A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

the Soviet. It often turned out, moreover, that a single platoon of a dozen or so soldiers sent its own representative who was on a par with one from a factory with several thousand workers. There was little real control of voting procedures. The blue of the workers' tunics was lost in the sea of grey uniforms when the first combined session of the Soviet assembled in the Catherine Hall on the evening of the 28th. Of the 3,000 delegates, more than two-thirds were servicemen — and this in a city where workers outnumbered soldiers by three or four to one. The fact that most of the soldiers were peasants may help to account for the chaotic nature of these early sessions, along with the general confusion of events.

* The Inter-District group, or Mezhraionka, was a left-wing faction of the Social Democrats in Petrograd. It favoured the reunification of the Menshevik and Bolshevik wings of the party. Trotsky and Lunacharsky belonged to it until the summer of 1917, when they joined the Bolsheviks.

'A mass meeting! Anyone who wants to gets up and says whatever he likes,' is how one delegate described the first session. There were no formal agendas, minutes or procedures for decision-making in the Soviet. Every decision was arrived at through open debate, with speakers in different parts of the hall all talking at once, and the resolutions passed by general acclamation, much as at a village assembly. Because such a body was incapable of any constructive work it soon took on a purely symbolic role, with the real decisions being made by the Executive and the socialist party caucuses to which most of its members belonged. The workers and soldiers who had made the revolution had in effect lost their political voice to the socialist intelligentsia, which claimed to speak in their name.³⁰

Meanwhile, over in the right wing of the Tauride Palace the Duma members of the Progressive Bloc and the Council of Elders were meeting to decide whether they should obey the Tsar's order of the previous night to prorogue the Duma, or whether they should defy it and place themselves at the head of the revolutionary movement. The radicals and socialists, whose spokesman was Kerensky, urged the latter course. But the more moderate Duma members, and none more than Miliukov, who acted as their 'boss', were clearly terrified by the sight of the crowds. From inside the palace the noise of the 'mobs', as they were inclined to call them, was growing louder and more threatening all the time. For a while these moderates sought to play for time by hiding, as it were, behind the thick volumes of constitutional law. It would be illegal, they pontificated, to usurp the powers of the Tsar by forming a cabinet on their own initiative; but it would be possible to cable the sovereign with a request for his permission to do so. In a strictly legal sense there was some logic to this reasoning: the crowds on the street had no authority to hand over power to the Duma and any government formed on that basis would lack formal legitimacy. But such legal niceties were hardly the point now. This, after all, was a revolution; and all revolutions, by their nature, are illegal. The only real power — the power of violence — now lay in the streets and the refusal of the Duma moderates to recognize this fact was an act of cowardice and shortsightedness. No doubt they were afraid that if they assumed power, the masses in the streets would try to impose on them a socialist programme of reforms and peace. In other words, they were reluctant to place themselves at the head of a revolutionary government, even though a revolution had just taken place. Rodzianko, the Duma President, and, in his own words, 'the fattest man in Russia', still spoke in terms of a 'government of public confidence' (which could mean one appointed by the Tsar) rather than a public or Duma government.

During the afternoon, however, as the Petrograd Soviet began to emerge as a rival contender for power in the left wing of the palace, twelve Duma members from the Progressive Bloc, along with Kerensky and Chkheidze, took

one more cautious step towards the assumption of power. They formed themselves into a 'Temporary Committee of Duma Members for the Restoration of Order in the Capital and the Establishment of Relations with Individuals and Institutions'. The length of its name betrayed the timidity of its intentions. This was a 'private' body of Duma members formed to help 'restore order' in the capital, not a Duma organ for the assumption of power. It was only later that night, when the Soviet plenum was in session and reports came in that the capital was sinking deeper into anarchy, that these reluctant revolutionaries, having failed in one last effort to persuade the Grand Duke Mikhail to become dictator, finally seized the initiative and proclaimed themselves in authority. There was simply no alternative — except Soviet power.³¹

By 28 February, then, two rival centres of power had emerged: in the right wing of the Tauride Palace there was the Temporary Committee of the Duma, which had the closest thing to formal power but no authority in the streets; while in the left wing there was the Soviet, which had the closest thing to power in the streets but no formal authority.

* * * Meanwhile, there were still some battles to be fought. Although the crowd had captured most of the city, there was still a danger that Major-General Khabalov might crush the uprising with the aid of troops from the Front, as the Tsar had ordered on the 27th. 'In conventional military terms', Mstislavsky recalled, 'our situation was quite catastrophic. We had neither artillery, nor machine-guns; neither commanding officers, nor field communications,' and if Khabalov attacked with disciplined troops, 'we had as much chance as a snowball in hell.' Everything depended on the fighting spirit of the mutinous soldiers and their willingness to carry out the orders of the Soviet. Many of the soldiers seemed much less interested in fighting for it than in 'joining the people' and getting drunk. Shklovsky, who was placed in charge of guarding the railway stations, found it almost impossible to convince the troops coming into Petrograd to assume even basic guard duties. The entire guard of the Nikolaevsky Station, where the vital trains from Moscow came in, consisted of a 'one-armed student and an ancient naval officer in what seemed to be the uniform of an ensign'. At the Tauride Palace things were rather better. Catherine the Great's graceful palace was now turned into the military headquarters of Red Petrograd. The Soviet established a Military Commission, which issued orders to ad hoc brigades placed at strategic points in the city. Hundreds of soldiers had encamped in the corridors of the Tauride Palace waiting for the order to defend this bastion of the revolution. Linde, having put aside his volume of Haldane, took up the command of the guard at the gates. Having been elected by his Finland Regiment to represent it in the Soviet, he had an extra reason to defend the palace with gun in hand. Here was the new politician armed. Stocks of food and guns were piled up high

in the rooms and corridors of the palace. In the middle of the Circular Hall there was a sewing machine: nobody knew how it had got there, or what it was supposed to be for. Perhaps someone had been planning for a long war and had thought it might be needed to mend uniforms. Nabokov described the scene inside the palace:

Soldiers, soldiers, and more soldiers, with tired, dull faces; everywhere were signs of an improvised camp, rubbish, straw; the air was thick like some kind of dense fog, there was a smell of soldiers' boots, cloth, sweat; from somewhere we could hear the hysterical voices of orators addressing a meeting in the Catherine Hall — everywhere crowding and bustling confusion.³²

There were still, moreover, some troublesome pockets of resistance in the capital: in the Winter Palace, in the General Staff building, at the Admiralty and in the Astoria Hotel. Some of the bloodiest fighting of the whole revolution took place in the hotel on the 28th. It was packed with senior officers and their families and, when snipers on its roof opened fire on the crowds below, the revolutionary soldiers brought up three machine-guns on armoured cars and began to fire through all the windows. Meanwhile, armed crowds stormed the building, wrecking the plush interior, looting the wine stores and searching the rooms for 'counter-revolutionaries'. Several dozen officers were shot or bayoneted. There was a long pitched battle amidst the broken chandeliers and mirrors of the vestibule, and at the end of it, according to one eye-witness, 'the revolving door was running in a pool of blood'.³³

* * * The main aim of the leaders in the Tauride Palace — both in the left wing and in the right — was to restore order on the streets. There was a real danger of the revolution degenerating into anarchy. Thousands of drunken workers and soldiers were roaming through the city looting stores, breaking into houses, beating up and robbing people in the streets. The revolutionary struggle against the police and the army officers was breaking down into uncontrolled violence and retribution. 'Unless all this is brought to a halt,' warned one deputy in the Soviet, 'the revolution will end in defeat and shame.'