The overall ineffectiveness of the government's post-July days attempts to suppress and discredit the Bolsheviks becomes apparent when one examines the condition and activities of the Bolshevik Central Committee, the Petersburg Committee, and the Military Organization during the second half of July and in early August. Of the nine-man Central Committee elected at the April Conference, for example, only Kamenev was behind bars. The necessity of remaining under cover put a severe crimp in the work of Lenin and Zinoviev; still, neither was entirely lost to the party. Zinoviev maintained and indeed soon increased his journalistic endeavors, while Lenin, by means of frequent written dispatches from Razliv and Finland, continued to exert an influence on the formation of Bolshevik policy.10 Moreover, Iosif Stalin and Iakov Sverdlov, along with the Moscow leaders Felix Dzerzhinsky, Andrei Bubnov, Grigorii Sokolnikov, and Nikolai Bukharin, all of whom were elected to the Central Committee at the end of July, filled the gap left by the absence of top Petrograd Bolshevik officials in jail or in hiding.11
Under the coolheaded leadership of Sverdlov, an indefatigable young administrator from the Urals who headed the party secretariat, the Central Committee quietly set itself up for business in a modest apartment outside the center of town. In the mid-1920s, when public criticism of higher party organs was still tolerated, Ilin-Zhenevsky recalled the operation of the Central Committee in this period with undisguised nostalgia:
Just about every day I used to go [to Central Committee headquarters] . . . and I frequently encountered a serene family scene. Everyone sits at the dining table and drinks tea. On the table, a large samovar steams coz- ily. L. R. Menzhinskaia [one of the secretaries], a towel over her shoulder,
The Bolshevik Central Committee, elected at the Sixth Congress. Surrounding Lenin in the circle from left to right: la. M. Sverdlov, L. D. Trotsky, G. E. Zinoviev, I. V. Stalin, L. B. Kamenev, M. S. Uritsky, A. S. Bubnov, G. Ia. Sokolnikov, F. E. Dzerzhinsky. Behind the circle, bottom row: V. P. Nogin, V. P. Miliutin; second row: A. A. Ioffe, N. N. Krestinsky; third row: I. T. Smilga, F. A. Sergeev; fourth row: E. D. Stasova, G. Lomov, A. I. Rykov, N. I. Bukharin, S. G. Shaumian, A. M. Kollontai. Missing from the picture are Ia. A. Berzin and M. F. Muranov. Ioffe, Stasova, and Lomov were Central Committee candidates.
rinses glasses, wipes them, and pours tea for each arriving comrade. . . . Involuntarily, a comparison with the present headquarters of the Central Committee comes to mind. [We have] a gigantic building with a labyrinth of sections and subsections. Bustling about on every floor are an enormous number of employees, feverishly completing urgent tasks. Naturally, with its functions so expanded today, there is no possibility of the Central
Committee operating in any other way. Still, there is a certain sadness in the fact that the time when simple and unpretentious, yet profoundly comradely and united effort was possible, has gone and will never come again.12
During the first weeks following the July uprising, the closure of Pravda handicapped the Central Committee's work; not until early August was it able to resume publication of a regular newspaper.13 Nonetheless, even in mid-July, while the reaction in Petrograd held full sway, Sverdlov felt confident enough of the future to cable party committees in the provinces that "the mood in Piter is hale and hearty. We are keeping our heads. The organization is not destroyed."14
On July 13, less than two weeks after the July uprising, the Central Committee managed to convene a secret two-day strategy conference in Petrograd. Bringing together members of the Central Committee, officials of the Military Organization, and representatives of party committees from Petrograd and Moscow,15 this meeting had as its central purpose the evaluation of changes in the political situation caused by the July uprising and formulation of appropriate tactical directives for the guidance of subordinate party organizations throughout Russia. The conference's importance is attested to by the fact that Lenin prepared, expressly for its consideration, a set of theses on tactics, in which he departed sharply from his pre-July tactical stance.16 In these theses Lenin argued that the counterrevolution, fully supported by the Mensheviks and SRs, had managed to take full control of the government and the revolution. Not only the moderate socialist parties but also the Soviet had become "mere fig leaves of the counterrevolution."
The perspective for the future outlined by Lenin flowed directly from this assessment of the prevailing situation. Now that the counterrevolution had consolidated itself and the soviets were powerless, there was no longer, in his estimation, any possibility that the revolution might develop peacefully. The party's pre-July orientation toward transfer of power to the soviets and the chief Bolshevik slogan, "All Power to the Soviets," had to be abandoned. The only tactical course left to the party was to prepare for an eventual armed uprising and transfer of power to the proletariat and poorer peasantry. (In conversations with Ordzhonikidze at this time, Lenin spoke of the possibility of a popular rising by September or October and of the need to focus Bolshevik activity in the factory-shop committees. The factory-shop committees, Lenin is quoted by Ordzhonikidze as saying, would have to become insurrectionary organs.)17
In order to appreciate the response of participants in the July 13-14 Central Committee conference to Lenin's directives, it is well to bear in mind the following factors. First, while there is evidence that by mid-June (i.e., prior to the July days) Lenin had given up whatever hope he may have had for the transfer of power to the soviets without an armed struggle, it appears that he shared his views in this regard with only a very few closest associates.18 To the party at large, his efforts to prevent a premature rising during the second half of June conveyed the impression that events had moderated his outlook; thus the ideas expressed in the theses came as a shot out of the blue. Second, the course now envisioned by Lenin inevitably reopened intraparty disputes over fundamental theoretical assumptions which had been papered over at the April Conference and which were to have been thrashed out at the approaching party congress. Finally, as we shall see, Lenin's assessment of the prevailing situation ran counter to the mood and views of many Bolshevik leaders, who, unlike Lenin, could evaluate the impact of the reaction personally and were in touch daily with leaders of left Menshevik and SR factions and the Petrograd masses generally.
No official record of the deliberations of the Bolshevik leadership on July 13-14 has been published. From related contemporary documents we know that Lenin's ideas were the subject of fierce debate.19 Volodarsky, of the Petersburg Committee, and Nogin and Rykov, from Moscow, took issue with Lenin on "every key issue touched on in the theses."20 There is also evidence that Zinoviev, who was as vehemently opposed to Lenin's course as were Volodarsky, Nogin, and Rykov, but who was not at the conference, made his views known to the participants in writing.21 Sverdlov, Via- cheslav Molotov, Stalin's future foreign minister, who was then a dour- faced political activist in his mid-twenties, and Saveliev probably spearheaded the fight for the adoption of Lenin's course. When the theses were put to a vote, they were decisively rejected, ten of the fifteen party officials attending the conference voting against them.22