It was the 16th. Ekaterina Alexeeva, employed as a cleaner of this building, was a member of the local Bolsheviks. The party chair, Kalinin, had given her a mission. He had enjoined her to prepare this secret meeting. When the poor dog outside grew too frenzied, Alexeeva sneaked out and tried to calm it. It would be a long night.
The Bolsheviks had come via a chain of passwords, in disguise, to a venue undisclosed until the last instant. Now they gathered, sat on the floor in a room with too few chairs.
Lenin was one of the last to arrive. He took off his wig, sat down in the corner, and launched into another passionate, desperate defence of his strategy. They had tried compromise. The masses’ mood was not unready but protean, he said. They were waiting. They had ‘given the Bolsheviks their trust, and demand from them not words but deeds’.
All who were there agreed that this was one of Lenin’s finest rhetorical hours. Nonetheless, he could not banish all hesitation.
For the MO, those unlikely sceptics, Krylenko remained cautious. Volodarsky ventured that while ‘nobody is tearing into the streets … everybody would respond to a call by the Soviet’. From the Rozhdestvensk district came ‘doubts … on whether they [the workers] will rise’. From the Okhten district: ‘Things are bad.’ ‘Matters are not so good in Krasnoe Selo. In Kronstadt, morale has fallen.’ And Zinoviev saw ‘fundamental doubts about whether the success of an uprising is assured’.
The familiar arguments wore on. Finally, as the slush continued outside, the Bolsheviks took it to a vote.
What Lenin wanted was a formal endorsement of the previous decision, though one leaving open the form and precise timing of insurrection, deferring to the CC and to the heads of the Petrograd Soviet and All-Russian Executive Committee. Zinoviev, by contrast, called for flatly prohibiting the organising of an uprising before the Second Congress, scheduled for the 20th, when the Bolshevik fraction could be consulted.
For Zinoviev: six votes for, fifteen against, three abstentions. For Lenin: four abstentions, two opposed, and nineteen in favour.
Where the missing vote went is a mystery of history. In any case, revolution it was, by a large margin. Though the schedule was still up for debate, for the second time in a week the Bolsheviks had voted for insurrection.
An anguished Kamenev played a last card. This decision, he said, would destroy the Bolsheviks. Accordingly, he tendered his resignation from the CC.
Deep in the small hours, the meeting was done and the Bolsheviks slipped away, leaving Alexeeva to clean up an almighty mess.
Kamenev and his dismayed allies begged to express their dissent in Rabochy put’. They were denied. Without a party outlet, but with Zinoviev’s support, Kamenev went elsewhere.
Gorky’s paper, Novaya zhizn, floated politically somewhere between the left of the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks themselves. More pessimistic than the latter, its line was firmly against ‘precipitous’ insurrection. It was in Novaya zhizn that Kamenev published a stunning attack.
‘At the present,’ he wrote, ‘the instigation of an armed uprising before and independent of the Soviet Congress would be an impermissible and even fatal step for the proletariat and the revolution.’
Though he strongly insinuated it, Kamenev stopped short of openly declaring that an insurrection was planned. But, especially from a militant of long standing, the publication of such doubts, let alone in a non-Bolshevik journal, was a profoundly shocking, and damaging, transgression of party discipline.
Lenin unleashed biblical wrath.
He could barely believe this treachery from Kamenev, with Zinoviev behind him. These were his old assocates. In the barrage of Lenin’s letters to the party that Kamenev’s piece provoked, there is sharp and real pain. ‘It is not easy for me to write in this way about former close comrades,’ he wrote, amid a cataract of rage at the ‘blacklegs’, ‘strikebreakers’, committers of ‘betrayal’, a ‘crime’, purveyors of ‘slanderous lies’. He insisted they be expelled.
But despite Lenin’s authority and insistence, on the day of Kamenev’s sensational attack, though fifteen of the eighteen delegates of Petrograd military units convening at Smolny denounced the government, fully half would still not commit to armed action. And those who were ready to come out would only do so, they made clear, for the Soviet. At a meeting of 200 Bolshevik activists called precisely to discuss seizing power, moderates like Larin and Riazanov attacked the CC’s plans as premature. They were backed by Chudnovsky, a comrade who had come straight from the south-western front. Over there, he warned, the Bolsheviks had no stronghold. Any insurrection now, he said, would be doomed.
Amid the palpable and escalating tension, Soviet leaders nervously rescheduled the Second Congress for the 25th. The moderates hoped to use the time to mobilise wider social forces on their side. But this gave a fillip to Lenin, too: now he had an extra five days to prepare to pre-empt congress with insurrection.
He needed those days. The party was deeply divided.
The MO was suspicious of the parvenu MRC, and jealous of its power. The respect the members retained for leaders of the party right, and the discomfort that Lenin’s scorched-earth harangues could provoke, boiled over: to one of Lenin’s denunciations of the Heavenly Twins, the Bolshevik editors appended criticism of his ‘sharp tone’. At a CC meeting on the 20th, Stalin objected to Kamenev’s resignation. When Kamenev and Zinoviev were forbidden from openly attacking the CC, Stalin announced his own resignation from the editorial board, in protest.
The CC accepted neither his resignation, nor Lenin’s demand for Kamenev and Zinoviev’s expulsion. Kamenev’s earlier resignation from the CC also seems, at some point, to have gone by the wayside.
‘Our whole position’, said Stalin, with uncharacteristic perspicacity, ‘is contradictory.’ The Bolsheviks were divided even in their agreements.
On the 19th, the MRC encountered a severe setback. The units at the Peter and Paul Fortress passed a resolution opposing coming out. These were soldiers who would be crucial in any uprising.
Milrevcom tried to regroup. On its first mobilising meeting, on Friday 20 October, it focused attention on the defence of the Soviet from potential attack. The coming Sunday was to be ‘Petrograd Soviet Day’, and the socialists had plans for various celebratory concerts and meetings. But that day was also the 105th anniversary of the liberation of Moscow from Napoleon, and the Soviet of the Union of Cossack Military Forces had scheduled its own religious procession. The left feared that the hard right might use this march to instigate a clash. Milrevcom sent representatives to city combat units to warn of such provocations, and scheduled a session of the Garrison Conference for the following morning.