Frequently Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee declared that the new administration intended to facilitate mass political participation. A revolution for and by the people was anticipated. Workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors were to take direct action. ‘Soviet power’ was to be established on their own initiative. But Lenin’s will to summon the people to liberate themselves was accompanied by a determination to impose central state authority. On 26 October he had issued a Decree on the Press, which enabled him to close down any newspapers publishing materials inimical to the decisions of the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.11 Repressive measures were given emphasis. Lenin pointed out that the authorities lacked a special agency to deal with sabotage and counter-revolutionary activity; and on 7 December, Sovnarkom at his instigation formed the so-called Extraordinary Commission (or Cheka). Its task of eliminating opposition to the October Revolution was kept vague and extensive: no inhibition was to deter this forerunner of the dreaded NKVD and KGB.12
Nor did Lenin forget that the tsars had ruled not a nation-state but an empire. Following up his early announcement on national self-determination, he offered complete independence to Finland and confirmed the Provisional Government’s similar proposal for German-occupied Poland. This was done in the hope that Soviet revolutionary republics would quickly be established by the Finns and the Poles, leading to their voluntary reabsorption in the same multinational state as Russia. Lenin believed that eventually this state would cover the continent.13 His objective was the construction of a pan-European socialist state. Meanwhile Lenin and his colleague Iosif Stalin, People’s Commissar for Nationalities, aimed to retain the remainder of the former empire intact; and on 3 November they jointly published a Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, confirming the abolition of all national and ethnic privileges and calling for the formation of a ‘voluntary and honourable union’. The right of secession was confirmed for the various nations involved.14
The Allied ambassadors in Petrograd did not know whether to laugh or cry. How could such upstarts pretend to a role in global politics? Was it not true that Lenin had spent more time in Swiss libraries than Russian factories? Was he not an impractical intellectual who would drown in a pool of practical difficulties once he actually wielded power? And were not his colleagues just as ineffectual?
It was true that not only the party’s central figures but also its provincial leaders were entirely inexperienced in government. Marx’s Das Kapital was their primer, which was studied by several of them in the prison cells of Nicholas II. Few of them had professional employment in private or governmental bodies before 1917.An oddity was Lev Krasin, a veteran Bolshevik still working for the Siemens Company at the time of the October Revolution. He was later to be appointed People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade. The rest of them were different. Most leading members of the party had spent their adult life on the run from the Okhrana. They had organized small revolutionary groups, issued proclamations and joined in strikes and demonstrations. They had studied and written socialist theory. Public life, out in the gaze of society, was a new experience for them as their days of political obscurity and untestable theorizing came to an end.
Lenin was the fastest at adjusting to the change. Until 1917 he had been an obscure Russian emigrant living mainly in Switzerland. Insofar as he had a reputation in Europe, it was not flattering; for he was known as a trouble-maker who had brought schism to the Marxists of the Russian Empire. Even many Bolsheviks were annoyed by him. His supporters were constantly asking him to spend less time on polemics and more time on making a real revolution, and alleged that his head was made giddy with all that Alpine air.
But, for Lenin, there were great questions at stake in almost any small matter. He had been involved in an unending line of controversies since becoming a revolutionary as a student at Kazan University. Born in the provincial town of Simbirsk in 1870, his real name was Vladimir Ulyanov. ‘Lenin’ was a pseudonym assumed years after he became a political activist. His background was a mixture of Jewish, German and Kalmyk as well as Russian elements. In the empire of the Romanovs this was not a unique combination. Nor was his father wholly unusual as a man of humble social origins in rising to the rank of province schools inspector (which automatically conferred hereditary nobility upon him and his heirs). This was a period of rapid educational expansion. The Ulyanovs were characteristic beneficiaries of the reforms which followed the Emancipation Edict.
The most extraordinary thing about the family, indeed, was the participation of Vladimir’s older brother Alexander in a conspiracy to assassinate Emperor Alexander III in 1887. The attempt failed, but Alexander Ulyanov was found out and hanged. A family which had dutifully made the best of the cultural opportunities available suddenly became subject to the police’s intense suspicion.
Lenin shared his brother’s rebelliousness, and was expelled from Kazan University as a student trouble-maker. He proceeded to take a first-class honours degree as an external student at St Petersburg University in 1891; but it was Marxism that enthralled him. He joined intellectual dissenters first in Samara and then in St Petersburg. The police caught him, and he was exiled to Siberia. There he wrote a book on the development of capitalism in Russia, which was published legally in 1899. He was released in 1900, and went into emigration in the following year. Young as he was, he had pretty definite notions about what his party — the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party — needed organizationally. What Is To Be Done?, printed in Russian in Munich in 1902, asserted the case for discipline, hierarchy and centralism; and it provoked the criticism that such a book owed more to the terrorists of Russian agrarian socialism than to conventional contemporary Marxism.
In 1903 the dispute over the booklet led the émigrés to set up separate factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. As Bolshevik leader he never lost the common touch. He personally met comrades arriving off the trains from Russia; and he volunteered to help fellow party member Nikolai Valentinov with his part-time job to trundle a customer’s belongings by handcart from one side of Geneva to another.15Doubtless he liked subordinate admirers better than rivals; all colleagues who rivalled his intellectual stature eventually walked out on him. Nor was his abrasiveness to everyone’s taste. An acquaintance likened him to ‘a schoolteacher from Småland about to lay into the priest with whom he had fallen out’.16 But when Lenin returned to Russia in the near-revolution of 1905–6, he showed that he could temper his fractiousness with tactical flexibility, even to the point of collaborating again with the Mensheviks.
The Okhrana’s offensive against the revolutionaries drove him back to Switzerland in 1907, and for the next decade he resumed his schismatic, doctrinaire ways. Acolytes like Lev Kamenev, Iosif Stalin and Grigori Zinoviev were attracted to him; but even Stalin called his disputations about epistemology in 1908–9 a storm in a tea-cup. Moreover, Lenin struggled against the foundation of a legal workers’ newspaper in St Petersburg. Spurning the chance to influence the labour movement in Russia on a daily basis, he preferred to engage in polemics in the journals of Marxist political and economic theory.17