'Do it, A.F., I beseech thee', and again Babushka bowed to the ground. Kerensky could stand it no longer. He sprang to his feet and seized the telephone. 'I must learn first where the Conference meets and consult Avksentiev', and rang up the Ministry of the Interior. But Avksentiev was not in his office and the matter had to be adjourned for the time. I fancy to Kerensky's great relief.86
The conference went ahead without arrests — and three months later the Bolsheviks came to power.
One of the many remarkable facts about the Bolshevik seizure of
power was that it had been expected for so long without anyone taking the measures needed to prevent it: such was the paralysis of the Provisional Government. During the evening of 25 October, as the ministers of the Provisional Government sat in the Winter Palace waiting for the end, many of them were tempted to curse Kerensky for having failed to destroy the Bolshevik Party after the July Days. The legal suppressions against them had certainly failed to reverse their growing influence. But the truth was that the government had neither the means nor the authority to make repressions work against a movement that was starting to grow deep roots in the mass-based organizations.
The social polarization of the summer gave the Bolsheviks their first real mass following as a party which based its main appeal on the plebeian rejection of all superordinate authority. The Kornilov crisis was the critical turning point, for it seemed to confirm their message that neither peace nor radical social change could be obtained through the politics of compromise with the bourgeoisie. The larger factories in the major cities, where the workers' sense of class solidarity was most developed, were the first to go over in large numbers to the Bolsheviks. By the end of May, the party had already gained control of the Central Bureau of the Factory Committees and, although the Menshevik trade unionists remained in the ascendancy until 1918, it also began to get its resolutions passed at important trade union assemblies. Bolshevik activists in the factories tended to be younger, more working class and much more militant than their Menshevik or SR rivals. This made them attractive to those groups of workers — both among the skilled and the unskilled — who were becoming increasingly prepared to engage in violent strikes, not just for better pay and working conditions but also for the control of the factory environment itself. As their network of party cells at the factory level grew, the Bolsheviks began to build up their membership among the working class, and as a result their finances grew through the new members' contributions. By the Sixth Party Conference at the end of July there were probably 200,000 Bolshevik members, rising to perhaps 350,000 on the eve of October, and the vast majority of these were blue-collar workers.87
The Bolsheviks made dramatic gains in the city Duma elections of August and September. In Petrograd they increased their share of the popular vote from 20 per cent in May to 33 per cent on 20 August. In Moscow, where the Bolsheviks had polled a mere II per cent in June, they swept to victory on 24 September with 51 per cent of the vote, while the SR vote collapsed from 56 per cent to 14 per cent, and the Mensheviks from 12 per cent to 4 per cent. The Kadets, on the other hand, as the only party representing the interests of the bourgeoisie, increased their share of the vote from 17 per cent to 31 per cent. These elections highlighted the political polarization of the country at large — Dan called them the 'civil war returns' — as voters swung to the two
extremes parties with an overt class appeal. The apathy of the uncommitted — particularly those such as petty clerks, traders and shop assistants, who had no obvious class allegiance or party to vote for — had much to do with the Bolshevik success. Six months of fruitless politics and incessant cabinet crises had not encouraged them to place much faith in the ballot box. The democratic parties ran low-key campaigns and huge numbers of voters stayed away from the polling stations. In the Petrograd elections the turn-out was down by a third since May, while in the Moscow elections it was down by nearly half.88 This of course played into the hands of the Bolsheviks, who were far more hungry — and much better organized — to win power than any other party. How many Communist take-overs have been based on the apathy of the voters in a democracy?
A similar swing to the Bolsheviks took place in the Soviets. Here too grass-roots apathy deprived the Mensheviks and the SRs of their early ascendancy. They had only themselves to blame. To begin with, the Soviets had been open and democratic organs, where important decisions were made by the elected assembly. This made their proceedings somewhat chaotic, but it also gave them a sense of excitement and popular creativity. As the Soviet leaders became involved in the responsibilities of government they began to organize the work of the Soviets along bureaucratic lines, and this alienated the mass of the workers from them. The assemblies began to decline in frequency and attendance as the initiative switched to the executives and their quasi-governmental commissions, whose members were increasingly nominated by the party caucuses. From popular organs of direct self-rule, the Soviets were thus already beginning to be transformed into complex bureaucratic structures, although this process is more commonly associated with the period after 1917. At the time, it seemed a natural development: the workers themselves were deemed to lack the political experience required to take on the responsibilities of government, while the Soviet parties, because of their old camaraderie within the revolutionary movement, were automatically assumed to be exempt from the factional abuse of power which such centralization made possible. This of course was naive — and merely played into the hands of the Bolsheviks, the undisputed masters of factional politics, who increasingly employed such tactics to secure control of the Soviet executives. In dozens of provincial Soviets the Bolsheviks managed to gain a majority on the executive, although they were only a minority in the assembly. This was especially common where a Bolshevik-controlled workers' section was merged with a section of soldiers or peasants and, because of its 'leading role' in the revolutionary movement, given more seats on the executive: in the Samara provincial Soviet, for example, the Bolsheviks made up 75 per cent of the executive but only 26 per cent of the assembly.89
But the Bolsheviks' growing domination of the Soviets was not solely
due to their factional scheming: they worked not just from above but also from below. The Soviets' bureaucratization had set them apart from the lives of the ordinary workers, who began to reduce their involvement in the Soviets and either lost all interest in politics or else looked instead to their own
As early as August, the Bolsheviks had won control of the Soviets in Ivanovo-Voznesentsk (the 'Russian Manchester'), Kronstadt, Ekaterinburg, Samara and Tsaritsyn. But after the Kornilov crisis many other Soviets followed suit: Riga, Saratov and Moscow itself. Even the Petrograd Soviet fell to the Bolsheviks. On 31 August it passed a Bolshevik motion condemning the coalition politics of the Soviet leaders and calling for the establishment of a Soviet government. Half the delegates eligible to vote had not been present at this historic meeting, though some of the Menshevik and SR delegates had voted against their party leaders. The leaders threatened to resign if the vote was not reversed at a second meeting on 9 September. But once again the Bolshevik motion was carried. Trotsky, appearing for the first time after his release from prison, dealt the decisive rhetorical blow by forcing the Soviet leaders to admit that Kerensky, by this stage widely regarded as a 'counter-revolutionary', was still a member of their executive. On 25 September the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet was completely revamped, with the Bolsheviks occupying four of the seven seats on its executive and Trotsky replacing Chkheidze as its Chairman. This was the beginning of the end. In the words of Sukhanov, the Petrograd Soviet was now Trotsky's guard, ready at a sign from him to storm the coalition'.90
The Bolshevik cause had been greatly strengthened by Trotsky's entry into the party. No one else in the leadership came anywhere near him as a public speaker, and for much of the revolutionary period it was this that made Trotsky, perhaps even more so than Lenin, the best-known Bolshevik leader in the country at large.* Whereas Lenin remained the master strategist of the party, working mainly behind the scenes, Trotsky became its principal source of public
