The Russian Revolution by Sheila Fitzpatrick Page A

it looked like a Bolshevik attempt at insurrection. The Kronstadt sailors, whose arrival in Petrograd set off the disorders, had Bolsheviks among their leaders, carried banners with the Bolshevik slogan `All power to the soviets', and made Bolshevik Party headquarters at the Kseshinskaya Palace their first destination. Yet when the demonstrators reached the Kseshinskaya Palace, Lenin's greeting was subdued, almost curt. He did not encourage them to take violent action against the Provisional Government or the Present Soviet leadership; and, although the crowd moved on to the Soviet and milled around in a threatening manner, no such action was taken. Confused and lacking leadership and specific plans, the demonstrators roamed the city, fell to drinking and looting, and finally dispersed.
    In one sense, the July Days were a vindication of Lenin's intransigent stand since April, for they indicated strong popular sentiment against the Provisional Government and the dual power, impatience with the coalition socialists, and eagerness on the part of the Kronstadt sailors and others for violent confrontation and probably insurrection. But in another sense, the July Days were a disaster for the Bolsheviks. Clearly Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee had been caught off balance. They had talked insurrection, in a general way, but not planned it. The Kronstadt Bolsheviks, responding to the sailors' revolutionary mood, had taken an initiative which, in effect, the Bolshevik Central Committee had disowned. The whole affair damaged Bolshevik morale and Lenin's credibility as a revolutionary leader.
    The damage was all the greater because the Bolsheviks, despite the leaders' hesitant and uncertain response, were blamed for the July Days by the Provisional Government and the moderate socialists of the Soviet. The Provisional Government decided to crack down, withdrawing the `parliamentary immunity' that politicians of all parties had enjoyed since the February Revolution. Several prominent Bolsheviks were arrested, along with Trotsky, who had taken a position close to Lenin's on the extreme left since his return to Russia in May and was to become an official Bolshevik Party member in August. Orders were issued for the arrest of Lenin and one of his closest associates in the Bolshevik leaderships, Grigorii Zinoviev. During the July Days, moreover, the Provisional Government had intimated that it had evidence to support the rumours that Lenin was a German agent, and the Bolsheviks were battered by a wave of patriotic denunciations in the press that temporarily eroded their popularity in the armed forces and the factories. The Bolshevik Central Committee (and no doubt Lenin himself) feared for Lenin's life. He went into hiding, and early in August, disguised as a workman, crossed the border and took refuge in Finland.
    If the Bolsheviks were in trouble, however, this was also true of the Provisional Government, headed from early July by Kerensky. The liberal-socialist coalition was in constant turmoil, with the socialists pushed to the left by their Soviet constituency and the liberals moving to the right under pressure from the industrialists, landowners, and military commanders, who were all increasingly alarmed by the collapse of authority and the popular disorders. Kerensky, despite an exalted sense of his mission to save Russia, was essentially a go-between and negotiator of political compromises, not greatly trusted or respected, and lacking a political base in any of the major parties. As he sadly complained, `I struggle with the Bolsheviks of the left and the Bolsheviks of the right, but people demand that I lean on one or the other.... I want to take a middle road, but nobody will help me.'16
    It seemed increasingly likely that the Provisional Government would fall one way or the other, but the question was, which? The threat from the left was a popular uprising in Petrograd and/or Bolshevik coup. Such a challenge had failed in