The Bolsheviks sat around a big dining table, many wearing the leather coats that were becoming a kind of uniform for them. Lenin was not there, so they started without him. Grigori fretted about him-he might have been arrested-but he arrived at ten o’clock, disguised in a wig that kept slipping and almost made him look foolish.
However, there was nothing laughable about the resolution he proposed, calling for an armed uprising, led by the Bolsheviks, to overthrow the provisional government and take power.
Grigori was elated. Everyone wanted an armed uprising, of course, but most revolutionaries said the time was not yet ripe. At last the most powerful of them was saying now.
Lenin spoke for an hour. As always he was strident, banging the table, shouting, and abusing those who disagreed with him. His style worked against him-you wanted to vote down someone who was so rude. But despite that he was persuasive. His knowledge was wide, his political instinct was unerring, and few men could stand firm against the hammer blows of his logical arguments.
Grigori was on Lenin’s side from the start. The important thing was to seize power and end the dithering, he thought. All other problems could be solved later. But would the others agree?
Zinoviev spoke against. Normally a handsome man, he, too, had changed his appearance to confuse the police. He had grown a beard and cropped his luxuriant thatch of curly black hair. He thought Lenin’s strategy was too risky. He was afraid an uprising would give the right wing an excuse for a military coup. He wanted the Bolshevik party to concentrate on winning the elections for the Constituent Assembly.
This timid argument infuriated Lenin. “The provisional government is never going to hold a national election!” he said. “Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool and a dupe.”
Trotsky and Stalin backed the uprising, but Trotsky angered Lenin by saying they should wait for the All-Russia Congress of Soviets, scheduled to begin in ten days’ time.
That struck Grigori as a good idea-Trotsky was always reasonable-but Lenin surprised him by roaring: “No!”
Trotsky said: “We’re likely to have a majority among the delegates-”
“If the congress forms a government, it is bound to be a coalition!” Lenin said angrily. “The Bolsheviks admitted to the government will be centrists. Who could wish for that-other than a counterrevolutionary traitor?”
Trotsky flushed at the insult, but he said nothing.
Grigori realized Lenin was right. As usual, Lenin had thought farther ahead than anyone else. In a coalition, the Mensheviks’ first demand would be that the prime minister must be a moderate-and they would probably settle for anyone but Lenin.
It dawned on Grigori-and at the same time on the rest of the committee, he guessed-that the only way Lenin could become prime minister was by a coup.
The dispute raged until the small hours. In the end they voted by ten to two in favor of an armed uprising.
However, Lenin did not get all his own way. No date was set for the coup.
When the meeting was over, Galina produced a samovar and put out cheese, sausage, and bread for the hungry revolutionaries.
As a child on Prince Andrei’s estate, Grigori had once witnessed the climax of a deer hunt. The dogs had brought down a stag just outside the village, and everyone had gone to look. When Grigori got there the deer was dying, the dogs already greedily eating the intestines spilling out of its ripped belly while the huntsmen on their horses swigged brandy in celebration. Yet even then the wretched beast had made one last attempt to fight back. It had swung its mighty antlers, impaling one dog and slashing another, and had, for a moment, almost looked as if it might struggle to its feet; then it had sunk back to the bloodstained earth and closed its eyes.
Grigori thought Prime Minister Kerensky, the leader of the provisional government, was like that stag. Everyone knew he was finished-except him.
As the bitter cold of a Russian winter closed around Petrograd like a fist, the crisis came to a head.
The Committee for Struggle, soon renamed the Military Revolutionary Committee, was dominated by the charismatic figure of Trotsky. He was not handsome, with his big nose, high forehead, and bulging eyes staring through rimless glasses, but he was charming and persuasive. Where Lenin shouted and bullied, Trotsky reasoned and beguiled. Grigori suspected that Trotsky was as tough as Lenin but better at hiding it.
On Monday, November 5, two days before the All-Russia Congress was due to start, Grigori went to a mass meeting, called by the Military Revolutionary Committee, of all the troops in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The meeting started at noon and went on all afternoon, hundreds of soldiers debating politics in the square in front of the fort while their officers fumed impotently. Then Trotsky arrived, to thunderous applause, and after listening to him they voted to obey the committee rather than the government, Trotsky, not Kerensky.
Walking away from the square, Grigori reflected that the government could not possibly tolerate a key army unit declaring its loyalty to someone else. The cannon of the fortress were directly across the river from the Winter Palace, where the provisional government was headquartered. Surely, he thought, Kerensky would now admit defeat and resign.
Next day Trotsky announced precautions against a counterrevolutionary coup by the army. He ordered Red Guards and troops loyal to the soviet to take over the bridges, railway stations, and police stations, plus the post office, the telegraph office, the telephone exchange, and the state bank.
Grigori was at Trotsky’s side, turning the great man’s stream of commands into detailed instructions for specific military units and dispatching the orders around the city by messengers on horseback, on bicycles, and in cars. He thought Trotsky’s “precautions” seemed very similar to a takeover.
To his amazement and delight, there was little resistance.
A spy at the Marinsky Palace reported that Prime Minister Kerensky had asked the preparliament-the body that had so miserably failed in its task of setting up the Constituent Assembly-for a vote of confidence. The preparliament refused. No one took much notice. Kerensky was history, just another inadequate man who had tried and failed to rule Russia. He returned to the Winter Palace, where his impotent government continued to pretend to rule.
Lenin was hiding at the apartment of a comrade, Margarita Fofanova. The Central Committee had ordered him not to move about the city, fearing he would be arrested. Grigori was one of the few people who knew his location. At eight o’clock in the evening Margarita arrived at the Smolny with a note from Lenin ordering the Bolsheviks to launch an armed insurrection immediately. Trotsky said tetchily: “What does he imagine we’re doing?”
But Grigori thought Lenin was right. In spite of everything, the Bolsheviks had not quite seized power. Once the Congress of Soviets assembled it would have all authority-and then, even if the Bolsheviks were in a majority, the result would be yet another coalition government based on compromise.
The congress was scheduled to begin tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock. Only Lenin seemed to understand the urgency of the situation, Grigori thought with a sense of desperation. He was needed here, at the heart of things.
Grigori decided to go and get him.
It was a freezing night, with a north wind that seemed to blow straight through the leather coat Grigori wore over his sergeant’s uniform. The center of the city was shockingly normal: well-dressed middle-class people were coming out of theaters and walking to brightly lit restaurants, while beggars pestered them for change and prostitutes smiled on street corners. Grigori nodded to a comrade who was selling a pamphlet by Lenin called Will the Bolsheviks Be Able to Hold the Power? Grigori did not buy one. He already knew the answer to that question.
Margarita’s flat was on the northern edge of the Vyborg district. Grigori could not drive there for fear of calling attention to Lenin’s hideout. He walked to the Finland Station, then caught a streetcar. The journey was long, and he spent most of it wondering if Lenin would refuse to come.
However, to his great relief Lenin did not need much persuading. “Without you, I don’t believe the other comrades will take the final decisive step,” Grigori said, and that was all it took to convince Lenin to come.
He left a note on the kitchen table, so that Margarita would not imagine he had been arrested. It said: “I have gone where you wanted me not to go. Good-bye, Ilich.” Party members called him Ilich, his middle name.
Grigori checked his pistol while Lenin put on his wig, a worker’s cap, and a shabby overcoat. Then they set out.
