Quickly they mandated the Menshevik intellectual Wladimir Woytinsky to arrange the palace’s defence. They dispatched telegrams to all garrison troops, and to the Kronstadt base, sternly reiterating the ban on demonstrations. They drafted a proclamation condemning the march as treachery, warning that it would be dealt with by ‘all available means’. Members of the Soviet fanned out across Petrograd to try to calm the streets.
News of the demonstration had reached the Bolshevik CC, also meeting in Tauride, a few doors down. There was quick and fractious debate. The CC, by now including Trotsky, maintained its cautious ‘Leninist’ line – that the time for such an adventure was not right – and voted against joining in. Urgently the leadership sent activists to try to hold the machine-gunners back. Zinoviev and Kamenev prepared an appeal for the front page of next day’s Pravda, imploring the masses to show restraint. The CC relayed its decision to their Second City Conference.
At that conference, however, dissent exploded.
Though expressions of support for the rebels were defeated and the CC position did pass, it was criticised by many high-profile delegates. The conference left called for a meeting with representatives from factories, the military, the Mezhraiontsy and Menshevik–Internationalists, to ‘take the temperature’ of the city. This demand was, and was understood to be, pressure on the CC to pitch left.
A compromise was rush-cobbled together, but though couched in the party’s usual tough language, it was in fact formalised floundering. It would take days, weeks, for the radicals to make sense of what was about to come – events that would lead them to shift their positions, discard the sloganeering call for Soviet power and envisage something new, more combative still.
‘We will see’, announced Tomsky, articulating the party’s hesitant stance at that moment, ‘how the movement develops.’ For now neither firestarters nor firefighters, the Bolsheviks could only commit to keeping on watching. ‘We will see.’
From the start, the demonstration was violent. Shouting marchers heaved together to overturn trams, tipping them out of their runnels to lie on their sides in their own shattered windows. On the bridges, revolutionary soldiers set up machine gun posts. The mood was insurrectionary.
And not only among the left. ‘Black Hundreds, hooligans, provocateurs, anarchists and desperate people introduce a large amount of chaos and absurdity to the demonstration’, said Lunacharsky. In volleys of shots and frantic punches and hurled and broken glass, the left and the hard right clashed. The city rang to the sounds of guns and hooves. Beside the City Council on Nevsky Prospect, bloody fighting erupted.
Bullets from machine guns took men down. Wounded demonstrators staggered to escape along Petrograd’s impassive streets and rounded colonnades. The faces of lions watched from the grand facades of which they were part, their mouths carved shut but the dirty city air giving them smut tongues. In the canals, gliding under the bridges, barges laden with wood from the endless forests continued their deliveries, as if the streets were not full of whinnying and screaming, as if armoured cars did not hurtle overhead, and the bargemen did not have to duck at the whine of missiles. Black-bearded men from the villages frowned up from the cuts where their low boats puttered.
At 7:45 p.m., a truck bristling with weapons pulled up at the Baltic Station: the men within had come to arrest Kerensky, who they had heard would be there. But they had missed him by moments. He had departed the city. Three battalions of the Machine Gun Regiment set out through Vyborg. ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!’ their placards read. News of the Kadet resignations from cabinet had not reached them yet – with them out, only six remained. Massed militants seized munitions from the Mikhailovskoe Artillery Academy, and stormed across the Liteiny Bridge, where one section of the crowd joined the Sixth Engineer Battalion and headed for Tauride – and another peeled off for the Kshesinskaya Mansion.
There, the Bolshevik leaders were still debating what to do, when word reached them that the armed masses were approaching. Someone in the room gasped: ‘Without the sanction of the Central Committee?’
To be a radical was to lead others, surely, to change their ideas, to persuade them to follow you; to go neither too far or too fast, nor to lag behind. ‘To patiently explain.’ How easy to forget that people do not need or await permission to move.
A great militant crowd spread out at the junction of the road and river, filling the space between the mosque and the mansion. For the party, Podvoisky, Lashevich and Nevsky emerged onto the mansion’s small low balcony. Standing only a few handspans above the multitude, they shouted greetings at them – then, absurdly, urged the enraged thousands to return to Vyborg.
But this movement could not be reversed. The question for the Bolsheviks, then, was whether to shun it, join it, or attempt to lead it.
A turning point: the militant MO at last got its way, as, scrambling to catch up, the party gave its hurried and flustered blessing to a march on the Tauride Palace, in an effort to spread its aegis over a fait accompli. The demonstrators set back out south across the city’s bridges and east along the river. It did not take them long to reach the palace, or to surround it.
Within, the Soviet was buzzing in an emergency session. There could be no holding back this sea of armed protestors, and a delegation from the First Machine Gun Regiment pushed their way inside. Storming through the corridors in their heavy boots, they found Chkheidze. As he stared at his unwanted visitors in alarm, the men informed him coldly that they were disturbed to hear that the Soviet was considering entering a new coalition government. That, they said, was something they could not allow.
Some among the throng were ready to be less polite. From the city outside, from beyond the palace fence, came voices hollering for the arrest of the leaders of the Coalition Government. The arrest of the Soviet itself!
But there was no plan and no direction. The streets, despite Bleikhman’s confidence, organised no one.
Darkness came at last, and though the tension had not abated, the massed crowds dispersed. For then.
That evening, the remaining ‘capitalist ministers’ of the coalition huddled with General Polovtsev in the Stavka headquarters near Palace Square. The Winter Palace and the Stavka were guarded by the only troops they had at their disposal: the loyalist war-wounded. Reinforcements were due to join them the next evening. That was a long time to wait.
The night stretched out. A few Cossack detachments roved the city, engaging insurrectionaries. Woytinsky, responsible for the Ispolkom’s protection, was on edge: the guard was inadequate to see off any serious attack on Tauride, and he knew it. And the Mensheviks and SRs also knew, notwithstanding a degree of wavering from the less radical regiments who had come out, that morning would bring more protests, heightened uncertainty. They denounced the Bolsheviks, condemned the ‘counterrevolutionary’ demonstrations, protested ‘these ominous signs of disintegration’.
As dawn approached, the Soviet delegates crept out to brave the streets, with the unenviable task of going to the regiments and factories, to try to talk them down.