Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Lenin had no telephone at his hideaway, the apartment of Madame Fofanova, although Krupskaya went back and forth with Lenin’s paper and oral messages pressuring the Central Committee.240 Between October 10 and 25, Lenin would see Trotsky only once, on October 18, in the private apartment where he was hiding, but that once was enough; Trotsky, at the Central Committee on October 20, harshly condemned Stalin’s attempt at internal party peacemaker, and the members voted to accept Kamenev’s resignation. Trotsky, even more than the Central Committee, became the key instrument of Lenin’s will. Kerensky, for his part, had expelled the Bolsheviks from the Krzesinska mansion (“the satin nest of a court ballerina,” in Trotsky’s piquant phrase). They had taken up residence in a finishing school for girls of the nobility, Smolny Institute, even farther out on the eastern edge of the capital than the Tauride Palace. The Soviet, expelled from the Tauride, had relocated to Smolny as well. There, the Soviet’s central executive committee had approved—by a single vote (13 to 12)—the formation of a defensive Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), which the full Soviet approved on October 12.241 The rationale for the armed body—originally proposed by the Mensheviks—was to calm the roiling garrison and defend the capital against a German attack. But Trotsky, urged on by Lenin, would use the MRC on behalf of the Bolsheviks to shunt aside the carcass of the Provisional Government. Now, everything broke Lenin’s way.

  The Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets had been scheduled for October 20—a colossal stroke of lucky timing, and Trotsky hatched the brilliant idea of having a seizure of power simultaneously with the congress, appropriating a source of critical legitimacy while imposing a fait accompli on all other socialists.242 Many delegates seemed unlikely to make it to Petrograd on time, and on October 17–18, moderate socialists forced the Soviet’s central executive committee to postpone the congress until October 25—crucial for the Bolsheviks, who gained time to undertake coup preparations.243 (The Military Revolutionary Committee only held its first meeting on October 20.)244 “The Soviet government will annihilate the misery of the trenches,” Trotsky told an audience of soldiers and sailors on October 21, according to the eyewitness Sukhanov. “It will give the land and it will heal the internal disorder. The Soviet government will give away everything in the country to the poor and to the troops in the trenches. If you, bourgeois, have two fur coats, give one to a soldier. . . . Have you got a warm pair of boots? Stay at home. A worker needs them.” Sukhanov added: “A resolution was proposed that those present stand for the workers’ and peasants’ cause to their last drop of blood. . . . Who’s in favor? As one, the thousand-man audience shot their hands up.” A similar scene took place the next day, at the Cirque Moderne, where Trotsky enjoined the crowd to swear an oath of allegiance: “If you support our policy to bring the revolution to victory, if you give the cause all your strength, if you support the Petrograd Soviet in this great cause without hesitation, then let us all swear our allegiance to the revolution. If you support this sacred oath which we are making, raise your hands.”245 On the eve of the Second Congress of Soviets, on October 23, the Trotsky-led MRC asserted its exclusive claim to command the capital garrison and, through its commissars posted to garrison regiments, ordered them “to combat readiness.”246 Still, the MRC remained uncertain as to its next moves.

  Stalin, on the afternoon of October 24, informed a gathering of Bolshevik delegates who had arrived for the congress that two possible courses of action divided the MRC: one held that “we organize an uprising at once”; the other advised “that we consolidate our forces.” A party Central Committee majority, he indicated, tilted toward the latter, meaning wait and see.247 Kerensky came to the rescue, again, ordering the arrests of top Bolsheviks—people he had released following the Kornilov debacle—and shuttering two Bolshevik newspapers: Workers’ Path and Soldier (two rightist papers were also to be closed, in a balancing act). On October 24, in Stalin’s presence, a handful of military cadets and citizens’ militia destroyed the freshly printed newspaper copies and damaged the presses, but Stalin’s staff ran to Smolny with news of the attack and the MRC dispatched forces and got the presses rolling again.248 Preparations for defense of the revolution became offense. Rumors of “suspicious” troop movements in the city—“Kornilovites!”—goaded the Red Guards to occupy the rail stations, control the bridges, and seize the telegraph. When the government disconnected the phone lines to Smolny, the MRC seized the telephone exchange, had the lines reconnected, and disconnected the Winter Palace. When the lights in Smolny seemed to be experiencing trouble, Red Guards seized the electricity generating station. Trotsky would later quip that “it was being left to the government of Kerensky, as you might say, to insurrect.”249

  In fact, the Bolsheviks would have laid claim to power anyway—nothing stood in their way. They managed to be thoroughly confused and still seize power because the Provisional Government simply vanished, just as the vaunted autocracy had vanished.250 Red Guards—described as “a huddled group of boys in workmen’s clothes, carrying guns with bayonets”—met zero resistance and by nightfall on October 24 already controlled most of the capital’s strategic points.251 During that night, Kerensky sacked the commander of the Petrograd military district, Colonel Georgy Polkovnikov, but the latter ignored his own dismissal and used military channels to wire the general staff at headquarters: “I report that the situation in Petrograd is menacing. There are no street demonstrations or disorders, but systematic seizure of institutions and railroad stations, and arrests are going on. No orders are being carried out. The military school cadets are abandoning their posts without resistance . . . there is no guarantee that attempts will not be made to capture the Provisional Government.”252 The colonel was right, but just how many garrison troops and irregulars the Bolsheviks mustered that night remains unclear, perhaps as few as 10,000.253 General Alexeyev would later claim he had 15,000 officers in Petrograd, of whom one third were immediately ready to defend the Winter Palace, but that his offer was not taken up. (In the event, the officers got drunk.)254 The Petrograd garrison did not participate en masse in the Bolsheviks’ coup, but more important, they did not defend the existing order.255 General V. A. Cheremisov, commander of the nearby northern front, hounded by a military revolutionary committee formed near his headquarters, rescinded the orders previously given to the reinforcements who were supposed to relieve the Winter Palace.256 All that the hollow Provisional Government managed to muster in its defense were women and children: that is, an all-female “Death Battalion” (140 strong) and a few hundred unenthusiastic young military cadets, who were assisted by a bicycle unit; some stray Cossacks; and forty war invalids whose commander had artificial legs.257

  LENIN AND TROTSKY

  In October 1917 Russia counted 1,429 soviets, including 455 of peasant deputies, a formidable grassroots movement, but their fate to a great extent rested in the hands of two men. Lenin had headed for Smolny around 10:00 p.m. on October 24—in violation of a Central Committee directive to remain in hiding—donning a wig with fake bandages around his face. A military cadet patrol stopped him and his lone bodyguard, but, looking over the deliberately rumpled Bolshevik leader, decided not to detain what appeared to be a drunk. Without a pass, Lenin had to sneak his way into Smolny; once inside, he started screaming for an immediate coup.258 He was wasting his breath: the putsch was already well under way. But the next night, the Second Congress of the Soviets was delayed while Military Revolutionary Committee forces sat on their hands outside the largely unguarded Winter Palace; the congress could not wait any longer and finally opened at 10:40 p.m. Smolny’s colonnaded hall, formerly used for school plays, had filled up with between 650 and 700 delegates, who were barely visible through the haze of cigarette smoke. Somewhat more than 300 were Bolsheviks (the largest bloc), along with nearly 100 Left SRs, who leaned toward the Bolshevik side. More than 500 delegates recognized the time had come for “all power to the soviets,” but, confronted with a Bolshevik
fait accompli, many were angry, especially the moderate socialists.259 A frail and awkward Yuly Martov, leader of the Mensheviks, in a trembling and scratchy voice—signs of his tuberculosis (or the onset of cancer)—offered a resolution calling for a “peaceful solution” and immediate negotiations for an inclusive “all-democratic government.” Martov’s resolution passed unanimously, amid “roaring applause.”260 But then vociferous critics of Bolshevism rose to condemn their conspiracy to arrest the Provisional Government “behind the back of the Congress” and foment “civil war,” thereby prompting most Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary delegates to demonstrate their disapproval of the Bolsheviks by walking out. “Bankrupts,” Trotsky shouted at their heels. “Go where you belong—onto the trash pile of history.”261

  “Martov walked in silence and did not look back—only at the exit did he stop,” recalled his fellow Menshevik Boris Nicolaevsky. A young Bolshevik firebrand from the Vyborg district stunned the Menshevik leader by saying, “And we among ourselves had thought, Martov at least will remain with us.” Martov replied: “One day you will understand the crime in which you are complicit,” and waved his hand as he departed the hall in Smolny.262

  After months of open discussion in newspapers, barracks, factories, street corners, and drawing rooms, the Bolshevik putsch was over and done before the vast majority of the population knew it had happened. On October 25, trams and buses in Petrograd operated normally, shops opened for business, theaters put on their productions (Fyodor Chaliapin sang Don Carlos). Around the empire, whether in Kiev or Vladivostok, people had little or no inkling of events in the capital. Still, the flow of power to the soviets had long been unmistakable: already in summer 1917, the Kronstadt naval base had become a de facto minirepublic ruled by a soviet. The Tashkent soviet, while refusing to accept Muslims (98 percent of the local population) as members, had seized power before the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd.263 By September 1917, at the very latest, the issue was never the survival of the ghostly Provisional Government, but what would replace it in the capital? One contender might have been the August 1917 Moscow State Conference, a potentially (unelected) Constituent Assembly of the establishment, but such an opportunity, to the extent it had existed, was squandered. This left replacement by the Petrograd Soviet. In that regard, the critical issue was who would wield the upper hand at the Soviet? There, the climb in Bolshevik fortunes had been stunning. In Petrograd, as in most other towns with huge wartime garrisons, Kerensky’s suicidal June offensive, and his August encouragement and then betrayal of Kornilov, delivered the Soviet to the Bolsheviks. That meteoric political gain was consolidated by Trotsky’s idea to use the recently formed Military Revolutionary Committee to present the Second Congress of Soviets with the fait accompli of a Bolshevik seizure of power.264 But the socialist opponents of the Bolshevik coup unwittingly did the rest in their abandonment of the congress hall.265

  Later, much would be made of the “art of insurrection,” especially by Trotsky. Sometime after 2:00 a.m. that first night of the Congress of Soviets (October 25–26)—at a parallel special session of the Petrograd Soviet held during the congress—he announced that forces of the Petrograd Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee had finally located the Provisional Government ministers inside the Winter Palace, seated around a table waiting to be arrested. (Kamenev—the Bolshevik opponent of the Bolshevik coup—would inform the Congress of Soviets of the arrests.) Lenin had written out a proclamation on the transfer of power (signed “Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet”), which the grandiloquent Anatoly Lunacharsky read aloud to the congress, while repeatedly being interrupted by riotous cheers. After discussion the Left SRs in the hall agreed to support the decree with a minor change; a delegate of the Menshevik Internationalists, who had returned to the hall, asked for an amendment calling for a government of the broadest possible elements, but he was ignored. Around 5:00 a.m., the primarily Bolshevik and Left SR delegates remaining in the hall overwhelmingly approved the transfer of power: just 2 voted against, and 12 abstained.266 Around 6:00 a.m., some seven hours into the opening session, the delegates adjourned to get some rest. There was no functioning government. The MRC Bolsheviks had frog-marched the ex-ministers into the damp cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress, which until the Kornilov-Kerensky affair had been full of Bolsheviks.267 Red Guards, however, had never actually “stormed” the Winter Palace: they, finally, had just climbed unopposed through unlocked doors or windows, many going straight for the storied wine cellars, history’s most luxurious.268 Each new Red Guard detachment sent to prevent a ransacking instead got drunk, too. “We tried flooding the cellars with water,” the leader of the Bolshevik forces on site recalled, “but the firemen . . . got drunk instead.”269

  Crucially, however, Kerensky’s vainglorious relocation of himself and the ersatz “ministers” into the Winter Palace forever linked the Provisional Government with the seat of oppressive tsarism. This symbolic link would facilitate depictions of the October Bolshevik coup—via tales of a mythical storming of the Winter Palace—as a continuation of the overthrow of the old regime, thereby eliding the February and October revolutions.

  Lenin had still not even appeared at the Congress of Soviets. He finally emerged—to thunderous applause—around 9:00 p.m. on the night of October 26, after the opening of the second (and last) session, still in the ragtag disguise he had used to evade capture while crossing the capital to Smolny. (As part of his disguise, Lenin had taken to donning a worker’s cap, which he never relinquished, even as he continued to wear “bourgeois” suits.)270 “Lenin—great Lenin,” recorded John Reed. “A short, stocky figure with a big head set down on his shoulders, bald and bulging . . . dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers too long for him.”271 He was not widely recognized. Lenin was predominantly an ethnic Russian, but had German, Jewish, and Kalmyk ancestry as well. Born the same year as Kornilov, Lenin by now was solidly middle-aged. He “is short, broad-shouldered, and lean,” the St. Petersburg writer Alexander Kuprin observed. “He looks neither repellant, militant, nor deep-thinking. He has high cheekbones and slanting eyes. . . . The dome of his forehead is broad and high, though not as exaggerated as it appears in foreshortened photographs. . . . He has traces of hair on his temples, and his beard and moustache still show how much of a fiery redhead he was in his youth. His hands are large and ugly. . . . I couldn’t stop looking at his eyes . . . they are narrow; besides which he tends to screw them up, no doubt a habit of concealing short sight, and this, and the rapid glances beneath his eyebrows, gives him an occasional squint and perhaps a look of cunning.”272 Gleb Kryzanowski, a Bolshevik, recorded a similar impression of Lenin’s short stature and eyes (“unusual, piercing, full of inner strength and energy, dark, dark, brown”), but found his visage startlingly distinct, “a pleasant, swarthy face with a touch of the Asiatic.”273 Not as Asiatic in appearance as the diminutive Kornilov, nor as wiry, Lenin’s face was nonetheless partly Mongol.

  Lo and behold: here was Russia’s Kalmyk savior.

  The Bolshevik zealot read out a decree on immediate peace “to peoples and governments of all the warring powers,” interrupted by stormy applause and a singing of the “Internationale.”274 Lenin also read out a decree on land endorsing the peasants’ private and collective land seizures, instead of a state nationalization. To objections that the land decree contradicted the long-standing Bolshevik platform and had been lifted from the Socialist Revolutionaries—no longer present in the hall—Lenin replied, “Who cares who drafted it. As a democratic government we cannot ignore the feelings of the lower orders [narodnye nizy] although we do not agree with them.”275 The land decree was adopted without discussion.

  Lev Kamenev, the chairman of the Soviet’s central executive committee, had deftly withdrawn Trotsky’s sharply worded resolution condemning the Mensheviks and SRs for walking out at the first session of the congress. Before Lenin’s appearance, in between the first (October 25–26
) and second (October 26–27) sessions of the Congress of Soviets, Kamenev strenuously worked to agree a coalition government with the Left SRs, but the latter had balked at the exclusion of all the other socialists. And so, near the very end of the Congress of Soviets’ second and final session, around 2:30 a.m. (October 27), Kamenev announced the formation of a “temporary” exclusively all-Bolshevik government. Boris Avilov, a Menshevik Internationalist, stood up and predicted that an all-Bolshevik government could neither solve the food supply crisis nor end the war. He further predicted that the Entente would not recognize a Bolshevik-monopoly government and that the latter would be compelled to accept a separate and onerous peace with Germany. Avilov proposed inviting back those elected Soviet delegates who had walked out and, with them, forming an all-socialist democratic government. Avilov’s proposal failed, garnering only a quarter of the votes (150) of those present in the hall (600), despite considerable sympathy for this stance even among many Bolsheviks.276 It was Trotsky who most vehemently spoke against a deal with the “traitors.”277