25) The Wavering Continues inside the Bolshevik Party

"Between the saints as the church paints them and the devils as the candidates for sainthood portray them, there are to be found living people. And it is they who make history. The high temper of the Bolshevik party expressed itself not in an absence of disagreements … but in the fact that in the most difficult circumstances it gathered itself in good season by means of inner crises, and made good its opportunity to interfere decisively in the course of events"

Trotsky's arrival - May 1917

Zinoviev and Kamenev attack 

The shift to the left in the Bolshevik Party only deepened Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s concerns. They chose to distribute a lengthy statement to party members opposing insurrection. Their alternative policy was for the Bolsheviks to form a strong opposition, perhaps managing to win a third of the seats, in the Constituent Assembly. Completely forgetting the Marxist theory of the state, they believed that, at one and the same time, the Bolsheviks could continue to conduct ‘revolutionary work’ through its majority in the soviets.

Somehow, Zinoviev and Kamenev imagined that a dual power between the proletariat’s soviets and the bourgeoisie’s Constituent Assembly could be peacefully maintained, allowing the Bolsheviks to gradually extend their support yet further.

But, as Trotsky explains: “A revolutionary situation cannot be preserved at will. If the Bolsheviks had not seized the power in October and November, in all probability they would not have seized it at all. Instead of firm leadership the masses would have found among the Bolsheviks that same disparity between word and deed which they were already sick of, and they would have ebbed away in the course of two or three months from this party which had deceived their hopes, just as they had recently ebbed away from the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. A part of the workers would have fallen into indifferentism, another part would have burned up their force … in anarchistic flare-ups … dictated by revenge and despair. The breathing-spell thus offered would have been used by the bourgeoisie to conclude a separate peace [with Germany], and stamp out the revolutionary organisations. Russia would again have been included in the circle of capitalist states as a semi-imperialist, semi-colonial country. The proletarian revolution would have been deferred to an indefinite future” (86).

But it was now Zinoviev and Kamenev who were in breach of party discipline, isolated within the C.C., not Lenin. A new meeting of the Central Committee, together with representatives from other key party organisations, was called, again at Lenin’s insistence. It was held in the suburb of Lesny on October 16th. Trotsky himself was absent, as he was busy guiding the resolution on the MRC through the Soviet which was meeting at the same time.

By now, the original deadline posed for the insurrection at the previous C.C. of the 15th had passed. As Joffé pointed out, this had proved to be too tight a deadline in practice, not just for organisational reasons but also to allow sufficient time to politically prepare support amongst the masses.

It was perhaps just as well that, on the 17th, the Compromisers announced their postponement of the opening of the Congress of Soviets to the 25th.

But Kamenev used the failure to meet the deadline as an argument to show that an insurrection at any time was pure adventurism. Others, like Miliutin, added their view that the party should be ready for defensive action should the government attack, but should not take the initiative themselves.

Lenin attacked their pessimistic appraisal and was supported by Krylenko who had just returned from the Northern Regional Congress. However, Krylenko argued against setting a precise date for insurrection, taking up the approach being pursued through the MRC which Trotsky was outlining at the Soviet. This made the conflict between the garrison and its command the basis of the plan of insurrection: “The question of the removal of the troops is just that fighting issue upon which the struggle is taking place. The attack upon us is thus already a fact, and this we can make use of. It is not necessary to worry about who shall begin, for the thing is already begun” (87).

Lenin, whose underground existence had left him unable to participate in the actual debate taking place amongst the workers and soldiers, still feared any delays which might be interpreted as support for Zinoviev and Kamenev’s outright opposition. However, this was now the real principled debate within the party – how to find the best route to the insurrection, both technically and politically.

In practice, the insurrection continued to mature along the lines set out at the Military Revolutionary Committee with the support of the Soviet and the Garrison Conference. With the political reliability of some elements in doubt, and with its members scattered from Moscow to Finland, the Bolshevik C.C. actually only played a secondary role at this stage. “The minutes show that the most important questions – that about the Congress of Soviets, the garrison, the Military Revolutionary Committee – were not discussed in advance in the Central Committee and did not issue from its initiative, but arose in Smolny out of the practical activity of the Soviet, and were worked over in the circle of soviet leaders – oftenest with the participation of Sverdlov” (88).

Nevertheless, the victory by twenty votes to two (Zinoviev and Kamenev), with three abstentions, for Lenin’s resolution calling for ‘an all-sided and most vigorous preparation of armed insurrection’ at the October 16th meeting was another important confirmation of Party policy.

But Zinoviev and Kamenev, rather than accepting the vote, issued a declaration the following day attacking the C.C.’s decision. Shamefully, they chose not to print their opposition on this sensitive internal matter in the Bolshevik press, but in the paper published by the Menshevik, Gorky.

Trotsky answers the rumours

The debates in the party and soviets, factories and barracks, inevitably created rumours that the insurrection was at hand. Newspaper editorials were now devoted to the issue with Gorky demanding the Bolsheviks refute the suggestion that they were planning a seizure of power. But the uncertainty was disconcerting the workers and soldiers, as well as the enemies of the revolution. Some began to ask whether an insurrection was perhaps being prepared behind their backs. The Bolsheviks needed to clarify the situation.

On the evening of October 18th, after the Garrison Conference, Trotsky made a declaration to the Petrograd Soviet: “ ‘During the last days … the press has been full of … rumours. The Soviet is an elective institution, and cannot have a decision which would not be known to the workers and soldiers. I declare in the name of the Soviet that no armed actions have been settled upon by us, but if the Soviet in the course of events should be obliged to set the date for a coming-out, the workers and soldiers would come out to the last man at its summons’. The delegates understood: the battle was near, but without them and over their heads the signal would not be given” (89).

“However, besides a reassuring explanation, the masses had to have a clear revolutionary prospective. For this purpose the speaker united the two questions – removal of the garrison and coming Congress of Soviets. ‘We will not permit them ... to strip Petrograd of its revolutionary garrison. It is known to the bourgeoisie that the Petrograd Soviet is going to propose to the Congress of Soviets that they seize the power. And foreseeing an inevitable battle, the bourgeois classes are trying to disarm Petrograd. At the first attempt of the counter-revolution to break up the Congress, we will answer with a counter-attack which will be ruthless, and which we will carry through to the end.’ Here, too, the announcement of a decisive political offensive was made under the formula of military defence” (90).

As Sukhanov, a Menshevik intellectual opposed to insurrection, later aptly put it: “For Smolny … the question of the garrison is a question of insurrection; for the soldiers it is a question of their own fate. ‘It would be difficult to imagine a more fortunate starting point for the policy of those days.’ ” (91).

The C.C. divisions widen

While the MRC was extending its influence over the capital, the dispute within the Bolshevik leadership was growing more acute.

Straight after Trotsky had spoken to the Petrograd Soviet on the 18th, Kamenev had deceitfully stepped in to announce that he supported everything that the MRC President had said. Of course, for tactical reasons, Trotsky had avoided directly admitting that the Bolsheviks were preparing for insurrection.

“Whereas Trotsky was juridically screening a policy of attack with a speciously defensive formula, Kamenev tried to make use of Trotsky’s formula – with which he was in radical disagreement – in order to screen a directly opposite policy” (92).

Kamenev’s action had been intolerable. Trotsky decided to refer the matter to the next meeting of the Bolshevik C.C. on October 20th. In the meantime, Kamenev had resigned from the Central Committee in order to himself be able to agitate against insurrection.

Sverdlov supported Trotsky’s motion accepting Kamenev’s resignation and read out a letter from Lenin attacking Kamenev for his trickery and demanding both his and Zinoviev’s expulsion from the party for making their declaration in Gorky’s paper. Meanwhile Zinoviev, along with Lunacharsky, had separately written to the party press also dishonestly saying that they ‘agreed’ with Trotsky as if to claim that he sided with them in opposing insurrection.

“It is easier to theorise about a revolution afterward than absorb it into your flesh and blood before it takes place. The approach of an insurrection has inevitably produced, and always will produce, crisis in the insurrectionary parties. Just as Lenin more fully and resolutely than others expressed in the autumn months of 1917 the objective necessity of an insurrection, and the will of the masses of revolution, so Zinoviev and Kamenev more frankly than others incarnated the blocking tendencies of the party … the influence of petty bourgeois connections, and the pressure of the ruling classes” (93).

“Between the saints as the church paints them and the devils as the candidates for sainthood portray them, there are to be found living people. And it is they who make history. The high temper of the Bolshevik party expressed itself not in an absence of disagreements … but in the fact that in the most difficult circumstances it gathered itself in good season by means of inner crises, and made good its opportunity to interfere decisively in the course of events. Lenin taught the party to create its own social opinion, resting upon the thoughts and feelings of the rising class. Thus by a process of selection and education, and in continual struggle, the Bolshevik party created not only a political but a moral medium of its own, independent of bourgeois social opinion and implacably opposed to it. Only this permitted the Bolsheviks to overcome the waverings in their own ranks and reveal in action that courageous determination without which the October victory would have been impossible” (94).

The role of Stalin

Shamefully Stalin, in his role as one of the editors of the party paper, had published Zinoviev’s dishonest letter with an accompanying note declaring sympathetically that, after all, the whole party was fundamentally ‘in agreement’ and criticising Lenin for being too sharp. “As though at that moment there could be a more fundamental question than the question of insurrection!” (95).

Stalin was in the minority voting to refuse Kamenev’s resignation and also argued, unsuccessfully, that Kamenev and Zinoviev should be allowed to continue their struggle against the C.C. decision, just when all energies needed to be directed towards the impending insurrection!

“This conduct on the part of Stalin might seem inexplicable in the light of the legend which has been created around him. In reality it fully corresponds to his spiritual mould and his political methods. His suspicious caution almost organically compels him at moments of great decision and deep difference of opinion to retire into the shadow, to wait, and if possible to insure himself against both outcomes. Stalin made [his] editorial comment by no means through light-mindedness … he did not think it advisable to burn irrevocably his bridge to the camp of the enemies of the uprising” (96).

“Stalin took no part at all in the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee and never appeared at its meetings … He was always a “centrist” in Bolshevism. That is, he tended organically to occupy an intermediate position between Marxism and opportunism. The self-contradictory character of centrism made it impossible for Stalin to occupy any independent position in the revolution. On the other hand, those traits which paralysed him at the great turning point of history - watchful waiting and empirical manoeuvring - must necessarily assure him a genuine ascendancy when the mass movement begins to ebb and the functionary comes to the front with his zeal to consolidate what has been attained - that is, primarily to insure his own position against new disturbances. The functionary, ruling in the name of a revolution, has need of revolutionary prestige. In his capacity as an ‘old Bolshevik’, Stalin proved the most suitable incarnation of this prestige imaginable” (97).