Like many other revolutionaries, Yemelianov met a tragic fate. He and three of his sons were arrested in the 1930s. Two sons were shot, and one was released after Stalin’s death. The elder Yemelianov was sent into exile in Siberia. In June 1945, apparently grasping that offering an appropriately hagiographic episode for Stalin’s biography represented his best chance for leniency, he appealed to Stalin for permission to return to his village: “In 1917 you saved the life of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin by arranging for me to hide him in a hut.”11 The appeal was shown to Stalin, and soon afterward Yemelianov was permitted to return to Razliv and even to work in the Lenin Museum established there. There is no doubt that his release was decided by Stalin personally. Yemelianov’s “recollection” that Stalin twice visited Lenin became part of Stalin’s official biography.12
While Lenin was in hiding in Finland, Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders continued to strengthen the party ranks. In late July 1917 they convened the Sixth Party Congress, at which Stalin delivered speeches and generally played a prominent role. The political winds were starting to favor the Bolsheviks. Having fully recovered from the Provisional Government’s ineffective efforts at suppression, they began to strengthen their position, helped by Prime Minister Aleksandr Kerensky’s frequent missteps. In August, Kerensky provoked a confrontation with the commander in chief of the Russian Army, General Lavr Kornilov. With Kerensky’s consent, Kornilov had sent some of his most reliable units to Petrograd to help secure the city after the unrest in July. Soon, however, Kerensky began to doubt Kornilov’s loyalty to the Provisional Government. In a pivotal moment of anti-Bolshevik dysfunction, he proclaimed Kornilov to be a mutineer. This conflict distracted attention from the Bolshevik threat. When the Bolsheviks sided with Kerensky against Kornilov, they obtained the release of several of their activists from prison. Lenin remained in hiding.
In September and October, the Provisional Government’s hold on power was clearly weakening, as was the influence of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary soviets that supported it. The Bolsheviks, meanwhile, grew increasingly active. Lenin believed that the time to revolt and seize power had come. Again he encountered opposition within the party to his call for armed insurrection, most prominently from Kamenev and Zinoviev. Most of the other party leaders, including Stalin, supported him. Understanding that his presence would help assuage doubts about the use of force, Lenin snuck into Petrograd. The final vote on the uprising was held at a Central Committee meeting on 10 October 1917. Kamenev and Zinoviev found themselves in the minority but did not back down. The following day they wrote a letter to a wider circle of members.
They had a strong case to make. They enumerated the weaknesses of Lenin’s arguments, disputing the assumption that the majority of Russians supported the Bolsheviks. They reminded their comrades of the huge difference between chanting popular slogans and putting them into effect. Furthermore, Germany was apparently prepared to reject the Bolsheviks’ peace terms, and Russian soldiers were clearly in no mood for a “revolutionary war.” “The soldierly masses will leave us in droves.” Kamenev and Zinoviev rejected Lenin’s references to imminent revolutions in the West as hypothetical. They hoped to avoid a civil war, but such avoidance required that the Bolsheviks coexist with other political forces. Now that they had majority support in many soviets, the Bolsheviks needed to gain seats within the Constituent Assembly since “only in the Soviets will the Constituent Assembly be able to find support for its revolutionary work. The Constituent Assembly plus the Soviets—this is the combined type of state institution toward which we are moving.” The way events were developing, the Bolsheviks were guaranteed significant or even overwhelming influence in these legal governmental bodies. On the other hand, if they launched an insurrection and it failed, the consequences would be much worse than the aftermath of the July riots.13
A strategy of achieving dominance through legal and peaceful means was neither utopian nor farfetched, but it did not appeal to Lenin. It is hard to know whether he truly believed that the Bolsheviks would be crushed in a counterrevolution if they failed to act first, but it is certain that Lenin did not want his party to join a coalition or take part, even as a dominant force, in the legal political process. The armed seizure of power was the best or perhaps the only means of avoiding a coalition with Mensheviks and SRs and getting rid of the Constituent Assembly, which was due to hold elections in a few weeks. Zinoviev and Kamenev’s proposal that the Bolsheviks launch a serious campaign for seats in the Constituent Assembly reflected the general recognition within the country of the importance of Russia’s new parliament. Officially, the Bolsheviks also recognized it. Stalin was among the party leaders running for a seat. It is telling that on 18 October 1917, amid heated preparations to seize power, he did not forget to send the Caucasus District Electoral Commission a telegram confirming his candidacy.14
Clearly concealing his true thinking and offering eloquent editorializing and slogans in place of practical planning, Lenin stubbornly repeated his call to action: it was necessary and possible to seize power by force, and the time had come. What would happen after the revolution? This question seemed to worry everyone but Lenin, whose implacable obstinacy was the only real argument in favor of insurrection. For a party that was not monolithic but was strongly oriented toward its leader, a party that was tired of uncertainty and contention, Lenin’s stubbornness was decisive. Most historians agree that without Lenin the October Revolution would probably never have happened.
Convinced that they were right (and not without justification, as it turned out), Zinoviev and Kamenev made a desperate move. Having been blocked from publishing in the Bolshevik press, Kamenev submitted an article to a small non-party newspaper spelling out the opposition’s views. Lenin was furious and demanded that Kamenev and Zinoviev be expelled from the party. Stalin was among those opposing this measure. He responded to Lenin by using his position as editor of Pravda to publish a letter from Zinoviev, along with a conciliatory editorial characterizing the incident as having “run its course” and stating that “overall, we remain like-minded.”15 This is one of the few times he openly opposed Lenin on a matter of substance. What explains this mini-revolt? Was Stalin not yet free of “rightist illusions”? It is possible that while appearing to follow Lenin, in his heart he shared Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s concerns. Other factors were probably at play as well, including Trotsky.
Lev (Leon) Trotsky had always played a prominent role within the Russian Social Democratic movement, but his ambitions were not limited to prominence within the party. Before the revolution, he was often at loggerheads with Lenin, and their mutual attacks often turned ugly. But as much as Lenin and Trotsky may have argued, they were also drawn to one another. Both were preoccupied with the idea of socialist revolution and fervently believed that it would soon be possible. Both were decisive and fearless of risk. Like Lenin, Trotsky learned of the revolution when he was out of the country, in the United States. He did not manage to return to Russia until May 1917, but once there he immediately entered the fray. His talents as an orator and organizer, along with his revolutionary credentials (he had been one of the leaders of the soviets during the 1905 revolution), earned him instant recognition. Upon arriving in Petrograd in 1917, Trotsky immediately understood that he and Lenin were natural allies. Their allegiance fell into place naturally, without any negotiations. Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and Lenin immediately recognized him as a strong partner, ready to use word and deed in an unwavering battle for power. Trotsky quickly found himself at the center of events. By September he was head of the Petrograd soviet, playing a key role in plotting the insurrection.