These ferocious disagreements on collaboration in the liberal government notwithstanding, both wings of the party were as yet in accord that the workers themselves were in no position to take power. On the ground, this doctrine could give Menshevik organisers, particularly moderates, a certain, somewhat abstract, even quietist political mien.
The young Bolshevik Dune regarded the cadre of Mensheviks within his Moscow workplace with respect, as ‘older, thoughtful and widely read comrades’, ‘the most skilled workers’, a ‘workers’ aristocracy’ with impressive knowledge and experience – but as those whose ‘revolutionary ardour had cooled’. During the post– April Theses factory debates, those Mensheviks of course spoke out against soviet power, at length and with citations, on the grounds that the country was not yet mature, and because ‘before workers could come to power they had to learn a great deal’. As Dune recalled,
The meeting listened carefully to all the speakers but with less attention to [Menshevik] arguments about the socialist and bourgeois–democratic revolutions, supported by citations from the works of Bebel and Marx … The Bolsheviks spoke in a way that was more comprehensible. We must preserve and strengthen the power we had won during the revolution, not give any of it away to the bourgeoisie. We must not liquidate the soviets as organs of power, but transfer power to them.
Tensions in the country continued to grow as the month stretched on. An uneasiness, a dangerous ill temper escalated among soldiers, workers, and, most dramatically, peasants. For the most part it did not, yet, take explicitly politicised forms, but it was protean, destructive and very often violent.
In the regions, bouts of rural insurgency occurred with ominous and increasing frequency. ‘Russia’, said the Kadet organ Rech, ‘is turned into a sort of madhouse’. Groups of angry peasants, often with soldiers among them, were looting manor houses in growing numbers. Soldiers, despite theatrical imprecations and blandishments from the war minister Kerensky, continued to desert in enormous numbers. Their columns stalked the countryside. They crowded the cities. Traumatised by the war, conspicuous objects of moral panic, on the wrong side of the law, many now broke it to survive, and for darker ends.
They were not the only ones. Crime rates soared: that year came countless more murders in Petrograd than in the last, and some were spectacular and particularly horrific, spreading angst and terror. Deserters broke into a house in Lesnoi, choked a servant to death and savagely beat a young boy before making off with money and valuables. A young woman from the city’s 10,000-strong Chinese minority was found hacked to death, her eyes gouged out. The middle classes in particular were in a panic – they felt more vulnerable than the rich, who could afford protection, or those in the tight-knit working-class areas, where workers’ militias were more effective than was the city’s own. It is no wonder that in this month, the phenomenon of samosudy, lynchings and mob justice, ‘took’, in the words of Petrogradsky listok, ‘a sharp turn’. The Gazeta-kopeika began to run a regular column entitled ‘Today’s Mob Trials’.
No less angry than the soldiers, though generally more politicised, was the mood among the workers. Strikes multiplied, as did those wheelbarrow-to-canal journeys for abusive overseers. And not only in Petrograd, or among the industrial workers most commonly associated with such agitation: in the town of Roslavl in Smolensk province, for example, it was milliners who made a stand. These mostly young Jewish women, with a tradition of militancy stretching back to 1905, came out for the eight-hour day, a 50 per cent wage increase, a two-day weekend plus paid holidays, and other demands. And they did so with no obsequious niceties.
On 13 May, the Kronstadt Soviet declared itself the only power on the naval island. It announced that it would not recognise the Coalition Government, and would deal only with the Petrograd Soviet. This radical repudiation of Dual Power, though heavily influenced by local Bolsheviks, was slapped down as adventurism by the Petrograd Bolshevik Central Committee. It was not the time, the CC insisted, for such toytown insurrectionary power grabs. The Bolsheviks, wrote Lenin in one pamphlet, must ‘set [themselves] free from the prevailing orgy of revolutionary phrase-mongering and really stimulate the consciousness both of the proletariat and of the mass in general’. The party’s task was to explain their reading of the situation ‘skilfully, in a way that people would understand’. Accordingly, the CC summoned to Petrograd the leading Kronstadt members, Raskolnikov and Roshal.
Lenin remonstrated with them. To no avail. Nor did an appeal from the Petrograd Soviet itself to the Kronstadt forces on 26 May resolve the matter. It would, in fact, require the intercession of Trotsky, on the 27th, to broker a compromise that allowed the Kronstadt Soviet to back down with dignity. Even after that, it remained the only effective government on the island.
In those heady days, as the Coalition Government struggled not to lose control of the country, its critics on the left had trouble controlling their own supporters.
The subordinated nations of the empire were stretching, feeling out new possibilities.
Between 1 and 11 May, Moscow hosted the convention demanded by Muslim Duma deputies in February. Nine hundred delegates from Muslim populations and nations arrived in the city – Bashkirs, Ossets, Turks, Tatars, Kirghiz and more.
Almost a quarter of those present were women, several fresh from the Women’s Muslim Congress in Kazan; one of the twelve-person presidium committee was a Tatar woman, Selima Jakubova. When one man asked why men should grant women political rights, a woman jumped up to answer. ‘You listen to the men of religion and raise no objections, but act as though you can grant us rights,’ she said. ‘Rather than that, we shall seize them!’