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

Sukhanov later wrote that those who stormed the Winter Palace and packed the Petrograd Soviet were not as fiercely ideological as those they followed. In his view, “their socialism was hunger and an unendurable longing for rest. Not bad material for an experiment, but–those experiments would be risky”. 22Exactly how risky was demonstrated when the Red Guards clearing out the Winter Palace the next day came across “one of the largest wine cellars ever known” 23and decided it was only fit that the victors enjoy the spoils. The order that Antonov-Ovseenko insisted upon broke down completely and the Winter Palace was thoroughly vandalised. The disorder spread to the streets of the capital, with shops and liquor stores broken into, their contents liberated, and attacks on any who looked well-dressed and affluent.

The new government had to station units on street corners to fire over the heads of drunken mobs. Police cells were jammed to capacity and it took weeks for the violent celebrations to burn out. Fuel was added to the fire by looting of the 570 government liquor depots in the capital, holding spirits confiscated under the wartime ban on distilling and selling alcohol. It was not only Petrograd that was convulsed by drunken riots. On 1st-2nd December, Odessa and Samara suffered the same when large mobs stormed government liquor holds. In Odessa they were dispersed with machinegun fire. In Samara the Red Guard sided with the rioters and let them smash and loot shops in the city. Order in the capital was finally restored in early December when martial law was imposed and all the confiscated liquor hoards were poured into the City’s canals. 24

The Petrograd insurrection of 25th October, for all its historical consequences, was a localised event coordinated and carried out by a relatively small group of men with no mandate to do so. The vast majority of the Russian population did not take part in it or even know about it. The 2nd Soviet Congress, which would “legitimise” the coup after the fact, had a very limited representative function. Elections to its plenary were haphazard and irregular. It had minimal representation for peasants, who constituted the bulk of Russia’s population and who still mostly supported the SRs. There was almost no representation for women, urban or rural. Lastly–not that this mattered to anybody outside a tiny number of Marxist theorists–the insurrection flew in the face of classical Marxist theory about a transfer of political power based on the leading role of a mature working class who were a majority of the population. From that perspective it was hardly a revolution at all. It was an insurrection that would very shortly herald a counter-revolution.

Moscow’s Bolsheviks, unlike those of Petrograd, were always more inclined to work with other socialists. It was not until 25th October that they formed a Military Revolutionary Committee, which consisted of four Bolsheviks, two Mensheviks and an independent. On the 26th they reluctantly followed Trotsky’s instructions to launch an insurrection. Street fighting raged across the city, particularly outside the walls of the Kremlin, which the insurgents failed to take. The key northern industrial city of Ivanovo-Voznesensk was taken speedily, as were other towns in the industrial northwest of the country, but middle and lower Volga cities like Samara hung in the balance and in the south, especially in Ukraine, the situation was confused and chaotic. Industrial Kharkov went over to the Bolsheviks quickly but the Ukrainian capital Kiev looked to the Ukrainian Rada for leadership.

The outcome of the Second Congress of Soviets held in the Smolny Institute on 25th and 26th October was therefore crucial. The Bolsheviks hoped the congress would endorse the insurrection on the grounds that their party clearly had popular support in working-class areas of Petrograd and Moscow, and the removal of a deeply discredited government by force was the result of a popular insurrection. On the other hand, it was obvious to many delegates that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were confronting them with a fait accompli backed by armed Red Guards. In theory the Bolshevik insurrection had been undertaken to create a government elected by and accountable to the National Congress of Soviets, but what if the congress did not approve the action, or demanded that the new government be a broad socialist coalition, as many delegates wished?

When the Second Congress opened at 10.40pm on the evening of 25th October the storming of the Winter Palace was still taking place, and during the debates delegates could hear the cruiser Aurora fire its guns. Not that the congress needed added drama. Most of the key players of Petrograd’s radical left were all assembled in one packed hall. They had been meeting in side rooms throughout the day, waiting for the siege of the Winter Palace to conclude and arguing amongst themselves. The Mensheviks were torn between trying to convert the congress to the idea of a broad socialist government which would now obviously have to include the Bolsheviks, or walking out of the congress in protest at the events of the last 24 hours (many of the arrested Ministers, such as Maliantovich, were Mensheviks). Martov and Sukhanov, leaders of the Left Mensheviks, argued strongly that leaving the Soviet now would isolate their party from the most active workers.

The delegates packed out the great hall of the Smolny, filling it with noise and tobacco smoke. As so often Trotsky best captures the texture of events:

The officers’ chevrons, the eye-glasses and neckties of intellectuals to be seen at the first congress had almost completely disappeared. A grey colour prevailed, in costumes and in faces. All had worn out their clothes during the war. Many of the city workers had provided themselves with soldiers’ coats. The trench delegates were by no means a pretty picture: long unshaven, in old worn trenchcoats, with heavy papahki (fur hats) on their disheveled hair, often with cotton sticking out through a hole, with coarse weather-beaten faces, heavy cracked hands, fingers yellowed with tobacco, buttons torn off, belts hanging loose, and long unoiled boots wrinkled and rusty. The plebian nation had for the first time sent up an honest representation made in its own image and not retouched. 1

There were roughly 650 delegates jammed into the hall, of which nearly 400 were Bolshevik. This reflected support for the Bolsheviks in local Soviets, although Rabinowitch records it also reflected a disproportionately large number of delegates from the northern industrial region (heavily Bolshevik) and a smaller number than was warranted from the Volga and southern regions (heavily SR). The Mensheviks, damaged by their participation in the Provisional Government, had about 90 delegates. The SRs had about 150, although it was difficult to judge which of those were “Left SRs” and which “Right SRs” (under the pressure of events and the demands of the Provisional Government, the SR party was in the process of splitting into right and left tendencies). A couple of hundred more delegates drifted in during the course of the congress in the next two days, mainly pro-Bolshevik Latvian soldiers. As Trotsky admits, “The registration was carried on intermittently, documents have been lost, information about party affiliations was incomplete”. 2Yet the delegates, whoever they were, were about to decide Russia’s future.

Kamenev was appointed Chair of the Congress. He immediately announced that its main business was: a) the formation of a new government, b) ending the war, and c) convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Martov spoke first. “The question of power is beginning to be decided by conspiratorial methods”, he told the delegates.