October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

  With the door to uncertainty opened, the committee read a long memorandum of concern circulated by Kamenev and Zinoviev. Its impact was palpable. Some districts and representatives remained optimistic – Latsis, as ever, was positively boosterish – but many grew chary. They were unsure whether the Red Guard, though bonded together ‘with a band of iron’, as one journalist put it, by ‘hunger and hatred of wage slavery’, was politically advanced enough for the task.

  Few disputed that the masses would mobilise again against any counterrevolution, nor their support for the Soviet or the Bolshevik call for power thereto, but that would not necessarily translate into following the party into insurrection. The economic crisis had beaten the people down, some said, leaving them reluctant to go on the offensive for the Bolsheviks.

  In the end, eight representatives thought the masses were ready to fight. Six considered them uncertain, and advocated delay. Five said the moment was wholly inopportune.

  Bubnov was horrified. He demanded the talk turn to practical preparatory matters. The assembly did approve certain ground-laying measures – a conference of party agitators, building links with communications workers, weapons training – but it made no concrete plans for uprising.

  The rebuffed CC hastily reconvened.

  Wet snow over dark streets, Petrograd’s northern Lesnoi district. A frantic Saint Bernard dog bayed at shadows slipping through the dark, each shape outlined briefly by the weather, then gone. With each howl, another figure passed, until at last more than a score of Bolshevik leaders were inside the building of the district Duma. As they stripped off their disguises, an agitated young woman greeted them.

  It was the 16th. Ekaterina Alexeeva, employed as a cleaner of this building, was a member of the local Bolsheviks. The party chair, Kalinin, had given her a mission. He had enjoined her to prepare this secret meeting. When the poor dog outside grew too frenzied, Alexeeva sneaked out and tried to calm it. It would be a long night.

  The Bolsheviks had come via a chain of passwords, in disguise, to a venue undisclosed until the last instant. Now they gathered, sat on the floor in a room with too few chairs.

  Lenin was one of the last to arrive. He took off his wig, sat down in the corner, and launched into another passionate, desperate defence of his strategy. They had tried compromise. The masses’ mood was not unready but protean, he said. They were waiting. They had ‘given the Bolsheviks their trust, and demand from them not words but deeds’.

  All who were there agreed that this was one of Lenin’s finest rhetorical hours. Nonetheless, he could not banish all hesitation.

  For the MO, those unlikely sceptics, Krylenko remained cautious. Volodarsky ventured that while ‘nobody is tearing into the streets … everybody would respond to a call by the Soviet’. From the Rozhdestvensk district came ‘doubts … on whether they [the workers] will rise’. From the Okhten district: ‘Things are bad.’ ‘Matters are not so good in Krasnoe Selo. In Kronstadt, morale has fallen.’ And Zinoviev saw ‘fundamental doubts about whether the success of an uprising is assured’.

  The familiar arguments wore on. Finally, as the slush continued outside, the Bolsheviks took it to a vote.

  What Lenin wanted was a formal endorsement of the previous decision, though one leaving open the form and precise timing of insurrection, deferring to the CC and to the heads of the Petrograd Soviet and All-Russian Executive Committee. Zinoviev, by contrast, called for flatly prohibiting the organising of an uprising before the Second Congress, scheduled for the 20th, when the Bolshevik fraction could be consulted.

  For Zinoviev: six votes for, fifteen against, three abstentions. For Lenin: four abstentions, two opposed, and nineteen in favour.

  Where the missing vote went is a mystery of history. In any case, revolution it was, by a large margin. Though the schedule was still up for debate, for the second time in a week the Bolsheviks had voted for insurrection.

  An anguished Kamenev played a last card. This decision, he said, would destroy the Bolsheviks. Accordingly, he tendered his resignation from the CC.

  Deep in the small hours, the meeting was done and the Bolsheviks slipped away, leaving Alexeeva to clean up an almighty mess.

  Kamenev and his dismayed allies begged to express their dissent in Rabochy put’. They were denied. Without a party outlet, but with Zinoviev’s support, Kamenev went elsewhere.

  Gorky’s paper, Novaya zhizn, floated politically somewhere between the left of the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks themselves. More pessimistic than the latter, its line was firmly against ‘precipitous’ insurrection. It was in Novaya zhizn that Kamenev published a stunning attack.

  ‘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.’

  Though he strongly insinuated it, Kamenev stopped short of openly declaring that an insurrection was planned. But, especially from a militant of long standing, the publication of such doubts, let alone in a non-Bolshevik journal, was a profoundly shocking, and damaging, transgression of party discipline.

  Lenin unleashed biblical wrath.

  He could barely believe this treachery from Kamenev, with Zinoviev behind him. These were his old assocates. In the barrage of Lenin’s letters to the party that Kamenev’s piece provoked, there is sharp and real pain. ‘It is not easy for me to write in this way about former close comrades,’ he wrote, amid a cataract of rage at the ‘blacklegs’, ‘strikebreakers’, committers of ‘betrayal’, a ‘crime’, purveyors of ‘slanderous lies’. He insisted they be expelled.

  But despite Lenin’s authority and insistence, on the day of Kamenev’s sensational attack, though fifteen of the eighteen delegates of Petrograd military units convening at Smolny denounced the government, fully half would still not commit to armed action. And those who were ready to come out would only do so, they made clear, for the Soviet. At a meeting of 200 Bolshevik activists called precisely to discuss seizing power, moderates like Larin and Riazanov attacked the CC’s plans as premature. They were backed by Chudnovsky, a comrade who had come straight from the south-western front. Over there, he warned, the Bolsheviks had no stronghold. Any insurrection now, he said, would be doomed.

  Amid the palpable and escalating tension, Soviet leaders nervously rescheduled the Second Congress for the 25th. The moderates hoped to use the time to mobilise wider social forces on their side. But this gave a fillip to Lenin, too: now he had an extra five days to prepare to pre-empt congress with insurrection.

  He needed those days. The party was deeply divided.

  The MO was suspicious of the parvenu MRC, and jealous of its power. The respect the members retained for leaders of the party right, and the discomfort that Lenin’s scorched-earth harangues could provoke, boiled over: to one of Lenin’s denunciations of the Heavenly Twins, the Bolshevik editors appended criticism of his ‘sharp tone’. At a CC meeting on the 20th, Stalin objected to Kamenev’s resignation. When Kamenev and Zinoviev were forbidden from openly attacking the CC, Stalin announced his own resignation from the editorial board, in protest.

  The CC accepted neither his resignation, nor Lenin’s demand for Kamenev and Zinoviev’s expulsion. Kamenev’s earlier resignation from the CC also seems, at some point, to have gone by the wayside.

  ‘Our whole position’, said Stalin, with uncharacteristic perspicacity, ‘is contradictory.’ The Bolsheviks were divided even in their agreements.

  On the 19th, the MRC encountered a severe setback. The units at the Peter and Paul Fortress passed a resolution opposing coming out. These were soldiers who would be crucial in any uprising.

  Milrevcom tried to regroup. On its first mobilising meeting, on Friday 20 October, it focused attention on the defence of the Soviet from potential attack. The coming Sunday was to be ‘Petrograd Soviet Day’, and the socialists had plans for various celebratory concerts and meetings. But that day was also the 105th anniversary of
the liberation of Moscow from Napoleon, and the Soviet of the Union of Cossack Military Forces had scheduled its own religious procession. The left feared that the hard right might use this march to instigate a clash. Milrevcom sent representatives to city combat units to warn of such provocations, and scheduled a session of the Garrison Conference for the following morning.

  Their Peter and Paul problem aside, mostly the MRC was energised. It was building momentum among the troops and winning over sceptics and ‘party-only’ strategists in the Bolsheviks with its successes. Now the CC asserted that ‘all Bolshevik organisations can become part of the revolutionary centre organised by the Soviet’. But naysayers, both to its role and to the CC strategy, remained.

  Lenin summoned the MO’s Podvoisky, Nevsky and Antonov to a nondescript apartment in the Vyborg district. He was determined, Nevsky recalled, to ‘eradicate the last vestiges of stubbornness’ about the feasibility of an uprising. In fact, some of the anxieties the MO men raised seemed to strike home with him. But when they argued for a delay of ten to fifteen days, he was beside himself with impatience. And in addition, now that he had been won over by it, Lenin told the MO it must work within the MRC.

  On the morning of the 21st, Trotsky opened the MRC’s garrison conference. He urged soldiers and workers to support the MRC and the soviets in the struggle for power. The garrison passed a resolution calling on the forthcoming Congress of Soviets to ‘take power’.

  ‘A whole series of people spoke out in regard to the necessity of immediately transferring power to the soviets,’ reported Golos soldata, a sceptical SR–Menshevik paper. There was reassurance, too, about what might occur on Sunday. ‘The representative of the Fourth Don Cossack Regiment informed the assembly that his regimental committee had decided against participation in the next day’s religious procession. The representative of the Fourteenth Don Cossack Regiment caused a sensation when he declared that his regiment not only would not support counterrevolutionary moves … but would fight the counterrevolution with all its strength.’ To rapturous applause, the speaker bent down to shake hands with his ‘comrade Cossack’.

  Buoyed, Milrevcom decided to confront the government.

  At midnight on the 21st, a group of MRC representatives arrived at General Staff to meet General Polkovnikov. ‘Henceforth’, one Sadovsky told him, ‘orders not signed by us are invalid.’

  The garrison, Polkovnikov countered, was his responsibility, and one commissar from the Central Executive Committee was enough. ‘We won’t recognise your commissars,’ he said. Battle was joined.

  The delegation returned to MRC headquarters to meet with Antonov, Sverdlov and Trotsky. There, together, they formulated a key document of the October revolution.

  ‘At a meeting on 21 October the revolutionary garrison united around the MRC,’ it read.

  Despite this, on the night of October 21–22, the headquarters of the Petrograd Military District refused to recognise the MRC … In so doing, the headquarters breaks with the revolutionary garrison and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies … The HQ becomes a direct weapon of counterrevolutionary forces … The protection of revolutionary order from counterrevolutionary attacks rests with the revolutionary soldiers directed by the MRC. No directives to the garrison not signed by the MRC should be considered valid … The revolution is in danger. Long live the revolutionary garrison.

  In the small hours of Sunday 22nd, in ad hoc session at Smolny, the garrison conference voted to endorse Trotsky’s explosive declaration. Simultaneously, Polkovnikov initiated his moves against the MRC. He carefully invited representatives of garrison committees and officials of the Petrograd and All-Russian Executive Committees to a meeting.

  Polkovnikov was shrewd. In response to their endorsement of the MRC declaration, he also invited the soldiers at Smolny to meet.

  Petrograd Soviet Day. At various mass meetings throughout the capital, the greatest Bolshevik orators – Trotsky, Raskolnikov, Kollontai, Volodarsky – whipped up the crowds. Even Kamenev, surprisingly, was prominent, taking the opportunity of his own speeches to downplay the prospects of any insurrection before the Second Congress.

  At the opera venue called the House of the People, Trotsky warned that Petrograd remained at imminent risk from the bourgeoisie. It was, he said, up to workers and soldiers to defend the city. According to Sukhanov, that perennial wry bystander, wryly standing by, this fostered ‘a mood bordering on ecstasy’.

  In such an atmosphere of cheers and shouts and clenched fists and militia determination and applause, Polkovnikov made his next move. His position was weak, and he knew it. Still seeking compromise, he now invited the MRC itself to meet with him the following day.

  Nor was he the only general fervently strategising. That evening, the Petrograd Military District chief of staff, Jaques Bagratuni, requested the quick deployment from the northern front of an infantry and a cavalry brigade, as well as an artillery battery, to the city. Woytinsky, at the front, responded that soldiers were suspicious. They would need to know why before agreeing.

  Kerensky, meanwhile, still grossly overestimated his hand. That very night, he proposed to his cabinet that Milrevcom be liquidated by force. Polkovnikov tried to persuade him to wait, hoping to get Milrevcom to rescind their declaration of power. But the government went ahead and issued an ultimatum.

  Either, it declared, the MRC would reverse its declaration of the 22nd, or the authorities would reverse it for them.

  23 October. Milrevcom had almost finished appointing its commissars – mostly, surprising no one, Bolshevik Military Organisation activists. Now it was time to ramp up confrontation with the government. The committee circulated a decree granting itself veto power over military orders.

  At midday, MRC representatives arrived back at Peter and Paul: they had requested a public meeting at the fortress where they had so recently been rebuffed. Much later, Antonov would claim that he had argued for sending pro-Bolshevik troops to take the fortress by force, but that Trotsky was convinced the soldiers there could be won over. Accordingly, Milrevcom organised a quite extraordinary debate.

  The fort commander spoke for the existing chain of command, joined in his efforts by high-profile Right SRs and Mensheviks. The MRC was represented mostly by Bolsheviks. For hours, the intense arguments unfolded, raging back and forth before the mass gathering of soldiers.

  As a drained Chudnovsky strove to make his best case for the MRC, he heard a surge of applause spread through the huge crowd. He blinked down at the growing commotion. He smiled.

  ‘I yield my place’, he shouted, ‘to Comrade Trotsky!’

  To the rising tide of euphoria, Trotsky mounted the platform. It was his turn to add his voice.

  The meeting continued as the day grew dark. The crowds relocated, made their way to the great wooden building at 11 Kamennoostrovsky Prospect. The Modern Circus, a dimly lit amphitheatre where the Bolshevik women’s journal Rabotnitsa held frequent gatherings, was a favourite forum for the revolutionaries. It had been the setting of many of the young Trotsky’s greatest speeches in 1905. Later he would write a lyrical eulogy to those 1905 events, a description that might serve to conjure up that October night twelve years later.

  Every square inch was filled, every human body compressed to its limit … The balconies threatened to fall under the excessive weight of human bodies … The air, intense with breathing and waiting, fairly exploded with shouts and with the passionate yells peculiar to the Modern Circus … No speaker, no matter how exhausted, could resist the electric tension of that impassioned human throng … Such was the Modern Circus. It had its own contours, fiery, tender, and frenzied.

  And it was there, at 8 p.m., that the soldiers finally, dramatically, voted.

  Everyone for the MRC moved to the left: those opposed, to the right. There was a protracted shuffling and shoving. When it was done, there rose a huge and sustained cheer. On the right were only a few officers, and some intellectuals from one of th
ose strange bicycle regiments. The majority, by far, stood for the MRC.

  The Peter and Paul units, which had declared against the MRC only three days before, had joined them. The symbolism was immense. And with it came more concrete advantages. Most of Petrograd’s weapon stores were now in MRC hands. And the cannon of the fortress looked out over the Winter Palace itself.

  Delegates had started to arrive for the Congress of Soviets. Bolsheviks and Left SRs would certainly have a majority, and they would be able to demand power transfer to the soviets, a truly socialist government. At a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet plenum that night, the flamboyant Antonov reported all the MRC’s moves, describing them as defensive, all for the sake of the Congress itself. As such, they received overwhelming support from the delegates.

  Milrevcom’s triumphs were indeed spectacular. It was therefore quite astonishing when, late that same night, it caved in to the Military District’s ultimatum. It withdrew its recent declaration – its veto power.

  What precipitated this remarkable climbdown is not clear. What seems likely is that Menshevik moderates Bogdanov and Gots announced that if the committee did not capitulate, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet would break off relations. It was in the Soviet’s name that Milrevcom drew its support and its legitimacy: how would such a breakdown look?

  Whatever threat it was that came, it was apparently not only the Left SRs, but also Bolshevik moderates like Riazanov who insisted the MRC cancel its claim to military authority, precipitating its own existential crisis.

  At 2:30 a.m., a strange army came through the cold city night. It was cobbled from whatever forces were to hand, on which the right could count. Two or three detachments of Junkers; some cadets from officers’ training schools; a few warriors from a Women’s Death Battalion; a battery of horse artillery from Pavlovsk; various Cossacks; a bicycle unit with their thick-wheeled machines; and a rifle regiment of war-wounded veterans. They headed through the quiet city to defend the Winter Palace.