On the 22nd, he addressed the delegates in person, hammering home his support for the poorest peasants and demanding the redistribution of land. Seemingly in response to this upstart stealing the thunder of the peasant party from the left, the SRs hurriedly added to their programme a provision that ‘all lands must without exception be placed under the jurisdiction of the land committees’. Later, Lenin would not hesitate to filch policies from the left wing of the SRs: for now, he provided the party with material.
It was a reflection of the fractiousness within the SRs that at their own Third Congress, held late that month, Chernov came under bitter assault from high-profile Left SRs like Boris Kamkov, Mark Natanson and the celebrated Maria Spiridonova herself. Spiridonova, after eleven brutal prison years, was freed in February, and had recently arrived in Petrograd in dramatic and triumphal style. Promptly elected mayor of Chita in Siberia, near where she had served time, on getting out, she immediately ordered the blowing up of the prisons. Now she and the other Left SRs accused Chernov of having ‘mutilated’ the party programme. They put forward their own proposals for land seizures, immediate peace and socialist government.
The left’s groundswell of support – 20 per cent of the delegates, and up to 40 per cent on some votes – could not win them more than one place (Natanson) on the Central Committee, and it was the moderates’ policies that the party officially represented at the Congress of Peasants’ Soviets. The SR radicals quietly inaugurated an ‘informational bureau’ to coordinate their activities. When rumours of this reached an alarmed Chernov, the Left SRs formally and falsely assured him that they had set up no such thing.
The assiduous push of Lenin and the Bolshevik radicals (not counting the party’s most adventurist wing) for intransigent political positions was starting to bear fruit, including among seemingly unlikely constituencies. That month, Nina Gerd, the organiser of the Committee for the Relief of Soldiers’ Wives in the Vyborg district, a liberal but an old friend of Krupskaya, surrendered to her the organisation. Three years before, in the recollection of one philanthropist, the soldatki had been ‘helpless creatures’, ‘blind moles’, pleading with the authorities for help. Now, as she relinquished the committee, Gerd told Krupskaya that the women ‘do not trust us; they are displeased with whatever we do; they have faith only in the Bolsheviks’. Soon the soldatki were self-organising in their own soviets. And this dauntless spirit was spreading.
At the time, though, for most of the empire, it is fair to say that local conditions, complicated as they often were by national questions and often steered by moderate activists, encouraged less radical positions than the Bolshevik hardliners would like. At the start of May, for example, the Georgian Bolsheviks Mikha Tskhakaya and Filipp Makharadze arrived from Petrograd in Tiflis, Georgia, to urge their comrades to break immediately with ‘collaborationist’ Mensheviks, and unite only with the left Menshevik–Internationalists. Their injunctions were received with scepticism.
In Baku, too, the local Bolsheviks worked with the Mensheviks, and Lenin’s April Theses still caused consternation: discussion of them in the Social Democratic press was hedged with disclaimers. A citywide conference of Social Democrats in mid-May, with a pro-Bolshevik majority, did oppose the Coalition Government, but would not vote to support a position of ‘all power to the soviets’. And in the Baku Soviet itself, resistance to leftist positions remained stiff. On 16 May, the Bolshevik Shaumian’s no-confidence resolution in the new government was roundly defeated: by 166 to nine, with eight abstentions, the soviet passed a Menshevik–SR–Dashnak (a leftist Armenian party) resolution supporting the inclusion of Petrograd Soviet members in the Provisional Government.
Among the most important exceptions to the tendency of regional moderation was Latvia. In the early days, its Bolsheviks, influenced in part by a strong tradition of local unity with Mensheviks, had taken a mild position, as with the Riga Committee’s ‘submissive’ statement of March. Since then, chivvied by their harder, Russia-based Central Committee, their ranks swelled by the return of more militant émigrés, attitudes had changed. The sheer dominance of the local Bolshevik party in the soviets, its outmanoeuvring of liberals within provisional elected councils, gave it so powerful a hand that, in the words of the historian Andrew Ezergailis, ‘the peculiarity of the institutional framework emerging in Latvia after March was that … the concept of dual power simply did not obtain’.
Key to this shift were the Latvian riflemen. The soviet of these soldiers had moved very rapidly leftward in only a few weeks, and at a congress on 15 May, it passed a resolution on the ‘Present Situation’ which laid out a Leninist position on the war, the Provisional Government, and the soviets. Julijs Danisevskis, who moved the document, pre-prepared it with his Bolshevik comrades in Moscow, from where he had only recent arrived. Two days after it passed, the soldiers elected a new Executive Commitee, of which only one member was not a Bolshevik.
Notwithstanding Brusilov’s sincere efforts to embrace certain democratic norms, Kerensky’s reimposition of traditional military discipline, combined with the ongoing threat of transfer to the front, provoked immense anger among soldiers. This was particularly true of those in revolutionary Petrograd – among whom Bolshevik influence was slowly increasing.
The First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was scheduled for 3 to 24 June, in the capital. The prospect of an opportunity to show its military strength appealed to the hard-left Bolshevik Military Organisation (MO). It prepared to flex its muscles. On 23 May, the MO agreed that several regiments – the Pavlovsky, Izmailovsky, Grenadier and First Reserve Infantry – were ‘ready to go out on their own’, to come onto the streets in a large armed demonstration against Kerensky’s military measures.
In the discussion that ensued among the MO activists, the question was never whether the demonstration should occur – on that there was no disagreement – but only how, under what parameters, whether it needed to attract the majority of the soldiers. The organisers decided to hold a meeting with representatives from Kronstadt early the following month. On the basis of that they would decide how and when this show of force should take place.
The repercussions of this decision would be profound.