No less angry than the soldiers, though generally more politicised, was the mood among the workers. Strikes multiplied, as did those wheelbarrow-to-canal journeys for abusive overseers. And not only in Petrograd, or among the industrial workers most commonly associated with such agitation: in the town of Roslavl in Smolensk province, for example, it was milliners who made a stand. These mostly young Jewish women, with a tradition of militancy stretching back to 1905, came out for the eight-hour day, a 50 per cent wage increase, a two-day weekend plus paid holidays, and other demands. And they did so with no obsequious niceties.
On 13 May, the Kronstadt Soviet declared itself the only power on the naval island. It announced that it would not recognise the Coalition Government, and would deal only with the Petrograd Soviet. This radical repudiation of Dual Power, though heavily influenced by local Bolsheviks, was slapped down as adventurism by the Petrograd Bolshevik Central Committee. It was not the time, the CC insisted, for such toytown insurrectionary power grabs. The Bolsheviks, wrote Lenin in one pamphlet, must ‘set [themselves] free from the prevailing orgy of revolutionary phrase-mongering and really stimulate the consciousness both of the proletariat and of the mass in general’. The party’s task was to explain their reading of the situation ‘skilfully, in a way that people would understand’. Accordingly, the CC summoned to Petrograd the leading Kronstadt members, Raskolnikov and Roshal.
Lenin remonstrated with them. To no avail. Nor did an appeal from the Petrograd Soviet itself to the Kronstadt forces on 26 May resolve the matter. It would, in fact, require the intercession of Trotsky, on the 27th, to broker a compromise that allowed the Kronstadt Soviet to back down with dignity. Even after that, it remained the only effective government on the island.
In those heady days, as the Coalition Government struggled not to lose control of the country, its critics on the left had trouble controlling their own supporters.
The subordinated nations of the empire were stretching, feeling out new possibilities.
Between 1 and 11 May, Moscow hosted the convention demanded by Muslim Duma deputies in February. Nine hundred delegates from Muslim populations and nations arrived in the city – Bashkirs, Ossets, Turks, Tatars, Kirghiz and more.
Almost a quarter of those present were women, several fresh from the Women’s Muslim Congress in Kazan; one of the twelve-person presidium committee was a Tatar woman, Selima Jakubova. When one man asked why men should grant women political rights, a woman jumped up to answer. ‘You listen to the men of religion and raise no objections, but act as though you can grant us rights,’ she said. ‘Rather than that, we shall seize them!’
The conference was riven on several axes. But a powerful programme of women’s rights was adopted, and, as the left at the Women’s Congress had advocated, polygyny was banned, if only symbolically. Against the plans of the powerful Tatar bourgeoisie for extraterritorial cultural–national autonomy, and against pan-Islamic aspirations, the conference advocated a federalist position of cultural autonomy. This could, and indeed would, mature into calls for national liberation.
Similar demands were on the rise. On 13 May, a Kirghiz–Kazakh congress sent greetings and solidarity to the Petrograd Soviet from Semipalatinsk, a province on the border with China with a largely nomadic population. This congress likewise asserted its right to ‘cultural–national self-determination’ and ‘political autonomy’. In Finland, February had energised a push for autonomy, and perhaps more. The government in Petrograd implored the Finns to wait for a Constituent Assembly: they were setting a bad example for other nationalities. In Bessarabia, there was a contest for the souls of Moldovan peasants. The left took on the fractious new Moldovan National Party, whose leaders demanded the ‘broadest autonomy’. Between 18 and 25 May, Kiev hosted the First Ukrainian Military Congress. Over 700 delegates attended, representing nearly a million people, from the fronts, the rear, and the fleets. A voice for national self-determination.
According to the Menshevik journal Rabochaya gazeta, now, post-revolution, ‘the Provisional Government [had] cut itself off completely from imperialist influences’ and was racing towards ‘universal peace’. On 6 May, the Soviet’s Izvestia, though heavy-hearted that Russian soldiers must continue to fight, asserted that they could at least do so ‘with all their energy and courage … in the firm belief that their heroic efforts will not be used for evil … [but] serving one and the same goal – the defence of the revolution from destruction and the earliest possible conclusion of universal peace’.
Alongside such appeals to the war’s new legitimacy, the Coalition Government knew that its international standing, certainly among the Allies, was heavily dependent on whether it was seen to be doing its bit to win the war – and doing so on those Allies’ decidedly unsocialist terms. Some were clear-sighted that this was a contradiction, and, continuing to laud the anti-imperialist necessity of the war’s continuation, they were entirely cynical. Among the many socialists who were not, who were sincere, the mental contortions were unbearable and tragic. And they grew more painful as the government prepared the army for an offensive.
On 11 May, Kerensky published the document ‘On the Rights of Soldiers’. The edict retained much of the content of Order Number 1 – a necessary sop to popular opinion – but, crucially, reinstated the authority of officers at the front. This included the right to appoint and remove lower-ranking officers without recourse to the soldiers’ committees, and the right to use corporal punishment. The Bolsheviks immediately derided this degrading return of traditional hierarchies as the ‘Declaration of the Rightlessness of Soldiers’.
Kerensky was a born performer. He set out to rally troops for a massive push, the offensive for which everyone was braced. It was a quixotic and grotesque campaign.
In the bomb-swept wilds of the front, the ‘persuader-in-chief’, as he was known, called on all his showmanship. He trudged smiling through the shit, mud and blood of battle lines, attired in immaculate quasi-military outfits. He assembled the soldiers, praised them warmly, met their eyes. He pressed a great deal of flesh. Standing on boxes and stumps and the bonnets of battered military cars, he delivered his shrill oratory to the massed troops, demanding sacrifice, working himself up into such a passion that he would sometimes faint.
And in limited fashion, for a limited time, these interventions worked. When Kerensky arrived, soldiers threw flowers. They carried the beaming leader on their shoulders. When he called for them to do so, they hurrahed. One last push, he exhorted the soldiers, would mean peace. At these words, they prayed and wept.
Or some of them did. The testeria of the reception was genuine, but it was neither deep nor lasting. Kerensky sincerely convinced himself that the army was ready and eager for an offensive. It was not. Perspicacious officers, like the thoughtful General Brusilov, with whom Kerensky replaced Alexeev as commander-in-chief on 22 April, knew this.
Besides, Kerensky only orated before certain troops. He was kept away from those where to attempt it would have been to invite injury or worse. Where he did speak, he soon left, and when the brief narcotic of his sermons ebbed, the soldiers were still stuck scant yards from enemy lines, in freezing filth, in the sights of machine guns. His best speeches notwithstanding, at several stops Kerensky was heckled. The rates of desertion remained astounding, the habits of mutiny assertive. Anti-war agitation, Bolshevik and other, did not abate.
The old guard at the army’s top were deeply bitter at the direction of the war and the erosion of old nostrums. On his first day in charge, Brusilov went to greet the staff at Stavka high command. Their ‘frosty feelings’, he said, were palpable. For these stiff and unreconstructed officers, his willingness to work with soldiers’ committees made Brusilov a traitor. He appalled the senior officers with a cack-handed attempt to show his democratic credentials, greeting the privates on arrival, reaching out to shake their hands. The startled men fumbled with their weapons to respond.
Still, irrespective of plunging morale, dis
trust at the top and desertion at the bottom, the momentum towards an offensive would not slow. No more would counterpressure for rebellion.
The First All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Soviets took place in Petrograd over almost the entirety of May. Reflecting the overlap between peasantry and soldiery, close to half the 1,200 accredited delegates were from the front.
A sizeable minority of delegates (329) had no affiliation. The majority of the 103 Social Democrats were Mensheviks. The SRs, predictably in this peasant country, dominated, with 537 representatives. Even without an absolute majority, they were able to push through their policy of support for coalition with the Provisional Government, their positions on war and peace and the nationalities question. But it was a reflection of the fractious and hardening mood in the country that such triumphs did not always come easily.
Despite the Bolsheviks’ tiny presence – a minuscule group of nine, accompanied by a caucus of fourteen ‘non-party’ delegates who tended to vote with them – their influence was growing. This was, in particular, because of their harder, more coherent and clearly expressed positions on the two key questions of war and land, as laid out in an open letter from Lenin to the Congress on 7 May.
On the 22nd, he addressed the delegates in person, hammering home his support for the poorest peasants and demanding the redistribution of land. Seemingly in response to this upstart stealing the thunder of the peasant party from the left, the SRs hurriedly added to their programme a provision that ‘all lands must without exception be placed under the jurisdiction of the land committees’. Later, Lenin would not hesitate to filch policies from the left wing of the SRs: for now, he provided the party with material.
It was a reflection of the fractiousness within the SRs that at their own Third Congress, held late that month, Chernov came under bitter assault from high-profile Left SRs like Boris Kamkov, Mark Natanson and the celebrated Maria Spiridonova herself. Spiridonova, after eleven brutal prison years, was freed in February, and had recently arrived in Petrograd in dramatic and triumphal style. Promptly elected mayor of Chita in Siberia, near where she had served time, on getting out, she immediately ordered the blowing up of the prisons. Now she and the other Left SRs accused Chernov of having ‘mutilated’ the party programme. They put forward their own proposals for land seizures, immediate peace and socialist government.
The left’s groundswell of support – 20 per cent of the delegates, and up to 40 per cent on some votes – could not win them more than one place (Natanson) on the Central Committee, and it was the moderates’ policies that the party officially represented at the Congress of Peasants’ Soviets. The SR radicals quietly inaugurated an ‘informational bureau’ to coordinate their activities. When rumours of this reached an alarmed Chernov, the Left SRs formally and falsely assured him that they had set up no such thing.
The assiduous push of Lenin and the Bolshevik radicals (not counting the party’s most adventurist wing) for intransigent political positions was starting to bear fruit, including among seemingly unlikely constituencies. That month, Nina Gerd, the organiser of the Committee for the Relief of Soldiers’ Wives in the Vyborg district, a liberal but an old friend of Krupskaya, surrendered to her the organisation. Three years before, in the recollection of one philanthropist, the soldatki had been ‘helpless creatures’, ‘blind moles’, pleading with the authorities for help. Now, as she relinquished the committee, Gerd told Krupskaya that the women ‘do not trust us; they are displeased with whatever we do; they have faith only in the Bolsheviks’. Soon the soldatki were self-organising in their own soviets. And this dauntless spirit was spreading.
At the time, though, for most of the empire, it is fair to say that local conditions, complicated as they often were by national questions and often steered by moderate activists, encouraged less radical positions than the Bolshevik hardliners would like. At the start of May, for example, the Georgian Bolsheviks Mikha Tskhakaya and Filipp Makharadze arrived from Petrograd in Tiflis, Georgia, to urge their comrades to break immediately with ‘collaborationist’ Mensheviks, and unite only with the left Menshevik–Internationalists. Their injunctions were received with scepticism.
In Baku, too, the local Bolsheviks worked with the Mensheviks, and Lenin’s April Theses still caused consternation: discussion of them in the Social Democratic press was hedged with disclaimers. A citywide conference of Social Democrats in mid-May, with a pro-Bolshevik majority, did oppose the Coalition Government, but would not vote to support a position of ‘all power to the soviets’. And in the Baku Soviet itself, resistance to leftist positions remained stiff. On 16 May, the Bolshevik Shaumian’s no-confidence resolution in the new government was roundly defeated: by 166 to nine, with eight abstentions, the soviet passed a Menshevik–SR–Dashnak (a leftist Armenian party) resolution supporting the inclusion of Petrograd Soviet members in the Provisional Government.
Among the most important exceptions to the tendency of regional moderation was Latvia. In the early days, its Bolsheviks, influenced in part by a strong tradition of local unity with Mensheviks, had taken a mild position, as with the Riga Committee’s ‘submissive’ statement of March. Since then, chivvied by their harder, Russia-based Central Committee, their ranks swelled by the return of more militant émigrés, attitudes had changed. The sheer dominance of the local Bolshevik party in the soviets, its outmanoeuvring of liberals within provisional elected councils, gave it so powerful a hand that, in the words of the historian Andrew Ezergailis, ‘the peculiarity of the institutional framework emerging in Latvia after March was that … the concept of dual power simply did not obtain’.
Key to this shift were the Latvian riflemen. The soviet of these soldiers had moved very rapidly leftward in only a few weeks, and at a congress on 15 May, it passed a resolution on the ‘Present Situation’ which laid out a Leninist position on the war, the Provisional Government, and the soviets. Julijs Danisevskis, who moved the document, pre-prepared it with his Bolshevik comrades in Moscow, from where he had only recent arrived. Two days after it passed, the soldiers elected a new Executive Commitee, of which only one member was not a Bolshevik.
Notwithstanding Brusilov’s sincere efforts to embrace certain democratic norms, Kerensky’s reimposition of traditional military discipline, combined with the ongoing threat of transfer to the front, provoked immense anger among soldiers. This was particularly true of those in revolutionary Petrograd – among whom Bolshevik influence was slowly increasing.
The First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was scheduled for 3 to 24 June, in the capital. The prospect of an opportunity to show its military strength appealed to the hard-left Bolshevik Military Organisation (MO). It prepared to flex its muscles. On 23 May, the MO agreed that several regiments – the Pavlovsky, Izmailovsky, Grenadier and First Reserve Infantry – were ‘ready to go out on their own’, to come onto the streets in a large armed demonstration against Kerensky’s military measures.
In the discussion that ensued among the MO activists, the question was never whether the demonstration should occur – on that there was no disagreement – but only how, under what parameters, whether it needed to attract the majority of the soldiers. The organisers decided to hold a meeting with representatives from Kronstadt early the following month. On the basis of that they would decide how and when this show of force should take place.
The repercussions of this decision would be profound.
On 30 May, yet another conference opened: the First Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees, the Fabzavkomy. Such committees had sprung up at the start of the February Revolution, mostly in the publicly owned defence plants, from where they had spread to private industry. In the early, heady post-February days, managers had agreed with the Soviet Ispolkom to introduce them to all plants in Petrograd, and in April they had been empowered to represent workers.
Initially they had tended to issue relatively moderate economic demands, along the kind of radical trade unionis
t lines that the socialist left might term ‘syndicalist’. Then, as shortages continued and social tension ratcheted up, the Fabzavkomy turned left, hard. While Mensheviks controlled most of the national trade unions, already in May it was the Bolsheviks who commanded more than two-thirds of the delegates to the Factory Committee Conference. Now those committees provocatively demanded that workers be given a decisive vote in factory management, and access to the firms’ accounting books.
The industrial working class as a whole was growing militant more quickly than were the peasants and soldiers. On the 31st, in the Workers’ Section of the Petrograd Soviet, a symptomatic motion was won by 173 to 144 votes, insisting that all power should be in the hands of the Soviets.
Such a vote would not have passed in the Soviet as a whole. Nonetheless, this Bolshevik formula was a slap in the face to advocates of Dual Power and to the moderates in the Soviet itself, let alone to the Coalition Government.
Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra, February 1913.
Grigori Rasputin, 1916.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin.
‘Konstantin Petrovich Ivanov’: a clean-shaven Lenin in disguise, August 1917.
Alexandra Kollontai, a provocative and brilliant Bolshevik leader.
Leon Trotsky, ‘charismatic and abrasive, brilliant and persuasive and divisive and difficult’.