October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

  ‘What about people’s commissars?’ said Trotsky.

  ‘Yes, that’s very good,’ Lenin said. ‘It smells terribly of revolution.’ The seed of the revolutionary government, the Council of People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom, was sown.

  Lenin suggested Trotsky for commissar of the interior. But Trotsky foresaw that enemies on the right would attack him – as a Jew.

  ‘Of what importance are such trifles?’ Lenin snapped.

  ‘There are still a good many fools left,’ Trotsky replied.

  ‘Surely we don’t keep step with fools?’

  ‘Sometimes’, said Trotsky, ‘one has to make some allowance for stupidity. Why create additional complications at the outset?’

  Dizzy with what was unfolding, the men drifted into strange, intense, playful, bureaucratic-utopian banter. The weight of their recent disagreements lightened. Lenin now teased Kamenev. The same Kamenev who, days before, he had denounced as a traitor, and who, hours before, had lugubriously opined that if they did take power, the Bolsheviks would not hold it for more than two weeks.

  ‘Never mind,’ Lenin told him. ‘When, in two years’ time, we’re still in power, you’ll be saying we can’t survive any longer than two years.’

  Dawn of the 25th approached. A desperate Kerensky issued an appeal to the Cossacks ‘in the name of freedom, honour and the glory of our native land … to act to aid the Soviet Central Executive Committee, the revolutionary democracy, and the Provisional Government, and to save the perishing Russian State’.

  But the Cossacks wanted to know if the infantry was coming out. When the government’s answer was equivocal, all but a small number of ultra-loyalists responded that they were disinclined to act alone, ‘serving as live targets’.

  Repeatedly, easily, at points throughout the city, Milrevcom disarmed loyalist guards and just told them to go home. And for the most part, they did. Insurgents occupied the Engineers’ Palace by the simple expedient of walking in. ‘They entered and took their seats, while those who were sitting there got up and left,’ one reminiscence has it. At 6 a.m., forty revolutionary sailors approached the Petrograd State Bank. Its guards, from the Semenovsky Regiment, had pledged neutrality: they would defend the bank from looters and criminals, but would not take sides between reaction and revolution. Nor would they intervene. They stood aside, therefore, and let the MRC take over.

  Within an hour, as watery winter light washed over the city, a detachment from the Keksgolmsky Regiment, commanded by Zakharov, an unusual military school cadet come over to the revolution, set out to the main telephone exchange. Zakharov had worked there, and he knew its security. When he arrived, he had no difficulty directing his troops to isolate and disarm the sullen, powerless cadets on duty there. The revolutionaries disconnected the government lines.

  They missed two. With these, the cabinet ministers holed up and huddled over two receivers amid the white-and-gilt filigrees, pilasters and chandeliers of the Malachite Room of the Winter Palace, and maintained contact with their meagre forces. They issued pointless instructions, bickering in low voices while Kerensky stared at nothing.

  Mid-morning. In Kronstadt, as they had before, armed sailors boarded whatever they could find that was seaworthy. From Helsingfors they set forth in five destroyers and a patrol boat, all festooned with revolutionary banners. Across Petrograd, revolutionaries were once more emptying the jails.

  At Smolny, a scruffy figure barged into the Bolshevik operations room. The activists stared, disconcerted at the newcomer, until at last Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich cried out and ran forward with his arms open. ‘Vladimir Ilyich, our father! I did not recognise you, dear one!’

  Lenin sat down to draft a proclamation. He was twitching with anxiety about time, desperate for the final overthrow of the government to be complete when Second Congress opened. He well knew the power of the fait accompli.

  To the Citizens of Russia. The Provisional Government has been overthrown. State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.

  The cause for which the people have struggled – the immediate proposal of a democratic peace, the elimination of landlord estates, workers’ control over production, the creation of a soviet government – the triumph of this cause has been assured.

  Long live the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ revolution!

  Quite convinced by now of Milrevcom’s usefulness, Lenin did not sign for the Bolsheviks, but in the name of that ‘non-party’ body.

  The proclamation was printed up quickly in the bold text blocks to which Cyrillic lends itself. As fast as copies could be distributed they were plastered as posters across countless walls. Operators keyed its words down telegraph wires.

  In fact it was not a truth but an aspiration.

  In the Winter Palace, Kerensky used his last channels of communication to arrange to join troops heading for the capital. To actually reach them, however, would not be at all easy. He might get away, but the MRC controlled the stations.

  He needed help. The General Staff conducted a long and increasingly frantic search, and at last found a suitable car. Pleading, they managed to secure the use of another from the American embassy – a vehicle with handy diplomatic plates.

  About 11 a.m. on the 25th, just as Lenin’s prefigurative proclamation began to circulate, the two vehicles sped past MRC roadblocks that were more enthusiastic than efficient.

  A broken Kerensky escaped the city with a tiny entourage, to go looking for loyal soldiers.

  It seemed to many citizens, the upheaval notwithstanding, almost like a normal day in Petrograd. A certain amount of racket and kerfuffle was impossible to ignore, certainly, but relatively few people were involved in the actual fighting, and only at key points. As those combatants went about their insurrectionary or counterrevolutionary work, reconfiguring the world, most trams were running, most shops stayed open.

  At midday, armed revolutionary soldiers and sailors arrived at the Mariinsky Palace. The Preparliamentarians anxiously discussing the unfolding drama were about to become actors in it.

  An MRC commissar stormed in. He ordered the Preparliament’s chair, Avksentiev, to clear the palace. Soldiers and sailors waving weapons shoved their way inside, scattering terrified deputies. In a daze, Avksentiev quickly gathered together as many of the steering committee as he could. They knew resistance was pointless, but departed under protest as formal as they could manage to make it, committed to reconvening as soon as possible.

  As they stepped out into stinging cold, the building’s new guards checked their papers, but did not detain them. The pitiful Preparliament was not the prize that, to Lenin’s maddened exasparation, still eluded them.

  That prize, now Kerenskyless, was in the Winter Palace. There, their world collapsing, the sullen embers of the Provisional Government still glowed.

  At noon in the grand Malachite Room, the textile magnate and Kadet Konovalov convened the cabinet.

  ‘I don’t know why this session was called,’ muttered the naval minister, Admiral Verderevsky. ‘We have no tangible military force and consequently are incapable of taking any action whatever.’ Perhaps, he posited, they should have convened with the Preparliament – and even as he spoke, news came that it had been dismissed.

  The ministers received reports and issued appeals to their dwindling interlocutors. Those not afflicted by Verderevsky’s mournful realism spun out fantasies. With the last shreds of their power gusting away, they dreamed up a new authority.

  With all the seriousness in the world, like burnt-out matches telling grim stories of the conflagration they will soon start, the ashes of Russia’s Provisional Government debated which of them to make dictator.

  This time the Kronstadt forces reached Petrograd’s waters in a former pleasure yacht, two minelayers, a training vessel, an antique battleship and a phalanx o
f tiny barges. Another madcap flotilla.

  Close by where the cabinet was fantasising of dictatorship, revolutionary sailors captured the Admiralty and arrested the naval high command. The Pavlovsky Regiment set up pickets on bridges. The Keksgolmsky Regiment took control north of the Moika river.

  Noon, the original time slated for the seizure of the Winter Palace, had come and gone. The deadline was pushed forward by three hours, which scheduled the arrest of the government for after the 2 p.m. opening of the Congress of Soviets – exactly what Lenin wanted to avoid. So that opening was postponed.

  But the hall of Smolny was now teeming with delegates from the Petrograd and provincial soviets. They demanded news. They could not be put off forever.

  At 2:35 p.m., therefore, Trotsky opened an emergency session of the Petrograd Soviet.

  ‘On behalf of the Military Revolutionary Committee,’ he exclaimed, ‘I declare that the Provisional Government no longer exists.’

  His words aroused a storm of joy. Key institutions were in MRC hands, Trotsky went on over the commotion. The Winter Palace would fall ‘momentarily’. Another huge cheer came: Lenin was entering the hall.

  ‘Long live Comrade Lenin,’ Trotsky cried, ‘back with us again!’

  Lenin’s first public appearance since July was brief and exultant. He offered no details, but announced ‘the beginning of a new period’, and exhorted: ‘Long live the world socialist revolution!’

  Most of those present responded with delight. But there was dissent.

  ‘You are anticipating the will of the Second Congres of Soviets,’ someone shouted.

  ‘The will of the Second Congress of Soviets has already been predetermined by the fact of the workers’ and soldiers’ uprising,’ Trotsky called back. ‘Now we have only to develop this triumph.’

  But amid proclamations from Volodarsky, Zinoviev and Lunacharsky, a small number of moderates, mostly Mensheviks, withdrew from the Soviet’s executive organs. They warned of terrible consequences from this conspiracy.

  The revolutionaries made slapstick errors. Baltic sailors arrived late to their postings. Some were marooned in a field beyond the Finnish city of Vyborg, thanks to a loyalist stationmaster who supplied an unreliable train.

  At 3 p.m., the rescheduled assault on the Provisional Government was delayed yet again. Lenin raged at the MRC. He was, Podvoisky recalled, ‘like a lion in a cage … He was ready to shoot us’.

  At the Winter Palace itself, as morale among the remaining 3,000 or so hungry loyalist troops collapsed, the cabinet secluded within continued to imagine a future history. Dan and Gots of the Preparliament had ruled Kadets out of their proposed government; so now, in an epically insignificant snub to the Mensheviks, the cabinet determined that the new leader would be of that party: the former minister of welfare, Nikolai Mikhailovich Kishkin.

  Just after 4 p.m., he was formally invested with power. Thus began the brief reign of Kishkin the dictator, all-powerful ruler of a clutch of palace rooms and a few outlying buildings.

  Dictator Kishkin rushed to the military headquarters to take command. His first action was to dismiss the chief of staff, Polkovnikov, and replace him with Bagratuni. This provoked the first crack in his absolute authority: miraculously resistant to awe at Kishkin’s power, Polkovnikov’s associates resigned en masse in protest at his scapegoating.

  Some made it through the perforated MRC defence and went glumly home. Some sat staring out of the windows.

  6 p.m. Cold rain came down with the dark. Another MRC deadline to attack the palace passed. Red Guards watched in mild consternation as cadets in the Palace Square erected their own barricades. Periodically, some excitable revolutionary or other would let off a shot, only to be rebuked by comrades. Lenin sent note after furious note to the MRC leaders, demanding they get on with it.

  At 6:15 p.m., a sizeable group of cadets decided they had no appetite for pointless sacrifice, particularly of themselves. They slipped out of the Winter Palace, taking their large-bore rifles with them. The ministers withdrew to Kerensky’s private rooms for supper. Borscht, fish, artichokes.

  At Peter and Paul, Blagonravov, the MRC commissar, decided the time really had come for the attack. He sent two cyclists to the General Staff with an ultimatum: his cannon, the guns of the Aurora and those of its sister ship the Amur would fire in twenty minutes unless the government surrendered.

  Blagonravov was bluffing. He had discovered that the big weapons trained on the palace from the fortress walls were unusable, too filthy to fire. The smaller replacements dragged hurriedly into position he then realised were not loaded. And he had no suitable ammunition.

  The generals went quickly to the cabinet to relay the MRC message. The last telegrapher in the General Staff tapped out to Pskov that the building was lost. ‘I am leaving work’, he added, ‘and getting out of here.’

  Someone in the palace wondered what would happen to it if the Aurora fired. ‘It will be turned’, said Verderevsky heavily, ‘into a heap of ruins.’

  Dictator Kishkin hurried to beg a few quaking cadets to stay. The cabinet, considering it their duty not to withdraw until the last possible moment, put out their own last telegram.

  ‘To all, all, all! The Petrograd Soviet’ – not the Bolsheviks, tellingly – ‘has declared the Provisional Government overthrown, and demands that power be yielded to it under threat of shelling … We have decided not to surrender and to put ourselves under the protection of the people’.

  At 8 p.m., it was the turn of 200 Cossacks to walk away from their posts. Bagratuni resigned and he, too, got out. In the palace, the remaining loyalist forces waited for death, smoking morosely under the tapestries.

  One flank was barely guarded. Anyone determined and lucky could sneak past the guards into the half-defended corridors. A succession of revolutionaries like Dashkevich and journalists like John Reed came and went, for the sake of curiosity, fraternisation, reportage. Chudnovsky was invited in, by cadets desperate to leave but fearful, and negotiating for their safety.

  The ministers vacated the Malachite Room for a less vulnerable office – which contained a telephone, its line miraculously still connected. The men dialled the city Duma and implored Petrograd’s mayor, Grigorii Shreider, down the line for help.

  The Duma met immediately in emergency session, and sent mediators to the Aurora, Smolny and the Winter Palace. But the MRC barred them from the ship, and the besiegers of the palace rebuffed them. Nor was their white flag clear enough: some of the last defenders within, on whose behalf they had come, fired at them. At Smolny, Kamenev received them courteously and offered them safe passage to the palace, but the escorted group had no more luck than those who went direct.

  It was at around this time that Kerensky managed to reach the front.

  Blagonravov had been trying to prepare, and realised with relief that the six-inch guns of Peter and Paul were in firing condition after all. But his ridiculous travails were not over. The revolutionaries had agreed that the final assault on the Winter Palace would begin when his men raised a lighted red lantern on the fortress flagpole – and no one, it had transpired, had such a lantern.

  Hunting for one throughout the dark grounds of Peter and Paul, Blagonravov promptly fell into a mud-pit. When, dirty and sodden, he finally found a suitable light and hared back to raise it, he discovered, nearly out of his mind with frustration, that ‘it proved extremely difficult to fix it on the flagpole’. It was not until 9:40 p.m., almost ten hours after the original deadline, that he overcame these obstacles and was at last able to signal the Aurora to fire.

  The ship’s first shot was a blank. Its blast was sound without fury, but a sound much louder than that of live ammunition. A cataclysmic boom shook Petrograd.

  On the banks of the river, curious onlookers dived in terror to the ground, covering their ears. Deafened and quivering from the report, scores of the last defenders in the palace lost heart and abandoned their posts, leaving only a hard core too committe
d, brave, paralysed, exhausted, stupid, or afraid to flee.

  The minister Semion Maslov of the Right SRs screamed down the phone line to a Duma representative, who relayed his words to the hushed house. ‘The democracy sent us into the Provisional Government: we didn’t want the appointments, but we went. Yet now … when we are being shot, we are not supported … Of course we will die. But my final words will be: “Contempt and damnation to the democracy which knew how to appoint us but was unable to defend us.”’

  After almost eight hours of stalling, the soviet delegates could be put off no longer. An hour after that first shot, in the grand colonnaded Assembly Hall of Smolny, the Second Congress of Soviets opened.

  The room was heavy with the fug of cigarettes, despite repeated shouts, many cheerfully taken up by the smokers themselves, that smoking was not allowed. The delegates, Sukhanov recorded with a shudder, mostly bore ‘the grey features of the Bolshevik provinces’. They looked, to his refined and intellectual eye, ‘morose’ and ‘primitive’ and ‘dark’, ‘crude and ignorant’.

  Of 670 delegates, 300 were Bolsheviks. A hundred and ninty-three were SRs, more than half of them of the party’s left; sixty-eight Mensheviks, and fourteen Menshevik–Internationalists. The rest were unaffiliated, or members of tiny groups. The size of the Bolshevik presence illustrated that support for the party was soaring among those who voted in the representatives – and was also bolstered by somewhat lax organisational arrangements that had given them more than their proportional share. Even so, without the Left SRs, they had no majority.

  It was not, however, a Bolshevik who rang the opening bell, but a Menshevik. The Bolsheviks played on Dan’s vanity by offering him this role. But he instantly quashed any hopes of cross-party camaraderie or congeniality.

  ‘The Central Executive Committee considers our customary opening political address superfluous,’ he announced. ‘Even now, our comrades who are selflessly fulfilling the obligations we placed on them are under fire at the Winter Palace.’