From Finland, armed groups set out by train and ship to join their comrades. More reds for Red Petrograd. In Room 36 of Smolny, Lenin gathered with Trotsky and Stalin, Smilga and Berzin – and Kamenev and Zinoviev. Their recent betrayal was hardly the most important thing on which to focus any more.
People bustled and came and went, bringing reports and instructions. The Bolsheviks leaned over maps, traced lines of attack. Lenin insisted that the Winter Palace must be taken and the Provisional Government arrested. This was now, without any question, an insurrection.
Lenin proposed to his comrades a – wholly Bolshevik – government to present to the Soviet Congress, when it opened later that day. But what should they call the appointees? ‘Minister’, he said, was ‘a vile, hackneyed word’.
‘What about people’s commissars?’ said Trotsky.
‘Yes, that’s very good,’ Lenin said. ‘It smells terribly of revolution.’ The seed of the revolutionary government, the Council of People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom, was sown.
Lenin suggested Trotsky for commissar of the interior. But Trotsky foresaw that enemies on the right would attack him – as a Jew.
‘Of what importance are such trifles?’ Lenin snapped.
‘There are still a good many fools left,’ Trotsky replied.
‘Surely we don’t keep step with fools?’
‘Sometimes’, said Trotsky, ‘one has to make some allowance for stupidity. Why create additional complications at the outset?’
Dizzy with what was unfolding, the men drifted into strange, intense, playful, bureaucratic-utopian banter. The weight of their recent disagreements lightened. Lenin now teased Kamenev. The same Kamenev who, days before, he had denounced as a traitor, and who, hours before, had lugubriously opined that if they did take power, the Bolsheviks would not hold it for more than two weeks.
‘Never mind,’ Lenin told him. ‘When, in two years’ time, we’re still in power, you’ll be saying we can’t survive any longer than two years.’
Dawn of the 25th approached. A desperate Kerensky issued an appeal to the Cossacks ‘in the name of freedom, honour and the glory of our native land … to act to aid the Soviet Central Executive Committee, the revolutionary democracy, and the Provisional Government, and to save the perishing Russian State’.
But the Cossacks wanted to know if the infantry was coming out. When the government’s answer was equivocal, all but a small number of ultra-loyalists responded that they were disinclined to act alone, ‘serving as live targets’.
Repeatedly, easily, at points throughout the city, Milrevcom disarmed loyalist guards and just told them to go home. And for the most part, they did. Insurgents occupied the Engineers’ Palace by the simple expedient of walking in. ‘They entered and took their seats, while those who were sitting there got up and left,’ one reminiscence has it. At 6 a.m., forty revolutionary sailors approached the Petrograd State Bank. Its guards, from the Semenovsky Regiment, had pledged neutrality: they would defend the bank from looters and criminals, but would not take sides between reaction and revolution. Nor would they intervene. They stood aside, therefore, and let the MRC take over.
Within an hour, as watery winter light washed over the city, a detachment from the Keksgolmsky Regiment, commanded by Zakharov, an unusual military school cadet come over to the revolution, set out to the main telephone exchange. Zakharov had worked there, and he knew its security. When he arrived, he had no difficulty directing his troops to isolate and disarm the sullen, powerless cadets on duty there. The revolutionaries disconnected the government lines.
They missed two. With these, the cabinet ministers holed up and huddled over two receivers amid the white-and-gilt filigrees, pilasters and chandeliers of the Malachite Room of the Winter Palace, and maintained contact with their meagre forces. They issued pointless instructions, bickering in low voices while Kerensky stared at nothing.
Mid-morning. In Kronstadt, as they had before, armed sailors boarded whatever they could find that was seaworthy. From Helsingfors they set forth in five destroyers and a patrol boat, all festooned with revolutionary banners. Across Petrograd, revolutionaries were once more emptying the jails.
At Smolny, a scruffy figure barged into the Bolshevik operations room. The activists stared, disconcerted at the newcomer, until at last Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich cried out and ran forward with his arms open. ‘Vladimir Ilyich, our father! I did not recognise you, dear one!’
Lenin sat down to draft a proclamation. He was twitching with anxiety about time, desperate for the final overthrow of the government to be complete when Second Congress opened. He well knew the power of the fait accompli.
To the Citizens of Russia. The Provisional Government has been overthrown. State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.
The cause for which the people have struggled – the immediate proposal of a democratic peace, the elimination of landlord estates, workers’ control over production, the creation of a soviet government – the triumph of this cause has been assured.
Long live the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ revolution!
Quite convinced by now of Milrevcom’s usefulness, Lenin did not sign for the Bolsheviks, but in the name of that ‘non-party’ body.
The proclamation was printed up quickly in the bold text blocks to which Cyrillic lends itself. As fast as copies could be distributed they were plastered as posters across countless walls. Operators keyed its words down telegraph wires.
In fact it was not a truth but an aspiration.
In the Winter Palace, Kerensky used his last channels of communication to arrange to join troops heading for the capital. To actually reach them, however, would not be at all easy. He might get away, but the MRC controlled the stations.
He needed help. The General Staff conducted a long and increasingly frantic search, and at last found a suitable car. Pleading, they managed to secure the use of another from the American embassy – a vehicle with handy diplomatic plates.
About 11 a.m. on the 25th, just as Lenin’s prefigurative proclamation began to circulate, the two vehicles sped past MRC roadblocks that were more enthusiastic than efficient.
A broken Kerensky escaped the city with a tiny entourage, to go looking for loyal soldiers.