1917
Page 30
Worse was to come. As historian Richard Pipes writes, “in September and October, Russia drifted rudderless,” while German armies moved ever closer. The stage was set for someone more determined and more ruthless than either Kornilov or Kerensky to assume power.
At the end of October, that someone was Lenin.
LENIN WAS DELIGHTED by the falling-out between Kornilov and Kerensky. It restored his sense of confidence that he alone held the key to power in Russia, and that violent insurrection was the only way to crack the lock. As late as September 1, Lenin was working on an article stating that he was ready to accept a compromise: the Bolsheviks would stick to nonviolent political tactics as long as the “moderates” were willing to form a government “wholly and exclusively responsible to the soviets.”11
Lenin could now throw aside any lingering thought of compromise. It was time to strike. He had his own historical parallel in mind: the Paris Commune that seized power from the French government in 1871. “The Bolsheviks, to put it bluntly, hold ten times more ‘trumps’ than the [Paris] Commune did,” he had written on September 16, in a memo urging some compromise with the mainstream political parties.12 Now, after Kornilov’s arrest, he fired off a message to the Bolshevik Central Committee on September 25: “Taking power immediately both in Moscow and [Petrograd] (it doesn’t matter who goes first; perhaps even Moscow can do it), we will absolutely and undoubtedly be victorious.”
Since the summer, the Bolsheviks had benefited from the fact that Russian voters (who now included women as well as all men) were becoming fed up with serial failure at the top. In desperation, they were turning to the Bolsheviks, the one party untainted by participation in a failing, flailing government. Votes in the Petrograd Municipal Council in August reflected this, as the Bolshevik share climbed from barely a fifth to a third. In Moscow in September, while the share of votes for the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks plummeted, those for the conservative Kadets and the Bolsheviks surged, from 17.2 to 31.5 percent and 11.7 to 49.5 percent, respectively.13
Part of this was Lenin’s softening of the Bolshevik message since July. The apocalyptic side of his vision, the picture of violent world revolution and class war, had been set aside. Instead, he was speaking of the “withering away of the state” under communism, as if the transition from capitalism and bourgeois democracy to the dictatorship of the proletariat would be a gradual, almost peaceful evolution instead of the violent smashing of the state he envisioned in State and Revolution. Nonetheless, it also owed its success to the powerful simplicity of Lenin’s Bolshevik slogan, “Peace, Land, Bread.” By October 1917, with no end in sight for either the war or the food shortages, large numbers of frustrated Russians were ready for a change.
They were going to get more than they had ever bargained for.
On September 14, the elections in the Petrograd Soviet gave a majority to the Bolsheviks for the first time. Yet when Lenin’s letter arrived urging immediate revolution, the members of the Central Committee were appalled. Both Trotsky and Kamenev, having been released from prison by the Kerensky government (a move it would bitterly regret in a few weeks’ time), were present when the letter was read. Both realized that the call for immediate revolution would be a disaster, and the committee ordered the letter burned (all copies except one, which survives), lest it trigger fresh arrests by the government. No one except Lenin truly believed revolution at this stage was possible or even, in the minds of some, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, desirable. What was needed was an outside catalyst, something that would rally public opinion to the Bolshevik side while also betraying the fatal weakness of the government.14
In fact, that had already happened, on September 15, when the gates of Kresty Prison swung open and Leon Trotsky walked away a free man.
Prison had done him good—it was a time of rest and routine after the frenzy of the summer. For the next month, he, not Lenin, would be the public face of the Bolshevik cause in Petrograd. His name appeared at the top of the Central Committee masthead; he secured a spot on the editorial board of Pravda. In the eyes of his admirers in Petrograd that fall (these admirers included a young American named John Reed, who had arrived in the capital days earlier), the story of the October Revolution in Russia was as much about Trotsky as about Lenin.
There was good reason for this. With his penetrating eye, Trotsky zeroed in on the fallacy that still held back the other members of the Central Committee: their belief that if the Bolsheviks were to gain a foothold in power, some arrangement of power sharing with the other socialist parties in the All-Russian Soviet was needed.
Trotsky, like Lenin, didn’t want a foothold; he wanted the whole thing. He also understood firsthand, as Lenin did by instinct, that none of the organs of governance in Russia had the capacity or the will to stand in the way of a handful of determined revolutionaries backed by their armed thugs.
So, while Lenin was still out of action in Finland, Trotsky detached the Bolsheviks from all other government organs and parties with the single exception of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which he knew would be useful in rubber-stamping a Bolshevik takeover. For example, Kamenev and others had looked forward to Bolshevik participation in the Democratic Conference that Kerensky had summoned to Petrograd to serve as a pre-parliament before the election of the Constituent Assembly. Trotsky, however, scornfully rejected the notion of Bolsheviks seating themselves next to the other, discredited socialist parties, and he secured Central Committee approval for pulling out of Kerensky’s staged confab.
There were still two challenges looming on the horizon. The first would be the meeting of a Second Congress of Soviets, slated for sometime in the fall. It was bound to position itself in rivalry to the Provisional Government, as the First Congress had done in June, and could pose a problem for a Bolshevik takeover. But the situation had changed since June, to the Bolsheviks’ advantage; they were now poised to send a sizable contingent of deputies to the Second Congress. It was the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries who had the most to fear from a Second Congress, where their influence was bound to be diminished. So, it was with great reluctance that the Menshevik-dominated Bureau of the Ispolkom finally yielded to Bolshevik pressure and agreed to summoning a Second Congress on November 2. Its agenda was supposed to be strictly limited to putting together legislative proposals for the coming Constituent Assembly.15 But many Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, saw the Second Congress as the perfect launching pad for their seizure of power.
Yet it was the Constituent Assembly that was the real threat—or, from the perspective of Russian democracy, the one real hope. Elected by universal suffrage, with a mandate to create a genuine constitutional republic, it might fill the looming political vacuum that the Bolsheviks needed in order to grab power. When Lenin wrote on September 26, “History won’t forgive us if we don’t seize power now,” it was also because he knew that if the Constituent Assembly managed to take power first, the tide of Russian history would run irrevocably against a Bolshevik Revolution.16
Time was running out in other ways, too. On September 19, German forces began operations against a series of fortified islands in the Gulf of Riga. If those fell, the Germans would be in a position to launch amphibious landings behind Russian lines; the collapse of the entire front could be imminent. Then it would be the Germans, not the Bolsheviks, who controlled events in the capital, including the fate of the Provisional Government. It really was necessary to speed up the timetable: and here Trotsky found one more tool at his disposal.
As the news from Riga got worse, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in the Petrograd Soviet began to worry that the city’s army garrison might not be able to summon enough troops to stop the Germans if they advanced on the capital. They called for a new independent body to coordinate military activity around Petrograd, to be under the control of the Petrograd Soviet rather than the army’s Military Staff.
Trotsky, now chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, quickly agreed to
participate. On October 29, the Soviet approved creation of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Trotsky soon made sure that loyal Bolsheviks were installed in its key posts, and then went to key army units to tell them that only the Bolsheviks would make sure they were never sent to the front. That was a definite morale boost for soldiers who had lost faith in the war months before. Trotsky also urged them to transfer their allegiance from the Provisional Government to the Petrograd Soviet, which meant, for all practical purposes, the Bolsheviks, Trotsky, and Lenin.17
Lenin himself was now the one piece missing from a successful putsch, and on either October 7 or October 8, he left Helsinki for a safe house on the Finnish-Russian border, at Vyborg. Once again, he traveled with a forged passport and in disguise, this time with a wig and glasses as a Finnish pastor of the Lutheran Church. Before leaving, he fired off to the Bolshevik Central Committee one last letter, titled “The Crisis Has Ripened.” (In fact, nothing had ripened except the Bolsheviks’ leverage for seizing power.) It urged action: “To pass up such a moment and ‘await’ the Congress of Soviets”—the Second Congress was due to take its seats in less than a month—“is complete idiocy or complete treason.”18
The moment for revolution was now.
As if on Lenin’s cue, on October 16 the Russian General Staff ordered the evacuation of the one remaining fortress between the Germans and the capital. German forces would soon be less than 225 miles from Petrograd. This sent up a storm of consternation in the government. Kerensky and others decided they needed to start preparing to move the government from Petrograd to Moscow; the Germans could conceivably be on the outskirts of the capital in less than a week.19
The Ispolkom, however, said no. With the Bolsheviks leading the charge, it declared that evacuation plans were only a ploy on the government’s part to escape the influence of the revolutionary masses, and to abjectly surrender the capital to the advancing Germans. Trotsky persuaded the Soldiers’ Section of the Soviet to condemn the government’s plans: the resolution called on Kerensky and his colleagues either to surrender to Germany or to give way to a new government. Alarmed and cowed by the unexpected storm of criticism, the Provisional Government gave way. It abandoned any evacuation plans and instead immediately ordered units from the Petrograd garrison to the front, for a last stand against the advancing Germans.
In retrospect, it’s hard to say which decision by the government was more foolish: yielding to the pressure to stay in a city that might, in a matter of days, be occupied by a foreign army, or commanding soldiers who were used to disobeying orders to risk their lives in a hopeless fight in a war they resolutely opposed.
At the urging of the Bolsheviks, the garrison, of course, refused to go. The issue went over to the Ispolkom, where the Bolsheviks, again led by Trotsky, presented a “compromise.” When the Mensheviks proposed setting up a Committee of Revolutionary Defense, or CRD, to organize resistance in the city against the German invader, a body that the soldiers might be more inclined to obey than their own officers, Trotsky did one better: he renamed the CRD as the Revolutionary Committee of Defense and ordered it to defend the city from the “domestic enemy” as well—meaning the Provisional Government. The way to do this was to detach command of all military units around Petrograd from the Military Staff and make the Petrograd Soviet the final authority in whose name the Revolutionary Committee of Defense would act. Trotsky did not need to add that this ensured that the Soviet’s Bolshevik majority would have the upper hand in deciding how and when the troops would be used, if ever.
Without thinking, the Ispolkom said yes. Later, Trotsky noted gleefully that it was the vote of October 22 that finally sealed the fate of the Provisional Government.20 Military units garrisoning the capital could now be officially used against the government, instead of protecting it. But there was still one more thing needed to pull off the coup: the Bolsheviks had to decide to act.
This was where Lenin had failed back in July; now he was in a very different mood. When he appeared before his comrades on October 23, the first time he had been seen in public in more than four months, he was like a man possessed. The meeting of the Central Committee took place in the Petersburg Side apartment of Galina Flaxerman, wife of leftist Menshevik and Lenin acquaintance Nikolai Sukhanov. Lenin’s appearance startled everyone. Shorn of his characteristic goatee and dressed as a Lutheran pastor with a silver-white wig, he looked more like an actor in a regional theater troupe than a revolutionary hero—an impression made more absurd by the fact that his wig kept slipping off as he spoke. He had to reach up constantly with one hand to shove it back into place.21
If his appearance seemed comical, his words were not. The time had come for revolution, he thundered. “Now is the moment for seizing power, or never . . . It is senseless to wait for the Constituent Assembly that will obviously not be on our side.”
Nor was he worried that if their plan failed, they couldn’t seize control of Russia. “The goal was not just to seize power at the center, or even end the war with Germany,” he had written to Petrograd’s leading Bolshevik organizer, Alexander Shliapnikov. The real goal was simply to destroy the status quo and plunge Russia into chaos and conflict. “The essence of our work, which must be persistent, systematic, and perhaps extremely long-term, is to aim for the transformation of the war into a civil war. When that will happen is another question . . . [but] we must wait for the moment to ripen, and systematically force it to open.”22
Therefore, when Trotsky raised the issue of waiting until the next meeting of the Second Congress of Soviets, now scheduled for November 7, where the Bolsheviks would have an elected majority, Lenin waved the objection away. “This holds no interest for me whatever,” he said irritably. “Of what importance is it? Will it even take place? And what can it accomplish even if it does meet? It is necessary to tear out power . . . That date may serve at best as camouflage, but the uprising must be carried out earlier and independently of the Congress of Soviets.”
He pounded the table. “The party must seize power, arms in hand, and then we will talk of the Congress of Soviets.”23
Battered and bullied, the other members of the Central Committee no longer had the willpower to resist their overbearing leader. By dawn, the resolution had passed, 10 votes to 2. Those against were Zinoviev and Kamenev. They still felt that triggering a revolution now, without some kind of popular endorsement, however contrived or phony, would be a mistake. They said as much in a letter they sent out afterward to Bolshevik chapters around the country, adding that Lenin’s assertion that a Bolshevik Revolution in Russia would trigger a worldwide workers’ revolt was at best an unproved assumption. When Lenin learned of the letter, his rage was considerable; he denounced them both as traitors. In the end, Zinoviev and Kamenev went along with the rest; like the others, they were more afraid of defying Lenin than they were of the consequences of another failed coup—even though if it failed this time, it would almost certainly put them all in front of a firing squad.
Overnight, the scene switched back to the Ispolkom and the All-Russian Soviet. On October 29, in a closed-door session, Trotsky’s plan for handing command of the city’s military forces to a single committee passed unanimously, with only two Menshevik deputies dissenting. Now renamed the Military Revolutionary Committee, or MRC, this executive body was quickly packed with Bolshevik members, with Trotsky at its head.
Everything was now in place for a bid for power. All that remained was a pretext for launching it. For Lenin’s and Trotsky’s goal was not just to take power from the Provisional Government and the Soviet and its executive body, the Ispolkom. It was also to find a way to make taking power look like a defensive move, as if the Bolsheviks were taking preventive action to protect the All-Russian Soviet from the Provisional Government.
The government soon obliged. When members of the Military Staff learned of the existence of the Military Revolutionary Committee, they were outraged. On November 4, the Military Staff issued a stern ultimatum to
the Soviet: revoke the committee or face “decisive measures.” The next night, the government ordered the shutting down of the two Bolshevik dailies, Pravda and Soldat; and troops were ordered to protect key points in the capital, including the Winter Palace.24
That night, Kerensky was feeling confident. For weeks, he had been expecting another Bolshevik coup; in many ways, he was actually hoping for one, so that he could crush the Bolsheviks once and for all. He had already dealt with Kornilov and the counterrevolutionary right; now it was the turn of the Bolsheviks and the radical left. To British ambassador George Buchanan, Kerensky kept saying, “I only wish that [the Bolsheviks] would come out, and I will then put them down.”
The next day, November 6, he had his wish.
In the early morning hours, people looked out their windows to see troops pouring out to take command of key points in the city, including the Winter Palace. Other soldiers were sent to raise the drawbridges across the Neva, so that workers could not march into the city center. Others took over the offices of Pravda and Soldat and shut down the presses, while still others set out to round up and arrest members of the Military Revolutionary Committee. By 2:30 in the afternoon, the streets of Petrograd were deserted. The government was closing down the city, and was putting the lid on any incipient revolution.
This was exactly what Lenin and the Bolsheviks were hoping for. That evening, the MRC issued its own statement, claiming that far from planning to stage an uprising, it was actually protecting “the interests of the Petrograd garrison and democracy” against the malign forces of counterrevolution, namely, Kerensky and the government.
Later, Lenin arrived at MRC headquarters, his face heavily bandaged as a disguise. He had been captured by a government patrol, but he pretended to be falling-down drunk, and they laughed and let him go. Now that he heard what was happening, he could not conceal his pleasure and excitement.