October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

9 September: Compromise and Its Discontents

At 5 a.m. on 1 September, after a long, weary debate on Kamenev’s motion and on their relationship to the government in general, the Petrograd Soviet voted.

The SRs suggested the Executive Committees appoint a cabinet responsible to a ‘Provisional Revolutionary Government’, but still insisted that it include some bourgeois groups – though no Kadets. In these post-Kornilov hours, the Kadets were despised for their complicity in the conspiracies.

The SR proposal was rejected. Instead, the meeting voted in favour of Kamenev’s.

Soldiers outnumbered workers in the Soviet two to one, but many were still on duty, so only a relatively small fraction of the membership was present for the tally. And Kamenev’s proposal was ‘moderate’ compared to the ‘Leninism’ of the Sixth Party Congress. All the same, this was a profoundly charged moment.

In March, Bolshevik opposition to the Provisional Government had lost by a humiliating 19 votes to 400. In April, arguing against participation in the cabinet had got them 100 votes against 2,000. But now, even after the debacle of the July Days, months of crisis in government, economy and war, and the dramatic counterrevolutionary attempt, had utterly changed the lie of the political land. Now, with its members supported by left Mensheviks and Left SRs – who were by that point the majority of the SRs in the capital – the Petrograd Soviet for the first time adopted a Bolshevik resolution: 279 for, 115 against, and 51 abstentions.

The vote seemed to signal an opportunity. Perhaps the Bolsheviks and other socialists could find common ground.

Such collaborative aspirations extended to unlikely quarters. In his Finnish hide, Lenin sat down to write his document ‘On Compromises’.

At the Sixth Congress, he had described the soviets as advancing ‘like sheep to the abattoir’ behind their leaders. He had foreclosed any possibility of working with Mensheviks and SRs, insisted on the absolute necessity of a forceful seizure of power. But ‘now, and only now,’ he wrote, in another dizzying shift of perspective, ‘perhaps during only a few days or a week or two’, it appeared there was a chance for a socialist soviet government to be set up ‘in a perfectly peaceful way’.

Struck by the mass opposition to the Kadets, and by the soviets’ impressive mobilisation against Kornilov, Lenin proposed that his party ‘return’ to the pre-July demand, ‘All Power to the Soviets’ – which call had, in any case, returned unbidden. ‘We… may offer a voluntary compromise,’ he suggested, with the moderate socialists.

Lenin proposed that the SRs and Mensheviks could form an exclusively socialist government, responsible to local soviets. The Bolsheviks would remain outside that government – ‘unless a dictatorship of the proletariat and poor peasants has been realised’ – but they would not agitate for the seizure of power. Instead, assuming the convocation of a Constituent Assembly and freedom of propaganda, they would operate as a ‘loyal opposition’, striving to win influence within the soviets.

‘Perhaps this is already impossible?’ Lenin wrote of this appeal, in particular, to the rank and file of the Mensheviks and SRs. ‘Perhaps. But if there is even one chance in a hundred, the attempt at realising this opportunity is still worthwhile.’

Late that evening of the 1st, the All-Russian Executive Committees resumed session. And as if to rubbish Lenin’s tantalising, as-yet-unseen thoughts, leading Mensheviks and SRs lined up to repudiate the passing of Kamenev’s motion by the Petrograd Soviet. They argued instead for support for Kerensky – notwithstanding his announcement that day that full power lay with a so-called Council of Five, the Directory on which he had insisted.

Kamenev taunted his opponents. He mocked them remorselessly for standing by while Kerensky ‘reduced [them] to nothing’. ‘I would hope’, he said, ‘that you will repel this blow as you repelled Kornilov’s attack.’ Martov, still adamantly against any Directory, proposed an all-socialist ministry. But the majority would not have it. Instead, in what could have been a bitter parody of wheel-spinning bureaucracy, they proposed yet another conference, a ‘Democratic State Conference’ this time, for all ‘democratic elements’.

Its purpose? Almost unbelievably, it was – to discuss the government.

In the early hours of 2 September, the committee rejected the Bolshevik and Menshevik–Internationalist proposals. Instead they offered their support to Kerensky.

The next day Lenin got word of the decision, just as he prepared to send ‘On Compromises’. No wonder he added to the manuscript a quick and melancholy postscript.

‘I say to myself: perhaps it is already too late to offer a compromise. Perhaps the few days in which a peaceful development was still possible have passed too… All that remains is to send these notes to the editor with the request to have them entitled: “Belated Thoughts”. Perhaps even belated thoughts are sometimes not without interest.’

Kerensky’s only sop to the Soviet was the exclusion from his dictatorial Directory of any Kadets. Alexeev took over as chief of staff, and Kornilov was transferred with thirty other conspirators to the Bykhov Monastery, where sympathetic jailers let his bodyguards stay with him, and families visited twice daily.

Striving to smother radical agitation, Kerensky directed military commanders, commissars and army organisations to end political activity among the troops. The order had precisely no effect. Kerensky’s negotiations with Kornilov were by then common knowledge, and they dried up whatever dregs of his authority remained. Only the moderate socialists still looked to him. For the right, he had betrayed Russia’s best hope; for the left, especially the soldiers, Kerensky had been negotiating with Kornilov a return to the hated regime of officers’ power.

Kerensky remained head of the government not through strength but despite weakness, propped up by widespread tensions elsewhere. If this was still, as Lenin described it, a balancing act, it was a negative one – a Bonapartism of the despised.

And yet, doggedly, in line with a certain stageism underlying their politics and their insistence on coalition, the moderate socialists still determined that power should remain Kerensky’s. Alliance with liberalism was non-negotiable. Even when opposing Kerensky’s concrete orders, they maintained that those orders were his to give.

On 4 September Kerensky demanded the dissolution of all revolutionary committees that had arisen during the crisis, including the Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution. That committee immediately met – in itself an act of civil disobedience – and bullishly expressed confidence that, given the continuing counterrevolutionary threat, such bodies would continue to operate.

Recalcitrance from the grassroots like this, as well as the growing and dramatic splits between left and right wings of the Mensheviks and SRs, kept Lenin hopeful for possibilities for compromise, his recent postscript notwithstanding. Between 6 and 9 September, in ‘The Tasks of the Revolution’, ‘The Russian Revolution and Civil War’ and ‘One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution’, he maintained that the soviets could take power peacefully. He even granted to his political opponents a degree of respect for their recent endeavours, declaring that an alliance of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs in a soviet regime would make civil war impossible.

These articles provoked consternation among his party comrades, particularly those on the Moscow Regional Bureau and Petersburg Committee. One might have thought them inured to surprise at Lenin’s switches, but here they were, astonished by this turn from the man they had recently defended from the left against Bolshevik moderates. Now, Lenin’s ‘On Compromises’ was rejected for publication by Rabochy put’ as too conciliatory.

And there were good reasons to be sceptical that his new aspiration for cooperation would bear fruit, even beside the Soviet All-Russian Committees’ support for Kerensky. On 3 September, the make-up of the newly planned Democratic Conference was announced, and it boded ill for the left. Of the 1,198 delegates, the proportion of seats for urban workers and soldiers was low compared to those for more conservative rural soviets, zemstvos and cooperatives.

Even so, the Bolsheviks sent out caucusing instructions to its delegates. Lenin’s approach seemed now, after all, compatible with that of the party right, those like Kamenev who thought the country unripe for socialist revolution, as well as with those more radical, for whom soviet power could be a transitional form away from capitalism. And all the while, up from the grassroots, there still came great pressure and hope for cross-party socialist unity. It seemed worth a shot to try for it.

The country was polarising not only between right and left, but between the politicised and the disengaged. Hence, perhaps counter-intuitively, as social tensions increased, the numbers voting in elections for the countless local bodies were declining. In Moscow in June, for example, 640,000 ballots were cast in municipal elections: now, three months later, there were only 380,000. And those who did vote gravitated to harder positions: the Kadet share grew from 17.2 to 31.5 per cent; the Bolsheviks soared from 11.7 to 49.5 per cent. And the moderates plummeted. The Mensheviks went from 12.2 to 4.2 per cent, and SRs from 58.9 to 14.7 per cent.

The Left SRs gained control of the party’s organisations and committees in Revel, Pskov, Helsingfors, Samara and Tashkent, among others, including Petrograd itself. They demanded a national Congress of Soviets and an exclusively socialist government. The Russian SR leadership seemed paralysed in the face of its surging left flank, which it had tried to high-handedly ignore. It now ‘expelled’ the Petrograd organisation, among others, for its deviation – a meaningless non-sanction, leaving all resources in place with the radicals. The SR CC staked everything on the Constituent Assembly elections, scheduled (then) for November.

In Baku, where Bolshevik orators had been shouted down at street meetings a few weeks before, the party’s motions were now sweeping factory committees and gatherings. ‘The Bolshevisation noticeable in all of Russia has appeared in the widest dimensions in our oil empire,’ wrote the local stalwart Shaumian of his region. ‘And long before the Kornilovshchina [Kornilov Affair]. The former masters of the situation, the Mensheviks, are not able to show themselves in the workers’ districts. Along with the Bolsheviks the SR-Internationalists [the left] have begun to get stronger… and have formed a bloc with the Bolsheviks.’

Across the empire, the Mensheviks were splintering. Some went to the right, as in Baku; at the other extreme, the Mensheviks in Tiflis, Georgia, took a hard-left position for a united socialist government that would include the Bolsheviks.

On the 5th, it was the turn of the Moscow Soviet to vote in favour of Kamenev’s 31 August resolution. A soviet congress in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, gained a Bolshevik majority. On the 6th, as Lenin’s ‘On Compromises’ was published, power in Ekaterinburg in the Urals passed into the hands of the soviets, and workers refused to recognise the Provisional Government. In protest at Kerensky’s Directory, nineteen Baltic Fleet committees recommended all ships fly red flags.

And whether or not dissent took socialist forms, the national aspirations of Russia’s minorities were amplifying. In Tashkent, Uzbekistan, tensions between Russian inhabitants and Muslim Uzbeks flared, until on 10 September local soldiers formed a revolutionary committee, expelling government representatives and taking control of the city. From the 8th to the 15th, the Ukrainian Rada provocatively convened a Congress of the Nationalities, bringing together Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, Tatars, Turks, Bessarabian Romanians, Latvians, Georgians, Estonians, Kazakhs, Cossacks and representatives of various radical parties. The Congress, in an escalation from the language of ‘cultural autonomy’, agreed that Russia must be ‘a federative-democratic republic’, each component part to decide how it would link to others. Except in the case of Poland, and to a lesser extent Finland, the orientation (let alone formal demand) was not for full independence. But dynamics towards independence in some form were at least implicit – and, later, would come very much to the fore.

The presidium of the Petrograd Soviet, composed of right Mensheviks and SRs, dismissed Kamenev’s victory of 1 September as just a side effect of how depleted the Soviet had been that night. On 9 September, they threatened to resign if the decision were not overturned.

The Bolsheviks were fearful they would not win the motion this time around. In an attempt to appeal to waverers and gain influence, they suggested a reform of the presidium along fair, proportional lines, to include previously unrepresented groups – including the Bolsheviks. ‘If coalition with the Kadets was acceptable,’ they argued in the chamber, ‘surely they can engage in coalition politics with the Bolsheviks in this organ.’

To this manoeuvre, Trotsky added a masterstroke.

Long ago, in the very earliest days of the Petrograd Soviet, he recalled, Kerensky himself, of course, had been on the presidium. So, asked Trotsky, did that presidium still consider Kerensky, he of the dictatorial Directory, a member?

The question put the moderates in an invidious position. Kerensky was now reviled as a counterrevolutionary – but their political commitment to collaboration forbade the moderate Mensheviks and SRs to repudiate him.

The presidium allowed that he was, indeed, one of them.

Not since Banquo had so unwelcome a ghost been at the table. The insult of Kerensky’s membership tipped the balance for the wider membership. The Petrograd Soviet sided, 519 to 414, with 67 abstentions, with the Bolsheviks and against their presidium, its toxic absent member included. The compromised presidium resigned en masse, in protest.

This is not to say that the Bolsheviks now commanded overwhelming support in this venue. They could still not be sure of passing all their motions. Nevertheless, this politicised procedural manoeuvre was a triumph. Lenin would later condemn it as excessively conciliatory: a harsh, unconvincing reproach, given its success and effects.

In September, the upward trajectory of the peasant war did not slow. In growing numbers, villagers sacked more estates, more violently, often with fire, often side by side with soldiers and deserters. In Penza, Saratov, Kazan, and especially Tambov, estates burned. Village soviets arose. Wrecking and theft blossomed into full-blown jacqueries.

Sometimes with these came notorious murders, like that of the landowner Prince Viazemskii the previous month, a killing that shocked liberal opinion because of the man’s charitable works. The situation grew bad enough for the Council of the Tambov Union of Private Landowners to issue a plea for help, signing it as ‘The Union of Unfortunate Landowners’.

In the first half of September, an official in Kozlovsk County put together a list of attacks on local estates. He documented fifty-four incidents, including ‘Condition of portions of the estate’. A spreadsheet of rural fury and destruction. ‘Wrecked’. ‘Wrecked and partly burned’. ‘Wrecked and burned’. ‘Wrecked’.

In the cities, a strike wave brought out not only skilled but white-collar and unskilled workers, hospital workers, clerks. Repeatedly the Red Guards now confronted government militias, and not always bloodlessly. Bosses locked out workers; starving proletarian communities raged from house to house in bands, hunting for both food speculators and food.

‘Anarchy essentially ruled over Petrograd,’ said K. I. Globachev. A former chief of the Okhrana, he had himself spent the days between February and August in the dark castle of Kresty jail, in punishment for that role. His observations, though, were fair. ‘Criminals multiplied to an unimaginable extent. Every day robberies and murders were committed not only at night, but also in broad daylight.’

The prisons could not hold the prisoners: due to the political upheavals, or the inadequacy of the guards, countless inmates simply walked out of jail to freedom. Globachev himself, fearful of how a secret policeman of the old regime would fare on the post-February streets, remained by choice behind Kresty’s walls.

In Ostrogozhsk, a town in Voronezh, looters targeted an alcohol store over three violent days that culminated in a vast conflagration. When troops finally suppressed this apocalyptic nihilo-drunkenness, fifty-seven people were dead, twenty-six of them burned alive.

The paper of the Right SRs, Volia naroda, editorialised about the growing anarchy with a terse, jittery, bullet-pointed list of ‘virtually, a period of civil war’.

How much worse, the paper wondered, could things get? It blamed Bolshevism.

Soviets across Russia were shifting to the left. In Astrakhan, a meeting of soviets and other socialists voted 276 to 175 against Menshevik/SR appeals for unity – including with groups that had been involved with Kornilov. Delegates instead backed the Bolshevik call to transfer power to workers and poor peasants.

In mid-September, military intelligence reported ‘open hostility and animosity… on the part of the soldiers; the most insignificant event may provoke unrest. Soldiers say… all the officers are followers of General Kornilov… [and] should be destroyed’. The war minister reported to the SRs ‘an increase of attacks on officers by soldiers, shootings, and throwing of grenades through the windows of officers’ meetings’. He explained the soldiers’ fury thus: ‘On the heels of declaring Kornilov a rebel, the army received instructions from the government to continue to execute his operative orders. Nobody wanted to believe that an order in such contradiction to the preceding instruction could be true.’

It was. Such was Kerensky’s crumbling government.

The festival feeling of March and April was replaced by the sense of a closing, an ending, and not in peace but in catastrophe, the mud and fire of war.

The renovated language of the early days seemed drowned out by bestial gibbering. ‘Where are they now, our deeds and our sacrifices?’ begged the writer Alexey Remizov of this apocalyptic world. He could find no answers. Only visions. ‘Smell of smoke and the howling of apes.’

On 14 September, the Democratic Conference opened in Petrograd’s famous Alexandrinsky Theatre. The hall was vivid with red banners, as if to express a unity of left purpose that was very much lacking. On the stage beyond the presidium’s table was the set of a play: behind the speakers were artificial trees, and doors to nowhere.

The hopes of radicals for the conference, never high, sank as attendees declared their affiliations. Some 532 SRs were present, only seventy-one of the party’s militant left wing; 530 Mensheviks, fifty-six Internationalist; fifty-five Popular Socialists; seventeen unaffiliated; and 134 Bolsheviks. The conference was heavily skewed in the moderates’ favour. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks were committed to trying to use the gathering to push for compromise, socialist government.

In their party caucus, Trotsky aspired to the transfer of power to the soviets; whereas Kamenev, unconvinced of the readiness of Russia for transformation and hoping to gain a wider base for workers’ rule, argued instead for the transfer of state power, ‘not to the Soviet’, but to a socialist coalition. The differences between these two positions bespoke distinct conceptions of history. But for the party delegates in that moment they were minor strategic nuances. Either way, the point was that Bolsheviks were fully engaged with the conference, poised to put the case for cooperation with the moderate left parties, for coalition and the peaceful development of the revolution – just as Lenin himself had argued since the start of the month.

So it was like a thunderbolt when, on the conference’s second day, the Bolshevik leadership received two new letters from their leader-in-hiding.

Now, hard as a stone, he upended all his recent conciliatory suggestions.

‘The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies in both capitals,’ began the first communication, ‘can and must take state power into their own hands.’ Lenin pilloried the Conference as ‘the compromising upper strata of the petty bourgeoisie’. He demanded Bolsheviks declare the necessity of ‘immediate transfer of all power to revolutionary democrats, headed by the revolutionary proletariat’, and then walk out.

Lenin’s comrades were utterly aghast.

Paradoxically, it was the continuation of the leftward shift of Russia itself, the trend that had raised in Lenin hopes of cooperation, that now changed his mind. Because with that tendency had come those triumphs for Bolsheviks in the two main cities’ soviets, and Lenin grew fretful about what would happen if the party did not act on its own. He feared revolutionary energies might dissipate, or the country slide on into anarchy – or that brutal counterrevolution might arise.

Unrest was shaking the German army and society. Lenin felt sure the whole of Europe was growing ripe for revolution, towards which a full-scale Russian revolution would be a powerful shove. And he was very anxious – for good reason, and in this he was not alone – lest the government surrender Petrograd, the red capital, to the Germans. If they did so, Bolshevik chances, he said, would be ‘a hundred times less favourable’.

The party had been right, he repeated, not to move in July, without the masses behind it. But now it had them.

Here again was one of those switchbacks that so discombobulated his comrades. It was not mere caprice, however, but the results of minute attention to shifts in politics, and exaggerated responses to these. Now, he insisted, with the masses behind it, the party must move.

Late on 15 September, a group of Bolshevik grandees left the Alexandrinsky and made for their HQ. There, in utmost secrecy, they discussed Lenin’s terrifying letters.

There was not a scintilla of support for his demands. He was utterly isolated. And, further, it was imperative to his comrades that his voice be muted, his message not get to Petrograd workers, or Petrograd or Moscow Bolshevik committees. Not because they would think Lenin wrong: because they might think him right. If that happened, Lomov would later explain, ‘many would doubt the correctness of the position adopted by the whole CC’.

The leadership delegated members to the MO and Petersburg Committee to make sure no calls for action reached workplaces or barracks. The CC readied themselves for conference business, as previously agreed.

Lenin’s new position was, literally, unspeakable. The CC voted to burn all but a single copy of each letter. As if they were pages from some dreadful grimoire. As if they would have liked to bury the ashes and sow the ground with salt.

Lenin’s scepticism about the potential of the starkly divided conference was vindicated. Throughout it, most Mensheviks and SRs remained as adamantly committed as ever to coalition with the bourgeoisie – which meant giving the despised and tottering Kerensky his head.

On the 16th, blithely dissimulating, the Bolshevik leadership published Lenin’s words – of two weeks before. They put out his amelioratory essay ‘The Russian Revolution and Civil War’.

Its author’s fury can be imagined: as far as he was concerned, that piece was now a fossil. On the 18th, the party’s formal conference statement on the government modelled itself on another of their leader’s antediluvian relics, ‘On Compromises’. Yes, the Bolsheviks did mobilise a demonstration outside the theatre, demanding a socialist government, but this rather dutiful intervention was far from the militant, armed, insurrectionary ‘surrounding’ of Alexandrinsky for which Lenin had just called.

Unable to tolerate what was going on, in agonies at his distance from the action, Lenin disobeyed a direct CC instruction. He decided to set out for the Finnish city of Vyborg (sharing its name with the district of the Russian capital), eighty miles from Petrograd. From there he would plot his way back into the heart of things.

He needed a disguise. Kustaa Rovio escorted him to a Helsingfors wigmaker, who threatened to scupper the pressing plan by insisting it would take a fortnight to personalise something suitable. The shopkeeper was flabbergasted to see Lenin impatiently fingering a ready-made grey hairpiece. Most buyers were attempting to rejuvenate themselves: this would have the opposite effect. But Lenin rebuffed all the man’s attempts to dissuade him. For a long time after that day, the wigmaker would tell the story of the youngish client who had wanted to look old.

In Vyborg, Lenin stayed a few weeks at 15 Alexanderinkatu, in the brick-making area of the city. He spent his days reading newspapers and writing, lodged in the shared dwelling of the socialist Latukka and Koikonen families. A solicitous and undemanding guest, the scourge of the established order quickly made himself popular. When at last – after more than one ferocious argument with the CC’s emissary, Shotman – he insisted on returning to Petrograd, the Latukkas and Koikonens were sad to see him go.

On the 19th, after four days of arguments about the future government and a gruelling five-hour roll call, the Democratic Conference at last voted on the principle of coalition with the bourgeoisie.

It was no surprise that the overrepresented moderates had it: the vote went 766 to 688 for coalition, with 38 abstentions. However, straight after this passed, delegates had to discuss two competing amendments.

The first insisted that those Kadets and others complicit in the Kornilov Affair be excluded from coalition; the second that the entirety of the Kadet party, as counterrevolutionaries, be excluded tout court.

The Bolsheviks, along with Martov, sensed an opportunity. They spoke for both amendments, no matter that they were not complementary.

There was tense, confused debate. But those who were deemed to have collaborated with Kornilov had come to be so roundly despised that when the votes came, both amendments passed. This meant the altered proposal had to be voted on anew. As doubly amended, it declared in favour of coalition with the bourgeoisie, but now on the basis that this should be without the participation of Kornilovites, including implicated Kadets; and, incoherently, that it should be without any Kadets at all.

The latter condition was unacceptable to the right moderates, who could not envisage any coalition without Kadets, and they therefore voted against. As, of course, did the left, because (though many had voted for at least one, if not both) these amendments were essentially irrelevant to them: they remained implacably opposed to any such coalition at all with the representatives of property. This absurd, temporary alliance of right and left in the conference ensured that the motion was overwhelmingly rejected.

No conclusion had been reached. Nothing was settled.

The man with whom the moderates urged coalition, Kerensky, remained pitifully weak, and growing weaker. He struggled, lashed out to shore up his authority. On 18 September he pronounced the dissolution of the Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet. The sailors responded simply that his order was ‘considered inoperative’.

The Democratic Conference, too, strained for relevance. After an exhausting all-day presidium session to deal with the unhelpful results of the vote on the 19th, a new presidium vote on coalition produced a split of fifty in favour and sixty against.

Almost unbelievably, with Beckettian comedy, faithful to some autotelic cycle of committee-generative committees, Tsereteli proposed establishing yet another body. This one, he said, would decide the make-up of a future cabinet, based on the Soviet’s political programme agreed on 14 August. The Bolsheviks (alone) had opposed this programme – but even their leadership, even now, still straining for the collaboration that Lenin had declared impossible, agreed to the formation of this ‘Democratic Council’, or Preparliament.

Which the presidium promptly voted must include propertied elements.

The previous day, Conference had approved coalition, but rejected coalition with Kadets. Now they rejected coalition, while mooting political cooperation with the bourgeoisie, including Kadets. The proceedings were outdoing their own absurdity.

The mechanisms, members and powers of the Preparliament were complicated and provisional, but that door did remain open to working with the right. A self-selecting team of moderates – since the left firmly opposed any such involvement of the bourgeoisie – were granted authority to meet with the government to decide a way forward.

And yet, despite all this, the Bolshevik CC decided on the 21st not to walk out of the Democratic Conference. They did vote among themselves against participating in the Preparliament, but so narrowly – by nine votes to eight – that they felt they must take the debate further, and convened an emergency meeting with delegates to discuss the issue.

Trotsky spoke for boycott, Rykov against. When after a stormy caucus the vote came, it was seventy-five to fifty in favour of taking part in the Preparliament.

Small wonder many Bolsheviks, particularly of the left, were sceptical of this decision. The very next day, as if to goad them, the unelected Preparliament commenced negotiations with Kerensky and his cabinet – and with representatives of the Kadets.

But the officials of the bourgeoisie with whom it negotiated would not accept the Soviet’s moderate 14 August programme. Nor would they agree to the Preparliament having any formal powers, insisting it should be merely consultative. In the face of this intransigence, Trotsky put to the newly inaugurated Preparliament a repudiation of their negotiations with the cabinet. But on the 23rd, this was easily defeated, and the negotiations themselves, albeit narrowly, were endorsed.

It was increasingly clear to Bolsheviks that other arenas of struggle might prove more congenial. They successfully demanded that the Soviet Central Executive Committee convene a nationwide Congress of Soviets in Petrograd, the next month. With what was surely relief, the party subordinated preparliamentary work to the tasks of building that October Congress, and of mobilising for the transfer of power to the soviets.

Meanwhile, with the inevitability of sunrise, Tsereteli’s team backed down on their own diluted platform, to make it more palatable to the despised Kadets on whom they would not turn their backs. One hundred and fifty representatives of property would, they agreed, be added to the 367 ‘democratic’ Preparliament delegates – who would, they also miserably allowed, have no power over the government.

And as this dilution, this self-abasement, continued, that bony hand of hunger was tightening its grip.

The American writer Louise Bryant had recently arrived in the capital. Walking in the cold of the early morning, she was horrified to see the food queues. Every day before dawn, people shivering in wretched clothes in the shadowy streets of Red Petrograd. They lined up for hours, long before the sun rose, as the wind scoured the boulevards. For milk, for tobacco, for food.

His comrades’ attempts to conceal Lenin’s intransigence were becoming increasingly blatant. From the city of Vyborg he sent rebuke after scathing rebuke, all of which were promptly bowdlerised.

As the Democratic Conference ended he dispatched to Rabochy put’ an essay entitled ‘Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks’, insisting that the Bolsheviks should have walked out, subjecting his party, and Zinoviev in particular, to remorseless criticism. The piece appeared on the 24th, as Preparliament negotiated – but now it was called ‘Heroes of Fraud’, and all attacks on the Bolsheviks had been excised.

Lenin’s fury grew awesome.

The next day, sulkily enabled by the Preparliament, Kerensky named his third coalition cabinet. Technically, again, it comprised a majority of socialists, but these moderate leftists held no key posts. And flatly breaking the Democratic Conference’s resolution, the Preparliament signed off on a cabinet that included the hated Tereshchenko, as well as four Kadets.

That was the day the Petrograd Soviet’s new, more representative presidium convened, after the walkout of its predecessors on the 9th. It was made up of one Menshevik, two SRs, and, in a historic shift that gave the party an absolute majority, four Bolsheviks.

One of the four was greeted with loud cheers and applause. Twelve years after he held a commanding role in the Soviet’s earlier, 1905 iteration, Leon Trotsky took his seat.

Trotsky immediately tabled a resolution stating that Petrograd’s workers and soldiers would not support the new, weak, reviled government. That instead, the solution lay with the forthcoming All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

Overwhelmingly, his motion passed.

And still Lenin’s comrades censored his writing. Between 22 and 24 September, his ‘From a Publicist’s Diary’ derided the party’s participation in the Preparliament. The Rabochy put’ board suppressed it – Trotsky among them, despite the piece praising him for his pro-boycott stance. On the 26th, with breathtaking cheek, they published instead part of ‘The Tasks of the Revolution’ – another pro-compromise throwback from that bygone epoch of three weeks previous.

His rage at last drove Lenin to conspiracy.

On the 27th, he wrote to Ivar Smilga, the ultra-left Bolshevik chair of the Regional Executive Committee of the Army, Fleet and Workers in Finland. Lenin did not so much flout as shatter the vaunted ‘discipline’ of a revolutionary party. What he attempted was no less than to create an alternative pro-insurrectionary axis within his organisation – an axis in which Finland was key.

‘It seems to me that we can have completely at our disposal only the troops in Finland and the Baltic Fleet, and only they can play a serious military role,’ he wrote to Smilga. ‘Give all your attention to the military preparation of the troops in Finland plus the fleet for the impending overthrow of Kerensky. Create a secret committee of absolutely trustworthy military men.’

These preparations took place amid increasing anxiety about the potential forthcoming fall of Petrograd – especially when, on 28 September, the Germans landed on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, near Riga. This was the start of Operation Albion, to gain control of the West Estonian archipelago, outflank Russian defences and leave Petrograd open for the taking.

Across Russia, fear was growing that the right, and the government, would simply surrender the city, this thorn in their side. That they would allow Red Petrograd to fall.

On 29 September, Lenin sent the CC ‘The Crisis Is Ripe’. It was a declaration of political war. This time, to circumvent the usual gagging treatment, he also circulated the document to the Petrograd and Moscow committees.

In the piece, Lenin repeated his strong conviction that Europe-wide revolution was at hand. He charged that unless the Bolsheviks seized power immediately, they would be ‘miserable traitors to the proletarian cause’. As far as he was concerned, waiting for the planned Second Soviet Congress was not just a waste of time, but a real risk to the revolution. ‘It is possible to take power now,’ he insisted, ‘whereas on 20–29 October you will not be given the chance.’

Then came the bombshell.

Even as this message arrived, Zinoviev was busy putting the leadership’s case in Rabochy put’ – a strategy directly at odds with Lenin’s. ‘Start getting ready for the Congress of Soviets,’ Zinoviev wrote. ‘Don’t become involved in any kind of separate direct action!’

Zinoviev: ‘Let’s concentrate all our energies on preparations for the Congress of Soviets.’

Lenin: ‘It is my profound conviction that if we “wait” for the Congress of Soviets, and let the present moment pass, it will ruin the revolution.’