Lenin bombarded Kamenev and the Bolsheviks with a barrage of articles and secret letters, arguing that time was short, with Kerensky starting another crackdown, and that the second Congress of Soviets had been summoned to Petrograd. Thus they must seize power first—or they would have to share power in a coalition, “and cover themselves with eternal shame and destroy themselves as a Party!”
Lenin secretly moved back from Finland to hide in the comfortable apartment of Margarita Fofanova in Vyborg, whence he continued to spew forth his radical bile. “The success of the Russian and world revolutions just depends on two or three days’ fighting,” he declared, fearing that Kamenev’s view could prevail. “Better to die a man than let the enemy pass!” When the Central Committee recoiled, he submitted his resignation. These letters were “written with extraordinary force,” wrote Bukharin, “and threatened us with all sorts of punishments.” In his brilliant rage, Lenin was beginning to sound almost deranged. Indeed Stalin, editor of the Party newspaper Rabochii Put (Workers’ Way), actually censored Lenin’s more outrageous ravings, publishing instead an earlier, more moderate piece.
Sometimes the ranting prophet broke free of his confinement. “One morning just before the October Revolution,” recalls Anna Alliluyeva, “there was a ring at the door. I saw a smallish man dressed in a black overcoat and a Finnish cap on the threshold.”
“Is Stalin at home?” he asked politely.
“Good Lord, you look just like a Finn, Vladimir Illich,” Anna exclaimed to Lenin. “After a brief conversation, Stalin and he left together…”
Just days later, these scruffy, diminutive figures, who now walked the streets of Petrograd disguised and unrecognized, seized the Russian Empire. They formed the world’s first Marxist government, remained at the peak of the state for the rest of their days, sacrificed millions of lives at the pitiless altar of their utopian ideology, and ruled the imperium, between them, for the next thirty-six years.{245}
41. 1917 Winter: The Countdown
Petrograd in October 1917 seemed calm, but beneath the glossy surface the city danced in a trance of last pleasures. “Gambling clubs functioned hectically from dusk till dawn,” reported John Reed, “with champagne flowing and stakes of 20,000 roubles. In the centre of the city at night, prostitutes in jewels and expensive furs walked up and down and crowded the cafés… Hold-ups increased to such an extent that it was dangerous to walk the streets.” Russia, wrote Ilya Ehrenburg, later one of Stalin’s favoured writers, “lived as if on a railway platform, waiting for the guard’s whistle.” Aristocrats sold priceless treasures on the streets, the food shortages worsened, queues lengthened, while the rich still dined at Donon’s and Constant’s, the two smartest restaurants, and the bourgeois vied for tickets to hear Chaliapin sing.
“Mysterious individuals circulating around the shivering women in lines for bread and milk, whispering that the Jews had cornered the food supply… Monarchist plots, German spies, smugglers hatching schemes,” observed Reed. “And, in the rain, the bitter chill, the great throbbing city under grey skies rushing faster and faster toward… what?” Trotsky answered Reed’s question, responding to the baying crowd at the Cirque Moderne: “The time for words has passed. The hour has come for a duel to the death between revolution and counter-revolution.” In the lonely magnificence of the Winter Palace, Kerensky waited, wasting the embers of his power in tokes of morphia and cocaine.
At 10 p.m. on the dark, drizzly night of 10 October 1917, Lenin seized his chance to convince the Central Committee: the eleven high Bolsheviks slipped one by one out of the Smolny to rendezvous at 32 Karpovka Embankment, a street-level apartment in the Petrograd District. It belonged to Galina Flakserman, the Bolshevik wife of the Menshevik scribe Sukhanov. “Oh the novel jokes of the merry muse of History,” he reflected. “This supreme and decisive session took place in my home… but without my knowledge.”
Some of the eleven were in disguise: a clean-shaven Lenin, who, Krupskaya thought, “looked every bit like a Lutheran priest,” sported an ill-fitting curly wig that kept sliding off his bald pate. As Lenin started to address Stalin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky in a hot room with a blanket covering the window, Galina Flakserman provided salami, cheese and black bread, brewing up the samovar in the corridor. But no one ate yet.
“The political situation is fully ripe for the transfer of power,” declared Lenin, but even then the Bolsheviks argued against him. Minutes were not taken, but we know that Stalin and Trotsky backed Lenin from the start. Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had grown a beard and cropped his locks as his disguise, remained unconvinced. The argument was “intense and passionate,” but Trotsky wrote that no one could match Lenin’s “thought, will, confidence, courage.” Gradually Lenin overcame “the wavering and the doubtful,” who now felt a “surge of strength and resolve.” In the early hours, there was a loud banging on the door. Was it Kerensky’s police? It was Galina Flakserman’s brother Yury, come to help serve the sausages and man the samovar. The Central Committee voted on a vague resolution for an uprising. “No practical plan of insurrection, even tentative, was sketched out that night,” recalls Trotsky. Nine supported Lenin against Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were “deeply convinced that to proclaim an armed uprising now means to gamble, not only with the fate of our Party, but with that of the Russian and international revolution.”
Ravenous and punch-drunk, the winners fell upon the sausages, and teased Zinoviev and Kamenev.{246}
Five days later, on 16 October, at another secret meeting at the Lesnoi District Duma on the northern outskirts, Lenin, backed by Stalin and Sverdlov (Trotsky being absent at the Soviet), again berated the doubters. “History will never forgive us if we don’t take power now!” he cried, resetting his precarious wig.
“We don’t have the right to take the risk and gamble everything at once,” retorted Zinoviev.
Stalin stood with Lenin: “The date must be chosen expediently.” The Central Committee must, said the former seminarist who saw his Marxism as a quasi-religion, have “more faith… There are two lines here: one holds a course for victory of revolution… the other doesn’t believe in revolution and counts merely on staying as an opposition… Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s proposals… give the counter-revolution the chance to get organized,” Stalin warned. “We’ll go on endless retreat and lose the entire revolution.”
Lenin won ten votes to two. The Central Committee elected Stalin, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky and two others to a Military-Revolutionary Centre “to become part” of Trotsky’s Military-Revolutionary Committee at the Soviet. The organ that would seize power had not yet been decided. The bewigged Lenin scuttled back into hiding as Kerensky sensed danger and raised the stakes: Petrograd was in danger from the advancing Germans. He announced the recall of loyal regiments from the front. There was no time to lose.
Then on 18 October Kamenev published an attack on the “ruinous step” of an uprising in Maxim Gorky’s journal, Novaya Zhizn. It is an irony of 1917 that, for all Lenin’s iron will, Kamenev, always “sodden with sentimentality,” in Trotsky’s words, was the only truly consistent Bolshevik. “Kamenev and Zinoviev have betrayed the CC!” Lenin exploded. “I demand the expulsion of both the strike-breakers.” But Zinoviev insisted, in a letter, on continuing the debate in secret. Stalin, as chief editor of Rabochii Put, published the letter.[172]
172
Another conciliatory gesture to Kamenev that shows Stalin’s instinct for maintaining some balance between Lenin and Trotsky, on the one hand, and the moderates on the other, in the Party. This was to pay rich dividends in the struggle to succeed Lenin.