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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.81: The Revolt of the Left SRs

Hello, and welcome back from holiday hiatus. I hope everyone is good, or at the very least, getting through it. Before we get going, I have one bit of business and one upcoming event to discuss. The bit of businesses is, as you probably noticed this week, there were two ads attached to the beginning of the show, rather than just one, that’s a thing that’ll start happening more in 2022, just be aware. But also be aware of that I remain committed to not inserting mid roll ads into this thing — once the music starts, the content will proceed uninterrupted. I can’t promise that’ll be the case for my future podcast endeavors, as the podcast industry is making my mid-roll holdout position increasingly untenable, but at least for the round of the Revolutions podcast, there aren’t going to be any mid-roll ads.

On the event front, I am very excited to tell you that on Tuesday, January 18th, I will be playing the role of interviewer/conversation partner for Jonathan Katz to discuss his new book Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. If you remember from way back in the final episode of the Haitian revolution series, I said that if you want to understand the burden and expansion of America’s empire, that everybody needs to go investigate the life and career of Smedley Butler. I even spelled his name for you. Well, now we have a thorough modern up-to-date account of the life and career Smedley Butler. Gangsters of Capitalism as a sensational read, and Katz did a great job exploring not just Butler’s historical life and times, but also the ongoing legacy of those life and times in the present day. So this is going to be a digital event, with politics and prose, on Tuesday, January 18th. I’l drop a link with all the information in the show notes, but truly, put this on your calendar, it’s going to be me and Jonathan Katz talking Gangsters of Capitalism, which obviously you should all buy and read.

Okay, so on with the show. We left off with Lenin’s communist government grappling with major economic, political, and social upheavals in the spring of 1918. Civil war was breaking out all around them; the Czech Legions had taken over the Trans-Siberian Railway; people in the cities were starving; industrial production had collapsed. In the context of this crisis, the government of the People’s Commissars unveiled new policies on almost all fronts that we have retroactively called war communism. Now there is an ongoing historical debate how much of this policy shift between the fall of 1917 and the spring of 1918 was the result of the People’s Commissars trying to survive the emergency of civil war and urban famine, and how much of this was just the Bolsheviks-turned-communists taking the mask off and doing what they had always intended to do after they tricked everybody into supporting them back in October with a bunch of decrees they never intended to be their permanent policies. But whichever explanation you prefer, the change in course was very real, and one group in particular — who clearly believed all those Bolshevik decrees back in October — now felt deeply betrayed. And that was the Left SRs.

The Left SRs as a party were defined by their decision to support the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution. Their presence inside the government, their votes in the Soviet executive, their vocal support for the Communists in the streets and in the villages, legitimized the government to the People’s Commissars and effectively countered accusations against Lenin, Trotsky, and the gang that they were trying to build a one party dictatorship. After all, it wasn’t a one party dictatorship, there were two parties. And what the second party brought to the table was, for example, access to the peasantry. The Communist Party had essentially zero operational presence outside the cities, and it was the Left SRs who provided a supportive link to the rural peasantry, who still, after all made up a vast majority of the population of Russia.

And initially, the Left SRs could offer this support without feeling queasy about it. The land decree Lenin had issued on October 26 was just him copying and pasting the SR land program. The Left SRs also supported worker control of factories, the end of any compromise with the bourgeoisie and the liberals, and all power to the Soviets. All of which was rapturously declared in the assembly hall of the Smolny Institute in those first heady days of late October and early November. Now the Left SRs had their disagreements with the Bolsheviks, but those were quibbles compared to the big pieces the October Revolution seemed to be locking in place. But after the Left SRs supported the Bolshevik dismissal of the Constituent Assembly in early January 1918, the relationship between the two parties started to sour.

The first biggest and most directly consequential difference between them was the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Left SRs hated the treaty. They believed, not without good reason, that it turned Russia into a subordinate colonial satellite of the German Empire. They also believed that it was a betrayal of the Bolshevik promise of peace without annexations or indemnities, as it allowed the Central Powers to effectively annex like a third of the former Russian Empire. They also believed that it sold out their brother and in the territory sacrificed to German occupation in the west, to stay nothing of their revolutionary comrades through Europe. The Left SRs agreed with the left Communist critique of the treaty, that ending the imperialist war was not supposed to mean utter capitulation to the Kaiser. If that was the only option, it was far better to embrace the fortunes of revolutionary war, and sweep a revolutionary army across Europe, to tear down imperial capitalism everywhere, root and branch. When Lenin got his way and the treaty was signed in March 1918, the Left SR commissars inside the government resigned rather than go along with it.

Even years later, the Left SR leader Maria Spiridonova told Emma Goldman that the treaty was the Bolsheviks’ first and greatest sin. “And as concerns the revolution itself,” Goldman wrote, summarizing what Spiridonova had told her, “it was precisely the Brest Treaty which struck it a fatal blow. Aside from the betrayal of Finland, White Russia, Latvia, and the Ukraine, which were turned over to the mercy of the Germans by the Brest piece, the peasant saw thousands of their brothers slain and had to submit to being robbed and plundered. The simple peasant mind could not understand the complete reversal of the former Bolshevik slogans of no ‘indemnity and no annexations,’ but even the simplest peasant could understand that his toil and his blood were to pay the indemnities imposed by the Brest conditions.” Spiridonova believed that the treaty fatally poisoned the revolutionary waters. “The peasants grew bitter and antagonistic to the Soviet regime,” she said. “Disheartened and discouraged, they turned from the revolution. As to the effect of the Brest piece upon the German workers, how could they continue in their faith in the Russian revolution in view of the fact that the Bolsheviks negotiated and accepted the peace terms with the German masters over the heads of the German proletariat? The historic fact remains that the Brest piece was the beginning of the end of the Russian revolution. No doubt other factors contributed to the debacle, but Brest was the most fatal of them.”

As a rejoinder to this, Lenin would note out point out two things: first, that the Germans’ obstacle- free invasion of Russian territory after the Russians stalled on signing the treaty in late February 1918 was proof positive that any call to launch a revolutionary war was pure fantasy. It wasn’t just that it was a different option or a less preferable option, but that it wasn’t an option at all. And second, that Spiridonova and the Left SRs generally overstated the hostility of the Russian peasantry to the treaty. They wanted peace. They had been voting for peace with their feet for like a year. And when the Left SRs go into revolt in the name of resuming the war, as they are about to do in this episode, no one’s going to rise with them. Now Spiridonova wasn’t wrong that the peasantry was growing bitter and antagonistic towards the Soviet regime, but this had far more to do with Communist land policy than Communist foreign policy.

Spiridonova and the Central Committee of the Left SRs knew the anger and bitterness of the peasantry very well, as they were presently fielding innumerable complaints from the peasantry about the advent of the food dictatorship and armed requisition of grain. Then on June 11th, 1918, the Communist government unveiled a new institution called the Committees of Poor Peasants or as they were called, the Kombedy. The Kombedy were the beginning of Lenin’s attempt to import class warfare into the rural areas by pitting landless peasants who lived on wage labor against Kulaks, the better off peasants who hired those landless workers. Now we’re going to talk more about this next week, but in addition to ratcheting up coercive pressure in the rural areas, the Kombedy looked like they were being established to supplant all the local Soviets that had grown up since 1917 and which represented all peasant interests, not just wage labor peasant interests. These local Soviets also just so happened to be dominated by the SRs, and they formed an institutional base of power for the SRs independent of the Communists. And that base of power now appeared targeted for demolition.

Now in general, the Left SRs had more libertarianish instincts than their Communist comrades, and the Left SRs were becoming concerned about the whole tilt of Communist policy. The worker control of factories that had been proclaimed right after the October Revolution was now being replaced by nationalization, centralization, the return of bourgeois managers and hierarchical factories. The new Red Army that was being formed was not being formed on the principle of voluntary enlistment and democratized regiments, both of which seem to be key gains of the revolution, but instead going back to the old ways of forced conscription, traditional military discipline, and even the active recruitment of former tsarist officers. Meanwhile, the Cheka, the effectively unaccountable secret police meant to protect the government from political threats, was rapidly growing in size, scope, and ruthlessness. To placate the Left SRs, the Bolsheviks had given them key positions inside the Cheka, but the Left SRs appear to have taken up those positions with the almost single purpose of curbing Bolshevik abuses. It became, for example, Left SR policy for party members in the Cheka to veto nearly every death sentence that came across their desks. Now, this is not to say that the Left SRs had any problem murdering people — they just wanted to murder the right people: nobles, bourgeoisie, bankers, imperialist, capitalists; not salt of the earth peasants who simply didn’t want to give up their last reserves of grain to a bunch of thugs holding bayonets to their throats.

So, all of this made the Left SRs incredibly concerned about the intentions of the Communists by about June 1918. And this was not just about bickering among various party leaders. The concerns of the Left SRs reflected a widespread and growing backlash to the behavior of the Peoples’ Commissars. A fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets was scheduled to convene in July of 1918, and both the Communists and the Left SRs considered it a distinct possibility that the Left SRs would come into the Congress wielding a majority of the votes. Believing that the wind was at their backs, the Left SRs decided to force the government of the People’s Commissars to change their policies. Most dramatically, they planned to use the Congress to force the abrogation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and demand Lenin’s government re-declare war on Germany. As we just heard Maria Spiridonova express, they believe the peace treaty was the poisoned route sapping the vitality of the revolution that they had signed up for. Indeed, the Left SR leadership considered the resumption of war to be the vital course correction the revolution needed, and they plan to go to any length to achieve it.

On June 24, the Left SR Central Committee resolved. If they did not win enough votes in the Fifth Congress to abrogate the treaty, they would force the resumption of war by other means. They adopted a resolution which said, “The Central Committee believes it to be both practical and possible to organize a series of terrorist acts against the leading representatives of German imperialism. In order to realize this, the forces of the party must be organized, and all necessary precautions taken so that the peasantry and the working classes will join the movement and actively help the party. This must be done after Moscow gives a signal. Such a signal may be an act of terrorism, or can take another form.”

This same resolution spelled out what they hope to achieve by this, which was not the overthrow of Lenin’s government, but simply forcing that government into a massive shift in policy. “We regard our policy,” the resolution said, “as an attack on the current policy of the council of Peoples’ Commissars but definitely not as a fight against the Bolsheviks themselves.”

So really what’s going on here is an attempt by the Left SRs to revive the dual power dynamic that had prevailed in 1917 between the Petrograd Soviet and the provisional government. And if you’ll remember, it was said that the job of the Soviet was to point a gun at the head of the provisional government and force them to do what the Soviet wanted, rather than overthrow and displace them. And that’s essentially what the Left SRs planned to do. They wanted to take up the role that had been played by the Petrograd Soviet 1917: point a gun at the head of the Peoples’ Commissars, and forced them to change their policy.

The Left SRs did not much hide what they were up to. They sent agents into the barracks and factories of Moscow to either win active support, or at the very least secure neutrality in case of a coming conflict. And they were pretty successful, as disillusionment with Lenin’s government was on the rise. On June 29th, the front page of the party newspaper contained an appeal to Left SR party members to report to their regional offices for orders, instructions, and military training. On June 30th, Maria Spiridonova publicly declared that the only thing that could save the revolution now was an armed uprising. They were quite open about this, just as the Bolsheviks had been very open in the lead up to October about what they planned to do. People are often under the mistaken impression that bold political insurrections must be preceded by hyper secretive codes of silence. But as often as not, these things are published, discussed, and planned right out in the open.

The Fifth Congress of Soviets opened on July 4th, 1918, in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. The Left SR delegates discovered that they compose something like 35% of the seats. Now it’s entirely likely they actually won a greater share of seats, but that the Communist controlled credentials committee may have approved a number of Communist delegates with incredibly dubious credentials, just to, uh, pad their numbers. But regardless, there was still some hope among the Left SRs that the Left Communist opposition to the peace treaty would join them. And the Left SR leaders got up one after the other and issued a series of blistering denunciations of the peace, culminating with the motion to tear up the treaty and re-declare war on Germany. But despite their own angry misgivings with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Left Communist delegates chose not to break party discipline and they voted against the Left SR motion. It was defeated. The treaty stood, war would not be re-declared. With this critical vote lost, the Left SR delegates promptly walked out of the room. That very night, they initiated their plans for the act of terrorism that would be the signal for a nationwide popular revolt. They ordered a hit on the German ambassador to Russia: Count Wilhelm von Mirbach.

The Left SRs had laid their plans to assassinate the ambassador quite well. And while they were openly signaling their intentions to stage some kind of uprising, they did not openly announce their intention to assassinate Mirbach, which came as quite a surprise to everyone. As I said earlier, the Left SRs had been given a number of positions inside the Cheka, and they now used those positions both to organize the hit and prepare for an insurrection they expected to follow. The deputy director of the Cheka was a Left SR named Pyotr Alexandrovich; the commander of the Cheka’s cavalry detachment was a guy named Dimitri Popov. They organized Cheka units composed almost entirely of Left SRs to be armed and ready to move. The two men tasked with actually carrying out the assassination were Yakov Blumkin, head of the Cheka’s German counter intelligence division, and Nikolai Andreyev, who was a photographer by trade. With all these senior Cheka officials in on the plot, it was easy to secure necessary papers and a believable story for Blumkin and Andreyev to get inside the German embassy. They arrived on the afternoon of July 6th, saying they had come to discuss the case of Lieutenant Roger Mirbach, a German officer suspected of espionage. This was a sensitive case, they said, as the suspect was presumed to be a member of the ambassador’s family, and they said it was vital for them to speak to the ambassador directly.

Now all their paperwork checked out, and this got them in the building, but Count Mirbach himself tried to get a subordinate official along with a staff translator to handle the meeting. But Blumkin insisted he had been instructed to only speak with the ambassador, so Count Mirbach reluctantly entered the room. He said that he much preferred all of this to be handled in writing, whereupon Blumkin and Andreyev opened their briefcases and pulled out revolvers. They started firing. Point blank range, and incredibly they missed with all of these point blank shots. The three Germans in the room dove for cover and Mirbach himself nearly got away through an adjoining room, but Andreyev managed to hit him with another bullet, and Blumkin tossed a bomb, blowing the wounded ambassador sideways. The two assassins then hustled out the window, up over a fence, and into a waiting car. They made a totally clean getaway.

They left behind a German embassy now consumed by blood and fire. The ambassador laid dead. No one in the building knew who the assailants were, why they had done it, whether this would be an isolated incident, or the beginning of an all out attack on Germans in Russia. In the Kremlin, Lenin was informed of the murder around 3:30 in the afternoon, and immediately a string of Peoples’ Commissars converged on the German embassy; first, to find out what had happened, and second, to assure the Germans that the government had nothing to do with it and would punish those responsible. Lenin himself came down around 5:00 PM, answering a demand from the German that he personally apologize for the murder of their ambassador, which was an unusual order from a foreign embassy to a head of state, but Lenin came down and complied, though witnesses reported the apology was cold and perfunctory, and he was mostly interested in the details of the crime itself. Lenin was very shaken to discover the assassins had clearly gained access to the ambassador with the help of top officials in the Cheka, which did not bode well for his own personal safety.

After the assassination, armed Left SR detachment started to move out and occupy key parts of Moscow, including the main Cheka headquarters, and the post and telegraph office, where they publicly broadcast their responsibility for the assassination, and called for a general popular uprising. They had at their disposal about 2000 sailors and cavalry, along with eight artillery guns, 64 heavy machine guns, and a half dozen armored cars. When the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky — who we’ll also talk about more next week as we start getting into the Red Terror days — headed down to the barracks of the cavalry detachment and demanded the two assassins be handed over at once. Instead, the men inside placed him under arrest and held him hostage. One Left SR boasted to Dzerzhinsky, “You stand before a fait accompli. The Brest treaty is over. A war with Germany is unavoidable.”

Meanwhile, Lenin was back at the Kremlin doing some nuclear grade fretting. He was one of the few people who understood just how shaky the Communist government actually was. For all their boasting and propaganda and decrees, at this moment, in Moscow on July 6th, 1918, the Left SRs could have quite easily taken over the Kremlin and shot Lenin and all his comrades had they wanted to. Lenin knew this better than anyone. The only troops he could really trust were a division of Latvian rifleman, who during 1917, had decided to tie their own future fortunes to the Bolsheviks, and ever since had proved to be Lenin’s most loyal and reliable troops. The Latvian riflemen were the only ones he really trusted to serve as his personal bodyguards. The Left SRs had chosen their day to assassinate Count Mirbach well, because it happened to be St John’s Day, a Latvian national holiday, and most of the Latvian rifleman were out on the outskirts of town celebrating, leaving behind only a skeleton crew of about 700 men. So for all the political momentum that had been building behind the Left SRs for the past few months, and the now practically open path to overthrowing the government if they want it to, the Left SRs didn’t really want to overthrow the government. This was not meant to be a coup. The assassination of Count Mirbach was supposed to fatally break relations between Germany and Russia and also spark irresistible, popular pressure that would force Lenin to re-declare war on Germany. And frankly, everything was going according to plan right into the evening of July 6th. But then it started to go sideways. A popular uprising did not materialize, and the Left SR insurrection fatally stalled out.

At around 7:00 PM, Maria Spiridonova and other Left SR leaders went down to the Bolshoi Theater and called on the Fifth Congress of Soviets to reconsider their unwillingness to re-declare war on Germany, but the Communist majority still refused to budge. And as the Left SRs delivered speeches to nervous but ultimately deaf ears, Latvian rifleman surrounded the building. The Communist delegates were allowed to depart, but the Left SRs were cooped up inside. They had, in fact, helpfully congregated themselves for a mass arrest. As Bukharin later said to Left SR leader Isaac Steinberg, who had been commissar of justice ithe government before resigning after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, “We were sitting in our room waiting for you to come arrest us. As you did not do it, we decided to arrest you instead.”

This was hardly the end of it, though. In terms of raw forces, the Left SRs still outnumbered the Communists nearly three to one. At midnight, the commander of the Latvian rifleman went to confer with Lenin and described the following scene:

The Kremlin was dark and empty. We were led into the meeting hall of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars and asked to wait. The fairly spacious premises in which I now found myself for the first time were illuminated by a single electric bulb suspended under the ceiling somewhere in the corner. The window curtains were drawn, the atmosphere reminded me of the front in the theater of military operations. A few minutes later, the door at the opposite end of the room opened and comrade Lenin entered. He approached me with quick steps and asked in a low voice, “Comrade, will we hold out till morning?”

Having asked the question, Lenin kept on staring at me. I had become accustomed that day to the unexpected, but Comrade Lenin’s question took me a back with its sharp formulation. Why was it important to hold out until the morning? Won’t we hold out to the end? Was our situation perhaps so precarious that my commissars had concealed from me it’s true nature?

Lenin’s own pale fear that a few thousand armed men were actually too much for his regime to handle did not align with Communist party pronouncements about the breadth and depth of their power, which they had apparently led even their most loyal operatives to believe. But the commander of the Latvian rifleman went about his business. He surveyed his available forces and found them augmented only by some Hungarian prisoners of war who had turned communist in the prison camps — they were led by a guy called Béla Kun, who offered to fight for the government — but as that was not nearly enough, the Latvian rifleman elected to hold off their counter attack until close to dawn, when the bulk of their forces who had been celebrating on the outskirts of town would be back in the central city. At 2:00 AM, the commander returned to the Kremlin.

“This time,” he said, “Comrade Lenin entered by the same door and approached me with the same quick steps. I took several paces towards him and reported, ” No later than 12 noon on July seven, we shall triumph all along the line. Lenin took my right hand into both of his and said, pressing it very hard, “Thank you, comrade. You have made me very happy.”

At about five o’clock in the morning, about 3,300 men were armed and ready to go, and they launched their counter attack. The Left SR detachments fought tenaciously for what was by now a collapsing lost cause. There was no popular uprising. They had not forced the government to change policy. War with Germany was not in fact now inevitable. It took six or seven hours worth of fighting in the streets, but the Latvian commander was right: by noon on July 7th, they had triumphed all along the line. The Left SRs were defeated.

Over the next several days, hundreds of Left SRs were arrested in Moscow, Petrograd, and other major cities. But in general, the punishment doled out by the government of Peoples’ Commissars was incredibly light. They summarily executed without trial a baker’s dozen of combat leaders from the ranks of the Cheka, including Deputy Director Alexandrovich. But as they interrogated other detainees, they just released anyone who claimed that they opposed the Central Committee’s decision to go into revolt or those who hadn’t actively participated. Plenty of other leaders were allowed to slip somewhat uncontested into the underground. Maria Spiridonova was held in custody at the Kremlin and would go on trial in November. She received a very light one year sentence for the crime of ordering the assassination of a credentialed diplomat in the service of literally trying to start a war. Now that is not the end of Maria Spiridonova’s persecution at the hands of the Communists, but in this initial context, this is a very light sentence. The Left SRs were treated very lightly for all this. And the general suspicion among both domestic and foreign observers is that the Communists, despite having weathered this brief storm, did not believe themselves strong enough or secure enough to just out and out persecute the Left SRs with a much heavier hand, if for no other reason than Left SRs were obviously quite adept at terrorist assassination, and it only takes a handful of people interested in vengeance to start picking off commissars of the people like they are ministers of the tsar.

But though the individual punishments were light the failure of the revolt of the Left SRs marks the end of them as a political party. Their membership split three ways, with some of them condemning their former comrades and reaffirming their support for the Communists. Others headed into the underground, and mostly focused on staging guerrilla, terrorist acts and places occupied by the Germans like Ukraine. Meanwhile, just a little while later, one of the assassins of Count Mirbach, Yakov Blumkin, came out of the underground. He comes back and he joined the Communist Party, and would join Trotsky’s staff, and would only be killed in 1930 on Stalin’s order, on account of his connections to Trotsky, not for his assassination of Count Mirbach.

So to round out today’s episode, the Left SRs made a number of crucially incorrect assumptions that led to an across the board failure of their plan. The main one being that they believe that the peace between Germany and Russia was so tenuous that something is trivial as the assassination of an ambassador would provoke Germany back into war, or, that Lenin and his government would allow themselves to be forced back into war. The truth was, both the German government and the Russian government, each for their own reasons, believe that maintaining peace between the two was absolutely vital. At this very moment, the Germans are off launching their spring offensive against the Allies in the west, their final, last ditch effort to win the war. They could absolutely not be distracted by the resumption of hostilities on their eastern front. Lenin’s government, meanwhile, realized that resuming the war against Germany would be the absolute end of them, and besides, they didn’t really have an army to fight them anyway.

There was also very clearly a misunderstanding about how hostile the people of Russia were to the peace. Sure, it was ignoble, and maybe even a little humiliating, but it was nothing compared to the horrors of war that they had been forced to endure. And then finally, the uprising failed for kind of the same reason the Bolsheviks attempted uprising during July 1917 had failed: they didn’t really have a clear plan for what to do if their intent to intimidate the government into doing what they wanted failed. And when the Communists refused to be intimidated, there wasn’t really a next step to take.

The July 6th uprising of the Left SRs is in many ways, a small wave amidst a much larger storm tossing around Lenin’s government. It came, it went, they moved on to bigger challenges. But it does mark a major milestone in the Russian Revolution, and the history of Russia generally, because the Left SRs are going to be expelled from every committee, congress, and position of authority they held. And as they were the only party besides the Communist Party presently participating in the administration of things, their expulsion marks the beginning of true one party rule in Russia. From here on out, the communist party will be the only party.

And next week, the Communists are going to draft a new constitution for Russia, and then set about ensuring that they will remain, forever after, the only game in town.