One of the most widely viewed Soviet films of the 1930s was the historical biopic Lenin in 1918 (1939). Directed by Mikhail Romm, it was a sequel to his earlier Lenin in October (1937), which told the story of the Bolshevik leader’s role in the 1917 revolution. This time, the plot is darker and more nuanced. Midway through the movie, Lenin is shown on a visit to a Moscow factory, where he delivers a rousing speech to the workers. But as he steps outside, gunshots ring out. The camera cuts to a menacing-looking woman skulking amid a crowd of people. With a cry of horror, the crowd realises that her victim is Lenin himself. With a stoical look on his face, Vladimir Ilyich clutches his chest and subsides into the arms of his companions.
The film is based on a real event, and I found the place where it happened, in the Zamoskvoreche district of Moscow, a stone’s throw from the apartment where I lived in the 1990s. What is now known as the Vladimir Ilyich Electromechanical Plant had originally been built in the mid nineteenth century by an Englishman called Hopper. I spotted a commemorative plaque on the wall recording the several occasions on which Lenin visited the building. It makes no reference to the dramatic events of 30 August 1918, but the guards at the gate happily told me stories of ‘the day Lenin nearly died’.
Romm’s movie shows the would-be assassin, a disenchanted Socialist Revolutionary named Fanny Kaplan, firing three bullets into Lenin’s arm, neck and jaw. His bodyguards bundle him into a car and rush him back to the Kremlin, unconscious and seemingly close to death. The Bolsheviks were gripped by panic and fear. The country was in the throes of civil war, surrounded by enemies, and the fragile new regime saw threats everywhere. There was an immediate assumption that this was an enemy conspiracy. News came in of another attack, this time fatal, on the head of the Petrograd secret police, Moisei Uritsky. Scores of suspects were rounded up, tortured and shot.fn1
With Soviet Russia enraged by British support for the Whites in the ongoing civil war, it was little surprise that the finger of blame should be pointed at London. The British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart and his fellow spy Sidney Reilly were accused of masterminding the plot on behalf of the Western imperialists. Red Guards ransacked the British embassy and shot dead a British official. Bruce Lockhart was dragged from his bed and arrested. With the dragnet closing in, Sidney Reilly fled north via Petrograd to Finland, finally reaching London on 8 November. Meanwhile, Bruce Lockhart was being interrogated by the Cheka in the Lubyanka prison. His memoirs are the epitome of English calm under duress, but there is little doubt that his life was hanging by a thread:
My term of imprisonment1 lasted for exactly one month. It may be divided into two periods: the first, which lasted five days and was marked by discomfort and fear; the second, which lasted for 24 days and may be described as a period of comparative comfort accompanied by acute mental strain. My one comfort was the official Bolshevik newspapers, which my gaolers took a propagandist joy in supplying to me. Certainly, as far as my own case was concerned, they were far from reassuring. They were still full of the Bruce Lockhart Plot. They contained numerous resolutions, passed by workmen’s committees, demanding my trial and execution … and still more fearsome accounts of the Terror, which was now in full force. From the first day of my captivity I had made up my mind that if Lenin died, my own life would not be worth a moment’s purchase.
Luckily for Bruce Lockhart, Lenin clung to life. His injuries were grave, and blood from the wound to his neck had spilled into his lungs, making breathing difficult. Surgeons decided it was too dangerous to remove the bullets from his body, and all they could do was dress the wounds to stave off infection. But the Bolshevik media played down the seriousness of Lenin’s injuries, fearing any threat to his life might engender public panic or encourage opposition forces plotting a coup against the regime. Pravda’s headline read: ‘Lenin, shot twice2, refuses help. Next morning, he reads papers, listens; continues to guide the locomotive of global revolution.’ The Lenin myth was gathering momentum; the intimations of saintly stoicism and the extravagant personality cult that would attend him in life and in death, are already evident in Pravda’s words.
Bruce Lockhart, who almost certainly did have a hand in the plot, was held in the Lubyanka, threatened with execution and confronted with the terrified Fanny Kaplan:
At six in the morning a woman was3 brought into the room. She was dressed in black. Her hair was black, and her eyes, set in a fixed stare, had great black rings under them … Her features were strongly Jewish … We guessed it was Kaplan. Doubtless, the Bolsheviks hoped she would give us some sign of recognition … But she went to the window and … looked out into the daylight. There she remained, apparently resigned to her fate, until the sentries came and took her away. She was shot before she knew if her attempt to alter history had failed or succeeded.
Bruce Lockhart was luckier. After a month in the Lubyanka, London exchanged him for a high-ranking Soviet diplomat. On his return, the British media were quick to portray him and Sidney Reilly as heroic Western agents nobly trying to smash the Communist menace. A radio play starring Errol Flynn and a Warner Brothers movie with Leslie Howard, entitled British Agent (1934), took a decidedly anti-Bolshevik stance, portraying our plucky ‘diplomats’ as the prime movers in a daring operation sanctioned by London.
Lenin recovered from his injuries, though they would ultimately contribute to his death five years later. But the immediate effect of the August shootings was a terrible hardening in the Bolshevik regime. On 2 September 1918, Yakov Sverdlov, chairman of the Bolshevik Central Committee, called for ‘Merciless mass terror4 against all opponents of the revolution!’ It was, he proclaimed, imperative to strike ruthlessly at those who had tried to murder Lenin and at those who supported them.
Sverdlov’s words signalled the beginning of the Red Terror, which was to last for months and claim the lives of thousands. In response to the attack on Lenin, so-called class enemies were rounded up and executed for no other crime than their social origin. In operations that foreshadowed the Gestapo, hostages were selected from former tsarist officials, landowners, priests, lawyers, bankers and merchants to be used as reprisals. The British journalist Morgan Philips Price recorded his horror at the Bolsheviks’ methods:
I shall never forget5 one of the Izvestia articles for Saturday, September 7th. There was no mistaking its meaning. It was proposed to take hostages from the former officers of the tsar’s army, from the KaDety and from the families of the Moscow and Petrograd middle classes and to shoot ten for every Communist who fell to the White Terror. Shortly after, a decree was issued by the Central Soviet Executive ordering all officers of the old army within territories of the Republic to report on a certain day at certain places … The reason given by the Bolshevik leaders for the Red Terror was that conspirators could only be convinced that the Soviet Republic was powerful enough to be respected if it was able to punish its enemies, but nothing would convince these enemies except the fear of death. All civilized restraints had gone …
Lenin himself signed the execution lists. The aim seemed to be the physical annihilation of a whole social class. Being modestly well off made you guilty; soft hands unused to manual labour could get you shot. Martin Latsis, the head of the Cheka in Ukraine, revealed the real aim of the Terror:
Don’t go looking6 in the evidence to see whether or not the accused fought against the Soviets with arms or words. Just ask him which class he belongs to, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and the very essence of the Red Terror.
As paranoia became the norm, the Bolsheviks relied more and more on the murderous henchmen of the Cheka. The organisation’s methods, cynically acknowledged by its fanatical leader, ‘Iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky, were extrajudicial: confessions extracted by torture followed by immediate execution. ‘We stand for organised terror7,’ Dzerzhinsky claimed, ‘this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly … Do not think that I seek forms of revolutionary justice; we are not in need of justice now – this is war …’
In the name of Lenin’s Utopia, an estimated half a million people were killed in the three years following the initial period of the Red Terror. But even that pales by comparison with the 9 million or more who died in the same period in the civil war. The death toll from combat, typhus, starvation and drought was appalling; and with another 1–2 million Russians fleeing abroad, the country was close to collapse. The economy was devastated, the currency worthless, and people reduced to primitive barter. The writer Yevgeny Zamyatin described Petrograd as ‘a city of icebergs8, mammoths and wasteland … where cavemen, swathed in hides and blankets, retreat from cave to cave’. People sold their possessions and family heirlooms for scraps, or bartered them for firewood. Horses, dogs and cats disappeared from city streets to be made into ‘civil war sausage’. Shortly before he himself starved to death, the philosopher Vasily Rozanov wrote presciently:
With a clank, a squeal and a groan9, an iron curtain has descended over Russian history: the show is over, the audience has risen. It’s time for people to put on their coats and go home. But when they look around they see there are no coats any more, and no more homes …
With factories closing down and wages losing 90 per cent of their value, even the proletariat was deserting the Bolshevik cause. ‘Down with Lenin10 and horsemeat,’ scrawled the Petrograd graffiti. ‘Give us the tsar and pork!’ Strikes broke out in several Petrograd factories. The government crushed them with tsarist methods – mass firings, arrests and executions.
As his hold on power became more fragile, Lenin abandoned his promises of freedom, justice and self-determination. From May 1918, the rhetoric of liberation gave way to what came to be known as War Communism – harsh, enslaving and repressive. Lenin had ridden a popular wave of unrest with his slogans of Peace, Bread, Land and Workers Control. But the Bolsheviks would rescind every one of these promises within months of coming to power. As early as November 1917, Golos Truda (The Voice of Labour), the official organ of the anarchist labour unions, had warned of the impending crackdown:
Once their power is consolidated11 and ‘legalised’, the Bolsheviks who are … proponents of centralist, authoritarian rule, will begin to rearrange the life of the country and of the people by dictatorial methods, imposed by the centre. The centre, in Petrograd, will impose the will of the party on the whole of all Russia and command the whole nation. Your soviets and your other local organisations will become, little by little, simply executive organs of the will of the central government. We will see the installation of an authoritarian and statist apparatus that will act from above and set about wiping out everything that stood in its way with an iron hand.
This is indeed what happened. In the name of War Communism, society was turned into a centralised command economy; the state was run as a militarised machine, where all must obey and deserters are shot. The nominally independent Factory Committees, to which Lenin had promised full workers’ control, were progressively subjugated to the Bolshevik-run trade unions. From mid 1918, workers’ control was reduced to monitoring rather than management. Between 1918 and 1921, forced labour was systematically imposed on the population, with breaches of discipline punishable by death. The labour camps began to fill up with ‘anti-revolutionary elements’. Industry was nationalised, private enterprise banned. Food was rationed and only workers and soldiers were guaranteed adequate sustenance. A siege mentality now informed the government’s every act. The families of former tsarist officers were held hostage to force them to build the new Red Army. Workers were no longer seen as agents of the revolution but as raw material, an expendable resource to be exploited in the great experiment of building socialism. The programme of War Communism had more than a touch of the Pol Pot about it.
Instead of peace, Lenin had brought devastation. Instead of bread – starvation. Instead of land – requisitions. Instead of workers’ representation – terror. Winston Churchill commented tartly that Lenin’s ‘purpose [was] to save12 the world, his method to blow it up’. The British consul in Petrograd, Colonel R.E. Kimens reported on the effects of War Communism:
The only work done by the Soviet13 authorities is the inciting of class hatred, requisitioning and confiscation of property, and destruction of absolutely everything. All freedom of word and action has been suppressed; the country is being ruled by an autocracy that is infinitely worse than that of the old regime. Justice does not exist and every act on the part of persons not belonging to the ‘proletariat’ is interpreted as counter-revolutionary and punished by imprisonment and in many cases execution … The Soviet authorities’ one object is to overthrow the existing order of things and capitalism, first in Russia and afterwards in all other countries, and to this end all methods are admissible as long as the masses remain satisfied … The danger is very great that Bolshevism will spread to neighbouring countries. In that case it will be impossible to stop the movement that presents a danger to the civilisation of the whole world.
Members of the former middle class were denounced as bourzhoui, ‘bourgeois parasites’, and ‘non-persons’. Their homes were confiscated, their furniture seized and their clothes requisitioned for the state. They were placed in the lowest category for food rations, on the border of starvation, and forced to do cruel, often deadly labour. Petrograd lost two-thirds of its population as people fled to the countryside to try to find food. City streets were filled with war orphans and child thieves. Begging, black marketeering and prostitution were rife.
In the countryside, peasants were divided into three categories – ‘poor’ and ‘medium’, and therefore allies of the proletariat; or kulaks, literally ‘grasping fists’, who had made some personal wealth from their farming and were therefore enemies of the people. These were the better farmers, the efficient businessmen or the village elders who took prominent roles in the rural community. As the class of peasants who had the most to lose under Bolshevik rule, and were considered the most likely to oppose it, the kulaks were made scapegoats for the disruption in food supplies. In speech after speech, they were demonised by Lenin:
A wave of kulak revolts14 is sweeping across Russia. The kulak hates the Soviet government like poison and is prepared to strangle and massacre hundreds of thousands of workers. We know very well that if the kulaks were to gain the upper hand they would ruthlessly slaughter hundreds of thousands of workers, in alliance with the landowners and capitalists, restore back-breaking conditions for the workers, abolish the eight-hour day and hand back the mills and factories to the capitalists. These bloodsuckers have grown rich on the want suffered by the people in the war; they have raked in thousands and hundreds of thousands of roubles by pushing up the price of grain and other products. These leeches have sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workers in the cities and factories starved. So we declare ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them! … The workers must crush the revolts of the kulaks with an iron hand!
The Bolsheviks handed power to armed ‘committees of the poorest peasants’ with a licence to plunder and murder the now hated kulaks. Within weeks, neighbour was killing neighbour. It may have rallied the poor to the Bolshevik cause, but it destroyed the class of peasants who had brought initiative and efficiency to the rural economy. Agriculture regressed to disastrous levels. Grain supplies dwindled. The cities starved.
With famine looming, the Bolsheviks’ most pressing problem was how to feed the workers and soldiers who were their key support. If hunger turned these classes against the regime, Bolshevism would perish. So the party decreed that armed food brigades should be sent out into the countryside to force the peasants to hand over their crops.
Red Guards appeared out of the blue demanding grain; peasants were tortured until supplies were handed over; those who resisted were shot, their homes burned and their families deported. For the Bolsheviks’ accusations against the kulaks – that they were guilty of hoarding supplies and deliberately starving the workers – were directed indiscriminately at all who managed to eke out anything more than a subsistence living. In reality, most peasants had barely enough to feed themselves. Knowing that their produce would be confiscated, the response of many was to down tools in protest. A third of the land went to seed, and cattle and horses were slaughtered in vast numbers.
From 1918 onwards, the regime’s brutality was met with armed resistance. The peasants murdered 15,000 members of the Bolshevik food brigades. One community impaled their decapitated heads on spikes, until a bombardment by government artillery razed the entire village to the ground. Escalating unrest in the Tambov region, 300 miles southeast of Moscow, culminated in the formation of a 70,000-strong Peasant Army, prepared to fight for freedom and the right to the land. Over a period of nearly two years, the rebellion spread to vast areas of southeastern Russia, recalling the great revolts of Razin and Pugachev (see here and see here). It took 100,000 troops and poison gas to massacre the rebels as they hid in the forests, with survivors and their families consigned to the growing network of prison camps.
By early 1921, crop failures were endemic, and famine spread across Russia. In the Volga region, 10 million people were on the verge of starvation and 22 million livestock were lost. The British writer and novelist Sir Philip Gibbs saw it at first hand:
The harvest had been annihilated15 by two terrible droughts. And the reserves of grain which had always been kept by the peasants had been used up to feed the Red Army. There were twenty-five million people threatened by starvation and many of them were dead and dying. I went into cottages where a whole family would be lying down to die. I really saw some terrible sights which filled my heart with pity for a great people. The children looked like fairy-tale children and it was most pitiful to see them dying of hunger with their stomachs swollen out.
Lenin seemed unmoved. It is hard to find a word of human sympathy or concern anywhere in his collected works. But he was quick to exploit the misery of the nation, to create scapegoats to deflect popular anger from the regime. Directives that he signed personally called for ever greater repression and the incitement of class hatred in the name of Bolshevism:
The insurrection of the kulaks16 must be suppressed without mercy. We need to set an example. You need to hang (I repeat, hang, without fail, in full public view) at least a hundred kulaks, the rich, the bloodsuckers. Then publish their names and take away all of their grain. Also, execute the hostages – in accordance with my previous telegram. Do it in such a way that people for hundreds of miles around will tremble and cry out, ‘Let us choke and strangle those bloodsucking kulaks!’ P.S. Use your toughest people for this.
When the clergy resisted the Bolshevik campaign to close down the churches and confiscate Church property, Lenin’s response was once again terror. ‘We must … put down all resistance17 with such brutality that they will not forget it for decades,’ he wrote. ‘The greater the numbers of reactionary clergy and bourgeoisie we succeed in executing … the better.’
Russia was slipping into anarchy. Strikes were crippling the towns; the countryside riven by revolt. Lenin’s response was more terror. When two other members of the government, Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin, tried to moderate the powers of the secret police Lenin overruled them. As late as 1921, he was still expanding the Cheka’s powers of summary execution.
But terror was not enough. Russia was teetering on the brink of another revolution. And in March 1921 an event of colossal importance would force the Bolsheviks to rethink the whole way they exercised power.
fn1 There was a reason why Lenin in 1918 should be given such prominence in the USSR of the late 1930s. This was the period of Stalinist witch-hunts, of alleged plots and conspiracies in all parts of society, and of purges and show trials. So a movie depicting dark forces at work to overthrow Soviet power was just what Stalin had ordered. And if you look closely, you can spot that one of the men the film shows plotting to murder Lenin is the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin. Again this was no coincidence: Bukharin had just gone on trial for his life, on trumped up charges, as the film hit the cinemas.