At last, at 8:30 p.m., against opposition of 102 and with 26 crucial abstentions, Dan’s ‘left’ resolution passed, with 123 votes.
A new era. Dan and Gots were now armed with a sliver-thin but newly radical mandate. Immediately they lit out through the cold evening to meet with the cabinet at the Winter Palace. This, they were sure, was the chance. They would demand the Provisional Government proclaim the cessation of hostilities. They would insist on peace negotiations, the transfer of manorial land, the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Everything could now change.
Alas.
It was just as Preparliament voted that the Helsingfors Bolshevik Leonid Stark, with only twelve armed sailors, took the Petrograd Telegraph Agency, a news wire. One of his first actions was to plug the flow of information. News of the Preparliament’s resolution went nowhere.
Though what difference that made is moot. Arriving at the Winter Palace, Dan and Gots were unnerved to find Kerensky at the point of derangement. One moment he morosely announced his intention to resign; the next he dismissed the Mensheviks, delusionally insisting that the government could cope alone.
The rebellion was, still, poised between defence and offensive. As late as 9 p.m., on the Troitsky Bridge, Osvald Denis, MRC commissar of the Pavlovsky Regiment, noticed increased movement among the loyalist forces. He wasted no time. He ordered barricades erected to block the way to the palace, and the arrest of government officials. But, very quickly, he received urgent word from Milrevcom. These measures were unauthorised, they told him. They ordered him to dismantle his checkpoints.
Incredulous, Denis ignored their command.
Lenin, meanwhile, could contain himself no longer. Directly contravening CC instructions – not for the first time – he did up his coat and placed a note on his hostess’s table.
‘I have gone’, it read, ‘where you did not want me to go.’
In wig, battered cap and ragged clothes, bandages swathed around his face in crude disguise, Lenin set out, together with his Finnish comrade Eino Rahja.
The two men crossed Vyborg in a swaying, near-empty tram. When, through chance remarks, the conductor revealed that she was a leftist, Lenin compulsively began to question her about – and lecture her on – the political situation.
They alighted near the Finland Station and continued on foot through the dangerous streets. At the bottom of Shpalernaya Street, Lenin and Rahja encountered a fired-up loyalist mounted patrol. Rahja held his breath.
But the cadets saw only a nervous injured drunk. They waved Lenin, the world’s most famous revolutionary, on his way. So it was that shortly before midnight, Lenin and Rahja reached the Smolny Institute.
At street corners, patrols kept watch. Machine-gunners hunched ready over weapons at the building’s entrance. That night the old finishing school was on a war footing. Vehicles came and went in a hubbub. Bonfires lit up the walls, the wary hard-eyed soldiers and the Red Guards.
Neither Rahja nor Lenin, of course, had an entry pass. The guards were adamant they could not come in. It seemed as if after their heart-in-mouth journey, the officious defences of their own side might stymie them.
But a crowd was gathering behind them, also demanding entrance. Its numbers grew, until abruptly under the riotous pressure of so many the sentries could only stand aside, helpless, and Lenin let the rush of people push him, take him with them through the perimeter, across the yard and on through the doors into the institute, and as 24 October became the 25th, he made his way at last along the corridors of Smolny to Room 36.
Where the Bolshevik caucus stared, stunned, as a shabby apparition interrupted them, unwinding bandages from his face, haranguing them to take power.
The All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviet eagerly pushed Dan’s newly left suggestions, the agenda that Kerensky had just rejected. These looked to be the best chance for stability. Left and even centrist Mensheviks were now scrambling to endorse the Committee of Public Safety, and to reaffirm the Preparliament’s demands. Those late hours, the left-wingers had momentum. Easily the majority of their own party caucus, the Left SRs resolved to liaise with the Menshevik–Internationalists, to coordinate efforts towards an exclusively socialist coalition.
They were not the only ones moving fast. Irrespective of Lenin’s exhortations and his furtive night journey, the logic of confrontation pushed Milrevcom ineluctibly towards a more overtly aggressive posture: the offensive it had done its best to avoid. Lenin’s presence at Smolny was nonetheless momentous, accelerating the trends.
It was past midnight. Around two hours after Lenin’s arrival at the institute, that resourceful commissar Denis, whose recent barricade-building had been so ill-received by his comrades, received new word from the MRC. Now they told him to reinforce the cordon they had previously ordered he destroy – a command he had declined to obey – and to exert control over movement in and out of the grounds of the Winter Palace. The final transition, from de facto to overt insurrection, had begun.
MRC commissar Michael Faerman took over the electric station and, on that harsh and freezing October night, disconnected government buildings. Commissar Karl Kadlubovsky occupied the main city post office. A company of the Sixth Engineer Battalion occupied Nikolaevsky Station. Their moonlit manoeuvres were watched by a statue, a scene from an uncanny story. ‘The hulks of house looked like medieval castles – giant shadows followed the engineers,’ one participant remembered. ‘At this sight, the next-to-last emperor appeared to rein in his horse in horror.’
3 a.m. Kerensky, who only a few hours earlier had claimed to be ready to face down any challenge, tore back, distraught, to General Staff headquarters, to hear a litany of strategic points falling. Loyalist morale pitched. Worse, though, quickly came.
At 3:30 a.m., a dark presence cut the shadowed Neva. Masts and wires and three looming smokestacks, great jutting guns. Out of the gloom came the armoured ship Aurora, making for the city’s heart.
The cruiser had long been undergoing repairs in a Neva shipyard. The men of its crew were staunchly radical – when trouble flared, they had disobeyed orders from the government, panicked at their proximity, to set out for sea – and now it was at MRC command that they came. The Aurora took the treacherous river under an expert eye: when its captain refused to have anything to do with the enterprise, the men locked him in his cabin and set out anyway. But he could not bear the risk to his great ship. He begged them to let him out, so he could navigate. It was he who guided them to anchor in the blackness by Nikolaevsky Bridge.
The Aurora’s searchlights cut the night. The cadets on the bridge, the last under government control, panicked in the glare. They fled.
When a few shock troops arrived to recapture it, 200 sailors and workers were defending the bridge.