In all these deliberations during the first months of the revolution the Bolsheviks remained a minority in the soviets. Lenin heard of the fall of the tsar in Switzerland and managed to return to Russia through Germany, having convinced the German government that he was more of a threat to Russia’s war effort than to their own. He traveled in a train whose doors were sealed until he reached neutral Sweden, reaching Petrograd via Finland on April 3/16, 1917, to the tumultuous welcome of his followers. He found that the Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, had returned from exile and were beginning to organize themselves. They all lacked, however, a clear idea of what their platform ought to be. Lenin’s was absolutely clear, as expressed in the “April Theses.” The fall of the tsar, he wrote, meant that the bourgeois revolution, the one the party had aimed for in 1905, had ended. In the country there was now dual power, the soviets alongside the Provisional Government. The aim should now be the seizure of power by the proletariat with the aim of transforming Russia into a socialist society. The instrument of that seizure was to be the soviets, primarily the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets. The immediate aim of the Bolsheviks was thus to secure a majority in the Petrograd and other soviets.
The story of the next few months is the story of the fulfillment of that goal. It was the situation of Russia that made it possible, for the whole country entered a major crisis. The collapse of the old government left little effective authority in its place, and much of that was cowed by the revolutionary crowd. In the villages the peasants simply took the land during the summer. In many places there was violence, but often they simply ignored the noble landowner and began to plow up his fields for their own. Sometimes they came to the mansions of the aristocrats and politely told them to leave. However it occurred, the peasant seizure of the land was a cataclysmic change in Russian society, in a few months putting an end to a social order that had lasted for centuries. Most nobles were no longer the masters of the land but impoverished refugees in the big cities. In the cities the workers used their new freedom to demand an eight-hour day, higher wages, and to form factory committees that tried to take control of the work place.
The left parties all came out into the open and tried to become mass organizations. The time of the revolutionary underground was over. At first the most successful were the SRs, with their traditions of direct action and appeal to the peasantry. For the first time they actually managed to organize significant numbers of peasants into their party, and their working class following was very large. They had one deep problem, however – the war. Even before 1917 some of the SRs had come out against the war, with a position very close to Lenin’s, but remained part of the larger party. As the crisis deepened over the summer of 1917, the split widened. The Mensheviks, always hoping to build a mass party in freer conditions, benefited enormously from the new freedom. When the soviets held their first congress of delegates from all of Russia in June, the SR’s and Mensheviks had nearly three hundred deputies each, and the Bolsheviks only a little more than a hundred. Moderation seemed to triumph, but the mood changed very fast.
The Bolsheviks for the first time were becoming a mass party, too. In place of the few thousand professional revolutionaries the party grew rapidly to over two hundred thousand, with the largest concentration in the large cities and in Petrograd in particular. These new members were overwhelmingly young factory workers, most under twenty-five. As more and more revolutionaries returned from abroad, the Bolsheviks also began to attract dissidents from the Mensheviks, the most important being Trotsky, whose opposition to the war brought him to join Lenin for the first time. Trotsky was a powerful orator, and his speeches were a major weapon in winning the masses to Bolshevism. The new members transformed the Bolshevik party, especially at the level of the rank and file, whose radicalism came to the fore in early July. The Petrograd Bolsheviks staged an armed demonstration that seemed to be turning into a bid for power. The Provisional Government, with support from the city soviet, was able to put it down and arrest many Bolshevik leaders. Lenin went into hiding in Finland and Trotsky landed in jail. In reaction to the events Kerenskii replaced Prince Lvov as prime minister. For a few weeks the revolutionary wave seemed to subside, but that was not to be. The war ground on, discontent in the army multiplied into a gradual collapse of discipline and Kerenskii replaced Brusilov with general Lavr Kornilov as commander in chief, hoping that Kornilov could restore order in the army. The task was beyond his powers. The transport net of the country, already weakened by the war, began to collapse, as did many essential industries and services. In the cities the soviets organized Red Guards, who contributed as much to disorder as to order. Revolutionary organizations and groups “expropriated” buildings for their own use, the most famous example being the Petrograd Soviet’s seizure of the buildings of the Smolnyi Institute in Petrograd, the aristocratic girls’ school founded by Empress Elizabeth. Thus it came to serve as the Bolshevik headquarters. For the middle and upper classes, it was the beginning of anarchy; for the workers, it was the dawn of a new world, chaotic, but their own. Endless discussion and meetings further disrupted factory work but also built a constituency for ever more radical demands. Life in Petrograd was feverish, and in the provinces only a bit calmer. Moscow and all towns and settlements with any industry boiled with meetings, speeches, and demonstrations. On the fringes of the country nationalist movements appeared with demands for autonomy. In Kiev groups of nationalist intellectuals and party activists proclaimed themselves the Ukrainian Rada (council) alongside the Provisional Government and the local soviets. Other groups formed in the Baltics and the Caucasus, though none of them advocated actual independence as yet.
The July days had put a crimp in the Bolshevik organization and its rise to dominance among the workers. Then at the end of August general Kornilov advanced on the capital with the Mountaineer Cavalry Corps consisting of the Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus – Chechens and Circassians – to restore discipline and order in the country. In the face of this challenge Kerenskii had to turn to the Petrograd Soviet, which armed the workers. The Bolsheviks had grown in strength since the July Days. They were now crucial for the defeat of Kornilov, and their leaders emerged from jail into the open again. The inability of Kerenskii to defend the revolution on his own was the last blow to his power, and from the time of the defeat of Kornilov on September 1/14, the Provisional Government essentially drifted. The locus of action had shifted to the soviets. During and right after the Kornilov episode the Bolsheviks finally secured a majority in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. As the weeks advanced and the economic and military crisis continued to worsen, another Congress of Soviets met, again with delegates from all over the country. Here the divisions in the SR party were to play a decisive role, for the Bolsheviks had clearly won the majority of the city workers, but in the villages they had no organization at all. The left wing of the SR party, increasingly radicalized by the revolution and demanding an immediate end to the war, was prepared to join the Bolsheviks. On October 10/23, Lenin returned from hiding in Finland and assembled the Bolshevik leaders. With the support of Trotsky and Stalin, he overcame the pessimists in the leadership, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and the Bolshevik Central Committee voted to seize power. With the votes of the Left SRs the Bolsheviks captured the leadership of the Congress of Soviets, and on October 25/November 7, 1917, the Red Guards moved on the Winter Palace to eject the Provisional Government. Only a few hundred defenders were left in the palace, officer cadets and the “Women’s Batallion of Death,” a unit formed of mostly middle-class women to fight in the war. On a signal from the naval cruiser Aurora, anchored in the Neva River, several thousand Red Guards in a fast walk through the autumn chill took the palace with minimal firing and casualties. Attempts at looting the wine cellar and the many treasures of the palace were quickly suppressed, and the ministers of the Provisional Government were escorted to prison in the St. Peter and Paul Fortress. Kerenskii escaped south in a US embassy car in a fruitless attempt to rally support at the front.