Red October: On the Brink

November 5-6 – October 23-24, 1917: Wheels in Motion. The workers of the Vyborg district, firmly with the Bolsheviks, establish patrols of the Red Guards in the neighborhood and acquire the keys to the drawbridges over the Neva. They were running the district committee of the party, the district soviet for Vyborg, and a unit of the Bolshevik Military Organization from a house on Samsonevsky Prospect. Soon they began requisitioning automobiles and medical supplies.

The British ambassador having expressed alarm about information indicating the imminence of an insurrection, Foreign Minister Tereshchenko replied that “Nothing of the kind” would happen. Kerensky, for his part, believed the reports of General Polkovnikov. This just meant that the tricks he had up his sleeve would prove more provocative than effective.

Orders to the garrison to make patrols were being obeyed – after receiving the sanction of the Military Revolutionary Committee – zealously. It is pretty easy to guess which side the patrols were looking out for and reporting to.

November 6 – October 24, 1917: The Revolution in Readiness. 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.

November 6 – October 24, 1917: The Counter-Revolution in Readiness. Trotsky also assesses the forces the government could put into play. The influence of the compromisist parties in the soldiers committees and soviets had collapsed. This left the officers, who had nobody to command, and the junkers, from the military preparatory schools, as the only reliable troops.

But how reliable were they? The officers hated Kerensky, but they hated the Bolsheviks more. Neither had their support made Kornilov’s insurrection a success. The junkers, most of them, hated the Bolsheviks. But some of them were Bolsheviks, so Smolny knew what was going on in the schools. Moreover, most of the schools were in workers’ districts or near barracks of the garrison; they could be kept under surveillance.

The government would have liked to be able to rely on the garrisons surrounding the capital. But in the main they, led by the Kronstadt sailors, were also turning left, and in some cases were solidly Bolshevik.

As for troops from the front, Baron Budburg, a corps commander on the Northern Front, wrote in his diary during this time, “There is not a single unit…which would not be in the control of the Bolsheviks” in the event of an insurrection.

November 6 – October 24, 1917: The Counter-Revolution in Action. The Provisional Government, becoming a little alarmed about the attitude of the Garrison Conference towards the district military headquarters, decides to do something. They would arrest the Military Revolutionary Committee, shut down the Bolshevik presses, and summon troops from nearby garrisons and the front.

The government thought they ought to get the backing of the Pre-Parliament first; nevertheless parts of the program were set in motion. The military schools of the junkers received orders to be ready for action. The cruiser Aurora, anchored in the Neva near the Winter Palace, was told to sail for the Baltic Fleet. Neighboring garrisons got orders to send troops and artillery to the capital. So did the Northern Front. The Minister of Justice revoked bail for people who, like Trotsky, had been released from jail, exposing them to arrest.

More direct steps, with a better chance of success, were also ordered: increasing the guard of the Winter Palace, raising the drawbridges over the Neva, stopping and searching automobile traffic, cutting off Smolny’s telephone lines.

Military headquarters issued orders as well. They wanted the commissars of the Military Revolutionary Committee removed from the units of the garrison, subject to possible court martial. They also asked owners to place their automobiles under protective custody at headquarters.

Meanwhile, at 5:30 a.m., a squad of junkers accompanied a government commissar to the Bolshevik printing plant. They’d come bearing an order from headquarters. The workers were not inclined to obey it, but the junkers broke in anyway, smashed the stereotypes, sealed the building, and went on guard.

November 6 – October 24, 1917: The Revolution in Action. The Pavlovsky Regiment, on patrol near the Winter Palace, is listening with the ears of the revolution to rumors about the preparations of the government. Smolny soon knew what the government had afoot. This time, orders would be meet with orders, actions with actions.

A couple of workers from the Bolshevik presses, for the moment in the hands of junkers, ran to Smolny for help. Trotsky and Podvoisky heard their story and caused orders to be issued. The Litovsky Regiment sent a company to the scene; a detachment of the Sixth Engineers, neighbors of the press plant, joined them. They sent the junkers packing, and within a few hours the paper, of which Stalin was editor, came out. Trotsky observes that these troops were following orders from a Military Revolutionary Committee that was itself subject to arrest: “That was insurrection.”

So was the Military Committee’s order to the cruiser Aurora. When it got the government’s orders to rejoin the fleet, the ship asked the Military Committee what to do about them. The orders were not to be obeyed, said the committee; instead the ship was to remain at its station, protect the garrison with its guns, and protect itself, using smaller vessels, from being boarded.

November 6 – October 24, 1917: Defense of the Congress? The attempts against the printing presses and the fleet are everywhere seen as counter-revolutionary. Moreover, since they were successfully resisted, the government itself was losing what little credibility it had left.

The insurrection put these circumstances to good account. The soldiers at the press plant and the sailors in the Neva River were defending the revolution, said Smolny. Though the phone lines were out, the cruiser Aurora had a powerful radio. It broadcast Smolny’s message: “the counter-revolution [has] taken the offensive.” Trotsky says it’s good for an insurrection to begin on the defensive. The cloak of self-defense is cast over a course of action that is, by its very nature, extra-legal.

So now the Military Revolutionary Committee, when it issued orders to the garrison, could say – and did say – it was acting in defense of the Congress of Soviets, due to convene the next day. Yet in essence its orders came, Trotsky says, with “the voice of a sovereign power.” The Military Committee sounded the same themes when it issued a proclamation and general orders covering the front page of Rabochy i Soldat that day. Reed reproduces the proclamation in Ten Days that Shook the World.

November 6 – October 24, 1917: The Central Committee in Readiness. 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.

November 6 – October 24, 1917: Trotsky Caucuses, etc. By 2:00 p.m., as many as 300 Bolshevik delegates to the Congress of Soviets are at Smolny. They caucused with Trotsky.

How to address the caucus presented some delicate issues. The delegates could not be told too much, lest important information reach enemy ears. Nor could the insurrection be given an offensive character, lest certain elements of the garrison hear of it and be put off. Further, as the conspiratorial nature of the insurrection could not be concealed, it had to be justified in terms of the Marxist theory of state.

So Trotsky cited recent articles by Lenin arguing the objective necessity of conspiracy in this case; he cited the incident at the Bolshevik printing plant and the orders to the Aurora to show the insurrection had started as a defensive maneuver. Smolny too had been placed in a state of defense, but against the threat to arrest the Military Revolutionary Committee.

The caucus wanted to know what would happen if Kerensky refused to submit to the Congress of Soviets. Trotsky replied that that would create “’not a political but a police question.’” Of course this meant that in such a case the insurrection would go over to the offensive, aggressively seizing and exercising the police powers of the state. And Trotsky says, “That was in essence almost exactly what happened.”

A delegation of the city duma interrupted the caucus for a moment. Trotsky says “they wanted to know too much.” He told them only that the Soviet would defend the Congress, that the Military Committee had issued orders to suppress looting, and that if the duma could not support the Congress, a new election would be held. They left, Trotsky says, “dissatisfied.”

Returning to the caucus, Trotsky drew the lesson of the meeting with the duma: the wheel had turned full circle. Weeks before, the Bolsheviks had a majority in the Soviet, but nothing, not even printing presses, to show for it. Now they were the people to see if you wanted to know the fate of the capital.

Next, at about 4:00 p.m., Trotsky was called to the Peter and Paul fortress. A battalion of bicyclists, thought to be loyal to the government, had had been kept out of the meeting the day before by their officers. Relying on the bicyclists to back him, the commandant threatened to arrest the commissar Blagonravov. Blagonravov arrested the commandant instead. Now the bicycle men had to be mollified.

Trotsky won this “supplementary oratorical battle” with the government’s representative. The matter was settled without a fight. Another detachment of bicycle men, assigned to guard the Winter Palace, heard of this result, stood down, and had to be replaced by junkers. The Peter and Paul remained solidly with the insurrection. Trucks and wagons continued to arrive, and to depart loaded with rifles and other weapons for the Red Guards.

November 6 – October 24, 1917: Or Insurrection? Alarmed when he ordered measures early that morning against the possibility of insurrection, Kerensky seems even more alarmed as he addresses the Pre-Parliament that afternoon. He recited what Lenin had been openly saying in the Bolshevik press. But the patience of the government had worn thin with the Bolsheviks and the “rabble” they represent. The last straws were calling out troops of the garrison to recover the Bolshevik printing plant and openly distributing weapons out of the government’s arsenals.

Then Konovalov handed Kerensky the text of the message from the Military Revolutionary Committee calling on the garrison to defend the Congress of Soviets. Kerensky read it to the assembly. So it was insurrection. Miliukov says, “Kerensky pronounced these words in the complacent tone of a lawyer who has at last succeeded on getting evidence against his opponent.” He promised “liquidation” to the insurrection, demanded the support of the Pre-Parliament for the government’s efforts in this endeavor, and left the hall.

Support did not come immediately or by acclamation. The parties caucused first, then debated among themselves. It took four hours, until 6:00 p.m., and still failed of unanimity. The socialists adopted a resolution suggested by the Menshevik Dan, blaming both the government and the Bolsheviks for the crisis. The Cadets and Cossacks, in the minority, promised “unqualified support to the government,” pending, as Trotsky observes, their own counter-revolutionary insurrection. The Pre-Parliament also proposed to entrust the struggle against the insurrection to a committee of public safety they would name. All in all, it was another staggering defeat for the authority of the government.

Meanwhile, in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky was doing his best to portray the actions of the Military Revolutionary Committee as defensive. He would say what the committee had done, and why, then ask rhetorically, “Is this insurrection?”

The fact is, it was. Miliukov speculates in his history that the Bolsheviks were planning to wait until the Congress of Soviets opened to take the insurrection on the offensive. But the government had proved so weak, they did so beforehand. Trotsky says, no, it was always intended to present the Congress, so far as possible, with a fait accompli. The Kronstadt sailors would join up with the Vyborg workers and take the capital together, then the Congress would convene.

But the weakness of the government did make a difference in the plans, as the next series of entries will show.

November 6 – October 24, 1917: The Struggle for the Bridges. Kerensky hurries off after his speech at the Pre-Parliament, leaving the delegates to their debates, once again animated, this time seemingly by the message of the Military Revolutionary Committee to the garrison. The government soon ordered detachments of junkers to the railroad stations and principal street crossings. They put the drawbridges over the Neva under guard and raised them. They redoubled efforts to requisition automobiles.

But the bridges were of capital importance to the insurrection: they connected the neighborhoods of the armed workers to the buildings and functions of the government the insurrection wanted to occupy and control. Trotsky says the people took their seizure as the opening blow against the insurrection itself. Red Guards and soldiers from the workers district marched on their own initiative to the river; the drawbridges came down without bloodshed. Some were raised and had to be lowered again before the evening was out.

The Military Revolutionary Committee ordered the cruiser Aurora to occupy the bridge upriver from its anchorage and lower it. Only after the commander was put under arrest (and thus given the plea of compulsion), did he and his officers carry these orders out. The former occupants, junkers, were long gone before the sailors could debark on the quays and take possession.

Now acts of defense and insurrection began to happen, some spontaneously, all over. Government militia seized the evening edition of Rabochy i Soldat and tried to drive off with it. The printers, reinforced by two sailors who happened by, regained the papers and delivered them to Smolny. The Military Committee sent two squads of the Preobrazhentsky Regiment to secure the facility.

An officer and some junkers, thinking they could find Lenin and arrest him in Vyborg, stumbled into a workers’ club by mistake. The workers summoned the Red Guard, who arrested the officer and junkers instead. The Red Guards conducted them to the Peter and Paul.

The commissar of the Keksgolmsky Regiment paid a visit to the telephone exchange. He was able to persuade the workers there to restore phone service to Smolny. Another commissar, freshly appointed to a post at the telegraph station, found soldiers of the Keksgolmsky Regiment already there. The telegraphers, none of whom were Bolsheviks, agreed for the time being to compromise with the insurrection.

Then, at 9:00 p.m., the Military Committee sent another commissar, with an escort of marines, to the government news agency. They were to censor, but not necessarily suppress, the dispatches emanating there.

Now the actions of the Military Committee, particularly with regard to the media of communications, already rapid and effective in the early 20^th century, seemed to have passed over to the offensive. Trotsky nevertheless says that, arguably, oversight of the media was just another instance of the dual power, with the Bolsheviks in the Soviet taking the place of the Compromisers. Yet even if “the umbilical cord of ‘legality’ was not conclusively severed,” it would be soon enough.

November 6-7 – October 24-25, 1917: The Marines Arrive? The two delegates from the Kronstadt Soviet to the Congress of Soviets arrive at Smolny during the afternoon of the 6^th (October24, old style). There they came across Chudnovsky, just returned from the front. The three of them began to argue about whether the time for insurrection was ripe. Chudnovsky was in doubt; he thought the mood at the front was not favorable.

Trotsky came in. He asked Flerovsky, one of the Kronstadt delegates, to return there. “Events are maturing so fast that everyone must be at his post,” Trotsky said. Hearing this, Chudnovsky shed his doubts and threw himself into plans for the operations.

Messages ordering mobilization went out by telephonegram and telegraph. Kronstadt’s forces were to set forth at dawn. Sverdlov wired Smilga in Finland “Send regulations.” This was the code for embarking 1,500 heavily armed marines on ships bound for Petrograd.

The original plan of operations, as we’ve seen, called for the marines to debark and join the Vyborg Red Guards; they would enter the capital together. Now, to take advantage of the initiative the insurrection had gained, the Guards would go in first, with the marines coming in to protect their flank or rear as needed. The new plan started off very well indeed, but the arrival of the marines became problematic, as we’ll see.