One wrong move on our part can wreck everything … if we were now able to seize power, it is naive 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.31
But Lenin had little control over his lieutenants. On 29 June he departed for a friend’s country dacha in Finland complaining of headaches and fatigue. Control of the party slipped out of his hands, as the Military Organization prepared the insurrection. Bolshevik and Anarchist agitators urged the machine-gunners to take to the streets in an armed demonstration on 3 July. A regimental concert in the People’s House on the 2nd to bid farewell to the soldiers due to leave for the Front was turned into an anti-government rally, with Trotsky and Lunacharsky (although neither was yet formally a Bolshevik) calling for the transfer of all power to the Soviet. The troops returned to their barracks too excited to sleep. They spent the night and the following morning debating whether to join the uprising. Many were reluctant to come out in force against the orders of the Soviet. But others were eager to join the uprising, seeing in it their last chance to resist the call-up to the Front, or perhaps simply the chance, as one of their slogans proposed, to ‘Beat the burzhoois!’ They elected a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, headed by the Bolshevik, A. I. Semashko, from the Military Organization, which assumed the leadership of the uprising and despatched emissaries to mobilize support from the rest of the garrison units, the factories in Vyborg, and the Kronstadt Naval Base.32
During the afternoon a vast grey mass of workers and soldiers moved from the outlying districts to the centre of the city. The streets returned to the look of the February Days, though the mood was now much darker and the composition of the crowd more solidly proletarian. The suits of the middle-class citizens, the beards of the students and the hats of the lady sympathizers, which had all been so visible in February, were no longer to be seen. The marchers carried Bolshevik slogans and were mostly armed, the soldiers with bayonets fixed to their rifles, the workers, brought out by the Red Guards, with belts of bullets wrapped around their torsos like Latin American bandits. A prominent place in the crowd was occupied by soldiers aged over forty who had marched through the city in armed ranks several times before. The demonstrators overturned trams, and set up pickets at various intersections. At one of these pickets, at the fashionable end of the Nevsky Prospekt, the Red Guards mounted a machine-gun. Its minders soon got bored and amused themselves by firing at the burzhoois in the streets and houses. Lorries and armoured cars hurtled about the city filled with soldiers firing into the air. Groups of armed men halted passing motorcars, turned out their terrified passengers, and rode about the streets, their bayonets bristling out in all directions. One official tried to stop the insurgents from confiscating his car by showing them a permit signed by Kerensky. But the soldiers merely laughed, claiming (falsely) that Kerensky had already been arrested: ‘You might as well show us a permit with the signature of Nicholas II.’33
The crowd as yet lacked leadership or direction. It did not quite know where it should go, or why. It had nothing but a ‘mood’ — which wasn’t enough to make a revolution. The Bolshevik and Anarchist agitators, who had brought out the insurgent army, failed to set it strategic objectives. ‘The street itself will organize us,’ the Anarchist Bleichman had claimed. There was an assumption that a large enough show of force was bound to bring the government down, and that the detailed questions of power could somehow be left to sort themselves out later. That, after all, was the experience of the February Days.34
