“Shut up, you youngsters!” called their father.
“Leave them, Sergei,” intervened Stalin. “They’re young, let them laugh!”
In the morning, they caught the train for the city, telling Soso they were inspecting a new apartment on Tenth Rozhdestvensky Street. As he jumped off the tram, Stalin called: “That’s good—but make sure you keep a room for me…”{230}
Stalin staked his claim to leadership, not at the Taurida Palace but at the Bolshevik headquarters, which now occupied the sin-drenched mansion of “that Tsarist concubine” Mathilde Kseshinskaya.[159] “This den of luxury, spurs and diamonds located opposite the Winter Palace,” in Trotsky’s words, was strategically vital, close to the Peter and Paul Fortress as well as the Vyborg factories.
In the ballerina’s boudoirs and ballrooms, Stalin reasserted himself, overturning the whippersnapper Molotov and the Russian Bureau. On 15 March, Stalin and Kamenev assumed control of Pravda and joined the Presidium of the Bureau. “I was thrown out,” said Molotov. “Stalin and Kamenev delicately but skilfully expelled me because they had more authority and were ten years older, so I didn’t resist.” Appointed as a Bolshevik representative to the Executive Committee of the Soviet, Stalin was welcomed at the Taurida Palace by his fellow Georgians Chkheidze and Iraki Tsereteli, its star orator. Stalin was exhilarated by the new politics, but even in those dizzy days he saw life as a Manichean struggle between light and darkness. “The chariot of the Russian Revolution,” declared Stalin, “is advancing with lightning speed,” but “glance around and you will see the sinister work ofdark forces going on incessantly.” He was quiet and vigilant. “In the work of the Soviet,” recalls the Menshevik diarist Nikolai Sukhanov, “the impression made on me… was that ofa grey blur.”
In faraway Switzerland, Lenin was vainly attacking the Provisional Government and demanding immediate peace with Germany, but in Petrograd, Stalin and Kamenev swung rightwards towards mild conciliation, hoping to lure radical, internationalist Mensheviks into the Party—hardly a foolish idea, especially since they insisted on a radical foreign policy.[160] But they “created confusion and indignation among Party members,” grumbled Shlyapnikov. Molotov relished being correct in opposing “their defensist line, a big mistake, Stalin’s mistake.” Kamenev and Stalin, sneered Trotsky, had turned the Bolsheviks into “a behind-the-scenes parliamentary group for putting pressure on the bourgeoisie.”
Yet Stalin’s critics exaggerated his folly. He was certainly cautious and colourless during those ten days, but his policies were sensible, realistic and tactical in their moderation. Trotsky admits that Stalin “had been giving expression to the hidden convictions of many Old Bolsheviks”—and of most Mensheviks. Even Krupskaya, on hearing Lenin’s extremist ranting, muttered, “It seems Illich is out of his mind.” The Bolsheviks then had no hope of overthrowing the Provisional Government—Lenin was audacious but out of touch. Besides, Lenin himself did not stick to his radical programme: he immediately made retreats and compromises before returning to it at the end of the year.
In Swiss exile, Lenin exploded while reading a speech by Chkheidze about conciliation with the Bolsheviks. “It’s simply shit!” he shouted.
“Vladimir, what language!” replied Krupskaya. “I repeat: shit!”
Lenin started to scribble out his Letters from Afar to correct Kamenev’s and Stalin’s folly. Stalin’s articles were being published almost daily.
Then on 18 March, Stalin stopped writing for a week, perhaps to reassess his policies: Lenin was coming.{231}
39. 1917 Summer: Sailors on the Streets
On 27 March 1917, Lenin, Krupskaya, Zinoviev and Stalin’s Georgian patron Tskhakaya boarded their famous Sealed Train. Almost a month after the February Revolution, Lenin had finally found a way to return to Russia. In the interim, he had entertained fantasies of taking a train pretending to be a deaf-and-dumb Swede or hitching a ride on a rickety biplane across central Europe. “We must get home,” he said. “But how?” Fortunately, the German High Command believed that the clinical insertion of Lenin and his revolutionary bacillus might infect Russia with the virus of pacifism, thereby knocking her out of the war.{232}
Lenin dominated the Sealed Train as he would Russia herself: he would have approved the smoking-bans of our era and insisted on dictating the smoking rules and lavatorial visitation rights of the entire train—in preparation, the Bolshevik Karl Radek joked, “for assuming the leadership of the Revolutionary Government.” Smokers were allowed to light up only in the lavatory, whereas non-smokers were issued with special “first-class” lavatory passes that gave them priority access.
On 3 April, they stopped at the Beloostrov Station on the Finnish-Russian border in what Krupskaya grandly called “those dear wretched little third-class railroad cars.” Stalin’s friend Ludmilla Stal welcomed Krupskaya with a delegation of women. Kamenev blithely climbed aboard to greet Lenin, but got a shock.
“What the hell have you been writing?” barked Lenin. “We’ve read a few issues of Pravda and we cursed you roundly.”
The train steamed into Petrograd’s Finland Station. Stalin boarded the carriage to greet “the Old Man,” who was still only forty-six. With his Homburg hat, tweed suit and bourgeois umbrella, this bald little man was a stranger to Russia, new and old. Yet this was an angrier Lenin, more violent, merciless and impatient than the man who had gone into exile a decade earlier: if he lacked Soso’s vindictive personal malice, he more resembled Stalin than the gentle fatherly image later peddled by Soviet propaganda. “I can’t listen to music too often,” he said after hearing Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. “It makes me want to say kind stupid things and pat the heads of people. But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.” Lenin was buzzing with this next battle. “One fighting campaign after another,” as he told his sometime mistress Inessa Armand. “That’s my life.” Stalin would have said the same things. Hailing from such different worlds—one with the manners of a nobleman, the other those of a peasant—they shared the same sentiments and favoured identical methods.
We do not know what Lenin said to him in the carriage,[161] but virtually as soon as they met, Stalin abandoned the “flabby” Kamenev and backed the Old Man.
Just before midnight, Lenin “alighted from the carriage with Stalin,” observed Molotov, who was present. The famous yet mysterious Lenin found Finland Station in revolutionary fiesta. A military band burst into “The Marseillaise;” searchlights scanned the avid crowds. Lenin reviewed an honour guard of revolutionary sailors from the Kronstadt Base, 2,000 Putilov plant workers, a crowd waving red banners and an array of armoured cars.
A phalanx of Red Guards—armed Bolshevik workers—escorted Lenin into the station’s Imperial Lounge, where he was greeted by the Soviet chairman, Chkheidze. But Lenin bounded onto an armoured car, telling the crowd (including Molotov, Voroshilov and Alliluyev) that the Provisional Government, with their “sweet speeches and great promises, are deceiving you just as they are deceiving the entire Russian people.” The speech, writes one witness, “shook and astonished the Faithful… like a clap of thunder.” The Bolsheviks must overthrow the government, end the “predatory imperialist war” and immediately transfer power to the soviets.
159
She was the lissom Polish ballerina who became Nicholas II’s first and only real mistress while he was heir to the throne. He had been in love with her, but when he fell for Alix of Hesse, who became Empress Alexandra, he continued to back Kseshinskaya’s rise to become the dominant prima ballerina of the Mariinsky. Afterwards, she entered an imperial
160
On 17 March, in his article “The War,” Stalin merely called for “pressure on the Provisional Government” about ending the war, while Lenin was already demanding its “overthrow.” He did not attack the Mensheviks but only wanted alliance with those who backed his belief in a defensist war. He wanted the Soviet to keep mastery over the Provisional Government and he demanded the urgent calling of a Constituent Assembly. On one hand, he only proposed “pressure” on the government; on the other, when the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks held a joint debate on the Provisional Government, he damned it as the organ of “the elites” who simply substituted “one Tsar for another.” He was still a Conciliator, as he explained at a Party conference at the end of March, held in the mansion and then in the Taurida.
161
The seductive Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai had just delivered Lenin’s furious Letters from Afar to the defiant Stalin and Kamenev. Even as the Old Man approached, Stalin had shortened or refused to publish Lenin’s articles, which he criticized as “unsatisfactory… a sketch with no facts.” Lenin called for immediate power seizure but did not deign to explain how he had decided to jump the first formal stage of Marxist development and jump straight to the second—“the transition to socialism.”