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An insurrection had not been in the Bolsheviks' immediate plans at any point since July. The uprising of 3-4 July had ended in disaster for the party, with hundreds of Bolsheviks arrested and Lenin forced into hiding in Finland rather than face trial for high treason in the courts. But Lenin disagreed with his comrades. In his view these repressions showed that the Provisional Government had been taken over by the 'military dictatorship' - the Civil War had started - and that meant that the party was obliged to fight or die in an armed uprising for the seizure of power. 'It is not a question of "the courts", but of an episode in the Civil War ... All hopes for a peaceful development of the Russian revolution have vanished for good,' he wrote on 8-10 July.4
After the Kornilov crisis, when the Mensheviks and SRs both moved to the left, Lenin was prepared to consider the idea of a compromise with them. Not that he gave up on his basic aim of a Bolshevik dictatorship. 'Our party,' he wrote in his article 'On Compromises' on 1 September, 'is striving after political domination for itself.'5 The leftward move of the Soviets - in which the Bolsheviks were rapidly becoming a dominant force - opened up the prospect of moving once again towards Soviet power through peaceful agitation, as Lenin had proposed before the July Days. During the fortnight leading up to the opening of the Democratic Conference, on 14 September, when the power question was to be resolved, Lenin supported Kamenev's initiative to persuade the Mensheviks and SRs to break with the Kadets and join the Bolsheviks in a socialist government based on the Soviets. If the SR and Mensheviks agreed, the Bolsheviks would renounce an armed uprising and compete for power within the Soviet movement itself. But Lenin's implication remained clear: if the Soviet leaders refused, the party should prepare for the seizure of power.
The Democratic Conference failed to break the coalition of the Mensheviks and SRs with the Kadets. On 24 September, Kerensky named a new cabinet, which looked much like the old one of July- August, with the socialists technically holding a majority of the portfolios but the Kadets in several key posts. With Kamenev's plan for a socialist coalition undermined by the outcome of the Democratic Conference, Lenin reverted to his campaign in the party for an immediate uprising.
He had already begun to advocate this in two letters to the Central Committee written from Finland on the eve of the Democratic Conference. The Bolsheviks, Lenin had argued, 'can and must take state power into their own hands'. Can - because the party had already won a majority in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets, which was 'enough to carry the people with it in any civil war', provided the party in power proposed an immediate peace and gave the land to the peasants. Must - because if it waited for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, 'Kerensky and Co.' would take pre-emptive action, either by giving up Petrograd to the Germans or by delaying the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Reminding his comrades of Marx's dictum that 'insurrection is an art', Lenin concluded that 'it would be naive to wait for a "formal" majority for the Bolsheviks. No revolution ever waits for that . History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.'6
These two letters reached the Central Committee on 15 September. They were, to say the least, highly inconvenient for the rest of the Bolshevik leaders since the Democratic Conference had just begun and they were still committed to Kamenev's conciliatory tactics. It was decided to burn all but one сору of the letters, lest they fall into the hands of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks and spark a revolt. The Central Committee continued to ignore Lenin's advice and printed instead his earlier articles, in which he had endorsed the Kamenev line. Lenin was beside himself with rage. Afraid to return to Petrograd (Kerensky had ordered his arrest at the Democratic Conference), Lenin moved from Finland to the resort town of Vyborg, eighty miles from Petrograd, to be closer to the capital. He assaulted the Central Committee and lower-level party organisations with a barrage of impatient letters, full of violent and abusive phrases heavily underlined, in which he urged them to start the armed insurrection at once. Lenin condemned the 'parliamentary tactics' of the Bolshevik leaders and welcomed the prospect of a civil war, which they were trying to avert on the false assumption that, like the Paris Communards, they were bound to lose. On the contrary, Lenin insisted, the anti-Bolshevik forces would be no more than those aligned behind the Kornilov movement, and they were bound to win.
On 29 September, at the high point of his frustration, Lenin scribbled an angry tirade against the Bolshevik leaders, in which he denounced them as 'miserable traitors to the proletarian cause'. They had wanted to delay the transfer of power until the Soviet Congress, whereas the moment was already ripe for the seizure of power and any delay would merely enable Kerensky to use military force against them. The workers, Lenin insisted, were solidly behind the Bolshevik cause; the peasants were starting their own war on the manors, thus ruling out the danger of an Eighteenth Brumaire, or a 'petty- bourgeois' counter-revolution, like that of 1849; while the strikes and mutinies in the rest of Europe were 'indisputable symptoms ... that we are on the eve of a world revolution'. To 'miss such a moment and "wait" for the Congress of Soviets would be utter idiocy, or sheer treachery', and if the Bolsheviks did so they would 'cover themselves with shame and destroy themselves as a party'. As a final ultimatum, he even threatened to resign from the Central Committee, thereby giving himself the freedom to take his campaign for an armed uprising to the Bolshevik rank and file, scheduled to meet at a party conference on 17 October. 'For it is my profound conviction that if we "wait" for the Congress of Soviets and let the present moment pass, we shall ruin the revolution.'7
Returning to Petrograd, where he lived under cover in the flat of a Bolshevik activist in Serdobolskaya Street on the Vyborg side, Lenin convened a secret meeting of the Central Committee on 10 October. The decision to prepare for an armed uprising was taken at this meeting, which, ironically, was held in the apartment of the Menshevik memoirist Nikolai Sukhanov, whose wife, Galina Flakser- man, was a veteran Bolshevik. Of the twenty-two Central Committee members only twelve were present (the most important resolution in the history of the party was thus taken by a minority of the Central Committee). By ten votes against two (Kamenev and Zinoviev) they recognised 'that an armed uprising [was] inevitable, and the time for it fully ripe', and instructed party organisations to prepare for it as 'the order of the day'.8
An armed uprising had thus been put on the Bolsheviks' agenda.
But a date for it had not been set. 'The resolution of 10 October is one of the best resolutions the Central Committee has ever passed,' declared Mikhail Kalinin, 'but when the uprising will take place is uncertain - perhaps in a year.'9 The ambivalent mood of the streets was the leaders' main concern. It was not at all clear whether the Petrograd workers and soldiers would 'come out' for an uprising. Many remembered the failure of the July uprising and the loss of workers' jobs and repressions that had followed it; they were reluctant to risk another defeat. The Bolshevik Military Organisation, which favoured an uprising, warned that the workers and the soldiers were not yet ready to come out on the party's call, though they might take to the streets if the Soviet was in danger from a 'counter-revolutionary' threat.