When the cheering subsided, Trotsky himself rose to respond to Martov.
‘A rising of the masses of the people requires no justification,’ he said. ‘What has happened is an insurrection, and not a conspiracy. We hardened the revolutionary energy of the Petersburg workers and soldiers. We openly forged the will of the masses for an insurrection, and not a conspiracy. The masses of the people followed our banner and our insurrection was victorious. And now we are told: renounce your victory, make concessions, compromise. With whom? I ask: with whom ought we to compromise? With those wretched groups which have left us or who are making this proposal? But after all we’ve had a full view of them. No one in Russia is with them any longer. A compromise is supposed to be made, as between two equal sides, by the millions of workers and peasants represented in this congress, whom they are ready, not for the first time or the last, to barter away as the bourgeoisie sees fit. No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out. Go where you ought to go: into the dustbin of history!’
The room erupted. Amid the loud sustained applause, Martov stood up. ‘Then we’ll leave!’ he shouted.
As he turned, a delegate barred his way. The man stared at him with an expression between sorrow and accusation.
‘And we had thought’, he said, ‘that Martov at least would remain with us.’
‘One day you will understand’, said Martov, his voice shaking, ‘the crime in which you are taking part.’
He walked out.
Congress quickly passed a spiteful denunciation of the departed, including of Martov. Such barbs were unwelcome and unnecessary as far as the remaining Left SRs and Menshevik–Internationalists were concerned – as they were, too, to many Bolsheviks.
Boris Kamkov was warmly clapped when he announced that his group, the Left SRs, had stayed. He tried to revive Martov’s proposal, gently criticising the Bolshevik majority. They had not carried the peasantry, or the bulk of the army, he reminded his listeners. Compromise was still necessary.
This time it was not Trotsky who responded, but the popular Lunacharsky – who had previously agreed to Martov’s move. The tasks ahead were onerous, he concurred, but ‘Kamkov’s criticism of us is unfounded.’
‘If starting this session we had initiated any steps whatever to reject or remove other elements, Kamkov would be right,’ Lunacharsky continued. ‘But all of us unanimously accepted Martov’s proposal to discuss peaceful ways of solving the crisis. And we were deluged by a hail of declarations. A systematic attack was conducted against us … Without hearing us out, not even bothering to discuss their own proposal, they [the Mensheviks and SRs] immediately sought to fence themselves off from us.’
In response, it could have been pointed out to Lunacharsky that Lenin had, for weeks, been insisting that his party must take power alone. And yet, all such cynicism notwithstanding, Lunacharsky was right.
Whether in joyful solidarity, truculently, in confusion, or whatever it might be, like everyone else of every other party, all the Bolsheviks in the hall had supported cooperation – a socialist unity government – when Martov first mooted it.
Bessie Beatty suggested that Trotsky failed to move as fast as he could in response to that first proposal, perhaps out of ‘some bitter memory of insults he had suffered at the hands of these other leaders’. That was debatable, and even if true, the Mensheviks, the Right SRs and others had chosen to throw the vote back in the faces of the Bolsheviks. They had gone straight from it to opposition, denouncing those to their left.
Lunacharsky’s question was reasonable: how do you cooperate with those who have rejected cooperation?
As if to underline the point, the departed moderates were, at that very moment, labelling the meeting only ‘a private gathering of Bolshevik delegates’. ‘The Central Executive Committee’, they announced, ‘considers the Second Congress as not having taken place.’
In the hall, the debate about conciliation dragged into the darkest hours. But by now the weight of opinion was with Lunacharsky, and with Trotsky.
It was endgame at the Winter Palace.
Wind intruded through smashed glass. The vast chambers were cold. Disconsolate soldiers, deprived of purpose, wandered past the double-headed eagles of the throne room. Invaders reached the emperor’s personal chamber. It was empty. They took their time attacking images of the man himself, hacking with their bayonets at the stiff, sedate life-sized Nicholas II watching from the wall. They scored the painting like beasts with talons, left long scratches, from the ex-tsar’s head to his booted feet.
Figures drifted in and out of sight, each unsure of who the other was. One Lieutenant Sinegub remained, committed to defending the government. He patrolled the besieged corridors for disjointed hours, awaiting attack, adrift in a kind of sedate panic, extreme, narcotic exhaustion, passing scenes like snips from some half-heard story: an old gentleman in the uniform of an admiral, sitting motionless in an armchair; an unlit, deserted switchboard; soldiers hunkered below the watching eyes of portraits in a gallery.
Men skirmished in stairwells. Any creak on the floorboards might be the revolution. Here came a junker heading somewhere, on some mission. He warned with a stilted calm that the person Sinegub had just passed – he had just walked past someone, yes – was probably one of the enemy. ‘Good, excellent,’ said Sinegub. ‘Watch! I will make sure at once.’ He turned and immobilised him – the other man, he saw, was indeed of the insurgency’s party – by pulling his coat down, like a child in a playground fight, so he could not move his arms.
About 2 a.m., MRC forces pushed into the palace in sudden numbers. Frantic, Konovalov telephoned Shreider. ‘All we have is a small force of cadets,’ he said. ‘Our arrest is imminent.’ The connection broke.
From the hallways, the ministers heard futile shots. The last of their defence. Footsteps. A breathless cadet came running in for orders. ‘Fight to the last man?’ he asked.
‘No bloodshed!’ they shouted. ‘We must surrender.’
They waited. A strange awkwardness. How best to be found? Not, surely, hovering embarrassedly, coats over their arm, like businessmen awaiting a train.
Kishkin the dictator took control. He issued the final two orders of his reign.
‘Leave your overcoats,’ he said. ‘Let us sit down at the table.’
They obeyed. And thus they were, a frozen tableau of a cabinet meeting, when Antonov burst dramatically in, his eccentric artist’s hat pushed back over his red hair. Behind him, soldiers, sailors, Red Guards.
‘The Provisional Government is here,’ said Konovalov with impressive decorum, as if in answer to a knock rather than an insurrection. ‘What do you want?’