The strike wave continued. On 22 June, Bolshevik delegates to the VTsIK – the All-Russian Soviet Ispolkom, or Executive Committee – warned that workers at the Putilov metalworks were likely to come out, and that they would not restrain them. On the 23rd, representatives of several labour organisations resolved that, as higher wages were not compensating for rising prices, they wanted control of production. At repeated mass meetings, the Kronstadt sailors determined to free those soldiers who had been arrested along with the anarchists. These were not secretive conspiracies: on the 25th, the sailors openly warned the justice minister of their plans.
All this while, the offensive demanded more and more men. Soldiers over forty, who had already served and been furloughed from the front, were starting to be recalled. To have risked their life once was not enough. In provincial towns like Astrakhan and Yelets, the call-up provoked riots.
The Bolsheviks were busy preparing their Sixth Congress, as well as the second City Conference of the Petersburg Committee, slated for early July. As they did, their in-party debates continued. Within the Petersburg Committee, Kalinin and other moderates won, nineteen to two, an appeal to eschew isolated revolutionary actions, resolving instead to build up political influence in the movement and the Soviet. But Latsis managed to amend the resolution: ‘if it proved impossible’ to restrain the masses, the Bolsheviks should take the movement into their own hands.
In the pages of Pravda, Lenin and Kamenev stressed caution, care, the slow building up of forces; simultaneously, Soldatskaya pravda continued to fan flames of more impatient dissent, pointedly declining to validate what their leaders described as a need to overcome ‘petty-bourgeois illusions’. On 22 June, at an informal meeting of members of the CC, the MO and the Petersburg Committee with the regiments supporting the Bolshevik party, Semashko – effectively in command of 15,000 radical machine-gunners – chided the CC for underestimating the party’s strength.
During those turbulent late June days, out of the boisterous energies of Petrograd’s most militant groups, particularly the increasingly legendary First Machine Gun Regiment, a tentative collective plan began to emerge. The protean notion grew more distinct as the days passed.
Determined to batten down the surge of unrest, and provoked by the ill discipline of the First Machine Gun Regiment, on 23 June the All-Russian Congress of the Soviet called on all garrison units to immediately obey orders. But the Soviet’s manoeuvering was uncertain. That same day, its vacillation with regard to the creaking Russian Empire came to the fore, when the Finnish parliament issued its Valtalaki – a ‘power act’ declaring its intent to legislate on domestic issues. The celebrating Finns were astonished when the leaders of the Soviet, having previously approved the negotiation of a treaty of independence – of which this fell short – reacted with outrage. Unilateral declarations of even limited autonomy had clearly not been what they had had in mind.
And meanwhile, on this last day of the Bolshevik MO Conference, its Biulleten reported a serious dispute between radicals and moderates – here the Leninists! – over whether to actively pursue agitation at the front while the offensive was proceeding successfully. The very premise of the debate, however, was mistaken. The offensive was not proceeding successfully.
After the first two, three exhilarating days of the offensive, its degeneration was swift. The scavenger birds of the front were gathering over what was becoming a catastrophe.
As early as 20 June, the exhausted, ill-equipped Russian troops ceased advancing. They refused to obey orders to attack. The next day, a German counterattack began. Panic spread through the Russian forces. On the 24th, a desolate Kerensky wired the Provisional Government that ‘in many cases, the breakthrough turned out to be unstable, and after the first days, sometimes even after the first hours of battle, there was a change of heart and spirits dropped. Instead of developing the initial successes units … began drawing up resolutions with demands for immediate leave to the rear’.
In the diaries of his AWOL years, A Deserter’s Notes, the young Ukrainian Aleksandr Dneprovskiy execrated the patriotic press in the last months before the offensive as ‘tubs of printed slop … poured over the heads of long-suffering humanity’. Despite the newspapers dutifully recycling patriotic blather, the miserable truth of events leaked quickly across the country. Often at first hand.
The situation had long ceased to be a matter of individuals, or even whole battalions, disobeying orders. Now there was mass movement of Russian troops in both directions: forward from the trenches, not belligerently but in more fraternisation, shouting greetings, picking a way through the landscape of cataclysm to share liquor and make-do conversation with the Germans they were supposed to kill; and, in vast numbers, in retreat from the front. Mass desertions. Thousands simply walked away.
That summer, the great poet and critic Viktor Shklovsky set out for the Galician war zone, a Soviet army commissar. He came the last miles on foot, through swampy spruce goves near Austrian lines.
While going through the forest, I kept running into stray soldiers with rifles, mostly young men. I asked, ‘Where are you off to?’
‘I’m sick.’
In other words, deserting from the front. What could you do with them?
Even though you know it’s useless, you say, ‘Go on back. This is disgraceful.’ They keep going.
The scale was staggering. A ramping up of already enormous numbers. On a single night near Volochinsk, shock battalions of the Eleventh Army arrested 12,000 deserters hiding or wandering numbly in the dark. This was a mass movement. Officially, 170,000 soldiers ran away during the offensive: the real number is very much higher.
Soldiers stormed trains from the front. The creaking engines rocked under their weight, screeching on the rails as men clung to roofs and buffers, as, rammed sullen and exhausted together, they swayed with the sluggish carriages. Near the northern front, thousands of the runaways set up what they announced was a ‘soldiers’ republic’, a strange new polity in an encampment near a Petrograd racecourse. They flooded the capital, hustling for cash. By the hot days of July, more than 50,000 deserters were in the city.
The men found work as casual labourers. They scavenged off the land. They became violent bandits, ripping and reconfiguring their old uniforms with a ragged swagger. Their desertions were the result of fear, of course, but that was by no means always all.
‘The mass desertions’, Trotsky wrote, ‘are ceasing in the present conditions to be the result of depraved individual wills’ – that would be a severe and unsympathetic assessment at any time – ‘and are becoming an expression of the complete incapacity of the government to weld the revolutionary army with inward unity of purpose.’ Among these hundreds of thousands, increasing numbers were in the mould of the eloquent Dneprovskiy, whose desertion inspired him to write, who combined a desperate desire not to die in stinking runnels of blood with political rage and despair, with critical lucidity in the analysis of the hated war.