Another feature of the episode was Lenin’s imposition of order on his colleagues. Radek drew attention to this, suggesting that it proved that Lenin had it in him to ‘assume leadership of the revolutionary government’.9 As the train rolled on to Berlin and halted in sidings for a whole day, this prognosis seemed far-fetched.10 Then on 30 March, six days after leaving Switzerland, the emigrants reached the northern port of Sassnitz. Yet another set of forms had to be filled in. As a precaution and on Lenin’s suggestion, the travellers should invent fresh pseudonyms for themselves. This was an absurd overreaction since the Germans already had detailed information about the Russians in their care. The German authorities accepted the forms without making a fuss. This had the comical result that, when Lenin’s trusted helpmate Hanecki telegraphed from Trelleborg in Sweden with an enquiry as to whether a Mr Ulyanov was present among the passengers, he at first received a negative reply from the Germans.
Eventually the Bolshevik leader admitted his true identity and tickets were purchased for the ferry Queen Victoria to convey them from Sassnitz to Trelleborg; they all set sail the same day. The crossing was a rough one and most of the Russians were violently seasick. According to Radek and Zinoviev, only three passengers – Lenin, Radek and Zinoviev – endured the journey without vomiting. They may have been boasting. Or perhaps the story is true because the three of them spent their time on deck arguing furiously about politics, which may well have distracted them from feeling sick. Hanecki treated them to a celebratory banquet on their arrival in Trelleborg. The passengers threw themselves upon the several courses – all the passengers save for Lenin, who concentrated on eliciting information about Russia from Hanecki. Next day the travellers took the train to Stockholm. Again they were fêted. Indeed this was the first occasion in Lenin’s career he was given recognition by official foreign leaders. The mayor of Stockholm, Karl Lindhagen, laid on a breakfast to welcome the Russians. The newspaper Politiken carried a piece on the returning émigrés and – yet again for the first time – a photograph of Lenin was published. This brief Swedish sojourn marked a stage in the Bolshevik party’s transition to prominence.
Radek understood that this required Lenin to present himself rather differently. He put this with typical tartness:11
Probably it was the decent appearance of our stolid Swedish comrades that was evoking in us a passionate desire for Ilich to resemble a human being. We cajoled him at least to buy new shoes. He was travelling in mountain boots with huge nails. We pointed out to him that if the plan had been to ruin the pavements of the disgusting cities of bourgeois Switzerland, his conscience should prevent him from travelling with such instruments of destruction to Petrograd, where perhaps there anyway were now no pavements at all.
Lenin was marched off to a department store where clothes were bought for him. Thus refitted, he was judged appropriately dressed to lead the struggle against the Russian Provisional Government.
On 31 March, the passengers boarded the evening train from Stockholm northwards to Finland while Hanecki, Radek and V. V. Vorovski stayed behind to look after Bolshevik affairs abroad. This time Lenin and Nadya had no compartment to themselves. Georgian Bolshevik David Suliashvili, who took the bunk opposite Lenin, watched as he ‘rapidly devoured the newspapers with his eyes’. While reading the Russian press, Lenin could not contain his annoyance with the Mensheviks: ‘Ach, the scoundrels!… Ach, the traitors!’12 Several hours and dozens of ill-tempered exclamations later, the train reached the border with Finland at Harapanda. There the passengers got off and hired sleighs across the road bridge into the town of Tornio. They were briefly searched by Russian border guards before getting on yet another train for Helsinki. In Tornio Lenin had picked up recent copies of Pravda. He took himself off to a corner of the waiting room and studied the contents. This gave him two unpleasant shocks. The first was that Malinovski had been proved beyond peradventure to have been an Okhrana agent. Lenin went white with astonishment. Zinoviev sketched the scene: ‘Several times Ilich, staring eyeball to eyeball, returned to this theme. In short sentences. More in a whisper. He looked straight in my face. “What a scoundrel! He tricked the lot of us. Traitor! Shooting’s too good for him!”’13 The second shock was the news that the Bolshevik Central Committee, led by Lev Kamenev and Iosif Stalin since their release from Siberian exile, had adopted a policy of conditional support for the Russian Provisional Government. Already disgusted with the Mensheviks, Lenin was infuriated by leading Bolsheviks.
From Helsinki the émigrés took the Finland Railway to Petrograd. The train went at a steady speed, never reaching forty miles per hour, and the passengers grew impatient. At Beloostrov, twenty miles north of the capital, their train halted at the Russo-Finnish administrative border for the regular passport and customs checks. The Bolshevik Central Committee had sent ahead none other than Lev Kamenev to greet the returning leader and discuss the reception awaiting him. Lenin received him with something less than hospitality: ‘What have you been writing in Pravda? We’ve seen a few copies and have called you all sorts of names!’
Lenin was also getting nervous again. As the train drew near to the capital late into the night on 3 April, he fretted lest he should be arrested on arrival despite the reassurances of Kamenev. In fact Kamenev was right. The Bolshevik leadership had arranged a welcome at the Finland Station in the Russian capital. Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries from the Petrograd Soviet also turned out. Twenty minutes before the train’s arrival, two sailors’ units assembled on the platform as a guard of honour for Lenin. The naval officer expected him to say a few words of greeting to them. It was almost midnight. Nikolai Chkheidze, a Menshevik leader and Petrograd Soviet chairman, turned up to greet the returning Bolshevik leader. Outside the station building a crowd of workers and soldiers had gathered, just as had happened at the Kursk Station when leaders of the various socialist parties had arrived from Siberian exile. Eyes were fixed on the railway line to the north, and at last the lights of the train were glimpsed in the darkness. The locomotive wound its way towards the station like a fiery snake. Steam hissed from the pistons. The crowd, most of whom had never previously seen Lenin, started to push towards the building. The train rumbled to the side of the platform. He had arrived. After a decade abroad Lenin stepped down from the carriage on to Russian soil.
Then the celebrations started to go awry as Lenin refused to join in the spirit of comradeship. Improvising a speech to the sailors of the guard of honour, he told them that they had been deceived by the Provisional Government.14 He was starting as he meant to go on. Followed by Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Kamenev, he strode through to the reception rooms formerly reserved for the Imperial family. Chkheidze greeted him as a respected emigrant and appealed for cooperation among all socialists, but Lenin barely looked at him and replied with a summons for ‘world socialist revolution’. He then walked out of the station and clambered on top of an armoured car brought to the Finland Station by local Bolsheviks. From this position he could survey the crowd of thousands. His message to them was that capitalism had to be brought down in Russia and the rest of Europe, and that genuine socialists should withhold all support for the Provisional Government.
Lenin’s words disconcerted practically everyone who heard them that night; many listeners – or at least those who were close enough to hear him – thought he had gone off his head. Kamenev and other leading Bolsheviks were baffled, and hoped that once he had got over his long separation from Russia in Switzerland he would come to his senses. Even Nadezhda Konstantinovna seems to have doubted his sanity.15 Just a few colleagues were pleased by what he had said at the Finland Station. Among these were Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapnikov. A lot of Bolsheviks of a lesser standing in the faction agreed, having been appalled by the agreement of most Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries and indeed many Bolsheviks to lend conditional support to the Provisional Government. Lenin had returned to a fluid situation. There was a chance – a chance that was bound
to grow larger with time – to build a separate anti-governmental party. The man who had stood high on the armoured car in dead of night had not been a lone wolf; he was part of a pack that would get noisier and stronger. Bolshevism was finding its confidence again. A leader had returned to Petrograd who would give clarity to Bolshevik ideas and add resolve to Bolshevik practical campaigns.
In the trains between Switzerland and Russia he had busied himself by sketching his proposed strategy. These he was to call his April Theses. He gave them a polish between Beloostrov and Petrograd, keeping his phraseology short and punchy. There were ten theses. Some were chiselled with attention to detail, others were offered in lapidary slabs. Lenin wrote his April Theses deliberately so as to appeal to all far-left socialists who were uneasy with the Provisional Government’s stance. He wanted to convince his own Bolsheviks; his desire was also to attract recruits from the other parties.
There is much confusion in scholarly writings about the April Theses. Most of it results from the assumption that Lenin was a politician averse to verbal fudging. This is quite wrong. Lenin had to operate in a specific legal environment and, although he wanted the Bolsheviks to seize power, it would have been dangerous to say this directly. He had not travelled to Petrograd to offer himself as a martyr. His purposes were evident even though they were couched in oblique terms. Essentially he was taking his wartime thought a little further and explicitly redefining Bolshevism. And this constituted a rejection of the traditional Russian Marxist notion that a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution should be consolidated in Russia before any attempt at a further revolution, involving a social and economic eradication of capitalism, should be made. In April 1917 he demanded the abandonment of ‘the old Bolshevism’ and the reduction of the two stages of the revolutionary process to one. Even so, Lenin’s demand was not made explicitly. He may have disliked acknowledging a strategic change of mind; or perhaps he did not want to get involved in a doctrinal dispute at a moment when his priority was to secure assent to a practical policy. Above all, the Provisional Government had to be replaced. Lenin in his April Theses argued that only by this means would there be a fundamental solution for the Russian Empire’s political, economic and social problems and an end to the Great War with a peace that would be unoppressive for all the belligerent peoples.
There had been grave questions about Lenin’s strategy since 1905 when he had aimed to make a ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’ by setting up a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. He had never successfully countered the charge that his ideas, if implemented, would establish an oppressive, arbitrary regime and very probably set off a civil war. His April Theses were even less capable of addressing these questions. And yet, although an oppressive, arbitrary regime was built into his new strategy, he refused to recognise the fact. He used logical flourishes but did not bother with consistent logic; he would not be fussed about niceties. The time had come, he stated boldly, to begin the advance on power.
Few Bolsheviks could believe their ears when he addressed them at a couple of meetings on 4 April. The first meeting occurred in the premises of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee in the early hours of the morning. This was the large town-mansion on Kronverski Boulevard previously occupied by the ballerina Matilda Kseshinskaya, Nicholas II’s former mistress. Showing no tiredness, Lenin delivered a diatribe against the Bolshevik Central Committee’s caution. He raged like a bull. Everything about him reflected impatience and determination. There was a clarity of intent that no one else in his party possessed. Indeed very few politicians in the other parties had quite the self-belief of Vladimir Lenin. Politics in Russia were turbulent and unpredictable, and most leaders had a degree of doubt about their policies; they naturally tended to seek support for the actions and to have their close colleagues tell them that what they were doing was right. There were exceptions to this. Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov had no need for his party members to bolster his commitment to basic liberal concepts; and Socialist-Revolutionary Alexander Kerenski’s confident understanding of the political possibilities inured him to criticisms by his fellow party leaders. Milyukov and Kerenski felt they could, if permitted by circumstances, act as the embodiment of the Revolution in Russia. Lenin felt the same, but, unlike these rivals, he did not see it as his task to modify the policies of the Provisional Government. Lenin aimed to make another Revolution.
He had yet to settle himself into the extraordinary environment. Arriving in Petrograd, he had no idea where he and Nadya would stay the night. But his family had thought about this on his behalf. Anna Ilinichna and her husband Mark Yelizarov were then living at 48 Broad Street, a multi-storey tenement built at the turn of the century in the Petrograd Side district to the north-east of the city’s centre. Younger sister Maria lived in the same apartment. After the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee meeting, Volodya and Nadya proceeded to Broad Street.
As they tried to make sense of developments, they were certain about one thing: the days of emigration were over for good. Nadya put this into her memoirs:16
When we were left alone, Ilich scanned the room: it was a typical room in a Petersburg apartment; there was an instant sense of the reality of the fact that we were now in Piter [Petrograd’s popular nickname] and that all those Parises, Genevas, Berns and Zurichs were already something genuinely in the past. We exchanged a couple of words on this subject.
There was no time for a longer conversation since it was late into the night and an important day awaited them. Lenin and Nadya slept separately. Gora Lozgachëv, the adoptive son of Anna and Mark, had pinned a notice over the two beds: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’17 It was a fitting scene. Lenin and Nadya were not paying heed to their marriage; their minds were fixated on the political tasks ahead. The opportunity to have a daily influence on Russian politics had been snatched from them in 1907. Now it had been restored and each was going to grasp it.
Lenin had one private duty to perform before he could dive into the political torrent. After breakfast, he asked Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich – friend of the Ulyanov family and a fellow Bolshevik – to obtain a car for his use. Together with Bonch-Bruevich, he visited the graves of his mother and his sister Olga in the Volkovo Cemetery. Lenin controlled his emotions at the graveside. Bonch-Bruevich, who was more typically Russian than Lenin in his emotional reactions, had expected him to weep, but this was not how the Ulyanovs had been brought up to behave.
Lenin enjoyed living again with his sisters. Dmitri Ilich was still serving as a doctor in Crimea and Lenin did not meet him for another two years. Lenin liked to play with young Gora. Anna Ilinichna ran the domestic regime according to strict rules and frightened any children who displeased her; she also stopped her husband from indulging their adoptive son.18 But she never dared to order Vladimir Ilich about and had only to leave the room and the noise would start. Gora and he engaged in every sort of horseplay. It was nothing for them to set the chairs flying in the sitting room. Lenin also played tricks on Gora. This involved a considerable amount of teasing at poor Gora’s expense. Nadya objected to the ‘inquisitorial’ aspect of Lenin’s behaviour: ‘Volodya! Well, now that you’ve completely tormented him, leave the child in peace! Look what you’ve done – you’ve broken the table.’19 On this occasion Lenin had lunged so suddenly at Gora that the two went tumbling over the table. A horrified Anna Ilinichna returned to ascertain what was happening.20 If her husband Mark had been responsible, he would have earned the lash of his wife’s tongue. But Lenin was different. Lenin could be forgiven everything. He was the family’s darling; he could be gently reproved, very gently; but no one was allowed to thwart him. It was all right to ‘spoil’ Lenin.
Anna Ilinichna had transferred her sisterly affection from Alexander to Vladimir after Alexander’s execution. Vladimir the writer and public figure embodied her ideal. But she idolised him also because the traumas of the family’s past could somehow be salved by Vladimir’s career. He
r brother Vladimir was bent on eradicating the old regime which, in her opinion, had treated the Ulyanovs brutally. He was a fighter in a noble cause.
We do not really know how much Lenin thought about Sasha’s execution, and certainly he had a propensity for clinical political judgement. But beneath the cool, analytical surface he was also a man of passion. Whatever his precise feelings about the Romanovs, he raged against the entire social order of tsarism. He detested the nobility, the industrialists, bankers. For Lenin, moreover, liberals were as bad as conservatives and outright reactionaries. Unlike other political leaders, he saw the Provisional Government not as the embodiment of a new regime but as a newer form of the old. His version of Marxist theory propelled him in the direction of denouncing the ‘capitalist ministers’ and their supporters. But so, too, did his family’s experience. He recalled – and no doubt the visit to the Volkovoe Cemetery reminded him forcibly – how his family had been ostracised in Simbirsk after Alexander’s execution. He felt no impulse to forgive and forget. Lenin had spent his adult life denouncing non-socialists as being no better than the regime they purported to oppose. Lenin, without saying this explicitly, wanted to settle some scores. He wanted revenge, and the surviving members of his family – as well as others in his own party (and in the general population) – felt the same.
It was in this spirit that he returned from the cemetery and went to his second political meeting of 4 April. This took place in room no. 13 of the Tauride Palace. This was the building which had formerly housed the State Duma and which, since the February Revolution, had contained both the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. The large parties were allowed to hold meetings there. A gathering of Bolsheviks from all over the country was held there in advance of a conference of the country’s soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Lenin astounded practically everyone who had not yet heard his proposals. Without naming names, he attacked those who offered reconciliation with the Mensheviks. The contents of the April Theses were revealed and explained. Most Bolsheviks could hardly believe their ears. Notable exceptions were Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapnikov. The rest were aghast. Kamenev in particular believed Lenin to have taken leave of his senses. Most of Lenin’s friends hoped that he would calm down once he had had a chance to acquaint himself with the realities of the contemporary situation in Russia. Surely, they asked, this madness could not long continue?
Lenin: A Biography Page 35
