October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

6 June: A Context of Collapse

On the first day of June, the Bolshevik Military Organisation met with representatives of the Kronstadt party and approved plans for a garrison demonstration. To the Central Committee, the MO sent a list of regiments it was confident it could persuade to take part. Together they numbered 60,000 men.

At that moment the CC was focused on affairs of state: from 3 to 24 June, that First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies – the gathering planned at the All-Russian Conference of Soviets, at the start of April – was meeting in Petrograd. Its 777 delegates comprised 73 unaffiliated socialists, 235 SRs, 248 Mensheviks, 32 Menshevik–Internationalists, and 105 Bolsheviks. The congress quickly elected a new SR- and Menshevik-dominated executive committee.

Almost as soon as proceedings opened, a visibly furious Martov went on the attack – against fellow Mensheviks. He deplored Tsereteli’s collaboration with the Provisional Government, particularly over the recent deportation of his Swiss comrade Robert Grimm. He appealed to the Mensheviks in the hall: ‘You, my past comrades in revolution, are you with those who give carte blanche to their minister to deport any category of citizen?’

From the Mensheviks came an extraordinary response: ‘Tsereteli is not a minister, but the conscience of the revolution!’

Then, Sukhanov wrote with admiration, Martov – ‘slight, meek, somewhat awkward’ – bravely faced down the ‘voracious, screeching monster’ of the crowd. The attack by his own party was so ugly that Trotsky himself, hardly a close comrade, ran forward to offer solidarity to the embattled internationalist. ‘Long live the honest socialist Martov!’ he shouted.

Tsereteli’s speech, by contrast, provoked ‘rapturous, never-ending applause’ from his fraction. Here was evidence of an ongoing shift among the leading party moderates towards being gosudarstvenniki – ‘statists’, of a sort. The crisis of April had strengthened the beliefs of those Mensheviks who saw socialist participation in power as necessary for authoritative government, and as a way to push their policies. With which, pari passu, grew their sense of themselves as custodians of the state itself – a state that might get things done.

It was not as if that state powered from success to success. After a month of governmental coalition, the mood in the country was hardening. Unrest in the countryside, the cities and at the front was increasing to the point of provoking serious social alarm. Urban crime and violence were still rising. Shortages grew worse. Hauling themselves feebly through the traffic on the streets of Petrograd in these high summer days, the horses were skeletal. The people were famished.

Despite all this, to the impatience of some on the left of his party, Lenin stuck to his patient programme of ‘explaining’ Bolshevik opposition to coalition, and of what he insisted was the real reason for social problems. ‘The pilfering of the bourgeoisie’, he told the congress, ‘is the source of the anarchy.’

Against such intransigence, on 4 June, Tsereteli, the minister of posts and telegraphs, justified the Soviet’s collaboration with the bourgeoisie to the gathered delegates. ‘There is’, he said, ‘no political party in Russia which at the present time would say “Give us power”.’

To which from the depths of the room an immediate heckle came back.

‘There is such a party,’ shouted Lenin.

On the 4th, the Bolshevik left showed its strength. On Petrograd’s Mars Field, the party held a rally in honour of the fallen of February. Alongside the Kronstadt sailors, the MO had organised hundreds of troops from the Moskovsky, Grenadier, Pavlovsky, Finlyandsky, Sixth Engineer, 180th Infantry, and First Machine Gun regiments. In his speech on behalf of the MO, Semashko pointedly praised the radicalism of Kronstadt – to an audience that included Krylenko of the Bolshevik CC, which had chided the soldiers, and the caution of which was provoking such exasperation among radicals.

Two days later, at a joint meeting with the CC and executive of the Petersburg Comittee, the MO again proposed an armed demonstration. At this point Lenin was in favour; Kamenev, ever cautious, was against, as were several others on the Petersburg Committee, including Zinoviev. Even Krupskaya, unusually, took a different line from Lenin – in her view the demonstration was unlikely to be peaceful, so perhaps, given the risks of it escalating beyond the party’s control, it should not go ahead.

In the end the leadership made no decision. A decision would soon be made for them.

The Bolsheviks were the most organised and largest group on the far left, but they were not the only one. To their own left were groups of anarchists of various sizes, inclinations and degrees of influence. Decidedly a minority current, anarchism nonetheless enjoyed localised support across the empire, with various strongholds, such as Odessa – and Petrograd.

There in the capital, the most radical and influential were the Anarchist–Communists. Some of their leaders were held in esteem, like Iosif Bleikhman, a fiery, unkempt, charismatic figure who spoke his native Russian with what Trotsky described as a ‘Jewish-American accent’ which his audiences enjoyed, and Shlema Asnin, a respected militant with the First Machine Gun Regiment, a dark-bearded former thief who dressed like a gothic cowboy, wide-brimmed hat, guns and all.

In the same chaotic expropriatory post-February wave during which the Bolsheviks moved into the Kshesinskaya Mansion, revolutionaries had taken and retooled the Vyborg summer home of the official P. P. Durnovo. Its gardens were now a park, with facilities for local children, and the building was hung with black banners reading ‘Death to all capitalists’. The house was the headquarters of several groups including the district bakers’ union, some far-left SR-Maximalists, and an Anarchist–Bolshevik group grandly styling itself the Soviet of the Petrograd People’s Militia. This last, desiring better facilities to produce its leaflets, on 5 June decided with staggering chutzpah to send eighty gun-toting members to occupy the press of the right-wing Russkaya volia. After only a day, two regiments easily forced them out. But the authorities were ruffled. Up with these anarchists, they decided, they would not put.

On the 7th, Minister of Justice P. N. Perevezev issued them a deadline of twenty-four hours to vacate their villa. The anarchists appealed to Vyborg workers for protection. It is a measure of the moment, and of the respect these anarchists commanded, that the next day saw sizeable armed demonstrations in support. Several thousand workers came out on their behalf, closing twenty-eight factories.

The contradictions of the Soviet immediately resurfaced. The Ispolkom, the Executive Committee, lobbied by workers’ delegations, asked Perevezev to rescind his ultimatum while they looked into the matter: simultaneously, they drafted an appeal to the demonstrators to return to work. Meanwhile the delegates to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets overwhelmingly voted for full cooperation with and support for Lvov’s government, and prohibited armed demonstrations without Soviet authorisation.

Such a commitment to maintaining order was, to the Bolsheviks, an irresistible opportunity for agitation: the party hurriedly brought forward to the evening of that day, the 8th, a discussion between the CC, the Petersburg Committee, the MO, and representatives of regiments, trade unions and factories of the MO’s proposal. Now, by 131 votes to 6, with 22 abstentions, the meeting agreed that the moment was propitious for organising a demonstration.

The size of this majority, though, disguised unease. Asked to vote on whether there was a general inclination among people to come out, and also on whether the masses would do so against Soviet opposition, the results were much less clear-cut. To the first question, the ayes had it, but only by fifty-eight to thirty-seven, with almost as many abstentions – fifty-two – as voted yes. To the second question, the affirmative margin was tiny: forty-seven to forty-two. And this time, among a group of militants not renowned for sitting on their hands, there were almost as many abstained as voted for yes and no combined: eighty. This bespoke immense uncertainty about the demonstration’s chances in the face of Soviet disapproval.

Still, the decision was made. The demonstration would go ahead at 2 p.m. on Saturday 10 June, which left only one day to organise. The call was to go out the next morning. A special edition of the MO daily paper, Soldatskaya pravda – a starker, blunter publication than Pravda, with a less educated reader in mind – was quickly prepared, containing routes, instructions and slogans. The key demand would be the end of dvoevlastie, Dual Power, and the transfer of all power to the Soviet.

That night, in an unrelated crackdown against militants, the authorities arrested Khaustov, editor of the Bolshevik MO’s frontline paper, Okopnaya pravda, and charged him with treason for writing against a military offensive. His incarceration would not, as we shall see, be without consequence.

The Anarchist–Communists, of course, were fully behind the upcoming demonstration. Late in the afternoon, the Mezhraiontsy were informed of the plans, and with Trotsky supporting them and over the objections of Lunacharsky, they voted to join the preparations. Across the capital, within military units and factories, Bolshevik agitators tabled resolutions in favour of coming out – and, for the most part, they won them, not least because, given that they were a minority within it, their call for all power to the Soviet did not appear partisan.

However, one important group remained in the dark. Almost unbelievably, in what was either a lamentable oversight or some ill-thought-through machination, the party’s organisers failed to alert their own Bolshevik delegates to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

At around 3 p.m. on the 9th, Bolshevik leaflets about the demonstration hit the streets. At once, the Coalition Government appealed for law and order, and warned that force would be met by stern force. It was only now, as word spread, that the Bolshevik Congress delegates got wind of the plans. Tacking somewhat to the right of their Petrograd comrades in general, many had concerns at the politics behind the decision: besides which they were, unsurprisingly, incandescent at their treatment.

At an emergency meeting with representatives from the CC, including Viktor Nogin, they made their fury clear. ‘Here I, a representative, only now found out that a demonstration was being organised,’ one said. They insisted that Nogin – who was himself opposed to the coming-out – dissuade the CC from its planned course.

The Soviet’s Executive Committee, too, was doing its utmost to prevent it. Many in the Soviet were terrified that any such armed provocation would provoke bloody clashes with the right, strengthening reaction; they also feared that this presaged some Bolshevik attempt to take control. And there was in fact a minority on the party left, including Old Bolsheviks Latsis, Smilga and Semashko, who wondered if the action might not indeed be a way to seize the city’s communications – perhaps even power.

Evening fell amid a flurry of rushed debates, miscommunications, preparations. False rumours spread that Kerensky had mobilised military forces to crush any march. Chkheidze, Gots, Tsereteli and Fydor Dan of the Soviet Congress presidium appealed desperately for order. Lunacharsky and other Mezhraiontsy tried to stop the congress from declaring action against the demonstration, stalling, it seems, in the hopes that caution would prevail among the Bolsheviks.

At 8:30 p.m., Zinoviev, Nogin and Kamenev reached the Kshesinskaya Mansion and reported the fury of the party’s delegates. The Bolshevik leadership hastily convened a meeting. In view of the tense situation, the naysayers vociferously counselled cancellation. But, despite the growing opposition, the meeting voted fourteen to two to go ahead.

Within a few hours, the Soviet Congress, meeting late and excluding Bolsheviks and Mezhraointsy, was unanimously condemning the Bolsheviks for their plans. It ruled that ‘not a single demonstration should be held today’, and prohibited any such action for three days. To police this, the Congress quickly inaugurated the splendidly named Bureau for Counteracting the Demonstration. The forces ranged against the plans were growing in anger and strength.

At last, at 2 a.m. on the 10th itself, the increasingly agitated Lenin, Zinoviev and Sverdlov met once again with Nogin, Kamenev and the Bolshevik delegation to the Congress, who demanded of the rump CC present – only five members – that it cancel the plans.

The CC voted. Kamenev and Nogin held firm to their opposition. Zinoviev had earlier switched sides, to support the proposal: now in these last tumultuous minutes he switched back again. And Sverdlov and Lenin abstained.

With what can only have been anxious relief, the Central Committee cancelled the demonstration, by three votes to none, with those two key abstentions.

The vote was ludicrously small. No members of the Petersburg Committee or the MO itself were present. Had there been any opposition to this final-second decision, the process could easily and reasonably have been denounced as inquorate and undemocratic. But Lenin made no objection. The demonstration was off.

An undignified, pell-mell rush. The unhappy Bolsheviks scrambled to inform party organisations and cadre, and the Anarchist– Communists themselves, that the action was cancelled. At 3 a.m., party printers got word. Urgently they rejigged the layouts of Pravda and Soldatskaya pravda, shuffling and reconfiguring stories, removing instructions for the demonstration. At dawn, party militants raced to factories and barracks to argue against what they had so keenly promoted scant hours before.

Delegates from the Soviet Congress, too, spread through Petrograd, pleading with workers and soldiers not to come out. Some local committees passed resolutions insisting that though they stood down, they did so in response to the Bolsheviks’ request, not to that of the Soviet Congress or the Coalition Government.

Not that the Bolsheviks could avoid censure. In the factories, barracks and courtyards of Vyborg, militants were furious at the volte-face. They inveighed against the party. Incredulous members, reported the Bolsheviks’ own Izvestia, heaped insults on their leaders. Soldatskaya pravda washed its hands of the decision: the order, it stressed, came from above. Stalin and Smilga proffered their resignations from the CC, in protest at the highly questionable vote from which they had been absent (their resignations were rejected). A disgusted Latsis reported members tearing up their party cards. In Kronstadt, one prominent Bolshevik, Flerovsky, described the wrath of his fellow sailors that morning as ‘among the most unpleasant’ hours of his life. He was able to dissuade them from a unilateral demonstration only by suggesting that a delegation sail to Petrograd to find out from the CC precisely what was going on.

The Bolshevik leadership had a lot of explaining to do.

At a special commission of Mensheviks and SRs on 11 May, Tsereteli gave voice to the rage of the moderates. The recent events, he said, were evidence of a shift in Bolshevik strategy from propaganda to an overt attempt to seize power by arms, and thus he called for the party’s suppression.

The debate continued at a meeting of the Congress.

Fyodor Dan was in his late forties, a committed high-profile Menshevik, a doctor who had served in the war as a surgeon, though he had been an anti-war ‘Zimmerwaldist’, close to the Menshevik left intellectually and personally – his wife Lydia was Martov’s sister. After February, however, he took a revolutionary defencist position, contending that newly revolutionary Russia had the right and the duty to hold out in the war. Notwithstanding certain leftist leanings, Dan was also, as he saw it perforce, an advocate of the ‘democracy’ – the democratic masses – working with the Provisional Government, and he supported Tsereteli’s ascension to minister for posts and telegraph in May. But despite that solidarity with his party comrade, and the vitriolic attacks it had earned him from the Bolsheviks, now, along with Bogdanov, Khinchuk and several others of his party, he opposed Tsereteli from the left.

On principles of revolutionary democracy, rather than of any particular support for the Bolsheviks, he argued against Tsereteli’s punitive stance. Dan’s group proposed a compromise. Armed demonstrations should be prohibited, and the Bolsheviks condemned rather than officially suppressed.

In Lenin’s absence, it was Kamenev who responded for the Bolsheviks – an interesting choice, given his consistent opposition to the demonstration that never was. He now insisted, not very persuasively, that the march was always to have been peaceful, and would have made no calls to seize power. Besides which, it had been cancelled at Congress’s request. What, he wondered, butter not melting in his mouth, was all the fuss about?

Between Dan’s suggestion of slapped wrists, and Kamenev’s wide-eyed ingenuousness, the situation seemed to be defusing. But then, out of order, Tsereteli took the floor again.

‘He is white as a sheet,’ Pravda reported, ‘and very excited. Tense silence reigns.’

Tsereteli launched into a brutal attack. The Bolsheviks were conspirators, he said. To stand against their plans, he demanded once more that they should be disarmed and legally repressed.

The mood was electric. All eyes turned to Kamenev as he rose to respond. If Tsereteli stood by such claims, he rather splendidly exclaimed, let him immediately arrest and try Kamenev himself. With that riposte, the Bolsheviks swept from the hall.

The debate was splenetic in their absence. On the side of Tsereteli were Avksentiev, Znamensky, Liber, and many other right socialists – including Kerensky. Ranged against them were centrist and Left SRs, Trudoviks and Mensheviks, and the far-left Mezhraiontsy. Some argued their case, like Dan, from principles of democracy; some affirmed that Tsereteli’s claims of conspiracy were unproven; some – most eloquently Martov – underlined that the mass of workers supported the Bolsheviks on many issues, and that the task of socialists to their right had, therefore, to be to win those workers over, not to make martyrs of the left.

When it came to the decision, the SRs and Mensheviks narrowly agreed to Dan’s compromise. Tsereteli’s suppressive resolution was withdrawn.

At an emergency meeting of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee, Lenin tried to put the case behind the cancellation. Again he stressed the necessity of ‘maximum calmness, caution, restraint and organisation’, but now he further implied – as, from a very different political position, had Tsereteli – that the revolution was entering a new phase.

Except in the most abstract possible way, Lenin did not apologise or admit to error. To do so was never his style. He argued, rather, that the CC had had ‘no alternative’ but to call a halt to the action, for two reasons: because the Soviet itself had ‘formally banned’ it, and because, according to reliable sources, a formidable group of Black Hundreds had intended a violent response, to unleash counterrevolution.

The former argument was quaint, coming from a man who had never hesitated to break an order or a law if he considered it advantageous so to do. As to the latter, Latsis pointed out that everyone had been aware of the possibility of a counterdemonstration. ‘If we were not ready for it,’ he said, ‘we should have approached the question of a demonstration negatively from the very beginning.’

The fact is that Lenin had blinked. And his abstention on the vote to cancel was not only uncharacteristic, but uncharacteristically evasive of responsibility: if, as he now claimed, there had been no choice, why had he not voted against the action? If the intent behind abstention had been to inoculate himself from criticism for backing down, it did not work.

Volodarsky, Slutsky, the irrepressible Latsis, and various others derided the CC as, in Tomsky’s words, ‘guilty of intolerable wavering’. Naumov, of the Soviet’s Bolshevik delegation, voiced the ultra-left mood, insisting bullishly that he was glad the leadership was undermined, because ‘it is necessary to trust only in oneself and the masses’. ‘If the cancellation was correct,’ he added, ‘when did we make a mistake?’

The question was pertinent. While it may not be alone in this, the socialist left has always tended to exaggerate its successes – the vinegary humorist Nadezhda Teffi quipped, ‘If Lenin were to talk about a meeting at which he, Zinoviev, Kamenev and five horses were present, he would say: “There were eight of us”’ – and it does not have a good record of acknowledging its failures. The fear, perhaps, is that fallibility undermines authority. The left’s typical method has been to brazen out errors; then, as long as possible after any dust has settled, remark en passant that ‘of course’, everyone knows ‘mistakes were made’, back in the mists of time.

On 12 June, Kerensky persuaded the All-Russian Soviet Congress, against the opposition of Bolsheviks and a few others, to resolve that ‘the Russian revolutionary democracy is obliged to keep its army in a condition to take either the offensive or defensive…[to] be decided from a purely military and strategic point of view’. This was permission to resume military operations – including advances. In other words, ‘defencism’, even in its ‘revolutionary’ variety, even undertaken in good faith to protect the gains of the revolution, could segue into ‘traditional’ war. Chernov was clear about this: ‘without an offence’, he said, ‘there is no defence’.

That done, Congress went on to pass Dan’s censure of the Bolsheviks. Then Dan, Bogdanov and Khinchuk proposed another way to take wind out of the left’s sails. The moderates in the Soviet were committed to channelling the city’s radical energies in their own direction, away from the radicals, through a sanctioned outlet to tap and shape the popular mood. Therefore, Congress scheduled for Sunday 18 June a mass demonstration of its very own. That, the moderates decided, would show the Bolsheviks who had a handle on the Petrograd masses.

At the front, the war crawled on. A strange infrastructure of death.

Beyond fields of rye and potatoes and grazing cows, deep in thick woods, Red Cross tents loomed in forest clearings. Dugouts and low log cabins; rough, jury-rigged chapels; and a staccato tinnitus of mortars. Trench-drenched soldiers the colour of the ripped-up earth taking what hours of respite they could, drinking tea from tin mugs. Alternate rhythms of boredom and terror, fire rising to meet German planes blasting overhead scattering propaganda, or fire of their own. The desperate jocularity of fraternisation, yells in halting German and Russian back and forth across those yards of no-man’s-land. The rage of machine guns, the visitations of bad spirits, twelve-inch shells nicknamed for the witch Baba Yaga, screaming in to tear the world apart.

Soldiers stumbled, snared by the war’s predatory metal, the barbed wire that grasped as if with its own purpose. Behind the lines huddled terrorised men – and a small number of women combatants, too – from across the empire, a debased cosmopolitanism of the conscripted, fingering bayonets in these premonitory graves.

All the while behind the front, inflation and inadequate supplies meant living conditions were collapsing. The peasants’ impatience grew more violent. A slow increase of reports of expropriation, less according to some rude, careful sense of village justice, now, than by sheer force, destruction, arson, sometimes murder.

Breakdown was widespread. On 1 June, in Baku, a thousand Azerbaijanis crowded the city hall, demanding grain, as relations soured between them and Armenians. In Latvia, landless peasants kept up pressure on the Land Council, demanding the expropriation of baronial estates. In Ukraine, on the 13th, after repeated attempts to negotiate with Petrograd, the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) issued its ‘First Universal’, announcing an ‘autonomous Ukrainian republic’ – just short of formal separation, but bad enough as far as the Russian right were concerned. The Coalition Government, though, had no choice but to allow it.

Some on the left had little sensitivity to tangled local tensions. In Baku, the Izvestia of the Soviet polemicised against Muslim nationalism without mentioning its counterpart among local Armenians, Jews or Russians. The local Bolsheviks, though they opposed the ‘bourgeois’ nationalist federalist demands of the Muslim National Committee, criticised such soviet myopia; they strove to keep communication open with the Muslim ‘democratic’ movement.

The two great wings of social democracy were moving further and further apart. In early June, those Baku Bolsheviks, following their Georgian comrades in Tiflis, terminated all association with the Mensheviks. At last the regional organisations were swinging behind Lenin’s call for schism.

In part in an effort to dilute the dangerous energies of nationalism and radicalism with Russian patriotism, and, more, to reassure the Allies, the government sped up its plans for what was now a Soviet Congress-authorised military offensive. On 16 June, at the southern front near Lwów, Russian heavy artillery began a pounding two-day onslaught. Kerensky, once more the persuader-in-chief, announced to Russian troops in Galicia that an offensive was about to commence. On the 18th, it would begin – on the very same day as the Soviet’s planned march.

The Mensheviks and the SRs inaugurated yet another organising committee, and their papers pushed hard for their demonstration. Briefly, with impressive perversity, the anarchists tried instead to build for one of their own, on the 14th. An irritated Pravda declared such plans ‘ruinous’, and they faded to nothing.

The Bolsheviks and Mezhraiontsy, too, agitated, according to the Bolshevik CC’s aspiration ‘to transform the demonstration, against the will of the Soviet, into an expression of support for the transfer of all power to the Soviet’. They hoped for what Zinoviev called ‘a demonstration within a demonstration’. By their good fortune, from 16 to 23 June, the All-Russian Conference of Bolshevik Military Organisations was scheduled in Petrograd, lending the party the skills of around 100 experienced activists.

The Soviet’s own rather vague slogans for the march declared for the ‘Democratic Republic’, ‘General Peace’ and ‘Immediate Convocation of a Constituent Assembly’. The Bolsheviks reverted to the combative slogans intended for the aborted march of 10 June: ‘Down with the Tsarist Duma!’ ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!’ (those non-socialists in the cabinet); ‘Down with the Politics of the Offensive!’ ‘Bread! Peace! Land!’ On the 14th, Pravda announced that Bolshevik supporters should come out under these slogans even if the rest of their factories did not. The Soviet leadership, to the hooting derision of the left, made a half-hearted attempt to insist that only official slogans would be permissible. The Bolshevik Fedorov embarrassed them by crowing that his party’s main slogan would be: ‘All Power to the Soviets!’

Still, those moderates were combative. On the 17th, Tsereteli mocked Kamenev. ‘Tomorrow’, he taunted, ‘not separate groups but all the working class of the capital there will demonstrate, not against the will of the Soviet but at its invitation. Now we shall all see which the majority follows, you or us.’

Indeed.

Sunday 18 June: a clear, windy morning. Workers and soldiers assembled early. That day sister demonstrations were planned in Moscow, Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Helsingfors (Helsinki), Kharkov, and across the empire.

At 9 a.m., a band struck up the Marseillaise, the French national anthem that had become an international hymn to freedom. The parade began its procession down Nevsky Prospect.

Its colossal size became slowly clear. The march filled the wide vista for miles. Some 400,000 people had taken to the streets.

The great column traced a route via the tomb of the February martyrs, to pay its respects. At its head walked the organisers from the Ispolkom, Mensheviks and SRs from the presidium of the All-Russia Congress, including Chkheidze, Dan, Gegechkori, Bogdanov and Gots. As they approached the Mars Field, they peeled away. A platform had been raised near the burial place. They ascended, to look out over the crowd.

Horror crept over them.

Sukhanov surveyed the mass of jostling banners. ‘Bolsheviks again,’ he later remembered thinking. ‘And there behind them is another Bolshevik column… Apparently the next one, too.’ His eyes widened. He turned his head to take it all slowly in. Here and there, he glimpsed an SR or an official Soviet slogan. But they were ‘submerged by the mass’. The overwhelming majority of banners advancing towards the aghast organisers – like, he said, Birnam Wood towards Macbeth – were Bolshevik.

Seas of ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!’ Wave after wave of ‘Peace! Bread! Land!’ And – a strange taunt to the Soviet conciliators – endless iterations of ‘All Power to the Soviet!’

Tsereteli had looked forward to the Soviet march being ‘a duel in the open arena’. Now blowback blew back, very hard. The results were devastating, unambiguous, crushing. ‘Sunday’s demonstration’, wrote Gorky’s paper Novaya zhizn, ‘revealed the complete triumph of Bolshevism among the Petersburg Proletariat.’

As they came past, Bolshevik after Bolshevik broke away from their fellows to rush up to Chkheidze. Kaustov, the recently imprisoned editor of the party’s front-line paper, they demanded, must be released from custody. Chkheidze made placatory noises. Soon the matter would be out of his hands.

Early afternoon. An extraordinary column of workers marched into sight, as precise as highly trained soldiers. ‘What district is this?’ came a shout.

‘Why, can’t you see?’ the group’s leader said proudly. ‘Exemplary order! That means it’s Vyborg.’ The militant district came led by their heavily Bolshevik soviet. The Vyborg red flags were interspersed with black banners, the irrepressible anarchists demanding ‘Down with Government and Capital!’ Ignoring official pleas, many Vyborg workers carried weapons.

At 3 p.m., 2,000 Anarchist–Communists and sympathetic soldiers broke away from the march and made rapidly for the bleak brick sprawl of Vyborg’s notorious riverside prison, Kresty. At its entrance gates they raised their weapons at the guards, and demanded Kaustov be let out. His terrified jailers plunged into the keep-like maze to fetch him out. Freed from his cell, Kaustov, with lordly front and without missing a beat, demanded that several other political prisoners also be released. Only when their comrades had emerged did the daring anarchists disperse.

That afternoon, as the exultant left celebrated the day, the minister of justice, Perevezev – one of the ten capitalist ministers against whom the banners had railed – called an emergency government meeting. He wanted full power to recapture all escaped prisoners. He demanded the right to employ any means necessary. He got it.

At three the following morning, 19 June, soldiers, Cossacks and armoured cars surrounded the Durnovo villa. They shone their lights on the walls in that eerie White Night, one of the city’s midsummer skies, dark but dimly glowing, a haze like a dirty sunset. The soldiers blared through a megaphone, shouting for the sixty anarchists within to hand over those they had broken out of jail the previous day. Most, including Kaustov, were long gone: still, the anarchists refused to cooperate. They ducked below the windows of the besieged building and hurled out bombs that did not explode. The troops stormed the doors.

A noisy, confused fracas. Asnin – so went the claim in the official enquiry – tried to grab a soldier’s rifle. There was a shot. Asnin was dead.

Word of his martyrdom spread fast through the district. That morning, the factories nearest the villa – the Rozenkrants, the Fenisk, Metalist, Promet and Parviainen plants, among others – came out in militant protest. Crowds gathered. Asnin’s grieving comrades displayed his body at the villa, and mourners lined up to pay respects.

Furious workers lobbied the Ispolkom, which begged for calm and implored the strikers to return to work. It set up an investigation. It demanded that the government release all those detained that night who were not accused of specific crimes. But such measures did little to mollify the militants. Anarchists from the Rozenkrants factory sent representatives to the radical First Machine Gun Regiment and the Moskovsky Regiment, to propose a joint demonstration against the government. The soldiers deflected the suggestion, but the seed of an idea was sown, rage stoked. From here began to accelerate a wave of protests in Petrograd.

That day, the 19th, also showed how divided and politically febrile Petrograd was. The same Nevsky Prospect that had, the previous day, vibrated with Bolshevik slogans under hundreds of thousands of boots, now hosted a parade organised by officer cadets. It was a largely middle-class demonstration, a fraction of the size of that of the 18th, but, nonetheless, it bespoke a certain genuine upsurge of patriotic enthusiasm. The marchers chanted, hurrahed for the troops. They sung nationalist songs and waved portraits of Kerensky. In the eyes of the right, Russian honour seemed to be on its way to a restoration: they were out on the streets to celebrate an event whose echoes had just reached the city: the advance of the army. A shift in the war, a long-mooted wager taken by those in charge. The June, or Kerensky, Offensive.

In Galicia, the Eighth Army broke through lines of demoralised Austrian troops across a twenty-mile front. The offensive, undertaken to reassure the Allies, to shift the war, to discipline the restive and troublesome rear, seemed a devastating success. On the central and northern fronts, the Seventh and Eleventh Armies rapidly took more than 18,000 prisoners. As the advance continued, patriotism swept the country, including among many socialists within the Soviet. An official proclamation from the All-Russian Congress burbled enthusiastically, demanding bread from the peasants and support from the citizenry for Russia’s heroic soldiers.

But such rah-rah did not last long. Word very soon began to drift back from the front that things were not going as planned.

In working-class areas in particular, unrest began to return. Several regiments and factory committees went as far as explicitly condemning the offensive in the Bolshevik press.

On 20 June, the First Machine Gun Regiment in Petrograd received orders to supply 500 machine guns to the front. The regimental committee agreed to this, but a mass meeting of the regiment felt differently. It was unwilling to lose weapons from the revolutionary capital, even to help their fellow soldiers. To the vigorous approval of the far left, the soldiers voted for another demonstration against the government, to be held as soon as possible. They approached other garrisons, and at 5 p.m. won the support of the Grenadier Guards.

The Soviet urgently denounced their actions as ‘a stab in the back’ of their comrades at the front. They begged the machine-gunners to reconsider. When, the next morning, the regiment was ordered to relocate two-thirds of its members to the front, it would only agree to send ten of the thirty detachments, and that only when ‘the war has taken on a revolutionary character’. Given Order Number 1, the machine-gunners insisted, such a forced transfer of units from Petrograd to the front was illegal, and the command was a calculated attempt to break the radical Petrograd garrison. They added, with ominous resolve: ‘If the Soviet… threatens this and other revolutionary regiments with forcible dissolution in response we will… not stop at using armed strength to break up the Provisional Government and other organisations supporting it.’

They were not intimidated by the Soviet’s authority. Even so, later that day the machine-gunners elected to wind down their agitation – possibly, if perhaps counterintuitively, at Bolshevik request. Because throughout this tumult, at the Conference of Bolshevik Military Organisations, Lenin and a cautious party leadership were striving to restrain their militants from ‘excessive’ insurgent action. Having yanked the party to the left in April, now Lenin was trying to tug it right.

On the 20th of the month, an agitated and perturbed Lenin addressed the conference. Startling those who assumed he would approve of their ‘revolutionary spirit’, he stressed that all talk of an immediate seizure of power was premature. Their enemies were trying to bait them, at a time when they did not have the mass support they would need for such a venture. The present priority, he said, was assiduously to increase that support – to build up influence in the Soviet.

‘This is no longer a capital,’ wrote Gorky, amid a sense of slow apocalypse, ‘it is a cesspit… The streets are filthy, there are piles of stinking rubbish in the courtyards… There is a growing idleness and cowardice in the people, and all those base and criminal instincts… are now destroying Russia.’

The strike wave continued. On 22 June, Bolshevik delegates to the VTsIK – the All-Russian Soviet Ispolkom, or Executive Committee – warned that workers at the Putilov metalworks were likely to come out, and that they would not restrain them. On the 23rd, representatives of several labour organisations resolved that, as higher wages were not compensating for rising prices, they wanted control of production. At repeated mass meetings, the Kronstadt sailors determined to free those soldiers who had been arrested along with the anarchists. These were not secretive conspiracies: on the 25th, the sailors openly warned the justice minister of their plans.

All this while, the offensive demanded more and more men. Soldiers over forty, who had already served and been furloughed from the front, were starting to be recalled. To have risked their life once was not enough. In provincial towns like Astrakhan and Yelets, the call-up provoked riots.

The Bolsheviks were busy preparing their Sixth Congress, as well as the second City Conference of the Petersburg Committee, slated for early July. As they did, their in-party debates continued. Within the Petersburg Committee, Kalinin and other moderates won, nineteen to two, an appeal to eschew isolated revolutionary actions, resolving instead to build up political influence in the movement and the Soviet. But Latsis managed to amend the resolution: ‘if it proved impossible’ to restrain the masses, the Bolsheviks should take the movement into their own hands.

In the pages of Pravda, Lenin and Kamenev stressed caution, care, the slow building up of forces; simultaneously, Soldatskaya pravda continued to fan flames of more impatient dissent, pointedly declining to validate what their leaders described as a need to overcome ‘petty-bourgeois illusions’. On 22 June, at an informal meeting of members of the CC, the MO and the Petersburg Committee with the regiments supporting the Bolshevik party, Semashko – effectively in command of 15,000 radical machine-gunners – chided the CC for underestimating the party’s strength.

During those turbulent late June days, out of the boisterous energies of Petrograd’s most militant groups, particularly the increasingly legendary First Machine Gun Regiment, a tentative collective plan began to emerge. The protean notion grew more distinct as the days passed.

Determined to batten down the surge of unrest, and provoked by the ill discipline of the First Machine Gun Regiment, on 23 June the All-Russian Congress of the Soviet called on all garrison units to immediately obey orders. But the Soviet’s manoeuvering was uncertain. That same day, its vacillation with regard to the creaking Russian Empire came to the fore, when the Finnish parliament issued its Valtalaki – a ‘power act’ declaring its intent to legislate on domestic issues. The celebrating Finns were astonished when the leaders of the Soviet, having previously approved the negotiation of a treaty of independence – of which this fell short – reacted with outrage. Unilateral declarations of even limited autonomy had clearly not been what they had had in mind.

And meanwhile, on this last day of the Bolshevik MO Conference, its Biulleten reported a serious dispute between radicals and moderates – here the Leninists! – over whether to actively pursue agitation at the front while the offensive was proceeding successfully. The very premise of the debate, however, was mistaken. The offensive was not proceeding successfully.

After the first two, three exhilarating days of the offensive, its degeneration was swift. The scavenger birds of the front were gathering over what was becoming a catastrophe.

As early as 20 June, the exhausted, ill-equipped Russian troops ceased advancing. They refused to obey orders to attack. The next day, a German counterattack began. Panic spread through the Russian forces. On the 24th, a desolate Kerensky wired the Provisional Government that ‘in many cases, the breakthrough turned out to be unstable, and after the first days, sometimes even after the first hours of battle, there was a change of heart and spirits dropped. Instead of developing the initial successes units… began drawing up resolutions with demands for immediate leave to the rear’.

In the diaries of his AWOL years, A Deserter’s Notes, the young Ukrainian Aleksandr Dneprovskiy execrated the patriotic press in the last months before the offensive as ‘tubs of printed slop… poured over the heads of long-suffering humanity’. Despite the newspapers dutifully recycling patriotic blather, the miserable truth of events leaked quickly across the country. Often at first hand.

The situation had long ceased to be a matter of individuals, or even whole battalions, disobeying orders. Now there was mass movement of Russian troops in both directions: forward from the trenches, not belligerently but in more fraternisation, shouting greetings, picking a way through the landscape of cataclysm to share liquor and make-do conversation with the Germans they were supposed to kill; and, in vast numbers, in retreat from the front. Mass desertions. Thousands simply walked away.

That summer, the great poet and critic Viktor Shklovsky set out for the Galician war zone, a Soviet army commissar. He came the last miles on foot, through swampy spruce goves near Austrian lines.

The scale was staggering. A ramping up of already enormous numbers. On a single night near Volochinsk, shock battalions of the Eleventh Army arrested 12,000 deserters hiding or wandering numbly in the dark. This was a mass movement. Officially, 170,000 soldiers ran away during the offensive: the real number is very much higher.

Soldiers stormed trains from the front. The creaking engines rocked under their weight, screeching on the rails as men clung to roofs and buffers, as, rammed sullen and exhausted together, they swayed with the sluggish carriages. Near the northern front, thousands of the runaways set up what they announced was a ‘soldiers’ republic’, a strange new polity in an encampment near a Petrograd racecourse. They flooded the capital, hustling for cash. By the hot days of July, more than 50,000 deserters were in the city.

The men found work as casual labourers. They scavenged off the land. They became violent bandits, ripping and reconfiguring their old uniforms with a ragged swagger. Their desertions were the result of fear, of course, but that was by no means always all.

‘The mass desertions’, Trotsky wrote, ‘are ceasing in the present conditions to be the result of depraved individual wills’ – that would be a severe and unsympathetic assessment at any time – ‘and are becoming an expression of the complete incapacity of the government to weld the revolutionary army with inward unity of purpose.’ Among these hundreds of thousands, increasing numbers were in the mould of the eloquent Dneprovskiy, whose desertion inspired him to write, who combined a desperate desire not to die in stinking runnels of blood with political rage and despair, with critical lucidity in the analysis of the hated war.

One ‘Worker Zemskov’ described himself in a letter to Kerensky – matter-of-factly, without apology – as ‘a deserter… hiding in the Kuban steppes for more than two years’. ‘To hell with it, though,’ he protested,

Some deserters now took to parading through Petrograd with placards, demanding what they called their ‘liberation’. This was desertion as a social movement.

Even before the offensive, the loathing the war engendered, the sense from soldiers, their families, their supporters, workers and peasants in vast numbers, that it must be ended immediately, gave the Bolsheviks political traction. From late June in particular, they ramped up their propaganda in the crumbling army: their networks of speakers and agitators were reaching 500 regiments along the front.

Lenin’s intention had always been to forge a perception of the Bolsheviks as the most unapologetic and absolute opposition to the war, but perhaps, as his left critics had cautioned, the details of his revolutionary defeatism had indeed been ambiguous. Perhaps they had been evasive, had elided distinct positions, and perhaps that had confused some audiences. In any case, the specifically (and ambiguously) ‘defeatist’ phraseology had, since Lenin’s return, been considerably less prominent. The party’s anti-war reputation was still, sure enough, growing.

On occasion this could become closely associated with the person of Lenin himself: thus, even before the offensive, soldiers of the Fifth Army on the northern front declared him the only authority they recognised. As the war grew ever more hated, people remembered the Bolshevik party’s unwavering opposition to it.

This was thanks in particular to the unstinting work of Bolshevik cadres, especially the undersung middle-level activists. They were the backbone of the party organisations across the empire. They worked hard, and grew more expert. Eduard Dune, in Moscow, travelled with his comrades far into surrounding country districts to give talks. Few of the several hundred in his local party were natural public speakers. But after February, they improved their skills, got to know their audiences – and their own strengths.

‘We began to specialise,’ he wrote. One comrade, Sapronov, was in his element in large meetings of thousands: a gentle soul called Kalmykov, ragged as a mendicant, toured the small workshops to deliver warm effective homilies; another, Artamanov, ‘either because he had an impressive bass voice or because he spoke the dialect of the Moscow suburbs or possibly for some other reason… was a great hit with peasant audiences’.

And such villagers in particular ‘listened willingly enough to speeches against the war and for peace’.

Even the more perspicacious of the party’s enemies could see the appeal and logic of its unflinching antinomianism towards the war, compared to the negotiations of the moderates. General Brusilov, no intellectual but a thoughtful man, would later recall: ‘The position of the Bolsheviks I understood, because they preached “Down with the war and immediate peace at any price,” but I couldn’t understand at all the tactics of the SRs and the Mensheviks, who first broke up the army, as if to avoid counterrevolution, and at the same time desired the continuation of the war to a victorious end.’

On 26 June, delegates from the Grenadier Regiment, one of many that had refused to advance against the Germans, returned to the capital. They told the reservists’ battalion the truth about the front – including that their own commanders drove them into battle at the points of machine guns. They appealed for help, and demanded all power to the soviets. Soldatskaya pravda pledged them full support.

Across the city and the empire, as news spread of the calamitous push that bore his name, the remnants of the Kerensky cult turned to dust.

After all his urgent and frenetic interventions, Lenin was exhausted to the point of illness. His family were concerned. His comrades persuaded him that he needed to take a rest. On the 27th, accompanied by his sister Maria, he left Petrograd. They travelled together across the border to the Finnish village of Neivola, where his comrade Bonch-Bruevich had a country cottage. There they spent the days relaxing, swimming in a lake, strolling in the sun.

As they did so, the machine-gunners received new orders for a substantial transfer of men and weapons. On the last day of the month, the military section of the Petrograd Soviet sent one G. B. Skalov to discuss these matters with them.

Provoked by the fury of their men, the Regimental Committee, controlled by SRs and Mensheviks, was pushed to hold the talks in the halls of the Tauride Palace. There the soldiers themselves, many of them anarchists or Bolsheviks – including Golovin, a leading light of the rebellion-that-never-was of the 20th and 21st – protested that these new orders were a prelude to treachery or sell-out.

The machine-gunners would not allow the regiment to be either disarmed or disbanded. They were of one mind. The room rang with their declarations. Openly, they began to discuss how to prevent this. In the sedate surroundings of the palace, the soldiers mooted the necessity of the force of arms, on the city streets.