Many thought the Old Man was mad and out of touch. “Lenin is a has-been,” the Menshevik Skobelev told Prince Lvov. Yet even his opponents could only marvel at his raging certainty: “Lenin,” says Sukhanov, “displayed such amazing force, such superhuman power of attack.”
Lenin rode his armoured car through the streets, surrounded by the blaring band, and the workers and soldiers, towards the Kseshinskaya Mansion, where, in the ballerina’s white-columned drawing-room, he harangued incredulous Bolsheviks. The next morning, he addressed them in Room 13 of the Taurida Palace. “Everyone was dumbfounded,” said Molotov. At first, only Alexandra Kollontai supported him unreservedly. The Bolsheviks, said Trotsky, “were as unprepared for Lenin as they had been for the February Revolution.”
Lenin’s tour deforce won over Stalin, who confessed: “Many things became clearer.” The people longed for peace and land, but the well-intentioned government insisted on honouring the Tsar’s promises to fight on against Germany and foolishly delayed settling the land question until the election of a Constituent Assembly, months away. Lenin alone grasped that this interval was his unique opportunity to seize Russia. After 6 April, Lenin and Stalin started working closely together at Pravda.{233}
On 18 April, Lenin was helped by the blunder of Foreign Minister Milyukov, who issued a diplomatic note informing Britain and France that Russia intended to annex Ottoman territories, an imperial war without an emperor. The Soviet had backed the Provisional Government only providing it waged a defensive war. A wave of revulsion shattered the fragile ministry. Prince Lvov formed a new coalition with Kerensky as Minister of War.
Radical Bolsheviks called for an armed uprising. Lenin, in the first of many such retreats after arriving with all ideological guns blazing, had to restrain his own hotheads: the uprising was “incorrect… at present.” When the Bolshevik Conference started on 24 April in Kseshinskaya’s ballroom, Lenin “entered like an inspector coming into a classroom.” Until Lenin’s arrival, thought Ludmilla Stal, “all comrades wandered in the darkness.” Stalin was firmly out of the darkness. When Kamenev attacked Lenin, Stalin mocked his erstwhile ally. He was a Leninist again—but that did not mean they agreed on everything.[162]
Stalin gave the report on the national question. He won the debate, but he was still best known for Caucasian banditry, and needed Lenin’s support. “We’ve known Comrade Koba for very many years,” Lenin declared. “We used to see him in Cracow where we had our Bureau. His activity in the Caucasus was important. He’s a good worker in all sorts of responsible work.” Molotov remembered Lenin explaining the essence of Stalin’s attraction for him: he was a “commanding figure—you could assign Stalin any task.”
On 29 April, Stalin came third with ninety-seven votes in the CC elections, just after Lenin and Zinoviev, a result that showed his standing in the Party. Stalin now spent most of his time at the Soviet, editing Pravda or working at the Central Committee with Lenin. The Central Committee chose Lenin, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev as a decision-making Bureau for the first time, a precursor of the all-powerful Politburo.{234}
On 4 May, Trotsky finally arrived from America and immediately dazzled Petrograd, speaking almost nightly at the “packed-out” Cirque Moderne, where “he was often carried to the stage” by the crowd. He was, noticed Sukhanov, “intoxicated with his popularity.”
Lenin recognized Trotsky’s worth and courted him, inviting him to join the Bolsheviks a week later. The only thing that divided them, said Lenin, was “ambition.” Stalin must have resented the return of this revolutionary star. He was to write more than sixty articles in 1917, but Trotsky sneered that he just produced “dull comments on brilliant events.” When Lenin appointed a delegation to negotiate with Trotsky, Stalin was understandably left out.
Unlike Trotsky, Stalin did not make his mark in 1917. He put it best himself: “Before the Revolution, our Party led an underground existence—a secret Party. Now circumstances have changed”—and they did not really suit him. He flourished in the shadows.
Nineteen-seventeen was really Stalin’s only experience of open democratic politics, hardly the ideal environment for someone trained in the cutthroat clan intrigues of the Caucasus. He spoke quietly with a comical Georgian accent. “I didn’t make out much of what he said,” reports a witness, “but one thing I noticed: all of Stalin’s sentences were sharp and crisp statements distinguished by clarity of formulation.” A worker who saw him speak thought that “what he said sounded all right, understandable and simple, but somehow one couldn’t remember his speech afterwards.” He “avoided making speeches at mass meetings,” but the plain, modest delivery of his anti-oratory proved to be surprisingly impressive and convincing for the many who distrusted showy intellectuals.
When Lenin seized power and, beleaguered on all sides, ran his government like a conspiratorial camarilla, Stalin was again in his element.
On 3 June, Soso’s young fans Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva came to admire their hero at the First Congress of the Soviets in the Military School on Vasilevsky Island. “Stalin and Sverdlov attended the opening sessions—they were the first to arrive with Lenin. I saw the three of them enter the empty hall,” reports Anna Alliluyeva, who was working for the Party. “We had not seen Stalin for many days and his room in the flat stood empty.”
“We must call on him,” whispered the schoolgirl Nadya. “Perhaps he’s changed his mind about coming to live in our apartment.” Next day, they witnessed the most dramatic moment of the Congress.
“There’s no party in Russia that dares say, ‘Just place power in our hands,’” boomed the Menshevik Tsereteli.
At this, Lenin leaped out of his chair and shouted: “There is such a party!”
Vereshchak, Stalin’s Bailovka cell mate, noticed that “Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were the main speakers” but “Sverdlov and Stalin silently directed the Bolshevik Faction—the first time I realized the full significance of the man.”
Stalin impressed Trotsky, whose description reveals why he lost their struggle for power. “Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes,” he wrote. “He did have the knack of convincing the average run of leaders, especially the provincials.” He “wasn’t regarded as the official leader of the Party,” says Sagirashvili, another Georgian Menshevik in Petrograd throughout 1917, but “everyone listened to what he had to say, including Lenin—he was a representative of the rank and file, one who expressed its real views and moods,” which were unknown to émigrés like Trotsky. Soso was the “unquestioned leader” of the Caucasians. Lenin, says Sagirashvili, “felt that behind him stood countless leaders from the provinces.”[163] While Trotsky was prancing on the stage at the Circus, Stalin was finding new allies such as the young man he had unceremoniously kicked off the Buro, Molotov.{235}
Stalin moved in with Molotov, who lived at a spacious flat on Shirokaya Street, across the Neva on the Petrograd side, with three other comrades. “It was like a kind of commune,” said Molotov. Stalin, unusually, apologized to Molotov for what the latter called “Stalin’s big mistake.” “You were the nearest of all to Lenin in the initial stage in April,” confessed Stalin. The two became friends. Besides, Molotov, who had not been elected to the Central Committee in April, was in need of a patron. They were opposites: the sturdy, stammering and bespectacled Molotov was ponderous, correct, rather bourgeois. But they shared Marxist fanaticism, a head for boozing, a Robespierrean belief in Terror, a vindictive inferiority-complex—and a beliefin Stalin’s mastery.
162
Lenin’s retreat from his extremism had brought him much closer to Stalin’s often-denounced policies. Stalin felt that Lenin’s insistence on “European civil war” was over the top, talk of “dictatorship” impolitic, and demands for “land nationalization” insensitive to peasant hopes. Lenin, attuning himself to the real demands of Russian politics, gradually altered these policies in public.
163
These “provincials” were the tough Committeemen who loathed Trotsky and would become the Stalinists of the future, many of them friends from the Caucasus. Such Bolshevik