Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (13 page)

In early June 1917, the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets met with 822 delegates. The towns were absurdly over-represented. The Social Revolutionaries, who spoke for the peasants, had 285 delegates. The Mensheviks, who represented the organized workers, had 248. There were minor groups totalling 150 and forty-five with no label. The Bolsheviks had 105.
⁵⁰
The anarchists staged a trial of strength on 3 July when they ordered big street demonstrations against the war. But they were scattered by loyal troops,
Pravda
was shut down and some Bolsheviks, including Kamenev and Trotsky, put in gaol. Lenin was allowed to escape to Finland: he was not yet considered a fatal enemy.
⁵¹
The decisive change came during the summer and early autumn. The
war-fronts began to collapse. In August Kerensky held an all-party ‘State Conference’ in Moscow, attended by 2,000 delegates. It accomplished nothing. At the end of the month, a Tsarist general, Kornilov, staged a military revolt which ended in fiasco. All these events played into Lenin’s hands, especially the last which allowed him to create an atmosphere of fear in which he could persuade people it was necessary to break the law to ‘preserve’ the new republic. But it was, above all, the failure of Kerensky to get food out of the peasants which sapped legal order. Troops were demobilizing themselves and flocking to the cities where there was no bread for them. There, they joined or formed Soviets, and were soon electing Bolshevik spokesmen who promised an immediate end to the war and the distribution of all estates to the peasants. By early September the Bolsheviks had majorities on both the Petrograd and the Moscow Soviets, the two that really mattered, and on 14 September Lenin, still in hiding, felt strong enough to issue the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’.
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Trotsky, just out of gaol, immediately became president of the Petrograd Soviet, the focus of the coming uprising.

Trotsky, indeed, was the active agent of the Revolution. But Lenin was the master-mind, who took all the key decisions and provided the essential ‘will to power’. The Bolshevik Revolution, let alone the creation of the Communist state, would have been quite impossible without him. He slipped back into Petrograd in disguise on 9 October and at a meeting of the Central Committee the next day he won a 10–2 vote for an armed rising. A Political Bureau or ‘Politburo’ – the first we hear of it – was created to manage the rising. But the actual military preparations were made by a ‘military-revolutionary committee’, formed under Trotsky from the Petrograd Soviet. The rising was timed to make use of the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which met on 25 October. The previous evening, Lenin formed an embryo government, and in the morning Trotsky’s men went into action and seized key points throughout the city. The members of the Provisional Government were taken prisoner or fled. There was very little bloodshed. That afternoon the Bolsheviks got the Congress of Soviets to approve the transfer of power. The following day, before dispersing, it adopted a decree making peace, another abolishing landed estates and a third approving the composition of the Council of People’s Commissars, or Sovnarkom for short, the first Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.
⁵³
But as Stalin was later careful to point out, it was the military revolutionary committee which seized power, and the Congress of Soviets ‘only
received
the power from the hands of the Petrograd Soviet’.
⁵⁴
His object in making” this distinction was to preserve the notion of a Marxist proletarian revolution. Certainly
there was nothing legal about the way in which Lenin came to power. But it was not a revolutionary uprising either. It was an old-style
coup
, or as the Germans were soon to call it, a
putsch.
There was nothing Marxist about it.

At the time, however, Lenin astutely made the greatest possible use of the spurious legitimacy conferred upon his regime by the Soviets. Indeed for the next two months he carefully operated at two levels, which corresponded in a curious way to the Marxist perception of the world. On the surface was the level of constitutional arrangements and formal legality. That was for show, for the satisfaction of the public, and for the outside world. At a lower level were the deep structures of real power: police, army, communications, arms. That was for real. At the show level, Lenin described his government as ‘provisional’ until the ‘Constituent Assembly’, which the Kerensky government had scheduled for election on 12 November, had had a chance to meet. So the elections proceeded, with the Bolsheviks merely one of the participating groups. It was the first and last true parliamentary election ever held in Russia. As expected it returned a majority of peasant-oriented Social Revolutionaries, 410 out of 707. The Bolsheviks had 175 seats, the Mensheviks were down to sixteen, the bourgeois Kadets had seventeen and ‘national groups’ made up the remaining members. Lenin fixed the Assembly’s first meeting for 5 January 1918. To keep up the show he invited three members of the
SR
left wing to join his Sovnarkom. This had the further advantage of splitting the
SRS
so that he now had a majority in the Congress of Soviets, and he summoned that to meet three days after the Assembly had been dealt with. He intended it would thereafter remain the tame instrument of his legitimacy. Reassured, perhaps, by these constitutional manoeuvres, the great city of Petrograd went about its business and pleasures. Even on the day Kerensky was overthrown, all the shops remained open, the trams ran, the cinemas were crowded. The Salvation Army, which the republic had admitted for the first time, played on street-corners. Karsavina was at the Mariinsky. Chaliapin sang at concerts. There were packed public lectures. Society congregated at Contant’s restaurant. There was extravagant gambling.
⁵⁵

Meanwhile, down among the structures, Lenin worked very fast. It is significant that, when he had so much else to do, he gave priority to controlling the press. In September, just before the
putsch
, he had publicly called for ‘a much more democratic’ and ‘incomparably more complete’ freedom of the press. In fact under the republic the press had become as free as in Britain or France. Two days after he seized power, Lenin ended this freedom with a decree on the press. As part of ‘certain temporary, extraordinary measures’, any newspapers
‘calling for open resistance or insubordination to the Workers’ or Peasants’ Government’, or ‘sowing sedition through demonstrably slanderous distortions of fact’, would be suppressed and their editors put on trial. By the next day the government had closed down ten Petrograd newspapers; ten more were shut the following week.
⁵⁶
Management of the news was entrusted primarily to the Bolshevik party newspaper,
Pravda
, and the paper of the Soviets,
Isvestia
, now taken over by Sovnarkom.

Meanwhile, with great speed if in some confusion, the physical apparatus of power was being occupied by the Bolshevik activists. The method was corporatist. Every organization, from factories to the trams, held Soviet-style elections. This was the easiest way to ensure that delegates chosen were broadly acceptable to the regime. Later, Boris Pasternak was to give a vignette of the process:

Everywhere there were new elections: for the running of housing, trade, industry and municipal services. Commissars were being appointed to each, men in black leather jerkins, with unlimited powers and an iron will, armed with means of intimidation and revolvers, who shaved little and slept less. They knew the shrinking bourgeois breed, the average holder of cheap government stocks, and they spoke to them without the slightest pity and with Mephistophelean smiles, as to petty thieves caught in the act. These were the people who reorganized everything in accordance with the plan, and company after company, enterprise after enterprise, became Bolshevised.
⁵⁷

This physical takeover was quickly given an infrastructure of decree-law. 10 November: Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks abolished. 22 November: house searches authorized; fur coats confiscated. 11 December: all schools taken from the Church and handed to the state. 14 December: state monopoly of all banking activity; all industry subjected to ‘workers’ control’. 16 December: all army ranks abolished. 21 December: new law code for ‘revolutionary courts’. 24 December: immediate nationalization of all factories. 29 December: all payments of interest and dividends stopped; bank-withdrawals strictly limited. As the novelist Ilya Ehrenburg put it later: ‘Every morning the inhabitants carefully studied the new decrees, still wet and crumpled, pasted on the walls: they wanted to know what was permitted and what was forbidden.’
⁵⁸

But even at this stage some of the key moves in the consolidation of power were not reflected in public decree-laws. In the initial stages of his take-over, Lenin depended entirely on the armed bands Trotsky had organized through the Petrograd Soviet. They were composed partly of politically motivated young thugs, the ‘men in black leather jerkins’, partly of deserters, often Cossacks. An eye-witness
described the scene in the rooms of the Smolny Institute, from which the Bolsheviks initially operated: ‘The Bureau was packed tight with Caucasian greatcoats, fur caps, felt cloaks, galloons, daggers, glossy black moustaches, astounded, prawn-like eyes, and the smell of horses. This was the élite, the cream headed by “native” officers, in all perhaps five hundred men. Cap in hand they confessed their loyalty to the Revolution.’
⁵⁹
These men were effective in overawing the crumbling republic. But for the enforcement of the new order, something both more sophisticated and more ruthless was required. Lenin needed a political police.

Believing, as he did, that violence was an essential element in the Revolution, Lenin never quailed before the need to employ terror. He inherited two traditions of justification for terror. From the French Revolution he could quote Robespierre: ‘The attribute of popular government in revolution is at one and the same time
virtue and terror
, virtue without which terror is fatal, terror without which virtue is impotent. The terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue.’
⁶⁰
Brushing aside the disastrous history of the Revolutionary Terror, Marx had given the method his own specific and unqualified endorsement. There was, he wrote, ‘only one means to
curtail
, simplify and localize the bloody agony of the old society and the bloody birth-pangs of the new, only one means – the revolutionary terror’.
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But Marx had said different things at different times. The orthodox German Marxists did not accept that terror was indispensable. A year after Lenin seized power, Rosa Luxemburg, in her German Communist Party programme of December 1918, stated: ‘The proletarian revolution needs for its purposes no terror, it hates and abominates murder.’
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Indeed, one of the reasons why she opposed Lenin’s ‘vanguard élite’ attempt to speed up the historical process of the proletarian revolution was precisely because she thought it would tempt him to use terror – as the Marxist text hinted – as a short-cut, especially against the background of the Tsarist autocracy and general Russian barbarism and contempt for life.

In fact the real tragedy of the Leninist Revolution, or rather one of its many tragedies, is that it revived a savage national method of government which was actually dying out quite fast. In the eighty years up to 1917, the number of people executed in the Russian empire averaged only seventeen a year, and the great bulk of these occurred in the earlier part of the period.
⁶³
Wartime Russia in the last years of the Tsars was in some ways more liberal than Britain and France under their wartime regulations. The Republic abolished the death penalty completely, though Kerensky restored it at the front in September 1917. Most of Lenin’s own comrades were
opposed to it. Most of the early Bolshevik killings were the work of sailors, who murdered two former ministers on 7 January 1918, and carried out a three-day massacre in Sevastopol the following month, or were indiscriminate peasant slaughters deep in the countryside.
⁶⁴

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the decision to use terror and oppressive police power was taken very early on by Lenin, endorsed by his chief military agent Trotsky; and that it was, as Rosa Luxemburg feared it would be, an inescapable part of his ideological approach to the seizure and maintenance of authority, and the type of centralized state he was determined to create. And this in turn was part of Lenin’s character, that will to power he had in such extraordinary abundance. As early as 1901 Lenin warned: ‘In principle we have never renounced terror and cannot renounce it.’
⁶⁵
Again: ‘We’ll ask the man, where do you stand on the question of the revolution? Are you for it or against it? If he’s against it, we’ll stand him up against a wall.’ Shortly after he came to power he asked: ‘Is it impossible to find among us a Fouquier-Tinville to tame our wild counter-revolutionaries?’
⁶⁶
The number of times Lenin, as head of the government, began to use such expressions as ‘shoot them’, ‘firing-squad’, ‘against the wall’, suggests a growing temperamental appetite for extreme methods.

There was also a revealing furtiveness, or rather deliberate duplicity, in the manner in which Lenin set up the instrument to be used, if necessary, for counter-revolutionary terror. The original Bolshevik armed force, as already explained, was Trotsky’s military-revolutionary committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Trotsky had no scruples about continuing to use force even after the Revolution had succeeded: ‘We shall not enter into the kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor’, was how he put it.
⁶⁷
Immediately after 25–26 October 1917, this committee became a sub-committee of the Central Executive and was given security jobs including fighting ‘counter-revolution’, defined as ‘sabotage, concealment ‘of supplies, deliberate holding up of cargoes, etc’. Its constitution was made public in a Sovnarkom decree of 12 November 1917.
⁶⁸
As it was charged with examining suspects, it set up a special section under Felix Dzerzhinsky, a fanatical Pole who was in charge of security at Smolny. However, when on 7 December 1917 the military committee was finally dissolved by another Sovnarkom decree, Dzerzhinsky’s section remained in being, becoming the ‘All-Russian Extraordinary Commission’ (Cheka), charged with combating ‘counter-revolution and sabotage’. The decree which created the Cheka was not made public until more than ten years later
(Pravda
, 18 December 1927), so that Lenin’s security force
was from the beginning and remained for the rest of his life a secret police in the true sense, in that its very existence was not officially acknowledged.
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