October. China MiévilleЧитать онлайн книгу.

      The twelve-, swiftly thirteen-person Provisional Committee of the Duma – to give it its preposterous full name, the Provisional Committee of the Members of the State Duma for the Restoration of Order in the Capital and the Establishment of Relations with Public Organisations and Institutions – was inaugurated by 5 p.m., dominated by the politics of the Kadets and the Progressive Bloc. It mandated itself, vaguely but urgently, to restore order in Petrograd and establish relations with public organisations and institutions. It understood, though, the limits of its own scope and voice at that moment of mass uprising. To make itself heard by the demonstrators, it reached out to two deputies from the left beyond the Progressive Bloc: N. S. Chkheidze, the leader of the Mensheviks; and that excitable Trudovik lawyer, who had earned the tsarina’s fury, Alexander Kerensky.

      It was 7 p.m. The Kadet deputy Ichas convened a meeting of 150 colleagues to create commissions, above all to handle the military question. Very soon the Reserve First Infantry Regiment, 12,000 soldiers and 200 officers in full formation, marched through the city’s upheaval to the Tauride Palace. There they pledged loyalty to the Duma – or rather, to its Provisional Committee. With one of the inspired flashes of which he was, in those days, still capable, Kerensky relayed orders to several military units to take control of strategic locations – Okhrana headquarters, the gendarmerie, those crucial railway stations.

      From the streets, meanwhile, as this continued, had arisen another kind of control. Some of the insurgents recalled those councils of 1905, those soviets. Activists and streetcorner agitators had already begun to call for their return, in leaflets, in boisterous voices from the crowds.

      So it was that at the very moment when the Duma was planning its Committee, elsewhere in the cavernous Tauride Palace another very different group gathered.

      Among those recently sprung from prison by the crowds were Gvozdev and Bogdanov, Mensheviks on the Central War Industries Committee. Immediately on their release they had fought their way through the chaos of Petrograd to join and caucus with their colleagues at the Palace, socialist Duma deputies of the SRs and the Mensheviks, representatives of the trade union and cooperative movements, Kerensky himself.

      That day, running south over the wide Liteiny Bridge above the Neva’s ice, Gvozdev saw another figure hurtling towards him. In the middle of the bridge, between its decorative mermaids, he came face to face with Zalezhsky, a leading Bolshevik who had also just escaped jail, and was heading in the opposite direction from the city centre towards the Vyborg district. The Menshevik made straight for the corridors of power; the Bolshevik for the workers’ districts. So goes the story, whether or not this bridgetop meeting occurred.

      At Tauride, the improvised assembly of Gvozdev, Bogdanov and their colleagues declared itself a Temporary Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. Immediately they sent word to the city’s plants and regiments that a soviet session would be held that same evening. In rushed, haphazard gatherings – there was certainly no time for more careful representative arrangements – factories chose representatives to join these deliberations. Within hours, the usual frock-coated Russian gentry, the intellectuals of the Duma and its associates, were joined by these less typical visitors. The corridors of the Tauride Palace nestling in its gardens began to fill with shabby, exhausted soldiers and workers.

      That evening, the conclave of socialist intellectuals and hastily delegated workers and soldiers gathered in Room 12 on the left side of the palace. The former chair of the Soviet of 1905, Khrustalev-Nosar, was there; Steklov, close to the Menshevik left; Ehrlich, a leader of the Jewish Bund; and the dogged local Bolshevik leader, the metalworker Shlyapnikov. Workers and soldiers talked over each other in excitement, chosen according to those ad hoc mechanisms while most workers were preoccupied with revolt, without time or inclination to vote for delegates. When Shlyapnikov took a moment to telephone Bolshevik activists, urging them to come and join him, they paid him no attention. They, too, were more concerned to focus on the masses in the streets than on what might be afoot in those rooms. And besides, they were rather suspicious of this nascent organ, the brainchild of the socialists to their right.

      At 9 p.m., the socialist lawyer Sokolov called the unruly meeting to order. Perhaps 250 people were in the room: only fifty or so, Sokolov ruled, were qualified to vote: the rest would remain as observers. He made his decisions as much on personal acquaintance as according to any formal structure.

      The gathering was repeatedly interrupted by banging doors, newcomers bursting in, excited reports from soldiers that this or that company had come over to the insurrection, roars and applause. Rank-and-file soldiers’ representatives came together in the room with those of the workers.

      Thus the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was born, at the suggestion of its own, pre-emptive, Temporary Executive Committee.

      Beyond the palace walls, in streets emptied of the detested tsarist police, workers were still plundering weapons from the regime’s stores to defend the factories, to impose their own rough order, gathering together, self-organising in armed groups, mostly young, mostly angry, radical, often politically incoherent. Among the urgent tasks of that night, its first, the Soviet set out to coordinate them by organising a workers’ militia to establish and maintain order. It inaugurated a food commission to regulate supply. Soon it would authorise certain newspapers to reappear. And unlike the Duma or its Provisional Committee, the Soviet could make such declarations and moves with a degree of connection – however hedged and mediated that chaotic night – to the streets, the workers, the soldiers.

      It needed a presidium. The meeting moved to vote in the Menshevik Chkheidze as chair, and as vice-chairs Skobelev and Kerensky. Like Chkheidze, Kerensky was a token socialist who had been approached to be part of the Duma’s committee earlier that evening: unlike Chkheidze, following the Soviet elections, and after giving, for him, an unusually perfunctory speech, he left the room.

      In Kerensky’s absence, the Soviet established an executive committee between the presidium and the full Soviet. This committee would come to be responsible for much of the Soviet’s management and many of its decisions. From that point on, it was at that level that the key debates occurred and decisions were made.

      Chkheidze, Skobelev and Kerensky of the presidium itself were automatically given executive committee places, along with the four members of its secretariat. Eight others were elected. With six members in total, the Mensheviks were the strongest single party. However, for a brief moment that evening, two-thirds of the executive committee’s fifteen places were taken, if not by the radical left, then by those on the internationalist, anti-war wing of the socialist movement, Bolsheviks and others – but, sapped by infighting and uncertainty about the nature of the Soviet, their relationship to it, and its relationship to political power and a new regime, they did nothing with this short-lived majority.

      The very next day, in fact, they would lose it, in response to a mishandled manoeuvre by the Bolshevik Shlyapnikov himself. Disgruntled by the small number of Bolsheviks on the executive committee, he moved to add to it members from each socialist party. His proposal was accepted – but along with his comrades and Iurenev of the Mezhraiontsy came those from the Popular Socialists, Trudoviks, SRs, Bund and Mensheviks. Thus expanded, the committee included many more right, or moderate, socialists.

      For now, as the Soviet continued bickering and bargaining, Kerensky hightailed his way back through the great palace to its opposite, right wing. He headed to where the other new group