talking had ended. In ‘Marxism and Insurrection’ he called for ‘the immediate transfer of power to the
Bolshevik party policy on the central question of governmental power was in flux. Radical opinion was strengthened by Trotski’s return to open activity. Throughout the country, moreover, there were many socialist leaders and activists who sought the Provisional Government’s removal. More and more city soviets, trade unions and factory-workshop committees were acquiring Bolshevik majorities in late September and early October. Sooner or later the question had to be answered: were the Bolsheviks going to seize power? If so, when would they do it? And if they did it, would they act alone or in some kind of socialist alliance? Stalin, though, had made his choice. He no longer saw the point of compromise of any kind with the Mensheviks. (Trotski had made the same transition.) His future lay with the Bolsheviks and with them alone. His position in the Bolshevik Central Committee was firmly held but he had next to no political authority outside its framework. He was one of the most influential yet one of the most obscure of Bolsheviks. If he had died in September 1917, no one — surely — would have written his biography.
13. OCTOBER
Petrograd in October 1917 was more placid than at any time since the fall of the Romanovs. The schools and offices functioned without interruption. Shops opened normally. The post and tram systems operated smoothly. The weather was getting brisk; people were wrapping up well before going outdoors but as yet there was no snow. Calm prevailed in the Russian capital and heady mass meetings were a thing of the past. Leading Bolsheviks who plotted insurrection had reason to worry. What if Lenin was wrong and the popular mood had turned away from supporting a revolutionary change of regime?
Yet the subterranean strata of politics were shifting. Lenin, holed up in Helsinki since mid-July, was frustrated by the Bolshevik Central Committee’s refusal to organise an uprising against the Provisional Government. Instinct told him the time for action had arrived, and he decided to take a chance and return secretly to Petrograd. Bolshevik leaders who met him secretly in the capital had to weather the anger of his demands for an insurrection. He was softening them up for a confrontation at the Central Committee on 10 October. Twelve members attended. Everyone knew there would be trouble. The minutes of the meeting were skimpily recorded — and this means that no trace survives of Stalin’s contribution. At any rate the crucial statements appear to have been made by Sverdlov and Lenin. Sverdlov as Central Committee Secretary was keeper of information on the party’s organisational condition and political appeal across the country. Convinced by Lenin’s arguments in favour of an uprising, he put a positive gloss on his report by stressing the rise in party membership. This gave Lenin his chance: ‘The majority of the population is now behind us. Politically the situation is entirely mature for a transfer of power.’1
Two Bolshevik Central Committee members opposed Lenin. One was Kamenev, who had never been a radical among Bolsheviks either in 1917 or earlier in the war. The other, surprisingly, was Zinoviev, who had been Lenin’s adjutant in the emigration before the February Revolution.2 Kamenev and Zinoviev together carried the dispute to Lenin. They dismissed his extreme optimism and pointed out that many urban soviets had yet to be won by the Bolsheviks. They stressed that the party’s electoral following was all but confined to the towns. They cast doubt on the assumption that the rest of Europe was on the brink of revolution. They feared the outbreak of civil war in Russia.3
Yet the vote went in favour of Lenin by ten votes to two. Stalin was among his supporters; he had left his association with Kamenev entirely behind him. He was convinced that the time had come to seize power. His mood can be gauged by the article he published in
The revolution is alive. Having broken up the Kornilov ‘mutiny’ and shaken up the front, it has flown over the towns and enlivened the factory districts — and now it is spreading into the countryside, brushing aside the hateful props of landlord power.
This was not an explicit call for insurrection. Stalin did not want to present Kerenski with a motive to close down the Bolshevik press again; but he warned that Kornilov’s action had been the first attempt at counter- revolution and that more would follow. Collaborationism, by which he meant the assistance given to the Provisional Government by Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, had been found politically bankrupt. The Kadets had been shown to be ‘a nest of and a spreader of counter-revolution’. Soviets and army committees should prepare themselves to repel ‘a second conspiracy of the
The Central Committee met again on 16 October. Representatives of Bolshevik party bodies in Petrograd and the provinces were invited to attend. Lenin again made the case for insurrection. He claimed that the moment was ripe even though there were reports that workers were unenthusiastic about a seizure of power. Lenin argued that ‘the mood of the masses’ was always changeable and that the party should be guided by evidence that ‘the entire European proletariat’ was on its side. He added that the Russian working class had come over to the Bolsheviks since the Kornilov Affair. Ranged against him were Central Committee members inspired by Kamenev and Zinoviev. Lenin’s critics denied that the Bolsheviks were strong enough to move against the Provisional Government and that a revolutionary situation existed elsewhere in Europe. Even Petrograd was an insecure citadel for Bolshevism. Zinoviev maintained: ‘We don’t have the right to take the risk and gamble everything at once.’6
Stalin supported Lenin:7
It could be said that it’s necessary to wait for a [counter-revolutionary] attack, but there must be understanding about what an attack is: the raising of bread prices, the sending of Cossacks into the Donets district and suchlike all constitute an attack. Until when are we to wait if no military attack occurs? What is proposed by Kamenev and Zinoviev objectively leads to the opportunity for the counter-revolution to get organised; we’ll go on to an endless retreat and lose the entire revolution.
He called upon the Central Committee to have ‘more faith’: ‘There are two lines here: one line holds a course for the victory of revolution and relies on Europe, the other doesn’t believe in revolution and counts merely upon staying as an opposition.’8 Sverdlov and other Central Committee members also came to Lenin’s aid; and although Trotski was absent because of his duties in the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, Lenin won the debate after midnight. The voting again went ten to two in his favour.
Lenin went back into hiding and sent furious letters to comrades in the Smolny Institute. This was the former girls’ secondary school in the centre of the capital where the Petrograd Soviet and the central bodies of the various parties — including the Bolsheviks — were based. Lenin was keeping up the pressure for armed action. Kerenski was considering his options and came to the conclusion that drastic action was required before the Bolsheviks moved against him. Tension rose on 18 October when Kamenev breached party discipline by stating the case against insurrection in the radical left-wing newspaper
