Lenin: A biography

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Widely regarded as one of the most intelligent, and most approachable, of the best-known members of the RSDLP, Martov was born in 1873 into a middle-class Russian Jewish family in Constantinople, where his father was engaged in commerce and acting as the Turkish correspondent for two leading St Petersburg journals. His mother was Viennese, and the atmosphere in the Tsederbaum household was one of liberal enlightenment and tolerance. In 1877 the family moved back to Odessa.

The early 1880s in Russia was a time of mounting hostility to all things foreign, as the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 had prompted the widespread belief that Russia’s new social evil was of foreign, Western origin. As a child Martov witnessed the atmosphere of hatred against the Jews when a pogrom was unleashed in Odessa, and however wholeheartedly he was to become a part of the Russian revolutionary movement, he never lost the sense that he had come from, and would remain part of, an oppressed and despised minority. The family moved to St Petersburg in 1882, and in 1889, when he was sixteen, Julius entered high school, where he formed strong bonds of friendship with the sons of the intelligentsia he found there.

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He was already a committed Populist when he was admitted to St Petersburg University in 1891, and he was soon arrested for voicing seditious ideas. Released after several months, he was expelled from the university, and in 1893 was rearrested and sentenced to two years’ exile from St Petersburg and any other university city. He spent 1893–95 in Vilna (Vilnius), which was both the centre of traditional East European Jewish culture and a hotbed of working-class organization. Martov arrived just at the moment when the leaders of Jewish workers’ groups were changing their tactics from intensive teaching circles to mass agitation. That is, instead of raising the general educational level of a few workers, who then tended to want to enter the ranks of the intelligentsia themselves, or to exploit their new-found culture to acquire professional qualifications, the idea was to gather large numbers of workers at secret meeting places and to convey one or two simple ideas, such as the injustice of low wages or poor conditions, and thus hope to ‘agitate’ them sufficiently to take strike action or to demonstrate for better conditions.

The new approach was highly successful, and when Martov returned to the capital in 1895, he spread these ideas. With Lenin, whom he met at that time, he formed the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, but in 1896, like his new comrade, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia. Released in 1900, he went abroad and collaborated with Lenin, Potresov, Plekhanov and Axelrod on their new newspaper, Iskra. Until 1903 it seemed Martov and Lenin were the perfect team. They each brought to the partnership experience in the organization of illegal groups and the formulation of ideas for wide consumption which, together with Plekhanov’s more sophisticated writing, created a newspaper that many workers, intellectuals and local organizers were eager to read, risking arrest and Siberian exile for the privilege. What Martov did not know, however, was that during these years of preparation Lenin had been encouraging his agents to use any means necessary to detach local social democratic committees from their existing loyalties, and to make them acknowledge Iskra as the sole ideological and organizational centre of Party activity. Martov naturally wanted Iskra to prosper, but he conceived of the forthcoming Second Party Congress as an opportunity to bind all of the existing social democratic elements into a single, broad-based party. It was only in the course of the Congress itself that he realised that Lenin’s idea was to exclude from the Party all but those elements which acknowledged the editors of Iskra as the leadership.

At the Second Congress, which took place in Brussels and London in the summer of 1903, it appeared that Martov’s prospects were bright. After Plekhanov, he emerged as the most significant delegate, although Lenin’s voice became more confident as he gained supporters. Millions of Soviet citizens, schooled in a history smoothed beyond recognition, believed that the split in 1903 into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was over the organizational question – or, more precisely, point one of the Party Statutes on membership. Schoolmasters, professors and army commissars all parroted, ‘Lenin wanted to create a party-citadel, a party-fighting unit. Martov preferred to create an amorphous, diffuse formation which could never have achieved Communist aims.’ Ironically, the last point was undoubtedly true. As for the ‘party-citadel’, that was not Lenin’s aim. The real issue was whether the Party was to be an order or a democratic body. Lenin was proposing that a member would support the Party by material means as well as by ‘personal participation in one of the Party organizations’. Martov’s formula was less rigorous: apart from material support, a member was obliged to give the Party ‘regular personal support under the guidance of one of its organizations’. According to Stalin’s Short Course on the history of the Party, Martov wanted to ‘open the door wide to unstable non-proletarian elements … These people would not be part of the organization, nor be subject to Party discipline or carry out Party tasks, nor face the associated dangers. Yet Martov … was proposing to recognize such people as Party members.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Stalin perhaps also believed it was an ‘organizational question’. Political ‘softness’, for Martov, meant not only a readiness to compromise, it also signified understanding the need for a union with high morality. And it was this, not the organizational question, that separated him from Lenin forever: the conflict was dominated by moral rather than political imperatives.

Martov, who had previously been in step with Lenin and had voted with him on all the points of the programme, suddenly ‘rebelled’ during the twenty-second session, not only over the membership issue, but on almost everything else. His rebellion was to last for the rest of his life. Although Lenin’s proposal received twenty-three votes to Martov’s twenty-eight, Lenin dominated in all further contests.

As we have seen, Martov virtually began his political life as an activist among the Jewish Social Democrats who were to found the Jewish Workers’ Union (known by its Yiddish name as the Bund) in 1897. In terms of scale alone, the Bund was to become an impressive social force. In 1904 it could count more than 20,000 members, or more than twice the number in the ‘Russian’ Party organizations.

(#litres_trial_promo) For Martov in the early 1890s, the Jewish organizations had seemed the most important force for attaining civil equality for the Jews.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the time of the Second Congress, however, he had become strongly opposed to what he now saw as Jewish separatism. The Bund, however, supported Martov at the Congress against Lenin until the majority of the delegates voted against giving it the status of sole representative of the Jewish workers in the RSDLP. Together with the delegates of Workers’ Cause, another dissident group, the five Bundists walked out, leaving Martov’s side a true minority.

In his relations with the young Vladimir Ulyanov, Martov had begun to observe certain features which in the end would make the chasm between them unbridgeable. He mentioned this in his ‘Notes of a Social Democrat’, which was published in Berlin, remarking that Lenin ‘did not yet have, or had in lesser measure, the confidence in his own strength – never mind in his historical calling – that was to emerge so clearly in his mature years … He was then twenty-five or twenty-six years old … and he was not yet full of the scorn and distrust of people which, I believe, is what made him into a certain type of leader.’

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In practice, until the revolution of 1917, Lenin strove for his main idea of creating a monolithic, centralized party. He never doubted that he would indeed come to power, and what would follow. The Party-order would already be in existence. It would not evaporate. Was this not a threat to the future? He did not think so, and anyone who did was worthy only to join Martov. All those in favour of an iron guard, and willing to fight and smash, were welcome in his party; those who were not could go to Martov’s ‘flabby monster’.

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Lenin went on disputing with Martov right up to October 1917, if a constant stream of abuse can be called disputing. Martov was intransigent. Inclined by nature to compromise, he felt no urge for conciliation. He had long ago come to believe that the socialism Lenin wanted had nothing in common with justice, or moral principles, or the humane origins of socialist thinking. Knowing he had already lost, he summed up the ‘interim’ accounts of 1917 in horror. He wrote to a friend, N.S. Kristi:

It is not merely the deep belief that it is senselessly utopian to try to plant socialism in an economically and culturally backward country, but also my organic inability to accept the Arakcheev-style [barracks] concept of socialism and the Pugachev-style [violent] notion of class struggle which are being generated by the very fact that they are trying to plant a European ideal in Asiatic soil. The resulting bouquet is hard to take. For me, socialism was never the denial of individual freedom and individualism, but on the contrary, their highest embodiment, and the principle of collectivism I always saw as opposed to ‘the herd instinct’ and levelling … What is happening here is the flourishing of a ‘trench – barracks’ variety of quasi-socialism, based on the ‘simplification’ of everything …

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Martov’s internationalist wartime position of ‘revolutionary defencism’ contrasted markedly with Lenin’s defeatism and Plekhanov’s patriotism, and was perhaps a truer and more noble one to take. The outbreak of war found Martov in Paris. In his small newspaper, Golos (The Voice), and later in Nashe slovo (Our Word), his constant cry was ‘Long live peace! Enough blood! Enough senseless slaughter!’ He maintained this position after returning to Petrograd in May 1917, arguing against defeatism and against turning the war into a civil war, but also against chauvinism, and so he was often under attack from both sides. I.G. Tsereteli, a Social Democrat who played a leading rôle in 1917, recalled Martov saying in the summer of that year: ‘Lenin is not interested in questions of war and peace. The only thing that interests him is the revolution, and the only real revolution for him is the one in which the Bolsheviks have seized power.’ Martov wondered what Lenin would do if the democrats, i.e. the Provisional Government, managed to make peace: ‘He would no doubt change his tactics and preach to the masses that all the post-war misfortunes were due to the criminal democrats because they ended the war too soon and didn’t have the courage to carry it on to the final destruction of German imperialism.’

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In June 1918 the Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK) voted to expel the Right SRs and Mensheviks. When they were asked to leave the meeting, Martov leapt up and began shouting curses at the ‘dictators’, ‘bonapartists’, ‘usurpers’, ‘putschists’, all the while struggling unsuccessfully to get his coat on. Lenin stood, white-faced, watching in silence. A Left SR sitting next to Martov began laughing and poking his finger at Martov, who, coughing and shouting, managed at last to get his coat on and leave, turning as he did so to hurl at his mirthful tormentor: ‘You may laugh now, young man, but give it three months and you’ll be following us.’

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Martov nevertheless remained an orthodox Marxist all his life. He believed that the socialist revolution could be an innovative and refreshing act of creativity, but he could not accept the Leninist monopoly and the Bolsheviks’ reliance on coercion and terror. In defeat, he naively believed that the revolution could be clean and moral and bright. When Red and White Terror clashed to produce a monstrous wave of violence, Martov wrote a pamphlet called ‘Down with the Death Penalty’. In it, he stated:

As soon as the Bolsheviks came to power, having announced the end of the death penalty, from the very first day they started killing prisoners taken in battle during the civil war, as all savages do. To kill enemies who have surrendered in battle on the promise that their lives will be spared … The death penalty has been abolished, but in every town and district various extraordinary commissions and military – revolutionary committees have sentenced hundreds and hundreds of people to be shot … This bloody debauchery is being carried out in the name of socialism, in the name of the teaching which proclaimed the brotherhood of people labouring for the highest goal of humanity … A party of death penalties is as much an enemy of the working class as a party of pogroms.

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As if to prove Martov right, in November 1923, after his death, the Politburo reviewed the ‘Turkestan question’. Central Committee member Jan Rudzutak, a Latvian, reported that Basmachi (anti-Bolshevik forces) chieftains had been invited to talks with the local Soviet authorities. They had been promised their lives were not in danger, and that a special conference would find ways of settling the conflict peacefully. One hundred and eighty-three chieftains had turned up. They were arrested at once, and 151 of them were sentenced to be shot. The first on the list had already been executed when Moscow intervened. The Politburo regarded the action as ‘inopportune’, nothing worse.

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If Martov’s arguments were moral, Lenin’s were purely pragmatic. On 31 January 1922 he wrote to Unshlikht: ‘I cannot possibly attend the Politburo. I’m feeling worse. But I don’t think there’s any need for me. It’s only a matter of purely technical measures to help our judges intensify (and speed up) repression against the Mensheviks …’

(#litres_trial_promo) Martov had no hope of influencing the Bolshevik leadership towards humanizing their policies. If his political death was noisy, his physical death was quiet and sad, like a guttering candle. Seriously ill, in the autumn of 1920 he was allowed by the Politburo to leave for Germany, where he founded Sotsialisticheskii vestnik. In his last article, he foresaw that the Bolsheviks would leave the scene and be replaced in Russia by a ‘democratic regime ruled by law’. He died of tuberculosis on 24 April 1923, not yet aged fifty. Perhaps it was as much the collapse of all his ideas as his constant smoking that killed him off.

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People like Martov wanted the course of revolution to be like a river, peaceful, smooth and broad, while Lenin’s followers saw it as a waterfall, cascading from on high. The party Lenin created soon became an order, after October 1917 a state order. Not a monastic or chivalrous order, but an ideological one, and until his death nobody had the slightest doubt that Lenin had the absolute right to be the master of this order. He had not, however, taken account of the fact that a party such as his could survive only within a totalitarian system, a fact demonstrated by the events of August 1991.

(#ulink_d44c5d8c-7bdc-5ae4-b877-0980f4655425) Vyacheslav Plehve, Nicholas II’s Interior Minister, was assassinated in 1904. Peter Stolypin was the Prime Minister from 1906 until he was assassinated – in the tsar’s presence – in 1911.

(#ulink_8e9d7240-0ab9-5bc4-8e4f-9b9cace36a36) Larin, whose real name was Mikhail Lurie, was a top official in the economic apparatus. Alexei Rykov was in charge of the Council for the National Economy.

3 The Scar of October (#ulink_7d7b8a3a-c78c-5bf5-b5e4-e370f36e34f6)

On the evening of 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. When mobilization was declared, the whole nation rallied to the tsar. Plekhanov expressed a strong desire to defend the fatherland, and even Trotsky, who was not a defencist, wrote in the Paris newspaper Nashe slovo (Our Word) (formerly Golos, The Voice) that to preach the defeat of tsarist Russia made no sense, since that would mean advocating the victory of reactionary Germany. Only Lenin sensed intuitively the improbable, fantastic chance of achieving his hopes.

As patriotism sank in the mud and blood of the trenches, and hopes for victory faded, Lenin grew confident that neither Tsar Nicholas nor Kaiser Wilhelm would emerge from the war without a revolution. The intelligentsia, both in Russia and Germany, cursed the war and called for peace. But while each side hoped that its own army would not be defeated, only Lenin saw the war as an indispensable ally.

Unlike the peasant in his soldier’s cloak, enduring gas attacks, or the prisoner of war in Saxony, or the impoverished family in the city, Lenin observed the war from the Russian émigré’s grand circle, at first in Poronino and Vienna, and then in the neutral comfort of Berne and Zurich. How did the leader of the future Russian revolution fill the time during its prologue? Did he prepare himself for the rôle he was to play? Was he confident of the outcome? Until the February revolution, he led the quiet life of a man used to living far from home and not very much concerned with domestic cares. Life for Lenin in those years meant writing hundreds of letters to a relatively limited circle of people, among them his close Bolshevik associates Alexander Shlyapnikov, Alexandra Kollontai, Karl Radek, Grigory Pyatakov, S. Ravich, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, and his friend and benefactor Maxim Gorky. A large part of his correspondence was with Inessa Armand, he being in Zurich, she in Clarens on Lake Geneva near Montreux. It was an emotionally charged exchange between two very close people who, though they discussed revolutionary matters, tried to give each other something more than routine reports, more than confirmation of the posting of books or organizing links between Russia and Scandinavia.

Lenin spent a lot of time studying the works of Hegel, Aristotle and Lassalle, as well as Napoleon and Clausewitz, he read Victor Hugo’s poetry and occasionally took Krupskaya to the local theatre. They were able to relax at a moderately priced spa in the mountain resort of Flums in St Gallen. When he was not writing letters, resting, holding meetings, travelling or rowing with his opponents, Lenin wrote articles, pamphlets and more substantial works such as ‘Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism’. Since the post from Russia was slow, he got his news from The Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Le Temps, and he gained the growing impression that an earthquake was approaching in Russia. The nation’s weariness of the hardships imposed by the war and constant defeats was reaching a critical point, although what lay beyond even Lenin did not suspect.

In early January 1917 he gave a lecture at the People’s House in Zurich on the twelfth anniversary of the 1905 revolution. The audience, mostly students, was sparse, and the lecture was boring, prolonged and largely descriptive. Lenin emphasized the fact that in 1905 the scale of civil unrest had been insufficient to topple the autocracy: ‘The peasants burned up to 2000 estates and divided the livestock among themselves … Unfortunately, this was only one-fifteenth of what they ought to have destroyed … They did not act with sufficient aggression, and that is one of the main causes for the failure of the revolution.’ He rushed on speedily through his notes, expressing the view that 1905 would remain ‘the prologue to the approaching European revolution’. He did not mention Russia as the scene of imminent rebellion, and also declared that the revolution would not come soon, concluding: ‘We old folks may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.’

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Democratic February (#ulink_cced9100-8abf-5f17-a3b9-d467eeb9befa)

The two chief causes of the February revolution were the unsuccessful progress of the war and the weakness of the regime. Ostensibly, the Russian state collapsed suddenly, but its foundations had been eroded long before. As for the war, despite strategic failures, Russia’s position was not hopeless. The front had been stabilized far from the Russian capital and other vital centres. A breakthrough by General Brusilov in the summer of 1916 had given the people hope in the possibility of an honourable outcome. Far-sighted politicians saw that Germany could not win, especially as the United States seemed likely to enter the war on the Allied side.

To be sure, Social Democratic agitation had its effect on the war-weary army, and the Germans managed to get Bolshevik-style propaganda into the Russian trenches, which would help the Kaiser rather than Russia. President of the Duma Rodzianko wrote in his memoirs that ‘the symptoms of the army’s disintegration could be felt already in the second year of the war … Reinforcements from reserve battalions were arriving at the front with a quarter of the men having deserted … Sometimes, echelons bound for the front would halt because they had nothing left but officers and subalterns. Everyone else had scattered.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Socialist agitation among the peasants who were unwilling to fight was extremely effective, and the Bolsheviks were making their own independent contribution to the disintegration of the Russian army. On the whole, however, Russia had not yet exhausted her material and human resources on a war that came to seem increasingly just as the German occupation of her territory endured, especially since it was Germany that had started the war.

But the regime proved incapable of governing in a critical situation. Nicholas II’s decision on 6 August 1915 to assume the post of Supreme Commander did not help. Almost the entire cabinet of ministers had protested that the tsar’s decision could threaten both him and the monarchy.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nicholas was adamant, however, and departed for Staff Headquarters, leaving the capital to the hostile and venal groupings that had formed in his own entourage. In a country accustomed to one-man rule, the ‘domestic peace’ proclaimed by the Duma when war broke out soon evaporated.

Events in the capital developed their own momentum. On 27 February (12 March New Style) 1917, crowds broke into the Tauride Palace, where a Provisional Committee of the Duma was meeting. By the evening of the same day another claimant to power had emerged, namely the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, hastily convened by the Party organizations. Paul Milyukov, the leader of the Constitutional Democrats, and soon to become Foreign Minister in the post-tsarist government, later wrote: ‘The soldiers appeared last, but they were the masters of the moment, even if they did not realize it themselves.’ They did not behave like conquerors, but rather like men fearful of the consequences of having disobeyed orders and killed their commanding officers. ‘They were even less sure than we that the revolution had succeeded. They wanted recognition and protection.’

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In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a ‘long fatigue’ began which finally knocked away the foundations of the state, social stability and national unity. The main question was who would exploit the new situation. The dominant thought in the public mind was that only drastic measures of a revolutionary character could provide an outcome. Some figures close to the tsar believed that the situation had arisen out of weakness on the part of the regime. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich had written bitterly to the tsar less than one month before his abdication: ‘We are present at the unprecedented spectacle of a revolution from above, not from below.’

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Isolated in Zurich, Lenin had no feel for the nuances of the situation, and when on 2 (15) March he heard that the revolution had succeeded, he was amazed. He first heard of it from Moisei Bronsky, a quiet, retiring Polish Social Democrat from Lodz. Bronsky did not know much himself, except that telegrams had come from Russia. With Bronsky, Lenin wandered all around Zurich trying to find out something more definite, but all they heard was that there’d been a revolution in Petrograd, the ministers had been arrested and crowds were packing the streets. Lenin returned home in a state of excitement: he must do something. Pacing restlessly up and down, he exclaimed to Krupskaya, who was sitting quietly in her old armchair: ‘It’s staggering! Such a surprise! Just imagine! We must get home, but how? It’s so incredibly unexpected! Amazing!’ When he had calmed down somewhat, he wrote his first letter after hearing the news. It was to Inessa Armand, telling her what he had heard and describing the general state of agitation in Zurich. ‘If the Germans aren’t lying, it has happened. Russia must have been on the brink of revolution for the last few days. I’m so excited I cannot possibly go to Scandinavia!!’

(#litres_trial_promo) Having only two months earlier predicted a long wait for such events, Lenin was now possessed of perfect hindsight, and like so many politicians, felt no need to recall what he had recently asserted.

He cabled Zinoviev in Berne suggesting he come to Zurich immediately, and simultaneously wrote to his most trusted agent, Yakov Ganetsky: ‘We must at all costs get back to Russia and the only possible plan is as follows: find a Swede who looks like me. But as I can’t speak Swedish he’ll have to be deaf and dumb. I’m sending my photo, in any case.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It was an order almost as tall as starting the world revolution, and was soon dropped in favour of a more practical one.

Meanwhile, the news from Petrograd was more and more staggering. The tsar had abdicated on 2 (15 New Style) March 1917, and so had his brother Michael, having first called on the people to submit to the Provisional Government, which had been ‘initiated by the State Duma and invested with full powers’ until a Constituent Assembly could be convened to determine the nature of government according to the will of the people.

(#litres_trial_promo) When Lenin read the list of names in the Provisional Government, he remarked sarcastically, ‘the bourgeoisie has managed to get its arse onto ministerial seats’. He had no doubt that these liberals were not one whit better than the tsar, and he regarded their adherence to democratic ideals as nothing better than an attempt ‘to make fools of the people’. In his first ‘letter from afar’ Lenin, accurately from the Bolshevik point of view, caught the flavour of the moment: apart from the Provisional Government there had emerged another ‘plaything’ of the regime, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, headed by N.S. Chkheidze, A.F. Kerensky and M.I. Skobelev. Only two Bolsheviks, Shlyapnikov and P.A. Zalutsky, were members of its executive committee. Lenin, however, saw in the existence of the two centres of power a unique opportunity for the Bolsheviks. In his view the Soviet was the prototype of the future dictatorship of the proletariat, while the Provisional Government, which might have introduced the principles of bourgeois democratic popular power, he saw as nothing other than the target of his frenzied attacks.

Less than a week after it had been formed, and without the slightest idea of what was happening in Petrograd and Russia, Lenin pronounced: ‘The government of Octobrists and Kadets, of the Guchkovs and Milyukovs … cannot give the people peace, bread or liberty.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The Octobrists had taken their name from the tsar’s October 1905 Manifesto, and had been the political party most committed to attempting reform within the limits permitted by the tsar, rather than in constant opposition. The Kadets, that is the KDs, or Constitutional Democrats, were a fairly broad coalition of liberals, ranging from former Marxist revolutionaries to moderate reformers, who had spearheaded the criticism of the tsar’s handling of the war effort and were effectively the dominant successors to the old regime. To attack the Provisional Government would undermine the possibility of a peaceful alternative to further revolution. It was therefore consistent for Lenin to tell the Bolsheviks, as they departed for Russia: ‘Our tactics are complete distrust, no support for the new government; we especially suspect Kerensky; we arm the proletariat as the only guarantee; we call for immediate elections to the Petrograd city council; we make no friendships with other parties.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a typical reaction: mentally Lenin had applauded the revolution, as his letter to Inessa Armand had shown, but power was in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and there were moderate socialists – Mensheviks – heading the soviets. None of this suited Lenin, who had shown he was incapable of compromise with such people. The only way forward was to arm the proletariat. Since the Bolsheviks had played no noticeable part in the February revolution, he had to change the scenario.

Before leaving Zurich, on 27 March Lenin made a speech in which he declared, with evident satisfaction, that ‘the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war in Russia has begun’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The February revolution was merely the first stage. ‘The unique historical situation of the present moment is as a moment of transition from the first stage of the revolution to the second, from the uprising against tsarism to the uprising against the bourgeoisie …’

(#litres_trial_promo) He ended his speech by declaring, ‘Long live the revolution! Long live the world proletarian revolution that has begun!’

In his first ‘letter from afar’ Lenin had described the present moment in Russian political life as ‘a bloodstained bundle’. But it was the Provisional Government that believed, rightly as it turned out, that remaining loyal to the Allies, rather than consciously assisting in the defeat of its own army, would cause less loss of Russian life. It would be hard to find a precedent in history when a political party, for the sake of gaining power, worked as consistently and as zealously for the defeat of its own country as the Bolsheviks were to do. It was, however, an essential link in the chain: the collapse of the state through military defeat would be followed by the seizure of power. The democratic forces of February were not capable of withstanding such a plan.

More surprising than Lenin’s cynicism and anti-patriotism was the fact that he gained enough supporters to achieve his plan in so short a time. Whether he dreamed up the idea of a separate peace with Germany in Zurich, or whether he was entirely preoccupied with the question of getting back to Russia, or whether uppermost in his mind was how to exploit the ardent desire for peace of millions of people, it is not possible to say. With the imagination of the creative writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has suggested, probably rightly, that all these thoughts were jumbled together in Lenin’s mind in the days following February and before his return to Russia in April.

(#litres_trial_promo) During that time, most politicians in Russia felt that February had opened up a great new chapter in their history, a chapter of democracy. Lenin, however, was convinced that if the country remained at that stage, he and his party would at best occupy an insignificant place among the opposition in the forthcoming Constituent Assembly. All the shrill revolutionary speeches of his followers would be seen as nothing but the sort of extreme leftism to which Western parliaments had become blithely accustomed. If the February revolution were to stick to the aims proclaimed by its leaders, there would be an opening for Lenin’s old rivals, the Mensheviks, and that was unacceptable to him. He must get to Russia. Having invented and nurtured a tribe of ‘professional revolutionaries’, he now intended to make use of them. The chance might not come again, and he was already forty-seven.

Parvus, Ganetsky and the ‘German Key’ (#ulink_280e5813-9081-5136-971e-84df1b5829d7)

Lenin wrote urgently to his most trusted agent, Yakov Ganetsky in Stockholm, to find a way for him out of his Swiss blind alley. He asked Robert Grimm, a Swiss socialist, to test the possibility of travelling through Germany, but there was no rapid response there. Ganetsky, meanwhile, expeditious and resourceful as always, sent five hundred roubles for the journey,

(#litres_trial_promo) but there was still no plan, and Lenin began to wonder if he had missed the train of history. He wrote to Inessa: ‘It looks as if we won’t get to Russia! England won’t let us. [The idea of] going through Germany isn’t working.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It is possible that the journey might indeed not have taken place at all, since Lenin was frankly afraid of either being arrested in England or sunk by a German U-boat. Perhaps, had he remained in Switzerland writing his ‘letters from afar’, the October revolution would never have happened. Trotsky was to write that without Lenin, October was inconceivable.

Besides the Bolsheviks, however, the German High Command was also interested in getting Lenin back to Russia. For some time they had not only been watching the Bolsheviks with interest, they had also been giving them substantial financial help through various front-men. German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg had been encouraged to do so both by the General Staff and some German Social Democrats, but in particular by Alexander Helphand, then the publisher of Die Glocke. In conversation with the German ambassador in Copenhagen, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Helphand insisted that there was danger in a separate peace with Russia, for the tsar would survive to stamp out the revolution. Only a German victory was acceptable. Helphand did not know that Lenin would soon state publicly that he had always been opposed to a separate Russo – German peace. In an article entitled ‘Where is the Regime and Where is the Revolution?’, published in July 1917 in Listok Pravdy, Lenin stated categorically that he had ‘always and unconditionally repudiated separate peace with Germany in the most decisive and irrevocable way!!’

(#litres_trial_promo) As we have seen, Lenin wanted the defeat of Russia and a civil war. It was a position the German High Command found deeply sympathetic, for their own ‘defeatists’ were hardly to be heard. As First Quartermaster General Erich von Ludendorff, the ‘military brain of the German nation’, was to write of this episode: ‘In helping Lenin to travel to Russia, our government accepted a special responsibility. The enterprise was justified from a military point of view. We had to bring Russia down.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The Bolshevik revolution, when it came, would offer Germany a unique opportunity to win the war. Ludendorff would declare frankly that the Soviet government ‘exists thanks to us’. It is worth noting that in May 1920, when the Politburo discussed the publication in Russian of Ludendorff’s memoirs, it was unanimously decided that ‘only those sections dealing with the Brest negotiations should be translated and published’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Being in power, the Bolsheviks were not especially afraid of exposure, but it would nonetheless be embarrassing. Having secured the defeat of Russia, they had not only served their own interests, but also those of German militarism.

The ‘German factor’ in the Russian revolution has been extensively treated, especially in non-Soviet literature. The Russian Marxists preferred to say nothing, following Lenin’s request (which curiously was not published immediately) ‘again and again to all honest citizens not to believe the dirty slander and dark rumours’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Bolsheviks never attempted to disprove the accusation that they had made a deal with the Germans to ‘bring Russia down’. While the financial connections had evidently been indirect, it was impossible to deny the call for Russia’s defeat. It was best either to say nothing, or simply ‘Don’t believe the slanderers.’

The question that remains to be answered is whether there was a Bolshevik – German understanding on ‘peace propaganda’, as the Germans preferred to refer to this touchy question. Did the Bolsheviks receive German money for the revolution? The historian S.P. Melgunov claimed that one should look for the ‘German golden key in the pocket of Parvus [Helphand], who was connected both to the socialist world and the [German] foreign ministry and representatives of the German General Staff’, and that this explained the extraordinarily rapid success of Lenin’s propaganda.

(#litres_trial_promo) The matter is one of the many secrets surrounding the revolution, and although I have examined a vast number of hitherto inaccessible documents, it is still far from clear. Much was decided within a small circle of Bolsheviks by word of mouth, many documents were destroyed after the revolution, and Lenin was very good at keeping secrets.

In order to lift the veil further, we must concentrate on two figures. The first is Alexander Lazarevich Helphand (also known as Parvus and Alexander Moskovich). The second, who is even more obscure, is Yakov Stanislavovich Fürstenberg (also known as Ganetsky, Hanecki, Borel, Hendriczek, Frantiszek, Nikolai, Marian Keller, Kuba … ). In 1917 these two shadowy figures played the rôle of unseen levers. They did not agitate the masses: their rôle was to help Lenin and his group secure the funds needed to do so.

Helphand was born three years before Lenin to a Jewish artisan in Berezicho in the province of Minsk. He went to school in Odessa and university in Berne, where he obtained a doctorate in philosophy. In the West he made the acquaintance of such grandees of the revolutionary movement as Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich, Zetkin, Kautsky and Adler, and he met Lenin and Krupskaya before the 1905 revolution. He acquired a reputation for great erudition, a paradoxical turn of mind, radical judgments and bold predictions. In a series of articles published in 1904 under the title ‘War and the Revolution’, he forecast Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan, which duly came to pass the following year, and, as an inevitable consequence, a revolutionary conflagration at home. Lenin had long kept an eye on Parvus, but always kept his distance. He might have been thinking of Parvus (or perhaps himself?) when he said to Gorky: ‘the clever Russian is almost always a Jew or has Jewish blood in him.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Kautsky introduced Parvus to journalism, a profession at which he excelled.

(#litres_trial_promo) Trotsky was captivated by him, and fascinated by his theory of ‘permanent revolution’. After leaving Russia, Parvus joined the German Social Democrats and for a long time edited the Dresden paper Arbeiter Zeitung.

Like Trotsky, Parvus played a prominent part in the 1905 revolution – unlike Lenin, who was little more than an extra. Both Trotsky and Parvus were arrested in St Petersburg and exiled, separately, to Siberia, whence they both escaped, first to St Petersburg and then abroad. Despite his talent as a writer, Parvus left only a small literary record, including a book of recollections of his spell in the Peter-Paul Fortress after the defeat of the 1905 revolution. Most of his time was taken up with his favourite occupation, commerce, in which he did extremely well. He was Gorky’s literary agent, and also represented his financial interests in Germany, where at one time his play Lower Depths was playing to full houses. According to Gorky, Parvus took his agreed twenty per cent of the profits for himself, dividing the rest one quarter to Gorky and three quarters to the German Social Democratic Party. Parvus amassed some 100,000 marks, but instead of sending Gorky his money, he wrote to him frankly admitting that he had spent it on a trip to Italy with a female companion. Gorky, who thought ‘it must have been a very pleasant holiday’ to have consumed only his quarter of the earnings, complained to the Central Committee of the German Social Democratic Party. A Party court made up of Kautsky, Bebel and Zetkin condemned Parvus morally, and he left Germany for Constantinople. There he became an advisor to the Young Turk movement, and carried on highly successful commerce between Turkey and Germany.

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When the war began, Parvus, now a rich man, became consumed by the idea of helping Germany by bringing about revolution in Russia, although there was more to his idea than this. In January 1915, Parvus explained his plan to Wangenheim, the German ambassador in Constantinople: ‘The interests of the German government are identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries. The Russian Democrats can only achieve their aim by the total destruction of Tsarism. On the other hand, Germany would not be completely successful if it were not possible to kindle a major revolution in Russia. However, there would still be a danger to Germany from Russia, even after the war, if the Russian empire were divided into a number of separate parts.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Here lay the essence of the German interest in the revolution, and its coincidence with Lenin’s desire for revolution via the defeat of Russia. While it is clear that the plan existed and that the Germans were interested in it, it is not clear quite how the German government intended to carry it out, or how the Bolsheviks would achieve their part of it without losing face.

Western historians have asserted that Lenin met Parvus in Zurich or Berne in May 1915. David Shub claims that ‘at first Lenin listened attentively to Parvus’s plan, but gave him no definite reply. To maintain contact with him, however, he sent Ganetsky-Fürstenberg to Copenhagen with orders to work in Parvus’s Institute and to keep him systematically informed about Parvus’s activities.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The official Soviet chronicle of Lenin’s activities in May 1915 states that he ordered from Berne Library a guide-book of resorts and The Influence of High-Mountain Climate and Mountain Excursions on Man, but says nothing about a meeting with Parvus. For his part, however, Parvus described their meeting in detail in a pamphlet entitled, ‘In the Struggle for the Truth’, confirming that it took place in Zurich. Shub asserts, on the basis of Parvus’s own testimony and other documents, that Parvus arrived in Switzerland in the company of Yekaterina Groman and took up residence in the most luxurious hotel. Through Groman, Parvus distributed largesse among needy Russian émigrés. One day in May he unexpectedly entered a restaurant where émigrés ate, and went straight to a table where Lenin, Krupskaya, Inessa Armand and Kasparov, another close friend, were sitting. After brief conversation, Lenin and Krupskaya accompanied Parvus to their apartment, where they talked until evening.

Parvus wrote of this meeting: ‘I told Lenin my views on the social-revolutionary consequences of the war and also drew his attention to the fact that, as long as the war was going on, there would be no revolution in Germany: revolution was possible only in Russia which would blow up as a result of a German victory.’ The meeting was confirmed by the Bolshevik, Arthur Zifeldt, who saw Lenin and Parvus leaving the restaurant together.

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Parvus made it known that he was setting up a new institute in Copenhagen to study the causes and effects of the war, and he succeeded in recruiting a number of Russian Social Democrats, among them some Mensheviks and some Bolsheviks, including, most notably, Yakov Ganetsky, Lenin’s most trusted agent.

(#litres_trial_promo) Parvus had frequent meetings with another of Lenin’s close associates, Karl Radek, who in 1924 wrote a sketch of him, based on personal recollections. Radek quoted Parvus saying of himself: ‘I’m Midas in reverse: whenever I touch gold it turns into garbage.’ Twenty years after the events, in an article entitled ‘Parvus-Lenin-Ganetsky’, Kerensky wrote: ‘The Provisional Government firmly established that Ganetsky’s “financial affairs” with Parvus were continued in Petrograd by the Bank of Siberia, where in the name of a relative of Ganetsky called Madame Sumenson, and also the not unknown Kozlovsky, very large sums came from Berlin via the New Bank in Stockholm through the mediation of the same Ganetsky.’ Kerensky could rightly claim that the first historical research into Bolshevik-German links was carried out by his government.

Materials in the Special Archive frequently record that in 1916 a special section was created in Berlin under the name ‘Stockholm’, headed by a certain Trautmann, who maintained contact with Parvus and Radek through Ganetsky. The archives also hold the addresses in Copenhagen where Parvus and Ganetsky lived not far from each other.

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