October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

  How could anyone feel safe? Was it not bad enough that parts of the city were now controlled by criminals, no-go zones for the authorities? By the Olympia amusement park on Zabalkanskii Prospect; Golodai, near Vasilievsky Island; Volkovo in the Narva district. Was it not enough that the city had ceded territory to outlaws and bandits, without them now mocking the very idea of retribution? How could anyone believe that the authorities had authority when this monstrosity could occur right above the militia’s heads?

  Disgusted crowds gathered outside the headquarters. They threw stones. They broke down the door, and smashed the place apart.

  As power evaporated, some convulsions took predictable, ugly forms. On 2 October in Smolensk, the town of Roslavl received, as the Smolensk Bulletin put it, ‘the following cup of poison to drink: a pogrom’. A mob of Black Hundreds chanting ‘Beat the Yids!’ attacked and murdered several people they accused of ‘speculation’– a charge provoked by finding galoshes in a Jewish-owned store the clerks of which had claimed they had none. The rampage continued throughout the night and the next day. The newspapers and authorities tried to link the Bolsheviks to the violence. This was a growing theme in the liberal press, despite its patent political absurdity, and despite the recorded efforts of Bolshevik soldiers in the town to stop the carnage.

  On 3 October, the Russian General Staff evacuated Revel, the last bastion between the front and the capital. The next day, accordingly, the government sought advice on the evacuation of the executive and key industries – but not of the Soviet – to Moscow. News of the discussions leaked out. There was a storm: the bourgeoisie were indeed planning to abandon the city built for them two centuries before. The city of bones. The Ispolkom forbade any such move without its approval, and the unstable government shelved the idea.

  In this ambience of perfidy, weakness and violence, Lenin took his campaign for insurrection to the wider party.

  There is no record of the CC’s reaction to Lenin’s resignation threat. Perhaps it provoked pleading negotiations. Whatever the particulars, it was not raised again, and he did not step down.

  On 1 October, he sent another letter, this time to the Central, Moscow and Petersburg committees, and to Bolsheviks in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. Citing peasant and labour unrest, mutinies in the German navy, and the growing Bolshevik influence after local elections in Moscow, he once more emphasised that delaying insurgent action until the Second Congress of Soviets was ‘positively criminal’. The Bolsheviks must ‘take power at once’, and appeal ‘to Workers, Peasants and Soldiers’ for ‘All Power to the Soviets’. But on this question of timing, he remained isolated: that same day, a meeting of Bolsheviks from towns outlying Petrograd opposed any action prior to the Congress.

  The CC could not hide his communications forever. On the 3rd, a letter at last reached the militant Moscow Regional Bureau, in which Lenin incited them to pressure the CC to prepare for insurrection. Several of his essays found their way to the Petersburg Committee. The members were divided as to Lenin’s demands, but united in outrage at the CC’s obfuscations. On the 5th, the Petersburg Committee met to discuss their reactions to what they had read.

  The debate was long and it was rancorous. Latsis loudly questioned the revolutionary credentials of those with the temerity to go against Lenin. In the end a proposal to decide on insurrectionary preparations was shelved. However, the Executive Commission delegated three members – including Latsis – to evaluate Bolshevik military strength and prepare district committees for possible action. They did not inform the CC.

  As awareness of Lenin’s positions spread through the party, despite the CC’s efforts to corral it, social upheaval was provoking a certain coterminous leftward shift on the CC itself. While the Petersburg Committee met in dissident conclave, at Smolny the CC at last voted to boycott the toothless Preparliament when it reconvened on the 7th. The decision was unanimous but for the ever-cautious Kamenev, who immediately called for patience from the Bolshevik Preparliamentarians, until a serious dispute might justify a walkout. He narrowly lost the argument to Trotsky’s call for immediate action.

  The next day, Petrograd commander General Polkovnikov instructed city troops to prepare for transfer to the front. He had known this would unleash fury, and it did.

  On the evening of the 7th, in the Mariinsky Palace, its remaining imperial crests decorously obscured with red draperies, before the eyes of the press and diplomatic corps, the Preparliament reopened. Kerensky gave another histrionic address, this one themed on law and order. There followed remarks from the Grandmother of the Revolution, Breshko-Breshkovskaya; then from Nikolai Avksentiev, the chair; and then at last Trotsky intervened. He stood to make an emergency announcement.

  Blisteringly, he denounced the government and the Preparliament as tools of counterrevolution. The audience erupted. Trotsky raised his voice over their clamour. ‘Petrograd is in danger!’ he shouted. ‘All power to the soviets! All land to the people!’ To jeers and catcalls, the fifty-three Bolshevik delegates rose together and left the hall.

  Their act was a sensation. An epidemic of rumours immediately followed: the Bolsheviks, people said, were planning an uprising.

  It was at some uncertain moment during these accelerating days, early in October, that Lenin slipped back into Petrograd.

  Krupskaya escorted him to Lesnoi. There he stayed again with his former landlady Margarita Fofanova. From her house he preached his gospel of urgency to an urgent city.

  On 9 October, mass anger at the plan to relocate the troops spilled into the Soviet. In the Executive Committee, the Menshevik Mark Broido put forward a compromise: the soldiers would prepare for transfer, but a committee should also be created to draw up plans for the defence of Petrograd that would win popular confidence. This, he thought, could reduce the anxieties about government treachery and address the fears for the capital, while smoothing a path of collaboration between government and Soviet.

  His proposal blindsided the Bolsheviks.

  Trotsky, recovering, quickly put forward a counterproposal, repudiating Kerensky and his government, accusing the bourgeoisie of preparing to surrender Petrograd, demanding immediate peace and soviet power, and summoning the garrison to prepare for battle. What he called for was a new iteration of the Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution, for the defence of Red Petrograd from internal as much as from external enemies, ‘attacks being openly prepared by military and civil Kornilovites’, as he put it. This was rather different from defencism on behalf of Mother Russia.

  Even now, with the Bolshevik majority on the Executive Committee, it was not Trotsky’s but Broido’s resolution that – narrowly – passed: anxiety about the war effort still precluded sanctioning the creation of a parallel military structure. But that evening, the two motions were put to a packed, uproarious session of the Soviet plenum. Now, backed by a huge majority of factory and barracks representatives, Trotsky’s torquing of Broido’s suggestion prevailed. Thus was born the Military Revolutionary Committee – Milrevcom, or the MRC.

  Trotsky would later characterise this vote in favour of the MRC as a ‘dry’, a ‘silent’ revolution, indispensable to the full revolution to come.

  The threat of Bolshevik insurrection was now openly discussed on all sides. Indeed, certain of their enemies invited it. ‘I would be prepared to offer prayers to produce this uprising,’ said Kerensky. ‘They will be utterly crushed.’ By contrast, many of the Bolsheviks themselves were more hesitant. The day after the Soviet meeting, a citywide party conference expressed clear reservations about an uprising before the Congress of Soviets.

  For its part, the CC had no formal position on such an action. Yet.

  As Sukhanov left his home for the Soviet on the morning of the 10th, his wife Galina Flakserman eyed nasty skies and made him promise not to try to return that night, but to stay at his office, as was his custom when the weather was so bad. That evening, as he settled down accordingly to sleep at Smolny, across th
e city figure after bundled-up figure slipped out of the grey drizzle and into his flat.

  ‘Oh, the novel jokes of the merry muse of History!’ wrote Sukhanov later, bitterly. Unlike her diarist husband, who was previously an independent and had recently joined the Menshevik left, Galina Flakserman was a long-time Bolshevik activist, on the staff of Izvestia. Unbeknownst to him, she had quietly informed her comrades that comings and goings at her roomy, many-entranced apartment would be unlikely to draw attention. Thus, with her husband out of the way, the Bolshevik CC came visiting.

  At least twelve of the twenty-one-strong committee were there, including Kollontai, Trotsky, Uritsky, Stalin, Varvara Iakovleva, Kamenev and Zinoviev. They gathered in the dining room, quickly dealing with routine business. There entered a clean-shaven, bespectacled, grey-haired man, ‘every bit like a Lutheran minister’, Alexandra Kollontai remembered.

  The CC stared at the newcomer. Absent-mindedly, he doffed his wig like a hat, to reveal a familiar bald pate. Lenin had arrived. The serious debates could begin.

  Lenin held forth. He was impassioned. As the hours wore on he drove home his now-familiar points. The time had come, he insisted again, for insurrection. The party’s ‘indifference toward the question of an uprising’ was a dereliction.

  It was not a monologue. Everyone took their turn to speak.

  Late at night, a knock at the door sent hearts lurching, plunging them all into fear. But it was only Flakserman’s brother, Yuri. Another Bolshevik, privy to the meeting, he had come to help with the samovar. He busied himself with the huge communal kettle, making tea.

  Kamenev and Zinoviev returned to that historic debate, assiduously explaining why they thought Lenin was wrong. They evoked the weight of the petty bourgeoisie, who were not – not yet, perhaps – on their side. They suggested that Lenin overestimated the Bolsheviks’ power in Petrograd, let alone elsewhere. They were adamant that he was incorrect about the imminence of international revolution. They argued for ‘a defensive posture’, for patience. ‘Through the army we have a revolver pointed at the temple of the bourgeoisie,’ they said. Better to ensure the convening of a Constituent Assembly, and to continue to consolidate their strength meanwhile.

  Their comrades called the consistently circumspect pair the ‘Heavenly Twins’, sometimes affectionately, sometimes in exasperation. They were not alone in the party hierarchy in their conservatism. But that night, those of similar bent – Nogin, Rykov and others – were absent.

  Which is not to say that Lenin’s position was accepted in all particulars by his other comrades. Trotsky, for one, felt less pressed by time than did Lenin, set greater store by the soviets, saw the forthcoming Congress as a potential legitimator of any action. But the key question of the night was this: were, or were not, the Bolsheviks mobilising for insurrection as soon as possible?

  On paper torn from a child’s notebook, Lenin scribbled a resolution.

  The CC acknowledges the international situation as it affects the Russian revolution … as well as the military situation … and the fact that the proletarian party has gained majorities in the soviets – all this, coupled with the peasant insurrection and the swing of popular confidence to our party, and finally, the obvious preparations for a second Kornilovshchina … makes armed insurrection the order of the day … Recognising that an armed uprising is inevitable and the time fully ripe, the CC instructs all party organisations to be guided accordingly and to consider and decide all practical questions from this viewpoint.

  At last, after prolonged and impassioned back-and-forth, they voted. By ten to two – Zinoviev and Kamenev, of course – the resolution passed. It was hazy in its details, but a Rubicon had been crossed. Insurrection was now the ‘order of the day’.

  The tension eased. Yuri Flakserman brought cheese, sausage and bread, and the famished revolutionaries fell to. Good-naturedly they teased the Heavenly Twins: hesitating to overthrow the bourgeoisie was so very Kamenev.

  The time frame for the event was hazy, too. Lenin wanted insurrection the next day: Kalinin, on the other hand, for example, while praising ‘one of the best resolutions the CC has ever passed’, thought – in what could surely have been the position of Zinoviev and Kamenev – that ‘perhaps in a year’ it might be time.

  On the 11th, the militant Northern Region Congress of Soviets gathered in the capital: fifty-one Bolsheviks, twenty-four Left SRs, four Maximalists (a revolutionary SR offshoot), one Menshevik– Internationalist, and ten SRs. All the delegates present, including those SRs, supported a socialist government. That morning, an exhausted Kollontai reported the CC’s vote to the Bolshevik participants. She left, as one recalled, ‘the impression that the CC’s signal to come out would be received at any minute’. ‘The plan’, Latsis would remember, ‘was that it [the Northern Region Congress] would declare itself the government, and that would be the start’.

  But Kamenev and Zinoviev were still lobbying against action. All they had to do was turn twelve Bolsheviks and/or Maximalists, and the CC would have no majority for immediate insurrection against Kerensky. The gathering was loud and radical, charging political prisoners in Kresty jail not to hunger strike but to keep their strength up ‘because the hour of your liberation is close at hand’. Nonetheless, to Lenin’s intense frustration, it closed on the 13th not with revolution, but with an appeal to the masses stressing the importance of the forthcoming Second Soviet Congress.

  Workers and soldiers still looked to the soviets. On 12 October, the Egersky Guards declared the Soviet ‘the voice of the genuine leaders of the workers and poorer peasantry’.

  That day, a closed session of the Ispolkom voted on whether to empower Trotsky’s MRC to militarily defend Red Petrograd from the government. The Mensheviks assailed the motion, but they were outvoted. Trotsky’s hasty riposte to Broido had created a ‘front organisation’, a party-controlled body with a non-party, soviet remit.

  The rumours of Bolshevik uprising grew more specific. ‘There is definite evidence’, reported Gazeta-kopeika, ‘that the Bolsheviks are energetically preparing for a coming-out on October 20.’ ‘The vile and bloody events of July 3–5’, warned the rightist Zhivoe slovo, ‘were only a rehearsal.’

  Kerensky’s cabinet remained bullish. ‘If the Bolsheviks act,’ one minister told the press, ‘we will carry out a surgical operation and the abscess will be extracted once and for all.’

  ‘We must ask the comrade Bolsheviks candidly,’ said Dan with acid courtesy at a plenary of the All-Russian Executive Committees on the 14th, ‘what is the purpose of their politics?’ Were they ‘calling upon the revolutionary proletariat to come out[?] I demand a yes-or-no answer’.

  From the floor, for the Bolsheviks, Riazanov responded. ‘We demand peace and land.’

  That was neither yes nor no, nor was it reassuring.

  15 October. At the corner of Sadovaya and Apraksina, where in July shots from above had left demonstrators dead and scattering, a crowd blocked the tramcars. They shouted for samosudy, a street trial for two shoplifters, a man in a soldier’s uniform, a woman in smart clothes. The mob fought through the city militia into the department store where the thieves cowered. A heaving scrum hauled the man outside while his sobbing accomplice made for a telephone booth. The crowd overwhelmed an officer trying to protect her, wrenched open the door and pulled her out into a rain of blows.

  ‘What are we waiting for?’ someone shouted. He drew a pistol and shot the man dead. There was a silence. Then someone shot the woman too, while the militia looked helplessly on.

  Sunday in Petrograd. This was how justice worked now.

  The following day, a full session of the Soviet discussed the MRC – Milrevcom.

  Eager not to present it as a Bolshevik body – which, though not formally, it effectively was – the party nominated to propose the resolution establishing it the young Pavel Lazimir, the chair of the soldiers’ section of the Soviet, a Left SR. Broido furiously warned that the MRC was not intended to de
fend the city, but to seize power. Justifying its focus on counterrevolution, and thus on military preparation, Trotsky called attention to the persistent threat from the right. The case was not hard to make: he quoted a notorious recent interview during which Rodzianko thundered, ‘To Hell with Petrograd!’

  On the 17th, at Pskov, generals met a Soviet delegation to argue for the redeployment of troops, bringing with them representatives from the front. The revolutionaries were concerned about the bitter resentment of those front-line soldiers: to them, the unwillingness of the rear garrison to relocate seemed an unconscionable lack of solidarity. The Soviet anxiously affirmed the heroism of that garrison, and still refused to promise any support for the generals’ call. As far as the General Staff were concerned, the encounter had been pointless.

  That was the day that Milrevcom, the soviet organ of militarised suspicion of the suspicious government, was inaugurated. But the Bolshevik CC did not yet give it their full attention: they were distracted by in-party uncertainties.

  On the 15th, the Petersburg Committee had assembled thirty-five Bolshevik representatives from across the city to prepare for the uprising. But the meeting was derailed by doubts, a caution that came from unlikely quarters.

  For the CC, Bubnov made the case for a ‘coming-out’. This time, one of those who argued against him was Nevsky.

  Nevsky, the erstwhile ultra, representative of the party’s trouble-making, radical Military Organisation, now reported that the MO ‘has just become rightist’. He enumerated the difficulties he perceived with the CC plan, including what he considered to be the totally inadequate preparation. He was deeply sceptical that the party could take the whole country.