On 20 June the First Machine-Gun Regiment was ordered to send 500 machine-guns with their crews to the Front, where, it was said, they were badly needed to support the offensive. Since the February Revolution not a single unit of the Petrograd garrison had been transferred to the Front. This had been one of the conditions set by the Petrograd Soviet on the establishment of the Provisional Government. The soldiers believed that they had 'made the revolution' and that they therefore had the right to remain in Petrograd to defend it against a 'counter- revolution'. The Provisional Government was all too aware that it lived at the mercy of the garrison's quarter of a million troops. Until now, it would not have dared to try to remove them from the capital. But by June the presence of these machine-gunners had become a major threat to the government's existence; and one of the main aims of the offensive was undoubtedly to transfer them to the Front. The Foreign Minister, Tereshchenko, admitted as much to the British Ambassador when he claimed in June that the offensive 'will enable us to take measures against the garrison in Petrograd, which is by far the worst and gives a bad example to the others'; while Kerensky repeatedly stressed that it was the aim of the offensive to restore order in the rear.29 Lvov's private notes, recently discovered in the Russian archives, confirm that during May and June the government was seriously considering removing the capital to Moscow.30 There were constant rumours that Petrograd was about to be abandoned to the Germans; and many of the 'patriotic' middle classes prayed that they were true (it was a dinner-party commonplace that only the Kaiser could restore order). But if the government's aim was to use the offensive as a pretext to remove the machine-gunners, then this was a very clumsy and a foolish way to go about it. The government could have easily transferred the machine-gunners to the rear, say to some backwater like Tambov province, on the grounds of 'defending the revolution' there. By sending them to the Front, and thus reneging on the Soviet's conditions, it gave credibility to the soldiers' claim — voiced by the Bolshevik and Anarchist agitators in their regiment — that the government was using the offensive to break up the garrison and that it was thus 'counter-revolutionary'. Since the April crisis, the soldiers had viewed the government's efforts to continue the war with growing suspicion — didn't this make them 'imperialists'? — and in this climate of mistrust such conspiracy theories were persuasive.
On 21 June the machine-gunners resolved to overthrow the Provisional Government, if it continued with its threat 'to break up this and other revolutionary regiments' by sending them to the Front. Dozens of other garrison units which had orders to join the offensive passed similar resolutions. The Bolshevik Military Organization encouraged the idea of an armed uprising, and effectively transformed itself into the operational staff for the capture of the capital. But
the Central Committee continued to urge restraint. It was the same policy clash as on 10 June, with the ultra-leftist leaders of the Vyborg Committee and the Military Organization keen to ride to power on the violence of the Petrograd vanguard, and the more cautious national leaders of the party afraid that a failed uprising might give rise to an anti-Bolshevik backlash in the country at large. The provinces, they said, were not yet ready for a socialist revolution and the premature seizure of power in the capital was likely to result in a civil war, in which Red Petrograd, like the Paris Commune, would be defeated by the provinces. So argued Lenin himself at a Conference of the Bolshevik Military Organizations on 20 June. He stressed the need to delay the armed uprising, resisting all provocations by the 'counter-revolutionaries', until the offensive was over and the Bolsheviks had won a majority in the Soviet:
One wrong move on our part can wreck everything ... if we were now able to seize power, it is naive to think that we would be able to hold it. . . Even in the Soviets of both capitals, not to speak now of the others, we are an insignificant minority . . . This is a basic fact, and it determines the behaviour of our Party . . . Events should not be anticipated. Time is on our side.31
But Lenin had little control over his lieutenants. On 29 June he departed for a friend's country dacha in Finland complaining of headaches and fatigue. Control of the party slipped out of his hands, as the Military Organization prepared the insurrection. Bolshevik and Anarchist agitators urged the machine-gunners to take to the streets in an armed demonstration on 3 July. A regimental concert in the People's House on the 2nd to bid farewell to the soldiers due to leave for the Front was turned into an anti-government rally, with Trotsky and Lunacharsky (although neither was yet formally a Bolshevik) calling for the transfer of all power to the Soviet. The troops returned to their barracks too excited to sleep. They spent the night and the following morning debating whether to join the uprising. Many were reluctant to come out in force against the orders of the Soviet. But others were eager to join the uprising, seeing in it their last chance to resist the call-up to the Front, or perhaps simply the chance, as one of their slogans proposed, to 'Beat the
During the afternoon a vast grey mass of workers and soldiers moved from the outlying districts to the centre of the city. The streets returned to the look of the February Days, though the mood was now much darker and
the composition of the crowd more solidly proletarian. The suits of the middle-class citizens, the beards of the students and the hats of the lady sympathizers, which had all been so visible in February, were no longer to be seen. The marchers carried Bolshevik slogans and were mostly armed, the soldiers with bayonets fixed to their rifles, the workers, brought out by the Red Guards, with belts of bullets wrapped around their torsos like Latin American bandits. A prominent place in the crowd was occupied by soldiers aged over forty who had marched through the city in armed ranks several times before. The demonstrators overturned trams, and set up pickets at various intersections. At one of these pickets, at the fashionable end of the Nevsky Prospekt, the Red Guards mounted a machine-gun. Its minders soon got bored and amused themselves by firing at the
The crowd as yet lacked leadership or direction. It did not quite know where it should go, or why. It had nothing but a 'mood' — which wasn't enough to make a revolution. The Bolshevik and Anarchist agitators, who had brought out the insurgent army, failed to set it strategic objectives. 'The street itself will organize us,' the Anarchist Bleichman had claimed. There was an assumption that a large enough show of force was bound to bring the government down, and that the detailed questions of power could somehow be left to sort themselves out later. That, after all, was the experience of the February Days.34
The bulk of the crowd moved towards the Tauride Palace, as it had done in February. Some became involved in gun fights with loyalist and right-wing forces on their way. There was a smell of civil war. The City Council Building on the Nevsky Prospekt was the scene of especially bloody fighting. The Bolshevik leader, Lunacharsky, watched in horror from inside the building. 'The movement developed spontaneously,' he wrote to his wife on the next day. 'Black Hundreds, hooligans, provocateurs, anarchists and desperate people introduced a large amount of chaos and absurdity to the demonstration.' By the early evening, a solid mass of people had assembled in front of the Tauride Palace. The Soviet leaders were in session debating whether to form a socialist government after the collapse of the coalition, and the crowd no doubt hoped to pressurize them into taking power. All Power to the Soviets!' came the roar from the street. The Workers' Section of the Soviet served as a mouthpiece for their demands. That afternoon it had been taken over by the Bolsheviks, who,
although still a minority in the Section, had turned up in one solid body for a hastily convened emergency session and — in a premonition of October — provoked the Mensheviks and SRs into walking out by passing a resolution calling for Soviet power. A Special Commission was elected to provide political organization for the crowds outside. But it proved quite ineffective — Sukhanov, who spent the July Days in the Tauride Palace, could not recall any of its activities. The street was thus deprived of any real leverage over the Soviet. Angry demonstrators called out for the arrest of the Soviet leaders, who had 'surrendered to the landlords and the bourgeoisie!' A delegation from the First Machine-Gun Regiment told Chkheidze that
