Red October: The Insurrection

Overnight November 6-7 – October 24-25, 1917: Petrograd Occupied. When the American journalist Reed leaves Smolny at about 4:00 a.m. on the morning of the 25^th (November 7, new style), somebody tells him the insurrection is already under way and going well. Reed says, “Behind us great Smolny, bright with lights, hummed like a gigantic hive….”

Operations had begun at about 2:00 a.m.; now they were offensive in nature and would be carried through to the end. Trotsky says that, though it’s possible to know what was done, it’s generally not possible to tell who did any given action or when the action got done. The records of the operations are scant.

The Bolshevik Military Organization grouped the workers and soldiers into divisions and set objectives for each division. Everything went according to plan. The first objectives were railroad stations, the electrical power plant, stores of munitions and food, the waterworks. The one bridge remaining to the junkers was seized. So were the centers of communication: the telephone exchange, telegraph exchange, post office, and printing plants were occupied and guarded in strength. So was the State Bank.

Trotsky gives a few specifics.

It fell to the engineer battalion, thoroughly Bolshevik, to take the Nikolaevsky railroad station. This they did without incident or bloodshed. They hardly knew what to do next. They stopped cars and people and checked their papers. At 6:00 a.m. they arrested two truckloads of junkers and sent them to Smolny. Detachments of engineers also guarded stores of food and the power plant.

Commissar Uralov got instructions to gather troops from the Semenov Guards Regiment and occupy a plant wanted for printing a special edition – bigger sheets and a larger circulation – of the Bolshevik paper. When Uralov roused them, the soldiers shouted “Hurrah!” So did the printers when Uralov told them why he and the soldiers had come.

Now the scales were falling from General Polkovnikov’s eyes. There were no demonstrations, just workers and soldiers systematically occupying every strategic point and function. The junkers were useless to resist them. “We have no guarantee there will not be an attempt to seize the Provisional Government,” he insightfully wired Cheremissov at the Northern Front.

Now too the Military Revolutionary Committee became bolder: it issued orders to arrest any officers who would not place themselves under the authority of the committee. Some of those who wouldn’t went into hiding instead. We’ll discover one of their hiding places later.

Trotsky also gives an example of the initiative displayed by the insurrectionary units. A chemical weapons battalion had junker military schools for neighbors. Their patrols kept the junkers in line by disarming them whenever they found them. The Pavlovsky Regiment was also patrolling in the neighborhood, so the staff of the chemical battalion saw to it they the soldiers had the keys to the battalion’s weapons.

Trotsky estimates no more than 10,000 men were required for occupation of the capital, nearly complete by morning. The bulk of the garrison had stayed in their barracks, on the ready.

Overnight November 6-7 – October 24-25, 1917: Politics of Insurrection. Meanwhile, sometime after midnight, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets opens a joint session of the workers and soldiers sections. Tseretilli was absent, Cheidze with him, both back home in Georgia. This left the Menshevik Dan to speak for the compromisist faction.

Dan, of course quite ignorant of how things were going and would go, gave arguments like those Kamenev and Zinoviev had given: the insurrection would ruin the revolution, the counter-revolution was too strong. So the Central Executive would not permit it: “Only over its dead body will the hostile camps cross their bayonets.” The left benches mocked, “Yes, it’s been dead a long time.” Truth, it seems, stood with the benches.

Trotsky pointed out that it was over-late for the Mensheviks to adopt the Bolshevik lines on peace and land, just as it had been over-late for Kerensky to suspend the death penalty. Anyhow, it was too late to forbid insurrection. Trotsky now openly declared that the insurrection had taken the offensive. He says, “The astounded members of the Central Executive Committee found no strength even to protest.”

Reed says the Menshevik Lieber nevertheless rose to speak, arguing that the proletariat was not ready to take power. Bolsheviks would speak, then leave the hall to consult with the Military Revolutionary Committee. Another Bolshevik would leave the committee and deliver a speech.

A length a compromisist offered a resolution empowering the Central Executive to formulate and issue decrees on peace and land. Volodarsky answered, no, that is for the Congress of Soviets to do, and the Bolsheviks left the hall. What was left of the Central Executive passed the resolution; the session broke up at about 4:00 a.m. Maybe they were surprised to see how peaceful the streets of an insurrection could look as they made their ways home.

By 3:20 a.m., the War Ministry was wiring the Caucasus: ovation for Trotsky, his claim of bloodless victory, bridges and rail stations in the hands of the Bolsheviks. “[T]he government will be unable to resist with the forces at hand.”

November 7 – October 25, 1917: Petrograd Taken. As morning draws on, the insurrection tightens its grip on the capital. At 7:00 a.m., a company of the Kekgolmsky Regiment took possession of the telephone exchange their commissar had visited the evening before. Marines occupied the State Bank at about the same time. A sentry was posted at each phone as a precaution. This action warmed the hearts of informed Bolsheviks throughout the city, for they knew about the 1871 insurrection of the Paris Commune. The Commune had hesitated to seize the state bank, and their hesitation in that matter was one of a number of reasons later given for the insurrection’s failure.

The last bridge remaining to the junkers was taken at about this time: the Dvortsovy bridge, under the eyes of Kerensky in the Winter Palace. But the insurrection was somewhat careless about the junkers themselves. A truckload of them, out seeking provisions, were taken prisoner and brought to Smolny. Trotsky gave them their freedom in exchange for their parole, that is, a promise not to bear arms against the Soviet. They were surprised and relieved at this. It’s not clear whether these individuals kept their promise, but the junkers from the city’s military schools continued to be the core of the government’s resistance, and specifically, as we’ll see, of the defense of the Winter Palace.

The insurrection also took the printing plant serving the Stock Exchange, and freed political prisoners from the Kresty prison.

The War Ministry took a moment to wire headquarters at the front. They could see that the garrison was with the Soviet. And that the patrols of the insurrection were everywhere. But if “there [had] been no coming out,” that is, armed confrontation and gunfire, this was the natural corollary of their first proposition about the garrison. So in conclusion, “the Provisional Government finds itself in the capital of a hostile state….[italics mine]” An unconscious epitome of the October Revolution!

Trotsky offers a metaphor for how it came about: A mountain climber, thinking another effort lies ahead, reaches and looks up and discovers he is already at the peak. It’s anticlimactic. Instead of a mighty convulsion, hundreds or thousands of small, isolated actions bring it about. Not just those of the Military Revolutionary committee and the party leadership, but also those of the districts and localities acting individually yet at the same time, Trotsky says, as “one single whole.” This whole proved greater than the sum of its parts.

At 10:00 a.m., the Petrograd Soviet made an announcement: “The Provisional Government is overthrown. The state power has passed into the hands of the Military Revolutionary Committee.” Overthrown the Provisional Government was, but the members of the cabinet were still in the Winter Palace, free in their own private persons. In the meantime the committee renewed orders to arrest hostile officers of the garrison and resist government troops trying to advance on the capital, by force if necessary.

A little later, the Provisional Government, in the person of Commissar Stankevich, managed to attempt a blow. Phone service to the Winter Palace had been cut. The commissar, arrived the night before from headquarters at the front, gathered a platoon of junker engineering students and led them to the telephone exchange. The marines on guard there could have repelled them with rifle fire from the windows, but didn’t fire at all. Neither did Stankevich permit his charges to fire; he did not want the blood of the people on their hands.

The officer in charge of the junker platoon did not feel that way; he sent for hand grenades and guncotton. Meanwhile a junker lieutenant and marine ensign, Trotsky says, “exchanged mighty epithets.” This was enough for the women working at the switchboards; they fled the scene. The junkers blocked the entrances with trucks. The insurrection sent in armored cars from all directions. Stankevich thought better of it and negotiated for withdrawal. At least the junkers were able to keep their arms.

That was all the government would or could do – until the time came to defend the Winter Palace.

November 7 – October 25, 1917: The Pre-Parliament Meets the Insurrection. 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.”