A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  The formation of the Coalition, which had been intended to reinforce the democratic centre, had the opposite effect. It accelerated the political and social polarization that led to the outbreak of the civil war in October. On the one hand, most of the provincial rank and file of the Kadets moved with their party leader Miliukov, who had resigned on 4 May, into right-wing opposition against the coalition government. Increasingly they abandoned their liberal self-image as a party of the nation as a whole and began to portray themselves as a party for the defence of bourgeois class interests, property rights, law and order and the Russian Empire. Within the Soviet camp, on the other hand, there was a steady drift towards the Left as the mass of the workers and the peasants became increasingly disillusioned with the failure of the socialists to use their position in the government to speed up the process of social reform or to bring about a democratic peace. The left-wing SRs and Mensheviks, who had been opposed to the coalition, were correct to warn their party colleagues that by entering the government, and by sharing in the blame for its shortcomings, they were bound to lose popular support. For the socialists were henceforth to be 'statesmen', they could no longer act like 'revolutionaries', and this obliged them to resist what they now called the growing 'anarchy' — the peasant seizures of the land, the workers' strikes and the breakdown of army discipline — in the interests of the state. Instead of using their popular mandate to take power for themselves, as they could have done in the April crisis, the Soviet leaders chose instead to lend their support to a liberal government which had already been discredited. They increasingly became seen as the guardians of a 'bourgeois' state, and the initiative for the revolution, for bread, land and peace, was taken up by the Bolsheviks.

  iii Lenin's Rage

  The Finland Station, on Petrograd's Vyborg side, shortly before midnight on 3 April 1917: workers and soldiers, with red flags and banners, fill the station hall; and there is a military band. The square outside is packed with automobiles and tank-like armoured cars; and the cold night air is blue with smoke. A mounted searchlight sweeps over the faces of the crowd and across the facades of the buildings, momentarily lighting up the tram-lines and the outlines of the city beyond. There is a general buzz of expectation: Lenin's train is due. At last it pulls into the station; a thunderous Marseillaise booms around the hall; and

  the small and stocky figure of Lenin appears from the carriage, his Swiss wool coat and Homburg hat strangely out of place amidst the welcoming congregation of grey tunics and workers' caps. An armed Bolshevik escort leads him in military formation to the Tsar's former waiting-room, where a Soviet delegation is standing by to greet him, the latest returning hero of the revolutionary struggle, after more than a decade of exile abroad.47

  For Lenin this was the end of an unexpected journey. The February Revolution had found him in Zurich and, like most of the socialist leaders, it had caught him by surprise. 'It's staggering!' he exclaimed to Krupskaya when he heard the news. 'It's so incredibly unexpected!' Lenin was determined to get back to Russia as soon as possible. But how could he cross the German lines? At first he thought of crossing the North Sea by steamer, as Plekhanov had already done. But the British were hostile to the Russian Marxists: Trotsky and Bukharin had both been detained in England on their way back to Russia from New York. Then he thought of travelling through Germany disguised as a deaf, dumb and blind Swede — until Krupskaya had joked that he was bound to give himself away by muttering abuse against the Mensheviks in his sleep. In a moment of desperation he had even considered hiring a private aeroplane to fly across eastern Europe; but then the thought of the dangers involved put him off this harebrained scheme. When it came to putting himself at physical risk, Lenin always had been something of a coward.*48

  It was Martov who came up with the idea of exchanging the Russian Marxist exiles in Switzerland for the German citizens interned in Russia. With the help of their Swiss comrades, the Russian exiles made contact with the German authorities, who quickly saw the advantage of letting the Bolsheviks, and other socialist groups opposed to the war, go back to Russia to stir up discord there. They even helped to finance their activities, although this should not necessarily be taken to mean, as many people were later to argue, that the Bolsheviks were German agents.49 The Provisional Government was not keen on the idea of an exchange — Miliukov was determined to oppose it in view of Lenin's well-known defeatist views — and dragged its heels over the negotiations. Martov and most of the Menshevik exiles were prepared to wait. But Lenin and thirty-one of his comrades were impatient enough to go ahead with the German plan without the sanction of the Russian government. On 27 March they left

  * Valentinov, who knew Lenin well in Switzerland, wrote: 'He would never have gone on to the streets to fight on the barricades, or stand in the line of fire. Not he, but other, humbler people were to do that . . . Lenin ran headlong even from emigre meetings which seemed likely to end in a scuffle. His rule was to "get away while the going was good" — to use his own words — meaning from any threat of danger. During his stay in Petersburg in 1905—6 he so exaggerated the danger to himself and went to such extremes in his anxiety for self-preservation that one was bound to ask whether he was not simply a man without personal courage.'

  on a German train from Gottmadingen on the Swiss border and travelled via Frankfurt, Berlin and Stockholm to Petrograd. The train, which had only one carriage, was 'sealed' in the sense that no inspections of passports or luggage were carried out by the Germans on the way. Lenin worked alone in his own compartment, while his fellow travellers, much to his annoyance, drank and sang in the corridor and the other compartments. Smoking was confined to the lavatory and Lenin ordered that all non-smokers should be issued with a 'first class' pass that gave them priority to use the lavatory over the smokers with their 'second class' passes. As Radek quipped, it seemed from this piece of minor social planning that Lenin was already preparing himself to 'assume the leadership of the revolutionary government'.50 The 'sealed train' was an early model of Lenin's state dictatorship.

  Lenin arrived a stranger to Russia. Apart from a six-month stay in 1905—6, he had spent the previous seventeen years in exile abroad. Most of the workers who turned out to meet him at the Finland Station could never have seen him before.* 'I know very little of Russia,' Lenin once told Gorky. 'Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, exile — that is all I know.' During 1917 he would often claim that the mass of the ordinary people were even further to the Left than the Bolsheviks. Yet he had no experience of them, and knew only what his party agents told him (which was often what he wanted to hear). Between 5 July and the October seizure of power Lenin did not make a single public appearance. He barely set foot in the provinces. The man who was set to become the dictator of Russia had almost no direct knowledge of the way its people lived. Apart from two years as a lawyer, he had never even had a job. He was a 'professional revolutionary', living apart from society and supporting himself from the party's funds and from the income of his mother's estate (which he continued to draw until her death in 1916). According to Gorky, it was this ignorance of everyday work, and the human suffering which it entailed, which had bred in Lenin a 'pitiless contempt, worthy of a nobleman, for the lives of the ordinary people .. . Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin. He does not know the ordinary people. He has never lived among them.'51

  'Well there it is,' Lenin wrote to Kollontai on 2 March. 'This first stage of the revolution (born of the war) will be neither the last, nor confined to Russia.' Lenin was already thinking of a second revolution — a revolution of his own. In his five 'Letters from Afar', written between 7 and 26 March, he mapped out his party's programme for the transition from 'the first to the

  * Many of the workers who came to greet Lenin may have turned up on the expectation of free beer. Welcoming receptions for returning party leaders had become a regular feature of life in the capital since the revolution, and for many of the workers they had become a pretext for a street party. Thi
s was particularly relevant in the case of Lenin's return from exile, since it coincided with the Easter holiday.

  BETWEEN REVOLUTIONS

  38 The Tsar's soldiers fire on the demonstrating workers in front of the Winter Palace, 9 January ('Bloody Sunday') 1905.

  39 Demonstrators confront a group of mounted cossacks on the Nevsky Prospekt in 1905.

  40 The opening of the State Duma in the Coronation Hall of the Winter Palace, 27 April 1906. The two Russias - autocratic and democratic - confronted each other on either side of the throne. On the left, the appointees of the crown; on the right, the Duma delegates.

  41 The Tauride Palace, the citadel of Russia's fragile democracy between 1906 and 1918.

  42 Petr Stolypin in 1909. Many things about the Prime Minister - his provincial background and his brilliant intellect - made him an outsider to his own bureaucracy.

  43 Patriotic volunteers pack parcels for the Front, Petrograd, 1915. The war campaign activated and politicized the public.

  44 The smart set of Petrograd see in the New Year of 1917. Note the anglophilia, the whisky and champagne. This sort of ostentatious hedonism had become quite common among the upper classes; and at a time of enormous wartime hardships it was deeply resented by the workers.

  45 Troops pump out a trench on the Northern Front. The poor construction of the trenches, a science which the tsarist Staff had never thought worth learning, was a major cause of the huge Russian losses in the First World War.

  46 Cossacks patrol the streets of Petrograd, early February 1917. Recruited from the poorest regions of the Kuban and the Don, they soon joined the revolutionary crowds.

  47 A 'pharaon' - the slang name for a policeman - is arrested by a group of soldiers during the February Days in Petrograd.

  48-9 The destruction of tsarist symbols. Above: a group of Moscow workers playing with the stone head of Alexander II in front of a movie camera. Below, a crowd on the Nevsky Prospekt in Petrograd stand around a bonfire with torn-down tsarist emblems during the February Days. Here, too, the display for the camera was an important part of the event.

  50 The crowd outside the Tauride Palace, 27 February 1917.

  51 Soldiers on the Western Front receive the announcement of the abdication of Nicholas II.

  second stage of the revolution': no support for the Provisional Government; a clean break with the Mensheviks and the Second International; the arming of the workers; the foundation of Soviet power (the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the poorest peasants'); and the conclusion of an immediate peace. Lenin boiled all this down into ten punchy theses — his famous April Theses — during the train journey from Switzerland and began to agitate for them upon his arrival at the Finland Station. Brushing aside the formal welcome of the Soviet leaders, the returning exile proclaimed the start of a 'worldwide Socialist revolution!', and then went out into the square, where he climbed on to the bonnet of a car and gave a speech to the waiting crowd. Above all the noise Sukhanov heard only the occasional phrase: '. . . any part in the shameful imperialist slaughter . .. lies and frauds . . . capitalist pirates . . .' Lenin was then taken off in an armoured car, which proceeded with a military band, workers and soldiers waving red flags, through the Vyborg streets to the Bolshevik headquarters — the palace of Kshesinskaya, the former ballerina and sometime mistress of the Tsar.52

  On the following day Lenin came with his own armed escort to the Tauride Palace and presented his Theses to a stunned assembly of the Social Democrats. He had turned the Party Programme on its head. Instead of accepting the need for a 'bourgeois stage' of the revolution, as all the Mensheviks and most of the Bolsheviks did, Lenin was calling for a new revolution to transfer power to 'the proletariat and the poorest peasants'. In the present revolutionary conditions, he argued, a parliamentary democracy would be a 'retrograde step' compared with the power of the Soviets, the direct self-rule of the proletariat. Theoretically, the April Theses had their roots in the lessons which Lenin had learned from the failure of the 1905 Revolution: that the Russian bourgeoisie was too feeble on its own to carry out a democratic revolution; and that this would have to be completed by the proletariat instead. The Theses also had their roots in the war, which had led him to conclude that, since the whole of Europe was on the brink of a socialist revolution, the Russian Revolution did not have to confine itself to bourgeois democratic objectives.* But the practical implications of the Theses — that the Bolsheviks should cease to support the February Revolution and should move towards the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat — went far beyond anything that all but the most extreme left-wingers in the party had ever considered before. It was still not clear whether Lenin envisaged the violent overthrow of the Provisional Government, and, if so, when this should happen. For the moment, he seemed content to limit the party's tasks to mass agitation. The Bolsheviks still lacked a majority

  * Trotsky had reached the same conclusions, and it is possible that his theory of the 'permanent revolution' partly influenced the April Theses.

  in the Soviets; and Russia, as Lenin pointed out, was 'now the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world'. But the sheer audacity of his speech, coming as it did at a joint SD assembly for the party's reunification, ensured a furious uproar in the hall. The Mensheviks booed and whistled. Tsereteli accused Lenin of ignoring the lessons of Marx and quoted Engels on the dangers of a premature seizure of power. Goldenberg said that the Bolshevik leader had abandoned Marxism altogether so as to occupy the anarchist throne vacated by Bakunin. B. O. Bogdanov condemned the Theses as 'the ravings of a madman'. Even Semen Kanatchikov, the Bolshevik worker we met in Chapter 3, who had come all the way from the Urals to hear Lenin speak, was flabbergasted by what he saw as the 'unrealistic nature of his ideas, which seemed to all of us to go far beyond the realms of what it was possible to achieve'. It seemed that Lenin, having spent so many years in exile abroad, had become out of touch with the realities of political life in Russia. Returning from the Tauride Palace that evening, Skobelev, the Menshevik, assured Prince Lvov: 'Lenin is a has-been.'53

  Which is just what he might have become, had it not been for one fact: that he was Lenin. All the odds were stacked against him in his struggle for the party to adopt the April Theses. The majority of the Bolsheviks had already pledged their tentative support for the Provisional Government prior to Lenin's arrival (Kollontai was the only major Bolshevik to support the April Theses from the start). Only the Vyborg Committee, the stronghold of Bolshevik extremism in the capital, came out in favour of Soviet power. Stalin and Kamenev, who returned from Siberian exile in mid-March and took over control of Pravda, strengthened this cautious approach. Like the Mensheviks, they assumed that the 'bourgeois' stage of the revolution still had a long way to run, that the dual power system was thus necessitated by objective conditions, and that the immediate tasks of the Bolsheviks lay in constructive work within the social democratic movement as a whole. Trotsky later accused them of acting more like a loyal opposition than the representatives of a workers' revolutionary party. The moderate motions of Kamenev and Stalin were adopted at the All-Russian Bolshevik Conference at the end of March: conditional support for the Provisional Government; the continuation of the war; support for the Soviet leaders. The Bolsheviks even agreed to explore the possibilities of reuniting with the Mensheviks. They were already working together, along with the SRs and other socialists, in most of the provincial Soviets. Far away from the factional disputes of their party leaders in the capital, the old camaraderie of the underground remained very strong in the provinces, and Lenin's combative factionalism was strongly resented and resisted by those provincial Bolsheviks who were either unwilling or simply unable to break their ties with the other left-wing groups.54

  Lenin always liked a fight. It was as if the whole of his life had been a preparation for the struggle that awaited him in 1917. 'That is my life!' he had

  confessed to Inessa Armand in 1916. 'One fighting campai
gn after another.' The campaign against the Populists, the campaign against the Economists, the campaign for the organization of the party along centralist lines, the campaign for the boycott of the Duma, the campaign against the Menshevik liquidators', the campaign against Bogdanov and Mach, the campaign against the war — these had been the defining moments of his life, and much of his personality had been invested in these political battles. As a private man there was nothing much to Lenin: he gave himself entirely to politics. There was no 'private Lenin' behind the politician. All biographies of the Bolshevik leader become unavoidably discussions of his political ideas and influence. Lenin's personal life was extraordinarily dull. He dressed and lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work and leisure. He liked everything to be neat and orderly. He was punctilious about his financial accounts, noting on slips of paper everything he spent on food, on train fares, on stationery, and so on. Every morning he tidied his desk. His books were ordered alphabetically. He sewed buttons on to his pin-striped suit, removed stains from it with petrol and kept his bicycle surgically clean.55

  There was a strong puritanical streak in Lenin's character which later manifested itself in the political culture of his regime. Asceticism was a common trait of the revolutionaries of Lenin's generation. They were all inspired by the self-denying revolutionary hero Rakhmetev in Chernyshevksy's novel What Is To Be Done? By suppressing his own sentiments, by denying himself the pleasures of life, Lenin tried to strengthen his resolve and to make himself, like Rakhmetev, insensitive to the suffering of others. This, he believed, was the 'hardness' required by every successful revolutionary: the ability to spill blood for political ends. 'The terrible thing in Lenin', Struve once remarked, 'was that combination in one person of self-castigation, which is the essence of all real asceticism, with the castigation of other people as expressed in abstract social hatred and cold political cruelty.' Even as the leader of the Soviet state Lenin lived the spartan lifestyle of the revolutionary underground. Until March 1918 he and Krupskaya occupied a barely furnished room in the Smolny Institute, a former girls' boarding school, sleeping on two narrow camp-beds and washing themselves with cold water from a bowl. It was more like a prison cell than the suite of the dictator of the biggest country in the world. When the government moved to Moscow they lived with Lenin's sister in a modest three-room apartment within the Kremlin and took their meals in the cafeteria. Like Rakhmetev, Lenin did weight training to build up his muscles. It was all part of the macho culture (the black leather jackets, the militant rhetoric, the belief in action and the cult of violence) that was the essence of Bolshevism. Lenin did not smoke, he did not really drink, and, apart from his romantic friendship with Inessa Armand, he was not interested in beautiful women. Krupskaya called him 'Ilich', his