October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

4 April: The Prodigal

In the muck, ideologues and true believers like the murderous Black Hundreds – ultra-monarchist pogrom enthusiasts, proto-fascists and mystics of hate – skulked and schemed behind closed doors, biding their time. The early days of the revolution were remarkable for how submerged and scattered that hard right was. Most of its high-profile figures had left the country or been arrested after February. Only the erratic Purishkevich remained at large, more or less powerless, tolerated and toothless. The political integument of Petrograd in particular had lurched leftward, repositioning radicals as moderates and moderates as right-wingers. In those days everyone was, or claimed to be, a socialist. No one wanted to be bourgeois.

Until the eve of revolution, the Kadets were a party of occasionally even bracing liberalism, harried by reaction, not without heroes. They entered April 1917 fresh from their congress, committed to a democratic republic. But now, history – revolution – made them conservatives. On the party’s right, Milyukov was an early outlier of this trend, a function of the strong tactics of weak liberalism in fractious times.

For now, though, as April began, not even the far left had unanimously declared itself an enemy of the Provisional Government. That was to come, with the train from Finland.

On 2 April, the Bolsheviks got word from Lenin that he would be back in Petrograd the next day. The leader was coming. They hastened to prepare. So it was that the following evening, at the little Belo Ostrov border station where Finland and Russia met, a small, select group of Bolsheviks awaited the train: Kollontai, Kamenev, Shlyapnikov, Lenin’s sister Maria, a few others.

They were not the only ones who had heard that Lenin was returning. Some hundred eager workers were on the platform too, to greet the train that wheezed slowly in. As his comrades watched, while the engine idled for half an hour, those gathered mortified Lenin by calling him out of his carriage and parading him jubilantly on their shoulders. ‘Gently, comrades,’ he muttered. At last they let him go and he took his seat again with relief, joined now by his excited party escort.

They were in for a shock.

As best he could, Lenin had kept up with his comrades’ writings on the war and the Provisional Government. ‘We had hardly got into the car and sat down,’ said Raskolnikov, a Kronstadt Bolshevik naval officer, ‘when Vladimir Ilyich burst out at Kamenev: “What’s this you’re writing in Pravda? We saw several issues and really swore at you.”’ This was his greeting to an old comrade.

The revolutionaries rocked homeward through a darkening landscape. Was he at risk of arrest? Lenin asked uneasily. His welcome party smiled at that. He would soon understand why.

When the train pulled in to Petrograd at 11 p.m., the Finland Station echoed to a vast cheer of welcome. Lenin at last began to grasp his own standing in the revolutionary capital. His comrades had arranged a showcase of the party’s strength, convoking friendly garrisons, but the excitement of the crowd clamouring for him was quite real. The station was festooned with vivid red banners. As he stepped, dazed, onto the platform, someone handed Lenin an incongruous bouquet. Thousands had come to salute him: workers, soldiers, Kronstadt sailors.

A throng of well-wishers propelled Lenin into the splendid chamber still called the ‘Tsar’s Room’. There, officials from the Soviet waited for their own chance to greet him. The Soviet chairman, the Georgian Menshevik Chkheidze, a serious, honest activist, had lost his usual amiable veneer. When the Bolshevik leader entered, Chkheidze launched into a welcome speech that was neither welcoming nor a speech. Sukhanov, who was of course present, called it a ‘sermon’, and a ‘glum’ one.

‘Comrade Lenin, in the name of the Petrograd Soviet and of the whole revolution we welcome you to Russia,’ said Chkheidze. ‘But we think’, he continued anxiously, ‘the principal task of the revolutionary democracy is the defence of the revolution against attacks from without or within. We consider this end to require not disunity, but the closing of democratic ranks. We hope you will pursue these objectives with us.’

The flowers dangled half-forgotten from Lenin’s fingers. He ignored Chkheidze. He looked up at the ceiling. He looked everywhere but at the beseeching Menshevik.

When Lenin at last replied, it was not to the Soviet chair, nor to anyone from its delegation. He spoke instead to everyone else present, to the crowd – his ‘dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers’. The imperialist war, he roared, was the start of European civil war. The longed-for international revolution was imminent. Provocatively, he praised by name his German comrade Karl Liebknecht. Ever the internationalist, he concluded with a stirring call to build from this first step: ‘Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!’

His Soviet hosts were stunned. They could only watch numbly as the crowds demanded a further speech. Lenin hurried from the station, climbed onto the bonnet of a car and began to hold forth. He denounced ‘any part in shameful imperialist slaughter’; he excoriated ‘lies and frauds’ and the ‘capitalist pirates’.

So much for postol’ku-poskol’ku.

February and March were festive bursts of architectural expropriation. Revolutionary groups captured and occupied government buildings, along with various sumptuous others. The Provisional Government and the Soviet had little option but to tolerate such appropriations. On 27 February, as the city convulsed, the legendary ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya and her son Vladimir had fled her modern mansion at 1–2 Kronverkskiy Prospect on the Neva’s north side, below the towering minarets of Petrograd’s main mosque: almost immediately, revolutionary soldiers had taken it over.

The house displayed a striking, strange asymmetry of interconnected structures, stairwells and halls. In mid-March the Bolsheviks had decided it would make an excellent headquarters, and had moved in without ado. On the night of 3 April, it was in its main meeting hall, amid precise art nouveau stylings, that Lenin made his views clear to the comrades who had gathered to welcome him home.

It had been the last day of the All-Russian Conference of Soviets. There, the Bolshevik caucus had unanimously approved their leadership’s policy of ‘vigilant control’ over the Provisional Government, and had broadly accepted Stalin and Kamenev’s opposition to ‘disorganising activities’ at the front. The next day, unity talks between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were due to start. Such was the mood music that Lenin interrupted.

‘I will never forget’, said Sukhanov, ‘that thunder-like speech, which startled and amazed not only me, a heretic… but all the true believers… It seemed as though all the elements had risen from their abodes, and the spirits of universal destruction… were hovering around Kshesinskaya’s reception room above the heads of the bewitched disciples.’

What Lenin demanded was continual revolution. He scorned talk of ‘watchfulness’. He denounced the Soviet’s ‘revolutionary defencism’ as an instrument of the bourgeoisie. He raged at the lack of Bolshevik ‘discipline’.

His comrades listened in stricken silence.

The next day at the Tauride Palace, Lenin intervened again, twice. First at a session of Bolshevik delegates from the Soviet Congress; then, with breathtaking audacity, at a Bolshevik–Menshevik meeting scheduled to discuss unity. Aware of his isolation, he made it clear that he was expounding personal opinion rather than party policy, as he presented his seminal document of the revolution: the April Theses.

Among its ten points was the wholesale rejection of ‘limited support’ for the Provisional Government and the ‘no opposition’ pledge of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee. Lenin repudiated without ‘the slightest concession… “revolutionary defencism”’ – continuing to advocate fraternisation at the front. He demanded the confiscation of landlord estates and the nationalisation of land, to be disposed of by peasant soviets; a single national bank under the Soviet’s control; and the abolition of the police, army and bureaucracy. For now, he said, the order of the day was to explain the imperative of a struggle to take power from the government, and to replace any parliamentary republic with a ‘Republic of Soviets’.

His speech unleashed bedlam. The impact of the Theses was electric, and Lenin’s isolation almost total. Speaker after outraged speaker denounced him. Tsereteli, the prominent Menshevik Lenin anathematised, accused him of breaking with Marx and Engels. Goldenberg, a Menshevik who had once been a leading Bolshevik, said Lenin was now an anarchist, ‘on Bakunin’s throne’. Lenin’s words, yelled the furious Menshevik Bogdanov, were ‘the ravings of a madman’.

Chernov, the SR leader, who reached Petrograd from exile five days after Lenin, after a dangerous sea journey through submarine-infested waters, saw Lenin’s ‘political excesses’ as so complete that he had marginalised himself. The evening of the prodigal’s shocking speech, another Menshevik, Skobelev, assured Milyukov that Lenin’s ‘lunatic ideas’ disqualified him from being a danger, and told Prince Lvov that the Bolshevik leader was ‘a has-been’.

And what of the Bolsheviks? How appalled were they?

It is often claimed that on 18 April the party’s Petersburg Committee rejected the Theses by thirteen to two, with one abstention. The story, however, is based on inaccurate minutes. Two of those present, Bagdatev and Zalezhsky, later insisted that the committee voted to approve the Theses, but by thirteen to two rejected Zalezhsky’s rather fawning motion that these be accepted without criticism or reservation. The Committee instead reserved the right to dissent on specifics and details.

And dissent they did. After Lenin’s speech at the Kshesinskaya Mansion, his comrades were not backward in coming forward with concerns.

The wrangles were mostly over tactical issues, such as Lenin’s suggestion that they change the name of the party, or his new political emphasis on the soviets rather than the more traditional propagandist stress on convening the Constituent Assembly. A particular point at issue was that Lenin adamantly opposed, almost as distasteful, making ‘impermissible, illusion-breeding “demands”’ on the Provisional Government, which would and could never accede to them. Instead he advocated ‘patient explanation’ in the soviets that the government could not be trusted. By contrast, Bagdatev, Kamenev and various others saw such ‘demands’ as a proven method of puncturing illusions, precisely because the government would fail to meet them. Kamenev called this ‘a method of exposure’.

A continuity, then, between ‘Old Bolshevism’ and Lenin’s theses could certainly be argued, as it was by many activists, such as Ludmila Stahl. But a permeable membrane exists between tactics and analysis – and emphasis. There was kinship, certainly, but the stress in the uncompromising theses was more than ‘mere’ rhetoric. It was no surprise that some in the party, both on Lenin’s side and against, considered them a break with Bolshevik tradition. Such debates could simultaneously be misunderstandings of the depth of shared ground, and symptomatic of real divergence more substantial than that supposedly in the ‘Letters from Afar’.

Bolshevik concerns at Lenin’s tack were widespread. The Kiev and Saratov organisations rejected the Theses outright. Lenin had been out of Russia too long, their members said, to understand its situation. Zinoviev, his comrade-in-exile and close collaborator, called the Theses ‘perplexing’; others in the party were not so kind.

At first the board of Pravda were hesitant to reproduce the Theses, but Lenin insisted, and they were published on 7 April – swiftly followed by Kamenev’s ‘Our Disagreements’, distancing the Bolsheviks from Lenin’s ‘personal opinions’. ‘Lenin’s general scheme appears to us unacceptable,’ he wrote, ‘inasmuch as it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois–democratic revolution is completed, and builds on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution.’

The party, more than many on the left, had always focused on the agency of the working class in collaboration with the peasantry. The post-1905 ‘Old Bolshevik’ hope for the revolution in Russia was steadily, if rather nebulously, pinned on that ‘democratic dictatorship of proletariat and peasantry’ destined to sweep away the muck of feudalism and oversee what could only be a move to a bourgeois–democratic system, including on the land. As late as 1914, Lenin was still writing that a Russian revolution would be limited to ‘a democratic republic… confiscation of the landed estates, and an eight-hour working day’. Now, though, he was dismissing Kamenev’s formula as ‘obsolete’, ‘no good at all’, ‘dead’. In the April Theses Lenin wrote that Russia was, right now, ‘passing from the first stage of the revolution… to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants’.

This was a shift. As regards the ‘second stage’, Lenin was clear that it was not ‘our immediate task to “introduce” socialism’, prior to a European socialist revolution, but to place power in the hands of working people, rather than to pursue political class collaboration as advocated by the Mensheviks. ‘Let the bourgeoisie continue to trade and build its mills and factories,’ the Bolshevik activist Sapranov later glossed it to young Eduard Dune, ‘but power must rest with the workers, not with the factory owners, traders, and their servants.’ Still, there is not necessarily a neat firewall between ‘trading and building’ on the one hand and ‘power’ on the other, and there was in Lenin’s position at least a tendential implication going further, an eye on a horizon. There is a political logic, after all, implicit in taking power. There was something pregnant even in Lenin’s emphasis – it was not an immediate task to introduce socialism – but…

No wonder Lenin was accused by his own party of falling into Trotsky’s heresy of ‘permanent revolution’, of folding February into, or at least edging determinedly towards, a full socialist insurrection.

But more Bolshevik exiles were returning. And they tended to be more radical than those who had remained. The economic hardships in the country were worsening, the inadequacies of the Provisional Government growing clear, the brief honeymoon of cross-class collaboration souring, and the Bolsheviks were recruiting from a mostly young, disillusioned, angry, even impetuous milieu. It was in this context that Lenin began a campaign to win over his comrades.

And his stubbornness did highlight a certain instability of the party’s current ‘quasi-Menshevik’ position, according to which some on the Bolshevik right seemed to imply that history was ‘not ready’ for socialism, while insisting that the bourgeois government could not deliver.

Ten days after Lenin’s return, the First Petrograd City Conference of the Bolsheviks convened. There, Lenin developed his argument, insisting that the Provisional Government could not be ‘“simply” overthrown’, that it was necessary first to win the majority in the Soviet. Still, delegate after delegate accused him of anarchism, schematicism, ‘Blanquism’ – a modern iteration of the radical conspiracies of the nineteenth-century French socialist Auguste Blanqui. By now, however, a week and a half after his return, he had gained supporters, too. Those stalwartly on his side, like Alexandra Kollontai and Ludmila Stahl, remained vocal. And he must have had a good deal of shy support, too, because though the majority of speakers spoke against him, his resolution on opposing the Provisional Government passed by thirty-three votes to six, with two abstentions.

This shift in the party cadres would soon make trouble for the Provisional Government.

In these April days, a remnant of the social carnivalesque of March continued, but now with a harder and more bitter edge. First signs of a general crisis were not hard to find.

In early April, thousands of soldiers’ wives – soldatki – marched through the capital. These women had started the war disadvantaged, browbeaten and precarious, desperate for charity and inadequate state support. But the absence of their husbands could also mean an unexpected liberation. In February their demands for food, support, respect, had started to take on a radical bent. That trend continued. In Kherson province, one observer saw the soldatki forcing their way into homes and ‘requisitioning’ any luxury they thought was undeserved.

On the land, the exuberant and pandemoniacal spread of soviets and congresses and conferences and peasant assemblies, amid established local bodies like volosts and township zemstvos, was beginning to take ominous forms. As early as March, in the Volga, pugnacious rural communes began disputing with landowners over rent and rights to the commons. Gangs of peasants were increasingly wont to make their way into private woods with axes and saws and fell the estate’s trees. Now, in April, particularly in the north-west districts – Balashov, Petrovsk, Serdobsk – that movement surged. Sometimes peasants simply began to mow the gentry’s meadows for their own use, paying only the prices they reckoned were fair for seed.

That sense of ‘fairness’ was crucial. Certainly there were moments of crude class rage and cruelty. But the actions of village communes against landlords were often scrupulously articulated in terms of a moral economy of justice. Sometimes this entailed the presentation of their demands in quasi-legal form, through manifestos and declarations formulated by sympathetic local intellectuals, or in the careful prolixity of autodidacts. This was an ad hoc realisation of the traditional chiliastic yearning for equal shares of the land for all who worked it – ‘black repartition’, as this redistribution was known – and the freedoms that should ensue.

‘Cabinet, appanage, monastery, church, and major estate owners’ lands must be surrendered to the people without compensation, for they were earned not by labour but by various amorous escapades,’ 130 illiterate peasants of Rakalovsk Volost in Viatka Province had their scribe write to the Petrograd Soviet, in a collective letter of 26 April, ‘not to mention through sly and devious behaviour around the tsar’.

It was one of a torrent of letters from the newly politicising, the engaged and eager, across the empire. Ever since February they had crossed the country, addressing themselves to the Soviet, to the government, to the land commissions, to the newspapers, to the SRs, to the Mensheviks, to Kerensky, to anyone or any organisation that seemed as if it might have some power or importance. In these first months some still took a tone so careful as to be almost cowed, though they were often hopeful, joyful, even, if unsure. Injunctions, entreaties, offers, queries and lamentations of curious people. They came in the great unparagaphed underpunctuated blocks of text, the urgent, rushing metaphors, and that stilted quasi-legalese of those not used to writing. There were poems and prayers and imprecations.

Outraged workers in the Tula Brass Cartridge Factory defended their output in Izvestia. The peasants of Lodeina village in Vologda wrote to the Soviet pleading for socialist newspapers. In the Menshevik press, the ‘Committee of Workers’ Elders’ in the Atlas Metal Factory decried alcoholism. Soldiers of the 2nd Battery Assembly of the Caucasus army sent a letter directly to ‘deeply respected deputy’ Chkheidze, lamenting their own lack of education and pleading with the Menshevik leader for books. Transport Repair Workshop Number 2 in Kiev wrote to him too, enclosing forty-two roubles for the martyrs of the revolution.

Over the months such letters would grow angrier and more desperate. Many were already angry now, and many more were impatient.

‘We are sick and tired of living in debt and slavery,’ the Rakalovsk peasants had their chairperson write. ‘We want space and light.’

On 18 April, the Provisional Government cabled its foreign allies with their official ‘Revolutionary Defencist’ war aims, as the Soviet demanded after Milyukov’s provocative interview the previous month. But Milyukov was seemingly determined to wreck any such move, to undermine what he considered inexcusable treason. To the document, the reiteration of the ‘Declaration of March 27’, he appended a note ‘clarifying’ that the cable did not mean Russia was planning to leave the war. That the country remained determined to fight for the ‘high ideals’ of the Allies.

The ‘Milyukov Note’, as it was swiftly known, was not the machination of one rogue right-wing Kadet. His draft and the plans for its communication were approved by the cabinet in a compromise between the Provisional Government’s left and right wings – precisely to undermine the Soviet.

On 19 April, when the Soviet Executive Committee discovered the note’s content, Chkheidze denounced Milyukov as ‘the evil genius of the revolution’. And the Ispolkom was not the only group so incensed. When on the 20th the text appeared in various newspapers, spontaneous, furious demonstrations instantly broke out.

In the Finland Regiment served the dashing sergeant Fedor Linde, a politically unaligned romantic who had played an important, undersung part in February, rousing the 5,000-strong Preobrazhensky Regiment to mutiny. Now the Milyukov note inflamed him as a betrayal of the revolution’s promise to end the war. As a revolutionary defencist, Linde feared that the note could demoralise and agitate the army in a profoundly unhelpful way.

When Milyukov’s intervention went public, Linde led a battalion of his regiment to the splendid neoclassical Marinsky Palace, where the Provisional Government met. He fully expected that the Soviet Executive, of which he was a member, would endorse his actions, assert its power, and arrest the perfidious government. Soldiers from the Moscow and Pavlov regiment joined his demonstration, and soon 25,000 men were angrily protesting outside the palace.

To Linde’s surprise and dismay, the Soviet condemned him. It insisted, rather, that it must help the Provisional Government restore its authority.

The Milyukov note and the escalating demonstrations against it caused uncertainty and tension among the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s resolution on the issue, passed that morning at an emergency session of the First Bolshevik Petrograd City Conference, was uncharacteristically equivocal. It condemned the note, and suggested that the end of the war would become possible only by transferring power to the Soviet – but it did not call workers and soldiers to come out.

However, thousands of soldiers and workers were already on the streets, demanding the resignations of Milyukov and Guchkov. When the Soviet ordered them to disperse, most, including the disconsolate Linde, obeyed. But the demonstrators were still carrying their placards reading ‘Down with Imperialist Policy’, and, tellingly, ‘Down with the Provisional Government’.

And such slogans went down well with some Bolshevik district delegates. There was a mood on the party left for such spectacles and interventions. Already that day, at the conference, Nevsky of the Military Organisation had argued for the mobilisation of troops to agitate for a Soviet seizure of power. Ludmila Stahl implored her comrades not to be ‘further left than Lenin himself’, and the delegates ultimately agreed to call for ‘solidarity with the resolution of the Central Committee’, meaning Lenin’s own, rather evasive motion.

But the next day, demonstrators were out again in their thousands, though with fewer soldiers among them. There was that surge again. Overthrow the government? The thought gained traction among Bolsheviks.

Hundreds of copies of a leaflet were scattering in the wind, some being trodden underfoot, many caught up and read: the anonymous thoughts of a troublemaker. ‘Down with the Provisional Government!’ was the heading. The comrades whispered that Bogdatiev, a far-left Bolshevik Putilov worker and candidate for the Central Committee, was the culprit. The redoubtable Kronstadt Bolsheviks were firmly in favour of overthrow. They were ready, they announced, ‘at any moment to support with armed force’ such demands.

On the afternoon of the 21st, demonstrations spread to Moscow, too. In the capital, workers once more took over Nevsky Prospect, shouting for the end of the Provisional Government. But this time as they marched forward they began to make out banners that were not their own. Another crowd milled outside the Kazan Cathedral, between its curving rows of columns like outflung arms. A Kadet counterdemonstration.

The Kadets stared pugnaciously and chanted their own slogans. ‘Hurrah for Milyukov!’ ‘Down with Lenin!’ ‘Long Live the Provisional Government!’

Clashes broke out in the shadow of the dome. People wielded their placards like weapons. They grabbed and swung. Then a series of shocking rat-tat-tat echoes. Gunfire, starting a panicked stampede. Three people died.

At 3 p.m., as workers marched again towards the Winter Palace, General Lavr Kornilov, in charge of the Petrograd Military District, ordered his units to take up position in the great square before it, surrounding the soaring Alexander Column.

Kornilov was a career soldier of Tatar and Cossack stock, celebrated for his escape from Austro-Hungarian captivity in 1916. Aggressive, dashing, unimaginative, brutal, brave, he had the unenviable task of re-establishing military discipline in Petrograd. As if to prove to him the scale of that commission, the soldiers now snubbed his order. Instead, they followed the Soviet’s command to stand down.

Kornilov was a hothead but not a fool. He swallowed back his fury and contempt, and avoided confrontation by rescinding his own instruction.

Rather than try to solve the crisis with violence, the Soviet issued an edict against unauthorised military presence on the streets. This was effectively a directive to wind down these disturbances, the April Days. That evening the Soviet Executive, the Ispolkom, voted, thirty-four against nineteen, to accept the Provisional Government’s ‘explanation’ of Milyukov’s note – an explanation that was tantamount to a withdrawal.

Activists’ blood was still up. That evening, at a meeting of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee’s Executive Commission, a motion for the government’s overthrow was gaining support. Having scandalised Bolshevik moderates, Lenin now moved to dampen the worrying ardour of his party’s ‘ultra-lefts’.

‘The slogan “Down with the Provisional Government”’, stated his resolution of 22 April, ‘is an incorrect one at the present moment’, because there was not yet a majority on the side of the revolutionary working class. Absent such weight, ‘such a slogan is either an empty phrase or, objectively, amounts to attempts of an adventurist character’. He reiterated that ‘only when the Soviets… adopt our policy and are willing to take power into their own hands’ would he advocate such a transfer.

The April Days had imparted an important, if unintended, lesson. It had become absolutely clear that the Soviet possessed more authority over the Petrograd Garrison than did the Provisional Government or the officers, whether the Soviet wished it or not.

The upsurges of the April Days may have been precipitous in the capital, but all over the country the tide of progress and change was still very strong. Across the immensity of Russian territory, the boisterousness and experiment thrown up by February went on, developing into particular shapes, channelling into more serious, formal investigations of liberation. In the nations and minorities unrest stirred, and moves for autonomy.

The predominantly Buddhist Buryat region of Siberia had seen waves of Russian immigration since the Trans-Siberian Railway reached its main city of Irkutsk in 1898. More than once in subsequent years it had been rocked by Buryat revolts against discriminatory laws, and it had faced chauvinist cultural and political threats from the Russian regime. In 1905 a Buryat congress had called for rights to self-government and linguistic–cultural freedom: it had been suppressed. Now, with the new wave of freedoms, came a new Congress in Irkutsk – which voted in favour of independence.

In Ossetia, in the Caucasus mountains, locals called a congress to establish organs of self-rule in the newly democratic state. In the Kuban, a region of southern Russia on the Black Sea, the local Cossacks in the Rada, its head hitherto appointed by the tsar, declared it the supreme local administrative power. Buoyed by the February revolution, and feeling it vindicated their own programme, members of the progressive, modernising Muslim Jadidist movement set up an Islamic Council in Tashkent, Turkestan, and across the region, helping to dismantle the old government structures – already undermined by the spread of local soviets – and enhancing the role of the indigenous Muslim population. At the end of the month, the council convened the first Pan-Turkestan Muslim Congress in the city. Its 150 delegates recognised the Provisional Government, and unanimously called for substantial regional autonomy.

Nor were such probings towards progress only in the arena of nationhood. The All-Russian meeting of Muslims, called for by Muslim Duma deputies immediately after the February revolution, was fast approaching – but before this, on 23 April, delegates gathered in Kazan in Tatarstan for the All-Russian Muslim Women’s Congress. There, fifty-nine women delegates met before an audience 300 strong, overwhelmingly female, to debate issues including the status of Sharia law, plural marriage, women’s rights and the hijab. Contributions came from a range of political and religious positions, from socialists like Zulaykha Rahmanqulova and the twenty-two-year-old poet Zahida Burnasheva, as well as from the religious scholars Fatima Latifiya and Labiba Huseynova, an expert on Islamic law.

Delegates debated whether Quranic injunctions were historically specific. Even many proponents of trans-historical orthodoxy interpreted the texts to insist, against conservative voices, that women had the right to attend mosque, or that polygyny was only permitted – a crucial caveat – if it was ‘just’; that is, with the permission of the first wife. Unsatisfied when the gathering approved that progressive–traditionalist position on plural marriage, the feminists and socialists mandated three of their number, including Burnasheva, to attend the All-Russian Muslim Conference in Moscow the next month, to put their alternative case against polygyny.

The conference passed ten principles, including women’s right to vote, the equality of the sexes, and the non-compulsory nature of the hijab. The centre of gravity of the discussions was clearly Jadidist, or further left. A symptom of tremulous times.

Petrograd was recovering from Linde’s adventure. From 24 to 29 April, immediately after the April Days, the Seventh All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, the RSDWP – since 1912, the Bolsheviks’ official name – took place. There, Lenin added his new ‘right’ critique of the left to his left critique of the Bolshevik right. The April Days, he said, should not have been a battle. Rather, they were an opportunity for ‘a peaceful reconnaissance of our enemy’s forces’ – that enemy being the Provisional Government. The Petersburg Committee in its enthusiasm had committed the ‘grave crime’ of moving, he said, ‘a wee bit to the left’.

Stalin was one of several who now shifted from their original more moderate position to vote with Lenin. There was continued vocal opposition to the April Theses from the more consistent Kamenev, among others, and from a minority further to the right clinging to the position of ‘watchfulness’ over the Provisional Government. Nonetheless, Lenin’s call for ‘all power to the soviets’, as expounded in a corrective to Bogdatiev and his adventurers, was overwhelmingly adopted. As was Lenin’s position that imperialist war and ‘revolutionary defencism’ should both be opposed.

Considering the horror which had greeted his proposals barely three weeks earlier, the shift was remarkable. Lenin’s stock was rising in his party, and fast.

The Bolsheviks were hardly monolithic, however. Lenin felt obliged to dilute his motion ‘On the Current Moment’ with concessions to Kamenevism, and still it only passed by seventy-one to thirty-nine votes, with eight abstentions. The Bolshevik right gained four places, one taken by Kamenev, on the nine-seat Central Committee, enough to hold Lenin’s feet to the fire. And on the question of the Second International, which had disgraced itself with its pro-war leanings, Lenin was entirely alone in voting to break with it.

Even so. When the congress closed on 29 April, Lenin could be cautiously pleased with his progress.

On the 26th, the Provisional Government issued a frank, emotional appeal. It admitted, as the April Days had shown, that it was not in control in Russia. It invited ‘representatives of those creative forces of the country which until then had not taken a direct and immediate part’ to join the administration.

This was a direct plea to the Soviet for formal collaboration. It wavered, riven by debates over how to respond.

The positions of Guchkov, the minister of war, and the hated Milyukov had become untenable. They resigned on the 29th.

During all the drama of the month, the Soviet had been attentive to the plights of various revolutionaries stranded abroad, prevented from returning home to Russia, possibly being held in conditions of questionable legality. The Soviet demanded the intercession of the government. One of Milyukov’s last tasks as foreign minister was to intervene with the British and Canadians on the matter of a Russian national detained by the British at a camp in Nova Scotia, considered a threat to the Allies. The prisoner’s name was Leon Trotsky.

Guchkov believed Dual Power was unsustainable, and instead sought a right-wing coalition linking the bourgeoisie in the Provisional Government with those ‘healthy’ parts of the armed forces, such as General Kornilov, along with various business leaders. This, of course, the Soviet would not countenance. But that did not mean it knew what to do with its own whip hand. It was still absurdly committed to ‘watching over’ a government that frankly proclaimed it could not govern.

The same day Milyukov and Guchkov resigned, the Soviet’s Executive Committee rejected coalition with the Provisional Government by a hair: twenty-three to twenty-two. Regional soviets – in Tiflis, Odessa, Nizhni Novgorod, Tver, Ekaterinburg and Moscow, among others – remained firmly set against the participation of socialists in the bourgeois government. Meanwhile, many further to their left, like the Bolsheviks, were growing dismissive of the Provisional Government tout court.

At the same time, however, pressures for collaboration mounted. Representatives of the patriotic socialist parties of the Allied countries, representing the international left wing of the pro-compromisers, agitated strongly for entry into the Russian government. These, in Zimmerwald parlance, were the social patriots. They came to Russia in their numbers, intent on convincing the Russian people to support the war. Albert Thomas from France, Arthur Henderson and James O’Grady from Britain, Emile Vandervelde and Louis De Brouckère from Belgium, France’s Marcel Cachin. They toured the country and the front, joining forces with Russian generals to bolster fighting spirit for what one French socialist, Pierre Renaudel, said it was now possible to describe ‘without blushing’ as ‘the war of justice’.

Most of those they sought to convince, exhausted by the war, ranged between indifference and hostility. To this their visitors seemed blind. In one particularly unedifying moment of theatre, Albert Thomas, addressing a crowd from a balcony, supplemented the French-language exhortations few understood with a ludicrous charade, like a mime at a children’s party. He twirled imaginary Kaiser moustaches, choked an imaginary Russia, and, mistaking his audience’s audible disgust at this buffoonery for praise, closed with a flourish of his bowler hat.

For the workers, peasants and soldiers who supported the soviets, and who were not implacably antagonistic to the government, common sense might suggest that having socialists within that government could only be a good thing. Gradually, certain provincial authorities began to make this argument. Kerensky was already a member of the cabinet, was he not? And Kerensky was popular, was he not? How could more Kerenskys be bad?

In the SR party, the tide began to pull in this direction, manifesting in a widening of the split between the left and right flanks. Rank-and-file soldiers demanded that the government conduct the war ‘in a revolutionary manner’. Military units in Petrograd – even including the pro-Bolshevik armoured car division – now announced in favour of coalition, on such grounds.

And to this species of ‘left’ entryism was, in strange arithmetic, added that of a certain ‘right’ socialism. Where radicals wanted coalition with the government out of faith in the soviets, those to their right, including many of the ‘official’ socialists in the moderate parties and in the soviets themselves, were coming to wonder if those soviets were finished – if power must now revert to more traditional forms.

Within the Petrograd Soviet, despite their numbers, the moderate SRs tended politically to trail the Menshevik leaders. There was diminishing distance between the dominant wings of the two organisations, and Dan, Chkheidze and Tsereteli of the Mensheviks were of a different class in ability to most of the SR figureheads. Since his return, even the esteemed Chernov, traditionally to the SR left, tacked quickly towards former party opponents such as Gots, and ‘revolutionary defencism’. He adopted the moderation of those SR intelligentsia previously to his right, arguing for a consolidation of February’s ‘revolutionary gains’, and against radical moves which might risk reactions. Decrying disorganisation on the left, and holding ‘propertied elements’ as better placed to govern, Chernov espoused socialist–liberal collaboration and support for the Provisional Government.

Excluding the rejectionist anarchists, Bolsheviks, Left SRs and left Mensheviks and maximalists of various traditions, the upshot was that both left-left and right-left began to turn towards coalition.

April ended with a rudderless government, lacking a minister of war, and with socialists in the Soviet committed to the success of a bourgeois revolution from the institutions of which they remained absent, and from which the bourgeoisie themselves were resigning. Small wonder that Kerensky prophesied entropy, confusion, doom. Disorganisation, he warned his Soviet comrades, would spread. The army would soon be unable to fight.

Thus it was with the war as key to the argument that the concerns of revolutionary defencists dovetailed with those of the country’s imperialists. They merged in Kerensky’s predictions of Russia’s impending collapse.