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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
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We ended last time with the great June Offensive, which was supposed to be the great panacea. Victory on the front lines would cement the legitimacy of the provisional government and simultaneously solve the problem of dual power, because it would prove that a coalition of socialists and liberals inside the government could work. It would also give them all some breathing space to hold the now increasingly overdue constituent assembly, which was supposed to settle all post-revolutionary constitutional questions. Military victory would also permanently discredit antiwar and anti-government critics, and it would create a feeling of triumphant national unity rather than the demoralized strife which had been the prevailing mood for several years now. And as if that was not enough, Russian victories on the eastern front in the war would probably pave the way for a general European peace. These were all the things that could have happened as a result of Russian victory in the June Offensive, but instead, as we saw at the end of last episode, within a matter of days, that offensive ground to an ignoble halt, and was then rolled back in a bloody confused mess of desertion and surrender. If victory promised to solve all political problems, defeat made them all ten times worse.
The political parties poised to take advantage of these military defeats were the very antiwar and antigovernment voices people like Alexander Kerensky hoped would be permanently silenced by military victory. But defeat only made those voices louder and more persuasive. Among the parties active in Petrograd in the early summer of 1917, it was a boon in particular to the fortunes of two groups: the Bolsheviks, and the anarchists. Now, we have not talked much about the anarchists yet because they’re still a very nascent force, really no more than a couple hundred organizers and activists. They did not really boast a large stable party apparatus like the SRs or the Mensheviks or the Bolsheviks, and the anarchists had only recently formed the Petrograd Federation of Anarchists to tie their very loose knit cells together. But from the February Revolution forward, this small group of anarchists had been the most hardline voices calling for the overthrow of the provisional government, the overthrow of capitalism, and an end to the bloody imperialist war. They called for the immediate destruction of the parasitic central state, and the reorganization of cities — particularly Petrograd — into decentralized autonomous communes, explicitly modeled on the memory of the Paris Commune. The anarchists were not afraid to advocate violence to achieve their ends, and by June they were able to make the very effective case to the people that ever since the glory days of February, all the other so-called revolutionary parties like the SRs or the Mensheviks had been working to prop up the bourgeois capitalist bosses, not overthrow them. They had been working to continue the imperialist war not end it immediately. I mean, how revolutionary are they, really?
In the context of June 1917, the anarchists and the Bolsheviks wind up sounding a lot alike. Lenin’s April Theses were in fact criticized by other Social-Democrats as being a downright anarchist program. One Marxist critic of Lenin said, “Lenin has now made himself the candidate for the one European throne that has been vacant for 30 years: the throne of Bakunin.”
Now, Lenin is obviously not an anarchist, but the Bolsheviks hard line opposition to the provisional government and their call to vest all power in the Soviet as the truly legitimate democratic assembly of the people made them virtually indistinguishable from anarchist organizers who were basically saying the same thing. And together, this same thing that they were saying was boiling down to the simple slogan: all power to the Soviets. If you were a worker or a soldier or a sailor who couldn’t understand the contradictory nuances of the Mensheviks and the SRs — capitalism is bad, but we must let the capitalist rule; the war is bad, but we must continue the war — then the alternative offered by the Bolsheviks and the anarchists made a lot of sense. Down with the provisional government. All power to the Soviet.
Now to be clear, the Bolsheviks and the anarchist groups were still a minority faction out there, both in terms of their voting strength inside the Soviet, and in terms of raw rank and file numbers. But they were a strong and growing minority, and between February and June 1917, they had both done extremely well among three key groups in Petrograd.
First was the First Machine Gun Regiment. Composed of more than 11,000 soldiers and 300 officers, the First Machine Gun Regiment was the most radical regiment in the Petrograd Garrison. In February, they had abandoned the overcrowded barracks and set up an improvised bivouac in the Vyborg district, the most radical working class neighborhood in Petrograd. The Bolshevik military organization, the section of the party who recruited and organized inside the military, had made the First Machine Gunners the most heavily bolshevised regiment in Petrograd, and it made all the other parties in Petrograd — the SRs, the Mensheviks, the Kadets — very nervous.
The second major group was those workers in the Vyborg districts, who were now mingling daily with the machine gunners. They had all helped overthrow the tsar in February, and stood perplexed and agitated as the Soviet continued to prop up their class enemies inside the provisional government. These workers wanted to end dual power by just doing away with the provisional government and letting the workers and the soldiers rule through the Soviet. Down with the capitalists, right? Right. Well aware that they had toppled the tsar in February with a great demonstration of courageous strength out in the streets, they were all talking themselves into the idea that another armed show strength would be necessary to force the Soviet to take the power that they did not seem to want to take. So between the machine gunners and the workers, the Vyborg district was the heart of both the Bolshevik Party and these looseknit anarchist cells.
Then finally, we have the sailors out at the Kronstadt Naval Base. These sailors had overthrown their officers during the February Revolution, and now existed as an autonomous island run by a self-organized Soviet. Among these sailors, the anarchist message resonated stronger than anywhere else, and they more or less shared equal influence with the Bolsheviks, to the excluded detriment of the SRs and the Mensheviks, who regarded the sailors of Kronstadt along with the workers and machine gunners in the Vyborg District with extreme uneasiness.
Now, though, in the grand scheme of things, the machine gunners in the Vyborg workers and the sailors in Kronstadt were not a huge force, they were strategically positioned to have an outsized influence on political affairs if they decided to, I don’t know, stage a coordinated armed uprising. These three groups were the most restive groups in the capital, and even their own alleged political leaders were having difficulty keeping them restrained. But with the launch of the June Offensive, the moorings began to snap one by one.
On June 20th, the military ordered the First Machine Gun Regiment to send 500 guns and crews to the front lines. This enraged them, as they had been promised back in February that nobody in the Petrograd Garrison would ever be sent to the front lines. It was only with difficulty that the Soviet convinced them to just follow the orders they were given. But within days, news was coming back that the offensive had turned into a bloody retreat. On June 26, a regiment who had refused to fight on the front anymore just packed things up and return to Petrograd where they spread the news of what was really happening out there. They had seen officers turn machine guns on their own men to force them to fight. This news was circulating on June 30th when fully two thirds of the First Machine Gun Regiment were then called up to the front. They howled with protest, not unjustly suspecting that these call-ups were as much about removing them from the capital for political reasons as political necessity. Besides, what were they going to do out there? Turn these machine guns on other Russian soldiers to force them to march out and die? Instead of complying, the machine gunners held near round the clock meetings where they agree that they would not go to the front, nor be disbanded, nor be disarmed.
The hostile disobedience of the machine gunners put the Bolsheviks in particular in an awkward position. Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders had no principled objection to an armed insurrection, but they were not at all convinced the time was ripe, especially if such an insurrection was aimed at defying the will of the Soviet, whose legitimacy the Bolsheviks were trying to protect so it could be used as the sovereign successor of the provisional government. This caution put them at odds with many rank and file Bolsheviks who were clearly spoiling for a final confrontation with the provisional government. They believed they had the muscle and the machine guns to overthrow that government.
With a crisis atmosphere brewing, the Bolsheviks had to walk a careful line between encouraging resistance and hostility to the government without wrecking their relationship with the Soviet or accidentally triggering some kind of reactionary backlash. The mixed messaging of the Bolsheviks was on full display on July the second, when they organized a farewell assembly and concert for soldiers bound for the front lines, with 5,000 people in attendance, leading Bolsheviks gave fiery speeches denouncing the war, denouncing the government, and demanding all power to the Soviet, but also, stopped short of calling for an immediate armed insurrection. Among the most popular speakers that night was Trotsky, who was not yet quite officially a Bolshevik, but who was with them in spirit and in action, and would very soon be an official party member, returning to his alliance with Lenin that had been broken back in the original Bolshevik/Menshevik split in 1903. Now Lenin himself was not there; he had just departed Petrograd for Finland a few days earlier, ostensibly for his health, but just as likely because the provisional government was probably about to arrest him on charges of being a German spy.
Now, while this concert was going on on the evening of July the second, the very shaky provisional government was taking a major tumble. The issue at hand was the seemingly unrelated matter of Ukraine’s position inside a post-revolutionary Russian Empire. The Kadet ministers believed that such matters needed to wait until the coming constituent assembly. But Kerensky convinced a majority of the ministers to grant Ukrainians a degree of political autonomy. When the vote for this was taken on the evening of July 2nd, four of the Kadet ministers immediately resigned in protest. And while technically they resigned over the matter of Ukraine, one gets the feeling that maybe this was just a pretext. The provisional government had staked its legitimacy to the June Offensive, and the June Offensive was turning out to be a catastrophic failure. The Kadet ministers were probably getting out while they’re getting was good. Their resignation reopened the question that had been dogging the revolution since February: was the provisional government really an institution worth saving, or did the Soviet just need to step up and claim all power for themselves?
As the Kadets were resigning from the coalition government, leaving the future of that government very much in doubt, the machine gunners in the Vyborg District were holding all night meetings. They had returned from the Bolshevik thrown concert fired up, and they spent the whole evening arguing and convincing each other that what they needed to do was force the Soviet to overthrow the provisional government and seize all power. Now they were not in total agreement with each other, and many companies said we’re not going to participate in any armed demonstration if it’s in defiance of the Soviet ban on armed demonstrations. This was essentially the position of the Bolshevik leadership, who were now trying to communicate back to their agents in the military organization, we’re not ready for an armed insurrection, don’t do it. But plenty of Bolshevik organizers simply defied those instructions. Standing alongside them in these meetings of soldiers were anarchists who had zero doubts or hesitation, and they were calling for an immediate armed uprising to overthrow the government, convinced that they had the strength and the will to do it. After meeting all night, a majority of the companies of the First Machine Gun Regiment voted on July 3rd to hold an armed demonstration that very day. They planned to force the executive committee of the Soviet to claim its rightful power… or else.
When word got back to the Bolshevik leadership, there was a great deal of hesitation and confusion and resistance. Yes, they had been at the forefront of the movement of all power to the Soviet, and just the night before they had been stoking the flames of seditious radicalism, but while they fanned those flames, they did not yet think they had amassed enough political TNT to blast their way into power. They were acutely aware of the consequences of moving too soon. If they lit the fuse and set off a bomb and the provisional government withstood the blast, it would be very bad for the Bolshevik party, maybe even the end of them entirely. So the central committee of the party — absent Lenin, who was still off in Finland — voted that conditions were not yet ripe. To strike prematurely would probably be suicide. With word spreading that the machine gunners were going to take to the streets, the Bolshevik central committee concluded the best play was to publicly call for peaceful restraint. So two of the principal Bolshevik leaders, Zinoviev and Kamenev, started drafting an official party editorial to run in Pravda the next day urging calm forbearance.
Now all that said, there’s also plenty of evidence that the Bolshevik leaders were simultaneously positioning themselves to take advantage of an armed uprising should it succeed. On that same afternoon of July 3rd, Bolsheviks induced the Soviet to announce an emergency session of the worker section of the Soviet, and when that call went out, a suspiciously large number of Bolshevik delegates showed up immediately while the Menshevik and SR delegates who typically commanded a majority scrambled to get down there. It was almost as if the Bolshevik delegates had been told to get ready for such an emergency call. When the SRs and Mensheviks, now temporarily finding themselves in the minority, implored the Bolsheviks to denounce all armed demonstrations, the Bolsheviks refused. The SRs and Mensheviks promptly walked out in protest. This left the Bolshevik delegates able to claim the authority of speaking for the worker section of the Soviet, which was a very convenient position to find themselves. They were suspiciously well-placed to force the executive committee of the Soviet to bow to armed public pressure to overthrow the provisional government… as if that was exactly the plan.
Meanwhile, out in the streets, the machine gunners had mounted their guns on automobiles and fanned out across the city to get other military units to join them. Now, some of those units joined up, and other stayed out of it, but almost nobody said, we are going to oppose you. By late afternoon, tens of thousands of armed protesters were out in force, including civilian workers. Street fighting led to general violent chaos as groups opposing the demonstrators now came out to fight, and one Bolshevik described the scene: “Black Hundreds, hooligans, provocateurs, anarchists, and desperate people introduce a large amount of chaos and absurdity to the demonstration.” inside the Tauride Palace, the executive committee of the Soviet met in panicked emergency session as a large armed crowd approached, and then surrounded the building. But even as this crowd shouted for the leaders of the Soviet to take power… or else, the leaders of the Soviet did not comply. And herein lies the rub of the July Days: to the extent that there was a plan, it was simply to mass a huge angry crowd of armed demonstrators shouting basically take power or else, and when the leaders of the Soviet did not comply, the demonstrators didn’t really have a clear idea of what to do about the or else part. They seem to have simply taken it for granted that the Soviet would buckle under pressure. They didn’t have a clear plan for who to arrest, what to take charge of, who to elevate to replace the ousted leaders or any of that normal coup d’état stuff. So when the leaders of the Soviet were not in fact intimidated into simply capitulating and overthrowing the government, the crowd out front simply melted away as darkness fell.
But that was not the end of it. It is after all the July Days, not the July Day.
The machine gunners had made contact with the Kronstadt sailors who agreed to turn out as reinforcements on the morning of July 4th. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik leaders belatedly decided to endorse the armed demonstrations, calculating now they couldn’t stop what was happening, and if they didn’t join it, they would lose all their credibility with the people they purported to lead. Early in the morning, they sent somebody to fetch Lenin from Finland and get him back to Petrograd. And then they had to grapple with the physical symbol of their previous hesitations. The morning edition of Pravda was all set to go to the printer with a column front and center written by Zinoviev and Kamenev urging restraint, because that had been the party line like six hours earlier. They needed now to pull that editorial, but did not have time to reset the layout to account for the sudden editorial 180. So they simply remove the offending paragraph. The July 4th, 1917 edition of Pramata has a big white blank spot at the center of the front page. And all I can say is that big white blank spot seems proof of vacillating improvisation from the Bolsheviks, not the execution of a carefully thought out coup d’etat. Because obviously the addition doesn’t say, all power to the Soviet, everybody turn out! it was just a big white blank spot.
In the late morning of July 4th, a boisterous flotilla of Kronstadt sailors made their way across the water from their island naval base to Petrograd. Representatives of the Soviet came out and told them the Soviet does not endorse their presence, please go back to your base, but the sailors ignored them. When they landed, they were greeted by other political leaders ready to join this all power to the Soviet insurrection. As I said, the anarchists were as influential among these sailors as the Bolsheviks were, and now even left-wing SRs were coming out; in particular, a woman named Maria Spiridonova had arrived to address the sailors. Spiridonova was a legendary revolutionary who had assassinated a security chief in 1905 and then been arrested, tortured, and exiled to Siberia in 1906. In the process of her ordeal, she became a near mythical martyr. Her exile only ended with the amnesties after the February Revolution, and since her return Spiridonova had made herself an implacable foe of the provisional government and Alexander Kerensky in particular. She is about to become the leading light of what becomes the Left SRs.
But the sailors were being led by a Bolshevik, and rather than let the leader of another party address the sailors, even the famous Maria Spiridonova, he denied her the chance to speak and ordered the men to head to Bolshevik party headquarters. This helped fracture the demonstration, as many of the anarchists and SRs quit the column and said, hey, we’re doing this for the revolution, not just to, like, put the Bolsheviks in power. When the sailors got to Bolshevik party headquarters, they found the leadership there still hesitant and nervous, not entirely sure that even they wanted the demonstration to put the Bolsheviks in power. They were not convinced any of this was actually a good idea.
Lenin had by now been rushed back from Finland, and didn’t want to come out to address the assembled demonstrators who were quite literally awaiting his marching orders. Now, some of Lenin hesitation was simply that he was not a great public speaker. He was good with a pen. He was good in a committee room. He was pretty okay in a medium sized assembly. But as the size of the audience grew, Lenin was less effective. And this is for example where Trotsky is going to become so essential to the rest of the revolution. Lenin’s speech was brief and full of mixed confusing messages. He said he was happy everybody was rising up on behalf of the slogan all power to the Soviet, it’s very good to demonstrate how much everybody wants this to happen, but please, don’t forget to be careful about how you go about it. And then he went back inside. And that was it. He was in and out in just a couple of minutes. And I gotta say, this is not exactly the rousing set of detailed instructions issued forth from a man executing a well thought out plot to seize power. Lenin was nervous, and he kept saying over and over again all through July 4th when people asked him what we should do, he said, simply, we’re going to have to wait and see how things go. And just a little foreshadowing about how things went, this brief public speech at Bolshevik party headquarters on July the fourth would be Lenin’s last public appearance until the end of October.
As the day progressed, tens of thousands of people were now marching hither and yon through the streets of Petrograd, probably somewhere around 60,000 in total. And it was incredibly chaotic. One of the main columns marching towards the Tauride Palace was fired at from the rooftops, causing stampeding and crossfire that left several people dead. When they all finally reassembled at the palace, the leaders of the Soviet dispatched no less a credentialed revolutionary than Victor Chernov to talk them down. Chernov, now minister of agriculture, went out there to try to give a speech defending the accomplishments of the coalition government, but the people just yelled at him and heckled him and manhandled him and said, just take power, man! And in one of the most famous quotes from the July Days, somebody shouted at Chernov, and I’m quoting here, ” Take power you son of a bitch when it is given!”
Chernov tried to keep speaking, but a group of sailors in the front grabbed him and threw him in a car and planned to keep him as a hostage until the Soviet claimed all power for itself. Now, even before Chernov got shoved in the car, the leaders of the Soviet realized he was not managing the crowd very well, and so they sent out a bunch of other revolutionary leaders to try to calm them, including Martov and Kamenev and some others. But the most important of them was Trotsky. Trotsky pushed his way through the car where Chernov was held, and showed that unlike Lenin, he was actually an insanely effective public speaker. He hopped up on the roof of the car and gave a speech where he cried,” Comrade Kronstadters! Pride and glory of the revolution! You’ve come to declare your will and show the Soviet that the working class no longer wants to see the bourgeoisie in power. But why hurt your own cause by petty acts of violence against casual individuals? Individuals are not worthy of your attention.” After this harangue, he called for everyone who favored committing violence to raise their hand. When no one in the now uncertain crowd immediately raised their hands, Trotsky hopped off the car, opened the door, and let Chernov out.
As I said, this is the rub of the July days: everyone seemed to be hoping that the mere threat of violence would induce the leaders of the Soviet to take power, and when they resisted, even the most radical of them, the Kronstadt sailors and the machine gunners, were not ready to take the next step. Not just threaten force, but use it. And certainly the leaders, I mean, we’re talking about inner circle, Bolsheviks, like Trotsky, were not saying, yeah, put a machine gun to Chernov’s head and blow his brains out if the Soviet doesn’t take power, because that’s not actually what they wanted to do.
Meanwhile, at that very moment, the provisional government’s minister of justice, a Trudovik named Pavel Pereverzev, played a major card he’d been holding in his back pocket. He called together delegates from 80 different military units of the Petrograd Garrison and showed them alleged proof that Lenin was a paid agent of the German government. That the real motivation for this demonstration was not about domestic politics, but about sewing as much chaos as possible inside Russia while the Germans counterattacked against the Russian army out on the front lines.
Now the main outlines of the accusation are basically true: Lenin and the Bolsheviks did take money from the Germans. And obviously they had come back to Russia under German auspices. When the story spread back to many of the companies and regiments who had previously been neutral about these armed demonstrations, they went from neutral to hostile. But though the main outline of the charge was true, we should be clear that Lenin was in no sense a German agent working for the German government. Yes, he caught a ride home from them, and he took money when they offered it, but that was because he was advancing his own agenda, not because he was, like, doing the Kaiser’s bidding.
The revelations about the Bolshevik connection to the Germans were the final security blanket for the provisional government. But even before the story spread, the attempted coup was already turning into an aborted coup. Heavy rains had started to fall, driving many of the less committed demonstrators away, and then inside the Tauride Palace, the executive committee of the Soviet still refuse to simply capitulate to the demands of the crowd. When a group of soldiers got sick of waiting and they stomped inside the palace and then burst into the room where the executive committee was meeting, the Mensheviks chairman of the committee sized them up, then handed them a proclamation ordering everybody to disperse. He told these soldiers, “study this proclamation carefully, and then don’t bother us again.” He ordered them to leave. The confused soldiers, caught off guard, did as they were instructed.
At midnight, the executive committee of the Soviet formally voted to not claim all power and instead reinforce the legitimacy of the provisional government. Then at one o’clock in the morning, there were more heavy footsteps out in the hallway. This indicated a fresh batch of soldiers were on the way. Many terrified delegates thought this might be them, but it turned out to be the nail in the coffin of the July Days. Three regiments of troops, incensed to discover that the Bolsheviks were German agents, had arrived to protect the Soviet and the legitimacy of the provisional government from those who would try to overthrow it,
The July days turned out to be exactly what Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders feared that it would be: a premature failure. In the final analysis, the fatal flaw was that it was all bark and no bite. Intimidation alone was expected to force the Soviet leaders to accept power. When intimidation didn’t work, nobody was ready to use brute force. The massed soldiers didn’t arrest anybody or shoot anybody, Bolshevik leaders were not standing ready to step in and declare themselves the new, like, emergency provisional executive of the Soviet or whatever. There were no proclamations printed and ready to say, the government is overthrown, the Soviet now reigns supreme.
Now it wasn’t absent violence, and in fact, the July Days were the most aggressively violent days of the revolution since February, but in the end it was all a big puffed up nothing. And it evaporated on the evening of July the fourth with a whimper, because nobody was ready, or willing, or able to go for the bang. But even though the July Days, uprising failed for lack of nerve at the moment of truth, it was still very clearly an attempt to overthrow the government by armed force, and for the Bolshevik leaders who belatedly endorsed the project, that failure was particularly bitter and aggravating. Their hesitation to endorse the demonstration in the first place had been entirely wrapped up in the fact that they didn’t think it would work, and that the consequences of failure would be catastrophic. And over the next few days, they reaped the very backlash that they had never wanted to sew in the first place. News now spread far and wide that the Bolsheviks were in league with the Germans. Warrants were issued for their arrest. The authorities smashed up the offices of Pravda and closed it down. Bolshevik leaders burned as many papers as they could before an army detachment surrounded their headquarters on the morning of July 7th and took over 500 party members into custody. Lenin himself shaved his mustache and headed back into hiding. After a few days bouncing between safe houses, he booked it back across the border to Finland. It was not unreasonable for any of them to conclude that having taken this shot and missed, it was now all over. The Bolshevik Party would be destroyed, and its leaders would probably wind up dead.
Lenin himself certainly consider this a very likely scenario. It seemed unlikely he would be able to return to Russia any time soon. And in the end, Lenin seemed destined to die in exile, living as an emigre just like he had for most of his life, now a failure and a hasbeen. He’d probably wind up muttering in cafes about the treachery of philistines while Swiss waiters nodded along with condescending pity for the sad old man who had ultimately amounted to nothing.
But even though Lenin and the Bolsheviks were now safely dead and buried, that did not really resolve the crisis for the provisional government who were still reeling from the failure of the June Offensive. And next week, they will emerge from the crisis of the July Days intact, but still being tossed by the incredibly treacherous waters of the Russian Revolution. And in the summer of 1917, it was not at all clear that the provisional government would ultimately survive, or frankly, that the revolution itself would survive.