On 30 May, yet another conference opened: the First Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees, the Fabzavkomy. Such committees had sprung up at the start of the February Revolution, mostly in the publicly owned defence plants, from where they had spread to private industry. In the early, heady post-February days, managers had agreed with the Soviet Ispolkom to introduce them to all plants in Petrograd, and in April they had been empowered to represent workers.
Initially they had tended to issue relatively moderate economic demands, along the kind of radical trade unionist lines that the socialist left might term ‘syndicalist’. Then, as shortages continued and social tension ratcheted up, the Fabzavkomy turned left, hard. While Mensheviks controlled most of the national trade unions, already in May it was the Bolsheviks who commanded more than two-thirds of the delegates to the Factory Committee Conference. Now those committees provocatively demanded that workers be given a decisive vote in factory management, and access to the firms’ accounting books.
The industrial working class as a whole was growing militant more quickly than were the peasants and soldiers. On the 31st, in the Workers’ Section of the Petrograd Soviet, a symptomatic motion was won by 173 to 144 votes, insisting that all power should be in the hands of the Soviets.
Such a vote would not have passed in the Soviet as a whole. Nonetheless, this Bolshevik formula was a slap in the face to advocates of Dual Power and to the moderates in the Soviet itself, let alone to the Coalition Government.
Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra, February 1913.
Grigori Rasputin, 1916.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin.
‘Konstantin Petrovich Ivanov’: a clean-shaven Lenin in disguise, August 1917.
Alexandra Kollontai, a provocative and brilliant Bolshevik leader.
Leon Trotsky, ‘charismatic and abrasive, brilliant and persuasive and divisive and difficult’.
The flamboyant lawyer and politician Alexander Kerensky, 1917.
Maria Spiridonova, who, at age twenty, shot and killed a brutal security chief.
Menshevik leader Julius Martov, ‘a rather charming type of bohemian … by predilection a haunter of cafés, indifferent to comfort, perpetually arguing and a bit of an eccentric’.
Demonstration in Petrograd, February 1917.
Revolutionary soldiers on the streets of Petrograd as news spreads of the tsar’s abdication, March 1917.
‘In March demonstrations in favour of the revolution shook Baku, Azerbaijan … a patchwork of medieval and modern edifices, watched over by the steep ziggurats of oil derricks.’
An advanced outpost of Petrograd Soviet soldiers ready to face General Kornilov, August 1917.
Members of the Red Guard below a banner reading, ‘To the health of the armed peoples, above all the workers’.
Cadets besieged in the Winter Palace on the eve of the October Revolution.
The armoured ship Aurora, after the revolution.
Yaroslav Sergeevich Nikolaev, Lenin’s Death Day (1957), oil on Canvas, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. ‘The revolution of 1917 is a revolution of trains.’
6
June: A Context of Collapse
On the first day of June, the Bolshevik Military Organisation met with representatives of the Kronstadt party and approved plans for a garrison demonstration. To the Central Committee, the MO sent a list of regiments it was confident it could persuade to take part. Together they numbered 60,000 men.
At that moment the CC was focused on affairs of state: from 3 to 24 June, that First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies – the gathering planned at the All-Russian Conference of Soviets, at the start of April – was meeting in Petrograd. Its 777 delegates comprised 73 unaffiliated socialists, 235 SRs, 248 Mensheviks, 32 Menshevik–Internationalists, and 105 Bolsheviks. The congress quickly elected a new SR-and Menshevik-dominated executive committee.
Almost as soon as proceedings opened, a visibly furious Martov went on the attack – against fellow Mensheviks. He deplored Tsereteli’s collaboration with the Provisional Government, particularly over the recent deportation of his Swiss comrade Robert Grimm. He appealed to the Mensheviks in the hall: ‘You, my past comrades in revolution, are you with those who give carte blanche to their minister to deport any category of citizen?’
From the Mensheviks came an extraordinary response: ‘Tsereteli is not a minister, but the conscience of the revolution!’
Then, Sukhanov wrote with admiration, Martov – ‘slight, meek, somewhat awkward’ – bravely faced down the ‘voracious, screeching monster’ of the crowd. The attack by his own party was so ugly that Trotsky himself, hardly a close comrade, ran forward to offer solidarity to the embattled internationalist. ‘Long live the honest socialist Martov!’ he shouted.
Tsereteli’s speech, by contrast, provoked ‘rapturous, never-ending applause’ from his fraction. Here was evidence of an ongoing shift among the leading party moderates towards being gosudarstvenniki – ‘statists’, of a sort. The crisis of April had strengthened the beliefs of those Mensheviks who saw socialist participation in power as necessary for authoritative government, and as a way to push their policies. With which, pari passu, grew their sense of themselves as custodians of the state itself – a state that might get things done.
It was not as if that state powered from success to success. After a month of governmental coalition, the mood in the country was hardening. Unrest in the countryside, the cities and at the front was increasing to the point of provoking serious social alarm. Urban crime and violence were still rising. Shortages grew worse. Hauling themselves feebly through the traffic on the streets of Petrograd in these high summer days, the horses were skeletal. The people were famished.
Despite all this, to the impatience of some on the left of his party, Lenin stuck to his patient programme of ‘explaining’ Bolshevik opposition to coalition, and of what he insisted was the real reason for social problems. ‘The pilfering of the bourgeoisie’, he told the congress, ‘is the source of the anarchy.’
Against such intransigence, on 4 June, Tsereteli, the minister of posts and telegraphs, justified the Soviet’s collaboration with the bourgeoisie to the gathered delegates. ‘There is’, he said, ‘no political party in Russia which at the present time would say “Give us power”.’
To which from the depths of the room an immediate heckle came back.
‘There is such a party,’ shouted Lenin.