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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Episode 10.73: Zeno’s Revolution
Okay we’re back. All is well, just hit a crazy streak of busy times and some rotten luck. The event in LA went great though, and I can’t wait to do more of those in the future. And I must also plug that this Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021, I will be doing an online book talk with Dr. Faith Hillis, University of Chicago professor of Russian history. But this is not about my book, this time. I will be the interviewer. Dr. Hillis wrote a really great book called Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s. If you have any interest at all in the Russian Revolution — and folks, if you’re listening to this, that’s you — please, by all means tune in. It’ll be a deep dive on the lives of everyone living in those Russian colonies scattered across Europe that served as embryos for the Russian Revolution. The event is in partnership with the New York Public Library, and I will drop a link to it in the show notes, but please do come out, Dr. Hillis is great, the book is great, and it’ll be a great night.
Now last time, we ended with the Bolshevik’s momentous decision on the night of October 10th, 1917, to stage an armed coup d’etat. What I want to talk about today is what happened in the two weeks after this decision was made, but before they actually went through with it. Because it would be very easy to just glide from one to the other, and skip over the fact that one of the most famous armed coups in history was by no means a forgone conclusion. These two weeks where a high wire act of tension, setbacks, and conflict, not just among the Bolsheviks and their various rivals, but among the Bolsheviks themselves.
Our loose guide for this week’s episode is an old friend, the American journalist John Reed. Reed has already made an appearance on the podcast because as you will recall, in 1913, he embedded himself with Pancho Villa, and wrote a series of newspaper dispatches from the Mexican Revolution collected and published as a book the following year called insurgent Mexico — which if you haven’t read Insurgent Mexico, by all means go read it.
But Reed is far more famous for his other book about being in the chaotic thick of revolution, 10 Days That Shook the World, his eyewitness account of the October Revolution. Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant, a fellow journalist and political activist, came to Russia to report on the ongoing revolutionary upheavals, and they arrived in Petrograd just after the Kornilov Affair. Bryant wrote her own account of their experience called Six Months in Russia, but Reed’s is a real tour de force of political journalism. It’s crammed to the hilt with direct quotes and long excerpts from papers and pamphlets and speeches, making it one of the indispensable first person accounts of the October Revolution in any language. Reed also had access to the principle players, and was, for example, in the last small group of reporters to interview Alexander Kerensky before the fall of the Winter Palace. So I highly recommend everybody read 10 Days That Shook the World, and if you do read it, you’ll recognize where I’m pulling most of the direct quotes from this week’s episode. Now Reed and Bryant were there to just generally kick around and report on events in Russia. They did not know that those events were building towards the October Revolution.
Now, by the second week of October, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party at least knew that they were building towards a revolution. Now, in retrospect, their decision is often portrayed as merely a ruthless will to power from a tiny clique of revolutionaries who represented no one but themselves. But Lenin’s plan did not call for like a dozen people to slip into the Winter Palace and declare themselves the new government without any popular support at all. Lenin was always critical of such Blanquist methods, which in the Russian tradition was expressed by the old People’s Will-style vanguardism. Lenin always believed that the people should be behind them, and would be behind them once they got going. In an open letter to his vacillating comrades, Lenin said the masses were presently in a state of nervous tension, and if they were not necessarily calling for an immediate insurrection, the very active insurrection would snap them into focus, and cause them to enthusiastically coalesce around the Bolsheviks.
He wrote: “… a firm party line, its unyielding resolve, is also a mood creating factor, particularly at the sharpest revolutionary moments.”
Lenin’s position was that the Bolsheviks could not and should not wait until they became the most popular party in Russia before launching a coup, because the very fact of launching the coup is what was going to make them the most popular party in Russia. Lenin believed the people were desperate for clear and decisive leadership, and that’s what he planned to give them.
But to achieve this, a Bolshevik coup had to be for something. And indeed it was. In the fall of 1917, the party had a positive platform aimed at delivering what the people desired, as well as a negative program, aimed at preventing what the people feared. The Bolsheviks hammered both sides of this program in the lead up to the coup. The positive side was encapsulated in a party editorial from October 4th, 1917 that ended with a clear, direct, and uncompromising five point platform:
- All power to the Soviets, both in the capital and in the provinces.
- Immediate truce on all fronts, and honest peace between peoples.
- Landlord estate to the peasants, without compensation.
- Worker control of industrial production.
- A faithfully and honestly elected constituent assembly.
So as the Bolsheviks drove towards power, this is what they were saying they were going to do with their power, and they were consciously ticking off each of the major constituencies they needed to win over. For the soldiers, peace. Now. Immediately. For the peasants land, now. Immediately. For the workers control of the factories, now, immediately. They promised no more delays hesitations or convoluted justifications. They promise to do away with the hypocritical and contradictory nonsense that had been floated by the liberals and the Mensheviks and the SRs since February. So for Lenin, it didn’t matter then in October 1917, the Bolsheviks didn’t technically have like any supporters among the peasantry who formed the mass majority of Russia. Who cares? When the Bolsheviks take power, we will transfer land from the large estates to the peasants, and voila, all the peasants will love us.
But if those were the desires to be fulfilled, what about the fears to be prevented? This was mostly aimed at the workers and soldiers of Petrograd, who the Bolsheviks needed to make their move. As we discussed last time, Kerensky gave the Bolsheviks a huge gift by floating the idea of evacuating Petrograd and letting the German sack it, and remember, the German to just a couple of hundred miles away at this point. The population of Petrograd understandably freaked out, and the Bolsheviks enthusiastically hammered the idea that the capitalists and the provisional government were basically in league with the kaiser. The Bolsheviks were also helped mightily by intemperate public remarks that confirmed the most exaggerated accusations. Mikhail Rodzianko, the old chairman of the state Duma, the first leader of the first provisional executive committee after the resignation of the tsar? He was quoted as saying, “Petrograd is in danger. I say to myself, let God take care of Petrograd. They fear that if Petrograd is lost, the central revolutionary organization will be destroyed. To that, I answer that I rejoice when all these organizations are destroyed, for they will bring nothing but disaster upon Russia.”
With quotes like this, floating around, it wasn’t hard to paint a picture that the liberals and capitalists and their agents in the provisional government were downright eager to toss the people of Petrograd to the Germans. The only thing that could save them was a self organized military apparatus by the people and for the people. Like, say, the recently formed military revolutionary committee.
The other fear of the Bolsheviks played on was that if the Germans didn’t sack Petrograd, then it would probably be some counterrevolutionary alliance of military officers, gangs of Black Hundreds, cossacks, and street thugs taking another shot at a Kornilov-style military coup. Rumors of such a coup swirled in the capital in the fall of 1917, and the Bolsheviks did everything they could to amplify and exaggerate the threat.
Trotsky said, “In essence, our strategy was offensive. We prepared to assault the government. But our agitation rested on the claim that the enemy was getting ready to disperse the Congress of Soviets, and it was necessary mercilessly to repulse them.”
Stalin later said, “The revolution — that is, the Bolshevik party — disguised its offensive actions behind a smoke screen of defenses in order to make it easier to attract into its orbit uncertain hesitating elements.”
Though the party had decided to go on offense, they knew it would only really work if it was sold as defense. And that’s exactly how they set about selling themselves: not as a self-interested clique making a power grab, but as the defenders of Petrograd and the revolution.
That the Bolsheviks were now plotting and insurrection was an open secret. People absolutely knew what was going on. On October 12th, one daily paper said, “There is definite evidence that the Bolsheviks are energetically preparing for a coming out on October 20th. That is, to coincide with the convening of the second All Russian Congress of Soviets, which the Bolsheviks themselves had called for. A right-wing paper prophesized, “The vile and bloody events of July three to five were only a rehearsal.” A Menshevik paper tried to derail the proposed coup by publishing a story allegedly revealing the details of the secret Bolshevik plan, including maps of their likely targets. Maxine Gorky, a former friend, ally, and sympathizer of Lenin, who had since drifted into a sort of intellectualized middle ground between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, urged the Bolshevik leaders to deny rumors of an insurrection, though he did agree that they were being pushed into this by the looming threat of counterrevolution. The military section of the SRs, on the other hand, thought the forces of counterrevolution would only be triggered if such an insurrection was launched. They issued a statement telling their members to stay home and not listen to dangerous hotheads. They said, “Counter-revolutionary plotters are planning to take advantage of this insurrection to destroy the revolution, open the front to Wilhelm, and wreck the constituent assembly. Stick stubbornly to your posts. Do not come out.” my point, though, is that in mid-October 1917, the Bolshevik coup was not flying under the radar. It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
Now this raises the obvious question: why didn’t the government do anything about it? Well, here’s the thing. Far from being alarmed by the thought of a Bolshevik uprising, Kerensky and his fellow ministers were positively giddy at the idea, because they were sure they’d be able to put it down without breaking a sweat. One of Kerensky’s ministers said, “If the Bolsheviks act, we will carry out a surgical operation and the abscesses will be extracted once and for all.” Kerensky himself. Infamously said, “I would be prepared to offer prayers to produce this uprising. I have greater forces than necessary. They will be utterly crushed.” To the British ambassador George Buchanan, Kerensky said, “I only wish the Bolsheviks would come out, and I will put them down.” He didn’t want to stop Lenin — he was begging for Lenin to carry his feeble party out into the open, where Kerensky could destroy them.
Kerensky and his fellow ministers were not the only ones who thought that would be the end result of an attempted coup. Plenty of rank and file Bolsheviks believed it too, and I’m not just talking about dissenting central committee members like Zinoviev and Kamenev. On October 15, the executive committee of the Petrograd Bolsheviks met with representatives from the Bolshevik military organization, and they all shared extreme skepticism at the central committee’s plan. They nodded along with a memo drafted by Zinoviev and Kamenev saying immediate insurrection was far too risky a gambit. The prevailing mood of hesitancy inside the military organization thus makes October the reverse of July. Back in July, Lenin and the central committee said an uprising was premature, while the defiantly optimistic military organization marched out into the streets anyway. Now, here in October, it’s the military organization leaders trying to dissuade Lenin and the central committee from doing something rash. Their attitude was, we’re not ready and we’re not sure that the people will turn out. Yes, they’ll come out if the second Congress of Soviets calls them, but for the Bolsheviks alone? They won’t.
The dissent from party leaders who were just below the central committee on the Bolshevik org chart just goes to further show that, as we’ve seen many times, despite typical portrayals of the Bolshevik party as some kind of hyper disciplined dictatorial extension of Lenin’s will, that’s never how they worked in practice. Sure, Lenin exerted a great deal of influence on the party. He exerted more individual influence than any other individual leader of any other party. But that is hardly the same as everybody doing what Lenin said all the time. All through the revolution, the Bolsheviks were constantly at odds with each other over strategy, tactics, theory, timing, means, and ends. Different sections and committees disagreed with each other. The Moscow committee wasn’t on the same page as the Petrograd committee. Rank and file agents would just go off and do their own thing, often ignoring the central committee entirely. Orders going from the top down were not followed. Demands coming from the bottom up forced the leaders to alter their plans. Now maybe they were a more cohesive herd of cats than any other party, but they were still mostly a herd of cats, as is evidenced by Lenin being more or less on the verge of a stroke every waking moment of his life.
But though there was an awful lot of pushback, Lenin and the central committee refuse to change course. On October 16th, the Bolshevik central committee held another meeting to grapple with the fact that lots of party members were extremely skeptical. At this meeting. Lenin stood on one side, while Zinoviev and Kamenev stood on the other. These were the three longest tenured Bolsheviks in the room, and they couldn’t agree on what to do. Kamenev thought the whole thing was a bad idea. Not only was an insurrection too risky, it was pointless. Kamenev believed that the party was well on its way to winning majorities in both the second Congress of the Soviet and the constituent assembly. So why do something incredibly risky like stage an armed uprising when the party was just weeks away from peacefully winning majorities? Zinoviev put forward a compromise motion saying that, at a minimum, the party must delay any armed uprising until the second Congress of the Soviets convened. The almost uniform word coming up from the streets was that the people would turn out if this Soviet called them out, but not the Bolshevik party alone. This motion was defeated. Lenin then put forward a counter motion reaffirming the October 10 decision to stage an insurrection as soon as practicable, though it did not yet set a firm time or date. That motion carried almost unanimously. Kamenev promptly resigned from the central committee, freeing him from the rules that prohibited central committee members from airing their disagreements publicly, exactly what Lenin had threatened to do a few weeks earlier when the central committee seemed hell bent on not staging an insurrection.
The following day, the executive committee of the national Soviet organization, still dominated by Mensheviks and SRs, announced that the second Congress of the Soviets would be delayed until October 25th. They knew what the Bolsheviks were up to, and they were trying to stall long enough to allow more Mensheviks and SR delegates to get to Petrograd so they would not lose control of the Soviet organization to the Bolsheviks. But it also gave the Bolsheviks a vital few extra days to prepare. And as they prepared, again, they are not really concealing themselves. On October 17th, Lenin published an open letter to his comrades where he invoked the image of the Soviet being a revolver pointed at the head of the provisional government. This was a common metaphor used to illustrate the Soviet role in the dual power system, that they didn’t need to wield power themselves, because they were a revolver pointed at the head of the provisional government, who would then do whatever they said. Lenin said, this revolver is useless if the leaders of the Soviet refuse to pull the trigger. He said:
If it is to be a revolver ‘with cartridges,’ this cannot mean anything but technical preparation for an uprising; the cartridges have to be procured, the revolver has to be loaded — and cartridges alone will not be enough.
Either…. openly renounce the slogan, ‘All Power to the Soviets,’ or start the uprising.
There is no middle course.
Lenin also debunked the notion that they should wait until the counter-revolution struck before making their own move. “What if the Kornilovites of the second draft will have learned a thing or two?” he asked. “What if they wait for hunger riots to begin, for the front to be broken through, for Petrograd to be surrendered, before they begin? What then?”
“… there is no objective way out and can be none except a dictatorship of the Kornilovites or a dictatorship of the proletariat.”
So Lenin wasn’t even bothering to hide his intentions here, and what’s more, he’s lifting the curtain on the whole anything we do will merely be defensive thing, because he’s quite openly saying, we can’t wait for them to strike first. We have to strike first. The best defense is a good offense. The only defense is a good offense.
Over the next few days, the Bolshevik coup was the talk of Petrograd, but people weren’t exactly eager to get involved. The military organization of the SRs in Petrograd voted to remain neutral in any coming Bolshevik insurrection. They would neither rise with the Bolsheviks nor help the government put them down. They would wait on the sidelines. But they did warn their members to be on the lookout for a full-on right-wing coup, which was also expected at practically any moment. They send out a circular to members warning them to be fully prepared for the merciless suppression, possible assaults by the Black Hundreds, pogromists, and counter-revolutionaries. On October 19th, the leaders of the garrison of the all-important Peter and Paul Fortress voted against joining any Bolshevik insurrection.
With reports like this in hand, Alexander Kerensky, his optimism was fully cemented. The intelligence coming into him indicated only a small number of soldiers were actually with the Bolsheviks. And he wasn’t wrong about that. There were something like 160,000 soldiers garrisoned in Petrograd, with another 85,000 in the general area. Of those, only a small fraction were actively participating in the coup. At most, the number was in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands. The vast majority of the soldiers clearly wanted no part of it. But here, kerensky made a fatal miscalculation. His brief time in the Winter Palace appears to have infected him with the same fatal case of blinkered myopia that took down Nicholas and Alexandra. Kerensky was convinced he was only threatened by a small group of malcontents, and that the vast majority of Russians were still with him. Kerensky took the small number of Bolshevik diehards to mean that those soldiers who declined to participate would defend his government. And boy, did he misread that. They didn’t plan to defend his government, they planned to sit on the sidelines and watch. They weren’t going to fight for Lenin, but they also sure as hell were not going to fight for Kerensky either.
More than anything, a mood of chaotic, noisy, bustling, and increasingly paranoid anticipation saturated Petrograd. And to set the scene, I’m just going to hand the reigns over to John Reed and let him describe what he saw in this final week: “Petrograd presented a curious spectacle in those days,” he wrote.
In the factories, the committee rooms were filled with stacks of rifles. Couriers came and went, and the Red Guard drilled. In all the barracks, meetings every day, and all night long, interminable hot arguments. On the streets, the crowds thickened towards a gloomy evening, pouring in slow voluble tides up and down the Nevsky, fighting for the newspapers. Holdups increased to such an extent that it was dangerous to walk down side streets… one afternoon, I saw a crowd of several hundred people beat and trampled to death a soldier caught stealing… Mysterious individuals circulated around the shivering women who waited in queue, long cold hours for bread and milk, whispering that the Jews had cornered the food supply — and that while the people starved, Soviet members lived luxuriously.
At Smoley, there were strict guards at the doors and the outer gates demanding everyone’s pass. The committee-rooms buzzed and hummed all day and all night, hundreds of soldiers and workmen slept on the floor, wherever they could find room. Upstairs in the great hall a thousand people crowded to the uproarious sessions of the Petrograd Soviet…
[…]
And in the rain, the bitter chill, the great throbbing city under gray skies rushing faster and faster towards — what?
On October 21st, the military revolutionary committee held a conference of representatives from the garrisons of Petrograd in order to coordinate what was ostensibly a municipal defense force, but which everyone well knew was a Bolshevik led military apparatus. The delegates in the room, many of them, members of the Bolshevik military organization, passed a resolution calling on the forthcoming Congress of Soviets to take power. Then, they set about ensuring that when the Congress of Soviets met, that the MRC would wield ultimate military authority in the capital. They sent a delegation to the ranking officer of the Petrograd military district, delivering a message that henceforth, soldiers in the garrison would only follow orders counter signed by the MRC, The officer scoffed, and said, I don’t recognize your delegation, your committee, or your orders. You have no authority here whatsoever.
This delegation then returned to MRC headquarters and announced that the regular chain of command military officers had rejected their authority. So they drafted a resolution and promulgated it on the morning of October 22nd. It read, “The headquarters of the Petrograd military district refuse to recognize the MRC. In doing so, the headquarters break with the revolutionary garrison of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies. The headquarters becomes a direct weapon of counter-revolutionary force.” Then, they staked a very bold claim to military power: “The protection of revolutionary order from counter-revolutionary attacks rests with the revolutionary soldiers directed by the MRC. No directives to the garrison not signed by the MRC should be considered valid.” They finished this by saying, “The revolution is in danger. Long live the revolutionary garrison.”
With this statement, they proclaimed their ultimate authority over all military decisions in Petrograd, and further said that any orders that contradicted the MRC was ipso facto an active counter revolution.
This declaration was issued early on October 22nd, and there was a plausible belief that there may be a major confrontation that very afternoon. October 22nd had been declared a day for celebrating the Petrograd Soviet, and there were lots of banquets and rallies and speeches planned. But it was also the anniversary of Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow, which was itself an annual nationalistic celebration. Conservative elements in the army indicated they planned to observe this celebration with parades of their own.
But as the day progressed, the energy in Petrograd was predominantly left-wing, not right-wing. Trotsky gave an electrifying speech at an opera house reminding everyone of how great things would be once the Soviet took power for itself. Soviet power was destined not only to put an end to the sufferings in the trenches, he thundered, it would provide land and stop internal disorder.
“The Soviet government will give everything the country has to the poor and the soldiers at the front. You, bourgeois, own two coats? Give one to the soldier freezing in the trenches. You have warm boots? Stay at home. Your boots are needed by a worker.”
People applauded rapturously. Trotsky called, “We will defend the cause of the workers and the peasants to the last drop of blood. Who will join us?” Everyone cheered, and raised their hands.
There was no great confrontation on October 22nd, and the following day, the MRC finished appointing their commissars, nearly all of whom doubled as members of the Bolshevik military organization. The mood of the city now shifted decisively in the direction of hoping the second Congress of Soviets declared itself the seat of a new national government, backed by the arms of the MRC. As most of the members of the Bolshevik Party had hoped, they were succeeding at organizing their coup under the popular legitimising banner of Soviet authority. On the afternoon of October 23rd, a group of MRC commissars went to the Peter and Paul Fortress to convince them to join the MRC chain of command. The commander of the fortress relented to demands to hold a democratic assembly of his soldiers. Once gathered, the men were harangued by Mensheviks and SRs imploring them to stay in the regular chain of command and not join insurrectionary hotheads, whose hot headedness would lead them all to their doom. Meanwhile, the MRC commissars, most of them Bolsheviks, said join us or Petrograd will fall, either to the Germans or to the counterrevolution. Trotsky arrived and gave a speech urging the Garrison to join with the MRC and defend the revolution. At 8:00 PM, they voted. Everyone who wanted to join the MRC moved to the left, everyone who wanted to maintain the status quo moved to the right. Nearly every soldier moved left. The MRC. And by extension, the Bolshevik Party now controlled the Peter and Paul Fortress, along with its huge cache of weapons and ammunition, and its direct line of sight on the Winter Palace, where Alexander Kerensky lived, worked, and, apparently, prayed for the Bolsheviks to take their best shot.
That night, John Reed headed to the Smolny Institute, headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet. He reported:
In the hall. I ran into some of the minor Bolshevik leaders. One showed me a revolver. “The game is on,” he said, and his face was pale. “Whether we move or not, the other side knows it must finish us or be finished.”
Reed then witnessed a speech by Trotsky.
“We are asked if we intend to come out,” Trotsky said. “I can give a clear answer to that question. The Petrograd Soviet feels that at last the moment has arrived when the power must fall into the hands of the Soviet. The transfer of government will be accomplished by the All Russian Congress. Whether an armed demonstration is necessary will depend on those who wish to interfere with the All Russian Congress. We feel that our government entrusted to the personnel of the provisional cabinet is a pitiless and helpless government, which only awaits the sweep of the broom of history to give way to a really popular government. But we are trying to avoid a conflict, Even now, today. We hope that the All Russian Congress will take into its hands that power and authority which rests upon the organized freedom of the people. If, however, the government wants to utilize the short period it is expected to live — twenty-four, forty eight, or seventy-two hours — to attack us, then we shall answer with counter-attacks, blow for blow, steel for iron!”
So this is pretty heavy stuff. But then, later that same night, with everything so clearly moving in a decisive direction, there was an unexpected flinch from the Bolsheviks and the MRC. The senior officer of the Petrograd military district invited them to engage in further talks over who had veto over what orders. Maybe an arrangement could be worked out. The Bolshevik leadership made a calculated decision to withdraw their unilateral claim to military authority, probably because they were not quite ready to make their move, and they didn’t want to spark something they couldn’t control. So they backed down. Or at least, they seemed to back down. Which was quite enough to convince Alexander Kerensky that he had the Bolsheviks right where he wanted them. This was a signal the Bolsheviks did not actually believe they were strong enough to back up their big talk. As soon as he heard the news, Kerensky issued orders to strike, giving the Bolsheviks exactly the attack they needed to claim that they were launching a counter attack. The revolution was in danger. Petrograd must be saved.
Next week, we will all wake up on the morning of October the 24th, 1917, and shake the world.