Vladimir Lenin was a less than intimidating orator. Recordings of his speeches reveal that he had a high-pitched voice and couldn’t pronounce his ‘R’s. In one of the earliest recorded examples, he can be heard explaining how the First World War and the ‘bourgeois’ revolution of February 1917 had opened the way for a genuine proletarian revolution:
The whole world is turning to revolutionary struggle1! The war has shown that capitalism is finished and a new order is ready to take its place … The liberals have betrayed the workers and become the enemies of socialism … Those who are faithful to the cause of liberation from the yoke of capitalism are known by the glorious name of Communists! Soon we shall see the triumph of Communism throughout the whole world!
Lenin’s predictions were only partially right. The ferocious power struggle between liberals and socialists in Russia after the February Revolution would decide the fate of the nation, if not the world. The most vivid account of the period is by the American journalist, John Reed, who witnessed the October Revolution. Reed’s book, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) was so outrageously pro-Bolshevik that Lenin was quick to endorse it as the official truth. ‘I unreservedly recommend2 this book to the workers of the world,’ he wrote. ‘I would like to see it published in millions of copies and translated into every language.’ History, as always, is written by the victors.fn1
We have inherited widely differing accounts of 1917 from the revolutionaries’ side, and even more from the defeated members of the tsarist regime and the Provisional Government. So the question of what really happened in October and who made the revolution has sparked fierce, sometimes lethal disputes.
Lenin had been hiding in Finland since the failure of the July insurrection, and his influence was confined to vociferous ‘letters from afar’ urging armed revolt. Stalin, who’d been in Petrograd the longest, was a junior figure in the Bolshevik leadership: he had shared prison and exile with Trotsky and Lenin, but was never regarded as anything more than a useful enforcer and party fundraiser (mainly through bank robberies). Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, the two other leading Bolsheviks, actively opposed a renewed attempt to seize power at a famous Bolshevik Central Committee meeting on 10 October (voting was ten for and two against, with Lenin smuggled in incognito to attend).
It was left largely to Trotsky to organise the revolution. He had been arrested in July and switched his allegiance from the cautious Mensheviks to the more radical Bolsheviks while in jail. On his release in September he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and took personal charge of the Military Revolutionary Committees, assembling Red Guard militias of former soldiers and policemen. Trotsky was the military brains of the revolution and he had a strategy ready when Lenin emerged from hiding to take charge at the end of October.
But the official Soviet accounts of 1917 give the opposite impression. The iconic Soviet film of the revolution, Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1927), is a case in point. Eisenstein had based the film on John Reed’s book, with Lenin and Trotsky occupying the starring roles. But Stalin ordered him to re-cut it and portray Trotsky as a coward. So the final version depicts a rather sinister-looking Trotsky, with exaggeratedly Jewish features, hesitating over the start of the revolution and cowering feebly in a doorway as the Bolsheviks march boldly onwards to seize power.
In truth, many groups were competing for influence in the period leading up to October: the liberals of Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government were nominally in charge; but the directly elected revolutionary Soviets of Workers and Soldiers had overwhelming public support. The Bolsheviks’ promise to end the war had increased their support among the public and, with a little manipulation of the membership regulations, they gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet. When Trotsky was elected chairman in September, he set about turning the Soviet into an instrument of the Bolshevik Party.
Conservative forces were active, too. At the end of August, the army commander General Lavr Kornilov advanced on the capital with six regiments of troops from the ferocious Caucasian Native Division, pledging to restore order by crushing the soviets, instituting full military discipline and hanging Lenin and co from the lampposts.
Kerensky vacillated, first supporting Kornilov but then panicking when he received reports that the coup might topple him too. He offered to do a deal with the Petrograd Soviet. In return for their help in fighting off the advancing Kornilov, Kerensky agreed to release all remaining Bolsheviks arrested after the July Days and to arm the Soviet with weapons from the government’s armouries.
The Bolsheviks agreed. They used their influence over the railway and communication workers to disrupt the coup, severing Kornilov’s supply lines and diverting the trains carrying his troops towards Petrograd. But when the coup was defeated and its leaders arrested, the Bolsheviks refused to hand back the guns. The episode left Lenin’s party armed and increasingly popular with the masses. By the end of October, they were ready to strike.
On the banks of the River Neva as it flows through the centre of St Petersburg, an armour-plated battleship sits permanently at anchor. Nowadays tourists swarm over its decks and wedding parties pose for photographs beside it. When I toured its oak-panelled cabins and engine room, a Russian pop group was playing noisily on the stern deck. The battleship Avrora was launched in 1900 and played its part in the ill-fated Battle of Tsushima five years later (see here). But the reason it has avoided the scrapheap is that this is the ship that fired the guns that launched the Bolshevik Revolution.
On the evening of 25 October, sailors on board the Avrora sent up a series of blank shots from its 6-inch cannons. The Baltic fleet was notorious for its revolutionary fervour, and the sound of the gunfire from the port area terrified the ministers of the Provisional Government holed up in the Winter Palace. The story propagated later by the Bolsheviks is that the Avrora’s salvoes were a prearranged signal that triggered fierce fighting throughout Petrograd as the masses rose up to seize power. Eisenstein’s October depicts the storming of the Winter Palace with such realism and so many thousands of extras that his black and white sequences are still frequently mistaken for real footage. The former residence of the tsar was the holiest symbol of the old regime, detested as much as the Bastille in revolutionary Paris, so you can understand why Bolshevik propaganda wanted its fall to be dramatic, passionate and bloody.
But, in reality, it was none of those. The Winter Palace was hardly defended: apart from a motley corps of teenage cadets and women soldiers, the troops had all drifted away or defected to the revolutionaries. The people just wandered in, got lost in the endless abandoned rooms and helped themselves to the tsar’s wine cellars. John Reed was there:
On both sides of the main gateway3 the doors stood wide open, light streamed out and from the huge pile came not the slightest sound. Carried along by the eager wave of men we were swept into the right-hand entrance, opening into a great bare vaulted room … A number of huge packing cases stood about, and upon these the Red Guards and soldiers fell furiously, battering them open with the butts of their rifles, and pulling out carpets, curtains, linen, porcelain plates, glassware. One man went strutting around with a bronze clock perched on his shoulder; another found a plume of ostrich feathers, which he stuck in his hat. The looting was just beginning when somebody cried, ‘Comrades! Don’t touch anything! Don’t take anything! This is the property of the People!’ In the meanwhile unrebuked we walked into the Palace. There was still a lot of coming and going, of searching for garrisons of Junkers [soldiers], which did not exist … We penetrated at length to the gold and malachite chamber with crimson brocade hangings where the Ministers had been in session all that day and night and where they had been betrayed to the Red Guards. The long table covered with green baize was just as they had left it, under arrest. Before each empty seat was pen and ink and paper; the papers were scribbled over with beginnings of plans of action, rough drafts of proclamations and manifestos. Most of these were scratched out as their futility became evident, and the rest of the sheet covered with absent-minded geometrical designs, as the writers sat despondently listening while Minister after Minister proposed chimerical schemes. I took one of these scribbled pages, in the hand writing of [Deputy Prime Minister] Konovalov, which read, ‘The Provisional Government appeals to all classes to support the Provisional Government’.
Kerensky himself had fled, promising to return with fresh troops to put down the revolution.fn2 Instead, he escaped to a lifetime of exile in Paris and New York, leaving his ministers behind to await arrest in the Winter Palace. They were rounded up in the imperial breakfast chamber and forced by the illiterate revolutionaries to write their own arrest warrants, before being carted off to prison without any serious resistance. In fact, there wasn’t much heroism or bloodshed anywhere in St Petersburg. Bolshevik tales of the masses storming the Winter Palace in the face of stiff resistance were myths; more damage was done to the palace during the shooting of Eisenstein’s film than in the storming itself. In contrast to the first two Russian revolutions in 1905 and February 1917, which were genuinely populist uprisings with widespread support from the people, October was very much a palace coup, a political putsch. The majority of people in Petrograd, let alone in the rest of Russia, barely knew it had happened. The coup was over in 24 hours with only two recorded deaths, far fewer than in the February Revolution, the July Days or, indeed, in 1905.
That evening, Lenin appeared before the Congress of All-Russian Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in the Smolny Institute, a former ladies’ finishing college on the edge of the city. He had been in exile for so long that few delegates knew him by sight, but all knew him by reputation. Alexandra Kollontai, the most powerful woman in the Bolshevik leadership, described his appearance in the language of reverential hagiography that would soon become de rigueur when speaking of the great leader:
And there was Lenin5 at the door of the conference hall. A whisper of voices rippled through the room: ‘Lenin!’ For a long time the enthusiastic applause of the deputies prevented him from speaking. Lenin made an extraordinarily powerful speech that literally electrified the will of the Soviet’s deputies…
Lenin’s speech that ‘literally electrified’ the deputies was a declaration of victory and a promise of swift action to satisfy the demands of the people:
Comrades! The revolution of workers6 and peasants, which the Bolsheviks have always supported, has been achieved! … The cause for which the people have fought so long and hard – immediate negotiations for a democratic end to the war, the abolition of the aristocracy’s ownership of the land, workers’ control over the means of production and the installation of a Soviet government – this cause has been won!
In Soviet accounts like those of Kollontai, Lenin is portrayed as confident and unwavering, single-mindedly directing the revolution from Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny. His metamorphosis into the infallible genius of later historiography was already under way. But Western eyewitnesses tell a different story – that no one was in charge of the chaotic October events and Lenin himself was never sure how it would all end. Morgan Phillips Price, a British journalist reporting for the Manchester Guardian, recorded his memories of the days after the Bolshevik coup for the BBC:
There was tremendous tension of course7. Lenin appeared there for the first time since he’d gone into hiding. I think he had shaved off his moustache. I just forget: either he’d shaved it off or he’d grown one; he looked different. And he made a speech in which – I was rather surprised – he didn’t show any very great enthusiasm. He’d been having to meet opposition in his own party to taking this action of seizing power, and he seemed to me to be a little uncertain of himself. About an hour later news arrived that the regiments had surrounded the Winter Palace and arrested the Provisional Government and that Kerensky had got into a disguise and escaped in a motorcar. And of course there was tremendous enthusiasm then, and it was felt that things were making progress …
When Lenin addressed the Congress of All-Russian Soviets the following day, he was heckled by the Mensheviks and one faction of the Socialist Revolutionaries. They complained that the Bolsheviks had been usurping control of the soviets by forcibly barring opposition delegates, especially in provincial areas outside the big cities. Lenin had used his party’s new dominance to set up a cabinet of ministers completely dominated by Bolsheviks, in effect an unelected government, known as the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars). Accusing the Bolsheviks of illegally seizing power, the Mensheviks stormed out in protest. As they left, Trotsky famously snarled, ‘You’re finished8, you pitiful bunch of bankrupts. Get out of here to where you now belong – in the dustbin of history.’
The Mensheviks’ concerns were well founded. Most supporters of the revolution had assumed that Lenin’s formula of ‘All Power to the Soviets’ meant government by some kind of socialist coalition, involving all the revolutionary factions, ready to offer them peace, land and workers’ control. But the Bolsheviks had begun to exert a stranglehold over the leadership of the soviets and they didn’t intend to relinquish it. One of the Sovnarkom’s first acts had been to create a new secret police, chillingly entitled the Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counterrevolution, which quickly became known as the Cheka from its first two initials. The secret police were instructed to round up and imprison the Bolsheviks’ opponents, including their former allies among the SRs and Mensheviks themselves. The crackdown on political pluralism had begun. Lenin’s government also passed genuinely popular measures, such as the Decree on Peace, and the Decree on the Distribution of Land to the Peasants. It nationalised the banks, seized church property, and turned the factories over to the workers. With a stick and a carrot, the Bolsheviks were consolidating their monopoly on power, and it would last for over 70 years.
The events of 1917 have long been regarded as a turning point in Russian history and in one sense they were. February put an end to tsarist rule and October inaugurated the era of proletarian socialism. But I believe the real chance for change came in the brief period between the revolutions. Lenin himself, with a hint of a sneer, called Russia between February and October ‘the freest country in the world’. The Provisional Government was committed to the introduction of liberal parliamentary democracy, respect for the rule of law and guarantees of individual civil rights – things that Russia has rarely known.
Lenin, by contrast, scorned such ‘bourgeois’ freedoms. ‘The Bolsheviks,’ he liked to say, ‘make no fetish of democracy9.’ The dictatorship of the proletariat would be imposed by a small group of revolutionaries who understood things better than the proletariat itself; democracy had no inherent value apart from its usefulness in promoting the socialist transformation of society. According to Maxim Gorky, Lenin had a ‘ruthless contempt, worthy of an aristocrat10, for the lives of ordinary individuals’. And Morgan Philips Price reported that even revolutionary leaders like Rosa Luxemburg were alarmed by his plans for a new dictatorship in Russia:
She did not like the Russian Communist Party11 [Bolshevik] monopolising all power in the soviets and expelling anyone who disagreed with it. She feared that Lenin’s policy had brought about, not the dictatorship of the working classes over the middle classes, which she approved of, but the dictatorship of the Communist Party over the working classes.
In a broader sense, 1917 was much less of a turning point. Russia’s thousand-year history of autocracy was going to continue. Only the name had changed.
The great Soviet author Vasily Grossman, writing shortly after the death of Stalin, identifies Russia’s two brief chances of freedom – the liberation of the serfs in 1861 and the ‘bourgeois’ revolution of February 1917 – both of which were tragically spurned. His late novel Everything Flows (1964), recognises in the October Revolution another ‘moment of unruly destiny’ when Russia again turned back:
Dozens, perhaps hundreds12 of … teachings, creeds and programmes came as suitors to the young Russia who had cast off the chains of tsarism. As they paraded before her, the advocates of progress gazed passionately and pleadingly into her face … Invisible threads bound these men to the ideals of Western parliaments and constitutional monarchies … But the slave girl’s gaze, the great slave girl’s searching, doubting, evaluating gaze came to rest on Lenin! It was him she chose… In February 1917 the path of freedom lay open for Russia, but Russia chose Lenin … The debate opened by the supporters of Russian freedom was ended. Russian slavery had once more proved invincible …
The terrible paradox of 1917 was that the Russian people’s striving for freedom and self-government was to deliver them up to a new and even more oppressive despotism.
fn1 Reed died of typhus in 1920 and was given a hero’s funeral under the Kremlin wall, but his book suffered a very Russian fate: when Stalin came to power he noted angrily that Reed fails to mention him as a leading player in the revolution and fulminated against the positive portrayal accorded to Trotsky, by then Stalin’s enemy and rival: ‘It scarcely needs proof that all these and similar “Arabian Nights” fairy tales are not in accordance with the truth … But after Trotsky’s latest pronouncements, it is no longer possible to ignore such fairy tales … and I must counter these absurd rumours with the actual facts.’ Soon after Stalin’s speech, Reed’s book was banned in Russia and all copies were pulped.
fn2 Nabokov commented tartly that ‘even to the very end4, Kerensky completely failed to understand the situation … Four or five days before the Bolshevik coup, I asked him if he considered a Bolshevik uprising a possibility and he replied, “I am praying for an uprising … I will crush it utterly”.’