“Yes. All the entrances have been taken. Everyone has surrendered. Only these quarters are still guarded. What does the Provisional Government command?”
“Say that we want no bloodshed, that we yield to force, that we surrender,” Kishkin said.
And there, by the door, fear mounted without letup, and we became anxious lest blood flow, lest we be too late to prevent it … And we shouted anxiously: “Hurry! Go and tell them! We want no blood! We surrender!”
The
Arrested by Antonov-Ovseenko at 2:10 a.m., the ministers were taken under guard to the Peter and Paul Fortress. On the way they barely escaped being lynched.
Three and a half hours earlier, unable to hold out any longer, the Bolsheviks had opened their congress in Smolnyi, in the large colonnaded Assembly Hall used before 1917 for theatrical performances and balls. Cleverly exploiting Theodore Dan’s vanity, they invited the Menshevik Soviet leader to inaugurate the proceedings, which had the effect of giving them an aura of Soviet legitimacy. A new Presidium was elected, composed of fourteen Bolshevik, seven Left SRs, and three Mensheviks. Kamenev took the chair. Although the legitimate Ispolkom had prescribed for the congress a very narrow agenda (the current situation, the Constituent Assembly, reelections to the Ispolkom), Kamenev altered it to something entirely different: governmental authority, war and peace, and the Constituent Assembly.
68. The Winter Palace, after being seized and looted by the Bolsheviks.
69. The Assembly Hall in Smolnyi, locale of the Second Congress of Soviets (the same hall shown on this page).
The composition of the congress bore little relationship to the country’s political alignment. Peasant organizations refused to participate, declaring the congress unauthorized and urging the nation’s soviets to boycott it.203 On the same grounds, the army committees refused to send delegates.204 Trotsky must have known better than to describe the Second Congress as “the most democratic of all parliaments in the history of the world.”205 It was, in fact, a gathering of Bolshevik-dominated urban soviets and military councils especially created for the purpose. In a statement issued on October 25, the Ispolkom declared:
The Central Executive Committee [Ispolkom] considers the Second Congress as not having taken place and regards it as a private gathering of Bolshevik delegates. The resolutions of this congress, lacking in legitimacy, are declared by the Central Executive Committee to have no binding force for local soviets and all army committees. The Central Executive Committee calls on the soviets and army organizations to rally around it to defend the Revolution. The Central Executive Committee will convene a new Congress of Soviets as soon as conditions make it possible to do so properly.206
The exact number of participants in this rump congress cannot be determined: the most reliable estimate indicates about 650 delegates, among them 338 Bolsheviks and 98 Left SRs. The two allied parties thus controlled two-thirds of the seats—a representation more than double what they were entitled to, judging by the elections to the Constituent Assembly three weeks later.207 Leaving nothing to chance, for they could not be entirely certain of the Left SRs, the Bolsheviks allocated to themselves 54 percent of the seats. How skewed the representation was is illustrated by the fact that, according to information made available seventy years later, Latvians, who had a strong Bolshevik movement, accounted for over 10 percent of the delegates.208
The initial hours were spent on raucous debates. While awaiting word that the ministers were under arrest, the Bolsheviks gave the floor to their socialist opponents. Amid hooting and heckling, the Mensheviks and the Socialists-Revolutionaries presented similar declarations denouncing the Bolshevik coup and demanding immediate negotiations with the Provisional Government. The Menshevik statement declared that the
military conspiracy was organized and carried out by the Bolshevik Party in the name of the soviets behind the backs of all the other parties and factions represented in the soviets … the seizure of power by the Petrograd Soviet on the eve of the Congress of Soviets constitutes a disorganization and disruption of the entire soviet organization.209
Trotsky described the opponents as “pitiful entities [
This happened around 1 a.m. on October 26. At 3:10 a.m. Kamenev announced that the Winter Palace had fallen and the ministers were in custody. At 6 a.m. he adjourned the congress until the evening.
