October 23 – October 10, 1917: The Vote for Insurrection

At the apartment of the Menshevik Sukhanov, his wife, a Bolshevik, receives a quorum of her party’s Central Committee. Twelve of the twenty-one members attended, including Lenin, disguised with a wig and spectacles, and shorn of his characteristic beard. The meeting lasted ten hours; Sukhanov’s wife served her guests bread, sausage, and tea “for reinforcement,” Trotsky says.

Sukhanov’s wife had encouraged him not to tire himself by the trip home from Smolny that evening. But one wonders if he missed the sausages or the household funds required to procure them.

Sverdlov opened the meeting in the usual way with a report on organization. He focused, apparently by previous arrangement with Lenin, on suspicious activities at the front, including an effort to surround the revolutionary garrison at Minsk with Cossack cavalry, and communication between the headquarters of the Minsk garrison and the general staff.

With that Lenin began to marshal his arguments. He spoke earnestly and extemporaneously; it was time to put an end to the waverings on the committee. The question came to a vote sooner than Lenin might have expected: ten to two in favor of insurrection. For the balance of the ten-hour meeting, one after another, the members favoring insurrection tried unsuccessfully to persuade the dissenters, Kamenev and Zinoviev, to change their minds.  

The resolution itself summarizes, somewhat elliptically, the arguments Lenin used and the committee accepted. Lenin wrote it out, Trotsky says, with the “gnawed end of a pencil” on a child’s notebook paper. The reasons given for immediate action begin, in Lenin’s preferred order of precedence, with the international situation:

·         Perceived progress in the “world-wide socialist revolution” combined with imperialist threats to its leading edge, the Russian Revolution

·         Kerensky’s machinations to abandon the military stronghold of the revolution, Petrograd, to the Germans

·         The scale and intensity of the peasant revolt

·         Bolshevik majorities in elections to the soviets, etc.

·         Counter-revolutionary preparations, including renewed efforts to break up the Petrograd garrison

Lenin might have added another argument he’d used before, that the people might lose confidence in the Bolsheviks just as they had in the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and sink back into indifference and despair. At any rate, the resolution says, “…all this places the armed insurrection on the order of the day.” Note that the resolution did not set a specific date for the insurrection. Trotsky recalled that Lenin wanted Kerensky to be deposed before the Congress of Soviets was to assemble, and so October 15^th (October 28, new style) was discussed and tentatively set.

The resolution concludes by putting the onus of action on the party, specifically for organizing the Northern Regional Conference of Soviets and for resisting the break-up of the Petrograd garrison.

Reed recounts a different story about how the vote was taken, one that has verisimilitude but not verity. He says the vote was taken twice, at first going against insurrection. Then a “rough workman” arose and warned the committee not to allow the destruction of the soviets. If they did, “we’re through with you!” Then another vote favorable to insurrection supposedly took place. Of course the public were not invited to this secret session of the Central Committee. But the rumor Reed picked up epitomizes the ripeness of the crisis, and the risk that the people were growing, again in the words of the committee, “tired of words and resolutions.”

The seven-member political bureau selected by the committee at this meeting, because it included Zinoviev and Kamenev and because they immediately tried to stir up opposition to the resolution, was still-born – it never met.

The Bolsheviks also took a decision to publish a paper, Beydnoth, addressed to the peasantry. Though the Social Revolutionaries were the strongest vote getters in rural areas, Lenin saw an opportunity to bring the peasants over to the party once the workers’ insurrection caught up with the peasant revolt.

Besides this, Trotsky gave a speech to a conference of Petrograd factory committees that day, calling for the workers to “break through [the] wall” between them and the peasants. On Trotsky’s motion, the conference created the “Worker to Peasant” program, under which workers would fabricate farm implements from the waste and scrap metal of the factories and distribute them in the provinces. But this was not the real solution to the peasants’ problem; the effort was primarily a form of agitation. The problem could only be addressed directly when the workers controlled the means of production.

Meanwhile, now that the harvest was passing, the peasant revolt was growing.