The capital waited anxiously. Kerensky, appointing himself Commander-in-Chief, found he was without military support and was forced to rely on the Soviet, which remobilized the Bolshevik Red Guards. The General was arrested, but the Cabinet fell apart. Kerensky thereupon anointed himself the dictator of a five-man Directory. He had survived but, like Mikhail Gorbachev after the August coup of 1991, as a busted flush. Sustained by cocaine and morphia, he reigned, but no longer ruled, from the splendour of Alexander III’s suite in the Winter Palace.
“We have at last a ‘new’ (brand new!) five-man Government,” joked Stalin on 3 September, “chosen by Kerensky, endorsed by Kerensky, responsible to Kerensky.” Bolshevik strength surged in the factories, and among soldiers and Kronstadt sailors. “The army that rose against Kornilov,” wrote Trotsky, “was the army-to-be of the October Revolution.”5
Stalin’s short reign as Bolshevik leader revealed the overbearing arrogance that had always been his trademark. The Central Committee brought the Military Organization under firm control. Stalin rudely appropriated their funds and took over their newspaper Soldat in an “unprincipled style, violating the most elementary principles of party democracy.” They appealed to the Central Committee. In an early description of Stalinism, they criticized his “outright system of persecution and repression of an extremely strange character.” Stalin hauled the Military Organization before a Party trial.* His allies Sverdlov and Dzerzhinsky cleared up his mess.6 But Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev now reemerged from hiding and prison. On 4 September, Trotsky joined Stalin on the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets and on Pravda. Stalin was again overshadowed. The limelight belonged to Trotsky.
Stalin often bumped into his old Menshevik acquaintance David Sagirashvili in the corridors of the Smolny Instituted.† When Sagirashvili accused him of propagating anti-Menshevik lies in his Pravda, “he would grin in a seemingly good-natured way” and explain, in a pre-Orwellian dictum, that a “lie always has a stronger effect than the truth. The main thing is to obtain one’s objective.” As Stalin later told Molotov, “Truth is protected by a battalion of lies.”
At last, both the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets fell into Lenin’s hands, but the Bolsheviks were still divided on what to do next. It was Lenin, by sheer force of will, who drove them to the October Revolution: sometimes one individual does change the course of history. Yet Kamenev now threatened to reroute history himself—the mild Bolshevik offered a completely different path. On 14 September, he began trying to negotiate a coalition with the Mensheviks and SRs at the Democratic State Conference in the Alexandrinsky Theatre.
The Old Man, hiding in Helsinki, was appalled and frustrated. On 15 September, he sent the Central Committee a letter ordering them to seize power on behalf of the Bolsheviks alone.
“History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now!” wrote Lenin. But Kamenev and Zinoviev feared losing everything. It was April all over again: they were not the only ones who thought Lenin was wildly misguided. “We were aghast!” admitted Bukharin. At the ensuing CC, attended by Trotsky, Kamenev, Sverdlov and Shaumian, up from the Caucasus, Stalin backed Lenin and proposed that the letter be distributed secretly to key Party organizations. The Central Committee refused by a vote of six to four, an extraordinary result just a month before the October Revolution that reveals the popularity of Kamenev’s way. Yet the two ultra-radicals, Stalin and Trotsky, seeing no need for any Menshevik alliance, supported Lenin. At the CC on 21 September, Stalin and Trotsky demanded a boycott of the coming pre-parliament, where Kamenev hoped to continue his coalition-building, but they were again decisively defeated. Lenin ranted that Kamenev and Zinoviev were “miserable traitors!”
On 25 September, the Bolsheviks took control of the Soviet Executive Committee. Trotsky, returning as Soviet chairman after thirteen years of arrest, exile and emigration, started to assert Soviet command of the military. He and his Inter-Borough Party had only just joined the Bolsheviks but, while Lenin remained in hiding, Trotsky continued to perform nightly at the packed Cirque Moderne.
Lenin bombarded Kamenev and the Bolsheviks with a barrage of articles and secret letters, arguing that time was short, with Kerensky starting another crackdown, and that the second Congress of Soviets had been summoned to Petrograd. Thus they must seize power first—or they would have to share power in a coalition, “and cover themselves with eternal shame and destroy themselves as a Party!”
Lenin secretly moved back from Finland to hide in the comfortable apartment of Margarita Fofanova in Vyborg, whence he continued to spew forth his radical bile. “The success of the Russian and world revolutions just depends on two or three days’ fighting,” he declared, fearing that Kamenev’s view could prevail. “Better to die a man than let the enemy pass!” When the Central Committee recoiled, he submitted his resignation. These letters were “written with extraordinary force,” wrote Bukharin, “and threatened us with all sorts of punishments.” In his brilliant rage, Lenin was beginning to sound almost deranged. Indeed Stalin, editor of the Party newspaper Rabochii Put (Workers’ Way), actually censored Lenin’s more outrageous ravings, publishing instead an earlier, more moderate piece.
Sometimes the ranting prophet broke free of his confinement. “One morning just before the October Revolution,” recalls Anna Alliluyeva, “there was a ring at the door. I saw a smallish man dressed in a black overcoat and a Finnish cap on the threshold.”
“Is Stalin at home?” he asked politely.
“Good Lord, you look just like a Finn, Vladimir Illich,” Anna exclaimed to Lenin. “After a brief conversation, Stalin and he left together . . .”
Just days later, these scruffy, diminutive figures, who now walked the streets of Petrograd disguised and unrecognized, seized the Russian Empire. They formed the world’s first Marxist government, remained at the peak of the state for the rest of their days, sacrificed millions of lives at the pitiless altar of their utopian ideology, and ruled the imperium, between them, for the next thirty-six years.7
* Just as the police were known as pharaohs so any military officers were nicknamed “Junkers” after the Prussian noble military class.
† Emelianov was arrested in the Great Terror. Krupskaya supposedly interceded on his behalf and he, along with his entire family, was kept in confinement until Stalin’s death.
* Thus Stalin designed his first semi-military tunic, a look probably copied from Kerensky, who now regarded himself as a Russian Napoleon: the vain Premier already lived in his own military uniform, boots and tunic despite having no military experience whatsoever. Stalin would wear this tunic for the rest of his life, often with a worker’s cap. Lenin had now ceased to wear his Homburg hat and favoured workers’ brimmed caps. In the Civil War, the so-called Party tunic, leather cap, coat, boots and Mauser became almost the Bolshevik uniform and symbolized the military nature of the Bolshevik.
* That summer, the other intriguing Party scandal was that Kamenev was accused of having been an Okhrana agent: the Central Committee asked Stalin to inform the Soviet Executive Committee. There was an investigation. Kamenev was cleared on 30 August.
† After its humiliation in the July Days, the Soviet was moved out of the Taurida Palace into another neo-classical edifice next door, the Smolny Institute, built by Catherine the Great as a boarding-school for noble girls, where all the parties, including the Bolsheviks, now set up their offices. It was from the Smolny that Zinoviev and then, after his downfall in 1926, Sergei Kirov, a young protégé of Stalin’s, ruled Leningrad. Here, in 1934, Kirov was assassinated, a crime which, whether or not it was organized by Stalin, provided the excuse for the Great Terror. During the Siege of Leningrad, the city was ruled from the Smolny. Today, it houses the office of the mayor of St. Petersburg.
41
1917 Winter: The Countdown
Petrograd in October 1917 seemed calm, but beneath the glossy surface the city danced in a trance of last pleasures. “Gambling clubs functioned hectically from dusk till
dawn,” reported John Reed, “with champagne flowing and stakes of 20,000 roubles. In the centre of the city at night, prostitutes in jewels and expensive furs walked up and down and crowded the cafés . . . Hold-ups increased to such an extent that it was dangerous to walk the streets.” Russia, wrote Ilya Ehrenburg, later one of Stalin’s favoured writers, “lived as if on a railway platform, waiting for the guard’s whistle.” Aristocrats sold priceless treasures on the streets, the food shortages worsened, queues lengthened, while the rich still dined at Donon’s and Constant’s, the two smartest restaurants, and the bourgeois vied for tickets to hear Chaliapin sing.
“Mysterious individuals circulating around the shivering women in lines for bread and milk, whispering that the Jews had cornered the food supply . . . Monarchist plots, German spies, smugglers hatching schemes,” observed Reed. “And, in the rain, the bitter chill, the great throbbing city under grey skies rushing faster and faster toward . . . what?” Trotsky answered Reed’s question, responding to the baying crowd at the Cirque Moderne: “The time for words has passed. The hour has come for a duel to the death between revolution and counter-revolution.” In the lonely magnificence of the Winter Palace, Kerensky waited, wasting the embers of his power in tokes of morphia and cocaine.
At 10 p.m. on the dark, drizzly night of 10 October 1917, Lenin seized his chance to convince the Central Committee: the eleven high Bolsheviks slipped one by one out of the Smolny to rendezvous at 32 Karpovka Embankment, a street-level apartment in the Petrograd District. It belonged to Galina Flakserman, the Bolshevik wife of the Menshevik scribe Sukhanov. “Oh the novel jokes of the merry muse of History,” he reflected. “This supreme and decisive session took place in my home . . . but without my knowledge.”
Some of the eleven were in disguise: a clean-shaven Lenin, who, Krupskaya thought, “looked every bit like a Lutheran priest,” sported an ill-fitting curly wig that kept sliding off his bald pate. As Lenin started to address Stalin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky in a hot room with a blanket covering the window, Galina Flakserman provided salami, cheese and black bread, brewing up the samovar in the corridor. But no one ate yet.
“The political situation is fully ripe for the transfer of power,” declared Lenin, but even then the Bolsheviks argued against him. Minutes were not taken, but we know that Stalin and Trotsky backed Lenin from the start. Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had grown a beard and cropped his locks as his disguise, remained unconvinced. The argument was “intense and passionate,” but Trotsky wrote that no one could match Lenin’s “thought, will, confidence, courage.” Gradually Lenin overcame “the wavering and the doubtful,” who now felt a “surge of strength and resolve.” In the early hours, there was a loud banging on the door. Was it Kerensky’s police? It was Galina Flakserman’s brother Yury, come to help serve the sausages and man the samovar. The Central Committee voted on a vague resolution for an uprising. “No practical plan of insurrection, even tentative, was sketched out that night,” recalls Trotsky. Nine supported Lenin against Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were “deeply convinced that to proclaim an armed uprising now means to gamble, not only with the fate of our Party, but with that of the Russian and international revolution.”
Ravenous and punch-drunk, the winners fell upon the sausages, and teased Zinoviev and Kamenev.1
Five days later, on 16 October, at another secret meeting at the Lesnoi District Duma on the northern outskirts, Lenin, backed by Stalin and Sverdlov (Trotsky being absent at the Soviet), again berated the doubters. “History will never forgive us if we don’t take power now!” he cried, resetting his precarious wig.
“We don’t have the right to take the risk and gamble everything at once,” retorted Zinoviev.
Stalin stood with Lenin: “The date must be chosen expediently.” The Central Committee must, said the former seminarist who saw his Marxism as a quasi-religion, have “more faith . . . There are two lines here: one holds a course for victory of revolution . . . the other doesn’t believe in revolution and counts merely on staying as an opposition . . . Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s proposals . . . give the counter-revolution the chance to get organized,” Stalin warned. “We’ll go on endless retreat and lose the entire revolution.”
Lenin won ten votes to two. The Central Committee elected Stalin, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky and two others to a Military-Revolutionary Centre “to become part” of Trotsky’s Military-Revolutionary Committee at the Soviet. The organ that would seize power had not yet been decided. The bewigged Lenin scuttled back into hiding as Kerensky sensed danger and raised the stakes: Petrograd was in danger from the advancing Germans. He announced the recall of loyal regiments from the front. There was no time to lose.
Then on 18 October Kamenev published an attack on the “ruinous step” of an uprising in Maxim Gorky’s journal, Novaya Zhizn. It is an irony of 1917 that, for all Lenin’s iron will, Kamenev, always “sodden with sentimentality,” in Trotsky’s words, was the only truly consistent Bolshevik. “Kamenev and Zinoviev have betrayed the CC!” Lenin exploded. “I demand the expulsion of both the strike-breakers.” But Zinoviev insisted, in a letter, on continuing the debate in secret. Stalin, as chief editor of Rabochii Put, published the letter.*
At a confrontational CC meeting on 20 October, Trotsky attacked Stalin for this. Stalin sulkily offered his resignation. It was refused, but this marked the first clash between the two Bolshevik titans. Trotsky called for the expulsion of the “strike-breakers;” Stalin countered by proposing that they “be required to submit but kept in the CC.” Kamenev tried to resign from the Central Committee, but was merely removed from the leadership. Stalin prepared the public for the rising in an article that declared: “The Bolsheviks have issued the call: be ready!”*
The Bolsheviks were getting ready themselves. In a third-floor office of the Smolny, Trotsky and Sverdlov held the first organizational meeting of the Military-Revolutionary Committee (MRC): it was secretly Bolshevik but had the advantage of operating under the aegis of the Soviet. This, not Stalin’s Centre, would be the uprising’s headquarters: he was not a member.†
On the twenty-first, the MRC declared itself the legitimate authority over the Petrograd garrison. Stalin, at the political centre of the Party, drafted the agenda for the second Congress of Soviets, assigning himself to speak on “nationalities,” Lenin on “land war and power,” and Trotsky on “the current situation.”2 On the twenty-third, the MRC took command of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Everything was ready: even myopic Molotov practised pistol-shooting in his Smolny office. “The existing government of landlords and capitalists,” reported Stalin that day, “must be replaced by a new government of workers and peasants . . . If all of you act solidly and staunchly, nobody will dare to resist the will of the people.”
At dawn on Tuesday, 24 October, Kerensky raided Stalin’s newspapers at the Trud Press. As Stalin watched, the troops smashed the presses, seized machinery and set guards over the offices. He now had to prise the Bolshevik press machine back into operation: just as modern coups always seize the television station, in 1917 a revolution without newspapers was unthinkable. Stalin called Red units for reinforcements while he managed to circulate the already printed papers. The Volkynia Regiment sent a company. By midday, Stalin had regained control of his presses. Later that day, he said the newspapers were “being set up again.” But he had missed the CC meeting where the tasks were handed out for the coup. Trotsky accused him of “dropping out of the game” because he was not on one of the lists of assignments:
Bubnov: railways
Dzerzhinsky: post and telegraph
Milyutin: food supplies
Podvoisky [changed to Sverdlov]: surveillance of the Provisional Government
Kamenev and Vinter: negotiations with Left SRs [the radical wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries]
Lomov and Nogin: information to Moscow
This list of second-raters proves nothing: Lenin, in hiding, and Trotsky, who also missed the meeting, we
re not even mentioned, while the “strike-breaker” Kamenev is included. Historians habitually follow Trotsky’s (totally prejudiced but superbly written) version of events in asserting that Stalin “missed the Revolution,” but this does not stand up to scrutiny. He was not the star of the day, but he missed a military assignment because he had his hands full at the raided newspapers, not because he was politically insignificant. Far from it: even Trotsky admits that “contact with Lenin was mainly through Stalin,” hardly an unimportant role (though he cannot resist adding, “because he was the person of least interest to the police”).
Stalin’s “missing the Revolution” was no more than a few daytime hours of the twenty-fourth, while the coup actually stretched over two days. He was at the newspapers all morning. Then he was summoned by Lenin: Margarita Fofanova reveals that Stalin intended to give a speech that day at the Polytechnical Institute but suddenly “we had to hand him a note from VI.” Lenin was twitching with fury at the Fofanova apartment. If Stalin had rushed to him, he would have found him ranting, “The Government is tottering! It must be given the deathblow at all costs . . . We mustn’t wait! We may lose everything!”
Stalin arrived at the Smolny Institute, where he, along with Trotsky, addressed the Bolshevik delegates, just arrived for the Congress of Soviets, presenting the coup as a reaction to the government suppression of the Bolsheviks, not as an uprising.* “At the front they’re coming over to us,” Stalin explained. “The Provisional Government’s wavering. The [cruiser] Aurora has been asked to fire on the bridges—in any case the bridges will be ours. There are mutinies among Junkers and troops. Rabochii Put is being set up again. The telephone system’s not ours yet. The Post Office is ours . . .” Red Guards and Bolshevik troops were on their way.
“I met Stalin on the eve of the Revolution at midnight in the Smolny,” reports Sagirashvili. Stalin was so excited that, “contrary to his usual solemnity and secrecy, he revealed the die had been cast.” That night, the eve of Glorious October, Stalin popped home to the Alliluyevs. “Yes, everything’s ready,” he told the girls. “We take action tomorrow. We’ve got all the city districts in our hands. We’ll seize power.”3
Young Stalin Page 42
