name, endeavouring to keep alive and to organize the revolutionary movement, which, in the end, the Stolypin Government ruthlessly suppressed. His name is connected with several cases of ‘expropriation’. Apparently he did not personally organize these armed raids on banks and post-offices, but considerable sums seized in such robberies were handed over to the Bolshevists and used by Lenin to develop his propaganda at home and abroad. He left Russia when the collapse of the 1905 Revolution became apparent and resumed his activities in Geneva. On the whole his position among the revolutionaries had been greatly strengthened and among the mixed crowd of new exiles who had been thrown out of Russia by the failure of the first revolutionary offensive he found many instruments suitable for his unscrupulous purpose.
In 1912 he moved to Cracow so as to be in closer touch with his agents in Russia. A singular episode, characteristic of his contempt for bourgeois morality, was his intrigue, in collusion with the Secret Police, to split the small Social Democratic Party in the Duma through a certain Malinovsky, who visited him in Cracow with the knowledge of the Head of the Department of Police.
In 1914, at the outbreak of war, Lenin was in Galicia. As a Russian subject he was arrested by the Austrian authorities, but he was released when it was discovered that he would be a useful agent in the task of weakening Russia. He returned to Switzerland, where he carried on defeatist propaganda with the object of transforming the war between the nations into a revolutionary civil war within each nation. He was joined by defeatist Socialists from various countries. The funds for these operations were perhaps provided by Germany, since the sums Lenin had received from expropriations during the first revolution were exhausted. The activities of this little group of Socialists were hardly noticed amid the great events of the war. The conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal in 1915 had the appearance of insignificant gatherings of crazy fanatics. Yet they drafted the defeatist revolutionary programme and framed the watchwords which later acquired enormous power in Russia and influenced the working classes throughout Europe. Lenin regarded the vicissitudes of the war purely from the standpoint of revolutionary tactics. He noted the lessons of war, industry, and State-control, and the effects of war on mass-psychology.
The Revolution of 1917
The revolution that suddenly broke out in Russia in March, 1917, gave Lenin his long-sought-for opportunity. The Provisional Government formed after the abdication of the Emperor Nicholas proclaimed unrestricted liberty and encouraged the return of the political exiles, who came flocking back in thousands. There was some difference of opinion in the Government about permitting the return of such a notorious defeatist as Lenin. He came nevertheless, transported through Germany with the help of the German General Staff. Ludendorff considered that he was likely to be a most effective agent in disorganizing the Russian Army, and wrecking the Russian front. In this he was not mistaken; what he did not foresee was that Lenin would provoke a violent revolutionary movement that was later to react on Germany herself.
Lenin was received in Petrograd with all revolutionary honours. Searchlights from armoured cars lighted up the Finland railway station, which was thronged with people. Socialists of all parties made speeches, but Lenin was not to be led away by any external success. He wanted real power. On April 14, the day after his arrival, he laid his programme before the Social Democratic Conference, a programme which six months afterwards he carried out to the letter in his decrees. At the time his speech was ridiculed by the moderate Socialists. Only a small group of Bolshevists applauded their leader when he declared that peace with the Germans must be concluded, at once, a Soviet Republic founded, the banks closed, that all power must be given to the workers, and that the Social-Democrats must henceforth call themselves Communists. His motion was rejected by 115 to 20.
Lenin had at his back a compact organization well equipped with money. The Bolshevists displayed extraordinary activity in demoralizing the Army and the workmen and in provoking riots among the peasantry. There was no power to restrain them. In Petrograd, Lenin took up his quarters in the house of the dancer Kaszesinska, and from the balcony addressed large crowds day after day. In July he attempted a coup d’état, but failed. He went into hiding, but continued to direct subversive movement. The Provisional Government under Kerensky shrank from coercive measures. The Socialist Revolutionaries and Social-Democrats who controlled the Petrograd Soviet partly sympathized with the Bolshevists, partly feared them, but in their appeals to the masses they were always outbid by Lenin’s followers, and speedily they lost ground.
After the failure of Korniloff’s attempt in August to re-establish law and order the general demoralization increased. The Army went to pieces and, taking advantage of this disorganized host of armed men, to whom he promised immediate peace, Lenin effected a coup d’état on November 7, 1917, this time without any difficulty. Lenin appeared with his followers in a Congress of Soviets, and was acclaimed as Dictator. The members of the Provisional Government were imprisoned, all but Kerensky, who escaped. There was a sharp struggle in Moscow, where for several days boys from officers’ training schools defended the Kremlin, but they finally succumbed.
Master of the Terror
Lenin took up his residence in the Kremlin, and from that ancient citadel of autocracy and orthodoxy launched his propaganda, of world-revolution. Outwardly he lived as modestly as when he had been an obscure political refugee. Both he and his wife – he had married late in the ’nineties Nadiezhda Krupskaya – had the scorn of sectarians for bourgeois inventions and comforts. Short and sturdy, with a bald head, small beard, and keen, bright, deep-set eyes, Lenin looked like a small tradesman. When he spoke at meetings his ill-fitting suit, his crooked tie, his generally nondescript appearance, disposed the crowd in his favour. ‘He is not one of the gentle-folk,’ they would say, ‘he is one of us.’
This is not the place to describe in detail the terrible achievements of Bolshevism – the shameful peace with Germany, the plundering of the educated and propertied classes, the long-continued terror with its thousands of innocent victims, the Communist experiment carried to the point of suppressing private trade, and making practically all the adult population of the towns servants and slaves of the Soviet Government; the civil war, the creation and strengthening of the Red Army, the fights with the border peoples, the Ukraine, with Koltchak and Denikin and with Poland, culminating in 1920 in the defeat of the White Armies and the conclusion of peace with Poland. Never in modern times has any great country passed through such a convulsion as that brought about by Lenin’s implacable effort to establish Communism in Russia, and thence to spread it throughout the world.
In the light of these world-shaking events Lenin’s personality acquired an immense significance. He retained control. He was the directive force. He was in effect Bolshevism. His associates were pygmies compared with him. Even Trotsky, who displayed great energy and ability in organizing the Red Army, deferred to Lenin. Both the Communist Party and the Council of People’s Commissaries were completely under Lenin’s control. It happened sometimes that after listening to a discussion of two conflicting motions in some meeting under his chairmanship Lenin would dictate to the secretary, without troubling to argue his point some third resolution entirely his own. He had an uncanny skill in detecting the weaknesses of his adversaries, and his associates regarded him with awe as a supreme tactician. His judgment was final.
He was ultimately responsible for the terror as for all the other main lines of Bolshevist policy. He presided over the meeting of the Council of People’s Commissaries which, in July, 1918, approved the foul murder of Nicholas ii and his family by the Ekaterinburg Soviet.
The Communist experiment brought Russia to economic ruin, famine, and barbarism. Under Soviet rule the Russian people suffered unheard of calamity. To Lenin, this mattered little. When the famine came in 1921 he remarked, with a scornful smile, ‘It’s a trifle if twenty millions or so die.’
He did realize, however, that the effort to maintain undiluted Communism was endangering the existence of his Government. In March, 1921, he called a halt. Against the wishes of the majority of his followers he proclaimed a new economic policy, consisting of a temporary compromise between Socialism and Capitalism, with the Communist movement in complete control. His hope was that this policy would secure a breathing space during which the Communists might rally for a new attack on world capitalism.
The famine raged. Russia sank deeper