Lengthy debate was impossible, however, because Lenin had already spoken for an hour and a half and his presence was awaited at a third meeting downstairs where the State Duma had once held its proceedings. This was to be a unificatory session of all Marxist delegates to the conference of the country’s soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Mensheviks went up to room 13 to press the Bolsheviks to bring their leader along with them.
The chairman of the session was Nikolai Chkheidze, and Lenin was again given the platform. His lengthy journey had left no mark on him. Pacing up and down, he was like a liberated animal. Having rehearsed his ideas twice already, he had a clear head – and he made a stormy declaration of revolutionary intent. But this time the response was critical. First of all, Irakli Tsereteli as Menshevik leader of the Petrograd Soviet made a plea for a unified Marxist party and argued that an early seizure of state power would lead to disaster. Mildly he suggested that eventually he would be able to co-operate with Lenin. Getting to his feet, Lenin instantly disillusioned him: ‘Never!’21 Former Bolshevik I. P. Goldenberg compared Lenin with the mid-nineteenth-century anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin, who had polemicised with Marx himself:22
The throne is now occupied which has been empty for thirty years since the death of Bakunin. From this seat the banner of civil war has been unfurled in the midst of revolutionary democracy. Lenin’s programme is sheer insurrectionism, which will lead us into the pit of anarchy. These are the tactics of the universal apostle of destruction.
After such a denunciation there was no chance of a rapid reconciliation between Bolshevik and Menshevik leaders. Other speakers continued the attack on Lenin. As the rowdy session broke up, the chairman Chkheidze permitted himself the jibe that ‘Lenin will remain a solitary figure outside the revolution and we’ll all go our own way.’23
Yet Lenin did not remain alone. He was pleased with his first day’s work in Petrograd and wished to consolidate it over the following weeks. On every possible occasion he harangued the Provisional Government, harangued the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries for supporting the Provisional Government, harangued Bolsheviks who sympathised with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. He spoke at open mass meetings. He wrote for Pravda. He attended and guided the Bolshevik Central Committee. He talked with visitors to Petrograd in order to get information about the provinces. He scoured the non-Bolshevik press for further news. He kept in touch with Radek in Stockholm and stayed abreast of the military and political situation elsewhere in Europe. He was aflame with zeal. Everything he did was undertaken so that the April Theses might become the foundation of Bolshevik revolutionary strategy.
But he was not inflexible. In the April Theses he had had the tact to recognise that not all the people who supported the Provisional Government were out-and-out imperialists. He knew that most workers and soldiers retained a patriotic will to defeat Germany. He had to persuade them carefully to come over to Bolshevism. For this to happen, moreover, the Bolsheviks had to obtain majorities in the soviets and other mass organisations: there could be no lasting possession of power unless the party had secured widespread popular support. The Bolsheviks therefore had to secure their opportunity to operate legally. Propaganda in the press and at open meetings would be crucial, and Lenin did not wish to create difficulties for the party by the open advocacy of activity that would invite repression by the Ministry of the Interior. On arrival in Petrograd he also learned that his own slogans were problematic. Most listeners were deeply disturbed by his talk of the need to turn the ‘imperialist war into a European civil war’. Nor did workers, soldiers and peasants in general warm to the prospect of a ‘revolutionary war’ or a ‘dictatorship’. As for his demand for Europe’s socialists to campaign for the defeat of their respective governments, this was a notion which simply offended Russian public opinion at all levels.
Lenin quickly dropped such slogans in his articles for Pravda and his speeches to heavily attended open meetings. He did not cease to believe in the slogans; he remained convinced that they alone were adequate to the epoch of socialist transformation which, according to him, had already arrived. But he was adjusting himself to practical needs and was sensible enough, for the present, to hearken to the warnings given to him by Kamenev. And even when modified, his slogans offered a massive contrast with the programme of the Provisional Government. He called for rule by the soviets. He demanded the nationalisation of large-scale industry and the banks. He urged the governmental expropriation of agricultural land. He advocated the cause of peace throughout Europe and argued that only a socialist administration, constituted by the soviets, could achieve this.
Constantly he declared that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were at best fools and at worst renegades in espousing co-operation between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government. He rejected their entire argument, which once he had shared, that Russia was at altogether too low a point of industrial and cultural development for the beginning of ‘the transition to socialism’ to be feasible. He denied that the country was best protected against military conquest by a political alliance of all social classes, and he scoffed at the suggestion that the primary task of the moment was to protect the gains of the February 1917 Revolution (even though he acknowledged that Russia had become ‘the freest country in the world’). His refrain was that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were the subordinate partners of the Kadets and that an ‘imperialist’ government had been established. Lenin pointed to the fact the Pavel Milyukov, who espoused the expansion of Russian territory at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, was Foreign Affairs Minister. This, he said, was proof that the replacement of Nicholas II by the Provisional Government had changed nothing essential in the orientation of official policy in Petrograd.
Events ran in his favour when it became known that Milyukov had notified the Allies that the government stood by Nicholas II’s war aims. On 20–21 April there was a protest demonstration in the capital against this. Bolsheviks joined in enthusiastically. Milyukov and Guchkov were compelled to resign from the cabinet and Prince Lvov had to put together a new coalition, including Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries as ministers. Ostensibly the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries acquired great influence at the apex of the state. In reality they became tarred with the brush of the Provisional Government’s continued failures to deal with the multiplicity of crises in the country.
At the Party Conference held by the Bolsheviks in the Kseshinskaya mansion from 24 April, Lenin seized his chance. The ‘Milyukov Note’, he declared, had proved that the Provisional Government was not to be trusted. Vacillating Bolshevik organisations had come over to his side. Few Bolsheviks who had disapproved of the April Theses were elected as delegates to the Conference. Many of the anti-Leninists, indeed, had already deserted the Bolsheviks. By moderating his language in public, furthermore, he allayed the doubts of leaders such as Kamenev who had attacked him in the Central Committee; and he agreed that, for the moment, the emphasis should be on propaganda rather than insurrection. Then, behind the closed doors of the Conference in the Kseshinskaya mansion, Lenin demanded the establishment of a socialist dictatorship. This alone, he maintained, would give land to the peasants, bread and employment to the workers, national self-determination to the non-Russians and peace to everyone. Objections were made that he had scrapped Marxist orthodoxy about stages in historical development. But most delegates had no patience with such niceties and Lenin’s call for Bolsheviks to play their part in the imminent revolution in Russia and the rest of Europe carried the day. On the ‘national question’ and on ‘the agrarian question’ too he was victorious. Bolshevism was back in his firm grasp once again.24
His rhetoric and imposing presence had made the best of a situation in the party that was already propitious. And both he and the Conference as a whole saw that the situation in the country was also turning in favour of the socialist far left. The difficulties facing the new government w
ere almost intractable in current conditions. The dislocation of industry and commerce was worsening. The food-supplies crisis was becoming acute. On the war fronts there was no good news. The framework of state administration, already somewhat creaky, was tottering dangerously. The abolition of the monarchy had opened politics to open public discussion and organisation, and the workers, soldiers and peasants expected much from the Provisional Government. Its ministers would find it extremely hard to satisfy them.
16. THE RUSSIAN COCKPIT
May to July 1917
Lenin had won over his party; his task now was to convince those of his fellow citizens to whom his party wished to appeal. It had not been difficult to convince the leaders and activists who attended the Party Conference. Much trickier would be the task of tossing the net of propaganda and organisation beyond the ranks of committed Bolsheviks. There was no certainty of success. If ‘Soviet power’ was to become a reality, very large sections of the Imperial population had to be brought over to Bolshevism.
Lenin aimed his slogans at workers, soldiers, sailors and peasants and he also tried to win over the non-Russian nationalities. The principal culprits for the country’s woes, he stated, were the industrialists, the bankers and the agricultural landlords. According to this analysis, on one side were ‘the people’, the exploited majority; on the other were the parasitical few. Although Lenin claimed to be offering policies based on unsentimental, scientific premises, his language was highly emotive and moralistic. It was also remarkably selective. Throughout these months Lenin strove to avoid giving offence to elements in the population that might otherwise have rallied to an anti-Bolshevik cause. Thus he made no overt threat to small-scale entrepreneurs, shopkeepers and self-employed artisans. He said nothing untoward about priests, mullahs and rabbis. He did not criticise officials and clerks in the various administrations of government, public services and business. Lenin wanted a clear field for the main political struggle, which he saw as being a contest between the ‘proletariat’ and the ‘bourgeoisie’. Whenever he wrote or spoke, he declared that the bourgeoisie was already on the offensive; he put forward his party as the only possible defender of the working class.
Lenin insisted that the Provisional Government was imperialist in intent and obedient to the interests of Russia’s robber capitalists. The people, he declared, were being tricked:1
Ruin is imminent. Catastrophe is on its way. The capitalists have brought and are bringing all countries to destruction. The sole salvation is revolutionary discipline, revolutionary measures taken by the revolutionary class, the proletarians and semi-proletarians, the transition of all state power into the hands of this class that will be able in reality to introduce such control, in reality to carry through victoriously ‘the struggle against the parasites’.
Lenin’s language was a curious mixture. His Marxist jargon was uncompromising: ‘proletarian’ was unusual enough, ‘semi-proletarian’ even more so to most of his fellow citizens. Yet there was also a punchy thrust in his writings. Ruin, catastrophe and destruction ran like a red thread through his vocabulary. When he got up on a platform, the audience was transfixed. He paced up and down. He fixed the crowd with a piercing gaze. He pinned his thumbs in his waistcoat like a schoolteacher, which added to the impression he gave of purveying genuine knowledge. He was not a conventionally brilliant orator. His enunciation was imperfect since he still failed to say his rs properly. He also took time to settle into a rhythm in the course of his speeches. But this did not matter to his audiences. The very opposite was the case: the awkwardness of his stocky, unprepossessing figure on the platform conveyed the impression of passion and willpower. In any case, it was often difficult to hear exactly what he was saying at the open public meetings, and the audiences were attracted as much by what they saw – an uncompromising militant leader speaking for the people’s cause – as by the precise verbal content of his oratory.
Also of some significance was the fact that Lenin began to dress differently from before 1917. Since leaving Sweden he had a new suit, shoes and cap, which had been bought at Karl Radek’s insistence. Consequently he no longer traipsed aroung in heavy, worn-down mountain boots. But it was the cap that his audiences remembered (and which has gone down in sartorial history as a ‘Lenin cap’). Commentators have usually contended that his new headwear was typical of the Russian working man of the period. Really his cap, bought in Stockholm, was the floppy sort worn around the turn of the century by painters.2 The result was to lend a touch of raffishness to Lenin’s appearance. Although he wore a smart suit like other politicians, his cap distinguished him from them and their solemn Homburg hats. his devil-may-care policies added to the effect. Lenin, in contrast with rival politicians in other parties, was visibly enjoying the Revolution. He relished every moment, and wished Russians to do the same. Lenin wanted them to abandon their inhibitions and seize the opportunities for self-emancipation with enthusiasm.
Thus Lenin rubbed shoulders comfortably with the factory labourers and garrison soldiers attending his meetings. He loved frequenting such a milieu; he was finding fulfilment as a Marxist in company with the working class and was in a mood of constant excitement. He confided to Nadya, when he joined her in the Ulyanov apartment at 48 Broad Street, that he had found himself politically at last.3 This adaptation required much effort. At one of his early meetings he sat on the platform with Alexandra Kollontai. At the last moment he panicked and asked her to deliver the speech on his behalf. Kollontai was astounded. She thought of Lenin as a confident party leader. She herself liked holding forth to large audiences, and persuaded Lenin that there was nothing very much to oratory. Lenin took heart and repaid her faith in his ability. He never again needed his inner belief to be enhanced by her or anyone else.4
Lots of people who disliked his policies confessed to being enthralled by his speeches. Many readers of his newspaper articles registered the same effect. He had an unrivalled ability to set out his arguments and lay out a militant case. His aggressive descriptions of his enemies and their policies gave everyone the feeling that here was a man who could wield governmental power. Provisional Government ministers were tame by comparison. Kadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had to compromise with each other; but Lenin treated compromise as a dirty word. He wanted dynamic, ruthless, correct measures to be taken, and contended that only a standpoint based upon ‘class struggle’ would suffice. He wrote a great deal: forty-eight pieces appeared in Pravda in May 1917 alone. As the Bolshevik central newspaper, Pravda was the main conduit of his ideas to the party, and no one’s name appeared in its pages more often than Lenin’s. He was in his element. He thought, wrote and acted as if he and the party were interchangeable. The country’s other newspapers had the same opinion that Lenin embodied the sole alternative to the political status quo.
He made public appearances too, delivering twenty-one speeches in May and June. Some of his speeches were short contributions to closed party meetings; others were disquisitions that included a couple of tirades to the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets. But he reserved most of his energy for Pravda. Lenin was a politician of the printed word; he was the brilliant gimnazia student who had turned into a Marxist scholar – and it had been he who developed the theory for Russian Marxists that the best instrument to establish a clandestine party was a newspaper, Iskra. He could adapt his style, but only up to a point. Words in print were still his revolutionary touchstone and he badgered colleagues who spent their time speaking at mass meetings rather than writing.5 The conventional wisdom that he was the master of all the political skills between the February and October Revolutions is unconvincing.
Yet Lenin enjoyed his politics. Petrograd was a place of great cultural effervescence in 1917. The world-famous bass Fedor Shalyapin was giving concerts. There were shows of paintings. Previously banned books were appearing. Street carnivals were organised. Symphony concerts were frequent. But Lenin kept his distance from them. Later he explained himself to Ma
xim Gorki:6
But often I can’t listen to music. It acts on my nerves. It makes one want to say a lot of sweet nonsense and stroke the heads of people who live in a filthy hell-hole and yet can create such beauty. But you can’t stroke anyone’s head today – you’ll get your hands cut off. The need is to beat them over the head, beat them mercilessly even though we, as an ideal, are against any coercion of people. Hm, hm… it’s a hellishly difficult necessity.
These words came from a man who knew he could not trust his emotions if he was to succeed at Revolution – a man who was willing to contemplate merciless violence not only against the party’s enemies but against just about anyone. Not that he had to try very hard to suppress his more generous impulses. He did it very easily, and did it with ever greater facility over the course of his career. The political task at hand was all that mattered.
Lenin: A Biography Page 36