Among the Petrograd Bolsheviks there were also militants who on the afternoon of July 4 probably argued for decisive military action. One of the most influential of these ultraradical local leaders was the Latvian Martin Latsis, representative of the powerful Vyborg District Bolshevik organization. In the course of preparations for the abortive June 10 demonstration Latsis had taken steps to insure that the marchers would be fully armed; along with the Central Committee's equally aggressive Ivar Smilga, a Lithuanian, Latsis had urged that the party be ready to "seize railroad stations, arsenals, banks, the post office, and telegraph."28 During the period of rising unrest on the eve of the July days, he was critical of the party for playing the role of "fireman" among the masses, and on the night of July 3, after the uprising had begun he objected to the Central Committee's determination to avoid decisive confrontation with the government.
Top Military Organization figures, among them Nikolai Podvoisky and Vladimir Nevsky, both long-time Bolsheviks, were similarly inclined. A veteran of street combat against government authorities in 1905, Podvoisky, thirty-seven years old in 1917, had the reputation of an ultraradical. In the days immediately after the overthrow of the tsar, Podvoisky reportedly was the first to declare that "the revolution is not over; it is just beginning." Nevsky, from Rostov-on-the-Don, had at one time been a brilliant student in the Natural Sciences Faculty at Moscow University (in the 1920s he would distinguish himself as an historian of the Russian revolutionary movement). Along with Podvoisky, he had been active in the earliest Bolshevik fighting squads and military organizations. In memoirs relating to his activity in 1917, Nevsky invariably boasted about the independence and radicalism of the Military Organization leadership at this time and about its active involvement in the organization of the July uprising. According to him, on July 4 Military Organization leaders waited for a signal from the Central Committee "to carry the affair to its conclusion."29
Several hours after Lenin's return to Petrograd, word reached the Kshesinskaia mansion of two new factors that were ultimately of decisive importance. First, it was learned that the helplessness of the government, the unwillingness of garrison units to come to the rescue of the government or the Soviet, the threat posed by the arrival of the Kronstadt sailors at the Taurida Palace, and expanding anarchy and bloodshed in the streets had impelled the All-Russian Executive Committees to call for troops from the front to reestablish order. In response to this appeal Menshevik and SR- controlled army committees on the northern front were already forming composite detachments for immediate dispatch to the capital. Second, word was leaked to the Bolsheviks that high-level government officials were attempting to mobilize garrison troops against the Bolsheviks by accusing Lenin of having organized the July uprising at the behest of enemy Germany.
The charge that Lenin was a German agent was not new. The rightist press had been leveling such accusations since his return to Russia through Germany. (Lenin's known opposition to the war effort made him particularly vulnerable to this charge.) Apparently the Provisional Government had begun investigating the possibility of Bolshevik collusion with the enemy in late April after a German agent, one Lieutenant Ermolenko, had turned himself in to the Russian General Staff and had alleged in the course of interrogation that Lenin was one of many German agents then operating in Russia. This occurred about the time of the April crisis, just when the Bolsheviks were becoming a serious nuisance to the Provisional Government. Members of the cabinet were inclined, quite likely, to believe these allegations; in any case, the prospect of discrediting the Bolsheviks in the eyes of the masses had great appeal. And so three cabinet members —Kerensky, Nekrasov, and Tereshchenko—were assigned to facilitate the inquiry. Several intelligence agencies in Petrograd and at the front became involved; indeed a special counterespionage bureau attached to the Petrograd Military District seems to have devoted most of its attention to building a case against the Bolsheviks. Among other things, this agency monitored the party's communications and kept its leaders under surveillance, all with the enthusiastic support of the minister of justice, Pavel Pereverzev. Only the counterespionage bureau, he is reported to have declared, could save Russia.30
It is now known that during World War I the Germans expended a substantial sum for the purpose of disrupting Russian internal affairs and that a portion of this money was funneled to the Bolsheviks.31 Relevant sources suggest, however, that most Bolshevik leaders, not to speak of the party's rank and file, were unaware of these subventions. While Lenin seems to have known of the German money there is no evidence that his policies or those of the party were in any way influenced by it.32 Ultimately, this aid did not significantly affect the outcome of the revolution. As for the July events, the charge that the uprising was instigated by Lenin in cooperation with the Germans was obviously groundless; from mid-June on, as we have seen, Lenin had worked with energy to prevent an insurrection from breaking out.
At the time of the July days the official investigation of Lenin's German connections, such as they were, was incomplete. But with the government apparently on the verge of being overthrown, officials of the counterespionage bureau decided to act with all deliberate speed. They concocted a plan to use the bits and pieces of incriminating evidence already collected to convince representatives of previously neutral garrison units not only that the Bolsheviks were recipients of German funds, but also that the street demonstrations were being directed by the Germans. If the plan worked, they reasoned, garrison units would provide the troops necessary to defend the government, restore order, and arrest the Bolsheviks. The scheme was presented to Pereverzev, and he gave it his approval. Defending his decision several days later, the minister of justice explained: "I felt that releasing this information would generate a mood in the garrison that would make continued neutrality impossible. I had a choice between a proposed definite elucidation of the whole of this grand crime's roots and threads by some unspecified date or the immediate putting down of a rebellion that threatened the overturn the government."33
Thus, late on July 4 the counterespionage bureau invited representatives of several garrison regiments to General Staff headquarters, where they were briefed on the case against Lenin. All witnesses agreed that these representatives were genuinely shocked by the disclosures; for their part, officials of the bureau were so encouraged by the apparent potency of their case that they decided to make portions of the evidence available to the press. Because officials of the counterespionage bureau were concerned that accusations against Lenin coming directly from a government agency would be suspect, two "outraged citizens"—Grigorii Aleksinsky, a former Bolshevik representative in the Duma, and V. Pankratov, an SR—were hastily recruited to prepare a statement on the charges for immediate circulation to newspapers.34