Unlike February, however, the militant street demonstrations had to be tightly supervised; Lenin had no faith in spontaneity even if he fully appreciated the need for giving his highly calculated endeavors the appearance of spontaneity. He learned from Napoleon and applied to civil war the principle of tiraillerie, or skirmishing, which some military historians regard as Napoleon’s major contribution to warfare.46 For purposes of combat, Napoleon used to divide his forces in two: the professional Guard and the mass of recruits. It was his practice at the beginning of a battle to send in the recruits to draw enemy fire: this provided a picture of enemy dispositions. At the critical moment, he sent the Guard into action to break the enemy’s lines at the weakest point and put him to flight. Lenin applied this tactic to urban warfare. The masses were brought out into the streets under seditious slogans to provoke a government reaction that would reveal its strengths and weaknesses. Were the crowds to succeed in overwhelming the government’s forces, then the Bolshevik equivalent of Napoleon’s Guard—the armed workers and soldiers organized by the Bolshevik Military Organization—would take over. Were they to fail, the point would still be made that the masses wanted change and that by resisting them the government proved to be “anti-democratic.” One would then await the next opportunity. The basic principle was Napoleon’s “on s’engage et puis on voit”—“one commits oneself and then one sees.”47 In his three attempts at a putsch (April, June, and July 1917), Lenin called out the mobs into the streets, but kept himself well in the background, always pretending to follow the “people” rather than lead them. After each such attempt failed, he would deny having had any revolutionary intentions, and even pretend that his party did all in its power to restrain the impetuous masses.*
Lenin’s technique of revolution required the manipulation of crowds. He followed, whether by instinct or from knowledge it is hard to tell, the theories of crowd behavior first formulated in 1895 by the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon in La Psychologie des Foules (Crowd Psychology). Le Bon held that on joining a crowd men lose their individuality, dissolving it in a collective personality with its own distinct psychology. Its main characteristic is a lowered capacity for logical reasoning and a corresponding rise in the sense of “invincible power.” Feeling invincible, crowds demand action, a craving that leaves them open to manipulation: “crowds are in a state of expectant attention which renders suggestion easy.” They are especially responsive to exhortation to violence by associations of words and ideas that evoke “grandiose and vague images” accompanied by an air of “mystery,” such as “liberty,” “democracy,” and “socialism.” Crowds respond to fanatics who incite them with constantly reiterated, violent images. Since, according to Le Bon, in the ultimate analysis the force that motivates crowds is religious faith, it “demands a god before everything else,” a leader whom it endows with supernatural qualities. The crowd’s religious sentiment is simple:
[the] worship of a being supposed superior, fear of the power with which the being is credited, blind submission to its commands, inability to discuss its dogmas, the desire to spread them, and a tendency to consider as enemies all by whom they are not accepted.48
A more recent observer of crowd behavior has called attention to the dynamism of crowds:
The crowd, once formed, wants to grow rapidly. It is difficult to exaggerate the power and determination with which it spreads. As long as it feels that it is growing—in revolutionary states, for example, which start with small but highly-charged crowds—it regards anything which opposes its growth as constricting.… The crowd here is like a besieged city and, as in many sieges, it has enemies before its walls and enemies within them. During the fighting it attracts more and more partisans from the country around.49
In a rare moment of candor, Lenin revealed to an associate, P. N. Lepeshinskii, that he well understood the principles of mass psychology:
At the end of the summer of 1906, [Lenin] in an intimate conversation predicted with considerable assurance the defeat of the Revolution and hinted at the need to prepare for a retreat. If despite such a pessimistic mood, he nevertheless worked for the intensification of the proletariat’s revolutionary forces, then this was, apparently, from the idea that the revolutionary spirit [revoliutsionnaia aktual’nost’] of the masses never does harm. If there should occur another chance for victory or even semi-victory, then it will be in large measure owing to this spirit.50
