As part of the build-up to the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution of November 1917, we reproduce here chapter 26 of Leon Trotsky’s My Life, headed From July to October. This book can be ordered at a special price from Wellred Books – just click here .
From July to October
On June 4, a declaration that I
had submitted concerning Kerensky’s preparation for an offensive at the
front was read by the Bolshevik faction at the congress of the Soviets.
We had pointed out that the offensive was an adventure that threatened
the very existence of the army. But the Provisional government was
growing intoxicated with its own speechifying. The ministers thought of
the masses of soldiers, stirred to their very depths by the revolution,
as so much soft clay to be moulded as they pleased. Kerensky toured the
front, adjured and threatened the troops, kneeled, kissed the earth – in
a word, downed it in every possible way, while he failed to answer any
of the questions tormenting the soldiers. He had deceived himself by his
cheap effects, and, assured of the support of the congress of the
Soviets, ordered the offensive. When the calamity that the Bolsheviks
had warned against came, the Bolsheviks were made the scapegoats. They
were hounded furiously. The reaction, which the Kadet party was
shielding, pressed in from all sides, demanding our heads.
The faith of the masses in the Provisional government was hopelessly
undermined. At this second stage of the revolution, Petrograd was again
too far in the van. In the July days, this vanguard came to an open
clash with Kerensky’s government. It was not yet an uprising, but only a
reconnaissance that went deep. But it had already become obvious in the
July encounter that Kerensky had no “democratic” army behind him; that
the forces supporting him against us were those of a counter-revolution.
During the session in the Taurid Palace on July 3, I learned of the
demonstration of the machine-gun regiment and its appeal to other troops
and to factory-workers. The news came as a surprise to me. The
demonstration had been spontaneous, at the initiative of the masses, but
next day it went farther, now with the participation of our party. The
Taurid Palace was overrun by the people. They had only one slogan:
“Power to the Soviets.”
In front of the palace, a suspicious-booking group of men who had
kept aloof from the crowd seized the minister of agriculture, Chernov,
and put him in an automobile. The crowd watched indifferently; at any
rate, their sympathy was not with him. The news of Chernov’s seizure and
of the danger that threatened him reached the palace. The Populists
decided to use machine-gun armored cars to rescue their leader. The
decline of their popularity was making them nervous; they wanted to show
a firm hand. I decided to try to go with Chernov in the automobile away
from the crowd, in order that I might release him afterward. But a
Bolshevik, Raskolnikov, a lieutenant in the Baltic navy, who had brought
the Kronstadt sailors to the demonstration, excitedly insisted on
releasing Chernov at once, to prevent people from saying that he had
been arrested by the Kronstadt men. I decided to try to carry out
Raskolnikov’s wish. I will let him speak for himself.
“It is difficult to say how long the turbulence of the
masses would have continued,” the impulsive lieutenant says in his
memoirs, “but for the intervention of Comrade Trotsky. He jumped on the
front of the automobile, and with an energetic wave of his hand, like a
man who was tired of waiting, gave the signal for silence. Instantly,
everything calmed down, and there was dead quiet. In a loud, clear and
ringing voice, Lev Davydovich made a short speech, ending with ‘those in
favor of violence to Chernov raise their hands!’ Nobody even opened his
mouth,” continues Raskolnikov; “no one uttered a word of protest.
‘Citizen Chernov, you are free,’ Trotsky said, as he turned around
solemnly to the minister of agriculture and with a wave of his hand,
invited him to leave the automobile. Chernov was half-dead and
half-alive. I helped him to get out of the automobile, and with an
exhausted, expressionless look and a hesitating, unsteady walk, he went
up the steps and disappeared into the vestibule of the palace. Satisfied
with his victory, Lev Davydovich walked away with him.”
If one discounts the unnecessarily pathetic tone, the
scene is described correctly. It did not keep the hostile press from
asserting that I had Chernov seized to have him lynched. Chernov shyly
kept silent; how could a “People’s” minister confess his indebtedness
not to his own popularity, but to the intervention of a Bolshevik for
the safety of his head?
Delegation after delegation demanded, in the name of the
demonstrants, that the Executive Committee take the power. Chiedze,
Tzereteli, Dan, and Gotz were sitting in the presidium like statues.
They did not answer the delegations, and looked blankly off into space
or exchanged perturbed and cryptic glances. Bolsheviks spoke one after
another in support of the delegations of workers and soldiers. The
members of the presidium were silent. They were waiting – but for what?
Hours passed in this way. Then, in the middle of the night, the halls of
the palace resounded suddenly with the triumphant blare of trumpets.
The members of the presidium came to life as if they had been touched by
an electric current. Some one solemnly reported that the Volyn regiment
had arrived from the front to put itself of the disposal of the Central
Executive Committee. In all of the Petrograd garrison, the “democracy”
had not had a single unit that it could rely on. And so it had had to
wait until an armed force could come from the front.
Now the whole setting changed immediately. The delegations were
driven out; Bolsheviks were not allowed to speak. The leaders of the
democracy were wreaking on us their vengeance for the fear that the
masses had made them suffer. Speeches from the platform of the Executive
Committee told of an armed mutiny suppressed by the loyal troops of the
revolution. The Bolsheviks were declared a counter-revolutionary party.
The arrival of that one Volyn regiment had done all this. Three and a
half months later, the same regiment co-operated wholeheartedly in the
overthrow of Kerensky’s government.
On the morning of the fifth I met Lenin. The offensive by the masses
had been beaten off. “Now they will shoot us down, one by one,” said
Lenin. “This is the right time for them.” But he overestimated the
opponent – not his venom, but his courage and ability to act. They did
not shoot us down one by one, although they were not far from it.
Bolsheviks were being beaten down in the streets and killed. Military
students sacked the Kseshinskaya palace and the printing-works of the Pravda. The whole street in front of the works was littered with manuscripts, and among those destroyed was my pamphlet To the Slanderers.
The deep reconnaissance of July had been transformed into a one-sided
battle. The enemy were easily victorious, because we did not fight. The
party was paying dearly for it. Lenin and Zinoviev were in hiding.
General arrests, followed by beatings, were the order of the day.
Cossacks and military students confiscated the money of those arrested,
on the ground that it was “German money.” Many of our sympathizers and
half-friends turned their backs on us. In the Taurid Palace, we were
proclaimed counter-revolutionists and were actually put outside the law.
The situation in the ruling circles of the party was bad. Lenin was
away; Kamenev’s wing was raising its head. Many – and these included
Stalin – simply let events take their own course, so that they might
show their wisdom the day after. The Bolshevik faction in the Central
Executive Committee felt orphaned in the Taurid Palace. It sent a
delegation to ask me if I would speak to them about the situation,
although I was not yet a member of the party; my formal joining had been
delayed until the party congress, soon to meet. I agreed readily, of
course. My talk with the Bolshevik faction established moral bonds of
the sort that are forged only under the enemy’s heaviest blows. I said
then that after this crisis we were to expect a rapid up swing; that the
masses would become twice as strongly attached to us when they had
verified the truth of our declaration by facts; that it was necessary to
keep a strict watch on every revolutionary, for at such moments men are
weighed on scales that do not err. Even now I recall with pleasure the
warmth and gratitude that the members showed me when I left them. “Lenin
is away,” Muralov said, “and of the others, only Trotsky has kept his
head.”
If I had been writing these memoirs under different circumstances –
although in other circumstances I should hardly have been writing them
at all – I should have hesitated to include much of what I say in these
pages. But now I cannot forget that widely organized lying about the
past which is one of the chief activities of the epigones. My friends
are in prison or in exile. I am obliged to speak of myself in a way that
I should never have done under other conditions. For me, it is a
question not merely of historical truth but also of a political struggle
that is still going on.
My unbroken fighting friendship as well as my political friendship
with Muralov began then. I must say at least a few words about the man.
Muralov is an old Bolshevik who went through the revolution of 1905 in
Moscow. In Serpukhov, in 1906, he was caught in the pogrom of the Black
Hundred – carried out, as usual, under the protection of the police.
Muralov is a magnificent giant, as fearless as he is kind. With a few
others, he found himself in a ring of enemies who had surrounded the
building of the Zemstvo administration. Muralov came out of the building
with a revolver in his hand and walked evenly toward the crowd. It
moved back a little. But the shock company of the Black Hundred blocked
his path, and the cabmen began to howl taunts at him. “Clear a way,”
ordered the giant without slackening his advance, as he raised the hand
holding the revolver. Several men pounced on him. He shot one of them
down and wounded another. The crowd drew back again. With the same even
step, cutting his way through the crowd like an ice-breaker, Muralov
walked on and on toward Moscow.
His subsequent trial lasted for two years, and, in spite of the
frenzy of the reaction that swept over the country, he was acquitted. An
agricultural expert by training, a soldier in an aut mobile detachment
during the imperialist war, a leader of the October fighting in Moscow,
Muralov became the first commander of the Moscow military region after
the victory. He was a fearless marshal of the revolutionary war, always
steady, simple, and unaffected. In his campaigning he was a tireless
living example; he gave agricultural advice, mowed grain, and in his
free moments gave medical treatment to both men and cows. In the most
difficult situations he radiated calm, warmth, and confidence. After the
close of the war, Muralov and I always tried to spend our free days
together. We were united too by our love of hunting. We scoured North
and South for bears and wolves, or for pheasants and bustards. At
present, Muralov is hunting in Siberia as an exiled oppositionist.
In the July days of 1917, Muralov held his head up, as usual, and
encouraged many others. In those days, we all needed a lot of
self-control to stride along the corridors and halls of the Taurid
Palace without bowing our heads, as we ran the gauntlet of furious
glances, venomous whispers, grinding of teeth, and a demonstrative
elbowing that seemed to say: “Look! Look!” There is no fury greater than
that of a vain and pampered “revolutionary” philistine when he begins
to perceive that the revolution which has suddenly lifted him to the top
is about to threaten his temporary splendor.
The route to the canteen of the Executive Committee was a little
Golgotha in those days. Tea was dispensed there, and sandwiches of black
bread and cheese or red caviar; the latter was plentiful in the Smolny
and later in the Kremlin. For dinner, the fare was a vegetable soup with
a chunk of meat. The canteen was in charge of a soldier named Grafov.
When the baiting of the Bolsheviks was at its worst, when Lenin was
declared a German spy and had to hide in a hut, I noticed that Grafov
would slip me a hotter glass of tea, or a sandwich better than the rest,
trying meanwhile not to look at me. He obviously sympathized with the
Bolsheviks but had to keep it from his superiors. I began to look about
me more attentively. Grafov was not the only one: the whole lower staff
of the Smolny – porters, messengers, watchmen – were unmistakably with
the Bolsheviks. Then I felt that our cause was half won. But so far,
only half.
The press was conducting an exceptionally venomous and dishonest
campaign against the Bolsheviks, a campaign surpassed in this respect
only by Stalin’s campaign against the opposition a few years later. In
July, Lunacharsky made a few equivocal statements which the press
naturally interpreted as a renunciation of Bolshevism. Some papers
attributed similar statements to me. On July 10, I addressed a letter to
the Provisional government in which I stated my complete agreement with
Lenin and which I ended as follows: “You can have no grounds for
exempting me from the action of the decree by virtue of which Lenin,
Zinoviev and Kamenev are subject to arrest; you can have no grounds for
doubting that I am as irreconcilably opposed to the general policy of
the Provisional government as my above-mentioned comrades.” Messrs. the
ministers drew the due conclusion from this letter, and arrested me as a
German agent.
In May, when Tzereteli was hounding the sailors and disarming the
machine-gun companies, I warned him that the day was probably not far
distant when he would have to seek help from the sailors against some
general who would be soaping the hangman’s rope for the revolution. In
August, such a general made his appearance in the person of Kornilov.
Tzereteli called for the help of the Kronstadt bluejackets; they did not
refuse it. The cruiser Aurora entered the waters of the Neva. I
was already in the Kresty prison when I saw this quick fulfilment of my
prophecy. The sailors from the Aurora sent a special
delegation to the prison to ask my advice: should they defend the Winter
Palace or take it by assault? I advised them to put off the squaring of
their account with Kerensky until they had finished Kornilov. “What’s
ours will not escape us.”
“It won’t?”
“It will not.”
While I was in prison, my wife and boys called to see me. The boys
had by that time acquired some political experience of their own. They
were spending the summer in the country house of the family of a retired
colonel. Visitors often came there, mostly officers, and as they helped
themselves to vodka they would rail at the Bolsheviks. In the July days
this railing reached its climax. (Some of these officers left soon
after that for the South, where the future “White” forces were being
gathered.) When, in the course of a meal, a certain young patriot called
Lenin and Trotsky German spies, my older boy dashed at him with a chair
and the younger one with a table-knife. The grown-ups separated them,
and the boys, sobbing hysterically, locked themselves in their room.
They were secretly planning to make their way on foot to Petrograd to
find out what was happening to the Bolsheviks there, but fortunately
their mother came, pacified them, and took them away. But in the city
things seemed hardly better. The newspapers were denouncing the
Bolsheviks, their father was in prison – the revolution was definitely
disappointing. But that did not prevent them from delightedly watching
my wife furtively slip me a pen-knife through the grating in the prison
reception-room. I continued to console them by saying that the real
revolution was still to come.
My daughters were being drawn more actively into political life. They
attended the meetings in the Modern Circus and took part in
demonstrations. During the July days, they were both shaken up in a mob,
one of them lost her glasses, both lost their hats, and both were
afraid that they would lose the father who had just reappeared on their
horizon.
During the days of Kornilov’s advance on Petrograd, the prison regime
was hanging by a thread. Everybody realized that if Kornilov entered
the city he would immediately slaughter all the Bolsheviks arrested by
Kerensky. The Central Executive Committee was afraid too that the
prisons might be raided by the White-guard elements in the capital. A
large detachment of troops was detailed to guard the Kresty. Of course
it proved to be not “democratic” but Bolshevik, and ready to release us
at any moment. But an act like that would have been the signal for an
immediate uprising, and the time for that had not yet come. Meanwhile,
the government itself began to release us, for the same reason that it
had called in the Bolshevik sailors to guard the Winter Palace. I went
straight from the Kresty to the newly organized committee for the
defense of the revolution, where I sat with the same gentlemen who had
put me in prison as an agent of the Hohenzollerns, and who had not yet
withdrawn the accusation against me. I must candidly confess that the
Populists and Mensheviks by their very appearance made one wish that
Kornilov might grip them by the scruffs of their necks and shake them in
the air. But this wish was not only irreverent, it was unpolitical. The
Bolsheviks stepped into the harness, and were everywhere in the first
line of the defense. The experience of Kornilov’s mutiny completed that
of the July days: once more Kerensky and Co. revealed the fact that they
had no forces of their own to back them. The army that rose against
Kornilov was the army-to-be of the October revolution. We took advantage
of the danger to arm the workers whom Tzereteli had been disarming with
such restless industry.
The capital quieted down in those days. Kornilov’s entry was awaited
with hope by some and with terror by others. Our boys heard some one
say, “He may come to-morrow,” and in the morning, before they were
dressed, they peered out of the window to see if he had arrived. But
Kornilov did not arrive. The revolutionary upswing of the masses was so
powerful that his mutiny simply melted away and evaporated. But not with
out leaving its trace; the mutiny was all grist to the Bolshevik mill.
“Retribution is not slow in coming,” I wrote in the Kornilov days.
“Hounded, persecuted, slandered, our party never grew as rapidly as it
is growing now. And this process will spread from the capitals to the
provinces, from the towns to the country and the army … Without
ceasing for a moment to be the class organization of the proletariat,
our party will be transformed in the fire of persecution into a true
leader of all the oppressed, downtrodden, deceived and hounded masses.”
We were hardly able to keep pace with the rising tide. The number of
Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet was increasing daily. We represented
almost half of the membership, and yet there was not a single Bolshevik
in the presidium. We raised the question of re-electing the Soviet
presidium. We offered to form a coalition presidium with the Mensheviks
and the Populists. Lenin, as we afterward found out, was displeased at
that, because he was afraid that it implied conciliatory tendencies on
our part. But no compromise was effected. Despite our recent joint
struggle against Kornilov, Tzereteli declined the coalition presidium.
We had hoped for this; nothing but a vote on the lists of candidates
along party lines could solve the problem now. I asked whether the list
of our opponents included Kerensky; formally, he was a member of the
presidium, though he did not attend the Soviet, and showed his disregard
of it in every way. The question took the presidium by surprise.
Kerensky was neither liked nor respected, but it was impossible to
disavow one’s prime minister. After consulting one another, the members
of the presidium answered: “Of course, he is included.” We wanted
nothing better. Here is an extract from the minutes: “We were convinced
that Kerensky was no longer in the presidium [tumultuous applause],
but we see now that we have been mistaken. The shadow of Kerensky is
hovering between Chiedze and Zavadye. When you are asked to approve the
political line-up of the presidium, remember that you are asked in this
way to approve the policies of Kerensky. [tumultuous applause]” This threw over to our side another hundred or so of the delegates who had been vacillating.
The Soviet numbered considerably more than a thousand members. The
voting was performed by going out the door. There was tremendous
excitement, for the question at issue was not the presidium, but the
revolution. I was walking about in the lobbies with a group of friends.
We reckoned that we should be a hundred votes short of half, and were
ready to consider that a success. But it happened that we received a
hundred votes more than the coalition of the Socialist-Revolutionists
and the Mensheviks. We were the victors. I took the chair. Tzereteli,
taking his leave, expressed his wish that we might stay in the Soviet at
least half as long as they had been leading the revolution. In other
words, our opponents opened for us a credit account of not more than
three months.
They made a gross miscalculation. We were undeviating in our march to power.
