For several months Lenin and the other expatriate revolutionaries in Switzerland had been following from afar the chaos on the battlefields and in the streets of Russia while negotiating with German Foreign Office officials for a safe and acceptable way of getting back there. One method seriously considered was to transport them clandestinely to the German front lines and arrange a truce, during which they could walk through the Russian lines, but this was discarded as making them too obviously German agents. Finally, a plan was agreed, in the hope that their return would result in more strikes on the home front and even more mutinies throughout the Russian armies, forcing the provisional government to sue for peace and enabling the Central Powers to switch as many as a million men to the slogging match on the Western Front. On 25 March, the German Foreign Ministry undertook to make available clandestine transport facilities to take expatriates to the Baltic coast and then via neutral Sweden and Finland to Russia. The only snag in this route was that British agents in Finland might be able to prevent them crossing the Finno-Russian border.125 Proving that there is nothing new about deniable clandestine operations, the mission had been approved by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, conducting negotiations with Lenin through a chain of intermediaries, but the Kaiser was not initially informed of this ungentlemanly ploy.126
Paranoia being a characteristic of revolutionaries, Lenin and Grigori Zinoviev – his closest collaborator at the time, born Hirsch Apfelbaum aka Ovsey-Gershon Radomylsky – feared that staying any longer in Switzerland might see them sidelined by the socialist-revolutionary members of the provisional government and their fellow Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet. Against that, returning to Petrograd at this juncture could see them accused of being German agents – which they effectively were. To feed the pretence that they were acting on their own unassisted initiative, it was agreed that they would pay third-class fares to travel on a special train granted extraterritorial rights while crossing Germany. Lenin was particularly nervous at this time because he was almost unknown to the great Russian public, owing his pre-eminence in émigré circles partly to covert support from the Okhrana’s European agents, who subsidised him because he was unable to work with anyone for long before precipitating yet another schism in the socialist revolutionary ranks.127
To the great relief of the small circle privy to the plan in the German High Command and Foreign Ministry, on 4 April the expat Russians indicated their readiness for a group of ‘twenty to thirty’ to leave for Russia.128 On 16 April 1917 the group of thirty-plus revolutionaries, including Lenin’s wife Krupskaya and her friend Inessa Armand, currently Lenin’s mistress, boarded what became known as ‘the sealed train’ in Berne.
Neglected by historians for years because her relationship was yet another state secret – revealing that Lenin had a human side to him, and also because the Stalinist USSR was misogynistic and ignored the part women had played in the revolution – Inessa Armand was much more than ‘just a bit on the side’. Born Elisabeth-Inès Stéphane d’Herbenville, the daughter of a French opera singer and his half-English music teacher wife, after her father died when she was only 5, she was brought up by a French aunt and grandmother working as teachers in Russia. Because Russian is an inflected language, she changed her name from Inès to Inessa, which can be declined like a Russian name. At the age of 18 she married Alexander Armand, one of the sons of a wealthy family who owned textile factories in the town of Pushkino. Enthused by radical political philosophy, he accepted an open marriage, in which she bore him four children before having another by his brother, Boris. He, like Inessa, was a socialist who attempted to organise the workers in the Armand family factories; her philanthropic activities included founding a school for poor children. In 1903 she joined the Social Democratic Labour Party and left her husband the following year, travelling to Sweden, where she was active in feminist politics.
Returning to Russia, she spent a brief spell in prison until freed in accordance with Nicholas II’s 1905 Manifesto. Re-arrested on 9 April 1907 for distributing Bolshevik propaganda, she was sentenced this time to two years’ exile in the Far North, but escaped and returned to Paris, where she met Lenin, Zinoviev and other Bolsheviks. In 1911, because she spoke five languages fluently, Lenin made her secretary general of the Committee of Foreign Organisations established to liaise with, and bring under his control, all pro-Bolshevik émigrés in Western Europe. Krupskaya recorded everyone’s appreciation of Inessa’s culture, ability to play the piano professionally and her joie de vivre. Yet the outspoken Russian-Jewish-Italian activist Anzhelika Balabanova criticised the newcomer to their inner circle for dressing to please Lenin and relaying slavishly his every word in whatever language she was talking.
Returning to Russia in 1912, to work for the election of Bolshevik candidates to the Duma, Inessa was arrested in September and imprisoned for six months. Travelling after her release to Kraków, where Lenin was then living, she rented a room in Kamenev’s house nearby and, according to Krupskaya, brought some life and gaiety into the grim, revolution-obsessed Bolshevik circle. Her ten-year affair with Lenin was common knowledge and, according to Kollontai and Balabanova, Inessa had a sixth child by him, as well as joining Kollontai and Krupskaya as joint editors of the news-sheet Rabotnitsa, or The Working Woman. Despite her intimacy with Lenin, he criticised her writing mercilessly, treating her as a lackey, like any other comrade. During the First World War, when Inessa lived with Lenin and Krupskaya in Switzerland, she believed that Russia should continue fighting until victory; he at the time wanted Russia to end its war, the more chaos, the better. None of his other close associates would have dared to disagree with him on this, or any other, issue. So, when he ordered her to accept his ruling, Inessa gave way.
The so-called ‘sealed train’ was actually a single carriage of eight second- and third-class compartments, single men roughing it in third while families travelled in second, with one second-class compartment reserved for Lenin, Krupskaya and Inessa. From here Lenin emerged once to yell at everyone to be quiet because he was working and, on another occasion, to solve the problem of the queue for the toilet by obliging everyone waiting to take a numbered piece of paper and wait their turn.
What was supposed to be a clandestine journey started in an unusual manner. Swiss counter-intelligence had been closely watching all the Russian conspirators since the start of the war. This is the official police report of the departure of Lenin’s group:
At 3.20 p.m. the express train was about to depart [with] one carriage full of Russian revolutionaries. I also saw the Russian named Lenin, who was obviously travelling as the leader of the group. It seems that the departure should have taken place in secret, but present at the station were approximately another 100 Russians of both sexes, who saw off those who were leaving with mixed feelings. Those in favour of pursuing war against Germany to the very end were cursing like cabmen, shouting that those who were travelling were German spies and provocateurs, or that ‘You will all be hanged, Jewish instigators that you are!’ Other cries were, ‘Provocateurs, scoundrels, pigs,’ etc. When the train started to move off, the travellers and many of their friends who had remained began to sing the Internationale, while the others began again to yell at them, ‘Provocateurs! Spies!’ etc.129
All the doors of the carriage were kept locked throughout the journey, with the exception of one in the compartment of the two German escorting officers on board. The only hitch in the plan came when the sealed carriage missed its connection with a northbound train somewhere in Germany because, for security reasons, the railway system had not been informed of its existence. This obliged the two escorting officers to accommodate the party of revolutionaries locked up incommunicado for the night in a small provincial hotel. The much reproduced iconic Soviet painting ‘Lenin at the Finland Station’ showed him heroically clinging onto the outside of Finnish locomotive No. 293 as it pulled into the Finlyandski Vokzal at the other end of the journey, waving a footplate man’s cap at the cheering crowd. Like most Communist icons, it was a fantasy. Arriving in Petrograd on 3 April (new calendar) he stepped out of his compartment and was hustled by a group of Bolshevik workers to what had been the Tsar’s waiting room, now renamed the ‘People’s Room’. Totally ignoring the welcome speech of Chkheidze, the chairman of the Soviet, he greeted the throng in the name of the February Revolution, as though he had been a prime mover, ignoring all those who had actually taken part.
Escorted from the station to the Kshesinskaya Palace, where the Bolsheviks had their headquarters, he again showed his contempt for the Soviet and the provisional government and just about everyone else. But sailors of the 2nd Baltic Fleet openly condemned him for accepting German money and assistance, students demonstrated against him outside the palace and a delegation of wounded soldiers and sailors arrived with banners inviting ‘Lenin and company’ to return to Germany, where they belonged.130 In the Duma building, on the day after his return, another returned exile who had been a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee declared, after hearing him speak, that Lenin was no longer a Marxist, but an anarchist. It was the consensus of opinion that he had shot himself in the foot. Kerensky said, ‘This man will destroy the Revolution!’131
As all clandestine operations officers know, revolutions cost money – with which the Bolsheviks were richly provided through the chain of bankers moving funds covertly from Germany through special accounts. Cut-outs and front companies were used so that the money was not traceable back to the German government. Director Olof Aschberg of the Swedish Nya Banken admitted to being the Bolsheviks’ banker, with as much as 60 million gold marks passing through his hands – the equivalent of 3 million pounds sterling, or in today’s values £180 million. One bagman alone, N.M. Weinberg, Petrograd agent for Berlin bankers Mendelssohn & Co., paid out 12 million roubles direct to the Bolsheviks in Russia, cash in hand ‘against signature acknowledging receipt’.
After the revolution, the Soviet regime did everything in its power to obscure the money trail, which disproved the myth of the spontaneous Bolshevik ‘revolution of workers and peasants’. On 20 December 1917 Felix Dzerzhinsky was appointed head of the Bolshevik secret police designated chrezvechainaya komissiya – the extraordinary commission,132 whose acronym che-ka became ‘Cheka’, the first in the line of Soviet secret police organisations. Dzerzhinsky, an ascetic, round-shouldered man of normally mild appearance who saw himself as the saint of the revolution, was a dysfunctional sociopath so devoid of normal emotion that he forced his wife to have their son adopted into a working-class family, to ensure that he grew up ‘socially correct’. Ordered by Lenin to recover the incriminating Mendelssohn company receipts, he arrested Weinberg, who was stripped and tortured in the Butyrka prison. The receipts having been already forwarded to Mendelssohn & Co.’s accounts department in Berlin as a matter of course, Weinberg could not save himself, and was shot – as he probably would have been anyway.133
The amount of German money handed over to a group of dissidents who might stage a coup d’état was colossal for the time but, given the escalating costs of the war, this clandestine financing seemed a worthwhile gamble in Berlin. As so often fixation on the short-term target completely blinded the planners to the long-term danger of their plan. After the war, the Kaiser’s normally perceptive Eastern Front commander, General Max Hoffmann, admitted, ‘We neither knew nor foresaw the danger to humanity from the consequences of this journey of the Bolsheviks to Russia.’134 Even Ludendorff admitted in his memoirs:
Our government, in sending Lenin to Russia, took upon itself a tremendous responsibility. From a military point of view, his journey was justified, for it was imperative that [tsarist] Russia should fall.135
The transparent device of Lenin’s group paying a third-class fare for a journey impossible at that time without the active help of the German government did nothing to protect the Bolsheviks from more accusations by their revolutionary rivals and by the provisional government that they were paid enemy agents. Russian Social Democratic revolutionary David Shub was personally acquainted with Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders, having shared their exile in Western Europe after escaping from internal exile in Siberia, to which he was sentenced for his role in the 1905 revolution. In 1948 his book titled Lenin: A Biography was published in the USA and immediately attacked by hard-line Stalinists as a fiction. So vituperative were these attacks that Shub wrote a detailed defence that was published in the 1950 March–April issue of New International magazine. His first paragraph included the words:
I am sufficiently familiar with the tradition of Bolshevik polemics not to be surprised by the abusive and defamatory character of Mr Schachtman’s review [of the book].
Among the numerous points on which Shub took issue with Schachtman is the matter of the German subsidies:
If the reader turns to pp. 211-16 of my book, he will … learn of financial transactions between Berlin, Stockholm and Petrograd revealed through the interception of 29 telegrams exchanged between the Bolshevik intermediaries who handled the transfer of funds for the Party. We find that 800,000 roubles were withdrawn from the Siberian Bank in Petrograd within two months by a confessed Bolshevik go-between. We find an admission by the same individual (who handled funds which reached the Siberian Bank from the Disconto Gesellschaft in Berlin via the Nea [sic] Bank of Stockholm) that she had instuctions ‘to give Koslovsky, then a Bolshevik member of the Soviet Executive Committee, any sum of money he demanded; some of these payments amounted to 100,000 roubles.136
Shub also quotes Tomáš Masaryk, first president of Czechoslovakia, the French military attaché in Petrograd and a French Socialist Minister, who provided corroboration of the German subsidies to the Bolsheviks.137 It has also been suggested that an important reason for Stalin’s murder of Trotsky was to prevent him from ever validating accusations that the October Revolution was financed by Berlin.
Trotsky arrived back in Russia via the US and Canada in spite of British attempts to prevent him doing so, which ceased when HM Ambassador in St Petersburg Sir George Buchanan advised the Foreign Office that this might provoke pro-Trotsky socialist revolutionaries to attack British businesses in Russia. Lenin was playing his favourite game of undermining all other claimants to power and confusing the uncommitted with his talk of ‘traitors to Socialism’, ‘the deception of the masses by the bourgoisie’ and ‘placing power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasantry’.138 In April, he issued a series of ‘Theses’, proclaiming ‘revolutionary defeatism’ without attracting many followers. Pravda’s reaction was:
As for Lenin’s general scheme, it seems to us unacceptable in that it starts from the assumption that the bourgeois revolution is ended, and counts on an immediate transforming of this revolution into a Socialist revolution.139
Meanwhile at the several Russian fronts, the killing continued. By mid-June the anti-war soviety in major towns and the armed forces were sufficiently organised to assemble at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, where Socialist Revolutionaries were in the majority, followed by the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, in that order. Lenin addressed the congress on 17 June, arguing that the Soviet was the counterpart of the French Revolutionary Convention of 1792 and should immediately seize all power from the provisional government. Kerensky rose to protest that this would lead to dictatorship – which was Lenin’s purpose. While he was greeted with applause and cheers from the mutinous soldiers and sailors, Kerensky’s moderate voice was not. Without waiting for the term spin-doctor to be invented, Lenin took the small-circulation news-sheet Pravda, which had been the party’s mouthpiece since 1912, and used the laundered German subsidies to unleash a huge PR campaign, an important element in which was a daily printing of 300,000 copies of the paper under his personal editorial control.
The stress of daily confrontation since his return, after the relative calm of life in Switzerland, had worn him down. Prematurely, a Bolshevik coup was planned but fizzled out. He left on 29 June, to stay out of danger with friends across the Finnish border in the small village of Neivola, only two hours by rail from Petrograd.140 There he had what sounds like another nervous breakdown, not even reading the newspapers to know what was happening in the Russian capital. On 4 July Maximilian Savelov, a member of the Pravda editorial staff, arrived to warn him that things were getting out of control in Petrograd. They caught the next train back there. On the following day, the newspaper Zhivoye Slovo denounced the Bolsheviks for being German agents. Worse was to come. On 6 July warrants were issued for the arrest of Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev as German spies after evidence was released by the provisional government that the Bolsheviks were financed by Berlin with Alexander Parvus as a go-between.141 Lenin went underground, hiding in friends’ apartments. However, scooped up in the search net, Krupskaya was arrested with another comrade mistaken for Lenin, but to whom he bore no physical resemblance. As historian Robert Service remarks, this was yet another proof that Lenin was virtually unknown to the general population and even to the Okhrana agents searching for him.142
The quasi-rebellion that had begun in Petrograd and Moscow spread rapidly to every city in European Russia and more slowly beyond the Urals to the shores of the Pacific. While the moderate liberals and socialists in the Duma continued to support the war effort, mutinies at the fronts rapidly grew too widespread for firing squads to execute all the ringleaders. The soldiers’ editions of Pravda which circulated at the fronts carried the message ‘Lay down your arms and go home!’143
Against this, Kerensky, as Minister for War, called on all ranks to strike at the enemy on the south-western front. General Brusilov’s attack, known as the Kerensky Offensive, was an insufficiently strong attack launched by Russian 7th, 8th and 11th armies south of Tarnopol on 1 July. Brusilov was using the same logic that had won success the previous year: attacks and diversions to wrong-foot the enemy along a 100-mile front, of which the main axis was on a front of 30 miles, heavily supported by artillery. Unwisely seeking to share the glory of a victory he wrongly anticipated, Kerensky toured the first line units in military uniform, haranguing them to fight for ‘Mat’ Rossiya i Svoboda’– ‘Mother Russia and their own freedom’ – with no mention of the Tsar. The Brusilov/Kerensky Offensive was crippled by increasing desertion and open mutinies in many of the Russian units involved and refusal to obey orders among Ukrainian soldiery, who hoped to force the Russian provisional government to grant autonomy to their nation.
Because he feared nationalist feelings among the ethnic minorities of his own empire, the Tsar had refused pleas from Czech and Slovak POWs to be allowed to fight against their overlords in the dual monarchy. Now, in an attempt to counteract the mutinies, volunteer POWs were armed and allowed to play their part in brigades formed from comrades who preferred to take their chance on the field of battle, rather than waste away in Siberian camps for the rest of the war. Brusilov placed the Czech Legion in the line opposite two Czech regiments in Austro-Hungarian uniform. Refusing to fire on their own countrymen in Russian uniform, 3,000 of these men walked across no man’s land to surrender, some changing uniform there and then to turn their weapons on yesterday’s comrades in the opposing trenches.
In the first week of July, it did seem that Brusilov’s luck of the previous year was holding: a 20-mile-wide breach was forced in the enemy front; the most significant advance was achieved on the left, or southern, flank of the offensive by Cossack General Lavr Kornilov, whose 8th Army pushed back the enemy 20 miles. OHL rushed German reinforcements from the Western Front and on 19 July its Südarmee counter-attacked with two German and nine Austro-Hungarian divisions. With its supply lines overextended, the right flank of Brusilov’s advance crumpled. Tens of thousands of soldiers deserting turned this retreat into a rout characterised by sabotage of military equipment and mutinies which made it plain that, although some units would still defend their lines if attacked, hardly any were prepared to accept again the rate of casualties inevitable in an offensive. Sick and exhausted, Brusilov attempted to control this uncontrollable situation, while Kornilov argued that attack was all that mattered. Kerensky sacked Brusilov and attempted to restore discipline by reintroducing the death penalty, which General Kornilov imposed rigorously for mutiny or desertion, causing an even further drop in morale.
In April 1917 the Bolsheviks had formed a ‘military organisation’ to enlist mutinous soldiers and sailors into their ranks. The Bolshevik Military Organisation (BMO) attracted 30,000 active members from 500 military units to an all-Russian conference in June. Discontent with the war saw a new rebellion break out in July. Between 3 and 5 July, on the old calendar, thousands of armed workers and soldiers demonstrated against the provisional government in the streets of Petrograd. Lenin, as always refusing to accept anyone else’s lead, at first forbade ‘his’ Bolsheviks from taking part, but Trotsky was still not a member of Lenin’s party. He showed physical courage when the leader of the SR Party Viktor Chernov was arrested at the Tauride Palace by militant demonstrators and rescued by Trotsky fighting his way through the angry throng to pull Chernov out of the car, in which they intended driving him away to an unknown fate. In the night of 4 July loyal troops moved in and secured the centre of Petrograd by midday on 5 July. A second official investigation by the provisional government into the Bolsheviks’ suspicious finances revealed legal proof that Lenin’s faction was funded by German money and resulted in a public accusation of treason by the Minister of Justice. It was left to the provisional government to issue arrest warrants against all the returnees accused of being German agents.
At a meeting on 15 July organised by anarchists, mutinous soldiers of the 1st Machine Gun Regiment were persuaded to join the strikers. Under the aegis of the Bolshevik Military Organisation, itself under pressure from rank-and-file soldiers but without the sanction of the Central Committee, the machine gunners enlisted soldiers from other regiments in Petrograd and Moscow to support the strikers and obey, not their officers but their own soldiers’ committees.
On 15 July anarchist groups summoned soldiers of the mutinous 1st Machine Gun Regiment, which had refused several times to move to the front, to demonstrate on the following day in Petrograd, Moscow and other industrial cities. This attracted followers from the disaffected garrison troops and striking workers, who marched with them under the slogan ‘Vsya vlast sovetam’ – ‘All power to the soviets’. Paradoxically, the socialist-revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks all refused for different reasons to join them, prompting Lenin to give it his blessing in an endeavour to grab control. Back in Petrograd, on 16 July 1917,144 the first provisional government met its inevitable end amid the widespread disorder of what were called ‘the July Days’, lasting from 16 to 20 July, during which period Lenin made some speeches urging restraint but was clearly out of his depth as things were developing too fast for him to control.
If this sounds confusing, it was. Pavel Milyukov, the leader of the ‘Kadets’, or Constitutional Democratic Party, described the situation as ‘chaos in the army, chaos in foreign policy, chaos in industry and chaos in the nationalist questions’. The ‘nationalist questions’ covered the independence movements in the Baltics, the Caucasus and Ukraine, where an armed uprising in Kiev was suppressed by Russian force of arms. One would think that Lenin would leap into the breach to exploit all this indecision and take control, but on the afternoon of 16 July it was the trio of Kamenev, Trotsky and Zinoviev who tried to stem the wellspring of discontent in the streets, against the wishes of leading members of the Bolshevik Party while the BMO mobilised reinforcements from the front lines and dispatched several armoured cars to capture key posts in Petrograd including the Peter and Paul Fortress.
An enormous demonstration of more than 500,000 strikers, soldiers and sailors in Petrograd on 17 July went off at half-cock – the demonstrators suffering 600–700 casualties from loyal troops. The socialist-revolutionaries and Mensheviks took against the Bolsheviks and supported soldiers loyal to the provisional government who were disarming the demonstrators and arresting the ringleaders. Despite Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev trying to control the developing situation, in the confusion the Bolsheviks’ offices were torched as were the offices of Pravda. There could have been no clearer statement of the gap that now separated the Bolsheviks from all the other revolutionary parties. Considering how many hundreds of thousands of words have been devoted to the history of Soviet Communism, it is interesting that there is no reliable published record of the internal discussions of the Bolshevik leadership at this time, with some members urging an intensification of activity and others, including Lenin, undecided what to do next. In the middle of the night on 18 July after the provisional government brought a number of loyal troops from the front to the streets of Petrograd and won over some previously neutral garrison troops, the Bolshevik Central Committee decided to call off the street demonstrations. Whether this was before or just after Kerensky ordered the arrest of Lenin and the other leading Bolsheviks, accused of inciting rebellion ‘with German financial backing’, is hard to untangle.
On 19 July the provisional government ordered the arrests of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev as well as Lunacharsky, Raskolnikov and Alexandra Kollontai – the pioneer feminist and prolific writer on social questions. Although she rejected political feminism as a bourgeois irrelevance in the perfect socialist state, the USSR turned out not to be that state, with only two women ever making it onto the Politburo. Kollontai wrote: ‘The separation of kitchen chores from marriage would be as great a reform as the separation of Church and State.’145
The government charged them with incitement to armed insurrection with the financial support of the German government – in other words, treason. Prince Lvov resigned on 21 July and was replaced as prime minister by Kerensky on the following day. Lenin warned Trotsky that they would all be shot. He afterward said that the only thing which saved them was the chronic indecisiveness of the provisional government, afraid to move too decisively against the Bolsheviks in case this upset the other socialist parties. Indecisiveness on both sides, then, during the ‘July Days’, which spluttered to a halt with Trotsky, Chkheidze and others telling the Kronstadt sailors, mutinous soldiers and workers from the Putilov factory to go back to work as the time was not yet right for a full-blooded revolution. Trotsky, Kamenev and Lunacharsky were arrested on 25 July.146 Lenin, as he had done before, slipped away to hide with Zinoviev in the suburban home of a Bolshevik railway worker named Sergei Alliluyev, whose daughter Nadezhda would become world famous as Stalin’s second wife, committing suicide in 1932. From there, Lenin fled in disguise – a wig to cover his bald pate – to safety in Helsingfors. It is difficult to untangle the power struggle between Lenin’s faction, the BMO and the Petrograd Soviet for and against the spontaneous street demonstrations because no records were kept, but even Lenin could not make up his mind on the best course to follow.
Initial support for Kerensky’s provisional government faded away when it became clear that his policies were unlikely to produce peace in the near future. He designated Boris Savinkov as Deputy Minister of War and appointed General Lavr Kornilov C-in-C of all Russian forces. Gen Brusilov, who knew him well, categorised Kornilov as having ‘the heart of a lion and the brains of a lamb’.147 For the business community and the Kadet Party, he was seen as the salvation of all Russia’s woes, but his recipe proved disastrous. On 19 August Kornilov posted one Russian and one Cossack cavalry corps to the region of Petrograd, plus the Dikaya Diviziya or Savage Division of Muslim Caucasian cavalry, with the aim of taking over the capital and executing all the alleged German agents there, particularly the Bolsheviks, and every member of the Petrograd Soviet. In the army generally, officers blamed the recent reverses on the battlefield on the mutinies and desertions, and praised the reintroduction of the death penalty at the front and the abolition of the various soldiers’ soviety that had been perverting normal military discipline since February. Yet, when Kornilov’s soldiers attempted a military coup, it was aborted by revolutionary railwaymen, who refused to transport them to Petrograd, forcing them to continue on foot until their route was blocked by 20,000 Red Guards – deserters and mutineers who had been armed by the Petrograd Soviet – facing them in defence of the capital. Included among them were a number of Caucasian Muslims, present at a conference in Petrograd, who persuaded the Savage Division – all strapping soldiers from the Caucasus – that the mission with which they had been tasked was treasonous.
News of all this unrest prompted Gen Ludendorff to exploit his enemy’s crippling internal problems by a bold drive towards Petrograd itself. By capturing Russian-controlled ports along the Baltic littoral, he could bring in supplies to his advancing troops by sea, avoiding the problems of extended terrestrial supply lines. Continuing the offensive in Estonia, on 3 September 1917 Ludendorff’s cousin General Oskar von Hutier crossed the Daugava or Western Dvina river, making liberal use of the artillery by firing 20,000 gas shells on the first day of the attack and followed up with special storm troops, who used flame throwers, light mortars and light machine guns to make a rapid advance, bypassing Russian strongpoints, which they left for the slower heavy troops to reduce with artillery.
Construction by the engineers of pontoon bridges over the Dvina – the modern border between Latvia and Belarus – allowed nine German divisions to cross in forty-eight hours. After offering feeble resistance, the defenders withdrew after hanging deserters on the spot, and left behind 250 artillery pieces, with the Germans in complete control of the important seaport of Riga by the end of the fourth day. From Riga to Petrograd as the crow files is less than 300 miles, and the news of this defeat shattered any public confidence in Kerensky’s provisional government. As head of government, his problems were insurmountable: the heavy losses on the battle fronts; mutinous soldiers deserting in ever larger numbers; other politicians doing their best to undermine him. There was zero enthusiasm to continue the war, even by those who had supported it; and there were shortages of food and supplies, impossible to remedy in wartime conditions.
By autumn 1917 it was estimated that 2 million men had deserted from the Russian armies. At the end of August, Kerensky fell out with Gen Kornilov and the provisional government was so apprehensive about the nearness of the German forces in Riga that it decided the prudent thing was to transfer the administration to Moscow, the old medieval capital. On 6 October a decree was issued announcing the transfer of several departments of state to Moscow, starting on 12 October. Kornilov was punished by cashiering from the army and incarcerated in the Bykhov Fortress with thirty of his officers, but would later escape in the confusion of the full-blown revolution and raise an anti-Bolskevik army in the civil war, being killed while fighting the Reds in the town of Ekaterinodar in April 1918. Ironically, the Bolsheviks were the ones who benefitted from Kornilov’s attempted coup, because among the political prisoners freed was Trotsky. Many workers had been given weapons by the provisional government to defend Petrograd, which they kept and used later in the autumn. The worst damage suffered by Kerensky was that his imprisonment of Kornilov and his increasingly favourable overtures to the revolutionary socialists alienated virtually all of the officers in the armed forces, so that when he appealed for their support in October, few responded. In the immediate future, however, public anger over Kornilov’s perceived mutiny resulted in officers being shot, hanged and drowned by their men.
Declaring a Russian Republic under his leadership, Kerensky clung to a semblance of power a little longer. His father had been Lenin’s headmaster, and the two families knew each other well, which may be why he was allowed to escape in disguise after the revolution. He died in New York in 1970 and was buried in Putney Vale cemetery, just a few miles from the Communist pilgrimage site of Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate.
Thanks largely to Lenin’s huge German-financed PR campaign, both the Moscow and Petrograd soviety came under Bolshevik control, the latter arresting the members of the Duma on 25 October. News of this reached even Letuchka No. 2 in Romania when newspapers arrived with reports of rioting in Moscow and people starving in Kiev, where there was an outbreak of cholera. Soldiers were also falling ill with chornaya ospa (black smallpox), which was always fatal. A nurse returning from leave in the Caucasus told Florence Farmborough that food was scarce even in that traditional land of plenty, with tea and sugar already rationed. The only good news was that the nurses’ salaries were raised from 50 roubles to 75 roubles a month – roughly £7.50 – but this was a time when a pair of boots, soon worn out in the damp and the mud, cost 100 roubles. Given permission to take some leave in Moscow, Farmborough had to literally fight her way onto trains, insulted because of her nurse’s uniform by mobs of mutineers deserting en masse. Having elbowed her way to a seat, she dared not leave it even to go to the toilet on the long and tedious journeys, lest a deserter immediately take it and refuse to give it up on her return.
Satisfied that Petrograd was safely under Bolshevik control, Lenin decided to return from Finland towards the end of October. But his recent hectoring letters to the Bolsheviks in Petrograd ordering them to take action immediately, which included a totally unfounded allegation that Britain and Germany were about to conclude a separate peace,148 reached the point where his letters were torn up, his return was temporarily forbidden and Trotsky was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, replacing Chkheidze. Lenin returned nevertheless and harangued the Bolshevik Central Committee at a secret meeting on 23 October on the necessity of an immediate armed uprising against the provisional government, finally wearing down almost all the opposition until the vote was taken, with ten for and only two votes against. On Trotsky’s initiative, a Military Revolutionary Committee was set up.
At the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June, only 105 of the 749 delegates had been Bolsheviks. Before the second congress was due to commence – on 25 October according to the Julian calendar or 6 November under the modern European calendar – with 390 Bolsheviks out of 649 delegates, Lenin was insistent with Stalin and Trotsky that the uprising against the provisional government must be a fait accompli. So it was that the Military Revolutionary Committee burst into the Winter Palace, which was already under threat from the mutinous Kronstadt sailors manning the big guns of the cruiser Aurora and by the cannon of the Peter and Paul Fortress. They placed the members of the provisional government under arrest, marching them through the streets, suffering the jeers of onlookers, and locked them up in the Fortress. Hearing the news, Lenin discarded his disguise and announced to the All-Russian Congress that the revolution had begun. Some hundred delegates walked out in protest at the Bolsheviks’ unilateral uprising, increasing his majority even further.
The congress argued its way through the night inside the Smolny Institute, a former school for daughters of the nobility, breaking up at dawn – when armed revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace. Or did they? Actually, this is another myth. Because Lenin considered that the newly invented cinema film was the most important of the arts for propaganda purposes, a heroic reconstruction, to be shown around the world, was filmed with soldiers firing volleys of blanks and brave workers lying in the snow, acting dead. In the event, the Winter Palace garrison had dwindled, partly by the defection of mutineers and partly due to lack of rations, from its normal complement of 2,000 to three squadrons of Cossacks, some cadets and 137 women of 1st Battalion of the Petrograd Women’s Brigade, who had recently paraded in front of Sylvia Pankhurst, taking the salute. Lacking sandbags, they had stacked logs against the external walls to absorb artillery shells. This inadequate garrison was swiftly overcome and locked up by the Military Revolutionary Committee. Taking his life in his hands, General Knox secured the release of the female soldiers from the Winter Palace by threatening their captors that he would otherwise tell the world how the Bolsheviks were treating women.
By the morning of 26 October – or 8 November on the modern calendar – the palace and virtually all places of strategic importance in Petrograd, like the main telegraph office, government ministries and power stations, were occupied by the Bolshevik activists. It was far from a bloodless coup. Conservatively estimated at 7,000, those killed included many innocent bystanders.149 Appearing that afternoon at the Congress the Bolshevik leaders were reportedly greeted with thunderous applause. Having decided to eschew bourgois titles and call themselves people’s commissars, united in the Soviet Narodnikh Kommissarov or Soviet of People’s Commissars, abbreviated to Sovnarkom, they proclaimed a ‘temporary’ administration headed by Lenin as Chairman, with Trotsky as Commissar of Foreign Affairs and Stalin as Commissar of Nationality Affairs, which seemed appropriate since he was such an obvious foreigner.
Trotsky issued an order to the armies, ordering the soldiers to arrest all their officers, but without lynching any, because he wanted them kept for the humiliation of show trials. Then, the men at the front were to elect representatives to contact the enemy. His edict ended, ‘The keys of peace are in your hands!’ It was what the nation had been waiting to hear. On 22 November Lenin and Stalin used the direct telephone line to Mogilev to order General Dukhonin, who had replaced Kornilov as C-in-C, to cease hostilities and open negotiations for an armistice. When he refused, People’s Commissar Krylenko was despatched to Mogilev with a group of Red Guards and Kronstadt sailors to replace Dukhonin and agree to any terms for an armistice. Dukhonin refused to yield and was killed by the Red Guards.