At Smolny, as the ominous echoes of the onslaught sounded, Martov raised his tremulous voice. He insisted on a peaceful solution. He called hoarsely for a ceasefire. For negotiations to begin on a cross-party, united, socialist government.
There came a great tumult of applause from the audience. From the presidium itself, Mstislavsky of the Left SRs offered Martov full-throated support. As, and vocally, did most of those present – including many grassroots Bolsheviks.
For the party leadership, Lunacharsky rose. And then, sensationally, he announced that ‘the Bolshevik fraction has absolutely nothing against the proposal made by Martov’.
The delegates voted on Martov’s call. Support was unanimous.
Bessie Beatty, correspondent for the San Francisco Bulletin, was in the room. She understood the stakes of what she saw. ‘It was’, she wrote, ‘a critical moment in the history of the Russian Revolution.’ It seemed as if a democratic socialist coalition was about to be born.
But as the moment stretched out, the guns on the Neva sounded again. Their echoes shook the room – and the chasms between parties reappeared.
‘A criminal political venture has been going on behind the back of the All-Russian Congress,’ announced a Menshevik officer, Kharash. ‘The Mensheviks and SRs repudiate all that is going on here, and stubbornly resist all attempts to seize the government.’
‘He does not represent the Twelfth Army!’ cried an angry soldier. ‘The army demands all power to the soviets!’
A barrage of heckles. Right SRs and Mensheviks took turns now to shout denunciations of the Bolsheviks, and to warn that they would withdraw from proceedings, as the left howled them down.
The mood grew more bitter. Khinchuk of the Moscow Soviet took his turn to speak. ‘The only possible peaceful solution to the present crisis’, he insisted, ‘continues to lie in negotiations with the Provisional Government.’
Bedlam. Khinchuk’s intervention was either a catastrophic underestimate of the hatred for Kerensky, or a deliberate provocation. It drew fury from far more than just the incredulous Bolsheviks. At last, into the din Khinchuk yelled, ‘We leave the present congress!’
But amid the stamping, booing and whistling that greeted that call, the Mensheviks and SRs hesitated. The threat to leave, after all, was a last card.
Across Petrograd, the Duma discussed Maslov’s doom-laden phone call. ‘Let our comrades know that we have not abandoned them; let them know we will die with them,’ proclaimed the SR Naum Bykhovsky. Liberals and conservatives rose to vote yes, that they would join those bunkered in the Winter Palace under fire; that they, too, were ready to die for the regime. The Kadet Countess Sofia Panina declared she would ‘stand in front of the cannon’.
Full of scorn, the Bolshevik representatives voted no. They would go too, they said, but not to the palace: to the Soviet.
The roll call done, the two competing pilgrimages set out in the darkness.
In Smolny, Erlich of the Jewish Bund interrupted proceedings with news of the city Duma deputies’ decisions. It was time, he said, for those who ‘did not wish a bloodbath’ to join the march to the palace, in solidarity with the cabinet. Again the left shouted imprecations, as Mensheviks, Bund, SRs and a smattering of others rose and at last walked out. Leaving the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs, and the agitated Menshevik–Internationalists behind.
Trudging through cold night rain, the self-exiled moderates from Smolny reached Nevsky Prospect and the Duma. There they joined forces with its deputies, with the Menshevik and SR members of the Executive Committee of the Peasants’ Soviets, and together they set out to show their solidarity with the cabinet. They walked four abreast behind Shreider, the mayor, and Sergei Prokopovich, the minister of supplies. Carrying bread and sausages for the ministers’ sustenance, quavering the Marseillaise, the 300-strong group sallied forth to die for the Provisional Government.
They did not make it a block. At the corner of the canal, revolutionaries blocked their way.
‘We demand to pass!’ Shreider and Prokopovich shouted. ‘We are going to the Winter Palace!’
A sailor, bemused, refused to let them through.
‘Shoot us if you want to!’ the marchers challenged. ‘We are ready to die, if you have the heart to fire on Russians and comrades … We bare our breasts to your guns!’
The peculiar standoff continued. The left refused to shoot, the right demanded their right to pass and/or be shot.
‘What will you do?’ yelled someone at the sailor who doggedly refused to murder him.
John Reed’s eyewitness account of what happened next is famous. ‘Another sailor came up, very much irritated. “We will spank you!” he cried energetically. “And if necessary we will shoot you too. Go home now, and leave us in peace.”’
That would be no fit fate for champions of democracy. Standing on a box, waving his umbrella, Prokopovich anounced to his followers that they would save these sailors from themselves. ‘We cannot have our innocent blood upon the hands of these ignorant men! … It is beneath our dignity to be shot down’ – let alone spanked – ‘here in the street by switchmen. Let us return to the Duma, and discuss the best means of saving the country and the Revolution!’
With that, the self-declared morituri for liberal democracy turned and set out on their embarrassingly short return journey, taking their sausages with them.
Martov remained in the Assembly Hall with the mass meeting. He was still desperate for compromise. Now he tabled a motion criticising the Bolsheviks for pre-empting Congress’s will, suggesting – again – that negotiations begin for a broad, inclusive socialist government. This was close to his proposal of two hours before – which, Lenin’s desire to break with moderates notwithstanding, the Bolsheviks had not opposed.
But two hours was a long time.
As Martov sat, there was a commotion, and the Bolsheviks’ Duma fraction pushed into the hall, to the delegates’ delight and surprise. They had come, they said, ‘to triumph or die with the All-Russian Congress’.