That evening, the sailors and soldiers affiliated with the Left SRs went into the streets to take hostages: they stopped automobiles from which they removed twenty-seven Bolshevik functionaries.
At the disposal of the Left SRs were 2,000 armed sailors and cavalry, eight artillery guns, sixty-four machine guns, and four to six armored cars.113 It was a formidable force, given that the bulk of Moscow’s Latvian contingent was relaxing in the suburbs and that soldiers of the Russian garrisons either sided with the rebels or professed neutrality. Lenin now found himself in the same humiliating predicament as Kerensky the previous October, a head of state without an armed force to defend his government. At this point, had the Left SRs so desired, there was nothing to prevent them from seizing the Kremlin and arresting the entire Bolshevik leadership. They did not even have to use force, for the members of their Central Committee carried passes giving them access to the Kremlin, including the offices and private apartments of Lenin.114
But the Left SRs had no such intentions and it was their aversion to power that saved the Bolsheviks. Their aim was to provoke the Germans and arouse the Russian “masses.” As one of the Left SR leaders told the captive Dzerzhinskii:
You stand before a fait accompli. The Brest Treaty is annulled; a war with Germany is unavoidable. We do not want power: let it be here as in the Ukraine. We will go underground. You can keep power, but you must stop being lackeys of Mirbach. Let Germany occupy Russia up to the Volga.115
So instead of marching on the Kremlin and overthrowing the Soviet Government, a detachment of Left SRs, headed by P. P. Proshian, went to the Central Post and Telegraph Office, which it occupied without resistance and from where it sent out appeals to Russian workers, peasants, and soldiers as well as the “whole world.”* These appeals were confused and contradictory. The Left SRs took responsibility for the murder of Mirbach and denounced the Bolsheviks as “agents of German imperialism.” They declared themselves in favor of the “soviet system” but rejected all other socialist parties as “counterrevolutionary.” In one telegram, they declared themselves to be “in power.” In the words of Vatsetis, the Left SRs acted “indecisively.”116
Spiridonova arrived at the Bolshoi Theater at 7 p.m. and delivered a long and rambling speech to the congress. Other Left SR speakers followed. There was total confusion. At 8 p.m. the delegates learned that armed Latvians had surrounded the building and sealed off the entrances, whereupon the Bolsheviks left. Spiridonova asked her followers to adjourn to the second floor. There she jumped on a table and screamed: “Hey, you, land, listen! Hey, you, land, listen!”117 The Bolshevik delegates, assembled in a wing of the Bolshoi, could not decide whether they were attacking or under attack. As Bukharin later told Isaac Steinberg: “We were sitting in our room waiting for you to come and arrest us.… As you did not do it, we decided to arrest you instead.”118
It was high time for the Bolsheviks to act; but hours went by and nothing happened. The government was in the grip of panic, for it had no serious force on which to rely. According to its own estimates, of the 24,000 armed men stationed in Moscow, one-third were pro-Bolshevik, one-fifth unreliable (i.e., anti-Bolshevik), and the rest uncertain.119 But even the pro-Bolshevik units could not be moved. The Bolshevik leadership was in such desperate straits it considered evacuating the Kremlin.120
At 5 p.m., I. I. Vatsetis, the commander of the Latvian Rifles, was summoned by N. I. Muralov, the commander of the Moscow Military District, to his headquarters. Also awaiting him there was Podvoiskii. The two briefed Vatsetis on the situation and asked him to prepare a plan of operations. At the same time, they told the shocked Latvian that another officer would be put in charge of the operation. This lack of confidence was almost certainly due to the Kremlin’s knowledge of Vatsetis’s dealings with the German Embassy. After attempts to find another Latvian to take command had failed, Vatsetis offered his services, guaranteeing success “with his head.” This was communicated to the Kremlin.*
Around 11:30 p.m. Lenin called to his office the Latvian political commissars attached to Vatsetis’s headquarters and asked whether they could vouch for the commander’s loyalty.121 When they responded affirmatively, Lenin consented to having Vatsetis put in charge of the operation against the Left SRs, but as an added precaution had four political commissars attached to his staff, instead of the usual two.
At midnight, Vatsetis received a call to meet with Lenin. This is how he describes the encounter:
The Kremlin was dark and empty. We were led into the meeting hall of the Council of People’s Commissars and asked to wait.… The fairly spacious premises in which I now found myself for the first time were illuminated by a single electric bulb, suspended from under the ceiling somewhere in the corner. The window curtains were drawn. The atmosphere reminded me of the front in the theater of military operations.… A few minutes later the door at the opposite end of the room opened and Comrade Lenin entered. He approached me with quick steps and asked in a low voice: “Comrade, will we hold out till the morning?” Having asked the question, Lenin kept on staring at me. I had become accustomed that day to the unexpected, but Comrade Lenin’s question took me aback with its sharp formulation.… Why was it important to hold out until the morning? Won’t we hold out to the end? Was our situation perhaps so precarious that my commissars had concealed from me its true nature?122
88. Colonel I. Vatsetis, commander of Latvian Rifles, as an officer in the Imperial Army.
Before answering Lenin’s question, Vatsetis requested time to survey the situation.123 The city had fallen into the hands of the rebels, except for the Kremlin, which stood out like a fortress under siege. When he arrived at the headquarters of the Latvian Division, his chief of staff told Vatsetis that the “entire Moscow garrison” had turned against the Bolsheviks. The so-called People’s Army (Narodnaia Armiia), the largest contingent of the Moscow garrison, which was undergoing training to fight the Germans alongside French and British troops, had decided to remain neutral. Another regiment had declared itself in favor of the Left SRs. The Latvians were all that was left: one battalion of the 1st Regiment, one battalion of the 2nd, and the 9th Regiment. There was also the 3rd Latvian Regiment, but its loyalty was in doubt. Vatsetis could also count on a Latvian artillery battery and a few smaller units, including a company of pro-Communist Hungarian POWs, commanded by Béla Kun.
With this information in hand, Vatsetis decided to delay the counterattack until the early hours of the morning, when the Latvian units would have returned from Khodynka. He dispatched two companies of the 9th Latvian Regiment to retake the Central Post and Telegraph Office, but they either proved inept or else defected, for the Left SRs managed to disarm them.
At 2 a.m. Vatsetis returned to the Kremlin:
Comrade Lenin entered by the same door and approached me with the same quick steps. I took several paces toward him and reported: “No later than twelve noon on July 7, we shall triumph all along the line.” Lenin took my right hand into both of his and, pressing it very hard, said, “Thank you, comrade. You have made me very happy.”124
When he launched his counterattack at 5 a.m. in humid and foggy weather, Vatsetis had under his command 3,300 men, of whom fewer than 500 were Russians. The Left SRs fought back ferociously, and it took the Latvians nearly seven hours to reduce the rebel centers and release, unharmed, Dzerzhinskii, Latsis, and the remaining hostages. Vatsetis received from Trotsky a bonus of 10,000 rubles for a job well done.125