Trotsky, recovering, quickly put forward a counterproposal, repudiating Kerensky and his government, accusing the bourgeoisie of preparing to surrender Petrograd, demanding immediate peace and soviet power, and summoning the garrison to prepare for battle. What he called for was a new iteration of the Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution, for the defence of Red Petrograd from internal as much as from external enemies, ‘attacks being openly prepared by military and civil Kornilovites’, as he put it. This was rather different from defencism on behalf of Mother Russia.
Even now, with the Bolshevik majority on the Executive Committee, it was not Trotsky’s but Broido’s resolution that – narrowly – passed: anxiety about the war effort still precluded sanctioning the creation of a parallel military structure. But that evening, the two motions were put to a packed, uproarious session of the Soviet plenum. Now, backed by a huge majority of factory and barracks representatives, Trotsky’s torquing of Broido’s suggestion prevailed. Thus was born the Military Revolutionary Committee – Milrevcom, or the MRC.
Trotsky would later characterise this vote in favour of the MRC as a ‘dry’, a ‘silent’ revolution, indispensable to the full revolution to come.
The threat of Bolshevik insurrection was now openly discussed on all sides. Indeed, certain of their enemies invited it. ‘I would be prepared to offer prayers to produce this uprising,’ said Kerensky. ‘They will be utterly crushed.’ By contrast, many of the Bolsheviks themselves were more hesitant. The day after the Soviet meeting, a citywide party conference expressed clear reservations about an uprising before the Congress of Soviets.
For its part, the CC had no formal position on such an action. Yet.
As Sukhanov left his home for the Soviet on the morning of the 10th, his wife Galina Flakserman eyed nasty skies and made him promise not to try to return that night, but to stay at his office, as was his custom when the weather was so bad. That evening, as he settled down accordingly to sleep at Smolny, across the city figure after bundled-up figure slipped out of the grey drizzle and into his flat.
‘Oh, the novel jokes of the merry muse of History!’ wrote Sukhanov later, bitterly. Unlike her diarist husband, who was previously an independent and had recently joined the Menshevik left, Galina Flakserman was a long-time Bolshevik activist, on the staff of Izvestia. Unbeknownst to him, she had quietly informed her comrades that comings and goings at her roomy, many-entranced apartment would be unlikely to draw attention. Thus, with her husband out of the way, the Bolshevik CC came visiting.
At least twelve of the twenty-one-strong committee were there, including Kollontai, Trotsky, Uritsky, Stalin, Varvara Iakovleva, Kamenev and Zinoviev. They gathered in the dining room, quickly dealing with routine business. There entered a clean-shaven, bespectacled, grey-haired man, ‘every bit like a Lutheran minister’, Alexandra Kollontai remembered.
The CC stared at the newcomer. Absent-mindedly, he doffed his wig like a hat, to reveal a familiar bald pate. Lenin had arrived. The serious debates could begin.
Lenin held forth. He was impassioned. As the hours wore on he drove home his now-familiar points. The time had come, he insisted again, for insurrection. The party’s ‘indifference toward the question of an uprising’ was a dereliction.
It was not a monologue. Everyone took their turn to speak.
Late at night, a knock at the door sent hearts lurching, plunging them all into fear. But it was only Flakserman’s brother, Yuri. Another Bolshevik, privy to the meeting, he had come to help with the samovar. He busied himself with the huge communal kettle, making tea.
Kamenev and Zinoviev returned to that historic debate, assiduously explaining why they thought Lenin was wrong. They evoked the weight of the petty bourgeoisie, who were not – not yet, perhaps – on their side. They suggested that Lenin overestimated the Bolsheviks’ power in Petrograd, let alone elsewhere. They were adamant that he was incorrect about the imminence of international revolution. They argued for ‘a defensive posture’, for patience. ‘Through the army we have a revolver pointed at the temple of the bourgeoisie,’ they said. Better to ensure the convening of a Constituent Assembly, and to continue to consolidate their strength meanwhile.
Their comrades called the consistently circumspect pair the ‘Heavenly Twins’, sometimes affectionately, sometimes in exasperation. They were not alone in the party hierarchy in their conservatism. But that night, those of similar bent – Nogin, Rykov and others – were absent.
Which is not to say that Lenin’s position was accepted in all particulars by his other comrades. Trotsky, for one, felt less pressed by time than did Lenin, set greater store by the soviets, saw the forthcoming Congress as a potential legitimator of any action. But the key question of the night was this: were, or were not, the Bolsheviks mobilising for insurrection as soon as possible?
On paper torn from a child’s notebook, Lenin scribbled a resolution.
The CC acknowledges the international situation as it affects the Russian revolution … as well as the military situation … and the fact that the proletarian party has gained majorities in the soviets – all this, coupled with the peasant insurrection and the swing of popular confidence to our party, and finally, the obvious preparations for a second Kornilovshchina … makes armed insurrection the order of the day … Recognising that an armed uprising is inevitable and the time fully ripe, the CC instructs all party organisations to be guided accordingly and to consider and decide all practical questions from this viewpoint.
At last, after prolonged and impassioned back-and-forth, they voted. By ten to two – Zinoviev and Kamenev, of course – the resolution passed. It was hazy in its details, but a Rubicon had been crossed. Insurrection was now the ‘order of the day’.
The tension eased. Yuri Flakserman brought cheese, sausage and bread, and the famished revolutionaries fell to. Good-naturedly they teased the Heavenly Twins: hesitating to overthrow the bourgeoisie was so very Kamenev.
The time frame for the event was hazy, too. Lenin wanted insurrection the next day: Kalinin, on the other hand, for example, while praising ‘one of the best resolutions the CC has ever passed’, thought – in what could surely have been the position of Zinoviev and Kamenev – that ‘perhaps in a year’ it might be time.