On 19 July, the Congress of Trade and Industry attacked the government for having ‘permitted the poisoning of the Russian people’. It demanded ‘a radical break … with the dictatorship of the Soviet’, and wondered openly if ‘a dictatorial power is needed to save the motherland’. Such a clamour against the Soviet would only increase. Take power, the streets had demanded, and the Soviet had declined the invitation. Now it was being bled of such power as it had.
At the urging of the Kadets, Kerensky passed laws imposing tough restrictions on public meetings. The brief window of permissiveness towards Ukrainian and Finnish nationalism closed: Russia had been building up troops on Finnish soil since it declared its semi-independence, and now, on 21 July, its parliament was dissolved – which provoked an alliance of the Finnish Social Democrats (who had held a majority) with the Bolsheviks. ‘The Russian Provisional Governement’, raged the SD paper Ty?mies, ‘together with Finland’s reactionary bourgeoisie has stabbed parliament and the whole Finnish democracy in the back.’
Reaction came to Petrograd as, around the country, peasant revolts grew in violence and anarchy continued, especially over the hated war, the catastrophic offensive costing hundreds of thousands of lives. On 19 July, in Atarsk, a district capital in Saratov, a group of angry ensigns waiting for a train to the front smashed the station lanterns and went hunting their superiors, guns at the ready, until a popular ensign took charge, and ordered the officers’ arrest. Rioting soldiers detained, threatened and even killed their officers.
Perhaps Kornilov’s relatively mild telegram of the 16th had lulled Kerensky into believing he might find in the general a collaborator. Such hopes were destroyed quickly and comprehensively. By the 19th of the month, the new commander-in-chief bluntly demanded total independence of operational procedures, with reference only ‘to conscience and to the people as a whole’. His people leaked this message to the press, that the public might marvel at his toughness.
Kerensky began to fear that he had created a monster. He had.
He was not alone in this growing sense of alarm. That month, shortly after Kornilov’s ascension, an anonymous ‘true friend and comrade’ sent a terse, prophetic note to the Executive Committee of the Soviet: ‘Comrades. Please drive out that fucking son of a bitch General Kornilov, or else he’s going to take his machine guns and drive you out.’
For a time, Kerensky was distracted from this rightist jostling by his own efforts to create a government. It took several attempts, but on 25 July, Kerensky at last managed to inaugurate the second Coalition Government. It was made up now of nine socialist ministers, a slight majority, but all except Chernov came from their parties’ right wings. In addition, and crucially, they entered cabinet as individuals, not as representatives of those parties, or of the Soviet.
In fact, the new government – including these ministers – did not recognise Soviet authority. Dual Power was done.
It was in this distinctly unfriendly climate that the Bolsheviks held their delayed Sixth Congress.
Late on 26 July, in a private hall in Vyborg, 150 Bolsheviks from across Russia came together. They assembled in a state of extreme tension and semi-illegality, rudderless, their leaders imprisoned or on the run. Two days after the start of their meeting, the government banned assemblies deemed harmful to security or the war, and the congress quietly relocated to a workers’ club in the south-west suburbs.
Embattled, the Bolsheviks were grateful for whatever solidarity they could get. Their welcome to left Mensheviks who attended, like Larin and Martov, was rapturous, notwithstanding the rebukes the guests offered along with their greetings.
But as the days passed and the caucusing continued, furtive, curtailed, anxious as the party was, something began to grow clear. The apocalypse had not, in fact, occurred. The mood was tense, but brighter than it had been two weeks before. The July Days had hurt the Bolsheviks – but that hurt had not cut deep, nor did it last long.
Fear of attacks from the right, among even considerably more moderate socialists, meant that district soviets had started closing ranks against perceived counterrevolution, even protecting the Bolsheviks as their own, if resented, left flank. In April, the party had 80,000 members in seventy-eight local organisations: now – after the crisis of July and a short, demoralising haemorrhage of members – it still numbered 200,000, in 162 organisations. Petrograd contained 41,000, with similarly strong numbers in the Ural mining territory, though there were fewer (and politically more ‘moderate’) Bolsheviks in and around Moscow. But the Mensheviks, by contrast – the party of the Soviet, still a crucial institution – had 8,000 members.
On the last two days of July, after a protracted debate, as per Lenin’s analysis and plea, the Bolsheviks dropped the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’. They began to plot a new course. A course that was predicated not on the strength and potential of the Soviets, but on direct seizure of power by the workers and the party.
8
August: Exile and Conspiracy
In those late days of summer, as the right ruminated a cleansing, there flourished a millennial indulgence. Bands and all-night dances, stained silk dresses and cravats, flies circling warming cake and vomit and spilt drink. Long days, warm orgiastic nights. A sybariticism for the end of a world. In Kiev, said the Countess Speransky, there were ‘suppers with gypsy bands and chorus, bridge and even tangoes, poker and romances’. As in Kiev, so across the cities of Russia, among the dreaming rich.
On 3 August, the Sixth Russian Social Democratic Workers Party Congress – the Bolshevik Congress – unanimously passed a resolution in favour of a new slogan. It was a compromise between the impatient ‘Leninists’, who saw the revolution entering a new post-Soviet phase, and the moderates, who still thought that they might be able to work with the socialists to their right to defend the revolution. Nonetheless, the symbolic importance of the shift in phraseology was immense. The lesson shook out, the calls changed. July had done its work. No longer did the Bolsheviks call for ‘All Power to the Soviets’. Instead they aspired to the ‘Complete Liquidation of the Dictatorship of the Counterrevolutionary Bourgeoisie’.
The Soviet relocated as required. The Smolny Institute was built in the early 1800s, a grandiose neoclassical edifice in the Smolny district east of the city centre, by the Neva. A building of cavernous corridors, white floors, watery electric light. On the ground level was a great mess hall, between hallways lined with offices full of secretaries and deputies and fractions of the parties of the Soviet, their military organisations and committees and conclaves. Piles of newspapers, pamphlets, posters covered the tables. Machine guns protruded from windows. Soldiers and workers packed the passages, sleeping on chairs and benches, guarding gatherings, watched by empty gold frames from which imperial portraits had been cut.