national self-determination. Central power remained weak and patchy, and experienced personnel were needed too badly in Petrograd and Moscow for many militants to be spared for work in the provinces. Lenin and his leading comrades felt that history was on their side. The Bolsheviks hoped that their revolution would proceed as much from below as from on high. Difficulties were unavoidable. The parties to the right of the Bolsheviks were not reconciled to being deposited in the wastepaper basket of politics. The middle and upper classes detested the Bolshevik seizure of power. The Orthodox Church was appalled by it. Kerenski’s armed sally would not be the last attempt at counter-revolution. But Lenin and Trotsky trusted that events would validate their strategy. Russia would undergo a socialist transformation and seizures of power by far-left socialists would soon follow all over Europe. A whole new epoch was in the making.
Neither the Allies nor the Central Powers had any interest in helping a regime that was calling for their downfall and an immediate end to the war. Few foreign newspapers greeted the rise of Bolshevism with enthusiasm. What is more, Sovnarkom had no diplomatic service and the Provisional Government’s ambassadors lobbied Allied governments to refuse recognition to the Bolsheviks.
The Western cheerleaders in Petrograd came into their own at this juncture. As John Reed, Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty and Albert Rhys Williams roamed around the city, they understood that events of historic importance were taking place. They had the luck to be on the spot. Within minutes of the fall of the Winter Palace they had entered the building to inspect the scene.3 The Bolsheviks welcomed assistance from the little American group in propagating the news in a positive spirit to foreign countries. Reed and his friends were given passes to enter virtually any public building they wanted.4 They were given privileged use of the international telegraph system, and on 15 November the Military-Revolutionary Committee allowed Reed to send the very first international cable from Petrograd — he could also travel free on the railway network.5 The Americans avidly wrote dispatches telling the story as they saw it. They tried to dispel the impression given in most of the Western press that the Bolsheviks were insincere, bloodthirsty or incompetent. They reported on the ease with which power had been seized. They recapitulated the decrees and endorsed objectives of peace, bread and land. They were acting as Sovnarkom’s window on the world.
Trotsky entranced them, especially Bryant and Beatty. He was an elegant man who was punctilious in his manners and fastidious about his appearance. For years he had denounced Lenin for his divisive tendencies; he was known for his efforts to bring the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks back together before the Great War. In the revolutionary crisis of 1905 he had shown his exceptional qualities. No one spoke more vividly, and he had no need for anything more than a short set of notes before he occupied the platform. Trotsky was a master of Russian prose. He had gone to the Balkan war in 1912–13 as a special correspondent for a Kiev newspaper. His autobiographical fragments sold well. But in writing them he exposed his vanity. Despite his efforts to bring the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks back together in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before the Great War, many critics suspected him of being just as egocentric as Lenin. But what surprised everybody in 1917 was how literally he believed in the need for a ruthless proletarian dictatorship. Plenty of Russian Marxists had talked about revolutionary violence without genuinely meaning it. Trotsky meant it — and he found a like-minded comrade in Lenin.
When Beatty met Trotsky in the Smolny Institute on 7 November, she enjoyed feeling ‘his lean hand grasping mine in a strong, characteristic handshake’.6 Louise Bryant left an equally adoring picture:
During the first days of the Bolshevik revolt I used to go to Smolny to get the latest news. Trotsky and his pretty little wife, who hardly spoke anything but French, lived in one room on the top floor. The room was partitioned off like a poor artist’s attic studio. In one end were two cots and a cheap little dresser and in the other a desk and two or three wooden chairs. There were no pictures, no comfort anywhere. Trotsky occupied this office all the time he was Minister of Foreign Affairs and many dignitaries found it necessary to call upon him there.7
Two Red Guards stood on constant duty, but Bryant noted how little he had changed his work habits and availability for interviews.8 Of all Bolsheviks he best understood the importance of talking to foreigners who could take the revolutionary gospel to the world. Bryant recorded: ‘He is the easiest official to interview in Russia and entirely the most satisfactory.’9
Jacques Sadoul of the French military mission agreed with this assessment.10 On 7–8 November he spent hours in the Smolny Institute, and he wrote to his patron Albert Thomas in Paris commending Lenin and Trotsky.11 The Bolsheviks soon treated him as a ‘comrade’. Sadoul bemoaned the lack of information reaching France. He criticized Ambassador Noulens for not being abreast of events; he argued too that the French press was failing in its duty to keep its country in touch with the situation — he thought it disgraceful that he came across only one correspondent from Paris at the Smolny Institute. Not working for a newspaper, Sadoul strove to exert an influence through Albert Thomas. He reported on Trotsky’s belief that the Decree on Peace would induce deep political stirrings in Europe. Even if revolutions did not instantly occur, popular pressure to end the war would grow. Although Sadoul did not expect the Germans to agree to the truce on the eastern front that the Bolsheviks were proposing, his admiration for Lenin and Trotsky was wholehearted: ‘Today Bolshevism is a fact of life. This is my contention. Bolshevism is a force which in my opinion cannot be damaged by any other Russian force.’12
As yet he did not approve of the Bolsheviks ruling by themselves, as he explained on 15 November: ‘What preoccupies me is the urgent need for a Menshevik–Bolshevik concentration in power in the interests of the Allies, Russia and the Revolution: I repeat this daily to Trotsky and to all the Bolsheviks I’ve had contact with.’ Sadoul gave the benefit of the doubt to Bolsheviks and blamed the Mensheviks for rejecting their overtures.13
Trotsky and Lenin were seen to have an equal influence on events. But Lenin concentrated on his work in Sovnarkom and the Central Committee and did not speak to foreign correspondents. Until his beard grew back, he did not look like the Lenin known to us from so many later posters; and few people outside the centre of Petrograd knew what he looked like because Russian newspapers carried no photographs of him.14 To party comrades, though, he was immediately familiar. He had founded the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social- Democratic Workers’ Party in 1903. Although he had sometimes co-operated with the Menshevik faction, he did this only for tactical reasons. He wrote on every big question of Marxist theory: industrial capitalism, land, imperialism and epistemology. His cofactionalists followed him into extremism, and there were times when they themselves objected to his insistence on temporary compromises. Whenever he was thwarted he formed his own sub-faction. He was the most notorious schismatic in the European socialist movement before the Great War. At the beginning of 1917 his band of close supporters was tiny. Russia’s political and economic disintegration as well as its military defeat gave him an opening that was not his own handiwork. He now intended to make the most of the situation.
Lenin was shortish, pedantic and impatient. With his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat, he seemed at times like an angry Sunday preacher. He gave the impression that there was only one answer — his answer — to any complicated question. He was a gambler who trusted his intuitions. He lived for the cause. He was a stickler for party discipline when his ideas were official policy, but he broke all the rules as soon as he was in a minority. Power for himself and the Bolsheviks was important to him but still dearer to his mind was the achievement of a revolutionary dictatorship to cast down capitalism and imperialism worldwide. He and Trotsky formed a bond of trust in the early weeks of Soviet rule.
Trotsky organized the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs from a distance and seldom entered its premises. The priority for him and Lenin was to secure authority in Petrograd. Trotsky liked the anecdote told about him that he intended simply to publish the secret wartime treaties of the Allies and then ‘shut up shop’.15 On the first occasion he had tried to accomplish this, he failed. The officials who had worked for the Provisional Government barred the doors of the old ministry to him. As soon as his entourage forced the locks, there was a mass exodus of personnel and Trotsky discovered that former Deputy Foreign Minister Neratov had made off with the treaties.16 This only temporarily foiled Sovnarkom. Texts of the treaties were discovered and verified, and Trotsky immediately released them for publication on 21 November 1917.17 They confirmed what the Bolsheviks had been saying all year — and indeed the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had said the same thing. Now it was proved beyond fear of contradiction: the Allies had entered the war with ambitions of territorial aggrandizement
Every Allied power was assured of benefit if and when the Central Powers were defeated. In March 1915 it
