ISR Issue 60, JulyAugust 2008
CLASSICS OF MARXISM
Leon Trotsky
It would be an obvious mistake to identify the
strength of the Bolshevik party with the strength of the soviets led by it.
The latter was much greater than the former. However, without the former it
would have been mere impotence. There is nothing mysterious in this.
The relations between the party and the Soviet grew out of the disaccord
inevitable in a revolutionary epoch between the colossal political
influence of Bolshevism and its narrow organizational grasp. A lever
correctly applied makes the human arm capable of lifting a weight many
times exceeding its living force, but without the living arm the lever is
nothing but a dead stick.
—Leon Trotsky
History of the Russian Revolution
Part two of a two-part review by AMY MULDOON.
A new edition of Trotsky’s classic is being
published by Haymarket Books this year. Here we present the second of a
two-part series outlining the main features of Trotsky’s work.
The first article, which appeared in ISR 58, took us from the February
Revolution, which brought down the tsarist autocracy and created dual
power between the workers’ councils (soviets) and a capitalist
provisional government (still committed to participation in the world war
and opposed to land reform and workers’ control), to the June
demonstrations that proved the Bolsheviks had won over a majority of
workers in Petrograd to their slogan “All Power to the
Soviets.”
DURING THE months from June to October 1917, Russia was
characterized by growing polarization, aggression from the Right, a
rejuvenation of the soviets, and fusion of the Bolshevik Party with the
soviets. The Bolsheviks saw their star rise as masses of men and women came
into open conflict with the moderate “March
socialists”—Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries
(SR)—in workplaces, barracks, and fields. As these parties of
compromise sharply declined, the bourgeoisie grew tired of their reliance
on the moderate socialists to sell the masses their agenda of profit and
war, and made their attempt at counterrevolution.
The Bolsheviks captured the leadership of the movement
as it radicalized not just by rallying the masses around the most decisive
slogans, but also by steering a course through the political turmoil that
pursuing those slogans produced. The second and third volumes of Leon
Trotsky’s The History of the Russian
Revolution captures this process of
interpenetration of the party and the working class and soldiers.
While the mere influence of revolutionary ideas and
some scattered militants within the rebelling mass were able to overthrow
the monarchy in February, the tasks of October required a far more
centralized operation for a simple reason: February’s struggle
involved elemental revolutionary force to overthrow a hated regime but
brought another minority to power, while October erected workers’
self rule, which necessitated far deeper and broader organization across
the entire class. Necessary for this were both soviets and a cadre of
revolutionaries, united in a party, implanted throughout the class, fully
aware of the historic implications of their actions.
Yet, as Trotsky makes clear, the party was not a united
monolith as the Stalinist mythmakers would have it. Lenin’s rearming
of the party in April did not win over the entire party; there were still
those in the party for whom the idea of a second, socialist revolution, led
by the Bolsheviks and against the will of the moderate socialist parties,
was still anathema. The real motion of the party was not dictated by a
solitary figure (not even Lenin), or clique, but was compelled forward
through a series of internal crises that played out through the
conflicting—and complementary—layers of the party cadres. The
dialectical progress of the party is visible in Trotsky’s version
precisely because the hesitations, mistakes, and debates are not hidden,
but explored in their depth and complexity.
A further insult heaped on the theoretical injuries
dealt to Stalinism throughout Trotsky’s work is the phenomenal role
played by Trotsky himself in the course of events—a reality that
Stalin’s falsifiers later wrote out of Russian history. Trotsky was
elected president of the Petrograd Soviet in September, became the chair of
the Military Revolutionary Committee that organized the October
insurrection, and was the Bolshevik’s most charismatic orator, called
upon in repeated crises to swing a neutral battalion to the side of
revolution or to refute the Compromisers’ slanderous attacks. With
Lenin in hiding for July, August, and September, Trotsky emerged as the central figure in the run-up
to the insurrection. Firmly asserting his own role, however, doesn’t
detract from the centrality he ascribes to Lenin: “Besides the
factories, barracks, villages, the front and the soviets, the revolution
had another laboratory: the brain of Lenin.”1 It is absolutely clear
from Trotsky’s account of the intense polemics against the
conservative “old Bolsheviks” that without Lenin, the party
would not have taken the decisive action on October 25, 1917.
Growing disillusionment
As the spring wore on, the hopes placed in the new
powers, both the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky and the
Central Executive Committee of the Soviet under the leadership of the
Menshevik and SR leaders, wore thin. The June offensive, orchestrated to
appease Russia’s allies in the war in hopes of receiving a
“Liberty Loan,” was an unqualified disaster. Characterizing the
impact of the offensive, Trotsky wrote, “The coalition government
violated in June the de facto armistice that had been established on the
front, throwing the troops into an offensive. By this act the February
regime, already characterized by the declining trust of the masses in the
Compromisers, dealt itself a fatal blow. The period opened of direct
preparation for a second revolution.”2
The economic crisis continued unabated, and the
national debt—fueled by the war—was approaching the value of
Russia’s total wealth, at 70 billion rubles. The increasingly
valueless paper currency churned out by the state printing presses were
named “kerenkies”; both “the bourgeois and the worker,
each in his own way, embodied in that name a slight note of disgust.”3 Factory owners were
deliberately closing down shops as a systematic campaign of sabotage,
resulting in a decline of metal production by 40 percent and textile output
by 20 percent. In the cities the shadow of famine loomed closer, convincing
the participants in the February uprising that the “future contained
no glimmer of hope. This was not what the workers had expected from the
revolution.”4
The months of hardship under a “socialist”
regime of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were taking their toll
politically. While up above the Compromisers vacillated between their
promises to the oppressed classes and their commitment to the bourgeoisie,
the tide below was turning steadily against them. The evidence was
accumulating against the parties of compromise, who dominated the soviet
but refused to assert soviet power against the bourgeoisie and military
ruling classes. Bitterness deepened where it already existed and spread
into new arenas. The Compromisers’ insistence on joining the
bourgeois parties in the Provisional Government opened a deepening rift.
The July Days would decisively sever many from the apron strings of
compromise.
“[Menshevik Minister of the Interior Irakli]
Tseretelli, following Kerensky,” writes Trostky,
had become not only an alien, but a hated figure to
the majority of the Petrograd workers and soldiers. On the fringes of the
revolution was a growing influence of the anarchists…But even more
disciplined layers of workers—even broad circles of the
party—were beginning to lose patience or at least to listen to those
who has lost it. The manifestation of June 18 had revealed to everybody
that the government was without support. “Why don’t they get
busy up there?” the soldiers and workers would ask, having in mind
not only the compromise leaders but also the governing bodies of the
Bolsheviks.5
Anxious over the immanent possibility of being sent to
the front, armed, and “inclined to overestimate the independent power
of a rifle,”6 the soldiers tended to be more impatient than the workers.
The oil of the soldiers’ urgency ran into the sparks of the
workers’ movement, already ignited by the ongoing explosion of prices
and sabotage by the bosses.
By the final days of June the demand for an
immediate transfer of power to the soviets was on the lips of sailors,
soldiers and workers. It was a rallying cry for an end of dual power in
favor of a soviet government. The Bolsheviks, weighing the relatively great
weight of Petrograd against the rest of the empire and front, cautioned
against a premature uprising, which would be isolated and squashed, thereby
setting back the prospects for revolution for the foreseeable future. The
Bolshevik’s paper, Pravda, came out against an uprising: “On the 21st of June, Lenin
appealed in Pravda to
the Petrograd workers and soldiers to wait until events should bring over
the heavy reserves to the side of Petrograd. ‘We understand the
excitement of the Petersburg workers, but we say to them: Comrades, an
immediate attack would be inexpedient.’”7
Tension was only increased when the government
attempted to move machine gunners out of the capital, and in response,
resolutions were passed throughout the barracks, including in previously
passive regiments, calling for the removal, and sometimes arrest, of the
ministers. Almost simultaneously, four Kadet ministers, representing the
party of the liberal bourgeoisie, withdrew from the Coalition Provisional
Government; the Compromisers, they indicated, had not done enough to
restrain the masses. The Kadets thought it better to leave the Compromisers
holding the bag of a failed offensive and collapsing economy; they
“considered it expedient to leave their left allies face to face with
defeat, and with the Bolsheviks.”8 Perhaps faced with an armed uprising, the Kadets
reasoned, the Compromisers would once and for all cease wavering and smash
the workers and soldiers.
On the other side of the equation, leaning as sharply
to the left as the Kadets were yanking to the right, the machine gunners on
the morning of July 3 decided to take decisive action, electing a provisional
revolutionary committee (eclipsing the soviet-affiliated committee) and
ignoring the agitators sent from the Bolsheviks who attempted to lower the
temperature. The roiled-up ranks “had no intention of breaking with
the Soviet; on the contrary, they wanted the Soviet to seize the power.
Still less did the masses intend to break with the Bolshevik Party. But
they did feel the party was irresolute. They wanted to get their shoulder
under it—shake a fist at the Executive Committee, give the Bolsheviks
a little shove.”9
Under the leadership of the machine gunners and their
newly formed committees, workers and soldiers poured into the streets, arms
in hand, completely grinding Petrograd to a halt. The two targets of the
march were the Tauride Palace, home of the Compromisers and their crumpling
government; and the abandoned residence of court ballerina Kshesinskaia,
now used as the headquarters of the Bolshevik Party.
Earlier in the afternoon an expanded Petrograd
Committee of the party had been meeting, agreeing that an armed
manifestation was premature and laying out the necessity to compel the
machine gunners to submit to the advice of the party. Lenin argued that an
armed demonstration was impossible at this time “unless we want a new
revolution.” But their verbal forces of compulsion were no match for
the wave of rebellion crashing on their doorstep. Trotsky describes the
scene:
At eight o’clock in the evening, the Machine Gun
Regiment, and soon after it the Moscow Regiment, came up to the palace of
Kshesinskaia. Popular Bolsheviks—Nevsky, Lashevich,
Podvoisky—speaking from the balcony, tried to send the regiments
home. They were answered from below: Doloi! Doloi! Such cries the Bolshevik
balcony had never yet heard from the soldiers; it was an alarming sign.
Behind the regiments the factories began to march up: “All Power to
the Soviets!” “Down with the ten minister capitalists!”
Those had been the banners of June 18th, but now they were hedged with
bayonets. The demonstration had become a mighty fact. What was to be done?
Could the Bolsheviks possibly stand aside?10
With the “mighty fact” of the demonstration
thronging their gates, the Bolshevik leaders reconsidered. They joined the
procession with the aim of guiding the movement to a peaceful—albeit
heavily armed—march on the Tauride Palace, where delegates from the
procession could present their demands to the Soviet Executive Committee.
The Executive Committee immediately declared the march
an “insurrection,” feeling itself as much under attack as the
Provisional Government they so dearly sought to screen from the angry
masses. Trotsky chides them:
It would be difficult, even with malice aforethought,
to devise a more viscous satire upon the Compromisers. Hundreds of
thousands of demonstrators were demanding the transfer of power to the
soviets. Cheidze, standing at the head of the soviet system and thus the
logical candidate for premier, was hunting for armed forces to employ
against the demonstrators. This colossal movement in favor of power to the
democracy, was denounced by the democratic leaders as an attack upon the
democracy by an armed gang.11
Simultaneously in another part of the Tauride Palace,
the workers’ section of the Petrograd Soviet was meeting in full
session for the first time in weeks, and the impact of months of betrayal
was making itself felt. The Bolsheviks now held almost two-thirds of the
seats. Lev Kamenev, speaking for the Bolsheviks, argued that though the
party did not call out the demonstration, “once the masses have come
out, our place is among them.” He then moved a resolution, backed by
Trotsky, that a committee of twenty-five be elected to lead the movement.
In response, the minority parties of compromise walked out. From this
moment on the Petrograd Soviet would become the leading center of
revolutionary activity.
The clash between the demonstrators and the Executive
Committee came to an anti-climax when the delegates of the procession
forced their admission into a joint session of the Executives. The
ministers declared the movement for soviet power to be
counterrevolutionary. Tseretelli argued, “To go out into the streets
with the demand ‘All Power to the Soviets’—is that to
support the soviets?.… Such a manifestation is not along the road of
revolution, but of counter-revolution.”12 It became starkly clear that the obstacle on the road
to revolution were the people sitting in the driver’s seat, and they
had no intention of putting their foot to the pedal.
As in February, “The masses spent their night
casting the balance of the day’s struggle. But now they did this with
the aid of a complicated system of organizations—factory, party, and
regimental—which conferred continually. In the districts it was
considered self-evident that the movement could not stop half way.”13 The Bolsheviks
again debated whether to attempt to end the movement, by calling for no
demonstration the next day. When they encountered thousands of Putilov
workers and their families marching outside Tauride and camping overnight
on the cobbles, the Bolsheviks finally decided to call out the masses the
following day, urging the protest to be peaceful.
Lenin, who came from Finland where he was resting from
an illness, appeared on the demand of the throngs around Kshenskaia palace
and made a short speech calling for firmness and self-restraint. Again the
protestors approached Tauride, but now better armed and with a clearer
demand for the transfer of power to the soviets. They were joined now by
the sailors of Kronstadt—the island fortress guarding Petrograd.
Socialist Revolutionary minister Chernov was sent out to speak, but he
faced nothing but hostility. Trotsky quotes Miliukov relating “how
‘a husky worker, shaking his fist in the face of the minister,
shouted furiously: “Take the power, you son-of-a-bitch, when they
give it to you.”’ Even though nothing more than an anecdote,
this expresses with crude accuracy the essence of the July
situation.”14 In fact, the Kronstadt sailors were so unimpressed with the
minister’s performance, they attempted to arrest him on the spot and
probably would have lynched him if Trotsky hadn’t been fetched from
within the palace to negotiate his release.
The night finished with no concessions from the
Compromisers and scattered street fighting with right-wing patriots and
anti-Semites. In the bourgeois district around the Nevsky Prospect, police
and provocateurs fired at the protestors from windows and rooftops. Writes
Trotsky, “They were attempting—and not without success—by
firing on the demonstrators to spread panic and produce clashes between the
different military units participating. When the houses from which shots
came were searched, machine gun nests were found, and sometimes also the
gunners.”
The Bolsheviks decided the time was ripe to call off
the demonstration; the “masses ebbed back into the suburbs, and they
cherished no intention of renewing the struggle on the following day. They
felt that the problem of ‘Power to the Soviets’ was
considerably more complicated than had appeared.”15
In the chapter “Could the Bolsheviks Have Seized
Power in July?” Trotsky explains the consciousness of the masses that
fueled a massive rebellion but could not unravel the question of power.
The workers and soldier felt clearly enough the
contrast between their moods and the policy of the Soviet—that is
between their today and their yesterday. In coming out for a government of
the soviets, they by no means gave their confidence to the compromisist
majority in those soviets. But they did not know how to settle with this
majority. To overthrow it by violence would have meant to dissolve the
soviets instead of giving them the power. Before they could find the path
to a change of personal composition of the soviets, the workers and
soldiers tried to subject the soviets to their will by the method of direct
action.
The executive bodies of the soviets were characterized
by an institutional inertia; staffed by the “March socialists,”
they did not reflect the radicalization of those who had voted for them. In
reality they actively resisted their constituents. But during the July
Days, the immense power of the radical masses could be felt and the
impotence of the Compromisers was apparent to all. In that context, should
the Bolsheviks have simply seized the power themselves, supplanting the
conservative leadership of the soviets? Trotsky answers that, having seized
power, they would not have been able to hold it, because even in Petrograd,
the workers “still had not broken the February umbilical chord
attaching it to the Compromisers. Many still cherished the illusion that
everything could be obtained by words and demonstrations—by
frightening the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries you could get them
to carry out a common policy with the Bolsheviks. Even the advanced
sections of the class had no clear idea by which roads it was possible to
arrive at the power.”16
The rest of the country and the front, moreover, were
not as intensely disillusioned as the capital. The offensive would not
fully collapse until July 6, and the full scale of the disaster would take
time to seep into popular consciousness. The ability of the capital to hold
out in the face of counterrevolution would be heavily influenced by the
support, or lack of support, of the provinces and the depth of disaffection
within the military.
Unlike the demonstrations in April, which forced the
most hated Kadet, Miliukov, out of the government, after the July Days
Lenin was forced into hiding in Finland. Trotsky explains that it reflected
a process of polarization in which the petty-bourgeois democrats were
driven toward the bourgeoisie:
The more the workers and soldiers closed up around the
Bolsheviks, the more resolutely were the Compromisers compelled to support
the bourgeoisie. In April the leaders of the Executive Committee, worrying
about their own influence, could still come one step to meet the masses and
throw Miliukov overboard—supplying him, to be sure, with a reliable
life-belt. In July the Compromisers joined the bourgeoisie and the officers
in raiding the Bolsheviks. The change in the correlation of forces was thus
caused this time, too, by a shift of the least stable of political forces,
the petty bourgeois democracy—its abrupt shift to the side of the
bourgeois counter-revolution.17
Month of reaction
The shift on the part of the Compromisers led to a
fanatical witch hunt against the Bolsheviks. “The demand for slanders
against the Bolsheviks,” Trotsky writes, “reached such
intensity that a supply could not fail to turn up.”18 Documents and testimonies
were “found” that “proved” Lenin to be a paid
German agent. The logic of the attack on the Bolshevik-led July
demonstrations as “counterrevolutionary” erupted into an
attempt to liquidate the party. The first target was the mansion where the
Bolsheviks had established their headquarters, which they were forced at
gunpoint to vacate. On July 13 the Executive Committee banned the Bolshevik
Party. The printing presses of the party were smashed and publication of
the party papers became erratic, and a formal investigation of the
Bolsheviks was initiated, including a call for the arrest of its key
leaders. The Ministry of Justice issued indictments for treason against
Lenin, Zinoviev, Kollontai, and other Bolshevik leaders. Trotsky and
Lunacharsky were arrested.
The official campaign of slander opened up a wide space
for gangs of rightist thugs to attack and beat Bolsheviks and other
radicals. A young Bolshevik worker, Voinov, was murdered in the street
while distributing leaflets. While the reaction raged in the capital and
Lenin fled the pogrom atmosphere, the moderate leaders such as Tseretelli
admitted under pressure that there was no truth to the accusations that
Lenin was in cahoots with the Germans. But they did nothing to quell the
right-wing backlash for which they had opened the gates.
Many Bolsheviks, including Lenin himself, initially
overestimated the strength of the counterrevolution; but the reaction
proved to have a fleeting character. The actions of the Compromisers, as
they again sought the allegiance within the government of the bourgeoisie
by attacking workers and peasants, caused another reversal. Just as a wave,
flowing back on itself for a moment pauses in balance, the oppressed
classes paused in the face of the right-wing onslaught, but would return
with greater energy, crashing into the forces of reaction with irresistible
momentum.
Counterrevolution lifts its head
While the Compromisers made amends with the Kadets,
they also realized that their power in the last instance relied on the
soviets. Trotsky writes they were “torn between the necessity of
reviving their half-friendship with the bourgeoisie, and the need of
softening the hostility of the masses. Tacking became for them a form of
existence. Their zigzags became a feverish tossing to and fro, but the
fundamental line kept swinging to the right.”19
The Provisional Government was reorganized again in
early July; with the Kadets out, it now was fully dominated by ministers
from the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. Instead of being the
“realization of the slogan of the June Days, ‘Down with the ten
minister capitalists,’” it was “only an exposure of its
inadequacy. The minister-democrats took the power only in order to bring
back the minister-capitalists.”20 They immediately opened negotiations with the Kadets,
who threw down a package of ultimatums: “independence” of the
Provisional Government from the soviets; reinstating the death penalty at
the front; abolition of soldiers’ committees.
The Kadets and upper military brass used the leverage
of the worsening situation at the front to push their demands. A favorite
of the Kadets, General Lavr Kornilov was promoted to commander of the armed
forces; he declared his own demands, including imposition of the death
penalty in the rear as well. His program for “salvation” upon
receiving the command consisted of militarization of factories and
railroads, complete destruction of all soldiers’ organization within
the military, and bringing the disobedient Petrograd garrison under the
direct command of headquarters, thus robbing the soviet of any influence.
Kornilov was dull-witted and brutal: “Without
waiting for the legal introduction of the death penalty, Kornilov here gave
orders to shoot deserters and set up their corpses on the road with an
inscription, threatened the peasants with severe penalties for violating
the proprietary rights of the landlords, created shock battalions, and on
every appropriate occasion, shook his fist at Petrograd.”21 His comrade in arms,
General Alexeiev described him as a “man with a lion’s heart
and the brain of a sheep.”22 The desire of the upper classes for a savior against
encroaching workers’ power was an open secret; in Kornilov these
sectors invested all their dreams of liquidating the Bolsheviks as well as
the soviets.
In order to impress upon the population the newly
forged “national unity,” Kerensky organized a state conference
for August 12–14 in Moscow, which was notable for its
over-representation of the rich and ruling classes. It was also notable for
the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the
“partners”—Kornilov and Kerensky—against each
other. Both wanted “order,” but the democrats nursed their
illusions of a bourgeois republic while the Kadet/military bloc sharpened
their knives for a full civil war against all vestiges of the revolution.
The contradictions inherent in the situation were ripening; the cleavages
of society were expressed within the very body meant to bridge the gap.
Soldiers and workers saw the state conference for what
it was: a direct threat to soviet power. In response, the trade unions and
local soviets of Moscow called a general strike, organizing without the
support of the compromise-dominated citywide Moscow Soviet. The strike
plunged Moscow into darkness when the electrical workers downed the
city’s lights—a fitting symbol of the relation between the
power of those gathered at the conference and those out on the street. The
strike’s overwhelming success surprised even the Bolsheviks who were
central to promoting the action, and it reflected their impressive rebound
after five weeks of harassment. The new Bolshevik paper, The Proletarian, snarled at the
conference attendees, “From Petrograd you went to Moscow—where
will you go from there?”23
Kornilov’s (and Kerensky’s) plot
Kornilov and his clique had chosen August 27 as the day
for a decisive blow against the capital. The pretext was to be a Bolshevik
“insurrection,” goaded into existence through the imposition of
martial law in the capital and if necessary by provocateurs posing as
Bolsheviks. Kerensky was fully party to it. Trotsky explains:
The events, the documents, the testimony of the
participants, and finally the confession of Kerensky himself, unanimously
bear witness that the Minister-President, without the knowledge of a part
of his own government, behind the back of the soviets which had given him
the power, in secrecy from the party of which he considered himself a
member, had entered into agreement with the highest generals of the army
for a radical change in the state régime with the help of armed
forces.24
Under the pretext of protecting the capital following
the capture of nearby Riga by German troops, three “loyal”
divisions were moved closer to Petrograd to set the stage for
Kornilov’s coup. In the early morning hours of August 28, troops
began their march on Petrograd, and reports filtered into the Executive
Committee, terrifying the democrats through the day. The fateful moment had
arrived for which Kerensky had schemed, though now he acted shocked at what
he had unleashed.
Gripped with fear upon realizing that Kornilov fully
intended to install himself as dictator and to wipe out not only the
soviets and all the parties associated with them, but also the Provisional
Government, Kerensky did an abrupt about-face. He dismissed Kornilov and
ordered his troops to halt—both orders Kornilov promptly ignored.
Kerensky, now completely isolated, had no forces of his own, no loyal
masses he could call upon in his defense; but luckily for Kerensky,
Kornilov had even fewer.
The Bolsheviks understood that while Kerensky was
poisoning the revolution, Kornilov had put a gun to its head. The more
immediate threat had to be dealt with before the revolution could deal with
the slower acting threat. During the defense of Petrograd, sailors came to
Trotsky, who was still in prison as a result of the July Days, and ask him
what they should do. “Use Kerensky as a gun-rest to shoot
Kornilov,” advised Trotsky. “Afterward we will settle with
Kerensky.”25
Despite the bluster about needing only “a couple
of loyal battalions” to wipe out the nest of Bolshevism in the
capital—which became the grumbled anthem of the declining upper
classes—the counterrevolutionary offensive melted away as it
approached Petrograd. Even Kornilov himself seemed to doubt the chances of
success and stayed a safe distance in a military installation outside the
capital. Trotsky quotes conservative French journalist Claude Anet: Asking
Kornilov why he “did not go to Petrograd at the decisive moment, the
chief of the conspiracy answered: ‘I was sick. I had a serious attack
of malaria, and was not in possession of my usual energy.’”26
The failure of the coup arose from its complete
isolation in Russian society; the arrogance of Kornilov’s clique led
them to believe that the oppressed needed only to feel the whip from a
strong hand to abandon the revolution. “On the contrary,”
Trotsky writes, “the masses were as if only awaiting a blow of the
whip in order to show what sources of energy and self-sacrifice were to be
found in their depths. This mistake in estimating the mood of the masses
brought all their other calculations to the dust.”27
Not everyone was miscalculating the mood. The
Bolsheviks, having made an amazing rebound after several weeks of
persecution,
had foreseen and forewarned, and they were the first
to appear at their posts…At a night session of the Military
Organization of the Bolsheviks, participated in by delegates of numerous
military detachments, it was decided to demand the arrest of all
conspirators, to arm the workers, to supply them with soldier instructors,
to guarantee the defense of the capital from below, and at the same time to
prepare for the creation of a revolutionary government of workers and
soldiers.28
While counterrevolutionaries were plotting, a new
soviet body was formed, the Committee of Struggle against
Counter-Revolution, made up of representatives from the three soviet
parties, the trade unions, and from the Bolshevik-dominated Petrograd
Soviet. Trotsky describes it, quoting the omni-present Menshevik Sukhanov:
“Notwithstanding the fact that they were in a
minority,” writes Sukhanov, “it was quite clear that in the
[Committee of Struggle against Counter-Revolution] the leadership belonged
to the Bolsheviks.” He explains this as follows: “If the
committee wanted to act seriously, it was compelled to act in a
revolutionary manner,” and for revolutionary action “only the
Bolsheviks had genuine resources,” for the masses were with them.
Intensity in the struggle has everywhere and always brought forth the more
active and bolder elements. This automatic selection inevitably elevated
the Bolsheviks, strengthened their influence, concentrated the initiative
in their hands, giving them de facto leadership even in those organizations
where they were in a minority. The nearer you came to the district, to the
factory, to the barrack, the more complete and indubitable was the
leadership of the Bolsheviks…A tie was formed from below, from the
shop, leading through the districts, to the Central Committee of the party.29
The character of the defense of Petrograd was a
brilliant illustration of both the political and organization maturation of
the workers and soldiers since February. The soviets, which had atrophied
under the pressure of the Compromisers, burst back to life, with the local
levels assuming new powers and leaping to take initiatives. The factory
committees and unions also asserted their powers: “railroad workers
tore up and barricaded the tracks in order to hold back Kornilov’s
army…The postal and telegraph clerks began to hold up and send to the
Committee [for Struggle against Counter-Revolution] telegrams and orders
from headquarters, or copies of them. The generals had been accustomed
during the years of war to think of transport and communications as
technical questions. They found out now that these were political
questions.”30
The generals also learned that those troops they
believed to be loyal were more often simply uninformed of their goals. They
mistook the soldiers’ hatred of Kerensky for indifference over the
fate of the government. Trotsky explains: “The resistance to the
rebels grew out of the very road beds, out of the stones, out of the
air.”31 Soldiers and railroad workers fraternized, and even the
Cossacks refused to move against Petrograd.
The universal nature of the sabotage and agitation was
an indubitable expression of the allegiance the masses had to the
revolution—and a desire to deepen it. Kerensky’s attempt to
embrace the right against “left anarchism” ironically did
decrease the “anarchism” of the Left but by reenergizing it and
weaving greater bonds of organization. The Left would be more unified,
homogenous, and effective from this moment on, because it was more closely
wedded to the Bolshevik Party—both in political outlook and through
the multiple party organizations.
The soviets returned to their stature of the spring.
Lenin, who after July had briefly considered dropping the slogan “All
Power to the Soviets” because they had become so atrophied under
moderate control, now wrote,
Let those of little faith learn from this example.
Shame on those who say, “We have no machine with which to replace
that old one which gravitates inexorably to the defense of the
bourgeoisie.” For we have a machine. And that is the soviets. Do not
fear the initiative and independence of the masses. Trust the revolutionary
organizations of the masses, and you will see in all spheres of the state
life that same power, majesty and unconquerable will of the workers and
peasants, which they have shown in their solidarity and enthusiasm against
Kornilovism.32
In the weeks that separated the July defeat of the
workers from August’s smashing of the counterrevolution, the
Bolsheviks had undergone a tremendous rebound. The industrialists of
Petrograd took the persecution of the Bolsheviks as a green light to
undermine workers’ power through sabotage—flooding mines,
smashing machines, hoarding materials, and disabling locomotives were all
attested to by workers struggling to keep the capital working. In many
factories and barracks the Bolsheviks found themselves, albeit only for a
couple of weeks, isolated and shunned. While in the major
cities—especially in the best-organized shops and
industries—the mood was declining, among the more backward sections
and in the provinces, new waves of struggle were emerging—including
among workplaces dominated by women—that fed new energy into the
movement overall.
The suppression of the Bolsheviks in reality only
lasted about three or four weeks. The offensive from the bosses, the
attempts at disarming the working class and re-imposing discipline in the
army, and the swift shift to the right by the government brought forth a
reaction from workers and soldiers that drew the working class closer to
the Bolsheviks. The leftward moving consciousness lacked the visible
explosiveness of July, but below the surface the resolve to fight through
to the end was increasing. Conflicts between local soviets and non-soviet
bodies, and upper and local soviets (as in the Moscow strike), became
bitter. The complexion of the soviets changed as well; by early September
the Bolsheviks had won majorities in both the Petrograd and Moscow soviets,
and even in soviets where they were numerically still weak in delegate
strength, Bolshevik slogans carried the day. On September 1 the Petrograd
Soviet voted for the creation of a government of workers and peasants, with
solid backing from the rank and file of the compromisist factions.
In the midst of an increased polarization, the
compromise parties organized a “Democratic Conference” in order
to restabilize a center and bring the Kadets into their project of creating
a national representative bourgeois government. The representation at the
conference was apportioned by the Compromisers to assure their desired
outcome. This “Pre-Parliament,” as it was called, would be the
last attempt the petty bourgeoisie would get at creating a
“democracy”—which existed for the explicit purpose of
eliminating the Bolsheviks. But as Miliukov pondered, “The fatal
question presented itself: Is it not too late to declare war on the
Bolsheviks?” Trotsky answers:
And indeed it actually was too late. On the day the
new government was formed, with six bourgeois and ten semi-socialist
ministers, the Petrograd Soviet completed the formation of a new Executive
Committee, consisting of thirteen Bolsheviks, six Social Revolutionaries
and three Mensheviks. The Soviet greeted the governmental coalition with a
resolution introduced by its new president, Trotsky. “The new
government...will go into the history of the revolution as the civil war
government...The news of the formation of the government will be met by the
whole revolutionary democracy with one answer: Resign! Relying upon this
unanimous voice of the authentic democracy, the All-Russian Congress of
Soviets will create a genuinely revolutionary government.” The enemy
tried to see in this resolution a mere ritual vote of non-confidence. In
reality it was a program of revolution. Exactly a month was required for
its realization.33
Two other tributaries of revolutionary energy
Outside of the cities and away from the front, the
gigantic engine of the rural upheaval began to run hotter. The February
promise of land to the peasants was betrayed and diluted at every turn; in
response, local land committees formed to take matters into their own
hands. Up until July the self-activity of the peasants was tamped down by
visits from government spokespeople who told them to “wait for the
convocation of the Constituent Assembly,” an event they deliberately
kept postponing. After the July defeat in the capital, the government was
more confident to send cavalry into the countryside to
“persuade” angry peasants not to confiscate land by force of
arms.
The party of the peasants, the Socialist
Revolutionaries, was dominated by the upper layers of the peasantry who
“got tangled up in a coalition”34 and were beholden to a government rife with landowners and
the bankers to whom they owed billions of rubles. The Socialist
Revolutionaries “went to pieces, therefore, not on the Utopian
character of their socialism, but on their democratic inconsistency. It
might have taken years to test out their Utopianism. Their betrayal of
agrarian democracy became clear in a few months. Under a government of
Social Revolutionaries the peasants had to take the road of insurrection in
order to carry out the Social Revolutionary program.”35 One historian cited
by Trotsky counted 4,954 agrarian conflicts against landlords between
February and October.
The scorched-earth tactics of ancient peasant
rebellions—razing the manor house, killing the resistant lords,
ousting clerical parasites, setting fire to landlords’ forests, and
plundering granaries—was largely independent of the urban movement
for the first months of the revolution. But the initiatives of workers in
the cities to contact family in the provinces and of deserting soldiers
returning home brought both political and organizational advances to the
rural upheaval. The name of Lenin and the program of the Bolsheviks became
common knowledge.
The fusion of the two revolutionary
currents—proletarian and peasant—proved irresistible. Trotsky
writes:
The 17th, 18th and 19th centuries of Russian history climbed up on the shoulders of
the 20th,
and bent it to the ground. The weakness of this belated bourgeois
revolution was manifested in the fact that the peasant war did not urge the
bourgeois revolutionists forward, but threw them back conclusively into the
camp of reaction. Tseretelli, the hard-labor convict of yesterday, defended
the estates of the landlords against anarchy! The peasant revolution, thus
rejected by the bourgeoisie, joined hands with the industrial proletariat.
In this way the 20th century not only got free of those past centuries
hanging upon it, but climbed up on their shoulders to a new historic level.
In order that the peasant might clear and fence his land, the worker had to
stand at the head of the state: that is the simplest formula for the
October revolution.36
In addition to Russia’s late development
retarding the alleviation of the suffering of millions of peasants, Russia
was also a powder keg of oppressed national minorities, conquered and
annexed over centuries. Within Russia’s imperial borders, 57 percent
of the population was non-Russian. Instead of capitalist development in
Russia integrating the multi-ethnic society, it codified ethnic and
national distinctions, creating specific oppressions to keep the
nationalities divided.
With the coming of the February Revolution, the hope
for liberation for the second-class citizens of Russia was similarly raised
and dashed by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who used the
claim of “unity” to deny long-denied national rights:
The compromisist democracy merely translated
traditions of the czarist national policy into the language of libertarian
rhetoric: it was now a question of defending the unity of the revolution.
But the ruling coalition had also another more pointed argument: wartime
expediency. This meant that the aspirations of individual nationalities
toward freedom must be portrayed as the work of the Austro-German General
Staff. Here too the Kadets played first violin and the Compromisers second.37
The Bolshevik program, formulated primarily by Lenin,
embraced the genuine rebellions of the oppressed nationalities as
inherently democratic movements that could contribute to the development of
the workers’ revolution by helping to shake the ruling class. The
Bolsheviks’ recognition of the right of self-determination for
oppressed minorities formed the basis for an internationalism between
equals, not the false internationalism of the liberals who claimed to be
acting against reactionary national divisions in order to continue the
exploitation of the empire’s national minorities. Because of the
duplicity of the Compromisers, and the fear of rising class struggle
driving the bourgeoisie of the subject nations into the arms of Great
Russia, the national aspirations of the oppressed flowed into the channel
of the October revolution.
Pre-Parliament versus Soviet Congress
The Pre-Parliament, with its lopsided allotment of the
most privileged layers of society, convened on October 7. The Bolsheviks,
after much internal dissent, walked out, following a fiery speech by
Trotsky that denounced the Right’s plan to abandon the capital to a
German advance—a transparent attempt to cut out the heart of the
revolution and toss it to the wolves. When it came to the survival of their
class rule, the Russian ruling class was willing to accept German conquest.
The Pre-Parliament was characterized by total
paralysis; the Right, dominated by the Kadets, argued the only way forward
was through repression and violence. The “Left” argued that
only under the cover of February’s slogans could Russian society
restabilize itself and drain the revolution of its energy. The Compromisers
wanted the bourgeoisie to rule, but only within the confines of a republic;
the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, wanted a military dictatorship to
restore bourgeois order. The impasse lasted for days on every issue brought
to the floor.
As they fiddled, Russia burned. The situation in the
army had taken a decisive turn; in July, the question of the attitude of
the front to the uprising had been decisive—in the negative sense.
But now, three months later, the front was a beehive of insubordination,
fraternization, and rebellion. There too, like the cities and the town, the
slogans of Bolshevism caught fire. Trotsky writes,
The mass would no longer endure in its midst the
wavering, the dubious, the neutral. It was striving to get hold of
everybody, to attract, to convince, to conquer. The factories joined with
the regiments in sending delegates to the front. The trenches got into
connection with the workers and peasants near by in the rear. In the towns
along the front there was an endless series of meetings, conferences,
consultations in which the soldiers and sailors would bring their activity
into accord with that of the workers and peasants. It was in this manner
that the backward White Russian front was won over to Bolshevism.38
The Bolsheviks gained majorities in one soviet election
after another, yet the Central Executive Committee remained the same. Only
a Second All Russian Congress of Soviets could rectify this disjuncture; in
fact it had been agreed upon in September at the Democratic Conference to
meet on October 20. In the face of a growing wave of Bolshevik victories
and scores of resolutions declaring the Soviet the sole power in the land,
the Compromisers attempted to stall. The Central Executive Committee
succeeded in postponing the Congress to the October 25, but the Bolsheviks
capitalized on their foot dragging to launch a campaign for the All Russia
Congress, which only propelled them further as the representatives of
soviet rule.
The question of insurrection
The decisive turn of the Compromisists in the July
crisis finally ended any thought that the power could be transferred
peacefully to the soviets; an armed insurrection would be needed. Within
the party, a debate about the viability of the slogan “All Power to
the Soviets” given their depleted state lasted until their sudden
return to prominence in the August crisis.39 The role of the local soviets, and their dramatic
change in complexion brought them back into the center of Bolshevik
strategy, but as the crisis in Russia deepened, the leadership of the
Bolshevik Party was divided on the immediate prospects for revolution.
As the Bolsheviks gained momentum across the country in
September, Lenin launched a polemic that preparation for armed
insurrection, and the need to set a date, was the central task facing the
party. He faced a strong current of conservatism, based both from
immediate, experiential causes, and deeper, theoretical ones as well. Among
comrades who were closest to the heat of the July conflagration, there was
a short-lived fear of a premature action that would fully wreck the party.
Their fears were overcome by a new set of experiences: rising class anger
and deepening identification with the need for a new Soviet Congress under
the banner of “All Power to the Soviets.”
But a stronger current against insurrection developed
within the highest level of the party and was carried by some of the oldest
Bolsheviks on the Central Committee. Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were
leaders of the party from the earliest days and two of Lenin’s
closest comrades. But in the days approaching the Congress, they violently
opposed the notion of an immediate socialist revolution in speeches and
party organs (which Trotsky points out were published with no interference
by Pravda’s editor,
Stalin). In essence, they had not broken from the pre-April formulation:
that Russia was only ripe for a bourgeois democracy, not workers’
power.
Lenin blasted the Central Committee from his hideout
with letter after letter demanding each time an immediate shift to making
an insurrection. The Central Committee was shocked and startled. Trotsky
quotes leading Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin: “The letter (of
Lenin) was written with extraordinary force and threatened us with all
sorts of punishments. We all gasped. Nobody had yet posed the question so
abruptly…At first all were bewildered. Afterwards, having talked it
over, we made a decision. Perhaps that was the sole case in the history of
our party when the Central Committee decided to burn a letter of
Lenin.”40
This was in mid-September, while the Democratic
Conference was convened; in fact, Lenin suggested a march on the Conference
in order to arrest the government in one fell swoop. The intensity of
Lenin’s conviction that the window of opportunity for the
insurrection was open, if only for a short time, led him to the most
extraordinary measures. On October 8 he resigned from the Central Committee
in protest of the suppression and editing of his writings, freeing himself
to agitate directly among the ranks of the membership in favor of immediate
seizure of power. His resignation was not accepted, but he did reach out to
the local leadership of the Bolsheviks; his letters found their way
“into the hands of the more reliable party workers of the district
locals. Early in October—and now over the heads of the Central
Committee—Lenin wrote directly to the Petrograd and Moscow
Committees.”41 This had the effect of lighting the fire more directly
under the Central Committee. The realization that Lenin had been advocating
for insurrection for weeks without the local cadres’ knowledge
generated an internal and irresistible pressure that also raised the
confidence of a section of the Central Committee to advocate arming for
insurrection.
Lenin moved to force a decision in a meeting of the
Central Committee on October 10. The meeting lasted ten hours, with twelve
of the twenty-one members of the Central Committee present. Ironically,
they met in the house of a Bolshevik who was married to the Menshevik
chronicler of the revolution, Sukhanov.42 From a debilitated and split central body, the
Bolsheviks emerged from this marathon session with a resolution placing
preparation for armed insurrection as their key task. The final resolution
included an accounting of the simultaneous crises of international
bourgeois forces and the Russian military, the peasant revolt, the rallying
of the masses to Bolshevik slogans, and the intention of the far right to
again take Petrograd. These were the factors, it was resolved, which made
immediate action necessary, and favorable.
The debate was not finished; the resolution sharpened
the conflict within the leadership, but with this difference: the right
wing was now in a minority, and the party swung into practical preparation,
though far slower than Lenin liked. Without his continual prodding, the
party would have acted far slower than it did. Zinoviev and Kamenev
continued to protest and argue—including publishing an attack on the
party’s preparations in Maxim Gorky’s newspaper, a deliberate
breach of party discipline for which Lenin called them “strike
breakers”—and Stalin continued to uncritically publish their
articles.
Insurrection and revolution
The Bolsheviks had learned a crucial lesson in the
defeats and victories of July and August: the broadest layers of the masses
would mobilize behind the defense of the revolution. Therefore, an insurrection would
stand the greatest chance of success, and share the greatest degree of
support, if it was accomplished in response to an attack on the gains of
the revolution. The progression of dual power into open hostility made such
an opportunity inevitable.
The Petrograd Soviet moved to create a body within the
military that could prepare for the transformation of the struggle from the
defensive to the offensive. “The formulae were all-inclusive and at
the same time ambiguous: they almost all balanced on a fine line between
defense of the capital and armed insurrection. However, these two tasks,
heretofore mutually exclusive, were now in actual fact growing into one.
Having seized the power, the soviet would be compelled to undertake the
military defense of Petrograd. The element of defense-camouflage was not,
therefore, violently dragged in, but flowed to some extent from the
conditions preceding the insurrection.”43 The Military Revolutionary Committee became the fulcrum
of the preparation for an insurrection.
The ground the insurrection would come to be made on
was the contested territory of who controlled the Petrograd Garrison. Dual
power achieved its greatest friction over the control of the army, as any
state power ultimately rests on the real ability to command armed forces.
The Right had lost any ground it gained in July and August after the
Kornilov debacle; they needed to counter the growing Bolshevization of the
army and the fleet. The government hoped to provoke a conflict between the
front and the rear by suggesting that revolutionary forces in the city were
betraying their brothers at the front out of selfishness, not refusing to
fight the war on principle. This strategy dramatically backfired: the
soldiers outright refused the notion of preparing for a winter campaign,
the workers took their side, and “this drew together the two sections
of the Soviet. The regiments began to support most heartily the demand that
the workers be armed.”44
In response to a proposal that regiments be transferred
to neighboring Reval, the Bolshevik sailor Dybenko, head of Centrobalt (the
Baltic Fleet Central Committee), speaking at the soldiers’ section of
the soviet, said, “Don’t believe a word of it. We will defend
Reval ourselves. Stay here and defend the interests of the
revolution.”45 The following vote took up the issue of the newly
formed Military Revolutionary Committee, which would effectively become the
administrator of the garrison. No orders were to be obeyed that were not
countersigned by their authority. The Compromisers had boycotted the
creation of the new committee; therefore it was staffed by the Bolsheviks
and the break-away Left Social Revolutionaries. In practice, however, it
was a Bolshevik body through and through. Trotsky, recently elected
president of the Petrograd Soviet, also led the Committee.
In effect, the soldiers’ delegates were voting
for an end to dual power in the military, and for the Petrograd Soviet to
have sole direction over the regiments stationed in Petrograd through the
vehicle of the Military Revolutionary Committee—cutting the legs out
from underneath the government and the Executive Committee. The Bolshevik
strategy was to amass as much real organizational, governmental strength on
the side of the workers and soldiers in advance of an insurrection, thereby
bolstering their chances of success.
Summoning the revolution
Lenin had been polemicizing for an armed seizure of
power as early as the Democratic Convention in September, and to do so
through the party, not through the soviets. He saw the deep conservatism on
the party’s own Central Committee and the Compromisers’
influence over the highest soviet bodies while the opportunity for
insurrection was growing sharply, and he was deeply concerned that the
party might let the window of opportunity pass. He argued the ground must
be cleared for the Second Congress to fulfill its mandate to become the
sole governing body in Russia; in order for this to happen, the government
had to be overthrown before the congress opened.
Lenin’s formulation was “First conquer
Kerensky and then summon the Congress.”46 It was an illusion to believe that just because the
Bolshevik slogans were the majority, the Compromisers would not attempt at
every turn to paralyze and sabotage the Congress, pushing it back toward
some coalition with the bourgeoisie. Breaking the Compromisers’ and
bourgeoisie’s power outside the soviet was necessary to disarm them inside the soviet. For Lenin,
whether the party or a soviet body organized the revolution did not change
the outcome. But in the course of October, the soviets moved dramatically
to the left in outlook and makeup. The party leadership closest to the
masses (including Trotsky himself) argued that the greatest support for
immediate action would come if the call to action was issued by the soviet
rather than the party. Trotsky wrote of the relationship of the
Bolsheviks to the soviets:
The party set the soviets in motion, the soviets set
in motion the workers, soldiers, and to some extent the peasantry. What was
gained in mass was lost in speed. If you represent this conducting
apparatus as a system of cog-wheels—a comparison to which Lenin had
recourse at another period on another theme—you may say that the
impatient attempt to connect the party wheel directly with the gigantic
wheel of the masses—omitting the medium-sized wheel of the
soviets—would have given rise to the danger of breaking the teeth of
the party wheel, and nevertheless not setting sufficiently large masses in
motion.47
Yet, at the same time, Lenin’s constant prodding
to get on with the task of insurrection, though his tactical advice was
flawed, was absolutely crucial in pushing the party into action. The
right-wing minority continued to organize against insurrection up to the
last minute, exaggerating the enemies’ strength and downplaying the
readiness of the working class for decisive action. In the end, only action
could decide who was right. “In revolutionary
calculations,” writes Trotsky, “statistics alone are not
enough; the co-efficient of living action is also essential.”48
Illusions and final wishes
With the opening of the Congress postponed to the 25th, the Compromisers
continued to live in their self-deceiving bubble. Believing they had a
shadow of support left, the government decided to move against the Military
Revolutionary Committee, to close down the pro-insurrection Bolshevik
papers, and to summon “reliable” military detachments to the
capital. They backed off from arresting the Military Revolutionary
Committee, but it made no difference. The rumor of the government action
flew through the streets, awakening revolutionary anger. The Bolshevik
press was successfully smashed up and sealed off, but only for a couple of
hours. “The seals were torn from the building, the moulds poured
again, and the work went on. With a few hours’ delay the newspaper
suppressed by the government came out under protection of the troops of a
committee which was itself liable to arrest. That was insurrection. That is
how it developed.”49
The feeble attacks of the government allowed the
Bolshevik-led Military Revolutionary Committee to begin down the road of
insurrection. Because conflicts had erupted periodically throughout
the whole two-power period, the parties of the Right and Compromise did not
at first respond as if to a revolution but simply more shifting of power
from foot to foot.
The real insurrection began at two in the morning on
October 25. Simultaneously the railroad stations, the lighting plant, the
munition and food stores, the water plant, the state bank, the large
presses, the telegraph exchange, the post office, and the major bridges
were occupied. Trotsky recounts one of many “seizures” which
were really more announcements of the coming soviet regime, and welcome
announcements at that:
The printing-plant was needed to issue the Bolshevik
paper in large format and with a big circulation. The soldiers had already
lain down to sleep. The commissar briefly told them the object of his
visit. “I hadn’t stopped talking when a shout of
‘Hurrah!’ went up on all sides. The soldiers were jumping out
of their bunks and crowding around me in a close circle.” A truck
loaded with Semenovtsi approached the printing-plant. The workers of the
night-shift quickly assembled in the rotary-press room. The commissar
explained why he had come. “And here, as in the barracks, the workers
answered with shouts of ‘Hurrah! Long live the Soviets!’”
The job was done. In much the same manner the other institutions were
seized. It was not necessary to employ force, for there was no resistance.
The insurrectionary masses lifted their elbows and pushed out the lords of
yesterday.50
The “lord of yesterday,” Kerensky, showed
his true colors upon realizing the insurrection was a fact: he fled.
“‘It is needless to say,’” Trotsky quotes Kerensky,
“‘that the whole street—both passers by and the
soldiers—immediately recognized me. I saluted as always, a little
carelessly and with an easy smile.’” To which Trotsky comments:
“Incomparable picture! Carelessly and smiling—thus the February
regime passed into the kingdom of shades.”51
The remnants of the government huddled in the Winter
Palace, hopelessly wishing for some salvation as they awaited the
inevitable siege of the palace. Trotsky describes their paralysis:
“The ministers were sick at heart. There was nothing to talk about,
nothing to hope for. The ministers disagreed with each other and with
themselves. Some sat still in a kind of stupor, others automatically paced
up and down the floor.”52
The twelve-hour siege of the Winter Palace dragged on
not because of the strength of the resistance, but a combination of an
over-complicated military plan and a sincere desire to not have to use
force at all. Constant delays arose as features of the plan didn’t
come off and the organizers of the siege waited and waited for surrender.
When they eventually bombarded the Winter Palace from the Aurora, most of the shells went
over the walls and fell harmlessly on the streets beyond, and many were
blanks. The greatest casualties were suffered in street fights with the
officers of the military academies, but even here the casualties on both
sides numbered in the dozens. The ministers were all peacefully
arrested and moved without incident to prison, where most were to be
released.
Compared to February, the October insurrection appears
to have been both less participatory and to have required far less
sacrifice on the part of the masses. These facts are not in opposition with
each other; the October revolution was a reflection of the greater
political maturity of the class, its deeper organization, its clarity of
aims, and the utter helplessness of its opposition.53
The Congress
The Second All Russian Congress opened its doors on
October 25, 1917, “the most democratic of all parliaments in the
world’s history. Who knows—perhaps also the most
important.”54 The composition of the Congress changed:
The officers’ chevrons, the eye-glasses and
neckties of intellectuals to be seen at the first Congress had almost
completely disappeared. A grey color prevailed uninterruptedly, in costumes
and in faces. All had worn out their clothes during the war. Many of the
city workers had provided themselves with soldiers’ coats. The trench
delegates were by no means a pretty picture: long unshaven, in old torn
trench-coats, with heavy papakhi on their dishevelled hair, often with cotton sticking out
through a hole, with coarse weather-beaten faces, heavy cracked hands,
fingers yellowed with tobacco, buttons torn off, belts hanging loose, and
long unoiled boots wrinkled and rusty. The plebeian nation had for the
first time sent up an honest representation made in its own image and not
retouched.55
The delegates to the Congress, as had been known
advance, were dominated by the Bolsheviks and their allies, the Left Social
Revolutionaries. Of the 650 delegates, 390 were Bolsheviks and 159 were
Social Revolutionaries, 60 percent of whom were Lefts who represented the
peasant uprising calling for soviet power and immediate land
redistribution. The Compromisers held less than 25 percent of the seats. Of
the seated delegates, 505 were for the immediate transfer of all power to
the soviets. Martov, Lenin’s former comrade in the old days before
the 1905 revolution, immediately attacked the majority for not reaching out
to the “rest of the democracy,” meaning the Compromisers who
had blocked with the bourgeois counterrevolution. Trotsky stood and replied:
An insurrection of the popular masses needs no
justification. We have tempered and hardened the revolutionary energy of
the Petrograd workers and soldiers. We have openly forged the will of the
masses to insurrection, and not conspiracy…Our insurrection has
conquered, and now you propose to us: Renounce your victory: make a
compromise. With whom? I ask: With whom ought we to make a compromise? With
that pitiful handful who just went out?.... Are the millions of workers and
peasants represented in this Congress, whom they are ready now as always to
turn over for a price to the mercies of the bourgeoisie, are they to enter
a compromise with these men? No, a compromise is no good here. To those who
have gone out, and to all who made like proposals, we must say, “You
are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played
out. Go where you belong from now on—into the rubbish-can of
history!”56
The remaining fragments of the compromise parties
continued to interrupt the will of the millions of people represented by
the soviet delegates to declare the Congress illegitimate. Their eruptions,
colored by a horror of breaking with the cultured and educated strata of
society, were answered by heckling soldiers, “their credentials
written all over them in the mud of the trenches.”57
The chapters “The October Insurrection” and
“The Congress of the Soviet Dictatorship” are probably the
fullest illustration of the brilliant experience of revolution; Trotsky
powerfully captures the scope and spirit of the high point of human
history. In his depiction of the Congress, Trotsky brings forth the voices
with startling clarity and emotion: the shrillness of the defeated petty
bourgeois, the anxiety and elation of the workers and soldiers rising up,
finding the harnesses of their oppression broken below them—feet
firmly on the ground, but tottering with new height.
The proclamation of the soviet power was read out by
Anatoli Lunacharsky, and its formulation, its directness and immediacy
capture the essence of revolutionary government:
“The authority of the compromisist Central
Executive Committee is at an end. The Provisional Government is deposed.
The Congress assumes the power...” The soviet government proposes
immediate peace. It will transfer the land to the peasant, democratize the
army, establish control over production, promptly summon the Constituent
Assembly, guarantee the right of nations of Russia to self-determination.
“The Congress resolves: That all power in the localities goes over to
the soviets.” Every phrase as it is read turns into a salvo of
applause.58
The Soviet Congress represented the worker and soldier
sections, but the representative of the Peasant Soviet “signed the
proclamation ‘with both hands and both feet.’”59 The
proclamation carried the vote: all but two votes in favor with twelve
abstentions. The following days saw the implementation of these
proclamations: freedom of agitation restored at the front, the death
penalty ended in the army, land decrees passed, secret treaties published,
and the offer of peace negotiations extended to enemy countries. Mutinies
became peace negotiations, peasant war became a new land law, and direct
action became workplace democracy: that was the nature of soviet rule. It
was a legal system based on self-activity, clearing the obstacles for a
deeper, more conscious life activity; not born out of resistance to a
parasitical, murderous class, but flowing from the deep reservoir of human
intelligence and creativity.
Conclusion
Trotsky’s motivation in writing History of the Russian Revolution was
to translate the experience of the revolution into both a teaching tool for
revolutionaries and a weapon in the battle against Stalinism. He
rescues the history from Stalin’s “epigone” historians,
who would have us believe the revolution was possible because of the
perfection of the Bolshevik party. From this model, there is nothing
to learn but the party was right at all important points—a hard model
to reproduce. The real history of the Bolsheviks was much more
dynamic as the party was propelled forward by the pressures of class
struggle and internal ideological and strategic conflicts. “The high
temper of the Bolshevik party expressed itself not in an absence of
disagreements, waverings, and even quakings, but in the fact that in the
most difficult circumstances it gathered itself in good season by means of
inner crises, and made good its opportunity to interfere decisively in the
course of events.”60
The tragic reality is that Trotsky lost his fight
against Stalin, and the caricature of the Bolshevik Party that Stalin
helped create is the dominant version people believe. October is
mis-remembered as a selfish coup over the heads of a passive population.
The challenges posed by the chaos, creativity, ingenuity and
intensity of the revolution are largely lost. By preserving the real
history of the many reversals and trials of the movement, Trotsky recovers
how the Bolsheviks were able to advance through self-correction and
transformation, not infallibility.
Trotsky has provided more than an account of the
triumphs of one revolution. History of the
Russian Revolution is an education on how to
think about revolution for those who are working to realize revolution in
our lifetimes. “It is easier to theorize about a revolution afterward
than absorb it into your flesh and blood before it takes place,”61 Trotsky
comments; but thanks to his writing, not impossible.
Amy Muldoon is a socialist living in New York. She can
be reached at [email protected]
Epigraph Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian
Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2006), 1131 (hereafter, all page
numbers refer to this edition).
1 972.
2 1190.
3 501.
4 503.
5 505.
6 507.
7 508.
8 511.
9 513. The Bolshevik Military Revolutionary Committee
played a role in the agitation leading to the July demonstration; another
indication that the party was not a single monolith, but a seething
organization involving many different factions and organizations, not
always pulling in the same direction. For an account see the first chapter
of Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come
to Power (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004).
10 519.
11 522.
12 526.
13 526.
14 538.
15 546.
16 567.
17 575.
18 585.
19 613.
20 615.
21 642.
22 643.
23 647.
24 696.
25 730.
26 723.
27 734.
28 726.
29 726–27.
30 728.
31 732.
32 973.
33 841.
34 864.
35 864.
36 881.
37 885.
38 924.
39 For more detailed accounting of this debate, see
Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come To Power.
40 982.
41 985.
42 Sukhanov wrote in response to learning of the
trick: “O new jest of the merry muse of history! That high-up and
decisive session was held in my apartment, still on the same Karpovka (32,
Apartment 31). But all this was without my knowledge…That time
special measures were taken to assure my sleeping outside the house: at
least my wife made carefully sure of my intention, and gave me friendly and
impartial advice—not to tire myself out after my work with the long
journey home. In any case the lofty assemblage was completely safe from any
invasion from me.” Trotsky comments: “What was more important,
it proved safe from invasions from Kerensky’s police.” 994.
43 941.
44 939.
45 944.
46 1004.
47 1130.
48 1040.
49 1054.
50 1072.
51 1092.
52 1103.
53 The revolution in Moscow, however, was far more
protracted and bloody than in Petrograd.
54 1148.
55 1149.
56 1157.
57 1154.
58 1163.
59 1163.
60 1013.
61 1012.