From the start, Lenin and Trotsky had been opposed to the Vikzhel talks: only the prospect of military defeat had brought them to the negotiating table. With the defeat of Kerensky, and even the battle in Moscow now beginning to swing back in their favour, with much of the city centre back in Bolshevik hands and the Kremlin itself under heavy bombardment, they set out to undermine the inter-party talks. At a meeting of the Central Committee on 1 November Trotsky condemned the compromise agreed by Kamenev and demanded at least 75 per cent of the cabinet seats for the Bolshevik Party: ‘there was no point organizing the insurrection if we don’t get the majority’. Lenin advocated leaving the talks altogether, or at least continuing with them only as ‘a diplomatic cover for the military operations [in Moscow]’. He even demanded the arrest of the Vikzhel leaders as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ — a typical provocation designed to wreck the talks, along with the arrest and beating up of the SR leaders, Gots and Zenzinov, by Bolshevik sailors, the closure of the Kadet press, and a series of raids on Menshevik and SR newspaper offices. Despite the objections of several moderate members of the Central Committee, it was agreed to present the Bolshevik platform as an ultimatum to the inter-party talks and abandon them if it was rejected. The SRs and Mensheviks would of course never accept this, as Lenin and Trotsky knew very well. The seizure of power had irrevocably split the socialist movement in Russia, and no amount of negotiation could hope to bridge the gulf. The Vikzhel talks were doomed, and finally broke down on 6 November.37
The chances of a coalition were extremely limited. It was almost certainly too late to resolve the power question by political means. The events of 25 October marked the beginning of the civil war. And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this was precisely what Lenin had wanted all along. He believed that the civil war had started back in August, and that the ‘talk talk’ of all the moderators just got in the way.
Having secured the dictatorship of his party, Lenin turned next to the task of securing his own dictatorship over the party itself. On 2 November the Central Committee was bullied into passing a series of quite astounding resolutions: Kamenev was accused of ‘un-Marxist’ activities against the October Revolution; his supporters were ordered to withdraw from the Central Committee; and if they failed to submit to the party’s policy against the inter-party talks — submitted in the form of an ‘Ultimatum from the majority of the Central Committee to the minority’ — were threatened with expulsion from the party altogether. Each member of the Central Committee was dragged before Lenin, in his private office, and told to sign the ultimatum or risk expulsion. As Lunacharsky had warned at a meeting of the Petrograd Bolsheviks on 1 November, Lenin’s bullying tactics would soon lead to a situation where ‘only one man would be left in the Party — the Dictator’. It was a haunting echo of Trotsky’s own famous warning, fourteen years before, that the party organization would first substitute itself for the party as a whole, then the Central Committee for the party organization, and then a single dictator for the Central Committee. On 4 November the five-man minority (Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Miliutin and Nogin) finally resigned from the Central Committee. Their open letter of protest appeared in Izvestiia the following day. Alongside it was printed a second letter of protest from five People’s Commissars, a third of Lenin’s cabinet, four who resigned and six other prominent Bolshevik leaders, in which it was stated that a purely Bolshevik government could be maintained only by means of ‘political terror’ and that, if this path was taken, it would lead to ‘the establishment of an unaccountable regime and to the destruction of the revolution and the country’.38
This was without doubt one of the most critical moments in the history of the Bolshevik Party. Though Lenin’s revolution had been carried out, the party emerged from it hopelessly divided and isolated from the rest of the revolutionary movement. Few people believed, in its second week, that the Bolshevik regime could survive.
ii The Smolny Autocrats
