Meanwhile, with the inevitability of sunrise, Tsereteli’s team backed down on their own diluted platform, to make it more palatable to the despised Kadets on whom they would not turn their backs. One hundred and fifty representatives of property would, they agreed, be added to the 367 ‘democratic’ Preparliament delegates – who would, they also miserably allowed, have no power over the government.
And as this dilution, this self-abasement, continued, that bony hand of hunger was tightening its grip.
The American writer Louise Bryant had recently arrived in the capital. Walking in the cold of the early morning, she was horrified to see the food queues. Every day before dawn, people shivering in wretched clothes in the shadowy streets of Red Petrograd. They lined up for hours, long before the sun rose, as the wind scoured the boulevards. For milk, for tobacco, for food.
His comrades’ attempts to conceal Lenin’s intransigence were becoming increasingly blatant. From the city of Vyborg he sent rebuke after scathing rebuke, all of which were promptly bowdlerised.
As the Democratic Conference ended he dispatched to Rabochy put’ an essay entitled ‘Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks’, insisting that the Bolsheviks should have walked out, subjecting his party, and Zinoviev in particular, to remorseless criticism. The piece appeared on the 24th, as Preparliament negotiated – but now it was called ‘Heroes of Fraud’, and all attacks on the Bolsheviks had been excised.
Lenin’s fury grew awesome.
The next day, sulkily enabled by the Preparliament, Kerensky named his third coalition cabinet. Technically, again, it comprised a majority of socialists, but these moderate leftists held no key posts. And flatly breaking the Democratic Conference’s resolution, the Preparliament signed off on a cabinet that included the hated Tereshchenko, as well as four Kadets.
That was the day the Petrograd Soviet’s new, more representative presidium convened, after the walkout of its predecessors on the 9th. It was made up of one Menshevik, two SRs, and, in a historic shift that gave the party an absolute majority, four Bolsheviks.
One of the four was greeted with loud cheers and applause. Twelve years after he held a commanding role in the Soviet’s earlier, 1905 iteration, Leon Trotsky took his seat.
Trotsky immediately tabled a resolution stating that Petrograd’s workers and soldiers would not support the new, weak, reviled government. That instead, the solution lay with the forthcoming All-Russian Congress of Soviets.
Overwhelmingly, his motion passed.
And still Lenin’s comrades censored his writing. Between 22 and 24 September, his ‘From a Publicist’s Diary’ derided the party’s participation in the Preparliament. The Rabochy put’ board suppressed it – Trotsky among them, despite the piece praising him for his pro-boycott stance. On the 26th, with breathtaking cheek, they published instead part of ‘The Tasks of the Revolution’ – another pro-compromise throwback from that bygone epoch of three weeks previous.
His rage at last drove Lenin to conspiracy.
On the 27th, he wrote to Ivar Smilga, the ultra-left Bolshevik chair of the Regional Executive Committee of the Army, Fleet and Workers in Finland. Lenin did not so much flout as shatter the vaunted ‘discipline’ of a revolutionary party. What he attempted was no less than to create an alternative pro-insurrectionary axis within his organisation – an axis in which Finland was key.
‘It seems to me that we can have completely at our disposal only the troops in Finland and the Baltic Fleet, and only they can play a serious military role,’ he wrote to Smilga. ‘Give all your attention to the military preparation of the troops in Finland plus the fleet for the impending overthrow of Kerensky. Create a secret committee of absolutely trustworthy military men.’
These preparations took place amid increasing anxiety about the potential forthcoming fall of Petrograd – especially when, on 28 September, the Germans landed on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, near Riga. This was the start of Operation Albion, to gain control of the West Estonian archipelago, outflank Russian defences and leave Petrograd open for the taking.
Across Russia, fear was growing that the right, and the government, would simply surrender the city, this thorn in their side. That they would allow Red Petrograd to fall.
On 29 September, Lenin sent the CC ‘The Crisis Is Ripe’. It was a declaration of political war. This time, to circumvent the usual gagging treatment, he also circulated the document to the Petrograd and Moscow committees.
In the piece, Lenin repeated his strong conviction that Europe-wide revolution was at hand. He charged that unless the Bolsheviks seized power immediately, they would be ‘miserable traitors to the proletarian cause’. As far as he was concerned, waiting for the planned Second Soviet Congress was not just a waste of time, but a real risk to the revolution. ‘It is possible to take power now,’ he insisted, ‘whereas on 20–29 October you will not be given the chance.’
Then came the bombshell.
In view of the fact that the CC has even left unanswered the persistent demands I have been making for such a policy ever since the beginning of the Democratic Conference, in view of the fact that the central organ is deleting from my articles all references to such glaring errors on the part of the Bolsheviks … I am compelled to regard this as a subtle hint that I should keep my mouth shut, and as a proposal for me to retire.
I am compelled to tender my resignation from the Central Committee, which I hereby do, reserving for myself freedom to campaign among the rank and file of the party and at the Party Congress.
Even as this message arrived, Zinoviev was busy putting the leadership’s case in Rabochy put’ – a strategy directly at odds with Lenin’s. ‘Start getting ready for the Congress of Soviets,’ Zinoviev wrote. ‘Don’t become involved in any kind of separate direct action!’
Zinoviev: ‘Let’s concentrate all our energies on preparations for the Congress of Soviets.’
Lenin: ‘It is my profound conviction that if we “wait” for the Congress of Soviets, and let the present moment pass, it will ruin the revolution.’
10
Red October
In October, in the forests, leaves were coming down in drifts, clogging the train tracks. The trees shook from the thud of guns. Kerensky remained Russia’s only hope: of this he was still certain. He gathered the rags of his messianism about him, believing himself chosen by something or other for something or other.
By the constant threat of reshuffles, he kept his last, etiolated Provisional Government in line. Kerensky was corroded by malicious gossip. The cult of him, a memory to embarrass its erstwhile devotees. He was Jewish, bigots whispered. He was not a real man, homophobes insinuated, calling him by feminine forms. And with the demise of the last shreds of faith in him, came social and military panic.