Unwilling to wait for the All-Russian Soviet Congress, Lenin pinned his hopes on the Northern Regional Congress of Soviets, which met in Petrograd on 11–13 October. As Latsis recalled, ‘the plan was that it would declare itself the government, and this would be the start’. Lenin had close ties with the Bolshevik leaders of the Baltic region: it was they who had convened the Northern Regional Congress and arranged for it to be held in Petrograd rather than Helsingfors. Lenin had spent the summer in the Baltic region and had come to see it as a vital launching base for the revolution in Russia as well as the rest of Europe. He was especially impressed by the revolutionary zeal of the Latvians: they made up his personal bodyguard and, during the early days of Soviet rule, the bulk of the leading Chekists and Red Army élite (Latsis, Eiduck, Peters, Smilga). The Bolsheviks in Riga had effectively controlled their Soviet from as early as August, and Lenin now looked towards them to import the principle of Soviet power into Russia.fn1 In a letter to Smilga, one of his closest associates during his summer of exile, Lenin had made it clear that he saw the Petrograd insurrection as a military invasion from the Baltic region. ‘It seems to me’, he had written on 17 September, ‘that we can have completely at our disposal only the troops in Finland and the Baltic Fleet and that only they can play a serious military role.’ The Northern Regional Congress was to provide the signal for this invasion. Smilga had organized it at Lenin’s urging and had assumed the role of its chairman. The Bolshevik delegates arrived fully armed and clearly assuming that it would become the centre for an uprising. But Lenin was once again frustrated: the majority of the delegates passed Kamenev’s cautious resolution to leave the creation of a Soviet government to the All-Russian Congress, due to convene on 20 October. Even in the Baltic, Lenin’s own preferred vanguard region, it seems there was no mass support for an insurrection on the call of the party.2
The same conclusion was suggested by the evidence presented to a meeting of the Central Committee on 16 October. The representatives of the Bolshevik Military Organization, the Petrograd Soviet, the trade unions and factory committees who attended this meeting all warned of the risks involved in staging an uprising before the Soviet Congress. Krylenko stated the view of the Military Organization that the soldiers’ fighting spirit was falling: ‘they would have to be stung by something, such as the breakup of the garrison, to come out for an uprising’. Volodarsky from the Petrograd Soviet confirmed the ‘general impression … that no one is ready to rush out on to the streets but that everyone will come out if the Soviet calls’. Colossal unemployment and the fear of dismissal held the workers back, according to Shmidt of the trade unions. Shliapnikov added that even in the metalworkers’ union, where the party’s influence was dominant, ‘a Bolshevik rising is not popular and rumours of this even produce panic’. Kamenev drew the logical conclusion: ‘there is no evidence of any kind that we must begin the fight before the 20th [when the Soviet Congress was due to convene]’. But Lenin was insistent on the need for immediate preparations and saw no reason to hold back in the cautious reports on the mood of the Petrograd masses: in a military coup d’étât, which is how he conceived of the seizure of power, only a small force was needed, provided it was well armed and disciplined enough. Such was Lenin’s towering influence over the rest of the party that he got his way. A counter-resolution by Zinoviev prohibiting the actual staging of an uprising before the Bolshevik delegates to the Soviet Congress had been consulted was defeated by 15 votes to 6, though the closeness of the vote, compared with the 19 to 2 majority in favour of Lenin’s much vaguer call for an uprising in the immediate future, does suggest that several Bolshevik leaders had serious apprehensions about the wisdom of an insurrection before the Soviet Congress, albeit not enough to make an open stand against the great dictator.3 That, after all, would take some courage.
