July Days: The Reaction

July 17 – July 4, 1917: The Reaction Takes Shape. War Minister Kerensky being at the front, it falls to Prime Minister Prince Lvov, with help from the Menshevik Tseretilli and two of Kerensky’s War Ministry assistants, to organize countermeasures to the manifestation. The only loyal forces immediately at hand were a few hundred Cossacks; the regiments of the garrison that had not joined the demonstration remained neutral. Nevertheless General Polotsev, commanding the government forces, announced that morning that he would “cleanse” the city of demonstrators; to that end, he ordered, citizens loyal to the government should remain indoors.

But what the General’s forces could actually do was proportional to their relative strength. They could not confront the militant soldiers and sailors frontally, so contented themselves with ambushing and disarming small detachments.

Some of the ambushes offered gunfire. The first attack struck at the rear of the column of marchers. Others soon followed. In one incident, reported by Izvestia, a church bell tolled, to signal fire from the neighboring rooftops. The march was disrupted, marchers wounded; return fire was disorganized, as the targets were uncertain; order was with difficulty restored. The march resumed, in a much grimmer mood.

Trotsky is not sure who the gunners were; the marchers themselves could hardly be sure. Some of them might have been government troops, others former officers who had organized into right-wing clubs. The Compromisers in the Petrograd Soviet later alleged German agents were involved. Bolsheviks on the scene found evidence suggesting agents provocateur had fired at the Cossacks to induce them to attack the demonstrators.

For at about 8:00 p.m., two squadrons of Cossacks rode up drawing artillery behind them. On General Polotsev’s orders, they were to defend the Tauride Palace. The Cossacks began by seizing armored cars and disarming whomever they could. At the Liteiny Bridge they came up against a barricade, behind which the resistance was well-organized. Both sides opened fire. The Cossacks retreated. Their cannon fired three volleys, but was also dispersed by long-range rifle fire.

The battle, which Trotsky says was the “biggest military episode of the July Days,” left about a dozen killed and forty wounded in all, about equally divided between the two sides. The demonstrators were now in control of the grounds of the Tauride Palace.

July 17 – July 4, 1917: At the Tauride Palace Again. As on the evening before, revolutionary workers and soldiers again stood before the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet in the Tauride Palace. This time, their demands having already been presented, they demanded an answer. The Central Executive Committee of the Soviets had been in joint session since about 6:00 p.m. Someone brought Chernov, a Social Revolutionary on the committee and also Minister of Agriculture in the Provisional Government, outside to speak. At that moment the Kronstadt sailors arrived. Apparently the sailors did not like the tendency of Chernov’s speech; they detained him. So informed, the Central Executive sent Bolsheviks and Trotskyites, including Trotsky himself, to right the situation. Trotsky says he saw agents of the tsarist secret police by the doorway, trying to get in.

Chernov had been ordered into an automobile. Trotsky’s first impulse was to ride away with him in it. But Midshipman Raskolnikov, a leader of the Kronstadters, excitedly told him that would give the wrong impression. So Trotsky stood on the car and gave a short speech, asking for a show of hands by those opposed to releasing the minister. No-one raised his hand; Chernov returned to the palace without further hindrance.

General Polotsev was hoping more Cossacks would arrive. Instead the 176^th regiment came up from Krasnoe Selo, rain-soaked and bearing full battle kit. The Soviet assumed these were “loyal” troops; the Menshevik Dan asked their commander to post sentries at the entrances to the palace. In fact the 176^th had come to join their militant brethren in the demonstration. Consulted by an aide, Trotsky advised the regiment to comply with the request, a duty they were only too happy to perform. Trotsky notes that, if it had been a Bolshevik insurrection, they could easily have arrested the entire Central Executive then and there.

The Soviet invited the demonstrators to speak. They chose 90 representatives and five orators, representing 54 factories. The speakers began by denying the claim in the Soviet’s manifesto of the previous day that the demonstrations were counter-revolutionary; the banners they carried were anything but. Tseretilli answered that the program of peace, nationalization of industry and land, and power to the soviets lay could not then be carried out, at least not in “the present circumstances…in the Petrograd atmosphere.” He proposed adjourning the Soviet and reconvening it in Moscow two weeks hence.

The Putilov workers were next to impose themselves on the Central Executive. In a mass of 30,000, they demanded that Tseretilli be brought before them. This could easily have gone wrong; even the Bolsheviks did not want something untoward to happen. So they sent Zinoviev, the Bolshevik upon whom Lenin relied as an orator, instead. Zinoviev began, “In place of Tseretilli, it is I who have come out to you,” and was greeted by laughter. He gave a long speech and ended by appealing to the demonstrators to depart in peaceful and orderly fashion.

This the demonstrators prepared to do, but while Zinoviev had been speaking, armed Putilov workers broke into the palace. One of them took the podium and accused the Soviet of “making bargains with the bourgeoisie and landlords.” Cheidze, presiding over the meeting, had a rifle under his nose. But he calmly handed the worker a printed manifesto and asked him to read it. It said the workers ought to go home, otherwise they would be traitors to the revolution.

Be that as it may. The Bolshevik Central Committee circulated a resolution for ending the demonstration. So the demonstration, for the most part, broke up, and the streets around the Tauride Palace emptied. But the Central Executive remained in session.

Overnight, July 17-18 – July 4-5, 1917: Reinforcements for the Soviet. Isolated, individual actions with no particular political agenda take place through the night. Some of the well-to-do were leaving town. Scattered gunfire could be heard. Militants searched houses and roofs for the weapons fired at them during the day, and the shooters. Looting took place. Merchants in a bourgeois neighborhood beat up workers, soldiers, sailors that happened to pass by on the way home or to the barracks.

The Central Executive Committee of the Soviets was still in session; the delegates of the workers were still with them in the Tauride Palace, waiting for an answer to their demands. At about 4:00 a.m., the Menshevik Dan rose to make an announcement: troops loyal to the Soviet had arrived! Now the right-socialists felt like singing the Marseillaise. But Martov, also a Menshevik but not a Compromiser, observed, ”A classic picture of the beginning of a counter-revolution.”

At first the Compromisers seem to have thought the troops had come from the front. They had been telephoning War Minister Kerensky, who was there, since the marchers first assembled two days before.

But agents of the Provisional Government (thought to be from the Department of Justice or the Intelligence Service) were playing another angle. They’d sent agitators to the neutral regiments of the garrison, which had not joined the demonstration, with “proof” that Lenin was a German spy. The slander worked; at dawn, after an exchange of messages, it was these regiments that marched to the palace to defend the Soviet from the Bolsheviks.

July 18 – July 5, 1917: Demonstrations Suppressed. At dawn, Bolsheviks pass through empty streets distributing a leaflet calling for an end to the demonstrations. The workers’ districts were quiet but “vigilant,” Trotsky says.

But the city streets had already gone over to the reaction. Trotsky does not make it entirely clear which troops carried out the arrests and destruction that followed. But he refers to them as “Cossacks” or “junkers,” terms normally reserved for reactionary units serving the Provisional Government under the command of General Polotsev. At any rate, Trotsky does not directly accuse the regiments that had gone over to the Soviet that morning, and the troops from the front, sent by Kerensky, did not arrive until later in the day.

So, at 6:00 a.m., a car “loaded with junkers” drove up to the offices of Pravda. When they left, everything, including the printing presses, was a wreck. On the streets of the bourgeois neighborhoods, troops were arresting workers, soldiers, sailors, and anybody who had anything favorable to say about Lenin or the Bolsheviks. Some of the Red Guards joined the Kronstadt sailors in the Peter and Paul fortress, now surrounded by streets under the control of government troops.

That afternoon, members of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets went to Bolshevik headquarters for a conference. Agreement was reached that the Bolsheviks would induce the Kronstadters to turn over the Peter and Paul to the government, and the government would not purge or suppress the Bolshevik party, and would release those already under arrest unless the arrest was for criminal activity.

Some hours later, the mood in the Soviet, in the streets, and among the garrison was changing. Agitation accusing the Bolsheviks of funding the demonstrations with German money took hold. Then troops from the front began to arrive. The Provisional Government held all the cards; indeed, the Bolsheviks had already laid down their hand that morning. Violent speeches filled the Tauride Palace; Now that the “correlation of forces…has changed,” the Bolsheviks had become the common enemy. Kamenev rose to remind the Central Executive of the agreement reached earlier that afternoon.

Kamenev’s reminder was too late. Prime Minister Prince Lvov had already given General Polotsev orders to clear out the palace of the ballerina Kshesinskaia and arrest any Bolsheviks found inside. Trotsky believes the right-socialist ministers in the Provisional Government knew of and consented to the order.

The Bolskeviks took countermeasures. The Military Organization put the Kronstadt midshipman Raskolnikov in command at the palace. This was at about 5:00 p.m. Raskolnikov sent for a warship from Kronstadt, but reconsidering this rash measure, rescinded the request. Cossacks, armored cars, and machine guns took position all around.

Thus the situation stood for the balance of the day.

July 18 – July 5, 1917: The Delegates of the Centrobalt. The workers of Helsinki, the soldiers of the Helsinki garrison, and the sailors of the Baltic Fleet stationed there are not far behind the Kronstadt sailors in militancy. When they heard of the July Days manifestation, they passed a resolution against the Provisional Government. Sentiment was so strong that even the Social Revolutionaries were compelled to support the resolution.

What they should do about it was more problematic. If the fleet were to move on Petrograd, Helsinki would be exposed to action by the German fleet. But then the Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet (Centrobalt) became aware of secret orders transmitted from the Provisional Government’s Assistant Navy Minister to the commanding admiral of the fleet. The admiral was to send destroyers to prevent the landing of the Kronstadt sailors, and deploy submarines to prevent the sailors of the fleet from sending ships to join the Kronstadters. The crews of the submarines and destroyers were thought to be less politically advanced than those of the new, modern battleships.

This made a decision more difficult, but the Centrobalt lost no time in making one. They passed a resolution to send a destroyer to Petrograd to find out what was going on there and to arrest the Assistant Navy Minister.

The destroyer Orpheus thus arrived at the mouth of the Neva River on July 18 (July 5, old style), some 24 hours after the Kronstadters had landed. By the time the Centrobalt delegation arrived at the Tauride Palace, the vehement mood there had deepened because of the initial success of the suppression. When the sailors read out their resolution, members of the Central Executive Committee denounced them as traitors and counter-revolutionaries.

Their mission to arrest the assistant minister having failed, the sailors themselves were arrested the following day. Then the president of the Centrobalt was arrested, and the admiral of the Baltic Fleet summoned to Petrograd to explain his part in the matter.

July 18 – July 5, 1917: Lenin Slandered. The Soviet hears the slander against Lenin but nobody, except relative newcomers to revolutionary work, believes it. Tseretilli and Cheidze, leaders of the Central Executive Committee and the Menshevik party, rejected the story out of hand, and asked the papers not to print it. But a publication known for yellow journalism did. The Minister of Justice, one of the socialist ministers in the Coalition Government, resigned on this account.

The slander had its origins in the circumstance that Lenin passed through Germany when he travelled to Petrograd in April. A former police spy and prisoner of war, one Ermolenko, made up the rest: Lenin had contacts with the German General Staff and was acting as their agent; German money was propping up the Bolshevik party with a view to destabilizing the dual government.

A discredited journalist and operative of the Intelligence Service, one Alexinsky, became the spokesman for the slander. He had passed Ermolenko’s fabricated report to the papers. The Menshevik Dan had already denounced him in Izvestia. Now Zinoviev demanded that the Central Executive conduct an immediate investigation with a view to exonerating Lenin and neutralizing the slander, but this gained little traction.

Trotsky records that Lenin then asked him, “Aren’t they getting ready to shoot us all?” So Lenin went back into hiding, at first in a Petrograd worker’s apartment. Zinoviev and others went underground too.

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 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.

July 19 – July 6, 1917: German Counterattack. A German counterattack opens an eight-mile breach in the Russian lines on the Southwestern Front at Tarnopol in Galicia (now part of the Ukraine). The German army recovered all the ground won by the Russian summer offensive and more besides.

Overnight July 19-20 – July 6-7, 1917: Kerensky Returns. That evening, War Minister Kerensky returns from army headquarters to Petrograd demanding that the Provisional Government take “decisive measures” against the Bolsheviks. By 2:00 a.m., the cabinet resolved to arrest and try the leaders of the “armed insurrection” supposed to have taken place a few days before. They were referring to the July Days.

The armed detachment sent to Lenin’s house did not find him there. He and Zinoviev were already in hiding.