The barracks of the First Machine-Gun Regiment was without a doubt the most menacing bastion of anti-government power on the Vyborg side. With 10,000 men and 1,000 machine-guns, it was by far the largest unit in the capital. Most of its soldiers had been expelled from their front-line units for insubordination and, as highly literate and militant soldiers, were susceptible to the propaganda of both the Bolsheviks and the Anarchists. The regiment’s adopted barracks on the Vyborg side nestled among the most strike-prone metal factories of the capital, right next door to the Bolsheviks’ headquarters. So important was it to the Bolsheviks that their Military Organization had its own special cell in the regiment.
On 20 June the First Machine-Gun Regiment was ordered to send 500 machine-guns with their crews to the Front, where, it was said, they were badly needed to support the offensive. Since the February Revolution not a single unit of the Petrograd garrison had been transferred to the Front. This had been one of the conditions set by the Petrograd Soviet on the establishment of the Provisional Government. The soldiers believed that they had ‘made the revolution’ and that they therefore had the right to remain in Petrograd to defend it against a ‘counter-revolution’. The Provisional Government was all too aware that it lived at the mercy of the garrison’s quarter of a million troops. Until now, it would not have dared to try to remove them from the capital. But by June the presence of these machine-gunners had become a major threat to the government’s existence; and one of the main aims of the offensive was undoubtedly to transfer them to the Front. The Foreign Minister, Tereshchenko, admitted as much to the British Ambassador when he claimed in June that the offensive ‘will enable us to take measures against the garrison in Petrograd, which is by far the worst and gives a bad example to the others’; while Kerensky repeatedly stressed that it was the aim of the offensive to restore order in the rear.29 Lvov’s private notes, recently discovered in the Russian archives, confirm that during May and June the government was seriously considering removing the capital to Moscow.30 There were constant rumours that Petrograd was about to be abandoned to the Germans; and many of the ‘patriotic’ middle classes prayed that they were true (it was a dinner-party commonplace that only the Kaiser could restore order). But if the government’s aim was to use the offensive as a pretext to remove the machine-gunners, then this was a very clumsy and a foolish way to go about it. The government could have easily transferred the machine-gunners to the rear, say to some backwater like Tambov province, on the grounds of ‘defending the revolution’ there. By sending them to the Front, and thus reneging on the Soviet’s conditions, it gave credibility to the soldiers’ claim — voiced by the Bolshevik and Anarchist agitators in their regiment — that the government was using the offensive to break up the garrison and that it was thus ‘counter-revolutionary’. Since the April crisis, the soldiers had viewed the government’s efforts to continue the war with growing suspicion — didn’t this make them ‘imperialists’? — and in this climate of mistrust such conspiracy theories were persuasive.
On 21 June the machine-gunners resolved to overthrow the Provisional Government, if it continued with its threat ‘to break up this and other revolutionary regiments’ by sending them to the Front. Dozens of other garrison units which had orders to join the offensive passed similar resolutions. The Bolshevik Military Organization encouraged the idea of an armed uprising, and effectively transformed itself into the operational staff for the capture of the capital. But the Central Committee continued to urge restraint. It was the same policy clash as on 10 June, with the ultra-leftist leaders of the Vyborg Committee and the Military Organization keen to ride to power on the violence of the Petrograd vanguard, and the more cautious national leaders of the party afraid that a failed uprising might give rise to an antiBolshevik backlash in the country at large. The provinces, they said, were not yet ready for a socialist revolution and the premature seizure of power in the capital was likely to result in a civil war, in which Red Petrograd, like the Paris Commune, would be defeated by the provinces. So argued Lenin himself at a Conference of the Bolshevik Military Organizations on 20 June. He stressed the need to delay the armed uprising, resisting all provocations by the ‘counter-revolutionaries’, until the offensive was over and the Bolsheviks had won a majority in the Soviet:
