As Cromwell had put it, “we are at the threshold;—and therefore it becomes us to lift up our heads, and … endeavor this way; not merely to look at that Prophecy … and passively wait.” What was needed was the constant reading of the signs and feverish work everywhere without exception. “In the depths of the popular masses,” wrote Bukharin on June 6, “there is a permanent process of fermentation, which, sooner or later, will manifest itself.” The surest sign of the approaching end was the emergence of two clearly branded armies. “The bourgeoisie is emerging as a force bringing death and putrefaction; the proletariat, as the carrier of life-creating energy, is marching ahead.” On July 30, at the Sixth Party Congress, Bukharin suggested that the peasant as property owner had entered into a temporary alliance with the bourgeoisie; his friend Osinsky (who, during the congress, was camped out next to him on the floor of a friend’s apartment) responded by saying that the Communist Manifesto had predicted otherwise; but Stalin explained that there were different kinds of peasants and that the poor ones were “following the bourgeoisie because of their lack of consciousness.” On October 17, one week after the Bolshevik Central Committee, chaired by Sverdlov, made the decision to stage an armed uprising, Bukharin wrote: “Society is inexorably splitting into two hostile camps. All intermediary groups are rapidly melting away.” All that was needed was one last burst of feverish activity.29
“In the days of the last coalition,” wrote the Menshevik N. N. Sukhanov, “the Bolsheviks demonstrated colossal energy and engaged in feverish activity throughout the country” (including his own apartment, where, secretly from him, his Bolshevik wife hosted the “uprising meeting” of the Central Committee). On October 21, Sukhanov listened to Trotsky speak about peace, land, and bread.30
The mood around me bordered on ecstasy. It seemed that, without any command or prior agreement, the crowd might suddenly burst into some kind of religious hymn…. At one point, Trotsky formulated a short general resolution or proclaimed a general formula to the effect that “we will defend the cause of the workers and peasants to the last drop of blood.”
“Who’s in favor?”
The crowd of thousands raised its hands as one man. I could see the raised hands and burning eyes of all the men, women, adolescents, workers, soldiers, peasants, and petit bourgeois. Were they in a state of spiritual fervor? Could they see, through the slightly raised curtain, a corner of that “holy land” they had been longing for?31
Two days earlier, after a different Trotsky speech, Sukhanov and his wife missed their streetcar. It was late at night, and the rain was pouring down; Sukhanov was in a bad mood because of the streetcar and the rain—and because Trotsky had said that the rumors of an imminent uprising were inaccurate insofar as they were not accurate. At last, they were able to catch a streetcar that would take them part of the way home.
I was extremely angry and sullen as I stood in the back of the streetcar. Next to us was a small, modest-looking man in glasses, with a black goatee and radiant Jewish eyes. Seeing my anger and sullenness, he seemed to want to try to cheer me up, comfort me, or distract me with some kind of advice about which route to take, but I responded curtly and monosyllabically.
“Who was that?” I asked my wife when we got off the streetcar.
“That was Sverdlov, one of our old Party men and a Duma member.”
Despite my bad mood, I am sure I would have cheered up and had a good laugh if I had been told that within two weeks this man would become the official head of the Russian Republic.32
■ ■ ■
Most accounts of the October takeover in Petrograd center around Smolny Palace, former home to the Institute of Noble Maidens, which, since August, had housed the Petrograd Soviet and Bolshevik military headquarters. “The whole of the revolution was taking place in Smolny” (as well as, possibly, in the workers’ suburbs), wrote Sukhanov. “Everywhere, armed groups of sailors, soldiers, and workers could be seen scurrying around. There was always a line of peasant emissaries and army unit delegates winding its way up the stairs to the third floor, where the Military-Revolutionary Committee was located.”33
“The whole of Smolny was brightly lit up,” wrote Lunacharsky, an old friend of Sukhanov’s. “Excited crowds scurried up and down the halls. All the rooms bubbled over with life, but the highest human tide, a truly passionate blizzard, was raging in the corner of the upstairs hall, where, in the back room, the Military-Revolutionary Committee held its meetings.… Several completely exhausted girls were coping heroically with the indescribable upsurge of people with requests, complaints, and demands. If you got caught up in that whirlpool, you could see all the excited faces and the many hands reaching out for a directive or a written order.”34
Mikhail Koltsov’s “October” offers a faithful restaging of his “March in February”:
In the evening twilight, the heavy shape of Smolny, with its three rows of lit-up windows, could be seen from far away.
Hurrying along the wide, hard, frost-covered road and dipping occasionally into potholes, soldiers and sailors, civilians with raised collars and squeaky galoshes, rattling automobiles and motorcycles all streamed toward the stone cavern of the main entrance.
… Pressing forward in a nervous, jostling throng, they could not be contained within the walls of the building; they kept streaming in and then seething ponderously and eerily, before finally spilling over.
It used to be quiet inside with schooldames walking solemnly by in soft kid shoes, quick-footed daughters of doomed rulers running up and down stairs, and, every so often, gold-embroidered old men with empty eyes floating by in clouds of reverent whispers.
But now it was full of noise. Orders rang out and the hundred feet of a changing guard tramped by under the black arches. Patrols, crews, and pickets flowed out in thick gray streams.
… Comrades! To the Winter Palace!35
The canonical memory of the October Revolution, like that of its February precursor and French model, was about moving from one building to another—until such time as “the city of pure gold, like transparent glass,” could be built. This time the flood swept into Smolny, surged up to the third floor, whirled around the entrance to the Military-Revolutionary Committee office, and then flowed, in orderly streams, toward the Winter Palace, where old men with empty eyes sat waiting. A member of the bureau of the Military-Revolutionary Committee, Nikolai Podvoisky, remembered guiding “the stormy stream” toward the palace and watching it “flood the porch, entrances, and stairways.” Having sent the arrested government ministers to the Peter and Paul Fortress, he returned to headquarters and found Lenin writing a decree on land. “No sooner had the reign of the bourgeoisie been toppled by armed people in the Winter Palace than Lenin began turning the first page of the emerging new world in Smolny.”36
Nikolai Podvoisky
In Trotsky’s account, around that time or perhaps a little later, Lenin looked at him “in a soft, friendly way and with an awkward shyness that suggested a desire for intimacy. ‘You know,’ he said hesitantly, ‘after all the persecutions and a life underground, to come to power …’—he was searching for the right word, and suddenly switched to German, making a circular motion around his head: ‘es schwindelt’ [it makes one’s head spin].”37
According to Lunacharsky, who was also in Smolny in those days, some people were afraid that “the peasant sea was going to open up and swallow us,” but “Lenin faced the enormous challenges with astonishing equanimity and took hold of them the way an experienced pilot would take hold of the helm of a giant ocean liner.” Lunacharsky wrote this in 1918, on the first anniversary of what had already become “the October Revolution” and in the certainty that Smolny would be turned into “the temple of our spirit.” But even in the midst of the revolution, on October 25, 1917, when he still had no idea what was happening around the Winter Palace, preferred a “democratic coalition” to a Bolshevik takeover, and thought the chances of victory were “dim and bleak,” he had written to h
is wife, “These are frightening, frightening days on a knife-edge. They are full of suffering and worries and the threat of a premature death. And yet still it is wonderful to live in a time of great events, when history does not trot along lazily and sleepily, but flies like a bird into unknown territory. I wish you were here with me, but thank god you are not.”38
Arkady Rozengolts
In the event, nothing frightening actually happened. (“The ease with which the coup was carried out came as a surprise to me,” wrote Lunacharsky two days later.) It was in Moscow, where the government forces put up some resistance, that the fate of the revolution was decided. According to Arosev, who, as one of the very few Bolsheviks with formal military training, had been put in charge of military headquarters, “that great uprising of the human mass in the name of humanity began simply and without hesitation—exactly the way the old books describe the creation of the world.” It began in a small room on the third floor of the Governor General’s (Soviet) Building. “One might have thought that it was not a room but a stage represention of a room, in which a fierce battle of the cigarette butts had taken place the previous night.” The secretary of the Military-Revolutionary Committee, Arkady Rozengolts, who could “make revolution with the same ease and inspiration with which a poet writes poetry,” ordered Arosev to occupy the telegraph, telephone exchange, and post office, and then quietly disappeared. “It was as if he had inhabited those rooms for hundreds of years, like an eternal ghost, for he knew where everything was and seemed to move from one room to another through the walls.”39
Arosev found the commander of the Moscow Red Guards, A. S. Vedernikov, and the two of them set off to carry out the order:
Comrade Vedernikov and I emerged from the Soviet Building onto Skobelev Square. It felt strange: all the people in the square were scurrying about as usual, all rushing someplace and worried about something, just like the day before, or the day before that. Two newspaper boys were loitering near the Skobelev Monument, and a young lady was haggling with a cabby. Everything was just as it always was.
“Do you have a revolver?” Vedernikov asked me.
“No.”
“Me neither. We’ve got to find one. Let’s go to the Dresden and see if one of the comrades can give us something.”
Everything all around was so peaceful, and we weren’t being attacked by anyone. The uprising in Petrograd had already taken place, and half the ministers were in prison, so why did we need a revolver? Comrade Vedernikov’s going off in search of a gun reminded me of a silly comedy in which the characters think they are more important than they actually are.”40
Vedernikov found a gun, and the two of them went to the Pokrovsky Barracks, where Arosev made a short speech, and one company agreed to join them. Within two hours the telegraph, telephone exchange, and post office had all been occupied. The great uprising of the human mass in the name of humanity had begun.
In Moscow, the enemy were the students of Moscow’s military schools, who had professional officers and a strong sense of duty, but no organized support, no single command, and—most important for Arosev—no address they could call their own. “While the Bolsheviks had one organization that was preparing to seize power—the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies with its executive offices in the right wing of the Soviet Building—the government, which was fighting for its existence, had several command centers … that vied with each other for supremacy.” After the Bolsheviks formed the Military-Revolutionary Committee and demanded full power, the non-Bolshevik members of the Soviet moved out of the building and “found themselves without a territorial center.” The great uprising of the human mass had acquired a home. “Its address had to be known to people in the districts, to regional commanders, scouts, and others.”41
The military headquarters, headed by Arosev, moved into a small ground-floor room facing a side street (the Chernyshev/Voznesensky Alley); the Military-Revolutionary Committee moved in next door; and the adjoining room became the secretariat, where young women issued permits and screened visitors, and where, according to one of the women, there were always “thick throngs of people pushing and shoving.” The rest of the building was “one long barracks.” Or rather, “it was a soldiers’ anthill,” with detachments “in constant circulation: from the soviet to their positions at the battle sites and then back to the soviet to rest.”42
The soviet building was Moscow’s Smolny, but there was no Moscow Winter Palace. The Kremlin changed hands twice, but there was no one there to topple. There were no “White forces,” either: groups of cadets attacked or defended various buildings looking for a tactical advantage but without any overall plan. There were times, wrote Arosev, when “it seemed as if the earth were shaking beneath our feet, our arms and feelings growing numb, and we, along with our soldiers, sliding along a knife’s edge, frightful and fateful, with victory on one side and death, on the other.” Most of the fighting, however, took place far from the soviet building, closer to the river and especially around the bridges connecting the city center to Trans-Moskva.43
The Swamp was solidly pro-Bolshevik. The soldiers guarding the Main Electric Tram Power Station had handed their weapons over to the local Red Guards, who posted their detachments on the station towers, in the Salt Yard, and at the entrance to the Big Stone Bridge. The soldiers quartered at the Einem candy factory and Ivan Smirnov vodka distillery had given them a machine gun, which they placed on top of the bellfry of St. Nicholas. A field phone connected the station to the Gustav List plant, which provided the largest Red Guard detachment in the area (between forty and one hundred men). Some of the armed Gustav List workers were sent to guard the bridges; others converted the riverside bathhouse into a fortified bunker. “We used to shoot at the Kremlin through holes we had made in the stone wall, either from a standing or lying position, and sometimes we had to take turns because there weren’t enough guns to go around,” remembered one of them. “It was even easier at night because we could aim at the different colored lantern flashes that must have been some kind of signals from the cadets who were running along the top of the wall to their lines below.”44
After a week of fighting, the last loyalist bastion, the Alexander Military College, just up the street from the Big Stone Bridge, laid down its arms. In the small room occupied by the Military-Revolutionary Committee, Rozengoltz asked Arosev, who was sitting on the couch next to him, to write an order appointing Nikolai Muralov commissar of the Moscow Military District.
“Commissar or Commander?” I asked.
“District Commissar—but it’s the same as commander.”
“Commander,” “Commissar,” I thought, not really comprehending how such an important thing could be done so simply. All I needed to do was scribble down “hand over” and “appointed,” put it to a vote, and, lo and behold, you have a new government. It was hard to believe….
But that is just what I did. I scribbled it down. A girl typed up the order. It was put to a vote, and Comrade Muralov became not simply Muralov, but District Commander….
This is how the new military government was created—simply and naturally. Or rather, it was not created, but born, and, as with any natural birth, washed in blood.45
Arosev spent much of the rest of his life remembering that day. In the 1932 version of his memoir, he wrote:
During those nights when no one slept and each thought we might come out victorious or might all be slaughtered, it occurred to me that no matter what was written in literature or what was created by an author’s imagination, nothing could be as powerful as this simple and austere reality. People were actually fighting for socialism. The socialism we used to dream and argue about was finally manifesting itself—in the flashing bayonets of the soldiers and raised collars of the workers swarming down Tverskaia, Arbat, and Lubianka Streets, gripping their Mausers and Parabellums and continuously advancing, tramping down harder and harder on the chest of the decaying, stinking bourgeoisie, that was infecting the weak ev
er so slightly with the smell of its decomposition. I have read almost everything lofty and solemn that we have in our old and new literature, looking in vain for something akin to the feeling we had on that cloudy morning when, in our trench coats smelling of rain and gunpowder, we climbed into an old, beat-up military car to be driven to headquarters as the new power.46
Meanwhile, Rachmaninoff was sitting in his apartment on Strastnoy (Christ’s Passion) Boulevard, a short walk from Skobelev Square. According to his wife, “he was busy revising his First Piano Concerto and was concentrating on his work. Because it was dangerous to turn the light on, the curtains in his study, which faced the courtyard, were drawn, and he was working by the light of a single candle.” As he told his biographer in 1933, “I sat at the writing-table or the piano all day without troubling about the rattle of machine-guns and rifle-shots. I would have greeted any intruder with the answer that Archimedes gave the conquerors of Syracuse.” Many people around him “were hoping that each new day would, at last, bring them the promised heaven on earth,” but he was not one of them. “I saw with terrible clearness that here was the beginning of the end—an end full of horrors the occurrence of which was merely a matter of time.” Three weeks later, he and his family left for Petrograd. On December 20, he went to Smolny to request exit visas. On December 23, he and his wife and two daughters arrived at the Finland Station and boarded the Stockholm train (probably the same one that had brought Lenin to Russia). He died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 28, 1943. His wish to have Nunc dimittis (“Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,” op. 37, no. 5) sung at his funeral could not be fulfilled. According to Rachmaninoff’s biographer, who cites a letter from the composer’s sister-in-law, “the choir was thought unable to cope and in any case the sheet music was not available at the time.”47
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