Stalin had been constantly moving home, working at night and then grabbing sleep at friends’ places. He often slept where he worked at the Kseshinskaya Mansion. Tatiana Slavatinskaya worked there as an assistant at the Central Committee under Sverdlov and Stasova. Ludmilla Stal helped edit Rabotnitsa (Working Woman) and manage relations with the Kronstadt sailors: they must have seen each other. It was said that Stalin reheated his romance with Stal. If so, she was not the only one.
Stalin did not just avail himself of Molotov’s political fidelity and domestic residence. “He stole my girl, Marusya,” Molotov laughed. Marusya was not the last woman whom Molotov would sacrifice to Stalin’s will.
Early one evening, Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva arrived at Pravda to see him. “The offices were crowded and filled with cigarette smoke.” An aide told them that “Stalin was busy,” says Anna, so “we sent a message saying we’d like to see him and he came out to meet us.”
“Well, hello,” said Soso, smiling affectionately, “I’m glad you’ve come. How are things at home?”
“Your room’s waiting for you,” said the girls.
“How kind, but I’m terribly busy,” he said. “But keep that room for me.”
Then “someone came up to him and Stalin hurriedly shook hands with us”—and rushed back to work.{236}
Nineteen-seventeen was, to paraphrase Lenin, a game of two steps forward, one step back. During June, the radicals in the armed wing of the Bolshevik Party—the Military Organization, which now claimed the allegiance of 60,000 troops—demanded an armed demonstration. The date was set for this accidental revolution: 10 June. At a Party meeting, Lenin supported them. It was “wrong to force matters, equally wrong to let the opportunity slip,” opined Stalin, who helped plan the demonstration and wrote its proclamation: “At the sight of armed workers, the bourgeois will take cover.” Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed it.
On 9 June at the Soviet, the Mensheviks read out Stalin’s appeal and Tsereteli railed against “the Bolshevik conspiracy to seize power.” Lenin needed Soviet support—he hoped to use its legitimacy as cover for his Bolshevik coup. Instead the Soviet banned the demonstration. After hours of panic, Lenin agreed to call it off: “One wrong move on our part can wreck everything.” He now became as cautious as Kamenev and Stalin had been in March. On the eleventh, Stalin, criticizing this “intolerable wavering,” threatened to resign.
The Soviet defiantly held its own demonstration on 18 June, but the Bolsheviks hijacked it, with Stalin publishing his proclamation in Pravda. It was a propaganda triumph. “Bright sunny day,” reported Stalin the next day, “the column of demonstrators is endless. From morn to eve, the procession files towards the Field of Mars, a forest of banners… a steady roar from the crowd… the Marseillaise and Internationale gave place to ‘You Have Fallen Victims.’” There were “cries of ‘All power to the Soviets!’… but not a single regiment or factory displayed ‘Confidence in the Provisional Government!’” Meanwhile in the continuing war against Imperial Germany, Kerensky, War Minister, ordered an offensive that he hoped would bolster the government. The offensive, Russia’s last of the war, was a disaster.{237}
Lenin was exhausted; suffering headaches, he retreated to sunbathe at a lakeside villa in Finland. Then the government faltered again: Kerensky’s offensive ground to a halt while Finland and Ukraine moved towards independence. The Kadet ministers resigned in protest.
In Lenin’s absence, his Military Organization[164] decided to seize power. The “night sky was lit up so brightly by the Aurora Borealis,” writes Sagirashvili, “that one could read a newspaper outdoors. Men didn’t sleep and some unknown force drew them out of doors to roam the streets. They could raise their eyes to this heavenly spectacle. A grandiose struggle of Darkness and Light.”
On 3 July, masses of soldiers, sailors and workers, toting machine-guns with bandoliers of ammo criss-crossing their chests, marched on the Taurida Palace, the Bolshevik First Machine-Gun Regiment in the vanguard. Cars were held up at gunpoint and requisitioned. As armoured cars and trucks full of gunmen raced around the streets, some of the troops started firing haphazardly at burzoi shoppers on Nevsky Prospect. Gunfights broke out. Out at the Kronstadt naval base, Bolshevik sailors rose up, murdered 120 officers, including their admiral, and then demanded that Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev give them their orders to take the capital. When they received no answers, they telephoned Stalin, sitting at his Pravda desk with the Bolshevik bard Demian Bedny: should they march with their guns?
“Rifles?” replied Stalin. “You comrades know best… As for we scribblers, we always take our guns, our pencils, everywhere with us, [but] as for you and your arms, you know best!” Stalin had half encouraged this semi-accidental coup, asking, “Did the Party have the right to wash its hands and stand apart?” Trotsky was probably right that Stalin was one of the organizers of the July uprising: “Wherever a fight started, whether on a square in Tiflis, in Baku Prison, on a Petrograd street, he always strove to make it as sharp as possible.”
The gun-toting mob seethed around the Taurida Palace, expecting the Soviet to seize power as in Lenin’s slogan: “All Power to the Soviets.” But inside, Chkheidze and the Soviet, discussing the formation of a new ministry, did not want power. They feared it. The mob was inflamed by the Soviet’s reluctance. Meanwhile Stalin’s ambiguous answer had worked: the Kronstadt sailors were on their way.
At the Kseshinskaya Mansion, Stalin and the Central Committee suddenly lost their nerve and summoned Lenin back from holiday. “We could have seized power,” Stalin said, “but against us would have risen the fronts, the provinces, the Soviets.” Stalin rushed to the Taurida to reassure Chkheidze and the Soviet—but the genie was out of the bottle.
Lenin was on the train bound for Petrograd when Stalin heard that Justice Minister Pavel Pereverzev was about to accuse the Bolshevik leader of treason, revealing that he had been funded by Imperial Germany. This was partly true, but Stalin returned to the Taurida Palace and appealed to his Georgian compatriot Chkheidze to suppress the story. Chkheidze agreed, but it was too late.
In the early hours of 4 July, Lenin rushed to the mansion. “You should be thrashed for this!” he yelled at the Bolshevik hotheads.
In the overcast morning, 400,000 workers and soldiers ruled the deserted streets, soon joined by 20,000 heavily armed sailors who landed in a flotilla of boats. They had no plan: the cock-of-the-walk sailors with brass bands playing were more interested in parading their girlfriends through the boulevards and terrorizing the burzois: “Sailors with scantily dressed and high-heeled ladies were seen everywhere.” The streets, recalled Stalin, “were scenes of jubilation.” The sailors gathered outside the Kseshinskaya Mansion to demand some leadership: where was Lenin? He tried to hide in the mansion before emerging sheepishly to give a short speech that settled nothing.
The sailors, boosted by another 20,000 Putilov workers, headed for the Taurida Palace to sort out the diffident Soviet whose members had disappointed them. There were ugly scenes[165]—but at 5 p.m. the heavens opened: rain doused the accidental revolution. The crowds dispersed. The loyal Izmailovsky Guards relieved the besieged Soviet, now exposed as a toothless talking-shop. Lenin and the dispirited Bolshevik Central Committee retreated pathetically. The July Days were over.
164
The Bolshevik Military Organization ignored Lenin’s caution, showing that the Bolsheviks were still far from a disciplined force under a single leader. On the contrary, they remained insubordinate and fractious. The slavish monolith of the Party of Stalin was still years in the future.
165
Some broke into the palace where the Soviet sat under siege, refusing to take power. The mob seized Chernov, the frail SR leader, and started to lynch him until, in a virtuoso performance, Trotsky intervened, leaped onto a limousine, addressed the sailors and rescued the terrified politician.