Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Shortly before the execution he was told to report to Sverdlov, who went through the details with him. Malkov’s instructions were to shoot Kaplan in the back of the neck – the classic Bolshevik method – in a garage in one of the Kremlin courtyards, with a car engine running to muffle the noise, ‘and her remains must be destroyed without trace’, ordered Sverdlov. She was shot at 4 a.m. on 4 September. The execution was witnessed by one person – a slightly odd choice by the Cheka officials: the ‘proletarian poet’ Demyan Bedny was there, said Sverdlov, for the purpose of ‘revolutionary inspiration’.

  Lenin did not interfere in the decision. Malkov wrote an account of the execution nearly forty years later. ‘A charming fable existed that Kaplan was supposed to have remained alive and that at the last minute Vladimir Ilyich had asked for Kaplan’s life to be spared. There are stories from so-called eyewitnesses that she was seen in a camp on Solovki Island or Kolyma, in 1932 or 1938, to show that Lenin was a kindly fellow who generously forgave his enemies their evil deeds. But nobody annulled Kaplan’s death sentence. These were nothing more than stories.’4

  —

  By the time of Kaplan’s execution the Bolsheviks had begun an orgy of revenge violence throughout the major cities and towns of Russia – Red Terror on a vast scale. Rumours spread immediately in Moscow and Petrograd that Lenin was dead and for some days the regime was thrown into panic. The doctors were issuing three-hourly bulletins on Lenin’s health, but although they were accurate they were widely disbelieved. Dr Rozanov said that ‘Vladimir Ilyich has been lucky. If the bullet had landed one millimetre in either direction, he would already be dead.’ There had been a serious haemorrhage into Lenin’s chest cavity and there was a chance of an infection, but he was healing well. Five doctors were treating him around the clock and within two days he was declared to be out of danger.

  Well before then, though, the Communist magnates had launched a series of brutal reprisals. At 11 p.m. on 30 August, a few hours after the shooting, Sverdlov wrote a decree warning opponents what was about to happen: ‘A few hours ago a villainous attempt was made on the life of Comrade Lenin. The working class will respond to attempts on the lives of its leaders by still further consolidating its forces and by merciless mass terror against all the enemies of the Revolution.’

  The Cheka was unleashed. In Petrograd 500 prisoners – Zinoviev referred to them as ‘hostages’ – were immediately ‘executed as a result of the terror proclaimed after the murder attempt on Vladimir Ilyich and the killing of Uritsky’. The following month there were 300 more. Former Tsarist officials and Socialist Revolutionaries were shot in public. In Nizhny Novgorod, forty-one people were executed the afternoon after Lenin was shot. Their names were published and the local Cheka warned that ‘to every murder of a Communist or an attempt at such a murder we shall reply by shooting bourgeois hostages’. In Kronstadt the sailors had held around 400 prisoners in a fortress for several months. The next morning there were no more prisoners: all had been killed.

  —

  The same was happening throughout the country. Sverdlov, now acting as head of the government, was receiving constant messages from commissars who had been despatched to the provinces. Stalin, in Tsaritsyn overseeing the war against the kulaks, cabled Moscow two days after the assassination attempt, reporting on dozens of arrests and executions: ‘Having heard of the wicked attempt of capitalist hirelings on the life of the greatest revolutionary, the leader of the proletariat…we answer this base attack with the organisation of systematic mass terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.’ Altogether 6,185 death sentences were issued in the two months after Lenin was shot, but it is likely that many more people were killed. ‘We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life,’ Trotsky said, justifying the terror.

  From now on there were practically no restraints on the Cheka. The message was that they could do more or less what they wished. At a cabaret-circus in Moscow, an off-duty group of Chekists attended the clown act Bim-Bom, a duo of circus comics who had been highly popular since the turn of the century with a mixture of slapstick farce and political satire. Everybody in Moscow went, from the well-off to workers. At one point during the show the Chekists, who had all had a drink or two, went onstage and began hectoring the clowns for their ‘counter-revolutionary’ and insulting material. The audience thought it was all part of the act – until one of the Chekists pulled out his revolver and shot dead the clown known as ‘Bom’.*5 The incident prompted protest; the deputy head of the Cheka, Yakov Peters, investigated but took no action against the killer, who he said was merely showing a little too much zealous revolutionary vigilance.

  * * *

  The murder attempt was the beginning of the ‘Lenin cult’, the exaggerated praise and semi-religious worship that characterised leadership in the Communist world for the following decades – perfected later by Stalin, Mao Zedong and Kim Il-Sung but originating in the days after the threat to Lenin’s life. Three days after the shooting Zinoviev made an absurd speech that set the tone: ‘Lenin is the greatest leader ever known by humanity, the apostle of the socialist Revolution,’ he gushed. Supposedly an atheist, he compared Lenin to Jesus Christ and said he was ‘leader by the Grace of God’ – as Orthodox priests had referred to the Tsars. Trotsky rushed back from the Front and at the Moscow Soviet called Lenin ‘the greatest human being of our revolutionary epoch, our new age…the loss of Lenin would be devastating to the Revolution’. The papers were full of special editions with extravagant and often fictitious material about Lenin’s heroism and personality. It was the first time the Soviet press had written at any length about Lenin the person.5

  Lenin recovered and was back at his desk within three weeks.*6 He took occasional exercise and walked around the Kremlin precincts with his left arm in a sling. Against his express orders he was filmed by a camera crew organised by Bonch-Bruevich. There were still rumours in Moscow that he had been killed and buried; Bonch-Bruevich and Sverdlov wanted to prove he was alive. ‘Was that a camera I saw on a rooftop?’ Lenin asked one day. ‘I thought I told you there were to be no photographs?’ ‘Yes, Vladimir Ilyich,’ Bonch-Bruevich admitted, ‘they are filming. This is the only way we can show for sure that you are still with us. It will do a lot to help us.’ Lenin was furious for a while, but was mollified. ‘Well, you’re probably right but I still don’t like it.’ On Stalin’s prompting, Lenin’s security detail was trebled in size and when he left the Kremlin three identical cars departed from the gates at the same time, so no potential assassin knew which of the vehicles was Lenin’s.

  Leonid Krasin, one of Lenin’s oldest comrades, wrote sagely to his wife on 7 September that ‘as it happens, the attempt to kill Lenin has made him much more popular than he was. One hears…people who are far from having any sympathy with the Bolsheviks, saying that it would have been a disaster if he had succumbed to his wounds, as it was thought at first that he might. And they are right…in the midst of all this chaos and confusion, he is the backbone of the new body politic, the main support on which everything rests.’ Many people who may have loathed him were saying the same sort of thing.6

  *1 The assassin was soon identified as Leonid Kannegisser, twenty-two, who was arrested a day later, horribly tortured to discover if he had accomplices, and, when it was found he had none, shot. He was a supporter of the SRs but had not acted with their knowledge. He was a talented poet – a friend of the writer Sergei Esenin and of Marina Tsvetaeva – and his poems were published posthumously in Paris in the 1920s.

  *2 There was one other wounded victim, Maria Popova, one of the women who was talking to Lenin after his speech at the factory. She remembered chatting with him. She said, ‘I told him “they’ve given permission to buy flour, but they haven’t lifted the roadblocks”, and Lenin replied, “according to the decree they can’t lift the roadblocks. We must struggle.” Then there was a shot and I fell.’

  *3 See the work of Robert S
ervice, a scholar I respect vastly, who is convinced Kaplan could not have fired the shots because of her eyesight and general mental confusion.

  *4 A few months later he was held up at gunpoint again. On 19 January 1919 he was visiting Nadya, who was convalescing in Sokolniki, in the northern outskirts of Moscow, following another painful attack of Graves’ Disease. On the way, his car was halted by six armed men. The bandits ordered him out of the car, demanded his wallet and took the Browning pistol he carried in his coat. His sister Maria, accompanying him, was searched too and blurted out, ‘How dare you search us. Don’t you know who we are? Don’t you recognise Lenin? You have no right to do this.’ ‘We have every right,’ the bandit leader replied. Lenin’s chauffeur, Stepan Gil, tried to intervene but Lenin told him to stand down. The bandits took the car and drove off, leaving Lenin and his entourage to walk to the nearest Party headquarters for help. They were refused admission – the bandits had taken his identity papers and the officials didn’t believe he was the Lenin. Eventually a call was put through to Dzerzhinsky, who recognised his voice and asked if there was a political motive for the incident. ‘No, definitely not. Otherwise they would have finished me off.’

  *5 He was Iwan Radsunski, mainstay of the act, who over the years worked with several ‘Bims’ – at this point Mieczsław Stanewieski.

  *6 Visitors while he was convalescing included Maxim Gorky, who was still writing newspaper articles regularly attacking the Revolution and Lenin personally. The Bolshevik leader wanted to see him. Gorky recalled: ‘I called on him when he was still unable to use his arm freely and could hardly move his perforated neck. In answer to my words of indignation he spoke unwillingly, as though it was something that bored him. “It was only a scuffle. What can be done about it? Everyone acts in the only way they know how.”’ Angelica Balabanova recalled him a few days after the shooting, ‘sitting on a balcony in the sun…I was overcome by emotion and embraced him silently. Only when I was leaving did he refer to what had happened…When we spoke, he seemed relieved that others decided Kaplan’s fate. He said, “The Central Committee will decide what to do with her.” But when he said this he must have known Kaplan was already dead.’ Nadya, though, ‘was deeply affected by the thought of revolutionaries condemning other revolutionaries to death…when we were alone afterwards she wept bitterly when she spoke of this’. One makes of that what one will, but Balabanova is usually a reliable source.

  45

  The Simple Life

  ‘In Lenin there was that combination in one person of self-castigation, which is the essence of all real asceticism, with the castigation of other people.’

  Pyotr Struve (1870–1944)

  While many of the other Kremlin magnates were soon enjoying the trappings of power, Lenin and Nadya lived fairly modestly. Their domestic arrangements were similar to the way they had existed in exile – unostentatious, though now they did have a maid/cleaner, Olymprada Zharalova, who had previously worked at an iron foundry in the Urals. Soon after they moved to Moscow, Lenin’s sister Maria began to live with them.*1 There were two cats, and occasionally a stray came to visit. Lenin loved cats and it was invariably he who left food and water out for them; Nadya and Maria often forgot.

  They seldom ate at the Kremlin restaurant, where top Communist Party officials were provided with decent meals at a time of tight rationing and hunger in Moscow. The Kremlin is a vast precinct, almost a small city within the city, comprising myriad streets and office buildings where 3,500 people worked within six months of the move from Petrograd. Nadya was often seen trudging along the pavements with black bread under her arm and a tureen of soup. Lenin put in a punishing seventeen hours almost every day, but he did try to return to the apartment for lunch – as he had done in Geneva or Zurich.

  Occasionally they entertained. When Clara Zetkin called a few months after the attempt on Lenin’s life she found ‘Nadya and Lenin’s sister at supper, which I was immediately and heartily asked to share. It was a simple meal: tea, black bread, butter, cheese. Later the sister tried to find “something sweet” for the “guest of honour” and discovered a rare jar of preserve.’ The modesty and simplicity were partly for political reasons: Lenin knew that his lifestyle would become known, and he wanted to convey to others that his outwardly puritanical ways should be those of all good Communists. But mainly it was genuine; it was the way he had always lived and the way he liked. He loathed the big, boozy, seven-course dinners with endless vodka toasts and macho storytelling that became the norm among Communist chieftains. He never went.1

  His one luxury was the guest house in Gorki, twenty kilometres south-west of Moscow, where Lenin first went to convalesce from his wounds after he was shot. He started using it regularly – ‘it’s just like a little Switzerland, peaceful,’ he said – and in his last two years lived there more or less permanently. It was called a ‘dacha’, or cottage, but it was far bigger and more comfortable than anywhere they had lived before, a gracious manor house fronted by six white columns, with a gaudy interior full of plate glass and chandeliers. It had once been owned by Savva Morozov, but was taken over by the Tsarist regime to entertain State guests and inherited by the Bolsheviks. In an area known as ‘the little hills’, it was surrounded by fir and silver birch trees, a beautiful garden, and had a verandah with stunning views. Both Lenin and Nadya grew to love it, though at first she said it was ‘so new and strange to us…we had never lived anywhere like it, so used as we were to humble dwellings…we felt exquisitely embarrassed. We found the smallest of the rooms to live in.’

  At Gorki, there were four bodyguards on permanent duty and a staff of three others, including a cook, Spiridon Putin, whose grandson Vladimir would decades later also become the leader of Russia.2

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  Most of the other Communist magnates lived far more lavishly. Lenin had envisaged his ‘vanguard’ of revolutionaries as an austere, almost monastic order, enduring hardship for the cause. But quickly, as Joffe said, it had become a privileged caste. The Communists had removed themselves from the people.

  The pampered lifestyle of the Bolshevik elite – and the corruption that went along with it – began early. Within a few weeks of the coup Lenin was sent a report from the Workers’ Section of the Smolny Institute, citadel of the October Revolution, telling him that while Petrograd was going hungry, corrupt Bolshevik officials at the Smolny were selling food by the lorry-load to black marketeers at fantastical prices. ‘The hungry workers see the well-dressed tsarinas of the Soviet Party bosses coming out with packets of food and being driven away in their cars,’ the report said. ‘They say it’s just the same as it was in the old days with the Romanovs and their fräuleins…They are afraid to complain to Zinoviev [Party boss in Petrograd] since he is surrounded by henchmen with revolvers who threaten the workers when they ask too many questions.’ Lenin was furious, though not entirely surprised. He put a stop to the immediate scandal but similar cases were constantly occurring. Lenin was always concerned that corruption – and bureaucracy – might eat into the soul of the Party, but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do anything significant about the problem.

  The privileges for Communist apparatchiks started innocuously enough. Regular meals for comrades who worked devotedly for the Revolution at low wages and great sacrifice seemed a reasonable price to pay for loyalty. In early 1918, when food shortages were extreme throughout Russia, Lenin supported a plan to open a restaurant just for Bolshevik activists in Petrograd, on the grounds that you can’t make revolution on an empty stomach: ‘The workers will understand the necessity of it,’ he said.

  Some purists thought that Party officials should be more rigorous than the rest of the population about keeping to the same rations as everyone else. They were countermanded by Lenin. ‘The heroics of personal self-sacrifice, which is their basic position, are, especially in the present conditions, profoundly petty bourgeois,’ he said. ‘The working class cannot march in the vanguard of the Revolution without its activ
ists, its organisers. The activists have to be cared for and at the present time…must be supported physically.’3

  The workers might have understood, had the privileges remained at a few decent meals. But the system quickly extended into a range of perks for the Communist elite based on seniority, length of membership, and loyalty. It was a system that had nothing to do with Marxism, but mirrored the complex chin system of the Tsarist civil service, with its minutely graded table of ranks which awarded benefits in a highly rigid manner. The Communist Nomenklatura system likewise protected the best jobs for Party members. Within two years, 4,000 Bolsheviks and their families were living in the Kremlin and the hotels commandeered by the Party, the Metropol and the National, both by Red Square.

  There were 2,000 domestic staff employed by Communist officials within a year of the move to Moscow, and a complex of special shops, a spa, a hairdresser, and restaurants with cooks trained in France. In Petrograd senior Party officials lived in the luxurious Hotel Astoria, recently restored to its former glory of Tsarist times. ‘Grishka’ Zinoviev lived in a spacious apartment in town, but a suite was always available for his use, as was an assortment of young mistresses.

  Soon after Stalin was appointed Commissar for State Control in 1919, the highly influential job that would give him immense power over State appointments and the entire business of government, Lenin ordered him to look at corruption in high places generally, and more specifically ‘to carry out an ultra-secret inspection of the Smolny offices’ without Zinoviev or other Petrograd officials knowing about it. Stalin didn’t often say no to Lenin but on this occasion he refused the order, claiming that spying on comrades would undermine the work of the Party and was against Bolshevik spirit. The reason, of course, was that he didn’t want to be loathed by other comrades as the man who would begin to take their privileges away. That was not how he would rise to the top.4