Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  The Menshevik Sukhanov has left the only record of Lenin’s appearance that night. He said he was impressed, if appalled. ‘I shall never forget that thunder-like speech which startled and amazed not only me, a heretic who had accidentally dropped in, but all the true believers as well. I am certain that no one had expected anything of the sort.’ The speech lacked wit or pathos, it was simplistic, ‘but Lenin had a way of hammering, hammering and hammering ideas into the heads of his audience until he took them captive. I felt as though I had been beaten about the head with flails.’

  The applause was rapturous and soon followed by enthusiastic singing of revolutionary songs. Lenin looked entirely exhausted when he finished, but it was nearly dawn before he managed to get away.5

  *1 After the Bolshevik Revolution Mathilde Kshesinskaya met Shlyapnikov to plead for her possessions back. She tried every trick in the book, including tears, but the ascetic revolutionary was adamant. She lost almost everything, including her mansion and a suitcase of jewellery the Tsar had given her. But she was allowed to leave Russia and went to her house in Cap d’Antibes, which had also been a gift from Nicholas. She eventually married her Grand Duke Andrei.

  30

  The Interregnum

  ‘The Revolution was made in the streets, the Government in the salons.’

  Nikolai Sukhanov (1882–1940)

  ‘And someone, falling on the map,

  Does not sleep in his dreams.

  There came a Bonaparte

  In my country.’

  Marina Tsvetaeva, on Alexander Kerensky,

  The Swans’ Encampment, July 1917

  Lenin finally got some sleep. He left the singing Bolsheviks at the Kshesinskaya Mansion and was taken in a commandeered car to his sister Anna’s apartment on Shirokaya Street, in a prosperous, middle-class district of Petrograd, where he lived for two months after his return. In the morning he and Nadya truly realised their exile had reached an end. ‘When we were alone…we looked about the room,’ said Nadya. ‘It was a typical city apartment. We sensed instantly that in reality we were now in Peter and that all those Parises, Genevas, Bernes and Zurichs were already genuinely in the past.’

  This was the first time he met his nephew Gora, now twelve, whom Anna and Mark Elizarov had adopted six years earlier. They would form a close bond, and instantly they were playing together in a relaxed way. At one point they were wrestling energetically and making a racket in the flat. His sister was cross: ‘Volodya! Now that you’ve completely tormented him, leave the poor boy alone. Look…you’ve broken the table.’

  His first venture out of the apartment that morning was to visit his mother and sister Olga’s grave at the Volkovo Cemetery. Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, his old family friend and loyal Bolshevik functionary, who had carried Maria Alexandrovna’s casket at her funeral nine months previously, drove him but discreetly kept his distance when Lenin went to the graveside, with its simple headstone. ‘Always calm, always in complete control of himself, Vladimir Ilyich never, especially in the presence of other people, disclosed the depth and intimacy of his feelings. But all of us knew how tender and affectionate he felt towards his mother, and knowing this we realised that the path leading to the little mound on the Volkovo Cemetery was one of the most difficult roads he trod.’1

  —

  With no more time for sentiment, Lenin returned to politics. Word of his incendiary speech the previous night had spread. Even his closest supporters were mystified by his tactics and extremism, his call for insurrection and demand for revolution now. His optimism – ‘if we push…we are bound to win’, he had said – seemed to many in his clique like a rash, utopian dream. Mid-morning on the day after he arrived in Petrograd he attended a joint meeting of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the magnificent Tauride Palace. He was greeted by catcalls and boos from both sides. One leading Bolshevik from Lenin’s home region of the Volga, Pavel Lebedev, told him plainly they were ‘perplexed, most of us are…I think it can only be explained, Comrade Lenin, by your prolonged lack of contact with Russian life’. Others were far less polite. ‘What you have been saying sounds like the ravings of a madman,’ the Menshevik Boris Bogdanov, one of the leaders of the Soviet, shouted at him. ‘It’s obscene to listen to this claptrap.’ Ivan Goldenberg, who had once been on the Bolshevik Central Committee and had known Lenin well, said that preaching civil war was ‘dangerous nonsense, but of course it is useless to talk of unity with someone whose watchword is schism. Your programme means insurrection, which will lead us…to anarchy. These are tactics which echo something old – primitive anarchism.’2

  When the uproar died down Lenin was calm, and repeated the same unyielding points he had made the previous night, which would soon be published in Petrograd as The April Theses. ‘There must be no compromise with the Provisional Government, which cannot in any case survive. All power must go to the Soviets,’ he declared. The war had to end at once; the army, the police and the civil service had to be abolished; the banks and the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy nationalised. Everything had to be destroyed before it would be rebuilt under socialism.

  Ministers in the Provisional Government were congratulating themselves that they had been clever to allow Lenin back into the country, convinced that his extremism had made life easier for them. The Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov, Minister of Agriculture, said Lenin’s ideas were so radical and ‘raving’ that ‘the Bolsheviks’ dangers will be limited and localised’. Prince Lvov, the Prime Minister, told Vladimir Nabokov (father of the novelist), his closest aide and Chief Secretary to the Cabinet, ‘Don’t worry about Lenin. The man is not dangerous – and, besides, we can arrest him whenever we want.’ That Tuesday evening after Lenin’s arrival, the Foreign Minister, Pavel Milyukov, leader of the Kadets and a highly regarded historian before he went into liberal politics, confidently told friends over dinner that the Bolshevik chief’s ideas ‘are entirely unacceptable…Now he’s in Russia, he will learn better.’ Though Lenin had been back in the country for less than twenty-four hours, the minister was writing him off. ‘Lenin is a completely lost man.’3

  —

  Overnight the Revolution had brought political freedoms never before known in Russia – and hardly ever since. People could say, write and read what they wanted, something they could not do a year later – nor their great-grandchildren a hundred years later. Within days, scores of newspapers representing all shades of opinion began appearing on the streets of Petrograd, Moscow and other cities. But along with those freedoms came anarchy, violence and a breakdown in law and order which the government was unable to prevent. Immediately after the Revolution there was wild rejoicing at the fall of the Romanov monarchy. Statues of historic Tsars were torn down and imperial emblems like the double-headed eagle were destroyed amid a series of spontaneous celebrations throughout the country. They were particularly joyful in the empire beyond Russia, from Warsaw to Tiflis, where many people hoped the Revolution would soon lead to national independence. Everywhere, a republic was an overwhelmingly popular cause. Lurid, semi-pornographic, anti-monarchist pamphlets with titles like The Secrets of the Romanovs, The Night Orgies of Rasputin and The German Woman’s Evil Lies were instant sell-outs. All the institutions of the former regime were under attack.

  But celebration had quickly given way to something darker: a quest for revenge, which Lenin and the Bolsheviks were quick to exploit, but which other socialists were convinced would destroy the ideals they had been struggling for over many decades. ‘Lynch-law, the destruction of houses and shops, jeering and attacks on public officials and strangers, unauthorised arrests, seizures and beatings-up for no reason – all are recorded every day,’ one enthusiastic revolutionary acknowledged apprehensively within a fortnight of the February Revolution.

  Gorky had supported the 1905 insurrection and the overthrow of the Tsar but loathed the heedless ‘destruction of the mob…an anarchic wave of plebeian violence and revenge…[has] brought the country to a ne
w dark age of barbaric chaos’, he said. Other intellectuals were appalled that all symbols of the old order and all traces of the past Russian civilization were being wiped out: national monuments, old buildings, libraries, works of art. ‘This is the struggle of culture against anarchy,’ Gorky said in a pessimistic piece in his newspaper, Novaya Zhizn. And he wrote to his wife Ekaterina about his beloved Petrograd: ‘This is no longer a capital; it is a cesspit. No one works; the streets are filthy; there are piles of stinking rubbish in the courtyards. It hurts me to say how bad things have become. There is growing idleness and cowardice in the people and all those base and criminal instincts…it seems are destroying Russia.’4

  Not everyone agreed. Alexander Blok believed that violence would be ‘cleansing’, a cathartic but necessary way of healing centuries-old wounds. Trotsky saw the violent mood as predictable, understandable and justifiable. ‘It is natural that people unaccustomed to revolution and its psychology, or those who have previously only experienced in the realm of ideas that which has unfolded…may view with sorrow, if not disgust, the anarchic wildness and violence which appeared on the surface of the revolutionary events. Yet in that riotous anarchy, even in its most negative manifestations, when the soldier, yesterday’s slave, all of a sudden found himself in a first-class railway carriage and tore out the velvet facings to make himself foot cloths, even in such an act of vandalism the awakening of personality was expressed. That downtrodden, persecuted Russian peasant, who was struck in the face and subjected to the vilest curses, found himself, for perhaps the first time in his life, in a first-class carriage and saw the velvet cushions, while on his feet he had stinking rags, and he tore up the velvet, saying that he too had the right to a piece of good silk or velvet.’ Lenin was determined to stoke up this desire for revenge and destruction, convinced it would help sweep him to power.5

  —

  From the start, there was a fatal weakness in the political arrangement immediately after the February Revolution. Two rival seats of power were established – a recipe for chaos. The Duma set up the Provisional Government of Prince Lvov, which, supposedly, was a seamless transition from the Tsarist regime. But on day one the government recognised the Soviet of Soldiers’, Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies as a partner and accepted that all government measures had to be approved by the Soviet before they were put into effect. The Soviets were hastily elected representatives from factories, army regiments and land communes, chosen within days of the Revolution, usually without a secret ballot. The Petrograd Soviet was more than 600-strong. They were not representative or in any modern sense democratic. But nor was the Duma which appointed the coalition government; that was a gerrymandered so-called parliament rigged by the Tsar and based on a minuscule electorate of property owners. They were frequently at loggerheads over the next few months and both tried to claim a bogus legitimacy. It has often been said, glibly, that the Provisional Government had power without authority and the Soviets had authority without power. But in fact both lacked power or authority. Lenin was able to expose this weakness time and again over the following months to make the system appear unworkable. As one of his supporters remarked, ‘for sheer political incompetence and well-meaning ineptitude, history has few more striking examples’ than the interregnum between the fall of the Tsar and the Bolshevik coup.

  The Soviets seemed anything but traditional chambers of parliament. ‘Anyone who wants gets up and says whatever he likes,’ one member of the Petrograd Soviet based in the Tauride Palace said after just a couple of weeks of work. ‘At first…deputies were sitting on chairs and benches…and tables. In the hall stood people of every description, creating confusion and disruption. Then the crowds of standing people became so dense that it was difficult to move about in the hall. A few hours later the chairs had completely vanished…and people dripping with sweat stood tightly squeezed together. The next day, or the day after, the tables too had vanished, except for the chairman’s, and the Assembly looked like a mass meeting.’6

  Over the following weeks things became increasingly chaotic, with more Soviets being formed in cities and provinces throughout the country. In the capital’s Soviet, ‘issues had to be resolved under the pressure of an extraordinary mass of delegates and petition-bearers from the Petrograd garrison, from the Front, from the backwaters of Russia’, the moderate Vladimir Stankevich recalled. Many delegates were barely literate. ‘The most important decisions were often reached by completely accidental majorities. There was no time to think matters over, everything was done in haste, after many sleepless nights, in confusion. Everyone was physically exhausted. No sleep. Endless meetings. The lack of proper food; people lived on bread and tea.’

  The Duma was equally a madhouse: ‘members were motivated by one single characteristic: their fear of the masses – and who could blame them’. In particular they were scared of the soldiers, whose mutiny had brought down the Tsar, and whose anger could turn on them. Three weeks after the Revolution the Minister of War, Guchkov, who had witnessed the Emperor’s abdication, wrote to the head of the Russian army and Chief of the General Staff, General Alexeyev, telling him that ‘the government has no real power and its orders are executed only in as much as this is permitted by the Soviet, which holds in its hands the most important elements of actual power, such as troops, railroads, postal and telegraph services…the Provisional Government exists only while it is permitted by the Soviet’. Lenin saw quickly how he could exploit this power vacuum. After just a few days back in Russia he was telling loyal supporters: ‘Very soon the government will not be in a position to preserve itself.’ Many still thought he was raving-mad.7

  —

  Vladimir Nabokov, the most senior civil servant in Russia, could see how weak and ineffective Prince Lvov had turned out to be. ‘I do not recall a single occasion when…[he] used a tone of authority or spoke decisively and definitively. He was the very embodiment of passivity.’ A decent, well-meaning liberal, now aged fifty-five, Lvov was entirely out of his depth in the revolutionary times of 1917. He was a rich landlord from the old nobility, with long experience of the zemstvo movement of local government and a great believer in modest, evolutionary reforms. He had played a significant role in financing hundreds of hospitals, schools and agricultural colleges for peasants. After the serfs were emancipated in the 1860s, Lvov gave peasants on his estates land in a gesture more generous than almost any landlord in the country. He was a kind man, but ineffective. One of his close allies, Alexander Bublikov, a powerful figure in the Duma, liked him – in fact almost everyone liked him – but he became exasperated by Lvov’s ‘permanent look of dismay and his constant efforts to be nice to everyone…he was a walking symbol of the impotence of the Provisional Government’. One of his old friends said he would always remember his air of ‘solemn ennui’.*1

  His good intentions led to woeful misjudgements about revolutionary Russia. He used to speak about the ‘soul of the Russian people…which by its very nature is a universal, democratic soul’, and he told Nabokov, who looked sceptical, that once the peasantry was freed from the yoke of Tsarist tyranny they would learn to rule themselves in the liberal, democratic spirit of Western Europe and the United States, which he admired hugely. Government colleagues were amazed by the immensity of his indecision. When faced with a series of thorny problems his habit was invariably to wait and see. One minister recalled how he would say, ‘Gentlemen, we must be patient. We must have faith in the good sense, statesmanship and loyalty of the Russian people’ – and then move on to other business.8

  —

  Lvov was completely overshadowed by a charismatic younger man who took over from him as Prime Minister early in the summer and came to be identified with all that was wrong with the Provisional Government: Alexander Kerensky. Aged thirty-six, but looking much younger, his face was deathly pale, almost sallow, and he possessed a ‘nervous, febrile manner, fragile in appearance, with a frantic intensity that made him seem to be permanently in pain’
. He had bright-green eyes, slightly narrow, and many people who knew him described how he tended to move his limbs jerkily in energetic bursts. The code-name in his Okhrana file was ‘Speedy’.

  Unlike Lenin, who came to loathe provincial Simbirsk, Kerensky wrote often that as a youth he had been happy there amid ‘the breathless songs of nightingales’. But he couldn’t wait to get out. He obtained a decent law degree at St Petersburg University and like so many students became involved in radical politics. But he was never seduced by Marxism – he said he hated ‘its austere completeness and orderly logic, borrowed from abroad’ – or by revolutionary terrorism. He joined the moderate workers’ group the Trudoviks, and later, when the war broke out, the Socialist Revolutionaries.

  He was jailed for four months in the Kresty Prison during the 1905 Revolution, where his health broke down. After his release he was a public defender in a number of high-profile political cases. He became famous for dramatic pleas for clemency against capital sentences. He was elected to the Duma in 1912 and quickly came to be celebrated for highly emotional theatrical speeches which ‘left him drained…his whole body would tremble, sweat poured down his pale cheeks’. He was admired by the galleries, if not by the more traditional Duma members. Early in life he had wanted to be an actor, until persuaded to take up a more stable profession, but his speeches, particularly during the war when he had a remarkable gift for rousing troops, were big set-piece occasions, occasionally accompanied by fainting fits.*2 These were partly genuine. He was an ill man for much of his life: he suffered from serious lung and kidney complaints. But they were perfectly timed.

  He turned into an extraordinary orator who could mesmerise crowds. A Kerensky performance ‘resembled the passage of a cyclone. Crowds gathered for hours to catch a glimpse of him. His path was everywhere strewn with flowers. Soldiers ran for miles after his motor car, trying to shake his hand or kiss the hem of his garment. At his meetings in great halls…audiences worked themselves up into paroxysms of enthusiasm and adoration. After a speech, the platform where he had appeared would be littered with watches, rings, bracelets, military medals and banknotes, sacrificed by admirers for the common cause.’9