The Bolshevik
Central Committee, seeing the initiative pass to the insurrection, meets in
Smolny to gather the threads to the party. Sverdlov was in the chair. Lenin had
not made his way from his new hiding place in Vyborg yet. Zinoviev was missing,
but Kamemev, who had become active in the operations of the insurrection, was
there. (Trotsky doesn’t say why Kamenev, voted
off the committee earlier in the week, happened to be participating in the
meeting, but he doesn’t say whether Kamenev cast any votes either.) Stalin, at
his post in the party’s pressrooms, also missed the meeting.
The agenda was
short: how, Trotsky says, to take “full possession of Petrograd in the next
twenty-four hours.” The Military Revolutionary Committee and the Bolshevik
Military Organization had already set, or were setting, a plan of operations
that would place all essential points and functions of the capital under the
control of the insurrection during that time. The Central Committee now had to
make decisions about leadership roles towards these ends.
Kamenev moved
that no member of the Central Committee should be allowed to leave Smolny
unless the committee as a whole approved. Trotsky proposed delegating members
of the committee as liaisons to or observers of the postal and telegraph
workers, the railroad workers, and the Provisional Government. Sverdlov was
given responsibility for the government. Another member became responsible for
food supplies. Kamenev was to conduct negotiations as necessary with the Left
Social Revolutionaries.
Trotsky also
called for establishing a reserve headquarters in the Peter and Paul fortress.
Lashevich was to represent the committee there, joining Corporal Blagonravov,
the commissar appointed by the Military Committee. Those two were to maintain
contact with Sverdlov in Smolny and provide fortress passes to the committee
members.
At the center of
all these arrangements was Sverdlov. He kept Smolny and the party in touch with
each other, funneled party workers to meet needs of the military organizations,
and carried out the most sensitive operations himself, or with the help of the
Bolshevik Military Organization. He was also the point of contact for the
party’s delegates to the Congress of Soviets, telling them as they arrived what
they needed to know and giving them something to do.
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