While the Romanovs adjusted to their circumstances in Tobolsk, the revolutionary crisis elsewhere was deepening. Petrograd was in a state of unrelieved tension and Kerensky decided that a drastic imposition of the Provisional Government’s authority over the soviets and the army garrisons was essential.
With this in mind he came to an agreement with General Kornilov to deploy reliable troops from the Eastern Front to the capital. Kornilov, commander-in-chief since July, had become the favourite of army officers and the political right. In Moscow in late August, at the State Conference of all parties and public organizations to the right of the Bolsheviks, he was fêted as a potential dictator who alone might restore order. Kerensky no longer enjoyed widespread popularity as economic and military difficulties increased. As he arrived with his bodyguard, an army officer asked him why he needed such protection. When Kerensky expressed surprise at the question, the officer impertinently explained that it was usual only for a coffin to be surrounded by so large a guard.1 Moreover, a Cossack colonel was said to have riled him by saying: ‘Don’t think, Mr Minister, that it’s anything like a matter of indifference to the Cossacks as to who occupies the Winter Palace, whether it’s Alexandra Fëdorovna with a sceptre in her hands or Alexander Fëdorovich with a syringe!’ This was a reference to Kerensky’s alleged use of morphine to ease his troubled mind.2 Although the story was probably apocryphal, the fact that people were spreading it was a sign of Kerensky’s weakening popularity.
Kerensky nonetheless remained confident in Kornilov until exchanges via the Hughes apparatus drew him to conclude that Kornilov was plotting a coup d’état using the transferred troops to carry it out. On 9 September he fired Kornilov as commander-in-chief and called off the deployment. At this point Kornilov went into open rebellion. Socialist parties, including the Bolsheviks, sped out to trains already bound for Petrograd and persuaded the soldiers to return to their bases. Kornilov and his military backers were locked up in Bykhov prison. He denied that he had ever had dictatorial ambitions; he claimed to have been loyally carrying out Kerensky’s orders until the moment when he received the order to halt the transfer. What is undeniable is that if Kornilov had arrived in full force, many Kadets and right-wing elements would have prodded him into assuming a political role. What is more, Kerensky’s victory over him had the curious result of weakening the Provisional Government. Without assistance from the soviets, he could not have turned back the trains, and for the rest of the month his authority ebbed away as Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and now even Bolsheviks strengthened their position in the capital.
Nicholas had for weeks been in a state of growing concern, and he was cheered by the news that Kornilov planned to transport forces to Petrograd and suppress the Bolsheviks.3 But the former emperor was clutching at straws if he thought that his own fortunes were about to improve. Kornilov made no attempt to advocate the monarchist cause. Far from it: he was to put on record his belief that the dynasty was responsible for bringing fateful trouble to Russia.4 In his appeals to the Russian people, he focused on the mortal danger currently facing the Motherland and warned of the inadequacy of the Provisional Government to deal with the situation.5 Nicholas could at least agree with this part of Kornilov’s case.
On the afternoon of 11 September, Nicholas read telegrams to the effect that Kornilov had risen in revolt and been removed as commander-in-chief.6 The terms of confinement continued to allow him access to news, and on 18 September he wrote in his diary:
Telegrams arrive here twice a day; many are formulated so unclearly that it is difficult to trust them. Obvious there is great confusion in Petrograd and another change in the composition of the government. Apparently nothing came of General Kornilov’s enterprise. He himself and the generals and officers who supported him have in large part been arrested, and the army units that headed for Petrograd are being turned back. The weather is wonderful, hot.7
This was the last time that he referred to events in the capital for some weeks as he gave himself up to settling the family and their entourage in Tobolsk. Reading books and sawing wood became his daytime routine, and in the evenings he tried to cheer up his wife and their children. But this did not mean that he ceased to care about the country’s fate. He worried endlessly about the military situation and always the newspapers gave grounds for pessimism.
Food supplies to most cities were diminishing by the week, and the army squads that Kerensky sent into the countryside to requisition grain and vegetable stocks failed to redress the situation. Peasants increasingly refused to pay rent to gentry landowners; in rural Russia, it was the peasantry’s land communes rather than the official administration that exercised power. Meanwhile, the urban diet markedly deteriorated. Industrial enterprises began to close as their supplies of raw materials and financial credits dried up. Some large factories closed down entirely. Strained relations between employers and the workforces had been exacerbated by the effects of rampant inflation. Even where an owner yielded to trade union pressure to raise wages, workers experienced a collapse in their standard of living. The industrialist Pavel Ryabushinski had put it starkly: ‘It will take the bony finger of hunger and national destitution to grab the throat of these false friends of the people, these members of various committees and soviets, before they will come to their senses.’8 This kind of remark enabled the Bolshevik Party to claim that the entire propertied elite sought to inflict terrible conditions on ‘the people’. As soviets, trade unions and factory-workshop committees underwent re-election, Bolsheviks made gains at the expense of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Steadily the Bolshevik Party rose to leadership in soviet executive committees.
As awareness grew of the likelihood that peasants would seize the gentry’s estates, conscripts at the front and in the garrisons became restless. Officers had long since lost control of their men, and desertions became a mass phenomenon. The German high command saw its chance to break through the defences along the Baltic coast and occupy Riga. A line of trenches that had stayed more or less the same since mid-1915 was broken, and the Russian armed forces lost their military effectives. The Western Allies looked askance at Kerensky’s request for financial assistance. Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, the United Kingdom and the United States took it for granted that unless a remarkable political transformation occurred in Petrograd, Russia was on the point of decisive defeat.
Lenin had called for exactly this to happen the start of the Great War, reasoning that socialist internationalists in the combatant countries had a duty to encourage the demise of their imperialist government. On return from Switzerland, he had rallied the support of those Bolsheviks who favoured the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the establishment of a socialist administration based on ‘soviet power’. Such an administration, he contended, would maintain popular support by withdrawing the army from the war, transferring the agricultural land to the peasantry’s control, nationalizing the banks and large industrial companies, implementing ‘workers’ control’ in factories and mines and offering the right of self-determination to national minorities. Once he had his growing party’s consent, the only question was about when and how to realize his revolutionary project. The Bolshevik Central Committee proved reluctant to implement the recommendations he sent from his hiding place in Finland. Impatient for action, he returned to Petrograd and cajoled the Central Committee to seize power at the earliest opportunity, and Trotsky, who had been a Bolshevik only since the summer, devised a strategy for insurrection which would coincide with the opening of the second All-Russia Congress of Soviets.
The strategy was put into effect on 7 November 1917 (or 25 October, according to the old calendar) by use of garrison troops and Red Guards obedient to the Petrograd Soviet. Kerensky fled the Winter Palace and the Provisional Government ceased to exist. Power was declared to lie in the hands of the soviets. The new Council of People’s Commissars – or Sovnarkom – was chosen with Lenin as its chairman and Trotsky as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Decrees were issued on peace and on land. Soviets elsewhere in the former Russian Empire were called upon to eject the old administration and exercise their own governmental authority. In the countryside, where few soviets yet existed, peasants were told to make revolution in their own way and show allegiance to Sovnarkom. Although the Bolsheviks as a party did not have a majority at the congress, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries did them a favour by walking out of the proceedings in protest. Talks were held about forming a coalition government with Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin and Trotsky could not stop the Bolshevik Central Committee from exploring this possibility since it probably constituted the rationale in the minds of most Bolsheviks and their supporters for overthrowing Kerensky. When the talks broke down, the Bolsheviks were left to rule alone.
They increasingly called themselves ‘communists’ to differentiate themselves from the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries as well as to emphasize their ultimate objective of founding a society without a government, a bureaucracy or an army. The fact that they were installing dictatorial rule in order to achieve this objective did not appear to them as a contradiction. They were people who believed that doctrinal and logical nicety mattered less than revolutionary action. Unlike Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, they felt confident that where Russia led, the countries of central and Western Europe would quickly follow. Bolsheviks predicted a rapid end to the Great War, brought about by working-class revolutions which would overturn the ‘bourgeois’ system of rule. Soon, they thought, the workers rather than the capitalist class would dominate politics. Disciplined organization and sheer weight of numbers were forecast to become a decisive obstacle against a successful counter-revolution. The era of human history projected by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels since the mid-nineteenth century was at last expected – at least by fervent Bolsheviks – to be realizable. Lenin and his comrades lived and breathed the idea that communism, so often derided as a utopian dream, was about to be established in practice; and most of them assumed that this would be accomplished in their own lifetimes.
The diaries of Nicholas and Alexandra initially showed little awareness of the extraordinary events in the capital. On the day when the Bolsheviks seized power, Nicholas sawed wood and had a consultation with his dentist Sergei Kostritski, who was about to depart for Crimea; he wrote about how much he enjoyed the air outside: ‘Another excellent day with a light frost.’ Alexandra noted the temperature (–6° Centigrade) and recorded: ‘The sun is shining bright.’9
But the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd had caused confusion in Tobolsk. Newspapers arrived only patchily from the capital, and the information in them was contradictory and depended heavily on each paper’s political line. Pankratov and Kobylinski were put into an invidious position. Appointed by Kerensky, they had no links with the new government led by Lenin and Trotsky, and Sovnarkom made no attempt to communicate with them.10 Events were swirling in the capital. Although Kerensky had departed the Winter Palace, he re-emerged a few days later on the Pulkovo Heights at the head of a force of Cossacks and other volunteers. Overthrown as minister-chairman, he aimed to reverse what Lenin and Trotsky had accomplished. Soldiers and Red Guards loyal to Sovnarkom beat them back and Lenin consolidated the Bolshevik grip on power. Nicholas desisted from recording his thinking about this turn of events. He barely referred to the October Revolution, making only the following record more than a fortnight later:
A lot of snow has fallen. For a long time there have been no newspapers from Petrograd; likewise telegrams. This is sickening at such a heavy time. Our daughters have played on sledges and leapt from them into a pile of snow. At nine o’clock there were vespers.11
For nearly four weeks he confined comments in his diary to matters of the daily routine: books that he was reading, outdoor tasks, letters that he wrote and the worsening weather.
But he spoke of his horror to the retinue. As Sydney Gibbes recollected:
As soon as the struggle [in Petrograd] began, Tobolsk was cut off from the world and no newspapers were received for quite a long time. Then suddenly a large bundle of newspapers were received all together and the full details of all the terrible details were revealed. I had never seen the emperor so shaken. For the moment he was completely incapable of saying or doing anything, nobody dared to say a word.12
The Provisional Government had behaved without undue harshness, but the Bolsheviks were a volatile and terrifying phenomenon.
On 1 December, Nicholas’s diary contained his first direct entry about Soviet policy:
The incredible news has arrived that three parliamentarians of our Vth Army had travelled to meet the Germans beyond Dvinsk and signed provisional truce terms with them. I never foresaw such a nightmare. How ever did those Bolshevik scoundrels summon up the sheer nerve to fulfil their own cherished dream of offering to conclude peace with the enemy without consulting the people’s opinion at a time when the adversary has occupied a great swathe of the country?13
He was writing from the heart and it does not seem to have occurred to him that neither he nor his ancestors had behaved any differently from Lenin and Trotsky as regards consulting and abiding by the expressed wishes of the people. His thinking was unadulterated by self-knowledge. Nor did he see the illogicality in accusing the Bolsheviks of the sin of doing precisely what they had for months said they aimed to do: calling a halt to the carnage on the Eastern Front and transforming global politics by action and example. What those same Bolsheviks omitted to add was that if peace and ‘European socialist revolution’ failed to follow from their truce negotiations, their next option was to start a ‘revolutionary war’ in central Europe.