Paul D'Amato looks at the
period of repression that followed the July Days--and the lessons that the
Bolshevik Party drew from the experience.
Series: The Russian
Revolution
In 2007, Socialist Worker
marked the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 with a yearlong
series outlining its course and consequences.
BY LATE June 1917, many
workers in Russia were fed up with the moderate leaders in the soviet who
refused to take power from the Provisional Government, which had re-launched a
disastrous military offensive, was refusing to act on the land question, and
was doing nothing to solve an acute hunger crisis.
Leon Trotsky notes in his History
of the Russian Revolution that even workers who were members of the Bolshevik
Party were losing patience with the party, wondering when it was going to act
decisively to turn the situation--and therefore were more and more susceptible
to anarchist agitation for immediate action to overthrow the Provisional
Government.
Lenin and the other leaders of
the Bolsheviks responded by urging calm and insisting that the time wasn't
right. "We understand your bitterness," Lenin wrote in Pravda on June
21, "but we say to them: Comrades, an immediate attack would be
inexpedient."
Lenin argued that the failure
of the military offensive must first be felt among the masses before more
decisive action could be taken.
Playing the part of the
"fire hose" was not something that worker militants in the party were
used to, and they found it distasteful. Pressure built for an armed
demonstration at the beginning of July.
The party's Central Committee
first insisted that there be no demonstration, then that it be unarmed--but it
couldn't control developments. In the end, party leaders decided to place
themselves at the head of the demonstration and steer it as much as possible
away from armed confrontation.
Yet those who had pushed most
for the armed demonstration--both anarchists and militants from the Bolshevik
Military Organization--really had no concrete plan as to what this
demonstration was to achieve.
The anarchist Bleichman argued
that all that was necessary was for the masses to come out into the streets
armed, and the Provisional Government would fall, just as the Tsar had fallen
in February. Many saw the action as merely a threatening protest--a shake of
the fist at soviet leaders, meant to pressure the Executive Committee of the
soviet into action.
The Cadet leader Miliukov
reported seeing a worker at the Tauride Palace shaking his fist in the face of
Chernov, a Socialist Revolutionary (SR) leader in the soviet and minister in
Kerensky's government, and saying, "Take the power, you sonofabitch, when
they give it to you."
But many of these same
participants had some vague hope that protests might go even further. Trotsky
had to come out and rescue Chernov from a lynching he was about to receive at
the hands of a group of sailors.
The still-moderate leaders of
the soviet, who were committed to collaborating with the capitalists,
considered these demonstrations demanding soviet power--i.e., that they should
take power into their hands--a dire threat that must be stopped.
The moderates denounced the
Bolsheviks as conspirators against the revolution. Kamenev, a moderate
Bolshevik, defended the party in the soviets, saying, "We did not summon
the manifestation. The popular masses themselves came into the street...But
once the masses have come out, our place is among them."
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AS THE demonstrations began,
tens of thousands of armed demonstrators marched to the Tauride Palace, the
location of the soviet, and masses of soldiers and workers also marched to the
Ksheshinskaya Mansion, where the Bolsheviks were headquartered, demanding
speeches. Lenin disappointed the protesters by urging patience and restraint.
Provocateurs deliberately shot
at Cossacks and regular troops who had been called from the front to put down
the demonstration, causing shootouts. After a series of fruitless armed
clashes, which included machine-gun and sniper attacks on protesters from the
windows of Petrograd's bourgeois districts, the Bolsheviks issued an appeal on
July 5 to end the demonstration. Sensing that the protest had exhausted itself,
the participants disbanded.
Trotsky brilliantly summed up
the "paradox" of the July days: "The July demonstrators wanted
to turn over the power to the soviets, but for this, the soviets had to agree
to take it," which they did not.
On the contrary, July showed
that the moderates were more willing to ally with the bourgeoisie to crush
revolutionary initiative than to accept the power that initiative was pushing
them to seize.
Trotsky remarks in the History
of the Russian Revolution that July was a "semi-revolution":
A prototype of the July Days
is to be found in all the old revolutions--with various, but generally speaking
unfavorable, and frequently catastrophic, results. This stage is involved in
the inner mechanics of a bourgeois revolution, inasmuch as that class which
sacrifices most for the success of the revolution and hopes the most from it,
receives the least of all.
The natural law of the process
is perfectly clear. The possessing class which is brought to power by the
revolution is inclined to think that with this the revolution has accomplished
its mission, and is therefore most of all concerned to demonstrate its
reliability to the forces of reaction.
This "revolutionary"
bourgeoisie provokes the indignation of the popular masses by those same
measures with which it strives to win the good will of the classes it has
overthrown. The disappointment of the masses follows very quickly; it follows
even before their vanguard has cooled off after the revolutionary struggle.
The people imagine that with a
new blow they can carry through, or correct, that which they did not accomplish
decisively enough before. Hence, the impulse to a new revolution, a revolution
without preparation, without program, without estimation of the reserves,
without calculation of consequences.
On the other hand, those
bourgeois layers which have arrived at the power are in a way only waiting for
a stormy outbreak from below, in order to make the attempt decisively to settle
accounts with the people.
Such is the social and
psychological basis of that supplementary semi-revolution, which has more than
once in history become the starting point of a victorious counterrevolution.
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FOR THE first few weeks after
the July demonstrations, it seemed that the reaction might be victorious. The
aftermath produced a wave of demoralization among workers and soldiers.
There was a brief orgy of
attacks, both physical and political, against the Bolshevik Party, but clearly
intended as part of a more general reaction against the entire left. Hundreds
were arrested, including Kamenev, the Kronstadt Bolshevik leader Raskolnikov
and other leading Bolsheviks.
Fearing for his life, Lenin
went into hiding, along with Zinoviev. Trotsky was also arrested.
A young Bolshevik activist
handing out leaflets was struck by a saber and killed after being arrested. The
party was driven from its headquarters in Ksheshinskaya, and its press was shut
down. Several local party offices were raided and destroyed.
The Soviet Executive Committee
issued a proclamation on July 8 demanding that the government "crush all
anarchical outbursts." Street assemblies were banned, and capital
punishment was restored in the military in the war zone. The extreme right
began acting more openly and confidently. Most significantly, all citizens were
ordered to turn in their weapons.
Using false evidence, Lenin
was accused of being a German agent. This slander campaign had its effect, in
particular, among some of the least conscious workers and soldiers. A handful
of Bolshevik workers were turned out of factories, and the party's recruitment
dried up. For a period, the military barracks excluded all Bolsheviks.
But in the end, the reaction
was relatively short-lived, and the movement bounced back in a matter of a
month--stronger, deeper and broader. Suspicious of the government still and
alarmed by the specter of counterrevolution, Russian workers refused to give up
their arms.
The greater the threat of
reaction, the more the Bolsheviks were welcomed as the guardian of the
revolution's left flank. While the party's recruitment briefly stopped, it lost
very few members, and its organization survived the period intact.
The local district
soviets--which were more in touch with the rank-and-file mood--showed little
interest in attacking Bolsheviks. What most interested them was preventing the
government from disarming the workers, stopping left-wing soldiers from being
sent to the front, resisting the reinstitution of the death penalty at the
front, and challenging the growth of the extreme right.
All these concerns led
straight back to the revival of the Bolsheviks' standing and the lowering of
the standing of the moderate soviet leaders, who were even more strongly allied
with the Provisional Government now than before the July Days.
By the beginning of August,
the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were reporting mass defections
from their party ranks into the Bolshevik Party, and at the beginning of
August, the workers' section of the soviet overwhelmingly passed a revolution
protesting the arrest and persecution of Bolsheviks. Also, Bolshevik influence
was once again gaining among the Petrograd military garrison.
Lenin himself exaggerated the
depth of the reaction, arguing that the soviets had exhausted themselves as
revolutionary organs of power, and that power could no longer be seized
relatively peacefully, as he had previously thought. He proposed that the party
now abandon its slogan "All power to the soviets," arguing that the
party would have to summon the coming insurrection through the party and the
factory councils.
Some Bolshevik activists more
in touch with developments in Petrograd disagreed. At the Sixth Party Congress,
held on July 26, Iurenev, an associate of Trotsky (who was still in prison),
argued that the "All power to the soviets" slogan wasn't necessarily
inappropriate even if an insurrection was necessary to achieve it. He argued
that acting outside and against the soviets would create a split between
revolutionary workers and poor peasants, who gave their allegiance to the
soviet.
Volodarsky, the party's most
popular orator, argued:
Do we need to maintain the
slogan "All power to the soviets" in the same form as before July
3-5? Certainly not! But you can't throw out the baby with the bathwater. We
must simply modify our slogan supported by the poorer peasantry and
revolutionary democracy organized in the soviets of workers', soldiers' and
peasants' deputies.
The Baku Bolshevik
Dzhaparidze, who had been elected as a candidate member of the Central
Committee, argued that the party should not equate the local and district
soviets with the soviet Executive Committee. He argued, correctly as it later
turned out, that the party must not turn its back on the soviets, but rather
continue to rally the masses around soviet power and win a Bolshevik majority
in them.
Yet at the same time, Lenin
was correct to begin pushing for a realization in the party that power could
only be seized by insurrectionary means.
Though the Sixth Congress
officially abandoned the slogan "All power to the soviets" through
the month of August (ironically at a time when the Bolsheviks' standing in
various soviets was growing), it was resurrected after the Kornilov coup
attempt at the end of the month.
What was left of Lenin's
argument was the importance of preparing the party and the working class for an
insurrection against the Provisional Government--once it was clear that the
party had a majority in Petrograd, Moscow and elsewhere among workers, soldiers
and sailors.
This article first appeared in
the August 3, 2007, edition of Socialist Worker.
