John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Under cover of a legitimately established defence force answerable to the Soviet, Trotsky was in fact creating the machinery of insurrection. Within a few days he announced that the military units of the Petrograd garrison now answered to the MRC, not the Army General Staff. The MRC then sent its own Commissars into the regiments to establish its authority. With this action the October Insurrection had in effect already succeeded. All the MRC now had to do was order the troops to take the main strategic points of the city and arrest the ministers of the Provisional Government. The decision to do so rested with the Bolshevik Central Committee.

The Bolshevik Party, at this juncture, was very far from a united bloc. There were factions and differences of opinion at all levels. Now they threatened to tear the party asunder. Since the fall of Kornilov, the resignation of the major socialist ministers and the forming of Kerensky’s last, feeble coalition government, Lenin had been frantically calling for an insurrection. In a letter to the Central Committee written on 12th September he wrote, “The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies of both capitals, can and must take state power into their own hands”. He warned that the Democratic Conference “represents not a majority of the revolutionary people but only the compromising upper strata of the petty bourgeoisie”. 7He also warned against election returns that indicated otherwise, for “elections prove nothing”–except, of course, elections to the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets.

The Central Committee met without Lenin and Trotsky present. Senior members such as Kamenev, Zinoviev and Nogin argued against an immediate insurrection. In the end, the Committee adopted a wait-and-see approach. The decision would have been no different had Trotsky been present for at this point he thought Lenin was being too impatient. He did not think counter-revolution was imminent and he preferred to prepare an uprising to coincide with the forthcoming Second National Congress of Soviets. Deutscher summarised his thinking:

He reasoned that as the Bolsheviks had conducted their entire agitation under the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’, they should stage the rising in such a manner that it should appear to everyone as the direct conclusion of this agitation. The rising should therefore be timed to coincide with, or slightly precede, the Congress of the Soviets, into whose hands the insurgents should then lay the power seized.

Lenin was not keen to lay power in anyone’s hands but the Bolsheviks. In a further letter of 8th October he went further than he intended. “It is clear that all power should pass to the Soviets”, he began, but added:

It should be equally indisputable for every Bolshevik that proletarian revolutionary power (or Bolshevik power, which is now one and the same thing) is assured of the utmost sympathy and unreserved support of the working and exploited people all over the world in general, and in the belligerent countries in particular, and among the Russian peasants especially.

This was a revealing statement. Firstly, that Lenin considered that Soviet power and Bolshevik power were “one and the same thing” (as they very shortly would be). Secondly, the belief that the mass of European workers felt “unreserved support” for the Bolsheviks, when at that point the vast majority of them had never heard of them. Thirdly, the belief that this support extended to the bulk of Russian peasants, who in the main still supported the SRs.

Two days earlier, in the letter subsequently published as Advice of an Onlooker , Lenin had laid out in stark terms to Petrograd Bolsheviks the tactics he expected of them. Unlike his hesitation when personally placed in front of a revolutionary crowd, his pen was fearless.

Our three main forces–the fleet, the workers and the army units–must be so combined as to occupy without fail and to hold at any cost: a) the telephone exchange; b) the telegraph office; c) the railway stations; d) and above all, the bridges.

Further urging that the Red Guards and Kronstadt sailors “encircle and cut off Petrograd”, he concluded that, “The success of both the Russian and world revolution depends on two or three days fighting”. 8He then travelled in disguise to Petrograd to attend a meeting of the Central Committee held on 10th October in an apartment at 32 Karpovka Street, called to decide if the Bolsheviks, acting through the MRC, would launch an armed overthrow of the Provisional Government.

The meeting lasted from 10pm until 6am. Only twelve of the Central Committee of twenty-one could attend due to other duties. Trotsky later recorded that “the debate was stormy, disorderly, chaotic”. Without providing details, he reported that the discussion expanded beyond simply arguing whether to launch an insurrection. The CC also discussed what form of socialism would follow a successful insurrection, asking of the Soviets “were they necessary? What for? Could they be dispensed with?” 9

Since July, when the Petrograd Soviet had refused to assume power on its own even when confronted by armed demonstrators insisting it do so, the Bolsheviks had quietly dropped the slogan “All Power to the Soviets”. Now, with Bolshevik majorities in many Soviets including Petrograd and Moscow, they saw the Soviets primarily as useful vehicles to legitimise a seizure of state power. At the end of the night Lenin wrote a resolution on a piece of paper which read “The party calls for the organisation of an armed insurrection”, and put it to the vote. The vote was ten for, two against, the two being Lenin’s long-standing senior lieutenants Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. It was not the only decision of historic consequence. At the close of the meeting a new body, a “Political Bureau” (soon shortened to Politburo) was elected, consisting of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bubnov and Sokolnikov.

This was not the end of the matter. The bloc of senior Bolsheviks who opposed an insurrection were respected and influential. Many of them had not been able to be present on 10th October. As well as Kamenev and Zinoviev it included CC members Rykov, Nogin and Miliutin, the ex-Inter-Districter Lunacharsky, the highly regarded Marxist scholar David Riazanov and those, like ex-Left Menshevik leader Yury Larin, who had recently joined the Bolsheviks. In the summary of Alexander Rabinowitch, this informal grouping saw a transfer of power to the Soviets as “a vehicle for building a strong alliance of left socialist parties and factions which would form a caretaker, exclusively socialist coalition government to begin peace negotiations and prepare for fundamental social reform by a Constituent Assembly”. 10

It was under the influence of these “moderates” that the Bolshevik Central Committee had, in July, begun to organise a conference of all left bodies (Bolsheviks, Left Mensheviks, Left SRs and trade unions) to pave the way for merger and unification, and to form a coherent alternative to the Provisional Government. This project was sidelined by the July Days but the impetus behind it fed through to the publicly declared policies of the Bolsheviks in August and September.

In this crucial period, just prior to the October insurrection, the Bolshevik Party did not call for a one-party Proletarian Dictatorship. On the contrary, it stood for an extension of local, grassroots democracy and, on the national level, immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly, the elections to which Bolshevik Regional Committees were instructed to fully engage in. Their core policies, which had made them so popular, were clear: workers’ control of industry, redistribution of land to the peasants and an immediate end to the war. Zinoviev and Kamenev felt that armed insurrection, decided upon by a handful of people on the Bolshevik Central Committee and carried out by the Petrograd Soviet’s MRC without any mandate from that Soviet to do so, was not the best or most democratic way to achieve these goals.