Even now, a few ultras from the Petersburg Committee, meeting in the deeps of the Vyborg district, wanted to continue this struggle. That afternoon, Latsis and a few of his comrades crept through the unfriendly city to the Reno factory. There, hiding in a watchman’s hut, Lenin was waiting.
Latsis enthusiastically put the case to him for summoning a general strike.
Incredulous, furious, Lenin laid down some home truths. He insisted that they take stock of the sheer scale of the setbacks, that they must understand the nature of the conjuncture. He scolded Latsis like a naughty child. Finally, not trusting the Petersburg Committee to do it themselves, Lenin drafted a back-to-work call on their behalf.
That evening, at a small Vyborg apartment, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Lenin and Podvoisky weighed up their predicament. The SRs and Mensheviks, Lenin declared, had made it clear that they would not accept power, even on a plate: they would choose to cede it to the bourgeoisie. The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’, therefore, was obsolete. It was time instead to demand, in peremptory if unwieldy fashion, ‘All Power to the Proletariat Led by Its Revolutionary Party – the Bolsheviks’.
For now, though, the Bolsheviks were hardly in a position to demand anything. The more pressing question was safety: that night, the cabinet issued warrants for the arrests of all the ‘organisers’ of the troubles, including Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kollontai, and Lunacharsky. To which list Trotsky, with typical twinkling arrogance, would soon demand to be added, a request the government granted.
As late as the evening of Friday 7 July, shots could still be heard in the city, even while trams rattled once more over the bridges and the lights of their reflections swayed in the Neva. Firing in Vyborg, a sudden volley near Vasilevsky Island, the staccato of some automatic weapon. Secret routes wound across the top of Petrograd, a roof-world above the courtyards, secret skyline walkways: ‘Perhaps the scoundrels are shooting again from housetops,’ wrote Harold Williams for the Daily Chronicle. He knew the percussions he heard were mopping-up operations. Reds and rebels being disarmed, or worse.
Some in the Bolsheviks, on the arrest list, operated in the open, daring the government to take them. Others gave themselves up. Initially, Lenin decided he would face a public trial. He was dissuaded from this course by various comrades – including his sister Maria – who felt that iron reaction in the capital would make his situation too dangerous. So he stayed in hiding. His decision was controversial: Kamenev and others worried it made him look guilty of the spying of which he was accused.
Lenin moved between comrades’ houses. He holed up in the apartment of one Margarita Fofanova, then on the top floor of 17 Rozhdestvenskaya Street, with the Alliluyev family. He shaved off his iconic beard, put on a worker’s tunic and an unlikely hat. He tried to fade into the crowd. On 9 July, still hunted by the police, he left Petrograd altogether.
It was the first of a series of heart-in-mouth escapes.
Late at night, Lenin and Zinoviev went to the Primorsky Station to meet their comrade Yemelyanov, a worker in an arms factory. Elbowing past the usual inebriated late travellers, ignoring the drunken songs, they made it onto the last train at 2 a.m. There they crouched on the steps of the rearmost coach, gripping the handles as the train clattered through the cool night. They were tense, poised to jump off in a moment, to launch themselves into the dark should anyone shout their names, should they be recognised. No matter how fast it sped, they decided, they would not risk staying aboard. They would rather leap. But they made it to Yemelyanov’s home village of Razliv, just beyond the city, without mishap.
They stayed there a few days in his barn, but when police extended their searches to this area, the fugitives made their way through the undergrowth to a crude hut by Lake Razliv’s deserted south-eastern shore. Zinoviev and Lenin disguised themelves as Finnish peasants, complete with a haystack by their rough lodgings. They waited out the days. There, with one tree stump for his table and another for his chair, Lenin kept out of sight, a martyr to the remorseless mosquitoes and the rain, and wrote.
The July events left residue. The crime rate of Petrograd was still rising. But, after the quasi-revolt of July, there came a spike in murders of a particular sort, a bleak social symptom. Murders born of political argument. The ill-tempered slanging matches of the day escalated abruptly into fights, even armed violence. After February, political debates had been fiery and exuberant. Now, they could be deadly.
Everywhere was confrontation, sometimes in sordid form. Strange threats. The pages of Petrogradsky listok carried a weird warning against the street justice and lynching parties, an ultimatum and a cruel negotiation from old-fashioned criminals themselves. They would no longer restrict themselves to robbery, said a spokesperson for this villainy, but would ‘kill anybody we meet at the dark corner of streets’. Burglary would be a prelude to slaughter. ‘Breaking into a house, we will not simply loot, but will murder everyone, even children, and won’t stop our bloody revenge until acts of mob violence are stopped.’
It seemed as if the disaster of the July Days had set the Bolsheviks back years. Steklov was arrested. The authorities ransacked the house of Anna Elizarova, Lenin’s sister. They took Kamenev on the 9th. By the late days of the month, Lunacharsky and Trotsky had joined many of the Bolshevik leaders, and other activists, in Kresty prison, where the guards stoked up the criminals against the ‘German spies’.
Still the political prisoners made space and time and conditions to write, and to debate. Some moderate left papers – Izvestia, Volia naroda, Golos soldata – still refrained from comment on the spying allegations. Even the Kadet paper, Rech, cautiously affirmed that the Bolsheviks were innocent until proven guilty. This did not, of course, inhibit it from backing the demands of right Mensheviks and SRs for punitive measures against them. Such examples of restraint aside, Lenin was denounced across the Russian media. By 11 July, when he tried to refute the charges in a piece sent to Gorky’s paper Novaya zhizn, the clamour was deafening.
‘The counterrevolution is victorious,’ wrote Latsis miserably on 12 July. ‘The Soviets are without power. The junkers, running wild, have begun to raid the Mensheviks too.’ The Left SRs, as well, were hounded by the police.
The Bolshevik Moscow Regional Committee reported resignations from the party, ‘disarray in the ranks’. In Vyselki, Ukraine, a ‘pogrom mood’ prevailed, and the party ‘was in flames’, riven by splits and bled by defections. Recruitment stalled. The workers, one activist from Kolpinsky reported, ‘turned against us’. In six districts, Bolsheviks were thrown out of factories by their workmates. On 16 July, in a punitive macabre ritual, a factory committee on Vasilievsky Island forced representatives of their local Bolsheviks to attend the funeral of a Cossack killed during the unrest.
That the Mezhraiontsy at last entered the party felt like little compensation for the retrenchment. Even some local Bolshevik groups came out against their own leadership. The Executive Committee of the party in Tiflis and, of all places, in Vyborg pledged full support to the Soviet, and demanded that the Bolshevik leadership turn themselves in.
Amid the setbacks came a few triumphs. None were more important than the left-moving Latvia, where the Bolsheviks held the workers’ soviets and landless peasants’ soviets, and cleaved to an uncompromising line. There, the July Days had their echo in a confrontation in Riga between Latvian riflemen and one of the ‘Death Battalions’, shock troops of the regime, that had left several dead on both sides. The Fifth Latvian Social Democratic Conference took place immediately after, from 9 to 19 July, and the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold, exercising measures of control over society at large – food distribution, local administration, and so on. The Latvian party already acted like a government-in-waiting. In possessing such confidence, though, it was an outlier.
Most ominous across the country was a certain rise of ultra-right, antisemitic pogromists. A group called Holy Russia put out Groza – Thunderstorm – with repeated calls to violence. S
treet-corner agitators fulminated against the Jews.
From his hide, throughout these bad days, Lenin sent articles to his comrades, and repeatedly proclaimed his innocence of spying. He received contacts who made the trek to the lonely shore, Yemelyanov’s son standing guard by the dark water, ready to make the bird-call sound that was an alarm if strangers appeared.
Lenin prepared for death at the hands of reaction. ‘Strictly entre nous,’ he wrote to Kamenev, ‘if I am done in, please publish my notebook “Marxism and the State”.’
He was not done in, and soon, in Finland, he would have a chance to develop that notebook on the state and revolution.
The street-fighting right may have been stronger immediately after the July Days, but the Provisional Government was not. On the contrary, the schisms at its heart were still intractable.
On 8 July, in the face of the gulf between himself and the cabinet socialists, Prime Minister Prince Lvov resigned. To replace him, he invited the only figure who seemed even remotely able to bridge that gap, a man of both the Duma and the Soviet – Kerensky.
Kerensky, of course, accepted. He began the unenviable process of putting together a new unity government.
In the demented early days of the Kerensky cult, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva recast the object of devotion as Napoleon:
And someone, falling on the map,
Does not sleep in his dreams.
There came a Bonaparte
In my country.
Now, Lenin too, months later, argued in Rabochy i soldat that Kerensky’s rule was Bonapartism – but from him that was not a flattering description. He used the term much as Marx and Engels had, in a technical way, to describe ‘the manoeuvring of state power, which leans on the military clique … for support, between two hostile classes and forces which more or less balance each other out’. For Lenin, Kerensky’s degenerating Bonapartism was a balancing act between opposed social forces.
The catastrophe at the front could no longer be hidden. The day he became prime minister, Kerensky made the redoubtable General Kornilov commander of the south-western front, where Russian troops were disintegrating at the most dramatic rate. In this move he was strongly encouraged by the government representative to that front, the extraordinary Boris Savinkov.
Savinkov played an important political role in those turbulent months. He was a man who had undergone a dramatic political journey. Not only an SR but, in the years leading up to the 1905 revolution, a flamboyant and notorious activist within the SR’s terrorist wing, its Battle Organisation, he had been involved in the killings of several tsarist officials. After 1905, he had become a writer of sensationalist novels. The advent of the war aroused in him a boundless chauvinism and militarism: in exile, he had joined the French Army, returning to Russia in April 1917, where he grew close to Kerensky. Though he believed in the judicious use of the commissars, the people’s representatives, to mediate between officers and soldiers, in his fervidly authoritarian patriotism, Savinkov was also an advocate of utterly ruthless measures against ill discipline – up to and including, it seems, military dictatorship.
On his appointment, Kornilov, the iron disciplinarian, demanded the authority to execute fleeing soldiers. Even before receiving his less than deferential request, in fact, Kerensky had already authorised commanders to fire on retreating soldiers, and within days the government reinstituted capital punishment at the front, as demanded. Still, when the details of Kornilov’s confrontational exchange with Kerensky were leaked to the press, Kornilov’s reputation as a hard man of the right soared, among both enemies and friends.
On 16 July, Kerensky, accompanied by Savinkov and his close collaborator Maximilian Filonenko, the right SR commissar of the Eighth Army, met with the Russian high command at Stavka, in Mogilev, to take stock of the military situation. Kornilov was not present – tellingly, the chaos and disintegration of the troops in his area would not permit it – and he telegraphed in his own, rather mild, report. Most of those generals who did attend, however, including Alexeev, Commander-in-Chief Brusilov, and Denikin of the western front, were nothing like so restrained.
Denikin in particular poured vitriol on the revolution, blaming it for the army’s collapse. He blasted the commissars to the stunned Kerensky, railed against Order Number 1, denounced the undermining of authority. The generals insisted that all such features of Dual Power be overturned.
On the train back to Petrograd, where he would preside with his usual histrionics at the funeral of Cossacks slain in the July Days, the shaken Kerensky decided that the gravity of the situation made it imperative to replace Brusilov with Kornilov as commander-in-chief. Within two days, he had taken the army away from a thoughtful, relatively open-minded career officer and delivered it to a hard-line, ambitious counterrevolutionary.
Emboldened by recent developments, disgusted at the state of the country, malcontents on the right pined for reaction, dreaming ever more loudly of a dictatorship.
On 18 July, Kerensky’s government moved into the Winter Palace. In an unsubtle snub, it requested the Soviet leave the Tauride Palace to make way for the Fourth State Duma. This was not a request that could be declined.
On 19 July, the Congress of Trade and Industry attacked the government for having ‘permitted the poisoning of the Russian people’. It demanded ‘a radical break … with the dictatorship of the Soviet’, and wondered openly if ‘a dictatorial power is needed to save the motherland’. Such a clamour against the Soviet would only increase. Take power, the streets had demanded, and the Soviet had declined the invitation. Now it was being bled of such power as it had.
At the urging of the Kadets, Kerensky passed laws imposing tough restrictions on public meetings. The brief window of permissiveness towards Ukrainian and Finnish nationalism closed: Russia had been building up troops on Finnish soil since it declared its semi-independence, and now, on 21 July, its parliament was dissolved – which provoked an alliance of the Finnish Social Democrats (who had held a majority) with the Bolsheviks. ‘The Russian Provisional Governement’, raged the SD paper Työmies, ‘together with Finland’s reactionary bourgeoisie has stabbed parliament and the whole Finnish democracy in the back.’
Reaction came to Petrograd as, around the country, peasant revolts grew in violence and anarchy continued, especially over the hated war, the catastrophic offensive costing hundreds of thousands of lives. On 19 July, in Atarsk, a district capital in Saratov, a group of angry ensigns waiting for a train to the front smashed the station lanterns and went hunting their superiors, guns at the ready, until a popular ensign took charge, and ordered the officers’ arrest. Rioting soldiers detained, threatened and even killed their officers.
Perhaps Kornilov’s relatively mild telegram of the 16th had lulled Kerensky into believing he might find in the general a collaborator. Such hopes were destroyed quickly and comprehensively. By the 19th of the month, the new commander-in-chief bluntly demanded total independence of operational procedures, with reference only ‘to conscience and to the people as a whole’. His people leaked this message to the press, that the public might marvel at his toughness.
Kerensky began to fear that he had created a monster. He had.
He was not alone in this growing sense of alarm. That month, shortly after Kornilov’s ascension, an anonymous ‘true friend and comrade’ sent a terse, prophetic note to the Executive Committee of the Soviet: ‘Comrades. Please drive out that fucking son of a bitch General Kornilov, or else he’s going to take his machine guns and drive you out.’
For a time, Kerensky was distracted from this rightist jostling by his own efforts to create a government. It took several attempts, but on 25 July, Kerensky at last managed to inaugurate the second Coalition Government. It was made up now of nine socialist ministers, a slight majority, but all except Chernov came from their parties’ right wings. In addition, and crucially, they entered cabinet as individuals, not as representatives of those parties, or of the Soviet.
In fa
ct, the new government – including these ministers – did not recognise Soviet authority. Dual Power was done.
It was in this distinctly unfriendly climate that the Bolsheviks held their delayed Sixth Congress.
Late on 26 July, in a private hall in Vyborg, 150 Bolsheviks from across Russia came together. They assembled in a state of extreme tension and semi-illegality, rudderless, their leaders imprisoned or on the run. Two days after the start of their meeting, the government banned assemblies deemed harmful to security or the war, and the congress quietly relocated to a workers’ club in the south-west suburbs.
Embattled, the Bolsheviks were grateful for whatever solidarity they could get. Their welcome to left Mensheviks who attended, like Larin and Martov, was rapturous, notwithstanding the rebukes the guests offered along with their greetings.
But as the days passed and the caucusing continued, furtive, curtailed, anxious as the party was, something began to grow clear. The apocalypse had not, in fact, occurred. The mood was tense, but brighter than it had been two weeks before. The July Days had hurt the Bolsheviks – but that hurt had not cut deep, nor did it last long.
Fear of attacks from the right, among even considerably more moderate socialists, meant that district soviets had started closing ranks against perceived counterrevolution, even protecting the Bolsheviks as their own, if resented, left flank. In April, the party had 80,000 members in seventy-eight local organisations: now – after the crisis of July and a short, demoralising haemorrhage of members – it still numbered 200,000, in 162 organisations. Petrograd contained 41,000, with similarly strong numbers in the Ural mining territory, though there were fewer (and politically more ‘moderate’) Bolsheviks in and around Moscow. But the Mensheviks, by contrast – the party of the Soviet, still a crucial institution – had 8,000 members.