Revolutions - 10.66 Finland Station

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

Wherein the Bolsheviks call for an Uber. The New Yorker Article by Adam Gopnick The New Republic Article by David Klion (Hi David!)  CBS This Morning Segment Look ma I'm on the tee-vee.

Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 10.66, Finland Station. Okay, so first of all, obviously we're here now. Pub Week is upon me, it's upon us. Hero of Two Worlds Publishes on Tuesday, August 24th. And as I record this, that's like 36 hours from now. And because Pub Week is upon us, the media has started to take notice, and there's a bunch of really nice pieces out there.

Adam Gopnik wrote a New Yorker article about Lafayette that heavily features me and the book. David Cleon wrote a very nice thing in The New Republic about me, about the book, about revolutions and podcasting and my approach to history in general. I thought it was great. Thank you, David. And then if you didn't see it, CBS this morning Saturday, aired a segment about me and the book. And I knew that one was coming because I was just back in D.C. for a few days doing filming and interviews for it. So it's out there too. It came out really nicely.

I'm putting the link to all of those in the show notes if you can't get enough Mike Duncan content or if you feel like you want to just broaden the scope of your general celebrations for the release of Hero of Two Worlds. It kind of feels like Saturnalia Eve around these parts and I got to tell you the attention and the support and the buzz have been giving me very nice feelings all week. So there is technically still time to pre-order the book if you want to join in the fun, but otherwise, you know, just go buy it on Tuesday. It'll be on the shelves. I think I'm getting pictures. It's already out on the shelves in some places. Everyone keeps telling me it's good.

I'm even starting to believe it myself. So, you know, enjoy it. I really think you will. But I cannot rest on my laurels here because there's still work to be done. There's always work to be done. Now, over the past two episodes, we talked about the emergence of dual power in post-February Revolution Russia, the provisional government, and the Soviet. with the latter nominally supporting the former,

but with so many strings attached, one imagines the provisional government suspected it was far more the puppet than the puppet master in the spring of 1917. But however contingent the Soviet support for the provisional government was, they did support the provisional government for both ideological and practical reasons. On an ideological level, most of the Mensheviks and SRs in the executive of the Soviet believe that the transition from medieval autocracy to modern socialism required an intermediate stage,

a bourgeois democratic period that would create the social, economic, and political conditions that would lay the groundwork for the future socialist revolution. This is the old two-stage theory of revolution. But then on a practical level, taking over and running the Russian Empire at this precise moment in history and the middle of an acute crisis seemed like such an insanely difficult task, that was bound to upset and disappoint a lot of people, the Soviet thought it would be a fine idea for the provisional government to take the heat.

After all, they're the official government, not us. But just as everybody was settling into this dynamic, it would be severely disrupted by a man who was about to get off the train at Finland Station and start mucking everything up for everybody. That is Vladimir Iliic Lenin. Now, as I've noted a couple times, Lenin and the other major socialist and revolutionary leaders took no part in the February

Revolution because they weren't there. Lenin had been living as an emigre for most of the past 17 years. Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Lenin had been packed up and shipped off to Switzerland, where he had been living and working since the summer of 1914. As we talked about in episode 10.55 on the Second International, Lenin was shocked when he started getting word at the beginning of the war that all the prince leaders of European socialism, including the really super important leaders of the German SPD, had all discovered justifications for supporting their national war efforts, rather than sticking to their anti-imperialist, anti-militarist, and anti-nationalist principles.

Their collective retreat into national chauvinism was so unexpected that at first Lenin thought it was German propaganda. But as we did discuss in episode 10.55, these guys didn't just become blind flag-waving super patriots, they had decent strategic reasons for thinking that sticking to an internationalist anti-war policy as a gigantic great-power war was breaking out would be suicide, metaphorically, and perhaps even literally. But though most of the leading European socialists took this path to supporting their respective war efforts, many others did not. And so every faction and party across Europe wound up having a small minority of internationalists, who like Lenin felt betrayed and refused to abandon their principles.

This was particularly true among the emigre Russian population, and so there are international Mensheviks, like our old friends, Pavel Axelrod and Julius Martov, who refused to follow Placanov into the ranks of Russian patriots. There were internationalists SRs like Victor Chernoff, and thanks to the stamp Lenin put on the party, there were a lot of internationalist Bolsheviks. Lenin, in fact, tried to find a silver,

lining in the collapse of the Second International by saying at least it revealed who the weakling hypocrites were. He said, the European war has done a great service to international socialism, in that it has clearly revealed the whole state of rottenness, baseness, and swinery of the opportunists, thus giving a magnificent incentive toward cleaning up the workers' movement and ridding it of the filth which has accumulated during the scores of peaceful years. The international's wing may be small and isolated in a few emigre colonies, but in Lenin's estimation they were at least strong and tough and resolute, and those are the kind of people you need to make a real revolution.

Those who truly opposed the war gathered in Zimmerwald, Switzerland in September 1915, to either outright claim the mantle of the Second International or at least create something new from its ashes. It was not a very big event. there were only 38 attendees, including all the Russians I just mentioned, plus Trotsky, representing a Russian group in Paris. Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Leibnick were there representing Germany, and in all, a dozen or so national groups were represented. But even at a meeting like this where everybody ostensibly agreed with each other, there were factional disputes,

because this is, after all, a Congress of left-wing deputies. Lenin was personally discussed did that many of the people there were opposed to the war on purely pacifistic and more. grounds. They only wanted to end the war because war is bad, not because the powers that wage war are bad. Lenin, on the other hand, organized a small, hard-left minority faction whose opposition to the war would be grounded in revolutionary principles and class conflict. He believed the pacifists would, and I'm quoting here, help the bourgeoisie nip the revolutionary movement in the bud, if, in exchange, they stop the conflict. was a deal that Lenin himself would not stomach.

Now, despite the divisions in the conference and arguments about language and emphasis, the Zimmerwald Conference produced a scathing denunciation of the war drafted by Trotsky. It said, The war has lasted more than a year. The battlefields are littered with millions of corpses. Millions more have been crippled for the rest of their lives. Europe is like a gigantic slaughterhouse. Its entire civilization, created through the labor of many generations,

is consigned to destruction. Fierce barbarity celebrates its triumph over everything that was until now the pride of humankind. Regardless of the truth regarding immediate responsibility for the outbreak of this war, one thing is clear. The war that produced this chaos is the result of imperialism, the striving by capitalist classes of each nation to feed their greed for profit through exploitation of human labor and natural resources around the entire globe. These were just the opening paragraphs, and it just goes on like this, denouncing capitalism, imperialism, militarism, and the old guard of the Second International who betrayed the class struggle.

The statement concluded, never in world history has there been a more urgent and noble task to be accomplished through our combined efforts. No sacrifice is too great, no burden is too heavy to achieve the goal of peace among the peoples. Now, Lenin and the other members of the left-wing faction at the Zimmerwald Conference did not actually agree with this final assessment, but they signed the manifesto in the interest of putting on a unanimous face. Their great critique was that the goal here was not peace among the peoples, but the revolutionary overthrow of the ruling classes of Europe by the workers of the world. And for all its bombast, the Zimmerwald manifesto fell well short on this front. So Lenin emerged as a leader of what is going to be known as the Zimmerwald left, anti-war socialists who were focused on responding to the crisis of the war by helping trigger a revolution, not responding to the crisis of war merely by trying to end the war.

In Lenin's most well-known formulation, he said they should turn the imperialist war into a civil war in every country. That is, encouraged the proletariat of every belligerent nation not to work for peace, per se, but to work tirelessly to overthrow their own governments. And this takes us into a question that I've alluded to a number of times but have not yet explained fully, and that is, what is the distinction between defeatists and defensivists in the socialist community? Now, most socialists in Europe and most socialists in Russia were defensivists. They believe that on a moral level and emotional level, a practical level, and a strategic level, it was good to help your country win the war, or at the very least, help your country not lose the war.

This is how you get all those socialist leaders pledging to ban strikes and promising to keep war industries rolling and not do anything to inhibit the conscription of soldiers. The alternative to this was to be a defeatist. Someone who believed it would be better for their own country to be defeated, because it would bring about the collapse of their existing state, create a chaotic vacuum that would be perfect for a revolutionary uprising. Now, there were not many defeatists out there. You've got to be pretty ideologically committed to actively hope your country loses a war

the size and scope of World War I, which after all is not some peripheral imperial conflict you're debating in the abstract, but a gigantic industrial war happening right in your own backyard. Lenin is for sure the most prominent socialist later during World War I to be tagged with the defeatist label. And the Bolsheviks became the party in Russia most associated with that tendency. But as with all things Lenin, he tended to have very flexible and nuanced beliefs that he kept well hidden behind blunt and exaggerated bombast. So during the war years, he, for example, said to a fellow Bolshevik, czarism is a hundred times worse than Kaiserism, apparently indicating that he would much prefer a German victory to the perpetuation of the czarist regime.

and then he said at another point, from the point of view of the working class of the toiling masses of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the Tsarist monarchy and its army. But what we need to understand here is that Lenin is making these remarks inside a very tiny world of squabbling emigre socialists. He's not like writing up public proclamations and sending them back to Russia saying, I hope we lose the war. But mostly the point he's trying to make here is not strictly, about whether it would be good or bad for the revolution if Russia lost the war.

But rather, whether it would be good to give up the revolution just to keep Russia from losing the war. Now, this is a very subtle distinction, but in his mind it was very clear. Defensiveists who were willing to give up revolution and prioritize military victory had it wrong. Just as on the other side, anti-war pacifists who prioritized peace over the revolution also had it wrong. wrong. And the reason they had it wrong is because they weren't prioritizing the revolution. So would Lenin rather see Russia lose the war than see Russian socialists or the Russian proletariat miss opportunities to overthrow the regime? In that sense, I think the answer is yes,

absolutely he would. That was the thing that was driving him crazy. When the war started, everybody agreed to set aside the revolution and focus on winning the war. The entire essence of our work, he said, must be to turn the national war into a civil war. When this will happen is not clear. We have to let the moment ripen, force it to ripen. But we are duty-bound to work for as long as it takes in this direction. Now, the problem for Lenin on a PR and communications front is that he may have had all of these subtle and nuanced and sophisticated beliefs, but he kept saying very clear and straightforward things like better the Kaiser than the Tsar. And he would say these to his own Bolshevik followers who would then pick up that line

and repeat it because he seemed so clear and straightforward. And then Lenin would get very frustrated because all of his factional enemies would eagerly paint Lenin and the Bolsheviks as unpatriotic traders who were now indistinguishable from German agents. After a couple of good years of expanding the party from 1912 to 1914, the Bolsheviks in Russia contracted sharply during the war years. Many members quit the party, and it was hard to recruit replacements because the Mensheviks and the Sars and the Trudeviks were happy to paint the Bolsheviks with a defeatist brush. So Lenin spent all of 1916 quite isolated with a group of

other Bolsheviks in Switzerland. They were pretty cut off from their comrades in Russia as there was a big giant war happening between them, though they were occasionally able to slip things through the lines, Lenin held out hope during this period that the war would ultimately destabilize Europe to the point where the working classes would get tired of being chucked at each other to die and instead go off and overthrow the tiny click of Imperial Masters who were doing the chucking. In the meantime, Lenin spent a great deal of time in libraries brushing up on his philosophy, reading a lot of Hegel and Aristotle so that he could better understand the tenets of Marxism, and would, ironically enough, cause him to drift from his former Marxist orthodoxy.

While he was doing this reading, he also commenced work on what was to become one of his most famous works, imperialism, the highest form of capitalism, wherein Lenin outlined a theory that capitalism had moved beyond the progressive stage that prevailed in Karl Marx's time to something higher, something different. Business and banking interests were coalescing into huge monopolies and outgrowing their domestic markets. That's what drove them into a colonialist feeding frenzy. They were looking for new resources and new markets. The scramble for new colonial markets had spread across the whole globe, across the Americas and Africa and Asia, and with the amount of unconquered territory running out,

the imperial powers of Europe were forced by the logic of capitalism to fight each other to take possession of each other's possessions. Hence, giant global war. Now, when you combine this with Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution and uneven and combined development, the idea that peripheral countries in this global conflict, which were colonized by foreign capital and advanced technology, were going to chart a different path than the one laid out for them in the orthodox version of historical materialism, we can really start to see Lenin's strategic lines in 1917, where on the one hand, a sudden and surprising break with everything he's been saying since the 1890s, but also something that develops quite naturally from what he had been reading and thinking and writing in 1915 and 1916.

By the end of 1916, Lenin had settled into a solid routine of research in Zurich. He was now in his mid-40s and had always suffered from recurrent illnesses. He had stomach problems and headaches. He was prone to fits of extreme rage when he got too worked up about like Dementcheviks, and he suffered for it physically and mentally and emotionally. He was absolutely convinced that. that he was right and everyone else was wrong, but no one else seemed to agree. He had a loyal group of Bolshevik lieutenants around him, but outside that group,

it was a lot of eye-rolling, and, oh, yeah, Lenin, sure, he's probably not going to amount to much anything. He had his good days and his bad days. He constantly switched between the boundless optimism of a lifelong revolutionary and the dispirited pessimism of a lifelong revolutionary. In January 1917, Lenin gave a speech to a group of Swiss students, and I quoted from this speech just a little bit a few episodes back when I wanted to establish the honest truth that all Russian socialists everywhere were taken by surprise by the February Revolution. But what Lenin said in full was, the coming years, precisely because of this predatory war, will lead to popular risings by the working class, and these upheavals will lead to, the victory of socialism. We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution, but I can express the confident hope that the youth, which is working so splendidly

in the socialist movement, will be fortunate enough not only to fight, but to win this revolution. Then in another conversation, Lenin told a young Romanian that it was true the revolution probably wasn't right around the corner, but it would come, and I'm quoting here, perhaps in two, perhaps in five, at the latest ten years. So when Lenin says he doesn't expect the revolution anytime soon or doesn't expect to see the revolution in his lifetime, he's not talking about it taking place in some far-flung future. He does believe it's coming, just not like in the next few weeks. And to the extent that he didn't believe he would live to see it, this is probably saying

more about his state of physical exhaustion and recurrent health problems that might cause him to drop dead sooner rather than later. But then a few weeks later, on March the 2nd, 1917, Lenin was getting ready to return to the library in Zurich after lunch, and a young Polish Bolshevik burst through the door and said, have you heard the news, there's a great revolution in Russia?

At first, Lenin brushed this off and said it's probably just another example of German propaganda, but he and Krupskaya and a few others went down to a spot where international newspapers were posted. Those international newspapers confirmed the incredible story. Now, at this point, the news they were reading about was the mutiny of the troops in Petrograd on Monday, February 27th, the resulting street fighting, and some information about a Soviet being formed as well as maybe a new provisional government. Now, they did not read about the abdication of the Tsar because that hadn't happened yet. Literally, as they're sitting there reading it, Nikki is sitting on a train trying to figure out what he's going to do with his life. What Lenin read

sent a jolt of electricity through him. It absolutely supercharged him. He became manic with energy. He may not have expected this, nor been able to predict how it would shake out, but he was able to instantly apprehend the possibilities. He said about formulating what he believed the Bolshevik response ought to be, and over the next few days drafted communiques back to Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd outlining what their strategy ought to be. These would become called the letters from afar, and and to the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd who received them, they were very much letters from afar. Lenin was clearly drafting them without any clear idea

what was actually happening in Petrograd. Without guidance from anybody, the Bolsheviks in the capital had more or less gone along with the approach of the Mensheviks and the SRs, support the provisional government as the legitimate government for the ideological and practical reasons we talked about at the beginning of the episode. Circumstances had also tended to merge all

the socialist parties back into an increasingly united bloc, with Mensheviks and SRs and Bolsheviks all towing the same line. Certainly the more rank and file party members, who weren't burdened by decades of mutual hurt feelings and lingering personal grudges, saw no reason why Bolsheviks and Mensheviks could not take this opportunity to reunite, to become a single party again and go forth and march into the revolutionary struggle together. But in Lenin's letters from afar, he was telling the Bolsheviks and Peckes, They must not form any alliances with any other parties, and they must not support the provisional government. Now, these letters are going to become the basis for the April D.C.s that we'll talk about

more next week, and which form the basis of Lenin's latest stubbornly held minority position, where he insists that he and the Bolsheviks are right and everyone else is wrong. More than anything, though, Lenin was now dying to get back to Russia, and he was not alone in that. a meeting of all the emigray Russian socialists was convened Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and SRs and they all kicked around plans for how to get home. Lenin said, we must go at all costs even if we go through hell. Martov suggested figuring out a way to negotiate passage with the Germans, maybe arranging some kind of prisoner exchange deal.

Other people talk about taking ships through England, maybe taking an airplane. They were debating which country offered the best opportunity. of forging passports. They didn't come to any kind of consensus, and these discussions just went on for days as each group tried to figure out the best way home. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were ultimately aided by an unlikely source in far-off Denmark. This was Alexander Parvus, who we last saw letting Trotsky crash on his couch for six months while they developed the foundations of what became the theory of permanent revolution. Parvus had long since abandoned. the ideals of revolutionary socialism in favor of the profits to be made from being an international

adventurer dealing in arms and information, but he was still very well connected, and with news of events in Russia reaching the West, he approached the German ambassador in Denmark with a suggestion. The German government should absolutely reach out to Lenin and help the Bolsheviks get back to Russia. Now, if you will recall, and probably you don't, Parvus had made a name for himself, predicting the course of the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905 with beat-for-beat precision. And now, he basically did the same thing. He told the German ambassador, Lenin is an uncompromising revolutionary. He is absolutely opposed to the war.

If he is allowed to return to Russia, he will not stop until he has overthrown the provisional government, at which point he will almost certainly turn around and cut a separate peace deal with Germany, taking Russia out of the war and relieving all the pressure on Germany's eastern front. This, in fact, might be something that only takes a matter of months if you can get him into Russia. The German ambassador took this idea up the chain of command, and with that high command well aware the war was going badly for them, and knowing that the United States was about to enter the war on the side of the Allies, they believed something drastic needed to be done in order to salvage victory. and the most logical place to find that something drastic was by exacerbating the chaos unfolding in Russia.

The Tsar was abdicating the throne, an untested provisional government was claiming power. There was chaos in the streets. The army was an open mutiny. This was absolutely something that could and should be exploited by the Germans, and they knew it. So this was not a low-level scheme. This was Foreign Minister Zimmerman, General Ludendorf, and ultimately Kaiser-Villen. helm approving a plan to send a batch of uncompromising hardcore revolutionaries who absolutely wanted to overthrow the Russian provisional government into Russia. These Russian socialists were to be put

on a sealed car in Switzerland and transported in secret through the German Empire, then they would go up through Sweden, cross over into Finland, and then head back into Petrograd, where, hopefully they would disembark and bring the whole Russian Empire crashing down. So the German ambassador in Switzerland, open negotiations with Lenin and about 30 other Bolsheviks. Over the next few days, they reached a few mutual understandings, mostly about trying to keep this all on the down low for both sides, because Lenin, for example, was acutely aware it would not look good if they appeared to be agents of the Kaiser,

especially as everybody had spent the last few years accusing them of being agents of the Kaiser, but ultimately they reached a deal that was acceptable to both sides. And when it was struck on March the 27th, nobody wasted any time. The Bolsheviks had just hours to pack up all their stuff and get on the train. Now, this was all supposed to be secret, but it was not secret for very long. The emigre community is small, and word soon leaked that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were in cahoots with the Germans. Everyone else was a gas that Lennon would make this deal, but Lennon was not, and he was absolutely not going to be dissuaded. He knew it didn't look good, but he also knew it was probably the safest, fastest, and most direct,

route back to Russia, and that was all that mattered to him. When they went down to the train station, they were greeted by a small crowd that heckled and shamed them, calling the Bolsheviks' traitors and German spies and pigs and frauds. But Lenin was convinced this was the only way, and he remained optimistic and undeterred in his own inimitable way. When they all finally settled down on the train, Lenin turned to one of his comrades and said, in six months' time, we shall either be swinging from the gallows or be in power. And then the train departed. The trip home took nearly a week. At first, they were in a seal car through German territory, sealed not so that the Bolsheviks couldn't spread their

revolutionary message, but sealed so that nobody would see them and spread the story that the Bolsheviks were being chauffured back to Russia by the Kaiser. Along the way, Lenin distilled the points he made in his letters from afar into a concise program that he planned to make the basis for the party as soon as he got back. Once through German territory, the group passed over on a ferry to Sweden and then continued on. Now, less conspicuously hidden behind a sealed car, the local communities in Sweden appeared to be well aware that there was a train full of Russian revolutionaries passing through. There was one tense moment at a checkpoint at the Finland border, but they

were allowed to pass and then started really breathing a sigh of relief. Finland was, after all, territory of the Russian Empire. And so, if nothing else, the group was no longer at the mercy of a foreign power. Now, as for the reception they would receive from the domestic powers, that remained to be seen. On April 3rd, 1907, the train finally pulled into Finland Station in Petrograd. A crowd knew Lennon and the others were on the train and they came down to greet them with enthusiastic cheers. Lennon got out and gave as stirring a speech as he was capable of giving. Now for most of the past 17 years, Lenin had lived his life as an exile. The total number of days he had spent inside Russia numbered probably less than 200.

But now he was back. And this time, he planned to stay. Hero Two Worlds is out now. Please go buy it. Thank you.