Bolsheviks, probably in order to set up a military government. He was thwarted by the action of Kerensky (now prime minister) in declaring him under arrest, by the railwaymen, who blocked the passage of his troops, and by the soldiers of the garrisons south and west of Petrograd, who fraternized with Kornilov’s troops and persuaded them they were fighting on the wrong side. General Krymov, their commander, committed suicide at this disgrace.
The mysterious aspect of the affair is that Kornilov had been appointed by Kerensky only shortly before, with an apparent mandate to tighten the discipline in the army. Indeed, the early stages of the coup itself were coordinated with Kerensky, who then abruptly changed his mind. The whole business seems, in fact, to have been dogged by the insoluble ambiguities of the Provisional Government’s position. Kerensky wanted to restore military discipline in order to be able to go on fighting the war, especially after the débâcle of the June offensive, but at the same time he knew that the measures Kornilov proposed–abolishing soldiers’ committees at the front, restoring the full power of officers, imposition of full military discipline among rear garrisons, in armament factories and on the railways–would alienate his allies in the soviets, and probably provoke a popular rising with Bolshevik backing. In the end Kerensky could not have it both ways, and he came down on the side of the soviets, in a manner that exposed Kornilov to maximum humiliation.
What is quite certain is that this fiasco dramatically revived the fortunes of the Bolsheviks. It left the High Command confused, demoralized and resentful of the Provisional Government. Alexeyev, Kornilov’s immediate successor, resigned in disgust in the middle of September, saying, ‘We have no army’, and describing his fellow officers as ‘martyrs’ in the face of the general indiscipline. By contrast, the workers’ militias, especially in Petrograd itself, gained enormously in status and self-esteem: under their new name of ‘Red Guards’ they gained many new recruits during September and October. The Bolsheviks’ view of events generally seemed to have been vindicated, and nearly all popular institutions, especially the soviets, swung sharply in their direction. From the beginning of September the Bolsheviks had a majority in the crucial Petrograd Soviet, and Trotsky became its chairman. Moscow soon followed suit, and it became clear that the elections to the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets would result in the Bolsheviks becoming the largest single party.
To forestall any possible repeat of the Kornilov affair, the Petrograd Soviet established on 9 October a Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), to organize the ‘revolutionary defence’ of the capital against either a military putsch or Kerensky’s reported intention of evacuating the city and letting the Germans (already in Riga, only 300 miles away) occupy it and crush the soviet. The motion to establish MRC was supported by left-wing Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries; its first chairman was a Socialist Revolutionary. All the same, the majority of its members were Bolsheviks. The new body immediately set about coordinating the Red Guards and, helped by the impassioned oratory of Trotsky, persuading the garrison troops to recognize it rather than the Provisional Government as their ultimate source of authority.
Throughout September, Lenin, at first from the safety of Finland (a warrant had been out for his arrest since the July Days), then from hiding in Petrograd, bombarded the party Central Committee with letters urging that the moment for the insurrection had come. He cited as evidence the Bolshevik majorities in the soviets, the rising wave of peasant unrest, the intended surrender of Petrograd (which would produce the ‘Paris Commune’ situation), and in the international dimension the recent mutiny in the German Baltic Fleet. Once MRC was in existence, that seemed to him the appropriate instrument for the seizure of power. And indeed, it was on the day after its establishment, 10 October, that he at last persuaded his colleagues on the Central Committee that a rising was ‘on the agenda’.
Even at this stage, however, there were sceptics among Lenin’s closest colleagues, notably Zinoviev and Kamenev, two of the longest standing members of the Bolshevik Party. Their arguments are worth dwelling on, as they represent an important strand in Bolshevik thinking at the time. They maintained that the Bolsheviks had more to gain by working with the other socialist parties in a coalition government based on the soviets, than by going it alone and risking a violent seizure of power. Bolshevik support was rising among peasants, workers and soldiers: they would soon dominate the soviets, and would gain a substantial share of the seats in the Constituent Assembly, whose elections were approaching. Why jeopardize all this by a violent coup, which would alienate everyone? And even if it succeeded, then the Bolsheviks would be left bearing the responsibility alone for the huge tasks of improving the food supply, restoring the industrial economy, and, most difficult of all, either securing peace with Germany or else leading a ‘revolutionary war’ against her. For such tasks a coalition was needed, and, moreover, the Bolsheviks were already in a position to lead it.
Of course, it can be argued that Zinoviev and Kamenev were pleading merely for different tactics, for what became known after the Second World War as the ‘popular front’ policy. Yet major differences of conception underlay their argument. Lenin’s attitude was utopian, even apocalyptic: for him, the Bolsheviks embodied, in some mystical sense, the people, and once they seized power that power would ipso facto be in the hands of the people. Zinoviev and Kamenev, by contrast, were practical politicians, worried about how power could actually be exercised. Probably their views were closer to those of the majority of Bolsheviks in the soviets.
One significant observation they made: ‘Insofar as the choice depends on us, we can and must confine ourselves now to a defensive position.’ That was precisely what, in the event, MRC did, and this fact may have been crucial to the success of the insurrection. For what finally provoked the seizure of power was Kerensky’s action, on the night of 23–24 October, in trying to close down two Bolshevik newspapers and to arrest some Bolsheviks on charges of antigovernment agitation. On the initiative of Trotsky, MRC responded by reopening the newspaper offices, and then, to ensure the safety of the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, due to open the next day in Petrograd, its troops began to occupy bridges, road junctions and railway stations, moving on to take over telegraph offices and government ministries during the following night. Lenin came out of hiding and went to the Smolny Institute, now the headquarters of MRC, to persuade them not to confine themselves to a defensive operation, but to carry on and arrest the Provisional Government. This is certainly what happened, whether because of Lenin’s influence or from the natural dynamic of events. MRC called in Baltic sailors from Kronstadt and Helsingfors, while Kerensky’s attempts to raise units from the front line were almost wholly unavailing, so low was the stock of the Provisional Government among army officers. In the end Kerensky slipped out of the city in a car to continue his efforts in person. The rest of the Provisional Government was duly arrested in the Winter Palace late on the night of the 25th–26th.
Already on the 25th Lenin felt able to issue a proclamation announcing that power had passed into the hands of the soviets. He did not, however, significantly, identify the Congress of Soviets or even the Petrograd Soviet as the new source of authority, but rather MRC, ‘which has placed itself at the head of the proletariat and the garrison of Petrograd’. He thus specifically located power in the institution where the Bolsheviks had perhaps the greatest weight. When the Congress of Soviets met that evening, a large and influential group of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, including most of the members of the executive committee of the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets (back in June), condemned this step as a usurpation and walked out of the assembly, to form a Committee of Public Safety and to try to organize resistance to unilateral Bolshevik rule. A few Mensheviks remained behind, while the much larger number of Socialist Revolutionaries who did so reconstituted themselves as the Left Socialist Revolutionary party, finalizing a break which had existed for some months in all but name.
Now that power was in the hands of the soviets, one might have expected that it would be exercised by the All-Russian Executive Committee (VTsIK), which was elected by the congress to conduct its business between sessions and to hold authority in the soviet movement. This, of course, contained representatives of several socialist parties. Lenin, however, announced that the supreme body in the new ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’ would be the so-called Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), a kind of ‘council of ministers’, whose members would all be Bolshevik. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries were