Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  In May 1918 he went on applying his general policies to the shattered economy. Chief among these was the imposition of what he called a Food Dictatorship, which rationalised the various local measures already being taken to procure food supplies for the towns. At Sovnarkom sessions he pressed his plans with urgency. When the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the National Economy seemed to hinder a coordinated approach by the Soviet state to industry and agriculture, Lenin was furious with Presidium leader V. P. Milyutin. Going home in a condition of shock, Milyutin confided to his diary:3

  Sovnarkom issued a reprimand to the Presidium. Ilich even declared that ‘it would be worth putting the Presidium in prison on bread and water for a week, but because of our weakness let’s limit ourselves to a reprimand…’; and that while it was possible to put us on to water and even to plunge us into water, it was sheer utopia to put us on bread and that even the People’s Commissariat of Food Supplies wouldn’t permit such a luxury.

  The fact that Milyutin was one of the few leading Bolsheviks who had supported Lenin in the Brest-Litovsk dispute gained him no relief. Lenin was on the rampage.

  Lenin’s economic priority was the collection of grain from the countryside. Civil war was the last thing on his mind. He told Trotski, who was assembling a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army in his new role as People’s Commissar of Military Affairs, to devote nine-tenths of the Army’s efforts to the procurement of food supplies. He told Sovnarkom that the secreting of grain should become the most heinous crime. He urged that hoarders be treated as ‘enemies of the people’ and that the state should ‘wage and carry through a merciless and terrorist defence and war against the peasant bourgeoisie and any other bourgeoisie holding on to grain surpluses’.4 The clumsy phrasing gives a sense of the forceful emotions powering Lenin. Sovnarkom preferred a more temperate formulation, but on the substance of policy he easily got his way: most Bolshevik leaders were itching to augment state control. As the Food Dictatorship was inaugurated, Lenin secured the establishment of a new institution: committees of village poor (kombedy). When the government’s commissars reached the countryside, they were empowered to liaise with these committees so as to discover the identities of the better-off peasants engaged in the hoarding of grain. Any hoarded grain was to be weighed out on the spot and a portion was to be distributed to the village’s poorer members before the remainder was taken on to the towns.

  Lenin had much greater difficulty with a further economic priority. By summer 1918 it was obvious that his proposal for collaboration with Russian industrialists such as Meshcherski would not work. Instead, to his colleagues’ amazement, he urged the conclusion of commercial deals with German businessmen. This second proposal was so contentious in later years that it was kept secret in the Sovnarkom archives. And it is easy to understand why. The Bolsheviks were critics of other socialists who failed to struggle for the overthrow of the ‘European bourgeoisie’. Lenin had spent the Great War denouncing Kautsky for avoiding a confrontation with Germany’s Imperial government and the magnates of German financial and industrial might. Now he wanted to deal commercially with those same magnates.

  But then again Lenin had made the October Revolution on the premise that Russia would make its ‘transition to socialism’ with help from capitalists. He had hoped to get this from Russian capitalists. If this proved impracticable, why not try to appeal to German capitalists? Ever the tactician, Lenin could not see why his party was not capable of being as flexible as himself.

  Yet his desire to make overtures to the capitalists of Germany did not signify a permanent accommodation to ‘German imperialism’. Lenin was still Lenin. He wished to exploit capitalist Germany while he could; but he still expected that such a Germany would not long endure. ‘European socialist Revolution’ remained high on his agenda. He had no doubt that far-left socialists abroad would triumph sooner or later. Justifying the Brest-Litovsk Treaty to the Fourth Congress of Soviets in March 1918 he had asserted: ‘We know that [Karl] Liebknecht will be victorious one way or another: this is inevitable in the workers’ movement.’ Lenin acknowledged that the Treaty gave no absolute guarantee of a ‘breathing space’ in Russia until such time as Liebknecht got going:5

  Yes, the peace we have come to is unstable in the highest degree and the breathing space we’ve received can be broken any day from both east and west: there’s no doubt about it; our international situation is so critical that we must strain every nerve to survive as long as possible until the Western revolution matures, a revolution that is maturing much more slowly than we expected and wanted; it is feeding and covering ever more and more combustible material.

  There were terrible moments for him. The worst was the declaration by Central Committee member Sokolnikov, the very man who signed the Treaty at Brest-Litovsk, that the Germans were no longer to be trusted and that the Treaty had been a mistake. He attacked the Treaty at the Central Committee on 10 May, and it was only Lenin’s fierce counter-offensive that saved Russia from going to war again.

  Worse was to follow. At the end of the month there was one of those small military incidents that were occurring all over Russia: a group of soldiers rebelled against Soviet authority. But this incident was not easily dealt with. It involved Czech former prisoners-of-war captured by the Russian Imperial Army who, under an agreement with the Allies, were travelling across Siberia to North America so that they could fight on the western front against the Central Powers. The mutual distrust of the Soviet authorities and this Czech Legion was profound; and when Trotski tried to have them disarmed, a confrontation took place in May. The 35,000 Czechs, stronger than any military force that Sovnarkom could put against them, turned their trains back towards central Russia and indicated their readiness to fight on behalf of Komuch in Samara for the overthrow of Lenin and his fellow People’s Commissars.

  Responsibility for dealing with the crisis was left to Trotski: even at this point Lenin did not sense the vital threat posed by the Czech Legion. He was preoccupied with the Fifth Congress of Soviets, which was scheduled to meet within the next few weeks. The two former partners in the Sovnarkom coalition, the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, eyed each other nervously throughout June 1918. The Congress opened on 4 July and such was the tension that each party placed a guard over its delegations. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were the first to act. On 6 July, while the Congress was debating, one of their leaders Yakov Blyumkin mounted an operation designed to blast the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk into oblivion. Blyumkin worked for the Cheka and had obtained a pass to visit the German embassy in Moscow. Once inside the building, he asked for a meeting with Ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach, in the course of which he pulled out a revolver and shot him before dashing outside. Mirbach was mortally wounded, and it was Blyumkin’s hope to provoke a diplomatic incident that would end with the Bolsheviks starting a revolutionary war with Imperial Germany.

  The news was relayed to Lenin and Dzierżyński. Lenin perceived what Blyumkin had been calculating and sought to forestall a German invasion by suppressing the entire Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party. He also paid a visit to the German embassy to express condolence on behalf of Sovnarkom. The government in Berlin had to be reassured that the Soviet authorities desired to maintain friendly relations. Dzierżyński was instructed to take reliable Cheka units to the Left Socialist-Revolutionary headquarters on Trëkhsvyatitelski Lane and arrest the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee.

  The operation was carried with Bolshevik military ineptitude. Arriving at the Left Socialist-Revolutionary headquarters, Dzierżyński was himself taken into custody. Lenin was at his wits’ end. If he could not rely on Dzierżyński, who could he turn to? (One answer might have been Trotski. But he was busy with the Czech Legion, and anyway he did not inspire total confidence at this stage.) The only thing for it was to assume personal control. Now he had two major tasks: the arrest of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee and the liberation of Dzierżyński
. For this he would still need a further agency of enforcement. His only option was to approach the leader of the Latvian Riflemen, General I. I. Vacietis, to head the attack. Lenin told him that Sovnarkom might not survive till morning. He may have been exaggerating in order to raise Vacietis’s feeling of pride. More probably, he had an acute sense of the danger to the regime in the capital. If a poorly organised group had been able to seize power in October 1917, another such group might repeat the feat. To Lenin’s relief, Vacietis agreed to the assignment.

  Things began to improve. The visit to the German embassy went as well as could be expected, and Vacietis’s troops did their violent job with efficiency. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary headquarters was captured on 7 July. Their leaders were arrested and Dzierżyński was found unharmed. Lenin and Dzierżyński decided that, although proof was not available of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee’s complicity in the assassination, a member of their Central Committee should be executed. Thus the Germans would be shown that the Bolsheviks meant business in protecting the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Bolsheviks were not discomfited by the thought of killing other socialists. On 9 July 1918, Dzierżyński in person undertook the task and shot Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee member V. A. Alexandrovich.

  The Cheka’s inefficiency during the Mirbach crisis continued to rankle with Lenin. He was also intrigued by how the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had organised their armed action against the Bolsheviks, and on 7 July he decided on the spur of the moment to pay a visit to their former headquarters in Trëkhsvyatitelski Lane. Stepan Gil as usual was the chauffeur. As they made their way, a group of armed men sprang on to the road and shouted at them to stop. Lenin instructed Gil to comply, but the armed men started to fire at them before they stopped. Luckily the men turned out to be Bolshevik supporters, and Lenin let them off with a rather schoolmasterly admonishment: ‘Comrades, you mustn’t casually fire at people from behind corners without seeing who you’re firing at!’6 This was the least he might have said in the circumstances. But the travails of that day were not yet over. Lenin’s car was stopped again after the visit to Trëkhsvyatitelski Lane. A semiofficial patrol of youths demanded to see his identity papers and decided that the document indicating that he was Sovnarkom Chairman was invalid. He was arrested and taken to the nearest police station. At least on this occasion he was not threatened with gunfire, and the police officer and he felt able to laugh about the incident.7

  Even then his day’s tutorial in life’s dangers in the Soviet republic had not been brought to a close. Shots were fired at their car on the journey back from the police station.8 The shots missed. Gil put his foot down hard on the accelerator and the two men arrived more exhausted than infuriated at the Kremlin. Their little trip around Moscow had several times brought them close to death.

  Lenin had not obtained much additional knowledge about the affair. Nor did he have an opportunity to acquire it in subsequent weeks. A still more serious military emergency was taking place in the Volga region. Komuch, having acquired a military force in the form of the Czech Legion, was ready to mount an offensive into the central region of Russia. From Samara they marched unopposed on Kazan before any defence could be assembled. Trotski as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs rushed to the Volga and, to general astonishment, the new Red Army succeeded in holding off the Komuch troops at the battle of Sviyazhk. As the Bolsheviks consolidated themselves in south-eastern Russia, there were growing problems in the north. The British had landed troops at Archangel and Lenin was concerned lest this be followed by a march on Petrograd. Recognising Sovnarkom’s military weakness, he secretly appealed to Germany for assistance. It was a highly sensitive option since Lenin could not be sure that the German forces themselves would not occupy Petrograd en route to Archangel. In fact the crisis faded and military collaboration between Sovnarkom and Ludendorff was not needed. But it had been a close-run thing. ‘Soviet power’ and the Bolshevik one-party state were under constant threat of collapse.9

  All the while Lenin was in a rage. Nothing could quite satiate his appetite for revenge against those elements from Imperial Russian society that he despised. Some he simply hated. He had a personal score to settle with the descendants of Alexander III, the emperor who had refused to spare the life of his elder brother Alexander. Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their family had been held since 30 April in the Ipatev House in Yekaterinburg. There was a constant possibility that anti-Bolshevik forces might break through to the Urals and rescue the Imperial family. For months the Bolshevik Central Committee had secretly pondered what to do with Nicholas II.

  A line of communication was in place for the Bolshevik regional leadership in the Urals to give information and receive orders. Nicholas II, at the time of his abdication in the previous year, had been the object of nearly universal contempt. Sympathy began to grow for him when he became simply citizen Nikolai Romanov. But Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee were implacable. The Romanovs had at the very least to be neutralised as a force in public life, and Trotski recommended that Nicholas should be brought back to Moscow and put on trial for the abuses committed by him and in his name before 1917. For a while Lenin demurred. Probably he did not like to associate himself directly with the judicial killing of Sovnarkom’s enemies. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee member V. A. Alexandrovich had been executed in secret and Lenin kept his distance from the event. But as the military encirclement of the Soviet-held territory continued, he hearkened to the argument for drastic steps to be taken. Nothing was more drastic than the event in the early hours of 18 July 1918. The former Emperor and his family were woken from their beds, taken down to the Ipatev House cellar, lined up against the wall and shot.

  It was among the most gruesome massacres of the Revolution. The victims included not only Nicholas and his wife but also their four daughters and their haemophiliac son together with several servants. In captivity, Nicholas had spent his time reading the Old Testament and Russian nineteenth-century classic novels. He and his family diverted themselves by putting on playlets for each other. Nicholas acted nobly as the paterfamilias and Alexandra proved herself an able manager of the family’s very restricted domestic budget. The Bolshevik leaders hardly appear in the last records they left behind. Alexandra’s diary in 1918 mentions Lenin only once. The Imperial couple’s main worry was that Nicholas should be put under duress to co-sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. How little they knew their Lenin. Neither Lenin nor any other Bolshevik leader would have dreamed of using the Romanovs in order to lend legitimacy to the Soviet regime. But about one thing they were absolutely right: that Lenin had the power of life or death over them. Empress Alexandra wrote on 4 June 1918: ‘I had a bath at 10. Lenin gave the order that the clocks have to be put 2 hours ahead (economy of electricity) so that at 10 they told us it was 12. At 10 strong thunderstorm.’10 Like most Russians, the Romanovs were disoriented by the changes made by the Bolsheviks. They were devout, perplexed and very middle-class in their habits. For them, Lenin was the Antichrist.

  He exterminated the Romanovs because they had misruled Russia. But he also turned to such measures because he enjoyed – really enjoyed – letting himself loose against people in general from the ancien régime. He hated not only the Imperial family but also the middling people who had administered and controlled Russia before 1917. He had never forgotten the ostracism undergone by the Ulyanovs after the conviction of Alexander Ilich. Landlords, priests, teachers, engineers and civil servants had treated them as pariahs. Why should he protect them now?

  There was a contradiction here. In The State and Revolution, at the height of his optimism about the working class, Lenin had argued that middle-class ‘specialists’ in the various professions would need to be kept in employment until such time as ordinary workers could be trained to take their place. But by mid-1918 he was fomenting the maltreatment of‘the bourgeoisie’; and, if he had given even the slightest attention to what this meant i
n practice, he would have known that this would have grievous consequences for those much needed ‘specialists’. And yet this does not mean that he definitely and positively wanted scientists, teachers, accountants and writers to suffer. It is more likely that he allowed his angry zeal for class struggle, including terror, to dominate everything in his thought. Politics had become viciously violent. Bolsheviks were not only purveyors of terrorism: they also were the targets of terrorist actions. Lenin indeed had nearly been assassinated in January 1918, and a leading member of the Party City Committee in Petrograd, V. Volodarski, was killed in June. The violence in Russia was largely the product of the October Revolution, and was to a considerable extent the fault of Lenin. But once the cycle of violence had started rolling he was no longer the only person responsible for applying it. He was transfixed by his concern to terrorise every conceivable opponent of Sovnarkom.

  The old problems with his health – headaches and insomnia – agitated him throughout spring and summer. From April to August his distraction was such that he published no lengthy piece on Marxist theory or Bolshevik party strategy. This was hardly odd behaviour in the case of most politicians. But it was highly uncharacteristic of Lenin. Nadezhda Konstantinovna noticed that his illness was stopping him from writing.11 His inability to sleep at nights must have left him in an acutely agitated condition; he never had the chance of calm consideration of public policy. Everything was done in panic. Everything was done angrily.