THE DAY OF THE COUP
All day Koba kept up his game of “peaceful intentions.” He was officially attached to the Second Congress of Soviets, and around midday he turned up together with Trotsky at a preliminary conference of delegates. The Congress proper was due to open on the following day. One of the Socialist Revolutionary delegates asked, “What is the purpose of the Military-Revolutionary Committee—insurrection or the preservation of order?” And Koba unhesitatingly replied that it was “preservation of order.” Koba paid fleeting visits to these gatherings and made peaceful declarations, but of course kept in close touch with his charge. The memoirs of V. Fofanova, the occupant of the apartment in which Lenin was hiding, are held in the former Party Archive. We read there that “when the 24th arrived, there was a public meeting at the Polytechnic Institute, at which Stalin was to speak, and we had to hand him a note from V. I. [Vladimir Ilyich Lenin].”
Lenin was evidently kept constantly informed by Koba and learned from him that the coup was proceeding successfully. The story of the February Revolution was obviously repeating itself—the uprising was meeting no resistance. That must have been why late that evening Lenin broke his arrangement to remain hidden in the apartment until victory was complete. His Finnish bodyguard, Raichia, would write later that “Ilyich asked for Stalin to be fetched,” but realizing that this would “mean a great waste of time” he disguised himself and set off for the Smolny without Koba. He did not remove his disguise while there in spite of all the reports of victory. Trotsky recalled that “Vladimir Ilyich and I sat together. With a handkerchief tied round his face, as if he was suffering from toothache, and wearing enormous spectacles, he was rather a strange sight. The Menshevik Dan scrutinized this strange character as he passed by. Lenin nudged me and said, ‘The rotters have recognized me.’ ”
MEMBER OF THE GOVERNMENT
In the course of the night Lenin called a meeting of the Central Committee. The Bolshevik S. Ravich remembered that it took place “in a tiny room, round a badly lit table, with overcoats thrown down on the floor. People were continually knocking at the door, bringing news of the uprising’s latest successes. Among those present were Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev … and Stalin.”
Koba had hurried to the Smolny on his charge’s heels, so obviously they were in continuous contact. This meeting was held to discuss the composition of the new Bolshevik government. Trotsky, whose mind was always on the French Revolution, proposed that the new ministers should call themselves People’s Commissars. Lenin liked the idea. They then went on to discuss the composition of the government. Lenin, naturally, proposed that Trotsky, the organizer of the coup, should be president of the Council of People’s Commissars. Trotsky would not hear of it, mentioning, among other reasons, his Jewishness. Lenin showed some embarrassment but nonetheless assumed that position himself and offered Trotsky “foreign affairs.” He did not, of course, forget faithful Koba. The Georgian became head of the Commissariat for Nationalities. Now he was a minister.
The new head of government spent the rest of the night in the same little room, bedding down on a pile of newspapers. But there was no sleep for the new commissar. He was drafting an “Appeal to the People,” announcing the overthrow of the Provisional Government. The overthrown government was, however, just where it had been, in the Winter Palace.
At 2:35 in the afternoon there was an emergency meeting of the Petrograd Soviet in what had once been the Assembly Hall of the Smolny. An eyewitness recalls the scene: “Two rows of massive white columns, lit by crystal chandeliers, the Presidium at a table on a dais, in the background an empty gilt frame from which a portrait of the emperor had been torn out.… Trotsky wore a black suit, as if dressed for a ball, with a soldier’s greatcoat draped over it. In the name of the Soviet he announced that the Provisional Government no longer existed.… Trotsky’s immortal speech is engraved on my memory.… It was like molten metal.… People listened with bated breath, resolved to follow him unquestioningly wherever he might lead them!” Lenin spoke next, announcing the victory of the workers’ and peasants’ Revolution. Molotov recalled, “I was in the Presidium, directly behind the rostrum. Lenin addressed the hall with one foot slightly raised. That was a habit he had when he spoke in public. I could see the sole of his shoe. And I noticed that it was worn right through.”
The mighty Bolshevik regime began with a hole in its shoe. Koba would later produce an edited version of the proceedings. His historians omitted everything except Lenin’s speech.
Even in the Smolny, Koba was yet to emerge from the shadows. The Provisional Government was still in the Winter Palace. For the time being the Bolsheviks were still mere mutineers. Lenin raged, “The Provisional Government must be finished off at whatever cost.” Meanwhile, the Soviets began their Second Congress. Koba was not one of the many elected to the Presidium. Lenin was evidently still afraid; he still hadn’t left off his disguise. And Koba, as before, had to remain in concealment somewhere in the Smolny, so that he could help the Leader of the Revolution disappear at any moment. Victory was, in fact, still not altogether certain. Kerensky had escaped from the encircled Winter Palace, and set off for the front in search of reinforcements. The Winter Palace itself was still holding out, with the Provisional Government still inside it. Podvoisky, one of the organizers of the armed uprising, wrote in his memoirs, “We should have taken the Winter Palace by the morning of the 25th. Zero hour was moved to noon, then to 6:00 P.M., after which no new time was fixed. Lenin paced the little room restlessly. He did not leave it for the opening of the Congress of Soviets. V.I. was swearing and shouting, he was ready to shoot us.”
A NEW WORLD
At 6:00 P.M. all approaches to the Winter Palace were blocked by insurgent troops. The defenders began to leave the palace. By midnight only a Women’s Battalion and a handful of cadets remained. It was time to begin. Blank shells were fired from the cruiser Aurora and the Peter and Paul Fortress. The whole city heard them. After this came a live shell from a gun near the General Staff Archway. The pediment of the palace was damaged.
The February Revolution was nearing its end. The poet Zinaida Gippius recorded her impressions of that historic night: “It began in sunny springtime and ended on that dreadful gloomy autumn day … no one on the streets, the electricity lamps are out … big guns firing, I can hear them from here, the fighting drags on … From our balcony I can see shellbursts like flashes of lightning in the sky.”
The shelling was followed by an assault on the palace. As Maria Bocharnikova, a top sergeant in the Women’s Battalion, put it, “The Bolshevik victory that night was a victory over women.”
The palace was finally taken at 1:50 A.M. on October 26. Foreign books in luxurious bindings were snatched from the Last Tsar’s quarters. Precious objects were looted. Those searching the courtyard came upon the palace’s wine cellars, and flung themselves upon the stocks of food and drink, dragging cases of wine and hams out into the square and off to the barracks. Meanwhile the arrested ministers were led across the courtyard and over the barricades, on their way to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Bocharnikova described the scene: “The women were arrested, and it was only thanks to the Grenadier Regiment that we were not raped. Our weapons were taken from us.… Only one woman was killed. But many of our number met their end when we separated and set off home without our weapons. Tipsy soldiers and sailors hunted women down, raped them, and threw them from the upper stories of houses down into the street.” Bocharnikova survived on this occasion, only to be shot during the Civil War.
While this was going on, a pale and distraught Menshevik, Abramovich, was shouting himself hoarse, struggling to make himself heard over the uproar in the hall, telling the delegates that the Aurora was bombarding the palace, and demanding that the siege be called off immediately. His words were drowned in the storm of applause that greeted a sailor from the Aurora, who announced that the palace had been taken. “Only then,” according to Trotsky, “did Lenin take off
his wig and wash off his makeup.”
The session went on until 5:00 A.M., after which the weary victors slept briefly. “Somebody spread blankets on the floor and put pillows down,” Trotsky wrote, “and Vladimir Ilyich and I took a rest, lying side by side.… [Later that morning Lenin said,] ‘The transition from the underground to power has been too sudden,’ adding, ‘my head is spinning,’ for some reason in German.” This touching scene, we may be sure, was witnessed by the loyal Koba. He knew very well what the friendship between the two leaders was worth.
How unutterably happy the organizers of the coup were as they went to sleep toward morning in the Smolny’s numerous rooms. In one of them a small, pockmarked Georgian had fallen asleep with a cold pipe in his hand. The man who would one day exterminate all those happy souls.
The next day was cold and misty. Wet snow was falling. Groups of curious spectators crowded round the Winter Palace, staring at the overturned street lamps and the scattered woodpiles.
That morning a new world was born. Koba’s world.
7
THE GREAT UTOPIA
The new society was like a child newly taken from the womb. It was covered with blood—but it had been born!
—R. Rolland
THE DREAMERS IN THE YOUNG LADIES’ INSTITUTE
“After the victory Stalin moved into the Smolny,” Fyodor Alliluyev tells us. And Molotov recalled that “for the first three days we did not leave the Smolny—I myself, Zinoviev, and Trotsky. Opposite were Stalin and Kamenev. We tried by fits and starts to picture the new life. Lenin, for instance, thought that, to begin with, the oppressive power of money, of capital, would be abolished in our country. We should do away with money altogether sometime in the twenties.”
Mirages swirled in that smoke-filled room of the former school for young ladies. Something fantastic had happened: an armchair utopia had become reality. They had not simply seized power. They were determined to build the new world of their dreams: a classless society, money abolished, the state withering away. And to build it quickly. Now that the coup had succeeded, they must, Lenin thought, advance full speed ahead toward socialism. “Socialism is already staring us in the face through the windows of modern capitalism,” he wrote jubilantly.
It all looked so easy: everything is monopolized in the interests of the victorious people, a single State Bank is established, a Leviathan to dominate the whole country. Everybody would take a turn governing everybody else. Literally the whole population would be involved in government: cooks would learn how to administer the state. And people would gradually reach the point at which nobody governed anybody else. The hateful state, which had enslaved mankind for centuries, would die away.
This was the dream which would lead them to create the most monstrous state of all.
The fair redivision of all land, proclaimed by Lenin on the night of the coup, was a confidence trick. The Bolshevik dream was to create, in the future, collective farms in which no one could say “This is mine,” and everything would be held in common. The “mine” must die. “Mine” always pointed the way to oppression. According to Peter Pavlenko, Stalin liked telling this story:
Saint Francis taught men to live without property. One monk asked him: “Can I at least have a Bible of my own?” St. Francis answered: “If today you have your own Bible, tomorrow you’ll start giving orders—telling somebody, ‘Go and fetch my Bible.’ ”
They decided to replace “loathsome trading—that seedbed of capitalism” with universal distribution of foodstuffs by the state. In that way their main objective would be achieved: the power of money would be at an end. Gold they would use to pave the streets, gold would be the material of which lavatory pans were made. They referred to money contemptuously as “monetary tokens,” and planned to print unconscionable quantities of it, to render the accursed stuff valueless. Christ’s disciples expected the Second Coming to happen immediately, and the Bolsheviks believed that world revolution was imminent. It would create a completely new world. Scientific foresight had already brought revolution to Russia. Now it gave assurance of world revolution. Russia’s great example was bound to attract others. Workers and peasants in soldiers’ uniforms had grown utterly weary of war. Why should they be massacred in the interests of their bosses? Inspired by Russia’s example, they would of course turn their bayonets against their oppressors. Give us world revolution! That was all they talked about during those days in the Smolny.
People’s Commissar Koba issued decrees. Yesterday’s political exile now signed, jointly with Lenin, a “Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia.” All Russia’s nationalities were guaranteed the right of self-determination. The empire of the Romanovs was coming apart at the seams: Poland, Finland, the Baltic countries, Ukraine, and the Caucasus all broke away. This would inevitably push the peoples of other empires even farther along the road to world revolution. From one day to another they expected to hear the awesome tramp of workers’ battalions. For the present all they had to do was hold out in this fortress conquered by the proletariat, and surrounded by its enemies.
STEAL WHAT WAS STOLEN
The great revolutionary redistribution was already under way. The spoils were shared out in accordance with the new government’s decrees: the land to the peasants, factories and mills to the workers. Peasant communes were seizing land, workers’ committees were taking mills and factories into their own hands. Owners who did not run away in time were “taken out into an open field” and never seen again. Soldiers at the front distributed the contents of army stores. Then, weighed down with looted ammunition, they deserted the front and headed homeward, shooting officers as they went. “Steal what was stolen from you” is a slogan beloved of all revolutions. Looting sealed the support of the people for their new rulers. Throughout Russia’s great expanses the story was the same.
But in Petrograd the Bolsheviks were still fighting for their lives. For the first two weeks they appeared to be doomed.
“We knew that the army might intervene at any moment and that the Bolsheviks would be done for,” an old émigré told me in Bulgaria. The intelligentsia sat in apartments without light, waiting for their liberators. Nobody believed that the Bolsheviks would last long.
Kerensky himself moved on the capital immediately after the coup. Trotsky and Lenin organized the city’s defenses and Koba was at Lenin’s side throughout, his inseparable shadow. Z. Gippius wrote: “The Cossacks and Kerensky were already at Tsarskoe Selo, where the garrison surrendered to them … but his soldiers had been got at by agitators … they were surrounded by a great crowd, and fraternization began.” The “mutiny” (as the Bolsheviks called the toppled premier’s offensive) was crushed.
RETREAT
My grandfather used to tell me how they drove Kerensky’s Cossacks out of Tsarskoe Selo. Plekhanov was living in Tsarskoe at the time.… They searched old Plekhanov’s home several times—not because they did not know who he was. Ilyich had obviously never forgiven him for that famous utterance of his—that “Russia’s history has not yet milled the flour from which the pie of socialism might be baked.” Also in Tsarskoe, some soldiers came up to my grandfather in the street: “Want to buy an officer, daddy?” “What would I do with him?” “Shoot him,” they said, and roared with laughter. (Letter from B. Nelidov, Moscow)
Did the father of Russian Marxism, I wonder, get a good look at the triumph of his ideas? Plekhanov left Russia, and died in the following year.
LENIN’S SHADOW
One of Lenin’s first decrees called for peace with Germany. At General Headquarters (GHQ) the commander-in-chief, Dukhonin, refused to negotiate an armistice. Lenin went to the radio station in person. With him, as always at that time, went his faithful shadow, Koba. Koba himself has described what happened next: “Lenin transmitted the order for Dukhonin’s removal. He called on the soldiers to ‘surround the generals and suspend military operations.’ ” Lenin appointed Ensign N. Krylenko, a Bolshevik, commander-in-chief. The new
commander-in-chief immediately drove to GHQ with a detachment. He made a speech, after which the soldiers “surrounded” Dukhonin and savagely murdered him.
In Petrograd the civil servants repeatedly came out on strike. “The civil servants won’t serve, the ministers aren’t working, the banks don’t open, the telephone doesn’t ring,” Gippius noted in her diary.
The commissars appointed by Lenin found no one in their ministries except cleaners and messengers.
One of those spending his days in a room at the Smolny was the Bolshevik Menzhinsky. His brother was a well-known banker, which was perhaps why Lenin had appointed him Minister of Finance. This aesthete, this sybarite in a luxurious fur coat, escorted by a detachment of Red Guards, paid a frustrating visit to the State Bank. The striking bank officials would not hand over the ten million rubles for which Lenin was asking. The man in charge of the country’s finances, reduced to safe-breaking, made off with five million rubles like a common thief.
As for Koba’s “People’s Commissariat,” it existed at first only in Lenin’s decree. But a few days later he acquired his first collaborator, an energetic one at that. A certain S. Peskovsky, who had taken part in the coup, now turned up in the Smolny to take part in the division of power. He wrote in his memoirs: “I decided to go to Trotsky and submit my application for a post in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. But Trotsky explained that it ‘would be a pity to use an old Party member in such an unimportant capacity,’ … [after which] I entered a room facing Ilyich’s office. There I found Menzhinsky lolling on a couch, looking exhausted.” Hearing that Peskovsky had studied at London University, Menzhinsky immediately offered him the directorship of the State Bank. But Peskovsky knew about the bank officials’ strike, and preferred to go on looking. He went into the next office. This was Ilyich’s office, which Stalin used on and off because he had no office of his own. Peskovsky obviously felt that this was where the power was, because he decided right away to work for Stalin. He asked Stalin if he had a commissariat. No, replied Stalin. “Well, I’ll make you a commissariat,” said Peskovsky. “I dashed around the Smolny, looking for a suitable place for a People’s Commissariat,” he recalled. “It was a complicated business. There was no room anywhere.” In the end, he found a friend of his, there to represent some commission or other, in one of the rooms, and talked him into joining forces, complete with desk and part of a room. Peskovsky triumphantly planted a card with the title “Commissariat of Nationalities” on his desk and went to report to Stalin. The “imperturbable Stalin” silently inspected his “commissariat,” was satisfied, and “returned to Lenin’s office.”
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