Lenin’s choleric intensity is obvious from a letter he sent to the Bolsheviks of Penza on 11 August 1918:12
Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because ‘the last decisive battle’ with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated.
1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.
2. Publish their names.
3. Seize all their grain from them.
4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday’s telegram. Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucking kulaks.
Telegraph receipt and implementation.
Yours, Lenin.
Find some truly hard people.
These words were so shocking in tone and content that they were kept secret during the Soviet period. The lax definition of victims – ‘kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers’ – was a virtual guarantee that abuse would occur. The entire message invited such abuse. Persons were to be judicially murdered simply for belonging to a social category.
Indeed Lenin was treating whole areas of Penza province as ‘kulak districts’. By his extravagant language he increased the hazard of armed units marching into villages and treating everyone as kulaks. He wanted to intimidate the whole rural population, not just the rich minority – and he was reckless of the negative impact this might have on his own policy of creating ‘committees of the village poor’. It is the vicious relish in exemplary terror that is so disgusting. Not even just a firing squad and a quick death. No, Lenin demanded a public hanging. Knowing that not all Bolsheviks would have the stomach for this, he told the Penza comrades to go out and find some sufficiently hard types to carry out the measures. This kind of message was not the exception but the rule. Throughout summer 1918 and the rest of the Civil War, Lenin ranted in the same manner. He urged that the city of Baku should be razed to the ground in the event of its being attacked and that public announcement of this should be posted around Baku so that collaborators might be discouraged.13 He reverted the practices of twentieth-century European war to the Middle Ages. No moral threshold was sacred.
And whenever he heard about Komuch and the Volga region his rage was awesome. Was this a geographical coincidence? Possibly Lenin in some subconscious fashion was taking revenge on the Volga region for the ostracism of the Ulyanovs after his brother’s arrest. What is clear is that he was taking a very detached approach to his regime’s murderous imposition. His first cousin Vladimir Ardashev, with whom he had spent summers on the family estate of Kokushkino, had worked as a lawyer. Lenin as a youth had spent much time with the Ardashevs and there had been visits to him abroad by members of the Ardashev family. In summer 1918 the news came through to Lenin in Moscow: Vladimir Ardashev, an innocent professional person, had been shot by Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg as belonging to the undesirable category of the ‘bourgeoisie’.
But Lenin was barely disconcerted. Cousin Ardashev had been caught on the wrong side of the growing Civil War. He had been inactive in politics, and he had done nothing to deserve his execution; he was a decent human being, but the logic of events forced a choice upon all Russians: for or against the ‘proletarian dictatorship’. Family ties were subordinate to politics. It never occurred to Lenin to ask what kind of Revolution was worth while that condoned the physical elimination of well-meaning, competent and honest people like his cousin. Lenin kept himself out of range of the Revolution’s carnage. This was the behaviour of a bookish fanatic who felt no need to witness the violent actuality of his Revolution. He knew what he wanted in abstract political terms, and treated the death of innocent individuals as part of the unavoidable messiness of historical progress. And so he did not mind having blood on his hands. When he made those disgusting demands for mass terror along the river Volga, many of the victims would inevitably include people such as his deceased cousin. But this did not bother Lenin.
Meanwhile the emergencies of the Moscow summer had not come to an end. Lenin had been caught unawares by the Mirbach assassination on 6 July and been shocked by the Left Socialist-Revolutionary rising. He had been put in danger when he travelled around the capital with Stepan Gil on 7 July. Even worse was to befall Lenin in the following month.
It happened on 30 August 1918. Lenin’s sister Maria Ilinichna pleaded with him not to leave the Kremlin that day. There had already been reports of the assassination of the Petrograd Cheka chief. But neither Maria Ilinichna nor Bukharin could adduce anything concrete to put him off his programme.14 Lenin laughed and announced he would go ahead with things as he had agreed several days ago. This was set to include two short open-air speeches. The first was to be at the Corn Exchange two miles to the east of the Kremlin, in Basmanny district, before he swept down to the south. Lenin was on good form; he did not take his bodyguard, but set off alone with his chauffeur Stepan Gil.15 He was acting true to the party’s ethos. The Bolsheviks as a party downplayed the political importance of individuals and discouraged leaders from acting as if they were indispensable. Lenin’s foolhardiness at least disproves the allegation that he was a physical coward. There had been a suspicion of this in July 1917 when he had fled Petrograd rather than defend himself before the law against charges of being a German agent. But his activity in 1918 had been very different. Daily he was taking his chances along with fellow Bolshevik leaders in open public view in Moscow.
At the Corn Exchange he roused the audience: ‘Let every worker and peasant who is still wavering on the question of power just take a look at the Volga, Siberia and Ukraine, and the reply will come back on its own, clear and definite!’16 He gave another such speech at the Mikhelson Factory. He told his second audience that ‘democracy’ was an abused term in contemporary political parlance. Like a religious zealot trying to cleanse the lexicon of faith, Lenin declared: ‘The place where the “democrats” rule is where you’ll find genuine, unvarnished robbery!’ All agreed that Sovnarkom’s Chairman had been on good form.
As he made his way back to the car by the Mikhelson Factory yard, Lenin was approached by a couple of women complaining about the official barrier detachments that prevented peasants from coming into Moscow to trade their grain. He agreed with them that the detachments were not operating as they should.17 Gil revved up the engine in anticipation of the trip back to the Kremlin. Lenin had reached just three paces from the car when several shots were fired. The target was Lenin; and on this occasion the assassins were more accurate than their predecessors in January 1918. Lenin was hit twice and was bleeding profusely. Uproar ensued in the yard and the Bolshevik party activists tried to surround their leader and grab the suspects. The priority, however, was to bundle Lenin into the car. When Lenin began questioning him about what was happening, Gil told him abruptly to keep quiet. Gil took control. He decided not to drive to a hospital in case a further group of killers lay in wait but to make straight for the Kremlin. Medically this could have been disastrous since at this stage no one knew the nature of Lenin’s wounds. But, in the light of the summer’s events in Moscow, Gil was correct that the Kremlin was the only safe refuge.18
On arrival at the Kremlin, Lenin himself acted with complete disregard for common sense. He had been hit twice. One bullet had pierced his left shoulder-blade and gone through to near the collar-bone on his right side. The other was lodged on the left at the base of his neck. Although the blood was pouring from him, he rejected Gil’s offer to carry him upstairs to his apartment. (It would have been sounder to avoid any movement whatsoever.) Lenin stumbled upstairs. He lurched into his bedroom and slumped on to a chair. Maria Ilinichna got up to see what was happening, and was horrified. There was no surgeon on duty. The Kremlin precinct was restricted to Bolshevik leaders, their families, servants and security personnel.
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br /> And so an urgent word was put out for Bolsheviks in the Kremlin who had some medical training. Two were found: these were Vera Velichkina (wife of Lenin’s personal assistant Bonch-Bruevich) and Vera Krestinskaya (wife of Bolshevik Central Committee member Nikolai Krestinski). Maria looked around for some food for Lenin while Bonch-Bruevich and Krestinskaya examined him. There was in fact no food in the apartment. So much for Maria’s greater skill at housekeeping! Then Nadezhda Konstantinovna, arriving back from a meeting at Moscow University, was told by Alexei Rykov what had happened.19 Her first thought was that he might be about to die. It had already been discovered that he had a punctured lung. What else might be found out? Nobody said much to reassure her. The Latvian maid was so terrified that she locked herself away. Panic was growing. Meanwhile Maria Ilinichna wanted to send someone out to the nearest grocer’s shop for a lemon. But she stopped herself when the thought occurred to her that the grocer, too, might be a collaborator of the assassins and might be plotting to purvey poison to the Kremlin. Lenin’s four female carers – Maria, Nadya and the two Veras – limited themselves to sending out to the nearest pharmacy for medicine.20 Why chemists should have been politically more reliable than grocers was not considered.
Things calmed down as prominent hospital surgeons were summoned to attend, and Professors Vladimir Rozanov and V. M. Mints arrived in the early hours of 31 August.21 A pot was already on the boil in the next room for the sterilising of the bandages. Rozanov and Mints disrobed the patient and staunched his wounds. Lenin’s arm was raised on a hoist.22 At last Lenin recognised the seriousness of his injury: ‘Is the end near? If it’s near, tell me straight so that I don’t leave matters pending.’23 The doctors reassured him that his condition would soon be stabilised.
By 1 September he was fit enough to be X-rayed.24 Lenin told his doctors that he felt no great discomfort from the puncture wounds and it was thought best to leave the bullets alone.25 Rozanov and Mints wanted to prevent their patient from exerting himself too quickly. The arm-hoist was invaluable for this purpose. Lenin was immobilised for as long as it was in place. He was also persuaded to take a lengthy period of convalescence outside Moscow: anything was better than the hoist in the Kremlin. By chance a large mansion house had come into the hands of the government in the previous week. It lay outside the village of Gorki, twenty-two miles to the capital’s south.26 It could be reached by road or by train to the little rail-stop of Gerasimovka. The house already had electricity, a telephone and central heating. It was also conveniently empty; the previous owners General and Mrs Reinbot had not lived there for years. It was readily convertible to use as a sanatorium. Lenin was passed fit for the journey and driven by road to Gorki on 25 September 1918.
Few Russians and even fewer foreigners had predicted that Lenin’s party would get its hands on power in the first place. Had it not been for the Great War, there would have been no October Revolution. Lenin had been given his chance because of the wartime economic dislocation, administrative breakdown and political disarray. And he had adjusted his thought and behaviour to the opportunities on offer. In particular, he had handled his party with perceptiveness, determination and daring. Without Lenin there would still have been problems for the Provisional Government. Almost certainly the Provisional Government would have fallen. But Lenin’s activity ensured that the manner of its collapse led to a political order of extreme authoritarianism. It also made civil war inevitable. Lenin had blustered, bullied and gambled. He had made extraordinary mistakes. He had pretended to a scientific attitude belying his intuitive approach to politics. He had tugged Marxism round to the kind of revolution he desired. He had split socialism in Russia and Europe into antagonistic camps and had set about building a world with the instruments of ideological polemic, political struggle and civil war. He had yet to show that his general prognosis was realistic. In the heat of armed conflict, as a variety of forces were concentrating their efforts to overthrow Sovnarkom, Lenin hoped and expected to justify himself.
PART FOUR
DEFENCE OF THE REVOLUTION
There’s nothing else I have.
Lenin in 1922
22. WAR LEADER
1918–1919
By most criteria there were few politicians less suited to fighting the Civil War than Lenin. As the eldest son of a widow, he had not been liable for service in the Imperial armed forces; and he made no secret of his military inexperience.1 Certainly he had read Clausewitz’s classic work On War. But the notes he took were peculiar. The conclusion Lenin drew from Clausewitz about the waging of war was that it was becoming an ever simpler technical matter. He did not expect complication. After his party assumed power, he left the practical details to others and did not go near the Red Army. Lenin carried his black Browning revolver with him for considerations of personal security. But he did not fire it. The closest he came to soldierly activity was on his hunting expeditions with his rifle outside Moscow, when he shot ducks and foxes. But this was the extent of his personal direct violence. His experience of large-scale armed conflict between one set of human beings and another had always been at second hand; and he had next to no foresight about the intensity of the Civil War that was exploding across the former Russian Empire.
Yet in at least one sense he was prepared for war. Quiet and inexperienced though he was, Lenin felt no inhibition about giving orders to use military force and the resultant bloodshed gave him no sleepless nights. The writer Maxim Gorki asked him how he knew how much force to use. Lenin, in Gorki’s opinion, was too ready to deploy the Cheka and the Red Army. But Lenin was unrepentant: ‘By what measure are you to gauge how many blows are necessary and how many are superfluous in the course of a particular fight?’2 For Lenin, the winning of the fight was the important thing. Only pedants were concerned about the careful calibration of violence. Lenin preferred to overdo the blows than to risk letting an opponent survive assault.
As a war leader, moreover, he developed very quickly even though he was distant from the military campaigns. By all accounts, he was the linchpin of the Bolshevik central party machine. Trotski as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs won the public plaudits as the party leader in closest contact with the Red Army. He had his own vehicle, which quickly came to be known as the Trotski Train, for travel to the war fronts. He addressed commissars and commanders and rank-and-file troops with panache. There were others who had wonderful talents. Bukharin was an expeditious editor for Pravda. Kamenev could handle the municipal administration for Moscow, Zinoviev for Petrograd. Stalin could run the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities Affairs and any other organisation requiring a firm, decisive hand. Sverdlov, Lenin’s right-hand man in the Kremlin, had the capacity to co-ordinate not only the Party Secretariat but also the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets. They all of them could exercise power with competence. They had sharp intelligence and an abundance of confidence.
Indeed they raged to amplify their power and to change the world around them in accordance with their doctrines. The year after the October Revolution had been a terrible lesson to them. Persuaded by Lenin in 1917 that the soviets could constitute the core of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, they had found the experience of government less than totally satisfactory. In doctrine they were Marxists of Lenin’s type. They worshipped orderliness, discipline, centralism, hierarchy and monolithic unity. They wanted their commands to be executed without attenuation. They aimed to impose their will mercilessly. Each of them let his subordinates know that results were expected to arrive fast. The Bolshevik central leadership had taken power so as to hasten a transformation of the political and economic world. The reality of power, however, was different. The Russian Empire had broken asunder. The economy and the administration had fallen apart. Politics had given way to chronic, indecisive military struggle. Impoverishment, hunger and disease were becoming normal. And in this situation the Bolsheviks knew that a fully centralised system of order was required. Practical
as well as doctrinal exigency was at work.
The Bolshevik central and local leaders were themselves in part to blame for the disorderliness. Each of them wanted the Revolution on his or her terms. The vertical line of command was a shambles in soviets, trade unions and other public bodies. When Lenin wrote to the Astrakhan communists, he had to threaten (or at least he felt he had to threaten) to kill them in order to secure compliance. The central public bodies were in constant disagreement with each other. Lenin could usually get his way with any of them. But he was the October Revolution’s leader: it would have been a pretty poor job if his personal authority had not carried some weight. Others in the Central Committee and Sovnarkom had a harder time. Personal jealousies and institutional rivalries were acute. Nor was the situation improved by the Bolshevik proclivity for establishing new bodies whenever an existing state body could not surmount a specific difficulty. Functional demarcation between institutions had been ridiculed by Lenin in The State and Revolution as a middle-class trick to disguise the reality of the ‘bourgeois dictatorship’ established under capitalism; and he and his party were staggered by the chaotic nature of administration after 1917.
Lenin called on his associates to work harder and, in some cases, to set a better example. The disputes between Trotski and Stalin infuriated him. Each of them wrote to him putting his case; the mutual hatred was naked. Lenin alone could effect an accommodation of sorts. He was not averse to playing the stern father to the party. When the sailors’ leader Pavel Dybenko was put under arrest for insubordination, Lenin took his wife Alexandra Kollontai aside: ‘It’s precisely you and Dybenko who should be setting an example to the broad masses who are still so far from understanding the new Soviet power – you who enjoy such popularity.’3 He released Dybenko only if Kollontai stood as the personal guarantor of his future good behaviour. No one but Lenin could have succeeded with Kollontai like this.
Lenin: A Biography Page 49