sight of the German trenches abandoned under fire. The main attack was aimed towards Lvov in the south, while supporting offensives were also launched on
the Western and Northern Fronts. For two days the advance continued. The German lines were broken and a glorious 'Triumph for Liberty!' was heralded in the patriotic press. Then, on the third day, the advance came to a halt, the Germans began to counter-attack, and the Russians fled in panic. It was partly a case of the usual military failings: units had been sent into battle without machine-guns; untrained soldiers had been ordered to engage in complex manoeuvres using hand grenades and ended up throwing them without first pulling the pins. But the main reason for the fiasco was the simple reluctance of the soldiers to fight. Having advanced two miles, the front-line troops felt they had done their bit and refused to go any further, while those in the second line would not take their places. The advance thus broke down as the men began to run away. In one night alone the shock battalions of the Eleventh Army arrested 12,000 deserters near the town of Volochinsk. Many soldiers turned their guns against their commanding officers rather than fight against the enemy. The retreat degenerated into chaos as soldiers looted shops and stores, raped peasant girls and murdered Jews. The crucial advance towards Lvov soon collapsed when the troops discovered a large store of alcohol in the abandoned town of Koniukhy and stopped there to get drunk. By the time they were fit to resume fighting three days and a hangover later, enemy reinforcements had arrived, and the Russians, suffering heavy losses, were forced to retreat.24
Amidst such chaos, even the shock troops stood little chance of success. Bochkareva's Battalion of Death did much better than most. The women volunteers broke through the first two German lines, followed by some of the sheepish male conscripts. But then they came under heavy German fire. The women dispersed in confusion, while most of the men stayed put in the German trenches, where they had found a large supply of liquor and proceeded to get drunk. Despite the shambles around her, Bochkareva battled on. At one point she came across one of her women having sexual intercourse with a soldier in a shell-hole. She ran her through with a bayonet; but the soldier escaped. Eventually, with most of her volunteers killed or wounded, even Bochkareva was forced to retreat.25 The offensive was over. It was Russia's last.
* * * The collapse of the offensive dealt a fatal blow to the Provisional Government and the personal authority of its leaders. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed. Millions of square miles of territory were lost. The leaders of the government had gambled everything on the offensive in the hope that it might rally the country behind them in the national defence of democracy. The coalition had been based upon this hope; and it held together as long as there was a chance of military success. But as the collapse of the offensive became clear, so the coalition fell apart.
It had been on the cards for some time. God only knows what Lvov
had gone through to keep his government together until at least the start of the offensive. After the socialists' entry into the cabinet, most of the Kadets had moved to the Right. They had given up their old pretence of standing 'above class' and had taken up the defence of property rights, military discipline, law and order and the Russian Empire against the demands of the nationalists. All this had placed them in growing opposition to the socialists, who were under pressure from their own supporters to steer the government's policies further to the Left. Formally, it was the question of Ukrainian autonomy which was to break the coalition and throw the country into crisis. When the government delegation to Kiev conceded a series of autonomous rights to the Rada on 2 July, three Kadet ministers resigned in protest. The Kadets were opposed to granting anything more than cultural freedoms to the 'Little Russians', and insisted that this could only be done by the Constituent Assembly. The concessions of 2 July were thus, in their view, illegal and, as Miliukov put it, amounted to the 'chopping up of Russia under the slogan of self- determination'.26 The Ukrainian question, however, was only the final straw. The breakdown of the coalition was also caused by fundamental conflicts over domestic social reforms. Foremost among these was Chernov's policy on land, which the Kadets accused of sanctioning the peasant revolution by giving the land committees temporary rights of control over the gentry's estates. Then there was the problem of militant strikes, which the Kadets blamed on the Mensheviks in control of the Ministry of Labour. Old class divisions, which had been papered over in the interests of the offensive, were, it seems, returning with a vengeance.
For Lvov the collapse of this 'national alliance' was a bitter disappointment. More than anyone else, he had stood for the liberal hope of uniting the country. As its figurehead, he had symbolized the government's ideal of constructive work in the interests of the nation. Party politics were a foreign land to him and he was increasingly out of his depth in the factional conflicts of his own cabinet meetings. 'I feel like a piece of driftwood, washed up by the revolutionary waves,' he told his old friend from the Japanese war, General Kuropatkin. He cursed both the Kadets and the socialists for placing class and party interests above those of the nation as a whole. The Kadets, he told his private secretary, had behaved like Great Russian chauvinists over the Ukraine; they could not see that some concessions had to be made, if the state was to be saved. But he was equally fed up with the socialists, who he said were trying to impose the Soviet programme on the Provisional Government. Chernov's policy on the land committees seemed nothing less to him, as a landowner, than a 'Bolshevik programme of organized confiscation'. In his
3 July he finally decided to resign.* 'I have reached the end of the road', he told his secretary, 'and so, I'm afraid, has my sort of liberalism.' Later that night he wrote to his parents in a rare mood of dark foreboding:
Sweet Father and Mother,
It was already clear to me about a week ago that there was no way out. Without a doubt the country is heading for a general slaughter, famine, the collapse of the front, where half the soldiers will perish, and the ruin of the urban population. The cultural inheritance of the nation, its people and civilization, will be destroyed. Armies of migrants, then small groups, and then maybe no more than individual people, will roam around the country fighting each other with rifles and then no more than clubs. I will not live to see it, and, I hope, neither will you.27
As he wrote these prophetic words, in the midst of the July crisis, the Bolsheviks were preparing for a decisive confrontation with the Provisional Government.
ii A Darker Shade of Red
On the eve of the July uprising the journalist Claude Anet took Joseph Noulens, the new French Ambassador, on an introductory tour of the Russian capital. From the opposite bank of the Neva, outside the French Embassy, he pointed out the Vyborg district, with its factory chimneys and barracks, and explained that the Bolsheviks reigned there as masters: 'If Lenin and Trotsky want to take Petrograd, there is nothing to stop them.' The French Ambassador listened in astonishment: 'How can the government tolerate such a situation?' he asked. 'But what can it do?' replied Anet. 'You must understand that the government has no power but a moral one, and even that seems to me very weak.'28
The barracks of the First Machine-Gun Regiment was without a doubt the most menacing bastion of anti- government power on the Vyborg side. With 10,000 men and 1,000 machine-guns, it was by far the largest unit in the capital. Most of its soldiers had been expelled from their front-line units for insubordination and, as highly literate and militant soldiers, were susceptible to the propaganda of both the Bolsheviks and the Anarchists. The regiment's adopted barracks on the Vyborg side nestled among the most strike-prone metal factories of the capital, right next door to the Bolsheviks' headquarters. So
* His resignation was not formally announced until 7 July.
important was it to the Bolsheviks that their Military Organization had its own special cell in the regiment.
