Already during the sitting of the Executive Committee, we had been informed over the telephone that the machine-gun regiment was getting ready for a demonstration. We then took measures, also over the telephone, to restrain it; but important events were preparing underneath. Representatives of army units disbanded for insubordination were coming from the front with alarming accounts of repressions, which made the Petrograd garrison very uneasy. The discontent of the Petrograd workers with the official leaders was proving the more acute, as Tsereteli, Dan, and Chkheidze were obviously bent on falsifying the sentiments of the proletariat by trying to prevent the Petrograd Soviet from giving expression to the new views of the labouring masses. The All-Russian Executive Committee, elected at the June Congress and depending for support on the more backward provinces, was pushing the Petrograd Soviet more and more to the background and was taking into its own hands even the conduct of purely Petrograd affairs. A conflict was inevitable. The workers and soldiers were exerting pressure from below, giving violent expression to their discontent with the official policy of the Soviet, and demanded from our party more drastic action. We considered that in view of the still backward condition of the provinces the hour for such action had not yet struck; but at the same time, we feared lest the events at the front might produce an immense confusion in the ranks of the revolutionary workers and create despair among them.
In the ranks of our party, the attitude towards the events of 16th-18th July was perfectly definite. On the one hand, there was the fear that Petrograd might become isolated from the more backward provinces; on the other hand, there was the hope that an active and energetic intervention of Petrograd might save the situation. The party propagandists in the lower ranks went hand in hand with the masses and carried on an uncompromising agitation.
There was still some hope that a demonstration of the revolutionary masses might break down the obstinate doctrinairism of the Coalitionists and compel them to realise at last that they could only maintain themselves in power if they completely broke with the bourgeoisie. Contrary to what was said and written at the time in the bourgeois press, there was no intention whatever in our party of seizing the reins of power by means of an armed rising. It was only a revolutionary demonstration which broke out spontaneously, though guided by us politically. The Central Executive Committee was sitting at the Tauride Palace when the stormy waves of armed soldiers and workers surrounded the Palace on every side. Among the demonstrators there was, undoubtedly, an insignificant minority of anarchists who were ready to use arms against the Soviet Centre. There were also some, obviously hired, Black Hundred elements who tried to seize the occasion for causing a riot and pogroms. It was from these elements that demands emanated for the arrest of Chernov and Tsereteli, for the forcible suppression of the Central Committee, etc. There was even an actual attempt made to arrest Chernov. Subsequently, at Kresty Prison, I met a sailor who had taken part in that attempt. He turned out to have been an ordinary criminal and had been imprisoned at the Kresty for burglary. But the bourgeois and compromise-mongers’ press had described the whole movement as being merely of a pogrom and counter-revolutionary character, and yet, at the same time, as a Bolshevik manoeuvre, having as its direct object the seizure of power by armed coercion of the Central Executive Committee.
The movement of 16th-18th July showed with perfect clearness that the leading parties of the Soviet lived in Petrograd in a complete political vacuum. It is true that the garrison was by no means entirely with us at that time. There were units which still hesitated, were still undecided and passive. But apart from the ensigns, there was not a single unit among the garrison, which was willing to fight against us in defence of the government or the leading parties in the Soviet. It was from the front that troops had to be fetched. The entire strategy of Tsereteli, Chernov, and others, during those July days was to gain time so as to enable Kerensky to draw ‘reliable’ troops into Petrograd. Delegation after delegation entered the Tauride Palace, which was surrounded by a huge armed crowd, and demanded a complete break with the bourgeoisie, energetic measures of social reform, and the commencement of peace negotiations. We Bolsheviks met every new detachment of demonstrators, either in the street or in the Palace, with harangues, calling on them to be calm, and assuring them that with the masses in their present mood the compromise-mongers would be unable to form a new coalition ministry. The men of Kronstadt were particularly determined, and it was only with difficulty that we could keep them within the bounds of a bare demonstration. On 17th July, the demonstration assumed a still more formidable character – this time under the direct leadership of our party. The Soviet leaders seemed to have lost their heads; their speeches were of an evasive character; the answers given by Chkheidze, the Ulysses, to the delegations were bereft of all political sense. It was clear that the political leaders were but marking time.
On the night of 17th July ‘trustworthy’ troops commenced to arrive from the front. During the sitting of the Executive Committee, the Tauride Palace was suddenly filled with the brass notes of the Marseillaise. The faces of the members of the Presidential Bureau changed immediately. Confidence, which had been so conspicuously lacking during the last few days, once more made its appearance. It was the Volhynian Regiment of the Guards which had arrived, the same regiment which a few months later marched at the head of the November Revolution under our banners.
From that moment, everything changed. There was no longer any need to stand on ceremony with the delegations of workers and soldiers or the representatives of the Baltic Fleet. Speeches were delivered from the tribune of the Executive Committee about an armed ‘rebellion’ which had now been ‘suppressed’ by the faithful revolutionary troops. The Bolsheviks were declared to be a counter-revolutionary party.
The fright which the bourgeoisie had undergone during the two days of armed demonstration now became transformed into a raging hate, which was displayed not only in the columns of their papers, but also in the streets of Petrograd, especially on the Nevsky Prospekt, where individual workers and soldiers were mercilessly beaten when caught carrying on their ‘criminal’ agitation. Ensigns, officers, members of shock battalions, Knights of St. George, became masters of the situation, and rabid counter-revolutionaries placed themselves at their head. A ruthless suppression of workers’ organisations and of institutions of our party was carried out throughout the city. There were arrests, raids, physical ill-treatment, and individual murders. In the night of 17th-18th July the then Minister of Justice, Pereverzev, issued to the press ‘documents’ purporting to prove that at the head of the Bolshevik party there stood paid agents of Germany.
The leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary and Menshevik parties had known us too long and too well to believe this accusation, but at the same time they were too closely interested in its success against us to protest against it publicly. Even now one cannot recall without disgust the orgy of lies poured forth in the columns of all the bourgeois and coalitionist press. Our papers were suppressed. Revolutionary Petrograd then felt that the provinces and the army were as yet far from being with it. For a brief moment, the workers were stricken with dismay. In the Petrograd garrison the disbanded regiments were sternly repressed, and individual units were disarmed. All this time the Soviet leaders were busy fabricating a new ministry to include third-rate middle-class groups which, without in any way strengthening the government, only deprived it of the last vestiges of revolutionary initiative.
In the meantime, events at the front were taking their course. The whole army had been shaken to its foundation. The soldiers saw that the vast majority of the officers who had camouflaged themselves at the beginning of the Revolution were, in reality, deeply hostile to the new regime. At the main headquarters, there was now going on quite openly a selection of counter-revolutionary elements. The Bolshevik publications were ruthlessly persecuted. The offensive had long ago given way to a tragic retreat. The bourgeois press was savagely slandering the army, and although on the eve of the offensive the governing parties had declared that we were an insignificant handful, that the army knew nothing of us and cared less, now that their adventure of the offensive had ended so tragically, these same people and parties were throwing the whole responsibility for the failure on us. The prisons were packed to overflowing with revolutionary soldiers and workers. For the investigation of the affair of 16th-18th July all the old wolves of Tsarist judiciary were recalled; yet the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks dared demand of Lenin, Zinoviev, and other comrades that they should voluntarily give themselves up to ‘justice!’