As on the evening
before, revolutionary workers and soldiers again stood before the headquarters
of the Petrograd Soviet in the Tauride Palace. This time, their demands having
already been presented, they demanded an answer. The Central Executive Committee of the Soviets had
been in joint session since about 6:00 p.m. Someone brought Chernov, a Social
Revolutionary on the committee and also Minister of Agriculture in the
Provisional Government, outside to speak. At that moment the Kronstadt sailors
arrived. Apparently the sailors did not like the tendency of Chernov’s speech;
they detained him. So informed, the Central Executive sent Bolsheviks and
Trotskyites, including Trotsky himself, to right the situation. Trotsky says he
saw agents of the tsarist secret police by the doorway, trying to get in.
Chernov had been
ordered into an automobile. Trotsky’s first impulse was to ride away with him
in it. But Midshipman Raskolnikov, a leader of the Kronstadters, excitedly told
him that would give the wrong impression. So Trotsky stood on the car and gave
a short speech, asking for a show of hands by those opposed to releasing the
minister. No-one raised his hand; Chernov returned to the palace without
further hindrance.
General Polotsev
was hoping more Cossacks would arrive. Instead the 176th regiment
came up from Krasnoe Selo, rain-soaked and bearing full battle kit. The Soviet
assumed these were “loyal” troops; the Menshevik Dan asked their commander to
post sentries at the entrances to the palace. In fact the 176th had
come to join their militant brethren in the demonstration. Consulted by an
aide, Trotsky advised the regiment to comply with the request, a duty they were
only too happy to perform. Trotsky notes that, if it had been a Bolshevik insurrection, they could easily have arrested
the entire Central Executive then and there.
The Soviet
invited the demonstrators to speak. They chose 90 representatives and five
orators, representing 54 factories. The speakers began by denying the claim in
the Soviet’s manifesto of the previous day that the demonstrations were
counter-revolutionary; the banners they carried were anything but. Tseretilli
answered that the program of peace, nationalization of industry and land, and
power to the soviets lay could not then be carried out, at least not in “the
present circumstances…in the Petrograd atmosphere.” He proposed adjourning the
Soviet and reconvening it in Moscow two weeks hence.
The Putilov
workers were next to impose themselves on the Central Executive. In a mass of
30,000, they demanded that Tseretilli be brought before them. This could easily
have gone wrong; even the Bolsheviks did not want something untoward to happen.
So they sent Zinoviev, the Bolshevik upon whom Lenin relied as an orator,
instead. Zinoviev began, “In place of Tseretilli, it is I who have come out to
you,” and was greeted by laughter. He gave a long speech and ended by appealing
to the demonstrators to depart in peaceful and orderly fashion.
This the
demonstrators prepared to do, but while Zinoviev had been speaking, armed
Putilov workers broke into the palace. One of them took the podium and accused
the Soviet of “making bargains with the bourgeoisie and landlords.” Cheidze,
presiding over the meeting, had a rifle under his nose. But he calmly handed
the worker a printed manifesto and asked him to read it. It said the workers
ought to go home, otherwise they would be traitors to the revolution.
Be that as it
may. The Bolshevik Central Committee circulated a resolution for ending the
demonstration. So the demonstration, for the most part, broke up, and the
streets around the Tauride Palace emptied. But the Central Executive remained
in session.
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