Thank you Siberian Fox for that vote of confidence. What follows is what happened after November 7, 1917:



At 10:00 A.M. (Wednesday, November 7th), Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee proclaimed the demise of the Provisional Government.



In order to keep the opposition off balance, the fiction that the Bolsheviks would submit to the Constituent Assembly needed to be maintained for a while longer. Accordingly, a resolution passed by the Bolshevik-dominated Congress of Soviets which was then in session declared its intention “to form for the administration of the country, until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, a Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government to be called Council of People’s Commissars” [Sovnarkom] with Lenin as Chairman."



No other party had a military organization with which to oppose the Bolsheviks on their own terms. Two weeks earlier, Trotsky had announced that all orders to the Petrograd garrison would have to be approved by his Military Revolutionary Committee ]MilRevKom] thereby preventing the Government from using the garrison against the Bolsheviks. This, as Trotsky later admitted, was the defining moment of the coup d’état. The other parties could only protest that



" The military conspiracy was organized and carried out by the Bolshevik Party in the name of the Soviets behind the backs of all the other parties and factions represented by the Soviets. The seizure of power by the Petrograd Soviet on the eve of the Congress of Soviets constitutes a disorganization and disruption of the entire Soviet organization. "



Trotsky contemptuously dismissed his critics as “pitiful entities” and told them: “Your role is finished! Go where you belong from now on—into the rubbish bin of history!” John Reed, the American journalist and Bolshevik sympathizer recalls that Trotsky’s “thin pointed face was positively Mephistophelian in its expression of malicious irony . . .”

Since November 5th, Kerensky had been in the Winter Palace meeting with the Cabinet and trying to deal with the crisis. The Menshevik leader Dan had proposed the only real solution: conclude an immediate peace with Germany.



Indeed! Peace with Germany was the Bolshevik secret of success; it was the source of their money and thus their power. Had this proposal been made a month ago, it would have neutralized the Bolsheviks and the real revolution might have been saved. Many years later, Lord Beaverbrook asked Kerensky what would have happened if the Provisional Government had offered the Germans a peace treaty. Kerensky replied: “We would be in Moscow today.” So why had he not done so? Because, said Kerensky, “We were naive.”



Early on November 7, it was realized that the situation was hopeless even though the Winter Palace would not surrender until early the next day. At 9:00 A.M. Kerensky borrowed a car from the American Ambassador and, disguised as a Serbian officer, headed for Gatchina where he found some Cossack troops willing to move against Petrograd. There was some desultory fighting around Tsarskoe Selo, but the Cossacks were persuaded by Bolshevik agitators that the Constituent Assembly would resolve all problems. On November 13, Trotsky wired Lenin: “Kerensky has been decisively repulsed. Kerensky is retreating. We are advancing . . .”

With the aid of British agent, Bruce Lockhart, Kerensky eventually escaped from Russia never to return. He died in the United States in 1970.



A spectre now haunted the Bolsheviks, the spectre of democracy. For months the Bolsheviks had excused their coup attempts and power grabs on the grounds of advancing the Constituent Assembly. Just as they had once defeated the Provisional Government with the slogan “All Power to the Soviets,” they now defeated the Petrograd Soviet and Kerensky with the slogan “All Power to the Constituent Assembly.”



“Long live the Constituent Assembly”, Trotsky had shouted as he walked out of the pre-Parliament in October. Now, despite Lenin’s desperate attempts to find a way around it, the time had come for the Russian people to go to the polls. The historic, first-time ever voting began on November 25 and soon confirmed Lenin’s worst fears. Despite a Bolshevik decree prohibiting political meetings, a massive voter turnout gave the Bolsheviks a mere 175 seats out of a 715 seat Assembly, not even a respectable minority.

Lenin suddenly rediscovered the problem with “bourgeois parliamentarianism” and determined to prevent the Assembly from meeting. Despite Bolshevik threats however, the newly-elected deputies arrived in Petrograd and defiantly decided to meet on December 11. One of the deputies, P.A. Sorokin, recorded the momentous day in his diary:



" The legal opening of the Constituent Assembly dawned beautifully clear. Blue sky, white snow, an auspicious background for the huge placards everywhere displayed. “Long life to the Constituent Assembly, the master of Russia.” Crowds of people bearing these standards welcomed the highest authority of the country, the real voice of the Russian people. As the deputies approached the Tauride Palace, thousands of people hailed them with deafening cheers. But when the deputies reached the gates they found them closed and guarded by Bolshevik Lettish soldiers, armed to the teeth.

Something had to be done, and at once. Climbing the iron fence of the palace I addressed the people while other deputies climbed up and scrambled after me. They managed to unlock the gates and crowds rushed in filling the courtyard. Staggered at the audacity of this move, the Lettish soldiers hesitated. We attacked the doors of the palace, also guarded by Lettish soldiers and officers behind whom appeared Uritsky and other Bolsheviks. Again speaking to the people, I concluded by thanking the Lettish soldiers for their welcome to the highest authority in Russia and their apparent willingness to guard its liberties. At last I even embraced the commanding officer. The whole lot wavered in confusion and as a result the doors were opened and we walked in. In the passage, Uritsky, an exceedingly repulsive Jew, demanded that we go to his office to register but we contemptuously pushed him aside saying that the Constituent Assembly stood in no need of his services. In the hall of the palace we held our meeting and called upon the Russian nation to defend the Constituent Assembly. A resolution was passed that the Assembly, in spite of every obstacle, should open on January 18. "



Lenin now prepared for the inevitable. Members of the Constituent Assembly electoral commission were arrested for their refusal to surrender its files to the SovNarKom . The Cadet party was outlawed, its leaders arrested and its newspapers trashed. Trotsky gave notice that such measures were just the beginning: “There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off the dying class” , he declared on December 15. “This is its right. You are indignant at the petty terror which we direct against our class opponents. But be put on notice that in one month at most this terror will assume more frightful forms, on the model of the great revolutionaries of France. Our enemies will face not prison but the guillotine!”



On January 18, tens of thousands of demonstrators once more appeared on the streets of Petrograd in support of the Assembly and faced squads of Red Guards with rifles leveled. Deputies had to run a gauntlet of jeering Bolsheviks on their way into the Tauride Palace. Many brought sandwiches and candles in anticipation of Bolshevik attempts to sabotage the proceedings. “Thus” , sneered Trotsky, “democracy entered upon the struggle with dictatorship heavily armed with sandwiches and candles.”



The galleries were packed with armed Bolsheviks who amused themselves by commenting aloud on whether is was preferable to hang, shoot, or bayonet the deputies. Outside the palace, Red Guards fired into the demonstrators and angrily seized their banners. At four o’clock, amid an atmosphere of menace and outright threat, the proceedings finally began.

The Bolsheviks set the tone by introducing a resolution designed to neutralize the Assembly. Hand-written by Lenin, it read: “In supporting the Soviet and the decrees of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, the Constituent Assembly admits that is has no power beyond working out some of the fundamental problems of reorganizing society on a Socialist basis.”



The session was marked by Bolshevik jeers and catcalls. They continually disrupted the proceedings by banging their rifle butts on the floor or sighting their revolvers on the deputies. Lenin gave no speeches but made ostentatious displays of pretended sleep. Before leaving, he gave a note to Anatoly Zheleznikov, a burly young sailor who had been placed in charge. The note read: “The Constituent Assembly should not be dispersed until the end of the session. Tomorrow, from early morning, nobody should be admitted to the Tauride Palace.” In another part of the palace, the Bolsheviks met and passed a resolution dissolving the Constituent Assembly.



Thus was democracy strangled in the cradle. As Trotsky later wrote: “The simple, open, brutal breaking-up of the Constituent Assembly dealt formal democracy a finishing blow from which it has never recovered.” History had taken a wrong turn . . .



But there was now a strong popular reaction against the Bolsheviks.

”All were against them," John Reed noted, “businessmen, speculators, investors, landowners, army officers, politicians, teachers, students, professional men, shopkeepers, clerks, agents. The other Socialist parties hated the Bolsheviks with an implacable hatred. On the side of the Soviets were the rank and file of the workers, the sailors, the undemoralized soldiers, the landless peasants, and a few—a very few—intellectuals.”



The newly-formed Party of the Unemployed opined that “The people have come to understand the dirty deeds of the Yids. Jews have settled on all the committees. We suggest they leave Petrograd within the next three days.”



But all of this came too late. As always, people had underestimated Lenin’s utter ruthlessness and his willingness to use terror. Just a month after the Bolshevik coup d’état , Lenin had decreed formation of the dreaded CheKa — “Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counterrevolution and Sabotage.” Hand-picked by Lenin for the job of organizing the CheKa was Felix Dzerzhinsky. According to Steinberg, the Commissar of Justice, Dzerzhinsky “was a revolutionary who . . . brought into the revolution an unquenchable hatred of his class enemies. He had a slender, haggard figure, a nervous twitching face, a satanic, pointed beard, and blue eyes behind which a dry flame of fanaticism gleamed.” His favorite phrase was “We don’t want justice, we want to settle accounts.” Ably assisted by his two killers-in-chief, Peters and Latsis, Dzerzhinsky began the task of ridding Russia of “parasitic elements of the population.”



Latsis, a particularly odious character, described the purpose of the Cheka: “We are exterminating the bourgeois as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal the words or deeds against the Soviet power. The first question we ask is: to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror.” The first “class enemies” were interred in camps on the Solovetsky Islands near Archangel - the “mother tumor,” as Alexander Solshenitsyn put it, “that metastasized into the Gulag.”

The CheKa, like other organs of repression, was staffed largely by minorities such as Poles, Armenians, Jews and Latvians. “Soft, too soft is the Russian”, Lenin had often complained. “He is incapable of applying the harsh measures of revolutionary terror.” These “measures” included: “Dispatch to the front, compulsory labor, confiscation, arrests, and execution by shooting.”

Nor were such measures to be restricted to “class enemies.” In one meeting of the SovNarKom at which Lenin presided, it was decided to make an example of foresters who had failed to fulfill their wood quota “. . . when a dozen or two have been shot, the rest will tackle the job in earnest .” Characteristically, Lenin ordered that “the shooting of the foresters, though adopted, must be omitted from the official minutes . . .” By the time of Dzerzhinky’s death in 1926, the Cheka was about twenty times the size of the Okhrana which had numbered some 14,000 at its height.

While the domestic situation quickly escalated into civil war, the time had come to settle accounts with the Germans . . .

We have met the enemy and he is us.