At its meeting later that day, Mark Broido, a worker affiliated with the Mensheviks, moved a resolution calling on the Petrograd garrison to prepare to defend the city and for the Soviet to form (or, rather, reconstitute) a “Committee of Revolutionary Defense” to “work out a plan” to this end.140 Caught by surprise, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs opposed Broido’s resolution on the grounds that it would strengthen the Provisional Government. It passed but with the barest majority (13–12). Following the vote, the Bolsheviks realized they had made a mistake. They had a Military Organization which they were grooming for armed insurrection: it was subordinated to the Bolshevik Central Committee and independent of the Soviet. This status was a mixed blessing: for while the Military Organization could be depended on faithfully to execute the orders of the Bolshevik high command, as the organ of one political party it could not act on behalf of the Soviet in whose name Bolsheviks intended to carry out their power seizure. A few years later, Trotsky would recall that the Bolsheviks, aware of this handicap, had decided already in September 1917 to avail themselves of any opportunity to create what he calls a “non-party ‘soviet’ organ to lead the uprising.”141 This is confirmed by K. A. Mekhonoshin, a member of the Military Organization, who says that the Bolsheviks felt it necessary “to transfer the center linking [them] with units of the garrison from the Military Organization of the party to the Soviet so as to be able, at the moment of action, to step forward in the name of the Soviet.”142 The organization proposed by the Mensheviks was ideally suited for this purpose.
That evening (October 9) when the Menshevik proposal came up for a vote at the Plenum of the Soviet, the Bolshevik deputies reversed their stand: they now agreed to the Soviet’s forming an organization to defend Petrograd from the Germans as long as it would defend it also from the “domestic” enemy. By the latter they meant the Provisional Government, which, in the words of one Bolshevik speaker, was conniving to surrender the “main bastion of the Revolution to the Kaiser, who, in turn, according to the Bolshevik resolution, was supported in his advance on Petrograd by the Allied Imperialists.”143 To this end, the Bolsheviks proposed that the “Military Defense Committee” should assume full charge of the city’s security against threats from the German “imperialists” as well as from Russian “counterrevolutionaries.”
Surprised by the way the Bolsheviks reformulated Broido’s proposal and knowing why they did so, the Mensheviks resolutely opposed the amendment. Defense of the city was the responsibility of the government and its Military Staff. But the Plenum preferred the Bolshevik version and voted for the formation of a “Revolutionary Committee of Defense”
to gather in its hands all the forces participating in the defense of Petrograd and its approaches [as well as] to take all measures to arm the workers, in this manner ensuring both the revolutionary defense of Petrograd and the security of the people against the openly prepared assault of the military and civilian Kornilovites.144
This extraordinary resolution adroitly combined the newly formed committee’s responsibility for meeting the real threat posed by the German armies with the imaginary one from the supporters of Kornilov, who were nowhere in sight. The Mensheviks and SRs now reaped the harvest of their demagoguery, their insistence on the “bourgeois” character of the Provisional Government and their obsessive concern with the counterrevolution.
The vote had decisive importance. Trotsky later claimed that it sealed the fate of the Provisional Government: it represented, in his words, a “silent” or “dry” revolution that gained the Bolsheviks “three-quarters if not nine-tenths” of the victory consummated on October 25–26.145
The matter was still not completely settled, however, because the decision of the Plenum required the approval of the Ispolkom and the entire Soviet. At a closed session of the Ispolkom on October 12, the two Menshevik representatives assailed the Bolshevik resolution, but they again suffered defeat, the body backing the Plenum’s decision unanimously, against their two votes. The Ispolkom renamed the new organization the Military-Revolutionary Committee (Voenno-Revoliutsionnyi Komitet, or Milrevkom for short) and empowered it to take charge of the defenses of the city.146
