At this point there was virtually nothing to prevent the Left SRs from seizing power. They had 2,000 well-armed troops in the capital compared to the 700 loyal to the regime. The bulk of the Latvian Rifles, the only crack troops in the capital upon which the Bolsheviks could rely, had been celebrating St John’s Day at the Khodynka Field — scene of the disaster on the coronation of the last Tsar in 1896 — on the outskirts of the capital. The Latvians were unable to return to Moscow because of fog, torrential rain and thunderstorms. Lenin was in a state of utter panic: like Kerensky in October, he had no troops to defend his regime. Vatsetis, the Latvian commander placed in charge of the government’s defence, recalls being summoned to the Kremlin after midnight, where ‘the atmosphere was like the Front in the theatre of a war’. Lenin’s first question to him was: ‘Comrade, can we hold out till morning?’77
But the Left SRs showed no inclination to press home their military advantage. They were much less interested in seizing power themselves than they were in calling for a popular uprising to force the Bolsheviks to change their policies. The Left SRs had no idea where this uprising would end up: they were happy to leave that to the ‘revolutionary creativity of the masses’. They were the ‘poets of the revolution’ and, like all poets, were anarchists at heart. At every stage of their relationship with the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs had been outsmarted by them; and even now, when they had them at their mercy, they soon lost the upper hand. Instead of marching on the Kremlin, the Left SR leaders went to the Bolshoi Theatre, where the Soviet Congress was in session. Spiridonova gave a long and characteristically hysterical speech denouncing the Bolshevik regime. Yet while she spoke the guards in charge of security at the congress surrounded the building and sealed off all the exits. The Bolshevik delegates were allowed to leave but all the others were arrested. The Left SRs had walked into a trap.
Later that night the Bolsheviks recaptured the Lubianka. Then, in the small hours of the morning, Vatsetis’s forces overcame the Combat Detachment in the Pokrovsky Barracks. Vatsetis was rewarded by the grateful Bolsheviks with 10,000 roubles and the Command of the Eastern Front: in September he was given the command of the whole Red Army. And yet the Left SRs were defeated less by him than they were by themselves. As their own party comrade Steinberg put it, they were beaten ‘not because their leaders were not brave enough, but because it was not at all their purpose to overthrow the government’.
Several hundred rebels were arrested. Alexandrovich and twelve other leaders of the Combat Detachment were summarily executed on the 7th. Most of the other Left SR leaders were imprisoned and placed on trial in November, when, given the climate at that time, they received extraordinarily lenient sentences (some of the Bolsheviks did not want to punish them at all) and indeed were later amnestied. Spiridonova was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, and then amnestied, only to be rearrested in February 1919, declared a lunatic and incarcerated in the Kremlin barracks. But she soon escaped, having won the sympathy of her guards. Bliumkin also managed to escape and later joined the Bolsheviks. As a party, the Left SRs were finished after the failed uprising of July. Its activists were forced out of the Soviets and driven underground. Hundreds were imprisoned or executed.78 Others — who had opposed the July uprising — broke away to form a new party called the Revolutionary Communists. With the removal of the Left SRs, who alone had acted as a brake on the lawlessness of the Cheka, a new wave of terror now began. Ironically, given their involvement in the Cheka, the Left SRs were its first victims.
*
After his abdication in March 1917, Nikolai Romanov (as he was now called) had been kept under house (or rather palace) arrest along with his family and their retinue at Tsarskoe Selo. Apart from the limitations on their movement, they suffered few privations: the huge costs of feeding and dining all of them were kept from the press for fear of causing public outrage.79 Their lives in these months were not unlike a long Edwardian house party — only with the difference that the ‘house guests’ were confined to certain rooms and, instead of the normal hunting, had to limit their exercise to a short walk around the garden supervised by guards.
