A People's Tragedy (102 page)

pickets already beginning to form around the Palace Square.17

Kerensky's departure threw the rest of the ministers into a panic (for a while they did not even know where he was). At midday they met in the Malachite Hall and prepared to organize the defence of the palace. But it was a hopeless task. They were totally inexperienced in military operations and spent the best part of the next four hours in a futile and aimless discussion of possible candidates for the post of 'Dictator' (dictator of what?) before settling on the Kadet doctor, and Minister of Welfare, Nikolai Kishkin.

The engineer Palchinsky, who was placed in charge of defending the palace, could not even find a plan of the building, or anyone expert in its topography, with the result that one of the side-doors was left unguarded and Bolshevik spies were able to enter it freely. There were already some loyalist forces inside the palace, and others outside who spent the afternoon building barricades out of piles of logs. Kerensky had kept a small number of troops on the ground floor since moving into the palace, and these were now joined by two companies of Cossacks, some young cadets from the military schools and 200 women from the Shock Battalion of Death, in all some 3,000 soldiers.

John Reed, one of several foreign journalists to slip past their guard during the afternoon, described the scene:

At the end of the corridor was a large, ornate room with gilded cornices and enormous crystal lustres . . . On both sides of the parqueted floor lay rows of dirty mattresses and blankets, upon which occasional soldiers were stretched out; everywhere was a litter of cigarette butts, bits of bread, cloth, and empty bottles with expensive French labels. More and more soldiers ... moved about in a stale atmosphere of tobacco-smoke and unwashed humanity. One had a bottle of white Burgundy, evidently filched from the cellars of the Palace . . . The place was a huge barrack.18

The fighting spirit of the soldiers defending the Winter Palace was extremely weak, however, and the longer they waited for the Bolsheviks to attack the more frightened they became. They were constantly reminded by the propaganda of the enemy that they were vastly outnumbered, and this made it difficult to keep up their morale. Alexander Sinegub, one of the officers in charge, recalls the soldiers smoking, getting drunk and cursing their hopeless situation while the ministers harangued them on the need to maintain discipline. The Cossacks were particularly disgruntled by the idea of having to fight alongside 'women with guns'. There was no real ammunition store inside the palace, while the food supply was not enough to feed all the soldiers even for dinner. As the evening wore on, more and more of these hungry soldiers became demoralized and abandoned the palace: the call of their stomachs was stronger than the call of duty. By the early evening, all but 300 of the troops had laid down their arms and slipped away to the restaurants in the city.19

During these final hours of waiting for the inevitable the ministers made a number of futile appeals to the people for help. Although all their telephone lines had been cut, they still had a secret line to the military telegraph office in the attic of the War Ministry building, where, unbeknown to the Bolsheviks, who had occupied the rest of the building, a young officer sat sending out the government's final appeals to various parts of the country (later, when he heard the palace had fallen, he put on his coat and hat and walked calmly out of the building). John Reed, who saw the green baize cabinet table shortly after the ministers' arrest, found it covered in dozens of roughly scribbled drafts, most of them scratched out as their futility became evident. No one, it seems, was prepared to rally to the defence of the Provisional Government. The one attempt to do so, by the deputies of the Petrograd city Duma, was a piece of surreal theatre that ended in farce. Responding to the ministers' appeal for support, the deputies declared their readiness to 'stand in front of the Bolshevik cannon', and marched off in columns of four towards the Winter Palace singing the Marseillaise. The white-bearded figure of Schreider, the Mayor of Petrograd, led this army of salvation, along with Prokopovich, the Minister of Supplies, who carried an umbrella to shelter himself from the rain which was now beginning to fall and a lantern to light up the way. The 300 deputies, dressed in their frock-coats, officers' tunics and dresses, each proudly bore a package of bread and salami for the hungry defenders of the Winter Palace. They were a walking symbol of the decent but doomed old liberal Russia that was about to disappear. The deputies had advanced less than a block from the Duma building when they were halted by a patrol of Bolshevik sailors near the Kazan Square. Schreider bared his breast to their guns and pronounced himself ready to die, if they did not let them pass. But the sailors, no doubt seeing the comical aspect of this impotent protest, threatened to 'spank'

them if they did not go home. Prokopovich then climbed on to a box and, waving his umbrella in the air, made a speech: 'Comrades and citizens! Force is being used against us! We cannot have our innocent blood upon the hands of these ignorant men! It is beneath our dignity to be shot down here in the streets . .. Let us return to the Duma and discuss the best means of saving the country and the revolution!' Whereupon the outraged deputies about-turned and marched back up the Nevsky, all the time maintaining a dignified silence in defeat.20

Meanwhile, at 6.50 p.m., the MRC delivered its ultimatum to the Winter Palace demanding the surrender of the Provisional Government. The ministers, who were at the time sitting down to a supper of borscht, steamed fish and artichokes, all felt a solemn obligation to be brave and resist for as long as they could, although some were concerned that the palace might be destroyed if the cruiser
Aurora,
anchored alongside the English Embankment,* opened fire at it as had been threatened. They reasoned that the Bolsheviks would be widely condemned if they were made to overthrow them by force; so the ultimatum was refused. For a long time nothing happened — the Bolsheviks were still messing around with faulty field-guns and lanterns in the Peter and Paul Fortress — but at 9.40 p.m. the signal was finally given and one blank round was fired by the
Aurora.
The huge sound of the blast, much louder than a live shot, caused the frightened ministers to drop at once to the floor. The women from the Battalion of Death became hysterical and had to be taken away to a room at the back of the palace, while most of the remaining cadets abandoned their posts. After a short break to allow those who wished to do so to leave the palace, Blagonravov gave the order for the real firing to begin from the Peter and Paul Fortress, the
Aurora
and the Palace Square. Most of the shells from the fortress landed harmlessly in the Neva.

George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, who inspected the palace the following day, found only three shrapnel marks on the river side of the building, although 'on the town side the walls were riddled with thousands of bullets from machine guns'.21

* The exact 'historic spot' where the
Aurora
was anchored happened to be by a pretty little chapel next to the Nikolaevsky Bridge. Several years later it was decided that this Christian link with the starting place of the Great October Socialist Revolution should be removed — and so the Bolsheviks turned the chapel into a public lavatory!

Just as the bombardment was getting under way, at 10.40 p.m., the Soviet Congress finally opened. The great hall of the Smolny was packed; the delegates stood in the aisles and perched on window-sills. The air was thick with blue tobacco smoke, despite repeated calls from the tribune for 'the comrades' not to smoke. The majority of the delegates were workers and soldiers in their tunics and greatcoats; their unwashed and dirty look contrasted sharply with the clean suits of the old executive members, the Mensheviks and SRs, seated on the platform for the final time. Sukhanov remarked that the 'grey features of the Bolshevik provinces' had a clear preponderance among the Congress delegates. He was shocked by their 'dark', 'morose' and 'primitive' appearance, and thought it reflected a 'crude and ignorant people whose devotion to the revolution was spite and despair, while their "Socialism" was hunger and an unendurable longing for rest'. This of course was a Menshevik speaking, but, even if we ignore his value-laden terms, there is no doubt that the mass of the delegates were indeed less cultured than the urbanized, skilled and educated types who had hitherto made up the majority of the Soviet movement.

The Bolsheviks did not have an absolute majority, as Sukhanov had thought, though with the support of the Left SRs they could push through virtually any motion they liked. Although precise numbers are difficult to determine, the Credentials Committee of the Congress reported that 300 of the 670 delegates were Bolsheviks, 193 SRs (of whom more than half were Left SRs), while 82 were Mensheviks (of whom 14 were Internationalists). Because of the lax regulations for the selection of delegates and their own superior party organization, the Bolsheviks had managed to secure rather more than their fair share of seats. The northern industrial Soviets, where the influence of the Bolsheviks was dominant both in the towns and the semi-industrial villages, sent more representatives than was warranted by their size; whereas those of the Volga and the agricultural south, where the SRs were dominant, sent fewer and in some cases even boycotted the Congress altogether. There was a similar imbalance among the delegates of the armed services, with the Bolshevized north far better represented than the non-Bolshevized south. The Latvians, the most Bolshevized troops of all, made up more than 10 per cent of the delegates.22

In accordance with these voting strengths, the old Soviet leaders vacated their seats on the platform; they were replaced by 14 Bolsheviks and 7 Left SRs. The Mensheviks declined to take up the 4 seats allocated to them.

The mandates of the delegates showed an overwhelming majority in favour of a Soviet government. It was up to the Congress to decide how this should be formed. Martov proposed the formation of a united democratic government based upon all the parties in the Soviet: this, he said, was the only way to avert a civil war. The proposal was met with torrents of applause. Even Lunacharsky was forced to admit that the Bolsheviks had nothing against it —

they could not abandon the slogan of Soviet Power — and the proposal was immediately passed by a unanimous vote. But just as it looked as if a socialist coalition was at last about to be formed, a series of Mensheviks and SRs bitterly denounced the violent assault on the Provisional Government. They declared that their parties, or at least the right-wing sections of them, would have nothing to do with this 'criminal venture', which was bound to throw the country into civil war, and walked out of the Congress hall in protest, while the Bolshevik delegates stamped their feet, whistled and hurled abuse at them.23

Lenin's planned provocation — the pre-emptive seizure of power — had worked. By walking out of the Congress, the Mensheviks and SRs undermined all hopes of reaching a compromise with the Bolshevik moderates and of forming a coalition government of all the Soviet parties. The path was now clear for the Bolshevik dictatorship, based on the Soviet, which Lenin had no doubt intended all along. In the charged political atmosphere of the time, it is easy to see why the Mensheviks and SRs acted as they did.

But it is equally difficult not to draw the conclusion that, by their actions, they merely played into Lenin's hands and thus committed political suicide. Writing in 1921, Sukhanov admitted as much:

We completely untied the Bolsheviks' hands, making them masters of the whole situation and yielding to them the whole arena of the Revolution. A struggle at the Congress for a united democratic front might have had some success . . . But by leaving the Congress, we ourselves gave the Bolsheviks a monopoly of the Soviet, of the masses, and of the Revolution. By our own irrational decision, we ensured the victory of Lenin's whole 'line'.24

The immediate effect of their walk-out was to split the opposition forces, leaving Martov and the other left-wing advocates of a coalition isolated. Martov made one more desperate appeal for an all-democratic government. But the mood in the hall was changing. As the mass of the delegates saw it, the Mensheviks and SRs had proved themselves to be 'counter-revolutionaries' by walking out of the Congress; and they were now ready to follow the lead of the Bolsheviks in opposing the whole idea of a compromise with them. Trotsky seized the initiative and, in one of the most often-quoted speeches of the twentieth century, denounced Martov's resolution for a coalition: 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 those wretched groups who have left us or who are making this proposal. ..

No one in Russia is with

them any longer. A compromise is supposed to be made between two equal sides .. . But here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we say: You are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out; go where you ought to go — into the dustbin of history!

In a moment of rage, which he must have agonized over for the rest of his life, Martov shouted, 'Then we'll leave!' and walked in silence towards the exit without looking back.

As he did so, a Bolshevik dressed in a black shirt, tied by a leather belt, stepped out into the aisle and said to Martov: And we had thought that Martov at least would remain with us.' Visibly shaken by these words, Lenin's old comrade replied: 'One day you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.' And with that he walked out — and into the political wilderness.25

It was past two o'clock in the morning and it only remained for Trotsky, who was now clearly doing the work of Lenin, to propose a resolution condemning the 'treacherous'

attempts of the Mensheviks and SRs to undermine Soviet power. In effect, this would be to give a Soviet stamp of approval to a Bolshevik dictatorship. The mass of the delegates, who were probably too ignorant to comprehend the political import of what they were doing, raised their hands in support (weren't they in favour of Soviet power?).