Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (24 page)

The demonstrators’ efforts to find leadership were no more successful at the Tauride Palace where the Petrograd Soviet was based. In their frus
tration they threatened leaders of the Soviet and briefly held the SR leader Chernov captive. It was only through the timely intervention of Trotsky and others that Chernov was released unharmed.

Exactly what Lenin intended in July has remained controversial but a fairly reliable view has emerged.
³
The revolutionary pressure was coming largely from below and in radical centres like Kronstadt the popular mood was to the left of the Bolsheviks. This caused their local representatives much embarrassment and they often led groups in July which were determined to seize power. Others complained that the Central Committee was calling on them to be ‘firemen’, that is they had to damp down the revolutionary enthusiasm of their constituency. Thus, different levels of the Party in the Petrograd region had different views on what policy should be. The grassroots Party cells, especially in Kronstadt, were being pushed by their constituents to support radical action while bodies higher up remained cautious. The confusion has led to arguments that the Bolsheviks planned to use the July Days to seize power. However, a ten-day rest in Finland is hardly the likely preparation Lenin would make for such a venture. None the less, they were tempted to lead the movement as it gathered momentum. The Central Committee agonized all night on 3/4 July (OS). However, Lenin was far from certain that the moment was right. From his perspective there were a number of shortcomings to the movement at that time. First, although it would have been possible, indeed simple, to arrest the government, the turmoil was largely confined to Petrograd and there was a danger that sufficient force could be raised in the rest of Russia, possibly with allied help, to crush the rising in the city and set up a military dictatorship. Second, the movement was a spontaneous one, it was not under Bolshevik control despite many lower-ranking Bolsheviks leading component parts of the demonstrations. Both these reasons appear to have weighed heavily with Lenin and the decision was taken to persuade the demonstrators to disperse peacefully.

The fact that the Bolsheviks did not lead the demonstrations did not prevent many, probably most, of their enemies from believing that they had been responsible. A new government, led for the first time by Alexander Kerensky, who had earlier been Minister of Justice and later Minister for War responsible for the disastrous offensive, quickly seized its opportunity to attack the left. The dispersal of the demonstrators put the left into disarray, since many had supported them, and made it defenceless for the moment. Kerensky took advantage of the moment to begin an assault on the Bolsheviks. The patriotic card was played prominently. The failure of the offensive was blamed on the left but worse was to come. Papers were produced by a former Bolshevik, Grigorii Alexinsky, purporting to prove that the Bolshevik leaders, and Lenin in particular, were German agents. Taken together with exaggerated claims about the ‘sealed train’ in which Lenin had travelled across Germany on his journey home from Switzerland, many were led to believe the stories. The issue of ‘German money’ has played a persistent but misleading role in the mythology of the Revolution, similar in some ways to the myth of Rasputin in that, while there may have been some basis in truth for aspects of the stories, the real significance of them is grossly exaggerated. German money may have found its way into Bolshevik coffers but no way was Lenin a German agent, taking orders from Berlin.
⁴
Germany and the Bolsheviks had some common interests, the weakening of the Russian war effort most obviously, but for quite different reasons. Lenin wanted to use Russia as a springboard to overthrow the German Empire, too. Hardly an objective of the Kaiser’s policy! None the less, the story was persistent and we will meet it again.

Though it was in essence false, the accusation was effective. Right-wing ‘patriots’ attacked the Bolsheviks’ premises, including the
Pravda
office, and personnel. Government troops occupied the Kshesinskaya mansion. Various homes of Bolsheviks were trashed by mobs or searched by the authorities. Lenin himself narrowly avoided being caught by a group of renegade officers who, on 9 July (OS), ransacked the flat of Lenin’s sister, Anna, and brother-in-law, Mark Elizarov, on Shirokaya ulitsa, where Lenin and Krupskaya had been living. They arrested Krupskaya and the Elizarovs and took them to the General Staff Headquarters but later let them go. ‘These are not the people we want,’ their colonel is reported to have said. According to Krupskaya ‘If Il’ich had been there they would have torn him to pieces.’ [Krupskaya 312] The Bolshevik Party was officially proscribed and warrants were issued for the arrest of its leaders, including Trotsky who had just thrown in his lot with Lenin. The Party circumvented proscription by using a different name but the threat of arrest brought problems for individuals. At first, Lenin wanted to give himself up but, after some discussion, in which Stalin was one of the leading protagonists urging Lenin not to hand himself over to the authorities, the Central Committee decided that it would be unwise and that he should go into hiding instead. He, and others including Zinoviev, were so valuable to the Party that they must remain free, so they went into hiding in Finland. Trotsky, on the other hand, walked into a police station and demanded to be arrested, arguing the government was not strong enough to hold him for long. The police obliged and arrested him on the spot.

Using the historian’s most powerful asset, hindsight, we might be inclined to minimize the importance of these events since their impact was, in the end, short-lived. From Lenin’s point of view, however, the conjuncture seemed to be a disaster of the first order. He proposed radical changes of policy and tactics to meet the crisis. The basic theoretical assumption behind his policies was, as he wrote in the opening section of
The Political Situation: Four Theses
, that ‘the counter-revolution has become organized and consolidated, and has actually taken state power into its hands.’ [CW 25 176, 10 July (OS)] Once again, he was viewing events through the prism of his earlier analyses, he was seeing events as a confirmation of his predictions. This was emerging as one of the key aspects of Lenin’s politics and could be said to have hampered clear analysis of actual events. The July Days were a case in point. The earlier prediction was that the tsarists and the Provisional Government would close ranks against the left and that, in effect, is what happened in the aftermath of the July Days. In fact, the new coalition government that emerged included more ministers from the defensist left and, as later events like the Moscow State Conference and the Kornilov mutiny were to show, the nationalist right hated Kerensky and the Provisional Government and wanted to see it removed and replaced by something more under their control, notably a military dictatorship. So, in that sense, Lenin was wrong. The counter-revolution had not seized power but Lenin had interpreted events that way because that is what he had been predicting.

With a weak premise it is no surprise that Lenin’s conclusions also look dubious. First, the balance between peaceful development through the soviets and the alternative policy of armed uprising now tipped in favour of the latter. Once again it fulfilled a prediction that the left would use peaceful means unless force was used against it. Lenin understood the reaction to the July Days to be just such a change on the part of the authorities. Of course, he was partially correct here although the force seemed to have emanated from the far left first and the government was reacting to threats to itself. However, Lenin was in no doubt about the new course. Strategy was now to be based on preparing an armed uprising. ‘All hopes for a peaceful development of the Russian revolution have vanished for good. This is the objective situation: either complete victory for the military dictatorship, or victory for the workers’ armed uprising.’ [CW 25 177] Even the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ was deemed to be outdated. It had been ‘a slogan for the peaceful development of the revolution which was possible … up to 5–9 July (OS) … This slogan is no longer correct, for it does not take into account that power has changed hands and that the revolution has in fact been completely betrayed by the SRs and Mensheviks.’ [CW 25 177–8] Finally, Lenin also was so impressed by the turnabout that he concluded extremely pessimistically that, in certain respects, the situation had thrown Bolshevism back to the pre-war situation and that it was now necessary to combine legal with illegal activity: ‘The party of the working class, without abandoning legal activity, but never for a moment overrating it, must
combine
legal with illegal work, as it did in 1912–14. Don’t let slip a single hour of illegal work. But don’t cherish any constitutional or “peaceful” illusions. Form illegal organizations or cells everywhere and at once for the publication of leaflets,
etc.
Reorganize immediately, consistently, resolutely, all along the line.’ [CW 25 178]. In other words, it was now necessary for key assets of the Bolshevik Party, its leadership, its press, to go back underground. As chief asset this is exactly what Lenin himself plus Kamenev and Zinoviev, the numbers two and three in the Party, actually did. In fact, for the next seven or eight weeks the legal segment of the Party continued to function through the simple expedient of circumventing the proscription by tactics from the tsarist period like changing names. The Party called itself Social Democratic Internationalists when its candidates stood for election. The newspapers changed their names and continued to circulate. For example, the banned
Pravda
appeared as
Rabochii Put’
from September to 26 October (OS). The Party even held an illegal congress (its sixth) from 26 July to 3 August (OS).

Far from being hamstrung by it, proscription was, in fact, a major boost for the Party in the medium term, turning them into martyrs and giving them the mantle of being the opponents most feared by the authorities. Conversely, this meant that as the number of critics and opponents of the authorities grew, so many of them saw the Bolsheviks as the natural leaders of the opposition. Lenin’s tactic of no support for the Provisional Government was reaping rich dividends.

Before looking at Lenin’s life in renewed exile, one more aspect of the events, one which is often overlooked as a relatively minor, or perhaps inevitable, development, needs our attention – the reconciliation between Lenin and Trotsky. It happened relatively smoothly and by stages, being completed at the underground Party Congress in the absence of both Trotsky, who was in jail, and Lenin, who was in hiding. It does show that Lenin’s political will could overcome his personal likes and dislikes in both directions. We have seen him most frequently expelling his friends and allies, like Martov, Plekhanov, Bogdanov and others including Trotsky, from his faction if he believed political expediency required it. In this case, because their political differences had fallen away, Lenin was prepared, more so than most of the other Party leaders around him, to welcome one of his most devastatingly outspoken critics back into the Party. In the long years of polemic between them, from 1906 to 1917, Trotsky had made many savage attacks on Lenin. His most noteworthy was his attack on Lenin’s concept of the Party and associated ‘democratic centralism’. In 1904 Trotsky had described Lenin as a ‘despot and terrorist’ and compared him to Robespierre. In
Our Political Tasks
(1904) he had made one of the most acute and devastating attacks on Lenin’s conception of the Party. ‘Lenin’s method leads to this: the party organization at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single “dictator” substitutes himself for the Central Committee.’ From the moment of reconciliation onwards, however, they worked smoothly together as though nothing had ever happened. Political expediency could work in both directions.

When the officers and cadets raided Anna Ulyanova and Mark Elizarov’s apartment on Shirokaya ulitsa it was not surprising they did not find Lenin. Krupskaya herself commented that ‘After our arrival in Petrograd I saw little of Il’ich.’ [Krupskaya 299] This appears to have remained the case for the whole period between April and October.

They worked in different places on different projects. Krupskaya was occupied in matters cultural and educational, Lenin in the Central Committee and
Pravda
. Lenin also had a wide range of formal and informal meetings which took him all over the city and would sometimes find him sleeping over at people’s apartments wherever he happened to be. The Ulyanovs’ devotion to the revolutionary cause and the revolutionary way of life remained total throughout these months. At the ages of forty-seven (Lenin) and forty-eight (Krupskaya) they did not have so much as a flat to call their own and had no possessions to speak of beyond the clothes they had frequently packed in their suitcases on their travels around Europe. They did not own a stick of furniture or anything of value or bulk. Their peripatetic life had created ingrained habits and there was no certainty that they would not have to move quickly once again. However, they were also completely uninterested in the acquisition of wealth and goods. Their focus remained on liberating the oppressed of Russia and the world and in this light what was needed were the means to conduct the struggle, resources for a newspaper, for organizing the Party and a simple subsistence for Lenin and Krupskaya. Personal possessions were not even on the agenda. It may also help explain why they had no children, although the possible inability of either one or the other of them to have children because of the effects of certain of their illnesses has also been proposed. However, we do not know the reason with any certainty. We do know children would scarcely have fitted into their life together.

In July Lenin remained untrammelled by material constraints and was able to cut ties immediately the decision was made and disappear from the view of the authorities. What followed was the last peaceful oasis in his active life. Armed with various false documents and living in a variety of places, Lenin had several months of separation from the front line of political struggle. Initially, he and Zinoviev lived in a grass-covered hut in a field near Razliv, some 35 kilometres from Petrograd. About the end of August, with documents describing him as a worker named Ivanov, Lenin, with the help of an engine-driver, disguised himself as a fireman and crossed the border into Finland, living in Lahti and then Helsinki. Even in Helsinki caution continued to reign supreme. He even reverted to old habits. He wrote to Krupskaya, using invisible ink, to invite her to visit him in Helsinki, drawing a rough map to help her. Clearly Krupskaya, who, as we have seen, had had problems mastering conspiratorial techniques back in the mid-1890s, was out of practice. She scorched the edge of the letter when she heated it over the lamp to make the invisible writing appear. This had unfortunate consequences: ‘Everything went off well, except for a delay caused by the lack of directions contained on that part of the map which I had burned. I wandered through the streets for a long time before I found the street I wanted.’ [Krupskaya 315] Did memories of other chases after Lenin in hiding, in Prague and Munich for example, spring to her mind? Her second visit, two weeks later, also had its difficulties when she lost herself briefly in a forest as night fell. When she arrived she found Lenin’s ‘mind was not on what he was saying, it was fixed on rebellion and how best to prepare for it.’ She continues: ‘His mind was constantly engaged on the problem of how to reorganize the whole state apparatus, how the masses were to be reorganized, how the whole social fabric was to be rewoven – as he expressed it.’ [Krupskaya 316]