Immediately on arriving in the city on the 21st, Tsereteli gave a speech that was admirably clear with a right-Menshevik analysis of history and the party leadership’s position on the Soviet’s relationship to the government. It also sounded a warning about his attitude to excessive radicalism. He congratulated the workers for not attempting proletarian revolution – he considered this an achievement as great as overthrowing tsarism: ‘you weighed the circumstances … you understood that the time has not yet come’.
‘You understood that a bourgeois revolution is taking place,’ he continued. ‘The power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie. You transferred this power to the bourgeoisie, but at the same time you have stood guard over the newly gained freedom … The Provisional Government must have full executive power in so far as this power strengthens the Revolution.’
The Mensheviks commanded the respect and affiliaton of many activists, and Tsereteli, Chkheidze, Skobolev and the top brass did not by any means speak for them all. Within two weeks, insinuations of their move towards conciliationism, ‘defencism’ and political moderation would leave Martov, the great left Menshevik, still in exile, ‘plagued by doubts’ and hoping that the rumours were ‘questionable’.
Within Petrograd, however, it was Tsereteli’s proposal of unity that the Bolsheviks considered.
The day after the party workers’ conference opened in Petrograd, so did an All-Russian Conference of Soviets, bearing impressive witness to the spread of the soviet form: 479 delegates from 138 local soviets, seven armies, thirteen rear units and twenty-six front units were represented.
Nomenclature was tangled: Russia that year was riddled with committees, caucuses, congresses, permanent and semi-permanent, standing and not-standing. Meetings proliferated ad well-minuted infinitum. This first conference of soviets was intended in part to plan the first congress of soviets, to take place in June. The Petrograd Soviet, now with delegates countrywide, technically became the All-Russian Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. After the conference, the growing Ispolkom, the Soviet Executive Committee responsible for day-to-day decisions and administration, now including representatives from the provinces, was formally renamed the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, or VTsIK. Any and all of these names might be used.
For the Mensheviks, it was at the soviet conference that Tsereteli made his mark, coordinating discussions, instilling a new professionalism, solidifying the positions of postol’ku-poskol’ku and a muscular revolutionary defencism. Until the peoples of other countries, he declared, overthrew their own governments or compelled them to change tack, ‘the Russian Revolution should fight against the foreign enemy with the same courage which it showed against the internal forces’. For the Bolsheviks, Kamenev instead put forward a version of the party’s internationalist insistence not on defence of the nation, but on the necessary export of the revolution, transforming the Russian experience into ‘a prologue for the uprising of the peoples of all the warring countries’.
His position was an affair of nuance and aspiration rather than an expression of any stark, concretely distinct policy. Even so, it was defeated by 57 votes to Tsereteli’s 325. Nevertheless, while Bolshevik powerbrokers tacked right, some other socialists in the Soviet tacked left, enabling both camps to meet in the middle. On relations between the Soviet and the Provisional Government, the official Soviet position, moved by the Menshevik Steklov, insisted so sternly on vigilant oversight that a satisfied Kamenev withdrew the alternative Bolshevik resolution.
Such convergence had only a very few days left to run.
On 29 March, the ‘sealed train’ arrived in Berlin via Stuttgart and Frankfurt. From there it headed coastward. All the way through Germany, Lenin wrote. Secluded in his cabin, fortified by refreshments from the unlikely restaurant car, he scribbled on as trees and towns rushed past. Thus, in March, in a stateless train, were born what would become known as the April Theses.
By the wild shores of Germany’s Jasmund peninsula, at the town of Sassnitz, a Swedish steamer awaited the travellers. It was dusk when they stumbled down the swaying gangplank into Sweden’s southernmost town of Trelleborg. Their journey had become news, and journalists trailed them. The mayor of Stockholm welcomed the party before it continued on to the Swedish capital, where Lenin went shopping for books, scorning his comrades’ pleas that he buy new clothes, and found time to attend a meeting of Russian leftists.
On the last day of the first full month of revolutionary Russia, the comrades climbed into traditional Finnish sleighs, and slipped across the crisp snow out of Stockholm towards Finland – Russian territory.
4
April: The Prodigal
In the muck, ideologues and true believers like the murderous Black Hundreds – ultra-monarchist pogrom enthusiasts, proto-fascists and mystics of hate – skulked and schemed behind closed doors, biding their time. The early days of the revolution were remarkable for how submerged and scattered that hard right was. Most of its high-profile figures had left the country or been arrested after February. Only the erratic Purishkevich remained at large, more or less powerless, tolerated and toothless. The political integument of Petrograd in particular had lurched leftward, repositioning radicals as moderates and moderates as right-wingers. In those days everyone was, or claimed to be, a socialist. No one wanted to be bourgeois.
Until the eve of revolution, the Kadets were a party of occasionally even bracing liberalism, harried by reaction, not without heroes. They entered April 1917 fresh from their congress, committed to a democratic republic. But now, history – revolution – made them conservatives. On the party’s right, Milyukov was an early outlier of this trend, a function of the strong tactics of weak liberalism in fractious times.
For now, though, as April began, not even the far left had unanimously declared itself an enemy of the Provisional Government. That was to come, with the train from Finland.
On 2 April, the Bolsheviks got word from Lenin that he would be back in Petrograd the next day. The leader was coming. They hastened to prepare. So it was that the following evening, at the little Belo Ostrov border station where Finland and Russia met, a small, select group of Bolsheviks awaited the train: Kollontai, Kamenev, Shlyapnikov, Lenin’s sister Maria, a few others.
They were not the only ones who had heard that Lenin was returning. Some hundred eager workers were on the platform too, to greet the train that wheezed slowly in. As his comrades watched, while the engine idled for half an hour, those gathered mortified Lenin by calling him out of his carriage and parading him jubilantly on their shoulders. ‘Gently, comrades,’ he muttered. At last they let him go and he took his seat again with relief, joined now by his excited party escort.
They were in for a shock.
As best he could, Lenin had kept up with his comrades’ writings on the war and the Provisional Government. ‘We had hardly got into the car and sat down,’ said Raskolnikov, a Kronstadt Bolshevik naval officer, ‘when Vladimir Ilyich burst out at Kamenev: “What’s this you’re writing in Pravda? We saw several issues and really swore at you.”’ This was his greeting to an old comrade.
The revolutionaries rocked homeward through a darkening landscape. Was he at risk of arrest? Lenin asked uneasily. His welcome party smiled at that. He would soon understand why.
When the train pulled in to Petrograd at 11 p.m., the Finland Station echoed to a vast cheer of welcome. Lenin at last began to grasp his own standing in the revolutionary capital. His comrades had arranged a showcase of the party’s strength, convoking friendly garrisons, but the excitement of the crowd clamouring for him was quite real. The station was festooned with vivid red banners. As he stepped, dazed, onto the platform, someone handed Lenin an incongruous bouquet. Thousands had come to salute him: workers, soldiers, Kronstadt sailors.
A throng of well-wishers propelled Lenin into the splendid chamber still called the ‘Tsar’s Room’. There, officials from the Soviet waited for their own chance to greet him. The Soviet
chairman, the Georgian Menshevik Chkheidze, a serious, honest activist, had lost his usual amiable veneer. When the Bolshevik leader entered, Chkheidze launched into a welcome speech that was neither welcoming nor a speech. Sukhanov, who was of course present, called it a ‘sermon’, and a ‘glum’ one.
‘Comrade Lenin, in the name of the Petrograd Soviet and of the whole revolution we welcome you to Russia,’ said Chkheidze. ‘But we think’, he continued anxiously, ‘the principal task of the revolutionary democracy is the defence of the revolution against attacks from without or within. We consider this end to require not disunity, but the closing of democratic ranks. We hope you will pursue these objectives with us.’
The flowers dangled half-forgotten from Lenin’s fingers. He ignored Chkheidze. He looked up at the ceiling. He looked everywhere but at the beseeching Menshevik.
When Lenin at last replied, it was not to the Soviet chair, nor to anyone from its delegation. He spoke instead to everyone else present, to the crowd – his ‘dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers’. The imperialist war, he roared, was the start of European civil war. The longed-for international revolution was imminent. Provocatively, he praised by name his German comrade Karl Liebknecht. Ever the internationalist, he concluded with a stirring call to build from this first step: ‘Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!’
His Soviet hosts were stunned. They could only watch numbly as the crowds demanded a further speech. Lenin hurried from the station, climbed onto the bonnet of a car and began to hold forth. He denounced ‘any part in shameful imperialist slaughter’; he excoriated ‘lies and frauds’ and the ‘capitalist pirates’.
So much for postol’ku-poskol’ku.
February and March were festive bursts of architectural expropriation. Revolutionary groups captured and occupied government buildings, along with various sumptuous others. The Provisional Government and the Soviet had little option but to tolerate such appropriations. On 27 February, as the city convulsed, the legendary ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya and her son Vladimir had fled her modern mansion at 1–2 Kronverkskiy Prospect on the Neva’s north side, below the towering minarets of Petrograd’s main mosque: almost immediately, revolutionary soldiers had taken it over.
The house displayed a striking, strange asymmetry of interconnected structures, stairwells and halls. In mid-March the Bolsheviks had decided it would make an excellent headquarters, and had moved in without ado. On the night of 3 April, it was in its main meeting hall, amid precise art nouveau stylings, that Lenin made his views clear to the comrades who had gathered to welcome him home.
It had been the last day of the All-Russian Conference of Soviets. There, the Bolshevik caucus had unanimously approved their leadership’s policy of ‘vigilant control’ over the Provisional Government, and had broadly accepted Stalin and Kamenev’s opposition to ‘disorganising activities’ at the front. The next day, unity talks between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were due to start. Such was the mood music that Lenin interrupted.
‘I will never forget’, said Sukhanov, ‘that thunder-like speech, which startled and amazed not only me, a heretic … but all the true believers … It seemed as though all the elements had risen from their abodes, and the spirits of universal destruction … were hovering around Kshesinskaya’s reception room above the heads of the bewitched disciples.’
What Lenin demanded was continual revolution. He scorned talk of ‘watchfulness’. He denounced the Soviet’s ‘revolutionary defencism’ as an instrument of the bourgeoisie. He raged at the lack of Bolshevik ‘discipline’.
His comrades listened in stricken silence.
The next day at the Tauride Palace, Lenin intervened again, twice. First at a session of Bolshevik delegates from the Soviet Congress; then, with breathtaking audacity, at a Bolshevik–Menshevik meeting scheduled to discuss unity. Aware of his isolation, he made it clear that he was expounding personal opinion rather than party policy, as he presented his seminal document of the revolution: the April Theses.
Among its ten points was the wholesale rejection of ‘limited support’ for the Provisional Government and the ‘no opposition’ pledge of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee. Lenin repudiated without ‘the slightest concession … “revolutionary defencism”’ – continuing to advocate fraternisation at the front. He demanded the confiscation of landlord estates and the nationalisation of land, to be disposed of by peasant soviets; a single national bank under the Soviet’s control; and the abolition of the police, army and bureaucracy. For now, he said, the order of the day was to explain the imperative of a struggle to take power from the government, and to replace any parliamentary republic with a ‘Republic of Soviets’.
His speech unleashed bedlam. The impact of the Theses was electric, and Lenin’s isolation almost total. Speaker after outraged speaker denounced him. Tsereteli, the prominent Menshevik Lenin anathematised, accused him of breaking with Marx and Engels. Goldenberg, a Menshevik who had once been a leading Bolshevik, said Lenin was now an anarchist, ‘on Bakunin’s throne’. Lenin’s words, yelled the furious Menshevik Bogdanov, were ‘the ravings of a madman’.
Chernov, the SR leader, who reached Petrograd from exile five days after Lenin, after a dangerous sea journey through submarine-infested waters, saw Lenin’s ‘political excesses’ as so complete that he had marginalised himself. The evening of the prodigal’s shocking speech, another Menshevik, Skobelev, assured Milyukov that Lenin’s ‘lunatic ideas’ disqualified him from being a danger, and told Prince Lvov that the Bolshevik leader was ‘a has-been’.
And what of the Bolsheviks? How appalled were they?
It is often claimed that on 18 April the party’s Petersburg Committee rejected the Theses by thirteen to two, with one abstention. The story, however, is based on inaccurate minutes. Two of those present, Bagdatev and Zalezhsky, later insisted that the committee voted to approve the Theses, but by thirteen to two rejected Zalezhsky’s rather fawning motion that these be accepted without criticism or reservation. The Committee instead reserved the right to dissent on specifics and details.
And dissent they did. After Lenin’s speech at the Kshesinskaya Mansion, his comrades were not backward in coming forward with concerns.
The wrangles were mostly over tactical issues, such as Lenin’s suggestion that they change the name of the party, or his new political emphasis on the soviets rather than the more traditional propagandist stress on convening the Constituent Assembly. A particular point at issue was that Lenin adamantly opposed, almost as distasteful, making ‘impermissible, illusion-breeding “demands”’ on the Provisional Government, which would and could never accede to them. Instead he advocated ‘patient explanation’ in the soviets that the government could not be trusted. By contrast, Bagdatev, Kamenev and various others saw such ‘demands’ as a proven method of puncturing illusions, precisely because the government would fail to meet them. Kamenev called this ‘a method of exposure’.
A continuity, then, between ‘Old Bolshevism’ and Lenin’s theses could certainly be argued, as it was by many activists, such as Ludmila Stahl. But a permeable membrane exists between tactics and analysis – and emphasis. There was kinship, certainly, but the stress in the uncompromising theses was more than ‘mere’ rhetoric. It was no surprise that some in the party, both on Lenin’s side and against, considered them a break with Bolshevik tradition. Such debates could simultaneously be misunderstandings of the depth of shared ground, and symptomatic of real divergence more substantial than that supposedly in the ‘Letters from Afar’.
Bolshevik concerns at Lenin’s tack were widespread. The Kiev and Saratov organisations rejected the Theses outright. Lenin had been out of Russia too long, their members said, to understand its situation. Zinoviev, his comrade-in-exile and close collaborator, called the Theses ‘perplexing’; others in the party were not so kind.
At first the board of Pravda were hesitant to reproduce the Theses, but Lenin insisted, and they were published on 7 April –
swiftly followed by Kamenev’s ‘Our Disagreements’, distancing the Bolsheviks from Lenin’s ‘personal opinions’. ‘Lenin’s general scheme appears to us unacceptable,’ he wrote, ‘inasmuch as it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois–democratic revolution is completed, and builds on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution.’
The party, more than many on the left, had always focused on the agency of the working class in collaboration with the peasantry. The post-1905 ‘Old Bolshevik’ hope for the revolution in Russia was steadily, if rather nebulously, pinned on that ‘democratic dictatorship of proletariat and peasantry’ destined to sweep away the muck of feudalism and oversee what could only be a move to a bourgeois–democratic system, including on the land. As late as 1914, Lenin was still writing that a Russian revolution would be limited to ‘a democratic republic … confiscation of the landed estates, and an eight-hour working day’. Now, though, he was dismissing Kamenev’s formula as ‘obsolete’, ‘no good at all’, ‘dead’. In the April Theses Lenin wrote that Russia was, right now, ‘passing from the first stage of the revolution … to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants’.
This was a shift. As regards the ‘second stage’, Lenin was clear that it was not ‘our immediate task to “introduce” socialism’, prior to a European socialist revolution, but to place power in the hands of working people, rather than to pursue political class collaboration as advocated by the Mensheviks. ‘Let the bourgeoisie continue to trade and build its mills and factories,’ the Bolshevik activist Sapranov later glossed it to young Eduard Dune, ‘but power must rest with the workers, not with the factory owners, traders, and their servants.’ Still, there is not necessarily a neat firewall between ‘trading and building’ on the one hand and ‘power’ on the other, and there was in Lenin’s position at least a tendential implication going further, an eye on a horizon. There is a political logic, after all, implicit in taking power. There was something pregnant even in Lenin’s emphasis – it was not an immediate task to introduce socialism – but …