That evening, at a small Vyborg apartment, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Lenin and Podvoisky weighed up their predicament. The SRs and Mensheviks, Lenin declared, had made it clear that they would not accept power, even on a plate: they would choose to cede it to the bourgeoisie. The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’, therefore, was obsolete. It was time instead to demand, in peremptory if unwieldy fashion, ‘All Power to the Proletariat Led by Its Revolutionary Party – the Bolsheviks’.
For now, though, the Bolsheviks were hardly in a position to demand anything. The more pressing question was safety: that night, the cabinet issued warrants for the arrests of all the ‘organisers’ of the troubles, including Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kollontai, and Lunacharsky. To which list Trotsky, with typical twinkling arrogance, would soon demand to be added, a request the government granted.
As late as the evening of Friday 7 July, shots could still be heard in the city, even while trams rattled once more over the bridges and the lights of their reflections swayed in the Neva. Firing in Vyborg, a sudden volley near Vasilevsky Island, the staccato of some automatic weapon. Secret routes wound across the top of Petrograd, a roof-world above the courtyards, secret skyline walkways: ‘Perhaps the scoundrels are shooting again from housetops,’ wrote Harold Williams for the Daily Chronicle. He knew the percussions he heard were mopping-up operations. Reds and rebels being disarmed, or worse.
Some in the Bolsheviks, on the arrest list, operated in the open, daring the government to take them. Others gave themselves up. Initially, Lenin decided he would face a public trial. He was dissuaded from this course by various comrades – including his sister Maria – who felt that iron reaction in the capital would make his situation too dangerous. So he stayed in hiding. His decision was controversial: Kamenev and others worried it made him look guilty of the spying of which he was accused.
Lenin moved between comrades’ houses. He holed up in the apartment of one Margarita Fofanova, then on the top floor of 17 Rozhdestvenskaya Street, with the Alliluyev family. He shaved off his iconic beard, put on a worker’s tunic and an unlikely hat. He tried to fade into the crowd. On 9 July, still hunted by the police, he left Petrograd altogether.
It was the first of a series of heart-in-mouth escapes.
Late at night, Lenin and Zinoviev went to the Primorsky Station to meet their comrade Yemelyanov, a worker in an arms factory. Elbowing past the usual inebriated late travellers, ignoring the drunken songs, they made it onto the last train at 2 a.m. There they crouched on the steps of the rearmost coach, gripping the handles as the train clattered through the cool night. They were tense, poised to jump off in a moment, to launch themselves into the dark should anyone shout their names, should they be recognised. No matter how fast it sped, they decided, they would not risk staying aboard. They would rather leap. But they made it to Yemelyanov’s home village of Razliv, just beyond the city, without mishap.
They stayed there a few days in his barn, but when police extended their searches to this area, the fugitives made their way through the undergrowth to a crude hut by Lake Razliv’s deserted south-eastern shore. Zinoviev and Lenin disguised themelves as Finnish peasants, complete with a haystack by their rough lodgings. They waited out the days. There, with one tree stump for his table and another for his chair, Lenin kept out of sight, a martyr to the remorseless mosquitoes and the rain, and wrote.
The July events left residue. The crime rate of Petrograd was still rising. But, after the quasi-revolt of July, there came a spike in murders of a particular sort, a bleak social symptom. Murders born of political argument. The ill-tempered slanging matches of the day escalated abruptly into fights, even armed violence. After February, political debates had been fiery and exuberant. Now, they could be deadly.
Everywhere was confrontation, sometimes in sordid form. Strange threats. The pages of Petrogradsky listok carried a weird warning against the street justice and lynching parties, an ultimatum and a cruel negotiation from old-fashioned criminals themselves. They would no longer restrict themselves to robbery, said a spokesperson for this villainy, but would ‘kill anybody we meet at the dark corner of streets’. Burglary would be a prelude to slaughter. ‘Breaking into a house, we will not simply loot, but will murder everyone, even children, and won’t stop our bloody revenge until acts of mob violence are stopped.’
It seemed as if the disaster of the July Days had set the Bolsheviks back years. Steklov was arrested. The authorities ransacked the house of Anna Elizarova, Lenin’s sister. They took Kamenev on the 9th. By the late days of the month, Lunacharsky and Trotsky had joined many of the Bolshevik leaders, and other activists, in Kresty prison, where the guards stoked up the criminals against the ‘German spies’.
Still the political prisoners made space and time and conditions to write, and to debate. Some moderate left papers – Izvestia, Volia naroda, Golos soldata – still refrained from comment on the spying allegations. Even the Kadet paper, Rech, cautiously affirmed that the Bolsheviks were innocent until proven guilty. This did not, of course, inhibit it from backing the demands of right Mensheviks and SRs for punitive measures against them. Such examples of restraint aside, Lenin was denounced across the Russian media. By 11 July, when he tried to refute the charges in a piece sent to Gorky’s paper Novaya zhizn, the clamour was deafening.
‘The counterrevolution is victorious,’ wrote Latsis miserably on 12 July. ‘The Soviets are without power. The junkers, running wild, have begun to raid the Mensheviks too.’ The Left SRs, as well, were hounded by the police.
The Bolshevik Moscow Regional Committee reported resignations from the party, ‘disarray in the ranks’. In Vyselki, Ukraine, a ‘pogrom mood’ prevailed, and the party ‘was in flames’, riven by splits and bled by defections. Recruitment stalled. The workers, one activist from Kolpinsky reported, ‘turned against us’. In six districts, Bolsheviks were thrown out of factories by their workmates. On 16 July, in a punitive macabre ritual, a factory committee on Vasilievsky Island forced representatives of their local Bolsheviks to attend the funeral of a Cossack killed during the unrest.