The Penguin History of Modern Russia

increasingly, the city soviets began to acquire Bolshevik-led leaderships. In Kronstadt the soviet was the local government in all but name, and the Volga city of Tsaritsyn declared its independence from the rest of Russia in midsummer. By 31 August the Petrograd Soviet was voting for the Bolshevik party’s resolutions. The Moscow Soviet followed suit a few days later. Through September and October the urban soviets of northern, central and south- eastern Russia went over to the Bolsheviks.

Disguised as a Lutheran Pastor, Lenin hastened back to Petrograd. On 10 October 1917 he cajoled his Central Committee colleagues into ratifying the policy of a rapid seizure of power. The Central Committee met again on 16 October with representatives of other major Bolshevik bodies in attendance.²⁹ Lenin again got his way strategically. In the ensuing days Trotski and other colleagues amended his wishes on schedule, insisting that the projected uprising in Petrograd should be timed to coincide with the opening of the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Thus the uprising would appear not as a coup d’etat by a single party but as a transfer of ‘all power to the soviets’.

Lenin was infuriated by the re-scheduling: he saw no need for the slightest delay. From his hiding-place in the capital’s outskirts, he bombarded his colleagues with arguments that unless a workers’ insurrection took place immediately, a right-wing military dictatorship would be installed. It is doubtful that he believed his own rhetoric; for no army general was as yet in any position to try to overthrow Kerenski and tame the soviets. Almost certainly Lenin guessed that the Kerenski cabinet was on the brink of collapse and that a broad socialist coalition would soon be formed. Such an outcome would not meet Lenin’s approval. Even if he were to be invited to join such an administration, his participation would unavoidably involve him in compromises on basic issues. Lenin did not fancy sharing power with Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries whom he accused of betraying the revolution.³⁰

Since July, Yuli Martov and the left-wing faction of the Menshevik party had been calling for the Kerenski cabinet to be replaced with an all-socialist coalition committed to radical social reform;³¹ and the left-wingers among the Socialist-Revolutionaries broke entirely with their party and formed a separate Party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in October. With these groups Lenin was willing to deal. But not with the rump of the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary Parties: they had supped with the capitalist Devil and deserved to be thrust into outer darkness.

The situation favoured Lenin, and he knew it. For just a few months the workers and soldiers and peasants held Russia’s fate in their hands. The Imperial family was under house arrest. Courtiers, bishops and aristocrats were staying out of the public eye. The generals were still too shocked by the Kornilov fiasco to know what to do. The middle classes were sunk in despair. The shopkeepers and other elements in the urban lower middle class had a thorough dislike for the Provisional Government. Thus the main danger for the Bolsheviks was not ‘bourgeois counter-revolution’ but working-class apathy. Even Lenin’s supporters in the Bolshevik central leadership warned him that the Petrograd workers were far from likely to turn out to participate in an insurrection — and perhaps this was yet another reason for Lenin’s impatience. If not now, when?

Yet it was also a crucial advantage for Lenin that the political and administrative system was in an advanced condition of disintegration. Peasants in most villages across the former Russian Empire governed themselves. The military conscripts intimidated their officers. The workers, even if they were loath to take to the streets, wished to impose their control over the factories and mines. Kerenski had lost authority over all these great social groups.

While central power was breaking down in Petrograd, moreover, it had virtually collapsed in the rest of Russia. And in the non-Russian regions, local self-government was already a reality. The Finnish Sejm and the Ukrainian Rada disdained to obey the Provisional Government. In the Transcaucasus, Georgians and Armenians and Azeris created bodies to challenge the Special Transcaucasian Committee appointed by the cabinet in Petrograd.³² An alternative government existed in the soviets in practically every region, province, city and town of Russia. Soviets were not omnipotent organizations. But they were stronger than any of their institutional rivals. They had formal hierarchies stretching from Petrograd to the localities; they had personnel who wanted a clean break with the old regime of Nicholas II and the new regime of Lvov and Kerenski. They could also see no prospect of improvement in political, social and economic conditions until the Provisional Government was removed.

Kamenev and Zinoviev had been so appalled by Lenin’s demarche that they informed the press of his plan for a seizure of power; they contended that the sole possible result would be a civil war that would damage the interests of the working class. But Trotski, Sverdlov, Stalin and Dzierzynski — in Lenin’s continued absence — steadied the nerve of the Bolshevik central leadership as plans were laid for armed action. Trotski came into his own when co-ordinating the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. This body’s influence over the capital’s garrison soldiers made it a perfect instrument to organize the armed measures for Kerenski’s removal. Garrison troops, Red Guards and Bolshevik party activists were being readied for revolution in Russia, Europe and the world.

4 The October Revolution (1917–1918)

The Provisional Government of Alexander Kerenski was overthrown in Petrograd on 25 October 1917. The Bolsheviks, operating through the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the City Soviet, seized power in a series of decisive actions. The post and telegraph offices and the railway stations were taken and the army garrisons were put under rebel control. By the end of the day the Winter Palace had fallen to the insurgents. On Lenin’s proposal, the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies ratified the transfer of authority to the soviets. A government led by him was quickly formed. He called for an immediate end to the Great War and for working people across Europe to establish their own socialist administrations. Fundamental reforms were promulgated in Russia. Land was to be transferred to the peasants; workers’ control was to be imposed in the factories; the right of national self-determination, including secession, was to be accorded to the non-Russian peoples. Opponents of the seizure of power were threatened with ruthless retaliation.

Bolsheviks pinpointed capitalism as the cause of the Great War and predicted further global struggles until such time as the capitalist order was brought to an end. According to this prognosis, capitalism predestined workers in general to political and economic misery also in peacetime.

Such thoughts did not originate with Bolshevism; on the contrary, they had been shared by fellow socialist parties in the Russian Empire, including the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and in the rest of Europe. The Socialist International had repeatedly expressed this consensus at its Congresses before 1914. Each of its parties thought it was time for the old world to be swept away and for socialism to be inaugurated. The awesome consequences of the Great War confirmed them in their belief. Other ideas, too, were held by Bolsheviks which were socialist commonplaces. For example, most of the world’s socialists subscribed strongly to the notion that central economic planning was crucial to the creation of a fairer society. They contended that social utility rather than private profit ought to guide decisions in public affairs. Not only far-left socialists but also the German Social- Democratic Party and the British Labour Party took such a standpoint.

It was the specific proposals of the Bolshevik party for the new world order that caused revulsion among fellow socialists. Lenin advocated dictatorship, class-based discrimination and ideological imposition. The definition of socialism had always been disputed among socialists, but nearly all of them took it as axiomatic that socialism would involve universal-suffrage democracy. Lenin’s ideas were therefore at variance with basic aspects of conventional socialist thought.

The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries drew attention to this, but their words were not always understood by socialists in the rest of Europe who did not yet have much information about Bolshevik attitudes. There persisted a hope in Western socialist parties that the divisions between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks might yet be overcome and that they might reunite to form a single party again. And so the mixture of contrast and similarity between Bolshevism and other variants of socialist thought baffled a large number of contemporary observers, and the confusion was made worse by the terminology. The Bolsheviks said they wanted to introduce socialism to Russia and to assist in the making of a ‘European socialist revolution’; but they also wanted to create