Before answering Lenin’s question, Vatsetis requested time to survey the situation.123 The city had fallen into the hands of the rebels, except for the Kremlin, which stood out like a fortress under siege. When he arrived at the headquarters of the Latvian Division, his chief of staff told Vatsetis that the “entire Moscow garrison” had turned against the Bolsheviks. The so-called People’s Army (Narodnaia Armiia), the largest contingent of the Moscow garrison, which was undergoing training to fight the Germans alongside French and British troops, had decided to remain neutral. Another regiment had declared itself in favor of the Left SRs. The Latvians were all that was left: one battalion of the 1st Regiment, one battalion of the 2nd, and the 9th Regiment. There was also the 3rd Latvian Regiment, but its loyalty was in doubt. Vatsetis could also count on a Latvian artillery battery and a few smaller units, including a company of pro-Communist Hungarian POWs, commanded by Béla Kun.
With this information in hand, Vatsetis decided to delay the counterattack until the early hours of the morning, when the Latvian units would have returned from Khodynka. He dispatched two companies of the 9th Latvian Regiment to retake the Central Post and Telegraph Office, but they either proved inept or else defected, for the Left SRs managed to disarm them.
At 2 a.m. Vatsetis returned to the Kremlin:
Comrade Lenin entered by the same door and approached me with the same quick steps. I took several paces toward him and reported: “No later than twelve noon on July 7, we shall triumph all along the line.” Lenin took my right hand into both of his and, pressing it very hard, said, “Thank you, comrade. You have made me very happy.”124
When he launched his counterattack at 5 a.m. in humid and foggy weather, Vatsetis had under his command 3,300 men, of whom fewer than 500 were Russians. The Left SRs fought back ferociously, and it took the Latvians nearly seven hours to reduce the rebel centers and release, unharmed, Dzerzhinskii, Latsis, and the remaining hostages. Vatsetis received from Trotsky a bonus of 10,000 rubles for a job well done.125
On July 7 and 8 the Bolsheviks arrested and questioned the rebels, including Spiridonova and other Left SR delegates to the Congress of Soviets. Riezler demanded that the government execute all those responsible for the murder of his ambassador, including the Central Committee of the Left SR Party. The government appointed two commissions, one to investigate the Left SR uprising, the other to look into the disloyal behavior of the garrison. Six hundred and fifty Left SRs were taken into custody in Moscow, Petrograd, and the provincial cities. A few days later it was announced that 200 of them had been shot.126 Ioffe told the Germans in Berlin that among those executed was Spiridonova. This greatly pleased them, and the German press played up the executions. The information was false: but when Chicherin issued a denial, the German Foreign Office used its influence to keep it out of the newspapers.127
In reality, the Bolsheviks treated the Left SRs with most unusual forbearance. Instead of carrying out a mass execution of those who had fought them arms in hand, as they would do a few days later in Iaroslavl, they briefly interrogated the prisoners and then had most of them released. They executed twelve sailors from Popov’s detachments as well as Aleksandrovich, whom they had caught at a railroad station trying to escape. Spiridonova and one of her associates were taken to the Kremlin and placed in a makeshift prison under Latvian guard. Two days later she was moved to a two-room apartment in the Kremlin, where she lived in relative comfort until her trial in November 1918. The Bolsheviks did not outlaw the Left SR Party and allowed it to bring out its newspaper.
