ALEXANDER RABINOWITCH

The Petrograd Garrison
and the Bolshevik Seizure of Power

Under the tsarist regime the Petrograd garrison was a powerful military force, inevitably a major and sometimes a decisive factor in the political history of the Russian state.¹ In the 1905 Revolution the garrison had remained loyal to the Tsar and in so doing had insured the preservation of the Russian monarchy. In February, 1917, Nicholas II’s fate was sealed when Petrograd-based military units, one after the other, joined the side of rebelling townspeople. Similarly, developments in the garrison were crucial to the defeat suffered by the Bolsheviks in July and to their subsequent triumph in October. Because of this a detailed knowledge of the Petrograd garrison’s composition, of the process by which it was transformed from a bulwark of autocracy to an ally of popular revolt, and finally, of the political impact of the garrison in 1917 is indispensable to an understanding of the Russian revolution. Unfortunately, relatively little work has been done on the makeup and role of the Petrograd garrison in 1917, on the Soviet side because of preoccupation with the importance of the workers during the revolutionary period, and in Western accounts because of a shortage of reliable published data.²

THE COMPOSITION AND IMPORTANCE
OF THE GARRISON

There is no doubt that far reaching changes in the composition of the Petrograd garrison took place during the devastating first three yaers of World War I. In normal times the guards regiments, which formed the backbone of the garrison, had been specially trained units recruited almost exclusively from the peasantry. However, this traditional core had been squandered in the campaigns of 1914-16 on the battlefields of East Prussia and Galacia. Consequently by 1917 most of the troops stationed in and around Petrograd, including those in regiments of the guard, were poorly trained wartime recruits, still predominantly peasant by background.³ Military discipline was foreign to these soldiers; a high percentage had already had their fill of duty at the front (the fourth company of all reserve infantry regiments was made up exclusively of rehabilitated evacuees⁴). In the aftermath of the February Revolution they removed officers who had openly opposed the revolution as well as those with reputations for particular severity, watched suspiciously for any sign of a return to the old order, and awaited the compromise peace they felt certain would be arranged by the newly created Petrograd Soviet.

Command of the Petrograd garrison during tsarist times was exercised by the Commander of the Petrograd Military District, and so it remained until late August, 1917, when troops in the capital were placed under the strategic authority of the Commander of the Northern Front. At the time of the February Revolution the major force controlled by the Petrograd Military District consisted of sixteen guards infantry regiments of 4,500 to 7,500 men each and six army reserve infantry regiments of 10,000 to 19,000 men each. Although popularly referred to as regiments and despite their substantial size, these units were actually reserve battalions of regiments at the front; their primary task was to train replacement companies for front line duty. The guards infantry regiments included the Preobrazhenskii, Semenovskii, Izmailovskii, Egerskii, Moskovskii, Pavlovskii, Finliandskii, Litovskii, Keksgolmskii, Petrogradskii, and Volynskii Regiments, all quartered in Petrograd. Also included among guards infantry units were four reserve rifle battalions (two located in Petrograd and two in Tsarskoe Selo). The six army reserve infantry regiments included the First and 180th Reserve Infantry Regiments in Petrograd, the Third Reserve Infantry Regiment in Peterhof, the 176th Reserve Infantry Regiment in Krasnoe Selo, the First Reserve Machine Gun Regiment in Oranienbaum (from the time of the February Revolution until after the July days the bulk of the First Machine Gun Regiment was actually billeted in the Vyborg District in Petrograd), and the Second Reserve Machine Gun Regiment in Strelna. All the above regiments were quartered within twenty miles of the capital. Among other important elements making up the Petrograd garrison in February, 1917, were the First and Fourth Don Cossack Regiments, spread throughout the city and its suburbs, a number of reserve engineer and artillery units, and various military schools. Technically, the huge Kronstadt Naval Base located outside the capital in the Gulf of Finland was not part of the Petrograd garrison, though in 1917 it consistently and actively supported the latter in political questions.

The composition and numerical strength of the Petrograd garrison were fluid throughout the Provisional Government period, the most significant movement of troops occurring in late May and June (in preparation for the Kerensky offensive) and in late July and August (after the July uprising). In July special units were brought into Petrograd to help maintain order while hundreds of soldiers who had participated in the July days were gradually shipped to the front (this movement of “Bolshevized” troops to the front was speeded up considerably in mid-August, 1917, on the eve of the Kornilov affair). Largely as a result of these continuing shifts and because of lack of uniformity in defining what troops should be included in the garrison, published estimates of the Petrograd garrison’s size in 1917 vary enormously. A figure of 215,000 to 300,000 soldiers stationed in and around Petrograd at the time of the February Revolution would seem to be a fair approximation. During the summer of 1917, transfers from the front to the capital ran far behind troop movements in the opposite direction so that by fall this figure may have dropped to about 150,000. There were substantial differences in the level of armament of these troops, and in general many of them were well below strength in equipment, arms, and ammunition. Still, it is clear that large numbers of garrison soldiers were quite well armed, and more importantly, were in close proximity to several major weapons and munitions plants and depots which promised access to ample supplies of military hardware.

The size and armament of the Petrograd garrison at the time of the February Revolution, then, insured that local military forces would be a major factor to be reckoned with in the crucial months immediately following the collapse of the old regime. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that until such time as control over the Petrograd garrison could be re-established, the Russian government was at the garrison’s mercy. Moreover, to make matters even more difficult for the government, the disintegration of the traditional police apparatus made post-tsarist administrators in Petrograd unduly dependent on military troops for the maintenance of public order.

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE GARRISON

Because of the garrison’s enormous potential political significance, a contest for influence there was inevitable in the post-February period among the Provisional Government, the Petrograd Soviet, and the major Russian political parties. During the first weeks of March, 1917, the Provisional Government sought to re-establish the authority of the Petrograd Military District and its officers over the forces of the garrison. Moreover, the government appointed commissars to major units of the garrison as a further means of exercising its influence. However, the efforts of the Provisional Government were quickly overshadowed by those of the more broadly-based Petrograd Soviet. Important steps toward assuring the allegiance of the garrison were taken by the Soviet on February 28, when army units were invited to elect representatives to participate in the work of the Petrograd Soviet (a special Soldiers’ Section was established to deal with the problems of the armed forces) and on March 3, when Soviet pressure forced the Provisional Government to include in its initial proclamation a provision that troops taking part in the revolution could not be disarmed or removed from Petrograd. Even more significant was the publication at about the same time of the Soviet’s Order Number One regarding behavior in the armed forces. Among other things, the order authorized the immediate election of soldier and sailor committees with broad but vaguely defined administrative authority in all military units, placed control of all weapons in the hands of these committees, announced that orders of the Duma Military Commission (that is, orders of the future Provisional Government) should be obeyed only if they did not conflict with the orders of the Soviet, and proclaimed full civil rights for soldiers when not on duty.⁵

The practical effect of these provisions was to make garrison units look to the Petrograd Soviet for ultimate authority and to all but destroy traditional codes of behavior in the armed forces. Moreover, the fact that the Petrograd Soviet’s stand on the war corresponded more closely to the soldiers’ yearning for peace than did the patriotic declarations of the Provisional Government contributed to the popularity of the Soviet in the initial weeks of the revolutionary period. In the first half of April, ostensibly for strategic reasons but certainly also because of the impossibility of re-establishing firm control over the troops, the Provisional Government formulated plans involving the shipment of a major portion of the garrison to the front, a move which only weakened its position further. Striking proof of the Provisional Government’s impotence in the garrison was furnished as early as the April crisis, when a few military regiments joined in popular demonstrations against the Provisional Government’s foreign policy. The troops ignored orders from General Kornilov, then Commander of the Petrograd Military District, to return to their barracks, finally halting their protest in response to directives from the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.⁶ Subsequently, in matters concerning the garrison, the Provisional Government was forced to act in concert with the Soviet.

In addition, the Kadets, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and Socialist-Revolutionaries competed among themselves for influence in the Petrograd garrison, the latter possessing an initial advantage by virtue of the support which they commanded among the more literate peasant-soldiers. But more than any other party the Bolsheviks, alone bent on overthrowing the Provisional Government and seizing power, devoted attention and an enormous expenditure of effort to the garrison. Indeed, while all of the major Russian political parties ultimately established special military branches, it seems apparent that only the semi-autonomous Bolshevik Military Organization was really active among troops of the garrison.⁷ Alone among the major Russian political parties, the Bolsheviks sought to challenge the Soviet as spokesman for the garrison’s seething discontent and to obtain absolute control of major garrison regiments, establishing party cells at battalion and even company levels as a means of attaining this objective. The party’s interest in the garrison was threefold. Most important, garrison regiments were viewed as a major element in the armed force that would be needed to overthrow the bourgeoisie; among Bolshevik Military Organization leaders it was all but axiomatic that to control the Petrograd garrison was to control Petrograd and that to win the capital was to obtain a dominant position in the struggle for power in Russia. Secondly, the indoctrination of replacement companies in the garrison was to serve as a funnel for the Bolshevization of the front. Finally, the spread of Bolshevik ideas to the soldier-peasants of the garrison was viewed as an important means of winning over the countryside.⁸

Bolshevik attempts to gain a foothold in the Petrograd garrison were not immediately successful. In March such efforts were hampered by a shortage of trained agitators and in early April widespread criticism of the Bolsheviks aroused by Lenin’s return passage through enemy Germany increased the difficulty of conducting anti-war propaganda in the garrison. In this respect developments such as the April crisis and, later, preparations to resume active military operations at the front marked a turning point in Military Organization fortunes. From then on the revolutionary Bolshevik program attracted a steadily increasing mass following. “Club Pravda,” a “non-party” soldiers’ club opened by the Military Organization in the basement of the Kshesinskaia mansion, became a magnet for the most extreme elements in the armed forces. Garrison rallies staged by the Military Organization drew crowds numbering into the thousands. Soldatskaia pravda, the Military Organization’s special soldiers’ newspaper and probably its most successful enterprise, quickly attained a circulation of 50,000, half of which was distributed in the Petrograd garrison and the remainder sent to the front. ⁹

Advertising itself as the soldiers’ own organ, Soldatskaia pravda focused attention on political issues of particular interest to the troops and on the hardships of everyday life in the armed forces. In a simple and direct style that contrasted sharply with the Central Committee’s Pravda, Soldatskaia pravda issued a steady stream of propaganda on important aspects of the Bolshevik program: the removal of the Provisional Government, the transfer of all power to the Soviets, the confiscation of farmland, and immediate peace. Soldatskaia pravda’s inaugural issue launched a campaign to encourage fraternization at the front, and in subsequent articles practical ways of initiating fraternization were discussed in detail. Each day except Monday, from April 15 to July 5, Soldatskaia pravda articles, often written by the soldiers themselves, attacked government attempts to re-establish a minimum of discipline in Petrograd regiments and to transfer soldiers from the garrison to the front, while an endless stream of letters and resolutions from frontline soldiers sketched a disturbing, albeit distorted, picture of conditions there.

By mid-May the effect of such propaganda was observable. To be sure, soldiers committees in most regiments remained under the control of non-Bolshevik moderates as they had been from the first days of the revolution. Moreover, there were some garrison units still relatively free of Bolshevik influence; generally speaking, such was the case in cavalry and cossack forces. However, party cells were flourishing in many units of the garrison and these were represented in the central Bolshevik Military Organization. Military Organization membership in Petrograd already totaled well over one thousand.¹⁰ Support for the Bolshevik program was quite strong in such large units as the Grenadier and Moskovskii Guards Regiments, the First Machine Gun Regiment, the 180th Reserve Infantry Regiment, and the Sixth Engineer Battalion. Probably facilitating Bolshevization in the latter unit was the fact that among the engineers were a relatively high percentage of industrial laborers. Among factors contributing to rapid Bolshevik success within several other regiments were the presence in some of these units of dynamic young officer-Bolsheviks (this factor was particularly significant in the 180th Reserve Infantry Regiment) and their location in seething factory districts of Petrograd, often in close proximity to Bolshevik Party headquarters. Bolshevik influence was also great among sailors at the Kronstadt Naval Base. Particularly bitter memories of the harsh injustices of the tsarist regime, the relatively high percentage of sailors of working class origin, and the existence of a strong revolutionary tradition harking back to 1905 appear to have aided the Bolshevik cause among the sailors. At Kronstadt, the local Soviet passed a resolution rejecting the authority of the Provisional Government on May 16. Yet for the Bolshevik Party this early success was a mixed blessing; while it increased the potential of the Bolsheviks to influence the course of political events in Petrograd, it tied the party’s fortunes to some of the most impatient, irresponsible, and generally anarchic elements in Russian society. The very significant problems which this situation posed for the Bolsheviks were reflected in the period immediately preceding the July days.

THE GARRISON AND THE JULY UPRISING¹¹

In late May, measures taken by the Provisional Government to restore a semblance of order and authority in the armed forces and the threat of imminent transfer to the front stirred unrest in several regiments of the garrison. Dissatisfaction was particularly acute in precisely those units in which Bolshevik influence was greatest. Under pressure for immediate revolutionary action from its garrison followers, desperate lest the socialist revolution occur too late to save them from death at the front, and bolstered by the confidence inevitably inspired by substantial armed force, the Bolshevik Military Organization appealed to the party Central Committee to authorize a march of Petrograd soldiers and workers to protest the policies of the government and to demonstrate support for the transfer of all power to the Soviets. Although L. B. Kamenev and other moderate Bolsheviks opposed such action on both ideological and strategic grounds, a Central Committee majority led by Lenin favored the proposal.¹² On June 8 a mass protest march, to be organized in secret, was scheduled for June 10; however, intervention by the Congress of Soviets forced Lenin to cancel this demonstration at the eleventh hour. And, apprehensive about the danger of a premature uprising in the capital (which the more conservative provinces and the front would oppose), Lenin now insisted on the immediate need for organization, patience, and discipline. He emphasized this point in a heated address to the Petrograd organization of the party on June 11;¹³ this was Lenin’s theme in some editorials which appeared in Pravda and the crux of his message to a session of the All-Russian Conference of Bolshevik Military Organizations, where demands for the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government were particularly emphatic. ¹⁴

However, Lenin’s policy of trying to control revolutionary unrest in Petrograd proved unsuccessful for several reasons, the most important of them connected with developments in the garrison. In the first place, on June 18 the Bolsheviks successfully turned a mass street demonstration sponsored by the Congress of Soviets into an impressive expression of support for the Bolshevik program. To rank-and-file Bolsheviks in Petrograd military units and factories and in Kronstadt, and to many junior level party leaders in the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee and Military Organization, this seemed evidence enough that the forces at the disposal of the party were more than adequate for the seizure of power.¹⁵ On this same day, Russian military forces on the Southwestern front launched their long-heralded offensive. Orders for sizable shipments of men and arms to the front now received by regiments of the Petrograd garrison triggered efforts by rank-and-file Bolsheviks in the most rebellious unit, the First Machine Gun Regiment, to organize an immediate uprising with or without the authorization of the party center.¹⁶ Although the leaders of the Bolshevik Military Organization cooperated in squelching this movement on June 20, there is evidence that on June 22, Military Organization leaders, genuinely concerned about losing the support of the masses to the more militant Anarchists if the party proved unwilling to act, began to lay plans for an uprising of their own.¹⁷

Eleven days later, on July 3, the First Machine Gun Regiment responded to new orders to send men and arms to the front by touching off the July uprising, aimed at overthrowing the Provisional Government and forcing the Soviet to take power. Organized with the help of Bolshevik Military Organization members in the regiment,¹⁸ it was almost immediately supported by all of the military units in which Bolsheviks had been most active and by large numbers of factory workers. Evidently only after the leadership of the Military Organization and the Petrograd organization of the party had approved participation in the movement, and then only very belatedly and reluctantly, did the Central Committee agree to stand at its head.¹⁹

Lenin’s judgment as to the untimeliness of immediate revolutionary action had been correct. To be sure, during the height of the July uprising the Provisional Government and the Soviet were completely at the mercy of demonstrating workers, soldiers, and sailors, with almost no garrison troops willing to come to the government’s rescue. However, such regiments as the Litovskii, Volynskii, Petrogradskii, and Preobrazhenskii Guards, who had been among the first to rebel in February, failed to respond to Bolshevik appeals to go into the streets. The effective support of several other units lasted only a few hours. Moreover, after receiving news that loyal troops would soon be arriving from the front and after the release of evidence purporting to show that Lenin was a German agent, previously neutral regiments were persuaded to come to the aid of the government.

The July uprising culminated in a serious defeat for the Bolshevik Party. The Provisional Government, now headed by Kerensky, appeared determined to destroy the party’s influence in the garrison and disband those regiments in which Bolshevization was most advanced. According to a plan drawn up by General G. D. Romanovskii and approved by Kerensky on July 11 (with the pencilled notation, “agreed, but I demand that this be forcefully carried out without deviation”), regiments of the Petrograd garrison were divided into three categories, depending on the extent of their involvement in the July movement. To the first category were assigned units participating in the demonstrations in full or close to full strength. Included in this group were the Grenadier Regiment, the First, Third, 176th, and 180th Reserve Infantry Regiments, and the First Machine Gun Regiment, together constituting the core of Military Organization strength in the garrison. These units were to be completely and permanently disbanded, their personnel (with the exception of those in jail) to be transferred to duty at the front. To the second category were assigned units in which only individual companies took part in the demonstrations. The Moskovskii, Pavlovskii, Third Rifle, and Second Machine Gun Regiments and the Sixth Engineer Battalion were assigned to this group. Only guilty elements in these units were to be dissolved. Finally, the third category was composed of units not taking an active part in the demonstrations but containing guilty individuals. This group was ordered to conduct a thorough housecleaning of subversive elements. By this plan Romanovskii proposed to reduce the garrison by one hundred thousand of its most unreliable elements.²⁰ The Military Organization’s Soldatskaia pravda was banned; much of the Military Organization’s apparatus in the garrison was damaged; the Military Organization’s junior level leadership was decimated by arrests. The list of garrison personnel jailed in the course of the Provisional Government’s investigation of the July uprising read like a Bolshevik Military Organization “Who’s Who.”²¹ In short, the Bolsheviks were forced to pay dearly for their early successes in the garrison.

A number of factors, however, permitted the Bolshevik Party to make a rapid recovery from its defeat in July and to emerge in the fall of 1917 with renewed strength and stature in the Petrograd garrison. First, the spirit of indignation toward the Bolsheviks among troops of the garrison did not last long. This was in large part because even after the collapse of the July offensive the Provisional Government and the General Staff, fully supported by the Soviet, continued to give top priority to restoring the discipline and fighting capacity of the armed forces and to seeing the struggle against the Central Powers through to a successful conclusion. Whether Russian military leaders were right in believing that a triumphant attack would arrest disintegration in the armed forces is problematical; what seems clear is that in the garrison word of the massive German breakthrough at the front brought further discredit to the war effort, the Provisional Government, and the Soviet. Among the major Russian political parties only the Bolsheviks remained uncompromised by support for the war.

Moreover, for a variety of reasons the Provisional Government’s efforts to deal forcefully with the Bolsheviks were also of short duration. The policy of disarming unreliable troops and removing them from the capital, for example, was only partially carried out. Quite naturally, most field commanders were not at all interested in receiving such replacements. Persuasive evidence regarding the Bolshevik role in the organization of the July uprising gathered by a special, high level investigating commission was not made public, and none of the many Bolsheviks arrested in the aftermath of the July days was ever brought to trial. Actually, the top leaders of the Bolshevik Military Organization somehow managed to evade arrest. A bit wiser and more cautious, but exhibiting remarkable resilience and energy, they were able to supervise rebuilding of the Military Organization in the garrison. Finally, despite restrictions on the Bolshevik press, Soldatskaia pravda, albeit under a new title, was circulating among the troops after a post-July days interruption of short duration. ²²

It appears clear that the Bolsheviks had already recouped many of their July losses by the time of the Kornilov affair in late August. However, relevant sources leave no doubt that a direct consequence of that blundering attempt by the High Command of the Russian army to establish a military dictatorship with or without Kerensky’s cooperation was a new upsurge in Bolshevik fortunes in the garrison. This was not only because to defend themselves from the danger on the right, the Provisional Government and the Soviet were forced to free imprisoned Bolsheviks and to authorize the issue of arms to Bolshevik supporters in the garrison and the factories. The Kornilov episode contributed immeasurably to the internal disintegration of the garrison. It shattered whatever moral authority the officers still possessed and as a result, the carrying out of even the most routine functions became virtually impossible for them. By seeming to demonstrate the validity of pre-July Bolshevik warnings in regard to the threat of counterrevolution and by putting the Bolsheviks in the position of appearing to be the chief defenders of the revolution, the Kornilov affair enormously enhanced Bolshevik prestige in the garrison. At the same time the Kornilov experience destroyed whatever loyalty the troops still had to the Provisional Government in general and Kerensky in particular. In his memoirs, W. S. Woytinsky, then Commissar of the Northern Front, focuses attention on this factor, recalling that every soldier knew that the conflict between Kerensky and Kornilov had been preceded by negotiations between them; that discussed in these negotiations were the reimposition of capital punishment, the curbing of soldiers’ committees, the return of power to officers, in short, a return to the ways of the “old regime.” Consequently, to the average soldier the Kornilovshchina appeared as a conspiracy against himself and against the revolution on the part of the Military High Command and Kerensky. ²³

In the several weeks between the Kornilov affair and the October Revolution a second purge of officers was carried out in many regiments. Military Organization membership in the garrison rose significantly, and Bolshevik collectives were successfully organized or expanded in most of those military units heretofore relatively free of Bolshevik influence—in the Egerskii, Petrogradskii, Izmailovskii, Preobrazhenskii, Volynskii, and Litovskii Guards Regiments, for example—and even in scattered military schools. Concomitantly, control of a number of regimental committees passed from more moderate elements into the hands of the Bolsheviks.²⁴ This change in the power position of the Bolsheviks was reflected in the fact that even soldiers in those garrison units which had been most instrumental in putting down the July uprising now passed Bolshevik-sponsored resolutions calling for transfer of all power to the Soviets.

This is not to suggest that in the aftermath of the Kornilov affair the Bolsheviks had already attained their goal of winning absolute control over the major elements of the Petrograd garrison. In September, 1917, only a fairly small percentage of soldiers in individual garrison regiments appear to have been politically active; these were the people who consistently participated in protest demonstrations and meetings and who ultimately played active roles in the overthrow of the Provisional Government. On the whole, garrison troops were more an unstable mob concerned most of all with avoiding transfer to the front than a disciplined Praetorian Guard. The soldiers viewed the Provisional Government and the General Staff with the greatest bitterness and suspicion (was not Kerensky—the same Kerensky who had conspired with Kornilov-now Commander-in-Chief as well as head of the Russian government?). Further, in the eyes of the average soldier the majority socialist leadership of the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, because of its close association with the policies of the Provisional Government, had been similarly compromised. However, the organs of the Soviet still embodied revolutionary legitimacy. In part because of this Lenin’s rallying cry from April on had been “All Power to the Soviets,” not “Power to the Bolsheviks.”²⁵ Consequently, what political loyalty the mass of garrison soldiers possessed was less to the Bolshevik Party than to the Bolshevik-dominated Petrograd Soviet. This was precisely what a Bolshevik district organization leader had in mind when at a party gathering in mid-October he reported that at the request of the Soviet the masses in his district would come out against the Provisional Government, but that at the request of the party few would act.²⁶ All this did not mean, of course, that garrison troops were not to be a decisive factor in the Bolshevik seizure of power; however, to assess properly the significance of the garrison in October it is necessary to consider, if only briefly, the broader problem of Bolshevik preparations for the overthrow of the Provisional Government.

THE BOLSHEVIKS PREPARE

Not long after the Kornilov affair Lenin, then still in hiding in Finland, appealed to his followers in Petrograd to overthrow the Provisional Government without delay. This action was not a direct response to the events of late August. Indeed, influenced by the open rift that had developed between the majority socialists and the Kadets during the Kornilov affair, Lenin apparently acquired some “constitutional illusions” of his own. In an article written for Rabochii on September 1, he momentarily ignored the course toward an armed uprising set by the Sixth Bolshevik Party Congress in late July; to him, the establishment of a government of Socialist Revolutionaries (SR’s) and Mensheviks responsible to the Soviets and a peaceful transition to socialism now seemed possible. However, in a postscript which Lenin added to this article two days later, after learning of a Central Executive Committee pledge of support to a five-man ruling Directory organized by Kerensky, Lenin wondered whether it was not already too late for this.²⁷ Moreover, subsequent Bolshevik triumphs in Soviet elections in Petrograd, Moscow, and other Russian cities made negotiation with the majority socialists increasingly unattractive. The effect of these victories on Lenin, coupled as they were with the Provisional Government’s announcement of coming elections to the Constituent Assembly, was electrifying.

On September 12 and September 14 Lenin began peppering his followers in Petrograd with frantic appeals to seize power.²⁸ The Germans were then consolidating their position in the Baltic; soon Russian naval forces would be forced out of the Gulf of Riga, leaving the approaches to Kronstadt and Petrograd unprotected. Taking note of the German advance, Lenin claimed that the Provisional Government was about to surrender the capital after which Bolshevik prospects for the seizure of power would be “one hundred times less favorable.” Pointing to Bolshevik victories in local Soviets, Lenin argued that the party had the support of a majority of peasants, workers, and soldiers. At the same time he repeated again and again that Russia was experiencing a revolutionary upsurge, that vacillation among Bolshevik enemies was enormous, and hence that the optimum moment for the seizure of power had arrived. Left unstated, though probably very real, was the fear on Lenin’s part that waiting to seize power until the opening of the Congress of Soviets (scheduled for October 20) or until after the convocation of the Constituent Assembly would cripple possibilities for an immediate revolutionary dictatorship.

At any rate, in his September letters from Finland Lenin sought to demonstrate that an organized rebellion (in his words, “the treatment of insurrection as an art”) was a fundamental tenet of Marxism. Treating insurrection as an art, the Bolsheviks “were to organize a headquarters of insurgent detachments, distribute their forces, surround the Aleksandrinskii theater [the meeting place of the Democratic State Conference], occupy the Peter and Paul Fortress, seize the telephone and telegraph exchanges, and arrest the General Staff and government,” all this “without losing an instant!”

Yet nothing on this order was attempted for several weeks. For the Bolsheviks this was probably extremely fortunate because an armed coup of the kind advocated by Lenin at this time might well have been disastrous. We have Stalin’s word that after the revolution Lenin himself acknowledged this.²⁹ The Bolsheviks were saved because of the stubborn opposition to the course advocated by Lenin on the part of those moderately inclined Bolsheviks who had warned against precipitous action in June and July. To them the debacle of July attested to the danger of going too far too fast, while the gains registered by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Kornilov affair seemed proof enough that the development of the revolution was working to their advantage. It is not surprising, then, that the Bolshevik Central Committee’s initial response to Lenin’s messages of mid-September was not much different from that which had greeted Lenin’s “Letters from Afar” six months earlier. The Central Committee evidently considered burning the letters; indeed, in a 1921 speech Bukharin maintained that the Central Committee resolved unanimously to do so.³⁰ According to the published protocols the committee voted to preserve one copy of each letter and to take steps to prevent a movement into the streets.³¹

Further pressure by Lenin, including an offer to resign from the Central Committee, brought some party leaders to Lenin’s side. And at its historic session in Sukhanov’s apartment on October 10, the Bolshevik Central Committee, with only Zinoviev and Kamenev in opposition, “resolved to place an armed uprising on the order of the day.”³² While this resolution said nothing about a possible date for an insurrection, it is clear that Lenin viewed it as authorization for an armed uprising at the earliest possible date before the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets, then scheduled for October 20. Yet even now the Petrograd Bolsheviks did little about actually preparing an immediate uprising, except talk. In his letters of early October and in a personal appeal to the Central Committee on October 10, Lenin argued that the Northern Congress of Soviets provided an eminently suitable institution for the organization of an insurrection against the Provisional Government.³³ Yet the Bolshevik-dominated Northern Congress was convened in Petrograd on October 11, sat for three days and dispersed, having limited itself to the passage of the usual collection of militant-sounding resolutions. More important, it appears that as late as October 18, when the Central Executive Committee announced that the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets was to be postponed until the twenty-fifth, the Bolsheviks were not much closer to starting an armed uprising than they had been on the tenth. Available evidence suggests that the primary reason for this was that the deep divisions among the leaders of the Bolshevik Party in regard to both ideology and tactics were not eliminated by the vaguely worded formal agreement of October 10.

The categorical opposition to the seizure of power by people like Kamenev and Zinoviev has already been mentioned, and there is no doubt that their actions after October 10 slowed preparations for an immediate armed uprising. Actually, in the aftermath of the Central Committee meeting of October 10, Kamenev and Zinoviev composed a memorandum for circulation to lower party organizations outlining the reasons for their opposition to the overthrow of the Provisional Government,³⁴ in the immediately succeeding days they agitated actively against such action, and on October 18 Kamenev all but made public Bolshevik plans in Gorky’s newspaper, Novaia zhizn’. Following this, even Lenin, to judge by his letters, began to think that the moment to strike had been lost.³⁵

However, there was another attitude, much more widely shared than that of Zinoviev and Kamenev, that helps to explain Bolshevik hesitancy and procrastination in October. The fact is that many lower-level Bolshevik leaders who in principle were fully as committed as Lenin to an early seizure of power were apprehensive about the tactical feasibility of the classical popular armed uprising advocated by Lenin. To be sure, it would be misleading to suggest that the views of lower-level Bolshevik leaders regarding immediate direct action after October 10 were uniformly pessimistic. Protocols of two major meetings at which reports from Bolsheviks working at the district level and in the Military Organization were heard (a meeting of the Petersburg Committee on October 15 and a session of the Central Committee with representatives of lower party organizations the next day) indicate that such was not the case.³⁶ For example, at the October 15 Petersburg Committee meeting M. Ia. Latsis of the all-important Vyborg District lavished praise on preparations by the workers in his area for the seizure of power and expressed confidence that they could be counted on, while I. A. Rakhia, speaking for the Finns, declared that their attitude toward an uprising was “the sooner the better.” Similarly, at the Central Committee meeting on the sixteenth, N. A. Skrypnik declared that an urge for practical action and a dissatisfaction with mere resolutions could be distinguished among the masses everywhere.

On the other hand, the general picture of the state of affairs in the factories and barracks that emerged at the important Bolshevik meetings of mid-October was often so unpromising that it could not but have had a dampening effect on the mood of party members. Perhaps the most alarming factor brought out at these discussions was the apparent lethargy of large numbers of Petrograd workers and soldiers. Thus, of nineteen district representatives at the Petersburg Committee meeting of October 15, only eight felt that the masses were in a “fighting mood” and ready to act immediately, apparently six representatives viewed the prevailing spirit as indefinite, while five referred explicitly to the lack of any desire to “come out.” The Military Organization leader V. I. Nevskii, while acknowledging that the whole of the Petrograd garrison would join workers in support of an uprising organized by the Soviet, asserted that among the workers there was no fighting spirit and that in this respect the soldiers were even more hopeless. M. M. Kharitonov said that among the masses he could distinguish no mood to fight, that in Kronstadt the mood had fallen sharply, and that he had witnessed widespread drunkenness even among Bolsheviks. An unidentified trade union representative felt that the mood of the masses was such that if they were attacked by the counterrevolution a rebuff would be given, but that the masses would not attack by themselves.

Similar observations were made at the Central Committee meeting of October 16. N. V. Krylenko revealed that reports to the Military Organization’s All-Russian Bureau from local representatives suggested that the revolutionary mood was falling, while I. Schmidt, speaking in behalf of the party’s trade union representatives, commented that the influence of the Bolsheviks predominated in the trade unions but warned that fear of layoffs acted as a brake on revolutionary action by the workers. A. G. Shliapnikov, representing the Metalist Union, commented in a similar vein and added that among metal workers rumors of a “coming out” had resulted in panic. Toward the end of the same meeting, M. V. Volodarskii, the Petersburg Committee’s top agitator, declared: “If the question of a coming out is being posed as a matter for tomorrow, then we must honestly say we are not ready. I have been making public appeals daily but must acknowledge that the masses have responded to our appeal with bewilderment.” A few local level Bolshevik leaders were a bit more optimistic than they had been a day earlier, a fact which did not escape A. V. Shotman, an opponent of immediate action. In an apparent dig at speakers who were allowing themselves to be swayed by Lenin’s enthusiasm he warned that “at the City Conference [the Third Bolshevik Petrograd City Conference in session from October 7 to October 11], in the Petersburg Committee, and in the Military Organization the mood was much more bleak than it is now being pictured.”

Apparent mass apathy was by no means the only important problem contributing to the pessimistic picture emanating from below on the eve of the proposed Bolshevik seizure of power. The local reports of October 15 and 16 revealed widespread concern about a general absence of technical preparations for an insurrection; indeed there were few speakers who did not note either serious organizational problems in connection with the Red Guards or critical shortages of arms and ammunition, and from the reports taken together it is clear that an apparatus for the seizure of power was still to be created. At the Petersburg Committee meeting of October 15, one of the bluntest statements regarding Bolshevik unpreparedness for an immediate uprising was issued by Nevskii, who, as a leader of the Military Organization, was most directly concerned with overall technical preparations for the seizure of power. Nevskii’s report on this occasion testifies to the enormous impact of the July experience on Military Organization leaders.³⁷ Warning that absolutely nothing had been done to prepare the provinces for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and that the Bolsheviks were in fact just beginning to gain a foothold in the countryside, he declared that peasants in several provinces had stated that in the event of an uprising they would withhold bread. Nevskii also pointed out that such vitally important factors as the support of the railroad workers and the Fifth Army on the Northern Front had not been secured. In general, technical preparations for an uprising had yet to be initiated; as matters stood there was no assurance that the Bolsheviks would have that initial preponderance of strength necessary for victory over the Provisional Government. For all these reasons Nevskii called the Central Committee’s resolution of October 10 “premature.”

Judging by the published protocols, Nevskii’s views were shared by the most important leaders of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee and Military Organization; within the Bolshevik Central Committee their chief adherent appears to have been Trotsky. Some Soviet historians suggest that such attitudes were the result of timidity and “constitutional illusions,” to use Lenin’s phrase. However, in retrospect they seem to have been based on a realistic appraisal of the prevailing mood and correlation of forces in Petrograd, the provinces, and at the front. In opposing the “immediate bayonet charge” advocated by Lenin, tactically more cautious Bolsheviks such as Trotsky argued that the prestige of the Soviets dictated that they, rather than the organs of the party, be utilized for the seizure of power. Confident that the Bolsheviks would have a majority in the Second Congress of Soviets, these Bolsheviks maintained that the probability of success would be greatly increased if the seizure of power could be linked with and legitimized by the decisions of the Congress. Some Bolsheviks sharing these views also urged that for maximum support any attack on the Provisional Government be masked as a defensive operation on behalf of the Soviet and the revolution, hence, that action be delayed until a suitable pretext for giving battle presented itself. At the Bolshevik strategy session of October 16, Krylenko was quite specific. He followed his pessimistic report on the mood of the garrison with the observation that some sort of immediate motivating factor was needed to mobilize the masses. He added that a fresh attempt by Kerensky to move unreliable troops out of the capital (several garrison units received orders to prepare for transfer to the front on October 9) provided just the issue around which a decisive struggle against the Provisional Government could be waged.³⁸

THE ROLE OF THE GARRISON IN OCTOBER

The unwillingness of garrison troops to accept transfer to the front in early summer, 1917 (during preparations for the ill-fated Kerensky offensive) and the problems which this created for the Provisional Government have already been touched upon. A similar situation developed in late September and early October, when it appeared that the Germans might attempt to take Petrograd. To judge by the report of the Commander of the Northern front, General Cheremisov, at a staff meeting on October 11, Russian military leaders did not take the possibility of an early attack on Petrograd seriously.³⁹ What appears clear is that the Kerensky government viewed the apparent German threat as an excellent excuse to rid the capital once and for all of the more unruly elements in the garrison.⁴⁰ On October 5 Kerensky directed General Polkovnikov, Commander of the Petrograd Military District, to prepare his troops for transfer to the front and the following day Polkovnikov issued preliminary instructions to key commanders.⁴¹ According to Woytinsky, Cheremisov himself had little taste for such an operation, feeling that transfers of troops from Petrograd would only hasten complete catastrophe at the front. Be that as it may, on October 9 Cheremisov issued a supplementary order drafted by Woytinsky reaffirming General Polkovnikov’s directive on the grounds that such action was absolutely vital to the defense of the capital from the Germans.

There is nothing surprising in the response of the troops once these directives became public. With encouragement from the Bolsheviks they quickly concluded that Kerensky, still in league with the generals, was once again bent on stifling the revolution. Rumors which had begun to circulate earlier that the Provisional Government was making preparations for a move to Moscow (these were later substantiated) served to reinforce the popular conviction that the revolution was in danger. As early as the spring of 1917, at the time of the April crisis, scattered elements of the garrison initiated protest demonstrations against the Provisional Government’s foreign policy; in June and July close to half of the garrison ranged itself against the government. Now as if with one voice garrison troops proclaimed lack of confidence in the Provisional Government and demanded transfer of power to the Soviets. On this occasion virtually all of the major garrison regiments which had refused to follow the Bolsheviks in July rejected the Provisional Government and pledged support to the Petrograd Soviet.⁴² Moreover, those units in which the government was most confident—for example, Cossack forces and the regiments rushed to Petrograd from the front after the July days—now either affirmed their neutrality in the struggle between the Petrograd Soviet and the military authorities or openly sided with the Soviet.

This new crisis involving the garrison erupted in the second week of October, and the Bolsheviks exploited it to the fullest. In the press, in the Petrograd Soviet, and most importantly, in factories and barracks, the Bolsheviks trumpeted the slogan, “the All-Russian Congress is in danger,” fanning popular fears of a “second Kornilov.” Thus on October 11 the lead editorial in Rabochii put’ ridiculed the argument that garrison forces were being ordered out of Petrograd for strategic reasons, arguing that ostensibly the offensive of June 18 had been “organized in the name of strategic necessity; yet later leading SR’s and Mensheviks had openly acknowledged that the offensive was initiated for political reasons—in order to take the army in hand.” The same pattern, Rabochii put’ implied, had been repeated in August. “The Kornilov ‘reforms,’ capital punishment, and the suppression of army organizations had been justified by the need to raise the fighting capacity of the army to fight the foreign enemy. Yet later it became clear to everyone that all of Kornilov’s strategy had been aimed at fighting the revolution. Before the Kornilov uprising,” the editorial went on, “the conspirators demanded the transfer of a whole group of regiments from Petrograd, for strategic necessity of course. The Bolsheviks had told the soldiers, you are being destroyed. But the soldiers still trusted the SR and Menshevik windbags-they left to dig trenches and the revolution nearly fell into the pit then being dug for it by Kornilov.” ⁴³

The government attempted to counter these arguments by presenting the dangers of a German attack in ever more alarming terms. The most important allies the government could count on in its conflict with the garrison were embittered front line troops, themselves long impatient to move to the rear. Consequently, in the days between October 9 and the fall of the Provisional Government, military authorities attempted to utilize the pressure of army committees at the front to force garrison regiments to accept transfer. However, at a conference in Pskov on October 17, garrison representatives temporarily dodged a direct rebuff from the front and the move failed. Actually, so great was the popular mistrust of the Provisional Government’s intentions at this time that even the majority socialists were forced to recognize that garrison troops could not be expected to respond to orders not in some way controlled by the Soviet. Hence at a session of the Petrograd Soviet’s Executive Committee on October 10 the Menshevik Mark Broido, while appealing to the soldiers to prepare for transfer to the front, proposed that a special committee be established by the Soviet to clarify the problem of Petrograd’s security and to draw up a plan for the defense of the city which could be popularly supported. Under Bolshevik supervision, this committee officially came into being on October 16 as the Military Revolutionary Committee.⁴⁴ Ostensibly created to organize the defense of Petrograd from the Germans and to save the Second Congress of Soviets from the counterrevolution, it became the directing body for the Bolshevik seizure of power.

The Military Revolutionary Committee was a formally elected organ of the Petrograd Soviet; among its approximately 66 members were Soviet officials and representatives of worker, soldier, and party organizations, Left SR’s, and Anarchists, as well as Bolsheviks. Actually, the Military Revolutionary Committee’s first chairman was a young Left SR, P. E. Lazimir, selected by the Bolsheviks with an eye toward maintaining the committee’s “non-party” character. However, beginning on October 20, when the Military Revolutionary Committee launched operations, its activities were effectively controlled by Trotsky and the central leadership of the Bolshevik Military Organization. As numerous historians have emphasized, the Military Revolutionary Committee’s efforts were handicapped by continuing self doubt and internal wrangling; yet on the whole the patient, cautious attack which Bolshevik strategists now managed to mount against the Provisional Government, the attention which they paid to retaining and expanding the support of the Soviet and the masses, and in this connection, the pains which they took to mask each forward step as a defense of the revolution and the Second Congress of Soviets contrast strikingly with the confused and erratic behavior of the party leadership in July.

In its first day of operation the Military Revolutionary Committee began substituting its own representatives with extensive command authority for government commissars in major garrison units, arms depots, and other militarily important points. A high percentage of these new commissars were well-known members of the Bolshevik Military Organization; many were young officers only recently released from the prisons in which they had languished since July. Now on October 20-22, with almost no exceptions, they were received by the troops with genuine enthusiasm. Somewhat earlier, an ad hoc conference of garrison delegates had been created to operate alongside the Military Revolutionary Committee, and during crucial stages in the seizure of power this conference of soldier delegates, the Military Revolutionary Committee’s commissar system, and regular company and regimental committees were effectively utilized to coordinate the activities of the troops in the struggle against the government.

By the evening of October 21, under intense pressure from Lenin, the Military Revolutionary Committee was ready for a test of strength with the government. On that date the committee sent a delegation to Colonel Polkovnikov with the demand that it be given the right to validate orders to the troops.⁴⁵ Not surprisingly, Polkovnikov rejected this demand, after which the Military Revolutionary Committee secured agreement from virtually the whole garrison that troop orders not countersigned by the Military Revolutionary Committee would be considered invalid.⁴⁶ It might be argued that for practical purposes, all this only confirmed procedures established much earlier; at least from the time of the April crisis the Provisional Government had been forced to take the attitudes of the Soviet into account in dealing with the troops. However, heretofore the majority socialists who dominated the Soviet supported the Provisional Government on fundamental political questions; hence only very rarely did it question orders from the Petrograd Military District. Now the situation was radically different; the authority of the Petrograd Soviet over the garrison meant that ultimate control of the troops was vested in a body openly committed to the immediate overthrow of the government.

Early on the morning of October 24, Kerensky initiated steps aimed at averting a coup d’état. Among other things, the Bolshevik newspapers Rabochii put’ and Soldat were raided and closed. According to official Soviet historiography concerned most of all with portraying the October revolution as a well-organized mass uprising and glorifying Lenin’s role in it, technical preparations were completed and the Bolshevik seizure of power commenced around midday, October 24, when the Military Revolutionary Committee openly resisted Kerensky’s belated effort to squelch the Bolsheviks and shortly before Lenin came out of hiding to take personal command of Bolshevik forces. During the following twenty-four hours, the Bolshevik newspapers were forcibly reopened and the telephone exchange, post office, state bank, railroad stations, main bridges, etc. were seized by Bolshevik-led workers, soldiers, and sailors on orders from the Military Revolutionary Committee. In the standard Soviet view, the overthrow of the Provisional Government culminated on the evening of the twenty-fifth with the storming of the Winter Palace, the arrest of government ministers, and the proclamation of the Soviet regime at the Second Congress of Soviets.

Yet when studying the development of the October Revolution, one is left with the feeling that the classic uprising directed by Lenin on October 24 and October 25 was supplementary in character.⁴⁷ This is not to imply that this armed insurrection may not have had great significance; in his detailed study, Red October, Robert V. Daniels, for one, argues persuasively that the decisive break with the majority socialists which resulted from the events of the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth freed Lenin’s hands for the creation of an all-Bolshevik dictatorship which otherwise would have been impossible.⁴⁸ It is probably also true that until Kerensky’s counterattack of the twenty-fourth most of Lenin’s followers, Trotsky included, were more concerned with maintaining the defensive and “legal” appearance of the Military Revolutionary Committee’s operations than with overthrowing the Provisional Government before the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets. Nonetheless Trotsky does not seem far off the mark when he suggests that the outcome of the insurrection of October 25 was “three-fourths, if not nine-tenths, settled” after the Military Revolutionary Committee assumed command of the garrison and control of arms distribution (i.e., on October 23),⁴⁹ for in a very real sense the Provisional Government and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee were disarmed without a shot being fired. In fact, a good case could probably be made for the argument that it was not until after the Military Revolutionary Committee had consolidated control of the garrison that the success of the classic general mass insurrection advocated by Lenin was assured.

What, then, was the significance of the crisis over the garrison for the Bolshevik seizure of power? Coming at the end of several weeks during which Lenin had tried with such little effect to prod his party into seizing power, at a time when prospects for overthrowing the Provisional Government before the Second Congress of Soviets appeared nil, and when the Bolshevik Party’s state of disarray was hardly distinguishable from that of its opponents, the conflict between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet over the removal of the Petrograd garrison provided a perfect immediate “cause” around which a decisive struggle with Kerensky could be waged. With the Kornilov affair fresh in mind, Petrograd soldiers needed little prodding from the Bolsheviks to see the proposed transfer of garrison troops as an attempt to disarm and destroy the revolution. In the Military Revolutionary Committee the garrison crisis provided an ostensibly non-party apparatus for the seizure of power; in addition, the fact that the battle against the government was to be waged over the removal of troops to the front insured that in its struggle with the Bolsheviks, the Provisional Government would receive no support from the garrison, inevitably its first and perhaps most important line of defense.

This is not to exaggerate the importance of the garrison in 1917. As it turned out, the overthrow of the Provisional Government did not require much military force. Moreover, the Bolshevik struggle to retain power was to reveal that when it came to actual fighting, both the sailors of the Baltic Fleet and the worker Red Guards were more reliable and effective than the troops of the garrison. The importance of developments in the Petrograd garrison in the summer of 1917 lies less in the garrison’s positive military contribution to the Bolshevik victory than in the disastrous effect that the demoralization of the garrison had upon attempts to reestablish public order and governmental authority and ultimately in the elimination of garrison troops as a significant military force on the side of the Provisional Government. Had the Bolsheviks been opposed by a few well armed and disciplined military units, it is not at all certain that they could have seized power; the crucial point is that by October there were almost no troops upon which the government could rely. That a similar process of disintegration had occurred in the provinces and at the front sealed the fate of the Provisional Government. Of course, the source of the government’s continuing difficulties with the garrison lay in its attempt to maintain Russia’s commitments in the war. This objective was behind Kerensky’s continuing and ultimately catastrophic efforts to restore a measure of order and discipline in the armed forces and initially, at least, to transfer a major portion of the garrison to the front. At the same time the Bolsheviks must be credited with having been the only major Russian political group to recognize the enormous potential significance of the garrison and to make a serious effort to obtain its support. As we have seen, the Bolshevik policy of tailoring the party’s program to the aspirations of the soldier and of attempting to make use of discontent among the troops of the Petrograd garrison in order to seize power was not without risk, as the July experience demonstrated. But undoubtedly this policy was of crucial significance to the Bolshevik triumph in October. At the time of the October Revolution the vast majority of Petrograd soldiers were not Bolshevik in the sense of supporting the creation of an exclusively Bolshevik government. The soldiers were anti-war and pro-Soviet; most of all they feared a second Kornilov. Hence the importance of Trotsky’s tactics. The soldiers of the Petrograd garrison supported the Bolsheviks in the struggle for transfer of all power to the Soviets because only the Bolsheviks were untainted by support for the war effort and only the overthrow of the Provisional Government seemed to offer them hope of avoiding a return to the injustices of the tsarist military system and death at the front.