Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  At the Finland Station Lenin took a horse-drawn cab to the Kshesinskaya Mansion. Isolated shooting was continuing in parts of the city. He rushed to the third-floor meeting room where most of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee had gathered, along with leaders of the Kronstadt sailors. He didn’t greet any of them. He just looked at them and growled, angrily, ‘You should all be thrashed for this.’ Then he began searching for a face-saving way out for himself and the Bolsheviks. The mutineers were still in control of parts of Petrograd, and thousands of demonstrators were outside the mansion waiting for him to speak. He gave a mealy-mouthed, lacklustre performance, calling off the demonstrations – ‘we always wanted this to be peaceful, with no violence’. But at the same time he tried to hedge his bets. The Bolshevik call ‘to give power to the Soviets will win one day, despite the zigzags of history, but maybe not today’, he said. Sukhanov, who was standing at the front of the throng, called it ‘a most ambiguous display’. The crowd was perplexed. A small group of soldiers and workers marched towards the Tauride Palace, but were halted by pro-government troops from the Izmailovsky Regiment and a detachment of Cossack cavalry. The immediate threat was over and Kerensky was on his way back to Petrograd from the Front. Lenin always maintained that there was no plot to overthrow the government at that point – ‘it was a little more than a demonstration, but a lot less than an insurrection’, he said later. But this was the low point in Lenin’s push for power.3

  —

  Back inside the mansion, Lenin’s temper had abated. He was calmer and told the comrades that they had to prepare for a backlash by the government – ‘a period of reaction’ – and ‘we will have to learn from the fiasco which will damage us’. He decided the Bolsheviks must give up on large street demonstrations, which would never bring them victory but merely make them unpopular and appear anarchic. They needed to organise more effectively in factories and in barracks to form armed groups loyal to the Bolshevik cause, and more specifically to its central leadership. These were the ‘Red Guards’ who would lead an uprising when the time was right.

  In the riots that day none of the Bolsheviks had any idea what was happening in the city. ‘Give me an exact account of your strength?’ Lenin challenged his comrades. ‘Name the units which would definitely follow us? Who is against us? Have the Neva bridges been accounted for?’ No one could give him any answers. He said that when the Bolsheviks made a serious attempt at seizing power it had to be organised efficiently and ruthlessly, not left to chance and a mob. They had to establish a ‘military revolutionary body that can plan’ an insurrection with precision.4

  More immediately they had to look after their own safety and prepare for a counterstrike by Provisional Government forces. Lenin said he would go underground and stay in hiding until he was safe. ‘This is when they are going to shoot us. It would be the most advantageous time for them,’ he told Trotsky.*2 That night he spent with Nadya at a safe house on the Petrograd side of the city, near Anna and Mark Elizarov’s apartment.

  * * *

  The next day the sensationalist, right-wing, pro-government newspaper Zhivoe Slovo (Living Word) accused Lenin of being an enemy agent and the Bolsheviks of receiving vast amounts of money from the Germans. ‘Horrors! Petrograd was yesterday almost seized by the Germans,’ its lead item began. If the story was true in essence the details were almost entirely fabricated, but they were widely believed.

  That evening Kerensky ordered the arrest of Lenin and his chief lieutenants on charges of ‘high treason and organising an armed uprising’. The Bolshevik leader went deeper underground. He stayed in five different Petrograd addresses over the following five days, sometimes changing places twice a day. Early on 6 July armed militiamen raided the Elizarovs’ flat. Nadya yelled, ‘Gendarmes! Just like the old regime’ as they barged in. Lenin wasn’t there but they arrested his brother-in-law, a tall, heavily built man who could not have resembled Lenin less. But they had no idea what Lenin looked like so they picked up Elizarov just in case, despite his protests.*3

  The army raided the Kshesinskaya Mansion, but no senior Bolsheviks were there. All had fled. They commandeered the building for government use and threw all the Party members out. Simultaneously the police swooped on the Pravda offices, where they missed Lenin by only a few minutes. They ransacked the place on government orders, ripping out the telephones and ruining the ready-to-print manuscripts. They destroyed the expensive, nearly new rotary presses and broke up the linotype machines.

  Some of the names on the government’s ‘wanted’ list were already under lock and key. Trotsky had voluntarily given himself up. Kamenev was identified at a roadblock trying to leave the city by car. Alexandra Kollontai was arrested in her apartment. Lenin was put up for a day and night in an affluent part of Petrograd at the apartment of a skilled worker and a trusted Bolshevik activist, Sergei Alliluyev. He had taken the room which was usually occupied by Stalin when he was staying in the city.*4

  That afternoon Lenin, Nadya and Zinoviev were in the apartment along with the remnants of the Bolshevik leadership who were not facing arrest. Feelers had been put out by Lenin to members of the Petrograd Soviet that if he gave himself up to them, would they guarantee his safety? They said they could not promise anything as the government was determined to bring him to trial. Nevertheless he suddenly looked at Nadya and told her, ‘I have decided that Grigory and I will turn ourselves in and appear for trial. We must say goodbye. We may never see each other again.’ They embraced briefly – one of the very few moments of tenderness they ever displayed in public. Then she returned to the Elizarovs’ apartment.5

  Immediately after Nadya left there was a quick formal meeting – that is, minutes were taken – of five other Bolshevik Central Committee members, including Stalin, Sverdlov and Elena Stasova, which countermanded Lenin’s decision. They persuaded him that it was too dangerous to give himself up, there would never be a fair trial and his safety was too important for the cause. It was Stasova whose argument was the most influential. She said that there was a rumour spreading throughout the city, and in the Soviet, that the government had unearthed documents proving that Lenin had been a spy for the Okhrana. He forced a wry smile and made the kind of tactical retreat for which he was famous. ‘You’re right, I can’t do it. It will be all right for the others. They will go to jail for a while and then be released. But I’ll swing.’ He made the argument simply in a statement issued the following day. ‘There is no guarantee of a just trial in Russia at the moment…to give oneself up to the authorities would be to yield to counter-revolutionaries to whom these charges against us are simply part of a small skirmish in the civil war.’

  Once again he faced charges among his own supporters of cowardice. ‘Many members of the Soviet were outraged,’ said Sukhanov, including several Bolsheviks who expressed ‘an unqualified resentment and condemnation of Lenin from the political and moral point of view. The flight of the shepherd could not but deliver a heavy blow to the sheep…what kind of general abandons the army, his comrades, and seeks personal safety in flight?’ There was no death penalty at the time, or prison with hard labour. ‘Lenin risked absolutely nothing but imprisonment and he might have had as much freedom of action in jail as in hiding…the others carried on working and writing and came out of jail after a few weeks with martyrs’ haloes.’

  But Lenin genuinely feared death if he stayed in Petrograd. He wrote to Kamenev that afternoon, worried about the notes he had written for a book he had been working on. ‘Entre nous, if I am done in, please make sure to publish my blue notebook Marxism and the State.’ This wasn’t paranoia, but an accurate judgement of his value to the Bolsheviks. Trotsky was clear. ‘If they [the Provisional Government] had managed to arrest him it is likely they would have dealt with him in the manner the German army officers dealt with Rosa Luxemburg,’ he wrote later.*5 ‘In that case it is very probable there wouldn’t have been a Bolshevik Revolution.’ A bitter ideological enemy, the American Ambassador, David F
rancis, made the same point and had continually advised the government to arrest Lenin. ‘Had the Provisional Government arraigned Lenin…tried and executed…him Russia would not have been compelled to go through another revolution, would have been spared the reign of terror and the loss from famine and murder of millions of her sons and daughters,’ he wrote later.

  On the run, Lenin decided instead to go further into hiding and find as safe a place as he could in Finland, ‘almost Russia’, where it would be far more difficult for the government agencies to track him. He changed his suit for more ordinary clothes, and, with Stalin’s help, he shaved his moustache and beard. ‘That’s good now,’ he said after examining himself in the mirror. ‘I look like a Finnish peasant and there’s hardly anyone who would recognise me.’ This was the start of another of Lenin’s urgent escapes from Russia. Few of his fellow Bolsheviks would know where he was or set eyes on him for the next three months.6

  *1 Lenin was now more careful about how they should write to each other. He gave her precise instructions in two successive letters. She should address hers to his sister Maria at the Pravda offices and mark the letters ‘For V. I.’. And he gave her the names of two emissaries they could use – ‘our entirely trusted comrades’.

  *2 At this stage Trotsky had not officially joined the Bolsheviks, but had met Lenin several times since he returned to Russia and the pair had made their peace. He had parted ways with the Mensheviks some years ago and been what he called a ‘freelance revolutionary’ showing loyalty to no side. But now he saw a real prospect for power and realised an alliance with Lenin was the only way to achieve it. He was willing to be led – if not to obey slavishly. He recognised that Lenin was a doer, not just ‘one of those revolutionaries who talks, talks, talks’. From this moment he threw in his lot with Lenin and the Bolsheviks enthusiastically. He brought several hundred of his own supporters with him, including some who would reach high positions in the Soviet regime after 1917.

  *3 He was released later that evening when he was identified to prison authorities as ‘definitely not Lenin’.

  *4 The next-door room belonged to Sergei and Olga Alliluyev’s sixteen-year-old daughter Nadezhda, who a short while later married Stalin (and committed suicide in 1932). She remembered little about this first encounter with the Bolshevik leader except the noise from the adjoining room – ‘a scraping of the pen day and night’.

  *5 Luxemburg was the inspiration for the Berlin socialist uprising in June 1919, which survived for a few weeks before it was suppressed by the German army. She was murdered in grisly fashion and her body thrown into the Landwehr Canal.

  35

  On the Run

  ‘When there’s the State there’s no freedom; when there’s freedom there will be no State.’

  Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917

  Shortly before 11 p.m. on 9 July Lenin, with Grigory Zinoviev, left the apartment where they had been hidden by Alliluyev. The plan for their escape was placed in the hands of the veteran Bolshevik metalworker Nikolai Yemelyanov, who owned a small hut by the Gulf of Finland thirty kilometres from the city centre, where they would be safe – at least for the time being. But getting there without hindrance was worrying the two men on the run. Lenin was in a highly nervous state – ‘he was in a desperate mood’, Yemelyanov recalled.

  The Finland Station was heavily policed so they decided to go by foot from Alliluyev’s home in central Petrograd to the suburban railway station of Novaya Derevnya, where they could catch a train on the small branch line to Sestroretsk. Walking was thought safer than taking a car or a taxi; vehicles were regularly being stopped by patrols.

  Lenin wouldn’t stand on the platform for fear of being recognised. The three of them hid under a line of waiting goods wagons. When their train was about to depart at around 1 a.m. they clambered onto the last freight coach. Lenin insisted on sitting on the steps and clinging to a handrail, in case he had to jump off in a hurry. ‘But it’s dangerous, you might fall,’ Yemelyanov said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m good at holding on,’ he replied.

  At one station a group of soldiers noticed Lenin and two of them moved to ask what was going on – but they had been drinking heavily and decided instead to return to their hooch bottle. After forty nervous minutes, near the end of the line, the three of them got out at Razliv, and walked the kilometre and a half to Yemelyanov’s hut, where they were to sleep in a hayloft which their host’s two adolescent sons had prepared for the distinguished Bolshevik visitors.

  Zinoviev wrote a lyrical account of their stay in the barn. ‘Cool nights marked with stars; the smell of cut hay…smoke from a small fire where venison simmered in a small pot. We go to bed early…It is cold. We cover ourselves with an old blanket…but it is narrow and each of us tries to leave the larger part to the other…Sometimes I cannot sleep for a long time, lying there in absolute silence. I can hear the beating of Ilyich’s heart. We are sleeping pressed closely against each other…’

  Lenin delighted rather less in the interlude. He always thought of himself as a man apart from his followers and cannot have enjoyed sharing a bed of hay with Zinoviev. He complained about the midges – ‘the insatiable mosquitoes gave no respite’ – he complained that he wasn’t getting enough information from Petrograd, and he was concerned about security. The hut was surrounded by other houses and was close to a campsite crowded with summer holidaymakers. It was near a lane used by many people throughout the day. There was a 200,000-ruble price on his head and he could be spotted by chance, despite his disguise. The newspapers had rightly reported that he had left Petrograd and had gone underground. Lenin insisted they had to move somewhere safer. Yemelyanov located another hiding place – a small thatched hut three kilometres away, in a clearing deep in a forest by a lake. Only a few peasants lived anywhere nearby. For the next three weeks this was where the coming Bolshevik Revolution would be planned.1

  —

  Lenin liked this more secluded second hiding place. He and Zinoviev made tea or cooked potatoes in a tin kettle suspended on forked sticks over a small fire. In the heat of the day they swam in the lake and in the long evening twilights Lenin fished for carp and bream. Via a circuitous route to avoid being followed by police spies, messengers from Petrograd came at least once a day, rowing the last part of the journey across the lake. Nadya came for the day once, changing trains several times to lose the men trailing her.

  On a writing pad by the fire he furiously wrote articles for the Party press and he got down to serious work on The State and Revolution, a study of the ideal of Communism that he wanted to build. There was no need for ‘bourgeois democracy’ or the State, he argued. After the Revolution, when the proletariat was free, the working class would govern themselves: that is when the State, as Engels had said, would ‘wither away’. The book’s best-known aperçu is neatly phrased: ‘When there’s the State there’s no freedom; when there’s freedom there will be no State.’ For a while it was considered one of Lenin’s most significant works, full of insights about the promised land to come. However, as time went on, under his successors, the book understandably went out of fashion and was seldom quoted in the Soviet Union, where the State resolutely refused to wither away but became ever stronger, more centralised and more vicious. It has a depressingly hollow ring when read a century later, though it has value as a kind of utopian dream: ‘We do not know when…[the State] will wither away, but we know it will.’2

  The rural idyll could not last. Zinoviev had a narrow escape one day when he went out hunting for game in a clearing among the woods. He was discovered by a forester who grew suspicious and asked him who he was and where he came from. He played dumb and pretended he was a Finnish peasant who didn’t speak Russian. Then word got through from Bolsheviks in Petrograd that the police believed Lenin was hiding somewhere around the Gulf of Finland. Lenin decided he had to get further away, into Finland proper. Zinoviev was less worried that he might be hanged and decided to return incognito to Petrograd.


  Lenin needed a fake passport to cross the Russian-Finnish ‘administrative border’. It would be the last of the innumerable false identity documents that he used in his life as a conspirator; this time he was a machine operator by the name of Konstantin Petrovich Ivanov. There is a curious photograph of him without a beard, the only one in existence, in which he appears a decidedly unimposing figure, shorn of all authority, entirely unrecognisable as the man who led the world’s first Communist revolution.

  The hastily devised plan was for both of them to leave on 8 August, with Yemelyanov and two new courier-guides, the Finnish Bolsheviks Eino Rakhia and Alexander Shotman. It involved a ten-kilometre walk eastwards through the forest from the lake to the tiny railway station at Levashevo, back towards Petrograd. From there, Zinoviev would head to the capital. Lenin would move on north to Finland, at first staying in the village of Udelnaya with a Bolshevik supporter, Emil Kalske, and then crossing the border posing as a stoker on a railway locomotive. It seemed to Lenin a well-laid plan. It turned into a disaster and he was lucky to escape in one piece – or jail.

  First they got lost in the woods. Yemelyanov was a local and supposed to know his way, but he took an unfamiliar short-cut and soon he had to admit he had no idea where he was. To make matters worse, as dusk descended they were being choked by smoke: in a nearby clearing a local farmer had been burning a peat bog. They stumbled around in the forest as darkness fell, ravenous with hunger. Shotman had packed just three small cucumbers for the five of them on the entire journey. When they came to a stream they couldn’t find a bridge and they had to wade across waist-deep. Finally, by a stroke of luck, they saw the flicker of a lantern. It was a tiny railway station, but not Levashevo, though at least it was on the same Petrograd-Finland line. Tired, hungry and wet, they had to wait hours in darkness for a train. Lenin was furious with Yemelyanov and Shotman for the hopeless disorganisation of the escape plan. It was putting the entire Revolution at risk. ‘Lenin’s nerves were on edge. He cursed us with extreme savagery,’ Shotman recalled. ‘Surely we ought to have obtained a detailed map of the area? Why hadn’t we studied the route and so on? We also caught it over the “reconnoitering”; why did it only seem to be the right station? Why didn’t we know precisely?’3