All that day, the
Military Revolutionary Committee is still issuing orders from Smolny. Word came
that Kornilov had escaped his “prison” in Bykhov. He and Kerensky were to be
arrested; assisting Kerensky will be considered a state crime. Agitators and
organizers were being recruited and sent to the front and to the provinces.
Units at the front were invited to elect new soldiers committees. Measures were
initiated to deal with recalcitrant railway, telegraph, and postal unions.
These were among,
Trotsky says, “thousands and myriads of orders” issued “by word of mouth, by
pencil, by typewriter, by wire….” It was not just another day’s work.
While the city
duma met and issued proclamations in the name of the Committee of Salvation,
the Bolshevik Central Committee met to decide the structure and contents of the
new government. There were two issues: whether to form the government in
coalition with the other socialist parties, and what to call the departmental
executives. The latter was easy to solve. “Ministers” had a bad smell to it. So
they would be “commissars” of the Soviet of Peoples Commissars.
As to the first
issue, the left Social Revolutionaries were the only faction of any size that
had stayed in the Congress of Soviets with the Bolsheviks the night before. They
caucused and negotiated, but found they could not agree to a Bolshevik program
that had hardly changed since Lenin’s April
Theses, and was the foundation of the October Revolution. Lenin and Trotsky
would not compromise the program, says the American journalist Reed, even
though Kamenev and Riazanov, among others, urged accommodation in order to give
the government a broader base. By about 7:00 p.m. that evening, the left Social
Revolutionaries decided they would not join the government on the Bolsheviks’
terms, but would nevertheless remain on the Military Revolutionary Committee. It
turned out they did not want, by joining
the government, to leave behind their fellow Social Revolutionaries on the
right entirely. The result was an all-Bolshevik government.
The Central
Committee had a visitor that afternoon. The Menshevik Martov interceded on
behalf of the imprisoned socialist ministers. The committee, seemingly via
Kamenev, confirmed Trotsky’s offer of house arrest. Trotsky cannot be sure
whether the ministers accepted the offer, or preferred to remain imprisoned in
solidarity with their bourgeois colleagues.
Meanwhile,
representatives of the railway, telegraphers, and postal unions adhered to the
Committee of Salvation, creating practical if not political obstacles to the
progress of the government of soviets. Even the stenographers, employees of the
old Central Executive Committee,
would absent themselves from the Congress of Soviets, and so the record of the
proceedings is scant. Trotsky calls this the first act in a “campaign of
sabotage” by the ex-Compromisers.
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