Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Lenin was not mollified. He wrote to Lunacharsky’s deputy, the historian Mikhail Pokrovsky, asking him to intervene. ‘Again I am asking you to help in the struggle against Futurism etc. Cannot this be stopped? Let’s agree to publish these Futurists twice a year and in not more than 1,500 copies. Can’t any reliable anti-Futurists be found?’ He told Gorky that Mayakovsky ‘shouts, invents words, and doesn’t go anywhere…it’s incomprehensible, difficult to read, disconnected, drivel. Is he talented? Very talented even? Hmmm. We shall see.’

  At a reception once he was fulminating against the Futurists and Symbolists in general and Mayakovsky in particular when Nadya interrupted him. ‘How many times have I told you, Volodya, that you should get Mayakovsky’s books…then you would understand him too. You just can’t get down to it.’

  He reacted similarly to modern painting and sculpture. An art student, Mikhail Gorlovsky, accompanied Lenin around an exhibition and heard his thoughts on abstract painting. ‘We all belonged to the avant garde and naturally approved of constructivism only. Among the pictures at this exhibition there was one detested artist whom we all contemptuously called “the dauber”. But he remained undeterred and went on with his realistic pictures. It was just this work that gave Lenin pleasure. “This, you see, is clear to me. I understand this, so do you, and so do the workers and everybody else. But explain to me what do I see in your pictures? In all these pictures [painted by you] I cannot find either eyes nor noses,” he said.’9

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  Lenin had fixed opinions about what art was for in the socialist world. ‘Why turn away from real beauty, and discard it for good and all, just because it is “old”? Why worship the new as the god to be obeyed, just because it is “new”? That is nonsense, sheer nonsense,’ he told an old comrade two years after seizing power. ‘Art belongs to the people. It must have its roots in the broad mass of workers. It must be understood and loved by them. It must be rooted in and grow with their thoughts and feelings and desires. It must arouse and develop the artist in them. Are we to give cake and sugar to a minority, when the mass of workers and peasants still lack black bread?’

  In the early Soviet years, before ‘socialist realism’ became the prescribed genre in literature, painting, film and even music, the first big new thing in the arts under Communism was ‘Prolekult’, proletarian culture. The idea was that art would reflect the experience of people in the workplace, and many artists went to factories to produce work collectively in teams rather than individually. ‘The “I” of bourgeois culture would yield to the “we” of the new world,’ as Lunacharsky said. Large amounts of money were spent on projects like building an orchestra from the sound of clanking factory machinery, and replacing old paintings in museums with often abstract new pieces produced in working conditions by a team of labourers and artists together. This was the first ‘cultural revolution’ under Communism, which aimed to destroy everything old and start anew. ‘It’s time for bullets to pepper museums,’ said Mayakovsky. ‘In the name of our tomorrow, we shall burn Raphael,’ wrote another Prolekult propagandist.*8

  The brain behind Prolekult and the organiser of its grand projects was Lenin’s old sparring partner Alexander Bogdanov, who had argued with him in the 1900s about religion and now wanted to reinvent culture. On a large budget, given to him by his old friend Lunacharsky.

  Lenin loathed Prolekult for aesthetic and political reasons. He believed that even if socialism destroyed capitalism it had to build on its foundations – a principle as important culturally as it was socially and economically. And he believed that most of the Prolekult ‘artists’ were poseurs and fakes. But he had to tread warily. He did not interfere with Bogdanov’s little empire for a while and allowed it funds as long as it remained clearly an artistic movement. But then Bogdanov and Lunacharsky made a mistake politically. Late in 1919 they over-reached and demanded autonomy for Prolekult as a branch of Soviet society with equal importance to the Communist Party. That is when Lenin stepped in, took away the money, demanded that Prolekult be subsumed within a minor Party body, and banned it from operating within State museums and factories. It went out of fashion. ‘Prolekult as an institution is a nonsense,’ he said. ‘One can become a Communist only by enriching one’s experience and memory with the knowledge of all the wealth that mankind has produced.’*9

  To begin with Lenin was more lenient towards books than newspapers. Censorship was established immediately after the Revolution but was mild for the first three years. The State Publishing House, Gosizdat, was founded by Lenin in December 1918 and took a monopoly on book publishing. The following year it had a monopoly on paper production; three years later, on the sale of all books. All manuscripts had to go to a preliminary censor, as they had done in Tsarist times. For the first few years, before Lenin became ill, censorship operated with a light hand. But within a few years some of Russia’s best writers had left: Ivan Bunin, Marina Tsvetaeva, Alexei Tolstoy, Boris Zaytsev, Vyacheslav Ivanov. Eventually Gorky left.*10 When Evgeny Zamyatin, author of the brilliant dystopian novel We, emigrated he said: ‘Russian literature will only have one future – its past.’

  Libraries, the institution beloved by Lenin, the places where he had spent so much of his life, came under attack. From the start of 1920 Nadya’s job at the Enlightenment Commissariat was to purge ‘unacceptable’ books from Russia’s public libraries – ‘an act of intellectual vampirism’, Gorky called it. She held the job until Lenin died. She performed the task with her customary zeal – and she had his blessing. Works by ninety-four authors including Kant, Descartes, William James, Schopenhauer, Pyotr Kropotkin and Ernst Mach were removed. ‘This tree of unknowledge was planted by Nadezhda Krupskaya under Lenin, with his direction and advice,’ acknowledged the chairman of the Central Libraries Commission later.

  *1 She continued to live with Nadya – though in a different Kremlin apartment – after Lenin died, and until their own deaths.

  *2 He sometimes ostentatiously deprived himself of comforts. One day in the freezing winter of 1918 the moulting sheepskin mat put under his desk to keep his feet warm was replaced by a fine polar bear skin. He protested – loudly – and demanded the old mat be returned. ‘It’s a luxury I don’t need…altogether unnecessary in a ruined country like this.’

  *3 In Communist Party speak a reprimand wasn’t just a word. Every member had a written Party record which would count towards future jobs and Party positions. A formal reprimand from the leader was a big black mark.

  *4 Until he was ‘purged’ himself in 1938 and executed, hours after his last court appearance.

  *5 The exception being Turgenev, whom he loved ‘despite the fact that he was a liberal’.

  *6 Lenin loathed the portrait of Novodorov in Tolstoy’s last novel Resurrection (1899), half idealistic dreamer and half ruthless opportunist revolutionary who has a lot of Lenin about him. ‘The whole of Novodorov’s revolutionary activity, though he could explain it very eloquently and very convincingly, appeared to be founded on nothing but ambition and the desire for supremacy. But, devoid of these moral and aesthetic qualities which call forth doubts and hesitations, he very soon acquired a position in the revolutionary world which satisfied him – that of leader of a Party. Having once chosen a direction, he never doubted or hesitated, and therefore was certain that he never made a mistake…His self-assurance was so great that it either repelled people or made them submit to him. And as he carried out his activity among very young people who mistook his boundless self-assurance for depth and wisdom, the majority did submit to him, and he had great success in revolutionary circles.’ How perceptive and prescient.

  *7 Blok soon became disillusioned by the Revolution, though, and within three years asked for permission to leave Russia. After long delays it was granted, but his health was failing and he died in 1921 before he could emigrate.

  *8 Operas were produced in rewritten versions. Tosca became ‘The Battle for the Commune’ and Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar was transf
ormed into ‘The Hammer and Sickle’.

  *9 At one point, however, when Lunacharsky asked for additional funds for the Bolshoi Opera, Lenin furiously refused. ‘What, money for that landlord art? Absolutely no. Instead we should close it down altogether. Workers don’t want to go there.’ For a short while he followed through with the idea of closing the Bolshoi, but was persuaded out of it and ultimately approved Lunacharsky’s budget increase. His initial reaction showed his true opinion, however.

  *10 Though he had an extremely complex relationship not only with Lenin but with the Soviet state. He returned a few years later under Stalin.

  46

  Reds and Whites

  ‘Soviet authority is organised civil war.’

  Leon Trotsky, July 1919

  ‘White Guards…the last dream of the old world.’

  Marina Tsvetaeva, July 1919

  Lenin said that the Civil War in Russia began on 25 October 1917. ‘Of course there will be attempts to overthrow us,’ he told his closest comrades at about the same time the Winter Palace fell to the Bolsheviks that evening. He was not a military man, he had no experience of warfare; he had never worn a uniform. But it turned out that he had a good understanding of strategy, he was shrewd at picking efficient generals, he was a ruthless commander-in-chief, and, importantly, he possessed the gift of luck.

  Lenin never went to the Front, he did not make stirring speeches to the troops, but he was in charge of military and political strategy. He made the major decisions and allowed his staff officers to work out the details. He pored over maps with his military aides, fired off dozens of encouraging or hectoring telegrams a day, worked around the clock, but left the soldiers to win his war, along with the trusted man he chose to command them: Leon Trotsky.

  Above all, Lenin was lucky in his enemy. In contrast to the Bolsheviks’ unified leadership, the ‘Whites’ were fragmented; there were three main armies separated by thousands of miles. Even when they managed to communicate over such vast distances, their leaders often loathed each other and had strong disagreements about strategy and tactics. There were all kinds of practical and military reasons the Whites lost the war: they controlled a smaller population to recruit from, and their problems with communications were insuperable. But the main reason ran deeper. The Whites were stuck in the past – they were ‘the last dream of the old world’, as the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, one of their passionate devotees, put it. Most Russians – and the minority groups in the empire, from Finland to the Caucasus – may have loathed and feared the Bolsheviks, but they did not want a return to the past. ‘We didn’t put forward a single new idea,’ acknowledged Vasily Shulgin, one of their leaders, in the summer of 1919. And when, after two and a half years, with three million dead from war, disease and hunger, they were defeated, most acknowledged why. ‘Their old regime psychology prevented the Whites from facing the new world the revolutions had created,’ Pyotr Struve, one of Lenin’s old friends turned enemy, said. ‘They conducted themselves as though nothing had happened whereas in reality the whole world around them had collapsed and in order to defeat the enemy they themselves had to undergo a rebirth. Nothing so hindered the White movement as this condition of psychologically staying put…in circumstances that ceased to exist. Men with this ancien régime mentality were immersed in this raging sea of revolutionary anarchy and could not find their bearings. In the revolutionary storm that struck Russia in 1917 even out-and-out restorationists had to turn revolutionaries in the psychological sense, because in a revolution only revolutionaries can find their way.’1

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  The immediate task for Lenin was to build an armed force from the ruins left after defeat by the Germans. He put Trotsky in charge of creating the Red Army, which quickly became an effective fighting unit – or at least, effective enough to beat off the Whites. For orthodox Marxists the very idea of a standing army was anathema: armies had existed to oppress the working class and forestall revolution. But Trotsky realised the Bolsheviks couldn’t rely on a ragbag assortment of former private soldiers who had just been beaten in a war, and untrained factory workers like the Red Guards – ‘vagabond, unstable elements’ as he described them. They needed a proficient unit fast. He saw that the only way was to use Tsarist officers with experience to establish a new army and train the men as soon as possible, and then to lead them. Many Bolsheviks in the existing army, and Party members, objected, first that ‘class enemies’ were being given special treatment ahead of their own people, and second that the Tsarist officers would betray the regime given half the chance. But Lenin backed Trotsky wholeheartedly. Disloyal officers were ‘not as dangerous to the Revolution as the loss of whole regiments through the incompetence of semi-educated Communist commanders who couldn’t even read a map’, argued Trotsky. Lenin agreed with him.

  The Red Army was formed by the Tsarist officer corps. More than 8,000 volunteered immediately after the Revolution, including around fifty generals. They were mostly career army men who would serve a civilian government, whatever its politics. Many had joined up before the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed, when it looked as though the Germans might sweep through Russia, and they acted from patriotism. Others wanted to be on the winning side, and bet on the Bolsheviks.

  Increasing numbers volunteered when they could see the Red Army was turning into a professional outfit. But the regime needed many more; Trotsky and Lenin resorted to force to press-gang them, and terror threats to keep them loyal. Altogether more than 50,000 Tsarist officers joined the Reds in the Civil War, including doctors, vets and engineers – most of them because their families were held hostage if they didn’t. They were told they would be watched by a commissar and if they did anything suspicious they would be shot and/or their families would be arrested. Only those who had relatives in Russia were recruited. Trotsky’s ‘Special Order Number 30’ of September 1918 stated: ‘Let the turncoats realise that they are at the same time betraying their own…fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives and children.’

  He told one of his trusted Bolshevik commanders how to keep the officers in line. ‘In case of dubious…[activity] put tough commissars over them with revolvers in hand. Give senior commanders the choice: Victory or Death. Don’t take your eyes off unreliable commanders. In the event of desertion by a member of the command staff, the commissar pays with his head.’

  Trotsky was a harsh disciplinarian. He issued death sentences for ‘unjustified retreat’ and ‘panic-mongering’, and Lenin backed him. When other commissars objected to Trotsky’s orders to execute a commissar and commander for withdrawing their troops during a siege of a strategic town, Lenin immediately took his side. He wrote a note in red ink on a blank sheet of paper that bore the Sovnarkom seal. It read: ‘Comrades: Knowing the strict character of Comrade Trotsky’s orders, I am so convinced, so absolutely convinced, of the correctness, expediency and necessity for the success of the cause…that I unreservedly endorse this order. Lenin.’ He told Trotsky as he was signing it: ‘I will give you as many blanks as you want.’

  Like Lenin, Trotsky had no military experience and had been a journalist, a pamphleteer, before the Revolution brought him power. But he was decisive, got things done by cutting through red tape and had a clear, logical mind. He was loathed by many Party members for his arrogance and hauteur, his perfectly pressed uniforms and his swagger. But nobody could deny his energy or his showmanship. He criss-crossed Russia in his special train equipped with a printing press, telegraph machines, an orchestra and a film crew and gave electrifying performances to rally often jaded and unwilling troops. He was the Red Army’s persuader-in-chief.2

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  The Whites had some competent military leaders, but they quarrelled with each other. Some wanted the monarchy back, most wanted to return the estates to the pre-1917 landlords, a few wanted a Western-style democracy. None wanted independence for the nations within the Russian empire, which was what Lenin was promising – along with land for the peasants and more power
for the workers. He didn’t mean the pledges, but any lie was justified for the Revolution. ‘We can tell the Ukrainians and Latvians anything…We have to be tactful at this stage, be careful,’ he told Kamenev. ‘We can always get…[these countries] back later.’ The Whites were offering very little and increasingly they found it hard to recruit soldiers. Like the Reds, they had to conscript, used press gangs and resorted to terror.

  The three White armies never managed to join forces; the Reds always found ways to cut them off from each other. They all claimed victories, but each was short-lived. There were no fixed fronts for most of the war. It was guerrilla fighting for much of the time between small units, not major armies on battlefields. Some towns and cities changed hands five or six times within two years.

  The best of the generals was Anton Denikin, forty-five at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, head of the Voluntary Army in the south of Russia – the first of the White units to be formed.*1 He was lowly born for an Imperial Staff officer, the son of a Polish seamstress and a liberated Russian serf. ‘He had irrepressible charm,’ acknowledged one of his rivals, ‘a tendency to stoutness, a large bald head bordered by trimmed greying hair, a pointed beard and a twirled moustache…his often stubborn look dissolved into a natural smile and infectious laughter.’ His diary shows him to have been extremely bright and imaginative. He understood what was wrong with the White movement and his army, most of whom were more interested in loot than in the war. ‘I cannot do anything with my army, I am glad if it simply carries out my orders,’ he told Major-General Herbert Holman, head of the British mission to his unit. ‘In some areas we control, justice serves as a pretext for personal vendettas and…is a system of organised lynch law.’ He added that sometimes his men, mostly the Cossacks, could not manoeuvre at any speed ‘because they are laden down by so much booty’.