THE RISE OF THE PROLETARIAT
Winter and the Bolsheviki came to Russia on the same chill breeze, and
each brought a strange new world.
Late one afternoon in early November, I walked through the gray streets
of Petrograd, and shivered. It was not cold as the thermometer speaks,
but cold as a room where death awaits a tardy undertaker--desolate,
ugly, forbidding. Autumn was already dead, and the burial long overdue.
The last copper-colored leaf had been stripped from the trees and
trampled in the dust some days since. The gray trunks of the birches
were nude, and conscious of it. The city was wrapped in a futile cloak
of fog, too thin to hide its nakedness, and every barren shrub and
battered cornice pleaded with delayed winter to cover its shame.
I turned my face away from the Summer Garden, and walked quickly past.
A million years had passed since that spring day, six months before,
when the sparrows occupied themselves with house-building in the green
leaves, and Vera and Ivan on the benches below devoted themselves to
castle-building.
Death was in the air. At that moment I hated the city, which I had come
to love as one loves a naughty child for all its faults and virtues,
its hopes, passions, potentialities, and failures--for the sum of its
stormy, troubled self.
I hurried back to my blue-and-white room, drew the curtains, turned on
all the lights, and curled up on the couch to bury myself in a book of
verse and shut it out.
The next afternoon at three o’clock I reached for the desk telephone to
call the American consul. There was no answer. I pushed the hook up and
down, tempting fate in the shape of an irate operator; but it produced
no response.
“Has it come?” I asked myself, and laughed at the question. It had
been the current one in Petrograd for weeks. Every time the electric
light failed, the water was turned off, or some one banged a door or
dropped a block of wood, Petrograd jumped automatically to the same
conclusion: it has come!
I put down the receiver, straightened the papers on my desk, and
started for the censor’s office. A new sentry was pacing up and down
outside the hotel. On the Morskaya, in the block below, the armored
car in the courtyard of the telephone exchange had moved nearer the
sidewalk, and was flaunting its guns ominously at the passing throng.
I hurried on, bent upon getting my letters ready for the weekly
express. Mr. Novometzky, the kindly censor, who softened one’s heart to
the whole tribe of blue-pencilers, shook his head despairingly when I
entered.
“Well, it has come,” he said. “There is trouble again. These are bad
times for poor Russia.”
I left him, and walked briskly toward the Nevsky on the trail of a
possible courier who would carry my mail across the world to San
Francisco. At the Moika a crowd had gathered around a big limousine.
Three soldiers held a brief parley with the chauffeur, then one of
them climbed into the vacant seat beside him. Farther down the street
another car was stopped, then another, and another.
I dined that night with a French aviator, and afterward we stood in the
lobby and watched a Battalion of Death file through the whirling door
and encamp on the marble floor.
At ten o’clock we wandered into the black streets. The Nevsky was
quiet. The Palace square was almost deserted. Along the Neva, at the
entrance to each of the bridges, a group of soldiers crowded around a
log fire. Here and there in the center of the circle was a small boy,
thrilling as small boys do the world over at the lateness of the hour,
the bigness of his companions, and the adventure of the moment. A few
steps away from each of these groups was a wagon filled with ammunition.
Back in the hotel, I met Baron B., whose title, estates, and sympathies
were all bound up in the hope of a return of the monarchy.
“Well, we have got them on the run this time,” he said.
Only a week before I had sat next to him at a dinner where, before my
amazed eyes, they toasted the Tsar and sang the old tabooed national
anthem. Our host, an Englishman, had introduced the baron as a great
officer and an absolutely fearless human being.
“He helped to stop the retreat from Tarnopol on the southwestern front
after the July offensive,” he said. “You ought to have seen him lining
up those deserters before the firing squad. He made quick work of the
bloody cowards.”
I urged the baron to tell me of his experiences, and shuddered
as I listened. He had nothing but contempt for Kerensky, his
commander-in-chief, and was eager for his downfall. His only fear was
that the Soviet would not take over the government.
“Two weeks of the Bolsheviki, and we will be able to lick these people
into shape,” he said. “The worse things get, the sooner they will be
willing to listen to reason. You don’t know the Russians.”
“We’ve got them on the run this time”--what could it mean? No good to
Kerensky, I was sure--no ultimate good to the masses of the Russian
people, if Baron B. could have his way.
There was nothing in the situation that night that augured well for
Kerensky’s government. He was like a man poised on a tight-rope. The
cry, “All power to the Soviet!” grew louder and more insistent with
every passing hour. The Russian workers, the youngest proletarian group
in the world, were the most class-conscious and determined, and--they
had guns.
The fleet was Bolshevist--I had no doubt of that. The Petrograd
garrison was Bolshevist. Every report from the front indicated that the
men in the trenches had swung farther and farther to the left. The land
and peace hunger clamored for immediate satisfaction.
Kerensky, trying like the true democrat he was to please every one,
succeeded in pleasing no one. He had lost touch with the masses.
Attacked from above and below, from within and without, there seemed
little hope for him. Those who should have been behind him, with
every energy and influence they possessed, were secretly willing his
downfall, and some of them were plotting to bring it about. Individual
members of the Allied military missions, still clinging to the old
belief that Russia could be saved by a man on horseback, in spite of
the Korniloff fiasco, were meeting behind closed doors, where they
discussed, not the way to save Kerensky, but the way to put a dictator
in his place. The names of Korniloff and Savinkoff were again bandied
about where ever two or three military men were gathered together.
Poor Kerensky! Too big, and not big enough. Any one of his problems was
a man-sized job. He was packing the load of a broken industrial and
economic machine, inherited from the régime of the Tsar, a corrupt,
inefficient, and disloyal bureaucracy, and a betrayed and disillusioned
army. His uncomprehending military partners, the Allies, were urging
the impossible, and refusing to grant the demand of the Russian masses
for a statement of war aims and a publication of the secret treaties,
without which Kerensky could no longer hold the faith of his followers.
Dark forces of the old order were working with German intriguers to
augment the chaos, and above and beyond and beneath everything was the
honest cry of the people for “Peace to the world!” and “Land to the
peasants!”
The Bolsheviki promised peace and land. They promised more: they
promised that the workers of the world should “arise and put a stop to
war and capitalistic exploitation forever.”
They were dreaming big dreams in Russia that night; scheming big
schemes; and they were not unaware that the dreams and schemes would
be used in the future by the rest of the world, perhaps as patterns by
which to model, perhaps only as horrible examples and tragic warnings.
It was an hour in which one needed all of one’s faith to believe that
the human march is forward, no matter how many members of the family
are lost on the way.
At daybreak a company of Red Guards from the Viborg factory
district--men whose only military equipment was a rifle slung over the
shoulder, and a conviction that the hour of the proletariat had come,
and that they were the defenders of the cause of the workers of the
world--came to a halt on the north bank of the Neva. The bridges were
guarded by cadets from the Engineers’ School, placed there the night
before, when Kerensky had ordered them opened. At the point of their
guns, the factory workers ordered the officers to close them again. The
engineers obeyed, and the street-cars started blithely on their way
back and forth across the river, just as if nothing had happened.
At the same moment, two detachments of Bolshevist soldiers and sailors,
acting under orders from the Military Revolutionary Committee, took
possession of the telephone exchange and the General Staff. It was all
done so swiftly and so quietly that the Bolshevik battle was half won
before Petrograd awoke to the knowledge that civil war was on.
It was nine o’clock when Petroff brought me tea and word that the
Bolsheviki had that minute taken possession of the hotel. Petroff’s
astounding news sent me hurriedly into the hall, and into the arms of a
squad of soldiers. The young officer in command detained me.
“Amerikanka Korrespondent,” I explained, and indicated a desire to go
downstairs.
“Pazhal’sta, pazhal’sta!” he said, bowing low, and motioning his men to
let me pass.
At the head of the winding staircase groups of frightened women were
gathered, searching the marble lobby below with troubled eyes. Nobody
seemed to know what had happened. The Battalion of Death had walked out
in the night, without firing so much as a single shot. Each floor was
crowded with soldiers and Red Guardsmen, who went from room to room,
searching for arms, and arresting officers suspected of anti-Bolshevik
sympathies. The landings were guarded by sentries, and the lobby
was swarming with men in faded uniforms. Two husky, bearded peasant
soldiers were stationed behind the counter, and one in the cashier’s
office kept watch over the safe. Two machine-guns poked their ominous
muzzles through the entry-way. My letter of credit was inside the safe,
and the only other money I had was an uncashed check for eight hundred
rubles.
I started for the National City Bank on the slender chance of finding
it open. I was just in time. Within the hour the Bolsheviki captured
the State Bank, and all the others promptly closed their doors.
On my way back I walked through the Dvortsovy Square. Four armored cars
were drawn up under the shadow of the mighty granite shaft in front
of the Winter Palace, their guns pointing significantly at the palace
windows. Flaming red flags were freshly painted on their gray sides,
and on one in large letters was the word “Proletariat.” A crowd of
perhaps twenty mechanics and chauffeurs tinkered with guns and engines,
making ready for instant action. Occasionally a man looked up from
the nut he was tightening to offer some comment on the situation. The
whereabouts of Kerensky was the chief topic of the moment.
“He is not there now,” said one of them, pointing with his wrench in
the direction of the palace. “He ran away to Finland in the night.”
“He is not in Finland,” said another scornfully. “He went away to get
troops. He is coming back to fight us.”
“They say he escaped to the front disguised as a Red Cross nurse,” said
a third, with a sneer that produced a loud burst of laughter from his
companions.
Inside the palace, seated around the mahogany table in the great
council chamber, where the Tsar of all the Russias had spoken commands
that made an empire tremble, fifteen members of the Provisional
Government grimly waited. In the hall outside the door ten military
school cadets kept watch. These, the women’s regiment, and a company
of cadets encamped on the lower floor, were all that stood between them
and the rising army of the workers. To them the whereabouts of Kerensky
was no secret. He had gone in search of loyal troops who would rise to
the protection of the Provisional Government, and upon his success or
failure they must stand or fall.
It was noon when I returned to St. Isaac’s Square. The Marinsky Palace,
where the Council of the Republic was meeting,--once the home of the
Council of the Empire, mouth-piece of absolutism in old Russia,--was
surrounded by sailors, soldiers, and Red Guardsmen. The palace guards
offered no resistance when a crowd of sailors demanded admission. They
swarmed through the entrances, and appeared simultaneously in various
parts of the hall. A sailor, a tam-o’-shanter on the back of his head
and long ribbon streamers flying out behind, stepped up to President
Avksentieff.
“Stop talking. Go home,” he said. “There is no Council of the Republic!”
Avksentieff and his followers demurred for a moment; then, looking
around the room at the men in blue, they adjourned, and filed into the
square. The Council of the Republic, hope of Tseretelli, Cheidze, and
those other moderate Socialists who were trying so desperately to stave
off the final break, was at an end.
The more radical Socialist members went to Smolney Institute, where
the delegates from all parts of Russia were flocking to the second
All-Russian Congress of Soviets.
At three o’clock I started for Smolney, a little old revolutionist
whom we Americans all called “Daddy R.,” trotting beside me. We walked
down the Morskaya toward the telephone exchange. Just opposite we
halted. Coming toward us, in regular marching formation, was a company
of military cadets, strapping, handsome fellows from the officers’
school. Before they reached the building, the commander halted them.
Half of the number walked deliberately past the armored car, turned,
and approached from the other side. A volley of rifle fire broke the
stillness, and the crowd scurried to the cover of doorways and side
streets. A gray-bearded, benevolent-looking _dvornik_ dragged me inside
a courtyard, where a dozen other people sought shelter, and clanged
the great iron door shut behind us. A beggar, with legs cut off at the
knees, hobbled beside me.
“_Crack! Crack!_” went the rifles again--then a moment of breathless
silence. The _dvornik_ cautiously opened the door a few inches, and I
put my head out. The street was deserted. The cadets were crouched in
kneeling positions on the sidewalks against the wall, guns pointing at
the telephone office.
The _dvornik_ pushed the door shut again, and this time he locked it
and motioned us to follow. We crossed a courtyard, and turned into a
dark, narrow tunnel, through which we picked our way over piles of
debris and up and down stone steps till we came into the open a block
below.
By another route Daddy R. and I made our way back to the Morskaya. I
stepped to the middle of the street to see what was happening, but a
Russian officer motioned me away.
“They will fire again in a minute,” he said. “They are trying to take
the telephone exchange from the Bolsheviki.”
He had no sooner finished speaking than the front of the building began
to belch lead in a shower that sent the cadets hurrying in search of
shelter. An armored car hove in sight from the opposite direction,
opened fire, and completed the rout of the attacking force.
We hurried toward the Nevsky. The bridge across the Moika was bristling
with guns. Four armored cars barred the way, and a crowd of soldiers
and sailors worked rapidly, throwing up a barricade across the street.
One man was stretched flat on the wooden pavement, prepared to fire a
machine-gun from the protection of a telegraph-pole. The Red Guards
waved the passengers back from the bridge, but the tracks were left
open, and the cars went back and forth unhindered. We tried to make
our way through the old France Hotel, which wanders all over the block
between the Morskaya and the Moika, and out on to the canal by another
entrance. Again we were turned back. Another volley of gunshot sent us
scurrying to the shelter of a basement shop.
It was nearly five when we reached the entrance of Smolney. The great
building, until a few months before a private seminary where the
feminine flower of Russian aristocracy was cultivated in seclusion,
had suddenly become an arsenal, bristling with guns and swarming with
armed men.
Upstairs the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies were gathering for the
Congress of Soviets. They were coming together to decide whether the
Bolshevik demand of “All power to the Soviets” should be granted. It
was a question already being answered by the voice of the guns.
The meeting was to open at five. At nine the crowd in the great,
chaste white assembly room was still waiting for action. Outside, in
the dimly lighted corridors, hundreds of men with muddy boots tramped
back and forth, in and out of committee rooms. Soon after nine, a
delegate from the Menshevik group announced that his party was still in
caucus, unable to come to an agreement, and asked for another hour’s
delay. A murmur of disapproval ran through the room. Nerves were at
trigger-tension. For once, Russian patience seemed to be about to reach
its limit.
Another hour passed. Suddenly through the windows opening on the Neva
came a steady _boom! boom! boom!_
“What’s that? What’s that?” asked the sailor of the soldier, and the
soldier of the workman.
A man with pale face and blazing eyes fought his way through the crowd
on to the platform.
“The cruiser _Aurora_ is shelling our comrades in the Winter Palace. We
demand that this bloodshed shall be stopped instantly!” he shouted.
“It’s a lie!” said one of them.
“It’s just another trick of the bourgeois to divide our forces!” said a
second.
A few men hurried from the hall; but the crowd had received too many
startling rumors that day to be much disturbed by another one.
Again came the _boom! boom! boom!_ from the direction of the Neva.
Again the murmur of question.
“It’s a motor-lorry cranking up in the courtyard below,” some one
ventured.
“The people upstairs are moving tables around,” another suggested.
That moment the attention of the crowd was diverted by the arrival of a
man of medium height, square-shouldered, lean, dark, and tense-looking.
His face was white, and his black hair brushed back from a wide
forehead, black mustache, and small black beard, his black jacket and
flowing black tie, still further emphasized the alabaster whiteness of
his skin. He stood within a few feet of me, one hand in his pocket, and
with sharp, quick glances took the measure of that strange sea of faces.
“Here’s Trotzky!” whispered the man beside me. “Come, I want you to
meet him.”
Before I had time to acquiesce or protest, I found a lean hand grasping
mine in a strong, characteristic handshake. We stood there for a few
moments, talking of inconsequential things, but all of us charged with
the tensity of the hour. There was keen intelligence here, nerve, a
certain uncompromising streak of iron, a sense of power; yet I little
suspected I was talking to the man whose name within a few brief weeks
would be a familiar word on every tongue--the most-talked-of human
being in an age of spectacular figures.
At twenty minutes to eleven our conversation was abruptly cut short by
the appearance of Dan, who opened the meeting. It was Dan’s swan-song.
Only a few weeks before, in this gathering, his voice would have been
law; but with the swing of the workers to the left his power was gone.
The mass had broken with its leaders, and every comment from the crowd
indicated more definitely the irrevocability of that break.
Dan announced that he would not make a speech, declaring that the
hour in which his comrades were being shelled in the Winter Palace,
and self-sacrificingly sticking to their posts, was not the hour for
oratory. He said that five hundred and thirteen delegates had been
seated, and the new presidium of twenty-five members would contain
fourteen Bolsheviki.
The spokesmen of the various parties then announced the names of
their representatives. Leaders of the social patriotic groups, of the
Mensheviki, and Socialist Revolutionists refused to take their place in
the presidium, and the Menshevik Internationalists declared they would
delay joining the presidium until certain questions were settled.
The Bolsheviki, with Nicolai Lenin and Zenovieff at their head, climbed
to the platform. A great cheer went up from the Bolshevik supporters.
Lenin and Zenovieff, who had been in hiding since the July riots, had
that day come out of their holes to take a historic part in this new
Revolution.
When the ovation had died down, Dan briefly stated the object of the
meeting before relinquishing his place to Trotzky.
“The business of the Convention,” said he, “divides itself into three
heads: a governmental crisis, the question of war and peace, and the
Constituent Assembly.”
“Take up the question of peace first,” shouted a soldier in the crowd.
It was all that was needed to set the indignation of the Mensheviki
flaming.
“Tavarischi, forty minutes have passed since we announced that our
comrades were being shelled in the Winter Palace, and the cruiser
_Aurora_ is still firing. We demand that this bloodshed be stopped
immediately.”
“A committee has already been sent out,” some one else declared.
Martoff, perhaps the ablest of the Menshevik Internationalists,
took the platform, and in a voice ringing with indignation demanded
immediate settlement of the governmental crisis.
“If this convention wants to be the voice of revolutionary democracy,
it must not sit idly by before the rapidly developing civil war that
may result in a disastrous explosion of the counter-revolution,” he
said. “When the question of the organization of the government is being
settled by the conspiracy of a single one of the revolutionary parties,
we are challenged by only one problem; the immediate warding off of
this impending civil war.”
He proposed the appointment of a committee for negotiating with other
Socialist parties and organizations to stop the rapidly developing
clash.
The resolution was passed; but, instead of immediately appointing a
committee, Trotzky permitted the convention to listen to the opinions
of delegate after delegate on a number of subjects not pertaining to
the question.
It was a critical moment in the history of the Russian Revolution.
Perhaps it was some bitter memory of insults he had suffered at the
hands of these other leaders, perhaps it was simply the natural
inability of the Russian to compromise, or a combination of these and
other motives, that made Trotzky delay action, and thereby toss away
his opportunity for compromise. Probably even he himself could not say.
Meanwhile the guns on the Neva continued their eloquent _boom! boom!
boom!_
Kharash, a delegate from the Twelfth Army, got the floor.
“While a proposition for peaceful settlement is being introduced here,
a battle goes on in the streets of Petrograd,” he said. “The Winter
Palace is being shelled. The specter of civil war is rising. The
Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionists repudiate all that is going on
here, and stubbornly resist all attempts to seize the government.”
“He does not represent the Twelfth Army!” cried a soldier from the
ranks. “The army demands all power to the Soviets.”
Twenty others were on their feet the same instant:
“Staff! Staff! He comes from the Staff! He is not a soldier!” they
shouted angrily, shaking their fists at the delegate from the Twelfth.
Pandemonium broke loose. The shouts of the men inside the building
drowned the boom of the guns outside. In the midst of it a man
demanded and got the floor.
“We are leaving the convention,” he said. “We can stand no more! We are
going unarmed to die with our comrades in the Winter Palace.”
A hush fell over the crowd. It was broken only by the sound of
shuffling feet as the speaker led the way to the door, followed by a
hundred or more of the conservative revolutionists, who filed quietly
out.
At midnight, with three fellow correspondents, I left the atmosphere
of that memorable meeting, gray with smoke and charged with battle,
and went in search of passes that would permit me to go to the Winter
Palace.