Bolsheviks take Moscow

On 15 November 1917 (2 November in the Julian calendar), at five in the afternoon, representatives of the Moscow Committee of Public Safety signed an agreement on capitulation with the Bolshevik Military Revolutionary Committee (PL). A week of street fighting, the bloodiest of the first days of the new regime, was over. In Petrograd the Bolsheviks had taken power almost without a shot, but in Moscow, Russia’s second capital, they had to win it with artillery. The victory coincided with the failure of Kerensky’s expedition against Petrograd and showed that the Bolsheviks would hold on to the power they had seized on 7 November.

Two authorities

News of the coup in Petrograd reached Moscow on 7 November. That evening the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, by 394 votes to 106, set up its own Military Revolutionary Committee on the model of the capital, to support the coup. The same day the city duma formed a Committee of Public Safety. It was headed by the city’s mayor, the right-wing Socialist Revolutionary Vadim Rudnev, and the defence of the city against the Bolsheviks was directed by Colonel Konstantin Ryabtsev, commander of the Moscow Military District, who was inclined to negotiate rather than fight. For two days the two authorities declared each other’s orders void, but there was no shooting. The Bolshevik ensign Oskar Berzin, appointed commandant of the Kremlin, won over the soldiers of the 56th Regiment guarding the fortress and the arsenal.

On the evening of 9 November Ryabtsev, who by then knew that Kerensky was advancing on Petrograd with Cossacks, declared martial law and issued an ultimatum to the Military Revolutionary Committee: dissolve itself, hand over the Kremlin and disarm the mutinous units. The committee rejected the ultimatum and called a general strike. During the night cadets and officers occupied the post office, the telegraph office, the telephone exchange and some of the railway stations. On the morning of 10 November Ryabtsev informed Berzin, who was cut off from the city, that the rising had been crushed, and demanded the surrender of the Kremlin. Berzin capitulated. After the cadets entered the fortress, the disarmed soldiers of the 56th Regiment were fired on with machine guns and many were killed. The course of this massacre is disputed. According to the Soviet version the cadets shot defenceless prisoners, while according to the cadets’ accounts the soldiers tried to recover their weapons.

A week of fighting

Estimates of the strength of the two sides varied widely. The Bolshevik Nikolai Muralov, one of the leaders of the rising, spoke of 50,000 soldiers and armed workers on the side of the soviets. On the other side, according to Chamberlin, about 10,000 cadets, officers, students and volunteers fought. The latter were better trained and held the city centre, with its government offices, the university, theatres and large shops. The workers’ suburbs, such as Presnya, known for the fighting of 1905, were in Red hands. The cadets drove through the streets in armoured cars, while the Red Guards dug trenches across the roadways against them and sent riflemen onto the rooftops in the enemy’s rear.

After 10 November the numerical superiority of the Reds began to tell. Artillery was brought up. The firing was clumsy and, according to Chamberlin, the city suffered more damage than the enemy. On 11 November the cadets were driven out of Tverskaya Street. The railwaymen’s union, Vikzhel, threatened to halt the movement of troop trains, which both sides were awaiting, and on 12 November forced a truce. It was poorly observed. When during the night Red Guard detachments began to arrive from Mytishchi, Serpukhov and other factory towns, and machine guns from Tula, the committee denounced the truce. On 13 November the Reds retook the post office, the telephone exchange and the stations, and on 14 November they occupied the hotels in the centre and the city duma building. Guns shelled the Kremlin. The Dormition and Annunciation Cathedrals were damaged, and worst of all the Small Nicholas Palace, where cadets were quartered. The Commissar for Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, who had heard exaggerated reports of the destruction, resigned in protest. Vladimir Lenin argued to him that one should not attach such importance to buildings when the way was being opened to a new order, and after a few days Lunacharsky withdrew his resignation.

Capitulation

On the morning of 15 November Rudnev, on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety, proposed ending the armed struggle and turning to “methods of political struggle”. In the afternoon the last fierce fighting flared up at the Nikitsky Gate, where artillery demolished a large building held by cadets. At 5 p.m. the agreement was signed. The Committee of Public Safety ceased to exist, the officers and cadets surrendered their weapons, prisoners on both sides were released, and the Military Revolutionary Committee guaranteed the cadets freedom and safety. Many Red Guards considered the terms too lenient. In the evening the committee ordered a ceasefire, but in some places shooting continued into the night. Accounts of the fate of the Kremlin differ. According to Chamberlin the Red Guards took it by storm on the morning of 15 November, blowing in the gates and overcoming the resistance of the exhausted cadets. According to Russian studies most of the cadets left the fortress of their own accord, and the Reds finally occupied it only on the morning of 16 November. The released soldiers of the 56th Regiment fell upon a colonel and several cadets whom they accused of shooting their comrades.

The exact number of victims is not known. Several hundred dead is the usual figure. On 23 November, during a great demonstration, 238 of those who had fallen on the side of the soviets were buried in two mass graves by the Kremlin wall on Red Square. Chamberlin wrote of five hundred. About three hundred dead defenders of the Provisional Government were buried a few days later in the Brotherhood Cemetery, among the graves of soldiers of the Great War. The Local Council of the Orthodox Church, then in session in Moscow, called in vain on both sides to stop the bloodshed and to spare the Kremlin churches. Moscow was the only place in central and northern Russia where the Bolshevik seizure of power met serious and bloody resistance. In most towns power passed to the soviets without a fight or after brief clashes.