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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.68: The June Offensive

Well folks, you did it. You completely knocked it out of the park. Last Wednesday, we got the news that Hero of Two Worlds is not just on the New York Times bestseller list, it is debuting at number three. Number three! That is for all hardcover nonfiction. That’s not new releases, not just history books, but all hardcover nonfiction. Number three in the country. Incredible. We planted ourselves a flag very close to the top of the mountain. Now, there is also a different bestseller list maintained by the American Booksellers Association that is an even more gratifying accomplishment because it reports on the independent bookstore channel. You know, all the bookstores that I told you to go pre-order the book from. Uh, on that list, we are number one. Number one! You guys stepped up so huge. We were the best-selling non-fiction book in independent stores in the United States. I’m absolutely over the moon about this. I cannot thank you enough. I hope you like the book. I hope you share the book. And even though I’m taking a moment here to savor the profound sense of joy and accomplishment and gratitude that I’m feeling, I know myself well enough to know that those feelings will quickly give way to me making plans to climb the next mountain. So I hope you all enjoy Hero of Two Worlds, I certainly love this book, so let’s take a moment to enjoy the success, and then all look forward to climbing the next mountain together. 

So speaking of mountains we’re climbing that we’re not even close to the summit of, back to the Russian Revolution. Now we ended last week with the April Crises that broke the first government of the February Revolution, and led to a new coalition ministry of liberals and socialists. The entrance of a bunch of socialists into the ministry, and the endorsement of the coalition government by the Soviet seemed to signal that the fragile period of dual power was drawing to a close. The liberal and socialist wings of the revolution appeared to be combining under the banner of revolutionary unity. The man who most personally exemplified this new spirit of unity was Alexander Kerensky, who had carved out a space for himself in both camps, and was now serving as minister of war. In the spring of 1917, he was probably the single most energetically influential leader in Russia. Today, he will embark on an audacious plan he believes will permanently solidify the gains of February, rally the empire back to patriotic health, and launch a new Russia towards a glorious future. In the spring of 1917, the Russian army would launch a major offensive to prove to themselves and to the world the revolution had not weakened Russia, but instead infused her with a mighty power.

As Kerensky took over as minister of war in the first week of May 1917, the long and frozen winter approached the spring thaw, and the question of how the February revolution would impact the war now had to be answered. As we discussed last week, now ex-foreign minister Pavel Milyukov believed most of the anti-tsarist revolutionary energy that had been building since 1915 was driven by the catastrophic mismanagement of the war. And though Milyukov let this analysis take him to the unsupported conclusion that there was nothing wrong with the composition of the army or the objectives of the war — just its management — he was far from the only one who believed a better run war was meant to be one of the principle results of the revolution. Kerensky himself was committed to the same idea, but he believed the revolution would do far more than just shuffle around a few ministers and generals. In Kerensky’s view, the revolution had changed the very nature of the Russian military, infusing it with a new patriotic and democratic spirit that would propel it to glorious victory; victory not on behalf of mere imperialist greed or territorial ambition, but in the name of global freedom and global peace. 

Now, aside from the sort of grandiose and idealistic notions, there were practical reasons for launching an offensive in the spring of 1917, both in terms of domestic politics and foreign relations. On the domestic front, the provisional government was still trying to find its legitimacy. Kerensky believed there was no surer path to securing that legitimacy than leading Russia to military victory. War weariness among the civilian population was acute, but true antiwar defeatism was still a fringe position. If the newspapers were suddenly filled with stories of Russian victories, victories that would be presented as the path to adjust an honorable peace, it was hard to think of a better way to convince the people that the new Russia really was superior to the old Russia.

On the foreign relations front, Britain and France were understandably worried this new Russia would abandon the war and seek a separate piece with the central powers. They were especially worried about this because they planned a major offensive in the spring of 1917 that was premised on Russia launching an energetic operation on the Eastern Front. Those plans had been approved by the tsar. Would the provisional government follow through with them? The answer to that question would be yes. Kerensky and his fellow ministers believe that securing the future peace and prosperity of Russia meant they could not abandon their wartime commitment. After all, if Russia bailed on Britain and France, Britain and France might turn around and bail on Russia, cut their own separate peace with the central powers, and leave Russia high and dry.

There was also the very practical matter of what to do with all the demoralized, mutinous, resentful, and angry soldiers that had helped overthrow the old Russia because they were so demoralized, mutinous, resentful, and angry. They were all presently sitting around, posing a major threat to the new Russia. Kerensky and his associates looked at this problem and turned to the old maxim that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. If the soldiers stopped being an inert mass of solid resentment and were given energetic purpose, they would cease to be a threat to the provisional government and instead become their greatest ally and asset. 

Now, morale in the military was, at the moment, incredibly volatile. On the one hand, Soviet Order Number One had swept through the ranks, and nearly every unit at the front had democratized their units and set up little governing committees. They now felt empowered to determine their own fates, and certainly believe that future military operations would require their approval. The bad old days of dying for no reason, just because some despotic aristocratic officer ordered them to die for no reason were over. Now, this mile bump in spirits for the rank and file was matched by acute demoralization in the officer corps, now in many cases disarmed, and exercising only the most nominal authority over their troops. The officers lived in justified fear of being lynched by their own men at any moment, justified because that sort of thing was happening with some regularity on up and down the lines. Plus nearly every form of discipline that the officers could use to keep their men in line were now effectively prohibited. 

Now, if you’ll recall, Order Number One was issued in the context of the immediate political emergency in Petrograd in the last week of February. And it was technically only meant to apply to the soldiers of the Petrograd Garrison. But its rapid spread through the ranks could not be stopped, and in short order, the Soviet issued a further Declaration of Soldiers Rights, to prevent any of the old unpopular forms of military discipline to be reinstated. Upon taking up their posts in May 1917, the new coalition government decided to embrace the fait accompli rather than try to reverse it. They issued a statement saying, and I’m quoting here, “The strengthening of the principles of democratization in the army and the organization and strengthening of its military power in defensive and offensive operations will be the most important task of the provisional government.” The government believed in fact that if handled properly, the democratization of the military did not have to be something that inhibited the military’s power, but positively unleashed it.

The general staff considered this an incredibly dubious proposition. But at the same time, they recognized if they pushed too hard to restore the old methods of discipline and hierarchies, they might get lynched themselves. But when they went to meet with new Minister of War Kerensky and the other government leaders, they did push for an acknowledgement that in an army orders have to be followed. Allowing soldiers to take any order as a mere suggestion to be debated and then possibly declined would create paralyzing dysfunction that would make the tsar’s management of the war looked like a model of technocratic efficiency. So Kerensky responded by issuing two clarifications to the organization in the military:

First, the existing office officer corps would retain the right to pick, choose. And promote its own officers. Soldiers did not in fact have the right to elect their own officers. 

Second, despite a general ban on corporal punishment, that ban would not apply during times of combat. When the fighting started, an officer retained the right to severely punish disobedience. Opponents to Kerensky’s left, most especially the Bolsheviks, would make a great deal of hay out of this `clarification,` telling the soldiers that effectively nullified all the false promises made in the Declaration of Soldiers Rights, and that really nothing had changed at all.

Despite these clarifications, for the most part, Kerensky tried to embrace the democratization of the army and the treatment of the soldiers, so that everybody understood that they were more than just anonymous cannon fodder. And he meant for that to be understood by both the men and the officers alike. Kerensky himself knew that one of the biggest problem was that the men simply didn’t know what they were fighting for. ?”After three years of the cruelest sufferings,” Kerensky noted, “the millions of soldiers exhausted to the last degree by the tortures of war, found themselves confronted suddenly with the questions: what are we dying for? Must we die?”

Kerensky spent most of may touring the frontlines, encouraging the men to understand that they were no longer mere slaves of the tsar’s imperialist ambitions, but were instead citizen soldiers, fighting to defend their homes, their families, and the revolution that was already at that moment setting them all free. When the war was over, they would all get to return to cities and towns and villages gloriously transformed by the new order of things. But first, they had to win the war. .

Kerensky’s tour was by all accounts, a great success. Everywhere he went, he delivered passionate orations to rally the troops, and they responded with adoring cheers. As Kerensky advanced through this tour, he was convinced more than ever that the Russian army was ready to launch a great military offensive.

But unfortunately the magical enthusiasm wore off almost as soon as he departed. Kerensky was trying to convince them that before they could go back home and enjoy the fruits of the revolution, they would first have to charge forward into the cannons and machine guns and barbed wire of the enemy. And after the speeches were over, and the men went back to the trenches, the troops couldn’t quite remember why they needed to charge into battle. Surely it was within the government’s power to simply sign a peace and let everybody return home to enjoy the fruits of the revolution without anybody dying. And so, these basic questions were ultimately left unanswered: what are we dying for? Must we die?

Helping the men to not be satisfied with what Kerensky was selling were plenty of left wing organizers and literature out there, making the not inaccurate point that whatever the government said, ultimately, Russian soldiers would be sent a fight and die for the benefit of French bankers and British imperialists. When the government used the euphemism that Russia must ‘uphold treaty obligations,’ that’s what they meant: we die. They profit. These debates about the point of the war then became a major topic of discussion at the first all Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies. On June 3rd, 1917, just over a thousand delegates from across Russia convened in Petrograd. In total, they represented over 300 separate soviets that had self convened since February, whether by soldiers, workers, or peasants. 21 of them represented active duty troops, eight were from rear guard garrisons, and another five representing fleets in the navy. The rest were civilians from all over the empire. Of the 777 delegates whose party affiliation we know, there were 285 SRs, 248 Mensheviks, 105 Bolsheviks and 32 Menshevik internationalists, which is to say the small groups surrounding Martov. These numbers meant that a strong majority at the Soviet Congress supported the provisional government, supported the recently formed coalition, and though they supported calls for the government to make every effort to achieve a general peace, they were ultimately as patriotically committed to the war as Kerensky. When a Swiss socialist named Robert Grimm was expelled from Russia the day the Congress opened because he had come to Russia, bearing an offer for a separate peace from the Germans, the Bolsheviks kicked up quite a fuss. But the rest of the Congress voted 640 to 121 to approve of his deportation. 

Now, the Bolsheviks were in a clear minority position during this Congress of Soviet, but they planned to use every opportunity to make themselves and their policies heard. They continued to agitate for the Soviet to quit monkeying around and assert the Soviet’s right to not just support the government of Russia, but to become the government of Russia. The coalition government was better in so far as it included socialists, but it was a deed half done but nobody else in the room thought they should go that far that fast. There was a famous moment when Irakli Tsereteli, one of the Mensheviks who was now in the coalition government defended the coalition by saying that there was no socialist party in Russia that thought it was a good idea to break the alliance with the liberals and upend the government. completely He declared, “There is not a political party in Russia, which would say, offer power to us, resign, and we will take your place. Such a party does not exist in Russia.” 

Out on the floor, Lenin, piped up and shouted, ” It does exist!”  

This triggered a great deal of laughter in the hall, both because it was kind of funny, and also because there goes Lenin again, proving he’s just a fanatical wacko on the fringes.

But Lenin was very serious. When he got a chance to make his first speech on June 4th, he exhorted the delegates to not backslide into mere parliamentary democracy. He pointed out that none of the alleged advanced western democracies had anything resembling the kind of real popular assemblies that the Soviets represented in Russia. They should not abandon this institution that represented true democracy in favor of mere bourgeois democracy. The Soviet ought to assert its right to be the sovereign assembly of Russia, not hand the keys over to bourgeois liberals who were in any case too weak in Russia actually govern on their own. Kerensky, now back from his tour of the frontlines, responded with a speech chiding Lenin for demanding wildly implausible gambits that would risk the gains of February, namely political freedom. Kerensky said if nothing else, they needed to move with deliberate caution so that, and I’m quoting, “Comrade Lenin, who has been abroad, may have the opportunity to speak here again, and not be forced to flee back to Switzerland.” This was a not too subtle reminder to everyone that Lenin was out of touch. 

Undeterred, as he always was, Lenin marched into the lion’s mouth again by rebuking any talk of a military offensive. Now he was very careful not to come off as naive or defeatist — which, hopefully as we’ve established, he was neither of those things — but he leaned hard into painting a picture of the war as fundamentally unjust. How could they possibly contemplate quote, “the continuation of the imperial slaughter and the death of more hundreds of thousands of millions of people?” The war itself was fundamentally imperialist and capitalist and could not be redeemed. It was so fundamentally unjust that it was a crime to ask more soldiers to die on behalf of it.

Trotsky, who as we’ll talk about next week had shifted back into alliance with Lenin, gave a pretty good speech, arguing that it would, yes, be good for the Russian army to go out and fight a war for revolutionary ideals, but that was hardly what was happening. Mealy mouth objectives like ‘upholding treaty obligations’ were hardly the stuff revolutions were made of. Trotsky said, “There exist, and there will exist ideas, watchwords, purposes, capable of rallying it and imparting to this army unity and enthusiasm. The army of the great French Revolution consciously responded to calls for an offensive. What is the crux of the matter? It is this: every soldier asks himself, for every five drops of blood which I’m going to shed today, will not one drop only be shed in the interest of the Russian Revolution and four in the interest of a French stock exchange and of English imperialism?”

Kerensky could only respond to this by saying the provisional government was absolutely trying to negotiate a general peace. And in fact, the Germans had already rejected two such offers. Kerensky said Germany would probably not come to the table unless they were defeated in battle, or unless the Kaiser was overthrown by the German people. And then he tossed another jab in Lenin’s direction by asking why Lenin had even come to Petrograd when he could be doing so much more to advance the cause of peace and international solidarity by getting off the train in Berlin to help his German comrades overthrow the Kaiser. 

But Lenin believed he was exactly where he needed to be, thank you very much. And as he and his comrades made speeches from the minority faction inside the Congress of Soviets, they determined to stage another armed demonstration to prove that they could not simply be brushed aside. Lenin believed in the power of action. Revolutions were ultimately made by deeds and not words. The Bolsheviks may not have huge numbers throughout the empire, but they had key strongholds in the capital, including a now heavily fortified working class district and the Kronstadt Naval Base. They had done very well recently recruiting from soldiers and workers who couldn’t care less about orthodox interpretations of thousand page tomes that said that the capitalists are the enemy, but to fulfill the prophecy of historical materialism we must also give them power. If you believe that the workers and soldiers who made the revolution should now get to lead the revolution, then the Bolsheviks were the party for you. And they were recruiting rapidly.

In the first week of June, the Bolsheviks planned to turn out 40 to 60,000 armed demonstrators as a show of force, a followup show of force to what had happened at the end of April. Maybe, if things went right, they might just go ahead and seize power from the weak willed backsliders, compromisers, and sellouts right then and there.

On June 9th, placards went up all over Petrograd calling for a mass turnout the next day. The leadership of the Congress of Soviets had been kept totally in the dark and they scrambled to head off what they believed was a dangerously de-stabilizing manifestation. As soon as they found out about it, they put up their own public call saying the Soviet did not sanction any demonstration on June 10th and everyone needed to stay home. This put Lenin and the central committee of the Bolsheviks on the horns of a dilemma, which they resolved by backing down. Their whole strategic thrust at this point was to direct the legitimacy of the Soviet towards their preferred policies, not accidentally destroy the Soviet legitimacy by challenging its authority. Now the Bolsheviks were not unanimous about this, and Stalin, for example, fumed about the decision to back down, thinking it proved the party’s lack of resolve. But Lenin and the others voted to call off the march and wait for another time.

The near miss of June 10th was the second time the Bolsheviks were suspected of aiming at an armed insurrection to seize power in something like a coup d’etat. The other socialist parties now had to decide what to do with them. They all supported the provisional goverment — hell, many of them were members of the provisional government. It had all been sanctioned by the Soviet. Where did the Bolsheviks get off thinking they could overthrow all of this in an armed insurrection? The Menshevik minister Tsereteli minced no words; in a meeting of socialist leaders on June 12th, he said, “That which has happened was nothing but 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.” He recommended the Soviet order the Bolsheviks to disarm and hand over all their weapons. 

But the others balked. The Bolsheviks may be rash and potentially dangerous, but they were also by far the most zealously active defenders of the revolution. To disarm them would be to disarm the Soviet’s most effective soldiers, and to leave the whole shared project of revolution open to reactionary counter-revolution. So they voted a compromise: the Soviet levied a general ban on all armed demonstrations by any party that did not have the approval of the Soviet, but they did not explicitly disarm the Bolsheviks. 

With tensions mounting in the capital, and threats to the provisional government coming from multiple directions, Alexander Kerensky wound up in roughly the same place Tsar Nicholas had been in the summer of 1914, hoping that a great military offensive would rallied patriotic unity of the nation, and then when they scored victories on the battlefield, defang all critics of the regime. Lenin and the Bolsheviks would be caught out openly opposing a glorious triumph and be fatally discredited. Lenin would probably have to crawl back to Switzerland and die in the mountains somehow. Kerensky’s preferred verdict of the February Revolution was a stable alliance of liberals and moderate socialists, forging a democratic Russia. He believed nothing put that vision on firmer footing than a great military victory. In fact, in June of 1917, he started very carefully putting each and every one of his eggs in that single basket.

To prepare for the offensive, Kerensky elevated General Brusilov to be commander in chief. As we’ve seen, Brusilov was probably the single best general the Russians had. Brusilov had ably demonstrated the year before that going on the offensive was an inevitably doomed to failure; the only thing that had stopped him in 1916 was the tsar letting overly cautious generals in the north remained passively inert rather than back him up. If that didn’t happen again, there was no reason they couldn’t, like, march all the way to Vienna. And as if that was not enough to recommend his promotion, Brusilov was also doing his best to accept the democratization of the army, to try to avoid seeing it in strictly negative terms like most of his fellow senior officers. Brusilov had his reservations, of course, which frankly grew considerably as the actual date of the offensive neared, but maybe a democratic army of citizen soldiers fired up by the spirit of patriotism really could carry the day.

Kerensky try to re-inflame that spirit of patriotism by going on another tour of the front lines. The results were basically the same: almost rapturous enthusiasm when he showed up to give a speech, but then when he left the soldiers returning to their kind of self-preserving bewilderment about why on earth they needed to go fight and die. The lines were stable. The Germans were making no threatening moves, and in fact, doing everything in their power to convince the Russian soldiers on the front lines to settle into a kind of defacto armistice so the Germans could focus all their attention on the west. Now, sure, if somebody attacks us, we’ll fight a defensive war in defense of Russia. But actually going out on the attack? Why? What for? Far from being fired up by patriotic and revolutionary passion to go risk their lives in glorious battle, the overriding motivation of nearly every soldier in the Russian army was to simply live through the war.

Despite increasing warning signs that the Russian army was maybe not fit for a major offensive operation, Kerensky continued on his course. The main line of attack would be aimed southwest towards the Austro-Hungarians in Galicia, where the Russians had always had the greatest success during the war. On June 16th, 1917, they opened up a massive two-day barrage that absolutely pummeled and exploded the lines of the Central Powers. Then, at 9:00 AM on June 18th, they opened up a massive offensive charge. The main thrust southwest into Galicia was matched by offensive operations in the west and in the north to keep the Germans from reinforcing the Austro-Hungarians as they had done the year before. 

For the first two days, everything seemed to be going great, and the Russians pushed forward and the central powers fell back. But the fighting was much heavier than anticipated. The number of Russian soldiers killed and wounded mounted rapidly, and within 48 hours, those soldiers left alive, who had just watched a bunch of their friends whose only goal had been to not die, die, made them stop and wonder, what’s the point of all this? Surely we’ve done enough. How many more of us have to die?

Back in Petrograd, the leaders of the Soviet tried to steal a bit of the Bolshevik’s thunder by finally authorizing a mass demonstration in the name of revolutionary unity on June 18th. It was meant to coincide with the beginning of the offensive and something like 400,000 people turned out. But while the Menshevik and SR leaders hoped that the whole thing would be a show of support for the provisional government and for the offensive, the Bolsheviks turned it into a great PR coup for themselves by handing out banners saying things like down with the war and down with the 10 capitalist ministers, which is to say the liberals in the coalition government. So when these hundreds of thousands paraded through Petrograd, they did so shouting Bolshevik slogans and holding Bolshevik banners. The leaders of the Soviet could only smile and wave and grit their teeth. 

Now, maybe, maybe of Kerensky’s June offensive had worked, this would not have been a big deal. If the news from the front had all been happy tales of victory and triumph, the rest of 1917 would have gone very, very differently. But that was not the news from the front. After two days of heavy fighting, most of the Russian soldiers concluded they had done enough. There was no reason to keep going to risk their lives. They started stopping short, refusing to fight. There are more than a few stories of units discovering huge caches of alcohol and just saying, screw it, let’s get drunk. This stalled out the push and gave the Germans and Austrians time to muster a counter offensive. And when they charged back, the Russian army just broke and fled. Many didn’t even bother running away; they just surrendered on the spot. Again, the goal was now to live through a pointless war. Better to be alive in a POW camp than dead in the mud. 

Kerensky himself observing the campaign near the front lines was confidentially admitting by June 24th the offensive he had staked practically everything on was falling apart. He had in fact wound up staking nearly every revolutionary party to the success of the June offensive. 

Except for one, of course. 

After two probably failed attempts to seize power already behind him, Lenin licked his lips and decided maybe the third time would be the charm. After all, one thing everybody knew from French history is that July is an excellent month to launch a revolutionary insurrection. 

When we come back, we will dive headlong into the July Days, but that is going to wait a couple of weeks. I have been burning it at both ends of the candle for the past several months, both producing episodes every week and doing the kind of insane amount of work that goes into promoting a book — I’ve been doing tons of press and interviews nonstop for the past several weeks, so I have scheduled myself a breather to recharge my batteries, so there’s not going to be a new episode for the next two weeks. Now in the meantime, there’ll be lots of other podcasts where I’ll show up on, and I’ll keep trying to keep you abreast of when and where I’m doing interviews. Or you can take this time to read Hero of Two Worlds or listen to the audio book. I hear it’s pretty good, and people like it. 

So I will be back on September 27th to tell you all about how Lenin and the Bolsheviks took advantage of Kerensky’s failed offensive by launching their own… failed offensive.