At 10.35 p.m. the organisers of the Congress could wait no longer. On behalf of the Central Executive Committee, Fëdor Dan rang the bell in the assembly hall for proceedings to be started. There were 670 delegates. Three hundred Bolsheviks constituted the largest group. They would have to rely on the other delegates in order to make up a majority. Fortunately there were plenty of these to hand. The left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party had already decided to form a separate party, and this new party – like the Bolsheviks – wanted to transfer land to the peasantry. There were also dozens of delegates to no party whatsoever who wished for a government based on the soviets. The other hope for Lenin was that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, offended by the events of the previous night, would walk out of the Congress. To this end he had bent his efforts. But he did this quietly and avoided making any public appearance or signing any public declarations in the course of the day. Nor did he turn up to the first session of the Congress. Trotski rather than Lenin headed the group of Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries who took the leading position on the platform in reflection of the strength of their Congress delegations.
Martov from the floor cried out for negotiations to be started for a peaceful end to the current crisis. The Congress overwhelmingly endorsed his proposal. But there followed Menshevik, Socialist-Revolutionary and Bundist criticisms of the violence elsewhere in Petrograd – and to the delight of Lenin, who still held himself in the background, the large anti-Bolshevik socialist parties stalked out. At this point it became harder for Martov to proceed, and he and his group of Menshevik-Internationalists also walked out. Trotski condemned them. Lenin was delighted that events were so strongly running his way and that he could rely upon Trotski in this matter.
He continued to handle himself carefully. In the eyes of his party’s enemies he embodied the most extreme political intransigence and destructiveness – and even many Bolsheviks retained reservations about his combative style of comportment. Furthermore, there was a strong body of opinion in the Bolshevik party as a whole and especially in the Central Committee that welcomed the formation of a government coalition of all socialist parties. Kamenev had returned to the Central Committee once the uprising had begun and Lenin ignored the attempt by Kamenev and Zinoviev to forestall the October Revolution. And so Kamenev became useful as the moderate face of Bolshevism while the Bolshevik leaders tried to present themselves as the people’s defenders against the oppressive Provisional Government. Most Bolshevik delegates had acquired mandates from their local constituencies on this same assumption. It is consequently possible that Lenin’s Central Committee colleagues judged it impolitic to let him loose as its main spokesman on 25 October 1917. Or perhaps he made this assessment for himself without pressure being brought to bear. At any rate he focussed his energies upon cajoling his associates in the Military-Revolutionary Committee and the Bolshevik Central Committee and to discussing what kind of government and policies should be announced next day.
Films were made of the October Revolution, novels written, songs sung and even ballets danced. In practically all of them a misleading image of Lenin was disseminated. There he is, with his fist raised, mouth tensed and a bearded chin. In fact, on that historic day of 25 October 1917 he spoke only briefly. He was not the Revolution’s great orator. He did not even look like his normal self because it took several further weeks before his moustache and beard grew back to their normal appearance – and indeed he would not agree to being photographed until January 1918. Contrary to conventional accounts, then, Lenin’s importance was not as a speaker in the Congress hall but rather as a strategist and inspirer behind the scenes – and in this role his contribution to the Revolution’s success was crucial.
At any rate he could afford to leave the Smolny Institute by the evening of 25 October. The management of the insurrection, he could at last concede, was in secure hands. His job next day would be to present not just slogans but actual decrees. At that time it would no longer be sufficient to castigate Kerenski: the new government would have to offer something different of its own. Lenin had snatched only the odd hour of sleep on 25 October. He badly needed some rest, and Bonch-Bruevich suggested that he should come home and sleep at his nearby flat. (He also gently pointed out that Lenin no longer needed his wig.) The Winter Palace was evidently on the brink of capture by the besiegers some time after midnight – and this duly came to pass. Accompanied by a large bodyguard, Lenin left the Institute for Bonch-Bruevich’s flat. He became drowsy in the car; he was obviously exhausted. Bonch-Bruevich gave Lenin the bedroom while he himself slept on the sofa in the living room. Even so, Lenin could not get to sleep. Once Bonch-Bruevich seemed to have drifted off into unconsciousness, Lenin crept back into the living room and drafted the decrees he had to present to the Congress of Soviets on 26 October.8
He did not mind how hard he drove himself so long as he was serving a higher purpose. But there was another impulse at work too. The Central Committee had asked him, at the meeting of 21 October which its members had banned him from attending, to prepare various ‘theses’ for use at the Congress of Soviets. He had done nothing to comply with this injunction until that night in Bonch-Bruevich’s flat. He had been suffused by the fear that the insurrection might not take place at all; perhaps he even suspected that the Central Committee’s request for theses had been a way of keeping him busy – and keeping him out of the way in Fofanova’s flat. Now he could at last concentrate properly on the theses and have them ready in rough form for the morning.
Both his Decree on Peace and his Decree on Land were of large significance for twentieth-century world history. Lenin knew this. The proclamation of a new government and a socialist revolution were only part of his brief. He needed also to propound a set of policies that contrasted entirely with those of Nicholas II, Prince Lvov and Alexander Kerenski. He did not want merely to take office. He wanted to wield power in Russia on different principles from those espoused by his predecessors. And he was determined that the message would go quickly beyond the Congress of Soviets in Petrograd. He told his host Bonch-Bruevich not only to publish little booklets of the decrees but also to go and buy up the remaindered copies of 1917 calendars on sale at a discount at the Sytin bookshop on the Nevski Prospekt. This strange request disconcerted Bonch-Bruevich. But Lenin explained that workers and soldiers lacked wrapping paper for their cigarettes. If booklets of decrees were handed out, people would simply roll them around twists of tobacco. Lenin’s scheme was meant to provide the Bolshevik party’s supporters with paper sufficient to allow them to avoid the need to do anything other than use the booklets for their intended political purpose.9
Although Bonch-Bruevich and Lenin had not had the rest they needed, they hastened back next morning to the Smolny Institute. Lenin greeted everyone he met with words of congratulation on the birth of the socialist Revolution. Already a manifesto had been released in the name of the Congress of Soviets. Anatoli Lunacharski had read it out to the Congress, but it was Lenin who had composed it. Inside the Institute he completed his work on the Decree on Peace, the Resolution on the Formation of a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government and the Decree of Land. Interspersed in his editorial work were meetings, both with particular delegates to the Congress and with the entre Bolshevik fraction and the Bolshevik Central Committee. An appeal was issued to the Left Socialist Revolutionaries to join a governmental coalition with the Bolsheviks. They refused, and Lenin without further ado resolved on a one-party government. He at last came before the Congress of Soviets, to tumultuous applause, at 9 p.m. By then it had been decided that he would be the government’s leader and that he would be described as the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (which was known by its acronym, Sovnarkom).
The session of the Congress of Soviets continued through the night of 26–27 October. Lenin went on consulting with his central party colleagues – Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir Milyutin and Lev Trotski – about his wording. He dr
afted a Decree on Workers’ Control, which was not published for several days. He also drafted a Decree on the Press, accepted and printed on 27 October. The point was that he gave literary expression to the October Revolution and that his various decrees were the clearest statement of his purposes. Lenin announced his government’s intention to be unlike any other in world history. Supposedly the people would know in full about its government’s internal discussions, and transparency of deliberation and decision would be complete.
Not once did Lenin mention Marxism in his various speeches of 25–27 October. He referred to ‘socialism’ only very fleetingly. Nor did he explain that his immediate objective was the establishment of a class-based dictatorship and that ultimately he aimed at the realisation of a communist, stateless society as described in his The State and Revolution. He was keeping his political cards close to his chest. He was a party boss, and wanted Bolshevism to be attractive to those workers, soldiers, peasants and intellectuals who had not yet supported it. And so terms such as dictatorship, terror, civil war and revolutionary war were yet again quietly shelved. He also continued to leave aside his lifelong imprecations against priests, mullahs and rabbis, against industrialists, the landed gentry and kulaks, against liberal, conservative and reactionary intellectuals. His emphasis was skewed more sharply in favour of a revolution ‘from below’ even than in The State and Revolution. His every pronouncement was directed towards encouraging the ‘masses’ to exercise initiative and engage in ‘autonomous activity’ (samodeyatel’nost’). His wish was for the Bolsheviks to appear as a party that would facilitate the making of Revolution by and for the people.
Sovnarkom, the new Soviet government, was announced to acclaim at the Congress on 26 October. Lenin was Chairman: he eschewed a title such as Premier or President. His People’s Commissar for External Affairs was Trotski. Stalin was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities Affairs. Bolshevik Central Committee members accepted governmental posts with enthusiasm and turned up in the next few days at the old ministries to implement the policies of the October Revolution. They thought – and they fended off every Menshevik and Socialist – Revolutionary criticism of their naivety – that the Russian revolutionary example would be followed within hours by working classes elsewhere in Europe. If not within hours, then within a few days. If by some extraordinary mishap not within days, then certainly within months.
The person who had given the most vivid expression to this way of thinking was Lenin. His speeches and decrees were rousing by any standards. The Decree on Peace, which he personally presented to the Congress on 26 October, was carefully formulated inasmuch as it did not overtly demand ‘European socialist revolution’; Lenin appealed not only to the peoples of the belligerent states but also to their governments (even though he had been condemning these governments as irredeemably ‘imperialist’). But the Decree’s gist was a practical summons to revolution:
The [Soviet] government proposes to all the governments and peoples of all the warring countries to conclude a truce immediately, while for its own part it considers it desirable that this truce should be concluded for no less than three months, i.e. for such a time that would entirely facilitate the completion of negotiations on peace with the participation of representatives of all peoples and nations without exception that have been dragged into the war or compelled to take part in it, as well as the convocation of plenipotentiary assemblies of popular representatives of all countries for the definitive confirmation of peace conditions.
These words were astonishing after three years of war. Hostilities on the eastern front were instantly suspended.
The Decree on Land was the other great reform of policy Lenin personally introduced to the Congress. Dismay at his dilatory approach to producing it had led the Central Committee to ask Vladimir Milyutin – the leading Bolshevik economist after Lenin and the newly appointed People’s Commissar of Agriculture – to get together with Yuri Larin to draft a decree. But Lenin took over and finished the job. He also took over the list of peasant demands as compiled in June by the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries as the detailed clauses of his decree. But the lengthy preamble was Lenin’s. It was not written in his most exciting language. Dryly he announced the abolition of landed property of the gentry, the Imperial family and the Church. Nor was it a work of legislative coherence. There was uncertainty about which institute was to dispose of the expropriated land: land committees, peasant communes or peasants’ soviets. The terminology, too, was vague. It was specified that the land of ‘rank-and-file peasants’ should be inviolable. But no definition was given of such peasants. And it was simultaneously laid down that private property in land, presumably including land owned by peasants, should be abolished in perpetuity.
Yet legal niceties were of no interest to Lenin. He wanted the Decree to have a ‘demonstrative’ effect and to foster the advance of Revolution. His general intent was anyway clear enough: the peasantry was invoked to take collective action to seize and cultivate all land not currently owned by peasants. Only in cases where large-scale advanced agriculture was practised did Lenin aspire to preventing a break-up of landed estates. He expressed unbounded faith in the peasantry. His speech to the Congress of Soviets spelled out his rationale:10
A crime was committed by the government that has been overthrown and by the conciliationist parties of the Mensheviks and SRs when on various pretexts they postponed the resolution of the land question and thereby brought the country to ruin and to a peasant uprising. Their words about pillage and anarchy in the countryside echo with falsehood and cowardly deceit. Where and when have pillage and anarchy been provoked by sensible measures?
Lenin, of course, was not genuinely the peasants’ champion. He thought that, if they took over the land, they would soon start competing with each other within the framework of a capitalist market economy – and eventually, he hoped, the Soviet government would be able to intervene on behalf of the ‘rural proletariat’ and nationalise the land. And so his ultimate objective remained to set up socialist collective farms.
He did not intend to let the October Revolution stand or fall by virtue of democratic consent. In those very first days at the Smolny Institute he tried to browbeat Sverdlov and other Central Committee members into announcing the postponement of the Constituent Assembly elections. Sverdlov refused. Bolsheviks had been saying that only they could be trusted to convoke the Constituent Assembly on time: they could not immediately postpone the elections. Lenin’s cynicism was rejected, at least initially.
Less controversial in the Bolshevik Central Committee was Lenin’s requirement that the resistance to the Soviet government should be ruthlessly quashed. Troops were sent out to oppose the Cossack detachments assembled by Kerenski; and the units of the Military-Revolutionary Committee continued to patrol the city. On 27 October, furthermore, a Decree on the Press was issued with Lenin’s signature. This was the first governmental instruction enabling the establishment of censorship. Any ‘organ of the press’ was liable to closure for inciting resistance to Sovnarkom. Indeed a newspaper could be put out of operation simply for being deemed to have ‘sown confusion by means of an obviously defamatory distortion of the facts’. Despite having campaigned in earlier months for the principle of ‘freedom of the press’, the Bolsheviks were not slow to arrogate to themselves powers enabling them to monopolise the information available through the media of public communication. The Decree mentioned that Sovnarkom regarded this as a temporary measure. But again it is open to doubt whether Lenin truly believed in this provisionality; he had said repeatedly in 1917 that ‘freedom of the press’ was a principle that played into the hands of the bourgeoisie. He was unlikely to alter this assumption in the heat of revolutionary struggle.
The immediate threat, however, came not from conservative and liberal newspapers but from Kerenski; and this situation widened the scope for sympathisers of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries to put political pressure on Sovnarkom to establish
a broad socialist coalition. Kamenev and other right-wing Bolsheviks thereby also acquired a leverage on Lenin and Trotski. The All-Russia Executive Committee of the Railwaymen’s Union (Vikzhel) warned that it would go on strike unless a coalition was formed. Kamenev was empowered by the Bolshevik Central Committee to negotiate with Vikzhel and Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary representatives. Lenin had to stay out of the way. He recognised this, but he did not trust Kamenev. In the circumstances it is remarkable that he kept the lid on his impatience and intransigence. For Kamenev on 30 October consented to a plan for an all-socialist governmental coalition that would exclude Lenin and Trotski.11
But by then Lenin was uninhibited by questions of internal party diplomacy. Sovnarkom’s security had increased. It had become improbable that the railwaymen would obey a call for a strike and the Cossacks of General Krasnov were defeated on the Pulkovo Heights. Lenin could safely attack Kamenev again. At the Bolshevik Central Committee on 1 November there was a decisive confrontation. Lenin and Trotski held to the opinion that an ultimatum should be delivered to the other parties declaring that a coalition would be entertained only if Bolshevik policies were pre-agreed as the basis of the government’s. This was really a way of breaking off negotiations without appearing to do so. The Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders with their long experience of Lenin had never been optimistic about the possibility of collaborating with him. His ideas on dictatorship and terror as well as his despotic personal behaviour were anathema to them. Nor did they approve of his closure of Kadet newspapers – and they saw signs of even greater trouble ahead when it became clear that Sovnarkom had prohibited right-wing Menshevik newspapers from operating. Lenin struck at Kamenev in the Bolshevik Central Committee on 2 November, and the policy of no compromise with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries was resumed.
Lenin: A Biography Page 42