The Russian Revolution полностью

†Tatiana Aleksinskii recalls that when questions were raised about the possible presence on the Central Committee of a police informer, Zinoviev quoted from Gogol’s Inspector General: “A good household makes use even of garbage.” La Grande Revue, XXVII, No. 9 (September 1923), 459.

‡The likelihood that Lenin was aware of Malinovskii’s police connections is accepted, in addition to Burtsev, by Stefan Possony (Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary, Chicago, 1964, 142–43). Malinovskii’s biographer rejects this hypothesis on the grounds that the Bolsheviks learned far less from Malinovskii about the police than the police learned about the Bolsheviks (Elwood, Malinovsky, 65–66). But he ignores Lenin’s own argument as well as Spiridovich’s statement about the use of double agents, cited above.

*Lenin, PSS, XXVI, 6. Lenin’s puzzling emphasis on Russia’s “oppression” of the Ukraine must be explained at least in part by his financial arrangements with the Austrian Government. He did not demand that the Ukrainians also be liberated from Austrian rule.

† An accusation to this effect is made by General Spiridovich, the usually well-informed official of the gendarmerie. He claims, without furnishing proof, that in June and July 1914 Lenin traveled twice to Berlin to work out with the Germans a plan of seditious activity in the rear of the Russian armies, for which he was to be paid 70 million marks: Spiridovich, Istoriia Bol’shevizma, 263–65.

*He felt vindicated by the events. In 1918, referring to the 1917 Revolution, he wrote that “Prussian guns played a larger role in it than Bolshevik leaflets. In particular, I believe that the Russian émigrés would still be wandering in emigration and stewing in their own juice if German regiments had not reached the Vistula”: Izvne (Stockholm), No. 1 (January 22, 1918), 2.

*On him, see Michael Futrell in St. Antony’s Papers, No. 12, Soviet Affairs, No. 3 (London, 1962), 23–52. The author had a unique opportunity to interview this Estonian but, unfortunately, chose to accept his testimony rather uncritically.

†Futrell in Soviet Affairs, 47, states that this was his only encounter with the Bolshevik leader, but this seems most unlikely.

‡It is reproduced in a cable from the German Minister in Berne, Count Romberg, to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in Berlin, dated September 30, 1915: Werner Hahlweg, Lenins Rückkehr nach Russland, 1917 (Leiden, 1957), 40–43 (English translation in Zeman, Germany, 6–7).

*Hans Steinwachs of the Political Section, German General Staff, to Minister Diego von Bergen of the Foreign Office, in Zeman, Germany, 17. The language of this document indicates that Kesküla misinformed Futrell when he intimated that he had obtained such reports by infiltrating Lenin’s organization in Sweden: Futrell in Soviet Affairs, 24.

*Lenin, Sochineniia, XIX, 437. “And objectively who profits by the slogan of peace?” Lenin wrote at this time. “Certainly not the revolutionary proletariat. Not the idea of using the war to speed up the collapse of capitalism.” Citing these words, Adam Ulam comments: “He overlooked the fact that the lives of millions of human beings also could have ‘profited’ by the ‘slogan of peace’ ”: The Bolsheviks (New York, 1965), 306.

10

The Bolshevik Bid for Power

In terms of modern opinion, the way to turn people into followers is to persuade them that in following your scheme, they are being active, critical, rebellious and free-spirited; behaving otherwise is passive and servile. The sheep were those who got hopelessly entangled in this set of confusions.

—Kenneth Minogue

Although it is common to speak of two Russian revolutions in 1917—one in February, the other in October—only the first merits the name. In February 1917, Russia experienced a genuine revolution in that the disorders that brought down the tsarist regime, although not unprovoked or unexpected, erupted spontaneously and the Provisional Government which succeeded gained immediate nationwide acceptance. Neither was true of October 1917. The events that led to the overthrow of the Provisional Government were not spontaneous but plotted and executed by a tightly organized conspiracy. It took these plotters three years of civil war and indiscriminate terror to subdue the majority of the population. October was a classic coup d’état, the capture of governmental power by a small minority, carried out, in deference to the democratic conventions of the age, with a show of mass participation, but without mass engagement. It introduced into revolutionary action methods more appropriate to warfare than to politics.