On June 21, Captain Pierre Laurent of French intelligence turned over to Russian counterintelligence fourteen intercepted communications between the Bolsheviks in Petrograd and their people in Stockholm indicative of dealings with the enemy; soon he produced fifteen more.129 The government claimed later that it had delayed arresting the Bolsheviks because it wanted to catch Lenin’s principal Stockholm agent, Ganetskii, on his next trip to Russia with incriminating documents.130 But in view of Kerensky’s behavior after the putsch, there are grounds for suspicion that behind the government’s procrastination lay fear of antagonizing the Soviet.
At the end of June, however, the authorities had enough evidence to proceed and on July 1 ordered the arrest of twenty-eight leading Bolsheviks within the week.131
Someone in the government alerted Lenin to this danger. The most likely suspect is the same Procurator of the Petrograd Judiciary Chamber (Sudebnaia Palata), N. S. Karinskii, who, according to Bonch-Bruevich, on July 4 would leak to the Bolsheviks that the ministry was about to make public information incriminating Lenin as a German agent.132 Lenin may also have been alerted by indications that on June 29 intelligence agents began shadowing Sumenson.133 Nothing else explains Lenin’s sudden disappearance from Petrograd and his furtive escape to Finland, where he was out of reach of the Russian police.*
Lenin hid in Finland from June 29 until the early-morning hours of July 4, when the Bolshevik putsch got underway. His role in the preparations for the July escapade cannot be established. But physical absence from the scene of action need not mean he was uninvolved: in the fall of 1917, Lenin would also hide out in Finland and still take an active part in the decisions leading to the October coup.
The July operation began in the Machine Gun Regiment when it learned that the government was about to disband it and disperse its men to the front.* On June 30, the Soviet invited regimental representatives to discuss their problems with the military authorities. The following day, regimental “activists” held their own meetings. The mood of the men, tense for some time, reached a feverish pitch.
On July 2, the Bolsheviks organized for the regiment a concert meeting at the People’s House (Narodnyi Dom).134 All outside speakers were Bolsheviks, among them Trotsky and Lunacharskii: Zinoviev and Kamenev were also scheduled to appear, but failed to show up, possibly because, like Lenin, they feared arrest.135 Addressing an audience of over 5,000 men, Trotsky berated the government for the June offensive and demanded the transfer of power to the Soviet. He did not tell the troops in so many words to refuse to obey the government, but the Military Organization had the meeting pass a resolution in this spirit: it accused Kerensky of following in the footsteps of “Nicholas the Bloody” and demanded all power to the soviets.136
The troops returned to the barracks too excited to sleep. They held an all-night discussion in the course of which voices were raised demanding violent action: one of the slogans proposed was “Beat the
A pogrom was in the making. The Bolsheviks, gathered at Kshesinskaia’s, were uncertain how to react: join or try to abort it. Some argued that since the troops could not be held back, the Bolsheviks should take charge; others thought it was too soon to move.138 Then, as later, the Bolsheviks were torn between the desire to ride to power on the wave of popular fury and the fear that spontaneous violence would provoke a nationalist reaction of which they would be the principal victims.
The company and regimental committees of the Machine Gun Regiment held further meetings on July 3: the atmosphere was that of a village assembly on the eve of a peasant rebellion. The main speakers were anarchists, the most prominent among them I. S. Bleikhman, “his shirt open on his breast and curly hair flying on all sides,”139 who called on the troops to take to the streets, weapons in hand, and stage an armed uprising. The anarchists did not spell out the objective of such action: that “the street itself will show.”140 The Bolshevik agitators who followed the anarchists did not take issue with them; they only urged that before acting the regiment seek instructions from the Bolshevik Military Organization.
But the troops, determined to avoid front-line duty and whipped into frenzy by the anarchists, would not wait: by a unanimous vote they decided to take to the streets, fully armed. A Provisional Revolutionary Committee was elected to organize the demonstration, under the chairmanship of a Bolshevik, Lieutenant A. Ia. Semashko. This happened between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m.
