At an emergency meeting with representatives from the CC, including Viktor Nogin, they made their fury clear. ‘Here I, a representative, only now found out that a demonstration was being organised,’ one said. They insisted that Nogin – who was himself opposed to the coming-out – dissuade the CC from its planned course.
The Soviet’s Executive Committee, too, was doing its utmost to prevent it. Many in the Soviet were terrified that any such armed provocation would provoke bloody clashes with the right, strengthening reaction; they also feared that this presaged some Bolshevik attempt to take control. And there was in fact a minority on the party left, including Old Bolsheviks Latsis, Smilga and Semashko, who wondered if the action might not indeed be a way to seize the city’s communications – perhaps even power.
Evening fell amid a flurry of rushed debates, miscommunications, preparations. False rumours spread that Kerensky had mobilised military forces to crush any march. Chkheidze, Gots, Tsereteli and Fydor Dan of the Soviet Congress presidium appealed desperately for order. Lunacharsky and other Mezhraiontsy tried to stop the congress from declaring action against the demonstration, stalling, it seems, in the hopes that caution would prevail among the Bolsheviks.
At 8:30 p.m., Zinoviev, Nogin and Kamenev reached the Kshesinskaya Mansion and reported the fury of the party’s delegates. The Bolshevik leadership hastily convened a meeting. In view of the tense situation, the naysayers vociferously counselled cancellation. But, despite the growing opposition, the meeting voted fourteen to two to go ahead.
Within a few hours, the Soviet Congress, meeting late and excluding Bolsheviks and Mezhraointsy, was unanimously condemning the Bolsheviks for their plans. It ruled that ‘not a single demonstration should be held today’, and prohibited any such action for three days. To police this, the Congress quickly inaugurated the splendidly named Bureau for Counteracting the Demonstration. The forces ranged against the plans were growing in anger and strength.
At last, at 2 a.m. on the 10th itself, the increasingly agitated Lenin, Zinoviev and Sverdlov met once again with Nogin, Kamenev and the Bolshevik delegation to the Congress, who demanded of the rump CC present – only five members – that it cancel the plans.
The CC voted. Kamenev and Nogin held firm to their opposition. Zinoviev had earlier switched sides, to support the proposal: now in these last tumultuous minutes he switched back again. And Sverdlov and Lenin abstained.
With what can only have been anxious relief, the Central Committee cancelled the demonstration, by three votes to none, with those two key abstentions.
The vote was ludicrously small. No members of the Petersburg Committee or the MO itself were present. Had there been any opposition to this final-second decision, the process could easily and reasonably have been denounced as inquorate and undemocratic. But Lenin made no objection. The demonstration was off.
An undignified, pell-mell rush. The unhappy Bolsheviks scrambled to inform party organisations and cadre, and the Anarchist– Communists themselves, that the action was cancelled. At 3 a.m., party printers got word. Urgently they rejigged the layouts of Pravda and Soldatskaya pravda, shuffling and reconfiguring stories, removing instructions for the demonstration. At dawn, party militants raced to factories and barracks to argue against what they had so keenly promoted scant hours before.
Delegates from the Soviet Congress, too, spread through Petrograd, pleading with workers and soldiers not to come out. Some local committees passed resolutions insisting that though they stood down, they did so in response to the Bolsheviks’ request, not to that of the Soviet Congress or the Coalition Government.
Not that the Bolsheviks could avoid censure. In the factories, barracks and courtyards of Vyborg, militants were furious at the volte-face. They inveighed against the party. Incredulous members, reported the Bolsheviks’ own Izvestia, heaped insults on their leaders. Soldatskaya pravda washed its hands of the decision: the order, it stressed, came from above. Stalin and Smilga proffered their resignations from the CC, in protest at the highly questionable vote from which they had been absent (their resignations were rejected). A disgusted Latsis reported members tearing up their party cards. In Kronstadt, one prominent Bolshevik, Flerovsky, described the wrath of his fellow sailors that morning as ‘among the most unpleasant’ hours of his life. He was able to dissuade them from a unilateral demonstration only by suggesting that a delegation sail to Petrograd to find out from the CC precisely what was going on.
The Bolshevik leadership had a lot of explaining to do.
At a special commission of Mensheviks and SRs on 11 May, Tsereteli gave voice to the rage of the moderates. The recent events, he said, were evidence of a shift in Bolshevik strategy from propaganda to an overt attempt to seize power by arms, and thus he called for the party’s suppression.
The debate continued at a meeting of the Congress.
Fyodor Dan was in his late forties, a committed high-profile Menshevik, a doctor who had served in the war as a surgeon, though he had been an anti-war ‘Zimmerwaldist’, close to the Menshevik left intellectually and personally – his wife Lydia was Martov’s sister. After February, however, he took a revolutionary defencist position, contending that newly revolutionary Russia had the right and the duty to hold out in the war. Notwithstanding certain leftist leanings, Dan was also, as he saw it perforce, an advocate of the ‘democracy’ – the democratic masses – working with the Provisional Government, and he supported Tsereteli’s ascension to minister for posts and telegraph in May. But despite that solidarity with his party comrade, and the vitriolic attacks it had earned him from the Bolsheviks, now, along with Bogdanov, Khinchuk and several others of his party, he opposed Tsereteli from the left.
On principles of revolutionary democracy, rather than of any particular support for the Bolsheviks, he argued against Tsereteli’s punitive stance. Dan’s group proposed a compromise. Armed demonstrations should be prohibited, and the Bolsheviks condemned rather than officially suppressed.
In Lenin’s absence, it was Kamenev who responded for the Bolsheviks – an interesting choice, given his consistent opposition to the demonstration that never was. He now insisted, not very persuasively, that the march was always to have been peaceful, and would have made no calls to seize power. Besides which, it had been cancelled at Congress’s request. What, he wondered, butter not melting in his mouth, was all the fuss about?
Between Dan’s suggestion of slapped wrists, and Kamenev’s wide-eyed ingenuousness, the situation seemed to be defusing. But then, out of order, Tsereteli took the floor again.
‘He is white as a sheet,’ Pravda reported, ‘and very excited. Tense silence reigns.’