A people's tragedy

fn7 Trotsky had reached the same conclusions, and it is possible that his theory of the ‘permanent revolution’ partly influenced the April Theses.

fn8 Gorbachev had a similar handicap.

fn9 Trotsky had encouraged the declaration. Speaking in the Kronstadt Soviet on 14 May he had said that what was good for Kronstadt would later be good for any other town: ‘You are ahead and the rest have fallen behind.’ Trotsky, however, was not yet a member of the Bolshevik Party.

fn10 Popular legend had it that the Anarchists had turned the villa into a madhouse, where orgies, sinister plots and witches’ sabbaths were held, but when the Procurator arrived he found it in perfect order with part of the garden used as a crèche for the workers’ children.

Chapter 10

fn1 The leaders of the Soviet and the Provisional Government were deceived by the fact that the soldiers, like the common people, expressed extreme hostility to everything ‘German’. But the concept of ‘German’ was for the soldiers a general symbol of everything they hated — the Empress, the treasonable tsarist government, the war and all foreigners — rather than the German soldiers (for whom they often expressed sympathy) on the other side of the front line.

fn2 Indeed, by blaming ‘the Bolsheviks’ for every military defeat, the commanders gave the impression that the Bolsheviks were much more influential than they actually were, and this had the effect of making the Bolsheviks even more attractive to the mass of the soldiers.

fn3 His resignation was not formally announced until 7 July.

fn4 Formerly Tsarskoe Selo.

fn5 His daughter, Nadezhda, would later marry Stalin.

fn6 Dmitrii Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), poet, literary and religious philosopher; Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945), writer and essayist, married to Merezhkovsky; Dmitrii Filosofov (1872–1940), literary critic and co-inhabitant with the Merezhkovskys; Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938), founder, along with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858–1943), of the Moscow Arts Theatre.

fn7 The ‘Directors’, apart from Kerensky, were: Tereshchenko (Foreign Affairs); General Verkhovsky (War); Admiral Verderevsky (Marine); and A. M. Nikitin (Posts and Telegraphs).

fn8 It had largely been personal rivalry that prevented Trotsky from joining the Bolshevik Party earlier, despite the absence of any real ideological differences between himself and Lenin during 1917. He could not bring himself to surrender to ‘Lenin’s party’ — a party which he had been so critical of in the past. As Lenin once replied when asked what still kept him and Trotsky apart: ‘Now don’t you know? Ambition, ambition, ambition.’ (Balabanoff, My Life, 175–6.)

fn9 The Mensheviks and SRs only had minority leftwing factions in favour of a Soviet government, of which more here.

fn10 This was roughly the import of the Bolshevik Decree on Workers’ Control passed on 14 November.

fn11 It is interesting how many Marxists of Deutscher’s generation (E. H. Carr immediately comes to mind) were inclined to see the Western democratic system as inherently authoritarian and the Soviet regime as inherently democratic. For Deutscher’s comments on Lenin’s ‘Soviet constitutionalism’ see The Prophet Armed, 290–1.

fn12 During the final days before 25 October Lenin stressed that a military-style coup was bound to succeed, even if only a very small number of disciplined fighters joined it, because Kerensky’s forces were so weak.

fn13 The Bolshevik Party Conference, scheduled for 17 October, was mysteriously cancelled at about this time — no doubt also on Lenin’s insistence. The mood of the party rank and file suggested that it would express powerful opposition to the idea of an armed insurrection. During the following days, Kamenev and Zinoviev spearheaded their opposition to the insurrection with a call for the Party Conference to be convened. We still lack the crucial archival evidence to tell the full story of this internal party struggle. (On this see Rabinowitch, ‘Bol’sheviki’, 119–20.)

Chapter 11

fn1 So much for the idea that Soviet power was always exported from Russia.

fn2 When Kerensky fled the capital on 25 October he left a small fortune in his bank account: the modest size of his last withdrawal, on 24 October, suggests that even at this final hour he was not expecting to be overthrown. His account book is in GARF, f. 1807, op. 1, d. 452.

fn3 It was only under Stalin, when the Bolsheviks began to call themselves ‘Ministers’, that they reverted back to suits.

fn4 The exact ‘historic spot’ where the Aurora was anchored happened to be by a pretty little chapel next to the Nikolaevsky Bridge. Several years later it was decided that this Christian link with the starting place of the Great October Socialist Revolution should be removed — and so the Bolsheviks turned the chapel into a public lavatory!