The government, strengthened by Kerensky’s growing popularity, decided to destroy the Bolsheviks. Despite Stalin’s pleading, Justice Minister Pereverzev published evidence of Lenin’s German financial backing. Many of the soldiers were swayed by this talk of treason.
At dawn on 5 July, government troops raided Pravda, just missing Lenin who was smuggled out by Stalin only minutes earlier. Overnight, howitzers and eight armoured cars took up positions to storm the Kseshinskaya Mansion, but the Bolsheviks had no will to defend their strongholds. Stalin speeded to the Bolshevik stronghold, the Peter and Paul Fortress, “where I managed to persuade the sailors not to accept battle;” shuttled between the soldiers and the Kseshinskaya Mansion to avoid a massacre; then asked Chkheidze and Tsereteli at the Taurida Palace for a guarantee of no bloodshed if the Bolsheviks surrendered the mansion and the fortress. Tsereteli agreed: “Stalin gave me a puzzled look and left.” On 6 July, the 500 Bolsheviks inside the ballerina’s mansion gave themselves up. Then Stalin returned to the Peter and Paul Fortress to oversee its surrender.
Lenin appreciated Stalin’s tireless troubleshooting. But, “as a result of their disastrous failure,” wrote John Reed, a socialist journalist from Portland, Oregon, “public opinion turned against them. Their leaderless hordes slunk back into the Vyborg Quarter, followed by a savage hunt of the Bolsheviki.”
The thirty-five-year-old Kerensky, the only man who could unite left and right, assumed the premiership. Ironically the son of Lenin’s headmaster in Simbirsk, he was a speaker of “burning intensity”—“the sudden fits and starts, the twitching of lips and the somnambulistic deliberation of his gestures make him like one possessed.” Kerensky’s Justice Minister ordered Lenin’s arrest.[166]
The Bolsheviks were on the verge of destruction. Lenin was on the run. Stalin took charge of his safety.{238}
40. 1917 Autumn: Soso and Nadya
Stalin moved Lenin five times in three days as Kerensky hunted down the Old Man. Trotsky and Kamenev were arrested, but Lenin, escorted by Stalin, returned to the underground. The police raided the house of Lenin’s sister. Krupskaya hastened to Stalin’s and Molotov’s place on Shirokaya Street to learn where Lenin was.
On the night of 6 July, Stalin rustled Lenin to his fifth hiding-place, the Alliluyevs’ smart new apartment, at Tenth Rozhdestvenskaya Street, where they had a uniformed doorman and a maid.
“Show me all the exits and entrances,” said Lenin on arrival, even checking the attic. “We gave him Stalin’s room,” said Olga. Lenin was surprisingly cheerful, staying for four tense days. Anna Alliluyeva came home to find her apartment full of unknown, nervous people. “I immediately recognized the person to whom I was first introduced.” Lenin sat on the sofa “in his shirtsleeves, wearing a waistcoat and a light-coloured shirt with a tie.” In the “unbearably stuffy” room, Lenin cross-examined her: what had she seen on the streets?
“They are saying you’ve run off to Kronstadt and you were hiding on a minesweeper.”
“Ha-ha-ha!” laughed Lenin with “infectious gaiety.” Then he asked Stalin and the others: “What do you think, comrades?”
Lenin spent his days writing. Stalin visited daily. He quietly took the political pulse at the Taurida Palace, where he bumped into Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Both were worried that “many prominent Bolsheviks took the view that Lenin shouldn’t hide but should appear [to stand trial]. Together,” wrote Sergo, “we went to see Lenin.” The government demanded Lenin’s surrender. At the Alliluyevs’, Lenin, Stalin, Sergo, Krupskaya and Lenin’s sister Maria debated what to do.
Lenin at first favoured surrender. Stalin disagreed. He initially believed that Lenin and Zinoviev should wait and hand themselves in only when their safety could be guaranteed, but his visit to the Taurida convinced him that this was impossible. “The Junkers[167] want to take you to prison,” he warned, “but they’ll kill you on the way.” Stasova arrived to report that more evidence of Lenin’s treason was being published. “A strong shudder ran over his face and [Lenin] declared with the utmost determination that he would have to go to jail” to clear his name at a trial.
“Let’s say goodbye,” Lenin said to Krupskaya. “We may never see each other again.”
Stalin and Sergo were despatched back to the Taurida Palace to seek a “guarantee that Illich wouldn’t be lynched by the Junkers.” The Mensheviks, Stalin reported back, “replied that they couldn’t say what will happen.”
Stalin and Sergo were now sure that Lenin would be murdered if he surrendered. “Stalin and the others urged Illich not to appear,” says Krupskaya. “Stalin convinced him and… saved his life.” Stalin was right: an ex—Duma member, V. N. Polovtiev, encountered the officer assigned to arrest Lenin. “How should I deliver this gentleman, Lenin?” the officer asked. “Whole or in pieces?”
The debate went back and forth. Suddenly Sergo drew an imaginary dagger and shouted like a Georgian bandit: “I’ll slice up anyone who wants Illich to be arrested!”
That seemed to clinch it. Lenin had to be smuggled out of Petrograd: Stalin “undertook to organize Lenin’s departure.” A worker named Emelianov[168] agreed to hide Lenin in his shack in Razliv, to the north of Petrograd.
Olga and Anna Alliluyeva bustled around their guests, making sure that Lenin and Stalin were eating properly.
“What are you feeding Stalin?” asked Lenin. “Please, Olga, you must watch him, he’s losing weight.”
Stalin meanwhile checked that Lenin was being fed properly: “Well, how’s the situation with provisions? Is Illich eating? Do the best you can for him.” Sometimes Stalin turned up with extra food.
Lenin and Stalin cautiously studied the escape plans. On 11 July, “Stalin arrived before the departure and everyone gathered in Lenin’s room to devise ways of disguising him.” Olga tried bandaging Lenin’s head, but that did not work. No one suggested drag.
“Wouldn’t it be better if I shaved,” suggested Lenin. “A moment later, Lenin sat with his face covered in soap” in front of the round shaving-mirror next to the portrait of Tolstoy in Stalin’s bedroom. Soso personally “acted as barber,” shaving off Lenin’s beard and moustache.
“It’s very good now.” Lenin admired himself in the mirror. “I look just like a Finnish peasant, and there’s hardly anyone who’ll recognize me.”
On the 12th, Stalin and Alliluyev escorted Lenin to Primorsky Station for his disappearing act: he hid at Razliv before moving to a barn in Finland. Travelling back and forth, Stalin became his main contact with Petrograd. “One of my sons used to bring Stalin to the shack [where Lenin was hiding] by boat,” remembered Emelianov.
In a barrage of articles, Stalin denounced Kerensky’s “new Dreyfus Affair,” the “vile calumnies against the Leader of our Party,” and the “pen pirates of the venal press.” He specially mocked the Menshevik “blind fools” for acting as patsies. Kerensky, he wrote, would drown them “like flies in milk.”
Hand over the Bolsheviks? he had the Mensheviks asking Kerensky in a rare example of Stalinist satire. “At your service, Messieurs the Intelligence Service.” Disarm the Revolution? “With the greatest of pleasure, Messieurs Landowners and Capitalists.”
166
Stalin’s Menshevik henchman from Baku, Vyshinsky, was head of Moscow’s Arbat region militia under Kerensky and signed arrest warrants for top Bolsheviks, including Lenin. After October, he joined the Bolsheviks. His shameful obedience to Kerensky ensured canine submission to Stalin to whose whim he owed his very survival.
167
Just as the police were known as
168
Emelianov was arrested in the Great Terror. Krupskaya supposedly interceded on his behalf and he, along with his entire family, was kept in confinement until Stalin’s death.