Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  The hayloft was safe only as a temporary refuge and Lenin and Zinoviev took up Yemelyanov’s idea of moving two miles to the far side of the lake from the village. There he had a hayfield and a thatched, wooden hut. Couriers could still reach them regularly from the capital, bringing the daily Petrograd newspapers and Central Committee business; indeed leading Bolsheviks also visited the fugitives in the hours of darkness. Lenin tried to make the best he could of things. In particular, he resumed his work on Marxist political theory, later to be published as The State and Revolution. He had always been able to calm himself by reading and writing, and he had plenty of material with him in the hut. For relaxation, Lenin and Zinoviev helped Yemelyanov to mow the hay. They also went swimming. Life near Razliv was quite uneventful until Zinoviev foolishly went hunting in a prohibited area and bumped into Mr Axënov the gamekeeper, who ordered him to hand over his rifle. Zinoviev pretended to be a Finn and to be unable to understand Russian. Mr Axënov was taken in by this act and, luckily for Zinoviev, relented. Afterwards Zinoviev sensibly refrained from shooting expeditions.6

  Meanwhile the insects were making conditions unbearable in the hut, as Yemelyanov was to remember:7

  A kitchen was erected alongside: a pot was hung from stakes and tea was boiled in it. But at night things were insufferable; the insatiable mosquitoes gave absolutely no respite. It didn’t matter how you hid from them, they would always get to where they wanted and they would frequently eat you. But there was nothing that could be done about it: you simply had to submit.

  Relief came only when it rained, and the summer of 1917 was a very wet one. But the storms also brought hardship because the water poured through the roof. Lenin and Zinoviev could not promote Revolution while they were sodden and cold, and decided to change plans.8 Zinoviev was less worried than Lenin about being arrested and chose to risk returning incognito to Petrograd. Lenin, however, still thought he might be hanged if ever he was put on trial; he therefore asked the Central Committee to arrange for him to travel to a safe-house in Finland. The two refugees, Lenin and Zinoviev, would leave Razliv together.

  They were provided with wigs. Kerenski’s Ministry of the Interior had hoped to prevent this kind of subterfuge by banning the hire and sale of wigs without proof of special need. But the Petrograd Bolshevik Dmitri Leshchenko pretended to need wigs for a railwaymen’s amateur theatrical troupe to which he belonged. The next step was to obtain formal travel papers. It was necessary to have these when crossing the Russian–Finnish administrative border.9 Lenin and Zinoviev had to be photographed in this new disguise and Leshchenko trudged out with the bulky equipment from the rail-stop to the hut on the other side of the lake. The job had to be done soon after dawn so as to minimise the danger of Lenin and Zinoviev being seen and recognised by passers-by. The whole process was a palaver. Having no tripod, Leshchenko had to crouch so as to hold the mirror-chamber while taking the picture. This meant that Lenin and Zinoviev too had to kneel. Only after taking several pictures did Leshchenko feel confident that he had a satisfactory image. Then he travelled back to Petrograd to print the negatives and fix the photograph to the forged papers.10

  Several of the negatives came out badly, but one of them was good enough and a scheme was devised for Lenin and Zinoviev to leave in the first week of August. Accompanied by Yemelyanov and the Finnish Bolsheviks Eino Rahja and Alexander Shotman, they were to make for Levashevo, a small station situated halfway between Petrograd and Beloos-trov on the Finland Railway. From there it was intended for them to take a train back in the direction of Petrograd, to Udelnaya, where they would stay overnight in the flat of the Finnish factory worker Emil Kalske. Thereafter Zinoviev would make his way back to Petrograd and take his chances there in safe-houses provided by the Bolshevik Central Committee. Lenin, who was still the Ministry of the Interior’s most wanted man, would not take the risk; instead he would head north for Finland.

  From Razliv, Lenin and Zinoviev were committing themselves to an expedition of seven miles through the woods in an easterly direction from the lake. On their way they would have to cross a large peat bog and a bridgeless river. Lenin soon regretted that he had not supervised the planning. The expedition was a farce. The first thing to happen was that Yemelyanov got them lost in the woods. Then they had to cross a large area of peat which the owner had set on fire and which was still smouldering. Worse was to follow. Shotman had packed only three baby cucumbers; he had not even brought a bread-roll. Hours later, the walkers, hungry and tired, heard a distant train-whistle. Their pleasure melted away when they discovered that they had reached not Levashevo but Dibuny. Lenin was furious with Shotman:11

  Vladimir Ilich must be given his due: he cursed us with extreme savagery for the bad organisation. Surely it had been necessary to obtain a detailed local map? Why hadn’t we studied the route in advance, and so on? We also caught it over the ‘reconnoitring’: why did it only ‘seem’ to be the right station? Why didn’t we know precisely?

  But at least Dibuny had a railway station and was situated on the Finland Railway. Things, hoped Lenin, might be about to get better.

  Unfortunately, things got worse. Yemelyanov and Shotman stood around at the station while Lenin, Zinoviev and Rahja loitered in hiding. As they waited for the next train to Udelnaya, an army officer grew suspicious of Yemelyanov and took him into custody. Then a youth armed with a rifle spoke to Shotman, who distracted attention by getting on the train without Lenin, Zinoviev and Rahja. Shotman planned to warn the Bolsheviks in Udelnaya about the difficulties that had arisen at Dibuny. But he was such a bundle of nerves that he alighted three miles down the track at Ozerki instead of at Udelnaya. It was three o’clock in the morning when he finally reached Kalske’s flat in Udelnaya.

  But the luck of the other travellers had begun to change some hours earlier. From Levashevo they took a train to Udelnaya and stayed overnight in the home of Finnish factory worker Emil Kalske, who lived half a mile from the station. Next day Lenin was given a stoker’s clothes to put on, and in the evening he joined train no. 293 driven by Hugo Jalava across the Russo-Finnish border bound for Terijoki. Accompanying him were Shotman, Rahja and a third Finn, Pekka Parviainen. Jalava played out a charade with Rahja:

  ‘Where are you going at such a time?’ I exclaimed so as to distract attention. Comrade Rahja replied: ‘Home to my dacha, to Terijoki.’

  And then, pointing to Ilich, he asked me to take a comrade on board the steam engine, explaining that he was a journalist wanting to acquaint himself with steam engine travel. I agreed. Ilich grabbed hold of the handrail and clambered up into the engine while comrade Rahja went into the empty wagon. I explained to my assistant that they were local dacha owners. So as not to get in the way of work during the stoking of the fuel, Ilich retreated to the tender and loaded timber into the box.

  The trick worked. At Terijoki, after a journey of twenty-five miles from Udelnaya, they left the train and took a carriage to Jalkala, nine miles into the Finnish interior.

  In the morning they moved on by train to Lahti. This journey, too, proved hectic. The problem was the disguise adopted by Lenin in Jalkala. Its main feature was an adhesive face-mask. The glue started to melt before the travellers reached Lahti and Lenin hurriedly had to remove the mask without the aid of Vaseline or water before getting off the train.12 Lenin wrote about the ‘art of revolution’. Demonstrably he himself was no master of revolutionary cosmetics.

  On the platform at Lahti he and his companions were worried that station employees might take an interest in him because of his face, which was still smarting from the glue’s removal. But no one was so inquisitive, and Lenin’s party calmed down. Shotman went ahead to organise Lenin’s secret arrival in Helsinki (Helsingfors). For many years Finnish Marxists had warmly co-operated with the Bolshevik faction because of its appreciation of ‘the national question’.13 They were past masters at deceiving the Russian governmental authorities and, unlike Yemelyanov, did not need maps to get around their own c
ountry. Lenin reached Helsinki on 10 August, and over the ensuing weeks he stayed at various safe-houses. One of them belonged to Gustav Rovio. Lenin could hardly have been more securely looked after since Rovio was the Finnish capital’s elected police chief. It was an astonishing situation. While the Russian Minister of the Interior in Petrograd was offering a reward of 200,000 rubles for the apprehension of Lenin, his formal subordinate in Helsinki was hiding Lenin from arrest.14

  Lenin settled himself to a rhythm of work while couriers established a line of contact with both Petrograd and Stockholm. There were two differences from his years as an emigrant. The first was that Lenin was physically distant from the central party apparatus. The second was the absence of Nadya. It is true that she visited him twice after obtaining a passport from ‘the old woman Atamanova’ and disguising herself as a worker. Yet he could not encourage her to stay; considerations of security even stopped him chaperoning her back to Helsinki railway station.15

  Meanwhile Lenin remained angry with the Central Committee for rejecting his proposals on slogans. Literary activity offered a little consolation. He had plenty of books and got down properly to the treatise on The State and Revolution. He had already been filling a dark-blue notebook on the subject before he left Switzerland. This contained his jottings from the works by Marx and Engels he had read there. Indeed his notes already contained a preliminary sketch of the book he wanted to write, and he believed that his ideas, if only he could get them into print, would be recognised as his masterpiece. He wrote to Kamenev about this, asking him to take responsibility for this if ever it should happen that he was arrested and executed: ‘Entre nous: if they bump me off, I would ask you to publish my notebook, “Marxism on the State” (it’s held up in Stockholm). A navy-blue bound folder. There’s a collection of all the citations from Marx and Engels as well as from Kautsky against Pannekoek.’16 With rising excitement he wrote up the chapters in Helsinki. He looked forward to publishing them and demonstrating that his idiosyncratic general interpretation of Marxism was the only authentic one.

  So why has Lenin been charged with monumental insincerity in relation to the book? The main reason lies in the contrast between the predictions made in The State and Revolution and the reality of Bolshevism in power. The State and Revolution described an imminent future when the working class would become the ruling class and ordinary workers themselves take the crucial decisions of state and society. Things turned out very differently after October 1917, when the Soviet state quickly became a one-party dictatorship that used force against industrial strikes and political protests by workers. A long shadow of doubt was cast over his intentions when he wrote The State and Revolution.

  Now it must be conceded that Lenin, a power-hungry politician, was often disingenuous and deceptive. His criterion of morality was simple: does a certain action advance or hinder the cause of the Revolution? Although he seldom lied through his teeth in politics, he had unrivalled proficiency in evasion of truthfulness. He was notorious for manufacturing statements that deliberately misled his enemies. But in 1917 he was attacked for going far beyond this. Not only was he charged with having always known that Roman Malinovski was an Okhrana agent but he himself was accused of operating as a paid German agent. In the liberal and conservative newspapers he was accused of treason to his country. Until the February 1917 Revolution it had been possible for him to deny that Malinovski had belonged to the Okhrana service; but the opening of the Ministry of the Interior’s files destroyed this illusion. Lenin had a case to answer and had had to attend the official hearing in the early summer. In self-defence he had simply argued that the Okhrana and Malinovski had fooled everyone. And he succeeded in persuading the hearing that the Bolsheviks before 1917 had never knowingly acted in concert with the tsarist monarchy’s secret police.

  Less easy to shrug off was the charge that the Bolshevik Central Committee since the February Revolution had acted as Germany’s conscious puppets. There was much circumstantial evidence that the Bolsheviks were in receipt of money from Berlin. The Russian CounterEspionage Bureau released the story to Petrograd newspaper editors on 4 July when the government was dealing with the trouble being caused by the Bolshevik party and its supporters in the centre of Petrograd.

  The Counter-Espionage Bureau’s investigators believed it plausible – but could not quite prove – that the money was transmitted to the Bolshevik Central Committee by Jakub Hanecki, who received it from the German intermediary Alexander Helphand-Parvus. Apparently Hanecki, an official of the Foreign Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee in Stockholm, secretly moved the funds by bank credits and by courier. It is now known that the German authorities made millions of marks available for the purpose of enabling Russians to conduct pro-peace propaganda. It can scarcely be a coincidence that the Bolsheviks, despite having only a minority of places in the soviets and other mass organisations after the February Revolution, rapidly set up a large number of newspapers. How much Lenin knew in detail about the German subsidy is unlikely ever to be discovered; but he was a politician who liked to be in control. It stretches credulity that he did not know what was going on. It so happened that the investigators were close to catching Hanecki himself red-handed on the frontier at Tornio. They were frustrated, however, by the premature disclosure of some of their findings by Petrograd daily newspapers.

  Lenin took a lawyerly approach to the accusation. He could easily repudiate the slur that he was acting on the instructions of the German government. He was also safe in denying that he had talked to Helphand-Parvus, and he could ridicule the suggestion that he had taken money into his personal possession from Hanecki. In this way he did not have to tell the direct lie that, under his general supervision, the Bolshevik leadership had accepted no money from Russia’s wartime enemy. Lenin’s evasiveness would have been explored aggressively if he had been in the Provisional Government’s custody. But he was living in Helsinki police chief Rovio’s house and he could wait for the storm about ‘the German gold’ to blow itself out.

  As he pressed forward with The State and Revolution, the task took longer than he had imagined – and he had not completed the final chapter before the October Revolution. He had very practical motives for wanting to write fast. He saw the book as a vital contribution to his party’s ability to deal with the current political situation in Russia. More generally, he aimed to explain the most appropriate strategy for Bolsheviks in Russia and far-left socialists elsewhere to establish a socialist state. He enjoyed asserting himself as a theorist. The argument of State and Revolution was that the other socialist parties, notably the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in Russia and the German Social-Democratic Party, had an inadequate strategy for the achievement of socialism. Lenin heaped the blame on Karl Kautsky, whom he treated as the originator of the basic ideas of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries; and he dedicated half the book to an examination of the political transformation predicted by Marx and Engels and already realised to some extent by the Russian soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies in the direction of European socialist revolution.

  Lenin made several fundamental assertions. Marx, he said, had assumed that usually it would take a campaign of violence for socialists to come to power. The middle classes held all the advantages under capitalism; they would use their education, money and any maleficent methods that came to hand in order to ward off Revolution. Socialists should therefore recognise violence as the necessary midwife to historical change. Furthermore, the revolutionary socialist regime would not long survive unless it continued to deploy violent methods. It should therefore fight to set up a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. In the early period of the socialist Revolution there should be an administration based unequivocally on principles of ‘class struggle’. The former upper and middle classes should lose their civic rights. Rule would be imposed by the working class, which steadily would infuse society – not just in Russia but in the entire industrialised world – with socialist re
forms.

  Laboriously Lenin adduced the legacy of Marx and Engels and tried to show that they had invented a specific series of stages whereby the perfect community – known as communism – would be attained around the world. This series, he proposed, would develop as follows. Capitalism would be overthrown by a violent revolution that would be consolidated by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Such a dictatorship, at first ruthless, would steadily impregnate the institutions, practices and ideals of socialism. The need for class-based discrimination would gradually diminish as the remnants of the old upper and middle classes ceased to constitute a threat. Socialism, as it matured, would facilitate enormous progress beyond capitalism. The lower social orders would get accustomed to running the administration, and the economy, liberated from the constraints of capitalism, would be expanded in those sectors bringing benefit to people’s general objective needs. Nevertheless socialism would still involve a degree of political and social inequality and would still necessitate the existence of a state. Lenin stressed that the raison d’etre of states was to use coercion to favour the interests of the ruling classes as they sought to dominate the other classes. Under socialism it would be the ‘proletariat’ that ruled.

  Yet Marxism’s ultimate goal, as Lenin emphasised, had always been to achieve a society without oppression and exploitation. This would be the very last stage of historical development. Under communism the principle would at last be realised: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. There would be no distinction of material reward. Each individual in society would have the fullest opportunity to develop potential talent. A person could do both manual and mental labour. The whole people would engage in its own administration; and the need for a professional political stratum, professional bureaucracy and professional armed forces would lapse. According to Lenin, a kitchen maid would be entrustable with decisions previously undertaken by ministers. The need for the state would disappear. As communism approached, there would be a ‘withering away’ of the state.