The Struggle at the Congress¶
Core Argument¶
The Struggle at the Congress
The chapter narrates the consummation of the October insurrection, focusing on the seizure of the Winter Palace and the concurrent political battle within the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The core argument is that the revolution’s triumph was determined not by technical military perfection—which was conspicuously absent, with locomotives failing, shells misfitting, and signal lanterns lost—but by the prior political conquest of the masses, which left the Provisional Government isolated and defenceless. The garrison inside the Winter Palace simply melted away; Admiral Verderevsky’s council of war admitted it possessed “no tangible military force.” The assault itself was bloodless, more a police operation than a battle, culminating in Antonov-Ovseyenko’s peremptory arrest of the ministers.
The chapter’s dramatic centre is the Congress, delayed until 10.40 p.m. while the siege continued. Trotsky declared the Provisional Government extinct and announced the founding of a power with “no other aim but to satisfy the needs of the soldiers, workers, and peasants.” The Bolsheviks and their Left SR allies commanded a clear majority: 300 Bolsheviks, 193 SRs (over half Lefts), and 82 Mensheviks. The presidium election confirmed this dominance, but the Mensheviks and Right SRs refused their seats. The polemical thrust is directed against two targets. First, the right-wing socialists—Mensheviks and SRs—who denounced the insurrection as an anticipation of the Congress’s will. Trotsky’s retort is blunt: “The will of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets has been anticipated by the rising of the Petrograd workers and soldiers.” Second, the chapter attacks the Bolshevik “Conciliators” within the party itself—Ryazanov, who called the uprising “insane,” and Lunacharsky, who initially supported Martov’s proposal for a coalition government with the right-wing socialists, a move that would have nullified the insurrection. Lenin and Trotsky opposed this; the Mensheviks themselves exposed its hollowness by denouncing the overthrow and walking out. Trotsky’s voice thundered after them: “They are just so much refuse which will be swept into the garbage-heap of history!”
The chapter then broadens its scope, arguing that the insurrection’s victory was not the final episode. It situates the October Revolution within the subsequent four-year civil war, where the Bolsheviks, reduced to the territory of old Muscovy, faced 21 foreign intervention armies. Trotsky’s Red Army, forged from the tsarist army’s remnants, prevailed through organisation and discipline, but also through the internationalist appeal of the Communist International: British dockers refused to load arms for counter-revolutionary Poland, and mutinies broke out in every interventionist army. The chapter acknowledges the later bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state under conditions of backwardness, but insists the revolution proved the potential of a nationalised planned economy.
The theoretical context is drawn from Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, which frames October as the first assault on the “deeper sphere of the unconscious” in social relations—the blind play of forces that parliamentarism left untouched. The chapter concludes with Rosa Luxemburg’s prison-cell defence of the Bolsheviks, written from Germany. She distinguishes the “essential” from the “accidental excrescences” of Bolshevik policy, praising Lenin and Trotsky for having “the courage, revolutionary far-sightedness and consistency” to proclaim socialism as the direct programme of practical politics. Her final judgement is that “the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism’.” The chapter thus argues against both the liberal and right-wing socialist condemnation of the insurrection and against later distortions that reduce Bolshevism to its degenerated aftermath, insisting instead on its enduring historical and internationalist significance.