The Seizure of Power¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: The Seizure of Power
This chapter narrates the final, decisive phase of the Bolshevik insurrection, centring on the internal party struggle over the timing and necessity of an armed uprising, and the subsequent, almost anticlimactic, ease with which power was seized. The core argument is that the success of the revolution was not a military coup but the political culmination of months of mass agitation, which rendered the old state apparatus powerless and made a violent confrontation largely unnecessary.
The narrative opens with the conflict at the top of the Bolshevik Party. Lenin, convinced that delay is fatal, presses the Central Committee for an immediate insurrection, winning the vote against only Kamenev and Zinoviev. The chapter highlights the severity of Kamenev and Zinoviev’s subsequent breach of discipline: they publicly denounced the planned uprising in a non-party newspaper, revealing secret party decisions to the enemy. Lenin, furious, demands their expulsion as “strike-breakers”. The chapter notes, however, that the party did not comply; they were neither expelled nor forced to recant. This is presented as evidence that the Stalinist era of forced confessions had not yet arrived, and that the revolutionary leadership, unlike a doomed regime, could absorb such mistakes without lasting damage.
The chapter then pivots to a theoretical polemic against the “great man” school of history and the notion that historical actors are merely stupid or mad. It argues that the “madness” of figures like Kerensky or Nicholas II is rooted in the objective crisis of a dying social system. A regime in terminal decline, trapped in contradictions, inevitably vacillates between concessions and repression, producing the appearance of incompetence. The chapter insists that while favourable conditions are necessary, revolutionary leadership remains decisive: had Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin led the party instead of Lenin and Trotsky, the opportunity would have been squandered.
The key event that broke the impasse was the Provisional Government’s blunder in demanding the transfer of two-thirds of the Petrograd garrison to the front. This clumsy attempt to weaken the revolutionary capital backfired, pushing wavering soldiers towards the Bolsheviks and providing a legitimate basis for self-defence. The chapter details how this led to the formation of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), a legal Soviet body that became the insurrection’s cutting edge. The MRC appointed commissars to arms depots and issued rifles to the Red Guard, all under the noses of a powerless government.
The chapter’s most striking claim is that the actual seizure of power was almost an afterthought, a “peaceful” affair. It draws heavily on Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution to illustrate this. The key to victory was not military force—the Red Guard numbered only 12,000 to 23,000—but the political conquest of the garrison. The chapter recounts how Trotsky personally won over the Peter and Paul Fortress not by force but by political agitation, addressing a meeting of wavering soldiers and winning them over with a resolution. This, the chapter argues, was the style of the October insurrection: potential bloody conflicts were settled before they began, through persuasion and the overwhelming authority of the Bolsheviks among the masses. The chapter concludes by citing Lenin’s insistence that insurrection must rely on a “revolutionary upsurge of the people”, not on conspiracy, and argues that the masses’ rallying to the Bolsheviks made direct participation in the fighting unnecessary.