Caucasus) and the 'reunification of Poland' and 'the gratification of the national aspirations of the Austrian Slavs' (i.e. the Russian conquest of Habsburg Galicia). Livid, Lenin published these remarks in Pravda on 13 April 1917 while exhorting all 'comrades, workers and soldiers' to 'read this statement of Milyukov at all your meetings! Make it understood that you do not wish to die for the sake of secret conventions concluded by Tsar Nicholas II, and which are still sacred to Milyukov!'25
The battle for the soul of Russian foreign policy now came to a head. On 13 April 1917, the same day Lenin was calling proletarians to the barricades against Milyukov in the pages of Pravda, Kerensky tried to placate the Bolshevik opposition by announcing that the government was preparing a note to Russia's allies in the spirit of the 9 April 1917 statement on war aims, now referred to generally (though inaccurately) as the 'peace without annexations' declaration. This was untrue, but it did force Milyukov's hand. Under ferocious pressure, the beleaguered foreign minister agreed to hand over to Entente diplomats the 9 April declaration, with a note appended to it reaffirming Russia's intention to stay in the war against the Central Powers and 'fully to carry out [her] obligations' to her allies. It is still not clear whether Kerensky, in arranging this compromise, meant to save Mily- ukov or destroy him. In the event, it was partly the timing that did in the foreign minister. The two 'notes to the Allies' were cabled to Russian embassies abroad on 18 April 1917 - that is, on May Day, still celebrated by most Russian socialists according to the western Gregorian calendar.26
Their blood now up, the Bolsheviks moved in for the kill. Although both Lenin and his party handlers later took great pains to deny that he advocated toppling the government during the 'April Days' rioting of 20-21 April 1917, the circumstantial evidence we have suggests that he must have done so at least tacitly. The two surviving party resolutions passed between 18 April and 22 April, of which Lenin's authorship was later confirmed, both denounced the Provisional Government in no uncertain terms; the first called for power to pass to the Soviets, and the second advocated fraternisation with the Germans at the front.27 Whether on Lenin's cue or spontaneously, Bolshevik agitators fanned out across Petrograd and Moscow carrying banners that read 'Down with the Provisional Government', 'Down with Milyukov' and 'All Power to the Soviets'. In Petrograd, the rioting grew quite serious on 21 April after N. I. Podvoisky, head of the Bolshevik Military Organisation, summoned sailors of the Kronstadt Soviet, widely known as enthusiastic street brawlers, into town. When the Bolshevik agitators approached the Kazan cathedral, shots were fired (to this day it is unknown by whom), and three people were killed. Once the failure of the putsch (if that is indeed what it was) had become clear, the Bolshevik Central Committee disowned further anti-government agitation in a resolution passed on 22 April. Lenin himself stayed mostly indoors during the rioting, uncertain, as he put it in his own postmortem, 'whether at that anxious moment the mass had shifted strongly to our side'.[2] Whatever Lenin's real role in the April Days, the pro-government counter-demonstrators had few doubts who was responsible, as many of their banners read 'Down with Lenin!'28
In scarcely two weeks, Lenin had utterly radicalised the Russian political landscape. To be sure, Chernov and other Social Revolutionaries shared Lenin's opposition to the 'imperialist war', and there were plenty of labour and socialist radicals who remained wary of the Provisional Government and Milyukov in particular. But until Lenin's arrival on the scene, these sentiments had remained inchoate and largely unexpressed. Whether or not activists and politicians agreed with him, Lenin's uncompromising views had become impossible to ignore. Judging by the aftermath of the April Days, which saw both Milyukov and Alexander Guchkov, the minister of defence, resign their posts, the Leninist opposition had established a kind of veto power over Russian foreign policy, if not yet outright control. Lenin was not alone responsible for the fall of Russia's liberals in May 1917, but he had a lot to do with it. In terms of political marketing, Lenin had established a powerful brand as the leader of the anti-war, anti-government opposition. All he had to do was stand firm on principle, and wait for Russia's leaders to flounder while prosecuting an increasingly unpopular war.
It was no easy task to square the circle of a post-imperialist foreign policy - certainly not with Lenin waiting to pounce on any mistake. In a new declaration of war aims dated 5 May 1917, the revamped, post-liberal cabinet vowed to 'democratise the army' and disowned imperialist war aims, while also asserting, a bit less convincingly, that 'a defeat of Russia and her Allies would be a great misfortune for all peoples, and would delay or make impossible a universal peace'.29 On 15 May 1917, the post-Milyukov Foreign Ministry tried to reconcile the Ottoman partition terms of Sazonov-Sykes-Picot with the Soviet's 'peace without annexations' principle. As if to confirm that the ghosts of Russian imperialism were not easily buried, the new statement of revolutionary Russia's war aims referred to 'provinces of Asiatic Turkey taken by right of war' before asserting, in an apparent contradiction, that the former Ottoman vilayets of Van, Bitlis and Erzurum would be 'forever Armenian'. Trying to blend together the old imperialist paternalism with the new idealism, the memorandum stipulated, awkwardly, that these 'Armenian' provinces would be administered by Russian officials, who would help repatriate Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish refugees.30
All across the lands of the former tsarist empire in May and June 1917 and especially on the military fronts, furious and fractious debates were conducted over the war and whether to pursue it, over war aims and their meaning, and over Lenin himself. Alexander Keren- sky, Guchkov's successor as minister of war, went on a barnstorming tour of the European fronts prior to the planned Galician offensive ofJune, trying to rally troops behind the idea that they were the vanguard of a new Russia, fighting no longer for the wretched tsar and his secret treaties but for democracy and the allies, socialism and the people. Most accounts seem to agree that these pep talks were well received, although the effect 'evaporated as soon as Kerensky left the scene'.[3] In Tiflis, headquarters of the Army of the Caucasus, which had dealt Turkey a series of near-death blows in 1916, mutinous sentiment was virtually non-existent. 'The membership of the soldiers' committees,' reported the new commander-in-chief Nikolai Yudenich (who had replaced the Romanov Grand Duke Nicholas), resolved 'to conduct the war to a victorious end'.31 In the Black Sea port from which Russia's amphibious operations against the Bosphorus were to be launched, morale had likewise remained generally robust after the February Revolution. 'Of course there are extremists here as well as in other parts,' G. W. Le Page, a British naval liaison officer, reported from Sevastopol on 29 April 1917, 'but the general feeling is that the war must be pushed on until the military power of the Central Powers is crushed.'32 In mid May, the sailors' soviet of Sevastopol debated the question of whether to invite Lenin - already notorious for his advocacy of ending the war immediately - to town. The vote was 342 to 20 against.33