Rereading the history of the Civil War of 1918 today, when the whole picture had been pieced together and we now have a clear idea of the desperate struggle for existence that was waged by the old landlord and capitalist system, one realizes that the revolution had won because the masses were mustered for the struggle, because a tremendous job of work had been done among them, because the masses had had it brought home to them what the struggle was about, and because that struggle was something near to them which they could understand. In the spring and summer of 1918 Ilyich lived in Moscow and worked at high pressure. Whenever he had a moment to spare he would go motoring outside Moscow with his sister Maria and me, always visiting new places, riding and thinking and filling his lungs with the fresh air. He would take notice of every little thing around him.
The middle peasants sympathized with the Soviet power, which stood for peace and was against the landlords, but they did not think it had come to stay, and were nothing loath on occasion to pass some humorous remark about it.
I remember once driving up to a bridge which had a look of very doubtful security about it. Vladimir Ilyich asked a peasant, who was standing by the bridge, whether the car could safely cross it. The peasant shook his head and said with a chuckle: " 'I'm not so sure. It's a Soviet bridge, if I may be pardoned for saying so." Ilyich often afterwards laughingly repeated the phrase that peasant had used.
On another occasion we were returning from a drive and were about to pass under a railway bridge when a herd of cows coming the other way blocked our path. Those cows coolly ignored all motor traffic and made way for no one on the road. We were obliged to stop. A peasant who walked past looked at Ilyich with a grin and said: "You had to give way to the cows all right."
The peasants did not sit on the fence long, though. In the middle of May the class struggle flared up and made them come off it.
The summer of 1918 was an extremely difficult one. Ilyich no longer wrote anything, and he did not sleep at nights. A photograph of him, taken shortly before he was shot at, shows him standing with a brooding air, looking as though he had just recovered from a serious illness.
It was a very difficult time.
The bourgeoisie, having lost all in the great proletarian revolution, was seeking aid from abroad. Now it took money from the Allies to organize revolts, now it called in the German troops, giving the population over to plunder and anarchy, plunging about from one orientation to another. The Germans helped the Finnish Whites and occupied the Ukraine, the Turks came to the aid of the Azerbaijan Mussavatists and the Georgian Mensheviks, the Germans occupied the Crimea, the British occupied Murmansk, the Allies helped the Czechoslovaks and the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries to cut Siberia off from the central provinces. Grain shipments from the Ukraine and Siberia were stopped, and Moscow and Petrograd were starving. The ring of fighting fronts kept narrowing.
On May 21, Ilyich wrote in a telegram to the Petrograd workers:
"...The plight of the revolution is critical. Remember, only you can save the revolution, there is no one else....
"Time is short: after painful May will come still more painful June and July and perhaps part of August." (Works, Vol. 27, p. 354.)
The spell of counter-revolutionary uprisings roused and rallied the kulaks. They hoarded their grain. The struggle with famine merged with the struggle against the counterrevolution. Vladimir Ilyich pressed for the organization of the Poor Peasants' Committees, and agitated strongly for the workers to join the Food Detachments, as their revolutionary experience would come in useful in the countryside. The fight for bread at that moment—he told the workers—was a fight for socialism.
It was necessary, Ilyich wrote to the Petrograd workers for "the advanced worker, as the leader of the poor, as the leader of the toiling masses of the countryside, as the builder of the state of toilers to 'go among the people."' He said that the fight-hardened experienced workers were the vanguard of the revolution.
"That is the sort of vanguard of the revolution—in Petrograd and throughout the country—that must sound the call, must rise in their mass, must understand that the salvation of the country is in their hands, that from them is demanded a heroism no less than that which they displayed in January and October 1905 and in February and October 1917, that a great 'crusade' must be organized against the grain profiteers, the kulaks, the parasites, the disorganizers and bribe-takers, a great 'crusade' against the violators of strictest state order in the collection, transportation and distribution of bread for the people and bread for the machines.
"The country and the revolution can be saved only by the mass effort of the advanced workers. We need tens of thousands of advanced and steeled proletarians, class conscious enough to explain matters to the millions of poor peasants all over the country and to assume the leadership of these millions...." (Ibid., pp. 361, 359.)
The workers of Petrograd responded to the appeal of Ilyich. They organized a "crusade." The poor peasants began to rally closer around the Soviet power. On June 11 the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decreed the organization of the Poor Peasants' Committees. The poor peasants began to look upon Lenin, of whom they had heard so much from the workers and soldiers, as their leader. Ilyich took care of the poor, but the poor also took care of Ilyich. Lydia Fotieva, Ilyich's secretary, relates how a Red Army man of a poor peasant family came to the Kremlin and cut off half of his loaf for Lenin. "Let him eat it, these are hungry times," he said. He did not even ask to see Ilyich, but just asked to have him pointed out to him from a distance when he passed by.
Ilyich got very angry when any attempts were made to create favoured living conditions for him, pay him a big salary, and so forth. I remember how angry he was over a pail of khalva, which Malkov, then commandant of the Kremlin, once brought him.
On May 23 Ilyich wrote a note to Bonch-Bruyevich:
"V.D. Bonch-Bruyevich,
Business-Manager,
Council of People's Commissars.
"In view of non-fulfilment by you of my insistent demand to notify me on what grounds my salary was raised from 500 to 800 rubles per month as from March 1, 1918, and in view of the obvious illegality of such a rise, which you have made arbitrarily by arrangement with the Secretary of the Council N.P. Gorbunov in direct violation of the decree of the Council of People's Commissars dated November 23, 1917, I herewith severely reprimand you.
"Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars
V. Ulyanov (LENIN)"
(Works, Vol. 35, p. 272).
The Germans concluded the peace of Brest with Soviet Russia and ceased hostilities, but did not abandon their plans for seizing Russia. During the Brest negotiations the German Government had entered into an agreement with the Ukrainian Rada, promising it their assistance in the fight against the Bolsheviks. After occupying the Ukraine and overthrowing the Soviet power there, the Germans dismissed the Rada, too, and set up in its place the tsarist General Skoropadsky as hetman—ruler of the Ukraine. The Ukraine virtually became a German colony. Grain, cattle, sugar and raw materials were shipped from the Ukraine to Germany in vast quantities.
The German imperialists did their utmost to fan the flame of civil war. Cossack ataman Krasnov, who escaped to the Don, appealed to the Germans for assistance, and they helped him to raise and rally White Guard Cossack units.
The Germans helped the White Finns to suppress the revolution in Finland and take brutal reprisals against the Finnish revolutionaries.
But the Germans were not the only ones to take aggressive action. At the beginning of April the Japanese and the British landed in Vladivostok.
Already in April a number of anti-Soviet parties had united and formed a Revival League. It consisted of Socialist-Revolutionaries, Cadets, Popular Socialists, Mensheviks and the "Unity" group. The League concluded an agreement with the Entente for Entente troops to be sent to Russia against the Bolsheviks and for the Czech Corps to be used for engineering a coup in Russia and overthrowing the Soviet Government. At the time of Kerensky the Czech Corps had numbered 42,000 strong, and included many Russian reactionary generals and officers. The plan of the revolt was discussed with the French Military Mission by members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee and representatives of the Siberian Socialist-Revolutionaries. It was decided that the Czechoslovak troops, evacuated to the Far East, would occupy strong points on the Ural, Siberian and Ussuri railways.
