Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (21 page)

In the long term, as we have seen, there is no doubt that Lenin expected the war to turn into a European revolution. However, some observers have argued that Lenin did not foresee the collapse of tsarism. Indeed, like the vast majority of people, including those from all sides on the spot and Nicholas II himself, the actual downfall of the autocracy was to be a shock. While many thought its days were numbered hardly anyone was prepared for the actual collapse. In faraway Switzerland, dependent on inaccurate newspaper reports, Lenin could not be expected to be more clairvoyant than anyone else. However, it is frequently claimed that he wrote, at about this time, that he would not live to see the coming revolution. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The misunderstanding comes from a misreading of the conclusion of one of the last two important public speeches Lenin made before his return. In a ‘Lecture on the 1905 Revolution’ given to young Swiss workers in German on 22 January 1917, the twelfth anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’, Lenin outlined the main features of the first Russian Revolution. He stressed several points which were key to his own strategy in 1917, namely, the rapidity with which a revolutionary situation can arise; the leading role of striking proletarians; the rapid spread of revolution to the peasant countryside which looked to the workers of the towns for leadership; and the fracturing of the army, since ‘militarism can never and under no circumstances be defeated and destroyed, except by a victorious struggle of one section of the national army against the other section’, that is by civil war. The purpose of the speech was, of course, to arouse the revolutionary enthusiasm of the young audience to which he was speaking. At the end, Lenin exhorted them not to be ‘deceived by the present grave-like stillness in Europe. Europe is pregnant with revolution. The monstrous horrors of the imperialist war, the suffering caused by the high cost of living everywhere engender a revolutionary mood.’ [CW 1 802] A few moments later he made the statement which is so misunderstood. ‘We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.’ [CW 1 802] Clearly this did not mean Lenin was not expecting revolution. It meant exactly the opposite. The revolution was ‘coming’ but it might not reach its conclusion in Lenin’s lifetime, quite another matter. It could, Lenin implied, take decades for the total overthrow of capitalism to be ensured.

It has, indeed, also been suggested that, as a result of consultations with physicians in Switzerland, Lenin may have been aware that his lifetime was likely to be short, that he was suffering from the same complaint that had cut his father down at the age of fifty-four (and he was already forty-six). Lenin did in fact die at the age of fifty-three after being seriously ill for nearly two years.
⁷

Be that as it may, Lenin was certainly expecting revolution, as he had been since the beginning of the war, but exactly what revolution and where it would break out first was impossible for anyone to foresee with precision. In the event, the news of the fall of the tsar in March 1917 hit the Russian community in Zurich like a thunderbolt. ‘After dinner, when Il’ich was getting ready to leave for the library, and I had finished with the dishes, Bronsky ran in with the announcement, “Haven’t you heard the news? There is a revolution in Russia.”’ The Russians flocked to the lake where the latest editions of the newspapers were displayed. There was no doubt. Revolution had broken out, the tsar had gone. In a moment, the Ulyanovs’ lives had been turned upside down. The routine of the library gave way to a feverish desire on the part of Lenin and most of the other exiles to get back to Russia. Where there had been diffidence in 1905, largely because the tsarist authorities remained intact throughout, there was now eagerness to return. But how? The British and French would not want to allow Russians opposed to the war to return for obvious reasons. Taking a passage through Germany was risky as it might open them to the charge of collusion with the enemy. Indeed, in July 1917 exactly that charge was laid at Lenin’s door. Clandestine return by aircraft was too fantastic. A Swedish passport might be possible but no one knew any Swedish. Krupskaya teased Lenin that if they did disguise themselves as Swedes then he would give them away because in his dreams he would see Mensheviks and start swearing out loud at them in Russian as he slept. [Krupskaya 288]

In the end, Lenin’s Swiss friend, socialist politician and fellow internationalist, Fritz Platten, negotiated conditions with the German ambassador for émigrés to return through Germany to Sweden and then to Finland and Petrograd. It was on this basis that 32 returnees, including Lenin, Krupskaya, Inessa Armand, the Zinovievs and Radek plus Fritz Platten, boarded their special railway carriage and set out across Germany on 9 April. They left and crossed to Sweden on 12 April where they were greeted by local socialists including the mayor of Stockholm on the 13th. Lenin left Stockholm that evening and eventually arrived in Petrograd’s Finland Station at 11pm on 16 April. He, and the rest of the group, were welcomed by a noisy crowd at the station. The most significant phase in the life of Lenin and of the Revolution had begun.

5

From the moment the news of the February Revolution broke, Lenin and most of the Russian émigré community in Switzerland were in a fever. Every scrap of information and rumour was scrutinized; plans were made for future tactics; a desperate desire to get back to the centre of events in Petrograd consumed most of them. According to Krupskaya, Lenin wrote to Alexandra Kollontai in Sweden, ‘Never
again
along the lines of the Second International! Never
again
with Kautsky! By all means a
more revolutionary
programme and more revolutionary tactics
… revolutionary propaganda, as heretofore, agitation and struggle for an
international
proletarian revolution and for the seizure of power by the “Soviets of Workers’ Deputies” (but not by Kadet fakers).’ [Krupskaya 287] Though he probably didn’t realize it he had already unlocked the gateway to power. By establishing his party as the opponents of the emerging Provisional Government led by Kadets (i.e. liberals like Miliukov of the Constitutional Democratic Party), Lenin was eventually to gather in all the growing opposition to that government on the left. However, in the early stages of the Revolution his position was very much that of a small minority. We will, of course, trace the stages by which the majority came to support Lenin.

Lenin had no sense that standing against the Provisional Government would be crucial. In March and April, it was only one aspect of a series of principles and strategies he proposed to his Party to guide them in the crisis. In particular, he wrote a series of
Letters From Afar
while he was still in Switzerland and in his first intervention on his return,
The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution
laid down his ten commandments which have come to be known as
The April Theses
. For the moment, however, Lenin led nothing. Only the first of his five
Letters From Afar
was published at the time and
The April Theses
were met with incredulity by many Party leaders. What was Lenin saying in these crucial weeks up to his return?

There was little that was new in these works. Rather, they were the encapsulation of the themes which had already emerged. Fundamental to everything was Lenin’s identification of the war as a continuing imperialist war – not a war of national defence, still less a revolutionary war – and Russia’s new Provisional Government as the handmaiden of Anglo-French capital. The Revolution, he argued, had been instigated to strengthen Russia’s part in the imperialist dogfight. The first
Letter from Afar
made these points crystal clear. ‘That it is an imperialist war on
both
sides is now … indisputable.’ [SW 2 3] One of the main forces behind the February Revolution, and the one which had assumed its leadership, was

the conspiracy of the Anglo-French imperialists who impelled Milyukov, Guchkov and Co. to seize power for the purpose of continu
ing the imperialist war, for the purpose of conducting the war still more ferociously and obstinately, for the purpose of slaughtering fresh millions of Russian workers and peasants in order that the Guchkovs might obtain Constantinople, the French capitalists Syria, the British capitalists Mesopotamia, and so on. [SW 2 5]

From the point of view of Marxist revolution Lenin repeated his view that February represented the beginning of the transition from the first stage of the Revolution to its second stage. In the third, unpublished,
Letter from Afar
Lenin referred to ‘the
factual
conclusion I drew in my first letter, namely: that the February–March Revolution was merely the
first stage
of the revolution. Russia is passing through a peculiar histori
cal moment of
transition
to the next stage … to a “second revolution”.’ [CW 23 323]

The first
Letter from Afar
also went into greater detail about the main contending forces at work in Russia. For Lenin these were threefold: the autocracy, the bourgeoisie and the workers. The antagonism between the first two was, he said, not deep. He even believed the Provisional Government would work for a tsarist restoration and that ‘the
whole
of the new government is monarchist, for Kerensky’s
verbal
republicanism cannot be taken seriously, is not worthy of a statesman and is,
objectively
, political chicanery.’ [SW 2 8] In fact Kerensky remained a republican and formally introduced the Russian Republic in September. Lenin was, however, partly correct in that the instinct of Miliukov and others was to preserve the monarchy but they were prevented from pursuing their hopes by popular opposition and the absence of a credible candidate. He was also right about the first two forces coming together and was particularly scathing about leftists who ignored this process and claimed they were supporting the bourgeoisie as a lesser evil than tsarism. ‘He who says the workers must
support
the new government in the interests of the struggle against tsarist reaction (and apparently this is being said …) is a traitor to the workers.’ [SW 2 8] For Lenin, it was still the same imperialist monster and must be opposed: ‘this new government is
already
bound hand and foot by imperialist capital, by the imperialist policy of
war
and plunder.’ [SW 2 8] The government was ‘as regards the
present
war but the agent of the billion-dollar “firm” “England and France”’. [SW 2 7]

One aspect of Lenin’s thought in 1917 which differed substantially from his ideas of 1905 was a greater appreciation of the role of soviets. Initially set up in the earlier revolution as committees to co-ordinate strikes they quickly took on the role of organs of mass self-expression but Lenin barely noticed them and rarely visited them. In 1917 they emerged rapidly in towns across the length and breadth of the Empire. Like the most important of them, the Petrograd Soviet, they brought together masses of workers, plus a crucial component of soldiers and/or sailors, together with radical intellectuals who took the lead. There were even some soviets in rural areas though in most of the countryside the political space occupied by soviets in the urban areas was more likely to be filled by village and
volost’
(parish) committees. Having learned from 1905, Lenin immediately identified the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies as the focus of mass proletarian action describing them as ‘an organization of the workers, the embryo of a workers’ government, the representative of the entire mass of the
poor
section of the population,
i.e.
of nine-tenths of the population, which is striving for
peace
,
bread
and
freedom
’ [SW 2 7], a broad front which may reflect a populist substrate still present in Lenin’s outlook. In more Marxist fashion he identified the ‘broad mass of rural semi-proletarians and partly also the small-peasant population’ as its allies along with the proletariat of other countries. ‘With these two allies,’ he concluded, ‘the proletariat,
utilizing the pecu
liarities
of the present situation, can and will proceed first to the achievement of a democratic republic and complete victory of the peasantry over the landlords, instead of the Guchkov–Miliukov semi-monarchy, and then to
socialism
, which alone can give the war-weary people
peace
,
bread
and
freedom
.’ [SW 2 10]

He did not leave his analysis there. In these last émigré writings he made a number of other important points, many of which stayed with him in 1917 and are crucial to understanding his strategy and tactics. He believed 1905 had been a practice run and in February ‘this eight-day revolution was “performed”, if we may use a metaphorical expression, as though after a dozen major and minor rehearsals; the “actors” knew each other, their parts, their places and their setting in every detail’ [SW 2 2], but it had ‘required a great, mighty and all-powerful “stage-manager”, capable … of vastly accelerating the course of world history’ in order for the revolution to evolve from its 1905 to 1917 stage. ‘This all-powerful “stage-manager”, this mighty accelerator, was the imperialist war.’ [SW 2 2] In accordance with his predictions of September 1914 he concluded that the imperialist ‘war was bound, to turn into a civil war between the hostile classes’. [SW 2 3] But one should not forget that the fact that the February Revolution succeeded so rapidly was ‘only due to the fact that, as a result of an extremely unique historical situation,
absolutely dissimilar currents
,
absolutely heteroge
neous
class interests,
absolutely contrary
political and social strivings have merged, and in a strikingly “harmonious” manner.’ [SW 2 5] These will soon break up into the capitalist-imperialist interest on one hand and the ‘as yet underdeveloped and comparatively weak
workers’ government
’ [SW 2 7] focused on the soviet.

Other crucial Leninist themes emerged. The third, also unpublished,
Letter from Afar
, pointed to themes of the necessity to organize; to prepare for civil war; to contemplate a new form of state organization with, at its heart, a citizen-militia. He already formulated the key text of his later pamphlet
State and Revolution
when he wrote that bourgeois revolutions only perfected and transferred the state machine from the hands of one party to another when the point was to smash it. [CW 23 325–6] Here, and in the important
Farewell Letter to the Swiss Workers
of 8 April, he argued that even a massive, soviet-based worker–peasant revolution would still not be socialism but only a step towards it. He also returned to his ambiguities about the revolutionary potential of the Russian working class:

To the Russian proletariat has fallen the great honour of beginning the series of revolutions which the imperialist war has made an objec
tive inevitability. But the idea that the Russian proletariat is the chosen revolutionary proletariat among the workers of the world is absolutely alien to us. We know perfectly well that the proletariat of Russia is less organized, less prepared and less class-conscious than the proletariat of other countries. It is not its special qualities, but rather the special conjuncture of historical circumstances that for a certain, perhaps very short, time has made the proletariat of Russia the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat of the whole world.

Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backward of European countries. Socialism cannot triumph there directly and immediately. But the peasant character of the country … may make our revolution the prologue to the world socialist revolution, a step toward it. [CW 23 371]

However, the future really hinged on another proletariat: ‘The German proletariat is the most trustworthy, the most reliable ally of the Russian and the world proletarian revolution.’ [CW 23 372]

In these words, before he had even left Switzerland, Lenin had inter
preted the February Revolution in the light of his earlier predictions and, to at least his own satisfaction, had confirmed his expectations. His prediction of the war turning into a civil war was, he said, ridiculed by the opportunists but now ‘only the blind can fail to see’ that ‘transformation of the imperialist war into civil war is
becoming
a fact.’ [CW 23 372] The future promised a massive battle of workers against capitalists and peasants against landowners by means of armed force. But even this would only lead to the establishment of the ‘democratic republic of workers and peasants’. It would only be a step towards socialism, not socialism itself.

On arrival in Petrograd Lenin, who had been working hard on the journey, produced his brilliant theses. They had the impact of a hand grenade and shocked many, even among his closest allies. [SW 2 13–16] Partly this was caused by context, partly by content. The Petrograd to which Lenin returned was still celebrating its liberation from autocracy and, while the initial euphoria of February had worn thin, there was still a lingering sense of national honeymoon, bringing the whole country together in a spirit of hope and renewal around the new situation. When Lenin and the rest of the group of revolutionaries returned to the city via the Finland Station it was an excuse for a radical party. It has often been suggested that his return was seen as being especially portentous but that is largely an anachronistic accretion from the later cult of his personality. Lenin was welcomed as a prominent radical but not in fundamentally different terms from many others. However, he was soon to show his distinctiveness. Even his closest loyalists could hardly believe what they were hearing. His injunctions caused widespread bewilderment. Like a schoolmaster in front of a dim class Lenin, as he said himself, read out his theses twice, very slowly. That was not enough. It took some three weeks of intense struggle in the Party to persuade the majority that he was correct.

The point that caused most immediate controversy was his injunction that there should be ‘no support for the Provisional Government’. Lenin was not the first of his group to arrive back in Petrograd. He had been preceded by returned exiles, notably Kamenev and Stalin. They had made policy as they thought appropriate in Lenin’s absence and had gone along with the mainstream in the Soviet who accepted the Provisional Government and worked with it in order to consolidate the overthrow of tsarism. The accepted wisdom among the Soviet leaders was that, if they alienated or opposed the Provisional Government, they might drive it, and the middle class it represented, back into the arms of the autocracy. Added to that, many Mensheviks also argued that Russia was not ready for a full-scale Marxist revolution. As we have seen, even Lenin shared their scepticism about the Russian working class, but he was prepared to pursue radical revolution in Russia with the overwhelming aim of spreading it to the rest of Europe.

There were other key points in
The April Theses
. The theoretical underpinning of his views remained that the war ‘unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war’ and as a result ‘not the slightest concession to “revolutionary defencism” is permissible’. He meant by this that those who said it was now right to fight for Russia because it was a democracy overlooked the fact of ‘the capitalist nature of [the] government’. Only a worker and poor peasant government which renounced conquest and made ‘a complete break’ with ‘all capitalist interests’ could conduct a war of revolutionary defence. Closely related to this was his assertion that Russia was ‘
passing
from the first stage of the revolution to its
second
stage which must put power into the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasantry’. His reason for the revolution being only at the first, bourgeois, rather than second, proletarian, stage is interesting. Lenin attributed it to ‘the insufficient class-consciousness and organization of the proletariat’. Once again he made a point of working-class backwardness.