In the Finland Regiment served the dashing sergeant Fedor Linde, a politically unaligned romantic who had played an important, undersung part in February, rousing the 5,000-strong Preobrazhensky Regiment to mutiny. Now the Milyukov note inflamed him as a betrayal of the revolution’s promise to end the war. As a revolutionary defencist, Linde feared that the note could demoralise and agitate the army in a profoundly unhelpful way.
When Milyukov’s intervention went public, Linde led a battalion of his regiment to the splendid neoclassical Marinsky Palace, where the Provisional Government met. He fully expected that the Soviet Executive, of which he was a member, would endorse his actions, assert its power, and arrest the perfidious government. Soldiers from the Moscow and Pavlov regiment joined his demonstration, and soon 25,000 men were angrily protesting outside the palace.
To Linde’s surprise and dismay, the Soviet condemned him. It insisted, rather, that it must help the Provisional Government restore its authority.
The Milyukov note and the escalating demonstrations against it caused uncertainty and tension among the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s resolution on the issue, passed that morning at an emergency session of the First Bolshevik Petrograd City Conference, was uncharacteristically equivocal. It condemned the note, and suggested that the end of the war would become possible only by transferring power to the Soviet – but it did not call workers and soldiers to come out.
However, thousands of soldiers and workers were already on the streets, demanding the resignations of Milyukov and Guchkov. When the Soviet ordered them to disperse, most, including the disconsolate Linde, obeyed. But the demonstrators were still carrying their placards reading ‘Down with Imperialist Policy’, and, tellingly, ‘Down with the Provisional Government’.
And such slogans went down well with some Bolshevik district delegates. There was a mood on the party left for such spectacles and interventions. Already that day, at the conference, Nevsky of the Military Organisation had argued for the mobilisation of troops to agitate for a Soviet seizure of power. Ludmila Stahl implored her comrades not to be ‘further left than Lenin himself’, and the delegates ultimately agreed to call for ‘solidarity with the resolution of the Central Committee’, meaning Lenin’s own, rather evasive motion.
But the next day, demonstrators were out again in their thousands, though with fewer soldiers among them. There was that surge again. Overthrow the government? The thought gained traction among Bolsheviks.
Hundreds of copies of a leaflet were scattering in the wind, some being trodden underfoot, many caught up and read: the anonymous thoughts of a troublemaker. ‘Down with the Provisional Government!’ was the heading. The comrades whispered that Bogdatiev, a far-left Bolshevik Putilov worker and candidate for the Central Committee, was the culprit. The redoubtable Kronstadt Bolsheviks were firmly in favour of overthrow. They were ready, they announced, ‘at any moment to support with armed force’ such demands.
On the afternoon of the 21st, demonstrations spread to Moscow, too. In the capital, workers once more took over Nevsky Prospect, shouting for the end of the Provisional Government. But this time as they marched forward they began to make out banners that were not their own. Another crowd milled outside the Kazan Cathedral, between its curving rows of columns like outflung arms. A Kadet counterdemonstration.
The Kadets stared pugnaciously and chanted their own slogans. ‘Hurrah for Milyukov!’ ‘Down with Lenin!’ ‘Long Live the Provisional Government!’
Clashes broke out in the shadow of the dome. People wielded their placards like weapons. They grabbed and swung. Then a series of shocking rat-tat-tat echoes. Gunfire, starting a panicked stampede. Three people died.
At 3 p.m., as workers marched again towards the Winter Palace, General Lavr Kornilov, in charge of the Petrograd Military District, ordered his units to take up position in the great square before it, surrounding the soaring Alexander Column.
Kornilov was a career soldier of Tatar and Cossack stock, celebrated for his escape from Austro-Hungarian captivity in 1916. Aggressive, dashing, unimaginative, brutal, brave, he had the unenviable task of re-establishing military discipline in Petrograd. As if to prove to him the scale of that commission, the soldiers now snubbed his order. Instead, they followed the Soviet’s command to stand down.
Kornilov was a hothead but not a fool. He swallowed back his fury and contempt, and avoided confrontation by rescinding his own instruction.
Rather than try to solve the crisis with violence, the Soviet issued an edict against unauthorised military presence on the streets. This was effectively a directive to wind down these disturbances, the April Days. That evening the Soviet Executive, the Ispolkom, voted, thirty-four against nineteen, to accept the Provisional Government’s ‘explanation’ of Milyukov’s note – an explanation that was tantamount to a withdrawal.
Activists’ blood was still up. That evening, at a meeting of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee’s Executive Commission, a motion for the government’s overthrow was gaining support. Having scandalised Bolshevik moderates, Lenin now moved to dampen the worrying ardour of his party’s ‘ultra-lefts’.
‘The slogan “Down with the Provisional Government”’, stated his resolution of 22 April, ‘is an incorrect one at the present moment’, because there was not yet a majority on the side of the revolutionary working class. Absent such weight, ‘such a slogan is either an empty phrase or, objectively, amounts to attempts of an adventurist character’. He reiterated that ‘only when the Soviets … adopt our policy and are willing to take power into their own hands’ would he advocate such a transfer.
The April Days had imparted an important, if unintended, lesson. It had become absolutely clear that the Soviet possessed more authority over the Petrograd Garrison than did the Provisional Government or the officers, whether the Soviet wished it or not.