October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

  In their party caucus, Trotsky aspired to the transfer of power to the soviets; whereas Kamenev, unconvinced of the readiness of Russia for transformation and hoping to gain a wider base for workers’ rule, argued instead for the transfer of state power, ‘not to the Soviet’, but to a socialist coalition. The differences between these two positions bespoke distinct conceptions of history. But for the party delegates in that moment they were minor strategic nuances. Either way, the point was that Bolsheviks were fully engaged with the conference, poised to put the case for cooperation with the moderate left parties, for coalition and the peaceful development of the revolution – just as Lenin himself had argued since the start of the month.

  So it was like a thunderbolt when, on the conference’s second day, the Bolshevik leadership received two new letters from their leader-in-hiding.

  Now, hard as a stone, he upended all his recent conciliatory suggestions.

  ‘The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies in both capitals,’ began the first communication, ‘can and must take state power into their own hands.’ Lenin pilloried the Conference as ‘the compromising upper strata of the petty bourgeoisie’. He demanded Bolsheviks declare the necessity of ‘immediate transfer of all power to revolutionary democrats, headed by the revolutionary proletariat’, and then walk out.

  Lenin’s comrades were utterly aghast.

  Paradoxically, it was the continuation of the leftward shift of Russia itself, the trend that had raised in Lenin hopes of cooperation, that now changed his mind. Because with that tendency had come those triumphs for Bolsheviks in the two main cities’ soviets, and Lenin grew fretful about what would happen if the party did not act on its own. He feared revolutionary energies might dissipate, or the country slide on into anarchy – or that brutal counterrevolution might arise.

  Unrest was shaking the German army and society. Lenin felt sure the whole of Europe was growing ripe for revolution, towards which a full-scale Russian revolution would be a powerful shove. And he was very anxious – for good reason, and in this he was not alone – lest the government surrender Petrograd, the red capital, to the Germans. If they did so, Bolshevik chances, he said, would be ‘a hundred times less favourable’.

  The party had been right, he repeated, not to move in July, without the masses behind it. But now it had them.

  Here again was one of those switchbacks that so discombobulated his comrades. It was not mere caprice, however, but the results of minute attention to shifts in politics, and exaggerated responses to these. Now, he insisted, with the masses behind it, the party must move.

  Late on 15 September, a group of Bolshevik grandees left the Alexandrinsky and made for their HQ. There, in utmost secrecy, they discussed Lenin’s terrifying letters.

  There was not a scintilla of support for his demands. He was utterly isolated. And, further, it was imperative to his comrades that his voice be muted, his message not get to Petrograd workers, or Petrograd or Moscow Bolshevik committees. Not because they would think Lenin wrong: because they might think him right. If that happened, Lomov would later explain, ‘many would doubt the correctness of the position adopted by the whole CC’.

  The leadership delegated members to the MO and Petersburg Committee to make sure no calls for action reached workplaces or barracks. The CC readied themselves for conference business, as previously agreed.

  Lenin’s new position was, literally, unspeakable. The CC voted to burn all but a single copy of each letter. As if they were pages from some dreadful grimoire. As if they would have liked to bury the ashes and sow the ground with salt.

  Lenin’s scepticism about the potential of the starkly divided conference was vindicated. Throughout it, most Mensheviks and SRs remained as adamantly committed as ever to coalition with the bourgeoisie – which meant giving the despised and tottering Kerensky his head.

  On the 16th, blithely dissimulating, the Bolshevik leadership published Lenin’s words – of two weeks before. They put out his amelioratory essay ‘The Russian Revolution and Civil War’.

  Its author’s fury can be imagined: as far as he was concerned, that piece was now a fossil. On the 18th, the party’s formal conference statement on the government modelled itself on another of their leader’s antediluvian relics, ‘On Compromises’. Yes, the Bolsheviks did mobilise a demonstration outside the theatre, demanding a socialist government, but this rather dutiful intervention was far from the militant, armed, insurrectionary ‘surrounding’ of Alexandrinsky for which Lenin had just called.

  Unable to tolerate what was going on, in agonies at his distance from the action, Lenin disobeyed a direct CC instruction. He decided to set out for the Finnish city of Vyborg (sharing its name with the district of the Russian capital), eighty miles from Petrograd. From there he would plot his way back into the heart of things.

  He needed a disguise. Kustaa Rovio escorted him to a Helsingfors wigmaker, who threatened to scupper the pressing plan by insisting it would take a fortnight to personalise something suitable. The shopkeeper was flabbergasted to see Lenin impatiently fingering a ready-made grey hairpiece. Most buyers were attempting to rejuvenate themselves: this would have the opposite effect. But Lenin rebuffed all the man’s attempts to dissuade him. For a long time after that day, the wigmaker would tell the story of the youngish client who had wanted to look old.

  In Vyborg, Lenin stayed a few weeks at 15 Alexanderinkatu, in the brick-making area of the city. He spent his days reading newspapers and writing, lodged in the shared dwelling of the socialist Latukka and Koikonen families. A solicitous and undemanding guest, the scourge of the established order quickly made himself popular. When at last – after more than one ferocious argument with the CC’s emissary, Shotman – he insisted on returning to Petrograd, the Latukkas and Koikonens were sad to see him go.

  On the 19th, after four days of arguments about the future government and a gruelling five-hour roll call, the Democratic Conference at last voted on the principle of coalition with the bourgeoisie.

  It was no surprise that the overrepresented moderates had it: the vote went 766 to 688 for coalition, with 38 abstentions. However, straight after this passed, delegates had to discuss two competing amendments.

  The first insisted that those Kadets and others complicit in the Kornilov Affair be excluded from coalition; the second that the entirety of the Kadet party, as counterrevolutionaries, be excluded tout court.

  The Bolsheviks, along with Martov, sensed an opportunity. They spoke for both amendments, no matter that they were not complementary.

  There was tense, confused debate. But those who were deemed to have collaborated with Kornilov had come to be so roundly despised that when the votes came, both amendments passed. This meant the altered proposal had to be voted on anew. As doubly amended, it declared in favour of coalition with the bourgeoisie, but now on the basis that this should be without the participation of Kornilovites, including implicated Kadets; and, incoherently, that it should be without any Kadets at all.

  The latter condition was unacceptable to the right moderates, who could not envisage any coalition without Kadets, and they therefore voted against. As, of course, did the left, because (though many had voted for at least one, if not both) these amendments were essentially irrelevant to them: they remained implacably opposed to any such coalition at all with the representatives of property. This absurd, temporary alliance of right and left in the conference ensured that the motion was overwhelmingly rejected.

  No conclusion had been reached. Nothing was settled.

  The man with whom the moderates urged coalition, Kerensky, remained pitifully weak, and growing weaker. He struggled, lashed out to shore up his authority. On 18 September he pronounced the dissolution of the Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet. The sailors responded simply that his order was ‘considered inoperative’.

  The Democratic Conference, too, strained for relevance. After an exhausting all-day presidiu
m session to deal with the unhelpful results of the vote on the 19th, a new presidium vote on coalition produced a split of fifty in favour and sixty against.

  Almost unbelievably, with Beckettian comedy, faithful to some autotelic cycle of committee-generative committees, Tsereteli proposed establishing yet another body. This one, he said, would decide the make-up of a future cabinet, based on the Soviet’s political programme agreed on 14 August. The Bolsheviks (alone) had opposed this programme – but even their leadership, even now, still straining for the collaboration that Lenin had declared impossible, agreed to the formation of this ‘Democratic Council’, or Preparliament.

  Which the presidium promptly voted must include propertied elements.

  The previous day, Conference had approved coalition, but rejected coalition with Kadets. Now they rejected coalition, while mooting political cooperation with the bourgeoisie, including Kadets. The proceedings were outdoing their own absurdity.

  The mechanisms, members and powers of the Preparliament were complicated and provisional, but that door did remain open to working with the right. A self-selecting team of moderates – since the left firmly opposed any such involvement of the bourgeoisie – were granted authority to meet with the government to decide a way forward.

  And yet, despite all this, the Bolshevik CC decided on the 21st not to walk out of the Democratic Conference. They did vote among themselves against participating in the Preparliament, but so narrowly – by nine votes to eight – that they felt they must take the debate further, and convened an emergency meeting with delegates to discuss the issue.

  Trotsky spoke for boycott, Rykov against. When after a stormy caucus the vote came, it was seventy-five to fifty in favour of taking part in the Preparliament.

  Small wonder many Bolsheviks, particularly of the left, were sceptical of this decision. The very next day, as if to goad them, the unelected Preparliament commenced negotiations with Kerensky and his cabinet – and with representatives of the Kadets.

  But the officials of the bourgeoisie with whom it negotiated would not accept the Soviet’s moderate 14 August programme. Nor would they agree to the Preparliament having any formal powers, insisting it should be merely consultative. In the face of this intransigence, Trotsky put to the newly inaugurated Preparliament a repudiation of their negotiations with the cabinet. But on the 23rd, this was easily defeated, and the negotiations themselves, albeit narrowly, were endorsed.

  It was increasingly clear to Bolsheviks that other arenas of struggle might prove more congenial. They successfully demanded that the Soviet Central Executive Committee convene a nationwide Congress of Soviets in Petrograd, the next month. With what was surely relief, the party subordinated preparliamentary work to the tasks of building that October Congress, and of mobilising for the transfer of power to the soviets.

  Meanwhile, with the inevitability of sunrise, Tsereteli’s team backed down on their own diluted platform, to make it more palatable to the despised Kadets on whom they would not turn their backs. One hundred and fifty representatives of property would, they agreed, be added to the 367 ‘democratic’ Preparliament delegates – who would, they also miserably allowed, have no power over the government.

  And as this dilution, this self-abasement, continued, that bony hand of hunger was tightening its grip.

  The American writer Louise Bryant had recently arrived in the capital. Walking in the cold of the early morning, she was horrified to see the food queues. Every day before dawn, people shivering in wretched clothes in the shadowy streets of Red Petrograd. They lined up for hours, long before the sun rose, as the wind scoured the boulevards. For milk, for tobacco, for food.

  His comrades’ attempts to conceal Lenin’s intransigence were becoming increasingly blatant. From the city of Vyborg he sent rebuke after scathing rebuke, all of which were promptly bowdlerised.

  As the Democratic Conference ended he dispatched to Rabochy put’ an essay entitled ‘Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks’, insisting that the Bolsheviks should have walked out, subjecting his party, and Zinoviev in particular, to remorseless criticism. The piece appeared on the 24th, as Preparliament negotiated – but now it was called ‘Heroes of Fraud’, and all attacks on the Bolsheviks had been excised.

  Lenin’s fury grew awesome.

  The next day, sulkily enabled by the Preparliament, Kerensky named his third coalition cabinet. Technically, again, it comprised a majority of socialists, but these moderate leftists held no key posts. And flatly breaking the Democratic Conference’s resolution, the Preparliament signed off on a cabinet that included the hated Tereshchenko, as well as four Kadets.

  That was the day the Petrograd Soviet’s new, more representative presidium convened, after the walkout of its predecessors on the 9th. It was made up of one Menshevik, two SRs, and, in a historic shift that gave the party an absolute majority, four Bolsheviks.

  One of the four was greeted with loud cheers and applause. Twelve years after he held a commanding role in the Soviet’s earlier, 1905 iteration, Leon Trotsky took his seat.

  Trotsky immediately tabled a resolution stating that Petrograd’s workers and soldiers would not support the new, weak, reviled government. That instead, the solution lay with the forthcoming All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

  Overwhelmingly, his motion passed.

  And still Lenin’s comrades censored his writing. Between 22 and 24 September, his ‘From a Publicist’s Diary’ derided the party’s participation in the Preparliament. The Rabochy put’ board suppressed it – Trotsky among them, despite the piece praising him for his pro-boycott stance. On the 26th, with breathtaking cheek, they published instead part of ‘The Tasks of the Revolution’ – another pro-compromise throwback from that bygone epoch of three weeks previous.

  His rage at last drove Lenin to conspiracy.

  On the 27th, he wrote to Ivar Smilga, the ultra-left Bolshevik chair of the Regional Executive Committee of the Army, Fleet and Workers in Finland. Lenin did not so much flout as shatter the vaunted ‘discipline’ of a revolutionary party. What he attempted was no less than to create an alternative pro-insurrectionary axis within his organisation – an axis in which Finland was key.

  ‘It seems to me that we can have completely at our disposal only the troops in Finland and the Baltic Fleet, and only they can play a serious military role,’ he wrote to Smilga. ‘Give all your attention to the military preparation of the troops in Finland plus the fleet for the impending overthrow of Kerensky. Create a secret committee of absolutely trustworthy military men.’

  These preparations took place amid increasing anxiety about the potential forthcoming fall of Petrograd – especially when, on 28 September, the Germans landed on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, near Riga. This was the start of Operation Albion, to gain control of the West Estonian archipelago, outflank Russian defences and leave Petrograd open for the taking.

  Across Russia, fear was growing that the right, and the government, would simply surrender the city, this thorn in their side. That they would allow Red Petrograd to fall.

  On 29 September, Lenin sent the CC ‘The Crisis Is Ripe’. It was a declaration of political war. This time, to circumvent the usual gagging treatment, he also circulated the document to the Petrograd and Moscow committees.

  In the piece, Lenin repeated his strong conviction that Europe-wide revolution was at hand. He charged that unless the Bolsheviks seized power immediately, they would be ‘miserable traitors to the proletarian cause’. As far as he was concerned, waiting for the planned Second Soviet Congress was not just a waste of time, but a real risk to the revolution. ‘It is possible to take power now,’ he insisted, ‘whereas on 20–29 October you will not be given the chance.’

  Then came the bombshell.

  In view of the fact that the CC has even left unanswered the persistent demands I have been making for such a policy ever since the beginning of the Democratic Conference, in view of the fact that the central organ is deletin
g from my articles all references to such glaring errors on the part of the Bolsheviks … I am compelled to regard this as a subtle hint that I should keep my mouth shut, and as a proposal for me to retire.

  I am compelled to tender my resignation from the Central Committee, which I hereby do, reserving for myself freedom to campaign among the rank and file of the party and at the Party Congress.

  Even as this message arrived, Zinoviev was busy putting the leadership’s case in Rabochy put’ – a strategy directly at odds with Lenin’s. ‘Start getting ready for the Congress of Soviets,’ Zinoviev wrote. ‘Don’t become involved in any kind of separate direct action!’

  Zinoviev: ‘Let’s concentrate all our energies on preparations for the Congress of Soviets.’

  Lenin: ‘It is my profound conviction that if we “wait” for the Congress of Soviets, and let the present moment pass, it will ruin the revolution.’

  10

  Red October

  In October, in the forests, leaves were coming down in drifts, clogging the train tracks. The trees shook from the thud of guns. Kerensky remained Russia’s only hope: of this he was still certain. He gathered the rags of his messianism about him, believing himself chosen by something or other for something or other.

  By the constant threat of reshuffles, he kept his last, etiolated Provisional Government in line. Kerensky was corroded by malicious gossip. The cult of him, a memory to embarrass its erstwhile devotees. He was Jewish, bigots whispered. He was not a real man, homophobes insinuated, calling him by feminine forms. And with the demise of the last shreds of faith in him, came social and military panic.

  On the first day of the month, amid the spiralling crime in Petrograd came a fresh horror. A man and his three young children were found savagely murdered in their Lesnoi apartment. Another atrocity among so many. But these victims’ home was in the very same building as the headquarters of the local branch of the city militia, the security patrols organised by the city duma.