That afternoon, as the exultant left celebrated the day, the minister of justice, Perevezev – one of the ten capitalist ministers against whom the banners had railed – called an emergency government meeting. He wanted full power to recapture all escaped prisoners. He demanded the right to employ any means necessary. He got it.
At three the following morning, 19 June, soldiers, Cossacks and armoured cars surrounded the Durnovo villa. They shone their lights on the walls in that eerie White Night, one of the city’s midsummer skies, dark but dimly glowing, a haze like a dirty sunset. The soldiers blared through a megaphone, shouting for the sixty anarchists within to hand over those they had broken out of jail the previous day. Most, including Kaustov, were long gone: still, the anarchists refused to cooperate. They ducked below the windows of the besieged building and hurled out bombs that did not explode. The troops stormed the doors.
A noisy, confused fracas. Asnin – so went the claim in the official enquiry – tried to grab a soldier’s rifle. There was a shot. Asnin was dead.
Word of his martyrdom spread fast through the district. That morning, the factories nearest the villa – the Rozenkrants, the Fenisk, Metalist, Promet and Parviainen plants, among others – came out in militant protest. Crowds gathered. Asnin’s grieving comrades displayed his body at the villa, and mourners lined up to pay respects.
Furious workers lobbied the Ispolkom, which begged for calm and implored the strikers to return to work. It set up an investigation. It demanded that the government release all those detained that night who were not accused of specific crimes. But such measures did little to mollify the militants. Anarchists from the Rozenkrants factory sent representatives to the radical First Machine Gun Regiment and the Moskovsky Regiment, to propose a joint demonstration against the government. The soldiers deflected the suggestion, but the seed of an idea was sown, rage stoked. From here began to accelerate a wave of protests in Petrograd.
That day, the 19th, also showed how divided and politically febrile Petrograd was. The same Nevsky Prospect that had, the previous day, vibrated with Bolshevik slogans under hundreds of thousands of boots, now hosted a parade organised by officer cadets. It was a largely middle-class demonstration, a fraction of the size of that of the 18th, but, nonetheless, it bespoke a certain genuine upsurge of patriotic enthusiasm. The marchers chanted, hurrahed for the troops. They sung nationalist songs and waved portraits of Kerensky. In the eyes of the right, Russian honour seemed to be on its way to a restoration: they were out on the streets to celebrate an event whose echoes had just reached the city: the advance of the army. A shift in the war, a long-mooted wager taken by those in charge. The June, or Kerensky, Offensive.
In Galicia, the Eighth Army broke through lines of demoralised Austrian troops across a twenty-mile front. The offensive, undertaken to reassure the Allies, to shift the war, to discipline the restive and troublesome rear, seemed a devastating success. On the central and northern fronts, the Seventh and Eleventh Armies rapidly took more than 18,000 prisoners. As the advance continued, patriotism swept the country, including among many socialists within the Soviet. An official proclamation from the All-Russian Congress burbled enthusiastically, demanding bread from the peasants and support from the citizenry for Russia’s heroic soldiers.
But such rah-rah did not last long. Word very soon began to drift back from the front that things were not going as planned.
In working-class areas in particular, unrest began to return. Several regiments and factory committees went as far as explicitly condemning the offensive in the Bolshevik press.
On 20 June, the First Machine Gun Regiment in Petrograd received orders to supply 500 machine guns to the front. The regimental committee agreed to this, but a mass meeting of the regiment felt differently. It was unwilling to lose weapons from the revolutionary capital, even to help their fellow soldiers. To the vigorous approval of the far left, the soldiers voted for another demonstration against the government, to be held as soon as possible. They approached other garrisons, and at 5 p.m. won the support of the Grenadier Guards.
The Soviet urgently denounced their actions as ‘a stab in the back’ of their comrades at the front. They begged the machine-gunners to reconsider. When, the next morning, the regiment was ordered to relocate two-thirds of its members to the front, it would only agree to send ten of the thirty detachments, and that only when ‘the war has taken on a revolutionary character’. Given Order Number 1, the machine-gunners insisted, such a forced transfer of units from Petrograd to the front was illegal, and the command was a calculated attempt to break the radical Petrograd garrison. They added, with ominous resolve: ‘If the Soviet … threatens this and other revolutionary regiments with forcible dissolution in response we will … not stop at using armed strength to break up the Provisional Government and other organisations supporting it.’
They were not intimidated by the Soviet’s authority. Even so, later that day the machine-gunners elected to wind down their agitation – possibly, if perhaps counterintuitively, at Bolshevik request. Because throughout this tumult, at the Conference of Bolshevik Military Organisations, Lenin and a cautious party leadership were striving to restrain their militants from ‘excessive’ insurgent action. Having yanked the party to the left in April, now Lenin was trying to tug it right.
On the 20th of the month, an agitated and perturbed Lenin addressed the conference. Startling those who assumed he would approve of their ‘revolutionary spirit’, he stressed that all talk of an immediate seizure of power was premature. Their enemies were trying to bait them, at a time when they did not have the mass support they would need for such a venture. The present priority, he said, was assiduously to increase that support – to build up influence in the Soviet.
‘This is no longer a capital,’ wrote Gorky, amid a sense of slow apocalypse, ‘it is a cesspit … The streets are filthy, there are piles of stinking rubbish in the courtyards … There is a growing idleness and cowardice in the people, and all those base and criminal instincts … are now destroying Russia.’