Maslenikov placed most of the blame for the tragedies befalling Russia on the leaders of the Soviet, whom he called "dreamers," "lunatics passing themselves off as pacifists," "petty careerists," and "a group of fanatics, transients, and traitors." (Maslenikov implied that those involved were mostly Jews, and he made no distinction between moderate socialists and Bolsheviks.) To the approval of many deputies, he proposed that the full Duma be convened in official session and demanded that all cabinet members report to it for a complete accounting. The Duma could then determine how the government should be reconstructed and what policies it should follow. "The State Duma is a trench defending the honor, the dignity, and the existence of Russia," he concluded. "In this trench we will either win or die."
Purishkevich voiced complete agreement with Maslenikov and expressed particular bitterness toward all those who continued to concern themselves with the defense of the revolution at a time when, in his words, "Every patriot ought to be shouting from every rooftop: 'Save Russia, save the motherland!' She is poised on the edge of ruin more because of internal enemies than because of the foreign foe." According to Purishkevich, what the country needed most was a strong voice to sound the alarm about the misfortunes befalling Russia, as well as liberal use of the noose. "If a thousand, two thousand, perhaps five thousand scoundrels at the front and several dozen in the rear had been done away with," he declared, "we would not have suffered such an unprecedented disgrace." To restrict hanging to the front, he contended, referring to the reimposition of the death penalty there, made no sense at all; rather, "it is necessary to eradicate the sources of trouble, not merely its consequences." Like Maslenikov, Purishkevich viewed the activity of the Soviet as wholly pernicious and looked to the Duma "to speak out sternly and powerfully and to mete out proper punishment to all who had earned it." "Long live the State Duma," shouted Purishkevich emotionally toward the end of his speech. "It is the only organ capable of saving Russia. . . . And let all the sinister forces that cling to the Provisional Government be destroyed. . . . These forces are led by people who have nothing in common with the peasantry, the soldiers, or the workers, and who fish in troubled waters alongside provocateurs maintained by the German emperor."
Despite the strong rhetoric by Maslenikov and Purishkevich, the public appeal for firm government (free of Soviet influence) and for total commitment to the war effort that the Provisional Committee subsequently adopted was moderate in tone. Moreover, the committee rejected the notion of attempting to convene the full Duma "to mete out punishment"; a majority of the deputies apparently agreed with Miliukov's conclusion that such a step was inappropriate.
Nonetheless, for the left and especially for the Bolsheviks these were indeed difficult days, subsequently remembered by many revolutinary veterans as perhaps the roughest in the history of the party. In some early memoirs of this period, Alexander Ilin-Zhenevsky, an editor of Soldatskaia pravda, recorded the problems he encountered searching for a press willing to print Bolshevik publications. Sent away with insults wherever he went, often even before identifying himself, he recalled wondering whether one could tell a Bolshevik by his looks.15 The Kronstadt Bolshevik Ivan Flerovsky described a walk that he and Lunacharsky had taken together on July 5. On Nevsky Prospect, just below the Anichkov Bridge, Flerovsky was "grabbed by a fellow wearing a cross of St. George in his lapel who was screaming, 'Here they are . . . anarchists . . . this one is from Kronstadt!' " A hostile mob at once surrounded Flerovsky and Lunacharsky and dragged them off to General Staff headquarters. In his memoirs Flerovsky relates in some detail the harrowing moments that ensued. The square separating the headquarters from the Winter Palace was in use at the time as a staging and billeting area for military forces mobilized by the government to restore order. It was crammed with pup tents, machine guns, artillery pieces, and stacked riflles. As Flerovsky and Lunacharsky were led through the area, crowds of milling, restless soldiers shook their fists menacingly and shouted obscenities at the pair of "German agents."16 Bolshevik newspapers of the post-July days period contain numerous accounts of the indignities suffered by suspected leftists. On July 14, for example, Proletarskoe delo17 printed an anguished letter from two imprisoned sailors, Aleko Fadeev and Mikhail Mikhailov:
On July 7 at 9:00 a.m. we set out to return to our units in Kronstadt when we were suddenly apprehended by a detachment of cadets and taken to General Staff headquarters. . . . While we were being led through the streets, the intelligentsia pounced on us, determined to kill us. Some of the attackers said scandalous things about us, that we were German agents.
. . . When we passed the naval staff building, even the doorman there begged our guard to line us up on the bank and shoot us. . . . Just as we arrived at headquarters . . . another convoy drew up with ten people under arrest. All had been beaten up and blood was streaming from their faces.
Many of those detained in this way were questioned and soon released. Some, however, spent weeks and even months in prison. Trotsky, who was imprisoned in the Crosses, described his encounters with some of these prisoners. One worker, Anton Ivashin, was beaten up and arrested in a public bath. Ivashin came to grief when, overhearing some dragoons newly arrived from the front talking about how the Petrograd garrison was receiving money from the Germans, he interrupted his scrubbing to inquire whether the soldiers had actually seen any evidence. He was immediately hauled off to jail. Another of Trotsky's fellow prisoners, Ivan Piskunov, was arrested for an equally careless remark. Chancing to come upon a street rally and hearing a soldier affirm that six thousand rubles had been found in the pockets of a rebel soldier killed in the July days, he barely managed to blurt, "That can't be!" before he was pummelled and dragged away.18 While there were frequent incidents of this kind during the post-July days reaction, what seems most remarkable is that only one Bolshevik, Ivan Voi- nov, a twenty-three-year-old helper in the Pravda circulation room, was killed. On July 6, Voinov was arrested while distributing copies of Listok pravdy. While he was being transported for interrogation, one of his captors struck him on the head with a saber; the young Bolshevik died instantly.19
It is difficult to estimate the number of Bolsheviks incarcerated in the aftermath of the July uprising, in part because many of those arrested were soon released and hence are not counted in available published sources, and also because political prisoners were held in many places of detention scattered throughout the capital. Roughly thirty "politicals," among them Petr Dashkevich, Nikolai Krylenko, I. U. Kudelko, Mikhail Ter-Arutuniants, Osvald Dzenis, Nikolai Vishnevetsky, and Iurii Kotsiubinsky, all military officers and the cream of Military Organization unit-level garrison leadership, were held in the First District Militia headquarters. Ilin-Zhenevsky, who often passed the building, later recalled seeing the familiar faces of his former close associates peering through the barred windows of their cells; catching sight of him, they would smile and wave.20
About 150 prisoners, a large percentage of them Kronstadt sailors indiscriminately rounded up in the streets, were held in the Second District Militia headquarters. The Crosses held 131 "politicals," many of whom were suspected extreme leftists netted in the streets, often merely for a loose word. In the Crosses, too, were some of the government's most prized prisoners—including Trotsky, Kamenev, Lunacharsky, Raskolnikov, Va- silii Sakharov, Roshal, Remnev, and Khaustov; some of the soldiers of the First Machine Gun Regiment who had initially triggered the July days; and Antonov-Ovseenko, Dybenko, and Khovrin of Tsentrobalt. Female prisoners, including the notorious Kollontai, were jailed in the Vyborg District hard-labor prison for women; twenty Bolsheviks were kept in the Transfer Prison; and over a dozen party members, presumably those requiring medical treatment, were held in the Nikolaevsky Military Hospital.21