The Russian Revolution (11 page)

The attempted coup failed largely because of the unreliability of the troops and the energetic actions of the Petrograd workers. Railwaymen diverted and obstructed the troop-trains; printers stopped publication of newspapers supporting Kornilov's move; metalworkers rushed out to meet the oncoming troops and explain that Petrograd was calm and their officers had deceived them. Under this pressure, the troops' morale disintegrated, the coup was aborted outside Petrograd without any serious military engagement, and General Krymov, the commanding officer acting under Kornilov's orders, surrendered to the Provisional Government and then committed suicide. Kornilov himself was arrested at Army Headquarters, offering no resistance and taking full responsibility.

In Petrograd, politicians of the centre and right rushed to reaffirm their loyalty to the Provisional Government, which Kerensky continued to head. But Kerensky's standing had been further damaged by his handling of the Kornilov affair, and the government weakened. The Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet also emerged with little credit, since the resistance to Kornilov had been organized largely at the local union and factory level; and this contributed to an upsurge of support for the Bolsheviks which almost immediately enabled them to displace the Soviet's old MenshevikSR leadership. The Army High Command was hit hardest of all, since the arrest of the Commander-in-Chief and failure of the coup left it demoralized and confused; relations between officers and men deteriorated sharply; and, as if this were not enough, the German advance was continuing, with Petrograd the apparent objective. In mid-September, General Alekseev, Kornilov's successor, abruptly resigned as Commander-in-Chief, prefacing his statement with an emotional tribute to Kornilov's high motives. Alekseev felt he could no longer take responsibility for an army in which discipline had collapsed and `our officers are martyrs'.

Practically speaking, in this hour of terrible danger, I can state with horror that we have no army (at these words the General's voice trembled and he shed a few tears), while the Germans are prepared, at any moment, to strike the last and most powerful blow against us.'7

The left gained most from the Kornilov affair, since it gave substance to the previously abstract notion of a counter-revolutionary threat from the right, demonstrated working-class strength, and at the same time convinced many workers that only their armed vigilance could save the revolution from its enemies. The Bolsheviks, with many of their leaders still gaoled or in hiding, played no special role in the actual resistance to Kornilov. But the new swing of popular opinion towards them, already discernible early in August, greatly accelerated after Kornilov's aborted coup; and in a practical sense they were to reap future benefit from the creation of workers' militia units or `Red Guards' which began in response to the Kornilov threat. The Bolsheviks' strength was that they were the only party uncompromised by association with the bourgeoisie and the February regime, and the party most firmly identified with ideas of workers' power and armed uprising.

The October Revolution

From April to August, the Bolsheviks' slogan `All power to the soviets' was essentially provocative-a taunt directed at the moderates who controlled the Petrograd Soviet and did not want to take all power. But the situation changed after the Kornilov affair, when the moderates lost control. The Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet on 31 August and a majority in the Moscow Soviet on 5 September. If the second national Congress of Soviets, scheduled to meet in October, followed the same political trend as the capitals, what were the implications? Did the Bolsheviks want a quasi-legal transfer of power to the soviets, based on a decision by the Congress that the Provisional Government had no further mandate to rule? Or was their old slogan really a call for insurrection, or an affirmation that the Bolsheviks (unlike the rest) had the courage to take power?

In September, Lenin wrote from his hiding place in Finland urging the Bolshevik party to prepare for an armed insurrection. The revolutionary moment had come, he said, and must be seized before it was too late. Delay would be fatal. The Bolsheviks must act before the meeting of the Second Congress of Soviets, pre-empting any decision that the Congress might make.

Lenin's advocacy of immediate armed uprising was passionate, but not entirely convincing to his colleagues in the leadership. Why should the Bolsheviks take a desperate gamble, when the tide was so clearly running their way? Moreover, Lenin himself did not return and take charge: surely he would have done this if he were really serious? No doubt the accusations against him in the summer had left him overwrought. Possibly he had been brooding about his and the Central Committee's hesitation during the July Days, convincing himself that a rare chance to seize power had been lost. In any case, Lenin was temperamental, like all great leaders. This mood might pass.

Lenin's behaviour at this time was certainly contradictory. On the one hand, he insisted on a Bolshevik insurrection. On the other, he remained for some weeks in Finland, despite the fact that the Provisional Government had released the left politicians imprisoned in July, the Bolsheviks now controlled the Soviet, and the time of acute danger to Lenin had surely passed. When he did return to Petrograd, probably at the end of the first week of October, he stayed in hiding, isolated even from the Bolsheviks, and communicated with his Central Committee through a series of angry, exhortatory letters.

On to October, the Bolshevik Central Committee agreed that an uprising was desirable in principle. But clearly many of the Bolsheviks were inclined to use their position in the Soviet to achieve a quasi-legal, non-violent transfer of power. According to the later recollections of a member of the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee,

Hardly any of us thought of the beginning as an armed seizure of all the institutions of government at a specific hour ... We thought of the uprising as the simple seizure of power by the Petrograd Soviet. The Soviet would cease complying with the orders of the Provisional Government, declare itself to be the power, and remove anyone who tried to prevent it from doing this.18

Trotsky, recently released from prison and admitted to Bolshevik Party membership, was now the leader of the Bolshevik majority in the Petrograd Soviet. He had also been one of the Soviet's leaders in 1905. Although he did not openly disagree with Lenin (and later claimed that their views had been identical), it seems probable that he too had doubts about insurrection, and thought that the Soviet could and should handle the problem of dislodging the Provisional Government.19

Strong objections to a Bolshevik-led insurrection came from two of Lenin's old Bolshevik comrades, Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. They thought it irresponsible for the Bolsheviks to seize power by a coup, and unrealistic to think that they could hold power alone. When Zinoviev and Kamenev published these arguments under their own names in a non-Bolshevik daily newspaper (Maxim Gorky's Novaya zhizn'), Lenin's anger and frustration rose to new heights. This was understandable, since it was not only an act of defiance but also a public announcement that the Bolsheviks were secretly planning an insurrection.

It may seem remarkable, in these circumstances, that the Bolsheviks' October coup actually came off. But in fact the advance publicity probably helped Lenin's cause rather than hindered it. It put the Bolsheviks in a position where it would have been difficult not to act, unless they had been arrested beforehand, or received strong indications that the workers, soldiers, and sailors of the Petrograd area would repudiate any revolutionary action. But Kerensky did not take decisive countermeasures against the Bolsheviks, and their control of the Petrograd Soviet's MilitaryRevolutionary Committee made it comparatively easy to organize a coup. The Military-Revolutionary Committee's basic purpose was to organize the workers' resistance to counter-revolution a la Kornilov, and Kerensky was clearly not in a position to interfere with that. The war situation was also an important factor: the Germans were advancing, and Petrograd was threatened. The workers had already rejected a Provisional Government order to evacuate the major industrial plants from the city: they did not trust the Government's intentions towards the revolution, and for that matter they did not trust its will to fight the Germans. (Paradoxically, given the workers' approval of the Bolshevik `peace' slogan both they and the Bolsheviks reacted belligerently when the German threat was immediate and actual: the old peace slogans were scarcely heard in the autumn and winter of 1917, after the fall of Riga.) Had Kerensky tried to disarm the workers as the Germans approached, he would probably have been lynched as a traitor and capitulationist.

The insurrection began on 24 October, the eve of the meeting of the Second Congress of Soviets, when the forces of the Soviet's Military-Revolutionary Committee began to occupy key governmental institutions, taking over the telegraph offices and the railway stations, setting up roadblocks on the city's bridges and surrounding the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was in session.

They encountered almost no violent resistance. The streets remained calm, and citizens continued to go about their everyday business. On the night of 24-5 October, Lenin came out of hiding and joined his comrades at the Smolny Institute, a former school for young ladies which was now the headquarters of the Soviet; he too was calm, having apparently recovered from his bout of nervous anxiety, and he resumed his old position of leadership as a matter of course.

By the afternoon of the 25th, the coup was all but accomplishedexcept, provokingly, for the taking of the Winter Palace, which was still under siege with the Provisional Government members inside. The Palace fell late in the evening, in a rather confused assault against a dwindling body of defenders. It was a less heroic occasion than later Soviet accounts suggest: the battleship Aurora, moored opposite the Palace in the River Neva, did not fire a single live shot, and the occupying forces let Kerensky slip out a side entrance and successfully flee the city by car. It was also slightly unsatisfactory in terms of political drama, since the Congress of Soviets-having delayed its first session for some hours, on Bolshevik insistencefinally began proceedings before the Palace fell, thus frustrating the Bolsheviks' wish to make a dramatic opening announcement. Still, the basic fact remained: the February regime had been overthrown, and power had passed to the victors of October.

Of course, this did leave one question unanswered. Who were the victors of October? In urging the Bolsheviks towards insurrection before the Congress of Soviets, Lenin had evidently wanted this title to go to the Bolsheviks. But the Bolsheviks had in fact organized the uprising through the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet; and, by accident or design, the Committee had procrastinated until the eve of the meeting of the national Congress of Soviets. (Trotsky later described this as a brilliant strategypresumably his own, since it was clearly not Lenin's-of using the soviets to legitimate a Bolshevik seizure of power.20) As the news went out to the provinces, the most common version was that the soviets had taken power.

The question was not wholly clarified at the Congress of Soviets which opened in Petrograd on 25 October. As it turned out, a clear majority of the Congress delegates had come with a mandate to support transfer of all power to the soviets. But this was not an exclusively Bolshevik group (300 of the 670 delegates were Bolsheviks, which gave the party a dominant position but not a majority), and such a mandate did not necessarily imply approval of the Bolsheviks' pre-emptive action. That action was violently criticized at the first session by a large group of Mensheviks and SRs, who then quit the Congress in protest. It was questioned in a more conciliatory manner by a Menshevik group headed by Martov, Lenin's old friend; but Trotsky consigned these critics, in a memorable phrase, to `the dust-heap of history'.

At the Congress, the Bolsheviks called for the transfer of power to workers', soldiers', and peasants' soviets throughout the country. As far as central power was concerned, the logical implication was surely that the place of the old Provisional Government would be taken by the standing Central Executive Committee of the soviets, elected by the Congress and including representatives from a number of political parties. But this was not so. To the surprise of many delegates, it was announced that central governmental functions would be assumed by a new Council of People's Commissars, whose all-Bolshevik membership was read out to the Congress on 26 October by a spokesman for the Bolshevik Party. The head of the new government was Lenin, and Trotsky was People's Commissar (Minister) of Foreign Affairs.

Some historians have suggested that the Bolsheviks' one-party rule emerged as the result of historical accident rather than intention21-that is, that the Bolsheviks did not mean to take power for themselves alone. But if the intention in question is Lenin's, the argument seems dubious; and Lenin overrode the objections of other leading members of the party. In September and October, Lenin seems clearly to have wanted the Bolsheviks to take power, not the multi-party soviets. He did not even want to use the soviets as camouflage, but would apparently have preferred to stage an unambiguous Bolshevik coup. In the provinces, certainly, the immediate result of the October Revolution was that the soviets took power; and the local soviets were not always dominated by Bolsheviks. Although the Bolsheviks' attitude to the soviets after October is open to different interpretations, it is perhaps fair to say that they had no objection in principle to the soviets exercising power at a local level, as long as the soviets were reliably Bolshevik. But this requirement was difficult to square with democratic elections contested by other political parties.

Certainly Lenin was quite firm on the issue of coalition in the new central government, the Council of People's Commissars. In November 1917, when the Bolshevik Central Committee discussed the possibility of moving from an all-Bolshevik government to a broader socialist coalition, Lenin was adamantly against it, even though several Bolsheviks resigned from the government in protest. Later a few `left SRs' (members of a splinter group of the SR Party that had accepted the October coup) were admitted to the Council of People's Commissars, but they were politicians without a strong party base. They were dropped from the government in mid1918, when the left SRs staged an uprising in protest against the peace treaty recently signed with Germany. The Bolsheviks made no further effort to form a coalition government with other parties.