The July Days in Petrograd

On the evening of 16 July 1917 (3 July in the Julian calendar), soldiers of the 1st Machine Gun Regiment came out armed onto the streets of Petrograd, followed by other units of the garrison and thousands of workers. The next day they were joined by sailors from Kronstadt. For two days crowds many thousands strong roamed the city under the slogan “All power to the soviets!”, surrounded the seat of the soviets in the Tauride Palace and fired at random. The rising, known as the July Days or the July crisis, had neither a clear aim nor decisive leadership. By 18 July it was all over. The government announced that the Bolsheviks were acting on German orders, and Vladimir Lenin had to go underground.

Background

Since the April crisis tension in the capital had not eased. Workers suffered from shortages of food and fuel, and the coalition government of Prince Georgy Lvov, which had included moderate socialists since May, could meet none of the great expectations: neither peace nor land for the peasants. The Bolsheviks, the only large socialist party to stay outside the government, were winning more and more supporters in the factories and barracks. On 1 July (18 June Old Style) a great demonstration called by the congress of soviets, meant as an expression of support for the government, marched through Petrograd under the Bolshevik slogans “Down with the ten capitalist ministers!” and “All power to the soviets!”. On the same day the Kerensky offensive began at the front. A day later the authorities used force to remove anarchists from the villa of the former minister Durnovo, which they had occupied. One of the anarchists was killed, and their agitators set off for the factories and barracks.

The most agitated unit was the 1st Machine Gun Regiment, the largest in the garrison. It numbered more than 11,000 men and was quartered in the working-class Vyborg Side. When, in connection with the offensive, it was ordered to send a large part of its men and machine guns to the front, the regimental committee replied that it would not move “until the war takes on a revolutionary character”. The soldiers feared that the government wanted in this way to rid the capital of its most revolutionary units. Anarchists agitated among them, as did activists of the Bolshevik Military Organisation, which was far more eager for action than the party leadership. The spark was a government crisis. On 15 July (2 July Old Style) four ministers from the Kadet party left the cabinet, among them Andrei Shingarev and Alexander Manuilov. They were protesting against the agreement that Kerensky, Mikhail Tereshchenko and Irakli Tsereteli had concluded in Kiev with the Ukrainian Central Rada, recognising its General Secretariat as an organ of government in Ukraine. The break-up of the coalition gave a new argument to those who wanted all power handed to the soviets.

16 July

On the morning of 16 July, at a meeting of the machine gun regiment, anarchists called for an immediate rising. The soldiers decided to go out onto the streets armed and elected a provisional revolutionary committee. Its emissaries went to other regiments, to the factories and to Kronstadt. The Bolshevik leadership was against the action: that very day Joseph Stalin, on behalf of the Central Committee, assured the leaders of the soviets that the party would not organise any demonstration. Lenin was not in the city at all. For several days he had been resting in the countryside in Finland. Popular Bolshevik speakers who tried to turn the soldiers back to their barracks were jeered.

At about 7 p.m. the regiment marched out of its barracks. Other units of the garrison joined it, and workers came out of the factories, among them thousands from the Putilov Works. The columns headed for the Kschessinska Mansion (PL), the Bolshevik headquarters, and from there to the Tauride Palace, where the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the soviets was in session, dominated by the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries. The demonstrators demanded that the soviets take power. Soldiers commandeered cars and fired into the air. In the evening shots were fired near Gostiny Dvor and there were the first casualties. The executive committee of the soviets called the participants in the armed action traitors to the revolution. The Bolsheviks, unable to stop the movement, decided late in the evening to put themselves at its head. The Central Committee called for a “peaceful, organised demonstration” the following day. An appeal for calm prepared earlier was pulled from the already typeset Pravda, and in the morning the paper came out with a blank space. Someone was sent to Finland to fetch Lenin.

17 July

On 17 July (4 July Old Style) the movement reached its peak. In the morning sailors from Kronstadt arrived in the capital on tugs and steamers. How many there were is not known. Estimates range from several thousand to 20,000, the highest figure being given by the Bolshevik Anatoly Lunacharsky. They were led by the local Bolshevik leaders, the naval midshipman Fyodor Raskolnikov and the medical student Semyon Roshal (PL). First they marched to the Kschessinska Mansion. Lenin, who had returned to Petrograd that morning, addressed them from the balcony. He spoke briefly and with restraint: he expressed his conviction that the slogan “All power to the soviets” would win in the end, and called for self-control and vigilance. It was his last public speech before the October Revolution.

Then the columns moved across the city to the Tauride Palace. On Nevsky Prospect, on Sadovaya Street, by Liteyny Prospect and elsewhere shooting broke out. It is not known who started it. According to the historian Alexander Rabinowitch, everyone was to blame: belligerent demonstrators, provocateurs, right-wing gangs and often simple panic and confusion. Sailors, convinced that they were being shot at from windows, broke into houses, and suspects they caught were lynched in the street. Shops and flats were looted. The government and the soviets were almost defenceless. The Preobrazhensky, Semyonovsky and Izmailovsky Guards regiments declared their “neutrality”, and the ministers conferred in Lvov’s unguarded flat. According to the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov, any group of ten men could have arrested the government at that moment.

In the afternoon tens of thousands of people stood in front of the Tauride Palace. The sailors demanded that the justice minister Pavel Pereverzev, who had ordered the anarchists removed from the Durnovo villa, be handed over to them. When the agriculture minister and Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov came out to the crowd, the sailors seized him and dragged him into a car. According to eyewitness accounts, a worker shook his fist at him and shouted: “Take power when it’s given to you!” Chernov was freed by Leon Trotsky, very popular among the sailors, who called the Kronstadt men “the pride and glory of the revolution” and asked which of them was for violence. No one raised a hand. Inside the palace a delegation of workers from 54 factories demanded that the leaders of the soviets take power. They, however, did not want power and played for time, waiting for loyal troops. They resolved only that in two weeks a plenum of the executive committees of the soviets would meet to decide the question of the government, and that until then the present cabinet would keep power.

The commander of the Petrograd Military District, General Pyotr Polovtsov, sent Cossacks with horse artillery guns to the palace. By Liteyny Prospect they came under fire, answered with their guns and lost several killed. The shots frightened the crowd. According to contemporary estimates, about 400 people were killed or wounded in the two days, many by stray bullets. Late in the evening the Izmailovsky Regiment arrived at the Tauride Palace, its band playing the “Marseillaise”, to defend the soviets. The leaders of the soviets breathed a sigh of relief.

The accusation against Lenin

The scales were tipped by documents that were supposed to prove that Lenin was a German agent. Counter-intelligence had been collecting material on the subject since the spring, but the investigation was not complete. On 17 July, when the authorities’ position seemed hopeless, Pereverzev agreed that two journalists, the former Bolshevik Grigory Alexinsky and the Socialist Revolutionary Vasily Pankratov, should publish a statement based on this material. The charges rested mainly on the testimony of Ensign Yermolenko. This former prisoner of war claimed that the Germans had sent him across the front on a sabotage mission and that at German headquarters he had heard that Lenin was their agent. The statement also spoke of money flowing through Stockholm from Alexander Parvus to the Bolsheviks via Jakub Hanecki and Mieczysław Kozłowski. Kerensky, too, pressed from the front for publication.

The effect was immediate. Delegates of the “neutral” Preobrazhensky Regiment, when shown the material, agreed to act against the demonstrators. The leaders of the soviets asked the newspapers to hold off publication until the matter was cleared up, and the ministers Nikolai Nekrasov and Tereshchenko were indignant that incomplete material had been disclosed. On 18 July, however, the small newspaper Zhivoye Slovo printed an article headed “Lenin, Hanecki and Co. – spies”, and the next day the rest of the press took up the story. Pereverzev soon lost his post. Yermolenko’s evidence was dubious, and even then few well-informed people took it seriously. Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev firmly denied it. German files published after the Second World War showed, however, that Berlin had indeed financed the Bolsheviks. Historians have not settled the dispute: most believe that Lenin took German money but was nobody’s agent.

The end of the rising

On the morning of 18 July (5 July Old Style) Pravda called off the demonstration. Most of the sailors returned to Kronstadt during the night. Several thousand stayed with Raskolnikov and Roshal in the Kschessinska Mansion and the neighbouring Peter and Paul Fortress, which the demonstrators had occupied in the preceding days. That day a detachment of officer cadets and soldiers burst into the Pravda offices, wrecked them and arrested some of the staff. Lenin had left only a few minutes earlier. Troops loyal to the government cleared the streets of the remaining demonstrators. On the morning of 19 July troops occupied the Kschessinska Mansion and the fortress without a fight, and the last sailors surrendered their weapons and sailed back to Kronstadt. On the same day units summoned from the front began arriving in the capital, and Kerensky returned from the front. The government issued a warrant for the arrest of Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev.

Lenin decided that in prison he could not count on a fair trial and might even be killed without one. After several days in hiding in the city he took refuge with Zinoviev at the home of a friendly worker in Razliv near Petrograd, then in a hut in a meadow, and in August he slipped across to Finland. Kamenev went to prison. Trotsky, who demanded to be treated in the same way as Lenin, was arrested at the beginning of August. The mutinous regiments were disbanded and their soldiers sent to the front.

Significance

Lenin called the July Days “something considerably more than a demonstration and less than a revolution”. It is still disputed whether the Bolsheviks were trying to seize power at the time. According to Richard Pipes it was a failed attempt at a coup d’état. Most historians, such as Rabinowitch and William Chamberlin, rather believe that the movement came from embittered soldiers and workers, and that the Bolshevik leadership was drawn into it and hesitated to the end. In Petrograd itself nothing stood in the way of an overturn for two days. The provinces and the front, however, would not have supported it, and the moderate socialists in the soviets preferred to save the government rather than reach for power.

In the short run the government was the victor. The Bolsheviks were denounced as German spies, their press was shut down, and their leaders went to prison or into hiding. Yet the government gained little. In those same days a German counter-offensive began near Złoczów that turned the Kerensky offensive into a rout, and on 20 July Prince Lvov resigned. Lenin drew the lesson from July that power could no longer be taken peacefully through soviets dominated by moderate socialists, and that an armed rising had to be prepared. Less than four months later the Bolsheviks carried one out successfully.