Kerensky quickly distanced himself from the release, but this was coy: on the 4th, he had already written from the front to Lvov (who disapproved), stating that it was ‘necessary to hasten the publication of the information in our hands’. The Byzantine details of the calumny were based on the say-so of one Lieutenant Yermolenko, and a merchant, Z. Burstein. The latter alleged that a German spy network in Stockholm, headed by the Marxist-theoretician-turned-German-patriot Parvus, maintained Bolshevik connections. Yermolenko, for his part, claimed to have been told of Lenin’s role by the German General Staff, while he, Yermolenko, was a prisoner of war whom those Germans (according, possibly, to a convoluted chain of mistaken identity) had attempted to recruit – which, said he, he ultimately gave them the impression they had successfully done.
These claims were a tangle of mendacity, invention and tendentiousness. Yermolenko was a strange character, at best a fantasist, while even his own government handlers described Burstein as wholly untrustworthy. The dossier had been prepared by an embittered ex-Bolshevik, Alexinsky, with a reputation for shit-stirring and malice so great he had been denied entry to the Soviet. Few serious people, even on the right, believed any of this stuff for a moment, which explains why some of the less dishonourable or more cautious right were furious with Zhivoe slovo for publishing.
Nonetheless, in the immediate term the effects were devastating.
July 5 was a day of bleak reaction. The pendulum swung.
That day Petrograd was not safe for the left. A Pravda distributor was killed on the street. Cossacks and other loyalists exerted control through intimidation and thuggery. The far right were exultant.
The danger was not all from the right, though, even in what should have been left strongholds. One party activist, E. Tarasova, came into a Vyborg factory she knew well, and instantly the women workers she had been speaking to days earlier screamed abuse, calling her a German spy, and hurled nuts and bolts at her, savagely cutting her hands and face. A Menshevik, they explained, shamefaced, when the panic abated, had been agitating against the Bolsheviks.
Nor was it only Bolsheviks who had reason to be afraid that day; the left Menshevik Woytinsky called the mood a ‘counterrevolutionary orgy’, marked by the ‘debauchery of the Black Hundreds’. Those sadistic vigilantes roamed the streets, smashing their way into houses on the hunt for ‘traitors’ and ‘troublemakers’. And they were not without popular support. ‘Public opinion’, Woytinsky noted gloomily, ‘demanded drastic measures.’
The Bolshevik left, like Raskolnikov, made ready to defend the Kshesinskaya Mansion. Some nursed illusions about returning to the offensive. But most of the leadership understood the gravity of their situation. That afternoon, Zinoviev forcefully demanded that the last demonstrators in the Peter and Paul Fortress surrender it. Any other course would be an absurd, doomed provocation.
The Bolsheviks began to disperse, for safety, and in preparation for a crackdown. Many of the top leadership headed into hiding, as they tried to come up with plans.
Three young activists, Liza Pylaeva, Nina Bogoslovskaya and Yelizaveta Koksharova slipped out of Peter and Paul disguised as nurses, carrying party funds and documents under bandages. They were swiftly intercepted by government forces who demanded to know what they were carrying in their baskets. Pylaeva grinned and said, ‘Dynamite and revolvers!’ The men chided her for the bad taste of her joke, and let her pass.
Now the Bolshevik CC voted ‘not to reverse the decision to end the demonstrations’ – as if, again, the decision had been theirs, as if a decision to reverse that ‘decision’ would have had any effect.
The July Days were over.
The Bolshevik leaders, rather nervously, sent a representative to the Soviet, to ascertain its position with regard to the party; the Soviet for its part sent Executive representatives to the Kshesinskaya Mansion. They promised that no further repressive measures would be taken against the party, and that demonstrators not accused of specific crimes would be released. The Bolsheviks agreed to call back the armoured cars of their supporters, surrender Peter and Paul (as Zinoviev had insisted, although the occupiers within continued to hem and haw) and send the sailors back to Kronstadt.
If the Soviet, notionally, committed itself to no more punitive measures, this was not the case for the Provisional Government.
At dawn the next day, General Polovtsev directed to the Kshesinskaya Mansion and to the Peter and Paul Fortress a huge attack force. Eight armoured cars, the Petrogradsky Regiment, sailors, cadets and the Aviation Academy were backed by terrifying heavy artillery. With them, too, was a front-line bicycle brigade: the idea of such soldiers was not then faintly comic, as now, but evocative of speed and modernity, and all major powers were experimenting with the bicycle, what one approving British brigade major called ‘this, the youngest, excrescence’ of the military. Before they set out, all the men of the attack force were galvanised with speeches: some of those there to exhort them, tellingly, were Soviet dignitaries.
At 7 a.m., the commander gave those within the mansion an hour to surrender. The MO was still in denial. Some members managed to get quickly away across the Sampsonievsky Bridge to Peter and Paul. There, they fondly imagined, they might make a stand. The 500 members remaining in Kshesinskaya did not resist. The firepower arrayed against them was awesomely disproportionate. When government soldiers entered to arrest them, they found seven members hurriedly burning party files. Soon thereafter, even the sailors who had made it to the Peter and Paul Fortress agreed, miserably, to surrender.
As a warning to the rest of the army, the authorities did not just punish but humiliated the Machine Gun Regiment, disarming and parading them publicly. Krupskaya witnessed the scene. ‘As they led their horses by the bridle so much hatred burned in their eyes, there was so much more hatred in their slow march, that it was clear that a more stupid method could not have been devised’ – if, that is, the aim of the government was social peace.
Even now, a few ultras from the Petersburg Committee, meeting in the deeps of the Vyborg district, wanted to continue this struggle. That afternoon, Latsis and a few of his comrades crept through the unfriendly city to the Reno factory. There, hiding in a watchman’s hut, Lenin was waiting.
Latsis enthusiastically put the case to him for summoning a general strike.
Incredulous, furious, Lenin laid down some home truths. He insisted that they take stock of the sheer scale of the setbacks, that they must understand the nature of the conjuncture. He scolded Latsis like a naughty child. Finally, not trusting the Petersburg Committee to do it themselves, Lenin drafted a back-to-work call on their behalf.