On 1 July, the Soviet issued a plaintive call to the First Machine Gunners to return to their barracks and await further instructions. But the gunners continued formulating plans for an armed demonstration-cum-uprising. That day, as tensions boiled up in the forms of crime, industrial upheaval and violent conflicts over shortages of food and fuel, the Bolshevik Petrograd Second City Conference opened in the Kshesinskaya Mansion.
Tensions between the wings of the party were sharpening. The enthusiasts and the ultra-left confronted the cautious. The MO had learnt of the gunners’ plans, and fervently insisted to the CC that the regiment could overthrow the government. That, in any case, a movement of the soldiers was inevitable: the question, therefore, was not whether it should ‘be allowed’, but how the party should relate to it.
The leadership, certain that the time was not ripe for insurrection, continued to urge restraint. They ordered the MO to try to prevent any outbreak.
Years later, Nevsky of the MO described how he discharged this duty. ‘When the Military Organisation, having learned of the machine-gunners’ demonstration, sent me as the more or less most popular Military Organisation orator to talk the masses into not going out, I talked to them, but in such a way that only a fool could come to the conclusion that he should not demonstrate.’ Nor was he the only MO comrade to perform this leftist ca’canny, discharging the letter of orders against their spirit. The Anarchist–Communists, of course, resorted to no such subterfuge. They were quite open in their support for an armed uprising.
On the afternoon of the 2nd, there was a concert at the city hall known as the People’s House. It was not the usual farewell to front-bound troops: this event was sponsored by the Bolsheviks themselves, to raise money for anti-war literature for soldiers to take to the front with them. An astonishing provocation.
Before of an audience of 5,000, musicians and poets performed, interspersed with speeches from leading Bolshevik and Mezhraiontsy activists – the latter now caucusing with the Bolsheviks so closely as to be effectively indistinguishable. The event became a wild anti-government, anti-war rally, and rang with denunciations of Kerensky. To the crowd’s delight, Trotsky and Lunacharsky demanded all power to the soviets. Such gatherings could only instil resolve in the machine-gunners.
That evening, the cabinet of the government met to discuss Ukraine’s declaration of independence. The Rada had pledged loyalty to revolutionary Russia and agreed to forgo a standing army, but having acquired broad legitimacy, it was now implicitly recognised as the voice of Ukrainians – and this was a loss of authority too far for the Kadet ministers.
After a long, rancorous debate late into the night, one Kadet, Nekrasov, voted for the proposal to accept the Ukrainian proposal, quitting his party to do so. The other four voted against, and quit the cabinet instead.
Six moderate socialists and five ‘capitalists’ remained. The coalition was collapsing.
From the first moments of 3 July, the air was tight and strained as a stretched skin. In the very early hours, Petrograd postal workers struck over pay. Then, at mid-morning of that warm day, a thousands-strong protest of the ‘over-forties’, those soldiers being recalled to the war, marched in protest down Nevsky.
The main demonstration business of the day began at around 11 a.m. As the First Machine Gun Regimental Committee discussed the troop and weapon transfers, preparing for negotiations with the Soviet, a mass meeting of several thousand activist machine-gunners under Golovin, supported by the Bolshevik MO, formulated their own position.
Bleikhman, the energetic Anarchist–Communist, exhorted them. He insisted that it was time to overthrow the Provisional Government and take power – directly, not even handing it to the Soviet. And as to organisation? ‘The street’, he said, ‘will organise us.’ He proposed a demonstration at 5 p.m. In an ambience of combative enthusiasm, the suggestion was unanimously passed.
The soldiers quickly elected a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, under the popular Bolshevik agitator A. I. Semashko, now directly disobeying his party’s injunctions. Soldiers’ delegates set out in boats for Kronstadt, and went racing through the city in their armoured cars, waving banners from their windows, spreading the word, garnering support from the Moskovsky, Grenadier, First Infantry, and Armoured Car Divisions – as well as from workers in their Vyborg factories. Not all their appeals were rewarded with explicit support: sometimes they met with ‘benevolent neutrality’. No signs of a countermovement, of active opposition, were visible, however.
Mid-afternoon. A seething, angry mass started to gather in the city’s outskirts, heading slowly for the centre.
Gone, now, were the uptown types. Vanishingly few of those present were the better-dressed, more affluent protestors who had taken part in the February marches. This was the armed anger of workers, soldiers – those Bonch-Bruevich had called to be Red Guards.
As the demonstrations began to converge on the Tauride Palace, around 3 p.m., the Bolshevik delegation to the Soviet convened the Workers’ section without notice. The party’s members turned up en bloc, outnumbering those Mensheviks and SRs who had scrambled to attend. The Bolsheviks were able to promptly pass a motion calling for all power to the Soviet. Their outflanked opponents walked out in protest.
At Kshesinskaya, the Bolshevik Second City Conference was into its third day. Heated disagreements continued. As the Petersburg Committee debated whether to override Lenin’s opposition and establish a separate newspaper – on the grounds that Pravda was not meeting their needs – two MO machine-gunners burst into the chamber, and announced that they were marching on the Provisional Government.
Chaos descended. Volodarsky excoriated the soldiers for going against party wishes; they witheringly replied that it was better to leave the party than turn against their regiment. With that, the machine-gunners walked out, and the meeting was abruptly terminated.
The All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and its counterpart for Peasants’ Deputies, were already assembled in the Tauride Palace: they had been trying to work out how best to offer their support to the diminished, Kadet-less Provisional Government. It was at around 4 p.m. that reports of the swelling demonstration got through to them. The Soviet leadership understood immediately that this was an existential threat to their authority – possibly even to their persons.