He is the leader of the new Russian government, which is just over two months old since the
October Revolution, but this week Lenin very nearly dies.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week US President Woodrow Wilson outlined his 14 points, which he hoped would be the
basis for postwar peace negotiations.
The Germans and Ottomans were planning new offensives, and at the same time were negotiating
a separate peace with the Russians, who had officially left the war last month.
Those negotiations could have been seriously affected by an event that happened this week,
an assassination attempt on Lenin.
This happened the 14th in Petrograd.
Lenin spoke at Mikhailovsky Manege from the top of an armored car.
He was explaining to the First Socialist Army why they had to go back to the front and keep
fighting, even though the October Revolution had happened under the slogan “Peace to
the People”.
As Lenin’s car drove away from the Manege afterward, Russian army sharpshooters made
the first of many attempts on Lenin’s life, ambushing the car and shattering the windshield
with bullets.
Fritz Platten, the Swiss communist, was in the back seat with Lenin and shoved Lenin
down and out of harm’s way.
Platten’s finger was grazed by a bullet, Lenin was unhurt, as was his sister Maria,
also in the back seat.
The news of the event was made public, but security could not catch nor even identify
the assassins.
Eventually, some of them would be revealed as White Russians who survived the Civil War
and then shared the details of the attempt.
Platten, who took Lenin’s bullet, was years later investigated on trumped up espionage
charges and sentenced to 4 years in Soviet prison for illegal possession of a gun.
He died there in 1942, on Lenin’s birthday.
That wasn’t the only big news from Russia this week.
On the 18th, Russia’s elected Constituent Assembly finally meets; there were armed guards
all over the building.
A crowd gathered in support but was shot at and dispersed by soldiers loyal to the Bolsheviks.
The Assembly was - as we’ve talked about before - dominated by anti-Bolshevik Right
Social Revolutionaries, who were over represented by outdated ballots that had not taken into
account their split before the election from the pro-Bolshevik left SRs.
There were many who had called for new elections.
It was pretty clear early on in the assembly that the right SRs did not think Russia was
up for Soviet power and would not agree to new elections.
The Bolsheviks and Left SRs walked out.
In the middle of the night, those who remained voted on land reform, a law making Russia
a democratic republic, and an appeal to the Allies for a democratic peace.
They left at nearly 0500 on the morning of the 19th, and would reconvene at 1700.
They arrived then to find the building locked down and the Assembly dissolved by the Bolshevik
government.
That government immediately called the Third Congress of Soviets, which meets next week
and will expunge any and all references to the Constituent Assembly in new editions of
the laws and decrees of the Soviet government.
The Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People will be passed and is
the basis of the Soviet Constitution.
The government will finally get an official name, the Soviet Russian Republic.
Its all-Russian Central Executive Committee will issue a decree of dissolution of Parliament
and that is all she wrote for the constituent assembly.
Thing is, dissolving the assembly didn’t really provoke that much of a popular reaction.
The Right SRs had alienated a lot of peasantry by supporting the Provisional government before
the Revolution and many peasant votes that were intended for left SRs ended up going
to Right SRs because of the ballot problems so the Right SRs did not have the support
they imagined.
Trotsky wrote years later in “Lenin”, “They (the deputies) brought candles with
them in case the Bolsheviki cut off the electric light and a vast number of sandwiches in case
their food be taken from them.
Thus, democracy entered upon the struggle with dictatorship heavily armed with sandwiches
and candles.
The people did not give a thought to supporting those who considered themselves their elect
and who in reality were only shadows of a period of the revolution that was already
passed.”
And in other Bolshevik news...
This week they arrested the Romanian minister to Petrograd, and also issued an ultimatum
to Romania, with an order for the Romanian king’s arrest.
Russia says Romanians are engaged in hostile acts against Russian soldiers in that country
and threatens war if those Russians arrested are not released.
A few words about Romania here, who had signed an armistice with the Central Powers at the
beginning of December.
They were forced to do that with Russia leaving the war, since they could no longer get help
from any of their other allies.
Anyhow, there was still a bunch of conflict on that former front, primarily because of
Russian revolutionary activity.
Romanian General Shcherbachev had even survived an assassination attempt by some of his own
troops and had fled to Odessa.
Russian soldiers from that front were now leaving and going home to Russia, and Soviets
- committees - were forming and reforming.
Officers no longer had control of their men.
Groups of Russian soldiers began pillaging the Romanian civilian population on their
way east.
They also sold their equipment - the clothes, weapons, horses, and even artillery to get
food and alcohol.
The Romanian army was redeployed along the whole border to cover the gaps left by the
retreating Russians, though of course it was now way overstretched.
Of course, also, at the moment the Russians were a bigger danger than the Germans or Austrians,
so 8 divisions were assigned to guard the Russian troops as they retreated.
A Bolshevik Soviet was organized last month in a military camp in Lassy that aimed to
begin a revolution in Romania and oust King Ferdinand, but they were disarmed without
a fight.
Still, there is scattered fighting between the Romanians and the Russians, most notably
next week at Galati, where the Romanians managed to disarm some 12,000 Russians.
Russian morale was apparently so bad that 3,000 Russians crossed the Sereth River and
surrendered to the Germans.
The Russians by this point were not really even an army anymore.
And parts of the former Russian empire had also been asserting themselves against the
new government.
Finland, for example, had declared independence last month, but power in Finnish Parliament
was fairly evenly divided between the left and the right.
The right had been pro-German throughout most of the war, and the Finnish volunteer unit,
the 27th Jäger Battalion had fought with the Germans on the Baltic front.
So they had declared their readiness to form a German alliance, but this provoked the left
into forming a workers’ militia.
By this time, there were local battles being fought between the Red left and the White
right.
This week, on January 15th, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim was appointed supreme commander
of the White Guards.
Mannerheim was a former general in the Imperial Russian Army.
There were other things at play too.
The Russian Bolsheviks had, back on New Year’s Eve, recognized Finnish independence, but
just a few days later had offered Finnish socialists Russian help to establish socialist
power there.
Meanwhile the Germans were shipping rifles and machine guns to the right.
(Keegan) It was a tinderbox waiting to explode.
There were explosions in the west though right now.
The British did a lot of bombing there this week, hitting Karlsruhe, Thienville, and Metz
the 14th, and bombing Metz again the 16th.
Also on the Western Front, on January 18th, a full American division, the 1st, entered
the front line on the St. Mihiel salient.
They had been sent there to gain front line experience just holding the line and took
no offensive actions for the time being.
And that’s it for the week.
Russian machinations about Romania; both sides’ machinations about Finland, some action in
the skies of Western Europe, and two major events in Russia.
The attempt on Lenin’s life, does, of course, lend itself to much speculation of the “what
if” kind; you may have some what if’s to share with us in the comments.
The end of the constituent assembly and the Third Congress of Soviets were a big deal,
though.
That really marked the end of representative government in Russia and the real beginning
of what would become the Soviet Union.
That would, however, take a lot more war and a lot more killing to achieve, so I’ll end
today with a quote about killing that I found in martin Gilbert’s “The First World War”.
This week on January 14th, British soldier Max Plowman, wounded on the Western Front,
resigned his commission.
This was quite rare.
He wrote to his regiment that his hatred of war, “has gradually deepened into the fixed
conviction that organized warfare of any kind is always organized murder... (and) so wholly
do I believe in the doctrine of incarnation - that God indeed lives in every human body
- that I believe that killing men is always killing God.”
If you want to learn more about Finland’s path to Independence, you can click right
here for that.
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