p On the day that the cruiser Aurora fired its cannon, the Great Socialist Revolution came into being. Assault forces of Red Guards and revolutionary soldiers and sailors stormed the Winter Palace on the night of 25 October 1917.

p At that very moment, as the artillery barrage roared a tumultuous meeting of the Second All-Russia Congress of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was in session at Smolny.

p I was there. There was an unbelievable hubbub at first, as the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks tried their hardest to wreck the Congress. They followed each other onto the platform to accuse the Bolsheviks of indulging in military intrigues behind the back of the Soviet. By a large majority the Congress rejected all the provocative verbiage of these accomplices of the bourgeoisie, whereupon they made a big point of walking out. I can still see those little men leaving, pursued by whistles and ironic comments from the floor.

p After they left, the meeting could be called to order. Lunacharsky read out Lenin’s appeal to the workers, soldiers and peasants to deafening applause: ’Backed by the will of the vast majority of the workers, soldiers and peasants, backed by the victorious uprising of the workers and the garrison which has taken place in Petrograd, the Congress takes power into its own hands... The Congress decrees: all power in the localities shall pass to the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies...’  [92•1 

p And then a storm of applause, the ovation of a lifetime, greeted the announcement that the Winter Palace had fallen and the Provisional Government was in custody.

p Lenin, Sverdlov and a number of Central Committee members were not present at that first session. Lenin appeared the next time the Congress sat, on 26 October, and presented two historic decrees— on land  [92•2  and on peace  [92•3 —to the Congress, which approved them almost 93 unanimously. The Second Congress created the world’s first government of workers and peasants, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), with Lenin at its head.

p And leading the Soviets, the new organs of government, throughout Russia—in Petrograd and Moscow, in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, around the Volga and in the Urals and North Caucasus—there were Bolsheviks, proven men, Lenin’s faithful followers and comradesin-arms.

p The Bolsheviks worked in the interests of all working people and depended on a proletariat that had been steeled in the hard school of revolution. They were supported by almost all the soldiers and working peasantry of Russia; they were backed both by the potent creative potential of millions of ordinary people, who found themselves for the first time in history faced with the task of running this massive country, and by the Soviets, the organs through which the people could genuinely exercise their power. The Bolsheviks were invincible. Before them lay a mighty task, such as had never been tackled in the history of mankind. For the first time ever the world was witnessing the creation of a free society, with no masters or slaves, no oppressors or oppressed. For the first time ever a socialist order was in the making; exploitation would become a thing of the past. But the first priority was to hold on to power, to defend the gains of the Great October Socialist Revolution.

p Hardly had the Aurora fired her shots, hardly was the ink dry on the first Soviet decrees, when the Russian bourgeoisie, with the support of its accomplices in France, England and America, fell on the people with vicious fury. The working people and the Bolsheviks became the target of military forays, counter-revolutionary plots and mutinies, of economic dislocation leading to famine, of sabotage and disorganisation in the political and economic spheres, of frenzied attacks and non-cooperation on the part of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks.

p Only the day after the revolution began, on 26 October, Kerensky  [93•1  escaped from Petrograd, made contact with Krasnov, a violently promonarchist general, and advanced on the capital. On 27 October Gatchina fell to Krasnov and there was a fierce battle at Pulkovo, on the approaches to Petrograd, while on the same day military cadets in Petrograd rebelled, supported by the Committee for the Defence of 94 the Motherland and the Revolution, a counter-revolutionary body which had been formed late on the previous evening by the Petrograd Town Duma, which was dominated by Constitutional Democrats.

p General Kaledin incited a rebellion in the Don region; General Dutov followed his example in Orenburg. The bourgeois Ukrainian Rada seized power in Kiev. The Russian counter-revolutionary forces, hand in glove with their imperialist supporters abroad, spread civil war throughout the land. Meanwhile the Germans were advancing deep into Russian territory.

p In Petrograd itself the counter-revolutionaries were scarcely bothering to hide what they were doing. The Provisional Government and the old Central Executive Committee, made up of SRs and Mensheviks, were refusing to cede their position by recognising the existence of the Soviet Government.

p Malicious sabotage was paralysing government all over Russia. Food deliveries to Petrograd ceased almost completely and our revolutionary capital found the bony hand of famine at its throat: in November 1917 the Petrograd bread ration per person was 300 grains every two days. The factories closed down for lack of finance, raw materials and fuel. In Petrograd hirelings of the bourgeoisie broke into the wine stores and led the people in drunken pogroms. Profiteers, brigands, looters and hooligans came crawling out of the woodwork.

p The employees of the State Bank, the Ministries, the Government Departments and the Post Office refused to recognise the authority of the Soviet Government. The Bank refused outright to deal with the new organs of government—the Council of People’s Commissars (the Sovnarkom), the new All-Russia Central Executive Committee and the recently reconstituted people’s commissariats. But it gave the Provisional Government and the old Executive Committee everything they asked, generously subsidising the counter-revolution. The Foreign Ministry would not translate or dispatch Soviet peace proposals to the combatant governments. Post Office clerks disobeyed Soviet directives, rejected telegrams and letters from the CEC and the Sovnarkom and delayed the delivery of Bolshevik newspapers, while continuing to handle the correspondence of government bodies which the revolution had removed from power.

p The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries on the Central Executive Committee that had been elected at the First Congress of Soviets arrogated to itself all CEC finances and documents, declaring that it recognised neither the new CEC nor the Congress at which it had been elected.

p This sort of thing was what the Bolsheviks and the working people of Russia were up against when the Republic of Soviets was in its 95 infancy. And no sooner was the victory of the revolution assured than alarmists, deserters and disorganisers arose within our own ranks— Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Nogin and Milyutin, to name a few— but in dealing with them Lenin and the Central Committee had the constant support of Sverdlov, one of the foremost champions of the Leninist line, one of the foremost creators of the new Soviet state.

p In a short time the deserters were driven from the Central Committee and left the Sovnarkom. But they remained on the CEC, and, in company with its Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik members, continued to obstruct its work.

The role of the CEC was enormous: it was the supreme state body, directing the local Soviets; it alone could establish and organise government power countrywide. Unless the CEC and the Sovnarkom were in complete accord, the Party line could not be carried out; the CEC itself could function only if it firmly followed the Party line, if its Bolshevik faction was united in opposition to the SRs and the Mensheviks. And this could not be while there was an alarmist clique within the Bolshevik faction trying to assert itself and use the CEC as a weapon against Lenin and the Central Committee. It was time to restore order: the CEC must be given a leader who could be relied on to the last. The choice was made, and on 8 (21) November 1917 the Central Committee put forward a resolution that Sverdlov should be recommended for the Chairmanship of the CEC. He was elected to the post on the same day.