The MRC had blinked. Kerensky struck.
As he prayed for the imminent arrival of loyalist troops from the front, Kerensky ordered Bagratuni to deploy those few he had. In the small hours of 24 October, the assault on the Bolsheviks began.
In the early winter darkness, a detachment of militia and cadets arrived at the Trud press, where Rabochy put’ was printed. They forced their way in and destroyed several thousand copies of the paper. They smashed equipment, sealed the entrance, and set a guard outside. In a fatuous nod at even-handedness, Kerensky also ordered the simultaneous shutdown of two hard-right journals, Zhivoe slovo and Novaya Rus’. No one, though, could mistake the target of this attack.
After a long day of meetings with newly arrived party delegates, several leading Bolshevik were deep asleep in the party’s Priboi publishing house, snoring on their cots amid the piles of books. A phone began to ring and would not stop. They groaned. One Lomov, at last, stumbled over and picked up.
Trotsky’s sharp voice, summoning them. ‘Kerensky is on the offensive!’
At Smolny, Lazimir, Trotsky, Sverdlov, Antonov and others scrambled to formulate MRC alerts for regimental committees and new commissars. ‘Directive Number One. The Petrograd Soviet is in direct danger … You are hereby directed to bring your regiment to battle readiness … Any procrastination or interference in executing this order will be considered a betrayal of the revolution.’
No one now knew if the Soviet Congress would even take place, now. Some in the MRC and the Petersburg Committee began, like Lenin, to agitate for immediate insurrection. But, even with their presses attacked and with loyalist forces on the move, the rump CC at Smolny, including Trotsky and Kamenev, considered pursuing negotiations between the MRC and the Military District. They seemed not yet to realise that Kerensky’s actions had rendered such a course irrelevant.
The CC was still framing the actions it supported as wholly defensive, at least until the Soviet Congress. But now it endorsed Trotsky’s decision to send guards to the Trud press, because ‘the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies cannot tolerate suppression of the free word’.
To reopen the press would be less defence than counterattack. As at the front, so with insurrection: the distinction between ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ can blur.
At 9 a.m., Dashkevich of the Bolshevik MO and CC pulled up to the printers with a company of machine-gun-toting Litovsky guards. Effortlessly and bloodlessly they overwhelmed the loyalist militia, and broke the government seals. ‘The comrade soldiers’, one reporter drily noted, ‘made no similar effort to liberate Zhivoe slovo.’ An edition of Pravda was rushed out, pushing the mainstream CC line by urging pressure on the forthcoming Congress of Soviets to replace Kerensky’s regime.
On the streets, armed workers and soldiers began congregating, trying to get a sense of the tides of events. The left were not the only side in motion.
Kerensky made his quick way to the Mariinsky Palace. There, in a bid to rally the Preparliament, that veteran melodramatist gave a speech that was rambling, incoherent and overwrought even by his own generous standards. The left, he wailed, was playing into German hands. He begged for support for his most Provisional of Governments. He pleaded for powers to suppress the Bolsheviks. The right applauded, while the Menshevik–Internationalists and Left SRs shifted in embarrassment at the spectacle he made of himself.
From there, Kerensky entrusted himself to the care of those meagre loyalist forces at the Winter Palace. He was certain that the Preparliament would now support him. The man was ‘completely oblivious’, the Left SR Kamkov would recall, ‘to the fact that there was nobody to put down the uprising regardless of what sanctions he was granted’.
As he holed up, Trotsky was explaining to the Bolshevik delegates that the party was not in favour of insurrection before the congress itself, but that it would allow the government’s own rot to undermine it. ‘It would be a mistake’, he said amid applause, ‘to arrest the government … This is defence, comrades. This is defence.’ Such was still the catechism.
That afternoon came a sudden ominous development: the army General Staff ordered the bridges of the city drawn. They yawned slowly open as their pulleys cranked, not to allow passage beneath but to prevent it above, marooning those growing gatherings of the people on their sides of the water. Only Palace Bridge remained passable, with government forces in control of it.
‘I remembered the July Days,’ Ilin-Zhenevsky of the Bolshevik MO later wrote. ‘The drawing of the bridges appeared to me as the first step in another attempt to destroy us. Was it possible the Provisional Government would triumph over us again?’
Schools sent students home, and government departments their employees. Word of the bridge closures spread. Shops and banks pulled their shutters down. The tramlines curtailed their services.
But at 4 p.m., just as the cycle regiment at the Winter Palace abruptly abandoned their posts, loyalist artillery cadets arrived at one of those vital bridges, the Liteiny, and found themselves facing a large, furious crowd. This time, people had decided, the bridges would not be allowed to fall to the enemy. The outnumbered cadets could only surrender.
The Women’s Death Battalion were ordered to the Troitsky Bridge, to hold it. But when they arrived, they realised that they stood squarely in the sights of the machine guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress. They balked.
Unbidden, Ilin-Zhenevsky directed garrison soldiers to secure the Grenadiers and Samsonovsky bridges. One group returned dragging heavy machinery behind them, and were followed by a shouting mechanic.
‘We have lowered the bridge,’ they told a curious Ilin-Zhenevsky, ‘and to make sure that it stays down, we’ve brought part of the mechanism.’ Ilin-Zhenevsky reassured the bridge technician that the revolutionaries would take good care of the bulky parts, and stashed them in the regimental committee room.
Not everything went the crowds’ way. On Nikolaevsky Bridge, cadets took on committed but ill-disciplined Red Guards in their civilian clothes, and drove them off to take the crossing. On the Palace Bridge, cadets and women from the Death Battalion managed to hold their ground. Still, by early evening, the crowds held two of Petrograd’s four main bridges. Enough.
At the insistence of the Left SRs, Milrevcom informed the press that ‘contrary to all rumours and reports’, it was not out to seize power, ‘but exclusively for defence’. As its members repeated that line, on MRC orders, commissar Stanislav Pestkovsky came to the city’s telegraph office. Its guards were of the Keksgolmsky Regiment, long since pledged to loyalty to the MRC. With them onside, without a shot fired, and though not one of the three thousand employees within was a Bolshevik, the city’s communications passed into Milrevcom hands.
Evening in a city in strange equipoise. Armed revolutionaries were gathered on the bridges, grimly holding them from government forces, while groups of respectable citizens promenaded as usual on Nevsky Prospect, where most of the restaurants and cinemas were open. Upheaval was traced over a regular city dusk.
At Margarita Fofanova’s apartment, in the outskirts, Lenin grew twitchy. Despite the relatively smooth progress of the fight so far, his comrades still would not declare for an uprising. Their defensive posture held sway.
‘The situation is critical in the extreme,’ he scrawled to them.
To delay the uprising would be fatal … With all my might I urge comrades to realise that everything now hangs by a thread; that we are confronted by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or congresses (even congresses of soviets), but exclusively … by the struggle of the armed people … We must at all costs, this very evening, this very night, arrest the government … We must not wait! We may lose everything! … The government is tottering. It must be given the death blow at all costs.
And who should take power? ‘That is not important at present. Let the MRC do it, or “some other institution”’.
Lenin asked Fofanova to deliver the note to Krupskaya, ‘and no one
else ’.
In Helsingfors, a radio operator handed a telegram to Dybenko, a young Bolshevik navy militant. ‘Send the regulations’. An agreed code. His comrades in the capital were instructing him to dispatch sailors and ships to Petrograd.
The hard left were not the only ones preparing. That night, even waverers were coming to understand that wavering could not continue. The feeble Preparliament reconvened again to discuss Kerensky’s pleas for support.
‘Let’s not play hide and seek with each other.’ The Left SR Boris Kamkov was peremptory. ‘Is there anybody at all who would trust this government?’
Martov stood to join the criticism. Somewhere in the hall, a wit of the right shouted, ‘Here is the minister of foreign affairs in the future cabinet!’
‘I’m nearsighted,’ Martov shot back, ‘and cannot tell if this is said by the minister of foreign affairs in Kornilov’s cabinet.’
The preparliamentarians traded barbs with desperate panache as structures of authority shuddered into splinters.
That Kamkov and Martov demanded, yet again, an immediate peace, a socialist government, land and army reform, was a surprise to no one. But the day’s upheavals, its lurches towards finality, were pushing moderates leftward, too.
Even Fyodor Dan, unexpectedly, after months of seeking coalition with the right, now insisted on ‘the clear enunciation by the government … of a platform in which the people will see their just interests supported by the government and the Council of the Republic and not the Bolsheviks’. What this meant was framing ‘the questions of peace and land and the democratisation of the army … in such a way that not a single worker or soldier will have the slightest doubt that our government is moving along this course with firm and resolute steps’.
The Kadets in the Preparliament, of course, proposed a resolution of support for the Provisional Government. Hard-line Cossacks put forth their own, viciously attacking that government from the right. But Dan articulated a newly mainstream SR/Menshevik resolution. Their calls were for the inauguration of a ‘Committee of Public Safety’ to work with the Provisional Government in restoring order – and for a radical programme for land and peace. The first, conciliatory-sounding, provision notwithstanding, this was a vote of left no confidence in Kerensky.
The chamber echoed as the debate over the three motions began.
At last, at 8:30 p.m., against opposition of 102 and with 26 crucial abstentions, Dan’s ‘left’ resolution passed, with 123 votes.
A new era. Dan and Gots were now armed with a sliver-thin but newly radical mandate. Immediately they lit out through the cold evening to meet with the cabinet at the Winter Palace. This, they were sure, was the chance. They would demand the Provisional Government proclaim the cessation of hostilities. They would insist on peace negotiations, the transfer of manorial land, the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Everything could now change.
Alas.
It was just as Preparliament voted that the Helsingfors Bolshevik Leonid Stark, with only twelve armed sailors, took the Petrograd Telegraph Agency, a news wire. One of his first actions was to plug the flow of information. News of the Preparliament’s resolution went nowhere.
Though what difference that made is moot. Arriving at the Winter Palace, Dan and Gots were unnerved to find Kerensky at the point of derangement. One moment he morosely announced his intention to resign; the next he dismissed the Mensheviks, delusionally insisting that the government could cope alone.
The rebellion was, still, poised between defence and offensive. As late as 9 p.m., on the Troitsky Bridge, Osvald Denis, MRC commissar of the Pavlovsky Regiment, noticed increased movement among the loyalist forces. He wasted no time. He ordered barricades erected to block the way to the palace, and the arrest of government officials. But, very quickly, he received urgent word from Milrevcom. These measures were unauthorised, they told him. They ordered him to dismantle his checkpoints.
Incredulous, Denis ignored their command.
Lenin, meanwhile, could contain himself no longer. Directly contravening CC instructions – not for the first time – he did up his coat and placed a note on his hostess’s table.
‘I have gone’, it read, ‘where you did not want me to go.’
In wig, battered cap and ragged clothes, bandages swathed around his face in crude disguise, Lenin set out, together with his Finnish comrade Eino Rahja.
The two men crossed Vyborg in a swaying, near-empty tram. When, through chance remarks, the conductor revealed that she was a leftist, Lenin compulsively began to question her about – and lecture her on – the political situation.
They alighted near the Finland Station and continued on foot through the dangerous streets. At the bottom of Shpalernaya Street, Lenin and Rahja encountered a fired-up loyalist mounted patrol. Rahja held his breath.
But the cadets saw only a nervous injured drunk. They waved Lenin, the world’s most famous revolutionary, on his way. So it was that shortly before midnight, Lenin and Rahja reached the Smolny Institute.
At street corners, patrols kept watch. Machine-gunners hunched ready over weapons at the building’s entrance. That night the old finishing school was on a war footing. Vehicles came and went in a hubbub. Bonfires lit up the walls, the wary hard-eyed soldiers and the Red Guards.
Neither Rahja nor Lenin, of course, had an entry pass. The guards were adamant they could not come in. It seemed as if after their heart-in-mouth journey, the officious defences of their own side might stymie them.
But a crowd was gathering behind them, also demanding entrance. Its numbers grew, until abruptly under the riotous pressure of so many the sentries could only stand aside, helpless, and Lenin let the rush of people push him, take him with them through the perimeter, across the yard and on through the doors into the institute, and as 24 October became the 25th, he made his way at last along the corridors of Smolny to Room 36.
Where the Bolshevik caucus stared, stunned, as a shabby apparition interrupted them, unwinding bandages from his face, haranguing them to take power.
The All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviet eagerly pushed Dan’s newly left suggestions, the agenda that Kerensky had just rejected. These looked to be the best chance for stability. Left and even centrist Mensheviks were now scrambling to endorse the Committee of Public Safety, and to reaffirm the Preparliament’s demands. Those late hours, the left-wingers had momentum. Easily the majority of their own party caucus, the Left SRs resolved to liaise with the Menshevik–Internationalists, to coordinate efforts towards an exclusively socialist coalition.
They were not the only ones moving fast. Irrespective of Lenin’s exhortations and his furtive night journey, the logic of confrontation pushed Milrevcom ineluctibly towards a more overtly aggressive posture: the offensive it had done its best to avoid. Lenin’s presence at Smolny was nonetheless momentous, accelerating the trends.
It was past midnight. Around two hours after Lenin’s arrival at the institute, that resourceful commissar Denis, whose recent barricade-building had been so ill-received by his comrades, received new word from the MRC. Now they told him to reinforce the cordon they had previously ordered he destroy – a command he had declined to obey – and to exert control over movement in and out of the grounds of the Winter Palace. The final transition, from de facto to overt insurrection, had begun.
MRC commissar Michael Faerman took over the electric station and, on that harsh and freezing October night, disconnected government buildings. Commissar Karl Kadlubovsky occupied the main city post office. A company of the Sixth Engineer Battalion occupied Nikolaevsky Station. Their moonlit manoeuvres were watched by a statue, a scene from an uncanny story. ‘The hulks of house looked like medieval castles – giant shadows followed the engineers,’ one participant remembered. ‘At this sight, the next-to-last emperor appeared to rein in his horse in horror.’
3 a.m. Kerensky, who only a few hours earlier had claimed to be ready to face down any challenge, tore back, distraught, to Gene
ral Staff headquarters, to hear a litany of strategic points falling. Loyalist morale pitched. Worse, though, quickly came.
At 3:30 a.m., a dark presence cut the shadowed Neva. Masts and wires and three looming smokestacks, great jutting guns. Out of the gloom came the armoured ship Aurora, making for the city’s heart.
The cruiser had long been undergoing repairs in a Neva shipyard. The men of its crew were staunchly radical – when trouble flared, they had disobeyed orders from the government, panicked at their proximity, to set out for sea – and now it was at MRC command that they came. The Aurora took the treacherous river under an expert eye: when its captain refused to have anything to do with the enterprise, the men locked him in his cabin and set out anyway. But he could not bear the risk to his great ship. He begged them to let him out, so he could navigate. It was he who guided them to anchor in the blackness by Nikolaevsky Bridge.
The Aurora’s searchlights cut the night. The cadets on the bridge, the last under government control, panicked in the glare. They fled.
When a few shock troops arrived to recapture it, 200 sailors and workers were defending the bridge.
From Finland, armed groups set out by train and ship to join their comrades. More reds for Red Petrograd. In Room 36 of Smolny, Lenin gathered with Trotsky and Stalin, Smilga and Berzin – and Kamenev and Zinoviev. Their recent betrayal was hardly the most important thing on which to focus any more.
People bustled and came and went, bringing reports and instructions. The Bolsheviks leaned over maps, traced lines of attack. Lenin insisted that the Winter Palace must be taken and the Provisional Government arrested. This was now, without any question, an insurrection.
Lenin proposed to his comrades a – wholly Bolshevik – government to present to the Soviet Congress, when it opened later that day. But what should they call the appointees? ‘Minister’, he said, was ‘a vile, hackneyed word’.