From this it was clear that Lenin intended to give no mercy even to the sections of society that had once supported the Bolsheviks enthusiastically.
What he was doing, without being properly aware of it, was facing up to the consequences of the October Revolution in the light of the political and economic setbacks. Authoritarianism had always pervaded his thought; it now became more evident and extreme. Writing in Uusikirkko, he jotted down the theme of another article he wanted to write soon: ‘First vanquish the bourgeoisie and then fight the bourgeoisie abroad.’15 This implied a will to prioritise political consolidation in Russia and to wait awhile before spreading revolution to other industrial countries. And his various drafts show that the struggle to vanquish the Russian bourgeoisie would be accompanied by massive intimidation of ‘the masses’. Lenin’s hard heart was hardened further.
Inside the Smolny Institute, he conferred with Sverdlov to finalise preparations for the reversal of the first (and until 1993 the last) remotely free universal-suffrage elections in Russia’s history. Lenin and Trotski had not made a secret of their hostility to the Constituent Assembly. All through December they had argued that such elections were not a true gauge of the people’s interests, and they had the entire membership of the Bolshevik and Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committees on their side. Violent suppression was openly contemplated, if not in Pravda then certainly on the streets. Sverdlov made the necessary military dispositions. Sovnarkom could rely upon having several units including both the Latvian Riflemen and the Red Guard on its side. The socialist opponents of the Sovnarkom coalition – Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bundists – had no serious counter-force. Lenin made a show of nonchalance and on 1 January 1918 he took a two-mile trip in his official limousine from the Smolny Institute to the Mikhailovski Manège in central Petrograd. With him were Maria Ilinichna, Fritz Platten and Nikolai Podvoiski. Lenin had made many such trips to meetings in November and December. Security precautions were few: Lenin wanted to show that he was a popular politician at the head of a popular revolution. In any case he was enjoying himself.
Having delivered a rousing speech at the Mikhailovski Manège, he started back around seven o’clock in the evening with his companions. His speech had been well received by party members and by the workers they had brought with them. The little group were looking forward to having supper in the Smolny Institute. It was already very dark but they were being carefully watched by two armed men. The car had barely left the Manège and reached the Simeon Bridge when the men stepped off the pavement, took aim and fired at the limousine. At the sound of shots, Platten instinctively threw himself across Lenin’s body. It was an incompetent attempt at assassination, but it had very nearly succeeded. Platten suffered worst. His act of courage left him with a hand wound. The limousine carried on to the Smolny Institute and Dzierżyński began a search for the attackers. A few days later it became clear that they had been monarchists. But in the interim a pretext was given to Sovnarkom to charge the socialist parties outside the governmental coalition with complicity in terrorism. The aim was to tar the majority parties in the forthcoming Constituent Assembly with the brush of anti-popular violence.
Lenin had often been accused of physical cowardice. He had gone out of his way to evade the police forces of both Nicholas II and the Provisional Government at times when others in his party took personal risks. But from 25 October 1917 his approach had changed. He had led a revolution. He knew that he would go down as a figure in the history books. Every day that the Soviet regime lasted was another page added to the annals of Lenin and Bolshevism. He joined other Bolsheviks in facing further danger, knowing that he had already survived for the event that meant most to him in his life: the Revolution.
But he did not seek martyrdom, and while he was alive, he knew that much needed to be done to enhance the prospects of Revolution. For him, this always meant that things had to be done rapidly and ruthlessly. His ideology and his temperament pushed him in the same direction. Probably his ill health did too: he felt that he had no time to waste. Lenin wanted to get on with the Revolution. Nothing was to stand as an obstacle. Over the next few days, he concentrated on the arrangements for the Constituent Assembly in the Tauride Palace. He could barely begin to discuss the subject temperately. The first session was scheduled for 5 January 1918 and he was already very tense when he arrived at the Tauride Palace. He knew that his intended action – the Assembly’s forcible closure – was of historic importance. As the proceedings began, Lenin was white as a sheet. Lacking armed support, the Socialist-Revolutionaries under Viktor Chernov could not resist the Bolsheviks. Chernov was subjected to catcalls and threatening gestures. But it was Sverdlov who spoke for the Bolsheviks. Lenin confined his contribution to permitting himself to be seen scoffing at the proceedings. By putting up Sverdlov instead of himself, Lenin was showing contempt for more than his old adversary Chernov. He was despising free and universal-suffrage elections as a mode of political struggle.
Quite how to stop the first session of the Constituent Assembly had not been worked out by Sovnarkom. Chernov looked as if he would the proceedings indefinitely. Yet again Lenin urged direct action upon his party and after some dispute his line was accepted. The Assembly would be closed and would not be permitted to resume work next day. Lenin’s plan nevertheless involved a degree of finesse. On his orders, the Assembly guard under the anarchist–communist Anatoli Zheleznyakov announced to the flabbergasted Chernov that the ‘guard was tired’ and that the building ought to be cleared. Chernov had no option but to comply and the Tauride Palace was emptied.
Since the Constituent Assembly had not approved all the Sovnarkom decrees, Lenin felt that he had acquired more than enough excuse to go to the Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies to secure agreement that the Assembly had outlived its usefulness. Subsequently the fount of legitimacy for the regime would be the Congress itself, and the Cheka – the new political police established in December – could freely hunt down the enemies of the Sovnarkom coalition. Lenin had got what he wanted. He had done this without having to harangue either the Constituent Assembly or the Congress of Soviets. He was the acknowledged leader of the October Revolution but he did not act alone. His Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Sovnarkom coalition had been moving in the same direction. The point was becoming obvious. Once Sovnarkom had taken power, it needed to use force to maintain itself. Not every party leader had recognised this before the October Revolution; but all of them did by 5 January 1918. It was a fateful process of learning. If they had known this in advance, they might not have sanctioned the seizure of power. But they had acceded to Lenin’s insistence on the Provisional Government’s overthrow in the fashion and at the time he demanded. Now they were getting used to living with the consequences, and to living with them without blaming him.
20. BREST-LITOVSK
January to May 1918
The huge task facing Lenin after the Constituent Assembly’s dispersal was to get Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to accept the separate peace pushed under their noses by the Central Powers. It was the fiercest struggle of his career. On his return from Switzerland, his April Theses had tipped the balance of Bolshevik party opinion. In October 1917 he had thrust the party towards overturning the Provisional Government. But on the question of war and peace Lenin faced a massive impediment. His Bolshevik party, having carried out the October Revolution and issued the Decree on Peace, would not accede to the signature of a peace with the imperialist governments of Berlin and Vienna.
Steadily the scale of the military threat on the eastern front was disclosing itself. In the last weeks of 1917, Trotski as People’s Commissar for External Affairs returned from the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, the town nearest to the trenches, still believing that he could endlessly prolong the truce. At any time, he thought, Revolution could erupt across Europe. On 7 January 1918 he returned in a more sombre mood,
bringing news that the Central Powers had presented an ultimatum. Lenin instantly argued for agreeing to the German demands for fear that the terms of the ultimatum might soon get even worse, but Trotski demurred and proposed that the negotiations be dragged out by means of a tactic of ‘neither war nor peace’. At that point Lenin took his case to the central and local leaderships of the Bolshevik party. At the Third Congress of Soviets on 8 January, he presented his ‘Theses on the Question of a Separate and Annexationist Peace’. Members of the Bolshevik fraction, after getting over their astonishment at his volte-face, turned him down flat even though most of them recognised that ‘revolutionary war’ was impracticable; they gave preference to Trotski’s policy of ‘neither war nor peace’. Lenin remained defiant: ‘In any event I stand for the immediate signature of peace; it is more secure.’
At the Central Committee next day, he made no secret of the distaste he felt for his own policy:1
Undoubtedly the peace that we are currently compelled to conclude is an obscene peace; but, if war begins, our government will be swept aside and peace will be concluded by another government… Those who stand on the side of revolutionary war point out that by this very step we will be engaged in a civil war with German imperialism and that thereby we’ll awaken revolution in Germany. But look! Germany is only pregnant with revolution, and a completely healthy baby has been born to us: the baby that is the socialist republic, which we shall be killing if we begin a war.
Lenin argued that the ‘socialist fatherland’ had to be protected in the short term but that nevertheless the Bolsheviks had to stay in readiness to spread revolution to Europe.
His chances of convincing his party with such thoughts were small and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries would not even listen to them. He had been in such situations in the past, before 1917; but in those years he could afford to take the risk of isolating himself: in 1918 he was leader of a governing party and the state was going to stand or fall in consequence of the decision taken about the separate peace proposal. It was not entirely helpful that among his main supporters in the Bolshevik Central Committee were figures who had had their doubts about his revolutionary strategy in 1917: Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Stalin went about asserting that ‘there is no revolutionary movement in the West’. Lenin genuinely believed that the ‘European socialist Revolution’ would eventually take place, and had to distance himself from Stalin’s position. And steadily Lenin began to exert an influence on the Bolshevik Central Committee. He worked to undermine the confidence of his opponents and focussed upon Bukharin. This was astute. Bukharin had never thought it possible for Russia to wage a successful war on German capitalism; he simply assumed that ‘revolutionary war’, if ever Trotski’s policy of ‘neither war nor peace’ should prove ineffective, would be the party’s sole alternative with ideological justification. This was the opinion of most leading Bolsheviks.
Already some of Lenin’s opponents could no longer assent to ‘revolutionary war’ as a practical option. Lenin himself, speaking at the Central Committee and at open public meetings in Petrograd, stressed his commitment to ‘European socialist Revolution’. He got his supporters in the Secretariat, Sverdlov and Stasova, to disseminate information on his behalf to the party in the provinces. As the arrangements were laid for the Seventh Party Congress, he reverted to his old method of providing mandates to activists known to be loyal to his policies. He also let it be known that, if the decision went against him, he would resign from the Central Committee and campaign throughout the party for the signature of a separate peace.
As he had predicted, the Central Powers grew impatient. On 10 February 1918, Trotski was given another ultimatum at Brest-Litovsk; he was told that an invasion would take place unless the Soviet authorities did as demanded by the governments in Berlin and Austria. The weakness of Trotski’s policy of ‘neither war nor peace’ was exposed. Trotski made the best of a bad job by announcing to the negotiators of both sides that Russia was simply withdrawing from the war. But by 16 February the patience of the Central Powers was exhausted. Unless peace was signed, they warned, their offensive on the eastern front would be resumed within two days. The Central Committee met on 17 February in Trotski’s presence; and Lenin issued a questionnaire to fellow members to discover what each of them would do in certain contingencies:2 he wanted to ensure that they, like he, felt personally responsible for whatever decision was taken. Decisiveness was his supreme quality and he aimed to make his colleagues understand that they should expect to live by the consequences of their recommendations. And yet he could not get his way in the Central Committee: a narrow majority yet again accepted Trotski’s policy of calling the bluff of the Central Powers.
Lenin was becoming frantic, and so were all his comrades: any option they chose would have repercussions on the eastern front and on the Great War as a whole. Political life was lived on a knife-edge. On 18 February, the day of the threatened invasion, the Central Committee met again. Lenin implored fellow members:
Yesterday there was an especially characteristic vote when everyone recognised the need for peace if a [revolutionary] movement in Germany weren’t to supervene and an offensive were to occur. Doubt exists whether the Germans want an offensive with a view to overthrowing the Soviet government. We stand before a situation where we must act!
But his plea was turned down. This time the German high command organised a vast advance along the Baltic littoral. By the afternoon its troops had travelled virtually unopposed through to Dvinsk. They were within four hundred miles of Petrograd. The Central Committee reconvened in haste and Lenin declaimed: ‘History will say that you gave away the Revolution.’
At last his argument hit home and by a slim margin of seven votes to five, he defeated Bukharin. Lenin gained the support of Trotski, who later said that he did not wish to opt for war unless he could do so with a united Bolshevik party. Even so, Trotski had hardly left the Central Committee before he set about enquiring whether the Soviet government might get emergency aid from the Allies if it refused to sign the peace treaty with Germany and Austria–Hungary. He won favour for this idea in the Central Committee on 22 February. Again the Central Powers were intransigent and demanded that Sovnarkom should disclaim sovereignty not only over Poland and the various Baltic provinces but also over Ukraine. This was the final ultimatum; failure to comply would result in a massive military invasion. On 23 February the weary members of the Bolshevik Central Committee hauled themselves along to hear Sverdlov’s report on the German ultimatum to the effect that Sovnarkom was given until seven o’clock next morning to confirm its acceptance of the Central Powers’ terms. This was the crucial meeting and Lenin spelled out its significance: ‘These terms must be signed. If you don’t sign them, you are signing the death warrant of Soviet power within three weeks.’3
Lenin kept nagging his antagonists. Among those who announced his continued opposition was Karl Radek. Lenin was furious and retorted that Radek was deluding himself:4
You’re worse than a hen. A hen can’t decide to cross the line of a circle drawn in chalk around it, but at least the hen can say in self-justification that someone else’s hand had drawn that circle. But you drew your formula around yourself with your own hand and now you’re gazing at the formula and not at reality.
Lenin’s imagery was always richer when he was trying to intimidate an opponent.
Still the dispute was not at an end. Lenin’s critics in his presence considered excluding him from Sovnarkom and starting a revolutionary war. Even Stalin wondered whether it was yet right to come to terms with the Central Powers. But most Central Committee members had no stomach for such a fight. And Lenin was like a rock and held firm while others in the room trembled. Yet again he indicated that, if his opponents won the day, he would resign from Sovnarkom – he would not need to be forced out – and resume his campaign for a separate peace treaty. And he got what he wanted; by a vote of seven to four with another four abstentions, the Bolshevik Centra
l Committee resolved that the treaty should be signed. This decision had been taken in the nick of time to forestall the German invasion. If Lenin had not won the debate, there is little doubt that the Central Powers would have concluded that the Bolsheviks were no longer of any use to them. The result would have been the occupation of the Russian heartland and the collapse of the October Revolution.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March. The Central Powers by and large stood by its contents and refrained from invading Russia once Sovnarkom had delivered up Poland, the Baltic provinces and Ukraine to their armies. Half of the industrial and agricultural resources of the Russian Empire were situated in this vast area as well as a third of the population. Furthermore, the German high command was enabled to transfer army divisions from the east to the west in order to attempt a final concentrated campaign against the French and the British forces. The decision taken in the Smolny Institute in the presence of fifteen Bolsheviks on 23 February had consequences that were quickly appreciated around the world.
In Russia the broader picture of international relations was ignored in the Bolshevik party press, and the party’s control over the press meant that the other parties knew little directly about what was happening elsewhere in Europe. But Lenin was sure that he had done the right thing. Immediately he set about persuading his party that it could exploit the ‘breathing space’ given by the peace Treaty. There was a tussle in the Bolshevik Central Committee about who should be deputed to go out to Brest-Litovsk to put his pen to the document. The obvious person would have been Lenin; but he arranged things so that his candidacy was not discussed. Members of the group who had carried out the negotiations refused to carry out the task, and it was obviously senseless to ask anyone who had supported Trotski or Bukharin. Grigori Sokolnikov therefore performed the unenviable role. This was not the last time that Lenin stayed aloof from decisions that might pollute his future reputation. No party in Russia, apart from the Bolsheviks, approved of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. If things did not work out, Lenin might pay dearly for his gamble in international relations. His instincts told him to minimise the personal damage.
Lenin: A Biography Page 45