The army, he further insisted, ‘will remain staunchly at its post, answering bullet with bullet and shell with shell’.
Thus, as the Bolshevik Ludmila Stahl put it, the party ‘groped in the darkness’ – for with this line, Pravda differed not so much from the lefter Mensheviks or radical Left SRs. Setting themselves against agitation at the front, the troika were some way from Lenin.
Immediately on her arrival in Petrograd Kollontai delivered Lenin’s ‘Letters from Afar’ to Pravda. The documents horrified and stunned his nervous comrades with their intransigence. The editors balked at publishing any but the first letter, and that, wrong-footed by its hard-left formulations, they assiduously bowdlerised, cutting it substantially.
The foregoing is a famous story of how Lenin’s shocking letters stung the Old Bolsheviks. And a story is what it is.
In fact, Pravda published only the first letter because this was, almost certainly, the only one it received. And although it is true that it was heavily edited, those interventions did little to blunt Lenin’s thesis or his provocative thrust. His argument that the revolution must continue remained clear, as did his exhortation to workers: ‘you must perform miracles of proletarian and popular organisation to prepare for your victory in the second stage of the revolution’ – a stage not of socialism, he would soon clarify, but of taking political power, of winning over the Soviet, to ensure the victory of the (necessarily bourgeois, democratic) revolution. At best, Lenin rather nebulously allowed (with an eye on the international context, where for him a revolution against and beyond capitalism could occur, inspired perhaps by Russian events), that might allow them to take faltering, initial steps towards socialism.
The Bolsheviks in Petrograd expressed enthusiasm for the letter. Lenin’s sister Maria Ulianov, a party comrade who worked on Pravda, contacted him to express the ‘full solidarity’ of his comrades, as did the gratified Kollontai. The edits that the Bolsheviks performed on a piece written days previously, and a long way away, served to remove outdated references to a possible return of Tsarism and unconvincing insinuations of an anti-Nicholas plot among the allies, while correcting certain infelicities of language.
They also mitigated Lenin’s typically splenetic denunciation of various enemies, including among liberals, the right, and non-Bolshevik socialists. The editors were judicious enough to delete insults directed at the Soviet Executive Committee’s chair Chkheidze, at Kerensky, and even at the moderate liberal Lvov, head of the Provisional Government: they had reason to believe, after all, that they would need their help bringing the Bolshevik exiles – Lenin included – back into the country. They did not censor his attacks on Kadets and right Mensheviks who could not be of use to them. Not so much soft, then, as strategic.
The later myth of the bombshell ‘Letters from Afar’ seems to have been born out of a combination of misunderstanding of the Pravda edits and rather tendentious retellings – by Trotsky, among others – in the context of in-party jostling for position.
Yet while this particular conflict was largely a retrospective fiction, it undeniably gained in plausibility due to the way Lenin’s formulations, including in his intemperate polemics, evinced an uncompromising tendency, a distinguishing political logic that would, in fact, be key to other real disputes within the party. Not ineluctible by any means, but chafing against Bolshevik moderation and coalition. The ‘Letters from Afar’ were thus ‘continuity’ Bolshevism, and yet contained seeds of a distinct and more trenchant position. One that would become clearer with Lenin’s return.
On 15 March, the Soviet paper Izvestia printed the Declaration of the Rights of Soldiers, which had recently passed in the Soldiers’ section of the Soviet. It declared the end of the hated and degrading system of tsarist military peonage. There would be no more compulsory saluting, censorship of letters, officers’ right to impose disciplinary punishments. The declaration also gave soldiers the right to elect representative committees. To traditionalists, what this meant was the destruction of the Russian army.
Questions of armed power, of the soldiery, of policing, and thus of the new motley militias, were clearly central to the establishment and stabilisation of power – though this significance seemed to escape the SRs, whose paper Delo naroda featured next to no discussion of the issue. For their part, the Kadets stressed the necessity of setting up a City Militia for policing purposes – and, urgently, to replace the volunteer forces. At the same time, some among the radicals were beginning a careful consideration of the role of those armed workers’ militias that had been so central in February, and of their relation to the soldiers themselves.
As early as 8 March, the Menshevik paper Rabochaya gazeta argued that while a trustworthy and preferably elected citizens’ police force was a pressing need, a militia in the sense of ‘the armed people’ to defend the revolution was both impossible and unnecessary, given the existence of the revolutionary army. In their writings, the Bolsheviks opined that the nascent City Militia was unsatisfactory and the continued existence of the revolutionary army could not be taken for granted, and hence – marking a recurrent distinction between their position and that of other socialists – stressed the centrality of self-organisation. On 18 March, the Bolshevik intellectual Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich published ‘The Armed People’ in Pravda, in which he called for a permanent, disciplined, democratic militia of the working class, trained by the revolutionary soldiers. Such a group, in exhortation, he named ‘a Red Guard of the Proletariat’. This name, this concept, this controversial body, would soon crop up again.
Order Number 2 notwithstanding, neither Order Number 1 nor the soldiers’ declaration reduced suspicion between the ranks. As one young captain lamented in a letter home: ‘Between us and the soldiers there is an abyss.’ And now the abyss was dangerous. He sensed in the men a new attitude of recalcitrance and overt resentment, ‘revenge for centuries of servitude’, which sometimes manifested in the murder of unpopular officers at the front.