Isolated,
individual actions with no particular political agenda take place through the
night. Some of the well-to-do were leaving town. Scattered gunfire could be
heard. Militants searched houses and roofs for the weapons fired at them during
the day, and the shooters. Looting took place. Merchants in a bourgeois
neighborhood beat up workers, soldiers, sailors that happened to pass by on the
way home or to the barracks.
The Central Executive Committee of the Soviets was still in session; the delegates of the workers were still with them in the Tauride Palace, waiting for an answer to their demands. At about 4:00 a.m., the Menshevik Dan rose to make an announcement: troops loyal to the Soviet had arrived! Now the right-socialists felt like singing the Marseillaise. But Martov, also a Menshevik but not a Compromiser, observed, ”A classic picture of the beginning of a counter-revolution.”
At first the Compromisers seem to have thought the troops had come from the front. They had been telephoning War Minister Kerensky, who was there, since the marchers first assembled two days before.
But agents of the Provisional Government (thought to be from the Department of Justice or the Intelligence Service) were playing another angle. They’d sent agitators to the neutral regiments of the garrison, which had not joined the demonstration, with “proof” that Lenin was a German spy. The slander worked; at dawn, after an exchange of messages, it was these regiments that marched to the palace to defend the Soviet from the Bolsheviks.
The Central Executive Committee of the Soviets was still in session; the delegates of the workers were still with them in the Tauride Palace, waiting for an answer to their demands. At about 4:00 a.m., the Menshevik Dan rose to make an announcement: troops loyal to the Soviet had arrived! Now the right-socialists felt like singing the Marseillaise. But Martov, also a Menshevik but not a Compromiser, observed, ”A classic picture of the beginning of a counter-revolution.”
At first the Compromisers seem to have thought the troops had come from the front. They had been telephoning War Minister Kerensky, who was there, since the marchers first assembled two days before.
But agents of the Provisional Government (thought to be from the Department of Justice or the Intelligence Service) were playing another angle. They’d sent agitators to the neutral regiments of the garrison, which had not joined the demonstration, with “proof” that Lenin was a German spy. The slander worked; at dawn, after an exchange of messages, it was these regiments that marched to the palace to defend the Soviet from the Bolsheviks.
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