not even locked. “The attack,” admits Antonov-Ovseenko, “had a completely disorganized character.” At about 2 a.m., they entered and started to work their way through the rooms.
In the Smolny’s chandeliered hall, pervaded by a “foul blue cloud of smoke” and the “stifling heat of unwashed human bodies,” the opening of the Congress, comprised (in Sukhanov’s words) of “primitive… dark provincial” Bolsheviks, could not be delayed any longer. But the Kerensky ministry still reigned in the palace, so Lenin could not yet appear. Instead Trotsky took the stage for the Bolsheviks. When Martov and the Mensheviks attacked Lenin’s “insane and criminal action,” Trotsky, “his thin pointed face positively mephistophelean in its malicious irony,” replied with one of history’s most crushing dismissals: “You are pathetic bankrupts! Go where you belong. Into the dustbin of history!”
“Then we’ll leave,” retorted Martov. The Mensheviks foolishly walked out of the hall—and into history: they never returned to the portals of power. Sagirashvili, a Menshevik who “didn’t agree with the boycott,” despondently roamed the Smolny corridors until “Stalin put his hand over my shoulder in the most friendly manner and started to talk to me in Georgian,” trying to recruit him to the Bolsheviks. Sagirashvili refused, but various ex-Mensheviks like Vyshinsky were to become some of Stalin’s most loyal retainers.[179]
On the boulevards and bridges near the palace, the thunder of the big guns finally dispersed the promenading thrill-seekers. “Even the prostitutes,” Sagirashvili noted, “disappeared from Nevsky Prospect where they once flocked like birds.”
Kerensky’s ministers, at their baize table in the gold and malachite room with crimson brocade hangings where Nicholas II and his family had dined before 1905, still debated whom to appoint as “Dictator.” Suddenly they gave up the charade and decided to surrender.
Just then the door opened.
43. Power: Stalin Out of the Shadows
A little man flew into the room, like a chip washed up by a wave under the pressure of the crowd that poured in behind him… He had long rust-coloured hair and glasses, a short trimmed reddish moustache and a small beard,” reported Maliantovich, Justice Minister. “His collar, shirt, cuffs and hands were those of a very dirty man.”
“The Provisional Government is here,” said Deputy Premier Konovalov. “What is your pleasure?”
“In the name of the Military-Revolutionary Committee,” replied Antonov-Ovseenko, “I declare all of you… under arrest.”
It was about 1:50 a.m. on 26 October. The new masters of the Winter Palace started to pillage, “pulling out carpets, curtains, linen, porcelain, plates.” One soldier stuck some ostrich feathers in his cap, while the old palace retainers, still in their blue, red and gold uniforms, tried to restrain the looters. There was no storming of the Winter Palace: more people were hurt filming the storming scene in Eisenstein’s movie. “The Neva,” Sagirashvili observed, “washed away Kerensky’s government.”
As the ministers were carted off to the Peter and Paul Fortress, Antonov-Ovseenko lost all control inside the palace, and some of the girls of the Women’s Shock Battalion were raped. “The matter of the wine-cellars became especially critical,” he recounts. Nicholas II’s cellars boasted Tokay from the age of Catherine the Great and stocks of Chateau d’Yquem 1847, the Emperor’s favourite, but:
the Preobrazhensky Regiment… got totally drunk. The Pavlovsky, our revolutionary buttress, also couldn’t resist. We sent guards from other picked units—all got utterly drunk. We posted guards from the Regimental Committees—they succumbed as well. We despatched armoured cars to drive away the crowd, but after a while they also began to weave suspiciously. When evening came, a violent bacchanalia overflowed.
Exasperated, Antonov-Ovseenko called the Petrograd Fire Brigade. “We tried flooding the cellars with water—but the firemen… got drunk instead.” The Commissars started smashing the bottles in Palace Square, but “the crowd drank from the gutters. The drunken ecstasy infected the entire city.”
Finally Lenin’s Council of People’s Commissars appointed a special Commissar of the Winter Palace with the highest authority, but, Antonov-Ovseenko notes drily, “This person also turned out not to be very reliable.”
At the Congress of Soviets, it was Kamenev, who, in spite of himself, announced that the Winter Palace had finally fallen. It was only then that Lenin removed his wig, washed off his makeup and emerged as the leader of Russia.{250}
Meanwhile Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva, keen to see the opening of the Congress, had walked to the Smolny and slipped into the great hall itself: “Judging by the excitement and cheers, we guessed something important had happened and there suddenly, in the crowd streaming towards us, we saw Stalin,” who beckoned them over.
“Oh it’s you! Delighted you’re here. Have you heard the news? The Winter Palace has fallen and our men are inside!”
The Bolsheviks almost collapsed with exhaustion. “At the time of the October [uprising],” explains Fyodor Alliluyev, Anna’s and Nadya’s eldest brother and Soso’s new assistant, “Comrade Stalin didn’t sleep for five days.” Sometimes they ate, sometimes they grabbed a catnap on the floor.
“The city was quiet, probably never so quiet in its history,” wrote John Reed. As the news arrived at Smolny that the city was finally in Bolshevik hands, Lenin began to relax, cracking jokes (at Kamenev’s expense) and reclining on newspapers on the floor. “The corridors were still full of hurrying men, hollow-eyed and dirty,” but in committee-rooms “people lay sleeping on the floor, guns beside them.”
The Bolshevik high command slept where they sat or bedded down on the floors of their Smolny offices. “Crushed by tiredness,” Stalin stayed awake drafting the Appeal to the People, until “he finally fell asleep while sitting in a chair behind his table,” says Fyodor Alliluyev. “The enraptured Lunarcharsky [People’s Commissar of Culture] tiptoed up to him as he slept and planted a kiss on his forehead. Comrade Stalin woke up and jovially laughed at A. V. Lunarcharsky for a long time.”
Lenin and Trotsky bedded down beside one another on a pile of newspapers. “You know,” sighed Lenin to Trotsky, “it makes one’s head spin to pass so quickly from persecutions and living-in-hiding to power!”{251}
At 6 a.m. on 26 October, as “a faint unearthly pallor [was] stealing over the silent streets, dimming the watchfires, the shadow of a terrible dawn grey-rising over Russia,” the “day broke on a city in the wildest excitement and confusion.” The streets quickly returned to normal. “The bourgeoisie,” notes Shlyapnikov, “from Guards officers to prostitutes,” reemerged onto the streets. As the Congress was supposed to meet at 1 p.m., the delegates started gathering first thing, but by 7 p.m. Lenin had still not appeared.
Finally, at 8:40 p.m., he arrived to uproarious applause—“this short stocky figure with a big head set down in his shoulders, bald and bulging, little eyes, a snubbish nose, a wide generous mouth, a strange popular leader,” reported Reed, “a leader purely by virtue of intellect, colourless—humourless, uncompromising and detached.”
“We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order!” declared Lenin simply. He spoke with one foot characteristically off the floor. “I noticed a hole in his shoe,” reports Molotov.
At 2:30 a.m., Kamenev[180] read out the new government on the stage of the Congress of Soviets. Soso appeared on the list as “J. V. Djugashvili-Stalin.” He was still not well known to the public nor admired by the Bolsheviks who had been in emigration. His obscurity in 1917 would always remain an embarrassing bruise on a very thin-skinned man, and he tried to correct it by a mendacious cult of personality. But in fact Lenin and an array of high Bolsheviks had long appreciated his ruthless competence.
“In those days,” says Fyodor Alliluyev, with such candour that his memoirs were never published, “Comrade Stalin was genuinely known only to the small circle of people who had come across him… in the political underground or had succeeded… in distinguishing real work and real devotion from chatter, noise [and] meaningless babble.”
The entire Soviet government now worked round the clock, in one room, at one table. “After the victory Stalin moved into the Smolny,” recalls Fyodor Alliluyev. “For the first three days, we didn’t leave,” says Molotov. “There was me, Zinoviev and Trotsky, then opposite were Stalin and Kamenev. We tried by fits and starts to picture the new life.” When Kamenev and Trotsky decided they wanted to abolish capital punishment in the army, recalled Stalin later, Lenin overheard them. “What nonsense!” he barked. “How can you have a revolution without shooting
