In the small hours, the Bolshevik CC urgently dispatched M. A. Saveliev to Bonch-Bruevich’s dacha to bring back Lenin. By 4 a.m., they were distributing a hastily printed leaflet drafted by Stalin, one that seemed, if anything, designed to stress their own relevance. In tones of equivocal vagueness – ‘We call upon this movement … to become a peaceful, organised expression of the will of the workers, soldiers and peasants of Petrograd’ – it pretended to a unity of purpose and analysis, an influence, that the party did not possess.
Playing catch-up, the Bolsheviks, who felt they had little choice, gave the militant MO its head, freed it to become part of whatever this was. Of course, now that the party line had switched, Zinoviev and Kamenev’s injunction in Pravda not to come out was worse than ineffectual: it was an embarrassment. But there was neither time nor focus to replace it. And who could be sure of what, exactly, should be put in its place? What was the party’s direction? In the absence of answers, the offending words were simply cut.
On the 4th, the second and more violent of the July Days, Pravda appeared, and the centre of its front page was blank. A white, textless hole.
The 4th. A warm damp dawn. Across the city, shops stayed shut. Insurgents’ trucks rushed through the streets. Soldiers squared off against real or imaginary enemies, gunfire sounding repeatedly in the morning quiet. The streets began to fill. By mid-morning, Petrograd thronged again with demonstrators. Half a million people would come out that day.
At 9 a.m., the dilapidated train carrying Lenin, his sister Maria, his comrades Bonch-Bruevich and Saveliev, crossed the Sestra river dividing Finland and Russia, through the border town of Belo-Ostrov. Though part of the Russian empire, the Finnish border was marked by checks. Bonch-Bruevich held his breath as an inspector examined their documents. With Petrograd in these throes, he was fearful that they would be intercepted. But the man waved them on, and the conclave continued back to the city.
As they approached, so too at the Neva’s mouth did a naval gallimaufry. A mad patchwork flotilla. Eight tugs, a torpedo boat, passenger ferries, three trawlers, three gunboats, a pair of barges, a scattering of civilian craft. On their decks, waving from their railings, guns aloft, the sailors of Kronstadt, riding the current. Thousands came, commanded by the energetic Bolshevik Raskolnikov, editor of the Kronstadt Pravda. They sailed for the mainland to join what they believed would be the culmination of their revolution. The fury of Kronstadt, the revolution’s redoubt, came in whatever they had been able to commandeer.
As they powered and tacked closer, the Soviet’s Executive Committee sent out its own tug to hail the bizarre arrivals. On its deck stood a messenger, begging them to leave, bellowing across the water that the Soviet did not want them. The motley armada left him bobbing in their overlapping wakes.
Kronstadt’s February had been bloody and desperate, an act of revolutionary hope on an isolated island, in expectation of counterrevolution by dawn. No officer held sway in their base now. The sailors’ soviet had had no qualms about completing its own local revolution, and their arrival meant more than just more men in Petrograd. They were, rather, emissaries from a red fortress. A living collective, a political premonition.
Their vessels swung into the city. The Kronstadt men moored near Nikolaevsky Bridge, tied up and raised their arms in greeting to the city. Demonstrators in the streets by the water’s edge watched and cheered, and exhorted the newcomers to overthrow the government. But Raskolnikov was not ready to head for the Tauride Palace yet. First, he announced, he would lead his sailors along the embankment, across the bridge north and past the long blank walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and thence to Kshesinskaya Mansion, on the wrong side of the river for the palace. But there at Kshesinskaya he would present the ranks to the Bolsheviks, or vice versa.
As they came ashore, there, waiting eagerly to address the celebrated sailors, stood Maria Spiridonova.
Spiridonova, the near-legendary SR, who had killed for the people and paid the price, whose torture and imprisonment in 1906 had shocked even liberal consciences. Her courage, sincerity and sacrifice – and doubtless her striking beauty – had made her something of a popular saint. Still implacably on her party’s hard and restive left, she was a fierce opponent of Kerensky and the government.
It was in a needless moment of petty sectarianism that Raskolnikov would not give Spiridonova – the great Spiridonova! – a chance to speak to the Kronstadt sailors. Instead he left her standing, humiliated and aggrieved, as he led his men away to the beat of their band.
The sailors marched across Vasilievsky Island and the Stock Exchange Bridge, carrying banners that read ‘All Power to the Soviets’. Their column arrived at last outside the mansion, where from the balcony Sverdlov, Lunacharsky and Nevsky addressed them. The anarchists and Left SRs among the congregation, furious at Spiridonova’s uncomradely snubbing, left this partisan gathering in protest.
Raskolnikov and Flerovsky made their way inside, where, holed up within, they found the newly returned Lenin.
The two Kronstadt Bolsheviks implored him to speak, to greet the militant visitors. Lenin, though, was troubled.
He was not happy with the day’s events, and he tried to decline, hinting at his disapproval of this huge precipitous provocation. But the demonstrators would not disperse or leave, and nor would they stop their shouting for him. The demands were audible through the mansion walls.
At last, before the tension reached some dangerous point, Lenin surrendered to the insistent crowd. He stepped out onto the balcony to a roaring ovation.
His hesitancy, though, was evident. His speech was uncharacteristically brimstone-free. He greeted the sailors with surprising mildness, hoped, rather than demanded, that ‘All Power to the Soviets’ would become a reality. He appealed for self-restraint and vigilance.
Even many party faithful were nonplussed. In particular, as one Kronstadt Bolshevik put it, they were taken aback by his emphasis on the necessity of a peaceful demonstration to ‘a column of armed men, craving to rush into battle’.