10
The Bolshevik Bid for Power
In terms of modern opinion, the way to turn people into followers is to persuade them that in following your scheme, they are being active, critical, rebellious and free-spirited; behaving otherwise is passive and servile. The sheep were those who got hopelessly entangled in this set of confusions.
—Kenneth Minogue
Although it is common to speak of two Russian revolutions in 1917—one in February, the other in October—only the first merits the name. In February 1917, Russia experienced a genuine revolution in that the disorders that brought down the tsarist regime, although not unprovoked or unexpected, erupted spontaneously and the Provisional Government which succeeded gained immediate nationwide acceptance. Neither was true of October 1917. The events that led to the overthrow of the Provisional Government were not spontaneous but plotted and executed by a tightly organized conspiracy. It took these plotters three years of civil war and indiscriminate terror to subdue the majority of the population. October was a classic coup d’état, the capture of governmental power by a small minority, carried out, in deference to the democratic conventions of the age, with a show of mass participation, but without mass engagement. It introduced into revolutionary action methods more appropriate to warfare than to politics.
The Bolshevik coup went through two phases. In the first, which lasted from April to July, Lenin attempted to take power in Petrograd by means of street demonstrations backed by armed force. It was his intention to escalate these demonstrations, on the pattern of the riots of February, into a full-scale revolt that would transfer power initially to the soviets and immediately afterward to his party. This strategy failed: the third attempt, in July, nearly resulted in the destruction of the Bolshevik Party. By August, the Bolsheviks recovered sufficiently to resume their drive for power, but this time they used a different strategy. Trotsky, who took charge while Lenin was hiding from the police in Finland, avoided street demonstrations. Instead, he disguised preparation for a Bolshevik coup behind the façade of a spurious and illegitimate Congress of Soviets, while relying on special shock troops to seize the nerve centers of the government. In name, the power seizure was carried out provisionally and on behalf of the soviets, but, in fact, permanently and for the benefit of the Bolshevik Party.
The outbreak of the February Revolution found Lenin in Zurich. Cut off from his homeland since the outbreak of the war, he had thrown himself into Swiss socialist politics, injecting into them an alien spirit of intolerance and contentiousness.1 His log for the winter of 1916–17 reveals a pattern of frenetic but unfocused activity, now given to pamphleteering, now to intrigues against deviant Swiss Social-Democrats, now to the study of Marx and Engels.
News from Russia reached Switzerland after a delay of several days. Lenin first learned of the disorders in Petrograd nearly a week late from a report in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of March 2/15. The report, datelined Berlin, inserted on page two between bulletins from the theater of war, said that a revolution had broken out in the Russian capital and that the Duma had arrested the tsarist ministers and assumed power.2
Lenin decided he had to get back to Russia at once: he now reproached himself for not having “risked” a move to Scandinavia in 1915 when it had been possible.*3 But how? The only point of entry into Russia was through Sweden. To reach Sweden, one had either to transit Allied territory, by way of France or England and Holland, or to cross Germany. Lenin requested Inessa Armand to explore, with utmost discretion, the chances of obtaining a British visa, but he placed little hope in this prospect because the British, aware of his defeatist program, were almost certain to refuse. He next conceived a fantastic scheme of traveling to Stockholm on a forged passport: he requested his agent there, Fürstenberg-Ganetskii, to find a Swede whose papers he could use, with the proviso that the man not only resemble him physically but also, since he knew no Swedish, be both deaf and dumb.4 None of these plans had any realistic chance of success. Lenin, therefore, seized on a scheme proposed by Martov in Paris on March 6/19 to a group of socialist émigrés: the Russians would ask the German Government, through a Swiss intermediary, for transit rights across its territory to Sweden in exchange for German and Austrian internees.5
While raging in Zurich, in the words of Trotsky, like a caged animal, Lenin did not lose sight of the political situation at home. He was concerned that his followers in Russia adopt a correct political course until he appeared on the scene. He was particularly anxious that they not emulate the “opportunistic” tactics of the Mensheviks and SRs of supporting the “bourgeois” Duma government. He outlined his policy in a telegram dispatched on March 6/19 to Petrograd by way of Stockholm:
Our tactics: complete mistrust, no support for the new government. We especially suspect Kerensky. The arming of the proletariat provides the only guarantee. Immediate elections to the Petrograd [Municipal] Duma. No rapprochement with the other parties.6
When Lenin cabled these instructions to his followers the Provisional Government had been in office only one week and had hardly had the opportunity to reveal its political physiognomy. In any event, far away from the scene and dependent on second- and third-hand accounts from Western news agencies, Lenin could not have known the intentions and actions of the new government. His insistence that it be treated with “complete mistrust” and denied support, therefore, could not have been due to disapproval of its policies: rather it reflected an a priori determination to remove it from power. His demand that the Bolsheviks not cooperate with the other parties indicated that he was bent on filling the ensuing power vacuum exclusively with the Bolshevik Party. This laconic document indicates that barely four days after he had learned of the February Revolution, Lenin was contemplating a Bolshevik coup d’état. His order to “arm the proletariat” suggests that he envisaged the coup as a military insurrection.
The Bolshevik Party in March 1917 was hardly in a condition to carry out such an ambitious plan. Police arrests during the war, culminating in those of February 26, 1917, when the party’s most important entity, the Petrograd Committee, was taken into custody7 had decapitated its apparatus: its leading figures were either in jail or in exile. In a report to Lenin in early December 1916, Shliapnikov described Bolshevik activities in some factories and garrison units during the preceding months under the slogans “Down with the War” and “Down with the Government,” but he also had to admit that the Bolsheviks were so infiltrated by police informers that illegal party activity had become virtually impossible.8 Subsequent Bolshevik claims of having inspired and even organized the February Revolution are, therefore, entirely spurious. The Bolsheviks rode the coattails first of the spontaneous demonstrators and then those of the Mensheviks and their soviets. Their following among the mutinous military units was close to nil and among the industrial workers at this time they had far fewer adherents than either the Mensheviks or the SRs. During the February days their role was limited to issuing appeals and manifestos: at most, they may have had a hand in preparing the revolutionary banners carried by workers and soldiers in the demonstrations of February 25–28.
The Bolsheviks, however, made up for what they lacked in numbers with organizational skills. On March 2, the Petrograd Committee of the party, freshly released from prison, set up a three-man Bureau consisting of Shliapnikov, V. M. Molotov, and P. A. Zalutskii.9 Three days later this Bureau brought out, under Molotov’s editorship, the first issue of the revived party organ, Pravda. On March 10 it established a Military Committee (later renamed Military Organization) under N. I. Podvoiskii and V. I. Nevskii, to conduct propaganda and agitation among the troops of the Petrograd garrison. For their headquarters, the Bolsheviks chose the luxurious Art Nouveau villa of the ballerina M. F. Kshesinskaia, rumored to have been a mistress of the young Nicholas II. This building they “requisitioned” with the help of friendly troops, ignoring the protests of its owner. Here, until July 1917, officiated the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, as well as its Petrograd Committee and Military Organization.