Their Peter and Paul problem aside, mostly the MRC was energised. It was building momentum among the troops and winning over sceptics and ‘party-only’ strategists in the Bolsheviks with its successes. Now the CC asserted that ‘all Bolshevik organisations can become part of the revolutionary centre organised by the Soviet’. But naysayers, both to its role and to the CC strategy, remained.
Lenin summoned the MO’s Podvoisky, Nevsky and Antonov to a nondescript apartment in the Vyborg district. He was determined, Nevsky recalled, to ‘eradicate the last vestiges of stubbornness’ about the feasibility of an uprising. In fact, some of the anxieties the MO men raised seemed to strike home with him. But when they argued for a delay of ten to fifteen days, he was beside himself with impatience. And in addition, now that he had been won over by it, Lenin told the MO it must work within the MRC.
On the morning of the 21st, Trotsky opened the MRC’s garrison conference. He urged soldiers and workers to support the MRC and the soviets in the struggle for power. The garrison passed a resolution calling on the forthcoming Congress of Soviets to ‘take power’.
‘A whole series of people spoke out in regard to the necessity of immediately transferring power to the soviets,’ reported Golos soldata, a sceptical SR–Menshevik paper. There was reassurance, too, about what might occur on Sunday. ‘The representative of the Fourth Don Cossack Regiment informed the assembly that his regimental committee had decided against participation in the next day’s religious procession. The representative of the Fourteenth Don Cossack Regiment caused a sensation when he declared that his regiment not only would not support counterrevolutionary moves … but would fight the counterrevolution with all its strength.’ To rapturous applause, the speaker bent down to shake hands with his ‘comrade Cossack’.
Buoyed, Milrevcom decided to confront the government.
At midnight on the 21st, a group of MRC representatives arrived at General Staff to meet General Polkovnikov. ‘Henceforth’, one Sadovsky told him, ‘orders not signed by us are invalid.’
The garrison, Polkovnikov countered, was his responsibility, and one commissar from the Central Executive Committee was enough. ‘We won’t recognise your commissars,’ he said. Battle was joined.
The delegation returned to MRC headquarters to meet with Antonov, Sverdlov and Trotsky. There, together, they formulated a key document of the October revolution.
‘At a meeting on 21 October the revolutionary garrison united around the MRC,’ it read.
Despite this, on the night of October 21–22, the headquarters of the Petrograd Military District refused to recognise the MRC … In so doing, the headquarters breaks with the revolutionary garrison and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies … The HQ becomes a direct weapon of counterrevolutionary forces … The protection of revolutionary order from counterrevolutionary attacks rests with the revolutionary soldiers directed by the MRC. No directives to the garrison not signed by the MRC should be considered valid … The revolution is in danger. Long live the revolutionary garrison.
In the small hours of Sunday 22nd, in ad hoc session at Smolny, the garrison conference voted to endorse Trotsky’s explosive declaration. Simultaneously, Polkovnikov initiated his moves against the MRC. He carefully invited representatives of garrison committees and officials of the Petrograd and All-Russian Executive Committees to a meeting.
Polkovnikov was shrewd. In response to their endorsement of the MRC declaration, he also invited the soldiers at Smolny to meet.
Petrograd Soviet Day. At various mass meetings throughout the capital, the greatest Bolshevik orators – Trotsky, Raskolnikov, Kollontai, Volodarsky – whipped up the crowds. Even Kamenev, surprisingly, was prominent, taking the opportunity of his own speeches to downplay the prospects of any insurrection before the Second Congress.
At the opera venue called the House of the People, Trotsky warned that Petrograd remained at imminent risk from the bourgeoisie. It was, he said, up to workers and soldiers to defend the city. According to Sukhanov, that perennial wry bystander, wryly standing by, this fostered ‘a mood bordering on ecstasy’.
In such an atmosphere of cheers and shouts and clenched fists and militia determination and applause, Polkovnikov made his next move. His position was weak, and he knew it. Still seeking compromise, he now invited the MRC itself to meet with him the following day.
Nor was he the only general fervently strategising. That evening, the Petrograd Military District chief of staff, Jaques Bagratuni, requested the quick deployment from the northern front of an infantry and a cavalry brigade, as well as an artillery battery, to the city. Woytinsky, at the front, responded that soldiers were suspicious. They would need to know why before agreeing.
Kerensky, meanwhile, still grossly overestimated his hand. That very night, he proposed to his cabinet that Milrevcom be liquidated by force. Polkovnikov tried to persuade him to wait, hoping to get Milrevcom to rescind their declaration of power. But the government went ahead and issued an ultimatum.
Either, it declared, the MRC would reverse its declaration of the 22nd, or the authorities would reverse it for them.
23 October. Milrevcom had almost finished appointing its commissars – mostly, surprising no one, Bolshevik Military Organisation activists. Now it was time to ramp up confrontation with the government. The committee circulated a decree granting itself veto power over military orders.
At midday, MRC representatives arrived back at Peter and Paul: they had requested a public meeting at the fortress where they had so recently been rebuffed. Much later, Antonov would claim that he had argued for sending pro-Bolshevik troops to take the fortress by force, but that Trotsky was convinced the soldiers there could be won over. Accordingly, Milrevcom organised a quite extraordinary debate.
The fort commander spoke for the existing chain of command, joined in his efforts by high-profile Right SRs and Mensheviks. The MRC was represented mostly by Bolsheviks. For hours, the intense arguments unfolded, raging back and forth before the mass gathering of soldiers.
As a drained Chudnovsky strove to make his best case for the MRC, he heard a surge of applause spread through the huge crowd. He blinked down at the growing commotion. He smiled.
‘I yield my place’, he shouted, ‘to Comrade Trotsky!’
To the rising tide of euphoria, Trotsky mounted the platform. It was his turn to add his voice.