The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  Unlike February, however, the militant street demonstrations had to be tightly supervised; Lenin had no faith in spontaneity even if he fully appreciated the need for giving his highly calculated endeavors the appearance of spontaneity. He learned from Napoleon and applied to civil war the principle of tiraillerie, or skirmishing, which some military historians regard as Napoleon’s major contribution to warfare.46 For purposes of combat, Napoleon used to divide his forces in two: the professional Guard and the mass of recruits. It was his practice at the beginning of a battle to send in the recruits to draw enemy fire: this provided a picture of enemy dispositions. At the critical moment, he sent the Guard into action to break the enemy’s lines at the weakest point and put him to flight. Lenin applied this tactic to urban warfare. The masses were brought out into the streets under seditious slogans to provoke a government reaction that would reveal its strengths and weaknesses. Were the crowds to succeed in overwhelming the government’s forces, then the Bolshevik equivalent of Napoleon’s Guard—the armed workers and soldiers organized by the Bolshevik Military Organization—would take over. Were they to fail, the point would still be made that the masses wanted change and that by resisting them the government proved to be “anti-democratic.” One would then await the next opportunity. The basic principle was Napoleon’s “on s’engage et puis on voit”—“one commits oneself and then one sees.”47 In his three attempts at a putsch (April, June, and July 1917), Lenin called out the mobs into the streets, but kept himself well in the background, always pretending to follow the “people” rather than lead them. After each such attempt failed, he would deny having had any revolutionary intentions, and even pretend that his party did all in its power to restrain the impetuous masses.*

  Lenin’s technique of revolution required the manipulation of crowds. He followed, whether by instinct or from knowledge it is hard to tell, the theories of crowd behavior first formulated in 1895 by the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon in La Psychologie des Foules (Crowd Psychology). Le Bon held that on joining a crowd men lose their individuality, dissolving it in a collective personality with its own distinct psychology. Its main characteristic is a lowered capacity for logical reasoning and a corresponding rise in the sense of “invincible power.” Feeling invincible, crowds demand action, a craving that leaves them open to manipulation: “crowds are in a state of expectant attention which renders suggestion easy.” They are especially responsive to exhortation to violence by associations of words and ideas that evoke “grandiose and vague images” accompanied by an air of “mystery,” such as “liberty,” “democracy,” and “socialism.” Crowds respond to fanatics who incite them with constantly reiterated, violent images. Since, according to Le Bon, in the ultimate analysis the force that motivates crowds is religious faith, it “demands a god before everything else,” a leader whom it endows with supernatural qualities. The crowd’s religious sentiment is simple:

  [the] worship of a being supposed superior, fear of the power with which the being is credited, blind submission to its commands, inability to discuss its dogmas, the desire to spread them, and a tendency to consider as enemies all by whom they are not accepted.

  48

  A more recent observer of crowd behavior has called attention to the dynamism of crowds:

  The crowd, once formed, wants to grow rapidly. It is difficult to exaggerate the power and determination with which it spreads. As long as it feels that it is growing—in revolutionary states, for example, which start with small but highly-charged crowds—it regards anything which opposes its growth as constricting.… The crowd here is like a besieged city and, as in many sieges, it has enemies before its walls and enemies within them. During the fighting it attracts more and more partisans from the country around.

  49

  In a rare moment of candor, Lenin revealed to an associate, P. N. Lepeshinskii, that he well understood the principles of mass psychology:

  At the end of the summer of 1906, [Lenin] in an intimate conversation predicted with considerable assurance the defeat of the Revolution and hinted at the need to prepare for a retreat. If despite such a pessimistic mood, he nevertheless worked for the intensification of the proletariat’s revolutionary forces, then this was, apparently, from the idea that the revolutionary spirit [

  revoliutsionnaia aktual’nost’

  ] of the masses never does harm. If there should occur another chance for victory or even semi-victory, then it will be in large measure owing to this spirit.

  50

  In other words, mass action, even if unsuccessful, was a valuable device to keep crowds at a high level of tension and combat readiness.*

  In the three months that followed his return to Russia, Lenin acted with reckless impetuosity to bring down the Provisional Government by mob action. He subjected the government and its socialist supporters to ceaseless verbal assaults as traitors to the Revolution, and concurrently incited the population to civil disobedience—the army to ignore government orders, the workers to take control of their factories, the communal peasants to seize private land, the ethnic minorities to claim their national rights. He had no timetable, but felt confident of imminent success because each skirmish revealed the indecision as well as the impotence of his adversaries. Had he not lost nerve in the decisive moment during the July putsch he might well have taken power then rather than in October.

  Paradoxically, although militarized, Lenin’s (and, later, Trotsky’s) tactics did not entail much physical violence. That was to come later, after power had been secured. The purpose of the propaganda campaigns and mass demonstrations, the barrage of words and the street disorders, was to implant in the minds of opponents as well as of the public at large a sense of inevitability: change was coming and nothing could stop it. Like his pupils and emulators Mussolini and Hitler, Lenin won power by first breaking the spirit of those who stood in his way, persuading them that they were doomed. The Bolshevik triumph in October was accomplished nine-tenths psychologically: the forces involved were negligible, a few thousand men at most in a nation of one hundred and fifty million, and victory came almost without a shot being fired. The whole operation served to confirm Napoleon’s dictum that the battle is won or lost in the minds of men before it even begins.

  The Bolsheviks made the first bid for power on April 21, taking advantage of a political crisis over Russia’s war aims.

  It will be recalled that at the end of March 1917, the Ispolkom compelled the Provisional Government to repudiate Miliukov’s claim to Austrian and Turkish territories. To placate the socialists, the government issued on March 27 a declaration, cleared by the Ispolkom, in which, without in so many words renouncing annexationist ambitions, it declared Russia’s objective to be “lasting peace” based on the “self-determination of nations.”

  This concession put the matter to rest, but only temporarily. It became once again a bone of contention in April with the return to Russia of Victor Chernov. The leader of the SR Party had spent the war years in the West, mainly in Switzerland, where he participated in the Zimmerwald and Kiental conferences, and published, allegedly with German funds, revolutionary literature for Russian prisoners of war in Germany and Austria.51 Back in Petrograd, he immediately launched a campaign against Miliukov, calling for his resignation and asking the government to transmit its March 27 declaration to Allied governments as a formal statement of Russia’s war aims. Miliukov objected to this demand on the grounds that the Allies could misinterpret Russia’s formal renunciation of the territories promised to her to mean that she intended to leave the war. But the cabinet overruled him: Kerensky displayed particular zeal in this affair, which promised to undermine Miliukov, his principal rival, and to strengthen his own position in the Soviet.52 Eventually, a compromise was reached. The government agreed to hand the Allies its declaration of March 27 but accompany it with an explanatory note which would remove any doubts about Russia’s intention to stay in the war. In the words of Kerensky, the note drafted by Miliuko
v and approved by the cabinet “should have satisfied the most violent critic of Miliukov’s ‘imperialism.’ ”53 It reaffirmed Russia’s determination to fight for the alliance’s common “high ideals” and “fully to carry out the obligations” toward it.54 On April 18 (May 1 in the West), the two documents were cabled to Russian embassies abroad for transmittal to Allied governments.

  When the government’s note appeared in Russian newspapers on the morning of April 20 it enraged the socialist intelligentsia. Its displeasure was due not to the pledge to fight until victory, which was the stated objective of all the socialist parties save for a fringe minority, but to the ambivalent language about “annexations and contributions.” The Ispolkom voted that day that “revolutionary democracy will not permit the spilling of blood for … aggressive objectives.” Russia had to fight on, but only until the time when all the belligerents were prepared to make peace without annexations.55

  This dispute could have been readily resolved by consultation between the government and the Ispolkom, which almost certainly would have led to the government’s capitulating. But before a compromise could be reached, the anger spilled to the barracks and workers’ quarters, which were linked to the Ispolkom with invisible threads.

  The street disorders on April 20–21 began spontaneously, but they were quickly taken in hand by the Bolsheviks. A young Social Democratic officer, Lieutenant Theodore Linde, who had participated in the drafting of Order No. 1, interpreted the government’s note as a betrayal of the revolution’s democratic ideals. He summoned representatives of his regiment, the Finnish Reserve Guards, and called on them to bring their men into the streets to demonstrate against Miliukov. He made the rounds of the other garrison units bearing a similar message.56 Linde was an ardent patriot who wanted Russia to stay in the war: he lost his life soon afterward, lynched by front-line troops whom he exhorted to combat but who decided, from his German-sounding name, that he was an enemy agent.57 Like most Russian socialists, however, he wanted the war to be waged for “democratic” ideals. He seems not to have realized that urging troops to take part in an unauthorized political manifestation was tantamount to inciting mutiny. From 3 p.m. onward, several military units, headed by the Finnish Guards, marched, fully armed, to Mariinskii Palace, the seat of the government, where they shouted for Miliukov’s resignation.58

  Because of the indisposition of Guchkov, the cabinet at this moment was meeting not in Mariinskii Palace but in Guchkov’s office at the Ministry of War. Before it now appeared General Kornilov, who, as commander of the Petrograd Military District, bore responsibility for the capital’s security. He requested permission to have troops disperse the mutineers. According to Kerensky, the cabinet unanimously denied this request: “We were all confident of the wisdom of our course and felt certain that the population would not permit any acts of violence against the Government.”59 It was the first, but not the last time that the Provisional Government, faced with an open challenge to its authority, flinched from using force—a fact that escaped neither Kornilov nor Lenin.

  Up to this point, the Bolsheviks had nothing to do with the disturbance: indeed, it seems to have caught them by surprise. But they lost no time in exploiting it.

  The activities of the Bolshevik high command at this time are far from clear, because most of the relevant documents remain unpublished. The official Communist version of the events holds that the party’s Central Committee did not authorize the anti-government demonstrations which took place in Petrograd in the evening of April 20 and throughout April 21: the Bolsheviks who took to the streets carrying banners reading “Down with the Provisional Government” and “All Power to the Soviets” are said to have acted on instructions of second-rank Bolsheviks, including one S. Ia. Bagdaev.* But it is quite unthinkable that in a centralized party like the Bolsheviks, a minor functionary would have taken it upon himself to authorize revolutionary slogans in defiance of the Central Committee—a charge rendered the more preposterous by Bagdaev’s documented opposition to Lenin’s confrontational stance against the Provisional Government.60 This misleading account of the events of April 20–21, 1917, has been made up in order to conceal the fact that the first Bolshevik attempt at a putsch ended in ignominious failure. To confuse the picture further, Communist historians have gone to the lengths of citing resolutions adopted by the party after the event as indicative of its intentions before it had taken place, and attributing directives written by Lenin to “unidentified sources.”

  In the afternoon of April 20, as the troops called out by Linde were converging on Mariinskii Square, the Bolshevik Central Committee convened an emergency session. It passed a resolution, which Lenin had drafted earlier in the day upon reading Miliukov’s note, which provided the rationale for the Bolshevik-sponsored demonstrations that followed. Early editions of Lenin’s writings denied his authorship; it has been finally acknowledged as his in the fifth edition of Lenin’s works, published in 1962.61 Lenin described the Provisional Government as “thoroughly imperialist” and dominated by domestic as well as Anglo-French capital. A regime of this kind was by its very nature incapable of renouncing annexations. Lenin criticized the Soviet for supporting the government and called on it to assume full power. This was not, as yet, an overt appeal for the overthrow of the government, but it required no deep reflection to draw such a conclusion from Lenin’s words. It certainly entitled Bolshevik demonstrators to carry banners reading “Down with the Provisional Government” and “All Power to the Soviets,” from which Lenin would later disassociate himself.

  What tactical decisions the Central Committee adopted at this meeting are not known: the published version of the minutes of the Petrograd Committee, which often joined in the meetings of the Central Committee, records only organizational trivia. It omits all subsequent sessions until May 3.62 Two things, however, are reasonably certain. Lenin seems to have been the main advocate of aggressive action and to have run into strong opposition: this much is known from the aftermath, when he came under criticism from his associates, notably Kamenev. Second, the demonstrations were intended as a full-scale putsch, a reenactment of February 26–27 when rioting workers and mutinous soldiers brought down the tsarist government.

  Already in the evening of April 20, after the troops that took part in the afternoon demonstration had returned to their barracks, fresh groups of soldiers and workers appeared on the streets with anti-government banners: they were the advance troop of the Bolshevik-led rioters. Before long, a counter-demonstration took place carrying banners reading “Down with Lenin!” On Nevsky, the demonstrators clashed. Following the intervention of the Ispolkom, the crowds were pacified.

  The Bolshevik Central Committee reconvened in the morning of April 21 to adopt directives for the day’s operations.63 One directive ordered the dispatch of agitators to factories and barracks to inform workers and soldiers about the demonstration planned for that day and urge them to join in.64 Such agitators appeared during the noontime lunch break in many factories of the Vyborg District, whose workers were the most radicalized in Petrograd. Appeals to the workers to take the afternoon off and participate in an anti-government protest met with a disappointing response, most likely because SR and Menshevik agents from the Ispolkom were on hand to neutralize them. Workers in only three small plants passed Bolshevik resolutions: they numbered a mere one thousand,65 less than .5 of 1 percent of Petrograd’s labor force. Putilov, Obukhov, and the other large enterprises ignored the Bolsheviks. That the Bolsheviks planned armed action is indicated by the fact that on April 21, N. I. Podvoiskii, the head of their Military Organization, called on the Kronshtadt naval base to dispatch to Petrograd a detachment of reliable sailors.66 The Kronshtadt sailors were the roughest, most violence-prone element in the city: heavily influenced by anarchists, they needed little encouragement to beat up and rob the burzhui. Bringing them into the city was almost certain to result in pogroms. To have invited them gives lie to Lenin’s claim that on April 21 the Bolsheviks h
ad intended a “peaceful reconnaissance.”

  In the early afternoon, a column bearing anti-government banners, preceded by units of the Bolshevik “Factory Militia” armed with guns, advanced along Nevsky toward the city center. Although a sorry performance, in which neither soldiers nor sailors took part, it was the first armed challenge to the democratic government. As the demonstrators approached the Kazan Cathedral, they ran into a counterprocession that shouted “Long Live the Provisional Government.” A melee ensued and some random shooting, in which three persons died. It was the first street violence in Petrograd since February.

  While his followers were on the streets, Lenin thought it prudent to stay at home.67

  Kornilov, seeking again to restore order, instructed artillery units and troops to be brought out. This time he ran into the defiance of the Ispolkom, which insisted it could calm the crowds by persuasion. It phoned the Military Staff to countermand Kornilov’s instructions. Kornilov then met with Ispolkom’s representatives. They assumed responsibility for stopping the disorders, whereupon he revoked his instructions and ordered the troops to stay in the barracks. To make certain that neither the government nor the Bolsheviks resorted to arms, the Ispolkom issued a proclamation to the Petrograd garrison:

  Comrade Soldiers! During these troubled days do not come out with weapons unless called by the Executive Committee [Ispolkom]. The Executive Committee alone has the right to dispose of you. Every order concerning the appearance of military units on the street (except for routine detail duty) must be issued on the blank of the Executive Committee, bear its seal and the signatures of at least two of the following: Chkheidze, Skobelev, Binasik, Sokolov, Goldman, Filippovskii, Bogdanov. Every order must be confirmed by telephoning 104–06.

  68

  This instruction subverted the authority of the military commander of Petrograd. Unable to carry out his duties, Kornilov asked to be relieved and assigned to the front. At the beginning of May he assumed command of the Eighth Army.