Among the streets
the troops of the insurrection occupy that morning are those around the
Mariinsky Palace, seat of the Council of the Russian Republic or
“Pre-Parliament.” The deputies, assembling at around noon-time, needed some
reassurance. They were disappointed to learn that the phone lines to the Winter
Palace were cut. The president Avksentiev offered what little he could:
Kerensky had gone to the front that morning; he’d be back with troops.
Presently troops
did arrive. The Military Revolutionary Committee sent in detachments of the Marine
Guards and the Litovsky and Keksgolmsky Regiments. Once they’d formed up on the
staircase and in the hall, their commander invited the deputies to leave. They
managed to agree, not without dissent from the right, that this was the thing
to do.
After passing
down the stair case through the cordon of insurrectionary troops, the deputies had
to present their papers before they could leave. The Military Committee wanted
to arrest any officials of the Provisional Government found in attendance. None
were found, but among those let through, to Trotsky’s regret, were “some who
soon became organizers of the civil war.”
Thus the Council
of the Russian Republic. The Bolsheviks had walked
out on the day it first assembled. Now, eighteen days later, they walked
back in, at the head of the insurrection, and made an end of it.
Some of the
deputies, walking along the Nevsky Prospect, noticed that the bourgeoisie were
laughing and joking. They did not expect the Bolsheviks to last three days. I
guess it proves on the one hand that the Red Guards had not roughed them up too
badly. On the other, it shows that the lack of realism certainly didn’t stop at
the doors of the Provisional Government.
Meanwhile Trotsky
convened a special session of the Petrograd Soviet. It was 2:35 p.m., according
to the journalists who reported what he said. Trotsky announced the extinction
of the Provisional Government; “We do not know of a single casualty,” he added.
He predicted the Winter Palace would be taken in minutes; it took a bit longer
than that, as we’ll see. Accused from the right of “anticipating the will of
the Congress of Soviets,” Trotsky answered that the insurrection was a
“colossal fact,” but that it remained (for the Congress, he seems to have meant)
“to develop our victory.”
Then Lenin, for
the first time since July, appeared and spoke. He had not tried to take the
reins from the hands of the Military Committee and the leadership on the scene.
Instead his eyes were fixed straight forward. He reviewed the points in the
Bolshevik program – the soviets, the war, the land, the means of production –
and concluded by saying, “The third Russian revolution must in the end lead to the
victory of socialism.”
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