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s. a. smith

Left SRs and Bolsheviks – whose support was now growing – found their

denunciation of the war falling on receptive ears.

On 3 July the Kadet ministers resigned from the government, ostensibly

over concessions made to Ukrainian nationalism.

By 2 a.m., 60,000 to 70,000

armed soldiers and workers had surrounded the Tauride Palace in Petrograd

to demand that the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets (VTsIK) take

power. The latter condemned the demonstration as ‘counter-revolutionary’

and denounced the Bolsheviks for attempting to ‘dictate with bayonets’ the pol-

icy of the Soviets. Although lower-level Bolshevik organisations were involved

in the demonstration, party leaders considered this attempted uprising prema-

ture. As more and more soldiers and workers came onto the streets, however,

they decided to lead the movement. By the next day, a semi-insurrection was

under way. That night the government brought in troops to protect the Soviet,

and newsthat a powerful forcewasonits wayfromthe northern front, together

with the increasingly ugly character of the demonstrations (estimates of total

dead and wounded in two days of rioting ran to 400), caused regiments that

had been raring for action to lose heart. Kerensky vowed ‘severe retribution’

on the insurgents and issued orders for the arrest of leading Bolsheviks and

for the closure of their newspapers. On 7 July, he formed a ‘government of sal-

vation of the revolution’ and on 21 July, after threatening to resign, persuaded

the Kadets to join a second coalition government. It looked as though the

Bolshevik goose had been truly cooked.

The peasant revolution

The political awareness of the peasantry was low, but historians often exag-

gerate the cultural and political isolation of the village. In the last decades of

tsarism, the expanding market for agricultural goods, large-scale migration,

the impact of urban consumer culture, rising rates of literacy, mass conscrip-

tion, and the arrival of refugees, had brought new ideas and values to the

village.

In 1917 soldiers returning from the front played a vital role in bring-

ing politics into the village, as did agitators sent by urban soviets and labour

organisations. The Petrograd Soviet of Peasant Deputies, for example, sent

44 A. K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Read, From Tsar, ch. 6

45 The following is based on: Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd

Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968); O. N.

Znamenskii, Iul’skii krizis 1917 goda (Leningrad: Nauka, 1964).

46 Stephen Frank and Mark Steinberg (eds.), Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices

and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

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about 3,000 agitators into the countryside, armed with agitational literature

produced at a cost of 65,000 roubles.

Educated folk were full of tales about

the political ignorance of the peasantry, but peasants latched on to elements

in the discourse of revolution – such as those of self-government, citizenship

and socialism – reinterpreting them according to their lights.

Dissatisfaction

over the state grain monopoly and the slow progress on land reform caused

peasants gradually to become disillusioned with the Provisional Government.

This, together with a desperate desire to see peace, a growing attraction to

soviet powerand an idealised vision of socialism, strengthened peasant support

in autumn 1917 for the Left SRs and, to a lesser extent, the Bolsheviks.

The ﬁrst issue that brought peasants into conﬂict with the government was

that of the state grain monopoly. The war had seen a small decline in the

amount of grain grown but, more worryingly, a more substantial fall in the

amount of grain marketed, from one quarter of the harvest in 1913 to one

sixth in 1917. Peasants had little incentive to sell grain given galloping inﬂation

and the shortage of consumer goods. The Provisional Government’s efforts

to force peasants to sell grain at ﬁxed prices provoked them into concealing

grain or turning it into alcohol.

The second issue that brought peasants

into conﬂict with the government was that of land redistribution. Peasants

believed that the revolution would redress the historic wrong done to them at

the time of the emancipation of the serfs by transferring gentry, Church and

state lands into the hands of those who worked them. The new government,

however, had no stomach for carrying out a massive land reform at a time

of war. Moreover, it was split between Kadets, who insisted that landlords be

fully compensated for land taken from them, and Chernov, who wished to

see the orderly transfer of land via the land committees to those who worked

it. With a view to allowing the Constituent Assembly to decide the question,

the government set up a somewhat bureaucratic structure of land committees

to prepare a detailed land settlement, region by region. This only served to

heighten peasant expectations.

From late spring, a struggle began between peasants and landlords. Initially,

peasants were cautious, testing the capacity of local authorities to curb their

47 Michael Hickey, ‘Urban Zemliachestva and Rural Revolution: Petrograd and the Smolensk

Countryside in 1917’, Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 23, 2 (1996): 143–60; Michael Melancon,

‘Soldiers, Peasant-Soldiers, and Peasant-Workers and their Organisations in Petrograd:

Ground-Level Revolution during the Early Months of 1917’, Soviet and Post-Soviet Review

23, 2 (1996): 183 (161–90).

48 Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting, ch. 5.

49 L. T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–21 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1990), ch. 3.

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encroachments on landlord property. They unilaterally reduced or failed to

pay rent, grazed cattle illegally on the landowners’ estates, stole wood from

their forests and took over uncultivated tracts of gentry land on the pretext

that it would otherwise remain unsown. In the non-Black Earth zone, where

dairy and livestock farming were critical, they tried to get their hands on mead-

ows and pasture. Seeing the inability of local commissars to respond, illegal

acts multiplied, levelling off during harvest from mid-July to mid-August, but

climbing sharply from September. Generally, the village gathering authorised

these actions, returning soldiers often spurring it on. By autumn the agrarian

movement was in full swing, with peasants increasingly seizing gentry land,

equipment and livestock and distributing them outright. The movement was

ﬁercest in the overcrowded central Black Earth and middle Volga provinces and

in Ukraine. The government introduced martial law in Tambov, Orel, Tula,

Riazan’, Penza and Saratov provinces, but soldiers in rear garrisons could not

be relied upon to put down peasant rebels. The Union of Landowners and

Farmers castigated the government for failing to defend the rights of private

property.

Political polarisation

By summer the economy was buckling under the strain of war.

In the ﬁrst

half of 1917 production of fuel and raw materials fell by over a third and gross

factory output over the year fell by 36 per cent compared with 1916. As a result,

enterprises closed and by October nearly half a million workers had been laid

off. The crisis was aggravated by mounting chaos in the transport system,

which meant that grain and industrial supplies failed to get through to the

towns. The government debt rose to an astronomical 49 billion roubles, of

which 11.2 billion was owed on foreign loans, and the government reacted by

printing money, further fuelling inﬂation. Between July and October prices

rose fourfold and in Moscow and Petrograd the real value of wages halved in

the second half of the year.

As the economic crisis deepened, class conﬂict intensiﬁed. Between

February and October, 2.5 million workers went on strike, stoppages increas-

ing in scale as the year wore on, but becoming ever harder to win.

The trade

50 John Channon, ‘The Landowners’, in Service, Society and Politics,pp.120–46.

51 The following is based on Paul Flenley, ‘Industrial Relations and the Economic Cri-

sis of 1917’, Revolutionary Russia 4, 2 (1991): 184–209; Velikaia oktiabr’skaia entsiklopediia,

pp. 593–4.

52 D. P. Koenker and W. G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1989).

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unions, which by October had over two million members, were organised

mainly along industry-wide lines. They endeavoured to negotiate collective

wage agreements with employers’ organisations, but negotiations were pro-

tracted and served to exacerbate class antagonism.

For their part, the factory

committees implemented workers’ control of production to prevent what they

believed to be widespread ‘sabotage’ by employers. Workers’ control signiﬁed

the close monitoring of the activities of management, rather than its displace-

ment, but it was fed by deep-seated aspirations for workplace democracy. The

idea of workers’ control, though not emanating from any political party, was

taken up by Bolsheviks, anarchists and some Left SRs; it proved to be a key

reason why worker support shifted in their favour. By contrast, the insistence

of the moderate socialists that only state regulation could restore order to the

economy – and that ‘control’ by individual factory committees only exacer-

bated the crisis – was another cause of their undoing.

Industrialists, resenting

any infringement of their right to manage, resorted to ever more extreme mea-

sures, including lockouts and the closure of mines and factories in the Urals and

Donbass.

Having failed to form a single national organisation to represent

their interests, they, too, became alienated from the ‘socialist’ government.

By summer a discourse of class was in the ascendant, symbolised in the sub-

stitution of the word ‘comrade’ for ‘citizen’ as the favoured form of address.

Given the underdevelopment of class relations in Russia, and the key role

played in the revolution by non-class groups such as soldiers and nationalist

movements, this was a remarkable development. After all, the language of

class, at least in its Marxist guise, had entered politics only since 1905. Yet it

proved easily assimilable since it played on a binary opposition that ran deep

in popular culture between ‘them’, the verkhi, that is those at the top, and ‘us’,

the nizy, that is those at the bottom. People’s identities, of course, were mul-

tiple – one was not only a worker, but a Russian, a woman, a young person –

yet ‘class’ came to reconﬁgure identities of nation, gender and youth in its

own terms. ‘We’ could signify the working class, ‘proletarian youth’, ‘working

women’, the ‘toiling people’ (i.e. peasants as well as workers) or ‘revolutionary

democracy’. ‘They’ could signify capitalists, landlords, army generals or, at its

most visceral, the burzhui, anyone with an overbearing manner, an education,

53 D. P. Koenker, ‘The Trade Unions’, in Acton et al., Critical Companion,p.450 (pp. 446–56).

54 Smith, Red Petrograd, ch. 7.

55 T. H. Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, vol. ii: Politics and Revolution in Russia’s Donbass,

1869–1924 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), ch. 8.

56 Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlasti,pp.303–14.

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soft hands or spectacles.

Faced by what they perceived to be an elemental

conﬂict tearing the heart out of the Russian nation, the Kadets struggled to

uphold a conception of ‘state-mindedness’, appealing to Russians to set aside

all class and sectional strife.

In 1918 the liberal P. V. Struve characterised the

Russian Revolution as ‘the ﬁrst case in world history of the triumph of inter-

nationalism and the class idea over nationalism and the national idea’.

But

this was only partly true. For if exponents of class politics rejected the Kadet

vision of the nation under siege – as well as the moderate socialist vision of

‘unity of all the vital forces of the nation’ – the exponents of class politics never

entirely rejected the appeal to the nation: rather they engaged in a struggle to

redeﬁne the ‘nation’ in terms of its toiling people, playing on the ambivalence

that inheres in the Russian word narod, which can mean both ‘nation’ and

‘common people’.

If Russian nationalism was in crisis by summer 1917, nationalism among the

non-Russian people was in the ascendant.

From the late nineteenth century,

the tsarist state had been destabilised by rising nationalisms, although these

played no direct part in its demise. At the time of the February Revolution

nationalism was developed extremely unevenly across the empire – strong in

the Baltic and the Caucasus, weak in Central Asia – and movements to form

independent nation-states proved irresistible only in Poland and Finland. Ini-

tially, nationalists demanded rights of culturalself-expression,such as schooling

or religious services in native languages, the formation of military units along

ethnic lines, and a measure of political autonomy within the framework of a

federal Russian state. The typical aspiration was encapsulated in the slogan

of the liberal and moderate socialist Ukrainian National Council, known as

57 L. H. Haimson, ‘The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia’,

Slavic Review 47, 1 (1988): 1–20; B. I. Kolonitskii, ‘Antibourgeois Propaganda and Anti-

Burzhui Consciousnessin 1917’, RussianReview 53, 2 (1994): 183–96; Michael C. Hickey,‘The

Rise and Fall of Smolensk’s Moderate Socialists: The Politics of Class and the Rhetoric of

Crisis in 1917’, in Donald J. Raleigh (ed.), Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet

Power, 1917–53 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), pp. 14–35.

58 W. G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party,

1917–21 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 134–70.

59 P. V. Struve, ‘Istoricheskii smysl’ russkoi revoliutsii i nasional’nye zadachi’, in Iz glubiny:

sbornik statei o russkoi revoliutsii (1918; Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1990), p. 235.

60 Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v avguste v 1917 g. Razgrom kornilovskogo miatezha

(Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1959), pp. 103, 407; V. F. Shishkin, Velikii Oktiabr’ i prole-

tarskii moral’ (Moscow: Mysl’, 1976), pp. 41–2, 49.

61 The following is based on Mark von Hagen, ‘The Great War and the Mobilization of

Ethnicity in the Russian Empire’, in Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder (eds.), Post-Soviet

Political Order: Conﬂict and State-Building (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 34–57; Ronald

G. Suny, ‘Nationalism and Class in the Russian Revolution’, in Frankel et al., Revolution

in Russia,pp.219–46; Stephen Jones, ‘The Non-Russian Nationalities’, in Service, Society

and Politics,pp.35–63.

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the Rada: ‘Long Live Autonomous Ukraine in a Federated Russia’. The Pro-

visional Government assumed that by abrogating discriminatory legislation

against national minorities it would ‘solve’ the national question. Its reluctance

to concede more substantial autonomy was motivated by fear that nationalist

movements were being used by Germany – a not unreasonable supposition if

one looks to their later record in the Baltic – and by an emotional commitment

to a uniﬁed Russian state, especially strong among the Kadets. As a result of

this reluctance, nationalist politicians stepped up demands for autonomy, at

the same time as they tacked to the left in order to keep in step with the

growing radicalism of peasants and workers, whose support they needed if

they were to create viable nation-states.

When in September Kerensky ﬁnally

endorsed the principle of self-determination ‘but only on such principles as the

Constituent Assembly shall determine’, it was too little and too late.

Never-

theless if nationalism became one more force undermining the viability of the

state, the strength of nationalist sentiment should not be exaggerated. In most

non-Russian areas, demands for radical social and economic policies eclipsed

purely nationalist demands. Workers, for example, generally inclined to class

politics rather than nationalist politics; and though peasants liked parties that

spoke to them in their own language and defended local interests, they proved

unreliable supporters of ‘their’ nation-states when called upon to ﬁght in their

defence. In general, but not invariably, nationalism proved successful where it

was reinforced by class divisions, as in Latvia, Estonia or Georgia.

In autumn 1917 a psychological break occurred in the public mood, with

the euphoria of the spring giving way to anxiety, even to a sense of impend-

ing doom. This was most evident in many elements that made up Russia’s

heterogeneous middle classes. The intelligentsia, which had long been losing

coherence as an ethically and ideologically deﬁned group, lost conﬁdence in

the common people whose interests it had always claimed to champion. By

autumn many felt that the existence of civilisation was menaced by the ‘dark

masses’; so fearful were they that sections of the press referred to them as

the ‘i.i.’, which stood for ‘terriﬁed intellectuals’.

Students, in the van of the

struggle against autocracy between 1899 and 1905, had ceased in the interven-

ing years automatically to identify with the Left. When 272 delegates arrived

for the All-Russian Congress of Students on 15 May they proved unable to

62 V. P. Buldakov, ‘Imperstvo i rossiiskaia revoliutsionnost’, pt. 2, Otechestvennaia istoriia,

1997,no.2: 24–7 (20–47).

63 Wade, Russian Revolution,p.148.

64 O. N. Znamenskii, Intelligentsiia nakanune velikogo oktiabria (fevral’–oktiabr’ 1917 g.)

(Leningrad: Nauka, 1988), p. 299. For a more positive depiction, see Christopher Read,

‘The Cultural Intelligentsia’, in Service, Society and Politics,pp.86–102.

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s. a. smith

forge a common programme, declaring themselves ‘necessary to no one, and

our resolutions binding on no one’.

Professional groups, such as lawyers,

doctors, teachers or engineers, showed rather more conﬁdence. One of the

paradoxes of the revolution was that as the power of the state weakened, its

reach – via the regulatory economic organs and democratised local admin-

istrations – expanded, and opportunities for professionals, managerial and

technical staff increased accordingly.

The liberal and technical professions,

however, showed little political coherence, with lower-status groups, such as

primary-school teachers or medical assistants, orienting towards ‘revolution-

ary democracy’, and higher-status groups, such as doctors or secondary-school

teachers, orienting towards the Kadets.

Beneath professionals were salaried

employees (sluzhashchie), a diverse group comprising white-collar workers in

public institutions, industry and commerce, and numbering close to 2 million.

Their tendency was to align politically with the ‘proletariat’ by forming trade

unions, although hostility towards them on the part of blue-collar workers was

by no means uncommon.

Salaried employees, along with the lower ranks

of professionals, were part of the heterogeneous lower-middle strata, whose

ranks also included artisans, traders and rentiers, and who numbered about

14 million by 1915.

Many of the latter turned against socialist ‘chatterers’ in

the soviets, demanding a ‘strong power’ to defend property and security.

Following the July Days, Kerensky, now prime minister, cultivated an image

as a ‘man of destiny’ summoned to ‘save Russia’.

On 12 July he restored the

death penalty at the front, and a week later military censorship. On 19 July he

65 Znamenskii, Intelligentsiia,pp.301, 275; A. P. Kupaigorodskaia, ‘Petrogradskoe studench-

estvo i oktiabr’, in Oktiabr’skoe vooruzhennoe vosstanie v Petrograde (Moscow: Nauka, 1980),

pp. 241–8.

66 Daniel Orlovsky, ‘The Lower Middle Strata in 1917’, in Acton et al. (eds.), Critical Com-

panion,pp.529–33; W. G. Rosenberg, ‘Social Mediations and State Constructions in

Revolutionary Russia’, Social History 19, 2 (1994): 169–88.

67 Howard White, ‘The Urban Middle Classes’, in Service, Society and Politics,pp.72–5

(64–85).

68 Ibid., pp. 79–80; Smith, Red Petrograd,pp.134–8; 233–4.

69 N. I. Vostrikov, Bor’ba za massy: gorodskie srednie sloi nakanune oktiabria (Moscow: Mysl’,

1970), p. 15.

70 N. P. Druzhinin, Meshchanskoe dvizhenie 1906–17 gg. (Iaroslavl’, 1917).

71 The account of the Kornilov rebellion is based on: J. L. Munck, The Kornilov Revolt:

A Critical Examination of Sources (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1987); G. Ioffe, Sem-

nadtsatyi god: Lenin, Kerenskii, Kornilov (Moscow: Nauka, 1995), p. 132; J. D. White ‘The

Kornilov Affair – A Study in Counter-Revolution’, Soviet Studies 20, 2 (1968–9): 187–205;

Allan Wildman, ‘Ofﬁcers of the General Staff and the Kornilov Movement’, in Frankel

et al. (eds.), Revolution in Russia,pp.76–101; A. F. Kerensky, The Prelude to Bolshevism: The

Kornilov Rebellion (New York: Haskell, 1972). For the view that Kornilov was betrayed at

the last minute by Kerensky, see George Katkov, Russia 1917: The Kornilov Affair (London:

Longman, 1980).

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The Revolutions of 1917–1918

appointed General L. G. Kornilov supreme commander-in-chief of the army.

Kerensky hoped to use the reactionary general to bolster his image as a strong

man and to restore frayed relations with the Kadets, many of whom talked

openly about the need for military dictatorship to save Russia from anarchy.

Kornilov and Kerensky entered into negotiations on the need to establish

‘ﬁrm government’, which both understood to mean crushing not only the

Bolsheviks but also the soviets. Kerensky, however, demurred at demands to

restore the death penalty in the rear and to militarise defence factories and the

railways. On 26 August Kerensky received what he took to be an ultimatum

from Kornilov demanding that all military and civil authority be placed in the

hands of a dictator. Accusing him of conspiring to overthrow the government,

he sent a telegram on 27 August relieving Kornilov of his duties. The latter

ignored it, ordering his troops to advance on Petrograd. Kerensky had no

option but to turn to the Soviet to prevent Kornilov’s troops from reaching

the capital.

Henceforth politics was a theatre of shadows with the real battles for power

going on in society. Kerensky formed a ﬁve-person ‘directory’, a personal dic-

tatorship in all but name, in which he had virtually complete responsibility

for military as well as civil affairs. But now even Mensheviks and SRs would

not countenance a government containing Kadets, since they had been bla-

tantly implicated in the Kornilov rebellion.

The depth of the crisis among

the moderate socialists was revealed at the Democratic Conference (14–19

September), called to rally ‘democratic’ organisations behind the govern-

ment.

This proved unable to resolve the question of whether or not the

government should involve ‘bourgeois’ forces. On 25 September Kerensky

went ahead and formed a third coalition, but failed to win ratiﬁcation from

the Petrograd Soviet.

The Bolshevik seizure of power

The Kornilov rebellion dramatised the danger of counter-revolution and

starkly underlined the feebleness of the Kerensky regime. Crucially, it trig-

gered a spectacular recovery by the Bolsheviks after the setback they had

suffered following the July Days. The party’s consistent opposition to the gov-

ernment of ‘capitalists and landowners’, its rejection of the ‘imperialist’ war,

its calls for land to the peasants, for power to the soviets and for workers’

72 Geoffrey Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 23–38.

73 Z. Galili et al. (eds.), Men’sheviki v 1917 godu, vol. iii,p.1 (Moscow: Rosspen, 1996),

pp. 13–34.

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s. a. smith

control now seemed to hundreds of thousands of workers and soldiers to pro-

vide a way forward.

In the ﬁrst half of September, eighty soviets in large and

medium towns backed the call for a transfer of power to the soviets. No one

was entirely sure what the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’, which belonged

as much to anarchists, Left SRs and some Mensheviks as to the Bolsheviks,

actually meant. While hiding in Finland, Lenin had written his most utopian

work, State and Revolution, which outlined his vision of a ‘commune state’ in

which the three pillars of the bourgeois state – the police, standing army and

the bureaucracy – would be smashed and in which parliamentary democracy

would be replaced by direct democracy based on the soviets.

But it is unlikely

that many – even in the Bolshevik Party – understood the slogan in that way.

For most it meant severing the alliance with the ‘bourgeoisie’ and forming a

socialist government consisting of all parties in VTsIK pending the convening

of a Constituent Assembly.

Seeing the surge in popular support for the Bolsheviks, Lenin became con-

vinced that nationally as well as internationally the time was ripe for the

Bolsheviks to seize power in the name of the soviets.

He blitzed the Central

Committee with demands that it prepare an insurrection, even threatening to

resign on 29 September. ‘History will not forgive us if we do not assume power

now.’

The majority of the leadership was unenthusiastic, believing that it

would be better to allow power to pass democratically to the soviets by waiting

for the Second Congress of Soviets, scheduled to open on 20 October. Having

returned in secret to Petrograd, Lenin on 10 October persuaded the Central

Committee to commit itself to the overthrow of the Provisional Government.

Signiﬁcantly, no timetable was set (see Plate 5). Zinoviev and Kamenev were

bitterly opposed to the decision, believing that the conditions for socialist rev-

olution did not yet exist and that an insurrection was likely to be crushed.

As late as 16 October, the mood in the party was against an insurrection and

the decision of Zinoviev and Kamenev to make public their opposition drove

74 David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days

1917 to July 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1984); D. P. Koenker, ‘The Evolution of Party

Consciousness in 1917: The Case of Moscow Workers’, Soviet Studies 30, 1 (1978): 38–62.

75 Neil Harding, ‘Lenin, Socialism and the State’, in Frankel et al. (eds.), Revolution in Russia,

pp. 287–303; Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. ii,pp.216–28.

76 Mandel, Petrograd Workers,pp.232–43; Wade, Russian Revolution,p.213; Read, From Tsar,

pp. 160, 176–7.

77 The following is based on Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The

Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: Norton, 1976); Marc Ferro, October 1917:A

Social History of the October Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), ch. 8.

78 V. I. Lenin, ‘The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power’, in V. I. Lenin, Between the Two

Revolutions: Articles and Speeches of 1917 (Moscow: Progress, 1971), p. 392; in Lenin, Collected

Wo r ks (Moscow: Progress, 1972), vol. xxvi,pp.19–21.

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The Revolutions of 1917–1918

Lenin to a paroxysm of fury. It fell to Trotsky, now chair of the Petrograd

Soviet, to make practical preparations, which he did, not by following Lenin’s

suggestion of an attack on the capital by sailors and soldiers of the northern

front, but by associating an insurrection with the defence of the Petrograd

garrison.

On 6 October the government had announced that half the garrison was

to be moved out of the capital to defend it against the onward advance of

the German army. The Soviet interpreted this as an attempt to rid Petrograd

of its most revolutionary elements, and on 9 October created an embryonic

Military-Revolutionary Committee (MRC) to resist the transfer. This was the

organisation that Trotsky used to unseat the government. On 20 October the

government ordered the transfer of troops to begin, but the MRC ordered

them not to move without its permission. On the night of 23–4 October,

Kerensky ordered the Bolshevik printing press to be shut down, as a pre-

lude to moving against the MRC, thus giving Trotsky another pretext to take

‘defensive’ action. On 24 October military units, backed by armed bands of

workers, known as Red Guards, took control of bridges, railway stations and

other strategic points. Kerensky ﬂed, unable to muster troops to resist the

insurgents. By the morning of 25 October only the Winter Palace remained

to be taken. That afternoon Lenin appeared for the ﬁrst time in public since

July, proclaiming to the Petrograd Soviet that the Provisional Government

was overthrown. ‘In Russia we must now set about building a proletarian

socialist state.’ At 10.40 p.m. the Second Congress of Soviets ﬁnally opened,

the artillery bombardment of the Winter Palace audible in the distance. The

Mensheviks and SRs denounced the insurrection as a provocation to civil

war and walked out, Trotsky’s taunt echoing in their ears: ‘You are miserable

bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you ought to be: into the dustbin

of history.’

The establishment of Bolshevik dictatorship

The Bolsheviks determined to break with the vacillation of the Provisional

Government by issuing decrees on the urgent questions of peace, land and

workers’ control of industry.

On 26 October they issued a peace decree

79 James D. White, The Russian Revolution, 1917–21: A Short History (London: Arnold, 1994),

pp. 160–7.

80 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1954), p. 314.

81 The following is based on Roy Medvedev, The October Revolution, trans. George Saunders

(New York: Columbia Press, 1979), p. 3; Keep, Russian Revolution,p.4; J. L. H. Keep (ed.),

135