His political prospects had not looked bright before the Great War. He could exert influence over Bolsheviks in face-to-face sessions, but his dominance evaporated whenever they returned to clandestine activity in Russia; and his call in 1914 for the military defeat of his native country lost him further support in his faction. But he held out for his opinions: ‘And so this is my fate. One campaign of struggle after another — against political idiocies, vulgarities, opportunism, etc.’18 The self-inflicted loneliness of his campaigns cultivated in him an inner strength which served him handsomely when the Romanov dynasty fell in February 1917. He was also older than any other leading Bolshevik, being aged forty-seven years while Central Committee members on average were eleven years younger.19 He was cleverer than all of them, including even Trotski. And while lacking any outward vanity, he was convinced that he was a man of destiny and that his tutelage of the Bolsheviks was essential for the inception of the socialist order.20
His rise to prominence was effected with minimal technological resources. The central party newspaper Pravda carried no photographs and had a print-run that did not usually exceed 90,000.21Such few cinemas as Russia possessed had shown newsreels not of Lenin but of Alexander Kerenski. Nevertheless he adapted well to the open political environment. His ability to rouse a crowd was such that adversaries recorded that he could make the hairs stand on the back of their necks with excitement. He also contrived to identify himself with ordinary working people by giving up his Homburg in favour of a workman’s cap. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were becoming synonyms in the minds of those Russians who followed contemporary politics.22
The mass media became freely available to him after the October Revolution. The Decree on Land had a large impact on opinion amidst the peasantry, and became popularly known as Lenin’s Decree.23 But Bolsheviks were extremely small in number; and most of the very few village ‘soviets’ were really communes under a different name.24 Moreover, the usual way for the peasantry to hear that the October Revolution had occurred in Petrograd was not through Pravda but from the accounts of soldiers who had left the Eastern front and the city garrison to return to their families and get a share of the land that was about to be redistributed. In the towns the profile of the Bolshevik party was much higher. Already having won majorities in dozens of urban soviets before the Provisional Government’s overthrow, Bolsheviks spread their rule across central, northern and south-eastern Russia; and their success was repeated in major industrial centres in the borderlands. Baku in Azerbaijan and Kharkov in Ukraine were notable examples.25
For the most part, the Bolsheviks came to power locally by means of local resources. Sovnarkom sent auxiliary armed units to assist the transfer of authority in Moscow; but elsewhere this was typically unnecessary. In Ivanovo the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries put up little resistance, and the Bolsheviks celebrated Sovnarkom’s establishment with a rendition of the Internationale. In Saratov there was fighting, but it lasted less than a day. On assuming power, the Bolsheviks were joyful and expectant: ‘Our commune is the start of the worldwide commune. We as leaders take full responsibility and fear nothing.’26
And yet the October Revolution was not yet secure. The political base of the Sovnarkom was exceedingly narrow: it did not include the Mensheviks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries or even the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries; it failed to embrace all Bolsheviks after the walk-out of the three People’s Commissars. Yet Lenin, backed by Trotski and Sverdlov, did not flinch. Indeed he seemed to grow in confidence as difficulties increased. The man was an irrepressible leader. Without compunction he gave unrestrained authority to the Extraordinary Commission and their chairman, Felix Dzierżyński. Initially Dzierżyński refrained from executing politicians hostile to Bolshevism; his victims were mainly fraudsters and other criminals. But the sword of the Revolution was being sharpened for arbitrary use at the regime’s demand. Lenin had no intention of casually losing the power he had won for his party.
Steadily the Bolshevik central leaders who had walked out on him and Trotski returned to their posts; and in mid-December the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, cheered by the Decree on Land and convinced that their political duty lay with the October Revolution, agreed to become partners of the Bolsheviks in Sovnarkom. As Left Socialist-Revolutionaries entered the People’s Commissariats, a two-party coalition was put in place.
Yet the question remained: what was to happen about the Constituent Assembly? Lenin had suggested to Sverdlov in the course of the October seizure of power in the capital that the elections should not go ahead.27 But Bolshevik party propaganda had played heavily upon the necessity of a democratically-chosen government. Lenin himself had jibed that Kerenski would find endless pretexts to postpone the elections and that, under the Bolsheviks, the overwhelming majority of society would rally to their cause.28 And so Lenin’s last-minute doubts about the Constituent Assembly were ignored. The final polling arrangements were made by November and were put to use in the first more or less free parliamentary elections in the country’s history. (They were to remain the only such elections in Russia until 1993.) To the horror of Sverdlov, who had dissuaded Lenin from banning the elections, the Bolsheviks gained only a quarter of the votes cast while the Socialist-Revolutionaries obtained thirty-seven per cent.29
The Sovnarkom coalition reacted ruthlessly: if the people failed to perceive where their best interests lay, then they had to be protected against themselves. The Constituent Assembly met on 5 January 1918 in the Tauride Palace. The Socialist-Revolutionary Viktor Chernov made a ringing denunciation of Bolshevism and asserted his own party’s commitment to parliamentary democracy, peace and the transfer of land to the peasants. But he had more words than guns. The custodian of the building, the anarchist Zheleznyakov, abruptly announced: ‘The guard is tired!’ The deputies to the Assembly were told to leave and a demonstration held in support of the elections was fired upon by troops loyal to Sovnarkom. The doors of the Constituent Assembly were closed, never to be reopened.
The handful of garrison soldiers, Red Guards and off-duty sailors who applied this violence could crush opposition in the capital, but were less impressive elsewhere. Contingents were sent from Petrograd and Moscow to Ukraine where the local government, the Rada, refused to accept the writ of Sovnarkom. Tens of thousands of armed fighters reached Kiev. The struggle was scrappy, and it took until late January 1918 before Kiev was occupied by the Bolshevik-led forces.
All this was gleefully noted by the German and Austrian high commands. Negotiations were held at Brest-Litovsk, the town nearest the trenches of the Eastern front’s northern sector on 14 November, and a truce was soon agreed. The Soviet government expected this to produce an interlude for socialist revolutions to break out in central Europe. Confident that the ‘imperialist war’ was about to end, Lenin and his colleagues issued orders for the Russian armies to be demobilized. To a large extent they were merely giving retrospective sanction to desertions. Ludendorff and Hindenburg at any rate were delighted; for it was German policy to seek Russia’s dissolution as a military power by political means. Inadvertently the Bolsheviks had performed this function brilliantly. Now the Bolsheviks, too, had to pay a price: in December 1917 the German negotiators at Brest-Litovsk delivered an ultimatum to the effect that Sovnarkom should allow national self-determination to the borderlands and cease to claim sovereignty over them.