1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  “Oh, that is gooood,” he said, rubbing his hands together and walking up and down the room, beaming. “That is verrry good.”25

  That night, Trotsky and the MRC sprang into action. At one post after another, the guards the government had assigned were told they were dismissed and should go home; those who didn’t were immediately disarmed and sent on their way. In the darkness, one by one, the city’s most vital centers were taken over by troops loyal to the Bolsheviks: railroad stations, post offices, telephone offices, banks, and bridges. It was an entirely bloodless coup, run like clockwork. It was clear that the Bolsheviks now controlled all law and order in the Russian capital.

  Only the Winter Palace was left. Kerensky, his face a mask of “suffering and controlled fear,” as one eyewitness remembered, was absorbing what was happening. He had called all his frontline commanders to plead for troops and help; every one of them turned him down. Almost comically, a two-man delegation from the Soviet appeared at 9:00 p.m., to protest the government’s “reactionary” measures. The threat of a Bolshevik takeover was exaggerated, they said. Kerensky, who knew the truth, threw them out.

  He and the government had lost; Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks had won. The next morning, November 7, at nine o’clock, he slipped out the back of the Winter Palace in the disguise of a Serbian officer and, in a borrowed car, drove through the gates, past both his guards and those of the Bolsheviks, and left the city.

  The car was flying an American flag.

  WASHINGTON, RAPALLO, BERLIN

  THE NEWS OF the Bolshevik coup sent shock waves across Europe, and into the White House. Wilson got the news just when plans for delivering help and supplies to Russia were taking final shape. With his usual optimism, he refused to be discouraged, even though the democratic Russian government that he and the Allies had counted on was gone. On the contrary, as he remarked to Congressman Frank Clark, “I have not lost faith in the Russian outcome by any means. Russia, like France in a past century, will no doubt have to go through deep waters[,] but she will come out upon firm land on the other side, and her great people, for they are a great people, will in my opinion take their proper place in the world.”26

  Wilson saw Lenin and the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Petrograd through his own Progressive prism: “as an extreme form of democratic anti-imperialist idealism,” as one expert has explained it, “whose radical energies might be guided by rational argument” into embracing Wilson’s globalist agenda, and therefore sustaining the war effort.27 Even Lenin’s talk of a separate peace with Germany did not worry Wilson.

  He conveyed the same hopeful view when he addressed the American Federation of Labor on November 12:

  May I not say that it is amazing to me that any group of persons should be so ill-informed as to suppose, as some groups in Russia apparently suppose, that any reforms planned in the interest of the people can live in the presence of a Germany powerful enough to undermine or overthrow them by intrigue or force? Any body of free men that compounds with the present German Government is compounding for its own destruction.28

  In other words, since Lenin and his allies were “free men” planning reforms in the interests of the Russian people, they would realize that any peace with Germany meant the doom of their regime. Wilson was certain that such a peace would not happen.

  The reaction in the other Allied capitals was far more muted, and for good reason. The Allied leaders were gathering that same week in Rapallo, Italy, in their last joint strategic conference without the Americans.

  The mood was grim, even before the unwelcome news came from Petrograd. On October 24, German armies had smashed the Italians at Caporetto, where thirty-five divisions of Austrians and Germans overwhelmed thirty-four divisions of Italian troops. The spearhead of the assault was the Alpine Division, led by one Capt. Erwin Rommel. Advancing through Italian lines obscured in rain and mist, Rommel’s men were able to sweep past Italian strongholds and create havoc in the enemy’s rear, capturing artillery pieces and dozens of prisoners without losing a single man. The next day, Rommel even caught an entire Italian detachment in the act of bathing.29

  “The further we penetrated into the hostile positions,” he recalled later, “the less prepared were the garrisons for our arrival, and the easier the fighting.”30 Rommel’s infiltration tactics were in fact a foretaste of the tactics he would employ twenty-three years later, in France, and a year after that, in the Western Desert—those crucial days on the Caporetto front saw the birth of blitzkrieg as well as the collapse of Italy’s will to fight on.

  As German and Austrian units moved into the gap Rommel had created, one Italian formation after another became demoralized and fell back. On October 25, the Italian general in charge, Luigi Cadorna, had no choice but to order a retreat. In no time, retreat turned into rout—one vividly described by an American volunteer ambulance driver serving with the Italian army named Ernest Hemingway, in his novel A Farewell to Arms. Before it was over, on November 9, the Italian line had dropped back more than sixty miles, to the River Piave, just north of Venice. There was considerable fear that the city of canals would itself fall into German hands. In the end, though Venice was saved, forty thousand Italian troops were killed or wounded and a quarter of a million were taken prisoner—and another four hundred thousand deserted. General Cadorna was dismissed.

  For a few weeks in November, it seemed that German forces under Gen. Otto von Below were about to drive another Allied country out of the war, just as Germany had driven Romania out the year before—and just as it was threatening to do with Russia now. When the Rapallo conference began, preventing Italy’s collapse had been the urgent priority. Before it ended, figuring out how to keep Russia in the war was added to the same list.

  To Lloyd George, the fall of Kerensky came as no surprise.31 The British prime minister had even flirted with a plan to abandon Russia to the Germans in exchange for peace in the west, until Foreign Minister Balfour and the rest of the War Cabinet talked him out of it. The question in his mind, and in the minds of others in the British government, was what to do if Lenin went ahead with his threat to sign a separate peace. There was talk of securing the military supplies stockpiled at Murmansk and Archangel from the other Allies, to keep them from falling into German hands—the first hint that Russia’s allies might enter the country to help it fight on. Otherwise, Lloyd George’s instinct, and that of his colleagues, was to avoid doing anything to antagonize or alienate the new Bolshevik government, in case it could be brought around to listen to reason. As a goodwill gesture, two Bolshevik agents who had been detained in London were sent back to Russia.32

  The attitude in France was very different. On November 13, French prime minister Paul Painlevé suffered a major defeat in the Chamber of Deputies and resigned. French president Raymond Poincaré appointed in his place a man whom he despised but who he knew was fully committed to the war: Georges Clemenceau. When he first appeared in front of the chamber, Clemenceau spoke in Churchillian terms: “You ask me for my policy. It is to wage war. Home policy? I wage war. Foreign policy? I wage war. All the time, in every sphere, I wage war.” The man who would be Woodrow Wilson’s fiercest friend when the Allies gathered to impose peace in Paris in 1919 was the man most determined to see Germany defeated—and the man most hostile to the Bolsheviks and all they represented (one reason France’s Socialists refused to join his government).

  In Clemenceau’s mind, Lenin’s proposal to sign a peace with Germany was morally as well as politically nothing less than an act of betrayal. France also held 80 percent of Russia’s external debt and 28 percent of Russia’s overseas investment. A Russia that felt free to abandon the war was also a Russia willing to abandon its other commitments to France; Clemenceau was determined not to let the ally that had balanced German power by dividing its attention slip away without a fight. But what leverage he could bring to bear was still unclear.

  Instead, it would take a man with a mind not so far from Lenin’s finall
y to show France, and the Allies, the way to deal decisively with Bolshevik Russia—namely, Woodrow Wilson.

  As for the reaction in Berlin, it was muted elation. The fall of Kerensky not only signaled the termination of Russia’s participation in the war, a major triumph at any time, but also opened the way for Germany to extend its territorial conquests in the east: if Lenin kept his word and wound up the war, it would leave Germany as the dominant power in eastern as well as Central Europe.

  Anyway, the last thing Ludendorff and the German General Staff worried about was who governed in Petrograd. The possibility that Lenin’s workers’ revolution would spread from Russia and trigger insurrections that would shake Germany to its foundations and preempt any hope for ultimate victory was as remote as that of Lenin and his colleagues landing on the moon.

  Yet, less than a year later, this was exactly what would happen.

  PETROGRAD, NOVEMBER 7–8

  “THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8. Dawn broke on a city in the wildest excitement and confusion, a whole nation heaving up in long hissing swell of storm.”

  These are the words of John Reed, who had arrived in September, in time to be caught up in the action of the Bolshevik Revolution, which he would immortalize, and glamorize, in his memoir of those tempestuous days, Ten Days That Shook the World. For the young radical American, it was a heady experience, as expressed in his hyperbolic title. Yet for those who were seizing power, the possibility that it might be suddenly and catastrophically reversed never left them, and dogged their every step, including Lenin’s.

  The putative leader of the revolution finally turned up, between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. on November 7, at the Bolshevik headquarters, still in disguise. Many didn’t recognize him until he drew up a chair, pulled out a pencil, and began composing a notice for public broadcast:

  TO THE CITIZENS OF RUSSIA! The Provisional Government has been deposed. Government authority has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.

  The task for which the people have been struggling—the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of landlord property in land, worker control over production, the creation of a Soviet government—this task is assured.

  Long Live the Revolution of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants!33

  Lenin signed it in the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee—of which he was not actually a member. Trotsky was, however, and when he caught sight of Lenin, he found him giddy with excitement. “Es schwindet!” he exclaimed in German, making a whirling motion with his hand. The experience of going from hunted fugitive to power holder literally overnight was indeed dizzying, almost overwhelming.34

  They had seized control of the capital virtually without a shot being fired. (Things would be different in Moscow, when the coup spread there and triggered savage fighting.) There was still the Winter Palace to deal with, though. Both men were reluctant to summon the Second Soviet Congress, which was slated to start that day, while the Winter Palace, defended by a detachment of women soldiers from the First Petrograd Women’s Battalion, still held out against the coup. So, Trotsky had to bluff his way through his initial meeting with the Petrograd Soviet that afternoon, when he brought it news of what had happened.

  “In the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee, I declare that the Provisional Government has ceased to exist.” When someone protested that he was jumping ahead of the coming Congress, Trotsky scornfully shouted back, “The will of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets has been predetermined by the enormous feat of the uprising of Petrograd workers and soldiers which occurred last night.” Of course, there was no “uprising,” but no one dared to disagree, especially when the building was surrounded by and filled with soldiers with bayonets.35

  Lenin made a brief appearance in front of the Petrograd Soviet, to hail “the worldwide socialist revolution” and to convey a sense of confidence that not everyone in the room was feeling. Then he retired to take a series of catnaps, as the Congress meeting was postponed hour by hour—while the Winter Palace still sat silent and defiant. Five thousand sailors from Kronstadt arrived outside its gates, but showed no inclination to take the palace by storm. A few shots from inside had them retreating back down the street.

  Holding the palace were a handful of army cadets and 137 enlistees from an all-women unit, the First Petrograd Women’s Battalion, which had formed in emulation of the First Russian Women’s Battalion, the so-called Battalion of Death, which had actually fought at the front on the Kerensky Offensive.

  Finally, at 6:30 p.m., the MRC gave the palace’s occupants an ultimatum to surrender or face bombardment from the cruiser Aurora and from guns in the Peter and Paul Fortress, now firmly in Bolshevik hands. At 9:00 p.m., the Aurora fired a blank salvo—a gesture that quickly passed into legend. Then the troops moved in.

  John Reed was there when they did. Earlier, he had been out in the Nevsky Prospekt, “where the whole city seemed to be promenading,” he later wrote. “On every corner immense crowds were massed around a core of hot discussion,” while some shook their fists and howled epithets at soldiers lounging on street corners as armored cars raced up and down the street covered with huge red letters: R.S.D.R.P., the initials of the Bolshevik Party.36 Later, Reed bumped into Kamenev carrying copies of the Petrograd Soviet’s endorsement of the revolution.

  “You consider it won then?” a breathless Reed asked.

  Kamenev shrugged. “There is so much to do,” he replied. “Horribly much. It is just beginning.”37

  There was, for example, the Winter Palace, where Reed joined the surging troops. “Carried along by the eager wave of men we were swept into the right-wing entrance, opening to a great bare vaulted room . . .” A row of wooden crates blocked the doorway, which the soldiers quickly knocked to pieces with their rifle butts.

  “All out! All out!” a soldier and an officer, members of the Red Guards (the paramilitary units raised from the various workers’ soviets that had become Lenin’s bodyguards and Bolshevik militias, and his armed alternative to relying on the regular army), shouted down the corridor. The young cadets assigned to guard the palace came out in groups of three or four, and were quickly disarmed, as were the women soldiers (several of whom were later raped or threatened with sexual violence). “Counterrevolutionaries! Enemies of the people!” some shouted at them, making the prisoners fear for their lives. Then others demanded, “Now, will you take up arms against the People anymore?”

  “No, no,” the cadets said emphatically. Then they were let go.38

  By midnight, it was all over. A total of five people had been killed and several more wounded, most from stray bullets. The ensuing mob stole everything from the Winter Palace that wasn’t nailed down, “statuettes, bottles of ink . . . bed spreads with the Imperial monogram, candles, a small oil-painting, desk blotters, gold-handled swords, cakes of soap, clothes of every description, blankets.”39

  By 2:00 a.m., remaining members of the government were locked up under guard in the Peter and Paul Fortress. They were lucky to be alive, and were nearly lynched by the mob as they passed through the gates.

  November 8 saw the streets returning to normal life, with streetcars running and restaurants open, and kiosks selling newspapers—including Pravda again. Things were anything but normal at the Smolny Institute, a former girls’ academy where the Soviet Congress had finally opened. Its numbers were much reduced. Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary delegates refused to participate; so did peasant organizations and army committees, condemning the Congress as unauthorized and urging a boycott by the nation’s soviets. The Ispolkom issued its own statement, saying it regarded the meeting of the Congress as “not having taken place” and condemning it as “a private gathering of Bolshevik delegates.”40

  None of that mattered to Lenin and Trotsky. With two-thirds of the delegates firmly in their control, they push
ed through their principal agenda items: the Decree on Land and the Decree on Peace.

  The first ordered the nationalization of all land in Russia and the transfer of ownership to the state until it decided how to distribute it to the various peasant communities. Land held privately by peasant proprietors was exempt from confiscation, however—a brazen appeal for peasant support.

  The Decree on Peace was an appeal to all belligerents to open negotiations for a “democratic” peace without annexations or reparations, and according to the principle of “the right to self-determination”—in short, the Petrograd formula adopted by the now deposed Provisional Government and Kerensky. It also proposed an immediate three-month armistice.

  “We want a just peace, we are not afraid of a revolutionary war,” Lenin told the thronging delegates, some six hundred fifty strong, who, from time to time, erupted with applause like rolling thunder. “Probably the imperialist governments will not answer our appeal.” He warned that if they did not accept, the revolution was prepared to fight on. But Lenin was sure that once “the German proletariat” learned of the peace offer, revolution would break out in Germany. The war would soon come to an end.

  No Bolshevik proposal, not even the Decree on Land, was more calculated to rally Russian public support to the coup. At 10:35 that evening, Kamenev called for a final vote. One lone hand shot up opposing the Decree on Peace, but its owner was quickly shouted down. The final vote was unanimous; Lenin’s proposal to end the war had passed.

  John Reed was in the room and watched the euphoric pandemonium that erupted. He saw an old soldier sobbing with relief, while a young man, his face shining, kept saying over and over, “The war is ended! The war is ended!” Someone called out for a moment of remembrance of those who had died for liberty, the ones who had died in prison or in exile, as well as those gunned down by czarist troops in the streets, as the crowd began singing the solemn “Funeral March”: