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p Although the collapse of the autocracy had been sudden, it had not really come as a surprise, even to the exiles in the wilds of Turukhansk. For years we Bolsheviks had been working for the revolution, had accepted prison and exile, forced labour and solitary confinement for the sake of the coming victory. Hundreds of Bolsheviks, the flower of the Party, had laid down their lives for the cause. Though we could not predict when the revolution would come, we lived in expectation, feeling it drawing closer.

p We knew that revolution was inevitable, but what exactly had happened in Russia and which classes, which parties were in power we in our Turukhansk exile did not know.

p Immediately after Sverdlov’s departure we formed a committee, headed by Maslennikov and including Bograd, myself and some others whose names I have forgotten, to take over Monastyrskoye. We began our management of Turukhansk by removing Kibirov, disbanding the guards, impounding police records and distributing the monastery lands gratis to the peasants.

p Meanwhile Sverdlov’s sledge was racing along the ice-bound expanses of the Yenisei. He stopped only to change horses, look at the latest newspapers and catch up on recent events; he slept in the sledge. The journey became hazardous towards the end, as cracks began to appear in the ice, but once he had reached Yeniseisk safely, the road to Krasnoyarsk, to Russia, was open.

p The closer he got to Krasnoyarsk, the more details of the unique and complex situation became available. He saw with increasing clarity that what was happening was historically unprecedented and could not be reduced to any preconceived set of ideas.

p But Lenin showed, in his ’Letters from Afar’  [79•1 , one of which was published in Pravda, that he had already completely grasped recent developments, complex and unique as they were. He maintained that the continuing war was still imperialist and gave an exhaustive description of the Provisional Government.

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p In the famous April Theses, one of his first speeches on his return to Petrograd  [80•1  on the night of 3 April, Lenin asserted that the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution had run its course and that the next major step would be the transition to the socialist revolution. A republican government of Soviets would then be formed, under which power would pass to the proletariat and the poorest peasants. The April Theses provided the Party with a unified set of tactics, a programme of action for the coming battle for socialism.

p But neither Sverdlov nor the Bolsheviks who met him in Krasnoyarsk knew any of this, although those who strictly adhered to the Pravda line, at first a minority in Krasnoyarsk, held the most clearsighted, the most Leninist, views. Sverdlov joined this group.

p When he spoke to the ”Pravda group’ shortly after his arrival, he made it clear from the outset that anything he said could represent only his personal attitude, although he knew that they would look to him, as a member of the Central Committee, for their orders. He did not know the intentions of the CC and did not feel justified in speaking in its name.

p No politically conscious worker, he continued, should give any support to the bourgeois-imperialist Provisional Government, since no amount of pressure or persuasion would ever alter its nature. Though power might have changed hands, the war in Europe was still imperialist, and all the talk of ’defending the revolution’ was nothing more than an attempt to deceive the people.

p He advised them to concentrate on agitation, kindling the Bolshevik spirit among the workers and soldiers and rallying them round the Party. He saw the Krasnoyarsk railway depot with its five thousand workers and the numerous military units billeted on the town as vital areas in which the conciliators and unifiers must be defeated.

p Sverdlov then left Krasnoyarsk for Petrograd, where representatives of the local Soviets of the larger towns were meeting for the first time, on the initiative of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee. The Central Committee Bureau had arranged for an All-Russia Conference of Party Workers to take place simultaneously. Sverdlov attended both, not to speak but to listen carefully to those of his comrades who had been in Petrograd long enough to be more fully in touch than he was.

p Both conferences lasted from 29 March to 3 April. Sverdlov went to the Urals next, not, of course, knowing that at that very time Lenin was crossing the border and within a day would be at the Finland 81

Lenin and Sverdlov on the Presidium of the Congress of Agricultural Communes and Poverty Committees, Moscow, December 19IK

Railway Station in Petrograd, surrounded by thousands of workers who had gone to greet their leader on his return from so many years of exile.

p The Ural proletariat gave a delighted welcome to ‘their’ Andrei. He went out to the factories straightaway and, no longer hampered by having to keep under cover, spoke at a different place every day.

p Following the line that had been mapped out in Petrograd, he hastened to muster the Bolshevik forces and prepare the ground for the revival of the regional organisation and the convocation of a local conference. He became the centre of a group of proven and militant Bolsheviks, many of whom had been through the hard school of prison and exile.

p The Free Ural Regional Party Conference met on 14 and 15 April under Sverdlov’s supervision. It had the extra title ‘free’ because it was the first of its kind to be held openly in the area.

p As soon as the delegates began to arrive, Sverdlov went to visit them in their lodgings, talking to them and showing tremendous interest in their experiences during the years of reaction, in prison and exile, and in their present work. His belief that the Ural workers were on the right path, behind Lenin and the Central Committee, grew stronger every day.

p The Conference adopted an essentially Bolshevik platform. Sverdlov spoke on the International, the agrarian question and the Party structure, and took part in debates on other issues. Like many leading Party members in those days, he was not able to determine current Party tactics as thoroughly as he would have liked. His views were neither totally clear nor completely accurate, and it was hard for him to formulate the concept of Soviets as a governmental form through which the dictatorship of the proletariat would operate. However, with regard to the Provisional Government, the war, unification with the Mensheviks (which was being seriously discussed in the Urals and elsewhere), and other matters, his approach was close to Lenin’s own.

p The Conference elected a five-man regional Party committee and authorised the local Party groups to elect nine delegates to the Seventh All-Russia Conference of the RSDLP(B). Sverdlov was unanimously chosen as a committee member and a conference delegate.

p The day after the Ural Conference closed, Sverdlov and the other delegates set out. He did not then know that he would never see his beloved Urals again.

p They arrived in Petrograd a few days before the April Conference began, which allowed Sverdlov to take part in the preliminaries. 82 Two days before the official opening his most ardent, most cherished desire was finally realised—he met Lenin. They were not to part company again until Sverdlov’s death; the intimacy that was born in April 1917 was to influence Sverdlov’s future decisively.

p Sverdlov was acquainted with most of the delegates, the finest members of the Party; he had either worked with them in the underground or met them in prison or exile.

p This Conference had a tremendous influence on the history of the Party, on the coming proletarian revolution. It wholeheartedly adopted Lenin’s plan for the development of the revolution as given in The April Theses. The transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the socialist revolution, and the pressing need to concentrate power in the hands of the Soviets were to define the Party’s tactics henceforth. The platforms of Kamenev, Rykov, Pyatakov and other of Lenin’s opponents were defeated.

p Indeed, Lenin was the major influence at the Conference; he spoke four times, took part in almost every debate and tabled most of the motions that were carried.

p The Conference was also useful in that it strengthened the Party’s structure and reorganised the Central Committee. Operating in clandestine conditions which put normal elections out of the question, the CC had often been forced to make up its numbers by cooption since the Prague Party Conference of 1912. By the time of the April Conference the CC and its Bureau had over 30 members, most of whom had not been elected. The new CC elected at the Conference had nine members, including Stalin, Milyutin, Nogin and Sverdlov, and was chaired by Lenin.

p The CC was then able to work in a more systematic way; both its organisational role, which was to grow as the revolution advanced, and its contact with the local groups were enhanced.

At the close of the April Conference the CC appointed Sverdlov head of its Secretariat, putting him in overall control of the CC’s organisational functions.