The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  The history of the Russian revolutionary movement knows several major instances of leaders of revolutionary organizations allowing some of their members to enter into relations with the political police as secret informers, in the hope that in return for giving the police some insignificant information, these party spies could extract from it much more useful information for the party.

  111

  When he testified before a commission of the Provisional Government in June 1917, Lenin hinted that, indeed, he may have used Malinovskii in this manner:

  I did not believe in provocateurship in this case and for the following reason: if Malinovskii were a provocateur, the Okhranka [sic] would not gain from that as much as our party gained from

  Pravda

  and the whole legal apparatus. It is clear that by putting a provocateur into the Duma, removing for him the rivals of the Bolsheviks, etc., the Okhranka was guided by a crude image of Bolshevism—I would say a comic book caricature: the Bolsheviks will not organize an armed uprising. To have in hand all the threads, from the point of view of the Okhranka, it was worth anything to get Malinovskii into the Duma and the [Bolshevik] Central Committee. But when the Okhranka achieved both these objectives, it turned out that Malinovskii had become one of those links in the long and solid chain connecting our illegal base with

  Pravda

  .

  *

  Although Lenin denied knowledge of Malinovskii’s police connections, this reasoning sounds like a convincing apology for employing a police agent to further the party’s objectives—that is, exploiting to the maximum the opportunities for legal work to win mass support when no other means were available.† When Malinovskii went on trial in 1918, the Bolshevik prosecutor indeed pressured tsarist police witnesses to testify that Malinovskii had done more harm to the tsarist authorities than to the Bolsheviks.112 The fact that Malinovskii returned of his own free will to Soviet Russia in November 1918, when the Red Terror was at its height, and demanded to see Lenin strongly suggests that he expected to be exonerated. But Lenin had no more use for him: he attended his trial but did not testify. Malinovskii was executed.

  In fact, Malinovskii had performed for Lenin many valuable services. His help in the founding of Pravda and Nash put’ has been mentioned. In addition, in his Duma speeches he read texts written by Lenin, Zinoviev, and other Bolshevik leaders: prior to delivery, he submitted these to Sergei Vissarionov, the deputy director of the Police Department, for editing.113 By this means, the Bolshevik message was spread nationwide. But above all he worked assiduously to prevent the reunification of Lenin’s followers in Russia with the Mensheviks. When the Fourth Duma convened, it transpired that the seven Menshevik and six Bolshevik deputies acted in a more cooperative spirit than either Lenin or the police desired: they behaved, in fact, like a single Social-Democratic delegation, as was usually the case when Lenin was not personally present to sow discord. Keeping them apart and thus weakening them was a mission to which the police assigned high priority: according to Beletskii, “Malinovskii was ordered to do everything possible to deepen the split in the parties.”114 It was a case of the interests of Lenin and the police coinciding.‡

  Lenin’s dictatorial methods and his complete lack of scruples alienated some of his staunchest supporters. Tired of intrigues and squabbles, caught in the prevailing mood of spiritualism, some of the brightest Bolsheviks began to seek solace in religion and idealistic philosophy: in 1909, the dominant tendency in Bolshevik ranks came to be known as Bogostroitel’stvo, or “God building.” Led by Bogdanov, the future head of “Proletarian Culture,” and A. V. Lunacharskii, the future Commissar of Enlightenment, the movement was a socialist response to Bogoiskatel’stvo, or “God-seeking,” popular among non-radical intellectuals. In Religion and Socialism, Lunacharskii depicted socialism as a type of religious experience, a “religion of labor.” In 1909, the proponents of this ideology established a school in Capri. Lenin, who found the whole development utterly distasteful, organized two counterschools, one in Bologna, the other in Longjumeau, near Paris. The latter, established in 1911, was a kind of Workers’ University, in which workers sent from Russia underwent systematic indoctrination in social science and politics: the faculty included Lenin and his two most loyal followers, Zinoviev and Kamenev. The inevitable police informer, this time disguised as a student, reported that the instruction at Longjumeau consisted of

  mindless memorization by the pupils of snatches of lessons, which in their presentation bore the character of indisputable dogmas and which in no way encouraged critical analysis and a rationally conscious absorption.

  115

  By 1912, after Martov’s public revelations of Lenin’s unscrupulous financial dealings and his use of money, much of it illicitly obtained, to achieve domination, the two factions gave up the pretense of being one party. The Mensheviks felt that the Bolshevik actions compromised the Social-Democratic movement. At the meeting of the International Socialist Bureau in 1912, Plekhanov openly accused Lenin of theft. But although the Mensheviks professed to be appalled by Lenin’s resort to crime and slander and by his admission that he deliberately misled workers about them, and although they castigated him as a “political charlatan” (Martov), they refrained from expelling him, whereas Struve, whose only sin was to sympathize with Eduard Bernstein’s “Revisionism,” they got rid of in no time. Little wonder Lenin would not take them seriously.

  The final break between the two factions occurred in January 1912 at Lenin’s Prague Conference, following which they never again held joint meetings. Lenin appropriated the name “Central Committee” and appointed one consisting exclusively of hard-line Bolsheviks. Although the breach at the top was complete, rank and file Mensheviks and Bolsheviks inside Russia more often than not worked together and continued to view each other as comrades.

  Lenin spent the two years preceding the outbreak of World War I in Cracow, from where he was able to maintain contact with his Russian followers. Either just before or immediately after the start of the war, he entered into a relationship with an agency of the Austrian Government, the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine, which in return for his support of Ukrainian national aspirations paid him subsidies and assisted his revolutionary activities.116The Union received funds from both Vienna and Berlin and operated under the supervision of the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. One of the people involved in its activities was Parvus, who in 1917 would play a critical part in securing Lenin passage through Germany to revolutionary Russia. An accounting statement submitted by the Union, dated Vienna, December 16, 1914, contains the following entry:

  The Union has given support to the Majority faction of Russian Social-Democracy in the form of money and help in the establishment of communications with Russia. The leader of that faction, Lenin, is not hostile to Ukrainian demands, as demonstrated by his lecture, reported on in

  Ukrainische Nachrichten

  .

  117

  50. Lenin: Paris 1910.

  This connection proved very useful to Lenin when the Austrian police arrested him and Grigori Zinoviev (July 26/August 8, 1914) as enemy aliens and suspected spies. Influential persons in the Austrian and Polish socialist movements, among them Jacob Ganetskii (Haniecki, also known as Fürstenberg), an employee of Parvus’s and a close associate of Lenin, intervened on their behalf. Five days later, the viceroy of Galicia in Lwow received a cable from Vienna advising him that it was not desirable to detain Lenin, who was identified as “an enemy of tsarism.”118 On August 6/19, the Cracow Military Procurator telegraphed the district court in Nowy Targ, where Lenin was incarcerated, ordering his immediate release.119 On August 19/September 1, Lenin, Krupskaia, and Krupskaia’s mother, on a pass from the Austrian police, left Vienna for Switzerland in an Austrian military mail train—a means of transport unlikely to be made available to ordinary enemy aliens.120 Zinoviev and his wife followed two weeks later. The circumstances of Lenin and Zinoviev’s release from an Aust
rian prison and the manner of Lenin’s departure from Austria indicate that Vienna regarded them as valuable assets.

  In Switzerland, Lenin immediately set to work to deal with the failure of the Socialist International to honor its anti-war platform.

  It had been a fundamental maxim of the international socialist movement that the interests of the working class cut across national borders and that the “proletariat” would under no circumstances spill blood in the capitalist struggle for markets. The Stuttgart Congress of the Socialist International, convened in August 1907, in the midst of an international crisis, devoted a great deal of attention to militarism and the threat of war. Two tendencies developed, one led by Bebel, which favored opposing war and, if war did break out, struggling for its “early termination.” The other trend was represented by three Russian delegates—Lenin, Martov, and Rosa Luxemburg, who, drawing on the Russian experience of 1905, wanted the socialists to take advantage of the fighting to unleash an international civil war.121 At the latter’s urging, the congress resolved that in the event of hostilities, it would be the duty of the workers and their parliamentary deputies

  to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and to do all in their power to utilize the economic and political crisis caused by the war to rouse the peoples and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.

  122

  This clause represented a rhetorical concession by the right-wing majority to the left-wing minority to paper over their differences. But Lenin was not satisfied with the compromise. Pursuing the same divisive tactic which he had employed in the Russian Social-Democratic movement, he set out to split off from the more moderate majority of the Socialist International an intransigent left, committed to exploiting a future war for revolutionary purposes. He opposed a pacifist policy aimed at stopping hostilities endorsed by most European socialists: indeed, he wanted war very badly because war presented unique opportunities to make revolution. Since such a stance was unpopular and inadmissible for a socialist, Lenin refrained from expressing it publicly. But once in a while, as in a letter to Maxim Gorky written in January 1913, during yet another international crisis he wrote: “A war between Austria and Russia would be a most useful thing for the revolution (in all of Eastern Europe) but it is not very likely that Franz Joseph and Nicky will give us this pleasure.”123

  Once the war broke out, socialist parliamentarians of both the Allied and Central powers reneged on their pledges. In the summer of 1914 they had spoken passionately for peace and brought masses of demonstrators into the streets to protest the drift to war. But when hostilities began, they fell in line and voted in favor of war budgets. Especially painful was the betrayal of the German Social-Democrats, who had the strongest party organization in Europe and formed the backbone of the Second International: the unanimous vote of their parliamentary delegation for war credits was a stunning and, as it turned out, near-fatal blow to the Socialist International.

  Russian socialists took the pledges of the International much more seriously than their comrades in the West, in part because they had shallower roots in their native country and took little patriotic pride in it and in part because they knew they had no chance of coming to power except by exploiting “the economic and political crisis caused by the war” posited by the Stuttgart resolution. Apart from the patriarchs of the Social-Democratic movement, such as Plekhanov and L. G. Deich, and a number of Socialists-Revolutionaries in whom the clash of arms awakened patriotic sentiments (Savinkov, Burtsev), most luminaries of Russian socialism remained faithful to the antiwar resolutions of the International. This the Social-Democratic and Trudovik (SR) deputies in the Fourth Duma demonstrated with their unanimous refusal to vote for war credits—the only European parliamentarians, save for the Serbians, to do so.

  On arrival in Switzerland, Lenin drafted a programmatic statement, called “The Tasks of Revolutionary Social Democracy in the European War.”124 After accusing the leaders of German, French, and Belgian Social-Democracy of betrayal, he outlined an uncompromisingly radical platform. Article 6 of “The Tasks” contained the following proposition:

  From the point of view of the working class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the least evil [

  naimenshee zlo

  ] would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its armies, which are oppressing Poland, the Ukraine, and a number of peoples of Russia …

  *

  No other prominent European socialist expressed himself publicly in favor of his country losing the war. Lenin’s startling call for the defeat of Russia inevitably brought charges that he was an agent of the German Government.†

  The practical conclusion of Lenin’s statement on the war was spelled out in the seventh and final article of his theses, which called for energetic agitation and propaganda among the civilian and military personnel of the belligerent nations for the purpose of unleashing a civil war against the “reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all the countries.” Copies of this document were smuggled into Russia and in November furnished the Imperial Government with grounds for closing down Pravda and arresting the Bolshevik Duma delegation. One of the lawyers who defended the Bolsheviks on this occasion was Alexander Kerensky. Tried on lesser charges than treason, which could have cost them their lives, the Bolsheviks were sentenced to exile, which all but put the party out of the picture until the February revolution.

  The thrust of Lenin’s program was that the socialists were to strive not to end the fighting but to exploit it for their own purposes: “The slogan of ‘peace’ is incorrect at this moment,” he wrote in October 1914. “This is a slogan of philistines and priests. The proletarian slogan must be: civil war.”125 Lenin would remain faithful to this formulation throughout the war. It was much safer for him to uphold it in neutral Switzerland, of course, than it was for his followers in belligerent Russia.

  Aware of Lenin’s war program, the Germans were eager to use him for their own purposes: after all, Lenin’s call for the defeat of the tsarist armies was tantamount to an endorsement of a German victory. Their main intermediary was Parvus, one of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1905, the originator of the theory of “uninterrupted revolution,” and more recently a collaborator with the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine. Parvus had one of the most impressive intellects in the Russian revolutionary movement as well as one of the most corrupt personalities. After the failure of the 1905 Revolution, he concluded that a successful revolution in Russia required the assistance of German armies: they alone were capable of destroying tsarism.* He placed himself at the disposal of the German Government, using his political connections to amass a sizable fortune. At the outbreak of the war he resided in Constantinople. He contacted the German Ambassador there and outlined to him the case for using Russian revolutionaries to promote German interests. His argument was that the Russian radicals could achieve their objective only if tsarism were destroyed and the Russian Empire broken up: since this objective happened also to suit Germany, “the interests of the German Government were … identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries.” He asked for money and authorization to communicate with Russian left-wing émigrés.126 With the encouragement of Berlin, in May 1915 he contacted Lenin in Zurich: familiar with Russian émigré politics, he knew that Lenin was the key figure on the left and that if he won him over the rest of the Russian anti-war left would fall in line.127 For the time being, the plan failed. It was not that Lenin objected to dealing with the Germans or felt qualms about taking money from them—he just would not negotiate with a traitor to the socialist cause, a renegade and “socialist chauvinist.” Parvus’s biographers suggest that in addition to personal dislike of Parvus, Lenin may also have feared that if he struck a deal with him, Parvus “would eventually acquire control of Russian socialist organizations, and, with his financial resources and his intellectual ability, be able to outmaneuver all the other party leaders.”128 Lenin never publicly referred
to this encounter.

  Although he rejected Parvus’s overtures, Lenin did maintain political and financial contacts with the German Government through an Estonian, Alexander Kesküla.* In 1905–07 Kesküla had been a leading Bolshevik in Estonia. Later, he turned into an ardent Estonian nationalist, determined to gain independence for his homeland. Convinced, like Parvus, that the destruction of tsarist Russia could be accomplished only by the German army, at the outbreak of the war he placed himself at the disposal of the German Government, joining its intelligence services. With German subsidies, he operated out of Switzerland and Sweden to secure from Russian émigrés information on internal conditions in Russia and to smuggle Bolshevik anti-war literature into that country. In October 1914, he met with Lenin.† in whom he was interested as an enemy of the tsarist regime and a potential liberator of Estonia. Many years later, Kesküla claimed that he did not finance the Bolsheviks directly, contributing instead, indirectly, to their treasury and subsidizing their publications. These were important sources of support for the impoverished Bolshevik Party in any event, but he may have paid Lenin direct subsidies as well.