‘I inform you, all of you,’ said Antonov, ‘members of the Provisional Government, that you are under arrest.’
Before the revolution, a political lifetime ago, one of those ministers present, Maliantovich, had sheltered Antonov in his house. The two men eyed each other, but did not mention it.
The Red Guards were furious to realise that Kerensky was long gone. Blood up, one shouted, ‘Bayonet all the sons of bitches!’
‘I will not allow any violence against them,’ Antonov calmly replied.
With that he led the ministers away, leaving behind them their rough drafts of proclamations, crossed out, those criss-crosses meandering like the dreams of dictatorship into fanciful designs. A telephone began to ring.
Sinegub watched from the corridor. When it was over, his government gone, his duty done, he turned quietly and walked away, out into the blaze of searchlights.
Looters ferreted through the warren of rooms. They ignored the artworks and took clothes and knick-knacks. They trampled papers across the floors. As they left, revolutionary soldiers checked them and confiscated their souvenirs. ‘This is the people’s palace,’ one Bolshevik lieutenant chided. ‘This is our palace. Do not steal from the people.’
A broken sword handle, a wax candle. The pilferers surrendered their booty. A blanket, a sofa cushion.
Antonov led the ex-ministers outside, where a rough, fired-up and angry crowd met them. He stood protectively in front of his prisoners. ‘Don’t hit them,’ he and other experienced – proud – Bolsheviks insisted. ‘It is uncultured.’
But the growling anger of the streets would not be appeased so easily. After anxious moments, it was by luck, when the noise of nearby machine-gun fire sent people scattering in alarm, that Antonov took the opportunity to run across the bridge, shoving and dragging the detainees to incarceration in the Fortress of Peter and Paul.
As the door to his cell was about to close, the Menshevik internal affairs minster Nikitin found a telegram from the Ukrainian Rada in his pocket.
‘I received this yesterday,’ he said. He handed it to Antonov. ‘Now it’s your problem.’
In Smolny, it was that dogged naysayer Kamenev who gave the delegates the news: ‘The leaders of the counterrevolution ensconced in the Winter Palace have been seized by the revolutionary garrison.’ He unleashed joyful pandemonium.
It was past 3 a.m., but there was still business to be done. For two more hours Congress heard reports come in – of units coming over to their side, of generals accepting MRC authority. There was still dissent, too. Someone called for the release of those SR ministers in prison: Trotsky lambasted them as false comrades.
Around 4 a.m., in an undignified afterword to his exit, a delegation from Martov’s group sheepishly re-entered, and tried to resubmit his call for a collaborative socialist government. Kamenev reminded the hall that those with whom Martov advocated compromise had turned their backs on his proposal. Still, ever the moderate, he moved to table Trotsky’s condemnation of the SRs and Mensheviks, putting it discreetly into procedural limbo, to spare blushes should talks resume.
Lenin would not return to the meeting that night. He was making plans. But he had written a document, which it was for Lunacharsky to present.
Addressed ‘To All Workers, Soldiers and Peasants’, Lenin proclaimed Soviet power and undertook to propose a democratic peace immediately. Land would be transferred to the peasants. The cities would be supplied with bread, the nations of the empire offered self-determination. But Lenin also warned that the revolution remained in danger – from without and from within.
‘The Kornilovites … are endeavouring to lead troops against Petrograd … Soldiers! Resist Kerensky, who is a Kornilovite! … Railwaymen! Stop all echelons sent by Kerensky against Petrograd! Soldiers, Workers, Employees! The fate of the revolution and democratic peace is in your hands!’
It took a long time to read the whole document aloud, interrupted as it was, so often, by such cheers of approval. One tiny verbal tweak ensured Left SR assent. A minuscule Menshevik faction abstained, preparing a path for reconciliation between left-Martovism and the Bolsheviks. No matter. At 5 a.m. on 26 October, Lenin’s manifesto was overwhelmingly voted through.
A roar. The echo of it faded as the magnitude of the shouted resolution became slowly clear. Men and women looked around at each other. That was passed. That was done.
Revolutionary government was proclaimed.
Revolutionary government had been proclaimed, and that was enough for one night. It would more than do for a first meeting, surely.
Exhausted, drunk on history, nerves still taut as wires, the delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets stumbled out of Smolny. They stepped out of the finishing school into a new moment of history, a new kind of first day, that of a workers’ government, morning in a new city, the capital of a workers’ state. They walked into the winter under a dim but lightening sky.
Epilogue: After October
‘Oh, my love, now I know all your freedom; I know that it will come; but what will it be like?’
Nikolai Chernyshevsky,
What Is to Be Done?
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That strange book What Is to Be Done? casts a long shadow. In 1902, Lenin named his own seminal tract on leftist organisation after the novel of forty years previously.
Chernyshevsky’s story is interspersed with dream sequences, of which the most celebrated is the fourth. Here, in eleven sections, the protagonist Vera Pavlovna journeys from the ancient past to a strange, affecting, utopian future. The hinge point of the book, the fulcrum from history to possibility, is the fourth dream’s Section 7: that section, in its entirety, forms the epigraph to this book.
Two rows of dots. Something ostentatiously unspoken. The transition from injustice to emancipation. Informed readers would understand that behind the extended ellipsis lay revolution.
With such discretion the author evaded the censor. But there is something almost religious, too, in this unwriting, from this atheist son of a priest. A political via negativa, an apophatic revolutionism.
For those who cleave to it, a paradox of actually existing revolution is that in its potential for utter reconfiguration, it is, precisely, beyond words, a messianic interruption – one that emerges from the quotidian. Unsayable, yet the culmination of everyday exhortations. Beyond language and of it, beyond representation and not.
Chernyshevsky’s dots, then, are one iteration of a strange story. This book has been an attempt at another.
And the urgent gasp, above, that Chernyshevsky has follow those dots? ‘What will it be like?’ That question, from the present vantage point in history, can only hurt.
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