October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

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.

The main demonstration business of the day began at around 11 a.m. As the First Machine Gun Regimental Committee discussed the troop and weapon transfers, preparing for negotiations with the Soviet, a mass meeting of several thousand activist machine-gunners under Golovin, supported by the Bolshevik MO, formulated their own position.

Bleikhman, the energetic Anarchist–Communist, exhorted them. He insisted that it was time to overthrow the Provisional Government and take power – directly, not even handing it to the Soviet. And as to organisation? ‘The street’, he said, ‘will organise us.’ He proposed a demonstration at 5 p.m. In an ambience of combative enthusiasm, the suggestion was unanimously passed.

The soldiers quickly elected a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, under the popular Bolshevik agitator A. I. Semashko, now directly disobeying his party’s injunctions. Soldiers’ delegates set out in boats for Kronstadt, and went racing through the city in their armoured cars, waving banners from their windows, spreading the word, garnering support from the Moskovsky, Grenadier, First Infantry, and Armoured Car Divisions – as well as from workers in their Vyborg factories. Not all their appeals were rewarded with explicit support: sometimes they met with ‘benevolent neutrality’. No signs of a countermovement, of active opposition, were visible, however.

Mid-afternoon. A seething, angry mass started to gather in the city’s outskirts, heading slowly for the centre.

Gone, now, were the uptown types. Vanishingly few of those present were the better-dressed, more affluent protestors who had taken part in the February marches. This was the armed anger of workers, soldiers – those Bonch-Bruevich had called to be Red Guards.

As the demonstrations began to converge on the Tauride Palace, around 3 p.m., the Bolshevik delegation to the Soviet convened the Workers’ section without notice. The party’s members turned up en bloc, outnumbering those Mensheviks and SRs who had scrambled to attend. The Bolsheviks were able to promptly pass a motion calling for all power to the Soviet. Their outflanked opponents walked out in protest.

At Kshesinskaya, the Bolshevik Second City Conference was into its third day. Heated disagreements continued. As the Petersburg Committee debated whether to override Lenin’s opposition and establish a separate newspaper – on the grounds that Pravda was not meeting their needs – two MO machine-gunners burst into the chamber, and announced that they were marching on the Provisional Government.

Chaos descended. Volodarsky excoriated the soldiers for going against party wishes; they witheringly replied that it was better to leave the party than turn against their regiment. With that, the machine-gunners walked out, and the meeting was abruptly terminated.

The All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and its counterpart for Peasants’ Deputies, were already assembled in the Tauride Palace: they had been trying to work out how best to offer their support to the diminished, Kadet-less Provisional Government. It was at around 4 p.m. that reports of the swelling demonstration got through to them. The Soviet leadership understood immediately that this was an existential threat to their authority – possibly even to their persons.

Quickly they mandated the Menshevik intellectual Wladimir Woytinsky to arrange the palace’s defence. They dispatched telegrams to all garrison troops, and to the Kronstadt base, sternly reiterating the ban on demonstrations. They drafted a proclamation condemning the march as treachery, warning that it would be dealt with by ‘all available means’. Members of the Soviet fanned out across Petrograd to try to calm the streets.

News of the demonstration had reached the Bolshevik CC, also meeting in Tauride, a few doors down. There was quick and fractious debate. The CC, by now including Trotsky, maintained its cautious ‘Leninist’ line – that the time for such an adventure was not right – and voted against joining in. Urgently the leadership sent activists to try to hold the machine-gunners back. Zinoviev and Kamenev prepared an appeal for the front page of next day’s Pravda, imploring the masses to show restraint. The CC relayed its decision to their Second City Conference.

At that conference, however, dissent exploded.

Though expressions of support for the rebels were defeated and the CC position did pass, it was criticised by many high-profile delegates. The conference left called for a meeting with representatives from factories, the military, the Mezhraiontsy and Menshevik–Internationalists, to ‘take the temperature’ of the city. This demand was, and was understood to be, pressure on the CC to pitch left.

A compromise was rush-cobbled together, but though couched in the party’s usual tough language, it was in fact formalised floundering. It would take days, weeks, for the radicals to make sense of what was about to come – events that would lead them to shift their positions, discard the sloganeering call for Soviet power and envisage something new, more combative still.

‘We will see’, announced Tomsky, articulating the party’s hesitant stance at that moment, ‘how the movement develops.’ For now neither firestarters nor firefighters, the Bolsheviks could only commit to keeping on watching. ‘We will see.’

From the start, the demonstration was violent. Shouting marchers heaved together to overturn trams, tipping them out of their runnels to lie on their sides in their own shattered windows. On the bridges, revolutionary soldiers set up machine gun posts. The mood was insurrectionary.

And not only among the left. ‘Black Hundreds, hooligans, provocateurs, anarchists and desperate people introduce a large amount of chaos and absurdity to the demonstration’, said Lunacharsky. In volleys of shots and frantic punches and hurled and broken glass, the left and the hard right clashed. The city rang to the sounds of guns and hooves. Beside the City Council on Nevsky Prospect, bloody fighting erupted.

Bullets from machine guns took men down. Wounded demonstrators staggered to escape along Petrograd’s impassive streets and rounded colonnades. The faces of lions watched from the grand facades of which they were part, their mouths carved shut but the dirty city air giving them smut tongues. In the canals, gliding under the bridges, barges laden with wood from the endless forests continued their deliveries, as if the streets were not full of whinnying and screaming, as if armoured cars did not hurtle overhead, and the bargemen did not have to duck at the whine of missiles. Black-bearded men from the villages frowned up from the cuts where their low boats puttered.

At 7:45 p.m., a truck bristling with weapons pulled up at the Baltic Station: the men within had come to arrest Kerensky, who they had heard would be there. But they had missed him by moments. He had departed the city. Three battalions of the Machine Gun Regiment set out through Vyborg. ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!’ their placards read. News of the Kadet resignations from cabinet had not reached them yet – with them out, only six remained. Massed militants seized munitions from the Mikhailovskoe Artillery Academy, and stormed across the Liteiny Bridge, where one section of the crowd joined the Sixth Engineer Battalion and headed for Tauride – and another peeled off for the Kshesinskaya Mansion.

There, the Bolshevik leaders were still debating what to do, when word reached them that the armed masses were approaching. Someone in the room gasped: ‘Without the sanction of the Central Committee?’

To be a radical was to lead others, surely, to change their ideas, to persuade them to follow you; to go neither too far or too fast, nor to lag behind. ‘To patiently explain.’ How easy to forget that people do not need or await permission to move.

A great militant crowd spread out at the junction of the road and river, filling the space between the mosque and the mansion. For the party, Podvoisky, Lashevich and Nevsky emerged onto the mansion’s small low balcony. Standing only a few handspans above the multitude, they shouted greetings at them – then, absurdly, urged the enraged thousands to return to Vyborg.

But this movement could not be reversed. The question for the Bolsheviks, then, was whether to shun it, join it, or attempt to lead it.

A turning point: the militant MO at last got its way, as, scrambling to catch up, the party gave its hurried and flustered blessing to a march on the Tauride Palace, in an effort to spread its aegis over a fait accompli. The demonstrators set back out south across the city’s bridges and east along the river. It did not take them long to reach the palace, or to surround it.

Within, the Soviet was buzzing in an emergency session. There could be no holding back this sea of armed protestors, and a delegation from the First Machine Gun Regiment pushed their way inside. Storming through the corridors in their heavy boots, they found Chkheidze. As he stared at his unwanted visitors in alarm, the men informed him coldly that they were disturbed to hear that the Soviet was considering entering a new coalition government. That, they said, was something they could not allow.

Some among the throng were ready to be less polite. From the city outside, from beyond the palace fence, came voices hollering for the arrest of the leaders of the Coalition Government. The arrest of the Soviet itself!

But there was no plan and no direction. The streets, despite Bleikhman’s confidence, organised no one.

Darkness came at last, and though the tension had not abated, the massed crowds dispersed. For then.

That evening, the remaining ‘capitalist ministers’ of the coalition huddled with General Polovtsev in the Stavka headquarters near Palace Square. The Winter Palace and the Stavka were guarded by the only troops they had at their disposal: the loyalist war-wounded. Reinforcements were due to join them the next evening. That was a long time to wait.

The night stretched out. A few Cossack detachments roved the city, engaging insurrectionaries. Woytinsky, responsible for the Ispolkom’s protection, was on edge: the guard was inadequate to see off any serious attack on Tauride, and he knew it. And the Mensheviks and SRs also knew, notwithstanding a degree of wavering from the less radical regiments who had come out, that morning would bring more protests, heightened uncertainty. They denounced the Bolsheviks, condemned the ‘counterrevolutionary’ demonstrations, protested ‘these ominous signs of disintegration’.

As dawn approached, the Soviet delegates crept out to brave the streets, with the unenviable task of going to the regiments and factories, to try to talk them down.

In the small hours, the Bolshevik CC urgently dispatched M. A. Saveliev to Bonch-Bruevich’s dacha to bring back Lenin. By 4 a.m., they were distributing a hastily printed leaflet drafted by Stalin, one that seemed, if anything, designed to stress their own relevance. In tones of equivocal vagueness – ‘We call upon this movement… to become a peaceful, organised expression of the will of the workers, soldiers and peasants of Petrograd’ – it pretended to a unity of purpose and analysis, an influence, that the party did not possess.

Playing catch-up, the Bolsheviks, who felt they had little choice, gave the militant MO its head, freed it to become part of whatever this was. Of course, now that the party line had switched, Zinoviev and Kamenev’s injunction in Pravda not to come out was worse than ineffectual: it was an embarrassment. But there was neither time nor focus to replace it. And who could be sure of what, exactly, should be put in its place? What was the party’s direction? In the absence of answers, the offending words were simply cut.

On the 4th, the second and more violent of the July Days, Pravda appeared, and the centre of its front page was blank. A white, textless hole.

The 4th. A warm damp dawn. Across the city, shops stayed shut. Insurgents’ trucks rushed through the streets. Soldiers squared off against real or imaginary enemies, gunfire sounding repeatedly in the morning quiet. The streets began to fill. By mid-morning, Petrograd thronged again with demonstrators. Half a million people would come out that day.

At 9 a.m., the dilapidated train carrying Lenin, his sister Maria, his comrades Bonch-Bruevich and Saveliev, crossed the Sestra river dividing Finland and Russia, through the border town of Belo-Ostrov. Though part of the Russian empire, the Finnish border was marked by checks. Bonch-Bruevich held his breath as an inspector examined their documents. With Petrograd in these throes, he was fearful that they would be intercepted. But the man waved them on, and the conclave continued back to the city.

As they approached, so too at the Neva’s mouth did a naval gallimaufry. A mad patchwork flotilla. Eight tugs, a torpedo boat, passenger ferries, three trawlers, three gunboats, a pair of barges, a scattering of civilian craft. On their decks, waving from their railings, guns aloft, the sailors of Kronstadt, riding the current. Thousands came, commanded by the energetic Bolshevik Raskolnikov, editor of the Kronstadt Pravda. They sailed for the mainland to join what they believed would be the culmination of their revolution. The fury of Kronstadt, the revolution’s redoubt, came in whatever they had been able to commandeer.

As they powered and tacked closer, the Soviet’s Executive Committee sent out its own tug to hail the bizarre arrivals. On its deck stood a messenger, begging them to leave, bellowing across the water that the Soviet did not want them. The motley armada left him bobbing in their overlapping wakes.

Kronstadt’s February had been bloody and desperate, an act of revolutionary hope on an isolated island, in expectation of counter-revolution by dawn. No officer held sway in their base now. The sailors’ soviet had had no qualms about completing its own local revolution, and their arrival meant more than just more men in Petrograd. They were, rather, emissaries from a red fortress. A living collective, a political premonition.

Their vessels swung into the city. The Kronstadt men moored near Nikolaevsky Bridge, tied up and raised their arms in greeting to the city. Demonstrators in the streets by the water’s edge watched and cheered, and exhorted the newcomers to overthrow the government. But Raskolnikov was not ready to head for the Tauride Palace yet. First, he announced, he would lead his sailors along the embankment, across the bridge north and past the long blank walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and thence to Kshesinskaya Mansion, on the wrong side of the river for the palace. But there at Kshesinskaya he would present the ranks to the Bolsheviks, or vice versa.

As they came ashore, there, waiting eagerly to address the celebrated sailors, stood Maria Spiridonova.

Spiridonova, the near-legendary SR, who had killed for the people and paid the price, whose torture and imprisonment in 1906 had shocked even liberal consciences. Her courage, sincerity and sacrifice – and doubtless her striking beauty – had made her something of a popular saint. Still implacably on her party’s hard and restive left, she was a fierce opponent of Kerensky and the government.

It was in a needless moment of petty sectarianism that Raskolnikov would not give Spiridonova – the great Spiridonova! – a chance to speak to the Kronstadt sailors. Instead he left her standing, humiliated and aggrieved, as he led his men away to the beat of their band.

The sailors marched across Vasilievsky Island and the Stock Exchange Bridge, carrying banners that read ‘All Power to the Soviets’. Their column arrived at last outside the mansion, where from the balcony Sverdlov, Lunacharsky and Nevsky addressed them. The anarchists and Left SRs among the congregation, furious at Spiridonova’s uncomradely snubbing, left this partisan gathering in protest.

Raskolnikov and Flerovsky made their way inside, where, holed up within, they found the newly returned Lenin.

The two Kronstadt Bolsheviks implored him to speak, to greet the militant visitors. Lenin, though, was troubled.

He was not happy with the day’s events, and he tried to decline, hinting at his disapproval of this huge precipitous provocation. But the demonstrators would not disperse or leave, and nor would they stop their shouting for him. The demands were audible through the mansion walls.

At last, before the tension reached some dangerous point, Lenin surrendered to the insistent crowd. He stepped out onto the balcony to a roaring ovation.

His hesitancy, though, was evident. His speech was uncharacteristically brimstone-free. He greeted the sailors with surprising mildness, hoped, rather than demanded, that ‘All Power to the Soviets’ would become a reality. He appealed for self-restraint and vigilance.

Even many party faithful were nonplussed. In particular, as one Kronstadt Bolshevik put it, they were taken aback by his emphasis on the necessity of a peaceful demonstration to ‘a column of armed men, craving to rush into battle’.

‘Looking at them,’ said the British ambassador’s daughter of the insurgent Kronstadt soldiers on the streets, ‘one wondered what the fate of Petrograd would be if these ruffians with their unshaven faces, their slouching walk, their utter brutality were to have the town at their mercy.’ What indeed? Did they, in fact, not so have the town? But this was something more than a demonstration, something less than an insurrection.

The MO agitated among the garrison at the Peter and Paul Fortress, where amid shouting and wrangling they drew 8,000 men to their side. Radicals with weapons in their hands spread out through the city, took control of anti-Bolshevik newspapers and set up guards at stations. The noise of bullets kept up, as right and left skirmished bloodily.

Mid-afternoon. Some 60,000 people processed by a church on the corner of Sadovaya and Apraksina streets. From above came pounding shots, sending the marchers scattering in panic. Five were left dead on the ground.

At 3 p.m., the huge sailors’ demonstration clogged the channel between the smart facades of Nevsky and Liteiny Prospects, where shop windows displayed proud support for the army’s offensive and for the government. The curious monied watched the marchers from above. From somewhere came another shot. A black-flag-carrying anarchist fell dying. The crowd stampeded again, ducking and zigzagging to safety, amid counterfire and chaos. Sailors broke into overlooking houses in rough search parties, hunting for arms and sometimes finding them. Blood had been spilt and blood was up, and the men spilt blood in revenge, lynching some of those they overcame.

Fired up, firing, fired upon, the marchers converged on the Tauride Palace. Again and again they shouted their demand: all power to the soviets. The skies released torrential rain, whipping up the end-of-days atmosphere among the many who stayed. As darkness started to fall, someone fired a sodden weapon at the palace, spreading panic. The Kronstadters were demanding to see Perverzev, the minister of justice, to hear from him why the anarchist Zhelezniakov, who had been taken into custody at Durnovo, had not been released.

At the very moment that the crowd began to break down doors to look for him, in fact, Perverzev was in his offices, greeting journalists and representatives from Petrograd military units. He had, he said, something to show them. Evidence that the government had been amassing for some time. Evidence that purported to prove that Lenin was a German spy.

Besieged in the Tauride Palace, the Soviet leaders were panicking. After quickly conferring, they sent out the SR leader Chernov as their emissary, to placate those howling and chanting for Perverzev. An amiable, erudite man, once held in general respect, they thought he could calm the demonstrators with a typical quotation-peppered speech.

But when he appeared, someone yelled, ‘Here is one of those who shoots at the people!’ Sailors began to grab for him. Startled and alarmed, Chernov clambered atop a barrel and began gamely to orate.

He must have thought it a crowd-pleasing touch to mention the four Kadets who had quit the government, and to declare, ‘Good riddance!’

‘Then why’, came an answering shout from the crowd, ‘didn’t you say so before?’

The mood grew ugly. Chernov shrank precariously back as suspicious men and women surrounding him jostled closer to where he balanced. A big worker pushed his way through and came up close and shook his fist in Chernov’s face.

‘Take power, you son of a bitch,’ he bellowed, in one of most famous phrases of 1917, ‘when it’s given to you!’

Inside the palace, Chernov’s comrades were realising what danger he was in. In desperation, they sent out several respected leftists – Martov, Kamenev, Steklov, Woytinsky – to rescue him. But, shoving through the crush, Raskolnikov beside him, it was Trotsky who reached him first.

A trumpet blasted out and the crowd fell quiet. Trotsky made his way to the car into which someone had shoved Chernov. He harangued the febrile crowd as he came, demanding they listen to him. Trotsky climbed onto the bonnet.

‘Comrade Kronstadters!’ he shouted. ‘Pride and glory of the revolution! You’ve come to declare your will and show the Soviet that the working class no longer wants to see the bourgeoisie in power. But why hurt your own cause by petty acts of violence against casual individuals? Individuals are not worthy of your attention.’

He faced down the furious heckles. He reached out his hand to an especially voluble sailor. ‘Give me your hand, comrade,’ he shouted. ‘Your hand, brother!’

The man would not oblige, but his confusion was palpable.

‘Those here in favour of violence,’ Trotsky shouted at last, ‘raise your hands.’

No hand was raised.

‘Citizen Chernov,’ Trotsky said, opening the car door, ‘you are free to go.’

Bruised, terrorised, humiliated, Chernov scurried back inside the palace. That he very probably owed Trotsky his life did not stop him sitting down that night to write a slew of blistering attacks on the Bolsheviks.

About 6 p.m., a joint meeting of the Soviet Executive Committees convened. The moderates turned to the army for help. They sent a plea to the reactionary General Polovtsev for some of the loyal troops stationed in the suburbs – because the political debates had not swayed all soldiers in the area – to come and defend them. ‘Now’, Polovtsev would recall the irony, ‘I was free to assume the role of saviour of the Soviet.’

Outside, tens of thousands of people still hollered, now for Tsereteli himself. Zinoviev, a popular Bolshevik, came out to calm them with banter and bonhomie, and begged them to disperse. But he could not dissuade them all from their aims, and a resolute group of protestors burst suddenly into the Catherine Hall where the terrified Soviet committees were meeting.

In response to this invasion, some of the Soviet members, in Sukhanov’s exquisite formulation, ‘did not reveal a sufficient courage and self-restraint’. They cowered from those furiously insisting that they take power.

With striking aplomb, disconcerting the man into silence, Chkheidze handed one heckler an official appeal to go home.

‘Please read it carefully,’ he said, ‘and don’t interrupt our business.’

As well as the army, the Soviet appealed to the fleet. A little after 7 p.m., Dudorov, assistant to the naval minister, called for four destroyers to intimidate the Kronstadters. In a shocking escalation, he ordered that ‘any ships attempting to depart from Kronstadt without specific orders are to be sunk by the submarine fleet’.

But the call was intercepted by the hard-left Baltic Fleet Central Committee, Tsentrobalt. It forced the commander, Verevsky, to respond: ‘Cannot carry out your orders.’

On the Mars Field, Cossacks charged Kronstadt sailors.

The Soviet kept debating. Like the demonstrators, the Bolsheviks, Spiridonova’s Left SRs and Martov’s Menshevik–Internationalists insisted that the current arrangement could not be allowed to continue. Mainstream and moderate SRs and Mensheviks, on the other hand, remained adamant that in this country, with its capitalism still undeveloped, its bourgeois phase unfinished and its proportionately small workers’ movement, a government without non-socialists would be a disaster. That coalition was indispensable at this stage.

In the Tauride Palace hall, workers’ and soldiers’ representatives pleaded for land to go to the peasants, for peace, for workers’ control.

‘We trust the Soviet, but not those whom the Soviet trusts,’ said one delegate. ‘Now that the Kadets have proclaimed their refusal to work with us,’ said another, ‘we ask you: who else will you barter with?’

Outside, shots and standoffs continued. Ambushes, sudden fusillades and the reek of smoke. Machine guns ripped horsemen from their mounts. A stampede of riderless horses, sprayed with men’s blood, hurtled along the embankment, hooves echoing, leering in terror.

Early evening and the skies were still too light. Abruptly, the 176th Regiment arrived and entered the palace.

These followers of the Mezhraiontsy had received a call to ‘defend the revolution’, and had come from Krasnoe Selo. By chance, the first authoritative figure they met was the Menshevik Dan. He wore, as he often did, his military uniform, and seeing the armed newcomers he had the presence of mind to immediately order them to sentry duty. The 176th complied.

Later, Sukhanov would mock them for obeying an enemy, one of the very moderates they opposed. Trotsky, however, would insist that their move was strategic, allowing them to enforce a degree of order while knowing where their opponents were. Either way, it is a curio of the moment that hard-left advocates of ‘all power to the soviets’ were delegated by a soviet opponent to defend the Soviet currently arguing furiously against taking the power they wanted it to take.

Those debates over power ground on. At 8 p.m. on the Liteiny Bridge, Cossacks engaged the workers: this was not February. A hammering of shots, the cries of those wounded or dying, and blood seeped through the crack where the bridge would part and its halves rise. Across the water from Kshesinskaya, 2,000 armed Kronstadt sailors breached the entrance of the Peter and Paul Fortress and took control of the military complex. A spectacular, gratuitous act: they did not know what to do with it now they had it. And still the Soviet continued to debate. Loyal troops at last started to reach Petrograd. Dead horses lay among scattered cartridges and broken glass.

By midnight, three positions were put before the Soviet. On the right, Avram Gots suggested pledging support to the rump Provisional Government until a Soviet Executive Committee plenum met. For Martov, to his left, ‘the Russian bourgeoisie as a whole has definitely gone over to the attack against the peasants’ and workers’ democracy’, ‘history demands that we take power into our own hands’ – and he called now for a new radical Provisional Government, this time with a majority of Soviet representatives. Lunacharsky, for the far left, demanded full Soviet power.

One by one, the delegates stood up to cast their votes. They announced for Gots; Dan of the Mensheviks; Kondratenko of the Trudoviks; Chaikovsky of the People’s Socialist Party; the SR Saakian; and more, person after person, from group after group. The left fought to keep making their case, knowing now that they would lose.

Close to 1 a.m., as Tsereteli declaimed at the rostrum, there came the noise of of heavy footfalls. The deputies rose, pale again with fear.

Then Dan shouted in relief. ‘Regiments loyal to the revolution have arrived’, he called, ‘to defend the Central Executive Committee!’

In came the Izmailovsky Guards, then the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky Regiments. Their bands played the Marseillaise, and the Mensheviks and SRs sang along in delight. The Soviet had been saved, was safe to not take power.

The soldiers who had delivered them were stern, still dismayed by what they had recently been told, information which was not yet public: the shock news that Lenin was a spy.

The July Days rippled through the larger provincial cities, reflecting local volatilities, particularly where garrisons were threatened with redeployment to the front: in Saratov, Krasnoyarsk, Taganrog, Nizhni Novgorod, Kiev, Astrakhan. In Nizhni Novgorod, an order for the muster of the 62nd Infantry Reserve Regiment on the evening of the 4th sparked a confrontation between loyalist and discontented soldiers, resulting in several deaths. On the 5th, the mutineers elected a Provisional Committee and for a short time took local power. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a militant working-class textile town, the soviet briefly asserted full authority.

For the most part, however, such events were not much more than hastily organised rallies. In the second city, for example, on hearing news of the Petrograd actions, the Moscow Bolsheviks issued a lukewarm call for a march to demand soviet power on 4 July. This was promptly banned by the Moscow Soviet, and the majority of workers obeyed. Many Bolsheviks would have been content, too, to let the matter rest, but, realising that their younger members, newly radicalised and enthusiastic, were likely to go ahead with some action anyway, they reluctantly joined them in a desultory, somewhat pathetic demonstration.

Between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., in Petrograd, the Bolshevik CC issued what they described as a ‘call’ on workers and soldiers to terminate the street demonstrations: it was, more accurately, a post factum recognition of the inevitable, as the movement ebbed.

On the morning of the 5th, on its back page, Pravda unconvincingly explained the party’s ‘decision’ to end the demonstrations – as if it were a decision, or the party’s to make. They had proceeded thus because ‘the object of the demonstration was achieved’; that is, ‘the slogans of the vanguard of the proletariat and of the army were imposingly and worthily proclaimed’. Imposing, perhaps: but the Bolsheviks had dithered lengthily over the appropriateness of ‘proclaiming’ them in such a way.

In any case, the goals the slogans expressed had, to put it mildly, not been met.

Dawn on the 5th. The authorities opened the bridges. Their ends pointed skyward, cutting the rebels off.

Lenin had just left the Pravda printworks when loyalist soldiers arrived to arrest him. So they arrested the workers instead, ransacked the files and smashed the equipment, bellowing about spies, German agents, treachery.

The previous day, as Perverzev spread stories about Lenin’s supposed treachery, a Bolshevik sympathiser in his ministry had sent word to the CC, which immediately requested that the Ispolkom stop the slander. Out of residual solidarity, out of concern for due process, or to avoid inflaming the situation in the city, Tsereteli and Chkheidze had telephoned the Petrograd newspapers. They enjoined them not to publish unverified claims.

Most acquiesced. But on the morning of the 5th, the morning the soldiers came, the front page of one sensationalist hard-right rag, Zhivoe slovo – the ‘Living Word’ – screamed: ‘Lenin, [his comrades] Ganetsky, Kozlovsky: German Spies!’

Nothing could stop the rumours now.

Kerensky quickly distanced himself from the release, but this was coy: on the 4th, he had already written from the front to Lvov (who disapproved), stating that it was ‘necessary to hasten the publication of the information in our hands’. The Byzantine details of the calumny were based on the say-so of one Lieutenant Yermolenko, and a merchant, Z. Burstein. The latter alleged that a German spy network in Stockholm, headed by the Marxist-theoretician-turned-German-patriot Parvus, maintained Bolshevik connections. Yermolenko, for his part, claimed to have been told of Lenin’s role by the German General Staff, while he, Yermolenko, was a prisoner of war whom those Germans (according, possibly, to a convoluted chain of mistaken identity) had attempted to recruit – which, said he, he ultimately gave them the impression they had successfully done.

These claims were a tangle of mendacity, invention and tendentiousness. Yermolenko was a strange character, at best a fantasist, while even his own government handlers described Burstein as wholly untrustworthy. The dossier had been prepared by an embittered ex-Bolshevik, Alexinsky, with a reputation for shit-stirring and malice so great he had been denied entry to the Soviet. Few serious people, even on the right, believed any of this stuff for a moment, which explains why some of the less dishonourable or more cautious right were furious with Zhivoe slovo for publishing.

Nonetheless, in the immediate term the effects were devastating.

July 5 was a day of bleak reaction. The pendulum swung.

That day Petrograd was not safe for the left. A Pravda distributor was killed on the street. Cossacks and other loyalists exerted control through intimidation and thuggery. The far right were exultant.

The danger was not all from the right, though, even in what should have been left strongholds. One party activist, E. Tarasova, came into a Vyborg factory she knew well, and instantly the women workers she had been speaking to days earlier screamed abuse, calling her a German spy, and hurled nuts and bolts at her, savagely cutting her hands and face. A Menshevik, they explained, shamefaced, when the panic abated, had been agitating against the Bolsheviks.

Nor was it only Bolsheviks who had reason to be afraid that day; the left Menshevik Woytinsky called the mood a ‘counterrevolutionary orgy’, marked by the ‘debauchery of the Black Hundreds’. Those sadistic vigilantes roamed the streets, smashing their way into houses on the hunt for ‘traitors’ and ‘troublemakers’. And they were not without popular support. ‘Public opinion’, Woytinsky noted gloomily, ‘demanded drastic measures.’

The Bolshevik left, like Raskolnikov, made ready to defend the Kshesinskaya Mansion. Some nursed illusions about returning to the offensive. But most of the leadership understood the gravity of their situation. That afternoon, Zinoviev forcefully demanded that the last demonstrators in the Peter and Paul Fortress surrender it. Any other course would be an absurd, doomed provocation.

The Bolsheviks began to disperse, for safety, and in preparation for a crackdown. Many of the top leadership headed into hiding, as they tried to come up with plans.

Three young activists, Liza Pylaeva, Nina Bogoslovskaya and Yelizaveta Koksharova slipped out of Peter and Paul disguised as nurses, carrying party funds and documents under bandages. They were swiftly intercepted by government forces who demanded to know what they were carrying in their baskets. Pylaeva grinned and said, ‘Dynamite and revolvers!’ The men chided her for the bad taste of her joke, and let her pass.

Now the Bolshevik CC voted ‘not to reverse the decision to end the demonstrations’ – as if, again, the decision had been theirs, as if a decision to reverse that ‘decision’ would have had any effect.

The July Days were over.

The Bolshevik leaders, rather nervously, sent a representative to the Soviet, to ascertain its position with regard to the party; the Soviet for its part sent Executive representatives to the Kshesinskaya Mansion. They promised that no further repressive measures would be taken against the party, and that demonstrators not accused of specific crimes would be released. The Bolsheviks agreed to call back the armoured cars of their supporters, surrender Peter and Paul (as Zinoviev had insisted, although the occupiers within continued to hem and haw) and send the sailors back to Kronstadt.

If the Soviet, notionally, committed itself to no more punitive measures, this was not the case for the Provisional Government.

At dawn the next day, General Polovtsev directed to the Kshesinskaya Mansion and to the Peter and Paul Fortress a huge attack force. Eight armoured cars, the Petrogradsky Regiment, sailors, cadets and the Aviation Academy were backed by terrifying heavy artillery. With them, too, was a front-line bicycle brigade: the idea of such soldiers was not then faintly comic, as now, but evocative of speed and modernity, and all major powers were experimenting with the bicycle, what one approving British brigade major called ‘this, the youngest, excrescence’ of the military. Before they set out, all the men of the attack force were galvanised with speeches: some of those there to exhort them, tellingly, were Soviet dignitaries.

At 7 a.m., the commander gave those within the mansion an hour to surrender. The MO was still in denial. Some members managed to get quickly away across the Sampsonievsky Bridge to Peter and Paul. There, they fondly imagined, they might make a stand. The 500 members remaining in Kshesinskaya did not resist. The firepower arrayed against them was awesomely disproportionate. When government soldiers entered to arrest them, they found seven members hurriedly burning party files. Soon thereafter, even the sailors who had made it to the Peter and Paul Fortress agreed, miserably, to surrender.

As a warning to the rest of the army, the authorities did not just punish but humiliated the Machine Gun Regiment, disarming and parading them publicly. Krupskaya witnessed the scene. ‘As they led their horses by the bridle so much hatred burned in their eyes, there was so much more hatred in their slow march, that it was clear that a more stupid method could not have been devised’ – if, that is, the aim of the government was social peace.

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. Street-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:

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 fact, 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.

On the last two days of July, after a protracted debate, as per Lenin’s analysis and plea, the Bolsheviks dropped the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’. They began to plot a new course. A course that was predicated not on the strength and potential of the Soviets, but on direct seizure of power by the workers and the party.