How It Started

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1917 (691 pp.)--N. N. Sukhanov--Oxford ($ 10).

Nikolai Nikolayevich Sukhanov was the first candid cameraman of the Russian Revolution: in seven volumes, he chronicled its events with movie vividness. As an original member of the Executive Committee of the first Soviet, he also co-directed the early scenes. Sukhanov was an economist, the editor (under Maxim Gorky) of the radical newspaper New Life, and a maverick Marxist. Although he himself knew almost everyone who made the revolution, he is today virtually forgotten except among professional historians. His seven-volume work was first published in 1922, but it has just now been pruned to a single volume and translated into English by Joel Carmichael, onetime OSS officer. The book does little to change the familiar picture, but, unlike most such tomes, it has an eyewitness excitement that makes it even harder to lay down than to lift.

"Stations Everyone!" It is difficult to believe, in 1955, how casual were the beginnings of the Soviet nightmare. In late February 1917, hoodlums, soapbox orators and strikers swirled through the streets of Petrograd. By a kind of spontaneous combustion, troops joined the demonstrators and fired on the police. Anarchy and heady illusion were in the air: "Ahead everything was completely different, unknown, wonderful . . . Surely all this was an illusion, nonsense, all a dream. Wasn't it time to wake up?"

The revolution woke up with two heads: the Provisional Government led by Social Revolutionary Alexander Kerensky, with the ideal of a Western-style democratic regime; and the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, a clashing spectrum of radical parties (mostly Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, with a few Bolsheviks) holding Socialist aims. On this Socialist family drama, Author Sukhanov lavishes the meticulous attention which an American sometimes devotes to a close pennant race. He also studs his chronicle with high-level vignettes. Among the more vivid:

P: Kerensky, then 35, skittishly mistaking a few stray shots in the courtyard outside his palace office for the beginning of a counterrevolution, leaps to the windowsill and bellows hoarsely: "Stations everyone! . . . Listen to me--I, Kerensky, am speaking to you, Kerensky is speaking to you! Defend your freedom and the revolution . . . Stations everyone!"

P: Trotsky, making his maiden speech before unfriendly Deputies of the Soviet. "He did not expect any sympathy. And to make it worse--his cuff kept constantly shooting out of his sleeve and threatening to fall on the heads of his nearest listeners."

P: Lenin, arriving at the Finland station in the famous "sealed train" in the middle of the night while a band blares the Marseillaise and a searchlight knifes the sky and startles the crowd. "Lenin came, or rather ran, into the waiting room. He wore a round cap, his face looked frozen, and there was a magnificent bouquet in his hands." Lenin toys with his flowers, stares at the ceiling, and gives a short pep talk, ending with "Long live the worldwide Socialist revolution!"

The Grey Blur. As Author Sukhanov describes the summer of 1917, it often seems that the de facto government of Russia was the crowd in the streets ("Everyone was demonstrating who wasn't too lazy!"). The crowd was fickle. When Lenin was tagged as a paid German agent by the opposition press, he took to the underground. Stalin, at the time, left only "the impression of a grey blur" on Sukhanov, "looming up now and then dimly and not leaving any trace."

Sukhanov refused to become a Bolshevik and regarded Lenin and Trotsky as brazen adventurers, ignorant of the mas ter role of economics in "scientific Socialism." By October, Lenin and Trotsky were more intent on seizing power than sticking to strict Marxist theory. Ironically, they decided on a coup d'etat in Sukhanov's own flat; Lenin showed up, still incognito, wearing a wig and without beard. Two weeks later, in what is known as the October revolution, the Bolsheviks marched friendly troops to key points and Trotsky sneeringly consigned opposition party members to the "dustbin of history." Sitting on the dustbin, and holding the lid down, were Lenin & Co.

In 1931 Sukhanov was hauled up in a dress rehearsal of the confession-and-purge trials to come. The charge : promoting Western military intervention to destroy the Soviet state. He pleaded guilty. Once in jail, however, he wrote an indignant appeal to the government -- now run by the "grey blur" -- and circulated a copy through the jail. Among other things, Sukhanov demanded that the GPU honor its promise "to release those willing to make untrue confessions." No one ever heard from him again.

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