LENIN ON THE TRAIN by CATHERINE MERRIDALE

LENIN ON THE TRAIN

CATHERINE MERRIDALE

Allen Lane, 2016, 354 pages

 

Review by Phil Shannon

The German ‘sealed train’ that gave Lenin safe passage from exile in Switzerland through war-time Germany to Russia in April 1917 was historically pivotal.  As the British historian, Catherine Merridale, reminds us in Lenin on the Train, Lenin was seen as a ‘plague bacillus’ (in Winston Churchill’s phrase) by Berlin, deployed by a German state desperate for a military edge in the first world war through taking one of its enemy states out of the war by sowing revolutionary disruption in Russia.  If Berlin was using Lenin for its military aims, however, Lenin was more than happy to use the German state for his political goal of socialist revolution in Russia and the rest of Europe.

 

Banished from Russia by Tsarist courts, Lenin had spent twenty years isolated from his home country and its simmering revolutionary discontents when stirring news came of the revolution which overthrew the autocratic Tsarist monarchy  in February 1917.  Lenin saw that the job of revolution was only half done, however.

 

Stopping the workers, peasants and soldiers from dispatching the new capitalist oligarchy was the top leadership in their workplace-based soviets of elected delegates.  These leaders, not deemed worthy of exile like the Bolshy Bolsheviks, were timid socialists, developing a liking for the comfortable pace of glacial reform and eyeing off the material pickings from comfortable seats in a mooted Western-style parliament (no more working with hammer or sickle for them).  A frantic Lenin was desperate to return.

 

All legitimate travel avenues for Lenin, however, were blocked by Britain which wanted to keep its ally, Russia, in the war, whilst Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, had vetoed a plan for Lenin to travel in disguise in a sleeper train because he would arouse suspicions due to his tendency, even in his sleep, to let fly against the political perfidy of fake socialists and revolutionary laggards. 

 

When the possibility of German assistance was first floated, Lenin was cautious.  By accepting the assistance of a government whose military was slaughtering Russians on the eastern front, Lenin could be seen as either a national or class traitor in Russia, and being stymied by Russian jail or being shunned by the Russian working people.

 

Deciding the benefits outweighed the risks, however, Lenin eventually accepted the offer of a German train but only after negotiating stringent conditions.  He insisted that the carriage be granted ‘extra-territorial status’ to ‘seal’ it from contact with Germans, including a chalk line dividing the Russian exiles’ territory from the German territory of the military guards on board.  Lenin was also adamant that Germany not bankroll the 32 returning Bolshevik revolutionaries (local Swiss socialists raised the cash) for the week-long  journey.

 

The simple three-word slogan, ‘Peace, Bread, Land’, and the audacious demand for ‘All Power to the Soviets’, that Lenin packed in his travel luggage brought political clarity and direction to the Russian people and brought party unity to the fractious Bolsheviks.  Socialism became not some vague, distant ideal but an urgent, realisable task.  Lenin, says Merridale, “had struck upon a kind of truth that people wanted to hear” -  after the February anti-Tsarist revolution, “the problems that had driven them to risk their lives for freedom in the first place had resurfaced, often with redoubled force” and only Lenin, at the head of the reinvigorated Bolsheviks, had the solution to the problems of war and hunger and lack of democracy.

 

This positive conclusion by Merridale about Lenin’s political impact is remarkably rare amongst orthodox intellectuals, who usually malign Lenin as a progenitor of Stalin, their default ideological setting.  Merridale’s favourable assessment is swiftly undermined, however, when she concludes by venting on what she professes to be Lenin’s inner dictator, whose murderous Marxist hands on the tiller in 1917 meant that “in the end, democracy could only skulk around the fringes of the revolution like a dog with mange”.

 

This linguistically Stalinesque simile is evidence of a lazy politics which also flavours the structure of her book.  The sealed train should be a fascinating microcosm of international politics and the political and personal dynamics of the Bolsheviks but, in Merridale’s hands, the train event is a but a brief narrative hinge between two massive, passionless, white-bread slabs of indigestible pre and post-Revolution history, offering no fresh insights.  Despite this attempt to divert Lenin into a literary siding, and to couple Lenin’s wagon to the loco Stalin, the wheels of democratic socialism remain stubbornly on track.

CAUGHT IN THE REVOLUTION: Petrograd 1917 by HELEN RAPPAPORT

CAUGHT IN THE REVOLUTION: Petrograd 1917

HELEN RAPPAPORT

Windmill Books, 2017, 430 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

In 1916-1917, whilst millions of starving Russian workers queued for hours for scarce bread, or perished on the eastern front, or were made idle from factories in a country where the living conditions were as atrocious as the record winter cold, the cream of the native Russian and foreign Western elites shopped at ease in specialist stores for luxury goods and swanned around at swanky dinner parties, sumptuous banquets, grand balls and nights at the opera.

 

In Caught in The Revolution, the British historian, Helen Rappaport, writes that the imperial pomp of this leisured world of furs and jewels, champagne and cake, and limousine and coach-and-horse, hid the “decay of a dying era” from the Westerners stranded in Petrograd, the Russian capital, by German submarines which had shut off escape through the ports of revolutionary Russia.

 

The Tsarist court and their Western allies were, by class instinct, ill-disposed towards revolution and were ambivalent about the anti-Tsarist revolution in February which resulted in a new government of (unelected) “respectable and bourgeois gentlemen” (perfectly acceptable, they thought) sharing power with directly-elected plebeian assemblies (‘soviets’) of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ representatives (not at all acceptable).

 

This new-fangled, grass-roots democracy of the soviets was met with condescension - weapons, and politics, were now in the hands of ‘irresponsible people’ complained Elsie Bowerman, upper-class English medical orderly.  The newly empowered proletarians were patronised - workers couldn’t cope with liberty because the ‘poorer classes had no opinions of their own’ and were the ‘prey of the last unscrupulous demagogue they have heard’, wailed James Jones, American engineering manager.

 

Aristocratic disdain came as naturally to the Western elite as breathing - the socialist ‘doctrine of Liberty’ was one that ‘preached a contempt for beauty’ as once-beautiful mansions and palaces now housed the great unwashed, sobbed Meriel Buchanan, daughter of the British ambassador, George, who recoiled at the disrespect shown towards their officers by Russian soldiers who ‘crowd into first-class carriages and eat in Restaurant cars while officers wait’.

 

Fear predominated - it was ‘like watching some savage beast that had broken out of its cage’, trembled Negley Farson, an Anglo-American exporter, whilst the soviets heralded the beginning of ‘the high road to anarchy’, fretted Major-General Knox, a future Tory parliamentarian. 

 

When the October revolution, eight months later, toppled the nominal government, Western antagonism to revolution redoubled and Lenin’s Bolsheviks - the most visionary, radical, militant and organised of the revolutionary forces – came in for especially heavy mauling.  The Bolsheviks were said to be bullies, hotheads, incendiary agitators, German agents.

 

Lenin was ‘the poison that will destroy the democratic revolution’, said Edward Heald, international YMCA leader.  Lenin was a ‘utopian dreamer’ and fanatic, ‘blind to justice or mercy, violent, Machiavellian and crazy with vanity’, spluttered Maurice Paleologue, the French Ambassador.  His British counterpart recognised that, as the Bolsheviks were the most popular and able of the revolutionaries, it was imperative that they be ‘squashed’, including assassinating Lenin and Trotsky, or through armed invasion.

Rappaport continues this tradition of aversion to revolution in her casual use of clichéd, politically pejorative language.  The crowds that made the Russian revolution?  ‘Rabble’ and ‘mob’, of course.  The popular supremacy of Bolshevik ideas and organising?  Nothing but power-hungry, extremist ideologues ‘fomenting unrest’ and ‘exploiting grievances’ through ‘inflammatory speeches’ and ‘overblown rhetoric’.

Rappaport’s stale political stereotype of a minority Bolshevik ‘coup’ maintains a hundred years of wilful misreading of the October revolution.  The fulcrum for the revolutionary transfer of power between classes was certainly limited in time (one night) and personnel (Bolsheviks), and organised with military secrecy and precision, but the absence of mass involvement in the mechanics of insurrection does not mean that the October revolution was a minority affair.

After the euphoria of seeing off the Tsar with a two-fingered salute in February, the popular mood had rapidly descended into a surly resentment at the new, bourgeois government which delivered the same old war and same old class exploitation.  In the face of massive popular pressure from months of protests and mutinies, and a leaderless, abortive uprising in July, the Bolsheviks finally overcame their hesitation and acted swiftly and decisively to carry out the popular will.  The efficiency that the Bolsheviks brought to the insurrectionary deed in fact prevented all but the merest fraction of the bloodshed (five thousand killed) of the February revolution.

Rappaport, however, is unburdened by any sophisticated political analysis and settles for the simplistic morality tale of evil Bolsheviks versus freedom-loving democrats.  Rappaport is much happier when writing, as she does in her many other books, about princesses in pretty white dresses, but whilst the Russian revolution may have lacked the regal glitz of an aristocratic caste, and come instead in mud-caked boots, unwashed greatcoats and dirty fingernails, it had the political majesty of revolutionary democratic change.

The Western foreign elite of a century ago saw the October revolution through the prism of their class privilege, through which they glimpsed their future, the future of superfluous people in a world where workers, with the help of those intellectuals who pitch in, govern the society they work and live in, through a great plebeian democratic reset.  They feared a new society in which the pampered stratum, like their moneyed counterparts today, would have to earn their keep and be on an equal footing in decision-making.  Their real fear of Lenin’s syllabus of Applied Marxism was his radical political and economic democracy (his ‘let every cook govern’ sent shivers up the spine of exploiters of cooks everywhere) which threatened their private wealth and undeserved privilege.

 

If Russia hadn’t been a backward, predominantly peasant economy, devastated by war and a ruinous peace treaty with Germany; if revolution in Europe had come to the soviets’ aid; if the capitalist West hadn't invaded the fledging socialist state, starved the Russian people through economic embargo and supported a vicious ‘White’ counter-revolution, then a Stalin-free, democratic socialist Russia might have stood a chance.  All the ifs were against revolutionary Russia, however, and 100 years on, the capitalist West and its orthodox intellectuals are still breathing a sigh of self-interested relief, though the looming torrent of anti-Bolshevik books on the centenary of the Russian Revolution suggests the old nightmare is still disturbing their peaceful repose.