The embassy staff feared that the assault on its ambassador signaled a general attack. The military personnel assumed responsibility for security. Attempts to communicate with the Soviet authorities proved of no avail because the telephone lines had been cut. Bothmer, the military attaché, rushed to the Metropole Hotel, the seat of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. There he told Karakhan, Chicherin’s deputy, what had happened. Karakhan contacted the Kremlin. Lenin received the news around 3:30 p.m. and immediately notified Dzerzhinskii and Sverdlov.107
Later that afternoon, a procession of Bolshevik notables visited the German Embassy. The first to arrive was Radek, with a sidearm which Bothmer describes as the size of a small siege gun. He was followed by Chicherin, Karakhan, and Dzerzhinskii. A squad of Latvian Rifles accompanied the Bolshevik notables. Lenin remained in the Kremlin, but Riezler, who assumed charge of the embassy, insisted that he appear in person with an explanation and apology. It was a most unusual demand for a foreign diplomat to make of a head of state, but such was the influence of the Germans at the time that Lenin had to obey. He came to the embassy, accompanied by Sverdlov, around 5 p.m. According to German witnesses, he displayed a purely technical interest in the tragedy, asking to be shown the place where the murder had been committed, the exact arrangement of the furniture, and the damage caused by the bomb. He declined to view the body of the deceased. He offered an apology which, in the words of one German, was as “cold as a dog’s snout” and promised that the guilty would be punished.108 Bothmer thought that the Russians looked very frightened.
When they fled, the assassins left their papers behind, including the document which had gained them admission to the embassy. From this material and information supplied by Riezler, Dzerzhinskii learned that the gunmen had presented themselves as representatives of the Cheka. Thoroughly alarmed, he set off for the Pokrovskii Barracks, which housed the Cheka Combat Detachment on Bol’shoi Trekhsviatitel’skii Pereulok 1. The barracks were under Popov’s control. Dzerzhinskii demanded that Bliumkin and Andreev be turned over to him, under the threat of having the entire Central Committee of the Left SR Party shot. Instead of complying, Popov’s sailors arrested Dzerzhinskii. He was to serve as a hostage to guarantee the safety of Spiridonova, who had gone to the Congress of Soviets to announce that Russia had been “liberated from Mirbach.”109
These events took place in a torrential rain, accompanied by thunder, which soon enveloped Moscow in a thick fog.
On his return to the Kremlin, Lenin was horrified to learn that Dzerzhinskii was a prisoner of the Cheka: according to Bonch-Bruevich, when he heard this news “Lenin did not turn pale—he turned white.”110 Suspecting that the Cheka had betrayed him, Lenin, through Trotsky, ordered it dissolved. M. Ia. Latsis was to organize a fresh security police.111 Latsis raced to the Cheka headquarters at Bolshaia Lubianka to find that this building, too, was under Popov’s control. The Left SR sailors who escorted him to Popov’s headquarters wanted to shoot Latsis on the spot: he was saved by the intercession of the Left SR Aleksandrovich.112 It was a comradely gesture that Latsis would not reciprocate a few days later when the roles were reversed and Aleksandrovich fell into the hands of the Cheka.
That evening, the sailors and soldiers affiliated with the Left SRs went into the streets to take hostages: they stopped automobiles from which they removed twenty-seven Bolshevik functionaries.
At the disposal of the Left SRs were 2,000 armed sailors and cavalry, eight artillery guns, sixty-four machine guns, and four to six armored cars.113 It was a formidable force, given that the bulk of Moscow’s Latvian contingent was relaxing in the suburbs and that soldiers of the Russian garrisons either sided with the rebels or professed neutrality. Lenin now found himself in the same humiliating predicament as Kerensky the previous October, a head of state without an armed force to defend his government. At this point, had the Left SRs so desired, there was nothing to prevent them from seizing the Kremlin and arresting the entire Bolshevik leadership. They did not even have to use force, for the members of their Central Committee carried passes giving them access to the Kremlin, including the offices and private apartments of Lenin.114
But the Left SRs had no such intentions and it was their aversion to power that saved the Bolsheviks. Their aim was to provoke the Germans and arouse the Russian “masses.” As one of the Left SR leaders told the captive Dzerzhinskii:
