2-8 July 1917

The government, under siege and virtually without armed defenders, sat as if paralyzed. It was its good fortune that the Minister of Justice took matters into his own hands and released to the press a small part of the evidence in his possession on Bolshevik dealings with the Germans. The information, which quickly reached the garrison troops, produced on them an electrifying effect. In the late afternoon, army units reached Taurida Palace ready to make short shrift of the Bolsheviks and their followers. The mutineers, along with sympathetic workers, ran for cover. By nightfall, the putsch was over.
(Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution, London 1995)

2 July

Report in The Sunday Times
According to a cable from Petrograd, the Russian offensive is having a favourable effect on the general political situation. The leaders of the social revolutionaries and the Minimalists – who represent the bulk of the Russian Socialists – advocate the necessity of supporting the offensive and suppressing anarchy. The hopes of many Russian Socialists, who expected the German Socialists to accept the Russian peace terms, have been disappointed in consequence of which they, too, have changed their attitude to the offensive, says the Central News. On the other hand, the Bolsheviki, who have been connected with the Anarchists, have recently lost ground owing to the compromising relations of the latter with spies and criminals.
(Report in The Sunday Times)

3 July

Report in The Times
Owing to the general satisfaction now prevailing here the efforts of extremist agitators to unite the population against the Government and against the continuance of the war seem likely to result in total failure.
('Extremists at a Discount', The Times, from our own correspondent, Odessa)

4 July

Memoir by the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov
I went out into the street around 11 o’clock. At the first glance it was obvious that the disorders had begun again. Clusters of people were collecting everywhere and arguing violently. Half the shops were shut. The trams had not been running since 8 o’clock that morning.
(N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: a Personal Record, Oxford 1955)

Diary entry of Joshua Butler Wright, Counselor of the American Embassy, Petrograd
Today seemed like a repetition of revolutionary days. The ‘Bolsheviks’, or extreme and anarchistic side, are in open revolt and up to late in the afternoon were in almost complete control of the city. Kronstadt sent its quota of sailors, too, which made matters very ugly and at 3.00 PM, as dangerous a mob as I ever hope to see – composed of half-drunken sailors, mutinous soldiers and armed civilians – paraded through our street, threatening people at the windows, and drinking openly from bottles.
(Witness to Revolution: The Russian Revolution Diary and Letters of J. Butler Wright, London 2002)

Diary entry of Louis de Robien, attaché at the French Embassy
Liteiny Street was a heartrending sight: dead horses, their skins taut and shining from the shower that had just fallen, lay in the wet roadway between the pools of water, some of which were tinged with red … A lot of inquisitive people had already gathered to rob the horses of their harness, but we did not see any more armed men. Neither did we see any dead or wounded: we are told that there are a great number of them, which seems probable considering the number of horses killed.
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917-1918, London 1969)

Letter from Aleksei Peshkov [Maxim Gorky] to his wife E.P. Peshkova from Petrograd
Matters are becoming more and more muddled, and it’s becoming more and more obvious that a civil conflict is inevitable here. To judge by the mood, the fighting promises to be brutal. There are meetings on the streets at night and a wild fury has flared up. Counter-revolutionary forces are actively organising themselves, while the revolutionaries just spout rhetoric. In general, things aren’t too cheerful … That fool Burtsev has announced in the newspapers that he will soon identify a provocateur and spy whose name will ‘stun the whole world’. The public has already started to speculate and has guessed that the person in question is M. Gorky. You think I’m joking? Not in the least. I’m already getting letters with salutations such as ‘to the traitor Judas, chief German spy and provocateur’ … Oh, how hard it is to live in Russia! How foolish we all are, how fantastically foolish!
(Maksim Gorky: Selected Letters, Oxford 1997)

Memoir of Princess Paley
The Bolshevist proceedings made us tremble for the life of the imprisoned Sovereigns. Everything was disorganised – the army had gone, honour had gone. The Revolutionaries had realised that if the army had remained intact, the Revolution sooner or later would come to an end. To save the Revolution they sacrificed the army. What remorse, what terrible feelings of guilt men’s consciences have to bear! But the Russian Revolutionaries have no conscience!
(Princess Paley,  Memories of Russia, 1916-1919 , London 1924)

5 July

Diary entry of Joshua Butler Wright, Counselor of the American Embassy, Petrograd
No definite news as to casualties of last night. One hundred and eighty ‘Bolsheviks’ rumoured killed … Public sentiment is suddenly turning against these extremists.
(Witness to Revolution: The Russian Revolution Diary and Letters of J. Butler Wright, London 2002)

Diary entry of Louis de Robien, attaché at the French Embassy
The streets are deserted, and the town is a dead place. It is raining. 
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917-1918, London 1969)

6 July

Memoir of Sir George Buchanan, British Ambassador to Russia
The Government had suppressed the Bolshevik rising and seemed at last determined to act with firmness … Kerensky had returned from the front on the evening of July 19 [6], and had at once demanded, as a condition of his retaining office, that the Government should have complete executive control over the army without any interference on the part of soldiers’ committees, that an end should be put to all Bolshevik agitation, and that Lenin and his associates should be arrested. The public and the majority of the troops were on the side of the Government, as their indignation had been aroused by the publication of documents proving that the Bolshevik leaders were in German pay.
(Sir George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia, London 1923)

Diary of Nicholas II
Luckily, the overwhelming majority of the troops in Petrograd remained faithful to their duty, and order has again been re-established on the streets. The weather was wonderful. Went for a good walk with Tatiana and Valia. In the afternoon we worked successfully in the woods – we cut down and sawed up four pine trees. In the evening I started Tartarin de Tarascon.
(Sergei Mironenko,  A Lifelong Passion, London 1996)

Memoir of Count Benckendorff
Prince Lvov, having resigned, for several days we were without Government, and Kerensky had taken refuge with his family in the Grand Palais at Tsarskoe, giving dinners at the expense of the Court, driving about Pavlovsk in the Emperor’s carriage.
(Sergei Mironenko,  A Lifelong Passion, London 1996)

7 July

Memoir of Manchester Guardian correspondent M. Philips Price
As usually happens, when the political atmosphere is charged, a spark from any quarter sets the magazine alight. There was in Petrograd at this moment a number of forty-year-old soldiers, who had been released for field work in the northern provinces. They had been ordered to return to take part in the offensive. Imagine the effect that this order of the Coalition Government had on these men. After three years of suffering and misery in fighting for hated Tsarism, they had been told that peace was at hand. A few days in their home, working at the harvest, in their domestic haunts with their families, had but whetted their appetite for peace. Now suddenly they were ordered to return without any hope being offered them that the end of the war was within  measurable distance. It is necessary to understand the psychology of these men in order to grasp the true significance of what happened afterwards in Petrograd and in other parts of the country. Out on the streets these forty-year-old soldiers, together with the machine gun division, went, spurred on by a blind feeling that they must have it out with their rulers, who had betrayed them.
(M. Philips Price, My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution, London 1921)

Letter to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets from the peasant Ivan Pastukhov, Vologda Province
Citizens of our Great Russia, workers’ and soldiers’ deputies,
We, the peasants of Vologda Province, beg you to help our families in their time of Need since we, their fathers, were drafted into military service and got sick in the service: some have rheumatism, some typhus, any and every kind of sickness; we can’t work at all, the hayfield goes uncultivated, there is no life-sustaining food at all, and all because of the war. Comrades, we beg of you, end this bloody drama as soon as possible. It isn’t a war – it’s the extermination of the people.
(Mark D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917, New Haven and London 2001)

Kerensky was furious that the government had not been able to take control of the situation during his absence at the front. He was determined that its replacement, formed on 7 July, under his premiership and supplanting a demoralised Prince Lvov, would be allowed 'dictatorial powers in order to bring the army back to discipline'. ... Retaining his role as Minister of War, Kerensky appointed as commander-in-chief of the army General Kornilov, whose immediate response was to call for the restoration of courts martial and capital punishment for desertion at the front.
(Helen Rappaport, Caught in the Revolution, London 2017)

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8 July 2017

I’ve probably been studying Russian history since about 14 (further confirmation, in my children’s eyes, of a truly ‘sad’ childhood), but I had failed to clock that the October revolution could so easily have been the July revolution. China Miéville paints a vivid picture in his book October of the events in early July, as reflected in this week’s extracts. There seem to be so many disparate elements struggling for control: the First Machine Gunners regiment, different factions within the Bolsheviks, the Kronstadt sailors, the increasingly precarious Coalition Government, still being propped up by the Soviet in the Tauride Palace as it pursued its own line.  Everyone jostling to control events that seemed to change direction by the minute.

At 7.45pm on 3 July a truck ‘bristling with weapons’ drove up to the Baltic Station in Petrograd to intercept and arrest Kerensky – but missed him by minutes. Lenin was still in Finland but returned early the following morning. His address to the demonstrators was ‘uncharacteristically brimstone free’: he felt it was too soon for the decisive moment. In the afternoon of 4 July, the mood turned increasingly violent. As the demonstrators converged on the Tauride Palace and one of the Soviet leaders, Chernov, came out to address them, a worker shook his fist in his face and bellowed, ‘Take power, you son of a bitch, when it’s given to you!’ According to Miéville the heat was taken out of the revolutionary fervour by a rumour initiated by the government that they had evidence of Lenin’s links with Germany – that the Bolshevik leader was essentially a German spy. The rumours were never corroborated, and eventually suppressed, but it’s interesting how political upheaval breeds such accusations, and how ‘the enemy within’, whether from Germany then or Russia now, remains a powerful image.