Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  Yet the political struggle in Petrograd was not over. The Bolshevik Party Congress, too, had to be persuaded to sanction the turnabout; and it was not definitively clear that the Congress would agree. Worse still, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had no internal strife about ‘revolutionary war’: all of them were intensely opposed to Lenin’s policy. For this reason Lenin adopted a step-by-step approach. First he dealt with his own party’s Congress. Proceedings began on 6 March and were introduced by Lenin:5

  A country that is petit-bourgeois by nature, disorganised by war and dragged down by it to an unbelievable condition has been placed in extraordinarily heavy circumstances: we have no army and yet we have to live side by side with a robber who is armed to the teeth. He still remains and will remain a robber, whom it was impossible, of course, to get at through agitation about peace without annexations and indemnities. A peaceful domestic pet has been lying side by side with a tiger and trying to convince him of the need for peace without annexations and indemnities while such a peace was obtainable only by attacking the tiger.

  Lenin’s sarcasm contrasted with the performance of the other side led by Bukharin. On point after point Bukharin gave ground. He admitted that a revolutionary war was impossible and that he had no principled objection to a separate peace with the Central Powers.

  And so the clash between Lenin and the Bolshevik left was onesided. Lenin knew that he would triumph and was willing to let Bukharin’s supporters vilify him uncontested on the Congress floor. He could remain calm while Zinoviev and Trotski had a tiff about the usefulness of the previous policy of ‘neither war nor peace’. Indeed he proceeded to a debate with Bukharin on the contents of the Party Programme, and politely entreated his opponent not to carry out his threat to refuse to serve in the next Bolshevik Central Committee. In short, he could show magnanimity in victory.

  Lenin had succeeded through his skills and determination. He was also helped by the fact that the internal party opposition lacked both tactical confidence and cunning. The Bolshevik left – or the Left Communists as they called themselves – did not really believe that a ‘revolutionary war’ would be feasible. Wherever they tried to rally mass support among workers likely to be conscripted in the event of such a war, they encountered hostility, and they were aware that the peasants who had filled the ranks of the Imperial Army had already voted with their feet on the question of war or peace: most of them either had deserted or had been demobilised. Yet they did not consciously recognise this, and they went on grumbling about the separate peace. Initially they withdrew from the Bolshevik Central Committee and Sovnarkom. So, too, did the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin railed against what he saw as their political puerility; but he tried to be diplomatic. He needed all the People’s Commissars he could get his hands on, and they for their part were prevailed upon to give support to the revolution of the workers and peasants. One by one they returned to their posts on an unofficial basis.

  The danger from the German forces had not been expunged. Having signed the Treaty, Sovnarkom could not be confident that the Germans would not keep moving on Petrograd. Lenin and his fellow People’s Commissars reluctantly accepted the need for them to shift the seat of government to Moscow. The decision had a practical motive. The Central Powers were conquering areas virtually unopposed; and although it had been Sovnarkom’s intention since the previous month to form a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, the units were small in number and primitive in training: they were plainly no match for the troops of Germany and Austria–Hungary. And so on 10 March the government’s main personnel embarked on the night train from Petrograd to Moscow.

  Initially most of the personnel were lodged in the Hotel National on Okhotny Ryad three hundred yards from the northern wall of the Kremlin. Lenin shared a makeshift apartment with his wife Nadezhda and his sister Maria. There were just two rooms together with a bathroom, and the hotel staff cleaned his shoes and generally looked after all of them.6 In later years there was a suggestion that he did not avail himself of the services of the staff; but Nadezhda Konstantinovna remonstrated against such saccharine idealisations: she liked to idealise him, but not in regard to his personal habits.7 Outside the Hotel National there was always noise. Okhotny Ryad was full of market stall-keepers throughout daytime hours. Students and other revolutionary enthusiasts were constantly arguing, canvassing and pasting up posters. The Bolshevik party leadership positioned loyal military units throughout the area. The Latvian Riflemen were especially welcome to Sovnarkom. But Lenin was a person who liked his settled routines. Ignoring the noise, he rose from his bed in mid-morning as he had always done in London, Zurich and Paris. He was going to make Revolution on his personal terms.8

  It is true that Lenin saw people of all sorts every time he left the Hotel National, and increasingly received visitors from the provinces. Thus he was never without information about the condition of ordinary people in Soviet Russia. But he did not live the lives of those people. Eating and sleeping in the Hotel National and working in the Kremlin, he always had a refuge from the harsh realities of misrule, hunger and war; and when people talked about such things, he pressed their information through the filter of his own ideas and only altered policies when the very existence of the Soviet regime was menaced.

  The stay in the sumptuous Hotel National was meant to last only until such time as the Kremlin had been got ready for Sovnarkom. It was not a task that Lenin relished. He had never liked Moscow because it was so much less Westernised than Petrograd. Physically and culturally Moscow embodied traditional Russian values. For Lenin, this was no recommendation at all. He wanted a Russia that abandoned all tsarist nostalgia, Orthodox Christianity and peasant aspirations. He had never retracted his remark of 1898 that Moscow was ‘a foul city’.9

  Indeed Moscow was more like a great conglomeration of villages than a metropolis. Foreigners – and Lenin was a bit like a foreigner himself – noted that lots of inhabitants still wore traditional peasant smocks and shoes made out of straw rather than leather. Few streets had pavements. The thoroughfares were extremely muddy in spring 1918, shortly after Sovnarkom arrived. In contrast with Petrograd’s rectilinear design, Moscow stretched out in a higgledy-piggledy sprawl, and Muscovites were proud of the difference. Each resident social stratum, from industrialists and bankers down to street-hawkers, felt that the unplanned, exuberant diversity of Moscow, which had been the capital of the country until Peter the Great started to build St Petersburg at the beginning of the eighteenth century, expressed something essential about Russia. Moscow’s factory owners were the foremost advocates of Russian nationalism. They had built magnificently in the past twenty years in a style that mixed traditionalism and explorative modernity. They had textile factories aplenty. They had strong connections with the countryside, and some of them were Old Believers. They thought that Petrograd’s elites had betrayed the national interest to foreign capitalist powers, and they judged Moscow to be the genuine capital of Mother Russia.

  Perhaps it served Lenin right, then, that he encountered a number of practical problems in the Kremlin. When trying to enter by the Trinity Gate with Bonch-Bruevich a day after the train trip from Petrograd, he was refused admission by a guard who did not recognise him. The guard was a Bolshevik supporter, but took some minutes before convincing himself of Lenin’s identity and allowing him admittance.

  Once inside the walls of the Kremlin, even Lenin was struck by the magnificence of the buildings. The inner precinct left a lasting impression. The Kremlin is a great triangular fortress in the city’s centre, standing 130 feet above the river Moskva. The walled perimeter is a mile and a quarter long and inside it there is a dazzling collection of ancient buildings. Chief among them was the Great Kremlin Palace. Next to the Palace was the Uspenski Cathedral; it was there that the tsars had been crowned until Peter the Great’s construction of St Petersburg. There was the Senate built by Catherine the Great. There were bells, bell-towers, golden cupolas, gigantic cannons, b
arracks, an armoury and spacious squares. On each tower there was a two-headed eagle, symbol of the glory and power of tsarism. From the top of the highest bell-tower it was possible to see across to a horizon twenty miles away. Everywhere he looked, Lenin saw the physical embodiment of a history that he had come to power in order to eliminate.

  But the Kremlin was in a mess. The neglect had set in with the monarchy’s downfall in February 1917 and fighting had occurred between Red Guards and monarchist officers at the end of the year. A dispiriting scene confronted Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich. The Senate Building, where it was proposed to base Sovnarkom and to assign Lenin an apartment, remained a shambles. The horse manure lay uncollected. There was hay, filthy bandages, broken paving and – when the spring came – the mud, mud, mud. Temporarily Lenin, Trotski and other Bolshevik leaders were put up in the Cavalry Corpus of the Great Kremlin Palace. Some of Nicholas II’s servants had remained at their posts. One elderly waiter, a certain Stupishin, was a stickler for traditional propriety. When Lenin and Trotski dined together in the evenings, Stupishin served their suppers on Imperial crockery. Stupishin would not allow them to start eating until he had ensured that the double-headed eagle symbol on the plates faced each person at the table. Lenin endured the fuss with amusement. In truth, not all the meals were fit for a tsar. Sometimes the diners had only buckwheat porridge and thin vegetable soup.

  Yet Lenin did not obtain permanent accommodation for Sovnarkom and for himself and his family until the end of the month, and then only after demanding to know the names of those ‘guilty’ for the delay.10 Bonch-Bruevich had put aside a comfortable apartment for Lenin, Nadya and Maria Ilinichna on the first floor of the old Senate Building. There were three main rooms and a hallway, a kitchen, bathroom and a maid’s room. Next door were the administrative bureaux of Sovnarkom, and from Lenin’s office a door led directly to the hall in which the meetings of Sovnarkom were held.

  The Senate Building apartment became his home. He had wandered around for so much of his life that it is doubtful whether he was capable of feeling at home anywhere by 1918. The fact that he lived in his place of work can hardly have produced an atmosphere of homeliness. Both Nadya and Maria, furthermore, were nearly as busy as he was with political affairs. All three of them lived on the run, grabbing food and sleep as and where they could. They could not care less about money and Lenin formally reprimanded Bonch-Bruevich for raising his salary as Sovnarkom Chairman without his sanction.11 What he wanted was a clean and quiet flat and an office well stocked with books. One of his first actions on occupying the premises was to demand a set of Vladimir Dal’s Russian dictionary and a map of the former Russian Empire. He put up a portrait of Karl Marx on the wall, and later added a bulky picture of the populist terrorist Stepan Khalturin. His daily needs no longer detained either his wife or his sister. A maid had been hired, and the chauffeuring was done by Stepan Gil. Meals were cooked for the inhabitants. Lenin and Nadya acquired a cat. They adored the animal, and Lenin was often seen carrying it along the corridor to the Sovnarkom meeting room. The cat knew how to look after itself. In the meeting room, it would snuggle down in Lenin’s armchair in the knowledge that no one would dare to disturb it. Nadya and the maid fed the cat, and, whenever the maid had a day off, Nadya asked a Sovnarkom secretary to take over the duty. She did not trust Lenin to lay out the food as was necessary.

  In fact Lenin was dependable in his care of their cat even if he was not always punctual in putting a plate in front of it.12 Most of the time both he and Nadya were preoccupied by their political tasks. The apartment was a place where they slept and ate. From the Kremlin, Lenin could order books from any library in Russia. He was able to phone any political functionary in the capital or the provinces, and meet the visitors who thronged to the Kremlin to meet him. He could buttonhole People’s Commissars as they emerged from their own apartments into the precinct and most of his main Bolshevik comrades – Trotski, Sverdlov, Kamenev and Stalin – were within easy reach together with their families. And he was able to organise receptions for party officials or for groups of peasants petitioning him on some matter.

  From the great walled precinct Lenin set out on trips to meetings at factory gates elsewhere in the city. He also visited Nadezhda Konstantinovna when she convalesced in the Sokolniki district on the northeastern outskirts. But, except when he himself spent periods of recuperation at the village of Gorki twenty miles from Moscow, he stayed in the central parts of the new capital. He had every opportunity to go to other towns and cities, but his only brief forays were to Petrograd in 1919 and 1920. Not even his frequently expressed nostalgia for the Volga region drew him back there. His place remained at the centre of revolutionary politics.

  While he demanded orderliness as Sovnarkom sought to consolidate the regime and its policies, his comrades exasperated him. Late at night he would switch off his office light in the full knowledge that his economical attitude to electricity was not a defining characteristic of other Bolsheviks. Sovnarkom’s Chairman paced down the corridors switching off the lights left on by his comrades.13 None of them would ever be quite like him. No doubt they left their pencils unsharpened, their buttons unsewn, their books unreturned to libraries. How could you make the Revolution with such people? But, whatever the irritation he experienced, he got over it. He was cheered by the thought that the October 1917 Revolution had already lasted longer than the eleven weeks of the 1871 Paris Commune. This was the nearest he came to overt sentimentality unless we take into account his enthusiasm for the working class. Nadezhda Konstantinovna was uncomfortable about this. As they rode by car through Moscow, she noted the rising amount of vandalism: windows smashed, wooden walls and roofs broken up and stolen. To her it was obvious that delinquent workers should be punished for such behaviour; and she told her husband severely that he should smarten up his thinking. There could be no socialism while such behaviour remained condoned by default.

  This marital dissension, which was kept from view by the Soviet censorship authorities, failed to induce Lenin to change his stance. It never did. He had fixed his mind on a strategic orientation that included the need for the working class to establish its dictatorship. He painted with a broad brush. He wanted to encourage revolutionary initiative and toss aside any considerations of ‘bourgeois morality’ for some years ahead. Yet there was much that had changed in his thought since the October Revolution. At every point of tension between elitist authoritarianism and mass self-liberation, Lenin’s priority was to secure his regime’s position – and this usually meant an increase in authoritarianism.

  Indeed his measures began to cause consternation among the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Initially the Sovnarkom coalition partners had got on reasonably well. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were already delighted with Lenin’s Decree on Land, were equally pleased in February 1918 when he signed the Basic Law on the Socialisation of the Land which – with the vigorous support of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries – ratified the transfer of agricultural land to the peasants. But he also wanted local soviets to get the necessary food supplies into the towns. He repeatedly asserted that there was an abundance of grain in the countryside and that the greed of the better-off peasants, or kulaks as he called them, was responsible for the low rations provided by central and local government. There was no time for shilly-shallying. Even before the Brest-Litovsk Treaty Lenin had believed that ruthless measures ought to be taken. He was committed to the maintenance of the state monopoly of the grain trade and in the longer term he wanted to take land ownership away from private persons, including peasants, and to give it to the state. All this complicated the already difficult relations with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who had joined the Sovnarkom on the specific premise that they would be able to look after the interests of the peasantry.

  Lenin’s way of consolidating the regime, however, was no longer subject to compromise. Already on 14 January 1918 he had drafted a Sovnarkom decree that minced no words:14
>
  [Sovnarkom] proposes to the All-Russia Food Supplies Committee and the Commissariat of Food Supplies to intensify the dispatch not only of commissars but also of numerically strong, armed detachments for the most revolutionary measures for the movement of loads, the collection and distribution of grain, etc., and also for a merciless struggle with speculators right through to the proposal for local soviets to shoot discovered speculators and saboteurs on the spot.

  His bleak inclinations of the past few weeks were taking shape as policy. Although it was not yet an open theme in his speeches, the movement towards ever greater severity was unmistakable.

  Sovnarkom had no compunction in spring 1918 about suppressing the many soviets in the provinces that elected Menshevik majorities. The Cheka and the new Red Army contingents were deployed to prevent effective resistance. The regime no longer limited itself to hunting down its declared enemies: the Kadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries; it was starting also to persecute those groups in society on whose support it had relied in order to come to power. Lenin had assumed that, once the working class had begun to favour the Bolsheviks, it would never return to the enemies of Bolshevism. But his faith in ‘the proletariat’ had always been conditional even in 1917; and in 1902 his booklet What Is to Be Done? had asserted the total inadequacy of the workers to adopt revolutionary policies unless firmly and correctly guided by the Marxist intelligentsia. At best he had been an ideological paternalist. Now he felt uninhibited about overturning the civic rights of the working class: the supremacy of the regime was not permitted to be challenged. Even at the work-place there should be no concession to indiscipline, and Lenin indicated that he wanted to introduce the time-and-motion principles of the same American theorist, F. W. Taylor, whom he had once excoriated as an advocate of capitalist interests.