From there, Kerensky entrusted himself to the care of those meagre loyalist forces at the Winter Palace. He was certain that the Preparliament would now support him. The man was ‘completely oblivious’, the Left SR Kamkov would recall, ‘to the fact that there was nobody to put down the uprising regardless of what sanctions he was granted’.
As he holed up, Trotsky was explaining to the Bolshevik delegates that the party was not in favour of insurrection before the congress itself, but that it would allow the government’s own rot to undermine it. ‘It would be a mistake’, he said amid applause, ‘to arrest the government … This is defence, comrades. This is defence.’ Such was still the catechism.
That afternoon came a sudden ominous development: the army General Staff ordered the bridges of the city drawn. They yawned slowly open as their pulleys cranked, not to allow passage beneath but to prevent it above, marooning those growing gatherings of the people on their sides of the water. Only Palace Bridge remained passable, with government forces in control of it.
‘I remembered the July Days,’ Ilin-Zhenevsky of the Bolshevik MO later wrote. ‘The drawing of the bridges appeared to me as the first step in another attempt to destroy us. Was it possible the Provisional Government would triumph over us again?’
Schools sent students home, and government departments their employees. Word of the bridge closures spread. Shops and banks pulled their shutters down. The tramlines curtailed their services.
But at 4 p.m., just as the cycle regiment at the Winter Palace abruptly abandoned their posts, loyalist artillery cadets arrived at one of those vital bridges, the Liteiny, and found themselves facing a large, furious crowd. This time, people had decided, the bridges would not be allowed to fall to the enemy. The outnumbered cadets could only surrender.
The Women’s Death Battalion were ordered to the Troitsky Bridge, to hold it. But when they arrived, they realised that they stood squarely in the sights of the machine guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress. They balked.
Unbidden, Ilin-Zhenevsky directed garrison soldiers to secure the Grenadiers and Samsonovsky bridges. One group returned dragging heavy machinery behind them, and were followed by a shouting mechanic.
‘We have lowered the bridge,’ they told a curious Ilin-Zhenevsky, ‘and to make sure that it stays down, we’ve brought part of the mechanism.’ Ilin-Zhenevsky reassured the bridge technician that the revolutionaries would take good care of the bulky parts, and stashed them in the regimental committee room.
Not everything went the crowds’ way. On Nikolaevsky Bridge, cadets took on committed but ill-disciplined Red Guards in their civilian clothes, and drove them off to take the crossing. On the Palace Bridge, cadets and women from the Death Battalion managed to hold their ground. Still, by early evening, the crowds held two of Petrograd’s four main bridges. Enough.
At the insistence of the Left SRs, Milrevcom informed the press that ‘contrary to all rumours and reports’, it was not out to seize power, ‘but exclusively for defence’. As its members repeated that line, on MRC orders, commissar Stanislav Pestkovsky came to the city’s telegraph office. Its guards were of the Keksgolmsky Regiment, long since pledged to loyalty to the MRC. With them onside, without a shot fired, and though not one of the three thousand employees within was a Bolshevik, the city’s communications passed into Milrevcom hands.
Evening in a city in strange equipoise. Armed revolutionaries were gathered on the bridges, grimly holding them from government forces, while groups of respectable citizens promenaded as usual on Nevsky Prospect, where most of the restaurants and cinemas were open. Upheaval was traced over a regular city dusk.
At Margarita Fofanova’s apartment, in the outskirts, Lenin grew twitchy. Despite the relatively smooth progress of the fight so far, his comrades still would not declare for an uprising. Their defensive posture held sway.
‘The situation is critical in the extreme,’ he scrawled to them.
To delay the uprising would be fatal … With all my might I urge comrades to realise that everything now hangs by a thread; that we are confronted by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or congresses (even congresses of soviets), but exclusively … by the struggle of the armed people … We must at all costs, this very evening, this very night, arrest the government … We must not wait! We may lose everything! … The government is tottering. It must be given the death blow at all costs.
And who should take power? ‘That is not important at present. Let the MRC do it, or “some other institution”’.
Lenin asked Fofanova to deliver the note to Krupskaya, ‘and no one else ’.
In Helsingfors, a radio operator handed a telegram to Dybenko, a young Bolshevik navy militant. ‘Send the regulations’. An agreed code. His comrades in the capital were instructing him to dispatch sailors and ships to Petrograd.
The hard left were not the only ones preparing. That night, even waverers were coming to understand that wavering could not continue. The feeble Preparliament reconvened again to discuss Kerensky’s pleas for support.
‘Let’s not play hide and seek with each other.’ The Left SR Boris Kamkov was peremptory. ‘Is there anybody at all who would trust this government?’
Martov stood to join the criticism. Somewhere in the hall, a wit of the right shouted, ‘Here is the minister of foreign affairs in the future cabinet!’
‘I’m nearsighted,’ Martov shot back, ‘and cannot tell if this is said by the minister of foreign affairs in Kornilov’s cabinet.’
The preparliamentarians traded barbs with desperate panache as structures of authority shuddered into splinters.
That Kamkov and Martov demanded, yet again, an immediate peace, a socialist government, land and army reform, was a surprise to no one. But the day’s upheavals, its lurches towards finality, were pushing moderates leftward, too.
Even Fyodor Dan, unexpectedly, after months of seeking coalition with the right, now insisted on ‘the clear enunciation by the government … of a platform in which the people will see their just interests supported by the government and the Council of the Republic and not the Bolsheviks’. What this meant was framing ‘the questions of peace and land and the democratisation of the army … in such a way that not a single worker or soldier will have the slightest doubt that our government is moving along this course with firm and resolute steps’.
The Kadets in the Preparliament, of course, proposed a resolution of support for the Provisional Government. Hard-line Cossacks put forth their own, viciously attacking that government from the right. But Dan articulated a newly mainstream SR/Menshevik resolution. Their calls were for the inauguration of a ‘Committee of Public Safety’ to work with the Provisional Government in restoring order – and for a radical programme for land and peace. The first, conciliatory-sounding, provision notwithstanding, this was a vote of left no confidence in Kerensky.
The chamber echoed as the debate over the three motions began.