The Russian Revolution

10

The Bolshevik Bid for Power

In terms of modern opinion, the way to turn people into followers is to persuade them that in following your scheme, they are being active, critical, rebellious and free-spirited; behaving otherwise is passive and servile. The sheep were those who got hopelessly entangled in this set of confusions.

—Kenneth Minogue

Although it is common to speak of two Russian revolutions in 1917—one in February, the other in October—only the first merits the name. In February 1917, Russia experienced a genuine revolution in that the disorders that brought down the tsarist regime, although not unprovoked or unexpected, erupted spontaneously and the Provisional Government which succeeded gained immediate nationwide acceptance. Neither was true of October 1917. The events that led to the overthrow of the Provisional Government were not spontaneous but plotted and executed by a tightly organized conspiracy. It took these plotters three years of civil war and indiscriminate terror to subdue the majority of the population. October was a classic coup d’état, the capture of governmental power by a small minority, carried out, in deference to the democratic conventions of the age, with a show of mass participation, but without mass engagement. It introduced into revolutionary action methods more appropriate to warfare than to politics.

The Bolshevik coup went through two phases. In the first, which lasted from April to July, Lenin attempted to take power in Petrograd by means of street demonstrations backed by armed force. It was his intention to escalate these demonstrations, on the pattern of the riots of February, into a full-scale revolt that would transfer power initially to the soviets and immediately afterward to his party. This strategy failed: the third attempt, in July, nearly resulted in the destruction of the Bolshevik Party. By August, the Bolsheviks recovered sufficiently to resume their drive for power, but this time they used a different strategy. Trotsky, who took charge while Lenin was hiding from the police in Finland, avoided street demonstrations. Instead, he disguised preparation for a Bolshevik coup behind the façade of a spurious and illegitimate Congress of Soviets, while relying on special shock troops to seize the nerve centers of the government. In name, the power seizure was carried out provisionally and on behalf of the soviets, but, in fact, permanently and for the benefit of the Bolshevik Party.

The outbreak of the February Revolution found Lenin in Zurich. Cut off from his homeland since the outbreak of the war, he had thrown himself into Swiss socialist politics, injecting into them an alien spirit of intolerance and contentiousness.¹ His log for the winter of 1916–17 reveals a pattern of frenetic but unfocused activity, now given to pamphleteering, now to intrigues against deviant Swiss Social-Democrats, now to the study of Marx and Engels.

News from Russia reached Switzerland after a delay of several days. Lenin first learned of the disorders in Petrograd nearly a week late from a report in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of March 2/15. The report, datelined Berlin, inserted on page two between bulletins from the theater of war, said that a revolution had broken out in the Russian capital and that the Duma had arrested the tsarist ministers and assumed power.²

Lenin decided he had to get back to Russia at once: he now reproached himself for not having “risked” a move to Scandinavia in 1915 when it had been possible.*³ But how? The only point of entry into Russia was through Sweden. To reach Sweden, one had either to transit Allied territory, by way of France or England and Holland, or to cross Germany. Lenin requested Inessa Armand to explore, with utmost discretion, the chances of obtaining a British visa, but he placed little hope in this prospect because the British, aware of his defeatist program, were almost certain to refuse. He next conceived a fantastic scheme of traveling to Stockholm on a forged passport: he requested his agent there, Fürstenberg-Ganetskii, to find a Swede whose papers he could use, with the proviso that the man not only resemble him physically but also, since he knew no Swedish, be both deaf and dumb.⁴ None of these plans had any realistic chance of success. Lenin, therefore, seized on a scheme proposed by Martov in Paris on March 6/19 to a group of socialist émigrés: the Russians would ask the German Government, through a Swiss intermediary, for transit rights across its territory to Sweden in exchange for German and Austrian internees.⁵

While raging in Zurich, in the words of Trotsky, like a caged animal, Lenin did not lose sight of the political situation at home. He was concerned that his followers in Russia adopt a correct political course until he appeared on the scene. He was particularly anxious that they not emulate the “opportunistic” tactics of the Mensheviks and SRs of supporting the “bourgeois” Duma government. He outlined his policy in a telegram dispatched on March 6/19 to Petrograd by way of Stockholm:

Our tactics: complete mistrust, no support for the new government. We especially suspect Kerensky. The arming of the proletariat provides the only guarantee. Immediate elections to the Petrograd [Municipal] Duma. No rapprochement with the other parties.⁶

When Lenin cabled these instructions to his followers the Provisional Government had been in office only one week and had hardly had the opportunity to reveal its political physiognomy. In any event, far away from the scene and dependent on second- and third-hand accounts from Western news agencies, Lenin could not have known the intentions and actions of the new government. His insistence that it be treated with “complete mistrust” and denied support, therefore, could not have been due to disapproval of its policies: rather it reflected an a priori determination to remove it from power. His demand that the Bolsheviks not cooperate with the other parties indicated that he was bent on filling the ensuing power vacuum exclusively with the Bolshevik Party. This laconic document indicates that barely four days after he had learned of the February Revolution, Lenin was contemplating a Bolshevik coup d’état. His order to “arm the proletariat” suggests that he envisaged the coup as a military insurrection.

The Bolshevik Party in March 1917 was hardly in a condition to carry out such an ambitious plan. Police arrests during the war, culminating in those of February 26, 1917, when the party’s most important entity, the Petrograd Committee, was taken into custody⁷ had decapitated its apparatus: its leading figures were either in jail or in exile. In a report to Lenin in early December 1916, Shliapnikov described Bolshevik activities in some factories and garrison units during the preceding months under the slogans “Down with the War” and “Down with the Government,” but he also had to admit that the Bolsheviks were so infiltrated by police informers that illegal party activity had become virtually impossible.⁸ Subsequent Bolshevik claims of having inspired and even organized the February Revolution are, therefore, entirely spurious. The Bolsheviks rode the coattails first of the spontaneous demonstrators and then those of the Mensheviks and their soviets. Their following among the mutinous military units was close to nil and among the industrial workers at this time they had far fewer adherents than either the Mensheviks or the SRs. During the February days their role was limited to issuing appeals and manifestos: at most, they may have had a hand in preparing the revolutionary banners carried by workers and soldiers in the demonstrations of February 25–28.

The Bolsheviks, however, made up for what they lacked in numbers with organizational skills. On March 2, the Petrograd Committee of the party, freshly released from prison, set up a three-man Bureau consisting of Shliapnikov, V. M. Molotov, and P. A. Zalutskii.⁹ Three days later this Bureau brought out, under Molotov’s editorship, the first issue of the revived party organ, Pravda. On March 10 it established a Military Committee (later renamed Military Organization) under N. I. Podvoiskii and V. I. Nevskii, to conduct propaganda and agitation among the troops of the Petrograd garrison. For their headquarters, the Bolsheviks chose the luxurious Art Nouveau villa of the ballerina M. F. Kshesinskaia, rumored to have been a mistress of the young Nicholas II. This building they “requisitioned” with the help of friendly troops, ignoring the protests of its owner. Here, until July 1917, officiated the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, as well as its Petrograd Committee and Military Organization.

During March 1917, the Bolsheviks in Russia, cut off from their leader, pursued a course that hardly differed from that of the Mensheviks and SRs. A resolution of the Central Committee passed that month described the Provisional Government as an agent of the “large bourgeoisie” and of “landowners,” but did not advocate that it be opposed. On March 3 the Petrograd Committee, the most powerful of the Bolshevik organizations, adopted the Menshevik-SR position calling for support of the government postol’ku-poskol’ku—that is, “to the extent that” it advanced the interests of the “masses.”¹⁰ Both in theory and in practice the leading Bolsheviks in Petrograd followed a line diametrically opposed to that of Lenin. They could not have been pleased, therefore, with Lenin’s advice contained in the telegram of March 6, which reached them after a delay of one week: the published minutes of the Petrograd Committee meetings do not record the discussion that followed its receipt.

This pro-Menshevik orientation was strengthened with the arrival in Petrograd from exile of three members of the Central Committee, L. B. Kamenev, Stalin, and M. K. Muranov, who, by virtue of seniority, assumed direction of the party and the editorship of Pravda. In their articles and speeches, the three rejected the position Lenin had taken at Zimmerwald and Kiental: instead of turning the war between nations into a civil war, they wanted the socialists to agitate for the immediate opening of peace negotiations.¹¹ On March 15 or 16, the Petrograd Bolsheviks held a party conference; the fact that neither its minutes nor its resolutions have been published strongly suggests that many participants adopted an anti-Leninist position on the critical issues of the attitude toward the government and the war.¹² It is known, however, that on March 18, at a closed meeting of the Petrograd Committee, Kamenev argued that although the Provisional Government was unmistakably “counterrevolutionary” and destined to be overthrown, the time for that lay in the future: “the important thing is not to take power: it is to hold on to it.”¹³ Kamenev spoke in the same vein at the All-Russian Consultation of Soviets at the end of March.¹⁴ At this time the Bolsheviks gave serious thought to reunification with the Mensheviks: on March 21, the Petrograd Committee declared that it was both “possible and desirable” to merge with those Mensheviks who accepted the Zimmerwald and Kiental platforms.*

Given these attitudes, it is understandable that the Petrograd Bolsheviks reacted with shock and disbelief when Alexandra Kollontai appeared before them bearing the first and second of Lenin’s “Letters from Afar.” Here, Lenin elaborated on his telegram of March 6/19: no support for the Provisional Government, arming the workers.¹⁵ The program struck them as utterly fantastic, thought up by someone out of touch with the situation in Russia. After hesitating for several days, they printed in Pravda the first “Letter from Afar” but without the passages in which Lenin attacked the Provisional Government.¹⁶ They refused to publish the second installment and those that followed.

At the All-Russian Conference of Bolsheviks held in Petrograd between March 28 and April 4, Stalin introduced and the delegates approved a motion calling for “control” over the Provisional Government and cooperation with the other “progressive forces” for the purpose of combating the “counterrevolution” and “broadening” the revolutionary movement.† The “un-Bolshevik” behavior of the Bolsheviks when on their own and their rapid shift after Lenin’s arrival demonstrates that their conduct was based, not on principles that the members could assimilate and apply, but on their leader’s will: that the Bolsheviks were bound together, not by what they believed, but in whom they believed.

The Germans had their own designs on the Russian radicals. The war was going nowhere and they had come to realize that their one remaining chance of winning was to break up the enemy alliance, preferably by forcing Russia out of the war. In the fall of 1916 the Kaiser mused along these lines:

From the strictly military point of view, it is important to detach one or another of the Entente belligerents by means of a separate peace, in order to hurl our full might against the rest.… We can organize our war effort, accordingly, only insofar as the internal struggle in Russia exerts influence on the conclusion of peace with us.¹⁷

Having failed in 1915 to eliminate Russia from the war by military means, the Germans now resorted to political steps, exploiting the internal divisions inside revolutionary Russia. The Provisional Government was totally committed to the Allied cause: so much so that some Germans believed the February Revolution to have been engineered by the British.¹⁸ The pronouncements of Foreign Minister Miliukov on Russia’s war aims gave the Central Powers little grounds for optimism. The only hope of breaking Russia away from the alliance, therefore, lay in supporting radical extremists who were opposed to the “imperialist” war and wanted it transformed into a civil war: in other words, the Zimmerwald-Kiental left, of which Lenin was the undisputed leader. Back in Russia, Lenin could give the Provisional Government no end of trouble by inciting class antagonisms, playing on the people’s war-weariness, and perhaps even grasping for power.

The strongest advocate of the “Lenin card” was Parvus. He had made one approach to Lenin in 1915: on that occasion, Lenin had refused to cooperate, but the situation was different now. In 1917 Parvus lived in Copenhagen where, as a cover for his intelligence activities, he operated an import company. He also had a spurious scientific institute from which to conduct espionage.¹⁹ His business agent in Stockholm was Jacob Ganetskii, Lenin’s trusted associate. Familiar with Russian émigré politics, Parvus placed high hopes on extremists like Lenin. He assured the German Ambassador to Denmark, Count V. Brockdorff-Rantzau, that if let loose, the anti-war left would spread such anarchy that after two or three months Russia would find it impossible to remain in the war.²⁰ He singled out Lenin for particular attention as “much more raving mad” than either Kerensky or Chkheidze. With uncanny foresight he predicted that once Lenin returned to Russia he would topple the Provisional Government, take over, and promptly conclude a separate peace.²¹ He understood well Lenin’s lust for power and believed he would strike a deal in order to be able to cross German territory to Sweden. Under Parvus’s influence, Brockdorff-Rantzau cabled to Berlin:

We must now unconditionally seek to create in Russia the greatest possible chaos.… We should do all we can … to exacerbate the differences between the moderate and extremist parties, because we have the greatest interest in the latter gaining the upper hand, since the Revolution will then become unavoidable and assume forms that must shatter the stability of the Russian state.²²

The German envoy in Switzerland, G. von Romberg, gave similar advice on the basis of information obtained from local experts on Russian affairs. He called Berlin’s attention to the fact that the followers of “Lehnin” caused discord in the Petrograd Soviet with calls for immediate peace negotiations and the refusal to cooperate with both the Provisional Government and the other socialist parties.²³

Won over, the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, instructed Romberg to initiate talks with the Russian émigrés about transit to Sweden. These talks were carried out in late March and early April (NS) with the assistance of Swiss socialists, initially Robert Grimm and then Fritz Platten. Lenin acted on behalf of the Russians. It is symptomatic of the myopia of the Germans that in venturing on these dangerous political waters they did not bother to inform themselves about either Lenin or his program: all that mattered to them was that the Bolsheviks and other adherents of the Zimmerwald-Kiental position wanted Russia out of the war. A historian who has inspected the German archives found in them no document to indicate interest in the Bolsheviks: two issues of Lenin’s journal, Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata, forwarded to Berlin by the Berne embassy, lay in the archive forty years later, their pages uncut.²⁴

In negotiating transit across Germany, Lenin took great pains to ensure that the émigrés would not lay themselves open to charges of collaborating with the enemy. He insisted that the train enjoy the status of an extraterritorial entity: no one was to enter it without the permission of Platten and there would be no passport controls.²⁵ The fact that a penurious refugee felt in a position to pose terms to the German Government indicates that he had a good appreciation of the services which he could render to it.

On the German side, the negotiations were carried out by the civilian authorities, with the active support of the Foreign Office, especially its chief, Richard von Kühlmann. Although subsequently it came to be believed that the driving force behind Lenin’s return to Russia was Ludendorff, in fact the general played a marginal role, his contribution being confined to providing transport.²⁶

On April 1 (NS), Platten transmitted Lenin’s terms to the German Embassy. Two days later, he was advised they were acceptable. At this time the German Treasury approved a request from the Foreign Ministry to allocate five million marks for “Russian work.”²⁷ What the Germans were doing in regard to Russia was part of a pattern:

For each of their enemies, France, Britain, Italy, and Russia, the Germans had long since worked out a scheme for treason from within. The plans all bore a rough similarity: first, discord by means of the parties of the far left; next pacifist articles published by defeatists either paid or directly inspired by Germany; and, finally, the establishment of an understanding with a prominent political personality who would ultimately take over the weakened enemy government and sue for peace.²⁸

For Britain, they used the Irishman Sir Roger Casement, for France, Joseph Caillaux, and for Russia, Lenin. Casement was shot, Caillaux imprisoned, and only Lenin justified the moneys spent on him.

At 3:20 P.M. on March 27/April 9, thirty-two Russian émigrés left Zurich for the German frontier. While a full list of passengers is not available—the agreement stipulated that the Germans would not inquire into who traveled in the train—it is known that among them were nineteen Bolsheviks, including Lenin, Krupskaia, Zinoviev with his wife and child, Inessa Armand, and Radek, as well as six members of the Bund and three followers of Trotsky.²⁹ Having crossed the border at Gottmadingen, they transferred to a German train, made up of two cars, one for the Russians, the other for their German escort. Contrary to legend, the train was not sealed.³⁰ Traveling thrpugh Stuttgart and Frankfurt, they arrived in Berlin in the early afternoon of March 29/April 11. There the train was held up for twenty hours, surrounded by German guards. On March 30/April 12 they departed for the Baltic port at Sassnitz, where they boarded a Swedish steamer bound for Trälleborg. On arrival, they were welcomed by the mayor of Stockholm. They then proceeded to the Swedish capital.³¹

Parvus was among those who awaited them there. He asked to meet with Lenin, but the cautious Bolshevik leader refused and passed him on to Radek, who, by virtue of being an Austrian subject, was not at risk of being accused of treason. Radek spent a good part of March 31/April 13 with Parvus. What transpired between them is not known. When they parted, Parvus dashed off to Berlin. On April 20 (NS), he met in private with the German State Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann. This encounter also left no record. He then returned to Stockholm.³² Although documentary evidence is lacking—as is usual in matters involving high-level covert operations—in the light of subsequent events it seems virtually certain that Parvus worked out with Radek, on behalf of the German Government, the terms and procedures for financing Bolshevik activities in Russia.*

The Russian Consulate in Stockholm had entry visas ready for the arrivals. The Provisional Government seems to have hesitated over whether to allow entry to the anti-war activists, but changed its mind in the hope that Lenin would compromise himself politically by having traveled across enemy territory.³³ The party left Stockholm for Finland on March 31/April 13, reaching Petrograd three days later (April 3/16) at 11:10 p.m.†

Lenin arrived in Petrograd on the final day of the All-Russian Bolshevik Conference. Many Bolsheviks from the provinces were on hand and they prepared a welcome for their leader that in theatricality surpassed anything ever seen in socialist circles. The Petrograd Committee rallied workers to the Finland Station; along the tracks it deployed a guard of soldiers and a military band. When Lenin emerged from the train, the band struck up the “Marseillaise” and the guard sprang to attention. Chkheidze welcomed the arrivals on behalf of the Ispolkom, voicing the hope that socialists would close ranks to defend “revolutionary freedom” from both the domestic counterrevolution and foreign aggression. Outside the Finland Station, Lenin mounted an armored car and, illuminated by a projector, delivered some brief remarks, after which he rode to Kshesinskaia’s followed by a crowd.³⁴

Sukhanov has left us an eyewitness account of the proceedings at the Bolshevik headquarters that night:

Below, in a fairly large hall, were assembled many people: workers, “professional revolutionaries,” and ladies. Chairs were in short supply, and half of those present had to stand uncomfortably or spread themselves out on tables. Someone was chosen chairman, and greetings in the form of reports from the localities got underway. This was, on the whole, monotonous and long-winded. But now and then there crept in what I thought were curious and characteristic features of the Bolshevik “style,” the specific mode of Bolshevik Party work. And it became obvious with absolute clarity that all Bolshevik work was held in the iron frames of its foreign spiritual center, without which the party’s members would have felt themselves utterly helpless, of which, at the same time, they were proud, of which the better ones among them felt themselves to be devoted servants, like the Knights of the Holy Grail. Kamenev, too, said something nondescript. Finally, they remembered Zinoviev, who was faintly applauded but said nothing. Finally, the greetings in the form of reports came to an end.…

And then, the grand master of the order rose to his feet with his “response.” I cannot forget that speech, like lightning, which shook up and astonished not only me, a heretic accidentally thrown into delirium, but also the true believers. I aver that no one had expected anything like it. It seemed as if all the elemental forces had risen from their lairs and the spirit of universal destruction, which knew no obstacles, no doubts, neither human difficulties nor human calculations, circled in Kshesinskaia’s hall above the heads of the enchanted disciples.³⁵

The thrust of Lenin’s ninety-minute speech was that the transition from the “bourgeois-democratic” to the “socialist” revolution had to be accomplished in a matter of months.* This meant that barely four weeks after tsarism had been overthrown, Lenin was publicly sentencing its successor to death. This proposition ran so contrary to the sentiments of the majority of his followers, it seemed so irresponsible and “adventurist,” that the remainder of the night, until the meeting broke up at 4 a.m., was spent in tempestuous debate.

Later that day Lenin read to a group of Bolsheviks and then separately to a joint meeting of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks a paper which, anticipating resistance, he presented as reflecting his personal opinions. Subsequently known as the “April Theses,” it outlined a program of action that must have appeared to his audiences as totally out of touch with reality if not positively mad.³⁶ He proposed no backing for the ongoing war; immediate transition to the “second” phase of the revolution; refusal to support the Provisional Government; transfer of all power to the Soviets; abolition of the army in favor of a popular militia; confiscation of all landlord property and nationalization of all land; the fusion of all banks into a single National Bank under Soviet supervision; Soviet control of production and distribution; creation of a new Socialist International.

Pravda’s editorial board refused to print Lenin’s “Theses” on the pretext of a mechanical breakdown at its printing plant.³⁷ A meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on April 6 passed a negative resolution on them. Kamenev insisted that Lenin’s analogy between the situation in contemporary Russia and the Paris Commune was faulty, while Stalin found the “Theses” “schematic” and short on facts.³⁸ But Lenin and Zinoviev, who had in the meantime joined the editorial board of Pravda, forced the issue, and the “Theses” appeared on April 7. Lenin’s article was accompanied by an editorial comment by Kamenev which disassociated the party’s organ from it. Lenin, Kamenev wrote,

proceeds from the premise that the bourgeois-democratic revolution has been completed and counts on the immediate transformation of that revolution into a socialist one.

But, he went on, the Central Committee thought otherwise and the Bolshevik Party would be guided by its resolutions.* The Petrograd Committee met on April 8 to discuss Lenin’s paper. Its verdict was also overwhelmingly negative, two voting in favor, thirteen against, with one abstention.³⁹ The reaction in the provincial cities was similar: the Bolshevik organizations in Kiev and Saratov, for instance, rejected Lenin’s program, the latter on the grounds that the author was out of touch with the situation in Russia.⁴⁰

Whatever the Bolsheviks’ opinion of their leader’s pronouncements, the Germans were delighted. On April 4/17, their agent in Stockholm cabled to Berlin: “Lenin’s entry into Russia successful. He is working exactly as we wish.”⁴¹

Lenin was a very secretive man: although he spoke and wrote voluminously, enough to fill fifty-five volumes of collected works, his speeches and writings are overwhelmingly propaganda and agitation, meant to persuade potential followers and destroy known opponents rather than reveal his thoughts. He rarely disclosed what was on his mind, even to close associates. As supreme commander in the global war between classes, he kept his plans private. To reconstruct his thinking, it is necessary, therefore, to proceed retroactively, from known deeds to concealed intentions.

On general issues—who the enemy was and what was to be done to him—Lenin was frank enough. The objective—the “program”—broadly defined, he made public; it was the tactics that he kept hidden. And herein lies the difficulty of divining Lenin’s intentions. For as Mussolini, himself no mean expert in the art of the coup d’état, confided to Giovanni Giolitti, “a State has to be defended not against a program of the revolution but against its tactics.”⁴²

Lenin rejected the Menshevik-SR doctrine of a two-stage revolution and its corollary, dvoevlastie or dyarchy; he meant to topple the Provisional Government as soon as practicable and seize power. His remarkably keen political instinct—the flair possessed by every successful general—told him this could be done. He knew the liberal and socialist intelligentsia for what they were: “vegetarian tigers,” to borrow a phrase from Clemenceau, who for all their revolutionary cant were deathly afraid of political responsibility and incapable of exercising it even if handed to them. In this respect, he judged them like Nicholas II. He further realized that underneath the appearance of national unity and universal support of the Provisional Government there seethed powerful destructive forces which, fanned and properly directed, could bring down the ineffective democracy and carry him to power: shortages of goods in the cities, agrarian unrest, ethnic aspirations. To accomplish their objective, the Bolsheviks had to set themselves clearly apart from both the Provisional Government and the other socialist parties as the sole alternative to the status quo. In line with this reasoning, after returning to Russia, Lenin compelled his followers to abandon the conciliatory attitude toward the Provisional Government and any thought of merging with the Mensheviks.

In view of the immense popularity of democratic slogans, Lenin could not openly claim power on behalf of the Bolshevik Party: no one outside Bolshevik ranks, and very few within them, would have found this prospect acceptable. For this reason, with one brief interlude, throughout 1917 he called for power to be transferred to the soviets. This tactic may appear puzzling in view of the fact that until the fall of 1917 the Bolsheviks were a minority in the soviets, so that, on the face of it, the implementation of this program would have transferred power to the Mensheviks and SRs. But the Bolsheviks felt confident the latter would not stand in their way. Tsereteli, who of all the Menshevik leaders had the fewest illusions about their rivals, wrote that the Bolsheviks believed they would have little trouble wresting national power from the soviet majority.⁴³ From Lenin’s point of view the Provisional Government, for all its incompetence, was a more dangerous enemy than the democratic socialists because it had at its disposal a large armed force and because it enjoyed a certain measure of support from the peasantry and the middle class: by appealing to nationalism it could rally powerful forces against him. As long as the Provisional Government stayed in power, however nominally, the danger always existed of the country veering to the right. With the soviet as the locus of authority, it was a relatively simple matter to keep on radicalizing the political atmosphere and pulling the irresolute socialists along by frightening them with the specter of a “counterrevolution.”

Lenin pursued his objective—seizure of power—in a manner that was rooted in the study of military history and military science. Genuine politics, even in its authoritarian form, entails some sort of accommodation both with other contenders for power and with the population at large, which leaves the governed scope for free initiative. But Lenin, for whom politics was always class war, thought in Clausewitzian terms: its purpose, as that of military strategy, was not accommodation with the opponent but his destruction. This meant, first and foremost, disarming him, in two senses: (1) depriving him of an armed force and (2) smashing his institutions. But it could also mean his physical annihilation, as on the field of battle. European socialists routinely talked of “class war,” but they meant by it a struggle waged mainly with non-violent means, such as industrial strikes and the ballot box, which might, at a certain point, culminate in barricades. Lenin and he alone understood “class war” in the literal sense to mean civil war—warfare with every available weapon for the purpose of strategic destruction and, if need be, extermination of rivals that left the victor with unchallenged mastery of the political battlefield. Revolution in this view was war waged by other means, the difference being that the combatants were not states and nations but social classes: its battle lines ran vertically rather than horizontally. In this militarization of politics lay a critical source of Lenin’s success, for those whom he designated as enemies could not conceive of anyone seriously treating politics as combat in which quarter was neither given nor expected.

This outlook on politics Lenin drew from the inner depths of his personality, in which the lust for domination combined with a patrimonial political culture shaped in the Russia of Alexander III in which he had grown up. But the theoretical justification for these psychological impulses and this cultural legacy he found in Marx’s comments on the Paris Commune. Marx’s writings on this subject made an overwhelming impression on him and became his guide to action. Observing the rise and fall of the Commune, Marx concluded that until then all revolutionaries had committed a cardinal mistake in that they took over existing institutions instead of destroying them. By leaving intact the political, social, and military structures of the class state and merely replacing their personnel, they provided a breeding ground for the counterrevolution. Future revolutionaries would have to proceed differently: “not transfer from one set of hands to another the bureaucratic-military machine, as has been done until now, but smash it.”⁴⁴ These words etched themselves deeply in Lenin’s mind: he repeated them at every opportunity and placed them at the heart of his principal political treatise, State and Revolution. They served to justify his destructive instincts and provided a rationale for his desire to erect a new order: an order all-encompassing in its “totalitarian” aspiration.

Lenin always viewed revolution in international terms; the Russian Revolution was for him a mere accident, a fortuitous snapping of “imperialism’s” weakest link. He was never interested in reforming Russia, but only in subjugating it so as to have a springboard for a revolution in the industrial countries and their colonies. Even as dictator of Russia he never ceased to view 1917 and its sequel from an international viewpoint: for him it was never the “Russian Revolution,” but the worldwide revolution that happened to have had its start in Russia. In his farewell address to the Swiss socialists, delivered the day before he left for home, he made this point with great emphasis:

It has fallen to the Russian proletariat to have the great honor of beginning a series of revolutions.… It is not its special qualities but the special historical conditions that have made the Russian proletariat, for a specific, perhaps very brief time, the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat of the whole world.

Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backward in Europe. It is not possible for socialism to triumph there directly, presently. But the peasant character of the country … can lend a vast sweep to the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia and make our revolution a prologue to the worldwide socialist revolution, a step toward it.⁴⁵

Lenin’s secretiveness about a worldwide socialist revolution was due in part to the desire to keep his opponents in the dark about his intentions and in part to the advantage that secrecy gave him of being able to avoid the stigma of failure if things did not work out as planned: whenever this happened, he always could (and in fact did) deny having had a plan. Even so, from the directives he issued in the spring and early summer of 1917, when he personally led the Bolshevik forces, one can form a general picture of his battle plan.

The experience of February seems to have persuaded Lenin that the Provisional Government could be brought down by massive street demonstrations. To begin with, the soil had to be prepared, as had been done in 1915–16, by a relentless campaign to discredit the government in the eyes of the population. To this end it had to be blamed for everything that went wrong: political disorders, shortages, inflation, military setbacks. It had to be charged with conspiring with the Germans to surrender Petrograd while pretending to defend it and of collaborating with General Kornilov while charging him with treason. The more preposterous the accusations, the more the politically inexperienced workers and soldiers were likely to believe them: why should an incredible reality not have incredible causes?

Unlike February, however, the militant street demonstrations had to be tightly supervised; Lenin had no faith in spontaneity even if he fully appreciated the need for giving his highly calculated endeavors the appearance of spontaneity. He learned from Napoleon and applied to civil war the principle of tiraillerie, or skirmishing, which some military historians regard as Napoleon’s major contribution to warfare.⁴⁶ For purposes of combat, Napoleon used to divide his forces in two: the professional Guard and the mass of recruits. It was his practice at the beginning of a battle to send in the recruits to draw enemy fire: this provided a picture of enemy dispositions. At the critical moment, he sent the Guard into action to break the enemy’s lines at the weakest point and put him to flight. Lenin applied this tactic to urban warfare. The masses were brought out into the streets under seditious slogans to provoke a government reaction that would reveal its strengths and weaknesses. Were the crowds to succeed in overwhelming the government’s forces, then the Bolshevik equivalent of Napoleon’s Guard—the armed workers and soldiers organized by the Bolshevik Military Organization—would take over. Were they to fail, the point would still be made that the masses wanted change and that by resisting them the government proved to be “anti-democratic.” One would then await the next opportunity. The basic principle was Napoleon’s “on s’engage et puis on voit”—“one commits oneself and then one sees.”⁴⁷ In his three attempts at a putsch (April, June, and July 1917), Lenin called out the mobs into the streets, but kept himself well in the background, always pretending to follow the “people” rather than lead them. After each such attempt failed, he would deny having had any revolutionary intentions, and even pretend that his party did all in its power to restrain the impetuous masses.*

Lenin’s technique of revolution required the manipulation of crowds. He followed, whether by instinct or from knowledge it is hard to tell, the theories of crowd behavior first formulated in 1895 by the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon in La Psychologie des Foules (Crowd Psychology). Le Bon held that on joining a crowd men lose their individuality, dissolving it in a collective personality with its own distinct psychology. Its main characteristic is a lowered capacity for logical reasoning and a corresponding rise in the sense of “invincible power.” Feeling invincible, crowds demand action, a craving that leaves them open to manipulation: “crowds are in a state of expectant attention which renders suggestion easy.” They are especially responsive to exhortation to violence by associations of words and ideas that evoke “grandiose and vague images” accompanied by an air of “mystery,” such as “liberty,” “democracy,” and “socialism.” Crowds respond to fanatics who incite them with constantly reiterated, violent images. Since, according to Le Bon, in the ultimate analysis the force that motivates crowds is religious faith, it “demands a god before everything else,” a leader whom it endows with supernatural qualities. The crowd’s religious sentiment is simple:

[the] worship of a being supposed superior, fear of the power with which the being is credited, blind submission to its commands, inability to discuss its dogmas, the desire to spread them, and a tendency to consider as enemies all by whom they are not accepted.⁴⁸

A more recent observer of crowd behavior has called attention to the dynamism of crowds:

The crowd, once formed, wants to grow rapidly. It is difficult to exaggerate the power and determination with which it spreads. As long as it feels that it is growing—in revolutionary states, for example, which start with small but highly-charged crowds—it regards anything which opposes its growth as constricting.… The crowd here is like a besieged city and, as in many sieges, it has enemies before its walls and enemies within them. During the fighting it attracts more and more partisans from the country around.⁴⁹

In a rare moment of candor, Lenin revealed to an associate, P. N. Lepeshinskii, that he well understood the principles of mass psychology:

At the end of the summer of 1906, [Lenin] in an intimate conversation predicted with considerable assurance the defeat of the Revolution and hinted at the need to prepare for a retreat. If despite such a pessimistic mood, he nevertheless worked for the intensification of the proletariat’s revolutionary forces, then this was, apparently, from the idea that the revolutionary spirit [revoliutsionnaia aktual’nost’] of the masses never does harm. If there should occur another chance for victory or even semi-victory, then it will be in large measure owing to this spirit.⁵⁰

In other words, mass action, even if unsuccessful, was a valuable device to keep crowds at a high level of tension and combat readiness.*

In the three months that followed his return to Russia, Lenin acted with reckless impetuosity to bring down the Provisional Government by mob action. He subjected the government and its socialist supporters to ceaseless verbal assaults as traitors to the Revolution, and concurrently incited the population to civil disobedience—the army to ignore government orders, the workers to take control of their factories, the communal peasants to seize private land, the ethnic minorities to claim their national rights. He had no timetable, but felt confident of imminent success because each skirmish revealed the indecision as well as the impotence of his adversaries. Had he not lost nerve in the decisive moment during the July putsch he might well have taken power then rather than in October.

Paradoxically, although militarized, Lenin’s (and, later, Trotsky’s) tactics did not entail much physical violence. That was to come later, after power had been secured. The purpose of the propaganda campaigns and mass demonstrations, the barrage of words and the street disorders, was to implant in the minds of opponents as well as of the public at large a sense of inevitability: change was coming and nothing could stop it. Like his pupils and emulators Mussolini and Hitler, Lenin won power by first breaking the spirit of those who stood in his way, persuading them that they were doomed. The Bolshevik triumph in October was accomplished nine-tenths psychologically: the forces involved were negligible, a few thousand men at most in a nation of one hundred and fifty million, and victory came almost without a shot being fired. The whole operation served to confirm Napoleon’s dictum that the battle is won or lost in the minds of men before it even begins.

The Bolsheviks made the first bid for power on April 21, taking advantage of a political crisis over Russia’s war aims.

It will be recalled that at the end of March 1917, the Ispolkom compelled the Provisional Government to repudiate Miliukov’s claim to Austrian and Turkish territories. To placate the socialists, the government issued on March 27 a declaration, cleared by the Ispolkom, in which, without in so many words renouncing annexationist ambitions, it declared Russia’s objective to be “lasting peace” based on the “self-determination of nations.”

This concession put the matter to rest, but only temporarily. It became once again a bone of contention in April with the return to Russia of Victor Chernov. The leader of the SR Party had spent the war years in the West, mainly in Switzerland, where he participated in the Zimmerwald and Kiental conferences, and published, allegedly with German funds, revolutionary literature for Russian prisoners of war in Germany and Austria.⁵¹ Back in Petrograd, he immediately launched a campaign against Miliukov, calling for his resignation and asking the government to transmit its March 27 declaration to Allied governments as a formal statement of Russia’s war aims. Miliukov objected to this demand on the grounds that the Allies could misinterpret Russia’s formal renunciation of the territories promised to her to mean that she intended to leave the war. But the cabinet overruled him: Kerensky displayed particular zeal in this affair, which promised to undermine Miliukov, his principal rival, and to strengthen his own position in the Soviet.⁵² Eventually, a compromise was reached. The government agreed to hand the Allies its declaration of March 27 but accompany it with an explanatory note which would remove any doubts about Russia’s intention to stay in the war. In the words of Kerensky, the note drafted by Miliukov and approved by the cabinet “should have satisfied the most violent critic of Miliukov’s ‘imperialism.’ ”⁵³ It reaffirmed Russia’s determination to fight for the alliance’s common “high ideals” and “fully to carry out the obligations” toward it.⁵⁴ On April 18 (May 1 in the West), the two documents were cabled to Russian embassies abroad for transmittal to Allied governments.

When the government’s note appeared in Russian newspapers on the morning of April 20 it enraged the socialist intelligentsia. Its displeasure was due not to the pledge to fight until victory, which was the stated objective of all the socialist parties save for a fringe minority, but to the ambivalent language about “annexations and contributions.” The Ispolkom voted that day that “revolutionary democracy will not permit the spilling of blood for … aggressive objectives.” Russia had to fight on, but only until the time when all the belligerents were prepared to make peace without annexations.⁵⁵

This dispute could have been readily resolved by consultation between the government and the Ispolkom, which almost certainly would have led to the government’s capitulating. But before a compromise could be reached, the anger spilled to the barracks and workers’ quarters, which were linked to the Ispolkom with invisible threads.

The street disorders on April 20–21 began spontaneously, but they were quickly taken in hand by the Bolsheviks. A young Social Democratic officer, Lieutenant Theodore Linde, who had participated in the drafting of Order No. 1, interpreted the government’s note as a betrayal of the revolution’s democratic ideals. He summoned representatives of his regiment, the Finnish Reserve Guards, and called on them to bring their men into the streets to demonstrate against Miliukov. He made the rounds of the other garrison units bearing a similar message.⁵⁶ Linde was an ardent patriot who wanted Russia to stay in the war: he lost his life soon afterward, lynched by front-line troops whom he exhorted to combat but who decided, from his German-sounding name, that he was an enemy agent.⁵⁷ Like most Russian socialists, however, he wanted the war to be waged for “democratic” ideals. He seems not to have realized that urging troops to take part in an unauthorized political manifestation was tantamount to inciting mutiny. From 3 p.m. onward, several military units, headed by the Finnish Guards, marched, fully armed, to Mariinskii Palace, the seat of the government, where they shouted for Miliukov’s resignation.⁵⁸

Because of the indisposition of Guchkov, the cabinet at this moment was meeting not in Mariinskii Palace but in Guchkov’s office at the Ministry of War. Before it now appeared General Kornilov, who, as commander of the Petrograd Military District, bore responsibility for the capital’s security. He requested permission to have troops disperse the mutineers. According to Kerensky, the cabinet unanimously denied this request: “We were all confident of the wisdom of our course and felt certain that the population would not permit any acts of violence against the Government.”⁵⁹ It was the first, but not the last time that the Provisional Government, faced with an open challenge to its authority, flinched from using force—a fact that escaped neither Kornilov nor Lenin.

Up to this point, the Bolsheviks had nothing to do with the disturbance: indeed, it seems to have caught them by surprise. But they lost no time in exploiting it.

The activities of the Bolshevik high command at this time are far from clear, because most of the relevant documents remain unpublished. The official Communist version of the events holds that the party’s Central Committee did not authorize the anti-government demonstrations which took place in Petrograd in the evening of April 20 and throughout April 21: the Bolsheviks who took to the streets carrying banners reading “Down with the Provisional Government” and “All Power to the Soviets” are said to have acted on instructions of second-rank Bolsheviks, including one S. Ia. Bagdaev.* But it is quite unthinkable that in a centralized party like the Bolsheviks, a minor functionary would have taken it upon himself to authorize revolutionary slogans in defiance of the Central Committee—a charge rendered the more preposterous by Bagdaev’s documented opposition to Lenin’s confrontational stance against the Provisional Government.⁶⁰ This misleading account of the events of April 20–21, 1917, has been made up in order to conceal the fact that the first Bolshevik attempt at a putsch ended in ignominious failure. To confuse the picture further, Communist historians have gone to the lengths of citing resolutions adopted by the party after the event as indicative of its intentions before it had taken place, and attributing directives written by Lenin to “unidentified sources.”

In the afternoon of April 20, as the troops called out by Linde were converging on Mariinskii Square, the Bolshevik Central Committee convened an emergency session. It passed a resolution, which Lenin had drafted earlier in the day upon reading Miliukov’s note, which provided the rationale for the Bolshevik-sponsored demonstrations that followed. Early editions of Lenin’s writings denied his authorship; it has been finally acknowledged as his in the fifth edition of Lenin’s works, published in 1962.⁶¹ Lenin described the Provisional Government as “thoroughly imperialist” and dominated by domestic as well as Anglo-French capital. A regime of this kind was by its very nature incapable of renouncing annexations. Lenin criticized the Soviet for supporting the government and called on it to assume full power. This was not, as yet, an overt appeal for the overthrow of the government, but it required no deep reflection to draw such a conclusion from Lenin’s words. It certainly entitled Bolshevik demonstrators to carry banners reading “Down with the Provisional Government” and “All Power to the Soviets,” from which Lenin would later disassociate himself.

What tactical decisions the Central Committee adopted at this meeting are not known: the published version of the minutes of the Petrograd Committee, which often joined in the meetings of the Central Committee, records only organizational trivia. It omits all subsequent sessions until May 3.⁶² Two things, however, are reasonably certain. Lenin seems to have been the main advocate of aggressive action and to have run into strong opposition: this much is known from the aftermath, when he came under criticism from his associates, notably Kamenev. Second, the demonstrations were intended as a full-scale putsch, a reenactment of February 26–27 when rioting workers and mutinous soldiers brought down the tsarist government.

Already in the evening of April 20, after the troops that took part in the afternoon demonstration had returned to their barracks, fresh groups of soldiers and workers appeared on the streets with anti-government banners: they were the advance troop of the Bolshevik-led rioters. Before long, a counter-demonstration took place carrying banners reading “Down with Lenin!” On Nevsky, the demonstrators clashed. Following the intervention of the Ispolkom, the crowds were pacified.

The Bolshevik Central Committee reconvened in the morning of April 21 to adopt directives for the day’s operations.⁶³ One directive ordered the dispatch of agitators to factories and barracks to inform workers and soldiers about the demonstration planned for that day and urge them to join in.⁶⁴ Such agitators appeared during the noontime lunch break in many factories of the Vyborg District, whose workers were the most radicalized in Petrograd. Appeals to the workers to take the afternoon off and participate in an anti-government protest met with a disappointing response, most likely because SR and Menshevik agents from the Ispolkom were on hand to neutralize them. Workers in only three small plants passed Bolshevik resolutions: they numbered a mere one thousand,⁶⁵ less than .5 of 1 percent of Petrograd’s labor force. Putilov, Obukhov, and the other large enterprises ignored the Bolsheviks. That the Bolsheviks planned armed action is indicated by the fact that on April 21, N. I. Podvoiskii, the head of their Military Organization, called on the Kronshtadt naval base to dispatch to Petrograd a detachment of reliable sailors.⁶⁶ The Kronshtadt sailors were the roughest, most violence-prone element in the city: heavily influenced by anarchists, they needed little encouragement to beat up and rob the burzhui. Bringing them into the city was almost certain to result in pogroms. To have invited them gives lie to Lenin’s claim that on April 21 the Bolsheviks had intended a “peaceful reconnaissance.”

In the early afternoon, a column bearing anti-government banners, preceded by units of the Bolshevik “Factory Militia” armed with guns, advanced along Nevsky toward the city center. Although a sorry performance, in which neither soldiers nor sailors took part, it was the first armed challenge to the democratic government. As the demonstrators approached the Kazan Cathedral, they ran into a counterprocession that shouted “Long Live the Provisional Government.” A melee ensued and some random shooting, in which three persons died. It was the first street violence in Petrograd since February.

While his followers were on the streets, Lenin thought it prudent to stay at home.⁶⁷

Kornilov, seeking again to restore order, instructed artillery units and troops to be brought out. This time he ran into the defiance of the Ispolkom, which insisted it could calm the crowds by persuasion. It phoned the Military Staff to countermand Kornilov’s instructions. Kornilov then met with Ispolkom’s representatives. They assumed responsibility for stopping the disorders, whereupon he revoked his instructions and ordered the troops to stay in the barracks. To make certain that neither the government nor the Bolsheviks resorted to arms, the Ispolkom issued a proclamation to the Petrograd garrison:

Comrade Soldiers! During these troubled days do not come out with weapons unless called by the Executive Committee [Ispolkom]. The Executive Committee alone has the right to dispose of you. Every order concerning the appearance of military units on the street (except for routine detail duty) must be issued on the blank of the Executive Committee, bear its seal and the signatures of at least two of the following: Chkheidze, Skobelev, Binasik, Sokolov, Goldman, Filippovskii, Bogdanov. Every order must be confirmed by telephoning 104–06.⁶⁸

This instruction subverted the authority of the military commander of Petrograd. Unable to carry out his duties, Kornilov asked to be relieved and assigned to the front. At the beginning of May he assumed command of the Eighth Army.

Later in the day, the Ispolkom voted to prohibit all demonstrations for the next forty-eight hours. It denounced anyone who led armed men into the streets as a “traitor to the Revolution.”⁶⁹

On April 21, analogous Bolshevik demonstrations under identical slogans took place in Moscow.

The disorders in Petrograd subsided toward the evening of April 21 from lack of mass support: demonstrators loyal to the government proved to be at least as militant as and considerably more numerous than those who followed the Bolshevik lead. In Moscow, Bolshevik riots went on for yet another day, terminating when angry mobs surrounded the rioters and tore anti-government banners from their hands.

The instant it became apparent that the putsch had failed, the Bolsheviks disclaimed all responsibility. On April 22, the Central Committee passed a resolution which conceded that the “petty bourgeois” mass, after some initial hesitation, had come out in support of the “pro-capitalist” forces, and condemned anti-government slogans as premature. The task of the party was defined as enlightening the workers about the true nature of the government. There were to be no more demonstrations and the instructions of the Soviet had to be obeyed. The resolution, most likely moved by Kamenev, represented a defeat for Lenin, whom Kamenev charged with “adventurism.” Lenin lamely defended himself by blaming the anti-government character of the demonstration on hotheads from the Petrograd Committee.

But even while defending himself, he inadvertently revealed what had been on his mind:

This was an attempt to resort to violent means. We did not know whether at that anxious moment the mass had strongly shifted to our side.… We merely wanted to carry out a peaceful reconnaissance of the enemy’s strength, not to give battle …⁷⁰

How to reconcile his admission that the April riots were “an attempt to resort to violent means” with the claim that they were meant as a “peaceful reconnaissance” Lenin did not explain.*

For the time being, the crowds followed the Ispolkom and, through its agency, the government. In this context, it is understandable why the socialist intellectuals opposed the use of force. But crowds are fickle, and the main lesson of April was not how weak the Bolshevik Party was but how unprepared the government and the leaders of the Soviet were to meet force with force. Analyzing the lessons of the April days a few months later, Lenin concluded that the Bolsheviks had been “insufficiently revolutionary” in their tactics, by which he could only have meant that they were wrong in not making a grab for power.⁷¹ Still, he drew much encouragement from this opening skirmish: according to Sukhanov, in April his hopes “sprouted wings.”⁷²

The April riots provoked the first serious government crisis. Barely two months after tsarism had collapsed, the intelligentsia saw the country disintegrating before their very eyes—and now they no longer had the tsar and the bureaucracy to blame. On April 26, the government issued an emotional appeal to the nation that it could no longer administer and wished to bring in “representatives of those creative forces of the country which until then had not taken a direct and immediate part” in administration, that is, the socialist intelligentsia.⁷³ The Ispolkom, still afraid of being compromised in the eyes of the “masses,” on April 28 rejected the government’s feeler.⁷⁴

The event that caused the Ispolkom to change its mind was Guchkov’s resignation, on April 30, as Minister of War. As he explains in his memoirs, Guchkov had concluded that Russia had become ungovernable: the only salvation lay in inviting into the government “healthy” forces as represented by General Kornilov and leaders of the business community.⁷⁵ Since this was not possible, given the attitude of the socialist intellectuals, he stepped down. According to Tsereteli, Guchkov’s resignation, accompanied as it was by Miliukov’s request to be relieved of his responsibilities, was symptomatic of a crisis of such dimensions that it could no longer be dealt with by palliative measures.⁷⁶ The “bourgeoisie” was abandoning the government. On May 1, the Ispolkom reversed itself and without consulting the plenum of the Soviet, voted 44–19, with two abstentions, to permit its members to accept cabinet posts.⁷⁷ The negative votes were cast by the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks-Internationalists (followers of Martov), who wanted the Soviet to assume full power. Tsereteli provided an explanation of the majority’s reasoning. The government, he said, had admitted its inability to save the country from the impending catastrophe. In these circumstances, the “democratic” forces had the duty to step in and help save the Revolution. The Soviet could not take power on its own behalf and in its own name, as Martov and Lenin wanted, because by so doing it would push into the arms of reactionaries those numerous elements in the country which, although not committed to democracy, were willing to cooperate with the democratic forces. What he meant another Menshevik, V. Voitinskii, spelled out in arguing for a coalition with the “bourgeoisie” and in obliquely opposing the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” on the grounds that the peasants stood “to the right” of the soviet,⁷⁸ and presumably would refuse to recognize as government a body in which they were not represented.

In agreeing to join a coalition government, the Ispolkom posed a number of conditions: a review of inter-Allied accords, an effort to end the war, further “democratization” of the armed forces, an agrarian policy that would set the stage for the distribution of land to the peasants, and the prompt convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The government, for its part, demanded that the Ispolkom acknowledge it as the exclusive bearer of state authority, empowered to resort to force if the situation required it, as well as the sole source of commands to the armed forces. Representatives of the government and the Ispolkom spent the opening days of May negotiating the terms of the coalition. Agreement was reached during the night of May 4–5, following which a new cabinet was installed in office. The placid and inoffensive Prince Lvov stayed on as Prime Minister; Guchkov and Miliukov formally resigned. The Foreign Ministry portfolio was given to the Kadet M. I. Tereshchenko—a strange choice, for Tereshchenko, a young businessman, had little experience and was unfamiliar to the public. But it was common knowledge that, like Kerensky, he belonged to the Freemasons: suspicions were voiced that he owed his appointment to Masonic connections. Kerensky took over the Ministry of War. He, too, had no background for the post, but his prominence in the Soviet and his rhetorical gifts were expected to inspire the troops as they were preparing for the summer offensive. Six socialists entered the coalition government, among them Chernov, who took the portfolio of Agriculture, and Tsereteli, who became Minister of Post and Telegraphs. The cabinet would have a life of two months.

The May accords somewhat eased the anomalies of dvoevlastie, which had confused the population as to the ultimate source of authority. They were indicative not only of a growing sense of desperation but also of the growing maturity of the socialist intelligentsia, and, as such, were a positive development. On the face of it, a government that united the “bourgeoisie” and “democracy” promised to be more effective than one in which the two groups confronted each other as antagonists. But the agreement also raised fresh problems. The instant the socialist leaders of the Soviet joined the government, they forfeited the role of an opposition. By entering the cabinet, they automatically came to share blame for everything that went wrong. This allowed the Bolsheviks, who refused to join, to pose as the sole alternative to the status quo and the custodians of the Russian Revolution. And since under the hopelessly incompetent administration of liberal and socialist intellectuals events were bound to go from bad to worse, they emerged as the only conceivable saviors of Russia.

The Provisional Government now faced the classic predicament of moderate revolutionaries who take the reins of power from the fallen authority. “Little by little,” writes Crane Brinton in his comparative study of revolutions,

the moderates find themselves losing the credit they had gained as opponents of the old regime, and taking on more and more of the discredit associated by the hopeful with the status of heir of the old regime. Forced on the defensive, they make mistake after mistake, partly because they are so little used to being on the defensive.

Emotionally unable to bear thinking of themselves as “falling behind in the revolutionary process” and to break with rivals on the left, they satisfy no one and are ready to give way to better-organized, better-staffed, more determined rivals.⁷⁹

In May and June 1917, the Bolshevik Party still ran a poor third to the other socialist parties: at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in early June, it had only 105 delegates as against 285 for the SRs and 248 for the Mensheviks.* But the tide was running in its favor.

The Bolsheviks enjoyed many advantages. In addition to their unique position as the sole alternative to the new Provisional Government and their determined and power-hungry leadership, there were at least two others.

The Mensheviks and SRs spouted socialist slogans, but they would not push them to their logical conclusions. This confused their constituency and helped the Bolsheviks. They insisted that since February 1917 Russia had a “bourgeois” regime which they controlled through the soviets: but if this was so, why not be rid of the “bourgeoisie” and vest full power in the soviets? The socialists called the war “imperialist”: if it was so, why not lay down arms and go home? “All Power to the Soviets” and “Down with the War,” though still unpopular slogans in the spring and summer of 1917, had about them a certain inexorable logic—they made “sense” in the context of ideas which the socialists planted in the mind of the population. Because the Bolsheviks had the courage to draw from the common socialist premises the obvious conclusions, the socialists could never really stand up to them: to have done so would have been tantamount to denying themselves. Time and again, whenever the followers of Lenin brazenly challenged democratic procedures and struck for power, the socialists would try to talk them out of it, yet, at the same time, they would prevent the government from reacting. It was difficult to stand up to the Bolsheviks if their only sin was seeking to reach the same goal by bolder means: in many ways, Lenin and his followers were the true “conscience of the Revolution.” Their intellectual irresponsibility combined with the moral cowardice of the socialist majority created a psychological and ideological environment in which the Bolshevik minority battened and grew.

But perhaps the single greatest advantage the Bolsheviks enjoyed over their rivals lay in their total unconcern for Russia. The conservatives, the liberals, and the socialists, each in their own way, sought to preserve Russia as a national entity, in defiance of the particular social and regional interests that the Revolution had unleashed and that were pulling the country apart. They appealed to the soldiers to maintain discipline, to the peasants to wait for the land reform, to the workers to keep up production, to the ethnic minorities to hold in abeyance demands for self-rule. These were unpopular appeals because the absence in the country of a strong sense of statehood and nationhood encouraged centrifugal tendencies and favored the advancement of special interests at the expense of the whole. The Bolsheviks, for whom Russia was no more than a springboard for a world revolution, had no such concerns. It suited them very well if spontaneous forces “smashed” existing institutions and destroyed Russia. For this reason, they encouraged to the fullest every destructive trend. And since these trends, once unleashed in February, were difficult to restrain in any event, they rode the crest of a swelling wave; by identifying themselves with the inevitable, they gained the appearance of being in control. Later on, when in power, they would in no time renege on all their promises and reconstruct the state in a more centralized, autocratic form than the country had ever known: but until then, their indifference to the fate of Russia proved for the Bolsheviks an immense, perhaps decisive asset.

The rapid disintegration of Russia from lack of firm leadership resulted in the weakening of all national institutions, including those run by the socialists, a process which gave the Bolsheviks an opportunity to outflank the Menshevik and SR leadership in the All-Russian Soviet and the major trade unions. Marc Ferro has noted that after the formation of the coalition government, the authority of the All-Russian Soviet in Petrograd declined while that of the regional soviets rose. A similar process occurred in the labor movement, where the national trade unions lost authority to local “Factory Committees.”⁸⁰ The regional soviets and Factory Committees were managed by politically inexperienced individuals amenable to Bolshevik manipulation.

The Bolsheviks enjoyed little influence in the major national trade unions, which were dominated by the Mensheviks. But as transport and communications deteriorated, the large national unions, centered in Petrograd or Moscow, lost touch with their members, scattered over the vast country. The workers now tended to shift loyalties from the professional unions to the factories. This process occurred despite the immense growth of the national trade union membership in 1917. The worker organizations which enjoyed the most rapid rise in power and influence were the Factory Committees, or Fabzavkomy. These had come into existence at the beginning of the February Revolution in the state-owned defense plants, after the disappearance of their government-appointed managers. From there, they spread to privately owned enterprises. On March 10, the association of Petrograd industrialists agreed with the Ispolkom to introduce Factory Committees in all the plants in the capital.⁸¹ The following month, the Provisional Government gave them official recognition, authorizing Factory Committees to act as representatives of workers.⁸²

Initially, the Fabzavkomy adopted a moderate stance, concentrating on increasing production and arbitrating industrial disputes. Then they radicalized. Unhappy over worsening inflation and shortages of fuel and raw materials which led to plant closures, they charged the employers with speculation, false bookkeeping, and resort to lockouts. Here and there, they chased away the proprietors and managers and attempted to run the factories on their own. Elsewhere, they demanded a stronger voice in the management. The Mensheviks viewed with disfavor these anarcho-syndicalist institutions and sought to integrate the Factory Committees into the national trade unions. But the trend ran in the opposite direction as the immediate, day-to-day concerns of the workers became increasingly more linked with fellow workers employed under the same roof than with their occupational counterparts elsewhere. The Bolsheviks found the Fabzavkomy an ideal device with which to neutralize Menshevik influence in the trade unions.⁸³ Although they disapproved of the syndicalist idea of “workers’ control” and after seizing power would liquidate this institution, in the spring of 1917 it was in their interest to promote it. They helped form Factory Committees and organized them nationally. At the First Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees, which they convened on May 30, the Bolsheviks controlled at least two-thirds of the delegates. Their motion calling for workers to be given a decisive vote in factory management as well as access to the firms’ accounting books passed with an overwhelming majority.⁸⁴ The Fabzavkomy were the first institution to fall under Bolshevik control.*

Because he envisaged the power seizure as a violent act, Lenin needed his own military detachments, independent of both the government and the Soviet and accountable only to his Central Committee. “Arming the workers” was central to his program for the coup d’état. During the February Revolution, crowds had looted arsenals: tens of thousands of guns had disappeared, some of them concealed in factories. The Petrograd Soviet organized a “People’s Militia” to replace the dissolved tsarist police, but Lenin refused to have the Bolsheviks join it: he wanted a force of his own.⁸⁵ So as not to be accused of building up an instrument of subversion, he disguised his private army, initially called “Workers’ Militia,” as an innocuous guard to protect factories from looters. On April 28, this militia was incorporated into a Bolshevik Red Guard (Krasnaia Gvardiia), which had the additional mission of “defending the Revolution” and “resisting reactionary forces.” The Bolsheviks ignored objections of the Soviet to this, their own army.⁸⁶ In the end, the Red Guards proved something of a disappointment because they turned either into an ordinary civil police or else merged with the People’s Militia, in either case failing to develop that spirit of class militancy that Lenin had expected of them.⁸⁷ In October, when needed, they would be conspicuous by their absence.

In preparation for their coup, the Bolsheviks also engaged in propaganda and agitation among the garrison and frontline troops. Responsibility for this work was assigned to the Military Organization which, according to one Communist source, had agents and cells in three-fourths of the garrison units.⁸⁸ From them, it obtained information on the mood of the troops, and through them it carried out anti-government and anti-war propaganda. The Bolsheviks won very few adherents among the men in uniform, but they were successful in fanning the troops’ discontent, which had the effect of making the soldiers less likely to obey calls of the government or the Soviet to move against them. According to Sukhanov, although even the most disgruntled garrison soldiers did not favor the Bolsheviks, their mood was one of “neutrality” and “indifference,” which made them receptive to anti-government appeals. In this category was the garrison’s largest unit, the First Machine Gun Regiment.⁸⁹

The Bolsheviks influenced minds mainly by means of the printed word. By June, Pravda had a run of 85,000 copies. They also put out provincial papers, papers addressed to special groups (e.g., female workers and ethnic minorities), and a multitude of pamphlets. They paid particular attention to the men in uniform. On April 15, they brought out a soldiers’ newspaper, Soldatskaia Pravda, which attained a printing of 50,000–75,000 copies. They followed it with a paper for sailors, Golos Pravdy, and another one for frontline troops, Okopnaia Pravda, printed in Kronshtadt and Riga, respectively. In the spring of 1917, they distributed to the troops about 100,000 papers a day, which, given that Russia had 12 million men under arms, was enough to supply one Bolshevik daily per company. In early July, the combined printing of the Bolshevik press was 320,000 copies. In addition, Soldatskaia Pravda printed 350,000 pamphlets and broadsheets.⁹⁰ This was a most remarkable achievement, considering that in February 1917 the Bolsheviks had had no press.

These publications spread Lenin’s message, but in a veiled form. The method employed was “propaganda” which did not tell readers what to do (that was the task of “agitation”) but planted in their minds ideas from which they would themselves draw the desired political conclusions. In appeals to the troops, for example, Bolshevik publications did not incite to desertion, since this would have made them liable to prosecution. In the first issue of Soldatskaia Pravda, Zinoviev wrote that the paper’s objective was forging an indestructible bond between workers and soldiers so that the troops would come to understand their “true” interests and not allow themselves to be used for “pogroms” against the workers. On the issue of the war, he was equally circumspect:

We do not favor dropping guns now. This is no way to end the war. Now the main task is to understand and explain to all soldiers for what purpose this war was begun, who began the war, who needs the war.⁹¹

The “who,” of course, was the “bourgeoisie” against whom the soldiers were to turn their guns.

Such organizational and publishing activities required a great deal of money. Much, if not most, of it came from Germany.

German subversive activities in Russia in the spring and summer of 1917 have left few traces in the documents.* Reliable people in Berlin, using reliable intermediaries, delivered cash to Bolshevik agents by way of neutral Sweden, without written requests or receipts passing hands. Although the opening of the German Foreign Office archives after World War II has made it possible to establish with certainty the fact of German subsidies to the Bolsheviks and with some approximation the sums involved, the exact uses to which the Bolsheviks put the German money remains obscure. According to Minister of Foreign Affairs Richard von Kühlmann, the chief architect of Germany’s pro-Bolshevik policy in 1917–18, the Bolsheviks used the German subsidies mainly for purposes of party organization and propaganda. On December 3, 1917 (NS), in a confidential report, Kühlmann thus summarized Germany’s contribution to the Bolshevik cause:

The disruption of the Entente and the subsequent creation of political combinations agreeable to us constitute the most important war aim of our diplomacy. Russia appeared to be the weakest link in the enemy chain. The task therefore was gradually to loosen it, and, when possible, to remove it. This was the purpose of the subversive activity we caused to be carried out in Russia behind the front—in the first place promotion of separatist tendencies and support of the Bolsheviks. It was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels and under different labels that they were able to build up their main organ, Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda and appreciably to extend the originally narrow basis of their party.⁹²

The total money assigned by the Germans to the Bolsheviks in 1917–18—to help them first take power and then to keep it—has been estimated by Eduard Bernstein, who had good connections in the German Government, at “more than 50 million deutsche marks in gold” ($6 to $10 million, which at that time would have bought nine or more tons of gold).⁹³*

Some of these funds the Germans channeled to Bolshevik agents in Stockholm, the principal of whom was Jacob Fürstenberg-Ganetskii. Responsibility for maintaining contact with the Bolsheviks was assigned to the Russian expert at the German Embassy in Stockholm, Kurt Riezler. According to the counterintelligence service of the Provisional Government, directed by Colonel B. Nikitin, the Germans deposited the money for Lenin at the Diskontogesellschaft in Berlin, which forwarded it to the Nye Bank in Stockholm. Ganetskii would make withdrawals from the Nye Bank, ostensibly for business purposes, but in fact for deposit at the Siberian Bank in Petrograd on the account of a relative of his, one Eugenia Sumenson, a lady of the Petrograd demimonde. Sumenson and one of Lenin’s lieutenants, the Pole M. Iu. Kozlovskii, operated in Petrograd a spurious pharmaceutical business as cover for financial dealings with Ganetskii. The transfer of German funds to Lenin could thus be disguised as legitimate business.⁹⁴ After her arrest in July 1917, Sumenson confessed to having turned over the moneys which she withdrew from the Siberian Bank to Kozlovskii, a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee.⁹⁵ She admitted to having taken out of her bank account for this purpose 750,000 rubles.⁹⁶ Sumenson and Kozlovskii maintained with Stockholm a coded business correspondence, some of which the government intercepted with the help of French intelligence. The following telegram is an example:

Stockholm from Petrograd Fürstenberg Grand Hotel Stockholm. Nestles sends no flour. Request. Sumenson. Nadezhdinskaia 36.⁹⁷

The Germans also used other means of subsidizing the Bolsheviks, one of which consisted of smuggling into Russia counterfeit ten-ruble bank notes. Quantities of such forged money were found on pro-Bolshevik soldiers and sailors arrested in the aftermath of the July putsch.⁹⁸

Lenin kept very much in the background in these transactions, entrusting financial dealings with the Germans to his lieutenants. Still, in a letter to Ganetskii and Radek of April 12, he complained he was receiving no money. On April 21 he acknowledged to Ganetskii that Kozlovskii had given him 2,000 rubles.⁹⁹ According to Nikitin, Lenin corresponded directly with Parvus badgering him for “more materials.”* Three of these communications were intercepted on the Finnish border.¹⁰⁰

Kerensky tackled his responsibilities as Minister of War with admirable energy, for he was convinced that the survival of democracy in Russia depended on a strong and disciplined army and that the army’s flagging spirits would be best uplifted by a successful offensive. The generals thought that if the army remained inactive much longer it would fall apart.¹⁰¹ He hoped to repeat the miracle of the French army in 1792, which stopped and then threw back the invading Prussians, rallying the nation to the revolutionary government. A major offensive was projected for June 12, in fulfillment of obligations to the Allies undertaken before the February Revolution. It had been originally designed as a purely military operation, but it now acquired an added political dimension. A successful offensive was expected to enhance the government’s prestige and reinfuse the population with patriotism, which would make it easier to deal with challengers from the right and the left. Tereshchenko told the French that if the offensive went well, measures would be taken to suppress mutinous elements in the Petrograd garrison.¹⁰²

In preparation for the offensive Kerensky carried out reforms in the army. Alekseev, probably the best strategist in Russia, impressed him as a defeatist, and he replaced him with Brusilov, the hero of the 1916 campaign.* He tightened military discipline, giving officers wide discretion to deal with insubordinate troops. Emulating the commissaires aux armées which the French army introduced in 1792, he sent commissars to the front to raise the soldiers’ morale and to arbitrate between them and the officers: it was an innovation of which the Bolsheviks would make extensive use in the Red Army. Kerensky spent most of May and early June at the front, delivering stirring patriotic speeches. His appearances had a galvanizing effect:

“Triumphal progress” seems a weak term to describe Kerensky’s tour of the front. In the violence of the agitation by which it was accompanied it resembled the passage of a cyclone. Crowds gathered for hours to catch a glimpse of him. His path was everywhere strewn with flowers. Soldiers ran for miles after his motor car, trying to shake his hand or kiss the hem of his garment. At his meetings in the great halls of Moscow the audiences worked themselves up into paroxysms of enthusiasm and adoration. The platforms from which he had spoken were littered with watches, rings, bracelets, military medals, and bank notes, sacrificed by admirers for the common cause.¹⁰³

An eyewitness who compared Kerensky to “a volcano hurling forth sheaves of all-consuming fire,” wrote that for Kerensky

all impediments between himself and the audience are intolerable.… He wants to be all before you, from head to foot, so that the only thing between you and him is the air, completely impregnated by his and your mutual radiations of invisible but mighty currents. For that reason he will hear nothing of rostra, pulpits, tables. He leaves the rostrum, jumps on the table; and when he stretches out his hands to you—nervous, supple, fiery, all quivering with the enthusiasm of prayer which seizes him—you feel that he touches you, grasps you with those hands, and irresistibly draws you to himself.¹⁰⁴

The impact of these speeches, however, evaporated as soon as Kerensky left the scene: professional officers dubbed him “Persuader in Chief.” As he afterward recalled, he found the mood of the frontline troops on the eve of the June offensive ambivalent. German and Bolshevik propaganda had as yet had little influence: its effect was confined to garrison units and the so-called Third Divisions, which were reserve units made up of fresh inductees. But he encountered a widespread sense that the Revolution had made it pointless to fight. “After three years of bitter suffering,” he writes, “millions of war-weary soldiers were asking themselves: ‘Why should I die now when at home a new, freer life is only beginning?’ ”¹⁰⁵ They received no answer from the Soviet, the institution they trusted the most, because its socialist majority adopted a characteristically ambivalent attitude:

51. Kerensky visiting the front: summer 1917.

If one looks through any typical resolution passed by the [Soviet’s] Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary majority one finds an utterly negative characterization of the war as imperialistic, a demand that it be stopped as quickly as possible and an unobtrusive phrase or two, inserted at Kerensky’s urgent demand, suggesting, with dubious logic and no emotional appeal whatever, that, pending a general peace, it would be a good thing if the Russian soldiers would continue to fight.¹⁰⁶

The Bolsheviks, as aware as the government of the disaffection and demoralization of the garrison units, decided early in June to exploit this mood. On June 1, the Military Organization voted to hold an armed demonstration. Since this unit took orders from the Central Committee, it can be taken for granted that the decision was adopted with the latter’s approval and probably on its initiative. On June 6, the Central Committee discussed bringing into the streets 40,000 armed soldiers and Red Guards to march under banners condemning Kerensky and the coalition government and then, at the appropriate moment, “go on the offensive.”¹⁰⁷ What this meant we know from Sukhanov, who learned of the Bolshevik plans from Nevskii, the chairman of the Military Organization:

The target of the “manifestation,” set for June 10, was to be the Mariinskii Palace, the seat of the Provisional Government. This was to be the destination of the worker detachments and regiments loyal to the Bolsheviks. Specially designated persons were to demand that members of the cabinet come out of the palace and answer questions. As the ministers spoke, specially designated groups were to voice “popular dissatisfaction” and excite the mood of the masses. Once the temperature had reached the appropriate level, the Provisional Government was to have been arrested on the spot. Of course, the capital was expected to react immediately. And depending on the nature of this reaction, the Bolshevik Central Committee, under one name or another, was to proclaim itself the government. If, in the course of the “manifestation,” the atmosphere for all this would prove sufficiently favorable, and the resistance shown by Lvov and Tsereteli weak, resistance was to have been overcome by the force of Bolshevik regiments and weapons.*

One slogan of the demonstrators was to have been “All Power to the Soviets,” but inasmuch as the Soviet refused to proclaim itself a government and indeed prohibited armed demonstrations, this slogan, as Sukhanov reasonably concludes, could have only meant that power was meant to pass into the hands of the Bolshevik Central Committee.¹⁰⁸ Since the demonstration was timed to coincide with the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets (scheduled to open on June 3), the Bolsheviks may have planned to confront the congress with a fait accompli and either compel it, against its will, to take power or claim power in its name. Lenin actually made no secret of his intentions. When, at the congress, Tsereteli stated that there was no party in Russia willing to assume power, Lenin shouted from his seat: “There is!” The episode became legend in Communist hagiography.

On June 6, four days before the projected Bolshevik demonstration, the Bolshevik high command met to make final preparations. The proceedings of this conference are known to us only from truncated minutes, in which the most important entry, Lenin’s remarks, have been severely cut.¹⁰⁹ The idea of a putsch ran into stiff resistance. Kamenev, who had criticized Lenin’s “adventurism” in April, again took the lead. The operation, he said, was certain to fail: the issue of the soviets assuming power was best left to the Congress. V. P. Nogin, from the Moscow branch of the Central Committee, was still more outspoken: “Lenin proposes a revolution,” he said. “Can we do it? We are a minority in the country. One cannot prepare an offensive in two days.” Zinoviev also joined the opposition, arguing that the projected action placed the party at great risk. Stalin, E. D. Stasova, the secretary of the Central Committee, and Nevskii vigorously supported Lenin’s proposal. Lenin’s arguments are not known, but judging from Nogin’s remarks it is obvious what he wanted.

The Petrograd Soviet and the Congress of Soviets, on behalf of which the demonstration was to take place, were kept completely in the dark.

On June 9, Bolshevik agitators appeared in the barracks and factories and informed the soldiers and workers of the demonstration scheduled for next day. The organ of the Military Organization, Soldatskaia Pravda, issued detailed instructions to the demonstrators. Its editorial ended with the words: “War to a victorious conclusion against the capitalists!”¹¹⁰

The congress, which was in session at this time, was so spellbound by its rhetoric that it did not even know of the Bolsheviks’ preparations until almost too late. It first learned what the Bolsheviks were up to in the afternoon of June 9 from Bolshevik posters. All the parties present—the Bolsheviks, of course, excepted—voted immediately to order a cancellation of the demonstration, and sent out agitators to workers’ quarters and barracks to spread the message. The Bolsheviks met later that day to deal with new developments. Following discussions, of which no published record exists, they decided to bow to the will of the congress and cancel their demonstration. They further agreed to participate in a peaceful (i.e., unarmed) manifestation scheduled by the Soviet for June 18. Apparently the Bolshevik high command felt it inopportune as yet to challenge the soviets head on.

A Bolshevik coup had been averted, but the Soviet gained a victory of dubious value because it lacked the moral courage to draw from this incident the proper conclusions. On June 11, some 100 socialist intellectuals representing all the parties in the Soviet, the Bolsheviks included, met to discuss the events of the preceding two days. The Menshevik spokesman, Theodore Dan, criticized the Bolsheviks and moved that no party be allowed to hold demonstrations without the Soviet’s approval and that armed units be brought out only in demonstrations sponsored by the Soviet. The penalty for violating these rules would be expulsion. Lenin chose to absent himself, and the Bolshevik case was defended by Trotsky, who had recently arrived in Russia and though not, as yet, formally a member, had drawn very close to the Bolshevik party. In the midst of the discussion, Tsereteli asked for the floor to oppose Dan’s motion which he thought too timid. Pale, his voice quivering from excitement, he shouted:

That which has happened … was nothing but a conspiracy—a conspiracy to overthrow the government and have the Bolsheviks take power, power which they know they will never obtain in any other way. The conspiracy was rendered harmless as soon as we discovered it. But it can recur tomorrow. It is said that the counterrevolution has raised its head. This is untrue. The counterrevolution has not raised its head; it has lowered its head. The counterrevolution can penetrate only by one door: the Bolsheviks. What the Bolsheviks are doing now is not propaganda of ideas but conspiracy. The weapon of criticism is replaced by the criticism of weapons. May the Bolsheviks forgive us, but we shall now adopt different methods of struggle. Revolutionaries unworthy of holding weapons must be deprived of them. The Bolsheviks must be disarmed. One must not leave in their hands those excessive technical means which they have had at their disposal until now. We must not leave them machine guns and weapons. We shall not tolerate conspiracies …*

Tsereteli received some support but the majority was against him. What proof had he of a Bolshevik conspiracy? Why disarm the Bolsheviks who represented a genuine mass movement? Did he really want to render the “proletariat” defenseless?¹¹¹ Martov denounced Tsereteli with particular vehemence. The next day, the socialists voted in favor of Dan’s milder motion, which meant that they refused to disarm the Bolsheviks and dismantle their subversive apparatus. It was a critical failure of nerve. Lenin had directly challenged the Soviet, and the Soviet averted its eyes. The majority preferred to make believe that the Bolsheviks were a genuine socialist party using questionable tactics rather than, as Tsereteli argued, a counterrevolutionary party bent on seizing power. The socialists thus lost the opportunity to delegitimize the Bolsheviks, to deprive them of a powerful political weapon, the claim that they acted on behalf and in the interest of the soviets against alleged enemies.

This cravenness was not lost on the Bolsheviks. The day after the defeat of Tsereteli’s motion, Pravda put the Soviet on notice that the Bolsheviks had no intention, now or in the future, of submitting to its orders:

We find it imperative to declare that, in having joined the Soviet and struggling to have it assume full power, we did not renounce for an instant for the benefit of the Soviet, which is in principle hostile to us, the right, separately and independently, to take advantage of all the freedoms to mobilize the working masses under the banner of our proletarian class party. We also categorically refuse henceforth to submit to such anti-democratic restrictions. Even if state authority were to pass entirely into the hands of the Soviet—and this we favor—and the Soviet would try to place fetters on our agitation, we would not submit passively, but risk prison and other punishments in the name of the idea of international socialism …¹¹²

This was a declaration of war on the Soviet, an assertion of the right to act in defiance of it if and when the Soviet became the government.

On June 16, the Russian army, generously supplied with guns and shells by the Allies, opened a two-day artillery barrage, following which it charged. The brunt of the Russian assault fell on the Southern Front and aimed at Lwow, the capital of Galicia. The Eighth Army, commanded by Kornilov, distinguished itself. Secondary offensive operations were launched on the Central and Northern Fronts. As the government had hoped, the offensive inspired patriotic manifestations. In this atmosphere, the Bolsheviks did not dare to oppose the campaign: at the Congress of Soviets in June, neither Lenin nor Trotsky opposed motions in its support.¹¹³

52. Russian soldiers fleeing Germans: July 1917.

The Russian operation against the Austrians made good progress for two days, and then it ground to a halt as the troops, feeling they had done their duty, refused to obey orders to attack. They were soon in headlong flight. On July 6, the Germans, having once again come to the assistance of their hard-pressed Austrian allies, counterattacked. At the sight of German uniforms, the Russians took to their heels, looting and spreading panic. The June offensive was the dying gasp of the old Russian army.

Since the old Russian army engaged in no significant operations after July 1917, this may be an appropriate place to tally the human casualties Russia suffered in World War I. It is difficult to determine these losses with reasonable accuracy because of the poor quality of Russian war statistics. In standard sources, Russian casualties are given as the highest of any belligerent power: Cruttwell, for instance, estimates 1.7 million Russian dead and 4.95 million wounded, which would slightly exceed the losses suffered by Germany and considerably those suffered by Britain and France, which had stayed in the war sixteen months longer than Russia. Other foreign estimates go as high as 2.5 million dead.¹¹⁴ These figures have been shown to be highly inflated. Official Russian sources speak of 775,400 battlefield fatalities. More recent Russian estimates indicate somewhat higher losses: 900,000 battlefield deaths and 400,000 from combat wounds, for a total of 1.3 million, which is equal to the fatalities suffered by the French and the Austrians but one-third less than the Germans.¹¹⁵

The Russians had far and away the largest number of war prisoners in enemy hands. The 3.9 million Russian captives in German and Austrian POW camps exceeded threefold the total number of prisoners of war (1.3 million) lost by the armies of Britain, France, and Germany combined.¹¹⁶ Only the Austro-Hungarian army, with 2.2 million prisoners, came close. For every 100 Russians who fell in battle, 300 surrendered. In the British army, the comparable figure was 20, in the French, 24, and in the German, 26.¹¹⁷ In other words, Russians surrendered at a rate twelve to fifteen times that of Western soldiers.

The failure of the June offensive was a personal calamity for Kerensky, who had counted on it to rally the divided country around him and the government. Having gambled and lost, he grew distraught, irascible, and excedingly suspicious. In this mood he committed cardinal mistakes that turned him from an adored leader into a scapegoat, despised by the left and right alike.

In the atmosphere of demoralization and despair brought about by the failure of the June offensive, Lenin and his lieutenants ventured on yet another putsch.

No event in the Russian Revolution has been more willfully lied about than the July 1917 insurrection, the reason being that it was Lenin’s worst blunder, a misjudgment that nearly caused the destruction of the Bolshevik Party: the equivalent of Hitler’s 1923 beer-hall putsch. To absolve themselves of responsibility, the Bolsheviks have gone to unusual lengths to misrepresent the July putsch as a spontaneous demonstration which they sought to direct into peaceful channels.

The July 3–5 action was precipitated by the government’s decision to dispatch units of the Petrograd garrision to the front for the anticipated enemy counteroffensive. Inspired primarily by military considerations, this decision was also meant to rid the capital of the units most contaminated by Bolshevik propaganda. To the Bolsheviks this move spelled disaster since it threatened to deprive them of the forces which they intended to use in their next bid for power.¹¹⁸ They responded with a furious propaganda campaign among the garrison troops, attacking the “bourgeois” government, protesting the “imperialist” war, and urging them to refuse to go to the front. No country with a tradition of democracy would have tolerated such incitement to mutiny in time of war.

The Bolsheviks had their main base of support in the 1st Machine Gun Regiment, the largest unit of the garrison, with 11,340 men and nearly 300 officers, among the latter numerous left-wing intellectuals. Many of the men were misfits expelled from their original units for incompetence or insubordination.¹¹⁹ Billeted in the Vyborg District, close to the radicalized factories, it was a seething mass. The Bolshevik Military Organization had here a cell of some thirty members, including junior officers, whom it provided with regular training in agitational techniques.¹²⁰ Bolsheviks as well as anarchists frequently addressed the regiment.

On June 20, the regiment received orders to dispatch to the front 500 machine guns with crews. The next day the troops held a meeting, at which they adopted a resolution—judging by its content, of Bolshevik origin—that they would go to the front only to fight a “revolutionary war”—that is, in defense of a government from which the “capitalists” had been removed and the Soviet had all the power. If, the resolution went on, the Provisional Government attempted to disband it, the regiment would resist.¹²¹ Emissaries were dispatched to other units of the garrison in quest of support.

The Bolsheviks, who played a major role in this mutiny, feared precipitous action likely to provoke a patriotic backlash. They had many enemies, ready to pounce on them at the slightest provocation: according to Shliapnikov, “our supporters could not appear alone on Nevsky without putting their lives at risk.”¹²² Their tactics, therefore, had to combine boldness with prudence: they agitated vigorously among the troops and workers to maintain a high level of tension, but opposed impulsive actions which could get out of hand and end in an anti-Bolshevik pogrom. On June 22, Soldatskaia Pravda appealed to soldiers and workers to refrain from demonstrating without explicit instructions from the party:

The Military Organization is not calling for public appearances. Should the need arise, the Military Organization will call for a public appearance in agreement with the leading institutions of the party—the Central Committee and the Petrograd Committee.¹²³

The Soviet went unmentioned. Such calls for restraint, subsequently cited by Communist historians as evidence that the Bolshevik Party bore no responsibility for the July riots, prove nothing of the kind: they merely show that the party wanted to keep tight control of events.

The first wave of discontent in the regiment was contained when the Bolsheviks dissuaded it from demonstrating and the Soviet refused to endorse its resolution. Resigned, the regiment dispatched 500 machine guns to the front.¹²⁴

At this time, the government, jointly with the Soviet, also quelled incipient violence at Kronshtadt. The garrison at this naval base near Petrograd was under strong anarchist influence but its political organization was in the hands of the Bolsheviks headed by F. F. Raskolnikov and S. G. Roshal.¹²⁵ The sailors had their grievance, namely the government’s forceful ejection of anarchists from the villa of ex-Minister Peter Durnovo, which they had seized after the February Revolution and made into headquarters. The anarchists at the villa behaved in so disorderly a fashion that on June 19 troops were sent to retake it and arrest the squatters.¹²⁶ Incited by the anarchists, the sailors threatened on June 23 to march on Petrograd to free the prisoners. They, too, were restrained by the joint efforts of the Soviet and the Bolsheviks.

But even as they were restrained, the Machine Gunners were subjected to a steady barrage of inflammatory propaganda. The Bolsheviks called for the transfer of all power to the Soviet, to be followed by reelections to the Soviet which would leave it exclusively in Bolshevik hands; this, they promised, would immediately bring peace. They also demanded the “annihilation” of the “bourgeoisie.” The anarchists incited the troops to “pogroms on the Miliukov streets—Nevsky and Liteinyi.”¹²⁷

According to V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, in the evening of June 29 an unexpected visitor appeared at his dacha in Neivola near the Finnish city of Vyborg, a short ride by commuter train from Petrograd. It was Lenin. Having traveled in a roundabout way—“from conspiratorial habit”—he explained that he was extremely exhausted and needed rest.¹²⁸ It was most unusual behavior, quite out of character for Lenin. He was not in the habit of taking vacations in the midst of important political events even when he had better cause to feel exhausted, as in the winter of 1917–18. In this case, the explanation is doubly suspect because in two days the Bolsheviks were to open a conference of their Petrograd organizations which it is hard to conceive Lenin would have wanted to miss. His “conspiratorial” behavior is also puzzling, since he had no ostensible need to conceal his movements. The reason for his sudden disappearance from Petrograd, therefore, must be sought elsewhere: it is virtually certain that he had gotten wind that the government, having obtained enough evidence of his financial dealings with the Germans, was about to arrest him.

On June 21, Captain Pierre Laurent of French intelligence turned over to Russian counterintelligence fourteen intercepted communications between the Bolsheviks in Petrograd and their people in Stockholm indicative of dealings with the enemy; soon he produced fifteen more.¹²⁹ The government claimed later that it had delayed arresting the Bolsheviks because it wanted to catch Lenin’s principal Stockholm agent, Ganetskii, on his next trip to Russia with incriminating documents.¹³⁰ But in view of Kerensky’s behavior after the putsch, there are grounds for suspicion that behind the government’s procrastination lay fear of antagonizing the Soviet.

At the end of June, however, the authorities had enough evidence to proceed and on July 1 ordered the arrest of twenty-eight leading Bolsheviks within the week.¹³¹

Someone in the government alerted Lenin to this danger. The most likely suspect is the same Procurator of the Petrograd Judiciary Chamber (Sudebnaia Palata), N. S. Karinskii, who, according to Bonch-Bruevich, on July 4 would leak to the Bolsheviks that the ministry was about to make public information incriminating Lenin as a German agent.¹³² Lenin may also have been alerted by indications that on June 29 intelligence agents began shadowing Sumenson.¹³³ Nothing else explains Lenin’s sudden disappearance from Petrograd and his furtive escape to Finland, where he was out of reach of the Russian police.*

Lenin hid in Finland from June 29 until the early-morning hours of July 4, when the Bolshevik putsch got underway. His role in the preparations for the July escapade cannot be established. But physical absence from the scene of action need not mean he was uninvolved: in the fall of 1917, Lenin would also hide out in Finland and still take an active part in the decisions leading to the October coup.

The July operation began in the Machine Gun Regiment when it learned that the government was about to disband it and disperse its men to the front.* On June 30, the Soviet invited regimental representatives to discuss their problems with the military authorities. The following day, regimental “activists” held their own meetings. The mood of the men, tense for some time, reached a feverish pitch.

On July 2, the Bolsheviks organized for the regiment a concert meeting at the People’s House (Narodnyi Dom).¹³⁴ All outside speakers were Bolsheviks, among them Trotsky and Lunacharskii: Zinoviev and Kamenev were also scheduled to appear, but failed to show up, possibly because, like Lenin, they feared arrest.¹³⁵ Addressing an audience of over 5,000 men, Trotsky berated the government for the June offensive and demanded the transfer of power to the Soviet. He did not tell the troops in so many words to refuse to obey the government, but the Military Organization had the meeting pass a resolution in this spirit: it accused Kerensky of following in the footsteps of “Nicholas the Bloody” and demanded all power to the soviets.¹³⁶

The troops returned to the barracks too excited to sleep. They held an all-night discussion in the course of which voices were raised demanding violent action: one of the slogans proposed was “Beat the burzhui.”¹³⁷

A pogrom was in the making. The Bolsheviks, gathered at Kshesinskaia’s, were uncertain how to react: join or try to abort it. Some argued that since the troops could not be held back, the Bolsheviks should take charge; others thought it was too soon to move.¹³⁸ Then, as later, the Bolsheviks were torn between the desire to ride to power on the wave of popular fury and the fear that spontaneous violence would provoke a nationalist reaction of which they would be the principal victims.

The company and regimental committees of the Machine Gun Regiment held further meetings on July 3: the atmosphere was that of a village assembly on the eve of a peasant rebellion. The main speakers were anarchists, the most prominent among them I. S. Bleikhman, “his shirt open on his breast and curly hair flying on all sides,”¹³⁹ who called on the troops to take to the streets, weapons in hand, and stage an armed uprising. The anarchists did not spell out the objective of such action: that “the street itself will show.”¹⁴⁰ The Bolshevik agitators who followed the anarchists did not take issue with them; they only urged that before acting the regiment seek instructions from the Bolshevik Military Organization.

But the troops, determined to avoid front-line duty and whipped into frenzy by the anarchists, would not wait: by a unanimous vote they decided to take to the streets, fully armed. A Provisional Revolutionary Committee was elected to organize the demonstration, under the chairmanship of a Bolshevik, Lieutenant A. Ia. Semashko. This happened between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m.

Semashko and his associates, several of whom belonged to the Military Organization, sent out patrols to learn whether the government was taking countermeasures and to confiscate automobiles. They also dispatched emissaries to factories and barracks and to Kronshtadt.

The emissaries met with a mixed reception. A few units of the garrison agreed to join: mainly elements of the 1st, 3rd, 176th, and 180th Infantry Regiments.¹⁴¹ The others refused. The Preobrazhenskii, Semenovskii, and Izmailovskii Guard Regiments declared “neutrality.”¹⁴² In the Machine Gun Regiment itself, despite threats of physical violence, many companies voted to stay on the sidelines: in the end only one-half of the regiment, some 5,000 men, participated in the putsch. Many factory workers also refused to take part.

For lack of adequate documentation, it is difficult to determine the attitude of the Bolsheviks toward these developments. In his report to the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Party later that month, Stalin claimed that at 4:00 p.m. on July 3 the Central Committee took a stand against an armed demonstration.¹⁴³ Trotsky confirms Stalin’s claim.¹⁴⁴ It is not inconceivable that the Bolshevik leaders, without Lenin to encourage them and afraid that a mutiny under their slogans but without their guidance could end in disaster, initially opposed it, but one would feel more confident of this judgment if the protocols of the Central Committee for that day were made available.

As soon as it learned of the proposed demonstration the Ispolkom appealed to the troops to desist:¹⁴⁵ it had no desire to bring down the government and to assume the power that the Bolsheviks were so insistently thrusting into its hands.

That afternoon there appeared before the Executive Committee of the Kronshtadt Soviet two anarchist deputies from the Machine Gun Regiment, wild in appearance and seemingly illiterate.¹⁴⁶ They let it be known that their regiment, along with other military units and factory workers, was taking to the streets to demand the transfer of power to the Soviet. They needed armed support. The chairman of the Executive Committee responded that the sailors would take part in no demonstration which the Petrograd Ispolkom had not authorized. In that event, the emissaries said, they would appeal directly to the sailors. Word went out and 8,000 to 10,000 sailors assembled to hear a hysterical speech about the government’s persecution of anarchists.¹⁴⁷ The sailors prepared to embark for Petrograd: it was unclear to what purpose, but beating up the burzhui, with some looting on the side, could not have been far from their minds. Roshal and Raskolnikov managed to restrain them long enough to call Bolshevik headquarters for instructions. After communicating with headquarters, Raskolnikov told the sailors the Bolshevik Party had decided to take part in the armed demonstration, whereupon the assembled sailors voted unanimously to join in.*

Delegates from the Machine Gunners appeared also before the workers of Putilov, many of whom they won over to their cause.¹⁴⁸

Around 7 p.m. those units of the Machine Gun Regiment that had voted in favor of a demonstration assembled in their barracks. Advance elements, riding in confiscated automobiles with mounted machine guns, were already dispersed in the central parts of Petrograd. At 8 p.m. the soldiers marched to Troitskii Bridge, where mutinous troops from other regiments joined them. At 10 p.m. the mutineers crossed the bridge. Nabokov observed them at this instant: “They had the same dull, vacant, brutal faces that we all remembered from the February days.”¹⁴⁹ Having made their way across the river, the troops divided into two columns, one of which went to Taurida, the other to Mariinskii, the seats of the Soviet and the government, respectively. There was some desultory shooting, mostly in the air, and a bit of looting.

The Bolshevik high command—Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky—appears to have decided on involving the party in these riots around midday on July 3—that is, as the troops of the Machine Gun Regiment were adopting resolutions to demonstrate. At the time, the three were in Taurida. Their plan was to take control of the Workers’ Section of the Soviet, proclaim in its name the passage of power to the Soviet, and present the Ispolkom as well as the Soldiers’ Section and the Plenum with an accomplished fact. The pretext was to have been the irresistible pressure of the masses.¹⁵⁰

To this end, the Bolsheviks engineered later in the day a mini-putsch in the Workers’ Section. Here, as in the Soldiers’ Section, they were in a minority. The Bolshevik faction requested the Ispolkom on very short notice to convene an extraordinary session of the Workers’ Section for 3 p.m. This allowed no time to contact all the SR and Menshevik members of the section: the Bolsheviks, however, made certain that their members turned up in a body, which assured them of a momentary majority. Zinoviev opened the meeting with a demand that the Soviet assume full governmental power. The Menshevik and SR deputies on hand opposed him and asked the Bolsheviks instead to help stop the Machine Gun Regiment. When the Bolsheviks refused, the Mensheviks and SRs walked out, leaving their rivals in full control. They elected a Bureau of the Workers’ Section, which duly passed a resolution presented by Kamenev, the opening sentence of which read:

In view of the crisis of authority, the Workers’ Section deems it necessary to insist that the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies take power in its hands.¹⁵¹

Of course, no such “All-Russian Congress” existed, even on paper. The message was clear: the Provisional Government was to be overthrown.

This accomplished, the Bolsheviks departed for Kshesinskaia’s for a meeting of the Central Committee. At 10 p.m., as the meeting was about to start, a column of the mutinous troops drew near. According to Communist sources, Nevskii and Podvoiskii, speaking from the balcony, urged them to return to their barracks, for which they were booed.* The Bolsheviks were still wavering. They were itching to move, but they worried about the reaction to a coup of front-line troops, among whom, despite vigorous propaganda, they had managed to win over only a few regiments, most notably the Latvian Rifles. The bulk of the combat forces remained loyal to the Provisional Government. Even the mood of the Petrograd garrison was far from certain.¹⁵² Still, the intensity of the disorders and the news that thousands of Putilov workers, accompanied by wives and children, were gathering in front of Taurida overcame their hesitations. At 11:40 p.m., by which time the rioting troops had returned to their barracks and calm had been restored to the city, the Central Committee adopted a resolution calling for the overthrow of the Provisional Government by armed force:

Having considered the events currently taking place in Petrograd, the meeting concludes: the present crisis of authority will not be resolved in the interests of the people if the revolutionary proletariat and garrison do not, at once, firmly and unequivocally, declare that they favor the transfer of power to the Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies.

To this end, it is recommended that the workers and soldiers at once take to the streets to demonstrate the expression of their will.¹⁵³

The Bolshevik objective was unequivocal, but their tactics, as always, were cautious and left room for a face-saving retreat. Mikhail Kalinin, a participant in these events, thus describes the party’s position.

Responsible party workers faced a delicate question: “What is this—a demonstration or something more? Perhaps the beginning of a proletarian revolution, the beginning of a power seizure?” This appeared important at the time, and they especially badgered [Lenin]. He would answer: “We will see what happens; now one can’t tell anything!” … This was, indeed, a review of the revolutionary forces, their numbers, quality, and activism.… This review could turn into a decisive encounter: everything depended on the correlation of forces and any number of chance occurrences. In any event, as if for purposes of insurance against unpleasant surprises, the commander’s order was: “We will see.” This in no way precluded the possibility of throwing the regiments into battle if the correlation of forces proved favorable or, on the other hand, of retreating with the least possible losses, which is what actually happened on July 4.*

The Central Committee entrusted the management of its operation scheduled for the next day, July 4, to the Military Organization, with Podvoiskii in charge.¹⁵⁴ Podvoiskii and his associates spent the night communicating with pro-Bolshevik military units and factories, advising them of the pending action and giving them marching orders. Kronshtadt received a call from Bolshevik headquarters at Kshesinskaia’s requesting troops.¹⁵⁵ The armed manifestation was to begin at 10 a.m.¹⁵⁶

On July 4, Pravda appeared with a large empty space on its front page: visible evidence of the removal the preceding night of an article by Kamenev and Zinoviev urging restraint.¹⁵⁷ The role of Lenin in these decisions, if any, cannot be determined. Bolshevik historians insist that he was enjoying the peace and quiet of the Finnish countryside, oblivious of what his colleagues were doing. He is said to have first learned of the Bolshevik action at 6 a.m. on July 4 from a courier, following which he immediately left for the capital in the company of Krupskaia and Bonch-Bruevich. This version seems unconvincing in view of the fact that Lenin’s followers never undertook any action which he did not personally approve: certainly not action which carried such immense risks. It is also known from Sukhanov (see below) that during the night preceding the riots, Lenin wrote an article for Pravda on the subject: this was almost certainly “All Power to the Soviets,” which the paper printed on July 5.¹⁵⁸

The Provisional Government had known as early as July 2 what the Bolsheviks were up to. On July 3 it contacted the headquarters of the Fifth Army in Dvinsk to request troops. None were forthcoming, at least in part because the socialists in the Soviet, whose approval was essential, hesitated to authorize resort to force.¹⁵⁹ In the early hours of July 4, General P. A. Polovtsev, the new commander of the Petrograd Military District, posted announcements forbidding armed demonstrations and “suggesting” to the garrison troops that they help preserve order.¹⁶⁰ The Military Staff surveyed the forces available to suppress street disorders and found them to be all but nonexistent: 100 men of the Preobrazhenskii Guard Regiment, one company from the Vladimir Military Academy, 2,000 Cossacks, and 50 war invalids. The rest of the garrison had no desire to become involved in a conflict with the mutinous troops.¹⁶¹

July 4 began peacefully: only the eerie silence of the deserted streets suggested something was brewing. At 11 a.m., soldiers of the Machine Gun Regiment, accompanied by Red Guards in automobiles, occupied key points in the city. At the same time, 5,000 to 6,000 armed sailors from Kronshtadt disembarked in Petrograd. Their commander, Raskolnikov, later expressed surprise that the government did not stop his force by sinking one or two of the boats from shore batteries.¹⁶² The sailors were under instructions to proceed from the landing pier near Nikolaevskii Bridge directly to Taurida. But as they lined up, a Bolshevik emissary told them that orders had been changed and they were to go instead to Kshesinskaia’s. The protests of the SRs present were ignored, and the SR Maria Spiridonova, who had come to address the sailors, was left without an audience. Preceded by a military band and carrying banners reading “All Power to the Soviets,” the sailors, drawn out in a long column, crossed Vasilevskii Island and the Stock Exchange Bridge to the Alexander Park, from where they continued to Bolshevik headquarters. There they were addressed from the balcony by Iakov Sverdlov, Lunarcharskii, Podvoiskii, and M. Lashevich. Lenin, who had arrived at Kshesinskaia’s a short time before, displayed an uncharacteristic reluctance to speak. At first, he refused to address the sailors on the grounds that he was not well, but he finally yielded and delivered a few brief remarks. Hailing the sailors, he told them that

he was happy to see what was happening, how the theoretical slogan, launched two months earlier, calling for the passage of all power to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was now being translated into reality.¹⁶³

Even these cautious words could leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Bolsheviks were engaged in a coup d’état. It was to be Lenin’s last public appearance until October 26.

The sailors marched off to Taurida. What transpired inside Bolshevik headquarters after their departure is known from Sukhanov, who was told by Lunacharskii:

… during the night of July 3–4, while sending to Pravda a declaration calling for a “peaceful demonstration,” Lenin had in mind a concrete plan for a coup d’état. Political power—in reality assumed by the Bolshevik Central Committee—was to have been formally embodied in a “Soviet” ministry composed of outstanding and popular Bolsheviks. At this point, three ministers were appointed: Lenin, Trotsky, and Lunacharskii. This government was to have issued at once decrees on peace and land, gaining in this manner the sympathy of millions in the capital and the provinces, thereby solidifying its authority. Lenin, Trotsky, and Lunacharskii reached such an agreement after the Kronshtadt [sailors] had left Kshesinskaia’s for Taurida Palace.… The revolution was to have been accomplished as follows: The 176th Regiment from Krasnoe Selo—the very same regiment to which Dan had entrusted the protection of Taurida—would arrest the Central Executive Committee, whereupon Lenin would arrive at the scene of action and proclaim the new government.*

The sailors, led by Raskolnikov, marched down Nevsky. Interspersed in their ranks were small army contingents and Red Guards. In front, on the side, and in the rear drove armored cars. The men carried banners with slogans prepared by the Bolshevik Central Committee.¹⁶⁴ As they turned into Liteinyi, in the heart of “bourgeois” Petrograd, shots rang out. The column broke up in panic, firing wildly and scattering in all directions: an eyewitness photographed the scene from a window, producing one of the few pictorial records of violence in the Russian Revolution (plate 53). When the shooting stopped, the demonstrators regrouped and resumed the march to Taurida, but they no longer kept an orderly formation and carried their guns at the ready. They arrived at the Soviet around 4 p.m., greeted with loud cheers from soldiers of the Machine Gun Regiment.

The Bolsheviks also brought to Taurida a large contingent of Putilov workers—estimates vary from 11,000 to 25,000.† Other factories and military units swelled the crowd, which came to number in the tens of thousands.^‡ Miliukov thus describes the scene that unfolded in front of Taurida—a scene which despite the appearance of spontaneity was closely orchestrated by Bolshevik agents dispersed in the crowd:

Taurida Palace became the focus of the struggle in the full sense of the word. Throughout the day armed military units gathered around it, demanding that the Soviet, at last, take power.… [Around 4 p.m.] the sailors of Kronshtadt arrived and tried to penetrate the building. They called for the Minister of Justice, Pereverzev, to explain why the sailor Zhelezniakov and the anarchists had been arrested at Durnovo’s villa. Tsereteli came out and told the hostile crowd that Pereverzev was not in the building, that he had already handed in his resignation and was no longer a minister: the first was true, the second not. Deprived of a direct excuse, the crowd for a while was at a loss what to do. But then shouts resounded that the ministers were responsible for each other: an attempt was made to arrest Tsereteli but he managed to escape inside the palace. Chernov emerged from the palace to calm the crowd. The crowd immediately threw itself on him and searched him for weapons. Chernov declared that under such circumstances he would not talk. The crowd fell silent. Chernov began a long speech about the activities of the socialist ministers in general and his own, as Minister of Agriculture, in particular. As for the Kadet ministers, bon voyage to them. The crowd shouted in response: “Why didn’t you say so before? Declare at once that the land is being turned over to the toilers and power to the soviets!” A tall worker, raising his fist to the minister’s face, shouted in a rage: “Take power, you s.o.b., when they give it to you!” Several men from the crowd seized Chernov and dragged him toward a car, while others pulled him toward the palace. Having torn the minister’s coat, the Kronshtadt sailors shoved him into the car and declared that they would not let him go until the Soviet took power. Some workers broke into the hall where the Soviet was in session, shouting: “Comrades, they are beating up Chernov!” In the midst of the turmoil, Chkheidze appointed Kamenev, Steklov, and Martov to liberate Chernov. But Chernov was liberated by Trotsky, who had just arrived on the scene. The Kronshtadt sailors obeyed him and Trotsky accompanied Chernov back into the hall.*

53. July events.

In the meantime, Lenin had unobtrusively made his way to Taurida, where he stayed out of sight, prepared, depending on how events unfolded, either to assume power or to declare the demonstration a spontaneous outburst of popular indignation and then disappear from sight. Raskolnikov thought he looked pleased.¹⁶⁵

Not all the action occurred at Taurida. While the mobs were converging on the seat of the Soviet, small armed detachments directed by the Military Organization occupied strategic points. Bolshevik prospects improved considerably when the garrison of the Peter and Paul Fortress, 8,000 strong, went over to them. Motorized Bolshevik units took over the plants of several anti-Bolshevik newspapers; anarchists seized the most outspoken of them, Novoe vremia. Other detachments took up guard duty at the Finland and Nicholas railroad stations, and set up machine gun emplacements on Nevsky and its side streets, which had the effect of cutting off the staff of the Petrograd Military District from Taurida Palace. One armed unit attacked the seat of the counterintelligence service where materials on Lenin’s dealings with the Germans were stored.¹⁶⁶ No resistance was encountered. In the judgment of a liberal newspaper, in the course of the day Petrograd passed into Bolshevik hands.¹⁶⁷

The stage was thus set for a formal takeover: nominally in the name of the Soviet, in reality on behalf of the Bolsheviks. In preparation for this crowning event the Bolsheviks had arranged for a delegation of handpicked “representatives” of fifty-four factories to call on Taurida with a petition demanding the Soviet assume power. These men forced their way into the room occupied by the Ispolkom. Several of them were allowed to speak. Martov and Spiridonova supported their demand: Martov declared that such was the will of history.¹⁶⁸ At this point it seemed that the rioters would physically inundate and take over the seat of the Soviet. The Soviet had no defense against this threat: its total protection consisted of six guards.¹⁶⁹

And yet the Bolsheviks failed to deliver the coup de grace. It is impossible to tell whether this was due to poor organization, indecisiveness, or both. Nikitin blamed the Bolshevik failure to take power on poor planning.

The uprising was improvised: all the actions of the enemy indicated that it had not been prepared. The regiments and large units did not know their immediate missions even in the main area. They were told from the balcony of Kshesinskaia’s: “Go to Taurida Palace, take power.” They went and while awaiting the promised further orders commingled with one another. By contrast, units of ten to fifteen men in trucks and armored cars and small detachments in automobiles enjoyed complete freedom of action, lorded it over the city, but they, too, received no concrete orders to take over the strongpoints such as railroad stations, telephone centers, supply depots, arsenals, the doors to all of which stood wide open. The streets flowed with blood, but there was no leadership …*

But in the ultimate analysis the Bolshevik failure seems to have been caused by factors other than inadequate forces or bad planning: contemporaries agree that the city was theirs for the asking. Rather, it was due to a last-minute failure of nerve on the part of the commander in chief. Lenin simply could not make up his mind: according to Zinoviev, who spent these hours by his side, he kept wondering aloud whether this was or was not the time to “try,” and in the end decided it was not.¹⁷⁰ For some reason he could not summon the courage to make the leap: possibly the dark cloud which hung over him of government revelations about dealings with the Germans held him back. Later, when both of them sat in jail, Trotsky told Raskolnikov, in what Raskolnikov took to be veiled criticism of Lenin: “Perhaps we made a mistake. We should have tried to take power.”¹⁷¹

When these events were taking place, Kerensky was at the front. The frightened ministers did nothing. The roar of thousands of armed men in front of Taurida, the sight of vehicles with soldiers and sailors racing to unknown destinations, the knowledge of being abandoned by the garrison filled them with a sense of hopelessness. According to Pereverzev, the government was effectively captive:

I did not arrest the leaders of the uprising on July 4, prior to the publication of documents, only because at that moment they already in effect had under arrest a part of the Provisional Government in Taurida Palace, and could have arrested Prince Lvov, myself, and Kerensky’s deputy without any risk to themselves, if their determination matched even one-tenth their criminal energy.¹⁷²

In this desperate situation, Pereverzev decided to release part of the information at his disposal on Lenin’s German connections, hoping that it would unleash a violent anti-Bolshevik reaction among the troops. He had urged two weeks earlier that this information be made public, but the cabinet overruled him, on the grounds (according to a Menshevik newspaper) that “it was necessary to display caution in a matter concerning the leader of the Bolsh[evik] Party.”¹⁷³ Although Kerensky was later to accuse Pereverzev of an “unpardonable” mistake in having released the facts on Lenin, he himself, having learned on July 4 of the disturbances, urged Lvov to “speed up the publication of information in the possession of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.”¹⁷⁴ After checking with Colonel Nikitin and General Polovtsev, Pereverzev invited to his office over eighty representatives of military units stationed in and around Petrograd as well as journalists. This occurred around 5 p.m., as the disturbance at Taurida was coming to a head and a Bolshevik coup seemed but minutes away.* In order to save the most damning material for the prospective trial of the Bolshevik leaders, Pereverzev released only fragments of the evidence at his disposal, and the least credible part at that. It consisted of a shaky account by Lieutenant D. Ermolenko, who reported that while a prisoner of war of the Germans he had been told that Lenin was working for them. This hearsay evidence did a great deal of harm to the government’s case, especially with the socialists. Pereverzev also released some of the information on Bolshevik financial dealings with Berlin by way of Stockholm. He unwisely asked G. A. Aleksinskii, a discredited onetime Bolshevik Duma deputy, to attest to the veracity of Ermolenko’s account.¹⁷⁵

54. P. N. Pereverzev.

Karinskii, a friend in the Ministry of Justice, instantly warned the Bolsheviks what Pereverzev was about to do,¹⁷⁶ whereupon Stalin asked the Ispolkom to stop the spread of “slanderous” information about Lenin. Chkheidze and Tsereteli obliged, telephoning the editorial offices of the Petrograd dailies to request, in the name of the Ispolkom, that they not publish the government’s release. Prince Lvov did likewise; so did Tereshchenko and Nekrasov.* All newspapers but one honored the request. The exception was the mass-circulation Zhivoe slovo, which appeared the next morning with banner headlines—LENIN, GANETSKII & CO. SPIES—followed by the account of Ermolenko and details concerning the moneys sent by the Germans to Kozlovskii and Sumenson through Ganetskii.¹⁷⁷ The report was endorsed by Aleksinskii. Broadsheets containing this information were posted throughout the city.

The revelations about Lenin and the Germans, spread by the regimental emissaries whom Pereverzev had briefed, had an electrifying effect on the troops: little as most of them cared whether Russia was ruled by the Provisional Government in partnership with the Soviet or by the Soviet alone, they felt passionately about collaboration with the enemy. The suspicions which lingered around Lenin because of his journey across enemy territory made him highly unpopular with the troops: according to Tsereteli, Lenin was so hated by the men in uniform that he had to ask the Ispolkom for protection.¹⁷⁸ The first to reach Taurida were units of the Izmailovskii Guards; they were followed by elements of the Preobrazhenskii and Semenovskii, the latter marching to a military band. Cossack units also turned up. At the sight and sound of approaching troops, the mob in front of Taurida fled pell-mell in all directions, some seeking safety in the palace.

At this moment, inside Taurida a discussion was underway between the Ispolkom and the Bolshevik factory “representatives.” The Mensheviks and SRs were playing for time, hoping that the government would come to their rescue. The instant loyal troops made their way into Taurida, they threw out the Bolshevik motion.¹⁷⁹

There was little violence because the rioters dispersed on their own. Raskolnikov ordered his sailors to return to Kronshtadt, keeping 400 men to defend Kshesinskaia’s. The sailors at first refused to leave, but gave in when they were surrounded by a superior and unfriendly force of loyal troops. By midnight Taurida was cleared of the mob.

The unexpected turn of events threw the Bolsheviks into complete disarray. Lenin fled Taurida as soon as he had learned from Karinskii of Pereverzev’s action, which must have been just before the soldiers arrived on the scene. After his departure, the Bolsheviks held a consultation, which ended with the decision to abort the putsch.¹⁸⁰ At noon they had been distributing ministerial portfolios among themselves; six hours later they were hunted quarry. Lenin thought all was lost. “Now they are going to shoot us,” he told Trotsky, “it is the most advantageous time for them.”¹⁸¹ He spent the following night at Kshesinskaia’s under the protection of Raskolnikov’s sailors. In the morning of July 5, as street vendors were hawking copies of Zhivoe slovo, he and Sverdlov slipped out and hid in a friend’s apartment. For the next five days he led an underground existence, changing quarters as often as twice daily. The other Bolshevik leaders, with the exception of Zinoviev, stayed in the open, risking arrest and in some cases demanding to be arrested.

On July 6, the government ordered the detention of Lenin and his accomplices, eleven in all, charging them with “high treason and organizing an armed uprising.”* Sumenson and Kozlovskii were promptly apprehended. Soldiers came to Steklov’s residence during the night of July 6–7; when they threatened to smash his rooms and beat him up, Steklov telephoned for help. The Ispolkom rushed two armored cars to protect him; Kerensky also intervened on his behalf.¹⁸² The same night, soldiers appeared at the apartment of Anna Elizarova, Lenin’s sister. As they searched the room, Krupskaia screamed at them: “Gendarmes! Just like under the old regime!”¹⁸³ The hunt for Bolshevik leaders went on for several days. On July 9, troops inspecting private automobiles caught Kamenev: in this case a lynching was prevented by Polovtsev, the commander of the Petrograd Military District, who not only freed Kamenev but provided a car to take him home.¹⁸⁴ In all, some 800 participants in the insurrection were taken into custody.* As far as can be determined, not one Bolshevik was physically harmed. Considerable damage, however, was done to Bolshevik properties. The editorial office and printing plant of Pravda were destroyed on July 5. After the sailors guarding Kshesinskaia’s had been disarmed without offering resistance, the Bolshevik headquarters were occupied as well. The Peter and Paul Fortress surrendered.

55. The Palace Square in Petrograd occupied by loyal troops after the suppression of the Bolshevik putsch: July 1917.

On July 6, Petrograd was taken over by garrison troops and soldiers freshly arrived from the front.

The Bolshevik Central Committee issued on July 6 a flat denial of the accusations of treason leveled at Lenin and demanded an investigation.¹⁸⁵ The Ispolkom obliged by appointing a five-man jury. It so happened that all five were Jews: since this might have laid the committee open to suspicion by the “counterrevolutionaries” that it was loaded in Lenin’s favor, it was dissolved and none appointed to replace it.

The Soviet, in fact, never looked into the accusations against Lenin, which did not deter it, however, from deciding firmly in favor of the accused. Although Lenin’s putsch was directed as much against the Soviet as against the government, with which, since May, it had been closely linked, the Ispolkom would not face reality. In the words of a Kadet newspaper, although the socialist intellectuals called the Bolsheviks “traitors,” “at the same time, as if nothing had happened, they remained for them comrades. They continued to work with them. They flattered and reasoned with them.”¹⁸⁶ The Mensheviks and SRs now, as before and later, viewed the Bolsheviks as errant friends and their opponents as counterrevolutionaries. They feared that the charges leveled at the Bolsheviks were merely a pretext for an assault on the Soviet and the entire socialist movement. The Menshevik Novaia zhizn’ cited Den’ as follows:

Today it is the Bolshevik Committee that is being convicted; tomorrow they will cast suspicions on the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, and then they will declare a Holy War against the Revolution.¹⁸⁷

The paper rejected out of hand the government’s charges against Lenin, accusing the “bourgeois press” of “deplorable slander” and “wild howls.” It urged the condemnation of those—presumably the Provisional Government—who engaged in “consciously slanderous defamation of prominent leaders of the working class.”¹⁸⁸ Among the socialists who sprang to Lenin’s defense, calling the charges against him “slander,” was Martov.* These claims had nothing to do with the facts of the case: the Ispolkom neither asked the government for its evidence nor undertook its own investigation.

Even so, it went to great pains to protect the Bolsheviks from government retribution. As early as July 5, a delegation of the Ispolkom went to Kshesinskaia’s to discuss with the Bolsheviks terms for a peaceful resolution of the affair. They all agreed that there would be no repressions against the party and that all those arrested in connection with the events of the preceding two days would be released.¹⁸⁹ The Ispolkom then requested Polovstev not to assault the Bolsheviks’ headquarters, as he had been expected to do momentarily.¹⁹⁰ It also passed a resolution forbidding the publication of government documents implicating Lenin.¹⁹¹

Lenin defended himself in several brief articles. In a joint letter with Zinoviev and Kamenev to Novaia zhizn’ he claimed never to have received “one kopeck” from Ganetskii and Kozlovskii, either for himself or for the party. The whole thing was a new Dreyfus or a new Beilis affair, engineered by Aleksinskii at the behest of the counterrevolution.¹⁹² On July 7, he declared that he would not stand trial because, under the circumstances, neither he nor Zinoviev could expect justice to be done.¹⁹³

Lenin always tended to overestimate the determination of his opponents. He was convinced that he and his party were finished, and like the Paris Commune, destined merely to serve as an inspiration for future generations. He considered moving the party center abroad once again, to Finland and even Sweden.¹⁹⁴ He entrusted to Kamenev his theoretical last will and testament, the manuscript of “Marxism on the State” (later used as the basis for State and Revolution), with instructions for publication in the event he was killed.¹⁹⁵ After Kamenev had been caught and nearly lynched, Lenin decided to take no more chances. During the night of July 9–10, accompanied by Zinoviev, he boarded a train at a small suburban railroad station to escape and hide in the countryside.

Lenin’s flight when his party faced the prospect of destruction was seen by most socialists as desertion. In the words of Sukhanov:

The disappearance of Lenin when threatened with arrest and trial [was], in itself, a fact worthy of note. In the Ispolkom no one had expected Lenin to “extricate himself from the situation” in just this way. His flight produced in our circles an immense sensation and led to passionate discussions in every conceivable way. Among the Bolsheviks, some approved of Lenin’s action. But the majority of the members of the Soviet reacted with a sharp condemnation. The Mameluks and the Soviet leaders shouted their righteous resentment. The opposition kept its opinion to itself: but this opinion reduced itself to an unqualified condemnation of Lenin from the political and moral points of view … the flight of the shepherd could not but deliver a heavy blow to the sheep. After all, the masses, mobilized by Lenin, bore the whole burden of responsibility for the July days.… And the “real culprit” abandons the army, his comrades, and seeks personal safety in flight!¹⁹⁶

Sukhanov adds that Lenin’s escape was seen as all the more reprehensible in that neither his life nor his personal freedom was at risk.

Kerensky, who returned to Petrograd in the evening of July 6, was furious with Pereverzev and fired him. Pereverzev, in his view, had “lost forever the possibility of establishing Lenin’s treason in final form, supported by documentary evidence.”¹⁹⁷ This seems a spurious rationale for Kerensky’s failure, in the days that followed, to take decisive action against Lenin and his followers. If no effort was made to “establish Lenin’s treason in final form” it was from the desire to placate the socialists who had sprung to Lenin’s defense: it was a “concession to the Soviets by a Government which had already lost Kadet support and could not afford to antagonize the Soviets as well.”* This consideration, indeed, was decisive in Kerensky’s behavior in July and the months ahead.

56. Mutinous soldiers of the 1st Machine Gun Regiment disarmed: July 5, 1917.

Kerensky now replaced Lvov as Prime Minister, while retaining the portfolios of War and Navy. He began to act as a dictator and, to give visible expression to his new status, moved into the Winter Palace, where he slept in the bed of Alexander III and worked at his desk.¹⁹⁸ On July 10 he asked Kornilov to assume command of the armed forces. He ordered the disarming and dissolution of units which participated in the July events; the garrison was to be reduced to 100,000 men, the rest to be sent to the front. Pravda and other Bolshevik publications were barred from the trenches.

Yet for all this display of determination, the Provisional Government did not dare take the one step that would have destroyed the Bolshevik Party: a public trial at which all the evidence in its possession of treasonous activity would have been laid out. A commission was appointed under the new Minister of Justice, A. S. Zarudnyi, to prepare the case against the Bolsheviks. It assiduously collected materials—by early October, eighty thick volumes—yet no legal proceedings were ever instituted. The reason for this failure was twofold: fear of “counterrevolution” and the wish not to antagonize the Ispolkom.

The July putsch imbued Kerensky with an obsessive fear that the right would exploit the Bolshevik threat to stage a monarchist coup. Addressing the Ispolkom on July 13, he urged it to distance itself from the elements which “with their actions inspire the forces of the counterrevolution” and pledged that “any attempt to restore the Russian monarchic regime will be suppressed in the most decisive, pitiless manner.”¹⁹⁹ Like many socialists, he is said to have been alarmed rather than gratified by the zeal with which loyal troops had crushed the July riots.²⁰⁰ In his eyes, the Bolsheviks were a threat only to the extent that their slogans and behavior encouraged the monarchists. It is almost certainly from the same consideration that he decided on July 7 to ship the Imperial family to Siberia. The departure was carried out in utmost secrecy during the night of July 31. Accompanied by an entourage of fifty attendants and servants, the Romanovs left for Tobolsk, a town which had no railroad and therefore offered fewer opportunities for escape.²⁰¹ The timing of the decision—three days after the Bolshevik putsch and the day after Kerensky’s return to Petrograd—indicates that Kerensky’s motive was to prevent right-wing elements from exploiting the situation to restore Nicholas to the throne. Such was the opinion of the British envoy.²⁰²

A related consideration was the desire to curry favor with the Ispolkom, which continued to regard the Bolsheviks as members in good standing and to treat all attacks against them as machinations of the “counterrevolution.” The Mensheviks and SRs in the Soviet repeatedly assailed the government for its “campaign of vilification” against Lenin, demanding that the charges be dropped and the detained Bolsheviks released.

Kerensky’s tolerant treatment of the Bolsheviks, who had almost overthrown him and his government, contrasted sharply with the impetuous manner he would reveal in dealing with General Kornilov the following month.

As a result of the inaction of both the government and the Ispolkom the fury against the Bolsheviks, which Pereverzev’s initiative had unleashed, dissipated. The two lost a unique opportunity to liquidate the genuine “counterrevolution” from the left out of fear of an imaginary “counterrevolution” from the right. The Bolsheviks soon recovered and resumed their bid for power. Trotsky later wrote that when, at the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1921, Lenin admitted the party had committed mistakes in its dealings with the enemy, “he had in mind our hasty uprising” in July 1917. “Fortunately,” Trotsky added, “our enemies had neither sufficient logical consistency nor determination.”²⁰³

*This apparently refers to an offer made to Lenin by Parvus at their 1915 meeting.

*N. F. Kudelli, Pervyi legaVnyi Peterburgskii Komitet Bol’shevikov v 79/7 g. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), 66; A. G. Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god, II (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925), 179–88. Shliapnikov claims that the Petrograd Bolsheviks were dismayed by the policies allegedly forced on them by Kamenev, Stalin, and Muranov, but in view of the policies which they themselves had pursued before the three senior Bolsheviks appeared in Petrograd, the more likely cause of the dismay seems to have been resentment at having to play second fiddle.

†The records of this conference, which have not been published in Russia, can be found in Leon Trotskii, Stalinskaia shkola falsifikatsii (Berlin, 1932), 225–90. The above resolutions appear on pp. 289–90.

*As an Austrian subject, Radek was considered an enemy alien by the Provisional Government. Refused an entry visa to Russia, he remained in Stockholm until October 1917 working for Lenin. Subsequently, several more parties of Russian émigrés crossed Germany en route to Russia.

†Subsequently, several more parties of Russian émigrés crossed Germany en route to Russia.

*There is no stenographic record of this speech, but the notes which Lenin used have been published: LS, XXI (1933), 33; see also LS, II (1924), 453–54, and F. F. Raskolnikov, Na boevykh postakh (Moscow, 1964), 67.

*Iu. Kamenev in Pravda, No. 27 (April 8, 1917), 2. Kamenev refers to the resolutions of the Bolshevik Conference of March 28.

*This tactic has succeeded in confusing even some historians: since the Bolsheviks did not openly declare that they wanted power, it is argued, they did not want it. But in October 1917 they would also pretend to act under pressure from below although no such pressure existed. The duality of instruments used by the Bolsheviks and their emulators was first noted by Curzio Malaparte in his Coup d’Etat. A participant in Mussolini’s power seizure, Malaparte realized what most contemporaries and many historians have missed—namely, that the Bolshevik revolution and its successors operated on two distinct levels, the observable and the concealed, the latter of which delivered the death blow to the existing regime’s vital organs.

*Cf. Eric Hoffer: “Action is a unifier.… All mass movements avail themselves of mass action as a means of unification. The conflicts a mass movement seeks and incites serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip its followers of their distinct individuality and render them more soluble in the collective medium”: The True Believer (New York, 1951), 117, 118–19.

*Ocherki istorii Leningradskoi organizatsii KPSS, I (Leningrad, 1962), 481. Bagdaev had in fact been charged by the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party with organizing the May 1 demonstration, which fell on April 18, the day the government’s declaration and note on war aims were delivered to Allied governments: Kudelli, Pervyi, 82.

*The American historian Alexander Rabinowitch, who adopts the Bolshevik thesis that the April demonstrations were a peaceful demonstration, avoids the problem by omitting in his citation of the above passage Lenin’s reference to “violent means”: Prelude to Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1968), 45.

*W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, I (New York, 1935), 159. The First Peasants’ Congress, attended by over a thousand delegates, had in it twenty Bolsheviks: VI, No. 4 (1957), 26.

*The rivalry between trade unions and Factory Committees would recur twenty years later in the United States when plant-based unions, affiliated with the CIO, challenged the craft-oriented unions of the AFL. Here, as in Russia, the Communists favored the former.

*A set of documents, purporting to demonstrate direct German involvement in Russian events, 1914–1917, and known as the “Sisson Papers,” had surfaced in early 1918. They were published in the United States by the Committee on Public Information, War Information Series, No. 20 (October 1918), The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy. The German Government had at once proclaimed them a complete forgery (Z. A. B. Zeman, Germany, and the Revolution in Russia, 1915–1918, London, 1958, p. X.) See further George Kennan in The Journal of Modern History, XXVIII, No. 2, June 1956, 130–54. Their effect has been to discredit for many years the very notion of German financial and political support of Lenin’s party.

*Bernstein’s figure was confirmed by postwar researches in German Foreign Ministry Archives. Documents found there indicate that until January 31, 1918, the German government had allocated for “propaganda” in Russia 40 million deutsche marks. This sum was exhausted by June 1918, following which (July 1918) an additional 40 million marks were assigned for this purpose, although apparently only 10 million were spent, not all of them on the Bolsheviks. A German mark at the time bought four-fifths of a tsarist ruble and approximately two post-1917 rubles (so-called “Kerenki”). Winfried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik, 1918 (Vienna-Munich, 1966) 213–14, Note 19.

*B. Nikitin, Rokovye gody (Paris, 1937), 109–10. According to the author (107–8), Kollontai also served as an intermediary delivering German money to Lenin. Despite overwhelming evidence of German subsidies to Lenin from German sources, some scholars still find the notion unacceptable. Among them is as well-informed a specialist as Boris Souvarine: see his article in Est & Ouest, No. 641 (June 1980), 1–5.

*In his memoirs Brusilov claims to have known even as he assumed supreme command that Russian troops had no fighting spirit left in them and that the offensive would fail: A. B. Brusilov, Moi vospominaniia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929), 216.

*N. Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, IV (Berlin, 1922), 319. Sukhanov did not provide the source of this information, but Boris Nikolaevskii, the Menshevik historian, deduced that it had to come from Nevskii: SV, No. 9–10 (1962), 135n. Tsereteli notes that although in 1922, when Sukhanov published his memoirs, all the principals were still alive and could have denied his account, none of them did so: I. G. Tsereteli, Vospominaniia o Fevral’skoi Revoliutsii, II (Paris-The Hague, 1963),185.

*Pravda, No. 80 (June 13, 1917), 2. This was a closed meeting and no other accounts exist. Tsereteli, however, affirms that the above citation from Pravda correctly renders his speech, with some minor, though not insignificant omissions: Tsereteli, Vospominaniia, II, 229–30.

*Lenin was aware as early as mid-May that the government intercepted his communications with Stockholm. On May 16 in the pages of Pravda he taunted the “servants of the Kadets” who, although “lording it over the Russo-Swedish frontier,” failed to catch all the letters and telegrams: Lenin, PSS, XXXII, 103–4. Cf. Zinoviev in PR, No. 8–9 (1927), 57.

*The best account of the role of the regiment in July, based on archival documents, is by P. M. Stulov in KL, No. 3/36 (1930), 64–125. Cf. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, II (New York, 1937), 17.

*Raskolnikov in PR, No. 5/17 (1923), 60. Roshal was shot in December 1917 by anti-Communists. Raskolnikov, a party member since 1910 and in 1917 deputy chairman of the Kronshtadt Soviet, in the 1920s and 1930s held various Soviet diplomatic posts abroad. Recalled to Moscow in 1939, he refused to return and assailed Stalin in an open letter, following which he was declared “an enemy of the people.” He died later that year in southern France under highly suspicious circumstances.

*Vladimirova in PR, No. 5/17 (1923), 11–13; Ia. M. Sverdlov in ISSSR, No. 2 (1957), 126. The report of the government commission appointed to investigate the July riots, reprinted in D. A. Chugaev, ed., Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v iiule g. (Moscow, 1959), 95–96, describes the Bolshevik speeches as much more militant.

*M. Kalinin in Krasnaia gazeta, July 16, 1920, 2. Since Lenin was not on the scene, Kalinin presumably refers to what he said the next day. Cf. a similar assessment by Raskolnikov in PR, No. 5/17 (1923), 59. The Bolshevik tactic was not lost on the Mensheviks. Tsereteli describes an incident that occurred in the afternoon of July 3 after Stalin had appeared before the Ispolkom to inform it that the Bolsheviks were doing all they could to stop the workers and soldiers from taking to the streets. Smiling, Chkheidze turned to Tsereteli, “Now the situation is clear.” “I asked him,” Tsereteli continues, “in what sense he considered the situation clear.” “In the sense,” Chkheidze responded, “that peaceful people have no need to enter into a protocol a statement of their peaceful intentions. It appears that we will have to deal with a so-called spontaneous demonstration which the Bolsheviks will join, saying that the masses cannot be left without leadership.” Tsereteli, Vospominaniia, I, 267.

*Sukhanov, Zapiski, IV, 511–12. After Sukhanov had published these recollections in 1920, Trotsky vehemently repudiated them and so did, at Trotsky’s prodding, Lunacharskii. Lunacharskii wrote Sukhanov a letter denouncing his statement as utterly baseless and warning that its publication could have for Sukhanov, “as a historian, an unpleasant consequence” (ibid., 51411.-51511.). Sukhanov, however, refused to recant, insisting that he accurately recalled what Lunacharskii had told him. Yet that same year Trotsky himself admitted in a French Communist publication that the July affair had been intended as a power seizure—that is, the establishment of a Bolshevik government: “We never doubted for a moment that those July days were a prelude to victory”: Bulletin Communiste (Paris) No. 10 (May 20, 1920), 6, cited in Milorad M. Drachkovitch and Branko Lazitch, Lenin and the Comintern, I (Stanford, Calif., 1972), 95.

†fNikitin, Rokovye gody, 133, gives the lower figure, Istoriia Putilovskogo Zavoda, 1801–1917 (Moscow, 1961), 626, the higher. Trotsky’s estimate of 80,000 (History, II, 29) is sheer fantasy.

‡The Bolshevik estimates of 500,000 or more demonstrators (V. Vladimirova in PR, No. 5/17, 1923,40) are vastly inflated: the crowd which took part in the demonstration probably did not exceed one-tenth that number. An analysis of the garrison units known to have participated indicates that at most 15–20 percent of the troops were involved, and very likely considerably fewer: see B. I. Kochakov in Uchënye Zapiski Leningradskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, No. 205 (1956), 65–66, and G. L. Sobolev in IZ, No. 88 (1971), 77. It was Bolshevik policy then and later greatly to exaggerate the number of demonstrators in order to justify the claim that they were not leading the “masses” but responding to their pressures: see the account by an eyewitness, A. Sobolev, in Rech,’ No. 155/3,897 (July 5, 1917), 1.

*Miliukov, Istoriia Vtoroi Russkoi Revoliutsii, I, Pt. 1 (Sofia, 1921), 243–44. Other versions of the Chernov incident are in Vladimirova, PR, No. 5/17 (1923), 34–35, and Raskolnikov, ibid, 69–71.

*Nikitin, Rokovye gody, 148. Nevskii says that the Military Organization, in anticipation of possible defeat, deliberately kept half its forces in reserve: Krasnoarmeets, No. 10/15 (October 1919), 40.

*NZh, No. 68 (July 7, 1917), 3. Pereverzev’s account of these events can be found in a letter to the editor, NoV, No. 14, 822 (July 9, 1917), 4. He is said also to have published recollections in PN, October 31, 1930, but this issue of the paper was unavailable to me.

*Zhivoe slovo, No. 54/407 (July 8, 1917), 1. Cf. Lenin, PSS, XXXII, 413. Lvov told the editors that premature revelation would allow the guilty to escape.

* A. Kerensky, The Crucifixion of Liberty (New York, 1934), 324. They were: Lenin, Zinoviev, Kollontai, Kozlovskii, Sumenson, Parvus, Ganetskii, Raskolnikov, Roshal, Semashko, and Lunacharskii. Trotsky was not on the list, presumably because he was not yet a member of the Bolshevik Party, which he joined only at the end of July. He was taken into custody later.

*Zarudnyi in NZh, No. 101 (August 15, 1917), 2. Nikitin, Rokovye gody, 158, says more than 2,000.

*On August 4, Tsereteli presented and the Ispolkom adopted a motion protesting the persecution of persons involved in the July events on the grounds that such persecution marked the beginning of the “counterrevolution”: NZh, No. 94 (August 6, 1917), 3.

*Richard Abraham, Alexander Kerensky (New York, 1987), 223–24. Pereverzev was fired in the early hours of July 5 on the initiative of Nekrasov and Tereshchenko, but stayed in his post two days longer.