Breakdown was widespread. On 1 June, in Baku, a thousand Azerbaijanis crowded the city hall, demanding grain, as relations soured between them and Armenians. In Latvia, landless peasants kept up pressure on the Land Council, demanding the expropriation of baronial estates. In Ukraine, on the 13th, after repeated attempts to negotiate with Petrograd, the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) issued its ‘First Universal’, announcing an ‘autonomous Ukrainian republic’ – just short of formal separation, but bad enough as far as the Russian right were concerned. The Coalition Government, though, had no choice but to allow it.
Some on the left had little sensitivity to tangled local tensions. In Baku, the Izvestia of the Soviet polemicised against Muslim nationalism without mentioning its counterpart among local Armenians, Jews or Russians. The local Bolsheviks, though they opposed the ‘bourgeois’ nationalist federalist demands of the Muslim National Committee, criticised such soviet myopia; they strove to keep communication open with the Muslim ‘democratic’ movement.
The two great wings of social democracy were moving further and further apart. In early June, those Baku Bolsheviks, following their Georgian comrades in Tiflis, terminated all association with the Mensheviks. At last the regional organisations were swinging behind Lenin’s call for schism.
In part in an effort to dilute the dangerous energies of nationalism and radicalism with Russian patriotism, and, more, to reassure the Allies, the government sped up its plans for what was now a Soviet Congress-authorised military offensive. On 16 June, at the southern front near Lwów, Russian heavy artillery began a pounding two-day onslaught. Kerensky, once more the persuader-in-chief, announced to Russian troops in Galicia that an offensive was about to commence. On the 18th, it would begin – on the very same day as the Soviet’s planned march.
The Mensheviks and the SRs inaugurated yet another organising committee, and their papers pushed hard for their demonstration. Briefly, with impressive perversity, the anarchists tried instead to build for one of their own, on the 14th. An irritated Pravda declared such plans ‘ruinous’, and they faded to nothing.
The Bolsheviks and Mezhraiontsy, too, agitated, according to the Bolshevik CC’s aspiration ‘to transform the demonstration, against the will of the Soviet, into an expression of support for the transfer of all power to the Soviet’. They hoped for what Zinoviev called ‘a demonstration within a demonstration’. By their good fortune, from 16 to 23 June, the All-Russian Conference of Bolshevik Military Organisations was scheduled in Petrograd, lending the party the skills of around 100 experienced activists.
The Soviet’s own rather vague slogans for the march declared for the ‘Democratic Republic’, ‘General Peace’ and ‘Immediate Convocation of a Constituent Assembly’. The Bolsheviks reverted to the combative slogans intended for the aborted march of 10 June: ‘Down with the Tsarist Duma!’ ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!’ (those non-socialists in the cabinet); ‘Down with the Politics of the Offensive!’ ‘Bread! Peace! Land!’ On the 14th, Pravda announced that Bolshevik supporters should come out under these slogans even if the rest of their factories did not. The Soviet leadership, to the hooting derision of the left, made a half-hearted attempt to insist that only official slogans would be permissible. The Bolshevik Fedorov embarrassed them by crowing that his party’s main slogan would be: ‘All Power to the Soviets!’
Still, those moderates were combative. On the 17th, Tsereteli mocked Kamenev. ‘Tomorrow’, he taunted, ‘not separate groups but all the working class of the capital there will demonstrate, not against the will of the Soviet but at its invitation. Now we shall all see which the majority follows, you or us.’
Indeed.
Sunday 18 June: a clear, windy morning. Workers and soldiers assembled early. That day sister demonstrations were planned in Moscow, Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Helsingfors (Helsinki), Kharkov, and across the empire.
At 9 a.m., a band struck up the Marseillaise, the French national anthem that had become an international hymn to freedom. The parade began its procession down Nevsky Prospect.
Its colossal size became slowly clear. The march filled the wide vista for miles. Some 400,000 people had taken to the streets.
The great column traced a route via the tomb of the February martyrs, to pay its respects. At its head walked the organisers from the Ispolkom, Mensheviks and SRs from the presidium of the All-Russia Congress, including Chkheidze, Dan, Gegechkori, Bogdanov and Gots. As they approached the Mars Field, they peeled away. A platform had been raised near the burial place. They ascended, to look out over the crowd.
Horror crept over them.
Sukhanov surveyed the mass of jostling banners. ‘Bolsheviks again,’ he later remembered thinking. ‘And there behind them is another Bolshevik column … Apparently the next one, too.’ His eyes widened. He turned his head to take it all slowly in. Here and there, he glimpsed an SR or an official Soviet slogan. But they were ‘submerged by the mass’. The overwhelming majority of banners advancing towards the aghast organisers – like, he said, Birnam Wood towards Macbeth – were Bolshevik.
Seas of ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!’ Wave after wave of ‘Peace! Bread! Land!’ And – a strange taunt to the Soviet conciliators – endless iterations of ‘All Power to the Soviet!’
Tsereteli had looked forward to the Soviet march being ‘a duel in the open arena’. Now blowback blew back, very hard. The results were devastating, unambiguous, crushing. ‘Sunday’s demonstration’, wrote Gorky’s paper Novaya zhizn, ‘revealed the complete triumph of Bolshevism among the Petersburg Proletariat.’
As they came past, Bolshevik after Bolshevik broke away from their fellows to rush up to Chkheidze. Kaustov, the recently imprisoned editor of the party’s frontline paper, they demanded, must be released from custody. Chkheidze made placatory noises. Soon the matter would be out of his hands.
Early afternoon. An extraordinary column of workers marched into sight, as precise as highly trained soldiers. ‘What district is this?’ came a shout.
‘Why, can’t you see?’ the group’s leader said proudly. ‘Exemplary order! That means it’s Vyborg.’ The militant district came led by their heavily Bolshevik soviet. The Vyborg red flags were interspersed with black banners, the irrepressible anarchists demanding ‘Down with Government and Capital!’ Ignoring official pleas, many Vyborg workers carried weapons.
At 3 p.m., 2,000 Anarchist–Communists and sympathetic soldiers broke away from the march and made rapidly for the bleak brick sprawl of Vyborg’s notorious riverside prison, Kresty. At its entrance gates they raised their weapons at the guards, and demanded Kaustov be let out. His terrified jailers plunged into the keep-like maze to fetch him out. Freed from his cell, Kaustov, with lordly front and without missing a beat, demanded that several other political prisoners also be released. Only when their comrades had emerged did the daring anarchists disperse.