June Demonstration

June 14 – June 1, 1917: Bolshevik Majorities. Workers at a Moscow factory elect a majority Bolshevik factory committee. The party won a plurality of seats on the Moscow Soviet during this time as well, and a large majority at a June conference of factory and shop committees in Petrograd were Bolshevik.

However, elections to the local dumas continued to favor moderate socialists. For example, a June election to the Moscow duma gave 60% of the delegates to the Social Revolutionaries. This reflected the large turnout of petit bourgeoisie in elections such as these.

June 16 – June 3, 1917: Congress of Soviets. The First All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies convenes in Petrograd; it continues until July 7 – June 24. Whether a particular soviet could send a delegate, and whether the delegate had a vote, depended on the size of the soviet’s membership. The Bolsheviks had about a fifth of the 777 delegates.

June 17 – June 4, 1917: Lenin Addresses the Congress. Lenin’s speech explains and defends the Bolshevik positions on participation in the Coalition ministry in particular, and the anti-revolutionary tendencies of the dual government in general. Follow the link to read the text.

Lenin also at one point advised the Congress to arrest the big bourgeoisie and keep them in close confinement until they should reveal their secret deals. Kerensky spoke against the motion and it did not pass.

A resolution against the Kronstadt sailors, who had arrested their officers, expelled the governor appointed by the Provisional Government, and put the local soviet in charge of the local government (May 26 – May 13), carried the Congress. Trotsky subsequently drafted, and the sailors agreed to, a declaration that avoided open conflict. Thereafter some of the sailors became well-traveled apostles of Bolshevism, a phenomenon Trotsky terms the “Kronstadt Miracle.”

June 20 – June 7, 1917: The Vyborg Gardens. The Vyborg workers had appropriated a tsarist minister’s suburban gardens and manor as a sort of community center and children’s playground. Responding to rumors in the press that criminals had established themselves there, the Executive Committee ordered an investigation, which of course did not find anything amiss.

So far a mere incident; but it has a sequel.

June 21 – June 8, 1917: Call for a Demonstration. A conference between the Bolsheviks and representatives of the Petrograd workers unions votes to call for a demonstration.

June 22 – June 9, 1917: Pravda Publishes the Call. Pravda publishes the call for a demonstration decided upon the previous day. Trotsky persuaded the Central Council of Factory and Shop Committees to endorse the call.

The slogans were to be an old one: “All Power to the Soviets!” and a new one: “Down with the Ten Minister-Capitalists!” (that is, the ten ministers of the Coalition Government who did not belong to one of the socialist parties). The Bolsheviks began to paste up posters in favor of the demonstration and its slogans. It had also happened that Vyborg elected a Bolshevik majority to its local duma during that time.

But the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries opposed the action. The Coalition Government did nothing to stop it, but the Congress of Soviets, with its Menshevik/Social Revolutionary super-majority, voted a resolution forbidding demonstrations for three days.

Meanwhile, the debates at the Congress of Soviets continued, as described in a separate entry. And Vyborg elected a Bolshevik majority to its local duma.

June 22 – June 9, 1917: Separate Peace? The Coalition Government having decided to continue participation in the war with a new offensive, Lenin again addresses the Congress of Soviets, this time on the Bolshevik war policy and position on a separate peace. The Bolshevik policy, he said, is premised on the imperialist character of the war. Russia’s allies, Britain, France, and now the United States, have imperialist aims; therefore Russia’s armies, in which the vast majority of the soldiers came from the peasantry, are fighting not to defend the revolution against Germany, but to support the capitalist ruling classes at home and abroad.

The Bolsheviks were being accused in the bourgeois press of seeking a separate peace. The party’s answer was peace through revolution – world revolution. (See the entry for May 10 – April 27, and the text of the party resolution here.) But Lenin did not try to explain the contingency of world revolution in this speech. Instead he demanded, “No peace with the German capitalists,” and “No alliance with the British and French” capitalists, at the same time reminding the Congress of the Provisional Government’s complicity in imperialist policies for the annexation of Armenia, Finland, and Ukraine.

Despite Lenin’s urgings, the Congress of Soviets voted to support the new offensive. The separately proposed Bolshevik resolution on the war was not even put to a vote.

June 23 – June 10, 1917: The Demonstration is Put Off. Overnight, Bolshevik influence helps develop a consensus among the demonstration’s supporters to postpone it.

The matter was debated in the Congress of Soviets that day and the next. A conspiracy theory developed claiming that the reactionaries planned to use the demonstration as a pretext for overthrowing the revolutionary government and dissolving the soviets.

Meanwhile, in Kiev, the Rada (parliament) declared the independence of the Ukraine.

June 24 – June 11, 1917: Conspiracy Theories. In a special, limited session of the Congress and Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, the Menshevik Tseretilli argues the conspiracy theory that the reactionaries intended to use the demonstration as a pretext for overthrowing the revolution. With Tseretilli, this became another pretext, for an attack on the Bolsheviks. He called for disarming the party, lest it conspire against the revolution from the left. Bolshevism was to be excised from the revolutionary body.

Trotsky says, “The hall was stunned into silence.” Kamenev offered to be arrested, so he could defend himself and his party against Tseretilli’s charge. The Bolsheviks walked out of the meeting.

June 25 – June 12, 1917: Compromise on the Left. Despite the Menshevik Tseretilli’s inflammatory speech, and another by his colleague Dan suggesting the Bolsheviks had connections with German agents, the Congress of Soviets as a whole is not ready to expel the Bolsheviks from the revolution’s ranks. A compromise developed in which the Bolsheviks gave up the call for a demonstration, and the other left parties in the soviets gave up the call to disarm the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were subjected to what Trotsky calls an “exceptional law,” but the law had no teeth: no arrests, proscriptions, impeachments, etc.

Trotsky denies it was the policy of the party to arm itself. It happened that workers who identified with the party kept arms to defend themselves from the police, and that soldiers who bore arms in the line of duty might also consider themselves Bolsheviks. These elements were, in fact, the main protection of the movement during the February Revolution.

Another line of criticism then offered proved difficult for the Bolsheviks to lay to rest. It held that the Bolsheviks were the party of the workers, but not of the peasants. But the revolution was the revolution of the workers and the peasants. This overlooked the fact that the party’s agrarian policy was one of Lenin’s April Theses, and had been fully articulated in his speech to the Conference of Peasant Deputies. The Bolsheviks were actively agitating among the peasantry in favor of this policy. 

Finally at this session of the Congress, a Menshevik offered a resolution calling for a demonstration the following Sunday, June 18 (July 1, new style), to show unity against the German enemy. This passed, as did a resolution to abolish the State Duma and convene the Constituent Assembly on September 30 (October 13, new style). The Congress also agreed to reconvene every three months.

June 29 – June 16, 1917: Offensive Ordered. War Minister Kerensky orders the summer offensive, calling for “an immediate and decisive blow” by the Russian armies. The general staff, on the contrary, believed the offensive was hopeless.

June 30 – June 17, 1917: Tseretilli’s Challenge. Pravda had immediately declared the Bolsheviks ready to march on June 18 (July 1, new style) in their “struggle for those aims for which we had intended to demonstrate on the 10^th.” The day before the march, the Menshevik Tseretilli issues a challenge to the Bolsheviks, saying the march would be a referendum revealing “whom the majority is following,” the Bolsheviks or their right-socialist rivals in the soviets.

July 1 – June 18, 1917: Summer Offensive Begins. War Minister Kerensky announces the beginning of the Russian summer offensive, as promised to her allies in the Entente and to the interests who were bankrolling the Russian war effort. But the announcement was something of an exaggeration. Only on the Southwestern Front, facing Galicia in southern Poland, did the command have the troops ready to attack. On three other fronts, as we’ll see, things weren’t ready for another three weeks. Thus, even though the Southwestern Front would advance some 20 miles in the days to come, the military advantages of a coordinated attack were lost.

The beginning of the offensive coincided with another event, the June Demonstration, described in a separate entry.

July 1 – June 18, 1917: June Demonstration. The demonstration called for by the Congress of Soviets the previous week takes place on Sunday the 18^th, but without the result expected by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries.

The demonstrators assembled with their banners in the Mars Field and followed generally the line of march (April 7 – March 25, 1917) taken to mark the funerals of those killed in the February Revolution. But there were fewer marchers in June than there had been to commemorate the funerals. Trotsky says the workers and soldiers marched, but (as this was a march sponsored by the Congress of Soviets) the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia did not.

It soon became clear to observers from the Congress that the great majority of the 400,000 marchers supported the Bolshevik program. Banners bearing Bolshevik slogans – “Down with the Ten Minister-Capitalists!” “Down with the Offensive!” “All Power to the Soviets!” – predominated.

Few banners or placards displayed slogans favoring the official program of the Soviet or the party programs of the Mensheviks or Social Revolutionaries. Fewer still supported the Provisional Government. Jewish intellectuals and supporters of Plekhanov, an early Russian Marxist but an enemy of Leninism, lowered such placards when the rest of the crowd shouted them down; Cossacks resisted until their banners were torn away and destroyed.

The meaning of the demonstration was unmistakable: no support either for the offensive or for the Coalition Government. Even the marchers themselves, whether Bolshevik or not, could perceive the influence of the Bolshevik line. Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries from the provinces could only argue that Petrograd did not speak for the whole country.

The June Demonstration is still considered the turning point from the bourgeois February Revolution to the proletarian October Revolution.

Meanwhile anarchists took advantage of the distraction to break into a number of prisons and liberate the tenants, most of them criminal, and not political, prisoners. Trotsky suspects the authorities winked at the enterprise, which went off without much interference from them. The Minister of Justice later ordered a raid on the Vyborg Gardens (see the entry for June 20 – June 7, 1917) on the pretext that the escapees and anarchists were hiding there. In the result, the mansion was ruined. The Vyborg workers responded by closing some of the factories.

July 2 – June 19, 1917: Counter-Demonstration. The bourgeois Cadet party stages a counter-demonstration on the Nevsky Prospect. Unlike the counter-demonstrations during the April Days, this one provoked no clashes and caused no casualties.

Yet tension was building. The revolutionary workers and soldiers, Lenin had said, were to the left of the Bolsheviks; the Bolshevik press was urging restraint. But the Coalition Government and its allies in the right-socialist parties of the Soviet hesitated or were powerless to act.