The Council of People's Commissars is formed

On the evening of 8 November 1917 (26 October in the Julian calendar) the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets met at the Smolny for its second session. A day earlier the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Provisional Government, and during the night they had taken the Winter Palace. Now the congress was to give the new power a programme and a government. It passed the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land, and set up a “provisional workers’ and peasants’ government”, the Council of People’s Commissars, known by its Russian abbreviation as the Sovnarkom. Its chairman was Vladimir Lenin, who took the place of Alexander Kerensky. Leon Trotsky became People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, succeeding Mikhail Tereshchenko.

The British chronology of the war records under 8 November that Lenin and Trotsky “assumed power”. The date is correct, although the proceedings dragged on until the morning of 9 November. The Decree on Peace was adopted late in the evening of 8 November. The Decree on Land was passed at about two in the morning, but bears the date 26 October Old Style, that is, 8 November. The composition of the government was announced towards dawn.

The Decree on Peace

The session began at about nine in the evening. The American journalist John Reed, who was in the hall, recalled that Lenin was greeted by an ovation lasting several minutes. When it died down, Lenin is said to have stated simply: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” First the congress approved the first measures of the Military Revolutionary Committee, among them the abolition of the death penalty at the front, restored by Kerensky in July, and the order to arrest the former prime minister. Then Lenin read out the draft Decree on Peace.

“The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, created by the revolution of 24–25 October and based on the Soviets” proposed to all the belligerent peoples and their governments the immediate opening of negotiations for a just, democratic peace, “without annexations and without indemnities”. The decree defined annexation broadly: it was any incorporation of a weaker nation into a strong state without its voluntary consent, regardless of when it had taken place and whether that nation lived in Europe or in countries overseas. The government abolished secret diplomacy and announced the immediate publication of the secret treaties that “the government of landowners and capitalists” had confirmed or concluded from the February Revolution to 7 November (25 October Old Style). Their provisions, in so far as they served annexations, it declared void. It proposed an armistice of at least three months, so that all nations could negotiate peace in that time and their assemblies ratify its terms. Finally it appealed to the workers of the three most advanced belligerent countries, Great Britain, France and Germany, to help bring the cause of peace to a successful conclusion.

The decree stipulated that the terms set out were not an ultimatum and that the government would also consider other peace proposals, provided they were put forward clearly and quickly. The slogan of “peace without annexations and indemnities” was not new. The Petrograd Soviet had been proclaiming it since the spring, and under its pressure the Provisional Government had also partly adopted it. What was new was that the Bolsheviks paid no heed to the allies and addressed the peoples directly, over the heads of their governments. According to Reed, the decree was adopted unanimously after 10.30 p.m., because the hall quickly forced the only delegate who raised his hand against it to lower it. The delegates sang the “Internationale”.

The Decree on Land

At about two in the morning the congress passed its second fundamental act. The Decree on Land abolished landlord ownership of land immediately and without compensation. The landed estates, together with state, church and monastery lands, with their livestock and buildings, passed to the disposal of the volost land committees and the uyezd soviets of peasants’ deputies, pending a decision by the Constituent Assembly. The land of “ordinary peasants and ordinary Cossacks” was not confiscated. Part of the decree was the so-called Peasant Mandate, drawn up in the summer by the Socialist Revolutionaries on the basis of 242 local peasant demands: it abolished private ownership of land and prohibited hired labour.

It was in essence the agrarian programme of the Socialist Revolutionaries, which the Provisional Government had not managed or not wished to carry out. Lenin answered the objections briefly: so be it, it does not matter who wrote it, a democratic government cannot ignore the will of the people. The decree in effect sanctioned what peasants in many provinces were already doing, namely seizing manorial land on their own initiative. At the front the news of the land division gave peasant soldiers yet another reason to go home.

The commissars’ government

Towards dawn on 9 November Lev Kamenev read out the decree establishing the government. Until the Constituent Assembly was convened, power was to be exercised by the Council of People’s Commissars, a board of the chairmen of the commissions directing the various branches of the state, responsible to the Congress of Soviets and its Central Executive Committee. The name “people’s commissar” was, as he later claimed, Trotsky’s invention. The Bolsheviks avoided the word “minister”, which was associated with the old regime.

The government consisted solely of Bolsheviks. The chairman was the 47-year-old Lenin, and the Commissar for Foreign Affairs Trotsky, who had turned 38 the day before. Internal affairs went to Alexei Rykov, agriculture to Vladimir Milyutin, labour to Alexander Shlyapnikov, trade and industry to Viktor Nogin, education to Anatoly Lunacharsky, finance to Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, justice to Georgy Oppokov (Lomov), food supply to Ivan Teodorovich, posts and telegraphs to Nikolai Glebov-Avilov, and nationalities to Joseph Stalin. Military and naval affairs were to be directed by a committee of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, Ensign Nikolai Krylenko and the sailor Pavel Dybenko. The commissariat for railways remained vacant, because the powerful railwaymen’s union demanded a government of all the socialist parties and did not recognise the coup.

The Bolsheviks offered seats in the government to the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, but for the time being they refused, hoping for an agreement of all the socialists. The Mensheviks and the Right Socialist Revolutionaries had already walked out of the congress the previous night. Now further statements by smaller groups, among them a representative of the Bund, were greeted by the hall with shouts of “How many times are you going to walk out?”. The congress elected a new All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Of its 101 members, 62 were Bolsheviks and 29 Left Socialist Revolutionaries, and Kamenev became its chairman. The congress backed the new government by a large majority and closed its proceedings.

Peace over the heads of governments

For the Entente the Decree on Peace was a call for a separate peace, which would allow Germany to transfer dozens of divisions to the Western Front and to Italy. Russia was bound by its undertaking of September 1914 not to conclude peace without its allies, and as recently as June the Provisional Government had rejected German proposals for an armistice. The governments in London, Paris, Rome and Washington did not recognise the new regime. Their ambassadors, the Briton George Buchanan, the Frenchman Joseph Noulens and the American David Francis, remained in Petrograd, but maintained no official relations with the Sovnarkom. Moreover, only fragmentary and contradictory news reached London and Paris. The Western press portrayed Lenin as a German agent and expressed the hope that Kerensky would return with troops and that the revolt of the “Maximalists”, as the Bolsheviks were called, would collapse. In Germany and Austria-Hungary, by contrast, the news from Petrograd raised hopes that Russia would leave the war.

Few in the West believed that the commissars’ government would last more than a few weeks. Lenin, however, took the Decree on Peace seriously. Less than two weeks later the new regime demanded that the high command immediately propose an armistice and approached the Allied embassies on the matter, and Trotsky began publishing the secret treaties from the archives of the foreign ministry. The road that began at the Smolny led to negotiations with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk.