The regime in these places of detention varied considerably. Nonetheless, except perhaps for the food, conditions in all of them were a good deal less oppressive than in tsarist days. While the staff in most prisons included a significant percentage of holdovers from before the February revolution, even these veterans now tended to be relatively lenient. Raskolnikov recalled that many of his guards at the Crosses were cautious toward, indeed even fearful of, "politicals." After all, following the February revolution, yesterday's high officials suddenly turned up in jail, while some of the previous inmates instantly became cabinet ministers. Prison personnel were naturally wary of such a turnabout happening again.22
Bolsheviks in common cells holding several inmates were also relatively well off. The prisoners who suffered most in the aftermath of the July days were those held in the Second District Militia headquarters, where overcrowding was a problem, and those particularly notorious figures, among them Raskolnikov, Trotsky, Kamenev, and Lunacharsky, who were initially kept in solitary confinement in the Crosses.23
Treatment of the imprisoned Bolsheviks shifted with the prevailing political winds. Thus the going was roughest for "politicals" just after the July days, when the Provisional Government appeared potentially strong and when it seemed as if the Bolsheviks were permanently crushed. When the fortunes of the party began to recover, the prison regime became noticeably freer. After a few weeks, Raskolnikov, for one, was removed from solitary confinement and was amazed to find that the doors to cells in the Crosses were now kept open throughout the day. "With the beginning of this open-door policy," he wrote, "individual cells were transformed into Jacobin clubs. Moving from one cell to another in noisy groups, we argued, played chess, and shared what we read in the papers." Recalling significant differences of opinion among his fellow prisoners, Raskolnikov observed that while all prisoners had faith in the ultimate triumph of the proletariat, in contrast to prerevolutionary days—when political prisoners were, typically, ideologically well-grounded, professional revolutionaries—a significant number of his comrades in the Crosses were youthful, recent converts to the Bolshevik cause. As a consequence, there were frequent, fierce debates about revolutionary tactics between impatient hotheads who believed the party had made a grievous error in not trying to take power in July, and older, experienced, more disciplined Bolsheviks who defended the tactics of the Central Committee. When Raskolnikov insisted that power could not be seized until a majority of workers supported the Bolsheviks, the hotheads countered that an energetic revolutionary vanguard could seize power on its own in the interest of the working class. Raskolnikov adds that while Trotsky had fully supported the cautious policy of the Central Committee during the July days, now, sitting in jail, he occasionally had second thoughts. "Perhaps we should have given it a try. What if the front had supported us? Then everything would have turned out differently." But these impetuous thoughts inevitably gave way very quickly to a more logical analysis of the prevailing correlation of forces.24
Almost all jailed rebels were allowed writing materials, and many took advantage of lax security to send petitions, articles, and messages to the world outside. Some prisoners, Roshal for one, used this time to begin writing memoirs. Among the inmates of the Crosses, the most prolific author appears to have been Trotsky. Taking time out only for daily walks, he remained rooted to his desk, writing political pamphlets and preparing daily articles for the Bolshevik press.
A week after his arrest, Kamenev drew up a personal appeal to the Central Executive Committee for help in expediting the proceedings against him:
I turned myself over to the courts because I had faith . . . that the authorities would present the accusations against me without delay and that I would have full opportunity to explain myself. Instead, a whole week has gone by and I still have not seen a single representative of the court authorities. . . . Meanwhile my being locked up has deprived me of the ability to wage a public struggle against the vile slander concerning my connection with German money. ... I want to think that the Soviet will not force me to acknowledge that those of my comrades who failed to obey its directives [to submit to the authorities] acted more wisely than I.25
Somewhat later, a group of political prisoners identifying themselves only as "soldiers thrown into prison" formulated an appeal to "comrade cyclists and soldiers of other military units that have arrived from the front": "You, dear comrades, know that our comrade workers and soldiers have been in Petrograd prisons without trials for more than a month. . . . Do you know that many of our comrade soldiers and workers are charged with being traitors merely because they had the courage to call themselves Bolsheviks? It is painful for us if you are aware of this and remain silent . . . [but] we do not believe this to be the case. . . . We believe you are already on our side, that you sympathize with us, and that you will come to help us."26 There is no record of any response to such appeals.
Naturally, Bolsheviks who still had their freedom did what they could to help arrested comrades, mobilizing public concern for their plight and maintaining the strongest possible pressure upon the government to release them. The Bolshevik Petersburg Committee created a special organization, the "Proletarian Red Cross," to collect funds for prisoners and their families; mutual aid organizations were also established at the district level.27
After several weeks of detention and increasing signs of a possible rightist coup, the patience of some prisoners reached the breaking point, despite improving conditions of confinement. What appears to have oppressed prisoners most was the government's desultoriness in handling their cases—in particular, in questioning and formally indicting them. Condemnation as German agents also enraged each and every prisoner, including the usually very controlled Trotsky. "Within our stone cells this slander pressed in on us like a wave of suffocating gas," one prisoner subsequently related.28
The inmates' growing frustration was reflected in their increasingly bitter letters and declarations, which appeared prominently in the leftist press. On August 2 political prisoners in the Second District Militia headquarters hit on a new way to protest their treatment, declaring a hunger strike. This action ended three days later, after representatives of the Central Executive Committee guaranteed that the prisoners' cases would be attended to without further delay and that individuals against whom there were no specific charges would soon be released.29 Beginning in mid-August, inmates at the Second District Militia headquarters were gradually freed, and in due course this success stimulated a w ave of hunger strikes at other prisons. In time these protests would arouse the sympathy of a major segment of the Petrograd population. For the moment, however, only a very small percentage of jailed Bolsheviks were actually set free.
THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF REPRESSION
V
iewing the apparent swing in sentiment against the Bolsheviks and the seemingly decisive steps taken by the Provisional Government to restore order in the immediate wake of the July uprising, many contemporary observers were inclined to believe, wishfully no doubt, that the Bolsheviks had incurred a fatal defeat. As one newspaper editor wrote confidently at the time: "The Bolsheviks are compromised, discredited, and crushed. More than that, they have been expelled from Russian life, their teaching has turned out to be an irreversible failure, and has scandalized itself and its believers before the world and for all time."1 And as another writer, a Kadet, put it: "The Bolsheviks are hopelessly compromised. . . . Bolshevism has died a sudden death. . . . [It] has turned out to be a bluff inflated with Germany money."2