Trotsky describes
the military and operational weight of the forces available to the insurrection
in some detail. The rank and file of the garrison was firmly on the side of peace,
the revolution, and the insurrection – in that order. This meant that, as far
as possible, the Bolsheviks would have to rely on armed workers – the Red
Guards – to accomplish the insurrection’s immediate objectives. Even if the
garrison could be made to fight, for example against counter-revolutionary
units sent from the front, they would lack leadership: their officers were
aligned with the government, and the politicians on the Military Revolutionary
Committee were no substitute. Further, the rank and file were not particularly
well trained or organized. The officers, shock troops, and even the junkers were
better trained, and they stood with the government. The well-trained Cossacks
too were generally, though not all of them, with the government.
On the other
hand, with the Garrison Conference’s support, the policy requiring orders to
the garrison to be countersigned by the Soviet (via the Military Committee) would
be fully operational. Thus, though the garrison would not oppose the
insurrection, Trotsky says, “its fighting weight” in support of the
insurrection “was not large.” As we’ll see, this judgment did not apply equally
to all the units of the garrison.
The Red Guards
had kept up their training ever since the July Days, eventually practicing
their drills in the public squares and on the boulevards. When the Bolsheviks
came into control of the Petrograd Soviet, many of them for the first time came
into possession of rifles and other weapons. The Red Guards recruited the young
and the old; even workers who had voted for the Mensheviks or Social
Revolutionaries were caught up; they practiced their marksmanship in the
factories. They were volunteers, but amateurs. Few of them had ever been under
fire; neither had their officers.
The relative
military value of the garrison and the Red Guards in an insurrection, Trotsky says,
can be explained by their reasons for adhering to the revolution. The conscript
soldiers of the peasantry wanted peace, and to return home after the revolution
to land that would then belong to them. The volunteer workers of the Red Guards
wanted social and political change along Marxist-Leninist lines. So the workers
would be the operational vanguard of the insurrection, and the garrison would
be the “mass of maneuver” against whatever forces to government might happen to
bring to bear. The Bolsheviks also knew they could call on the garrisons of
what Trotsky calls the “military ring around the capital” as their first
reserves, and the staunchly revolutionary troops from Finland and the Baltic
Fleet as their second.
More concretely,
the Military Revolutionary Committee took steps to put Smolny in better
defense. Trotsky says they were almost too late, but on the other hand, why tip
off the enemy by acting too soon? At 3:00 a.m. the early morning of November 6
(October 24, old style), all the American journalist Reed saw was a couple of
machine guns and “strong patrols of soldiers.” The Military Committee was
bringing in a company of infantry from the Litovsky Regiment and a machine gun
company. Then cordwood was piled up as a barricade against rifle fire.
Provisions and ammunition came in by truck, and cannon were posted in front.
Reserves crowded Smolny’s halls. By evening, Sukhanov writes, “the defense of
Smolny began to look like something.”
The Peter and
Paul fortress, which had come over to the revolution only the day before, was
also being put in better defense that day. Detachments of the Machine Gun
Regiment were cleaning their 80 guns and placing them where they would command
the bridge and quay of the Neva River. Patrols and sentries also increased.
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