Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  It is unlikely he meant any of this: there would be no ‘democratic institutions’ in the state Lenin built and little talk about democracy. But as a political tactic it seemed perfectly timed: in one move it wrong-footed the Mensheviks, the liberals and the Tsarist regime; it made Lenin seem reasonable and constructive, and it brought the Bolsheviks new members at a time when they were sorely needed. Elena Stasova, Lenin’s most senior agent in St Petersburg, wrote around this time telling him that the Party had been ‘almost destroyed’ and there were probably no more than 800 loyal Bolsheviks in the capital, and perhaps the same number again in all of Russia. The organisation, she said, ‘is cut to ribbons. There are no solid regional centres. The local organisations are cut off from one another and in the majority of cases, everywhere, there are only workers in them; the professionals [professional revolutionaries] have long since vanished. There are no secret addresses [safe houses] anywhere, nor any such conspiratorial practices.’

  Lenin’s about-face on parliaments appeared to be a clever ploy and increased his reputation within the revolutionary movement as a master tactician. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But it was one of his biggest mistakes; it led to a bitter personal blow and caused serious damage to the Party as a whole.

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  Lenin chose as the leader of the Bolshevik group of seven in the Duma – in effect the chief of the Party in Russia – a thirty-six-year-old Russified Pole named Roman Malinovsky. For a while Malinovsky was one of his favourites, a trusted confidant, the young man he was planning to turn into one of the stars of the Revolution.

  Lenin admired him mainly because he was working-class, originally from peasant stock, but also because he was vigorous, super-intelligent, had a powerful charm, was an eloquent speaker – Nadya said that he had ‘a beautiful voice’ – and was a natural leader. He didn’t mind that Malinovsky could also be boorish, rude, a heavy drinker and displayed violent mood swings. ‘At last, for the first time, we have an outstanding worker, a real leader representing us,’ Lenin said of him. ‘The results may not be visible immediately, but they are bound to be outstanding.’2

  A tailor turned metalworker, Malinovsky had been arrested three times and eventually jailed from 1899 to 1902 for ‘robbery with breaking and entering’. There was also a charge outstanding of attempted rape. The police noted on his file that he was a heavy spender and his wages were never sufficient for his expensive tastes.

  Soon after coming out of prison he got a job as a metal-turner and joined the Metalworkers’ Union. He was recruited into the Social Democratic Party. He was also recruited by the Okhrana as a spy and agent provocateur. Partly he was motivated by straightforward greed; partly the secret police threatened to reactivate the attempted rape charge.

  At first he was simply receiving a few small amounts of cash to supplement his wages. But as he rose in the labour organisation he became more important to the Okhrana. He betrayed the real names of agents, codes and the addresses of safe houses. For three years from 1906 he was head of the union, careful to steer a steady course between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. He became central to the regime’s main policy in dealing with the Social Democrats: keeping the party divided and fighting among themselves. Part of the strategy was to build up Lenin, who was still vehemently against healing the Party split with the Mensheviks.

  Soon Malinovsky was no longer a casual piece-rate informant but on a retainer from the Okhrana with a regular salary of 100 rubles a month plus expenses, considerably more than the average wages of a metalworker. He had a code-name, Portnoi (tailor). ‘Malinovsky was given the order to do as much as possible to deepen the split in the Party,’ Police Director Sergei Beletsky said. ‘The whole purpose of my direction is summed up in this: to give no possibility of the Party uniting. I worked on the principle of divide et impera.’3

  He was also ordered to ‘come out’ as a Bolshevik and to take the first opportunity to get acquainted with Lenin. The Bolshevik leader was so taken with him when they met for the first time in January 1912 at the Party Congress in Prague that Malinovsky was promoted to membership of the Central Committee – high leadership – and persuaded to stand as a deputy in the Duma.

  The secret police were equally pleased with their protégé. He was given a personal telephone hotline to Okhrana headquarters. Meetings with police chief Beletsky were held at private rooms in the most fashionable restaurants. He was taken to meet the Assistant Minister of Justice, the chief of the Okhrana and the Governor General of Moscow.

  Both the Bolsheviks and the regime did what they could to ensure his easy election. The police arrested all his most popular rivals to smooth his way, and he was given a certificate of good repute to clear his criminal record. The police showed their appreciation by raising Malinovsky’s retainer to 5,000 rubles a month, with bonuses for particularly valuable information – by far the highest amount that any of their spies had received.*2

  Malinovsky was earning his money. He knew all the senior Bolsheviks in Russia and betrayed many of them, including Yakov Sverdlov, who became one of the most important Bolshevik leaders after the Revolution. In February 1913 Lenin sent Sverdlov on a secret mission to St Petersburg from Swiss exile. He was staying in the capital at the home of a Bolshevik sympathiser but was arrested when he was moving from there ‘to a safer place’. Very few others apart from Malinovsky would have known the details. A month later, Stalin was picked up by the police at a concert given to raise money for Bolshevik members of the Duma. He had asked Malinovsky if it was safe to go and was told ‘Yes for sure.’ Both were sent to Siberia, where they remained until February 1917.*3

  Lenin had a blind spot about Malinovsky. Some people had warned him that the young man was untrustworthy, but he wouldn’t listen. Nikolai Bukharin was arrested in Tula in 1911, the day after he saw Malinovsky. He wrote to Lenin with his suspicions, but Lenin was furious that his trusted confidant was being slandered. After escaping from Siberian exile, Bukharin went to see Lenin and told him personally that he was convinced Malinovsky was a double agent. Lenin thought he was jealous. ‘Vladimir Ilyich thought it utterly impossible for Malinovsky to have been an agent provocateur,’ Nadya said. ‘The rumours…[about him] came from Menshevik circles…Only once did a doubt flash across his mind.’ They were taking a walk after an evening with the Zinovievs. ‘All of a sudden he stopped on the little bridge we were crossing and said: “It may be true…” and his face expressed anxiety. “What are you talking about, it’s nonsense,” I answered. Ilyich calmed down and began to abuse the Mensheviks…He had no further doubts on the question.’

  Lenin said simply that at the time he did not believe the allegations, not just because of their provenance, but ‘if Malinovsky was a provocateur, the Okhrana would not gain from that as much as our Party did’. It seems a rationalisation, hardly likely, given the damage Malinovsky caused, but Lenin sincerely believed it.4

  The Okhrana’s top agent was becoming too difficult to control and his police handlers were tiring of him. He made incendiary speeches in the Duma designed to keep Bolshevik suspicions at bay, but the police thought they were damaging to the regime. They paid him off with 6,000 rubles and gave him a ticket out of Russia.

  Lenin couldn’t understand why Malinovsky resigned from the Duma in May 1914, seemingly at the height of his authority, leaving the Bolshevik ranks inside Russia in disarray. At first he was angry. But then he was persuaded that Malinovsky had suffered a nervous breakdown and he was mollified. The truth was that Malinovsky feared his double life would be exposed.

  Lenin continued to believe in him until the secret police files were opened after the Tsar abdicated and the Okhrana was abolished. For a ruthless, intensely secretive man, whose life was bound up in conspiratorial plotting, Lenin could be naïvely trusting. He hardly ever spoke about Malinovsky after the truth about him emerged, though he did admit to Zinoviev in the summer of 1917, ‘that bastard, that man Malinovsky. He fooled us all for years. I never saw throug
h that scoundrel. What a swine!’*4, 5

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  Another millionaire turned up at just the right time to boost the Bolsheviks’ fortunes. Press censorship was relaxed in spring 1912 and as the Bolsheviks had decided to take part in the Duma elections they were allowed, for the first time, to publish a legal newspaper. Lenin was excited and he saw it as a big opportunity to attract a mass membership for the Party. He had high ambitions. He wanted to produce a daily paper, full of news as well as propaganda, relying on correspondents from around Russia, but with him as the guiding spirit, a chief editor in absentia. Though the Bolsheviks were partially legalised, there was still a warrant out for his arrest and he couldn’t return to Russia. Lenin had the format of the paper worked out. He had chosen a title – Pravda (Truth); he selected a team of journalists to staff it and contribute to it. All he lacked was enough money to produce the publication. The vital funds came from a gift by Viktor Tikhomirov, who had just inherited a fortune following the death of his father, a Kazan merchant. He had been a member of a group of radical intellectuals meeting secretly in Kazan, but when he moved to St Petersburg after the 1905 uprising he joined the Social Democrats, was convinced by Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and became a Bolshevik. Tikhomirov donated Lenin 100,000 rubles – a huge sum – to launch what would become one of the most famous, or rather notorious, newspapers in the world.

  On Lenin’s orders Pravda tried carefully to remain on the right side of the law, occasionally overstepping it, when an issue would be confiscated. It had a print run of 60,000 and on most days sold out within a few hours. Of the many newspapers that began appearing at this time, representing practically all shades of opinion, it was one of the most professionally produced. Despite regular harassment from the regime it survived a range of crises. It was banned nine times – only to reappear the next day, with a slightly different title. The new name would always have the word ‘Pravda’ in it. So when the regime closed one paper down, a new incarnation would appear – Workers’ Truth, Daily Truth, Evening Truth, Truth of Labour, The Way of Truth, Proletarian Truth, and so on. The job of editor was not the safest, though the paper was supposed to be legal. In its first thirty-eight issues, Pravda had a succession of thirty-six editors, all of whom were arrested. Between them they spent forty-seven months in jail. By the time the regime finally banned it soon after the First World War began, 636 issues of Pravda had appeared and Lenin had written voluminously for the paper – 280 pieces under his byline, many more unsigned. He concerned himself with every aspect of the paper, from the ‘Party line’ to advice on typography. There is no evidence he was an expert on fonts and type sizes, but he wrote to one of the editors, Vladimir Karpinsky, telling him he could squeeze more material into two pages if the paper changed to the smaller brevier script and fitted a more compact masthead into the corner of a page; ‘then there could be room provided for another two articles’.6

  Nadya told Lenin’s sisters that ‘he became another person after the first number of Pravda appeared’. He added a postscript: ‘now at last there is real live work to do’. But he couldn’t be closely enough involved with Pravda from Paris; he had to get nearer to Russia. He chose to move to Kraków, just ten kilometres from the Russian border. ‘No matter how provincial and barbarous this town of ours may be, by and large I am better off here than in Paris,’ he told his mother in mid-June 1912, soon after arriving. It turned out to be one of his favourite cities in Europe.

  * * *

  Traditionally, England, Switzerland and France were the destinations of choice for Russian émigrés. The Austrian part of Poland was a new departure, but there was a lot to recommend it and ‘in so many ways it is much more convenient than Paris’, thought Nadya. ‘Whereas the French police assisted the Russian police in every possible way, the Poles…were hostile to the whole Russian government. In Kraków we could be sure that our letters would not be intercepted and that no one would spy on the newcomers.’

  When Gorky wrote asking him why he was in ‘bourgeois’ Austria he said it was convenient: ‘the frontier is close by and we make good use of it. It’s much nearer to Petersburg. We get the papers from there on the third day. It’s become far easier to write for [them] from here. Co-operation and communication with them goes much easier. There is less squabbling here, which is an advantage.’7

  They rented a house with the Zinovievs in Zwierzyniec, a well-to-do suburb close to the River Vistula and a forest. ‘The streets were unpaved and exceedingly muddy,’ Nadya told Lenin’s mother. ‘But five kilometres away there’s Las Wolski, a beautiful wood which we frequent on our bicycles.’ Further in the distance were the foothills of a range of peaks. They were smaller than Lenin’s beloved Alps, but he felt happy that mountains were nearby. ‘Volodya is quite jolly in Poland,’ Nadya said.

  In later years Lenin often spoke with delight about a mountain jaunt he took with a Kraków friend, Sergei Bagoczki. They set off one day to climb the serene Babya mountain, a well-known Tatra attraction. The tour to take was to walk halfway up in the afternoon, spend the night at a hut, and see the peak at dawn. But on the day they picked the weather was changeable. They left their bicycles at the foot of the mountain and set off along a sloping path. ‘We soon reached woods,’ recounted Bagoczki. ‘It was getting darker. Unfortunately, we had left our torches with our bicycles. The path zigzagged up…but it disappeared. We started looking for the path in all directions, but in vain. It was dark, we moved slowly, stumbling against bushes and stumps. There was the danger that we might have to spend the night in the woods. Suddenly a light twinkled…and we could see the windows of a hut.’ They stayed the night and asked the hut watchman to wake them at 4 a.m. ‘Through my sleep I heard Vladimir Ilyich’s voice: “It’s already seven and we were not roused. We missed the sunrise.” We called the watchman. “But gentlemen, look through the window…such mist that nothing can be seen two steps from you. I thought you’d better sleep.”…He said there would be no change before tomorrow. So our enterprise was doomed to failure. We could not wait till the next day because Vladimir Ilyich had to be in Kraków in the evening. Our fiasco did not discourage him. “On my first free day I shall come again,” he said. Hardly two weeks passed by and we went…the watchman greeted us as old friends and promised to wake us early, no matter about the weather. Four o’clock came; there was mist but not as thick as it had been last time…We reached the top but the mist persisted. We could see no more than a few yards ahead. We decided to wait and have breakfast…after half an hour the mist began to lift…in front of us a wonderful view was unveiling. In the distance, lit up by the bright rays of the sun, the long range of the Tatra peaks as if suspended in the air; below, everything wrapped in fog, like a blanket of thick foam. Vladimir Ilyich was glowing: “You see our efforts were not in vain,” he said.’8

  Galicia was dirt-poor but recognisable to Lenin as ‘almost Russia’, he told his mother, ‘it reminds me of home’. The peasants were similar to those he saw on market days in Simbirsk or Kazan: ‘there are bent-nosed women in colourful dresses…just like Russia’. The Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, looked like a shtetl in any of the western regions of the Tsar’s empire – like Russian-occupied Poland just a few kilometres away. ‘Each of us secretly thought about Russia,’ Nadya said. ‘We all had a strong desire to go…We avoided speaking about this, but all of us secretly thought about it. Kraków…was only semi-exile.’9

  *1 There has never been proof, but the best evidence suggests that the assassination at the Kiev Opera House was in fact organised by Stolypin’s enemies within the government and the royal court, though the Tsar himself was definitely not involved. The man who pulled the trigger, Dmitry Bogrov, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer from a well-off Kievan family, was a Socialist Revolutionary, but he was given the means to commit the murder by senior figures in the Interior Ministry. And it was the police who got him a hard-to-obtain ticket to the opera that evening for the performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Earli
er in the day he had begged the police for a ticket. It was a terrorist act – but the terrorists seem to have been government officials.

  *2 The Okhrana was not as omniscient or efficient as it was often made out to be. In fiction, spies have traditionally been brilliant ‘masterminds’. Less so in fact. On the whole, barring some remarkable exceptions, spies have been quite dim. But one thing the Okhrana was good at was recruiting double agents and provocateurs. Around the same time that Malinovsky began his double life, Yevno Azef, the leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the biggest terrorist organisation in Russia, behind hundreds of assassinations of government officials, had been an Okhrana agent. About to be unmasked by his comrades, he escaped to Germany in the nick of time. He died in Berlin in 1918, of natural causes.

  *3 Sverdlov was Stalin’s most bitter enemy – even more so than Trotsky would famously become – and the antipathy began when they were exiled together at Kureiko, a remote hamlet in the frozen wastes of Siberia, just inside the Arctic Circle. After a while, Sverdlov could hardly bear to be anywhere near the Georgian. ‘A comrade is with me but we know each other too well,’ he wrote to a friend. He didn’t name ‘the comrade’ but it was definitely Stalin. ‘Saddest of all in exile or prison conditions…a man bares himself and all his petty aspects are revealed. The worst thing is that all the trivialities of…[a person’s] life are seen.’

  *4 Malinovsky was thrown out of the Party in 1914, but not because he was a traitor – those charges were never proved against him in a ‘court of inquiry’ chaired in 1914 by Lenin. He was reprimanded for abandoning his position at the Duma. He chose to return to Russia from Germany after the war. He was tried secretly and maintained throughout that Lenin knew he was working for the Okhrana, but that was certainly untrue. He was sentenced to death but believed that if he could talk to Lenin he would be pardoned or the sentence would be commuted to a prison term. Lenin would not listen to him or intervene and Malinovsky was shot in November 1918.