The generals went quickly to the cabinet to relay the MRC message. The last telegrapher in the General Staff tapped out to Pskov that the building was lost. ‘I am leaving work’, he added, ‘and getting out of here.’
Someone in the palace wondered what would happen to it if the Aurora fired. ‘It will be turned’, said Verderevsky heavily, ‘into a heap of ruins.’
Dictator Kishkin hurried to beg a few quaking cadets to stay. The cabinet, considering it their duty not to withdraw until the last possible moment, put out their own last telegram.
‘To all, all, all! The Petrograd Soviet’ – not the Bolsheviks, tellingly – ‘has declared the Provisional Government overthrown, and demands that power be yielded to it under threat of shelling … We have decided not to surrender and to put ourselves under the protection of the people’.
At 8 p.m., it was the turn of 200 Cossacks to walk away from their posts. Bagratuni resigned and he, too, got out. In the palace, the remaining loyalist forces waited for death, smoking morosely under the tapestries.
One flank was barely guarded. Anyone determined and lucky could sneak past the guards into the half-defended corridors. A succession of revolutionaries like Dashkevich and journalists like John Reed came and went, for the sake of curiosity, fraternisation, reportage. Chudnovsky was invited in, by cadets desperate to leave but fearful, and negotiating for their safety.
The ministers vacated the Malachite Room for a less vulnerable office – which contained a telephone, its line miraculously still connected. The men dialled the city Duma and implored Petrograd’s mayor, Grigorii Shreider, down the line for help.
The Duma met immediately in emergency session, and sent mediators to the Aurora, Smolny and the Winter Palace. But the MRC barred them from the ship, and the besiegers of the palace rebuffed them. Nor was their white flag clear enough: some of the last defenders within, on whose behalf they had come, fired at them. At Smolny, Kamenev received them courteously and offered them safe passage to the palace, but the escorted group had no more luck than those who went direct.
It was at around this time that Kerensky managed to reach the front.
Blagonravov had been trying to prepare, and realised with relief that the six-inch guns of Peter and Paul were in firing condition after all. But his ridiculous travails were not over. The revolutionaries had agreed that the final assault on the Winter Palace would begin when his men raised a lighted red lantern on the fortress flagpole – and no one, it had transpired, had such a lantern.
Hunting for one throughout the dark grounds of Peter and Paul, Blagonravov promptly fell into a mud-pit. When, dirty and sodden, he finally found a suitable light and hared back to raise it, he discovered, nearly out of his mind with frustration, that ‘it proved extremely difficult to fix it on the flagpole’. It was not until 9:40 p.m., almost ten hours after the original deadline, that he overcame these obstacles and was at last able to signal the Aurora to fire.
The ship’s first shot was a blank. Its blast was sound without fury, but a sound much louder than that of live ammunition. A cataclysmic boom shook Petrograd.
On the banks of the river, curious onlookers dived in terror to the ground, covering their ears. Deafened and quivering from the report, scores of the last defenders in the palace lost heart and abandoned their posts, leaving only a hard core too committed, brave, paralysed, exhausted, stupid, or afraid to flee.
The minister Semion Maslov of the Right SRs screamed down the phone line to a Duma representative, who relayed his words to the hushed house. ‘The democracy sent us into the Provisional Government: we didn’t want the appointments, but we went. Yet now … when we are being shot, we are not supported … Of course we will die. But my final words will be: “Contempt and damnation to the democracy which knew how to appoint us but was unable to defend us.”’
After almost eight hours of stalling, the soviet delegates could be put off no longer. An hour after that first shot, in the grand colonnaded Assembly Hall of Smolny, the Second Congress of Soviets opened.
The room was heavy with the fug of cigarettes, despite repeated shouts, many cheerfully taken up by the smokers themselves, that smoking was not allowed. The delegates, Sukhanov recorded with a shudder, mostly bore ‘the grey features of the Bolshevik provinces’. They looked, to his refined and intellectual eye, ‘morose’ and ‘primitive’ and ‘dark’, ‘crude and ignorant’.
Of 670 delegates, 300 were Bolsheviks. A hundred and ninty-three were SRs, more than half of them of the party’s left; sixty-eight Mensheviks, and fourteen Menshevik–Internationalists. The rest were unaffiliated, or members of tiny groups. The size of the Bolshevik presence illustrated that support for the party was soaring among those who voted in the representatives – and was also bolstered by somewhat lax organisational arrangements that had given them more than their proportional share. Even so, without the Left SRs, they had no majority.
It was not, however, a Bolshevik who rang the opening bell, but a Menshevik. The Bolsheviks played on Dan’s vanity by offering him this role. But he instantly quashed any hopes of cross-party camaraderie or congeniality.
‘The Central Executive Committee considers our customary opening political address superfluous,’ he announced. ‘Even now, our comrades who are selflessly fulfilling the obligations we placed on them are under fire at the Winter Palace.’
Dan and the other moderates who had led the Soviet since March vacated their seats to be replaced by the new, proportionally allotted presidium. To uproarious approval, fourteen Bolsheviks – including Kollontai, Lunacharsky, Trotsky, Zinoviev – and seven Left SRs, including the great Maria Spiridonova, ascended the platform. The Mensheviks, in dudgeon, abjured their three seats. One place was held for the Menshevik–Internationalists: in a move simultaneously dignified and pathetic, Martov’s group declined to take it, but reserved the right to do so later.
As the new revolutionary leadership sat and prepared for business, the room suddenly reverberated with another cannon boom. Everybody froze.
This time the shot came from the Peter and Paul Fortress. Unlike the Aurora’s, its round was not a blank.
The oily flash of detonations reflected in the Neva. Shells soared up, arcing in the night and screaming as they descended towards their target. Many, in mercy or incompetence, combusted loud, spectacular and harmless in the air. Many more plunged with crashing splashes deep into the water.
From their own emplacements, the Red Guards fired too. Their bullets peppered the Winter Palace walls. The vestiges of government within cowered under the table as glass rained down around them.