Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Sovnarkom’s future was uncertain for several days as negotiations began among the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin and Trotsky had never described their preferences with precision, which proved to have been brilliantly devious. Workers and soldiers voting Bolshevik in soviet elections had assumed that this would lead to the formation of a socialist government coalition. Most Bolsheviks felt the same, and it was a basic requirement of several Bolshevik Central Committee members who had taken Lenin’s side at the October meetings. 2

Kamenev was eager to bring such a coalition to birth. The Central Committee deputed him to conduct discussions with the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders — and Lenin and Trotsky were impotent to prevent this. The Menshevikled Railwaymen’s Union went on strike to destroy any chance of the Bolsheviks ruling alone. Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders felt strong enough to stipulate that they would join a coalition only on condition that it excluded Lenin and Trotsky. Politics were caught in a storm as Kerenski unexpectedly returned to the outskirts of Petrograd with a Cossack cavalry unit. Garrison troops and the Red Guard were sent out to confront them. A brief conflict followed before the Cossacks were routed and Kerenski fled. This steeled Lenin and his supporters in the Central Committee in standing firm against the demands being made upon them. Their confidence grew when the strike on the railways faded away. The Central Committee resolved to drop the talks with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries; and although overtures continued to be made to the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks were willing to rule by themselves in the interim. Even Kamenev and his sympathizers became willing to cast their lots in with a strategy that excluded those socialists who had co-operated with the Provisional Government.

The Bolsheviks were desperate to spread the news around Russia. The party published newspapers in all the main cities and its local committees could issue proclamations and put up posters. Sovnarkom’s occupation of the telegraph offices enabled it to relay the exact text of decrees.

In city after city in Russia there was a declaration of the transfer of power to the soviets. Workers took control of factories and mines. Peasants were stimulated by the Decree on Land to occupy the landed estates. Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee sent out messages explaining that it was up to the ‘localities’ to make their own revolutions. Non-Russians, who made up half the population of the old empire, were promised national self-determination. Central power remained weak and patchy, and experienced personnel were needed too badly in Petrograd and Moscow for many militants to be spared for work in the provinces. Lenin and his leading comrades felt that history was on their side. The Bolsheviks hoped that their revolution would proceed as much from below as from on high. Difficulties were unavoidable. The parties to the right of the Bolsheviks were not reconciled to being deposited in the wastepaper basket of politics. The middle and upper classes detested the Bolshevik seizure of power. The Orthodox Church was appalled by it. Kerenski’s armed sally would not be the last attempt at counter-revolution. But Lenin and Trotsky trusted that events would validate their strategy. Russia would undergo a socialist transformation and seizures of power by far-left socialists would soon follow all over Europe. A whole new epoch was in the making.

Neither the Allies nor the Central Powers had any interest in helping a regime that was calling for their downfall and an immediate end to the war. Few foreign newspapers greeted the rise of Bolshevism with enthusiasm. What is more, Sovnarkom had no diplomatic service and the Provisional Government’s ambassadors lobbied Allied governments to refuse recognition to the Bolsheviks.

The Western cheerleaders in Petrograd came into their own at this juncture. As John Reed, Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty and Albert Rhys Williams roamed around the city, they understood that events of historic importance were taking place. They had the luck to be on the spot. Within minutes of the fall of the Winter Palace they had entered the building to inspect the scene. 3The Bolsheviks welcomed assistance from the little American group in propagating the news in a positive spirit to foreign countries. Reed and his friends were given passes to enter virtually any public building they wanted. 4They were given privileged use of the international telegraph system, and on 15 November the Military-Revolutionary Committee allowed Reed to send the very first international cable from Petrograd — he could also travel free on the railway network. 5The Americans avidly wrote dispatches telling the story as they saw it. They tried to dispel the impression given in most of the Western press that the Bolsheviks were insincere, bloodthirsty or incompetent. They reported on the ease with which power had been seized. They recapitulated the decrees and endorsed objectives of peace, bread and land. They were acting as Sovnarkom’s window on the world.

Trotsky entranced them, especially Bryant and Beatty. He was an elegant man who was punctilious in his manners and fastidious about his appearance. For years he had denounced Lenin for his divisive tendencies; he was known for his efforts to bring the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks back together before the Great War. In the revolutionary crisis of 1905 he had shown his exceptional qualities. No one spoke more vividly, and he had no need for anything more than a short set of notes before he occupied the platform. Trotsky was a master of Russian prose. He had gone to the Balkan war in 1912–13 as a special correspondent for a Kiev newspaper. His autobiographical fragments sold well. But in writing them he exposed his vanity. Despite his efforts to bring the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks back together in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before the Great War, many critics suspected him of being just as egocentric as Lenin. But what surprised everybody in 1917 was how literally he believed in the need for a ruthless proletarian dictatorship. Plenty of Russian Marxists had talked about revolutionary violence without genuinely meaning it. Trotsky meant it — and he found a like-minded comrade in Lenin.

When Beatty met Trotsky in the Smolny Institute on 7 November, she enjoyed feeling ‘his lean hand grasping mine in a strong, characteristic handshake’. 6Louise Bryant left an equally adoring picture:

During the first days of the Bolshevik revolt I used to go to Smolny to get the latest news. Trotsky and his pretty little wife, who hardly spoke anything but French, lived in one room on the top floor. The room was partitioned off like a poor artist’s attic studio. In one end were two cots and a cheap little dresser and in the other a desk and two or three wooden chairs. There were no pictures, no comfort anywhere. Trotsky occupied this office all the time he was Minister of Foreign Affairs and many dignitaries found it necessary to call upon him there. 7

Two Red Guards stood on constant duty, but Bryant noted how little he had changed his work habits and availability for interviews. 8Of all Bolsheviks he best understood the importance of talking to foreigners who could take the revolutionary gospel to the world. Bryant recorded: ‘He is the easiest official to interview in Russia and entirely the most satisfactory.’ 9

Jacques Sadoul of the French military mission agreed with this assessment. 10On 7–8 November he spent hours in the Smolny Institute, and he wrote to his patron Albert Thomas in Paris commending Lenin and Trotsky. 11The Bolsheviks soon treated him as a ‘comrade’. Sadoul bemoaned the lack of information reaching France. He criticized Ambassador Noulens for not being abreast of events; he argued too that the French press was failing in its duty to keep its country in touch with the situation — he thought it disgraceful that he came across only one correspondent from Paris at the Smolny Institute. Not working for a newspaper, Sadoul strove to exert an influence through Albert Thomas. He reported on Trotsky’s belief that the Decree on Peace would induce deep political stirrings in Europe. Even if revolutions did not instantly occur, popular pressure to end the war would grow. Although Sadoul did not expect the Germans to agree to the truce on the eastern front that the Bolsheviks were proposing, his admiration for Lenin and Trotsky was wholehearted: ‘Today Bolshevism is a fact of life. This is my contention. Bolshevism is a force which in my opinion cannot be damaged by any other Russian force.’ 12