The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  In September 1915, apparently in response to Kesküla’s request, Lenin provided him with a curious seven-point program outlining the conditions on which revolutionary Russia would be prepared to make peace with Germany. The document was found after World War II in the archives of the German Foreign Office.‡ Its existence suggests that Lenin saw in Kesküla not only an Estonian patriot but also an agent of the German Government. Apart from several points affecting internal Russian affairs (proclamation of a republic, confiscation of large estates, introduction of an eight-hour workday, and autonomy for the ethnic minorities), Lenin affirmed the possibility of a separate peace, provided Germany renounced all annexations and contributions (although exceptions could be made for “buffer states”). He further proposed a Russian withdrawal from Turkish territory and an offensive against India. The Germans certainly had these proposals in mind when a year and a half later they allowed Lenin to travel across their territory to Russia.

  Using funds placed at his disposal by Berlin, Kesküla arranged for the publication in Sweden of Lenin’s and Bukharin’s writings, which Bolshevik runners smuggled into Russia. One such subsidy was stolen by a Bolshevik agent.129 Lenin reciprocated the favor by forwarding to Kesküla reports sent by his agents in Russia on the internal situation there, in which the Germans, for obvious reasons, were keenly interested. In a dispatch dated May 8, 1916, an official of the German General Staff reported to the Foreign Office functionary in charge of subversive operations in the east:

  In the last few months, Kesküla has opened up numerous new connections with Russia.… He has also maintained his extremely useful contact with Lenin, and has transmitted to us the contents of the situation reports sent to Lenin by Lenin’s confidential agents in Russia. Kesküla must therefore continue to be provided with the necessary means in the future. Taking into account the exceptionally unfavorable exchange conditions, 20,000 marks per month should just be sufficient.

  *

  As in the case of Parvus, Lenin maintained lifelong silence about his relations with Kesküla, and understandably so, since they were nothing short of high treason.

  In September 1915, there convened, on the initiative of Italian socialists, a secret conference of the International in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald, near Berne. The Russians were strongly represented, with the leaders of both Social-Democratic factions and the SR Party in attendance. The group quickly broke up into two factions, a more moderate one, which wanted to preserve links with those socialists who supported the war, and a left one, which demanded a clean break. The latter, comprising eight of the thirty-eight delegates, was headed by Lenin. The majority rejected Lenin’s draft proposal for the transformation of the “imperialist” war into a civil war because it was unfeasible as well as dangerous: as one delegate pointed out, the signatories of such a proclamation would face death after returning home while Lenin enjoyed the safety of Switzerland. It also turned down Lenin’s demand for a split from the Committee of the International, controlled by patriotic socialists. Even so, Lenin did not go down in defeat at Zimmerwald,130 for the official manifesto of the conference did make some verbal concessions to him, condemning those socialists who backed their government’s war efforts and calling on workers of all countries to join in the “class struggle.”131 The Zimmerwald left issued its own statement, which was stronger but stopped short of calling on the European masses to rise in rebellion, as Lenin wanted.132 Underpinning the disagreements between the two wings were differing attitudes toward patriotism, which most of the European socialists felt intensely and most of the Russian ones did not.

  In April 1916, a sequel to the Zimmerwald Conference met at Kiental in the Bernese Oberland. The gathering was called by the International Socialist Committee to deal with the war, about to enter its third year. The participants, representing the pacifist wing of the International, again refused to yield to the Zimmerwald left but went considerably further in accommodating it than the year before. In the resolution on “The Attitude of the Proletariat toward the Question of Peace,” the conference, blaming the war on capitalism, asserted that neither “bourgeois nor socialist pacifism” could solve the tragedy facing mankind:

  If a capitalist society cannot provide the conditions for a lasting peace, then the conditions will be provided by socialism.…

  The struggle for lasting peace can, therefore, be only a struggle for the realization of socialism.133

  The practical conclusion was for the “proletariat to raise the call for an immediate truce and an opening of peace negotiations.” Again, no call for rebellion and turning the guns against the bourgeoisie, but such action was not precluded by the premise of the resolution and may even be said to have been implicit in it.

  As he had done at Zimmerwald, Lenin drafted the minority report for the left, which concluded with this appeal to the proletariat: “Lay down your weapons. Turn them against the common foe!—the capitalist governments.”* Among the twelve signatories under Lenin’s statement (of the forty-four present) Zinoviev took it upon himself to represent Latvia and Karl Radek, Holland.

  The key Kiental resolution on the “International Socialist Bureau,” based on a draft by Zinoviev, came close to meeting the demands of the left by condemning this organization for turning into “an accomplice in the policy of the so-called ‘defense of the fatherland’ and of civil peace” and contending that the

  International can recover from its collapse as a definite political power only to the extent to which

  the proletariat is able to liberate itself from all imperialist and chauvinist influences and reenter the road of class struggle and of mass action.134

  Even though Lenin’s demand for a split in the International once again went down in defeat, after the conference adjourned a member of the right, S. Grumbach, declared that “Lenin and his friends have played an important role at Zimmerwald and a decisive role at Kiental.”135 Indeed, the Kiental resolutions laid the groundwork for the Third International, which Lenin was to found in 1919.

  Lenin owed his relative success at Zimmerwald and Kiental in 1915–16, as he did later in the Russia of 1917, to the fact that he took the socialists at their word and demanded that they make good on their rhetoric. This earned him a small but devoted following in foreign socialist circles. More importantly, it paralyzed his opponents and prevented them from giving him battle because with this stand he seized the moral high ground of the socialist movement. The leaders of the International despised Lenin for his intrigues and slander, but they could not disown him without disowning themselves. His tactics enabled him to push the international socialist movement steadily leftward and eventually to split off from it his own faction, exactly as he had done in Russian Social-Democracy.

  This said, it must be noted that the war years were for Lenin and Krupskaia a time of severe hardship, a time of poverty and isolation from Russia. They lived in quarters that bordered on slums, took their meals in the company of criminals and prostitutes, and found themselves abandoned by many onetime friends. Even some former followers came now to view Lenin as a crackpot and “political Jesuit,” a spent man.136 When Krasin, once one of Lenin’s closest associates, now living in comfort as an official working for war industries, was approached for a contribution for Lenin, he pulled out two five-ruble notes, saying: “Lenin does not deserve support. He is a harmful type, and you never know what crazy ideas will sprout in his Tatar head. To hell with him!”137

  The only shaft of light in Lenin’s exile was an affair with Inessa Armand, the French-born daughter of two music-hall artists and the wife of a wealthy Russian. Influenced by Chernyshevskii, she broke with her husband and joined the Bolsheviks. She met Lenin and his wife in Paris in 1910. She soon became Lenin’s mistress, tolerated by Krupskaia, as well as a faithful follower. Although Bertram Wolfe speaks of her as a “dedicated, romantic heroine,” Angelica Balabanoff, who had many occasions to meet Inessa, describes her as “the perfect—almost passive—executrix of [Lenin’s] o
rders,” “the prototype of the perfect Bolshevik of rigid, unconditional obedience.”138 She seems to have been the only human being with whom Lenin ever established intimate personal relations.

  Lenin did not lose faith in the ultimate outbreak of a European revolution, but the prospect seemed remote. The Imperial Government had sufficiently weathered the military and political crisis of 1915 to be able to launch a major offensive in 1916. From sporadic communications sent him by his Petrograd agent, Alexander Shliapnikov, he knew of the deteriorating economic situation in Russia and the popular discontent in its cities,139 but he disregarded the information, apparently convinced of the ability of the Imperial regime to overcome such difficulties. Addressing a gathering of socialist youths in Zurich on January 9/22, 1917, he predicted that while a revolution in Europe was unavoidable, “we old-timers perhaps shall not live [to see] the decisive battles of the looming revolution.”140 These words he spoke eight weeks before the collapse of tsarism.

  *On the primary and secondary materials concerning the young Lenin which are kept concealed in Soviet depositories, see Richard Pipes, ed., Revolutionary Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 27, note 2.

  †I have attempted to draw a picture of Lenin’s early intellectual and spiritual evolution on the basis of the available documentary evidence in Revolutionary Russia, which I edited. Most of the information on the pages which follow comes from this work as supplemented by two other of my writings: Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) and Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). Of the secondary sources, the most valuable is Nikolai Valentinov’s The Early Years of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969).

  *Chernyshevskii was the leading radical publicist of the 1860s, the author of What is to be done?, a novel that urged young people to abandon their families and join communities committed to new positivistic and utilitarian ways of thinking. He regarded the existing world as rotten and doomed. The hero of the novel, Rakhmetov, is portrayed as a “new man” of iron will, totally dedicated to radical change. Lenin borrowed the title of Chernyshevskii’s novel for his first political tract.

  *In 1792, in a transport of exuberance, Robespierre exclaimed: “I am neither the courtier of the people, nor its moderator, nor its tribune, nor its defender—I am the people itself!” (Alfred Cobban, Aspects of the French Revolution, London, 1968, 188.)

  †He eventually came to tolerate his personal cult because, as he explained to Angelica Balabanoff, it was “useful, even necessary”: “Our peasants are suspicious; they don’t read, they must see in order to believe. If they see my likeness, they are persuaded that Lenin exists.” Impressions of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964, 5–6).

  *A. N. Potresov, Posmertnyi sbornik proizvedenii (Paris, 1937), 297. Tatiana Aleksinskii concurs: “For Lenin, politics superseded everything and left room for nothing else”: La Grande Revue, XXVII, No. 9 (September 1923), 459.

  *In order for his common-law wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, to accompany him to Siberia, Lenin had to marry her. Since the Russian government did not recognize civil marriages, the wedding (July 10, 1898) had to take place in church: Robert H. McNeal, Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaya and Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1972), 65. Neither Lenin nor his bride ever referred in their writings to this embarrassing episode.

  *See above, Chapter 1.

  †Lenin, PSS, IV, 375–76. A decade later, Benito Mussolini, ten years Lenin’s junior and a leading Italian socialist, arrived independently at the same conclusion. In 1912 he wrote that “a worker who is merely organized has become a petty bourgeois who obeys only the voice of interest. Every appeal to ideals finds him deaf: B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, IV (Florence, 1952), 156. On another occasion Mussolini said that workers were, by their very nature, “pacifistic”: A. Rossi, The Rise of Italian Fascism, 1918–1922 (London, 1938), 134.

  * At the end of the month, to elude surveillance by the Russian and Belgian police, the congress moved to London.

  *Parvus first formulated the theory of “uninterrupted” or “permanent” revolution (without, however, using either name) in the introduction to Trotsky’s pamphlet Do deviatogo Ianvaria (Geneva, 1905), pp. iii-xiv, dated Munich, January 18/31, 1905. On this subject, see Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (New York-London, 1954), 112–14, 118–19, 149–62, and Z. A. B. Zeman and W. B. Scharlau, The Merchant of the Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus) (London, 1965), 76–79. The concept of “Revolution in Permanence” had been briefly promoted by Marx in 1848: Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1960), 77.

  †Lenin, PSS, XI, 222. Both Wolfe (Three, 291–94) and Schapiro (Communist Party, 77–78) believe this statement to be an aberration on Lenin’s part, because he subsequently said on many occasions that Russia could not bypass the “capitalist” and “democratic” phase. But as his behavior in 1917 would reveal, he only paid lip service to the idea of a “democratic” revolution: his true strategy called for an immediate transition from “bourgeois” democracy to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

  * Proletarii, August 21, 1906, No. 1, in A. I. Spiridovich, Istoriia Bol’shevizma v Rossii (Paris, 1922), 138. The Okhrana, whose agents kept it well informed on Bolshevik affairs, reported shortly before the February Revolution that Lenin was not opposed to terror but thought that the SRs attached too much importance to it: Report dated December 24, 1916/January 6, 1917, Hoover Institution, Okhrana Archives, Index No. XVIIa-XVIId, Folder 5, No. R. As we shall note, his organization supplied the SRs with explosives for their terrorist operations.

  *These facts did not escape Stalin. Referring to the Fifth Congress, which he had attended, he wrote: “Statistics showed that the majority of the Menshevik faction consists of Jews.… On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik faction consists of Russians.… In this connection, one of the Bolsheviks observed in jest (it seems it was Comrade Aleksinskii) that the Mensheviks are a Jewish faction, the Bolsheviks a genuine Russian faction, hence it would not be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom in the party”: I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, II (Moscow, 1946) 50–51.

  *Krasin’s employment by this German electronics firm may not have been fortuitous. According to the head of Russian counterintelligence in 1917, Siemens had used its agencies for purposes of espionage, which led to the shutting down of its office in southern Russia: B. Nikitin, Rokovye gody (Paris, 1937), 118.

  *The importance of such subsidies was stressed by Lenin in a letter of December 1904 to a potential donor: “Our undertaking is faced with bankruptcy if we do not hold out with the help of extraordinary resources for at least half a year. And in order to hold out without cutting back, we need a minimum of two thousand rubles a month”: Lenin, PSS, XLVI, 433.

  * Padenie, V, 69, and I, 315. He abolished police cells in the armed forces and in secondary schools, on the grounds that it was improper for men in uniform and students to inform on each other. S. P. Beletskii, the director of the Police Department and Malinovskii’s immediate supervisor, believed that these measures disorganized the work of political counterintelligence: Ibid., V, 70–71, 75. Beletskii was shot in September 1918 by the Cheka in the first wave of the Red Terror.

  *The possibility has been raised that Dzhunkovskii fired Malinovskii because he was alarmed by the effect his inflammatory Duma speeches were having on workers at a time when Russia was in the grip of a new wave of industrial strikes: Ralph Carter Elwood, Roman Malinovsky (Newtonville, Mass., 1977), 41–43.

  †Lenin, PSS, XXV, 394. In 1915, Malinovskii volunteered for the Russian armies in France. Wounded and captured by the Germans, he conducted pro-German propaganda among Russian prisoners of war. During this time, he maintained a regular correspondence with Lenin: Padenie, VII, 374; Elwood, Malinovsky, 59; Grigorii Aronson, Rossiia nakanune Revoliutsii (New York, 1962), 53–54.

  * Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitel’stva, No. 81/127 (June 16, 1917), 3. Len
in’s testimony on Malinovskii is published neither in the multivolume edition of the commission’s records (Padenie) nor in his Collected Works.

  †Tatiana Aleksinskii recalls that when questions were raised about the possible presence on the Central Committee of a police informer, Zinoviev quoted from Gogol’s Inspector General: “A good household makes use even of garbage.” La Grande Revue, XXVII, No. 9 (September 1923), 459.

  ‡The likelihood that Lenin was aware of Malinovskii’s police connections is accepted, in addition to Burtsev, by Stefan Possony (Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary, Chicago, 1964, 142–43). Malinovskii’s biographer rejects this hypothesis on the grounds that the Bolsheviks learned far less from Malinovskii about the police than the police learned about the Bolsheviks (Elwood, Malinovsky, 65–66). But he ignores Lenin’s own argument as well as Spiridovich’s statement about the use of double agents, cited above.

  *Lenin, PSS, XXVI, 6. Lenin’s puzzling emphasis on Russia’s “oppression” of the Ukraine must be explained at least in part by his financial arrangements with the Austrian Government. He did not demand that the Ukrainians also be liberated from Austrian rule.

  † An accusation to this effect is made by General Spiridovich, the usually well-informed official of the gendarmerie. He claims, without furnishing proof, that in June and July 1914 Lenin traveled twice to Berlin to work out with the Germans a plan of seditious activity in the rear of the Russian armies, for which he was to be paid 70 million marks: Spiridovich, Istoriia Bol’shevizma, 263–65.

  *He felt vindicated by the events. In 1918, referring to the 1917 Revolution, he wrote that “Prussian guns played a larger role in it than Bolshevik leaflets. In particular, I believe that the Russian émigrés would still be wandering in emigration and stewing in their own juice if German regiments had not reached the Vistula”: Izvne (Stockholm), No. 1 (January 22, 1918), 2.