One ‘Worker Zemskov’ described himself in a letter to Kerensky – matter-of-factly, without apology – as ‘a deserter … hiding in the Kuban steppes for more than two years’. ‘To hell with it, though,’ he protested,
what kind of freedom is this, when millions of voiceless slaves are still being led like sheep to the cannons and machine guns and the officer is still treating the slave as if he were a mere thing, when still only crude coercion restrains the multimillionfold army of grey slaves, when the new government (exactly like the old) has the authority to send the entire male population into this bloody abyss (war)?
Some deserters now took to parading through Petrograd with placards, demanding what they called their ‘liberation’. This was desertion as a social movement.
Even before the offensive, the loathing the war engendered, the sense from soldiers, their families, their supporters, workers and peasants in vast numbers, that it must be ended immediately, gave the Bolsheviks political traction. From late June in particular, they ramped up their propaganda in the crumbling army: their networks of speakers and agitators were reaching 500 regiments along the front.
Lenin’s intention had always been to forge a perception of the Bolsheviks as the most unapologetic and absolute opposition to the war, but perhaps, as his left critics had cautioned, the details of his revolutionary defeatism had indeed been ambiguous. Perhaps they had been evasive, had elided distinct positions, and perhaps that had confused some audiences. In any case, the specifically (and ambiguously) ‘defeatist’ phraseology had, since Lenin’s return, been considerably less prominent. The party’s anti-war reputation was still, sure enough, growing.
On occasion this could become closely associated with the person of Lenin himself: thus, even before the offensive, soldiers of the Fifth Army on the northern front declared him the only authority they recognised. As the war grew ever more hated, people remembered the Bolshevik party’s unwavering opposition to it.
This was thanks in particular to the unstinting work of Bolshevik cadres, especially the undersung middle-level activists. They were the backbone of the party organisations across the empire. They worked hard, and grew more expert. Eduard Dune, in Moscow, travelled with his comrades far into surrounding country districts to give talks. Few of the several hundred in his local party were natural public speakers. But after February, they improved their skills, got to know their audiences – and their own strengths.
‘We began to specialise,’ he wrote. One comrade, Sapronov, was in his element in large meetings of thousands: a gentle soul called Kalmykov, ragged as a mendicant, toured the small workshops to deliver warm effective homilies; another, Artamanov, ‘either because he had an impressive bass voice or because he spoke the dialect of the Moscow suburbs or possibly for some other reason … was a great hit with peasant audiences’.
And such villagers in particular ‘listened willingly enough to speeches against the war and for peace’.
Even the more perspicacious of the party’s enemies could see the appeal and logic of its unflinching antinomianism towards the war, compared to the negotiations of the moderates. General Brusilov, no intellectual but a thoughtful man, would later recall: ‘The position of the Bolsheviks I understood, because they preached “Down with the war and immediate peace at any price,” but I couldn’t understand at all the tactics of the SRs and the Mensheviks, who first broke up the army, as if to avoid counterrevolution, and at the same time desired the continuation of the war to a victorious end.’
On 26 June, delegates from the Grenadier Regiment, one of many that had refused to advance against the Germans, returned to the capital. They told the reservists’ battalion the truth about the front – including that their own commanders drove them into battle at the points of machine guns. They appealed for help, and demanded all power to the soviets. Soldatskaya pravda pledged them full support.
Across the city and the empire, as news spread of the calamitous push that bore his name, the remnants of the Kerensky cult turned to dust.
After all his urgent and frenetic interventions, Lenin was exhausted to the point of illness. His family were concerned. His comrades persuaded him that he needed to take a rest. On the 27th, accompanied by his sister Maria, he left Petrograd. They travelled together across the border to the Finnish village of Neivola, where his comrade Bonch-Bruevich had a country cottage. There they spent the days relaxing, swimming in a lake, strolling in the sun.
As they did so, the machine-gunners received new orders for a substantial transfer of men and weapons. On the last day of the month, the military section of the Petrograd Soviet sent one G. B. Skalov to discuss these matters with them.
Provoked by the fury of their men, the Regimental Committee, controlled by SRs and Mensheviks, was pushed to hold the talks in the halls of the Tauride Palace. There the soldiers themselves, many of them anarchists or Bolsheviks – including Golovin, a leading light of the rebellion-that-never-was of the 20th and 21st – protested that these new orders were a prelude to treachery or sell-out.
The machine-gunners would not allow the regiment to be either disarmed or disbanded. They were of one mind. The room rang with their declarations. Openly, they began to discuss how to prevent this. In the sedate surroundings of the palace, the soldiers mooted the necessity of the force of arms, on the city streets.
7
July: Hot Days
Deep in the Vyborg district, a shouting crowd dragged a man behind them. They hauled him through the uneven streets and he howled and left a red trail behind him. It was not only his blood. He was a wheeler-dealer, a middleman, a food speculator in a hungry city. The meat he sold was old and rotten. The locals had caught him and pelted and smeared him with his own decaying wares, so that he left behind him a trail of rancid flesh and blood. ‘The surge is coming to the surface,’ Latsis wrote in his diary at the start of the month. ‘It is beginning. There is uneasiness in the district.’
‘Russians returning, Russians, mind you, simply throw up their hands and describe it as bedlam.’ Swallows and Amazons had yet to be born behind Arthur Ransome’s eyes: these days he was the correspondent of the British Daily News, a man keen to express the delirium of Petrograd. The uneasiness in the districts. ‘One lives the whole time in an atmosphere of mental conflict of the most violent kind.’