Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  Trotsky and Lenin were seen to have an equal influence on events. But Lenin concentrated on his work in Sovnarkom and the Central Committee and did not speak to foreign correspondents. Until his beard grew back, he did not look like the Lenin known to us from so many later posters; and few people outside the centre of Petrograd knew what he looked like because Russian newspapers carried no photographs of him.14 To party comrades, though, he was immediately familiar. He had founded the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party in 1903. Although he had sometimes co-operated with the Menshevik faction, he did this only for tactical reasons. He wrote on every big question of Marxist theory: industrial capitalism, land, imperialism and epistemology. His cofactionalists followed him into extremism, and there were times when they themselves objected to his insistence on temporary compromises. Whenever he was thwarted he formed his own sub-faction. He was the most notorious schismatic in the European socialist movement before the Great War. At the beginning of 1917 his band of close supporters was tiny. Russia’s political and economic disintegration as well as its military defeat gave him an opening that was not his own handiwork. He now intended to make the most of the situation.

  Lenin was shortish, pedantic and impatient. With his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat, he seemed at times like an angry Sunday preacher. He gave the impression that there was only one answer — his answer — to any complicated question. He was a gambler who trusted his intuitions. He lived for the cause. He was a stickler for party discipline when his ideas were official policy, but he broke all the rules as soon as he was in a minority. Power for himself and the Bolsheviks was important to him but still dearer to his mind was the achievement of a revolutionary dictatorship to cast down capitalism and imperialism worldwide. He and Trotsky formed a bond of trust in the early weeks of Soviet rule.

  Trotsky organized the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs from a distance and seldom entered its premises. The priority for him and Lenin was to secure authority in Petrograd. Trotsky liked the anecdote told about him that he intended simply to publish the secret wartime treaties of the Allies and then ‘shut up shop’.15 On the first occasion he had tried to accomplish this, he failed. The officials who had worked for the Provisional Government barred the doors of the old ministry to him. As soon as his entourage forced the locks, there was a mass exodus of personnel and Trotsky discovered that former Deputy Foreign Minister Neratov had made off with the treaties.16 This only temporarily foiled Sovnarkom. Texts of the treaties were discovered and verified, and Trotsky immediately released them for publication on 21 November 1917.17 They confirmed what the Bolsheviks had been saying all year — and indeed the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had said the same thing. Now it was proved beyond fear of contradiction: the Allies had entered the war with ambitions of territorial aggrandizement

  Every Allied power was assured of benefit if and when the Central Powers were defeated. In March 1915 it had been agreed that Russia would annex Constantinople and northern Persia while Britain and France would acquire spheres of influence in what subsequently became Iraq, Jordan and Syria. The following month Italy was promised the Trentino as well as territory in Anatolia in return for joining the Allied side. In May 1916 the British and French agreed between themselves how to divide up the Middle East. In August that year France, Britain and Russia offered Transylvania and Dobruja to Romania to secure its adherence to the Alliance. Further deals were done in 1917 satisfying demands by the Japanese, British, French and Russians for the post-war settlement. Soviet newspapers were the first to print the treaties. The content was so sensational that the Western press followed suit — and it was Trotsky’s expectation that workers and soldiers throughout Europe would conclude that the war should be stopped at once. And whereas British and French public opinion had been easy to stir up in favour of war in 1914, the American entry into the conflict was always controversial in the US and President Wilson repudiated expansionist aims. Lenin and Trotsky hoped to prise Washington out of the Anglo-French embrace. Wilson had already insisted on being informed about the Allied treaties. His abhorrence of them was instantaneous; and on a visit to Washington the British Foreign Secretary A. J. Balfour had to express regret at the spectacle of European states striving to distribute countries among themselves as the spoils of war. Wilson refused to be bound by treaties made by others before America had joined the war.18

  The question meanwhile arose about what was going to happen in Russia. The decrees streamed thick and fast from Sovnarkom. Workers’ control was approved for industrial enterprises. Universal free education was introduced for children. Church and state were separated. The official calendar was changed from Julian to Gregorian — and many Orthodox Christian believers thought this proved that Lenin or Trotsky was the Antichrist. Religious processions were banned or discouraged. Economic nationalizations were announced. The banks were expropriated. Large industrial concerns were taken into the hands of the revolutionary state — and a further programme of seizures was projected. The entire export and import trade was turned into a state monopoly. Wherever local soviets found the peasantry withholding grain from sale, they dispatched armed workers’ units to take it by force. The People’s Commissariats replaced the old ministries. An entirely new security apparatus, the Extraordinary Commission (Cheka, in its Russian acronym), was established under Felix Dzerzhinski to combat sabotage and counter-revolutionary activity. Lenin deliberately arranged for the Cheka’s operations to lie outside Sovnarkom’s control. Annihilation of resistance to Sovnarkom was the cardinal aim. As they consolidated their power, the Bolsheviks repeated their offer to share power with the Left Socialist- Revolutionaries and a concordat was agreed on 20 December 1917.

  All this happened under the grim shadow of war. Sovnarkom had sued for peace on 22 November and dismissed General Dukhonin for refusing to transmit the request to the Germans. The Bolshevik ensign Nikolai Krylenko temporarily took over command. Ludendorff asked General Hoffmann, at the headquarters of the German forces on the eastern front, whether it was possible to negotiate with ‘these people’. Hoffmann said yes. If Ludendorff needed additional troops in northern France, this was the way to get them.19 On 15 December an armistice was agreed along the entire eastern front from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Both sides prepared for talks to be held a week later.

  The Bolsheviks at the same time encouraged Russian front-line troops to fraternize with Germans. While urgently seeking to reduce the likelihood of Germany renewing its offensive, Sovnarkom was eager to expand revolutionary activity. Propaganda was distributed across the trenches to German and Austrian soldiers who were urged to stop fighting and overthrow their governments. Sovnarkom also tried to gain control of Ukraine by sending forces to Kiev against the Central Rada, which had started acting like the government of an independent state after Kerenski’s downfall. Conflict raged between Bolsheviks and the Ukrainian administration throughout the winter. The Bolsheviks saw no absolute distinction between internal and external policy. In December 1917 Lenin summoned Finnish ministers to Petrograd and granted independence to their country. The Finns were less than enthusiastic since they worried that any collusion with Sovnarkom would be held against them by the Western Allies. But they acceded to the Soviet offer and returned to Helsinki to celebrate. The Bolsheviks calculated that if the Finns became independent they would cease to mistrust the Russians — and eventually they would acquire a far-left government that would align itself with Sovnarkom. Finland would come back to Russia.

  The Soviet leadership tried to make light of its difficulties. The Constituent Assembly election took place in late November and resulted in defeat for the Bolsheviks, who gained less than a quarter of the votes. Lenin had wanted to call off the election rather than risk this outcome, but his advice was rejected because he and his comrades had made great play of being the only party that would convoke the Assembly. The Bolsheviks would have done better if the electoral lists had been drawn up a
fter the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries split organizationally from the rest of their party and entered Sovnarkom. In fact no single party achieved an absolute majority. But the rump of the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries emerged with easily the biggest number of seats. When the Constituent Assembly met on 18 January 1918, the Socialist-Revolutionaries took control. Sovnarkom reacted by ordering closure of the proceedings a day later, and Red Guards enforced Lenin’s orders. Lacking the troops to resist, the Socialist-Revolutionary leaders moved off to their political stronghold in the Volga region. In the provincial capital Samara they established the government they had wanted to create in Petrograd. Its name was the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, or Komuch in its Russian acronym. Komuch resolved to take power back from Sovnarkom by armed force.

  The Bolsheviks remained calm about this state of affairs even though it was bound to lead to civil war. They had made their revolution. They could not know how long they would last in power. They and their families were aware that danger could be in store for them in Petrograd. Bolshevik leaders joked that they kept their suitcases packed for fear that they might suddenly have to flee. But they were determined to fight to the end for the revolutionary power they had established.

  6. IN THE LIGHT OF THE FIRE

  The Bolshevik leaders saw themselves instead as the advance guard of Marxist science and revolutionary progress — they hated being thought of as mere politicians. Abroad, in the months before their propaganda reached foreign far-left socialists, they remained something of a mystery; and unsympathetic newspapers — as the vast majority were in the West — depicted them as a gang of vandals who had exploited the unusual circumstances of Russia’s wartime travail. The Russian adversaries of Bolshevism generally offered the same analysis. The few among them who accepted that Lenin and Trotsky were bright and intelligent nonetheless insisted that they had taken leave of their senses. The general prediction was that Bolshevik rule would be ephemeral. No one thought they stood much chance of holding on to power. Although the Bolsheviks themselves shared the suspicion that their days in government might be numbered, they still believed that their example would be followed elsewhere even if they went down to defeat. They were willing to lay down their lives in the revolutionary cause, convinced that history was on their side — and it was about to be shown that only those observers who took account of the communist mental universe could properly plan ways to counteract it.

  Nikolai Bukharin, Bolshevik Central Committee member and young philosopher of communism, offered an ecstatic hymn to the glorious communist future:

  The human race is not broken up into warring camps: it is united here by common work and the common struggle with the external forces of nature. Border posts are dug out. Individual fatherlands are eliminated. All humanity without national distinctions is bound together in all its parts and organized into one single whole. Here all the peoples are one great friendly working family.1

  Like the Old Testament prophet Isaiah who had rhapsodized about the wolf dwelling with the lamb and the leopard lying down with the kid, Bukharin clearly felt that a great and perfect epoch lay ahead for humankind.

  Communist thinkers swaddled their ideas in global clothing. They believed that the Great War was no accident of dynastic rivalries or personal misjudgements. The slaughterhouse of 1914 was the result of economic development reaching a level where profits were insecure without conquest of new foreign markets. European states had scrambled to colonize Africa and Asia in the last years of the nineteenth century. Rising powers like Germany had arrived too late to seize what they thought they deserved, and their governments were under pressure by banks and industries to adopt a belligerent policy towards the established empires. Capitalist economic development required the taking of gambles with assets and elbowing competitors aside. Cabinets had to satisfy the demands of their most powerful businessmen. ‘Finance capitalism’ was the dominant force in the world economy, a case powerfully made by the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding in his 1910 book Finance Capital. Bolsheviks had welcomed the book as scientific proof that capitalism had reached its highest possible stage of development. Economic crises and world wars would occur until such time as socialism took control. It did not matter to the communists in Russia that Hilferding did not share their ideas on violent revolution and dictatorship. They praised his economics while rejecting his politics.

  They spat out contemporary European socialism in disgust. They honoured Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and continued to subscribe to the usefulness of earlier writings by Georgi Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky. But they believed that Plekhanov and Kautsky had turned traitors to Europe’s labour movement by their actions since 1914. Plekhanov had supported the Russian military effort and Kautsky had failed to call for Germany’s defeat. Unconditional opposition to the war was shared by the entire Bolshevik leadership.

  Bolsheviks marked out their position by calling themselves communists and denouncing most other socialists as ‘social-traitors’ while claiming that they were the only true socialists. Which were they? Communists or socialists? Lenin tried to clear up the confusion in The State and Revolution, which he wrote in 1917 and published the following year. He had no time for any kind of socialism other than Marxism. He also insisted that Marxists for decades had misinterpreted Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and allowed their essential ideas to fall into abeyance. Genuine Marxism according to Lenin was founded on the need for violent revolution and a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ so that capitalism might be supplanted. The dictatorial structure would only be temporary. It would establish a socialist order enshrining the principle of ‘an equal amount of products for an equal amount of labour’. As support grew throughout society, the reliance on force would steadily decrease. A second stage would then begin that would be the ultimate stage in human history: communism. No compulsion at all would be required in communist society. There would be no army, no bureaucracy and no state. Social classes would disappear. Life would proceed on lines set by the people of the entire world with the common good in mind. Although Lenin was not someone who often displayed his poetic side, he looked forward keenly to a time when the universal principle would be ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.

  Lenin pinned his arguments to the coat-tails of Marx and Engels. If he could prove to his own satisfaction that his was the correct interpretation of Marxist doctrine, that was quite enough for him. Trotsky and Bukharin were uncomfortable about this. Bukharin felt it important to subject the recent technological and social changes in contemporary capitalism to close scrutiny. Witnessing the latest profusion of inventions, he insisted that well-being and stability would remain out of reach for most people until after a socialist revolution. Trotsky too disdained to hark back endlessly to the founders of Marxism. His forte was to highlight the unfettered profiteering and bottomless human misery brought about by the war.

  Bolsheviks agreed that they were living in an era when the downtrodden of the earth would become its rulers. Ivan Zalkind, Trotsky’s deputy in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, put it like this:

  Our revolution is a revolution belonging completely to the workers. Go to Petrograd and see the district soviets, go and see the Red Guards and you’ll notice that it’s above all a workers’ revolution. The peasants and soldiers come only in second place. The bourgeoisie doesn’t exist in this second revolution. The intellectuals who played the primordial role in 1905 today are only supernumeraries. Lenin and Trotsky are merely the spokesmen of the workers. We are currently carrying out a great experiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s no longer a revolution of the sans culottes [as in the French Revolution] but of the penniless.2

  Bukharin, too, felt sure that the communists had the world at their feet:

  People in [the] communist order don’t sit on one another’s neck. Here there are no rich or parvenus, there are no bosses and subordinates; here society is not divided into classes,
one of which lords it over another. But once there are no classes, this means that there are no different sorts of people (poor and rich) with one sort sharpening its teeth against another — the oppressors against the oppressed or the oppressed against the oppressors.3

  Lenin admitted that Russia’s factory workers were only a small part of society. Sensing that this infringed his theory of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, he sometimes brandished slogans such as putting power into the hands of ‘the workers and poorest peasants’. Bolshevik writers anyway made clear that the urban ‘proletariat’ did not consist only of the factory workforce. A booklet was issued about domestic servants, who were to be attracted into the revolutionary movement. So too were the unemployed. Communists announced that the days of the privileged few enjoying the ministrations of the poor were coming to an end.4

  Trotsky thought that events had validated the revolutionary strategy he had advocated since 1905. In his booklet What Next? he declared:

  Throwing off the manacles of capitalist power, the revolution would become permanent, i.e. uninterrupted; it would apply state power not so as to consolidate a regime of capitalist exploitation materially but on the contrary so as to surmount it. Its definitive success along these lines would depend on the successes of the proletarian revolution in Europe. On the other hand, the Russian revolution has been capable of delivering the more powerful thrust to the revolutionary movement in the West the more decisively and bravely it breaks the resistance of its own bourgeoisie. Such was and remains the only real prospect for the further development of the revolution.5

  Was this utopian? Trotsky answered no. The true idiocy in his eyes had been the doctrines of rivals like the Mensheviks and Socialist- Revolutionaries who went into coalition with ‘capitalist ministers’. They lacked spirit and clear-sightedness; they were double-dealers. The Bolsheviks were not carrying out a ‘national’ or a ‘bourgeois’ revolution but had started an international socialist one. He declared: ‘And the twentieth century is “our fatherland in time”.’6 Trotsky gave out the slogan: ‘Permanent revolution against permanent carnage!’7