A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Soviet revolution without them. If the Soviet leaders were reluctant to take power, how could they give All Power to the Soviet'?

One final event on that day symbolized the powerlessness of the crowd. At around 7 p.m. a group of armed and angry workers from the Putilov plant burst into the Catherine Hall. The Soviet deputies leaped from their seats. Some threw themselves on to the ground in panic. One of the workers, a 'classical sans-culotte' dressed in a blue factory tunic and cap, jumped up on to the speakers' platform. Shaking his rifle in the air, he shouted incoherently at the deputies:

Comrades! How long must we workers put up with treachery? You're all here debating and making deals with the bourgeoisie and the landlords . . . You're busy betraying the working class. Well, just understand that the working class won't put up with it! There are 30,000 of us all told here from Putilov. We're going to have our way. All power to the Soviets! We have a firm grip on our rifles! Your Kerenskys and Tseretelis are not going to fool us!

Chkheidze, the Soviet chairman, was sitting next to the hysterical worker. He calmly leaned across and placed a piece of paper into his hand. It was a manifesto, printed the evening before, in which it was said that the demonstrators should go home, or be condemned as traitors to the revolution. 'Here, please take this, Comrade,' Chkheidze said to him in an imperious tone. 'It says here what you

and your Putilov comrades should do. Please read it carefully and don't interrupt our business.'⁴⁸ The confused worker, not knowing what he should do, took the manifesto and left the hall with the rest of the Putilovites. No doubt he was fuming with anger and frustration at his profound humiliation; and yet he was powerless to resist, not because he lacked the guns, but because he lacked the will. Centuries of serfdom and subservience had not prepared him to stand up to his political masters — and in that lay the tragedy of the Russian people as a whole. This was one of the finest scenes of the whole revolution — one of those rare moments in history when the hidden relations of power are flashed up on to the surface of events and the broader course of developments becomes clear.

As darkness fell, the crowds dispersed. Most of them made their way back home, damp and dejected, to the workers' districts and barracks. The Kronstadt sailors wandered around the city, not knowing where to go. Throughout the night the affluent residential streets reverberated to the sounds of broken windows, sporadic shots and screams, as the last survivors of the failed uprising took out their anger in acts of looting and violence against the burzhoois. The Petrograd military headquarters were inundated with telephone calls from terrified shopkeepers, bankers and housewives. In a last desperate act of defiance, 2,000 Kronstadters seized control of the Peter and Paul Fortress. They did not know what to do with the conquered fortress — it was just a symbol of the old regime which it seemed a good idea to capture as a final hostage of the uprising. The sailors slept in the prisons empty cells, and the following day agreed to leave it on condition that they were allowed to make their own way back to Kronstadt, keeping all their weapons.⁴⁹

By this stage, loyal troops were flocking to defend the Tauride Palace. The Izmailovsky Regiment was the first to arrive, on the evening of the 4th, with a thunderous rendering of the Marseillaise — as if in response to the Internationale of the Kronstadters — from its military band. As they heard the sound of it approaching, the Soviet leaders embraced each other with tears of relief: the siege of the Tauride Palace was finally over. Standing arm in arm, they broke spontaneously into the stirring chorus of Aux armes, citoyens'. It was, as Martov angrily muttered, a 'classic scene from the start of a counterrevolution'.⁵⁰

* * * Like most of the loyalist troops, the Izmailovksy Regiment had been turned against the Bolsheviks by leaflets released that evening by the Minister of Justice Pereverzev accusing them of being German agents. On the next day, 5 July, the right-wing press was full of so-called 'evidence' to that effect. Much of it was based on the dubious testimony of a Lieutenant Yermolenko, who claimed to have been told by the Germans, whilst he was a prisoner of war, that Lenin was

working for them. There is no doubt that the Germans had financed the Bolshevik Party — the Provisional Government had known that since April. But this did not prove Pereverzev's claim, still repeated by many historians, that the Bolsheviks were German agents. For one thing, the actual amount of German finance was not very great, given the party's financial problems during the summer; and, for another, there is no evidence that the Bolsheviks planned their policies to suit Berlin. Yet the timely release of these charges had an explosive effect, turning many soldiers against the Bolsheviks. Acting under orders from Pereverzev, a large detachment of military cadets ransacked the Pravda offices at dawn on 5 July. They only just missed Lenin, who had left for the first of his pre-October hide-outs, the flat of the Bolshevik worker, Sergei Alliluyev,* only minutes before.⁵¹

Lenin had been given early warning of the treason charges by a secret contact in the Ministry of Justice. Hoping to mitigate the xenophobic reaction which was bound to follow, he called for an end to the demonstrations in an article on the back page of Pravda. But it was too late. By the morning of the 5th, the capital was seized with anti-Bolshevik hysteria. The right-wing tabloids bayed for Bolshevik blood, instantly blaming the 'German agents' for the reverses at the Front. It seemed self-evident that the Bolsheviks had planned their uprising to coincide with the German advance. General Polovtsov, who was responsible for the repressions as the head of the Petrograd Military District, later acknowledged that the Bolshevik-baiting contained 'a strong anti- Semitic tendency'; but in the usual way that Russians of his class justified pogroms he put it down 'to the Jews themselves because among the Bolshevik leaders their percentage was not far from a hundred. It was beginning to annoy the soldiers to see that Jews ruled everything, and the remarks I heard in the barracks plainly showed what the soldiers thought about it.'⁵²

Early in the morning of 6 July a massive task force of loyalist troops, complete with eight armoured cars and several batteries of heavy artillery, moved up to liberate the Kshesinskaya Mansion. Amidst the anti-Bolshevik hysteria, there had been outrage in the right-wing press at the thought of the unwashed Bolshevik workers and soldiers rummaging through the velvets and silks of Kshesinskaya's boudoir. Not a single shot was fired in the recapture of the ballerina's former mansion. The 500 Bolsheviks still inside surrendered without resistance, despite the large store of weapons at their disposal. The Bolshevik leaders had been too busy burning party files to organize resistance.⁵³

Later that day, Pereverzev ordered Lenin's arrest, along with eleven other Bolshevik leaders. They were all charged with high treason. Most of them stayed in the open, risking arrest, and in some cases even giving themselves up. But

* His daughter, Nadezhda, would later marry Stalin.

Lenin fled underground — first to a series of safe houses in the capital and then, on 9 July, along with Zinoviev, travelling through the countryside to Finland. Lenin shaved off his beard and wore a worker's tunic and cap to disguise himself. During the following days dozens of houses in the capital were turned over by troops in search of him. Even Gorky's flat was raided. Some 800 Bolsheviks in all were imprisoned, including Kamenev, Lunacharsky, Kollontai and Trotsky — the last not yet a member of the party, though he had declared his allegiance to it.⁵⁴ The Peter and Paul Fortress, whose cells had been empty since the February Revolution, once again began to be filled with 'politicals'.

As Lenin travelled into the northern wilderness, it must have seemed to him that the Bolshevik cause was finished. Before leaving the capital he had handed to Kamenev the manuscript of what was later to become The State and Revolution, with instructions for it to be published if he should be killed. Lenin was always prone to overestimate the physical danger to himself: in this respect he was something of a coward. It cannot be said that his life was ever at direct risk during his summer on the run: at one point he even stayed with the Chief of Police in Helsingfors, who happened to be a Bolshevik sympathizer. After Lenin's death, during the cult of Lenin, fantastic stories would be told of his personal bravery during countless narrow escapes