It was to the Soviet that the women marched – even those whose placards supported the war. The Soviet in which so many had vested their aspirations, despite its own ambivalence about power.
It strove to rationalise its structures, without much success. At its largest, that month, it had 3,000 boisterous members – a tiny number from the left (forty Bolsheviks, for example). Every thousand workers voted for a delegate – and every company of soldiers, initially large reserve companies, but quickly extending to those much smaller, skewing the representation heavily in the soldiers’ favour. Ultimately 150,000 troops would have double the representation of 450,000 Petrograd workers. The soldiers’ delegates were predominantly SR followers and, though often radical on the war, tended to be much less so on other issues than their proletarian counterparts.
One typical March day, the Petrograd general assembly discussed the following topics: a tsarist police plot against a union of Social Democrats; an anti-pogrom commission for the southern provinces; a call on Petrograd bakers not to interrupt work; a dispute over office space between two newspapers; taking over the Anichkov Palace; and posters explaining decisions of the central food committee. Then came some (intriguingly unspecified) negotiations with the Provisional Government; the idea of a soldiers’ newspaper; an obscure point about the Fortress of Peter and Paul; a quarrel between workers and soldiers over bread distribution; the reception of delegations, plus wives, from the various garrisons; and the American Embassy. The list is not exhaustive.
Such enthusiastic bedlam might seem a nightmare, or a strange, faltering carnival, depending on one’s perspective.
The Kadets, Mensheviks, SRs, and Bolsheviks all understood the key importance of the Petrograd garrison, and all created military organisations to promote their influence within it. What set the Bolsheviks apart was how early they did so – from 10 March – and with what intensity. The activists running the committee, Nevsky, Bogdatiev, Podvoisky and Sulimov, were all but the last from the party’s left wing.
In these early days, they were not especially welcome among the soldiers. But they were tenacious. Less than two weeks after they started operations, Podvoisky and his comrades invited garrison representatives to a Military Organisation Constituent Assembly, out of which, on the last day of the month, the Bolshevik Military Organisation (MO) was born.
Almost immediately after the February revolution, one comrade had heard Podvoisky announce that ‘the revolution is not over; it is just beginning’. The MO was in the hands of such independent spirited, uncompromising Bolshevik ‘lefts’ from the start. More than once they would breach party discipline – sometimes with dramatic results.
There came, first, a boost to a more moderate party consensus on 12 March. That day saw the burial of perhaps 184 martyrs of the revolution – the numbers are uncertain – killed in the city’s street fighting. These were mass graves. Long deep trenches in the hard earth of the Mars Field, the great park in the centre of Petrograd.
From early morning until long into the night came hundreds of thousands of mourners. Perhaps as many as a million filled the wide streets of the capital. From every part of the city, they converged slowly on the field, carrying their dead in red coffins. A new, religionless religion. They came with sad music. They came representing their units, their factories, their institutions, their civic groups, their parties. They came in ethnic groups – columns from the Jewish Bund, from the Armenian revolutionary Dashnaktsutyun, and others. A column of the blind came, carrying one of their own. They did not stop. No group stopped, no one made a speech. The marchers came carrying their cold comrades, solemnly passed their coffins to the burial workers and marched on, and a gun boomed in salute from the fortress across the river as the fallen were lowered. The living trudged through light snow, on wooden walkways erected between the maze of graves. Their dead were not victims, Lunacharsky’s eulogies would claim, but heroes, whose fate engendered not grief but envy.
And as the mass of citizens sang and remembered the lost, three veteran party activists returned to the city from exile in Siberia. One was the Old Bolshevik Lev Kamenev, married to Trotsky’s sister Olga Bronstein and a close comrade of Lenin, though always a party ‘wet’ (he had, in an almost incredible act he later shamefacedly denied, advocated sending a telegram to Michael Romanov praising his decision to decline the throne). With him were the erstwhile Duma deputy Muranov, renowned for having taken a hard defeatist line in defiance of the death penalty; and a member of the CC, one Joseph Stalin.
Stalin, of course, was not yet Stalin. Today, any account of the revolution is haunted by a ghost from the future, that twinkly-eyed, moustachioed monstrosity, Uncle Joe, the butcher, key architect of a grotesque and crushing despotic state – the -ism that bears his name. There have been decades of debate about the aetiology of Stalinism, volumes of stories about the man’s brutality and that of his regime. They cast shadows backwards from what would come.
But this was 1917. Stalin had not turned forty. He was, then, just Stalin, Ioseb Jughashvili, known to his comrades as Koba, a Georgian ex-trainee priest and meteorological clerk, and a longtime Bolshevik activist. A capable, if never scintillating, organiser. At best an adequate intellectual, at worst an embarrassing one. He was neither a party left nor a party right per se, but something of a weathervane. The impression he left was one of not leaving much of an impression. Sukhanov would remember him as ‘a grey blur’.
There is a rare hint at something more troubling about the man in the assessment of the party’s Russian Bureau in Petrograd, which allowed him to join, but only as advisor, without the right to a vote – because, it said, of ‘certain personal features that are inherent in him’. Would that the rest of Sukhanov’s description had been accurate: that Stalin had remained no more than glimpsed, ‘looming up now and then dimly and without leaving any trace’.
Almost immediately, the three returnees carried out something of a coup at Pravda, installing Muranov as editor on 13 March. The paper began to expound their decidedly moderate positions.
On 15 March, Kamenev wrote:
Our slogan is not the empty cry ‘Down with war! – which means the disorganisation of the revolutionary army and of the army that is becoming ever more revolutionary. Our slogan is bring pressure to bear on the Provisional Government so as to compel it to make, without fail, openly and before the eyes of world democracy, an attempt to induce all the warring countries to initiate immediate negotiations to end the world war. Till then let everyone remain at his post.