A People's Tragedy (103 page)

But the Left SR leaders, who should have known better, were equally fooled; and they too raised their hands in the naive conviction, as their leader, Boris Kamkov, later explained, that 'our place was with the revolution' and that, by going along with the Bolshevik adventure, they might be able to tame it.26

Meanwhile, the final assault on the Winter Palace was nearing completion. The loyalist forces had virtually all abandoned the defence of the palace and Bolshevik troops could enter it at will. The ministers, who were now stretched out on sofas, or slouched in chairs, awaiting the end, could hear the sound of running soldiers, shouts and gun shots from the floor below. Finally, some time after 2 a.m., these sounds grew louder: the Bolshevik attackers were climbing the stairs and approaching the door. It was clear that the moment for surrender had arrived. The ministers jumped up and — for some strange reason — grabbed hold of their overcoats, as the door was suddenly flung open and in stepped the small, unassuming figure of Antonov-Ovseenko. 'You are all under arrest,'

the Bolshevik leader announced. A register of the ministers was taken. The realization that Kerensky was not present angered the attackers, one of whom shouted: 'Bayonet all the sons of bitches!' But otherwise discipline was maintained. The ministers were led away on foot (no cars were available) to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where they were locked up in dismal conditions for a number of weeks. The Bolshevik escorts had to defend them on the way from

several attempts to lynch them on the streets, and it must have been with some relief that the ministers finally reached the safety of their prison. Perhaps some of them were also secretly relieved to be no longer burdened with the near-impossible task of trying to govern Russia. As the door of his cell banged shut, Alexei Nikitin, the deposed Minister of the Interior, found in his pocket a half-forgotten telegram from the Ukrainian Rada. 'I received this yesterday,' he told Antonov-Ovseenko, as he handed him the crumpled piece of paper, 'now it's your problem.'27

It fell to Kamenev, ironically enough, to announce the arrest of the ministers to the Soviet Congress. The Bolsheviks cheered as their names were read out. But a large peasant, his face convulsed with rage, got up on behalf of the SRs to denounce the arrest of the socialist ministers. 'Do you know that four comrades, who risked their lives and their freedom fighting against the tyranny of the Tsar, have been flung into the Peter and Paul prison — the historical tomb of Liberty?' There was pandemonium as people shouted out, while Trotsky, gesturing for silence, answered by denouncing them as false

'comrades' and claimed there was no reason 'to handle them with gloves'. After the July Days 'they didn't use much ceremony with us!' Kamenev then announced that the Cyclist Battalion had come over to the 'side of the revolution'. There were reports of more vital troops joining from the Northern Front. And then Lunacharsky read out Lenin's Manifesto 'To All Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants', in which 'Soviet Power' was proclaimed, and its promises on land, bread and peace were announced. The reading of this historic proclamation, which was constantly interrupted by the thunderous cheers of the delegates, played an enormous symbolic role. It provided the illusion that the insurrection was the culmination of a revolution by 'the masses'. When it had been passed, shortly after 5 a.m. on the 26th, the weary but elated delegates emerged from the Tauride Palace. 'The night was yet heavy and chill,' wrote John Reed. 'There was only a faint unearthly pallor stealing over the silent streets, dimming the watch-fires, the shadow of a terrible dawn rising over Russia.'28

* * * How many people took part in the insurrection? Historians have always been sharply divided on this question, with those on the Left depicting October as a popular revolution driven from below, and those on the Right depicting it as a
coup d'etat
without any mass support. At the root of the question is the nature — and thus the

'legitimacy' — of the Soviet system. And in this sense it is one of the fundamental questions of the twentieth century.

The number of active participants in the insurrection was not very large — although of course it must be borne in mind that large numbers were not needed for the task, given the almost complete absence of any military forces in the capital prepared to defend the Provisional Government. Trotsky himself

claimed that 25,000 to 30,000 people 'at the most' were actively involved — that is about 5 per cent of all the workers and soldiers in the city — and this broadly tallies with the calculations based on the number of Red Guard units, Fleet crews and regiments which were mobilized. Most of them were involved in a limited fashion, such as guarding factories and strategic buildings, manning the pickets and generally

'standing by'. During the evening of the 25th, there were probably something in the region of 10,000 to 15,000 people milling around in the Palace Square; but not all of them were actually involved in the 'storming' of the palace, although many more would later claim that they had taken part.* Of course, once the palace had been seized, larger crowds of people did become involved, although, as we shall see, this was largely a question of looting its wine stores.29

The few surviving photographs of the October Days clearly show the small size of the insurgent force. They depict a handful of Red Guards and sailors standing around in half-deserted streets. None of the familiar images of a people's revolution — crowds on the street, barricades and fighting — were in evidence. The whole insurrection, as Trotsky himself acknowledged, was carried out as a
coup d'etat
with 'a series of small operations, calculated and prepared in advance'. The immediate vicinity of the Winter Palace was the only part of the city to be seriously disrupted during 25 October.

Elsewhere the life of Petrograd carried on as normal. Streetcars and taxis ran as usual; the Nevsky was full of the normal crowds; and during the evening shops, restaurants, theatres and cinemas even remained open. The Marinsky Theatre went ahead with its scheduled performance of
Boris Godunov;
while the famous bass Shaliapin sang in
Don
Carlos
before a packed house at the Narodny Dom. At around 9 p.m. John Reed was able to dine in the Hotel France, just off Palace Square, although after his soup the waiter asked him to move into the main dining-room at the back of the building, since they expected shooting to begin and wanted to put out the lights in the cafe. Even the climax of the insurrection passed by largely unnoticed. Volodya Averbakh was walking home by Gogol Street, not a hundred yards from Palace Square, at about 11 p.m., just as the Bolsheviks were readying themselves for their final assault on the Winter Palace.

'The street was completely deserted,' Averbakh recalled. 'The night was quiet, and the city seemed dead. We could even hear the echo of our own footsteps on the pavement.'30

In the workers' districts things were just as quiet, judging by the local

* During the 1930s, when the party carried out a survey of the Red Guard veterans of October, 12 per cent of those responding claimed to have participated in the storming of the palace. On this calculation, 46,000 people would have been involved in the assault (Startsev,
Ocherki,
275). It would be interesting to know the results of a similar survey of the Muscovite intelligentsia during the defence of the parliament building in August 1991. The number of people claiming to have been there, alongside Yeltsin on the tank, would probably run into the hundreds of thousands.

police reports recently unearthed from the Soviet archives. Asked in the first week of November if there had been any mass armed movements in the October Days, the district police commissars responded, without exception, that there had been none.

'Everything was quiet on the streets,' replied the chief of the Okhtensk police district.

'The streets were empty,' added the police chief of the 3rd Spassky district. In the 1st Vyborg police district, the most Bolshevized part of the city, the police chief made the following report on 25 October: 'the Red Guards helped the police in the maintenance of order, and there were no night-time events to report, apart from the arrest of two drunken and disorderly soldiers, accused of shooting and wounding a man — also, it seems, drunk.'31 Thus began the Great October Socialist Revolution in the Bolshevik bastion of the Vyborg district.

What about the nature of the crowd during the insurrection? The following incident tells us something about this.

When the Bolsheviks took control of the Winter Palace, they discovered one of the largest wine cellars ever known. During the following days tens of thousands of antique bottles disappeared from the vaults. The Bolshevik workers and soldiers were helping themselves to the Chateau d'Yquem 1847, the last Tsar's favourite vintage, and selling off the vodka to the crowds outside. The drunken mobs went on the rampage. The Winter Palace was badly vandalized. Shops and liquor stores were looted. Sailors and soldiers went around the well-to-do districts robbing apartments and killing people for sport. Anyone well dressed was an obvious target. Even Uritsky, the Bolshevik leader, narrowly escaped with his life, if not his clothes, when his sleigh was stopped one freezing night on his way home from the Smolny. With his warm overcoat, pince-nez and Jewish-intellectual looks, he had been mistaken for a
burzhooi.

The Bolsheviks tried in vain to stem the anarchy by sealing off the liquor supply. They appointed a Commissar of the Winter Palace — who was constantly drunk on the job.

They posted guards around the cellar — who licensed themselves to sell off the bottles of liquor. They pumped the wine out on to the street — but crowds gathered to drink it from the gutter. They tried to destroy the offending treasure, to transfer it to the Smolny, and even to ship it to Sweden — but all their efforts came to nothing. Hundreds of drunkards were thrown into jail — in one police precinct alone 182 people were arrested on the night of 4 November for drunkenness and looting — until there was no more room in the cells. Machine-guns were set up to deter the looters by firing over their heads — and sometimes at them — but still the looters came. For several weeks the anarchy continued — martial law was even imposed — until, at last, the alcohol ran out with the old year, and the capital woke up with the biggest hangover in history.

The Bolsheviks blamed the 'provocations of the bourgeoisie' for this bacchanalia. It was hard for them to admit that their own supporters, who were supposed to be the 'disciplined vanguard of the proletariat', could have been involved in such anarchic behaviour. But the recently opened records of the MRC show that many of those who had taken part in the seizure of power were the instigators of these drunken riots. Some of them, no doubt, had only taken part in the insurrection
because
of the prospect of loot: the whole uprising for them was a big adventure, a day out in the city with the rest of the lads, and with a licence to rob and kill. This is not to say that the Bolsheviks were simply hooligans and criminals, as many propertied types concluded at the time. But it is to say that the uprising was bound to descend into chaos because the Bolsheviks had at their disposal very few disciplined fighters and because the seizure of power itself, as a violent act, encouraged such actions from the crowd. Similar outbursts of looting and violence were noted in dozens of cities during and after October. Indeed, they were often an integral element of the transfer of power.32

All this suggests that the Bolshevik insurrection was not so much the culmination of a social revolution, although of course there were several different social revolutions —

in the towns and in the cities, in the countryside, in the armed forces and in the borderlands — and in each of these there were militant forces that had some connections with the Bolsheviks. It was more the result of the degeneration of the urban revolution, and in particular of the workers' movement, as an organized and constructive force, with vandalism, crime, generalized violence and drunken looting as the main expressions of this social breakdown. Gorky, who was, as always, quick to condemn this anarchic violence, was at pains to point out that 'what is going on now is
not a
process of social revolution
but a 'pogrom of greed, hatred and vengeance'.33 The participants in this destructive violence were not the organized 'working class' but the victims of the breakdown of that class and of the devastation of the war years: the growing army of the urban unemployed; the refugees from the occupied regions, soldiers and sailors, who congregated in the cities; bandits and criminals released from the jails; and the unskilled labourers from the countryside who had always been the most prone to outbursts of anarchic violence in the cities. These were the semi-peasant types whom Gorky had blamed for the urban violence in the spring and to whose support he had ascribed the rising fortunes of the Bolsheviks. He returned to the same theme on the eve of their seizure of power:

All the dark instincts of the crowd irritated by the disintegration of life and by the lies and filth of politics will flare up and fume, poisoning us with anger, hate and revenge; people will kill one another, unable to suppress their own animal stupidity. An unorganized crowd, hardly understanding what it wants, will crawl out into the street, and, using this crowd

as a cover, adventurers, thieves, and professional murderers will begin to 'create the history of the Russian Revolution'.34

As for the Petrograd workers, they took little part in the insurrection. This was the height of the economic crisis and the fear of losing their jobs was enough to deter the vast majority of them from coming out on to the streets. Hence the factories and the transport system functioned much as normal. The workers, in any case, owed their allegiance to the Soviet rather than the Bolsheviks. Most of them did not know — or even wish to know — the differences of doctrine between the socialist parties. Their own voting patterns were determined by class rather than by party: they tended to vote as their factory had voted in the past, or opted for the party whose candidate seemed most like a worker and spoke the language of class. Among the unskilled, in particular, there was a common belief that the Bolsheviks were a party of 'big men' (from the peasant term
bolshaki).