Certainly some activists attempted systematic politicisation in the army, but most of what came to be called ‘trench Bolshevism’ was simply a disgust at the soldier’s lot, a loathing of officers, and a reasonable desire not to fight and die in a hated war. After February, rates of desertion spiked. Armed men simply walked out of the trenches laden with whatever equipment they did not discard, trudging back to the towns and cities, back to the country, the mud of the fields.
In the growing anti-war mood, despite fervent attempts by the patriotic to stoke bellicose nationalism, such desertion was not always felt as shameful. ‘The streets are full of soldiers,’ complained one official of the town of Perm, near the Ural Mountains, in mid-March. ‘They harass respectable ladies, ride around with prostitutes, and behave in public like hooligans. They know that no one dares to punish them.’
On the 17th, Lenin declared Martov’s plan to be his ‘only hope’ for getting out of Switzerland, a place he roundly cursed. He was well aware that by travelling with German help, he risked being accused of treason – as, in due course, he was. For the Provisional Government, Milyukov declared that anyone who entered the country in such fashion would be subject to legal action. Regardless, ‘even through hell’, he said, Lenin was determined to go.
With the intermediation of the Swiss Socialist Party, he tried to minimise the dangers of perceived fraternisation with German authorities, insisting that there would be no passport controls on the journey, no stops or investigations along the way, and that the Germans would have no right to enquire as to the passengers’ details. The ‘sealed train’ would not technically be sealed: much stranger, it would be an extraterritorial entity, a rolling-stock legal nullity.
On 21 March, the German Embassy accepted his terms. Courtesy of the Reich, Lenin and several other revolutionaries were headed home.
Given its incoherent organisation, the range of its activities and its own unease about its authority, it might seem astonishing that the Petrograd Soviet had any sway at all. But the chagrin of the Provisional Government about the rival power was warranted: the Soviet’s announcements could directly impact government policies, most notably with respect to the war itself.
As early as 14 March, the Soviet issued a manifesto written with the help of the celebrated writer and leftist Maxim Gorky. This called for a just peace, and for ‘the peoples of the world’ ‘to take into their own hands the question of war and peace’, and to ‘oppose the acquisitive policy of the ruling classes’.
The international reception of such outreach was precisely nil. Within Russia, however, the manifesto had a propagandistic impact in its refusal of annexations or indemnities, which seemed a step towards peace; a series of military congresses endorsed it, soldiers declaring for the Soviet. A week later, the Soviet officially adopted this ‘Revolutionary Defencism’ as its position.
Such a call for peace while maintaining revolutionary Russia’s right to defend itself contained a certain ambiguity, leaving the door open to a continuing, even intensifying, war effort. Still, the Soviet declaration was anathema to right-wing liberals like Milyukov, now foreign minister, both on patriotic principle and because he believed the autocracy’s overthrow had revitalised Russia and its military power. The country could now fight effectively, he thought, if only it was allowed to.
On 23 March, during a press interview, Milyukov pointedly mentioned that he looked to a peace conference to verify Russia’s claims over the Ukrainian parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that he expected, in fulfilment of a long-held Russian expansionist dream, to gain Constantinople and the Dardanelles Straits. His absurd claims of ‘pacifist aims’ notwithstanding, this was a major provocation, and the Soviet was duly provoked. In response to the Soviet’s outrage, on 27 March the Provisional Government was forced to publish a statement of war aims very close to the Soviet’s own, invoking the ‘self-determination of nations’ and implicitly voiding the claims to Turkish and Austrian territories. But the incorrigibly off-message Milyukov openly told the Manchester Guardian that this did nothing to alter Russia’s – hardly very ‘revolutionary’ – commitments to its allies. The Soviet reacted with more fury. Its leaders – particularly Viktor Chernov, head and chief intellectual of the SRs, soon to return to Petrograd – insisted that the government’s 27 March declaration, which struck a very different tone to the foreign minister’s, be forwarded to the allies as a ‘diplomatic note’. Urged by Kerensky, a harsh rival to Milyukov, the Provisional Government felt constrained to comply. Further confrontation on this issue was not avoided, however: only postponed.
The same day as the government’s statement, a motley mix of revolutionaries met at the Zurich station. They boarded a train, checked their baggage and stowed their food. The travellers were six members of the Bund, three followers of Trotsky and nineteen Bolsheviks. A gathering of revolutionary heavyweights, including Lenin and Krupskaya; Zinoviev, the intelligent, hard-working, tousled-haired man viewed as Lenin’s henchman; Zlata Lilina, Bolshevik activist and the mother of Zinoviev’s young son Stefan; and the remarkable, controversial Polish revolutionary Karl Radek. Here too was Inessa Armand, the French-Russian communist, feminist, writer and musician, Lenin’s close collaborator and comrade, with whom, rumours have long suggested, his relationship was at various points more than platonic.
At the Swiss border, the exiles transferred to a two-coach special: one carriage for the Russians, one for their German escorts. The journey across Germany began. Lenin spent hours writing and making plans, breaking off late at night to complain to his boisterous comrades about their noise. To disperse the loud crowd outside the toilet, he instituted a system of slips for its use, either for its intended function or to have a smoke, in the proportions, he decided, three to one. ‘This’, Karl Radek remembered drily, ‘naturally evoked further discussions about the value of human needs.’
Far from being ‘sealed’, every time the train stopped, the German authorities had their hands full keeping local Social Democrats from trying to meet and socialise with the famous (and unwilling) Lenin. He asked his comrades to tell one persistent trade unionist to go to ‘the devil’s grandmother’.
As the train crawled on, in Russia, Kamenev and Stalin consolidated their position at an all-Russian conference of party workers. There was, however, resistance to what some comrades saw as their conditional support for the government, and still more to what was, essentially, revolutionary defencism. The Muscovite Old Bolshevik Viktor Nogin, later a party moderate, now argued that ‘we ought not now to talk about support but resistance’; Skrypnyk agreed that ‘the government is not fortifying, but checking the cause of the revolution’. But the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks – the proposal of Irakli Tsereteli, the outstanding Menshevik intellect and orator, recently returned from Siberian exile and now in charge of the Petrograd Soviet.