Young Stalin

Russia’s last of the war, was a disaster.^{237}

Lenin was exhausted; suffering headaches, he retreated to sunbathe at a lakeside villa in Finland. Then the government faltered again: Kerensky’s offensive ground to a halt while Finland and Ukraine moved towards independence. The Kadet ministers resigned in protest.

In Lenin’s absence, his Military Organization[164] decided to seize power. The “night sky was lit up so brightly by the Aurora Borealis,” writes Sagirashvili, “that one could read a newspaper outdoors. Men didn’t sleep and some unknown force drew them out of doors to roam the streets. They could raise their eyes to this heavenly spectacle. A grandiose struggle of Darkness and Light.”

On 3 July, masses of soldiers, sailors and workers, toting machine-guns with bandoliers of ammo criss- crossing their chests, marched on the Taurida Palace, the Bolshevik First Machine-Gun Regiment in the vanguard. Cars were held up at gunpoint and requisitioned. As armoured cars and trucks full of gunmen raced around the streets, some of the troops started firing haphazardly at burzoi shoppers on Nevsky Prospect. Gunfights broke out. Out at the Kronstadt naval base, Bolshevik sailors rose up, murdered 120 officers, including their admiral, and then demanded that Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev give them their orders to take the capital. When they received no answers, they telephoned Stalin, sitting at his Pravda desk with the Bolshevik bard Demian Bedny: should they march with their guns?

“Rifles?” replied Stalin. “You comrades know best… As for we scribblers, we always take our guns, our pencils, everywhere with us, [but] as for you and your arms, you know best!” Stalin had half encouraged this semi- accidental coup, asking, “Did the Party have the right to wash its hands and stand apart?” Trotsky was probably right that Stalin was one of the organizers of the July uprising: “Wherever a fight started, whether on a square in Tiflis, in Baku Prison, on a Petrograd street, he always strove to make it as sharp as possible.”

The gun-toting mob seethed around the Taurida Palace, expecting the Soviet to seize power as in Lenin’s slogan: “All Power to the Soviets.” But inside, Chkheidze and the Soviet, discussing the formation of a new ministry, did not want power. They feared it. The mob was inflamed by the Soviet’s reluctance. Meanwhile Stalin’s ambiguous answer had worked: the Kronstadt sailors were on their way.

At the Kseshinskaya Mansion, Stalin and the Central Committee suddenly lost their nerve and summoned Lenin back from holiday. “We could have seized power,” Stalin said, “but against us would have risen the fronts, the provinces, the Soviets.” Stalin rushed to the Taurida to reassure Chkheidze and the Soviet—but the genie was out of the bottle.

Lenin was on the train bound for Petrograd when Stalin heard that Justice Minister Pavel Pereverzev was about to accuse the Bolshevik leader of treason, revealing that he had been funded by Imperial Germany. This was partly true, but Stalin returned to the Taurida Palace and appealed to his Georgian compatriot Chkheidze to suppress the story. Chkheidze agreed, but it was too late.

In the early hours of 4 July, Lenin rushed to the mansion. “You should be thrashed for this!” he yelled at the Bolshevik hotheads.

In the overcast morning, 400,000 workers and soldiers ruled the deserted streets, soon joined by 20,000 heavily armed sailors who landed in a flotilla of boats. They had no plan: the cock-of-the-walk sailors with brass bands playing were more interested in parading their girlfriends through the boulevards and terrorizing the burzois: “Sailors with scantily dressed and high-heeled ladies were seen everywhere.” The streets, recalled Stalin, “were scenes of jubilation.” The sailors gathered outside the Kseshinskaya Mansion to demand some leadership: where was Lenin? He tried to hide in the mansion before emerging sheepishly to give a short speech that settled nothing.

The sailors, boosted by another 20,000 Putilov workers, headed for the Taurida Palace to sort out the diffident Soviet whose members had disappointed them. There were ugly scenes [165]—but at 5 p.m. the heavens opened: rain doused the accidental revolution. The crowds dispersed. The loyal Izmailovsky Guards relieved the besieged Soviet, now exposed as a toothless talking-shop. Lenin and the dispirited Bolshevik Central Committee retreated pathetically. The July Days were over.

The government, strengthened by Kerensky’s growing popularity, decided to destroy the Bolsheviks. Despite Stalin’s pleading, Justice Minister Pereverzev published evidence of Lenin’s German financial backing. Many of the soldiers were swayed by this talk of treason.

At dawn on 5 July, government troops raided Pravda, just missing Lenin who was smuggled out by Stalin only minutes earlier. Overnight, howitzers and eight armoured cars took up positions to storm the Kseshinskaya Mansion, but the Bolsheviks had no will to defend their strongholds. Stalin speeded to the Bolshevik stronghold, the Peter and Paul Fortress, “where I managed to persuade the sailors not to accept battle;” shuttled between the soldiers and the Kseshinskaya Mansion to avoid a massacre; then asked Chkheidze and Tsereteli at the Taurida Palace for a guarantee of no bloodshed if the Bolsheviks surrendered the mansion and the fortress. Tsereteli agreed: “Stalin gave me a puzzled look and left.” On 6 July, the 500 Bolsheviks inside the ballerina’s mansion gave themselves up. Then Stalin returned to the Peter and Paul Fortress to oversee its surrender.

Lenin appreciated Stalin’s tireless troubleshooting. But, “as a result of their disastrous failure,” wrote John Reed, a socialist journalist from Portland, Oregon, “public opinion turned against them. Their leaderless hordes slunk back into the Vyborg Quarter, followed by a savage hunt of the Bolsheviki.”

The thirty-five-year-old Kerensky, the only man who could unite left and right, assumed the premiership. Ironically the son of Lenin’s headmaster in Simbirsk, he was a speaker of “burning intensity”—“the sudden fits and starts, the twitching of lips and the somnambulistic deliberation of his gestures make him like one possessed.” Kerensky’s Justice Minister ordered Lenin’s arrest.[166]

The Bolsheviks were on the verge of destruction. Lenin was on the run. Stalin took charge of his safety.^{238}

40. 1917 Autumn: Soso and Nadya

Stalin moved Lenin five times in three days as Kerensky hunted down the Old Man. Trotsky and Kamenev were arrested, but Lenin, escorted by Stalin, returned to the underground. The police raided the house of Lenin’s sister. Krupskaya hastened to Stalin’s and Molotov’s place on Shirokaya Street to learn where Lenin was.

On the night of 6 July, Stalin rustled Lenin to his fifth hiding-place, the Alliluyevs’ smart new apartment, at Tenth Rozhdestvenskaya Street, where they had a uniformed doorman and a maid.

“Show me all the exits and entrances,” said Lenin on arrival, even checking the attic. “We gave him Stalin’s room,” said Olga. Lenin was surprisingly cheerful, staying for four tense days. Anna Alliluyeva came home to find her apartment full of unknown, nervous people. “I immediately recognized the person to whom I was first introduced.” Lenin sat on the sofa “in his shirtsleeves, wearing a waistcoat and a light-coloured shirt with a tie.” In the “unbearably stuffy” room, Lenin cross-examined her: what had she seen on the streets?

“They are saying you’ve run off to Kronstadt and you were hiding on a minesweeper.”

“Ha-ha-ha!” laughed Lenin with “infectious gaiety.” Then he asked Stalin and the others: “What do you think, comrades?”

Lenin spent his days writing. Stalin visited daily. He quietly took the political pulse at the Taurida Palace, where he bumped into Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Both were worried that “many prominent Bolsheviks took the view that Lenin shouldn’t hide but should appear [to stand trial]. Together,” wrote Sergo, “we went to see Lenin.” The government demanded Lenin’s surrender. At the Alliluyevs’, Lenin, Stalin, Sergo, Krupskaya and Lenin’s sister Maria debated what to do.

Lenin at first favoured surrender. Stalin disagreed. He initially believed that Lenin and Zinoviev should wait and hand themselves in only when their safety could be guaranteed, but his visit to the Taurida convinced him that this was impossible. “The Junkers[167] want to take you to prison,” he warned, “but they’ll kill you on the way.” Stasova arrived to report that more evidence of Lenin’s treason was being published. “A strong shudder ran over his face and [Lenin] declared with the utmost determination that he would have to go to jail” to clear his name at a trial.

“Let’s say goodbye,” Lenin said to Krupskaya. “We may never see each other again.”