* It had largely been personal rivalry that prevented Trotsky from joining the Bolshevik Party earlier, despite the absence of any real ideological differences between himself and Lenin during 1917. He could not bring himself to surrender to 'Lenin's party' — a party which he had been so critical of in the past. As Lenin once replied when asked what still kept him and Trotsky apart: 'Now don't you know? Ambition, ambition, ambition.' (Balabanoff,
inspiration. During the weeks leading up to the seizure of power he spoke almost every night before a packed house at the Cirque Moderne. With his sharp ringing voice, his piercing logic and brilliant wit, he held his listeners spellbound with his denunciations of the Provisional Government. There was a literary, almost Homeric, quality to his oratory (some of his speeches were recorded). It stemmed from the expressive skill of his phrasing, the richness of his imagery, the powerful rhythm and pathos of his speech, and, perhaps above all, the simple style of narration which he used to involve his listeners in the moral drama from which he then drew his political conclusions. He was always careful to use examples and comparisons from the real life of his audience. This gave his speeches a familiarity and earned Trotsky the popular reputation of being 'one of us'.91 It was this that gave him his extraordinary power to master the crowd, even sometimes when it was extremely hostile. The incident with Chernov during the July Days was a good example, as were the occasions in the civil war, when Trotsky persuaded dangerous bands of deserters from the Red Army to return to the Front against the Whites.
Trotsky brought the Mezhraionka with him into the party. The Mezh-raionka, or Inter-District group, was a faction of SD Internationalists with good contacts in the Petrograd garrison. Its importance stemmed less from the size of its following (which was certainly fewer than 4,000 members) than from the stature of its leaders. It was really no more than a collection of brilliant generals without an army. Yet in them the Bolsheviks were to gain some of their most talented organizers, theoreticians, polemicists and agitators: Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Antonov- Ovseenko, Ryazanov, Uritsky, Manuilsky, Pokrovsky, Yoffe and Volodarsky. Many of them were set to play a prominent part in the seizure of power and the later development of the Soviet regime.
The rising fortunes of the Bolsheviks during the summer and autumn were essentially due to die fact that they were the only major political party which stood uncompromisingly for Soviet power.* This point bears emphasizing, for one of the most basic misconceptions of the Russian Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were swept to power on a tide of mass support for the party itself. The October insurrection was a
* The Mensheviks and SRs only had minority left-wing factions in favour of a Soviet government, of which more on pages 464—5.
autumn and winter. The slogan All Power to the Soviets!' was a useful tool, a banner of popular legitimation covering the nakedness of Lenin's ambition (which was better expressed as All Power to the Party). Later, as the nature of the Bolshevik dictatorship became apparent, the party faced the growing opposition of precisely those groups in society which in 1917 had rallied behind the Soviet slogan.
The popular demand for Soviet power had never expressed itself in a preference for the dictatorship of any particular party. The torrent of resolutions, petitions and declarations from the factories, the army units and the villages in support of a Soviet government after the Kornilov crisis invariably called on all the socialist parties to take part in its establishment, and often displayed a marked impatience with the factional disputes between them. Their political language had basically remained unchanged since 1905: the dominant image within them was that of 'the people', the
What the workers saw in Soviet power, above all, was the chance to control their own factory environment. They wanted to regulate their own shop-floor relations, to set their own wages and working conditions, and combat the 'sabotage', the conspiratorial running-down of production by profit-conscious employers, which many workers blamed for the industrial crisis. In this heightened atmosphere of class war, impatience was growing with the Mensheviks' leadership of the labour movement: their policies of mediating labour disputes and conciliating the employers had failed to stop the rising tide of unemployment. Many workers, especially those under the influence of the Bolsheviks, saw the solution in the sequestration (or nationalization) of their factory by a Workers' State, called 'Soviet Power', which would then set up a management board of workers, technicians and Soviet officials to keep the factory running.* It was part of the growing political consciousness of the workers, the realization that their demands could only be achieved by changing the nature of the state itself.
* This was roughly the import of the Bolshevik Decree on Workers' Control passed on 14 November.
This politicization became manifest in the dramatic upsurge of strikes which crippled the country from September onwards. Because of the general effects of inflation, it was far more widespread than previous strike-waves: unskilled labourers and semi-intelligentsia groups, such as hospital, city and clerical workers, were forced to cast aside their usual reluctance to strike in the struggle to keep up with the rising cost of living. Yet because strikes were ineffective — and even counter-productive — in combating inflation, they were often accompanied by broader political demands for the whole economy to be restructured. Industrial strikes, still the most common, were also much more likely to end up in violence. They were no less than a battle for the control of the workplace and the city economy as a whole. The trade unions and factory committees, which tended to have a moderating influence, soon lost control of these militant strikes. They spilled on to the streets and sometimes even ended in bloody conflicts between the workers — armed, trained and organized by the Red Guards — and the government militias. Employers and managers were assaulted; and where they resorted to lock-outs, the factory buildings were stormed and occupied by the workers. Some strikes spread to involve the residents of whole urban districts in attacks on bakeries and shops, house searches and arrests of the
September also saw a violent upturn in the peasant war against the landed estates. With the approach of the autumn ploughing, the time seemed ripe for a final reckoning with the old agrarian order. The peasants were fed up with waiting for the Provisional Government to deliver on its promises about the land, and most villages now had their own band of soldiers from the army ready to lead them in the march on the manors. The pogrom, or violent sacking of an estate by the mob, became a widespread phenomenon in the central black-soil regions, whereas in previous months the peasant movement had been mainly confined to disputes over rent, the confiscation of cattle and the organized seizure of the arable fields by the village committee. In Tambov province hundreds of manor houses were burned and vandalized — the aim ostensibly being, as the peasants put it, to 'drive the squires out'. This violent wave of destruction seems to have started with the murder of Prince Boris Vyazemsky, the owner of several thousand hectares in the Usman region of Tambov. The local peasants had been demanding since the spring that Vyazemsky lower his rents and return the hundred hectares of prime pasture he had taken from them as a punishment for their part in the revolution of 1905. But on both counts Vyazemsky had refused. On 24 August some 5,000 peasants from the neighbouring villages
occupied the estate. Fortified by vodka from
