A People's Tragedy (104 page)

So when the leaders of the railwaymen's union, Vikzhel, issued an ultimatum on 29

October demanding that the Bolsheviks begin talks with the other socialist parties for the formation of an all-Soviet government, they received a great deal of support. To the mass of the workers, it seemed that the whole point of the revolution, as expressed at the Soviet Congress, was the formation of a government of the working people as a whole and not just of one party. Hundreds of factories, garrisons, Front and Fleet assemblies sent petitions to Smolny in support of the Vikzhel plan. The Obukhovsky Factory in Petrograd threatened to 'knock the heads of all the party leaders together' if they failed to reach agreement. The workers in Moscow and other provincial cities, where party factionalism was much less pronounced than in the capital, also expressed strong support. There was a general sense that the party leaders, by squabbling between themselves, were betraying the ideals of the revolution and leading the country towards civil war. Among the soldiers', declared a petition from the 35th Division, 'there are no Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, or SRs, but only Democrats.'35

There were powerful reasons, at least to begin with, for the Bolsheviks to respect Vikzhel's demands. The union's leaders had threatened to bring all the railways to a halt if the inter-party talks did not commence. If this happened the food and fuel supply in the capital, which had already declined to critical levels, would get even worse, looting and rioting would accelerate out of control, and thousands of workers would come out on strike. How long could the Bolsheviks last in this situation? The support of the railways was even more critical for the Bolshevik military campaign on two fronts: against Kerensky's troops on the outskirts of the capital; and in Moscow, where the Bolshevik forces had to fight for power in the streets against loyalist forces.

After his hasty departure from Petrograd on the morning of the 25th, Kerensky had set up his headquarters at Gatchina, the old imperial residence just outside the city. Most of the army commanders, to whom he appealed for help, were reluctant to become involved in a military adventure against the Bolsheviks: it was bound to be seen by the soldiers as 'counter-revolutionary' and, like the Kornilov crisis, could only hasten the collapse of the army. General Cheremisov, Commander of the Northern Front, even cancelled Kerensky's order for troops on the grounds that the Provisional Government no longer existed. Only General Krasnov put his forces —

eighteen Cossack companies — at Kerensky's disposal; while a small force of cadets and officers, organized around the SR-led Committee for the Salvation of Russia and the Revolution, was supposed to rise up in the capital in time for their arrival. The Bolsheviks, however, had even fewer troops prepared to fight than Kerensky. The Petrograd garrison quickly fell apart after the seizure of power, as the mass of the soldiers went on a drunken rampage or fled to their homes in the countryside. The Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd had no direct link with the revolutionary troops at the Front, and even if they had it was doubtful the troops would come out on their call.

According to Reed, Lenin was fully prepared for defeat. His best chance lay with the hold-up of Krasnov's troops, situated around Pskov, by the railway workers, as had happened during the Kornilov crisis. Hence the need to respond to the Vikzhel ultimatum.

In Moscow, meanwhile, power hung in the balance for ten days. The MRC forces were engaged in a bloody street war — the opening shots of the civil war — against the military cadets and student volunteers, who remained loyal to the Provisional Government and were organized by the Moscow city Duma and its Committee of Public Safety. The heaviest fighting took place around the Kremlin, and many of the city's greatest architectural treasures were badly damaged. For ordinary Muscovites, too frightened to leave their homes, these were terrible days. Brusilov's flat was caught in the crossfire, and was used by soldiers of both sides to shoot or signal from the windows. The old man himself was badly wounded in the leg when a hand grenade flew in through the window. He had to be stretchered out to receive treatment in a nearby hospital, while 'bombs and bullets continued to fly in all directions. I prayed all the way that none of them would hit my poor old wife, who walked along by my side.'36 The Moscow Bolsheviks were reluctant fighters — they were much more inclined to resolve the power question through negotiation, as proposed by Vikzhel. Nor were they very good at fighting: the Kremlin was soon lost in the opening battle on the 27th; and two days later the situation had become so bad, with the Bolshevik forces pushed back into the industrial suburbs, that they were frankly glad of the temporary ceasefire enforced by the intervention of Vikzhel. Without victory in Moscow, even Lenin recognized that the Bolsheviks could not retain power on their own. The inter-party talks would have to go ahead.

On 29 October the Central Committee authorized Kamenev to represent the party at the Vikzhel inter-party talks on the platform of Soviet power, as passed at the Second Congress. It was always going to be hard to persuade the right-wing Mensheviks and SRs to accept this, or indeed any partnership with the Bolshevik Party, after their walk-out from the Soviet Congress in protest against the seizure of power. At the opening meeting, confident that the Bolsheviks were on the verge of defeat, they set impossible terms for their involvement in any government: the release of the ministers arrested in the seizure of the Winter Palace; an armistice with Kerensky's troops; the abolition of the MRC; the transfer of the Petrograd garrison to the control of the Duma; and the involvement of Kerensky in the formation of the new administration, which was to exclude Lenin. In short, they were demanding that the clock be put back to 20 October.

No wonder Kamenev sounded glum in his report to the Soviet Congress that evening.

On the next day, however, things began to change. Kerensky's offensive had collapsed overnight, much in the manner of Krymov's earlier assault on Petrograd during the Kornilov crisis. Most of Krasnov's Cossacks, who had always been reluctant to fight without infantry support, simply gave up under a barrage from Bolshevik agitators, while the rest were easily repulsed by the Baltic troops on the Pulkovo Heights just outside the city. The Mensheviks and SRs were forced to soften their terms and agreed to take part in a coalition with the Bolsheviks, provided the leadership of the Soviet was broadened to include members from the First Soviet Congress, the city Dumas, the Peasant Soviet (which was still to convene) and the trade unions. Kamenev agreed and even suggested, in a moment of naive credulity, that the Bolsheviks would not insist on the presence of Lenin or Trotsky in the cabinet. But they had different ideas.

From the start, Lenin and Trotsky had been opposed to the Vikzhel talks: only the prospect of military defeat had brought them to the negotiating table. With the defeat of Kerensky, and even the battle in Moscow now beginning to swing back in their favour, with much of the city centre back in Bolshevik hands and the Kremlin itself under heavy bombardment, they set out to undermine the inter-party talks. At a meeting of the Central Committee on I November Trotsky condemned the compromise agreed by Kamenev and demanded at least 75 per cent of the cabinet seats for the Bolshevik Party:

'there was no point organizing the insurrection if we don't get the majority'. Lenin advocated leaving the talks altogether, or at least continuing with them only as 'a diplomatic cover for the military operations [in Moscow]'. He even demanded the arrest of the Vikzhel leaders as 'counter-revolutionaries' — a typical provocation designed to wreck the talks, along with the arrest and beating up of the SR leaders, Gots and Zenzinov, by Bolshevik sailors, the closure of the Kadet press, and a series of raids on Menshevik and SR newspaper offices. Despite

the objections of several moderate members of the Central Committee, it was agreed to present the Bolshevik platform as an ultimatum to the inter-party talks and abandon them if it was rejected. The SRs and Mensheviks would of course never accept this, as Lenin and Trotsky knew very well. The seizure of power had irrevocably split the socialist movement in Russia, and no amount of negotiation could hope to bridge the gulf. The Vikzhel talks were doomed, and finally broke down on 6 November.37

The chances of a coalition were extremely limited. It was almost certainly too late to resolve the power question by political means. The events of 25 October marked the beginning of the civil war. And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this was precisely what Lenin had wanted all along. He believed that the civil war had started back in August, and that the 'talk talk' of all the moderators just got in the way.

Having secured the dictatorship of his party, Lenin turned next to the task of securing his own dictatorship over the party itself. On 2 November the Central Committee was bullied into passing a series of quite astounding resolutions: Kamenev was accused of

'un-Marxist' activities against the October Revolution; his supporters were ordered to withdraw from the Central Committee; and if they failed to submit to the party's policy against the inter-party talks — submitted in the form of an 'Ultimatum from the majority of the Central Committee to the minority' — were threatened with expulsion from the party altogether. Each member of the Central Committee was dragged before Lenin, in his private office, and told to sign the ultimatum or risk expulsion. As Lunacharsky had warned at a meeting of the Petrograd Bolsheviks on I November, Lenin's bullying tactics would soon lead to a situation where 'only one man would be left in the Party —

the Dictator'. It was a haunting echo of Trotsky's own famous warning, fourteen years before, that the party organization would first substitute itself for the party as a whole, then the Central Committee for the party organization, and then a single dictator for the Central Committee. On 4 November the five-man minority (Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Miliutin and Nogin) finally resigned from the Central Committee. Their open letter of protest appeared in
Lzvestiia
the following day. Alongside it was printed a second letter of protest from five People's Commissars, a third of Lenin's cabinet, four who resigned and six other prominent Bolshevik leaders, in which it was stated that a purely Bolshevik government could be maintained only by means of 'political terror'

and that, if this path was taken, it would lead to 'the establishment of an unaccountable regime and to the destruction of the revolution and the country'.38

This was without doubt one of the most critical moments in the history of the Bolshevik Party. Though Lenin's revolution had been carried out, the party emerged from it hopelessly divided and isolated from the rest of

the revolutionary movement. Few people believed, in its second week, that the Bolshevik regime could survive.

ii
The Smolny Autocrats

Five days after the Bolshevik seizure of power, Alexandra Kollontai, the new People's Commissar of Social Welfare, drove up to the entrance of a large government building on Kazan Street. It had formerly housed the Provisional Government's Ministry of Social Welfare, and she was now coming to take possession of it. An old liveried doorman opened the door and examined Kollontai from head to foot. No woman in Russia had ever been appointed to the head of a ministry before, and, as he looked at her now, he might have been excused for thinking that she was just one more impoverished war widow looking for government aid. Kollontai demanded to see the highest-ranking official in the building, but the old man replied that visiting hours were over for the day.

When she announced that she was the People's Commissar and demanded to be let in, he merely replied that petitioners were received between one and three and that it was already five. Kollontai tried to force her way through, but the doorman blocked her way and closed the doors in her face.

It was hardly an auspicious start to the new regime. The employees of the Ministry had joined a general Civil Servants' strike in protest against the Bolshevik seizure of power, and when Kollontai returned the next morning with a small detachment of soldiers to take over the building she found it almost deserted. Virtually all the officials had joined the anti-Bolshevik strike, and only the doormen, cleaners and messenger boys, who could not afford to go on strike, had turned up for work as usual. Since it was pointless to try to operate from this vacant building, Kollontai returned to the Smolny and set up office in a small room there. The old doorman in Kazan Street redirected the ragged children and widows, the refugees and ruined peasants who came to plead for aid to the Bolshevik headquarters.

The early weeks of the new regime were frustrated by similar strikes and campaigns of sabotage in all the major ministries and government departments, the banks, the post and telegraph office, the railways administration, the municipal bodies, the law courts, schools, universities and other vital institutions. Although these public employees held diverse political views, virtually all were agreed that the Bolshevik regime was illegal and had to be opposed. Trotsky was greeted with ironic laughter when he arrived at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and introduced himself to a meeting of the officials as their new Minister; when he ordered them back to work, they left the building in protest. In the Anichkov Palace, where the country's food supply was administered, the Civil Servants removed all the office
furniture and locked away the account books in the palace safe. In the post and telegraph office they walked off with all the directories and piles of telegram blanks (on which some of them would later write their memoirs). The striking officials of the Medical Department even went so far as to remove the nibs from all the pens.39

The refusal of the State Bank and the Treasury to honour the new government's cash demands was the most serious threat of all. Without money to pay its supporters, the Bolshevik regime could not hope to survive for long. Sovnarkom (the Council of People's Commissars) had made various requests for the transfer of ten million roubles, but each was refused by the bank officials as illegal. On 7 November the new Commissar of Finance, V R. Menzhinsky, appeared at the State Bank with a detachment of sailors and demanded the money; but the bankers stood firm and, despite further armed threats, dismissals and ultimatums, continued their strike. Ten days later the Bolsheviks finally seized control of the bank and forced the employees, at the point of a gun, to open the vaults. Five million roubles were removed, taken off to the Smolny in a velvet bag and deposited on Lenin's desk. The whole operation resembled a bank holdup. The Bolsheviks now took over the State Bank, making it possible for them to dip their hands freely into the nation's coffers; yet none of them had the slightest idea of how such a vast bank worked. 'There were people among us who were acquainted with the banking system from books and manuals,' recalled one of its new directors, 'but there was not a single man among us who knew the technical procedure of the Russian State Bank. We entered the enormous corridors of this bank as if we were penetrating a virgin forest.'40