Late evening of 26 October 1917. Lenin stands before the Second Congress of Soviets. He grips the lectern. He has kept his audience waiting – it is nearly 9 p.m. – and now he waits himself, silent, as applause rolls over him. At last he bends forward and, in a hoarse voice, speaks his first, famous words to the gathering.
‘We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.’
That provokes new delight. A roar.
Lenin follows the Left SRs, proposing the abolition of private property in land. With respect to the war, Congress issues a ‘proclamation to the peoples and governments of all the belligerent nations’, for immediate negotiation towards democratic peace. Approval is unanimous.
‘The war is ended!’ comes a hushed exclamation. ‘The war is ended!’
Delegates are sobbing. They break not into celebratory but funereal song, honouring those who have died in the struggle for this moment.
But the war is not yet ended, and the order that will be constructed is anything but socialist.
Instead, the months and years that follow will see the revolution embattled, assailed, isolated, ossified, broken. We know where this is going: purges, gulags, starvation, mass murder.
October is still ground zero for arguments about fundamental, radical social change. Its degradation was not a given, was not written in any stars.
The story of the hopes, struggles, strains and defeats that follow 1917 has been told before and will be again. That story, and above all the questions arising from it – the urgencies of change, of how change is possible, of the dangers that will beset it – stretch vastly beyond us. These last pages can only offer a fleeting glance.
Instantly after the uprising, Kerensky meets and plans resistance with the hard-right General Krasnov. Under his command, a thousand Cossacks move on the capital. Within Petrograd itself, motley forces around the Mensheviks and Right SRs in the city Duma form into a group, the Committee for Salvation, arrayed against the new Council of People’s Commissars. The oppositionists’ motivations run the gamut, from deep antipathy to democracy to the sincere anguish of socialists at what they see as a doomed undertaking. Strange and temporary bedfellows they may be, but a bed they decide they must share, including with the likes of Purishkevich: the committee plans an uprising in Petrograd to coincide with the arrival of Krasnov’s troops.
But Milrevcom gets wind of the plans. October 29 sees a scrappy, short-lived ‘Junker mutiny’ in the capital, when military cadets attempt to take control. Again, shells rock the city and the resistance is crushed. Again, Antonov deploys his revolutionary honour, the cultivated culture of the militant, to protect captives from a vengeful crowd. His prisoners are spared: others are not so fortunate.
The next day, at Pulkovo Heights, twelve miles out of Petrograd, Krasnov’s forces face a ragtag army of workers, sailors and soldiers, untrained and undisciplined but outnumbering them ten to one. The fight is ugly and bloody. Krasnov’s forces fall back to the town of Gatchina, where Kerensky is based. Two days later, in exchange for safe passage away, they agree to hand him over.
The erstwhile persuader has a last escapade in him. He makes a successful run for it, disguised in a sailor’s uniform and unlikely goggles. He ends his days in exile, issuing tract after self-exculpating tract.
The pro-coalition All-Russian Executive Committee of the Union of Railway Workers demands a government of all socialist groups. Neither Lenin nor Trotsky, both hard-line on the question, attend the resulting conference: those Bolsheviks who do – Kamenev, Zinoviev and Milyutin – agree that a socialist coalition is the best chance for survival. But at that moment, when the new regime’s survival is under most threat from Krasnov’s approach, many SRs and Mensheviks are as much concerned with military resistance to the government as with negotiation. With Krasnov defeated, they convert to coalition – just as the Bolshevik CC adopts a harder line.
This line is not without controversy. On 3 November, five dissenters, including the Heavenly Twins Zinoviev and Kamenev, resign from the CC. But they will retract their opposition in December, when, with fanfare, the Left SRs join the government. For a brief moment, a coalition arises.
The consolidation of the revolution around the country is uneven. In Moscow, there is protracted, bitter fighting. Opponents of the new regime, though, are disoriented and divided, and the Bolsheviks extend their control.
At the start of January 1918, the government requires of the long-delayed, newly convened Constituent Assembly that it recognise the sovereignty of the soviets. When the CA representatives refuse, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs declare it undemocratic and unrepresentative in this new context: after all, its (Right SR-dominated) membership was chosen before October. The radicals turn their back on it, leaving the assembly to wind down ignominiously. It is then suppressed.
Worse soon comes. On 3 March 1918, after weeks of strained, strange and strung-out negotiations, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the Soviet government and Germany and its allies brings Russia’s role in the war to a close – but under shockingly punitive terms.
Lenin has fought a lonely battle insisting that the invidious demands be accepted, as for him the priority – at almost all costs – is to end the war, consolidate the new regime and await the international revolution. Many on the party’s left demur, sure that the Central Powers are so pregnant with revolution that the war should continue until that very upheaval. But in the face of a devastating German advance, Lenin, threatening again to resign, finally wins the argument.
Russia gains peace but loses swathes of land and population, some of its most fertile regions, and vast industrial and financial resources. In these vacated territories, the Central Powers install counter-revolutionary puppet regimes.
In protest at the treaty, the Left SRs resign from government. Tensions escalate as the Bolsheviks respond to worsening famine with brutal measures of food procurement, antagonising the peasantry, as detailed in a scathing open letter from Maria Spiridonova.
In June, Left SR activists assassinate the German ambassador, hoping to provoke a return to now-‘revolutionary’ war. In July they stage an uprising against the Bolsheviks – and are suppressed. As peasant resistance to the requisitioning hardens, and Bolshevik activists are assassinated – Volodarsky, Uritsky – the government responds with repressive, often sanguinary measures. Thus the one-party state begins to entrench.
The days are punctuated with unlikely political moments. In October 1918, the Mensheviks, who in many cases remain opposed to it, recognise the October revolution as ‘historically necessary’; the same year, as the government desperately shores up the collapsing economy, the left Bolshevik Shlyapnikov voices the strange indignation of many in the party that ‘the capitalist class renounced the organising role in production assigned to it’.