The Bolsheviks Come to Power - New Edition: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd

'The best book on the 1917 revolution—a seminal study' STEPHEN F. COHEN, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Alexander Rabinowitch

THE

и ж а. л ш ш па та тяж

СОМЕ ТО POWER

The Revolution of lgi? in Petrograd

The Bolsheviks Come to Power

The Bolsheviks Come to Power

The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd

NEW EDITION

Alexander Rabinowitch

First published in 1976 by W.W. Norton and Company, New York

This new edition first published 2017 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © 1976, 2004, and 2017 by Alexander Rabinowitch

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN

978

0

7453

9999

7

Hardback

ISBN

978

0

7453

9998

0

Paperback

ISBN

978

1

7868

0102

9

PDF eBook

ISBN

978

1

7868

0104

3

Kindle eBook

ISBN

978

1

7868

0103

6

EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset in the United States of America

Printed in the United Kingdom

For Ellen and Misha

Contents

List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii

Note on Transliteration, Dates, and Terminology xv Preface to the Centenary Edition xvii Introduction xxxiii

• THE JULY UPRISING 1

• the bolsheviks under fire 17

• petrograd during the reaction 39

• the ineffectivenes of repression 51

• the bolshevik resurgence 83

• the rise of kornilov 94

• kornilov versus kerensky 110

• the bolsheviks and kornilov's defeat 129

• the question of a new government 151

• "all power to the soviets!" 168

• lenin's campaign for an insurrection 191

• obstacles to an uprising 209

• the garrison crisis and the military

revolutionary committee 224

• ON the eve 249

• the bolsheviks come to power 273

• epilogue 305

Notes 315

Selected Bibliography 358 Index 379

Finland .Station I

Stock Exchange Bridge

Nikolaevsky

EKATERINSKY

.OBVOPNV CANAI

Baltic Station

Warsaw Station

14

Russkii Reno factory

Novyi Lessner factory

Moskovsky Regiment

Meeting place of Sixth Congress

Erikson factory

Grenadersky Bridge

First Machine Gun Regiment

Sukhanov apartment

Elizarova apartment

Grenadier Regiment

Bolshevik headquarters, Vyborg District

Trud printing press

Mikhailovsky Artillery School

Crosses Prison

Metallist factory

Samsonevsky Bridge

Cirque Moderne

Kshesinskaia Mansion

Kronwerk Arsenal

Peter and Paul Fortress

Stock exchange

Petersburg University

Aurora

Finliandsky Regiment 180th Infantry Regiment Franco-Russian shipyard Second Baltic Fleet Detachment Keksgolmsky Regiment Central telegraph office Petrograd telegraph agency Post office War Ministry Admiralty Palace Square St. Isaac's Cathedral General Staff headquarters Petrograd telephone station Winter Palace

Pravda editorial offices and printing plant

Pavlovsky Regiment

War Memorial Field

Kazan Cathedral

City Duma

State Bank

Mariinsky Palace

Priboi publishing house

Litovsky Regiment

Fourteenth Cossack Regiment

Preobrazhensky Regiment

Sixth Engineer Battalion

Volynsky Regiment

Taurida Palace

Smolny

Legend:

PETROGRAD

1917

^J/2

0

First Reserve Infantry Regiment Bonch-Bruevich apartment Znamensky Square First and Fourth Cossack Regiments Semenovsky Regiment Petrograd electric station Egersky Regiment Petrogradsky Regiment Izmailovsky Guards Regiment Harbor Canal Putilov factory

Illustrations

Soldiers and cossacks celebrating during the February days page xxxvii Members of the first Provisional Government (Hoover Institution Archives)

page xl

Members of the new coalition cabinet formed following the April crisis (Hoover Institution Archives) page xlv

The Rabotnitsa editorial board (From Velikii oktiabr' . . . albom) page xlvii

The Presidium of the First All-Russian Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (Hoover Institution Archives) page xlvix

Demonstration sponsored by the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin) page l

Street scene in Petrograd, 1917 (The National Archives) page 8

July 4, 1917, in Petrograd page 11

Cartoon, "A High Post for the Leaders of the Rebellion" page 18 Soldiers of the First Machine Gun Regiment (Museum of the Revolution, USSR) p^ag^{e 2}9

Cartoon, "The Arrest of Alexandra Kollontai" page 31 Cartoon, "Lenin in the Role of Nicholas II" page 37

The funeral of seven cossacks killed during the July days (Hoover Institution Archives) page 41

Kerensky departing for the front (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin) page 56

The Bolshevik Central Committee, elected at the Sixth Congress (From Velikii oktiabr' . . . albom) [see Bibliography] page 58

Members of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee in 1917 (From Velikii oktiabr' . . . albom) page 65

Key members of the Bolshevik Military Organization (From Velikii oktiabr' . . . albom) page 73

The Bolshoi Theater (Hoover Institution Archives) page 112

General Lavr Kornilov and Boris Savinkov arrive for the Moscow State

Conference (From White Against Red by Dimitry V. Lehovich, courtesy of Mr. Lehovich) page 114

Kerensky addressing military personnel (Hoover Institution Archives) page 116

V. N. Lvov (Hoover Institution Archives) page 122

Members of the Bolshevik Kronstadt Committee (From Velikii oktiabr' . . . albom) page 145

Map of Kornilov affair page 147

Factory workers gathered for a political meeting page 155

The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies page 161

Lenin's resolution endorsing insurrection (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) page 207

Members of the Military Revolutionary Committee (From Velikii oktiabr' . . . albom) page 238

The Women's Battalion on the Palace Square (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) page 255

Workers in a Petrograd factory (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin) page 264

Smolny during the October days (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin) page 267

Soldiers operate the main Petrograd telephone station (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) page 270

Kerensky and aides in the Winter Palace (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library) page 271

Lenin's manifesto of October 25 (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin) page 275

Barricades near St. Isaac's Cathedral (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin) page 280

Petrograd during the October days page 281

Military school cadets in the Winter Palace (Collection Viollet) page 283

The cruiser Aurora on the Neva page 286

The First Council of People's Commissars (From Velikii oktiabr' . . . albom) page 307

Acknowledgments

_T

his book could not have been completed without the generous support of several funding institutions. A postdoctoral fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled me to begin research at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California, in 1967. Grants from the In­ternational Research and Exchanges Board and the American Council of Learned Societies made it possible to spend the fall semester 1970-1971 gathering material in Moscow and Leningrad as a participant in the Senior Scholars' Exchange between the United States and the USSR, and the remainder of the year finishing research and drafting the initial chapters in Washington, D.C. Summer faculty fellowships from Indiana University and its Russian and East European Institute allowed me to devote summers to work on the book. The bulk of the manuscript was completed in 1973-1974 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, where my stay was supported partially by a grant from the National En­dowment for the Humanities.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge my debt to the staffs of the Lenin Library and the Fundamental Library of the Social Sciences in Moscow; the Sal- tykov-Shchedrin Library and particularly the Academy of Sciences Library in Leningrad; the Hoover Institution; the Indiana, Columbia, Georgetown, and Stanford university libraries; the New York Public Library; and the Library of Congress. I am especially grateful to Anna M. Bourguina of the Hoover Institution for help in obtaining several important sources unavail­able elsewhere.

In the Soviet Union my work was enriched by consultations with Acade­mician P. V. Volobuev. Professors George F. Kennan, Carl Kaysen, and Robert C. Tucker helped make my year at the Institute for Advanced Study one of the most memorable and without doubt the most productive of my life. Margaret Van Sant at the Institute for Advanced Study and Deborah Chase and Nancy Maness of the Indiana University Department of History and Russian and East European Institute, respectively, somehow managed to maintain good humor throughout the arduous task of typing the chapters.

I am grateful to Indiana University Press for permission to quote from my study Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1911 Up­rising, and to James L. Mairs and Emily Garlin, my editors at Norton, for their help in preparing the present book for publication.

The greatest debt that I have incurred is to my wife, Janet Rabinowitch. A constant source of intellectual stimulation and encouragement, she went over successive drafts with an experienced editorial eye and made countless suggestions for improvement. Whatever merits this book may possess are due in no small part to her interest and patience.

Special thanks are also due my colleague Stephen F. Cohen; his invaria­bly sound advice and perceptive criticism were of enormous benefit at every stage of my work. Leopold Haimson, who has been the source of inspira­tion for a whole generation of American students of Russian labor history, shared useful thoughts relating to this study during several discussions in the spring of 1974. I owe much to them, as well as to John M. Thompson, George F. Kennan, William G. Rosenberg, S. Frederick Starr, Stephen Soudakoff, and Donald Raleigh, who read and commented on some or all of the chapters. Their suggestions have been invaluable in revising the manu­script. I alone, of course, bear responsibility for the remaining shortcomings.

Note on Transliteration, Dates, and Terminology

the Library of Congress, with some simplifications. When appropri­ate, proper names are spelled in their more customary English forms.

All dates are given according to the Julian calendar, in use in Russia until 1918, rather than the Gregorian calendar of the West. In 1917 the former was thirteen days behind the latter.

he system of transliteration employed in this work is the one used by

As used in this book, "soviet" or "soviets" refers to the elected councils of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies, representative revolutionary or­ganizations that sprang up throughout Russia in 1917, rather than to people or institutions of the USSR, the most common current meaning of these words. The term "Soviet" refers more specifically to the central institutions of the soviets in 1917, usually the Central Executive Committee of the All- Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies and the Ex­ecutive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Peasants' Deputies. The two All-Russian Executive Committees often met and acted jointly.

Preface to the Centenary Edition

_W

ith the perspective of a full century, the October revolution of 1917 in Russia appears as a seminal phase in a complex and dynamic political and social process deeply rooted in the profound injustices of late Imperial Rus­sia and greatly exacerbated by Russia's participation in a losing world war.¹ This phase began in Petrograd, then the capital and industrial center of the Russian empire, shortly after the February 1917 revolution that ended with the overthrow of Nicholas II and the end of the three-centuries-old tsarist regime. Primarily as a consequence of popular frustration with the cautious domestic and foreign policies of the liberal Provisional Government established after the fall of the tsar, this phase culminated eight wildly turbulent months later in the coming to power of Lenin and the Bolsheviks (renamed Communists in March 1918) and the birth of Soviet Russia.

The Bolshevik triumph in the fierce struggle for power in 1917 Russia and in the terrible three-year civil war that followed led to the gradual formation of the ultra-authoritarian Communist-controlled Soviet regime that dominated Russian politics and society and was the central factor in international affairs for the better part of the last century. At another level, the Bolsheviks coming to power marked the start of a gigantic, although ultimately failed, experiment in egalitarian socialism of worldwide impact in the near term and of enduring global interest. Surely, then, the October revolution of 1917 in Petrograd was one of the seminal events, and arguably, the single most important historical development, of the twentieth century.

***

Let me begin by recalling the influences that shaped my thinking about the Rus­sian Revolution before I began my own professional study of it. Undoubtedly the most important of these influences was my upbringing in a family of liberal

Russian intelligenty. In 1932 my mother, Anna Maiersohn, a native of Zhitomir, Ukraine, was an actress performing with a Russian theater troupe in Europe when she and my father, the well-known physical chemist Eugene I. Rabinow- itch, were married. My father, born in St. Petersburg in 1898, had fled Russia in August 1918, two weeks before the start of the first Red Terror there. In 1921, he was among a large cohort of young Russian students who emigrated to Germany and were able to enter German universities, many through the intercession of the leading social democrat Eduard Bernstein, then a member of the Reichstag. As a doctoral student at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin (now Humboldt University), my father studied with such prominent scientists, then already No­bel laureates, as Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Max von Laue, Walter Ernst, and Erwin Schrodinger. On the eve of World War II, after temporary appointments with the brilliant physicists James Franck at the University of Gottingen and Niels Bohr at Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, as well as at the University of London, he received a position in the chemistry department at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

During my childhood and earliest formative years, when my father was at MIT, our family was an integral part of a vibrant Russian emigre community on the east coast of the United States. We spent summers in the lush Green Moun­tains of southern Vermont where my father bought a dacha, a summer home, not far from that of Michael Karpovich, a moderate socialist in 1917, an eminent Harvard historian, and the doyen of Russian historical studies in the United States. Some of my most vivid recollections of that time revolve around endless lunches and dinners on Karpovich's front porch at which some of the most prom­inent Russians then living in the United States discussed issues related to Russian history, literature, and current events—from such figures as Vladimir Nabokov to Alexander Kerensky, the last head of the Provisional Government that replaced the tsar in February 1917. At times, these conversations in Vermont developed into lively arguments. Yet there were some matters about which almost every­one agreed. Among these was that the October revolution, which had uprooted them was a military coup carried out by a tightly knit group of revolutionary fanatics led by Lenin and Trotsky, financed by the enemy Germans, and devoid of genuine popular support. Another point of broad agreement was that every­thing that flowed from "Red October" was an abomination and a global threat. Thus, while my lifelong interest in Russian history and culture grew out of these early family associations, especially from interactions with Karpovich and the Menshevik leader, historian, and principal archivist of Russian Social Democracy Boris Nicolaevsky, they left me with an uncompromisingly negative view of the Bolsheviks, the revolution that brought them to power, and, indeed, virtually the entire Soviet historical experience.

These critical attitudes toward most everything connected with the Bolshe­viks and "Red October" were reinforced by the ever increasing climate of hostility toward the Soviet Union during my high school and college years [1948—1956]. These years coincided with the McCarthy era and the Korean War. Following college, these attitudes were further reinforced during my two years as an ROTC army officer. In the army, I was trained to think of the Soviet Union as the very incarnation of evil and the archenemy of the "free world."

I began formal study of Russian history first with the late Leopold Haimson at the University of Chicago, and then at Indiana University with the diplomatic historian John M. Thompson. Together, Haimson and Thompson awakened my interest in the Russian Revolution as a seminal political and social phenomenon worthy of serious study. Nonetheless, when the time came to pick a topic for my doctoral dissertation, my fundamental views about the Soviet Union and its birth remained unchanged. My first choice of dissertation topics was a biography of Iraklii Tsereteli, a prominent Georgian Menshevik, a minister in the Provisional Government, the de facto head of the moderate socialist bloc in the national soviet, and an inveterate enemy of Bolshevism. But after it became apparent that a full-scale biography of Tsereteli required knowledge of Georgian, I focused my doctoral research on Tsereteli during the political crises of spring and summer 1917, especially following the abortive July uprising. At that time, Tsereteli led an effort to buttress Kerensky and to criminalize the Bolsheviks as instigators of the attempted uprising and as paid agents of enemy Germany.

How then did I come to shift my interest from the fiercely anti-Bolshevik Tsereteli to his archenemies, the Bolsheviks? And, looking ahead, how did I come to make a sharp break with my initial views about the Bolsheviks and about the movement that brought them to power? Over the years, I have often been asked these questions and the answers are quite simple. My work with Haimson and Thompson had instilled in me a passion for gathering historical evidence as well as a commitment to being as honest as humanly possible in interpreting it. And the fact is that early on, I concluded that Tsereteli's view of the July uprising as no more than a failed Leninist coup was belied by the images that emerged starkly from the relatively limited body of primary source material then available to me—primarily contemporary Russian newspapers, published documents, and memoirs. Even before the fall of 1963, when I began a nine-month appointment as a graduate exchange student in Moscow, my main research interest had shifted from Tsereteli to the then still puzzling and controversial question of the Bolshe­vik role in the July 1917 uprising.

Some sources that had been available in the United States helped me to begin answering this question. They confirmed the momentous role played by Lenin in pointing the Bolsheviks squarely toward an early socialist revolution following his return to Russia in April 1917, with his well-known "April Theses." These theses were officially adopted at the Seventh All-Russian [Bolshevik Party] Conference. However, published records of the conference also revealed deep divisions about the revolution and revolutionary strategy still remaining among the party's top leaders after they were adopted—most importantly, among members of the newly elected Central Committee.2 An even more significant source for me was the de­tailed minutes of weekly meetings of the local Bolshevik Petersburg Committee in 1917. First published in 1927 but suppressed under Stalin and rarely consult­ed, they also reflected the diversity of political views within the Bolshevik Party organization then, as well as something else of no less importance, namely the Bolshevik Party's rapid growth from a small conspiratorial organization in the late tsarist era into a mass political party, firmly rooted in factories and barracks, after the fall of tsarism. This critically important, long-neglected source also re­flected the party's relatively decentralized, flexible, and democratic structure and operational style in 1917 (which tended to make lower party bodies responsive to the evolving popular mood).³

Rare Bolshevik memoirs published in the relatively free 1920s and also avail­able for study in the West strongly reinforced these images. Ironically, Nicolaevsky, who shared Tsereteli's demonic view of Lenin and of his central role in organizing the July uprising, steered me to the memoirs of Vladimir Nevskii, an important early historian of the Russian revolutionary movement and a Petrograd Bolshevik with whom Nicolaevsky had personal ties (Nevskii's writings helped document the independent role of the Bolshevik Military Organization in encouraging the July uprising against the wishes of Lenin and the Central Committee⁴).

Although access to Soviet archives was out of the question for Western histo­rians like me until the Gorbachev era, my ten months as an exchange scholar in Moscow and Leningrad during the 1963—64 academic year proved indispensable in further clarifying still puzzling aspects of the Bolshevik role in the July upris­ing and shedding new light on broader fundamental questions stemming from my research regarding the structure and operation of the party and its relation to the growing restlessness unfolding at a popular level. For example, close com­parison of the Central Committee's main newspaper, Pravda, and the Bolshevik Military Organization's Soldatskaia Pravda during the run-up to the July uprising (Soldatskaia Pravda had not been available in the West) documented the growing divergence between the tactical caution of the Central Committee and the rad­icalism of the Military Organization. Moreover, the pages of Soldatskaia Pravda as well as of the Kronstadt daily Izvestiia Kronshtadtskogo soveta during the weeks preceding the July uprising mirrored sharply rising unrest among soldiers of the Petrograd garrison and Baltic Fleet sailors and helped reveal crucial connections between it and the Bolshevik Military Organization's escalating militancy and resulting separatism. (Complete runs of both papers were available in what was then called the Lenin State Library in Moscow.)

The findings of my doctoral dissertation research were reflected in my first book, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising.:⁵ Following its appearance, Soviet historians labeled me a "bourgeois falsifier" for raising doubts about the Bolsheviks' fundamental unity behind Lenin. However, most Western reviewers of the book seemed persuaded by my depiction of the July uprising as a valid reflection of popular frustration with the meager results of the February revolution, which was encouraged and supported by radical elements in the Bolshevik Military Organization and the Petersburg Committee. Most also accepted my conclusion that although the uprising was in part the outgrowth of months-long Bolshevik anti-government agitation and propaganda, it erupt­ed against the wishes of the Central Committee, some of whose members, like Lenin, were justifiably fearful that the overthrow of the Provisional Government would be opposed by the vast majority of peasants in the provinces and loyalist soldiers at the front, and others, like Lev Kamenev, who remained convinced that a socialist revolution in backward Russia was premature. At the time, Bolshevik moderates along with the Menshevik-Internationalists and Left SRs, were con­cerned most of all with not undermining construction of the strongest possible anti-government alliance of left-socialist parties and groups pending convocation of a representative Constituent Assembly.

Prelude to Revolution was published during a period when neo-Stalinist ap­proaches to history were reimposed following Nikita Khrushchev's ouster in 1964. As in the Stalin era, Soviet historians were again tasked with "exposing" Western historians of the revolution as "bourgeois falsifiers." Typical of the hostile attacks on me at this time was a review article, "The Events of July 1917 in Contempo­rary Bourgeois Historiography," by the Moscow historian N. V. Romanovskii. Romanovskii summarily dismissed the legitimacy of my source base, rejected out of hand all my findings regarding the underlying causes and character of the July movement, and, most importantly, blasted my view of differences in the be­havior of top Bolshevik leaders in 1917, particularly as it related to the important independent role of ultra-radical Bolsheviks in the Petersburg Committee and Military Organization and their differences with Leninists and party moderates during the run-up to and eruption of the July uprising. "The correct approach to differing opinions existing within the party," Romanovskii insisted, "should be based on the fact that at no time did they disrupt the programmatic and organi­zational unity of the Bolshevik party, or deter it from following the course set by Lenin."⁶ Happily for me, Western reviewers of Prelude to Revolution were more generous than their Soviet counterparts. Most praised my book for providing a compelling, solidly documented explanation of the previously puzzling role of the Bolsheviks in the July uprising. Thus, Marc Ferro, the leading French historian of the Russian Revolution, commented in Annales that I had "broken through the protective wall surrounding the history of the Communist Party during the revolution of 1917." "Pursuing clues like a true Sherlock Holmes," he went on, I had "discovered and proven the unexpected—that in July 1917, the Bolshevik party was not a centralized disciplined organization and was divided not only by strategic and theoretical conflicts but also by the existence of relatively autono­mous party branches."⁷

The Israeli historian Israel Getzler concluded that Prelude to Revolution made the July uprising "intelligible as the runaway climax of uncoordinated and con­tradictory Bolshevik policies and activities," at the same time that one of the doy­ens of American historians of modern Russia, Nicholas V. Riazanovsky, praised the book for its "objectivity, judiciousness, and sure handling of the evidence."⁸ Pointing to the July crisis as a major turning point in the revolution as well as to the thoroughness and fairness of my research, the British historian John L. H. Keep concluded that had I been given access to archives, my account of develop­ments at the regimental or factory level might have been fuller, but that "it was doubtful that there were party documents hidden from view that would have significantly altered my conclusions."⁹ In a similar vein, Keep's American col­league Theodore H. Von Laue added that Prelude to Revolution demonstrated that "sound scholarly investigations of critical moments and issues in 1917 were both possible and profitable, even under existing [source] limitations."¹⁰

Despite the strong public criticism of Prelude to Revolution by Soviet histo­rians and renewed strictures on historical research during the Brezhnev era my access to the huge trove of contemporary newspapers and rare published docu­ments and memoirs necessary for the completion of my research in the Soviet Union for my next project on October itself, presented in The Bolsheviks Come to Power, was essentially unimpeded.ⁿ In conducting this research, I utilized the analytical framework relating to the character, structure, and operation of the Bolshevik Party, and its relationship to popular political behavior, that had prov­en to be so fruitful in clarifying the development of the July uprising. Much of my research for the book was carried out in major Moscow and Leningrad libraries during the late 1960s and early 1970s. A year as a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, Princeton, provided the time necessary to finish writing it. Initially published in the United States in 1976, it has since been republished in multiple English and foreign-language editions. Moreover, in addition to this new Haymarket Books edition, centennial French and Italian editions of the book have been or are about to be published.

As readers will see, my findings in The Bolsheviks Come to Power clashed with earlier Western views of the October revolution as no more than a classic military coup d'etat, directed by Lenin and Trotsky and carried out by a small, disciplined band of revolutionary fanatics without significant popular support. Yet most non-Soviet reviewers seemed persuaded by my depiction of the Oc­tober revolution as the outgrowth of skyrocketing popular dissatisfaction with the conservative, if not openly counterrevolutionary, policies of the Provisional Government and, concomitantly, of the immense and expanding attraction of the Bolshevik political platform, which called for immediate peace, the elimination of food shortages, fundamental land reform, and transfer of all governmental power to democratic, multiparty soviets pending timely convocation of an elec­tive, representative Constituent Assembly. Most Western reviewers also accepted my view, foreshadowed in Prelude to Revolution, of the Bolshevik Party in 1917 as a mass, relatively democratically structured and operated political organization, with close interactive ties to factory workers, soldiers, and sailors, and tolerant of diversity within its top leadership. Moreover, they found compelling my depic­tion of "Red October" as less a classic armed uprising or coup d'etat mastermind­ed by Lenin and led by Trotsky—although, to repeat, their leadership at critical moments was absolutely essential—than the successful outcome of a cleverly de­veloped political and strictly limited military operation that succeeded because of its responsiveness to the prevailing popular mood and existing correlation of forces. Prominent literary and social critic Irving Howe characterized The Bol­sheviks Come to Power as "the best volume on the Russian Revolution in years." "What is so valuable about the book," he explained, "is that it undoes both rig­id stereotypes: that of Leninism as inherently 'correct,' pointing straight toward revolutionary triumph, and of Leninism as always rigidly authoritarian, pointing straight toward dictatorship."^ Reviewing The Bolsheviks Come to Power for the New Republic, Robert Rosenstone, the noted writer, filmmaker, and specialist on the relationship between film and history, pointed to the book's narrative pow­er. As he put it, "Rabinowitch explains in great detail the inner workings of the Bolshevik party. . . . We enter the rooms where the Central Committee heatedly debates alternative positions, then watch party members in other settings, at local soviets, in factories, at meetings of the Duma, at diverse convocations of political groups. . . . [T]he overall effect is exciting, moving, alive with the realization that more than a clash between arms, the Revolution was a battle among words, ideas, beliefs."¹³ The well-known contemporary American political scientist and historian Stephen F. Cohen praised The Bolsheviks Come to Power as "revisionist scholarship in the best and truest sense." "Both political and social history," he continued, "it greatly expands our detailed knowledge of the turbulent events of 1917, while deepening and revising our understanding of the Bolshevik party and the social factors that brought it to power.'⁴⁴ Concluding a review of The Bolsheviks Come to Power, the late Allan Wildman, the leading Western scholar of the revolutionary process in the Russian army, wrote that "It is my estimate that [Rabinowitch] has permanently and fundamentally altered our perception of Bolshevism in 1917, something which has been long overdue."i5 According to a writer in the Economist, "[Rabinowitch] sets out to establish exactly what hap­pened . . . and it could hardly have been better done.'⁴⁶ In a letter to me, written on November 9, 1976, not long after the publication of The Bolsheviks Come to Power, the distinguished diplomat and historian George F. Kennan wrote that the book "is clearly the finest and most comprehensive history of the November revolution and its background to have appeared in any language," and expressed certainty that one day "it will make a profound and beneficial impression in Russia." "It is a striking fact that Russians who in the future want to learn about the early history of Soviet power in their country," he went on, "are going to have to turn to Americans—to yourself, Steve Cohen, Moshe Lewin, and others—for their instruction."!⁷ In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's implosion a quarter century later, Kennan's prophesy turned out to be remarkably accurate. For the time being, however, hostility toward my work, as nearly as could be discerned, remained unchanged; the appearance of The Bolsheviks Come to Power triggered intensified attacks.

Not until close to the end of the two-decades-long Brezhnev era did bold and progressive younger Soviet historians in Moscow and Leningrad begin to distin­guish openly between Western historians who remained wedded to traditional Cold War stereotypes of the October revolution and an emerging group of "revi­sionist" historians like myself who, in their view, were earnestly attempting to be thorough and politically detached in their studies. With the advent of perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev, this tentative, limited acceptance of divergent inter­pretations of the revolution went significantly further. In October 1989, The Bol­sheviks Come to Power, in a Russian translation, became the first Western study of the October revolution to be published in the Soviet Union.!⁸

I remember the day that the first Russian edition was officially launched in a packed auditorium at the Progress publishing house in central Moscow as one of the most satisfying of my life. Present for the occasion were surviving old Bol­sheviks and their families, including the wife and children of Nikolai Bukharin, a sprinkling of dissidents and journalists, and many Soviet historians. Previously, I had wrapped copies of my books in plain brown envelopes and buried them at the very bottom of my suitcase in the hope of getting a few of them past Soviet border guards and into the hands of Russian colleagues with only very mixed success. Now a hundred thousand copies were about to go on sale to readers in the Soviet Union—the very audience I most wanted to reach. I later learned that this first Russian-language edition of The Bolsheviks Come to Power sold out in a few weeks. In recent years, I have frequently been told by colleagues in Russia that The Bolsheviks Come to Power is required reading for Russian intellectuals seriously interested in the history of the revolution.1⁹

Another especially memorable moment in my professional life occurred in June 1991, when the heretofore undreamed of happened, and I was unexpectedly given permission to work in Soviet historical archives. This was all the more fortu­itous because at that time I had reached a premature dead end on the book project I had been working on since the publication of The Bolsheviks Come to Power—a study of the earliest development of the authoritarian, one-party controlled Soviet political system. My fundamental problem in completing research for that book stemmed from the fact that the multiplicity of published sources that had proven to be so important for my work on 1917 simply didn't exist for 1918. Apart from the fact that all but the official, carefully controlled Soviet and Communist press was essentially shut down by early that year, it was such a difficult and depressing time for the ruling Communists that relatively very few memoir or documentary accounts relating to it were prepared, let alone published. Moreover, toward the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, some ambitious and highly rel­evant archival publication projects begun in the mid-1920s were stopped before seeing the light of day. The opportunity to work in Soviet historical archives, then, came as a godsend! Now at my disposal were mountains of fascinating, essentially never-before-examined primary sources, including internal records of the government, party, secret police, and Red Army and Red Fleet, as well as trade unions and factories. However, these new, unforeseen possibilities also posed a dilemma for me. Should I now suspend my research on the emergence of the Soviet political system and update my book on the October revolution based on the archival sources suddenly available? As prophetically suggested by John Keep in his review of Prelude to Revolution, after studying a representative sample of archival documents, I concluded that although they would provide fresh infor­mation, they would not alter my basic findings. Therefore, I resumed my research on the post-October period. The first product of this newer research, The Bolshe­viks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd, appeared simultaneously in the United States and Russia in 2007.²⁰ I am now completing the final volume in this series, tentatively titled The Bolsheviks Survive: Government and Crises in Civil War Petrograd.

A full bibliography listing the sources upon which The Bolsheviks Come to Power is based can be found at the end of this book. Western and Soviet/Rus­sian historical research since its initial publication has contributed significant­ly to our knowledge of understudied aspects of the 1917 revolutions in Russia. Among important scholarly works published during this period are studies of the State Duma by A. V. Nikolaev;²¹ factory workers by Diane P. Koenker, S. A. Smith, David Mandel, Rex A. Wade, and Gennady Shkliarevsky;²² soldiers at the front by Allan K. Wildman, the army and Russian society generally by Joshua A. Sanborn, and Baltic Fleet sailors by Evan Mawdsley and Israel Getzler;²³ the intelligentsia by O. N. Znamenskii;2⁴ Bolshevik women by Barbara Evans Cle- ments;25 the revolution in the Russian Orthodox church by M. A. Babkin and P. G. Rogoznyi;26 the revolution outside Petrograd by Donald J. Raleigh, Orlando Figes, N. N. Kabutova, I. V. Narskii, Peter Holquist, Sarah Badcock, Aaron Re- tish, and V. P. Sapon;27 non-Bolshevik parties and groups by Lutz Hafner, Ziva Galili, S. V. Tiutiukin; and Michael S. Melancon;2® the Constituent Assembly by Oliver H. Radkey and L. G. Protasov;29 and key figures such as Leon Trotsky by Irving Howe, Baruch Knei Paz, and Pierre Broue; Aleksandr Shliapnikov by Barbara Allen; Alexander Kerensky by Richard Abraham, V. P. Fediuk, and S. V. Tiutiukin; General Lavr Kornilov by G. Z. Ioffe; and Paul Miliukov by Melissa Kirschke Stockdale.30

Interesting works applying cultural approaches to the revolutionary era include studies by Richard Stites, Frederick C. Corney, Boris Kolonitskii, and Orlando Figes coauthored with Boris Kolonitskii.31 Among especially valuable historiographical, bibliographical, and general studies are those by Edward Ac­ton, Jonathan D. Smele, Marc Ferro, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, V. I. Startsev, Manfred Hildermeir, Christopher Read, S. V. Leonov, V. P. Buldakov, Rex A. Wade, D. Lieven, Joshua Sanborn, and Mark D. Steinberg.^ Since the implosion of the So­viet Union, many of the most valuable works relating to 1917 published in Russia have been comprehensive document collections and enormously useful reference works.³³ An illuminating collection of documents relating to 1917 at a popular level is Mark D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917.34 Beginning in 1988, a British scholarly journal, Revolutionary Russia, has been publishing important fresh research on the revolutionary era (especially the work of younger scholars).

The opening of Soviet archives beginning in 1990 and the implosion of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 led to the expectation of a flowering of illumi­nating scholarly studies related to the October revolution by historians in Russia stimulated by the sudden opportunity to carry out fresh basic research unhin­dered by ideological constraints and enlivened by meaningful collaboration with their Western colleagues. A promising first step in this direction was reflected in the convocation in January 1993, in St. Petersburg, of a large international scholarly conference to discuss central, controversial issues relating to the Febru­ary and October 1917 Russian revolutions. Participating in this truly remarkable gathering were leading senior and younger Russian specialists on the revolutions, some sixty-one in all, and eighteen of their counterparts from the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Finland. As the conference proceedings show, free and lively discussions took place at all of the conference sessions.35

An important by-product of the contacts furthered by this conference was the preparation of the pioneering Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914—1921.3⁶ Modeled after the Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution by Franfois Furet and Mona Ozouf,3⁷ this volume consists of sixty-five essays on key aspects of the Russian revolutionary era by forty-seven authoritative scholars from Russia, the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, and Scotland, many of whom had participated in the 1993 conference in St. Petersburg. Together, the Petersburg conference and Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution helped stimulate a variety of collaborative international conferences and colloquia, col­laborative publication projects, and close personal and fruitful professional asso­ciations that continue to flourish today. It is no exaggeration to say that at this point, relations between foreign and Russian scholars have been normalized. It is also difficult to overstate the immense scholarly importance and achievement embodied in the documents and reference works already mentioned.

However, with some important exceptions, the expectation that access to archives and the end of the Soviet era would stimulate a quick outpouring of meaningful scholarly research on the revolution by historians in Russia was not realized. Rather, in immediate post-Soviet Russia fundamental research on the subject was stunted by distaste for a subject that was and remains deeply politi­cized. Russian audiences were treated to a cascade of semi-fictional, sensationalist "exposes" of Bolsheviks and Bolshevism by journalists and popular writers rath­er than fresh professional scholarly studies. As reflected in the listing below of important scholarly monographs on the Russian revolutions that have appeared since the initial publication of The Bolsheviks Come to Power, this situation has begun to change. A particularly significant sign of this shift was an international colloquium organized in connection with the 1917 centenary in St. Petersburg in June 2016. Held at the European University in St. Petersburg, this important scholarly forum brought together Russian and Western historians of the Russian Revolution for the presentation and discussion of new, largely archival research on the general theme "The Epoch of War and Revolution (1914-1922)." Other in­ternational centenary symposia and conferences are being planned for St. Peters­burg as well as Moscow and other leading Russian centers of learning. However, increased emphasis in contemporary Russia on stability, orthodoxy, nationalism, and authoritarianism militate against the possibility that the centenary will wit­ness the explosion of fundamental scholarly research on the Russian revolutions of 1917 that might otherwise be expected.

In the West, to conservative Western historians like Harvard's Richard Pipes, the implosion of the Soviet system served to confirm the illegitimacy of its birth. In 1976, in a New York Times essay partly devoted to a review of The Bolsheviks Come to Power, Pipes had not attached any particular significance to the book, writing simply that it was "a scholarly work, based on professional research." Pipes continued: "The author concludes (rightly in my opinion) that a principal source of the Bolsheviks' success lay in their political flexibility that enabled them to respond to the rapidly changing moods of the masses," adding that "the book represents the fullest available account of the strategy and tactics which the Bol­sheviks pursued in the capital city between July and October 1917 but at the same time . . . it does not significantly alter the view prevailing in Western works of how the power seizure was engineered or why it succeeded.'^⁸ Twenty-five years later, at the height of the American triumphalism that followed the demise of the Soviet Union, in an article titled "1917 and the Revisionists," Pipes moved swiftly to settle scores with Western historians like me. His article was one of a group of essays on the "Sins of the Scholars" in a special issue of the conservative magazine the National Interest devoted to an "autopsy" on "The Strange Death of Soviet Communism." In it, I was identified as "the true revisionist expert" and The Bolsheviks Come to Power was characterized as "no more than a rehash of the interpretation inflicted on the Soviet historical profession by the Communist party."3⁹ Yet the prevailing triumphalist spirit did not lead to the repudiation of "revisionism" and/or the preparation of archival-based studies bolstering the tra­ditional "consensus" that Pipes had confidently envisioned.

When the first edition of The Bolsheviks Come to Power was published, the fate of many of the Petrograd Bolsheviks who figure prominently in the book was uncertain. This is no longer the case. As a follow-up to this story, we now know that some died in the life-or-death struggle for survival in the civil war. Victims of the civil war included V. Volodarskii and M. Uritskii (both assas­sinated in Petrograd by terrorists), A. I. Slutskii, V. K. Slutskaia, I. A. Rakhia, and S. G. Roshal. However, many more survived the civil war and 1920s only to lose their lives during Stalin's Great Terror. Thus, of the Central Committee elected at the Sixth Party Congress in late July, most of those who survived into the 1930s perished. An exception, of course, was Stalin. Purge victims included I. T. Smilga, L. B. Kamenev, G. E. Zinoviev, A. S. Bubnov, N. N. Krestinskii, Ia. A. Berzin, V. P. Militiutin, A. I. Rykov, N. I. Bukharin, and Leon Trotsky (brutally murdered in Mexico by an agent of Stalin). Among prominent members of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee who fell victim to the purges were A. G. Shliapnikov, P. A. Zalutskii, M. Ia. Latsis, I. N. Stukov, G. E. Evdokimov, V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, G. I. Bokii, S. M. Gessen, M. A. Saveliev, E. N. Egorova, S. K. Ordzhonikidze, and M. P. Tomskii (the last two escaped execution by com­mitting suicide); among those from the Bolshevik Military Organization who perished were V. I. Nevskii, N. V. Krylenko, M. S. Kedrov, K. A. Mekhanoshin, A. F. Il'in-Zhenevskii, and F. P. Khaustov; two prominent Kronstadt Bolsheviks, F. F. Raskolnikov and A. M. Liubovich, were also among Stalin's victims. Among prominent Petrograd Bolsheviks who somehow survived both the civil war and Stalin's repressions were V. M. Molotov, M. I. Kalinin, Elena Stasova, Aleksandra Kollontai, and N. I. Podvoiskii.

As the centenary of 1917 approached, I was often asked whether my conclusions about the character of the Bolshevik Party and its coming to power had changed over time. My answer, "No, not significantly," is the same as it was in 1991, when Russian historical archives first became available to me. However, the critical im­portance of looking back at and learning from momentous historical events has never been greater than in today's deeply troubled world. It is with these realities in mind that I welcome this new Haymarket Books edition of my study of "Red October" in Petrograd, where one of the seminal events in modern history began.

Notes

Traditionally, both in the West and in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia the February and October "revolutions" have been viewed as separate events. In recent years, however, the periodization of the revolution has been hotly disputed. I now view the events of February and October, 1917 as important phases of the same Great Russian Revolution.

Four moderates, Lev Kamenev, Viktor Nogin, Vladimir Miliutin, and Grig- orii Fedorov, were members of the nine-man Central Committee elected by the conference.

See P. F. Kudelli, ed. Pervyi legal'nyi Petersburgskii komitet bol'shevikov v 1917

(Moscow—Leningrad, 1927). For an updated, more complete, and greatly enhanced edition of these protocols see T. A. Abrosimova, T. P. Bondarevskaia, E. T. Leikina, and V. Iu. Cherniaev, eds, Pervyi Petersburgskii Komitet RSDRP (b) v 1917godu: Pro- tokoly i materialy zasedanii (St. Petersburg, 2003).

In 1917, Nevskii had been a prominent leader of the Bolshevik Military Or­ganization.

Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington, IN, 1968).

N. V. Romanovskii, "Iiul'skie sobytiia v sovremennoi burzhuaznoi isto- riografii," Istoriia SSSR no. 3 (1971): 220-21.

Marc Ferro, Annales no. 4 (July-August 1979): pp. 898-99.

Israel Getzler, Soviet Studies 21, no. 2 (October 1969): 255-57; Nicholas V. Riazanovsky, Political Science Quarterly 84, no. 1 (March, 1969): 125-27.

John L. H. Keep, Slavonic and East European Review 48, no. 112 (July 1970): 464-66.

Theodore H. Von Laue, American Historical Review 74, no. 1 (October 1968): 234-35.

Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York, 1976).

Communication from Howe to James L. Mairs, my editor at W. W. Nor­ton, undated.

Robert Rosenstone, New Republic, June 18, 1977, 35-36.

Communication from Cohen to James L. Mairs, undated.

Allan Wildman, Russian History 4 (1977): 86-88.

"Three Sides of Bolshevism," Economist, October 27, 1979, 120.

Stephen F. Cohen is the author of the classic biography of N. I. Bukharin, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York, 1973). In the case of Robert C. Tucker, Kennan was probably referring to the first volume of his widely acclaimed Stalin biography, Stalin as Revolutionary (New York, 1973), and in the case of Moshe Lewin, to his important works Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (Evanston, IL, 1968), Lenin's Last Struggle (New York, 1968), and Political Currents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton, NJ, 1974).

Aleksandr Rabinovich, Bol'shevikiprikhodiat k vlasti: Revoliutsiia 1917goda v Petrograde (Moscow, 1989).

Thus, in a review of The Bolsheviks in Power Boris Kolonitskii, the leading contemporary Petersburg historian of the 1917 Russian revolutions, wrote that "no one studying the history of the revolution [today] can do without Prelude to Revolu­tion and The Bolsheviks Come to Power." See Kolonitskii's review in Rossiiskaia istori­ia, no. 4, 2009, 193-95.

Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN, 2007); Aleksandr Rabi­novich, Bol'sheviki u vlasti: Pervyi godsovetskoi epokhi v Petrograde (Moscow, 2007).

A. V. Nikolaev, Revoliutsiia i vlast': IV Gosudarstennaia duma 27 fevralia—3 marta 1917goda (St. Petersburg, 2005).

See Diane P. Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Prince­ton, NJ, 1981); S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories (Cambridge, 1984); David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime: From the February Revolution to the July Days 1917 (London, 1983) and The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (Lon­don, 1984); Rex A. Wade, Red Guards and Workers' Militias in the Russian Revolu­tion (Stanford, CA, 1984); and Gennady Shkliarevsky, Labor in the Russian Revolu­tion: Factory Committees and Trade Unions (New York, 1993).

Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers' Revolt (Princeton, NJ, 1980) and The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace (Princeton, NJ, 1987), and Joshua A. San­born, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Poli­tics, 1905-1925 (DeKalb, IL, 2003); Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet: War and Politics, February 1917-April 1918 (London, 1978); and Israel Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge, 1983).

O. N. Znamenskii, Intelligentsiia nakanune Velikogo Oktiabria (Fevral— Oktiabr 1917g.) (Leningrad, 1988).

Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women (Cambridge, 1997).

M. A. Babkin, Dukhovenstvo Russkoi pravoslavnoi tservi i sverzhenie monarkhii (nachaloXXv.-konets 1917g.) (Moscow, 2007); P. G. Rogoznyi, Tserkovaia revoliutsiia 1917goda (Vyshee dukhovenstvo Rossiiskoi Tserkvi v bor'be za vlast' v eparkhiakhposle Fevral'skoi revoliutsii (St. Petersburg, 2008).

Donald J. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca, NY, 1986); Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in the Rev­olution, 1917—1921 (Oxford, 1989); N. N. Kabutova, Vlast'i obshchestvo v rossiiskoi provintsii: 1917god v Povolzh'e (Samara, 1989); I. V. Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe: Budni naseleniia Urala v 1917—1922 (Moscow, 2001); Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914—1921 (Cambridge, 2002); Sarah Badcock, Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (Cambridge, 2007); Aaron Retish, Russia's Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State (1914-1922) (Cambridge, 2008); and V. P. Sapon, Ternovoi venets svobody: libertarizm v ideologii i revoliutsion- noipraktike rossiiskoi levykh radikalov (1917—1918gg.) (Nizhnyi Novgorod, 2008).

Lutz Hafner, Die Partei der linken Sozialrevolutionare in der Russichen Rev­olution von 1917—1918 (Cologne, 1994); Ziva Galili, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: Social Realities and Political Strategies (Princeton, NJ, 1989); S. V. Tiutiukin, Mensheviki: Stranitsy istorii (Moscow, 2002); and Michael S. Melan- con, The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914—1917 (Columbus, 1990).

Oliver H. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly 1917 (Ithaca, NY, 1989); L. G. Protasov, Vserossiiskoe uchredi- tel'noe sobranie: Istoriia rozhdeniia i gibeli (Moscow, 1997).

Irving Howe, Leon Trotsky (New York, 1978), Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford, 1979), Pierre Broue, Trotsky (Paris,

1988); Barbara C. Allen, Alexander Shliapnikov: Life of an Old Bolshevik (Chicago, 2017), Richard Abraham, Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (New York, 1987), V. P. Fediuk, Kerenskii (Moscow, 2009), S. V. Tiutiukin, Aleksandr Kerenskii. Stranitsypoliticheskoi biografii (1905—1917); G. Z. Ioffe, "Beloe Delo," GeneralKornilov (Moscow, 1989); Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, PaulMiliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880-1918 (Ithaca, NY, 1996).

Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Visions and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York and Oxford, 1989); Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2004); Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of1917 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1999); and B. I. Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlasti i bor'ba za vlast': Kizucheniiupoliticheskoi kul'tury rossi- iskoi revoliutsii 1917goda (St. Petersburg, 2012) and "Tragicheskaia erotika": Obrazy imperatorskoi sem'i v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 2010).

Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (London, 1990); Jonathan D. Smele, ed., The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921: An Annotated Bibliography (London and New York, 2003) and Jonathan D. Smele, The 'Russian' Civil Wars, 1916-1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (New York, 2016); Marc Ferro, La Revolution de 1917: Octobre, naissance d'une societe (Paris, 1976); Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle and London, 1981); V. I. Startsev, Krakh Kerenshchiny (Leningrad, 1982); Manfred Hildermeier, Die rus- sische Revolution 1905-1921 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1989); S. V. Leonov, Rozhdenie sovetskoi imperii: gosudarstvo i ideologia, 1917-1922 (Moscow, 1997); Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917-1921 (Ox­ford, 1996); Vladimir P. Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta (Moscow, 2010); V. P. Buldakov and T. G. Leont'eva, Voinaporodivshaia revoliutsiiu: Rossiia 1914-1917gg. (Moscow, 2015); Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge, 2005); Dominic Lieven, The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution (New York, 2016); Joshua Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruc­tion of the Russian Empire (Oxford, 2014); and Mark D. Steinberg, The Russian Rev­olution, 1905-1921 (Oxford, 2017).

Among the most important of these documentary works are some forty-four volumes on the major non-Bolshevik parties during the revolutionary era: Politiches- kiepartii Rossii konetsXlX-pervaia tret'XX veka: Dokumental'noe nasledie, published by Rosspen (Moscow, 1996-2005). Particularly germane to the focus of The Bolshe­viks Come to Power is B. D. Galperina, O. N. Znamenskii, and V. I. Startsev, eds., Petrogradskii sovet rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov v 1917godu, T. 1-4 (Leningrad and Moscow, 1991-2003), and a compendium of documents prepared by T. A. Abrosimova, T. P. Bondarevskaia, E. T. Leikin, and V. Iu. Cherniaev, eds., Peter- burgskii komitet RSDRP (b) v 1917godu: Protokoly i materialy zasedanii (St. Peters­burg, 2003). However, with the exception of the latter, critical documents relating to the Bolshevik Party during the revolution have not been republished, notwith­standing that Soviet era compilations of them are universally acknowledged to be distorted and incomplete. Two especially useful reference works are P. V. Volobuev,

A. S. Velidov, E. G. Gimpelson, V. P. Danilov, V. V. Zhuravlev, V. I. Miller, A. P. Nenarokov, A. I. Razgon, Iu. Iu. Figatner, M. N. Khitrov, and L. K. Shkarenikov, eds., Politicheskie deiateli Rossii 1917: Bibliograficheskii slovar' (Moscow, 1993), and V. V. Shelokhaev, V. P. Buldakov, N. D. Erofeev, O. A. Zumarin, S. V. Kuleshev, V. V. Kriven'skii, A. Iu. Morozova, I. S. Rosental', and A. K. Sorokin, eds., Politiches­kie partii Rossii konets XlX-pervaia tret'XX veka: Entsyklopediia. (Moscow, 1996).

Mark D. Steinberg, ed., Voices of Revolution (New Haven, CT and London, 2001).

See V. Iu. Cherniaev, Z. Galili, L. Haimson, B. I. Kolonitskii, S. I. Potolov, and Iu. Sherrer, eds., Anatomiia revoliutsii. 1917god v Rossii: massy, partii, vlast' (St. Petersburg, 1994).

Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, William G. Rosenberg, eds., Crit­ical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914—1921 (Bloomington, IN, 1997). An updated Russian-language edition of this important work has finally appeared; see E. Akton, V. G. Rozenberg, and V. Iu. Cherniaev, Kriticheskii slovar'Russkoi revoliutsii: 1914-1921 (St. Petersburg, 2014).

Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolu­tion (Cambridge, MA, 1989).

Richard Pipes, New York Times, December 12, 1976.

Richard Pipes, "1917 and the Revisionists," National Interest (Spring 1993): 68-79.

Introduction

_H

undreds of books have been written about the October 1917 revolu­tion in Russia. Why should anyone want to produce still another? During the years since I began working on the present book, this question has been asked of me many times.

My interest in studying and writing about the October revolution stems partly from that event's inherent drama and monumental historical signifi­cance. In Russia in 1917 the ultraradical Bolshevik party emerged from ob­scurity to direct the overthrow of the Western-style Provisional Government and to establish the first national communist political system. These events occurred during the eight months that followed the collapse of the cen­turies-old tsarist regime, in the third year of Russia's catastrophic involve­ment in a devastating European war. Russia was then the third largest country in the world, with a population of more than 165 million occupying an area three times as large as the continental United States and bigger than China and India together. I have long felt that existing accounts of this seminal chapter in modern Russian and, indeed, in world history do not do it justice.

Further stimulating my attraction to 1917 Russia as a subject for research and writing is the failure of existing works to answer many key questions relating to the October revolution and, most importantly, to explain satis­factorily why things turned out as they did. Many books on the revolution are memoirs written by participants in the events described; these personal recollections, though often valuable and fascinating, inevitably present a one-sided view of the revolution, either passionately sympathetic or pro­foundly hostile, depending on which side of the political fence the author was on in 1917.

Historians in the Soviet Union have produced an avalanche of studies on 1917. Many of these works, particularly those written in the relatively free 1920s and during the Khrushchev period, contain a wealth of illuminating factual data from previously untapped archives. But the requirement that writers in the Soviet Union conform to officially prescribed interpretations of history, influenced strongly by contemporary political considerations, limits the overall value of their work.

Outside the Soviet Union several monographs on important aspects of the revolution have appeared in recent years; foremost among these are the works of Oliver H. Radkey, William G. Rosenberg, Ronald G. Suny, Marc Ferro, George Katkov, and Rex Wade.¹ Nonetheless we still do not have a reliable history of the Provisional Government or of the Russian economy in the revolutionary period. We know little about the impact of millions of war-weary soldiers on Russian politics in 1917, or about the de­velopment of the revolution in provincial areas, or, for that matter, about the role of the peasantry or of the growing Russian working class in the rev­olution's course. In fact, the only broadly focused Western investigation of the October revolution based on intensive research in primary sources re­mains the first volume of William Henry Chamberlin's The Russian Revolu­tion, 1911-1921.² Pioneering in its time and still of great value, Cham­berlin's study was written in the early 1930s, before a large body of source material germane to an understanding of the revolution became readily ac­cessible to Western scholars.

In this book, I have elected to focus attention on the revolution in Pet­rograd³ for several related reasons. First, Petrograd was, after all, the capi­tal. In the Russian empire, with its long tradition of strong, arbitrary rule from the center, the political situation in Petrograd, especially control of the institutions and symbols of national power, was of immense significance in determining the course of the revolution throughout the country. In addi­tion to being the governmental hub, Petrograd, with a war-inflated popula­tion of 2.7 million in 1917, was the country's most important commercial and industrial center. For this reason and also because so much more infor­mation is available on Petrograd than on other major Russian cities in 1917, analysis of political, social, and economic developments there provide par­ticularly worthwhile insights into the course of the revolution in urban Rus­sia generally. Finally, because in 1917 the national headquarters of the Bolshevik Party and the center of Bolshevik activities were in Petrograd, it is there that one can best study both the party's operations from top to bot­tom and the way in which the Bolsheviks interacted with the masses.

But isn't Petrograd the one Russian city that has been treated extensively in Western literature on the revolution, one might fairly ask. True enough. Yet, despite all that has been written about 1917 in general and "Red Pet­rograd" in particular, we still do not have a full, reliable account of the rev­olution there. Two relatively recent studies, Sergei Melgunov's The Bolshe­vik Seizure of Power⁴' and Robert V. Daniels's Red October,⁵ while very useful, are limited in that both center chiefly on the period just before, during, and—in the case of Melgunov—right after the Provisional Government's overthrow; major developments in the summer and early fall of 1917, an ap­preciation of which is essential for an understanding of what happened in October, receive scant attention. Moreover, the political behavior of Pet­rograd workers, soldiers, and sailors, and its impact on the course of the revolution, are not taken into account, the events of October being pre­sented largely as a disorganized struggle between two similarly indecisive and inept combatants—the Kerensky government and the Bolshevik leader­ship.

If the present book helps to fill this deficiency in Western his­toriography and, in so doing, stimulates readers to view the events of 1917 with new perspective, it will have accomplished its purpose. My primary aim has been to reconstruct, as fully and accurately as possible, the devel­opment of the "revolution from below" and the outlook, activity, and situa­tion of the Bolshevik party organization in Petrograd at all levels between February and October 1917. In the process I have tried to clarify the vital relationship between these two central aspects of the revolution and the eventual Bolshevik success.

Extensive research along these lines has prompted me to question many of the basic assumptions of historians in both the Soviet Union and the West regarding the character and sources of strength of the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and, indeed, the very nature of the October revolution in Pet­rograd. Historians in the Soviet Union have stressed historical inevitability and the role of a tightly knit revolutionary party led by Lenin in accounting for the outcome of the October revolution, while many Western scholars have viewed this event either as an historical accident or, more frequently, as the result of a well-executed coup d etat without significant mass support; I find, however, that a full explanation of the Bolshevik seizure of power is much more complex than any of these interpretations suggest.

Studying the aspirations of factory workers, soldiers, and sailors as ex­pressed in contemporary documents, I find that these concerns corre­sponded closely to the program of political, economic, and social reform put forth by the Bolsheviks at a time when all other major political parties were widely discredited because of their failure to press hard enough for mean­ingful internal changes and an immediate end to Russia's participation in the war. As a result, in October the goals of the Bolsheviks, as the masses understood them, had strong popular support.

In Petrograd in 1917 the Bolshevik Party bore little resemblance to the by-and-large united, authoritarian, conspiratorial organization effectively controlled by Lenin depicted in most existing accounts. To be sure, the party's course toward an early socialist revolution was strongly influenced by Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Born in Simbirsk in 1870, the son of a school inspector of minor nobility, Lenin, a lawyer by profession, had entered the Russian social democratic movement in the 1890s and quickly committed himself to the goal of organizing the Russian working class into a political force capable of leading the struggle to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. In 1903, almost singlehandedly, he had precipitated the famous split of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party into its radical Bolshevik and moderate Menshevik factions, chiefly over the issue of the nature and objec­tives of a Marxist revolutionary party in Russia. In the repressive conditions then prevailing, Lenin had sought the creation of a tightly knit, centrally directed organization of disciplined, militant revolutionaries, rather than the more democratic mass workers' party envisioned by the Mensheviks.⁶ Only a highly professional party, Lenin then reasoned, would be capable of ful­filling revolutionary tasks and of protecting Russian social democracy from decimation by the authorities and from reformism.

In 1905 Lenin had modified the classic Marxist blueprint for a two-stage revolution, generally viewed by Russian social democrats as applicable to Russia, when he suggested that following the overthrow of the tsar, a "revo­lutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" might pave the way for a socialist revolution without an extended period of liberal government and capitalist industrial development.

After the outbreak of World War I, within all the major Russian socialist groups there had emerged ^udefensist" factions, which supported the Rus­sian war effort, and "internationalist" factions, which condemned the mili­tary struggle in Europe and called for the arrangement of an immediate peace without victors or vanquished. At this time, Lenin had once again set himself squarely apart from most of his fellow socialists by rejecting sup­port for his nation's war effort and proposing instead the fomenting of social revolution in all the warring countries as an immediate social democratic slogan. Subsequently, he had constructed a bold if coolly received theory to show that with the eruption of the war, the capitalist system had reached its highest, "imperalist," stage, a critical situation in international economic af­fairs that would inevitably precipitate an international socialist revolution.⁷

By the beginning of 1917, as the result of rapidly worsening economic conditions, staggering military reverses and horrendous personnel losses, and historically unprecedented governmental incompetence and mis­management, the old regime was bankrupt among virtually all segments of the Russian population. On February 23, International Women's Day, dis­turbances that broke out among long lines of housewives waiting in the bit­ter cold to buy bread touched off massive demonstrations calling for the overthrow of the monarchy and an end to the war. A week later Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.

Lenin, who had been in exile abroad for close to a decade, was then in Zurich, Switzerland. Most of what he knew about the revolution in those early weeks he gleaned from conservative European newspapers, an obvious handicap but not one to prevent him from attempting to direct the activities of his followers in Russia. Reading accounts of Russian developments in the London Times, Le Temps, and the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Lenin quickly con­cluded that while the workers had led the struggle during the February

Soldiers and cossacks celebrating during the February days in Petrograd.

days, the bourgeoisie had taken advantage of the situation to consolidate its own political power in Petrograd. To judge by his writings of March 1917, he seems not to have appreciated the degree to which socialist leaders in Petrograd had cooperated with liberals in the formation of the Provisional Government, or the extent to which the population at large, at least for the moment, acquiesced in this development. Lenin assumed that revolutionary Russian workers, having helped bring down the regime of Nicholas II, would instinctively see that a bourgeois government would do no more than the tsarist regime to fulfill their keenest aspirations. Moreover, following three years of the most terrible warfare in history, the end of which was not yet in sight, Lenin was obsessed by the thought that all of the major Euro­pean countries were on the threshold of socialist revolution and that a prole­tarian insurrection in Russia would be the spark that would spur desperate, peace-hungry workers everywhere to rise against their governments. Thus in his initial directives to the party leadership in Petrograd, partially con­tained in his "Letters from Afar," he insisted on the necessity of arming and organizing the masses for the imminent second stage of the revolution, which would overthrow the "government of capitalists and large land­owners."⁸

Returning to Petrograd on April 3, Lenin declared publicly that the Feb­ruary revolution had not solved the Russian proletariat's fundamental prob­lems, that the working class of Russia could not stop halfway, and that in

alliance with the soldier-masses the Russian proletariat would turn the bourgeois democratic revolution into a proletarian socialist revolution.⁹

The Petrograd Bolshevik organization in 1917 included many leaders whose views differed significantly from Lenin's; Bolsheviks of varying per­suasions had important influence in determining the party's policies, con­tributing ultimately to its success. There were, among others, "moderate" or "right" Bolsheviks, who consistently rejected almost all of Lenin's fun­damental theoretical and strategic assumptions. Their best known and most articulate spokesman was the thirty-four-year-old, Moscow-born Lev Ka- menev, a Bolshevik since 1903. Kamenev did not accept the idea that the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia was complete. Believing that the Russian working class was still relatively weak, rejecting the supposition that all Europe was on the verge of revolt, and convinced that neither the Russian peasantry nor the foreign bourgeoisie would permit the victory of socialism in Russia, the mild-mannered Kamenev, from the time of his re­turn to Petrograd from Siberia in mid-March 1917, advocated vigilant so­cialist control over the Provisional Government rather than the latter's re­moval. In succeeding months, as the Russian revolution deepened, Kamenev spoke out for the creation of an exclusively socialist government; this was to be a broad coalition made up of all major socialist groups, which would retain its mandate only until the establishment of a democratic re­public by a Constituent Assembly. On the war issue, Kamenev called for support of the Russian war effort pending conclusion of a negotiated peace, a position closer to that of most moderate socialists than to Lenin's.

Among Petrograd Bolsheviks in 1917 there were many other indepen­dent-minded leaders who, while sharing Lenin's theoretical assumptions regarding the possibility of a socialist revolution in Russia, often disagreed with him on tactical questions. Foremost of these was the legendary Lev Trotsky, then thirty-eight, who had first gained both international fame and enormous stature among the Petrograd masses as the bold and coura­geous chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet during the revolution of 1905. A brilliant writer, Trotsky was a tireless and spellbinding public speaker justly considered one of the greatest orators of modern times.¹⁰

The general direction of Bolshevik activity in 1917 was set by the Sev­enth All-Russian Party Conference in April and the Sixth Bolshevik Party Congress of late July and early August; between such national assemblies it was determined primarily by majority vote of a democratically elected party Central Committee. At the same time, amid the chaotic, locally vary­ing, constantly fluctuating conditions prevailing in Russia in 1917, the Cen­tral Committee, at the top of the Bolshevik organizational hierarchy, was simply unable to control the behavior of major regional organizations. Ex­cept in a broad, general way, it rarely tried. In Petrograd, important auxil­iary arms such as the Petersburg Committee,¹¹ which directed party work in the capital, and the Military Organization,¹² responsible for the conduct of revolutionary activity among troops, were relatively free to tailor their tactics and appeals to suit local conditions. When necessary, they staunchly protected their prerogatives.

Beyond this, in 1917 Lenin's prerevolutionary conception of a small, pro­fessional, conspiratorial party was discarded and the doors opened wide to tens of thousands of new members who were by no means without influ­ence, so that to a significant degree the party was now both responsive and open to the masses.

This is not to minimize Lenin's importance in the development of the revolution. It is almost as difficult for me as it has been for virtually all of my predecessors who have written about the revolution to envision the triumph of the Bolsheviks in Lenin's absence. For all the lively debate and spirited give-and-take that I find to have existed within the Bolshevik orga­nization in 1917, the Bolsheviks were doubtless more unified than any of their major rivals for power. Certainly this was a key factor in their effec­tiveness. Nonetheless, my research suggests that the relative flexibility of the party, as well as its responsiveness to the prevailing mass mood, had at least as much to do with the ultimate Bolshevik victory as did revolutionary discipline, organizational unity, or obedience to Lenin.

I should add that in attempting to reconstruct the events with which this book deals, I have tried to let the facts speak for themselves; it is left for the reader to judge whether my conclusions are warranted by the evidence.

When Lenin returned to Petrograd in April 1917 and sounded the call for immediate social revolution, moderate socialists and Bolsheviks alike were unresponsive to his militant appeals. These were still the euphoric first weeks following the February revolution. The patriotic, liberal democratic Provisional Government, which was to rule until a representative Constitu­ent Assembly could be popularly elected to establish a permanent political system, appeared to have the blessings and good wishes of practically ev­eryone. Included in this government were some of the most talented and best known figures in the Russian liberal movement. The new prime minis­ter was Prince Georgii Lvov, a much respected, progressive zemstvo leader (the zemstvos were institutions of limited local self-government created in 1864). Foreign minister and dominant figure in the government was Pavel Miliukov, a professor of history and the leading spokesman of the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats, the main Russian liberal party); alongside him in the cabinet were other prominent Kadets such as Nikolai Nekrasov, Andrei Shingarev, and Alexander Manuilov, ministers of transportation, agriculture, and education, respectively. The key Ministry of War was headed by the powerful industrialist and founder of the right-liberal Oc- tobrist Party, Alexander Guchkov; as chairman of the Central War Indus­tries Committee, Guchkov had already acquired considerable experience in helping to direct the war effort. The minister of finance was a self-made

Ли! Фин 1 (.4*ritmJin

в ф

Ч 1 И Ир к«ю*.|-мь

Members of the first Provisional Government, formed at the beginning of March 1917. Bottom row, left to right: A. I. Konovalov, P. X. Miliukov, G. E. Lvov, A. I. Guchkov, X. V. Xekrasov. Top row : M. I. Tereshchenko, A. A. Manuilov, A. F. Kerensky, A. I. Shingarev, V. X. Lvov.

tycoon, Mikhail Tereshchenko. The new minister of justice was the young lawyer Alexander Kerensky. Prior to the revolution Kerensky had made a name as the flamboyant defense attorney in widely publicized political trials and as an outspoken leftist deputy in the Third and Fourth Dumas.

The long-time American consul general in St. Petersburg, John Harold Snodgrass, no doubt expressed the views of most contemporary observers when he commented in the New York Times of Sunday, March 25, 1917: "Nowhere in their country could the Russian people have found better men to lead them out of the darkness of tyranny. . . . Lvov and his associates are to Russia what Washington and his associates were to America when it became a nation."

Чип (Ьш С Нскросл*ь

Чии Им. Д МмлпЬот. * ^Посин

1-ог ВРЕМЕННОЕ ПРАВИТЕЛЬСТВО.

Лии. Юст. Kfpfttckw.

4

Чин. Эеч 1Пинг*1реиъ

Ч hap Up Ч.п.чикопъ.

п

rr

Of course most friends of Russia abroad believed that because the new ministers had been selected by the Duma, the pale copy of a Western-style parliament that had been established in tsarist Russia following the revolu­tion of 1905, they could speak for the entire population. This was not an al­together valid assumption. The Fourth Duma, in session in 1917, had been elected in 1912 under regulations that excluded the bulk of the population from the franchise. During the February days there also sprang up in Pet­rograd a soviet (council) of workers' and soldiers' deputies modeled after spontaneously created organs that had had a brief existence in Russia dur­ing the revolution of 1905. In the spring and summer of 1917, soviets were

established in each of the districts of Petrograd, and, concomitantly, similar institutions of grass roots democracy came into being in cities, towns, and villages throughout Russia. In May an All-Russian Congress of Peasants' Soviets was convened in Petrograd, and in June representatives of workers' and soldiers' soviets gathered in the capital for their first nationwide con­gress. These national conventions formed permanent АН-Russian Executive Committees (the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, and the Executive Commit­tee of the All-Russian Congress of Peasants' Deputies), which, taken together, were numerically more representative and, by virtue of the loy­alty that they commanded among factory workers, peasants, and particu­larly soldiers, potentially more powerful than the Provisional Government.

Until the fall of 1917 the central organs of the All-Russian Soviets were dominated by leaders of the moderate socialist parties—the social demo­cratic Menshevik Party and the neopopulist Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs). These leaders contented themselves with acting as guardians of the revolution and demonstrated no interest in challenging the Provisional Gov­ernment as the lawful supreme political authority. This was, at least in part, for doctrinal reasons; the Mensheviks remained committed to the or­thodox Marxist assumption that a "bourgeois revolution," which the over­throw of the autocracy appeared to represent, had necessarily to be fol­lowed by an indefinite period of bourgeois democratic rule. For their part, SRs in the Executive Committees, while not prevented by ideology from taking power into their own hands, shared with many Mensheviks the con­viction that collaboration with military commanders and commercial and industrial groups was absolutely essential for Russia's survival in the war and as a bulwark against counterrevolution.

The situation that confronted Lenin upon his return to Russia in April, therefore, differed disappointingly from what he had anticipated. Among workers and soldiers, Bolshevik influence was relatively weak. The Men­sheviks and SRs had overwhelming majorities in the soviets, which Lenin now considered the embryonic institutions of a workers' government. Under moderate socialist direction the soviets supported the Provisional Government and, pending arrangement of a negotiated peace, endorsed the Russian defense effort. If that were not sufficient cause for discouragement, the influence of moderately inclined Bolsheviks led by Kamenev had created a strong mood of compromise toward the government and of sup­port for reconciliation with the Mensheviks within Lenin's own party.¹³

In adapting his goals to fit the prevailing situation and to make them pal­atable to the majority of his party, Lenin hewed a thin line; while scaling down his immediate objectives and accepting concessions to the moderates, he nonetheless retained the core of his radical program and his tactical flexi­bility. In regard to the possibility of forming a unified social democratic party, Lenin was intransigent; alliance with the Mensheviks, he argued, would associate the Bolshevik Party with the Russian defense effort and thus destroy its capacity to lead the world revolutionary struggle. To all who would listen, Lenin declared categorically that he would strike out on his own if his followers insisted on reunification and if they declined ac­tively to oppose the government's war effort. Almost exclusively because of Lenin's interference, discussions regarding unification between the Menshe- viks and Bolsheviks quickly broke down;¹⁴ still, a strong attraction for polit­ical cooperation with other socialist groups lingered among the Bolsheviks throughout 1917.

Lenin also refused to alter his theoretical analysis of the revolution. In a summation of his views published in the party's main newspaper, Pravda, on April 7—the celebrated "April Theses"—he defined the situation in Rus­sia as the transition between the first, "bourgeois democratic," stage of the revolution and the second, "socialist," stage. He still insisted that the Provi­sional Government should not be supported in any way and that the party's goal was the transfer of power to the soviets. Yet Lenin's message no longer included an immediate call to arms. As long as the masses retained faith in the bourgeoisie, Lenin explained, the party's primary task was to expose the fraudulence of the Provisional Government and the errors of the Soviet leadership. The party would patiently have to convince the masses that the Provisional Government could not bring peace and that the soviets were the only truly revolutionary form of government.¹⁵

In part because of these modifications and in part because of an energetic lobbying campaign, Lenin was able quickly to win a significant portion of the Bolshevik leadership to his side. This initial success is mirrored in the proceedings of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee during April as well as in the results of the First Bolshevik Petrograd City Conference, where Lenin won his initial victories over the right. Meeting from April 14 to 22, the conference adopted by a decisive vote of thirty-seven to three a resolu­tion written by Lenin condemning the Provisional Government and calling for the eventual transfer of power to the soviets.¹⁶

At the All-Russian Bolshevik Party Conference, which opened in Pet­rograd on April 24, Lenin won further victories. The conference resolution on the war reflected Lenin's uncompromising repudiation of the conflict and the Russian defense effort. In its resolution on the government question, the conference condemned the Provisional Government as an instrument of the bourgeoisie and an ally of counterrevolution, and suggested that, for self-protection, the proletariat would have to organize and arm.¹⁷

Still, at the April Conference the Kamenev faction argued loud and long for its position, not without significant results. The influence of the moderates is reflected in the fact that five of their number were elected to the nine-man Central Committee,¹⁸ insuring the moderation of that body from late April through July. The moderate point of view was also evident in the major conference resolutions.¹⁹

Moreover, in part due to the influence of the moderates, full discussion of some of the fundamental theoretical assumptions underlying Lenin's pro­gram, most importantly his concept of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, was postponed.²⁰

Taken together, the April Conference resolutions pointed the party vaguely toward the socialist revolution while leaving unanswered the crucial questions "How?" and "When?" While the ultimate goal of transferring power to the soviets was implicit in several of the resolutions, for the time being the party was to concentrate on "the prolonged task of building up the class consciousness of the proletariat," "mobilizing it into opposition to the wavering policies of the petty bourgeoisie," and "increasing and consoli­dating Bolshevik strength in the soviets."

The dominant view among Bolshevik leaders from all over Russia drawn together for the April Conference was that these tasks would not be ac­complished overnight. Yet in the weeks that followed, among workers, sol­diers, and sailors in the capital, support for the repudiation of the Provi­sional Government and the transfer of state power to the soviets grew with astonishing speed. This was partly because of widespread disenchantment with the results of the February revolution. Deteriorating economic condi­tions had helped trigger the upheaval in the first place. To Petrograd, in particular, the war brought critical shortages of housing, food, clothing, fuel, and raw materials. Some of the shortages stemmed from a halt in the flow of foreign commodities, such as coal from England and cheap cotton from the United States; most, however, were the result of domestic ship­ping and distribution problems. Russia's internal water transport and railway systems were simply inadequate to meet both civil and military needs. In the case of grain, peasants, finding it impossible to procure manufactured goods, refused to part with their produce for rapidly depreciating paper money. As the scarcity of goods increased, the gap between wages and the rising cost of living widened. Petrograd's roughly 390,000 factory workers, of whom approximately a third were women, were hardest hit by the resulting inflation. Despite a significant increase in nominal wages between the outbreak of the war and the beginning of 1917 (by as much as 260 per­cent), real wages declined to about a third of prewar levels, largely as a result of drastic increases in the price of consumer necessities.²¹

The February revolution did not alleviate these difficulties; on the con­trary, administrative confusion increased in March and April, and this, in addition to the continued deterioration of transportation, led to a significant worsening of the supply situation. The increased shortages of raw materials and fuel that now developed forced factory owners to curtail production further and led to extensive additional layoffs. Simultaneously, delivery of foodstuffs also continued to decline; attempts by the government to in­troduce an effective food pricing and rationing system failed to ease the strains caused by these shortages. In the spring of 1917 workers in a number of industries had received substantial wage increases. However, skyrocketing prices quickly offset these gains, so that by early summer Pet­rograd factory workers, generally speaking, were economically little better off than they had been in February.²²

To the 215,000 to 300,000 soldiers of the war-inflated Petrograd garrison, and also to the sailors and soldiers from the nearby Kronstadt naval base, who numbered around 30,000, the fruits of the February revolution were similarly disappointing. In normal times the guards regiments, which formed the backbone of the garrison, had been specially trained units re­cruited almost exclusively from the peasantry; this traditional core had been squandered in the campaigns of 1914-1916 on the battlefields of East Prus­sia and Galicia. Consequently, by 1917 most of the troops stationed in and around Petrograd, including those in regiments of the guard, were poorly trained wartime recruits, still predominately of peasant background. Mili­tary discipline was foreign to these soldiers; a high percentage had had their fill of duty at the front. The decisive moment of the February revolution had occurred when garrison units, one after another, joined rebelling townspeople.

After the collapse of the old regime, soldiers and sailors had removed officers who openly opposed the revolution as well as those with reputations for particular severity. Initially, they had hailed the changes in the armed forces brought about by the revolution. Among the most important of these was the formation of democratically elected army and navy committees with broad but vaguely defined administrative authority in all military units (the creation of such committees was initially sanctioned by the Petrograd Soviet in its famous Order Number One,²³ issued on March 1). Enlisted personnel watched suspiciously for any sign of a return to the old order and awaited the compromise peace they felt confident would be negotiated by the Petrograd Soviet. The Provisional Government's patriotic declarations and obvious overriding concern with halting the further development of the revolution and improving Russia's military preparedness were to them un­derstandably disturbing.²⁴

For these reasons, by the late spring of 1917 rapidly growing numbers of Petrograd workers and soldiers and Baltic Fleet sailors viewed the Provi­sional Government increasingly as an organ of the propertied classes, op­posed to fundamental political change and uninterested in the needs of ordi­nary people. On the other hand, the soviets were contrasted more and more positively with the Provisional Government and viewed as genuinely demo­cratic institutions of popular self-rule. The divorce between the orientation of the government and the mood and aspirations of the Petrograd masses had been reflected initially on April 20 and 21, when thousands of workers, soldiers, and sailors, carrying banners emblazoned with slogans such as "Down with Miliukov!" "Down with Annexationist Politics!" and even "Down with the Provisional Government!" took to the streets to protest

Members of the new coalition cabinet formed following the April crisis: Bottom row, left to right: A. I. Konovalov, A. A. Manuilov, F. I. Rodichev, V. N. Lvov, I. V. Godnev. Middle row: A. I. Shingarev, M. I. Tereshchenko, G. E. Lvov, N. V. Nekrasov, P. N. Pereverzev. Top row: M. I. Skobelev, V. M. Chernov, A. F. Kerensky, I. G. Tsereteli, A. V. Peshekhonov.

я

«

ё

Miliukov's obvious intention of pursuing the war to a "victorious conclu­sion." Significantly, the crowds ended these demonstrations only at the request of the Petrograd Soviet, after openly ignoring government orders to disperse.²⁵

In the wake of this April crisis, two of the ministers most closely as­sociated with the government's unpopular foreign and military policies, Miliukov and Guchkov, left the cabinet. In this first political shake-up after the February revolution, several key moderate socialist leaders from the Pet­rograd Soviet were prevailed upon to accept ministerial posts. The Georgian Menshevik Iraklii Tsereteli, the passionate tribune of the Social Demo­cratic fraction in the Second Duma before his arrest, imprisonment, and Siberian exile, and, for much of 1917, probably the single most authoritative official in the Soviet, became minister of posts and telegraph. (Tsereteli was the acknowledged head of the Menshevik-SR bloc and originator of many of its policies.) The titular head and main theoretician of the SRs, Viktor Chernov, became minister of agriculture. A close associate of Tsereteli's, Mikhail Skobelev, was named minister of labor. Aleksei Peshekhonov, founder and leader of the Popular Socialist Party, became minister of foodsupply. Pavel Pereverzev, another SR, took the post of minister of justice, while Kerensky became war and naval minister.

These personnel changes, however, did not significantly alter the govern­ment's orientation. The cabinet was now split between liberals, determined to delay fundamental reforms until the convocation of the Constituent As­sembly and concerned in the meantime almost exclusively with restoring governmental authority, strengthening the fighting capacity of the army, and pursuing the war to a victorious conclusion and moderate socialist So­viet leaders, anxious to respond to popular demands for immediate reform and hopeful of taking the lead in bringing about the early conclusion of the war on the basis of no annexations and no indemnities. Consequently, the first coalition, formed at the beginning of May, was potentially even less capable of marshaling an attack on national problems than its predecessor. While unable to reach a consensus on domestic matters, in the realm of foreign policy the government chose simultaneously to upgrade the combat readiness of the armed forces in preparation for a summer offensive and to encourage negotiations aimed at achieving a compromise peace.

Once they had joined the first coalition, the moderate socialists became identified in the popular mind with the shortcomings of the Provisional Government. Only the Bolsheviks, among the major Russian political groups, remained untainted by association with the government and were therefore completely free to organize opposition to it, a situation of which the party took maximum advantage.

By the eve of World War I, the Bolsheviks had achieved considerable success in weaning Petrograd factory workers away from the more moder­ate Mensheviks.²⁶ Much of this gain was probably lost during the war, when thousands of experienced workers were shipped to the front and when the Bolshevik organization in Petrograd was decimated by arrests. Beginning soon after the February revolution, working through institutions such as the Bolshevik Military Organization, neighborhood party commit­tees, district soviets, the trade union movement, factory-shop committees,²⁷ and other nonparty mass organizations, the Bolsheviks concentrated on in­creasing their influence among military personnel and factory workers. In the Petrograd Soviet, at endless rounds of political rallies, and in the pages of the mass-circulation party publications Pravda, Soldatskaia pravda, and Rabotnitsa²⁸ they trumpeted their programs and articulated what they per­ceived to be the most strongly felt aspirations of the masses. To the peasant-soldiers of the garrison, the Bolsheviks proclaimed: If you don't want to die at the front, if you don't want the reinstitution of tsarist disci­pline, if you want better living conditions and the redistribution of farmland, power must be transferred to the soviets. Of particular interest to workers, the Bolsheviks demanded tight soviet control over all phases of the economy, higher wages, an eight-hour working day, worker control in the factories, and an end to inflation. Heaping blame for unresolved problems

The Rabotnitsa editorial board. Bottom row, left to right: A. M. Kollontai, L. N. Stahl. Sec­ond row: A. I. Elizarova, V. M. Bonch-Bruevich. Third row: К. I. Nikolaeva, P. F. Kudelli, K. N. Samoilova.

upon "greedy capitalists and landlords," the Bolsheviks raised the ugly specter of counterrevolution should the soviets not assume governmental authority.

The results of these efforts were quickly apparent. In February there had been about two thousand Bolsheviks in Petrograd. At the opening of the April Conference party membership had risen to sixteen thousand. By late June it had reached thirty-two thousand, while two thousand garrison sol­diers had joined the Bolshevik Military Organization and four thousand soldiers had become associated with "Club Pravda," a "nonparty" club for military personnel operated by the Military Organization.²⁹ (The influence of the party was particularly strong in several powerful military units quar­tered in working-class districts of the capital and at Kronstadt, where in mid-May the local soviet passed a resolution rejecting the authority of the Provisional Government.)

In Petrograd, by late spring, imposing numbers of impatient, Bolshevik-influenced workers, soldiers, and sailors, on the one hand, and the Provisional Government and moderate socialist leadership of the Soviet, on the other, were on a collision course; the former demanded the transfer of governmental power to the Soviet, while the latter insisted that such a step would invite disaster. This situation was highlighted in early June when the Bolshevik Military Organization, spurred on by its restless new rank-and-file converts in the garrison, proposed that the party organize an antiwar, antigovernment mass protest march during the meetings of the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (the congress met in Petrograd from June 3 to June 24). The party Central Committee accepted the proposal and scheduled the demonstration for June 10. The idea struck a responsive chord. Because the core of the demonstra­tion appeal was opposition to the launching of a new offensive against the Germans and Austrians and a call for the transfer of power to the SR-Menshevik-controlled Soviet, rather than to the Bolshevik Party itself, even nominal supporters of the moderate socialist parties were enticed into the movement.³⁰

The Congress of Soviets, which had just passed a resolution pledging full cooperation and support to the government, viewed the proposed march as a repudiation of its policies, which indeed it was, and as a clear-cut threat to the coalition. On June 9 congress delegates resolved to take whatever steps were necessary to prevent the march; a three-day ban on demonstrations was issued, delegates were dispatched to workers' districts and military bar­racks, and maximum pressure was brought to bear on Bolshevik leaders to rethink their plans. At the eleventh hour, partly because of this opposition, the Bolshevik Central Committee aborted the march.

The unpopularity of the congress's stand among Petrograd workers and soldiers was reflected in an incident that occurred shortly afterward. On June 12, alarmed by the apparent restlessness of workers and soldiers in the capital and convinced that they would respond to appeals from the majority socialists as readily as to those of the Bolsheviks, the Congress of Soviets scheduled a mass march of its own for June 18. This demonstration was in­tended to serve as a gesture of conciliation to the Bolsheviks and as a means of channeling widespread unrest into the expression of support for the congress's policies. Though the Mensheviks and SRs worked feverishly to insure the success of the march, their plans backfired. On the appointed

Members of the Presidium of the First All-Russian Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Dep­uties. Left to right: M. I. Skobelev, N. S. Chkheidze, G. V. Plekhanov, and I. G. Tsereteli.

day, the moderate socialist Soviet leadership watched long columns of workers and soldiers, representing virtually all of Petrograd's factories and military regiments, over 400,000 strong, parade by, holding aloft crimson banners bearing the slogans: "Down with the Ten Minister-Capitalists!" "Down with the Politics of the Offensive!" "All Power to the Soviets!" The sea of Bolshevik banners and placards, all contemporary observers agreed, was broken only occasionally by slogans endorsed by the congress.

This clear indication of the divergence between popular opinion in Petrograd and the behavior of the government and the Soviet leadership created strains among the moderate socialists; militant left factions began to emerge within both the Menshevik and SR organizations. Still, if disen­chantment with the Provisional Government and support for the Bolshevik program were already far advanced in the capital, the same was not true in most of the provinces and at the front. The probable correlation of forces in the country at large was mirrored in the makeup of the First Congress of Soviets: in attendance were 533 registered Mensheviks and SRs, and 105 Bolsheviks.³¹

In these circumstances, with the moderate socialists stubbornly resisting all pressures to create a soviet government, Lenin cautioned his associates against deluding themselves that power might be transferred to the soviets peacefully. At the same time, he was adamant about keeping a tight reign in the short run on politically impatient elements within the Petrograd Bolshe­vik organization and on local workers and soldiers generally, while working to expand support for the party's program among peasants in the coun­tryside and soldiers at the front.

This was by no means a simple task. The party's rapid growth since Feb­ruary had flooded its ranks with militants who knew next to nothing about Marxism and who were united by little more than overwhelming impa­tience for immediate revolutionary action. The problem had arisen initially

The mass demonstration sponsored by the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets on June 18. "The sea of Bolshevik banners and placards . . . w as broken only occasionally by slogans endorsed by the congress."

in April during the mass protests against Miliukov. Rank-and-file party members from garrison regiments and factories undoubtedly helped pro­voke the street demonstrations in the first place, although the Central Com­mittee did not become involved until after the movement was well un­derway; subsequently, the top party leadership endorsed the demonstrations. Impulsive elements in the Petrograd party organization and in the Bolshevik Military Organization, responsive to their militant constit­uents and fearful of losing ground to the anarchists, took a significantly more radical tack; some officials of the Petersburg Committee prepared and widely circulated a leaflet appealing, in the party's name, for the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government and the arrest of cabinet minis­ters.³² Similarly, during preparations for the abortive June 10 demon­stration these same elements had laid plans on their own to seize vital public services and munitions stores.³³

The beginning of the long-anticipated Russian offensive on June 18 com­pounded the problem of controlling unrest in Petrograd. Ordered to the front in support of the attack, thousands of garrison soldiers, including

many members of the Bolshevik Military Organization, insisted that the Provisional Government be overthrown without further delay.

During the second half of June, Lenin devoted much attention to re­straining those of his followers who were bent on immediate action.³⁴ At the same time he worked on a draft program for the approaching party con­gress, scheduled for July 26. By the end of the month Lenin was exhausted from the unaccustomed exertions and strains of the preceding weeks. On June 27, accompanied by his sister Maria, he left Petrograd for a few days of rest at the country cottage of Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich in the village of Neivola, in Finland. There he spent several days relaxing in the summer sun and strolling and swimming at a nearby lake.

This pleasant interlude was interrupted on the early morning of July 4 by the news that a mass insurrection had broken out in the capital. The alarm­ing information was conveyed to Lenin by Maximilian Saveliev, who had been sent from Petrograd the previous evening on behalf of the Bolshevik Central Committee. The situation in the capital was critical, and it was evi­dent that the party was deeply involved. Crucial decisions had to be made. Without delay, Lenin caught an early-morning train to Petrograd.³⁵

THE JULY UPRISING

_S

till some twenty-five miles from the capital, the mud-spattered, dark green carriages of the Finnish railway train wound their way through pine- and fir-covered, boulder-strewn hills broken here and there by clus­ters of tidy log cottages. It was the first run of the morning. Seated on hard benches smooth from wear, in a dilapidated carriage occupied mainly by respectably dressed summer residents of the Finnish countryside commut­ing to work in Petrograd, Lenin, his younger sister Maria, and his comrades Bonch-Bruevich, an authority on Russian religious sects who had been ac­tive in the Russian Social Democratic Party from its earliest years, and Saveliev, the university-educated son of a minor noble, also a long-time party member, talked together animatedly. About nine o'clock the train crossed the Sestra River, a narrow, meandering stream that served as a boundary between Finland and Russia; minutes later it slowed to a stop at the small border station of Beloostrov.

Up the track a machinist uncoupled the locomotive, which, chugging and hissing rhythmically, moved off slowly to take on wood and water. Conver­sation between Lenin and his companions was interrupted at this point by an officious border inspector who popped into their compartment and commanded sharply, "Documents! Show your documents! Have them ready!" Many years later Bonch-Bruevich recalled his uneasiness as he and his friends handed their papers to the waiting inspector. Lenin was traveling on his own passport. Would the name "Ulianov" arouse suspicion? The inspector stamped all four passports with only a perfunctory glance and hurried on.¹

During the twenty-minute stopover at Beloostrov, Bonch-Bruevich rushed off to fetch the morning papers, while Lenin, Saveliev, and Maria Ilinichna ordered coffee at the station buffet. Bonch-Bruevich soon returned with several late editions, and Lenin pounced on them for news of the uprising in Petrograd. Prominent stories in almost all the papers carried details of the previous day's events. From all indications it appeared that the movement of armed soldiers and factory workers into the streets had been triggered in mid-afternoon by soldiers of the several-thousand-man First Machine Gun Regiment. One or two machine gunners had been dispatched to each major factory and military unit, where, more often than not, their appeals for insurrection had been greeted with enthusiasm. By early eve­ning upper-class citizens had disappeared from downtown streets, and thousands of soldiers in full battle dress and workers carrying banners, many of the latter accompanied by their families, were demonstrating out­side the Mariinsky and Taurida palaces, headquarters of the Provisional Government and the Soviet respectively, demanding the transfer of power to the Soviet. According to these accounts, large groups of rebelling work­ers and soldiers had gone out of their way to parade past Bolshevik head­quarters in the Kshesinskaia mansion, a sign of Bolshevik involvement in preparation of the uprising and of the authority of the party among the Petrograd masses.

Insurgents in motorcars commandeered on the streets and in military trucks bristling with machine guns and decorated with red banners had been observed weaving about the city all evening unhindered. There were numerous reports of random rifle and machine gun fire in widely scattered areas; the extent of casualties was as yet unknown. At rail stations long lines of alarmed, well-dressed Petrograders queued up for tickets and prepared to leave the city. With the consent of the guards on duty, insurgent forces had taken control of the psychologically and strategically important Peter and Paul Fortress. According to last-minute dispatches, a group of rebel soldiers had made an unsuccessful attempt to capture War Minister Kerensky. In addition, the left appeared to have secured a major victory in the Workers' Section of the Petrograd Soviet, which on the previous evening had broken with the leadership of the central Soviet organs by endorsing the idea of transferring power to the soviets and forming a commission to help give the mass movement a peaceful and organized character.²

At the start of the trouble the government and the Soviet had appealed to soldiers and workers not to go into the streets; after it was clear that this effort had failed, the commander of the Petrograd Military District, Gen­eral Petr Polovtsev, a youthful but tough and already much decorated cavalry officer, had urgently called on units of the garrison to restore order in the streets. However, troops not participating in the uprising were ignor­ing his directives. Late in the evening Polovtsev had published a ban on further demonstrations of any kind. Meanwhile, both the cabinet and the Ail-Russian Executive Committees had been meeting in emergency session on and off throughout the night in connection with the expanding crisis.

In these early reports there was little consensus about what had sparked the uprising. One of the day's featured stories was that several Kadets had resigned from the cabinet because of differences with socialist ministers over government policy toward the Ukraine.³ Some observers took it for granted that the developing insurrection was directly related to the apparent breakup of the coalition. Thus a correspondent for the Kadet newspaper RecV suggested that the latter development had provided the opportunity for soldiers in a few military regiments and workers in some factories to demonstrate their preference for the transfer of "all power to the soviets.'⁴ Other observers attributed the disruptions to dissatisfaction among garrison troops with brutal measures adopted by military authorities to deal with front-line units that refused to advance against the enemy.⁵

Despite differences as to the precise issue that had triggered the move­ment to overthrow the government, virtually all commentators seemed agreed that the Bolsheviks, more than any other political group, were to blame for the trouble. A writer for Izvestiia, the newspaper of the Central Executive Committee and the Petrograd Soviet, concluded that a part of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison had come into the streets with arms in hand under the influence of "totally irresponsible Bolshevik agitation." In his view, the Bolsheviks were attempting to make use of genuine dissatisfac­tion and unrest among the proletarian and soldier masses for their own purposes.⁶ An editorial in Birzhevye vedomosti, a nonparty liberal daily, put the matter more directly. "What is this?" queried the writer rhetorically. "The realization of the unfulfilled Bolshevik lust of June 10? An armed uprising against the Provisional Government and the majority of the or­ganized democracy?"⁷ Years later Bonch-Bruevich recalled that during the trip back to Petrograd Lenin was alarmed most of all by the fury toward the Bolsheviks that was sharply reflected in the July 4 papers.⁸

The third warning bell, announcing the train's impending departure, in­terrupted Lenin's thoughts. Gulping his coffee and grabbing up the papers, he bounded after his associates, who were hurrying back to their compart­ment. Once again settled in his seat, Lenin fell silent, absorbing the rest of the day's important news.

On this summer morning the papers reported more than the usual upset over the increasingly critical shortages of food and fuel. On July 2 the minister of food supply, Peshekhonov, had summoned representatives of the Central Petrograd Food Supply Board so that they could be apprised of the growing emergency. The report of a board staff member spelled out the dimensions of the existing food supply breakdown in the Petrograd area. It revealed that even with a reduction in rations, grain reserves would barely last until September. The Food Supply Board had recently pur­chased 100,000 poods (a pood equals thirty-six pounds) of rice in Vladivostok, but deliveries to Petrograd were delayed by shipping difficulties. Milk de­liveries had fallen sharply, largely because of currency problems with Fin­land, Petrograd's main source of dairy products. Supplies of feed grain and hay reaching Petrograd were a scant third of the necessary minimum. De­liveries of eggs and vegetables were also sharply reduced, in part because

authorities in several provinces were not permitting outbound shipments.⁹

There was news that the Committee on Fuel Supply had dispatched an emergency report to the mayor of Petrograd characterizing the situation with regard to wood supplies as catastrophic. The report placed the blame for this shortage on disruptions on rail lines, the overload of the Petrograd rail head, and difficulties with river transport caused by labor problems and by bad weather. It implied that unless immediate measures to eliminate supply and distribution problems for wood were undertaken, increasing numbers of plants and factories would be forced to shut down for lack of fuel.¹⁰ A related report indicated that the growing fuel emergency had im­pelled officials of the Moscow Stock Exchange to forward an urgent memorandum to the Ministry of Trade and Industry in Petrograd. The stock exchange officials warned that the shutdown of many factories in the course of the summer because of lack of fuel and raw materials was already certain. These officials strongly supported factory owners who insisted on their financial inability to keep on the payroll the many thousands of em­ployees who would soon be forced out of work. In addition, they predicted that massive labor unrest in major industrial areas was inevitable unless the government mobilized unemployed workers for jobs in agriculture and pro­vided adequate relief benefits. The memorandum urged that the govern­ment inform the public of the nature and causes of the developing situation so that laid-off workers would not hold factory owners responsible for their situation.¹¹

The main government committees charged with organizing elections to the Constituent Assembly and preparing a land reform program for its adoption were continuing their deliberations. The previous day the Elec­tions Committee had spent many hours debating how members of the armed forces would be represented in the assembly. Meanwhile, the Land Reform Committee heard reports from representatives of local land commit­tees on developments in the provinces. The delegate from Penza Province reported that local peasants were putting the principle of socialization of the land into practice spontaneously by seizing and dividing up land according to a labor norm. Efforts by authorities to protect private property were useless, he maintained. No official would dare take action against the peas­ants for fear of reprisal. A representative from Poltava Province declared that the peasants were demanding socialization of the land and were await­ing the implementation of this action through proper legislative procedures. "It is clear to me," he went on, "that to avoid land seizures it is necessary for the government to prepare laws on the leasing of land, the prohibition of land purchases and sales, and the conservation of forests. Any delay in the publication of such regulations will make peasants apprehensive that land reform will never come." A speaker from the Don Region declared that the population of his area was demanding the expropriation of private landhold- ings without compensation. The Petrograd Soviet's representative on the committee berated the Provisional Government for allowing individual ministries to pursue directly conflicting policies in the countryside. He was particularly critical of the Ministry of the Interior, which, he said, con­demned as criminal and anarchical every action taken by the local land reform committees, set up by the Ministry of Agriculture.¹²

It was reported that a day-long strike of Petrograd lumber workers had been settled. Postal and telegraph workers, however, threatened a walkout beginning at 8:00 p.m. on July 4. Clerks and loaders at the main post office were already refusing to work or to allow postmen to make deliveries as the result of a dispute over fringe benefits and a monthly pay raise. At the same time, employees of hotels and rooming houses had joined a citywide wait­ers' strike. Like the waiters, they were calling for an end to hourly wages and demanding instead compensation based on a percentage of revenue in addition to their regular base salary. In the face of the walkout some res­taurant owners were inviting their customers into the kitchen to serve themselves.¹³

The major news item from abroad was that in Berlin, Bethmann-Holweg had resigned as chancellor and had been replaced by George Michaelis.¹⁴ Because of the former chancellor's apparent readiness to entertain the possi­bility of a negotiated compromise peace, German annexationist and military circles had for many months been applying pressure on Bethmann-Holweg to give up his post; his ultimate departure and the appointment of Michaelis, a nonentity selected by General Ludendorff, were striking indi­cations of the military high command's decisive hold over German politics.

From Dvinsk came a detailed account of a visit to the northern front on July 1 and 2 by Minister of Labor Skobelev and Vladimir Lebedev, acting naval minister.¹⁵ The two were hastily dispatched to the front in the wake of reports that sizable numbers of Fifth Army troops were refusing to obey their commanders' orders and remained adamantly opposed to engaging the enemy. This was the period between the start of the long-awaited and loudly trumpeted Kerensky offensive, launched on June 18, and the deci­sive German counterattack, begun on July 6. The main thrust of the initial Russian attack had taken place on the southwestern front. At first it had been modestly successful. (When word of the Russian advance reached Pet­rograd, the nationalist press was jubilant.) Yet within days the demoralized condition of the army at the front became evident, as units that had been persuaded to move into the attack at its start now refused to fight further. By July 4 even the inflated official military dispatches could not hide the fact that the initial breakthrough had bogged down and that Russian forces, under attack everywhere, were suffering heavy losses.

On the northern front, the advance was not due to begin until July 8. A few miles from the front lines, as bands blared, soldiers lined up smartly for review and roared their approval as Skobelev trooped the line. Many of these soldiers had seen action and been wounded in earlier campaigns.

Since the February revolution they had been reading Pravda, Soldatskaia pravda, Okopnaia pravda,¹⁶ and the countless other revolutionary antiwar publications with which the Bolsheviks had inundated the battle zones; by now they were preoccupied with thoughts of peace and land and a more equitable political and social order. The objectives of the war were incom­prehensible to most of the soldiers, and they were angered by the knowl­edge that while the Soviet was trying to arrange a just peace, the govern­ment was preparing to launch a new offensive. As a result, the soldiers' antagonism toward their officers mounted sharply. Some units were even becoming distrustful of their own elected committees, which, dominated by Mensheviks and SRs, by and large supported the government's military policies. Nevertheless, while their generals beamed encouragement, the ranks cheered Skobelev. He implored them to give their all for a free Rus­sia, and they responded: "Right you are! We are ready to die for liberty! We will do our duty to the end!" The soldiers waved banners bearing the slogans "To the Attack!" and "Down with Cowards!" A group hoisted Lebedev and Skobelev to their shoulders and conveyed them to their motorcar. Yet barely a week later, when the order to attack was given, the same soldiers would throw down their weapons and stumble pell-mell from the battlefield.

The train carrying Lenin and his companions began slowing down. At the northernmost outskirts of Petrograd it passed the lush gardens of the Forestry Institute and crossed Sampsonevsky Prospect, which ran south­ward through the Vyborg District, Petrograd's large industrial ghetto. The crowded, soot-blackened factories, grimy, vermin-infested, multilevel bar­racks, and rundown workers' shanties that the train was now passing had provided fertile ground for the spread of revolutionary ideas during the first great spurt of Russian industrial development in the last decades of the tsarist regime. Embittered students from the Forestry Institute had joined their fellows at St. Petersburg University in the outburst of student unrest that had shaken the Russian government at the end of the 1890s, and they were to be found alongside industrial workers manning the barricades in 1905, July 1914, and February 1917. In October 1905 police had directed a hail of bullets at a crowd of workers demonstrating near the southern end of Sampsonevsky Prospect, at the corner of Botkinskaia Street. Just a short distance away, separated by narrow, muddy, refuse-ridden alleys, were three of Petrograd's larger factories—the Erikson, Novyi Lessner, and Russkii Reno plants. Major political strikes had taken place at the Erikson telephone and electrical factory in 1905, 1912, 1914, and 1916. In 1913 the Novyi Lessner machine factory had been the scene of one of the longest and most famous strikes in Russian labor history, lasting 102 days. A pitched battle between Reno auto factory workers and soldiers and the police in

October 1916 was one of the first signs of the impending storm that culmi­nated a few months later in the fall of the tsar. Now, as Lenin's train moved sluggishly past and drew to a noisy stop at the Finland Station, all three factories were again shut down. Workers from the Reno, Erikson, and Novyi Lessner plants had been among the first to tak^ to the streets the day before.

As Lenin strode from the train, the scene at the Finland Station was very different from the one which had greeted him in April. Then, returning from exile, he had been met by crowds of workers and soldiers. There had been banners and flowers, a band, and an honor guard of sailors. Even the leadership of the Soviet had made its appearance; Nikolai Chkheidze, chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, had been among those welcoming Lenin in what formerly had been the imperial waiting room. On that occasion Lenin had driven to Bolshevik headquarters perched atop an armored car, accompanied by an imposing procession of party functionaries, workers, and soldiers. Now, as Bonch-Bruevich hastened off in search of a taxi, there were no bands or welcoming speeches. An acrid odor of steam, stale food, and sweat permeated the humid summer air. Porters hustled about their tasks. From a booth draped in bunting, an elderly matron with pince-nez gesticulated wildly as she exhorted passersby: "Support our revolutionary soldiers! Sign your liberty loan pledges here!" On the square outside, throngs of workers and soldiers milled about, preparing to renew their de­mands for immediate peace and the transfer of power to the soviets.

During the more than two hundred years since its founding by Peter the Great, the Russian imperial capital, like prerevolutionary Paris, had become divided into sharply defined socioeconomic districts. Generally speaking, the central sections of the city, encompassing the southern parts of Vasi- lievsky Island and the "Petersburg side" on the right bank of the Neva, and much of the left bank extending from the river to the Obvodny Canal, were the domain of the upper and middle classes, while most factory work­ers lived and worked in the outer industrial districts. The central sections boasted the luxurious rococo and neoclassical palaces of the royal family and high aristocracy, the massive edifices that served as headquarters for imperial officialdom, the imposing Isaac and Kazan cathedrals, and the gran­ite river and canal embankments which together made Petrograd one of Europe's most beautiful capitals. Here, too, were centers of Russian culture such as the Royal Mariinsky Theater, home of the opera and the famed imperial ballet; the Royal Alexandrinsky Theater, where the best in Euro­pean drama and comedy alternated with the classics of Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy; and the Petersburg Conservatory, on whose stage the most accomplished musicians of the time performed. Also located in this central area on the left bank of the Neva were the capital's banks, offices, and

Street scene in Petrograd, 1917.

better residential neighborhoods, which changed in character as one went further from the Admiralty—the hub of the city—from aristocratic palaces through professional apartment houses to the tenements of the lower middle class. Originating at the Admiralty and dominated by its needle spire was Nevsky Prospect, Petrograd's broadest and finest avenue, with the city's most fashionable shops, while across the Neva, to the north, the embank­ment at the eastern end of Vasilievsky Island was lined by the distinctive buildings of St. Petersburg University, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Fine Arts, three symbols of Russian intellectual and artistic achievement, and by the columned facade of the Stock Exchange.

The major factories of Petrograd were located in the districts surrounding this central area—in the Narva, Moscow, and Alexander Nevsky districts on the left bank of the Neva, and in the more remote areas of Vasilievsky Island and the Okhta and Vyborg districts on its right bank.

On the Petersburg side, surrounded by a formal garden and protected by a high, ornate, wrought-iron fence, was the spacious and elegant Kshesin- skaia mansion, the former residence of Mathilde Kshesinskaia, prima bal­lerina of the Mariinsky Ballet and reputed to have been the mistress of Tsar Nicholas II. Kshesinskaia had fled the mansion during the February days, after which it had been taken over by soldiers of an armored car division quartered nearby. In early March, the Bolsheviks, then operating out of two cramped rooms in the attic of the Central Labor Exchange, requested and received permission from the soldiers to make the building their headquarters.¹⁷ In short order, the Central Committee, the Petersburg

Committee, and the Bolshevik Military Organization were comfortably es­tablished in different parts of the mansion.

From the Bolsheviks' point of view, the Kshesinskaia mansion was ideally situated. A stone's throw from the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Cirque Moderne, a cavernous concert and assembly hall now the scene of frequent political rallies, it was also close to many military barracks as well as to the teeming factories in the Vyborg District. The move to the Kshesinskaia mansion coincided with the party's spurt in membership and popularity following the February revolution. The new headquarters, over which flew the red standard of the Central Committee, soon became a magnet for dis­gruntled workers, soldiers, and sailors. The mansion's spacious basement housed the Military Organization's Club Pravda, while the grounds out­side the building became the scene of round-the-clock rallies. Each day from early morning until late at night, Sergei Bagdatiev,¹⁸ or Moisei Volodarsky,¹⁹ or another of the party's more popular agitators could be seen atop a rostrum overlooking the street haranguing crowds of passersby. Approximately once a week, elected representatives of party committees in the various districts of the capital assembled at the Kshesinskaia mansion for business meetings. It was to a stunned late-night gathering of some three hundred party leaders in the ornate, white-columned drawing room that Lenin had first personally outlined his new program upon his return to Petrograd on the night of April 3. Several weeks later the mansion was the meeting-place for the Bolsheviks' April Conference.

Not everyone was quite as pleased by this arrangement as were the Bol­sheviks. By late spring, Kshesinskaia was determined to get her house back, evidently more for the purpose of expelling the Bolsheviks than out of any desire to return to it herself. In late April and May she badgered both the government and the Petrograd Soviet about evicting the Bolsheviks, and ultimately she took the matter to court. Subsequently, a justice of the peace had given the party twenty days to vacate the mansion,²⁰ but the Bol­sheviks on various pretexts had delayed the move. It was to this beehive of radicalism that many of the demonstrating soldiers and workers came on the evening of July 3. While thousands of marchers chanting "All Power to the Soviets!" waited impatiently for instructions, party leaders from the Military Organization and the Petersburg Committee, gathered in the mansion's master bedroom, debated what action to take and ultimately agreed to support openly and lead the movement on the streets.

Lenin hastened to the Kshesinskaia mansion around midday on July 4. He had hardly been briefed on the latest events when some ten thousand Bolshevik-led sailors from Kronstadt, most of them armed and battle- hungry, surrounded the building, demanding his appearance. At first Lenin declined, asserting that his refusal to appear would express his opposition to the demonstration. But at the insistence of Kronstadt Bolshevik leaders, he ultimately acquiesced. As he stepped out on the second-floor balcony to address the sailors, he grumbled to some Military Organization officials, "You should be thrashed for this!"²¹

Lenin's ambivalent comments on this occasion reflected his dilemma. He voiced a few words of greeting, expressed certainty that the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" would triumph in the end, and concluded by appeal­ing to the sailors for self-restraint, determination, and vigilance, years later one of Lenin's listeners recalled that for many of the sailors, Lenin's em­phasis on the necessity of a peaceful demonstration was unexpected. Anarchists among them and some Bolsheviks as well were unable to see how a column of armed men, eager for battle, could restrict itself to an armed demonstration.²²

Lenin now found himself in an untenable situation. The previous day's developments had reconfirmed that among workers and soldiers in the capi­tal, the Provisional Government had little support. The Soviet leadership, however, was still determined not to yield to mass pressure. Majority socialists remained convinced that neither the provincial population nor the army at the front would support a transfer of power to the soviets, and that in any case it was necessary for "all the vital forces of the country" to work together in the interest of the war effort and the survival of the revolution. They feared that by breaking with the liberals and the business and indus­trial circles who supported them they would run the risk of weakening the war effort and enhancing the likelihood of a successful counterrevolution.

Because of the Soviet's refusal to take power, the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" was, at least for the time being, tactically bankrupt from the Bolsheviks' point of view. The choice now facing the party was whether to attempt to seize power by force or to mount an effort to end the demonstra­tions. In weighing these alternatives Lenin considered the potential reaction of the provinces and the front to be of decisive importance. In this regard the situation was no doubt fluid and unclear, but the immediate indications were not very promising. Bolshevik support continued to be weak among the peasantry, while many soldiers were still loyal to the Soviet leadership.

On the afternoon of July 4 the extent of support for direct revolutionary action in the capital itself was by no means certain. The Kronstadt sailors were present in force and spoiling for a fight—en route from the Kshesin- skaia mansion to the Taurida Palace they engaged in a confused gun battle with snipers firing from upper-story windows and rooftops on Nevsky Prospect, and broke into scores of houses and apartments, terrorizing the occupants. But some of the troops who had participated in the demonstra­tions the previous evening had already wearied of the event, while other garrison units still refused to take sides. Moreover, the possibility of the Bolsheviks seizing power independently of and in opposition to the Soviet had never been presented to the workers and soldiers; indeed, while there is

July 4, 1917 in Petrograd. Demonstrators on Nevsky Prospect scatter in confusion after being fired upon.

evidence that this contingency had been considered by a few top party offi­cials before July (specifically by Lenin and by leaders of the Bolshevik Mili­tary Organization),²³ it had not been discussed within the party leadership generally. So the potential reaction to a call to battle even of many Bol­shevik leaders, not to speak of their followers, was impossible to gauge.

All this suggested the advisability of a quick retreat. Yet that alternative also had drawbacks. The party was already compromised. The Bolsheviks' program and agitational work had obviously helped inspire the street movement. Banners carried by the demonstrators bore Bolshevik slogans. Pressured by its garrison converts, the Bolshevik Military Organization, without authorization from the Central Committee, had helped organize the movement in the first place. To be sure, on the afternoon of July 3 the Central Committee had made genuine attempts to hold back the movement. However, only a few hours later, with the demonstration already in prog­ress, the leadership of the Military Organization and the Petersburg Com­mittee, followed belatedly by the Central Committee, had reversed the party's earlier stand and publicly endorsed the demonstrations. Subse­quently the Military Organization took full control of the movement and began mobilizing the most formidable and broadest possible military sup­port. The organization had, among other things, summoned reinforcements from the front, dispatched armored cars to seize key posts and bridges, and sent a company of soldiers to occupy the Peter and Paul Fortress.²⁴

There is no published record of the deliberations of the Bolshevik leader­ship on July 4; given the circumstances, it is doubtful that any record was kept. Mikhail Kalinin, a ranking Bolshevik participant, later recalled that at this point Lenin's mind was open on the question of whether the movement in the streets was the beginning of the seizure of power; Lenin did not exclude the possibility of throwing regiments into battle in favorable cir­cumstances or, alternatively, of ultimately retreating with as few losses as possible.²⁵ As he pondered how the party might extricate itself from its exposed position, Lenin almost certainly received conflicting advice. Right Bolsheviks on the Central Committee, in view of their tactical stance on the development of the revolution and their opposition to measures risking a decisive rupture with the moderate socialists, must have been strongly op­posed to seizing power in defiance of the All-Russian Executive Committees.²⁶

Other authoritative figures who probably appealed for caution on this occasion were Trotsky and Grigorii Zinoviev. Among associates in the party, the curly-haired, pudgy Zinoviev, the son of a Jewish dairyman, was known primarily for his talents as a writer and party organizer. During the decade before the revolution, Zinoviev was probably Lenin's closest assis­tant and political confidant. Zinoviev returned to Russia with Lenin in April 1917 and subsequently became an editor of Pravda and a prominent member of the Bolshevik fraction in the Petrograd Soviet. Thirty-four years old in 1917, Zinoviev was often given to alternate fits of elation and depres­sion. An internationalist on the war issue and receptive in theory to the possibility of an early socialist revolution in Russia, in political behavior Zinoviev nonetheless tended to be vastly more cautious than Lenin. In early June, for example, he firmly opposed the organization of a mass demonstra­tion on the grounds that such action would herald a new stage in the revolu­tion for which the Bolsheviks were unprepared. At the afternoon Central Committee meeting on July 3, both Zinoviev and Trotsky supported the demands of Kamenev and others that the party mobilize its forces to restrain the masses. At a subsequent meeting of party officials late that night, after assuring themselves that there was nothing the Bolsheviks could do to pre­vent a continuation of the protest the next day, Zinoviev and Trotsky took the side of those who argued that the party should endorse and control the movement. At the same time, they were adamant in their insistence that the demonstrations be peaceful.²⁷

Some of the Petersburg Committee members who had favored applying pressure on the All-Russian Executive Committees in the past were proba­bly cool to the idea of escalating the action on July 4. In June the volatile Volodarsky, for one, had supported the organization of mass demonstrations as a means of disrupting the war effort, of retaining the loyalty of the in­creasingly impatient working-class population, and, if possible, of forcing the majority socialists to form an all-socialist government. In Volodarsky's view, the best interests of the revolution demanded the creation of a soviet government in which a broad coalition of left socialist groups would work together. As an active member of the Petrograd Soviet with close ties to both workers and soldiers, however, Volodarsky was keenly aware of the loyalty of those groups to the Soviet; he would not have advocated over­throwing the Provisional Government against the will of the Soviet leader­ship.

Among the Petrograd Bolsheviks there were also militants who on the afternoon of July 4 probably argued for decisive military action. One of the most influential of these ultraradical local leaders was the Latvian Martin Latsis, representative of the powerful Vyborg District Bolshevik organiza­tion. In the course of preparations for the abortive June 10 demonstration Latsis had taken steps to insure that the marchers would be fully armed; along with the Central Committee's equally aggressive Ivar Smilga, a Lithuanian, Latsis had urged that the party be ready to "seize railroad sta­tions, arsenals, banks, the post office, and telegraph."²⁸ During the period of rising unrest on the eve of the July days, he was critical of the party for playing the role of "fireman" among the masses, and on the night of July 3, after the uprising had begun he objected to the Central Committee's deter­mination to avoid decisive confrontation with the government.

Top Military Organization figures, among them Nikolai Podvoisky and Vladimir Nevsky, both long-time Bolsheviks, were similarly inclined. A veteran of street combat against government authorities in 1905, Podvoisky, thirty-seven years old in 1917, had the reputation of an ultraradical. In the days immediately after the overthrow of the tsar, Podvoisky reportedly was the first to declare that "the revolution is not over; it is just beginning." Nevsky, from Rostov-on-the-Don, had at one time been a brilliant student in the Natural Sciences Faculty at Moscow University (in the 1920s he would distinguish himself as an historian of the Russian revolutionary movement). Along with Podvoisky, he had been active in the earliest Bol­shevik fighting squads and military organizations. In memoirs relating to his activity in 1917, Nevsky invariably boasted about the independence and radicalism of the Military Organization leadership at this time and about its active involvement in the organization of the July uprising. According to him, on July 4 Military Organization leaders waited for a signal from the Central Committee "to carry the affair to its conclusion."²⁹

Several hours after Lenin's return to Petrograd, word reached the Kshesinskaia mansion of two new factors that were ultimately of decisive importance. First, it was learned that the helplessness of the government, the unwillingness of garrison units to come to the rescue of the government or the Soviet, the threat posed by the arrival of the Kronstadt sailors at the Taurida Palace, and expanding anarchy and bloodshed in the streets had impelled the All-Russian Executive Committees to call for troops from the front to reestablish order. In response to this appeal Menshevik and SR- controlled army committees on the northern front were already forming composite detachments for immediate dispatch to the capital. Second, word was leaked to the Bolsheviks that high-level government officials were at­tempting to mobilize garrison troops against the Bolsheviks by accusing Lenin of having organized the July uprising at the behest of enemy Ger­many.

The charge that Lenin was a German agent was not new. The rightist press had been leveling such accusations since his return to Russia through Germany. (Lenin's known opposition to the war effort made him particu­larly vulnerable to this charge.) Apparently the Provisional Government had begun investigating the possibility of Bolshevik collusion with the enemy in late April after a German agent, one Lieutenant Ermolenko, had turned himself in to the Russian General Staff and had alleged in the course of interrogation that Lenin was one of many German agents then operating in Russia. This occurred about the time of the April crisis, just when the Bolsheviks were becoming a serious nuisance to the Provisional Govern­ment. Members of the cabinet were inclined, quite likely, to believe these allegations; in any case, the prospect of discrediting the Bolsheviks in the eyes of the masses had great appeal. And so three cabinet members —Kerensky, Nekrasov, and Tereshchenko—were assigned to facilitate the inquiry. Several intelligence agencies in Petrograd and at the front became involved; indeed a special counterespionage bureau attached to the Petro­grad Military District seems to have devoted most of its attention to building a case against the Bolsheviks. Among other things, this agency monitored the party's communications and kept its leaders under surveillance, all with the enthusiastic support of the minister of justice, Pavel Pereverzev. Only the counterespionage bureau, he is reported to have declared, could save Russia.³⁰

It is now known that during World War I the Germans expended a sub­stantial sum for the purpose of disrupting Russian internal affairs and that a portion of this money was funneled to the Bolsheviks.³¹ Relevant sources suggest, however, that most Bolshevik leaders, not to speak of the party's rank and file, were unaware of these subventions. While Lenin seems to have known of the German money there is no evidence that his policies or those of the party were in any way influenced by it.³² Ultimately, this aid did not significantly affect the outcome of the revolution. As for the July events, the charge that the uprising was instigated by Lenin in cooperation with the Germans was obviously groundless; from mid-June on, as we have seen, Lenin had worked with energy to prevent an insurrection from break­ing out.

At the time of the July days the official investigation of Lenin's German connections, such as they were, was incomplete. But with the government apparently on the verge of being overthrown, officials of the counterespio­nage bureau decided to act with all deliberate speed. They concocted a plan to use the bits and pieces of incriminating evidence already collected to convince representatives of previously neutral garrison units not only that the Bolsheviks were recipients of German funds, but also that the street demonstrations were being directed by the Germans. If the plan worked, they reasoned, garrison units would provide the troops necessary to defend the government, restore order, and arrest the Bolsheviks. The scheme was presented to Pereverzev, and he gave it his approval. Defending his deci­sion several days later, the minister of justice explained: "I felt that releas­ing this information would generate a mood in the garrison that would make continued neutrality impossible. I had a choice between a proposed definite elucidation of the whole of this grand crime's roots and threads by some unspecified date or the immediate putting down of a rebellion that threatened the overturn the government."³³

Thus, late on July 4 the counterespionage bureau invited representatives of several garrison regiments to General Staff headquarters, where they were briefed on the case against Lenin. All witnesses agreed that these rep­resentatives were genuinely shocked by the disclosures; for their part, officials of the bureau were so encouraged by the apparent potency of their case that they decided to make portions of the evidence available to the press. Because officials of the counterespionage bureau were concerned that accusations against Lenin coming directly from a government agency would be suspect, two "outraged citizens"—Grigorii Aleksinsky, a former Bol­shevik representative in the Duma, and V. Pankratov, an SR—were hastily recruited to prepare a statement on the charges for immediate circulation to newspapers.³⁴

It should be emphasized that the actions of the counterespionage bureau, the minister of justice, and later Aleksinsky and Pankratov were taken without the sanction of the full cabinet. As it turned out, at the time of the July uprising ministers Nekrasov, Tereshchenko, and Lvov felt strongly that while the Bolsheviks were indeed receiving money from the Germans, the evidence against Lenin then in the hands of the government was incon­clusive, and that premature disclosure would prevent any possibility of ever substantiating it.³⁵ During the evening of July 4 Lvov had personally ap­pealed to all newspapers to withhold publication of the charges against Lenin.³⁶ Of course, the information already passed to regimental represen­tatives could not be prevented from spreading throughout the garrison. And the impact of the disseminated charges, together with rumors of massive troop movements from the front, was decisive. At 1:00 a.m., July 5, previ­ously neutral regiments began marching to the Taurida Palace, where the Ail-Russian Executive Committees were in session, to proclaim their loy­alty to the Soviet and the government. The immediate crisis having passed, the Executive Committees quickly adopted a resolution pledging support to what remained of the Provisional Government. The resolution also called for the convocation in two weeks of a meeting with representatives of pro­vincial soviets for the purpose of reaching a final decision regarding the composition of a future cabinet and the question of establishing a soviet government.³⁷

These developments late on July 4—that is, the dispatch of loyal troops from the front and the abrupt shift in the mood of a number of garrison regiments—were, of course, fully as damaging for the Bolshevik cause as they were providential for the Provisional Government. By late evening, the effect of both factors on the mood of previously passive garrison units was already becoming apparent. In these circumstances there wasn't time even to gauge the mood of the provinces. At two or three o'clock in the morning, July 5, a gathering of Central Committee members took stock of the developing situation and resolved to call on workers and soldiers to terminate the street demonstrations.

The party's retreat was made public in an unobtrusive back-page an­nouncement in Pravda on July 5. "It has been decided to end the demon­strations," the announcement explained, "because the goal of presenting the slogans of the leading elements of the working class and the army has been achieved." This explanation was transparently false; the goal of the radical elements in the Petrograd garrison and of the Bolshevik extremists who had triggered the July uprising in the first place had been the overthrow of the Provisional Government. In belatedly supporting the movement, most party leaders probably held out the hope that the pressure of the streets would be enough to force the All-Russian Executive Committees to take power into their own hands. As it turned out, neither the extremists' aims nor the more limited hopes of party moderates were realized. The impatient workers, soldiers, and sailors of Petrograd who until now had flocked be­hind the Bolsheviks emerged from the July experience compromised and, temporarily at least, demoralized. At the same time the resolve of the gov­ernment, of all moderate and conservative political groups, and of the well- to-do classes generally, to restore order at whatever cost and to have done with extremists once and for all was greatly intensified. Whether this defeat for the left would be decisive remained to be seen. In the meantime, iso­lated and exposed, the Bolsheviks were forced to turn to the unenviable task of somehow explaining their role in the unsuccessful insurrection, defend­ing themselves against treason charges, and generally protecting themselves from the inevitable onslaught of reaction.

THE BOLSHEVIKS UNDER FIRE

_T

he attack on the Bolshevik Party in the wake of the July days was launched by Zhivoe slovo, a reactionary, scandalmongering boulevard newspaper aptly characterized by Lenin as a "yellow, base, dirty little rag."¹ Zhivoe slovo stood for law, order, and strong rule at home, and unre­lenting war to total victory against the Central Powers. It regarded as archenemies socialists generally and the extremist Bolsheviks in particular. One can easily imagine with what glee Zhivoe slovo's editors received the Aleksinsky-Pankratov charges on the evening of July 4. Interpreting subse­quent efforts by Prince Lvov and others to delay their publication as proof that radicals in the highest levels of government were part of the nefarious plot to sell out Russia to the foreign foe, they published the sensational statement in full on the morning of July 5, prefaced by a front-page banner headline: "Lenin, Ganetsky, and Kozlovsky German Spies!" (lakov Ganetsky and Mechislav Kozlovsky were Bolsheviks through whom Ger­man money had allegedly been funneled to the party.)

The Bolsheviks promptly protested. A short note in Pravda on July 5, written even before Zhivoe slovo reached the streets, warned readers that hostile circles might be planning a campaign to slander the Bolshevik lead­ership. Immediately after the appearance of the Aleksinsky-Pankratov statement, Lenin dashed off several scathing newspaper essays vehemently denying the charges against him and attempting to rebut them.² Simulta­neously, other top Bolshevik leaders implored Soviet officials to protect them from being crucified by the press. In response, the Central Executive Committee issued an appeal urging the public to refrain from commenting on the accusations against the Bolsheviks until a special committee of in­quiry to be set up by the Soviet had had time to conduct a thorough investigation.³ Once Zhivoe slovo had opened the floodgates, however, neither the protests of the Bolsheviks nor the entreaties of Soviet leaders

Cartoon from Petrogradskaia gazeta, July 7, 1917, labeled "A High Post for the Leaders of the Rebellion." The caption reads: "Lenin wants a high post? . . . Well? A position is ready for him!!!" (An exact copy, redrawn for this volume.)

could prevent the eruption of an ugly scandal concerning the Bolsheviks' alleged German ties. By midday on July 5 Petrograd buzzed with rumors that "Lenin is a provocateur." The statement by Aleksinsky and Pankratov was immediately reproduced as a leaflet and within hours copies were being handed out by the hundreds on street corners. By the next day many Petrograd newspapers were treating the charges as established fact and openly competing with one another to produce sensational accounts of Bol­shevik treachery.

Newspaper headlines on July 6 and 7 convey the ferocity of this cam­paign. "A Second and Great Azevshchina," proclaimed a headline in the rightist Malenkaia gazeta, its editor recalling the scandal that had rocked the Russian revolutionary movement in 1908 when it was revealed that the Socialist Revolutionary Party leader Evno Azev was working for the police. The editor of a popular nonparty daily, Petrogradskii listok, did not dig as far back for his headline. "Horrors!" he captioned his story in reference to July 4, when both the government and the Soviet were at the mercy of rioting workers and soldiers. "Petrograd was seized by the Germans."

Accusations against the Bolsheviks made on July 9 by the venerable Georgii Plekhanov, father of the Russian social democratic movement and editor of the newspaper Edinstvo, were no less explicit.⁴ In response to a government telegram published the previous day, which declared, "It has been definitely established that German agents took part in organizing the July disturbances," Plekhanov observed: "If the government is convinced of this, the riots cannot be treated as if they were merely the regrettable result of tactical confusion. . . . Apparently, the disruptions . . . were an in­tegral part of a plan formulated by the foreign enemy to destroy Russia. Therefore stamping them out must be a constituent part of any plan for Russia's national defense." Concluded Plekhanov: "The revolution must crush everything in its way immediately, decisively, and mercilessly."

One of the most widely circulated post-July days indictments of the Bol­sheviks was written by the famous old populist Vladimir Burtsev. Notori­ous years earlier for his relentless pursuit of police spies in revolutionary organizations, Burtsev was, in 1917, an ultranationalist close in political outlook to Plekhanov. On July 6, in an open letter subsequently printed in many Petrograd papers, he joined the onslaught against the Bolsheviks. As to whether or not Lenin was a German agent, Burtsev commented: "Among the Bolsheviks, provocateurs and German agents have played and continue to play a great role. In regard to the Bolshevik leaders about whom we are now asked, we can say: No, they are not provocateurs. . . . [But] thanks to them—to Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, etc.— during those damna­ble days, July 3, 4, and 5, William II achieved what he had previously only dreamed about. ... In those days Lenin and his comrades cost us no less than a major plague or cholera epidemic."⁵

Rech\ the organ of the Kadets, was relatively cautious in its treatment of the Aleksinsky-Pankratov accusations. While affirming the principle that the Bolsheviks ought not to be judged guilty until the charges against them had been proven, writers for Rech\ in their insistence on strong measures against the left, tacitly accepted the validity of the charges.⁶ A front-page account of the scandal in the right Menshevik Den' on July 6 was similarly circumspect.

It bears recording that, unlike Edinstvo and Den\ several moderate socialist papers in Petrograd (Izvestiia, Golos soldata, and Volia naroda, for instance) heeded the admonitions of the Central Executive Committee to refrain from commenting, directly or indirectly, on the merits of the treason charges against Lenin and his followers. This provided the party scant relief, however. For with the lone exception of Maxim Gorky's Novaia zhizn\ the entire socialist press rejected Bolshevik claims that the July movement had been spontaneous and called for decisive measures to deal with extremism as insistently as did liberal and rightist papers.

Typical of anti-Bolshevik editorials appearing in moderate socialist papers in the aftermath of the July days was one in Izvestiia, the main organ of the Central Executive Committee, on July 6:

According to Pravda, the goals of the July 3-4 demonstrations have been achieved. [In reality] what did the demonstrations and the Bolsheviks (the official leaders of the demonstrations) accomplish? They [the demonstrations] caused the deaths of four hundred workers, soldiers, sailors, women, and children. . . . They resulted in the wrecking and looting of private apartments [and] stores. . . . They brought about a weakening of our forces at the front. . . . They engendered dissension, . . . shattering united revolutionary action, which is the main source of the revolution's strength. . . . During July 3-4 the revolution was dealt a terrible blow. ... If this defeat is not fatal for the entire revolutionary cause, the disorganizing tactics of the Bolsheviks will be least responsible for this.

A similarly hostile editorial, "To the Pillory," appeared in Golos soldata, a military-oriented organ of the Central Executive Committee, on July 6. "Gentlemen fr om Pravda" observed its author. "You could not have been unaware of what your appeals for a 'peaceful demonstration' would lead to. . . . You slandered the government; you lied and cast aspersions on the Mensheviks, SRs, and soviets; you created panic, frightening people with the specter of the still unreal danger of the Black Hundreds. . . . And now, according to the custom of all cowards, you are covering your tracks, hiding the truth from your readers and followers." A day earlier, a writer for the right SR paper Volia naroda had declared emphatically: "The Bol­sheviks are openly acting contrary to the will of the revolutionary democ­racy. The revolutionary democracy [i.e., the socialist parties, soviets, trade unions, cooperatives, etc.] has enough power to force everyone to obey its will. It must do this. ... In these feverish days, any procrastination might prove fatal."

The Provisional Government had contemplated the use of force to sup­press militant leftist groups for the first time after the April crisis. During the late spring and early summer, mounting pressure for such action had been exerted by the military high command and by conservative and liberal political circles thoroughly alarmed by expanding anarchy at home as well as by apparent chaos among soldiers at the front. Prior to the July days, however, the government's capacity to move against the extreme left was limited by its lack of authority among the Petrograd masses and by the reluctance of many deputies in the central Soviet organs to countenance repression so long as any hope remained that such measures could be avoided.⁷

The July uprising strengthened the determination of the government to take whatever action was necessary to prevent similar outbreaks in the fu­ture; at the same time, a number of factors militated against the Soviet's continued opposition to the application of force against the left. For one thing, as we shall see, the July experience triggered an indiscriminate reac­tion against all leftist groups, moderate socialists included, thus putting the Soviet, as well as the Bolsheviks, on the defensive. Of course, the capacity of the Soviet leadership to influence the government's behavior was closely related to the authority that the Soviet enjoyed among the masses. Follow­ing the July uprising, workers, sailors, and soldiers in the capital were con­fused and dispirited. Whom they would follow in the future remained to be seen, but in the short run the Soviet's power base was, at best, uncertain. Meanwhile, troops dispatched from the front to the capital provided the government, at long last, with a sizable military force upon which it could depend.

Further decreasing the likelihood that the Soviet would interfere in the Provisional Government's adoption of repressive measures was the fact that the events of July 3-5 persuaded heretofore wavering Soviet deputies of the need to act quickly and decisively to restore order and, in this connection, to take a firm stand against the Bolsheviks. While reluctantly acknowledg­ing the necessity of repression, most moderate socialists did not give up striving for reform and immediate peace. They insisted that repression be kept to a minimum, and, most important, that "exceptional measures" be taken only against individuals accused of specific crimes, not against "whole groups." In contrast to the liberals, the Mensheviks and SRs were genuinely alarmed by the danger that the reactionary wave following the July days posed for the revolution. But their response to the threat of coun­terrevolution (like their earlier response to attacks from the extreme left) was to rally more closely behind the government and to insist on coalition with the liberal parties.

It is ironic that the Soviet leadership had become most receptive to closer cooperation with the government at a time when the latter was in a sham­bles. It will be recalled that three Kadet ministers withdrew from the cabinet on the night of July 2. They were followed into retirement three days later by Pereverzev, who resigned in the wake of criticism of his unau­thorized release of the Aleksinsky-Pankratov documents. Prince Lvov him­self left the government on July 7 after socialist ministers presented him with a list of "general principles" intended as the basis of a political pro­gram for a new coalition. Modeled after proposals for reform adopted by the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, these principles were simply too rad­ical for Lvov. Unable to accept them, he resigned. The remaining cabinet members now named Kerensky acting prime minister and entrusted him with the formation of a new government.

Simultaneously, most of the measures rejected by Lvov were incorpo­rated into a "Declaration of Principles" released for publication in the cabinet's name on July 8. Among other things, this declaration pledged the government to arrange an Allied conference in August for the purpose of working out the details of a compromise peace proposal, and to take all steps necessary to insure that elections to the Constituent Assembly would be held on September 7. The declaration acknowledged the importance of adopting, "at the earliest possible moment," local government reforms based on the principle of universal, direct, and secret suffrage, and prom­ised the abolition of estates and of civil ranks and orders. Moreover, it pledged the government to the preparation of an overall plan for regulating the national economy and to the immediate passage of meaningful labor legislation. Finally, it committed the government to the preparation, for submission to the Constituent Assembly, of a basic land reform program transferring all land into the hands of the peasantry (to judge by Lvov's statements to the press at the time, this endorsement of revolutionary changes in landholding w as w hat disturbed him most of all). In deference to the liberals, the declaration made no reference to the dissolution of the Duma and the State Council, or to the immediate declaration of a republic—two demands that had been endorsed by the Congress of Soviets and that were included in the original list of principles drawn up by the socialist ministers.⁸

As the price of their participation in a new⁷ coalition, the Kadets now demanded that the government disavow the declaration of July 8. Confident that the bulk of the population shared their view that the July days had discredited the moderate socialists along with the Bolsheviks, and conse­quently that a propitious moment for the reestablishment of order and the preeminence of the government had finally arrived, the Kadets were ada­mant in demanding that in the future socialist ministers maintain complete independence from the Soviet. In internal affairs they insisted that the gov­ernment abjure consideration of any further social reforms (in keeping with this position they demanded that Chernov be replaced as minister of ag­riculture because of his role in facilitating land reform); moreover, they called for an end to pluralism in governmental authority, i.e., to the politi­cal and administrative authority of soviets and committees. On the war issue, the Kadets insisted that the government be guided by the principle of total commitment to the Allies and that it take all steps necessary to reestab­lish traditional military discipline and to build a strong army. Negotiations aimed at somehow squaring these demands with the declaration of July 8 were naturally tortured and acrimonious; while they dragged on, Russia, more than ever, was without effective national leadership.⁹

Meanwhile, the initially successful offensive at the front had been turned into a most terrible rout of the Russian armies by the Germans, who launched a massive, devastating counterattack against the Russian Eleventh Army on the southwestern front. Boris Savinkov, government commissar for the southwestern front, now telegraphed Petrograd:

The German offensive ... is developing into an unprecedented disas­ter. . . . Most units are in a state of rapidly spreading disintegration.

There can be no talk of authority or discipline. . . . Some units are with­drawing from their positions on their own, without even waiting for the enemy to approach. There were cases when orders for immediate rein­forcements were debated in meetings for hours, with the result that these reinforcements were as much as a day late. . . . Long columns of deserters stretch for hundreds of versts [a verst equals six-tenths of a mile] to the rear. . . . Let the entire country know the truth of what is happening here.¹⁰

Even before receipt of this oppressive news, the All-Russian Executive Committees had gathered in joint session on the night of July 7-8 to discuss the latest developments, the most important being the behavior of the Bol­sheviks, the sudden explosion of counterrevolutionary sentiment, and the breakup of the cabinet. This meeting culminated in the passage of a resolu­tion that characterized the July movement as "an adventurous, abortive armed uprising" by "anarcho-Bolshevik elements." While stressing that "ex­ceptional measures" could be taken only against individuals, this resolution explicitly recognized the responsibility of the government to assure the pro­tection of revolutionary freedoms and the maintenance of order. At the same time, it strongly endorsed immediate passage of the reform legislation called for by the Congress of Soviets.¹¹

For most moderate socialists, word of the debacle at the front appeared to reinforce strongly the need for the creation of a representative national gov­ernment powerful enough to halt expanding anarchy. A joint emergency meeting of the All-Russian Executive Committees was hurriedly convened late on the night of July 9-10, soon after the situation at the front became known. Here, bitterness toward the Bolsheviks for subverting the policies of the Soviet majority, as well as support for the creation of a strong revolutionary dictatorship, reached a new peak; a succession of speakers lashed out at the Bolsheviks for, among other things, precipitating an as­sault on the Soviet during the July days, being responsible for the condi­tions that had triggered counterrevolutionary activity, and, perhaps worst of all, contributing mightily to the collapse of the armed forces.

The influential Menshevik Fedor Dan spoke for the entire moderate socialist bloc on this occasion. A physician by profession and, along with Lenin, a veteran of the first major social democratic organization established in St. Petersburg, among Menshevik leaders in 1917 Dan was slightly left of center. After the abortive June 10 demonstration, for example, he had strongly opposed Tsereteli on the question of applying sanctions against the Bolsheviks and their followers, believing that the Bolshevik threat was ex­aggerated and that precipitous action against the extreme left would only undermine further the position of the government and strengthen Lenin's hand. Now, his usually mild face taut with anger, dressed in a shapeless military surgeon's uniform, he proposed that, in view of the prevailing civil and military emergency, the Provisional Government immediately be pro­claimed a "government to save the revolution," and, moreover, that it be vested with comprehensive powers to restore organization and discipline in the army, wage a decisive struggle against any and all manifestations of counterrevolution and anarchy, and promulgate the reform program em­bodied in the cabinet declaration of July 8. The Executive Committees sub­sequently adopted a resolution to this effect by an overwhelming vote.¹² "Let the government crush all anarchical outbursts and all attempts to de­stroy the gains of the revolution with an iron hand," declared a proclama­tion announcing this decision to the Russian public. "Let [the government] carry out all those measures required by the revolution."¹³

It is worth noting that the Menshevik-Internationalists and Left SRs (the extreme left groups within the Menshevik and SR camps), not to speak of the Bolsheviks, did not support the political resolution passed by the All- Russian Executive Committees on July 9, in effect a blank check for a gov­ernment whose makeup and program were at this point completely unclear.

Bearded, frail Iulii Martov, his voice hoarse from endless speech-making, pince-nez drooping slightly on his nose, spoke for the Menshevik- Internationalists. The son of a russified, liberally inclined Jewish intellec­tual, Martov, in his mid-forties in 1917, had been propelled into the rev­olutionary movement by the injustices of Jewish life in tsarist Russia, by the fiercely repressive environment and virulent anti-Semitism he experi­enced in school, and by progressive ideas and "forbidden books" which he first encountered at home. Already a committed social democrat in the early 1890s and revered among his associates for his intellect, personal courage, high principles, and honesty, Martov had broken with Lenin, ear­lier a close friend and collaborator, at the time of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split in 1903. From then on he had been the Mensheviks' most prestigious and widely respected political figure. Following the outbreak of World War I, Martov had led the fight of Menshevik "internationalists" for an im­mediate, negotiated, compromise peace. Upon returning to Russia from exile abroad in early May 1917, he opposed the established Menshevik policies of limited support for the war and of participation in the govern­ment and headed a largely independent internationalist faction within the loosely structured Menshevik organization. Convinced that continued coali­tion government would lead to the destruction of the revolution, at the height of the July days Martov came out for the formation of an all-socialist government "capable of moving the revolution forward." Now, slightly less than a week later, he insisted emotionally that the Soviet's program for saving the country could not be realized if there were enemies on the left.

Martov went on to read a Menshevik-Internationalist declaration ex­pressing the view that the Provisional Government's foreign and domestic policies, because they were neither consistent nor sufficiently revolu­tionary, had contributed significantly to the crisis facing Russia. The declara­tion concluded that the revolutionary democracy (i.e., the whole spectrum of democratic institutions and socialist parties) could save the country and the revolution only if the divisions that had already appeared in its ranks were not exacerbated, if all the powers of a revolutionary government were concentrated on combating the mounting threat of counterrevolution, and if decisive steps toward reform could convince the army that in rebuffing the enemy it was shedding blood for land, freedom, and an early peace.¹⁴ A few days later, at a plenary session of the Executive Committees on July 17, after the Kadets had made plain their terms for entry into the government, Martov insisted that the soviets had no choice but to assume full govern­mental power. "Either the revolutionary democracy will take responsibility for the revolution upon itself," he declared, "or it will lose the ability to influence the revolution's fate."¹⁵

Events would soon show that Martov's vision of a revolutionary soviet government uniting all socialist elements, carrying out a broad program of reform, vigorously challenging the counterrevolution, and striving in every way to arrange an immediate compromise peace corresponded quite closely to the aspirations of the politically conscious Petrograd masses. We shall see, for example, that precisely these goals were expressed in the discus­sions and resolutions of most district-level soviets in the aftermath of the July days. Within the SR-Menshevik leadership at this time, however, Martov's views were shared by a relatively small minority. Discussion of political issues at the Executive Committees plenum on July 17 culminated in an endorsement of the position adopted by the Executive Committees on July 9.¹⁶

In view of the commitment of most Mensheviks and SRs to the Provi­sional Government and to coalition politics, it is not surprising that in negotiations to form a new cabinet the moderate socialists ultimately gave up considerable ground to the Kadets. These negotiations took place on July 21 and 22, after Kerensky, frustrated in his previous efforts to create a new government, abruptly tendered his resignation, which the remaining ministers refused to accept. Instead, they met with representatives of the various competing political parties, central Soviet organs, and Provisional Committee of the State Duma and agreed to give Kerensky complete freedom in forming a government. Armed with this mandate, Kerensky proceeded at this point to engage ministers on a nonrepresentative basis. Under this mutually acceptable arrangement, cabinet members would not act as representatives of their respective parties and socialist ministers would no longer be formally responsible to the Soviet. Although individual ministers might support the declaration of July 8, the cabinet as a whole would not be pledged to it. In practice this meant that the Soviet's leverage over the government was further reduced, while the principles put forward by the socialists, even in the scaled-down version of July 8, were no longer a part of the government's program.

On this basis, the second coalition, headed by Kerensky and composed of eight socialists and seven liberals, came into being. The most influential figures in the new cabinet were Kerensky (in addition to becoming prime minister, he retained the War and Naval Ministry) and two of his close associates, Nikolai Nekrasov (deputy prime minister and minister of fi­nance) and Tereshchenko (foreign affairs). To almost everyone's surprise, Chernov managed to remain the minister of agriculture. Among those miss­ing from the new cabinet was Tsereteli; in ill health and overwhelmingly tired of cabinet politics, he now opted to concentrate his energies on the affairs of the Soviet.¹⁷

The government crackdown on the Bolsheviks began very early on the morning of July 5 with the dispatch of a large detachment of military school cadets to raid the Pravda editorial offices and printing plant. The cadets arrived at their destination only a little too late to catch Lenin, who had left the premises moments earlier. A few members of the Pravda staff were beaten up and arrested during the raid. The cadets made a thorough search of the press, in the course of which they wrecked furniture and equipment and dumped bales of freshly printed newspapers into the nearby Moika Canal. Featured accounts of this episode in many Petrograd newspapers the next day triumphantly disclosed that the cadets had turned up a letter in German from a German baron; the letter was said to have hailed Bolshevik activity and expressed the hope that the party would acquire predominant influence in Petrograd. "German Correspondence Found" was the way a headline in Malenkaia gazeta summed up this discovery.¹⁸

On July 4 the cabinet specifically authorized the command of the Pet­rograd Military District to remove the Bolsheviks from the Kshesinskaia mansion. Before dawn on July 6 a full-scale attack force commanded by A. I. Kuzmin and composed of the Petrogradsky Regiment; eight armored cars; one company each from the Preobrazhensky, Semenovsky, and Vol- ynsky guards regiments; a detachment of sailors from the Black Sea Fleet; some cadet detachments; students from the Aviation Academy; and a front-line bicycle brigade—all supported by heavy artillery—prepared to storm the Bolshevik headquarters. Warned of the impending attack, some second-level party leaders at the mansion seriously contemplated resistance and even began preparations in this regard. But in the end it was recognized that the situation was hopeless, and the Bolsheviks made a successful dash to the Peter and Paul Fortress, then still occupied by friendly forces.¹⁹

In the Kshesinskaia mansion, Kuzmin's troops seized a substantial quan­tity of arms and arrested seven Bolsheviks who were working frantically to complete the evacuation of party files. Moreover, they discovered in an attic some pogromist Black Hundred leaflets, evidently left there in tsarist times. (The Black Hundreds were extreme rightist groups that organized pogroms in late tsarist Russia.) To Petrogradskaia gazeta, this find indicated that the Bolsheviks were in league with the extreme right, as well as with the Germans. A headline in the paper on July 7 read: "Lenin, William II, and Dr. Dubrovin [a notorious member of the extreme right] Working To­gether! It Is Proved the Leninists Organized the Uprising in Association with the Black Hundreds!"

In the early afternoon of July 6 government troops reoccupied the Peter and Paul Fortress, one of the last strongholds of leftist resistance. By then, several of the military units dispatched from the northern front had reached the capital. The bicyclists, an armored car division, and the second squad­ron of the Little-Russian Dragoons had arrived in the morning, in time to participate in the taking of the Kshesinskaia mansion and the Peter and Paul Fortress. The Fourteenth Mistavsky Hussar Regiment, in full battle dress, reached Petrograd in the early evening. Preceded by standard-bearers hold­ing aloft a red banner with the legend "We Have Come to Support the All-Russian Executive Committees of Soldiers', Workers', and Peasants' Deputies," the regiment marched off to the General Staff building to report to the government.²⁰ The minister of agriculture, Viktor Chernov, wel­comed some of the troops on the Palace Square. "It makes me sad to speak of why you have come," he said. "But I believe this will be your first and last such visit. . . . We hope and believe that [in the future] no one will dare act contrary to the will of the majority of the revolutionary democracy."²¹

Between July 6 and 12 the cabinet issued a series of hastily formulated directives aimed at restoring order and punishing political troublemakers. At a marathon session the night of July 6-7 it was decreed that "all organiz­ers and leaders of the armed movement against the government established by the people and all those making appeals and instigations in support of it should be arrested and brought to trial as traitors to their nation and the revolution."²² Simultaneously, the government published new penal regula­tions which included the following: (1) Anyone guilty of making public appeals for murder, plundering, robbery, pogroms, and other heinous crimes, as well as for violence against any part of the population, is to be punished by confinement in a prison or fortress for no longer than three years; (2) those guilty of making public appeals for disobedience of lawful government directives are to be punished by confinement in a fortress for not more than three years or by incarceration in a prison; anyone guilty of inciting officers, soldiers, and other military personnel to disobey the laws in effect under the new democratic system in the army, or the directives of military authorities consistent with them, is to be punished according to regulations pertaining to acts of treason.²³

Kerensky, named prime minister on July 7, had not been in Petrograd at the height of the July days, having left the capital for a tour of the front late on the afternoon of July 3. While at the front, he had received detailed reports on the developing crisis in the capital. In response, he shot off a

telegram to Lvov demanding that "traitorous actions be decisively sup­pressed, insurgent units disarmed, and all instigators of insurrections and mutineers brought to trial."²⁴ While at the front, moreover, Kerensky was shown the latest issue of Tovarishch, a Russian-language propaganda weekly published by the Germans for circulation among enemy troops. An article in this issue suggested to Kerensky that the Germans had known in advance of the insurrection in the capital; naturally, this reinforced his belief that Lenin was a German agent.²⁵

Incensed to the point of distraction, Kerensky boarded a train to return to the capital on the morning of July 6; at the railway depot in Polotsk, the carriage in which he was sleeping was partially wrecked by a bomb.²⁶ Al­though physically unharmed, Kerensky was understandably unnerved by the incident. It is not surprising that, upon his arrival in Petrograd on the evening of July 6, he was fuming and champing at the bit to have done with the Bolsheviks. From this time on, Kerensky stood at the forefront of cabinet ministers speaking out for a tough policy toward the extreme left. Addressing a crowd of soldiers and workers from a windowsill of the Gen­eral Staff building a short while later (as two officers held his legs to pre­vent a fall), he pronounced: "I will not allow anyone to encroach upon the triumphs of the Russian revolution." With voice rising to fever pitch, he shouted: "Damnation to those traitors who abandon their brothers who are shedding blood at the front. Let those who betray their country in its days of trial be damned!"²⁷ In an interview with the Associated Press several days later, after he had been officially installed as prime minister, Kerensky declared with equal vigor: "[Our] fundamental task is the defense of the country from ruin and anarchy. My government will save Russia, and if the motives of reason, honor, and conscience prove inadequate, it will beat her into unity with blood and iron."²⁸

First and foremost, the July insurrection was, of course, a garrison mutiny. At its July 6-7 session, the cabinet ordered that nonmilitary units participating in the July uprising be disarmed and dissolved, their personnel to be transferred at the discretion of the war and naval ministers. A detailed plan supplementing this order bore Kerensky's handwritten notation: "Agreed, but I demand that this be carried out forcefully, without devia­tion." About the same time, Kerensky issued a strong condemnation of the Kronstadt sailors, implying that they were acting under the influence of "German agents and provocateurs." All commands and ships of the fleet were ordered to turn over to the authorities in Petrograd for investigation and trial "all suspicious persons calling for disobedience to the government and agitating against the offensive."²⁹

Steps aimed at halting the disintegration of the army at the front were also initiated at this time. Thus military commanders were authorized to fire on Russian units fleeing the field of battle on their own. Bolshevik

Soldiers of the First Machine Gun Regiment after being disarmed on July 8, 1917.

newspapers were banned from all theaters of military operations. Political meetings among front troops were strictly forbidden. Most significant, the government decreed the reinstitution of capital punishment for military offenses in the battle zones, simultaneously authorizing the creation of ad hoc "military revolutionary" courts with authority to impose the death sentence.³⁰

To prevent rebel workers and sailors caught in the central sections of Petrograd from fleeing to the comparative safety of the left-bank factory districts, the drawbridges over the Neva were kept open. At the same time, the country's borders were sealed, to keep "German agents" from escaping abroad. Street assemblies were temporarily banned. The ministers of war and of the interior were empowered to shut down newspapers encouraging disobedience of military authorities or appealing for violence; by virtue of this order, the Bolshevik papers Pravda, Soldatskaia pravda, Okopnaia pravda, and Golos pravdy were closed. In a move obviously directed primarily to­ward disarming workers, all civilians in the capital were ordered to turn over to the government all weapons and military supplies in their posses­sion; failure to hand over arms was to be considered theft of public property and prosecuted accordingly.³¹

On July 7 the cabinet made N. S. Karinsky, prosecutor of the Petrograd court of appeals, responsible for investigating all matters relating to the organization of the July uprising; in view of this, the All-Russian Executive Committees agreed to drop the Soviet's planned independent inquiry into the insurrection.³² Even before the prosecutor's office was able to launch its investigation, however, the authorities in Petrograd had begun rounding up key Bolsheviks. The cabinet specifically ordered the arrest and detention of

Lenin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. As we shall see, Lenin and Zinoviev im­mediately went underground (as did Nevsky and Podvoisky, the two top Military Organization officials). Only Kamenev did not flee—he was ar­rested and jailed on July 9.

Two days earlier the government had incarcerated members of two large naval delegations dispatched from Helsingfors to Petrograd by the leftist- dominated Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet (Tsentrobalt); among the arrested sailors were such influential "fleet" Bolsheviks as Pavel Dybenko and Nikolai Khovrin. A week later Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, another key Helsingfors Bolshevik, was also imprisoned. One of several suspicious characters in a car full of workers detained by a cossack patrol at this time was Sergei Bagdatiev, an Armenian by background who had once been a candidate for the Bolshevik Central Committee. On the afternoon of July 4, Bagdatiev was reported cruising around Petrograd atop an armored car, waving a rifle and crying out to gaping onlookers to "arrest the ministers." Upon interrogation following his arrest, Bagdatiev modestly admitted to being one of the organizers of the uprising. Newspaper accounts of his capture were very definite about two things: that Bagdatiev was a German spy and that he was a Jew. To Malenkaia gazeta's man-on-the-scene, Bagdatiev's "outward appearance, his hooked nose, his short reddish beard," and the fact that he was "masquerading in a democratic workman's shirt" were dead giveaways. Noted the reporter, "Bagdatiev speaks Russian well with barely a trace of a Jewish accent."³³

Flavian Khaustov, an editor of Okopnaia pravda and the focus of a wide­spread manhunt since his escape from the Crosses Prison (an ancient jail in the Vyborg District built in the form of two crosses) on June 18, was now recaptured, picked up leaving a theater at the Luna Park amusement center, evidently on a tip from an informer.³⁴ Taking leftist leaders from the Kron- stadt naval base into custody was infinitely more difficult for the govern­ment. In response to a telegram from Kerensky demanding that "counter­revolutionary instigators" be turned over to the government at once, the Executive Committee of the Kronstadt Soviet wired back: "Inasmuch as no one knows of any 'counterrevolutionary' instigators in Kronstadt, it will be impossible to conduct arrests." Specifically directed to turn over several key Bolshevik leaders (Fedor Raskolnikov, Semion Roshal, and Afanasii Rem- nev), the Kronstadt Soviet persisted in its refusal to cooperate with the government. Only after the naval base was threatened with blockade and bombardment was it agreed that all of the sought-after Kronstadters, except for Roshal (who had disappeared), would turn themselves in.³⁵ Subse­quently, Roshal also surrendered; encountering Raskolnikov in the Crosses shortly afterward, he explained, "After your arrest, it seemed awkward to hide."³⁶