Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (12 page)

In the years before 1914, from his impotent exile in Switzerland, Lenin watched the progress of Mussolini with approval and some envy. Mussolini turned the province of Forli into an island of socialism – the first of many in Italy – by supporting the
braccianti
day-labourers against the landowners.
³³
He became one of the most effective and widely read socialist journalists in Europe. In 1912, aged twenty-nine, and still young-looking, thin, stern, with large, dark, luminous eyes, he took over the Italian Socialist Party at the Congress of Reggio Emilia, by insisting that socialism must be Marxist, thoroughgoing, internationalist, uncompromising. Lenin, reporting the congress for
Pravda
(15 July 1912), rejoiced: ‘The party of the Italian socialist proletariat has taken the right path.’ He agreed when Mussolini prevented the socialists from participating in the ‘bourgeois reformist’ Giolitti government, and so foreshadowed the emergence of the Italian Communist Party.
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He strongly endorsed Mussolini’s prophecy on the eve of war: ‘With the unleashing of a mighty clash of peoples, the bourgeoisie is playing its last card and calls forth on the world scene that which Karl Marx called the sixth great power: the socialist revolution.’
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As Marxist heretics and violent revolutionary activists, Lenin and Mussolini had six salient features in common. Both were totally opposed to bourgeois parliaments and any type of ‘reformism’. Both saw the party as a highly centralized, strictly hierarchical and ferociously disciplined agency for furthering socialist objectives. Both wanted a leadership of professional revolutionaries. Neither had any confidence in the capacity of the proletariat to organize itself. Both thought revolutionary consciousness could be brought to the masses from without by a revolutionary, self-appointed élite. Finally, both believed that, in the coming struggle between the classes, organized violence would be the final arbiter.
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The Great War saw the bifurcation of Leninism and Mussolini’s proto-fascism. It was a question not merely of intellect and situation but of character. Mussolini had the humanity, including the vanity and the longing to be loved, which Lenin so conspicuously lacked. He was exceptionally sensitive and responsive to mass opinion. When the war came and the armies marched, he sniffed the nationalism in the air and drew down great lungfuls of it. It was intoxicating: and he moved sharply in a new direction. Lenin, on the other hand, was impervious to such aromas. His isolation from people, his indifference to them, gave him a certain massive integrity and consistency. In one way it was a weakness: he never knew what people were actually going to do – that was why he was continually surprised by events, both before and after he came to power. But it was also his strength. His absolute self-confidence and masterful will were never, for a moment, eroded by tactical calculations as to how people were likely to react. Moreover, he was seeking power in a country where traditionally people counted for nothing; were mere dirt beneath the ruler’s feet.

Hence when Lenin returned to Petrograd he was totally unaffected by any wartime sentiment. He had said all along that the war was a bourgeois adventure. The defeat of the Tsar was ‘the least evil’. The army should be undermined by propaganda, the men encouraged ‘to turn their guns on their officers’, and any disaster exploited to ‘hasten the destruction … of the capitalist class’. There should be ‘ruthless struggle against the chauvinism and patriotism of the bourgeoisie of all countries without exception’.
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Lenin was dismayed by the failure of all socialists to smash the war, and as it prolonged itself he lost hope of the millennium coming soon. In January 1917 he doubted whether ‘I will live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution’.
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So when the Tsar was sent packing six weeks later he was surprised, as usual. To his delight, the new parliamentary regime opted to continue the war, while releasing political prisoners and thus allowing his own men to subvert it. The
Bolsheviks would overturn the new government and seize power by opposing the war.
Pravda
resumed publication on 5 March. Kamenev and Stalin hurried back from Siberia to take charge of it eight days later. Then, to Lenin’s consternation, the two idiots promptly changed the paper’s line and committed it to supporting the war! That was why, the second Lenin set eyes on Kamenev on 3 April, he bawled him out. The
Pravda
line promptly changed back again. Lenin sat down and wrote a set of ‘theses’ to explain why the war had to be resisted and ended. Stalin later squared his yard-arm by confessing to ‘a completely mistaken position’ which ‘I shared with other party comrades and renounced it completely … when I adhered to Lenin’s theses’.
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Most other Bolsheviks did the same. They were overwhelmed by Lenin’s certainty. The war did not matter. It had served its purpose in destroying the autocracy. Now they must exploit war-weariness to oust the parliamentarians. He was indifferent to how much territory Russia lost, so long as a nucleus was preserved in which to install Bolshevism. Then they could await events with confidence. A German victory was irrelevant because their German comrades would soon be in power there – and in Britain and France too – and the day of the world socialist revolution would have dawned.
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In outlining this continental fantasy Lenin had, almost by chance, hit upon the one line of policy which could bring him to power. He had no real power-base in Russia. He had never sought to create one. He had concentrated exclusively on building up a small organization of intellectual and sub-intellectual desperadoes, which he could completely dominate. It had no following at all among the peasants. Only one of the Bolshevik élite even had a peasant background. It had a few adherents among the unskilled workers. But the skilled workers, and virtually all who were unionized, were attached – in so far as any had political affiliations – to the Mensheviks.
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That was not surprising. Lenin’s intransigence had driven all the ablest socialists into the Menshevik camp. That suited him: all the easier to drill the remainder to follow him without argument when the moment to strike came. As one of them put it, ‘Before Lenin arrived, all the comrades were wandering in the dark.’
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The other Bolshevik with clear ideas of his own was Trotsky. In May he arrived in Petrograd from America. He quickly realized Lenin was the only decisive man of action among them, and became his principal lieutenant. Thereafter these two men could command perhaps 20,000 followers in a nation of over 160 million.

The Russian Revolution of 1917, both in its ‘February’ and its ‘October’ phases, was made by the peasants, who had grown in number from 56 million in 1867 to 103.2 million by 1913.
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In pre-war Russia there were less than 3.5 million factory workers and
miners, and even by the widest definition the ‘proletariat’ numbered only 15 million. Many of the 25 million inhabitants of large towns were part of extended peasant families, working in town but based on villages. This connection helped to transmit radical ideas to the peasants. But in essence they were there already, and always had been. There was a Russian tradition of peasant collectivism, based on the commune
(obshchina)
and the craftsmen’s co-operative
(artel).
It had the sanction of the Orthodox Church. Private enrichment was against the communal interest. It was often sinful. The grasping peasant, the
kulak
(’fist’), was a bad peasant: the
kulaks
were not a class (that was a later Bolshevik invention). Most peasants harboured both a respect for hierarchy and an egalitarian spirit, the latter liable to surface in moments of crisis when notions of freedom
(volya)
drove them to seize and confiscate. But the peasants never evinced the slightest desire for ‘nationalization’ or ‘socialization’: they did not even possess words for such concepts. What many wanted were independent plots, as was natural. The steps taken to create peasant proprietors since 1861 merely whetted their appetites, hence the rural agitation of 1905. From 1906, a clever Tsarist minister, P.A.Stolypin, accelerated the process, partly to appease the peasants, partly to boost food supplies to the towns, thus assisting the rapid industrialization of Russia. He also helped peasants to come out of the communes. Up to the middle of 1915 nearly 2 million got title to individual plots, plus a further 1.7 million following the voluntary break-up of communes. As a result, in the decade before the war, Russian agricultural productivity was rising rapidly, the peasants becoming better educated and, for the first time, investing in technology.
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The war struck a devastating blow at this development, perhaps the most hopeful in all Russian history, which promised to create a relatively contented and prosperous peasantry, as in France and central Europe, while providing enough food to make industrialization fairly painless. The war conscripted millions of peasants, while demanding from those who remained far more food to feed the swollen armies and the expanded war-factories. There were massive compulsory purchases. But food prices rose fast. Hence tension between town and countryside grew, with each blaming the other for their misery. The Bolsheviks were later able to exploit this hatred. As the war went on, the government
‘s
efforts to gouge food out of the villages became more brutal. So agrarian rioting increased, with 557 outbreaks recorded up to December 1916. But food shortages increased too, and food prices rose fast. As a result there was an unprecedented rise in the number of factory strikes in 1916, despite the fact that many industrial areas were under martial law or
‘reinforced security’. The strikes came to a head at the end of February 1917, and would have been smashed, but for the fact that the peasants were angry and desperate also. Nearly all the soldiers were peasants, and when the Petrograd garrison was ordered to coerce the factory workers it mutinied. About a third, some 66,000, defied their officers. As they were armed, the regime collapsed. So the first stage of the Revolution was the work of peasants.

The destruction of the autocracy inevitably carried with it the rural hierarchy. Those peasants without plots began to seize and parcel up the big estates. That might not have mattered. The Provisional Government was bound to enact a land reform anyway, as soon as it got itself organized. But in the meantime it was committed to carrying on the war. The war was going badly. The Galician offensive failed; Lwov had fallen by July. There was a change of ministry and Kerensky was made Prime Minister. He decided to continue the war, and to do this he had to get supplies out of the peasants. It was at this point that Lenin’s anti-war policy, by pure luck, proved itself inspired. He knew nothing about the peasants; had no idea what was going on in the countryside. But by opposing the war he was opposing a policy which was bound to fail anyway, and aligning his group with the popular peasant forces, both in the villages and, more important, within the army. As a result, the Bolsheviks for the first time even got a foothold in the countryside: by the end of 1917 they had about 2,400 rural workers in 203 centres. Meanwhile, the attempt to enforce the war policy wrecked the Provisional Government. A decree it had passed on 25 March obliged the peasants to hand over their entire crop, less a proportion for seed, fodder and subsistence. Before the war, 75 per cent of the grain had gone onto the market and 40 per cent had been exported. Now, with the countryside in revolt, there was no chance of Kerensky collecting what he needed to keep the war going. For the first time in modern Russian history, most of the harvest remained down on the farms. Kerensky got less than a sixth of it.
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The attempt to grab more merely drove the peasants into open revolt and the authority of the Provisional Government in the countryside began to collapse. At the same time, the failure to get the grain to the towns meant a rapid acceleration of food prices in September, no bread at all in many places, mutiny in the army and navy, and strikes in the factories. By the beginning of October, the revolt of the peasants had already kicked the guts out of Kerensky’s government.
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The moment had now arrived for Lenin to seize power with the ‘vanguard élite’ he had trained for precisely this purpose. He had, of course, no mandate to destroy parliamentary government. He had no
mandate for anything, not even a notional Marxist one. He was not a peasant leader. He was not much of a proletarian leader either. In any case the Russian proletariat was tiny. And it did not want Leninism. Of more than one hundred petitions submitted by industrial workers to the central authorities in March 1917, scarcely any mentioned Socialism. Some 51 per cent demanded fewer hours, 18 per cent higher wages, 15 per cent better work conditions and 12 per cent rights for workers’ committees. There was no mass support for a ‘revolution of the proletariat’; virtually no support at all for anything remotely resembling what Lenin was proposing to do.
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This was the only occasion, from that day to this, when Russian factory workers had the chance to say what they really wanted; and what they wanted was to improve their lot, not to turn the world upside down. By ‘workers’ committees’ they meant Soviets. These had first appeared in 1905, quite spontaneously. Lenin was baffled by them: according to the Marxist texts they ought not to exist. However, they reappeared in the ‘February Revolution’, and when he returned to Russia in April 1917 he decided they might provide an alternative vehicle to the parliamentary system he hated. He thought, and in this respect he was proved right, that some at least of the factory Soviets could be penetrated and so manipulated by his men. Hence his ‘April Theses’ advocated ‘Not a parliamentary republic … but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Poor Peasants’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, growing from below upwards’.
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Ever a skilful opportunist, he began to see Soviets as a modern version of the 1870 Paris Commune: they could be managed by a determined group, such as his own, and so become the instrument for the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Hence when the Bolsheviks met in conference later in April he got them to voice the demand that ‘proletarians of town and country’ should bring about ‘the rapid transfer of all state power into the hands of the Soviets’.
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When Trotsky, who had actually worked in a 1905 Soviet, arrived in May he was put in charge of an effort to capture the most important of the town Soviets, in Petrograd.