The meeting continued as the day grew dark. The crowds relocated, made their way to the great wooden building at 11 Kamennoostrovsky Prospect. The Modern Circus, a dimly lit amphitheatre where the Bolshevik women’s journal Rabotnitsa held frequent gatherings, was a favourite forum for the revolutionaries. It had been the setting of many of the young Trotsky’s greatest speeches in 1905. Later he would write a lyrical eulogy to those 1905 events, a description that might serve to conjure up that October night twelve years later.
Every square inch was filled, every human body compressed to its limit … The balconies threatened to fall under the excessive weight of human bodies … The air, intense with breathing and waiting, fairly exploded with shouts and with the passionate yells peculiar to the Modern Circus … No speaker, no matter how exhausted, could resist the electric tension of that impassioned human throng … Such was the Modern Circus. It had its own contours, fiery, tender, and frenzied.
And it was there, at 8 p.m., that the soldiers finally, dramatically, voted.
Everyone for the MRC moved to the left: those opposed, to the right. There was a protracted shuffling and shoving. When it was done, there rose a huge and sustained cheer. On the right were only a few officers, and some intellectuals from one of those strange bicycle regiments. The majority, by far, stood for the MRC.
The Peter and Paul units, which had declared against the MRC only three days before, had joined them. The symbolism was immense. And with it came more concrete advantages. Most of Petrograd’s weapon stores were now in MRC hands. And the cannon of the fortress looked out over the Winter Palace itself.
Delegates had started to arrive for the Congress of Soviets. Bolsheviks and Left SRs would certainly have a majority, and they would be able to demand power transfer to the soviets, a truly socialist government. At a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet plenum that night, the flamboyant Antonov reported all the MRC’s moves, describing them as defensive, all for the sake of the Congress itself. As such, they received overwhelming support from the delegates.
Milrevcom’s triumphs were indeed spectacular. It was therefore quite astonishing when, late that same night, it caved in to the Military District’s ultimatum. It withdrew its recent declaration – its veto power.
What precipitated this remarkable climbdown is not clear. What seems likely is that Menshevik moderates Bogdanov and Gots announced that if the committee did not capitulate, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet would break off relations. It was in the Soviet’s name that Milrevcom drew its support and its legitimacy: how would such a breakdown look?
Whatever threat it was that came, it was apparently not only the Left SRs, but also Bolshevik moderates like Riazanov who insisted the MRC cancel its claim to military authority, precipitating its own existential crisis.
At 2:30 a.m., a strange army came through the cold city night. It was cobbled from whatever forces were to hand, on which the right could count. Two or three detachments of Junkers; some cadets from officers’ training schools; a few warriors from a Women’s Death Battalion; a battery of horse artillery from Pavlovsk; various Cossacks; a bicycle unit with their thick-wheeled machines; and a rifle regiment of war-wounded veterans. They headed through the quiet city to defend the Winter Palace.
The MRC had blinked. Kerensky struck.
As he prayed for the imminent arrival of loyalist troops from the front, Kerensky ordered Bagratuni to deploy those few he had. In the small hours of 24 October, the assault on the Bolsheviks began.
In the early winter darkness, a detachment of militia and cadets arrived at the Trud press, where Rabochy put’ was printed. They forced their way in and destroyed several thousand copies of the paper. They smashed equipment, sealed the entrance, and set a guard outside. In a fatuous nod at even-handedness, Kerensky also ordered the simultaneous shutdown of two hard-right journals, Zhivoe slovo and Novaya Rus’. No one, though, could mistake the target of this attack.
After a long day of meetings with newly arrived party delegates, several leading Bolshevik were deep asleep in the party’s Priboi publishing house, snoring on their cots amid the piles of books. A phone began to ring and would not stop. They groaned. One Lomov, at last, stumbled over and picked up.
Trotsky’s sharp voice, summoning them. ‘Kerensky is on the offensive!’
At Smolny, Lazimir, Trotsky, Sverdlov, Antonov and others scrambled to formulate MRC alerts for regimental committees and new commissars. ‘Directive Number One. The Petrograd Soviet is in direct danger … You are hereby directed to bring your regiment to battle readiness … Any procrastination or interference in executing this order will be considered a betrayal of the revolution.’
No one now knew if the Soviet Congress would even take place, now. Some in the MRC and the Petersburg Committee began, like Lenin, to agitate for immediate insurrection. But, even with their presses attacked and with loyalist forces on the move, the rump CC at Smolny, including Trotsky and Kamenev, considered pursuing negotiations between the MRC and the Military District. They seemed not yet to realise that Kerensky’s actions had rendered such a course irrelevant.
The CC was still framing the actions it supported as wholly defensive, at least until the Soviet Congress. But now it endorsed Trotsky’s decision to send guards to the Trud press, because ‘the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies cannot tolerate suppression of the free word’.
To reopen the press would be less defence than counterattack. As at the front, so with insurrection: the distinction between ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ can blur.
At 9 a.m., Dashkevich of the Bolshevik MO and CC pulled up to the printers with a company of machine-gun-toting Litovsky guards. Effortlessly and bloodlessly they overwhelmed the loyalist militia, and broke the government seals. ‘The comrade soldiers’, one reporter drily noted, ‘made no similar effort to liberate Zhivoe slovo.’ An edition of Pravda was rushed out, pushing the mainstream CC line by urging pressure on the forthcoming Congress of Soviets to replace Kerensky’s regime.
On the streets, armed workers and soldiers began congregating, trying to get a sense of the tides of events. The left were not the only side in motion.
Kerensky made his quick way to the Mariinsky Palace. There, in a bid to rally the Preparliament, that veteran melodramatist gave a speech that was rambling, incoherent and overwrought even by his own generous standards. The left, he wailed, was playing into German hands. He begged for support for his most Provisional of Governments. He pleaded for powers to suppress the Bolsheviks. The right applauded, while the Menshevik–Internationalists and Left SRs shifted in embarrassment at the spectacle he made of himself.