by Ian Grey
In July, Kerensky had become prime minister, and with the support of the Excom had formed a new cabinet with a majority of moderate socialists. The challenge to Kerensky’s government came from the right. It was led by General Lavrenti Kornilov, a Cossack of proven bravery and ability, but his attempted coup collapsed without a shot fired.
This military challenge to the government and the threat of a reactionary dictatorship had rallied the whole city behind Kerensky. Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Bolsheviks formed a united front in the Soviet. The Bolsheviks were particularly active. With the committee’s approval, they enlisted an armed militia, which enabled them to expand the Red Guard to a strength of some 20,000 in Petrograd.
The Bolshevik party began growing in strength. The July Days and the denunciation of Lenin as a German agent had proved to be only minor setbacks. By the time of the Sixth Congress in August 1917, membership had increased to some 200,000. It was an impressive growth, but still, the party represented a tiny minority in the country as a whole and could claim the support of only 5.4 percent of the workers averaged over twenty-five towns. But, while insignificant in size, it was organized and disciplined, and in Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin it had exceptional leaders.
Still in hiding, Lenin was now in a frenzy of impatience. He was convinced that an insurrection, led by the party, and a dictatorship of the left were immediately possible. At a meeting early in September, the Central Committee had before it his demand that revolutionary detachments should arrest the government and seize power. The committee and the party as a whole believed he was recklessly inviting a repetition of the July Days. They were acutely nervous. Lenin’s proposed action was precipitous; the party and the country were not ready.
On October 20, Lenin slipped into Petrograd. With furious energy, he pressed on members of the Central Committee his arguments for immediate revolution. The committee held a secret meeting on October 23, attended by Lenin and Zinoviev, and there was heated debate on Lenin’s resolution that “an armed rising is inevitable and the time perfectly ripe.” Of the twenty-two members of the Central Committee, nine were absent, but finally, worn down by Lenin’s tireless argument, all present, except Kamenev and Zinoviev, voted for Lenin’s policy. The fact that he had a majority, no matter how slender, was enough. He considered now that the party was committed to action, and it would certainly happen before the Congress of Soviets began on October 25.
Lenin’s plan involved a tremendous gamble. He was counting on taking the government by surprise and on gaining popular support by promising prompt solutions to the problems of peace, bread, and the land. Kamenev and Zinoviev, who were not cast in a heroic mold, were alarmed. Stalin offered no opposition and supported this bid for power.
Meanwhile Kamenev and Zinoviev, apparently in a mood of panic, were publicizing their opposition and emphasizing the dangers involved. To Lenin and others, it was treason to oppose and to reveal Bolshevik intentions. It was all the more culpable since the party rank and file were increasingly alarmed by their warnings. This was more than Lenin could stand. He had returned to Finland, and from his hiding place there, he demanded that the Central Committee expel them from the party.
At a meeting of the committee on October 30, Trotsky advocated action against Kamenev and Zinoviev and branded them as traitors. He was not influenced by the fact that Kamenev was his brother-in-law; indeed, he was demonstrating that loyalty to the party stood far above personal relationships. Other members supported the case for severe punishment. It was Stalin who brought the note of moderation into the fury of the discussion. His argument in favor of tolerance flowed not from a passive, oil-on-troubled-waters attitude, nor from some incredibly farsighted realization that he might need the support of these two comrades in the future, but from a deep concern for the unity of the party at this critical time. Summarily expelling two comrades of long standing would cause discord and solve nothing. Kamenev and Zinoviev knew that they had acted irresponsibly, and they would not repeat their mistakes. After his intervention, the proposal to expel them was dropped. Then it was decided to remove Kamenev from the editorial board of Pravda. This, too, was dropped, when Stalin resigned in protest and the committee refused to accept his resignation.
After Lenin’s return to Finland, Trotsky took charge. He was chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, set up on October 25. Serving as the headquarters staff of the Revolution, this committee controlled the Red Guard and all military units in the city which supported the Bolsheviks. There was also a special military revolutionary “center,” consisting of five members, elected or appointed on October 29. Stalin, but not Trotsky, was a member of this center, which has been described as the real organizing force of the Revolution.
Trotsky was undeniably the leader and the driving force in all of the preparations and in the insurrection itself. Early on the morning of November 7, 1917, the Revolution began. Troops under the command of the Military Revolutionary Committee occupied key points throughout Petrograd. By early afternoon, the insurgents had control of the whole of the city, except the Winter Palace; it was taken during the evening.
The swift, almost bloodless, capture of Petrograd set a pattern which was followed throughout most of the country. The exceptions were the Cossacks of the Don, Kuban, and Orenberg regions who resisted Bolshevik attempts to take control, and the capture of Moscow, accomplished by the Red Guards only on November 15 after severe fighting.
On November 8, Lenin appeared at the session of the Congress of Soviets. He was acknowledged as leader of the Revolution in a resounding ovation. The fact that he had not directed the preparations or played any part in the momentous events of the previous day was evidently not held against him. Stalin’s contribution to the preparations is not known, but during the Revolution in Petrograd, he was said to have been at his desk in the party’s editorial offices. Again, as with Lenin, his absence from the scenes of action was not a cause of reproach. It is probable they stood back from the events so they would be ready to continue the struggle if the insurrection failed. It had not failed, but the two men who were to be responsible for Russia’s fortunes in the years ahead now had to learn the realities of power.
The Revolution, one of the most momentous events in history, had happened swiftly and almost without struggle.
Lenin and his supporters knew, however, that their position was precarious. The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets had approved the new government, but the people of Petrograd and throughout the country were confused. They accepted the coup because the Bolsheviks alone among the political parties seemed capable of positive action, and had promised to provide food, to solve the land problem, and to bring immediate peace. In the longer term, they were counting on the election of the Constituent Assembly, which would draft a constitution and bring to birth the new Russian republic. Only then, they believed, would order be truly restored and a new era of national prosperity launched.
One of Lenin’s first acts was to select a cabinet, known as the Council of People’s kommissars, or Sovnarkom. The fifteen kommissars included Lenin himself as president, Trotsky as kommissar for Foreign Affairs, Stalin for Nationalities, Lunacharsky for the People’s Education, Shlyapnikov for Labor, Aleksei Rykov for Home Affairs, and Vladimir Milyutin for Agriculture.
The congress formally appointed Lenin’s Council of People’s Kommissars by decree, and then elected a Central Executive Committee of 101 members. The Bolsheviks won sixty-two seats on this committee, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had formed a separate party, twenty-nine seats, and other parties ten. The Executive Committee was to exercise legislative powers when the congress was not in session. In practice, Sovnarkom was soon wielding both legislative and executive functions.
On November 8, Lenin appeared before the congress. It was a time of high excitement, and he received a “tumultuous welcome.” He read a proclamation, addressed to all peoples at war, calling for immediate peace without annexa
tions and without indemnities. Next he read a decree, abolishing private ownership of land “immediately and without purchase,” and providing for distribution of all land to those who cultivated it with their own labor. This was a reversal of policy, and it introduced the proposal made by Stalin as a temporary measure eleven years earlier in Stockholm. The All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Deputies debated a proposal to merge with the Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets and, after the walkout of the more conservative deputies, it approved the merger.
Lenin thus succeeded nominally in basing his government on the three main classes - workers, peasants, and soldiers. But he had not yet met the demand in Sovnarkom, in the Central Executive Committee, and within his own party for a coalition of all socialist parties. Right-wing Bolsheviks, in particular, were determined to force a coalition with the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. Zinoviev, Rykov, Milyutin, Vladimir Nogin, and Lunacharsky, who had all opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power but after its success had accepted office in Sovnarkom, now resigned. They and Kamenev also were even prepared to consider a Menshevik proposal that Lenin and Trotsky should be excluded from any coalition government. The agitation continued until, with the approval of the majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee, a statement, signed by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, threatened the agitators with expulsion from the party. The threat had a sobering effect, and the question of coalition was forgotten in the tide of shattering events that followed.
The Constituent Assembly presented another challenge. The elections were to begin on November 12, the date fixed earlier by the provisional government. Lenin had always proclaimed the vital importance of the Assembly. As the date of the elections approached, he was increasingly troubled.
The results were far worse than he had feared. The Bolsheviks won only 175 of the 707 seats. To Lenin and his close supporters, the result was unacceptable, and one to be corrected by guns and bayonets.
On January 5, 1918, the Constituent Assembly held its opening session in the Tauride Palace. The Bolshevik and Left Socialist Revolutionary deputies walked out of the chamber. On the following morning, when the deputies arrived to resume the session, Red Guards barred the entrance to the palace. A demonstration of Socialist Revolutionaries was dispersed by Red Guards with rifle fire. The Constituent Assembly, so long awaited and discussed, was in effect dissolved, and the people, in a mood of apathy, appeared unconcerned.
On the same day, the Central Executive Committee, appointed by the Congress of Soviets, which had a Bolshevik majority, approved the suppression of the Constituent Assembly. The justification was that it was an organ of counterrevolution. With their passion for at least a show of legality, the Bolsheviks, after rigging the elections, hurriedly convened a Third Congress of Soviets. By an overwhelming majority, this Congress approved the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly.
Stalin was directly involved in all of the major events of this time. He was already influential and indispensable to Lenin. He had signed the statement warning the right-wing members, who were agitating for coalition, and he had rejected the Menshevik proposal that Lenin and Trotsky should be excluded from a coalition government. He was to support Lenin strongly during the party crisis over the peace treaty with Germany. At the same time, he was demonstrating his capacity for handling numerous responsibilities.
His first task was to create the People’s Kommissariat for Nationality Affairs, known as Narkomnats. He was assisted by S. S. Pestkovsky, a Pole who had taken part in the October Revolution.
In a room in the Smolny Institute, Pestkovsky found a vacant table. He pushed it against the wall and pinned above it a piece of paper, inscribed “People’s Kommissariat for Nationality Affairs.” This table with two chairs provided the kommissariat’s first office.
Soon after becoming kommissar, Stalin attended the congress of the Finnish Socialist party in Helsinki. On November 14, he addressed the congress and declared solemnly that his government would honor its undertaking to the Finnish people. “Full freedom to shape their own life is given to the Finns as well as to the other peoples of Russia! A voluntary and honest alliance between the Finnish and the Russian peoples! No tutelage, no control from above, over the Finnish people! These are the guiding principles of the policy of the Council of People’s Kommissars.”
This was in accordance with “The Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia,” signed by Lenin and Stalin a few days after the Revolution. To his audience in Helsinki, Stalin’s speech was no doubt all the more impressive, because he came from one of the small oppressed nations of the Russian Empire. Subsequently, when reporting to the Central Executive Committee on the ratification of Sovnarkom’s decree, recognizing Finland’s independence, he deplored the fact that a bourgeois regime was in power. He went on to castigate the Finnish Social Democrat party for its “indecisiveness and incomprehensible cowardice” in failing to grasp power.
For the present, however, he stood firmly by the principle of national self-determination, although criticized by Nikolai Bukharin and other members for yielding to the bourgeois nationalism of the small nations. A few weeks later, at the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, he enunciated a change, stating that “the right of self-determination [was the right] not of the bourgeoisie but of the toiling masses of a given nation. The principle of self-determination ought to be used as a means in the struggle for socialism, and it ought to be subordinated to the principles of socialism.” This change was all the more necessary because most of the small nations had installed governments which were non-socialist and anti-Bolshevik.
In April 1918, he issued from Narkomnats an appeal to the Soviets of the national minorities under non-Bolshevik leadership. He pointed out that it was essential to free the people from bourgeois leadership and to convert them to the idea of Soviet autonomy. “It is necessary to elevate the masses to the level of the Soviet regime, and to fuse their best representatives with the latter. But this is impossible without autonomy of these outlying regions, that is without organizing local schools, local courts, local administration, local organs of authority, local sociopolitical and educational institutions with guaranteed full right of use of the local native language of the masses in all spheres of sociopolitical work.” This policy was soon to be interpreted in the slogan “national in form - socialist in content.”
In May 1918, when opening a preparatory conference on the creation of a Tatar-Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Republic, he expressed this centralist policy in forthright terms. A sovereign, “purely nationalist” form of autonomy would be disruptive and, indeed, anti-Soviet. The country needed “a strong Russian-wide state authority, capable of quelling conclusively the enemies of socialism and of organizing a new communist economy.” The central authority should, therefore, exercise all functions of importance, leaving to the autonomous regions the administrative, political, and cultural functions, which were regional in character.
Stalin was a member of the commission set up to draft the first constitution, which was adopted in July 1918, creating the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. The form of federalism with national territorial units which he advocated was embodied in his draft article eleven. At this time, however, the RSFSR had a treaty relationship with the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Transcaucasian Soviet republics. This was to be changed by the 1924 constitution, creating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Nationality affairs can have taken up only a small part of his time. On November 29, 1917, the Central Committee of the party had appointed a chetvërtka, or foursome, comprising Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Sverdlov, to exercise power in all emergency matters. According to Trotsky, this inner council became a troika, or threesome, because Sverdlov was too deeply involved in the work of the party secretariat to be available. Membership of this inner council and of Sovnarkom was for Stalin all the more demanding, because of Lenin’s reliance on him.
“Lenin could not get along without Stalin even for a single da
y,” Pestkovsky wrote. “Probably for that reason our office in the Smolny was under the wing of Lenin. In the course of the day, he would call Stalin out an endless number of times, or would appear in our office and lead him away. Most of the day Stalin spent with Lenin.”
In this early period, Sovnarkom met for five or six hours nearly every day, Lenin took the chair, and he drafted many of the decrees, which poured from these meetings. On December 29 and 30, decrees proclaimed “the eradication of every inequality in the army”; soldiers would in future choose their own officers and elect committees to supervise them. Marriage and divorce laws were relaxed; the legal equality of men and women was emphasized; illegitimate children would have the same rights as the legitimate. Numerous decrees disposed of private property. The nationalization of industry began. All banks were nationalized. The eight-hour working day became law with immediate effect. Workers, through their elected committees, were to have a decisive voice in the management of industry.
The old legal system was swept away, and new courts and revolutionary tribunals were set up. Lenin had expected for a long time that such tribunals, as well as a secret police, would be needed to deal with the enemies of the regime. In December, he entrusted to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, a Pole and a fanatic, the task of organizing the new All-Russian commission to fight counterrevolution and sabotage. Under its short name of Cheka, it became the dread secret arm of the regime, and it spawned as its successors the GPU, NKVD, MVD, and KGB. On February 5, 1918, a decree proclaimed the separation of church and state, and confirmed the right of every citizen to freedom of belief and worship. The Cyrillic alphabet was revised, and from February 1, the Gregorian calendar was introduced.