Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  But Kerensky was not all show. He could be brave. He denounced anti-Semitism wherever he saw it – amid court circles or in the lower ranks of the army. Once he went to Kuzhi, a small town near the Front in western Ukraine, where Jews were being lynched for allegedly (but entirely wrongly) helping German troops, and pleaded with soldiers and local soldiers to stop their ‘barbarous and counter-productive’ actions. His intervention prevented what might have turned into a far bloodier pogrom. Personally he was invariably kind. He didn’t know Lenin but recognised his sister Anna on a steamer on the Volga, just before the war started in July 1914. The two got talking and, apparently, he said to her, ‘Look now, you’ll see Vladimir soon.’ ‘Why do you say that?,’ she asked. ‘The war will change everything in Russia,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘And your brother will be able to return.’*3

  Kerensky was the only declared socialist in the first Provisional Government and the only one who was a member of both the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet. But he was a socialist in name only, more, as one of his friends said, ‘a perpetual student radical’. He never ventured out on the streets during the nine months of the Provisional Government. He scurried between the Right and Left wings of the Tauride Palace trying to make himself useful, or at least plausible, to both. In the Duma he always wore a perfectly pressed morning coat with a starched dress shirt and collar. When he made fiery speeches in the Soviet he ripped off the collar and took off his coat to appear more proletarian. He was not a revolutionary, but, as Trotsky put it, ‘a man who merely hung around the Revolution’.*4

  He presented himself after February 1917 as ‘the undisputed leader of the people’ and for a while his popularity was enormous. He was the favourite of the liberal intelligentsia, and also the sections of the army which wanted to continue the war. He was convinced of his own greatness, and convinced a few others too. Zinaida Gippius wrote in her diary: ‘there is only one name that unites everybody – and that is…Kerensky. We loved him. There was something alive, something birdlike and childish in him. He is the right man in the right place.’10

  Lenin loathed him as the type of bourgeois liberal for whom he had nothing but contempt, even though Kerensky’s father had so generously tried to help his family. From the first day after the February Revolution, Lenin identified him as the most implacable foe of the Bolsheviks and the greatest threat to him personally. That is why he reserved his greatest abuse for him. He described Kerensky as ‘that flabby windbag’, and ‘no more than a balalaika on which they…[the other Provisional Government ministers] play, in order to deceive the workers’. Kerensky proclaiming socialism was an insult to real socialists. ‘One should push such people up against the wall, and if they still don’t give in, trample them in the mud.’

  *1 Even as a young man he displayed world-weariness. On a visit to Niagara Falls, his companion waxed lyrical about the splendour of the view. Lvov replied, ‘Really, now, what of it? A river flows and drops. That’s all.’

  *2 One of Kerensky’s teachers watching him play the lead part, Khlestakov, in a school production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector wrote acidly that ‘the figure of this lovable lady-killer and…conman might have been created for him’.

  *3 This story comes from friends of Kerensky, but has corroboration from Lenin acquaintances, though not directly from Anna Ulyanova or her family.

  *4 In the winter of 1916 he was critically ill after an operation to remove a tubercular kidney. He was close to death for a month. While he was convalescing he started an affair with Lilya Baranovskaya, a cousin and close friend of his wife Olga, who had left her army officer husband. For many months, between the two revolutions, they all lived together, with their various children.

  31

  ‘Peace, Land and Bread’

  ‘We know from experience that great affairs have only been achieved in our time by those who have not striven to keep their word, once given, and were able, when necessary, to twist others round their fingers.’

  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1532

  The public Lenin adopted a highly populist style of politics that would be recognisable – and imitated by many a rabble-rouser – a hundred years later, even in long-established, sophisticated democracies. He offered simple solutions to complex problems. He lied unashamedly. He was never a sparkling orator, as Kerensky and Trotsky were in their varying ways. But he was brilliant at presenting a case in direct, straightforward language that anyone could understand, and explaining how the world could be changed if only people would listen to him and his Bolsheviks. Economic injustice and semi-feudalism had held Russia back for centuries? His answer was simple: ‘All the people have to do is expropriate a thousand banking and industrial big-shots…and break the resistance of a few dozen millionaires,’ he said. The people were hungry for land? Simple. ‘The peasants must seize the estates from their former landowner masters. They must be masters now.’ Workers may not understand how to run industries? Lenin had a solution: ‘Arrest a score or two of capitalists, keep them in the same condition as Nicholas Romanov now lives, and they will disclose to you all the clues and secrets of their enrichment.’ Lenin knew that a revolutionary state would need experts, professionals in various fields, to keep functioning. But he argued that people had heard too much from experts. ‘Any worker will master any ministry in a few days; no special skill is needed…and it isn’t necessary to know the techniques of the work, that’s the job of a bureaucrat and we can compel them to do the work just as they are compelled to work now.’1

  With brazen cynicism he would promise people everything and anything. He promised peasants land – though he didn’t believe in handing the estates to peasants; he wanted to nationalise the land on which peasants would work on big state-owned collective farms. He said workers should run their factories. But he didn’t actually believe in workers controlling their enterprises, or his other pledge of establishing co-operatives managed by trade unions. He aimed to centralise control of labour under the leadership of his Party. When the Provisional Government delayed the Constituent Assembly elections it had originally planned for early September, Lenin attacked it for ‘betraying’ democracy. Of course, he didn’t believe in ‘bourgeois democracy’ – free elections between competing political parties, and there would be none for seventy years in the state which he created. He told his lieutenants that in their propaganda it was important to keep things simple. ‘We must talk about peace, land and bread, these things. Then we will shine like a beacon in the darkness.’ He defended what he knew were lies on the basis that he rationalised most things: the end – socialist revolution – justified the means.2

  Day after day for the first three months after Lenin returned to Russia he spoke at scores of meetings and became a popular draw. He was clear, logical, direct, sincere, apparently honest and persuasive. He was not a powerful physical presence, ‘but people could sense there was something remarkable about him’, as Gorky, who grew to despise the way he conducted politics that spring, acknowledged. Most importantly, he sounded optimistic, upbeat, positive, and offered his listeners hope. He smiled and laughed a lot during this period. He was visibly enjoying the Revolution. Some people who knew him before the war, though, including many who spent time in exile with him, noted a marked change in his demeanour. ‘How he had aged,’ remarked Roman Gul, an old Social Democrat comrade who saw a lot of him in Switzerland. ‘Lenin’s whole appearance had altered. And not only that. There was none of his old geniality, his friendliness or comradely humour in his relations with other people. The new Lenin that arrived was cynical and rude, a conspirator against everyone and everything, determined to launch his drive for power.’

  This was the first time Lenin had spoken to large groups of workers. His experience up to now had been at small meetings of Party activists and conferences of socialists – intellectuals mainly – who were in broad agreement with him. But he found he had developed a voice that could reach ordinary workers. It did not happen immediately
, though, and he had to work hard at simplifying his message. Initially, by his own admission, he became ‘very nervous in front of crowds’. At his first big meeting a few days after arriving at the Finland Station he was terrified he would freeze entirely. He was sharing a platform with Alexandra Kollontai; before they went onstage his face turned pale and, as he confessed, he ‘was scared and asked her to make the speech’. Kollontai was astonished that he seemed to lack confidence and did what she could to boost him, telling him that of course he could do it superbly, there was nothing to be apprehensive about speaking to large numbers. He mounted the platform, delivered the speech, received rousing applause, and never admitted to stage fright again.

  The society hostess Countess Irina Skariatina told friends that despite her first instincts of shock and outrage, she was impressed by Lenin. ‘I have been there twice…He is bald, terribly ugly, wears a crumpled old brown suit, speaks without any oratorical power, more like a college professor calmly delivering his daily lecture…Yet what he says drives the people crazy. No, positively it is not the way this man speaks but what he says that electrifies his listeners more than any other orator I have ever heard.’

  He wrote incessantly – forty-eight pieces in Pravda during May alone, though some were only a few hundred words long. It was a phenomenal work rate, but he and other politicians were satisfying a hunger for politics entirely unknown in Russia. A new word was coined in the language in the spring of 1917: mittingovanie, meaning attending political meetings. ‘Day and night, across the country, a continuous disorderly meeting went on from February until the autumn,’ said the writer Konstantin Paustovsky, who had also seen life at the Front and knew how soldiers were being politicised. In Petrograd the weeks following the February Revolution were ‘a festival of liberation’, wrote the American reporter Albert Rhys Williams. ‘You cannot buy a hat or a packet of cigarettes without being enticed into a political discussion…The servants and house porters demand advice on which party to vote for in the local elections for the Soviet. Every wall is placarded with notices of meetings, lectures…and announcements, not only in Russian, but in Polish, Lithuanian, Yiddish…Two men argue at a street corner and at once one is surrounded by an excited crowd. Even at concerts now the music is diluted with political speeches by well-known orators. Nevsky Prospekt has become a kind of Quartier Latin. Book hawkers line the pavement.’ John Reed said simply that for months ‘in Petrograd every street corner was a public tribune’.3

  * * *

  The Provisional Government drifted from crisis to crisis and always looked unstable. It survived a series of street demonstrations at the end of April which the Bolsheviks had not initiated, but which they led enthusiastically. There were more than 150,000 people on one march, many holding placards demanding ‘Down with the government’, but it never got out of police control. Lenin’s opponents on the Right, as well as Mensheviks and SRs, accused him of attempting to lead a putsch. He denied it categorically – and at this point he was being honest. The Bolsheviks had made no plans to topple the government and were in no way ready to mount a coup. ‘The matter might have been different if we saw that the masses…[on the demonstrations] had swung sharply in our direction,’ he told Zinoviev and Kamenev later. ‘But that did not happen. We prepared a peaceful demonstration but some comrades, it is true, went too far…The slogan “Down with the Provisional Government” is adventurist. We cannot overthrow the government at this time. We wanted only a peaceful reconnaissance of our enemies’ forces.’4

  There were four coalitions in eight and a half months, and seven major Cabinet reshuffles. None could ensure law and order, maintain a grip on the army or control inflation, which grew exponentially. The government was in no position to borrow any more from the West; its credit was worthless, so its answer was to print more money. The Treasury printing works outside Petrograd could barely keep pace: it did not have enough ‘guillotines’ to cut the sheets of notes from the presses, so in many cases bank customers cut off individual notes themselves. Average industrial wages trebled in the three months after February, but had fallen in real purchasing power by two-thirds.

  The army was a sullen mass, defeated and depressed. Soldiers believed, with some justice, that it was their mutiny which had turned the Revolution and brought down the old regime. Government ministers feared the troops could do the same to them. Immediately after the Revolution the soldiers made a series of demands to bring ‘democracy’ to the army and a guarantee that they would not be prosecuted for any refusal to obey orders during the February uprising.

  The deal they reached handed Lenin enormous influence within the army and was a major factor in helping the Bolsheviks to gain enough support among soldiers and sailors to seize power a few months later. Order Number One, as it was called, had a profound effect in the armed forces. It made the army answerable to the Petrograd Soviet, not the Provisional Government; troops and sailors would elect their own committees, which would send delegates to the Soviet. Soldiers were ‘citizens’, not subject to martial laws. The committees would control the weapons, ‘which shall in no cases be surrendered to their superior officers’. They would no longer have to salute officers when they were off-duty; officers were banned from striking the men, as they habitually did in the Tsarist army. Officers had to address their men with the formal ‘vy’ rather than ‘ty’. Soldiers addressed their officers as ‘Mr General’ or ‘Mr Colonel’ rather than ‘Your Honour’ or ‘Your Excellency’. Lenin despatched a large number of recruiting sergeants into the barracks, and soldiers were joining the Bolsheviks. He stepped up his campaign for a separate peace with the Germans to end the war.

  ‘This is the end of the army,’ declared the clever and influential right-wing politician Vasily Shulgin when he heard about Order Number One. But the army was already dead. More than a million and a quarter men had already deserted: around 10,000 a day left their regiments in April and May. ‘All discipline has vanished in the army,’ the French Ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, reported to Paris. ‘Officers are being insulted…and if they complain are massacred…Deserters are wandering over Russia, filling the stations, storming the carriages and paralysing the transport links, both military and civil. Soldiers positively swarm at big junctions. A train arrives: the soldiers make the passengers get out, take their places and compel the stationmaster to switch the train’s destination to wherever they demand. It may be a train full of troops for the Front. The men get out at some station, hold a meeting, confer with each other for an hour or two, and wind up by demanding to be taken back to their starting point.’

  Colonel Alfred Knox, the British Military Attaché to Petrograd, was incredulous about the state of the Russian forces. At the end of April he and a group of other British officers visited the Northern Front, ‘where units have been turned into political debating societies…and parleying takes place daily with the enemy, who laughs at the credulity of the Russian soldier. On the home front, in rural Russia, prisoners of war had been freed by the peasants and were working on landlords’ estates while in Moscow German and Austrian officers walked about freely…surely there has never been another country at war in which the POWs declared a strike for better pay and conditions in life.’

  The government had ceased counting the number of deserters, and even if they caught up with some of them, ‘What could we do?’ wondered General Klembovsky, an aide to the chiefs of staff at army headquarters. ‘The death sentence? You can’t hang whole divisions. Courts martial? But then half the army will be in Siberia. You don’t frighten soldiers with the threat of imprisonment or hard labour. “What of it. We will be back in five years – with a whole skin,” they say.’5

  Troops had become radicalised, but not necessarily in the way Lenin wanted. General Brusilov, who would be appointed Army Commander-in-Chief in the summer of 1917, said later that ‘the soldiers wanted one thing: peace – so they could go home…[to their villages], rob the landowners and live freely without paying taxes or recog
nising any authority. Soldiers veered towards Bolshevism because they believed it was their programme. They did not have the slightest idea of what Communism was, or what the Socialist International meant, but they imagined themselves at home, living without laws or landowners. The anarchistic “freedom” is what they called Bolshevism.’

  The writer Ivan Bunin spent the first part of 1917 in a village on the Volga and kept a diary of the period. He was a vitriolic anti-Bolshevik, but he agreed with Lenin about the war. The peasants were simply fed up with the conflict and ‘realised, as their masters should have, that victory was impossible…The people don’t want to fight. They are tired of the war and they don’t understand what we are fighting for. The war isn’t their business. They grow more furious by the day.’

  Lenin’s critics were appalled by his determination to stir up class hatreds for his political ends. But to him, socialism was class war; and the accompanying violence was inevitable. As he so often said, ‘No great question…has yet been resolved in history other than by force.’ Chaos in Russia, he told close comrades, should be welcomed on the basis that ‘what’s bad for them, the bourgeois government, is good for us’. But even some of his admirers were shocked by the crude, mob-rousing populism he displayed in the spring and summer of 1917, such as the slogan he used in most speeches, ‘Loot the looters’. The passionate socialist Gorky was in despair. ‘Every day my anxiety grows,’ he wrote to his wife on 14 June. ‘The crazy politics of Lenin will soon lead to a civil war.’6