“Oh, that is goo-oo-d,” Lenin responded gaily in a singsong voice, and began to pace up and down the room, rubbing his hands in excitement. “That is verr-rr-ry good.” Lenin liked military cunning: to deceive the enemy, to make a fool of him—what delightful work!189
Lenin spent the night relaxing on the floor while Podvoiskii, Antonov-Ovseenko, and G. I. Chudnovskii, a friend of Trotsky’s, under Trotsky’s overall command, directed the operation.
That night (October 24–25), the Bolsheviks systematically took over all the objectives of strategic importance by the simple device of posting pickets: it was a model modern coup d’état as described by Malaparte. Iunker guards were told to go home: they either withdrew voluntarily or were disarmed. Thus, under cover of darkness, one by one, railroad stations, post offices, telephone centers, banks, and bridges fell under Bolshevik control. No resistance was encountered, no shots fired. The Bolsjieviks took the Engineers’ Palace in the most casual manner imaginable: “They entered and took their seats while those who were sitting there got up and left; thus the staff was taken.”190
At the Central Telephone Exchange, the Bolsheviks disconnected the lines from the Winter Palace, but they missed two which were not registered. Using these lines, the ministers, gathered in the Malachite Room, maintained contact with the outside. Although in his public pronouncements he exuded confidence, to an eyewitness Kerensky appeared old and tired as he stared into the void, seeing no one, his half-closed eyes hiding “suffering and controlled fear.”191 At 9 p.m., a delegation from the Soviet, headed by Theodore Dan and Abraham Gots, turned up to tell the ministers that under the influence of the “reactionary” Military Staff they greatly overestimated the Bolshevik threat. Kerensky showed them the door.192 That night, Kerensky at last contacted front-line commanders and asked for aid. In vain: none was available. At 9 a.m. on October 25 he slipped out of the Winter Palace disguised as a Serbian officer and in a car borrowed from a U.S. Embassy official, flying the American flag, drove off to the front in search of help.
By then, the Winter Palace was the only structure still left in government hands. Lenin insisted that before the Second Congress of Soviets officially opened and proclaimed the Provisional Government deposed, the ministers had to be under arrest. But the Bolshevik forces proved inadequate to the task. It turned out that, for all their claims, they had no men willing to brave fire: their alleged 45,000 Red Guards and tens of thousands of supporters among the garrison were nowhere to be seen. A halfhearted assault on the palace was launched at dawn, but at the first sound of shots the attackers beat a retreat.
66. N. I. Podvoiskii.
Burning with impatience, fearful of intervention by troops from the front, Lenin decided to wait no longer. Between 8 and 9 a.m. he made his way to the Bolshevik operations room. At first no one knew him. Bonch-Bruevich burst with joy when he realized who he was: “Vladimir Ilich, our father,” he shouted as he embraced him, “I did not recognize you, dear one!”193 Lenin sat down and drafted, in the name of the Milrevkom, a declaration announcing that the Provisional Government was deposed. Released to the press at 10 a.m. (October 25), it read as follows:
TO THE CITIZENS OF RUSSIA!
The Provisional Government has been deposed. Government authority has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Military-Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.
The task for which the people have been struggling—the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of landlord property in land, worker control over production, the creation of a Soviet Government—this task is assured.
Long Live the Revolution of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants!
The Military-Revolutionary Committee of the
Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.*
This document, which takes pride of place in the corpus of Bolshevik decrees, declared sovereign power over Russia to have been assumed by a body which no one outside the Bolshevik Central Committee had given authority to do so. The Petrograd Soviet had formed the Milrevkom to defend the city, not to topple the government. The Second Congress of Soviets, which was to legitimize the coup, had not even opened when the Bolsheviks had already acted in its name. This procedure, however, was consistent with Lenin’s argument that it was of no consequence in whose name power was formally taken: “This is not important right now: let the Military-Revolutionary Committee take it or ‘some other institution,’ ” he had written the night before. Because the coup was unauthorized and so quietly carried out, the population of Petrograd had no reason to take the claim seriously. According to eyewitnesses, on October 25 life in Petrograd returned to normal as offices and shops reopened, factory workers went to work, and places of entertainment filled again with crowds. No one except a handful of principals knew what had happened: that the capital city was in the iron grip of armed Bolsheviks and that nothing would ever be the same again. Lenin later said that starting the world revolution in Russia was as easy as “picking up a feather.”194
In the meantime, Kerensky was speeding to Pskov, the headquarters of the Northern Front. By an exquisite twist of history, the only troops available to move against the Bolsheviks were Cossacks of the same Third Cavalry Corps whom two months earlier he had accused of participating in Kornilov’s “treason.” They so despised Kerensky for having slandered Kornilov and driven their commander, General Krymov, to suicide that they refused to heed his pleas. Kerensky eventually persuaded some of them to advance on the capital by way of Luga. Under the command of Ataman P. N. Krasnov, they scattered the troops sent by the Bolsheviks and occupied Gatchina. That evening, they reached Tsarskoe Selo, a two-hour ride to the capital. But disappointed that no other units joined them, they dismounted and refused to go farther.
In Petrograd, the situation seemed material for comedy. After the Bolsheviks had proclaimed them deposed, the ministers remained in the Malachite Room, on the Neva side of the Winter Palace, awaiting the arrival of Kerensky at the head of relief troops. Because of that, the Second Congress of Soviets, assembled at Smolnyi, had to be postponed from hour to hour. At 2 p.m., 5,000 sailors arrived from Kronshtadt: but this “pride and beauty of the Revolution,” so adept at roughing up unarmed civilians, had no stomach for battle. When their attempt to assault the palace was met with fire, they too gave up.
Lenin did not dare to show himself in public until the cabinet (presumably including Kerensky, of whose escape he was unaware) fell into Bolshevik hands. He spent most of October 25 bandaged, wigged, and bespectacled. After Dan and Skobelev, passing by, saw through his disguise,195 he retired to his hideaway, where he took catnaps on the floor, while Trotsky came and went to report the latest news.
Unwilling to open the Congress of Soviets as long as the Winter Palace held out, yet afraid of losing the delegates, Trotsky convened at 2:35 p.m. an Extraordinary Session of the Petrograd Soviet. It cannot be determined who took part in these deliberations: since the SRs and Mensheviks had left Smolnyi the day before and there were hundreds of Bolshevik and pro-Bolshevik delegates from the provinces in the building, it is safe to assume that it was virtually a completely Bolshevik and Left SR affair.
Opening the meeting (with Lenin still absent), Trotsky announced: “In the name of the Military-Revolutionary Committee, I declare that the Provisional Government has ceased to exist.” When a delegate, in response to one of Trotsky’s announcements, shouted from the floor, “You are anticipating the will of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets!” Trotsky retorted: