October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

  They did not back down but fired. A man was killed. On returning to their base, the soldiers’ ringleaders were arrested and taken across the water, behind the long low walls of the fortress, to the notorious prison of Peter and Paul below the thornlike spire.

  Forty people died that Sunday. The slaughter devastated the demonstrators’ morale. Even in the militant Vyborg district on the north side, the local Bolsheviks considered winding down the strike. For its part, the autocracy broke off its half-hearted negotiations with the Duma’s President Rodzianko, and dissolved the parliament it held in such contempt.

  Rodzianko telegraphed the tsar.

  ‘The situation is serious.’ His warning sped along the wires by the railway lines, across the wide hard countryside to Mogilev. ‘There is anarchy in the capital. The government is paralysed. It is necessary immediately to entrust a person who enjoys the confidence of the country with the formation of a new government. Any delay is equivalent to death. I pray God that in this hour responsibility will not fall upon the sovereign.’

  Nicholas did not reply.

  The next morning, Rodzianko tried again. ‘The situation is growing worse. Measures must be adopted immediately, because tomorrow will be too late. The last hour has come when the fate of the fatherland and the dynasty is being decided.’

  At the High Command headquarters, Count Vladimir Frederiks, Nicholas’s imperial household minister, waited politely as his master read the message unspooling from the machine. ‘That fat Rodzianko has written me some nonsense,’ the tsar said at last, ‘to which I will not even reply.’

  In the capital, the previous day’s murder weighed heavy on some of those who had been ordered to commit it. Like that of the Pavlovsky, the Volinsky regiment’s training detachment had shot demonstrators, and had spent the night gathered in their barracks in a long session of self-recrimination. Now its men confronted their captain, Lashkevitch, and declared expiatory mutiny. They would not, they told him, shoot again.

  Peremptorily, Lashkevitch read out the tsar’s command to restore order. Once, perhaps, that might have persuaded them to submit. Now it was a provocation. There was a scuffle, shouts, alarm. Someone in the crowd of soldiers raised a weapon. Or perhaps, it has even been suggested, Lashkevitch raised his own gun in a panic and turned it on himself. Wherever it came from, a sudden shot sounded. The soldiers stared as the captain fell.

  Something died with him. A hesitation.

  The Volinsky soldiers roused the Litovsky and Preobrazhensky regiments from their barracks nearby. Officers from the Moscow regiment struggled to assert command. They were overpowered. The soldiers headed out into the city for the Vyborg district. This time it was they who sought to fraternise with the workers.

  Under the gun-grey skies, the streets of Petrograd began to rage.

  A dumbfounded General Khabalov tried to mobilise six loyal companies. Some officers and soldiers, individually and in makeshift groups, stayed loyal, and even put up armed resistance to the escalating insurrection. But at a mass level, out of conviction or cowardice, exhaustion or equivocation, for whatever reason at all, the troops refused to rally. Those soldiers who would not join with and fight alongside the workers, under leaders thrown up in the rough meritocracy of the moment, simply disappeared. In eyewitness descriptions, the same phrase recurs many times: even the supposedly loyal units ‘melted away’.

  Crowds of workers and soldiers ransacked government buildings and broke into police arsenals, took the weapons they found and went after the police, killing them where they could. They burned the stations down, sending their records up in smoke with them, firing at any ‘Pharaoh’ they saw, including the police snipers who had scrambled to the rooftops and sometimes leaned over to take aim. The rebels searched churches for caches of weapons, soldiers and workers rummaging together in uneasy reverential silence. They stormed prisons and tore open doors and freed the bewildered inmates. They set light to the district court and stood watching the bonfire, as if in some new winter festival. In the absence of any counterforce, the overthrowers exuberantly, chaotically overthrew.

  Their clamour spread beyond Petrograd. In Moscow, in particular, officials had tried and failed to suppress news of the growing disturbances. Word of what was occurring reached the second city. Moscow workers began to walk out, some heading home, some for the city centre, seeking news and direction.

  On the afternoon of the 27th, the tsar was pursuing his military pottering at Stavka, unperturbed. His tranquillity was not unique: the war minister, Bieliaev, cabled him to report, with surreal complacency, that a few minor disturbances were occurring in a few military units in Petrograd, and that they were being dealt with. That all would soon be calm.

  In the boulevards of the insurgent city, revolutionary socialists jostled alongside angry liberals and all shades in between, and they were not calm. What they shared was a certainty that change, a revolution, was necessary, and ineluctable. They were in a new city, in eruption, on Red Monday. The old law was dying, the new not yet decided.

  Under the darkening sky, accompanied by breaking glass and in the guttering light of fires, groups of men and women drifted aimlessly together and apart, workers, freed criminals, radical agitators, soldiers, freelance hooligans, spies and drunkards. Armed with what they had found. Here, a figure in a greatcoat waving an officer’s sabre and an empty revolver. There, a young teenager with a kitchen knife. A student with machine-gun bullets slung around his waist, a rifle in each hand. A man wielded a pole for cleaning tramlines as if it were a pike.

  Crowds of thousands surged down Shpalernaya Street, flocking to the spread stone wings of the Tauride Palace, seat of the Duma: ineffectual, divided and blindsided though the body was, huge numbers of citizens looked to it as an alternative government. All the more lamentable, then, that the Duma itself was unwilling, even now, to rebel against the tsar – even against his orders that it dissolve itself.

  As directed, with the loyalty of cowardice or the cowardice of loyalty, the Duma members wound their official meeting down. The letter of the tsar’s command duly obeyed, they left the assembly hall. They shuffled a little way through the high corridors of the building – and into another chamber, where they reconvened as, technically, a new, private gathering. Struggling for resolve, this remaindered Duma committed to staying in Petrograd and attempting to assert some control. Its members authorised a council to elect a Provisional Committee from among representatives of all the Duma parties except for the extreme right, and except for the Bolsheviks.

  Before they chose this group, Rodzianko, accompanied this time by Nicholas’s own brother Grand Duke Michael, made yet another effort to breach the tsar’s bovine placidity. Only a shift to constitutional monarchy, Rodzianko was now certain, might placate the country, and Michael had agreed, in principle, to take power on this model.

  Once again they strove to impress upon the tsar the apocalyptic seriousness of the situation. To the surprise, it must be assumed, of no one, Nicholas riposted with icy politeness that he was perfectly capable of managing his affairs.

  There is something almost Herculean about the tsar’s ability to refuse reality while his capital went up in flames, his police fled, his soldiers rebelled, and his officials, his own brother, implored him to do something, anything. Shortly thereafter it was the turn of his distraught premier to wire him, begging to be relieved of office. Nicholas stiffly informed Prince Golitzin that there would be no changes to the cabinet, and reiterated his demand for ‘vigorous measures’ to suppress disturbances.

  The tsar paddled on, dignified and proper, eyes on the horizon, the current hauling him towards a cataract.

  The twelve-, swiftly thirteen-person Provisional Committee of the Duma – to give it its preposterous full name, the Provisional Committee of the Members of the State Duma for the Restoration of Order in the Capital and the Establishment of Relations with Public Organisations and Institutions – was inaugurated by 5 p.m., dominated by the politics of t
he Kadets and the Progressive Bloc. It mandated itself, vaguely but urgently, to restore order in Petrograd and establish relations with public organisations and institutions. It understood, though, the limits of its own scope and voice at that moment of mass uprising. To make itself heard by the demonstrators, it reached out to two deputies from the left beyond the Progressive Bloc: N. S. Chkheidze, the leader of the Mensheviks; and that excitable Trudovik lawyer, who had earned the tsarina’s fury, Alexander Kerensky.

  It was 7 p.m. The Kadet deputy Ichas convened a meeting of 150 colleagues to create commissions, above all to handle the military question. Very soon the Reserve First Infantry Regiment, 12,000 soldiers and 200 officers in full formation, marched through the city’s upheaval to the Tauride Palace. There they pledged loyalty to the Duma – or rather, to its Provisional Committee. With one of the inspired flashes of which he was, in those days, still capable, Kerensky relayed orders to several military units to take control of strategic locations – Okhrana headquarters, the gendarmerie, those crucial railway stations.

  From the streets, meanwhile, as this continued, had arisen another kind of control. Some of the insurgents recalled those councils of 1905, those soviets. Activists and streetcorner agitators had already begun to call for their return, in leaflets, in boisterous voices from the crowds.

  So it was that at the very moment when the Duma was planning its Committee, elsewhere in the cavernous Tauride Palace another very different group gathered.

  Among those recently sprung from prison by the crowds were Gvozdev and Bogdanov, Mensheviks on the Central War Industries Committee. Immediately on their release they had fought their way through the chaos of Petrograd to join and caucus with their colleagues at the Palace, socialist Duma deputies of the SRs and the Mensheviks, representatives of the trade union and cooperative movements, Kerensky himself.

  That day, running south over the wide Liteiny Bridge above the Neva’s ice, Gvozdev saw another figure hurtling towards him. In the middle of the bridge, between its decorative mermaids, he came face to face with Zalezhskii, a leading Bolshevik who had also just escaped jail, and was heading in the opposite direction from the city centre towards the Vyborg district. The Menshevik made straight for the corridors of power; the Bolshevik for the workers’ districts. So goes the story, whether or not this bridgetop meeting occurred.

  At Tauride, the improvised assembly of Gvozdev, Bogdanov and their colleagues declared itself a Temporary Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. Immediately they sent word to the city’s plants and regiments that a soviet session would be held that same evening. In rushed, haphazard gatherings – there was certainly no time for more careful representative arrangements – factories chose representatives to join these deliberations. Within hours, the usual frock-coated Russian gentry, the intellectuals of the Duma and its associates, were joined by these less typical visitors. The corridors of the Tauride Palace nestling in its gardens began to fill with shabby, exhausted soldiers and workers.

  That evening, the conclave of socialist intellectuals and hastily delegated workers and soldiers gathered in Room 12 on the left side of the palace. The former chair of the Soviet of 1905, Khrustalev-Nosar, was there; Steklov, close to the Menshevik left; Ehrlich, a leader of the Jewish Bund; and the dogged local Bolshevik leader, the metalworker Shlyapnikov. Workers and soldiers talked over each other in excitement, chosen according to those ad hoc mechanisms while most workers were preoccupied with revolt, without time or inclination to vote for delegates. When Shlyapnikov took a moment to telephone Bolshevik activists, urging them to come and join him, they paid him no attention. They, too, were more concerned to focus on the masses in the streets than on what might be afoot in those rooms. And besides, they were rather suspicious of this nascent organ, the brainchild of the socialists to their right.

  At 9 p.m., the socialist lawyer Sokolov called the unruly meeting to order. Perhaps 250 people were in the room: only fifty or so, Sokolov ruled, were qualified to vote: the rest would remain as observers. He made his decisions as much on personal acquaintance as according to any formal structure.

  The gathering was repeatedly interrupted by banging doors, newcomers bursting in, excited reports from soldiers that this or that company had come over to the insurrection, roars and applause. Rank-and-file soldiers’ representatives came together in the room with those of the workers.

  Thus the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was born, at the suggestion of its own, pre-emptive, Temporary Executive Committee.

  Beyond the palace walls, in streets emptied of the detested tsarist police, workers were still plundering weapons from the regime’s stores to defend the factories, to impose their own rough order, gathering together, self-organising in armed groups, mostly young, mostly angry, radical, often politically incoherent. Among the urgent tasks of that night, its first, the Soviet set out to coordinate them by organising a workers’ militia to establish and maintain order. It inaugurated a food commission to regulate supply. Soon it would authorise certain newspapers to reappear. And unlike the Duma or its Provisional Committee, the Soviet could make such declarations and moves with a degree of connection – however hedged and mediated that chaotic night – to the streets, the workers, the soldiers.

  It needed a presidium. The meeting moved to vote in the Menshevik Chkheidze as chair, and as vice-chairs Skobolev and Kerensky. Like Chkheidze, Kerensky was a token socialist who had been approached to be part of the Duma’s committee earlier that evening: unlike Chkheidze, following the Soviet elections, and after giving, for him, an unusually perfunctory speech, he left the room.

  In Kerensky’s absence, the Soviet established an executive committee between the presidium and the full Soviet. This committee would come to be responsible for much of the Soviet’s management and many of its decisions. From that point on, it was at that level that the key debates occurred and decisions were made.

  Chkheidze, Skobolev and Kerensky of the presidium itself were automatically given executive committee places, along with the four members of its secretariat. Eight others were elected. With six members in total, the Mensheviks were the strongest single party. However, for a brief moment that evening, two-thirds of the executive committee’s fifteen places were taken, if not by the radical left, then by those on the internationalist, anti-war wing of the socialist movement, Bolsheviks and others – but, sapped by infighting and uncertainty about the nature of the Soviet, their relationship to it, and its relationship to political power and a new regime, they did nothing with this short-lived majority.

  The very next day, in fact, they would lose it, in response to a mishandled manoeuvre by the Bolshevik Shlyapnikov himself. Disgruntled by the small number of Bolsheviks on the executive committee, he moved to add to it members from each socialist party. His proposal was accepted – but along with his comrades and Iurenev of the Mezhraiontsy came those from the Popular Socialists, Trudoviks, SRs, Bund and Mensheviks. Thus expanded, the committee included many more right, or moderate, socialists.

  For now, as the Soviet continued bickering and bargaining, Kerensky hightailed his way back through the great palace to its opposite, right wing. He headed to where the other new group of which he was a member, the Duma’s Provisional Committee, was meeting.

  Late that night, the beleaguered General Khabalov, with no more than 2,000 troops still with him, dodged through a shadowy and dangerous Petrograd to seek refuge within the courtyard and surrounds of the tsar’s Winter Palace. On his arrival, the tsar’s brother ejected him, humiliatingly, forcing him and his men to scurry to the Admiralty building across the street. There they would hunker down for the night.

  At Mogilev, a hazy awareness was at last spreading that all was not as it should be. Nicholas ordered General Ivanov to return to the capital, to restore order with a shock troop of Cavaliers of St George, recipients of the country’s highest military honour. Still, neither the tsar nor any advisor took steps to relocate troops from the f
ronts nearest Petrograd. Ivanov himself prepared for his new mission with absurd, inappropriate languor, sending his adjutant shopping for gifts for friends at home.

  The uprising’s ripples were still spreading across the country.

  Closest, and most crucial, was Kronstadt. Kronstadt was Petrograd’s protective naval base, a fortified town of 50,000 – naval crews, soldiers and young sailors, a few merchants and workers – encircled by forbidding batteries and forts on the tiny island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland. Its officers were notoriously sadistic and brutal. Only seven years before, several hundred sailors had been executed during an attempted revolt. That memory was raw.

  Now the sailors got word of the uprising. They were close enough to see the smoke from fires and hear shooting across the water. They swiftly decided that they, too, would have a revolution.

  Late evening on 27 February, and in Petrograd’s enormous Marinsky Palace, on the south side of St Isaac’s Square, the tsar’s council of ministers met for the last time. The city was now firmly in the hands of the revolution: they recognised this fait accompli, ending their inglorious tenure, submitting their resignations to the tsar. A meaningless formality.

  Kerensky, a fine speaker with the moral authority of the left, an energetic and ambitious man still only in his mid-thirties, was making himself invaluable to the Duma Provisional Committee. He took a leading role in establishing a kind of military order, announcing that a revolutionary staff had been established at the State Duma, and setting out to drive frantically through Petrograd, declaring to groups of exhilarated insurgent soldiers that the Duma was with them.