Although he rejected Parvus’s overtures, Lenin did maintain political and financial contacts with the German Government through an Estonian, Alexander Kesküla.* In 1905–07 Kesküla had been a leading Bolshevik in Estonia. Later, he turned into an ardent Estonian nationalist, determined to gain independence for his homeland. Convinced, like Parvus, that the destruction of tsarist Russia could be accomplished only by the German army, at the outbreak of the war he placed himself at the disposal of the German Government, joining its intelligence services. With German subsidies, he operated out of Switzerland and Sweden to secure from Russian émigrés information on internal conditions in Russia and to smuggle Bolshevik anti-war literature into that country. In October 1914, he met with Lenin.† in whom he was interested as an enemy of the tsarist regime and a potential liberator of Estonia. Many years later, Kesküla claimed that he did not finance the Bolsheviks directly, contributing instead, indirectly, to their treasury and subsidizing their publications. These were important sources of support for the impoverished Bolshevik Party in any event, but he may have paid Lenin direct subsidies as well.
In September 1915, apparently in response to Kesküla’s request, Lenin provided him with a curious seven-point program outlining the conditions on which revolutionary Russia would be prepared to make peace with Germany. The document was found after World War II in the archives of the German Foreign Office.‡ Its existence suggests that Lenin saw in Kesküla not only an Estonian patriot but also an agent of the German Government. Apart from several points affecting internal Russian affairs (proclamation of a republic, confiscation of large estates, introduction of an eight-hour workday, and autonomy for the ethnic minorities), Lenin affirmed the possibility of a separate peace, provided Germany renounced all annexations and contributions (although exceptions could be made for “buffer states”). He further proposed a Russian withdrawal from Turkish territory and an offensive against India. The Germans certainly had these proposals in mind when a year and a half later they allowed Lenin to travel across their territory to Russia.
Using funds placed at his disposal by Berlin, Kesküla arranged for the publication in Sweden of Lenin’s and Bukharin’s writings, which Bolshevik runners smuggled into Russia. One such subsidy was stolen by a Bolshevik agent.129 Lenin reciprocated the favor by forwarding to Kesküla reports sent by his agents in Russia on the internal situation there, in which the Germans, for obvious reasons, were keenly interested. In a dispatch dated May 8, 1916, an official of the German General Staff reported to the Foreign Office functionary in charge of subversive operations in the east:
In the last few months, Kesküla has opened up numerous new connections with Russia.… He has also maintained his extremely useful contact with Lenin, and has transmitted to us the contents of the situation reports sent to Lenin by Lenin’s confidential agents in Russia. Kesküla must therefore continue to be provided with the necessary means in the future. Taking into account the exceptionally unfavorable exchange conditions, 20,000 marks per month should just be sufficient.*
As in the case of Parvus, Lenin maintained lifelong silence about his relations with Kesküla, and understandably so, since they were nothing short of high treason.
In September 1915, there convened, on the initiative of Italian socialists, a secret conference of the International in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald, near Berne. The Russians were strongly represented, with the leaders of both Social-Democratic factions and the SR Party in attendance. The group quickly broke up into two factions, a more moderate one, which wanted to preserve links with those socialists who supported the war, and a left one, which demanded a clean break. The latter, comprising eight of the thirty-eight delegates, was headed by Lenin. The majority rejected Lenin’s draft proposal for the transformation of the “imperialist” war into a civil war because it was unfeasible as well as dangerous: as one delegate pointed out, the signatories of such a proclamation would face death after returning home while Lenin enjoyed the safety of Switzerland. It also turned down Lenin’s demand for a split from the Committee of the International, controlled by patriotic socialists. Even so, Lenin did not go down in defeat at Zimmerwald,130 for the official manifesto of the conference did make some verbal concessions to him, condemning those socialists who backed their government’s war efforts and calling on workers of all countries to join in the “class struggle.”131 The Zimmerwald left issued its own statement, which was stronger but stopped short of calling on the European masses to rise in rebellion, as Lenin wanted.132 Underpinning the disagreements between the two wings were differing attitudes toward patriotism, which most of the European socialists felt intensely and most of the Russian ones did not.
In April 1916, a sequel to the Zimmerwald Conference met at Kiental in the Bernese Oberland. The gathering was called by the International Socialist Committee to deal with the war, about to enter its third year. The participants, representing the pacifist wing of the International, again refused to yield to the Zimmerwald left but went considerably further in accommodating it than the year before. In the resolution on “The Attitude of the Proletariat toward the Question of Peace,” the conference, blaming the war on capitalism, asserted that neither “bourgeois nor socialist pacifism” could solve the tragedy facing mankind:
If a capitalist society cannot provide the conditions for a lasting peace, then the conditions will be provided by socialism.… The struggle for lasting peace can, therefore, be only a struggle for the realization of socialism.133
The practical conclusion was for the “proletariat to raise the call for an immediate truce and an opening of peace negotiations.” Again, no call for rebellion and turning the guns against the bourgeoisie, but such action was not precluded by the premise of the resolution and may even be said to have been implicit in it.
As he had done at Zimmerwald, Lenin drafted the minority report for the left, which concluded with this appeal to the proletariat: “Lay down your weapons. Turn them against the common foe!—the capitalist governments.”* Among the twelve signatories under Lenin’s statement (of the forty-four present) Zinoviev took it upon himself to represent Latvia and Karl Radek, Holland.