A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  Unwilling to wait for the All-Russian Soviet Congress, Lenin pinned his hopes on the Northern Regional Congress of Soviets, which met in Petrograd on II—13 October. As Latsis recalled, 'the plan was that it would declare itself the government, and this would be the start'. Lenin had close ties with the Bolshevik leaders of the Baltic region: it was they who had convened the Northern Regional Congress and arranged for it to be held in Petrograd rather than Helsingfors. Lenin had spent the summer in the Baltic region and had come to see it as a vital launching base for the revolution in Russia as well as the rest of Europe. He was especially impressed by the revolutionary zeal of the Latvians: they made up his personal bodyguard and, during the early days of Soviet rule, the bulk of the leading Chekists and Red Army elite (Latsis, Eiduck, Peters, Smilga). The Bolsheviks in Riga had effectively controlled their Soviet from as early as August, and Lenin now looked towards them to import the principle of Soviet power into Russia.* In a letter to Smilga, one of his closest associates

  * So much for the idea that Soviet power was always exported from Russia.

  during his summer of exile, Lenin had made it clear that he saw the Petrograd insurrection as a military invasion from the Baltic region. 'It seems to me', he had written on 17 September, 'that we can have completely at our disposal only the troops in Finland and the Baltic Fleet and that only they can play a serious military role.' The Northern Regional Congress was to provide the signal for this invasion. Smilga had organized it at Lenin's urging and had assumed the role of its chairman. The Bolshevik delegates arrived fully armed and clearly assuming that it would become the centre for an uprising. But Lenin was once again frustrated: the majority of the delegates passed Kamenev's cautious resolution to leave the creation of a Soviet government to the All-Russian Congress, due to convene on 20 October. Even in the Baltic, Lenin's own preferred vanguard region, it seems there was no mass support for an insurrection on the call of the party.2

  The same conclusion was suggested by the evidence presented to a meeting of the Central Committee on 16 October. The representatives of the Bolshevik Military Organization, the Petrograd Soviet, the trade unions and factory committees who attended this meeting all warned of the risks involved in staging an uprising before the Soviet Congress. Krylenko stated the view of the Military Organization that the soldiers' fighting spirit was falling: 'they would have to be stung by something, such as the break-up of the garrison, to come out for an uprising'. Volodarsky from the Petrograd Soviet confirmed the 'general impression . . . that no one is ready to rush out on to the streets but that everyone will come out if the Soviet calls'. Colossal unemployment and the fear of dismissal held the workers back, according to Shmidt of the trade unions. Shliapnikov added that even in the metalworkers' union, where the party's influence was dominant, 'a Bolshevik rising is not popular and rumours of this even produce panic'. Kamenev drew the logical conclusion: 'there is no evidence of any kind that we must begin the fight before the 20th [when the Soviet Congress was due to convene]'. But Lenin was insistent on the need for immediate preparations and saw no reason to hold back in the cautious reports on the mood of the Petrograd masses: in a military coup d'etat, which is how he conceived of the seizure of power, only a small force was needed, provided it was well armed and disciplined enough. Such was Lenin's towering influence over the rest of the party that he got his way. A counter-resolution by Zinoviev prohibiting the actual staging of an uprising before the Bolshevik delegates to the Soviet Congress had been consulted was defeated by 15 votes to 6, though the closeness of the vote, compared with the 19 to 2 majority in favour of Lenin's much vaguer call for an uprising in the immediate future, does suggest that several Bolshevik leaders had serious apprehensions about the wisdom of an insurrection before the Soviet Congress, albeit not enough to make an open stand against the great dictator.3 That, after all, would take some courage.

  At the end of the meeting Kamenev declared that he could not accept its resolution, which in his view would lead the party to ruin, and submitted his resignation to the Central Committee in order to make his campaign public. He also demanded the convocation of the Party Conference, which Lenin had managed to get postponed: there was little doubt that it would oppose the call for an uprising before the Soviet Congress. On 18 October Kamenev aired his views in Gorky's newspaper, Novaia zhizn'. 'At the present', he wrote, 'the instigation of an armed uprising before and independent of the Soviet Congress would be an impermissible and even fatal step for the proletariat and the revolution.' This of course was to let the cat out of the bag: rumours of a Bolshevik coup had been spreading for weeks, and now the conspiracy had finally been exposed. Trotsky was forced to deny the rumours in the Petrograd Soviet, but for once his performance was less than convincing. Lenin was furious and, in a sign of the sort of purges to come, denounced Kamenev and Zinoviev in the Bolshevik press. 'Strike-breaking', 'betrayal', 'blacklegs', 'slanderous lies' and 'crime' — such terms were littered throughout the angry letters he sent on 18 and 19 October. 'Mr Zinoviev and Mr Kamenev' (this was the ultimate insult — they were now no longer even 'comrades') should be 'expelled from the party'.4 Such were the actions of a tyrant.

  By publishing these letters, Lenin was taking the campaign for an uprising into the public domain. He had always based his argument for a preemptive seizure of power (before the Soviet Congress) on the danger — which he either overestimated or (more likely) invented — that the Provisional Government might not allow the Congress to convene. All the local party reports made it clear that, while the Petrograd workers and soldiers would not come out on the call of the party alone, many would do so if the Soviet was threatened. This had been true since the Kornilov crisis, when the popular notion that a 'counterrevolution' still lurked in the shadows of Kerensky's regime had first taken root. If the Bolsheviks were to get their supporters on to the streets once again, they would have to convince them that the Soviet was in danger. Their opponents did this for them.

  With the Bolshevik conspiracy public knowledge, the Soviet leaders resolved to delay the Soviet Congress until 25 October. They hoped that the extra five days would give them the chance to muster their supporters from the far-flung provinces. But it merely gave the Bolsheviks the extra time they needed to make the final preparations for their uprising. Moreover, it lent credibility to their charge that the Soviet leaders were planning to ditch the Soviet Congress altogether. It is certainly true that they had regrets about calling it in the first place: when they had done so, at the time of the Democratic Conference, the swing to the Bolsheviks had not yet been fully apparent; but as the Congress approached, they realized that defeat stared them in the face.

  Perhaps the Soviet leaders would have been better advised to concentrate their efforts on demanding strong repressive measures to counter the Bolshevik threat. The truth was that, even with a majority at the Soviet Congress, their paper resolutions would not be enough to fend off the bayonets of the Bolsheviks. But the Mensheviks and SRs were precluded from taking such measures by their feelings of comradeship with the Bolshevik Party. They could not forget that only months before they had been fellow-fighters in the revolutionary underground (and could not see diat only months ahead they would become the victims of the Bolshevik Terror). They limited themselves to questions aimed at putting the Bolsheviks on the spot. They stamped their feet and demanded that the Bolsheviks declared their plans before the Soviet. 'I want a yes or no answer,' insisted Dan, as if the Bolsheviks were likely to give it.5

  Kerensky's own conduct was equally short-sighted. During the final weeks of the Provisional Government his behaviour began to resemble that of the last Tsar: both men refused to recognize the revolutionary threat to their own authority. With Nicholas such complacency had stemmed from hopeless despair and fatalistic resignation; but with Kerensky it was rather the result of his own foolish optimism. Kerensky's nationwide popularity during the early days of the revolution had gone to his head. He had come to believe in his own 'providentia
l calling' to lead 'the people' to freedom and, like the Tsar confined to his Winter Palace, was sufficiently removed from their real situation not to question this faith. Like Nicholas, he surrounded himself with devoted admirers who dared not speak their mind; and kept his cabinet weak by constant talk of reshuffles. He had no idea of — or no wish to know — the true extent of his own unpopularity.

  No doubt he had not heard the joke circulating round the country during the final weeks of his regime: 'Q: What is the difference between Russia today and at the end of last year? A: Then we had Alexandra Fedorovna [the Empress], but now we have Alexander Fedorovich [Kerensky].' The isolation of the Prime Minister was almost complete. The people's hero of the spring had become their anti-hero by the autumn. There were widespread rumours of his 'moral corruption' (just as there had been of the Romanovs): of his fine living in the Winter Palace; of his love affair with Elena Biriukova, his wife's cousin, who lived with the Kerenskys in the palace; of his constant drunkenness; and of his addiction to morphine and cocaine. Friends and acquaintances would ring Kerensky's wife to express their deepest sympathy. 'I could not understand why they were being so solicitous,' she later recalled, 'but then it turned out that there was some story in the left-wing press that Kerensky had left his wife and had run off with some actress.' It was falsely rumoured that Kerensky was a Jew, which in the climate of anti-Semitism that ran throughout the revolutionary era was highly damaging to his popular image. Kerensky himself recalled that when

  he fled the Winter Palace, just before the Bolshevik seizure of power, he saw the following ironic graffiti written on a wall: 'Down with the Jew Kerensky, Long Live Trotsky!' It was also rumoured that Kerensky liked to dress in women's clothes. There was much that was rather feminine in Kerensky's physique and gestures (Gippius called him her 'girlish revolutionary'), and this made him appear weak to many of the workers, in particular, who contrasted him unfavourably with the muscular masculinity of the Bolsheviks. Later it was even rumoured that when Kerensky had fled the Winter Palace he had been dressed in the outfit of a nurse/1

  It was not just on the streets that Kerensky lost his credibility. The Western Allies, who had always been his strongest supporters, also turned against him after the Kornilov crisis. The British Foreign Ministry was clearly taken in by the rumours about his private life. It was under the absurd impression that his secretary, David Soskice, was a German agent and a Bolshevik, and that Kerensky himself was about to conclude a separate peace with Germany. Nabokov, the Provisional Government's representative in London, thought that the British had decided to wash their hands of Kerensky, believing him to be on his way out', once Kornilov's reforms had been jettisoned.7

  Even among the democratic intelligentsia, where he had once been hailed as a popular hero, Kerensky was now reviled. His oldest patron, the poetess and salon hostess Zinaida Gippius, wrote in her diary on 24 October: 'Nobody wants the Bolsheviks, but nobody is prepared to fight for Kerensky either.' This just about sums it up. Brusilov, who since his dismissal as Commander-in-Chief had become an advocate of the need to raise a civilian militia in order to fight the Bolsheviks, found that he could muster neither volunteers nor money to buy mercenaries. Everybody cursed the Bolsheviks but nobody was prepared to do anything about them. The bourgeoisie and the Rightist groups would have nothing more to do with the Provisional Government, and even welcomed its demise. Nobody wanted to defend it, least of all the monarchists. They preferred to let the Bolsheviks seize power, in the belief that they would not last long and would bring the country to such utter ruin that all the socialists would be discredited, whereupon the Rightists would impose their own dictatorship.8

  Kerensky remained oblivious to his declining fortunes. He continued to trust in the support of 'the people' — was he not their hostage? — and refused to take any preventive measures against the Bolshevik threat. No attempt was made to seize control of the Smolny, or to arrest the Bolshevik leaders, or to reinforce the defence of the city, during the first half of October, when such measures stood at least some chance of success. He seemed to believe that any 3olshevik rising would be a repeat of the July Days fiasco. He even began to pray that the Bolsheviks would make a move, in the naive belief that this would

  give him the chance to deal with them once and for all. 'I would be prepared to offer prayers to produce this uprising,' he told Nabokov on 20 October. 'I have greater forces than necessary. They will be utterly crushed.'*9

  Confident of victory, Kerensky declared war on the Bolsheviks. He announced his plans to transfer the bulk of the Petrograd garrison to the Northern Front, where the Germans were advancing towards the capital. As on the eve of the July crisis, he no doubt saw in the German threat an excellent excuse to rid the capital of its unruly soldiers; and he must have been counting on the idea that, as in July, the break-up of the garrison would give rise to a badly planned Bolshevik uprising. But this was, of course, a fatal miscalculation. It gave credibility to the Bolshevik charge that there was a 'counter-revolutionary plot' within government circles — a charge which they needed in order to rally support for an immediate uprising. The Bolsheviks claimed that Kerensky was planning to abandon the capital in order to close down the Soviet Congress and kill off the revolution. Such fears reached fever pitch when Rodzianko, the former Duma President, urged Kerensky to do just that in a speech that was widely reported in the press under the headline: 'To hell with Petrograd!'

  This was the highly charged political atmosphere in which the Military Revolutionary Committee was able to supersede the authority of the Provisional Government inside the Petrograd garrison and become the leading organizational force of the Bolshevik insurrection. It all happened in a matter of days — and the secret of the MRC's success was in posing as an organ of Soviet defence. The MRC was formed in the middle of October, and held its first organizational meeting on the 20th. Like the Soviet Committee for Struggle Against the Counter-Revolution, which had arisen during the Kornilov crisis, it was conceived as an ad hoc body of revolutionary defence (as much against the Germans as against the 'counter-revolution'). Its Bureau, which met on the third floor of the Smolny, was made up of three Bolsheviks and two Left SRs, with P. E. Lazimir, a Left SR, as its nominal chairman. This served to give it the appearance of a Soviet organization, which was important because the soldiers would only come out on the call of the Soviet. But in fact the MRC was a Bolshevik organization. Its real leaders were Trotsky, Antonov-Ovseenko, and the Baltic sailor Dybenko, the huge black-bearded lover of Kollontai (who was old enough to be his mother). The role of the Left SRs was what Trotsky called 'camouflage' to conceal the Bolshevik coup plans. The fact that the Left SRs allowed themselves to be used in this way says all that needs to be said about their political naivety. Their strategic decisions were guided by a formless revolutionary spirit

  * When Kerensky fled the capital on 25 October he left a small fortune in his bank account: the modest size of his last withdrawal, on 24 October, suggests that even at this final hour he was not expecting to be overthrown. His account book is in GARF, f. 1807, op. I, d. 452.

  characteristic of students. They were lambs to the Bolshevik wolf. When the MRC resolved to launch the seizure of power, in the small hours of 25 October, the two Left SRs were not even there.

  The threat of transfer to the Front immediately sparked a general mutiny in the Petrograd garrison. The bulk of the soldiers refused to obey the orders of the General Staff and switched their allegiance to the MRC, which sent out commissars to replace the unit commanders. Meetings of soldiers expressed their readiness to 'come out' against the Provisional Government if called to do so by the Petrograd Soviet. Even the once loyal Cossack regiments went along with the mutiny, or remained neutral. On 21 October the MRC proclaimed itself the ruling authority of the garrison: it was the first act of the insurrection. The General Staff made a last desperate effort to salvage some of its authority by reaching a compromise with the MRC. But it was too late. The garrison units we
re already under the effective control of the commissars. On 23 October the MRC extended its power to the Peter and Paul Fortress, whose cannon overlooked the Winter Palace. The Provisional Government had lost effective military control of the capital a full two days before the armed uprising began. This was the essential fact of the whole insurrection: without it one cannot explain the ease of the Bolshevik victory. By 25 October the most important task of any successful revolution — the capture of the garrison in the capital — had already been completed; the Provisional Government was defenceless; and it only remained for the Bolsheviks to walk into the Winter Palace and arrest the ministers.

  The remarkable thing about the Bolshevik insurrection is that hardly any of the Bolshevik leaders had wanted it to happen until a few hours before it began. Until late in the evening of 24 October the majority of the Central Committee and the MRC had not envisaged the overthrow of the Provisional Government before the opening of the Soviet Congress the next day. Trotsky, who in Lenin's absence had effectively assumed the leadership of the party, repeatedly stressed the need for discipline and patience. On the morning of the 24th Kerensky had ordered the closure of two Bolshevik newspapers. Trotsky refused to be drawn by this 'provocation': the MRC should be placed on alert; the city's strategic installations should be seized as a defensive measure against any further 'counter-revolutionary' threats; but, as he insisted at a meeting of the Bolshevik Congress delegates in the afternoon, 'it would be a mistake to use even one of the armoured cars which now defend the Winter Palace to arrest the government. . . This is defence, comrades. This is defence.' Later that evening, in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky declared — and had good reason to believe — that 'an armed conflict today or tomorrow, on the eve of the Soviet Congress, is not in our plans'.10