November 7 – October 25, 1917: The March of the City Duma

One of the last outbound telephone calls from the Winter Palace’s regular lines that evening goes to the city duma in their headquarters on the Nevsky Prospect. It sparked a considerable discussion, not so much about what to do, but about what unkind fate had in store for the Bolsheviks. Minister of Supplies Prokopovich, briefly detained by the Bolsheviks that morning on the way to the cabinet meeting at the Winter Palace, expressed the desire to join his colleagues in their fate. The duma, dominated by the bourgeois parties, was sympathetic.

Now gunfire could be heard from the direction of the palace. Something must be done! In Trotsky’s words, “The duma must march in a body to the Winter Palace in order to die there, if necessary, with the government.” It was, at any rate, a plan. But it had to be ratified. More discussion. The delegates from the Compromiser parties were ready to march; the Cadets would join them. The advice of the Bolshevik delegates – to stay off the streets and suggest to the government that they ought, in order to avoid bloodshed, to surrender – was ignored.

The duma took a roll-call vote: sixty-two of the delegates were prepared to die “if necessary.” Then the duma got word that the Executive Committee of the Deputies of the Peasants Soviets wanted to march with them. Another round of speeches was now required.

The palace defenders heard of the march: to them “a miracle,” Trotsky suggests. By the time it passed from mouth to mouth, the rumor sounded like a miracle indeed: “The people with the clergy at their head,” where “people” again means “bourgeoisie.”

The streets around the Nevsky Prospect were dark and pretty quiet when the marchers, bearing lanterns and umbrellas, got underway. The fourteen Bolshevik delegates went off to Smolny and the Congress of Soviets, leaving three Menshevik-Internationalists quite alone in the halls of the duma. The American journalist Reed saw the minister Prokopovich, the mayor of Petrograd, and Avksentiev, lately the President of the Pre-Parliament, in the procession, but no clergy.

No people either, of any social condition. The whole crowd numbered no more than 400 marchers, mainly all politicians. They sang the Marseillaise to keep up their morale. Where the Nevsky Prospect crosses over the Ekaterininsky Canal, the march encountered an ensign’s guard of marines. Reed recounts the conversation. The marines did not propose to allow anyone to interfere with the insurrection’s business at the Winter Palace. The marchers could see that the marines would halt their march by force. Prokopovich made a new proposal, “’Let us return to the duma and talk over methods of saving the country and the revolution.’”

And this proposal was very sensibly adopted. On the return they did not feel much like singing the Marseillaise.