November 7 – October 25, 1917: The Winter Palace Bombarded

At about 4:00 p.m., ships from Kronstadt join the cruiser Aurora. They came much later than planned, but of course the officers did not share the feelings of the sailors towards the revolution.

One of the ships, another cruiser, took a position menacing the Baltic railroad, in case the government should send reinforcements in that way. The others, two destroyers and two gunboats, sailed up the Neva River. They still had to debark their marines, and then the marines had to take their place in the encirclement. From the Winter Palace, says Trotsky, the reinforcement must have looked to the Minister of the Marine, Admiral Verderevsky, formidable.

By 5:00 p.m., the Keksgolmsky Regiment had occupied the War Ministry. By 6:00 p.m., the palace was at last surrounded. Armored cars took up positions at the entrances to the Palace Square; one of them ran up and disarmed the junkers at the main gate.

But the next step in the Military Committee’s plan, an increasingly menacing series of bombardments, was also complicated – perhaps a bit more than necessary. We’ll return to this part of the story in a moment.

Meanwhile, inside the palace, if they couldn’t get anything else, the cabinet was at least trying to get news. At 4:00 p.m., Kerensky’s deputy Konovalov called a meeting with party leaders to see what they could do. Only one attended, expressed “sympathy,” as Trotsky says, and hastily left. A secret telephone line was still working, but no good news could be had from the front. Officers without commands drifted into the palace; they made the staff prepare dinner and serve it with wine.

The junkers demanded and received a new conference with the cabinet. But the news the cabinet could share would at this point could hardly have given satisfaction. While this was going on, Kishkin came in with an ultimatum from Antonov. The encirclement was complete, naval guns were trained on the palace; the cabinet should surrender and the garrison should give up its arms. The ministers of war and marine advised their civilian colleges to give in. This the latter would not do; they made no answer and appealed to the city duma instead. The duma was, after all, the only legitimate authority in the city…!

Now the cabinet heard from the district military headquarters: the commanding general there offered to resign. Half an hour later a detachment of soldiers, marines, and Red Guards advanced on headquarters, met no resistance, and arrested the general instead. Then the general who had replaced Polkovnikov stood down. Demoted and ordered to leave by Kishkin, he fell into the hands of some marines. But Podvoisky took custody before he could come to any harm. It was about 5:00 p.m.

The junker riflemen crouched behind the cordwood barriers in front of the palace could see that the siege was tightening. They began to fire more rapidly, with rifles and machine guns; the besiegers did the same; casualties, the first of the whole day anywhere in the city, were suffered.

The cabinet grew apprehensive about the view from the room where they were meeting, called the Malachite Room. If they could see the ships in the river, the ships could fire at them – directly. So they moved to an interior room and papered over the windows overlooking the courtyard. Then the lights went off: the insurrection was in control of the electricity. The cabinet had to content themselves with a lamp.

The palace staff found this a good moment to absent themselves. The displaced officers ordered those who remained to bring more wine. Word of the debauch reached the defenders; it had a demoralizing effect. The junker artillerymen announced they had received orders to return to their school. At least they left a couple of their guns behind. The Pavlovsky Regiment captured and disarmed them on their way out, taking two of their guns and turning them around to bear on the Winter Palace.

At last the Cossack regiments, despairing of infantry support, resolved to withdraw their squadrons. Their machine gunners too, though the guns were left behind. The besiegers let the Cossacks out through a passage the defenders did not know about. This was at about 9:00 p.m.

Infiltration tactics began to have an effect that evening. Troops armed with words entered the palace through the passage the Cossacks used to leave. They did not find it difficult to demoralize the junker guards and patrols in the halls; they advised that anybody who wanted to leave could do so freely.

The plan for bombarding the palace was at last coming together. Like the plan of encirclement, it took longer to hatch than hoped. Corporal Blagonravov got some field guns up onto the parapets of the Peter and Paul by noon, but the insurrection had not found any gunners. There was a company of gunners in the garrison, but they were not revolutionists. Reluctant to fire on the government, they made difficulties about the guns: they were rusty, the compressors needed oil.

Antonov, waiting for the agreed signal from the fortress, grew cross at the delay. He went to see Blagonravov; they lost the way; Antonov suspected treachery for a moment. When they finally found the guns, Antonov dismissed the artillerists and sent for men from the Aurora. Then a messenger hurried up: the palace has surrendered…! But it was only headquarters, taken by the insurrection at about 5:00 p.m.

Blagonravov also had to explain that the agreed signal for beginning the bombardment, a red lantern hoisted above the rampants of the Peter and Paul, could not be given. A red lantern was nowhere to be had. Never mind. Lashevich sends over gunners from the Aurora; they began anew to prepare the guns.

Meanwhile Chudnovsky also found his way into the palace and persuaded some junkers to give up. Then Chudnovsky was arrested and the junkers had to persuade the commandant to let him go. A few junkers went with him and some of the Cavaliers of St. George too; their exit created confusion in the courtyard, where the junker riflemen still kept up their fire.

The lights went back on, making a good target of the junkers. Somebody switched them off, then they went back on again. The junkers fired at the light; an officer threatened the palace electrician. But the marines had taken control of the current.

Then the soldiers of the Women’s Battalion, thinking that the tsarist General Alexiev was held captive and, moreover, that his life must in the interest of the Russian land and people be preserved, sortied to his rescue. Their advance broke up under fire and the greater part of them surrendered. This was at about 10:00 p.m.

Then a lull, for about an hour. Trotsky says, “The besiegers are busied with the preparation of artillery fire.” The surrounded government, under the impression that the besiegers were weak and that their assault had failed, was sending defiant messages: “’Let the army and the people answer!’”

At length the guns and cannon were ready. The plan of bombardment called for a series of escalations: first blanks, then light caliber guns, then the six-inch guns of the Aurora would open up. The blanks made a huge sound and flash. Maybe this would change the defenders’ minds. Antonov again proposed that the defenders give up. Some of them do, including junkers and the rest of the Women’s Battalion, leaving their weapons on the sidewalk.

The bombardment was renewed – somewhat. The rate of fire was not all the Aurora was capable of: thirty-some shots over the course of nearly two hours. Only two hits. Trotsky wonders, “Is lack of skill the real cause?”

Perhaps the commander of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War has overlooked some things about naval gunfire. During World War II, a cruiser with six-inch guns could open fire on an enemy ship at nearly 10,000 yards. A broadside every minute would not be considered a very rapid rate of fire. Not all the shells could be counted on to hit; the target, say another cruiser, would have been about 600 feet long and 55 or more feet abeam. It was also moving. Nevertheless it was possible for one cruiser to hit and, after repeated hits, sink another.

The Winter Palace was not moving. It was, say, a block or more long. The range for Aurora’s six-inch guns was point blank. On Wikipedia, it looks as if she could bring a broadside of eight guns to bear. So consider the story Trotsky relates of the Minister of Marine, Admiral Verderevsky, in light of these facts. The commandant brought the admiral a shard of metal from somewhere on the palace grounds. The admiral inspected it and said, yes, the shard came from a shell fired by the Aurora. Now the government knew that its own navy was willing to fire at it.

Trotsky finds reason to doubt the story about the shard. But it is true that a shell can be fitted with a fuse, and the fuse can ignite the explosive in the shell at any desired range. It seems to me this shard must have come from a shell that exploded over the palace, not in it.

That is, the gunners were not shooting at the palace at all. Neither did the sailors want to cause any more casualties than absolutely necessary, nor the officers to deface a monument of tsarist Russia. On this account, the two “hits” Trotsky mentions were actually misses.

As little effect as the barrage had on the Winter Palace, it caused plenty of consternation and anxiety in other parts of the city, as the next entries show.

November 7 – October 25, 1917: Inside the Winter Palace

The Provisional Government – minus Kerensky – is getting nowhere in its efforts to find reinforcements while the insurrection’s encirclement is still fairly porous. General Polkovnikov was too discouraged to act. General Alexiev, once commander in chief under the tsar, came to headquarters as an advisor. He soon realized the game was up and left.

That morning insurrectionary troops had not yet encircled the Winter Palace, nor had they occupied the streets nearby or the square in which it stood. They’d watched Kerensky’s car drive off and let Stankevich pass in and out again. Now they were stopping cars and dispossessing the riders. Somehow they missed the cars of the ministers summoned to the palace for a cabinet meeting. Only one minister was stopped and arrested, and he was later released.

The cabinet was thus able to meet and try what Polkovnikov could not find the energy for. At about 11:00 a.m., finding no-one else in the cabinet willing, they appointed Kishkin, a Cadet and a civilian, to coordinate the defense. Trotsky observes this can hardly have induced troops from the front, who hated the Cadets, to come to the cabinet’s rescue. Kishkin relieved Polkovnikov and appointed an equally ineffective replacement.

If he wanted more defenders, Kishkin would have to find more junkers and persuade the Cossacks to come in. The defense also needed armored cars, they had six, but five departed and did not return. Fortunately the palace still had a direct wire to district military headquarters. There was also a telephone line the insurrection had overlooked.

At noon the palace was defended by ensigns from two junker schools and a section of field artillery from a third, an engineering school. The junkers piled up cordwood in the courtyard as a barricade for their riflemen.

Difficulties arose. Passers-by brandished revolvers and disarmed the surprised sentries. There did not appear to be sufficient rations for the day, much less for a siege. Agitators so played on their nerves that the junkers demanded a council of war with the ministers. Konovalov granted it; the whole cabinet was there with him.

An hour’s meeting gave reassurance. The chief of the engineering school took command of the whole junker contingent; his actions made the defense seem more substantial. So did rifle fire from behind the barricades, meant to clear the square. This gave the Military Committee pause. Deciding to bring up more reserves, mainly the still-expected Kronstadters, the committee called off a planned advance.

Now there was time to bring in more defenders too. Note that the encirclement had to face both ways: inward to hold the defenders, and outward to prevent reinforcements. Neither circle was complete. The Cossacks, after much internal debate, resolved to send in two squadrons of cavalry and some machine gun crews. They arrived towards evening. Shortly afterwards some forty Cavaliers of St. George, crippled war veterans, came up, and after them a company of the Women’s Battalion, widows of men killed in the war. If this was their infantry support, the Cossacks did not like the looks of it. At no time, Trotsky estimates, did the garrison defending the palace number more than 2,000.

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., Smolny 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.

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.

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 – 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: 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 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.