The next day, train 293 for Finland arrived at Udelnaya Station. The driver was Guro Jalava, railwayman, conspirator, committed Marxist.
‘I came to the edge of the platform,’ he later recalled, ‘whereat a man strode from among the trees and hoisted himself up into the cab. It was, of course, Lenin, although I hardly recognised him. He was to be my stoker.’
The photograph in the fake passport with which Lenin – ‘Konstantin Petrovich Ivanov’ – travelled has become famous. With a cap perched high on a curly wig, the contours of his beardless mouth unfamiliar, wryly upturned, his deep small eyes are all that is recognisable.
Lenin rolled up his sleeves. He set to work, so enthusiastically that the train spewed out generous plumes of smoke. His driver recalled how Lenin shovelled with gusto, feeding the engine, making it run fast, bearing him away on the ties and rails.
When he alighted at last, Lenin the stoker still had a circuitous clandestine journey ahead of him. It was not until 11 p.m. on 10 August that Lenin arrived at a small, homely apartment at 1 Hakaniemi Square, in the north of Helsingfors. This was the Rovio residence. With his wife away visiting family, Kustaa Rovio, an activist for the Social Democrats, had agreed to shelter the Russian Marxist.
A large, imposing man, Rovio’s career had taken a staggeringly unlikely turn. A socialist of long standing, he was also now the head of the Helsingfors Police.
Quite how he came to square this role with his revolutionary commitment is unclear. Of the guest who had, a few years previously, advocated stockpiling ‘bombs and stones, etc., or acids’ to drop on his colleagues, police chief Rovio said: ‘I have never met such a congenial and charming comrade.’
Lenin’s sole demands – and on these he was adamant – were that Rovio should procure him the Russian newspapers every day, and arrange the secret delivery of letters back to his party comrades. This his host did even when, due to the imminent return of Mrs Rovio, Lenin relocated to the apartment of a socialist couple, the Blomqvists, in nearby Telekatu.
Taking her own hazardous routes, hiking on foot through a forest over the border, Krupskaya more than once visited her husband. Lenin himself strolled Helsingfors with remarkable freedom. ‘It is necessary to be quick, Kerensky,’ he declared with relish at the Blomqvists’ kitchen table, reading of the government’s hunt for him, ‘in order to catch me.’
Above all, throughout August, as he had in July and as he would in September, Lenin wrote. Messages and letters and instructions to comrades, and another, longer work. The very first day he lodged with him, Rovio found Lenin asleep at a desk, his head in his arms, a closely written notebook before him. ‘Consumed with curiosity,’ Rovio reported, ‘I began turning over the pages. It was the manuscript of his book The State and Revolution.’
This is an extraordinary, sinewy negotiation of remorseless anti-statism with the temporary necessity of ‘the bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie’, under the proletariat. The historic text, described by Lucio Colletti as ‘Lenin’s greatest contribution to political theory’, was composed on a log by a mosquito-ridden lake, and then on a policeman’s table. It would not yet be quite finished when circumstances changed, and Lenin made his way back to Russia. The text closes with a legendary truncation: ‘It is more pleasant and useful to go through the experience of the revolution than to write about it.’
The same day that Lenin arrived at the Rovios’ flat, on 10 August, Kornilov went again to meet Kerensky in Petrograd, at Savinkov’s insistence. They were to discuss the general’s new demands: now he wanted control of the railways and war industries. He asked, too, peremptorily, for the right to employ extraordinary repression as he considered necessary, including relocating slacking workers to the front.
Mistrust between prime minister and general was such that Kornilov arrived with a substantial and provocative bodyguard. This was a body of Turkmen fighters from the so-called Savage Division of volunteer soldiers from across the Caucasus – heavily mythicised figures, chosen to intimidate. As Kerensky watched in alarm from the Winter Palace, the red-robed warriors came jogging into view down the wide streets, surrounding Kornilov’s car, brandishing scimitars and machine-guns. They took up positions around the palace door like enemies preparing for a parlay.
The meeting was icy. Kornilov had heard rumours that he might be replaced, and he menacingly advised Kerensky against any such step. When Kerensky would not commit to everything he wanted, Kornilov insisted on meeting with the cabinet to put his case; but Kerensky would only convene an informal group, excluding the Kadets, that agreed in principle to most of Kornilov’s demands but were vague about the time frame, and continued to oppose the militarisation of railways and industries. The general left in a severe temper.
In fact, the desperate Kerensky was not altogether opposed even to those rejected measures, given the context of social collapse. He was, however, understandably fearful of the reaction such moves would provoke in the Soviet and beyond. His strategy of ‘balance’ now had him provoking the fury of those to his left and those to his right.
In a strained effort to reconcile widening social divisions, the Provisional Government scrambled to put together a symbolic, consultative gathering. Almost 2,500 delegates would attend the Moscow State Conference, representing trade unions, Dumas, commerce and the soviets. The event was to take place in the splendid neoclassical edifice of the second city’s Bolshoi Theatre, between 12 and 14 August.
Through their membership of the Soviet and VTsIK, the Bolsheviks qualified for delegates. Initially they planned to make a scornful declaration followed by an ostentatious walkout, but Chkheidze got wind, and refused to permit any such thing. The party decided that they would stay away altogether.
The hard-left Bolshevik Moscow Regional Bureau called a one-day strike as the conference opened. The Moscow Soviet, where the mainstream SRs and Mensheviks had a small majority, opposed the move, if narrowly, but after debates and battles in the city’s factories, in a sign of Bolshevik strength, most of the workers stayed out. Delegates descended to streets where streetcars did not run and restaurants were closed. The buffet of the theatre itself was shut: the strike forced the attendees of this showcase of national and cross-class unity to prepare their own food. And to do so in the dark: the gaslights were unlit.