Early Morning November 8 – October 26, 1917: Victory for the Congress

During the recess that started at 2:00 a.m., delegates to the Congress of Soviets trade rumors about the fall of the Winter Palace and the capture of the cabinet of the Provisional Government; when it reconvenes, Kamenev, to bitter cheers, reads Antonov’s list of arrested ministers. The name of Foreign Minister Tereshchenko, a better friend to the capital markets of the Entente than to the soldiers at the front, was received with pronounced hostility.

A left-Social Revolutionary spoke up on behalf of the imprisoned socialist ministers. Another deputy said it would be ironic if the Minister of Agriculture should “’turn up in the same cell’” he had occupied under the tsar. This cut no ice with Trotsky, who had already been held in Kresty prison both under the tsar and under the government of the minister in question. The socialist ministers would be held under house arrest, Trotsky answered, due to “’considerations of expediency’” until the revolution’s grip on its new government was secure.

Next a representative of the Third Bicycle Battalion appeared before the Congress to announce that his unit, chosen out of all the troops at the front to ride against the revolution, had met with the Fifth Bicycle Battalion on the way, and together with them decided not to do it: “’[W]e will not give the power to a government at the head of which stand the bourgeoisie and the landlords!’” Trotsky says this speaker was “greeted with a storm, a whirlwind, a cyclone.” The bicyclist gave evidence that the front, which might have replaced the deposed Provisional Government as the greatest of the threats the revolution faced, would not become its enemy.

Then a Menshevik spoke up. The Congress thought they had left. Now the threat of troops from the front inspired no doubts or fears. So they left again, seemingly for good.

At 5:17 a.m. Krylenko came in to read a message received by the Military Revolutionary Committee: The 12^th Army, holding the Northern Front nearest Petrograd in Estonia, had, with its commanding General Cheremissov, placed itself at the disposal of the committee. The commissar appointed by the Provisional Government had resigned. “Pandemonium,” says the American journalist Reed.

The rivals of the Bolshevik program having taken themselves out of the picture, Lunacharsky now came forward to read a proclamation and move that it be adopted and published by the Congress. By it, the Congress took the power of the state into its own hands, gave all local power to the soviets, and adopted all the other essentials of the Bolshevik program. The proclamation anticipated the decrees on peace and land that would come the next day.

Peasant delegates, admitted to the Congress but not given votes, now, because it promised the redistribution of lands, wanted to subscribe to the proclamation. So they were given votes. The proclamation frightened those few remaining delegates who thought the Bolsheviks were headed to disaster. A last group of Mensheviks withdrew – some of them apparently for the third time. Only fourteen votes out of hundreds were cast against the resolution.

The Congress adjourned at about 6:00 a.m.