In Europe

by Geert Mak

  Far more likely is that something changed within Lenin himself during that journey. After the meeting between Parvoes and Radek in Stockholm, he may suddenly have realised that his penniless Bolsheviks could, within only a matter of weeks, have tens of millions of gold German marks at their disposal, providing unparalleled opportunities for organisation and propaganda.

  About one fact, however, there is virtually no room for disagreement: after this train journey, the German millions came flowing in. In the communist history books, stories to this effect – which began to circulate within a few months – were always dismissed as ‘foul slander and obscurantist rumours’. Today, however, no one can avoid the conclusion that the glorious October Revolution was actually financed by the German ministry of foreign affairs.

  First of all, there are the German records themselves, made public after 1945. In them, one sees that the ministry had set up a special contact group for Parvoes and his people as early as 1916, under the code name ‘Stockholm’. The following is taken directly from the confidential report submitted to the kaiser, and dated 3 December, 1917: ‘It was not until the Bolsheviks began receiving a steady supply of funding from us, through diverse channels and under assorted headings, that they were able to transform their most important organ, Pravda, into an energetic propaganda vehicle and to broaden the narrow base of their party.’ Calculations recorded by the Germany ministry of foreign affairs on 5 February, 1918 show that 40,580,997 gold marks had been allocated for ‘propaganda and special objectives’ in Russia, and that 26,566,122 of those marks had already been paid out as of 31 January. Such sums would today be equivalent to hundreds of millions of euros. All available information indicates that the lion's share of this funding went to the Bolsheviks.

  The Russians, understandably enough, carefully eradicated all traces of this operation. In summer 1917, the provisional government – with the help of the French intelligence service – began a thorough investigation into alleged financial contacts between the Germans and the Bolsheviks. Yet Lenin and his companions were never taken to court. The dossier, all twenty-one volumes of it, was confiscated and destroyed right after the October Revolution, on the orders of Lev Trotsky.

  The results, however, were plain to see. From spring 1917 the Bolsheviks’ propaganda activities were so massive and widespread that they could not possibly have been funded from the party's own coffers. In February 1917 the Bolsheviks did not own a single printing press. In March, Pravda was in such dire straits that relief benefits had to be organised to keep it running. Four months later, the Bolshevik press had a combined daily circulation of 320,000 newspapers, as well as around 350,000 pamphlets and brochures. Pravda appeared in more than forty editions, including in Polish and Armenian. Some 100,000 newspapers were distributed daily among the armed forces: the Soldatsja Pravda for the infantry, the Gols Pravdy for the navy, the Okopnaja Pravada (Trench Truth) for the front. There was enough money to pay party officials a regular salary, a luxury unheard of in Bolshevik circles. Party membership swelled between April and August 1917 from 23,000 to 200,000. The Bolsheviks never deigned to explain this sudden and profuse wealth.

  Does this mean that Lenin was actually nothing but a mere German agent? Not at all. Throughout his life his conduct shows that he was purely a revolutionary in heart and soul, a revolutionary who made all else secondary to that goal, and who was even prepared to make a pact with the Devil to achieve his objectives. His alliance with the Germans was purely a coalition of opportunity, one that served the interests of both parties at a given moment, but which could be tossed aside again at the next. Lenin, in fact, had only one goal: grand, worldwide revolution. Within that context, the Russian Revolution was but a start.

  The travelling party fell apart. Karl Radek became editor of Izvestia, was one of the delegation that negotiated a peace with Germany, and then became Lenin's most important agent in Poland and Berlin. For all his lightheartedness, he loved being close to the centre of power; one day, it was too late for him to withdraw. During a Stalinist show trial in January 1937 he was convicted of ‘sabotage, treason and terrorism’. He ended up in the Gulag and died there two years later: beaten to death, stabbed to death or thrown to his death on a concrete floor, the rumours disagree. Grigori Sokolnikov met a similar fate: he was murdered in 1939 in one of Stalin's prisons, apparently by his fellow prisoners.

  For a time, Grigori Zinovyev was considered Lenin's natural successor, but lost out to Stalin. He was executed in August 1936. Olga Ravitsj, his wife, disappeared in the Gulag. In late 1918 Parvoes fled to Switzerland, where he had a bank account containing more than two million Swiss francs. Later he returned to Germany, for he had financial interests all over Europe. After his death in Berlin in December 1924, all his personal documents vanished into thin air.

  Inessa Armand did not live long: she served, among other things, as head of the women's section of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party, but became overworked and died of cholera and a broken heart in September 1920. Nadezhda Krupskaya grew fat, interfering and querulous. In 1926 she succeeded in expanding the Soviet Union's list of banned literature by at least a hundred books, including the work of Dostoyevsky, the Koran and the Bible. She died in 1939.

  Lenin survived Inessa Armand by no more than four years. An attempt was made on his life in 1918. He was deeply traumatised, his reign of terror became more intense, and he never completely recovered. After 1921 his health deteriorated. He died on 21 January, 1924, before reaching the age of fifty-four.

  Chapter FOURTEEN

  Petrograd

  ST PETERSBURG, 15 MARCH, 1999. IT TAKES DAYS TO FALL IN LOVE with the Hotel Neva, but then it is for ever. Who could help but fall for its curlicue staircases and czarist corridors, its unrelenting Stalinist mattresses, the central heating adjustable at all hours by simply opening or closing the window just a crack, its gurgling showers, the yellowish-brown moisture from its taps, the middle-aged babushkas who rule over their floors like little empresses, the red beets and soggy eggs at breakfast? Your first instinct is to get away as quickly as possible, but then you start developing a strange affection for all this, and after that you are lost.

  Of course the hotel has its typical Russian quirks. In the canteen, for example, you see a NO SMOKING sign, while everyone there is nonchalantly puffing away. The true Russia hand knows: that sign has nothing to do with smoking, but everything to do with power. It allows the canteen supervisor to ban or permit smoking as she sees fit, to hand out favours and sanctions, to exercise sovereignty, in other words, over her little fiefdom. Clean towels? That has to be discussed at length with two other female supervisors. A table at which to write? But now I have gone too far! ‘You'll have to request permission from the superior!’ our lady of the corridor cries. The table eventually arrives, bringing with it the next problem: what about a chair?

  And so I while away my days here, chez Oblomov. At night the temperature drops to around twelve below zero, during the day the sun shines. From my room I have a view of the stone cannons adorning the front of an old munitions plant, and of a brightly lit branch office of the former KGB. The Neva is a wide, white expanse of ice. The sky is a brilliant blue. Children are playing on the canals.

  Everyone else is talking about what a rotten winter it has been. In August the city was still lively and bright, then the rouble turned into Monopoly money, after that the weather turned cold, companies went bankrupt, building projects came to a halt, and the birds haven't even started singing yet.

  Candles and incense smoulder in the smudgy black vaults of the church nearby. It is full of people, young and old, wrapped up snugly in shawls. A little market has sprung up close to the tiled stove. At least a dozen women have set up a trade in vodka, leeks and assorted obscurities.

  In one of the naves, a priest begins chanting. Leaning against a wall are four coffin lids, and now I see the four corpses as well: two emaciated old people and two somewhat younger souls, a man with a pointed fa
ce and a skinny woman with dark hair and bushy eyebrows. The women around the stove genuflect from behind their wares. And the winter holds on, it will never end, even though everyone is long exhausted.

  My growing attachment to this city and the indolent life at the hotel, I reflect, may have something to do with a deep and fundamental sense of recognition. The last time I was here was about six years ago, and little has changed in the city since. The revolution of Sony, IBM and Head & Shoulders that has been sweeping the Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and East Germans along with it since 1989 seems to have got stranded here amid the drab houses and brownish snow. Moscow is where all the money is made on the black market. In St Petersburg the trams are the same weathered wrecks they were then, the potholes in the streets are as deep as ever, the rubbish lies around for a long, long time, and every couple of hundred metres along the street you see someone tinkering with his car. The city is still torn down the middle each evening when the bridges over the Neva are pulled up for a few hours, providing the perfect adulterer's excuse: ‘Sorry, I had to wait for the bridge.’

  What has disappeared in the last six years is the established order. The St Petersburg Times of 16 March, 1999 reports a bank robbery by the pensioner Dmitri Setrakov: during the rouble crisis of August 1998 he lost his entire life savings of $20,000; no one helped him; his last resort was a TOZ-106 hunting rifle. Another article: in the city of Prokopyevsk, three patients in an intensive care ward are in additional mortal danger because the hospital cannot pay its electricity bill. A whole government apparatus has gone bust here. If my hotel pays any taxes at all, it is to the boss of the shabby guards at the door, a mafia chieftain who runs a little country of his own. Someone recounts the story of the local entrepreneur Sergei M. Like everyone, Sergei pays for protection, for a ‘roof’ as they say here. One day an angry customer came into Sergei's place of business, accompanied by an armed gangster, to demand his money back. Sergei was given permission to call his ‘roof’. Within a few minutes his protector was there in the office, fully armed. The two gangsters talked calmly for a few minutes; it soon turned out that Sergei's roof belonged to a network of patronage within the St Petersburg mafia that ranked higher than the customer's. The case was closed: Sergei was not bothered again.

  And so it goes everywhere in this stateless state, even unto the old Singer factory that now houses Dom Knigi, the biggest bookshop in St Petersburg. At Dom Knigi, every department – fiction, non-fiction, children's literature – is watched over by a heavily armed commando, the guardian angel sent by yet another private state. A simple shopping trip in this city leads you from one sovereignty to the next.

  The old section of St Petersburg is essentially a frozen metropolis from 1917, with the same doors and decorated house fronts, the same street lamps and the same graceful bridges. The only difference with 1917 is that all of this is eighty years older now and a great deal more ramshackle, for there has never been money for maintenance or restoration. But on the other hand, where else does one find a city where money was no object for two whole centuries, a city that was moulded by the best European architects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then more or less forgotten?

  The communist leaders who came later focused all their razing and renewal on Moscow. They did not like Leningrad, and that was the salvation of the beautiful banks of the Neva, the lovely, low ochre-yellow buildings and Nevsky Prospect, which today looks much as it did in Gogol's day, except that little is left of the ‘carnivalesque atmosphere’, the ‘cheerful carriages’ and the ‘spotlessly clean sidewalks’.

  The history of St Petersburg reflects the relationship between Russia and Europe. And, by association, it also reflects the gulf between the Russian state and the Russian people, which grew wider and went on growing until it finally became unbridgeable.

  St Petersburg itself, like Vienna, like Berlin, reflects the dream of an old dynasty, with all the accompanying peculiarities. But St Petersburg has much more going for it. The city, after all, was designed and built as a grand attempt to force a change in the course and the thinking of a semi-medieval nation. That ambition, that evangelical message, can be seen on the streets and buildings everywhere, even today. The physical forms have something overly deliberate about them, like a caricature of nineteenth-century Europe. The palaces here are more exuberant than anywhere else, the boulevards wider than any I have seen, the opulence is that of the parvenu. Here reigns, as the Marquis de Custine once wrote, a typical ‘façade culture’, one ‘without roots in history or in the Russian soil, an apparent order, like a veil thrown over the Asiatic barbarism’.

  St Petersburg symbolises the continuing identity crisis of this huge empire to Europe's east: who are we really, where do we want to belong? ‘Of course we're Europeans,’ say the two schoolgirls I speak to briefly on Nevsky Prospect. But at the same time they talk excitedly about their upcoming holiday ‘to Europe’, as though that were some far-off and exotic world.

  A friend of a friend grants me a taste of the atmosphere of the palace that once belonged to Felix Yusupov, the nobleman who later murdered the seer Grigori Rasputin. I am even allowed a peek at the room and the untidy garden where it all happened. Yusopov, an Oxford graduate, was ‘merely’ married to the czar's niece, yet the palace has the size and the allure of the residences of a Western European potentate. Aristocrats like Yusopov did absolutely nothing at all, but until 1914 were the reigning European champions at the noble art of wasting money. The notes I make during the visit are punctuated solely with exclamation marks. The Turkish bath! The Jugendstil dining room! The prince did not have much time to enjoy it, however: in 1917 he fled head over heels to Paris, where he died at a ripe old age in the 1960s. I take a peek at his private theatre: a complete miniature Bolshoi, a chocolate box lined with red velvet, with every last accoutrement, exclusively for the prince and his guests.

  Like his cousin Wilhelm II, Czar Nicholas II felt a strong bond with his English kin. The czar was married to Queen Victoria's granddaughter, spoke English like a Cambridge don, cultivated public-school manners and was known as ‘the most civil man in Europe’. At the same time, he aspired to the status of a true Russian czar, the absolute ruler over a vast, semi-Asiatic empire.

  And just like Kaiser Wilhelm, Nicholas preferred living in a past of his own making. He intended his dynasty to remain a beacon in the uncertain days of modernisation and democratisation. Many of the glorious façades of St Petersburg's eighteenth-century palaces were replaced, with the czar's approval, with new ones in a hotchpotch of neo-Renaissance, neo-baroque or ‘pre-modern Gothic’ styles. In that way, too, the city resembled Berlin; the nouveau riche left their mark on both cities with identical conviction.

  The reign of Nicholas II began under a bad sign. A few days after his coronation, during the traditional distribution of cake and beverages, he watched as 1,400 people were trampled to death in the crowd. In 1881 – Nicholas was thirteen at the time – his relatively liberal grandfather Alexander II was murdered in his carriage by ‘nihilistic’ revolutionaries. That was the first, and perhaps the seminal, turning point in modern Russian history. After that, moderate reformers could accomplish almost nothing. The second was the popular rebellion of 1905. The third and pivotal change was the Bolshevik coup of 1917.

  Ten years after the death of Alexander II, the country was racked by unparalleled famine. The czarist regime could not do a thing. Countless well-to-do volunteers went to the countryside to help the suffering farmers, and for many of them the contrast between the grinding poverty of the farmers and the regime's shortsighted arrogance came as a shock. In 1894, Alexander III, a reactionary mogul, died unexpectedly of a kidney ailment. His son Nicholas had to assume power whether he liked it or not.

  Kaiser Wilhelm, despite his conservatism, was thoroughly interested in all forms of modern technology, but Nicholas was obsessed with seventeenth-century fantasies. The role he wished to play fitted neither his age nor his person. He yearned for absolute
power over an empire, but at the same time lacked the vision and skills needed for such a position. To make matters worse he did not even realise that he lacked those talents, or that Russia was actually in need of very different qualities indeed. His greatest achievement came in 1913: the pompous celebration of 300 years of the Romanov dynasty. It was one, great nostalgic cry for a non-existent past.

  During those same years, Russian literacy rose from twenty per cent in 1897 to forty per cent in 1914. Between 1860 and 1914, the number of university students grew from 5,000 to nearly 70,000, and the number of Russian newspapers from 13 to more than 850. Even the Russian miri, the village communes of peasant farmers, were opening up to the real world. But Nicholas had no eye for any of that.

  On Sunday, 9 January, 1905, his soldiers opened fire on a praying, kneeling crowd in St Petersburg. About 200 people were killed, hundreds more were wounded. The myth of ‘Papa Czar’ was shattered and the Russian people were furious, riots and disturbances broke out everywhere. Some 3,000 rural estates were looted. From the famous steps at the quayside in Odessa, soldiers fired on a crowd that was demonstrating in support of mutineers on the battleship Potemkin. More than 2,000 people were killed: shot, trampled or drowned. In late 1905, a revolt in Moscow was crushed at the last moment.

  A czarist countermovement arose: anti-liberal, anti-socialist, and above all anti-Semitic. Some 700 pogroms took place across Russia in the fall of 1905. In Odessa 800 Jews were murdered, more than 100,000 lost their homes. And rightly so, according to the czar. ‘Nine out of every ten of the troublemakers were Jews,’ he wrote contentedly to his mother on 27 October, 1905. To him, the pogroms were a clear demonstration of what an enraged crowd of loyal subjects could do: ‘They encircle the houses where the revolutionaries have sought refuge, set them on fire and kill everyone who tries to escape.’