The Tsar was no longer in the capital, nor at Tsarskoe Selo, but at his military headquarters at Mogilev, near the Front. In another of his disastrous list of errors he had eighteen months earlier taken personal command of the army – against the advice of all his ministers and his Imperial General Staff. It meant that when things went wrong he couldn’t blame his field commanders but took responsibility for the conduct of the war himself.*5 He had been told of the street demonstrations, but did not grasp how serious they were and believed the usual methods against riot in the capital – sending in the troops – would work. Alexandra wrote complacently, telling him, ‘this is a hooligan movement. Young people run and shout that there is no bread, simply to create excitement, along with workers who prevent others from working. If the weather were still very cold they would probably all stay home. But all this will pass and become calm…’12
He chose to ignore the more realistic warnings given by the President of the Duma, Rodzianko: ‘Situation serious. In the capital anarchy. Government paralysed. Transport of food and fuel completely disorganised. Public disaffection growing. On the streets chaotic shooting. It is essential at once to entrust a person enjoying country’s confidence with the formation of a new government. There should be no delay. All delay is death.’ Having heard nothing, a few hours later he sent another cable. ‘Situation deteriorating. Imperative to take immediate steps for tomorrow will be too late. The last hour has struck, decisive as the fate of the Fatherland and dynasty.’ The Tsar’s only reaction was to glance at the telegram and turn to his chief aide, the addled seventy-nine-year-old, heavily bewhiskered courtier Count Vladimir Fredericks, and say, ‘that fat fellow Rodzianko has again written to me all kinds of nonsense. I shan’t even bother to answer.’13
Nicholas sent a fateful order to General Sergei Khabalov, commander of the Petrograd Military District: ‘I order you to use whatever force is necessary to stop tomorrow the disorders in the capital, which are unacceptable at this difficult time of war with Germany and Austria.’
Khabalov said later that he was dismayed by the Tsar’s instructions. He knew, if Nicholas didn’t, that the troops wouldn’t obey orders. The Revolution was sparked by bread riots but it succeeded because every regiment in the Petrograd guard – the smart regiments that for centuries had been fiercely loyal to the Romanovs – mutinied. It was the famous Guards of the Preobrazhensky, Volinsky, Pavlovsky and Litovsky, known as the Tsar’s praetorians, who decided the fate of the Emperor.
A day and a half after the Tsar’s order the Petrograd Chief of Police described the scenes in the capital in his last report to the Interior Minister. ‘At six in the morning the telephone rang. The city prefect told me that an NCO in the Volinsky Regiment of the Guard named Kirpichnikov had just killed his superior officer…the assassin had disappeared and the attitude of the regiment was threatening…[to other officers]. I now saw how far anarchy had spread and infected the barracks. A short while later the Prefect called again with more bad news. Brigadier-General Dobrovsky, commander of a battalion of sappers in the Guards, had been killed by his men. The events moved fast. The Volinsky troops…chased almost all its officers out of the barracks. These mutineers joined the Preobrazhensky regiment, whose barracks were near their own. They succeeded in capturing the arsenal on the Liteiny Bridge. Soldiers were dashing about the streets armed with guns. A raging crowd invaded the Prison of Preliminary Confinement and opened the cells. Soon it was the same in all the city’s prisons. The police stations were taken by the mob. Policemen who were not able to change into mufti were torn to pieces. Fires finished off the rest.’
Historians have often said that it had been a generally peaceful uprising. This is a popular myth that has gained authority largely because the February Revolution was genuinely supported by the vast majority of people. But it was violent. Far more people were killed in February than would die in the Bolshevik coup in October – 1,433 in Petrograd and around 3,000 in Moscow, where armed gangs roamed the streets for several days. The October coup was almost bloodless by comparison.14
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After ordering the troops to suppress the demonstrations, the Tsar prorogued the Duma. Again, his instinct when in trouble was to ban politics. But the Duma politicians refused to go quietly and when the following morning members entered the Tauride Palace,*6 there was nobody to enforce the Emperor’s will. With no government, anarchy on the streets, the army in open mutiny and mobs throughout the city shouting ‘Death to the Tsar’, they filled the power vacuum, or tried to, with a ‘Temporary Committee of the State Duma’. First, the Duma established a Provisional Government led by an elderly liberal, Prince Georgy Lvov, who quickly formed a coalition comprising some Kadets – the centre-right Constitutional Democrats – other liberals and moderate socialists, like Alexander Kerensky, who would be in charge until elections to a Constituent Assembly. Second, it had to decide what to do about the Tsar. They agreed unanimously that Nicholas had to go, but the royalists wanted him to abdicate in favour of his son Alexei, and retain a constitutional monarchy. They were swung around against the Romanovs and the idea of monarchy by the liberals and leftists – ‘it is not only unacceptable, but also utopian, given the general hatred of the monarchy among the mass of the people’. They agreed, with the Kadets’ blessing, that they would force the Tsar to abdicate in favour of his brother Michael, who gave his word to them that the following day he would dissolve the Romanovs’ claim to the throne.
It was only when the top army officers advised Nicholas to abdicate – in particular his Chief of Staff, General Mikhail Alexeyev – that he agreed to go. He said his son was too ill to be Tsar ‘and I can’t bear to be parted from him’. The dignity of his departure and his gentlemanly bearing should not mask how hopeless Nicholas II had been as a ruler, and in what a terrible state he was leaving his country. The Duma had despatched two right-wing politicians, Alexander Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin, to extract the abdication proclamation. The Tsar was returning to Petrograd from his military headquarters in the imperial railway carriage. They met him at a remote station near Pskov at 9.45 p.m. on 1 March. The Tsar ‘was absolutely calm, almost impenetrable,’ Guchkov recalled. ‘I even wondered whether we were dealing with a normal person. One might allow oneself some show of emotion on the occasion, but nothing of the sort.’ A few words were drafted on a page. ‘We hand over the succession to Our Beloved Brother the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and bless him on his succession.’ Fredericks placed the document on the royal writing desk. ‘Then, bowing his head for a few moments, he dipped his pen and…for the last time appended his signature as Tsar of All the Russias to the writ of Abdication.’ Nicholas admitted later he was seething with anger and deep in pain, but as one of his aides said soon afterwards, the extraordinary event was as matter-of-fact ‘as if he were turning over command of a cavalry regiment’.15
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The radical groups had played virtually no part in the Revolution, as Sergei Mstislavsky, a leading Socialist Revolutionary activist in Petrograd, acknowledged. ‘We SRs were fast asleep, like the Foolish Virgins in the Gospel,’ he said in a somewhat inappropriate analogy. ‘The truth of the matter is that outside of the small factions of the revolutionaries…stewing in our own juices, the socialist parties were completely bankrupt.’ The Bolsheviks had reluctantly joined the street demonstrations, but had not led them. ‘We didn’t think this was going to be a revolution, so went along with the protests with a heavy heart, thinking they would be brutally suppressed by the Tsar,’ said Vladimir Kayurov, one of the leaders of the Party underground in Russia. The highest-ranking Bolshevik in Petrograd at the time, Shlyapnikov, who reached Petrograd soon after the Revolution, admitted later that in February 1917 the Bolsheviks were weak, with a maximum of 3,000 members in Russia, and almost entirely broke. In the previous two months, he said, a paltry 1,117 rubles and fifty kopecks had gone into Party funds. The Petrograd Bolsheviks couldn’t afford to send agitators to the provinces and they had relie
d on activists visiting relatives or going out of the city on regular work assignments.16
The Revolution had been entirely spontaneous, an outpouring of anger – a classic example of a popular revolt against an incompetent and bankrupt regime. The Tsar’s secret police had beaten the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary groups; but they had forgotten about the people. The British journalist Arthur Ransome began his 3 March despatch for the Daily News: ‘Let there be no mistake…This was not an organised revolution. It will be impossible to make a statue in memory of its organiser, unless that statue represents a simple Russian peasant soldier.’*7
For the first few days it seemed as though ‘a miracle has occurred and we may expect more miracles’, as Alexander Blok wrote to his mother. There was a giddy sense of freedom – but also of foreboding. ‘There is the extraordinary feeling that nothing is forbidden, that anything can happen.’ After 300 years in absolute power the Romanov dynasty had collapsed in a matter of days ‘like a train crash in the night, like a bridge crumbling beneath your feet, like a house falling down’.
*1 A foolish prohibition which left a giant black hole in the budget. The sale of vodka was a state monopoly and the scale so large that the tax brought in nearly 20 per cent of the state’s income. To make up for the loss the government had to borrow yet more, adding to the already enormous debts caused by the war, and also to print money which fuelled inflation. Though rarely mentioned, the vodka ban was a big factor in the fall of the Tsarist regime; and seventy years later, when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to prohibit alcohol, the result was similar. It helped to bankrupt the USSR and played a major part in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
*2 The Field Marshal had heard of the last audience with the Tsar given to Sir George Buchanan early in January 1917. The ambassador told him that there was now a barrier between him and his people and that if Russia was still united as a nation it was in opposing his present policy…‘Your Majesty, if I may be permitted to say so, has but one safe course…namely, to break down the barrier that separates you from your people and to regain their confidence.’ The Emperor, who was significantly shorter than the languid and elegant Buchanan, drew himself up to his fullest height and replied coldly, ‘Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people or that they are to regain my confidence?’
*3 But he was amused by the idea. He suggested she should find ‘a convenient old man for the purpose’ and recommended Pavel Axelrod, a long-time Menshevik enemy of his who, though a naturalised Swiss and a widower, was aged sixty-seven. Ravich – in her early thirties – declined the suggestion.
*4 That didn’t deter Princess Catherine Radziwill from holding on 25 February the soirée that all Petrograd society had been talking about for weeks. In his diary Maurice Paléologue, the French Ambassador, said that her brilliantly lit palace on Fontanka and the opulence of the evening brought to mind Paris in 1789.
*5 His officers pleaded with the Tsar not to appoint himself army commander, but Nicholas argued that his presence would improve morale and if the troops would not fight for Russia, they would for him. How wrong he was. General Brusilov, in command at the Front, said the decision was a terrible misjudgement. ‘Everyone knew that Nicholas understood next to nothing about military matters and, although the word “Tsar” still had a magical power over the troops, he utterly lacked the charisma to bring the magic to life. Faced with a group of soldiers, he was nervous and didn’t know what to say.’ The Council of Ministers, which rarely criticised the Tsar, was unanimous in opposition. ‘The decision you have taken threatens Russia, You and Your dynasty with the gravest consequences.’
*6 The enormous palace had originally been built by the statesman and soldier Prince Grigory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s lover (and, some say, secret husband). It was home to the Duma (in the right wing of the building as it faced the River Neva) and, since the Revolution, to the Petrograd Soviet (which met in the left wing).
*7 Ransome’s adventure stories written later, when he produced a number of novels, were nowhere near as exciting as his life. He was a gifted reporter and wrote vivid despatches from the front line of Russia’s revolutions. A left-winger, but not from his writings a Communist, he was certainly a British spy and very possibly a double agent. He left his first wife back in England and ran off with Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky’s trusted secretary. It is still not entirely clear, as some of his biographers claim, whether he seduced her to work for British intelligence, or vice versa. Or indeed neither.
28
The Sealed Train
‘The Germans turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.’
Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume Two, 1929
The idea originally came from Lenin’s former friend turned bitter enemy, Yuli Martov. He had been languishing in Swiss exile for the last ten years with his group of supporters, all equally desperate to return to revolutionary Russia.
On the evening of 6 March 1917 a large gathering of leftist émigrés met at the Zur Eintracht café to discuss how they could get home. It was rare for Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs to be in the same room together, but on this exceptional occasion the feuding habit was broken. One German socialist who was there said that, at the start of the meeting, he had ‘never seen Lenin so excited and furious’. He could barely stay in his seat, paced up and down the hall ‘like a bundle of nervous energy’ and repeatedly said, ‘We must go at all costs, even if we go through hell.’
The suggestion of going through Germany was made by Martov early in the meeting. The Provisional Government in Petrograd had freed all political prisoners. Perhaps, he said, they could broker a deal whereby the Russians would repatriate some German and Austrian prisoners in return for a guarantee of safe passage through Germany for the Russian exiles stuck in Switzerland?
Lenin immediately looked interested and, for once, told Martov that he was onto an ‘excellent idea’. But the Bolshevik leader was far too impatient to negotiate through the government under Prince Lvov, which he described as ‘ten capitalists and one hostage to democracy’. It would take far too long and be altogether too cumbersome. Nor did he want to deal with the new Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which had quickly established itself as a rival power base in Russia’s capital. As usual, Lenin was determined to operate in secrecy. He told a Bolshevik aide, ‘we ought to get busy on Martov’s excellent plan…only we cannot go about it directly. They would suspect us…Non-party Russians and Russian patriots should appeal to the Swiss ministers with a request that negotiations be started with representatives of the Swiss government in Berne. We cannot participate directly or indirectly. Our participation would ruin everything. But the plan itself is very good and very correct.’1
Secrecy was vital to Lenin: ‘I personally can’t make any moves unless very special measures have been taken,’ he told Inessa. He recruited the Swiss socialist Robert Grimm, editor of the radical Berner Tagwacht, to negotiate on his behalf – discreetly. He didn’t trust Grimm, ‘a detestable centrist’, he told a group of comrades. But Grimm could be useful and he was well connected with the Swiss government and socialists throughout Europe. At the same time, Lenin opened a second front and started other confidential talks with someone he found equally loathsome: through his trusted lieutenant in Scandinavia, Ganetsky, he made contact with Helphand, the shadowy Parvus. Lenin had refused any ‘tainted’ Kaiser’s money when Parvus had offered it two years earlier. Now he could no longer afford such scruples. He was prepared to make a deal with the Germans if the terms were right.2
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From the German point of view, investing in Lenin seemed an entirely justifiable tactic of war and a risk worth taking – though they, too, had an interest in keeping the agreement secret from their own people, and if possible from the Western Allies. General Erich Ludendorff, as Quartermaster-General one of the two most s
enior commanders in the German army, admitted that he had no idea who Lenin was before the February Revolution in Petrograd – and didn’t have any understanding of Lenin’s politics or of Marxism. It was mumbo jumbo to him. But if Lenin could help to destabilise Russia, wooing him onto their side made military sense. It became a yet more tempting aim now: in February 1917 the German High Command was certain that the US would imminently enter the war on the Allies’ side (which they did on 6 April). It was important to avoid continuing to fight on two fronts. Ludendorff said later that ‘having once sent Lenin to Russia, our government had a special responsibility. From the war’s point of view, his journey was justified. Russia had to be beaten.’ General Max Hoffmann, Germany’s commander of the armies against Russia, was equally candid. ‘In the same way that I hurled grenades into enemy trenches and released poison gas against our opponents so do I have the right to use propaganda against our enemies.’3
Once Helphand/Parvus was convinced that Lenin was serious about a deal, he persuaded the German Ambassador to Denmark, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, to approach Berlin with the idea of helping Lenin reach Petrograd. He predicted, with remarkable prescience, that if Lenin returned to Russia he would topple the Provisional Government, take power in an armed uprising and promptly conclude a separate peace. He said that Lenin had such a ‘lust for power’ that he would certainly agree to accept German help to reach his homeland.
The ambassador cabled the German Foreign Ministry at once. ‘We must now definitely try to create the utmost chaos in Russia. To this end we must avoid any traceable interference in the course of the Russian Revolution. But we must secretly do all that we can to aggravate the differences between the moderate and the extreme parties…since we are interested in the victory of the latter. For another upheaval will then be inevitable, and will take forms that will shake the Russian state to its foundations. Support by us to the extreme elements in Russia is preferable, because in this way the work is done more thoroughly and achieves its results more quickly. According to all forecasts we may count on the disintegration being so far advanced in three months or so that military intervention by us will guarantee the collapse of Russian strength.’ It was an optimistic forecast but the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, agreed that it was in German interests ‘that the radical wing of the Russian Revolution should prevail’. Kaiser Wilhelm was personally told the general outline of the idea and approved of it.4
Lenin Page 33
