Kerensky hurries off after his speech at the Pre-Parliament,
leaving the delegates to their debates, once again animated, this time seemingly
by the message of the Military Revolutionary Committee to the garrison. The
government soon ordered detachments of junkers to the railroad stations and
principal street crossings. They put the drawbridges over the Neva under guard
and raised them. They redoubled efforts to requisition automobiles.
But the bridges
were of capital importance to the insurrection: they connected the
neighborhoods of the armed workers to the buildings and functions of the
government the insurrection wanted to occupy and control. Trotsky says the
people took their seizure as the opening blow against the insurrection itself.
Red Guards and soldiers from the workers district marched on their own
initiative to the river; the drawbridges came down without bloodshed. Some were
raised and had to be lowered again before the evening was out.
The Military
Revolutionary Committee ordered the cruiser Aurora to occupy the bridge upriver
from its anchorage and lower it. Only after the commander was put under arrest
(and thus given the plea of compulsion), did he and his officers carry these
orders out. The former occupants, junkers, were long gone before the sailors
could debark on the quays and take possession.
Now acts of
defense and insurrection began to happen, some spontaneously, all over.
Government militia seized the evening edition of Rabochy i Soldat and tried to drive off with it. The printers,
reinforced by two sailors who happened by, regained the papers and delivered
them to Smolny. The Military Committee sent two squads of the Preobrazhentsky
Regiment to secure the facility.
An officer and
some junkers, thinking they could find Lenin and arrest him in Vyborg, stumbled
into a workers’ club by mistake. The workers summoned the Red Guard, who
arrested the officer and junkers instead. The Red Guards conducted them to the
Peter and Paul.
The commissar of
the Keksgolmsky Regiment paid a visit to the telephone exchange. He was able to
persuade the workers there to restore phone service to Smolny. Another
commissar, freshly appointed to a post at the telegraph station, found soldiers
of the Keksgolmsky Regiment already there. The telegraphers, none of whom were
Bolsheviks, agreed for the time being to compromise with the insurrection.
Then, at 9:00
p.m., the Military Committee sent another commissar, with an escort of marines,
to the government news agency. They were to censor, but not necessarily
suppress, the dispatches emanating there.
Now the actions
of the Military Committee, particularly with regard to the media of
communications, already rapid and effective in the early 20th
century, seemed to have passed over to the offensive. Trotsky nevertheless says
that, arguably, oversight of the media was just another instance of the dual
power, with the Bolsheviks in the Soviet taking the place of the Compromisers.
Yet even if “the umbilical cord of ‘legality’ was not conclusively severed,” it
would be soon enough.
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