But, before any heads could be beaten, Lenin had to have power. The Bolshevik party needed to overthrow the Provisional Government and set up a new revolutionary administration. The soviets and other ‘mass’ organisations, in Lenin’s vision, ought to become the basis of governmental authority. Thus would the ‘transition to socialism’ be undertaken.
With this purpose in mind it was vital for the Bolshevik party to enter the soviets without delay. Bolsheviks should campaign in elections and get themselves into leading soviet posts at the expense of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Accused of wanting to lead his small party into a coup d’état, he replied in Pravda: ‘We shall be for the transition of power into the hands of the proletarians and semi-proletarians at such a time when the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies come over to the side of our politics and want to take this power into their own hands.’7 Thus he affirmed that he would not seize power regardless of popular opinion and that the priority for the Bolsheviks was to obtain a majority in the soviets. The Provisional Government had come into existence only through the acquiescence of the Petrograd Soviet, and ministers ignored the policies of the soviets at their peril. Furthermore, an All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was scheduled for June. The soviets were about to set up a national administrative framework parallel to the Provisional Government, and Lenin urged his party to get ready to use this framework as an instrument to rule the country.
He himself was willing to modify policies further in the light of popular demands. In the April Theses he had called for ‘land nationalisation’. But, after a survey of peasant opinion undertaken by the Socialist-Revolutionaries indicated hostility to any such nationalisation, Lenin dropped the slogan. Several of his Bolshevik adjutants, notably Stalin, had long argued that it would be hopeless to try to take agricultural land into state property once the peasantry had launched a violent campaign against their landlords. Lenin by August was willing to alter his stance. He would need the consent of the peasantry if he was to consolidate a revolutionary regime. The Bolshevik Central Committee announced a new slogan, ‘land socialisation’, which gave the peasants virtually a free hand to dispose of the land. He preferred nationalisation, but the greater good – from his standpoint – was served by the acquisition of the peasantry’s support.
Another change of policy occurred when he learned that workforces in Petrograd were beginning to institute ‘workers’ control’ in their factories. Just as previously he had objected to peasant communes being allowed to control the villages, so he had never liked the idea of workers taking over their respective factories without direction from the party. But this was a revolutionary situation and, Lenin urged, workers had to be encouraged to make revolution. Their ‘creativity’ and ‘initiative’ had to be fostered. The Bolshevik party leadership would do what it could to guide the revolution from above, but ‘the masses’ had to participate; they had to undertake their revolution from below. And so the Bolshevik leaders had to learn to listen to the voices of workers, soldiers and peasants. Bolshevism in 1905–6 had been too doctrinaire, and Lenin had been exasperated at his fellow activists’ distaste for becoming involved in the soviets, trade unions and other mass organisations. There should be no repetition of this blunder in 1917. The Bolshevik party had to be dynamic and flexible within the broad lines of its policies. Consequently it was to be welcomed if workers in Petrograd aspired to institute supervision over factory managements in order to keep their factories in operation.
In May and June 1917 most of the policies were fairly clear. The Bolshevik Central Committee and Pravda stood for the revolutionary transfer of governmental power to the soviets. They advocated a general peace in Europe, preceded by an armistice on the eastern front. They called for the nationalisation of large-scale industry and banking, for workers’ control in the factories, for the transfer of agricultural land to the peasantry, for national self-determination and for intensified cultural development. The vanguard of this political movement would be the Bolshevik party, which would guide the lower social orders to their destiny: socialist Revolution. Revolution in Russia would quickly be followed by fraternal revolutionary seizures of power elsewhere in Europe. What Russian workers could easily do, he asserted, would be accomplished with still greater ease by the workers of the more advanced industrial powers.
Such a prospect appealed to his party, and over the same months the joint organisations of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks went their separate ways. The Bolsheviks became a genuinely separate political party for the first time. Nor was there any doubt about who led the Bolshevik party. It was Lenin. Initially he was able to keep Nadezhda Konstantinovna working at his side. But she was the first to recognise that the arrangement could not last:8
In the meantime I did not entirely succeed in handling matters in the Secretariat. Of course, it was more difficult by far for Ilich to work without a personal secretary such as I had previously been for him; but now it caused inconvenience since I had to attend both the [Pravda] editorial board and Central Committee meetings. Ilich and I talked it over and decided that I should give up the secretaryship and go off and do educational work.
Her self-description as Lenin’s personal secretary was too embarrassing to be printed until the late 1980s: Lenin was officially meant to have no particular privileges at home or at work. At any rate the other Bolshevik leaders evidently resented the additional influence accruing to Lenin from her presence at his side, and formal respect for the equal rights of Central Committee members was restored. First Yelena Stasova, then Yakov Sverdlov ran the Secretariat. Lenin did not approve. But he backed down and to his relief he found that both Stasova and Sverdlov were his political admirers no less than was his wife.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna was not telling the full story. While she worked briefly in the Central Committee Secretariat, her sister-in-law Maria Ilinichna was the editorial secretary of Pravda. Rivalry for his attention had often arisen among Lenin’s women and Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s culinary incompetence continued to provoke ribaldry. She did not mind too much since she never claimed to be a chef. But she could have done without Maria Ilinichna making such a song and dance about Lenin’s enthusiasm for her chicken dishes. It was hardly surprising that Lenin enjoyed the change of diet since he and Nadya had had to eat horsemeat too often for their liking in Switzerland. (Russians, like the British, tend to be squeamish about eating the horse.) In any case Maria knew how to needle her sister-in-law. Refusing to continue this domestic competition in the central party offices, Nadya took herself off and settled down to political work as party organiser and educator in the Vyborg industrial district.
She was still bothered by Graves’s disease, and her cardiac instability was still troubling her, but she was determined to play a part to her fullest ability in the Revolution. She was also the daily provider of emotional succour to the Bolshevik leader. The frantic political pace put him under unrelieved pressure. Headaches and insomnia returned. Maria Ilinichna said that his lifestyle abroad had caused his problems because he had never had a regular, healthy diet. But the disruption of routine got worse in Petrograd; and the fact that he had to attend Central Committee and Pravda editorial sessions at which most of his colleagues chainsmoked was an additional irritation. He was constantly exhausted. It is possible that he was already suffering the minor heart attacks that certainly took place within the next two years. But, if attacks occurred, he kept quiet about them. He had lived for the Revolution, and the historic moment of Revolution had arrived. Lenin needed no second thoughts: he could not allow the moment to pass him by – and he had the arrogance to assume that the Revolution might crash if left to itself.
Nadya did what she could to help, but this was difficult. At party meetings and in front of the crowds Lenin had to perform:9
On 1 May, Vladimir Ilich gave a speech at the Field of Mars. This was the first May holiday since the overthrow of tsarist power. All the parties turned o
ut. May Day was a festival of hopes and aspirations connected with the history of the world-wide labour movement. On that day I lay flat on my back and did not hear Vladimir Ilich’s contribution; but when he arrived home he was not happily excited but rather tired out.
He used to get very tired at that time, and consequently I held back from quizzing him about work. Things turned out badly with our walks too. Once we went out to Yelagin Island, but it turned out to be so crowded and bustling there. We strolled over to sit by the Karpovka embankment. Then we took up the habit of walking around the empty streets of Petrograd Side.
No Alpine air. No vigorous striding up mountain paths. No trips on his bicycle. Just a quick little stroll around the block from Broad Street.
But increasingly Lenin could leave important party functions to others in the Bolshevik Central Committee. Sverdlov was a brilliant administrator in the Secretariat. Kamenev did regular work in the Petrograd Soviet. Stalin was adept at handling most jobs given to him. Zinoviev was a captivating orator. The party also started to attract other Marxists who had previously not accepted Bolshevism. One such was Felix Dzierżyński, a Polish leader who had worked closely with Rosa Luxemburg. But perhaps the most surprising new Bolshevik adherent was none other than Trotski. Lenin courted him once Trotski had made his way back from North America in May 1917. For his part Trotski thought Lenin’s decision to go for immediate socialist revolution to be a tacit espousal of Trotskyism. Trotski was therefore keen to enter the only large party that was unconditionally hostile to the Provisional Government: he gave up entirely on the Mensheviks. But years of vituperation between Trotski and the Bolshevik faction were not easily expunged from the minds of other leading Bolsheviks, and Lenin had his work cut out persuading his less calculating comrades to welcome the dazzling literary, oratorical and organisational skills of their former enemy. But Lenin succeeded, and Trotski joined.
It was as well for Lenin that he could depend on such a team since there were limits to his influence inside and outside his party. Few people knew what he looked like. Contemporary Russian newspapers carried no pictures of him; and unlike Alexander Kerenski, the real master of the modern technology of politics in 1917, Lenin had no opportunity to have newsreels taken of him. Moreover, Pravda was a dour newspaper and commissioned no cartoons of him, and posters of Lenin were not made until after the October Revolution. Contrary to the conventional impression about them, the propaganda techniques of the Bolsheviks in 1917 were not very imaginative, and it was the newspapers of the other political trends that pioneered pictorial representation. Even so, such newspapers did not popularise Lenin’s image with anything near to accuracy. For example, the caricaturists in the Kadet newspaper Rech portrayed him as a great bear of a man rather than the squat, stocky fellow that he was – and, as often as not, without his moustache and with more hair than he had since his early twenties.
Lenin did not stray from Petrograd on political campaigns; he turned down every invitation to visit the rest of Russia after his long journey from Zurich. What he knew about the country came through visitors to Petrograd and from the newspapers. There was obvious irony in this. He was credited by the Provisional Government and the anti-Bolshevik parties with almost miraculous power (and this reputation has not vanished in our day). Yet the Bolshevik party was not the well-oiled machine of command that would have made this possible. Its committees in the provinces were reluctant automatically to toe the line drawn by the Central Committee. Organisationally the party was as anarchic as any other contemporary political party. It was also equally subject to the vagaries of the post and telegraph services. Messages from Petrograd arrived slowly or not at all. And the party’s central newspaper Pravda had a typical print-run of only ninety thousand copies for a population of 160 million people,10 and half of these copies were kept for distribution in the capital. The link that Lenin wanted between himself and the general populace was pretty weak in practice.
Yet the enemies of the Bolshevik party identified him as the greatest single threat to political stability. Liberals and conservatives treated his trip by special train across Germany as proof that he was a German spy. Less respectable newspapers played the anti-semitic card, claiming that Lenin was pursuing the interests of the Jews. The press campaign against him stirred up passions that threatened his personal safety. On one occasion a couple of upper-class Russian women burst into the Pravda offices and announced: ‘We have come to beat up Lenin!’ Luckily for him, this was an isolated episode; it might have been different if, instead of two ladies, a group of Cossacks had come to get him. Nevertheless the Bolshevik Central Committee took the precaution of assigning several party members to go round with him.
His recurrent concern was to keep probing the defences of the Provisional Government. For this purpose there was no better method than a large political demonstration, preferably involving armed soldiers and sailors. He had no elaborate plan for insurrection, or any plan whatsoever; but he was constantly on the look-out for any weaknesses that might be exploited. He had tried this in the protest demonstration against the Milyukov Note in April. He tried the same again in June, when the Central Committee organised a demonstration to coincide with the opening of the First Congress of Soviets. The demonstration was to be an armed affair, and unsurprisingly the Provisional Government foresaw trouble. Ministers consulted the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Petrograd Soviet, who were equally worried. The Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet decided to ban the Bolshevik-led demonstration and the Petrograd Soviet held its own demonstration in support of the First Congress of Soviets, a demonstration that would include Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks. Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries prided themselves on a bomb deftly defused. At the Congress of Soviets, lasting from 3 to 24 June 1917, they celebrated victory and proceeded to establish a Central Executive Committee to co-ordinate all the country’s soviets until the next Congress.
The great leaders of the Petrograd Soviet – Tsereteli, Chkheidze, Dan and Liber – paraded their achievements since the February Revolution. They highlighted the concordat between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government on civil freedoms and national defence. They boasted that, when Foreign Minister Milyukov tried to wriggle out of this, the Petrograd Soviet had forced his resignation and the creation of a government coalition involving several Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders claimed that all this had been beneficial for the socialist cause in Russia.
Lenin spent his energies denouncing this co-operation as a fundamental betrayal of socialism. His words were aimed at people who were very well known to him: Chernov, Dan, Tsereteli and Martov. He had polemicised with them over many years. This had not stopped him from having coffee with one or other of them if he happened upon them in a foreign coffee-house; mutual political exasperation had not prevented social contact. This changed irreversibly in 1917. For Lenin, the behaviour of his Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries after the February Revolution put them beyond the pale. He did not engage them with a detailed refutation of their policies. In some measure this was because he was so disgusted with them. But it was also because he did not want to draw unnecessary attention to the strength of their case. For a start, it was entirely reasonable for them to deny that conclusive evidence existed that Europe was on the brink of a general socialist revolution. They worked hard to convoke a conference of Europe’s anti-war socialists in Stockholm; but they argued, too, that it would be irresponsible to forget that Russia should be defended against the Central Powers. They also touched a raw nerve when they mentioned that Lenin himself had until recently scoffed at the idea that the Russian Empire was yet industrially and culturally equipped to progress towards socialism.
As ministers, too, they were having an impact. Viktor Chernov as Agriculture Minister gave peasant-led ‘land committees’ the right to take uncultivated land into their control despite the protests of gentry
farmers. Mikhail Skobelev, overriding the protests of employers, used the Ministry of Labour to introduce schemes for compulsory health insurance, for safety at the work-place and for the arbitration of industrial conflict. Tsereteli’s post as Minister of Posts and Telegraphs did not inhibit him from insisting that greater autonomy should be accorded to non-Russian regions such as Finland and Ukraine.
Yet the clock was ticking against the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Every concession they wrenched from the hands of the Kadets was small alongside the problems bearing down on the Provisional Government. Monetary inflation was meteoric and industrial production plummeted. Wages, which had risen after the fall of the Romanov monarchy, failed to maintain their real value. Food supplies to the towns ran short. The central state administration steadily disintegrated. Regions, provinces and cities ran their affairs without regard for the Provisional Government. Elective sectional organisations, especially the soviets, began to act as if they wielded formal state power. The workers’ control movement began to spread beyond Petrograd. Peasants in Russia and Ukraine were illegally pasturing their cattle and chopping down landlords’ timber – and there was an increase in expropriations of landed estates. Soldiers were deserting the eastern front in their thousands. Refugees in their millions roamed Russia’s cities. The Provisional Government was seen to support the interests of the propertied elites, for it refused to undertake basic reforms until after the end of the Great War – and the end of the Great War was not in sight. Such a situation was primed for Lenin and the Bolshevik party to exploit.
This is not to say that the Provisional Government acted with consummate skill. Alexander Kerenski, its Military Affairs Minister, opted to abide by Nicholas II’s commitment to resuming a Russian offensive on the eastern front. No doubt the Provisional Government felt that it needed to show the Allies that it was not a broken reed. It also wanted to deflect Russian public criticism by means of a swift victory against the Austrians.
Lenin: A Biography Page 37