Tsereteli launched into a brutal attack. The Bolsheviks were conspirators, he said. To stand against their plans, he demanded once more that they should be disarmed and legally repressed.
The mood was electric. All eyes turned to Kamenev as he rose to respond. If Tsereteli stood by such claims, he rather splendidly exclaimed, let him immediately arrest and try Kamenev himself. With that riposte, the Bolsheviks swept from the hall.
The debate was splenetic in their absence. On the side of Tsereteli were Avksentiev, Znamensky, Liber, and many other right socialists – including Kerensky. Ranged against them were centrist and Left SRs, Trudoviks and Mensheviks, and the far-left Mezhraiontsy. Some argued their case, like Dan, from principles of democracy; some affirmed that Tsereteli’s claims of conspiracy were unproven; some – most eloquently Martov – underlined that the mass of workers supported the Bolsheviks on many issues, and that the task of socialists to their right had, therefore, to be to win those workers over, not to make martyrs of the left.
When it came to the decision, the SRs and Mensheviks narrowly agreed to Dan’s compromise. Tsereteli’s suppressive resolution was withdrawn.
At an emergency meeting of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee, Lenin tried to put the case behind the cancellation. Again he stressed the necessity of ‘maximum calmness, caution, restraint and organisation’, but now he further implied – as, from a very different political position, had Tsereteli – that the revolution was entering a new phase.
Except in the most abstract possible way, Lenin did not apologise or admit to error. To do so was never his style. He argued, rather, that the CC had had ‘no alternative’ but to call a halt to the action, for two reasons: because the Soviet itself had ‘formally banned’ it, and because, according to reliable sources, a formidable group of Black Hundreds had intended a violent response, to unleash counterrevolution.
The former argument was quaint, coming from a man who had never hesitated to break an order or a law if he considered it advantageous so to do. As to the latter, Latsis pointed out that everyone had been aware of the possibility of a counterdemonstration. ‘If we were not ready for it,’ he said, ‘we should have approached the question of a demonstration negatively from the very beginning.’
The fact is that Lenin had blinked. And his abstention on the vote to cancel was not only uncharacteristic, but uncharacteristically evasive of responsibility: if, as he now claimed, there had been no choice, why had he not voted against the action? If the intent behind abstention had been to inoculate himself from criticism for backing down, it did not work.
Volodarsky, Slutsky, the irrepressible Latsis, and various others derided the CC as, in Tomsky’s words, ‘guilty of intolerable wavering’. Naumov, of the Soviet’s Bolshevik delegation, voiced the ultra-left mood, insisting bullishly that he was glad the leadership was undermined, because ‘it is necessary to trust only in oneself and the masses’. ‘If the cancellation was correct,’ he added, ‘when did we make a mistake?’
The question was pertinent. While it may not be alone in this, the socialist left has always tended to exaggerate its successes – the vinegary humorist Nadezhda Teffi quipped, ‘If Lenin were to talk about a meeting at which he, Zinoviev, Kamenev and five horses were present, he would say: “There were eight of us”’ – and it does not have a good record of acknowledging its failures. The fear, perhaps, is that fallibility undermines authority. The left’s typical method has been to brazen out errors; then, as long as possible after any dust has settled, remark en passant that ‘of course’, everyone knows ‘mistakes were made’, back in the mists of time.
On 12 June, Kerensky persuaded the All-Russian Soviet Congress, against the opposition of Bolsheviks and a few others, to resolve that ‘the Russian revolutionary democracy is obliged to keep its army in a condition to take either the offensive or defensive …[to] be decided from a purely military and strategic point of view’. This was permission to resume military operations – including advances. In other words, ‘defencism’, even in its ‘revolutionary’ variety, even undertaken in good faith to protect the gains of the revolution, could segue into ‘traditional’ war. Chernov was clear about this: ‘without an offence’, he said, ‘there is no defence’.
That done, Congress went on to pass Dan’s censure of the Bolsheviks. Then Dan, Bogdanov and Khinchuk proposed another way to take wind out of the left’s sails. The moderates in the Soviet were committed to channelling the city’s radical energies in their own direction, away from the radicals, through a sanctioned outlet to tap and shape the popular mood. Therefore, Congress scheduled for Sunday 18 June a mass demonstration of its very own. That, the moderates decided, would show the Bolsheviks who had a handle on the Petrograd masses.
At the front, the war crawled on. A strange infrastructure of death.
Beyond fields of rye and potatoes and grazing cows, deep in thick woods, Red Cross tents loomed in forest clearings. Dugouts and low log cabins; rough, jury-rigged chapels; and a staccato tinnitus of mortars. Trench-drenched soldiers the colour of the ripped-up earth taking what hours of respite they could, drinking tea from tin mugs. Alternate rhythms of boredom and terror, fire rising to meet German planes blasting overhead scattering propaganda, or fire of their own. The desperate jocularity of fraternisation, yells in halting German and Russian back and forth across those yards of no-man’s-land. The rage of machine guns, the visitations of bad spirits, twelve-inch shells nicknamed for the witch Baba Yaga, screaming in to tear the world apart.
Soldiers stumbled, snared by the war’s predatory metal, the barbed wire that grasped as if with its own purpose. Behind the lines huddled terrorised men – and a small number of women combatants, too – from across the empire, a debased cosmopolitanism of the conscripted, fingering bayonets in these premonitory graves.
All the while behind the front, inflation and inadequate supplies meant living conditions were collapsing. The peasants’ impatience grew more violent. A slow increase of reports of expropriation, less according to some rude, careful sense of village justice, now, than by sheer force, destruction, arson, sometimes murder.