Kornilov, seeking again to restore order, instructed artillery units and troops to be brought out. This time he ran into the defiance of the Ispolkom, which insisted it could calm the crowds by persuasion. It phoned the Military Staff to countermand Kornilov’s instructions. Kornilov then met with Ispolkom’s representatives. They assumed responsibility for stopping the disorders, whereupon he revoked his instructions and ordered the troops to stay in the barracks. To make certain that neither the government nor the Bolsheviks resorted to arms, the Ispolkom issued a proclamation to the Petrograd garrison:
Comrade Soldiers! During these troubled days do not come out with weapons unless called by the Executive Committee [Ispolkom]. The Executive Committee alone has the right to dispose of you. Every order concerning the appearance of military units on the street (except for routine detail duty) must be issued on the blank of the Executive Committee, bear its seal and the signatures of at least two of the following: Chkheidze, Skobelev, Binasik, Sokolov, Goldman, Filippovskii, Bogdanov. Every order must be confirmed by telephoning 104–06.68
This instruction subverted the authority of the military commander of Petrograd. Unable to carry out his duties, Kornilov asked to be relieved and assigned to the front. At the beginning of May he assumed command of the Eighth Army.
Later in the day, the Ispolkom voted to prohibit all demonstrations for the next forty-eight hours. It denounced anyone who led armed men into the streets as a “traitor to the Revolution.”69
On April 21, analogous Bolshevik demonstrations under identical slogans took place in Moscow.
The disorders in Petrograd subsided toward the evening of April 21 from lack of mass support: demonstrators loyal to the government proved to be at least as militant as and considerably more numerous than those who followed the Bolshevik lead. In Moscow, Bolshevik riots went on for yet another day, terminating when angry mobs surrounded the rioters and tore anti-government banners from their hands.
The instant it became apparent that the putsch had failed, the Bolsheviks disclaimed all responsibility. On April 22, the Central Committee passed a resolution which conceded that the “petty bourgeois” mass, after some initial hesitation, had come out in support of the “pro-capitalist” forces, and condemned anti-government slogans as premature. The task of the party was defined as enlightening the workers about the true nature of the government. There were to be no more demonstrations and the instructions of the Soviet had to be obeyed. The resolution, most likely moved by Kamenev, represented a defeat for Lenin, whom Kamenev charged with “adventurism.” Lenin lamely defended himself by blaming the anti-government character of the demonstration on hotheads from the Petrograd Committee.
But even while defending himself, he inadvertently revealed what had been on his mind:
This was an attempt to resort to violent means. We did not know whether at that anxious moment the mass had strongly shifted to our side.… We merely wanted to carry out a peaceful reconnaissance of the enemy’s strength, not to give battle …70
How to reconcile his admission that the April riots were “an attempt to resort to violent means” with the claim that they were meant as a “peaceful reconnaissance” Lenin did not explain.*
For the time being, the crowds followed the Ispolkom and, through its agency, the government. In this context, it is understandable why the socialist intellectuals opposed the use of force. But crowds are fickle, and the main lesson of April was not how weak the Bolshevik Party was but how unprepared the government and the leaders of the Soviet were to meet force with force. Analyzing the lessons of the April days a few months later, Lenin concluded that the Bolsheviks had been “insufficiently revolutionary” in their tactics, by which he could only have meant that they were wrong in not making a grab for power.71 Still, he drew much encouragement from this opening skirmish: according to Sukhanov, in April his hopes “sprouted wings.”72
The April riots provoked the first serious government crisis. Barely two months after tsarism had collapsed, the intelligentsia saw the country disintegrating before their very eyes—and now they no longer had the tsar and the bureaucracy to blame. On April 26, the government issued an emotional appeal to the nation that it could no longer administer and wished to bring in “representatives of those creative forces of the country which until then had not taken a direct and immediate part” in administration, that is, the socialist intelligentsia.73 The Ispolkom, still afraid of being compromised in the eyes of the “masses,” on April 28 rejected the government’s feeler.74
