As noted, Kerensky never carried out any serious punitive actions against the Bolsheviks for the July putsch. According to the chief of his counterintelligence, Colonel Nikitin, on July 10–11 he even deprived the Military Staff of the authority to arrest Bolsheviks and forbade it to confiscate weapons found in their possession.85 At the end of July, he looked the other way as the Bolsheviks held their Sixth Party Congress in Petrograd.
This passivity derived in large measure from Kerensky’s desire to appease the Ispolkom, which rallied to the Bolsheviks. As we have seen, on August 4 it adopted a resolution, moved by Tsereteli, to stop further “persecution” of those involved in what was delicately called the “events of July 3–5.” At the August 18 session, the Soviet voted to “protest decisively the illegal arrests and excesses” committed against the representatives of the “extreme currents of the socialist parties.”86 In response, the government began to release one by one prominent Bolsheviks, sometimes on bail, sometimes on the guarantee of friends. The first to be freed (and cleared of all charges) was Kamenev, who regained freedom on August 4. Lunacharskii, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, and Alexandra Kollontai were set free shortly afterward. Others followed.
In the meantime, the Bolsheviks were reasserting themselves as a political force. They benefited from the political polarization which occurred during the summer when the liberals and conservatives gravitated toward Kornilov and the radicals shifted toward the extreme left. Workers, soldiers, and sailors, disgusted with the vacillations of the Mensheviks and SRs, abandoned them in droves in favor of the only alternative, the Bolsheviks. But there was also political fatigue: Russians who had gone in droves to the polling stations in the spring grew tired of elections which did nothing to improve their condition. This held especially true for conservative elements who felt they stood no chance against the radicals, but it also applied to the liberal and moderate socialist constituencies. This trend can be demonstrated by the results of the municipal elections in Petrograd and Moscow. In the voting for the Petrograd Municipal Council on August 20, one week before the Kornilov incident, the Bolsheviks increased the share of the votes they had gained in May 1917 from 20.4 percent to 33.3 percent, or by more than one-half. In absolute numbers, however, their votes increased only by 17 percent due to the drop in the number of those casting ballots. Whereas in the Spring elections, 70 percent of those elegible had gone to the polls, in August the proportion dropped to 50 percent; in some districts of the capital city, half of those who had previously voted abstained.* 87 In Moscow, in the September municipal elections the decline in voter participation was even more dramatic. Here, 380,000 ballots were cast compared to 640,000 the previous June. More than half of them went to the Bolsheviks, who picked up 120,000 votes while the socialists (SRs, Mensheviks, and their affiliates) lost 375,000 voters; most of the latter presumably had chosen to stay home.
M
UNICIPAL
E
LECTIONS IN
M
OSCOW
(in percentage of seats)
88
One effect of this polarization was the erosion of the political base on which Kerensky had counted in his bid for unchallenged power. The poor showing by the socialist parties in the Petrograd municipal elections in mid-August may have been an important factor in Kerensky’s behavior later that month. For with his political base melting away, what better way of enhancing his popularity and influence with the left than as the vanquisher of the “counterrevolution,” even if only an imaginary one?
The Kornilov Affair raised Bolshevik fortunes to unprecedented heights. To neutralize Kornilov’s phantom putsch and stop Krymov’s troops from occupying Petrograd, Kerensky asked for help from the Ispolkom. At a night session of August 27–28 the Ispolkom approved, on a Menshevik motion, the creation of a “Committee to Fight the Counterrevolution.” But since the Bolshevik Military Organization was the only force which the Ispolkom could invoke, this action had the effect of placing the Bolsheviks in charge of the Soviet’s military contingent:89 in this manner, yesterday’s arsonists became today’s firefighters. Kerensky also appealed directly to the Bolsheviks to help him against Kornilov by using their influence with the soldiers, which had grown appreciably at this time.90 An agent of his requested the sailors of the cruiser Aurora, known for their Anarchist and Bolshevik sympathies, to assume responsibility for the protection of the Winter Palace, Kerensky’s residence and the seat of the Provisional Government.91 M. S. Uritskii would later claim that these actions of Kerensky’s “rehabilitated” the Bolsheviks. Kerensky also made it possible for the Bolsheviks to arm themselves by distributing 40,000 guns to the workers, a good share of which fell into Bolshevik hands; these weapons the Bolsheviks kept after the crisis had passed.92 How far matters had progressed with the rehabilitation of the Bolshevik Party may be judged by the decision of the government on August 30 to release all the Bolsheviks still in detention except those few against whom it had initiated legal proceedings.93 Trotsky was one of the beneficiaries of this amnesty: freed from the Kresty prison on September 3 on 3,000 rubles’ bail, he took charge of the Bolshevik faction in the Soviet. By October 10 all but twenty-seven Bolsheviks were at liberty94 and preparing for the next coup, while Kornilov and other generals languished in the Bykhov Fortress. On September 12, the Ispolkom requested the government to offer guarantees of personal security and a fair trial to Lenin and Zinoviev.95
A no less important consequence of the Kornilov Affair was a break between Kerensky and the military. For although the officer corps, confused about the issues and unwilling to defy the government openly, refused to join in Kornilov’s mutiny, it despised Kerensky for his treatment of their commander, the arrest of many prominent generals, and his pandering to the left. When, in late October, Kerensky would call on the military to help save his government from the Bolsheviks, his pleas would fall on deaf ears.
On September 1, Kerensky proclaimed Russia a “republic.” One week later (September 8) he abolished the Department of Political Counterintelligence, depriving himself of the principal source of information on Bolshevik plans.96
It was only a question of time before Kerensky would be overthrown by someone able to provide firm leadership. Such a person had to come from the left. Whatever the differences dividing them, the parties of the left closed ranks when confronted with the specter of “counterrevolution,” a term which in their definition included any initiative to restore to Russia effective government and a viable military force. But since the country had to have both, the initiative to restore order had to emerge from within their own ranks: the “counterrevolution” would come disguised as the “true” revolution.
In the meantime, Lenin, in his rural hideaway, was busy redesigning the world.
Accompanied by Zinoviev and a worker named N. A. Emelianov, he arrived in the evening of July 9 at Razliv, a railroad junction in a region of country dachas. Lenin had his beard shaved off, following which, disguised as farm laborers, the two Bolsheviks were led to a field hut nearby, which would serve as their home for the next month.
Lenin, who had an aversion to memoirs, left no reminiscences of this period in his life, but there exists a brief account by Zinoviev.97 The two lived in concealment, but maintained contact with the capital by means of couriers. Lenin was so irritated by attacks on him and his party that for a while he refused to read newspapers. The events of July 4 preyed on his mind: he often wondered aloud whether the Bolsheviks could not have taken power and every time reached a negative conclusion. With the late summer rains flooding their hut, it was time to move. Zinoviev returned to Petrograd while Lenin went on to Helsinki. To cross into Finland, he used false papers identifying him as a worker: judging by the passport photograph, which shows him cleanly shaven and wearing a wig, the disguise gave him something of a rakish appearance.
Removed from the day-to-day direction of his party and probably resigned to the probability that he would never have another opportunity to s
eize power, Lenin devoted his attention to the long-term objectives of the Communist movement. He resumed work on the essay on Marx and the State, which he would publish the next year under the title State and Revolution. It was to be his legacy to future generations, a blueprint for revolutionary strategy after the capitalist order had been overthrown.
State and Revolution is a nihilistic work which argues that the Revolution must destroy root and branch all “bourgeois” institutions. Lenin begins with citations from Engels to the effect that the state, everywhere and at all times, has represented the interests of the exploiting class and reflected class conflicts. He accepts this proposition as proven and elaborates on it exclusively with reference to Marx and Engels, without referring to the history of either political institutions or political practices.
The central message of the work derives from the lessons which Marx had drawn from the Paris Commune and formulated in Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon:
The parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen, along with the means of repression, the means of centralization of state power. All revolutions have perfected this machine instead of smashing it.
*
Marx rephrased the argument in a letter to a friend:
If you look into the concluding chapter of my
Eighteenth Brumaire
, you will find that I declare the next attempt of the French Revolution: not to transfer from one set of hands to another the bureaucratic-military machine, as was done until now, but to
smash
it.
98
Nothing that Marx wrote on the strategy and tactics of revolution etched itself more deeply on Lenin’s mind. He often quoted this passage: it was his guide to action after taking power. The destructive fury which he directed against the Russian state and Russian society and all their institutions found theoretical justification in this dictum of Marx’s. Marx provided Lenin with a solution to the most troublesome problem confronting modern revolutionaries: how to prevent the successful revolution from being undone by a counter revolutionary reaction. The solution was to liquidate the “bureaucratic-military machine” of the old regime in order to deprive the counterrevolution of a ground in which to breed.
What would replace the old order? Again referring to Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune, Lenin pointed to such mass-participatory institutions as communes and people’s militias that offered no haven to cadres of reactionary civil servants and officers. In this connection, he predicted the ultimate disappearance of the professional bureaucracy: “Under socialism, all will govern in turn and quickly become accustomed to no one governing.”99 Later, when the Communist bureaucracy grew to unheard-of proportions, this passage would be flung in Lenin’s face. There is no question that Lenin was unpleasantly surprised and greatly worried by the emergence in Soviet Russia of a mammoth bureaucracy: it was probably his main concern in the final year of life. But he was never under the illusion that the bureaucracy would vanish with the fall of “capitalism.” He realized that for a long time after the Revolution the “proletarian dictatorship” would have to assume the shape of a state, with all that this implied:
In the “
transition
” from capitalism to communism, repression is
still
necessary, but it is already the repression of the minority of the exploiters by the majority of the exploited. A special apparatus, a special machine of repression, the “state,” is
still
necessary.
100
While working on State and Revolution, Lenin also addressed the economic policies of a future Communist regime. This he did in two essays written in September, after the Kornilov Affair, when Bolshevik prospects unexpectedly improved.101 The thesis of these essays is very different from that of his political writings. While determined to “smash” the old state and its armed forces, Lenin favored preserving the “capitalist” economy and harnessing it in the service of the revolutionary state. We shall discuss this subject in the chapter devoted to “War Communism.” Here suffice it to say that Lenin derived his economic ideas from reading certain contemporary German writers, notably Rudolf Hilferding, who held that advanced or “finance” capitalism had attained a level of concentration at which it became relatively easy to introduce socialism by the simple device of nationalizing banks and syndicates.
Thus, while intending to uproot the entire political and military apparatus of the old, “capitalist” regime, Lenin wanted to retain and use its economic apparatus. In the end, he would destroy all three.
But this lay in the future. The immediate problems involved revolutionary tactics, and here Lenin found himself at odds with his associates.
In spite of the willingness of the socialists in the Soviet to forgive and forget the July putsch and despite their defense of the Bolsheviks against the government’s harassment, Lenin decided that the time for masking his bid for power under Soviet slogans had passed: henceforth, the Bolsheviks would have to strive for power directly, openly, by means of armed insurrection. In “The Political Situation,” written on July 10, one day after reaching his rural hideaway, he argued:
All hopes for the peaceful evolution of the Russian Revolution have disappeared without trace. The objective situation: either the ultimate triumph of the military dictatorship or the triumph of the
decisive struggle of the workers…
The slogan of the passage of all power to the soviets was the slogan of the peaceful evolution of the Revolution, which was possible in April, May, June, until July 5–9—that is, until the passage of actual power into the hands of the military dictatorship. Now this slogan is no longer correct, because it does not take into account the completed passage [of power] and the complete betrayal, in deed, of the Revolution by the SRs and Mensheviks.
102
In the original version of the manuscript Lenin had written “armed uprising,” which he later changed to “decisive struggle of the workers.”103 The novelty of these remarks was not that power had to be taken by force—the Bolshevikled armed workers, soldiers, and sailors who had taken over the streets of Petrograd in April and July hardly staged a festival of song and dance—but that the Bolsheviks now had to strike for themselves, without pretending to act on behalf of the soviets.
The Sixth Bolshevik Congress held at the end of July approved this program. Its resolution stated that Russia was now ruled by a “dictatorship of the counterrevolutionary imperialist bourgeoisie” under which the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” had lost its validity. The new slogan called for the “liquidation” of Kerensky’s “dictatorship.” This was the task of the Bolshevik Party, which would rally behind itself all anti-counterrevolutionary groups, headed by the proletariat and supported by the poor peasantry.104 Dispassionately analyzed, the premises of this resolution were absurd and its conclusions deceptive, but its practical meaning was unmistakable: henceforth the Bolsheviks would wage war against the Soviet as well as against the Provisional Government.
Many Bolsheviks were unhappy over the new tactic and the abandonment of pro-Soviet slogans. On another occasion that month, Stalin tried to put their minds at ease by assuring them that “the party is indubitably in favor of those soviets where we have a majority.”105
But it was not long before the Bolsheviks, noting a general cooling of interest in the soviets, changed their minds once again: for this growing apathy gave them an opportunity to penetrate and manipulate the soviets for their own ends. Izvestiia, the official soviet organ, wrote at the beginning of September that
in recent times one can observe indifference toward work in soviets.… Indeed, of the more than 1,000 delegates [of the Petrograd Soviet] only 400 to 500 attend its meetings, and those who fail to turn up are precisely representatives of parties which until now had formed a soviet majority
106
—that is, Mensheviks and SRs. The same compla
int could be read in Izvestiia one month later in an editorial called “Crisis of the Soviet Organization.” Its author recalled that when the soviets had been at the peak of popularity the “interurban” (inogorodnyi) department of the Ispolkom listed up to 800 soviets in the country. By October, many of these soviets no longer existed or existed only on paper. Reports from the provinces indicated that the soviets were losing prestige and influence. The editorial complained of the inability of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies to get together with peasant organizations, which resulted in the peasantry remaining “entirely outside” the soviet structure. But even in localities where the soviets continued to function, as in Petrograd and Moscow, they no longer represented all “democracy” because many intellectuals and workers stayed away:
The soviets were a marvelous organization to fight the old regime, but they are entirely incapable of taking upon themselves the creation of a new one.… When autocracy fell, and the bureaucratic order along with it, we erected the soviets of deputies as temporary barracks to shelter all democracy.
Now, Izvestiia concluded, the soviets were being abandoned for permanent “stone structures,” such as the Municipal Councils, chosen on a more representative franchise.107
The growing disenchantment with the soviets and the absenteeism of their socialist rivals enabled the Bolsheviks to gain in them an influence out of proportion to their national following. As their role in the soviets grew, they reverted to the old slogan: “All Power to the Soviets.”
The Russian Revolution Page 73
