The Russian Revolution полностью

The unexpected turn of events threw the Bolsheviks into complete disarray. Lenin fled Taurida as soon as he had learned from Karinskii of Pereverzev’s action, which must have been just before the soldiers arrived on the scene. After his departure, the Bolsheviks held a consultation, which ended with the decision to abort the putsch.¹⁸⁰ At noon they had been distributing ministerial portfolios among themselves; six hours later they were hunted quarry. Lenin thought all was lost. “Now they are going to shoot us,” he told Trotsky, “it is the most advantageous time for them.”¹⁸¹ He spent the following night at Kshesinskaia’s under the protection of Raskolnikov’s sailors. In the morning of July 5, as street vendors were hawking copies of Zhivoe slovo, he and Sverdlov slipped out and hid in a friend’s apartment. For the next five days he led an underground existence, changing quarters as often as twice daily. The other Bolshevik leaders, with the exception of Zinoviev, stayed in the open, risking arrest and in some cases demanding to be arrested.

On July 6, the government ordered the detention of Lenin and his accomplices, eleven in all, charging them with “high treason and organizing an armed uprising.”* Sumenson and Kozlovskii were promptly apprehended. Soldiers came to Steklov’s residence during the night of July 6–7; when they threatened to smash his rooms and beat him up, Steklov telephoned for help. The Ispolkom rushed two armored cars to protect him; Kerensky also intervened on his behalf.¹⁸² The same night, soldiers appeared at the apartment of Anna Elizarova, Lenin’s sister. As they searched the room, Krupskaia screamed at them: “Gendarmes! Just like under the old regime!”¹⁸³ The hunt for Bolshevik leaders went on for several days. On July 9, troops inspecting private automobiles caught Kamenev: in this case a lynching was prevented by Polovtsev, the commander of the Petrograd Military District, who not only freed Kamenev but provided a car to take him home.¹⁸⁴ In all, some 800 participants in the insurrection were taken into custody.* As far as can be determined, not one Bolshevik was physically harmed. Considerable damage, however, was done to Bolshevik properties. The editorial office and printing plant of Pravda were destroyed on July 5. After the sailors guarding Kshesinskaia’s had been disarmed without offering resistance, the Bolshevik headquarters were occupied as well. The Peter and Paul Fortress surrendered.

55. The Palace Square in Petrograd occupied by loyal troops after the suppression of the Bolshevik putsch: July 1917.

On July 6, Petrograd was taken over by garrison troops and soldiers freshly arrived from the front.

The Bolshevik Central Committee issued on July 6 a flat denial of the accusations of treason leveled at Lenin and demanded an investigation.¹⁸⁵ The Ispolkom obliged by appointing a five-man jury. It so happened that all five were Jews: since this might have laid the committee open to suspicion by the “counterrevolutionaries” that it was loaded in Lenin’s favor, it was dissolved and none appointed to replace it.

The Soviet, in fact, never looked into the accusations against Lenin, which did not deter it, however, from deciding firmly in favor of the accused. Although Lenin’s putsch was directed as much against the Soviet as against the government, with which, since May, it had been closely linked, the Ispolkom would not face reality. In the words of a Kadet newspaper, although the socialist intellectuals called the Bolsheviks “traitors,” “at the same time, as if nothing had happened, they remained for them comrades. They continued to work with them. They flattered and reasoned with them.”¹⁸⁶ The Mensheviks and SRs now, as before and later, viewed the Bolsheviks as errant friends and their opponents as counterrevolutionaries. They feared that the charges leveled at the Bolsheviks were merely a pretext for an assault on the Soviet and the entire socialist movement. The Menshevik Novaia zhizn’ cited Den’ as follows:

Today it is the Bolshevik Committee that is being convicted; tomorrow they will cast suspicions on the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, and then they will declare a Holy War against the Revolution.¹⁸⁷

The paper rejected out of hand the government’s charges against Lenin, accusing the “bourgeois press” of “deplorable slander” and “wild howls.” It urged the condemnation of those—presumably the Provisional Government—who engaged in “consciously slanderous defamation of prominent leaders of the working class.”¹⁸⁸ Among the socialists who sprang to Lenin’s defense, calling the charges against him “slander,” was Martov.* These claims had nothing to do with the facts of the case: the Ispolkom neither asked the government for its evidence nor undertook its own investigation.