On the 11th, the militant Northern Region Congress of Soviets gathered in the capital: fifty-one Bolsheviks, twenty-four Left SRs, four Maximalists (a revolutionary SR offshoot), one Menshevik– Internationalist, and ten SRs. All the delegates present, including those SRs, supported a socialist government. That morning, an exhausted Kollontai reported the CC’s vote to the Bolshevik participants. She left, as one recalled, ‘the impression that the CC’s signal to come out would be received at any minute’. ‘The plan’, Latsis would remember, ‘was that it [the Northern Region Congress] would declare itself the government, and that would be the start’.
But Kamenev and Zinoviev were still lobbying against action. All they had to do was turn twelve Bolsheviks and/or Maximalists, and the CC would have no majority for immediate insurrection against Kerensky. The gathering was loud and radical, charging political prisoners in Kresty jail not to hunger strike but to keep their strength up ‘because the hour of your liberation is close at hand’. Nonetheless, to Lenin’s intense frustration, it closed on the 13th not with revolution, but with an appeal to the masses stressing the importance of the forthcoming Second Soviet Congress.
Workers and soldiers still looked to the soviets. On 12 October, the Egersky Guards declared the Soviet ‘the voice of the genuine leaders of the workers and poorer peasantry’.
That day, a closed session of the Ispolkom voted on whether to empower Trotsky’s MRC to militarily defend Red Petrograd from the government. The Mensheviks assailed the motion, but they were outvoted. Trotsky’s hasty riposte to Broido had created a ‘front organisation’, a party-controlled body with a non-party, soviet remit.
The rumours of Bolshevik uprising grew more specific. ‘There is definite evidence’, reported Gazeta-kopeika, ‘that the Bolsheviks are energetically preparing for a coming-out on October 20.’ ‘The vile and bloody events of July 3–5’, warned the rightist Zhivoe slovo, ‘were only a rehearsal.’
Kerensky’s cabinet remained bullish. ‘If the Bolsheviks act,’ one minister told the press, ‘we will carry out a surgical operation and the abscess will be extracted once and for all.’
‘We must ask the comrade Bolsheviks candidly,’ said Dan with acid courtesy at a plenary of the All-Russian Executive Committees on the 14th, ‘what is the purpose of their politics?’ Were they ‘calling upon the revolutionary proletariat to come out[?] I demand a yes-or-no answer’.
From the floor, for the Bolsheviks, Riazanov responded. ‘We demand peace and land.’
That was neither yes nor no, nor was it reassuring.
15 October. At the corner of Sadovaya and Apraksina, where in July shots from above had left demonstrators dead and scattering, a crowd blocked the tramcars. They shouted for samosudy, a street trial for two shoplifters, a man in a soldier’s uniform, a woman in smart clothes. The mob fought through the city militia into the department store where the thieves cowered. A heaving scrum hauled the man outside while his sobbing accomplice made for a telephone booth. The crowd overwhelmed an officer trying to protect her, wrenched open the door and pulled her out into a rain of blows.
‘What are we waiting for?’ someone shouted. He drew a pistol and shot the man dead. There was a silence. Then someone shot the woman too, while the militia looked helplessly on.
Sunday in Petrograd. This was how justice worked now.
The following day, a full session of the Soviet discussed the MRC – Milrevcom.
Eager not to present it as a Bolshevik body – which, though not formally, it effectively was – the party nominated to propose the resolution establishing it the young Pavel Lazimir, the chair of the soldiers’ section of the Soviet, a Left SR. Broido furiously warned that the MRC was not intended to defend the city, but to seize power. Justifying its focus on counterrevolution, and thus on military preparation, Trotsky called attention to the persistent threat from the right. The case was not hard to make: he quoted a notorious recent interview during which Rodzianko thundered, ‘To Hell with Petrograd!’
On the 17th, at Pskov, generals met a Soviet delegation to argue for the redeployment of troops, bringing with them representatives from the front. The revolutionaries were concerned about the bitter resentment of those front-line soldiers: to them, the unwillingness of the rear garrison to relocate seemed an unconscionable lack of solidarity. The Soviet anxiously affirmed the heroism of that garrison, and still refused to promise any support for the generals’ call. As far as the General Staff were concerned, the encounter had been pointless.
That was the day that Milrevcom, the soviet organ of militarised suspicion of the suspicious government, was inaugurated. But the Bolshevik CC did not yet give it their full attention: they were distracted by in-party uncertainties.
On the 15th, the Petersburg Committee had assembled thirty-five Bolshevik representatives from across the city to prepare for the uprising. But the meeting was derailed by doubts, a caution that came from unlikely quarters.
For the CC, Bubnov made the case for a ‘coming-out’. This time, one of those who argued against him was Nevsky.
Nevsky, the erstwhile ultra, representative of the party’s trouble-making, radical Military Organisation, now reported that the MO ‘has just become rightist’. He enumerated the difficulties he perceived with the CC plan, including what he considered to be the totally inadequate preparation. He was deeply sceptical that the party could take the whole country.
With the door to uncertainty opened, the committee read a long memorandum of concern circulated by Kamenev and Zinoviev. Its impact was palpable. Some districts and representatives remained optimistic – Latsis, as ever, was positively boosterish – but many grew chary. They were unsure whether the Red Guard, though bonded together ‘with a band of iron’, as one journalist put it, by ‘hunger and hatred of wage slavery’, was politically advanced enough for the task.
Few disputed that the masses would mobilise again against any counterrevolution, nor their support for the Soviet or the Bolshevik call for power thereto, but that would not necessarily translate into following the party into insurrection. The economic crisis had beaten the people down, some said, leaving them reluctant to go on the offensive for the Bolsheviks.
In the end, eight representatives thought the masses were ready to fight. Six considered them uncertain, and advocated delay. Five said the moment was wholly inopportune.
Bubnov was horrified. He demanded the talk turn to practical preparatory matters. The assembly did approve certain ground-laying measures – a conference of party agitators, building links with communications workers, weapons training – but it made no concrete plans for uprising.
The rebuffed CC hastily reconvened.
Wet snow over dark streets, Petrograd’s northern Lesnoi district. A frantic Saint Bernard dog bayed at shadows slipping through the dark, each shape outlined briefly by the weather, then gone. With each howl, another figure passed, until at last more than a score of Bolshevik leaders were inside the building of the district Duma. As they stripped off their disguises, an agitated young woman greeted them.