July 19 – July 6, 1917: Bolsheviks Evicted

At 3:00 a.m., elements of the Petrograd garrison loyal to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets take up positions around Bolshevik headquarters. (In an interesting digression, Trotsky explains how the palace of the ballerina Kshesinskaia came to be their headquarters, and how this circumstance became an element of propaganda against the party.) A Social Revolutionary spokesman for the Soviet ordered the occupants to leave. Obligingly, a hundred or more Kronstadt sailors dashed out and made it over the Neva River to the Peter and Paul fortress.

When the troops entered the palace, they found no-one there but a few of the party’s employees. That left the Peter and Paul, and its garrison of soldiers of the Machine Gun regiment, Kronstadters, and Red Guards from Vyborg to be dealt with. The Bolshevik Central Committee sent Stalin to conduct this negotiation; he and his Menshevik comrade were successful. This episode marked the end of the July Days.

Except in the provinces. The spirit of the July Days caught on in Moscow, where, though moderate Bolsheviks carried a vote against insurrection, there were demonstrations on July 19 (July 6, old style). The Riga Soviet adopted the slogan, “All power to the soviets!” on that day, and Ekaterinburg a few days later. There was also a work stoppage in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. Clashes occurred then and in the days that followed in Riga, Nizhni-Novogorod, Kiev, and even Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. But it was not enough to make a proletarian revolution possible that summer.

Meanwhile in Petrograd, the workers went back to the factories. The only people demonstrating in the streets were the soldiers Kerensky had sent from the front. Gunfire and looting continued. Trotsky again states that machine gun fire from “experienced provocateurs” was aimed at the newly arrived troops in an effort to stir them up against the workers. On this occasion, unlike on similar occasions during the February Revolution, officers stood between the soldiers and the workers, who were not permitted to explain that they had not fired the guns.