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Trotsky arrived in Kronstadt on 4 March, with Tukhachevsky in command of a unit of 20,000 Red Army troops. The following morning they issued an ultimatum authorised by Lenin. ‘Kronstadt and the rebellious ships must immediately submit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. Only those who surrender unconditionally may count on the mercy of the Republic.’
There was no reply from Petrichenko. Two days later the shore batteries opened fire and Tukhachevsky’s white-caped soldiers attacked the naval base in a snowstorm. ‘The first shot was fired by Trotsky…standing up to his knees in the blood of workers…he opened fire against revolutionary Kronstadt, which has risen against the autocracy of the Communists,’ said Petrichenko.
The young sailor made one last emotional appeal to the magnates in the Kremlin. ‘Barely three years ago, you – Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and all of you – were denounced as traitors and German spies. We, the workers and sailors, had to come to your rescue and saved your skins from the Kerensky government. It is we who placed you in power. Have you forgotten that? Now you threaten us with the sword. You are playing with fire. You are repeating the blunders and crimes of Kerensky. Beware that a similar fate doesn’t overtake you.’
The troops were repulsed for a few days but in the end it was a massacre. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Even Tukhachevsky was appalled by the carnage and surprised by the sailors’ determination to fight against hopeless odds. ‘It wasn’t a battle, but an inferno,’ he said later. ‘They fought like wild beasts. I cannot understand where they found the strength for such furious rage. Every house had to be taken by storm.’ Nearly all the sailors who survived the final assault on 16 March were summarily executed. Petrichenko and around a hundred others managed to escape to Finland. But thousands died on the frozen lake around Kronstadt. When it was over the Finnish government demanded that the Soviets remove the bodies from the ice. Otherwise the dead would have been swept to Finland’s shores when the thaw came.2
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The terror became so routine that some people were slaughtered by ghastly mistake. At a Sovnarkom meeting in October 1919 commissars were discussing investment in railways. Halfway through, Lenin wrote a note to Dzerzhinsky asking: ‘How many dangerous counter-revolutionaries do we have in prison?’ The Cheka boss scribbled a reply, ‘around 1,500’, and returned the note to Lenin who read it, placed an X by the answer and returned it to Dzerzhinsky. That night hundreds of prisoners in Moscow were executed. Lenin had not ordered them to be shot, as his secretary, Fotieva, explained later. Sometimes he placed a cross by documents he had seen merely to show that he had read the information and taken note of it. So casual had the imposition of revolutionary justice become that this appalling error barely caused a stir of any kind.
Lenin would always justify the terror on principle, but occasionally relented when he was made aware of individual cases. Gorky’s relationship with Lenin survived even though Novaya Zhizn had been closed down in summer 1918. He criticised Lenin relentlessly – one of the very few Russians allowed to do so. Yet they met frequently as friends and he was given special leeway as the most famous living Russian writer.*2
He intervened often, mostly on behalf of other authors, artists or academics. He loathed Lenin’s intolerance, which he had seen often in the past. In June 1919 he protested about the searches and arrests of members of the Petrograd intelligentsia. ‘They are the same people who helped you personally, hid you in their homes,’ Gorky told him. Lenin replied characteristically: ‘Yes of course they are excellent, good people and that is precisely why their homes have to be searched. Precisely because of this one has sometimes a contre coeur to arrest them. Of course they are excellent and good, of course their sympathy goes always to the oppressed, of course they are always against persecution. And what do they see around them? The persecutor – our Cheka; the oppressed – the Kadets, and the SRs who flee from it. Obviously their duty, as they conceive it, tells them to ally themselves…against us.’ His principle was simple: it is better that 100 innocent people are killed than that one person who is a danger to the Revolution remains free and a potential threat. And the Cheka put this principle into bloody practice. ‘Whoever does not understand the need for any revolutionary class to secure its victory understands nothing of the history of revolution,’ he said. ‘The dictatorship means – take note of this once and for all – unrestrained power and the use of force, not of law.’3
Gorky saved scores of people from death or prison by directly appealing to Lenin. After bringing up one case, on 12 April 1919 Lenin told officials of the Orel Soviet: ‘Writer Ivan Volny has been arrested. His friend Gorky earnestly requests the greatest caution and impartiality in the investigation. Can he be set free under strict surveillance?’ Volny was released soon afterwards. In the same month Gorky asked him to release the Left SR Nina Shklovskaya, Alexander Blok’s secretary. In March 1920 Gorky wrote to Lenin asking for the release of the chemist Alexei Sapozhnikov from jail ‘so that he can continue his valuable work on cures for various diseases’. Three days later he was freed. ‘And also it is necessary to give [the physician Ivan] Manukhin the possibility of doing his research on an anti-typhus serum,’ Gorky wrote as a postscript. Manukhin was released within a week.*3
Somehow, on 3 September 1920 a letter reached Lenin from Nadezhda Nikulia, a seventy-four-year-old former actress from the Maly Theatre in Moscow. She said she had happily given up several rooms in her apartment to help the poor. Now she was threatened with jail if she didn’t ‘surrender my last passageway’. Lenin forwarded a note on the margin to Dzerzhinsky: ‘Investigate and telephone her. Leave her in peace.’ But these cases were like appeals to the sovereign in imperial times. Justice was arbitrary. For the millions who had no access to Gorky or to the Kremlin there was no protection against corrupt, vicious and cowardly officials, or the Cheka. Lenin’s Russia was a state effectively without law.
The Mensheviks were banned in spring 1921. To begin with they were not being killed. The days of random mass purges of Communists were yet to come. But thousands were arrested and Lenin was happy to see them leave the country. When Sovnarkom met on 5 January to discuss ‘the Menshevik question’ they ordered Józef Unszlicht, the deputy chief of the Cheka, to find two or three towns – ‘not excluding those on a railway’ – where Mensheviks could be settled. Lenin told him ‘not to obstruct’ Mensheviks who wanted to emigrate abroad and if a ‘subsidy for fares’ was required, finance was available from Party funds to send them into exile.*4, 4
* * *
In July 1921 Henry Fisher, a voluntary aid worker, described conditions at the railway station in Simbirsk, the town where Lenin was born and raised. ‘Imagine a compact mass of sordid rags, among which are visible here and there lean, naked arms, faces already stamped with the seal of death. Above all one is conscious of a poisonous odour. It is impossible to pass. The waiting room, the corridor, every foot thickly covered with people…in every imaginable position. If one looks closely, one sees these filthy rags are swarming with vermin. Nursing babies have lost their voices and are no longer able to cry. Every day more than twenty dead are carried away, but it is not possible to remove all of them. Sometimes corpses remain among the living for more than five days…A woman tries to soothe a small child lying in her lap. The child cries…For some time the mother goes on rocking it in her arms. Then suddenly she strikes it. The child screams anew. This seems to drive the woman mad. She begins to beat it furiously, her face distorted with rage. She rains blows with her fist on its little face, on its head, and at last she throws it upon the floor and kicks it with her foot. A murmur of horror rises around her. The child is lifted from the ground, curses are hurled at the mother, who, after her furious excitement has subsided, has again become herself, utterly indifferent to everything around her. Her eyes are fixed, but are apparently sightless.’
Starvation was not uncommon in Russia. There had been famines in 1906 and again in the year before the war. But the gre
at Volga famine in 1921 was by far the worst since the horror which the young Vladimir Ulyanov had witnessed in 1891–2. A crop failure in 1920, followed by a heavy frost and a swelteringly hot summer, were serious natural disasters. However, the catastrophe the following year was caused more by man than by nature.
The main reason was Lenin’s continued policy of grain requisitioning. Peasants had been used to maintaining stocks to see themselves through times of bad harvests. Now they grew just enough for subsistence, to feed their livestock and to keep sufficient seed to sow the next harvest. What was the point of producing more if the Bolsheviks took it all? By 1920 the sown area of the Volga region had declined by 25 per cent in three years. When a poor harvest came there were no reserves of stock.
The Volga region was the worst hit but there was mass starvation in Ukraine, the Urals and Kazakhstan. In Samara Province it was estimated that two million people were dying of hunger, more than two-thirds of the population: around 700,000 died over the next two years. A quarter of the peasantry in Russia were starving.
Vast numbers of people went to train stations along the Russian rail network, where they imagined there might be food or a means of catching a train somewhere else – hence the scene in Simbirsk described by Fisher. Cannibalism was common. People were storing corpses as food. One woman was caught with her child eating pieces of her dead husband. When police interviewed her she said, ‘We won’t give him up…he is our own family and no one has the right to take him away from us.’ There were several cases of mothers killing one of their children in order to feed the others.
Until July 1921 the Soviet government refused to admit there was a disaster happening, as the Tsar had done in the 1890s: the words ‘famine’ and ‘starvation’ were banned in the press on Lenin’s orders. It was left to a few individuals to begin relief efforts – as in the 1890s when Tolstoy and Chekhov raised money for soup kitchens and hospitals. Gorky appealed for international help. Herbert Hoover offered aid from the American Relief Administration, which was feeding millions of people in Western Europe.
Initially Lenin rejected aid of any kind and furiously declared, ‘one must punish Hoover, one must publicly slap his face so the whole world sees’. But he was talked round by comrades in the Kremlin, principally Litvinov, Foreign Commissar Chicherin and Zinoviev, who argued that continuing to refuse help would look bad internationally.
Lenin showed no gratitude and ordered the Cheka to spy on the ARA teams. He wrote to Vyacheslav Molotov, then a high-ranking official in the Sovnarkom secretariat: ‘We can expect the arrival of a lot of Americans. We must take care of surveillance and intelligence…the main thing is to identify and mobilise the maximum number of Communists who know English to introduce them into the Hoover Commission and for other forms of surveillance.’ Hoover’s aid workers fed twenty-five million people in the Volga region alone and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the ARA closed down its Russian efforts – prematurely. When it was revealed that the Soviets were taking foreign aid but at the same time selling its cereals for hard currency, it caused a scandal that forced the ARA teams to leave Russia, amid bitterness.5
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The famine was accompanied by peasants’ revolts throughout the country – the last major opposition to the regime before rural Russia was cowed into submission by the Soviets. The Red Army was used to suppress dozens of rebellions throughout 1921,*5 but Lenin was most concerned about the rising in Tambov Province, south-east of Moscow, news of which was spreading to Russian cities and abroad. Thousands of food-requisitioning brigades had been attacked and Communist officials had been murdered. Lenin resorted to all means at his disposal to crush the rebels, including weapons of mass destruction. He said that the peasant wars ‘were far more dangerous to us than all the Denikins, Kolchaks and Yudeniches put together’.
Tukhachevsky had no qualms about putting down the Kronstadt rising. A month later he was given four weeks to defeat the Tambov villagers, led by a Socialist Revolutionary, Alexander Antonov, who had taken part in Maria Spiridovlova’s revolt three years earlier. An order approved by Lenin personally authorised Tukhachevsky to use poisoned gas against a band of peasants armed with a few hundred rifles. ‘The remnants of [Antonov’s]…bandits are gathering in a forest and carrying out raids on peaceful inhabitants. These forests where the bandits are hiding must be cleared with poison gas. Careful calculations must be made to ensure that the cloud of asphyxiating gas spreads throughout the forest and exterminates everything hidden there. The artillery inspector must immediately release the required number of poison gas…[shells] and necessary specialists to the localities. Signed Lenin.’
Even after these attacks some villagers fought on. Tukhachevsky had 50,000 troops, three armed trains, several mobile machine-gun units, seventy field guns and a squadron of fighter planes. They burned whole villages when they faced resistance and took no prisoners. Tukhachevsky could not keep to his deadline of one month but the rebellion was crushed – as were all the others.*6, 6
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The one institution that continued to resist Lenin’s will was the Orthodox Church. Christianity and Lenin’s brand of Communism were bound to collide, eventually. Lenin had always intended to campaign against religion and, if he could, destroy the Church, but he bided his time. For the first three years he was careful and relied on propaganda. After the Whites were defeated and the rebel peasants pacified, Lenin seized his moment to strike at the Church – with an issue on which he hoped to find popular support.
Under the Tsars the Church had a unique position of immense temporal as well as spiritual power. The Orthodox faith alone had the right to proselytise; it received generous state subsidies which paid most of the salaries of 45,000 parish priests and financed 100,000 monasteries. It was one of the biggest landowners in Russia. Church attendance had been falling sharply for a decade before the February Revolution, but Russia was still a predominantly Orthodox country. Orthodoxy and Tsardom were united in an inseparable link: the Church was effectively a department of state with its own minister. Historically its politics were ultra-reactionary.
One of Lenin’s first decrees separated Church and State, recognised civil marriages, banned the teaching of religion in state schools and took away all the Church’s state funding – fairly moderate in a revolution led by diehard atheists. A new Patriarch, the Metropolitan of Moscow, Tikhon, had a reputation as a ‘pious and unsophisticated man…with more than a touch of Russian fatalism about him’. He chose to clash with the Bolsheviks from the start. He deplored ‘these monsters of the human race…the open and concealed enemies…of Christ who have begun to persecute the Church and are striving to destroy Christ’s cause by sowing everywhere…the seeds of malice, hatred and fraudulent strife’.
There were a few isolated attacks on some priests, but they were not official policy at this stage. Lenin was quite specific in his instructions to the Cheka and the Red Guards to leave the Church alone, for now. ‘Be very careful in handling the Church. Do nothing hasty. There will come a time for this battle, but wait,’ he wrote to Dzerzhinsky. When he and the other Communist leaders were ‘anathematised’ by Tikhon, Lenin ignored the Patriarch.
In 1919 the government began to seize Church land and property, as it had already done from all the big landowners. This included factories, apartment blocks, dairies, hospitals, shops, as well as monasteries with large farms. The regime introduced tougher rules against teaching religion anywhere outside churches, including ‘in public places such as parks’. Tikhon complained that ‘this aims to make impossible the very existence of churches, Church institutions and the clergy’. He was put under house arrest for a few months and a hundred or so priests were arrested.
Then the famine came and Lenin saw the opportunity for a full-scale attack on faiths other than Communism. Tikhon offered to give the State a substantial amount of money and ‘Church treasure – except for holy consecrated vessels’. In summer 1921 Lenin launched a propaganda campaign th
roughout the press, saying the Church was ‘hoarding its treasures’ and demanding that it hand over more of its ‘hidden wealth…so we can turn gold into bread’. If it refused, the property would be confiscated.
When Tikhon replied that it would be sacrilege to use consecrated items for secular purposes, Lenin sent Cheka officers to loot the churches. In the small town of Shuya, 300 kilometres north-east of Moscow, early in 1922 fifteen devout townspeople were killed when they tried to stop soldiers seizing valuables from the church. In Lenin’s absence, the Party’s ruling Politburo decided to delay future confiscations, at least for a short while. When he was told about the decision he went into one of his rages. To him, this was the best time for a showdown with the clergy and comrades shouldn’t shy away from one.
Lenin’s response to his fellow Kremlin magnates – only available recently, some considerable time after the collapse of the USSR – still has the power to shock in its cynical brutality. It reveals Lenin at his worst, and it is hardly a surprise that his successors carefully hid the letter for decades. It is worth quoting at some length. Lenin deliberately used the famine as an excuse to launch an assault on the clergy: ‘The enemy [he meant the Church] is committing an enormous strategic mistake in trying to drag us into battle at this time…for us this is the moment when we can with ninety-nine chances out of a hundred smash them and secure for ourselves an unassailable position for many decades to come. It is precisely now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and thousands of corpses are littering the roads…that we must carry out the confiscation of Church valuables, with the most merciless energy and crush any resistance. It is now, and only now, that the peasant mass will be for us, or at any rate will not be in a condition to support the clergy…We must seize the valuables now speedily; we will be unable to do so later because no other moment except that of desperate hunger will give us support among the masses. The confiscations must be conducted with merciless determination…the greater the number of clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason…[i.e., resisting church looting] the better. We must teach these people a lesson so they will not dare even to think of resistance for decades.’7
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