by Follett, Ken
“Anyway, he’s gone,” Grigori said with satisfaction. “And I don’t suppose he’ll ever come back.”
However, Grigori’s mood turned pessimistic when noon came around and none of the sailors had appeared.
He crossed the bridge to the Peter and Paul Fortress to make sure the cannon were ready. To his horror he found that they were museum pieces, there only for show, and could not be fired. He ordered Isaak to find some working artillery.
He hurried back to the Smolny to tell Trotsky his plan was behind schedule. The guard at the door said: “There was someone here looking for you, comrade. Something about a midwife.”
“I can’t deal with that now,” Grigori said.
Events were moving very fast. Grigori learned that the Red Guards had taken the Marinsky Palace and dispersed the preparliament without bloodshed. Those Bolsheviks in jail had been released. Trotsky had ordered all troops outside Petrograd to remain where they were, and they were obeying him, not their officers. Lenin was writing a manifesto that began: “To the citizens of Russia: The provisional government has been overthrown!”
“But the assault has not begun,” Grigori told Trotsky miserably. “I don’t see how it can be managed before three o’clock.”
“Don’t worry,” said Trotsky. “We can delay the opening of the congress.”
Grigori returned to the square in front of the Winter Palace. At two in the afternoon, at long last, he saw the minelayer Amur sail into the Neva with a thousand sailors from Kronstadt on its deck, and the workers of Petrograd lined the banks to cheer them.
If Kerensky had thought to put a few mines in the narrow channel he could have kept the sailors out of the city and defeated the revolution. But there were no mines, and the sailors in their black pea jackets began to disembark, carrying their rifles. Grigori prepared to deploy them around the Winter Palace.
But the plan was still bedeviled by snags, to Grigori’s immense exasperation. Isaak found a cannon and, with much effort, got it dragged into place, only to find that there were no shells for it. Meanwhile, loyalist troops at the palace were building barricades.
Maddened by frustration, Grigori drove back to the Smolny.
An emergency session of the Petrograd soviet was about to start. The spacious hall of the girls’ school, painted a virginal white, was packed full with hundreds of delegates. Grigori went up onto the stage and sat beside Trotsky, who was about to open the session. “The assault has been delayed by a series of problems,” he said.
Trotsky took the bad news calmly. Lenin would have thrown a fit. Trotsky said: “When can you take the palace?”
“Realistically, six o’clock.”
Trotsky nodded calmly and stood up to address the meeting. “On behalf of the Military Revolutionary Committee, I declare that the provisional government no longer exists!” he shouted.
There was a storm of cheering and shouting. Grigori thought: I hope I can make that lie true.
When the noise died down, Trotsky listed the achievements of the Red Guards: the overnight seizure of railway stations and other key buildings, and the dispersal of the preparliament. He also announced that several government ministers had been individually arrested. “The Winter Palace has not been taken, but its fate will be decided momentarily!” There were more cheers.
A dissenter shouted: “You are anticipating the will of the Congress of Soviets!”
This was the soft democratic argument, one that Grigori himself would have advanced in the old days, before he became a realist.
Trotsky’s response was so quick that he must have expected this criticism. “The will of the congress has already been anticipated by the uprising of workers and soldiers,” he replied.
Suddenly there was a murmur around the hall. People began to stand up. Grigori looked toward the door, wondering why. He saw Lenin walking in. The deputies began to cheer. The noise became thunderous as Lenin came up onto the stage. He and Trotsky stood side by side, smiling and bowing in acknowledgment of the standing ovation, as the crowd acclaimed the coup that had not yet taken place.
The tension between the victory being proclaimed in the hall and the reality of muddle and delay outside was too much for Grigori to bear, and he slipped away.
The sailors still had not arrived from Helsingfors, and the cannon at the fortress were not yet ready to fire. As night fell, a cold drizzling rain began. Standing at the edge of Palace Square, with the Winter Palace in front of him and general staff headquarters behind, Grigori saw a force of cadets emerge from the palace. Their uniform badges said they were from the Mikhailovsky Artillery School, and they were leaving, taking four heavy guns with them. Grigori let them go.
At seven o’clock he ordered a force of soldiers and sailors to enter general staff headquarters and seize control. They did so without opposition.
At eight o’clock the two hundred Cossacks on guard at the palace decided to return to their barracks, and Grigori let them through the cordon. He realized that the irksome delays might not be a total catastrophe: the forces he had to overcome were diminishing with time.
Just before ten, Isaak reported that the cannon were finally ready at the Peter and Paul Fortress. Grigori ordered one blank round to be fired, followed by a pause. As he had expected, more troops fled the palace.
Could it be this easy?
Out on the water, an alarm sounded aboard the Amur. Seeking the cause, Grigori looked downriver and saw the lights of approaching ships. His heart went cold. Had Kerensky succeeded in sending loyal forces to save his government at the last gasp? But then a cheer went up on the deck of the Amur, and Grigori realized the newcomers were the sailors from Helsingfors.
When they were safely anchored, he gave the order for the shelling to begin—at last.
There was a thunder of guns. Some shells exploded in midair, lighting up the ships on the river and the besieged palace. Grigori saw a hit on a third-floor corner window, and wondered if there had been anyone in the room. To his amazement, the brightly lit streetcars continued without interruption to trundle across the nearby Troitsky Bridge and Palace Bridge.
It was nothing like the battlefield, of course. At the front there were hundreds of guns firing, perhaps thousands; here, just four. There were long intervals between shots, and it was shocking to see how many were wasted, falling short and dropping harmlessly into the river.
Grigori called a halt and sent small groups of troops into the palace to reconnoiter. They came back to say that those few guards left were offering no resistance.
Shortly after midnight, Grigori led a larger contingent inside. In accordance with prearranged tactics they spread through the palace, running along the grand dark corridors, neutralizing opposition and searching for government ministers. The palace looked like a disorderly barracks, with soldiers’ mattresses on the parquet floors of the gilded staterooms, and everywhere a filthy litter of cigarette ends, crusts of bread, and empty bottles with French labels that the guards had presumably taken from the costly cellars of the tsar.
Grigori heard a few scattered shots but there was not much fighting. He found no government ministers on the ground floor. The thought occurred to him they might have sneaked away, and he suffered a panicky moment. He did not want to have to report to Trotsky and Lenin that the members of Kerensky’s government had slipped through his fingers.
With Isaak and two other men he ran up a broad staircase to check the next floor. Together they burst through a pair of double doors into a meeting room and there found what was left of the provisional government: a small group of frightened men in suits and ties, sitting at a table and on armchairs around the room, wide-eyed with apprehension.
One of them mustered a remnant of authority. “The provisional government is here—what do you want?” he said.
Grigori recognized Alexander Konovalov, the wealthy textile manufacturer who was Kerensky’s deputy prime minister.
Grigori replied: “You are all under arrest.” It was a g
ood moment, and he savored it.
He turned to Isaak. “Write down their names.” He recognized all of them. “Konovalov, Maliantovich, Nikitin, Tereschenko . . . ” When the list was complete he said: “Take them to the Peter and Paul Fortress and put them in the cells. I’ll go to the Smolny and give Trotsky and Lenin the good news.”
He left the building. Crossing Palace Square, he stopped for a minute, remembering his mother. She had died on this spot twelve years ago, shot by the tsar’s guards. He turned around and looked at the vast palace, with its rows of white columns and the moonlight glinting off hundreds of windows. In a sudden fit of rage, he shook his fist at the building. “That’s what you get, you devils,” he said aloud. “That’s what you get for killing her.”
He waited until he felt calm again. I don’t even know who I’m talking to, he thought. He jumped into his dust-colored armored car, waiting beside a dismantled barricade. “To the Smolny,” he told the driver.
As he drove the short distance he began to feel elated. Now we really have won, he told himself. We are the victors. The people have overthrown their oppressors.
He ran up the steps of the Smolny and into the hall. The place was packed, and the Congress of Soviets had opened. Trotsky had not been able to keep on postponing it. That was bad news. It would be just like the Mensheviks, and the other milquetoast revolutionaries, to demand a place in the new government even though they had done nothing to overthrow the old.
A fog of tobacco smoke hung around the chandeliers. The members of the presidium were seated on the platform. Grigori knew most of them, and he studied the composition of the group. The Bolsheviks occupied fourteen of the twenty-five seats, he noted. That meant the party had the largest number of delegates. But he was horrified to see that the chairman was Kamenev—a moderate Bolshevik who had voted against an armed uprising! As Lenin had warned, the congress was shaping up for another feeble compromise.
Grigori scanned the delegates in the hall and spotted Lenin in the front row. He went over and said to the man in the next seat: “I have to talk to Ilich—let me have your chair.” The man looked resentful, but after a moment he got up.
Grigori spoke into Lenin’s ear. “The Winter Palace is in our hands,” he said. He gave the names of the ministers who had been arrested.
“Too late,” said Lenin bleakly.
That was what Grigori had feared. “What’s happening here?”
Lenin looked black. “Martov proposed the motion.” Julius Martov was Lenin’s old enemy. Martov had always wanted the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to be like the British Labour Party, and fight for working people by democratic means; and his quarrel with Lenin over this issue had split the SDLP, back in 1903, into its two factions, Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Martov’s Mensheviks. “He argued for an end to street fighting followed by negotiations for a democratic government.”
“Negotiations?” Grigori said incredulously. “We’ve seized power!”
“We supported the motion,” Lenin said tonelessly.
Grigori was surprised. “Why?”
“We would have lost if we opposed it. We have three hundred of the six hundred and seventy delegates. We’re the largest party by a big margin, but we don’t have an overall majority.”
Grigori could have wept. The coup had come too late. There would be another coalition, its composition dictated by deals and compromises, and the government would dither on while Russians starved at home and died at the front.
“But they’re attacking us anyway,” Lenin added.
Grigori listened to the current speaker, someone he did not know. “This congress was called to discuss the new government, yet what do we find?” the man was saying angrily. “An irresponsible seizure of power has already occurred and the will of the congress has been preempted! We must save the revolution from this mad venture.”
There was a storm of protest from the Bolshevik delegates. Grigori heard Lenin saying: “Swine! Bastard! Traitor!”
Kamenev called for order.
But the next speech was also bitterly hostile to the Bolsheviks and their coup, and it was followed by more in the same vein. Lev Khinchuk, a Menshevik, called for negotiations with the provisional government, and the eruption of indignation among the delegates was so violent that Khinchuk could not continue for some minutes. Finally, shouting over the noise, he said: “We leave the present congress!” Then he walked out of the hall.
Grigori saw that their tactic would be to say that the congress had no authority once they had withdrawn. “Deserters!” someone shouted, and the cry was taken up around the hall.
Grigori was appalled. They had waited so long for this congress. The delegates represented the will of the Russian people. But it was falling apart.
He looked at Lenin. To Grigori’s astonishment, Lenin’s eyes glittered with delight. “This is wonderful,” he said. “We’re saved! I never imagined they would make such a mistake.”
Grigori had no idea what he was talking about. Had Lenin become irrational?
The next speaker was Mikhail Gendelman, a leading Socialist Revolutionary. He said: “Taking cognizance of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, holding them responsible for this insane and criminal action, and finding it impossible to collaborate with them, the Socialist Revolutionary faction is leaving the congress!” And he walked out, followed by all the Socialist Revolutionaries. They were jeered, booed, and whistled at by the remaining delegates.
Grigori was mortified. How could his triumph have degenerated, so quickly, into this kind of rowdyism?
But Lenin looked even more pleased.
A series of soldier-delegates spoke in favor of the Bolshevik coup, and Grigori began to brighten, but he still did not understand Lenin’s jubilation. Ilich was now scribbling something on a notepad. As speech followed speech he corrected and rewrote. Finally he handed two sheets of paper to Grigori. “This must be presented to the congress for immediate adoption,” he said.
It was a long statement, full of the usual rhetoric, but Grigori homed in on the key sentence: “The congress hereby resolves to take governmental power into its own hands.”
That was what Grigori wanted.
“For Trotsky to read out?” said Grigori.
“No, not Trotsky.” Lenin scanned the men—and one woman—on the platform. “Lunacharsky,” he said.
Grigori guessed Lenin felt Trotsky had already gained enough glory.
Grigori took the proclamation to Lunarcharsky, who made a signal to the chairman. A few minutes later Kamenev called on Lunarcharsky, who stood up and read out Lenin’s words.
Every sentence was greeted with a roar of approval.
The chairman called for a vote.
And now, at last, Grigori began to see why Lenin was happy. With the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries out of the room, the Bolsheviks had an overwhelming majority. They could do anything they liked. There was no need for compromise.
A vote was taken. Only two delegates were against.
The Bolsheviks had the power, and now they had the legitimacy.
The chairman closed the session. It was five A.M. on Thursday, November 8. The Russian Revolution was victorious. And the Bolsheviks were in charge.
Grigori left the room behind Josef Stalin, the Georgian revolutionary, and another man. Stalin’s companion wore a leather coat and a cartridge belt, as did many of the Bolsheviks, but something about him rang an alarm bell in Grigori’s memory. When the man turned to say something to Stalin, Grigori recognized him, and a tremor of shock and horror ran through him.
It was Mikhail Pinsky.
He had joined the revolution.
{ VI }
Grigori was exhausted. He had not slept for two nights. There had been so much to do that he had hardly noticed the passage of days. The armored car was the most uncomfortable vehicle he had ever traveled in, but all the same he fell asleep as it drove him home. When Isaak woke him he saw that they were outside the house. He
wondered how much Katerina knew of what had happened. He hoped she had not heard too much, for that would give him the pleasure of telling her about the triumph of the revolution.
He went into the house and stumbled up the stairs. There was a light under the door. “It’s me,” he said, and went into the room.
Katerina was sitting up in bed with a tiny baby in her arms.
Grigori was suffused with delight. “The baby came!” he said. “He’s beautiful.”
“It’s a girl.”
“A girl!”
“You promised you would be here,” Katerina said accusingly.
“I didn’t know!” He looked at the baby. “She has dark hair, like me. What shall we call her?”
“I sent you a message.”
Grigori recalled the guard who had told him someone was looking for him. Something about a midwife, the man had said. “Oh, my God,” Grigori said. “I was so busy . . . ”
“Magda was attending to another birth,” Katerina said. “I had to have Kseniya.”
Grigori was concerned. “Did you suffer?”
“Of course I suffered,” Katerina snapped.
“I’m so sorry. But listen! There’s been a revolution! A real one, this time—we’ve taken power! The Bolsheviks are forming a government.” He bent down to kiss her.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, and she turned her face away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
March 1918
Walter stood on the roof of a small medieval church in the village of Villefranche-sur-Oise, not far from St.-Quentin. For a while this had been a rest-and-recreation area in the German rear echelon and the French inhabitants, making the best of it, had sold omelettes and wine, when they could get any, to their conquerors. “Malheur la guerre,” they said. “Pour nous, pour vous, pour tout le monde.” “Miserable war—for us, for you, for everyone.” Small advances by the Allies had since driven the French residents away, flattened half the buildings, and brought the village closer to the front line: now it was an assembly zone.
