Henceforth politics was a theatre of shadows with the real battles for power going on in society. Kerensky formed a five-person 'directory', a personal dictatorship in all but name, in which he had virtually complete responsibility for military as well as civil affairs. But now even Mensheviks and SRs would not countenance a government containing Kadets, since they had been blatantly implicated in the Kornilov rebellion.[123] The depth of the crisis among the moderate socialists was revealed at the Democratic Conference (14-19 September), called to rally 'democratic' organisations behind the government.[124] This proved unable to resolve the question of whether or not the government should involve 'bourgeois' forces. On 25 September Kerensky went ahead and formed a third coalition, but failed to win ratification from the Petrograd Soviet.
The Bolshevik seizure of power
The Kornilov rebellion dramatised the danger of counter-revolution and starkly underlined the feebleness of the Kerensky regime. Crucially, it triggered a spectacular recovery by the Bolsheviks after the setback they had suffered following the July Days. The party's consistent opposition to the government of'capitalists and landowners', its rejection ofthe 'imperialist' war, its calls for land to the peasants, for power to the soviets and for workers' control now seemed to hundreds ofthousands ofworkers and soldiers to provide a way forward.[125] In the first half of September, eighty soviets in large and medium towns backed the call for a transfer of power to the soviets. No one was entirely sure what the slogan 'All Power to the Soviets', which belonged as much to anarchists, Left SRs and some Mensheviks as to the Bolsheviks, actually meant. While hiding in Finland, Lenin had written his most utopian work, State and Revolution, which outlined his vision of a 'commune state' in which the three pillars of the bourgeois state - the police, standing army and the bureaucracy - would be smashed and in which parliamentary democracy would be replaced by direct democracy based on the soviets.[126] But it is unlikely that many - even in the Bolshevik Party - understood the slogan in that way. For most it meant severing the alliance with the 'bourgeoisie' and forming a socialist government consisting of all parties in VTsIK pending the convening of a Constituent Assembly.[127]
Seeing the surge in popular support for the Bolsheviks, Lenin became convinced that nationally as well as internationally the time was ripe for the Bolsheviks to seize power in the name of the soviets.[128] He blitzed the Central Committee with demands that it prepare an insurrection, even threatening to resign on 29 September. 'History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.'[129] The majority of the leadership was unenthusiastic, believing that it would be better to allow power to pass democratically to the soviets by waiting for the Second Congress of Soviets, scheduled to open on 20 October. Having returned in secret to Petrograd, Lenin on 10 October persuaded the Central Committee to commit itself to the overthrow of the Provisional Government. Significantly, no timetable was set (see Plate 5). Zinoviev and Kamenev were bitterly opposed to the decision, believing that the conditions for socialist revolution did not yet exist and that an insurrection was likely to be crushed. As late as 16 October, the mood in the party was against an insurrection and the decision of Zinoviev and Kamenev to make public their opposition drove
Lenin to a paroxysm of fury. It fell to Trotsky, now chair of the Petrograd Soviet, to make practical preparations, which he did, not by following Lenin's suggestion of an attack on the capital by sailors and soldiers of the northern front, but by associating an insurrection with the defence of the Petrograd garrison.[130]
On 6 October the government had announced that half the garrison was to be moved out of the capital to defend it against the onward advance of the German army. The Soviet interpreted this as an attempt to rid Petrograd of its most revolutionary elements, and on 9 October created an embryonic Military-Revolutionary Committee (MRC) to resist the transfer. This was the organisation that Trotsky used to unseat the government. On 20 October the government ordered the transfer of troops to begin, but the MRC ordered them not to move without its permission. On the night of 23-4 October, Kerensky ordered the Bolshevik printing press to be shut down, as a prelude to moving against the MRC, thus giving Trotsky another pretext to take 'defensive' action. On 24 October military units, backed by armed bands of workers, known as Red Guards, took control of bridges, railway stations and other strategic points. Kerensky fled, unable to muster troops to resist the insurgents. By the morning of 25 October only the Winter Palace remained to be taken. That afternoon Lenin appeared for the first time in public since July, proclaiming to the Petrograd Soviet that the Provisional Government was overthrown. 'In Russia we must now set about building a proletarian socialist state.' At 10.40 p.m. the Second Congress of Soviets finally opened, the artillery bombardment of the Winter Palace audible in the distance. The Mensheviks and SRs denounced the insurrection as a provocation to civil war and walked out, Trotsky's taunt echoing in their ears: 'You are miserable bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you ought to be: into the dustbin of history.'[131]
The establishment of Bolshevik dictatorship
The Bolsheviks determined to break with the vacillation of the Provisional Government by issuing decrees on the urgent questions of peace, land and workers' control of industry.[132] On 26 October they issued a peace decree calling on all the belligerent powers to begin peace talks on the basis of no annexations or indemnities and self-determination for national minorities. The rejection by the Entente of this proposal led to the Bolsheviks suing for a separate peace with Germany. German terms proved to be tough and Lenin's insistence that they be accepted caused what was arguably the deepest schism ever experienced by the Bolshevik Party.82 On 18 February the German high command lost patience with Trotsky's stalling tactics and sent 700,000 troops into Russia where they met virtually no resistance. On 23 February it proffered terms even more draconian. At the crucial meeting of the Central Committee that evening, opponents of peace gained four votes against seven in favour of acceptance, while four supporters of Trotsky's formula of 'No war, no peace' abstained. The peace treaty, signed at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March, was massively punitive: the Baltic provinces, a large part of Belorussia and the whole of the Ukraine were excised from the former empire.
On 26 October the Bolshevik government also issued a Land Decree that legitimised the spontaneous land seizures by formally confiscating all gentry, Church and crown lands and transferring them to peasant use.83 Significantly, it did not embody the Bolshevikpolicy of'nationalising' land-that is, oftakingit directly into state ownership -but the SRpolicy of'socialisation', whereby land 'passes into the use of the entire toilingpeople'. This left individual communes free to decide how much land should be distributed and whether it should be apportioned on the basis ofthe number of'eaters' or able-bodied members in each household. The idea of socialising land proved hugely popular. The decree precipitated a wave ofland confiscation: in the central provinces three-quarters of landowners' land was confiscated between November and January 1918.84 How much better off peasants were as a result of the land redistribution is hard to say, since there was no uniformity in the amount of land they received, even within a single township. Slightly more than half of communes received no additional land, usually because there was no adjacent estate that could be confiscated. And since two-thirds of confiscated land was already rented to peasants, the amount of new land that became available represented just
123
Geoffrey Swain,
124
Z. Galili et al. (eds.),
pp. 13-34.
125
David Mandel,
126
Neil Harding, 'Lenin, Socialism and the State', in Frankel et al. (eds.),
127
Mandel,
128
The following is based on Alexander Rabinowitch,
129
V. I. Lenin, 'The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power', in V. I. Lenin,
130
James D. White,
131
Isaac Deutscher,
132
The following is based on Roy Medvedev,