‘He is white as a sheet,’ Pravda reported, ‘and very excited. Tense silence reigns.’
Tsereteli launched into a brutal attack. The Bolsheviks were conspirators, he said. To stand against their plans, he demanded once more that they should be disarmed and legally repressed.
The mood was electric. All eyes turned to Kamenev as he rose to respond. If Tsereteli stood by such claims, he rather splendidly exclaimed, let him immediately arrest and try Kamenev himself. With that riposte, the Bolsheviks swept from the hall.
The debate was splenetic in their absence. On the side of Tsereteli were Avksentiev, Znamensky, Liber, and many other right socialists – including Kerensky. Ranged against them were centrist and Left SRs, Trudoviks and Mensheviks, and the far-left Mezhraiontsy. Some argued their case, like Dan, from principles of democracy; some affirmed that Tsereteli’s claims of conspiracy were unproven; some – most eloquently Martov – underlined that the mass of workers supported the Bolsheviks on many issues, and that the task of socialists to their right had, therefore, to be to win those workers over, not to make martyrs of the left.
When it came to the decision, the SRs and Mensheviks narrowly agreed to Dan’s compromise. Tsereteli’s suppressive resolution was withdrawn.
At an emergency meeting of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee, Lenin tried to put the case behind the cancellation. Again he stressed the necessity of ‘maximum calmness, caution, restraint and organisation’, but now he further implied – as, from a very different political position, had Tsereteli – that the revolution was entering a new phase.
Except in the most abstract possible way, Lenin did not apologise or admit to error. To do so was never his style. He argued, rather, that the CC had had ‘no alternative’ but to call a halt to the action, for two reasons: because the Soviet itself had ‘formally banned’ it, and because, according to reliable sources, a formidable group of Black Hundreds had intended a violent response, to unleash counterrevolution.
The former argument was quaint, coming from a man who had never hesitated to break an order or a law if he considered it advantageous so to do. As to the latter, Latsis pointed out that everyone had been aware of the possibility of a counterdemonstration. ‘If we were not ready for it,’ he said, ‘we should have approached the question of a demonstration negatively from the very beginning.’
The fact is that Lenin had blinked. And his abstention on the vote to cancel was not only uncharacteristic, but uncharacteristically evasive of responsibility: if, as he now claimed, there had been no choice, why had he not voted against the action? If the intent behind abstention had been to inoculate himself from criticism for backing down, it did not work.
Volodarsky, Slutsky, the irrepressible Latsis, and various others derided the CC as, in Tomsky’s words, ‘guilty of intolerable wavering’. Naumov, of the Soviet’s Bolshevik delegation, voiced the ultra-left mood, insisting bullishly that he was glad the leadership was undermined, because ‘it is necessary to trust only in oneself and the masses’. ‘If the cancellation was correct,’ he added, ‘when did we make a mistake?’
The question was pertinent. While it may not be alone in this, the socialist left has always tended to exaggerate its successes – the vinegary humorist Nadezhda Teffi quipped, ‘If Lenin were to talk about a meeting at which he, Zinoviev, Kamenev and five horses were present, he would say: “There were eight of us”’ – and it does not have a good record of acknowledging its failures. The fear, perhaps, is that fallibility undermines authority. The left’s typical method has been to brazen out errors; then, as long as possible after any dust has settled, remark en passant that ‘of course’, everyone knows ‘mistakes were made’, back in the mists of time.
On 12 June, Kerensky persuaded the All-Russian Soviet Congress, against the opposition of Bolsheviks and a few others, to resolve that ‘the Russian revolutionary democracy is obliged to keep its army in a condition to take either the offensive or defensive …[to] be decided from a purely military and strategic point of view’. This was permission to resume military operations – including advances. In other words, ‘defencism’, even in its ‘revolutionary’ variety, even undertaken in good faith to protect the gains of the revolution, could segue into ‘traditional’ war. Chernov was clear about this: ‘without an offence’, he said, ‘there is no defence’.
That done, Congress went on to pass Dan’s censure of the Bolsheviks. Then Dan, Bogdanov and Khinchuk proposed another way to take wind out of the left’s sails. The moderates in the Soviet were committed to channelling the city’s radical energies in their own direction, away from the radicals, through a sanctioned outlet to tap and shape the popular mood. Therefore, Congress scheduled for Sunday 18 June a mass demonstration of its very own. That, the moderates decided, would show the Bolsheviks who had a handle on the Petrograd masses.
At the front, the war crawled on. A strange infrastructure of death.
Beyond fields of rye and potatoes and grazing cows, deep in thick woods, Red Cross tents loomed in forest clearings. Dugouts and low log cabins; rough, jury-rigged chapels; and a staccato tinnitus of mortars. Trench-drenched soldiers the colour of the ripped-up earth taking what hours of respite they could, drinking tea from tin mugs. Alternate rhythms of boredom and terror, fire rising to meet German planes blasting overhead scattering propaganda, or fire of their own. The desperate jocularity of fraternisation, yells in halting German and Russian back and forth across those yards of no-man’s-land. The rage of machine guns, the visitations of bad spirits, twelve-inch shells nicknamed for the witch Baba Yaga, screaming in to tear the world apart.
Soldiers stumbled, snared by the war’s predatory metal, the barbed wire that grasped as if with its own purpose. Behind the lines huddled terrorised men – and a small number of women combatants, too – from across the empire, a debased cosmopolitanism of the conscripted, fingering bayonets in these premonitory graves.
All the while behind the front, inflation and inadequate supplies meant living conditions were collapsing. The peasants’ impatience grew more violent. A slow increase of reports of expropriation, less according to some rude, careful sense of village justice, now, than by sheer force, destruction, arson, sometimes murder.
Breakdown was widespread. On 1 June, in Baku, a thousand Azerbaijanis crowded the city hall, demanding grain, as relations soured between them and Armenians. In Latvia, landless peasants kept up pressure on the Land Council, demanding the expropriation of baronial estates. In Ukraine, on the 13th, after repeated attempts to negotiate with Petrograd, the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) issued its ‘First Universal’, announcing an ‘autonomous Ukrainian republic’ – just short of formal separation, but bad enough as far as the Russian right were concerned. The Coalition Government, though, had no choice but to allow it.
Some on the left had little sensitivity to tangled local tensions. In Baku, the Izvestia of the Soviet polemicised against Muslim nationalism without mentioning its counterpart among local Armenians, Jews or Russians. The local Bolsheviks, though they opposed the ‘bourgeois’ nationalist federalist demands of the Muslim National Committee, criticised such soviet myopia; they strove to keep communication open with the Muslim ‘democratic’ movement.
The two great wings of social democracy were moving further and further apart. In early June, those Baku Bolsheviks, following their Georgian comrades in Tiflis, terminated all association with the Mensheviks. At last the regional organisations were swinging behind Lenin’s call for schism.
In part in an effort to dilute the dangerous energies of nationalism and radicalism with Russian patriotism, and, more, to reassure the Allies, the government sped up its plans for what was now a Soviet Congress-authorised military offensive. On 16 June, at the southern front near Lwów, Russian heavy artillery began a pounding two-day onslaught. Kerensky, once more the persuader-in-chief, announced to Russian troops in Galicia that an offensive was about to commence. On the 18th, it would begin – on the very same day as the Soviet?
??s planned march.
The Mensheviks and the SRs inaugurated yet another organising committee, and their papers pushed hard for their demonstration. Briefly, with impressive perversity, the anarchists tried instead to build for one of their own, on the 14th. An irritated Pravda declared such plans ‘ruinous’, and they faded to nothing.
The Bolsheviks and Mezhraiontsy, too, agitated, according to the Bolshevik CC’s aspiration ‘to transform the demonstration, against the will of the Soviet, into an expression of support for the transfer of all power to the Soviet’. They hoped for what Zinoviev called ‘a demonstration within a demonstration’. By their good fortune, from 16 to 23 June, the All-Russian Conference of Bolshevik Military Organisations was scheduled in Petrograd, lending the party the skills of around 100 experienced activists.
The Soviet’s own rather vague slogans for the march declared for the ‘Democratic Republic’, ‘General Peace’ and ‘Immediate Convocation of a Constituent Assembly’. The Bolsheviks reverted to the combative slogans intended for the aborted march of 10 June: ‘Down with the Tsarist Duma!’ ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!’ (those non-socialists in the cabinet); ‘Down with the Politics of the Offensive!’ ‘Bread! Peace! Land!’ On the 14th, Pravda announced that Bolshevik supporters should come out under these slogans even if the rest of their factories did not. The Soviet leadership, to the hooting derision of the left, made a half-hearted attempt to insist that only official slogans would be permissible. The Bolshevik Fedorov embarrassed them by crowing that his party’s main slogan would be: ‘All Power to the Soviets!’
Still, those moderates were combative. On the 17th, Tsereteli mocked Kamenev. ‘Tomorrow’, he taunted, ‘not separate groups but all the working class of the capital there will demonstrate, not against the will of the Soviet but at its invitation. Now we shall all see which the majority follows, you or us.’
Indeed.
Sunday 18 June: a clear, windy morning. Workers and soldiers assembled early. That day sister demonstrations were planned in Moscow, Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Helsingfors (Helsinki), Kharkov, and across the empire.
At 9 a.m., a band struck up the Marseillaise, the French national anthem that had become an international hymn to freedom. The parade began its procession down Nevsky Prospect.
Its colossal size became slowly clear. The march filled the wide vista for miles. Some 400,000 people had taken to the streets.
The great column traced a route via the tomb of the February martyrs, to pay its respects. At its head walked the organisers from the Ispolkom, Mensheviks and SRs from the presidium of the All-Russia Congress, including Chkheidze, Dan, Gegechkori, Bogdanov and Gots. As they approached the Mars Field, they peeled away. A platform had been raised near the burial place. They ascended, to look out over the crowd.
Horror crept over them.
Sukhanov surveyed the mass of jostling banners. ‘Bolsheviks again,’ he later remembered thinking. ‘And there behind them is another Bolshevik column … Apparently the next one, too.’ His eyes widened. He turned his head to take it all slowly in. Here and there, he glimpsed an SR or an official Soviet slogan. But they were ‘submerged by the mass’. The overwhelming majority of banners advancing towards the aghast organisers – like, he said, Birnam Wood towards Macbeth – were Bolshevik.
Seas of ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!’ Wave after wave of ‘Peace! Bread! Land!’ And – a strange taunt to the Soviet conciliators – endless iterations of ‘All Power to the Soviet!’
Tsereteli had looked forward to the Soviet march being ‘a duel in the open arena’. Now blowback blew back, very hard. The results were devastating, unambiguous, crushing. ‘Sunday’s demonstration’, wrote Gorky’s paper Novaya zhizn, ‘revealed the complete triumph of Bolshevism among the Petersburg Proletariat.’
As they came past, Bolshevik after Bolshevik broke away from their fellows to rush up to Chkheidze. Kaustov, the recently imprisoned editor of the party’s front-line paper, they demanded, must be released from custody. Chkheidze made placatory noises. Soon the matter would be out of his hands.
Early afternoon. An extraordinary column of workers marched into sight, as precise as highly trained soldiers. ‘What district is this?’ came a shout.
‘Why, can’t you see?’ the group’s leader said proudly. ‘Exemplary order! That means it’s Vyborg.’ The militant district came led by their heavily Bolshevik soviet. The Vyborg red flags were interspersed with black banners, the irrepressible anarchists demanding ‘Down with Government and Capital!’ Ignoring official pleas, many Vyborg workers carried weapons.
At 3 p.m., 2,000 Anarchist–Communists and sympathetic soldiers broke away from the march and made rapidly for the bleak brick sprawl of Vyborg’s notorious riverside prison, Kresty. At its entrance gates they raised their weapons at the guards, and demanded Kaustov be let out. His terrified jailers plunged into the keep-like maze to fetch him out. Freed from his cell, Kaustov, with lordly front and without missing a beat, demanded that several other political prisoners also be released. Only when their comrades had emerged did the daring anarchists disperse.
That afternoon, as the exultant left celebrated the day, the minister of justice, Perevezev – one of the ten capitalist ministers against whom the banners had railed – called an emergency government meeting. He wanted full power to recapture all escaped prisoners. He demanded the right to employ any means necessary. He got it.
At three the following morning, 19 June, soldiers, Cossacks and armoured cars surrounded the Durnovo villa. They shone their lights on the walls in that eerie White Night, one of the city’s midsummer skies, dark but dimly glowing, a haze like a dirty sunset. The soldiers blared through a megaphone, shouting for the sixty anarchists within to hand over those they had broken out of jail the previous day. Most, including Kaustov, were long gone: still, the anarchists refused to cooperate. They ducked below the windows of the besieged building and hurled out bombs that did not explode. The troops stormed the doors.
A noisy, confused fracas. Asnin – so went the claim in the official enquiry – tried to grab a soldier’s rifle. There was a shot. Asnin was dead.
Word of his martyrdom spread fast through the district. That morning, the factories nearest the villa – the Rozenkrants, the Fenisk, Metalist, Promet and Parviainen plants, among others – came out in militant protest. Crowds gathered. Asnin’s grieving comrades displayed his body at the villa, and mourners lined up to pay respects.
Furious workers lobbied the Ispolkom, which begged for calm and implored the strikers to return to work. It set up an investigation. It demanded that the government release all those detained that night who were not accused of specific crimes. But such measures did little to mollify the militants. Anarchists from the Rozenkrants factory sent representatives to the radical First Machine Gun Regiment and the Moskovsky Regiment, to propose a joint demonstration against the government. The soldiers deflected the suggestion, but the seed of an idea was sown, rage stoked. From here began to accelerate a wave of protests in Petrograd.
That day, the 19th, also showed how divided and politically febrile Petrograd was. The same Nevsky Prospect that had, the previous day, vibrated with Bolshevik slogans under hundreds of thousands of boots, now hosted a parade organised by officer cadets. It was a largely middle-class demonstration, a fraction of the size of that of the 18th, but, nonetheless, it bespoke a certain genuine upsurge of patriotic enthusiasm. The marchers chanted, hurrahed for the troops. They sung nationalist songs and waved portraits of Kerensky. In the eyes of the right, Russian honour seemed to be on its way to a restoration: they were out on the streets to celebrate an event whose echoes had just reached the city: the advance of the army. A shift in the war, a long-mooted wager taken by those in charge. The June, or Kerensky, Offensive.
In Galicia, the Eighth Army broke through lines of demoralised Austrian troops across a twenty-mile front. The offensive, undertaken to reassure the Allies, to shift the war, to discipline the rest
ive and troublesome rear, seemed a devastating success. On the central and northern fronts, the Seventh and Eleventh Armies rapidly took more than 18,000 prisoners. As the advance continued, patriotism swept the country, including among many socialists within the Soviet. An official proclamation from the All-Russian Congress burbled enthusiastically, demanding bread from the peasants and support from the citizenry for Russia’s heroic soldiers.
But such rah-rah did not last long. Word very soon began to drift back from the front that things were not going as planned.
In working-class areas in particular, unrest began to return. Several regiments and factory committees went as far as explicitly condemning the offensive in the Bolshevik press.
On 20 June, the First Machine Gun Regiment in Petrograd received orders to supply 500 machine guns to the front. The regimental committee agreed to this, but a mass meeting of the regiment felt differently. It was unwilling to lose weapons from the revolutionary capital, even to help their fellow soldiers. To the vigorous approval of the far left, the soldiers voted for another demonstration against the government, to be held as soon as possible. They approached other garrisons, and at 5 p.m. won the support of the Grenadier Guards.
The Soviet urgently denounced their actions as ‘a stab in the back’ of their comrades at the front. They begged the machine-gunners to reconsider. When, the next morning, the regiment was ordered to relocate two-thirds of its members to the front, it would only agree to send ten of the thirty detachments, and that only when ‘the war has taken on a revolutionary character’. Given Order Number 1, the machine-gunners insisted, such a forced transfer of units from Petrograd to the front was illegal, and the command was a calculated attempt to break the radical Petrograd garrison. They added, with ominous resolve: ‘If the Soviet … threatens this and other revolutionary regiments with forcible dissolution in response we will … not stop at using armed strength to break up the Provisional Government and other organisations supporting it.’