October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

10 Red October

In October, in the forests, leaves were coming down in drifts, clogging the train tracks. The trees shook from the thud of guns. Kerensky remained Russia’s only hope: of this he was still certain. He gathered the rags of his messianism about him, believing himself chosen by something or other for something or other.

By the constant threat of reshuffles, he kept his last, etiolated Provisional Government in line. Kerensky was corroded by malicious gossip. The cult of him, a memory to embarrass its erstwhile devotees. He was Jewish, bigots whispered. He was not a real man, homophobes insinuated, calling him by feminine forms. And with the demise of the last shreds of faith in him, came social and military panic.

On the first day of the month, amid the spiralling crime in Petrograd came a fresh horror. A man and his three young children were found savagely murdered in their Lesnoi apartment. Another atrocity among so many. But these victims’ home was in the very same building as the headquarters of the local branch of the city militia, the security patrols organised by the city duma.

How could anyone feel safe? Was it not bad enough that parts of the city were now controlled by criminals, no-go zones for the authorities? By the Olympia amusement park on Zabalkanskii Prospect; Golodai, near Vasilievsky Island; Volkovo in the Narva district. Was it not enough that the city had ceded territory to outlaws and bandits, without them now mocking the very idea of retribution? How could anyone believe that the authorities had authority when this monstrosity could occur right above the militia’s heads?

Disgusted crowds gathered outside the headquarters. They threw stones. They broke down the door, and smashed the place apart.

As power evaporated, some convulsions took predictable, ugly forms. On 2 October in Smolensk, the town of Roslavl received, as the Smolensk Bulletin put it, ‘the following cup of poison to drink: a pogrom’. A mob of Black Hundreds chanting ‘Beat the Yids!’ attacked and murdered several people they accused of ‘speculation’– a charge provoked by finding galoshes in a Jewish-owned store the clerks of which had claimed they had none. The rampage continued throughout the night and the next day. The newspapers and authorities tried to link the Bolsheviks to the violence. This was a growing theme in the liberal press, despite its patent political absurdity, and despite the recorded efforts of Bolshevik soldiers in the town to stop the carnage.

On 3 October, the Russian General Staff evacuated Revel, the last bastion between the front and the capital. The next day, accordingly, the government sought advice on the evacuation of the executive and key industries – but not of the Soviet – to Moscow. News of the discussions leaked out. There was a storm: the bourgeoisie were indeed planning to abandon the city built for them two centuries before. The city of bones. The Ispolkom forbade any such move without its approval, and the unstable government shelved the idea.

In this ambience of perfidy, weakness and violence, Lenin took his campaign for insurrection to the wider party.

There is no record of the CC’s reaction to Lenin’s resignation threat. Perhaps it provoked pleading negotiations. Whatever the particulars, it was not raised again, and he did not step down.

On 1 October, he sent another letter, this time to the Central, Moscow and Petersburg committees, and to Bolsheviks in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. Citing peasant and labour unrest, mutinies in the German navy, and the growing Bolshevik influence after local elections in Moscow, he once more emphasised that delaying insurgent action until the Second Congress of Soviets was ‘positively criminal’. The Bolsheviks must ‘take power at once’, and appeal ‘to Workers, Peasants and Soldiers’ for ‘All Power to the Soviets’. But on this question of timing, he remained isolated: that same day, a meeting of Bolsheviks from towns outlying Petrograd opposed any action prior to the Congress.

The CC could not hide his communications forever. On the 3rd, a letter at last reached the militant Moscow Regional Bureau, in which Lenin incited them to pressure the CC to prepare for insurrection. Several of his essays found their way to the Petersburg Committee. The members were divided as to Lenin’s demands, but united in outrage at the CC’s obfuscations. On the 5th, the Petersburg Committee met to discuss their reactions to what they had read.

The debate was long and it was rancorous. Latsis loudly questioned the revolutionary credentials of those with the temerity to go against Lenin. In the end a proposal to decide on insurrectionary preparations was shelved. However, the Executive Commission delegated three members – including Latsis – to evaluate Bolshevik military strength and prepare district committees for possible action. They did not inform the CC.

As awareness of Lenin’s positions spread through the party, despite the CC’s efforts to corral it, social upheaval was provoking a certain coterminous leftward shift on the CC itself. While the Petersburg Committee met in dissident conclave, at Smolny the CC at last voted to boycott the toothless Preparliament when it reconvened on the 7th. The decision was unanimous but for the ever-cautious Kamenev, who immediately called for patience from the Bolshevik Preparliamentarians, until a serious dispute might justify a walkout. He narrowly lost the argument to Trotsky’s call for immediate action.

The next day, Petrograd commander General Polkovnikov instructed city troops to prepare for transfer to the front. He had known this would unleash fury, and it did.

On the evening of the 7th, in the Mariinsky Palace, its remaining imperial crests decorously obscured with red draperies, before the eyes of the press and diplomatic corps, the Preparliament reopened. Kerensky gave another histrionic address, this one themed on law and order. There followed remarks from the Grandmother of the Revolution, Breshko-Breshkovskaya; then from Nikolai Avksentiev, the chair; and then at last Trotsky intervened. He stood to make an emergency announcement.

Blisteringly, he denounced the government and the Preparliament as tools of counterrevolution. The audience erupted. Trotsky raised his voice over their clamour. ‘Petrograd is in danger!’ he shouted. ‘All power to the soviets! All land to the people!’ To jeers and catcalls, the fifty-three Bolshevik delegates rose together and left the hall.

Their act was a sensation. An epidemic of rumours immediately followed: the Bolsheviks, people said, were planning an uprising.

It was at some uncertain moment during these accelerating days, early in October, that Lenin slipped back into Petrograd.

Krupskaya escorted him to Lesnoi. There he stayed again with his former landlady Margarita Fofanova. From her house he preached his gospel of urgency to an urgent city.

On 9 October, mass anger at the plan to relocate the troops spilled into the Soviet. In the Executive Committee, the Menshevik Mark Broido put forward a compromise: the soldiers would prepare for transfer, but a committee should also be created to draw up plans for the defence of Petrograd that would win popular confidence. This, he thought, could reduce the anxieties about government treachery and address the fears for the capital, while smoothing a path of collaboration between government and Soviet.

His proposal blindsided the Bolsheviks.

Trotsky, recovering, quickly put forward a counterproposal, repudiating Kerensky and his government, accusing the bourgeoisie of preparing to surrender Petrograd, demanding immediate peace and soviet power, and summoning the garrison to prepare for battle. What he called for was a new iteration of the Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution, for the defence of Red Petrograd from internal as much as from external enemies, ‘attacks being openly prepared by military and civil Kornilovites’, as he put it. This was rather different from defencism on behalf of Mother Russia.

Even now, with the Bolshevik majority on the Executive Committee, it was not Trotsky’s but Broido’s resolution that – narrowly – passed: anxiety about the war effort still precluded sanctioning the creation of a parallel military structure. But that evening, the two motions were put to a packed, uproarious session of the Soviet plenum. Now, backed by a huge majority of factory and barracks representatives, Trotsky’s torquing of Broido’s suggestion prevailed. Thus was born the Military Revolutionary Committee – Milrevcom, or the MRC.

Trotsky would later characterise this vote in favour of the MRC as a ‘dry’, a ‘silent’ revolution, indispensable to the full revolution to come.

The threat of Bolshevik insurrection was now openly discussed on all sides. Indeed, certain of their enemies invited it. ‘I would be prepared to offer prayers to produce this uprising,’ said Kerensky. ‘They will be utterly crushed.’ By contrast, many of the Bolsheviks themselves were more hesitant. The day after the Soviet meeting, a citywide party conference expressed clear reservations about an uprising before the Congress of Soviets.

For its part, the CC had no formal position on such an action. Yet.

As Sukhanov left his home for the Soviet on the morning of the 10th, his wife Galina Flakserman eyed nasty skies and made him promise not to try to return that night, but to stay at his office, as was his custom when the weather was so bad. That evening, as he settled down accordingly to sleep at Smolny, across the city figure after bundled-up figure slipped out of the grey drizzle and into his flat.

‘Oh, the novel jokes of the merry muse of History!’ wrote Sukhanov later, bitterly. Unlike her diarist husband, who was previously an independent and had recently joined the Menshevik left, Galina Flakserman was a long-time Bolshevik activist, on the staff of Izvestia. Unbeknownst to him, she had quietly informed her comrades that comings and goings at her roomy, many-entranced apartment would be unlikely to draw attention. Thus, with her husband out of the way, the Bolshevik CC came visiting.

At least twelve of the twenty-one-strong committee were there, including Kollontai, Trotsky, Uritsky, Stalin, Varvara Iakovleva, Kamenev and Zinoviev. They gathered in the dining room, quickly dealing with routine business. There entered a clean-shaven, bespectacled, grey-haired man, ‘every bit like a Lutheran minister’, Alexandra Kollontai remembered.

The CC stared at the newcomer. Absent-mindedly, he doffed his wig like a hat, to reveal a familiar bald pate. Lenin had arrived. The serious debates could begin.

Lenin held forth. He was impassioned. As the hours wore on he drove home his now-familiar points. The time had come, he insisted again, for insurrection. The party’s ‘indifference toward the question of an uprising’ was a dereliction.

It was not a monologue. Everyone took their turn to speak.

Late at night, a knock at the door sent hearts lurching, plunging them all into fear. But it was only Flakserman’s brother, Yuri. Another Bolshevik, privy to the meeting, he had come to help with the samovar. He busied himself with the huge communal kettle, making tea.

Kamenev and Zinoviev returned to that historic debate, assiduously explaining why they thought Lenin was wrong. They evoked the weight of the petty bourgeoisie, who were not – not yet, perhaps – on their side. They suggested that Lenin overestimated the Bolsheviks’ power in Petrograd, let alone elsewhere. They were adamant that he was incorrect about the imminence of international revolution. They argued for ‘a defensive posture’, for patience. ‘Through the army we have a revolver pointed at the temple of the bourgeoisie,’ they said. Better to ensure the convening of a Constituent Assembly, and to continue to consolidate their strength meanwhile.

Their comrades called the consistently circumspect pair the ‘Heavenly Twins’, sometimes affectionately, sometimes in exasperation. They were not alone in the party hierarchy in their conservatism. But that night, those of similar bent – Nogin, Rykov and others – were absent.

Which is not to say that Lenin’s position was accepted in all particulars by his other comrades. Trotsky, for one, felt less pressed by time than did Lenin, set greater store by the soviets, saw the forthcoming Congress as a potential legitimator of any action. But the key question of the night was this: were, or were not, the Bolsheviks mobilising for insurrection as soon as possible?

On paper torn from a child’s notebook, Lenin scribbled a resolution.

At last, after prolonged and impassioned back-and-forth, they voted. By ten to two – Zinoviev and Kamenev, of course – the resolution passed. It was hazy in its details, but a Rubicon had been crossed. Insurrection was now the ‘order of the day’.

The tension eased. Yuri Flakserman brought cheese, sausage and bread, and the famished revolutionaries fell to. Good-naturedly they teased the Heavenly Twins: hesitating to overthrow the bourgeoisie was so very Kamenev.

The time frame for the event was hazy, too. Lenin wanted insurrection the next day: Kalinin, on the other hand, for example, while praising ‘one of the best resolutions the CC has ever passed’, thought – in what could surely have been the position of Zinoviev and Kamenev – that ‘perhaps in a year’ it might be time.

On the 11th, the militant Northern Region Congress of Soviets gathered in the capital: fifty-one Bolsheviks, twenty-four Left SRs, four Maximalists (a revolutionary SR offshoot), one Menshevik– Internationalist, and ten SRs. All the delegates present, including those SRs, supported a socialist government. That morning, an exhausted Kollontai reported the CC’s vote to the Bolshevik participants. She left, as one recalled, ‘the impression that the CC’s signal to come out would be received at any minute’. ‘The plan’, Latsis would remember, ‘was that it [the Northern Region Congress] would declare itself the government, and that would be the start’.

But Kamenev and Zinoviev were still lobbying against action. All they had to do was turn twelve Bolsheviks and/or Maximalists, and the CC would have no majority for immediate insurrection against Kerensky. The gathering was loud and radical, charging political prisoners in Kresty jail not to hunger strike but to keep their strength up ‘because the hour of your liberation is close at hand’. Nonetheless, to Lenin’s intense frustration, it closed on the 13th not with revolution, but with an appeal to the masses stressing the importance of the forthcoming Second Soviet Congress.

Workers and soldiers still looked to the soviets. On 12 October, the Egersky Guards declared the Soviet ‘the voice of the genuine leaders of the workers and poorer peasantry’.

That day, a closed session of the Ispolkom voted on whether to empower Trotsky’s MRC to militarily defend Red Petrograd from the government. The Mensheviks assailed the motion, but they were outvoted. Trotsky’s hasty riposte to Broido had created a ‘front organisation’, a party-controlled body with a non-party, soviet remit.

The rumours of Bolshevik uprising grew more specific. ‘There is definite evidence’, reported Gazeta-kopeika, ‘that the Bolsheviks are energetically preparing for a coming-out on October 20.’ ‘The vile and bloody events of July 3–5’, warned the rightist Zhivoe slovo, ‘were only a rehearsal.’

Kerensky’s cabinet remained bullish. ‘If the Bolsheviks act,’ one minister told the press, ‘we will carry out a surgical operation and the abscess will be extracted once and for all.’

‘We must ask the comrade Bolsheviks candidly,’ said Dan with acid courtesy at a plenary of the All-Russian Executive Committees on the 14th, ‘what is the purpose of their politics?’ Were they ‘calling upon the revolutionary proletariat to come out[?] I demand a yes-or-no answer’.

From the floor, for the Bolsheviks, Riazanov responded. ‘We demand peace and land.’

That was neither yes nor no, nor was it reassuring.

15 October. At the corner of Sadovaya and Apraksina, where in July shots from above had left demonstrators dead and scattering, a crowd blocked the tramcars. They shouted for samosudy, a street trial for two shoplifters, a man in a soldier’s uniform, a woman in smart clothes. The mob fought through the city militia into the department store where the thieves cowered. A heaving scrum hauled the man outside while his sobbing accomplice made for a telephone booth. The crowd overwhelmed an officer trying to protect her, wrenched open the door and pulled her out into a rain of blows.

‘What are we waiting for?’ someone shouted. He drew a pistol and shot the man dead. There was a silence. Then someone shot the woman too, while the militia looked helplessly on.

Sunday in Petrograd. This was how justice worked now.

The following day, a full session of the Soviet discussed the MRC – Milrevcom.

Eager not to present it as a Bolshevik body – which, though not formally, it effectively was – the party nominated to propose the resolution establishing it the young Pavel Lazimir, the chair of the soldiers’ section of the Soviet, a Left SR. Broido furiously warned that the MRC was not intended to defend the city, but to seize power. Justifying its focus on counterrevolution, and thus on military preparation, Trotsky called attention to the persistent threat from the right. The case was not hard to make: he quoted a notorious recent interview during which Rodzianko thundered, ‘To Hell with Petrograd!’

On the 17th, at Pskov, generals met a Soviet delegation to argue for the redeployment of troops, bringing with them representatives from the front. The revolutionaries were concerned about the bitter resentment of those front-line soldiers: to them, the unwillingness of the rear garrison to relocate seemed an unconscionable lack of solidarity. The Soviet anxiously affirmed the heroism of that garrison, and still refused to promise any support for the generals’ call. As far as the General Staff were concerned, the encounter had been pointless.

That was the day that Milrevcom, the soviet organ of militarised suspicion of the suspicious government, was inaugurated. But the Bolshevik CC did not yet give it their full attention: they were distracted by in-party uncertainties.

On the 15th, the Petersburg Committee had assembled thirty-five Bolshevik representatives from across the city to prepare for the uprising. But the meeting was derailed by doubts, a caution that came from unlikely quarters.

For the CC, Bubnov made the case for a ‘coming-out’. This time, one of those who argued against him was Nevsky.

Nevsky, the erstwhile ultra, representative of the party’s trouble-making, radical Military Organisation, now reported that the MO ‘has just become rightist’. He enumerated the difficulties he perceived with the CC plan, including what he considered to be the totally inadequate preparation. He was deeply sceptical that the party could take the whole country.

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.

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.

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 those 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.

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.

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 General 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’.

‘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.

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 of 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 committed, 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.’

Dan and the other moderates who had led the Soviet since March vacated their seats to be replaced by the new, proportionally allotted presidium. To uproarious approval, fourteen Bolsheviks – including Kollontai, Lunacharsky, Trotsky, Zinoviev – and seven Left SRs, including the great Maria Spiridonova, ascended the platform. The Mensheviks, in dudgeon, abjured their three seats. One place was held for the Menshevik–Internationalists: in a move simultaneously dignified and pathetic, Martov’s group declined to take it, but reserved the right to do so later.

As the new revolutionary leadership sat and prepared for business, the room suddenly reverberated with another cannon boom. Everybody froze.

This time the shot came from the Peter and Paul Fortress. Unlike the Aurora’s, its round was not a blank.

The oily flash of detonations reflected in the Neva. Shells soared up, arcing in the night and screaming as they descended towards their target. Many, in mercy or incompetence, combusted loud, spectacular and harmless in the air. Many more plunged with crashing splashes deep into the water.

From their own emplacements, the Red Guards fired too. Their bullets peppered the Winter Palace walls. The vestiges of government within cowered under the table as glass rained down around them.

At Smolny, as the ominous echoes of the onslaught sounded, Martov raised his tremulous voice. He insisted on a peaceful solution. He called hoarsely for a ceasefire. For negotiations to begin on a cross-party, united, socialist government.

There came a great tumult of applause from the audience. From the presidium itself, Mstislavsky of the Left SRs offered Martov full-throated support. As, and vocally, did most of those present – including many grassroots Bolsheviks.

For the party leadership, Lunacharsky rose. And then, sensationally, he announced that ‘the Bolshevik fraction has absolutely nothing against the proposal made by Martov’.

The delegates voted on Martov’s call. Support was unanimous.

Bessie Beatty, correspondent for the San Francisco Bulletin, was in the room. She understood the stakes of what she saw. ‘It was’, she wrote, ‘a critical moment in the history of the Russian Revolution.’ It seemed as if a democratic socialist coalition was about to be born.

But as the moment stretched out, the guns on the Neva sounded again. Their echoes shook the room – and the chasms between parties reappeared.

‘A criminal political venture has been going on behind the back of the All-Russian Congress,’ announced a Menshevik officer, Kharash. ‘The Mensheviks and SRs repudiate all that is going on here, and stubbornly resist all attempts to seize the government.’

‘He does not represent the Twelfth Army!’ cried an angry soldier. ‘The army demands all power to the soviets!’

A barrage of heckles. Right SRs and Mensheviks took turns now to shout denunciations of the Bolsheviks, and to warn that they would withdraw from proceedings, as the left howled them down.

The mood grew more bitter. Khinchuk of the Moscow Soviet took his turn to speak. ‘The only possible peaceful solution to the present crisis’, he insisted, ‘continues to lie in negotiations with the Provisional Government.’

Bedlam. Khinchuk’s intervention was either a catastrophic underestimate of the hatred for Kerensky, or a deliberate provocation. It drew fury from far more than just the incredulous Bolsheviks. At last, into the din Khinchuk yelled, ‘We leave the present congress!’

But amid the stamping, booing and whistling that greeted that call, the Mensheviks and SRs hesitated. The threat to leave, after all, was a last card.

Across Petrograd, the Duma discussed Maslov’s doom-laden phone call. ‘Let our comrades know that we have not abandoned them; let them know we will die with them,’ proclaimed the SR Naum Bykhovsky. Liberals and conservatives rose to vote yes, that they would join those bunkered in the Winter Palace under fire; that they, too, were ready to die for the regime. The Kadet Countess Sofia Panina declared she would ‘stand in front of the cannon’.

Full of scorn, the Bolshevik representatives voted no. They would go too, they said, but not to the palace: to the Soviet.

The roll call done, the two competing pilgrimages set out in the darkness.

In Smolny, Erlich of the Jewish Bund interrupted proceedings with news of the city Duma deputies’ decisions. It was time, he said, for those who ‘did not wish a bloodbath’ to join the march to the palace, in solidarity with the cabinet. Again the left shouted imprecations, as Mensheviks, Bund, SRs and a smattering of others rose and at last walked out. Leaving the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs, and the agitated Menshevik–Internationalists behind.

Trudging through cold night rain, the self-exiled moderates from Smolny reached Nevsky Prospect and the Duma. There they joined forces with its deputies, with the Menshevik and SR members of the Executive Committee of the Peasants’ Soviets, and together they set out to show their solidarity with the cabinet. They walked four abreast behind Shreider, the mayor, and Sergei Prokopovich, the minister of supplies. Carrying bread and sausages for the ministers’ sustenance, quavering the Marseillaise, the 300-strong group sallied forth to die for the Provisional Government.

They did not make it a block. At the corner of the canal, revolutionaries blocked their way.

‘We demand to pass!’ Shreider and Prokopovich shouted. ‘We are going to the Winter Palace!’

A sailor, bemused, refused to let them through.

‘Shoot us if you want to!’ the marchers challenged. ‘We are ready to die, if you have the heart to fire on Russians and comrades… We bare our breasts to your guns!’

The peculiar standoff continued. The left refused to shoot, the right demanded their right to pass and/or be shot.

‘What will you do?’ yelled someone at the sailor who doggedly refused to murder him.

John Reed’s eyewitness account of what happened next is famous. ‘Another sailor came up, very much irritated. “We will spank you!” he cried energetically. “And if necessary we will shoot you too. Go home now, and leave us in peace.”’

That would be no fit fate for champions of democracy. Standing on a box, waving his umbrella, Prokopovich anounced to his followers that they would save these sailors from themselves. ‘We cannot have our innocent blood upon the hands of these ignorant men!… It is beneath our dignity to be shot down’ – let alone spanked – ‘here in the street by switchmen. Let us return to the Duma, and discuss the best means of saving the country and the Revolution!’

With that, the self-declared morituri for liberal democracy turned and set out on their embarrassingly short return journey, taking their sausages with them.

Martov remained in the Assembly Hall with the mass meeting. He was still desperate for compromise. Now he tabled a motion criticising the Bolsheviks for pre-empting Congress’s will, suggesting – again – that negotiations begin for a broad, inclusive socialist government. This was close to his proposal of two hours before – which, Lenin’s desire to break with moderates notwithstanding, the Bolsheviks had not opposed.

But two hours was a long time.

As Martov sat, there was a commotion, and the Bolsheviks’ Duma fraction pushed into the hall, to the delegates’ delight and surprise. They had come, they said, ‘to triumph or die with the All-Russian Congress’.

When the cheering subsided, Trotsky himself rose to respond to Martov.

‘A rising of the masses of the people requires no justification,’ he said. ‘What has happened is an insurrection, and not a conspiracy. We hardened the revolutionary energy of the Petersburg workers and soldiers. We openly forged the will of the masses for an insurrection, and not a conspiracy. The masses of the people followed our banner and our insurrection was victorious. And now we are told: renounce your victory, make concessions, compromise. With whom? I ask: with whom ought we to compromise? With those wretched groups which have left us or who are making this proposal? But after all we’ve had a full view of them. No one in Russia is with them any longer. A compromise is supposed to be made, as between two equal sides, by the millions of workers and peasants represented in this congress, whom they are ready, not for the first time or the last, to barter away as the bourgeoisie sees fit. No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out. Go where you ought to go: into the dustbin of history!’

The room erupted. Amid the loud sustained applause, Martov stood up. ‘Then we’ll leave!’ he shouted.

As he turned, a delegate barred his way. The man stared at him with an expression between sorrow and accusation.

‘And we had thought’, he said, ‘that Martov at least would remain with us.’

‘One day you will understand’, said Martov, his voice shaking, ‘the crime in which you are taking part.’

He walked out.

Congress quickly passed a spiteful denunciation of the departed, including of Martov. Such barbs were unwelcome and unnecessary as far as the remaining Left SRs and Menshevik–Internationalists were concerned – as they were, too, to many Bolsheviks.

Boris Kamkov was warmly clapped when he announced that his group, the Left SRs, had stayed. He tried to revive Martov’s proposal, gently criticising the Bolshevik majority. They had not carried the peasantry, or the bulk of the army, he reminded his listeners. Compromise was still necessary.

This time it was not Trotsky who responded, but the popular Lunacharsky – who had previously agreed to Martov’s move. The tasks ahead were onerous, he concurred, but ‘Kamkov’s criticism of us is unfounded.’

‘If starting this session we had initiated any steps whatever to reject or remove other elements, Kamkov would be right,’ Lunacharsky continued. ‘But all of us unanimously accepted Martov’s proposal to discuss peaceful ways of solving the crisis. And we were deluged by a hail of declarations. A systematic attack was conducted against us… Without hearing us out, not even bothering to discuss their own proposal, they [the Mensheviks and SRs] immediately sought to fence themselves off from us.’

In response, it could have been pointed out to Lunacharsky that Lenin had, for weeks, been insisting that his party must take power alone. And yet, all such cynicism notwithstanding, Lunacharsky was right.

Whether in joyful solidarity, truculently, in confusion, or whatever it might be, like everyone else of every other party, all the Bolsheviks in the hall had supported cooperation – a socialist unity government – when Martov first mooted it.

Bessie Beatty suggested that Trotsky failed to move as fast as he could in response to that first proposal, perhaps out of ‘some bitter memory of insults he had suffered at the hands of these other leaders’. That was debatable, and even if true, the Mensheviks, the Right SRs and others had chosen to throw the vote back in the faces of the Bolsheviks. They had gone straight from it to opposition, denouncing those to their left.

Lunacharsky’s question was reasonable: how do you cooperate with those who have rejected cooperation?

As if to underline the point, the departed moderates were, at that very moment, labelling the meeting only ‘a private gathering of Bolshevik delegates’. ‘The Central Executive Committee’, they announced, ‘considers the Second Congress as not having taken place.’

In the hall, the debate about conciliation dragged into the darkest hours. But by now the weight of opinion was with Lunacharsky, and with Trotsky.

It was endgame at the Winter Palace.

Wind intruded through smashed glass. The vast chambers were cold. Disconsolate soldiers, deprived of purpose, wandered past the double-headed eagles of the throne room. Invaders reached the emperor’s personal chamber. It was empty. They took their time attacking images of the man himself, hacking with their bayonets at the stiff, sedate life-sized Nicholas II watching from the wall. They scored the painting like beasts with talons, left long scratches, from the ex-tsar’s head to his booted feet.

Figures drifted in and out of sight, each unsure of who the other was. One Lieutenant Sinegub remained, committed to defending the government. He patrolled the besieged corridors for disjointed hours, awaiting attack, adrift in a kind of sedate panic, extreme, narcotic exhaustion, passing scenes like snips from some half-heard story: an old gentleman in the uniform of an admiral, sitting motionless in an armchair; an unlit, deserted switchboard; soldiers hunkered below the watching eyes of portraits in a gallery.

Men skirmished in stairwells. Any creak on the floorboards might be the revolution. Here came a junker heading somewhere, on some mission. He warned with a stilted calm that the person Sinegub had just passed – he had just walked past someone, yes – was probably one of the enemy. ‘Good, excellent,’ said Sinegub. ‘Watch! I will make sure at once.’ He turned and immobilised him – the other man, he saw, was indeed of the insurgency’s party – by pulling his coat down, like a child in a playground fight, so he could not move his arms.

About 2 a.m., MRC forces pushed into the palace in sudden numbers. Frantic, Konovalov telephoned Shreider. ‘All we have is a small force of cadets,’ he said. ‘Our arrest is imminent.’ The connection broke.

From the hallways, the ministers heard futile shots. The last of their defence. Footsteps. A breathless cadet came running in for orders. ‘Fight to the last man?’ he asked.

‘No bloodshed!’ they shouted. ‘We must surrender.’

They waited. A strange awkwardness. How best to be found? Not, surely, hovering embarrassedly, coats over their arm, like businessmen awaiting a train.

Kishkin the dictator took control. He issued the final two orders of his reign.

‘Leave your overcoats,’ he said. ‘Let us sit down at the table.’

They obeyed. And thus they were, a frozen tableau of a cabinet meeting, when Antonov burst dramatically in, his eccentric artist’s hat pushed back over his red hair. Behind him, soldiers, sailors, Red Guards.

‘The Provisional Government is here,’ said Konovalov with impressive decorum, as if in answer to a knock rather than an insurrection. ‘What do you want?’

‘I inform you, all of you,’ said Antonov, ‘members of the Provisional Government, that you are under arrest.’

Before the revolution, a political lifetime ago, one of those ministers present, Maliantovich, had sheltered Antonov in his house. The two men eyed each other, but did not mention it.

The Red Guards were furious to realise that Kerensky was long gone. Blood up, one shouted, ‘Bayonet all the sons of bitches!’

‘I will not allow any violence against them,’ Antonov calmly replied.

With that he led the ministers away, leaving behind them their rough drafts of proclamations, crossed out, those criss-crosses meandering like the dreams of dictatorship into fanciful designs. A telephone began to ring.

Sinegub watched from the corridor. When it was over, his government gone, his duty done, he turned quietly and walked away, out into the blaze of searchlights.

Looters ferreted through the warren of rooms. They ignored the artworks and took clothes and knick-knacks. They trampled papers across the floors. As they left, revolutionary soldiers checked them and confiscated their souvenirs. ‘This is the people’s palace,’ one Bolshevik lieutenant chided. ‘This is our palace. Do not steal from the people.’

A broken sword handle, a wax candle. The pilferers surrendered their booty. A blanket, a sofa cushion.

Antonov led the ex-ministers outside, where a rough, fired-up and angry crowd met them. He stood protectively in front of his prisoners. ‘Don’t hit them,’ he and other experienced – proud – Bolsheviks insisted. ‘It is uncultured.’

But the growling anger of the streets would not be appeased so easily. After anxious moments, it was by luck, when the noise of nearby machine-gun fire sent people scattering in alarm, that Antonov took the opportunity to run across the bridge, shoving and dragging the detainees to incarceration in the Fortress of Peter and Paul.

As the door to his cell was about to close, the Menshevik internal affairs minster Nikitin found a telegram from the Ukrainian Rada in his pocket.

‘I received this yesterday,’ he said. He handed it to Antonov. ‘Now it’s your problem.’

In Smolny, it was that dogged naysayer Kamenev who gave the delegates the news: ‘The leaders of the counterrevolution ensconced in the Winter Palace have been seized by the revolutionary garrison.’ He unleashed joyful pandemonium.

It was past 3 a.m., but there was still business to be done. For two more hours Congress heard reports come in – of units coming over to their side, of generals accepting MRC authority. There was still dissent, too. Someone called for the release of those SR ministers in prison: Trotsky lambasted them as false comrades.

Around 4 a.m., in an undignified afterword to his exit, a delegation from Martov’s group sheepishly re-entered, and tried to resubmit his call for a collaborative socialist government. Kamenev reminded the hall that those with whom Martov advocated compromise had turned their backs on his proposal. Still, ever the moderate, he moved to table Trotsky’s condemnation of the SRs and Mensheviks, putting it discreetly into procedural limbo, to spare blushes should talks resume.

Lenin would not return to the meeting that night. He was making plans. But he had written a document, which it was for Lunacharsky to present.

Addressed ‘To All Workers, Soldiers and Peasants’, Lenin proclaimed Soviet power and undertook to propose a democratic peace immediately. Land would be transferred to the peasants. The cities would be supplied with bread, the nations of the empire offered self-determination. But Lenin also warned that the revolution remained in danger – from without and from within.

‘The Kornilovites… are endeavouring to lead troops against Petrograd… Soldiers! Resist Kerensky, who is a Kornilovite!… Railwaymen! Stop all echelons sent by Kerensky against Petrograd! Soldiers, Workers, Employees! The fate of the revolution and democratic peace is in your hands!’

It took a long time to read the whole document aloud, interrupted as it was, so often, by such cheers of approval. One tiny verbal tweak ensured Left SR assent. A minuscule Menshevik faction abstained, preparing a path for reconciliation between left-Martovism and the Bolsheviks. No matter. At 5 a.m. on 26 October, Lenin’s manifesto was overwhelmingly voted through.

A roar. The echo of it faded as the magnitude of the shouted resolution became slowly clear. Men and women looked around at each other. That was passed. That was done.

Revolutionary government was proclaimed.

Revolutionary government had been proclaimed, and that was enough for one night. It would more than do for a first meeting, surely.

Exhausted, drunk on history, nerves still taut as wires, the delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets stumbled out of Smolny. They stepped out of the finishing school into a new moment of history, a new kind of first day, that of a workers’ government, morning in a new city, the capital of a workers’ state. They walked into the winter under a dim but lightening sky.