For security reasons Lenin’s comrades had insisted that he stay at the safe house chosen for him in the working-class Vyborg district. Secreted away in the home of Margarita Fofanova, a loyal Party worker who was ordered not to allow Lenin to leave her apartment, he had spent most of the day pacing up and down the main room of the flat growing increasingly irritable. He had received hardly any visitors and heard no news of the impending uprising until around 6 p.m., when Fofanova returned and told him that there seemed no sign anywhere in the city of the Bolsheviks’ shock troops, the Red Guards. ‘I don’t understand them,’ he said. ‘What on earth are they afraid of? Just ask if they have a hundred trustworthy soldiers or Red Guards with rifles. That’s all I need.’
Impatient, Lenin worried that his military committee, few of whom had any fighting experience, would bungle the coup. Even worse, he imagined that his civilian comrades had, in his absence, aborted the insurrection altogether. He knew that many even in his closest circle doubted the Bolsheviks could take power, let alone keep it; some feared they would be ‘hanged from lamp posts’ if they tried. Lenin had imposed his will on them, as he had always found a way to do before in nearly two decades of leadership in the underground revolutionary movement. He had bullied, cajoled and finally blackmailed them by threatening to resign, leaving the Bolsheviks rudderless. Finally, a fortnight earlier, he had secured a majority of the senior Party figures to go along with him. But still they might change their minds and call off the uprising. Power might yet elude him.
Lenin hastily scribbled a stirring plea to his comrades. ‘It is as clear as can be that delaying the uprising really would be fatal,’ he wrote. ‘Everything now hangs by a thread. We must not wait. We must at any price act this evening, tonight, or we may lose everything. History will not forgive delay by revolutionists who could be victorious today (and will surely be victorious today) while they risk losing all tomorrow. The government is tottering. It must be given the death blow at all costs.’
He told Fofanova to take the note to the local Vyborg Party headquarters close by, then hand it to his wife, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, ‘and no one else’. She would ensure that it reached the highest Party officials.
Lenin was desperate to get to the Smolny. The leader should be leading, not hiding away. But there was a warrant out for his arrest and he was in danger. He had been living underground since early July, in Finland for three months and for the last three weeks in Petrograd. At first the authorities had made half-hearted attempts to catch him. Days earlier the Bolsheviks had been warned that now the government was far more determined to track him down. Another hazard was that law and order had collapsed in Petrograd and casual violence from random criminals made parts of the city no-go areas. ‘Hold-ups increased to such an extent that it was dangerous to walk down side streets,’ wrote one reporter. ‘On the Sadovaya [a principal street near the Finland Station] one afternoon I saw a crowd of several hundred people beat and trample to death a soldier caught stealing.’1
* * *
Soon after 9 p.m. Lenin’s bodyguard, Eino Rakhia, appeared at the apartment. He was a Finnish Bolshevik who had become close to Lenin during many years in exile. He said that the government had ordered all the bridges across the River Neva to be raised. If that succeeded the Vyborg district would be cut off from the centre of the city and, if they could muster enough soldiers, government loyalists could take control of Petrograd quarter by quarter, cutting off Red Guard units from each other and severing communications.
‘Well then, we’ll go to Smolny,’ Lenin said.
Rakhia warned him there was no transport and they would have to go by foot. ‘It could take hours – and it’s very risky.’ Both were without passes that would allow them into central areas of the capital.
Lenin insisted that in that case they had better get going immediately. He found some paper and left a message for Fofanova. ‘I’ve gone where you didn’t want me to go. Goodbye. Ilyich.’
Lenin then put on his disguise – the old clothes of a labourer, a pair of spectacles and the wig that refused to stay in place even when he donned the workman’s peaked cap that would become familiar in coming years. He had shaved off his trademark reddish beard earlier in the summer. He wrapped a dirty handkerchief around his face. If anyone stopped him the plan was to say that he was suffering from toothache.
They then went out into the freezing, windy night. Lenin thought it would rain and wore galoshes over his shoes. They walked a few hundred metres but struck lucky when a near-empty tram came along. It took them several kilometres to the corner of the Petrograd Botanical Gardens, close to the Finland Station, the end of the line. In many later Soviet histories Lenin is said to have had a conversation with a tram conductress who asked him, ‘Where have you come from? Don’t you know there’s going to be a revolution? We’re going to kick the bosses out!’ Lenin is supposed to have laughed heartily and explained to the woman how revolutions occur – much to the annoyance of Rakhia, who feared Lenin would give himself away.
The tram stopped by the Liteiny Bridge just before midnight. This is where the journey became more difficult and dangerous. One end of the bridge was held by Red Guards, who believed the pair were true proletarians and waved them through. The other side was still in the hands of government troops who were checking for passes. At exactly this moment a group of workers was arguing with the soldiers and the two men seized the opportunity to slip past the soldiers unnoticed.
They walked down Liteiny Prospekt – close to the Smolny – but ran into two army cadets, young officers, who asked for their identification papers. Rakhia was armed with two revolvers and reckoned that if necessary he was prepared to fight it out with them. Then he had a better idea. He whispered to Lenin, ‘I can deal with those soldiers, you go on,’ and Lenin moved off. Rakhia began to distract the guards by arguing with them, swaying unsteadily on his feet and slurring his words. The cadets reached for their pistols but decided to do nothing. They let them through thinking they were merely two harmless old drunks. Marxists are not supposed to believe in luck, accident or happenstance, but rather explain life through broad historical forces. Yet the second most influential Bolshevik leader in 1917, Leon Trotsky, said simply that if Lenin had been arrested, or shot, or had not been in Petrograd, ‘there would have been no October Revolution’.
They reached ‘great Smolny’, a huge ochre-coloured Palladian building with a colonnaded façade spanning more than 150 metres. This was the ‘internal arena of the Revolution’. That night it was ‘bright with lights and from a distance resembled an ocean liner in the night sea’. Closer up it ‘hummed like a gigantic hive’. Young Red Guards stood around outside, ‘a huddled group of boys in workmen’s clothes, carrying guns with bayonets, talking nervously together’, warming their hands around bonfires. Lenin wasn’t recognised, but his problems were not over. Both he and Rakhia had out-of-date passes – white instead of the newly valid red papers issued that morning. ‘This is ridiculous, what a mess,’ shouted Rakhia. ‘You’re refusing entry to a member of the Petrograd Soviet.’ When that didn’t work, Lenin started arguing with the guards too. It was only when people behind them in the queue objected to the delay, and began to push and shove, that the guards let them in. ‘Lenin came in, laughing,’ one man in the crowd recalled later. When he doffed his cap to the guards, the wig came off.
Lenin had never been in the building before and he had no idea where to go. For weeks the Smolny had been packed with soldiers sleeping in the corridors, revolutionary politicians plotting in its warren of 120 rooms and journalists watching the story of the Russian Revolution unfold. The stench was overpowering. ‘The air was thick with cigarette smoke; the floors were covered with rubbish and everywhere there was the smell of urine. Futile signs were posted on the walls: “Comrades please preserve cleanliness”.’ Rakhia took Lenin, still concerned about hiding his identity, to the second floor. Here he was among as many opponents as friends.
At the
top of the stairs he found Trotsky, head of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the man in charge of planning the coup. ‘Vladimir Ilyich, disguised, was an odd sight,’ Trotsky said later. As they greeted each other, two prominent members of an opposition socialist group eyed Lenin carefully, smiled and looked knowingly at each other. ‘Dammit, they’ve recognised me, the scoundrels,’ he muttered.
Lenin was ushered into Room 10, where the Military Revolutionary Committee had been in permanent session for days. ‘We found ourselves in the presence of a little grey-haired old man, wearing a pince-nez,’ recalled Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, soon to become one of the Bolsheviks’ most ruthless hatchet men. ‘You could have taken him for a schoolmaster or a second-hand book dealer. He took off his wig…and then we recognised his eyes, sparkling as usual with a glint of humour. “Any news?” he asked.’
In hiding Lenin had known little about the precise details of the coup. The artist of the insurrection dealt in broad brush strokes. Now he saw maps of the city spread out on tables and he was told how the main strongpoints of Petrograd would be in Bolshevik hands by the morning. There were about 25,000 armed Red Guards available, but only a fraction of them would be needed, said Trotsky. The revolutionaries would take power without firing a shot.
Some blankets and pillows were placed in the corner of the room and Lenin and Trotsky lay down. But neither could sleep. At 2 a.m. Trotsky looked at his watch and said, ‘It’s begun.’ Lenin replied, ‘I’m dizzy. From being on the run to supreme power – that’s too much,’ and according to Trotsky made the sign of the Cross.*1, 2
—
It has been an enduring myth that the Revolution was an impeccably organised operation by a group of highly disciplined conspirators who knew exactly what they were doing throughout. It is a version of events that suited both sides. Soviet historians in the following decades presented ‘glorious October’ as a rising of the masses, brilliantly led by the master of timing and tactics, V. I. Lenin, and his skilful, heroic lieutenants in the Bolshevik Party, who kept to a strict timetable of insurrection.
The defeated ‘Whites’, as they would soon be called, also held to a comforting myth: that they lost power in a precisely calibrated military takeover masterminded by an evil genius whose plans, diabolical though they were, cleverly took account of chaos on the streets of Petrograd. It would not have impressed the loyalists’ supporters – or soothed their own amour propre – if it was put about that they were beaten by a group of plotters who very nearly botched their revolution. The Bolsheviks might easily have failed if at certain key moments they had met some slight resistance.
In reality the ‘plot’ was the worst-kept secret in history. Everyone in Petrograd had heard that the Bolsheviks were preparing an imminent coup. It had been discussed in the press for the past ten days. The main right-wing newspaper Rech (Speech) had even revealed the date, 25 October, and the leftist Novaya Zhizn (New Life), run by the writer Maxim Gorky, had warned the Bolsheviks against using violence and ‘shedding more blood in Russia’. The supposedly perfect clockwork timekeeping of the insurrection was so vague that nobody could tell for certain exactly when it began. At one stage the Mayor of Petrograd sent a delegation to the participants of both sides wondering if the uprising had started. He could not get an accurate answer. The Bolsheviks had little military experience. Alexander Genevsky, one of their main commanders on the ground, had been a temporary lieutenant in the Tsarist army, declared unfit after he was gassed early in the First World War. He had been asked to become a ‘general’ in the rebel forces. His orders were to keep the military planners at the Smolny up to date with events by ringing a number that he was told would always be available, 148–11. The few times it wasn’t out of order, it was engaged. The Bolsheviks failed to master the Petrograd telephone system and had to send runners throughout the city streets. The key force of sailors from the Kronstadt naval base – reliable Bolshevik supporters – arrived in Petrograd a day late.
They won because the other side, the Provisional Government and its backers – a coalition of the centre-right, liberals and moderate socialists – were even more incompetent and divided, and because they didn’t take the Bolsheviks seriously until it was too late. But mainly it was because most of the people didn’t care which side won. In fact, few people realised anything significant had happened until it was all over.3
At the Smolny, Lenin couldn’t rest during the night. He continually pored over maps and anxiously waited for news. He was short-tempered, constantly calling for more reliable information and swifter action, insisting on accelerating the revolt. ‘He worked at furious speed, spitting out panting couriers and despatching aides…amid the buzz of telegraphs.’ He was hastily preparing the statements and decrees he would make when power was assured. He moved between Room 10, where the Military Revolutionary Committee met, to Room 36, down a long corridor where the human odours mixed with the smell of boiled cabbage from the refectory on the ground floor of the building. This was where the rest of the Bolshevik leadership in the Party’s Central Committee met, ‘in a tiny room around a badly lit table with overcoats thrown on the floor. People were constantly knocking on the door with news.’
At one point soon after dawn the comrades began discussing the form of the new government. Lenin wondered what it should be called.
‘We must not call the members ministers,’ he said. ‘It’s a repulsive, hackneyed word.’
‘Why not commissars,’ Trotsky suggested, ‘only there are too many commissars already. How about People’s Commissars?’
‘People’s Commissars. I like that. And what shall we call the government?’
‘The Council [Soviet] of People’s Commissars.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ exclaimed Lenin. ‘It has the smell of revolution.’*2
There followed a charade of modesty among the revolutionaries, who within hours would be supreme oligarchs exercising awesome power over the lives and deaths of millions.
Lenin proposed that Trotsky should be head of the government, while he himself remained leader of the Bolshevik Party. Nobody knows whether he meant it or not, but he showed little surprise when Trotsky refused. ‘You know very well that a Jew can’t be Premier in Russia,’ he said. ‘And besides you’d constantly be disagreeing with me. You’re the leader. It has to be you.’ The decision was unanimous.4
—
Overnight, small groups of Red Guards seized the strategic command positions of the city. They secured all the bridges across the Neva before dawn, except for the Nikolai Bridge next to the Winter Palace. Earlier they had captured the Peter and Paul Fortress, directly across the river, whose guns held a commanding view of the palace, where the Prime Minister, Alexander Kerensky, resided and the Provisional Government met. The occasional crack of gunfire could be heard, but there had been no fighting. ‘It happened while the city was in deep slumber,’ recorded Nikolai Sukhanov, whose eyewitness account of the Revolution remains one of the best accounts of the events. ‘More like the changing of the guard than an insurrection.’
At 6 a.m. the State Bank fell, an hour later the Central Telephone Exchange, the main Post Office and the Telegraph Building. By 8 a.m. the rebels had taken all the railway stations. The Bolsheviks controlled communications throughout Petrograd and had barely fired a shot. There were no casualties. In theory the government could call on the city’s garrison troops, numbering some 35,000. But as Trotsky had predicted, even if the majority of the soldiers were not actively siding with the Bolsheviks, they weren’t prepared to fight them either.
* * *
The timing of the insurrection was crucial to Lenin’s political strategy. Since the Tsar had fallen seven months earlier power had been shared uneasily between a series of coalition governments, which had grown successively weaker, and the Soviets. In Russian the word ‘soviet’ means simply ‘council’, and they were hastily elected delegates of workers and soldiers who claimed that they had instigated and led the Revolution in Febru
ary that brought down the Romanov autocracy.
Lenin had excluded the Bolsheviks from joining the government, but for the previous month they had held a small majority on the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin’s plan was to overthrow the government and claim that he was acting on behalf of the Soviets. Real power would lie with him and the Bolsheviks, but keeping the Soviet on board gave him political cover and a semblance of popular support. But there was one big snag. The Congress of Soviets was due to meet that day – in the splendid white and gold ballroom of the Smolny, just below the warren of rooms where the Bolsheviks had been planning the coup. Lenin was supposed to present the takeover as a fait accompli when the Congress convened at noon, and declare a victory for the Revolution. However, the government still survived and the Winter Palace – symbol of power in Russia since the time of Catherine the Great – had not fallen.
Lenin had been told by his military committee that seizing the palace would be a straightforward matter, over within five or six hours. But it would take more than fifteen hours, amid a catalogue of errors that would have been farcical if the stakes had not been so high.
* * *
At 9 a.m. Lenin demanded the surrender of the government. He received no reply. Prime Minister Kerensky had left soon after dawn for the army headquarters in an attempt to raise some loyal troops to defeat the rebellion. The Bolsheviks had made no effort to detain him, though his escape had not been straightforward. There were thirty cars parked outside the palace but none were in working order. He couldn’t even find a taxi to take him. An ensign was sent to see if he could requisition a car that would run. The British Embassy turned him down, but an official from the US Legation was persuaded to let Kerensky use his own car, a Renault, as long as it was returned.*3 Another officer managed to scrounge a luxurious open-topped Pierce Arrow and some fuel. Kerensky was driven around Palace Square and through the streets of Petrograd with the roof down, easily recognisable.
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