Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Lenin was infuriated that the renovations on the flat were slow. He wrote a typical angry note, with an implied threat, to the deputy head of public property after the work had been going on for longer than a month. ‘I should very much like to have the name and address of the person you entrusted to complete the work on the apartment. It’s dragging on inordinately and the person guilty of such unbelievable delays must be found.’

  Back in Moscow, he began to see Inessa regularly. She was given a senior official position – head of the Women’s section of the Party Central Committee. But her position of influence was not connected to the jobs she held or her titles. Everyone close to Lenin knew about her place in his life. A special closed-circuit telephone system was set up in Moscow so that Party officials could communicate without going through the normal operator. On Lenin’s orders Inessa’s apartment was one of the first to be connected to it. He called her regularly on the phone. Hers was one of the few numbers – 31436 – in his personal address book. She visited the Kremlin and occasionally he visited her in her apartment not far from the Kremlin – at 3/14 Arbat, apartment 12, corner of Denezhny and Glazovsky. He took down the address in his own hand.

  The move was supposed to be temporary. Zinoviev declared the following day: ‘We are convinced that the change in capital will not last long and that the difficult conditions dictating its necessity will pass.’ But the Communist magnates grew to enjoy their new living conditions and palatial Kremlin surroundings, and soon there was no more talk about a return to Petrograd.7

  *1 The only person charged in connection with the murders was the commandant of the Red Guards at the hospital, Stepan Basov, who appeared before a Revolutionary Tribunal a few weeks later. He claimed that the killing was justified because ‘at least it means there are two less bourgeois mouths to feed’. He was given a telling-off.

  *2 Including one old retainer, a waiter, Stupishin, from the days of Alexander III, who one evening served Lenin and Trotsky on the finest imperial crockery. He made sure, trying to hide a smile, that the gilded double-headed eagle symbol faced each diner at the table, though all they had to eat was vegetable soup and buckwheat porridge.

  42

  The Battle for Grain

  ‘If the rich farmers persist in sucking the people’s blood, we will turn them over to the people themselves. If we find too many obstacles in dealing out justice to these traitors, the conspirators, the profiteers, then we will let the people deal with them.’

  Maximilien Robespierre, 1792

  Much of Russia was hungry – and Lenin had to find someone to blame. From the first he thought that scapegoating the farmers would be the most efficient way to feed the country, whatever misery and bloodshed would be inflicted on Russia’s thousands of villages. The Bolsheviks didn’t create the immediate food crisis; the dislocation of the war, a transport system that had completely broken down and poor harvests were among the causes. But Lenin’s punitive policies of compulsion and brutal terror in the countryside made things a great deal worse.

  Lenin needed an enemy. So he invented a new class of Russian – kulaks, or rich peasants – whom he claimed were hoarding grain and deliberately starving the rest of the country, particularly the cities.*1 In reality there were very few rich peasants in Russia – a small number owned any substantial amount of land, some were moneylenders to other peasants, a few possessed more than one horse, cow or a plough. Fewer than 2 per cent of peasant households employed anybody outside their own family. Lenin’s campaign against kulaks was an extension of the class war he was waging in the cities. Rigorous Marxists always suspected rural life and the peasantry – a ‘backward class’, still semi-feudal – which stood in the way of the inevitable historical development towards socialism, according to the German oracle himself. Most of the Bolsheviks were from the urban intelligentsia, which generally despised the muzhiks for being part of superstitious, illiterate Old Russia. The Bolsheviks suspected, perhaps rightly, that the peasantry would never support them. So they were coerced, bullied and eventually terrorised into obedience. Originally those identified as kulaks were mostly the village elders or the leaders of the communes. Or they were the most successful, imaginative or hardest-working farmers. Before the Revolution Lenin had promised that peasants would be given land seized from the major landowners – the nobles, big industrialists and the Church. There was little talk of that after the coup.

  Food shortages worsened during 1918 and affected the cities hardest, partly because the transport system was so poor that distribution was a huge problem, and partly because of inflation. Money quickly became worthless following the Revolution and farmers refused to be paid in cash. The mint, which had employed around 3,000 people in 1917, had a staff of 13,500 a year later: ‘printing money was the only growth industry’, said Sukhanov, not entirely in jest. Within a year the number of rubles in circulation rose from 60 billion to 225 billion. An entire parallel system of payment in kind and barter was created. Some strict Bolsheviks, experimenting with supposedly socialist economic theories, thought inflation a good thing because it would destroy the reliance of the economy on money. Lenin disagreed and realised what it would do to the value of everything, but like so many leaders throughout history he was powerless to deal with inflation once it had taken hold.

  Millions of people were leaving the cities in the hope that there would be more food in the country, which for a while there was. Petrograd lost two-thirds of its population within eighteen months. ‘This is a dying city,’ Gorky wrote to his wife. ‘Everyone is leaving, by foot, by horse, by train. Dead horses are lying in the streets; dogs eat them.’ Quickly, people were eating them too, in a country where, unlike in France at the time, horsemeat was by no means a delicacy. Russian exile Emma Goldman, who went back to Petrograd in 1918 after living in America for nearly twenty years, compared the ‘gaiety and vivacity and brilliance’ of the city with her return, when ‘it was almost in ruins as if a hurricane had swept over it. The houses looked like broken old tombs upon neglected and forgotten cemeteries…the people walked about like living corpses; the shortage of food and fuel was slowly sapping the city…emaciated and frost-bitten men, women and children were being whipped by the common lash, the search for a piece of bread…it was a heart-rending sight by day, an oppressive weight at night. It haunted me, this awful oppressive silence broken by occasional shots.’

  Zinaida Gippius said most of her friends, the ‘former people’, had ‘distended stomachs…by the spring of 1919 practically all of them had become unrecognisable’. Some of the intellectuals were ‘on the books…working for the Bolsheviks as minor clerks. They are given just enough to die of hunger but slowly. People with swollen bellies were advised to eat their potatoes unpeeled, but by the spring there were no potatoes…they had vanished, as had the potato-skin flat cakes.’1

  Lenin never tried to pretend there was no crisis. ‘We shall perish and ruin the whole Revolution if we do not conquer famine in the next few months,’ he wrote to Shlyapnikov in early June 1918. ‘The time before the new harvest is the most difficult and critical period for us.’ He was well aware of conditions in Petrograd when he told Trotsky three months after the government moved that ‘the city is in a catastrophic condition. There is no bread. The population is given the remaining potato and flour crusts…Petrograd is on the verge of perishing from starvation.’

  —

  Lenin’s answer to the food crisis was increased compulsion and terror. He launched ‘a battle for grain’ with a bloodcurdling speech in early summer 1918 blaming the kulaks and the ‘profiteers’ for hunger in Russia. ‘The kulaks are the rabid foes of the Soviet government…these bloodsuckers have grown rich on the hunger of the people. These spiders have grown fat out of the workers. These leeches have sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workers in the cities have starved. Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to all of them.’

  First he set a fixed rate the government would pay for corn and oth
er grains at mid-1916 prices – absurdly low as inflation had increased at least sevenfold in the last year and a half. When peasants refused to sell at that price, hid their stock and seeds, or threatened to replant crops that weren’t covered by fixed prices, he used force. A decree written by Lenin on 13 May set up the Food Commissariat, which established a system of grain requisitions ‘using armed detachments of workers and Red Guards…we will conduct a merciless war’.

  The decree was clear about what the regime would do and why. ‘The peasant bourgeoisie, having accumulated in their cash boxes enormous money which they extorted from the State during the war, remains stubbornly resistant to the groans of the starving workers and poor peasants…they will not bring their grain to the collection points, threatening to force the government to raise prices again, so that they can sell their grain at fabulous prices to speculators…the greedy stubbornness of the village kulaks and rich peasants must be brought to an end. Only one way remains: to answer the violence of the grain owners against the poor with violence against the grain hoarders. Not one pood of grain should remain in the hands of the peasants beyond the amount required for sowing of their fields and feeding their families until the next harvest.’2

  Requisition brigades, as they were called, were sent to more than 20,000 villages within the first two months of the decree. Usually they consisted of seventy-five men, armed with two or three machine guns, who would surround a village and demand that peasants hand over a set yield of grain decided by the local Bolshevik Party headquarters. ‘Speculators who are caught red-handed not delivering the required amount of grain and can be convicted on clear evidence will be executed on the spot,’ Lenin’s decree declared. Often the brigades acted with extreme brutality, routinely torturing suspects until the ‘right’ amount of grain was found. One Bolshevik official who saw a brigade sweep through a village in the ‘black earth’ region of southern Russia was shocked. ‘The measures of extraction are reminiscent of a medieval inquisition. They make the peasants strip and kneel on the ground, whip or beat them, sometimes kill them.’ Lenin personally suggested an added twist on the ‘class war in the villages’. He said that when punishments were inflicted, the brigades ‘should call upon at least six witnesses who must be picked from the poor population of the neighbourhood’. There were cases of the brigades holding twenty or thirty villagers ransom until the amount of grain they demanded was handed over. Originally Lenin had insisted that all peasants should hand over grain by name and anyone who failed to do so would ‘be shot on the spot’. But the Food Commissar, Alexander Tsyurupa, and Trotsky baulked at the idea and it had to be slightly watered down to say that a peasant ‘who failed to deliver to properly designated rail stations and shipping points should be declared an enemy of the people’.

  Even Dzerzhinsky warned against the harshness of the ‘battle for grain’ and told Lenin that it would damage the Bolsheviks’ reputation with rural Russia, ‘perhaps for a generation’, but Lenin took little notice. Rather, he demanded harsher action. On 23 August he wrote to the Bolshevik chiefs in Penza Province: ‘Comrades, the kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole Revolution demand it, for the final and decisive battle with the kulaks everywhere is now engaged. An example must be made. 1) Hang (and I mean hang, so the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Identify hostages…Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks. Cable that you have received this and carried out [instructions]. Lenin.

  PS Find tougher people.’

  A few days later, on the 29th, he cabled again to express ‘extreme indignation that absolutely nothing definite has been received from you about what serious measures have been taken to suppress the kulaks mercilessly and to confiscate their grain in the five districts run by you. Your inaction is criminal.’

  At least 3,700 people were killed, probably many more, in the first year of food requisitions. Entire villages were burned down, or the seed supply used for planting the next year’s crop was confiscated leaving the peasants destitute. Tsyurupa, a ruthless old Bolshevik and hardly a soft touch, once said that ‘the food brigades emulate the methods of the Tsarist police’. He was advised by Lenin to toughen up. The ‘battle for grain’ was justified because it would pacify rural Russia and ‘this is the meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat’, he said.

  Lenin wanted to issue another decree declaring that ‘in every grain-producing district twenty-five or thirty hostages should be taken from among the rich, who will answer with their lives for the collection and loading of all surpluses’. Tsyurupa replied that he disapproved of hostage-taking. At the next Cabinet meeting Lenin demanded to know why he had not reported how he was intending to comply with the orders about hostages. Tsyurupa seemed uncomfortable and murmured that he did not know how to organise it. Lenin looked straight at him and said, simply, ‘Energetically.’ He then sent the commissar a note, explaining what he meant. ‘I am not suggesting that hostages be taken, but that they be appointed by name from each district. The object of appointing them is that, being rich, just as they are responsible for their contribution, so they are responsible with their lives for the immediate collection and loading of grain surpluses.’

  Stalin was posted to Tsaritsyn (later renamed Stalingrad, and then Volgograd) in June 1918 to secure food supplies. He purged the city of anyone suspected of being a counter-revolutionary. It wasn’t tough enough for Lenin, who ordered him to be yet more ruthless – ‘be merciless’, he cabled. Stalin replied swiftly: ‘Be assured our hand will not tremble.’*2

  But the ruthless war was having little effect on Russia’s supply. In the first year requisitions yielded little extra grain. Even by the government’s official figures the food brigades collected only about 570,000 tons – from a total harvest yield of forty-nine million tons. Lenin later wound down the food brigades and, for a while, his rhetoric against the peasants softened. He tried a different tactic to get them on his side. But campaigns against kulaks and forcing farmers at gunpoint to produce for the State became a feature of Soviet life for decades to come.3

  —

  The food requisitions prompted the first major rebellion against the Soviet regime. The Socialist Revolutionaries had split in two after the Bolshevik coup; the ‘Lefts’ became junior partners in Lenin’s regime, with a few Sovnarkom seats and high positions in the Cheka. The ‘Rights’, like the Mensheviks, never accepted the new government.

  The Lefts soon realised they had made a mistake and from March 1918 began to separate themselves from the coalition. Then in early July they tried to bring down the government with a coup attempt of their own, which came close to succeeding.

  The Lefts were led by Maria Spiridonova, who after the February Revolution had emerged a heroine from eleven years in jail. She was the only woman leader of a political party in Russia’s history and could claim broad support in rural Russia where the SRs, heirs of the Populist tradition of agrarian socialism, were strongly represented in the villages. The SRs had received twenty million more votes than the Bolsheviks in the Constituent Assembly elections.

  Spiridonova, thirty-four, had been horribly maltreated in prison. She had been raped several times by guards, who repeatedly extinguished cigarettes on her bare arms. She was painfully thin, had long dark hair which, unusually for the time, hung loose below her shoulders, and intense blue eyes. Men often used the word ‘hysteric’ in their descriptions of her, but she was fiercely intelligent, a mesmeric, passionate speaker and had no fear. She was ruthless in her way and not opposed to violence – she had, after all, murdered a policeman when she was twenty-one. But she was bitterly opposed to Lenin, whom she met only once. She refused to accept the ‘humiliating’ Brest-Litovsk peace, which she said shamed the whole of Russia.

  It was the Bolsheviks’ war against the villages that prompted
the Left SRs to action. She told followers that her whole life had been devoted to the welfare of peasants: the security official she had shot in January 1906 in Tambov Province, Gavril Luzhenovsky, had been in charge of the brutal suppression of a peasants’ revolt. Lenin, she declared, was almost as bad as Luzhenovsky had been. ‘I accuse you, Lenin, of betraying the peasants, of making use of them for your own ends. To you…they are dung, only manure. Our other differences are only temporary, but on the peasant question we are prepared to give battle. When the peasants are humiliated, oppressed and crushed, you will find me holding the same pistol which once forced me to defend…[them].’4

  —

  The first shot in the Lefts’ rebellion was fired on 20 June in Petrograd. A Socialist Revolutionary terrorist killed the head of the city’s propaganda and agitation section, V. Volodarsky (his Party soubriquet; his real name was Moisei Goldstein). Lenin was in a rage – less with the SRs than with the Party chief in Petrograd, Zinoviev. A group of Bolshevik factory workers planned to attack the SR headquarters in the city. Zinoviev had prevented them. He received a typical cable from Lenin the next day. ‘Disgraceful! This is im-per-missible [underlined twice]. The workers were right. I protest that you should be meddling with the completely correct revolutionary initiative of the masses. The terrorists will take us for milksops. It is necessary to encourage the energy and mass character of the terror against counter-revolutionaries and especially in Petrograd, whose example will be decisive.’ The SRs in Petrograd were attacked, though Volodarsky’s killer was not immediately found.

  Two weeks later the Lefts responded, directed by Spiridonova. On 6 July one group murdered the German Ambassador to Moscow, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, the only diplomatic representative from any major country in Russia. The object was to kill the Brest-Litovsk Treaty as well as the count, give the Bolsheviks a diplomatic headache and, possibly, prompt the Germans to begin a fresh war against Russia. It was a clumsy operation by the twenty-year-old Cheka agent Yakov Blumkin, who initially missed the ambassador from point-blank range, and managed to hit him only by luck on the third attempt when he was in fact aiming at one of Mirbach’s aides. He escaped after exploding a hand-made bomb.*3