The workers’ revolution had begun and with it the transformation of world history, as Dominic Alexander shows

The government and the military command were alarmed at the huge rallies in support of the Bolsheviks, and began to send appeals for loyal troops to be sent to Petrograd, while trying to put pressure on the MRC to back down from its claim to authority over the garrison. The MRC, however, accelerated its replacement of commissars, often with members of the Bolshevik Military Organisation, only now being released from prison since the July Days.

The MRC was also able to take over the Peter and Paul Fortress (which overlooked the Winter Palace) and a major arsenal. The soldiers stationed at the fortress had been loyal to the right SRs and Mensheviks, but were won over to the MRC by a delegation of speakers including Trotsky.^[1] The moves so far were presented as defensive in nature, crucially thereby gaining the cooperation of the Left SRs, who wanted no takeover before the Congress of Soviets. There was still significant hesitation, nonetheless; late on 23 October, Left SRs and moderate Bolsheviks convinced the MRC to rescind its declaration of the previous day on its absolute control over military command.

Kerensky thought that this sudden caution on the part of the MRC was just a delaying tactic, and decided to arrest the entire body, before being dissuaded by advisors from such a rash move. The government did, however, decide to arrest those who had been freed on bail for their role in the July Days, which would have taken away many prominent left leaders, including Trotsky, as well as shut down the revolutionary press. As a result, Trotsky and the MRC went on high alert at the Smolny Institute, the home of the Soviet, and issued Directive Number One asking regiments loyal to the Soviet to go to battle readiness.

Some in the MRC wanted to move to an armed uprising immediately, but Trotsky argued for a more restrained response. Instead, two of the most revolutionary units were ordered to reopen the presses closed by Kerensky, which they did, overwhelming the government troops set to guard them. Within hours of its closure, the Bolshevik paper was back in circulation. At this point, a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee, with Lenin absent, decided against an immediate uprising, keeping the focus on the imminent Congress of Soviets. With more delegates arriving in Petrograd, it was becoming clear that if the alliance with the Left SRs held, then the Bolsheviks would have the numbers to win a vote for the Congress to replace the government.

Smolny was on high alert at this point, but things could be still rather chaotic. On one occasion, Trotsky arrived there without his pass, and said to a soldier guarding the doors:

‘Never mind. You know me. My name is Trotsky.’

‘You haven’t got a pass. You cannot go in. Names don’t mean anything to me.’

‘But I am the president of the Petrograd Soviet.’

‘Well, if you’re as important a fellow as that you must at least have one little paper.’

Finally the soldier’s superior was called, who said:

‘Trotsky? I’ve heard the name somewhere. I guess it’s all right. You can go in, comrade …’^[2]

However famous Trotsky and Lenin were at this point, the revolution and loyalty to it was not a matter of a charismatic personality cult, the soldiers were there defending the Soviet for their own reasons.

Kerensky was still desperately trying to call up troops from the front, as it became ever clearer that the vast majority in Petrograd were obeying orders from the MRC and the Bolsheviks rather than the government. The naval command ordered the radicalised ship the Aurora out to sea, but the order was countermanded by the MRC, and the sailors rose against their officers, and kept the ship in Petrograd.^[3] Military units called by the government to Petrograd either refused the order or were prevented by others who were obeying the MRC. The only forces to make it to the Winter Palace on 24 October were the Women’s Shock Battalion (an earlier creation of Kerensky’s aimed at shaming Russian men back into war readiness) and a detachment of officer cadets.

At this late stage, the Menshevik leader Fyodor Dan and right SR Abram Gotz attempted to convince Kerensky to declare that the government would immediately begin negotiations for peace and announce that all manorial lands would be transferred into the hands of the land committees, in the hope that this would cut support from underneath the Bolsheviks. However, Kerensky’s government, and the military leadership particularly, were far too entangled with bourgeois and landowner interests for this to be any kind of realistic strategy. It would bring about the kind of government he was in place to prevent, and probably prompt the generals to oust him. Meanwhile the Left-SR and Menshevik-Internationalist factions were cooperating in an attempt to achieve a purely socialist government of all factions, based on the Soviet Congress.

Soviet power declared

Alarmed at reports of large numbers of armed workers and soldiers gathering around the Smolny, the generals ordered the bridges across the river to be raised, to prevent more people from the working-class suburbs from coming into the centre. However, as soon as a force of cadets arrived at the Liteiny Bridge, enraged workers challenged them and escorted them back to their academy, without the MRC even intervening.^[4] By early evening, most of the main bridges were firmly in the hands of Red Guards and other forces hostile to the government.

During the afternoon of 24 October, the MRC was able to take control of the central telegraph office, thanks largely to the soldiers stationed there. A regiment that had supported the government in July now took control of the Baltic rail station for the MRC upon news that loyalist forces were supposed to be arriving there. Revolutionary committees in the nearby naval bases also received previously arranged signals to send ships and sailors to the city to support the rising, which they did.

Lenin, still in hiding at this point, was desperately worried still that if the Bolsheviks did not press the advantage, the government would be able to gather forces to fight back, or that the end result would be a weak coalition government headed by the moderate leaders. Yet, his requests to the CC to be allowed to come to Smolny were rebuffed. Finally, he simply disobeyed instructions, donned his customary disguise of wig and cap, and set off to the Soviet with one companion. It is not proven how far Lenin personally quickened the pace of events, but in the early hours of 25 October, the MRC did shift to more aggressive measures.^[5]

One commissar even began to arrest government officials as they passed checkpoints he had set up. The Petrograd electric station was taken over, and the supply to government offices was switched off, while simultaneously the post office was taken over. The Aurora, against its captain’s wishes, sailed up the river to the last bridge held by government forces, and the cadets set to guard it fled. A government attempt to retake the bridge later found it held securely by workers and sailors. In similar manner, the state bank, the telephone station, and the remaining railway stations were all taken, with the soldiers or cadets in these places on government orders either giving way or being disarmed. Not everything went smoothly: early in the morning the War Ministry was taken over, but a military telegraph in the attic was not discovered until much later in the day and continued in use connecting the government in the Winter Palace to the wider country, enabling it to make appeals and proclamations all the while.^[6]

Kerensky made a final desperate appeal to the Cossack forces in the capital, but they replied that they would not be ‘acting alone and serving as live targets.’^[7] Kerensky fled the city early on 25 October in the hope of reaching loyal forces from the northern front. By the morning, with ships and detachments of sailors converging on the city, and plans for taking the Winter Palace being drawn up, Lenin was drafting a declaration of the transfer of power to the soviets’ MRC, even as the Congress of Soviets was about to open. This document was already being printed and sent out by the telegraph across the country as the day began. Thus despite the doubts and reservations of many of the Bolshevik leaders themselves, the transfer of power was to be presented to the Congress as a fait accompli. This happened, as much as anything else, because of Kerensky’s own abortive attempt to suppress the MRC, but the fact that events proceeded almost of their own accord from that provocation shows just how ripe Petrograd was for revolution.

Trotsky and then Lenin, in his first public appearance since July, announced to the Petrograd Soviet that the overthrow of the Provisional Government had been accomplished, although the Winter Palace was not yet in revolutionary hands. Trotsky observed of the history of revolution that ‘I know of no other examples in which such huge masses were involved and which developed so bloodlessly. The power of the Provisional Government  … was dead and awaited the blow of the broom of history which had to sweep it away.’ Lenin then announced that the workers and peasants’ revolution had occurred: ‘Long live the world socialist revolution.’^[8]

The audience was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, apart from some Menshevik deputies who withdrew from the Soviet executive in protest. On the day, one Menshevik remarked that ‘perhaps the Bolsheviks can seize the power, but they won’t be able to hold it more than three days. They haven’t the men to run a government.’^[9]  The moderates couldn’t imagine a government without the middle-class intelligentsia, of which they were mostly composed. Thus also they insisted that the Russian proletariat was not ready for a socialist revolution, and that the Bolshevik actions were ‘criminal’ and doomed to disaster.

Soviet government formed

The government ministers in the Winter Palace were effectively under siege all day. The morale of their defenders ebbed constantly, as the reinforcements from the front failed to arrive, and various elements of the defending forces, cadets and Cossacks, gradually drifted away back to their barracks and academies in the course of the evening. Ministers were still involved in scheming and making new appointments when the MRC finally delivered an ultimatum for surrender. The General Staff headquarters surrendered before the deadline, but the government held out.

At 10pm, the Aurora fired a deliberately blank round, but the blast was felt throughout the city, prompting most of the remaining cadets and some of the women’s battalion to abandon their posts. An hour later, the order was given to begin shooting live ammunition. Among supporters of the government in the Duma, there was an effort to organise a march to the Winter Palace, proclaiming their willingness to ‘die with the government’.^[10] In the event, the march was blocked by a detachment of sailors, at which point the delegates, decrying ‘these ignorant men’, turned back and dispersed.^[11]

At 10:40pm, the Congress of Soviets finally began, with the Bolsheviks having 300 of 670 delegates, and the Left-SRs close to a hundred. A new Tsay-ee-kah was elected with a Bolshevik majority, but the Mensheviks refused to take the seats allotted to them. After the Aurora’s first blast was heard, the left-Menshevik Martov demanded that before anything else, the Congress find a way to stop the fighting and create a democratic government acceptable to all. This found wide favour, even with many Bolshevik delegates, and the motion passed. Lenin’s fear that a moderate socialist coalition would take the place of the Provisional Government and share many of its political characteristics seemed to be coming to pass.

However, the moderates poisoned their cause in the ensuing debate by rising one after another to denounce the Bolsheviks in harsh terms, and demanding negotiations with the Provisional Government, provoking anger well beyond the party’s own ranks. The right SR and Menshevik demand that the Congress repudiate Bolshevik actions failed, and so they announced their withdrawal from the Congress. The efforts of the Left SRs, Menshevik-Internationalists, and moderate Bolsheviks to effect a compromise and some sort of coalition were thus left in tatters. The Bolshevik paper, Pravda, responded to coalition demands contemptuously: ‘our “coalition” is that of the proletariat and the revolutionary Army with the poor peasants.’^[12] Sukhanov later noted that ‘we completely untied the Bolsheviks’ hands, making them masters of the entire situation and yielding to them the whole arena of the revolution … By quitting the congress, we ourselves gave the Bolsheviks a monopoly of the Soviet, of the masses and of the revolution.’^[13]

Sukhanov’s lament is true only up to a point. The scale of the mass support enjoyed by the Bolsheviks in Petrograd at this time and the extremity of the economic crisis meant that, one way or another, a revolutionary soviet government with the Bolsheviks in a majority was the only likely outcome of these days. Soldier delegates indeed reacted to the walkout with variations on one initial outburst: ‘Let them go – the army is not with them.’^[14] Lenin was able to defeat Martov’s next motion for compromise, and Trotsky rallied the Congress, famously consigning the moderates to the ‘dustbin of history’. He finished his speech declaiming, ‘Down with the compromisers! Down with the servants of the bourgeoisie! Long live the triumphant uprising of soldiers, workers, and peasants!’

The ministers of the Provisional Government finally surrendered around 2am, by that point defended only by a handful of cadets against overwhelming force. A Bolshevik member of the MRC, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, had the ministers arrested, and prevented harm being done to them by angry crowds on the way to the Peter and Paul Fortress where they were held. The Soviet Congress received the news of the surrender joyfully, particularly when several reports arrived confirming that front regiments were unwilling to act against the Soviet. Lenin presented a manifesto advancing a democratic peace for all nations, transfer of lands to the peasantry, the democratisation of the army, workers’ control of industry, and the transfer of local government authority to soviets. The Menshevik-Internationalists had also walked out of the Congress after its rejection of their motion calling for negotiations for a broad socialist unity government, but the Left SRs stayed and supported Lenin’s manifesto.^[15] A new government, the Soviet of People’s Commissars, was formed, at first composed exclusively of Bolsheviks.

Counterrevolutionary moves

The moderate Mensheviks and SRs were not quite done, however, forming a Committee for Salvation to work against the revolution. They launched an insurrection on 28 October, seizing the telephone station and the state bank. However, their planning was, rather farcically, overheard by a couple of soldiers hiding behind a curtain, who were thus able to send a warning to Smolny.^[16] In the event, the only rebelling forces were some cadets, and the MRC was able to retake these points quickly, and blockade the military academies involved. There were some further difficulties such as at the Telephone Exchange, where the young, female switchboard staff, who had supported the insurgent cadets, were outraged at the revolutionary sailors who had retaken the place. They were not placated by the MRC commissar, who tried to convince them to see themselves as workers who would be given better wages and conditions under the soviet government. Rather, their self-perception was as middle class, with nothing in common with ‘dirty, ignorant people’ and ‘animals’. They left en masse, but the ancillary staff and five operators remained, and with an appeal out for those with the necessary experience, the exchange kept functioning.^[17]

Another more serious military attempt to oust the Soviet government came with General Krasnov’s march on Petrograd with a thousand Cossacks. On 30 to 31 October, twelve miles from Petrograd, this force was faced by a revolutionary mobilisation of workers’ detachments, sailors and units of the Petrograd garrison ten times its size, which organised itself on the fly. There was a confused and bloody battle, but the Cossacks were defeated, and two days later agreed to turn Kerensky over for trial, in return for an amnesty. In fact, Kerensky escaped from Russia. In the south, in the Don region, another Cossack general, Kaledin, held significant coal mines, restricting energy supplies to the cities, and wasn’t defeated until early February 1918. The last supreme commander of the Russian army, Dukhonin and his counterrevolutionary officers were isolated and defeated at Moghilev in early December.

Less dramatic but potentially disastrous was the opposition of the leadership of the railway union, the Vikzhel, which was still in moderate socialist hands. It threatened a nationwide strike and gained support from some soviet organisations. Together with Krasnov’s revolt, this led to negotiations for a socialist coalition, but the moderates insisted that a new government could not include Lenin or Trotsky. With the latter two busy organising Petrograd’s defence, the moderate Bolshevik leaders, Kamenev and Zinoviev, seriously considered it. Once Lenin and Trotsky were back in meetings, this was off the table. The rank and file of railway workers held mass meetings repudiating their leadership’s stance and kept the lines open. The Vikzhel talks stalled, and finally the Left SRs accepted positions in the new Soviet government.^[18]

With the railways functioning, soviet forces in Petrograd were able to reinforce those in Moscow, where fighting between government and revolutionary forces was much more serious and protracted than in the capital. Elsewhere, from Sevastopol to Nizhny Novgorod, soviets also took control, although Moscow was not the only city where there was fighting. A major challenge came from the Cossacks, who were initially still united behind their landowner leaders, and willing to fight the new soviet government. However, once the Bolsheviks were able to counter the lies that Cossack lands were to be divided among Russian peasants, and that, to the contrary, ordinary Cossacks could form their own soviets and redistribute Cossack lands amongst themselves, then the leaders found that their armies dissolved.^[19] In Ukraine, and Finland, however, anti-soviet governments succeeded and were recognised by the Western powers.

Although the soviet government itself was exclusively Bolshevik, with the later addition of some left SRs, the soviet apparatus itself contained revolutionaries of many varieties, even including some notable anarchists. The coalition with the Left SRs lasted until March 1918, when they angrily left, refusing to accept the harsh peace terms imposed by Germany. Instead, they believed that a revolutionary war should be waged against Germany, in an utterly exhausted and hungry country, rather than accept the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This position exposed the fundamentally delusional politics of many of the Left SRs, for all their fitful revolutionary enthusiasm.

The success of the October Revolution had much less to do with the vagaries of the leaderships of the various socialist parties and trade unions, and much more to do with decisive mass support for the Bolshevik programme. Overwhelmingly, the soldiers, at the front or elsewhere, wanted an end to the war, and it was clear that workers would not be adequately fed or clothed until it was ended. The SR programme promised land for the peasanty, but when in the government, they did little to bring it about. The Bolsheviks were accused of stealing SR policy, yet they were the ones to push it towards fruition and were rapidly gaining peasant support in the run up to October.

As the moderate leaders prevaricated on socialist aims, continually compromising with the representatives of the old order, they became increasingly discredited in the eyes of workers, soldiers and peasants. The explosion in self-organisation of the masses since February 1917 meant that it was possible for the rank and file of organisations to move in spite of the reluctance and moderation of their leaderships, and rally in support of the Bolshevik programme. Without the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, and others, the revolution might not have happened, but without mass self-organisation and revolutionary consciousness, great orators, organisers and strategists would all have been impotent voices in the wilderness.

The revolutionary government of October 1917 had little space to start moulding a socialist society in crisis-riven Russia. Lenin and Trotsky both hoped that proletarian revolution in Russia would help to spark revolution elsewhere in war-torn Europe. This hope was by no means unrealistic, with Germany in particular looking very close to such a crisis early in 1917, and revolution actually breaking out in November 1918. Elsewhere in Europe, the end of the war, and the collapse of the old regimes in the central and eastern Europe, brought a wave of radicalism. Italy saw massive workers’ militancy and an abortive revolution before succumbing to fascism in 1922. Hungary had a short-lived soviet republic in 1919, and vibrant communist parties, driven by enthusiasm for the Russian revolution, sprang up across the continent. The German revolution was defeated, although that was not fully decided until 1923. The crucial difference from Russia was the absence of an experienced revolutionary party and leadership able to navigate the difficulties of a revolutionary period and guide mass forces to socialist revolution.

The failure of the German revolution in particular meant that there were no international allies to rescue the Soviet state from the brutal civil war, which began in 1918 after the highly punitive peace conditions imposed by Germany. The remnants of the old regime, allied with various liberal and moderate socialist factions, were able to form White Armies to lay siege to the workers’ state, which was centred on the core industrial regions around Petrograd and Moscow. The Whites’ ability to prolong the war came, of course, through massive financial and armaments subsidies from the Western imperialist powers. These also landed troops in various areas on the Arctic and Black Sea coasts, hoping to knock out the revolutionary regime quickly. Armed intervention could not be sustained, but the subsidies supported vicious and bloody fighting that lasted until 1921, leaving Russia utterly devastated.

The militant and organised working class that had driven the revolution in 1917 had been all but destroyed by famine, war and industrial collapse. The vibrant democracy of the soviets of 1917 was left as no more than a shell, although there was a limited revival in the early 1920s. The internal democracy of the Bolshevik Party itself had also been fatally compromised by the terrible efforts required to win the civil war, and in the place of the democratic, participatory soviet system of government, an authoritarian bureaucracy had taken shape.

This bureaucracy was in significant part staffed by erstwhile Tsarist officials, and by ex-Mensheviks who had joined the Communist Party in large numbers but retained much of their original mechanistic and fatalistic theoretical outlook. These elements were the base for Stalin’s rise to power, and the consolidation of a new ruling class, in effect a counterrevolution, that eventually destroyed what was left of the old Bolshevik cadres that had survived the civil war. The workers’ state of 1917 was not entirely doomed by the civil war, and the sparks of revolution were still visible in many vibrant aspects of socialist life in the earlier 1920s, but in the end, to survive, the proletarian revolution needed to have become international.

[1] ibid. p.246.

[2] Reed, Ten Days, pp.67-8.

[3] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.254.

[4] ibid. p.261.

[5] ibid. p.268.

[6] Reed, Ten Days, p.111.

[7] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.271.

[8] ibid. p.279.

[9] Reed, Ten Days, p.89.

[10] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.290.

[11] ibid. p.299.

[12] Reed, Ten Days, p.186.

[13] Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, p.294.

[14] ibid. p.294.

[15] ibid. p.304.

[16] Reed, Ten Days, p.161.

[17] ibid. p.185.

[18] ibid. p.187, p.199, p.221.

[19] ibid. p.250.