After he had finished, the serious business began. Sverdlov proposed a Bolshevik motion calling on the Assembly automatically to ratify Sovnarkom decrees as a rubber-stamp body – beginning with Decrees on the Rights of Workers, the nationalisation of the banks, and a Decree on Compulsory Labour ‘to destroy the class of parasites’.
It was defeated by a big margin and the Bolsheviks walked out – ‘We won’t stay in this counter-revolutionary body,’ said the leader of the Kronstadt sailors, Raskolnikov. There was an adjournment and Lenin then gave the order to dissolve the Assembly: ‘the situation is now clear and we can get rid of them’, he said. But he ordered the Red Guards not to use violence. He said that when the deputies left later that night the palace should be locked up and nobody was to be allowed back in the next day.
When delegates filled the chamber again at 11.30 p.m. the speeches became longer and duller: ‘one sailor, sitting in…a box cursed Tsereteli in a monotone and raised his rifle at him. Another amused himself by sighting Chernov along his gun barrel, grinning,’ recalled Reed. Lenin left around 1 a.m., thinking it unnecessary to witness the end of Russia’s brief experiment with democracy.
At around 4 a.m. the Navy Commissar Dybenko ordered the commander of the Red Guards, Anatoly Zheleznyakov, to empty the chamber. He approached Chernov on the podium, tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Everybody here should leave the chamber now because the guards are tired.’ Chernov told him that ‘We are also tired but that cannot interrupt our work which all Russia is watching.’ The guards, most of whom were drunk, began fingering their weapons menacingly and turning the lights off one by one. At 4.40 a.m. on 6 January all the delegates filed out and the gates of the palace were locked behind them. When they began to return to the Tauride the next afternoon the way was barred by soldiers and a decree was posted on the palace gates dissolving the Assembly.
Lenin told Trotsky later that ‘yes it was a risk, a big risk, not to put off the Assembly. But in the end it was for the best. Dispersing it…means the full and open liquidation of formal democracy in the name of the revolutionary dictatorship. It will serve as a good lesson. The people wanted to convene the Assembly so we convened it. But the people at once sensed that this Assembly represented…[a return to the past] so now we have carried out the will of the people.’
A few days later Vladimir Medem, one of the leaders of the Jewish Bund, told a friend, a delegate to the Assembly, that ‘there are many impatient people who think that without the Constituent Assembly it will be easier and quicker to make everyone happy. But nobody has ever been made happier by force.’4
Lenin was right about his strategy, though. There was little significant support outside the intelligentsia for the Assembly, no big demonstrations, no strikes, no mutinies in the army. ‘There was apathy among the soldiers and workers…Lenin judged correctly,’ said one of his Sovnarkom comrades.
—
Just after dawn on 6 January, a few hours after the Assembly was closed down, two sailors from the Baltic Fleet cruiser Seagull walked into the Mariinsky Hospital in Petrograd. They burst straight into the room where, under armed guard, two former Provisional Government ministers were sleeping, strangled them and shot them to make sure they were dead. Then the killers calmly walked out into Liteiny Avenue without anyone stopping them.
The ministers, a well-known physician, Andrei Shingarev, and the Professor of Constitutional Law at Petrograd University, Fyodor Kokoshkin – both leading Kadets – had been transferred to the hospital only the previous day. Since their arrest immediately after the Bolshevik coup, they had been held in the Peter and Paul Fortress. But both reported feeling unwell and were moved to the hospital supposedly under tight security.
When Lenin was told about the murders later that morning he summoned the Commissar for Justice, Isaac Steinberg. ‘This is a serious matter and it has to be investigated urgently and properly…not skated over.’ Steinberg was a Left SR and belonged to the junior partner in the Sovnarkom, but had spent years in exile in Siberia under the Tsarist regime as a Populist agitator. He was a highly respected lawyer. He immediately set up an investigation, which Lenin said he supported wholeheartedly.
To begin with the investigation proceeded normally. The head of the Baltic Fleet said he would co-operate and Dybenko announced with solemnity at a Sovnarkom meeting: ‘I shall write a strong appeal to the sailors not to do such things again and we will say we are going to bring the culprits to justice.’ Then he paused and the tone changed. ‘But of course they will only regard the affair as an act of political terror.’ That, according to the Justice Commissar, was when he realised that under the Bolsheviks the phrase ‘political terror’ would justify a wide range of crimes.
Steinberg insisted on continuing with the investigation and believed the killers had been identified. ‘Naturally, they should be arrested,’ he told Lenin. But it was not so simple. ‘Do you want us to go against the sailors? That might be tricky.’ ‘Yes,’ said Steinberg. ‘If we don’t now it will be more difficult to rein in the violence and quench the thirst for blood later. This was murder, not political terror.’
Lenin shrugged his shoulders. ‘Really? I don’t think the people are interested in such matters. Ask any worker or peasant. They won’t have heard of Dr Shingarev.’ Steinberg said he could only go after the guilty sailors ‘if I can have a detachment of Red Guards to surround their barracks and take them’. He wasn’t given the men and the killers were never arrested.*1
—
The wave of crime and anarchy spreading through Petrograd and other major cities was a dilemma for Lenin. He had witnessed some of it himself on New Year’s Day, just after he returned from a Christmas break in Finland with Nadya. Early in the afternoon, as Lenin was driven from a speaking engagement back to Smolny, random shots were fired at his car. Fritz Platten, the Swiss socialist who helped to organise the ‘sealed train’ through Germany, was on a short visit and was in the car with him. When he heard the shots he covered himself over Lenin’s body to protect the Bolshevik leader. Platten received a slight glancing wound on his hand; Lenin was unharmed. But there were several bullet holes along one side of the vehicle. Nobody knew Lenin was in the car so it was not an assassination attempt, just random violence. But it showed how lawless Russia had become over the last year. The chaos had to be controlled.
On the other hand, Lenin was himself encouraging much of the violence for political reasons – as people’s revenge against the bourgeois for ‘centuries of gross inequality’ and as ‘revolutionary justice against the exploiters’. At first his rhetoric had considerable appeal: wasn’t this what the Revolution was all about, to abolish privilege? The settling of accounts with the bourgeoisie, in Dzerzhinsky’s favourite phrase, began before the Cheka took control of the terror.
The apartments of the rich were robbed and vandalised, they were attacked on the streets, they were routinely abused. People took revenge into their own hands, and Lenin egged them on. In mid-December 1917 he had declared that those who ‘hoarded’ food or wealth were ‘enemies of the people’, and in typically vicious language called for ‘a war to the death against the rich, the idlers and parasites…[citizens must] cleanse the Russian land of all vermin, of scoundrel fleas, the bedbug rich…in one place they can jail a dozen rich men, a dozen scoundrels, half a dozen workers who shirk on the job…in another place they will be out to work on cleaning latrines. In a third they will be given yellow tickets [as prostitutes were given] after a term in prison, so that everyone knows they are harmful and an eye can be kept on them. In a fourth, one out of every ten idlers will be shot. The more variety the better…for only practice can devise the best methods of struggle.’5
Soon, Bolshevik agitators whipped up random mobs into action. ‘Wrest from the bourgeoisie the millions taken from the masses and cunningly turned into silken undergarments, furs, carpets, gold, furniture and paintings…we will take them and give them to the proletariat and then force the bourgeoisie to wo
rk for their rations,’ urged a Party apparatchik in Ekaterinburg in December 1917. The rich were branded ‘former people’, awarded far lower rations, and were placed at the back of the queues for bread. Some scions of great aristocratic families starved to death. Middle-class families were made to share their homes with the poor and often ended up with the smaller rooms in a larger apartment – ‘a revolution in domestic life, a new world, where the servants and masters literally changed places’. The revenge notion was justified by Trotsky in a robust, if chilling, way: ‘For centuries our fathers and grandfathers have been cleaning up the dirt and filth of the ruling classes, but now we will make them clean up our dirt. We must make life so uncomfortable for them that they will lose the desire to remain bourgeois.’
One of Lenin’s decrees codified Bolshevik ideas of ‘revolutionary justice’. At a stroke he abolished the existing legal system, though he kept the Tsarist principle that there was one system of justice for normal crimes against property and separate laws for crimes against the State. He established ‘People’s Courts’ for common criminals – essentially ad hoc mob trials in which twelve ‘elected’ judges, most of them barely literate, would rule less on the facts of a case than with the use, in Lenin’s words, of ‘revolutionary conscience’. Lenin’s hatred of the law and lawyers shone through in this decree. ‘The Court proceedings were not evidence-based, the procedures were more or less made up as they went along. There were cases of some people being convicted on “denunciations” by people involved in long-term family feuds, and some of women denouncing their unfaithful husbands,’ said Steinberg. ‘The sentences fitted the mood of the crowd, which freely voiced its opinions from the gallery.’
Lenin’s other new creation was borrowed from the French Revolution – the Revolutionary Tribunal. They dealt with crimes against the State and were popular for a year or so but were phased out over time. Public trials were replaced by closed ten-minute hearings by a ‘troika’ of Party members operated by the Cheka.
Lenin had a very simple, straightforward and at least honest argument in favour of this system of so-called justice: his system was far superior, practically and morally, because it operated in the interests of the exploited classes – which justified everything. ‘For us there does not, and cannot, exist the old system of morality and “humanity” invented by the bourgeoisie for the purpose of oppressing and exploiting the “lower classes”. Our morality is new, our humanity is absolute, for it rests on the ideal of destroying all oppression and coercion. To us, all is permitted, for we are the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving or oppressing anyone, but in the name of freeing all from bondage…Blood? Let there be blood, if it alone can turn the grey-white-and-black banner of the old piratical world to a scarlet hue, for only the complete and final death of that old world will save us from the return of the old jackals.’6
When he was tackled head-on about the amount of bloodshed he had unleashed, he was unapologetic. The American journalist Lincoln Steffens asked him, ‘Will the Red Terror and the killing continue?’ Lenin replied: ‘Do you mean to tell me that these men who have just organised the slaughter of seventeen million men in a purposeless war are concerned over the few thousand killed in our revolution, which has a conscious aim – to avoid the necessity of future wars? But never mind…I don’t deny the terror, don’t minimise the evils of revolution. They occur. They must be counted on.’
On 21 February 1918 Lenin issued a decree, ‘The Socialist Fatherland in Danger’ – written in his familiar literary style – which allowed Red Guards to ‘shoot on the spot…enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans and counter-revolutionary agitators’. When he read it the Justice Commissar, Steinberg, went to see Lenin and protested that such harsh measures would ‘destroy the Revolution’. Lenin replied: ‘On the contrary…do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very cruellest revolutionary terror?’ ‘Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice at all? Let’s call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination and be done with it.’ Lenin’s face lit up, according to Steinberg, and he said: ‘Well put. That’s exactly what it should be; but we can’t say that.’
* * *
Amid the strictest secrecy, overnight on 10–11 March 1918, two government trains left Moskovsky Station in Petrograd bound for Moscow. The first carried Lenin, Nadya, Maria Ulyanova, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky and Stalin, accompanied by forty-three typists, secretaries, bodyguards and telephonists. The second train, an hour or so behind, contained the rest of the Bolshevik leadership with an assortment of Party hacks and civil servants, along with two carriages full of files and documents. They were moving the entire Soviet government to Russia’s second city and the historic capital pre-dating the time of Peter the Great.
The move was Lenin’s personal decision, and many of his close clique didn’t like it. In fact Lenin didn’t like it. He hardly knew Moscow, but what he did know he detested. He had never lived there or stayed for longer than a few days at a time. His early letters in the 1890s are full of references to Moscow as ‘a foul city’, a ‘filthy hole’, and in one, ‘a nightmare…sickening’. But Lenin realised that the Brest-Litovsk agreements gave Russia no guarantees and the Germans could break them at any time. At one point before the treaty was signed they had just about reached Pskov, only 150 kilometres from Petrograd, a few days’ march away. ‘The peace we have come to is unstable,’ he told comrades. ‘The breathing space we have achieved can be broken any day…There’s no doubt that our international situation is so critical that we must strain every nerve to survive for as long as possible until the Western revolution matures, a revolution that is maturing much more slowly than we expected and wanted.’
Most of the old Bolsheviks saw Petrograd as a Western city in the European tradition and regarded Moscow with its onion-domed churches as the capital of Orthodoxy and Old Russia – semi-Asiatic. Moving there seemed to many a step backwards and suggested a separation from the European roots of socialism: ‘Moscow, with its medieval walls and its countless gilded cupolas, was an utter paradox as a fortress of the revolutionary dictatorship,’ said Trotsky. Others in the Bolshevik leadership remarked that moving away seemed ‘cowardly’ and would look like a moral defeat. The Bolsheviks should consider ‘the glorious spirit of the Smolny’. Lenin dismissed their arguments. When the government moved, power and authority would move with it. ‘If the Germans in one big swoop overrun Petersburg [he nearly always referred to it by that name, or Peter] – and all of us – then the Revolution perishes. If the government is in Moscow, then the fall of Petersburg will be a grievous blow, but only a blow. If we stay…we are increasing the military danger. If we leave for Moscow, the temptation for the Germans to take Petersburg is much smaller. What is the advantage for them in taking a hungry and revolutionary city?…Why do you prattle about the symbolic importance of Smolny? The Smolny is what it is because we are in it. When we are all in the Kremlin, all your symbolism will be in the Kremlin.’
Moscow was in a dreadful state when Lenin and his comrades arrived. If the coup in Petrograd had been generally peaceful, there had been serious fighting for six days in Moscow between Red Guards and troops loyal to Kerensky. Around a thousand fighters from both sides and civilians caught in the crossfire were killed before Kerensky’s men surrendered. There was still rubble lying on many streets and some of the city’s finest old buildings – including St Basil’s Cathedral – had been severely damaged. The stucco in many of the palaces was studded with bullet holes.
When Lenin and Nadya arrived they stayed for five days in a two-room suite at the National Hotel, just off Red Square, whose one-time grandeur even then had somewhat faded. They were spotted by a reporter ‘sitting in the lobby surrounded by rags and tatters of baggage and bedding rolled up in a blanket, a battered trunk, parcels of books, and every kind of basket’. The next day one of the guards at the Trinity Gate of the Kremlin refused at first to allow Lenin through because he ha
d never seen a picture of him and didn’t recognise him.
The Kremlin itself had been sorely neglected since the Tsar fell. Some of the buildings were falling to pieces; horse manure filled the courtyards and the place stank. Lenin’s first order was to replace the music on the clock at the Spassky Gate, which was still playing ‘God Save the Tsar’. It was changed to the ‘Internationale’.
Lenin and Nadya were temporarily given a functional but far from cosy two-room apartment at the magnificent Cavalry Corpus of the Great Kremlin Palace, where some of the other Bolshevik magnates were also staying. Most of the Tsar’s servants were still there and stayed on.*2 Five weeks later, as the Kremlin was being refurbished, they moved into a comfortable but simple three-room apartment, plus a maid’s room, on the first floor of the main government building, which remained their Moscow home. Many of the other comrades were given far more luxurious billets in the Kremlin or in grand buildings nearby.
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