In the spring of 1957, a box of documents was released under the forty-year secrecy rule by the German state archives in Bonn. They were a verbatim record of telegrams between German diplomats in Switzerland and the Foreign Ministry in Berlin:
Bern, 23 März 1917. Hervorragende russische Revolutionäre hier, hätten den Wunsch über Deutschland nach Rußland heimzukehren… [Bern, 23 March 19171: Leading revolutionaries here wish to return to Russia via Germany… Please send instructions…]
Da wir Interesse daran haben, daß Einfluß des radikalen Flügels in Rußland Oberhand gewinnt, scheint mir eventuelle Durchreiseerlaubnis durch Deutschland angezeigt… [In Germany’s interests for radical wing of revolutionaries to prevail in Russia … arrange train transportation for them … provide money …]
Wir müssen unbedingt jetzt suchen, in Rußland ein größtmögliches Chaos zu schaffen… [We must try to create utmost chaos … facilitate the triumph of the extremists and another shattering upheaval … then military intervention by us will guarantee the collapse of Russian power …]
Since 1914, German agents had been keeping a close eye on the groups of exiled Russian revolutionaries in Bern and Zurich. When tsarist power was overthrown by the forces of the February Revolution in 1917, Lenin and co were desperate to get back to their homeland. It appeared that the exiles could be of service to the German cause. If Berlin could help get them back home, they would almost certainly stir up so much trouble for the Russian government that Russia would be forced to withdraw from the war and concede a peace accord favourable to German interests. According to Winston Churchill, the Germans aim was to send Lenin into Russia2 ‘in the same way that you might send a vial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera into the water supply of a great city. And it worked with amazing accuracy ….’
In late February, the German Foreign Ministry provided money and a single-carriage train to take the revolutionaries eastwards across Europe. From Bern, Lenin, his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya and 30 others sped through Frankfurt, Berlin and Stockholm, unable to leave their compartment because of the locks on the doors, sealed by the German authorities to prevent the contagion of revolution seeping out en route. The sealed train arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd shortly before midnight on 3 April 1917 and is still standing there today.
I saw Locomotive 293, in a glass box under a rather twee canopy next to platform one. It has been preserved – venerated, almost – for the best part of a century, but it draws fewer crowds today than in the Soviet past: a helpful lady railway official spent 20 minutes looking for the key to let me through to see it.
In April 1917, Lenin was half expecting to be arrested as he stepped out of his carriage. He had not been in Russia for 12 years and he himself admitted he knew ‘very little’ about what had been happening there. But he had the unshakable confidence of a true believer, a revolutionary fanaticism born from a lifetime’s commitment to the cause.
Lenin was born in 1870 to a wealthy, liberal-minded family in Simbirsk. His elder brother’s execution for involvement in a plot against the tsar imbued him with an enduring hatred of the regime. His early political activism earned him time in prison and banishment to Siberia, where he married his fellow revolutionary, Krupskaya. From 1900 to 1917, Lenin lived abroad, returning to Russia only briefly in 1905. He was a professional revolutionary, leading a shadowy existence, supported by funds from his mother’s estate. His lack of experience of everyday work and human suffering, said Maxim Gorky, had left Lenin ‘ignorant of the lives of ordinary people … He does not know them. He has not lived among them.’
When he stepped off the train at the Finland Station, Lenin was not arrested but greeted by a raucous, slightly tipsy bunch of soldiers and workers who waved red flags and cheered his every word. ‘The Russian revolution created by you3,’ he proclaimed to the crowd, ‘has opened a whole new epoch! … The worldwide socialist revolution is dawning; European capitalism is on the brink of collapse. Soldiers, comrades! We must fight for a socialist revolution in Russia! We must fight until the total victory of the proletariat! Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!’
I followed in Lenin’s footsteps and was caught up in a noisy pro-Communist demonstration on the spot where he was greeted nine decades earlier. Men were shouting slogans much as they have done since the day he arrived, only now with the aid of megaphones. Lenin’s Soviet-era statue still stands in front of the Finland Station, a little the worse for wear since a protestor’s bomb blew a hole in his backside in 2009, but with the iconic arm still outstretched and the unwavering expression of single-minded confidence still on his face.
His confidence was largely sham. Lenin was stepping into a country in chaos. Tsarism had gone but the revolutionaries were far from united, and the Bolsheviks were minor players, knowing what they wanted to destroy but not what they wanted to create. Lenin was not in control. No one was.
The Provisional Government was planning for free and fair national elections, and introducing a remarkable series of liberal reforms. It released political prisoners and promised civil liberties, ended religious and ethnic discrimination, and abolished both the death penalty and the discredited tsarist police. The Provisional Government’s liberal idealism was impeccable, but the middle of a world war with revolutionary chaos on the streets was not the easiest moment to introduce democracy.
For its part, the Petrograd Soviet, the explosive assembly of workers, peasants and soldiers, was biding its time. Among its leaders, the Socialist Revolutionaries were quarrelling over land reform, split between those who wanted to grant the land to the peasants immediately and those who wanted to wait until the end of the war. The Mensheviks were sticking to the Marxian doctrine that society must go through a phase of capitalist democracy before a true revolution can usher in socialism. So the Soviet took the position that the Provisional Government should be allowed to get on with it: the revolution would have to wait until Russia’s bourgeois liberal phase had run its course.
Lenin had other ideas. His first act in the chamber of the Petrograd Soviet was to proclaim a manifesto known as the ‘April Theses’, which set out a much more urgent blueprint for revolution. The soviets, he said, should stop waiting for history, stop cooperating with the Provisional Government and step forward at once to install a dictatorship of the proletariat.
‘All Power to the Soviets!’ was Lenin’s dramatic conclusion that day in April 1917, and it has resonated down the years. It was actually an odd thing for him to demand, because the Bolsheviks were no more than a minor faction in the soviets’ leaderships. But Lenin knew that the soviets were the closest thing to a true representation of the will of the people, and he was already plotting a Bolshevik coup to take control of them. His April Theses addressed the demands coming from the different sectors of society and gave them the answers they wanted to hear:
The first stage of the revolution4 [in February] … placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The second stage must now place it in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest peasants! … There must be no support for the bourgeois Provisional Government. We must expose its capitalist, imperialist nature … as the worst enemy of peace and socialism. No! to a parliamentary republic. Yes! to a republic of the People’s Soviets … An end to the imperialist war … abolition of the police, army and bureaucracy … confiscation of the landowners’ estates, nationalisation of the land and its redistribution by the soviets … the salaries of state officials not to exceed those of an average worker … the banks to be nationalised under the control of the soviets … the creation of a new revolutionary Internationale!
Lenin’s speech that day showed he had understood the radicalism of the popular mood. The February Revolution had emboldened workers and peasants all over the country to oust tsarist officials and set up their own centres of power. The peasants’ yearning to own the land was finding violent expression in the burning of landowners’ estates; the workers were seizing factories and creating workers’ committees to run them; the ethnic minorities were demanding independence and an end to Russian imperial domination. Above all, there was growing opposition to the war, which the Provisional Government had pledged to continue fighting; and there was universal anger at the food shortages.
Other revolutionaries hesitated. Lenin boldly promised the people what they wanted to hear: Land, Peace, Bread and Freedom. In practice it meant an abdication of any responsibility for law and order, or for the crumbling Russian Empire. But it was a masterstroke of PR: the Bolsheviks became the standard-bearer for the aspirations of the people, and it would give them the popular support they needed to have a real chance of taking power.
By June 1917, Lenin was ready to make his move. At the Congress of Russian Soviets, held in the Large Hall of the Tauride Palace, the Mensheviks and most of the SRs were still arguing that the time was not ripe for a socialist revolution. ‘There is no political party that can say to the Provisional Government, “Give power to us and leave the scene – we will take your place”,’ said the Menshevik leader Irakli Tsereteli. ‘Such a party does not exist in Russia.’
Lenin seized the moment. He stood and uttered the phrase that would signal the advent of Bolshevism as a force to be reckoned with: ‘Yest takaya partiya!5’ he declared: ‘There is such a party!’
To those who say there is no political party ready to take full responsibility for power in Russia, I say ‘Yes, there is! … We Bolsheviks will not shirk the task. We are ready here and now to assume the fullness of power!’
It was brilliant political theatre. Those three words – Yest takaya partiya! – became part of Bolshevik legend, repeated endlessly for the next seven decades. They would appear in manifestos and on banners, in children’s textbooks and in Soviet literature and music.
By the summer of 1917, Russia was falling apart and circumstances were playing into Lenin’s hands. Prince Lvov had resigned as prime minister and the Provisional Government had a new leader. The mercurial socialist lawyer Alexander Kerensky was committed to social justice, democracy and the rule of law, but events outran him. The KaDet minister Vladimir Nabokov supported the government’s liberal ideals, but concluded that Kerensky was not big enough for the job:
The man was gifted6, but not of the highest calibre. He had the appearance of a dandy, the face of an actor and an unpleasant smile that bared his upper teeth … He combined abnormal vanity with a love of posing, ostentation and pomp … It is difficult to imagine how the dizzying heights to which he was carried during the first months of the [February] Revolution reacted on Kerensky’s psyche. In his soul he must have realised that all the admiration and idolisation were mere mass hysteria, for he had neither the merits nor the intellectual and moral qualities to deserve them. He was a fortuitous little man, to whom history assigned a role in which he was destined to fail so ingloriously, without a trace …
As minister of war, Kerensky had kept Russia’s promise to Britain and France to carry on fighting the Germans. In June he had launched a new offensive to take the pressure off the allies in the West, but it was beaten back with heavy losses. Lenin, by contrast, advocated immediate withdrawal from the war. Nabokov was harshly critical of Kerensky for failing to recognise the growing anti-war sentiment playing into the hands of the Bolsheviks:
I expressed my opinion7 that one of the basic causes of the [impending] revolution was weariness of the war and the people’s reluctance to continue it … No sage could have ended it without colossal damage, both material and moral. But if there had been an acceptance that the war was hopelessly lost, catastrophe could perhaps have been avoided … I maintained that there was no other conclusion than the necessity of a separate peace with Germany.
History proved Nabokov right. In early July, angry soldiers and workers took to the streets. A famous series of photographs taken on 4 July 1917 on Nevsky Prospekt shows protesting crowds being gunned down by government troops in Petrograd. Heaps of bodies were left lying in the middle of the road, at a crossroads under a maze of trolley bus cables, while the rest of the crowd ran desperately for cover. Nabokov witnessed the tragedy unfold:
Armoured cars and vehicles8 darted through the streets … Shooting broke out from various directions. When the crackle of shots started up, the multitude of people overflowing the pavements of the Nevsky Prospekt dashed to one side, fleeing in a headlong rush, knocking down those they ran into … The days were lovely and warm; the sun was shining – a striking contrast with the alarming effect of what was happening …
Radical mobs of soldiers and workers were roaming through the capital. Inflamed by Lenin’s rhetoric, the Petrograd garrison had refused to be sent to the front. The sailors of the Kronstadt fortress were in open revolt, and a quarter of a million people had besieged the Tauride Palace calling for the soviets to seize power and end the war. Terrified and fearing anarchy, the Provisional Government had ordered those troops who remained loyal to open fire.
With Russians now gunned down on the streets, the Bolsheviks could claim that Kerensky and the ‘bourgeois liberal’ government were just as great enemies of the people as the tsar had been. It seemed that Lenin’s moment had come: another revolution was under way. Then, inexplicably, he fled.
I have always been puzzled by Lenin’s decision to disown the July uprising; after his fiery exhortations to seize power, it seemed a startling change of tack. But the journalist Nikolai Valentinov, who knew Lenin as a friend, suggests an explanation in a manic depressive side to Lenin’s character:
He would be gripped by a state of rage9, of ferocious passion, a frenzy of enthusiasm and extreme nervous energy … but then would come a sudden drop in his spirits, a sort of exhaustion, a very obvious wilting and depression … Looking back, it’s clear that these two alternating states were the psychological essence of his behaviour.
Overtaken by self-doubt, gripped by fear of what he had unleashed, Lenin suddenly announced that the uprising of the July Days was premature, that the whole thing would end in disaster like the short-lived working-class government of the Paris Commune of 1871. Following a government raid on Bolshevik headquarters on 5 July, he went underground.
For the next three months Lenin hid, first in Petrograd, then in a primitive straw hut on Lake Razliv north of the city. ‘Lenin’s hut’, in the middle of a birch forest a hundred yards from the lakeshore, was preserved and made into a national shrine after 1917, and for most of the twentieth century it was visited by Communist pilgrims. Today the elaborate visitor centre, with its museum, billboards, pergolas and restaurants looks shabby and neglected. The pile of straw in which Lenin sheltered, allegedly original, seems to have survived suspiciously well in this harsh northern climate for nearly a century. The museum has his forged identity documents, with his red beard shaved off and his bald head disguised under a thick wig. It preserves the tree stump at which Lenin is supposed to have sat and plotted the future course of the people’s uprising in his treatise The State and Revolution (1917), before finally fleeing abroad to Finland, where he stayed until October.
With Lenin in hiding, the Provisional Government celebrated victory prematurely. Kerensky told his ministers the Bolsheviks had missed their chance and were now a spent force. Their party newspaper, Pravda (Truth), was banned and a government commission announced that Lenin and his comrades were German provocateurs. Their return to Russia in a German train and their acceptance of funds from Berlin were splashed on the front page of pro-government newspapers under the headline: ‘Lenin and Co are spies!10’fn1
Those Bolsheviks who hadn’t gone to ground, including the recently returned Leon Trotsky, were arrested on suspicion of treason. But the Provisional Government was committed to the rule of law, and when it turned out there was insufficient evidence to charge them, it let them go. Vladimir Nabokov offered this despairing comparison:
The Provisional Government could have11 used [the July Days] to eliminate Lenin and co. But it failed to do so. The government simply made concessions to the socialists … The Provisional Government had no sense of real power. This was a struggle between two forces: on the one side, those public elements that were sensible and moderate, but – alas! – timid and unorganised; and, on the other, organised immorality with its fanatical, absolutist leaders … The Lenins and the Trotskys are completely indifferent to the fate of individuals. ‘When you chop down a forest, chips must fly’ is their convenient answer to every question.
By disbanding the instruments of state power – the police, the secret police and the death penalty, even in the armed forces – the Provisional Government had voluntarily renounced its coercive control over society. In the months after July 1917, it was effectively at the mercy of the ‘maximalist’ revolutionaries who denounced bourgeois liberal democracy and demanded nothing less than a revolutionary dictatorship. By October, the pressure for change would be unstoppable.
fn1 On 5 July 1917, the pro-government newspaper Zhivoe Slovo (The Living Word) printed an article by a former Bolshevik, Grigory Aleksinsky, ‘revealing’ that Lenin was in the pay of the Germans. Four days later, the allegations were repeated by the State Prosecutor’s Office.