October

by China Miéville

  Bleikhman, the energetic Anarchist–Communist, exhorted them. He insisted that it was time to overthrow the Provisional Government and take power – directly, not even handing it to the Soviet. And as to organisation? ‘The street’, he said, ‘will organise us.’ He proposed a demonstration at 5 p.m. In an ambience of combative enthusiasm, the suggestion was unanimously passed.

  The soldiers quickly elected a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, under the popular Bolshevik agitator A. I. Semashko, now directly disobeying his party’s injunctions. Soldiers’ delegates set out in boats for Kronstadt, and went racing through the city in their armoured cars, waving banners from their windows, spreading the word, garnering support from the Moskovsky, Grenadier, First Infantry, and Armoured Car Divisions – as well as from workers in their Vyborg factories. Not all their appeals were rewarded with explicit support: sometimes they met with ‘benevolent neutrality’. No signs of a countermovement, of active opposition, were visible, however.

  Mid-afternoon. A seething, angry mass started to gather in the city’s outskirts, heading slowly for the centre.

  Gone, now, were the uptown types. Vanishingly few of those present were the better-dressed, more affluent protestors who had taken part in the February marches. This was the armed anger of workers, soldiers – those Bonch-Bruevich had called to be Red Guards.

  As the demonstrations began to converge on the Tauride Palace, around 3 p.m., the Bolshevik delegation to the Soviet convened the Workers’ section without notice. The party’s members turned up en bloc, outnumbering those Mensheviks and SRs who had scrambled to attend. The Bolsheviks were able to promptly pass a motion calling for all power to the Soviet. Their outflanked opponents walked out in protest.

  At Kshesinskaya, the Bolshevik Second City Conference was into its third day. Heated disagreements continued. As the Petersburg Committee debated whether to override Lenin’s opposition and establish a separate newspaper – on the grounds that Pravda was not meeting their needs – two MO machine-gunners burst into the chamber, and announced that they were marching on the Provisional Government.

  Chaos descended. Volodarsky excoriated the soldiers for going against party wishes; they witheringly replied that it was better to leave the party than turn against their regiment. With that, the machine-gunners walked out, and the meeting was abruptly terminated.

  The All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and its counterpart for Peasants’ Deputies, were already assembled in the Tauride Palace: they had been trying to work out how best to offer their support to the diminished, Kadet-less Provisional Government. It was at around 4 p.m. that reports of the swelling demonstration got through to them. The Soviet leadership understood immediately that this was an existential threat to their authority – possibly even to their persons.

  Quickly they mandated the Menshevik intellectual Wladimir Woytinsky to arrange the palace’s defence. They dispatched telegrams to all garrison troops, and to the Kronstadt base, sternly reiterating the ban on demonstrations. They drafted a proclamation condemning the march as treachery, warning that it would be dealt with by ‘all available means’. Members of the Soviet fanned out across Petrograd to try to calm the streets.

  News of the demonstration had reached the Bolshevik CC, also meeting in Tauride, a few doors down. There was quick and fractious debate. The CC, by now including Trotsky, maintained its cautious ‘Leninist’ line – that the time for such an adventure was not right – and voted against joining in. Urgently the leadership sent activists to try to hold the machine-gunners back. Zinoviev and Kamenev prepared an appeal for the front page of next day’s Pravda, imploring the masses to show restraint. The CC relayed its decision to their Second City Conference.

  At that conference, however, dissent exploded.

  Though expressions of support for the rebels were defeated and the CC position did pass, it was criticised by many high-profile delegates. The conference left called for a meeting with representatives from factories, the military, the Mezhraiontsy and Menshevik–Internationalists, to ‘take the temperature’ of the city. This demand was, and was understood to be, pressure on the CC to pitch left.

  A compromise was rush-cobbled together, but though couched in the party’s usual tough language, it was in fact formalised floundering. It would take days, weeks, for the radicals to make sense of what was about to come – events that would lead them to shift their positions, discard the sloganeering call for Soviet power and envisage something new, more combative still.

  ‘We will see’, announced Tomsky, articulating the party’s hesitant stance at that moment, ‘how the movement develops.’ For now neither firestarters nor firefighters, the Bolsheviks could only commit to keeping on watching. ‘We will see.’

  From the start, the demonstration was violent. Shouting marchers heaved together to overturn trams, tipping them out of their runnels to lie on their sides in their own shattered windows. On the bridges, revolutionary soldiers set up machine gun posts. The mood was insurrectionary.

  And not only among the left. ‘Black Hundreds, hooligans, provocateurs, anarchists and desperate people introduce a large amount of chaos and absurdity to the demonstration’, said Lunacharsky. In volleys of shots and frantic punches and hurled and broken glass, the left and the hard right clashed. The city rang to the sounds of guns and hooves. Beside the City Council on Nevsky Prospect, bloody fighting erupted.

  Bullets from machine guns took men down. Wounded demonstrators staggered to escape along Petrograd’s impassive streets and rounded colonnades. The faces of lions watched from the grand facades of which they were part, their mouths carved shut but the dirty city air giving them smut tongues. In the canals, gliding under the bridges, barges laden with wood from the endless forests continued their deliveries, as if the streets were not full of whinnying and screaming, as if armoured cars did not hurtle overhead, and the bargemen did not have to duck at the whine of missiles. Black-bearded men from the villages frowned up from the cuts where their low boats puttered.

  At 7:45 p.m., a truck bristling with weapons pulled up at the Baltic Station: the men within had come to arrest Kerensky, who they had heard would be there. But they had missed him by moments. He had departed the city. Three battalions of the Machine Gun Regiment set out through Vyborg. ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!’ their placards read. News of the Kadet resignations from cabinet had not reached them yet – with them out, only six remained. Massed militants seized munitions from the Mikhailovskoe Artillery Academy, and stormed across the Liteiny Bridge, where one section of the crowd joined the Sixth Engineer Battalion and headed for Tauride – and another peeled off for the Kshesinskaya Mansion.

  There, the Bolshevik leaders were still debating what to do, when word reached them that the armed masses were approaching. Someone in the room gasped: ‘Without the sanction of the Central Committee?’

  To be a radical was to lead others, surely, to change their ideas, to persuade them to follow you; to go neither too far or too fast, nor to lag behind. ‘To patiently explain.’ How easy to forget that people do not need or await permission to move.

  A great militant crowd spread out at the junction of the road and river, filling the space between the mosque and the mansion. For the party, Podvoisky, Lashevich and Nevsky emerged onto the mansion’s small low balcony. Standing only a few handspans above the multitude, they shouted greetings at them – then, absurdly, urged the enraged thousands to return to Vyborg.

  But this movement could not be reversed. The question for the Bolsheviks, then, was whether to shun it, join it, or attempt to lead it.

  A turning point: the militant MO at last got its way, as, scrambling to catch up, the party gave its hurried and flustered blessing to a march on the Tauride Palace, in an effort to spread its aegis over a fait accompli. The demonstrators set back out south across the city’s bridges and east along the river. It did not take them long to reach the palace, or to surro
und it.

  Within, the Soviet was buzzing in an emergency session. There could be no holding back this sea of armed protestors, and a delegation from the First Machine Gun Regiment pushed their way inside. Storming through the corridors in their heavy boots, they found Chkheidze. As he stared at his unwanted visitors in alarm, the men informed him coldly that they were disturbed to hear that the Soviet was considering entering a new coalition government. That, they said, was something they could not allow.

  Some among the throng were ready to be less polite. From the city outside, from beyond the palace fence, came voices hollering for the arrest of the leaders of the Coalition Government. The arrest of the Soviet itself!

  But there was no plan and no direction. The streets, despite Bleikhman’s confidence, organised no one.

  Darkness came at last, and though the tension had not abated, the massed crowds dispersed. For then.

  That evening, the remaining ‘capitalist ministers’ of the coalition huddled with General Polovtsev in the Stavka headquarters near Palace Square. The Winter Palace and the Stavka were guarded by the only troops they had at their disposal: the loyalist war-wounded. Reinforcements were due to join them the next evening. That was a long time to wait.

  The night stretched out. A few Cossack detachments roved the city, engaging insurrectionaries. Woytinsky, responsible for the Ispolkom’s protection, was on edge: the guard was inadequate to see off any serious attack on Tauride, and he knew it. And the Mensheviks and SRs also knew, notwithstanding a degree of wavering from the less radical regiments who had come out, that morning would bring more protests, heightened uncertainty. They denounced the Bolsheviks, condemned the ‘counterrevolutionary’ demonstrations, protested ‘these ominous signs of disintegration’.

  As dawn approached, the Soviet delegates crept out to brave the streets, with the unenviable task of going to the regiments and factories, to try to talk them down.

  In the small hours, the Bolshevik CC urgently dispatched M. A. Saveliev to Bonch-Bruevich’s dacha to bring back Lenin. By 4 a.m., they were distributing a hastily printed leaflet drafted by Stalin, one that seemed, if anything, designed to stress their own relevance. In tones of equivocal vagueness – ‘We call upon this movement … to become a peaceful, organised expression of the will of the workers, soldiers and peasants of Petrograd’ – it pretended to a unity of purpose and analysis, an influence, that the party did not possess.

  Playing catch-up, the Bolsheviks, who felt they had little choice, gave the militant MO its head, freed it to become part of whatever this was. Of course, now that the party line had switched, Zinoviev and Kamenev’s injunction in Pravda not to come out was worse than ineffectual: it was an embarrassment. But there was neither time nor focus to replace it. And who could be sure of what, exactly, should be put in its place? What was the party’s direction? In the absence of answers, the offending words were simply cut.

  On the 4th, the second and more violent of the July Days, Pravda appeared, and the centre of its front page was blank. A white, textless hole.

  The 4th. A warm damp dawn. Across the city, shops stayed shut. Insurgents’ trucks rushed through the streets. Soldiers squared off against real or imaginary enemies, gunfire sounding repeatedly in the morning quiet. The streets began to fill. By mid-morning, Petrograd thronged again with demonstrators. Half a million people would come out that day.

  At 9 a.m., the dilapidated train carrying Lenin, his sister Maria, his comrades Bonch-Bruevich and Saveliev, crossed the Sestra river dividing Finland and Russia, through the border town of Belo-Ostrov. Though part of the Russian empire, the Finnish border was marked by checks. Bonch-Bruevich held his breath as an inspector examined their documents. With Petrograd in these throes, he was fearful that they would be intercepted. But the man waved them on, and the conclave continued back to the city.

  As they approached, so too at the Neva’s mouth did a naval gallimaufry. A mad patchwork flotilla. Eight tugs, a torpedo boat, passenger ferries, three trawlers, three gunboats, a pair of barges, a scattering of civilian craft. On their decks, waving from their railings, guns aloft, the sailors of Kronstadt, riding the current. Thousands came, commanded by the energetic Bolshevik Raskolnikov, editor of the Kronstadt Pravda. They sailed for the mainland to join what they believed would be the culmination of their revolution. The fury of Kronstadt, the revolution’s redoubt, came in whatever they had been able to commandeer.

  As they powered and tacked closer, the Soviet’s Executive Committee sent out its own tug to hail the bizarre arrivals. On its deck stood a messenger, begging them to leave, bellowing across the water that the Soviet did not want them. The motley armada left him bobbing in their overlapping wakes.

  Kronstadt’s February had been bloody and desperate, an act of revolutionary hope on an isolated island, in expectation of counter-revolution by dawn. No officer held sway in their base now. The sailors’ soviet had had no qualms about completing its own local revolution, and their arrival meant more than just more men in Petrograd. They were, rather, emissaries from a red fortress. A living collective, a political premonition.

  Their vessels swung into the city. The Kronstadt men moored near Nikolaevsky Bridge, tied up and raised their arms in greeting to the city. Demonstrators in the streets by the water’s edge watched and cheered, and exhorted the newcomers to overthrow the government. But Raskolnikov was not ready to head for the Tauride Palace yet. First, he announced, he would lead his sailors along the embankment, across the bridge north and past the long blank walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and thence to Kshesinskaya Mansion, on the wrong side of the river for the palace. But there at Kshesinskaya he would present the ranks to the Bolsheviks, or vice versa.

  As they came ashore, there, waiting eagerly to address the celebrated sailors, stood Maria Spiridonova.

  Spiridonova, the near-legendary SR, who had killed for the people and paid the price, whose torture and imprisonment in 1906 had shocked even liberal consciences. Her courage, sincerity and sacrifice – and doubtless her striking beauty – had made her something of a popular saint. Still implacably on her party’s hard and restive left, she was a fierce opponent of Kerensky and the government.

  It was in a needless moment of petty sectarianism that Raskolnikov would not give Spiridonova – the great Spiridonova! – a chance to speak to the Kronstadt sailors. Instead he left her standing, humiliated and aggrieved, as he led his men away to the beat of their band.

  The sailors marched across Vasilievsky Island and the Stock Exchange Bridge, carrying banners that read ‘All Power to the Soviets’. Their column arrived at last outside the mansion, where from the balcony Sverdlov, Lunacharsky and Nevsky addressed them. The anarchists and Left SRs among the congregation, furious at Spiridonova’s uncomradely snubbing, left this partisan gathering in protest.

  Raskolnikov and Flerovsky made their way inside, where, holed up within, they found the newly returned Lenin.

  The two Kronstadt Bolsheviks implored him to speak, to greet the militant visitors. Lenin, though, was troubled.

  He was not happy with the day’s events, and he tried to decline, hinting at his disapproval of this huge precipitous provocation. But the demonstrators would not disperse or leave, and nor would they stop their shouting for him. The demands were audible through the mansion walls.

  At last, before the tension reached some dangerous point, Lenin surrendered to the insistent crowd. He stepped out onto the balcony to a roaring ovation.

  His hesitancy, though, was evident. His speech was uncharacteristically brimstone-free. He greeted the sailors with surprising mildness, hoped, rather than demanded, that ‘All Power to the Soviets’ would become a reality. He appealed for self-restraint and vigilance.

  Even many party faithful were nonplussed. In particular, as one Kronstadt Bolshevik put it, they were taken aback by his emphasis on the necessity of a peaceful demonstration to ‘a column of armed men, craving to rush into battle’.

  ‘Lookin
g at them,’ said the British ambassador’s daughter of the insurgent Kronstadt soldiers on the streets, ‘one wondered what the fate of Petrograd would be if these ruffians with their unshaven faces, their slouching walk, their utter brutality were to have the town at their mercy.’ What indeed? Did they, in fact, not so have the town? But this was something more than a demonstration, something less than an insurrection.

  The MO agitated among the garrison at the Peter and Paul Fortress, where amid shouting and wrangling they drew 8,000 men to their side. Radicals with weapons in their hands spread out through the city, took control of anti-Bolshevik newspapers and set up guards at stations. The noise of bullets kept up, as right and left skirmished bloodily.

  Mid-afternoon. Some 60,000 people processed by a church on the corner of Sadovaya and Apraksina streets. From above came pounding shots, sending the marchers scattering in panic. Five were left dead on the ground.

  At 3 p.m., the huge sailors’ demonstration clogged the channel between the smart facades of Nevsky and Liteiny Prospects, where shop windows displayed proud support for the army’s offensive and for the government. The curious monied watched the marchers from above. From somewhere came another shot. A black-flag-carrying anarchist fell dying. The crowd stampeded again, ducking and zigzagging to safety, amid counterfire and chaos. Sailors broke into overlooking houses in rough search parties, hunting for arms and sometimes finding them. Blood had been spilt and blood was up, and the men spilt blood in revenge, lynching some of those they overcame.

  Fired up, firing, fired upon, the marchers converged on the Tauride Palace. Again and again they shouted their demand: all power to the soviets. The skies released torrential rain, whipping up the end-of-days atmosphere among the many who stayed. As darkness started to fall, someone fired a sodden weapon at the palace, spreading panic. The Kronstadters were demanding to see Perverzev, the minister of justice, to hear from him why the anarchist Zhelezniakov, who had been taken into custody at Durnovo, had not been released.