On January 22, 1917, Lenin said to an audience of young people in a lecture on the 1905 Revolution: “We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.” On the 15th of February, he wrote his sister María, asking about certain sums of money which had been sent him without explanation from Russia. “Nádya,” he told her, “is teasing me, says I’m beginning to draw my pension. Ha! ha! that’s a good joke because living is infernally expensive, and my capacity for work is desperately low on account of my bad nerves.”
They had been living on a small legacy which had been inherited by Krúpskaya’s mother. A broker in Vienna had taken half of it for transferring it to them in wartime, and there had not been very much more than the equivalent of a thousand dollars left. Their funds were so low in 1917 that Lenin tried to get his brother-in-law in Russia to arrange for the publication of a “pedagogical encyclopaedia,” which he proposed to have Krúpskaya write.
They had lodged at first in Zürich at a boarding-house where “Ilyích liked the simplicity of the service, the fact that the coffee was served in a cup with a broken handle, that we ate in the kitchen, that the conversation was simple.” But it turned out to be an underworld hangout. There was a prostitute who “spoke quite openly of her profession,” and a man who, though he “did not talk much,” revealed “by the casual phrases he uttered that he was of an almost criminal type.” They were interested in these people, but Krúpskaya insisted they should move, for fear they should get into trouble. So they transferred to a shoemaker’s family, where they occupied a single room in an old and gloomy house that went back almost to the sixteenth century. They could have got a better room for the money: there was a sausage factory opposite their windows, and the stench was so overwhelming that they opened them only late at night and spent most of their time in the library. But Vladímir Ilyích would never consent to leave after he had heard his landlady declare that “the soldiers ought to turn their weapons against their governments.” They often had only oatmeal for lunch, and when it got scorched, Lenin would say to the landlady: “We live in grand style, you see. We have roasts every day.”
The years, as Vladímir had written his sister, had told pretty severely on their nerves. It had been hard, after 1905, to settle down to exile again, and that had been twelve years ago. Their comrades had been cracking up even worse than after the arrests of the nineties. One of them went to pieces in Lenin’s house and had delusions about seeing his sister, who had been hanged. Another had caught tuberculosis during a sentence in a penal regiment; they sent him to Davos, but he died. Another, a survivor of the Moscow insurrection, came to see them one day and “began talking excitedly and incoherently about chariots filled with sheaves of corn and beautiful girls standing in the chariots.” Vladímir stayed with him while Nádya got a psychiatrist, who said the man was going crazy from starvation. Later, he tied stones to his feet and neck and drowned himself in the Seine. Another, a factory worker in Russia, who, due to his political activities, found it difficult to keep a job and was unable to support his wife and children, broke down and became an agent provocateur. He took to drink, and one evening drove his family out of the house, stuffed up the chimney, lit the stove, and in the morning was found dead. Now they were plagued by a new kind of spies: not the old race of obvious dicks who used to stand on the street-corners and wait for them and whom they could easily dodge, but plausible and exalted young men, who talked themselves into posts in the party.
They had gone to see the Lafargues in Paris, and Krúpskaya, a little excited at meeting the daughter of Marx, had babbled something rather inarticulately about the part that women were playing in the revolutionary movement; the conversation had lagged. Lenin had talked to Lafargue about the book, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, that he was writing against the Marxist mystics, and Lafargue agreed about the hollowness of religion. Laura had glanced at her husband and said: “He will soon prove the sincerity of his convictions.” Lenin had been deeply moved when he had heard of their double suicide. “If one cannot work for the Party any longer,” he had said to Krúpskaya at the time, “one must be able to look truth in the face and die the way the Lafargues did.”
Elizavéta Vasílevna, his mother-in-law, used to say to people: “He’ll kill both Nadyúsha and himself with that life.” She herself died in 1915. She had wanted that last year to go to Russia, but there was no one to look after her there, and just before her death she said to Nádya, “I’ll wait till I can go with you two.” She had worked hard for the comrades as they came and went, had sewed “armor” into skirts and waistcoats in which illegal literature was to be carried and composed endless bogus letters that were to have messages written between the lines. Vladímir used to buy her presents in order to make her life a little more cheerful; once when she had failed to lay in cigarettes for a holiday, had ransacked the town to find her some. She had always regarded herself as a believer, and would not talk to them about sacred subjects; but had said suddenly, just before her death: “I used to be religious when I was young, but as I lived on and learned about life, I saw that it was all nonsense.” And she asked to be cremated after her death. She died after an outing on a warm day of March, when she and Nádya had sat out for half an hour on a bench in the Berne forest.
Krúpskaya herself became ill after her mother’s death. It was a recrudescence of an ailment that had first appeared in 1913. Something had gone wrong with her heart then; her hands had begun to tremble. The doctor had said that she had a weak heart and that her nerves were giving way. The cobbler’s wife, who did their shopping—they were in Cracow now—was indignant: “Who said you were nervous—big ladies are nervous and throw the dishes around!” But she found that she couldn’t work, and Vladímir took her to the mountains. It turned out that she had exophthalmic goiter. It had been always a slightly sore point with Nádya that people thought she looked like a fish. She complains in one of her early letters that Vladímir’s sister Anna had said she had the look of a herring, and her conspiratorial names had been “Lamprey” and “Fish”; I once heard her described as “an old codfish” by a lady who had visited her in the Kremlin. Now the goiter, by swelling her neck and causing her eyes to protrude, intensified this effect. Vladímir had her operated on in Berne: the operation turned out to be difficult; they were working over her three hours without giving her an anesthetic—to the usual effect on Lenin that was produced by the presence of suffering. Lenin’s letters through all this period show the strain of Nádya’s illness.
One day in the middle of March when they had just finished eating dinner and Nádya had done the dishes and Ilyích was about to go to the library, a Polish comrade came bursting in, crying: “Haven’t you heard the news? There’s been a revolution in Russia!”
This time the defeats of the World War were carrying the tide across the barriers that had curbed it in 1905. The coal mines and factories of Poland had been lost with the Russian defeats; and half the production of the country was being expended on the fighting forces. On January 22, the anniversary of Father Gapón’s demonstration, there had been a strike of a hundred and fifty thousand in Petrograd; and on March 8 a new general strike had begun: the workers poured into the streets. Now the army, full of peasant conscripts, could no longer be mobilized against them. Even the Cossacks, even the Semyónovsky Regiment, which had put down the Moscow insurrection, came over to the side of the rebels. The people were disgusted with the war, and they had completely lost confidence in the Tsar; the royal family, under the dominion of Raspútin, were secretly trying to make peace with the Germans; the big landlords and the bourgeoisie, who had an interest in continuing the war, were also eager to get rid of the autocracy. The Tsar himself had gone to General Headquarters in order to get away from the trouble; and when he attempted to return to Petrograd, the railroad workers held up his train. The whole machinery of the monarchy had stopped: the Tsar was forced to send his abdication by telegram, and a few days later was put under arrest. He had tried to dissolve the Fourth Duma, as he had done with its predecessors, but this time they refused to disband, and formed a Provisional Committee, which appointed a Provisional Government. A Workers’ Soviet, with an Executive Committee that included both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, sprang to life from its paralyzation of 1905, like one of the victims of Koshchéy, the deathless enchanter of the Russian folktale, who was finally slain by the breaking of an egg; and the Committee decided to bring in the army and make it a Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.
Lenin had to depend on foreign newspapers; but through their blurred and biased despatches he managed to grasp the fundamental factors. In the few articles he wrote for Právda, which was now being published again, before he was able to return to Russia, he laid down the general assumptions on which he was afterwards to act. The power hung between the two bodies, Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet—which represented two groupings of interests, irreconcilable with one another, The Soviet was the spokesman of the people, who wanted peace, bread, liberty, land. The Provisional Government, whatever it might say, was recruited from a bourgeoisie whose tendencies toward liberalism were limited to the desire to get rid of the Románovs: the Minister of War and Marine was Guchkóv, a big Moscow industrialist and real-estate owner; the Minister of Foreign Affairs was Milyukóv, a former professor of History and the founder of the Kadet Party—the principal leader of the Russian bourgeoisie; and the Minister of Justice was a young lawyer only a shade further to the left than the Kadets. This last was the son of old Kerénsky, the director of the gimnáziya at Simbírsk, who had given Vladímir Ulyánov a good character after the execution of his brother and had guaranteed that his mother would keep him out of trouble. Kerénsky the younger had grown up to be a highly successful orator of the emotional and ornamental kind, badly spoiled by the ladies of Petrograd and cherishing an almost mystical conviction that he had been chosen for some illustrious role.
This government, Lenin said, could never give the people what they wanted. It could not give them peace, because it depended on the subsidy of France and England and was committed to carrying on their war: it had never yet said a word about repudiating the imperialistic policy of annexing Armenia, Galicia and Turkey and capturing Constantinople. It could not give them bread, because the only way to give them bread would be by violating the sanctities of both capital and landlordship, and the bourgeoisie by definition were bound to protect the principle of property. It would not give them freedom, because it was the government of those landlords and capitalists who had always shown themselves afraid of the people. The only potential allies of the Soviet were, first, the small peasants and the other impoverished groups in Russia, and second, the proletariat of the other warring nations.
The revolution was only as yet in its first and transitory phase, and it would still have to wrest the power away from the bourgeoisie. The workers, the peasants and the soldiers must organize all over Russia under the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet. They must do away with the old police and establish a “people’s militia”; and this militia must take upon itself to distribute such food as there was, seeing to it “that every child should have a bottle of good milk and that no adult of a rich family should dare to take extra milk till the children had all been supplied,” and “that the palaces and luxurious homes left by the Tsar and the aristocracy should not stand idle but should provide shelter for the homeless and destitute.” The Soviet, once it was dominant, must declare itself not responsible for treaties concluded by the monarchy or by any bourgeois government, and it must publish all secret treaties; it must propose an immediate armistice to all the nations; it must insist on the liberation of all colonies and dependent peoples; it must propose to the workers of all countries that they overthrow their bourgeois governments and transfer power to workers’ Soviets; it must declare that the billion-dollar debts contracted by the bourgeois governments for the purpose of carrying on the war should be paid by the capitalists themselves: for the workers and peasants to pay interest on these debts “would mean paying tribute to the capitalists over a period of many, many years for having generously permitted the workers to kill one another over the division of spoils by the capitalists.”—And now we must answer the objections of Kautsky, who, writing on the Russian situation, warns us that “two things are absolutely necessary to the proletariat: democracy and socialism.” But precisely what does this mean? Milyukóv would say he wanted democracy; Kerénsky would say he wanted socialism—
But here the fifth letter breaks off. Lenin is on his way to Russia and will not now be obliged to finish it.—The first days he had lain awake nights trying to work out ways to get back. The French and British would not give him a passport for the same reason that the British were to take Trotsky off his ship at Halifax—though Plekhánov and other nationalist socialists were to be sent home in a British ironclad with a guard of torpedo-boats. The truth was that Milyukóv himself had telegraphed the Russian consuls not to repatriate the internationalist socialists. Lenin thought seriously about going in an airplane, but in the morning he knew he couldn’t manage it. Then he decided he would have to get a false passport—if possible, a Swedish one, because a Swede would be least suspect. Unfortunately he knew no Swedish, and he wondered whether he could get enough up to pass himself off at the frontier; then concluded he ought not to take chances, ought not to try to speak at all; and wrote to a comrade in Sweden asking him to find two Swedish deaf mutes who looked like Zinóvyev and him. “You’ll fall asleep,” Krúpskaya told him, “and see Mensheviks in your dreams, and you’ll start swearing and shouting, ‘Scoundrels, scoundrels!’ and give the whole plot away.”
On March 19 there was a meeting of exiles to discuss getting back to Russia. Mártov had worked up a plan for persuading the German government to let them return through Germany in exchange for German and Austrian prisoners. Lenin leaped at the idea, which hadn’t occurred to him; but nobody else wanted to risk it. Mártov himself got cold feet, and it was Lenin who put the scheme through. Appeals to the Swiss government came to nothing, and telegrams to Russia got no answers: the patriots of the Provisional Government did not want the internationalists back, and the socialists themselves were in doubt. “What torture it is for us all,” Lenin wrote to the comrade in Stockholm, “to be sitting here at such a time!” He was sitting himself in his low-ceilinged room writing his Letters from Afar. At last Lenin wired the comrade in Sweden to send somebody to Chkheídze, the Menshevik who was President of the Petrograd Soviet, to appeal to him on the ground that it was his duty to get the stranded Mensheviks back. Other pressure was brought to bear, and permission was finally wired in the form, “Ulyánov must come immediately.” It was arranged with the German ambassador in Switzerland that a party was to be sent through Germany: the Germans were hoping that Lenin would further disorganize the Russian government. It was agreed that while they were passing through Germany, nobody should leave the train or communicate with anyone outside, and that nobody should be allowed to enter without the permission of the Swiss socialist who accompanied them. The German government insisted that Lenin should receive a representative of the trade unions. Lenin told them that if any boarded the train, he would refuse to have anything to do with him.
When Lenin got the news that they could go, he insisted on their taking the next train, which left in a couple of hours. Krúpskaya didn’t think she could get packed, settle her accounts with the landlady and take the books back to the library in time, and she suggested that she might follow later. But Vladímir insisted she must go with him. They left a lot of their things in a box in the event that they might have to come back. Their landlord, who has written an account of their tenancy, had never paid any special attention to them. When Frau Lenin had first come about the room, his wife had not wanted to take her: “You could see that she was the Russian type,” and “she wore a dress that was a little bit short”; but when Lenin appeared himself, he made a better impression. They could see that he had strength in his chest: “My God,” their son used to say, “he’s got a neck like a bull!” For the rest, they were punctual about paying, and Herr Lenin got along well with his wife. “I think the two of them never quarreled. With Frau Lenin it was easy to get along. She was allowed to cook in our kitchen with my wife. We had agreed to let her do that. The two women always got along well together, which is something to wonder at, if one considers that the kitchen was a narrow intestine of a room, and that they had to squeeze by each other to pass. Frau Lenin would have made a good Hausfrau, but she always had her mind on other work.” When Frau Lenin mentioned to Frau Kammerer that she wanted to get to Russia, Frau Kammerer expressed concern about her going into “that insecure country at such an uncertain time.” “You see, Frau Kammerer,” Frau Lenin said, “that’s where I have work to do. Here I have nothing to do.” Her husband said to Herr Kammerer just before he left: “So, Herr Kammerer, now there’s going to be peace.”
In the train that left the morning of April 8 there were thirty Russian exiles, including not a single Menshevik. They were accompanied by the Swiss socialist Platten, who made himself responsible for the trip, and the Polish socialist Radek. Some of the best of the comrades had been horrified by the indiscretion of Lenin in resorting to the aid of the Germans and making the trip through an enemy country. They came to the station and besieged the travelers, begging them not to go. Lenin got into the train without replying a word. In the carriage he found a comrade, who had been suspected of being a stool-pigeon. “The man had made a little too sure of his seat. Suddenly we saw Lenin seize him by the collar and in an incomparably matter-of-fact manner pitch him out on to the platform.”
The Germans overpowered them with meals of a size to which they were far from accustomed, in order to demonstrate to the Russians the abundance of food in Germany. Lenin and Krúpskaya, who had never up to now been in any of the belligerent countries during this later period of the War, were surprised, as they passed through Germany, at the absence of adult men: at the stations, in the fields and the city streets, there were only a few women and children, and boys and girls in their teens. Lenin believed they would be arrested as soon as they arrived in Russia, and he discussed with his comrades a speech of defense which he was preparing on the way. But on the whole he kept much to himself. At Stuttgart, the trade union man got on with a cavalry captain and sat down in a special compartment. He sent his compliments to the Russians through Platten, in the name of the liberation of peoples, and requested an interview. Platten answered that they did not want to talk to him and could not return his greeting. The only person who spoke to the Germans was the four-year-old son of one of the Russians, who stuck his head into the compartment and said in French: “What does the conductor do?”
On the way to Stockholm, Lenin declared that the Central Committee of the Party must positively have an office in Sweden. When they got in, they were met and feted by the Swedish socialist deputies. There was a red flag hung up in the waiting-room and a gigantic Swedish repast. Radek took Lenin to a shop and bought him a new pair of shoes, insisting that he was now a public man and must give some thought to the decency of his appearance; but Lenin drew the line at a new overcoat or extra underwear, declaring that he was not going to Russia to open a tailor’s shop.
They crossed from Sweden to Finland in little Finnish sleighs. Platten and Radek were stopped at the Russian frontier. Lenin sent a telegram to his sisters, announcing that he was arriving Monday night at eleven. In Russianized Finland, Krúpskaya says, “everything was already familiar and dear to us: the wretched third-class cars, the Russian soldiers. It was terribly good.” Here the soldiers were back in the streets again. The station platforms were crowded with soldiers. An elderly man picked the little boy up and fed him some Easter cheese. A comrade leaned out the window and shouted, “Long live the world revolution”; but the soldiers looked around at him puzzled. Lenin got hold of some copies of Právda, which Kámenev and Stalin were editing, and discovered that they were talking mildly of bringing pressure on the Provisional Government to make it open negotiations for peace, and loyally proclaiming that so long as the German army obeyed the Emperor, so long must the Russian soldier “firmly stand at his post, and answer bullet with bullet and shell with shell.”
He was just expressing himself on the subject when the train whistle blew and some soldiers came in. A lieutenant with a pale face walked back and forth past Lenin and Krúpskaya, and when the soldiers had gone to sit in a car that was almost empty, Lenin came and sat down beside them. It turned out that he, too, believed in a war for defense, Lenin told him that they should stop the war altogether, and he, too, grew very pale. Other soldiers came into the car and they crowded around Lenin, some standing up on the benches. They were jammed so tight you could hardly move. “And as the minutes passed,” says Krúpskaya, “they became more attentive, and their faces became more tense.” He cross-examined them about their lives and about the general state of mind in the army: “How? what? why? what proportion?” reports a non-commissioned officer who was there.—Who were their commanders?—Mostly officers with revolutionary views.—Didn’t they have a junior staff? didn’t these take any part in the command? … Why was there so little promotion?—They didn’t have the knowledge of operations, so they stuck to their old staff.—It would be better to promote the non-commissioned officers. The rank and file can trust its own people more than it can the white-handed ones.—He suggested that they ask the conductor to let them into a car with more space so that they could hold something in the nature of a meeting, and he talked to them about his “theses” all night.
Early in the morning, at Beloóstrov, a delegation of Bolsheviks got in, Kámenev and Stalin among them. The moment Lenin laid eyes on Kámenev, whom he had not seen in several years, he burst out: “What’s this you’re writing in Právda? We’ve just seen some numbers, and we gave it to you good and proper!” Lenin’s younger sister María was also there, and a delegation of women workers. The women wanted Krúpskaya to say something, but she found that words had left her. There was a demand for Lenin to speak, and the train-crew, who knew nothing about their passenger except that he was somebody special, picked him up and carried him into the buffet and stood him on a table. A crowd slowly gathered around; then the conductor came up and told the trainmen that it was time to start on. Lenin cut short his speech. The train pulled out of the station. Lenin asked the comrades whether they thought that the group would be arrested as soon as they arrived in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks only smiled.
Two hundred years before, Giambattista Vico, at his books in a far corner of Europe the whole width of the continent away, in asserting that “the social world” was “certainly the work of man,” had refrained from going further and declaring, as Grotius had done, that the social institutions of men could be explained in terms of man alone. Grotius, though one of Vico’s masters, had been a Protestant and a heretic, and his great book had been put on the Index, so that Vico was afraid even to edit it. In the Catholic city of Naples, in the shadow of the Inquisition, Vico had to keep God in his system.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Babeuf, who not only believed that human society had been made by man but who wanted to remake that society, had said in explaining his failure: “We have but to reflect for a moment on the multitude of passions in the ascendancy in this period of corruption we have come to, to convince ourselves that the chances against the possibility of realizing such a project are in the proportion of more than a hundred to one.”
Lenin in 1917, with a remnant of Vico’s God still disguised in the Dialectic, but with no fear of Roman Pope or Protestant Synod, not so sure of the controls of society as the engineer was of the engine that was taking him to Petrograd, yet in a position to calculate the chances with closer accuracy than a hundred to one, stood on the eve of the moment when for the first time in the human exploit the key of a philosophy of history was to fit an historical lock.
If the door that Lenin was to open did not give quite on the prospect he hoped, we must remember that of all the great Marxists he was least in love with prophetic visions, most readily readjusted his prospects. “Theoretical classification doesn’t matter now,” he had just written in Letters from Afar, apropos of whether the immediate measures he contemplated for feeding the Russian people should be regarded as constituting a “dictatorship of the proletariat” or a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the poorest peasantry.” … “It would be indeed a grave error if we tried now to fit the complex, urgent, rapidly-unfolding practical tasks of the revolution into the Procrustean bed of a narrowly conceived ‘theory,’ instead of regarding theory first of all and above all as a guide to action.”
We have watched the attempts of Michelet to relive the recorded events of the past as a coherent artistic creation, and we have seen how the material of history always broke out of the pattern of art. Lenin is now to attempt to impose on the events of the present a pattern of actual direction which will determine the history of the future. We must not wonder if later events are not always amenable to this pattern. The point is that Western man at this moment can be seen to have made some definite progress in mastering the greeds and the fears, the bewilderments, in which he has lived.
The terminal where the trains get in from Finland is today a little shabby stucco station, rubber-gray and tarnished pink, with a long trainshed held up by slim columns that branch where they meet the roof. On one side the trains come in; on the other are the doors to the waiting-rooms, the buffet and the baggage-room. It is a building of a size and design which in any more modern country of Europe would be considered appropriate to a provincial town rather than to the splendors of a capital; but, with its benches rubbed dull with waiting, its ticketed cakes and rolls in glass cases, it is the typical small station of Europe, the same with that sameness of all the useful institutions that have spread everywhere with middle-class enterprise. Today the peasant women with bundles and baskets and big handkerchiefs around their heads sit quietly on the benches.
But at the time of which I am writing there was a restroom reserved for the Tsar, and there the comrades who met him took Lenin, when the train got in very late the night of April 16. On the platform he had been confronted by men come back from prison or exile, who greeted him with tears on their cheeks.
There is an account of Lenin’s reception by N. Sukhánov, a non-party socialist, who was present. Lenin came walking into the Tsar’s room at a speed that was almost running. His coat was unbuttoned; his face looked chilled; he was carrying a great bouquet of roses, with which he had just been presented. When he ran into the Menshevik, Chkheídze, the President of the Petrograd Soviet, he suddenly stopped in his tracks, as if he had come up against an unexpected obstacle. Chkheídze, without dropping the morose expression which he had been wearing while waiting for Lenin, addressed him in the sententious accents of the conventional welcoming speech. “Comrade Lenin,” he said, “in the name of the Petrograd Soviet and of the whole revolution, we welcome you to Russia … but we consider that at the present time the principal task of the revolutionary democracy is to defend our revolution against every kind of attack, both from within and from without… . We hope that you will join us in striving toward this goal.” Lenin stood there, says Sukhánov, “looking as if all this that was happening only a few feet away did not concern him in the least; he glanced from one side to the other; looked the surrounding public over, and even examined the ceiling of the ‘Tsar’s Room,’ while rearranging his bouquet (which harmonized rather badly with his whole figure).” At last, turning away from the committee and not replying directly to the speech, he addressed the crowd beyond them: “Dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers, I am happy to greet in you the victorious Russian revolution, to greet you as the advance guard of the international proletarian army… . The war of imperialist brigandage is the beginning of civil war in Europe… . The hour is not far when, at the summons of our Comrade Karl Liebknecht, the people will turn their weapons against their capitalist exploiters… . In Germany, everything is already in ferment! Not today, but tomorrow, any day, may see the general collapse of European capitalism. The Russian revolution you have accomplished has dealt it the first blow and has opened a new epoch… . Long live the International Social Revolution!”
He left the room. On the platform outside, an officer came up and saluted. Lenin, surprised, returned the salute. The officer gave a command: a detachment of sailors with bayonets stood at attention. The place was being spotted by searchlights and bands were playing the Marseillaise. A great roar of a cheer went up from a crowd that was pressing all around. “What’s this?” Lenin said, stepping back. They told him it was a welcome to Petrograd by the revolutionary workers and sailors: they had been roaring one word—“Lenin.” The sailors presented arms, and their commander reported to Lenin for duty. It was whispered that they wanted him to speak. He walked a few paces and took off his bowler hat. “Comrade sailors,” he said, “I greet you without knowing yet whether or not you have been believing in all the promises of the Provisional Government. But I am convinced that when they talk to you sweetly, when they promise you a lot, they are deceiving you and the whole Russian people. The people needs peace; the people needs bread; the people needs land. And they give you war, hunger, no bread—leave the landlords still on the land… . We must fight for the social revolution, fight to the end, till the complete victory of the proletariat. Long live the world social revolution!”
“How extraordinary it was!” says Sukhánov. “To us, who had been ceaselessly busy, who had been completely sunk in the ordinary vulgar work of the revolution, the current needs, the immediately urgent things that are inconspicuous ‘in history,’ ” a sudden dazzling light seemed to flash. “Lenin’s voice, issuing straight from the railway carriage, was a ‘voice from the outside.’ Upon us, in the midst of the revolution, broke—the truth, by no means dissonant, by no means violating its context, but a new and brusque, a somewhat stunning note.” They were pulled up by the realization “that Lenin was undeniably right, not only in announcing to us that the world socialist revolution had begun, not only in pointing out the indissoluble connection between the world war and the collapse of the imperialist system, but in emphasizing and bringing to the fore the ‘world revolution’ itself, insisting that we must hold our course by it and evaluate in its light all the events of contemporary history.” All this, they could now see, was unquestionable; but did he really understand, they wondered, how these ideas could be made practical use of in the politics of their own revolution? Did he really know the situation in Russia? Never mind for the present. The whole thing was very extraordinary!
The crowd carried Lenin on their shoulders to one of the armored cars that had been drawn up outside. The Provisional Government, who had done their best to bar the streets against the gathering throngs, had forbidden bringing out these cars, which could become formidable factors in a mass demonstration; but this had had no effect on the Bolsheviks. He had to make another speech, standing above the crowd on top of the car. The square in front of the station was jammed: there they were, the textile workers, the metal workers, the peasant soldiers and sailors. There was no electric light in the square, but the searchlights showed red banners with gold lettering.
The armored car started on, leading a procession from the station. The other cars dimmed their lights to bring out the brightness of Lenin’s. In this light he could see the workers’ guard stretching all along both sides of the road. “Those,” says Krúpskaya, “who have not lived through the revolution cannot imagine its grand solemn beauty.” The sailors had been the Kronstadt garrison; the searchlights were from the Peter-Paul Fortress. They were going to the Kshesínskaya Palace, the house of the prima ballerina who had been the Tsar’s mistress, which the Bolsheviks, in a gesture deliberately symbolic and much to the indignation of its inmate, had taken over for party headquarters.
Inside it was all big mirrors, crystal candelabra, frescoed ceilings, satin upholstery, wide staircases and broad white cupboards. A good many of the bronze statues and marble cupids had been broken by the invaders; but the furniture of the ballerina had been carefully put away and replaced by plain chairs, tables and benches, set about, rather sparsely, where they were needed. Only a few Chinese vases, left stranded among the newspapers and manifestoes, were still getting in people’s way. They wanted to give Lenin tea and to treat him to speeches of welcome, but he made them talk about tactics. The palace was surrounded by a crowd who were shouting for him to speak. He went out on a balcony to meet them. It was as if all the stifled rebellion on which the great flat and heavy city had pressed with its pompous façades since the time of those artisans whom Peter the Great had sent to perish in building it in the swamp, had boiled up in a single night. And Lenin, who had talked only at party meetings, before audiences of Marxist students, who had hardly appeared in public in 1905, now spoke to them with a voice of authority that was to pick up all their undirected energy, to command their uncertain confidence, and to swell suddenly to a world-wide resonance.
Yet at first, as they heard him that night—says Sukhánov, who was standing outside—there were signs that they were shocked and frightened. As Lenin’s hoarse accents crackled out over them, with his phrases about the “robber-capitalists … the destruction of the peoples of Europe for the profits of a gang of exploiters … what the defense of the fatherland means is the defense of the capitalists against everybody else”—as these phrases broke over them like shells, the soldiers of the guard of honor itself muttered: “What’s that? What’s he saying? If he’d come down here, we’d show him!” They had, however, Sukhánov says, made no attempt to “show him” when he was talking to them face to face, and Sukhánov never heard of their doing so later.
He went in again, but had to return and make a second speech. When he came back, a meeting was called. In the great ballroom, the long speeches of welcome began to gush afresh. Trotsky says that Lenin endured their flood “like an impatient pedestrian in a doorway, waiting for the rain to stop.” From time to time he glanced at his watch. When he spoke, he talked for two hours and filled his audience with turmoil and terror.
“On the journey here with my comrades,” he said, “I was expecting that they would take us straight from the station to Peter and Paul. We are far from that, it seems. But let us not give up the hope that we shall still not escape that experience.” He swept aside agrarian reform and other legal measures proposed by the Soviet, and declared that the peasants themselves should organize and seize the land without the aid of governmental intervention. In the cities, the armed workers must take over the direction of the factories. He threw overboard the Soviet majority, and hauled the Bolsheviks themselves over the coals. The proletarian revolution was imminent: they must give no countenance to the Provisional Government. “We don’t need any parliamentary republic. We don’t need any bourgeois democracy. We don’t need any government except the Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies!”
The speech, says Sukhánov, for all its “staggering content and its lucid and brilliant eloquence,” conspicuously lacked “one thing: an analysis of the ‘objective premises,’ of the social-economic foundations for socialism in Russia.” But he goes on to say that he “came out on the street feeling as if I had been flogged over the head with a flail. Only one thing was clear: there was no way for me, a non-party man, to go along with Lenin. In delight I drank in the air, freshening now with spring. The morning had all but dawned, the day was already there.” A young Bolshevik naval officer who took part in the meeting writes: “The words of Ilyích laid down a Rubicon between the tactics of yesterday and today,”
But most of the leaders were stunned. There was no discussion of the speech that night; but indignation was to break out the next day when Lenin discharged another broadside at a general meeting of the Social Democrats. “Lenin,” declared one of the Bolsheviks, “has just now presented his candidacy for one throne in Europe which has been vacant thirty years: I mean, the throne of Bakúnin. Lenin in new words is telling the same old story: it is the old discarded notions of primitive anarchism all over again. Lenin the Social Democrat, Lenin the Marxist, Lenin the leader of our militant Social Democracy—this Lenin is no more!” And the left-wing Bogdánov, who sat just under the platform, furiously scolded the audience: “You ought to be ashamed to applaud this nonsense—you cover yourselves with shame! And you call yourselves Marxists!”
The purpose of Lenin’s speech had been to prevent a proposed amalgamation of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; but at that moment it looked as if he was to have the effect of driving the Bolsheviks in the other direction. To many of the Bolsheviks themselves, it seemed, as it had done to his opponents after the rupture of 1903, that Lenin had simply succeeded in getting himself out on a limb.
The night of their arrival, Krúpskaya records, after the reception in the Kshesínskaya Palace, she and Lenin “went home to our people, to Anna Ilyínishna and Mark Timoféyevich.” María Ilyínishna was living with her brother-in-law and sister. Vladímir Ilyích and Nádya were given a separate room; and there they found that Anna’s foster son had hung up over their beds the last words of the Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the World, Unite!”
Krúpskaya says she hardly spoke to Ilyích. “Everything was understood without words.”