The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  Lenin was the fastest at adjusting to the change. Until 1917 he had been an obscure Russian emigrant living mainly in Switzerland. Insofar as he had a reputation in Europe, it was not flattering; for he was known as a trouble-maker who had brought schism to the Marxists of the Russian Empire. Even many Bolsheviks were annoyed by him. His supporters were constantly asking him to spend less time on polemics and more time on making a real revolution, and alleged that his head was made giddy with all that Alpine air.

  But, for Lenin, there were great questions at stake in almost any small matter. He had been involved in an unending line of controversies since becoming a revolutionary as a student at Kazan University. Born in the provincial town of Simbirsk in 1870, his real name was Vladimir Ulyanov. ‘Lenin’ was a pseudonym assumed years after he became a political activist. His background was a mixture of Jewish, German and Kalmyk as well as Russian elements. In the empire of the Romanovs this was not a unique combination. Nor was his father wholly unusual as a man of humble social origins in rising to the rank of province schools inspector (which automatically conferred hereditary nobility upon him and his heirs). This was a period of rapid educational expansion. The Ulyanovs were characteristic beneficiaries of the reforms which followed the Emancipation Edict.

  The most extraordinary thing about the family, indeed, was the participation of Vladimir’s older brother Alexander in a conspiracy to assassinate Emperor Alexander III in 1887. The attempt failed, but Alexander Ulyanov was found out and hanged. A family which had dutifully made the best of the cultural opportunities available suddenly became subject to the police’s intense suspicion.

  Lenin shared his brother’s rebelliousness, and was expelled from Kazan University as a student trouble-maker. He proceeded to take a first-class honours degree as an external student at St Petersburg University in 1891; but it was Marxism that enthralled him. He joined intellectual dissenters first in Samara and then in St Petersburg. The police caught him, and he was exiled to Siberia. There he wrote a book on the development of capitalism in Russia, which was published legally in 1899. He was released in 1900, and went into emigration in the following year. Young as he was, he had pretty definite notions about what his party – the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party – needed organizationally. What Is To Be Done?, printed in Russian in Munich in 1902, asserted the case for discipline, hierarchy and centralism; and it provoked the criticism that such a book owed more to the terrorists of Russian agrarian socialism than to conventional contemporary Marxism.

  In 1903 the dispute over the booklet led the émigrés to set up separate factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. As Bolshevik leader he never lost the common touch. He personally met comrades arriving off the trains from Russia; and he volunteered to help fellow party member Nikolai Valentinov with his part-time job to trundle a customer’s belongings by handcart from one side of Geneva to another.15 Doubtless he liked subordinate admirers better than rivals; all colleagues who rivalled his intellectual stature eventually walked out on him. Nor was his abrasiveness to everyone’s taste. An acquaintance likened him to ‘a schoolteacher from Smaland about to lay into the priest he had fallen out with’.16 But when Lenin returned to Russia in the near-revolution of 1905–6, he showed that he could temper his fractiousness with tactical flexibility, even to the point of collaborating again with the Mensheviks.

  The Okhrana’s offensive against the revolutionaries drove him back to Switzerland in 1907, and for the next decade he resumed his schismatic, doctrinaire ways. Acolytes like Lev Kamenev, Iosif Stalin and Grigori Zinoviev were attracted to him; but even Stalin called his disputations about epistemology in 1908–9 a storm in a tea-cup. Moreover, Lenin struggled against the foundation of a legal workers’ newspaper in St Petersburg. Spurning the chance to influence the labour movement in Russia on a daily basis, he preferred to engage in polemics in the journals of Marxist political and economic theory.17

  His political prospects had not looked bright before the Great War. He could exert influence over Bolsheviks in face-to-face sessions, but his dominance evaporated whenever they returned to clandestine activity in Russia; and his call in 1914 for the military defeat of his native country lost him further support in his faction. But he held out for his opinions: ‘And so this is my fate. One campaign of struggle after another – against political idiocies, vulgarities, opportunism, etc.’18 The self-inflicted loneliness of his campaigns cultivated in him an inner strength which served him handsomely when the Romanov dynasty fell in February 1917. He was also older than any other leading Bolshevik, being aged forty-seven years while Central Committee members on average were eleven years younger.19 He was cleverer than all of them, including even Trotski. And while lacking any outward vanity, he was convinced that he was a man of destiny and that his tutelage of the Bolsheviks was essential for the inception of the socialist order.20

  His rise to prominence was effected with minimal technological resources. The central party newspaper Pravda carried no photographs and had a print-run that did not usually exceed 90,000.21 Such few cinemas as Russia possessed had shown newsreels not of Lenin but of Alexander Kerenski. Nevertheless he adapted well to the open political environment. His ability to rouse a crowd was such that adversaries recorded that he could make the hairs stand on the back of their necks with excitement. He also contrived to identify himself with ordinary working people by giving up his Homburg in favour of a workman’s cap. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were becoming synonyms in the minds of those Russians who followed contemporary politics.22

  The mass media became freely available to him after the October Revolution. The Decree on Land had a large impact on opinion amidst the peasantry, and became popularly known as Lenin’s Decree.23 But Bolsheviks were extremely small in number; and most of the very few village ‘soviets’ were really communes under a different name.24 Moreover, the usual way for the peasantry to hear that the October Revolution had occurred in Petrograd was not through Pravda but from the accounts of soldiers who had left the Eastern front and the city garrison to return to their families and get a share of the land that was about to be redistributed. In the towns the profile of the Bolshevik party was much higher. Already having won majorities in dozens of urban soviets before the Provisional Government’s overthrow, Bolsheviks spread their rule across central, northern and south-eastern Russia; and their success was repeated in the main industrial centres in the borderlands. Baku in Azerbaijan and Kharkov in Ukraine were notable examples.25

  For the most part, the Bolsheviks came to power locally by means of local resources. Sovnarkom sent auxiliary armed units to assist the transfer of authority in Moscow; but elsewhere this was typically unnecessary. In Ivanovo the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries put up little resistance, and the Bolsheviks celebrated Sovnarkom’s establishment with a rendition of the Internationale. In Saratov there was fighting, but it lasted less than a day. On assuming power, the Bolsheviks were joyful and expectant: ‘Our commune is the start of the worldwide commune. We as leaders take full responsibility and fear nothing.’26

  And yet the October Revolution was not yet secure. The political base of the Sovnarkom was exceedingly narrow: it did not include the Mensheviks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries or even the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries; it failed to embrace all Bolsheviks after the walk-out of the three People’s Commissars. Yet Lenin, backed by Trotski and Sverdlov, did not flinch. Indeed he seemed to grow in confidence as difficulties increased. The man was an irrepressible leader. Without compunction he gave unrestrained authority to the Extraordinary Commission and their chairman, Felix Dzierżyński. Initially Dzierżyński refrained from executing politicians hostile to Bolshevism; his victims were mainly fraudsters and other criminals. But the sword of the Revolution was being sharpened for arbitrary use at the regime’s demand. Lenin had no intention of casually losing the power he had won for his party.

  Steadily the Bolshevik central leaders who h
ad walked out on him and Trotski returned to their posts; and in mid-December the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, cheered by the Decree on Land and convinced that their political duty lay with the October Revolution, agreed to become partners of the Bolsheviks in Sovnarkom. As Left Socialist-Revolutionaries entered the People’s Commissariats, a two-party coalition was put in place.

  Yet the question remained: what was to happen about the Constituent Assembly? Lenin had suggested to Sverdlov in the course of the October seizure of power in the capital that the elections should not go ahead.27 But Bolshevik party propaganda had played heavily upon the necessity of a democratically-chosen government. Lenin himself had jibed that Kerenski would find endless pretexts to postpone the elections and that, under the Bolsheviks, the overwhelming majority of society would rally to their cause.28 And so Lenin’s last-minute doubts about the Constituent Assembly were ignored. The final polling arrangements were made by November and were put to use in the first more or less free parliamentary elections in the country’s history. (They were to remain the only such elections in Russia until 1993.) To the horror of Sverdlov, who had dissuaded Lenin from banning the elections, the Bolsheviks gained only a quarter of the votes cast while the Socialist-Revolutionaries obtained thirty-seven per cent.29

  The Sovnarkom coalition reacted ruthlessly: if the people failed to perceive where their best interests lay, then they had to be protected against themselves. The Constituent Assembly met on 5 January 1918 in the Tauride Palace. The Socialist-Revolutionary Viktor Chernov made a ringing denunciation of Bolshevism and asserted his own party’s commitment to parliamentary democracy, peace and the transfer of land to the peasants. But he had more words than guns. The custodian of the building, the anarchist Zheleznyakov, abruptly announced: ‘The guard is tired!’ The deputies to the Assembly were told to leave and a demonstration held in support of the elections was fired upon by troops loyal to Sovnarkom. The doors of the Constituent Assembly were closed, never to be reopened.

  The handful of garrison soldiers, Red Guards and off-duty sailors who applied this violence could crush opposition in the capital, but were less impressive elsewhere. Contingents were sent from Petrograd and Moscow to Ukraine where the local government, the Rada, refused to accept the writ of Sovnarkom. Tens of thousands of armed fighters reached Kiev. The struggle was scrappy, and it took until late January 1918 before Kiev was occupied by the Bolshevik-led forces.

  All this was gleefully noted by the German and Austrian high commands. Negotiations were held at Brest-Litovsk, the town nearest the trenches of the Eastern front’s northern sector on 14 November, and a truce was soon agreed. The Soviet government expected this to produce an interlude for socialist revolutions to break out in central Europe. Confident that the ‘imperialist war’ was about to end, Lenin and his colleagues issued orders for the Russian armies to be demobilized. To a large extent they were merely giving retrospective sanction to desertions. Ludendorff and Hindenburg at any rate were delighted; for it was German policy to seek Russia’s dissolution as a military power by political means. Inadvertently the Bolsheviks had performed this function brilliantly. Now the Bolsheviks, too, had to pay a price: in December 1917 the German negotiators at Brest-Litovsk delivered an ultimatum to the effect that Sovnarkom should allow national self-determination to the borderlands and cease to claim sovereignty over them.

  Around New Year 1918 Lenin asked his colleagues whether it was really possible to fight the Germans.30 Trotski saw the deserted Russian trenches every time he travelled to and from Brest-Litovsk. A Russian army no longer existed to repel attack. In this situation, as Trotski acknowledged, Sovnarkom could not fulfil its commitment to waging a ‘revolutionary war’. And yet Trotski also argued against signing a separate peace with the Central Powers, a peace that was intolerable not only to the Bolsheviks but also to all other Russian political parties. His recommendation was that Bolsheviks should drag out the negotiations, using them as an opportunity to issue calls to revolution which would be reported in Berlin as well as in Petrograd.

  Despite his professional inexperience, Trotski proved a match for Richard von Kühlmann and Otto von Czernin who parleyed on behalf of the Central Powers. His tactic of ‘neither war nor peace’ was so bizarre in the world history of diplomacy that his interlocutors did not immediately know how to reply. But in January 1918 the Central Powers gave their ultimatum that, unless a separate peace was quickly signed on the Eastern front, Russia would be overrun. Lenin counselled Sovnarkom that the coalition had no choice but to accept the German terms, and that procrastination would provoke either an immediate invasion or a worsening of the terms of the ultimatum. All the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries rejected his advice. Successive meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee, too, turned it down. As the ill-tempered deliberations proceeded, Trotski’s policy of neither war nor peace was temporarily adopted. But eventually a choice would have to be made between war and peace.

  Lenin concentrated upon persuading fellow leading Bolsheviks. On 8 January he offered his ‘Theses on a Separate and Annexationist Peace’ to the party’s faction at the Third Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Cossacks’ Deputies. Only fifteen out of sixty-three listeners voted for him.31 But Lenin was fired up for the struggle. He secured Trotski’s private consent that he would support Lenin if and when it came to a straight choice between war and peace; and he tempted the vacillators with the thought that a peace on the Eastern front would enable the Bolsheviks to ‘strangle’ the Russian bourgeoisie and prepare better for an eventual revolutionary war in Europe.32

  Steadily Lenin gained ground in the Central Committee. Sverdlov, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev backed him strongly, and Bukharin and the Left Communists, as they were becoming known, began to wilt in the heat of Lenin’s assault. At the Central Committee he circulated a questionnaire on contingency planning. Bukharin conceded that there were imaginable situations when he would not object in principle to the signature of a separate peace. Sverdlov’s Secretariat plied the local party committees with a version of the debate that was biased in Lenin’s favour. There was also a distinct lack of impartiality in the Secretariat’s arrangements for the selection of delegates to a Seventh Party Congress which would definitively decide between war and peace.33 And as Lenin had warned, the Germans were not fooled by Trotski’s delaying tactics. On 18 February they advanced from Riga and took Dvinsk, only six hundred kilometres from Petrograd. That evening, at last, a shaken Central Committee adopted Lenin’s policy of bowing to the German terms.

  The vote had gone seven to five for Lenin because Trotski had joined his side. But then Trotski had second thoughts and again voted against Lenin. Germany and Austria-Hungary, however, increased their demands. The Soviet government had previously been asked to relinquish claims of sovereignty over the area presently occupied by the German and Austrian armies. Now Lenin and his colleagues were required to forgo all Ukraine, Belorussia and the entire south Baltic region to the eastern edge of the Estonian lands. Sovnarkom would lose all the western borderlands.

  Sverdlov took the news to the Central Committee on 23 February that the Germans were giving them until seven o’clock the next morning to announce compliance. Momentarily Stalin suggested that their bluff should be called. But Lenin furiously threatened to withdraw from Sovnarkom and campaign in the country for a separate peace: ‘These terms must be signed. If you do not sign them, you are signing the death warrant for Soviet power within three weeks!’34 Trotski found a way to climb down by declaring a preference for revolutionary war but postulating that it could not be fought by a divided party. He therefore abstained in the vote in the Central Committee, and victory was handed to Lenin. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March. Cannily Lenin, Russia’s pre-eminent advocate of a separate peace, declined to attend the official ceremony and entrusted this task instead to Central Committee member Grigori Sokolnikov.

  Opinion in the rest of the party had also been moving in Lenin’s favour;
and at the Party Congress, which lasted three days from 6 March, his arguments and Sverdlov’s organizational manipulations paid off: the delegates approved the signature of ‘the obscene peace’. But at a price. Disgusted Left Communists, with Bukharin at their head, resigned from both Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were no less horrified, and pulled their representatives out of Sovnarkom. Not even Lenin was totally confident that the separate peace with the Central Powers would hold. On 10 March the seat of government was moved from Petrograd to Moscow, which had not been the Russian capital for two centuries, just in case the German armies decided to occupy the entire Baltic region. Nor was it inconceivable that Moscow, too, might become a target for the Germans.

  In fact it was in Germany’s interest to abide by the terms of the treaty so as to be able to concentrate her best military divisions on the Western front.35 Ludendorff needed to finish off the war against Britain and France before the USA could bring her formidable military and industrial power in full on their side. Only then would Germany have the opportunity to turn on Russia. The Bolsheviks had to keep on hoping that socialist revolution would occur in Berlin before any such contingency might arise.

  In the meantime Sovnarkom faced enormous difficulties. By the stroke of a pen Russia had been disjoined from Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic region. Half the grain, coal, iron and human population of the former Russian Empire was lost to the rulers in Petrograd and Moscow. There would have been an economic crisis even without the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The harvest of summer 1917 was only thirteen per cent below the average for the half-decade before the Great War; but this was 13.3 million metric tons of grain short of the country’s requirements.36 Ukraine, southern Russia and the Volga region usually enjoyed good enough harvests with which to feed themselves and sell the remainder in the rest of the Russian Empire. These three regions had a shortfall in 1917–18, and possessed no surplus to ‘export’ to other parts. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk made a bad situation worse.