*Ruzskii was arrested by the Bolsheviks in September 1918 while living in retirement in the North Caucasian city of Piatigorsk, and murdered, along with 136 other victims of terror, the following month. He was very anxious to clear his name of charges that he had pressured Nicholas to abdicate. (Alexandra called him “Judas” in a letter to Nicholas of March 3, 1917: KA, No. 4,1923, 219.) His story, as recounted by S. N. Vilchkovskii, is in RL, No. 3 (1922), 161–86.
*After the Revolution, in emigration, he would proclaim himself successor to the Russian throne.
*“Riding school” apparently refers to the royal manège in Paris, the seat of the National Assembly during the Revolution, notorious for its unruly proceedings.
*A. Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god, III (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), 173. The secrecy may have been due to embarrassment that so many Ispolkom members were non-Russians (Georgians, Jews, Latvians, Poles, Lithuanians, etc.): V. B. Stankevich, Vospominaniia, 1914–1919 g. (Berlin, 1920), 86.
†B. Ia. Nalivaiskii, ed., Petrogradskii Sovet Rabochikh i Soldatskikh Deputatov: Protokoly Zasedanii Ispolnitel’nogo Komiteta i Biuro Ispolnitel’nogo Komiteta (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925), 59. According to Marc Ferro, Des Soviets au Communisme Bureaucratique (Paris, 1980), 36, the resolution was moved by Shliapnikov. It was by this procedure that in May, on his return from the United States, Leon Trotsky would receive a seat on the Ispolkom.
*N. Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, I (Berlin-Petersburg-Moscow, 1922), 255–56. Revoliutsiia, I, 49; T. Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (Seattle-London, 1981) 410–12. The minority consisted of members of the Jewish Bund augmented by some Mensheviks and Mezhraiontsy.
*When on March 18 General Ruzskii asked Rodzianko to explain the chain of authority in the new government, Rodzianko answered that the Provisional Government had been appointed by the Provisional Committee of the Duma, which retained control over its actions and ministerial appointments (RL, No. 3, 1922, 158–59). Since the Provisional Committee had ceased to function by then, this explanation was either delusion or deception.
*According to S. P. Melgunov, Martovskie dni (Paris, 1961), 107, the term “Provisional Government” was not officially used until March 10.
*Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 148, gives the total casualties as 1,315. Avdeev’s figures, which seem more accurate, are 1,443 victims, of which 168 or 169 were killed or died from wounds: 11 policemen, 70 military personnel, 22 workers, 5 students, and 60 others, 5 of them children (Revoliutsiia, I, in).
†In this picture (Plate 44) most of the military appear to wear officer’s uniforms.
*Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 145. The message to Ivanov was sent at Alekseev’s request: KA, No. 2/21 (1927), 31.
*Ivanov made his way to Tsarskoe Selo, where he met with the Empress (Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 148), but his men were stopped at the approaches to Petrograd at Luga by mutinous troops and dissuaded from proceeding with their mission: RL, No. 3 (1922), 126.
†In fact, the “people” were nowhere clamoring for the Tsarevich to assume the throne under a regency: this was wishful thinking on the part of Duma politicians.
*P. E. Shchegolev, ed., Otrechenie Nikolaia II (Leningrad, 1927), 203–5. Admiral A. I. Nepenin, commander of the Baltic Fleet, concurred as well. His telegram came late: he himself was murdered two days later by sailors: N. de Basily, Diplomat of Imperial Russia, 1903–1917: Memoirs (Stanford, Calif., 1973), 121, and RL, No. 3 (1922), 143–44. There was no response from Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who commanded the Black Sea Fleet.
*Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 159. Later, when he returned to Tsarskoe, Nicholas showed Count Benckendorff the cables from the front commanders to explain his decision to abdicate: P. K. Benckendorff, Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo (London, 1927), 44–45.
*Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 171. According to Voeikov (Padenie, III, 79), Nicholas chose to go to Mogilev rather than proceed directly to Tsarskoe because the road to there was still barred.
*At that time, the Soviet transferred to the Smolnyi Institute, which had housed a finishing school for aristocratic girls.
*Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 191; G. Buchanan, My Mission to Russia, II (Boston, 1923), 104–5. Miliukov withheld the King’s message from Nicholas.
* As described in Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 198, from the words of Mstislavskii. Benckendorff, who witnessed the scene, says that Mstislavskii was content to see the ex-Tsar pass in the corridor: Benckendorff, Last Days, 49–50.
*Although the daughter of the British Ambassador has gone to great lengths to depict her father as highly upset by his government’s action (Meriel Buchanan, The Dissolution of an Empire, London, 1932, 196–98), English archives show that he endorsed it: Kenneth Rose, King George V (London, 1983), 214.
PART TWO
The Bolsheviks Conquer Russia
Russia has been conquered by the Bolsheviks.…
—Lenin, March 1918
[The Bolshevik Party] set itself the task of overthrowing the world.
—Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed
9
Lenin and the Origins of Bolshevism
He will go far, for he believes all he says.
—Mirabeau of Robespierre
One need not believe that history is made by “great men” to appreciate the immense importance of Lenin for the Russian Revolution and the regime that issued from it. It is not only that the power which he accumulated allowed Lenin to exert a decisive influence on the course of events but also that the regime which he established in October 1917 institutionalized, as it were, his personality. The Bolshevik Party was Lenin’s creation: as its founder, he conceived it in his own image and, overcoming all opposition from within and without, kept it on the course he had charted. The same party, on seizing power in October 1917, promptly eliminated all rival parties and organizations to become Russia’s exclusive source of political authority. Communist Russia, therefore, has been from the beginning to an unusual extent a reflection of the mind and psyche of one man: his biography and its history are uniquely fused.
Although few historical figures have been so much written about, authentic information on Lenin is sparse. Lenin was so unwilling to distinguish himself from his cause or even to concede that he had an existence separate from it that he left almost no autobiographical data: his life, as he conceived it, was at one with the party’s. In his own eyes and in the eyes of his associates he had only a public personality. Such individual traits as are attributed to him in the Communist literature are the standard virtues of hagiography: self-denying devotion to the cause, modesty, self-discipline, generosity.
Least known is Lenin’s formative period. The entire corpus of writings for the first twenty-three years of his life consists of a mere twenty items, nearly all of them petitions, certificates, and other official documents.1 There are no letters, diaries, or essays such as one would expect from a young intellectual. Either such materials do not exist or, as is more likely, they are secreted in Soviet archives because their release would reveal a young Lenin very different from the one portrayed in the official literature.* In either event, the biographer has very little to go on in attempting to reconstruct Lenin’s intellectual and psychic development during the period (roughly 1887–93) when he evolved from an ordinary youth without political commitments or even interests into a fanatical revolutionary. Such evidence as we possess is largely circumstantial; much of it rests on negative knowledge—that is, what Lenin failed to do given his opportunities. Reconstructing the young Lenin requires a conscientious effort to peel off layers of distorting varnish deposited on his image by years of institutionalized cult.†