1917: the year of revolutions (2) October

Poster for Sergei Eisenstein's film, October.

This post is indebted to a number of books, most especially Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (Pimlico, 1997).

Key places 

1. The Smolny Institute, a former secondary school belonging to the ‘Society for the upbringing of Well-Born Girls’, founded by Catherine II. It had been the headquarters of the Soviet Executive since the July Days. The Bolshevik Central Committee was in Room 36. The Military Revolutionary Committee met on the 3rd floor. 
2. The Winter Palace where Kerensky had transferred his headquarters in July. 
3. The Petrograd garrison. 
4. The cruiser Aurora moored opposite the Winter Palace.
5. The Mariinsky Palace: home of the Pre-Parliament, a recently appointed body, giving a facade of democratic government until the Constituent Assembly met. 

Key organisations 

1. The All-Russian Congress of Soviets (not yet dominated by the Bolsheviks, though they were rapidly gaining influence). 
2. The Military Revolutionary Committee. This had been formed on 12 October and held its first organisational meeting on 20 October. It was a Bolshevik organisation, though it included Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Its real leader was Trotsky. 

After the resolution of 10 October, the Bolsheviks had decided on a revolution, but still did not agree on the date. Against fierce opposition from Zinoviev and Kamenev, Lenin continued to argue for a pre-emptive seizure of power before the meeting of the All Russian Congress of Soviets. 

The Winter Palace, now the Hermitage Museum and Art Gallery.

On 23 October, Kerensky ordered the closure of two Bolshevik newspapers, closed down the bridges over the Neva River and ordered troops to defend the Winter Palace. The cruiser, Aurora, whose sailors were heavily Bolshevik, was put out to sea. Within a few hours, however, it had returned to its base.

On 24 October, Trotsky, from his headquarters in the Smolny, set in motion the counter-measures to coordinate the revolution. On the night of 24-5 October the Red Guards secured the armoury at the Peter and Paul Fortress, and seized control of railway stations, post and telegraph offices, the state bank, and the electricity station. By dawn, they were in control of most of the city with the exception of the central zone around the Winter Palace. Kerensky fled the capital in the US ambassador’s car in search of troops. Members of his Cabinet remained in the Winter Palace.

On the morning of 25 October Bolshevik soldiers and sailors dispersed the Preparliament deputies in the Mariinsky Palace.  By this time about 5,000 sailors had arrived from the Kronstadt base, and this was sufficient to ensure the success of the uprising. Lenin made his way in disguise to the Smolny where Trotsky announced to an emergency meeting of the Petrograd Soviet that ‘Kerensky’s power has been overthrown’. Lenin then harangued the meeting on the need for a Soviet government ‘without any participation whatever by the bourgeoisie’. This was the moment when he took over the revolution and his party. Power could now be presented as a fait accompli and Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries were to be excluded. 

At 6 pm the assault on the Winter Palace began. This so-called ‘storming’ was more like a house arrest since most of the defending forces had left for home before the assault began. (More people were killed during the filming of Eisenstein’s October than in the actual storming.) Technical factors had prevented an earlier assault: the Baltic sailors arrived late, field guns discovered at the last moment were found to be inoperable, no red lantern could be found to start the assault. From Lenin's point of view, these delays were infuriating – it was vital to him to have the seizure of power completed before the opening of the Soviet Congress. But in fact, the Winter Palace could have been taken at any time. The building was defended by two companies of Cossacks, some young cadets from the military school, and 200 women from the Shock Battalion of Death - about 3000 soldiers in all. Morale was very low and they were short of food and ammunition. By the evening only 300 were left. 

1917: the year of revolutions (1) February to October

Workers on the streets of Petrograd.

The third winter of the war coincided with unprecedentedly cold weather (-15 C) in Petrograd. Arctic frosts and blizzards brought the railways to a standstill. Factories closed and thousands of workers were laid off. Food was short.

On Thursday 23 February the temperature rose suddenly and people left their houses. This was International Women's Day, an important date in the socialist calendar and towards noon thousands of women, students and peasants, began to march towards the city centre to protest for equal rights. The march coincided with a strike of women textile workers who were protesting about bread shortages. They were quickly joined by their menfolk from the neighbouring metal works and as they marched towards the city centre they shouted ‘Bread’ and ‘Down with the Tsar’. By the afternoon some 100,000 workers had come out on strike and marched to the city centre.  

On 25 February a three-day general strike began. All the city’s factories ceased to operate, as some 200,000 workers joined the demonstrations, which now had a more political flavour. On Sunday 26 February, police and soldiers fired on marchers, shooting more than fifty people dead. 

In the early hours of 27 February the revolution began in earnest when the Petrograd garrison voted to disobey orders to fire on civilians. Soldiers and workers captured the Arsenal, occupied the telephone exchange and most of the railway stations, requisitioned cars and drove round the streets firing at police snipers and being fired on by them. 

The Peter and Paul Fortress, Petrograd

On 28 February the crowd stormed the Peter and Paul Fortress, ‘the Russian Bastille’ (though the prisons were empty). After some fighting, the red flag was finally raised.

The February Revolution was spontaneous and involved the great mass of the civilian population of Petrograd.  It was more violent than the subsequent October Revolution – nearly 1500 people were killed. Symbols of the old state power were destroyed, tsarist states smashed or beheaded, policemen hunted down and lynched.

But the revolutionary leaders were taken by surprise. They were in exile, in prison or abroad. Lenin was in Zurich, Trotsky in New York. Having spent their whole lives waiting for the revolution they failed to recognise it when it came. 

Russia in the First World War

Russian prisoners after Tannenberg,
August 1914
Public domain

On 1 August 1914 Germany declared war on Russia. Austria-Hungary declared war on the 6th. The immediate cause was Germany’s decision to support Austria-Hungary in her struggle with Russia in the Balkans. With the declarations of war, Russia experienced a wave of patriotic fervour. The Duma dissolved itself in a gesture of solidarity. St Petersburg lost its German name and was renamed Petrograd.

It is not true that Russia was unprepared for war. After the defeat by Japan, there had been considerable military expenditure, and by 1914 she was spending more than Germany on her armed forces. Her standing army of 1.4 million men was the largest in the world. Fully mobilised, she could field over 5 million soldiers. The trouble was that she was well prepared for a short war, but had no real contingency plans for a long war of attrition. Whereas the other European powers proved able to adapt, the tsarist system proved too unwieldy and inflexible. 

Russia fought a south-west war against the Austrians and a north-west war against the Germans. In mid-August the Russians broke through in Galicia, forcing the Austrians to retreat. This established the military reputation of General Alexei A. Brusilov, one of the most brilliant of the First World War commanders. 

General Alexei Brusilov
A brilliant commander with
an impossible task.
Public domain

On the north-western front, by contrast, the Russian advance ended in defeat at the hands of the Germans at Tannenberg in East Prussia on 31 August 1914. A second defeat at the Masurian Lakes in September compounded Russia's humiliation. A quarter of a million men were lost.

The army lacked a clear command structure. Military authority was divided between the War Ministry, Supreme Headquarters and the Front commands. Commanders were appointed for their loyalty to the court rather than their competence. The aristocratic generals wanted to fight a nineteenth-century cavalry war and scorned the art of building trenches. The trains were filled with horses and fodder.

Russia: the early twentieth century

Nicholas II 

Nicholas II (1894-1917)

Nicholas succeeded his father in November 1894. Later that month he married the German princess Alix of Hesse (Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna). He and Alexandra were crowned at the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow on 14 May 1896. The coronation was marred by the deaths of more than a thousand people at the tragedy of the Khondynka Field. Nicholas was not responsible for the disaster, but his tin-eared response was a public-relations disaster.

His reign was a tragedly for himself and for Russia. In 1904 Alexandra at last gave birth to a male heir after four daughters - but the longed-for son was a haemophiliac. In her desperation, the tsarina turned to the holy man, Grigori Rasputin, and she came completely under his influence.

Opposition

The Russian government was confronted with an almost universally hostile intelligentsia (a Russian word), and the autocracy of Nicholas II was increasingly challenged by both revolutionaries and constitutionalists. In 1900 the peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party was founded. In the 1880s many opposition movements became dominated by the ideology of Marxism.

In 1898 nine delegates from workers’ associations and Marxist discussion groups met at Minsk and formed the first ‘Congress of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party’. Most of the participants were well known to the secret police, the Okhrana, and were shortly afterwards arrested and imprisoned.

One leader was rapidly emerging. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk in 1870, the son of an inspector of schools for the province. Both his parents came from noble families. In 1887 his elder brother Alexander Ulyanov, was executed for his involvement with an abortive plot to assassinate the Tsar. When he enrolled as a law student at the University of Kazan he was drawn into another clandestine group calling itself the People’s Will. At this stage Marxism was only one of a number of revolutionary ideologies.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)
in 1916.
Public domain.

At university he read Das Kapital and he was expelled for his subversive views. But he then enrolled at St Petersburg university and qualified as a lawyer. In 1883 he arrived in St Petersburg. In the summer of 1895 he travelled to Switzerland, but returned to St Petersburg in the same year. In the winter he was arrested by the Okhrana for incitement to strikes. After a year in prison he was sentenced to three years in Siberia (1897-1900) where he married a fellow-revolutionary, Nadezhda Krupskaya.