Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  There was a further tremor on 4 November when Kamenev and four colleagues resigned from the Bolshevik Central Committee and several People’s Commissars announced either their resignation from Sovnarkom or their disapproval of Lenin’s refusal to negotiate sincerely in pursuit of an all-socialist coalition. But Lenin did not yield and Trotski stood by him. Together with Central Committee Secretary Sverdlov and People’s Commissar for Nationalities Affairs Iosif Stalin they were determined to proceed with revolutionary political consolidation. The inner core of the Bolshevik Central Committee was rock-hard. Its members were aware that their infant regime had not yet faced its greatest trials. Every day that Sovnarkom lasted, they thought, was a major accomplishment. But at the very least they wanted to leave a mark on the history of Russia and Europe in the event that they were forced to flee from Petrograd in defeat. Decrees, proclamations, instructions and summonses flowed out from the Smolny Institute. Nerve and faith were required. Lenin and his associates had taken a vast gamble with the politics of their party and their country, and it was by no means certain that they had laid a sound bet.

  After that first fortnight of political insurrection, armed defence and inter-party negotiation there was a need for them to consolidate their position. This required three main achievements. Firstly, they had to spread their administrative authority to other parts of the country. Secondly, they had to complete the promulgation of their revolutionary decrees. Thirdly, they had to deal with the Central Powers on the eastern front. It was an awesome task – and most of their enemies in the country were already convinced that they would fail. Surely they had already made too many grievous errors of anticipation? Their assumptions had been infantile. They thought that the armies of the Central Powers would be dissolved by the corrosive effects of fraternisation with Russian soldiers. They believed, too, that workers in Russia who had voted for the Bolsheviks would constantly support them. They trusted that the rushing decline of the economy could quickly be reversed by means of governmental restrictions on capitalism. They had little sense of the grip of age-old traditions upon popular consciousness, traditions of religion, social deference and political indifference. Their enemies depicted Lenin and his associates as ill-educated, reckless semi-intellectuals at best. Among the most reactionary political elements there was another dimension: they asserted that Lenin was a Jew, a cosmopolitan and an anti-Russian in league with Russia’s national enemies.

  But few people in Russia at the time had a presentiment that Lenin’s regime might last for years, far less that it might stretch to seven decades of existence. The supreme Bolshevik leaders were not entirely convinced either. They had a phrase for their condition: they lived by ‘sitting on their suitcases’. How long could they last out? In such a situation it was natural for the very highest stratum of the party to try and find succour in leadership. Increasingly it seemed to the metropolitan provincial party leaders that Lenin, despite his occasional strategic and tactical lapses, was a reliable guide. He was, furthermore, a willing leader. Even if they survived the current political crisis, they would need a leader. Lenin was such a leader.

  He did not experience any impulse to question what he was up to. He knew, at least in broad terms, his purposes. Bolsheviks, he repeatedly argued, had to face up to the consequences of the October seizure of power. He had told them – even if he had kept it secret from the workers who voted for the Bolsheviks – that a government of firm, even authoritarian purposes was crucial. In April, Lenin had told his Bolsheviks to prepare themselves to take power. Most observers had mocked him. But he had ignored the ribaldry and steeled his party to hold its nerve, and against widely expressed expectations the Bolsheviks had succeeded in taking power. Now the party’s critics laughed at him on the ground that he expected that the October Revolution would succeed in fulfilling his strategic analysis. But he no longer took Kadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries seriously. He had not done so for a dozen years; and unlike other revolutionaries, he did not experience second thoughts about his analysis when others considered it eccentric. He had never minded singing as a soloist. Now that he was in power there was still less of a temptation to cramp his vocal cords, and he hymned the Revolution with all his passion.

  Lenin liked to explain his strategy in dualistic terms. He wanted a revolution from above and a revolution from below; he wanted both dictatorship and democracy. He aimed at authoritarian imposition and liberation. His writings in 1917 had combined these polarities. And yet, however much he toyed with such dualism, he raged to impose Sovnarkom’s authority and would let nothing get in his way. Coercion steadily assumed prominence at the expense of persuasion. Lenin instructed and commanded and he sanctioned violence, including outright state terror.

  In the first few days he wrote up or edited the various decrees he had not yet submitted. Among them, on 29 October, was a Decree on the Eight-Hour Day. At last the founder of the working-class dictatorship took up the specific interests of the working class. On the same day a Decree on Popular Education committed Sovnarkom to the provision of universal, free, secular schooling for children. Then on 2 November came the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which assured every citizen that Sovnarkom opposed every vestige of national and religious privilege. National self-determination, even to the point of secession, was offered to the nations of the former Russian Empire. The Declaration was co-signed by Lenin and Stalin. On 14 November, the Decree on Workers’ Control – which Lenin was meant to have written earlier – was issued. This was the scheme whereby the workers of a given enterprise should be given the right through an elected committee to supervise the enterprise’s management. Still the decrees kept coming. On 1 December, Sovnarkom established a Supreme Council of the National Economy to take proprietorial and regulatory authority over industry, banking, agriculture and trade. All banks were nationalised on 14 December and steadily in the ensuing weeks a number of large-scale factories were taken into the hands of the state. Sovnarkom was carrying through the programme it had promised in the months when the Bolsheviks were advancing on power.

  Not every decree had been adumbrated in public before the October Revolution. Lenin had tried to strike a jovial tone in saying how the Bolsheviks might try to emulate the Jacobin Terror in the French Revolution. But, as soon as he took power and had seen off the prospect of an all-socialist coalition, his true harshness was displayed again. He it was who came to Sovnarkom to make the case for the re-establishment of a secret political police. The October Revolution, he argued, had to be efficiently protected. Thus there would be created an Extraordinary Commission. Its head, on Lenin’s recommendation, would be Felix Dzierżyński, and its powers in ‘the struggle against counter-revolution and sabotage’ were left deliberately vague and were kept free of interference even from Sovnarkom. It was called the Extraordinary Commission mainly because even Lenin believed that the need for such an organisation would be only temporary; and it must be mentioned, too, that Lenin did not at this stage call for a campaign of extensive mass terror.

  But it was a fateful step. Not being someone who believed in legality, Lenin felt comfortable with a political police untrammelled by niceties of written procedure – and the Extraordinary Commission’s charter allowed him and Dzierżyński to expand its range of functions at will. He was forever talking and writing about bourgeois bloodsuckers. Class war was congenial to him. A conversation took place about the Bolsheviks’ intentions between Lenin and the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Isaak Shteinberg. ‘In that case,’ asked Shteinberg, why should we bother with a People’s Commissariat of Justice? Let’s honestly call it the Commissariat for Social Annihilation and we’ll get involved in that!’ Lenin responded as follows: ‘Well said!… That’s exactly how it’s got to be… but it can’t be stated by us.’12 It cannot be proved that Lenin held the total physical liquidation of the middle classes as a party objective. But cases of abuse towards the rich, the aristocratic and the privileged certainly failed to arouse
pity. His resentment against the old ruling elites, which he had felt acutely after the hanging of his brother Alexander in 1887, was never far from the surface of his thinking.

  He thought back to the political writings of the Russian radicals of the previous century. Talking to an old acquaintance, he said: ‘We are engaged in annihilation, but don’t you recall what Pisarev said? “Break, beat up everything, beat and destroy! Everything that is being broken is rubbish with no right to life. What survives is good…”’13 Although the conversation cannot be independently verified, it has the ring of plausibility. Lenin wished to annihilate every vestige of the old regime and to use every available weapon in the struggle.

  It remained unclear how far he would go in assuaging his wish for revenge, a wish that was given an intellectual veneer in the form of his version of Marxism. The three first months of the October Revolution had solved nothing as yet. Soviets in industrial towns had gone over to Sovnarkom’s side and had declared themselves the local governmental authority. The peasantry of Russia and Ukraine were taking up the injunctions of the Decree on Land. Non-Russians, especially the Finns, were welcoming the scope provided for national self-expression. And German and Austrian diplomats were sitting down with representatives of the Bolsheviks to discuss what should happen after the truce on the eastern front came to an end. The Bolsheviks even managed to entice the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries into becoming junior partners in a Sovnarkom coalition, and they began to take their places on 9 December. All this was to the good. But could it last? Could it lead to the general popular socialist Revolution in Russia, Europe and the rest of the world that Lenin had believed when he wrote out his April Theses and his State and Revolution?

  19. DICTATORSHIP UNDER SIEGE

  Winter 1917–1918

  Questions about the spread and survival of the Revolution were bothering Lenin. Although other members of Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee were thinking about them, most of them concentrated on their institutional functions. Only Trotski gave as much attention to general policy as Lenin did. Lenin did not particularly welcome Trotski’s contributions since they sometimes contradicted his own thoughts. He preferred to do the thinking himself and to encourage his leading comrades to get on with the business of running their People’s Commissariats. The Bolsheviks lacked prior experience of large-scale administration, and several of them were embarrassed about this. Lenin’s reply was emphatic: ‘But do you think that any of us has that?’1

  The mood among Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries remained utopian. They were confident that European socialist Revolution was imminent and that Russia’s revolutionary transformation would be swift and easy. Trotski was as hard-headed as any other Bolshevik leader, but on arrival at the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs to take over as People’s Commissar he thought that his job would be strictly ephemeral. He would enter the building, publish the secret treaties between Nicholas II and the Allies and then simply ‘shut up shop’. Thus Trotski underestimated the will of the Central Powers to crush the Russian forces on the eastern front. Other Bolshevik governmental officials were equally intoxicated. Nikolai Osinski, Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, spent days elaborating charts and statistics for the perfection of the structures of industry and agriculture while the economy itself went to rack and ruin. Nikolai Podvoiski was absorbed in his plans to reorganise the armed forces at a time when most soldiers were jumping on trains and returning to their villages. Yuri Larin, it seemed to Lenin, constituted the most absurd case. Hardly a week passed without Larin composing a proposal for fundamental reconstruction of this or that People’s Commissariat.

  Lenin too was a utopian thinker, but he was able to adjust his policies in the interests of political survival. It is true that he did not always use this capacity and that he had often stuck to doctrinal positions when his party might have helped itself by being more flexible. But he had revised many policies in pursuit of power in 1917, and afterwards it became axiomatic for him that the October Revolution had to be protected at all costs. Indeed Lenin felt in his element. He derived pleasure from his historic responsibility to work out a programme of measures that would save the October Revolution and enhance its achievements.

  Several things worried him. Even while seizing power in October 1917, he had anticipated that the Bolsheviks and their allies would not win the Constituent Assembly elections. He was also alarmed about economic conditions. He began to query whether the urban working class had the discipline and commitment necessary for a proper socialist revolution. He was equally concerned about the progress made among the non-Russians. The promise of national self-determination had failed to give rise to a socialist seizure of power in Ukraine and Finland. Worse still, there were no insurrections in Germany, Austria, France and the United Kingdom. The ‘European socialist Revolution’ had stalled, and Lenin learned from Trotski on his trips back to Petrograd from Brest-Litovsk that the Central Powers were bent on invasion if Russia rejected their terms. Lenin had argued, in the teeth of opposition among Bolsheviks in April 1917, that socialist Revolution would be an easy business. He had scoffed at the dire predictions about Bolshevism made by Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Now his job was to persuade Bolsheviks that the tasks of Revolution would be harder than he had convinced them it would be.

  Lenin could at last take the measure of things on the streets of Petrograd by going for walks near the Smolny Institute. From 10 November 1917 he and Nadezhda Konstantinovna had a two-room flat on the first floor. The period of separation was over, at least for the next few months. The flat itself was small but comfortable, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna remembered it fondly:2

  At last Ilich and I settled down in the Smolny [Institute]. We were allocated a room there that had once been occupied by an upper-class lady. It was a room with a partitioning screen on the other side of which stood the bed. One had to enter via the washroom. No one could get along to the couple’s flat without a special permit signed by Lenin.

  Not that Lenin and Krupskaya spent much time there. His office was room no. 81 on the second floor in the north wing, and when Lenin was not in his office he was usually in the reception room opposite the office where officials waited to have a word with him. There was always a queue of them and the reception room got packed out. He loved to talk with them and often took the chance to deliver a short speech on current issues.3 The flat of Lenin and Krupskaya was not a genuine domestic sanctuary. The neighbouring large room was used for Sovnarkom sessions; and Trotski and his family lived in the flat opposite to that of the Lenins. People’s Commissars and their various deputies and assistants bustled up and down the corridor. In the English phrase, Lenin and Krupskaya ‘lived over the shop’. Krupskaya had been appointed as Deputy Commissar of Popular Enlightenment and had to get out and about; she could not, and was not asked to, attend to her husband. It was not just his Revolution: it was also hers; and in any case his colleagues in the Central Committee had firmly refused to have her back in a secretarial capacity. Lenin and Krupskaya were political colleagues, but colleagues in separate institutions; they no longer had an intimate working relationship.

  Lacking a woman to organise his domestic affairs, Lenin – according to Krupskaya’s memoirs – lived from hand to mouth:4

  Ilich was in a pretty neglected condition. [His bodyguard] Zhëltyshev fetched Ilich his lunch, bread, that which was laid down as his ration. Sometimes Maria Ilinichna brought him food of some sort from her home; but I wasn’t at home and there was no regular concern for his diet.

  Perhaps Krupskaya was trying to stress her importance to Lenin’s well-being and his sister Maria’s inadequacy. Be that as it may, his women had their own political commitments and left him largely to his own devices. The result was that he forgot to eat at the normal times of day and sauntered along to the communal cafeteria to grab a piece of pickled herring and some bread.5 His health deteriorated; headaches and insomnia returned.6

  W
hen Lenin and Krupskaya did have time together, they took a walk – usually unaccompanied by Zhëltyshev. On one occasion a dozen housewives standing outside the Institute screamed at them. In fact the women had not recognised Lenin: they were abusing everyone they spotted coming out of the building.7 Thus Lenin and Krupskaya could go around incognito even though his name was in the newspapers every day.

  In fact denunciations of his dictatorial regime were frequent. The tone was strident and direct, but occasionally there was an attempt at satire. The most notable occurred in the Socialist Revolutionary newspaper Delo Naroda, when the writer Yevgeni Zamyatin wrote a sequence of short pieces ridiculing Lenin in the guise of a certain Theta. In case the reader missed the point, Zamyatin mentioned that Theta was treated as a son by Ulyan Petrovich – a verbal glance at Lenin’s family name. Theta is a person without a home. He is a pathetic, bald little man whose usefulness to Ulyan Petrovich is that he can fill in forms for him at the local police station. He has odd habits such as drinking ink while at work. But Theta is also casually unpleasant; in particular when he visits the countryside to investigate reports of cholera, he simply bans the disease and orders corporal punishment of a villager who catches it. The villager, however, ‘antigovernmentally died’. In the end Theta’s powers wane to such an extent that he turns into an ink stain and passes away.8