What is incontrovertible is the fact that Kerensky's quarrel with his commander-in-chief made the Bolshevik seizure of power all but inevitable.
THE 'HARMLESS DRUNK': LENIN AND THE OCTOBER INSURRECTION
October 1917
orlando figes
on the Vyborg side of Petrograd disguised in a wig and worker's cap with a bandage wrapped around his head. Accompanied by the Finnish Bolshevik, Eino Rakhia, he set off for the Smolny Institute, the Soviet headquarters, to urge his party comrades to launch an insurrection before the Soviet Congress the next day. Lenin rode through the Vyborg district in an empty tram. He badgered the conductress with questions on the latest situation in the capital, where Red Guards and soldiers were fighting for control of the railway stations and the streets. Discovering that she was a leftist, he harangued her with advice on revolutionary action. From the Finland Station the two men continued their journey on foot. Near the Tauride Palace they were stopped by a government patrol, but Kerensky's policemen mistook Lenin for a harmless drunk and let him pass.[6]
' around 10 p.m. on 24 October 1917, Lenin left his hiding place
Lenin reached the Smolny shortly before midnight. The building was ablaze with lights. Trucks and armoured cars rushed to and fro laden down with troops and munitions. Machine guns had been set up outside the gates, where Red Guards on alert for 'counter-revolutionary forces' loyal to Kerensky's government checked the passes of thoseentering. Without a pass, Lenin only succeeded in gaining entry by squeezing past the Red Guards in a crowd. He went at once to Room 36, where the Bolshevik caucus to the Soviet Congress met. He bullied them into convening a meeting of the Central Committee, which gave the order for the insurrection to begin.
What might have happened if the government patrol had arrested Lenin on his way to the Smolny? Counterfactual ('what if?') history is only really meaningful if it hinges on a single chance event that could demonstrably have changed the course of history. That is clearly the case here. Had Lenin been arrested, we can say with reasonable certainty that the Bolsheviks would not have launched an insurrection on 25 October; that Soviet power would have been proclaimed by the Congress; and a government of all the parties in the Soviet would have been established as a consequence. In the following weeks and months there would no doubt have been bitter conflicts between the socialists. Soviet power would have been opposed by military forces on the right. But not for long: the Soviet forces would have been too strong. There would not have been a military conflict on the vast scale of the Civil War that engulfed Russia in the four years after October 1917 - a civil war that shaped the violent culture of the Bolshevik regime under Lenin and Stalin.
There was no need for an insurrection to establish Soviet power. Kerensky's power had collapsed. 'Nobody wants the Bolsheviks, but nobody is prepared to fight for Kerensky either,' wrote his firmest supporter, the poet and salon hostess Zinaida Gippius in her diary on 24 October.2 After the Kornilov fiasco, bourgeois and rightist groups would have nothing more to do with the Provisional Government, and even welcomed its demise. Many preferred to let the Bolsheviks take power in the belief that they would bring the country to such ruin that all socialists would be discredited, whereupon the rightists would impose a military dictatorship. The Western Allies, who had backed Kerensky in the summer, also turned against him after the Kornilov crisis, partly based on rumours that he was about to make a separate peace with Germany.
With the MRC in control of the Petrograd garrison, Kerensky had lost effective military control of the capital a full five days before the armed uprising began. Belatedly, on the evening of the 24th, he tried to summon loyal troops from the northern front. His order was despatched with the forged signature of the Soviet leaders, because Kerensky feared the soldiers would not recognise the authority of the Provisional Government. By the following morning, there was still no sign of the troops, so he resolved to go off in search of them. With the railways in Bolshevik hands, he was forced to travel by car. But such was the utter helplessness of the Provisional Government that it did not have one at its disposal. Military officials had to seize a Renault from outside the American Embassy, which later launched a diplomatic protest, while a second car was found at the War Ministry, although it had no fuel and more men had to be sent out to 'borrow' some from the English Hospital. At around 11 a.m. the two cars sped out of the Winter Palace and headed out of the city. Kerensky was seated in the second car, flying the Stars and Stripes, which helped him past the MRC pickets already forming around Palace Square.
Meanwhile the Soviet delegates were arriving for the opening of the Congress in the Great Hall of the Smolny. From their composition it seemed highly likely that there would be a solid majority in favour of Soviet power. Following the Kornilov affair, there had been a sharp leftward turn in the mood of the soldiers and workers. The mass of the soldiers suspected that their officers had supported Kornilov. For this reason there was a dramatic deterioration in army discipline from the end ofAugust. Soldiers' assemblies passed resolutions calling for peace and Soviet power. The rate of desertion rose sharply: tens of thousands left their units every day. Most of the deserters were peasants, eager to return to their villages, where the harvest season was now in full swing. Armed and organised, these peasant soldiers led the attacks on the manors that became more frequent as of September.
In the big industrial cities there was a similar process of radicali- sation in the wake of the Kornilov crisis. The Bolsheviks were the principal beneficiaries of this, winning their first majority in the Petrograd Soviet on 31 August - adding to their control of the Soviets in Ivanovo-Voznesentsk (the 'Russian Manchester'), Kronstadt, Ekaterinburg, Samara and Tsaritsyn. The Soviets of Riga, Saratov and Moscow itself fell to the Bolsheviks soon afterwards. The rising fortunes of the Bolsheviks were due mainly to the fact that they were the only major political party that stood uncompromisingly for 'All power to the Soviets'.
This point bears emphasising, for one of the most basic misconceptions about the October Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were swept to power on a tide of mass support for the party. They were not. The October insurrection was a coup d'etat, actively supported by a small minority of the population, but it took place in the midst of a social revolution, which was focused on the popular ideal of Soviet power. After the Kornilov crisis there was a sudden outpouring of resolutions from factories, villages and army units calling for a Soviet government, by which they understood a social revolution of their own making, led by all the parties in the All-Russian Soviet. It was to be a government specifically without the parties of the bourgeoisie, the Kadets in particular, which had been discredited by their involvement in the Kornilov movement. But almost without exception these resolutions called on all the socialist parties to participate in a Soviet government.
On the evening of 24 October, it looked as if an all-socialist government would come into being at the Soviet Congress the next day. While Lenin was making his way towards the Smolny, Kamenev was rushing round inside trying to win the support of the other socialist parties for a resolution calling on the Congress to form a Soviet government. The SRs and Mensheviks, whose congress delegates met late into the night, were coming round in favour of the plan.
Until Lenin's arrival on the scene, the Bolshevik leaders planned to wait for the Soviet Congress, arming their supporters on the streets to make sure it convened by defending it, if necessary, against any 'counter-revolutionary' forces attempting to close it down. Trotsky, who in Lenin's absence had effectively assumed the leadership of the party, repeatedly stressed the need for discipline and patience. On the morning of the 24th, when Kerensky ordered the closure of two Bolshevik newspapers, Trotsky refused to be drawn by this 'provocation': the MRC should be placed on alert; the city's strategic installations should be seized as a defensive measure against any further 'counterrevolutionary' threats; but, as he insisted at a meeting of the Bolshevik Congress delegates in the afternoon, 'it would be a mistake to use even one of the armoured cars which now defend the Winter Palace to arrest the government ... This is defence, comrades. This is defence.' Later that evening, in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky declared - and had good reason to believe - that 'an armed conflict today or tomorrow, on the eve of the Soviet Congress, is not in our plans'.3