October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

  No wonder Lenin was accused by his own party of falling into Trotsky’s heresy of ‘permanent revolution’, of folding February into, or at least edging determinedly towards, a full socialist insurrection.

  But more Bolshevik exiles were returning. And they tended to be more radical than those who had remained. The economic hardships in the country were worsening, the inadequacies of the Provisional Government growing clear, the brief honeymoon of cross-class collaboration souring, and the Bolsheviks were recruiting from a mostly young, disillusioned, angry, even impetuous milieu. It was in this context that Lenin began a campaign to win over his comrades.

  And his stubbornness did highlight a certain instability of the party’s current ‘quasi-Menshevik’ position, according to which some on the Bolshevik right seemed to imply that history was ‘not ready’ for socialism, while insisting that the bourgeois government could not deliver.

  Ten days after Lenin’s return, the First Petrograd City Conference of the Bolsheviks convened. There, Lenin developed his argument, insisting that the Provisional Government could not be ‘“simply” overthrown’, that it was necessary first to win the majority in the Soviet. Still, delegate after delegate accused him of anarchism, schematicism, ‘Blanquism’ – a modern iteration of the radical conspiracies of the nineteenth-century French socialist Auguste Blanqui. By now, however, a week and a half after his return, he had gained supporters, too. Those stalwartly on his side, like Alexandra Kollontai and Ludmila Stahl, remained vocal. And he must have had a good deal of shy support, too, because though the majority of speakers spoke against him, his resolution on opposing the Provisional Government passed by thirty-three votes to six, with two abstentions.

  This shift in the party cadres would soon make trouble for the Provisional Government.

  In these April days, a remnant of the social carnivalesque of March continued, but now with a harder and more bitter edge. First signs of a general crisis were not hard to find.

  In early April, thousands of soldiers’ wives – soldatki – marched through the capital. These women had started the war disadvantaged, browbeaten and precarious, desperate for charity and inadequate state support. But the absence of their husbands could also mean an unexpected liberation. In February their demands for food, support, respect, had started to take on a radical bent. That trend continued. In Kherson province, one observer saw the soldatki forcing their way into homes and ‘requisitioning’ any luxury they thought was undeserved.

  Not only did they flout laws and intimidate the authorities wherever they possibly could, there were also direct acts of violence. The state flour trader who did not want to offer them his goods at discounted price was beaten by a band of soldiers’ wives, and the pristav, the local police chief, who wanted to hurry to his help, escaped the same fate by a hair’s breadth.

  On the land, the exuberant and pandemoniacal spread of soviets and congresses and conferences and peasant assemblies, amid established local bodies like volosts and township zemstvos, was beginning to take ominous forms. As early as March, in the Volga, pugnacious rural communes began disputing with landowners over rent and rights to the commons. Gangs of peasants were increasingly wont to make their way into private woods with axes and saws and fell the estate’s trees. Now, in April, particularly in the north-west districts – Balashov, Petrovsk, Serdobsk – that movement surged. Sometimes peasants simply began to mow the gentry’s meadows for their own use, paying only the prices they reckoned were fair for seed.

  That sense of ‘fairness’ was crucial. Certainly there were moments of crude class rage and cruelty. But the actions of village communes against landlords were often scrupulously articulated in terms of a moral economy of justice. Sometimes this entailed the presentation of their demands in quasi-legal form, through manifestos and declarations formulated by sympathetic local intellectuals, or in the careful prolixity of autodidacts. This was an ad hoc realisation of the traditional chiliastic yearning for equal shares of the land for all who worked it – ‘black repartition’, as this redistribution was known – and the freedoms that should ensue.

  ‘Cabinet, appanage, monastery, church, and major estate owners’ lands must be surrendered to the people without compensation, for they were earned not by labour but by various amorous escapades,’ 130 illiterate peasants of Rakalovsk Volost in Viatka Province had their scribe write to the Petrograd Soviet, in a collective letter of 26 April, ‘not to mention through sly and devious behaviour around the tsar’.

  It was one of a torrent of letters from the newly politicising, the engaged and eager, across the empire. Ever since February they had crossed the country, addressing themselves to the Soviet, to the government, to the land commissions, to the newspapers, to the SRs, to the Mensheviks, to Kerensky, to anyone or any organisation that seemed as if it might have some power or importance. In these first months some still took a tone so careful as to be almost cowed, though they were often hopeful, joyful, even, if unsure. Injunctions, entreaties, offers, queries and lamentations of curious people. They came in the great unparagaphed underpunctuated blocks of text, the urgent, rushing metaphors, and that stilted quasi-legalese of those not used to writing. There were poems and prayers and imprecations.

  Outraged workers in the Tula Brass Cartridge Factory defended their output in Izvestia. The peasants of Lodeina village in Vologda wrote to the Soviet pleading for socialist newspapers. In the Menshevik press, the ‘Committee of Workers’ Elders’ in the Atlas Metal Factory decried alcoholism. Soldiers of the 2nd Battery Assembly of the Caucasus army sent a letter directly to ‘deeply respected deputy’ Chkheidze, lamenting their own lack of education and pleading with the Menshevik leader for books. Transport Repair Workshop Number 2 in Kiev wrote to him too, enclosing forty-two roubles for the martyrs of the revolution.

  Over the months such letters would grow angrier and more desperate. Many were already angry now, and many more were impatient.

  ‘We are sick and tired of living in debt and slavery,’ the Rakalovsk peasants had their chairperson write. ‘We want space and light.’

  On 18 April, the Provisional Government cabled its foreign allies with their official ‘Revolutionary Defencist’ war aims, as the Soviet demanded after Milyukov’s provocative interview the previous month. But Milyukov was seemingly determined to wreck any such move, to undermine what he considered inexcusable treason. To the document, the reiteration of the ‘Declaration of March 27’, he appended a note ‘clarifying’ that the cable did not mean Russia was planning to leave the war. That the country remained determined to fight for the ‘high ideals’ of the Allies.

  The ‘Milyukov Note’, as it was swiftly known, was not the machination of one rogue right-wing Kadet. His draft and the plans for its communication were approved by the cabinet in a compromise between the Provisional Government’s left and right wings – precisely to undermine the Soviet.

  On 19 April, when the Soviet Executive Committee discovered the note’s content, Chkheidze denounced Milyukov as ‘the evil genius of the revolution’. And the Ispolkom was not the only group so incensed. When on the 20th the text appeared in various newspapers, spontaneous, furious demonstrations instantly broke out.

  In the Finland Regiment served the dashing sergeant Fedor Linde, a politically unaligned romantic who had played an important, undersung part in February, rousing the 5,000-strong Preobrazhensky Regiment to mutiny. Now the Milyukov note inflamed him as a betrayal of the revolution’s promise to end the war. As a revolutionary defencist, Linde feared that the note could demoralise and agitate the army in a profoundly unhelpful way.

  When Milyukov’s intervention went public, Linde led a battalion of his regiment to the splendid neoclassical Marinsky Palace, where the Provisional Government met. He fully expected that the Soviet Executive, of which he was a member, would endorse his actions, assert its power, and arrest the perfidious government. Soldiers from the Moscow and Pavlov regiment joined his demonstration, and soon 25,000 men were an
grily protesting outside the palace.

  To Linde’s surprise and dismay, the Soviet condemned him. It insisted, rather, that it must help the Provisional Government restore its authority.

  The Milyukov note and the escalating demonstrations against it caused uncertainty and tension among the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s resolution on the issue, passed that morning at an emergency session of the First Bolshevik Petrograd City Conference, was uncharacteristically equivocal. It condemned the note, and suggested that the end of the war would become possible only by transferring power to the Soviet – but it did not call workers and soldiers to come out.

  However, thousands of soldiers and workers were already on the streets, demanding the resignations of Milyukov and Guchkov. When the Soviet ordered them to disperse, most, including the disconsolate Linde, obeyed. But the demonstrators were still carrying their placards reading ‘Down with Imperialist Policy’, and, tellingly, ‘Down with the Provisional Government’.

  And such slogans went down well with some Bolshevik district delegates. There was a mood on the party left for such spectacles and interventions. Already that day, at the conference, Nevsky of the Military Organisation had argued for the mobilisation of troops to agitate for a Soviet seizure of power. Ludmila Stahl implored her comrades not to be ‘further left than Lenin himself’, and the delegates ultimately agreed to call for ‘solidarity with the resolution of the Central Committee’, meaning Lenin’s own, rather evasive motion.

  But the next day, demonstrators were out again in their thousands, though with fewer soldiers among them. There was that surge again. Overthrow the government? The thought gained traction among Bolsheviks.

  Hundreds of copies of a leaflet were scattering in the wind, some being trodden underfoot, many caught up and read: the anonymous thoughts of a troublemaker. ‘Down with the Provisional Government!’ was the heading. The comrades whispered that Bogdatiev, a far-left Bolshevik Putilov worker and candidate for the Central Committee, was the culprit. The redoubtable Kronstadt Bolsheviks were firmly in favour of overthrow. They were ready, they announced, ‘at any moment to support with armed force’ such demands.

  On the afternoon of the 21st, demonstrations spread to Moscow, too. In the capital, workers once more took over Nevsky Prospect, shouting for the end of the Provisional Government. But this time as they marched forward they began to make out banners that were not their own. Another crowd milled outside the Kazan Cathedral, between its curving rows of columns like outflung arms. A Kadet counterdemonstration.

  The Kadets stared pugnaciously and chanted their own slogans. ‘Hurrah for Milyukov!’ ‘Down with Lenin!’ ‘Long Live the Provisional Government!’

  Clashes broke out in the shadow of the dome. People wielded their placards like weapons. They grabbed and swung. Then a series of shocking rat-tat-tat echoes. Gunfire, starting a panicked stampede. Three people died.

  At 3 p.m., as workers marched again towards the Winter Palace, General Lavr Kornilov, in charge of the Petrograd Military District, ordered his units to take up position in the great square before it, surrounding the soaring Alexander Column.

  Kornilov was a career soldier of Tatar and Cossack stock, celebrated for his escape from Austro-Hungarian captivity in 1916. Aggressive, dashing, unimaginative, brutal, brave, he had the unenviable task of re-establishing military discipline in Petrograd. As if to prove to him the scale of that commission, the soldiers now snubbed his order. Instead, they followed the Soviet’s command to stand down.

  Kornilov was a hothead but not a fool. He swallowed back his fury and contempt, and avoided confrontation by rescinding his own instruction.

  Rather than try to solve the crisis with violence, the Soviet issued an edict against unauthorised military presence on the streets. This was effectively a directive to wind down these disturbances, the April Days. That evening the Soviet Executive, the Ispolkom, voted, thirty-four against nineteen, to accept the Provisional Government’s ‘explanation’ of Milyukov’s note – an explanation that was tantamount to a withdrawal.

  Activists’ blood was still up. That evening, at a meeting of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee’s Executive Commission, a motion for the government’s overthrow was gaining support. Having scandalised Bolshevik moderates, Lenin now moved to dampen the worrying ardour of his party’s ‘ultra-lefts’.

  ‘The slogan “Down with the Provisional Government”’, stated his resolution of 22 April, ‘is an incorrect one at the present moment’, because there was not yet a majority on the side of the revolutionary working class. Absent such weight, ‘such a slogan is either an empty phrase or, objectively, amounts to attempts of an adventurist character’. He reiterated that ‘only when the Soviets … adopt our policy and are willing to take power into their own hands’ would he advocate such a transfer.

  The April Days had imparted an important, if unintended, lesson. It had become absolutely clear that the Soviet possessed more authority over the Petrograd Garrison than did the Provisional Government or the officers, whether the Soviet wished it or not.

  The upsurges of the April Days may have been precipitous in the capital, but all over the country the tide of progress and change was still very strong. Across the immensity of Russian territory, the boisterousness and experiment thrown up by February went on, developing into particular shapes, channelling into more serious, formal investigations of liberation. In the nations and minorities unrest stirred, and moves for autonomy.

  The predominantly Buddhist Buryat region of Siberia had seen waves of Russian immigration since the Trans-Siberian Railway reached its main city of Irkutsk in 1898. More than once in subsequent years it had been rocked by Buryat revolts against discriminatory laws, and it had faced chauvinist cultural and political threats from the Russian regime. In 1905 a Buryat congress had called for rights to self-government and linguistic–cultural freedom: it had been suppressed. Now, with the new wave of freedoms, came a new Congress in Irkutsk – which voted in favour of independence.

  In Ossetia, in the Caucasus mountains, locals called a congress to establish organs of self-rule in the newly democratic state. In the Kuban, a region of southern Russia on the Black Sea, the local Cossacks in the Rada, its head hitherto appointed by the tsar, declared it the supreme local administrative power. Buoyed by the February revolution, and feeling it vindicated their own programme, members of the progressive, modernising Muslim Jadidist movement set up an Islamic Council in Tashkent, Turkestan, and across the region, helping to dismantle the old government structures – already undermined by the spread of local soviets – and enhancing the role of the indigenous Muslim population. At the end of the month, the council convened the first Pan-Turkestan Muslim Congress in the city. Its 150 delegates recognised the Provisional Government, and unanimously called for substantial regional autonomy.

  Nor were such probings towards progress only in the arena of nationhood. The All-Russian meeting of Muslims, called for by Muslim Duma deputies immediately after the February revolution, was fast approaching – but before this, on 23 April, delegates gathered in Kazan in Tatarstan for the All-Russian Muslim Women’s Congress. There, fifty-nine women delegates met before an audience 300 strong, overwhelmingly female, to debate issues including the status of Sharia law, plural marriage, women’s rights and the hijab. Contributions came from a range of political and religious positions, from socialists like Zulaykha Rahmanqulova and the twenty-two-year-old poet Zahida Burnasheva, as well as from the religious scholars Fatima Latifiya and Labiba Huseynova, an expert on Islamic law.

  Delegates debated whether Quranic injunctions were historically specific. Even many proponents of trans-historical orthodoxy interpreted the texts to insist, against conservative voices, that women had the right to attend mosque, or that polygyny was only permitted – a crucial caveat – if it was ‘just’; that is, with the permission of the first wife. Unsatisfied when the gathering approved that progressive–traditionalist position on plural marriage, the feminists and social
ists mandated three of their number, including Burnasheva, to attend the All-Russian Muslim Conference in Moscow the next month, to put their alternative case against polygyny.

  The conference passed ten principles, including women’s right to vote, the equality of the sexes, and the non-compulsory nature of the hijab. The centre of gravity of the discussions was clearly Jadidist, or further left. A symptom of tremulous times.

  Petrograd was recovering from Linde’s adventure. From 24 to 29 April, immediately after the April Days, the Seventh All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, the RSDWP – since 1912, the Bolsheviks’ official name – took place. There, Lenin added his new ‘right’ critique of the left to his left critique of the Bolshevik right. The April Days, he said, should not have been a battle. Rather, they were an opportunity for ‘a peaceful reconnaissance of our enemy’s forces’ – that enemy being the Provisional Government. The Petersburg Committee in its enthusiasm had committed the ‘grave crime’ of moving, he said, ‘a wee bit to the left’.

  Stalin was one of several who now shifted from their original more moderate position to vote with Lenin. There was continued vocal opposition to the April Theses from the more consistent Kamenev, among others, and from a minority further to the right clinging to the position of ‘watchfulness’ over the Provisional Government. Nonetheless, Lenin’s call for ‘all power to the soviets’, as expounded in a corrective to Bogdatiev and his adventurers, was overwhelmingly adopted. As was Lenin’s position that imperialist war and ‘revolutionary defencism’ should both be opposed.