27. The Deciding Night¶
Core Argument¶
Here, in the twenty-seventh chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky reconstructs the final hours before the Bolshevik seizure of power, the night of 24 October. The core narrative thrust is not a chronicle of dramatic street fighting but a portrayal of a revolution that unfolds almost silently, through the occupation of key institutions by disciplined detachments, directed by telephone from the Smolny. The chapter’s central argument is that the insurrection succeeded because the Provisional Government had already been politically and morally hollowed out; the Bolsheviks were not so much storming a fortress as taking possession of an abandoned house.
Trotsky presents himself as the commander on the bridge, sleepless for days, receiving reports from all districts. The key claims are supported by specific examples: the government’s attempt to close the Bolshevik printing works is thwarted within hours by a simple order from the Military-Revolutionary Committee, backed by a sapper battalion. The telephone exchange, seized by military students, is retaken by sailors with two small guns. The cruiser Aurora, ordered out of the Neva by the government, simply ignores the command and refers to the Smolny. Trotsky’s polemic is directed against the “living ghosts of democracy” – the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries still meeting in the Winter Palace, whose “impotence” is contrasted with Bolshevik resolve. He also mocks the bourgeois press, which had predicted rivers of blood but failed to notice an uprising actually taking place.
The chapter draws heavily on the theoretical context of a mass uprising versus a conspiracy. Trotsky insists that what occurred was “an uprising of the masses of the people,” not a putsch. His reply to Dan at the Congress of Soviets – “Go to the place where you belong from now – on the dust-bin of history!” – is the culminating polemical strike, dismissing the demand for a coalition government. The narrative is punctuated by a rare moment of personal vulnerability: Trotsky faints from exhaustion, a detail he uses to underscore the physical toll of leadership. The chapter ends with Lenin and Trotsky resting side-by-side, discussing the sight of workers and soldiers standing together at street fires, a moment of revolutionary idyll before the final business of taking the Winter Palace.