Fall of Giants

The second time, the Bolsheviks won the vote.

Grigori was relieved. The soviet had backed the soldiers and set up an alternative military command.

They were one large step closer to power.

{III}

Next day, feeling optimistic, Grigori and the other leading Bolsheviks slipped quietly away from the Smolny in ones and twos, careful not to attract the attention of the secret police, and made their way to the large apartment of a comrade, Galina Flakserman, for the meeting of the Central Committee.

Grigori was nervous about the meeting and arrived early. He circled the block, looking for idlers who might be police spies, but he saw no one suspicious. Inside the building he reconnoitered the different exits-there were three-and determined the fastest way out.

The Bolsheviks sat around a big dining table, many wearing the leather coats that were becoming a kind of uniform for them. Lenin was not there, so they started without him. Grigori fretted about him-he might have been arrested-but he arrived at ten o’clock, disguised in a wig that kept slipping and almost made him look foolish.

However, there was nothing laughable about the resolution he proposed, calling for an armed uprising, led by the Bolsheviks, to overthrow the provisional government and take power.

Grigori was elated. Everyone wanted an armed uprising, of course, but most revolutionaries said the time was not yet ripe. At last the most powerful of them was saying now.

Lenin spoke for an hour. As always he was strident, banging the table, shouting, and abusing those who disagreed with him. His style worked against him-you wanted to vote down someone who was so rude. But despite that he was persuasive. His knowledge was wide, his political instinct was unerring, and few men could stand firm against the hammer blows of his logical arguments.

Grigori was on Lenin’s side from the start. The important thing was to seize power and end the dithering, he thought. All other problems could be solved later. But would the others agree?

Zinoviev spoke against. Normally a handsome man, he, too, had changed his appearance to confuse the police. He had grown a beard and cropped his luxuriant thatch of curly black hair. He thought Lenin’s strategy was too risky. He was afraid an uprising would give the right wing an excuse for a military coup. He wanted the Bolshevik party to concentrate on winning the elections for the Constituent Assembly.

This timid argument infuriated Lenin. “The provisional government is never going to hold a national election!” he said. “Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool and a dupe.”

Trotsky and Stalin backed the uprising, but Trotsky angered Lenin by saying they should wait for the All-Russia Congress of Soviets, scheduled to begin in ten days’ time.

That struck Grigori as a good idea-Trotsky was always reasonable-but Lenin surprised him by roaring: “No!”

Trotsky said: “We’re likely to have a majority among the delegates-”

“If the congress forms a government, it is bound to be a coalition!” Lenin said angrily. “The Bolsheviks admitted to the government will be centrists. Who could wish for that-other than a counterrevolutionary traitor?”

Trotsky flushed at the insult, but he said nothing.

Grigori realized Lenin was right. As usual, Lenin had thought farther ahead than anyone else. In a coalition, the Mensheviks’ first demand would be that the prime minister must be a moderate-and they would probably settle for anyone but Lenin.

It dawned on Grigori-and at the same time on the rest of the committee, he guessed-that the only way Lenin could become prime minister was by a coup.

The dispute raged until the small hours. In the end they voted by ten to two in favor of an armed uprising.

However, Lenin did not get all his own way. No date was set for the coup.

When the meeting was over, Galina produced a samovar and put out cheese, sausage, and bread for the hungry revolutionaries.

{IV}

As a child on Prince Andrei’s estate, Grigori had once witnessed the climax of a deer hunt. The dogs had brought down a stag just outside the village, and everyone had gone to look. When Grigori got there the deer was dying, the dogs already greedily eating the intestines spilling out of its ripped belly while the huntsmen on their horses swigged brandy in celebration. Yet even then the wretched beast had made one last attempt to fight back. It had swung its mighty antlers, impaling one dog and slashing another, and had, for a moment, almost looked as if it might struggle to its feet; then it had sunk back to the bloodstained earth and closed its eyes.

Grigori thought Prime Minister Kerensky, the leader of the provisional government, was like that stag. Everyone knew he was finished-except him.

As the bitter cold of a Russian winter closed around Petrograd like a fist, the crisis came to a head.