The taking of the Winter Palace was a long, drawn out affair. The Red Guards and soldiers were not particularly anxious to launch an attack, especially since the number of defenders was decreasing by the hour. The insurgents entered by ones and twos through the "servants' entrance" of the palace, which was not defended. The Aurora fired some blanks, giving
the signal to the Peter and Paul Fortress to direct its artillery fire against the Winter Palace; after firing about thirty shells, the gunners succeeded in hitting their target only two or three times. More and more Red Guards were entering the palace. Initially, the officer cadets defending tl*e Provisional Government took the Red Guards prisoner. Then, as the Red Guards' numbers grew, they took the cadets prisoner and disarmed them. Antonov-Ovseenko made his way into the palace and arrested the members of the Provisional Government, then sent a telegram to Lenin: 'The Winter Palace was taken at 2:04 am."
The Congress of Soviets, which by then consisted only of Bolsheviks and Left SRs, the Mensheviks and Right SRs having walked out in protest against the seizure of power, approved the formation of a "provisional workers' and peasants' government." It was called the Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom, and was to rule "until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly." This government was made up entirely of Bolsheviks. Its president was Lenin; Trotsky became people's commissar of foreign affairs; Rykov, internal affairs; Milyutin, agriculture; Lomov, justice; Nogin, commerce and industry; Shlyapnikov, labor; Teodorovich, food; Lunacharsky, education; and Stalin, nationalities. Thus the October revolution was completed.
"In some respects, a revolution is a miracle," Lenin later wrote.89 And so it must have seemed. For the second time within the year a government, stricken with impotence, was toppled by a flick of the finger. In October, as in February, the government discovered at the critical moment that it had no support. The difference between the two revolutions was that in February the tsarist government was swept aside by an explosion of universal discontent, whereas in October the Provisional Government was overthrown by a party led by a man who knew what he wanted and who was firmly persuaded that he incarnated the laws of history, that he alone had fully assimilated the teachings of Marx and Engels.
Lenin got what he wanted; the Bolshevik party came to the Congress of Soviets with power in its hands. To achieve this goal he had had to overcome the resistance of his comrades, which was far more serious than that of the Provisional Government. The "rightist" enemies of the Provisional Government—generals and officers—were convinced that if the Bolsheviks came to power they could not hold on to it for more than a few weeks and that in the meantime at least Kerensky would have been ousted.
On October 25 the first session of the Congress of Soviets adopted two decrees presented by Lenin, on peace and on land. For the first and last time, the Bolshevik chief kept his word; he gave the country peace and land. Soon a new war would break out, a civil war this time, which would last more than three years. As for the land, it would turn out that the landlords had much less than was believed for the peasants to take, and soon the state would confiscate everything grown on the land anyway. Meanwhile, on October 25 Lenin read aloud the text of the decree on peace, which called upon the peoples and governments of all the belligerent countries to agree to a just and democratic peace without annexations or indemnities and an immediate three-month armistice to allow for peace negotiations. His decree on land stated in part: "All land... shall be confiscated without compensation [in any form] and become the property of the whole people."90
Lenin included in the Decree on Land the exact wording of a program drawn up by an SR newspaper. This program was based on 242 "mandates" submitted by local peasant representatives to the All-Russia Congress of Peasant Deputies, held in Petrograd in August 1917. Commenting on the program at that time, Lenin wrote: "The peasants want to keep their small farms. ... No sensible socialist will differ with the peasant poor over this." He added that as long as "political power is taken over by the proletariat, the rest will come by itself."91
Lenin was able to listen calmly to the angry SRs at the Second Congress of Soviets as they denounced him for "stealing their program." "A fine Marxist this is," they said, "who has harassed us for fifteen years from the heights of his Marxist grandeur, for being petit bourgeois and unscientific, but who no sooner seizes power than he implements our program." To which he responded calmly: "A fine party it is which had to be driven from power before its program could be implemented."92 Lenin was calm because he alone knew that without the support of the peasantry he could not retain power, and that as long as he had power, he could easily take back what he had given and what he had promised.
In the week after the insurrection, a few half-hearted and uncoordinated attempts by the former government to oppose the new one ended in failure. Kerensky, who had left the Winter Palace on the morning of October 25, sought aid at Pskov, the site of Northern Front general headquarters. Only General Krasnov, commander of the Third Cavalry Corps, took up the defense of the Provisional Government, the same Krasnov who under General Krymov's orders had marched on Petrograd in August to overthrow the Kerensky government. Krasnov managed to gather together only 700 cavalrymen, "less than a normal regiment."93 But these modest forces allowed him nonetheless to occupy Gatchina and then Tsarskoe Selo. On October 30 detachments of the Red Guard, reinforced by sailors, stopped the Cossacks' advance at the hills of Pulkovo outside Petrograd. Trotsky wrote that this victory belonged to a Colonel Valden, who had accepted the command of the Red Guards, "not because he agreed with us," but apparently because "he hated Kerensky so much that this hatred awoke a certain sympathy for us in him."94 Krasnov ordered a retreat to Gatchina, where he was arrested. Kerensky had time to flee, thus ending his brief passage through Russian history.
While General Krasnov in his strange alliance with the socialist Kerensky led several hundred Cossacks on Petrograd, General Cheremisov, commander of the Northern Front, considered the country's main danger to be the "German of Berlin," against whom the front had to be maintained; as for the Bolsheviks, the "Germans of Petrograd," they would not be able to stay in power anyhow. At the same time, the representatives of the "revolutionary democrats," the Mensheviks and Right SRs, formed a Union for the Salvation of the Homeland and the Revolution. But their struggle against the Bolsheviks remained verbal.
During his first week in power the most serious resistance Lenin ran into came from his closest comrades in the Central Committee and the government. It broke out on two fronts, when the All-Russia Executive Committee of the Railroad Workers' Union, the Vikzhel, demanded on October 29 that a "homogeneous socialist government" including all the socialist parties be formed. Their demand included the threat of a general railroad strike. The poet Alexander Blok was wrong when he wrote, 'The Vikzhel has shown the breadth of its black hands." The Vikzhel's "hands" were not "black" (that is to say, reactionary) but pink. During the October days, the neutral position of the union, which refused to allow military trains into Petrograd, had contributed to the Bolshevik victory. And when the union issued its ultimatum, the Central Committee agreed to the "necessity of broadening the base of the government and the possibility of changing its composition." It did this in Lenin's and Trotsky's absence. The former was leading the suppression of a desperate attempt by the officer cadets to start an insurrection in the city; the latter was mobilizing forces against Krasnov. A Central Committee delegation headed by Kamenev went to a meeting called by the Vikzhel and agreed to the proposal of a coalition government made up of eighteen members, five of them Bolsheviks, but excluding Lenin and Trotsky. A delegation of workers from the Putilov Factory declared at this meeting: "We will not allow bloodshed between the revolutionary parties; we will not allow a civil war." One of the workers summarized the opinion of the capital's proletariat in these words: 'To hell with Lenin and Chernov [leader of the Right SRs]. Hang them both!"95