On the first day of the month, amid the spiralling crime in Petrograd came a fresh horror. A man and his three young children were found savagely murdered in their Lesnoi apartment. Another atrocity among so many. But these victims’ home was in the very same building as the headquarters of the local branch of the city militia, the security patrols organised by the city duma.
How could anyone feel safe? Was it not bad enough that parts of the city were now controlled by criminals, no-go zones for the authorities? By the Olympia amusement park on Zabalkanskii Prospect; Golodai, near Vasilievsky Island; Volkovo in the Narva district. Was it not enough that the city had ceded territory to outlaws and bandits, without them now mocking the very idea of retribution? How could anyone believe that the authorities had authority when this monstrosity could occur right above the militia’s heads?
Disgusted crowds gathered outside the headquarters. They threw stones. They broke down the door, and smashed the place apart.
As power evaporated, some convulsions took predictable, ugly forms. On 2 October in Smolensk, the town of Roslavl received, as the Smolensk Bulletin put it, ‘the following cup of poison to drink: a pogrom’. A mob of Black Hundreds chanting ‘Beat the Yids!’ attacked and murdered several people they accused of ‘speculation’– a charge provoked by finding galoshes in a Jewish-owned store the clerks of which had claimed they had none. The rampage continued throughout the night and the next day. The newspapers and authorities tried to link the Bolsheviks to the violence. This was a growing theme in the liberal press, despite its patent political absurdity, and despite the recorded efforts of Bolshevik soldiers in the town to stop the carnage.
On 3 October, the Russian General Staff evacuated Revel, the last bastion between the front and the capital. The next day, accordingly, the government sought advice on the evacuation of the executive and key industries – but not of the Soviet – to Moscow. News of the discussions leaked out. There was a storm: the bourgeoisie were indeed planning to abandon the city built for them two centuries before. The city of bones. The Ispolkom forbade any such move without its approval, and the unstable government shelved the idea.
In this ambience of perfidy, weakness and violence, Lenin took his campaign for insurrection to the wider party.
There is no record of the CC’s reaction to Lenin’s resignation threat. Perhaps it provoked pleading negotiations. Whatever the particulars, it was not raised again, and he did not step down.
On 1 October, he sent another letter, this time to the Central, Moscow and Petersburg committees, and to Bolsheviks in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. Citing peasant and labour unrest, mutinies in the German navy, and the growing Bolshevik influence after local elections in Moscow, he once more emphasised that delaying insurgent action until the Second Congress of Soviets was ‘positively criminal’. The Bolsheviks must ‘take power at once’, and appeal ‘to Workers, Peasants and Soldiers’ for ‘All Power to the Soviets’. But on this question of timing, he remained isolated: that same day, a meeting of Bolsheviks from towns outlying Petrograd opposed any action prior to the Congress.
The CC could not hide his communications forever. On the 3rd, a letter at last reached the militant Moscow Regional Bureau, in which Lenin incited them to pressure the CC to prepare for insurrection. Several of his essays found their way to the Petersburg Committee. The members were divided as to Lenin’s demands, but united in outrage at the CC’s obfuscations. On the 5th, the Petersburg Committee met to discuss their reactions to what they had read.
The debate was long and it was rancorous. Latsis loudly questioned the revolutionary credentials of those with the temerity to go against Lenin. In the end a proposal to decide on insurrectionary preparations was shelved. However, the Executive Commission delegated three members – including Latsis – to evaluate Bolshevik military strength and prepare district committees for possible action. They did not inform the CC.
As awareness of Lenin’s positions spread through the party, despite the CC’s efforts to corral it, social upheaval was provoking a certain coterminous leftward shift on the CC itself. While the Petersburg Committee met in dissident conclave, at Smolny the CC at last voted to boycott the toothless Preparliament when it reconvened on the 7th. The decision was unanimous but for the ever-cautious Kamenev, who immediately called for patience from the Bolshevik Preparliamentarians, until a serious dispute might justify a walkout. He narrowly lost the argument to Trotsky’s call for immediate action.
The next day, Petrograd commander General Polkovnikov instructed city troops to prepare for transfer to the front. He had known this would unleash fury, and it did.
On the evening of the 7th, in the Mariinsky Palace, its remaining imperial crests decorously obscured with red draperies, before the eyes of the press and diplomatic corps, the Preparliament reopened. Kerensky gave another histrionic address, this one themed on law and order. There followed remarks from the Grandmother of the Revolution, Breshko-Breshkovskaya; then from Nikolai Avksentiev, the chair; and then at last Trotsky intervened. He stood to make an emergency announcement.
Blisteringly, he denounced the government and the Preparliament as tools of counterrevolution. The audience erupted. Trotsky raised his voice over their clamour. ‘Petrograd is in danger!’ he shouted. ‘All power to the soviets! All land to the people!’ To jeers and catcalls, the fifty-three Bolshevik delegates rose together and left the hall.
Their act was a sensation. An epidemic of rumours immediately followed: the Bolsheviks, people said, were planning an uprising.
It was at some uncertain moment during these accelerating days, early in October, that Lenin slipped back into Petrograd.
Krupskaya escorted him to Lesnoi. There he stayed again with his former landlady Margarita Fofanova. From her house he preached his gospel of urgency to an urgent city.
On 9 October, mass anger at the plan to relocate the troops spilled into the Soviet. In the Executive Committee, the Menshevik Mark Broido put forward a compromise: the soldiers would prepare for transfer, but a committee should also be created to draw up plans for the defence of Petrograd that would win popular confidence. This, he thought, could reduce the anxieties about government treachery and address the fears for the capital, while smoothing a path of collaboration between government and Soviet.
His proposal blindsided the Bolsheviks.