In Europe (23 page)

Between Finland and Russia is an old-fashioned border with watch-towers, passport stamps and serious men. After that comes a debatable
zone: do the telegraph poles here actually look a bit shoddier, the wooden houses just a little less neat? The snow still masks the differences. But half an hour later the train slowly pulls into a grey city. Men are fishing on the frozen river; behind them are towers with golden domes; in front of the station dozens of old women all try to sell their one jar of pickles, or two bottles of vodka, or a knitted sweater. Now we really have crossed the border, the only border that counts.

‘Everyone in our group sat glued to the windows,’ Nadezhda Krupskaya recalled. A few soldiers had boarded the train. Little Robert was sitting on the lap of a Russian war veteran, his arms around the man's neck. The man shared his raisin bread with him. The soldiers gave Lenin a few back copies of
Pravda
, Zinovyev reported, ‘he shook his head and threw up his hands in despair.’

The group got off the train in Petrograd, at Finland Station. By then, according to the Russian calendar, it was 3 April. Nadezhda had been worried: if they arrived so late, how would they ever find a hansom cab to take them to where they were staying? They had no idea what awaited them.

In those first weeks following the revolution it was customary to give all homecoming exiles a great welcome, and the Bolsheviks had gone all out for their leader. Even the Mensheviks took part in the celebration. Huge triumphal arches had been set up on the platforms. Banners bearing ‘every revolutionary slogan one could imagine’ hung above the honour guards from the various army units.‘The crowd in front of Finland Station blocked the entire square, you could barely move, and the trams were almost unable to get through,’ recalled the journalist Nikolai Suchanov, editor of Gorky's
Letopis
(Chronicle). The Ulyanovs were led into what had once been the czar's private waiting room. Military bands played the ‘Marsellaise’; the soldiers had not had enough time to practise the ‘Internationale’. Lenin made a couple of short speeches. Suchanov was able to catch only a few words: ‘Scandalous imperialistic massacre … lies and deception … capitalist pirates’. The crowd was ecstatic.

The Bolsheviks had set up their headquarters in Kshesinskaya Palace, the enormous villa Czar Nicholas II had built for his mistress, the ballerina Matilda Kshesinsky. (‘I'm not a capitalist! I worked hard for this!’ was what she shouted at the first Bolshevik intruders.) A banquet had
been laid out in the huge halls and passageways, but Lenin hardly had a chance to eat. Everyone wanted to talk to him. Only past midnight did he begin his big speech.

For two full hours, he drilled his followers on the new party line. ‘I'll never forget that harangue,’ Suchanov wrote. ‘It amazed and shocked not only me, an apostate who was there by chance, but also all the true believers.’ Lenin launched a ferocious attack on the new leaders, calling them ‘opportunists’ and ‘betrayers of the revolution’, and that alone, Suchanov noted, ‘caused the heads of his listeners to spin’. After all, these ‘mouthpieces of the bourgeoisie’ were former revolutionaries and had all, like Lenin, spent years in exile. Until Lenin's arrival, the Bolsheviks of Petrograd had enthusiastically supported the provisional government as well. For didn't the revolution belong to everyone?

Yet Lenin's opinions could not have come as a complete surprise. In the first telegrams and letters he sent after the revolution, he – unafflicted by any knowledge of the local situation – had already given strict instructions to the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg: give no support to the provisional government, arm the workers, all power to the soviets! His comrades had found these positions so unrealistic that only excerpts from those letters had been made public.

Suddenly, however, yet another wild idea had been added to the list; namely, that the transition from the ‘bourgeois democracy’ to the ‘socialist revolution’ had to take place within a few months. When he left Zurich, Lenin had said that Russia was a ‘country of farmers’, ‘one of the most backward countries in Europe’. A place where socialism could not ‘immediately triumph’. Somewhere along the way, he must have changed his mind.

As soon as he arrived in Petrograd, Lenin began talking about the need for a ‘second revolution’, in order not to ‘become a slave to capitalism’. All power was ‘immediately’ to be placed in the hands of the soviets. This, less than one month after the fall of the czar, sounded the death knell for the provisional government. It also constituted a definitive break with the Mensheviks and the other revolutionary groups. Lenin's sudden change of course clashed with almost all the revolutionary theories, which assumed that a long period would be needed between the ‘civil revolution’ and the ‘proletarian revolution’. That was held to be particularly
true of less developed countries such as Russia. The slogan ‘all power to the soviets’ seemed less than practical too. Those councils, after all, had always been little more than loose configurations of contentious committees for the organisation of workers’ strikes, and could hardly be expected to assume governmental power immediately.

The day after his arrival, Lenin launched the April Theses, the new programme he had worked on during his train journey: no support for the provisional government; withdrawal from the war; a complete break with capitalism; the expropriation of all private lands; the nationalisation of the banks; the dismantling of the army and the police corps and the establishment of a republic of soviets, led by farmers and workers. His vision clashed so dramatically with the prevailing mood in Petrograd that even many Bolsheviks felt that Lenin had lost touch with reality. He had been in exile too long. ‘Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin,’ Gorky wrote at the time. ‘He doesn't know the common people. He has never lived among them.’

Lenin ultimately emerged as the winner of the revolution. But, as the historian Richard Pipes rightly explains, that was not because of his huge support or astute vision. The Bolshevik's success lay in their cocksureness. They established bonds with precisely those groups from which the socialist parties in Western Europe had alienated themselves: farmers and soldiers. Against all the odds, they seized power at exactly the right moment. And they had powerful allies: Berlin, gold German marks and the hard winds of world war.

A number of mysteries still surround Lenin's return to Russia. What made him change his mind during the train journey through Germany and Sweden? Some historians point to the strikingly long stop – of at least half a day – that Lenin's ‘sealed train’ made in Berlin. They suspect that, in the course of that stop, Lenin was in contact with several top German officials concerning the strategy to be pursued. It is a wild assumption, for an escapade like that does not match up with Lenin's extreme caution on precisely this point: in Stockholm, after all, he refused to meet with or even see his old comrade Parvoes.

Far more likely is that something changed within Lenin himself during that journey. After the meeting between Parvoes and Radek in Stockholm,
he may suddenly have realised that his penniless Bolsheviks could, within only a matter of weeks, have tens of millions of gold German marks at their disposal, providing unparalleled opportunities for organisation and propaganda.

About one fact, however, there is virtually no room for disagreement: after this train journey, the German millions came flowing in. In the communist history books, stories to this effect – which began to circulate within a few months – were always dismissed as ‘foul slander and obscurantist rumours’. Today, however, no one can avoid the conclusion that the glorious October Revolution was actually financed by the German ministry of foreign affairs.

First of all, there are the German records themselves, made public after 1945. In them, one sees that the ministry had set up a special contact group for Parvoes and his people as early as 1916, under the code name ‘Stockholm’. The following is taken directly from the confidential report submitted to the kaiser, and dated 3 December, 1917: ‘It was not until the Bolsheviks began receiving a steady supply of funding from us, through diverse channels and under assorted headings, that they were able to transform their most important organ,
Pravda
, into an energetic propaganda vehicle and to broaden the narrow base of their party.’ Calculations recorded by the Germany ministry of foreign affairs on 5 February, 1918 show that 40,580,997 gold marks had been allocated for ‘propaganda and special objectives’ in Russia, and that 26,566,122 of those marks had already been paid out as of 31 January. Such sums would today be equivalent to hundreds of millions of euros. All available information indicates that the lion's share of this funding went to the Bolsheviks.

The Russians, understandably enough, carefully eradicated all traces of this operation. In summer 1917, the provisional government – with the help of the French intelligence service – began a thorough investigation into alleged financial contacts between the Germans and the Bolsheviks. Yet Lenin and his companions were never taken to court. The dossier, all twenty-one volumes of it, was confiscated and destroyed right after the October Revolution, on the orders of Lev Trotsky.

The results, however, were plain to see. From spring 1917 the Bolsheviks’ propaganda activities were so massive and widespread that they could not possibly have been funded from the party's own coffers. In February
1917 the Bolsheviks did not own a single printing press. In March,
Pravda
was in such dire straits that relief benefits had to be organised to keep it running. Four months later, the Bolshevik press had a combined daily circulation of 320,000 newspapers, as well as around 350,000 pamphlets and brochures.
Pravda
appeared in more than forty editions, including in Polish and Armenian. Some 100,000 newspapers were distributed daily among the armed forces: the
Soldatsja Pravda
for the infantry, the
Gols Pravdy
for the navy, the
Okopnaja Pravada
(Trench Truth) for the front. There was enough money to pay party officials a regular salary, a luxury unheard of in Bolshevik circles. Party membership swelled between April and August 1917 from 23,000 to 200,000. The Bolsheviks never deigned to explain this sudden and profuse wealth.

Does this mean that Lenin was actually nothing but a mere German agent? Not at all. Throughout his life his conduct shows that he was purely a revolutionary in heart and soul, a revolutionary who made all else secondary to that goal, and who was even prepared to make a pact with the Devil to achieve his objectives. His alliance with the Germans was purely a coalition of opportunity, one that served the interests of both parties at a given moment, but which could be tossed aside again at the next. Lenin, in fact, had only one goal: grand, worldwide revolution. Within that context, the Russian Revolution was but a start.

The travelling party fell apart. Karl Radek became editor of
Izvestia
, was one of the delegation that negotiated a peace with Germany, and then became Lenin's most important agent in Poland and Berlin. For all his lightheartedness, he loved being close to the centre of power; one day, it was too late for him to withdraw. During a Stalinist show trial in January 1937 he was convicted of ‘sabotage, treason and terrorism’. He ended up in the Gulag and died there two years later: beaten to death, stabbed to death or thrown to his death on a concrete floor, the rumours disagree. Grigori Sokolnikov met a similar fate: he was murdered in 1939 in one of Stalin's prisons, apparently by his fellow prisoners.

For a time, Grigori Zinovyev was considered Lenin's natural successor, but lost out to Stalin. He was executed in August 1936. Olga Ravitsj, his wife, disappeared in the Gulag. In late 1918 Parvoes fled to Switzerland, where he had a bank account containing more than two million Swiss
francs. Later he returned to Germany, for he had financial interests all over Europe. After his death in Berlin in December 1924, all his personal documents vanished into thin air.

Inessa Armand did not live long: she served, among other things, as head of the women's section of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party, but became overworked and died of cholera and a broken heart in September 1920. Nadezhda Krupskaya grew fat, interfering and querulous. In 1926 she succeeded in expanding the Soviet Union's list of banned literature by at least a hundred books, including the work of Dostoyevsky, the Koran and the Bible. She died in 1939.

Lenin survived Inessa Armand by no more than four years. An attempt was made on his life in 1918. He was deeply traumatised, his reign of terror became more intense, and he never completely recovered. After 1921 his health deteriorated. He died on 21 January, 1924, before reaching the age of fifty-four.

ST PETERSBURG, 15 MARCH, 1999. IT TAKES DAYS TO FALL IN LOVE
with the Hotel Neva, but then it is for ever. Who could help but fall for its curlicue staircases and czarist corridors, its unrelenting Stalinist mattresses, the central heating adjustable at all hours by simply opening or closing the window just a crack, its gurgling showers, the yellowish-brown moisture from its taps, the middle-aged
babushkas
who rule over their floors like little empresses, the red beets and soggy eggs at breakfast? Your first instinct is to get away as quickly as possible, but then you start developing a strange affection for all this, and after that you are lost.

Of course the hotel has its typical Russian quirks. In the canteen, for example, you see a NO SMOKING sign, while everyone there is nonchalantly puffing away. The true Russia hand knows: that sign has nothing to do with smoking, but everything to do with power. It allows the canteen supervisor to ban or permit smoking as she sees fit, to hand out favours and sanctions, to exercise sovereignty, in other words, over her little fiefdom. Clean towels? That has to be discussed at length with two other female supervisors. A table at which to write? But now I have gone too far! ‘You'll have to request permission from the superior!’ our lady of the corridor cries. The table eventually arrives, bringing with it the next problem: what about a chair?