Fall of Giants

Grigori heard a few scattered shots but there was not much fighting. He found no government ministers on the ground floor. The thought occurred to him they might have sneaked away, and he suffered a panicky moment. He did not want to have to report to Trotsky and Lenin that the members of Kerensky’s government had slipped through his fingers.

With Isaak and two other men he ran up a broad staircase to check the next floor. Together they burst through a pair of double doors into a meeting room and there found what was left of the provisional government: a small group of frightened men in suits and ties, sitting at a table and on armchairs around the room, wide-eyed with apprehension.

One of them mustered a remnant of authority. “The provisional government is here-what do you want?” he said.

Grigori recognized Alexander Konovalov, the wealthy textile manufacturer who was Kerensky’s deputy prime minister.

Grigori replied: “You are all under arrest.” It was a good moment, and he savored it.

He turned to Isaak. “Write down their names.” He recognized all of them. “Konovalov, Maliantovich, Nikitin, Tereschenko… ” When the list was complete he said: “Take them to the Peter and Paul Fortress and put them in the cells. I’ll go to the Smolny and give Trotsky and Lenin the good news.”

He left the building. Crossing Palace Square, he stopped for a minute, remembering his mother. She had died on this spot twelve years ago, shot by the tsar’s guards. He turned around and looked at the vast palace, with its rows of white columns and the moonlight glinting off hundreds of windows. In a sudden fit of rage, he shook his fist at the building. “That’s what you get, you devils,” he said aloud. “That’s what you get for killing her.”

He waited until he felt calm again. I don’t even know who I’m talking to, he thought. He jumped into his dust-colored armored car, waiting beside a dismantled barricade. “To the Smolny,” he told the driver.

As he drove the short distance he began to feel elated. Now we really have won, he told himself. We are the victors. The people have overthrown their oppressors.

He ran up the steps of the Smolny and into the hall. The place was packed, and the Congress of Soviets had opened. Trotsky had not been able to keep on postponing it. That was bad news. It would be just like the Mensheviks, and the other milquetoast revolutionaries, to demand a place in the new government even though they had done nothing to overthrow the old.

A fog of tobacco smoke hung around the chandeliers. The members of the presidium were seated on the platform. Grigori knew most of them, and he studied the composition of the group. The Bolsheviks occupied fourteen of the twenty-five seats, he noted. That meant the party had the largest number of delegates. But he was horrified to see that the chairman was Kamenev-a moderate Bolshevik who had voted against an armed uprising! As Lenin had warned, the congress was shaping up for another feeble compromise.

Grigori scanned the delegates in the hall and spotted Lenin in the front row. He went over and said to the man in the next seat: “I have to talk to Ilich-let me have your chair.” The man looked resentful, but after a moment he got up.

Grigori spoke into Lenin’s ear. “The Winter Palace is in our hands,” he said. He gave the names of the ministers who had been arrested.

“Too late,” said Lenin bleakly.

That was what Grigori had feared. “What’s happening here?”

Lenin looked black. “Martov proposed the motion.” Julius Martov was Lenin’s old enemy. Martov had always wanted the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to be like the British Labour Party, and fight for working people by democratic means; and his quarrel with Lenin over this issue had split the SDLP, back in 1903, into its two factions, Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Martov’s Mensheviks. “He argued for an end to street fighting followed by negotiations for a democratic government.”

“Negotiations?” Grigori said incredulously. “We’ve seized power!”

“We supported the motion,” Lenin said tonelessly.

Grigori was surprised. “Why?”

“We would have lost if we opposed it. We have three hundred of the six hundred and seventy delegates. We’re the largest party by a big margin, but we don’t have an overall majority.”

Grigori could have wept. The coup had come too late. There would be another coalition, its composition dictated by deals and compromises, and the government would dither on while Russians starved at home and died at the front.

“But they’re attacking us anyway,” Lenin added.

Grigori listened to the current speaker, someone he did not know. “This congress was called to discuss the new government, yet what do we find?” the man was saying angrily. “An irresponsible seizure of power has already occurred and the will of the congress has been preempted! We must save the revolution from this mad venture.”

There was a storm of protest from the Bolshevik delegates. Grigori heard Lenin saying: “Swine! Bastard! Traitor!”

Kamenev called for order.