With 50,000 armed and angry men surrounding the Tauride Palace, there was nothing to prevent a Bolshevik coup d’étât. V. S. Woytinsky, who was placed in charge of defending the palace, had only eighteen soldiers from the Pavlovsky Regiment at his disposal. There were not even enough soldiers to guard the posts at the entrance to the building, so Woytinsky relied on deception, placing all his men at the huge French windows which spanned the façade of the palace to make it appear as if it was properly defended. To the Soviet leaders inside the palace debating the question of power, it seemed ‘completely obvious’ that they were about to be stormed. ‘At any moment’, recalled the Menshevik, Bogdanov, ‘the armed mobs could have broken in, wrecked the Tauride Palace, and arrested or shot us if we refused to take the power into our hands.’44 The Provisional Government, or what remained of it, was equally defenceless. During the morning the cabinet ministers had taken refuge in the building of the General Staff opposite the Winter Palace. Apart from a few dozen Cossacks, there were no available forces willing to defend them. Kerensky had run off to the Front, leaving the Warsaw Station only minutes before his Bolshevik chasers arrived there. The Marinsky Palace, the seat of government power, stood wide open for the taking. The strategic points of the city — the arsenals, the telephone exchange, the supply depots and the railway stations — were all undefended. With a single order from Lenin, the insurgents could easily have taken them as the first step towards the seizure of power.
But that order did not come, and the crowd in front of the Tauride Palace, not quite sure of what it should do, soon lost all its organization. The hand of God, in the form of the weather, also contributed to the collapse of the uprising. At 5 p.m. the storm clouds finally broke and there was a torrential rainstorm. Most of the crowd ran for cover and did not bother to come back. But the unruly elements stayed on. Perhaps because they were soaked by the rain, they lost their self-control and began to fire wildly at the Tauride Palace. This caused the rest of the crowd to scream and stampede in panic: dozens of people were crushed. Some sailors began to penetrate into the palace, climbing in through the open windows. They called for the socialist ministers to come out and explain their reluctance to take power. Chernov was sent out to calm the crowd. But as soon as he appeared on the steps angry shouts were heard from the sailors. The crowd surged forward and seized hold of him, searching him for weapons. One worker raised his fist and shouted at him in anger: ‘Take power, you son of a bitch, when it’s handed to you!’ Several armed men bundled the SR leader into an open car. They declared him under arrest and said they would not release him until the Soviet had taken power. Chernov had gone one better than his old rival, Kerensky. He was now a real ‘hostage of the democracy’.
