—
The Civil War was already happening on the land, which was engulfed in chaos. The Provisional Government’s writ never ran throughout much of provincial Russia, where law and order had entirely broken down. Hundreds of large estates throughout Russia were seized by peasants who evicted, brutalised and in many cases murdered their landowners. It was a process that began well before the Bolshevik seizure of power, almost immediately after the February Revolution. The ‘marches on the manors’ were a spontaneous movement to force the landowners to hand over the estates to their tenants – in most cases, formerly their serfs. In the past the squire was protected by the army, which for centuries had put down peasant and serf unrest using harsh measures. But now, since the Revolution, the soldiers were often the leaders and instigators of the violence and in many parts of the country the police force no longer existed. The squire was now on his own.
Fury against the estate owners had been an abiding tradition among the muzhiks. Deep within the commune – the mir – under serfdom was the belief that land should not be privately owned by the gentry who never worked on it, but only by those who ploughed the fields and tended the livestock. ‘We are yours, but the land is ours,’ the saying went. The accepted belief was that one day the Tsar would divide up the land anew and hand over the estates to peasant farmers in an entirely different dispensation. The Tsar was gone, but now, many thought, was the chance for the great redivision of the land that would bring justice for the peasantry.
From the early summer, mostly in areas with the best agricultural land, assemblies of peasants would meet in villages and vote to confiscate the squire’s domains. Groups of men – there were some women, but mostly it was men with guns, pitchforks and hoes – would head for the manor, demand to see the landlord and evict the whole family, usually with just a few hours’ notice. Often the deed was accompanied by grisly violence, justified as payback for the brutality of the Stolypin period of 1905–07, when thousands of peasants were killed by soldiers acting on behalf of the gentry landowners. There were many examples similar to that which took place in June 1917 at the fine manor house of Bor Polianshcina near Saratov. A mob led by a group of army deserters hacked the aged Prince Vladimir Saburov to death with axes as retribution for the role his son had played as local ‘land captain’ in 1906, when twelve peasants had been hanged in front of their wives and children. After the bloody murder they burned down the house, where there had been one of the finest private libraries in Europe. They marched on Tolstoy’s manor at Yasnaya Polyana, 200 kilometres south of Moscow, though the great novelist had idolised the Russian peasantry and always campaigned for their rights. His aged and semi-blind widow Sophia pleaded for help from the Provisional Government but none came. She and her daughters packed her books and boxes in one room and stood guard with a revolver and an axe. On the night the mob came to the manor all the lights were off and they assumed the house had already been looted, so they passed on to another estate nearby.
—
Prince Lvov was powerless to restore order in the countryside, and from his reaction it is not entirely clear he wanted to. He shrugged his shoulders and said in blasé fashion that he ‘entirely understood…the revolution on the land’. He told ministers over lunch in early June that it was ‘the revenge of the serfs as a result – and I say this as a landowner – of our original sin. If only Russia had been blessed with a real landed aristocracy, like that in England, which had the decency to treat…[peasants] like human beings rather than dogs. Then things here might have been different.’7
At the end of May a newly created All Russian Assembly of Peasants, a self-appointed group of delegates from local land assemblies, declared that all the property seizures that had been carried out so far were legal, and all their so-called laws were legitimate. Lenin supported the Assembly, on the basis that he would promise the peasants anything to gain their backing. But it was a charade. He had a low opinion of Russia’s muzhiks, whom he regarded as barbaric and semi-feudal. Nevertheless he would go along with the assemblies – for now. As the Bolshevik leader in Nizhny Novgorod said, barely disguising his contempt, ‘the local peasantry has…a fixed opinion that all civil laws have lost their force…[since February] and that all legal relations ought now to be regulated by peasant organisations’.
Prince Boris Vyazemsky refused to accept the verdict of one of these assemblies that he must hand over Lotarevo, his family estate in the fertile Tambov ‘black earth’ province, with its beautiful manor house, stud farm and hospital. His brother Dmitry had been among the most brutal of the army officers who had hanged hundreds of peasants in the troubles of 1906, and the entire family had been resented since. When a mob came to evict him with sticks and clubs in the summer of 1917 a village elder said that though they respected him personally they wanted to finish for good with the Vyazemskys and ‘take the land that rightfully belongs to us’. The prince wouldn’t leave the estate in his own carriage. The peasants formed a kangaroo court and ordered him to be sent to the Front. He had barely got to the nearest railway station before another mob of army deserters and peasants ran him through with bayonets. When he was dead they cut off his head.
The peasants had made their revolution – before Lenin would later unmake it for them and impose his own version of what a revolution should be.8
32
The Spoils of War
‘Lenin is a man of great capacities, but the abnormal conditions of underground life have dwarfed and stunted them most gruesomely. He could say of himself, “I know not where I am going, but I am going there with determination.” Lenin’s devotion to the revolutionary cause permeates his entire being. But to him…there is no difference between personal policy and the interests of the Party…of socialism. Lenin possesses an outstanding mind, but it is a mind of a single dimension. He is an absolutely honest man, but with a one-track mind…and consequently a man with a stunted moral sensitivity.’
Viktor Chernov, Lenin profile in Delo Naroda
(The People’s Cause), April 1917
Lenin and Kerensky never spoke to each other. But once they did speak at each other, when they both appeared at the first All Russian Congress of Soviets on 17 June.*1 The main hall of the Naval Cadet College on Vasilyevsky Island was full to bursting, but the Bolsheviks were vastly outnumbered. There were about 900 SRs and Mensheviks, and 105 Bolsheviks. It was a dramatic occasion that nearly backfired against Lenin, but he was smart enough on his feet to save the day.
At one point in the morning session the leading Menshevik from Georgia, Irakli Tsereteli, said that politics in Russia was gridlocked and no party could form a functioning, plausible government on their own or was ready to assume power. Lenin rose, cleared his throat and said: ‘Yes there is such a party. We, the Bolsheviks, are prepared. No party should refuse this and our Party certainly doesn’t. It is ready to take over full power at any moment.’ A few Bolsheviks cheered him in a lukewarm way. But most of the hall burst into laughter and began jeering him. He looked unfazed and stayed on his feet. When the noise in the hall died down, but still to some barracking, he carried on. ‘You can laugh all you want to, but unlike others we have a programme in relation to the economic crisis. Look at what you are doing by continuing the war,’ he said, pointing a scornful finger at Kerensky and other ministers. ‘Capitalists with 800 per cent war profits are walking about the country just as before. Why don’t you publish the figures of their profits, arrest some fifty of them and keep them locked up for a bit, even if you keep them under the same luxurious conditions as you keep Nicholas Romanov. You talk about peace without annexations and contributions. Put that into practice in our own country…You talk to us about an advance on the Front. We are not against war in principle. We are only against a capitalist war for capitalist ends, and until the entire government and the bourgeoisie is ousted, your type of socialists are the mere tools of those who have brought this disaster upon the world.’*2
There was a hush in the hal
l and Kerensky rose to reply. He was now Minister of War and he wore a brown military tunic and gaiters, though he had never been in the military. He had his arm in a sling around his neck, though he had no wound or injury that anybody knew about. ‘His face was pale with nervous tension, and his eyes blazed like fiery beads,’ as one observer near him recalled. He began in quiet, measured tones.
‘Our duty is to strengthen our new-won freedom so that our comrades who have come back from exile in Siberia shall not go back there, so that that comrade [pointing a finger at Lenin] who has been living comfortably all this time in Switzerland shall not have to fly back there again. He proposes to us a new and wonderful recipe for our revolution; we are to arrest a handful of Russian capitalists. Comrades, I am not a Marxist. But I think I understand socialism better than brother Lenin, and I know that Karl Marx never proposed such methods of Oriental despotism.’
As he continued, ‘his face flushed and his voice harsher with excitement’, he became more melodramatic, as was his usual rhetorical style. ‘You tell us that you fear reaction. You say you want to strengthen our new freedom, and yet you propose to lead us the way of France in 1792. How did it end in France after 1792? It ended in the fall of the Republic and the rise of a dictator. The problem for the Russian socialist parties is to prevent such an end as occurred in France…instead of reconstruction, you clamour for more destruction. Out of the chaos that you wish to make will arise a dictator.’ He paused and dramatically walked across the room towards the group of Bolsheviks around Lenin. ‘I will not be the dictator that you are trying to create. Who will?’ And then he turned his back on Lenin, who sat there smiling, calmly stroking his chin. It was a rousing performance.*3, 1
—
Lenin was full of optimism, partly because he was convinced his message was getting through, but mostly because he had a vast new source of funds at his disposal. Bolshevik Party membership was growing. From a maximum of around 23,000 at the beginning of March it had reached 200,000 by July. More importantly, the Bolsheviks had quickly established a thriving newspaper empire, by far the largest of any other political organisation in the country. Pravda was legalised at the end of February. By mid-April it was printing – and selling – 85,000 copies a day in Petrograd. There were provincial editions of the paper and versions for different nationalities which appeared in, among other languages, Georgian, Latvian, Polish, Armenian and Yiddish. Large editions were produced for soldiers – Soldatskaia Pravda for front-line troops had a daily print run of 70,000 – and a special edition for sailors. Suddenly the Bolsheviks were able to afford a brand-new, expensive, state-of-the-art printing press, and had the money for large stocks of newsprint, a distribution system involving substantial numbers of people, and they found competent journalists to produce readable, in some cases brilliant, copy. Altogether, by the beginning of July they were producing forty-one publications with a circulation of nearly 350,000. ‘It was an extraordinary feat of organisation’ to get the papers up and running so quickly, said Trotsky, and it made a huge propaganda impact for the Bolsheviks. People who had barely heard of them before now knew where they stood – certainly on the issue of the war.
The operation was masterminded by Lenin, but could not have happened without large amounts of money from the Germans, as part of the deal which included the ‘sealed train’ journey. It is certain that Lenin knew all the details, though he didn’t handle the arrangements personally, and there is no paper trail linking him directly to the transactions. It was some time after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 before any of the evidence came to light; the Communist Party had carefully buried the proof for more than seventy years. Even now the details are sketchy. Nobody knows for sure how much was funnelled from Germany to the Bolsheviks between February 1917 until at least March 1918. The German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein was one of the first to make allegations publicly. But he was well known as a long-standing enemy of Lenin and he admitted that he could prove nothing from his ‘undoubtedly reliable sources’. Also, he claimed that the amount the Germans gave Lenin was fantastical – ‘as much as fifty million gold marks’ he said, worth around US$100 million now. Whatever the true figure, it was nowhere near as much as that, though it was certainly a large sum.
Rumours began circulating about Germany financing the Bolsheviks soon after Lenin returned to Russia. They were always denied. When the Provisional Government began investigating the allegations in April, with the intention of charging him with spying for an enemy country, they came up with partial information but no solid proof and made the mistake of trying to invent some of the evidence instead.*4
The Germans admitted later that they backed the Bolsheviks financially, without saying by how much. They congratulated themselves on a successful strategy when the Bolsheviks took power. The German Foreign Minister, Richard von Kühlmann, was almost inclined to boast: ‘The disruption of the Entente…constitutes the most important war aim of our diplomacy,’ he told government colleagues. ‘Russia was the weakest link in the enemy chain. Our task has been to loosen it and, when possible, to remove it. This was the purpose of our “subversive” activity in Russia [with revolutionary groups]…It was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels and under different labels, that they were in a position to build up their organ, Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda and appreciably to extend the narrow base of their Party…It is entirely in our interests.’2
The German money was channelled through Helphand/Parvus, who was in regular, direct communication with Lenin’s chief factotum in Scandinavia, Ganetsky. It was deposited into Scandinavian banks and Ganetsky transferred it to one of his relatives, Evgenia Mavrikovna Sumenson, who seemed on the surface to be a respectable, well-dressed middle-class woman of a certain age, but was a trusted and long-serving Bolshevik agent. She opened several accounts in Russian banks, though even a hundred years later only a couple of them have been traced. In the spring of 1917 records show there were a million rubles in the Bank of Siberia in Sumenson’s name and around the same amount again in the Azov Don Bank. She would hand it to another operative in the Bolshevik underground, Mechislav Kozlovsky, who would distribute it to Pravda and its offshoot publications, as well as for other propaganda purposes. ‘I gave him money whenever he asked for it, without ever taking any receipts, as I was under the impression that he was Ganetsky’s deputy,’ Sumenson said later.
Sumenson was arrested by the Provisional Government’s intelligence services on 8 July and confessed to her side of the transactions, but kept the name of Lenin out of the affair. Lenin simply lied and claimed he had no financial links with Ganetsky of any kind and had no idea of a connection between Ganetsky and Parvus.*5
Once in power Lenin was quick to cover his tracks. The new regime after the Revolution destroyed all the evidence they could find when officials went through Provisional Government papers. Lenin and Trotsky certainly knew about the cover-up, and more than likely ordered it. They were determined to leave no traces, but at least one surviving note suggests they were careless. Fyodor Zalkind and Evgeny Polivanov, two functionaries from the Foreign Commissariat under Trotsky, reported that they had located some ‘relevant material which has been confiscated’. They wrote to Lenin that ‘in the Ministry of Justice archives from the files of the so-called “treason” of Comrades Lenin, Zinoviev, Kollontai and others, we have removed German Imperial Bank order number 27433, dated 2 March 1917, authorising payment of monies’. They say they ‘examined all the books of the New Bank of Stockholm…there appeared an order 2,704 from the Imperial German Bank’ which they also removed. The documents surfaced seventy years later.3
A big war chest from Germany was a great boost to Bolshevik fortunes. But the incompetence of Lenin’s opponents was a bigger factor – and he was quick to seize the opportunities they repeatedly gave him.
*1 Soon after Lenin returned to Russia Kerensky wanted to meet him. He thought it might help the Provisional
Government gain support from the Left, but he never understood his enemy. The Cabinet Secretary, Vladimir Nabokov, noted that ministers barely mentioned Lenin, either at official meetings or privately. So he was surprised ‘when I heard Kerensky saying he would like to meet Lenin and have a chat with him. In reply to the puzzled questions that followed…he explained that the Bolshevik leader was “living in a completely isolated atmosphere, he knows nothing and sees everything through the lens of his own fantasies, and he has no one to help him get his bearings on what’s going on”.’ Perhaps Kerensky was in truth talking about himself? In any case, Lenin refused to meet him.
*2 The British journalist Morgan Philips Price, who later became a Labour MP, reporting the event for the leftish magazine Common Sense, was the only foreign correspondent covering the Congress. He wasn’t overly impressed by Lenin, ‘a short man with a round head, small, pig-like eyes and close-cropped hair…One sat spellbound at his command of language and the passion of his denunciation but when it was all over one felt inclined to scratch one’s head and ask what it was all about.’
*3 According to Kerensky’s memoirs, never a reliable record of events but as melodramatic as his speeches, Lenin ‘picked up his briefcase, with his head bent…and strode out of the hall almost unnoticed’. But this was wishful thinking on his part. Lenin remained seated and stayed in the hall longer than Kerensky did.
*4 The US government sent Edgar Sisson, the former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and at this point the head of the American Committee on Public Information, to investigate the Provisional Government’s allegations against Lenin. His report, ‘The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy’, which came out in 1918, was clear that plenty of money had changed hands, but had doubts about some of the government’s evidence or whether it would stand up as proof of espionage. One of America’s best-known Russia scholars and diplomats, George Kennan, later American Ambassador to Moscow, author of the Cold War policy of ‘containment’ of the USSR and no friend of Bolshevism, dismissed most of the government’s evidence as fake. ‘The state of affairs suggested in the main body of the documents is of such historical implausibility that the question might be asked whether they should not be declared generally fraudulent…at every hand one finds serious discrepancies between circumstances suggested by the documents and known historical fact.’
Lenin Page 38
