Chairman
Vladimir Ulianov (Lenin)
Internal Affairs
A. I. Rykov
Agriculture
V. P. Miliutin
Labor
A. G. Shliapnikov
War and Navy
V. A. Ovseenko (Antonov)
N. V. Krylenko
P. E. Dybenko
Trade and Industry
V. P. Nogin
Enlightenment
A. V. Lunacharskii
Finance
I. I. Skvortsov (Stepanov)
Foreign Affairs
L. D. Bronstein (Trotsky)
Justice
G. I. Oppokov (Lomov)
Supply
I. A. Teodorovich
Post and Telegraphs
N. P. Avilov (Glebov)
Chairman for Nationality Affairs
I. V. Dzhugashvili (Stalin)
The existing Ispolkom was declared deposed and replaced with a new one, composed of 101 members, of whom 62 were Bolsheviks and 29 Left SRs. Kamenev was named chairman. In the decree establishing the Sovnarkom, drafted by Lenin, the Sovnarkom was made accountable to the Ispolkom, which thereby became something of a parliament with authority to veto legislation and cabinet appointments.
The Bolshevik high command, exceedingly anxious at this uncertain time not to appear to be preempting power, insisted that the decrees passed by the congress were enacted on a provisional basis, subject to approval, emendation, or rejection by the Constituent Assembly. In the words of a Communist historian:
In the days of October, the sovereignty of the Constituent Assembly was not denied … in all its resolutions [the Second Congress of Soviets] took the Constituent Assembly into account and adopted its basic decisions “until its convocation.”
217
While the Decree on Peace did not refer to the Constituent Assembly, in his report on it to the Second Congress, Lenin promised: “We will submit all the peace proposals to the Constituent Assembly for decision.”218 The provisions of the Land Decree were conditional as well: “Only the all-national Constituent Assembly can resolve the land question in all its dimensions.”219 As concerned the new cabinet, the Sovnarkom, a resolution which Lenin drafted and the congress approved stated: “To form for the administration of the country, until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, a Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government to be called Council of People’s Commissars.”220 Hence, it was logical for the new government, on its first day in office (October 27), to affirm that the elections for the Constituent Assembly would proceed as scheduled on November 12.221 Hence, too, by dispersing the Assembly on its first day, before it had had a chance to legislate, the Bolsheviks delegitimized themselves, even by their own definition.
The Bolsheviks made their initial concessions to legality only because they could not be certain what the future held in store. They had to allow for the possibility of Kerensky arriving momentarily in Petrograd with troops, in which case they would need the support of the entire Soviet. They ventured to violate legal norms openly only a week or so later, after it had become apparent that no punitive expeditions would materialize.
The one armed clash between pro-Bolshevik and pro-government troops for control of the capital occurred on October 30 at Pulkovo, a hilly suburb. Krasnov’s Cossacks, discouraged by lack of support and confused by Bolshevik agitators, after wasting three precious days in Tsarskoe Selo were finally persuaded to advance. They opened operations along the Slavianka River: here, 600 Cossacks confronted a force of Red Guards, sailors, and soldiers at least ten times larger.222 The Red Guards and soldiers quickly fled, but the 3,000 sailors stood their ground and carried the day. Having lost their field commander, the Cossacks retreated to Gatchina. This ended the possibility of any further military intervention on behalf of the Provisional Government.
In Moscow, things went awry for the Bolsheviks from the start: they could have ended in disaster had the government representatives displayed greater determination.
Moscow’s Bolsheviks had not prepared themselves for a power seizure because they sided with Kamenev and Zinoviev rather than Lenin and Trotsky: Uritskii told the Central Committee on October 20 that the majority of the Moscow delegates opposed an uprising.223
Having learned of the events in Petrograd on October 25, the Bolsheviks had the Soviet pass a resolution setting up a Revolutionary Committee. But whereas in the capital city the equivalent organization was under Bolshevik control, in Moscow it was intended as a genuine interparty Soviet organ and the Mensheviks, SRs, and other socialists were invited to join. While the SRs declined, the Mensheviks accepted the invitation but posed several conditions; these were rejected, whereupon they withdrew.224 Emulating the Petrograd Milrevkom, the Moscow Revolutionary Committee issued at 10 p.m. an appeal to the city’s garrison to be ready for action and obey only orders issued by it or carrying its countersignature.225
The Moscow Revolutionary Committee made its first move in the morning of October 26 by sending two commissars to the Kremlin to take over the ancient fortress and distribute weapons in its arsenal to pro-Bolshevik Red Guards. Troops of the 56th Regiment guarding the Kremlin obeyed, confused by the fact that one of these commissars was its own officer. Even so, the Bolsheviks were unable to remove the weapons because the Kremlin was soon encircled by iunkers, who gave them an ultimatum to surrender. When it was rejected, the iunkers attacked: a few hours later (6 a.m. on October 28) the Kremlin was in their hands.
Its capture gave the pro-government forces control of the city’s center. At this point, the officials charged with military and civilian authority could have crushed the Bolshevik uprising. But they hesitated, in part from overconfidence, in part from a desire to avoid further bloodshed. Fear of the “counterrevolution” also weighed on their minds. The Committee of Public Safety, headed by the city’s mayor, V. V. Rudnev, and the military command under Colonel K. I. Riabtsev, instead of arresting the Revolutionary Committee, entered into negotiations with it. These negotiations, which went on for three days (October 28–30), gave the Bolsheviks time to recover and bring in reinforcements from the industrial suburbs and nearby towns. The Revolutionary Committee, which during the night of October 28–29 had viewed its situation as “critical,”226 two days later felt confident enough to go on the offensive. Ultimately, the only inhabitants of Moscow willing to defend democracy turned out to be teenage youths from military academies, universities, and gymnasia who put their lives on the line without leadership or support from their elders.
The negotiations between the Committee of Public Safety and the Revolutionary Committee for a peaceful resolution of the conflict broke down at midnight, October 30–31, when the latter unilaterally terminated the armistice and ordered its units to charge.227 The forces on both sides seem to have been roughly equal, 15,000 men each. During the ensuing night, Moscow became the scene of fierce house-to-house fighting. Determined to recapture the Kremlin, the Bolsheviks attacked with artillery fire, which inflicted damage on its ancient walls. Although the iunkers acquitted themselves well, they were gradually squeezed and isolated by the Bolshevik forces converging from the suburbs. In the morning of November 2, the Committee of Public Safety ordered its forces to cease resistance. That evening it signed with the Revolutionary Committee an act of surrender by virtue of which it dissolved itself and its forces laid down arms.228
70. Cadets defending the Moscow Kremlin: November 1917.
71. Fires burning in Moscow during battle between loyal and Bolshevik forces: November 1917.
In other parts of Russia, the situation followed a bewildering variety of scenarios, the course and outcome of the conflict in each city depending on the strength and determination of the contending parties. Although Communist ideologists have labeled the period immediately following the October coup in Petrograd “the triumphal march of Soviet power,” to the historian the matter looks different: it was not “Soviet” but Bolshevik power that was
spreading, often against the wishes of the soviets, and it was not so much “triumphantly marching” as conquering by military force.
Because they followed no discernible pattern, it is next to impossible to describe the Bolshevik conquests outside the two capital cities.229 In some areas, the Bolsheviks joined hands with the SRs and Mensheviks to proclaim “soviet” rule; in others, they ejected their rivals and took power for themselves. Here and there, pro-government forces offered resistance, but in many localities they proclaimed “neutrality.” In most provincial cities local Bolsheviks had to act on their own, without directives from Petrograd. By early November, they were in control of the heartland of the Empire, Great Russia, or at any rate of the cities of that region, which they transformed into bastions in the midst of a hostile or indifferent rural population, much as the Normans had done in Russia a thousand years earlier. The countryside was almost entirely outside their grasp and so were most of the borderlands, which separated themselves to form sovereign republics. These, as we shall see, the Bolsheviks had to reconquer in military campaigns.
The vast majority of Russia’s inhabitants at the time had no inkling of what had happened. Nominally, the soviets, which since February had acted as co-regent, assumed full power. This hardly seemed a revolutionary event: it was rather a logical extension of the principle of “dual power” introduced during the first days of the February Revolution. Trotsky’s deception which disguised the Bolshevik power seizure as the transfer of power to the soviets succeeded brilliantly: looking back at the events of October, he rightly took pride in the skillful exploitation for Bolshevik ends of practices which the democratic socialists had introduced in February and March. The result of the deception was that the total break in government went virtually unnoticed, appearing merely as a “legal” resolution of yet another governmental crisis:
We term the uprising “legal” in the sense that it grew out of the “normal” conditions of dual power. When the appeasers [SRs and Mensheviks] were in charge of the Petrograd Soviet it happened more than once that the Soviet checked and corrected the government’s decisions. This [practice], as it were, formed part of the constitution of the regime known to history as “Kerenskyism.” We Bolsheviks, having taken power in the Petrograd Soviet, merely expanded and deepened the methods of dual power. We took it upon ourselves to check the order concerning the dispatch of the garrison [to the front]. In this manner, we concealed behind the traditions and practices of dual power what was a de facto rising of the Petrograd garrison. Moreover, by formally timing in our agitation the question of power to coincide with the moment of the Second Congress of Soviets, we developed and deepened the established traditions of dual power, preparing the framework of Soviet legality for the Bolshevik uprising on an all-Russian scale.
230
Part of the deception was to keep hidden the socialist objective of the October coup: no official document issued in the first week of the new regime, when it felt still very unsure of itself, used the word “socialism.” That this was deliberate practice and not oversight may be seen from the fact that in the original draft of the October 25 announcement declaring the Provisional Government deposed, Lenin had written the slogan “Long Live Socialism!” but then thought better of it and crossed it out.231 The earliest official use of “socialism” occurred in a document written by Lenin and dated November 2, which stated that “the Central Committee has complete faith in the triumph of the socialist revolution.”232
All this had the effect of lulling the sense that something drastic had happened, allaying public apprehension and inhibiting active resistance. How prevalent was ignorance of the meaning of the October coup may be illustrated by the reaction of the Petrograd Stock Exchange. According to the contemporary press, the Stock Exchange was “entirely unimpressed” by the change of regimes or even the subsequent announcement that Russia had had a socialist revolution. Although in the days immediately following the coup there was little trading in securities, prices held firm. The only indication of nervousness was the sharp fall in the value of the ruble: between October 23 and November 4, the ruble lost one-half of its foreign exchange value, declining from 6.20 to 12–14 to the U.S. dollar.233
The fall of the Provisional Government caused few regrets: eyewitnesses report that the population reacted to it with complete indifference. This was true even in Moscow, where the Bolsheviks had to overcome stiff opposition: here the disappearance of the government is said to have gone unnoticed. The man on the street seemed to feel that it made no difference who was in charge since things could not possibly get any worse.234
*Few subjects have aroused such interest among historians of the Russian Revolution, and the literature on it is correspondingly voluminous. The principal source materials have been published in D. A. Chugaev, ed., Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v avguste 1917g.: Razgrom Kornilov-skogo miatezha (Moscow, 1959), esp. 419–72, and Revoliutsiia, IV, passim. Kerensky’s account is in Deh Kornilova (Ekaterinoslav, 1918) (in English: The Prelude to Bolshevism, New York, 1919); Boris Savinkov’s, in K delu Kornilova (Paris, 1919). Of the secondary literature, especially informative are: E. I. Martynov’s partisan but richly documented Kornilov (Leningrad, 1927), P. N. Miliukov’s Istoriia Vtoroi Russkoi Revoliutsii, I, Pt. 2 (Sofia, 1921), and George Katkov’s The Kornilov Affair (London-New York, 1980).
*This is also the opinion of General Martynov, who observed these events at close range and studied the archival evidence: Kornilov, 100. Cf. N. N. Golovin, Rossiiskaia kontr-revoliutsiia v 1917–1918 gg., I, pt. 2 (Tallinn, 1937), 37.
*His conviction that the government was riddled with disloyal elements and possibly enemy agents was reinforced by the leak to the press of a confidential memorandum which he had submitted to the government at this time. The left-wing press published excerpts from it and launched against Kornilov a campaign of vilification: Martynov, Kornilov, 48.
*In private conversation with the author, Kerensky conceded that his actions in 1917 had been strongly influenced by the lessons of the French Revolution.
*According to the paper (No. 189, p. 3), the government believed this would be an all-out Bolshevik effort.
*The original deposition of Lvov, drawn up on September 14, 1917, is reproduced in Chugaev, ed., Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v avguste, 425–28. His recollections, published in PN in November and December 1920, are reprinted in A. Kerensky and R. Browder, eds., The Russian Provisional Government 1917, III (Stanford, Calif., 1961), 1558–68. After Vladimir Nabokov père wrote a letter to Poslednie novosti dismissing Lvov’s account of a conversation with him as “nonsense” (PN, No. 199, December 15, 1920, 3), their publication was terminated. Lvov returned to Russia in 1921 or 1922 and joined the renegate “Living Church.”
†Kerensky gave an account of his exchanges with Lvov to the commission investigating the Kornilov Affair on October 8, 1917. He later published it, with commentaries, in Delo Kornilova, 83–86.
‡This is the opinion of Golovin: Kontr-revoliutsiia, I, Pt. 2, 25. Lvov later claimed that he had requested and received from Kerensky authority to negotiate with his associates provided he acted with great discretion and in utmost secrecy: PN, No. 190 (December 4, 1920), 2. Given Kerensky’s subsequent activities, such behavior would not have been out of character. Even more likely is the connivance of Nekrasov, Kerensky’s closest adviser, who played a major role in exacerbating the conflict between the two men.
*Martynov, Kornilov, 84–85. In his deposition, Lvov said that Aladin’s memorandum represented “not my positions but Aladin’s conclusions from my words”: Chugaev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v avguste, 426.
*Accounts of this meeting: Kerensky, Delo Kornilova, 132–36, and Miliukov, Istoriia I, Pt. 2, 204–5. Miliukov talked to Lvov immediately before and after his meeting with the Prime Minister.
*Miliukov, Istoriia, I, Pt. 2, 213. Unlike Kerensky, Kornilov later admitted that he had acted thoughtlessly in not asking Kerensky to spell out what Lvov had conveyed to hi
m on his behalf: A. S. Lukomskii, Vospominaniia, I (Berlin, 1922), 240.
†He spent the night in a room adjoining the Alexander III suite occupied by the Prime Minister, who kept him awake bellowing operatic arias. He was later placed under house arrest and treated by a psychiatrist: Izvestiia, No. 201 (October 19, 1917), 5.
* Revoliutsiia, IV, 99. According to Savinkov, between 9 and 10 p.m.—that is, before the cabinet had met—Kerensky told him it was too late to reach an understanding with Kornilov because the telegram dismissing him had already gone out: Mercure de France, No. 503 (June 1, 1919), 439
*Golovin, Kontr-revoliutsiia, I, Pt. 2, 35. Nekrasov, the eminence grise of Kerensky’s regime and a thoroughly sinister figure, throughout 1917 pushed the Prime Minister leftward. A professor of engineering at the Tomsk Polytechnic and a leading figure on the left wing of the Kadet Party, he was involved on January 1, 1918, in an unsuccessful attempt on Lenin’s life. The would-be assassins were pardoned, following which Nekrasov went into Bolshevik service under an assumed name. His identity was eventually discovered and he seems to have been imprisoned (N. Iakovlev, I Avgusta 1914, Moscow, 1974, 226–32).
†A businessman with political ambitions, Zavoiko was the counterpart of Nekrasov, pushing Kornilov toward the right: on him, see Martynov, Kornilov, 20–22.
*Zinaida Gippius thus depicts the encounter between Kornilov’s cavalry and the units sent from Petrograd to intercept them: “There was no ‘bloodshed.’ Near Luga and in some other places, the divisions dispatched by Kornilov and the ‘Petrograders’ ran into each other. They confronted each other, uncomprehending. The ‘Kornilovites’ were especially amazed. They had gone to ‘defend the Provisional Government’ and encountered an ‘enemy’ who had also gone to ‘defend the Provisional Government.’ … So they stood and pondered. They couldn’t understand a thing. But recalling the teaching of frontline agitators that ‘one should fraternize with the enemy,’ they fervently fraternized”: Siniaia kniga (Belgrade, 1929), 181; diary entry of August 31, 1917.
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