mezzanine box where government ministers used to sit during sessions of the Tsarist Duma. He affected a nonchalant and bored manner which, as one of his clique said, belied his inner nerves. He chatted with a couple of American journalists in a relaxed way, asking one of them, Albert Rhys Williams, how he was getting on learning Russian. ‘I’m finding it difficult, the words are so long,’ the reporter said. ‘Well you should do it as I learned languages: get to know the nouns first, then the verbs and leave the grammar to the last.’ At one point a little later he pretended to be asleep, with his hands over his eyes. But he was alert. The SR leader Viktor Chernov was elected to the Assembly chair and made a long, grandiloquent speech denouncing the Revolution. The Bolsheviks were vastly outnumbered but heckled and jeered him throughout.3