A people's tragedy

The fate of Russia thus depended on the actions of the Soviet leaders at the Democratic Conference. This was the moment when their national leadership was put to the crucial test — and was found wanting. The Conference took place in the Alexandrinsky Theatre, which proved a suitable venue since the meeting ended in farce. Three clear political groupings immediately became apparent: the Right, which favoured a coalition with the Kadets; the Centre, which favoured a coalition with the bourgeoisie but without the Kadets; and the Left, which supported a socialist government, either based on the Soviets or more broadly on the democratic groups represented at the conference. But when it came to the vote there was total confusion. To begin with, the conference passed a resolution (by 766 votes to 688) supporting the general principle of a coalition with the bourgeoisie. But then it passed two further amendments excluding the Kadets from such a coalition. This so angered the Right that they then sided with the Left in a second vote on the original resolution and defeated it by 813 votes to 183. After four days of debate the conference had ended without an opinion on the vital issue for which it had been called. This was neither the first nor the last time in the brief and interrupted history of the Russian democratic movement that the basic skills of parliamentary decision-making proved beyond its leaders; but it was perhaps the most critical in terms of its consequences.

An extraordinary delegation of conference members was hastily convened to resolve the government crisis. It was dominated by the SR and Menshevik leaders in favour of a coalition and, contrary to the clear vote of the conference, immediately opened negotiations with the Kadets. On 24 September agreement was reached, and the following day Kerensky named his cabinet. It was in essence the same political compromise as the Second Coalition of July, with the moderate socialists technically holding a majority of the portfolios and the Kadets in control of the key posts. But the Third Coalition had none of the ministerial talent — slight though that had been — of its predecessor. It was made up of second-rate Kadets and obscure provincial Trudoviks without any real experience of government at the national level. The socialists had wanted to make it responsible to the Preparliament — a bogus and ultimately impotent body appointed by the Democratic Conference in the vain hope of giving the Republic some form of legitimacy until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly (Plekhanov called it ‘the little house on chicken’s feet’). But the Kadets had forced them to give up this demand as the price for their involvement in the coalition. The Provisional Government was thus to remain de jure the sovereign power until the Assembly convened.100 But would this new opera buffa cabinet even last that long? Without de facto power, it proved incapable of passing meaningful legislation and only hoped to cling on to office until the November elections. Survival for six weeks — that was the sum of its minuscule ambitions — and yet it lasted only four.

The failure of the Democratic Conference was a public confession of the political bankruptcy of the Soviet leaders. After this final admission of their reluctance to assume power, there was a sudden and sharp collapse in the support for the Mensheviks and SRs. The Menshevik Party had practically ceased to exist in Petrograd by the end of September: the last all-city party conference was unable to meet for lack of a quorum. It was not just their rigid Marxist dogma that had kept the Menshevik leaders within the coalition, but a much more fundamental failure to recognize the social and political forces which had been unfolding during 1917. ‘Almost from the outset’, writes Leo Haimson, the foremost historian of the Mensheviks, ‘they had found themselves valiantly trying to master a chaos that had gradually overwhelmed them. Nothing about the experience had proven familiar, or run according to expectations.’ They had failed to see that their own base of support, the industrial workers, was becoming radicalized, and that only a Soviet government could hope to command any real authority among them. Blinded by their own commitment to the state, which had made them defend the coalition principle at all costs, they ceased to act or think like revolutionaries and dismissed the workers’ growing radicalism and support for the Bolsheviks as a manifestation of their ‘ignorance’ and ‘immaturity’; and this confirmed them in their dogmatic belief that the Soviets were not ready for power.101 The SR leaders were guilty of similar self-deception in their naive belief that the peasantry’s demand for a fundamental land reform, upon which the SR Party had been built, could be put off until the end of the war and the resolution of the power question at the Constituent Assembly. The peasants were increasingly indifferent to the outcome of the war and to the form of the national government: all they wanted was peace, land and freedom, as expressed in the volia of their own autonomous village committees and Soviets. This would be proved by the ill-fated SR struggle during 1918 to reverse the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and to rally the Volga peasants behind the defence of the Constituent Assembly, after it had been closed by the Bolsheviks.

The failure of the SRs, like that of the Mensheviks, was above all a failure of leadership. Both parties were hopelessly split on the two fundamental issues of 1917: what to do with the war and where to draw the balance between the political and social revolutions. Their rightwing leaders were Defensist and placed greater stress on the political revolution; while their leftwing comrades were firmly committed to peace and radical social reforms. Given Russia’s historical legacy and the huge cultural gulf between the intelligentsia and the masses, there was perhaps no real prospect, at least in 1917, of sustaining a political revolution in the European tradition. But a socialist democracy might just have been stabilized, if the Soviet leaders had agreed to form a coalition with the Bolsheviks in September — and if Lenin had subsequently agreed to respect such a coalition. These, of course, were very big ‘ifs’. The Left SRs did eventually form a lonely alliance with the Bolsheviks in October, though by that stage Lenin had no intention of treating them as an equal partner. As for the leftwing Mensheviks, they were hopelessly stranded. Martov, their leader, could not bring himself to join any sort of alliance with his old rival Lenin, although this was the logical outcome of his quarrel with the Defensists, as most of his supporters recognized. A party loyalist to the end, Martov remained on board the sinking ship of Menshevism.

Trotsky described Martov as the ‘Hamlet of Democratic Socialism’ — and this is just about the sum of it. Like so many of the veteran socialist leaders who found themselves at the head of the Soviet movement in 1917, Martov was much too good an intellectual to be a successful politician. He was always held back by his own integrity and philosophical approach to politics. He tended to choose his allies by the coherence of their general world-view rather than the timeliness or even the practicality of their policies. It was this that made him stick with the Mensheviks rather than switch to a tactical alliance with the Bolsheviks in September: he placed greater importance on the basic Marxist principles of the Mensheviks than on the purely political arguments for such an alliance. This high-minded approach has since won Martov many plaudits among the socialist intelligentsia: even Lenin was said to have confessed in 192l that his single greatest regret was ‘that Martov is not with us. What an amazing comrade he is, what a pure man!’ Yet such noble principles are a fatal burden for the revolutionary leader, and in Martov’s case they made him soft and indecisive when just the opposite was required.102

The same intellectual indecisiveness was characteristic of many of the Soviet leaders in 1917 — and in this sense they could all be described as Hamlets of democratic socialism. Chernov was a similarly tragic figure in the SR Party. Like Martov, he was a brilliant intellectual and party theoretician, yet he utterly lacked the qualities required to become a successful revolutionary leader. He did not have that hardness of inner resolve and will, that single-minded determination to carry his policies through, even if this meant splitting his own party, or indeed that basic instinct to judge when the moment was ripe to strike out for power. That was the crucial difference between a Chernov and a Lenin — and upon that difference the fate of Russia turned.

*

With Kamenev’s plan for a socialist coalition scotched by the failure of the Democratic Conference, Lenin reverted to his campaign in the party for an immediate armed uprising. He had already begun to advocate this in two letters to the Central Committee written from exile in Finland on the eve of the conference. The Bolsheviks, Lenin had argued, ‘can and must take state power into their own hands’. Can — because the party had already won a majority in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets, which was ‘enough to carry the people with it’ in any civil war, provided the party in power proposed an immediate peace and gave the land to the peasants. Must — because if it waited for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, ‘Kerensky and Co.’ would take preemptive action against the transfer of power, either by giving up Petrograd to the Germans or by delaying the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The Democratic Conference was to be condemned, since it represented ‘only the compromising upper strata of the bourgeoisie. We must not be deceived by the election figures: elections prove nothing … The majority of the people are on our side.’ Reminding his comrades of Marx’s dictum that ‘insurrection is an art’, Lenin had concluded that ‘it would be naive to wait for a “formal” majority for the Bolsheviks. No revolution ever waits for that … History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.’103

These two letters reached the Central Committee on 15 September. They were, to say the least, highly inconvenient for the rest of the Bolshevik leaders (‘We were all aghast’, Bukharin recalled) since the Democratic Conference had just begun and they were still committed to Kamenev’s conciliatory tactics. It was even resolved to burn all but one copy of the letters, lest they should fall into the hands of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks and spark a revolt. The Central Committee continued to ignore Lenin’s advice and printed instead his earlier articles, in which he had endorsed the Kamenev line. Lenin was beside himself with rage. While he was still afraid to return to Petrograd (Kerensky had ordered Lenin’s arrest at the Democratic Conference), he moved from Finland to the resort town of Vyborg, eighty miles from the capital, to be closer. During the following weeks, he assaulted the Central Committee and the lower-level party organizations with a barrage of impatient letters, full of violent and abusive phrases heavily underlined, in which he urged them to start the armed insurrection at once. He condemned the ‘parliamentary tactics’ of the Bolshevik leaders; and welcomed the prospect of a civil war (‘the sharpest form of the class struggle’), which they were trying to avert on the false assumption that, like the Paris Communards, they were bound to be defeated. On the contrary, Lenin insisted, the antiBolshevik forces would be no more than those aligned behind the Kornilov movement, and any ‘rivers of blood’ would give ‘certain victory’ to the party.

Finally, on 29 September, at the high point of his frustration, Lenin scribbled an angry tirade against the Bolshevik leaders, in which he denounced them as ‘miserable traitors to the proletarian cause’. They had wanted to delay the transfer of power until the Soviet Congress, due to convene on 20 October, whereas the moment was already ripe for the seizure of power and any delay would merely enable Kerensky to use military force against them. The workers, Lenin insisted, were solidly behind the Bolshevik cause; the peasants were starting their own war on the manors, thus ruling out the danger of an Eighteenth Brumaire, or a ‘petty-bourgeois’ counter-revolution, like that of 1849; while the strikes and mutinies in the rest of Europe were ‘indisputable symptoms … that we are on the eve of a world revolution’. To ‘miss such a moment and “wait” for the Congress of Soviets would be utter idiocy, or sheer treachery’, and if the Bolsheviks did so they would ‘cover themselves with shame and destroy themselves as a party’. As a final ultimatum, he even threatened to resign from the Central Committee, thereby giving himself the freedom to take his campaign for an armed uprising to the Bolshevik rank and file, scheduled to meet at a Party Conference on 17 October. ‘For it is my profound conviction that if we “wait” for the Congress of Soviets and let the present moment pass, we shall ruin the revolution.’104 Lenin’s infamous ‘rage’ was reaching fever pitch.

Why was Lenin so insistent on the need for an armed uprising before the Congress of Soviets? All the signs were that time was on the side of the Bolsheviks: the country was falling apart; the Soviets were moving to the left; and the forthcoming Congress would almost certainly endorse the Bolshevik call for a transfer of power to the Soviets. Why stage a premature uprising and run the risk of civil war and defeat? Many Bolshevik leaders had stressed the need for the seizure of power to coincide with the Soviet Congress itself. This was the view of Trotsky and several other Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet — and since they were closely informed about the mood in the capital and would have to play a leading role in any uprising, their point of view was highly influential in the party at large. While these leaders doubted that the party had sufficient support to justify an insurrection in its own name, they thought that it might be successfully carried out in the name of the Soviets. Since the Bolsheviks had conducted their campaign on the slogan of Soviet power, it was said that they needed the Congress to legitimize such an uprising and make it appear as the work of the Soviet as a whole, rather than one party. By taking this line, which would have delayed the uprising by no more than a few days, Lenin could have won widespread support in the party against those, such as Kamenev and Zinoviev, who were flatly opposed to the idea of an uprising. But Lenin was adamant — the seizure of power had to be carried out before the Congress convened. He continued to insist on this right up until the eve of the Congress itself.

Lenin justified his impatience by the notion that any delay in the seizure of power would enable Kerensky to organize repressive measures against it: Petrograd would be abandoned to the Germans; the seat of government would be moved to Moscow; and the Soviet Congress itself would be banned. This of course was nonsense. Kerensky was quite incapable of such decisive action and, in any case, as Kamenev pointed out, the government was powerless to put any counter-revolutionary intentions into practice. Lenin, it seems from some of his other writings at this time,fn12 was deliberately inventing the danger of a clampdown by Kerensky in order to strengthen his own arguments for a preemptive insurrection, although it is possible that he had become so out of touch with the real situation in Russia, having been in Finland since July, that he himself believed it. There were certainly rumours in the press that the government was planning to evacuate the capital in early October; and these no doubt reinforced his conviction that a civil war had begun, and that military victory would go to the side which dared to strike first. ‘On s’engage et puis en voit.’

But there was another motive for wanting the insurrection before the Soviet Congress convened, quite apart from military tactics. If the transfer of power took place by a vote of the Congress itself, the result would almost certainly be a coalition government made up of all the Soviet parties. The Bolsheviks might gain the largest share of the ministerial places, if these were allocated on a proportional basis, but would still have to rule in partnership with at least the leftwing — and possibly all — of the SR and Menshevik parties. This would be a resounding political victory for Kamenev, Lenin’s arch rival in the Bolshevik Party, who would no doubt emerge as the central figure in such a coalition. Under his leadership, the centre of power would remain with the Soviet Congress, rather than the party; and there might even be a renewed effort to reunite the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. As for Lenin himself, he ran the risk of being kept out of office, either on the insistence of the Mensheviks and SRs or on account of his own unwillingness to co-operate with them. He would thus be consigned to the leftwing margins of his own party. On the other hand, if a Bolshevik seizure of power took place before the Congress convened, then Lenin would emerge as the political master. The Congress majority would probably endorse the Bolshevik action, thereby giving the party the right to form a government of its own. If the Mensheviks and SRs could bring themselves to accept this forcible seizure of power, as a fait accompli, then a few minor places for them would no doubt be found in Lenin’s cabinet. Otherwise, they would have no choice but to go into opposition, leaving the Bolsheviks in government on their own. Kamenev’s coalition efforts would thus be undermined; Lenin would have his Dictatorship of the Proletariat; and although the result would inevitably be to plunge the country into civil war, this was something Lenin himself accepted — and perhaps even welcomed — as a part of the revolutionary process.

Returning to the capital, where he lived under cover in the flat of a party worker, Margarita Fofanova, Lenin convened a secret meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 10 October. The decision to prepare for an armed insurrection was taken at this meeting. It was one of those small ironies, of which there are bound to be many in the history of any revolution, that this historic event took place in the house of the Menshevik, Nikolai Sukhanov. His wife, Galina Flakserman, was a veteran Bolshevik (just imagine their domestic squabbles!) and had told her meddlesome husband not to bother coming home from his office at the Smolny that night, as it seems was his habit. Lenin arrived late and disguised in a wig — Kollontai recalled that ‘he looked every bit like a Lutheran minister’ — which he doffed for a moment on entering the apartment and then kept adjusting during the meeting: in his haste he had forgotten to pack the powder and, without it, the wig kept slipping off his shiny bald head. Of the twenty-one Central Committee members only twelve were present. The most important decision in the history of the Bolshevik Party — to launch the armed insurrection — was thus taken by a minority of the Central Committee: it passed by ten votes to two (Kamenev and Zinoviev). This, in effect, was a Leninist ‘coup’ within the Bolshevik Party.fn13 Once again, Lenin had managed to impose his will on the rest of its leaders. Without his decisive personal influence, it is hard to imagine the Bolshevik seizure of power.

In the small hours of the following morning, as the meeting drew to a close, Lenin hastily pencilled its historic resolution on a piece of scrap paper torn from a child’s notebook. Although no specific dates or tactics had been set, it recognized ‘that an armed uprising [was] inevitable, and the time for it fully ripe’, and instructed the party organizations to prepare for it as ‘the order of the day’. With the meeting adjourned, Sukhanov’s wife brought out the samovar and set the dining table with cheese, salami and black bread. The Bolsheviks at once tucked in.105 Conspiracy had made them hungry.

11 Lenin’s Revolution

*

i The Art of Insurrection

Some of the revolution’s most dramatic scenes were to be played out in a school for the daughters of the nobility. The Smolny Institute, a vast, ochre-coloured, classical palace on the outskirts of the capital, had lain more or less empty since the fall of the Tsar. After the July Days the Soviet Executive had been forced to move its headquarters there from the more prestigious Tauride Palace. From that point on it became, in the words of Sukhanov, the ‘internal arena of the revolution’. The Second All-Russian Soviet Congress of October, where Soviet power was proclaimed, took place in the white-colonnaded ballroom, where the schoolgirls had once perfected their waltzes and polkas.

The Smolny had none of the calm architectural grace of the Tauride Palace. Like most girls’ academies of the nineteenth century, it was austere and practical, more like a prison than a place to broaden the mind and uplift the spirit. This austerity seemed to reflect the change of mood among its revolutionary squatters. There was a general air of sternness, of sleepless nights and feverish improvisation inside the Smolny. John Reed said that it ‘hummed like a gigantic hive’. The outer gates were guarded by surly armed guards, who carefully checked the passes of everyone who entered (Trotsky himself was once refused entry when he could not find his pass). The endless vaulted corridors, dimly lit by electric lamps, were lined with resting soldiers and bundles of newspapers. There was a constant rush of people and the sound of their heavy boots on the stone floors echoed thunderously. The air was thick with cigarette smoke; the floors were covered with rubbish; and everywhere there was the smell of urine. Futile signs were hung up on the walls: ‘Comrades, for the sake of your health, preserve cleanliness!’ But no one took any notice. The barrack-like classrooms were filled by the offices of the various revolutionary organizations. On their doors, which constantly opened and shut, were still the old enamel plaques naming the classrooms; but over these hung crude paper signs to inform the passer-by of their new occupants: the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet; the Bureau of the Factory Committees; or the caucus of some political party. The centre of life at the Smolny was the ornate chandeliered ballroom, where the uproarious sessions of the Soviet were held; above the dais, where the executive sat, was a blank space on the wall, from which the Tsar’s portrait had been removed. Downstairs, in the girls’ former refectory, there was always a huge crowd of hungry workers and soldiers; many came to the Smolny for no other reason than to eat. They wolfed down their food, slurped hot tea from tins, and shouted obscenities which the young gentlewomen of the Smolny school could not even have imagined.1

With the Bolshevik Central Committee entrenched in Room 36, the Smolny became a physical challenge to the existence of the Provisional Government. The crucial meeting of 10 October had placed an armed uprising on the Bolsheviks’ agenda. But they had not set a date. As yet, most of the Bolshevik leaders were still opposed to Lenin’s demand for an immediate insurrection, while some put it off to the distant future. ‘The resolution of 10 October is one of the best resolutions the Central Committee has ever passed,’ declared Mikhail Kalinin, ‘but when this uprising will take place is uncertain — perhaps in a year.’ The ambivalent mood of the streets was the main cause for concern. Everyone sensed a general fatigue and discontent with the Kerenshchina. The war had gone on for far too long, people were fed up queuing half the night for bread, and there was a widespread feeling in the factories and the barracks that the status quo could no longer be endured. But would the Petrograd workers and soldiers ‘come out’ for an uprising? Many remembered the July Days, the loss of workers’ jobs and repressions which followed, and were reluctant to risk another defeat. The Bolshevik Military Organization, which had its pulse on the mood of the capital’s slums, repeatedly warned that while the workers and soldiers were thoroughly disgruntled and sympathized with their slogans, they were not yet ready to come out on the party’s call, though they might take to the streets on the call of the Soviet if it was in danger.

Unwilling to wait for the All-Russian Soviet Congress, Lenin pinned his hopes on the Northern Regional Congress of Soviets, which met in Petrograd on 11–13 October. As Latsis recalled, ‘the plan was that it would declare itself the government, and this would be the start’. Lenin had close ties with the Bolshevik leaders of the Baltic region: it was they who had convened the Northern Regional Congress and arranged for it to be held in Petrograd rather than Helsingfors. Lenin had spent the summer in the Baltic region and had come to see it as a vital launching base for the revolution in Russia as well as the rest of Europe. He was especially impressed by the revolutionary zeal of the Latvians: they made up his personal bodyguard and, during the early days of Soviet rule, the bulk of the leading Chekists and Red Army élite (Latsis, Eiduck, Peters, Smilga). The Bolsheviks in Riga had effectively controlled their Soviet from as early as August, and Lenin now looked towards them to import the principle of Soviet power into Russia.fn1 In a letter to Smilga, one of his closest associates during his summer of exile, Lenin had made it clear that he saw the Petrograd insurrection as a military invasion from the Baltic region. ‘It seems to me’, he had written on 17 September, ‘that we can have completely at our disposal only the troops in Finland and the Baltic Fleet and that only they can play a serious military role.’ The Northern Regional Congress was to provide the signal for this invasion. Smilga had organized it at Lenin’s urging and had assumed the role of its chairman. The Bolshevik delegates arrived fully armed and clearly assuming that it would become the centre for an uprising. But Lenin was once again frustrated: the majority of the delegates passed Kamenev’s cautious resolution to leave the creation of a Soviet government to the All-Russian Congress, due to convene on 20 October. Even in the Baltic, Lenin’s own preferred vanguard region, it seems there was no mass support for an insurrection on the call of the party.2

The same conclusion was suggested by the evidence presented to a meeting of the Central Committee on 16 October. The representatives of the Bolshevik Military Organization, the Petrograd Soviet, the trade unions and factory committees who attended this meeting all warned of the risks involved in staging an uprising before the Soviet Congress. Krylenko stated the view of the Military Organization that the soldiers’ fighting spirit was falling: ‘they would have to be stung by something, such as the breakup of the garrison, to come out for an uprising’. Volodarsky from the Petrograd Soviet confirmed the ‘general impression … that no one is ready to rush out on to the streets but that everyone will come out if the Soviet calls’. Colossal unemployment and the fear of dismissal held the workers back, according to Shmidt of the trade unions. Shliapnikov added that even in the metalworkers’ union, where the party’s influence was dominant, ‘a Bolshevik rising is not popular and rumours of this even produce panic’. Kamenev drew the logical conclusion: ‘there is no evidence of any kind that we must begin the fight before the 20th [when the Soviet Congress was due to convene]’. But Lenin was insistent on the need for immediate preparations and saw no reason to hold back in the cautious reports on the mood of the Petrograd masses: in a military coup d’étât, which is how he conceived of the seizure of power, only a small force was needed, provided it was well armed and disciplined enough. Such was Lenin’s towering influence over the rest of the party that he got his way. A counter-resolution by Zinoviev prohibiting the actual staging of an uprising before the Bolshevik delegates to the Soviet Congress had been consulted was defeated by 15 votes to 6, though the closeness of the vote, compared with the 19 to 2 majority in favour of Lenin’s much vaguer call for an uprising in the immediate future, does suggest that several Bolshevik leaders had serious apprehensions about the wisdom of an insurrection before the Soviet Congress, albeit not enough to make an open stand against the great dictator.3 That, after all, would take some courage.

At the end of the meeting Kamenev declared that he could not accept its resolution, which in his view would lead the party to ruin, and submitted his resignation to the Central Committee in order to make his campaign public. He also demanded the convocation of the Party Conference, which Lenin had managed to get postponed: there was little doubt that it would oppose the call for an uprising before the Soviet Congress. On 18 October Kamenev aired his views in Gorky’s newspaper, Novaia zhizn’. ‘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.’ This of course was to let the cat out of the bag: rumours of a Bolshevik coup had been spreading for weeks, and now the conspiracy had finally been exposed. Trotsky was forced to deny the rumours in the Petrograd Soviet, but for once his performance was less than convincing. Lenin was furious and, in a sign of the sort of purges to come, denounced Kamenev and Zinoviev in the Bolshevik press. ‘Strike-breaking’, ‘betrayal’, ‘blacklegs’, ‘slanderous lies’ and ‘crime’ — such terms were littered throughout the angry letters he sent on 18 and 19 October. ‘Mr Zinoviev and Mr Kamenev’ (this was the ultimate insult — they were now no longer even ‘comrades’) should be ‘expelled from the party’.4 Such were the actions of a tyrant.

By publishing these letters, Lenin was taking the campaign for an uprising into the public domain. He had always based his argument for a preemptive seizure of power (before the Soviet Congress) on the danger — which he either overestimated or (more likely) invented — that the Provisional Government might not allow the Congress to convene. All the local party reports made it clear that, while the Petrograd workers and soldiers would not come out on the call of the party alone, many would do so if the Soviet was threatened. This had been true since the Kornilov crisis, when the popular notion that a ‘counter-revolution’ still lurked in the shadows of Kerensky’s regime had first taken root. If the Bolsheviks were to get their supporters on to the streets once again, they would have to convince them that the Soviet was in danger. Their opponents did this for them.

With the Bolshevik conspiracy public knowledge, the Soviet leaders resolved to delay the Soviet Congress until 25 October. They hoped that the extra five days would give them the chance to muster their supporters from the far-flung provinces. But it merely gave the Bolsheviks the extra time they needed to make the final preparations for their uprising. Moreover, it lent credibility to their charge that the Soviet leaders were planning to ditch the Soviet Congress altogether. It is certainly true that they had regrets about calling it in the first place: when they had done so, at the time of the Democratic Conference, the swing to the Bolsheviks had not yet been fully apparent; but as the Congress approached, they realized that defeat stared them in the face.

Perhaps the Soviet leaders would have been better advised to concentrate their efforts on demanding strong repressive measures to counter the Bolshevik threat. The truth was that, even with a majority at the Soviet Congress, their paper resolutions would not be enough to fend off the bayonets of the Bolsheviks. But the Mensheviks and SRs were precluded from taking such measures by their feelings of comradeship with the Bolshevik Party. They could not forget that only months before they had been fellow-fighters in the revolutionary underground (and could not see that only months ahead they would become the victims of the Bolshevik Terror). They limited themselves to questions aimed at putting the Bolsheviks on the spot. They stamped their feet and demanded that the Bolsheviks declared their plans before the Soviet. ‘I want a yes or no answer,’ insisted Dan, as if the Bolsheviks were likely to give it.5

Kerensky’s own conduct was equally short-sighted. During the final weeks of the Provisional Government his behaviour began to resemble that of the last Tsar: both men refused to recognize the revolutionary threat to their own authority. With Nicholas such complacency had stemmed from hopeless despair and fatalistic resignation; but with Kerensky it was rather the result of his own foolish optimism. Kerensky’s nationwide popularity during the early days of the revolution had gone to his head. He had come to believe in his own ‘providential calling’ to lead ‘the people’ to freedom and, like the Tsar confined to his Winter Palace, was sufficiently removed from their real situation not to question this faith. Like Nicholas, he surrounded himself with devoted admirers who dared not speak their mind; and kept his cabinet weak by constant talk of reshuffles. He had no idea of — or no wish to know — the true extent of his own unpopularity.

No doubt he had not heard the joke circulating round the country during the final weeks of his regime: ‘Q: What is the difference between Russia today and at the end of last year? A: Then we had Alexandra Fedorovna [the Empress], but now we have Alexander Fedorovich [Kerensky].’ The isolation of the Prime Minister was almost complete. The people’s hero of the spring had become their anti-hero by the autumn. There were widespread rumours of his ‘moral corruption’ (just as there had been of the Romanovs): of his fine living in the Winter Palace; of his love affair with Elena Biriukova, his wife’s cousin, who lived with the Kerenskys in the palace; of his constant drunkenness; and of his addiction to morphine and cocaine. Friends and acquaintances would ring Kerensky’s wife to express their deepest sympathy. ‘I could not understand why they were being so solicitous,’ she later recalled, ‘but then it turned out that there was some story in the leftwing press that Kerensky had left his wife and had run off with some actress.’ It was falsely rumoured that Kerensky was a Jew, which in the climate of anti-Semitism that ran throughout the revolutionary era was highly damaging to his popular image. Kerensky himself recalled that when he fled the Winter Palace, just before the Bolshevik seizure of power, he saw the following ironic graffiti written on a wall: ‘Down with the Jew Kerensky, Long Live Trotsky!’ It was also rumoured that Kerensky liked to dress in women’s clothes. There was much that was rather feminine in Kerensky’s physique and gestures (Gippius called him her ‘girlish revolutionary’), and this made him appear weak to many of the workers, in particular, who contrasted him unfavourably with the muscular masculinity of the Bolsheviks. Later it was even rumoured that when Kerensky had fled the Winter Palace he had been dressed in the outfit of a nurse.6

It was not just on the streets that Kerensky lost his credibility. The Western Allies, who had always been his strongest supporters, also turned against him after the Kornilov crisis. The British Foreign Ministry was clearly taken in by the rumours about his private life. It was under the absurd impression that his secretary, David Soskice, was a German agent and a Bolshevik, and that Kerensky himself was about to conclude a separate peace with Germany. Nabokov, the Provisional Government’s representative in London, thought that the British had decided to wash their hands of Kerensky, believing him to be ‘on his way out’, once Kornilov’s reforms had been jettisoned.7

Even among the democratic intelligentsia, where he had once been hailed as a popular hero, Kerensky was now reviled. His oldest patron, the poetess and salon hostess Zinaida Gippius, wrote in her diary on 24 October: ‘Nobody wants the Bolsheviks, but nobody is prepared to fight for Kerensky either.’ This just about sums it up. Brusilov, who since his dismissal as Commander-in-Chief had become an advocate of the need to raise a civilian militia in order to fight the Bolsheviks, found that he could muster neither volunteers nor money to buy mercenaries. Everybody cursed the Bolsheviks but nobody was prepared to do anything about them. The bourgeoisie and the Rightist groups would have nothing more to do with the Provisional Government, and even welcomed its demise. Nobody wanted to defend it, least of all the monarchists. They preferred to let the Bolsheviks seize power, in the belief that they would not last long and would bring the country to such utter ruin that all the socialists would be discredited, whereupon the Rightists would impose their own dictatorship.8

Kerensky remained oblivious to his declining fortunes. He continued to trust in the support of ‘the people’ — was he not their hostage? — and refused to take any preventive measures against the Bolshevik threat. No attempt was made to seize control of the Smolny, or to arrest the Bolshevik leaders, or to reinforce the defence of the city, during the first half of October, when such measures stood at least some chance of success. He seemed to believe that any Bolshevik rising would be a repeat of the July Days fiasco. He even began to pray that the Bolsheviks would make a move, in the naive belief that this would give him the chance to deal with them once and for all. ‘I would be prepared to offer prayers to produce this uprising,’ he told Nabokov on 20 October. ‘I have greater forces than necessary. They will be utterly crushed.’fn29

Confident of victory, Kerensky declared war on the Bolsheviks. He announced his plans to transfer the bulk of the Petrograd garrison to the Northern Front, where the Germans were advancing towards the capital. As on the eve of the July crisis, he no doubt saw in the German threat an excellent excuse to rid the capital of its unruly soldiers; and he must have been counting on the idea that, as in July, the breakup of the garrison would give rise to a badly planned Bolshevik uprising. But this was, of course, a fatal miscalculation. It gave credibility to the Bolshevik charge that there was a ‘counter-revolutionary plot’ within government circles — a charge which they needed in order to rally support for an immediate uprising. The Bolsheviks claimed that Kerensky was planning to abandon the capital in order to close down the Soviet Congress and kill off the revolution. Such fears reached fever pitch when Rodzianko, the former Duma President, urged Kerensky to do just that in a speech that was widely reported in the press under the headline: ‘To hell with Petrograd!’

This was the highly charged political atmosphere in which the Military Revolutionary Committee was able to supersede the authority of the Provisional Government inside the Petrograd garrison and become the leading organizational force of the Bolshevik insurrection. It all happened in a matter of days — and the secret of the MRC’s success was in posing as an organ of Soviet defence. The MRC was formed in the middle of October, and held its first organizational meeting on the 20th. Like the Soviet Committee for Struggle Against the Counter-Revolution, which had arisen during the Kornilov crisis, it was conceived as an ad hoc body of revolutionary defence (as much against the Germans as against the ‘counter-revolution’). Its Bureau, which met on the third floor of the Smolny, was made up of three Bolsheviks and two Left SRs, with P. E. Lazimir, a Left SR, as its nominal chairman. This served to give it the appearance of a Soviet organization, which was important because the soldiers would only come out on the call of the Soviet. But in fact the MRC was a Bolshevik organization. Its real leaders were Trotsky, Antonov-Ovseenko, and the Baltic sailor Dybenko, the huge black-bearded lover of Kollontai (who was old enough to be his mother). The role of the Left SRs was what Trotsky called ‘camouflage’ to conceal the Bolshevik coup plans. The fact that the Left SRs allowed themselves to be used in this way says all that needs to be said about their political naivety. Their strategic decisions were guided by a formless revolutionary spirit characteristic of students. They were lambs to the Bolshevik wolf. When the MRC resolved to launch the seizure of power, in the small hours of 25 October, the two Left SRs were not even there.

The threat of transfer to the Front immediately sparked a general mutiny in the Petrograd garrison. The bulk of the soldiers refused to obey the orders of the General Staff and switched their allegiance to the MRC, which sent out commissars to replace the unit commanders. Meetings of soldiers expressed their readiness to ‘come out’ against the Provisional Government if called to do so by the Petrograd Soviet. Even the once loyal Cossack regiments went along with the mutiny, or remained neutral. On 21 October the MRC proclaimed itself the ruling authority of the garrison: it was the first act of the insurrection. The General Staff made a last desperate effort to salvage some of its authority by reaching a compromise with the MRC. But it was too late. The garrison units were already under the effective control of the commissars. On 23 October the MRC extended its power to the Peter and Paul Fortress, whose cannon overlooked the Winter Palace. The Provisional Government had lost effective military control of the capital a full two days before the armed uprising began. This was the essential fact of the whole insurrection: without it one cannot explain the ease of the Bolshevik victory. By 25 October the most important task of any successful revolution — the capture of the garrison in the capital — had already been completed; the Provisional Government was defenceless; and it only remained for the Bolsheviks to walk into the Winter Palace and arrest the ministers.

The remarkable thing about the Bolshevik insurrection is that hardly any of the Bolshevik leaders had wanted it to happen until a few hours before it began. Until late in the evening of 24 October the majority of the Central Committee and the MRC had not envisaged the overthrow of the Provisional Government before the opening of the Soviet Congress the next day. Trotsky, who in Lenin’s absence had effectively assumed the leadership of the party, repeatedly stressed the need for discipline and patience. On the morning of the 24th Kerensky had ordered the closure of two Bolshevik newspapers. Trotsky refused to be drawn by this ‘provocation’: the MRC should be placed on alert; the city’s strategic installations should be seized as a defensive measure against any further ‘counter-revolutionary’ threats; but, as he insisted at a meeting of the Bolshevik Congress delegates in the afternoon, ‘it would be a mistake to use even one of the armoured cars which now defend the Winter Palace to arrest the government … This is defence, comrades. This is defence.’ Later that evening, in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky declared — and had good reason to believe — that ‘an armed conflict today or tomorrow, on the eve of the Soviet Congress, is not in our plans’.10

There were obvious reasons not to force events at this final hour. The Bolsheviks needed the sanction of the Soviet Congress to give legitimacy to their seizure of power: without it they could certainly not rely on the support of the soldiers and workers, and might even run the risk of having to fight against them. The Soviet delegates were already arriving for the opening of the Congress on the 25th, and from their composition it seemed highly likely that there would be a solid majority in favour of Soviet power. As for the Provisional Government — well, it was looking increasingly provisional, and would no doubt fall at the slightest prod. In the evening of the 24th the Preparliament had effectively passed a motion of no confidence in it. Even Dan and Gots, previously among the most obstinate advocates of the coalition, abandoned Kerensky and called for the establishment of a democratic government committed to peace and radical reforms. They wanted to publicize this as a historic proclamation plastered throughout the capital that same night, in the hope that it might appease the potential insurgents and strengthen the campaign for a peaceful resolution of the power question through the formation of a socialist coalition. Perhaps it was already too late for this: it looked like trying to fend off the Bolshevik guns with paper decrees. Yet, even in these final hours, there was still some basis for hope that agreement might be reached. In the evening of the 24th Kamenev was still rushing around the Smolny trying to win support for a resolution calling on the Congress to form a socialist government of all the Soviet parties; and the SRs and Mensheviks, whose congress delegates met late into the night, were at last coming round to support the plan.

Meanwhile, however, the Bolshevik insurrection was already gaining momentum. Despite Trotsky’s call for discipline, it was hard to stop the defensive measures of the MRC from spilling into a general offensive. As darkness fell, armed crowds of Bolshevik workers and soldiers spilled into the centre of the city. The government blockades on the bridges, which controlled the routes from the outlying slums, were taken over by Red Guards. They set up road blocks and patrolled the streets in armoured cars, while late-night theatre-goers hurried home. By the early hours of the morning, Bolshevik forces had seized control of the railway stations, the post and telegraph, the state bank, the telephone exchange and the electricity station. The Red Guards had taken over the local police stations and had begun to assume the functions of the police themselves. Overall, the insurgents had the control of almost all the city with the exception of the central zone around the Winter Palace and St Isaac’s Square. Bunkered inside the Winter Palace, Kerensky’s ministers did not even have control over their own lights or telephones. One of the Bolshevik engineers engaged in the occupation of the Nikolaevsky Station recalled standing guard by the equestrian statue of Alexander III:

It was a freezing night. One could feel the north wind going through one’s bones. On the streets adjacent to the Nikolaevsky Station groups of engineers huddled, shivering from the cold, and peered vigilantly into the shadowy night. The moonlight created a fantastic scene. The hulks of the houses looked like medieval castles, and giant shadows followed the engineers. At this sight the next-to-last Emperor appeared to rein in his horse in horror.11

These early successes strengthened Lenin’s appeal for the immediate seizure of power. The Bolshevik leaders did not want a repeat of the July Days, when their own initial hesitation in supporting the initiative of the streets had resulted in fiasco. As news reached them of the Bolshevik gains, so pressure mounted to take control of the situation and start the insurrection. Lenin’s intervention was decisive. Confined to Fofanova’s flat, he had become increasingly frustrated as he watched the day’s events unfold. At 6 p.m. he scribbled a desperate appeal to the Petrograd party organizations, urging them to launch an insurrection in the next few hours, and ordered Fofanova to deliver it to the Smolny. The Soviet Congress was due to open the following afternoon, and unless the Bolsheviks had already seized power by then, his whole political strategy would be doomed. By 10 p.m. Lenin could hold back no longer. He donned his wig and a worker’s cap, wrapped a bandage around his head, and set off for the Smolny, accompanied by the Finnish Bolshevik, Eino Rakhia. Riding through the Vyborg district in an empty streetcar, Lenin overwhelmed the poor conductress with questions on the latest situation and, discovering that she was a leftist, bullied her with advice on revolutionary action. From the Finland Station the two men continued their journey on foot. Near the Tauride Palace a government patrol stopped them, but, according to Rakhia, mistook Lenin, who was dressed in his worst clothes, for a harmless drunk and let them proceed.12 One can only wonder how different history would have been if Lenin had been arrested.

Shortly before midnight they finally reached the Smolny. The building was ablaze with lights, like an ocean liner in the dark night sea. Trucks and armoured cars rushed to and fro laden down with Bolshevik troops and guns. Machine-guns had been set up outside the gates, where the Red Guards huddled around a bonfire checking the passes of those wanting to enter the military headquarters of the insurrection. Lenin had arrived without a pass and, in his disguise, was not recognized by the Red Guards; he only succeeded in gaining entry by squeezing through them amidst a crowd. He went at once to Room 36, where the Bolshevik caucus met, and harangued his comrades on the need to start the seizure of power. A meeting of the Central Committee was hastily convened and, although no protocol of it was recorded, the testimonies of those who were there are all agreed that Lenin had a decisive effect in changing the dominant mood from one of defence to one of offence. The Central Committee at last gave the order for the insurrection to begin. A map of the city was brought out and the Bolshevik leaders pored over it, drawing up the main lines of attack and assigning military tasks.

During a break in their deliberations Lenin suggested drawing up a list of the Bolshevik government to be presented to the Soviet Congress the next day. The question arose as to what to call the new government and its members. The term ‘Provisional Government’ was thought to sound outmoded, whilst calling themselves ‘ministers’ seemed far too bureaucratic and respectable. The Bolsheviks, after all, liked to see themselves as a fighting organization: they dressed in macho black leather jackets and military boots, whereas most of the other political parties wore ministerial suits.fn3 It was Trotsky who came forward with the idea of calling the ministers ‘people’s commissars’ in emulation of the Jacobins. Everyone liked the suggestion. ‘Yes, that’s very good,’ said Lenin, ‘it smells of revolution. And we can call the government itself the “Council of People’s Commissars”.’ Nominations were taken for the various cabinet posts, although with Kerensky not yet overthrown the exercise seemed rather premature and was carried out in a light-hearted manner. Lenin stretched himself out on the floor, relaxed and triumphant. He made several jokes at Kamenev’s expense, who had warned that the party could not hold on to power for more than a fortnight. ‘Never mind,’ Lenin quipped, ‘when, in two years’ time, we are still in power, then you will be saying that we cannot survive longer than two years.’13

*

Few historical events have been more profoundly distorted by myth than those of 25 October 1917. The popular image of the Bolshevik insurrection, as a bloody struggle by the tens of thousands with several thousand fallen heroes, owes more to October — Eisenstein’s brilliant but largely fictional propaganda film to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the event — than to historical fact. The Great October Socialist Revolution, as it came to be called in Soviet mythology, was in reality such a small-scale event, being in effect no more than a military coup, that it passed unnoticed by the vast majority of the inhabitants of Petrograd. Theatres, restaurants and tram cars functioned much as normal while the Bolsheviks came to power. The whole insurrection could have been completed in six hours, had it not been for the ludicrous incompetence of the insurgents themselves, which made it take an extra fifteen. The legendary ‘storming’ of the Winter Palace, where Kerensky’s cabinet held its final session, was more like a routine house arrest, since most of the forces defending the palace had already left for home, hungry and dejected, before the assault began. The only real damage to the imperial residence in the whole affair was a chipped cornice and a shattered window on the third floor.

The Bolshevik plan was simple: the garrison soldiers, the Red Guards and the Kronstadt sailors were to capture the Marinsky Palace and disperse the Preparliament; demand the surrender of the Provisional Government and, if it refused, seize control of the Winter Palace on a signal from the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Baltic cruiser Aurora. The MRC expected to complete the operations by noon — in time for Lenin to present the seizure of power as a fait accompli to the Soviet Congress. At 10 a.m., in anticipation of a speedy victory, the Bolshevik leader was already putting the final touches to his manifesto, ‘To the Citizens of Russia!’, announcing the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the transfer of power to the MRC.14

The first part of the plan went smoothly enough: shortly before noon a group of Bolshevik soldiers and sailors burst into the Marinsky Palace and ordered the deputies to disperse. But after that elementary technical failures forced the MRC to postpone the operations around the Winter Palace until 3 p.m., then 6 p.m., whereafter it ceased to bother with any set deadlines at all. The first major hold-up was the late arrival of the Baltic sailors, without whom the MRC would not go ahead. Then there was another, even more frustrating, problem. The assault on the Winter Palace was due to begin with the heavy field-guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress, but at the final moment these were discovered to be rusty museum pieces which could not be fired. Soldiers were hastily sent out to drag alternative cannons up to the fortress walls, but when these arrived it turned out that there were no suitable shells for them. Even more surreal was the panic created by the seemingly simple task of raising a red lantern to the top of the fortress’s flagpole to signal the start of the assault on the palace. When the moment for action arrived, no red lantern could be found. The Bolshevik Commissar of the Fortress, Blagonravov, went out in search of a suitable lamp but got himself lost in the dark and fell into a muddy bog. When he finally returned, the lamp he had brought could not be fixed to the flagpole and was never seen by those who took part in the assault. In any case, it wasn’t red.15

From Lenin’s point of view all these delays were infuriating. It was vital for him to have the seizure of power completed before the opening of the Soviet Congress and, although this too had been delayed, time was rapidly running out. At around 3 p.m. he had told a packed session of the Petrograd Soviet that the Provisional Government had already been overthrown. It was of course a lie — the Ministers were still barricaded inside the Winter Palace — but that was a minor detail: the fact of the seizure of power was to be so important to his political strategy over the next few hours that he was even prepared to invent it. As afternoon turned into evening, he screamed at the MRC commanders to seize the Winter Palace without delay. Podvoisky recalls him pacing around in a small room in the Smolny ‘like a lion in a cage. He needed the Winter Palace at any cost … he was ready to shoot us.’16

In fact the Bolshevik forces which had gathered in the centre of the city by this stage could have walked quite freely into the Winter Palace, since its defence was almost non-existent. With the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison, Kerensky had tried to summon loyal troops from the Northern Front. His order had been dispatched on the night of the 24th with the forged signature of the Soviet leaders, since Kerensky feared the soldiers would not come on the authority of the Provisional Government. By the following morning there was still no sign of the troops and he resolved to go off in search of them. With the railways in Bolshevik hands, he was forced to travel by car; but such was the utter helplessness of the Provisional Government that it did not even have a taxi at its disposal. Military officials were sent out to find a car. They seized a Renault from outside the American Embassy (which later launched a diplomatic protest), while a second car was found at the War Ministry, although it had no fuel and more men had to be sent out to ‘borrow’ some from the English Hospital. At around 11 a.m. the two cars sped out of the Winter Palace and headed out of the city. Kerensky was seated in the second car, flying the Stars and Stripes, which no doubt helped him past the MRC pickets already beginning to form around the Palace Square.17

Kerensky’s departure threw the rest of the ministers into a panic (for a while they did not even know where he was). At midday they met in the Malachite Hall and prepared to organize the defence of the palace. But it was a hopeless task. They were totally inexperienced in military operations and spent the best part of the next four hours in a futile and aimless discussion of possible candidates for the post of ‘Dictator’ (dictator of what?) before settling on the Kadet doctor, and Minister of Welfare, Nikolai Kishkin. The engineer Palchinsky, who was placed in charge of defending the palace, could not even find a plan of the building, or anyone expert in its topography, with the result that one of the side-doors was left unguarded and Bolshevik spies were able to enter it freely. There were already some loyalist forces inside the palace, and others outside who spent the afternoon building barricades out of piles of logs. Kerensky had kept a small number of troops on the ground floor since moving into the palace, and these were now joined by two companies of Cossacks, some young cadets from the military schools and 200 women from the Shock Battalion of Death, in all some 3,000 soldiers. John Reed, one of several foreign journalists to slip past their guard during the afternoon, described the scene:

At the end of the corridor was a large, ornate room with gilded cornices and enormous crystal lustres … On both sides of the parqueted floor lay rows of dirty mattresses and blankets, upon which occasional soldiers were stretched out; everywhere was a litter of cigarette butts, bits of bread, cloth, and empty bottles with expensive French labels. More and more soldiers … moved about in a stale atmosphere of tobacco-smoke and unwashed humanity. One had a bottle of white Burgundy, evidently filched from the cellars of the Palace … The place was a huge barrack.18

The fighting spirit of the soldiers defending the Winter Palace was extremely weak, however, and the longer they waited for the Bolsheviks to attack the more frightened they became. They were constantly reminded by the propaganda of the enemy that they were vastly outnumbered, and this made it difficult to keep up their morale. Alexander Sinegub, one of the officers in charge, recalls the soldiers smoking, getting drunk and cursing their hopeless situation while the ministers harangued them on the need to maintain discipline. The Cossacks were particularly disgruntled by the idea of having to fight alongside ‘women with guns’. There was no real ammunition store inside the palace, while the food supply was not enough to feed all the soldiers even for dinner. As the evening wore on, more and more of these hungry soldiers became demoralized and abandoned the palace: the call of their stomachs was stronger than the call of duty. By the early evening, all but 300 of the troops had laid down their arms and slipped away to the restaurants in the city.19

During these final hours of waiting for the inevitable the ministers made a number of futile appeals to the people for help. Although all their telephone lines had been cut, they still had a secret line to the military telegraph office in the attic of the War Ministry building, where, unbeknown to the Bolsheviks, who had occupied the rest of the building, a young officer sat sending out the government’s final appeals to various parts of the country (later, when he heard the palace had fallen, he put on his coat and hat and walked calmly out of the building). John Reed, who saw the green baize cabinet table shortly after the ministers’ arrest, found it covered in dozens of roughly scribbled drafts, most of them scratched out as their futility became evident. No one, it seems, was prepared to rally to the defence of the Provisional Government. The one attempt to do so, by the deputies of the Petrograd city Duma, was a piece of surreal theatre that ended in farce. Responding to the ministers’ appeal for support, the deputies declared their readiness to ‘stand in front of the Bolshevik cannon’, and marched off in columns of four towards the Winter Palace singing the Marseillaise. The white-bearded figure of Schreider, the Mayor of Petrograd, led this army of salvation, along with Prokopovich, the Minister of Supplies, who carried an umbrella to shelter himself from the rain which was now beginning to fall and a lantern to light up the way. The 300 deputies, dressed in their frock-coats, officers’ tunics and dresses, each proudly bore a package of bread and salami for the hungry defenders of the Winter Palace. They were a walking symbol of the decent but doomed old liberal Russia that was about to disappear. The deputies had advanced less than a block from the Duma building when they were halted by a patrol of Bolshevik sailors near the Kazan Square. Schreider bared his breast to their guns and pronounced himself ready to die, if they did not let them pass. But the sailors, no doubt seeing the comical aspect of this impotent protest, threatened to ‘spank’ them if they did not go home. Prokopovich then climbed on to a box and, waving his umbrella in the air, made a speech: ‘Comrades and citizens! Force is being used against us! We cannot have our innocent blood upon the hands of these ignorant men! It is beneath our dignity to be shot down here in the streets … Let us return to the Duma and discuss the best means of saving the country and the revolution!’ Whereupon the outraged deputies about-turned and marched back up the Nevsky, all the time maintaining a dignified silence in defeat.20

Meanwhile, at 6.50 p.m., the MRC delivered its ultimatum to the Winter Palace demanding the surrender of the Provisional Government. The ministers, who were at the time sitting down to a supper of borscht, steamed fish and artichokes, all felt a solemn obligation to be brave and resist for as long as they could, although some were concerned that the palace might be destroyed if the cruiser Aurora, anchored alongside the English Embankment,fn4 opened fire at it as had been threatened. They reasoned that the Bolsheviks would be widely condemned if they were made to overthrow them by force; so the ultimatum was refused. For a long time nothing happened — the Bolsheviks were still messing around with faulty field-guns and lanterns in the Peter and Paul Fortress — but at 9.40 p.m. the signal was finally given and one blank round was fired by the Aurora. The huge sound of the blast, much louder than a live shot, caused the frightened ministers to drop at once to the floor. The women from the Battalion of Death became hysterical and had to be taken away to a room at the back of the palace, while most of the remaining cadets abandoned their posts. After a short break to allow those who wished to do so to leave the palace, Blagonravov gave the order for the real firing to begin from the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Aurora and the Palace Square. Most of the shells from the fortress landed harmlessly in the Neva. George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, who inspected the palace the following day, found only three shrapnel marks on the river side of the building, although ‘on the town side the walls were riddled with thousands of bullets from machine guns’.21

Just as the bombardment was getting under way, at 10.40 p.m., the Soviet Congress finally opened. The great hall of the Smolny was packed; the delegates stood in the aisles and perched on window-sills. The air was thick with blue tobacco smoke, despite repeated calls from the tribune for ‘the comrades’ not to smoke. The majority of the delegates were workers and soldiers in their tunics and greatcoats; their unwashed and dirty look contrasted sharply with the clean suits of the old executive members, the Mensheviks and SRs, seated on the platform for the final time. Sukhanov remarked that the ‘grey features of the Bolshevik provinces’ had a clear preponderance among the Congress delegates. He was shocked by their ‘dark’, ‘morose’ and ‘primitive’ appearance, and thought it reflected a ‘crude and ignorant people whose devotion to the revolution was spite and despair, while their “Socialism” was hunger and an unendurable longing for rest’. This of course was a Menshevik speaking, but, even if we ignore his value-laden terms, there is no doubt that the mass of the delegates were indeed less cultured than the urbanized, skilled and educated types who had hitherto made up the majority of the Soviet movement.

The Bolsheviks did not have an absolute majority, as Sukhanov had thought, though with the support of the Left SRs they could push through virtually any motion they liked. Although precise numbers are difficult to determine, the Credentials Committee of the Congress reported that 300 of the 670 delegates were Bolsheviks, 193 SRs (of whom more than half were Left SRs), while 82 were Mensheviks (of whom 14 were Internationalists). Because of the lax regulations for the selection of delegates and their own superior party organization, the Bolsheviks had managed to secure rather more than their fair share of seats. The northern industrial Soviets, where the influence of the Bolsheviks was dominant both in the towns and the semi-industrial villages, sent more representatives than was warranted by their size; whereas those of the Volga and the agricultural south, where the SRs were dominant, sent fewer and in some cases even boycotted the Congress altogether. There was a similar imbalance among the delegates of the armed services, with the Bolshevized north far better represented than the non-Bolshevized south. The Latvians, the most Bolshevized troops of all, made up more than 10 per cent of the delegates.22

In accordance with these voting strengths, the old Soviet leaders vacated their seats on the platform; they were replaced by 14 Bolsheviks and 7 Left SRs. The Mensheviks declined to take up the 4 seats allocated to them.

The mandates of the delegates showed an overwhelming majority in favour of a Soviet government. It was up to the Congress to decide how this should be formed. Martov proposed the formation of a united democratic government based upon all the parties in the Soviet: this, he said, was the only way to avert a civil war. The proposal was met with torrents of applause. Even Lunacharsky was forced to admit that the Bolsheviks had nothing against it — they could not abandon the slogan of Soviet Power — and the proposal was immediately passed by a unanimous vote. But just as it looked as if a socialist coalition was at last about to be formed, a series of Mensheviks and SRs bitterly denounced the violent assault on the Provisional Government. They declared that their parties, or at least the rightwing sections of them, would have nothing to do with this ‘criminal venture’, which was bound to throw the country into civil war, and walked out of the Congress hall in protest, while the Bolshevik delegates stamped their feet, whistled and hurled abuse at them.23

Lenin’s planned provocation — the preemptive seizure of power — had worked. By walking out of the Congress, the Mensheviks and SRs undermined all hopes of reaching a compromise with the Bolshevik moderates and of forming a coalition government of all the Soviet parties. The path was now clear for the Bolshevik dictatorship, based on the Soviet, which Lenin had no doubt intended all along. In the charged political atmosphere of the time, it is easy to see why the Mensheviks and SRs acted as they did. But it is equally difficult not to draw the conclusion that, by their actions, they merely played into Lenin’s hands and thus committed political suicide. Writing in 1921, Sukhanov admitted as much:

We completely untied the Bolsheviks’ hands, making them masters of the whole situation and yielding to them the whole arena of the Revolution. A struggle at the Congress for a united democratic front might have had some success … But by leaving the Congress, we ourselves gave the Bolsheviks a monopoly of the Soviet, of the masses, and of the Revolution. By our own irrational decision, we ensured the victory of Lenin’s whole ‘line’.24

The immediate effect of their walk-out was to split the opposition forces, leaving Martov and the other leftwing advocates of a coalition isolated. Martov made one more desperate appeal for an all-democratic government. But the mood in the hall was changing. As the mass of the delegates saw it, the Mensheviks and SRs had proved themselves to be ‘counter-revolutionaries’ by walking out of the Congress; and they were now ready to follow the lead of the Bolsheviks in opposing the whole idea of a compromise with them. Trotsky seized the initiative and, in one of the most often-quoted speeches of the twentieth century, denounced Martov’s resolution for a coalition:

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 those wretched groups who have left us or who are making this proposal … No one in Russia is with them any longer. A compromise is supposed to be made between two equal sides … But here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we say: You are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out; go where you ought to go — into the dustbin of history!

In a moment of rage, which he must have agonized over for the rest of his life, Martov shouted, ‘Then we’ll leave!’ and walked in silence towards the exit without looking back. As he did so, a Bolshevik dressed in a black shirt, tied by a leather belt, stepped out into the aisle and said to Martov: ‘And we had thought that Martov at least would remain with us.’ Visibly shaken by these words, Lenin’s old comrade replied: ‘One day you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.’ And with that he walked out — and into the political wilderness.25

It was past two o’clock in the morning and it only remained for Trotsky, who was now clearly doing the work of Lenin, to propose a resolution condemning the ‘treacherous’ attempts of the Mensheviks and SRs to undermine Soviet power. In effect, this would be to give a Soviet stamp of approval to a Bolshevik dictatorship. The mass of the delegates, who were probably too ignorant to comprehend the political import of what they were doing, raised their hands in support (weren’t they in favour of Soviet power?). But the Left SR leaders, who should have known better, were equally fooled; and they too raised their hands in the naive conviction, as their leader, Boris Kamkov, later explained, that ‘our place was with the revolution’ and that, by going along with the Bolshevik adventure, they might be able to tame it.26

Meanwhile, the final assault on the Winter Palace was nearing completion. The loyalist forces had virtually all abandoned the defence of the palace and Bolshevik troops could enter it at will. The ministers, who were now stretched out on sofas, or slouched in chairs, awaiting the end, could hear the sound of running soldiers, shouts and gun shots from the floor below. Finally, some time after 2 a.m., these sounds grew louder: the Bolshevik attackers were climbing the stairs and approaching the door. It was clear that the moment for surrender had arrived. The ministers jumped up and — for some strange reason — grabbed hold of their overcoats, as the door was suddenly flung open and in stepped the small, unassuming figure of Antonov-Ovseenko. ‘You are all under arrest,’ the Bolshevik leader announced. A register of the ministers was taken. The realization that Kerensky was not present angered the attackers, one of whom shouted: ‘Bayonet all the sons of bitches!’ But otherwise discipline was maintained. The ministers were led away on foot (no cars were available) to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where they were locked up in dismal conditions for a number of weeks. The Bolshevik escorts had to defend them on the way from several attempts to lynch them on the streets, and it must have been with some relief that the ministers finally reached the safety of their prison. Perhaps some of them were also secretly relieved to be no longer burdened with the near-impossible task of trying to govern Russia. As the door of his cell banged shut, Alexei Nikitin, the deposed Minister of the Interior, found in his pocket a half-forgotten telegram from the Ukrainian Rada. ‘I received this yesterday,’ he told Antonov-Ovseenko, as he handed him the crumpled piece of paper, ‘now it’s your problem.’27

It fell to Kamenev, ironically enough, to announce the arrest of the ministers to the Soviet Congress. The Bolsheviks cheered as their names were read out. But a large peasant, his face convulsed with rage, got up on behalf of the SRs to denounce the arrest of the socialist ministers. ‘Do you know that four comrades, who risked their lives and their freedom fighting against the tyranny of the Tsar, have been flung into the Peter and Paul prison — the historical tomb of Liberty?’ There was pandemonium as people shouted out, while Trotsky, gesturing for silence, answered by denouncing them as false ‘comrades’ and claimed there was no reason ‘to handle them with gloves’. After the July Days ‘they didn’t use much ceremony with us!’ Kamenev then announced that the Cyclist Battalion had come over to the ‘side of the revolution’. There were reports of more vital troops joining from the Northern Front. And then Lunacharsky read out Lenin’s Manifesto ‘To All Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants’, in which ‘Soviet Power’ was proclaimed, and its promises on land, bread and peace were announced. The reading of this historic proclamation, which was constantly interrupted by the thunderous cheers of the delegates, played an enormous symbolic role. It provided the illusion that the insurrection was the culmination of a revolution by ‘the masses’. When it had been passed, shortly after 5 a.m. on the 26th, the weary but elated delegates emerged from the Tauride Palace. ‘The night was yet heavy and chill,’ wrote John Reed. ‘There was only a faint unearthly pallor stealing over the silent streets, dimming the watch-fires, the shadow of a terrible dawn rising over Russia.’28

*

How many people took part in the insurrection? Historians have always been sharply divided on this question, with those on the Left depicting October as a popular revolution driven from below, and those on the Right depicting it as a coup d’étât without any mass support. At the root of the question is the nature — and thus the ‘legitimacy’ — of the Soviet system. And in this sense it is one of the fundamental questions of the twentieth century.

The number of active participants in the insurrection was not very large — although of course it must be borne in mind that large numbers were not needed for the task, given the almost complete absence of any military forces in the capital prepared to defend the Provisional Government. Trotsky himself claimed that 25,000 to 30,000 people ‘at the most’ were actively involved — that is about 5 per cent of all the workers and soldiers in the city — and this broadly tallies with the calculations based on the number of Red Guard units, Fleet crews and regiments which were mobilized. Most of them were involved in a limited fashion, such as guarding factories and strategic buildings, manning the pickets and generally ‘standing by’. During the evening of the 25th, there were probably something in the region of 10,000 to 15,000 people milling around in the Palace Square; but not all of them were actually involved in the ‘storming’ of the palace, although many more would later claim that they had taken part.fn5 Of course, once the palace had been seized, larger crowds of people did become involved, although, as we shall see, this was largely a question of looting its wine stores.29

The few surviving photographs of the October Days clearly show the small size of the insurgent force. They depict a handful of Red Guards and sailors standing around in half-deserted streets. None of the familiar images of a people’s revolution — crowds on the street, barricades and fighting — were in evidence. The whole insurrection, as Trotsky himself acknowledged, was carried out as a coup d’étât with ‘a series of small operations, calculated and prepared in advance’. The immediate vicinity of the Winter Palace was the only part of the city to be seriously disrupted during 25 October. Elsewhere the life of Petrograd carried on as normal. Streetcars and taxis ran as usual; the Nevsky was full of the normal crowds; and during the evening shops, restaurants, theatres and cinemas even remained open. The Marinsky Theatre went ahead with its scheduled performance of Boris Godunov; while the famous bass Shaliapin sang in Don Carlos before a packed house at the Narodny Dom. At around 9 p.m. John Reed was able to dine in the Hotel France, just off Palace Square, although after his soup the waiter asked him to move into the main dining-room at the back of the building, since they expected shooting to begin and wanted to put out the lights in the café. Even the climax of the insurrection passed by largely unnoticed. Volodya Averbakh was walking home by Gogol Street, not a hundred yards from Palace Square, at about 11 p.m., just as the Bolsheviks were readying themselves for their final assault on the Winter Palace. ‘The street was completely deserted,’ Averbakh recalled. ‘The night was quiet, and the city seemed dead. We could even hear the echo of our own footsteps on the pavement.’30

In the workers’ districts things were just as quiet, judging by the local police reports recently unearthed from the Soviet archives. Asked in the first week of November if there had been any mass armed movements in the October Days, the district police commissars responded, without exception, that there had been none. ‘Everything was quiet on the streets,’ replied the chief of the Okhtensk police district. ‘The streets were empty,’ added the police chief of the 3rd Spassky district. In the 1st Vyborg police district, the most Bolshevized part of the city, the police chief made the following report on 25 October: ‘the Red Guards helped the police in the maintenance of order, and there were no night-time events to report, apart from the arrest of two drunken and disorderly soldiers, accused of shooting and wounding a man — also, it seems, drunk.’31 Thus began the Great October Socialist Revolution in the Bolshevik bastion of the Vyborg district.

What about the nature of the crowd during the insurrection? The following incident tells us something about this.

When the Bolsheviks took control of the Winter Palace, they discovered one of the largest wine cellars ever known. During the following days tens of thousands of antique bottles disappeared from the vaults. The Bolshevik workers and soldiers were helping themselves to the Château d’Yquem 1847, the last Tsar’s favourite vintage, and selling off the vodka to the crowds outside. The drunken mobs went on the rampage. The Winter Palace was badly vandalized. Shops and liquor stores were looted. Sailors and soldiers went around the well-to-do districts robbing apartments and killing people for sport. Anyone well dressed was an obvious target. Even Uritsky, the Bolshevik leader, narrowly escaped with his life, if not his clothes, when his sleigh was stopped one freezing night on his way home from the Smolny. With his warm overcoat, pince-nez and Jewish-intellectual looks, he had been mistaken for a burzhooi.

The Bolsheviks tried in vain to stem the anarchy by sealing off the liquor supply. They appointed a Commissar of the Winter Palace — who was constantly drunk on the job. They posted guards around the cellar — who licensed themselves to sell off the bottles of liquor. They pumped the wine out on to the street — but crowds gathered to drink it from the gutter. They tried to destroy the offending treasure, to transfer it to the Smolny, and even to ship it to Sweden — but all their efforts came to nothing. Hundreds of drunkards were thrown into jail — in one police precinct alone 182 people were arrested on the night of 4 November for drunkenness and looting — until there was no more room in the cells. Machine-guns were set up to deter the looters by firing over their heads — and sometimes at them — but still the looters came. For several weeks the anarchy continued — martial law was even imposed — until, at last, the alcohol ran out with the old year, and the capital woke up with the biggest hangover in history.

The Bolsheviks blamed the ‘provocations of the bourgeoisie’ for this bacchanalia. It was hard for them to admit that their own supporters, who were supposed to be the ‘disciplined vanguard of the proletariat’, could have been involved in such anarchic behaviour. But the recently opened records of the MRC show that many of those who had taken part in the seizure of power were the instigators of these drunken riots. Some of them, no doubt, had only taken part in the insurrection because of the prospect of loot: the whole uprising for them was a big adventure, a day out in the city with the rest of the lads, and with a licence to rob and kill. This is not to say that the Bolsheviks were simply hooligans and criminals, as many propertied types concluded at the time. But it is to say that the uprising was bound to descend into chaos because the Bolsheviks had at their disposal very few disciplined fighters and because the seizure of power itself, as a violent act, encouraged such actions from the crowd. Similar outbursts of looting and violence were noted in dozens of cities during and after October. Indeed, they were often an integral element of the transfer of power.32

All this suggests that the Bolshevik insurrection was not so much the culmination of a social revolution, although of course there were several different social revolutions — in the towns and in the cities, in the countryside, in the armed forces and in the borderlands — and in each of these there were militant forces that had some connections with the Bolsheviks. It was more the result of the degeneration of the urban revolution, and in particular of the workers’ movement, as an organized and constructive force, with vandalism, crime, generalized violence and drunken looting as the main expressions of this social breakdown. Gorky, who was, as always, quick to condemn this anarchic violence, was at pains to point out that ‘what is going on now is not a process of social revolution’ but a ‘pogrom of greed, hatred and vengeance’.33 The participants in this destructive violence were not the organized ‘working class’ but the victims of the breakdown of that class and of the devastation of the war years: the growing army of the urban unemployed; the refugees from the occupied regions, soldiers and sailors, who congregated in the cities; bandits and criminals released from the jails; and the unskilled labourers from the countryside who had always been the most prone to outbursts of anarchic violence in the cities. These were the semi-peasant types whom Gorky had blamed for the urban violence in the spring and to whose support he had ascribed the rising fortunes of the Bolsheviks. He returned to the same theme on the eve of their seizure of power:

All the dark instincts of the crowd irritated by the disintegration of life and by the lies and filth of politics will flare up and fume, poisoning us with anger, hate and revenge; people will kill one another, unable to suppress their own animal stupidity. An unorganized crowd, hardly understanding what it wants, will crawl out into the street, and, using this crowd as a cover, adventurers, thieves, and professional murderers will begin to ‘create the history of the Russian Revolution’.34

As for the Petrograd workers, they took little part in the insurrection. This was the height of the economic crisis and the fear of losing their jobs was enough to deter the vast majority of them from coming out on to the streets. Hence the factories and the transport system functioned much as normal. The workers, in any case, owed their allegiance to the Soviet rather than the Bolsheviks. Most of them did not know — or even wish to know — the differences of doctrine between the socialist parties. Their own voting patterns were determined by class rather than by party: they tended to vote as their factory had voted in the past, or opted for the party whose candidate seemed most like a worker and spoke the language of class. Among the unskilled, in particular, there was a common belief that the Bolsheviks were a party of ‘big men’ (from the peasant term bolshaki).

So when the leaders of the railwaymen’s union, Vikzhel, issued an ultimatum on 29 October demanding that the Bolsheviks begin talks with the other socialist parties for the formation of an all-Soviet government, they received a great deal of support. To the mass of the workers, it seemed that the whole point of the revolution, as expressed at the Soviet Congress, was the formation of a government of the working people as a whole and not just of one party. Hundreds of factories, garrisons, Front and Fleet assemblies sent petitions to Smolny in support of the Vikzhel plan. The Obukhovsky Factory in Petrograd threatened to ‘knock the heads of all the party leaders together’ if they failed to reach agreement. The workers in Moscow and other provincial cities, where party factionalism was much less pronounced than in the capital, also expressed strong support. There was a general sense that the party leaders, by squabbling between themselves, were betraying the ideals of the revolution and leading the country towards civil war. ‘Among the soldiers’, declared a petition from the 35th Division, ‘there are no Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, or SRs, but only Democrats.’35

There were powerful reasons, at least to begin with, for the Bolsheviks to respect Vikzhel’s demands. The union’s leaders had threatened to bring all the railways to a halt if the inter-party talks did not commence. If this happened the food and fuel supply in the capital, which had already declined to critical levels, would get even worse, looting and rioting would accelerate out of control, and thousands of workers would come out on strike. How long could the Bolsheviks last in this situation? The support of the railways was even more critical for the Bolshevik military campaign on two fronts: against Kerensky’s troops on the outskirts of the capital; and in Moscow, where the Bolshevik forces had to fight for power in the streets against loyalist forces.

After his hasty departure from Petrograd on the morning of the 25th, Kerensky had set up his headquarters at Gatchina, the old imperial residence just outside the city. Most of the army commanders, to whom he appealed for help, were reluctant to become involved in a military adventure against the Bolsheviks: it was bound to be seen by the soldiers as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and, like the Kornilov crisis, could only hasten the collapse of the army. General Cheremisov, Commander of the Northern Front, even cancelled Kerensky’s order for troops on the grounds that the Provisional Government no longer existed. Only General Krasnov put his forces — eighteen Cossack companies — at Kerensky’s disposal; while a small force of cadets and officers, organized around the SR-led Committee for the Salvation of Russia and the Revolution, was supposed to rise up in the capital in time for their arrival. The Bolsheviks, however, had even fewer troops prepared to fight than Kerensky. The Petrograd garrison quickly fell apart after the seizure of power, as the mass of the soldiers went on a drunken rampage or fled to their homes in the countryside. The Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd had no direct link with the revolutionary troops at the Front, and even if they had it was doubtful the troops would come out on their call. According to Reed, Lenin was fully prepared for defeat. His best chance lay with the hold-up of Krasnov’s troops, situated around Pskov, by the railway workers, as had happened during the Kornilov crisis. Hence the need to respond to the Vikzhel ultimatum.

In Moscow, meanwhile, power hung in the balance for ten days. The MRC forces were engaged in a bloody street war — the opening shots of the civil war — against the military cadets and student volunteers, who remained loyal to the Provisional Government and were organized by the Moscow city Duma and its Committee of Public Safety. The heaviest fighting took place around the Kremlin, and many of the city’s greatest architectural treasures were badly damaged. For ordinary Muscovites, too frightened to leave their homes, these were terrible days. Brusilov’s flat was caught in the crossfire, and was used by soldiers of both sides to shoot or signal from the windows. The old man himself was badly wounded in the leg when a hand grenade flew in through the window. He had to be stretchered out to receive treatment in a nearby hospital, while ‘bombs and bullets continued to fly in all directions. I prayed all the way that none of them would hit my poor old wife, who walked along by my side.’36 The Moscow Bolsheviks were reluctant fighters — they were much more inclined to resolve the power question through negotiation, as proposed by Vikzhel. Nor were they very good at fighting: the Kremlin was soon lost in the opening battle on the 27th; and two days later the situation had become so bad, with the Bolshevik forces pushed back into the industrial suburbs, that they were frankly glad of the temporary ceasefire enforced by the intervention of Vikzhel. Without victory in Moscow, even Lenin recognized that the Bolsheviks could not retain power on their own. The inter-party talks would have to go ahead.

On 29 October the Central Committee authorized Kamenev to represent the party at the Vikzhel inter-party talks on the platform of Soviet power, as passed at the Second Congress. It was always going to be hard to persuade the rightwing Mensheviks and SRs to accept this, or indeed any partnership with the Bolshevik Party, after their walk-out from the Soviet Congress in protest against the seizure of power. At the opening meeting, confident that the Bolsheviks were on the verge of defeat, they set impossible terms for their involvement in any government: the release of the ministers arrested in the seizure of the Winter Palace; an armistice with Kerensky’s troops; the abolition of the MRC; the transfer of the Petrograd garrison to the control of the Duma; and the involvement of Kerensky in the formation of the new administration, which was to exclude Lenin. In short, they were demanding that the clock be put back to 20 October. No wonder Kamenev sounded glum in his report to the Soviet Congress that evening.

On the next day, however, things began to change. Kerensky’s offensive had collapsed overnight, much in the manner of Krymov’s earlier assault on Petrograd during the Kornilov crisis. Most of Krasnov’s Cossacks, who had always been reluctant to fight without infantry support, simply gave up under a barrage from Bolshevik agitators, while the rest were easily repulsed by the Baltic troops on the Pulkovo Heights just outside the city. The Mensheviks and SRs were forced to soften their terms and agreed to take part in a coalition with the Bolsheviks, provided the leadership of the Soviet was broadened to include members from the First Soviet Congress, the city Dumas, the Peasant Soviet (which was still to convene) and the trade unions. Kamenev agreed and even suggested, in a moment of naive credulity, that the Bolsheviks would not insist on the presence of Lenin or Trotsky in the cabinet. But they had different ideas.

From the start, Lenin and Trotsky had been opposed to the Vikzhel talks: only the prospect of military defeat had brought them to the negotiating table. With the defeat of Kerensky, and even the battle in Moscow now beginning to swing back in their favour, with much of the city centre back in Bolshevik hands and the Kremlin itself under heavy bombardment, they set out to undermine the inter-party talks. At a meeting of the Central Committee on 1 November Trotsky condemned the compromise agreed by Kamenev and demanded at least 75 per cent of the cabinet seats for the Bolshevik Party: ‘there was no point organizing the insurrection if we don’t get the majority’. Lenin advocated leaving the talks altogether, or at least continuing with them only as ‘a diplomatic cover for the military operations [in Moscow]’. He even demanded the arrest of the Vikzhel leaders as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ — a typical provocation designed to wreck the talks, along with the arrest and beating up of the SR leaders, Gots and Zenzinov, by Bolshevik sailors, the closure of the Kadet press, and a series of raids on Menshevik and SR newspaper offices. Despite the objections of several moderate members of the Central Committee, it was agreed to present the Bolshevik platform as an ultimatum to the inter-party talks and abandon them if it was rejected. The SRs and Mensheviks would of course never accept this, as Lenin and Trotsky knew very well. The seizure of power had irrevocably split the socialist movement in Russia, and no amount of negotiation could hope to bridge the gulf. The Vikzhel talks were doomed, and finally broke down on 6 November.37

The chances of a coalition were extremely limited. It was almost certainly too late to resolve the power question by political means. The events of 25 October marked the beginning of the civil war. And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this was precisely what Lenin had wanted all along. He believed that the civil war had started back in August, and that the ‘talk talk’ of all the moderators just got in the way.

Having secured the dictatorship of his party, Lenin turned next to the task of securing his own dictatorship over the party itself. On 2 November the Central Committee was bullied into passing a series of quite astounding resolutions: Kamenev was accused of ‘un-Marxist’ activities against the October Revolution; his supporters were ordered to withdraw from the Central Committee; and if they failed to submit to the party’s policy against the inter-party talks — submitted in the form of an ‘Ultimatum from the majority of the Central Committee to the minority’ — were threatened with expulsion from the party altogether. Each member of the Central Committee was dragged before Lenin, in his private office, and told to sign the ultimatum or risk expulsion. As Lunacharsky had warned at a meeting of the Petrograd Bolsheviks on 1 November, Lenin’s bullying tactics would soon lead to a situation where ‘only one man would be left in the Party — the Dictator’. It was a haunting echo of Trotsky’s own famous warning, fourteen years before, that the party organization would first substitute itself for the party as a whole, then the Central Committee for the party organization, and then a single dictator for the Central Committee. On 4 November the five-man minority (Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Miliutin and Nogin) finally resigned from the Central Committee. Their open letter of protest appeared in Izvestiia the following day. Alongside it was printed a second letter of protest from five People’s Commissars, a third of Lenin’s cabinet, four who resigned and six other prominent Bolshevik leaders, in which it was stated that a purely Bolshevik government could be maintained only by means of ‘political terror’ and that, if this path was taken, it would lead to ‘the establishment of an unaccountable regime and to the destruction of the revolution and the country’.38

This was without doubt one of the most critical moments in the history of the Bolshevik Party. Though Lenin’s revolution had been carried out, the party emerged from it hopelessly divided and isolated from the rest of the revolutionary movement. Few people believed, in its second week, that the Bolshevik regime could survive.

ii The Smolny Autocrats

Five days after the Bolshevik seizure of power, Alexandra Kollontai, the new People’s Commissar of Social Welfare, drove up to the entrance of a large government building on Kazan Street. It had formerly housed the Provisional Government’s Ministry of Social Welfare, and she was now coming to take possession of it. An old liveried doorman opened the door and examined Kollontai from head to foot. No woman in Russia had ever been appointed to the head of a ministry before, and, as he looked at her now, he might have been excused for thinking that she was just one more impoverished war widow looking for government aid. Kollontai demanded to see the highest-ranking official in the building, but the old man replied that visiting hours were over for the day. When she announced that she was the People’s Commissar and demanded to be let in, he merely replied that petitioners were received between one and three and that it was already five. Kollontai tried to force her way through, but the doorman blocked her way and closed the doors in her face.

It was hardly an auspicious start to the new regime. The employees of the Ministry had joined a general Civil Servants’ strike in protest against the Bolshevik seizure of power, and when Kollontai returned the next morning with a small detachment of soldiers to take over the building she found it almost deserted. Virtually all the officials had joined the antiBolshevik strike, and only the doormen, cleaners and messenger boys, who could not afford to go on strike, had turned up for work as usual. Since it was pointless to try to operate from this vacant building, Kollontai returned to the Smolny and set up office in a small room there. The old doorman in Kazan Street redirected the ragged children and widows, the refugees and ruined peasants who came to plead for aid to the Bolshevik headquarters.

The early weeks of the new regime were frustrated by similar strikes and campaigns of sabotage in all the major ministries and government departments, the banks, the post and telegraph office, the railways administration, the municipal bodies, the law courts, schools, universities and other vital institutions. Although these public employees held diverse political views, virtually all were agreed that the Bolshevik regime was illegal and had to be opposed. Trotsky was greeted with ironic laughter when he arrived at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and introduced himself to a meeting of the officials as their new Minister; when he ordered them back to work, they left the building in protest. In the Anichkov Palace, where the country’s food supply was administered, the Civil Servants removed all the office furniture and locked away the account books in the palace safe. In the post and telegraph office they walked off with all the directories and piles of telegram blanks (on which some of them would later write their memoirs). The striking officials of the Medical Department even went so far as to remove the nibs from all the pens.39

The refusal of the State Bank and the Treasury to honour the new government’s cash demands was the most serious threat of all. Without money to pay its supporters, the Bolshevik regime could not hope to survive for long. Sovnarkom (the Council of People’s Commissars) had made various requests for the transfer of ten million roubles, but each was refused by the bank officials as illegal. On 7 November the new Commissar of Finance, V. R. Menzhinsky, appeared at the State Bank with a detachment of sailors and demanded the money; but the bankers stood firm and, despite further armed threats, dismissals and ultimatums, continued their strike. Ten days later the Bolsheviks finally seized control of the bank and forced the employees, at the point of a gun, to open the vaults. Five million roubles were removed, taken off to the Smolny in a velvet bag and deposited on Lenin’s desk. The whole operation resembled a bank hold-up. The Bolsheviks now took over the State Bank, making it possible for them to dip their hands freely into the nation’s coffers; yet none of them had the slightest idea of how such a vast bank worked. ‘There were people among us who were acquainted with the banking system from books and manuals,’ recalled one of its new directors, ‘but there was not a single man among us who knew the technical procedure of the Russian State Bank. We entered the enormous corridors of this bank as if we were penetrating a virgin forest.’40

To their opponents, these first stumbling efforts to master the basic institutions of the state symbolized the Bolsheviks’ fundamental weakness. Few people thought that the new regime could last. ‘Caliphs for an hour’ was the verdict of much of the press. The SR leader, Gots, gave the Bolsheviks ‘no more than a few days’; Gorky gave them two weeks; Tsereteli up to three; while Nabokov refused to ‘believe for one minute in the strength of the Bolshevik regime and expected its early demise’. Many of the less sanguine Bolsheviks were no more optimistic. ‘Things are so unstable’, wrote Lunacharsky to his wife on 29 October, ‘that every time I break off from a letter, I don’t even know if it will be my last. I could at any moment be thrown into jail.’41

It was not just the opposition of the Civil Service, or the Bolsheviks’ own lack of technical expertise in running the complex machinery of the state, which seemed to signal their imminent downfall. The Bolsheviks had no means of feeding the cities or halting the collapse of the economy. They were isolated from the peasants, the vast majority of the population, who were almost bound to vote against them in the forthcoming elections to the Constituent Assembly. Like the Paris Commune of 1871, Petrograd appeared like a tiny Red island in the middle of a vast Green ocean. The Bolsheviks also had to deal with the censure of the Western powers and the rest of the socialist intelligentsia. Gorky’s newspaper, Novaia zhizn’, was the most prominent and outspoken mouthpiece of this opposition during the autumn and winter, and it says much for his skills as a politician that it did not fall prey to the Bolshevik censors, like most of the opposition press. Gorky’s own column, ‘Untimely Thoughts’, with its bitter denunciations of the ‘new autocracy’, must have worn Lenin’s indulgent fondness for the writer dangerously thin. Gorky himself often expressed surprise that the paper had not been closed down. ‘Lenin and Trotsky’, he warned as early as 7 November, ‘do not have the slightest idea of the meaning of freedom or the Rights of Man. They have already become poisoned with the filthy venom of power, and this is shown by their shameful attitude towards freedom of speech, the individual, and all those other civil liberties for which the democracy struggled.’42

None the less, in spite of their seemingly fatal isolation, the Bolsheviks managed to consolidate their dictatorship during the first three months of the new regime. By the time of its convocation, in January 1918, the Constituent Assembly, upon which the democratic opposition had pinned all its hopes, had already been made powerless by the rise of the one-party state and the spread of local Soviet rule through the provinces. How did the Bolsheviks achieve this? The absence of a serious military opposition during this critical period, when their power was weakest, no doubt helps to explain their success. The great White armies of the Civil War had yet to be formed and the main antiBolshevik forces were small Cossack armies engaged in local wars on the periphery of the Empire. Anti-Bolshevik forces in the centre of Russia were almost non-existent. The SRs and the Kadets, the most likely leaders of such a force, were so convinced of the regime’s imminent collapse that they neglected to organize against it. Everyone naturally assumed that it would fall through its own internal weaknesses, so no one did anything to help bring this about. The Committee for the Salvation of Russia and the Revolution, organized by the SRs in the first few days after the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, had no real forces behind it; while plans to set up a rival socialist government headed by Chernov at Stavka, the old headquarters of the army, never got off the ground.

But the crux of the Bolshevik success was a two-fold process of state-building and destruction. On the one hand, at the highest levels of the state, they sought to centralize all power in the hands of the party and, by the use of terror, to wipe out all political opposition. At the grass-roots level, on the other, they encouraged the destruction of the old state hierarchies by throwing all power to the local Soviets, the factory organizations, the soldiers’ committees and other decentralized forms of class rule. The vacuum of power which this created would help to undermine the democracy at the centre, while the masses themselves would be neutralized by the exercise of power over their old class or ethnic enemies within their own local environment. There was of course no master plan to this — everything was improvised, as it had to be in a revolution; yet Lenin, at least, had an instinctive sense of the general direction, of what he himself called the ‘revolutionary dialectic’, and in many ways that was the essence of his political genius. Local Soviet rule in the countryside, which was in effect the unfettered power of the village assembly to rule itself and divide the gentry’s land, would undermine the need for the Constituent Assembly in the minds of the peasants, and thus destroy the political base of the SRs. The exercise of ‘workers’ control’ through the factory committees would help to dismantle the old industrial infrastructure — what the Bolsheviks called the ‘capitalist system’ — while shifting the blame for the industrial crisis to the workers themselves. The spread of soldiers’ power and of local peace initiatives at the Front, which the Bolsheviks encouraged, would undermine the plans of the old army commanders to mobilize the troops against the new regime and restart the war. And finally, the breakaway of the ethnic borderlands from the Russian Empire, which the Bolsheviks also supported at this time, would complete the fragmentation of the old imperial state and, according to Lenin, hasten the demise of feudal relations.fn6

No doubt Lenin viewed all these movements as a means to destroy the old political system and thus clear the way for the establishment of his own party’s dictatorship. There is of course no proof of this — only the evidence of what actually took place and virtually everything else which we know of his previous thoughts and actions. It is hard to swallow the notion, which some historians on the Left have favoured, that Lenin was a libertarian at heart and encouraged all these localized forms of power in order to construct a new decentralized type of state, as set out in the State and Revolution; a plan which was only later blown off-course by the centralizing demands of the civil war. Lenin’s conception of the revolutionary state had always been centralist in essence. He merely used the energies of these localist movements to destroy the ancien régime, along with the fragile democracy of 1917, while always intending to destroy these movements, in turn, as separate political forces. While he supported the peasants’ movement against the gentry’s estates, his ultimate aim was to replace the peasant smallholding system with collectivized farms. While he supported the calls for ‘workers’ control’, he no doubt did so in the knowledge that it would lead to chaos and thus strengthen the need to return to centralized management methods under the party’s control. While he supported soldiers’ power in so far as it destroyed the old imperial army, he arguably always intended to construct the Red Army on conventional lines. And while he encouraged the various national independence movements, his eventual aim was to abolish national states altogether. In everything he did, Lenin’s ultimate purpose was the pursuit of power. Power for him was not a means — it was the end in itself. To paraphrase George Orwell, he did not establish a dictatorship to safeguard the revolution; he made a revolution to establish the dictatorship.

*

The first priority of the Bolsheviks was the establishment of firm executive control. It took several weeks to break down the resistance of the Civil Service. The strike leaders and some senior Civil Servants were arrested; political commissars were appointed to oversee the bureaucracy; and junior officials willing to serve the Bolshevik rulers were promoted to senior posts. Overall, most Civil Servants in 1918 had been Civil Servants before 1917, especially in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy. But where the old Civil Service was mistrusted (most notably in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) there was usually a thorough purge.43 This established a pattern that was to repeat itself throughout the early years of Soviet state-building. It was a marriage of convenience between the Bolsheviks’ demand for loyalty and the ambitions of the party’s growing rank and file. One of its results was to promote third-rate party hacks, corrupt opportunists and semi-literate elements from the lower classes into positions of real power. This low cultural level of the Soviet bureaucracy was to be a permanent legacy of October which would later come to haunt the Bolshevik leaders.

Because of the Civil Service strike, which made it impossible to set up a system of cabinet rule, the MRC continued to function as the effective government until mid-November. By that time most of the People’s Commissars had gained enough control of their respective ministries to enable the transfer of executive authority to Sovnarkom. But Sovnarkom was no ordinary cabinet government. For one thing, there was no clear division between the interests of the party and the government. The meetings of Sovnarkom, which were chaired by Lenin in the Bolshevik headquarters at Smolny, discussed party and government matters interchangeably; Central Committee resolutions were implemented as Soviet decrees. Everything about the early work of Sovnarkom presented a picture of hasty improvisation. Its meetings had no formal agenda and everything was discussed as ‘urgent business’, while Lenin drew up the appropriate resolutions and, when the moment was right, announced them to the meeting. They were usually passed without discussion, since few dared question Lenin’s judgement.

There was, according to many observers, a conspiratorial atmosphere at these meetings. It was as if the Bolsheviks were psychologically unable to make the transition from an underground fighting organization to a responsible party of national government. They could not bring themselves to exchange their leather jackets for ministerial suits. Simon Liberman, who sometimes sat in on the Sovnarkom meetings, recalled that:

despite all the efforts of an officious secretary to impart to each session the solemn character of a cabinet meeting, we could not help feeling that here we were, attending another sitting of an underground revolutionary committee! For years we had belonged to various underground organizations. All of this seemed so familiar. Many of the commissars remained seated in their topcoats or greatcoats; most of them wore the forbidding leather jackets.44

The Bolsheviks never quite succeeded in ridding themselves of their underground habits. Even as late as 1921, Lenin still gave the impression of a party conspirator rather than a statesman. It was of course a common phenomenon — one might call it the Jacobin Syndrome — which in part explains the tendency of the revolutionary state to perpetuate violence and terror. But the Bolsheviks took it one step further than the Jacobins. Theirs was the first of the twentieth-century dictatorships (followed by those of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Castro) to glorify its own violent past through propaganda and the adoption of military symbols and emblems. It was as if this cult of violence was central to the Bolshevik self-image, an end in itself rather than the means.

Just as the party came to overshadow the work of Sovnarkom, so Sovnarkom came to overshadow the work of the Soviet Executive. Although the Bolshevik seizure of power had been carried out in the name of the Soviet Congress, Lenin had no intention of ruling through the Congress, or its permanent executive. He did not believe in the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, even when the parliament in question was a Soviet one with, technically at least, an inbuilt Bolshevik majority. In the first weeks after the October coup the Soviet Executive was a real parliamentary brake on Sovnarkom. The Left SRs, the Anarchists and the tiny group of Menshevik Internationalists grouped around Gorky’s Novaia zhizn’, were a vocal opposition, which, if joined by the Bolshevik moderates, could almost overturn the Leninist majority. In mid-November, when the leaders of the Peasant Soviet, or rather its left wing,fn7 were added to the Soviet Executive, the potential strength of this opposition was even further increased. On 24 November it actually gained a majority of one for a motion of censure against the Bolshevik closure of the Petrograd City Duma eight days before, although on a recount the decision was reversed.

Yet the merger with the Peasant Soviet was also a critical turning point in the demise of the Soviet Executive as a legislative institution (which was almost certainly what Lenin had intended). To the 108 peasant deputies were added a further 100 delegates from the revolutionary organizations in the army and navy, and half that number again from the trade unions. This more than tripled its size, to 366 members, which was far too many to serve as an effective executive body. The burden of decision-making was thus shifted to Sovnarkom. From mid-November the Soviet Executive began to meet less often (once or twice a week), while Sovnarkom meetings became more frequent (once or twice a day). The volume of legislative acts brought before the Soviet Executive also sharply diminished, as Sovnarkom began to rule by decree. On 4 November Sovnarkom decreed itself the right to pass urgent legislation without approval from the Soviet — a clear breach of the principle of Soviet power. The Bolshevik moderates voted with the opposition against the decree, but it was still passed by two votes in the Soviet Executive. Kamenev resigned as the Chairman of the Soviet Executive and joined the opposition in a concerted effort to defend the sovereignty of the Soviet. But the Leninists pushed on. Sverdlov, who replaced Kamenev, was an ardent advocate of the party dictatorship and faithfully carried out Lenin’s instructions to bring it about by centralizing power through Sovnarkom. On 17 November he presented the Soviet Executive with a ‘constitutional instruction’: while formally reiterating that Sovnarkom was responsible to the Soviet and had to present it with all its legislative acts for approval, it did not specify when this had to be done. Sovnarkom, in other words, could publish a legally binding decree without the prior approval of the Soviet, which increasingly became its practice. On 12 December the Soviet Executive met for the first time in two weeks: during its recess Sovnarkom had begun peace talks with the Central Powers, declared war on the Ukraine and introduced martial law in Petrograd and Moscow. As Sukhanov protested, all these measures had been implemented without discussion in the Soviet. The principle of Soviet power, by which the Bolsheviks claimed their right to rule, had been buried; the Soviet Executive had been reduced to a ‘sorry parody of a revolutionary parliament’.45

From the first days of the new regime the Bolsheviks had set out to destroy, as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, all those parties which had opposed the October seizure of power. On 27 October Sovnarkom banned the opposition press. The ban was greeted with outrage. The Bolshevik moderates voted against it in the Soviet Executive on 4 November; the five resignations from the Bolshevik Central Committee that day, followed by an equal number of resignations from Sovnarkom, were also partly in protest against the ban; while the Printers’ Union threatened a national strike unless the freedom of the press was restored. But none of this was enough to prevent the MRC from sending in Bolshevik squads to smash many of the opposition presses, to confiscate their newsprint and arrest their editors. Most of the opposition papers were simply driven underground and soon reappeared with a slightly altered name. The SR paper, Volia naroda, reappeared the next day as Volia, and later on as Narod. The socialist paper, Den’ (Day), appeared as Morning, Midday, Afternoon, Evening, Night, Midnight, and so on.46

*

The opposition parties were sustained by the hope of political salvation through the Constituent Assembly. It was surely the true voice of the democracy. Every citizen was represented by it, regardless of class, whereas the Soviets were only representative of the workers, the peasants and the soldiers. The opposition believed that the Constituent Assembly was bound to be recognized as the highest sovereign power in the land: not even the Bolsheviks would dare to challenge that. In fact, the Bolshevik leaders were divided over their policy towards the Assembly, though we still do not know enough about their internal debates on this matter. Lenin had always been contemptuous of the ballot box and had made it clear as early as the April Theses that he viewed Soviet power as a higher form of democracy than the Constituent Assembly. There was no room for the ‘bourgeoisie’ in the Soviets and, in Lenin’s view, no room for them either in the revolution. But the seizure of power had been partly justified as a measure to ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly: a great deal of fuss had been made about how the Provisional Government was planning not to convene it, and about how only a Soviet government could lead the country to the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks could not renege on their promise without losing face. The moderates in the party, moreover, were all, to varying degrees, committed on principle to the Constituent Assembly. Kamenev, for one, was a consistent advocate of the idea that the Bolsheviks should compete for power within it and, like some of the Left SRs, even favoured the notion of combining Soviet power at the local level with the Assembly as a sovereign national parliament.

Given all this, Lenin had little option but to allow the elections to go ahead. Polling started on 12 November and lasted for two weeks, since the vast size of the country made it necessary to stagger the elections. The campaign was vigorous, sometimes violent, and the turn-out high. Most people knew that it was, in effect, a national referendum on the Bolshevik regime. The SRs received 16 million votes (38 per cent of the total), most of them cast by the peasants in the central agricultural zone and Siberia. But the ballot papers had not distinguished between the Left SRs, who supported the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the Right SRs, who did not. The split in the party had taken place too recently for the printing changes to be made, except in one or two places. It is not at all clear, therefore, how much of the SR vote was opposed to the Bolshevik regime, although this was the crucial question of the whole election. The only thing that can be said with relative certainty is that the Left SRs had their main base of support among the younger peasant soldiers, whereas the Right SRs had their stronghold in the older peasants of the village. According to Oliver Radkey, the best authority on this subject, the peasants were more or less split down the middle between the two parties, although the Right SRs probably came out on top in the elections because they retained the bulk of the provincial party organizations and were thus better prepared for the campaign. The traditional voting habits of the peasantry, whereby the whole village assembly resolved to cast its votes for the same party, certainly favoured the Right SRs, since most of the village elders were inclined towards them. But even if the Right SRs did gain most of the peasant vote, they still lacked an outright majority in the Assembly. Only the support of the Mensheviks (who won 3 per cent of the vote), the Kadets (5 per cent) and the Ukrainian SRs (12 per cent) would give them that, though such was the gap between the Russian and the Ukrainian SRs on the question of national independence that even this was open to doubt.47

Nevertheless, the election results were a profound setback for the government’s claim to rule in the name of the people. The Bolsheviks won just 10 million votes (24 per cent of the total), most of them cast by the soldiers and the workers of the industrial north. In Petrograd and Moscow they won a majority; but in the agricultural south, where their organization was extremely weak, they picked up hardly any votes. The Bolsheviks at once declared the results unfair: local reports on electoral abuses, which were bound to take place in a country as vast and backward as Russia, were rigorously collected and cited as evidence of the need for reelections. Meanwhile, they stepped up their campaign of intimidation and threats against the defenders of the Assembly. The opening of the Assembly was postponed indefinitely by Sovnarkom on 20 November, just eight days before it was due to convene. On the following day Sovnarkom issued a decree giving electors the right to recall their deputies from all representative bodies, including the Constituent Assembly, provided this was supported by more than half the electorate within a given constituency. This meant, in effect, that Bolshevik activists were given the right to reverse the result of democratic elections by drumming up support in the factories and garrisons. It was obviously aimed against the Kadets, who had done rather well in the cities by rallying the right-of-centre vote. Trotsky defended the bill in the Soviet Executive as a ‘painless’ alternative to the outright closure of the Assembly in the event of it being opposed to the principle of Soviet power. It was a blatant threat that the Bolsheviks would not tolerate a hostile parliament. ‘If the Kadets were to have a majority,’ he warned, ‘then of course the Constituent Assembly would not be given power.’48 As a physical reminder of this threat, the MRC burst into the Tauride Palace on 23 November and arrested the Assembly’s three electoral commissioners. They were held captive and interrogated in the Smolny for six days, before being dismissed and replaced by the Bolshevik Uritsky.

The opposition parties were outraged by these acts of intimidation. It looked as if the Bolsheviks were slowly coming round to the view that the Assembly should either be postponed into the distant future or closed down altogether in the light of their party’s poor performance in the elections. They immediately formed a Union for the Defence of the Constituent Assembly and called on their supporters to demonstrate in front of the Tauride Palace on 28 November with a view to forcing the parliament’s opening. Large crowds turned out on that day, though nowhere near as many as the 200,000 claimed by some of the opposition press: a quarter of that number would be a more reasonable estimate, with most of them students, officers and striking Civil Servants, though there were some workers too, such as the printers and skilled artisans. A group of forty-five Assembly deputies, led by Schreider, the indefatigable Mayor of Petrograd, forced their way into the palace through the Bolshevik pickets, the Latvian Riflemen, and proceeded to the first point on the agenda of the parliament, the election of a Presidium. Of course they knew that they lacked the necessary quorum of 400 deputies, but it was at least a symbolic gesture. The next day they found the Tauride Palace surrounded by troops. The crowds were kept away and, although the deputies were once again admitted, they were soon ordered to leave.

The demonstration was immediately branded as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ act organized by the Kadets. The Kadet Party was outlawed and denounced, in the Jacobin tradition, as ‘enemies of the people’. Dozens of its leaders were arrested, including several delegates to the Constituent Assembly: Shingarev, Kokoshkin, Dolgorukov, Panina, Astrov and Rodichev. Revolutionary justice did not recognize parliamentary immunity. Most of them were taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where they were kept for three months in fairly reasonable conditions (Dolgorukov found time to catch up with his reading and welcomed the freedom from telephone calls), although Kokoshkin and Shingarev both fell sick, the former with TB, and had to be transferred to the prison hospital (where they were later brutally murdered by a group of Bolshevik sailors). The Left SRs opposed the arrests as an act of terror, while Gorky denounced them as a ‘disgrace to the democracy’. But the Bolshevik leaders were clearly intent on destroying the Kadets as the ‘organized force of the bourgeois counter-revolution’. It was not so much a ban on a political party, as the declaration of civil war on a whole social class. Justifying the arrests in the Soviet Executive, Lenin called the Kadet Central Committee the ‘political staff of the bourgeoisie’. Trotsky even claimed that since the bourgeoisie was already passing away from the scene of history, the Bolsheviks’ measures of violence against it were for its own good, since they would help to put it out of its misery even more quickly: ‘There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off a class that is collapsing: that is its right.’49

The arrests of the supposed ‘enemies of the people’ did not end with the Kadets. Like the Jacobin Terror, to which the Bolshevik leaders continually appealed for justification, they soon spread into the ranks of the revolutionary movement itself. The Kadets were joined in the Peter and Paul Fortress by a number of SR and Menshevik leaders (Avksentiev, Gots, Sorokin, Argunov), as well as some of the leaders of the Peasant Soviet. Orders were even sent out for the arrest of Tsereteli, Dan and Chernov. By the end of December the prisons were so full of these new ‘politicals’ that the Bolsheviks began to release common criminals in order to make more room. Some of the richer political prisoners, such as the businessmen Tret’iakov and Konovalov, the former Minister of Trade and Industry, were released for a ransom.50

Slowly but surely, the shape of the new police state was starting to emerge. On 5 December the MRC was finally abolished and, two days later, its duties transferred to the Cheka,fn8 the new security organ that one day would become the KGB. From its very inception the Cheka worked outside the law: there was not even a published decree to mark its organization, only the secret minutes of Sovnarkom, to which the Cheka was supposed to be subordinated, although in reality it was virtually beyond political account. Lenin had stressed the need ‘for a staunch proletarian Jacobin’ to head the new ‘Okhrana’ and he found that man in Felix Dzerzhinsky, a forty-year-old Pole from the Lithuanian city of Vilnius who had spent half his adult life in various tsarist prisons and who thus perhaps had his own special motive to ensure that all these ‘enemies of the people’ suffered equally in jail. During his childhood Dzerzhinsky had wanted to be a Jesuit priest and, although he had long ceased to believe in religion, he carried that same fanatical spirit into his campaigns of political persecution. At the Sovnarkom meeting at which it was established he described the task of the Cheka as a merciless war against the internal enemies of the revolution:

We need to send to that front — the most dangerous and cruel of fronts — determined, hard, dedicated comrades ready to do anything in defence of the Revolution. Do not think that I seek forms of revolutionary justice; we are not now in need of justice. It is war now — face to face, a fight to the finish. Life or death!51

One might well ask why the Bolshevik moderates, who were openly opposed to the use of political terror and enjoyed widespread support among the party rank and file, failed to act as a more effective brake on the Leninist zealots. The answer surely lies in the psychological weakness of the moderates and the autocratic status of Lenin among the party leaders after the ‘victory’ of October.fn9 None of the Bolshevik moderates had either the courage or the capacity for leadership to stand up against Lenin and run the risk of splitting the party. The five who had been brave enough to resign from the Central Committee on 4 November all sooner or later made their peace with Lenin: Zinoviev, who had always been a coward and an opportunist, was the first to recant on 8 November, and was readmitted to the Central Committee; Kamenev, Miliutin, Nogin and Rykov held out three weeks longer. To a greater or lesser extent, the fundamental weakness of all the moderates was their own intellectualism. While it made them uncomfortable with the idea of the Terror, it also deprived them of the means to take their fight against it beyond the realm of words. Lunacharsky was a perfect example. On 2 November he had burst into tears at a Sovnarkom meeting, and subsequently resigned as Commissar of Enlightenment, after hearing reports that the Bolshevik bombardment of the Kremlin had destroyed St Basil’s Cathedral during the fighting in Moscow. ‘I cannot bear it any longer,’ he had written in Novaia zhizn’. ‘My cup is full. I am powerless to stop this barbarism.’ When these reports turned out to be false he had withdrawn his resignation; yet he remained just as frustrated by his impotence against the Bolshevik Terror. Gorky, one of his oldest political friends, who later plagued him with requests to save the country’s writers and artists from persecution, summed up the situation of the moderates in a New Year’s letter to Ekaterina:

It is clear that Russia is heading for a new and even more savage autocracy. Yesterday I called on the ‘Commissar of Justice’, a decent enough man but, like all the representatives of ‘the authorities’, utterly impotent. I pleaded with him to release Vernadsky, it seems without success … Lunacharsky’s behaviour is astonishingly absurd and ludicrous — he is both a comical and a tragic figure. All the Bolsheviks of his ilk have become repulsively pitiable and wretched.52

The Left SRs, who joined Sovnarkom on 12 December, were paralysed by a similar impotence. They had been the only major group not to walk out of the Soviet Congress after the Bolshevik seizure of power, and this had led to their final break with the Right SRs. From that point on, the two were separate parties battling for control of the provincial SR organizations and the Peasant Soviet. Whereas the Right SRs were determined to keep the Bolsheviks isolated and focused all their hopes on the Constituent Assembly, the Left SRs believed that by joining the Bolsheviks in government — and the Cheka — they might be able to curb their worst excesses. Most of the Left SR leaders were still young enough to be excused for such foolish idealism: Steinberg, Karelin and Kalegaev were all in their twenties, while Spiridonova and Kamkov were only thirty-two. The Left SRs were inspired by what they saw as the revolutionary spontaneity of the Soviets. They tried to reconcile extreme libertarianism with the use of extreme terror for the promotion of that ideal. After October they flooded into the local Soviet organs, where they became the dominant party of the radicalized peasants and soldiers. The Decree on Land, which Lenin introduced at the Second Soviet Congress on 26 October, was in effect the agrarian programme of the Left SRs, as he himself admitted. It gave carte blanche to local peasant communities to seize and redivide all the private land. This was enough to persuade the Left SRs that a concordat with the Bolsheviks might be reached; and in mid-November, after they had led the Peasant Soviet into a merger with the All-Russian Soviet Executive, they began negotiations for their own entry into Sovnarkom. Kalegaev became Commissar of Agriculture; Steinberg the ‘impotent’ Commissar of Justice visited by Gorky; and five others took on minor posts, including the administration of the country’s crumbling post and telegraph network. But the Bolsheviks retained the key government posts, and the Left SRs were really no more than a fig-leaf used by Lenin to conceal the nakedness of his dictatorship. Contrary to their naive expectations, the Left SRs were powerless to moderate the despotic extremes of his policies; and in almost every aspect these turned out to be diametrically opposed to their own revolutionary ideals. The semi-anarchist system of decentralized Soviets which they had envisaged was impossible to attain within the centralized structure of Lenin’s Dictatorship of the Proletariat; their support for the peasant commune, the organization of the factories on anarcho-syndicalist lines, and the political autonomy of the national minorities were all incompatible with the long-terms goals of Bolshevism; and their passionate commitment to civil liberties (Spiridonova had once demanded the destruction of the Peter and Paul Fortress as a symbol of the police state) was hardly reconcilable with the Bolshevik methods of rule.

With the Left SRs safely on board, Lenin stepped up his campaign of persecution against the Constituent Assembly. Despite their commitment to democratic freedoms, the Left SRs were just as determined as the Bolsheviks not to allow the principle of parliamentary sovereignty to supersede that of Soviet power. After the events of 28 November many Bolsheviks and Left SRs favoured the idea of driving the Kadets out of the Constituent Assembly, which could then be reorganized around their two parties into a Revolutionary Convention. Bukharin had proposed this in the Central Committee on 29 November. Like the French Convention of 1792, which had replaced the Legislative Assembly, this would be a much more pliant body for the Soviet dictatorship, yet it would preserve all the outward signs of a national parliament in order to appease what Bukharin called the ‘constitutional illusions [that] are still alive in the masses’.53

Lenin, meanwhile, was coming round to favour the outright abolition of the Constituent Assembly. On 12 December he published his ‘Theses’ on the subject, in which he argued that Soviet power had cancelled out the need for a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ Assembly. In any case, it was no longer truly representative because of the split in the SR Party and the leftward shift of the masses since October. The ‘class struggle’ and the defeat of the ‘counter-revolution’ demanded the consolidation of Soviet power and, unless the Assembly was ready to recognize this, ‘the entire people’ would agree that it was ‘doomed to political extinction’. It was a declaration of intent to abolish the Assembly, unless the Assembly agreed to abolish itself. Lenin’s ultimatum became the policy of the party, and this in turn became the policy of Sovnarkom. Ten days later, at a meeting of the Soviet Executive, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs both demanded the closure of the Constituent Assembly, unless it resolved to subordinate itself to the Soviets at its opening session on 5 January. A Third Soviet Congress was meanwhile convened for 8 January, two weeks earlier than originally planned, so that, as Zinoviev put it, ‘the oppressed people may pass sentence on the Constituent Assembly’. Lenin drew up a ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Working People’ to be passed by the Constituent Assembly at its opening session. This spurious replica of the Rights of Man proclaimed Russia a Republic of Soviets and endorsed all the decrees of Sovnarkom, including the abolition of private landed property, the nationalization of the banks and the introduction of universal labour conscription.54 It was the death sentence of the Constituent Assembly.

Petrograd was in a state of siege on 5 January, the opening day of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks had placed the capital under martial law, forbidden public gatherings and flooded the city with troops. Most of them were concentrated near the Tauride Palace, where the Assembly was due to convene. The palace was cordoned off with barricades guarded by Bolshevik pickets. Its forecourt, where Chernov had once been held by the mob, was filled with bivouacs, artillery, machine-guns and field kitchens. It looked like an armed encampment. The Bolsheviks had set up a special military staff and called in their staunchest defenders — the Kronstadt sailors, Latvian Riflemen and Red Guards — to deal with any ‘counter-revolutionary’ actions by the Union for the Defence of the Constituent Assembly.

The Union had at one stage planned to start an uprising, but since they had no real military forces at their disposal, had abandoned the idea at the final moment in favour of a mass demonstration under the slogan of ‘All Power to the Constituent Assembly’. During the morning a sizeable crowd gathered on the Mars Field and, towards noon, began to march in various columns towards the Tauride Palace. Some sources counted 50,000 marchers, but the actual number was probably less. It was certainly not as large as the organizers had hoped: far fewer workers and soldiers turned up than expected, so the crowd was largely made up of the same small active citizenry — students, Civil Servants and middle-class professionals — who had taken part in the earlier march on 28 November. As the demonstrators approached the Liteiny Prospekt they were fired upon by Bolshevik troops, hiding on the rooftops with their machine-guns. Several other columns of marchers, one including workers from the Obukhovsky munitions plant, were also fired on. At least ten people were killed and several dozen wounded.

It was the first time government troops had fired on an unarmed crowd since the February Days. The victims were buried on 9 January, the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, next to the victims of that massacre in the Preobrazhensky Cemetery. The historic parallels did not go unnoticed. Several workers’ delegations turned up for the funeral, and one laid a wreath with the inscription: ‘To the victims of the Smolny autocrats’. Gorky, who had witnessed both massacres, underlined the parallels in Novaia zhizn’. It was the emotional climax of his bitter disillusionment with the revolution:

On 9 January 1905, when the downtrodden, ill-treated soldiers were firing into unarmed and peaceful crowds of workers by order of the tsarist regime, intellectuals and workers ran up to the soldiers — the unwilling murderers — and shouted point-blank in their faces: ‘What are you doing, damn you? Who are you killing?’ …

However, the majority of the Tsar’s soldiers answered the reproaches and persuasions with dismal and slavish words: ‘We’ve got our orders. We know nothing, we’ve got our orders’. And, like machines, they fired at the crowds. Reluctantly, perhaps with a heavy heart, but — they fired.

On 5 January 1918 the unarmed Petersburg democracy — factory and white-collar workers — demonstrated peacefully in honour of the Constituent Assembly.

For almost a hundred years the finest Russians have lived by the idea of a Constituent Assembly … Rivers of blood have been spilled on the sacrificial altar of this idea, and now the ‘People’s Commissars’ have given the orders to shoot the democracy which demonstrated in honour of this idea …

Thus, on 5 January, the Petrograd workers were mowed down, unarmed … They were mowed down from ambush, through cracks in fences, in a cowardly fashion, as if by real murderers.

And just as on 9 January 1905, people who had not lost their conscience and reason asked those who were shooting: ‘What are you doing, idiots? Aren’t they your own people marching? You can see there are red banners everywhere …’

And — like the tsarist soldiers — these murderers under orders answered: ‘We’ve got our orders! We’ve got our orders to shoot.’

I ask the ‘People’s’ Commissars, among whom there must be decent and sensible people: Do they understand that … they will inevitably end up by strangling the entire Russian democracy and ruining all the conquests of the revolution?

Do they understand this? Or do they think, on the contrary, that ‘either we have power or everyone and everything will perish’?55

By 4 p.m., when the opening session of the Assembly commenced, the atmosphere in the Tauride Palace was extremely tense. Many of the SR deputies had taken part in the morning’s demonstration and were angered by the shootings. To add insult to injury, each of them had been bodily searched by the Bolshevik guards as they entered the palace. Contrary to the claims of the Bolshevik press, not all the arrested deputies had been released for the opening session: Argunov, Avksentiev and Sorokin were even reported as having made speeches in the Tauride Palace, when in fact they were still in the Peter and Paul Fortress. In the Catherine Hall, where the assembly was held, there were almost as many troops as there were delegates. They stood at the back of the hall and sat up in the galleries, drinking vodka and shouting abuse at the SR deputies. Lenin surveyed the scene from the old government loge, where the tsarist ministers had sat during the sessions of the Duma. He gave the impression of a general at the moment before the start of a decisive battle — and that indeed is what it was.

The SRs tried to take the initiative by opening the session with a debate of their own, but the Bolsheviks created such a din that their first speaker, Mikhailov, the oldest member of the Assembly, was unable to make himself heard. Chernov, elected Chairman of the Assembly, made a long and ineffectual speech, as was his usual custom; it did nothing for the reputation of the then only genuinely democratic national parliament in Russia’s history as it awaited its execution. Tsereteli then appeared, despite the Bolshevik order for his arrest, and did rather better, denouncing the regime with such a passion that even the hecklers on the Left were forced to shut up and listen. But the Bolsheviks soon after brought the conflict to a head. Raskolnikov, the leader of the Kronstadt sailors, introduced their Declaration of the Rights of the Working People. When this was rejected, by 237 votes against 146, the Bolsheviks declared the Assembly to be in the hands of the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and walked out of the hall. A recess was called, while the Bolsheviks and Left SRs discussed what to do. The latter, wavering as usual, wanted to delay the dissolution, but Lenin was adamant: ‘the situation is now clear and we can get rid of them’. It was resolved to dissolve the Assembly, although out of deference to the Left SRs, who briefly returned to the session, Lenin instructed the Red Guards not to use violence: when the deputies left, the palace was to be locked up and no one allowed to convene there on the following day. At 2 a.m., having satisfied himself that everything was under control, Lenin returned to the Smolny, and went to bed.56

A little over two hours remained before the Assembly was closed down. After the Bolsheviks’ departure, various SR speakers made their usual lengthy speeches, while the Red Guards continued to get drunk and heckle from the gallery. Some of them amused themselves by aiming their guns at the speakers. The SRs resolved to use up these final minutes rushing through decrees on land and peace so that the Assembly would at least go under with a symbolic record of popular legislation: they already had an eye to the fast developing civil war, in which they would need to mobilize the support of the democracy for the restoration of the Constituent Assembly. At 2.30 a.m. the Left SRs finally walked out of the hall, unconvinced by the desperate efforts of their old party comrades to push through in minutes what they had failed to do in six months of power under the Provisional Government. The Bolshevik Dybenko then gave the order to the leader of the Red Guards, an anarchist sailor named Zhelezniakov, to bring the meeting to a close. At 4 a.m. he mounted the tribune and, tapping Chernov on the shoulder, announced that ‘all those present should leave the assembly hall because the guard is tired’. Chernov replied that the members of the Constituent Assembly were also tired but that this did not prevent them from ‘proclaiming a law awaited by all of Russia’. The guards became angry, shouted ‘Down with Chernov!’, and gathered menacingly with their guns in the main body of the hall. Chernov kept the meeting going for a further twenty minutes; but he had never been noted for his personal bravery before the mob (witness 4 July), and finally agreed to adjourn the meeting until the following afternoon.57 The only session of the Constituent Assembly had finally ended: it was 4.40 a.m. on 6 January. The delegates sheepishly filed out and the Tauride Palace was then locked up, bringing the twelve-year history of this democratic citadel to a premature end. When the deputies returned the following day, they were denied admission and presented with a decree dissolving the Assembly.

Two days later, on 8 January, the Third Congress of Soviets convened. The Bolsheviks and Left SRs had packed the Congress with their own supporters: nine out of ten delegates came from these two parties. The Congress duly passed all the measures presented to it by the government representatives, including the bogus Declaration of the Rights of the Working People, which effectively served as the first constitution of the Soviet state. This was the only sort of ‘parliament’ Lenin was ready to work with — one that would rubber-stamp all his decrees.

*

Shortly after the closure of the Constituent Assembly Boris Sokolov asked an SR deputy from the Volga region whether his party would try to defend it by force. ‘Do you realize what you are saying?’ the deputy replied. ‘Do you realize that we are the people’s representatives, that we have received the high honour of being elected by the people to write the laws of a new democratic republic? But to defend the Constituent Assembly, to defend us, its members — that is the duty of the people.’58 Most of the SRs were equally paralysed by the ideal of themselves as the leaders of ‘the people’, who would somehow come to their rescue. And as a result there was no military campaign to reverse the closure of the Constituent Assembly. No doubt any such campaign would have been doomed from the start, for the democratic leaders of Russia had no real military forces at their disposal. The Union for the Defence of the Constituent Assembly was dominated by SR intellectuals and could only muster the support of a few cadets. But their naive belief in the support of ‘the people’ was also disturbing, because it betrayed a complete failure to comprehend the revolutionary forces at work and thus boded ill for their chances in the coming civil war.

Sokolov, who was himself a Right SR, thought that the root of his comrades’ passivity was their metamorphosis from an underground group of revolutionaries into the leaders of the Provisional Government. This is surely right. Their adopted sense of responsibility for the state (and no doubt a little pride in their new ministerial status) led the Right SRs to reject their old terrorist ways of revolutionary struggle and depend exclusively on parliamentary methods. It was this that had tied them to the Kadets and held them back from forming a purely Soviet government in 1917. ‘We must proceed by legal means alone,’ was how Sokolov characterized their thinking, ‘we must defend the law by the only means permissible to the people’s representatives, by parliamentary means.’ They were doubtless sincere and held a deep conviction that, by refusing to fight the Bolsheviks using Bolshevik methods, they were saving Russia from the traumas of a civil war. Mark Vishniak, the Right SR and Secretary of the Constituent Assembly, later acknowledged that their hands had been tied by their own insistence on the need to avoid a civil war at all costs. But there was also a large dose of foolish vanity in all this. The Right SRs were hypnotized by the ‘sanctity’ and the ‘dignity’ of the Constituent Assembly, the first democratic parliament in the history of Russia, and by the ‘honour’ which this bestowed upon them as its representatives. Carried away by such ideals, they deluded themselves into believing that Russia was firmly set on the same democratic path as England or America, and that the ‘will of the people’ was alone enough to defend its democratic institutions. They placed so much faith in their own democratic methods that they failed to see how the Bolsheviks’ undemocratic methods could succeed in the long run.59

Yet it was more than a problem of methods: the faith of the Right SRs in ‘the people’ was itself misplaced. There was no mass reaction to the closure of the Constituent Assembly. The demonstration of 5 January was much smaller and more middle-class than the Right SRs had hoped. Sokolov thought that the dominant mood in the capital was one of passivity. After nearly a year of political conflict, none of which had reversed the economic crisis, people could be excused for a cynical indifference towards politics and politicians. More pressing concerns, such as the daily hunt for food and fuel, occupied most people for most of the time. Even Gorky — a political animal if ever there was one — succumbed to the general mood. On 26 January he wrote to Ekaterina:

We are living here as the captives of the ‘Bolsheviks’, as the French call Lenin’s venerable henchmen. Life is not much fun! And it’s highly annoying, but what can we the people do? There is nothing we can do. ‘He who survives will be saved.’ We survived the Romanov autocracy, perhaps we’ll survive Ul’ianov’s. Life has become comic — and tragic. Don’t laugh! Novaia zhizn’ looks like going under. My mood is foul, added to which I am feeling bad physically. There are days when I wake up and don’t even want to work. I don’t seem to want anything any more, and am paralysed by apathy, which is totally alien to me.60

There was an even more profound indifference among the peasantry, the traditional base of support of the SR Party. The SR intelligentsia had always been mistaken in their belief that the peasants shared their veneration for the Constituent Assembly. To the educated peasants, or those who had long been exposed to the propaganda of the SRs, the Assembly perhaps stood as a political symbol of ‘the revolution’. But to the mass of the peasants, whose political outlook was limited to the narrow confines of their own village and fields, it was only a distant thing in the city, dominated by the ‘chiefs’ of the various parties, which they did not understand, and was quite unlike their own political organizations. It was a national parliament, long cherished by the intelligentsia, but the peasants did not share the intelligentsia’s conception of the political nation, its language of ‘statehood’ and ‘democracy’, of ‘civic rights and duties’, was alien to them, and when they used this urban rhetoric they attached to it a specific ‘peasant’ meaning to suit the needs of their own communities.61 The village Soviets were much closer to the political ideals of the mass of the peasants, being in effect no more than their own village assemblies in a more revolutionary form. Through the village and volost Soviets the peasants were already carrying out their own revolution on the land, and they did not need the sanction of a decree by the Constituent Assembly (or, for that matter, the Soviet Government itself) to complete this. The Right SRs could not understand this fundamental fact: that the autonomy of the peasants through their village Soviets had, from their point of view, reduced the significance of any national parliament, since they had already attained their volia, the ancient peasant ideal of self-rule. To be sure, out of habit, or deference to their village elders, the mass of the peasants would cast their votes for the SRs in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. But very few were prepared to fight the SR battle for its restoration, as the dismal failure of the Komuch would prove in the summer of 1918. Virtually all the resolutions from the villages on this question made it clear that they did not want the Assembly to be restored as the ‘political master of the Russian land’, in the words of one, with a higher authority than the local Soviets. In other words, they did not want to be ruled by a central state. As Sokolov later acknowledged from his experience as an SR propagandist in the army:

The Constituent Assembly was something totally unknown and unclear to the mass of the front-line soldiers, it was without doubt a terra incognita. Their sympathies were clearly with the Soviets. These were the institutions that were near and dear to them, reminding them of their own village assemblies … I more than once had occasion to hear the soldiers, sometimes even the most intelligent of them, object to the Constituent Assembly. To most of them it was associated with the State Duma, an institution that was remote to them. ‘What do we need some Constituent Assembly for, when we already have our Soviets, where our own deputies can meet and decide everything?’62

After their defeat in the capital the SRs returned to their old provincial strongholds to rally support for the restoration of democracy. It was to prove a painful lesson in the new realities of provincial life. They found the local peasantry largely indifferent to the closure of the Constituent Assembly and their own party organizations in a state of decay. By basing their party on the support of the peasants, the SRs came to realize that they had built it on sand.

In province after province the Right SRs had lost control of the Soviets to the extreme Left. In the northern and central industrial provinces, where the Bolsheviks and Left SRs could count on the support of most of the workers and garrison soldiers, as well as a large proportion of the semi-industrial peasants, most of the provincial Soviets were in Bolshevik hands, usually through the ballot box, by the end of October, and only in Novgorod, Pskov and Tver did any serious fighting take place. In some of these towns, especially where there was a garrison, the Bolsheviks simply used their military strength to oust the opposition from the Soviet and install their own ‘majority’. Further south, in the agricultural provinces, the transfer of power was not generally completed until the New Year and was often quite bloody, with fighting in the streets of the main provincial towns (Orel, Kursk, Voronezh, Astrakhan, Chernigov, Odessa, Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, Sevastopol and others). In most places the extreme Left organized its supporters among the soldiers and workers into an MRC, which seized control of the government institutions after defeating the cadet or Cossack forces loyal to the city Duma. New elections to the ruling Soviet were then held which, in one form or another, were usually rigged. As in Petrograd, the SRs and Mensheviks often played into the hands of the extreme Left by boycotting the Soviet and these ‘reelections’. Yet, without real military forces of their own, or a large and active citizenry willing to take up arms in defence of the democracy, they had little option. The political civilization of the provincial towns was not much more advanced than in backward peasant Russia and outside the capital cities there was no real urban middle class to sustain the democratic revolution. That was the tragedy of 1917.

iii Looting the Looters

For the first time in many years General Denikin found himself among ordinary Russians as he sat in a third-class railway carriage, disguised as a Polish nobleman, on his way to the Don:

Now I was simply a boorzhui, who was shoved and cursed, sometimes with malice, sometimes just in passing, but fortunately no one paid any attention to me. Now I saw real life more clearly and was terrified. I saw a boundless hatred of ideas and of people, of everything that was socially or intellectually higher than the crowd, of everything which bore the slightest trace of abundance, even of inanimate objects, which were the signs of some culture strange or inaccessible to the crowd. This feeling expressed hatred accumulated over the centuries, the bitterness of three years of war, and the hysteria generated by the revolutionary leaders.

The future White army leader was not the only refugee from Bolshevik Russia to feel the wrath of the crowd during that terrible winter of 1917–18. The memoir literature is full of similar accounts by princes, countesses, artists, writers and businessmen of the traumatic journeys they had to make through revolutionary Russia in order to flee the Bolshevik regime. They all express the same sense of shock at the rudeness and hostility which they now encountered from the ordinary people: weren’t these the brothers and sisters of their nannies and their maids, their cooks and their butlers, who only yesterday had seemed so kind and respectful? It was as if the servant class had all along been wearing a mask of good will which had been blown away by the revolution to reveal the real face of hatred below.

For the vast majority of the Russian people the ending of all social privilege was the basic principle of the revolution. The Russians had a long tradition of social levelling stretching back to the peasant commune. It was expressed in the popular notions of social justice which lay at the heart of the 1917 Revolution. The common belief of the Russian people that surplus wealth was immoral, that property was theft and that manual labour was the only real source of value owed much less to the doctrines of Marx than it did to the egalitarian customs of the village commune. These ideals of social justice had also become a part of that peculiar brand of Christianity which the Russian peasants had made their own. In the Russian peasant mind there was Christian virtue in poverty.fn10 ‘The meek shall inherit the earth!’ It was this which gave the revolution its quasi-religious status in the popular consciousness: the war on wealth was seen as a purgatory on the way to the gates of a heaven on earth.

If the Bolsheviks had popular appeal in 1917, it was in their promise to end all privilege and replace the unjust social order with a republic of equals. The utopian vision of a universal socialist state was fundamental to the popular idealism of the revolution. One peasant-worker, for example, wrote to the All-Russian Peasant Soviet in May 1917: ‘All the people, whether rich or poor, should be provided for; every person should receive his fair and equal ration from a committee so that there is enough for everyone. Not only food but work and living space should be equally divided by committees; everything should be declared public property.’ The rejection of all superordinate forms of authority (judges, officers, priests, squires, employers, and so on) was the main driving force of the social revolution. By giving institutional form to this war on privilege, the Bolsheviks were able to draw on the revolutionary energies of those numerous elements from the poor who derived pleasure from seeing the rich and mighty destroyed, regardless of whether it brought about any improvement in their own lot. If Soviet power could do little to relieve the misery of the poor, it could at least make the lives of the rich still more miserable than their own — and this was a cause of considerable psychological satisfaction. After 1918, as the revolution’s ideals became tarnished and the people became more and more impoverished, the Bolshevik regime was increasingly inclined to base its appeal almost exclusively on these vulgar pleasures of revenge. In an editorial to mark the start of 1919, Pravda proudly proclaimed:

Where are the wealthy, the fashionable ladies, the expensive restaurants and private mansions, the beautiful entrances, the lying newspapers, all the corrupted ‘golden life’? All swept away. You can no longer see on the street a rich barin [gentleman] in a fur coat reading the Russkie vedomosti [a liberal newspaper closed down after October 1917]. There is no Russkie vedomosti, no fur coat for the barin; he is living in the Ukraine or the Kuban, or else he is exhausted and grown thin from living on a third-class ration; he no longer even has the appearance of a barin.63

This plebeian war on privilege was in part an extension of the violence and destruction which Gorky had condemned in the wake of the February Revolution. There was the same hatred and mistrust of the propertied classes, the same cruel desire for retribution, and the same urge to destroy the old civilization. To the propertied classes, it all seemed part of the same revolutionary storm. They compared the violence of 1917 to the Pugachevshchina, the anarchic wave of peasant destruction — ‘senseless and merciless’, as Pushkin had described it — which had haunted Russia since the eighteenth century. They talked of the ‘dark’ and ‘savage’ instincts of the people, which the Bolsheviks had inflamed, just as their predecessors had talked in the nineteenth century of Pugachev’s followers. Yet such crude and value-laden stereotypes probably tell us more about those who used them than they do about those they were meant to describe. It was, in other words, only the social pretensions of those who saw themselves as ‘civilized’ and ‘respectable’ which defined the violence of the crowd as ‘anarchic’, ‘dark’ and ‘savage.’ If one looks at the violence in its own terms, there are important distinctions between the war against privilege after October and earlier forms of violence against the propertied classes.

For one thing, the violence after October was articulated and legitimized by a new language of class, and class conflict, which had been developed by the socialist parties during 1917. The old and deferential forms of address for the members of the propertied classes (gospodin and barin) were phased out of use. They soon became a form of abuse, or of sarcastic mocking, for those who had lost their title and wealth. These were the ‘former people’ (byvshchie liudi), as the Bolsheviks came to call them. The proliferation of egalitarian forms of address — ‘comrade’ (for party members and workers) and ‘citizen’ (for all others) — seemed to signify a new republican equality, although of course, in reality, the comrades, to adapt George Orwell’s phrase, were rather more equal than the others. The word ‘comrade’ (tovarishch) had long had connotations of brotherhood and solidarity among the most class-conscious industrial workers. It became a badge of proletarian pride, a sign to distinguish and unite the avenging army of the poor in the class war against the rich. This new language of class awakened a sense of dignity and power in the once downtrodden. It was soon reflected in a greater assertiveness in the dress and body-language of the lower classes. Servicemen and workers tilted back their caps and unbuttoned their tunics in a show of cocky defiance. They went around with a pistol sticking out visibly from their belts and behaved in a generally aggressive manner. They spoke rudely to their ‘social betters’, refused to give up their tram-seats to women, and sat in the theatre, smoking and drinking, with their feet up on the chairs in front of them.

In the minds of the ordinary people, who had never read their Marx, class divisions were based much more on emotion than objective social criteria. The popular term burzhooi, for example, had no set class connotations, despite its obvious derivation from the word ‘bourgeois’. It was used as a general form of abuse against employers, officers, landowners, priests, merchants, Jews, students, professionals or anyone else well dressed, foreign looking or seemingly well-to-do. Hungry workers condemned the peasants as burzhoois because they were thought to be hoarding foodstuffs; while peasants — who often confused the word with barzhui (the owners of a barge) and birzhye (from the word for the Stock Exchange, birzh) — likewise condemned the workers, and all townsmen in general, because they were thought to be hoarding manufactured goods. The burzhoois, in other words, were not so much a class as a set of popular scapegoats, or internal enemies, who could be redefined almost at will to account for the breakdown of the market, the hardships of the war and the general inequalities of society. Villagers often described the burzhooi as a ‘hidden’ and ‘crafty’ enemy of the peasants who was to blame for all their problems: he could be a townsman, a trader or an official. In urban food queues, where endless theories of sabotage were spun to explain the shortage of bread, the words burzhooi, ‘speculator’, ‘German’ and ‘Jew’ were virtually synonymous. This was a society at war with itself — only everyone thought they were fighting the burzhooi.64

The socialist press encouraged such popular attitudes by depicting the burzhoois as ‘enemies of the people’. The best-selling pamphlet of 1917 — which did more than any other publication to shape the political and class consciousness of the mass of the ordinary people — was Spiders and Flies by Wilhelm (not to be confused with Karl) Liebknecht. Several million copies of it were sold in more than twenty different editions sponsored by all the major socialist parties. Spiders and Flies divided Russia into two warring species:

The spiders are the masters, the money-grubbers, the exploiters, the gentry, the wealthy, and the priests, pimps and parasites of all types! … The flies are the unhappy workers, who must obey all those laws the capitalist happens to think up — must obey, for the poor man has not even a crumb of bread.fn11

The rich and educated, by being labelled burzhooi, were automatically vilified as antisocial. ‘The burzhooi’, wrote one socialist pamphleteer, ‘is someone who thinks only of himself, of his belly. It is someone who is aloof, who is ready to grab anyone by the throat if it involves his money or food.’ As the social crisis deepened, the burzhoois were increasingly condemned as ‘parasites’ and ‘bloodsuckers’, and violent calls for their downfall were heard with growing regularity, not just from the extreme leftwing parties but also from the streets, the factories and the barracks. ‘We should exterminate all the burzhooi’, proclaimed one factory worker in January 1918, ‘so that the honest Russian people will be able to live more easily.’65

The Bolsheviks encouraged this war on privilege — and even made it their own popular raison d’être. Lenin had always been an advocate of using mass terror against the enemies of his revolution. In ‘How to Organize Competition?’, written in December 1917, he called for a ‘war to the death against the rich, the idlers and the parasites’. Each village and town should be left to develop its own means of:

cleansing the Russian land of all vermin, of scoundrel fleas, the bedbug rich and so on. In one place they will put into prison a dozen rich men, a dozen scoundrels, half a dozen workers who shirk on the job … In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third they will be given yellow tickets [such as prostitutes were given] after a term in prison, so that everyone knows they are harmful and can keep an eye on them. In a fourth one out of every ten idlers will be shot. The more variety the better … for only practice can devise the best methods of struggle.66

On many occasions he stressed that the ‘proletarian state’ was ‘a system of organized violence’ against the bourgeoisie: this was what he had always understood by the term ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. Licensing popular acts of plunder and retribution was an integral element of this system, a means of ‘terrorizing the bourgeoisie’ into submission to the Proletarian State. Here were the origins of the Red Terror.

Historians have tended to neglect the connections between this plebeian war on privilege and the origins of the Red Terror. Most of them have seen the Terror as exclusively political. They have shown how it was imposed by the Bolsheviks — either deliberately to build up their power, so that terror became the fundamental basis of their regime (the view of the Right), or as a largely pragmatic response to the threats and problems of the civil war (the view of the Left). Neither is a satisfactory explanation. The Terror erupted from below. It was an integral element of the social revolution from the start. The Bolsheviks encouraged but did not create this mass terror. The main institutions of the Terror were all shaped, at least in part, in response to these pressures from below. The anarchic plunder of bourgeois, Church and noble property was legitimized and institutionalized by the Bolshevik decrees of revolutionary confiscation and taxation, which the local Chekas then enforced through the arrest of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ hostages. The mob trials of bourgeois employers, officers, speculators and other ‘enemies of the people’ were institutionalized through the People’s Courts and the crude system of ‘revolutionary justice’ which they administered — which in turn became a part of the Cheka Terror.

The Cheka system, as centrally organized political terror, did not really take off until the late summer of 1918 (see here). During the early months of the Bolshevik regime, the Cheka system was, like the rest of the state apparatus, extremely decentralized; and this often meant that social pressures, such as the desire of the local population to despoil the rich and powerful, or even the desire of one community to pursue a vendetta against another, could determine whom the local Cheka bosses chose to arrest or execute. This ‘mass terror’ is analysed here, the aim being to understand the social roots of the Cheka’s Terror. For, however much one may condemn it, and however hard it may be to admit, there is no doubt that the Terror struck a deep chord in the Russian civil war mentality, and that it had a strange mass appeal. The slogan ‘Death to the Bourgeoisie!’, which was written on the walls of the Cheka interrogation rooms, was also the slogan of the street. People even called their daughters Terrora.

*

In January 1918, at a meeting of party agitators on their way to the provinces, Lenin explained that the plunder of bourgeois property was to be encouraged as a form of social justice by revenge. It was a question of ‘looting the looters’. Under this slogan, which the Bolsheviks soon made their own, there was an orgy of robbery and violence in the next few months. Gorky described it as a mass pogrom. Armed gangs robbed the propertied — and then robbed each other. Swindlers, thieves and bandits grew rich, as law and order finally vanished. ‘They rob artistically,’ Gorky wrote in a bitter editorial on 16 March:

no doubt history will tell of this process of Russia’s self-robbery with the greatest inspiration. They rob and sell churches and museums, they sell cannons and rifles, they pilfer army warehouses, they rob the palaces of former grand dukes; everything which can be plundered is plundered, everything which can be sold is sold; in Theodossia the soldiers even traffic in people — they bring Turkish, Armenian and Kurdish women from the Caucasus and sell them for twenty-five roubles apiece. This is very ‘original’, and we can be proud — there was nothing like it even in the era of the Great French Revolution.67

In the provinces the establishment of Soviet power was often accompanied by such acts of looting and violence. Most of it was perpetrated by unruly elements in the crowd, though the local party leaders were often involved, or else urged the crowd on from the sidelines. In Ekaterinoslav the local Bolshevik leader told his followers to ‘wrest from the bourgeoisie the millions taken from the masses and cunningly turned into silken undergarments, furs, carpets, gold, furniture, paintings, china. We have to take it and give it to the proletariat and then force the bourgeoisie to work for their rations for the Soviet regime.’ In Stavropol the Bolshevized soldiers systematically plundered shops and houses, and arrested hostages from the bourgeoisie; the local Soviet, which shared power with the leaders of the Duma and the zemstvos, was too weak to stop this terror and chose instead to license it as the first step towards the seizure of outright power. The violence soon spread to the surrounding countryside, as the Russian peasant soldiers vented their old class and ethnic hatred of the land-rich Kalmyk pastoralists by setting fire to their houses and killing their families with quite unspeakable brutality (pregnant women had their babies cut out of their wombs). The Kalmyks then retaliated by attacking the Russian peasant farms. It was common for the terror to spiral in this way as long-suppressed ethnic and social conflicts suddenly exploded and there was no neutral power to stop them. In the Don industrial town of Taganrog the Red Guards reaped a savage revenge on the military cadets, mostly bourgeois sons, whom they had defeated in the seizure of power. Fifty cadets, who had surrendered on the promise of an amnesty, were marched off to a metal factory, tied by their hands and feet, and thrown, one by one, into the blast furnace. In Evpatoria, a Crimean coastal town, the Bolshevized sailors were allowed by the Soviet leaders to go on the rampage: in three days they massacred 800 officers and bourgeois residents. Most of them were killed in a tortuous fashion, with broken arms and legs tied around their head before their bodies were thrown into the sea. Similar massacres took place in Yalta, Theodossia and Sevastopol.68

This war against the bourgeoisie was paralleled by a number of Bolshevik decrees sanctioning the ‘looting of the looters’. Soviet officials, bearing flimsy warrants, would go round bourgeois houses confiscating typewriters, furniture, clothes and valuables ‘for the revolution’. Factories were taken out of private ownership, shares and bonds were annulled, and the law of private inheritance was later abolished. Banks were nationalized and the holders of accounts were restricted to withdrawals of no more than 1,000 roubles per month (a sum that was soon made worthless by hyperinflation). The owners of bank safe deposits were ordered to appear with their keys so that the boxes could be inspected: foreign money, gold and silver, and all other precious items were subject to confiscation. During the first six months of 1918 more than 35,000 deposit boxes were inspected. Countess Meshcherskaia gives a vivid description of the sailor placed in charge of this operation at her local bank:

Around his chest was wrapped a belt of machine-gun cartridges and from his holster, at his side, one could just make out the handle of his revolver. Young and broad-shouldered, with his eyes wide open from the consciousness that he was performing an important task, he tried to make his large and friendly face look menacing by frowning at us. He didn’t have the slightest notion about precious jewels but knew only one thing: the state needed gold.

From their opened safe, he took several handfuls of items — jewels, diamond monograms, silver crucifixes and even a Fabergé egg — and piled them up on a table. Several times he paused ‘to gaze admiringly at this mountain of booty’.69

The Soviets levied their own punitive taxes on the bourgeoisie. This was often the start of the Bolshevik Terror, since the local Chekas were inclined to enforce the payment of these levies by arresting hostages. In Nizhnyi Novgorod, for example, the Soviet imposed a revolutionary levy of twenty-two million roubles, while the Cheka arrested 105 bourgeois citizens and held them hostage until the levy was paid.70 Many of these taxes were imposed on people quite unable to pay: emigration and inflation had drastically reduced the size and wealth of the Russian bourgeoisie and many of those persecuted as ‘the rich’ were no more than petty traders or half-impoverished teachers, doctors and clerks. Convinced by their own propaganda that this phantom bourgeoisie must be hiding its wealth, the local Chekas made even more arrests and began to shoot their hostages.

The same happened with the confiscation of Church property. It began with a clumsy attempt by Kollontai, the People’s Commissar of Social Welfare, to turn the Alexander Nevsky Monastery into a sanctuary for war invalids. On 19 January she sent a detachment of sailors to occupy this famous holy shrine in the centre of Petrograd. They were met by an angry crowd of worshippers and, in the scuffles that followed, a priest was shot dead. Lenin was furious: the last thing he needed now was open confrontation with the Church, which so far had been careful to keep out of politics. But since Kollontai had already enraged the priesthood, he saw no reason for holding back from the conflict which, as he saw it, would have to come sooner or later. The Decree on the Separation of Church and State was published the next day, 20 January, much earlier than planned. It declared all Church property to be the property of the state. Sanctioned by this licence, Bolshevik squads went round the country’s churches and monasteries looting their silver, drinking their wine and terrorizing the priesthood. Patriarch Tikhon, the head of the Church, called on the clergy to resist ‘these monsters of the human race’ in a pastoral letter anathematizing the Bolshevik regime. Not all the priesthood chose the path of open opposition. Some of the minor clergy, who had welcomed the revolution as a chance to build closer ties with their parish, sought to conciliate the Bolsheviks. The Preobrazhensky Monastery in Viatka, for example, turned itself into a labouring commune with a nursery for workers’ children and a workshop where the nuns made clothes and shoes for orphans. But most of the clergy and their congregations followed Tikhon’s call, which enabled the Bolsheviks to brand them as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and to step up their campaign of looting and terror. The monks of the Alexander Svirsky Monastery in Olonetsk, for example, after trying to resist the Bolshevik squads, were imprisoned — and later executed — by the local Cheka.71

One of the most traumatic humiliations suffered by the wealthy classes in these early months of the Soviet regime was the compulsory sharing of all or part of their living space. The Bolsheviks were proud — and stressed it in their propaganda — that they were forcing the wealthy to share their spacious houses with the urban poor. To many people this seemed only fair: the fact that some people had lived in palaces, while others languished in damp and dirty cellars, had become a symbol of the unjust social order of the old regime. Wealthy families often tried their best to find a clean and modest couple to move in with them whom they might be able to persuade to make do with one or two of the smallest rooms in the house. But the vigilance of the buildings committees, which were placed in charge of this process, made it very hard. These committees were usually formed by the old house porters and domestic servants, among whom the desire for revenge could often be very strong. Joining the buildings committee, and even more the party, gave them a licence to turn the tables on their former superiors. They occupied the best rooms in the house and filled them with the finest furniture, while their previous employers were moved into the servants’ quarters. Here was a whole world of hidden revolutions in domestic life where the servants and the masters literally changed places. It was a microcosm of the social transformation in the country at large.

‘I’ve spent all my life in the stables,’ complained an ex-servant at a political rally in the Cirque Moderne, ‘while they live in their beautiful flats and lie on soft couches playing with their poodles. No more of that, I say! It’s my turn to play with poodles now: and, as for them, it is their turn to go and work in the stables.’ The idea of putting the leisured classes to work was an integral element of the war on social privilege — and the Bolsheviks were quick to institutionalize it. Lenin had promised that the fundamental rule of the Soviet order would be ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’ The universal conscription of labour was part of the Declaration of Rights of the Working People (which was in effect a Declaration of the Obligations of the Non-Working People) which the Bolsheviks had presented to the Constituent Assembly. Trotsky pioneered the mass conscription of bourgeois labour in the early days of the Red Army, where it was used for non-combatant tasks in the rear, such as digging trenches and cleaning out the barracks. But it soon became a general practice of the city Soviets. Aristocrats, former factory directors, stockbrokers, lawyers, artists, priests and former officials would all be rounded up and forced to do jobs such as clearing the rubbish or snow from the streets. Meanwhile, commissars and groups of idle workers would stand around smoking and watching with obvious pleasure as the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, none of whom had ever done a single day of manual labour in their lives before, struggled to master their shovels and picks. There was no real economic benefit in these conscriptions of bourgeois labour; their sole purpose was to degrade and physically destroy the genteel classes. As Trotsky put it in a speech that perfectly expressed the mob psychology: ‘For centuries our fathers and grandfathers have been cleaning up the dirt and the filth of the ruling classes, but now we will make them clean up our dirt. We must make life so uncomfortable for them that they will lose the desire to remain bourgeois.’72

Dispossessed and degraded, the life of these ‘former people’ soon became an arduous daily struggle. Hours were spent queuing for bread and fuel along with the rest of the urban poor. As inflation rocketed, they were forced to sell their last precious possessions just to feed themselves. Baroness Meyendorff sold a diamond brooch for 5,000 roubles — enough to buy a bag of flour. Mighty scions of the aristocracy were reduced to petty street vendors: Princess Golitsyn sold home-made pies, Baroness Wrangel knitwear, Countess Witte cakes and sweets, while Brusilov’s wife sold matches, just like hundreds of wounded veterans from the army her husband had once commanded. A former Gentleman of the Chamber to the Tsar became the concierge of a museum, where strange creatures were kept in jars of alcoholic spirit; he exchanged this for water and sold the gruesome alcohol on the streets. The flea-markets of Petrograd and Moscow were filled with the former belongings of fallen plutocrats: icons, paintings, carpets, pianos, gramophones, samovars, morning coats and ball dresses — all could be picked up for the price of a meal or two. The more precious items were snapped up by the nouveaux riches of the Soviet regime — commissars and officials, looting soldiers and sailors, petty traders and bandits — as they sought to acquire the status symbols of a ruling class. The new masters of Russia were easily distinguishable by the way they wore their long and dirty hair greased back, by their gold-toothed smiles and their eau-de-cologne smells, and by the way they went around the shops and hotels with dolled-up girls of easy virtue on their arm.

Baron Wrangel recalls one of these arrivistes rouges, a Bolshevik soldier ‘straight from the plough’, purchasing a pearl necklace for his mistress in one of the top jewellers on Nevsky Prospekt. His mistress was a former kitchen-maid, now dressed in sumptuous furs and diamonds, though her face was covered with the scars of smallpox. The country boy was obviously proud to be seen with such a ‘fine lady’ and demanded to be shown ‘the most expensive pearls, shining ones like the barynifn12 wear’. He was not satisfied with those the jeweller brought out because, at 75,000 roubles, they were still not expensive enough. He and his mistress were due that evening at a reception in the Winter Palace and had to have the best. The kitchen-maid announced that they would go to the Gostiny Dvor, where ‘we are sure to find what I want’. This produced a fit of contemptuous laughter from the other customers, a group of former society ladies who had come to sell their diamonds, because the shops there were known to sell cheap imitation jewellery. Realizing that she had made a blunder, the poor girl blushed and tried to recover herself by saying that they would take ‘the wretched pearls’ after all and come back when the jeweller had found something better.73

Many of Russia’s fallen rich and mighty sold up everything and either went abroad, though this was very hard, or fled south to the Ukraine and Kuban, or else east to Siberia, where the White Guards had their main bases of power. Others sought refuge on their landed estates in the countryside, hoping that the peasants, whom they had always seen as humble and respectful, would be kinder to them than the Bolshevized workers in the towns. But here too the war against the rich was in full swing, as the peasants, sanctioned by the October Decree on Land, carried out their own seizures of the gentry’s land and property.

The equal distribution of all the means of production, the land, the tools and the livestock, had long been the basic ideal of the peasant revolution. They looked upon this ‘Black Repartition’ as the Will of God, and believed that the rest of the revolution had also been organized on the same general principles. The All-Russian Soviet was conceived of by the peasants as a kind of giant village commune redistributing all the property in the country. Many peasants were convinced, in the words of one of their more literate representatives, that socialism, of which they had only vaguely heard, ‘was some sort of mystical means — mystical because we could not imagine how this would be done — of dividing all the property and the money of the rich; according to our village tailor, this would mean that every peasant household would be given 200,000 roubles. This, it seems, was the biggest number he could think of.’74

The peasants themselves had no mystical means of dividing up the land. They did not even have the basic technical means, such as maps and rulers. The land was divided as it always had been, by pacing out the width of the strips, or judging the overall size of the plots by eye, and then allocating them to the peasant households according to the local egalitarian norm. This usually meant the number of eaters, or more rarely the number of adult workers, in each household. Without accurate land-surveying methods, these divisions were inevitably accompanied by arguments, sometimes ending in fist-fights, over who should get what piece of land. But in general terms, given its crucial importance for a peasant community, the land repartition was remarkable for its peacefulness — a tribute to the self-organization of the village communes which carried it through.

The confiscated lands of the gentry and the Church were usually divided separately because it was feared that if the revolution was reversed the peasants would be forced to return this land to its former owners. Many communes stipulated that all their household members had to receive a strip of this land in order to share the burden of risk. The gentry themselves, including those who returned to their estates from the cities, were usually left a generous portion of land and tools, enough to turn their estates into a sizeable family farm on a par with the rest of the peasant households. While the peasants were in no doubt that the gentry had to be destroyed as a superordinate class, they also believed that the squires should be allowed to turn themselves into ‘peasants’ and farm a share of ‘God’s land’, as they put it, with their own family labour. The rights of land and labour, which lay at the heart of the peasant commune, were understood as basic human rights. Indeed, in so far as the ‘peasantization’ of the squires was in line with the basic peasant ideal of creating a society made up entirely of smallholding family farmers, it was even something to be welcomed. Many landowners, especially the smaller ones, remained on the land after 1917; and they were joined by those, normally resident in the cities, who now sought refuge from the Bolshevik Terror on their estates. As late as the mid-1920s there were still some 10,000 former landlords living on their manors alongside the peasants, a figure equivalent to 10 per cent of the total number of landowners in Russia before 1917.

The Rudnevs, a medium-sized landowning family in Simbirsk province, were a typical example. They had decided to stay on their family estate because, as Semen Rudnev put it, they thought that ‘the disturbances of the revolution would be less harsh in the countryside than in the towns [and because] the economic conditions of the village, with its almost natural economy, would also be better’. The turmoil of 1917 largely passed their village by. The Rudnevs spent the summer and autumn in the leisurely manner to which they were accustomed: ‘The men went drinking and hunting, guests from Simbirsk came to stay, and we went off to Nazhim and the milk-farm for picnics and mushroom picking.’ During the following winter they agreed to the demand of the neighbouring village commune to turn their land and property over to the peasants. They kept a small farm of 20 desyatiny (54 acres) near the manor house, where they continued to live. The livestock and tools were auctioned off at bargain prices, though most of the peasants could not afford to feed their new pedigree horses, which kept running back to their former owners for hay. The peasants came to work in the Rudnevs’ fields during the spring and were paid in vodka and fruit liqueurs. The harvest was bigger than the peasants’ and so the commune ordered the Rudnevs to sell their surplus grain at fixed prices to the village poor. But well before the harvest could be gathered the manor house was ransacked, and the Rudnevs forced to flee, by a local detachment of the Red Guards.75

This was a common pattern. Though peasant acts of violence, pillage and arson were not uncommon, it was usually the young demobilized soldiers who took the lead in instigating them. The slogan ‘Loot the Looters!’ was brought home to the villages by those who returned from the Front and the garrisons, where they had developed a strong sense of militant brotherhood and where they had been exposed to the propaganda of the Bolsheviks. They often formed a paramilitary faction inside the village, not unlike the fascisti in rural Italy at this time. They had their own regional organizations, such as the Union of Front-Line Soldiers, or the Union of Wounded Veterans, as well as their own Red Guard detachments, attached to the local Soviet, which could exert a powerful influence on the village and steer it towards more violent forms of action against the gentry. In one particular village of the Kerensky district in Penza province, for example, peasant attacks on the local squires suddenly increased: it was connected to the return of several soldiers, who were then elected to the head of the village Soviet. The war had obviously had a brutalizing effect upon them, for they soon became notorious for their heavy bouts of drinking and sadistic violence. One poor noble widow, who had hitherto lived quite peacefully with the peasants, having already given to them most of her land and livestock, was driven to suicide when the drunken bullies shot her last horse and cow and left her pet dog dead on her doorstep: it had been an act of pure spite.76

*

The Russians, it might seem, were particularly prone to such cruel and savage acts of revenge. ‘I am’, wrote Gorky, ‘especially distrustful of a Russian when he gets power into his hands. Not long ago a slave, he becomes the most unbridled despot as soon as he has the chance to become his neighbour’s master.’77 Mob trials and lynchings were the most common expression of this popular vengeance, both in the countryside and in the towns. They had taken off as a mass phenomenon in response to the catastrophic rise in crime and the breakdown of law and order during 1917 (when Gorky claimed to have counted over 10,000 cases of mob justice). Since the police and the old criminal courts had virtually disappeared, there was a common feeling that the only way to deal with the problem of crime was by mob trials in the street. Some poor thief would be seized by the crowd, given summary justice and executed on the spot. Gorky witnessed one such instance in the centre of Petrograd, in which even children had taken part in the brutal execution of a thief (see here). As the socio-economic crisis deepened, and the popular belief developed that the burzhoois were responsible for it, so these mob trials began to assume an overtly class nature. They became a weapon in the war against privilege, focusing less on petty thieves from the urban poor and much more on merchants and shopkeepers, factory owners and employers, army officers, former tsarist officials and other figures of superordinate authority.

The Bolsheviks gave institutional form to the mob trials through the new People’s Courts, where ‘revolutionary justice’ was summarily administered in all criminal cases. The old criminal justice system, with its formal rules of law, was abolished as a relic of the ‘bourgeois order’. The twelve elected judges who made up the People’s Courts did not have to have any formal legal training — they were to be guided by their ‘revolutionary conscience’ — and were mainly drawn from the workers, the peasants and the petty officials of the old law courts. Half of them had not been educated beyond primary level, and one in five belonged to the Bolshevik Party. The sessions of the People’s Courts were little more than formalized mob trials. There were no set legal procedures or rules of evidence, which in any case hardly featured. Convictions were usually secured on the basis of denunciations, often arising from private vendettas, and sentences tailored to fit the mood of the crowd, which freely voiced its opinions from the public gallery.