Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  *5 Parvus wrote to the Provisional Government investigators denying any involvement – in his best grandiloquent manner which convinced nobody. ‘You lunatics…Why do you worry about whether I have given money to Lenin? Lenin and others have never demanded or received any money from me either as a loan or a gift. But I have given them – and many others – something much more effective than money, or dynamite. I am one of those men who have given spiritual nourishment to the revolutionary determination of the Russian proletariat…’ When in power Lenin refused any contact with Parvus and barred him from Russia when he asked to return in 1918. ‘Absolutely not,’ Lenin told Bonch-Bruevich, his private secretary. ‘The Revolution must not be tainted by people like him.’

  33

  A Desperate Gamble

  ‘I know of cases where soldiers in regiments which had promised to go on the attack after hearing a speech by Kerensky…change their minds and refuse to attack when the time for action came.’

  General Anton Denikin, army commander on the Western Front, June 1917

  ‘Those who make revolutions by halves are simply digging their own graves.’

  François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848)

  The writer W. Somerset Maugham, who freelanced from time to time as a British intelligence agent, spent the spring and summer of 1917 in Petrograd. His mission: to do all he could to keep Russia in the war and ensure that Germany would have to continue fighting on two Fronts. ‘I was exhilarated by the responsibility of my position,’ Maugham wrote later. ‘I went as a private agent, who could be disavowed if necessary, with instructions to get in touch with parties hostile to the government…to prevent the Bolsheviks from seizing power.’ Maugham boasted that he had ‘unlimited money at my disposal’, but when he suggested giving £50,000 to the Mensheviks and SRs, most of whom still supported the war, the British Foreign Office baulked at the sum and the risky nature of the enterprise. As the Germans were giving Lenin and the Bolsheviks the equivalent of millions this seems somewhat short-sighted and penny-pinching, but it is doubtful that Maugham’s plan could in any case have succeeded.

  The Allies’ policy of exerting maximum pressure on war-weary Russia to continue fighting was a boon to Lenin. He told comrades throughout May and June that the one thing he really feared was that the Provisional Government would do ‘the sensible thing’, steal Bolshevik policy and seek a separate peace with Germany. ‘It would cut the ground from under our feet,’ he told Trotsky. At one point in May he thought it would happen, but he didn’t grasp the argument of the other ministers in the government, some of whom believed that if Russia could hold out for a little longer, the Western Allies would win the war for them and Russia would benefit.

  Publicly the Western Allies welcomed the February Revolution. The US President, Woodrow Wilson, said that ‘a new and liberal government in Russia, replacing the tyrannical and corrupt’ Tsar was a desirable partner for America. ‘Now Russia’s forbidding autocracy has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added to the forces that are fighting for freedom…for justice and for peace…here is a fit partner for a League of Honour.’ When Lenin heard of the President’s speech he muttered, ‘what a hypocrite and windbag’.

  The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, sent a message to Prince Lvov two days after the Revolution: ‘We believe the Revolution, whereby the Russian people have placed their destinies on the sure foundation of freedom, is the greatest service they have yet made to the cause for which the Allied peoples have been fighting since August 1914.’

  But behind the public utterances the Western leaders were seriously worried that the Provisional Government would cave in to pressure from the Left and sue for a separate peace with Germany. The British sent spies like Somerset Maugham and Robert Bruce Lockhart – as did the French and the Americans – to meddle covertly in Russia’s politics, and diplomats were more openly trying to stiffen the Provisional Government’s resolve. The Allied interference led directly to a military disaster which hastened the second 1917 Revolution and helped bring about the outcome they least wanted: Bolsheviks in power and Russia’s withdrawal from the war.1

  —

  The Minister of War, Kerensky, and the Kadet members of the government wanted to show Russia’s commitment to the war effort. They persuaded the top brass in the army to lay plans for a summer offensive – a big push that would drive the Germans and Austrians out of Ukraine, much of which had been occupied for two years. Before it began, the Army Chief of Staff, Brusilov, warned Kerensky of his growing doubts. Dozens of mutinies had already taken place even in supposedly loyal and well-trained units, and thousands of soldiers were refusing to move up to the Front. As many as three-quarters of the troops might desert, he told Kerensky – ‘But he paid not the slightest attention to my words.’

  The offensive was a desperate gamble, with odds stacked against the Russians. On 16 June it started with a two-day heavy artillery bombardment of German trenches in north-west Ukraine. Two days later the troops moved forward and at first the German lines were broken – a ‘Triumph for Liberty’ was heralded in the patriotic newspapers. But the advance stalled on the third day; the Germans regrouped and counter-attacked. The Russians fled in panic. The supply lines were stretched and many units were without weapons or ammunition. But the main reason the offensive failed was that the men refused to fight. In one night alone, a crack battalion of the 11th Army arrested 12,000 deserters near the Ukrainian town of Volochinsk. There were hundreds of cases of men shooting their officers before running away. The Russians lost nearly 200,000 men killed or wounded and millions of square miles of territory in a few weeks. Baron Aleksei Budberg, from a famous noble family, was a colonel in one of the front-line regiments and anything but a typical, reactionary, old-school officer. He said that even before this point the army ‘no longer existed as a military organisation…eighty per cent of the soldiers, officers and men would have agreed with the slogan “Down with the War”. It’s terrible as an officer to give an order without any confidence – often without the slightest hope – that it will be carried out.’ The failed offensive was a fatal blow for the Provisional Government and the authority of its leaders – and a big propaganda coup for Lenin, who stepped up the Bolshevik campaign against Kerensky, who despite the disastrous military defeat became Prime Minister in early July.2

  —

  Kerensky thought about an armistice with Germany soon after he became Premier, but he ruled it out. He argued that it would make him ‘responsible for national humiliation’.*1

  But although the Western Allies knew the pressure he was under they did not make things easier for him. They offered him no more loans to ease Russia’s economic plight, no reinforcements and little extra war materiel. In diplomatic terms they bullied the Provisional Government into continuing the war – a woefully short-sighted policy. The British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, reported back to London in July: ‘I saw Kerensky this morning. I told him that though I was one of the few who had not abandoned all hope of Russia being able to pull herself together, I could not assume responsibility for sending favourable reports…[home] unless he could give me satisfactory assurances regarding the maintenance of order in the rear as well as on the food and transport questions. I told him that what preoccupies me most was that the Socialist [not the Communist] members of the Government are afraid of making the army a really efficient fighting force lest it might one day be used against the Revolution…I could not conceal how painful it was to watch what was going on in Petrograd. While British soldiers were shedding their blood for Russia, Russian soldiers were loafing in the streets, fishing in the rivers and riding on the trams and German agents are everywhere.’

  Once, after Kerensky had been hectored by both Buchanan and by David Francis, the American Ambassador, he met Somerset Maugham and tried to explain the government’s predicament: ‘I will not be able to keep the army in the trenches. I don’t see how we can go on. Of course I don�
�t say that to the people. I always say that we shall continue whatever happens, but unless I have something to tell my army, it’s impossible.’ The ice-cool espionage agent showed little sympathy.*2

  *1 In 1931 the British-Canadian press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, lunching with Kerensky in London, asked him whether the Bolsheviks could have been stopped if the Provisional Government had sought a peace deal with the Germans. ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘We should be in Moscow now.’ A surprised Beaverbrook asked why on earth he hadn’t done so. ‘We were too naïve,’ Kerensky replied.

  *2 Some of the agents were dubious about their mission. Bruce Lockhart told his bosses that they were pursuing a futile policy. ‘The Allies were blinded in their desire to prolong the military collaboration of Russia at all costs,’ he wrote. ‘They entirely failed to see what was possible and what was not…they were simply playing into Lenin’s hands and estranging Kerensky from the Russian people.’

  34

  The July Days

  ‘This is when they are going to shoot us. It would be the most advantageous time for them.’

  Lenin to Trotsky, 4 July 1917

  ‘A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution.’

  Lenin, The Collapse of the Second International, 1915

  By midsummer Nadya could see all the signs of overwork, strain and nervous exhaustion in her husband which had so often brought him near to collapse. He was sleeping badly and ‘suffering from terrible headaches, his face was white and his eyes showed great fatigue’. He was buoyed by the excitement of the revolutionary moment – ‘at last it is real work we are doing’, he told comrades. But the relentless speaking and non-stop journalism, quite apart from leading a fractious political party like the Bolsheviks, was taking its toll. In Swiss exile regular walking in the mountains, or swimming in lakes and rivers, kept him fit and had relaxed him. But since he returned to Russia he had taken almost no exercise and eaten poorly. After one speech, recalled Nadya, ‘when he arrived home, he was not excited and happy but tired out, exhausted. Even our walks were of no help and didn’t go well. Once we went out to Yelagin Island [a popular local beauty spot, with woods and a lake], but it was so crowded there that we couldn’t really stroll as we liked. Then we took up the habit of walking the empty streets of the Petrograd side.’ These were close to Anna and Mark Elizarov’s apartment where they were still staying, but the gentle city walks were not enough to re-energise Lenin. ‘He looked terrible at this time,’ another comrade said. ‘His face was sallow. His tongue was grey.’ Inessa had gone to Moscow a few days after arriving in Russia to be with her children, in particular her son André who was suffering from suspected tuberculosis. At least once, and possibly more while she was in Petrograd, she met Lenin at his sister’s apartment, as is clear from his note to her – ‘My dearest friend…With us life is unchanged from what you saw here yourself. There is no end to the exhaustion…’*1

  Nadya knew the cure: a break as far away from stress or work as was possible. She despatched Lenin, with his sister Maria, for a few days to a remote spot on the Finnish coast where he could rest and recuperate. But before he went, there were serious political decisions to be made. The Bolsheviks had called for a series of demonstrations in Petrograd for late June and early July to protest against the war and to exert maximum pressure on the shaky Provisional Government. On 20 June Lenin told his closest lieutenants at a hastily convened late-night meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee that the idea was to ‘probe and see what develops’, but not to let the protests get out of hand. ‘We must be specifically careful not to give way to a provocation. One false move on our part could wreck everything. Even if we were now able to seize power we’re in no position to hold it…in the Soviets of both capitals [Petrograd and Moscow] not to speak of the others elsewhere in the country, we are in an insignificant minority. This is a basic fact…Events should not be anticipated. Time is on our side.’ A week later he met his close circle again and said that the demonstrations should go ahead, but ‘we must handle ourselves with care’.

  With his sister Maria, Lenin left Petrograd on 29 June for the dacha owned by Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich and his wife Vera, a doctor, in the small fishing village of Nevyola on the Karelian Isthmus. Nadya stayed behind in the city. He sat on the verandah for long periods looking out at the sky and the countryside, bleak but in its way beautiful. He went for long walks. He read English novels and chatted to his sister. He bathed in a nearby lake, causing a great deal of anxiety to Bonch-Bruevich, a genial, paunchy, ginger-bearded giant of a man who looked more like a gentleman stockbroker or lawyer than a dangerous revolutionary. ‘Vladimir Ilyich was a strong swimmer but he liked venturing too far out…we kept warning him it could be dangerous; the cold currents might create whirlpools. We said people had drowned nearby in this lake not long ago. “Well, I promise I won’t drown,” he said. Then he just laughed and disappeared under the water.’ The break had its usual effect and restored his energy.1

  —

  There are still those who claim it was a ‘diplomatic holiday’, conveniently timed so that Lenin could distance himself from what was happening in Petrograd. The demonstrations turned violent and there were bloody clashes in the streets. The city was in chaos and even some Bolsheviks and their sympathisers thought an attempted coup was taking place. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a leading Party organiser and at that time a close friend of Stalin – he would later become the leader of the Bolsheviks in Georgia – said he believed the demonstrations were ‘the first serious attempt to finish with the power of the Provisional Government’. Others were not so sure, including most of the Menshevik leadership and the Provisional Government’s chief intelligence official, Boris Nikitin, who admitted that it was more of a ‘muddle than a plot’.

  Even now the only thing that is clear about the July Days, as they were called, is that there was nothing planned or organised about them. It is highly unlikely that Lenin would have authorised a putsch if he was not in Petrograd to oversee it. He had dreamed of a revolution for most of his life, had written about little else for the last twenty-five years, had made himself an expert on ‘the art’ of insurrection. Surely, if this was the central moment of his life, Lenin wouldn’t have left things so much to chance. It seems entirely out of character.

  On the other hand, the Bolsheviks had called for the demonstrations and it was always probable that they could get out of control. They appeared to want their cake and eat it. When the rioting began while Lenin was ‘on vacation’, the leadership left in Petrograd panicked, had no idea what to do and lost their nerve.

  Some military units – the 1st Rifle Brigade and a large contingent of sailors from the Kronstadt naval base – mutinied, pledged loyalty to the Bolsheviks and wanted to storm the Tauride Palace to topple the government and the Duma. For several hours on 3 July they were in control of Petrograd and could easily have marched into the Tauride and the Winter Palace if they had wanted to. The Bolshevik leadership dithered and never gave the order.

  Later in the day troops loyal to the government fought back. Around 300 people – soldiers and civilians – died in street battles. Petrograd was in total confusion. Nobody knew who was in charge of the government; Kerensky was in Kiev following a series of fiery speeches to troops on the Ukraine Front. Angry soldiers from both sides were patrolling the streets, where isolated rioting continued all day. Sailors and troops backing the Bolsheviks couldn’t understand why the Party bosses hadn’t seized power when it looked as though it was theirs: ‘Take the power, you son of a bitch, when it is offered,’ a soldier shouted in Trotsky’s direction late that afternoon.2

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  In Nevyola at 6 a.m. on Wednesday 4 July Lenin was woken by a frantic knock at the door of the Bonch-Bruevichs’ wooden cottage. It was a nervous-looking Maximilian Savelev, an editorial board director on Pravda, who had been sent by the rest of the Bolshevik leadership to beg Lenin to return
to Petrograd at once. ‘The demonstrations have got totally out of hand and violent, there’s chaos in the city.’ Lenin flew into one of his rages. ‘What are they doing? They will bring the whole cause to perdition,’ he said. Bonch-Bruevich had come to the door and Lenin told him, ‘this is absolutely the wrong time. We will have to do something quickly. It cannot work. We cannot seize power now.’

  He raced to the nearest railway station, Mustamäki, to take the first Petrograd train. Some of the passengers had heard the news and were blaming ‘those damned Bolsheviks’ or ‘that Lenin fellow’ for the riots, though nobody recognised him. At this point barely anyone in Russia – even long-standing Bolsheviks – knew what Lenin looked like. He found some of the morning papers on the train. They did not make comfortable reading. The Menshevik Rabochaya Gazeta (Workers’ Daily) called it ‘a stab in the back for the Revolution’. The Socialist Revolutionary Delo Naroda said the riots would lead to civil war. The Kadets’ paper, Rech, simply came out with the headline ‘Anarchy’. Lenin was furious when he saw a blank white page in Pravda. He later discovered that a piece scheduled to appear counselling caution was pulled at the last minute because the Bolshevik leadership had no idea what political line to take.