October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

  In March, Bolshevik opposition to the Provisional Government had lost by a humiliating 19 votes to 400. In April, arguing against participation in the cabinet had got them 100 votes against 2,000. But now, even after the debacle of the July Days, months of crisis in government, economy and war, and the dramatic counterrevolutionary attempt, had utterly changed the lie of the political land. Now, with its members supported by left Mensheviks and Left SRs – who were by that point the majority of the SRs in the capital – the Petrograd Soviet for the first time adopted a Bolshevik resolution: 279 for, 115 against, and 51 abstentions.

  The vote seemed to signal an opportunity. Perhaps the Bolsheviks and other socialists could find common ground.

  Such collaborative aspirations extended to unlikely quarters. In his Finnish hide, Lenin sat down to write his document ‘On Compromises’.

  At the Sixth Congress, he had described the soviets as advancing ‘like sheep to the abattoir’ behind their leaders. He had foreclosed any possibility of working with Mensheviks and SRs, insisted on the absolute necessity of a forceful seizure of power. But ‘now, and only now,’ he wrote, in another dizzying shift of perspective, ‘perhaps during only a few days or a week or two’, it appeared there was a chance for a socialist soviet government to be set up ‘in a perfectly peaceful way’.

  Struck by the mass opposition to the Kadets, and by the soviets’ impressive mobilisation against Kornilov, Lenin proposed that his party ‘return’ to the pre-July demand, ‘All Power to the Soviets’ – which call had, in any case, returned unbidden. ‘We … may offer a voluntary compromise,’ he suggested, with the moderate socialists.

  Lenin proposed that the SRs and Mensheviks could form an exclusively socialist government, responsible to local soviets. The Bolsheviks would remain outside that government – ‘unless a dictatorship of the proletariat and poor peasants has been realised’ – but they would not agitate for the seizure of power. Instead, assuming the convocation of a Constituent Assembly and freedom of propaganda, they would operate as a ‘loyal opposition’, striving to win influence within the soviets.

  ‘Perhaps this is already impossible?’ Lenin wrote of this appeal, in particular, to the rank and file of the Mensheviks and SRs. ‘Perhaps. But if there is even one chance in a hundred, the attempt at realising this opportunity is still worthwhile.’

  Late that evening of the 1st, the All-Russian Executive Committees resumed session. And as if to rubbish Lenin’s tantalising, as-yet-unseen thoughts, leading Mensheviks and SRs lined up to repudiate the passing of Kamenev’s motion by the Petrograd Soviet. They argued instead for support for Kerensky – notwithstanding his announcement that day that full power lay with a so-called Council of Five, the Directory on which he had insisted.

  Kamenev taunted his opponents. He mocked them remorselessly for standing by while Kerensky ‘reduced [them] to nothing’. ‘I would hope’, he said, ‘that you will repel this blow as you repelled Kornilov’s attack.’ Martov, still adamantly against any Directory, proposed an all-socialist ministry. But the majority would not have it. Instead, in what could have been a bitter parody of wheel-spinning bureaucracy, they proposed yet another conference, a ‘Democratic State Conference’ this time, for all ‘democratic elements’.

  Its purpose? Almost unbelievably, it was – to discuss the government.

  In the early hours of 2 September, the committee rejected the Bolshevik and Menshevik–Internationalist proposals. Instead they offered their support to Kerensky.

  The next day Lenin got word of the decision, just as he prepared to send ‘On Compromises’. No wonder he added to the manuscript a quick and melancholy postscript.

  ‘I say to myself: perhaps it is already too late to offer a compromise. Perhaps the few days in which a peaceful development was still possible have passed too … All that remains is to send these notes to the editor with the request to have them entitled: “Belated Thoughts”. Perhaps even belated thoughts are sometimes not without interest.’

  Kerensky’s only sop to the Soviet was the exclusion from his dictatorial Directory of any Kadets. Alexeev took over as chief of staff, and Kornilov was transferred with thirty other conspirators to the Bykhov Monastery, where sympathetic jailers let his bodyguards stay with him, and families visited twice daily.

  Striving to smother radical agitation, Kerensky directed military commanders, commissars and army organisations to end political activity among the troops. The order had precisely no effect. Kerensky’s negotiations with Kornilov were by then common knowledge, and they dried up whatever dregs of his authority remained. Only the moderate socialists still looked to him. For the right, he had betrayed Russia’s best hope; for the left, especially the soldiers, Kerensky had been negotiating with Kornilov a return to the hated regime of officers’ power.

  Kerensky remained head of the government not through strength but despite weakness, propped up by widespread tensions elsewhere. If this was still, as Lenin described it, a balancing act, it was a negative one – a Bonapartism of the despised.

  And yet, doggedly, in line with a certain stageism underlying their politics and their insistence on coalition, the moderate socialists still determined that power should remain Kerensky’s. Alliance with liberalism was non-negotiable. Even when opposing Kerensky’s concrete orders, they maintained that those orders were his to give.

  On 4 September Kerensky demanded the dissolution of all revolutionary committees that had arisen during the crisis, including the Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution. That committee immediately met – in itself an act of civil disobedience – and bullishly expressed confidence that, given the continuing counterrevolutionary threat, such bodies would continue to operate.

  Recalcitrance from the grassroots like this, as well as the growing and dramatic splits between left and right wings of the Mensheviks and SRs, kept Lenin hopeful for possibilities for compromise, his recent postscript notwithstanding. Between 6 and 9 September, in ‘The Tasks of the Revolution’, ‘The Russian Revolution and Civil War’ and ‘One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution’, he maintained that the soviets could take power peacefully. He even granted to his political opponents a degree of respect for their recent endeavours, declaring that an alliance of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs in a soviet regime would make civil war impossible.

  These articles provoked consternation among his party comrades, particularly those on the Moscow Regional Bureau and Petersburg Committee. One might have thought them inured to surprise at Lenin’s switches, but here they were, astonished by this turn from the man they had recently defended from the left against Bolshevik moderates. Now, Lenin’s ‘On Compromises’ was rejected for publication by Rabochy put’ as too conciliatory.

  And there were good reasons to be sceptical that his new aspiration for cooperation would bear fruit, even beside the Soviet All-Russian Committees’ support for Kerensky. On 3 September, the make-up of the newly planned Democratic Conference was announced, and it boded ill for the left. Of the 1,198 delegates, the proportion of seats for urban workers and soldiers was low compared to those for more conservative rural soviets, zemstvos and cooperatives.

  Even so, the Bolsheviks sent out caucusing instructions to its delegates. Lenin’s approach seemed now, after all, compatible with that of the party right, those like Kamenev who thought the country unripe for socialist revolution, as well as with those more radical, for whom soviet power could be a transitional form away from capitalism. And all the while, up from the grassroots, there still came great pressure and hope for cross-party socialist unity. It seemed worth a shot to try for it.

  The country was polarising not only between right and left, but between the politicised and the disengaged. Hence, perhaps counter-intuitively, as social tensions increased, the numbers voting in elections for the countless local bodies were declining. In Moscow in June, for example, 640,000 ballots were cast in municipal elections: now, three months later, there were only 380,000. And tho
se who did vote gravitated to harder positions: the Kadet share grew from 17.2 to 31.5 per cent; the Bolsheviks soared from 11.7 to 49.5 per cent. And the moderates plummeted. The Mensheviks went from 12.2 to 4.2 per cent, and SRs from 58.9 to 14.7 per cent.

  The Left SRs gained control of the party’s organisations and committees in Revel, Pskov, Helsingfors, Samara and Tashkent, among others, including Petrograd itself. They demanded a national Congress of Soviets and an exclusively socialist government. The Russian SR leadership seemed paralysed in the face of its surging left flank, which it had tried to high-handedly ignore. It now ‘expelled’ the Petrograd organisation, among others, for its deviation – a meaningless non-sanction, leaving all resources in place with the radicals. The SR CC staked everything on the Constituent Assembly elections, scheduled (then) for November.

  In Baku, where Bolshevik orators had been shouted down at street meetings a few weeks before, the party’s motions were now sweeping factory committees and gatherings. ‘The Bolshevisation noticeable in all of Russia has appeared in the widest dimensions in our oil empire,’ wrote the local stalwart Shaumian of his region. ‘And long before the Kornilovshchina [Kornilov Affair]. The former masters of the situation, the Mensheviks, are not able to show themselves in the workers’ districts. Along with the Bolsheviks the SR-Internationalists [the left] have begun to get stronger … and have formed a bloc with the Bolsheviks.’

  Across the empire, the Mensheviks were splintering. Some went to the right, as in Baku; at the other extreme, the Mensheviks in Tiflis, Georgia, took a hard-left position for a united socialist government that would include the Bolsheviks.

  On the 5th, it was the turn of the Moscow Soviet to vote in favour of Kamenev’s 31 August resolution. A soviet congress in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, gained a Bolshevik majority. On the 6th, as Lenin’s ‘On Compromises’ was published, power in Ekaterinburg in the Urals passed into the hands of the soviets, and workers refused to recognise the Provisional Government. In protest at Kerensky’s Directory, nineteen Baltic Fleet committees recommended all ships fly red flags.

  And whether or not dissent took socialist forms, the national aspirations of Russia’s minorities were amplifying. In Tashkent, Uzbekistan, tensions between Russian inhabitants and Muslim Uzbeks flared, until on 10 September local soldiers formed a revolutionary committee, expelling government representatives and taking control of the city. From the 8th to the 15th, the Ukrainian Rada provocatively convened a Congress of the Nationalities, bringing together Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, Tatars, Turks, Bessarabian Romanians, Latvians, Georgians, Estonians, Kazakhs, Cossacks and representatives of various radical parties. The Congress, in an escalation from the language of ‘cultural autonomy’, agreed that Russia must be ‘a federative-democratic republic’, each component part to decide how it would link to others. Except in the case of Poland, and to a lesser extent Finland, the orientation (let alone formal demand) was not for full independence. But dynamics towards independence in some form were at least implicit – and, later, would come very much to the fore.

  The presidium of the Petrograd Soviet, composed of right Mensheviks and SRs, dismissed Kamenev’s victory of 1 September as just a side effect of how depleted the Soviet had been that night. On 9 September, they threatened to resign if the decision were not overturned.

  The Bolsheviks were fearful they would not win the motion this time around. In an attempt to appeal to waverers and gain influence, they suggested a reform of the presidium along fair, proportional lines, to include previously unrepresented groups – including the Bolsheviks. ‘If coalition with the Kadets was acceptable,’ they argued in the chamber, ‘surely they can engage in coalition politics with the Bolsheviks in this organ.’

  To this manoeuvre, Trotsky added a masterstroke.

  Long ago, in the very earliest days of the Petrograd Soviet, he recalled, Kerensky himself, of course, had been on the presidium. So, asked Trotsky, did that presidium still consider Kerensky, he of the dictatorial Directory, a member?

  The question put the moderates in an invidious position. Kerensky was now reviled as a counterrevolutionary – but their political commitment to collaboration forbade the moderate Mensheviks and SRs to repudiate him.

  The presidium allowed that he was, indeed, one of them.

  Not since Banquo had so unwelcome a ghost been at the table. The insult of Kerensky’s membership tipped the balance for the wider membership. The Petrograd Soviet sided, 519 to 414, with 67 abstentions, with the Bolsheviks and against their presidium, its toxic absent member included. The compromised presidium resigned en masse, in protest.

  This is not to say that the Bolsheviks now commanded overwhelming support in this venue. They could still not be sure of passing all their motions. Nevertheless, this politicised procedural manoeuvre was a triumph. Lenin would later condemn it as excessively conciliatory: a harsh, unconvincing reproach, given its success and effects.

  In September, the upward trajectory of the peasant war did not slow. In growing numbers, villagers sacked more estates, more violently, often with fire, often side by side with soldiers and deserters. In Penza, Saratov, Kazan, and especially Tambov, estates burned. Village soviets arose. Wrecking and theft blossomed into full-blown jacqueries.

  Sometimes with these came notorious murders, like that of the landowner Prince Viazemskii the previous month, a killing that shocked liberal opinion because of the man’s charitable works. The situation grew bad enough for the Council of the Tambov Union of Private Landowners to issue a plea for help, signing it as ‘The Union of Unfortunate Landowners’.

  In the first half of September, an official in Kozlovsk County put together a list of attacks on local estates. He documented fifty-four incidents, including ‘Condition of portions of the estate’. A spreadsheet of rural fury and destruction. ‘Wrecked’. ‘Wrecked and partly burned’. ‘Wrecked and burned’. ‘Wrecked’.

  In the cities, a strike wave brought out not only skilled but white-collar and unskilled workers, hospital workers, clerks. Repeatedly the Red Guards now confronted government militias, and not always bloodlessly. Bosses locked out workers; starving proletarian communities raged from house to house in bands, hunting for both food speculators and food.

  ‘Anarchy essentially ruled over Petrograd,’ said K. I. Globachev. A former chief of the Okhrana, he had himself spent the days between February and August in the dark castle of Kresty jail, in punishment for that role. His observations, though, were fair. ‘Criminals multiplied to an unimaginable extent. Every day robberies and murders were committed not only at night, but also in broad daylight.’

  The prisons could not hold the prisoners: due to the political upheavals, or the inadequacy of the guards, countless inmates simply walked out of jail to freedom. Globachev himself, fearful of how a secret policeman of the old regime would fare on the post-February streets, remained by choice behind Kresty’s walls.

  In Ostrogozhsk, a town in Voronezh, looters targeted an alcohol store over three violent days that culminated in a vast conflagration. When troops finally suppressed this apocalyptic nihilo-drunkenness, fifty-seven people were dead, twenty-six of them burned alive.

  The paper of the Right SRs, Volia naroda, editorialised about the growing anarchy with a terse, jittery, bullet-pointed list of ‘virtually, a period of civil war’.

  A mutiny in Orel …

  In Rostov the town hall is dynamited.

  In Tambov Governorate there are agrarian pogroms …

  Gangs of robbers on the roads in Pskov …

  Along the Volga, near Kamyshin, soldiers loot trains.

  How much worse, the paper wondered, could things get? It blamed Bolshevism.

  Soviets across Russia were shifting to the left. In Astrakhan, a meeting of soviets and other socialists voted 276 to 175 against Menshevik/SR appeals for unity – including with groups that had been involved with Kornilov. Delegates instead backed the Bolshevik call to transfer power to workers and poor peasants.r />
  In mid-September, military intelligence reported ‘open hostility and animosity … on the part of the soldiers; the most insignificant event may provoke unrest. Soldiers say … all the officers are followers of General Kornilov … [and] should be destroyed’. The war minister reported to the SRs ‘an increase of attacks on officers by soldiers, shootings, and throwing of grenades through the windows of officers’ meetings’. He explained the soldiers’ fury thus: ‘On the heels of declaring Kornilov a rebel, the army received instructions from the government to continue to execute his operative orders. Nobody wanted to believe that an order in such contradiction to the preceding instruction could be true.’

  It was. Such was Kerensky’s crumbling government.

  The festival feeling of March and April was replaced by the sense of a closing, an ending, and not in peace but in catastrophe, the mud and fire of war.

  The renovated language of the early days seemed drowned out by bestial gibbering. ‘Where are they now, our deeds and our sacrifices?’ begged the writer Alexey Remizov of this apocalyptic world. He could find no answers. Only visions. ‘Smell of smoke and the howling of apes.’

  On 14 September, the Democratic Conference opened in Petrograd’s famous Alexandrinsky Theatre. The hall was vivid with red banners, as if to express a unity of left purpose that was very much lacking. On the stage beyond the presidium’s table was the set of a play: behind the speakers were artificial trees, and doors to nowhere.

  The hopes of radicals for the conference, never high, sank as attendees declared their affiliations. Some 532 SRs were present, only seventy-one of the party’s militant left wing; 530 Mensheviks, fifty-six Internationalist; fifty-five Popular Socialists; seventeen unaffiliated; and 134 Bolsheviks. The conference was heavily skewed in the moderates’ favour. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks were committed to trying to use the gathering to push for compromise, socialist government.