Assassination of Mirbach

On 6 July 1918, at about three in the afternoon, shots rang out in the building of the German legation in Moscow on Denezhny Lane. Two officers of the Cheka, Yakov Blumkin and Nikolai Andreyev, killed the envoy of the Reich, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach-Harff, who had taken up his post with Lenin’s government only two and a half months earlier. Both assassins belonged to the Party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. They wanted to break the peace with Germany and force the Bolsheviks to resume the war. The assassination started the Left SR uprising in Moscow, which was crushed within a day.

A sentence on the “breathing space”

Until the spring of 1918 the Left SRs had been the Bolsheviks’ only partner in government. When in March the Congress of Soviets ratified the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, their people’s commissars resigned, but the party still sat in the soviets and in the Cheka. They regarded the peace, which Lenin called a “breathing space”, as a betrayal of the revolution, especially since the Germans had occupied Ukraine, dispersed the Central Rada and returned the land to the landowners. For them Mirbach was the embodiment of that peace. The envoy himself, for that matter, had no illusions about his hosts. On 25 June he wrote to the Secretary of State, Richard von Kühlmann, that after two months of observation he could not give Bolshevism a favourable diagnosis: “we are standing at the bedside of a gravely ill man”.

On 24 June the Central Committee of the Left SRs resolved to put an end to the “so-called breathing space” as soon as possible and to organise a series of assassinations of the most prominent representatives of German imperialism. The party hoped to change government policy at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, convened in Moscow. The congress met on 4 July in the Bolshoi Theatre. Mirbach sat in the diplomatic box, and the SR delegates, turned towards him, shouted “Down with Mirbach!” and drowned out Lenin’s speech. One of the party’s leaders, Boris Kamkov, said that the dictatorship of the proletariat had turned into a “dictatorship of Mirbach”. The Bolshevik majority, however, rejected all the SR motions, and at that point the party turned to assassination.

The attack in the legation

Blumkin headed the Cheka department dealing with counter-intelligence against the Germans, and Andreyev was his assistant. According to Blumkin’s memoirs, the order to kill the envoy was passed to him on 4 July by the party’s leader, Maria Spiridonova. The pretext for the meeting was the case of an Austrian named Robert Mirbach, arrested by the Cheka, whom Blumkin presented as a distant relative of the envoy. The two men drove to the legation in a Cheka car, with pistols and bombs in their briefcases. They showed a Commission mandate bearing the forged signature of its chairman, Felix Dzerzhinsky. According to the findings of the investigation, the seal on it had been affixed by Dzerzhinsky’s deputy, the Left SR Vyacheslav Alexandrovich (PL).

Mirbach received them in the drawing room together with the legation counsellor Kurt Riezler and an interpreter, Lieutenant Müller. The legation had already received warnings of a planned attack and had passed them on to the Soviet authorities, so the envoy may have thought that the visitors had come about exactly that matter. After a short conversation Blumkin drew a revolver and fired at all three in turn, but missed. According to witnesses, the first bomb thrown did not explode. When Mirbach tried to flee the room, Andreyev hit him with a pistol shot, and a second bomb blew out the drawing-room windows. The assassins jumped out of the window, Blumkin injuring his leg, and drove off in the waiting car. The envoy died some fifteen minutes later. He was 47. The assassins left behind a briefcase with documents issued in their names.

Moscow in the hands of Popov’s detachment

The assassins took refuge in the headquarters of a Cheka detachment commanded by the Left SR Dmitry Popov, in Trekhsvyatitelsky Lane. The detachment numbered several hundred men, mostly sailors and Finns, and had several guns and armoured cars. The party’s Central Committee also gathered there. Dzerzhinsky came in person to demand that Blumkin be handed over and threatened to have the committee members shot, but was himself arrested and held as a hostage. The SRs took several dozen hostages in all, among them the Cheka’s deputy chairman Martin Latsis and the chairman of the Moscow soviet, Pyotr Smidovich. They also seized the telegraph office and sent out proclamations announcing that “the hangman Mirbach” had been killed and calling the Bolsheviks agents of German imperialism.

Lenin learned of the assassination by telephone and at first thought the whole Cheka had mutinied. At about five in the afternoon he went with the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Yakov Sverdlov, to the legation to offer condolences. The Germans remembered that his apology was icily cold. Meanwhile, on Bolshevik orders, Chekists and soldiers surrounded the Bolshoi Theatre. The Bolshevik delegates were let out, while the Left SR faction, some four hundred and fifty people, together with Spiridonova, were detained in the building.

The hardest thing was to find loyal troops. Most regiments of the Moscow garrison declared themselves neutral, and the Bolsheviks could count only on the Latvian Riflemen. Some of them were celebrating the Latvian midsummer festival outside the city that night, which by the Old Style calendar fell precisely on 6–7 July. Command was entrusted to Colonel Jukums Vācietis, whom Lenin did not fully trust either. The attack planned for the night did not take place, because the units had not managed to assemble in time.

Suppression

On the morning of 7 July the Latvians placed guns a few hundred metres from the headquarters of Popov’s detachment and, after a failed attempt at negotiation, opened fire. The first shells hit the building where the Central Committee was meeting, and the SR leaders left it immediately. By early afternoon it was all over. Dzerzhinsky was freed, several hundred of Popov’s men were taken prisoner, and the leaders fled the city. The SRs had not tried to arrest the government or seize the Kremlin, although according to some historians they had the means to do so. The American historian Alexander Rabinowitch believes that their aim was to change government policy, not to seize power. From the outset the Soviet authorities presented these events as an uprising against Soviet power.

Repression came at once. Alexandrovich and twelve Chekists from Popov’s detachment were shot without trial within a day. Dzerzhinsky stepped down from the leadership of the Cheka for several weeks. In Petrograd the SR units were disarmed, and armed resistance was offered only by the garrison of the Corps of Pages building. On 9 July the Congress of Soviets, now meeting without the Left SRs, condemned their uprising, and in the following weeks they were removed from the soviets throughout the country. The last coalition in which the Bolsheviks shared power with another party fell apart. Blumkin and Andreyev escaped. At the end of the year a court sentenced them in absentia to three years in prison, and Spiridonova received one year. Blumkin soon returned to service in the Cheka.

Other July uprisings

During the night of 5/6 July the anti-Bolshevik Yaroslavl uprising broke out on the Volga. It had been prepared by Boris Savinkov’s People’s Union for the Defence of the Motherland and Freedom, and was led by Colonel Alexander Perkhurov (PL). It had no organisational link with the SR uprising in Moscow. The Bolsheviks put it down by 21 July, shelling the city with artillery. A few days after Mirbach’s assassination, on 10 July, the commander of the Eastern Front against the Czechoslovaks, the Left SR Mikhail Muravyov, rose against the government in Simbirsk. He was killed the following day.

Crisis with Berlin

The Left SRs had hoped that Germany would answer the killing of its envoy with a declaration of war. That did not happen. Kaiser Wilhelm II was opposed to breaking off relations, and the German army was just preparing another offensive in France and had no strength for a new campaign in the east. Berlin did, however, demand guarantees of safety for its diplomats. On 14 July Riezler, who headed the legation after Mirbach’s death, presented a demand that a battalion of German soldiers be brought into Moscow to guard the mission. Lenin refused, regarding it as the beginning of an occupation of Russia, and the dispute ended in a compromise. As the new envoy in Moscow the Germans appointed the former Vice-Chancellor Karl Helfferich, who arrived in the city at the end of July. The Brest peace survived the assassination, but relations between Berlin and Moscow were never again what they had been before 6 July.