The Central Executive Committee [Ispolkom] considers the Second Congress as not having taken place and regards it as a private gathering of Bolshevik delegates. The resolutions of this congress, lacking in legitimacy, are declared by the Central Executive Committee to have no binding force for local soviets and all army committees. The Central Executive Committee calls on the soviets and army organizations to rally around it to defend the Revolution. The Central Executive Committee will convene a new Congress of Soviets as soon as conditions make it possible to do so properly.206
The exact number of participants in this rump congress cannot be determined: the most reliable estimate indicates about 650 delegates, among them 338 Bolsheviks and 98 Left SRs. The two allied parties thus controlled two-thirds of the seats—a representation more than double what they were entitled to, judging by the elections to the Constituent Assembly three weeks later.207 Leaving nothing to chance, for they could not be entirely certain of the Left SRs, the Bolsheviks allocated to themselves 54 percent of the seats. How skewed the representation was is illustrated by the fact that, according to information made available seventy years later, Latvians, who had a strong Bolshevik movement, accounted for over 10 percent of the delegates.208
The initial hours were spent on raucous debates. While awaiting word that the ministers were under arrest, the Bolsheviks gave the floor to their socialist opponents. Amid hooting and heckling, the Mensheviks and the Socialists-Revolutionaries presented similar declarations denouncing the Bolshevik coup and demanding immediate negotiations with the Provisional Government. The Menshevik statement declared that the
military conspiracy was organized and carried out by the Bolshevik Party in the name of the soviets behind the backs of all the other parties and factions represented in the soviets … the seizure of power by the Petrograd Soviet on the eve of the Congress of Soviets constitutes a disorganization and disruption of the entire soviet organization.209
Trotsky described the opponents as “pitiful entities [edinitsy]” and “bankrupts” whose place was on the “garbage heap of history,” whereupon Martov declared he was leaving.210
This happened around 1 a.m. on October 26. At 3:10 a.m. Kamenev announced that the Winter Palace had fallen and the ministers were in custody. At 6 a.m. he adjourned the congress until the evening.
Lenin now went to Bonch-Bruevich’s apartment to draft key decrees for the congress’s ratification. The two principal decrees on which he counted to win the support of soldiers and peasants for the coup, dealing with peace and land, were later in the day submitted to a caucus of the Bolshevik delegates, which approved them without debate.
The congress resumed at 10:40 p.m. Lenin, greeted with tumultuous applause, presented the decrees on peace and land. They sailed through on a voice vote.
The Decree on Peace211 was misnamed since it was not a legislative act, but an appeal to all the belligerent powers to open immediate negotiations for a “democratic” peace without annexations and contributions, guaranteeing every nation “the right to self-determination.” Secret diplomacy was to be abolished and secret treaties made public. Until peace negotiations could get underway, Russia proposed a three-month armistice.
The Decree on Land212 was lifted bodily from the program of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party as supplemented with 242 instructions from peasant communities published two months earlier in Izvestiia of the All-Russian Union of Peasants’ Deputies.213 Instead of ordering the nationalization all the land—that is, the transfer of ownership to the state—as the Bolshevik program demanded, it called for its “socialization”—that is, withdrawal from commerce and transfer to peasant communes for use. All landed properties of landlords, the state, the church, and others not engaged in farming were to be confiscated without compensation and turned over to the volost’ land committees until such time as the Constituent Assembly decided on their ultimate disposal. Private holdings of peasants, however, were exempt. This was an unabashed concession to peasant wishes which had little in common with the Bolshevik land program and was designed to win peasant support in the elections to the Constituent Assembly.
The third and final decree presented to the delegates set up a new government called the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovet Narodnykh Komissarov, or Sovnarkom). It was to serve only until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, scheduled for the following month: hence, like its predecessor, it was named “Provisional Government.”214 Lenin at first offered its chairmanship to Trotsky, but Trotsky refused. Lenin was none too eager to enter the cabinet, preferring to work from behind the scenes. “At first Lenin did not want to join the government,” Lunacharskii recalled. “ ‘I will work in the Central Committee of the party,’ he said. But we said no. We would not agree to that. We made him assume principal responsibility. Everyone prefers to be only a critic.”215 So Lenin took over the chairmanship of the Sovnarkom, while concurrently serving, in fact if not in name, as chairman of the Bolshevik Central Committee. The new cabinet had the same structure as the old, with the addition of one new post, that of chairman (rather than commissar) for Nationality Affairs. All the commissars were members of the Bolshevik Party and subject to its discipline: the Left SRs were invited to join but refused, insisting on a cabinet representative of “all the forces of revolutionary democracy,” including the Mensheviks and SRs.216 The composition of the Sovnarkom was as follows:*
Chairman
Vladimir Ulianov (Lenin)
Internal Affairs
A. I. Rykov
Agriculture
V. P. Miliutin
Labor
A. G. Shliapnikov
War and Navy
V. A. Ovseenko (Antonov)
N. V. Krylenko
P. E. Dybenko
Trade and Industry
V. P. Nogin
Enlightenment
A. V. Lunacharskii
Finance
I. I. Skvortsov (Stepanov)
Foreign Affairs
L. D. Bronstein (Trotsky)
Justice
G. I. Oppokov (Lomov)
Supply
I. A. Teodorovich
Post and Telegraphs
N. P. Avilov (Glebov)
Chairman for Nationality Affairs
I. V. Dzhugashvili (Stalin)
The existing Ispolkom was declared deposed and replaced with a new one, composed of 101 members, of whom 62 were Bolsheviks and 29 Left SRs. Kamenev was named chairman. In the decree establishing the Sovnarkom, drafted by Lenin, the Sovnarkom was made accountable to the Ispolkom, which thereby became something of a parliament with authority to veto legislation and cabinet appointments.
The Bolshevik high command, exceedingly anxious at this uncertain time not to appear to be preempting power, insisted that the decrees passed by the congress were enacted on a provisional basis, subject to approval, emendation, or rejection by the Constituent Assembly. In the words of a Communist historian:
In the days of October, the sovereignty of the Constituent Assembly was not denied … in all its resolutions [the Second Congress of Soviets] took the Constituent Assembly into account and adopted its basic decisions “until its convocation.”217
While the Decree on Peace did not refer to the Constituent Assembly, in his report on it to the Second Congress, Lenin promised: “We will submit all the peace proposals to the Constituent Assembly for decision.”218 The provisions of the Land Decree were conditional as welclass="underline" “Only the all-national Constituent Assembly can resolve the land question in all its dimensions.”219 As concerned the new cabinet, the Sovnarkom, a resolution which Lenin drafted and the congress approved stated: “To form for the administration of the country, until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, a Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government to be called Council of People’s Commissars.”220 Hence, it was logical for the new government, on its first day in office (October 27), to affirm that the elections for the Constituent Assembly would proceed as scheduled on November 12.221 Hence, too, by dispersing the Assembly on its first day, before it had had a chance to legislate, the Bolsheviks delegitimized themselves, even by their own definition.