As subsequent events were to show, the situation in Moscow was so tenuous that had the Left SRs wanted to seize power they could have done so with even greater ease than the Bolsheviks in October. But they emphatically did not want the responsibility of governing. Their rebellion was not so much a coup d’état as a coup de théâtre, a grand political demonstration intended to galvanize the “masses” and revive their flagging revolutionary spirit. They committed the very error that Lenin was forever warning his followers against, that of “playing” at revolution.
When the Congress of Soviets opened at the Bolshoi Theater, the Left SRs and Bolsheviks at once flew at each other’s throats. Left SR speakers accused the Bolsheviks of betraying the Revolution and instigating a war between city and village, while the Bolsheviks charged the Left SRs with trying to provoke a war between Russia and Germany. The Left SRs introduced a motion calling for an expression of no confidence in the Bolshevik Government, the abrogation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and a declaration of war on Germany. The Bolshevik majority defeated the motion, whereupon the Left SRs walked out.103
According to Bliumkin, in the evening of July 4 Spiridonova requested him to come see her.104 She said that the party wanted him to assassinate Mirbach. Bliumkin asked for twenty-four hours to make the necessary preparations. These included procuring for himself and Andreev a document bearing a forged signature of Dzerzhinskii requesting for the two men an audience with the German Ambassador, two revolvers, two bombs, and a car belonging to the Cheka chauifeured by Popov.
Around 2:15–2:30 p.m. on July 6 two representatives of the Cheka presented themselves at the German Embassy on Denezhnyi Pereulok. One identified himself as Iakov Bliumkin, an official of the Cheka counterintelligence service, the other as Nicholas Andreev, a representative of the Revolutionary Tribunal. They showed credentials signed by Dzerzhinskii and a secretary of the Cheka authorizing them to discuss “a matter of direct concern to the ambassador.”105 This turned out to be the case of a Lieutenant Robert Mirbach, believed to be a relative of the ambassador, whom the Cheka had detained on suspicion of espionage. The visitors were received by Riezler and an interpreter, Lieutenant L. G. Miller. Riezler told them that he had the authority to speak on Count Mirbach’s behalf, but the Russians refused to deal with him, insisting that Dzerzhinskii had instructed them to speak personally with the ambassador.
The German Embassy had for some time been receiving warnings of possible violence. There were anonymous letters and suspicious incidents, such as visits by electricians to inspect lighting fixtures that were in perfect working order and strangers taking photographs of the embassy building. Mirbach was reluctant to meet with the visitors, but since they produced credentials from the head of the Cheka he came down to see them. The Russians said he might be interested in the case of Lieutenant Mirbach. The ambassador replied that he would prefer that the information be provided in writing. At this point, Bliumkin and Andreev reached into their briefcases and pulled out revolvers, which they fired at Mirbach and Riezler. All their shots missed. Riezler and Miller dropped to the floor. Mirbach rose and tried to escape through the main living room to the upstairs quarters. Andreev ran after him and fired at the back of the head. Bliumkin threw a bomb into the middle of the room. The two assassins jumped out of the open windows. Bliumkin injured himself, but he managed to follow Andreev and climb a two-and-a-half-meter-high iron fence surrounding the embassy building to reach the automobile which waited outside with its engine running. Mirbach, who never regained consciousness, died at 3:15 p.m.106
The embassy staff feared that the assault on its ambassador signaled a general attack. The military personnel assumed responsibility for security. Attempts to communicate with the Soviet authorities proved of no avail because the telephone lines had been cut. Bothmer, the military attaché, rushed to the Metropole Hotel, the seat of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. There he told Karakhan, Chicherin’s deputy, what had happened. Karakhan contacted the Kremlin. Lenin received the news around 3:30 p.m. and immediately notified Dzerzhinskii and Sverdlov.107
Later that afternoon, a procession of Bolshevik notables visited the German Embassy. The first to arrive was Radek, with a sidearm which Bothmer describes as the size of a small siege gun. He was followed by Chicherin, Karakhan, and Dzerzhinskii. A squad of Latvian Rifles accompanied the Bolshevik notables. Lenin remained in the Kremlin, but Riezler, who assumed charge of the embassy, insisted that he appear in person with an explanation and apology. It was a most unusual demand for a foreign diplomat to make of a head of state, but such was the influence of the Germans at the time that Lenin had to obey. He came to the embassy, accompanied by Sverdlov, around 5 p.m. According to German witnesses, he displayed a purely technical interest in the tragedy, asking to be shown the place where the murder had been committed, the exact arrangement of the furniture, and the damage caused by the bomb. He declined to view the body of the deceased. He offered an apology which, in the words of one German, was as “cold as a dog’s snout” and promised that the guilty would be punished.108 Bothmer thought that the Russians looked very frightened.
When they fled, the assassins left their papers behind, including the document which had gained them admission to the embassy. From this material and information supplied by Riezler, Dzerzhinskii learned that the gunmen had presented themselves as representatives of the Cheka. Thoroughly alarmed, he set off for the Pokrovskii Barracks, which housed the Cheka Combat Detachment on Bol’shoi Trekhsviatitel’skii Pereulok 1. The barracks were under Popov’s control. Dzerzhinskii demanded that Bliumkin and Andreev be turned over to him, under the threat of having the entire Central Committee of the Left SR Party shot. Instead of complying, Popov’s sailors arrested Dzerzhinskii. He was to serve as a hostage to guarantee the safety of Spiridonova, who had gone to the Congress of Soviets to announce that Russia had been “liberated from Mirbach.”109
These events took place in a torrential rain, accompanied by thunder, which soon enveloped Moscow in a thick fog.
On his return to the Kremlin, Lenin was horrified to learn that Dzerzhinskii was a prisoner of the Cheka: according to Bonch-Bruevich, when he heard this news “Lenin did not turn pale—he turned white.”110 Suspecting that the Cheka had betrayed him, Lenin, through Trotsky, ordered it dissolved. M. Ia. Latsis was to organize a fresh security police.111 Latsis raced to the Cheka headquarters at Bolshaia Lubianka to find that this building, too, was under Popov’s control. The Left SR sailors who escorted him to Popov’s headquarters wanted to shoot Latsis on the spot: he was saved by the intercession of the Left SR Aleksandrovich.112 It was a comradely gesture that Latsis would not reciprocate a few days later when the roles were reversed and Aleksandrovich fell into the hands of the Cheka.
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 Bre
st 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
On July 7 and 8 the Bolsheviks arrested and questioned the rebels, including Spiridonova and other Left SR delegates to the Congress of Soviets. Riezler demanded that the government execute all those responsible for the murder of his ambassador, including the Central Committee of the Left SR Party. The government appointed two commissions, one to investigate the Left SR uprising, the other to look into the disloyal behavior of the garrison. Six hundred and fifty Left SRs were taken into custody in Moscow, Petrograd, and the provincial cities. A few days later it was announced that 200 of them had been shot.126 Ioffe told the Germans in Berlin that among those executed was Spiridonova. This greatly pleased them, and the German press played up the executions. The information was false: but when Chicherin issued a denial, the German Foreign Office used its influence to keep it out of the newspapers.127
In reality, the Bolsheviks treated the Left SRs with most unusual forbearance. Instead of carrying out a mass execution of those who had fought them arms in hand, as they would do a few days later in Iaroslavl, they briefly interrogated the prisoners and then had most of them released. They executed twelve sailors from Popov’s detachments as well as Aleksandrovich, whom they had caught at a railroad station trying to escape. Spiridonova and one of her associates were taken to the Kremlin and placed in a makeshift prison under Latvian guard. Two days later she was moved to a two-room apartment in the Kremlin, where she lived in relative comfort until her trial in November 1918. The Bolsheviks did not outlaw the Left SR Party and allowed it to bring out its newspaper. Pravda, referring to the Left SRs as “prodigal sons,” expressed the hope that they would soon return to the fold.128 Zinoviev lavished praise on Spiridonova as a “wonderful woman” with a “he
art of gold” whose imprisonment kept him awake at night.129
Neither before nor after did the Bolsheviks show such leniency to their enemies. Indeed, this unusual behavior has led some historians to suspect that the murder of Mirbach and the Left SR uprising had been staged by the Bolsheviks, although it is difficult to find a motive for such elaborate deception or an explanation of how it could have been concealed from the participants.130 The explanation, however, does not require any resort to conspiratorial theories. In July the Bolsheviks found themselves in what seemed a hopeless situation, under attack by the Czechs, facing armed rebellion in Iaroslavl and Murom, abandoned by Russian workers and soldiers, unsure even of the loyalty of the Latvians. They were not about to antagonize the followers of the Left SR Party. But above all, they feared for their lives. Radek surely did not speak only for himself when he confided to a German friend that the Bolsheviks treated the Left SRs so leniently from fear of their revenge.131 The ranks of that party were indeed filled with fanatics who thought little of sacrificing themselves for their cause: fanatics like Spiridonova herself, who in a letter to the Bolshevik leaders from prison came close to expressing regret that she had not been executed since her death might have brought them to their “senses.”132 Mirbach’s successor, Karl Helfferich, also was of the opinion that the Bolsheviks were afraid to liquidate the Left SRs.133
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