This dispute could have been readily resolved by consultation between the government and the Ispolkom, which almost certainly would have led to the government’s capitulating. But before a compromise could be reached, the anger spilled to the barracks and workers’ quarters, which were linked to the Ispolkom with invisible threads.
The street disorders on April 20–21 began spontaneously, but they were quickly taken in hand by the Bolsheviks. A young Social Democratic officer, Lieutenant Theodore Linde, who had participated in the drafting of Order No. 1, interpreted the government’s note as a betrayal of the revolution’s democratic ideals. He summoned representatives of his regiment, the Finnish Reserve Guards, and called on them to bring their men into the streets to demonstrate against Miliukov. He made the rounds of the other garrison units bearing a similar message.56 Linde was an ardent patriot who wanted Russia to stay in the war: he lost his life soon afterward, lynched by front-line troops whom he exhorted to combat but who decided, from his German-sounding name, that he was an enemy agent.57 Like most Russian socialists, however, he wanted the war to be waged for “democratic” ideals. He seems not to have realized that urging troops to take part in an unauthorized political manifestation was tantamount to inciting mutiny. From 3 p.m. onward, several military units, headed by the Finnish Guards, marched, fully armed, to Mariinskii Palace, the seat of the government, where they shouted for Miliukov’s resignation.58
Because of the indisposition of Guchkov, the cabinet at this moment was meeting not in Mariinskii Palace but in Guchkov’s office at the Ministry of War. Before it now appeared General Kornilov, who, as commander of the Petrograd Military District, bore responsibility for the capital’s security. He requested permission to have troops disperse the mutineers. According to Kerensky, the cabinet unanimously denied this request: “We were all confident of the wisdom of our course and felt certain that the population would not permit any acts of violence against the Government.”59 It was the first, but not the last time that the Provisional Government, faced with an open challenge to its authority, flinched from using force—a fact that escaped neither Kornilov nor Lenin.
Up to this point, the Bolsheviks had nothing to do with the disturbance: indeed, it seems to have caught them by surprise. But they lost no time in exploiting it.
The activities of the Bolshevik high command at this time are far from clear, because most of the relevant documents remain unpublished. The official Communist version of the events holds that the party’s Central Committee did not authorize the anti-government demonstrations which took place in Petrograd in the evening of April 20 and throughout April 21: the Bolsheviks who took to the streets carrying banners reading “Down with the Provisional Government” and “All Power to the Soviets” are said to have acted on instructions of second-rank Bolsheviks, including one S. Ia. Bagdaev.* But it is quite unthinkable that in a centralized party like the Bolsheviks, a minor functionary would have taken it upon himself to authorize revolutionary slogans in defiance of the Central Committee—a charge rendered the more preposterous by Bagdaev’s documented opposition to Lenin’s confrontational stance against the Provisional Government.60 This misleading account of the events of April 20–21, 1917, has been made up in order to conceal the fact that the first Bolshevik attempt at a putsch ended in ignominious failure. To confuse the picture further, Communist historians have gone to the lengths of citing resolutions adopted by the party after the event as indicative of its intentions before it had taken place, and attributing directives written by Lenin to “unidentified sources.”
