October 1917

The insurrection that gave power to the Bolsheviks was strictly speaking the work of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Although only small numbers were actively involved initially, the total lack of opposition to them, the absence of support for the Provisional Government meant they could not be described as a minority. Support for the action came rushing in after the event from the Soviet of Petrograd Trade Unions and the All-Russian Soviet of Factory Committees amongst others. The factory committees rallied to the Bolsheviks because the latter appeared to support the workers' aspirations. The committees had been active in the July Days, had helped organise armed guards, and were involved In the Military-Revolutionary Committee. Skrypnik, a Bolshevik on the Central Council of Factory Committees had told the party's Central Committee that the workers were ready for a revolution, and if there wasn't one soon, the committees would swing to the anarcho-syndicalists. Mass meetings in Petrograd called for the Second All-Russian Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies to form a government. This was a clear ratification of the seizure of power. If October was 'easy', it was because all the work had been done beforehand. The Provisional Government was utterly discredited, and Bolshevism's reactionary aspect had not been revealed.

Despite the mass of workers and soldiers thronging the Soviet Congress on October 25th, the presidium was elected on the basis of 14 Bolsheviks, 7 Social-Revolutionaries, three Mensheviks and one Internationalist. The Bolsheviks then trooped out their worker-candidates Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev and so on. When it came to forming a government, Kamenev read out a Bolshevik Central Committee proposal for a Soviet of People's Commissars, whereby "control over the activities of the government is vested in the Congress of Soviets and its Central Executive Committee". Seven Bolsheviks from the party's central committee were nominated, and thus Lenin and Trotsky came to sit at the top, never having done a day's work in their lives. The "workers' government" was now composed of middle-class professional revolutionaries.

The Bolshevik party leadership at that time was composed of well-educated militants, generally in their mid-thirties on average. Most had some personal means, and thus no need to work, either sustained by family wealth or party funds. Some took jobs to 'get into industry' (an updating of the old Narodnik idea of going to the people: this is still much copied by today's imitation Bolsheviks). In their origins, the Bolsheviks ranged from the aristocratic, like Chicherin, to the bureaucratic, like Lenin and Kollontai, via the landed bourgeois (Smilga), the commercial bourgeois (Yoffe) and the higher industrial bourgeois (Pyatakov). These were the sort of people used to being a ruling class.

It was the Red Guard who peremptorily closed clown the Constituent Assembly, the Western-style parliament. While the Assembly members and the socialists (including some Bolsheviks) were shocked, the population as a whole was completely indifferent to the end of another talking-shop. The Red Guardist Trifonov had wanted to turn the Red Guard into a militia under the control of the factory committees that all workers would pass through. But after October the Bolsheviks did not trust the Red Guard, as it was an armed force independent of the party, and Lenin said that "the place for the best workers is the factory." The workers in general used the Bolshevik slogans, except the call for nationalisation, where workers were for control by the factory committees. Even at the moment of revolution, when the Bolsheviks were able to ride the waves, the conflict between them and the workers was there in potential. In some other ways the workers went further than the Bolsheviks. It was workers who were insistent on the closure of all bourgeois papers, and compulsory labour or expulsion for the bourgeois. But the party won the day: in 1916 the constitution of the new state was ratified with the words "the party leads and dominates the entire apparatus of state." The workers, for all their efforts, remained workers.