And his stubbornness did highlight a certain instability of the party’s current ‘quasi-Menshevik’ position, according to which some on the Bolshevik right seemed to imply that history was ‘not ready’ for socialism, while insisting that the bourgeois government could not deliver.
Ten days after Lenin’s return, the First Petrograd City Conference of the Bolsheviks convened. There, Lenin developed his argument, insisting that the Provisional Government could not be ‘“simply” overthrown’, that it was necessary first to win the majority in the Soviet. Still, delegate after delegate accused him of anarchism, schematicism, ‘Blanquism’ – a modern iteration of the radical conspiracies of the nineteenth-century French socialist Auguste Blanqui. By now, however, a week and a half after his return, he had gained supporters, too. Those stalwartly on his side, like Alexandra Kollontai and Ludmila Stahl, remained vocal. And he must have had a good deal of shy support, too, because though the majority of speakers spoke against him, his resolution on opposing the Provisional Government passed by thirty-three votes to six, with two abstentions.
This shift in the party cadres would soon make trouble for the Provisional Government.
In these April days, a remnant of the social carnivalesque of March continued, but now with a harder and more bitter edge. First signs of a general crisis were not hard to find.
In early April, thousands of soldiers’ wives – soldatki – marched through the capital. These women had started the war disadvantaged, browbeaten and precarious, desperate for charity and inadequate state support. But the absence of their husbands could also mean an unexpected liberation. In February their demands for food, support, respect, had started to take on a radical bent. That trend continued. In Kherson province, one observer saw the soldatki forcing their way into homes and ‘requisitioning’ any luxury they thought was undeserved.
Not only did they flout laws and intimidate the authorities wherever they possibly could, there were also direct acts of violence. The state flour trader who did not want to offer them his goods at discounted price was beaten by a band of soldiers’ wives, and the pristav, the local police chief, who wanted to hurry to his help, escaped the same fate by a hair’s breadth.
On the land, the exuberant and pandemoniacal spread of soviets and congresses and conferences and peasant assemblies, amid established local bodies like volosts and township zemstvos, was beginning to take ominous forms. As early as March, in the Volga, pugnacious rural communes began disputing with landowners over rent and rights to the commons. Gangs of peasants were increasingly wont to make their way into private woods with axes and saws and fell the estate’s trees. Now, in April, particularly in the north-west districts – Balashov, Petrovsk, Serdobsk – that movement surged. Sometimes peasants simply began to mow the gentry’s meadows for their own use, paying only the prices they reckoned were fair for seed.
That sense of ‘fairness’ was crucial. Certainly there were moments of crude class rage and cruelty. But the actions of village communes against landlords were often scrupulously articulated in terms of a moral economy of justice. Sometimes this entailed the presentation of their demands in quasi-legal form, through manifestos and declarations formulated by sympathetic local intellectuals, or in the careful prolixity of autodidacts. This was an ad hoc realisation of the traditional chiliastic yearning for equal shares of the land for all who worked it – ‘black repartition’, as this redistribution was known – and the freedoms that should ensue.
‘Cabinet, appanage, monastery, church, and major estate owners’ lands must be surrendered to the people without compensation, for they were earned not by labour but by various amorous escapades,’ 130 illiterate peasants of Rakalovsk Volost in Viatka Province had their scribe write to the Petrograd Soviet, in a collective letter of 26 April, ‘not to mention through sly and devious behaviour around the tsar’.
It was one of a torrent of letters from the newly politicising, the engaged and eager, across the empire. Ever since February they had crossed the country, addressing themselves to the Soviet, to the government, to the land commissions, to the newspapers, to the SRs, to the Mensheviks, to Kerensky, to anyone or any organisation that seemed as if it might have some power or importance. In these first months some still took a tone so careful as to be almost cowed, though they were often hopeful, joyful, even, if unsure. Injunctions, entreaties, offers, queries and lamentations of curious people. They came in the great unparagaphed underpunctuated blocks of text, the urgent, rushing metaphors, and that stilted quasi-legalese of those not used to writing. There were poems and prayers and imprecations.
Outraged workers in the Tula Brass Cartridge Factory defended their output in Izvestia. The peasants of Lodeina village in Vologda wrote to the Soviet pleading for socialist newspapers. In the Menshevik press, the ‘Committee of Workers’ Elders’ in the Atlas Metal Factory decried alcoholism. Soldiers of the 2nd Battery Assembly of the Caucasus army sent a letter directly to ‘deeply respected deputy’ Chkheidze, lamenting their own lack of education and pleading with the Menshevik leader for books. Transport Repair Workshop Number 2 in Kiev wrote to him too, enclosing forty-two roubles for the martyrs of the revolution.
Over the months such letters would grow angrier and more desperate. Many were already angry now, and many more were impatient.
‘We are sick and tired of living in debt and slavery,’ the Rakalovsk peasants had their chairperson write. ‘We want space and light.’
On 18 April, the Provisional Government cabled its foreign allies with their official ‘Revolutionary Defencist’ war aims, as the Soviet demanded after Milyukov’s provocative interview the previous month. But Milyukov was seemingly determined to wreck any such move, to undermine what he considered inexcusable treason. To the document, the reiteration of the ‘Declaration of March 27’, he appended a note ‘clarifying’ that the cable did not mean Russia was planning to leave the war. That the country remained determined to fight for the ‘high ideals’ of the Allies.
The ‘Milyukov Note’, as it was swiftly known, was not the machination of one rogue right-wing Kadet. His draft and the plans for its communication were approved by the cabinet in a compromise between the Provisional Government’s left and right wings – precisely to undermine the Soviet.
On 19 April, when the Soviet Executive Committee discovered the note’s content, Chkheidze denounced Milyukov as ‘the evil genius of the revolution’. And the Ispolkom was not the only group so incensed. When on the 20th the text appeared in various newspapers, spontaneous, furious demonstrations instantly broke out.