Chapter 1/ Revolution

                  The myth that the Bolsheviks came to power through revolution.

         What transpired in the night of November 6-7, 1917, and in the years that followed has been referred to, these fifty 'years, as a revolution. The proletariat, yearning for communism, rose in majestic might and drove the bourgeois moneychangers out of the temples of labor. This is grotesque falsification. In truth, the Bolsheviks, with no mandate except their contempt for mandates, pulled off a coup d'etat, a putsch, and, since it was directed against a " revolution already in, full eruption, it was in essence a counter revolution.

         This is not semantic quibbling. It is indispensable to keeping the Soviet half-century in focus. Long, long ago "Confucius gave his famous injunction: "See to it that "things are called by their right name." In the sense that social prophets have' accepted it, revolution implies a spontaneous popular explosion-masses goaded beyond endurance revolting at last against injustice. No matter how the definition is stretched and twisted, it does not cover the Bolshevik seizure of power. That was a deed "plotted in secrecy, condemned by those in whose name it was done, denounced by many of the Bolshevik chieftains themselves.

         Lenin, Trotsky, and their cohorts did not overthrow the monarchy. They overthrew the first democratic society in Russian history, set up through a truly popular revolution in March, 1917-a revolution that climaxed a century of struggle, education, preparation and heroism a society Lenin himself called "the freest country in the world." Free, but weak and hungry, attempting to continue the exhausting war with Germany-in short, easy prey for political adventurer. (35)

         A more accurate understanding of what really happened strips the plotters of revolutionary glamour and absolves the Russian peoples of bloodguilt for the disaster. The Bolsheviks did not command an uprising but engineered a conspiratorial power-grab. They did not free the people the people freed them. The fall of the monarchy caught the Bolshevik leaders by surprise. Lenin and Zinoviev learned of the event from the newspapers in Switzerland, Trotsky and Bukharin from the newspapers in New York. Stalin was among the lesser figures in exile colonies within Russia.

         Lenin and some thirty disciples reached Petrograd on April 16, 1917, having been conducted across Germany in a sealed train by the Kaiser's government-a calculated injection of poison into the already fevered Russian bloodstream. The purpose of Germany, which still had vast armies tied up on its eastern fronts, was merely to compound the chaos in Russia and drive it out of the war. Though Lenin came well supplied with German funds, he was decidedly no dupe of the Kaiser. He was calling for a proletarian overthrow of the German monarchy and of the Provisional Government in his own country with equal vehemence. Neither Wilhelm II nor his generals understood or cared what Lenin stood for.

         Leon Trotsky arrived in May, others straggled in from foreign exiles and remote comers of the Russian empire. They represented the smallest of the Russian radical movements. Launched at the turn of the century as a minority faction within the Social Democratic Party, it claimed twenty-five thousand members when the Romanoff dynasty fell but probably had about fifteen thousand. Years later the estimate was upped to eighty thousand, but even that was small compared with the hundreds of thousands in the ranks of the Mensheviks and much larger memberships in the party of Social Revolutionaries, non-Marxist socialists based on the peasantry rather than the working class. In the Putilov Works in Petrograd, a stronghold of revolutionary sentiment, there were only thirty-odd Bolsheviks in mid-1917.

         But theirs was a movement that scoffed at numbers and frankly mistrusted the multitudes.(36) The workers could be educated for their role after the revolution; they would not- led but driven to the terrestrial heaven. Lenin always sneered at the obsession of competing socialist groups–with their "mass-base.'' Give us an organization of professional revolutionaries, he use to say, "and we will turn Russia upside down." The differences between him and the other socialist parties were those of techniques, and tempos, rather than ultimate objectives.

         Revolution, in his view, was not a popular surge, in the romantic tradition. It was a swift, deadly blow by a small, disciplined elite, unencumbered by moral or humanitarian baggage. It was a job for full-time professionals, in Lenin’s words: "a small tight kernel consisting reliable experienced and steeled workers . . . connected by all the rules of conspiracy."

         Not an open movement but a private cabal with the masses so much raw stuff for processing. Neither the workers nor the people at large had any inherent rights, "least of all the right to choose between alternative social systems. Their hopes, greeds, and despairs were motive power to be channeled in the way an engineer channels electricity. When the advanced portion (meaning those who obeyed him) has sufficient "striking forces," Lenin explained in 1919, it must "conquer the power of the state, and then use the power of the state, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat, as an instrument of its class in order to gain the sympathy of the majority of the toilers."

         Thus, in the second year of his rule, Lenin did not bother to pretend that the regime already had the sympathy of the toilers. First you hijack control, then you make them like it: except for the revolutionary jargon and-the lofty goals it was the strong-arm code of gangsterdom. The Bolsheviks had left it to others to "go to the people," to organize labor unions, to stir up the sluggish peasants, and finally to topple the old Order. Meanwhile Lenin perfected his conspiratorial machine to exploit an upheaval when it came.

         A mass movement or a small, centrally controlled. conspiracy? This was the main rock on which the Social Democratic party of Russia had split, at a "unification" congress begun in Brussels and finished in London in the summer of 1903, into groupings variously described as hards and softs, extremists and moderates, but eventually designated as Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.(37)

         There were at the start forty-odd delegates at the meeting. As the heated polemics unwound, many of these walked out to register disagreement. Their withdrawal left the group generaled by Lenin with a majority of two votes. He seized upon this accident, shrewdly, to call his faction "the majority"-bolshinstvo in Russian-and its members, accordingly, Bolsheviks. His opponents, though they spoke for an overwhelming majority of the socialist rank and-file in the home country, meekly accepted the designation of Mensheviks-minorities-and the two false labels stuck.

         The twenty-four-year-old Trotsky, wooed by both factions, took a middle ground, joining neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks, but he identified the cancer in Bolshevism with extraordinary precision. "In Lenin's scheme," he wrote in 1904, "the party takes the place of the working class. The party organization displaces the party. The Central Committee displaces the party organization, and finally, the Dictator displaces the Central Committee."

         Unfortunately for himself and Russia, he disowned his own prophetic wisdom in early 1917 and joined Lenin. Perhaps the temptations of leadership and the splendors of power were too much for this ego-ridden intellectual.

         Beyond a determination to capture the revolution and a Machiavellian code of conduct, "the Bolsheviks who streamed into the capital had no plan. In the end the focused will of Lenin proved plan enough. He excoriated the hesitant as dolts and cowards and drove them to the putsch, which most of them opposed until the last hour, and many after its initial success, as an insane adventure.

         The Soviets were not a Bolshevik invention. (The word means simply "councils.") During the 1905 revolution Soviets representing trade unions, peasant groups, and political organizations arose spontaneously in a number of Russian cities to direct revolutionary policy and strategy. The most important of these, in St. Petersburg, was headed by young Trotsky. (38) They came into being again in 1917, under the imposing title of Workers', Peasants', and Soldiers' Deputies, ostensibly as a forum for discussing problems and issues, but almost at once assuming quasi-governmental authority.

         Within the moderate and democratic political leaders concentrating on the Provisional Government, the Soviets tended to attract the more impatient and demagogic spokesmen. The bourgeois" elements were not excluded; they were unwelcome and stayed away.

         Soviet sessions were noisy, disordered, impulsive, often in session day and night, the deputies for the most part designated in factories and military barracks, but often self-appointed. The disciplined Leninists easily infiltrated and in time had narrow majorities in the Petrograd, Moscow, and a few other Soviets; in most of the provincial Soviets they were minorities or without any representation. For the Leninists the Soviets provided a potent instrument against the hard-pressed government and they used it as a cover for their manipulations, in the way that countless communist fronts were destined to be used all over the, world in the years ahead.

         In raising the cry of "All power to the Soviets!" the Bolsheviks gave it a populist and even democratic ring, with no hint of the 'one-party monopoly to come. On the contrary, the slogan was baited with democratic pledges, couched in the vocabulary of freedom. In the preparatory months, Lenin, tongue in cheek, warned against "total power." He laughed and fumed at enemies who said he planned to abolish private ownership and impose communism. To what lengths those bourgeois gentry go in maligning the tribunes of the people! He denied angrily that his communists had communist intentions.

         A more complete record of deceit can hardly be found in the annals of demagogy. The Bolsheviks lied, had to lie, because they knew that the population, the working class included, had no desire for expropriation and communism. The peasants, for whom the revolution meant simply personal land ownership, would have been frightened out of their wits by talk of nationalization-and they made up 85 per cent of the population. (39) In the pre-putsch months every issue of Pravda, then edited by Molotov and Stalin, offered freedom, civil liberties, the secret ballot, a Constituent Assembly, even-handed justice, the right to strike, the right of non-Russian peoples to secede from the empire; above all, immediate peace. The Molotovs and Stalins believed in none of these things--they were promising what they knew the people wanted.

         The Soviet seizure of power in Petrograd was accomplished, in Lenin's words, by "an amazingly small number." In a city of one million, the actual forces involved were less than twenty thousand, most of them newly created Red Guards. Even these contingents were pathetically duped, having not the remotest notion of the real purpose for which they were being used. They were striking out, they thought, for the multi-party Soviets, for freedom, equality, and other goals which their organizers: regarded as emotional garbage.

         With very little effort and few casualties, the insurgents took over the telephone and telegraph centrals, police headquarters, other public buildings, strategic points, and the main printing establishments. Only the high command of the Provisional Government, headed by Alexander Kerensky, held out late into the night in the old tsarist Winter Palace, bravely defended by a women's battalion then on duty. The last stand was of no avail. The battleship Aurora bombarded the headquarters from the Neva River, while the Red Guards laid siege on the ground. Kerensky and a few other leaders succeeded in escaping before the capitulation.

         And so a handful of able, cynical men simply captured the revolution from its makers. Their real intentions had been carefully concealed from the Red Guards and the, regular soldiers who smashed the Provisional Government, from the small left wing of Kerensky's own party, the Social Revolutionaries, who supported the coup, and even from the rank-and-file of the Bolshevik party.

         The historic tide that swept away the throne was running: wild. The more moderate socialists and democrats sought to curb the flood. Only Lenin and some of his associates--(40) not all by any means-chose to ride the turbulence. War weary troops were deserting the fronts and spreading like lava over the country. Peasants were seizing and dividing the land. Workers in some places were taking control of factories and mines. Along came the Bolsheviks--of whom the populace had scarcely heard-and urged them all to do what they were doing in any case.

         Everybody promised peace and land. But the moderates promised it for tomorrow, when an elected parliament would lay down the rules. The Leninists outbid them. "Take what you want," they shouted, "take it now, including peace." Their membership swelled. Few of the new members had any idea of the implications of Marxism, world revolution, and the rest.

         The supposed upsurge of sentiment for "proletarian dictatorship" is a subsequent invention. Earlier such things were mentioned only to be denied. That dictatorship of the proletariat turned out to be, as Trotsky and others had foreseen a dozen years before, a dictatorship over proletariat, over the ruling party, and over the rest of the country.

         The very idea of a Russian proletariat was a piece of duplicity. For this we have Lenin's own testimony. On December 25, 1919, when he could afford to tell some truths with impunity, he taunted some of his followers in this connection. "What is a proletariat?" he asked them. "It is a class which is occupied in big industry. But where is your industry? The industrial proletariat . . . has been dislocated, has ceased to exist as a proletariat . . . the proletariat vanished." In other words, the dictatorship of a class that was negligible when it theoretically assumed total sovereignty and was non-existent two years after the assumption!

         The seizure of power for a mythical proletariat was a bluff. Nearly all of Lenin's associates were terrified by the wildness of his bluffs. They knew that his trumped-up government represented nothing and nobody, and they were frightened of the consequences. This was why so many of them urged the enlistment of partners in the game through coalition with other socialist and peasant groups. (41) Lenin allowed negotiations with other parties to be started, but only as a tactic of deception: "a diplomatic move to divert attention from the military operations"-the awesome civil war had begun.

         Only ten days after the coup, five members of Lenin's Central Committee resigned in protest against his highhanded methods. His "disastrous policy," their statement said, was "carried out against the will of an enormous majority of tl1e proletariat and soldiers." They demanded a "socialist government of all parties in the Soviet," because "the alternative is a purely Bolshevik government which can maintain itself only by means of political terror." The signers included Gregory Zinoviev, who was to reign for years over the Communist International, and Alexei Rykov, who in 1924 would succeed Lenin as Premier-both of them fated to be executed by Stalin in the great blood purges to come.

         When the extent of the' deception became apparent, other staunch Bolsheviks and fellow travelers-Krassin, Vorovsky, Kamenev, Maxim Gorki, Alexandra Kollontai, and others-assailed Lenin as a mad gambler and worse. Eventually all of them returned to his honey pots of power, but that could not cancel out the truth of their words.

         Two weeks after the Bolshevik usurpation, Gorki, the gifted novelist of the working class, wrote in his own paper, Novaya Zhizn: "Blind fanatics and unscrupulous adventurers are rushing headlong toward social revolution -as a matter of fact it is the road to anarchy and ruin of the proletariat and the revolution. Along this road Lenin and his aides think it is possible to commit all crimes . . . . The working class must not allow adventurers and madmen to throw upon the proletariat the responsibility for the disgraceful, senseless and bloody crimes . . . ."

         Other powerful voices within the communist fold were raised. Alexandra Kollontai, later to be a famous Soviet ambassadress, charged publicly that the communist leaders, "having severed all ties with the masses, carry out their own policy. . : under cover of the party label" Another and greater woman revolutionist, Rosa Luxemburg, leader of the German communist Spartacus League, while defending the new Soviet regime in principle, denounced its totalitarian nature. (42) "The remedy discovered by Lenin and Trotsky," she warned, "is worse than the evil it is supposed to cure."

         "With repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the Soviets must also become more and more crippled," she wrote in 1918. "Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinions, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a more semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains an active element."

         Such conditions, she foresaw, "must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life." But Rosa Luxemburg was 'repudiated by her own Sparticists; mesmerized by Lenin's success, the German communists obeyed his orders, tried to duplicate his course-and failed dismally. She did not live to see the ugly fulfillment of her prophecies; a few months after she wrote them, she was abducted and murdered by German right-wing extremists,.

         Inside the bleeding Russia, protests were soon squelched, with the suppression of all but the government newspapers, the expulsion of non-Bolsheviks from the Soviets, the arrests of most champions of decency, the execution of tens of thousands. In justice to these martyrs for the cause of freedom, whatever one may think of their different social theories, it should be recognized that the communist power-grab was not an expression of the dominant revolutionary trends of the preceding century but a reversal and rejection of their humanitarian essence.

         Ever since December, 1825, when the "Decembrist" attack on the monarchy took place in St. Petersburg, revolutionary thought and organization in Russia had been grounded in the all-importance of the person. The Great Russian philosopher, Nicholas Berdiaev, writing after the triumph of Bolshevism, emphasized that even in its most extreme manifestation, the Russian revolutionary movement still retained a religious impulse. Nechayevism, a Russian and more bloody version of Machiavellism, was the exception, untypical, and a minor ingredient. Unfortunately, with the triumph of Bolshevism the exception prevailed. (43)

         Far from making a revolution, the Leninists strangled the revolution in its infancy. But the country did not submit meekly or forgets its revolutionary heritage. Millions have paid with their liberty and their lives for a resistance, violent or passive, that began on the day the Leninist took power and has continued to this day.