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

TROTSKY IN THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION 307
attempted to strike a blow from the vacuum in which he and
his government were suspended. He banned Rabochyi Put
(Workers' Road), under which title Pravda had appeared since
the July days, and he ordered the closing of its editorial offices
and printing-press. A working girl and a man from the press
rushed to the Military Revolutionary Committee, saying that
they were prepared to break the seals on the premises of Rabochyi
Put and to go on producing the paper if the Committee gave
them an effective military escort. This suggestion, breathlessly
made by an unknown working girl, came to Trotsky like a
flash. 'A piece of official sealing wax', he wrote later, 'on the
door of the Bolshevik editorial room as a military measurethat
was not much. But what a superb signal for battle !' 1 On
the spot he signed an order sending a company of riflemen and
a few platoons of sappers to guard the Bolshevik offices and
printing-press. The order was carried out instantaneously.
This was a tentative gambit. It was made on the dawn of
24 October. Next morning the papers were full ofreports about
Kerensky's pla11 to suppress the Soviet and the Bolshevik party.
The Military Revolutionary Committee was working out the
last details of the rising, which, as was now clear, could not be
delayed a single day. The Smolny Institute, hitherto guarded
with insouciant slackness, was rapidly transformed into a
fortress, bristling with cannon and machine-guns. In the early
morning, the Central Committee of the party met for the last
time before the decisive event. All members present in Petrograd
had arrived, with the exception of Lenin and Zinoviev, who
had not yet come into the open, and Stalin who was unaccountably
absent. 2 Kamenev, who had resigned from the Committee
to oppose the insurrection, placed himself at the service of the
insurgents once the action had started; and he displayed surprising
initiative. It was he who proposed, inter alia, that no
member of the Committee should leave Smolny during the day.
On Trotsky's initiative, each was given a specific assignment in
liaison and organization. Dzerzhinsky kept in touch with the
posts and telegraphs; Bubnov with the railwaymen; Nogin and
Lomov with Moscow. Sverdlov was to watch the movements
th~mselves to be dictated to by a rival organization, he said that the Soviet would
die a natural death ..• .' Sir George Buchanan, /lfy Mission to Russia, vol. ii, p. 11.
2
' Trotsky, Hislcry, vol. iii, p. 205.
Prorokoly Tsen. Korn., pp. 141-3.