A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  from the sailors. The crowd surged forward and seized hold of him, searching him for weapons. One worker raised his fist and shouted at him in anger: 'Take power, you son of a bitch, when it's handed to you.'' Several armed men bundled the SR leader into an open car. They declared him under arrest and said they would not release him until the Soviet had taken power. Chernov had gone one better than his old rival, Kerensky. He was now a real 'hostage of the democracy'.

  A group of workers broke into the Catherine Hall and interrupted the session: 'Comrade Chernov has been arrested by the mob! They're tearing him to pieces right now! To the rescue! Everyone out into the street!' Chkheidze proposed that Kamenev, Martov and Trotsky should be sent out to rescue the Minister. But Trotsky was the first to get there. Pushing his way through the shouting crowds, he went straight to the car, where the hatless, dishevelled and terrified Chernov sat under arrest in the back seat, and climbed up on to the bonnet. The Kronstadters all knew the figure of Trotsky and waited for his instructions. Had the Bolsheviks planned for the seizure of power, this was surely the moment to urge the sailors on to the storming of the Tauride, the arrest of the Soviet leaders and the proclamation of a socialist government. Raskolnikov, who was standing by Trotsky, asked Chernov's captors where they were planning to take their hostage. 'We don't know,' they answered. 'Wherever you wish, Comrade Raskolnikov. He is at your disposal.' But Trotsky called for Chernov to be released. 'Comrade Kronstadters, pride and glory of the Russian Revolution!', he began in his clear metallic voice; '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.' The sailors shouted angrily at Trotsky: they could not understand why Chernov was to be let go, if the aim of their mission was to overthrow the government. But not knowing what to do on their own, they sullenly agreed to release the Minister. 'Citizen Chernov, you are free,' declared Comrade Trotsky, opening the car door and motioning him to get out. Chernov was half-dead and plainly did not understand what was happening to him. He had to be helped out of the car and led, like a frail old man, back into the Tauride Palace.45 A critical moment had passed, one of the most famous in the history of the revolution, and with it had also passed the initiative for a seizure of power.

  According to Sukhanov's account of his conversation with Lunacharsky, the key to the Bolshevik 'plan' for the seizure of power was the 176th Regiment from Krasnoe Selo. It was supposed to arrive at the Tauride Palace and arrest the Soviet leaders. At around 6 o'clock it finally appeared, led by its regimental band. The soldiers were tired and soaked by the rain. With their packs and greatcoats on their shoulders, their mess tins and cooking pots clanging as they walked, they settled themselves in the forecourt of the palace and began to

  unpack their wet things and prepare their rifles. They had not the slightest idea what they were supposed to do, and only knew that they had been called out to 'defend the revolution'. But where were their leaders? An officer and six men climbed the Tauride steps and asked to see someone from the Soviet. The Menshevik, Dan, came out to greet them. He did not know what the regiment was, or why it had come to the palace, but he soon found a use for it. The 'insurrectionary' soldiers were posted as sentries at various points of the building to protect the Soviet leaders against the insurrection.46 Having come to demonstrate against the Soviet leaders, they had ended up defending them against the demonstrators. Such things happen in a revolution, when the crowd does not know its leaders.

  From this point on, the insurrection was effectively over. By itself, the crowd was unable to bring about political change. The Soviet leaders, discussing the question of whether to assume power, were all the more determined not to be pushed into it by the mob in the street. 'The decision of the revolutionary democracy cannot be dictated by bayonets,' declared Tsereteli.47 Once the Soviet had resolved not to take power, there was nothing the crowd could do. It did not know how to force the Soviet leaders into changing their minds, or how to complete a Soviet revolution without them. If the Soviet leaders were reluctant to take power, how could they give All Power to the Soviet'?

  One final event on that day symbolized the powerlessness of the crowd. At around 7 p.m. a group of armed and angry workers from the Putilov plant burst into the Catherine Hall. The Soviet deputies leaped from their seats. Some threw themselves on to the ground in panic. One of the workers, a 'classical sans-culotte' dressed in a blue factory tunic and cap, jumped up on to the speakers' platform. Shaking his rifle in the air, he shouted incoherently at the deputies:

  Comrades! How long must we workers put up with treachery? You're all here debating and making deals with the bourgeoisie and the landlords . . . You're busy betraying the working class. Well, just understand that the working class won't put up with it! There are 30,000 of us all told here from Putilov. We're going to have our way. All power to the Soviets! We have a firm grip on our rifles! Your Kerenskys and Tseretelis are not going to fool us!

  Chkheidze, the Soviet chairman, was sitting next to the hysterical worker. He calmly leaned across and placed a piece of paper into his hand. It was a manifesto, printed the evening before, in which it was said that the demonstrators should go home, or be condemned as traitors to the revolution. 'Here, please take this, Comrade,' Chkheidze said to him in an imperious tone. 'It says here what you

  and your Putilov comrades should do. Please read it carefully and don't interrupt our business.'48 The confused worker, not knowing what he should do, took the manifesto and left the hall with the rest of the Putilovites. No doubt he was fuming with anger and frustration at his profound humiliation; and yet he was powerless to resist, not because he lacked the guns, but because he lacked the will. Centuries of serfdom and subservience had not prepared him to stand up to his political masters — and in that lay the tragedy of the Russian people as a whole. This was one of the finest scenes of the whole revolution — one of those rare moments in history when the hidden relations of power are flashed up on to the surface of events and the broader course of developments becomes clear.

  As darkness fell, the crowds dispersed. Most of them made their way back home, damp and dejected, to the workers' districts and barracks. The Kronstadt sailors wandered around the city, not knowing where to go. Throughout the night the affluent residential streets reverberated to the sounds of broken windows, sporadic shots and screams, as the last survivors of the failed uprising took out their anger in acts of looting and violence against the burzhoois. The Petrograd military headquarters were inundated with telephone calls from terrified shopkeepers, bankers and housewives. In a last desperate act of defiance, 2,000 Kronstadters seized control of the Peter and Paul Fortress. They did not know what to do with the conquered fortress — it was just a symbol of the old regime which it seemed a good idea to capture as a final hostage of the uprising. The sailors slept in the prisons empty cells, and the following day agreed to leave it on condition that they were allowed to make their own way back to Kronstadt, keeping all their weapons.49

  By this stage, loyal troops were flocking to defend the Tauride Palace. The Izmailovsky Regiment was the first to arrive, on the evening of the 4th, with a thunderous rendering of the Marseillaise — as if in response to the Internationale of the Kronstadters — from its military band. As they heard the sound of it approaching, the Soviet leaders embraced each other with tears of relief: the siege of the Tauride Palace was finally over. Standing arm in arm, they broke spontaneously into the stirring chorus of Aux armes, citoyens'. It was, as Martov angrily muttered, a 'classic scene from the start of a counterrevolution'.50

  * * * Like most of the loyalist troops, the Izmailovksy Regiment had been turned against the Bolsheviks by leaflets released that evening by the Minister of Justice Pereverzev accusing them of being German agents. On the next day, 5 July, the right-wing press was full of so-called 'evidence' to that effect. Much of it was b
ased on the dubious testimony of a Lieutenant Yermolenko, who claimed to have been told by the Germans, whilst he was a prisoner of war, that Lenin was

  working for them. There is no doubt that the Germans had financed the Bolshevik Party — the Provisional Government had known that since April. But this did not prove Pereverzev's claim, still repeated by many historians, that the Bolsheviks were German agents. For one thing, the actual amount of German finance was not very great, given the party's financial problems during the summer; and, for another, there is no evidence that the Bolsheviks planned their policies to suit Berlin. Yet the timely release of these charges had an explosive effect, turning many soldiers against the Bolsheviks. Acting under orders from Pereverzev, a large detachment of military cadets ransacked the Pravda offices at dawn on 5 July. They only just missed Lenin, who had left for the first of his pre-October hide-outs, the flat of the Bolshevik worker, Sergei Alliluyev,* only minutes before.51

  Lenin had been given early warning of the treason charges by a secret contact in the Ministry of Justice. Hoping to mitigate the xenophobic reaction which was bound to follow, he called for an end to the demonstrations in an article on the back page of Pravda. But it was too late. By the morning of the 5th, the capital was seized with anti-Bolshevik hysteria. The right-wing tabloids bayed for Bolshevik blood, instantly blaming the 'German agents' for the reverses at the Front. It seemed self-evident that the Bolsheviks had planned their uprising to coincide with the German advance. General Polovtsov, who was responsible for the repressions as the head of the Petrograd Military District, later acknowledged that the Bolshevik-baiting contained 'a strong anti-Semitic tendency'; but in the usual way that Russians of his class justified pogroms he put it down 'to the Jews themselves because among the Bolshevik leaders their percentage was not far from a hundred. It was beginning to annoy the soldiers to see that Jews ruled everything, and the remarks I heard in the barracks plainly showed what the soldiers thought about it.'52

  Early in the morning of 6 July a massive task force of loyalist troops, complete with eight armoured cars and several batteries of heavy artillery, moved up to liberate the Kshesinskaya Mansion. Amidst the anti-Bolshevik hysteria, there had been outrage in the right-wing press at the thought of the unwashed Bolshevik workers and soldiers rummaging through the velvets and silks of Kshesinskaya's boudoir. Not a single shot was fired in the recapture of the ballerina's former mansion. The 500 Bolsheviks still inside surrendered without resistance, despite the large store of weapons at their disposal. The Bolshevik leaders had been too busy burning party files to organize resistance.53

  Later that day, Pereverzev ordered Lenin's arrest, along with eleven other Bolshevik leaders. They were all charged with high treason. Most of them stayed in the open, risking arrest, and in some cases even giving themselves up. But

  * His daughter, Nadezhda, would later marry Stalin.

  Lenin fled underground — first to a series of safe houses in the capital and then, on 9 July, along with Zinoviev, travelling through the countryside to Finland. Lenin shaved off his beard and wore a worker's tunic and cap to disguise himself. During the following days dozens of houses in the capital were turned over by troops in search of him. Even Gorky's flat was raided. Some 800 Bolsheviks in all were imprisoned, including Kamenev, Lunacharsky, Kollontai and Trotsky — the last not yet a member of the party, though he had declared his allegiance to it.54 The Peter and Paul Fortress, whose cells had been empty since the February Revolution, once again began to be filled with 'politicals'.

  As Lenin travelled into the northern wilderness, it must have seemed to him that the Bolshevik cause was finished. Before leaving the capital he had handed to Kamenev the manuscript of what was later to become The State and Revolution, with instructions for it to be published if he should be killed. Lenin was always prone to overestimate the physical danger to himself: in this respect he was something of a coward. It cannot be said that his life was ever at direct risk during his summer on the run: at one point he even stayed with the Chief of Police in Helsingfors, who happened to be a Bolshevik sympathizer. After Lenin's death, during the cult of Lenin, fantastic stories would be told of his personal bravery during countless narrow escapes from the police. But none of them was true. One true incident during this summer, although it hardly spoke of Lenin's courage, took place in a village near Sestoretsk on the Gulf of Finland, where Lenin and Zinoviev spent several weeks sleeping in the hay loft of a party worker. One day they saw two men with guns approaching and assumed that they were the police coming to arrest them. The two leaders of the world revolution dived for cover into a haystack. 'The only thing left to do now', Lenin whispered to Zinoviev, 'is to die an honourable death.' The strangers, however, walked right past: it turned out that they were hunting for ducks.55

  However, given the frenzied anti-Bolshevik atmosphere, it is not hard to see why Lenin should have been so concerned for his personal safety. This was a time of lynch law, and the tabloid press was full of cartoons showing Lenin on the scaffold. Some of the Bolshevik leaders, Kamenev in particular, wanted Lenin to give himself up and stand trial. They thought he could use his appearance in the courts to reject the treason charges and denounce the authorities. By fleeing abroad, they argued, he risked making the workers suspect that he must have had something to hide. Besides, there was a long tradition of socialists making propaganda from the dock: Trotsky had done it quite brilliantly in 1906; and Lenin's own brother had done it at his trial in 1887. But Lenin was not the sort of man to play the role of a revolutionary martyr: his life was much too important for that. As he saw it, there was no question of getting a fair trial (that, he said, was a 'constitutional illusion'), since the rule of law had been suspended and the state itself had been taken over by the 'counter-

  revolution'. 'It is not a question of "the courts", but of an episode in the civil war.' Underlying this was a fundamental shift in Lenin's thinking which was to have important consequences. Since the April Theses he had accepted the need to base the party's work on peaceful or political means. But in the wake of the July Days, when, as he saw it, the state had been taken over by 'the military dictatorship', he moved towards the idea of an armed uprising for the seizure of power.56 Lenin's refusal to appear in the courts was in effect his own declaration of a civil war.

  The Soviet leaders were equally fearful of a right-wing backlash and, although they denounced the July uprising and the part the Bolsheviks had played in it, they were also inclined to defend them against the punitive measures of the government. Gorky summed up the ambivalent views of the revolutionary intelligentsia in a letter to Ekaterina on 10 July:

  You will know from the newspapers about the atrocities that have taken place here. My own immediate impression of them is immensely hard to put into words. What has happened and is happening now is repulsively stupid, cowardly and loutish. But it is wrong to assume that everything can be blamed on 'the Bolsheviks' and these so-called German agents, who undoubtedly took no part in the events. The Kadets are to blame here for stirring up trouble, along with the usual philistines and, generally, the whole mass of Petersburg. I am not trying to defend 'the Bolsheviks' — they know themselves there is no justification for what they have done . . . The Bolshevism of the emotions, which played on the dark instincts of the masses, has mortally wounded itself — and that is good. But the Democracy, England, France and Germany, may see the rout of the Bolsheviks as the defeat of the whole Revolution, and that is desperately bad, for it will deflate the revolutionary mood in the West and endlessly prolong the war ... I fear that Lenin has come to an awkward end. He of course is not too bad, but his closest comrades, it seems, are truly rogues and scoundrels. They have all been arrested. Now the bourgeois press is after Novaia zhizri, and will probably get it closed down, And then the campaign will start against you and your SRs. The counter-revolution is no longer some idle intention, but a fact. The Kadets stand at its head, people used to intrigue and not ashamed to use such means of struggle
.57

  The Soviet Executive protested against the arrest of the Bolshevik leaders and dismissed the treason charges against them as Black Hundred slander designed to split the revolutionary democracy. The old traditions of socialist camaraderie — in which there were 'no enemies on the Left!' — died hard. Most of the Soviet leaders continued to view the Bolsheviks as 'comrades'. They

  agreed that the witch-hunt against them was in danger of leading to a right-wing backlash against all socialists in general. As Novaia zhizri put it: 'Today they accuse the Bolsheviks; tomorrow they will cast suspicions on the Soviet; and then they will declare a Holy War Against the Revolution.'58 The left-wing Mensheviks, many of whom still harboured hopes of reuniting their party with the Bolsheviks, were especially assiduous in their opposition to government repressions; and it was largely due to their efforts that the public trial and commission set up to examine the treason charges lost momentum and came to naught. It was this, more than anything else, that ensured the survival of the Bolsheviks. Because of the reluctance of the Soviet leaders to cut their ties with them, a prime opportunity had been missed to end the Leninist threat once and for all. Twelve months later, when many of these same Soviet leaders sat in Bolshevik jails, they would come to regret it.

  The Soviet leaders, in choosing to close ranks with the Bolsheviks, had no doubt overreacted to the threat of a 'counter-revolution'. As in February, they had looked at reality through the distorting prism of history: the shadows of 1849 and 1906 had obscured their vision. It was partly the same fear of counterrevolution which also prevented them, as in February, from taking power themselves. This too would prove a fatal mistake — for only a Soviet government could have filled the power vacuum left by the collapse of the coalition. True, it might not have brought about peace, bread or land; nor could it have ended the spiral into chaos and violence in the country; but at least it would have denied the Bolsheviks the chance to rally mass support under the slogan of All Power to the Soviets!' During the July Days the streets had begged the Soviet leaders to take power. Yet the latter had calmly dismissed this as no more than Bolshevik demagogy. It did not occur to them that such calls might express the wishes of the rest of the democracy. After all, as its self-appointed leaders, wasn't it their task to decide that? 'I have been in the provinces and on the Front,' Tsereteli reassured the Soviet deputies on 4 July, 'and I am stating that the authority of the Provisional Government in the country is extremely great.'59 Their rigid party dogma told the Mensheviks and the SRs that a socialist government could not be formed because the 'bourgeois stage of the revolution' had still not been completed. This higher logic drove these philosophers to the conclusion that a new coalition had to be patched together at all costs and that, if the Kadets still refused to join it, then a bloc would have to be formed with other bourgeois groups. 'The coalition is dead! Long live the coalition!'