The Soviet kept debating. Like the demonstrators, the Bolsheviks, Spiridonova’s Left SRs and Martov’s Menshevik–Internationalists insisted that the current arrangement could not be allowed to continue. Mainstream and moderate SRs and Mensheviks, on the other hand, remained adamant that in this country, with its capitalism still undeveloped, its bourgeois phase unfinished and its proportionately small workers’ movement, a government without non-socialists would be a disaster. That coalition was indispensable at this stage.
In the Tauride Palace hall, workers’ and soldiers’ representatives pleaded for land to go to the peasants, for peace, for workers’ control.
‘We trust the Soviet, but not those whom the Soviet trusts,’ said one delegate. ‘Now that the Kadets have proclaimed their refusal to work with us,’ said another, ‘we ask you: who else will you barter with?’
Outside, shots and standoffs continued. Ambushes, sudden fusillades and the reek of smoke. Machine guns ripped horsemen from their mounts. A stampede of riderless horses, sprayed with men’s blood, hurtled along the embankment, hooves echoing, leering in terror.
Early evening and the skies were still too light. Abruptly, the 176th Regiment arrived and entered the palace.
These followers of the Mezhraiontsy had received a call to ‘defend the revolution’, and had come from Krasnoe Selo. By chance, the first authoritative figure they met was the Menshevik Dan. He wore, as he often did, his military uniform, and seeing the armed newcomers he had the presence of mind to immediately order them to sentry duty. The 176th complied.
Later, Sukhanov would mock them for obeying an enemy, one of the very moderates they opposed. Trotsky, however, would insist that their move was strategic, allowing them to enforce a degree of order while knowing where their opponents were. Either way, it is a curio of the moment that hard-left advocates of ‘all power to the soviets’ were delegated by a soviet opponent to defend the Soviet currently arguing furiously against taking the power they wanted it to take.
Those debates over power ground on. At 8 p.m. on the Liteiny Bridge, Cossacks engaged the workers: this was not February. A hammering of shots, the cries of those wounded or dying, and blood seeped through the crack where the bridge would part and its halves rise. Across the water from Kshesinskaya, 2,000 armed Kronstadt sailors breached the entrance of the Peter and Paul Fortress and took control of the military complex. A spectacular, gratuitous act: they did not know what to do with it now they had it. And still the Soviet continued to debate. Loyal troops at last started to reach Petrograd. Dead horses lay among scattered cartridges and broken glass.
By midnight, three positions were put before the Soviet. On the right, Avram Gots suggested pledging support to the rump Provisional Government until a Soviet Executive Committee plenum met. For Martov, to his left, ‘the Russian bourgeoisie as a whole has definitely gone over to the attack against the peasants’ and workers’ democracy’, ‘history demands that we take power into our own hands’ – and he called now for a new radical Provisional Government, this time with a majority of Soviet representatives. Lunacharsky, for the far left, demanded full Soviet power.
One by one, the delegates stood up to cast their votes. They announced for Gots; Dan of the Mensheviks; Kondratenko of the Trudoviks; Chaikovsky of the People’s Socialist Party; the SR Saakian; and more, person after person, from group after group. The left fought to keep making their case, knowing now that they would lose.
Close to 1 a.m., as Tsereteli declaimed at the rostrum, there came the noise of of heavy footfalls. The deputies rose, pale again with fear.
Then Dan shouted in relief. ‘Regiments loyal to the revolution have arrived’, he called, ‘to defend the Central Executive Committee!’
In came the Izmailovsky Guards, then the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky Regiments. Their bands played the Marseillaise, and the Mensheviks and SRs sang along in delight. The Soviet had been saved, was safe to not take power.
The soldiers who had delivered them were stern, still dismayed by what they had recently been told, information which was not yet public: the shock news that Lenin was a spy.
The July Days rippled through the larger provincial cities, reflecting local volatilities, particularly where garrisons were threatened with redeployment to the front: in Saratov, Krasnoyarsk, Taganrog, Nizhni Novgorod, Kiev, Astrakhan. In Nizhni Novgorod, an order for the muster of the 62nd Infantry Reserve Regiment on the evening of the 4th sparked a confrontation between loyalist and discontented soldiers, resulting in several deaths. On the 5th, the mutineers elected a Provisional Committee and for a short time took local power. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a militant working-class textile town, the soviet briefly asserted full authority.
For the most part, however, such events were not much more than hastily organised rallies. In the second city, for example, on hearing news of the Petrograd actions, the Moscow Bolsheviks issued a lukewarm call for a march to demand soviet power on 4 July. This was promptly banned by the Moscow Soviet, and the majority of workers obeyed. Many Bolsheviks would have been content, too, to let the matter rest, but, realising that their younger members, newly radicalised and enthusiastic, were likely to go ahead with some action anyway, they reluctantly joined them in a desultory, somewhat pathetic demonstration.
Between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., in Petrograd, the Bolshevik CC issued what they described as a ‘call’ on workers and soldiers to terminate the street demonstrations: it was, more accurately, a post factum recognition of the inevitable, as the movement ebbed.
On the morning of the 5th, on its back page, Pravda unconvincingly explained the party’s ‘decision’ to end the demonstrations – as if it were a decision, or the party’s to make. They had proceeded thus because ‘the object of the demonstration was achieved’; that is, ‘the slogans of the vanguard of the proletariat and of the army were imposingly and worthily proclaimed’. Imposing, perhaps: but the Bolsheviks had dithered lengthily over the appropriateness of ‘proclaiming’ them in such a way.
In any case, the goals the slogans expressed had, to put it mildly, not been met.
Dawn on the 5th. The authorities opened the bridges. Their ends pointed skyward, cutting the rebels off.
Lenin had just left the Pravda printworks when loyalist soldiers arrived to arrest him. So they arrested the workers instead, ransacked the files and smashed the equipment, bellowing about spies, German agents, treachery.
The previous day, as Perverzev spread stories about Lenin’s supposed treachery, a Bolshevik sympathiser in his ministry had sent word to the CC, which immediately requested that the Ispolkom stop the slander. Out of residual solidarity, out of concern for due process, or to avoid inflaming the situation in the city, Tsereteli and Chkheidze had telephoned the Petrograd newspapers. They enjoined them not to publish unverified claims.
Most acquiesced. But on the morning of the 5th, the morning the soldiers came, the front page of one sensationalist hard-right rag, Zhivoe slovo – the ‘Living Word’ – screamed: ‘Lenin, [his comrades] Ganetsky, Kozlovsky: German Spies!’
Nothing could stop the rumours now.