The Triumph of Bolshevism¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter argues that the October insurrection was not a conspiratorial coup, as its enemies claim, but the political culmination of a mass movement. The seizure of power appeared smooth for two reasons: one technical, the other political. The technical success owed to meticulous planning by the Military Revolutionary Committee under Trotsky, who applied the military principle of concentrating overwhelming force at the decisive point, combined with surprise and deception—every move was presented as defensive while the offensive advanced swiftly. But the decisive factor was political: nine-tenths of the work had been accomplished beforehand by winning a clear majority in the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets. When the moment came, the Provisional Government, like the tsarist regime before it, had no defenders.
The chapter draws on Kerensky’s own memoirs to illustrate this. Kerensky admits he waited for troops from the front that never arrived, while the railways were sabotaged; the telephone exchange, post office, and government buildings fell to Red Guards; and he himself fled Petrograd in a car lent by the American embassy. The insurrection was not secret. The chapter quotes the French paper Entente, which observed that the Bolsheviks did not conspire but acted openly, fixing the date of their seizure of power in advance. Resistance was negligible: soldiers refused orders to attack print shops; the Winter Palace fell “not with a bang, but a whimper.”
The chapter polemicises against critics who complain that Lenin and Trotsky did not wait for formal approval from the Congress of Soviets before launching the offensive. This argument is dismissed as ludicrous: the question of power had been settled by the workers and soldiers beforehand; the Congress merely stamped a decision already taken. The timing of the rising was a technical military matter for the Military Revolutionary Committee, not a subject for parliamentary debate. The chapter concludes with Trotsky’s declaration to the Petrograd Soviet that the Provisional Government no longer existed, and with Lenin’s historic speech to the Congress of Soviets on 25 October, in which he proclaimed the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, called for an immediate end to the war, the abolition of landed proprietorship, workers’ control over production, and the building of a proletarian socialist state, expressing confidence in the world socialist revolution.