Young Stalin (60 page)

Ravenous and punch-drunk, the winners fell upon the sausages, and teased Zinoviev and Kamenev.
¹

Five days later, on 16 October, at another secret meeting at the Lesnoi
District Duma on the northern outskirts, Lenin, backed by Stalin and Sverdlov (Trotsky being absent at the Soviet), again berated the doubters. “History will never forgive us if we don’t take power now!” he cried, resetting his precarious wig.

“We don’t have the right to take the risk and gamble everything at once,” retorted Zinoviev.

Stalin stood with Lenin: “The date must be chosen expediently.” The Central Committee must, said the former seminarist who saw his Marxism as a quasi-religion, have “more faith . . . There are two lines here: one holds a course for victory of revolution . . . the other doesn’t believe in revolution and counts merely on staying as an opposition . . . Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s proposals . . . give the counter-revolution the chance to get organized,” Stalin warned. “We’ll go on endless retreat and lose the entire revolution.”

Lenin won ten votes to two. The Central Committee elected Stalin, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky and two others to a Military-Revolutionary Centre “to become part” of Trotsky’s Military-Revolutionary Committee at the Soviet. The organ that would seize power had not yet been decided. The bewigged Lenin scuttled back into hiding as Kerensky sensed danger and raised the stakes: Petrograd was in danger from the advancing Germans. He announced the recall of loyal regiments from the front. There was no time to lose.

Then on 18 October Kamenev published an attack on the “ruinous step” of an uprising in Maxim Gorky’s journal,
Novaya Zhizn
. It is an irony of 1917 that, for all Lenin’s iron will, Kamenev, always “sodden with sentimentality,” in Trotsky’s words, was the only truly consistent Bolshevik. “Kamenev and Zinoviev have betrayed the CC!” Lenin exploded. “I demand the expulsion of both the strike-breakers.” But Zinoviev insisted, in a letter, on continuing the debate in secret. Stalin, as chief editor of
Rabochii Put
, published the letter.
^*

At a confrontational CC meeting on 20 October, Trotsky attacked Stalin for this. Stalin sulkily offered his resignation. It was refused, but this marked the first clash between the two Bolshevik titans. Trotsky called for the expulsion of the “strike-breakers;” Stalin countered by proposing that they “be required to submit but kept in the CC.” Kamenev
tried to resign from the Central Committee, but was merely removed from the leadership. Stalin prepared the public for the rising in an article that declared: “The Bolsheviks have issued the call: be ready!”
^*

The Bolsheviks were getting ready themselves. In a third-floor office of the Smolny, Trotsky and Sverdlov held the first organizational meeting of the Military-Revolutionary Committee (MRC): it was secretly Bolshevik but had the advantage of operating under the aegis of the Soviet. This, not Stalin’s Centre, would be the uprising’s headquarters: he was not a member.
^†

On the twenty-first, the MRC declared itself the legitimate authority over the Petrograd garrison. Stalin, at the political centre of the Party, drafted the agenda for the second Congress of Soviets, assigning himself to speak on “nationalities,” Lenin on “land war and power,” and Trotsky on “the current situation.”
²
On the twenty-third, the MRC took command of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Everything was ready: even myopic Molotov practised pistol-shooting in his Smolny office. “The existing government of landlords and capitalists,” reported Stalin that day, “must be replaced by a new government of workers and peasants . . . If all of you act solidly and staunchly, nobody will dare to resist the will of the people.”

At dawn on Tuesday, 24 October, Kerensky raided Stalin’s newspapers at the Trud Press. As Stalin watched, the troops smashed the presses, seized machinery and set guards over the offices. He now had to prise the Bolshevik press machine back into operation: just as modern coups always seize the television station, in 1917 a revolution without newspapers was unthinkable. Stalin called Red units for reinforcements while he managed
to circulate the already printed papers. The Volkynia Regiment sent a company. By midday, Stalin had regained control of his presses. Later that day, he said the newspapers were “being set up again.” But he had missed the CC meeting where the tasks were handed out for the coup. Trotsky accused him of “dropping out of the game” because he was not on one of the lists of assignments:

Bubnov: railways

Dzerzhinsky: post and telegraph

Milyutin: food supplies

Podvoisky [changed to Sverdlov]: surveillance of the Provisional Government

Kamenev and Vinter: negotiations with Left SRs [the radical wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries]

Lomov and Nogin: information to Moscow

This list of second-raters proves nothing: Lenin, in hiding, and Trotsky, who also missed the meeting, were not even mentioned, while the “strike-breaker” Kamenev is included. Historians habitually follow Trotsky’s (totally prejudiced but superbly written) version of events in asserting that Stalin “missed the Revolution,” but this does not stand up to scrutiny. He was not the star of the day, but he missed a military assignment because he had his hands full at the raided newspapers, not because he was politically insignificant. Far from it: even Trotsky admits that “contact with Lenin was mainly through Stalin,” hardly an unimportant role (though he cannot resist adding, “because he was the person of least interest to the police”).

Stalin’s “missing the Revolution” was no more than a few daytime hours of the twenty-fourth, while the coup actually stretched over two days. He was at the newspapers all morning. Then he was summoned by Lenin: Margarita Fofanova reveals that Stalin intended to give a speech that day at the Polytechnical Institute but suddenly “we had to hand him a note from VI.” Lenin was twitching with fury at the Fofanova apartment. If Stalin had rushed to him, he would have found him ranting, “The Government is tottering! It must be
given the deathblow
at all costs . . . We mustn’t wait! We may lose everything!”

Stalin arrived at the Smolny Institute, where he, along with Trotsky, addressed the Bolshevik delegates, just arrived for the Congress of Soviets,
presenting the coup as a reaction to the government suppression of the Bolsheviks, not as an uprising.
^*
“At the front they’re coming over to us,” Stalin explained. “The Provisional Government’s wavering. The [cruiser]
Aurora
has been asked to fire on the bridges—in any case the bridges will be ours. There are mutinies among Junkers and troops.
Rabochii Put
is being set up again. The telephone system’s not ours yet. The Post Office is ours . . .” Red Guards and Bolshevik troops were on their way.

“I met Stalin on the eve of the Revolution at midnight in the Smolny,” reports Sagirashvili. Stalin was so excited that, “contrary to his usual solemnity and secrecy, he revealed the die had been cast.” That night, the eve of Glorious October, Stalin popped home to the Alliluyevs. “Yes, everything’s ready,” he told the girls. “We take action tomorrow. We’ve got all the city districts in our hands. We’ll seize power.”
³

Stalin kept Lenin informed. The Old Man sent almost hourly notes to the MRC to energize them before the Congress opened. It was set for the next day but Lenin insisted it be brought forward. “What are they afraid of?” he wrote in one note. “Just ask if they have a hundred trustworthy soldiers or Red Guards with rifles. That’s all I need!”

It is no wonder that Lenin was frustrated. The October Revolution would become one of the iconic events of the twentieth century, mythologized by Soviet propaganda, romanticized in John Reed’s
Ten Days That Shook the World
, immortalized by Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpiece
October
and made ridiculous by Stalin’s vainglorious exaggerations. But the reality of October was more farce than glory. Tragically, the real Revolution, pitiless and bloody, started the moment this comedy ended.

Still stuck at Fofanova’s apartment, Lenin could not understand the delay. “Everything now hangs by a thread,” he wrote that night. “The matter must be decided without fail this evening!” He paced the floor. Fofanova begged him not to emerge and risk arrest. Finally at 10:50 p.m., Lenin could stand it no longer.

*
Another conciliatory gesture to Kamenev that shows Stalin’s instinct for maintaining some balance between Lenin and Trotsky, on the one hand, and the moderates on the other, in the Party. This was to pay rich dividends in the struggle to succeed Lenin.

*
In this rarely quoted article of 20 October, biblically entitled “The Strong Bulls of Bashan Have Beset Me Round!,” Stalin warned how he and the Party would regard intellectuals and artistic celebrities in their new Russia. Maxim Gorky, despite being a longtime supporter and funder of the Bolsheviks, now had severe reservations, declaring, “I cannot keep silent.” Stalin mocked such “terrified neurasthenics . . . verily ‘strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round,’ threatening and imploring. Here’s our reply!” Stalin warned that “there is a general croaking in the marsh of our bewildered intellectuals. The Revolution has not cringed before celebrities but has taken them into our service or, if they refused to learn, has consigned them to oblivion.”

†
Trotsky preferred to use his own new recruits to the Bolshevik Party, such as Antonov-Ovseenko, as his top operatives on the MRC, which had existed since 9 October. Sverdlov, Molotov and Dzerzhinsky were members. Why not Stalin? It is possible Stalin’s confrontation with the Military Organization in August or just his general truculence inhibited Sverdlov from inviting him to join. But it is more likely Stalin was simply busy with his press responsibilities and communications with Lenin, both vital. As for the Centre, on which Stalin served, it never met, even though his propagandists claimed that it was the real centre of the Revolution.

*
“Within the Military-Revolutionary Committee, there are two points of view,” said Stalin. “The first is that we organize an uprising at once and the second is that we consolidate our forces. The CC has sided with the second view.”

42

Glorious October 1917:
The Bungled Uprising

I
have gone where you didn’t want me to go,” Lenin scribbled to Fofanova. “Illich asked for Stalin to be fetched,” recorded Lenin’s bodyguard, Rakhia. “Then he realized this would waste time.” He glued on his curly wig, set a worker’s cap on his head, wrapped a bandage around his face and put on some giant spectacles. Then he and Rakhia set off into the night.

Lenin boarded a tram. He was so tense that he breathlessly cross-examined the bemused ticket-collector before giving her a lecture on revolutionary strategy. It is unclear if she ever discovered the identity of this bewigged, bandaged, bespectacled loon, but there were probably many madmen loose in the city that night. Near the Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny, a mounted government patrol actually stopped him, but released him as a harmless drunk. He was sober—but far from harmless.

At around midnight, Lenin reached “great Smolny”—“bright with lights,” says Reed, it “hummed like a gigantic hive.” Red Guards, “a huddled group of boys in workmen’s clothes, carrying guns with bayonets, talking nervously together,” warmed their hands round giant bonfires; the motors of armoured cars whirred, motorcycles revved, but no one recognized Lenin. He had no papers, so the Red Guards at the gates refused to allow him access.

“What a mess!” shouted Rakhia. “I’m a delegate [for the Congress] and they won’t let me through.” The crowd supported him and pushed the two of them inside: “Lenin came in last, laughing!” But when he doffed his cap, his glue-stiffened wig came off too.
^*

The Smolny was a campsite. While the Soviet met in the splendid ballroom, newspapers, fag-ends and bedding covered the floors. Soldiers snored in the corridors. The reek of smoke, sweat and urine blended with the aroma of boiled cabbage from the refectory downstairs. Lenin hastened through the corridors, holding on to his wig, trying to hide his identity. But the Menshevik, Dan, spotted him.

“The rotters have recognized me,” muttered Lenin.

In the early hours of Wednesday, 25 October, Stalin, donning his leather jacket and cap, joined Lenin in Room 36 at the Smolny for an emergency CC meeting. Even Zinoviev and Kamenev were invited. Lenin insisted on accelerating the revolt. The Congress delegates were gathering in the very same building.