Edmund A. Walsh
The Fall of the Russian Empire
CHAPTER XII
WHO WAS COMRADE JAKOLEV ?
WHO WAS COMRADE JAKOLEV ?
IN an earlier chapter I promised to hazard a guess as to the identity of Commissar Jakolev and the nature of his mission of "particular importance ." It will be only a deduced conclusion, in the realm of conjecture, quite distinct from the facts before narrated, which have been juridically established and historically authenticated . The only persons capable of fully substantiating my thesis are dead ; the remaining principal actors in that unsuccessful episode are still dumb, though they have contributed valuable hints .
It will be necessary to recall the military history of the Great War and to visualize the situation on the Western Front at that time . Germany had suffered a fatal check by the entrance of the United States into the arena on the side of her adversaries . With fresh and seemingly unending American forces pouring into the trenches and massing before Saint-Mihiel, the German High Staff prepared for that supreme drive on Paris that caused the world to hold its breath in agonized expectation . The scales of war hung even .
The disappearance of Russia from the Allied line was followed by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which reduced Bolshevist Russia to the status of a sullen vassal of the Teutonic Powers . The interpreter of Germany's will and the virtual dictator of Russia's foreign policy was Count Mirbach, the German ambassador in Moscow. Fully aware of the fundamentally revolutionary character of Bolshevism, with its threat to German monarchism as well as to Russian autocracy, and perfectly willing to repudiate the dubious alliance which military necessity had obliged her to contract with Communist Russia, Germany decided on a bold move . She would restore monarchy in Russia and place Alexis on the throne--provided the Czar would consent to sign the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and align Russia with the Teutonic Powers !
The Czar's spontaneous and indignant reaction to Jakolev's very first proposals and his outspoken resentment against Germany support this view : "I will let them cut off my hand before I do it ." The coachman who drove the team to Tiumen reported that Jakolev had sought in vain to win the Czar over to some weighty project . Although unable to hear the exact words, the driver made out that Nicholas always refused ; he did not "scold the Bolsheviks, but some body else ."
General Ludendorff, in his Memoirs, gives solid ground for a similar surmise . Guardedly, vaguely, as if unwilling yet to admit the full truth, he says : --
We could have deposed the Soviet Government, which was thoroughly hostile to us, and given help to other authorities in Russia, which were not working against us, but indeed anxious to cooperate with us . This would have been a success of great importance to the general conduct of the war . If some other government were established in Russia, it would almost certainly have been possible to come to some compromise with it over the Peace of Brest .
These are significant words . If Mirbach was authorized to sound out Nicholas on this important possibility, he must get the Czar back to Moscow, or, better still, out of Russia . Sverdlov, already under the domination of Mirbach, may have been obliged to acquiesce--or feign acquiescence--in the plan to move the Czar . It was noted at Tobolsk that Jakolev was not the usual type of Bolshevist Commissar ; he was suave, well spoken, versed in foreign languages, showed breeding, "had clean hands and thin fingers," in the words of Khobylinsky, and treated the former monarch with courtesy and deference . He did not omit to salute Nicholas as the Emperor entered the cart for the trip to Tiumen . His nervous haste and ill-concealed anxiety to get his prisoner out of the danger zone indicates knowledge of some coup d'état ahead .
But something went wrong . Either the Czar refused point-blank to accede to the Teutonic advances, as we may reasonably assume from his own condemnatory utterances and was flung back into the hands of the Soviets by that infuriated Mirbach, or Mirbach himself was double-crossed by Sverdlov, who permitted the escape as far as Omsk and then ordered the farce to be ended at Ekaterinburg . In any case, the final decision was abrupt and unexpected ; no preparation had been made for the imprisonment at Ekaterinburg and Ipatiev's house was requisitioned at a moment's notice ; no properly constituted guard was on hand, but had to be recruited from a local factory ; the encircling stockade was hurriedly erected after the arrival of the prisoners . Neither Sverdlov nor Mirbach is available to affirm or deny ; they were assassinated too soon .
If my main hypothesis be true, which only time and the opening up of more European archives can determine, then Comrade Jakolev was an agent of the German High Staff ; and Nicholas II, redeeming an inglorious past by one heroic choice, was murdered because of his unshakable loyalty to the cause of the Allies .
Chapter XIII
THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
IT is time to retrace our steps, return to Petrograd, and resume the strictly historical sequence of events which we have interrupted, advisedly, in order to follow the imperial family, step by step, to its pitiable end. Both narratives might have been continued, as it were, in parallel columns, as they run concurrently ; but it has been judged more satisfactory for the reader — if admittedly less chronological — to close the history of the Romanov's before depicting the complicated phases upon which the Revolution itself now enters. These two currents diverged almost immediately ; the fortunes of the deposed monarch and the mass movements of the capital never crossed, but swept farther and farther apart. Both ended in catastrophe for the principal actors, though, in point of time, the monarch survived longer than the Constitutional Democracy which had unhorsed his autocracy.
Beginning on the tenth of March, fully five days before the formal abdication of the Czar, a series of events occurred which were destined to exercise an important and permanent influence on the direction which the Revolution ultimately took. With the workmen of the Petrograd factories and shops on general strike, revolutionary meetings and street demonstrations increased in number and frequency; no one as yet seemed to have formulated a constructive political program, intent as all were on destroying every hated vestige of the old regime. Loosed from the traditional restraint of the Cossack, who now joined the universal revolt, Petrograd gave full vent to an ancient Russian characteristic and indulged an inhibited, centrifugal passion which craved destruction and found satisfaction in mere negation.
“At last! At last!” shouted a demonstrator, pointing at a red glow in the direction of the Nicolaevsky station.
“What is burning ?”
“The police station.”
“But there is a fire station in the same building.”
“That won’t help. We are going to destroy all government offices, burn, smash, kill all police, all tyrants, all despots.”
On the Liteiny a new blaze breaks out and is unchecked. It is the Okroujny Soud, the magnificent building of the High Court of Justice.
“Who started that fire?” someone asks. “Is it not necessary to have a court building for new Russia ?”
As the frenzy spreads, rioters and looters fall on their natural enemies, the policemen. The Social Revolutionary, Pitirim Sorokin, tells us that he came on a group of men pitilessly beating a prostrate policeman with butts of revolvers and grinding their victim’s body into the pavement with their boot heels. “Stop that, you brutes !” cried Sorokin’s companion. “Arrest the man if you like, but don’t kill him.”
“Who are you to hinder us from killing a Pharaoh ?” the mob yelled. “Are you also a counter-revolutionary ?” A few moments later, from a window on the fourth floor of a house where a Czarist general lodged, a man was tossed to the pavement beneath by revolting soldiers. His piercing shriek of agony was drowned by shouts of exultation. “As the body crashed on the stones,” Sorokin writes, “men rushed forward, stamping on it, lashing it with whatever they held in their hands. Deathly sick with the hideousness of the sight, I ran on, my companion following.” . . . But someone plucked desperately at his sleeve : “Sorokin ! I know you are generous. Save me ! In the name of God, save me.” In this trembling fugitive Sorokin recognized a spy of the Secret Service who, two years previously, had denounced and secured the arrest of the very man from whom he was now begging sanctuary. “Go home quickly,” answered Sorokin. “Destroy your uniform and then, if you can, change your lodging. . . If anything happens, let me know.”
Kerensky passes at the head of a squad of soldiers leading one of the Ministers of the Czar to prison. The mob yells imprecations and attempts to tear the victim limb from limb. “In the name of the Revolution,” cries Kerensky, “I forbid you to touch this man. It is not for you to judge him. He and all the others will be tried, and I swear to you that they will receive justice.”
Meanwhile, what of the Duma, the legally elected representative assembly which alone could claim to voice the collective will of the Russian people ? Much and heated controversy centers about that body, apologists of the monarchy assailing it bitterly as a hotbed of treasonable conspiracy, while neutral historians blame its members severely for the feebleness and indecision of its policy. Truth is, no one had a clear idea or a political program, much less a determined will to assume leadership at a moment when the mounting passion of the populace created disorders which needed, above all else, cool heads, alert minds, and eyes that saw something more relevant to Russia’s future than the welcome vision of a toppling throne, burning police stations, and jail deliveries. Everyone foresaw the Revolution, and no one prepared for it. Gutchkov’s frank admission is the key to the kaleidoscopic variations that are to follow : “. . . The destruction of old forms of life was faster than the creation of new forms to replace them.”
The Revolution was everyone’s special business in Russia, and hence its excesses became no one’s responsibility. Ordered by the Emperor to dissolve and disperse on March 12, the Duma obeyed the letter of the ukase by transforming its sessions into “unofficial” sittings called by authority of a Temporary Executive Committee of Members acting on their individual liability. With the supreme authority of the monarch already repudiated in fact, though not announced in public until seventy-two hours later, this technical abdication by the Duma of its legal headship left the State virtually at the mercy of highest and the most daredevil bidder. Although in the popular imagination the Duma remained the focal point of the Revolutionary movement, its halls and corridors inundated by surging masses who gravitated toward it in search of inspiration, advice, and active leadership, its over legalistic hesitation on receipt of the Czar’s ukase furnished just the necessary interlude for a Jacobin coup d’état. To be sure, it boldly re-assumed its authority at midnight, March 13, only to find that, Russian-like, it was again too late !
The interval brought forth a rival claimant. The Union of Cooperative Workers of Petrograd — the only legal labor union then in existence — had already, on March 10, summoned delegates from different quarters of the capital to a conference in their headquarters at 144 Nevsky Prospekt. About thirty-five workmen and a few Social Democrats responded. There for the first time was heard a demand for the formation of “Soviets” along the lines of the abortive Soviet of Khroustalev Nossar which made itself master of St. Petersburg for a brief space in 1905. Couriers were dispatched to every factory in the metropolitan area with instructions to organize elections of delegates according to trades and occupations, one representative to be chosen from each thousand workmen, while factories of less than a thousand hands were invited to send one spokesman. By March 12 the Soviet was ready to bid for the control, of Russia.
On that morning several revolting regiments, in conjunction with insurgent civilians, took possession of the Arsenal, the Central Artillery Bureau, and the prison called “The Crosses.” From the latter the mob and the troops liberated, not only political prisoners, but all common-law criminals as well. They then rushed to the Tauride Palace, where the Duma sat ; Tcheidze, Skobelev, and Kerensky, Socialist members of the Duma, welcomed them, Kerensky himself undertaking to find a room for the accommodation of this self-elected and heterogeneous parliament. He secured Room No. 12,[1] into which crowded a dozen labor leaders, including the Social Democrats from the Duma ; a group of factory delegates Bogdanov, and Gvozdev, just out of prison Grinievitch, of the local Menshivist organization Volkov, and Kamensky, delegates of the Union of Petrograd Labor Cooperatives ; and N.D. Sokolov, who is described by an informed narrator of the events as “representing only himself.” The inevitable proclamation to the people was the first business of the day : —
Citizens ! The representatives of the workmen, the soldiers, and the population of Petrograd, sitting in the building of the State Duma, by the present give notice that their first session will take place this evening at seven o’clock. All troops that have gone over to the people must elect on the spot a representative for each company. Factories must elect one representative per thousand workmen. Those with less than a thousand workmen send one representative.
The appeal was signed by the temporary Executive Committee of the Soviet of Labor Deputies.
The second proclamation of the Soviet organizers — as yet no plenary session had been held — was a stroke of genius. The attitude of the army toward this new form of political control was uncertain and gave rise to anxiety in Room No. 12. There must, then, be a special gesture in the direction of the Petrograd Garrison, which, admittedly, held a Pretorian balance of power. It was forthcoming immediately : —
Citizens ! The soldiers who have made themselves watchmen of the people’s interests are, since this morning, in the streets, hungry. The Soviet of Workmen Deputies and Soldiers makes every effort to feed the soldiers, guardians of the people’s interests, but the immediate organization of a commissariat for the troops is very difficult. The Soviet appeals to you, citizens, begging you to provide for the soldiers’ nourishment, devoting to this purpose all provisions in your possession.
Toward evening, Room 12 began to fill up ; the two adjoining rooms, 11 and 13, were requisitioned. Generals and military commanders began to drift in, tiring of the perfervid oratory in the Chamber of the Duma, where parliamentarians vied with sociologists in endless discussion of the psychology of the masses — and missed it. The realists in Room 12 appointed two of the first-comers to immediate command of the ultimate arguments of Revolution : the land forces were assigned to Colonel Maslovsky, the navy to Lieutenant Philippovsky. At 9 P.M., with the Duma still sitting, — and debating as usual, — Tcheidze rang a bell and declared the Soviet of Workmen convened in their first formal session. It now numbered one hundred and fifty persons. A Council was appointed, including the Duma Members, Tcheidze and Kerensky ; an Executive Committee was elected, and various commissions created. After an all-night session, this parent Soviet issued its first official pronouncement in the pages of a newspaper founded overnight, to be known thereafter as Izvestia.
News of theNo. I — March 13, 1917 No. I
PETROGRAD SOVIET OF WORKMEN DEPUTIES
TO THE POPULATION OF PETROGRAD AND RUSSIA
FROM THE SOVIET OF WORKMEN’S DEPUTIES
The old authorities brought the country to ruin and the people to starvation. It became impossible to endure it longer. The population of Petrograd came out in the streets to express its discontent. It was met with guns. Instead of bread, the government of the Czar gave the people bullets.
But the soldiers have refused to go against the people and have revolted against the government. Together with the civilians, they have seized the armories, the military stores, and many important government institutions.The struggle is still going on ; it must be brought to an end. The old power must be deposed and replaced by a people’s government. This is the salvation of Russia.To secure a victorious end of this struggle in the interests of democracy, the people must create an organization of its own power.
Yesterday, March 12, a Soviet of Workmen Deputies was formed in the Capital. It consists of representatives elected from the shops and factories, the revolting military detachments, and also from democratic and socialistic parties and groups.The Soviet of Workmen Deputies now in session at the Imperial Duma faces, as its basic problem, the organization of the people’s forces in the battle for permanent political freedom and self-government in Russia.The Soviet has appointed district commissars to execute the people’s authority in the districts of Petrograd.
We call upon the inhabitants of the capital to rally around the Soviet, to form district committees, and to take the administration of local affairs in their own hands.All together, we unite our forces to fight for the complete destruction of the old government, and for the calling of a Constituent Assembly, elected on the basis of a universal, equal, direct, and secret ballot.THE SOVIET OF WORKERS’ DEPUTIES
On the following day, March 14, representatives of the military units took their places in the Soviet, the title of which was straightway enlarged into “Soviet of Workmen and Soldiers’ Deputies.”
Outmaneuvered at the starting post, the Duma took alarm — and compromised. An “Executive Committee of the State Duma” was formed, consisting of Rodzianko, Kerensky, Tcheidze, Milyukov, Karaoulov, Konovalov, Nekrassov, Schidlovsky, Dimitrioukov, Rjevsky, Shulgin, and V. Lvov. These names were communicated to Room 12 with an invitation to consolidate and cooperate. The Soviet placidly ignored the message and continued to address the people over the head of the Duma, urging the formation of regional Soviets for the administration of local affairs. The only means of contact between the two competing bodies was the liaison effected by Kerensky and Tcheidze, who retained their membership in both. Learning that the military section of the Soviet was about to take measures that looked seditious, Rodzianko, at three o’clock in the morning, went in person to their session and proposed a fusion with the military commission of the Duma Committee. With no available funds of their own, the Soviet leaders judged it opportune to accede to this limited coalition and agreed to the nomination of Colonel Engelhardt, a Duma member, to the Presidency of the Joint Commission.
The following days were spent in endless and complicated negotiations between the legally elected Duma of the land and the illegal Soviet, representing a fraction of the inhabitants of Petrograd ; the issue was the personnel of the forthcoming Ministry. For two days the bargaining continued. Finally, on the fifteenth, a compromise Cabinet was agreed upon and published as “The Provisional Government of Russia”: Premier and Minister of the Interior, Prince G.E. Lvov, the venerable and veteran leader of the Zemstvo movement ; Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paul L. Milyukov, leader of the Constitutional-Democratic Party (Cadets) ; Minister of War and Marine, A.I. Gutchkov, member of the Duma and a leader of the Oktobrist (Conservative) Party, and representative of the Moscow merchant class ; Minister of Finance, N.B. Terestchenko, a free lance in politics, one of the wealthiest men in Russia and noted as a philanthropist ; Minister of Agriculture, A.I. Shingariov Constitutional-Democrat, member of the fourth Duma Minister of Education, Professor A.I. Manuilov Constitutional-Democrat, well-known University lecturer Minister of Commerce and Industry, A.I. Konovalov, Progressive, publicist, member of the Duma, one of the foremost industrialists and commercial leaders of Moscow Minister of Railways, N. Nekrassov, member of the Duma,leader of the left wing of the Constitutional-Democratic Party ; Procurator of the Holy Synod, V. Lvov, Moderate Conservative, landed proprietor, and member of the Duma ; State Controller, Godnev, Oktobrist, veteran publicist from the Volga districts ; Vice Premier and Minister of Justice, A.F. Kerensky, Social Democrat, an active participant in anti-Tzaristic propaganda among the working and peasant classes.
The first official act of the new Provisional Government was the issuance of its declaration : —
1. Full and immediate amnesty for all political, religious, and terroristic crimes, military mutinies, and agrarian offenses, et cetera. (Followed by abolition of capital punishment on March 25.)2. Freedom of speech, the press, meetings, unions, and strikes. Political liberties to be granted to all men serving in the army within the limits of military requirements.3. Cancellation of all restrictions of class, religion, and nationality.4. Immediate preparation for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly elected by universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage for the establishment of a formal government and of the Constitution of the country.5. The police to be replaced by a people’s militia, with elective chiefs subordinate to the organizations of local self-government.6. Members of local self-governing institutions to be elected by universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage.7. The units of the army that have taken part in the Revolutionary movement not to be disarmed or removed from Petrograd.8. Military discipline to be preserved on parade and on duty. Soldiers, however, to be free to enjoy all social rights enjoyed by other citizens.The Provisional Government deems it its duty to add that it has no intention of taking advantage of war time to delay carrying out the aforesaid reforms and measures.2
Thus, on the arrival of Gutchkov and Shulgin from Pskov bearing the text of the Czar’s abdication, the ancient regime had completely disappeared ; its ministers had either been placed under arrest or were in hiding, and a new, de facto, government existed. But it was a dual government composed of two irreconcilable elements, one bourgeois and democratic, the second proletarian and socialistic, both contending for mastery, neither in complete control of the Revolution.
This duality of control, never fully abolished until November 7, gave time for one deadly stroke that completed the demoralization of the army and unloosed the anarchy that had been seething in its ranks for a year. I mean the notorious and much discussed “Order Number One.”
On March 14 there was promulgated to the troops of the Petrograd Garrison and wirelessed to the front the following extraordinary command : —
ORDER NUMBER ONE. MARCH 14, 1917
To the garrison of the Petrograd District, to all guardsmen, soldiers of the line, of the artillery, and of the fleet, for immediate and strict observance, and to the workmen of Petrograd for information.The Soviet of Workmen and Soldiers’ Deputies has decreed : —1. That committees be elected of representatives of the men in all companies, battalions, regiments, artillery parks, batteries, squadrons, and separate services of various military institutions and on the ships of the fleet.2. All military units not yet represented on the Soviet of Workmen’s Deputies to elect one representative from each company. These representatives to provide themselves with written certificates and to report to the Duma at 10 A.M. on March 17.3. In all its political activities the military unit is subordinate to the Soviet and to its respective committees.4. The orders of the Military Commission of the Duma are to be obeyed only when they are not in contradiction with the orders and decrees of the Soviet.5. All arms — rifles, machine guns, armored cars, etc. — are to be at the disposal and under the control of company and battalion committees and should never be handed over to the officers even should they claim them.6. On parade and on duty the soldiers must comply with strict military discipline ; but off parade and off duty, in their political, social, and private life, soldiers must suffer no restriction of the rights common to all citizens. In particular, saluting when off duty is abolished.7. Officers are no longer to be addressed as “Your Excellency,” “Your Honor,” etc. Instead, they should be addressed as “Mr. General,” “Mr. Colonel,” etc.8. Rudeness to soldiers on the part of all ranks and, in particular, addressing them in the second person singular is prohibited, and any infringement of this regulation and misunderstandings between officers and men are to be reported by the latter to the company commanders.This order is to be read in all companies, battalions, regiments, batteries, and other combatant and noncombatant formations.(Signed)
THE PETROGRAD SOVIET OF WORKMEN
AND SOLDIERS’ DEPUTIES
From the military point of view, this “printed charter of license” meant practically the transfer of the actual command of operations to committees of soldiers and opened the way for the dismissal of officers by their men. Who were the authors of this final folly which destroyed discipline and initiated that “melting away” process which was to ensue ? Interrogated by the present writer, Mr. Kerensky put the entire blame on the Soviet and pointed out that, as the Provisional Government did not come into existence until the night of March 15, no responsibility can be laid on its shoulders.
He insists, moreover, that Colonel Engelhardt, the Temporary Chairman of the Joint Military Commission, had refused categorically to sanction its promulgation.
“Very well,” answered the Delegates to the Soviet, “if you refuse, we will draft it ourselves.”
Intended, moreover, primarily for the soldiers of the Petrograd Garrison, it was radioed to the front by persons whose identity has never been discovered.
Influential members of the Soviet likewise disclaim responsibility for the fatal effects which followed.
“Pilates,” retorts General Denikin, “they washed their hands of the writing of their own credo.” For their words are placed on record, in the report of the secret sitting of the Government, the Commanders-in-Chief, and the Executive Committee of the Workmen and Soldiers’ Deputies, of May 4 (17), 1917 : —
TZERETELLI : You might, perhaps, understand Order Number One if you knew the circumstances in which it was issued. We were confronted with an unorganized mob, and we had to organize.
SKOBELEV : I consider it necessary to explain the circumstances in which Order Number One was issued. Among the troops that overthrew the old regime, the commanding officers did not join the rebels. In order to deprive the former of their importance, we were forced to issue Order Number One. We had inward apprehensions as to the attitude of the front toward the Revolution. Certain instructions were given, which provoked our distrust. Today we have ascertained that this distrust was well-founded.
A member of the Soviet, Joseph Goldenberg, editor of New Life, was still more outspoken. He said to the French journalist, Claude Anet, “Order Number One was not an error, but a necessity. It was not drafted by Sokolov. It is the expression of the unanimous will of the Soviet. On the day ‘we made the Revolution,’ we understood that if we did not dismember the old army it would crush the Revolution. We had to choose between the army and the Revolution. We did not hesitate — we chose the latter, and I dare say that we were right.”
Alarmed by the flood of protesting telegrams from the front recounting the disastrous effects of the Prikaz, the Provisional Government, on March 19, attempted to undo the harm by a proclamation to the army which declared that the Order was not universal and that troops should obey only commanders acting under authority from the Provisional Government.
“The Russian is clever, but always too late.”
The mischief was done and was never undone ; both Russia and the Allies were soon to feel the results. Again — as in every conflict with Room No. 12 — the Provisional Government found itself on the losing side.
Was it a bloodless transformation ? If compared with its historic prototype, the French Revolution, the answer must be a half affirmative. There was no storming of a Bastille, no taking of a Tuileries, no Vendée. The nearest approach to a pitched battle was the last stand made by four companies of infantry, one company of Cossack's, two batteries, and a single platoon of machine gunners who took up a position at the Admiralty under the joint command of General Havalov, Commander of the Petrograd Garrison, Beliaev, Minister of War, and the Czar’s own brother, the Grand Duke Michael. Their positions though strategically a commanding one for even a thousand men, became untenable because of lack of food and ammunition, but mainly because of the overwhelming artillery power of the revolted garrison, which numbered nearly one hundred and fifty thousand men. The Royalists retired without battle, leaving the Capital in undisputed possession of the revolutionaries.
But there were frightful acts of vengeance, cowardly slaughter of officers at Kronstadt and in Petrograd, coupled with mob violence of bestial brutality directed against police, public officials, and alleged counter-revolutionaries in the Capital and elsewhere. The lives lost may have reached a total of five thousand.
Russia now enters upon its first summer as a free nation. From the Allied Powers came congratulations and expressions of confidence. On March 22, one week after, the abdication of Nicholas II, Mr. David Francis, American ambassador in Petrograd, acting under instructions from Secretary of State Lansing, waited on Milyukov and announced America’s recognition of the Provisional Government as the de jure Government of Russia. The same afternoon, to lend solemnity and formality to that historic event, Mr. Francis, accompanied by the entire personnel of the Embassy, returned to the Marensky Palace to meet the assembled Council of Ministers and convey the recognition in official form : —
Mr. President of the Council of Ministers, I have the honor as American ambassador, and as representative of the Government of the United States accredited to Russia, to hereby make formal recognition of the Provisional Government of All the Russia's and to state that it gives me pleasure officially and personally to continue intercourse with Russia through the medium of the new government.May the cordial relations existing between the two countries continue to obtain and may they prove mutually satisfactory and beneficial.
Mr. Francis felt a just pride in being the spokesman of the first people to welcome Russia into the family of free, sovereign, and independent nations. England, France, and Italy followed suit, within forty-eight hours. On the second of April, President Wilson, in his memorable speech to the Congress of the United States, confirmed America’s friendship for the Russian people, in words that electrified his hearers : —
Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia ? Russia was known by those who knew her best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instincts, their habitual attitude toward life. . . . Here is a fit partner for a league of honor.
On the second of April, the veteran labor leader, Samuel Gompers, cabled the greetings of the American Federation of Labor : —
WASHINGTON, April 2, 1917. . . We send greetings. The establishment of the liberty of Russia finds a warm spot in the hearts of America’s workers. . . . In the name of America’s workers, whose watchwords are “Justice, Freedom, and Humanity,” we plead that Russia’s workers and masses shall maintain what you have already achieved and practically and rationally solve the problem of to-day and safeguard the future from the reactionary forces who would gladly take advantage of your lack of unity to reestablish the old regime of royalty, reaction, tyranny, and injustice. Our best wishes are with Russia in her new opportunity.
SAMUEL GOMPERS
President, American Federation of Labor
The effect of the Revolution within Russia was comparable only to the joy created by the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. “Life is flowing in a heaving, purifying torrent,” wrote an English correspondent from Petrograd. “Never was any country in the world as interesting as Russia now is. Old men are saying, ‘Nunc dimittis’; young men are singing in the dawn ; and I have met many men and women who seem walking in a hushed sense of benediction.” The sunshine of freedom flooded men’s souls and exalted their spirits. It was the romantic moment of the Revolution. Mr. Kerensky, Minister of Justice and Vice Premier of the Soviet, believed the hour had come for a generous act of universal clemency. “Send a telegram,” he said to Sorokin, “to the governors of prisons throughout Russia to liberate all political prisoners.” When written, he signed it : “Citizen Kerensky.” The political come trooping into Petrograd, followed, alas ! by criminals, hooligans, and international adventurers.
Professor Ross, of the University of Wisconsin, found himself in Siberia during these times. He reports that something like twenty thousand sledges were needed to transport the exiles out of Northern Siberia. “It is certain,” he writes, “that up to June 23, 1917, more than a thousand refugees had passed in through Yokohama alone. I had an opportunity to observe many of these, and their appearance boded ill for their native land. For the most part, they were of the lowest class of Russian Jews, dirty, sordid, repulsive, not genuine revolutionists at all, but ignorant, self-seeking proletarians. One of them on our boat tried to smuggle into the country twenty-three pairs of shoes and fifteen pairs of gloves, and made great outcry when he was required to pay duty on these goods. It was his sort which, on leaving the quarters which had been provided for them at Vladivostok, stole the silver from the table and the blankets and pillows from the beds. The real revolutionists in New York, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere had protested against the repatriation of these impostors at Russia’s expense, but their protests went unheeded. It seemed as if the Russian consuls — appointees of the old regime, be it noted — took a malicious pleasure in sending back persons certain to make trouble.”
Chapter XIV
LENIN AND A SEALED CAR
FROM GERMANY
ASTRAKHAN, on the northwestern shore of the Caspian, was the birthplace of Lenin’s father, Ilia Ulianov, who came from a respectable middle-class stock which had somehow been crossed with Mongolian blood ; miscegenation was clearly visible in the future dictator’s countenance. But it was at Simbirsk on the Volga that Vladimir was born, April 10, 1870, while his father was acting as Inspector of Rural Schools, a position which entitled him to be addressed as “Your Excellency.” In the same city lived the family of Alexander Kerensky, whose father was principal of the local high school and hence exercised supervision over the Ulianov boys — including Vladimir — during the period of their secondary education. The friendship between the two families which gave Russia its rival claimants for supreme power in 1917 must have been intimate, for when old Ulianov died it was Kerensky’s father who became guardian of the children and completed their schooling. Kerensky records the coincidence in his writings and recalls an accidental meeting with Ulianov’s sister in 1914. The conversation naturally centred upon her brother, then living as a political exile in Western Europe. “But don’t worry,” Kerensky assured her, “you will soon see him again. There will be a war and it will open to him the road to Russia.” “My prophecy,” he adds, “half serious and half in jest, was realized. Alas ! to Russia’s sorrow.”
The school reports of the district of Simbirsk contained flattering comments on young Ulianov’s scholarship and conduct : “Excellent,” “assiduous,” “perfect,” are frequent notations. Lenin’s biographer, Isaac Don Levine, finds the following estimate from the headmaster of the Classical High School from which Lenin was graduated : —
Very gifted, always punctual and diligent, Ulianov was first in all the classes and received a gold medal upon the conclusion of his studies as the most deserving of a the students, in progress, development, and, conduct. Neither in school nor outside of it has there, ever been registered a case in which the school authorities had occasion to censure him. His parents always followed carefully his studies and moral development, and from 1886, after his father’s death, his mother all alone concentrated her efforts on the education of her children. Religion and prudent discipline were the basis of this education. The good fruits of it were evident in Ulianov’s perfect behavior. Examining more closely the life which he led at home, and his character, I could not fail to notice an excessive reserve and gruffness, even with acquaintances, and also with his comrades at school.
But the classical philosophers of Greece and Rome were not to retain their fascination for the honor student of Simbirsk. Though always retaining a fondness for the terse forcefulness of Latin proverbs, Lenin discarded the idealism of the Greeks. Plato, in particular, he repudiated because of his teleology ; hence the works of that master were included in the index of one hundred and thirty-four prohibited works drawn up for Soviet Russia by the Main Committee for National Education presided over by Krupskaia, Lenin’s widow. Democritus, materialist par excellence, was permitted to survive, however, as the only safe philosopher of antiquity. One can understand how the atomic theory of the Grecian Iconoclast, which pictures the cosmos as a whirlwind of bellicose particles in perpetual flux, would be particularly welcome in Bolshevist circles as a satisfactory description of the universe.
The turning point in Ulianov’s character development seems to have come just after he passed his seventeenth year. Who was it that said, “At eighteen a man will join any party that, attacks ?” In 1887 his elder brother, Alexander Ulianov, a shy, reserved university student, became ringleader in an attempt to assassinate Alexander III ; the attempt was frustrated and Ulianov was executed. From that day Vladimir was an implacable rebel and never relented until his agent, Jurovsky, first slew and then dismembered the body of Nicholas II, the executioner’s son.
Expelled from the University of Kazan for radicalism, forbidden to reside in Moscow, forbidden to leave the country to reside abroad, Vladimir Ulianov finally succeeded in passing the examinations of the Law School of the University of St. Petersburg, in 1891, and was admitted to the bar in Samara in 1892. Returning to St. Petersburg, he there embarked on his life work of indoctrinating workmen with the theories of Karl Marx, meeting with such success that in 1896 he was condemned to exile in Central Siberia. In the village of Shushenskoye, near the Mongolian frontier, he toiled unremittingly for three years on his most pretentious work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, and returned to clandestine social warfare on the expiration of his three-year sentence.
The ensuing years, until 1905, were passed in an extraordinary manifestation of dogged, persevering, and calculating propaganda. Pamphlets, tracts, theses, lectures, dialectics, drafts of revolutionary warfare, and philippics marked by biting sarcasm, poured from his fertile pen. From Munich he edited Iskra (“The Spark”); in Paris he lectured before the Institute for Social Sciences ; in London, at the 1903 convention, he split the Social Democrats by converting the majority to his program of direct action and advocated immediate uprising of the proletariat in armed revolt. Here the name “Bolshevik” first appeared ; the word merely designates the purely historical fact that the left and more radical wing of the Social Democratic Party succeeded in obtaining a majority vote. (Bolshoi in Russian means “great,” “large,” and is, in itself, an innocuous term.) The more conservative right wing was henceforth to be known as “Mensheviki,” the defeated or minority group. The accidental fact that the Bolsheviki also advocate a maximum of radicalism is a secondary connotation.
Back in Petrograd, under an assumed name, Lenin fanned the fires of the abortive Revolution of 1905, and on its failure continued unabated his undermining of the established order of things from Finland, Germany, Galicia, France, and, finally, Switzerland. Temporary setbacks but served to harden his heart, sharpen his tongue, whet his purpose, and dehumanize his soul. Advancing years, far from mellowing his character, rather limited his capacity to think or breathe except in terms of class consciousness. His whole being was seared and grooved by a network of scars, the result of his unending mental conflict with God and His creation. Every new thought or impression, every emotion, every reaction from the physical world, even in the domain of art and beauty, was diverted, as it were, into some one or other of these runnels and emptied into a central reservoir of hate. He had a genius for unifying unrelated phenomena and discovering underlying social significance's in the most disparate and indifferent acts.
Trotsky, just escaped from Siberia, takes a walk with his chief one day through the streets of London. “He showed me Westminster Abbey (from outside) and some other famous buildings. I no longer know how he expressed himself, but the meaning was : ‘That is their famous Westminster.’ The ‘their’ meant, naturally, not the English, but the enemy. Not emphatic at all, rather deeply organic and revealed by the pitch of his voice, this meaning was always obvious when he spoke of any kind of cultural values or new conquests, whether it was about the edification of the British Museum or the richness of information of the Times, or, many years later, German artillery or French aviation. ‘They understand’ or ‘They have,’ ‘They have accomplished or succeeded,’ but always as enemies ! The invisible shadow of the shareholders of society lay, as it were, in his eyes, on all human culture, and this shadow he felt as incontestably as the daylight.”
Lenin became a personification of will power devoid of the control of conscience and consecrated to world revolution. His mind became a sealed book, except for three thoughts Russia, Revolution, the World on Fire. In What Is To Be Done ? he states his platform baldly : —
Workingmen are not and cannot be conscious of the antagonism of their interests to those of the existing order. Only the educated representatives of the possessing classes are conscious of it. The history of all countries shows that the working classes alone can create but trade-unionism. The workingmen can be saved only by an organization of revolutionaries which, unlike the labor unions, must consist exclusively of people whose profession is revolutionary activity. Such an organization must not be too wide and must be as secret as possible.
“Unmoral” best describes his ethics, as human acts to him were only good or bad in the relation they bore to the inevitable class struggle, not to any objective norm of morality, which he despised. “For Lenin,” writes one who knew him, “moral principles do not exist, just as there is no music for a deaf person . . . Morality or humanity do not exist in Lenin’s vocabulary except in such phrases as ‘capitalist morality,’ or ‘slobbering humanity.’ ”
In the words of another of his colleagues, Minsky : “One might say Lenin lived outside of his own personality, and this is why he had no intimates. He was a devotee of his cult, a hermit of his vow. He met and parted with people only on party grounds.
“Men and conditions meant nothing to Lenin but means to accomplish his aims. This is why some of his former associates now call him a ‘hangman.’ But he is really a monomaniac — a man with a fixed idea.
“Whoever met for the first time this ungainly, poorly dressed, somewhat round-shouldered, bald-headed man with his impenetrable Mongol face and slow movements, would take him for a small bureaucrat, and would never believe that he was face to face with one of the most fearless, crafty, and willful maniacs of our time. Only after recognizing his narrow, sharp eye and unforgettable smile might one guess the extraordinary will-power concealed behind the ordinary mask of his face.”
Posterity will never understand the phenomenal influence which this man was destined to wield in his own day and generation, unless men explore the sources of his power. His aims and principles — for he did have a very definite group of guiding motives — must be examined from his point of view, or else the ensuing conflict reveals only the dust and fury of a dog fight. Precisely because his theory seemed eminently reasonable, coherent, and justified, he was enabled to endow it with vitality and persuasive appeal. First and foremost must it be remembered that Lenin made Communism a religion. Karl Marx was its divinity ; Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto its inspired writings — its Bible ; and he, Nicholas Lenin, was its master missionary. “We are rock-ribbed Marxists” was his unvarying credo. On this human trilogy a faith was founded and propagated which, in its psychological reactions, supplied an earth-born substitute for that natural instinct and need which humanity feels for a divine revelation. Beginning with one pivotal dogma, — false, as most men believe, — the apostles of Communism have elaborated a set of doctrines, conclusions, and rules of conduct which furnish them with weapons of daily propaganda. Of these its adherents are intimately, and often sincerely, persuaded — at least, your true Communist is, that one sincere believer of whom Lenin spoke in the First Moscow Congress, when he said : “Among one hundred so-called Bolshevik there is one real Bolshevik, with thirty-nine criminals and sixty fools.”
Now, the basic doctrine upon which the whole structure rests, and upon whose validity Communism stands or falls, is the assertion that the purely economic motive has been the determining element in all human activity and that the development of humanity has been determined and limited by the production, consumption, distribution, and exchange of material goods. The Marxian Socialist is an economic monist. For him the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas is economic waste ; the genius of a Phidias, the sublime poetic raptures of a Homer, a Dante, and a Shakespeare, are universally immortal only if interpreted in a proletarian sense ; the laws of a Solon, the juridical monuments bequeathed by Justinian and Blackstone and Kent, the principles of human, freedom established by Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence, have contributed nothing to purer government ; the exquisite charity of a Damien, — that whitened saint among the leprous shadows of Molokai, — the blood of Christianity’s first social revolutionaries shed in the Coliseum, the writings of Paul and Matthew and Mark and Luke and John, the life and sacrificial death of the Word made Flesh, the subsequent miraculous progress of Christianity — all these and similar manifestations of mind and Spirit are ineffectual gestures, wasted energies, which left no serious impression on the heart of man nor influenced the course of human affairs ! Or, if they did, the mainspring of their motivation was purely economic ! Underlying this economic determinism we find, however, still another postulate, equally famous and equally at variance with human experience. It is the Marxian notion of value. According to Marxian reckoning, the value of a given object, the quality in the article which makes it capable of being exchanged for another object, or for money, is solely the amount of human labor that has been expended in producing it or modifying the raw material into a marketable form. And by labor Marx means, of course, the purely manual labor of the workman who produces the ultimate form. “The quantity of labor,” he says, “is measured by its duration . . . but labor which constitutes the substance of value is equal, uniform human labor, the expenditure of the same intensity of labor power.” Hence, three hundred working hours spent by two workmen in producing two objects should determine an identical value for those products ; both should bring the same price because of the amount of physical labor, measured in terms of time, that has been consumed in producing them. By such reckoning it would seem to matter very little what was produced. One of the workers, a skilled laborer, may have contrived an excellent gold watch, whereas the other produces a fully dressed, bizarre rag doll with a painted face, crinkly hair, and shoe buttons for eyes, but which has taken the same time and labor to complete as did the gold watch. These efforts, according to the Marxian postulate, have the right to equal compensation. The conclusion is manifestly untenable. No reputable economist now holds it.1
Then, too, under this hypothesis the intellectual worker, the author, the research professor, the mathematician, obliged to work from twelve to fourteen hours a day, after spending all their youth and most of their manhood in the acquisition of the necessary qualifications, become worthy only of the consideration accorded to the linotypist who puts their thoughts and findings into print for eight hours a day — with time and a half for overtime.
The theory ignores the numerous other elements entering into the production of exchangeable articles, such as the furnishing of raw material, of tools, machinery, and workshops, the payment of taxes and overhead, the technical administration and direction of the labor — in a word, all those factors entering into the involved process of production which are furnished at the risk and expense, not of the laborer, but of the so-called capitalist. Both capital and labor, employer and employee, brain worker and manual worker, have a definite and legitimate function to perform, and one without the other is powerless.
But with dogged, undaunted persistence the Communist repeats that it is only the actual physical labor that creates value, refusing again to face the cold, inescapable fact that if there is no one who wants the object it has no value whatsoever in exchange. The psychological state of the buyer is as important as the labor expended. A marooned sailor on a desert island sees a ship looming over the horizon. He has at hand a crude rowboat hollowed out of the trunk of a tree, made in a couple of days. But he also has on hand, as salvage from the wreck, several Rolls-Royce automobiles that probably took many months to fabricate and may be worth eight to ten thousand dollars apiece — elsewhere. The boat has acquired a superior “place value,” independently of human labor. As the celebrated economist, Gide, expresses it, “The value of things grows by scarcity and diminishes by abundance. Abundance may decrease it to zero. A superabundance of goods is always valueless when we cannot make use of the surplus, for then it is entirely useless.” Benjamin Franklin reveals the same common sense in the terse and homely philosophizings of Poor Richard : “When the well is dry, we know the value of water.” Robinson Crusoe accumulated an important collection of intrinsically valuable commodities on his desert island as proof of his labor. But they had no value, did not become economic wealth, until somebody wanted them to supply a definite personal need.
Then, too, value frequently exists where labor is entirely absent. Many objects have a value of their own without the slightest intervention of human labor, such as springs of mineral water, a sperm whale cast up on the seashore, and guano deposits. And there are objects which undergo extraordinary increase in value without the slightest touch of manual labor. For example, a wine cellar, assembled before the Federal Prohibition Act.
But with a display of dialectics and an array of industrial statistics, by frequent appeals to the emotions, your orthodox Communist continues to assert that the capitalist system, like a vampire, appropriates what justly belongs to the laborer and pays him only a miserable, minimum salary, whereas the entire exchange value should accrue to the manual producer. All financial gains over and above that of the labor value embedded, as it were, within the commodity, Marx calls “surplus value,” and it is the unwarranted accumulation of surplus values that creates the bête noire of Communism, which is capital. Playing cleverly and bitterly on the injustices that have undoubtedly arisen from the indefensible greed of individual capitalists since the world began, Marx next deduces as a permanent working principle his so-called “class warfare.”
Assuming that his premises are sound, he recognizes only two entities in the human race — the employing and the employed classes — and from the “inevitable” conflict arising between these eternal antagonists he derives every social, economic, religious, political, and industrial evil that history has recorded. These classes he calls the “bourgeoisie” (employing class) and the “proletariat” (employed or wage-earning class). This conception of industrial life as a daily class struggle is then enlarged and transferred until it embraces every form of human activity. Everything centers about that stormy petrel. It is the only explanation of history, and alone can interpret historical variations, account for the rise and fall of empires, explain the domination of given races, and is the ultimate principle of wars, plagues, and famines. It penetrates the realms of philosophy, metaphysics, economics, and the political sciences. It has not as yet fully embraced tote natural sciences and pure mathematics, but, as one commentator truly points out, there is hardly another known field of human knowledge from Totemism to the origin of Greek tragedy which your orthodox Marxist will not undertake to explain on the basis of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The panacea of mundane ills is therefore to be sought in an application of Marx’s principles to the root of human diseases. And as, for the Marxist, the root of all evil is private property, so the first tremendous blow must be struck at that institution. Then industry must be nationalized and expropriated in favor of the operatives ; the bourgeoisie must be disarmed, then disenfranchised and destroyed, as you would exterminate parasitic insects.
Education, art, literature, music, and similar manifestations of human genius must be cultivated only in so far as they serve to increase the class consciousness of the proletariat and ensure the dictatorship of that class. Religion, in the Marxist scheme of life, is an opiate only, invented to drug the proletariat into unthinking submission to their capitalistic overlords ; hence it should be deliberately identified in the minds of the masses with the patent and more repulsive abuses of capitalism in order that it may then be destroyed with impunity.
So far Karl Marx and Engels and Bebel, the doctrinaires. Now enters on the scene Nicholas Lenin, the doer of deeds, the Mohammed of Marxism, who applies the doctrine with fire and sword, first, to Russia, then in spe to the entire world. As one of Lenin’s admirers, Losovsky, points out, “Marx directed against capitalism the weapon of criticism. Lenin employed the criticism of weapons. . . . Lenin had the same genius for making history as Marx had for explaining it.”
In one important respect did Lenin surpass his master. It would appear that Marx admitted, as a natural transition, that the proletariat would pass through democracy to supreme victory, gaining political ascendancy by the legal path of the ballot. He does not seem to make particular mention in any place of that immediate dictatorship of the proletariat which became the battle cry of the left wing of the Social Democrats and is still the avowed goal of the Third International.
The exiled Lenin, realistic, opportunist that he was, and alert strategist, recognized in the World War and its attendant confusion an opportunity, as unparalleled as it was unexpected, to launch at once the World Revolution. He became feverishly active. At the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences, convoked by anti-war Socialists in 1915 and 1916, he preached local defeatism, sabotage, general strikes, and domestic revolt, as sure means of transforming the “imperialist war into a civil war.” But internationalism capitulated to nationalism, and his last hope, the Socialist Party of Germany, supported the Reichstag by voting war credits. Bullets, not ballots, for the bourgeoisie, had been Lenin’s hope ; with bitter scorn and sarcasm he now turns on his former colleagues, such as Kautsky, Leo Deutsch, Plekhanov, and all Mensheviki, — who relied on pacific evolution rather than bloody revolution, — and poured savage ridicule on their Fabianism. “Boot-lickers of the capitalists,” “Cowards,” “Lily-livered milksops,” and such descriptive epithets fill the pages of Lenin’s philippics against the Mensheviki, as they do Stalin’s later work on Leninism. War, implacable war, with no mercy shown, organized terrorism, complete physical annihilation of the bourgeois opponent — such was the all-inclusive strategy of this impatient Hotspur.2
His opportunity was not long in coming and from an unexpected quarter.
The political attitude of Germany toward Russia, naturally enough, had undergone a complete transformation in August 1914. Previously German foreign policy included, as one of its major objectives, the gradual enticement of Russia into the Teutonic alignment by weaning the Czar away from his English and French alliances. Then, too, the preservation of the monarchical principle, as vital to the Hohenzollern's as to the Romanov's, was a serious deterrent to the natural hostility felt by the Kaiser at the growing Pan Slavic aspirations of his Eastern neighbor. He limited his eager diplomats, therefore, to two Machiavellian courses they urged Russia toward her disastrous adventures in the East, counting on Japan to keep the Russian Bear occupied on his Eastern frontier, and, as a collateral precaution, they poured an occasional supply of oil on the nationalistic fires forever smoldering among the non-Slavic elements of the Czar’s empire. But with open warfare declared, neither the family ties between the reigning houses nor the inviolability of the monarchical principle could stand in the way of Russia’s downfall. The stubborn resistance of the Russian armies seriously upset the war lord’s strategy, divided his forces, and in the long run undoubtedly saved the Allies in the West. Hence copious recourse was had to the arts of propaganda, both within Russia and among revolutionaries living abroad. The disaffection of Finland offered a convenient “back-door ” entrance into Russia for German spies, and the suspicions of Sweden were cultivated by whispering in her ears the rumor that Russia planned to seize a strip of Scandinavian territory. The elaborate Intelligence Service tolerated in Sweden was the result. Similar propaganda centers had already been established by Austria at Cracow and among the Ukrainophiles in Vienna.
The abdication of the Czar and the subsequent uncertainty of command at Petrograd presented a superb opportunity to the German High Staff for progressive demoralization of the enemy’s rear guard. Orders went out from Headquarters that Russian exiles, particularly revolutionaries, should be urged to return to their homeland, bringing their defeatism and socialism with them. Funds and transportation were provided from the War Chest and presumably charged off as legitimate expenditures for poison gas. The Secretary of the Swiss Socialist Party, Fritz Platten, acted as party whip and rounded up thirty or more Russian radicals, including Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Lunacharsky, Radek, Krylenko, and Voikov. German agents handed over a generous supply of gold to Lenin, who received it as readily from German hands for the destruction of Russia as he would have taken it from English or French sources for the destruction of Germany. “Of course,” writes Radek, one of the returning exiles, “we knew perfectly well that the German authorities had their own designs in granting us the permission to travel across Germany. . . . We did not pay much attention to this, for we knew that if a true revolution developed in Russia its influence would spread far beyond our borders.”
The German High Command felt the same. They had no delusions as to the seriousness of the step they were taking. Hence, the car bearing the Bolshevist “bacillus” was guarded by detectives and a strong military contingent, and no communications permitted with outsiders as the train passed through German territory en route to Finland.
The “Sealed Car” takes its place in history beside the Wooden Horse of Troy.
“By sending Lenin to Russia,” writes General Ludendorff in My War Memories, “our Government had moreover assumed a great responsibility. From a military point of view his journey was justified, for Russia had to be laid low. But our Government should have seen to it that we also were not involved in her fall.”
General von Hoffmann, Chief of the German General Staff on the Eastern Front, in his memoirs, The War of Lost Opportunities, defends the action of the German Government in these words : —
We naturally tried, by means of propaganda, to increase the disintegration that the Russian Revolution had introduced into the army. Some man at home who had connections with the Russian revolutionaries exiled in Switzerland came upon the idea of employing some of them in order to hasten the undermining, and poisoning of the morale of the Russian army. He applied to Deputy Erzberger and the Deputy of the German Foreign Office. And thus it came about that Lenin was conveyed through Germany to Petersburg in the manner that afterward transpired.In the same way as I send shells into the enemy trenches, as I discharge poison gas at him, I, as an enemy, have the right to employ the expedient of propaganda against his garrisons.
As for Lenin, this kindly act of the German High Staff was a veritable deus ex machina ; it was the fruition of thirty years of waiting and dreaming and planning. Controlled, obsessed, transformed, by his single idea of world revolution, he had driven straight for his goal with unshakable pertinacity; and here he was rolling swiftly toward Russia under military escort ! The vision of this hour had been the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night that led him through the darkness and drab monotony of prison days in that house of the dead, Siberia. It sustained him during his exile in Switzerland, where he ate with it, slept with it, walked with it, and talked with it, until, like the magnetic North, it was now drawing him back to Petrograd, at precisely the opportune moment. No Roman conqueror leading captives at his chariot wheels ever made a more triumphant entry, than did this Third Nicholas into the demoralized Muscovite capital on April 16, 1917. He was the Russian Marius, and the whole world should be his Jugurtha.
Leon Trotsky was also on his way across the ocean from New York. British authorities detained him at Halifax ; but the Provisional Government of Russia protested to its ally, and Mr. Trotsky was allowed to proceed.
1 Mr. Kerensky in his account mentions Room 13 ; other witnesses maintain that Room 12 was the first chosen. In point of fact, three rooms were eventually used — 11, 12, 13.
2 No mention is found of two basic problems : land and the Church. On April 2, however, the Provisional Government promulgated its “Agrarian Reform,” designed to hand over the land to those who worked it. In numerous cases they had already taken it. Simultaneously, a Central Land Committee began work on a basic “Land Law” for submission to the Constituent Assembly ; but the peasants regarded the Cadet programme as a half-measure, in no way meeting the land hunger of the moujik. With the accession of Kerensky to the Premiership, more radical expropriation was contemplated and the decrees prepared. It remained, however, for the new Bolshevist Government to enact finally the long-awaited confiscatory legislation.
In the sphere of Church administration, the Provisional Government moved with greater dispatch. The ecclesiastical, authorities were encouraged to convoke a National Sobor (Council) with a view to reëstablishing the independent functioning of the Church destroyed by Peter the Great through the abolition of the office of Patriarch. The Council met in the autumn ; in the early days of November, while firing in the streets announced the downfall of the Provisional Government, the Sobor elected Archbishop Tikhon, Metropolitan of Moscow, to the office of Patriarch of the Orthodox Russian Church, and thus revived an office that had been defunct for two hundred years.
CHAPTER 14 NOTES
In the sphere of Church administration, the Provisional Government moved with greater dispatch. The ecclesiastical, authorities were encouraged to convoke a National Sobor (Council) with a view to reëstablishing the independent functioning of the Church destroyed by Peter the Great through the abolition of the office of Patriarch. The Council met in the autumn ; in the early days of November, while firing in the streets announced the downfall of the Provisional Government, the Sobor elected Archbishop Tikhon, Metropolitan of Moscow, to the office of Patriarch of the Orthodox Russian Church, and thus revived an office that had been defunct for two hundred years.
CHAPTER 14 NOTES
1 The author is familiar with the explanations advanced at this point by Communist writers who seek to rescue Marx from the consequences of his theory by insisting that he does not mean the individual, quantitative labor of a particular workman, but the average period usually necessary, under given social conditions, to produce the commodity in question : “socially necessary hours of labor.” But the distinction proves too much ; it introduces an element of quality and of utility, both of which are extraneous to Marx’s original intention. A “socially necessary labor hour,” to mean anything, would have to be accepted by all men and nations concerned in the complex processes of modern industrial life ; it is an ideal entity, corresponding to nothing objective and tangible. There is no other self-operating criterion conceivable beyond the law of supply and demand.
2 Lenin is said to have often repeated that, in the event of his being forced to go, he would rather surrender to restored autocracy than to a bourgeois republic — i.e., to stabilized democracy. — Milyukov, Lowell Lectures, Boston, 1921.
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