With the benefit of hindsight, one can see that those who facilely wrote off Bolshevism as a potent political force in the mid-summer of 1917 failed completely to take account of the basic concerns and great potential power of the Petrograd masses and of the enormous attraction that a revolutionary political and social program like that of the Bolsheviks held for them. At the same time, such people were obviously misled by the torrent of tough- sounding decrees emanating from the Winter Palace; they read into the actions of the Provisional Government a singleness of purpose and degree of strength and effectiveness that it simply did not possess. Kerensky's flaming hard-line rhetoric notwithstanding, almost none of the major repressive measures adopted by the cabinet during this period either was fully implemented or successfully achieved its objectives. The policy of getting arms and ammunition out of the hands of civilians, for example, encountered early obstacles and was not pursued for long. Similarly, only the First Machine Gun Regiment, the 180th Infantry Regiment, and the Grenadier Regiment, among the many units of the Petrograd garrison in which Bolsheviks had a strong foothold, were effectively disarmed. While considerable numbers of personnel from radicalized units were transferred to the front in late July and August, none of these units, contrary to the original intention, were completely liquidated. As for the government's avowed aim of arresting and quickly bringing to trial leaders and supporters of the July insurrection, although many Bolsheviks were jailed after the rebellion's collapse, most of the Petrograd party organization's roughly thirty-two thousand members were not disturbed by the authorities. Those leftists actually jailed were not formally indicted for some time, if at all, and the October revolution intervened before any of them were brought to trial.
Various factors contributed to this state of affairs. The Provisional Government's fundamental weakness and lack of credibility among the masses were probably the main reasons for its lack of success in disarming civilians. The official justification for requisitioning weapons was that soldiers under attack at the front badly needed them; actually, the government's main concern in taking this action was to lessen the danger of renewed civil strife by confiscating hand guns, rifles, and machine guns which workers had acquired during the February days and which they had used in July to terrorize the government and the Soviet. The central Soviet organs endorsed this effort. But most factory workers, suspicious of the government's intentions and alarmed over what they perceived to be the mounting danger of counterrevolution, would have none of it. Although some civilians obediently turned in weapons immediately after publication of government orders to this effect, it soon became apparent that most workers possessing arms were unwilling to surrender them peacefully. Government troops consequently raided factories and offices of leftist supporters in which arms were believed to be hidden. More often than not these fishing expeditions failed to turn up weapons, and they were discontinued toward the end of July. Their main result was to exacerbate relations between factory workers and the authorities.
That many strongly Bolshevik-influenced military units managed to avoid disarmament was probably partly a result of the fact that they publicly repudiated their previous behavior and adopted fervent pledges of loyalty to the new Kerensky regime as soon as the latter's plans concerning the garrison became known. That the government's plan of transferring Bol- shevized troops out of the capital was only partially realized was in part because front commanders had headaches enough as it was and were understandably reluctant to accept such unreliable reinforcements. Additionally, making a fair determination of which troops among the 215,000 to 300,000 soldiers of the Petrograd garrison actually deserved to be punished by shipment to the front was no easy matter. Even in the most belligerent regiments, only a very small proportion of soldiers had consciously acted to overthrow the government in July. The command of the Petrograd Military District was disorganized, and inevitably many largely blameless units were summarily punished by shipment out of the capital, while some troops that had mutinied in July were still in Petrograd in October.
The fact that only a small percentage of Bolshevik leaders were arrested after the July days was due partly to the All-Russian Executive Committees' stubborn insistence that action be taken only against individuals, not against whole political groups. Of course, the Provisional Government did not contain any Cavaignacs; this was in part because cabinet ministers were justifiably apprehensive about the government's ability to control the massive protest that an officially sponsored, indiscriminate attack on the left was bound to stimulate. To be sure, at the height of the reaction that followed the July days, some leftist institutions were subjected to military attack. Present-day Soviet historians view these assaults as part of a deliberate, all-out campaign by the government to crush the entire Bolshevik organization and the militant labor movement generally. Yet this interpretation does not withstand careful scrutiny. When each of the major post-July military attacks on the left is examined closely, one finds that with a few exceptions (among the most prominent of which were the government's raids on the Kshesinskaia mansion and the offices of Pravda), this or that attack on a district Bolshevik committee or nonparty labor organization or factory either was directly connected to government attempts to confiscate weapons or was undertaken at the initiative of some zealous, anonymous, second-level official, often a holdover from the tsarist regime, without the approval of higher authorities.
This was the case with the July 9 raid on Bolshevik headquarters in the downtown Liteiny District. Several days before this attack, the Liteiny District Committee had unwittingly moved into new quarters in a building also housing a regional counterintelligence office. As far as the personnel in this office were concerned, every Bolshevik was a German agent; acting on their own, they picked the next Sunday to forcibly evict their new neighbors.3 Similarly, the same day's raid on Bolshevik Party headquarters in the Petrograd District, which ended with the wrecking of a neighboring Menshevik office, was initiated and led by junior officers attached to the Petrograd Military District. Probing by reporters later revealed that the attack force did not have a warrant, and spokesmen for the government and even General Polovtsev himself denied prior knowledge of the operation.4
Raids in the suburb of Sestroretsk at this time were also apparently the result of an excess of zeal on the part of lower-level military personnel. When members of a local hunting club at Sestroretsk took some pot shots at camping soldiers, the soldiers jumped to the conclusion that factory workers were responsible and reported as much to the headquarters of the Petrograd Military District. General Polovtsev responded by ordering his troops to disarm some worker detachments known to exist in the Sestroretsk factory. Although this occurred before publication of the Provisional Government's orders regarding the turning in of weapons, the commander of the force sent to the Sestroretsk factory announced that all weapons in the hands of civilians, regardless of whether or not they belonged to the worker detachments, were to be confiscated. Moreover, despite the fact that large quantities of arms and ammunition were turned in, government troops arrested seven leftist organizers and searched and wrecked scores of private apartments and labor organization offices in the town of Sestroretsk itself.5 Evidently because General Polovtsev could not or, more likely, would not control the frequent excesses of his subordinates, he was relieved of command at the Central Executive Committee's insistence on July 13.6