The reformist leaders of the Soviets remained deaf to all these appeals. The cowardice of the Mensheviks and SRs, in refusing to take power, meant that the initiative inevitably passed to the forces of reaction. Despite the February overturn, the tsarist regime had not been decisively defeated. Behind the shirt tails of the Russian popular front (the Provisional Government), the ruling class was regrouping and preparing its revenge. The result was the reaction of the ‘July Days’. The immediate issue was the offensive of 1 July. On the very day that the workers and soldiers were demonstrating on the streets of Petrograd demanding peace and the publication of the secret treaties, Kerensky launched a new offensive. ‘Spontaneous’ patriotic demonstrations were organised on the Nevsky Prospekt, where smartly dressed bourgeois ladies and gentlemen vied with officers and journalists in their invective against the Bolsheviks. The reactionaries were once again crawling out of the woodwork, encouraged by news of the offensive.
At the Congress of Soviets, the Bolshevik minority energetically protested against the offensive, pointing out that it would lead to a strengthening of the reactionary elements in the armed forces, who would take advantage of the situation to attempt to re-establish discipline and regain control. The revolution would be placed in the gravest danger:
An offensive, whatever its outcome may be from the military point of view, means politically strengthening imperialist morale, imperialist sentiments, and infatuation with imperialism. It means strengthening the old, unchanged army officers (‘waging the war as we have been waging it so far’), and strengthening the main position of the counter-revolution. (LCW, An Alliance to Stop the Revolution, vol. 25, p. 53.)
These warnings were subsequently made flesh in the person of General Kornilov. If the offensive succeeded, it would encourage the reactionary forces and push a layer of the petty bourgeois and peasants towards the bourgeoisie, isolating the revolutionary proletariat. If it failed, it could lead to the complete collapse of the army, producing a demobilising effect on the masses. In the event, the latter variant was what occurred.
On 2 July a ministerial crisis broke out over the Ukrainian question, which revealed the utter inability of the Provisional Government to solve the national question. The case for breaking the coalition and ejecting the bourgeois ministers was never clearer. But the more the crisis deepened, the more the ‘socialist’ ministers clung to the bourgeois liberals. Kerensky was moving rapidly to the right and becoming indistinguishable from the Cadet ministers. The reformist leaders were terrified of the masses. The June demonstration had given them a fright, and the more they saw the increase in the influence of the Bolsheviks, the more they saw the danger to their position from the left, and clung still more fervently to the right. The Bolsheviks, for their part, intensified their campaign demanding that the Mensheviks and SRs break with the capitalists and take the power into their own hands. This apparent paradox in reality represented the only way in which the Bolsheviks could gain the ear of the masses. Lenin even put to the Soviet leaders that, if they took power, the Bolsheviks would guarantee that the struggle for power would be confined to the peaceful struggle to win a majority in the Soviets. Trotsky explains:
After all the experiences of the Coalition, it might have seemed that there could be only one way out, viz., to break with the Cadets and to form a purely Soviet Government. The correlation of forces inside the Soviets at the time was such that a Soviet Government would have meant, from a party point of view, the concentration of power in the hands of the SRs and Mensheviks. We were deliberately aiming at such a result, since the constant re-elections to the Soviets provided the necessary machinery for securing a sufficiently faithful reflection of the growing radicalisation of the masses of the workers and soldiers. We foresaw that after the break of the Coalition with the bourgeoisie the radical tendencies would necessarily gain the upper hand on the Soviets. In such conditions the struggle of the proletariat for power would naturally shift to the floor of the Soviet organisations, and would proceed in a painless fashion.
The pressure for decisive action was building up among the workers and soldiers of Petrograd. Again the Bolsheviks called an armed demonstration to put pressure on the Soviet leaders. Trotsky explains the motives of the Bolsheviks:
There was still some hope that a demonstration of 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 bourgeois. 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. (L. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, in The Essential Trotsky, pp. 35-36 and p. 37.)
The mood of the soldiers was particularly explosive. The First Machine Gun Regiment, stationed in the working-class Vyborg district, was agitated by the news that they would have to send 500 machine gun crews to the front. The regiment, where the influence of the Bolsheviks was strong, drew their own conclusion: it was necessary to overthrow the Provisional Government. Sections of the Bolsheviks – especially the Military Organisation – sympathised with this aim. There is a tendency among military men to overestimate the independent power of the gun. But the Bolshevik Central Committee firmly opposed any attempt to seize power in Petrograd at this stage. The provinces were not yet ready and, under such circumstances, the seizure of the capital would be a putsch.
One wrong move on our part can wreck everything. If we were now able to seize power, it is naïve to think that we would be able to hold it… Even in the Soviets of both capitals, not to speak now of the others, we are an insignificant minority… This is a basic fact, and it determines the behaviour of our Party… Events should not be anticipated. Time is on our side. (A. Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising, pp. 121-22.)
But the Bolsheviks could not prevent the explosion that was being prepared. On 3 July, the soldiers, sailors and workers, incensed at the moves of the government to send them as cannon fodder to the front, poured out onto the streets of the capital. It was a spontaneous uprising involving a large number of people moving around the streets with no clear aim or strategy. The reformist leaders looked on aghast as an immense crowd of workers and sailors surrounded the Tauride Palace where the Central Executive was meeting. The initiative for the demonstration came from below, from the workers and soldiers of Petrograd, exasperated by the shilly-shallying of the Soviet leaders, whose indignation had been raised to boiling point by the announcement of the July offensive. Far from aiming to seize power, the Bolsheviks did their best to restrain the masses, fearing quite rightly that Petrograd would be isolated from the rest of Russia.
Lunacharsky wrote to his wife the next day: “The movement developed spontaneously. Black Hundreds, hooligans, provocateurs, anarchists, and desperate people introduced a large amount of chaos and absurdity into the demonstration.” (Quoted in O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, p. 424.) Anarchist and Black Hundred elements attempted to incite the demonstrators to attacking the building and arresting the Soviet leaders, and an actual attempt was made to arrest the SR leader Chernov. This enabled the reactionary press later to describe the July demonstration as a pogrom and simultaneously an attempted putsch organised by the Bolsheviks against the revolution and the Soviet majority. None of this bears the slightest relation to the truth. The Central Committee met at 4 p.m. on 3 July and decided to do everything possible to restrain the movement, which threatened to turn into a full-blown uprising. Delegates were hastily dispatched to the factories and barracks to prevent the masses from coming out onto the streets, but it was already too late. The movement had started and nothing could stop it.
Late that night the Central Committee, together with the Petrograd Committee and the Military Organisation, taking into account the mood of the masses, decided to take part in the demonstration in order to give it an organised and peaceful character. Lenin was away on holiday, in an attempt to recover his strength after the exhaustion of the last few months. But being informed of the sudden turn of events, he hurried back to the capital, where he found a chaotic and potentially dangerous state of affairs. On 4 July, a vast number of people were involved in the demonstrations. More than half a million thronged the streets of Petrograd with no order, aim, or leadership. The small number of anarchists in Petrograd were delighted: ‘The streets will organise us!’ was the typical comment. But things were not so simple, as events showed.
By 4 July, the demonstration had assumed a huge and threatening character. By now, the Bolsheviks were straining might and main to keep things within limits.
“We Bolsheviks,” recalls Trotsky, “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 compromisemongers 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.”
Trotsky was sent to rescue the SR leader Chernov who had been ‘arrested’ by the Kronstadt sailors. In the course of his ‘arrest’, one of the workers angrily shook his fist in Chernov’s face and shouted at him: “Take the power, you son of a bitch, when it’s handed to you!” In a famous incident, Trotsky recalls the mood of sullen suspicion that emanated from all sides as he made his way through the ranks of the rebellious sailors. They were waiting for Trotsky to give them the order to take power, but instead he asked them to release their prisoner. The sailors shouted angrily at Trotsky, who felt that the slightest wrong word or action would have ended in his being set on and killed. At seven o’clock in the evening, a crowd of armed and angry workers from the Putilov plant burst in on a meeting of the terrified Soviet leaders. A worker in blue overalls jumped onto the platform and, waving his rifle in the air, shouted 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! (Ibid., pp. 38-39 and p. 431.)
The Soviet leaders were compelled to negotiate to gain time while Kerensky brought in ‘reliable’ troops from the front. But the arrival of troops from the front was the signal for a counter-revolutionary offensive. The bourgeois took revenge for the fright it had suffered. The counter-attack was led by the Soviet leaders, who recovered their nerve the moment the Volhynian regiment arrived. They no longer had any reason to negotiate with the alleged perpetrators of an ‘armed rebellion’. The Bolsheviks were declared a ‘counter-revolutionary party’. Cossacks and police fired on the demonstrators from the rooftops, causing panic. Later, when the loyal troops had arrived and disarmed the rebel units, the middle class gave vent to their fury. Workers were beaten up by respectable ladies and gentlemen on the Nevsky Prospekt. There was a wave of raids, arrests, beatings, and even murders. On the night of 4-5 July, the Justice Minister PN Pereverzev gave the press papers that purported to show that Lenin was a German agent. On the night of 5 July, the offices of Pravda were wrecked by government forces. The Bolshevik papers were suppressed. Rebel units were sent to the front to be massacred. Suddenly, the pendulum was swinging violently to the right.