They were not intimidated by the Soviet’s authority. Even so, later that day the machine-gunners elected to wind down their agitation – possibly, if perhaps counterintuitively, at Bolshevik request. Because throughout this tumult, at the Conference of Bolshevik Military Organisations, Lenin and a cautious party leadership were striving to restrain their militants from ‘excessive’ insurgent action. Having yanked the party to the left in April, now Lenin was trying to tug it right.
On the 20th of the month, an agitated and perturbed Lenin addressed the conference. Startling those who assumed he would approve of their ‘revolutionary spirit’, he stressed that all talk of an immediate seizure of power was premature. Their enemies were trying to bait them, at a time when they did not have the mass support they would need for such a venture. The present priority, he said, was assiduously to increase that support – to build up influence in the Soviet.
‘This is no longer a capital,’ wrote Gorky, amid a sense of slow apocalypse, ‘it is a cesspit … The streets are filthy, there are piles of stinking rubbish in the courtyards … There is a growing idleness and cowardice in the people, and all those base and criminal instincts … are now destroying Russia.’
The strike wave continued. On 22 June, Bolshevik delegates to the VTsIK – the All-Russian Soviet Ispolkom, or Executive Committee – warned that workers at the Putilov metalworks were likely to come out, and that they would not restrain them. On the 23rd, representatives of several labour organisations resolved that, as higher wages were not compensating for rising prices, they wanted control of production. At repeated mass meetings, the Kronstadt sailors determined to free those soldiers who had been arrested along with the anarchists. These were not secretive conspiracies: on the 25th, the sailors openly warned the justice minister of their plans.
All this while, the offensive demanded more and more men. Soldiers over forty, who had already served and been furloughed from the front, were starting to be recalled. To have risked their life once was not enough. In provincial towns like Astrakhan and Yelets, the call-up provoked riots.
The Bolsheviks were busy preparing their Sixth Congress, as well as the second City Conference of the Petersburg Committee, slated for early July. As they did, their in-party debates continued. Within the Petersburg Committee, Kalinin and other moderates won, nineteen to two, an appeal to eschew isolated revolutionary actions, resolving instead to build up political influence in the movement and the Soviet. But Latsis managed to amend the resolution: ‘if it proved impossible’ to restrain the masses, the Bolsheviks should take the movement into their own hands.
In the pages of Pravda, Lenin and Kamenev stressed caution, care, the slow building up of forces; simultaneously, Soldatskaya pravda continued to fan flames of more impatient dissent, pointedly declining to validate what their leaders described as a need to overcome ‘petty-bourgeois illusions’. On 22 June, at an informal meeting of members of the CC, the MO and the Petersburg Committee with the regiments supporting the Bolshevik party, Semashko – effectively in command of 15,000 radical machine-gunners – chided the CC for underestimating the party’s strength.
During those turbulent late June days, out of the boisterous energies of Petrograd’s most militant groups, particularly the increasingly legendary First Machine Gun Regiment, a tentative collective plan began to emerge. The protean notion grew more distinct as the days passed.
Determined to batten down the surge of unrest, and provoked by the ill discipline of the First Machine Gun Regiment, on 23 June the All-Russian Congress of the Soviet called on all garrison units to immediately obey orders. But the Soviet’s manoeuvering was uncertain. That same day, its vacillation with regard to the creaking Russian Empire came to the fore, when the Finnish parliament issued its Valtalaki – a ‘power act’ declaring its intent to legislate on domestic issues. The celebrating Finns were astonished when the leaders of the Soviet, having previously approved the negotiation of a treaty of independence – of which this fell short – reacted with outrage. Unilateral declarations of even limited autonomy had clearly not been what they had had in mind.
And meanwhile, on this last day of the Bolshevik MO Conference, its Biulleten reported a serious dispute between radicals and moderates – here the Leninists! – over whether to actively pursue agitation at the front while the offensive was proceeding successfully. The very premise of the debate, however, was mistaken. The offensive was not proceeding successfully.
After the first two, three exhilarating days of the offensive, its degeneration was swift. The scavenger birds of the front were gathering over what was becoming a catastrophe.
As early as 20 June, the exhausted, ill-equipped Russian troops ceased advancing. They refused to obey orders to attack. The next day, a German counterattack began. Panic spread through the Russian forces. On the 24th, a desolate Kerensky wired the Provisional Government that ‘in many cases, the breakthrough turned out to be unstable, and after the first days, sometimes even after the first hours of battle, there was a change of heart and spirits dropped. Instead of developing the initial successes units … began drawing up resolutions with demands for immediate leave to the rear’.
In the diaries of his AWOL years, A Deserter’s Notes, the young Ukrainian Aleksandr Dneprovskiy execrated the patriotic press in the last months before the offensive as ‘tubs of printed slop … poured over the heads of long-suffering humanity’. Despite the newspapers dutifully recycling patriotic blather, the miserable truth of events leaked quickly across the country. Often at first hand.
The situation had long ceased to be a matter of individuals, or even whole battalions, disobeying orders. Now there was mass movement of Russian troops in both directions: forward from the trenches, not belligerently but in more fraternisation, shouting greetings, picking a way through the landscape of cataclysm to share liquor and make-do conversation with the Germans they were supposed to kill; and, in vast numbers, in retreat from the front. Mass desertions. Thousands simply walked away.
That summer, the great poet and critic Viktor Shklovsky set out for the Galician war zone, a Soviet army commissar. He came the last miles on foot, through swampy spruce goves near Austrian lines.
While going through the forest, I kept running into stray soldiers with rifles, mostly young men. I asked, ‘Where are you off to?’
‘I’m sick.’
In other words, deserting from the front. What could you do with them?
Even though you know it’s useless, you say, ‘Go on back. This is disgraceful.’ They keep going.
The scale was staggering. A ramping up of already enormous numbers. On a single night near Volochinsk, shock battalions of the Eleventh Army arrested 12,000 deserters hiding or wandering numbly in the dark. This was a mass movement. Officially, 170,000 soldiers ran away during the offensive: the real number is very much higher.
Soldiers stormed trains from the front. The creaking engines rocked under their weight, screeching on the rails as men clung to roofs and buffers, as, rammed sullen and exhausted together, they swayed with the sluggish carriages. Near the northern front, thousands of the runaways set up what they announced was a ‘soldiers’ republic’, a strange new polity in an encampment near a Petrograd racecourse. They flooded the capital, hustling for cash. By the hot days of July, more than 50,000 deserters were in the city.
The men found work as casual labourers. They scavenged off the land. They became violent bandits, ripping and reconfiguring their old uniforms with a ragged swagger. Their desertions were the result of fear, of course, but that was by no means always all.
‘The mass desertions’, Trotsky wrote, ‘are ceasing in the present conditions to be the result of depraved individual wills’ – that would be a severe and unsympathetic assessment at any time – ‘and are becoming an expression of the complete incapacity of the government to weld the revolutionary army with inward unity of purpose.’ Among these hundreds of thousands, increasing numbers were in the mould of the eloquent Dneprov
skiy, whose desertion inspired him to write, who combined a desperate desire not to die in stinking runnels of blood with political rage and despair, with critical lucidity in the analysis of the hated war.
One ‘Worker Zemskov’ described himself in a letter to Kerensky – matter-of-factly, without apology – as ‘a deserter … hiding in the Kuban steppes for more than two years’. ‘To hell with it, though,’ he protested,
what kind of freedom is this, when millions of voiceless slaves are still being led like sheep to the cannons and machine guns and the officer is still treating the slave as if he were a mere thing, when still only crude coercion restrains the multimillionfold army of grey slaves, when the new government (exactly like the old) has the authority to send the entire male population into this bloody abyss (war)?
Some deserters now took to parading through Petrograd with placards, demanding what they called their ‘liberation’. This was desertion as a social movement.
Even before the offensive, the loathing the war engendered, the sense from soldiers, their families, their supporters, workers and peasants in vast numbers, that it must be ended immediately, gave the Bolsheviks political traction. From late June in particular, they ramped up their propaganda in the crumbling army: their networks of speakers and agitators were reaching 500 regiments along the front.
Lenin’s intention had always been to forge a perception of the Bolsheviks as the most unapologetic and absolute opposition to the war, but perhaps, as his left critics had cautioned, the details of his revolutionary defeatism had indeed been ambiguous. Perhaps they had been evasive, had elided distinct positions, and perhaps that had confused some audiences. In any case, the specifically (and ambiguously) ‘defeatist’ phraseology had, since Lenin’s return, been considerably less prominent. The party’s anti-war reputation was still, sure enough, growing.
On occasion this could become closely associated with the person of Lenin himself: thus, even before the offensive, soldiers of the Fifth Army on the northern front declared him the only authority they recognised. As the war grew ever more hated, people remembered the Bolshevik party’s unwavering opposition to it.
This was thanks in particular to the unstinting work of Bolshevik cadres, especially the undersung middle-level activists. They were the backbone of the party organisations across the empire. They worked hard, and grew more expert. Eduard Dune, in Moscow, travelled with his comrades far into surrounding country districts to give talks. Few of the several hundred in his local party were natural public speakers. But after February, they improved their skills, got to know their audiences – and their own strengths.
‘We began to specialise,’ he wrote. One comrade, Sapronov, was in his element in large meetings of thousands: a gentle soul called Kalmykov, ragged as a mendicant, toured the small workshops to deliver warm effective homilies; another, Artamanov, ‘either because he had an impressive bass voice or because he spoke the dialect of the Moscow suburbs or possibly for some other reason … was a great hit with peasant audiences’.
And such villagers in particular ‘listened willingly enough to speeches against the war and for peace’.
Even the more perspicacious of the party’s enemies could see the appeal and logic of its unflinching antinomianism towards the war, compared to the negotiations of the moderates. General Brusilov, no intellectual but a thoughtful man, would later recall: ‘The position of the Bolsheviks I understood, because they preached “Down with the war and immediate peace at any price,” but I couldn’t understand at all the tactics of the SRs and the Mensheviks, who first broke up the army, as if to avoid counterrevolution, and at the same time desired the continuation of the war to a victorious end.’
On 26 June, delegates from the Grenadier Regiment, one of many that had refused to advance against the Germans, returned to the capital. They told the reservists’ battalion the truth about the front – including that their own commanders drove them into battle at the points of machine guns. They appealed for help, and demanded all power to the soviets. Soldatskaya pravda pledged them full support.
Across the city and the empire, as news spread of the calamitous push that bore his name, the remnants of the Kerensky cult turned to dust.
After all his urgent and frenetic interventions, Lenin was exhausted to the point of illness. His family were concerned. His comrades persuaded him that he needed to take a rest. On the 27th, accompanied by his sister Maria, he left Petrograd. They travelled together across the border to the Finnish village of Neivola, where his comrade Bonch-Bruevich had a country cottage. There they spent the days relaxing, swimming in a lake, strolling in the sun.
As they did so, the machine-gunners received new orders for a substantial transfer of men and weapons. On the last day of the month, the military section of the Petrograd Soviet sent one G. B. Skalov to discuss these matters with them.
Provoked by the fury of their men, the Regimental Committee, controlled by SRs and Mensheviks, was pushed to hold the talks in the halls of the Tauride Palace. There the soldiers themselves, many of them anarchists or Bolsheviks – including Golovin, a leading light of the rebellion-that-never-was of the 20th and 21st – protested that these new orders were a prelude to treachery or sell-out.
The machine-gunners would not allow the regiment to be either disarmed or disbanded. They were of one mind. The room rang with their declarations. Openly, they began to discuss how to prevent this. In the sedate surroundings of the palace, the soldiers mooted the necessity of the force of arms, on the city streets.
7
July: Hot Days
Deep in the Vyborg district, a shouting crowd dragged a man behind them. They hauled him through the uneven streets and he howled and left a red trail behind him. It was not only his blood. He was a wheeler-dealer, a middleman, a food speculator in a hungry city. The meat he sold was old and rotten. The locals had caught him and pelted and smeared him with his own decaying wares, so that he left behind him a trail of rancid flesh and blood. ‘The surge is coming to the surface,’ Latsis wrote in his diary at the start of the month. ‘It is beginning. There is uneasiness in the district.’
‘Russians returning, Russians, mind you, simply throw up their hands and describe it as bedlam.’ Swallows and Amazons had yet to be born behind Arthur Ransome’s eyes: these days he was the correspondent of the British Daily News, a man keen to express the delirium of Petrograd. The uneasiness in the districts. ‘One lives the whole time in an atmosphere of mental conflict of the most violent kind.’
On 1 July, the Soviet issued a plaintive call to the First Machine Gunners to return to their barracks and await further instructions. But the gunners continued formulating plans for an armed demonstration-cum-uprising. That day, as tensions boiled up in the forms of crime, industrial upheaval and violent conflicts over shortages of food and fuel, the Bolshevik Petrograd Second City Conference opened in the Kshesinskaya Mansion.
Tensions between the wings of the party were sharpening. The enthusiasts and the ultra-left confronted the cautious. The MO had learnt of the gunners’ plans, and fervently insisted to the CC that the regiment could overthrow the government. That, in any case, a movement of the soldiers was inevitable: the question, therefore, was not whether it should ‘be allowed’, but how the party should relate to it.
The leadership, certain that the time was not ripe for insurrection, continued to urge restraint. They ordered the MO to try to prevent any outbreak.
Years later, Nevsky of the MO described how he discharged this duty. ‘When the Military Organisation, having learned of the machine-gunners’ demonstration, sent me as the more or less most popular Military Organisation orator to talk the masses into not going out, I talked to them, but in such a way that only a fool could come to the conclusion that he should not demonstrate.’ Nor was he the only MO comrade to perform this leftist ca’canny, discharging the letter of orders against their spirit. The Anarchist–Communists, of course, resorted to no such subterfuge. They were quite open
in their support for an armed uprising.
On the afternoon of the 2nd, there was a concert at the city hall known as the People’s House. It was not the usual farewell to front-bound troops: this event was sponsored by the Bolsheviks themselves, to raise money for anti-war literature for soldiers to take to the front with them. An astonishing provocation.
Before of an audience of 5,000, musicians and poets performed, interspersed with speeches from leading Bolshevik and Mezhraiontsy activists – the latter now caucusing with the Bolsheviks so closely as to be effectively indistinguishable. The event became a wild anti-government, anti-war rally, and rang with denunciations of Kerensky. To the crowd’s delight, Trotsky and Lunacharsky demanded all power to the soviets. Such gatherings could only instil resolve in the machine-gunners.
That evening, the cabinet of the government met to discuss Ukraine’s declaration of independence. The Rada had pledged loyalty to revolutionary Russia and agreed to forgo a standing army, but having acquired broad legitimacy, it was now implicitly recognised as the voice of Ukrainians – and this was a loss of authority too far for the Kadet ministers.
After a long, rancorous debate late into the night, one Kadet, Nekrasov, voted for the proposal to accept the Ukrainian proposal, quitting his party to do so. The other four voted against, and quit the cabinet instead.
Six moderate socialists and five ‘capitalists’ remained. The coalition was collapsing.
From the first moments of 3 July, the air was tight and strained as a stretched skin. In the very early hours, Petrograd postal workers struck over pay. Then, at mid-morning of that warm day, a thousands-strong protest of the ‘over-forties’, those soldiers being recalled to the war, marched in protest down Nevsky.