isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

TROTSKY IN THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION 271
ment in order to keep the movement within the limits of a
peaceful demonstration, the purpose of which would be once
again to urge the moderate Socialists to form their own Ministry
based on the Soviets. With this demand enormous crowds
appeared in the centre of the city, filling the streets, marching,
and holding meetings in the course of two days and nights.
Bolshevik speakers, including Lenin, addressed them, inveighing
against the ruling coalition but also appealing for calm and
discipline.
The greatest and the angriest crowd besieged the Tauride
Palace, where the central Executive of the Soviets had its offices.
The crowd sent delegations to the Palace to declare that they
would not disperse until the moderate Socialists broke up their
coalition with the Cadets. Some Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries
were convinced that Lenin had staged the spectacle
and intended it as an armed insurrection. True, for leaders of an
insurrection, the Bolsheviks behaved strangely: they harangued
the masses, restraining them and warning them against acts of
violence. There were, nevertheless, some appearances of premeditated
Bolshevik action. It was known that Bolshevik
rankers had led the agitation, and the sailors of Kronstadt were
most prominent in the commotion.' The moderate Socialists
sat in the besieged Palace in terror of their lives. They appealed
to military headquarters for help. As almost the entire garrison
was on the side of the Bolsheviks, reliable detachments were
called from the front. While the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries
waited to be rescued, word came that the crowd
outside had seized Chernov, the Minister of Agriculture, and
was about to lynch him. Trotsky, who had spent the whole night
and the morning in the Palace, now pleading with the demonstrators
outside and now with the Executive inside, rushed out
to the scene of the riot.
' Thirty-five years after the event, R. Abramovich, t_he Menshevik leader wrote:
'The anti-war mood began to rise feverishly after the ill-starred June offensive. The
hostile. reaction to this attempt to revivr: a war which in the mind of the masses was
already dead was so strong that my own feeling at the tirne was that already during
the July days the Bolsheviks could have seized power by means of their semi-coup,
if Lenin and his friends had shown greater determination.' (Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik,
March 1952: 'The Tragedy of a Belated Revolution'.) During the events, however,
and afterwards, Abramovich charged the Bolsheviks with outright conspiracy to
seize power. Trotsky, History of the Russian Reuolution, vol. ii, p. 39.