fn6 Many of the workers who came to greet Lenin may have turned up on the expectation of free beer. Welcoming receptions for returning party leaders had become a regular feature of life in the capital since the revolution, and for many of the workers they had become a pretext for a street party. This was particularly relevant in the case of Lenin’s return from exile, since it coincided with the Easter holiday.
fn7 Trotsky had reached the same conclusions, and it is possible that his theory of the ‘permanent revolution’ partly influenced the April Theses.
fn8 Gorbachev had a similar handicap.
fn9 Trotsky had encouraged the declaration. Speaking in the Kronstadt Soviet on 14 May he had said that what was good for Kronstadt would later be good for any other town: ‘You are ahead and the rest have fallen behind.’ Trotsky, however, was not yet a member of the Bolshevik Party.
fn10 Popular legend had it that the Anarchists had turned the villa into a madhouse, where orgies, sinister plots and witches’ sabbaths were held, but when the Procurator arrived he found it in perfect order with part of the garden used as a crèche for the workers’ children.
Chapter 10
fn1 The leaders of the Soviet and the Provisional Government were deceived by the fact that the soldiers, like the common people, expressed extreme hostility to everything ‘German’. But the concept of ‘German’ was for the soldiers a general symbol of everything they hated — the Empress, the treasonable tsarist government, the war and all foreigners — rather than the German soldiers (for whom they often expressed sympathy) on the other side of the front line.
fn2 Indeed, by blaming ‘the Bolsheviks’ for every military defeat, the commanders gave the impression that the Bolsheviks were much more influential than they actually were, and this had the effect of making the Bolsheviks even more attractive to the mass of the soldiers.
fn3 His resignation was not formally announced until 7 July.
fn4 Formerly Tsarskoe Selo.
fn5 His daughter, Nadezhda, would later marry Stalin.
fn6 Dmitrii Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), poet, literary and religious philosopher; Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945), writer and essayist, married to Merezhkovsky; Dmitrii Filosofov (1872–1940), literary critic and co-inhabitant with the Merezhkovskys; Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938), founder, along with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858–1943), of the Moscow Arts Theatre.
fn7 The ‘Directors’, apart from Kerensky, were: Tereshchenko (Foreign Affairs); General Verkhovsky (War); Admiral Verderevsky (Marine); and A. M. Nikitin (Posts and Telegraphs).
fn8 It had largely been personal rivalry that prevented Trotsky from joining the Bolshevik Party earlier, despite the absence of any real ideological differences between himself and Lenin during 1917. He could not bring himself to surrender to ‘Lenin’s party’ — a party which he had been so critical of in the past. As Lenin once replied when asked what still kept him and Trotsky apart: ‘Now don’t you know? Ambition, ambition, ambition.’ (Balabanoff, My Life, 175–6.)
fn9 The Mensheviks and SRs only had minority leftwing factions in favour of a Soviet government, of which more here.
fn10 This was roughly the import of the Bolshevik Decree on Workers’ Control passed on 14 November.
fn11 It is interesting how many Marxists of Deutscher’s generation (E. H. Carr immediately comes to mind) were inclined to see the Western democratic system as inherently authoritarian and the Soviet regime as inherently democratic. For Deutscher’s comments on Lenin’s ‘Soviet constitutionalism’ see The Prophet Armed, 290–1.
fn12 During the final days before 25 October Lenin stressed that a military-style coup was bound to succeed, even if only a very small number of disciplined fighters joined it, because Kerensky’s forces were so weak.
fn13 The Bolshevik Party Conference, scheduled for 17 October, was mysteriously cancelled at about this time — no doubt also on Lenin’s insistence. The mood of the party rank and file suggested that it would express powerful opposition to the idea of an armed insurrection. During the following days, Kamenev and Zinoviev spearheaded their opposition to the insurrection with a call for the Party Conference to be convened. We still lack the crucial archival evidence to tell the full story of this internal party struggle. (On this see Rabinowitch, ‘Bol’sheviki’, 119–20.)
Chapter 11
fn1 So much for the idea that Soviet power was always exported from Russia.
fn2 When Kerensky fled the capital on 25 October he left a small fortune in his bank account: the modest size of his last withdrawal, on 24 October, suggests that even at this final hour he was not expecting to be overthrown. His account book is in GARF, f. 1807, op. 1, d. 452.
fn3 It was only under Stalin, when the Bolsheviks began to call themselves ‘Ministers’, that they reverted back to suits.
fn4 The exact ‘historic spot’ where the Aurora was anchored happened to be by a pretty little chapel next to the Nikolaevsky Bridge. Several years later it was decided that this Christian link with the starting place of the Great October Socialist Revolution should be removed — and so the Bolsheviks turned the chapel into a public lavatory!
fn5 During the 1930s, when the party carried out a survey of the Red Guard veterans of October, 12 per cent of those responding claimed to have participated in the storming of the palace. On this calculation, 46,000 people would have been involved in the assault (Startsev, Ocherki, 275). It would be interesting to know the results of a similar survey of the Muscovite intelligentsia during the defence of the parliament building in August 1991. The number of people claiming to have been there, alongside Yeltsin on the tank, would probably run into the hundreds of thousands.
fn6 The Declaration of the Rights of the Nations of Russia, proclaimed on 2 November, granted the non-Russian peoples full rights of self-determination, including the freedom to separate from Russia and form an independent state. Finland was the first to take advantage of this, declaring itself independent on 23 November 1917. It was followed by Lithuania (28 November), Latvia (30 December), the Ukraine (9 January 1918), Estonia (24 February), Transcaucasia (22 April) and Poland (3 November).
fn7 The Right SRs had called a Second Congress of Peasant Soviets to rally support against the Bolshevik regime, but it was swamped by leftwing delegates from the soldiers’ committees and the lower-level Soviet organizations, causing the Right SRs to walk out in protest. The leftwing leaders then passed a resolution to merge this ‘Extraordinary’ Congress with the All-Russian Soviet Executive.
fn8 Its full name was the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.
fn9 According to Lozovsky, the Bolshevik trade unionist who had resigned from Sovnarkom on 4 November, the ‘hero-worship’ of Lenin had become a basic expectation of party discipline. See his open letter of protest against the dictatorial methods of the Leninist wing in Novaia zhizn’, 4 November 1917.
fn10 To the Western mind, it may seem strange that the Bolsheviks should have chosen to call their main peasant newspaper The Peasant Poor (Krest’ianskaia Bednota). But in fact it was a brilliant example of their propaganda. The Russian peasant saw himself as poor, and, unlike the peasants of the Protestant West, saw nothing shameful in being poor.
fn11 Rightwing pamphleteers before the war used the image of the spider to depict the Jew ‘sucking the blood of the harmless flies (the Russian people) it has caught in its web’ (Engelstein, Keys, 322–3).