A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

basic instinct to judge when the moment was ripe to strike out for power. That was the crucial difference between a Chernov and a Lenin — and upon that difference the fate of Russia turned.

* * * With Kamenev's plan for a socialist coalition scotched by the failure of the Democratic Conference, Lenin reverted to his campaign in the party for an immediate armed uprising. He had already begun to advocate this in two letters to the Central Committee written from exile in Finland on the eve of the conference. The Bolsheviks, Lenin had argued, 'can and must take state power into their own hands'. Can — because the party had already won a majority in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets, which was 'enough to carry the people with it' in any civil war, provided the party in power proposed an immediate peace and gave the land to the peasants. Must — because if it waited for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, 'Kerensky and Co.' would take preemptive action against the transfer of power, either by giving up Petrograd to the Germans or by delaying the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The Democratic Conference was to be condemned, since it represented 'only the compromising upper strata of the bourgeoisie. We must not be deceived by the election figures: elections prove nothing . . . The majority of the people are on our side.' Reminding his comrades of Marx's dictum that 'insurrection is an art', Lenin had concluded that 'it would be naive to wait for a 'formal' majority for the Bolsheviks. No revolution ever waits for that. . . History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.'¹⁰³

These two letters reached the Central Committee on 15 September. They were, to say the least, highly inconvenient for the rest of the Bolshevik leaders ('We were all aghast', Bukharin recalled) since the Democratic Conference had just begun and they were still committed to Kamenev's conciliatory tactics. It was even resolved to burn all but one copy of the letters, lest they should fall into the hands of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks and spark a revolt. The Central Committee continued to ignore Lenin's advice and printed instead his earlier articles, in which he had endorsed the Kamenev line. Lenin was beside himself with rage. While he was still afraid to return to Petrograd (Kerensky had ordered

Lenin's arrest at the Democratic Conference), he moved from Finland to the resort town of Vyborg, eighty miles from the capital, to be closer. During the following weeks, he assaulted the Central Committee and the lower-level party organizations with a barrage of impatient letters, full of violent and abusive phrases heavily underlined, in which he urged them to start the armed insurrection at once. He condemned the 'parliamentary tactics' of the Bolshevik leaders; and welcomed the prospect of a civil war ('the sharpest form of the class struggle'), which they were trying to avert on the false assumption that, like the Paris Communards, they were bound to be defeated. On the contrary, Lenin insisted, the antiBolshevik forces would be no more than those aligned behind the Kornilov movement, and any 'rivers of blood' would give 'certain victory' to the party.

Finally, on 29 September, at the high point of his frustration, Lenin scribbled an angry tirade against the Bolshevik leaders, in which he denounced them as 'miserable traitors to the proletarian cause. They had wanted to delay the transfer of power until the Soviet Congress, due to convene on 20 October, whereas the moment was already ripe for the seizure of power and any delay would merely enable Kerensky to use military force against them. The workers, Lenin insisted, were solidly behind the Bolshevik cause; the peasants were starting their own war on the manors, thus ruling out the danger of an Eighteenth Brumaire, or a 'petty-bourgeois' counter-revolution, like that of 1849; while the strikes and mutinies in the rest of Europe were 'indisputable symptoms . . . that we are on the eve of a world revolution. To 'miss such a moment and 'wait' for the Congress of Soviets would be utter idiocy, or sheer treachery', and if the Bolsheviks did so they would 'cover themselves with shame and destroy themselves as a party'. As a final ultimatum, he even threatened to resign from the Central Committee, thereby giving himself the freedom to take his campaign for an armed uprising to the Bolshevik rank and file, scheduled to meet at a Party Conference on 17 October. 'For it is my profound conviction that if we 'wait' for the Congress of Soviets and let the present moment pass, we shall ruin the revolution.'¹⁰⁴ Lenin's infamous 'rage' was reaching fever pitch.

Why was Lenin so insistent on the need for an armed uprising before the Congress of Soviets? All the signs were that time was on the side of the Bolsheviks: the country was falling apart; the Soviets were moving to the left; and the forthcoming Congress would almost certainly endorse the Bolshevik call for a transfer of power to the Soviets. Why stage a premature uprising and run the risk of civil war and defeat? Many Bolshevik leaders had stressed the need for the seizure of power to coincide with the Soviet Congress itself. This was the view of Trotsky and several other Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet — and since they were closely informed about the mood in the capital and would have to play a leading role in any uprising, their point of view was highly influential

in the party at large. While these leaders doubted that the party had sufficient support to justify an insurrection in its own name, they thought that it might be successfully carried out in the name of the Soviets. Since the Bolsheviks had conducted their campaign on the slogan of Soviet power, it was said that they needed the Congress to legitimize such an uprising and make it appear as the work of the Soviet as a whole, rather than one party. By taking this line, which would have delayed the uprising by no more than a few days, Lenin could have won widespread support in the party against those, such as Kamenev and Zinoviev, who were flatly opposed to the idea of an uprising. But Lenin was adamant — the seizure of power had to be carried out before the Congress convened. He continued to insist on this right up until the eve of the Congress itself.

Lenin justified his impatience by the notion that any delay in the seizure of power would enable Kerensky to organize repressive measures against it: Petrograd would be abandoned to the Germans; the seat of government would be moved to Moscow; and the Soviet Congress itself would be banned. This of course was nonsense. Kerensky was quite incapable of such decisive action and, in any case, as Kamenev pointed out, the government was powerless to put any counter-revolutionary intentions into practice. Lenin, it seems from some of his other writings at this time,* was deliberately inventing the danger of a clamp-down by Kerensky in order to strengthen his own arguments for a pre-emptive insurrection, although it is possible that he had become so out of touch with the real situation in Russia, having been in Finland since July, that he himself believed it. There were certainly rumours in the press that the government was planning to evacuate the capital in early October; and these no doubt reinforced his conviction that a civil war had begun, and that military victory would go to the side which dared to strike first. 'On s'engage et puis en voit.'

But there was another motive for wanting the insurrection before the Soviet Congress convened, quite apart from military tactics. If the transfer of power took place by a vote of the Congress itself, the result would almost certainly be a coalition government made up of all the Soviet parties. The Bolsheviks might gain the largest share of the ministerial places, if these were allocated on a proportional basis, but would still have to rule in partnership with at least the left-wing — and possibly all — of the SR and Menshevik parties. This would be a resounding political victory for Kamenev, Lenin's arch rival in the Bolshevik Party, who would no doubt emerge as the central figure in such a coalition. Under his leadership, the centre of power would remain with

* During the final days before 25 October Lenin stressed that a military-style coup was bound to succeed, even if only a very small number of disciplined fighters joined it, because Kerensky's forces were so weak.

the Soviet Congress, rather than the party; and there might even be a renewed effort to reunite the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. As for Lenin himself, he ran the risk of being kept out of office, either on the insistence of the Mensheviks and SRs or on account of his own unwillingness to co-operate with them. He would thus be consigned to the left-wing margins of his own party. On the other hand, if a Bolshevik seizure of power took place before the Congress convened, then Lenin would emerge as the political master. The Congress majority would probably endorse the Bolshevik action, thereby giving the party the right to form a government of its own. If the Mensheviks and SRs could bring themselves to accept this forcible seizure of power, as a fait accompli, then a few minor places for them would no doubt be found in Lenin's cabinet. Otherwise, they would have no choice but to go into opposition, leaving the Bolsheviks in government on their own. Kamenev's coalition efforts would thus be undermined; Lenin would have his Dictatorship of the Proletariat; and although the result