October

by China Miéville

  The Soviet’s Executive Committee, the Ispolkom, had allowed a single hour to discuss and decide the shape of post-revolutionary power. A ludicrous aspiration. The meeting dragged well over the allotted time. Under the dome of the Tauride Palace’s great hall the hundreds of Soviet delegates, its general assembly, were awaiting the Ispolkom’s report back. Their impatience grew loud. As noon slipped past, the Ispolkom sent the Menshevik Skobolev to plead for more time.

  As he spoke, he was dramatically interrupted. The doors to the chamber flew open and a voluble group of uniformed soldiers piled in. As the newcomers clamoured, the Ispolkom got word and rushed to join the throng.

  The anxious soldiers had come to ask the Soviet for guidance: how should they respond to Rodzianko’s demands to surrender their arms? What should they do about their officers, against whom the popular mood remained ugly enough that there was a real danger of lynchings? And should they obey the Soviet, or the Duma Committee?

  The raucous crowd left them in no doubt that they must keep their arms. That much was simple.

  The decision to dissolve the Soviet’s Military Commission into that of the Duma Committee, however, provoked more controversy. The left in the room were hollering, denouncing it as collaboration. For the Ispolkom, Sokolev, a former Bolshevik, defended the move on grounds of the military experience and ‘historic role’ of the bourgeoisie.

  Out of the arguments echoing through the hall, a consensus began to emerge. Anti-revolutionary officers were not to be trusted, but the command of ‘moderate’ officers was valid – though only as regards matters of combat. As the back-and-forth continued, one soldier from the Preobrazhensky Regiment explained how he and his comrades had voted in an administrative committee from within their own ranks.

  Elected officers. The idea spread roots.

  At last the Soviet put together a draft resolution. It stressed that soldiers’ committees were important. It proposed soviet democracy within units, combined with military discipline on duty. The soldiers, the gathering urged, should send representatives to the Duma Committee’s Military Commission, and recognise its authority – in so far as it did not deviate from the opinion of the Soviet.

  In that extraordinary conditional clause, radicalism and conciliation swirled together but did not mix.

  Newly resolute, the soldiers went to present these decisions to the Military Commission’s Colonel Engelhardt. They demanded that he pass an order for the election of, as he later recalled, ‘the junior officers’. On behalf of the Duma Committee, however, Rodzianko immediately rejected this left compromise, leaving Engelhardt to placate the furious soldiers as best he could.

  The jockeying was not yet done: later that evening, mandated by the Soviet, they returned to the Military Commision to request of Engelhardt that regulations regarding military organisation be drawn up, in collaboration with the Duma Committee. When he rejected this further overture, the soldiers took their angry leave.

  ‘So much the better,’ one exclaimed as they went. ‘We will write them ourselves.’

  At 6 p.m., in the Soviet, a packed Executive Committee, soon joined by several new delegates mandated by the soldiers – Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, independents, one lonely Kadet – resumed their discussions on power. Once again, the moderates called for active coalition with the Duma Committee. But the prevailing position, as put by Sukhanov, an independent intellectual close to the left Mensheviks, was that the Soviet’s ‘task’ was, rather, to ‘compel’ the reluctant liberal bourgeoisie to take power. In the Menshevik model, they were the necessary agent, after all, of a necessary, and necessarily bourgeois, revolution. And excessively stringent conditions for compromise, of course, risked dissuading this timorous bourgeois liberalism from fulfilling its historic role.

  On such a basis, the Ispolkom thrashed out nine conditions for its support of a provisional government:

  1)an amnesty for political and religious prisoners;

  2)freedom of expression, publication and strikes;

  3)the introduction of a democratic republic by universal, equal, direct, secret – male – suffrage;

  4)preparation for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, towards a permanent government;

  5)replacement of the police force by a people’s militia;

  6)elections to local administrative bodies as per point three;

  7)abolition of discrimination based on class, religion or nationality;

  8)self-government of the army, including election of officers;

  9)no withdrawal from Petrograd or disarmament of revolutionary army units.

  Crucially, as befitting its self-perceived role as overseer, the committee also voted, thirteen to eight, that its members should not serve in the cabinet of the provisional government the Duma Committee would create.

  These were moderate demands. The left in the room was mostly quiet: all the upheaval had left the Bolsheviks, in particular, floundering somewhat, uncertain as to how to iterate their differentia specifica of consistent anti-liberalism.

  The most radical points in the list were those concerning the army. These came from the soldiers’ representatives, furious at Engelhardt’s intransigence. And their anger was not yet spent.

  The exhausted executive delegated a small group to join the soldiers in formalising their particular demands. They crowded together into a small room, Sokolov hunched at a dark desk, scribbling for them, translating into legalese. Half an hour later they emerged with what Trotsky would call ‘a charter of freedom of the revolutionary army’, and ‘the single worthy document of the February Revolution’, one put forward not by the Soviet Executive but by the soldiers themselves – Order Number 1.

  Order Number 1 consisted of seven points:

  1)election of soldiers’ committees in military units;

  2)election of their representatives to the Soviet;

  3)subordination of soldiers to the Soviet in political actions;

  4)subordination of soldiers to the Military Commission – in so far, again and crucially, as its orders did not deviate from the Soviet’s;

  5)control of weapons by soldiers’ committees;

  6)military discipline while on duty, with full civil rights at other times;

  7)abolition of officers’ honorary titles and of officers’ use of derogatory terms for their men.

  The order gave priority to the power of the Soviet over that of the Duma Committee, and put the weapons of the Petrograd Garrison at the Soviet’s disposal. And yet that Soviet’s Executive Committee, with its strange cocktail of Jesuitical Marxism and political hesitancy, did not want the power thus bestowed. However under-enforced it would go on to be, whatever an embarrassment it might prove to the more cautious, in essence Order Number 1 was a severe rebuke to traditional military authority – and it would remain so, as a clarion.

  Its last two points were a military articulation of the insistence on honour, on human dignity, for which the most radical workers had striven since 1905. Soldiers were, up to February, still subject to grotesque humiliations. They could not receive books or newspapers, belong to any political societies, attend lectures or the theatre, without permission. They could not wear civilian clothes off-duty. They could not eat in restaurants or ride in streetcars. And their officers referred to them by humiliating nicknames and using those superior linguistic forms. Hence this fight against belittling familiarity, the class spite of grammar.

  Soldiers, like workers and others, demanded to be addressed with the respectful ‘Citizen’, a term spreading so widely it was as if it had been ‘invented just now!’ the poet Michael Kuzmin wrote.

  The revolution and its language seduced him: ‘Tough sandpaper has polished all our words.’

  General Ivanov and his shock troops arrived late in Tsarskoe Selo, where the tsarina, dressed as a nurse, was tending her measles-infected children. She was fearful that Ivanov’s presence might inflame the political situation, but his mission was already over: word came from Alexeev t
hat he was not to proceed.

  A little before 8 p.m., the tsar himself arrived at Pskov. Rodzianko had promised to meet him there, but now he sent apologies. He was, unknown to Nicholas, preparing for negotiations between the Duma Committee and the Soviet.

  A General Ruzskii was in command of forces around the medieval city of Pskov. When he came to greet the tsar, the general arrived late, harassed, brusque, and wearing rubber boots. This was a borderline seditious lack of pomp. The tsar forbore. He gave the general permission to speak freely. He asked him for his assessment of the situation.

  The old ways, Ruzskii offered carefully, had run their course.

  Perhaps, he suggested, the tsar might adopt a formula such as ‘the sovereign reigns and the government rules’.

  A constitutional monarchy? The mere insinuation provoked in Nicholas a kind of glazed satori of his own limits. This ‘was incomprehensible’ to him, he muttered. To come around to something like that, he said, he would have to be reborn.

  At 11:30 p.m., as the Soviet and Duma committees prepared to meet in Petrograd, Nicholas received a telegram that General Alexeev had sent him hours before, at the same time as he had called off the tsar’s troops.

  ‘It is impossible’, Nicholas read, ‘to ask the army calmly to wage war while a revolution is in progress in the rear.’

  Alexeev begged the tsar to appoint a cabinet of national confidence, imploring him to sign a draft manifesto to this effect, that members of the Duma Committee had been hurriedly formulating and in support of which they had been collecting endorsements – pointedly including one from the tsar’s cousin, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich.

  To the tsar, this – from the loyal Alexeev – was a severe blow. He pondered. At last he recalled Ruzskii and ordered him to relay to Rodzianko and Alexeev his consent – that the Duma should form a cabinet. Then he cabled Ivanov, rescinding his command and ordering him not to proceed to Petrograd.

  By then, that order, of course, like the man who gave it, was redundant.

  At midnight on 1 March, Sukhanov, Chkheidze, Steklov and Sokolov of the Soviet crossed from one side of the Tauride Palace to the other on a mission Sukhanov had initiated, one neither quite official nor quite unsanctioned. They were meeting their Duma counterparts, to discuss terms for the Soviet’s support for the Duma in taking power.

  Close to the left of the Mensheviks, Sukhanov was a clever, waspish, sardonic witness of this year, with an uncanny ability to be present at the key moments of history. In his memoirs, that night is vivid.

  Below its high ceiling the Duma’s meeting room was foul with cigarette butts, bottles, and the smell from plates of half-eaten food which made the famished socialists salivate. Ten Duma representatives were there, including Milyukov, Rodzianko and Lvov. Technically a Soviet man, Kerensky was also present. He kept uncharacteristically quiet. Rodzianko sulked and obsessively sipped soda water. For the most part it was Pavel Milyukov, of the Kadets, who spoke for the Committee, and Sukhanov who spoke for the Soviet.

  The groups gauged the distance between them. On two key political questions, the war and the redistribution of land, they were quite divided. These issues, then, they avoided. Those aside, liberals and socialists – the latter disinclined to dissuade the former from taking power – were pleasantly surprised at how smoothly the negotiations proceeded.

  Though he accepted that Nicholas himself must go, the Anglophile Milyukov dreamed of keeping the institution of the monarchy. Could Nicholas, he mused, be persuaded to abdicate in favour of his son, under the regency of the tsar’s brother Michael? As if recollecting the present company of republican leftists, Milyukov hastened to describe the pair as ‘a sick child … and a thoroughly stupid man’. That notion, Chkheidze told him, was unrealistic as well as unacceptable.

  It was established that troublesome points could wait until the convening of a Constituent Assembly, so this question, too, was shelved. Point three of the Soviet’s nine, about a ‘democratic republic’, was dropped.

  To avoid trouble in the short term, Milyukov, with curled lip, agreed not to relocate the city’s revolutionary troops. What he would not countenance, however, was the election of officers. For the liberals and for the right, what this would mean was the destruction of the army. And what of Order Number 1? Troops to obey the government only in so far as its orders did not conflict with the Soviet’s? The idea was appalling.

  Shulgin interjected. He was never as diplomatic as Milyukov. If the Soviet had the power implied in that order, he coldly suggested, they should immediately arrest the Duma Committee and set up government alone.

  To actually take power was, of course, the last thing the flustered socialists wanted.

  It was at that moment that an agitated group of army officers abruptly arrived to interrupt the discussion. They called Shulgin outside.

  The revolution has its mysteries. This perfectly timed intervention is one. The identities of the officers remain unclear, as does their precise message. Whoever they were, they seem to have intimated to Shulgin that opposing Order Number 1, that night, would mean bloodshed. Perhaps even be a massacre of officers.

  Whatever the source of the opaque intercession, it proved vital. On his return to the room, Shulgin agreed that the Soviet need not rescind Order Number 1, but that it would issue a second order to soften it.

  The Duma Committee had its own demands. The Soviet Executive Committee, it insisted, must restore order and re-establish contact between soldiers and officers. Much as the fact might stick in the conservative craw, it was clear that the Ispolkom was the only body that might have the power to do this. And the Ispolkom must proclaim the Provisional Government, agreed between itself and the Duma Committee, legitimate.

  Milyukov had girded himself for struggle on such points. He was agreeably surprised by the Soviet representatives’ ready – even eager – acquiescence.

  It was 3 a.m. on 2 March when the meeting adjourned. Not everyone, though, could afford to sleep: some still had other urgent business.

  It was very soon thereafter that a strange truncated two-car train hauled out from Petrograd’s Warsaw Station, shedding light into the night. Escorted by guards, it carried Shulgin and Alexander Guchkov, a conservative Octobrist politician, on a mission to reshape history. The two right-wingers had taken on themselves an unpleasant task: they had volunteered to go to meet the tsar, to try to persuade him to abdicate.

  At station after station along the route, the platform and their train were invaded by crowds of soldiers and civilians, ignoring the cold, buoyed by insurgency, desperate for details, all in excited debate. At Lugin and Gatchina rebellious soldiers greeted the travellers enthusiastically: as representatives of the Duma, and thus, in many minds, of the revolution itself, Guchkov and Shulgin had to give speech after brief speech.

  The early morning dragged, then the day, as the agitated, impatient men prepared for their task, not knowing it was already superfluous.

  One reason the tsar had chosen to go to Pskov was its connection by wire to the capital. In a communications room deep in the Tauride Palace, there was a Hughes machine. Invented more than a half-century previously, this telegraphic apparatus was an intricate tangle of brass wheels, wires and wood, its lettered black and white keyboard designed to mimic a piano’s. At such machines, as the print wheel turned, virtuoso operators would ‘play’ the text of messages, and at the other end of the connection, a long ribbon of words would emerge.

  Russia’s was an extensive empire of wires, running mostly through post offices and alongside railways. Along them passed events and opinions, information, dissent, order, confusion and clarity, spreading out in the staccato clatter of keys struck and unspooling paper, each party dictating one sentence at a time to trained operators at their keyboards.

  At 3:30 a.m., very soon after Guchkov and Shulgin left, Rodzianko connected to Pskov on the Hughes machine. At the other end, through his own telegrapher, a bleary Ruzskii conveyed the good news that Nicholas, t
hen fretfully scribbling in his diary in his private train carriage, had agreed at last to form a responsible ministry.

  ‘It is obvious’, responded Rodzianko, ‘that His Majesty and you do not realise what is going on here.’

  Stunned, Ruzskii watched Rodzianko’s devastating message chatter out, word by word. The opportunity had been missed. The time for ministries was over.

  Accordingly, at 5 a.m., with Rodzianko still only halfway through that momentous exchange, Milyukov met the lawyer Sokolov and the independent leftist Sukhanov from the Soviet, to formalise their collaboration.

  The proclamation, Milyukov would later crow, enjoined the people to restore order, which was ‘almost the same thing that [he, Milyukov] … had been telling the soldiers from the platform of the regiment barracks. And it was accepted for publication in the name of the Soviet!’ There was no reference to the election of officers. Nor did the Soviet’s Executive Committee interfere with the selection of the new cabinet. The Duma Committee offered positions to the two members of the Soviet to whom it had already made overtures, Chkheidze and Kerensky. Such government roles the Soviet had already in principle refused.

  This decision would soon be dramatically overturned.

  The long exchange between Rodzianko and Ruzskii continued. As was usual, it was also relayed to other relevant parties on the lines. The calamitous information spread out. At 6 a.m., one of the recipients, General Danilo of the northern front, ordered telegraphists to forward it to Mogilev, to General Alexeev.

  Alexeev instantly understood the magnitude of what he read. At 8:30 a.m., he ordered Pskov staff to wake the tsar and relay to him the conversation’s contents.

  ‘All etiquette must be ignored,’ he insisted. His urgency was not shared. The tsar, he was coldly informed, was sleeping.