In an article, ‘The October Revolution’, printed in Pravda on 6 November, the day the congress opened, Stalin undertook to separate Trotskiy from the party. To the party, specifically the Central Committee and Lenin, he gave the whole credit for having inspired the Petrograd uprising ‘from beginning to end’. To Trotskiy, as ‘president of the Petrograd Soviet’, he assigned a very large but intrinsically different share: the ‘immediate direction’ of ‘all practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising’.20 Trotskiy had, by implication, put personal 72 an armed camp power and organizational efficiency (of the kind he was currently using the military specialists to generate) ahead of party collegiality. For those who wished to understand it that way, Trotskiy’s report to the congress at its last session on 9 November made Stalin’s implications virtually explicit. In the south, he said, the ‘negative characteristics’ of guerrillaism persisted; and with Stalin particularly in mind, he added, Not all Soviet workers have understood that our administration has been centralized and that all orders issued from above must be final … We shall be pitiless with those workers who have not yet understood. We will remove them, cast them out of our ranks, pull them up with repressions.21 While Stalin and Trotskiy skirmished at the congress, events elsewhere were subjecting their positions to the most serious test yet. The stalemate in the World War was dissolving. Germany had asked for an armistice. In his first speech since being wounded, Lenin had told the Central Executive Committee and the Moscow Soviet on 22 October that ‘never before have we been so near the world workers’ revolution, and … never before have we been in such a perilous position’. The trouble was that near as the revolution might be, it had not actually begun. The governments that had fought the war were still in power, somewhat falteringly in Germany but solidly in France and England (and the United States). The war’s ending before the revolution came would allow the Allies to divert enormous military resources to the campaign against the Soviet Republic and could terminate the Soviet–German semi-alliance or even bring Germany back into the field as an active enemy.22 In his opening address to the Congress of Soviets on 6 November, Lenin confirmed the peril. He informed the delegates that Germany had on the previous day severed relations with Soviet Russia and was expelling Joffe and the embassy personnel. Germany, he inferred, had made a tacit deal with US President Woodrow Wilson and was going to hold Poland, the Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia until Allied troops arrived to take possession of them. The revolution remained a hope but nothing more – until the congress’s last minutes when Sverdlov briefly interrupted the adjournment proceedings to read a news item: the Berlin radio station had announced that a mutiny had broken out in the German naval base at Kiel. the ‘fortress of socialist revolution’ The 9th of November 1918 appeared by the following morning to have been an even more historic day than 7 November 1917 had been, the day of the true workers’ revolution. The German imperial government had been overthrown and a republic proclaimed. Radio broadcasts indicated that workers’ and soldiers’ councils (soviets) had seized control in Berlin and Kiel, that Joffe and the Soviet Embassy staff were 73 the red army 1918–1941 being recalled to Berlin and that German soldiers had arrested the official armistice delegation and begun peace negotiations between themselves and the French soldiers. The revolution appeared to be spreading like wildfire. By telegraph, Lenin ordered Joffe, who was last heard from at Minsk on the German side of the demarcation line, to return to Berlin at once. He also sent telegrams to the Orel and Kursk district executive committees directing them to enlist the German troops in the Ukraine in the campaign against Krasnov. As the picture became clearer, however, it lost some of its luster. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils had sprung up, and Germany had become a republic, but right-wing socialists with no taste at all for revolution, not the councils, were in control.
In an article, ‘The October Revolution’, printed in Pravda on 6 November, the day the congress opened, Stalin undertook to separate Trotskiy from the party. To the party, specifically the Central Committee and Lenin, he gave the whole credit for having inspired the Petrograd uprising ‘from beginning to end’. To Trotskiy, as ‘president of the Petrograd Soviet’, he assigned a very large but intrinsically different share: the ‘immediate direction’ of ‘all practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising’.20 Trotskiy had, by implication, put personal 72 an armed camp power and organizational efficiency (of the kind he was currently using the military specialists to generate) ahead of party collegiality. For those who wished to understand it that way, Trotskiy’s report to the congress at its last session on 9 November made Stalin’s implications virtually explicit. In the south, he said, the ‘negative characteristics’ of guerrillaism persisted; and with Stalin particularly in mind, he added, Not all Soviet workers have understood that our administration has been centralized and that all orders issued from above must be final … We shall be pitiless with those workers who have not yet understood. We will remove them, cast them out of our ranks, pull them up with repressions.21 While Stalin and Trotskiy skirmished at the congress, events elsewhere were subjecting their positions to the most serious test yet. The stalemate in the World War was dissolving. Germany had asked for an armistice. In his first speech since being wounded, Lenin had told the Central Executive Committee and the Moscow Soviet on 22 October that ‘never before have we been so near the world workers’ revolution, and … never before have we been in such a perilous position’. The trouble was that near as the revolution might be, it had not actually begun. The governments that had fought the war were still in power, somewhat falteringly in Germany but solidly in France and England (and the United States). The war’s ending before the revolution came would allow the Allies to divert enormous military resources to the campaign against the Soviet Republic and could terminate the Soviet–German semi-alliance or even bring Germany back into the field as an active enemy.22 In his opening address to the Congress of Soviets on 6 November, Lenin confirmed the peril. He informed the delegates that Germany had on the previous day severed relations with Soviet Russia and was expelling Joffe and the embassy personnel. Germany, he inferred, had made a tacit deal with US President Woodrow Wilson and was going to hold Poland, the Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia until Allied troops arrived to take possession of them. The revolution remained a hope but nothing more – until the congress’s last minutes when Sverdlov briefly interrupted the adjournment proceedings to read a news item: the Berlin radio station had announced that a mutiny had broken out in the German naval base at Kiel. the ‘fortress of socialist revolution’ The 9th of November 1918 appeared by the following morning to have been an even more historic day than 7 November 1917 had been, the day of the true workers’ revolution. The German imperial government had been overthrown and a republic proclaimed. Radio broadcasts indicated that workers’ and soldiers’ councils (soviets) had seized control in Berlin and Kiel, that Joffe and the Soviet Embassy staff were 73 the red army 1918–1941 being recalled to Berlin and that German soldiers had arrested the official armistice delegation and begun peace negotiations between themselves and the French soldiers. The revolution appeared to be spreading like wildfire. By telegraph, Lenin ordered Joffe, who was last heard from at Minsk on the German side of the demarcation line, to return to Berlin at once. He also sent telegrams to the Orel and Kursk district executive committees directing them to enlist the German troops in the Ukraine in the campaign against Krasnov. As the picture became clearer, however, it lost some of its luster. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils had sprung up, and Germany had become a republic, but right-wing socialists with no taste at all for revolution, not the councils, were in control.