Koba now had a free hand, and Lenin was told in a telegram that “the military council has inherited a run-down estate. Have had to start all over again.” The ruinous condition of the “estate” was said to be due to a “conspiracy” on the part of the “military experts.” And on August 22, in the night, a barge put out into the middle of the Volga. On board were the “military experts” brought in by Trotsky and Snesarev, and arrested by Koba. All were shot.
The offensive had failed, but Koba stoutly defended Tsaritsyn. The city was never surrendered. Grain and oil got through to Moscow.
NEWS FROM MOSCOW: A SHOT
At the end of August 1918 Lenin was wounded after addressing workers at the Mikhelson factory. He ended his speech with the slogan “Freedom or death!” and walked down the steps from the platform and across the yard toward a waiting car. Then came three revolver shots, and Lenin fell beside the car, struck by two bullets.
Many legends have grown up around the attempt on Lenin’s life. The official files are in the former Central Archive of the KGB, and in 1995 I was able to consult them. Among them is the testimony of Lenin’s driver, K. Gill, who was waiting for him in the car and saw the whole thing. Lenin left the building, Gill tells us, “surrounded by women and men.… He was only three steps away from the car … when I saw, not more than three paces to his left, a woman’s hand holding a Browning revolver protruding from a group of several people. Three shots were fired.”
Photographs attached to the file illustrate the details of the attack: the would-be assassin was standing by the front left wheel of the car, Lenin by the back wheel, facing her at a distance of three paces.
“I rushed toward the spot where the shots were coming from,” Gill testified. “The woman threw the revolver down at my feet and vanished in the crowd.… A woman medical assistant who happened to be in the crowd and two other persons [obviously Lenin’s bodyguard] helped me to put Lenin in the car and the four of us drove off to the Kremlin.”
Gill carried the Leader home at breakneck speed. Lenin was able to go upstairs to his Kremlin apartment unaided. According to the official communiqué: “One bullet entered below the left shoulder blade and lodged in the right side of his neck … the other penetrated his left shoulder. The patient is fully conscious. The best surgeons have been called in to treat him.” Doctor Rozanov wrote later that “Lenin’s life was not in danger.”
The Leader’s wound would shortly release rivers of blood.
A young woman in a black dress was detained just a few blocks away from the site of the attempted assassination. This was Fanny Kaplan, a revolutionary who had been imprisoned under the tsar for taking part in the preparation of a terrorist act.
In her depositions she stated: “I shot Lenin because I believe that he is delaying the realization of the socialist ideal by decades.… I decided to take this step back in February.… The Bolsheviks are conspirators. They have seized power without the people’s consent.” Asked about her accomplices and her party allegiance, Kaplan said, “I made the attempt entirely by myself.”
The investigation was carried out quickly, although historians find that many questions remain unanswered. How, for instance, did the half-blind Kaplan manage to hit Lenin? Was there, perhaps, another assassin, who managed to escape? The Russian historian Volkogonov writes in his Lenin: “It was not Kaplan who fired the shots. She was merely the one prepared to accept responsibility.” In my view, everything about the event is perfectly logical: it was precisely because she was half-blind that Kaplan failed to wound Lenin fatally at a distance of three paces. A much more interesting question is whether she did have accomplices, and whether she in fact belonged to a political party or “acted independently” as she claimed.
On September 3 the Kremlin commandant, Malkov, led Kaplan out into the yard and shot her in the back of the neck, with the Bolshevik poet Demyan Biedny as an interested spectator. The Cheka put out the rumor that Lenin personally had pardoned the revolutionary Kaplan. The rumor lingered for decades.
Trotsky and his army were near Kazan, fighting the attacking Czechs. The moment he heard about the attempt on Lenin, Trotsky left the front and rushed to Moscow. He felt himself to be Lenin’s heir.
Koba, however, remained in place at Tsaritsyn. What could he have achieved in a Moscow without Lenin? He was, after all, a member of the ruling group only on Lenin’s authority.
At about this time a student, L. Kenigisser, killed Trotsky’s friend Uritsky, the chairman of the Cheka in Petrograd. Kenigisser’s explanation was that he had killed Uritsky to avenge executed officers and the death of a friend of his.
Trotsky made a fiery speech on the need for retribution, and on September 2, after a stormy debate in the Central Committee, the Bolsheviks launched their campaign of Red Terror.
Koba heard about it in Tsaritsyn.
RUSSIA AWASH WITH BLOOD
The Terror had, in fact, been in progress throughout 1918, without prior warning. It had been there in the summer, when the whole imperial family was shot in a dirty cellar at Ekaterinburg. When Koba was busy shooting officers at Tsaritsyn. When Jews with their bellies ripped open littered the streets of Ukrainian towns. When Lenin, shortly before the attempt on his life, was told of a peasant revolt in Penza and telegraphed: “Terror against kulaks, priests, and White Guardists. Imprison suspicious persons in concentration camps outside city.”
Throughout that year people were tortured and murdered all over the country. Both sides killed people: the bloody cellars of the Bolshevik Cheka sections were no different from the blood-washed cellars of White Guard counterespionage units. In both, people were swathed in barbed wire, eyes were gouged out, gloves were made of human skin, people were impaled. Denikin’s government was horrified by the bestial savagery of its warriors, while on the other side, punishment where no crime had been committed was officially acknowledged policy. The decision on Red Terror was made public on September 5, 1918.
After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, tsarist ministers had debated whether or not to declare “each and every member of a revolutionary party responsible for any further crime, however small, and outside the law.” They could not bring themselves to do it. The Bolsheviks could and did.
A hostage system was introduced. Five hundred “representatives of the overthrown classes”—if we rely only on official figures—were shot immediately after Uritsky’s assassination. In Kronstadt, four hundred former officers were lined up in front of three deep trenches and shot.
Revenge of course had nothing to do with it. It would have been strange to wreak vengeance on former tsarist ministers and to kill senators and clergymen because Kaplan had shot Lenin. The terror had a much broader purpose, which Trotsky partly revealed when discussing reasons for the murder of the imperial family. It was necessary, he said, “to give our own ranks a jolt, show them that there is no going back. Ahead of us lies total victory, or total disaster.” Complicity in crime brings people together, makes them realize that it is victory, or retribution. It was, moreover, as Trotsky also wrote, necessary to “horrify and terrify the enemy.” But not only the enemy. The population at large had to be terrified. The Red Terror meant that the regime had the right to punish where there was no crime, it meant that the common man lived in a state of constant Kafkaesque dread, a feeling that, confronted with authority, he had no rights. This was the ultimate meaning of the Terror. And Koba took the lesson to heart.
That was the point at which “the living spirit of the Revolution finally took wing, and flew away,” as M. Spiridonova wrote in prison.
DRESS REHEARSAL FOR STALINIST TERROR
Whoever takes captives, to captivity he goes. Whoever slays with the sword, he must be slain.
—Revelation 13:10
The Red Terror escalated. G. Petrovsky, People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, signed an “Order Concerning Hostages,” according to which “all right-wing Socialist Revolutionaries known to local Soviets are to be arrested immedi
ately. A significant number of hostages must be taken from among the bourgeoisie and the officer class. The slightest attempt to resist should be met by wholesale shooting.”
A campaign of mass murder developed throughout the country. In the Cheka Weekly we read:
Executions Reported by Provincial Cheka Sections:
Novgorod Cheka 38 persons
Pskov Cheka 31
Yaroslavl 38
Poshekhon 31
Terror was becoming a nationwide competition. Lists of people who could expect to die were pasted up all over the country. A typical announcement would read: “At the least sign of counterrevolutionary activity these persons will be shot immediately”—followed by the names of dozens of hostages. It became common practice to take a husband hostage and wait for his hapless wife to come and purchase his life with her body. Chekists invited the wives of arrested officers to join in their drinking bouts. This was part of the routine training for new Cheka personnel.
All of them would later serve Koba, only to perish later in his camps.
Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Trotsky all extolled the Terror in public. Even the humane Bukharin stated that “proletarian coercion in all forms, beginning with execution, is the method by which communist man is fashioned from the human material of the capitalist epoch.”
As for Koba, he did not care to discuss the subject. He simply acted. And horror gripped Tsaritsyn.
As the Chekists warmed to their task they called for “a deepening of the Terror.” We read in the Cheka Weekly that “in many towns mass executions of hostages have already been carried out. And that is good. In such matters half-measures are worst of all. They exacerbate the enemy without weakening him.” The author of this article wanted to go further, and called for the authorization of torture. It was time to get rid of petit bourgeois ideology.
But the bloodthirsty omnipotence of the Cheka was beginning to provoke murmurs of dissent in the Party itself. In a letter to Pravda one Communist wrote, “We are turning the slogan ‘all power to the Soviets’ into ‘all power to the Cheka.’ ” After this a commission was set up “to acquaint the public with the activity of” the Cheka. Koba was among its members, and the executioner of Tsaritsyn now emerged as a restraining force, an opponent of extreme measures. In general, the center, the halfway point between contestants, was becoming more and more frequently his favorite position. He made one exception: where Trotsky was concerned he was always passionately ready to do battle. He knew that Lenin appreciated this ardor of his.
The commission ruled that the call for the use of torture was a mistake, the young hotheads in the Cheka were told what could be said and what must never be mentioned, even if it had to be done.
These ideas about the need to use torture he would put into practice in twenty years’ time. And the cruel idiots who had called for it in 1918 would learn on their own skins what torture means.
HA-HA
When Stalin died he left behind thousands of books in his Kremlin apartment and at his dacha in Kuntsevo. There was émigré, White Guard literature, and there were works by old acquaintances whom he had killed: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin. Their books, confiscated everywhere else in the country, lived on in his library. In the Khrushchev period the library was broken up, and only books annotated by Stalin were left behind. The laconic Koba had left a great number of marginal notes in his books, and these jottings offer a curious way in to the Great Conspirator’s private thoughts.
In the Party Archive, I leafed through two of his books, both about terror. The first was Trotsky’s Terror and Communism (1920). Wherever Trotsky extolled terror and revolutionary violence Koba made an enthusiastic note: “Right!” “Well said!” “Yes!” We can see him, alone with himself, expressing his real opinion of his enemy, who, as we shall shortly see, was always his teacher! A teacher second only to Lenin.
The second book was Terrorism and Communism, by the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky. “The leaders of the proletariat,” Kautsky wrote, “have begun to resort to extreme measures, bloody measures—to terror.” Koba has ringed these words, and written “ha-ha” in the margin. The Civil War leader, who had witnessed massacres from day to day, who had waded through a sea of blood, finds it funny, this “bourgeois fear of blood.” He writes “nota bene” beside this passage in Marx: “There is only one way to shorten and ease the convulsions of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new—revolutionary terror.” Koba took the lesson to heart.
N.B.: Terror is the quickest way to the new society.
“ALL POWER TO THE CHEKA!”
Koba was bound to cast a sympathetic and curious eye on the Cheka, this new power born of terror. Its credo appeared in Red Sword, the organ of the Special Corps of the Cheka: “All things are permitted us, because we were the first in the world to take up the sword … in the name of the liberation and emancipation of all men from slavery! Who is to reproach us, armed as we are with this sacred sword, who is to reproach us for the manner of our struggle?” This was a thought which Koba would realize fully two decades later. And its authors would learn in full what it meant in practice.
TROTSKY MIGHTIER STILL
In early September the Red army, under Trotsky’s leadership, struck a number of powerful blows. In a space of three days they took Kazan, Samara, and Lenin’s hometown, Simbirsk.
Lenin, who had only just recovered from his wound, telegraphed his congratulations to Trotsky.
In the second half of September Koba arrived in Moscow to visit Lenin now that he was well again. And Lenin, of course, at Koba’s request, sent a congratulatory telegram to the commander on the southern front, Voroshilov. Trotsky took this as a snub to himself: yet again Lenin was conniving at Koba’s self-promotion. He reacted boldly, sending P. Sytin, a former tsarist general, to Tsaritsyn as front commander. Koba and Voroshilov refused to accept his authority. As usual, they sent a coded telegram to Lenin: “Sytin is a man … who does not deserve our trust.… Necessary to discuss in Central Committee behavior of Trotsky who shows disrespect for senior Party members in favor of traitors in ranks of military experts.” Trotsky replied immediately: “Categorically insist on recall of Stalin. Things are going badly on Tsaritsyn front, in spite of our superior forces. Voroshilov able to command a regiment, but not an army of 50,000 men.” Lenin could not contradict Trotsky just then, and in October 1918 Koba was recalled to Moscow.
In Moscow he realized at once that he would have to capitulate. Trotsky was too powerful. He informed Voroshilov that he had “just been sent to see Lenin. He is furious and insists we rethink.”
Koba’s contrariness disappeared immediately. “I think we can settle this matter quietly,” he told Lenin pacifically, and beat a hasty retreat. In his Pravda article on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik regime he sang the praises of Trotsky: “All the work in connection with the practical organization of the uprising was carried out under the immediate direction of … Comrade Trotsky.… For the garrison’s speedy decision to side with the Soviets, and the skillful organization of the Military Revolutionary Committee’s work, the Party is indebted primarily and chiefly to Comrade Trotsky.” To keep Koba at the front, Lenin himself undertook the task of reconciliation. He informed Trotsky that “on his arrival Stalin persuaded Voroshilov to submit completely to orders from the Center.” Koba also knew when to retreat.
LIFE IN UTOPIA
In Moscow the Bolsheviks were getting ready to celebrate the first anniversary of the October Revolution. They were entitled to celebrate—they had been governing the country for a whole year. Who would ever have believed it! The artist Annenkov remembered how he helped to decorate the capital for this occasion. Although there was no cloth to be had in Moscow, thousands of red streamers and thousands of red banners fluttered over the city. A hungry city, but a beautiful red city! They discovered late in the day that they had forgotten the most important thing of all—to erect the platform from which Lenin, now recovered from his bullet wounds,
was to deliver a speech at 9:00 next morning. Annenkov made a rough sketch, fires were lit on the square, and work went on all night. The job was done by “a brigade of professors and intellectuals,” forced to carry it out by way of “compulsory labor education.” By 8:00 A.M. the platform was up, and Lenin was able to make his speech from it. Trotsky stood at the front of the rostrum as Lenin’s heir.
Koba saw the platform, and must have appreciated its significance. It was a public declaration of the order of precedence. What had been going on behind the scenes of the regime would now be advertised from that platform for all to see. On the very spot from which Lenin was now holding forth, Koba would erect his Mausoleum. It would become the new Rostrum, on which Koba would line up his own associates in order of precedence.
The vital concerns of ordinary people living in that beflagged capital were quite different. When could they get bread? Where could they get firewood? Bread was brought in from the provinces by “bag people.” The militia would arrest them and confiscate their bread. But still they infiltrated the hungry city. There were hundreds of them in houses and courtyards around the stations. People passed on their addresses. In our household a scrap of paper with one such address survived for several years: “First building after the station, there’s a fence in the yard, the second board is loose, go through and there’s another yard. There’s a rubbish dump in that yard and somebody will be waiting behind that rubbish dump with bread.” The starving intelligentsia crept from one such address to another, trying to exchange family treasures for bread.
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