This outlook on politics Lenin drew from the inner depths of his personality, in which the lust for domination combined with a patrimonial political culture shaped in the Russia of Alexander III in which he had grown up. But the theoretical justification for these psychological impulses and this cultural legacy he found in Marx’s comments on the Paris Commune. Marx’s writings on this subject made an overwhelming impression on him and became his guide to action. Observing the rise and fall of the Commune, Marx concluded that until then all revolutionaries had committed a cardinal mistake in that they took over existing institutions instead of destroying them. By leaving intact the political, social, and military structures of the class state and merely replacing their personnel, they provided a breeding ground for the counterrevolution. Future revolutionaries would have to proceed differently: “not transfer from one set of hands to another the bureaucratic-military machine, as has been done until now, but smash it.”44 These words etched themselves deeply in Lenin’s mind: he repeated them at every opportunity and placed them at the heart of his principal political treatise, State and Revolution. They served to justify his destructive instincts and provided a rationale for his desire to erect a new order: an order all-encompassing in its “totalitarian” aspiration.
Lenin always viewed revolution in international terms; the Russian Revolution was for him a mere accident, a fortuitous snapping of “imperialism’s” weakest link. He was never interested in reforming Russia, but only in subjugating it so as to have a springboard for a revolution in the industrial countries and their colonies. Even as dictator of Russia he never ceased to view 1917 and its sequel from an international viewpoint: for him it was never the “Russian Revolution,” but the worldwide revolution that happened to have had its start in Russia. In his farewell address to the Swiss socialists, delivered the day before he left for home, he made this point with great emphasis:
It has fallen to the Russian proletariat to have the great honor of beginning a series of revolutions.… It is not its special qualities but the special historical conditions that have made the Russian proletariat, for a specific, perhaps very brief time, the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat of the whole world.
Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backward in Europe. It is not possible for socialism to triumph there directly, presently. But the peasant character of the country … can lend a vast sweep to the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia and make our revolution a prologue to the worldwide socialist revolution, a step toward it.45
Lenin’s secretiveness about a worldwide socialist revolution was due in part to the desire to keep his opponents in the dark about his intentions and in part to the advantage that secrecy gave him of being able to avoid the stigma of failure if things did not work out as planned: whenever this happened, he always could (and in fact did) deny having had a plan. Even so, from the directives he issued in the spring and early summer of 1917, when he personally led the Bolshevik forces, one can form a general picture of his battle plan.
The experience of February seems to have persuaded Lenin that the Provisional Government could be brought down by massive street demonstrations. To begin with, the soil had to be prepared, as had been done in 1915–16, by a relentless campaign to discredit the government in the eyes of the population. To this end it had to be blamed for everything that went wrong: political disorders, shortages, inflation, military setbacks. It had to be charged with conspiring with the Germans to surrender Petrograd while pretending to defend it and of collaborating with General Kornilov while charging him with treason. The more preposterous the accusations, the more the politically inexperienced workers and soldiers were likely to believe them: why should an incredible reality not have incredible causes?
Unlike February, however, the militant street demonstrations had to be tightly supervised; Lenin had no faith in spontaneity even if he fully appreciated the need for giving his highly calculated endeavors the appearance of spontaneity. He learned from Napoleon and applied to civil war the principle of tiraillerie, or skirmishing, which some military historians regard as Napoleon’s major contribution to warfare.46 For purposes of combat, Napoleon used to divide his forces in two: the professional Guard and the mass of recruits. It was his practice at the beginning of a battle to send in the recruits to draw enemy fire: this provided a picture of enemy dispositions. At the critical moment, he sent the Guard into action to break the enemy’s lines at the weakest point and put him to flight. Lenin applied this tactic to urban warfare. The masses were brought out into the streets under seditious slogans to provoke a government reaction that would reveal its strengths and weaknesses. Were the crowds to succeed in overwhelming the government’s forces, then the Bolshevik equivalent of Napoleon’s Guard—the armed workers and soldiers organized by the Bolshevik Military Organization—would take over. Were they to fail, the point would still be made that the masses wanted change and that by resisting them the government proved to be “anti-democratic.” One would then await the next opportunity. The basic principle was Napoleon’s “on s’engage et puis on voit”—“one commits oneself and then one sees.”47 In his three attempts at a putsch (April, June, and July 1917), Lenin called out the mobs into the streets, but kept himself well in the background, always pretending to follow the “people” rather than lead them. After each such attempt failed, he would deny having had any revolutionary intentions, and even pretend that his party did all in its power to restrain the impetuous masses.*
Lenin’s technique of revolution required the manipulation of crowds. He followed, whether by instinct or from knowledge it is hard to tell, the theories of crowd behavior first formulated in 1895 by the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon in La Psychologie des Foules (Crowd Psychology). Le Bon held that on joining a crowd men lose their individuality, dissolving it in a collective personality with its own distinct psychology. Its main characteristic is a lowered capacity for logical reasoning and a corresponding rise in the sense of “invincible power.” Feeling invincible, crowds demand action, a craving that leaves them open to manipulation: “crowds are in a state of expectant attention which renders suggestion easy.” They are especially responsive to exhortation to violence by associations of words and ideas that evoke “grandiose and vague images” accompanied by an air of “mystery,” such as “liberty,” “democracy,” and “socialism.” Crowds respond to fanatics who incite them with constantly reiterated, violent images. Since, according to Le Bon, in the ultimate analysis the force that motivates crowds is religious faith, it “demands a god before everything else,” a leader whom it endows with supernatural qualities. The crowd’s religious sentiment is simple: