The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  54. P. N. Pereverzev.

  Karinskii, a friend in the Ministry of Justice, instantly warned the Bolsheviks what Pereverzev was about to do,176 whereupon Stalin asked the Ispolkom to stop the spread of “slanderous” information about Lenin. Chkheidze and Tsereteli obliged, telephoning the editorial offices of the Petrograd dailies to request, in the name of the Ispolkom, that they not publish the government’s release. Prince Lvov did likewise; so did Tereshchenko and Nekrasov.* All newspapers but one honored the request. The exception was the mass-circulation Zhivoe slovo, which appeared the next morning with banner headlines—LENIN, GANETSKII & CO. SPIES—followed by the account of Ermolenko and details concerning the moneys sent by the Germans to Kozlovskii and Sumenson through Ganetskii.177 The report was endorsed by Aleksinskii. Broadsheets containing this information were posted throughout the city.

  The revelations about Lenin and the Germans, spread by the regimental emissaries whom Pereverzev had briefed, had an electrifying effect on the troops: little as most of them cared whether Russia was ruled by the Provisional Government in partnership with the Soviet or by the Soviet alone, they felt passionately about collaboration with the enemy. The suspicions which lingered around Lenin because of his journey across enemy territory made him highly unpopular with the troops: according to Tsereteli, Lenin was so hated by the men in uniform that he had to ask the Ispolkom for protection.178 The first to reach Taurida were units of the Izmailovskii Guards; they were followed by elements of the Preobrazhenskii and Semenovskii, the latter marching to a military band. Cossack units also turned up. At the sight and sound of approaching troops, the mob in front of Taurida fled pell-mell in all directions, some seeking safety in the palace.

  At this moment, inside Taurida a discussion was underway between the Ispolkom and the Bolshevik factory “representatives.” The Mensheviks and SRs were playing for time, hoping that the government would come to their rescue. The instant loyal troops made their way into Taurida, they threw out the Bolshevik motion.179

  There was little violence because the rioters dispersed on their own. Raskolnikov ordered his sailors to return to Kronshtadt, keeping 400 men to defend Kshesinskaia’s. The sailors at first refused to leave, but gave in when they were surrounded by a superior and unfriendly force of loyal troops. By midnight Taurida was cleared of the mob.

  The unexpected turn of events threw the Bolsheviks into complete disarray. Lenin fled Taurida as soon as he had learned from Karinskii of Pereverzev’s action, which must have been just before the soldiers arrived on the scene. After his departure, the Bolsheviks held a consultation, which ended with the decision to abort the putsch.180 At noon they had been distributing ministerial portfolios among themselves; six hours later they were hunted quarry. Lenin thought all was lost. “Now they are going to shoot us,” he told Trotsky, “it is the most advantageous time for them.”181 He spent the following night at Kshesinskaia’s under the protection of Raskolnikov’s sailors. In the morning of July 5, as street vendors were hawking copies of Zhivoe slovo, he and Sverdlov slipped out and hid in a friend’s apartment. For the next five days he led an underground existence, changing quarters as often as twice daily. The other Bolshevik leaders, with the exception of Zinoviev, stayed in the open, risking arrest and in some cases demanding to be arrested.

  On July 6, the government ordered the detention of Lenin and his accomplices, eleven in all, charging them with “high treason and organizing an armed uprising.”* Sumenson and Kozlovskii were promptly apprehended. Soldiers came to Steklov’s residence during the night of July 6–7; when they threatened to smash his rooms and beat him up, Steklov telephoned for help. The Ispolkom rushed two armored cars to protect him; Kerensky also intervened on his behalf.182 The same night, soldiers appeared at the apartment of Anna Elizarova, Lenin’s sister. As they searched the room, Krupskaia screamed at them: “Gendarmes! Just like under the old regime!”183 The hunt for Bolshevik leaders went on for several days. On July 9, troops inspecting private automobiles caught Kamenev: in this case a lynching was prevented by Polovtsev, the commander of the Petrograd Military District, who not only freed Kamenev but provided a car to take him home.184 In all, some 800 participants in the insurrection were taken into custody.* As far as can be determined, not one Bolshevik was physically harmed. Considerable damage, however, was done to Bolshevik properties. The editorial office and printing plant of Pravda were destroyed on July 5. After the sailors guarding Kshesinskaia’s had been disarmed without offering resistance, the Bolshevik headquarters were occupied as well. The Peter and Paul Fortress surrendered.

  55. The Palace Square in Petrograd occupied by loyal troops after the suppression of the Bolshevik putsch: July 1917.

  On July 6, Petrograd was taken over by garrison troops and soldiers freshly arrived from the front.

  The Bolshevik Central Committee issued on July 6 a flat denial of the accusations of treason leveled at Lenin and demanded an investigation.185 The Ispolkom obliged by appointing a five-man jury. It so happened that all five were Jews: since this might have laid the committee open to suspicion by the “counterrevolutionaries” that it was loaded in Lenin’s favor, it was dissolved and none appointed to replace it.

  The Soviet, in fact, never looked into the accusations against Lenin, which did not deter it, however, from deciding firmly in favor of the accused. Although Lenin’s putsch was directed as much against the Soviet as against the government, with which, since May, it had been closely linked, the Ispolkom would not face reality. In the words of a Kadet newspaper, although the socialist intellectuals called the Bolsheviks “traitors,” “at the same time, as if nothing had happened, they remained for them comrades. They continued to work with them. They flattered and reasoned with them.”186 The Mensheviks and SRs now, as before and later, viewed the Bolsheviks as errant friends and their opponents as counterrevolutionaries. They feared that the charges leveled at the Bolsheviks were merely a pretext for an assault on the Soviet and the entire socialist movement. The Menshevik Novaia zhizn’ cited Den’ as follows:

  Today it is the Bolshevik Committee that is being convicted; tomorrow they will cast suspicions on the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, and then they will declare a Holy War against the Revolution.

  187

  The paper rejected out of hand the government’s charges against Lenin, accusing the “bourgeois press” of “deplorable slander” and “wild howls.” It urged the condemnation of those—presumably the Provisional Government—who engaged in “consciously slanderous defamation of prominent leaders of the working class.”188 Among the socialists who sprang to Lenin’s defense, calling the charges against him “slander,” was Martov.* These claims had nothing to do with the facts of the case: the Ispolkom neither asked the government for its evidence nor undertook its own investigation.

  Even so, it went to great pains to protect the Bolsheviks from government retribution. As early as July 5, a delegation of the Ispolkom went to Kshesinskaia’s to discuss with the Bolsheviks terms for a peaceful resolution of the affair. They all agreed that there would be no repressions against the party and that all those arrested in connection with the events of the preceding two days would be released.189 The Ispolkom then requested Polovstev not to assault the Bolsheviks’ headquarters, as he had been expected to do momentarily.190 It also passed a resolution forbidding the publication of government documents implicating Lenin.191

  Lenin defended himself in several brief articles. In a joint letter with Zinoviev and Kamenev to Novaia zhizn’ he claimed never to have received “one kopeck” from Ganetskii and Kozlovskii, either for himself or for the party. The whole thing was a new Dreyfus or a new Beilis affair, engineered by Aleksinskii at the behest of the counterrevolution.192 On July 7, he declared that he would not stand trial because, under the circumstances, neither he nor Zinoviev could expect justice to be done.193

  Lenin always tended to overestimate the determination of his opponents. He was convinced that he and his party were f
inished, and like the Paris Commune, destined merely to serve as an inspiration for future generations. He considered moving the party center abroad once again, to Finland and even Sweden.194 He entrusted to Kamenev his theoretical last will and testament, the manuscript of “Marxism on the State” (later used as the basis for State and Revolution), with instructions for publication in the event he was killed.195 After Kamenev had been caught and nearly lynched, Lenin decided to take no more chances. During the night of July 9–10, accompanied by Zinoviev, he boarded a train at a small suburban railroad station to escape and hide in the countryside.

  Lenin’s flight when his party faced the prospect of destruction was seen by most socialists as desertion. In the words of Sukhanov:

  The disappearance of Lenin when threatened with arrest and trial [was], in itself, a fact worthy of note. In the Ispolkom no one had expected Lenin to “extricate himself from the situation” in just this way. His flight produced in our circles an immense sensation and led to passionate discussions in every conceivable way. Among the Bolsheviks, some approved of Lenin’s action. But the majority of the members of the Soviet reacted with a sharp condemnation. The Mameluks and the Soviet leaders shouted their righteous resentment. The opposition kept its opinion to itself: but this opinion reduced itself to an unqualified condemnation of Lenin from the political and moral points of view … the flight of the shepherd could not but deliver a heavy blow to the sheep. After all, the masses, mobilized by Lenin, bore the whole burden of responsibility for the July days.… And the “real culprit” abandons the army, his comrades, and seeks personal safety in flight!

  196

  Sukhanov adds that Lenin’s escape was seen as all the more reprehensible in that neither his life nor his personal freedom was at risk.

  Kerensky, who returned to Petrograd in the evening of July 6, was furious with Pereverzev and fired him. Pereverzev, in his view, had “lost forever the possibility of establishing Lenin’s treason in final form, supported by documentary evidence.”197 This seems a spurious rationale for Kerensky’s failure, in the days that followed, to take decisive action against Lenin and his followers. If no effort was made to “establish Lenin’s treason in final form” it was from the desire to placate the socialists who had sprung to Lenin’s defense: it was a “concession to the Soviets by a Government which had already lost Kadet support and could not afford to antagonize the Soviets as well.”* This consideration, indeed, was decisive in Kerensky’s behavior in July and the months ahead.

  56. Mutinous soldiers of the 1st Machine Gun Regiment disarmed: July 5, 1917.

  Kerensky now replaced Lvov as Prime Minister, while retaining the portfolios of War and Navy. He began to act as a dictator and, to give visible expression to his new status, moved into the Winter Palace, where he slept in the bed of Alexander III and worked at his desk.198 On July 10 he asked Kornilov to assume command of the armed forces. He ordered the disarming and dissolution of units which participated in the July events; the garrison was to be reduced to 100,000 men, the rest to be sent to the front. Pravda and other Bolshevik publications were barred from the trenches.

  Yet for all this display of determination, the Provisional Government did not dare take the one step that would have destroyed the Bolshevik Party: a public trial at which all the evidence in its possession of treasonous activity would have been laid out. A commission was appointed under the new Minister of Justice, A. S. Zarudnyi, to prepare the case against the Bolsheviks. It assiduously collected materials—by early October, eighty thick volumes—yet no legal proceedings were ever instituted. The reason for this failure was twofold: fear of “counterrevolution” and the wish not to antagonize the Ispolkom.

  The July putsch imbued Kerensky with an obsessive fear that the right would exploit the Bolshevik threat to stage a monarchist coup. Addressing the Ispolkom on July 13, he urged it to distance itself from the elements which “with their actions inspire the forces of the counterrevolution” and pledged that “any attempt to restore the Russian monarchic regime will be suppressed in the most decisive, pitiless manner.”199 Like many socialists, he is said to have been alarmed rather than gratified by the zeal with which loyal troops had crushed the July riots.200 In his eyes, the Bolsheviks were a threat only to the extent that their slogans and behavior encouraged the monarchists. It is almost certainly from the same consideration that he decided on July 7 to ship the Imperial family to Siberia. The departure was carried out in utmost secrecy during the night of July 31. Accompanied by an entourage of fifty attendants and servants, the Romanovs left for Tobolsk, a town which had no railroad and therefore offered fewer opportunities for escape.201 The timing of the decision—three days after the Bolshevik putsch and the day after Kerensky’s return to Petrograd—indicates that Kerensky’s motive was to prevent right-wing elements from exploiting the situation to restore Nicholas to the throne. Such was the opinion of the British envoy.202

  A related consideration was the desire to curry favor with the Ispolkom, which continued to regard the Bolsheviks as members in good standing and to treat all attacks against them as machinations of the “counterrevolution.” The Mensheviks and SRs in the Soviet repeatedly assailed the government for its “campaign of vilification” against Lenin, demanding that the charges be dropped and the detained Bolsheviks released.

  Kerensky’s tolerant treatment of the Bolsheviks, who had almost overthrown him and his government, contrasted sharply with the impetuous manner he would reveal in dealing with General Kornilov the following month.

  As a result of the inaction of both the government and the Ispolkom the fury against the Bolsheviks, which Pereverzev’s initiative had unleashed, dissipated. The two lost a unique opportunity to liquidate the genuine “counterrevolution” from the left out of fear of an imaginary “counterrevolution” from the right. The Bolsheviks soon recovered and resumed their bid for power. Trotsky later wrote that when, at the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1921, Lenin admitted the party had committed mistakes in its dealings with the enemy, “he had in mind our hasty uprising” in July 1917. “Fortunately,” Trotsky added, “our enemies had neither sufficient logical consistency nor determination.”203

  *This apparently refers to an offer made to Lenin by Parvus at their 1915 meeting.

  *N. F. Kudelli, Pervyi legaVnyi Peterburgskii Komitet Bol’shevikov v 79/7 g. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), 66; A. G. Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god, II (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925), 179–88. Shliapnikov claims that the Petrograd Bolsheviks were dismayed by the policies allegedly forced on them by Kamenev, Stalin, and Muranov, but in view of the policies which they themselves had pursued before the three senior Bolsheviks appeared in Petrograd, the more likely cause of the dismay seems to have been resentment at having to play second fiddle.

  †The records of this conference, which have not been published in Russia, can be found in Leon Trotskii, Stalinskaia shkola falsifikatsii (Berlin, 1932), 225–90. The above resolutions appear on pp. 289–90.

  *As an Austrian subject, Radek was considered an enemy alien by the Provisional Government. Refused an entry visa to Russia, he remained in Stockholm until October 1917 working for Lenin. Subsequently, several more parties of Russian émigrés crossed Germany en route to Russia.

  †Subsequently, several more parties of Russian émigrés crossed Germany en route to Russia.

  *There is no stenographic record of this speech, but the notes which Lenin used have been published: LS, XXI (1933), 33; see also LS, II (1924), 453–54, and F. F. Raskolnikov, Na boevykh postakh (Moscow, 1964), 67.

  *Iu. Kamenev in Pravda, No. 27 (April 8, 1917), 2. Kamenev refers to the resolutions of the Bolshevik Conference of March 28.

  *This tactic has succeeded in confusing even some historians: since the Bolsheviks did not openly declare that they wanted power, it is argued, they did not want it. But in October 1917 they would also pretend to act under pressure from below although no such pressure existed. The duality of instruments used by the Bolsheviks and
their emulators was first noted by Curzio Malaparte in his Coup d’Etat. A participant in Mussolini’s power seizure, Malaparte realized what most contemporaries and many historians have missed—namely, that the Bolshevik revolution and its successors operated on two distinct levels, the observable and the concealed, the latter of which delivered the death blow to the existing regime’s vital organs.

  *Cf. Eric Hoffer: “Action is a unifier.… All mass movements avail themselves of mass action as a means of unification. The conflicts a mass movement seeks and incites serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip its followers of their distinct individuality and render them more soluble in the collective medium”: The True Believer (New York, 1951), 117, 118–19.