Lenin, Trotsky and the October Revolution
A Sealed Train and a Slogan
When the Tsar fell in March 1917, Lenin was in Zürich. Cut off from Russia by the war, he reached the Finland Station in Petrograd on 3 April thanks to the German government, who paid for a sealed railway carriage to take him through Germany. They wanted Russia knocked out of the war; they expected Lenin to oblige. He delivered. The next morning he stunned even his own Bolshevik colleagues by reading out the April Theses: no cooperation with the Provisional Government; immediate end to the war; all power to the soviets; nationalisation of land; the slogan ‘Peace, Land, Bread’.
Lenin’s slogan ‘Peace, Land, Bread’ was the political masterstroke of 1917. ‘Peace’ appealed to soldiers and to war-weary cities; ‘Land’ appealed to peasants who wanted the noble estates broken up; ‘Bread’ appealed to workers facing inflation and food queues. No other party offered all three.
Trotsky Joins
Lenin’s most important new ally was Leon Trotsky, who returned to Petrograd from New York in May. Trotsky had spent fifteen years as an independent Marxist outside both factions of the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks; he had been close to the former at the 1903 split. He formally joined the Bolsheviks with his group at the party’s Sixth Congress that summer. He was arguably their best public speaker, a battle-hardened veteran of the 1905 St Petersburg Soviet, and a brilliant organiser. With Lenin in hiding for parts of the year and other senior Bolsheviks (Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev) more cautious, Trotsky’s combination of theory, oratory and military instinct would matter decisively.
A Disciplined Party
The Bolsheviks were not large in 1917. In April they had perhaps 24,000 members; by October maybe 350,000. What made them effective was not size but discipline. Lenin’s 1903 demand for a small party of professional revolutionaries had produced a body where the central committee’s decisions were binding on every cell. Their newspaper Pravda repeated the same slogans week after week. Their agitators were trained to give the same answers to the same questions in any factory or barracks. While other socialist groups debated, the Bolsheviks acted.
After the Kornilov Affair in August 1917 (covered in the previous lesson), the Bolsheviks emerged with arms, prestige, and growing soviet majorities. By 25 September they controlled the Petrograd Soviet under Trotsky as chairman. By early October Lenin, still hiding in Finland, was writing letters to the central committee demanding immediate insurrection.
On 10 October (OS) the Bolshevik central committee met in secret in Petrograd. Lenin had returned in disguise. He demanded an immediate seizure of power before the Constituent Assembly elections, which he expected the Bolsheviks to lose. Two senior Bolsheviks — Kamenev and Zinoviev — opposed insurrection and were so worried they leaked the plan to the press. Most of the committee voted with Lenin. Practical preparation was handed to Trotsky’s newly created Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which would coordinate the seizure under the cover of defending the Soviet from a supposed government coup.
The October Insurrection
The seizure of power began on the night of 24–25 October (6–7 November, NS). Sailors from the Kronstadt naval base, Bolshevik Red Guards from the factories and pro-Bolshevik units of the Petrograd garrison occupied the central railway stations, telegraph office, post office, state bank and bridges. Resistance was minimal; many Provisional Government supporters had already fled or simply refused to fight. Kerensky escaped Petrograd that morning to look for loyal troops, leaving his cabinet to be arrested in the Winter Palace.
The Winter Palace fell in the early hours of 26 October. The cruiser Aurora fired blank shells from the Neva to signal the assault. Inside, the cabinet was guarded by a few hundred officer cadets and the Women’s Battalion of Death; resistance was brief and casualties light. Soviet propaganda would later film a stylised ‘storming’, but in reality the takeover was closer to a tightly organised coup than a popular uprising.
As the Winter Palace fell, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened in the Smolny Institute. The Bolsheviks held a narrow majority. Mensheviks and right-wing Socialist Revolutionaries walked out in protest at the seizure of power, leaving the floor to Lenin’s party and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Trotsky famously dismissed the departing Mensheviks: ‘You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!’ The Congress passed the Decree on Peace (calling for an immediate end to the war) and the Decree on Land (abolishing private ownership). A new government — the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) — was named, with Lenin as chairman.
Why the Bolsheviks Won in 1917
The Bolshevik victory was not predetermined. It came from the combination of two long-running weaknesses in their opponents and three Bolshevik strengths. Their opponents’ weaknesses: the Provisional Government refused to end the war or distribute land, and Dual Power meant it could not coerce its own population. Their strengths: a clear, popular slogan that no rival could match; a tightly disciplined party that could act when others debated; and Trotsky’s organisational skill in turning the Petrograd Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee into the instrument of the seizure.
It is fashionable to argue that the Bolsheviks were lucky — that in any of a dozen moments between April and October the situation could have gone the other way. That is true. It is also true that they were the only party who had organised themselves to take advantage of luck when it came.
The October Revolution was a tightly planned coup, not a mass uprising. Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee coordinated armed workers, sailors and pro-Bolshevik soldiers to seize key buildings on the night of 24–25 October. The Winter Palace fell in the early hours of 26 October with light casualties. The Second Congress of Soviets ratified the new government the next morning.