The forces of revolution that caused the June crisis continued to operate with growing intensity.
Not one of the aims of the revolution had yet been achieved. Food difficulties increased. Economic disruption grew, spreading from region to region and from district to district. Factory after factory came to a standstill—mostly at the instance of the employers. The paralysis of the productive organism crept over the whole country, spreading along the transport arteries.
One hundred and eight factories employing 8,701 workers were closed down in May, 125 factories employing 38,455 workers in June, and 206 factories employing 47,754 workers in July. The output of metal declined by 40 per cent and of textiles by 20 per cent.
Famine loomed.
It was clear that the bourgeoisie had assumed the offensive. The class purpose of this offensive was blurted out with cynical frankness by Ryabushinsky, a big industrialist, at a congress of merchants and industrialists. He gleefully announced that the time was at hand when
“the gaunt hand of famine and nation-wide poverty will seize the friends of the people—the members of all these committees and Soviets—by the throat.”(1)
All through May, and especially in June, strikes were continually breaking out all over the country, the workers demanding an eight-hour day and an improvement in their material conditions.
The Donbas was seething, the conflicts between the workers and employers never ceasing for a moment. A wave of strikes swept over the Urals. Over 20,000 workers of the Sormovo Works, in the Nizhni Novgorod region, went on strike. Prolonged industrial conflicts became a normal occurrence in the Moscow district.
The agrarian revolution was rapidly gaining ground in the country districts. By July forty-three provinces were affected by the peasant movement. Peasants were rising against the landlords despite the Socialist-Revolutionaries entrenched in the peasant Soviets.
The movement of the workers and peasants was bound to affect the army, in which there were special causes for acute discontent among the soldiers. There were persistent rumours that the death penalty was to be restored at the front and that refractionary regiments were to be disbanded. A state of nervousness and alarm prevailed and tended more and more to find expression in a blunt refusal to fight.
The struggle was particularly acute in Petrograd. The June demonstration had shown how great was the latent strength of the proletariat and the Bolshevik Party. After the June events, every day brought news of fresh demonstrations for one cause or another. What alarmed the bourgeoisie and the compromisers most was that these demonstrations invariably assumed a political, and very often a Bolshevik, hue. On June 2 the workers of the Skorokhod factory demanded the transfer of power to the Soviets; on June 8 the workers of the Obukhov factory adopted a similar resolution: on June 10 the workers of the Old Parviainen factory insisted on the transfer of power to the Soviets. On June 13, nineteen factories and three army units in Petrograd were on the side of the Bolsheviks. “We have overthrown the old government, we will bring down Kerensky as well!” the workers and soldiers declared. The movement for the transfer of power to the Soviets grew with extreme rapidity. Only a spark was required to start an explosion among the incensed masses and to launch them against the capitalist government.
The bourgeoisie realised whither the mood of the workers and soldiers in the capital was tending. The situation was aggravated by the ominous news from the front.
The official reports spoke with growing alarm of tens of thousands of deserters from the front. The headquarter staffs of the armies complained that the soldiers’ committees were arbitrarily removing officers. But what the commissars and generals referred to in their telegrams most of all was the universal fraternization that was going on. Control of the army was slipping from the hands of the commanders.
The offensive begun so ineffectually in June had collapsed. A catastrophe might occur at any minute. Urgent measures had to be taken before the news of the defeat at the front added fuel to the flames. Another reason why urgent measures had to be adopted was that the elections to the Constituent Assembly were approaching. Try as it would to postpone the elections, the government was compelled by the pressure of the masses to appoint the convocation of the Constituent Assembly for September 30. The collapse of the offensive and the alarming news from the countryside left not the slightest doubt that the peasant delegates in the Constituent Assembly would adopt a position far to the Left of their official leaders, the Socialist-Revolutionaries.
On July 2, seizing on a chance pretext, the bourgeoisie withdrew its representatives from the government.
The Cadet Ministers—Shingaryov, Minister of Finance, Manuylov, Minister of Education, and Prince Shakhovskoi, Minister of Poor Relief—announced their disagreement with the policy of Kerensky and Tereshchenko on the Ukrainian question, and resigned from the government. Nekrasov, Minister of Ways of communication, at first tendered his resignation, but later thought better of it and sent a letter to the Cadet Central Committee resigning from the party. The bourgeoisie calculated that the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who were well aware of the State of alarm and were informed of the military disaster, would fear to take power into their own hands. The Cadets knew that, scared at their threat to resign from the government, the compromisers would convulsively cling to the bourgeois Ministers and consent to any concession. It was in the interest of the Cadets to provoke a government crisis, wring full power from the scared petty-bourgeois, and then launch a determined attack on Bolshevism. On June 3, at a conference of members of the State Duma, Milyukov had declared amidst applause:
“Russian society must unite in the struggle against this menace of Bolshevism. . . . If, after long procrastination, the Provisional Government realises that the government has other means besides persuasion—the means it has already begun to use—if it adopts this path, the conquests of the Russian revolution will be consolidated. And we must call upon each other and upon the Provisional Government to follow this path.”(2)
And then the whole game would be played in accordance with the old, familiar rules: the proletariat would be provoked into premature action and then ruthlessly crushed by armed force. The Cadets had the support of the bourgeois and the Black Hundred parties. At a private conference of members of the State Duma held on June 16 in connection with the elections to the city district Dumas, Purishkevich declared:
“If you reflect on the figures, on the results of these elections, you will realise that a brilliant victory has been won by the noble party of ‘National Freedom’ [as the Cadets called their party—Ed.], because this party, the extreme Right party in Russia obtained the votes of all those standing more to the right.”(3)
In face of the menace of revolution, all the bourgeois parties rallied around the Cadets.
The Cadets, however, had miscalculated. Their manœuvre created a crisis not only in the government but also in the country.
The first news of the manœuvres of the Cadets provoked an outburst of indignation among the workers. At a joint meeting of the company and regimental committees of the 1st Machine-Gun Regiment held on the morning of July 3, voices were raised demanding that the question of armed action should be discussed. The proposal was taken up by those present, who started a meeting on the spot.
The representatives of the rank and file demanded immediate armed action for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. The soldiers spoke indignantly of Kerensky’s attempts to smash the revolution under cover of cries about fighting the war to a victorious finish. There were cries of “Out into the streets!” The excited machine-gunners rushed out of the barracks where the meeting was held, crying, “Down with the War!” and “All Power to the Soviets!”
Piling machine-guns into automobile trucks which were hung with placards bearing the inscriptions, “Let the bourgeoisie Perish by Our Machine-Guns!” and “Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!” the regiment moved towards the Taurida Palace, despite the appeals of the Bolshevik Party to refrain from action.
The machine-gunners elected delegates and dispatched them post-haste to other regiments, to the big factories and to Kronstadt. Everywhere the machine-gunners’ delegates found the atmosphere heated, and the masses ready to fight.
“About 2 p.m. on July 3,” a worker of the New Parviainen factory relates, “several comrades arrived from the 1st Machine-Gun Regiment and requested us to give them an automobile truck for their machine-guns and to support their action against the Provisional Government. . . . A general meeting of the workers was summoned. The meeting was a stormy one. The comrades from the Machine-Gun Regiment argued eagerly and convincingly that the overthrow of the Provisional Government and of Kerensky was timely and essential. The workers were in an extremely revolutionary mood. . . . I went home to get my gun. When I returned trucks were leaving the factory yard carrying machine-gunners and a number of our workers.”(4)
A similar frame of mind was encountered by the delegates to the other factories. Thus machine-gunners arrived at the Putilov works at about 2 p.m. and called upon the workers to come out against the government which was threatening to dispatch the revolutionary garrison to the front. “Down with such Ministers!” was heard from all parts of the huge crowd. In response to the request to support the action of the machine-gunners, the workers cried: “Let’s go, let’s go!”(5) Late that night about 30,000 Putilov workers, with their wives and children, marched to the Palace, calling out other factories and regiments on the way.
In Kronstadt the delegates from the 1st Machine-Gun Regiment called a meeting on the Yakornaya Square. Their appeal met with a warm response. The sailors decided to support the action of the garrison and workers of Petrograd. Raskolnikov, Vice-Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet, managed in the meantime to get into touch with the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party by direct wire and to report on the state of affairs in Kronstadt.
“The question is not whether to act or not to act,” he said. “It is a question of a different order: will the action take place under our leadership, or will it take place without the participation of our Party—spontaneously, and in an unorganised way? In either case, action is absolutely inevitable, and nothing can avert it.”(6)
The Executive Committee of the Kronstadt Soviet resolved to join in the action of the Petrograd garrison and appointed the assembly of the armed units for dispatch to Petrograd for 6 a.m. on July 4.
[1] “The Commercial and Industrial Congress,” Russkiye Vedomosti, No. 177, August 4, 1917.
[2] “Conference of Members of the State Duma,” Rech, No. 129, June 4, 1917.
[3] The Bourgeoisie and the Landlords in 1917. Private Conferences of Members of the State Duma, Moscow, 1932, p. 127.
[4] Romanov, “The Parviainen Factory,” Leningrad Workers in the Fight for the Power of the Soviets, Leningrad, 1924, p. 54.
[5] “The Putilov Works,” Leningrad Workers in the Fight for the Power of the Soviets, Leningrad, 1924, p. 47.
[6] F. F. Raskolnikov, Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917, Moscow, 1925, p. 116.
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