The reason for Lenin’s continuing impatience must surely have stemmed from his anticipation that the Bolsheviks would not have a clear majority at the Congress of Soviets — and indeed they gained only 300 out of 670 elected delegates.3 He could not drive his policies through the Congress without some compromise with other parties. It is true that many Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lately accepted that an exclusively socialist coalition, including the Bolsheviks, should be formed. But Lenin could think of nothing worse than the sharing of power with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. The Congress of Soviets might foist a coalition upon him. His counter-measure was to get the Military-Revolutionary Committee to grab power hours in advance of the Congress on the assumption that this would probably annoy the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries enough to dissuade them from joining a coalition with the Bolsheviks.
The ploy worked. As the Congress assembled in the Smolny Institute, the fug of cigarette smoke grew denser. Workers and soldiers sympathetic to the Bolsheviks filled the main hall. The appearance of Trotski and Lenin was greeted with a cheering roar. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were disgusted, and denounced what they described as a Bolshevik party coup d’état. The Menshevik Yuli Martov declared that most of the Bolshevik delegates to the Congress had been elected on the understanding that a general socialist coalition would come to power, and his words were given a respectful hearing. Yet tempers ran high among other Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries present. In an act of stupendous folly, they stormed out of the hall.4
Their exodus meant that the Bolsheviks, who had the largest delegation, became the party with a clear-cut majority. Lenin and Trotski proceeded to form their own government. Trotski suggested that it should be called the Council of People’s Commissars (or, as it was in its Russian acronym, Sovnarkom). Thus he contrived to avoid the bourgeois connotations of words such as ‘ministers’ and ‘cabinets’. Lenin would not be Prime Minister or Premier, but merely Chairman, and Trotski would serve as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The Second Congress of Soviets had not been abandoned by all the foes of the Bolsheviks: the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had remained inside the Institute. Lenin and Trotski invited them to join Sovnarkom, but were turned down. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were waiting to see whether the Bolshevik-led administration would survive; and they, too, aspired to the establishment of a general socialist coalition.
Lenin and Trotski set their faces against such a coalition; but they were opposed by colleagues in the Bolshevik Central Committee who also wanted to negotiate with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries to this end. Furthermore, the central executive body of the Railwaymen’s Union threatened to go on strike until a coalition of all socialist parties had been set up, and the political position of Lenin and Trotski was weakened further when news arrived that a Cossack contingent loyal to Kerenski was moving on Petrograd.
But things then swung back in favour of Lenin and Trotski. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries no more wished to sit in a government including Lenin and Trotski than Lenin and Trotski wanted them as colleagues. The negotiations broke down, and Lenin unperturbedly maintained an all-Bolshevik Sovnarkom. Three Bolsheviks resigned from Sovnarkom, thinking this would compel Lenin to back down.5 But to no avail. The rail strike petered out, and the Cossacks of General Krasnov were defeated by Sovnarkom’s soldiers on the Pulkovo Heights outside the capital. The Bolshevik leaders who had stood by Lenin were delighted. Victory, both military and political, was anticipated by Lenin and Trotski not only in Russia but also across Europe. Trotski as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs expected simply to publish the secret wartime treaties of the Allies and then to ‘shut up shop’.6 For he thought that the Red revolutions abroad would end the need for international diplomacy altogether.
Trotski met the Allied diplomats, mainly with the intention of keeping the regime’s future options open. The burden of energy, however, fell elsewhere. Sovnarkom was the government of a state which was still coming into being. Its coercive powers were patchy in Petrograd, non-existent in the provinces. The Red Guards were ill-trained and not too well disciplined. The garrisons were as reluctant to fight other Russians as they had been to take on the Germans. Public announcements were the most effective weapons in Sovnarkom’s arsenal. On 25 October, Lenin wrote a proclamation justifying the ‘victorious uprising’ by reference to ‘the will of the huge majority of workers, soldiers and peasants’. His sketch of future measures included the bringing of ‘an immediate democratic peace to all the peoples’. In Russia the Constituent Assembly would be convoked. Food supplies would be secured for the towns and workers’ control over industrial establishments instituted. ‘Democratization of the army’ would be achieved. The lands of gentry, crown and church would be transferred ‘to the disposal of the peasant committees’.7
Two momentous documents were signed by Lenin on 26 October. The Decree on Peace made a plea to governments and to ‘all the warring peoples’ to bring about a ‘just, democratic peace’. There should be no annexations, no indemnities, no enclosure of small nationalities in larger states against their will. Lenin usually eschewed what he considered as moralistic language, but he now described the Great War as ‘the greatest crime against humanity’:8 probably he was trying to use terminology congruent with the terminology of President Woodrow Wilson. But above all he wanted to rally the hundreds of millions of Europe’s workers and soldiers to the banner of socialist revolution; he never doubted that, without revolutions, no worthwhile peace could be achieved.
The Decree on Land, edited and signed by him on the same day, summoned the peasants to undertake radical agrarian reform. Expropriation of estates was to take place without compensation of their owners. The land and equipment seized from gentry, crown and church was to ‘belong to the entire people’. Lenin stressed that ‘rank-and-file’ peasants should be allowed to keep their property intact. The appeal was therefore directed at the poor and the less-than-rich. This brief preamble was followed by clauses which had not been written by him but purloined from the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries, which had collated 242 ‘instructions’ set out by peasant committees themselves in summer 1917. Lenin’s decree repeated them verbatim. Land was to become an ‘all-people’s legacy’; it could no longer be bought, sold, rented or mortgaged. Sovnarkom’s main stipulation was that the large estates should not be broken up but handed over to the state. Yet peasants were to decide most practicalities for themselves as the land passed into their hands.9
Other decrees briskly followed. The eight-hour day, which had been introduced under the Provisional Government, was confirmed on 29 October, and a code on workers’ control in factories and mines was issued on 14 November. This was not yet a comprehensive design for the transformation of the economy’s urban sector; and, while industry was at least mentioned in those early weeks of power, Lenin was slow to announce measures on commerce, finance and taxation. His main advice to the party’s supporters outside Petrograd was to ‘introduce the strictest control over production and account-keeping’ and to arrest those who attempted sabotage.10