The bulk of the crowd moved towards the Tauride Palace, as it had done in February. Some became involved in gun fights with loyalist and rightwing forces on their way. There was a smell of civil war. The City Council Building on the Nevsky Prospekt was the scene of especially bloody fighting. The Bolshevik leader, Lunacharsky, watched in horror from inside the building. ‘The movement developed spontaneously,’ he wrote to his wife on the next day. ‘Black Hundreds, hooligans, provocateurs, anarchists and desperate people introduced a large amount of chaos and absurdity to the demonstration.’ By the early evening, a solid mass of people had assembled in front of the Tauride Palace. The Soviet leaders were in session debating whether to form a socialist government after the collapse of the coalition, and the crowd no doubt hoped to pressurize them into taking power. ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ came the roar from the street. The Workers’ Section of the Soviet served as a mouthpiece for their demands. That afternoon it had been taken over by the Bolsheviks, who, although still a minority in the Section, had turned up in one solid body for a hastily convened emergency session and — in a premonition of October — provoked the Mensheviks and SRs into walking out by passing a resolution calling for Soviet power. A Special Commission was elected to provide political organization for the crowds outside. But it proved quite ineffective — Sukhanov, who spent the July Days in the Tauride Palace, could not recall any of its activities. The street was thus deprived of any real leverage over the Soviet. Angry demonstrators called out for the arrest of the Soviet leaders, who had ‘surrendered to the landlords and the bourgeoisie!’ A delegation from the First Machine-Gun Regiment told Chkheidze that it was ‘disturbed by rumours that the Executive intended to enter into a new coalition with the reactionary capitalists’, and that they ‘would not stand for such a policy’ because ‘they had already suffered enough’. Some of the soldiers penetrated into the Catherine Hall, where they watched the debate. Yet none of them thought to arrest the Soviet leaders, who were quite defenceless. There was no one to tell the soldiers to do it.35
As darkness fell, the crowd began to disperse. The uprising seemed to be coming to an end. There were rumours that the Provisional Government had already been arrested. But nothing of the sort had taken place. The remnants of the cabinet were having a meeting in Prince Lvov’s apartment. At around 10 p.m. a group of armed workers and soldiers burst into the entrance hall, where they announced to the hall porter that they had come to arrest the Ministers. Tsereteli was summoned to negotiate with them, but before he got to the entrance the insurgents had lost their nerve and run away with his car.36
Precisely at this moment the Bolshevik Central Committee was meeting in the Kshesinskaya Mansion to decide on its policy towards the uprising. Although it had so far been urging restraint, afraid to risk all in a premature putsch, there seemed no holding back the movement now. The workers and soldiers had virtually taken over the city, the Kronstadt sailors were on their way, and the vast majority of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks in Petrograd were joining the uprising, leaving the Central Committee on the sidelines. Shortly before midnight it was agreed to call for further demonstrations on the following day. The front page of Pravda, which was due to appear with an article by Kamenev and Zinoviev calling for restraint, had to be altered at the final moment and appeared the next morning with a large blank space. Leaflets were hastily printed and distributed in the streets calling for ‘organized’ demonstrations and a ‘new power’ based on the Soviet. Meanwhile, a messenger from the Central Committee sped off in a car to Finland to bring Lenin back to the capital.37
The exact intentions of the Bolshevik leaders have always been a subject of fierce controversy. Some historians have argued that the Bolsheviks were planning to overthrow the Provisional Government by armed force. Richard Pipes, for example, claims that the July affair was orchestrated from the start by the Bolshevik leaders as ‘a power seizure’; it was only when the embarrassing failure of the putsch became clear that they sought to conceal their intentions by depicting the uprising as a ‘spontaneous demonstration which they sought to direct into peaceful channels’. This last version of events — as a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ — was the standard Soviet view. It was supported by the American scholar, Alexander Rabinowitch, in his classic account of the July Days. According to Rabinowitch, the Central Committee only joined the uprising under pressure from its rank and file, and never intended it to go any further than a show of force to pressurize the Soviet into taking power.38
