VIII. July 1906: The Revolution That Might Have Been

In early July, V.D. Kuzmin-Karavaev, formerly professor at the Military Juridicial Academy and now a moderate deputy in the Duma, observed that the “situation in the country” bore all the marks of a gathering storm—not the quiet, but the thunderheads themselves. There was no insurrection, but everywhere revolver shots and the explosion of bombs. Gentry estates were not being consumed by fire, but here and there they were burning, and peasants were carting away gentry grain. There was no general strike, but strikes took place in every city. Troops were not openly mutinous, but soldiers everywhere were in ferment (an inaccurate but not unreasonable characterization given the behavior of mutineers). “Everyone’s nerves are drawn to the last degree of tension. Everyone is on edge, waiting, trying to guess what will come tomorrow, in a month, in a year.”¹ The atmosphere was so highly charged, he concluded, that even a liberal ministry would have great difficulty riding out the anarchy.

Kuzmin-Karavaev worried about the dangers facing a liberal government because by June the rumors of impending dissolution of the Duma that had been circulating since May had been joined by rumors that the regime would invite the Kadets to take over the government. The competing rumors accurately reflected the irresolution of the regime, which was paralyzed by its antipathy to the Duma and its fear that dissolution would unleash the storm. The cabinet resolved on June 1 and again (with the Tsar in attendance) on June 7-8 that the Duma must be dissolved, but neither Prime Minister Goremykin nor the Tsar did anything to implement these resolutions. Within the cabinet, the liberal Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Izvolskii, without informing his colleagues, contacted Duma liberals and then presented to the Tsar a memorial they had composed urging that only the inclusion of public figures in the cabinet could restore confidence in the government. At the court, unbeknownst to Izvolskii or anyone else in the cabinet, General Trepov (now Palace Commandant) sought out the leaders of the Kadet Party and in the middle of June actually met with Miliukov and expressed his willingness to accept a Kadet cabinet and limited expropriation of gentry land as proposed by the Kadets. Trepov’s motives were clear: he feared for the survival of Tsarism. To his brother’s objections to a compromise with the Duma, Trepov responded: “All is lost, and we must save the Emperor and the dynasty from an inevitable catastrophe.”² The Tsar followed up Trepov’s initiative by authorizing Izvolskii and Minister of Interior Stolypin to sound out the Kadets. Stolypin apparently favored inclusion of a few Kadets in the cabinet only if that would make the inevitable dissolution of the Duma more palatable to at least a part of the public, but the Tsar’s uncles and a few liberal officials were prepared to accept a liberal ministry for its own sake. All of this intriguing behind the scenes galvanized conservatives in and out of the cabinet, and they pressed for speedy dissolution. The cabinet on June 20 issued another declaration on the unacceptability of expropriation. Trepov retreated but did not yield: in a famous interview with Reuters on June 23 he maintained that expropriation was impossible, but asserted that a Kadet ministry offered the best hope of restoring order, though if that failed another course would have to be chosen. The Tsar himself on June 28 deigned to hear out the moderate leader Shipov’s plea for a liberal cabinet.³ While it is difficult to conceive of the Tsar actually appointing Kadets to high office, at the end of June the regime was still unable to decide what to do. And every passing day brought more agrarian disorders, more strikes, and more mutinies.

The crisis generated by the Duma divided revolutionaries no less than the regime. Because they believed the public supported the Duma as an institution, Mensheviks favored revolutionary mass action in the summer. They supported the demand for a ministry responsible to the Duma, urged the Duma to appeal to the public for support, and themselves organized meetings between the SD deputies and the Petersburg workers. As of mid-June, Menshevik leaders held that it was not yet time to force a confrontation with the government because the public was not psychologically prepared for the demise of Tsarism, and the proletariat was as yet inadequately organized. In early July, however, Menshevik strategists urged the Duma to force expropriation by appealing directly to the people, and believed that such an appeal would be the first step on the way to making the Duma a genuine “organ of power.” The latter euphemism was necessary in the legal press, but Mensheviks exploited it for its vagueness; precisely what they envisioned as the end product of revolutionary action was unclear. Alone of the important revolutionary groups, however, Mensheviks in early July contemplated a midsummer assault on the regime. While the Duma could not openly call on the people to take “immediate action,” read a Menshevik editorial of July 5, the Duma must know that if the people waited for events to unfold the Duma would never pass a law and would be dissolved.⁴ Only revolution could save the Duma, and in the Menshevik view only the Duma could provide a rallying point for successful revolution.

Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries denied that the Duma could serve as an “organ of power”—for them, the revolution must not stop short of a constituent assembly—and they were utterly unwilling to link revolutionary action to the Duma. They continued to key their plans, instead, to the peasantry, who would be ready for insurrection only after the harvest. Bolsheviks denounced any proposal for a “responsible ministry”—a Kadet ministry—as betrayal of the revolution. Instead of fostering a revolutionary confrontation between the regime and the Duma as a whole, they hoped to persuade the Trudoviks, and through them the peasants, that their belief in the Duma’s capacity to obtain justice was misplaced and that only insurrection could provide land and liberty. Mensheviks and Bolsheviks carried their dispute into workers meetings, where Bolsheviks played on worker antipathy to polite society and made effective use of the Kadets’ apparent willingness to compromise with the regime. Even Mensheviks felt obliged to denounce the Kadets for avoiding any action that would provide the regime a pretext for dissolving the Duma.⁵ Conflict over how best to turn the Duma to the advantage of revolution thus produced not only disarray among revolutionaries, but confused and contradictory messages to their working class following.

Reining in Revolutionary Soldiers

The mutinies in the army had no impact on revolutionary strategy, though by May they were drawing appreciative comment. As a Bolshevik wrote in early July, “Unfolding your newspaper, you automatically look for reports from the army. This is completely understandable now, given the prospect that the army will play an enormous role in liberating the country.”⁶ A Poltava Menshevik, writing shortly after a mutiny in the Poltava garrison, expressed the common view that the disturbances in the army were not especially threatening “in an active sense” since the regiments that had gone on strike had principally economic demands. Nevertheless, the mutinies did reflect “the spirit of the times” and raised doubts as to whether the army, the pillar of the “bureaucracy,” would take action against the people.⁷ Revolutionaries might have been more enthusiastic if their hopes for the army had not been disappointed in 1905. The SR leader Viktor Chernov wrote in June that “In general, our mutinies, as experience has shown, proceed in an extremely disorderly fashion and the soldiers show no capacity to resist or to take the initiative themselves.” There was always, too, potential for an outburst of random violence, a consequence of the suppression of the soldiers’ individuality. But, Chernov concluded hopefully, the government’s policy of arresting instigators only increased the number of disturbances.⁸ (That, of course, was why officers generally feared to arrest instigators.) All revolutionaries saw the connection between mutinies and the Duma, but that did not influence their views on proper revolutionary strategy.⁹

The military organizations themselves attempted to restrain soldiers and sailors from rising until the time appointed by revolutionary leaders. A resolution adopted in April by the SD (Menshevik) military organization in Sevastopol, where pressure for insurrection came to a head first, set forth the thinking of all the military organizations.

Taking into account:

1) that a military insurrection on any scale at all is unthinkable without a popular insurrection,

2) that premature attempts to begin a military insurrection will lead only to the more or less complete destruction of the forces of revolution,

3) that more or less extensive disorder in any one unit could at present lead to the same result,

—Taking all of this into account, the Sevastopol Committee of the Military Organization of the RSDRP has resolved:

a) immediately to explain to sailors and soldiers that a military insurrection depends on a national insurrection;

b) given disorder in any unit, to make every effort to prevent this disorder from turning into a premature, hence doomed, insurrection;

c) to point out to sailors and soldiers the recklessness of those who are adventuristically attempting to call them to such an insurrection.¹⁰

Similar resolutions were common. In May, the SD (Menshevik) and SR military organizations in Kiev jointly agreed not to respond to repressive actions for at least two months, and in the meantime to prepare for insurrection at harvest time. In early June, the SD (Bolshevik) military organization in Finland called on soldiers not to respond to the provocative actions of their officers, these being designed to deprive soldiers of their leaders, and argued that despite the many midsummer peasant disorders, the most politically conscious peasants understood that the best time for agrarian revolution was autumn. At the same time, the SR Maximalists in Moscow urged soldiers to do nothing, at least until the regime dissolved the Duma or took some other extreme step. In late June, the Petersburg SR military organization persuaded its soldier members to pass a resolution against reacting to arrests and even against presenting demands. In June and early July, SD and SR military organizations in Ekaterinoslav, Kazan, Kronstadt, Nizhnii Novgorod, Penza, Tiflis—almost everywhere, in fact—faced strong pressure for action from their soldier members but urged upon them resolutions calling for delay until the rest of the country was ready.¹¹

The surge of mutinies through May and June would seem to indicate that these resolutions were offered in vain, but that is not an entirely accurate impression. A common pattern seems (the evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive) to have been that soldiers who were not in the military organizations but had some contact with them started mutinies; once begun, military organization soldiers exercised a moderating influence. Where military organization soldiers were involved in presenting petitions of grievances, they attempted to prevent incidents that might lead to all-or-nothing confrontations with the military command (as in Kursk, where SR soldiers managed to prevent other soldiers from storming the camp jail). In Abo (Finland), soldiers in the SD military organization talked their fellows out of a further confrontation after demands had been presented. In Samara, the arrest of some soldiers triggered a mutiny that the SR military organization had been trying to head off, but SR soldiers were able to prevent the mutiny from getting out of control. In Nizhnii Novgorod, the SD military organization in early June dissuaded the 32nd Don cossacks from mutiny when the cossacks were told to hand in their weapons, but arrest of some cossacks did produce mutiny on June 18.¹²

While in many garrisons the military organizations had at best tenuous control over the soldiers’ behavior, in the garrisons that were best organized they were able despite intense pressure to prevent the outbreak of mutinies altogether. In Petersburg, the SR military organization succeeded repeatedly in May and June in preventing units from mutinying. In late May the sappers encamped at Kolpino outside Petersburg were ready to blow up their officers’ club, seize the local arsenal, and march on Petersburg; they could be talked out of this only by a representative of the SR Central Committee, Andrei Argunov. By June, the leading soldiers in the SR Petersburg organization no longer even subscribed to the view that they should wait for civilians to prepare before themselves beginning the uprising.¹³ In Sevastopol, too, despite the increasing displeasure of the soldiers and sailors (and their threats to begin without civilian authorization) the SD and SR military organizations were able to avert a garrison-wide mutiny that threatened to explode at any moment.¹⁴

The situation in Kronstadt in May and June was summed up in a secret police report, which noted that half of the garrison as well as 80 percent of the fleet was untrustworthy.

Meetings are for the most part organized in the barracks, with revolutionary speakers admitted to the meetings almost daily. . . . In the naval barracks, announcements are posted on the day of the meetings. . . . At every meeting, the government’s policy with respect to the Duma is criticized and the need to support the demands of the latter is asserted. . . . According to the politically conscious sailors, the revolutionary mood is at such a pitch that they will not wait for the moment of conflict between Duma and government. . . . The outbursts among sailors on economic grounds that have occurred lately have been restrained by the revolutionaries so as to conserve strength for when it will be needed.¹⁵

In late May, sailors were talking of shelling the Tsar’s residence at Peterhof. In May, too, the sailing of the ships for summer exercises almost triggered a rising because the ships’ guns were activated and the sailors temporarily had access to rifles. In June, a rumor that the artillerists were to be transferred led to a tense two-day discussion by SD and SR military organizations of the pros and cons of an uprising. The SR military organization sent to Petersburg for Jan, the SR national military organizer and very popular in the Kronstadt garrison, who brought along a Trudovik deputy (because of the Trudoviks’ immense moral authority among the sailors) and Argunov of the SR Central Committee. The soldiers and sailors were finally persuaded not to rise—no mean accomplishment given the mood in the garrison.¹⁶

The mutiny of the 6th sapper brigade illustrates the military organizations’ ability to control revolutionary soldiers, and the conditions under which control broke down.¹⁷ In May, the sappers, back from the war and permanently quartered in Moscow, encamped in Kaluga Province. Tension at the camp was high from the start, as soldiers met openly and in large numbers (up to 700 at a time). Sappers connected with the SD military organization in Moscow set up a complete hierarchy of committees from company to brigade level, though they apparently maintained for themselves an inner, “secret organization” (according to the secret police report). The committees discussed how to prepare the sappers for mutiny and the demands that should be presented. In anticipation of a mutiny, the sappers wrote the Moscow SD military organization requesting that it ascertain the number and mood of the troops in Kaluga (“because we will soon have dealings with them”) and to send a civilian organizer on receipt of a coded telegram. The brigade committee then dispatched one soldier to talk things over with the military organization in Moscow, another to look into the situation in nearby cities (the latter reported that soldiers in Kaluga and Tula were “reliable and will not fire at the sappers”). However, the sapper sent to Moscow returned with the directive that “no demands be presented before receipt of a signal from Moscow, since not everything is ready [there].”

The sapper organization attempted to comply, but eventually lost control over the camp. On June 22 a sapper informed his battalion that he had been sentenced to two years in a disciplinary battalion and asked, “Will you let me be sent there or not?” The sapper organization was powerless to check the spontaneous, angry reaction. The sappers demanded the release of their arrested comrade, then presented other demands. For about a week, the soldiers met almost continuously, with intermittent breaks for drill. The sapper organization wished to take the mutiny further, but its messages were not received in Moscow (the police had discovered one letter drop); the organization seems in consequence to have exercised a restraining influence. On June 29, two infantry regiments (one the Astrakhan Grenadiers) arrived from Moscow. On the 30th, thirty-nine sapper leaders were summoned to camp headquarters, which had been secretly surrounded by two companies of Astrakhan infantry. The thirty-nine were arrested; the camp reacted with outrage; a mob formed (and threatened the officers who fell in their path), but without leaders the sappers were uncertain how to proceed. Over the next few days another 100 sappers were arrested. Nevertheless, on July 4 a report on the incident to the Ministry of War noted that the sappers were still “very agitated” and that there was a “persistent rumor that the 9th Ingermanland regiment would come from Kaluga” to help liberate the arrested sappers. Though the mutiny as such was over, the sappers were not cowed.

Despite the rush of mutinies in late May and June, the military organization did use their considerable influence to prevent mutiny, or failing that to keep mutiny within moderate limits. That the number of mutinies did not rise in the second half of June must be attributed in part to the efforts of the military organizations. Not surprisingly, they were uncomfortable with the role they were playing. By June many SD and SR military organizations were laying plans for insurrection even if for the time being they felt constrained not to put them into effect. By the end of June the SR military organization in Kronstadt had decided that when it became impossible to restrain the soldiers and sailors any longer it would lead the uprising. The civilian SR military organizers in Petersburg voted in June to begin a military insurrection but were overruled by the SR Central Committee. In June, too, the Tiflis Menshevik military organization urged soldiers to rise if the Duma should be dispersed, the Bolshevik military organization in Nizhnii Novgorod drew up plans for a summer rising, and the Menshevik military organization in Simbirsk sought agreement from its sister organizations for coordinated mutinies in all the garrisons of the middle Volga.¹⁸

The SR military organizations had the opportunity, at their national conference in late June, to press their party leadership for insurrection as the soldiers were pressing them. The military organizations informed the party leaders present that they could not hold the soldiers in check indefinitely and that in some garrisons the limit had already been reached. A report on tactics delivered by a representative of the Petersburg military organization attributed this to a psychology specific to the armed forces: unlike workers and peasants, once soldiers had been set in motion they had to be allowed to move forward, they could not for long sustain a high level of tension. But, he went on, this was not necessarily a drawback. While soldiers might be subsidiary with respect to the revolution as a whole, they could certainly initiate insurrection. Soldiers themselves did not wish to wait on peasants and workers, while peasants and workers would certainly hasten to the soldiers’ assistance. In the final analysis, it was not up to revolutionaries to dictate the timing of insurrection, which certainly could not be scheduled in advance for the autumn. A member of the SR Central Committee objected that the party was not yet ready for insurrection, workers were not ready, the railway union was not ready, and the Trudoviks—valued allies—were not ready; and he reaffirmed that the next uprising should be timed to coincide with the autumnal peak of peasant unrest. On the other hand, he promised that if the government were to dissolve the Duma, the party would call for insurrection. As events would prove, the SR leadership did not mean by that term what the military organizers had in mind.

The SR military organizations did not explicitly challenge their Central Committee’s right to determine party strategy, but their restiveness came through during the discussion of the proper response to spontaneous mutiny. The principal proponents of military organization independence in this matter, spokesmen for the Sevastopol and Petersburg organizations, admitted that ideally the Central Comittee should orchestrate a nation-wide military insurrection, but argued that if a serious mutiny were in the offing the local military organization must take the initiative and lend mutiny a maximum degree of organization. Since there was general agreement that the military organizations had a moral responsibility to assume leadership of mutinous soldiers, the conference adopted a resolution incorporating that proposition. That gave the military organizations considerable leeway, but at least the resolution paid verbal obeisance to the canon that the military, peasant, and worker revolutions ought preferably to begin together. The delegate from Sevastopol, on the other hand, coolly informed the conference that should the Black Sea Fleet sail (this would involve activating the ships’ guns and so would put immense firepower in the hands of revolutionary sailors), his organization would begin insurrection on its own initiative.¹⁹

So matters stood as the regime prepared at last to dissolve the Duma: the army engulfed by mutiny; revolutionary soldiers and sailors pressing for insurrection; the military organizations gradually yielding to the pressure; the leaders of the revolutionary parties demanding restraint. The upheaval in the army was only a part of the larger crisis that the Duma had touched off: at midsummer, agrarian disorders mounted as rapidly as mutiny, and strikes—though not on the ascendant—were numerous. The revolutionaries’ appeal to soldiers to postpone mutiny derived in large part from their refusal to concede that the conflict between Duma and regime stood at the center of the crisis. It remained to be seen whether the soldiers’ willingness to rebel would survive the regime’s reassertion of its absolute authority, and whether revolutionaries would be able, or at least willing, to make something of the soldiers’ revolution should it continue.

The Duma Dissolved, Revolutionaries Divided

The decisions leading up to the dissolution are shrouded in mystification stemming from the Tsar’s habit of masking indecision with reticence, and intentionally fostered by the ministers most directly involved. Prime Minister Goremykin, Minister of Interior Stolypin, and Minister of War Rediger made an apparently firm decision on July 2 to dissolve the Duma on Sunday, July 9, and thereupon ordered that troops be brought to the capital by the evening of the 8th to ensure public order. Neither Goremykin nor Stolypin would have committed himself without the assent of the Tsar (Rediger was brought in only as a technical consultant, not as policy maker), so we must presume that the Tsar had as of that date made up his mind. Yet there is no evidence about who or what swayed him. The most likely candidate is Stolypin, who, bypassing Goremykin, had been urging firm decisions on the Tsar and presumably reported that negotiations with the Kadets were fruitless, using as a compelling argument for dissolution the Duma’s decision to issue an appeal to the people not to consider the government’s June 20 denunciation of expropriation the last word on the land question. Shortly the Tsar would reward Stolypin for his decisiveness by appointing him Prime Minister. Yet the Tsar and the three ministers who were making arrangements carefully concealed the decision from the rest of the cabinet. The Tsar informed State Controller Schwanebach on July 5, but on July 7 Goremykin announced to the cabinet that because of the Duma’s appeal to the people on the land issue he would recommend to the Tsar immediate dissolution. On the 8th Goremykin presented the cabinet the signed manifesto on dissolution, and news that Stolypin would replace him.²⁰ The sequence of events suggests that Goremykin and Stolypin were unsure even after July 2 that the Tsar would go through with his decision.

Even as the cabinet as a whole remained uninformed, Stolypin’s Ministry of Interior made preparations to deal with the consequences of dissolution. In the week preceding July 9 the secret police offices were polled on how the public would react, and on the likelihood that the revolutionaries would be able to agree on a common response. The secret police unanimously reported that the public (presumably urban) would remain calm and revolutionaries as disunited as ever. The Ministry of Interior was not worried about the peasants, because it did not believe that agrarian disorders could pose any immediate peril to the regime. According to the secret police official Bakai (whose testimony is indirectly supported by Foreign Minister Izvolskii), only the mutinies in the army caused the government concern—and grave concern—but the government was confident nonetheless that mutinies could be suppressed one way or another.²¹ Beginning on July 6, the cabinet still unaware, Guards units moved into the capital from the Krasnoe Selo camp (by the 10th a total of 22,000 troops occupied Petersburg). Secret police officials in the provinces were warned to prepare for disorders on July 9, and orders went out to round up revolutionaries working on the railroads, in guerrilla organizations, and in the army, and to keep an especially close watch on units infected by revolutionary propaganda. In Petersburg, the police on the 7th and 8th arrested most of the SD Petersburg Committee and a part of the SR Central Committee (Chernov and Argunov escaped through a window of the newspaper office where they had been trapped.)²²

The regime’s preparation for the dissolution was thus as complete as possible, but the decision remained in doubt even after the announcement to the cabinet on July 8. When they learned that the Tsar had signed the manifesto, Trepov and his equally conservative and equally fearful cohort, Minister of Court Baron Friederichs, implored the Tsar not to go through with the dissolution. Late at night on July 8 a messenger arrived from the Tsar to tell Goremykin to hold back the manifesto. Goremykin, foreseeing that Nicholas might lose his nerve, had already handed the manifesto to the printers with instructions for immediate publication, and had locked himself in his room with orders that he not be disturbed under any circumstances.²³ As in October 1905, Nicholas’ advisors had made the key decisions for him.

In the event, the dissolution provoked not upheaval but a great silence—whether ominous or stunned was not immediately apparent. Dissolution, because it was carried out on a Sunday when the Duma was not meeting, involved no more than sealing the Duma chambers and posting police and soldiers to turn away any deputies who might appear. The streets of Petersburg were abnormally and eerily quiet, and calm prevailed in Moscow and most other cities as well. Maurice Baring, travelling third class between Petersburg and Moscow on four successive nights to ascertain the public reaction, found his fellow passengers absorbed in talk of politics and popular disorders, but detected no inclination on their part to rebel despite their evident sympathy for the Duma.²⁴ In the countryside, on the other hand, where rebellion was already under way, Bernard Pares found that “for the first time within my knowledge voices were freely raised on the village green in criticism even of the dynasty itself,” and when a village priest read the manifesto on dissolution the peasants refused to hear him out and left the church when he continued to read it over their objections.²⁵ Peasants were indeed angry. Those who believed the Tsar had dispersed the Duma did not therefore abandon their intention of seizing land. Many peasants simply refused to believe that the Tsar had betrayed them, and converted the Duma into a mythical source of authority. Maurice Baring heard peasants in a village outside Moscow assert that “the authorities” had signed the manifesto on dissolution but the Tsar had not. After the manifesto was read to some peasants in Orel Province, they shouted: “There is no such Manifesto and there could not be. . . . We have to do as we see fit, to get what we need and what the Duma demanded.”²⁶

How the peoples of the Russian Empire would react after July 9 depended in part, obviously, on the reaction of the Duma itself. No group in the Duma had made plans for dissolution. The Kadets had discussed the possibility of responding with a manifesto of some sort, but had made no decision; they had also talked about passively resisting expulsion from the Duma chamber, but only as a show of solidarity if the Trudoviks refused to leave (the manner of dissolution ruled out that possibility). Confronted with dissolution, the Kadets decided to do no more than make an angry gesture. On the 9th the Kadet Central Committee and 200-odd deputies (120 of them Kadets) repaired across the Finnish border to Vyborg, and there on the 10th 181 of them signed a Kadet-authored manifesto—inspired by the Kadet desire to keep their response within strictly constitutional limits—calling on the country to demand popular representation and to refuse to pay taxes or submit to military conscription until a new Duma provided legal authority for these functions of government. That feeble appeal satisfied no one but the Kadets, and was in fact too radical for many of them.²⁷

The Trudoviks, especially, had expected dissolution to have far more serious consequences. Their leaders had concluded by late June that dissolution would trigger revolution, and some of the Trudovik deputies touring their constituencies publicly urged peasants to join in insurrection if it came to that. On July 9 and 10, the Trudovik deputies urged the Kadets to defy the government and resume the sessions of the Duma in Petersburg, to join in the establishment of a committee of the Duma to direct popular resistance to the regime, and to join the Trudoviks in an appeal for a political general strike. The Trudoviks themselves took the initiative in issuing, on July 12, an appeal to the army (which the SD deputies endorsed), the gist of which was that soldiers should not obey the orders of an illegal government. By then the Trudoviks were intimately involved in the consultations at which revolutionary parties and organizations sought to settle upon a common strategy. Meanwhile, a number of Trudovik deputies toured the villages to encourage peasants not to pay taxes or report to conscription boards and to seize land, and workers in factory settlements to set up soviets. Peasants responded enthusiastically to these appeals and defended their deputies from arrest.²⁸ Dissolution had turned the Trudoviks, at least temporarily, into a genuinely revolutionary party whose enormous appeal to peasants all over Russia more then compensated for its utter lack of local organizations.

The Trudoviks received as little support from the revolutionary parties as from the Kadets for their view that the Duma dissolved should spearhead revolution. Only the Menshevik leadership believed that dissolution would be understood by all classes as the occasion for overthrowing the regime. The Menshevik-controlled SD Central Committee called upon the Duma to refuse to accept dissolution and to assume the responsibility for convening a constituent assembly, and like the Trudoviks urged a general strike to force the regime to capitulate and reconvene the Duma. When on about July 14 a conference of all the revolutionary organizations turned down the Menshevik proposal, the SD Central Committee instructed SD committees to organize “local mass protest demonstrations” in the hope that these would precipitate a general strike.

Bolsheviks refused to submit to the Central Committee’s instructions. The Duma was not worth defending, they asserted, and insurrection, the inevitable byproduct of a general strike, must be postponed until the expected post-harvest peasant disorders. Bolsheviks on the Central Committee claimed that the government had dissolved the Duma precisely in order to provoke worker insurrection before peasants were ready, and Lenin’s immediate reaction to the dissolution was to dash off a pamphlet explaining why the revolutionary parties should do nothing until the harvest. Bolsheviks urged that preparations be drawn up for action in the fall, but they had been calling for such preparations all along. The only immediate measure they recommended was that workers form soviets to prepare for insurrection; in the meantime, workers should refrain even from going on strike. Congenital antipathy to the Duma and instinctive suspicion of Menshevik recommendations of course played a part in the Bolsheviks’ disinclination to respond to the dissolution, but they also raised serious practical objections to the Menshevik plans. They worried, for instance, that the proletariat simply was not prepared for the insurrection that would grow out of a general strike. And if the government should call the Duma back into session, would revolutionaries have to suspend the strike without forcing the conflict to its logical conclusion, the overthrow of the regime? It was in any case preposterous, they said, to defend the Duma when the Duma had been unwilling to act on its own behalf. Even the left-liberal lawyers’ union asserted that the Duma’s day had passed.²⁹

Bolsheviks and Mensheviks carried their dispute over tactics to the Petersburg workers and into the provinces, and the Menshevik leadership failed signally to win support. Even solidly Menshevik committees such as those in Rostov-on-Don and Irkutsk urged workers not to respond to government provocation. The Bolshevik Central Region Committee and Bolshevik committees in Nizhnii Novgorod and Moscow urged peasants to rise and workers to wait. Some committees were uncertain how to react to the dissolution, and like the Bolshevik committees in Iaroslavl and Ekaterinburg called on workers to prepare for insurrection Without indicating whether or not insurrection was about to commence. Yet if—understandably enough—some SDs lacked a clear view of tactics immediately after July 9, the great majority believed they should hold the workers back. The SD parties among the national minorities evinced no uncertainty at all: they adamantly opposed responding to the dissolution of the Duma with a general strike or insurrection. The Riga Federative Committee (Latvian SD, Bund, RSDRP) warned workers against government provocation, the Latvian and Polish SD Central Committees appealed to workers to do nothing, and the Bund stressed the untimeliness of any action in midsummer.³⁰

SRs, too, argued against precipitate action, but they at least came up with a scheme that gave an appearance of movement. The SR leadership concluded that, even though the harvest was not in, the dissolution of the Duma had provided the spark for a peasant rising. The SRs first tried to persuade the members of the Duma to reconvene in the capital and oblige the regime to disperse them by force, as this would provide more compelling grounds for insurrection. That effort failing, and after consulting with the Trudoviks and the All-Russian Peasant and Railway Unions (both closely affiliated with the SRs), the SR Central Committee decided to implement a plan originally devised to take advantage of the expected fall surge in agrarian disorders and designed to protect workers from the isolation that SRs believed had doomed the insurrections in December. On July 12 the SRs issued an appeal for peasant insurrection, and followed that up on the 13th or 14th with appropriate instructions to local SR committees. Peasants were to replace local officials, seize land and turn it over to revolutionary committees, and, when a base had been established locally, expand their insurgency. SR military organizations were to instruct revolutionary troops to cease obeying their officers immediately (and the SR leadership authorized military organizers to draw up but not implement a plan for insurrection in the Baltic Fleet). Workers were to form soviets wherever possible, but they were not to undertake other action until the peasant movement was well underway (SRs joined Bolsheviks in agitating against an immediate political strike). As a member of the SR Central Committee explained two months later, peasants, no matter how agitated by government treachery, would not rise everywhere at the same time. If the response to the SR appeal demonstrated that peasants were ready for insurrection, and it would be some time before one could be certain, then soldiers would be unleashed, and following that a general strike would commence.³¹ The SR plan, in other words, was to see what peasants would do, in the meantime plan for but not begin military insurrection, and hold the workers back until the last moment. Since this scheme did not commit them to anything definite, all the other revolutionary organizations could—and did—support it.³²

As the Bolsheviks pointed out, every passing day made a general strike in the name of the Duma more absurd, though of course the Bolsheviks bore their share of responsibility for the delay. But the Bolsheviks were not alone; all the revolutionary parties and organizations rejected the Menshevik-Trudovik appeal for a general strike, and all issued appeals of their own to the workers to do nothing. The secret police prognosis that revolutionaries would be unable to agree on a common course of action proved overly pessimistic: while they remained divided on tactics and strategy, they agreed with nearunanimity that for the moment they need do nothing at all. They would have continued to do nothing had soldiers and sailors not forced action upon them.

Soldiers Rise Alone

Soldiers and sailors did not believe that the dissolution of the Duma had put an end to the revolution. In Petersburg itself, a deputation of soldiers sought out deputies to the Duma on July 9 and offered their support if the Duma would defy the government. Two cossack deputations, one of officers, the other of enlisted men, informed cossack deputies that the cossack regiments in the capital were at their disposal. Immediately upon receiving news of dissolution on July 9, eighty sailors on the light cruiser Rus at Libava resolved that they would rise at the first summons. Cossacks in Taganrog refused on July 9 to fire on a workers’ protest demonstration (the streets were not everywhere quiet), and the local paper in Kostroma reported that on the 11th cossacks disobeyed orders to disperse a crowd of young workers singing revolutionary songs.³³ At the camp outside the Brest-Litovsk fortress, artillerists infuriated by the dissolution of the Duma formed a mob after evening roll call on July 9, threw dirt and rocks at their officers, and burned down the officers’ mess. Shortly after July 9 the entire Askhabad garrison held a meeting to discuss the dissolution. When an officer disciplined two men of the 111th Don infantry in camp outside Mariampol on July 15, the soldiers mutinied, presented demands, voiced their anger over the dissolution of the Duma, and swore at the regimental chaplain when he tried to calm them.

Dissolution of the Duma did not discourage mutiny, whether undertaken for political or other reasons. So far as the available evidence reveals, in fact, the proportion of mutinies with manifest political content was no greater in the two weeks following dissolution than before: fourteen of thirty mutinies (47 percent) July 9-23, fifty-four of 121 mutinies (45 percent) April-July 8. Four sapper battalions mutinied in camp at Orany (near Vilna) on July 10 and presented demands without, apparently, expressing any political sentiments, while a company of the 4th Andizhan reserve battalion in Novy Margelan mutinied on July 15 to prevent two soldiers from being sent to a disciplinary battalion. These soldiers disclosed not their political views, but their reading of the political situation: they did not believe that dissolution had foreclosed the opportunity for mutiny. That was an assessment shared by many others. At no time in July did the incidence of mutiny quite reach the June level, but—though weekly numbers are small and subject to random fluctuation—soldiers appear to have been somewhat more prone to mutiny immediately after than immediately before July 9: nine mutinies July 18, fourteen mutinies July 9-16, sixteen mutinies July 17-23. So far as soldiers were concerned, the condition that had permitted mutiny before July 9—disbelief in the regime’s ability to make good its claim to sole authority—continued to hold. As the secret police reported from Tikhoretsk, soldiers guarding the station had decided that they would not act against workers in the event of disorders, because “we don’t know whom we have to serve, the government or the people.”³⁴

Many soldiers professed to know the answer to that question and claimed like the cossacks in Petersburg and sailors in Libava to be awaiting the signal for insurrection. Military organizers reported from Sevastopol and Nizhnii Novgorod that soldiers and sailors were eager to rise, and the prior mutinies and indiscipline in those garrisons lend the reports credence. The military organizations were under instructions to restrain soldiers and most did so, though with some difficulty. In Dvinsk, for instance, soldiers insisted that the SD military organization draw up plans for insurrection, but agreed to wait until either Riga or Petersburg had risen.³⁵ Soldiers did answer the call of the Poltava SR military organization, which decided to convert the soldiers’ cointinuing urge to mutiny into regional military insurrection. On July 14, the training detail of the 34th Sevsk infantry decided to mutiny because two of their number had been arrested for possession of revolutionary literature. The Poltava SR military organization expanded upon that decision by calling on the entire Poltava garrison to rise, and sent word to the SR military organizations in Kharkov and Kremenchug to do likewise (there is no record of SR attempts to incite disturbances in those two garrisons). Because the dissolution of the Duma had angered the Poltava soldiers, they responded eagerly to the SR appeal. On July 15, the entire Sevsk regiment, joined by two batteries of the 9th artillery brigade with eight loaded guns, marched to the jail to free their comrades. However, when officers and cossacks opened fire with a machine gun, the mutineers fled back to their barracks.³⁶

Soldiers did not always wait patiently for civilians to lead the way. The SD soldiers’ organization in the 83rd Samur infantry planned to seize power in Deshlagar (Azerbaijan) after coordinating plans with other regiments in the region. When officers learned of the plot on July 16, the revolutionary soldiers decided to mutiny immediately in order to forestall arrests. On the 17th, all five of the companies of the 83rd Samur then in Deshlagar rose, and soldiers wired the three other regiments of the 21st infantry division that they had taken power. The soldiers then marched through town with their band and held a meeting at which the leader of the soldiers’ organization explained that other regiments would follow their lead and that together they could overthrow the Tsarist regime. The soldiers began enthusiastically to dig trenches on the approaches to town. Most of them were badly frightened, however, when their officers resisted arrest (one took a shot at a soldier) and the arresting party killed the regimental commander, three other officers, and the regimental chaplain (one of whose anti-revolutionary sermons was subsequently published in the military chaplains’ journal). Many of the soldiers thereupon ran off into the hills, and in the evening others arrested the sixty or so who wished to continue the mutiny.³⁷

The insurrections in Poltava and Deshlagar reveal both the willingness of soldiers to rise against the regime and the propensity even of politically motivated mutineers to panic when they felt themselves standing alone and exposed to retribution. As the Sevastopol SD and other military organizations had warned, isolated military insurrections were doomed to defeat, not because the regime had so many reliable units to deploy against mutineers, but because most soldiers were psychologically incapable of sustaining their mutinies in isolation. Soldiers mutinied when they believed their action would be supported by others. What the continuation of the mutinies and the pledges of support for insurrection after July 9 indicate is that for two weeks after the dissolution of the Duma soldiers and sailors continued to believe support would be forthcoming. What the ignominious collapse of insurrection in Poltava and Deshlagar tells us is that soldiers could not make the revolution by themselves.

Revolutionary soldiers and sailors in Kronstadt thought they could. They were as eager for insurrection as any one in the empire—they had been looking forward to it since April—and they were numerous, well-organized, and determined to carry mutiny through even in the face of resistance. Anticipating trouble in Kronstadt, the police on the eve of the dissolution rounded up most of the civilians in the local SD military organization (most of the SRs remained at large), and also pulled in many soldiers and sailors who represented their units in the garrison assembly. Fearing mutiny on the ships that were at sea for summer exercises, the Naval Minister ordered that no ship be allowed to enter Kronstadt without his express authorization. The arrests almost triggered mutiny in the Kronstadt fortress mine company, but the soldiers decided to permit the arrests rather than disrupt plans for mutiny by the entire garrison; deputy representatives, previously selected for just this eventuality, took the place of the arrested men. The soldiers’ and sailors’ organization thus remained strong, and after July 9 waited expectantly for the signal to rise.³⁸

Convinced that the dissolution of the Duma provided both the necessary motivation for soldiers who had thus far refused to commit themselves and the perfect occasion for an insurrection that would spread from Kronstadt to the rest of the empire, the Kronstadt SRs on July 9 began feverishly to make final preparations for seizing control of the base (the SR national military organizer, Jan, sat in on the round-the-clock conference of the planning committee), and on the same day sent a man to Helsingfors to work out a plan for mutiny by the entire Baltic Fleet. The SR military organization in Helsingfors was eager to begin, and even the solidly Bolshevik military organization there gave its assent. The Helsingfors Bolsheviks had begun to draft plans for a mutiny by the fleet even before July 9, and though they were aware of the Bolshevik leadership’s opposition to a midsummer rising linked to the Duma, they took the Menshevik call for a general strike and the Bolshevik summons to “prepare” for the same thing to be sufficient justification for cooperating with the SRs. The three military organizations decided that the rising would begin in Helsingfors as soon as the capital ships returned. Helsingfors would inform Kronstadt (and Revel, summer base for the cruisers) when the battleships were ready to mutiny, Kronstadt would cable Helsingfors when the Kronstadt garrison was ready, then Helsingfors would cable Kronstadt when the ships had risen. The object of insurrection in Kronstadt was to ensure that the mutinous ships would not have to brave the guns of Kronstadt’s ring of island forts, and from Kronstadt the fleet would move on Petersburg and compel the regime to convene a constituent assembly. The Helsingfors SD military organization later claimed that it had agreed to the plan only with the proviso that the sanction of the SD Central Committee be obtained, but it clearly was impatient to begin. The Revel SD military organization, on the other hand, informed of the plan by two SRs from Helsingfors, said that it could do nothing without instructions from the party Central Committee.³⁹

The leaders of the revolutionary parties most certainly did not approve of what their military organizations were doing. Through Jan the SR Central Committee was aware that the SR military organizations in Kronstradt and Helsingfors were planning for an insurrection by the Baltic Fleet, and even authorized planning for military insurrection elsewhere as well. But it did not intend that these plans be executed immediately; the mood of the peasants had first to be ascertained. Through the Petersburg SD military organization, whom the Kronstadt SRs attempted to involve, the Bolshevik leadership, too, learned of the plans for insurrection and took determined steps to thwart them. On July 16, a group of Bolsheviks arrived in Kronstadt to talk sailors and soldiers out of rising. One member of the Bolshevik delegation was inclined to go along with the Kronstadt SRs, but the rest adamantly insisted that while insurrection should be prepared it must not be undertaken. The meeting of unit delegates before which the Bolsheviks and SRs thrashed out the issue—little better than a shouting match, which itself discouraged the soldiers—concluded that the uprising should be postponed. Bolshevik arguments swayed the infantry delegates, or at least gave them an excuse for backing away from a risky venture, and the lack of infantry support was reason enough to delay mutiny because the sailors in port were unarmed.⁴⁰

The revolutionaries’ inability to agree on a response to the dissolution of the Duma thus percolated down to the military organizations and disrupted plans for insurrection. SR and, in Helsingfors, Bolshevik military organizers were under rank and file pressure to authorize mutiny, and they took advantage of ambiguous instructions to forge ahead on their own. The SR military organizations acted as though their Central Committee’s agreement to planning amounted to permission to undertake insurrection, while the Bolshevik military organization in Helsingfors interpreted the conflicting appeals by Menshevik and Bolshevik leaders to suit its own purposes. But the military organizations could not in the end prevail against their party leaderships. At one point the SR Jan appealed to the SD Central Committee to bring the Bolshevik military organization in Petersburg around, but given the relationship between the SD factions, Menshevik intervention would only have made the Bolsheviks more obdurate.⁴¹ When the debilitating divisions within the revolutionary camp were thrust upon them, even the Kronstadt militants began to have second thoughts.

The Baltic insurrection began in Helsingfors, where there were no unseemly disputes among revolutionaries to discourage soldiers and sailors, and where the soldiers’ eagerness to rebel outstripped the military organizations’ ability to restrain them and made a hash of the plan for coordinated mutinies around the Baltic littoral.⁴² The Helsingfors garrison consisted of three geographically distinct parts: infantry in the city itself; naval units based on Skatuden peninsula (in July, principally destroyer crews); and the garrison of Sveaborg fortress, the “Gibraltar of the North,” on a chain of islands guarding the entrance to the harbor. Revolutionary sentiment was strongest among the sailors and the Sveaborg artillerists. The artillerists had mutinied in October and since May had routinely taunted the fortress’s ranking officers during weekly reviews; both SD and SR military organizations had worked hard to keep them from mutinying. The artillerists’ impatience for revolution mounted rapidly after the dissolution of the Duma, in part because Helsingfors was the scene of angry protest rallies addressed by Social Democratic and Trudovik deputies to the Duma and other radicals (the writer Leonid Andreev among them). The military organizations continued to discourage mutiny while they put the final touches on their plan—allotting a role to the large Finnish workers’ Red Guard, for instance. Sveaborg fortress was not itself an important objective; the key to the success of insurrection lay with the big ships, still at sea.

The Helsingfors military organizations lost control over their following because of the soldiers’ propensity to challenge their officers’ authority and the difficulty of maintaining close contact with all of the scattered segments of the garrison. On July 15, artillerists, the fortress mine company, and some other soldiers met on one of the fortress islands and discussed the plan for a fleet insurrection (officers soon heard about the meeting and the plan). This was probably the first time the artillerists learned the details, and presumably one of the purposes of the meeting was to explain the importance of restraint. On July 16, the mine company after evening roll demanded the traditional “spirits money” that had recently been diverted into the mess budget. The fortress commandant came to calm the men, but they refused to disperse, cursed, and insisted that the money be returned. On the morning of the 17th they refused to drill, so infantry were called in to disarm and guard the mine company. However, the infantry were sympathetic and permitted contact between miners and artillerists, who promised their support and decided to begin an uprising at midnight.

The SD and SR military organizations in Helsingfors learned of the artillerists’ decision late in the afternoon, and both attempted to prevent the rising. The SD military organization urged a messenger from the artillerists to persuade the others not to make a final decision until the battleships returned. The leader of the SR military organization, Captain Tsion, himself an artillerist and so able to gain access to the fortress, rushed to Sveaborg and by 9:00 P.M. had persuaded the artillerists to postpone their mutiny for at least five days, by which time, he promised, Kronstadt would be ready and the Baltic Fleet could even expect support from the Black Sea Fleet. The SD military organization informed the SD Petersburg Committee (the effective Bolshevik leadership) that Sveaborg might blow at any moment. The Petersburg Committee hastily dispatched a delegation to head off the mutiny if that were possible without serious losses, or in the worst case to assist in leading the mutiny. The SD and SR military organizations in Helsingfors were impatient to get the rising under way, but there was nothing frivolous about their endeavor.

Though Captain Tsion had extracted a promise that nothing would happen on the 17th, artillerists on one of the outlying islands had not been informed. When about midnight they fired a shot signalling the beginning of the rising, the other artillerists concluded that the plan had been changed again and that the mutiny was on. Some immediately rushed to free miners and artillerists who were under arrest. Officers positioned infantry to block the raid, but the infantry ran away rather than fire. Nevertheless, a stray shot turned some of the infantry against the artillerists, and the artillerists withdrew without freeing the miners rather than shoot it out. Seven of the ten fortress artillery companies quickly took over the three islands with the big guns. The central, or Commandant’s, island remained in the hands of officers, the fortress infantry regiment, and two companies of Finland rifles who arrived before boats from the mainland were subject to fire.

Presented with a mutiny in progress, the military organizations decided immediately to support it in Helsingfors and in the garrisons elsewhere in Finland. On the morning of the 18th, the SD military organization attempted to bring out the sailors in the barracks on Skatuden Peninsula and on the few ships in the harbor. The sailors on shore rose and arrested their officers; sailors on ship had been locked below deck, officers and petty officers fired the ships’ guns at the barracks, and mutineers trapped on the peninsula by cossacks and infantry surrendered. At the same time, the Finnish Red Guard took to the streets, sending some detachments to join the artillerists and sailors, others to block railway bridges, destroy telegraph lines, and otherwise hamper the convergence on Helsingfors of a punitive force. The Red Guard attempted to call a general strike, but the leadership of the Finnish Social Democratic Party opposed it, maintaining that this was a wholly Russian affair that Russians should settle. By the afternoon of the 18th the insurrection was once again confined to the fortress, but the artillerists were not disheartened. They were well led—besides Captain Tsion, two Social Democratic artillery officers had joined them—and had raised a red flag inscribed on one side “Land and Liberty,” on the other “Constituent Assembly.” They began to bombard Commandant’s Island and another held by infantry, and after renewed bombardment in the very early morning of the 19th (at that time of year it is never dark in Helsingfors, and there is full daylight for about twenty-one hours a day) the infantry surrendered. A general whom the artillerists captured wrote the fortress commandant that there was no recourse but capitulation, but the commandant refused to give in.

News of the mutiny at Sveaborg fell upon revolutionaries in Kronstadt without any forewarning; they learned of it from the papers on the 18th. It was all the more unexpected because they had agreed only two days earlier to postpone insurrection. Then in the early afternoon they received from Helsingfors a coded telegram that the fleet had risen and was sailing toward Kronstadt, which was stranger still—the coded telegram that was to have been sent prior to mutiny had not been received. Two interpretations were possible: either the fleet had in fact risen, or whoever sent the telegram had not known that information on the Sveaborg mutiny would appear in the press and, having established no code for a mutiny at Sveaborg alone, had sent the only message available to let Kronstadt know that a mutiny had begun. On the evening of the 18th, SR civilians and sailors met to discuss what to do. The sailors were impatient to begin, but the meeting concluded that not enough were present to make so fateful a decision. A meeting of the entire garrison assembly was set for the morning of the 19th, and an SR hurried off to Petersburg to find Jan and get instructions.⁴³

By the time soldiers and sailors gathered on the 19th, the SR, Bolshevik, and Menshevik leaderships had all decided that the mutiny in Sveaborg must be supported. Chernov and Azef from the SR Central Committee—Azef from the secret police as well—led a party of SRs to Helsingfors to direct the rising there and to place revolutionaries on the capital ships when they arrived. Ilia Fundaminskii, another leading SR, set off to raise Revel, and the SR leadership instructed the Sevastopol SRs to begin military insurrection as well. Jan came with word that a meeting of the SD Central Committee he had attended on the 18th had agreed to insurrection. The SD Central Committee pulled out all the stops: messages went to SDs in Revel, Libava, Ust-Dvinsk (near Riga), and Sevastopol to bring out the soldiers and sailors. The Bolshevik Petersburg Committee and Petersburg military organization sent men to Kronstadt to help organize and lead insurrection, and a Trudovik Duma deputy, Fedot Onipko, also came to take part. The Kronstadt unit representatives and revolutionaries were thus assured that they had the full backing of the revolutionary parties. They were confident that sailors, miners, and artillerists would rise without hesitation, and that part of the infantry would join once the insurrection was under way. The major weakness was that sailors lacked rifles, so the first act—set for midnight—would be to capture the arsenal.⁴⁴

No sooner had all revolutionaries finally agreed to support insurrection than the entire enterprise unravelled. During the afternoon of the 19th, careless handling of munitions at Sveaborg set off an explosion in a powder magazine that killed and injured sixty mutineers. The artillerists might still have been able to take the rest of the fortress by storm and were preparing to do so when the battleship Tsesarevich and the cruiser Bogatyr steamed up and began shelling the islands. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, commander of the Petersburg military district, had feared the ships would mutiny and only the insistence of Quartermaster General Raukh had overcome his considerable reluctance to send them. Their guns manned by officers, cadets, and trusted sailors, the ships pounded the islands, and on the night of the 19th the Sveaborg artillerists decided to surrender the next day, as many as possible escaping in the meantime.⁴⁵ In Kronstadt, the authorities learned the details of the revolutionaries’ plan a few hours before the insurrection began—not through Azef, apparently, but from local sources—and they positioned infantry to block the sailors as soon as they emerged from their barracks. The sailors on shore rose (killing five officers), as did the miners (killing two officers) and sappers. Infantry drove the sailors back into their barracks with scarcely any gunfire, but the miners and sappers captured one of the outer forts. The artillerists did not rise, at least in part because they had thought insurrection postponed and were not fully aware or convinced of the wisdom of the change in plans. The crew of the one ship in port (the battleship Alexander II), also poorly informed, did not rise but refused to go ashore to help suppress the rising. When they learned they stood alone, the miners and sappers surrendered. By the morning of the 20th, execution of mutineers was already under way.⁴⁶ The SD military organization in Revel engineered mutiny on the cruiser Pamiat’ Azova on the night of July 19-20. In taking over the ship, mutineers killed six officers and wounded others, and that frightened most of the crew. During the evening of the 20th the petty officers, fearing for their own lives, recaptured the ship. Ilia Fundaminskii was arrested when he came on board later that night.⁴⁷

There was nothing revolutionaries could have done to salvage the Baltic insurrections, but they did provide a sorry epilogue. In approving the insurrection in Kronstadt, the Menshevik-controlled SD Central Committee had on July 19 attempted to convene a conference of all revolutionary groups to proclaim at last a general strike, and the Bolshevik-dominated SD Petersburg Committee had set about organizing a city-wide strike to support the Sveaborg and Kronstadt insurgents. Failing to gather representatives of the revolutionary parties, the SD Central Committee on its own issued an appeal for a general strike under the slogan, “Struggle for the Duma as an Organ of Power for Convening the Constituent Assembly” (as infelicitous in Russian as in English), and sent out emissaries to the major cities to give local committees similar instructions. Since Bolsheviks had opposed a strike to support the Duma ever since the dissolution, the Bolshevik members of the SD Central Committee issued a sharp protest, and the Bolsheviks’ refusal to agitate for a strike linked in any way with the Duma badly disrupted preparations for a strike in Petersburg. Eventually the Petersburg Committee (or a part of it—the majority felt this amounted to a coup) and the Central Committee did agree to begin a strike on July 21, but the goal of the strike remained unclear.⁴⁸

On the very eve of the strike, the night of July 20-21, the Mensheviks finally organized a conference of the principal revolutionary organizations (the Bolsheviks, not being a separate party, did not participate). At the outset only the Trudoviks and the Mensheviks themselves favored an immediate general strike. The Bund and the PPS agreed to the strike only because it appeared that the Russians were going to go ahead anyway. The SRs continued to oppose a strike, and proposed that the initiative should instead be left to the village, or that the Baltic insurgents be supported by other military insurrections. In the end the SRs gave in, conceding that it would be criminal to call on the army to revolt without providing maximum support. All parties involved in the negotiations had at last agreed to a strike—the soldiers and sailors of Sveaborg and Kronstadt had forced them to it—but most did so only against their better judgment.⁴⁹

A strike called over so much opposition, preceded by almost two weeks of agitation against a strike and several days of wrangling over its purpose, and which began when everyone knew that the Baltic insurrections had already been suppressed, could not help but fail. Workers who had not previously been involved in strikes downed tools in Petersburg, street car drivers went out, and even the cabmen struck. By July 22 roughly 60,000 of Petersburg’s workers, one-quarter of the total, were on strike. But the workers in some of the largest and most politicized plants—the Semiannikov, Obukhov, and Baltic works, the most important shops in the Putilov works—refused to take part. Since workers in the major plants had not gone out, by July 23 striking workers were returning to their jobs. They let it be known that they felt betrayed by the workers whom they had expected to show the way, and that they would not soon again take part in a political strike. Normally activist workers explained that they would strike only for the final showdown with the government, and that a precondition for this was a stronger peasant movement and, especially, participation by the railway union. Railway workers said they could join only during the final, most critical stage of the strike. A complete fiasco in Petersburg, the general strike never got off the ground anywhere else. The Moscow SD committee, after considerable resistance, agreed to call a strike; it got under way on July 24 and miscarried almost immediately. In Sevastopol and Odessa, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks together refused to call a strike, turned down as well their Central Committee’s call for military insurrection, and forced the Sevastopol SRs to cancel a garrison insurrection at the last minute. SR committees in the provinces refused to foment peasant disorders that they believed to be poorly prepared and untimely.⁵⁰ Only in Petersburg had the Baltic insurrections persuaded revolutionaries even temporarily that July was a good month for revolution.

Revolutionary Theory versus the Psychology of Revolution

The attempt to overthrow the Tsarist regime in July 1906 failed so ignominiously that the failure has about it the aura of inevitability. Many of the circumstances contributing to the fiasco could not have been altered. Given that the military organizations had drawn in large numbers of soldiers and sailors, it was inevitable that the authorities would in some garrisons, as in Kronstadt, get wind of plans for insurrection. Revolutionary sentiment in the armed forces was so explosive that some mutinies, as at Sveaborg, naturally broke out ahead of schedule and disrupted the revolutionaries’ plans. Given the ideological differences among them, and the gravity of a decision to call for a general strike or insurrection, the revolutionary parties were bound to differ over tactics and strategy. In warning against precipitate action, SRs and Bolsheviks displayed an admirable capacity for caution and responsibility: revolution was a dangerous business and lives ought not to be needlessly squandered. Yet the Bolsheviks’ and SRs’ persistent campaign to delay the assault on the regime derived from a wrongheaded analysis of peasant rebellion and deserves much of the credit for the failure of the general strike even to get off the ground.

The regime at midsummer was in an unenviable situation. By late June the army was of such doubtful reliability that the government in effect conceded rural Russia to peasant rebellion, and agrarian disorders achieved the same level as in November 1905. From the regime’s point of view, the only saving feature of agrarian rebellion in the summer of 1906 was that peasants were withholding labor and rent rather than burning and looting. That reduced the level of violence, but rendered brute force a less effective means of suppressing peasants (a point made well by a contemporary cartoon that had cossacks riding station behind peasants at the plow). Furthermore, in 1906 the Duma provided peasants better cover for rebellion than had the myth of Imperial approval to seize land in 1905, because the Duma really did promise land. Peasants by no means accepted the dispersal calmly, and in the immediate aftermath continued to view the Duma as an agency expressing their views and the authority for seizing land. The behavior of the Trudovik Onipko’s constituents in Stavropol Province was indicative of the Duma’s capacity to arouse peasants even after July 9. When they learned Onipko had been arrested in Kronstadt, they gathered by the thousands to demand the release of “the people’s elect.” Telegrams and petitions to Petersburg failing to secure his release, the peasants turned to the almighty, ordering up special religious services “for the health and liberation of Fedot Mikhailov” and demanding that the clergy pray for Onipko rather than the Tsar. Peasants drove recalcitrant clergymen—fifteen in the space of a few days—from the churches and told them to seek their daily bread from those for whom they prayed. Within a week, full-scale peasant rebellion was under way in Stavropol Province.⁵¹

Revolutionaries knew in July that peasant rebellion was mounting fast, but they misunderstood its dynamics. Both Bolsheviks and SRs assumed that peasant rebellion was a function of seasonal changes in the peasants’ physical environment and rhythm of work, yet in 1905 and 1906 every forecast based on the seasonal cycle proved wrong. In 1905 peasant rebellion peaked during the winter dead season, despite the SR belief that it would not. In 1906, peasants rebelled neither at spring planting nor after the harvest. Peasant rebellion in 1905 and 1906 followed not the seasons, but events in the cities that affected the peasants’ view of the regime’s authority—urban disorders in 1905, the behavior of the Duma in 1906. Trudoviks, who really were peasants, understood this perfectly well. At the conference of revolutionary organizations on the night of July 20-21, a Trudovik answered the SR argument that workers should strike after peasants had risen by asserting that if the city rose so, probably, would the village. And he observed further that peasant rebellion developed irregularly, and that there would never be a moment at which one could state definitively that “the village” had risen.⁵² Indeed, with news dribbling in late from rural areas, revolutionaries continued to anticipate through August that the harvest would bring full-scale agrarian rebellion and so the occasion for urban insurrection.⁵³ Peasants reacted to what was happening in the cities much more quickly than that, and immediately after the failure of the July general strike the number of agrarian disorders declined precipitously (see Table VII-1).

The behavior of the soldiers paralleled that of peasants in July, as it had throughout 1905 and 1906. The mutinies that began in May and continued unabated after July 9 followed from the soldiers’ conviction that the Duma, first as reality and then as disembodied representative of the will of the Russian people, would overturn the existing social and military orders. Like peasants, many soldiers and sailors—in Poltava, Deshlagar, Kronstadt, Sveaborg, Revel—were willing to take up arms against the regime after July 9. Soldiers in Petersburg supported the July strike: the 200th Izhorsk regiment refused to perform guard duty at a munitions works when the workers went on strike. But when the strike collapsed, soldiers all over the city let it be known that workers had deserted them and had betrayed the mutineers of Sveaborg and Kronstadt, and after July 23 mutinies declined even more precipitously than peasant unrest: from sixteen between July 17 and 23, to two in the last week of July.⁵⁴ Suppression of the insurrections at Sveaborg and Kronstadt must have dulled the soldiers’ appetite for mutiny, but news of the suppression did not deter the men of the 200th Izhorsk, and at Helsingfors harbor itself the crew of the cruiser Kazbek refused on July 20 to go to one of the islands to help round up surrendering artillerists. Suppression of military insurrection had not checked revolution in the army in 1905, either. What made mutiny unthinkable was the soldiers’ conviction after July 23 that there was no alternative to the authority of the regime. Soldiers wished to rebel, and unlike peasants they had the means at their disposal to impose their own vision of the social order. But, like peasants, they could act only when they believed that the Duma, or an all-powerful revolutionary committee, or some other authority real or imagined, sanctioned their rebellion. By the end of July, soldiers could hardly have believed workers and revolutionaries were trustworthy, let alone that they represented an alternative to the Tsarist regime.

Mensheviks, then, had judged correctly: though they later claimed that their call for a general strike had been a mistake deriving from a conspiratorial party structure that impeded correct assessment of the popular mood, the dissolution of the Duma did provide an opportunity—perhaps the best during the entire revolution—to destroy the Tsarist regime.⁵⁵ Peasants and soldiers expected revolutionaries and workers to rise, and their behavior up to July 21 indicates that they would have supported a general strike. The condition that Bolsheviks and SRs held to be prerequisite for successful revolution—simultaneous upheaval in factory, village, and barracks—was very nearly met in July 1906. Only the workers were missing. That workers were capable of going on strike in large numbers at that point is an untestable proposition. What we do know is that the workers in small shops who were far more active throughout 1906 than in 1905 responded with alacrity to the call for a general strike in Petersburg, that the revolutionary parties had far larger organized followings in the major plants in mid-1906 than they had had at any time in 1905, that the workers in the large plants gave as their reason for not participating the arguments for delay that Bolsheviks and SRs had employed up to the very eve of the strike, and that revolutionaries almost everywhere outside the capitals refused even to attempt to promote a general strike. Had revolutionaries been preparing the workers for months to take advantage of rather than to ignore the dissolution of the Duma, had they issued a call for a strike immediately after July 9, the strike would certainly have been more impressive than it was, perhaps extensive enough to give an added boost to peasant rebellion and to trigger the final collapse of the army—and with it, of the regime.