by Victor Serge
An article by Trotsky
This evening Izvestia publishes a leading article by Trotsky: Petrograd is also defending itself from within. Two columns of cold logical argument, terribly logical and clear.
As I read it, I remember his metallic voice, his regular gestures, his imposing military appearance which is deliberately very simple, his concentrated energy, sure of itself, imperturbable, emanating from his whole being. Nobody but he could write this article, write it as it is, simple, hard and firm.
From the military point of view, he explains, the most advantageous course of action at the present time would be to draw the enemy into the city and fight them there. Since the telephone and telegraphic systems are in our hands, and the strategic points are fortified and defended with the support of the working population, Petrograd, with its maze-like streets, its canals, its houses turned into fortresses or concealing ambushes, would be a death-trap for the small White army. There are indeed a few lines where he writes of saving artistic treasures and innocent victims (whose blood would not be on our hands in any case), but the conclusion is unambiguous. If the regular army cannot carry out its task, Petrograd will have to defend itself within its own walls. “Be prepared, Petrograd! Perhaps you are destined in these October days to write the most glorious page of your history!”
When an army leader writes that, the fearful inhabitant, accustomed to the obligatory optimism of the authorities, expects the worst. This evening the atmosphere is heavy with anxiety. I have just read this article from Izvestia, pasted up on Nevsky Prospect.
A whole silent group of people has formed in front of the poster. Suddenly we jump: somewhere, behind the Gostinny Dvor, on the other side of the roadway, a bomb has apparently just gone off. But it is only a purely nervous reaction which doesn’t bother anyone. Evening is falling, grey and gloomy with rain.
Among the citizens conversations betray a beginning of panic. It is said that planes have just bombed Smolny; they say a bomb has destroyed a house in the Sadovaia. There’s no truth in it. Where do these rumors come from? They are born unconsciously from fear, or from the overexcitement of people’s imaginations; and they spread from one conversation to the next, unconsciously inflated and distorted.
The organization of internal defence has sprung up instantaneously. To create it, it was merely necessary to use the framework of the Communist Party, to mobilize cadres and members, something which was done within a few hours. Thanks to the accurate registration of forces, to the centralization of initiatives, to the establishment of a precise correspondence between the machinery of the party and that of the government, all the energies of the city are diverted from their habitual activities to concentrate on one single task: the preparation for fighting within the city, which will be defended street by street, house by house. Attached to the party committee in each sector or administrative district of the city troikas are formed, committees of three, possessed of full powers to defend the sector. The president of the troika is the military leader of the sector. In the party premises, activity is intensifying in feverish fashion; but now, strangely, you scarcely hear the usual rattle of typewriters.
Petrograd by night
At eight o’clock, the streets are dead. But there are many patrols, guardhouses, observation posts. The internal defence has been well organized. On the corners of the streets, in pairs or in threes, militia men and women are tirelessly checking the special passes which allow people to be on the streets after the time of the curfew. Then there are patrols of soldiers, with grim childlike faces under their white papakhas (fur hats).
In twos and threes the Communists are also patrolling, checking on those responsible for maintaining order. They are mainly women, workers from factories and offices.
There is a roar of motorcycles. The sudden glow of an acetylene lamp dazzles me for a second. The motorbike has stopped at the edge of the pavement; it is carrying two men dressed in black leather, armed with long Mauser pistols, hanging from their belts in wooden holsters. One of them must be the head of the internal security service, for he rapidly questions the militiamen.
What is the good of this excess of precautions? It seems to me unnecessary in the absolute still of the night. There is no glimmer of light at the windows of the great stone houses, very black, very tall. There is nobody on the streets, except for party comrades coming off duty or on their way to it. There are thousands and thousands of us, armed, organized to defend the revolution. We feel that we are the living force, the only force. Is it possible that, in this dark, silent, dead city, the enemy is also watching us?
The Communists
Three a.m., four a.m. The air trembles as cannon-fire approaches. A brief detonation has made all those who are sleeping in their dark homes, under threat, shiver. Ah! They heave a sigh of relief. For expectation was oppressive. Now the die is cast. It will be battle, blood on the pavements, barricades, the Commune standing up to fight, and those who want to kill it will pay a heavy price.
The cannon thunders, very near, very near, with great explosions coming at intervals of a few minutes. The glass in the windows quivers. It sounds like the breath of powerful steel monsters. I lean out of the window. At each detonation, there are great white flashes of lightning against the dark sky, over there towards the harbor. Doubtless our fleet is firing. So the enemy is approaching, perhaps already at the gates of Narva, or in the Peterhof district. So there is fighting in the city!
The evening before last, before the great danger had been made public, a comrade, a well-known member of the soviet, came to see us and together we envisaged these terrible moments. Now as I walk rapidly through the silent streets, towards the flashes and the roar of the cannon, I can see him again, restless and excitable, his movements rather jerky, with his fine disheveled mane of hair and his small, dark eyes, tired and drawn but penetrating, a man whom underground struggle, jail and penal servitude, insurrection and power have marked profoundly. He is a man who passionately loves books, jewelry, statuettes, medallions—his house is full of them. I had the distinct impression that at the very thought of losing his collections and his books a shiver of despair ran through his flesh and his soul.
Agitatedly, with a false laugh, he said to me: “Oh well! We’ll abandon our books and take up guns”; then, getting more and more excited, with feverish movements: “If we have to surrender Red Petrograd to them, I propose we set fire to it, that we blow it up, that we reduce it to a heap of stones! Cut the water mains, blow up bridges and power stations, defend every district, every house, stone by stone! We shall be killed to the last person, but we shall let the world know what it costs to overcome us!” And the thought of the “neutral” and the “innocent” scarcely affected us. Nobody is neutral any more. Those who remain silent are with the past, against the future.
At the party committee in one of the sectors of the city. It is just opposite the Marinsky theater, in a little single-storied hotel where all the windows are lit up. As I approach, a strange silhouette rises up before me. A soft felt hat, an overcoat with the collar turned up, wearing a tight cartridge-belt; above the shoulder is a bayonet. The man approaches, the glass in his pince-nez glitters. I recognize N. a great reader and a great scribbler in the eyes of God, a peculiar character and an obstinate rebel; he is Polish or Finnish, knowing eight languages, a theologian, a legal writer, a man of letters, an anarchist, a Marxist, and God knows what else besides? We greet each other. I notice a thick book in his overcoat pocket, beneath the butt of his rifle.
“What are you reading?”
“Poincaré, The Value of Science.”
“Oh yes! The Value of Science.”
In the cellars of the committee premises, I glimpse men, fully dressed, fully armed, with their boots on, ready to leap into action at a moment’s notice. I look at them for a moment, these men of the Commune now sleeping, so tired that the thought of the coming hour does not suffice to keep them awake. The sentry watching at their door looks me up and dow
n in a stern fashion, and is only satisfied when I have shown him my party member’s pass. The mysterious omnipresence of the enemy is thus manifested in the slightest movements.
The men are at their combat posts or resting; it is the women who are doing night duty, making telephone connections, ready for any job. There are about twenty of them here, in these vast rooms full of the smell of extinguished cigarettes, of leather, of ink. There are guns in a corner. There are heaps of files, papers on all the tables, cards, revolvers, little boxes of cartridges. Rolled up in their coats, young women are sleeping on a sofa.
Two others are talking softly while going through a packet of letters confiscated somewhere. One is quite young, with a fresh complexion and rings round her eyes showing terrible tiredness. She is our secretary: she must be getting hardly any sleep these days. The cannon which thunders ceaselessly makes her smile. Last year, during a similar night of battle, at Pskov, she tells me, she gave birth to her first-born.
The cannon we can hear is our own. An hour ago the situation was tragic, but now things are going better.
VR Menzhinskaya, a collaborator of Lunacharsky at the Commissariat of Enlightenment, is on the telephone. She raises her face, with its regular but delicate features surrounded by a halo of white hair, towards me and tells me that a counter-attack by the officer cadets (Kursanty) has just recaptured Serguiero, near Peterhof. Two hours earlier a telephone message from Smolny had conveyed to all the committees the order to make final preparations for battle as quickly as possible, since the enemy might break into the city at any moment. The military command of the armed city has left Ligovo, and is occupying the Baltic Station. Here a small woman in a fur coat is carefully examining a Browning pistol. She turns round. I recognize the keen eyes of Lilina, commissar for social planning.
I think I should not be in any way surprised if I saw entering this room, wearing a red bonnet and armed with the pike of the most plebeian sections of the Commune, some sans-culotte friend of Hébert or Jacques Roux.f Am I not in the Jacobin Club? It is the time of the terror and the war in the Vendée; the British are fighting a war to the death against us.
Attitude of the neutral population
The cannon is still thundering. As I return, I pass not far from a group of people who are talking in a doorway. Doubtless they are tenants “on guard” at the doors of two neighboring houses. A soldier, with his cheek bandaged, a woman wearing a colored handkerchief, a dvornik (concierge), and someone else. They are talking of the ongoing battle, not knowing whether the cannon they can hear is ours or the enemy’s. I come closer, in a state of excitement, and say: “That’s our fire you can hear … the news is excellent.”
My words are met with a hostile silence. Then the soldier with the bandaged cheek replies with a scarcely concealed snigger:
“Good Lord, the news is excellent, no doubt about it!”
Are the inhabitants against us then?
The Communists have flocked to enlist and have left for the front: but at most they are twelve or fifteen thousand in a city which still numbers more than eight hundred thousand inhabitants. The whole of the working-class population seems to have responded to the appeal with goodwill. The workers grumble too, but they still take part, for they all know very well, by instinct, that they and their cause are at stake. From Schlüsselburg practically the entire ablebodied male population has come to our assistance. But how about the inhabitants? How about the grey mass of those thousands of people who are neither workers, nor rich, nor poor, nor revolutionaries, nor absolutely ignorant, nor properly educated—the mass of those who live in a capital where so many live on small profits, hold subordinate positions, live on trade and industry; people whom the revolution has suddenly deprived of their justification for existing as well as of their means of living?
They are against communism; that I have known for a long time. In their eyes it is utopian, absurd and arbitrary, and they condemn it unequivocally. And their universal ill will is not the least cause of our difficulties. But do they want to see the victory of the Whites?
I’ve listened to them, I’ve asked them. No. They would like a change, the end of the Bolshevism that they detest, but not the old order, not a new White terror. However, they do believe in Yudenich’s victory as something very probable. An intellectual, an engineer, explained to me his way of thinking:Within twenty-four hours the Whites can be here without encountering any serious resistance. There will be no fighting in the city. Half of the Communists have only become members out of self-interest. They will run away. There will only be a few pockets of isolated resistance. Petrograd is a ripe fruit which will fall of its own accord into the hand which is waiting to pick it. The population will blindly applaud anyone who gives them white bread.
At first sight, these things said in a realistic tone carry a great deal of weight. In fact, they only explain the mistake made by these intellectuals, teachers, engineers, businessmen who, as we have since learned, were at this very moment organizing the provisional White government for Petrograd—and who were to be shot less than a month later!
Like almost all arguments which are too realistic, this one is wrong. It is the argument of people who, lacking conviction and faith, cannot conceive of the power of a class which has achieved consciousness, and cannot understand that History is irreversible, that one cannot go against the stream, that the new principles have real force.
The apathetic and hostile inhabitants, even if ten times more numerous than the Communist proletariat, scarcely count because they represent the past, for they have no ideal. We—the Reds—despite hunger, mistakes, and even crimes—we are on our way to the city of the future.
Chaos, improvisation, doubt, anxiety
I have this great confidence. Nonetheless, when I think of the immediate danger, I feel somewhat shaken. Too much difficult or defective improvisation, too much disorder ends up by giving me a sense of impending rout. The liaison and information mechanisms are in a deplorable condition. The newspapers publish communiqués only twelve hours after rumors have circulated among the public; moreover, there are a mass of things they don’t say and those are precisely the most important ones, those which would enable us to estimate the extent of the danger.
In what could be called the “leading circles” around the executive committee of the soviet and the party committees, almost nothing is known. An appalling day!
The next morning when I arrive at the local headquarters—which in Gogol Street occupies a large grey-stone house, formerly the property of an insurance company—I find the pavement cluttered up with furniture, bundles of paper, and packets. Typists, messengers and orderlies are hurrying through the corridors, lugging about pieces of furniture and packages. Lorries are starting up with a great noise of motors, amid clouds of suffocating smoke. The headquarters is being moved. It is going to be installed at the Peter-Paul Fortress; it will certainly be more secure in the Tsar’s old citadel.
By chance I meet on a staircase the engineer Krasin. Tall, wearing a grey suit, detachable collar and cuffs, he is dressed respectably, smartly even. His face shows signs of age, with jagged features which were once handsome, and a solemn gaze; he looks like a businessman from Paris or London. What is known? I ask questions at random. Nobody knows anything about what happened during the night. The liaison center is already at the Peter-Paul Fortress.
But there the confusion of removal is even crazier. To find a particular section of the headquarters you have to run through all the buildings which are separated by broad paths, fortifications and courtyards planted with trees. The rooms are full of furniture piled up in complete confusion. Temporary notices in blue pencil on writing paper indicate: automobile department, office of the local commander, and other departments. But the one which centralizes information and draws up communiqués has got lost.
Nothing more is known at Smolny, where, since I’ve just come from the headquarters, I am keenly questioned. Nobody knows anything definite—except doubtless
the defense headquarters. That is the reality.
This morning’s Krasnaya Gazeta publishes the news that we have recaptured Gatchina during the night. I am confidentially informed that our troops are also once more occupying Tsarkoe Selo. At three o’clock I discover that none of this is true. The cannon can be heard intermittently. Yudenich is still at Gatchina.
The republic in danger
Yudenich is at Gatchina. Denikin, supplied by the Entente, is now treading the soil of Greater Russia. He has just advanced beyond Orel.
Orel is an old Russian city which no previous enemy had reached. From here on, right up to Tula and Moscow, there is no natural obstacle enabling serious resistance. This victorious offensive by the counter-revolution has, in less than two months, robbed us of the Crimea and the Ukraine. What forces can halt it? Trotsky was wrong, for the first time.
Our defensive struggle in Siberia is suffering the effects. I presume we have had to remove the best contingents from the troops on the Eastern front to send them into action on the Southern front. Will they get there in time?
Admiral Kolchak, who had been defeated in the Urals, is recovering as he feels us getting weaker. He has just driven us out of Tobolsk. Such is today’s news. Yudenich at Gatchina, Denikin at Orel, Kolchak at Tobolsk. The assault against the Russian Commune has been launched. For anyone who is aware of the extent of the hunger and the immense weariness of the masses, the danger appears to be enormous. Since the days of Brest-Litovsk, socialist Russia has not known a threat comparable to that of the present moment.
The impression overwhelms you. The ill-starred inevitability of events, danger everywhere, war, turning on every front to our disadvantage, and here, in the expectation of street fighting, disorganization, improvisation, lack of co-ordination, all the little mistakes, all the instances of neglect and inertia preparing perhaps for a terrible disaster.