A People's Tragedy (130 page)

The Extraordinary Assemblies were a grass-roots workers' movement. Established in March, they had a membership of several hundred thousand workers at the height of their influence in June. The Mensheviks and SRs played a prominent role in their leadership at the national level, and it was often their local activists who were to the fore in factory assemblies. The spring marked a general resurgence of these parties' fortunes in the industrial cities. By establishing an electoral pact they were able to defeat the Bolsheviks in several city Soviet elections. But it does not follow that the workers'

assemblies were a protest movement
for
the Mensheviks and the SRs as opposed to one (which happened to include them)
against
the Bolsheviks.62 True, many of the factories'

protest

resolutions voiced the same concerns as the Mensheviks and the SRs: they condemned the closure of the Constituent Assembly, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the repression of the opposition. But this may only go to show that Mensheviks and SRs wrote these resolutions and either added these demands to those of the workers or else framed the workers' demands in their own terms. In any case, judging from the minutes of the factory meetings, the thing that exercised the workers most was a general feeling that the promise of a 'workers' revolution' — a promise that had led many of them to support the Bolsheviks in the autumn of 1917 — had not been fulfilled. As the striking workers of the Sormovo factory declared in June: 'The Soviet regime, having been established in our name, has become completely alien to us. It promised to bring the workers Socialism but has brought them empty factories and destitution.' This, as far as one can tell, was a general feeling shared by all the politicized workers — including a large proportion of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks, many of whom joined the Extraordinary Assemblies movement. Even the Vyborg district party committee in Petrograd, that bastion of militant Bolshevism in 1917, distributed the propaganda of the Extraordinary Assemblies to its members.63

By April 1918, Lenin had come round to the view that industry had to be brought under state control, as opposed to workers' control through collegial boards, with a traditional management structure ('one-man management') capable of restoring labour discipline.

In 'The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power', written that month, Lenin demanded that the working-class offensive against the capitalist industrial system should be halted in the broader interests of economic reconstruction. The expertise of the 'bourgeois' managers had to be tapped in the interests of the state; this, he admitted, meant using capitalist methods to construct the socialist order. It would be necessary to pay the bourgeois managers a high salary, and to restore their authority on the shop-floor, in order to ensure their co-operation with the Soviet regime, even though this went against the egalitarian principles of the Left. But, he argued, since the working class had not yet been trained for the tasks of management, this was a 'tribute' that had to be paid. The ideals of equality had to be sacrificed in the interests of efficiency.64

From this point on the Bolsheviks began to encourage the process of nationalization, the second major plank of War Communism after the war against the market. Until then, it had developed largely from below, on the initiative of the local Soviets and workers'

organizations, and had assumed the character of a revolution in the factories with the workers using the process to impose their own control on the managers. Now, with Lenin's backing, it was taken over by the central state and its All-Russian Council for the Economy (VSNKh), which used the process to replace the workers' system of factory management with state-appointed ('bourgeois') managers aiming to restore discipline on the shop floor. This in effect meant shifting the centre of industrial power from the factory committees and the trade unions to the managerial apparatus of the party-state.65

The change in policy was clearly motivated by the growing threat from the working class. The easiest way to stop the factory organizations from acting as a channel for the workers' opposition movement was to bring them under central dictation. The Sovnarkom Decree of 28 June, by which most of Russia's large-scale industry was nationalized, came just three days before a general strike in Petrograd called by the Extraordinary Assemblies in protest against the Bolshevik regime. Although the decree had been in preparation for several weeks, there is no doubt that its precise timing was largely dictated by the need to preempt this strike.* Since 9 May, when the Cheka had opened fire on a crowd of demonstrating workers in the Petrograd suburb of Kolpino, there had been a spiral of strikes and workers' protests, industry had been brought to a virtual halt, and in those cities where free polling was allowed, the Mensheviks and SRs had swept the board. In short, it appeared as if the Petrograd strike, if it was allowed to go ahead, might easily develop into a national strike, perhaps leading to the downfall of the regime. This was also a critical moment in the civil war, with the Czechs and the SRs building up a power base on the Volga and widespread revolts in the Red rear. The Bolshevik Commissar for the Press, Volodarsky, was assassinated by an SR on 20 June.

The Bolshevik leadership was afraid that this might be the start of a
coup d'etat
by the SRs and the Mensheviks. They thought it was essential to bring the factories under state control and to head off the threat of a general strike in their last remaining stronghold of power.

The Decree on Nationalization transferred the management of the factories from the workers' organizations to the party apparatus. The party bosses used it to threaten the workers with dismissal if they went ahead with their planned strike. The strike organizers were arrested — especially those who were known to be connected with the SRs and the Mensheviks — and dozens of them shot as 'counter-revolutionaries'. Not surprisingly, given this intimidation, very few workers came out on to the streets for the general strike. The Bolsheviks drove home their victory: the Extraordinary Assemblies were outlawed, their leaders imprisoned and the dissident trade unions purged. The Mensheviks and SRs were now expelled from the Soviets, denounced as 'counterrevolutionaries', and driven underground. The last of the opposition newspapers were shut down. Even Gorky's
Novaia zhizn,
which had helped to organize the Petrograd strike and which had often declared its support for the Extraordinary Assemblies,

"
Another consideration was that many of the joint-stock companies affected by the decree were German-owned and that under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty any of these companies which were nationalized after I July would have to be fully indemnified (Malle,
Economic,
59—61).

was finally closed on 16 July. 'We are heading for a total civil war,' a despondent Gorky wrote to Ekaterina, 'and it seems that the war will be a savage one ... Oh, how hard it is to live in Russia! We are all so stupid — so fantastically stupid.'66

iii The Colour of Blood

Strange though it may seem, Lenin only became a Russian household name and image in September 1918 — and then only because he had nearly died. During the first ten months of Bolshevik rule, he was rarely seen in public. Shots fired at his car on New Year's Day had left the leader of the world revolution fearful for his life; and after that he seldom ventured out of his closely guarded quarters in the Smolny or the Kremlin.

'Nobody even knew Lenin's face,' Krupskaya wrote of those early weeks. In the evening he would often stroll around the Smolny and nobody would ever recognize him, since there were still no portraits of him then.'*67

All that changed on 30 August. Lenin had gone to the Mikhelson Factory in the southern Moscow suburbs to deliver a standard harangue to the workers on the need to defend the revolution, as was the custom of the Bolshevik leaders on Friday afternoons.

Earlier that day news had reached him that Uritsky, the Bolshevik chief of the Petrograd Cheka, had been killed by an SR assassin, Leonid Kanegiser. Lenin's family had pleaded with him to call off his visit; but Lenin this time chose to go ahead. As he left the factory, a woman named Fanny Kaplan approached him through the crowd and shot three times at him. Lenin fell to the ground, while his bodyguards pursued the assassin.

By the time he was brought back to the Kremlin, he seemed on the point of death. One of the bullets had lodged in his neck and he was bleeding profusely. Blood had entered one of his lungs. (It did not stop him from making sure his doctors were Bolsheviks.) For the next few days his life hung in the balance. But then he began to recover and by 25 September was declared well enough to go with Krupskaya to convalesce at Gorki, a village outside Moscow, where an estate had been requisitioned for his private use.

Lenin's quick recovery was declared a miracle in the Bolshevik press. He was hailed as a Christ-like figure, blessed with supernatural powers, who was not afraid to sacrifice his own life for the good of the people. Bukharin, the editor of
Pravda,
claimed fantastically that Lenin had refused help after the shooting and, 'with his pierced lungs still spilling blood', had gone back to work immediately so as to make sure that the

'locomotive' of the revolution did

* The first official portrait of Lenin only appeared in January 1918.

not stop. Zinoviev, in a special pamphlet for mass distribution, extolled Lenin as the son of a peasant who had 'made the revolution': 'He is the chosen one of millions. He is the leader by the grace of God. Such a leader is born once in 500 years in the life of mankind.' Dozens of other eulogies appeared in the press during the weeks after the shooting. The workers were said to be concerned only for one thing: that 'their leader'

should recover. Lenin's poster-portrait began to appear in the streets. He himself appeared for the first time in a documentary film,
Vladimir Ilich's Kremlin Stroll,
shown throughout Moscow that autumn to dispel the growing rumour that he had been killed. It was the start of the Lenin cult — a cult designed by the Bolsheviks, apparently against Lenin's will,* to promote their leader as the 'people's Tsar'.68

The cult was reminiscent in some ways of the ancient cult of the divine Tsar. It went back to the medieval practice of canonizing princes who were prematurely killed whilst serving Russia. But the Lenin cult was new in the sense that it also fed into folklore myths of the popular leaders against the Tsar, such as Stenka Razin or Emelian Pugachev, blessed with magical and Christ-like powers. Here was the mixture of peasant Christianity and pagan myth that had long associated revolution with the hunt for truth and justice
(pravda)
in the popular consciousness. The orchestrators of the Lenin cult consciously played upon this theme. 'Lenin cannot be killed', declared one of his hagiographers on I September, 'because Lenin is the rising up of the oppressed. So long as the proletariat lives — Lenin lives.' Thus Lenin as the Workers' Christ. Another propagandist claimed that it had been the 'will of the proletariat' that had miraculously intervened, like some crucifix or a button on his chest, to deflect Kaplan's bullets from causing a fatal wound. Poems were published depicting Lenin as a martyr sent by God to suffer for the poor:

You came to us, to ease

Our excruciating torment,

You came to us a leader, to destroy

The enemies of the workers' movement.

We will not forget your suffering,

That you, our leader, endured for us.

You stood a martyr ...

A biography of Lenin for the workers was rushed out after the shooting. With the sort of title that one more readily associates with the cults of Stalin or Mao,

* According to Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin disapproved of the cult (Marxist ideology negated the significance of any individual in history) and put a brake on it when he recovered (Bonch-Bruevich,
Vospominaniia o Lenine,
337—40).

The Great Leader of the Workers' Revolution,
it depicted Lenin as supremely wise, a superhuman God-like figure, beloved by all the workers. A similar pamphlet for the peasants,
The Leader of the Rural Poor, V.L Ul'ianov-Lenin,
was printed in 100,000

copies. It read a bit like the
Lives of the Saints,
the favourite reading of the peasants. All sorts of myths about Lenin, the fighter for truth and justice, began to circulate among the peasantry. Photographs of him appeared for the first time in remote villages. These were often placed in the 'red corner', the 'holy spot' inside the peasant hut where icons and portraits of the Tsar had been traditionally placed.69

Lenin's failed assassin, Fanny Kaplan, was a young Jewish woman and former Anarchist turned SR, who told the Cheka that the plot to kill him had been all her own.

She said that Lenin had betrayed the revolution, and that 'by living longer, he merely postpones the ideal of socialism for decades to come'. Kaplan was detained in the same Lubianka cell as the British diplomat, Bruce Lockhart, whom the Bolsheviks had also arrested on suspicion of involvement in the plot. He described her entering the cell: She was dressed in black. Her hair was black, and her eyes, set in a fixed stare, had great black rings under them. Her face was colourless. Her features, strongly Jewish, were unattractive. She might have been any age between twenty and thirty-five. We guessed it was Kaplan. Doubtless the Bolsheviks hoped that she would give us some sign of recognition.

But she did not. Soon she was removed to the Kremlin, where she was almost certainly tortured before being shot (and her remains destroyed without trace) on 3 September.

According to Angelica Balabanoff, soon to become the Secretary of the Comintern, Krupskaya wept at the thought that, in Kaplan, the first revolutionary had been killed by the revolutionary government.70 One wonders how much she wept for the thousands of other revolutionaries shortly to be killed in revenge for the wounding of her husband.