The Bolsheviks Come to Power - New Edition: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd

On September 3, as Lenin was about to send "On Compromises" to Pet­rograd, he learned of the creation of the Directory, of the fundamental reluctance of a majority of moderate socialists to sanction the formation of an exclusively socialist government, and, to the contrary, of their efforts to organize a new coalition cabinet with representatives of the bourgeoisie from outside the Kadet Party. Under the influence of these reports, Lenin added a brief postscript to "On Compromises" in which he observed pes­simistically: "After reading today's [Sunday's] papers, I say to myself: perhaps it is already too late to offer a compromise. . . . Yes, to all appear­ances, the day when by chance the path of peaceful development became possible has already passed."³

Yet even now Lenin did not wholly abandon the idea of a peaceful course. During the first week and a half of September, his interest in a possible "compromise" was evidently kept at least partially alive by continu­ing, well-publicized wrangling within Menshevik and SR ranks regarding a future government, and festering antipathy between Kerensky and the moderate socialist leadership of the Soviet, as reflected, for example, in the stubborn resistance of the Committee for Struggle to government attempts at dissolving revolutionary committees created during the Kornilov crisis. At any rate, Lenin returned to the question of a possible compromise with the moderates and the nonviolent development of the revolution in three subsequent articles of this period: "The Tasks of the Revolution," "The Russian Revolution and Civil War," and "One of the Fundamental Ques­tions of the Revolution."⁴

In "The Tasks of the Revolution," written around September 6 although not published until the end of September, Lenin elaborated in some detail on the political scheme that he had first proposed in "On Compromises." "By seizing full power," he contended, "the soviets could still today—and this is probably their last chance—insure the peaceful development of the revolution, peaceful elections of deputies by the people, and a peaceful struggle of parties inside the soviets."⁵

In "One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution," written a day or two later (but published on September 14), Lenin expounded upon the supreme importance of state power in the development of any revolution and the new significance which he attached to the immediate transfer of "all power to the soviets":

The question of power cannot be evaded or brushed aside because it is the key question determining everything in a revolution's development. . . . The whole issue at present is whether the petty-bourgeois democrats have learned anything during these great, exceptionally eventful, six months. If not, then the revolution is lost, and only a victorious uprising of the pro­letariat can save it. If they have learned something, the establishment of a stable, unwavering power must be begun immediately. . . . Only soviet power could be stable and not be overthrown even in the stormiest months of the stormiest revolution. Only this power could insure a continuous and broad development of the revolution, a peaceful struggle of parties within the soviets.

Directing his attention to the Mensheviks and SRs Lenin went on to explain the meaning of the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" as he had resurrected it in "On Compromises":

The slogan "Power to the Soviets" is very often incorrectly interpreted to mean a "cabinet of the parties of the Soviet majority." . . . [Not so.] "Power to the Soviets" means radically reshaping the entire old state ap­paratus, that bureaucratic apparatus which hampers everything demo­cratic. It means removing this apparatus and substituting for it a new pop­ular one, i.e., a truly democratic apparatus of soviets, i.e., the organized and armed majority of the people—the workers, soldiers, and peasants. It means allowing the majority of the people initiative and independence not only in the election of deputies, but also in state administration, in ef­fecting reforms and various other changes.

Only a soviet regime, he suggested, would possess the courage and deci­siveness to institute a grain monopoly, impose effective controls over pro­duction and distribution, restrict the issue of paper money, insure a fair exchange of grain for manufactured goods, etc.—all measures required by the unprecedented burdens and hardships of the war and the unparalleled economic dislocation and danger of famine. Such a government, "steering a firm course," he explained, would in effect be the "dictatorship of the pro­letariat and poorer peasantry" whose necessity he had pointed to in the "April Theses." This government would deal forcefully with Kornilov and his cohorts and would complete the democratization of the army at once. Lenin assured his readers that two days after its creation, 99 percent of the army would be enthusiastic supporters of this dictatorship. It would give land to the peasants and full power to the local peasant committees, and hence would be certain of peasant support. Only a strong, popularly based government, Lenin contended, would be capable of smashing the resistance of the capitalists, displaying truly supreme courage and determination in the exercise of power, and securing the enthusiastic, selfless, and heroic support of the masses both in the army and among the peasants. Im­mediately transferring power to the soviets, he insisted, was the only way to make further progress gradual, peaceful, and smooth.⁶

In "The Russian Revolution and Civil War," the last essay of the series, probably completed on September 9 (and published on September 16), Lenin sought to allay the fears of the moderate socialists that breaking with the bourgeoisie would precipitate a bloody civil war, arguing that, to the contrary, the growing indignation and bitterness of the masses insured that further dalliance in the creation of a soviet government would make inevita­ble a workers' uprising and a civil war which, while bloody and to be avoided if at all possible, would in any case result in the triumph of the proletariat. "Only the immediate transfer of all power to the soviets would make civil war in Russia impossible," he explained. "A civil war begun by the bourgeoisie against an alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Socialist Rev­olutionaries and Mensheviks, against the soviets of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies, is inconceivable: such a 'war' would not last even until the first battle." In support of this line of reasoning, Lenin pointed to the helplessness of the bourgeoisie during the Kornilov affair. At that time, he declared, the alliance of Bolsheviks, SRs and Mensheviks "scored a victory over the counterrevolution with an ease heretofore never achieved in any revolution."⁷

It is indicative of the spirit of freewheeling debate within the Bolshevik organization in 1917 that even Lenin's new moderation was not accepted without opposition. By the time "On Compromises" was received by Bol­shevik leaders in Petrograd, the All-Russian Executive Committees had formally rejected the Bolsheviks' August 31 declaration. To the editors of Rabochii put\ the kind of "compromise" envisioned by Lenin seemed im­practicable. One member of the editorial board, Grigorii Sokolnikov, later recalled that "On Compromises" was initially rejected for publication. Upon Lenin's insistence, the decision was reconsidered, and the article was published on September 6.⁸

Objections to the views expressed in "On Compromises" also emerged among members of the consistently militant Bolshevik Moscow Regional Bureau⁹ and among some of the more radical leaders of the Petersburg

Committee, who, having rallied to Lenin's side on the question of breaking with the moderate socialists entirely and preparing for an eventual indepen­dent armed seizure of power at the Sixth Congress little more than four weeks earlier, were clearly dumbfounded by this latest abrupt shift in Lenin's outlook. Such a reaction on the part of some local leaders in Petro­grad emerged during an evaluation of the "current moment" by the Peters­burg Committee on September 7, the day after the publication of "On Compromises."¹⁰

Representing the Petersburg Committee's Executive Commission, the outspoken Slutsky opened this discussion. While accepting Lenin's conten­tion that the masses and the moderate socialists had been pushed leftward and that to some extent even the soviets had been rejuvenated by the Kor­nilov experience, he rebelled at the thought of rapprochement with the Men­sheviks and SRs, arguing that the party's main tasks were to restrain the masses from premature action and to prepare to use the soviets as combat centers in the seizure of power.¹¹ Later in the discussion, responding to arguments upholding Lenin's point of view, Slutsky again took the floor. "As in the factories, so among the poverty-stricken peasants, we see move­ment leftward," he declared. "For us to consider compromise now is ludi­crous. No compromises! . . . Our revolution is not like those which oc­curred in the West. Ours is a proletarian revolution. Our task is to clarify our position and to prepare unconditionally for a military clash." In a sim­ilar vein, G. F. Kolmin, an independent thinker who had been among the party's hotheads in July, rejected the idea that the soviets and the Mensheviks and SRs had somehow been fundamentally transformed by the Kornilov affair. "Their leftward swing," he insisted, "does not give us reason to believe the soviets will take a revolutionary path. Our position should stay the same. Our goal is not to go arm in arm with the Soviet leaders, but to try to tear more revolutionary elements away from them and mobilize them behind us." Interestingly, the remarks of the Central Committee's representative to the Petersburg Committee, Bubnov, seemed closer to the sentiments of Slutsky and Kolmin than to the ideas expressed by Lenin in "On Compromises."

It is difficult to gauge the extent of such feelings among members of the Petersburg Committee at this time because the discussion of the current moment at the September 7 meeting ended without the adoption of a reso­lution. In any case, as in the pre-July period, a peaceful course was compat­ible in the short run with the programmatic views both of right Bolsheviks like Kamenev—who considered Russia unprepared for a socialist revolu­tion, and for the time being looked no further than to the construction of a broadly based, exclusively socialist coalition government, including Bol­sheviks, creation of a democratic republic, and the convocation of the Con­stituent Assembly—and of those like Lenin, Trotsky, and local-level Bol­shevik leaders in Petrograd, to whom transfer of power to the soviets and a

Menshevik-SR government were seen as a transitory stage in the develop­ment of the socialist revolution, one which would quickly lead to the estab­lishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat and poorer peasantry. It is clear that among a majority of the Central Committee the course proposed by Lenin struck a responsive chord. And, under the Central Committee's direc­tion, the Petrograd Bolsheviks during the first weeks in September concen­trated less on deepening the gulf between them and the moderates, or pre­paring the masses for an early armed seizure of power in the spirit of Lenin's directives to the Sixth Congress, than on tasks consistent with the possibility of a peaceful development of the revolution. In particular, they devoted their energies to winning the support of still-wavering elements in the Menshevik-SR camp to the principle of breaking completely with the bourgeoisie, further expanding and consolidating the party's influence in mass organizations (most importantly in the Petrograd Soviet), and assuring the largest possible party representation in the coming Democratic State Conference, now scheduled for mid-September and designated by the Men­sheviks and SRs as the forum in which the question of coalition and the nature of a new government would be finally settled.

For the Bolsheviks, competition for influence in the Petrograd Soviet re­quired particular attention. Less than half of those eligible to vote in the Soviet had been present for the sensational August 31 session at which a majority voted support for the Bolshevik political program. A high percent­age of the absent deputies were soldiers (among whom SR influence had been very great heretofore), then still occupying defensive positions outside the capital. Thus it is not surprising that the moderate socialists played down the import of the August 3 1 Bolshevik triumph and looked to its early reversal.

The issue that SR-Menshevik strategists picked for a direct test of relative strength in the soviet was the future makeup of the Petrograd Soviet's Pre­sidium. From its inception in March, the Presidium had been composed exclusively of Mensheviks and SRs. Among its members were Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Chernov, Dan, Skobelev, Gots, and Anisimov—the moderates' best known and most authoritative public figures. These luminaries now declared their intention of resigning en masse if the vote of August 31 was not formally repudiated and the old leadership given a vote of confidence. This strategy put the Bolsheviks in a perilous position because it was possi­ble, even likely, that they could not command enough votes to win such a contest of personal prestige. Yet a reversal of the August 31 vote and a pledge of confidence in the Mensheviks and SRs would mean a serious set­back in the party's recently successful drive for broader mass support.

To avoid the possibility of such a defeat, the Bolsheviks attempted to diffuse the political significance of the vote on the Presidium by focusing attention on procedural matters. Specifically, they argued that it was unfair for the Presidium to be composed, as it had been in the past, exclusively of representatives of the majority. Instead of choosing between opposing polit­ical programs and in effect letting the winners form the Presidium, as the moderates proposed, the Bolsheviks suggested that the democratic proce­dure would be to reconstruct the Presidium on a proportional basis, adding an appropriate number of members from previously unrepresented groups. This plan appeared quite reasonable to the many deputies who leaned to the left but who might be reluctant to side with the Bolsheviks at the cost of wholly repudiating their own leaders.¹² In a effort to appeal to these waver­ing deputies, Kamenev, arguing before the Petrograd Soviet in favor of proportional representation, declared: "If coalition with the Kadets was ac­ceptable to the Mensheviks and SRs at the Moscow State Conference, surely they can engage in coalition politics with the Bolsheviks in this organ."

The crucial test vote on procedures for the reorganization of the Pre­sidium took place at the start of the Petrograd Soviet session on September 9. The Bolshevik position received a narrow majority.¹³ Lenin was subse­quently to criticize the Bolshevik leadership in the Soviet for championing proportional representation in the elections to the Presidium, viewing their action as merely another instance of his followers accepting an unnecessary degree of cooperation with other socialist groups at the expense of their own goals. The soundness of the proportional representation tactic, however, was borne out later at the same session when debate on another Bolshevik proposal revealed that the Bolsheviks did not yet have a dependable major­ity in the Petrograd Soviet. In this case, changes proposed by the Bol­sheviks in the basis upon which soldiers were to be represented in the Soviet were opposed by a majority, and the Bolsheviks were forced to withdraw their resolution at the last minute to avoid its certain defeat.¹⁴

Ultimately the party's sensitive strategy in the Petrograd Soviet worked to Bolshevik advantage. When the results of the September 9 vote on pro­portional representation were announced, the majority socialists who had comprised the old Presidium walked out in a huff, and on September 25 the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet was completely reorganized. Making up the new Presidium were two SRs, one Menshevik, and four Bolsheviks (Trotsky, Kamenev, Rykov, and Fedorov); Trotsky replaced Chkheidze as chairman.¹⁵

Concurrently, the Bolshevik leadership was also devoting considerable attention to preparations for the Democratic State Conference. In a cable of September 4 to thirty-seven subordinate party committees throughout the country and in a follow-up letter the next day, the party leadership had underlined the significance of a strong representation at the conference; Bol­sheviks were advised to become thoroughly familiar with the makeup of the conference and, wherever possible, to work for the election of party mem­bers. All delegates elected with Bolshevik support were to report to the headquarters of the Bolshevik Soviet fraction at Smolny for orientation im­mediately upon arrival in the capital.¹⁶

Hopes that the Democratic State Conference would repudiate coalition politics and initiate steps to form a new, exclusively socialist government were dealt a blow with the announcement of the conference's composition. Workers', soldiers', and peasants' soviets; municipal dumas; army commit­tees; trade unions; and a dozen lesser institutions were to be represented at the conference by some 1,198 delegates. But the proportion of seats allotted to urban workers' and soldiers' soviets and trade unions, institutions in which the Bolsheviks were strongest, was low in comparison with the rep­resentation given rural peasant soviets, zemstvos, and cooperatives, still dominated by the moderates.

Even so, the Bolsheviks did not completely give up the hope that the conference might create a socialist government. At a meeting on September 13 the Central Committee assigned Trotsky, Kamenev, Stalin, Miliutin, and Rykov to draw up an appropriate platform for presentation to the conference.¹⁷ Based in part on Lenin's writings of early September, the resulting platform was predicated on the assumption that a peaceful de­velopment of the revolution was still possible and that a revolutionary gov­ernment could and should be created by the conference.¹⁸ Like Lenin's "On Compromises," the Bolshevik platform for the Democratic State Confer­ence was basically an appeal to previous supporters of coalition politics to break definitively with the bourgeoisie, and an expression of faith in the soviets as organs of revolutionary government. The platform declared bluntly that the Bolsheviks had not tried to take power against the or­ganized will of the majority of the working masses and would not. In lan­guage similar to Lenin's, it was affirmed that with full freedom of agitation and the continuous renovation of the soviets from below , the struggle for influence and power would take place within the soviets.¹⁹ At the same time the platform differed from "On Compromises" in not specifically ex­cluding the possibility that the Bolsheviks would participate in a soviet government;²⁰ this appears to have been the result of Kamenev's influence.

On the eve of the Democratic State Conference it became apparent that the extreme left's apprehension regarding the probable composition of the conference was well founded. Of the arriving delegates willing to declare a political preference, 532 turned out to be SRs (of whom 71 were Left SRs), 530 were Mensheviks (of whom 56 were Internationalists), 55 were Popular Socialists, and 17 affirmed that they had no specific party affiliation. Only 134 were Bolsheviks.²¹

Still, in preliminary discussions at individual party caucuses and at meet­ings of delegates by institutional affiliation it was immediately revealed that on the crucial question of further coalition with nonsocialist parties there was no consensus among the moderates; the major divisions over this issue which had first appeared in the wake of the Kornilov crisis had, if anything, deepened. The uneasiness of many Menshevik and SR leaders previously loyal to the Provisional Government was voiced by the Menshevik Bog- danov, who commented on the opening day of the conference: "At this

terrible time we must recognize without equivocation that we don't have a governmental authority; we have had a continuous reshuffling of the cabinet, governmental leapfrog in no way distinguishable from that of tsarist times. The result of these never-ending ministerial switches has been total ineffectiveness, for which we ourselves are responsible. . . . It is pain­ful for me as a supporter of coalition to say so, but I must acknowledge that the main cause of this governmental paralysis has been the coalition charac­ter of the cabinet."²²

Thus, as the Democratic State Conference got underway, there were at least a few encouraging signs for Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd who still held out hope that a majority of delegates might vote to break with Kerensky and create a homogeneous socialist government. This lingering hope was voiced by Zinoviev in a front-page editorial titled "Our Triumph and Our Tasks," published in the September 13 issue of Rabochii put" and no doubt circulated among the arriving delegates:

The chief question now confronting every revolutionary is whether or not there remain possibilities for the peaceful development of the revolu­tion and what needs to be done to strengthen these possibilities. And it is necessary to answer that any such possibilities hinge on the adoption of a specific compromise, a definite agreement between the working class, once and for all following our party, and the masses who make up the petty bourgeois democracy and who follow the SRs and Mensheviks. . . . An agreement with the petty bourgeois democracy is desirable and, under conditions which are well known, possible! . . . The All-Russian Confer­ence convening shortly could still open the way for such a peaceful outcome.²³

The Democratic State Conference opened in the Alexandrinsky Theater, now the Pushkin Theater, on the night of September 14. The famous old hall, its loges, orchestra, and balconies crammed with delegates from all over Russia, took on an appearance quite unknown in tsarist days. The red plush upholstery of the seats and boxes blended with the crimson sea of revolutionary banners. Onstage the curtains were raised to reveal a set de­picting a large hall with several doors flanked by artificial junipers and palms. The conference presidium was seated behind a long, narrow table extending across the stage; before the table stood a lectern draped with red bunting and bearing a sign cautioning, "No Smoking!"

The Bolsheviks' hopes for the creation of a new government at the Democratic State Conference were voiced in the formal opening address made in the party's behalf by Kamenev at the first conference session and in comments by Trotsky to a caucus of the Bolshevik delegation the following afternoon. In his lengthy speech, Kamenev declared that the record achieved by the various cabinets over the preceding six months made it impossible to retain any confidence in the policies proposed by Kerensky.

Kamenev insisted that conditions had deteriorated to such a tragic state that time for further experiments with coalition government had run out. The government's failure to squelch the counterrevolutionary movement in the army, as well as actions taken in regard to agriculture, food supply, and the conduct of foreign affairs, he argued, were errors not of this or that minister-socialist, but of the political influence of the bouregoisie as a class:

There has not been a single revolution in which the realization of the ideals of the workers did not provoke the terror of counterrevolutionary forces. ... If the democracy is unw illing to take power now , it must honestly tell itself: "We don't have confidence in our own powers and so you Burishkins and Kishkins²⁴ must come and take charge of us, we don't know how to do it." . . . You can write a program to satisfy the working democracy but it is pure utopianism to believe that such a program would be pursued genuinely and honestly by the bourgeoisie. . . . The only possible course is for state power to be transferred to the democracy—not to the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, but to that democracy which is well enough represented here. We must establish a new government and an institution to which that government must be responsible.²⁵

Trotsky, in his orientation to Bolshevik delegates alone, explained that in so far as possible, their primary aim should be to convince the conference to reject coalition with the privileged classes and to take the organization of a new government into its own hands; if successful, this would be the first step in the transfer of power to the soviets.²⁶

It is worth noting that while Kamenev was speaking out for the creation of a broad, democratic coalition government (reflective of the various groups invited to the Democratic State Conference) and against an exclusively soviet regime, Trotsky urged the transfer of full power to the soviets. This important distinction bespoke fundamentally different views on the de­velopment of the Russian revolution which were soon to erupt into one of the bitterest and most important internal controversies in the history of Bolshevism. In the context of the present discussion, however, the crucial point is that both Kamenev and Trotsky, along with most Petrograd Bolsheviks, viewed positively the work of the Democratic State Confer­ence and the prospects for peaceful development of the revolution.

In view of the Bolsheviks' prevailing moderation at this time, and consid­ering that since early September Lenin himself had been lending encour­agement to such an approach, one can imagine the shock experienced by the top Bolshevik leadership when, on September 15, they received two letters written by Lenin between September 12 and 14 in which he completely abandoned the moderate positions embodied in "On Compromises" and summoned the Bolsheviks to take upon themselves the preparation of an immediate armed uprising.

There appear to have been a number of mutually supporting reasons for this outwardly dramatic shift. On the one hand, factors such as the strong position of the extreme left in Finland, the winning of majority support for the Bolshevik program in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets and in a number of other regional soviets, the massive expansion of social upheaval among land-hungry peasants in the countryside, the continuing disintegra­tion of the army at the front and the soldiers' increasingly insistent demands for immediate peace, and signs of revolutionary unrest in the German Fleet seem to have encouraged Lenin to hope that seizure of power by the Bol­sheviks would have strong support in the cities and would no longer be solidly opposed by the provinces and the front, and that the creation of a genuinely revolutionary government in Russia would serve as a catalyst for mass rebellions in other European countries. And, of course, as Lenin began to sense the possibility of a quick resolution to the problem of creat­ing an extreme left government, his interest in "compromise" with the moderate socialist parties cooled. On the other hand, somewhat contradic­torily, Lenin also seems to have become genuinely alarmed that the gov­ernment might somehow still manage to deflate the revolution by negotiat­ing a separate peace, surrendering Petrograd to the Germans, manipulating elections to the Constituent Assembly, or provoking a disorganized popular insurrection. He also seems to have worried that if the party delayed too long, it would begin to lose influence among the masses and become power­less to halt Russia's slide into complete anarchy.

The first of Lenin's two explosive letters, this one addressed to the Cen­tral, Petersburg, and Moscow committees, began: "The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in the soviets of workers' and soldiers' deputies in both capitals, can and must take state power into their own hands. They can because the active majority of revolutionary elements in the two chief cities is large enough to carry the people with it, to overcome the opposition's resistance, to smash it, and to gain and retain power." The Democratic State Conference, he insisted, "represents not a majority of the revolution­ary people, but only the compromising upper strata of the petty bourgeoisie." Why was it necessary for the Bolsheviks to assume power "at this very moment'? Because, affirmed Lenin, "the impending surrender of Petrograd will make our chances a hundred times less favorable." Selecting the precise moment for the start of an uprising would be up to local leaders on the spot; what the top Bolshevik leadership had to do at once was to take advantage of the presence in Petrograd of what amounted to a party congress to set the task of organizing an "armed uprising in Petrograd and Moscow, the seizure of power, and the overthrow of the government." By taking power in Mos­cow and Petrograd at once (it didn't matter to him which came first), Lenin concluded, "we shall win absolutely and unquestionably."²⁷

In his second letter, which bore the title "Marxism and Insurrection" and was addressed to the Central Committee alone, Lenin argued that "treating insurrection as an art" was not Blanquism, as alleged by "present-day op­portunists," but a fundamental tenet of Marxism. To be successful, he wrote, insurrection had necessarily to rely not upon conspiracy or upon a party, but upon the proletariat, and it had to be based on a revolutionary upsurge of the people. A final condition was that a successful insurrection had to be timed to occur when the activity of the advanced ranks was at its height, while, on the other hand, vacillations within the enemy camp were strongest. Affirming that refusal to treat insurrection as an art once these preconditions existed was a "betrayal of Marxism and of the revolution," Lenin went on to explain why an immediate insurrection was the "order of the day." He contrasted the existing situation with conditions prevailing in July, observing that at that time the Bolsheviks had still lacked the sup­port of the proletariat; now, as a result of the persecution of the Bolsheviks and the Kornilov experience, the party had majorities in the soviets in both Moscow and Petrograd. In July there had been no countrywide revolution­ary upsurge, but such an upsurge had followed the Kornilov revolt. Fi­nally, earlier there had not been serious wavering among the Bolsheviks' enemies, while now there was a significant degree of vacillation. "We could not have retained power politically on July 3-4," Lenin concluded, "because before the Kornilov revolt, the army and the provinces could and would have marched against Petrograd. Now the picture is entirely differ­ent. . . . All the objective conditions exist for a successful insurrection."

Toward the end of "Marxism and Insurrection," Lenin demanded that the Central Committee consolidate the Bolshevik group at the Democratic State Conference—"without fearing to leave the waverers in the waverers' camp." It was to draw up a brief declaration ("the briefer and the more trenchant the better") "emphasizing in no uncertain manner the irrelevance of long speeches and of 'speeches' in general, the need for immediate action to save the revolution, the absolute necessity for a complete break with the bourgeoisie, for the removal of the present government in its entirety . . . and for the immediate transfer of all power to revolutionary democrats, headed by the revolutionary proletariat." The Bolsheviks, "having read this declara­tion, and having appealed for decisions and not talk, for action and not resolution-writing," were to dispatch their "entire group to xht factories and barracks." At the same time, treating insurrection in a Marxist way, as an art, and without losing a single moment, the Bolsheviks were to "organize a headquarters of insurgent detachments, distribute forces, move the reliable regiments to the most important points, surround the Alexandrinsky Thea­ter, occupy the Peter and Paul Fortress, [and] arrest the General Staff and the government." They were to "mobilize the armed workers and call them to fight the last desperate fight, occupy the telegraph and telephone ex­changes, establish headquarters in the central telephone exchange, and con­nect it by telephone with all the factories, regiments, and points of armed conflict."²⁸

Not surprisingly, the initial response of Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd to these messages was strongly reminiscent of the one which had been ac­corded Lenin's earlier "Letters from Afar." "We were all aghast," Bukharin was to recall a few years later.²⁹ Hastening from the Alexandrinsky Theater to their own headquarters, members of the Central Committee met in emergency secret session the evening of September 15 to discuss the letters. Present were not only those Central Committee members normally in Pet­rograd and responsible for the day-to-day direction of the party (that is, Bubnov, Dzerzhinsky, Ioffe, Miliutin, Sverdlov, Sokolnikov, Stalin, and Uritsky), but also Kamenev, Kollontai, and Trotsky (this was Trotsky's second Central Committee meeting since his release from jail); the Moscow Bolsheviks Bukharin, Lomov, Nogin, and Rykov; and Stepan Shaumian, Central Committee representative of the Bolshevik organization in the Caucasus. Copies of Lenin's letters had been distributed to most of those in attendance prior to their deliberations.³⁰ The published protocol of the en­suing discussion is extremely fragmentary.³¹ The committee agreed on the advisability of scheduling an early meeting specifically devoted to tactical questions. A suggestion by Stalin that Lenin's letters be circulated was re­jected, despite the fact that the first letter was specifically addressed to the Petersburg and Moscow committees, as well as to the Central Committee. To the contrary, most of those present were apparently concerned above all that they be quietly destroyed. Bukharin later maintained that the Central Committee considered burning the letters and, indeed, unanimously agreed to do so.³² According to the official protocol, the committee voted to pre­serve only one copy of each letter and to take steps to prevent a movement into the streets.

Lomov later pointed to one of the Central Committee's overriding con­cerns at this time: "We are apprehensive about what would happen if the letters reached the Petrograd workers . . . and the Petersburg and Moscow committees because this would have immediately introduced enormous dis­cord into our ranks. . . . We were afraid that if Lenin's words reached the workers, many would doubt the correctness of the position adopted by the whole Central Committee."³³ As an additional safeguard, the Central Committee concluded its discussion on September 15 by charging members assigned to working with the Military Organization and the Petersburg Committee (Sverdlov and Bubnov respectively) with responsibility for insuring that no appeals for immediate action along the lines demanded by Lenin were made in barracks and factories.

For the time being, then, Lenin's appeals for the overthrow of the Provi­sional Government were unceremoniously turned aside. Virtually the only change in the public behavior of the Bolsheviks at the Democratic State Conference after receipt of Lenin's messages was that Trotsky, for one, began to play down the possibility of the conference's forming a govern­ment as the first step toward the transfer of power to the soviets. Instead, he now categorically insisted on the transfer of political power directly to the soviets. This subtle but important shift was reflected at a caucus of conference delegates from workers' and soldiers' soviets on September 18. There Trotsky got into a heated argument with Martov, who spoke in favor of the creation by the conference of a broad socialist government including representatives of all the major groups invited to the Democratic State Con­ference. Countering Martov, Trotsky contended that the composition of the Democratic State Conference was such that endowing it with complete governmental power would be a rash step; rather, it was absolutely neces­sary to transfer power to the soviets, which had fully proved themselves to be a powerful, constructive political force.³⁴

Bolshevik efforts to prevail upon conference delegates to break with the bourgeoisie and take the first steps toward the creation of a revolutionary government were not terminated. The party's formal statement on the gov­ernment question, the platform which had been authorized by the Central Committee on September 13 and which, as we have seen, was modeled in part after Lenin's "On Compromises," was formally read to a session of the conference on September 18. That night, in response to Bolshevik appeals, 150 delegates from Petrograd factories and military units staged a demon­stration outside the Alexandrinsky Theater in support of the creation of an exclusively socialist government. Thus, instead of withdrawing from the conference and going to the masses with a call to rise, as Lenin advised, the party was mobilizing workers and soldiers to apply pressure on the Demo­cratic State Conference to pursue a more radical course.³⁵

For Lenin, the presentation of the Bolshevik platform to the Democratic State Conference was an unmistakable sign of the party leadership's rejec­tion of the assumptions contained in his mid-September letters. No doubt Lenin was even more disturbed upon reading the September 16 edition of Rabochiiput\ which featured his earlier essay, "The Russian Revolution and Civil War," with its author identified. Not only had the Central Committee taken steps to insure that the party at large would not be influenced by his appeals for an immediate uprising, but it also was circulating his more moderate views of the previous week, inevitably conveying the impression that they constituted his thinking at the moment.

At this point Lenin decided to return at once to Petrograd despite the fact that the Central Committee had expressly forbidden him to do so, ostensi­bly out of fear for his safety. On September 17 or shortly thereafter, with­out the Central Committee's authorization,³⁶ Lenin traveled from Helsing­fors to Vyborg, within eighty miles of the capital, and advised Krupskaia and Sverdlov, although not the Central Committee, of his determination to return to Petrograd.³⁷

Meanwhile, at the Democratic State Conference, delegates had spent the better part of four days (September 14-18) in group meetings, party gather­ings, and official sessions turning over all questions relating to the nature of the future government. A formal vote on this issue was held on September 19, and it turned out to be a complete fiasco for everyone concerned. Ac­cording to procedures worked out in advance by the conference presidium, the delegates were first to register their views on coalition in principle. Next, they were asked to vote on two proposed amendments: (1) that ele­ments of the Kadet Party and other groups which had been involved in the Kornilov affair be excluded from participation in the coalition; and (2) that the entire Kadet Party be excluded. Finally, the delegates were to vote on the entire resolution as amended.

In an initial roll call vote which lasted five hours, the principle of coali­tion with the bourgeoisie was accepted by a count of 766 in favor, 688 opposed, with 38 abstentions. This vote confirmed Bolshevik apprehensions regarding the makeup of the conference; representatives of workers' and soldiers' soviets and trade unions had voted overwhelmingly against coali­tion, but they were overpowered by large majorities of the more numerous deputies from peasant soviets, military committees, zemstvos, and coopera­tives, who supported coalition.³⁸ Next, the conference acted on the two proposed amendments. On behalf of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky spoke in sup­port of both, as did Martov for the Menshevik-Internationalists and Boris Kamkov for the Left SRs. To the dismay of many, though obviously not all, of those who favored coalition in principle, both amendments were passed. The entire resolution as amended—that is, the acceptance of coali­tion in principle but with the exclusion of the Kadet Party as well as other groups that had supported Kornilov—satisfied almost no one. The Bol­sheviks, of course, opposed the resolution; they were joined by large num­bers of coalition supporters who simply could not imagine the creation of a viable coalition government without the Kadets. Only 183 delegates voted for the resolution as amended, with 813 opposed and 80 abstentions.³⁹

Thus four days of the most intense discussion and debate had fully re­vealed the fundamental difference of opinion among "democratic groups" but had settled absolutely nothing regarding the makeup of the future gov­ernment. The relationship of the socialists to the government was, if any­thing, more confused than it had been before the contradictory voting of September 19. That such a situation could not continue was abundantly clear to the Presidium of the Democratic State Conference; upon its insis­tence, before adjournment of the session of September 19, conference dele­gates resolved not to disperse until mutually acceptable conditions for the formation, functioning, and program of a new government were somehow agreed upon.

The following day the Presidium scheduled formal discussions aimed at breaking the existing impasse. Participating in this gathering were Pre­sidium members and representatives of the various parties and groups attending the Democratic State Conference. Their bitter debates on the

government issue lasted from morning until early evening. Tsereteli, point­ing to the deep divisions which had emerged within the democracy the previous day in regard to the question of coalition, argued that the democ­racy by itself could not organize a viable government. He was joined by Gots and Avksentiev, who stressed once again the importance of maintain­ing some kind of political alliance with the bourgeoisie. Kamenev was the Bolsheviks' chief spokesman at this meeting. Contending unconvincingly that the formation of a coalition government had been decisively rejected the previous day, he pressed the case for a "homogeneous democratic minis­try." To calm the fears of the moderates in regard to what the Bolsheviks' attitude toward such a government might be, he added categorically: "We will not overthrow such a government. We will support it insofar as it pursues a democratic policy and leads the country to the Constituent As­sembly." After the delegates had talked themselves hoarse, a formal vote was taken on the question of coalition: fifty delegates voted in favor; sixty were opposed.

In view of this continuing, almost even, split, Tsereteli suggested a somewhat different tack. He proposed that an attempt be made to come to a consensus regarding the political program to be pursued by the future gov­ernment and to leave the precise character of the cabinet to the discretion of a permanent representative body which would be selected by the confer­ence and to which the government would be responsible until the convoca­tion of the Constituent Assembly. This course was subsequently adopted. With regard to the program to be pursued by a new government, most delegates expressed solidarity with the Soviet's "August 14 program";⁴⁰ only the Bolsheviks voiced opposition. But the Bolsheviks joined the rest of the participants in this meeting in supporting the creation of a permanent representative body.⁴¹

Kamenev hoped that this new⁷ institution would be "homogeneous," that a significant proportion of its membership would come from workers' and soldiers' soviets, and hence that it would be less resistant to breaking with the bourgeoisie than the Democratic State Conference. It became clear al­most immediately, however, that any such hope was ill-founded. With the Bolsheviks again alone in opposition, the participants in this meeting went on to agree that the new permanent body (it was initially christened the "Democratic Council" but was referred to more often as the "Preparlia- ment") should include both representatives of groups at the conference and propertied elements. This was a direct reversal of the previous day's voting pattern. At the September 19 session the delegates had begun by approving coalition in principle and then had eliminated any practical possibility of actually creating a coalition government by rejecting Kadet participation. Then, on September 20, an ad hoc meeting of delegates, after initially re­jecting coalition, adopted a resolution indirectly reintroducing the possibil­ity of political cooperation with representatives of the bourgeoisie, not ex­cluding the Kadets.⁴²

Proponents of coalition were quick to seize upon this opportunity. At a conference plenum late the same night, September 20, Tsereteli introduced a resolution, subsequently passed, which shifted responsibility for a final decision on the government question to the Preparliament. Among other things, this resolution provided that the future government would work to realize the program of August 14, that it would pursue an energetic foreign policy aimed at concluding a general peace, and that it would be responsible and accountable to a permanent representative body which, pending convo­cation of the Constituent Assembly, would reflect the popular will. The resolution specified that this representative body, the Preparliament, was to be made up of delegates to the Democratic State Conference. The resolu­tion contained nothing specific about the participation of the bourgeoisie in either the Preparliament or the future government; however, it tacitly en­dorsed the possibility of another coalition with the vague statement that if bourgeois elements were to be drawn into the government, the permanent representative body would be enlarged by the inclusion of bourgeois groups. The resolution specified that under those circumstances, the pre­dominance of democratic elements would have to be maintained. Finally, the resolution provided for the selection of five conference delegates (this figure was later doubled) to begin negotiations aimed at facilitating the con­struction of a government in accordance with these provisions. These dele­gates were to report to the Democratic Council on the results of their ef­forts, which were to be subject to confirmation by the council.⁴³ Thus the long-anticipated Democratic State Conference ended in what amounted to an evasion: a few as-yet-unnamed representatives were to be made respon­sible for somehow devising an acceptable solution to the cabinet crisis which more than a thousand delegates to the conference from all over Rus­sia had been unable to resolve.

In part because opponents of further cooperation with the bourgeoisie would have no part of formal discussions with Kerensky, the conference negotiating team was inevitably dominated by prominent proponents of co­alition politics from the Soviet—people like Tsereteli, Avksentiev, Gots, and Chkheidze—along with representatives of cooperative and zemstvo groups who viewed the participation of authoritative segments of the bourgeoisie in the government as absolutely essential for Russia's survival. This delegation met in acrimonious bargaining sessions with Kerensky, other cabinet ministers, representatives of the Kadet Central Committee, and business and industrial figures from Petrograd and Moscow on Sep­tember 22-24. As was to be expected, spokesmen for the bourgeoisie were unwilling to accept the Soviet's program of August 14 as the basis for gov­ernment policy; while not totally opposed to the idea of a Preparliament, they insisted that legally only the Provisional Government had the author­ity to create such an organ, and that, in any case, under no circumstances could a new cabinet be responsible to the Preparliament—in other words, that the latter could be no more than an advisory body. At the same time, Kerensky was absolutely adamant on the need to form another coalition cabinet.

For practical purposes, then, members of the delegation from the Demo­cratic State Conference were faced with the choice of backing down on the more controversial planks in the August 14 program and tacitly acknowl­edging the government's primacy over and independence of the Preparlia­ment, or breaking with Kerensky and giving up the prospect of bringing representatives of the bourgeoisie into the government. Predictably, they opted for the first alternative. In a sense, the tactics that Tsereteli's delega­tion pursued in the complex political negotiations of September 22-24 were the opposite of those employed by Tsereteli at the Democratic State Con­ference. At the conference, Tsereteli had managed to gain an agreement that allowed for the possibility of a coalition by putting aside the question of the precise makeup of the cabinet and focusing attention on the program to be pursued by the government irrespective of its composition. Now, in the face of firm resistance both to the August 14 program as the basis for policy and to the responsibility of the government to the Preparliament, Tsereteli was forced to deemphasize these considerations and, instead, to stress the critical importance of an alliance between the democracy and the bourgeoisie as the only possible basis for solving Russia's ills.

During the last phase of the negotiations of September 22-24 the August 14 program was revised and softened so as to make it palatable to the Kadets. At this time, it was agreed that the government would quickly prepare and issue a decree formally establishing the Preparliament, and that this institution, now renamed the Council of the Republic but still referred to most often as the Preparliament, would be composed of the 367 delegates already selected from the Democratic State Conference plus up to 150 rep­resentatives of the propertied classes. It was also understood that legally this would be a purely advisory body and, most important, that it would have no formal jurisdiction over the government.⁴⁴

Late on the night of September 23, the Preparliament, as originally formed at the close of the Democratic State Conference, met and handily rejected a Bolshevik declaration presented by Trotsky repudiating the Tsereteli delegation's negotiations as a betrayal of the will of the masses and calling for the creation of a "genuinely revolutionary government." Instead, by a narrow margin, the Preparliament passed a resolution introduced by Dan tacitly endorsing the new arrangements. Having done this, the dele­gates adjourned to await formal reconstitution by the Provisional Govern­ment of an expanded assembly. The way was now open for Kerensky to name formally a new coalition cabinet, and he did so on September 25. The

new cabinet included the Kadets Alexander Konovalov, Kishkin, Sergei Smirnov, and Anton Kartashev. While technically a majority of the minis­ters were socialists, the key Foreign Ministry remained in the hands of Tereshchenko, Konovalov was named deputy prime minister and minister of industry, and Kerensky stayed on as head of the government and commander-in-chief of the army.⁴⁵

On September 21, the day after the Democratic State Conference adopted Tsereteli's resolution sanctioning discussions with Kerensky on the formation of a new government (but before the results of these negotiations were known), the Bolshevik Central Committee met to consider the party's immediate political course. What was perhaps most striking about this meeting was that even now, in the face of the Democratic State Conference's failure to break with the politics of coalition, Lenin's recom­mendation that the urban masses be called to arms was given absolutely no consideration.⁴⁶ To be sure, this was probably due partly to the influence of right Bolsheviks such as Kamenev, Rykov, and Nogin. But the fact re­mains that even party officials who fully shared Lenin's fundamental as­sumptions regarding the necessity and feasibility of an early socialist revolu­tion in Russia were skeptical of successfully mobilizing the masses behind the "immediate bayonet charge" envisioned by Lenin. In part because of their continuing interaction with workers and soldiers, leaders like Trotsky, Bubnov, Sokolnikov, and Sverdlov possessed what appears to have been a realistic appreciation of the limits of the party's influence and authority among the masses, and of the latter's attachment to the soviets as legitimate democratic organs in which all genuinely revolutionary groups would work together to fulfill the revolution. Also, as a result of the Kornilov experi­ence they were much less concerned than Lenin about Kerensky's capacity to damage the left. Consequently, they now began to associate the seizure of power and the creation of a new government with the convocation in the near future of a national Congress of Soviets—this to take advantage of the legitimacy of the soviets in the eyes of the masses.

It should be added that in the wake of the Democratic State Conference, right Bolsheviks also supported the early convocation of a Congress of Soviets and paid lip service to the slogan "All Power to the Soviets." The essential difference between "Leninists in spirit," like Trotsky, and right Bolsheviks, like Kamenev, was that while the former looked to a soviet congress to transfer power to a government of the extreme left pledged to immediate peace and a radical program of internal change, the latter viewed a Congress of Soviets as a vehicle for building a broader, stronger alliance of "democratic groups," which might, at the most, form a caretaker all- socialist coalition government, pending convocation of the Constituent As­sembly.

Hence the central issue that divided the party leadership in Petrograd as the Democratic State Conference drew to a close was not the organization of an immediate popular uprising, which everyone in the coterie of high Bolsheviks privy to Lenin's most recent recommendations seems to have rejected categorically, or the immediate convocation of a Congress of Soviets, which all accepted. Rather, it was whether to stage a formal walk­out from the Democratic State Conference and whether to participate in the Preparliament, the former in its last hours and the latter in the process of formation and scheduled to open on September 23. To the Kamenev fac­tion, taking advantage of the end of the Democratic State Conference and the proceedings of the Preparliament to discredit coalition politics and to maintain alliances with wavering elements in the Menshevik-SR camp was an essential counterpart to the consolidation, at the coming Congress of Soviets, of the strongest possible broad socialist bloc. Meanwhile, to party leaders of Trotsky's persuasion, demonstratively withdrawing from the Democratic State Conference and boycotting the Preparliament constituted the necessary prelude to utilizing a Congress of Soviets to break decisively with conciliatory groups, transfer power to the soviets, and strike out anew on a revolutionary path with whatever other genuinely revolutionary groups were willing to go along.

At its morning meeting on September 21, the Bolshevik Central Commit­tee adopted something of a compromise on the question of the Democratic State Conference: it was decided not to pull out of the conference formally but rather to register a protest against the actions of the coalitionists by recalling the Bolshevik members of the conference Presidium. Then, the Central Committee voted nine to eight not to participate in the Preparlia­ment. Because of the almost even split on this issue, it was agreed that a final decision regarding a boycott of the Preparliament would be left to the discretion of a joint meeting of the Central Committee with the Bolshevik delegation to the Democratic Conference, to be held as soon as the delegates could be gathered.

This assembly, in size roughly equivalent to a party congress, met later the same day. Trotsky acted as spokesman for those in favor of a boycott and Rykov for those opposed. Stalin, among others, sided with Trotsky; Kamenev, Nogin, and Riazanov supported Rykov. Trotsky later remem­bered that the ensuing debate was long and extremely heated. When the matter came to a vote, the earlier Central Committee decision was reversed—a major setback for the left. The assembled party representatives from all over Russia voted seventy-seven to fifty in favor of participation in the Preparliament; the decision was immediately confirmed by the Central Committee.⁴⁷

Two days later, on September 23, under prodding from the Bolsheviks, the Central Executive Committee met with delegates to the Democratic State Conference from provincial soviets, and it was agreed to convene a nationwide Congress of Soviets in Petrograd on October 20. With the Con­gress of Soviets now scheduled, the Bolsheviks adopted a major policy statement setting forth the relationship of the party's activities in the Pre­parliament to the campaign underway for transfer of power to the soviets at the coming congress. According to this statement, adopted on September 24 at a joint meeting of the Central Committee, representatives of the Peters­burg Committee, and the Bolshevik Preparliament delegation, just formed, the primary task of the party in the prevailing situation was to mobilize the broad masses in support of the transfer of power to the soviets and to strengthen and expand the political authority of the soviets to the point where it rivaled that of the government. In this connection, party members were to focus attention on strengthening ties among local soviets; firming up contacts with other worker, soldier, and peasant revolutionary organs; ar­ranging the reelection of national and local soviet executive organs still con­trolled by moderates, holding regional soviet congresses; and, of course, in­suring that the All-Russian Congress of Soviets would, indeed, be held. Activity in the Preparliament, the statement emphasized, was to be strictly subordinate to the requirements of this mass struggle.⁴⁸

Meanwhile, developments in the Petrograd Soviet reflected the degree to which the formation of the third coalition cabinet, together with worsening economic conditions, was working to the advantage of the extreme left. On September 25, the new Bolshevik-dominated Presidium officially took office. To roars of approval, Trotsky again assumed leadership of the Pet­rograd Soviet, the position he had held in 1905 when he had first disting­uished himself as a powerful revolutionary tribune. In accepting the post of chairman, Trotsky harked back to those earlier days, recalling that then

the Petrograd Soviet was experiencing a moment of crisis which ended in defeat. Now we feel distinctly stronger. Yet the list of new ministers pub­lished in the evening papers . . . attests to the fact that the revolution has reached [another] critical point. We are certain that the work of the new Presidium will be accompanied by a new rise in the development of the revolution. We belong to different parties and have our own work to con­duct, but in directing the work of the Petrograd Soviet we will observe the individual rights and complete freedom of all fractions: the arm of the Presidium will never be used to stifle a minority.⁴⁹

Not long after Trotsky's pledge to direct the work of the Petrograd Soviet in a democratic spirit, the Bolsheviks put before the deputies a reso­lution authored by Trotsky expressing the unwillingness of Petrograd work­ers and soldiers to support the new coalition. Passed immediately by an overwhelming vote, the resolution expressed certainty that the entire revolutionary democracy would greet the formation of the new government with the demand "Resign!" Sustained by this unanimous voice of the gen­uine democracy, the All-Russian Congress of Soviets would replace the coalition with a genuinely revolutionary government.⁵⁰

This basic orientation toward the creation of a new government at the Congress of Soviets was to shape the Bolsheviks' activity throughout the latter part of September. This was the line taken, for example, by Rabochii puf during this period; beginning on September 27, each day's edition car­ried the banner headline "Prepare for the Congress of Soviets on October 20! Convene Regional Congresses Immediately!" Zinoviev expressed this outlook in a front-page editorial on September 26, condemning the newly announced coalition government—the so-called September bloc: "In our view the all-powerful authority over the Russian land is the Congress of Soviets opening on October 20. By the time the congress convenes, if it is able to meet at all, the experience with this new coalition will have failed and wavering elements will at long last associate themselves with our slogan, 'All Power to the Soviets.' Each day will witness a growth in our force, each step of the September bloc will demonstrate the validity of our point of view."⁵¹

The party's new tactical course was neatly reflected in an appeal to work­ers and soldiers published in Rabochii puf on September 30 (it had evidently been written by Zinoviev and formally discussed and endorsed by the en­tire Central Committee). Titled "Before the Congress of Soviets," this ap­peal warned that the counterrevolution would go to any lengths to prevent the convocation of the nationwide soviet congress and the Constituent As­sembly. In these circumstances workers and soldiers were to be vigiliant, at the same time making every effort to insure the selection of congress dele­gates opposed to coalition:

Be on your guard, comrades! Don't rely on anyone but yourselves. Don't waste even an hour, start getting ready for the Congress of Soviets. Convene regional congresses. Take care to see that enemies of coalition are sent to the congress. . . . Don't become involved in any kind of separate direct action! Let's concentrate all our energies on preparations for the Congress of Soviets; it alone will assure that the Constituent Assembly will be convened and carry forth its revolutionary work. . . .

Central Committee of the RSDRP⁵²

•11-

LENIN'S CAMPAIGN FOR AN INSURRECTION

_J

udging by proceedings in the Petrograd Soviet and by the tenor of polit­ical resolutions appearing in the left press at the end of September, Petrograd workers and soldiers responded enthusiastically to the idea of an early congress of soviets to create a revolutionary government. The same cannot be said of Lenin, who was convinced that the party leadership in Petrograd was letting slip the last golden moments when the Provisional Government could be overthrown with ease. First from Vyborg and subse­quently from the apartment of Margarita Fofanova (on the northernmost edge of the Vyborg District, just off the rail line from Finland),¹ where he was living secretly, he delivered a series of slashing rebukes to his followers in the capital. These were coupled with ever more insistent demands that the Provisional Government be overthrown without further delay.

The first of these verbal assaults took the form of an essay intended for publication in Rabochii put' entitled "Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks." It began with a scathing denunciation of the Democratic State Conference, the majority socialists, and Kerensky, and ended with a thoroughgoing critique of the Bolsheviks themselves. Wrote Lenin:

The Bolsheviks should have walked out [of the Democratic State Conference]. Ninety-nine percent of the Bolshevik delegation should have gone to the factories and barracks. . . . The Bolsheviks, it turned out, had an erroneous attitude toward parliamentarianism in moments of revolu­tionary (and not constitutional) crisis and a mistaken attitude toward the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. . . . Comrade Zinoviev made a mistake in writing about the Commune ambiguously, to say the least, so that it appeared that the Commune, although victorious in Petrograd, might be defeated, as in France in 1871.² This is absolutely untrue. If the Com­mune were victorious in Petrograd, it would be victorious throughout Russia. ... It was [also] a mistake on his part to write that the Bolsheviks did

right in proposing proportional representation in the Presidium of the Pet­rograd Soviet. . . . [And] Comrade Kamenev was wrong in delivering the first speech at the conference in a purely "constitutional" spirit when he raised the foolish question of confidence or no-confidence in the government.³

Written as the Democratic State Conference drew to a close, "Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks" was published in Rabochii put' on September 24 under the title "Heroes of Fraud," and with all direct criti­cism of the Bolsheviks edited out.

Between September 22 and 24, Lenin worked on another newspaper essay, "From a Publicist's Diary," which took the form of a daily journal. A portion of the entry for September 22 reads:

The more one reflects on the meaning of the so-called Democratic Con­ference . . . the more firmly convinced one becomes that our party com­mitted a mistake in participating in it. . . . We must boycott the Prepar­liament. We must leave it and go to the Soviet of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies, to the trade unions, to the masses in general. We must call them to the struggle. We must give them a correct and clear slogan: disperse Kerensky's Bonapartist gang with its fake Preparliament. . . . The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, even after the Kornilov re­volt, refused to accept our compromise of peacefully transferring power to the soviets. . . . They have again sunk into the morass of mean and filthy bargaining with the Kadets. Down with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries! . . . Ruthlessly expel them from all revolutionary organi­zations. No negotiations, no communications with these friends of the Kishkins, the friends of the Kornilovite landowners and capitalists.

The next day, September 23, Lenin recorded:

Trotsky was for the boycott. Bravo, Comrade Trotsky! Boycottism was defeated in the Bolshevik group at the Democratic Conference. Long live the boycott! We cannot and must not under any circumstances reconcile ourselves to participation. A group at one of the conferences is not the highest organ of the party and even the decisions of the highest organs are subject to revision on the basis of experience. We must strive at all cost to have the boycott question solved at a plenary meeting of the Central Committee and at an extraordinary party congress. . . . There is not the slightest doubt that there are noticeable vacillations at the top of our party that may become ruinous.⁴

The editorial board of Rabochii put\ composed of Sokolnikov, Trotsky, Kamenev, Stalin, and Volodarsky, suppressed "From a Publicist's Diary" entirely, and instead on September 26 began publication of "The Tasks of

the Revolution/' one of the articles written during Lenin's period of mod­eration in early September, when he had been seriously considering the pos­sibility of compromise with the moderates.

Lenin's patience was nearing the breaking point. On September 27 he wrote a long letter to Smilga giving vent to his frustrations and encouraging Smilga to take the initiative in preparing the overthrow of the government:

Kerensky is obviously entering into an understanding with the Kornilov- ites to use troops to put down the Bolsheviks. And what are we doing? We are only passing resolutions. . . . It is necessary to agitate inside the party for an earnest attitude towards an armed uprising. . . . This letter should be typed and delivered to comrades in Petrograd and Moscow. . . . Take advantage of your high position [i.e., as chairman of the Re­gional Executive Committee of the Army, Fleet, and Workers in Finland]. . . . Devote exclusive attention to the military preparation of the troops in Finland plus the fleet for the impending overthrow of Kerensky. . . . Why should we tolerate three more weeks of war and Kerensky's "Kor- nilovite preparations"?⁵

Lenin returned to this theme two days later (very likely the day of his return to Petrograd) in an essay, "The Crisis Has Matured." Here he pro­pounded the thesis that developments in all the major European countries indicated that the worldwide proletarian revolution was at hand, that the advantageous circumstances in which the Bolsheviks in Russia found them­selves placed a special burden upon them, and that the Bolsheviks would be "miserable traitors to the proletarian cause" if they delayed seizing power any longer. In the last part of the essay, directed to members of the Bol­shevik Central, Moscow, and Petersburg committees but not intended for publication, Lenin penned his most withering critique of the policies being pursued by his party's leadership. He even tendered his resignation from the Central Committee. He wrote:

We must admit that there is a tendency . . . among the leaders of our party which favors waiting for the Congress of Soviets, [and] is opposed to taking power immediately. . . . That tendency must be overcome or the Bolsheviks will cover themselves with eternal shame and destroy themselves as a party. . . . "To wait" for the Congress of Soviets is idiocy, for the congress will give nothing and can give nothing. . . . We have thousands of armed workers and soldiers in Petrograd who could at once seize the Winter Palace, the General Staff building, the telephone exchange and the large printing presses. If we were to attack at once, suddenly, from three points, Petrograd, Moscow, and the Baltic fleet, the chances are a hundred to one that we would succeed with smaller sacrifices than on July 3-5.

In submitting his resignation, Lenin offered the following explanation:

In view of the fact that the Central Committee has even 1ф unanswered the persistent demands I have been making for such a policy [the over­throw of the government] ever since the beginning of the Democratic Con­ference; in view of the fact that the central newspaper is deleting from my articles all references to such glaring errors on the part of the Bolsheviks as the shameful decision to participate in the Preparliament, the admission of the Mensheviks to the Presidium of the Soviet, etc., etc., I am compelled to regard this as a "subtle" hint at the unwillingness of the Central Com­mittee even to consider this question, a subtle hint that I should keep my mouth shut, and as a proposal for me to retire.

I am compelled to tender my resignation from the Central Committee, which I hereby do, reserving for myself freedom to campaign among the party rank and file and at the party congress.

For it is my profound conviction that if we "wait" for the Congress of Soviets and let the present moment pass, we will ruin the revolution.⁶

There is no evidence that this resignation was ever formally considered by the Central Committee, and, as we shall see, Lenin was soon to participate in the deliberations of that body as if it had never been submitted.

Lenin's campaign for support within the party at large began two days later (October 1) with a letter addressed jointly to the Central, Moscow, and Petersburg committees, and also to Bolshevik members of the Petro­grad and Moscow soviets. Lenin pointed to repression by the government of revolutionary unrest among the peasantry, mutinies in the German navy and the apparent beginnings of widespread revolutionary disturbances there, Bolshevik victories in local elections in Moscow and increases in Bol­shevik support among soldiers, and major labor disputes involving railway and postal workers, as evidence that "procrastination is positively criminal," that "the Bolsheviks have no right to wait for the Congress of Soviets and must take power at once." By so doing they would "save the world revolu­tion," "save the Russian revolution," and "save the lives of hundreds of people at the front."⁷

At the same time, Lenin prepared an appeal "To Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers," obviously intended for the broadest mass circulation; it read in part:

. . . Comrades! Look around you, see what is happening in the coun­tryside, see what is happening in the army, and you will realize that the peasants and soldiers cannot tolerate it any longer. . . .

Kerensky is again negotiating with the Kornilovite generals and officers to lead troops against the soviets of workers' and soldiers' deputies, to prevent the soviets from obtaining power!

... Go to the barracks, go to the cossack units, go to the working people and explain the truth to them.

If power is in the hands of the soviets . . . there will be a workers' and

peasants' government in Russia; it will immediately, without losing a single day, offer a just peace to all belligerent peoples. ...

If power is in the hands of the soviets, the landowners' estates will immediately be declared the inalienable property of the whole people. . . .

No, not one more day are the people willing to suffer postponement. . . .

Down with the government of Kerensky, who is conniving with the Kornilov- ite landowning generals to suppress the peasants, to fire on the peasants, to drag out the war!

All power to the soviets of workers' and soldiers' deputies!⁸

Indications that the Central Committee could no longer successfully con­tain the dissemination of Lenin's appeals—indeed, that they were already having an impact on lower party organizations—appeared in the first days of October. One of Lenin's appeals for action had come into the possession of the Moscow Regional Bureau, firmly controlled by the militant wing of the Bolshevik organization in the Moscow area, at the end of September. At a meeting of the Central Committee on October 3, Lomov, a member of the bureau and a candidate member of the Central Committee, delivered a for­mal report on behalf of the bureau aimed at bringing pressure to bear on the Central Committee to initiate preparations for the seizure of power. Lomov expressed concern that in the Moscow area the mood was extremely tense, that the Bolsheviks had majorities in many soviets, and that the masses were insistent on concrete action; meanwhile, party members were simply marking time. The Central Committee heard Lomov out but declined to discuss his report.⁹

At roughly the same time (on October 3 or 4) several of Lenin's appeals also reached militant leaders of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee.¹⁰ In the pre-July period, the leadership of the Petersburg Committee frequently had stood significantly to the left of the Central Committee on issues relat­ing to the development of the revolution and on occasion had acted quite independently in deciding major policy questions. This had led to friction between the Petersburg Committee and the Central Committee, and in the aftermath of the July uprising the two organs apparently had reached a tacit understanding of sorts: the Petrograd organization would not make deci­sions potentially affecting the entire country without first obtaining the consent of the Central Committee, while, for its part, the Central Commit­tee would attempt to ascertain the Petersburg Committee's views before making major policy decisions. To facilitate coordination between the two committees, Bubnov had been delegated to represent the Central Commit­tee in the Petersburg Committee.¹¹

Upon receipt of Lenin's letters, the leadership of the Petersburg Commit­tee learned for the first time that the Central Committee had grossly vio­lated this tacit agreement. Not only had it rejected Lenin's proposal to or­ganize an armed uprising without consulting the Petersburg Committee, it

had actively endeavored to conceal and misrepresent Lenin's views throughout the second half of September. As it turned out, the Petersburg Committee's nine-man Executive Commission was divided between a strong majority responsive to Lenin's appeals and a vocal minority that con­sidered them premature. Nonetheless, the Central Committee's censorship of Lenin's views enraged Executive Commission members to a man.¹² The commission's initial response was a formal request to the Central Commit­tee for an immediate meeting between the Central Committee and represen­tatives from Petersburg and Moscow to discuss the party's future tactical course.¹³

This request, dispatched on October 5, no doubt played a role in prompting the Central Committee to reassess its policies. Within the Cen­tral Committee itself, however, a shift in outlook regarding strategy and tactics was already taking place. The Preparliament, now thoroughly re­structured, was due to reconvene on October 7, and at a meeting of the Central Committee on October 5 proponents of a boycott insisted that the question of participation be reconsidered. Now that the Preparliament con­tained propertied elements and, in any case, had little political power, only Kamenev, of those present on October 5, could find any merit in taking part. By a vote of all against one it was agreed that the party would stage a walkout from the Preparliament at its opening session.¹⁴

Naturally appalled at this decision, Kamenev immediately submitted a formal memorandum to the Central Committee contending that "with­drawal from the first session oriented the party's tactics in an extremely dangerous direction" and requesting to be relieved of all responsibility for representing the party in the Soviet Central Executive Committee and other political organs.¹⁵ Quite likely at Kamenev's insistence, the boycott issue was discussed further at a meeting of the arriving Bolshevik Preparliament delegation, on the afternoon of October 7. As on September 21, arguments in this assembly of Bolshevik representatives from subordinate party or­ganizations throughout the country dragged on interminably and were at times extremely heated. Trotsky again presented the main case for a boycott. In opposition, members of the more conciliatory wing of the party, Kamenev and Riazanov among them, no longer advocated participa­tion in the Preparliament but urged merely that a withdrawal be postponed until the emergence of a serious issue which would provide clear justification for a walkout. In the end, however, by a very narrow margin, the delegation endorsed an immediate boycott.¹⁶

Meanwhile, without waiting for a response from the Central Committee, the Executive Commission called together the full Petersburg Committee expressly to discuss Lenin's letters.¹⁷ This meeting was convened on Oc­tober 5 at the Petersburg Committee's regular Narva District meeting-place at the same time as the Central Committee, gathered at Smolny, was debat­ing a boycott of the Preparliament. The Executive Commission had agreed that this session should be closed to all but regularly elected district rep­resentatives; hence improperly accredited party members were preliminar­ily asked to leave. Lenin's letter of October 1 calling for the immediate overthrow of the government was then read aloud, after which Iukka Rakhia¹⁸ took the floor on behalf of the Executive Commission to deliver a formal report on the current moment.

Rakhia had been among the Petersburg Committee's ultraradicals on the eve of the July uprising and was one of those imprisoned in its aftermath. He now acted as spokesman for the Executive Commission majority sym­pathetic to Lenin's appeals. In arguing the case for an immediate insur­rection, Rakhia focused particular attention on conditions in his native Finland. The mood of the troops in Finland, he declared, was solidly Bol­shevik; political power was effectively in the hands of the Bolshevik Re­gional Committee. The Regional Committee was at war with the Provisional Government, and the situation was such that it had to either surrender its position or go further. There were rumors regarding the disarmament of Kronstadt, he added, and an explosive situation was developing there. For these reasons he insisted that the party was in a life-or-death situation and urged that discussion focus exclusively on Lenin's recommendations and on technical matters connected with the preparation of an insurrection.

The intense but always sober and pragmatic Volodarsky rose next, to voice the concerns of the Executive Commission minority, which remained skeptical of the efficacy of immediate action. Volodarsky urged his listeners to weigh their steps carefully. "We have a responsibility to the working class," he argued. "At present the army gets 80 percent of the bread, nine- tenths of the meat, etc. And no measures can help this." In Volodarsky's estimate, the demoralization of the army at the front was also reason for pause. "At the front," he declared, "there is nothing but tiredness. . . . The soldiers want an end to the war. . . . We say that if our peace terms are not accepted, we will fight the imperialists . . . [but] the army will not take part in a revolutionary war." Volodarsky also expressed doubt regard­ing the party's concrete military support both locally and in the country at large. "Petrograd and Finland are not all of Russia, and yet even here we do not have sufficient strength compared with what can be mobilized against us from the front. If we could just hope to have bread for ten to fifteen days, if we could raise allowances, this would increase our influence and allow for the possibility of rousing the army. But the way things stand, we would not be able to do this. These are the toughest months for procuring food supplies. . . . Even if the entire countryside supported us and agreed to furnish bread, we would still have no means of transporting it."

Volodarsky asserted that the revolutionary situation abroad was another factor that called for delay. "Only revolutionary outbreaks in the West can save us," he declared. "The revolutionary movement is growing among West­ern European workers and if we do not force developments, this ally will only increase in strength." While recommending caution, Volodarsky took pains to disassociate himself from the policies advocated by the party's right and to suggest that his differences with Lenin centered upon tactics rather than goals. "Even at the Democratic Conference," he observed, "I was against participation in the Preparliament. We made an unpardonable error. The correct revolutionary path is to reject compromises but not to force developments ... at the same time building up fighting strength so that power can be taken when it is inevitable and unavoidable." The hard thing, he contended, was not to seize power, but to keep it. "We must show the masses that our path, the course along which we came to power, is the only right one," he concluded. "We must understand that taking power, we will be forced to lower wages, to increase unemployment, to institute terror. . . . We do not have the right to reject these methods, but there is no need to rush into them."

Mikhail Lashevich, the only other member of the Executive Commission who can be identified definitively as sharing Volodarsky's views, now rose to support his colleague. Since 1906 Lashevich had been immersed almost totally in revolutionary activity. He had been drafted in 1915, and the mid­summer of 1917 found him attached to the rebellious First Machine Gun Regiment. On the eve of the July days, he was perhaps the only Bolshevik activist among the machine gunners who was genuinely alarmed about the prospect of an early insurrection. Lashevich had devoted much of his time to work in the Petrograd Soviet, where he was elected chairman of the Bolshevik fraction. At the Sixth Bolshevik Party Congress, along with Volo­darsky, he was among those staunchly defending the soviets as revolu­tionary institutions, against the attacks of the Leninists. On the present occasion, he was similarly forthright, articulating practical concerns which subsequent events showed to have been shared by others but which at this point relatively few were willing to voice.

Lashevich acknowledged that the revolution had reached a critical mo­ment, but warned his listeners against trying to move too far too fast. "We have heard reports from all regions and because of this the situation facing Russia is clear to us," he said, referring to reports made in the Petrograd Soviet and at the Democratic State Conference.

It has become apparent that the Russian economy—both industry and food production—is close to ruin. The Mensheviks themselves have acknowl­edged that revolutionary measures will be required to check this rush into disaster. Even the immediate conclusion of peace will not prevent the crash. Power is coming to us, this is a fact. We must accept it even though there is a 98 percent chance that . . . we will be defeated. . . . But must we take power now? I believe we ought not force matters. ... By taking power now we will turn elements against us that are bound to come our way later. . . . Wavering elements are increasingly coming to recognize the necessity of revolutionary measures which we began advocating two months ago. Lenin's strategic plan limps on all four legs. . . . Let's not fool ourselves. We will not be able to furnish bread. The likelihood is great that we will not be able to provide peace. While the war is going on, I don't expect a revolution in Germany. ... An immediate decree transfer­ring land to the peasants would probably raise the spirit of the masses, but even then they probably would not go to fight. We must coolly take cog­nizance of all this when we make our decision. Lenin hasn't given us a sufficient explanation of why it is necessary to seize power now, before the Congress of Soviets. . . . The Congress of Soviets will provide an ap­paratus and if the delegates are in favor of taking power, it will be a differ­ent question. ... I agree with Rakhia that we must prepare. We stand on a volcano. I wonder as I wake up each morning—has it already erupted?

Boky, the secretary of the Petersburg Committee, now interrupted the discussion to read aloud five theses written by Lenin a day or two earlier (they were intended primarily for consideration at a city party conference scheduled to open on October 7). In the theses Lenin had outlined his ar­gument against participating in the Preparliament and tying the overthrow of the government to the Congress of Soviets, and had reiterated the neces­sity of organizing an armed uprising as quickly as possible. Under the influence of Lenin's militant stand several speakers rose to attack the views of Volodarsky and Lashevich and to defend those of Lenin. Kharitonov commented sarcastically: "Volodarsky and Lashevich have been infected by the atmosphere at Smolny. ... As a political party we are aiming for power and I think we have come to a time when we can realize this aim."

Rakhia took the floor once again. "I thought all of us were rev­olutionaries," he declared, "but when I heard Volodarsky and Lashevich I began to wonder." Taking issue with the claim that a Bolshevik government would founder because of inability to maintain industrial production and provide essential food supplies, Rakhia expressed the opinion that much of Russia's economic distress resulted from the sabotage of industrialists, a problem that would be eliminated by a revolutionary government. Moreover, he insisted that in delaying the seizure of power, the Bolsheviks were alienating, rather than acquiring, support.

The Petersburg Committee's discussion had by now been going on for many hours. At the conclusion of the Central Committee meeting, which had taken place simultaneously, Bubnov, Sokolnikov, and Smilga went at once to the Petersburg Committee meeting, still in progress upon their ar­rival. All three were, of course, much closer to Lenin than to Kamenev in political sentiment, a fact which they immediately made clear. Indeed, their primary concern was to ascertain how local-level leaders in closest touch with workers and soldiers felt the masses would respond to the Bolshevik boycott of the Preparliament, which the Central Committee had just de­cided upon, and how and when, in their view, power might most easily be seized.

If any participants in this meeting, apart from Volodarsky and Lashevich, were inclined to argue against an immediate insurrection, the militancy of Bubnov, Sokolnikov, and Smilga probably inhibited them from taking the floor. Although no member of the Petersburg Commitee suggested initiating an uprising at once, as Lenin seemed to have been rec­ommending, many of the most influential Petersburg Committee mem­bers, among them Latsis, Kalinin, Molotov, and Grigorii Evdokimov, spoke in support of a militant course. The indefatigable Latsis pointed to Russian naval defeats in the Baltic and expressed fear that the destruction of the Baltic Fleet was imminent—a development which would make the seizure of power significantly more difficult. Kalinin insisted somewhat ambigu­ously that the question of seizing power was now before the party and all that remained was the difficult question of ascertaining the proper moment for attack. Molotov spoke in a similar vein: "Presently we are on the eve of an overturn. . . . Our task now is not to restrain the masses but to select the most opportune moment for taking power into our own hands." Finally, Evdokimov, a member of the Central Soviet of Factory-Shop Committees, asserted that the soldiers' great thirst for peace was yet another argument for early action against the government since "a second Kornilov might ap­pear with peace as his slogan and then we will be strangled."

Towards the close of the meeting, Rakhia proposed that, before adjourn­ing, the Petersburg Committee should attempt to arrive at a decision re­garding preparation of an uprising. However, Volodarsky advised that pas­sage of a formal resolution be delayed until the convocation two days hence of the much larger citywide party conference. This proposal was apparently acceptable to the majority, for the published record breaks off abruptly at this point.¹⁹

Not long after the full Petersburg Committee had dispersed, however, the Executive Commission made a start at implementing Lenin's recom­mendations. As Latsis later explained, while it was necessary to be ready for serious combat, so far no systematic preparations had been made.²⁰ The Executive Commission now delegated three of its members—Iakov Fenik- shtein, Ivan Moskvin, and Latsis—to initiate an evaluation of the party's military strength and, in general, to prepare district committees for action against the government. All this, records Latsis, was undertaken without in­forming the Central Committee.²¹

Word of what the Executive Commission was up to did not take long to reach the Central Committee, whose members, it will be recalled, had been apprehensive about the potentially explosive reaction of radically inclined local-level leaders from the time they had received Lenin's mid-September letters. The committee met at once to discuss the problem. The published record of this meeting on October 7 is brief, indicating only that Bubnov reported the formation by the Executive Commission of a bureau to ascer­tain the mood of the masses and to establish close contact between them and party centers, and that after considering and discussing the importance of proper coordination and precise information, it was decided to create a bureau attached to the Central Committee "for information concerning the struggle against the counterrevolution." Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Bubnov were designated as the Central Committee's representatives in this bureau.²² Nevsky and Podvoisky from the Military Organization and Latsis and Moskvin from the Petersburg Committee were subsequently named to the bureau as well.²³ There is no evidence that the bureau functioned ac­tively; for the time being the Central Committee's primary objective in es­tablishing such a body seems to have been to undercut the operation in­itiated by the Executive Commission.

On the evening of October 7 Kerensky and his cabinet, representatives of the Allied diplomatic corps, nearly five hundred delegates from all parts of Russia, and a large contingent of journalists gathered in the stately white and crimson hall of the Mariinsky Palace, the former meeting-place of the Im­perial State Council, for the ceremonial opening of the Preparliament. Befitting the times, the imperial crest over the speaker's tribune and a cen­tennial portrait of the State Council by Repin were discreetly concealed behind red draperies. Most of the audience was in place when the fifty- three Bolshevik delegates arrived, directly from their heated deliberations at Smolny. This first session was given over largely to patriotic declarations and appeals to law and order by Kerensky; by the aging populist Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, as senior member of the Preparliament; and by Av- ksentiev, its chairman. As the session drew to a close Trotsky demanded the floor for an emergency announcement.

Mounting the speaker's platform, Trotsky launched into a denunciation of the Provisional Government and the Preparliament as tools of the coun­terrevolutionary bourgeoisie, and warned that the revolution was on the verge of being crushed. Obviously choosing his words more for the benefit of Petrograd workers and soldiers than for his immediate audience, he sounded a ringing battle cry: "At a time when Wilhelm's troops are threatening Petrograd, the government of Kerensky and Konovalov is pre­paring to flee Petrograd. . . . Leaving the Provisional Council, we are ap­pealing to workers, soldiers, and peasants of all Russia for vigilance and fortitude." "Petrograd is in danger," he roared, struggling to be heard over a storm of protests from the center and right. "The revolution and the peo­ple are in danger! The government is intensifying this threat and the ruling parties are helping it! Only the people can save themselves and the country! We turn to the people! All power to the soviets! All land to the people! Long live an immediate, just, democratic peace! Long live the Con­stituent Assembly!" The Bolshevik delegates now rose from their seats and filed out of the hall to the accompaniment of hoots and jeers. "Bastards!" someone shouted. "Go to your German trains!" hollered another in the audience, as the last of the Bolsheviks disappeared through the door.²⁴

Predictably, Trotsky's inflammatory declaration and the Bolsheviks' de­monstrative walkout from the Preparliament created a sensation, touching off a wave of speculation regarding the party's next move. "Literally every­where," noted a reporter for Novaia zhizn' on October 8, "in long queues, among people casually congregating in the streets, in trolleys—rumors are circulating about an uprising being prepared by the Bolsheviks."

Still, it is unlikely that anyone took special notice when, on the evening of October 10, members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, bundled in heavy coats against the late fall chill and a drizzly rain, slipped out of Smolny, one by one, to attend a strategy session in a secret meeting-place across the Neva, far out on the Petersburg side. This was to be Lenin's first direct confrontation with the Central Committee since his return from Fin­land; it had been carefully organized by Sverdlov at Lenin's behest. By an ironic twist of fate the gathering was to be held in the apartment of the left Menshevik Sukhanov, that unsurpassed chronicler of the revolution who had somehow managed to turn up at almost every important political meet­ing in Petrograd since the February revolution. But on this occasion Sukhanov was not in attendance. His wife, Galina Flakserman, a Bolshevik activist since 1905 and in 1917 a member of the staff of Izvestiia and an aide in the Central Committee secretariat, once had offered Sverdlov the use of the Sukhanov flat, should the need arise. It was a roomy apartment with several entrances, so the comings and goings of a large number of people would not attract particular attention. Sverdlov had decided to make use of this location for the October 10 meeting. For her part, Flakserman insured that her meddlesome husband would remain away on this historic night. "The weather is wretched, and you must promise not to try to make it all the way back home tonight," she had counseled solicitously as he departed for work early that morning.²⁵

At the start of the October 10 Central Committee meeting, while a few latecomers straggled in, Sverdlov disposed of routine business and also passed on some disturbing late reports filtering into the party's offices of counterrevolutionary plots allegedly being hatched on the northern front and at western front headquarters in Minsk. Sverdlov noted that these ru­mors had not yet been confirmed and suggested that one feasible way of deal­ing with any incipient plots in Minsk was to seize military headquarters there. He added that pro-Bolshevik troops in Minsk were also available for dispatch to Petrograd.

Lenin soon appeared. "Clean-shaven and wearing a wig, he looked every bit like a Lutheran minister," Kollontai later recalled. By 10:00 p.m. at least a dozen of the Central Committee's twenty-one members, including Lenin,

Bubnov, Dzerzhinsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kollontai, Lomov, Sokolnikov, Stalin, Trotsky, Uritsky, and Iakovleva, were seated around the Sukhanovs' dining room table in the dim illumination provided by a hang­ing lamp. Their attention soon turned to the main item of business—"the current moment."

Lenin began the discussion with an impassioned plea for immediate ac­tion which lasted nearly an hour. At the outset, he reproached his associates for "indifference toward the question of an uprising." The party, he charged, should have concerned itself with the technical side of this prob­lem long ago. In support of his claim that time was of the essence, Lenin again expressed certainty that the government was about to surrender Pet­rograd to the Germans as a means of stifling the revolution. (Apparently, unfounded rumors that Kerensky was contemplating giving up Petrograd without a fight circulated widely at this time, but it is difficult to say whether Lenin actually believed such a step likely or was merely trying to make the strongest possible case for immediate action.) Referring to other vague rumors of a possible peace settlement at Russia's expense and indica­tions of revolutionary unrest abroad, he also insisted that the international situation provided another reason for the Bolsheviks to take the initiative at once.

Echoing the arguments advanced in some of his earlier letters, Lenin went on to compare the prevailing situation with the time of the abortive July uprising, concluding that in the intervening period the Bolsheviks had made gigantic strides in building up support. The indifference of the masses to revolutionary action could be explained by their boredom with words and resolutions. "The majority is with us now," Lenin insisted, and "the political situation is fully ripe for the transfer of power." It was now crucial to discuss the technical aspect of the overthrow of the government. Yet instead, like the defensists, the Bolsheviks were inclined to think of the systematic preparation of an uprising as something akin to a political sin. To wait for the Constituent Assembly, which obviously won't "be with us," said Lenin, was senseless and would only complicate the task. Lenin wound up his remarks with some concrete suggestions about how and when the insurrection against the government should start: the party must use the Northern Region Congress of Soviets opening at Smolny the next morning, as well as the proposed offer of soldiers from Minsk and the raid of military headquarters there, for the beginning of decisive action.

The official published account of the debate following Lenin's appeal is brief and very incomplete. The remarks of Kamenev and Zinoviev, Lenin's main opponents, are not reflected in the official record at all.²⁶ References to this meeting in other contemporary documents and descriptions in sev­eral published memoirs reveal that the discussion was "passionate and tense," that it lasted through the night and into the early morning, and that eventually virtually everyone present spoke. Lomov and Iakovleva appar­ently reported on the tactical views of Bolshevik leaders in Moscow and on the political situation in the Moscow area generally. Uritsky voiced grave concern about the party's reliable military strength in Petrograd, yet as­serted somewhat contradictorily that if the Bolsheviks were bent on an up­rising then it was necessary to begin making definite preparations for it. Sverdlov, drawing upon information flowing into the Central Committee Secretariat, reported on conditions elsewhere in Russia and evidently strongly supported the idea of an insurrection.

Late at night, the assembled leaders were badly shaken by an insistent knock at the door. The caller turned out to be Flakserman's brother Iurii, a military school cadet and also a Bolshevik, who had come to help with the samovar. Not long after this momentary fright, Kamenev and Zinoviev, the latter sporting an unaccustomed beard and with his curly hair clipped short, tried their best to counter Lenin's arguments, attacking the idea of an armed uprising on both theoretical and practical grounds. As he had at the April Conference, Kamenev, now joined by Zinoviev, underlined the im­portance of the petty bourgeoisie in the development of the Russian revolu­tion. As the two put it in a summation of their arguments which they later prepared,²⁷ the Russian working class, by itself, could not complete the present revolution. "We simply cannot lose sight of the fact that between us and the bourgeoisie there is an enormous third camp, that of the petty bourgeoisie. This camp joined with us during the Kornilov affair and brought us victory. It will ally with us again more than once . . . , but for the time being it is closer to the bourgeoisie than to [the Bolsheviks]."

Kamenev and Zinoviev also voiced skepticism regarding Lenin's assump­tions that a majority of the Russian population now backed the Bolsheviks and that the international proletariat was in the main for the Bolsheviks. In their view, a majority of Russian workers and a significant percentage of soldiers supported the Bolsheviks—"but everything else is questionable." They suggested, for example, that if elections to the Constituent Assembly were held in the prevailing circumstances, a majority of peasants would vote for the SRs. As for the soldiers who now supported the Bolsheviks, they would "run away" should the Bolsheviks be forced to conduct a rev­olutionary war. Granting some validity to Lenin's argument that it would be more difficult for the German government to fight against a revolution­ary Russia which proposed a democratic peace, they nonetheless consid­ered it unlikely that such a handicap would deter the Germans.

At the same time, as far as Kamenev and Zinoviev were concerned, the idea that the Bolsheviks in Russia could count on significant aid from rev­olutionary workers abroad was without foundation. While conceding that there were important signs of growing revolutionary unrest in Germany and Italy, they insisted that it was a long way from this to any kind of active support for a proletarian revolution in a Russia which had declared war on the entire bourgeois world. Moreover, if the Bolsheviks in Russia were to suffer defeat, the revolutionary movement abroad would be dealt a major blow. The outbreak of serious revolutions in Europe would make it obligatory for Bolsheviks in Russia to take power at once, they argued. Only after the beginning of this upheaval abroad would the success of a proletarian revolution in Russia be assured. Such a time was coming, they acknowledged, but it most definitely had not yet arrived.

Finally, Kamenev and Zinoviev contended that Lenin's assessment of Bolshevik strength and of the government's isolation and weakness in Pet­rograd was vastly exaggerated. Neither workers nor soldiers were bursting for a fight, while, in any case, the military troops at the government's dis­posal were far stronger than those supporting the revolution. Moreover, supported by the Central Executive Committee, the Provisional Govern­ment would almost certainly request help from the front. In view of this, the party would be forced to fight in circumstances very different from those at the time of the struggle against Kornilov. Then the party had fought alongside the SRs and Mensheviks and even some close allies of Kerensky. Now it would be necessary to take on "the Black Hundreds, plus the Kadets, plus Kerensky and the Provisional Government, plus the Cen­tral Executive Committee and the SRs and Mensheviks." For the party, the consequences of such a struggle would be inevitable defeat.

As an alternative to the immediate uprising advocated by Lenin, Kamenev and Zinoviev urged that the party adhere to a nonviolent political course, "a defensive posture" aimed at acquiring the strongest possible rep­resentation for the masses at the Constituent Assembly. Countering Lenin's contention that if allowed more time, the government would successfully torpedo the Constituent Assembly, they expressed certainty that the bourgeoisie was too weak to implement its counterrevolutionary objectives, or even to effectively manipulate elections to the Constituent Assembly. Maintained Kamenev and Zinoviev: "Through the army, through the workers, we have a revolver pointed at the temple of the bourgeoisie. If it even considered attempting to do away with the Constituent Assembly, it would again push the petty bourgeois parties to us and the revolver would be triggered." Sympathy for the Bolsheviks would continue to grow while the Kadet-Menshevik-SR bloc would gradually disintegrate. Support for the party in the Constituent Assembly, working in conjunction with the soviets, would be so strong that the Bolsheviks' enemies would be forced to make concessions at every step or risk the creation of a majority bloc of Bolsheviks, Left SRs, nonparty peasant representatives, and the like that would put through the party's program. The only way such a scenario might be disrupted, Zinoviev and Kamenev concluded, would be if the party initiated an untimely insurrection such as that proposed by Lenin, thereby subjecting the proletariat to attack from the entire counterrevolu­tion allied with the petty bourgeois democracy.

In sum, these were the arguments advanced by Kamenev and Zinoviev.

Perhaps in a broader party forum, such as that assembled in Petrograd during the Democratic State Conference, they might even now have at­tracted strong support. But such potential sympathizers as Nogin and Rykov were not present at the historic gathering of October 10, and every­one else sided with Lenin. Apart from Kamenev and Zinoviev, differences among Central Committee members on this occasion no longer revolved around fundamental theoretical issues or the question of whether or not to overthrow the Provisional Government and transfer power to the soviets, but centered on how soon and in what manner this might be done and whether or not it was necessary to associate an uprising with the Congress of Soviets. In the resolution which Lenin proposed at the close of the Oc­tober 10 meeting these issues were somewhat blurred. Hastily scratched out with the gnawed end of a pencil on a sheet of paper torn from a child's notebook, it read in part:

The Central Committee acknowledges that the international situation as it affects the Russian revolution ... as well as the military situation . . . and the fact that the proletarian party has gained majorities in the soviets—all this, coupled with the peasant insurrection and the swing of popular confidence to our party, and finally, the obvious preparations for a second Kornilovshchina . . . makes armed insurrection the order of the day.

Recognizing that an armed uprising is inevitable and the time fully ripe, the Central Committee instructs all party organizations to be guided ac­cordingly and to consider and decide all practical questions from this standpoint (the Northern Region Congress of Soviets, the withdrawal of troops from Petrograd, the action of [comrades] in Moscow and Minsk, etc).

This call to arms was adopted by a vote of ten to two. Kollontai remem­bered that as soon as the vote was taken, the prevailing tension evaporated and everyone suddenly felt starved. Iurii Flakserman produced the samovar, along with some cheese, sausage, and black bread, and the hungry group immediately pounced on the food. Arguments continued for a bit, Kollontai recalled, but they were now interspersed with humor—and good-natured gibes at Kamenev and Zinoviev.²⁸

Thus ended this historic meeting between Lenin and the Bolshevik Cen­tral Committee. Historians in the Soviet Union frequently have viewed the night of October 10 as the moment when doubts about a militant revolu­tionary course within the Central Committee were, for practical purposes, eliminated, after which Bolshevik organizations everywhere set about energetically preparing a popular armed uprising along the lines urged by Lenin. This interpretation does not accurately describe the circumstances. The Central Committee resolution of October 10, which left the exact character and timing of an insurrection to the discretion of subordinate Bol­shevik organizations, did not resolve the very profound differences of opin- рИЕЕ feHfyyH ^ ^f/y- p -

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ion regarding revolutionary tactics that still existed between Lenin and other party leaders more acutely attuned to the specific political situation prevailing in Petrograd. As we shall see, these tactical divergences were to have great significance in the subsequent development of the revolution.

This is not to suggest that the Central Committee meeting of October 10 was unimportant. The October 10 resolution on "the current moment" made the seizure of power "the order of the day." For the Bolsheviks, this constituted a major advance over the corresponding resolution at the Sixth Congress (which had merely acknowledged the necessity of an armed upris­ing) as well as a formal reversal of the orientation toward a peaceful de­velopment of the revolution which had shaped the party's policies through­out September. While Kamenev and Zinoviev now watched in dismay, word of the Central Committee's decision and call to arms was spread to key party committees around the country. Looking back over the period between the Kornilov affair and the decision of October 10, one can see that, as in April, chief responsibility for this drastic transformation in the outlook of the party's top hierarchy belongs to Lenin. It was Lenin who, over a period of several weeks, alternately cajoled, pressured, and threatened his colleagues, and who, by force of argument and personal au­thority, ultimately succeeded in turning a majority of the Central Commit­tee toward an insurrectionary course. This major personal victory of Lenin's should be borne in mind as we turn to a consideration of political developments in Petrograd and intraparty disputes over tactics between Oc­tober 10 and the Bolshevik seizure of power. Few modern historical episodes better illustrate the sometimes decisive role of an individual in historical events.

12

OBSTACLES TO AN UPRISING

_T

he Bolshevik Central Committee's bitterly debated decision to make the seizure of power the order of the day was not reflected at once in Rabochii put\ the party's main newspaper. The banner headline "Com­rade Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants—Prepare for the Congress of Soviets Opening October 20," displayed beside the paper's masthead daily since September 27, was for the time retained. This does not mean, however, that the October 10 resolution was without immediate effect; behind the scenes, Bolsheviks supporting the party's new, ultramilitant course now mounted a concerted effort to prepare an armed uprising at the earliest possible moment.

Attention was initially centered chiefly on the Northern Region Congress of Soviets, which met in Petrograd from October 11 to 13. As Latsis later recorded: "The plan was that it [the Northern Congress] would declare itself the government, and this would be the start."¹ One of the many re­gional assemblies of soviets convened in various parts of Russia in prepara­tion for the coming All-Russian Congress, the Northern Region Congress brought together ninety-four delegates representing army and navy com­mittees and local soviets, primarily from northwestern Russia.² Chaired by Krylenko and solidly leftist, the congress included among its participants fifty-one Bolsheviks, twenty-four Left SRs, four Maximalists (a small ter­rorist offshoot of the SR Party), one Menshevik-Internationalist, and only ten SRs (four Mensheviks had departed the congress shortly after it opened). It was this apparent strength of the extreme left that led Lenin and other party leaders to view the congress as a suitable institution around which to organize Kerensky's overthrow.

Apparently the Bolshevik-led Regional Executive Committee of the Army, Fleet, and Workers in Finland, which scheduled the Northern Re­gion Congress and arranged for it to be held in Petrograd rather than Hel- singfors, also viewed the congress as an appropriate institution for the initi­ation and legitimization of an insurrection. Plans for the congress were made after the Regional Executive Committee's chairman, Smilga, received Lenin's letter of September 27 in which he had been urged to personally take the initiative in preparing the overthrow⁷ of the government. In an article on the Northern Congress published in Rabochii put" on October 8 and in the Kronstadt Proletarskoe delo two days later, Smilga declared that the congress "would in all likelihood have to assume a tremendously impor­tant role in the political life of the country." "It is no secret to anyone," he went on to assert, "that defensists of all varieties are conducting a furious campaign against the All-Russian Congress of Soviets . . . [and] that if we passively await the twentieth, there will be no congress. It is necessary to rebuff the onslaught of the defensists, not only with words but with deeds. The crisis is growing with extraordinary speed. The current status can last only for a few days. ... In this moment the regional congress can have enormous significance."³

On October 7, even before the Central Committee agreed to prepare an insurrection, participants in a city wide conference of Petrograd Bolsheviks were primed for the possibility that the Northern Region Congress would initiate action against the government.⁴ Subsequently, on the morning of the eleventh, Kollontai informed conference participants of the resolution passed by the Central Committee, pointing, no doubt, to the key role en­visioned for the Northern Region Congress.⁵

In a message of October 8 to Bolsheviks participating in the Northern Region Congress, Lenin insisted that delegates would be "traitors to the International" if they limited themselves to "mere resolutions." "We must not wait for the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which the Central Execu­tive Committee may put off until November," Lenin inveighed; "only the immediate movement of troops from Finland and the Baltic Fleet . . . can save the Russian and world revolutions. . . . [These forces] can and must march on Petrograd, smash the Kornilovite regiments, rouse both capital cities, initiate mass agitation for a government which will immediately give land to the peasants and make proposals for peace, overthrow Kerensky's government and establish such a government. Procrastination would be fatal."⁶ Two days later, at the October 10 meeting of the Central Commit­tee, Lenin had urged the party to make use of the Northern Region Con­gress of Soviets for the beginning of decisive action.

Word of the Central Committee's decision to organize an uprising was conveyed to Bolshevik delegates at the Northern Region Congress upon their arrival at Smolny the morning of October 11; indeed, it appears that during the early sessions of the congress, these delegates were led to believe that directives to start an insurrection could be expected momentarily.⁷ One of the secretaries of the congress, the Kronstadt Bolshevik Boris Breslav, later remembered that as the congress opened, many of its participants as­sumed that it would become the center for an uprising: "They were under the impression that the Central Committee's signal to come out would be received at any minute."⁸

Such thinking was encouraged by Sokolnikov in a report on the current moment delivered on behalf of the Central Committee at an initial meeting of the party's fraction at the Northern Congress on the morning of October 11. Sokolnikov's message boiled down to the following: "The moment when it is necessary to go into battle for the triumph of the soviets throughout the country has arrived. ... It is no accident that the congress has been moved to Petrograd, for it may be that it will have to be the organization that will start an uprising."⁹

The atmosphere at the Northern Region Congress of Soviets became greatly heated early in the proceedings when Antonov-Ovseenko an­nounced that political prisoners still in the Crosses Prison had begun a hunger strike. In response, the delegates passed an appeal to the prisoners: "Halt your hunger strike and marshal your strength because the hour of your liberation is close at hand."¹⁰ Yet, despite this beginning, the Bol­shevik leadership held back from actually summoning the delegates to help organize the overthrow of Kerensky. Instead, the congress adjourned late on October 13 after passage of a fairly moderate joint Bolshevik-Left SR resolution which in effect tied the creation of a soviet government to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.¹¹

The failure of the Northern Region Congress to trigger an uprising can be explained by several related factors. For one thing, Bolshevik Military Organization leaders, who since April had had chief responsibility for pre­paring the seizure of power, raised what in retrospect seem to have been justified doubts regarding the party's readiness for an armed uprising. Dur­ing the preceding weeks and months, as we have seen, the Bolsheviks had directed their attention almost entirely to activities consistent with the peaceful development of the revolution. Relatively little effort had been de­voted, in either the barracks or the factories, to the kind of careful technical preparation needed to support a party-organized insurrection. Bolshevik control in units of the Petrograd garrison involved in the July days had not yet been restored.¹² Many of the worker Red Guard units created during the Kornilov crisis had since disintegrated; not until mid-October was an effort begun to coordinate and train Red Guard units on a city wide basis. Then too, nothing had yet been done to assure the cooperation of rail work­ers so that the capital would not be immediately cut off from the rest of the country in the event of an insurrection.

Nevsky had such problems in mind when, in a candid early memoir, he wrote that "educated by the bitter experience of the July days," the Mili­tary Organization at this time "delayed and carefully considered its actions. There was much that was not yet prepared, much that had to be adjusted, much to be corrected, and here and there, we found flagrant deficiencies."

Nevsky went on to acknowledge that, for these reasons, he and Podvoisky firmly insisted that the start of any uprising be delayed for about two weeks.¹³ Elsewhere he later commented, "We had to pour cold water on all those ardent comrades who were straining for a fight, not having an idea of all the difficulties connected with an uprising'⁴⁴—an assessment applicable most of all to Lenin.

A second factor impelling Bolshevik Party strategists to delay an insur­rection against the Provisional Government was that local leaders in closest day-to-day contact with the masses now voiced similarly grave concern about the possibility of mobilizing sufficient numbers of Petrograd workers and soldiers in support of an armed uprising in advance of the Congress of Soviets, which since September 2 3 had been trumpeted with increasing volume, by Bolsheviks, Left SRs, and Menshevik-Internationalists alike, as the appropriate forum for the legitimate settlement of the government ques­tion. Particularly strong reservations along this line appear to have emerged at the citywide Bolshevik conference on October 10, at a conference of party representatives from Petrograd Province (that is, from outlying towns) on October 1, and at a meeting between members of the Military Organization Bureau and representatives from units of the Petrograd garri­son which took place during the second week of October. According to the recollections of Alexander Shotman, an official of the provincial organiza­tion and a confidant of Lenin who had been active in the Russian social democratic movement from the days of the Petersburg Union of Struggle, majorities at all three gatherings opposed an uprising before the Second Congress of Soviets.¹⁵

Actually, the staunchly radical complexion of the Northern Region Con­gress notwithstanding, by the evening of October 12 it was probably evi­dent that winning majority support for an immediate insurrection would be virtually impossible even there. In the first place, while Trotsky, Sokol- nikov, and other supporters of the Central Committee's October 10 resolu­tion were exploring how this decision might best be implemented, Kamenev and Zinoviev were working desperately to prevent the initiation of an uprising, certain that an immediate, party-organized insurrection could end only in a far more serious disaster than that following the July uprising, and believing, not unjustifiably, that a majority of party leaders in the country might well support this view. After the Central Committee meeting on October 10 they dispatched a summary of their arguments against the seizure of power to major party committees throughout the country and to the Bolshevik fractions in the Central Executive Committee, the Petrograd Soviet, and the Northern Region Congress of Soviets. "We are deeply convinced," they wrote, "that to declare an armed uprising now would be to risk the fate not only of the party but of the world revolution. There is no doubt that there are times in history when the downtrodden class must acknowledge that it is better to be defeated than to surrender without a struggle. Is the Russian working class in this kind of position now? No and a thousand times no!"¹⁶

In Petrograd, Kamenev and Zinoviev personally lobbied for postpone­ment of precipitous revolutionary action among local party leaders generally and among deputies to the Northern Region Congress of Soviets in particular.¹⁷

At the Northern Region Congress, the Left SRs, who shared in full the reservations of Kamenev and Zinoviev regarding an armed uprising, also actively opposed use of the congress to overthrow the government.¹⁸ At this time, the Left SRs were interested most of all in facilitating the creation of a broadly representative, exclusively socialist government at the coming Sec­ond All-Russian Congress of Soviets. As was the case with Rabochii put\ every issue of the Left SR newspaper Znamia truda from September 27 on carried the banner headline "Comrades, Prepare for the All-Russian Con­gress of Soviets."¹⁹ Unlike Rabochii put\ however, the editors of Znamia truda consistently coupled this message with the sternest warnings against early armed action against the Provisional Government. Sergei Mstislavsky expressed this message in a lead editorial on October 13: "A coming-out by the workers and soldiers would be a monstrous crime ... an attack not on the Provisional Government, but on the soviets. . . . And because of this, those who appeal to the masses for action, for the seizure of power, deceive. Their appeal is a cry not for the triumph of the people's will, but for its self-destruction."

Mstislavsky's colleague Boris Kamkov later explained the policies pursued by Left SRs in the capital at this time:

In the wake of the Democratic State Conference, after it became clear that the defensists were unwilling to break with the politics of coalition, we looked to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets to assume the task of organizing a new government. In our agitation in military barracks and factories we emphasized the necessity of being prepared to provide or­ganized armed support to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in case the Kerensky regime did not recognize the authority of the newly organized socialist government. A few days before the All-Russian Congress, how­ever, it became clear to those of us working in factories and barracks that the Bolsheviks were mobilizing their forces not simply to defend the gov­ernment established by the congress, but rather to seize power in advance of the congress. And in this matter we departed very drastically from the Bolsheviks. Their course seemed to us both dangerous and senseless. After coalition had so bankrupted itself, after it had become an empty shell and the very word coalition had become a term of abuse in worker and soldier circles, and when among workers and peasants it was impossible to find a single solid group which would defend coalition government, it seemed to us that it would be possible to rid ourselves painlessly of this skeleton by action of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. At the same time, we be­lieved that if this were done in another way, say by means of the seizure of power in Petrograd before the congress, this might appear to be adventurist—as the seizure of power not by the soviets, but by one politi­cal party. It seemed to us that this would immediately complicate the situ­ation and make it impossible to avoid civil war.²⁰

The difficulties which the lobbying efforts of Kamenev and Zinoviev, coupled with the opposition of the Left SRs, posed for Bolshevik leaders seriously exploring the possibility of organizing an insurrection at the Northern Region Congress of Soviets can be easily understood if one bears in mind that the Left SRs, together with the SRs and Menshevik- Internationalists, could probably count on close to thirty-five of the ninety votes in the congress. Thus Kamenev and Zinoviev had only to sow reser­vations about the wisdom of an uprising among less than a dozen of the remaining fifty-five Bolshevik and Maximalist delegates to prevent im­mediate action—and there is no doubt that had the matter come to a vote, they would have had little difficulty in doing so.

Actually, as the Northern Region Congress drew to a close, what seems to have worried its participants most was the possibility that the Central Executive Committee might manage to have the All-Russian Congress postponed or cancelled altogether on the grounds that it was interfering with preparations for the Constituent Assembly. Consequently, one of its last acts was to adopt an appeal to the masses emphasizing the importance of the All-Russian Congress and its assumption of power as the sole means of assuring that a properly elected Constituent Assembly would be con­vened without further delays.²¹

The deputies also created a permanent executive committee. There is no doubt that some Bolshevik members of this committee viewed it primarily as an insurrectionary organ; thus, Antonov later recalled reaching an agree­ment with Smilga immediately after the Northern Congress to the effect that Smilga would return to Helsingfors to organize detachments of sailors, infantry, and artillerymen for the support of an uprising, while Antonov would direct the committee's work in Petrograd. According to Antonov, the forces mobilized by Smilga were to be dispatched to Petrograd upon receipt of a telegram reading "Send the regulations." Antonov makes it clear, however, that these arrangements were made privately.²² The osten­sible purpose of the permanent committee set up by the Northern Congress of Soviets was to organize and prepare military forces for the defense and support of the coming All-Russian Congress of Soviets; hence, even the Left SRs agreed to take part in its work.

As it turned out, the Northern Region Congress was for the most part a thundering, highly visible expression of ultraradical sentiment. Moreover, while the congress was in session, Bolshevik agitators were circulating throughout the working-class districts of Petrograd, energetically seeking, with mixed success, to whip up the hostility of workers and soldiers toward the existing government in preparation for a momentary call to arms. Yet from the party's point of view, for the time being this activity, following upon the heels of the Bolsheviks' departure from the Preparliament, had the largely negative effect of heightening the apprehension of government sup­porters in regard to Bolshevik intentions.²³ Virtually all of Petrograd's daily papers were now filled with speculation about Bolshevik plans and ac­tivities. The lead editorial in Gorky's Novaia zhizn' on October 15, for ex­ample, reported that the Bolsheviks were conducting widespread agitation for an uprising. "The mood of the masses is not uniform," wrote the editorialist, "A portion is apparently ready to act, another is not particu­larly inclined toward combat and is leaning more toward refraining from active steps, and there are also groups who are either hostile or completely passive toward a coming out."

Similarly, Gazeta-kopeika informed its readers on October 14 that "there is definite evidence that the Bolsheviks are energetically preparing for a com­ing out on October 20." A few days later, under the headline "The Bol­sheviks Are Coming Out," the rightist Zhivoe slovo announced that "the vile and bloody events of July 3-5 were only a rehearsal. Now the Bolsheviks are preparing to give the performance itself. ... In factories and barracks everywhere, Bolsheviks are appealing to workers and soldiers to come out into the streets of Petrograd with weapons in hand at the first signal, to overthrow the government and massacre the bourgeoisie." All writers cou­pled their alarms with dire warnings regarding the consequences of rev­olutionary action and/or insistent appeals that the government take deci­sive measures against the left before it was too late. A writer for Birzhevye vedomosti declared on the morning of October 14 in an editorial titled "It Is Time to Act": "The Bolsheviks talk about an early coming out of the masses ever more precisely and definitely. . . . Yet all this is patiently tolerated by the government and the democracy without counteraction. . . . The mo­ment which the government must use for the firm defense of revolutionary Petrograd from anarchy has arrived."

Of course, moderate socialist leaders at Smolny and the cabinet ministers in the Winter Palace were now equally attuned to the likelihood of an early Bolshevik-led insurrection. At a plenary session of the All-Russian Execu­tive Committees on October 14, Dan, referring to the flood of reports of extremist agitation and apparent Bolshevik preparations for an insurrection, declared: "We must ask the comrade Bolsheviks candidly, what is the pur­pose of their politics? . . . The Bolsheviks must announce from this podium whether or not they are calling upon the revolutionary proletariat to come out. ... I want a yes-or-no answer." From the floor came Riazanov's far from reassuring reply: "We demand peace and land." Significantly, at the close of this session even Martov, for the Menshevik- Internationalists, and Livshits, for the Left SRs, rose to support a resolu­tion proposed by Dan appealing to workers, soldiers, and peasants to main­tain calm and branding a "coming out" of any kind completely impermissible.²⁴

To judge by press reports, a significant portion of each daily session of Kerensky's cabinet at this time was devoted to discussion of the Bolshevik menace. At a meeting on October 17, Kishkin, minister of the interior, reported that the force at the disposal of the government would be sufficient to put down disturbances once they broke out, but too weak to initiate action against the left. According to information in the government's hands, he added, an uprising had originally been planned for October 18 but had been postponed until the twenty-third because of insufficient preparation.²⁵

The cabinet weighed various countermeasures. Yet, conscious of the complexities of the prevailing situation, it limited itself to directing the com­mander of the Petrograd Military District, General Georgii Polkovnikov, to ready the government's defenses, and to issuing daily appeals for order; clearly the ministers hoped the Bolsheviks would compromise themselves by making the first move. As the war minister, General Verkhovsky, de­clared realistically: "We have a plan—it is necessary to await the action of the other side. Bolshevism has infected the Soviet and there is not enough strength to disperse it."²⁶ Departing from a cabinet meeting on the night of October 13, the date the Northern Region Congress of Soviets closed, an unidentified minister commented to waiting reporters somewhat more brashly: "At present the government is not in the least desirous of a clash. But what are we to do? If the Bolsheviks act, we will carry out a surgical operation and the abscess will be extracted once and for all."²⁷

In the wake of the Northern Region Congress, Lenin continued to press for an immediate rising, while, for their part, Kamenev and Zinoviev cam­paigned just as vigorously to prevent a precipitous insurrection and to allay the apprehension of the Bolsheviks' opponents regarding this possibility. Meanwhile, local party activists with close ties to the garrison, factories, and mass organizations went on exploring practical possibilities for imple­menting the Central Committee's October 10 resolution. The difficulties which they encountered in preparing an insurrection before the All-Russian Congress of Soviets surfaced clearly at two important party strategy ses­sions which followed the Northern Region Congress—the first, an October 15 emergency meeting of the Petersburg Committee, and the second, a has­tily arranged conference between the Central Committee and representa­tives of the Petersburg Committee, Military Organization, Petrograd Province Bolshevik Committee, Petrograd Soviet, and trade union and factory-shop committee leadership the following night.²⁸

The Petersburg Committee meeting of October 15 was attended by thirty-five representatives of Bolshevik committees from the districts of Pet­rograd. The primary business of the evening, discussion of preparations for an insurrection, opened with a formal report on the current moment by Bubnov, the Central Committee's man on the Petersburg committee. Bub­nov made a strong plea for action against the government, declaring: "We are drawing ourselves into a clash. . . . We stand at the brink of a 'coming out.' " Maintaining that all the elements for an uprising were at hand, he insisted: "We must prepare all our forces for action. . . . We must gather all our agitators. ... If we are to save the revolution, we must follow an offensive as well as a defensive policy."

No sooner had Bubnov finished, however, than Nevsky rushed forward to present the case for a substantial delay in the organization of an uprising. The enormous impact of the July experience on Military Organization lead­ers is clearly reflected in Nevsky's carefully phrased speech on this occa­sion. "I must turn the assembly's attention to the myriad of difficulties we have encountered," he insisted at the start. "The Military Organization has just become rightist." Warning that absolutely nothing had been done to prepare the provinces for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and that the Bolsheviks were in fact just beginning to gain a foothold in the countryside, he asserted that peasants in several regions had declared that in the event of an uprising they would withhold bread. He added that the party could not hope to achieve victory if it ignored the mood of the masses. Nevsky went on to point out that such vital factors as the support of rail­road workers and the cooperation of the Fifth Army on the northern front had not been secured. In general, technical preparations for an uprising had not been initiated; as matters stood, there was no assurance that the Bol­sheviks would have that initial preponderance of strength necessary for vic­tory over the Provisional Government. For all these reasons Nevsky con­cluded that the Central Committee's resolution of October 10 was prema­ture.

Following Nevsky's address, evidently in response to a request from the floor, Boky, the Petersburg Committee secretary, read aloud in their en­tirety both the Central Committee's October 10 resolution and the long Kamenev-Zinoviev memorandum. The blunt warnings of Kamenev and Zinoviev, coming on the heels of those of Nevsky, clearly had a profound impact on the assembled local party officials, for it was now agreed that the Central Committee's resolution should be considered "broadly," that is, from the standpoint of both its basic feasibility and the prospects for its implementation.

With this in mind, the committee listened to reports on the prevailing situation in each district. For the most part, these served to reinforce ap­prehensions regarding the wisdom of immediate action. To be sure, it would be misleading to suggest that the reports were uniformly pessimistic. For example, the indefatigable Latsis lavished praise on preparations for the seizure of power being made by workers in the crucial Vyborg District and expressed confidence that they could be depended upon. Vinokurov, the representative of the Nevsky District, who, unlike Latsis, was not given to exaggeration, vouchsafed, "The mood favors us—the masses are beginning to prick up their ears." And Iukka Rakhia, speaking for the Finns, declared that their attitude toward an uprising was "the sooner the better."

On the other hand, the general picture of the state of affairs in the fac­tories and barracks was often so unpromising that it could not but have had a dampening effect on the mood of party members. Perhaps the most alarming factor brought out at this discussion was the apparent lethargy of large numbers of Petrograd workers and soldiers. It should be borne in mind that at issue here was not whether workers and soldiers were sym­pathetic to transfer of power to the soviets—that the Bolshevik program was broadly supported by the masses was acknowledged by all—but whether or not they would risk loss of work, immediate shipment to the front, impris­onment, or even death in response to a Bolshevik call for an uprising on the very eve of the Congress of Soviets. And in this regard, of nineteen district representatives who reported on the situation in their localities, only eight felt the masses were in a fighting mood and ready to rise at once, six appear to have viewed the prevailing spirit as indefinite and inclined toward wait­ing, while five referred explicitly to the absence of any desire to come out.²⁹

Kalinin, the future president of the Soviet state, observed that in the Lesnovsky subdistrict (part of the large Vyborg District), things were mov­ing badly for the moment. Savva Ravich of the Moscow District, a dentist, expressed the view that the masses would come out if directed by the Soviet, but that few would respond at the behest of the party. Sergei Prokhorov, a carpenter by trade and representative of the Petersburg Dis­trict, reported that "where our influence is strong, there is a wait-and-see mood; where this is not the case, the mood is apathetic. . . . Even if the Soviet issues a call to come out, some factories, mine for example, will not act." Alexander Akselrod of the Rozhdestvensky District, and Naum An- tselovich, who represented the Petrograd Trade Union Soviet and was also chairman of the electricians' union, agreed that the mood of the masses was such that if they were attacked by the counterrevolution a rebuff would be given, but that the masses would not attack by themselves. Akselrod added that the mood was deflated because of layoffs connected with the evacuation of factories. Representing the Petrograd provincial party organization, Kharitonov, summarizing reports made at the Petrograd provincial confer­ence two weeks earlier, was similarly pessimistic. He said the consensus there was that the masses were dispirited. "Out of five thousand of our supporters in Krasnoe Selo," he asserted, "only five hundred would come here [to participate in an insurrection]; the rest would wait it out in Krasnoe Selo." He added that in Kronstadt the mood had fallen sharply and that there was widespread drunkenness, even among Bolsheviks.

Apparent mass apathy was by no means the only important problem contributing to the pessimistic picture emanating from lower party levels on the eve of the proposed Bolshevik seizure of power. The local reports of October 15 also revealed widespread concern about a general absence of technical preparations for an insurrection; indeed, there were few speakers who did not take note of serious organizational problems in connection with the Red Guards or critical shortages of arms and ammunition, and from the reports taken together, it is clear that no insurrectionary organs had been created as yet. S. M. Gessen, of the Narva District, observed drily that since there were no combat centers, fighting forces, presumably those created during the Kornilov crisis, had broken up. Vinokurov, who had been optimistic about the mood of workers in the Nevsky District, acknowl­edged that the district had no Red Guard units and that it could not boast about its organizational apparatus. Prokhorov declared directly, "Things are bad as regards the Red Guards. ... In general the district is in a state of complete disintegration." The representative of the Shlusselburg District noted that a Red Guard unit had been organized but that people were reluc­tant to enroll because there were few arms.

Clearly appalled by the turn of the discussion, Bubnov demanded to be heard out of turn to remind Petersburg Committee members that the Cen­tral Committee went ahead with a consideration of the current moment on October 10 under prodding from the Petersburg Committee. He implored his listeners to focus their attention on practical measures. Shortly after­ward, the assembled local party representatives agreed, among other things, to call a conference of party agitators to explain slogans, to organize the publication of an evening newspaper, to improve communications, to strengthen contacts with rail and postal-telegraph workers, and to speed up the instruction of workers in the use of weapons. Most Petersburg Commit­tee members who voted for such steps were perhaps more hopeful that they would achieve quick results than was Kalinin, who, having listened to the district reports, commented: "The resolution of October 10 is one of the best resolutions the Central Committee has ever passed . . . but when this uprising will take place is uncertain—perhaps in a year." Still, clearly im­plicit in the measures adopted by the Petersburg Committee on the night of October 15 was the assumption that the party was not yet ready for im­mediate battle.

The hastily organized Central Committee conference the following night had as its purpose reassessment of the party's strategy in the face of the difficulties that had developed in implementing the call for an immediate insurrection. The meeting, attended by roughly twenty-five Bolshevik lead­ers, was held in the headquarters of the Lesnoi District Duma, far out on the northern outskirts of the capital, under arrangements worked out by Shotman and Kalinin, the latter then chairman of the Lesnoi District Duma. Sverdlova recalls that until the last minute participants did not know where the meeting would be held; they were given a password and a rendezvous, and when assembled, they were led, a few at a time, to the

Duma building. One of the last to arrive w as Lenin, who hastily doffed his wig before entering the two connecting rooms where the rest of the par­ticipants were gathered. There were few chairs; most people simply sat on the floor.³⁰ Lenin settled on a hassock in a corner, drew some notes from his pocket, and began to inspect them. By habit, he raised his hand to pat down his wig, then caught himself and smiled.³¹

A young Bolshevik, Ekaterina Alekseeva, who worked in the Lesnoi Dis­trict Duma building straightening up and doing other odd jobs, recorded her vivid recollections of this occasion. Alekseeva's greatest fear was that some suspicious outsider would call the authorities. Until the very last party official had departed in the wee hours of the morning, she was frantic with worry, listening for strange sounds and keeping a close watch on neighboring buildings to assure herself that all was quiet. She recalls that each arrival was greeted by a loud howl from a neighbor's restless Saint Bernard, and that when she was not keeping watch at the windows or firing up the samovar, she spent a good deal of time calming the dog. The meet­ing, which began around 8:00 p.m., broke up at 3:00 a.m. the next morning, by which time a slushy snow, one of the season's first, had begun to fall. The participants, recalls Alekseeva, left behind a big mess.³²

The October 16 meeting opened with Lenin delivering a strong defense of the Central Committee's decision to organize an immediate insurrection. Responding at the outset to lingering interest on the part of Bolshevik mod­erates in working with the Mensheviks and SRs, he emphasized that every effort had already been made to achieve a compromise with them; but by the time the impossibility of reaching an understanding with the moderate socialists had become clear, it had also become evident that the masses fol­lowed the Bolsheviks. Lenin went on to minimize the significance of the apparent deflation in the mood of the masses which had emerged so strongly in the reports of local party activists the previous evening, insisting that "we cannot govern ourselves according to the mood of the masses since it fluctuates and is difficult to appraise. . . . The masses have given the Bolsheviks their trust and demand from them not words but deeds, decisive policies both in the fight against the war and in the struggle with economic dislocation." Toward the close of his remarks, Lenin outlined his reasons for believing that the situation was propitious for a socialist revolution in Russia, concluding that "acting now we will have the entire European pro­letariat on our side." He ended by articulating his apprehension regarding the plans of the government, arguing that "the bourgeoisie is intent on sur­rendering Petrograd as a means of crushing the revolution, and the only way of avoiding this is by taking the defense of the capital into our own hands. ... It follows that the most decisive political action possible is now required—which can only mean an armed uprising." "Power must be seized immediately, at once," he repeated again and again; "Every day lost could be fatal. History will not forgive us if we do not take power now!"³³

In 1924, Shotman, who had heard Lenin speak frequently both before and after the October revolution, recalled this as one of his best addresses.³⁴ At the October 16 meeting, Shotman commented with justification that at earlier gatherings where the feasibility of a coming out had been discussed, the mood among participants had been much more pessimistic than it seemed now. This was a reflection, no doubt, of Lenin's legendary persua­siveness. Even so, following Lenin's speech, Nikolai Krylenko, on behalf of the Military Organization, reaffirmed that it was the impression of the Military Organization leadership that the revolutionary mood of the soldiers was subsiding, and that a majority believed that the party "should not force the issue." Reporting on the attitudes of the deputies in the Petrograd Soviet, Volodarsky, who, after Trotsky, was perhaps the party's most ef­fective and popular spokesman there, voiced the general impression that "nobody is tearing into the streets, but everybody would respond to a call by the Soviet." Vasilii Shmidt, a leading figure in the Petrograd Trade Union Soviet, and Alexander Shliapnikov, chairman of the metalworkers' union and also a high official in the Trade Union Soviet, attempted to characterize the political attitude of trade union members. Shmidt con­tended that while everyone demanded transfer of power to the soviets, ac­tive steps on the part of Petrograd's more than 500,000 trade unionists could not be expected, primarily because of widespread fear of dismissals and layoffs. Shliapnikov added that in the metalworkers' union the party's influence was predominant, but a Bolshevik coming-out was not popu­lar. Rumors of such action had even triggered panic.

At the start of the October 16 meeting, Kamenev and Zinoviev had turned down the opportunity to reply to Lenin immediately. Bolstered by such negative reports, Zinoviev took the floor at this point to insist that "there are fundamental doubts about whether the success of an uprising is assured." He ticked off a string of arguments against an uprising and urged that, if possible, the Central Committee resolution of October 10 be recon­sidered. Kamenev declared that the experience of trying to organize an up­rising confirmed that the conditions for one did not exist. The party's prep­arations, he urged, served only to cause the government to strengthen its defenses. Echoing Kamenev, Volodarsky made the point that if the Central Committee's resolution had been intended as an order, then it was already unfulfilled. "If the question of a coming out is posed as a question for to­morrow," he went on to affirm, "then we have to acknowledge that we are not ready. I have been making public appeals daily and must report that the masses are puzzled by our appeal."

Lenin nonetheless insisted on a formal endorsement of the Central Committee's October 10 resolution, leaving the precise form and timing of an insurrection up to the Central Committee, and to the party leadership in the Petrograd Soviet and in the All-Russian Executive Committee. Zinoviev countered Lenin's proposal by recommending adoption of a resolution pro­hibiting the actual organization of an uprising before consultation with the Bolshevik fraction at the Second Congress of Soviets. When the resolutions were voted upon, nineteen participants in the meeting supported Lenin's resolution, with two opposed and four abstentions; the vote on Zinoviev's resolution was six in favor, fifteen opposed, and three abstentions. The latter vote indicates, it would seem, that a fairly large minority of nine of the party leaders present—that is, more than a third of those who took part in the voting—had strong enough reservations about the preparation of an immediate insurrection either to favor consultation or to abstain from taking sides on this question.³⁵ Beyond this, comparison of these figures with in­dividual speeches at the meeting suggests that even some of those party officials who still harbored reservations about the wisdom of trying to or­ganize an armed uprising before the Congress of Soviets probably voted in favor of Lenin's resolution and against Zinoviev's. For implicit in the com­ments of several speakers who ostensibly supported Lenin's motion was the assumption that conditions were not yet ripe for a party-organized insurrec­tion, and that the October 10 resolution was an affirmation of intent to overthrow the government at the first suitable opportunity, rather than a policy directive for immediate implementation.

At the October 16 meeting, Miliutin articulated the view just described most openly and directly; while Trotsky did not attend the meeting, he clearly shared this outlook. Historians in the Soviet Union often attribute these attitudes to timidity—or "constitutional illusions," to use Lenin's phrase—and tend to equate them with the positions of Kamenev and Zinoviev. More accurately, however, the position taken by Trotsky and others of like mind seems to have been based on a realistic appraisal of available evidence regarding the prevailing mood and correlation of forces in Petrograd, the provinces, and the front.

In any case, it is important to note that the controversy raging within the Bolshevik leadership over the preparation of an uprising was by no means silenced by this endorsement of the October 10 resolution. At the conclu­sion of the October 16 meeting, Kamenev, declaring that he could not de­fend the point of view reflected in the Central Committee's latest decisions and believing that this position would lead to the defeat of the party and the proletariat, submitted his resignation from the Central Committee. At the same time, Kamenev joined Zinoviev in formally demanding the immediate convocation, by telegraph, of a Central Committee plenum. Three other moderates—Nogin, Miliutin, and Rykov—tried unsuccessfully to have Rabochii put' publish an appeal, the substance of which has never come to light.³⁶ Unable to get a hearing in the Bolshevik press, Kamenev aired his arguments against an insurrection in Gorky's paper, Novaia zhizn\ on Oc­tober 18. After the appearance of Kamenev's statement, even Lenin, to judge by his letters, momentarily feared that the opportunity to strike might have been lost. Beside himself with fury, he now declared war on

Kamenev and Zinoviev and launched an effort to have them ousted from the party.³⁷ At a meeting on October 20, however, the Central Committee stubbornly resisted Lenin's demands, and limited its action to accepting Kamenev's resignation from the party leadership and admonishing Kamenev and Zinoviev not to make public statements of any kind counter to the decisions of the Central Committee.³⁸

On October 18, the evening that Kamenev's declaration against an upris­ing appeared in Novaia zhizn\ the intraparty controversy also erupted openly at a gathering of some two hundred Bolshevik activists at Smolny, called expressly to coordinate preparations for the seizure of power. Here the Bolshevik moderates Riazanov and Larin took the floor to attack prep­arations for an uprising. Also speaking out in this vein was Grigorii Chud- novsky, freshly arrived in the capital from the southwestern front to attend the Congress of Soviets. Drawing on his experience among troops on the southwestern front, where the Bolsheviks did not have a firm foothold, Chudnovky proclaimed with great passion that an insurrection organized by the Bolsheviks was destined for certain defeat.³⁹

•13-

THE GARRISON CRISIS AND THE MILITARY REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE

JL jLwith the Provisional Government, reactions to the obstacles con­nected with an immediate armed uprising were varied. In the face of con­tinuing concern that the insurrectionary organs, weapons, and trained per­sonnel for an organized insurrection were not yet ready; that seizure of power by the Bolsheviks alone would be opposed by all other major politi­cal parties, by the peasants in the provinces and the soldiers at the front, indeed perhaps even by such mass democratic institutions as the soviets and trade unions, as well as by elements within the Bolshevik Party itself; and finally, that even workers and soldiers in Petrograd were unresponsive to calls for a rising before the Congress of Soviets—some Bolshevik officials counseled simply that the start of an insurrection be postponed pending further preparation. As we have seen, this was the response of the Military Organization chiefs, Podvoisky and Nevsky, who consistently viewed the seizure of power in purely military terms.¹

mong Bolshevik leaders who shared Lenin's impatience to have done

Another approach which gradually suggested itself to tactically cautious Bolsheviks, often those most active in the soviets or in other local represen­tative institutions and hence particularly attuned to the prevailing mass mood, ran along the following lines: (1) that the soviets (because of their stature in the eyes of workers and soldiers), and not the organs of the party, should be employed for the overthrow of the Provisional Government; (2) that for the broadest support, any attack on the government should be masked as a defensive operation on behalf of the soviets; (3) thus that action should be delayed until a suitable excuse for giving battle presented itself; (4) that to undercut potential resistance and maximize the probability of success, every opportunity should be utilized to subvert the Provisional

Government's power peacefully; and (5) that the formal overthrow of the government should be linked with and legitimized by the decisions of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets.² While this was, in many respects, an extension of the politics and outlook of the Bolshevik left before October 10, these tactics were now to be pursued much more aggressively. It should be borne in mind as well that most Bolsheviks holding these views either in full or in part were confident that a majority at the coming Congress of Soviets would support a transfer of power to the soviets. Their most influential spokesman was Trotsky. But his outlook was shared by a significant number of other top Bolsheviks, including Stalin.

Framed against this background, the Provisional Government's sudden announcement, in the second week of October, of plans to move the bulk of the Petrograd garrison to the front came as a godsend to the Bolsheviks. It provided a perfect immediate cause around which a decisive struggle with the Kerensky regime could be initiated.

Outwardly, the Russian cabinet's decision regarding disposition of garri­son units was tied to German military moves in the Baltic. It will be recalled that on August 20 German forces had occupied the key seaport of Riga; it had seemed that, for the first time in the long war, the enemy might attempt an early advance on Petrograd itself. It should also be remembered that on the eve of the Kornilov affair, Kerensky had used the possibility of a further German advance to justify transfer of sizable numbers of Bol- shevized garrison troops to the northern front.

Concern about an enemy attack on Petrograd again mounted sharply in the first week of October when German air and amphibious forces carried out a brilliantly successful sneak attack, capturing the small but strategically important islands of Osel and Moon, at the entrance to the Gulf of Riga, and Dago, at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland. As a result, the entire Russian Baltic Fleet was driven back into the Finnish Gulf.³ Appraising the significance of these setbacks, the chief of staff of the Russian army, Gen­eral Nikolai Dukhonin, declared in the Preparliament that "with the loss of these islands, which for us are keys to the Baltic in the full sense of the term, we are in effect back to the age of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, our outlets to the sea controlled by Germany."⁴

In Petrograd news of these most recent military disasters gave rise to a storm of mutual recriminations. The government, along with liberal and conservative circles, implied that the unruly Baltic sailors were primarily to blame. Even before the German assault was well underway, Kerensky him­self had helped to fuel these charges, demanding in a message immediately released to the press that the sailors put an end to "consciously or uncon­sciously playing into the hands of the enemy." He asserted: "The Kronstad- ters have already succeeded in seeing to it that in this critical hour, not all of our defenses are in place."⁵ After the islands had fallen, Kerensky, at a closed meeting of a Preparliament committee for defense matters, con­tended that fully adequate military planning for the protection of the is­lands had come to naught because of the cowardice, lack of discipline, and demoralization of the naval units charged with their defense.⁶

On the other hand, the extreme left spoke up for the sailors, accusing the government and the General Staff of intentionally mismanaging Russia's defenses in order to justify political repression, resurrecting claims first raised against top civil and military authorities after the unexpected Russian retreat from Riga. Such accusations quickly helped intensify popular fears that Kerensky was preparing to surrender Petrograd in order to stifle the revolution. Apprehension in this regard reached fever pitch in the wake of rumors (later substantiated) that the Provisional Government was making preparations for a hasty move to Moscow, and a sensational, widely publi­cized speech by Mikhail Rodzianko, the well-known, formerly powerful president of the State Duma. Addressing the possibility that the Germans might take Petrograd, Rodzianko declared directly: "Petrograd appears threatened. ... I say, to hell with Petrograd. . . . People fear our central institutions in Petrograd will be destroyed. To this, let me say that I should be glad if these institutions are destroyed because they have brought Russia nothing but grief."⁷

There is no direct evidence that the Provisional Government ever seri­ously entertained the idea of surrendering Petrograd to the Germans without a fight. Moreover, Russian military leaders do not appear to have consi­dered an early German attack on Petrograd likely in the fall of 1917.⁸ What does seem to be true is that, as in late August, the embattled Kerensky perceived the apparent German threat as an excellent excuse to rid the capi­tal once and for all of the more unruly elements in the garrison.⁹

At this time, the Provisional Government's commissar on the northern front, Woytinsky, was assigned the task of facilitating the removal from the capital of the more unreliable garrison regiments, replacing them with less "corrupt" units from the army in the field.¹⁰ Simultaneously, on October 5, the government directed General Polkovnikov, commander of the Petrograd Military District, to prepare his troops for transfer to the front, and the following day Polkovnikov issued preliminary instructions to key commanders.¹¹

According to Woytinsky, Cheremisov himself had little taste for such an operation, feeling that the transfer of troops from Petrograd would only increase problems at the front. This is confirmed by a classified telegram which Cheremisov sent to the War Ministry on October 17, clarifying his attitude toward the receipt of garrison troops: "The initiative for dispatch of garrison troops to the front came from you, not from me. . . . When it became apparent that garrison units . . . were incapable of fighting, I said that from an operational point of view they were of little need to us. . . . We have enough such units as it is. In view of the desire you have ex­pressed to send them to the front, however, I do not reject them, if you consider their movement from Petrograd necessary."¹² Despite his reserva­tions, on October 9 Cheremisov issued a supplementary order, drafted by Woytinsky, endorsing Polkovnikov's directives and justifying them on the grounds that such action was absolutely vital to the defense of the capital from the Germans.

Soldiers in Petrograd reacted to news of these orders with predictable vehemence. In unison, garrison troops proclaimed their lack of confidence in the Provisional Government and demanded the transfer of power to the soviets. As in the aftermath of the Kornilov crisis, all the major garrison regiments that had been reluctant to follow the Bolsheviks during the July uprising now repudiated the Provisional Government and pledged support to the Petrograd Soviet. Moreover, those units of which the government was most confident—for example, cossack forces and front soldiers who had been rushed to Petrograd following the July days—either affirmed their neutrality in the struggle now developing over disposition of the garrison between the Petrograd Soviet and military authorities, or sided openly with the Soviet.

Typical of the avalanche of antigovernment resolutions adopted by garri­son units at this time was one passed at a mass protest meeting of soldiers from the Egersky Guards Regiment on October 12. It affirmed:

The pulling out of the revolutionary garrison from Petrograd is needed only by the privileged bourgeoisie as a means of stifling the revolution, dispersing the Congress of Soviets, and subverting the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. As long as governmental power remains in the hands of obvious counterrevolutionaries, Kornilovites, and semi- Kornilovites, we will carry on a firm struggle against the transfer of the revolutionary garrison from Petrograd, the center of the revolution. . . . We declare to all who listen that, while refusing to leave Petrograd, we will nonetheless heed the voice of the genuine leaders of the workers and poorer peasantry, that is, the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. We will believe in and follow it because everything else is pure treachery and open mockery of the world revolution.¹³

In the foregoing resolution, the soldiers of the Egersky Regiment under­lined their loyalty and support for the Soviet, rather than the Bolsheviks or any other single political party. This attitude, which, as mentioned earlier, had been observed by local Bolshevik leaders, was expressed in many of the political statements adopted by worker, soldier, and sailor organizations at this time. It was vividly reflected, for instance, at a mass meeting of per­sonnel from the Petrograd-based Second Baltic Fleet Detachment on Oc­tober 19 called in the wake of persistent rumors that the Bolsheviks were organizing an armed uprising to take place the next day.¹⁴ The government commissar in the unit, Krasnovsky, opened the meeting by reading an ap­peal for patience and order from the day's Izvestiia. Subsequently, Avgust

Loos, a military clerk who was not formally affiliated with any political party but whose revolutionary credentials are established by the fact that he was a member of the Tsentrobalt delegation imprisoned following the July uprising, also called on the sailors to refrain from coming out in the near future because "such action before elections to the Constituent Assembly might damage the support which left parties now enjoy among a broad segment of the population."

At this point, a Bolshevik, Nikolai Nevarovsky, took the floor, and, upon identifying himself as a Kronstadt sailor, was greeted by loud applause. Nevarovsky berated Krasnovsky for citing Izvestiia, which, he claimed, had outlived its time and did little to defend the interests of the laboring classes; nonetheless Nevarovsky also argued that it was necessary to refrain from any coming out. Next, the chairman of the unit sailor committee, Volodin, one guesses a Bolshevik as well, spoke up to say he had information regard­ing "a coming-out of thirty thousand workers whose patience with the Pro­visional Government has reached the limit." Volodin expressed hope that the men of the Second Baltic Fleet Detachment would not confine them­selves merely to the passage of resolutions. Yet this is precisely what the sailors did. The meeting ended with the adoption of a formal statement specifically repudiating "separate disorganized armed action," but at the same time declaring the readiness of the sailors to "come out" if such action was specifically sanctioned by the Petrograd Soviet. The resolution con­cluded: "As ardent enemies of the coalition Provisional Government who believe the policies of this government to be disastrous for democracy . . . we await with great impatience the portentous opening of the Congress of Representatives of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, in which we have faith, and which we invite to take power. We propose that it create an organ which will give the people bread and arrange a peace based on the principles proclaimed by the laboring democracy."

The new crisis involving the garrison, which surfaced publicly on Mon­day, October 9, did not reach its peak until the following week. Through­out this time, the Bolsheviks exploited it to the fullest. In the press, in the Petrograd Soviet, and, most importantly, in factories and barracks, the Bol­sheviks trumpeted the slogan, "the All-Russian Congress is in danger," fan­ning fears of a second Kornilov affair. Thus on October 11 the lead editorial in Rabochii put' ridiculed the argument that garrison forces were being or­dered out of Petrograd for strategic reasons, contending that ostensibly the offensive of June 18 had been "organized in the name of strategic necessity; yet later leading SRs and Mensheviks had openly acknowledged that the offensive was initiated for political reasons—in order to take the army in hand." The same pattern, Rabochii puf implied, had been repeated in Au­gust.

The Kornilov "reforms," capital punishment, and the suppression of army organizations had been justified by the need to raise the fighting capacity

of the army to combat the foreign enemy. Yet later it became clear to everyone that all of Kornilov's strategy had been aimed at fighting the revolution. Before the Kornilov uprising the conspirators demanded the transfer of a whole group of regiments from Petrograd, for strategic neces­sity, of course. The Bolsheviks had told soldiers, you are being destroyed. But the soldiers still trusted the SR and Menshevik windbags—they left to dig trenches and the revolution nearly fell into the pit being dug for it by Kornilov.

The government attempted to counter these arguments by presenting the dangers of a German attack in ever more alarming terms. Among the most important allies the government could look to in its conflict with the garri­son were embittered front soldiers, impatient to move to the rear, and front committees, many of them still in the hands of moderates. Consequently, military authorities attempted to employ pressure from army front commit­tees to force garrison regiments to accept transfer. On October 14 major garrison regiments received urgent telegrams from the headquarters of the Petrograd Military District, endorsed by General Cheremisov, ordering them to select delegates for a conference with front commanders and rep­resentatives of front army committees to be held at northern front head­quarters in Pskov the next day; the purpose of this meeting was to brief garrison units on the conditions necessitating their withdrawal from the capital and to acquaint them with the attitudes of front army organizations on this question.¹⁵

During these same days, front pressure on the garrison was exerted through the government and the moderate socialist press, which published numerous resolutions and letters from front committees demanding that garrison regiments ^udo their revolutionary duty." Thus on October 17 Golos soldata printed in full, on its front page, a strongly worded resolution passed by the Executive Committee of the Twelfth Army Soviet of Soldiers' Dep­uties. The resolution declared that only by "helping to defend the front could garrison regiments save the revolutionary capital" and it concluded with a demand for "submission to revolutionary duty and unqualified sacrifice" so that "brothers in the trenches would not be destroyed." An analogous declaration dispatched by the soldiers' committee of the First Army, which appeared in Golos soldata two days later, was even more em­phatic; it bitterly attacked soldiers in the rear for having allowed "liberty to deteriorate into anarchy and revolution into pogroms" and expressed full readiness to make garrison units move to the front by force of arms if they were unwilling to do so voluntarily.¹⁶

In his memoirs, Woytinsky suggests that by this time the gap in outlook between the radicalized, peace-hungry soldiers in the trenches and the more moderate, defensist front committees was so great that perhaps only on the issue of front troops being replaced by soldiers from the rear were the two in agreement.¹⁷ Nonetheless, for the Bolsheviks the apparent resentment of trench soldiers toward troops in the rear which emerged over the issue of transfers was a matter of considerable concern, serving to increase the pos­sibility that, as in July, front units might be mobilized successfully by Kerensky to pacify the capital.

That the policies of Bolshevik leaders in the Petrograd Soviet were fully attuned to this danger is yet another sign of the degree to which the Bol­sheviks were sensitive to, and, in their overall behavior, very much influenced by, the prevailing mass mood. On October 15, the Bolshevik leadership in the Petrograd Soviet arranged an early-morning meeting of garrison representatives designated to go to Pskov. The purpose of this gathering was to formulate a common response to the demands of the front committees. In this connection, the representatives readily accepted the ar­gument of the Bolsheviks that inasmuch as the question of garrison transfers was a central political issue, the resolution of which was the prerogative of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, the dispatch of represen­tatives to Pskov should be delayed pending its review.

Army committees on the northern front responded to this temporary re­buff with a declaration that only a joint conference of front and garrison representatives, and not the Petrograd Soviet or garrison alone, had the right to decide the legitimacy of transfers. The front declaration demanded that representatives of the garrison present themselves for such a conference on October 17.¹⁸ Meanwhile, the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee hurriedly considered the question of what to do about the demand for a conference in Pskov; ultimately, it authorized dispatch of a delegation, but drastically altered its character and composition. As provided for by the Ex­ecutive Committee, the delegation of garrison representatives was to be ex­panded by the addition of an even larger contingent of soviet deputies who shared the point of view of the Petrograd Soviet in regard to Petrograd's revolutionary defense. A plenary session of the Petrograd Soviet on Oc­tober 16 endorsed this procedure, stipulating that the delegation was em­powered only to gather and exchange information.¹⁹

Of course the Petrograd Soviet's action effectively destroyed any possibil­ity that the Pskov conference would work to the advantage of the Provi­sional Government. Convened on the afternoon of October 17, it acted as a sounding board for differing points of view⁷, but nothing more. Cheremisov and his fellow officers, surrounded by battle maps, outlined the military situation on the northern front and in the Baltic. Woytinsky contends that Cheremisov spoke without enthusiasm, conveying the distinct impression that at bottom it made no difference to him whether or not Petrograd regi­ments moved to the front, and that he did not wish to become involved in the matter. A succession of embittered front representatives described, graphically, the impossible situation of the front soldiers and the latter's resentment of garrison troops, whom they believed to be lounging comfort­ably in the rear, unwilling to support the common defense effort.

In response, the Petrograd delegation pointed to the purported sacrifices already made by most garrison soldiers in the interests of the revolution and of Russia's defense. To Woytinsky's frustration, the subsequent discussion was concerned as much with the need for transfer of power to the soviets, for peace, and for the long-suffering front-line soldier to return home, as it was with the question of getting new regiments into the trenches. Toward the close of the meeting, the Bolshevik Military Organization leader and chairman of the Military Section of the Petrograd Soviet, Andrei Sadovsky, who had played a prominent role in the writing of "Order Number One" at the time of the February revolution, read a formal statement on behalf of the Petrograd delegation. Composed by Sverdlov, the message voiced the left's apprehension that counterrevolutionary motives were behind efforts to withdraw the garrison. For his part, Woytinsky sought to obtain a pledge from the visitors that they would work to obtain the garrison's voluntary compliance with requests for troop support. Leaning on their limited man­date, the delegates from Petrograd refused to enter into such an agreement and even demurred from endorsing an oral resume of their discussion.²⁰

Actually, mistrust of the Provisional Government's intentions at this time was so widespread that even the moderate socialists were forced to recog­nize that garrison troops could not be expected to respond to relocation orders not in some way controlled by the Petrograd Soviet. On the morning of October 9, not long after Cheremisov's directive to the garrison became public, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet considered the question of the capital's military defense and the suspicions of garrison troops in regard to the government's motives; at least by implication, all of the participants in this discussion acknowledged that the fears of the sol­diers were justified. The Menshevik Mark Broido put before the deputies a joint Menshevik-SR resolution which, while calling on garrison soldiers to begin preparations for movement to the front, at the same time sought to calm them by providing for the creation of a special committee to evaluate defense needs and to prepare military defense plans that would inspire popular confidence. At bottom, the intent of the resolution was to facilitate cooperation between the Petrograd Soviet and the government in the in­terest of the war effort.²¹

The Bolsheviks countered this proposal with a significantly more militant one, hastily scratched out by Trotsky, repudiating the Kerensky govern­ment as the ruination of the country and proclaiming that Russia's sole hope of salvation lay in immediate peace.²² The resolution embodying this pro­posal accused the bourgeoisie, along with Kerensky, of preparing to turn over Petrograd, "the main fortress of the revolution," to the Germans. Affirming that the Petrograd Soviet could in no way take responsibility for the government's military strategy and, in particular, the withdrawal of troops from Petrograd, it insisted that the way to assure survival was to transfer power to the soviets. Like the moderate socialist resolution, the

Bolshevik proposal called on the garrison to come to battle readiness; even now, popular determination to resist the foreign foe was too strong for the Bolsheviks to ignore completely. By implication, however, these prepara­tions were intended as much to defend the revolution from the government and the right as from the Germans. The Bolshevik resolution specifically provided for the creation of a "revolutionary defense committee" (the future Military Revolutionary Committee), the primary purpose of which was to become fully familiar with all information relating to the defense of the capital and to take all possible steps to arm workers in order to "facilitate the revolutionary defense of Petrograd and the safety of the people from the attacks being openly prepared by military and civil Kornilovites." The proposed committee appeared to be modeled after the Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution organized by the Soviet leadership at the time of the Kornilov affair. Yet there was a fundamental difference between the two institutions: while the defense committee established in late August had been formally committed to the protection of the Provi­sional Government against the onslaught of the counterrevolution, for the committee proposed by the Bolsheviks one of the main enemies was the Provisional Government itself.

The surprising thing about the October 9 vote on the Menshevik-SR and Bolshevik resolutions in the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, now commonly assumed to be completely controlled by the Bolsheviks, was that the Menshevik-SR resolution was passed. A narrow majority of deputies present were evidently sympathetic to the moderates' argument that the Bolshevik resolution, by creating an independent military headquarters alongside that of the government, would severely cripple defense efforts. However, both resolutions were subsequently put before an unusually crowded and lively plenary session of the Petrograd Soviet late the same evening (a reporter later commented that the mood of the meeting was reminiscent of the first days of the revolution); here the militant Bolshevik motion clearly struck the more responsive chord, receiving the support of an overwhelming majority of factory and barracks representatives.²³

Such, in brief, was the original conception of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the institution used by the Bolsheviks in the following days to subvert and overthrow the Provisional Government. Histories of the Oc­tober revolution written in the Soviet Union in Stalin's time conveyed the impression that the creation of the Military Revolutionary Committee was a direct result of the Bolshevik Central Committee's decision of October 10 to organize an armed uprising, and that from the outset the organization of an insurrection was the committee's primary purpose.²⁴ Indeed, this view was implicit even in the valuable three-volume collection of documents concern­ing the Military Revolutionary Committee published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the mid-1960s.²⁵ This interpretation is obviously misleading.²⁶ At no time during the first half of October was the question of forming a nonparty institution like the Military Revolutionary Commit­tee ever raised in the Central Committee; indeed, the Military Revolu­tionary Committee was conceived on October 9, that is, the day before the Central Committee's decision regarding preparation of an uprising.

An organizational plan for the Military Revolutionary Committee was considered by leaders of the Military Section of the Petrograd Soviet on October 11. This plan was overwhelmingly endorsed at meetings of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet on October 12 and the Sol­diers' Section on October 13, and it was officially ratified by the full Pet­rograd Soviet on the night of October 16, at the same session that endorsed the Executive Committee's plans for the Pskov conference. As the organiza­tional plan for the Military Revolutionary Committee emerged on October 16, it provided for the creation of a committee to determine the minimum military force required in Petrograd itself (and hence not available for trans­fer), to make a precise accounting of all garrison personnel and reserves of provisions and weapons, and to formulate a working plan for the defense of the capital. The enabling act which set up the Military Revolutionary Committee also provided for the creation of a "garrison conference," primarily an assembly of representatives from all units of the garrison which would meet on a regular basis to facilitate communications between the Military Revolutionary Committee and the garrison, and among the individual regiments themselves.²⁷

It is worthy of note that this plan was significantly less provocative than the proposal that had been first rejected by the Executive Committee and later adopted by the full Petrograd Soviet on October 9; the plan adopted on October 16 said nothing about arming workers or about defense against internal, as well as external, threats to the revolution. To be sure, this was in part the result of practical parliamentary considerations; still, there is no reason to doubt that, initially, even most Bolsheviks viewed the new committee's chief purpose as the prevention of government attempts to ship the Bolshevized Petrograd garrison to the front and, in general, the defense of the left from attack, rather than the overthrow of the government. As we have seen, during these days, Lenin and other Bolshevik militants looked not to the Petrograd Soviet, but to the Bolshevik Military Organization and the Northern Region Congress of Soviets to organize an insurrection. Not until after the Northern Congress had ended (at the time of the October 15 and 16 party strategy sessions when the crucial importance of tying any moves against the government prior to the Congress of Soviets to the de­fense of the soviets and the congress was perceived) did party leaders begin to look at the Military Revolutionary Committee as something more than an organ of mutual self-defense. Relevant in this respect is the fact that at the October 15 Petersburg Committee meeting, local party leaders were uncer­tain of how the Military Revolutionary Committee just then taking shape related to their own planning for an insurrection; Latsis merely took note of the committee's creation and pointed to the necessity of determining an official attitude toward it. The Petersburg Committee considered simply dispatching representatives to the Military Revolutionary Committee, but concluded by agreeing to seek a clarification of the latter's status from the Central Committee before doing so.²⁸

The Central Committee, at its meeting on October 16, after reconfirming the October 10 decision, selected a "Military-Revolutionary Center" com­posed of Sverdlov, Stalin, Bubnov, Uritsky, and Dzerzhinsky. It then specified that this center was to "become part of the Soviet Revolutionary Committee," thereby suggesting for the first time the possibility that the Military Revolutionary Committee might become the directing body for the seizure of power.²⁹ Not until October 20, however, did the Military Rev­olutionary Committee hold an organizational meeting; at this time it selected a five-man leadership bureau composed of three Bolsheviks (An- tonov, Podvoisky, and Sadovsky) and two Left SRs (Lazimir and Sukhar- kov). Before this, it had been conceivable that the Mensheviks and SRs might be prominently represented in the committee; hence it was only after the actual composition and leadership of the Military Revolutionary Com­mittee became clear that the Bolshevik strategists could fully relate it to their ow n planning with any degree of confidence.

Significantly, between October 9 and 22 the formation and initial ac­tivities of the Military Revolutionary Committee, which were major news topics in all other newspapers including Rabochii put\ were virtually ignored in Soldat, reflecting the fact that the leadership of the Military Organization was still jealously guarding its primacy in matters relating to the garrison. On October 19 or 20, the Military Organization sent a memorandum to the Central Committee (its text has not been published) evidently insisting on the critical importance of leaving the direction of an armed uprising in the hands of the Military Organization rather than regular party organs or the Petrograd Soviet.³⁰ On October 20, however, most likely after the first organizational session of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the Central Committee rejected the Military Organization's arguments, asserting that "all Bolshevik organizations can become part of the revolutionary center organized by the [Petrograd] Soviet and discuss within the Bolshevik frac­tion all questions which concern them."³¹

It is important to note that by this time Lenin had also come to see the potential importance of the Military Revolutionary Committee as an osten­sibly nonparty insurrectionary organ, although, in contrast to Trotsky and many other top party strategists, he remained absolutely adamant on the need to seize power by means of an armed uprising and, equally important, to do so before the Second Congress of Soviets, which on October 18 had been rescheduled to open on October 25. Late one evening, probably be­tween October 20 and 23,³² at Lenin's insistence, the chiefs of the Military Organization, Podvoisky and Nevsky, along with Antonov (as head of the

Executive Committee created by the Northern Region Congress of Soviets) were summoned from Smolny to a small apartment in the Vyborg District for an urgent consultation. To judge by the recollections of this meeting by Podvoisky, Nevsky, and Antonov, at this point the Military Organization leadership, like Lenin, still tended to envision the seizure of power primar­ily in military terms, that is, as a properly organized armed uprising against the existing government. Podvoisky attempted to obtain Lenin's endorse­ment of the Military Organization's primacy in preparations for the over­throw of the Provisional Government—but to no avail. Rather, echoing the earlier decision of the Central Committee, Lenin insisted not only that the Military Organization work through the Military Revolutionary Commit­tee, but that it not attempt to dictate the latter's policies, that the member­ship of the Military Revolutionary Committee be made as broad as possible, and that individual initiatives be encouraged, as long as they were consis­tent with the party's objectives.³³

According to Nevsky, Lenin's chief purpose in calling this meeting was to "eradicate the last vestiges of stubbornness" within the Military Organi­zation in regard to an uprising.³⁴ For, even now, Military Organization leaders were divided and, on the whole, pessimistic about the wisdom of initiating an insurrection without significant further preparation. At this late-night confrontation with Lenin, Antonov reported on the revolutionary situation in Finland, observing that the artillerists in Sveaborg were still under the influence of Mensheviks and SRs, and that the political attitudes of Kuban Cossacks stationed in Finland were cause for concern. In regard to the assistance that the Bolsheviks could expect from revolutionary ele­ments in the Baltic region, Antonov expressed certainty that the fleet would respond positively to a call for an insurrection. He minimized the significance of the actual immediate military support that could be counted upon from the sailors, however, warning that "the depth of the channels would be prohibitive, that sailors on the more radical big ships would be fearful of submarines and cruisers, and, finally, that the sailors would be unwilling to expose the front." To this Lenin retorted, "The sailors must understand that the revolution is in greater danger in Petrograd than on the Baltic." Responded Antonov: "They don't understand. The most I can guarantee are two or three gunboats to be brought up the Neva and a de­fensive detachment of three thousand or so sailors and workers from Vyborg." "Not enough," growled Lenin.³⁵

When it was their turn to report, both Nevsky and Podvoisky argued for a delay of ten to fifteen days in the start of an uprising. Nevsky reem- phasized the difficulty of moving radicalized elements of the fleet to the capital in time to be of any use, while Podvoisky pleaded for further time to coordinate preparations for an insurrection at the front and in provincial garrisons. As far as Podvoisky was concerned, time was on the Bolsheviks' side, and the danger lay in premature action.

To all these reservations Lenin turned a deaf ear; Podvoisky remembered that he became "restless and impatient" at the very mention of delay. "Time is on the side of the government," not the Bolsheviks, Lenin argued. Waiting would "only give the government more time to destroy the Bol­sheviks with loyal troops brought in from the front."³⁶ Over and over Lenin reiterated the absolute necessity of overthrowing the Provisional Govern­ment before the Congress of Soviets so that "the congress, irrespective of its composition, would be confronted with a situation in which the seizure of power by the workers is an actual fact."³⁷ Antonov recalled that he and Nevsky were greatly influenced by Lenin's arguments, but that Podvoisky remained skeptical. At any rate, their discussion ended with the Military Organization leaders agreeing to work within the Military Revolutionary Committee and, in general, to intensify their preparation to maximum degree.³⁸

Meanwhile, both the Military Revolutionary Committee and the garrison conference, which had been approved formally by the Petrograd Soviet on October 16, had begun to function. The garrison conference was the first of the two to start operations, representatives of most major military units in Petrograd and its suburbs responding positively to requests from the Mili­tary Section of the Petrograd Soviet to send delegates to Smolny for the conference's first session on October 18. The main purpose of this initial gathering was to obtain a clearer sense of the extent to which individual units would go in supporting the Petrograd Soviet and, in particular, in opposing the government on the issue of withdrawing the bulk of the garri­son from the capital. Each of the assembled representatives characterized the political position of his unit and, specifically, its attitude toward taking arms against the Provisional Government. From the government's point of view, the results of this informal sounding, capturing the leftward swing among the soldiers caused by the threat of shipment to the front, were thoroughly disquieting. All but three of the eighteen representatives whose reports were recorded proclaimed lack of confidence in the Provisional Government and firm support for transfer of power to the soviets. At the same time, these reports were not wholly reassuring to the Bolsheviks. Roughly half the spokesmen affirming support for a soviet government were noncommittal in regard to armed action, while the remainder either directly or implicitly made it clear that they would countenance a "coming-out" only if it were organized by the Petrograd Soviet or, in one case, the All- Russian Congress of Soviets. Said the representative of the Egersky Guards Regiment, "We would support an uprising only in response to an order from the Petrograd Soviet; but [in such a case] we would take action in an organized way and would demand the immediate overthrow of the govern­ment and transfer of power to the soviets."³⁹