Petrograd Soviet

• 1. Introduction

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  The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies was born on the same day that the February Revolution began. On the morning of the 27th of February 1917, a crowd of disaffected soldiers broke open the Peter and Paul Fortress and freed the entire leadership of a workers' group that had been arrested just a month earlier. By that evening, between 69 and 300 people had gathered at the Tauride Palace to do something that would reshape the course of the twentieth century: elect a new council. What emerges from the months that followed is a story not of one power, but of two. A city council that was never supposed to govern found itself controlling the telegraph offices, the railroads, the press, and the food supply, all while insisting it was not the government. How did a chaotic, unruly body of speechmakers become the engine of the October Revolution? And who, in the end, was actually in charge?

• 2. Roots in Crisis

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  The Central Workers' Group was founded in November 1915 by the Mensheviks, created originally to mediate between workers and the new Central War Industry Committee in Petrograd. That relatively modest mandate did not survive contact with the pressures of World War I. As the conflict dragged on and the economic situation worsened, the group grew steadily more radical, encouraging street demonstrations and issuing revolutionary proclamations.

  Alexander Protopopov, the Minister of the Interior in Imperial Russia, moved against the group on the 27th of January 1917, ordering the arrest of its entire leadership. They were taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress, a destination that carried a heavy symbolic weight in Russian political life. Their imprisonment lasted exactly a month before the February Revolution swept them back onto the streets. The chairman of the group convened a meeting that same day, the 27th of February, to organize a new Soviet of Workers' Deputies. It was a remarkably swift pivot from prison cell to founding assembly.

  The body that coalesced at the Tauride Palace that evening chose Nikolay Chkheidze as chairman of a provisional executive committee, the Ispolkom, composed mostly of Menshevik deputies. Izvestia was named the official newspaper. By the following day's plenary session, elected representatives from factories and the military had swelled the ranks, and within two weeks enthusiasm and non-representative voting had pushed the Soviet's membership to almost 3,000 deputies, the majority of them soldiers.

• 3. A Second Government

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  On the 1st of March 1917, the Ispolkom made a pivotal decision: it would remain outside any new State Duma. The logic was deliberately protective. Standing apart allowed the Soviet to criticize without bearing any responsibility for outcomes. Two days later, on the 2nd of March, the Soviet received the eight-point program of the Provisional Committee and issued a carefully worded, conditional statement of support that stopped well short of endorsement.

  What followed was a sustained campaign of institutional pressure. The Soviet's executive committee publicly attacked the Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov as bourgeois, while boasting openly of its practical hold over the country's infrastructure: the post, telegraphs, press, railroads, and food supply. A formal mechanism for this pressure was created on the 8th of March in the form of a Contact Commission, described as a body to inform the Provisional Government of the demands of the revolutionary people, to pressure it to meet those demands, and to exercise uninterrupted control over how it did so. By the 19th of March, the Soviet's reach extended to the military front lines, with commissars appointed with the support of the Ministry of War.

  The body's own Order No. 1, a seven-article directive, was among the first concrete examples of this parallel authority in action. The Ispolkom was, in Soviet historiography, the engine of what became known as dvoevlastie: dual power. The government governed in name; the Soviet held the leverage in fact.

• 4. Bolshevik Ascent

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  In June 1917, the Bolsheviks were printing 100,000 copies of Pravda and its associated papers daily, including Soldatskaya Pravda, Golos Pravdy, and Okopnaya Pravda. By July, they were distributing over 350,000 leaflets. The propaganda campaign was precise in its targeting: the Bolsheviks attacked the socialist parties that had entered the Cabinet for the failures of the Provisional Government, positioning themselves as the only uncorrupted opposition.

  The July Days riots of the 16th and the 17th of July, inspired but not led by the Bolsheviks, produced no immediate gains. But the Ispolkom, despite its wariness toward the Bolsheviks, moved to shield them from serious consequences, adopting resolutions on the 4th of August and the 18th of August against their arrest and prosecution. The government responded by releasing many senior Bolsheviks on bail or on promises of good behavior.

  The arithmetic of the August 20th municipal elections told the clearest story. The Bolsheviks took a third of the votes, a fifty percent increase over just three months. During the Kornilov affair, the Ispolkom was forced to rely on Bolshevik military forces as its primary shield against what it called counter-revolution. Kerensky ordered 40,000 rifles distributed to Petrograd workers, many of which ended up in Bolshevik hands. On the 25th of September, the Bolsheviks secured a majority in the Workers' Section, and Leon Trotsky was elected chairman. He began directing the Soviet's transformation into an explicitly revolutionary organ.

• 5. The October Seizure

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  On the 9th of October, with German forces advancing toward the city, the Soviet debated a Committee of Revolutionary Defense. Trotsky and the Bolsheviks amended the resolution to add protection against domestic as well as foreign threats, effectively folding counter-revolutionary suppression into the committee's mandate. The Ispolkom approved the amended resolution on the 12th of October, against Menshevik resistance, and the full Soviet approved it on the 16th, creating the Military Revolutionary Committee, also called the Milrevcom.

  Pavel Lazimir chaired the Milrevcom, with Nikolai Podvoisky as his deputy, and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko as secretary. The committee served as a front for the Bolshevik Military Organization. On the night of the 21st of October, the Milrevcom took exclusive control of the Petrograd garrison in the name of the Soldiers' Section. Colonel Polkovnikov, the District Commander, refused to recognize this authority and was condemned in a public Milrevcom statement as a tool of counter-revolutionary forces. Negotiations on the 23rd and the 24th of October stalled without resolution.

  The uprising that began on the 24th of October moved with striking speed. Armed groups seized the main telegraph offices and lowered the bridges across the Neva. By the morning of the 25th, the Milrevcom issued an announcement written by Lenin declaring the end of the Provisional Government. That evening, the Second Congress of Soviets opened in the Assembly Hall in Smolny, where roughly 600 delegates chose a Presidium of 3 Mensheviks and 21 Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.

• 6. Transfer of Power

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  The day after the Congress of Soviets opened, the old Ispolkom rejected the Congress's proceedings and called on soviets and the army to defend the Revolution. It was a defiant gesture and a futile one. That same evening, the Congress dismissed the Ispolkom entirely and replaced it with a new body of 101 members, 62 of them Bolsheviks, under Lev Borisovich Kamenev.

  The Congress also approved the Decree on Peace, the Decree on Land, and the formation of the Council of People's Commissars, known as Sovnarkom, intended to serve as an executive governing body accountable to the newly created Central Executive Committee until a Constituent Assembly could meet. In practice, Sovnarkom would eclipse the Central Executive Committee in autonomy and power. The Petrograd Soviet's own membership had already been evolving: after the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June and July of 1917, the body had begun adding representatives from across Russia and the front lines, renaming itself the All-Russian Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. Grigory Zinoviev would go on to chair the body from the 13th of December 1917 through the 26th of March 1926, a tenure spanning the consolidation of Bolshevik rule. The chaotic assembly that had first met at the Tauride Palace in late February, whose meetings were described as little more than a stage for speechmakers, had in nine months become the vessel through which an entire governmental order was replaced.