Because he envisaged the power seizure as a violent act, Lenin needed his own military detachments, independent of both the government and the Soviet and accountable only to his Central Committee. “Arming the workers” was central to his program for the coup d’état. During the February Revolution, crowds had looted arsenals: tens of thousands of guns had disappeared, some of them concealed in factories. The Petrograd Soviet organized a “People’s Militia” to replace the dissolved tsarist police, but Lenin refused to have the Bolsheviks join it: he wanted a force of his own.85 So as not to be accused of building up an instrument of subversion, he disguised his private army, initially called “Workers’ Militia,” as an innocuous guard to protect factories from looters. On April 28, this militia was incorporated into a Bolshevik Red Guard (Krasnaia Gvardiia), which had the additional mission of “defending the Revolution” and “resisting reactionary forces.” The Bolsheviks ignored objections of the Soviet to this, their own army.86 In the end, the Red Guards proved something of a disappointment because they turned either into an ordinary civil police or else merged with the People’s Militia, in either case failing to develop that spirit of class militancy that Lenin had expected of them.87 In October, when needed, they would be conspicuous by their absence.
In preparation for their coup, the Bolsheviks also engaged in propaganda and agitation among the garrison and frontline troops. Responsibility for this work was assigned to the Military Organization which, according to one Communist source, had agents and cells in three-fourths of the garrison units.88 From them, it obtained information on the mood of the troops, and through them it carried out anti-government and anti-war propaganda. The Bolsheviks won very few adherents among the men in uniform, but they were successful in fanning the troops’ discontent, which had the effect of making the soldiers less likely to obey calls of the government or the Soviet to move against them. According to Sukhanov, although even the most disgruntled garrison soldiers did not favor the Bolsheviks, their mood was one of “neutrality” and “indifference,” which made them receptive to anti-government appeals. In this category was the garrison’s largest unit, the First Machine Gun Regiment.89
The Bolsheviks influenced minds mainly by means of the printed word. By June, Pravda had a run of 85,000 copies. They also put out provincial papers, papers addressed to special groups (e.g., female workers and ethnic minorities), and a multitude of pamphlets. They paid particular attention to the men in uniform. On April 15, they brought out a soldiers’ newspaper, Soldatskaia Pravda, which attained a printing of 50,000–75,000 copies. They followed it with a paper for sailors, Golos Pravdy, and another one for frontline troops, Okopnaia Pravda, printed in Kronshtadt and Riga, respectively. In the spring of 1917, they distributed to the troops about 100,000 papers a day, which, given that Russia had 12 million men under arms, was enough to supply one Bolshevik daily per company. In early July, the combined printing of the Bolshevik press was 320,000 copies. In addition, Soldatskaia Pravda printed 350,000 pamphlets and broadsheets.90 This was a most remarkable achievement, considering that in February 1917 the Bolsheviks had had no press.
These publications spread Lenin’s message, but in a veiled form. The method employed was “propaganda” which did not tell readers what to do (that was the task of “agitation”) but planted in their minds ideas from which they would themselves draw the desired political conclusions. In appeals to the troops, for example, Bolshevik publications did not incite to desertion, since this would have made them liable to prosecution. In the first issue of Soldatskaia Pravda, Zinoviev wrote that the paper’s objective was forging an indestructible bond between workers and soldiers so that the troops would come to understand their “true” interests and not allow themselves to be used for “pogroms” against the workers. On the issue of the war, he was equally circumspect:
We do not favor dropping guns now. This is no way to end the war. Now the main task is to understand and explain to all soldiers for what purpose this war was begun, who began the war, who needs the war.91
The “who,” of course, was the “bourgeoisie” against whom the soldiers were to turn their guns.
Such organizational and publishing activities required a great deal of money. Much, if not most, of it came from Germany.
German subversive activities in Russia in the spring and summer of 1917 have left few traces in the documents.* Reliable people in Berlin, using reliable intermediaries, delivered cash to Bolshevik agents by way of neutral Sweden, without written requests or receipts passing hands. Although the opening of the German Foreign Office archives after World War II has made it possible to establish with certainty the fact of German subsidies to the Bolsheviks and with some approximation the sums involved, the exact uses to which the Bolsheviks put the German money remains obscure. According to Minister of Foreign Affairs Richard von Kühlmann, the chief architect of Germany’s pro-Bolshevik policy in 1917–18, the Bolsheviks used the German subsidies mainly for purposes of party organization and propaganda. On December 3, 1917 (NS), in a confidential report, Kühlmann thus summarized Germany’s contribution to the Bolshevik cause:
The disruption of the Entente and the subsequent creation of political combinations agreeable to us constitute the most important war aim of our diplomacy. Russia appeared to be the weakest link in the enemy chain. The task therefore was gradually to loosen it, and, when possible, to remove it. This was the purpose of the subversive activity we caused to be carried out in Russia behind the front—in the first place promotion of separatist tendencies and support of the Bolsheviks. It was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels and under different labels that they were able to build up their main organ, Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda and appreciably to extend the originally narrow basis of their party.92
The total money assigned by the Germans to the Bolsheviks in 1917–18—to help them first take power and then to keep it—has been estimated by Eduard Bernstein, who had good connections in the German Government, at “more than 50 million deutsche marks in gold” ($6 to $10 million, which at that time would have bought nine or more tons of gold).93*
Some of these funds the Germans channeled to Bolshevik agents in Stockholm, the principal of whom was Jacob Fürstenberg-Ganetskii. Responsibility for maintaining contact with the Bolsheviks was assigned to the Russian expert at the German Embassy in Stockholm, Kurt Riezler. According to the counterintelligence service of the Provisional Government, directed by Colonel B. Nikitin, the Germans deposited the money for Lenin at the Diskontogesellschaft in Berlin, which forwarded it to the Nye Bank in Stockholm. Ganetskii would make withdrawals from the Nye Bank, ostensibly for business purposes, but in fact for deposit at the Siberian Bank in Petrograd on the account of a relative of his, one Eugenia Sumenson, a lady of the Petrograd demimonde. Sumenson and one of Lenin’s lieutenants, the Pole M. Iu. Kozlovskii, operated in Petrograd a spurious pharmaceutical business as cover for financial dealings with Ganetskii. The transfer of German funds to Lenin could thus be disguised as legitimate business.94 After her arrest in July 1917, Sumenson confessed to having turned over the moneys which she withdrew from the Siberian Bank to Kozlovskii, a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee.95 She admitted to having taken out of her bank account for this purpose 750,000 rubles.96 Sumenson and Kozlovskii maintained with Stockholm a coded business correspondence, some of which the government intercepted with the help of French intelligence. The following telegram is an example: