There was little violence because the rioters dispersed on their own. Raskolnikov ordered his sailors to return to Kronshtadt, keeping 400 men to defend Kshesinskaia’s. The sailors at first refused to leave, but gave in when they were surrounded by a superior and unfriendly force of loyal troops. By midnight Taurida was cleared of the mob.
The unexpected turn of events threw the Bolsheviks into complete disarray. Lenin fled Taurida as soon as he had learned from Karinskii of Pereverzev’s action, which must have been just before the soldiers arrived on the scene. After his departure, the Bolsheviks held a consultation, which ended with the decision to abort the putsch.180 At noon they had been distributing ministerial portfolios among themselves; six hours later they were hunted quarry. Lenin thought all was lost. “Now they are going to shoot us,” he told Trotsky, “it is the most advantageous time for them.”181 He spent the following night at Kshesinskaia’s under the protection of Raskolnikov’s sailors. In the morning of July 5, as street vendors were hawking copies of Zhivoe slovo, he and Sverdlov slipped out and hid in a friend’s apartment. For the next five days he led an underground existence, changing quarters as often as twice daily. The other Bolshevik leaders, with the exception of Zinoviev, stayed in the open, risking arrest and in some cases demanding to be arrested.
On July 6, the government ordered the detention of Lenin and his accomplices, eleven in all, charging them with “high treason and organizing an armed uprising.”* Sumenson and Kozlovskii were promptly apprehended. Soldiers came to Steklov’s residence during the night of July 6–7; when they threatened to smash his rooms and beat him up, Steklov telephoned for help. The Ispolkom rushed two armored cars to protect him; Kerensky also intervened on his behalf.182 The same night, soldiers appeared at the apartment of Anna Elizarova, Lenin’s sister. As they searched the room, Krupskaia screamed at them: “Gendarmes! Just like under the old regime!”183 The hunt for Bolshevik leaders went on for several days. On July 9, troops inspecting private automobiles caught Kamenev: in this case a lynching was prevented by Polovtsev, the commander of the Petrograd Military District, who not only freed Kamenev but provided a car to take him home.184 In all, some 800 participants in the insurrection were taken into custody.* As far as can be determined, not one Bolshevik was physically harmed. Considerable damage, however, was done to Bolshevik properties. The editorial office and printing plant of Pravda were destroyed on July 5. After the sailors guarding Kshesinskaia’s had been disarmed without offering resistance, the Bolshevik headquarters were occupied as well. The Peter and Paul Fortress surrendered.
55. The Palace Square in Petrograd occupied by loyal troops after the suppression of the Bolshevik putsch: July 1917.
On July 6, Petrograd was taken over by garrison troops and soldiers freshly arrived from the front.
The Bolshevik Central Committee issued on July 6 a flat denial of the accusations of treason leveled at Lenin and demanded an investigation.185 The Ispolkom obliged by appointing a five-man jury. It so happened that all five were Jews: since this might have laid the committee open to suspicion by the “counterrevolutionaries” that it was loaded in Lenin’s favor, it was dissolved and none appointed to replace it.
The Soviet, in fact, never looked into the accusations against Lenin, which did not deter it, however, from deciding firmly in favor of the accused. Although Lenin’s putsch was directed as much against the Soviet as against the government, with which, since May, it had been closely linked, the Ispolkom would not face reality. In the words of a Kadet newspaper, although the socialist intellectuals called the Bolsheviks “traitors,” “at the same time, as if nothing had happened, they remained for them comrades. They continued to work with them. They flattered and reasoned with them.”186 The Mensheviks and SRs now, as before and later, viewed the Bolsheviks as errant friends and their opponents as counterrevolutionaries. They feared that the charges leveled at the Bolsheviks were merely a pretext for an assault on the Soviet and the entire socialist movement. The Menshevik Novaia zhizn’ cited Den’ as follows:
Today it is the Bolshevik Committee that is being convicted; tomorrow they will cast suspicions on the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, and then they will declare a Holy War against the Revolution.187
The paper rejected out of hand the government’s charges against Lenin, accusing the “bourgeois press” of “deplorable slander” and “wild howls.” It urged the condemnation of those—presumably the Provisional Government—who engaged in “consciously slanderous defamation of prominent leaders of the working class.”188 Among the socialists who sprang to Lenin’s defense, calling the charges against him “slander,” was Martov.* These claims had nothing to do with the facts of the case: the Ispolkom neither asked the government for its evidence nor undertook its own investigation.
Even so, it went to great pains to protect the Bolsheviks from government retribution. As early as July 5, a delegation of the Ispolkom went to Kshesinskaia’s to discuss with the Bolsheviks terms for a peaceful resolution of the affair. They all agreed that there would be no repressions against the party and that all those arrested in connection with the events of the preceding two days would be released.189 The Ispolkom then requested Polovstev not to assault the Bolsheviks’ headquarters, as he had been expected to do momentarily.190 It also passed a resolution forbidding the publication of government documents implicating Lenin.191
Lenin defended himself in several brief articles. In a joint letter with Zinoviev and Kamenev to Novaia zhizn’ he claimed never to have received “one kopeck” from Ganetskii and Kozlovskii, either for himself or for the party. The whole thing was a new Dreyfus or a new Beilis affair, engineered by Aleksinskii at the behest of the counterrevolution.192 On July 7, he declared that he would not stand trial because, under the circumstances, neither he nor Zinoviev could expect justice to be done.193
Lenin always tended to overestimate the determination of his opponents. He was convinced that he and his party were finished, and like the Paris Commune, destined merely to serve as an inspiration for future generations. He considered moving the party center abroad once again, to Finland and even Sweden.194 He entrusted to Kamenev his theoretical last will and testament, the manuscript of “Marxism on the State” (later used as the basis for State and Revolution), with instructions for publication in the event he was killed.195 After Kamenev had been caught and nearly lynched, Lenin decided to take no more chances. During the night of July 9–10, accompanied by Zinoviev, he boarded a train at a small suburban railroad station to escape and hide in the countryside.
Lenin’s flight when his party faced the prospect of destruction was seen by most socialists as desertion. In the words of Sukhanov:
The disappearance of Lenin when threatened with arrest and trial [was], in itself, a fact worthy of note. In the Ispolkom no one had expected Lenin to “extricate himself from the situation” in just this way. His flight produced in our circles an immense sensation and led to passionate discussions in every conceivable way. Among the Bolsheviks, some approved of Lenin’s action. But the majority of the members of the Soviet reacted with a sharp condemnation. The Mameluks and the Soviet leaders shouted their righteous resentment. The opposition kept its opinion to itself: but this opinion reduced itself to an unqualified condemnation of Lenin from the political and moral points of view … the flight of the shepherd could not but deliver a heavy blow to the sheep. After all, the masses, mobilized by Lenin, bore the whole burden of responsibility for the July days.… And the “real culprit” abandons the army, his comrades, and seeks personal safety in flight!196