This development had dangerous implications for the Bolsheviks, the more so in that the armed forces on which they had previously relied were all but gone as spring approached. The soldiers who did not return home formed marauding bands that terrorized the population and sometimes assaulted soviet officials.
The growing mood of disenchantment and the feeling that they could not obtain redress from existing institutions, firmly in Bolshevik hands, prompted the Petrograd workers to create new institutions, independent of the Bolsheviks and the bodies (soviets, trade unions, Factory Committees) which they controlled. On January 5/18, 1918—the day the Constituent Assembly opened—representatives or “plenipotentiaries” of Petrograd factories met to discuss the current situation. Some speakers referred to a “break” in worker attitudes.140 In February, these plenipotentiaries began to hold regular meetings. Incomplete evidence indicates one such meeting in March, four in April, three in May, and three in June. The March meeting of delegates representing fifty-six factories, for which records exist,141 heard strong anti-Bolshevik language. It protested that the government, while claiming to rule on behalf of workers and peasants, exercised autocratic authority and refused to hold new elections to the soviets. It called for a rejection of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the dissolution of the Sovnarkom, and the immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly.
On March 31 the Bolsheviks had the Cheka search the headquarters of the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries and impound the literature found there. Otherwise they did not interfere as yet, probably from fear of provoking worker unrest.
Aware that the urban workers were turning against them, the Bolsheviks delayed holding soviet elections. When some independent soviets did so anyway, producing non-Bolshevik majorities, they disbanded them by force. The inability to use the soviets compounded the workers’ frustration. In early May, many concluded that they had to take matters into their own hands.
On May 8, massive worker assemblies were held at the Putilov and Obukhov plants to discuss the two most burning issues: food and politics. At Putilov, over 10,000 workers heard denunciations of the government. Bolshevik speakers were given a hostile reception and their resolutions went down in defeat. The meeting demanded the “immediate unification of all socialist and democratic forces,” the lifting of restrictions on free trade in bread, fresh elections to the Constituent Assembly, and reelections to the Petrograd Soviet by secret ballot.142 Obukhov workers passed, with a virtually unanimous vote, a similar resolution.143
The next day an event occurred at Kolpino, an industrial town south of Petrograd, which added fuel to growing worker discontent. Kolpino had been especially badly served by government supply agencies: and with only 300 of the city’s work force of 10,000 employed, few had money to buy food on the black market. A further delay in food deliveries provoked the women to call a city-wide protest. The Bolshevik commissar lost his head and ordered troops to fire on the demonstrators. In the ensuing panic the impression spread that there were numerous dead, although, as transpired later, there was only one fatality and six injured.144 By standards of the time, nothing extraordinary: but Petrograd workers needed little cause to give vent to pent-up anger.
Having heard from emissaries sent by Kolpino what had happened there, the major Petrograd factories suspended work. The Obukhov workers passed a resolution condemning the government and demanding an end to the “rule of commissars” (
The Bolsheviks still prudently kept in the background. But to prevent these inflammatory resolutions from spreading, they shut down, permanently or temporarily, a number of opposition newspapers, four of them in Moscow. The Kadet
