October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

  Fired up, firing, fired upon, the marchers converged on the Tauride Palace. Again and again they shouted their demand: all power to the soviets. The skies released torrential rain, whipping up the end-of-days atmosphere among the many who stayed. As darkness started to fall, someone fired a sodden weapon at the palace, spreading panic. The Kronstadters were demanding to see Perverzev, the minister of justice, to hear from him why the anarchist Zhelezniakov, who had been taken into custody at Durnovo, had not been released.

  At the very moment that the crowd began to break down doors to look for him, in fact, Perverzev was in his offices, greeting journalists and representatives from Petrograd military units. He had, he said, something to show them. Evidence that the government had been amassing for some time. Evidence that purported to prove that Lenin was a German spy.

  Besieged in the Tauride Palace, the Soviet leaders were panicking. After quickly conferring, they sent out the SR leader Chernov as their emissary, to placate those howling and chanting for Perverzev. An amiable, erudite man, once held in general respect, they thought he could calm the demonstrators with a typical quotation-peppered speech.

  But when he appeared, someone yelled, ‘Here is one of those who shoots at the people!’ Sailors began to grab for him. Startled and alarmed, Chernov clambered atop a barrel and began gamely to orate.

  He must have thought it a crowd-pleasing touch to mention the four Kadets who had quit the government, and to declare, ‘Good riddance!’

  ‘Then why’, came an answering shout from the crowd, ‘didn’t you say so before?’

  The mood grew ugly. Chernov shrank precariously back as suspicious men and women surrounding him jostled closer to where he balanced. A big worker pushed his way through and came up close and shook his fist in Chernov’s face.

  ‘Take power, you son of a bitch,’ he bellowed, in one of most famous phrases of 1917, ‘when it’s given to you!’

  Inside the palace, Chernov’s comrades were realising what danger he was in. In desperation, they sent out several respected leftists – Martov, Kamenev, Steklov, Woytinsky – to rescue him. But, shoving through the crush, Raskolnikov beside him, it was Trotsky who reached him first.

  A trumpet blasted out and the crowd fell quiet. Trotsky made his way to the car into which someone had shoved Chernov. He harangued the febrile crowd as he came, demanding they listen to him. Trotsky climbed onto the bonnet.

  ‘Comrade Kronstadters!’ he shouted. ‘Pride and glory of the revolution! You’ve come to declare your will and show the Soviet that the working class no longer wants to see the bourgeoisie in power. But why hurt your own cause by petty acts of violence against casual individuals? Individuals are not worthy of your attention.’

  He faced down the furious heckles. He reached out his hand to an especially voluble sailor. ‘Give me your hand, comrade,’ he shouted. ‘Your hand, brother!’

  The man would not oblige, but his confusion was palpable.

  ‘Those here in favour of violence,’ Trotsky shouted at last, ‘raise your hands.’

  No hand was raised.

  ‘Citizen Chernov,’ Trotsky said, opening the car door, ‘you are free to go.’

  Bruised, terrorised, humiliated, Chernov scurried back inside the palace. That he very probably owed Trotsky his life did not stop him sitting down that night to write a slew of blistering attacks on the Bolsheviks.

  About 6 p.m., a joint meeting of the Soviet Executive Committees convened. The moderates turned to the army for help. They sent a plea to the reactionary General Polovtsev for some of the loyal troops stationed in the suburbs – because the political debates had not swayed all soldiers in the area – to come and defend them. ‘Now’, Polovtsev would recall the irony, ‘I was free to assume the role of saviour of the Soviet.’

  Outside, tens of thousands of people still hollered, now for Tsereteli himself. Zinoviev, a popular Bolshevik, came out to calm them with banter and bonhomie, and begged them to disperse. But he could not dissuade them all from their aims, and a resolute group of protestors burst suddenly into the Catherine Hall where the terrified Soviet committees were meeting.

  In response to this invasion, some of the Soviet members, in Sukhanov’s exquisite formulation, ‘did not reveal a sufficient courage and self-restraint’. They cowered from those furiously insisting that they take power.

  With striking aplomb, disconcerting the man into silence, Chkheidze handed one heckler an official appeal to go home.

  ‘Please read it carefully,’ he said, ‘and don’t interrupt our business.’

  As well as the army, the Soviet appealed to the fleet. A little after 7 p.m., Dudorov, assistant to the naval minister, called for four destroyers to intimidate the Kronstadters. In a shocking escalation, he ordered that ‘any ships attempting to depart from Kronstadt without specific orders are to be sunk by the submarine fleet’.

  But the call was intercepted by the hard-left Baltic Fleet Central Committee, Tsentrobalt. It forced the commander, Verevsky, to respond: ‘Cannot carry out your orders.’

  On the Mars Field, Cossacks charged Kronstadt sailors.

  The Soviet kept debating. Like the demonstrators, the Bolsheviks, Spiridonova’s Left SRs and Martov’s Menshevik–Internationalists insisted that the current arrangement could not be allowed to continue. Mainstream and moderate SRs and Mensheviks, on the other hand, remained adamant that in this country, with its capitalism still undeveloped, its bourgeois phase unfinished and its proportionately small workers’ movement, a government without non-socialists would be a disaster. That coalition was indispensable at this stage.

  In the Tauride Palace hall, workers’ and soldiers’ representatives pleaded for land to go to the peasants, for peace, for workers’ control.

  ‘We trust the Soviet, but not those whom the Soviet trusts,’ said one delegate. ‘Now that the Kadets have proclaimed their refusal to work with us,’ said another, ‘we ask you: who else will you barter with?’

  Outside, shots and standoffs continued. Ambushes, sudden fusillades and the reek of smoke. Machine guns ripped horsemen from their mounts. A stampede of riderless horses, sprayed with men’s blood, hurtled along the embankment, hooves echoing, leering in terror.

  Early evening and the skies were still too light. Abruptly, the 176th Regiment arrived and entered the palace.

  These followers of the Mezhraiontsy had received a call to ‘defend the revolution’, and had come from Krasnoe Selo. By chance, the first authoritative figure they met was the Menshevik Dan. He wore, as he often did, his military uniform, and seeing the armed newcomers he had the presence of mind to immediately order them to sentry duty. The 176th complied.

  Later, Sukhanov would mock them for obeying an enemy, one of the very moderates they opposed. Trotsky, however, would insist that their move was strategic, allowing them to enforce a degree of order while knowing where their opponents were. Either way, it is a curio of the moment that hard-left advocates of ‘all power to the soviets’ were delegated by a soviet opponent to defend the Soviet currently arguing furiously against taking the power they wanted it to take.

  Those debates over power ground on. At 8 p.m. on the Liteiny Bridge, Cossacks engaged the workers: this was not February. A hammering of shots, the cries of those wounded or dying, and blood seeped through the crack where the bridge would part and its halves rise. Across the water from Kshesinskaya, 2,000 armed Kronstadt sailors breached the entrance of the Peter and Paul Fortress and took control of the military complex. A spectacular, gratuitous act: they did not know what to do with it now they had it. And still the Soviet continued to debate. Loyal troops at last started to reach Petrograd. Dead horses lay among scattered cartridges and broken glass.

  By midnight, three positions were put before the Soviet. On the right, Avram Gots suggested pledging support to the rump Provisional Government until a Soviet Executive Committee plenum met. For Martov, to his left, ‘the Russian bourgeoisie as a whole has definitely gone over to the attack a
gainst the peasants’ and workers’ democracy’, ‘history demands that we take power into our own hands’ – and he called now for a new radical Provisional Government, this time with a majority of Soviet representatives. Lunacharsky, for the far left, demanded full Soviet power.

  One by one, the delegates stood up to cast their votes. They announced for Gots; Dan of the Mensheviks; Kondratenko of the Trudoviks; Chaikovsky of the People’s Socialist Party; the SR Saakian; and more, person after person, from group after group. The left fought to keep making their case, knowing now that they would lose.

  Close to 1 a.m., as Tsereteli declaimed at the rostrum, there came the noise of of heavy footfalls. The deputies rose, pale again with fear.

  Then Dan shouted in relief. ‘Regiments loyal to the revolution have arrived’, he called, ‘to defend the Central Executive Committee!’

  In came the Izmailovsky Guards, then the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky Regiments. Their bands played the Marseillaise, and the Mensheviks and SRs sang along in delight. The Soviet had been saved, was safe to not take power.

  The soldiers who had delivered them were stern, still dismayed by what they had recently been told, information which was not yet public: the shock news that Lenin was a spy.

  The July Days rippled through the larger provincial cities, reflecting local volatilities, particularly where garrisons were threatened with redeployment to the front: in Saratov, Krasnoyarsk, Taganrog, Nizhni Novgorod, Kiev, Astrakhan. In Nizhni Novgorod, an order for the muster of the 62nd Infantry Reserve Regiment on the evening of the 4th sparked a confrontation between loyalist and discontented soldiers, resulting in several deaths. On the 5th, the mutineers elected a Provisional Committee and for a short time took local power. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a militant working-class textile town, the soviet briefly asserted full authority.

  For the most part, however, such events were not much more than hastily organised rallies. In the second city, for example, on hearing news of the Petrograd actions, the Moscow Bolsheviks issued a lukewarm call for a march to demand soviet power on 4 July. This was promptly banned by the Moscow Soviet, and the majority of workers obeyed. Many Bolsheviks would have been content, too, to let the matter rest, but, realising that their younger members, newly radicalised and enthusiastic, were likely to go ahead with some action anyway, they reluctantly joined them in a desultory, somewhat pathetic demonstration.

  Between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., in Petrograd, the Bolshevik CC issued what they described as a ‘call’ on workers and soldiers to terminate the street demonstrations: it was, more accurately, a post factum recognition of the inevitable, as the movement ebbed.

  On the morning of the 5th, on its back page, Pravda unconvincingly explained the party’s ‘decision’ to end the demonstrations – as if it were a decision, or the party’s to make. They had proceeded thus because ‘the object of the demonstration was achieved’; that is, ‘the slogans of the vanguard of the proletariat and of the army were imposingly and worthily proclaimed’. Imposing, perhaps: but the Bolsheviks had dithered lengthily over the appropriateness of ‘proclaiming’ them in such a way.

  In any case, the goals the slogans expressed had, to put it mildly, not been met.

  Dawn on the 5th. The authorities opened the bridges. Their ends pointed skyward, cutting the rebels off.

  Lenin had just left the Pravda printworks when loyalist soldiers arrived to arrest him. So they arrested the workers instead, ransacked the files and smashed the equipment, bellowing about spies, German agents, treachery.

  The previous day, as Perverzev spread stories about Lenin’s supposed treachery, a Bolshevik sympathiser in his ministry had sent word to the CC, which immediately requested that the Ispolkom stop the slander. Out of residual solidarity, out of concern for due process, or to avoid inflaming the situation in the city, Tsereteli and Chkheidze had telephoned the Petrograd newspapers. They enjoined them not to publish unverified claims.

  Most acquiesced. But on the morning of the 5th, the morning the soldiers came, the front page of one sensationalist hard-right rag, Zhivoe slovo – the ‘Living Word’ – screamed: ‘Lenin, [his comrades] Ganetsky, Kozlovsky: German Spies!’

  Nothing could stop the rumours now.

  Kerensky quickly distanced himself from the release, but this was coy: on the 4th, he had already written from the front to Lvov (who disapproved), stating that it was ‘necessary to hasten the publication of the information in our hands’. The Byzantine details of the calumny were based on the say-so of one Lieutenant Yermolenko, and a merchant, Z. Burstein. The latter alleged that a German spy network in Stockholm, headed by the Marxist-theoretician-turned-German-patriot Parvus, maintained Bolshevik connections. Yermolenko, for his part, claimed to have been told of Lenin’s role by the German General Staff, while he, Yermolenko, was a prisoner of war whom those Germans (according, possibly, to a convoluted chain of mistaken identity) had attempted to recruit – which, said he, he ultimately gave them the impression they had successfully done.

  These claims were a tangle of mendacity, invention and tendentiousness. Yermolenko was a strange character, at best a fantasist, while even his own government handlers described Burstein as wholly untrustworthy. The dossier had been prepared by an embittered ex-Bolshevik, Alexinsky, with a reputation for shit-stirring and malice so great he had been denied entry to the Soviet. Few serious people, even on the right, believed any of this stuff for a moment, which explains why some of the less dishonourable or more cautious right were furious with Zhivoe slovo for publishing.

  Nonetheless, in the immediate term the effects were devastating.

  July 5 was a day of bleak reaction. The pendulum swung.

  That day Petrograd was not safe for the left. A Pravda distributor was killed on the street. Cossacks and other loyalists exerted control through intimidation and thuggery. The far right were exultant.

  The danger was not all from the right, though, even in what should have been left strongholds. One party activist, E. Tarasova, came into a Vyborg factory she knew well, and instantly the women workers she had been speaking to days earlier screamed abuse, calling her a German spy, and hurled nuts and bolts at her, savagely cutting her hands and face. A Menshevik, they explained, shamefaced, when the panic abated, had been agitating against the Bolsheviks.

  Nor was it only Bolsheviks who had reason to be afraid that day; the left Menshevik Woytinsky called the mood a ‘counterrevolutionary orgy’, marked by the ‘debauchery of the Black Hundreds’. Those sadistic vigilantes roamed the streets, smashing their way into houses on the hunt for ‘traitors’ and ‘troublemakers’. And they were not without popular support. ‘Public opinion’, Woytinsky noted gloomily, ‘demanded drastic measures.’

  The Bolshevik left, like Raskolnikov, made ready to defend the Kshesinskaya Mansion. Some nursed illusions about returning to the offensive. But most of the leadership understood the gravity of their situation. That afternoon, Zinoviev forcefully demanded that the last demonstrators in the Peter and Paul Fortress surrender it. Any other course would be an absurd, doomed provocation.

  The Bolsheviks began to disperse, for safety, and in preparation for a crackdown. Many of the top leadership headed into hiding, as they tried to come up with plans.

  Three young activists, Liza Pylaeva, Nina Bogoslovskaya and Yelizaveta Koksharova slipped out of Peter and Paul disguised as nurses, carrying party funds and documents under bandages. They were swiftly intercepted by government forces who demanded to know what they were carrying in their baskets. Pylaeva grinned and said, ‘Dynamite and revolvers!’ The men chided her for the bad taste of her joke, and let her pass.

  Now the Bolshevik CC voted ‘not to reverse the decision to end the demonstrations’ – as if, again, the decision had been theirs, as if a decision to reverse that ‘decision’ would have had any effect.

  The July Days were over.

  The Bolshevik leaders, rather nervously, sent a representative to the Soviet, to ascertain its position with reg
ard to the party; the Soviet for its part sent Executive representatives to the Kshesinskaya Mansion. They promised that no further repressive measures would be taken against the party, and that demonstrators not accused of specific crimes would be released. The Bolsheviks agreed to call back the armoured cars of their supporters, surrender Peter and Paul (as Zinoviev had insisted, although the occupiers within continued to hem and haw) and send the sailors back to Kronstadt.

  If the Soviet, notionally, committed itself to no more punitive measures, this was not the case for the Provisional Government.

  At dawn the next day, General Polovtsev directed to the Kshesinskaya Mansion and to the Peter and Paul Fortress a huge attack force. Eight armoured cars, the Petrogradsky Regiment, sailors, cadets and the Aviation Academy were backed by terrifying heavy artillery. With them, too, was a front-line bicycle brigade: the idea of such soldiers was not then faintly comic, as now, but evocative of speed and modernity, and all major powers were experimenting with the bicycle, what one approving British brigade major called ‘this, the youngest, excrescence’ of the military. Before they set out, all the men of the attack force were galvanised with speeches: some of those there to exhort them, tellingly, were Soviet dignitaries.

  At 7 a.m., the commander gave those within the mansion an hour to surrender. The MO was still in denial. Some members managed to get quickly away across the Sampsonievsky Bridge to Peter and Paul. There, they fondly imagined, they might make a stand. The 500 members remaining in Kshesinskaya did not resist. The firepower arrayed against them was awesomely disproportionate. When government soldiers entered to arrest them, they found seven members hurriedly burning party files. Soon thereafter, even the sailors who had made it to the Peter and Paul Fortress agreed, miserably, to surrender.

  As a warning to the rest of the army, the authorities did not just punish but humiliated the Machine Gun Regiment, disarming and parading them publicly. Krupskaya witnessed the scene. ‘As they led their horses by the bridle so much hatred burned in their eyes, there was so much more hatred in their slow march, that it was clear that a more stupid method could not have been devised’ – if, that is, the aim of the government was social peace.