Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

  “I think he’s right,” said Katerina. “Everyone is fed up with governments who speak about democracy but do nothing about the price of bread.”

  As usual, Katerina said what most Petrograd workers were thinking.

  Magda was expecting them and had made tea. “I’m sorry there’s no sugar,” she said. “I haven’t been able to get sugar for weeks.”

  “I can’t wait to get this over with,” said Katerina. “I’m so tired of carrying all this weight.”

  Magda felt Katerina’s belly and said she had about two weeks to go. Katerina said: “It was awful when Vladimir was born. I had no friends, and the midwife was a hard-faced Siberian bitch called Kseniya.”

  “I know Kseniya,” said Magda. “She’s competent, but a bit stern.”

  “I’ll say.”

  Konstantin was leaving for the Smolny Institute. Although the soviet was not in session every day, there were constant meetings of committees and ad hoc groups. Kerensky’s provisional government was now so weak that the soviet gained authority by default. “I hear Lenin is back in town,” Konstantin said to Grigori.

  “Yes, he got back last night.”

  “Where is he staying?”

  “It’s a secret. The police are still keen to arrest him.”

  “What made him return?”

  “We’ll find out tomorrow. He’s called a meeting of the Central Committee.”

  Konstantin left to catch a streetcar to the city center. Grigori walked Katerina home. When he was about to leave for the barracks, she said: “I feel better, knowing Magda will be with me.”

  “Good.” Grigori still felt that childbirth seemed more dangerous than an armed uprising.

  “And you’ll be there too,” Katerina added.

  “Not actually in the room,” Grigori said nervously.

  “No, of course not. But you’ll be outside, pacing up and down, and that will make me feel safe.”

  “Good.”

  “You will be there, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Whatever happens, I’ll be there.”

  When he got to the barracks an hour later he found the place in turmoil. On the parade ground, officers were trying to get guns and ammunition loaded onto wagons, with little success: every battalion committee was either holding a meeting or preparing to hold one. “Kerensky has done it now!” said Isaak jubilantly. “He’s trying to send us to the front.”

  Grigori’s heart sank. “Send who?”

  “The entire Petrograd garrison! The orders have come down. We’re to change places with soldiers at the front.”

  “What’s their reason?”

  “They say it’s because of the German advance.” The Germans had taken the islands in the Gulf of Riga and were heading toward Petrograd.

  “Rubbish,” said Grigori angrily. “It’s an attempt to undermine the soviet.” And it was a clever attempt, he realized as he thought it through. If the troops in Petrograd were replaced by others coming back from the front, it would take days, perhaps weeks of organization to form new soldiers’ committees and elect new deputies to the soviet. Worse, the new men would lack the experience of the last six months’ political battles—which would have to be fought all over again. “What do the soldiers say?”

  “They’re furious. They want Kerensky to negotiate peace, not send them to die.”

  “Will they refuse to leave Petrograd?”

  “I don’t know. It will help if they get the backing of the soviet.”

  “I’ll take care of that.”

  Grigori took an armored car and two bodyguards and drove over the Liteiny Bridge to the Smolny. This looked like a setback, he reflected, but it might turn into an opportunity. Until now, not all troops had supported the Bolsheviks, but Kerensky’s attempt to send them to the front might swing the waverers over. The more he thought about it, the more he believed this could be Kerensky’s big mistake.

  The Smolny was a grand building that had been a school for daughters of the wealthy. Two machine guns from Grigori’s regiment guarded the entrance. Red Guards attempted to verify everyone’s identity—but, Grigori noted uneasily, the crowds going in and out were so numerous that the check was not rigorous.

  The courtyard was a scene of frenetic activity. Armored cars, motorcycles, trucks, and cars came and went constantly, competing for space. A broad flight of steps led up to a row of arches and a classical colonnade. In an upstairs room Grigori found the executive committee of the soviet in session.

  The Mensheviks were calling on the garrison soldiers to prepare to move to the front. As usual, Grigori thought with disgust, the Mensheviks were surrendering without a fight; and he suffered a sudden panicky fear that the revolution was slipping away from him.

  He went into a huddle with the other Bolsheviks on the executive to compose a more militant resolution. “The only way to defend Petrograd against the Germans is to mobilize the workers,” Trotsky said.

  “As we did at the time of the Kornilov Putsch,” Grigori said with enthusiasm. “We need another Committee for Struggle to take charge of the defense of the city.”

  Trotsky scribbled a draft, then stood up to propose the motion.

  The Mensheviks were outraged. “You would be creating a second military command center alongside army headquarters!” said Mark Broido. “No man can serve two masters.”

  To Grigori’s disgust, most committeemen agreed with that. The Menshevik motion was passed and Trotsky’s was defeated. Grigori left the meeting in despair. Could the soldiers’ loyalty to the soviet survive such a rebuff?

  That afternoon the Bolsheviks met in Room 36 and decided they could not accept this decision. They agreed to propose their motion again that evening, at the meeting of the full soviet.

  The second time, the Bolsheviks won the vote.

  Grigori was relieved. The soviet had backed the soldiers and set up an alternative military command.

  They were one large step closer to power.

  { III }

  Next day, feeling optimistic, Grigori and the other leading Bolsheviks slipped quietly away from the Smolny in ones and twos, careful not to attract the attention of the secret police, and made their way to the large apartment of a comrade, Galina Flakserman, for the meeting of the Central Committee.

  Grigori was nervous about the meeting and arrived early. He circled the block, looking for idlers who might be police spies, but he saw no one suspicious. Inside the building he reconnoitered the different exits—there were three—and determined the fastest way out.

  The Bolsheviks sat around a big dining table, many wearing the leather coats that were becoming a kind of uniform for them. Lenin was not there, so they started without him. Grigori fretted about him—he might have been arrested—but he arrived at ten o’clock, disguised in a wig that kept slipping and almost made him look foolish.

  However, there was nothing laughable about the resolution he proposed, calling for an armed uprising, led by the Bolsheviks, to overthrow the provisional government and take power.

  Grigori was elated. Everyone wanted an armed uprising, of course, but most revolutionaries said the time was not yet ripe. At last the most powerful of them was saying now.

  Lenin spoke for an hour. As always he was strident, banging the table, shouting, and abusing those who disagreed with him. His style worked against him—you wanted to vote down someone who was so rude. But despite that he was persuasive. His knowledge was wide, his political instinct was unerring, and few men could stand firm against the hammer blows of his logical arguments.

  Grigori was on Lenin’s side from the start. The important thing was to seize power and end the dithering, he thought. All other problems could be solved later. But would the others agree?

  Zinoviev spoke against. Normally a handsome man, he, too, had changed his appearance to confuse the police. He had grown a beard and cropped his luxuriant thatch of curly black hair. He thought Lenin’s strategy was too risky. He was afraid an uprising would give th
e right wing an excuse for a military coup. He wanted the Bolshevik party to concentrate on winning the elections for the Constituent Assembly.

  This timid argument infuriated Lenin. “The provisional government is never going to hold a national election!” he said. “Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool and a dupe.”

  Trotsky and Stalin backed the uprising, but Trotsky angered Lenin by saying they should wait for the All-Russia Congress of Soviets, scheduled to begin in ten days’ time.

  That struck Grigori as a good idea—Trotsky was always reasonable—but Lenin surprised him by roaring: “No!”

  Trotsky said: “We’re likely to have a majority among the delegates—”

  “If the congress forms a government, it is bound to be a coalition!” Lenin said angrily. “The Bolsheviks admitted to the government will be centrists. Who could wish for that—other than a counterrevolutionary traitor?”

  Trotsky flushed at the insult, but he said nothing.

  Grigori realized Lenin was right. As usual, Lenin had thought farther ahead than anyone else. In a coalition, the Mensheviks’ first demand would be that the prime minister must be a moderate—and they would probably settle for anyone but Lenin.

  It dawned on Grigori—and at the same time on the rest of the committee, he guessed—that the only way Lenin could become prime minister was by a coup.

  The dispute raged until the small hours. In the end they voted by ten to two in favor of an armed uprising.

  However, Lenin did not get all his own way. No date was set for the coup.

  When the meeting was over, Galina produced a samovar and put out cheese, sausage, and bread for the hungry revolutionaries.

  { IV }

  As a child on Prince Andrei’s estate, Grigori had once witnessed the climax of a deer hunt. The dogs had brought down a stag just outside the village, and everyone had gone to look. When Grigori got there the deer was dying, the dogs already greedily eating the intestines spilling out of its ripped belly while the huntsmen on their horses swigged brandy in celebration. Yet even then the wretched beast had made one last attempt to fight back. It had swung its mighty antlers, impaling one dog and slashing another, and had, for a moment, almost looked as if it might struggle to its feet; then it had sunk back to the bloodstained earth and closed its eyes.

  Grigori thought Prime Minister Kerensky, the leader of the provisional government, was like that stag. Everyone knew he was finished—except him.

  As the bitter cold of a Russian winter closed around Petrograd like a fist, the crisis came to a head.

  The Committee for Struggle, soon renamed the Military Revolutionary Committee, was dominated by the charismatic figure of Trotsky. He was not handsome, with his big nose, high forehead, and bulging eyes staring through rimless glasses, but he was charming and persuasive. Where Lenin shouted and bullied, Trotsky reasoned and beguiled. Grigori suspected that Trotsky was as tough as Lenin but better at hiding it.

  On Monday, November 5, two days before the All-Russia Congress was due to start, Grigori went to a mass meeting, called by the Military Revolutionary Committee, of all the troops in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The meeting started at noon and went on all afternoon, hundreds of soldiers debating politics in the square in front of the fort while their officers fumed impotently. Then Trotsky arrived, to thunderous applause, and after listening to him they voted to obey the committee rather than the government, Trotsky, not Kerensky.

  Walking away from the square, Grigori reflected that the government could not possibly tolerate a key army unit declaring its loyalty to someone else. The cannon of the fortress were directly across the river from the Winter Palace, where the provisional government was headquartered. Surely, he thought, Kerensky would now admit defeat and resign.

  Next day Trotsky announced precautions against a counterrevolutionary coup by the army. He ordered Red Guards and troops loyal to the soviet to take over the bridges, railway stations, and police stations, plus the post office, the telegraph office, the telephone exchange, and the state bank.

  Grigori was at Trotsky’s side, turning the great man’s stream of commands into detailed instructions for specific military units and dispatching the orders around the city by messengers on horseback, on bicycles, and in cars. He thought Trotsky’s “precautions” seemed very similar to a takeover.

  To his amazement and delight, there was little resistance.

  A spy at the Marinsky Palace reported that Prime Minister Kerensky had asked the preparliament—the body that had so miserably failed in its task of setting up the Constituent Assembly—for a vote of confidence. The preparliament refused. No one took much notice. Kerensky was history, just another inadequate man who had tried and failed to rule Russia. He returned to the Winter Palace, where his impotent government continued to pretend to rule.

  Lenin was hiding at the apartment of a comrade, Margarita Fofanova. The Central Committee had ordered him not to move about the city, fearing he would be arrested. Grigori was one of the few people who knew his location. At eight o’clock in the evening Margarita arrived at the Smolny with a note from Lenin ordering the Bolsheviks to launch an armed insurrection immediately. Trotsky said tetchily: “What does he imagine we’re doing?”

  But Grigori thought Lenin was right. In spite of everything, the Bolsheviks had not quite seized power. Once the Congress of Soviets assembled it would have all authority—and then, even if the Bolsheviks were in a majority, the result would be yet another coalition government based on compromise.

  The congress was scheduled to begin tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock. Only Lenin seemed to understand the urgency of the situation, Grigori thought with a sense of desperation. He was needed here, at the heart of things.

  Grigori decided to go and get him.

  It was a freezing night, with a north wind that seemed to blow straight through the leather coat Grigori wore over his sergeant’s uniform. The center of the city was shockingly normal: well-dressed middle-class people were coming out of theaters and walking to brightly lit restaurants, while beggars pestered them for change and prostitutes smiled on street corners. Grigori nodded to a comrade who was selling a pamphlet by Lenin called Will the Bolsheviks Be Able to Hold the Power? Grigori did not buy one. He already knew the answer to that question.

  Margarita’s flat was on the northern edge of the Vyborg district. Grigori could not drive there for fear of calling attention to Lenin’s hideout. He walked to the Finland Station, then caught a streetcar. The journey was long, and he spent most of it wondering if Lenin would refuse to come.

  However, to his great relief Lenin did not need much persuading. “Without you, I don’t believe the other comrades will take the final decisive step,” Grigori said, and that was all it took to convince Lenin to come.

  He left a note on the kitchen table, so that Margarita would not imagine he had been arrested. It said: “I have gone where you wanted me not to go. Good-bye, Ilich.” Party members called him Ilich, his middle name.

  Grigori checked his pistol while Lenin put on his wig, a worker’s cap, and a shabby overcoat. Then they set out.

  Grigori kept a sharp lookout, fearful that they would run into a detachment of police or an army patrol and Lenin would be recognized. He made up his mind that, rather than let Lenin be arrested, he would shoot without hesitation.

  They were the only passengers on the streetcar. Lenin questioned the conductress on what she thought of the latest political developments.

  Walking from the Finland Station they heard hoofbeats and hid from what turned out to be a troop of loyalist cadets looking for trouble.

  Grigori triumphantly delivered Lenin to the Smolny at midnight.

  Lenin went at once to Room 36 and called a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Trotsky reported that Red Guards now controlled many of the city’s key points. But that was not enough for Lenin. For symbolic reasons, he argued, the revolutionary troops had to seize the Winter Palace and arrest the ministers of the p
rovisional government. That would be the act that convinced people that power had passed, finally and irrevocably, to the revolutionaries.

  Grigori knew he was right.

  So did everyone else.

  Trotsky began to plan the taking of the Winter Palace.

  Grigori did not get home to Katerina that night.

  { V }

  There could be no mistakes.

  The final act of the revolution had to be decisive, Grigori knew. He made sure the orders were clear and reached their destinations in good time.

  The plan was not complicated, but Grigori worried that Trotsky’s timetable was optimistic. The bulk of the attacking force would consist of revolutionary sailors. The majority were coming from Helsingfors, capital of the Finnish region, by train and ship. They left at three A.M. More were coming from Kronstadt, the island naval base twenty miles offshore.

  The attack was scheduled to begin at twelve noon.

  Like a battlefield operation, it would start with an artillery barrage: the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress would fire across the river and batter down the walls of the palace. Then the sailors and soldiers would take over the building. Trotsky said it would be over by two o’clock, when the Congress of Soviets was due to start.

  Lenin wanted to stand up at the opening and announce that the Bolsheviks had already taken power. It was the only way to prevent another indecisive, ineffective compromise government, the only way to ensure that Lenin ended up in charge.

  Grigori worried that things might not go as fast as Trotsky hoped.

  Security was poor at the Winter Palace, and at dawn Grigori was able to send Isaak inside to reconnoiter. He reported that there were about three thousand loyalist troops in the building. If they were properly organized and fought bravely, there would be a mighty battle.

  Isaak also discovered that Kerensky had left town. Because the Red Guards controlled the railway stations he had been unable to leave by train, and he had eventually departed in a commandeered car. “What kind of prime minister can’t catch a train in his own capital?” Isaak said.