It seemed to many citizens, the upheaval notwithstanding, almost like a normal day in Petrograd. A certain amount of racket and kerfuffle was impossible to ignore, certainly, but relatively few people were involved in the actual fighting, and only at key points. As those combatants went about their insurrectionary or counterrevolutionary work, reconfiguring the world, most trams were running, most shops stayed open.
At midday, armed revolutionary soldiers and sailors arrived at the Mariinsky Palace. The Preparliamentarians anxiously discussing the unfolding drama were about to become actors in it.
An MRC commissar stormed in. He ordered the Preparliament’s chair, Avksentiev, to clear the palace. Soldiers and sailors waving weapons shoved their way inside, scattering terrified deputies. In a daze, Avksentiev quickly gathered together as many of the steering committee as he could. They knew resistance was pointless, but departed under protest as formal as they could manage to make it, committed to reconvening as soon as possible.
As they stepped out into stinging cold, the building’s new guards checked their papers, but did not detain them. The pitiful Preparliament was not the prize that, to Lenin’s maddened exasparation, still eluded them.
That prize, now Kerenskyless, was in the Winter Palace. There, their world collapsing, the sullen embers of the Provisional Government still glowed.
At noon in the grand Malachite Room, the textile magnate and Kadet Konovalov convened the cabinet.
‘I don’t know why this session was called,’ muttered the naval minister, Admiral Verderevsky. ‘We have no tangible military force and consequently are incapable of taking any action whatever.’ Perhaps, he posited, they should have convened with the Preparliament – and even as he spoke, news came that it had been dismissed.
The ministers received reports and issued appeals to their dwindling interlocutors. Those not afflicted by Verderevsky’s mournful realism spun out fantasies. With the last shreds of their power gusting away, they dreamed up a new authority.
With all the seriousness in the world, like burnt-out matches telling grim stories of the conflagration they will soon start, the ashes of Russia’s Provisional Government debated which of them to make dictator.
This time the Kronstadt forces reached Petrograd’s waters in a former pleasure yacht, two minelayers, a training vessel, an antique battleship and a phalanx of tiny barges. Another madcap flotilla.
Close by where the cabinet was fantasising of dictatorship, revolutionary sailors captured the Admiralty and arrested the naval high command. The Pavlovsky Regiment set up pickets on bridges. The Keksgolmsky Regiment took control north of the Moika river.
Noon, the original time slated for the seizure of the Winter Palace, had come and gone. The deadline was pushed forward by three hours, which scheduled the arrest of the government for after the 2 p.m. opening of the Congress of Soviets – exactly what Lenin wanted to avoid. So that opening was postponed.
But the hall of Smolny was now teeming with delegates from the Petrograd and provincial soviets. They demanded news. They could not be put off forever.
At 2:35 p.m., therefore, Trotsky opened an emergency session of the Petrograd Soviet.
‘On behalf of the Military Revolutionary Committee,’ he exclaimed, ‘I declare that the Provisional Government no longer exists.’
His words aroused a storm of joy. Key institutions were in MRC hands, Trotsky went on over the commotion. The Winter Palace would fall ‘momentarily’. Another huge cheer came: Lenin was entering the hall.
‘Long live Comrade Lenin,’ Trotsky cried, ‘back with us again!’
Lenin’s first public appearance since July was brief and exultant. He offered no details, but announced ‘the beginning of a new period’, and exhorted: ‘Long live the world socialist revolution!’
Most of those present responded with delight. But there was dissent.
‘You are anticipating the will of the Second Congres of Soviets,’ someone shouted.
‘The will of the Second Congress of Soviets has already been predetermined by the fact of the workers’ and soldiers’ uprising,’ Trotsky called back. ‘Now we have only to develop this triumph.’
But amid proclamations from Volodarsky, Zinoviev and Lunacharsky, a small number of moderates, mostly Mensheviks, withdrew from the Soviet’s executive organs. They warned of terrible consequences from this conspiracy.
The revolutionaries made slapstick errors. Baltic sailors arrived late to their postings. Some were marooned in a field beyond the Finnish city of Vyborg, thanks to a loyalist stationmaster who supplied an unreliable train.
At 3 p.m., the rescheduled assault on the Provisional Government was delayed yet again. Lenin raged at the MRC. He was, Podvoisky recalled, ‘like a lion in a cage … He was ready to shoot us’.
At the Winter Palace itself, as morale among the remaining 3,000 or so hungry loyalist troops collapsed, the cabinet secluded within continued to imagine a future history. Dan and Gots of the Preparliament had ruled Kadets out of their proposed government; so now, in an epically insignificant snub to the Mensheviks, the cabinet determined that the new leader would be of that party: the former minister of welfare, Nikolai Mikhailovich Kishkin.
Just after 4 p.m., he was formally invested with power. Thus began the brief reign of Kishkin the dictator, all-powerful ruler of a clutch of palace rooms and a few outlying buildings.
Dictator Kishkin rushed to the military headquarters to take command. His first action was to dismiss the chief of staff, Polkovnikov, and replace him with Bagratuni. This provoked the first crack in his absolute authority: miraculously resistant to awe at Kishkin’s power, Polkovnikov’s associates resigned en masse in protest at his scapegoating.
Some made it through the perforated MRC defence and went glumly home. Some sat staring out of the windows.
6 p.m. Cold rain came down with the dark. Another MRC deadline to attack the palace passed. Red Guards watched in mild consternation as cadets in the Palace Square erected their own barricades. Periodically, some excitable revolutionary or other would let off a shot, only to be rebuked by comrades. Lenin sent note after furious note to the MRC leaders, demanding they get on with it.
At 6:15 p.m., a sizeable group of cadets decided they had no appetite for pointless sacrifice, particularly of themselves. They slipped out of the Winter Palace, taking their large-bore rifles with them. The ministers withdrew to Kerensky’s private rooms for supper. Borscht, fish, artichokes.
At Peter and Paul, Blagonravov, the MRC commissar, decided the time really had come for the attack. He sent two cyclists to the General Staff with an ultimatum: his cannon, the guns of the Aurora and those of its sister ship the Amur would fire in twenty minutes unless the government surrendered.
Blagonravov was bluffing. He had discovered that the big weapons trained on the palace from the fortress walls were unusable, too filthy to fire. The smaller replacements dragged hurriedly into position he then realised were not loaded. And he had no suitable ammunition.