Its capture gave the pro-government forces control of the city’s center. At this point, the officials charged with military and civilian authority could have crushed the Bolshevik uprising. But they hesitated, in part from overconfidence, in part from a desire to avoid further bloodshed. Fear of the “counterrevolution” also weighed on their minds. The Committee of Public Safety, headed by the city’s mayor, V. V. Rudnev, and the military command under Colonel K. I. Riabtsev, instead of arresting the Revolutionary Committee, entered into negotiations with it. These negotiations, which went on for three days (October 28–30), gave the Bolsheviks time to recover and bring in reinforcements from the industrial suburbs and nearby towns. The Revolutionary Committee, which during the night of October 28–29 had viewed its situation as “critical,”226 two days later felt confident enough to go on the offensive. Ultimately, the only inhabitants of Moscow willing to defend democracy turned out to be teenage youths from military academies, universities, and gymnasia who put their lives on the line without leadership or support from their elders.
The negotiations between the Committee of Public Safety and the Revolutionary Committee for a peaceful resolution of the conflict broke down at midnight, October 30–31, when the latter unilaterally terminated the armistice and ordered its units to charge.227 The forces on both sides seem to have been roughly equal, 15,000 men each. During the ensuing night, Moscow became the scene of fierce house-to-house fighting. Determined to recapture the Kremlin, the Bolsheviks attacked with artillery fire, which inflicted damage on its ancient walls. Although the
70. Cadets defending the Moscow Kremlin: November 1917.
71. Fires burning in Moscow during battle between loyal and Bolshevik forces: November 1917.
In other parts of Russia, the situation followed a bewildering variety of scenarios, the course and outcome of the conflict in each city depending on the strength and determination of the contending parties. Although Communist ideologists have labeled the period immediately following the October coup in Petrograd “the triumphal march of Soviet power,” to the historian the matter looks different: it was not “Soviet” but Bolshevik power that was spreading, often against the wishes of the soviets, and it was not so much “triumphantly marching” as conquering by military force.
Because they followed no discernible pattern, it is next to impossible to describe the Bolshevik conquests outside the two capital cities.229 In some areas, the Bolsheviks joined hands with the SRs and Mensheviks to proclaim “soviet” rule; in others, they ejected their rivals and took power for themselves. Here and there, pro-government forces offered resistance, but in many localities they proclaimed “neutrality.” In most provincial cities local Bolsheviks had to act on their own, without directives from Petrograd. By early November, they were in control of the heartland of the Empire, Great Russia, or at any rate of the cities of that region, which they transformed into bastions in the midst of a hostile or indifferent rural population, much as the Normans had done in Russia a thousand years earlier. The countryside was almost entirely outside their grasp and so were most of the borderlands, which separated themselves to form sovereign republics. These, as we shall see, the Bolsheviks had to reconquer in military campaigns.
The vast majority of Russia’s inhabitants at the time had no inkling of what had happened. Nominally, the soviets, which since February had acted as co-regent, assumed full power. This hardly seemed a revolutionary event: it was rather a logical extension of the principle of “dual power” introduced during the first days of the February Revolution. Trotsky’s deception which disguised the Bolshevik power seizure as the transfer of power to the soviets succeeded brilliantly: looking back at the events of October, he rightly took pride in the skillful exploitation for Bolshevik ends of practices which the democratic socialists had introduced in February and March. The result of the deception was that the total break in government went virtually unnoticed, appearing merely as a “legal” resolution of yet another governmental crisis:
