Finally at 6:30 p.m. on the twenty-fifth, the Bolsheviks ordered the cruisers Aurora and Amur to steam upriver. They sent in an ultimatum: “Government and troops to capitulate. This ultimatum expires at 7:10 after which we will immediately open fire.” The ultimatum duly ran out.
Nothing happened. The storming was delayed by a quixotic bid to stop the Bolshevik Revolution, despite the frenzied orders of Lenin and Trotsky.
The mayor of Petrograd, the white-bearded Grigory Shreider, who had been debating at the City Council how to prevent the bombardment of the palace, suddenly pledged to defend the government himself. The city councillors backed him. Thus it was that the venerable mayor, the councillors and the minister of food, Prokopovich, well-dressed bourgeoisie wearing velvet-collared cloaks, frock coats and fob-watches, marched out, four abreast like penguins on parade. Each was unarmed except for an umbrella, a lantern and a salami—dinner for the defenders of the palace. First they proceeded to the Smolny, where they were received by Kamenev, who seconded Molotov to accompany them to the Winter Palace. This parade of salamis and umbrellas, accompanied by the ponderous Molotov, headed down Nevsky Prospect singing “The Marseillaise,” until they were stopped by a Red checkpoint outside Kazan Station.
The mayor demanded that the Red Guards make way, or shoot unarmed citizens, according to John Reed, who recorded the dialogue.
“No, we won’t shoot unarmed Russian people,” said the commander of the checkpoint.
“We will go forward! What can you do!” Prokopovich and Shreider insisted. “What can you do?”
“We can’t let you pass,” mused the soldier. “We will do something.”
Then a laughing sailor thought of something. “We will spank you!” he roared, destroying the dignified aura with which the marchers had surrounded themselves. “We will spank you.”
The rescue attempt ended in guffaws, but still the palace held out, even though its defenders were becoming increasingly drunk on the contents of the Tsar’s superb wine-cellar. Meanwhile cars were crossing the bridges, trams rumbling along the streets, and that night Chaliapin was singing in Don Carlos at the Narodny Dom. “Up the Nevsky the entire world seemed to be promenading.” The hookers, who, like rats on a ship or canaries in a coal mine, were the test of imminent danger, still silkily patrolled the Prospect. “The streets,” says Sagirashvili, “were overflowing with all sorts of riffraff.”
Finally at 9:40 p.m., the Aurora fired a blank shelclass="underline" signal for the assault. Inside the palace, the Women’s Shock Battalion were so alarmed by the boom that many of them went into the wrong sort of shock and had to be calmed down in a backroom. Outside the palace, the Bolshevik commanders, Podvoisky and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, whom Lenin had wanted to shoot for their ineptitude, had amassed overwhelming force.
The gunners at the Peter and Paul Fortress managed a barrage of three dozen 6-inch shells. Only two hit the palace, but they succeeded in terrifying the defenders. Armoured cars raked the walls with machine-gun fire and small groups of sailors and Red Guards discovered that the palace was not only undefended but that the doors were not even locked. “The attack,” admits Antonov-Ovseenko, “had a completely disorganized character.” At about 2 a.m., they entered and started to work their way through the rooms.
In the Smolny’s chandeliered hall, pervaded by a “foul blue cloud of smoke” and the “stifling heat of unwashed human bodies,” the opening of the Congress, comprised (in Sukhanov’s words) of “primitive… dark provincial” Bolsheviks, could not be delayed any longer. But the Kerensky ministry still reigned in the palace, so Lenin could not yet appear. Instead Trotsky took the stage for the Bolsheviks. When Martov and the Mensheviks attacked Lenin’s “insane and criminal action,” Trotsky, “his thin pointed face positively mephistophelean in its malicious irony,” replied with one of history’s most crushing dismissals: “You are pathetic bankrupts! Go where you belong. Into the dustbin of history!”
“Then we’ll leave,” retorted Martov. The Mensheviks foolishly walked out of the hall—and into history: they never returned to the portals of power. Sagirashvili, a Menshevik who “didn’t agree with the boycott,” despondently roamed the Smolny corridors until “Stalin put his hand over my shoulder in the most friendly manner and started to talk to me in Georgian,” trying to recruit him to the Bolsheviks. Sagirashvili refused, but various ex-Mensheviks like Vyshinsky were to become some of Stalin’s most loyal retainers.[179]
On the boulevards and bridges near the palace, the thunder of the big guns finally dispersed the promenading thrill-seekers. “Even the prostitutes,” Sagirashvili noted, “disappeared from Nevsky Prospect where they once flocked like birds.”
Kerensky’s ministers, at their baize table in the gold and malachite room with crimson brocade hangings where Nicholas II and his family had dined before 1905, still debated whom to appoint as “Dictator.” Suddenly they gave up the charade and decided to surrender.
Just then the door opened.
43. Power: Stalin Out of the Shadows
A little man flew into the room, like a chip washed up by a wave under the pressure of the crowd that poured in behind him… He had long rust-coloured hair and glasses, a short trimmed reddish moustache and a small beard,” reported Maliantovich, Justice Minister. “His collar, shirt, cuffs and hands were those of a very dirty man.”
“The Provisional Government is here,” said Deputy Premier Konovalov. “What is your pleasure?”
“In the name of the Military-Revolutionary Committee,” replied Antonov-Ovseenko, “I declare all of you… under arrest.”
It was about 1:50 a.m. on 26 October. The new masters of the Winter Palace started to pillage, “pulling out carpets, curtains, linen, porcelain, plates.” One soldier stuck some ostrich feathers in his cap, while the old palace retainers, still in their blue, red and gold uniforms, tried to restrain the looters. There was no storming of the Winter Palace: more people were hurt filming the storming scene in Eisenstein’s movie. “The Neva,” Sagirashvili observed, “washed away Kerensky’s government.”
As the ministers were carted off to the Peter and Paul Fortress, Antonov-Ovseenko lost all control inside the palace, and some of the girls of the Women’s Shock Battalion were raped. “The matter of the wine-cellars became especially critical,” he recounts. Nicholas II’s cellars boasted Tokay from the age of Catherine the Great and stocks of Château d’Yquem 1847, the Emperor’s favourite, but:
the Preobrazhensky Regiment… got totally drunk. The Pavlovsky, our revolutionary buttress, also couldn’t resist. We sent guards from other picked units—all got utterly drunk. We posted guards from the Regimental Committees—they succumbed as well. We despatched armoured cars to drive away the crowd, but after a while they also began to weave suspiciously. When evening came, a violent bacchanalia overflowed.
Exasperated, Antonov-Ovseenko called the Petrograd Fire Brigade. “We tried flooding the cellars with water—but the firemen… got drunk instead.” The Commissars started smashing the bottles in Palace Square, but “the crowd drank from the gutters. The drunken ecstasy infected the entire city.”
Finally Lenin’s Council of People’s Commissars appointed a special Commissar of the Winter Palace with the highest authority, but, Antonov-Ovseenko notes drily, “This person also turned out not to be very reliable.”
179
Sagirashvili was not the only Menshevik whom Stalin was courting. A Bolshevik-turned-Menshevik, Alexander Troyanovsky, the noble officer with whom Stalin had stayed in Vienna, was walking in the streets when a pair of hands covered his eyes. “Are you with us or against us?” asked Stalin.