Linde’s body was brought back to Petrograd and given a hero’s burial. The democratic press portrayed the ‘fallen fighter of the people’s cause’ as a shining example of the patriotic revolutionary sentiment which the Russian army now so badly needed. Linde was not the first Soviet leader to be killed by the Bolshevized troops. There had been several similar murders during the previous weeks. Even Sokolov, the famous Soviet leader and author of Order Number One, the founding charter of soldiers’ rights, had been beaten up and taken hostage by a mob of mutinous soldiers whom he had tried to persuade to return to battle. But Linde’s brutal murder, coming as it did at the height of the summer crisis, was seen to be of particular significance. It symbolized the end of the idealistic hopes of the first revolutionary months — the ideal of a free state of citizens, who could be persuaded to fulfil their civic duties to Russia and the revolution. The death of Linde had finally confirmed that the time for persuasion had come to an end. The Russian people were not ready to be citizens, and Kerensky’s notorious rebuke that the free Russian state would become ‘a state of rebellious slaves’ seemed to be vindicated by the growing chaos in the country at large. The Russian army was collapsing and in headlong retreat. On 21 August the Germans captured Riga, and it seemed, as Zinaida Gippius noted in her diary, that ‘they could take Petrograd at any moment.’ The Empire was falling apart, with self-appointed nationalist governments in Finland and the Ukraine declaring their own independence, while each day brought fresh newspaper reports of militant strikes by workers, of anarchy on the railways, of peasant attacks on the gentry’s estates and of crime and disorder in the cities. The lesson of all this, which more and more people were beginning to draw, seemed to be that Russia could only be governed by force. Even Tsereteli was obliged to acknowledge that the summer crisis marked the end of the revolution’s ‘rose-coloured dreamy youth’ and the start of a new and ‘grim period’ when coercive measures would have to be taken to halt the anarchic tide.63
The propertied classes led the call for order. ‘The Fatherland in Danger!’ became their rallying cry. Hysterical with fear, they gambled vast amounts of money, sold their properties cheaply, and lived wildly for the moment, as if it was the final summer of Russian civilization. Countess Speransky found that in Kiev, ‘parties on the river, auto-picnics to châteaux in the neighbourhood, dinners and suppers with gypsy-bands and chorus, bridge and even tangoes, poker, and romances were the order of the day’. The funeral of the seven Cossacks killed by the Bolsheviks during the July Days became a stage for the propertied classes to indulge themselves in a patriotic show of emotion. The funeral began with a sung requiem in St Isaac’s Cathedral, followed by a solemn procession through the streets of the capital with each of the seven caskets on a white gilded horse-drawn carriage flanked on either side by liveried Cossacks and incense-waving priests. It was not so much a demonstration of democratic solidarity as a mournful lament for the old regime. There was a growing atmosphere of counter-revolution. Newspapers called for the Bolsheviks to be hanged and the Soviet to be closed down. In the absence of the Bolshevik leaders, Chernov became the new ‘German spy’ and the bête noire of the Right. Bolshevik workers were beaten up by the Black Hundred mobs. Respectable middle-class citizens flocked to the various rightwing groups which blamed Russia’s ills on the Jews and called for the restoration of the Tsar, or some other dictator, to save Russia from catastrophe.64
