Stockholm from Petrograd Fürstenberg Grand Hotel Stockholm. Nestles sends no flour. Request. Sumenson. Nadezhdinskaia 36.97
The Germans also used other means of subsidizing the Bolsheviks, one of which consisted of smuggling into Russia counterfeit ten-ruble bank notes. Quantities of such forged money were found on pro-Bolshevik soldiers and sailors arrested in the aftermath of the July putsch.98
Lenin kept very much in the background in these transactions, entrusting financial dealings with the Germans to his lieutenants. Still, in a letter to Ganetskii and Radek of April 12, he complained he was receiving no money. On April 21 he acknowledged to Ganetskii that Kozlovskii had given him 2,000 rubles.99 According to Nikitin, Lenin corresponded directly with Parvus badgering him for “more materials.”* Three of these communications were intercepted on the Finnish border.100
Kerensky tackled his responsibilities as Minister of War with admirable energy, for he was convinced that the survival of democracy in Russia depended on a strong and disciplined army and that the army’s flagging spirits would be best uplifted by a successful offensive. The generals thought that if the army remained inactive much longer it would fall apart.101 He hoped to repeat the miracle of the French army in 1792, which stopped and then threw back the invading Prussians, rallying the nation to the revolutionary government. A major offensive was projected for June 12, in fulfillment of obligations to the Allies undertaken before the February Revolution. It had been originally designed as a purely military operation, but it now acquired an added political dimension. A successful offensive was expected to enhance the government’s prestige and reinfuse the population with patriotism, which would make it easier to deal with challengers from the right and the left. Tereshchenko told the French that if the offensive went well, measures would be taken to suppress mutinous elements in the Petrograd garrison.102
In preparation for the offensive Kerensky carried out reforms in the army. Alekseev, probably the best strategist in Russia, impressed him as a defeatist, and he replaced him with Brusilov, the hero of the 1916 campaign.* He tightened military discipline, giving officers wide discretion to deal with insubordinate troops. Emulating the commissaires aux armées which the French army introduced in 1792, he sent commissars to the front to raise the soldiers’ morale and to arbitrate between them and the officers: it was an innovation of which the Bolsheviks would make extensive use in the Red Army. Kerensky spent most of May and early June at the front, delivering stirring patriotic speeches. His appearances had a galvanizing effect:
“Triumphal progress” seems a weak term to describe Kerensky’s tour of the front. In the violence of the agitation by which it was accompanied it resembled the passage of a cyclone. Crowds gathered for hours to catch a glimpse of him. His path was everywhere strewn with flowers. Soldiers ran for miles after his motor car, trying to shake his hand or kiss the hem of his garment. At his meetings in the great halls of Moscow the audiences worked themselves up into paroxysms of enthusiasm and adoration. The platforms from which he had spoken were littered with watches, rings, bracelets, military medals, and bank notes, sacrificed by admirers for the common cause.103
An eyewitness who compared Kerensky to “a volcano hurling forth sheaves of all-consuming fire,” wrote that for Kerensky
all impediments between himself and the audience are intolerable.… He wants to be all before you, from head to foot, so that the only thing between you and him is the air, completely impregnated by his and your mutual radiations of invisible but mighty currents. For that reason he will hear nothing of rostra, pulpits, tables. He leaves the rostrum, jumps on the table; and when he stretches out his hands to you—nervous, supple, fiery, all quivering with the enthusiasm of prayer which seizes him—you feel that he touches you, grasps you with those hands, and irresistibly draws you to himself.104
The impact of these speeches, however, evaporated as soon as Kerensky left the scene: professional officers dubbed him “Persuader in Chief.” As he afterward recalled, he found the mood of the frontline troops on the eve of the June offensive ambivalent. German and Bolshevik propaganda had as yet had little influence: its effect was confined to garrison units and the so-called Third Divisions, which were reserve units made up of fresh inductees. But he encountered a widespread sense that the Revolution had made it pointless to fight. “After three years of bitter suffering,” he writes, “millions of war-weary soldiers were asking themselves: ‘Why should I die now when at home a new, freer life is only beginning?’ ”105 They received no answer from the Soviet, the institution they trusted the most, because its socialist majority adopted a characteristically ambivalent attitude:
51. Kerensky visiting the front: summer 1917.
If one looks through any typical resolution passed by the [Soviet’s] Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary majority one finds an utterly negative characterization of the war as imperialistic, a demand that it be stopped as quickly as possible and an unobtrusive phrase or two, inserted at Kerensky’s urgent demand, suggesting, with dubious logic and no emotional appeal whatever, that, pending a general peace, it would be a good thing if the Russian soldiers would continue to fight.106
The Bolsheviks, as aware as the government of the disaffection and demoralization of the garrison units, decided early in June to exploit this mood. On June 1, the Military Organization voted to hold an armed demonstration. Since this unit took orders from the Central Committee, it can be taken for granted that the decision was adopted with the latter’s approval and probably on its initiative. On June 6, the Central Committee discussed bringing into the streets 40,000 armed soldiers and Red Guards to march under banners condemning Kerensky and the coalition government and then, at the appropriate moment, “go on the offensive.”107 What this meant we know from Sukhanov, who learned of the Bolshevik plans from Nevskii, the chairman of the Military Organization:
The target of the “manifestation,” set for June 10, was to be the Mariinskii Palace, the seat of the Provisional Government. This was to be the destination of the worker detachments and regiments loyal to the Bolsheviks. Specially designated persons were to demand that members of the cabinet come out of the palace and answer questions. As the ministers spoke, specially designated groups were to voice “popular dissatisfaction” and excite the mood of the masses. Once the temperature had reached the appropriate level, the Provisional Government was to have been arrested on the spot. Of course, the capital was expected to react immediately. And depending on the nature of this reaction, the Bolshevik Central Committee, under one name or another, was to proclaim itself the government. If, in the course of the “manifestation,” the atmosphere for all this would prove sufficiently favorable, and the resistance shown by Lvov and Tsereteli weak, resistance was to have been overcome by the force of Bolshevik regiments and weapons.*
One slogan of the demonstrators was to have been “All Power to the Soviets,” but inasmuch as the Soviet refused to proclaim itself a government and indeed prohibited armed demonstrations, this slogan, as Sukhanov reasonably concludes, could have only meant that power was meant to pass into the hands of the Bolshevik Central Committee.108 Since the demonstration was timed to coincide with the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets (scheduled to open on June 3), the Bolsheviks may have planned to confront the congress with a fait accompli and either compel it, against its will, to take power or claim power in its name. Lenin actually made no secret of his intentions. When, at the congress, Tsereteli stated that there was no party in Russia willing to assume power, Lenin shouted from his seat: “There is!” The episode became legend in Communist hagiography.