The disenchantment of the masses with coalition government made the Bolshevik scenario seem like a plausible response to Russia’s interlocking crises. Ultimately the success of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 was based on the success of the message they sent to the workers, soldiers and peasants. This message can be conveyed in three words and a punctuation mark: ‘Take the power!’ ‘Power’ here translates vlast, a word that could also be translated as ‘sovereign authority’, the ultimate source of legitimacy and decision-making. Everybody in Russia realized that the key question that confronted the country after the abdication of the tsar was the identity of the vlast. Everybody realized that only a tverdaia vlast, a strong and tough-minded sovereign authority, could effectively respond to the multiple crises buffeting Russian society.
The Bolsheviks insisted that ‘the nature of the class that holds the vlast decides everything’ – and they meant everything.25 They told the Russian narod that as long as the vlast was controlled by their class enemies – the landowner, the capitalist, the ‘bourgeois’ in whatever form – the imperialist war would continue, the economic collapse would continue, the postponement of radical land reform would continue. Troubles would cease only when the workers as a class took the power and fulfilled their historical mission of leading the narod to revolutionary victory.
Lenin argued that a proletarian vlast was necessary for a strong and effective state. According to a common misunderstanding of Lenin’s message in 1917, however, Lenin advanced the semi-anarchist slogan of ‘smash the state!’ This distortion of Lenin’s message is taken from State and Revolution, Lenin’s most famous book from 1917. This production is based on reading done in early 1917 before the outbreak of revolution in Russia and published in 1918 and it strikingly lacks the tang of Russia during the year of revolution. It is pitched at an abstract level of socialist revolution in general and consists mainly of angry polemics about the meaning of various passages from Marx and Engels. The phrase ‘smash the state’ is shorthand for the following slogan: ‘Smash the bourgeois state and replace it with a strong and effective proletarian state.’ The bourgeois state apparatus is smashed when (a) it cannot be used to repress the revolution and (b) it is thoroughly democratized. The proletarian state is not smashed – rather, it gradually dies out as society is transformed.
Lenin wanted to smash the bourgeois state apparatus, but he had a very different view of the bourgeois economic apparatus. This apparatus, perfected and given vast powers by the wartime state, must be carefully preserved and used as a ready-made tool by the revolutionary class. A perfect symbol for the imperialist economic apparatus was Germany’s Waffen- und Munitionsbeschaffungsamt (Weapons and Ammunition Supply Department), or WUMBA for short. Lenin’s vision of socialist revolution can be paraphrased as ‘WUMBA for the people’. As he wrote in December 1916:
The war has proved with special clarity and also in practical terms the truth that, before the war, was repeated by all the vozhdi of socialism that have now gone over to the bourgeoisie: contemporary capitalist society, especially in the advanced countries, has fully matured for the transition to socialism.
If, for instance, Germany can direct the economic life of 66 million people from a single centre, and strain the energies of the narod to wage a predatory war in the interests of 100 or 200 financial magnates or aristocrats, the monarchy, etc., then the same can be done, in the interests of nine-tenths of the population, by the non-propertied masses, if their struggle is directed by the purposive workers, liberated from social-imperialist and social-pacifist influence… Expropriate the banks and, relying on the masses, carry out in their interests the very same thing WUMBA is carrying out in Germany!26
Lenin’s response to the crises of 1917 is best expressed, not by State and Revolution, but by two pamphlets from autumn 1917, one on the economic crisis (The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Deal with It) and the other on the political crisis (Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?).27 Here Lenin sets out at length the programme I have summarized as ‘Take the power!’ and ‘WUMBA for the people’. These slogans were intertwined. A key theme in Lenin’s rhetoric is emblazoned in a chapter title from one of Lenin’s pamphlets: ‘Control Measures Are Known to All and Easy to Take’.28 Land to the peasant, extensive economic regulation, peace diplomacy – these policies were all supported by the political rivals of the Bolsheviks, at least officially. And so, Lenin insisted, the only reason (and Lenin literally meant only) that these policies were not carried out was the inherent class nature of the bourgeois vlast.
Lenin’s pamphlets from autumn 1917 also contain the famous and revealing image of the cook administering the state. The Russian word used by Lenin – kukarkha, a female cook – makes clear that he is alluding to the notorious circular of the tsarist education official cited in chapter One that discouraged the education of the children of cooks and similar persons:
We are not utopians. We know that an unskilled workman or a kukharka is not capable of stepping immediately into the administration of the state. In this we agree with the [liberal] Kadets, with Breshkovskaya, and with Tsereteli [leading figures in the SR and Menshevik parties respectively]. But we are different from these citizens in that we demand an immediate break with the prejudice that that only the rich, or chinovniki [bureaucrats] from rich families, are in a position to administer the state, and to carry out the ordinary, day-to-day work of administration.29
Lenin is here truly Ilich, that is, son of Ilya, the educational reformer who fought within the tsarist system to make schools as widely available as possible.
Thus Lenin’s heroic scenario gave the Bolsheviks a programme that struck many as a plausible response to the accelerating crisis – and struck others as unmitigated demagoguery. The resulting polarization first came to a head in July 1917, when a popular demonstration against the Provisional Government almost turned into an attempted coup d’état. Lenin did not support any attempt at a coup at this time because he felt that the project of a government based on the soviets did not yet have strong majority support. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik party was implicated and orders were issued for the arrest of Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky (who had now joined the Bolshevik party) and other leaders. Lenin and Zinoviev evaded arrest and holed up in a hut near Lake Razliv in Finland, not too far from Petrograd (Krupskaya remained in Petrograd). Lenin had once more returned to the underground.