Such enthusiastic bedlam might seem a nightmare, or a strange, faltering carnival, depending on one’s perspective.
The Kadets, Mensheviks, SRs, and Bolsheviks all understood the key importance of the Petrograd garrison, and all created military organisations to promote their influence within it. What set the Bolsheviks apart was how early they did so – from 10 March – and with what intensity. The activists running the committee, Nevsky, Bogdatiev, Podvoisky and Sulimov, were all but the last from the party’s left wing.
In these early days, they were not especially welcome among the soldiers. But they were tenacious. Less than two weeks after they started operations, Podvoisky and his comrades invited garrison representatives to a Military Organisation Constituent Assembly, out of which, on the last day of the month, the Bolshevik Military Organisation (MO) was born.
Almost immediately after the February revolution, one comrade had heard Podvoisky announce that ‘the revolution is not over; it is just beginning’. The MO was in the hands of such independent spirited, uncompromising Bolshevik ‘lefts’ from the start. More than once they would breach party discipline – sometimes with dramatic results.
There came, first, a boost to a more moderate party consensus on 12 March. That day saw the burial of perhaps 184 martyrs of the revolution – the numbers are uncertain – killed in the city’s street fighting. These were mass graves. Long deep trenches in the hard earth of the Mars Field, the great park in the centre of Petrograd.
From early morning until long into the night came hundreds of thousands of mourners. Perhaps as many as a million filled the wide streets of the capital. From every part of the city, they converged slowly on the field, carrying their dead in red coffins. A new, religionless religion. They came with sad music. They came representing their units, their factories, their institutions, their civic groups, their parties. They came in ethnic groups – columns from the Jewish Bund, from the Armenian revolutionary Dashnaktsutyun, and others. A column of the blind came, carrying one of their own. They did not stop. No group stopped, no one made a speech. The marchers came carrying their cold comrades, solemnly passed their coffins to the burial workers and marched on, and a gun boomed in salute from the fortress across the river as the fallen were lowered. The living trudged through light snow, on wooden walkways erected between the maze of graves. Their dead were not victims, Lunacharsky’s eulogies would claim, but heroes, whose fate engendered not grief but envy.
And as the mass of citizens sang and remembered the lost, three veteran party activists returned to the city from exile in Siberia. One was the Old Bolshevik Lev Kamenev, married to Trotsky’s sister Olga Bronstein and a close comrade of Lenin, though always a party ‘wet’ (he had, in an almost incredible act he later shamefacedly denied, advocated sending a telegram to Michael Romanov praising his decision to decline the throne). With him were the erstwhile Duma deputy Muranov, renowned for having taken a hard defeatist line in defiance of the death penalty; and a member of the CC, one Joseph Stalin.
Stalin, of course, was not yet Stalin. Today, any account of the revolution is haunted by a ghost from the future, that twinkly-eyed, moustachioed monstrosity, Uncle Joe, the butcher, key architect of a grotesque and crushing despotic state – the -ism that bears his name. There have been decades of debate about the aetiology of Stalinism, volumes of stories about the man’s brutality and that of his regime. They cast shadows backwards from what would come.
But this was 1917. Stalin had not turned forty. He was, then, just Stalin, Ioseb Jughashvili, known to his comrades as Koba, a Georgian ex-trainee priest and meteorological clerk, and a longtime Bolshevik activist. A capable, if never scintillating, organiser. At best an adequate intellectual, at worst an embarrassing one. He was neither a party left nor a party right per se, but something of a weathervane. The impression he left was one of not leaving much of an impression. Sukhanov would remember him as ‘a grey blur’.
There is a rare hint at something more troubling about the man in the assessment of the party’s Russian Bureau in Petrograd, which allowed him to join, but only as advisor, without the right to a vote – because, it said, of ‘certain personal features that are inherent in him’. Would that the rest of Sukhanov’s description had been accurate: that Stalin had remained no more than glimpsed, ‘looming up now and then dimly and without leaving any trace’.
Almost immediately, the three returnees carried out something of a coup at Pravda, installing Muranov as editor on 13 March. The paper began to expound their decidedly moderate positions.
On 15 March, Kamenev wrote:
Our slogan is not the empty cry ‘Down with war! – which means the disorganisation of the revolutionary army and of the army that is becoming ever more revolutionary. Our slogan is bring pressure to bear on the Provisional Government so as to compel it to make, without fail, openly and before the eyes of world democracy, an attempt to induce all the warring countries to initiate immediate negotiations to end the world war. Till then let everyone remain at his post.
The army, he further insisted, ‘will remain staunchly at its post, answering bullet with bullet and shell with shell’.
Thus, as the Bolshevik Ludmila Stahl put it, the party ‘groped in the darkness’ – for with this line, Pravda differed not so much from the lefter Mensheviks or radical Left SRs. Setting themselves against agitation at the front, the troika were some way from Lenin.
Immediately on her arrival in Petrograd Kollontai delivered Lenin’s ‘Letters from Afar’ to Pravda. The documents horrified and stunned his nervous comrades with their intransigence. The editors balked at publishing any but the first letter, and that, wrong-footed by its hard-left formulations, they assiduously bowdlerised, cutting it substantially.
The foregoing is a famous story of how Lenin’s shocking letters stung the Old Bolsheviks. And a story is what it is.
In fact, Pravda published only the first letter because this was, almost certainly, the only one it received. And although it is true that it was heavily edited, those interventions did little to blunt Lenin’s thesis or his provocative thrust. His argument that the revolution must continue remained clear, as did his exhortation to workers: ‘you must perform miracles of proletarian and popular organisation to prepare for your victory in the second stage of the revolution’ – a stage not of socialism, he would soon clarify, but of taking political power, of winning over the Soviet, to ensure the victory of the (necessarily bourgeois, democratic) revolution. At best, Lenin rather nebulously allowed (with an eye on the international context, where for him a revolution against and beyond capitalism could occur, inspired perhaps by Russian events), that might allow them to take faltering, initial steps towards socialism.
The Bolsheviks in Petrograd expressed enthusiasm for the letter. Lenin’s sister Maria Ulianov, a party comrade who worked on Pravda, contacted him to express the ‘full solidarity’ of his comrades, as did the gratified Kollontai. The edits that the Bolsheviks performed on a piece written days previously, and a long way away, served to remove outdated references to a possible return of Tsarism and unconvincing insinuations of an anti-Nicholas plot among the allies, while correcting certain infelicities of language.
They also mitigated Lenin’s typically splenetic denunciation of various enemies, including among liberals, the right, and non-Bolshevik socialists. The editors were judicious enough to delete insults directed at the Soviet Executive Committee’s chair Chkheidze, at Kerensky, and even at the moderate liberal Lvov, head of the Provisional Government: they had reason to believe, after all, that they would need their help bringing the Bolshevik exiles – Lenin included – back into the country. They did not censor his attacks on Kadets and right Mensheviks who could not be of use to them. Not so much soft, then, as strategic.
The later myth of the bombshell ‘Letters from Afar’ seems to have been born out of a combination of misunderstanding of the Pravda edits and rather tendentious retellings – by Trotsky, among others – in the context o
f in-party jostling for position.
Yet while this particular conflict was largely a retrospective fiction, it undeniably gained in plausibility due to the way Lenin’s formulations, including in his intemperate polemics, evinced an uncompromising tendency, a distinguishing political logic that would, in fact, be key to other real disputes within the party. Not ineluctible by any means, but chafing against Bolshevik moderation and coalition. The ‘Letters from Afar’ were thus ‘continuity’ Bolshevism, and yet contained seeds of a distinct and more trenchant position. One that would become clearer with Lenin’s return.
On 15 March, the Soviet paper Izvestia printed the Declaration of the Rights of Soldiers, which had recently passed in the Soldiers’ section of the Soviet. It declared the end of the hated and degrading system of tsarist military peonage. There would be no more compulsory saluting, censorship of letters, officers’ right to impose disciplinary punishments. The declaration also gave soldiers the right to elect representative committees. To traditionalists, what this meant was the destruction of the Russian army.
Questions of armed power, of the soldiery, of policing, and thus of the new motley militias, were clearly central to the establishment and stabilisation of power – though this significance seemed to escape the SRs, whose paper Delo naroda featured next to no discussion of the issue. For their part, the Kadets stressed the necessity of setting up a City Militia for policing purposes – and, urgently, to replace the volunteer forces. At the same time, some among the radicals were beginning a careful consideration of the role of those armed workers’ militias that had been so central in February, and of their relation to the soldiers themselves.
As early as 8 March, the Menshevik paper Rabochaya gazeta argued that while a trustworthy and preferably elected citizens’ police force was a pressing need, a militia in the sense of ‘the armed people’ to defend the revolution was both impossible and unnecessary, given the existence of the revolutionary army. In their writings, the Bolsheviks opined that the nascent City Militia was unsatisfactory and the continued existence of the revolutionary army could not be taken for granted, and hence – marking a recurrent distinction between their position and that of other socialists – stressed the centrality of self-organisation. On 18 March, the Bolshevik intellectual Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich published ‘The Armed People’ in Pravda, in which he called for a permanent, disciplined, democratic militia of the working class, trained by the revolutionary soldiers. Such a group, in exhortation, he named ‘a Red Guard of the Proletariat’. This name, this concept, this controversial body, would soon crop up again.
Order Number 2 notwithstanding, neither Order Number 1 nor the soldiers’ declaration reduced suspicion between the ranks. As one young captain lamented in a letter home: ‘Between us and the soldiers there is an abyss.’ And now the abyss was dangerous. He sensed in the men a new attitude of recalcitrance and overt resentment, ‘revenge for centuries of servitude’, which sometimes manifested in the murder of unpopular officers at the front.
Certainly some activists attempted systematic politicisation in the army, but most of what came to be called ‘trench Bolshevism’ was simply a disgust at the soldier’s lot, a loathing of officers, and a reasonable desire not to fight and die in a hated war. After February, rates of desertion spiked. Armed men simply walked out of the trenches laden with whatever equipment they did not discard, trudging back to the towns and cities, back to the country, the mud of the fields.
In the growing anti-war mood, despite fervent attempts by the patriotic to stoke bellicose nationalism, such desertion was not always felt as shameful. ‘The streets are full of soldiers,’ complained one official of the town of Perm, near the Ural Mountains, in mid-March. ‘They harass respectable ladies, ride around with prostitutes, and behave in public like hooligans. They know that no one dares to punish them.’
On the 17th, Lenin declared Martov’s plan to be his ‘only hope’ for getting out of Switzerland, a place he roundly cursed. He was well aware that by travelling with German help, he risked being accused of treason – as, in due course, he was. For the Provisional Government, Milyukov declared that anyone who entered the country in such fashion would be subject to legal action. Regardless, ‘even through hell’, he said, Lenin was determined to go.
With the intermediation of the Swiss Socialist Party, he tried to minimise the dangers of perceived fraternisation with German authorities, insisting that there would be no passport controls on the journey, no stops or investigations along the way, and that the Germans would have no right to enquire as to the passengers’ details. The ‘sealed train’ would not technically be sealed: much stranger, it would be an extraterritorial entity, a rolling-stock legal nullity.
On 21 March, the German Embassy accepted his terms. Courtesy of the Reich, Lenin and several other revolutionaries were headed home.
Given its incoherent organisation, the range of its activities and its own unease about its authority, it might seem astonishing that the Petrograd Soviet had any sway at all. But the chagrin of the Provisional Government about the rival power was warranted: the Soviet’s announcements could directly impact government policies, most notably with respect to the war itself.
As early as 14 March, the Soviet issued a manifesto written with the help of the celebrated writer and leftist Maxim Gorky. This called for a just peace, and for ‘the peoples of the world’ ‘to take into their own hands the question of war and peace’, and to ‘oppose the acquisitive policy of the ruling classes’.
The international reception of such outreach was precisely nil. Within Russia, however, the manifesto had a propagandistic impact in its refusal of annexations or indemnities, which seemed a step towards peace; a series of military congresses endorsed it, soldiers declaring for the Soviet. A week later, the Soviet officially adopted this ‘Revolutionary Defencism’ as its position.
Such a call for peace while maintaining revolutionary Russia’s right to defend itself contained a certain ambiguity, leaving the door open to a continuing, even intensifying, war effort. Still, the Soviet declaration was anathema to right-wing liberals like Milyukov, now foreign minister, both on patriotic principle and because he believed the autocracy’s overthrow had revitalised Russia and its military power. The country could now fight effectively, he thought, if only it was allowed to.
On 23 March, during a press interview, Milyukov pointedly mentioned that he looked to a peace conference to verify Russia’s claims over the Ukrainian parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that he expected, in fulfilment of a long-held Russian expansionist dream, to gain Constantinople and the Dardanelles Straits. His absurd claims of ‘pacifist aims’ notwithstanding, this was a major provocation, and the Soviet was duly provoked. In response to the Soviet’s outrage, on 27 March the Provisional Government was forced to publish a statement of war aims very close to the Soviet’s own, invoking the ‘self-determination of nations’ and implicitly voiding the claims to Turkish and Austrian territories. But the incorrigibly off-message Milyukov openly told the Manchester Guardian that this did nothing to alter Russia’s – hardly very ‘revolutionary’ – commitments to its allies. The Soviet reacted with more fury. Its leaders – particularly Viktor Chernov, head and chief intellectual of the SRs, soon to return to Petrograd – insisted that the government’s 27 March declaration, which struck a very different tone to the foreign minister’s, be forwarded to the allies as a ‘diplomatic note’. Urged by Kerensky, a harsh rival to Milyukov, the Provisional Government felt constrained to comply. Further confrontation on this issue was not avoided, however: only postponed.
The same day as the government’s statement, a motley mix of revolutionaries met at the Zurich station. They boarded a train, checked their baggage and stowed their food. The travellers were six members of the Bund, three followers of Trotsky and nineteen Bolsheviks. A gathering of revolutionary heavyweights, including Lenin and Krupskaya; Zinoviev, the intelligent, hard-working, tousled-haired man viewed as Lenin’s henc
hman; Zlata Lilina, Bolshevik activist and the mother of Zinoviev’s young son Stefan; and the remarkable, controversial Polish revolutionary Karl Radek. Here too was Inessa Armand, the French-Russian communist, feminist, writer and musician, Lenin’s close collaborator and comrade, with whom, rumours have long suggested, his relationship was at various points more than platonic.
At the Swiss border, the exiles transferred to a two-coach special: one carriage for the Russians, one for their German escorts. The journey across Germany began. Lenin spent hours writing and making plans, breaking off late at night to complain to his boisterous comrades about their noise. To disperse the loud crowd outside the toilet, he instituted a system of slips for its use, either for its intended function or to have a smoke, in the proportions, he decided, three to one. ‘This’, Karl Radek remembered drily, ‘naturally evoked further discussions about the value of human needs.’
Far from being ‘sealed’, every time the train stopped, the German authorities had their hands full keeping local Social Democrats from trying to meet and socialise with the famous (and unwilling) Lenin. He asked his comrades to tell one persistent trade unionist to go to ‘the devil’s grandmother’.
As the train crawled on, in Russia, Kamenev and Stalin consolidated their position at an all-Russian conference of party workers. There was, however, resistance to what some comrades saw as their conditional support for the government, and still more to what was, essentially, revolutionary defencism. The Muscovite Old Bolshevik Viktor Nogin, later a party moderate, now argued that ‘we ought not now to talk about support but resistance’; Skrypnyk agreed that ‘the government is not fortifying, but checking the cause of the revolution’. But the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks – the proposal of Irakli Tsereteli, the outstanding Menshevik intellect and orator, recently returned from Siberian exile and now in charge of the Petrograd Soviet.
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution Page 11