The Left SR uprising and the assassination of Mirbach

Why did the Bolsheviks' only coalition partner turn on them within a year?

In the first months after the October Revolution the Soviet government was not purely Bolshevik. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who had split from the SR Party, entered the Council of People's Commissars in December 1917 and took the commissariats of agriculture, state property, justice, posts and telegraphs, and local government. The SRs had long claimed to speak for the Russian peasantry, and their left wing opposed the war and backed Soviet power. Where the Bolsheviks leaned on urban workers, this party was the bridge to the countryside. The first break came over the war. When the Congress of Soviets ratified the Brest-Litovsk peace with Germany in March 1918, the Left SRs left the Council of People's Commissars in protest. This was not a complete rupture. Party members stayed in the Central Executive Committee, the boards of the commissariats and the military bodies, and in the Cheka Vyacheslav Aleksandrovich went on serving as Dzerzhinsky's deputy. That half-way position is what made the events of July possible. 1 2 3

For this party the Brest peace meant abandoning international revolution. After the treaty German troops occupied Ukraine and installed the Hetmanate, and in Finland they helped crush the Reds. The Left SR Sergey Mstislavsky coined the slogan "Not war but uprising": the people of the occupied lands should rise against the Germans. There might be no army for a war between states, but partisan resistance and insurrection were possible, and they would carry revolution to the German soldiers. Surprisingly, the party's best-known figure, Maria Spiridonova, stood at first on the other side. At the party congress in April she tried to persuade her comrades that the peace had been "signed by want, by hunger, by the people's unwillingness to fight". Between May and June, however, she changed her position and went from being the last link with the Bolsheviks to being their fiercest critic. What changed her can only be understood through policy in the countryside. 4 2 5 6

In the spring of 1918 the cities were starving and the peasants would not hand over grain at the fixed low price. In May the government proclaimed the food dictatorship, giving emergency powers to the Commissariat of Food, and sent armed requisition detachments to the villages. On 11 June it created the kombedy, committees of the rural poor, to make poor peasants its partners in collecting grain. The kombedy were an instrument for finding grain and also for displacing the rural soviets where the Left SRs were strong. The Left SRs did not call for abandoning the state grain monopoly as such; they wanted grain exchanged for manufactured goods through the local soviets. As they saw it, this policy was driving town and country into war. The Peasant Section of the Central Executive Committee, which Spiridonova chaired, was overwhelmed with protests from the countryside. 2 6 7

In June political conflict piled on top. On 14 June the Central Executive Committee expelled the right and centre SRs and the Mensheviks and urged all soviets to do the same. The Left SR Vladimir Karelin called this illegal, since only the Congress of Soviets could change the committee's composition. On 22 June Alexei Shchastny, the commander who had brought the Baltic Fleet out through the ice, was shot on the verdict of a revolutionary tribunal. Left SR members of the Presidium asked for the verdict to be set aside and were outvoted. For a party with a long record against the death penalty this was a bitter blow. The clash of early July was thus four grievances bursting at once: the war, grain, Soviet democracy and the death penalty. 2 8 4

Why choose to kill an ambassador instead of winning a vote in the congress?

The decision came before the congress met. On 24 June the Left SR Central Committee, chaired by Spiridonova, resolved that the "breathing space" created by the Brest treaty had to end and that terrorist acts should be organised against leading representatives of German imperialism. Spiridonova and Ilya Mayorov were among those elected to the bureau charged with this. The resolution named no one, however, and left the timing to a later meeting. The party's Third Congress, meeting from 28 June to 1 July, denounced the government's food policy as creating a disastrous front between town and country and resolved "to break by revolutionary means the Brest treaty, ruinous to the Russian and world revolution", entrusting this to the Central Committee. Even so the party tried the legal path first. With support growing in the struggle over grain, its members thought they might win a majority at the Fifth Congress of Soviets. 7 9 10 2 4

That hope collapsed when the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on the evening of 4 July. The Left SRs had 352 or 353 delegates, about 30 percent, against 745 to 773 Bolsheviks. They objected to a scale of representation that gave one delegate per 25,000 town dwellers and one per 125,000 in the countryside, and accused the Bolsheviks of manufacturing a majority with delegates of doubtful standing. The atmosphere was ugly. On the 5th Boris Kamkov promised to sweep the requisition detachments and committees of the poor out of the villages, and Spiridonova called the Bolsheviks "traitors to the revolution" and heirs of Kerensky's policy. Lenin's report for the Council of People's Commissars was interrupted by shouts of "Mirbach won't allow it!" The Left SR motion of no confidence in the government, denunciation of the Brest treaty and a declaration of war on Germany was voted down, and the party walked out. 2 4 7 10

Who ordered the killing, and when, is still unclear. In his 1919 testimony Blumkin said that on the evening of 4 July "a member of the Central Committee" (some historians take this to be Proshian) sent for him and told him it had been decided to kill Mirbach. Later he also said that Spiridonova gave the instruction on the committee's behalf, and Spiridonova herself wrote in a 1937 letter to the NKVD that she had directed the attack. But there is no record of the Central Committee meeting between 24 June and 6 July, which leads some to read it as the work of part of the leadership rather than of the whole party. As for the date, Richard Pipes argues that 6 July was also chosen because it was the Jāņi holiday of the Latvian units most loyal to the Bolsheviks. English-language scholarship holds that most delegates, and even the Cheka deputy chairman Aleksandrovich, did not know what was being prepared. 10 11 7 4 2

What happened at the German embassy on the afternoon of 6 July?

The assassins were Cheka men. Yakov Blumkin, a Left SR from Odessa not yet twenty, had joined the Cheka that June by decision of his party, headed the section for countering international espionage and watched the German embassy. Nikolai Andreyev was a photographer in the same section. Their pretext was the Cheka's case against the ambassador's "relative" Robert Mirbach, a distant kinship largely of Blumkin's making. They carried a Cheka mandate authorising them to negotiate over a matter directly concerning the ambassador. Dzerzhinsky's signature was forged and the seal was stamped by Aleksandrovich; sources differ on what Aleksandrovich knew when he did so. He also wrote the note for a car, and the pair drove in a vehicle with a Cheka sailor at the wheel, with pistols and bombs hidden in briefcases, to the embassy at 5 Denezhny Lane. 11 10 4 3

Wilhelm von Mirbach at first declined to appear but in the end came to a reception room with the counsellor Kurt Riezler and the interpreter Müller. He replied that the matter would be dealt with through the normal channels. Shortly before 3 p.m. Blumkin drew a pistol and fired at all three, missing every time. As Riezler and Müller dropped to the floor Mirbach ran for the next room and was shot from behind; a bomb went off and shattered the windows. Most accounts name Andreyev as the one who fired the fatal shot, though Blumkin later went around boasting "I killed Mirbach" and took the trouble to deny the rumours about Andreyev. Mirbach died at about 3:15. The assassins jumped from a window and went over the fence, Blumkin injuring his leg. They left behind a briefcase with the mandates in their own names, as well as their caps, and two witnesses survived, so the culprits were known the same day. 12 4 11 10

Mirbach was targeted because he stood for the Brest peace. After taking part in the peace negotiations he served as ambassador in Moscow from April 1918. According to telegrams cited in German-language scholarship, in May and June he asked Berlin for funds to keep the Bolshevik government going, while in a letter of 25 June he wrote gloomily that "we are at the bedside of a seriously ill patient" and advised preparing other forces as well. To the Left SRs he was "the executioner". The embassy had been receiving threats since mid-June. On hearing the news Lenin went with Sverdlov to the embassy at about 5 p.m. to apologise; German records say the apology was "cold as a dog's nose". The cable that the American consul-general DeWitt Poole sent home that evening said that the attackers had driven up and thrown a bomb through a window, a reminder of how rumour spread in the confusion. 12 13 2 14

How did Dzerzhinsky become a hostage, and what did the rebels do?

The killers fled to the Cheka's own unit. The Cheka Combat Detachment was commanded by the Baltic Fleet sailor Dmitry Popov, its men were mostly Finns and sailors, and its headquarters was the Morozov mansion in Trekhsvyatitelsky Lane. When the news came, the Cheka chairman Felix Dzerzhinsky went there himself with only a few Chekists, demanded Blumkin and searched the place, breaking down doors. He unexpectedly came upon the Central Committee members gathered there. Dzerzhinsky declared Proshian and Karelin under arrest and threatened to shoot Popov on the spot, but was soon disarmed by his own deputy Aleksandrovich, who told him: "By decision of the Central Committee of the Left SR Party, I declare you under arrest." That evening Martin Latsis, sent to replace him, was seized in the Cheka building on the Lubyanka, whose guards were Popov's men. Twenty-seven Bolshevik officials were taken hostage, among them the Moscow Soviet chairman Pyotr Smidovich, and the delegate Nikolai Abelman was killed as cars were seized. 2 4 3 15 6

Popov's detachment was the most dangerous armed force in the city. Sources give its strength variously as some 500, 800 or up to 1,800 men, with eight guns, dozens of machine guns and armoured cars. Yet it did not move on the Kremlin. Some of its sailors took the Cheka building, the General Post Office and the Central Telegraph and sent out appeals, nothing more. The appeals announced that "the executioner Mirbach is dead" and called on workers and Red Army men to stand against German spies. A group under Proshian disarmed two companies of Latvian Riflemen sent to guard the telegraph office, and telegrams it sent spoke of the Left SRs having taken power. But Popov told an arrested chairman of a Latvian regimental committee: "We are not against Soviet power, but against the present gang of compromisers." With passes to the Kremlin in hand, the rebels arrested neither Lenin nor the Bolshevik delegates. 2 4 15 10 16

Spiridonova meanwhile went back to the Bolshoi, meaning to tell the delegates herself and move the congress. She reportedly declared that "the Russian people are free of Mirbach", climbed onto a table and cried "Listen, O earth!" It was already too late. Bolsheviks were called out on the pretext of a meeting of their fraction, Yakov Peters and others checked papers at the doors, and about 450 Left SR delegates were shut inside the theatre. Most did not even know what had happened. In the gloom they made speeches and sang the "Internationale". Popov is said to have threatened to blow up half the Kremlin "for Marusya" (Spiridonova). Next morning Lev Kamenev came and told them that they were no longer a fraction but members of a party in revolt. 2 4 10 7

How did the Latvian Riflemen end the revolt in a day?

The Bolshevik leaders were not confident at first. Lenin thought the whole Cheka had rebelled, and Bonch-Bruevich recalled that on hearing the news he "did not even turn pale, but turned white". Other units of the Moscow garrison went over to the rebels or stayed neutral, and few obeyed Trotsky's orders. The reliable force was the Latvian Riflemen, but even their commander, the former imperial colonel Ioakim Vatsetis, could not be trusted. Lenin would accept his services only with four commissars attached, and Trotsky asked four times whether he had gone over. That day the Latvians were celebrating their holiday on the Khodynka field. Vatsetis brought them in and gathered some 3,300 men. Command lay with an emergency five of Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, Podvoisky and Muralov, who had district patrols arrest suspicious persons without passes, changed the guard at the telephone exchange and sent delegates to the factories. 2 4 17

The assault planned for 2 a.m. was put off when the troops failed to arrive on time, and a night of torrential rain and morning fog held things up further. On the morning of 7 July a Latvian battery set up its guns about 200 paces from the target, and an attempt at negotiation failed. Eduard Berzin's battery shelled the Morozov mansion directly from about 11:30, knowing that Dzerzhinsky and other hostages were inside; Trotsky later reported to the congress that the fire had been "exceptionally accurate". The first shells wrecked the headquarters and cut off command. The committee members soon left the building, and Popov and Yuri Sablin led their men out toward Rogozhskaya. It was all over by about 2 p.m. About 400 men were captured and the hostages were freed. In a newspaper interview the very next day Lenin argued that the revolt had brought Russia to the brink of war, quoting an old woman: "The devils, so they've driven us into war after all!" 4 10 15 2 3 6 16

The revolt did not spread beyond Moscow. In Petrograd most Left SR organisations were disarmed without even knowing the Moscow news. The only fight was at the Corps of Pages, where 350 to 380 young guards were shelled on the evening of 7 July and about 150 surrendered. Armed detachments were also broken up in Vitebsk, Vladimir, Orsha and elsewhere. The Yaroslavl uprising that broke out the same day was a separate anti-Bolshevik rising associated with Savinkov, but that afternoon some of Lenin's few remaining forces left for it, leaving Moscow more exposed. 4 2

How did the Soviet regime change after the revolt?

Punishment was swift but its reach was surprisingly narrow. Aleksandrovich, disguised and fleeing via the Kursk station, was caught and said: "All I did, I did according to the decision of the Central Committee; I consider it morally impermissible to answer your questions." He was shot on 8 July with twelve Chekists of Popov's detachment. The government announced that 200 had been shot, but the executions actually carried out were these thirteen. Most delegates were released, and Spiridonova and others, thirteen in all, were moved to the Kremlin, a number soon reduced. The Cheka changed. Dzerzhinsky stepped down as chairman on 7 July as a witness in the assassination, and Peters built a new collegium of Communists only. Dzerzhinsky returned on 22 August. So ended the time when the Cheka shared power with a non-Bolshevik party. 3 2 4 18 13

The political consequences were greater. When the congress resumed on 9 July Trotsky reported on the arrests and the suppression, and on 10 July it resolved that the assassination had been part of a conspiracy to transfer power by armed rising. The same day it adopted the first Soviet constitution. The resolution did not ban the party as such and only required expelling from the soviets those who backed the Central Committee's "adventure", but the Commissar of the Interior Grigory Petrovsky ordered them all expelled from local soviets whatever their stance. The party papers Znamya truda and Golos trudovogo krestyanstva were closed. By the end of the year 34 district soviets had just 160 Left SR deputies out of 805. Some 200 delegates returned to the congress declaring against their party's policy, and in August and September the Party of Narodnik Communists and the Party of Revolutionary Communism split off. The one-party system was completed only later, but after July 1918 the Bolsheviks never again had an equal partner in the Soviet government. 2 4 6 19 20 21

Another blow soon came in the army. On 10 July Mikhail Muravyov, a Left SR commanding the Eastern Front, took about a thousand men by steamer from Kazan to Simbirsk, arrested Mikhail Tukhachevsky and others, and declared war on Germany. Lenin and Trotsky declared him an "enemy of the people", but their appeal appeared after he was already dead. On 11 July he was killed resisting arrest in a meeting of the provincial executive committee (some sources say he shot himself). It has not been established that this Muravyov mutiny was ordered by the Central Committee, and most researchers see it as his own decision after hearing the Moscow news and fearing arrest. 22 2

The trial was held before the Revolutionary Tribunal on 27 November. Of the fourteen defendants only Spiridonova and Sablin appeared. Popov was declared an enemy of the working people and outlawed, to be shot when caught; eleven, among them Proshian, Kamkov, Karelin, Blumkin, Andreyev and Mayorov, were given three years with forced labour; Spiridonova and Sablin, in view of their past services to the revolution, received one year. Both were soon amnestied. This leniency, set against the shooting of hundreds at Yaroslavl, later bred plenty of speculation. But the price was paid in the end. Popov joined Makhno's army and was shot by the Cheka in 1921. Spiridonova went through repeated arrests and exile and was shot with Mayorov in the Medvedev Forest in September 1941; Kamkov, Karelin and Sablin were executed in the Great Purge. Andrei Kolegayev, who had left the party and joined the Bolsheviks, did not escape the firing squad of the Great Purge either. 2 4 15 9 23 1 10

Why did Germany not go back to war?

The Left SR scheme was that if the ambassador died Germany would attack, the Bolsheviks would then have to fight and the people would rise. The chain broke at its first link. On 14 July Riezler demanded that an armed battalion be stationed in Moscow to guard the embassy, which would in effect have put the Council of People's Commissars under the German army. Lenin refused, calling it "the beginning of occupation of Russia by foreign troops". But the war scare was brief. The Second Battle of the Marne opened on the Western Front and drew German attention there, and the sides settled for a thousand Red Guards protecting the embassy along with 300 unarmed German soldiers in plain clothes. Seen from Berlin, toppling the Bolsheviks might bring a more hostile regime, so keeping the treaty mattered more than the ambassador's death. 4 2 10

The Left SRs did not give up. On 30 July the party member Boris Donskoy killed the German commander Hermann von Eichhorn with a bomb in Kiev, and this raised no greater threat of war than the ambassador's assassination. Germany again merely protested. On 27 August the Soviet government signed a still heavier supplementary treaty in Berlin. Nor did a popular rising come. Rural discontent was real and fed the peasant risings that followed, but it did not connect with the movements of a unit in Moscow. There was no alliance with the Left Communists either. What ended the treaty was not assassination but Germany's defeat: with the armistice in November the Soviet government declared the Brest treaty void. 2 4 24

Was it an uprising, an armed demonstration or a trap?

The very name of the event is disputed. The Fifth Congress resolution defined the assassination as part of a conspiracy to transfer power, and Lenin said that "criminal adventurers, hysterical intellectuals" had trampled on the will of the people. This judgement became the framework of Soviet historiography, which described the "Left SR mutiny" as an attempt to seize power. It was not only the official Soviet view. E. H. Carr saw the actions after the assassination as an attempt to take power in Moscow and the provinces, and Nicolas Werth also assessed it as an attempted coup. In 2013 the Russian historian A. V. Medvedev argued, on the evidence of the telegraph seizure and telegrams, that it should be judged an attempt to overthrow the government. The words about having taken power in the telegrams sent by Proshian's group are the strongest support for this reading. 6 16 4

The participants said otherwise. Spiridonova wrote that they had carried out only "a terrorist act of international significance, an act of protest before the whole world against the strangling of our revolution", and that everything else was self-defence against Bolshevik reprisal. Kamkov called it an "armed demonstration", and Popov in 1921 likewise testified to "self-defence". Most Western scholarship leans this way. Richard Pipes held that the plan did not envisage seizing power at all, and Alexander Rabinowitch, having gone through unpublished evidence too, concluded that apart from Proshian's occupation of the telegraph office everything the Left SRs did was consistent with seeking to change Lenin's policies and not with taking power. Orlando Figes mocked them for "playing at revolution" and wrote, echoing their comrade Steinberg, that they were beaten because overthrowing the government was never their purpose. In Russia Yaroslav Leontyev likewise holds that one can speak of pressure or a kind of blackmail, but not of an uprising or mutiny. 6 2 4 7

A third interpretation is that the Bolsheviks staged it. Raised by George Katkov in 1961 and developed by Yuri Felshtinsky from 1985, it argues from the light punishments, Dzerzhinsky's signature and the benefit of the one-party system that Dzerzhinsky organised the assassination. Felshtinsky himself first said Lenin knew, then in a 1990 article recast it as a plot of some Left SR committee members with Dzerzhinsky and probably Bukharin and Pyatakov. Scholars such as Razgon and Ovrutsky have rebutted it. The heart of the criticism is that it wipes out a party congress resolution, a Central Committee decision and the participants' own admissions on conjecture alone. No direct evidence for the claim has emerged. Benefiting from an event does not make one its author. The episode was later put to other uses too. In 1935 Vatsetis claimed that Trotsky had staged it, but he was executed in 1938, and at the Bukharin trial of 1938 Karelin was brought in as a witness and gave "testimony" that Bukharin and the Left SRs had conspired in 1918 to take power. 6 2 4 25 24

How did the film The Sixth of July portray the event?

The work that did most to bring the event to the Soviet public was the 1968 Mosfilm picture The Sixth of July. Mikhail Shatrov adapted it from his own play, Yuli Karasik directed, and Alfred Schnittke wrote the score. Made in black and white for the fiftieth anniversary, it won a special prize at the Karlovy Vary festival in Czechoslovakia. Yuri Kayurov plays Lenin, Vasily Lanovoy Dzerzhinsky and Alla Demidova Spiridonova, with Armen Dzhigarkhanyan (Proshian), Vyacheslav Shalevich (Blumkin), Nikolai Volkov (Mirbach) and Yuri Nazarov (Aleksandrovich). The 1953 film Hostile Whirlwinds had earlier treated Dzerzhinsky and this suppression. 17 3 2

The film's main line follows the record: the congress at the Bolshoi, the arrests of Dzerzhinsky and Latsis, the deployment of the Latvian Riflemen and the resumption of the congress on 9 July. Its frame, though, is the official Soviet interpretation, that the Left SRs tried to wrest power from the Bolsheviks. Its plot, for example, has the assassination decided at an emergency Central Committee meeting on 6 July, whereas, as seen above, Blumkin testified to instructions on 4 July, and how the decision was reached remains unclear. The film is thus both a record of the event and evidence of how the Soviet Union wished to remember it. 17 10 11