October 31 – October 18, 1917: Kamenev’s Trick

The Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet is again in session; with rumors flying about insurrection, the Bolsheviks have to give some sort of account of themselves. Trotsky spoke, admitting in the first place that he had signed an order for rifles that went to the Red Guard.

In the second place, he forged a link between the removal of the Petrograd garrison and the convocation of the Congress of Soviets. The Petrograd Soviet, he argued, would ask the Congress to seize the power; in the meantime, the Soviet would resist attempts, originating with the bourgeoisie, to break up the garrison – or for that matter the Congress. With the Garrison Conference and its countersign policy in place, the Soviet’s resistance had teeth.

Someone asked whether the Soviet had set a date for the insurrection. Trotsky replied that it had not, but that “if it became necessary to set one, the workers and soldiers would come out as one man.” Kamenev, sitting next to Trotsky, rose to make a comment that he “wanted to sign his name to Trotsky’s every word.” Of course this meant that he, Kamenev, did not think an insurrection would become necessary any time soon. But it was wrong to implicate Trotsky, and by extension the Bolshevik party, in that opinion. This episode was to have consequences.

Sukhanov’s motion to commemorate Gorky’s 50^th anniversary failed.

Trotsky relates an anecdote of Sukhanov’s observations after this session of the Executive Committee. First, Sukhanov says in his history, he saw Trotsky leave the meeting and approach the run-down, crowded automobiles the Central Executive Committee had made available to the Bolsheviks. After a moment, Trotsky “chuckled and…disappeared into the darkness” on foot. Then, boarding a passenger car, a smallish man with a goatee consoled Sukhanov on the discomforts of travel by rail. Sukhanov learned that the man’s name was Sverdlov, and that he was a “old party worker.” But he did not then know that Sverdlov and a quorum of the Bolshevik Central Committee had met in his apartments eight days before, nor could he know that in two weeks, Sverdlov would be President of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of All Russia.

Trotsky was apparently due at the All Russian Conference of Factory and Shop Committees that evening. There he spoke against “vacillation and wavering,” and everybody knew he was talking about Kamenev and Zinoviev. The conference also raised an issue that was being raised in Moscow factories and in the artillery factories. A resolution declaring worker control of production “in the interest of the whole country” passed with only five dissenting votes. Thus workers representing every Russian industry endorsed not just the theoretical validity of worker control but also their ability to manage the factories successfully, as in some cases they were already doing.