The Bolsheviks made their initial concessions to legality only because they could not be certain what the future held in store. They had to allow for the possibility of Kerensky arriving momentarily in Petrograd with troops, in which case they would need the support of the entire Soviet. They ventured to violate legal norms openly only a week or so later, after it had become apparent that no punitive expeditions would materialize.
The one armed clash between pro-Bolshevik and pro-government troops for control of the capital occurred on October 30 at Pulkovo, a hilly suburb. Krasnov’s Cossacks, discouraged by lack of support and confused by Bolshevik agitators, after wasting three precious days in Tsarskoe Selo were finally persuaded to advance. They opened operations along the Slavianka River: here, 600 Cossacks confronted a force of Red Guards, sailors, and soldiers at least ten times larger.222 The Red Guards and soldiers quickly fled, but the 3,000 sailors stood their ground and carried the day. Having lost their field commander, the Cossacks retreated to Gatchina. This ended the possibility of any further military intervention on behalf of the Provisional Government.
In Moscow, things went awry for the Bolsheviks from the start: they could have ended in disaster had the government representatives displayed greater determination.
Moscow’s Bolsheviks had not prepared themselves for a power seizure because they sided with Kamenev and Zinoviev rather than Lenin and Trotsky: Uritskii told the Central Committee on October 20 that the majority of the Moscow delegates opposed an uprising.223
Having learned of the events in Petrograd on October 25, the Bolsheviks had the Soviet pass a resolution setting up a Revolutionary Committee. But whereas in the capital city the equivalent organization was under Bolshevik control, in Moscow it was intended as a genuine interparty Soviet organ and the Mensheviks, SRs, and other socialists were invited to join. While the SRs declined, the Mensheviks accepted the invitation but posed several conditions; these were rejected, whereupon they withdrew.224 Emulating the Petrograd Milrevkom, the Moscow Revolutionary Committee issued at 10 p.m. an appeal to the city’s garrison to be ready for action and obey only orders issued by it or carrying its countersignature.225
The Moscow Revolutionary Committee made its first move in the morning of October 26 by sending two commissars to the Kremlin to take over the ancient fortress and distribute weapons in its arsenal to pro-Bolshevik Red Guards. Troops of the 56th Regiment guarding the Kremlin obeyed, confused by the fact that one of these commissars was its own officer. Even so, the Bolsheviks were unable to remove the weapons because the Kremlin was soon encircled by iunkers, who gave them an ultimatum to surrender. When it was rejected, the iunkers attacked: a few hours later (6 a.m. on October 28) the Kremlin was in their hands.
Its capture gave the pro-government forces control of the city’s center. At this point, the officials charged with military and civilian authority could have crushed the Bolshevik uprising. But they hesitated, in part from overconfidence, in part from a desire to avoid further bloodshed. Fear of the “counterrevolution” also weighed on their minds. The Committee of Public Safety, headed by the city’s mayor, V. V. Rudnev, and the military command under Colonel K. I. Riabtsev, instead of arresting the Revolutionary Committee, entered into negotiations with it. These negotiations, which went on for three days (October 28–30), gave the Bolsheviks time to recover and bring in reinforcements from the industrial suburbs and nearby towns. The Revolutionary Committee, which during the night of October 28–29 had viewed its situation as “critical,”226 two days later felt confident enough to go on the offensive. Ultimately, the only inhabitants of Moscow willing to defend democracy turned out to be teenage youths from military academies, universities, and gymnasia who put their lives on the line without leadership or support from their elders.
The negotiations between the Committee of Public Safety and the Revolutionary Committee for a peaceful resolution of the conflict broke down at midnight, October 30–31, when the latter unilaterally terminated the armistice and ordered its units to charge.227 The forces on both sides seem to have been roughly equal, 15,000 men each. During the ensuing night, Moscow became the scene of fierce house-to-house fighting. Determined to recapture the Kremlin, the Bolsheviks attacked with artillery fire, which inflicted damage on its ancient walls. Although the iunkers acquitted themselves well, they were gradually squeezed and isolated by the Bolshevik forces converging from the suburbs. In the morning of November 2, the Committee of Public Safety ordered its forces to cease resistance. That evening it signed with the Revolutionary Committee an act of surrender by virtue of which it dissolved itself and its forces laid down arms.228
70. Cadets defending the Moscow Kremlin: November 1917.
71. Fires burning in Moscow during battle between loyal and Bolshevik forces: November 1917.
In other parts of Russia, the situation followed a bewildering variety of scenarios, the course and outcome of the conflict in each city depending on the strength and determination of the contending parties. Although Communist ideologists have labeled the period immediately following the October coup in Petrograd “the triumphal march of Soviet power,” to the historian the matter looks different: it was not “Soviet” but Bolshevik power that was spreading, often against the wishes of the soviets, and it was not so much “triumphantly marching” as conquering by military force.
Because they followed no discernible pattern, it is next to impossible to describe the Bolshevik conquests outside the two capital cities.229 In some areas, the Bolsheviks joined hands with the SRs and Mensheviks to proclaim “soviet” rule; in others, they ejected their rivals and took power for themselves. Here and there, pro-government forces offered resistance, but in many localities they proclaimed “neutrality.” In most provincial cities local Bolsheviks had to act on their own, without directives from Petrograd. By early November, they were in control of the heartland of the Empire, Great Russia, or at any rate of the cities of that region, which they transformed into bastions in the midst of a hostile or indifferent rural population, much as the Normans had done in Russia a thousand years earlier. The countryside was almost entirely outside their grasp and so were most of the borderlands, which separated themselves to form sovereign republics. These, as we shall see, the Bolsheviks had to reconquer in military campaigns.
The vast majority of Russia’s inhabitants at the time had no inkling of what had happened. Nominally, the soviets, which since February had acted as co-regent, assumed full power. This hardly seemed a revolutionary event: it was rather a logical extension of the principle of “dual power” introduced during the first days of the February Revolution. Trotsky’s deception which disguised the Bolshevik power seizure as the transfer of power to the soviets succeeded brilliantly: looking back at the events of October, he rightly took pride in the skillful exploitation for Bolshevik ends of practices which the democratic socialists had introduced in February and March. The result of the deception was that the total break in government went virtually unnoticed, appearing merely as a “legal” resolution of yet another governmental crisis: