In Baku, where Bolshevik orators had been shouted down at street meetings a few weeks before, the party’s motions were now sweeping factory committees and gatherings. ‘The Bolshevisation noticeable in all of Russia has appeared in the widest dimensions in our oil empire,’ wrote the local stalwart Shaumian of his region. ‘And long before the Kornilovshchina [Kornilov Affair]. The former masters of the situation, the Mensheviks, are not able to show themselves in the workers’ districts. Along with the Bolsheviks the SR-Internationalists [the left] have begun to get stronger … and have formed a bloc with the Bolsheviks.’
Across the empire, the Mensheviks were splintering. Some went to the right, as in Baku; at the other extreme, the Mensheviks in Tiflis, Georgia, took a hard-left position for a united socialist government that would include the Bolsheviks.
On the 5th, it was the turn of the Moscow Soviet to vote in favour of Kamenev’s 31 August resolution. A soviet congress in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, gained a Bolshevik majority. On the 6th, as Lenin’s ‘On Compromises’ was published, power in Ekaterinburg in the Urals passed into the hands of the soviets, and workers refused to recognise the Provisional Government. In protest at Kerensky’s Directory, nineteen Baltic Fleet committees recommended all ships fly red flags.
And whether or not dissent took socialist forms, the national aspirations of Russia’s minorities were amplifying. In Tashkent, Uzbekistan, tensions between Russian inhabitants and Muslim Uzbeks flared, until on 10 September local soldiers formed a revolutionary committee, expelling government representatives and taking control of the city. From the 8th to the 15th, the Ukrainian Rada provocatively convened a Congress of the Nationalities, bringing together Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, Tatars, Turks, Bessarabian Romanians, Latvians, Georgians, Estonians, Kazakhs, Cossacks and representatives of various radical parties. The Congress, in an escalation from the language of ‘cultural autonomy’, agreed that Russia must be ‘a federative-democratic republic’, each component part to decide how it would link to others. Except in the case of Poland, and to a lesser extent Finland, the orientation (let alone formal demand) was not for full independence. But dynamics towards independence in some form were at least implicit – and, later, would come very much to the fore.
The presidium of the Petrograd Soviet, composed of right Mensheviks and SRs, dismissed Kamenev’s victory of 1 September as just a side effect of how depleted the Soviet had been that night. On 9 September, they threatened to resign if the decision were not overturned.
The Bolsheviks were fearful they would not win the motion this time around. In an attempt to appeal to waverers and gain influence, they suggested a reform of the presidium along fair, proportional lines, to include previously unrepresented groups – including the Bolsheviks. ‘If coalition with the Kadets was acceptable,’ they argued in the chamber, ‘surely they can engage in coalition politics with the Bolsheviks in this organ.’
To this manoeuvre, Trotsky added a masterstroke.
Long ago, in the very earliest days of the Petrograd Soviet, he recalled, Kerensky himself, of course, had been on the presidium. So, asked Trotsky, did that presidium still consider Kerensky, he of the dictatorial Directory, a member?
The question put the moderates in an invidious position. Kerensky was now reviled as a counterrevolutionary – but their political commitment to collaboration forbade the moderate Mensheviks and SRs to repudiate him.
The presidium allowed that he was, indeed, one of them.
Not since Banquo had so unwelcome a ghost been at the table. The insult of Kerensky’s membership tipped the balance for the wider membership. The Petrograd Soviet sided, 519 to 414, with 67 abstentions, with the Bolsheviks and against their presidium, its toxic absent member included. The compromised presidium resigned en masse, in protest.
This is not to say that the Bolsheviks now commanded overwhelming support in this venue. They could still not be sure of passing all their motions. Nevertheless, this politicised procedural manoeuvre was a triumph. Lenin would later condemn it as excessively conciliatory: a harsh, unconvincing reproach, given its success and effects.
In September, the upward trajectory of the peasant war did not slow. In growing numbers, villagers sacked more estates, more violently, often with fire, often side by side with soldiers and deserters. In Penza, Saratov, Kazan, and especially Tambov, estates burned. Village soviets arose. Wrecking and theft blossomed into full-blown jacqueries.
Sometimes with these came notorious murders, like that of the landowner Prince Viazemskii the previous month, a killing that shocked liberal opinion because of the man’s charitable works. The situation grew bad enough for the Council of the Tambov Union of Private Landowners to issue a plea for help, signing it as ‘The Union of Unfortunate Landowners’.
In the first half of September, an official in Kozlovsk County put together a list of attacks on local estates. He documented fifty-four incidents, including ‘Condition of portions of the estate’. A spreadsheet of rural fury and destruction. ‘Wrecked’. ‘Wrecked and partly burned’. ‘Wrecked and burned’. ‘Wrecked’.
In the cities, a strike wave brought out not only skilled but white-collar and unskilled workers, hospital workers, clerks. Repeatedly the Red Guards now confronted government militias, and not always bloodlessly. Bosses locked out workers; starving proletarian communities raged from house to house in bands, hunting for both food speculators and food.
‘Anarchy essentially ruled over Petrograd,’ said K. I. Globachev. A former chief of the Okhrana, he had himself spent the days between February and August in the dark castle of Kresty jail, in punishment for that role. His observations, though, were fair. ‘Criminals multiplied to an unimaginable extent. Every day robberies and murders were committed not only at night, but also in broad daylight.’
The prisons could not hold the prisoners: due to the political upheavals, or the inadequacy of the guards, countless inmates simply walked out of jail to freedom. Globachev himself, fearful of how a secret policeman of the old regime would fare on the post-February streets, remained by choice behind Kresty’s walls.
In Ostrogozhsk, a town in Voronezh, looters targeted an alcohol store over three violent days that culminated in a vast conflagration. When troops finally suppressed this apocalyptic nihilo-drunkenness, fifty-seven people were dead, twenty-six of them burned alive.
The paper of the Right SRs, Volia naroda, editorialised about the growing anarchy with a terse, jittery, bullet-pointed list of ‘virtually, a period of civil war’.
A mutiny in Orel …
In Rostov the town hall is dynamited.
In Tambov Governorate there are agrarian pogroms …
Gangs of robbers on the roads in Pskov …
Along the Volga, near Kamyshin, soldiers loot trains.
How much worse, the paper wondered, could things get? It blamed Bolshevism.