Still, we should be careful not to exaggerate the impact of Lenin's arrival on Russian politics, at least in the short run. As an exile, Lenin had been free to devise a policy line unconstrained by concern for comity with fellow Russian socialists or any other practical considerations, unlike those Bolsheviks already in Russia, like Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin. Kamenev, speaking for the Bolshevik Central Committee, said that it would defend the current party platform, which offered qualified support for the Provisional Government and the war, 'against the demoralizing influence of "revolutionary defeatism" and against Comrade Lenin's criticism'.10 Stalin denounced Lenin's 'down with the war' slogan as 'useless' in the pages of Pravda.11 The April Theses were voted down soundly in the Petrograd Committee on 8 April 1917 by 13 to 2 against. Despite his later reputation for infallibility, Lenin had not won over his own party yet, and remained unable to do so for months afterwards, losing votes in the Central Committee in October 1917 (on a resolution to overthrow the government without the pretext of a gathering of the Soviets, 10 to 2) and in a national party conference in January 1918 (on whether to sign a separate peace immediately with the Germans, 48 to 15).12
Nevertheless, Lenin had laid down an unmistakable declaration of intent that could not be ignored. Unlike the Mensheviks led by Nikolai Chkeidze, who chaired Ispolkom, and the Social Revolutionaries of
Alexander Kerensky, who commanded the loyalty of most Russian peasants, the Bolsheviks now had a spokesman (if not yet a leader) willing to abandon the world war altogether in order to further the revolution. With the Western allies - including now, after 6 April 1917 (19 April New Style), the United States as an 'associated power' - expecting Russia to stay in the war and carry out her promised diversionary strike on the eastern front before summer, Lenin's anti-war stance had potentially explosive political and strategic implications. True, he was not alone in this stance: Viktor Chernov, the SR party leader in exile who had arrived in Petrograd just five days after Lenin, took a similarly uncompromising (though not identical) line on the war. It was Chernov, not Lenin, who first singled out the liberal Kadet foreign minister, Pavel Milyukov, for abuse over his refusal to renounce Russia's imperialist war aims - including, especially, the conquest of Constantinople and the Ottoman Straits - at a press conference on 22 March 1917 (4 April New Style). Denouncing the 'saturnalia of predatory appetites' expressed in the 'secret treaties', Chernov called for Milyukov's head.13 (As Milyukov explained his own view in a private letter to a friend, 'it would be absurd and criminal to renounce the biggest prize of the war . in the name of some humanitarian and cosmopolitan idea of international socialism'.14) Chernov was, however, no Lenin. Instead of declaring war on the Provisional Government, he went to work for it as agriculture minister in May 1917, allowing Lenin to appear as the leader of the anti-war opposition, untainted by any connection to the Provisional Government.
The Milyukov crisis was the first test of Lenin's mettle after he arrived in Russia, and deserves a closer look. The issue of war aims was arguably the political question opened up by the February Revolution, even if it had been initially obscured in the popular euphoria over the fall of the tsar and his secret police. For what purpose, after all, were all those millions of wretched muzhiks fighting, bleeding and dying on fronts stretching from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea? While few in Russia, or anywhere else, yet suspected the full extent of the secret Ottoman partition plans agreed between then-foreign minister Sergei
Sazonov, Mark Sykes and Georges Picot in 1915-16, rumours were running hot, and getting hotter all the time. On 2 December 1916, then- chairman of the Council of Ministers A. F. Trepov, to quiet the usual mob of hecklers that had greeted his first Duma address, had revealed publicly for the first time that Britain and France had promised Russia Constantinople and the Straits.15 Realising the political potency of the issue, Kerensky had reportedly rifled through the Foreign Ministry archives after the tsar had abdicated in March for copies of these 'secret treaties', and then instructed the Provisional Committee of the Duma to 'Hide them!' Suspecting that the Provisional Government was indeed hiding something, Bolshevik factory committees in Petrograd had issued a series of resolutions demanding the publication of the secret treaties.16
The Bolsheviks were not wrong to be suspicious. Back on 24 December 1916, Tsar Nicholas II had authorised the creation of a special amphibious 'Black Sea division', crowned by a 'Tsargradsky regiment', to spearhead the conquest of Constantinople ('Tsargrad' being the name favoured by Russian chauvinists for the Ottoman capital).17 As late as 21 February 1917, before the February Revolution broke out, the last foreign minister of tsarist Russia, N. N. Pokrovsky, had submitted a memorandum to Stavka recommending a Bospho- rus strike be carried out as soon as possible, to ensure that Russia not be deprived of her prize by her allies if the war ended later that year.18 On 26 February 1917, at the height of the revolutionary chaos, Russia's chief of army staff, Mikhail Alexeev, huddled with political advisers, including ex-foreign minister Sazonov and former chairman of the Council of Ministers Boris Sturmer, to discuss Pokrovsky's request in light of the disturbing news from Petrograd. Sturmer, who knew all about popular mobs after being demonised for his German name, expressly advocated that the seizure of Constantinople was now 'essential in order to calm public opinion in Russia'.19 One day after this, the French government solemnly reaffirmed its commitment to 'settling at the end of the present war the question of Constantinople and the Straits in conformance with the age-old vows of Russia'.20
On the very day Milyukov first got in hot water over his refusal to renounce these war aims - 22 March 1917 - a squadron of Russia's Black Sea fleet arrived at the mouth of the Bosphorus in 'grand style', comprised of 'five or six destroyers', two battle cruisers and three seaplane carriers. Although news of this reconnaissance probe was little reported in politics-obsessed Petrograd, there were real dogfights in the air, as the Germans and Turks scrambled seven of their own seaplanes into action to send Russian pilots back to their carriers before they could surveille the city's defences.21 The very next day, undaunted by the firestorm of opposition stirred up by his press conference, the diplomatic liaison at Russian military headquarters reported to Milyu- kov that two full divisions would be ready to sail for the Bosphorus by mid May, and, hopefully, a third by later that summer.22 More even than the Bolsheviks knew, Milyukov was dead serious about conquering Constantinople.
Lenin, for his part, was just as serious that Russia's 'imperialist war' must be stopped in its tracks. Shortly before he had returned to Russia, Milyukov had been pressured by Kerensky and the Petrograd Soviet, on 27 March 1917, into issuing a revised 'declaration of war aims' which stated that 'the purpose of free Russia is not domination over other nations, or the seizure of their national possessions or forcible occupation of foreign territories, but the establishment of stable peace on the basis of self-determination of peoples' - while also pledging Russia, in a glaring contradiction, to observe fully 'all obligations assumed towards our Allies'.23 In an interview with Morgan Philips Price of the Manchester Guardian, Milyukov had been similarly equivocal, hinting that Russia might be willing to renounce her sovereign claim on the Ottoman Straits, so long as she retained 'the right to close the Straits to foreign warships', which was 'not possible unless she possesses the Straits and fortifies them'.24 To clear up the resulting confusion Mily- ukov had then, on 11 April, declared that, while he understood the appeal of a 'peace without annexations', Russia and her allies remained committed to projects such as 'the reunification of Armenia' (i.e. the ongoing carve-up of Ottoman Asia Minor by the Russian Army of the