Left SR uprising (1918)
좌파 사회혁명당 봉기 (1918)
The rising of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in Moscow on 6 and 7 July 1918 against the Brest-Litovsk peace and the requisitioning of grain in the villages. On 6 July the party members Yakov Blumkin and Nikolai Andreyev, who worked in the Cheka, assassinated the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach, and the party-controlled Cheka detachment of Dmitry Popov took the Cheka chairman Felix Dzerzhinsky hostage. On 7 July Vācietis's Latvian Riflemen crushed the revolt with artillery, the Left SRs were expelled from the soviets, and the Soviet government became a Bolshevik one-party government.
In depth
The Left SRs had formed a coalition government with the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution but left the Council of People's Commissars in March 1918 in protest at the Brest-Litovsk peace, while remaining in bodies such as the Cheka. Left in the minority at the 5th All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which opened on 4 July, the party's Central Committee resolved to assassinate the ambassador in order to rekindle the war with Germany and spark a popular rising. On the afternoon of 6 July Blumkin and Andreyev entered the embassy with Cheka papers bearing Dzerzhinsky's forged signature, shot Mirbach, threw grenades and fled to the headquarters of Popov's detachment. Dzerzhinsky, who came to demand the killers, was seized there, and the rebels took 27 Bolshevik officials hostage, among them the Cheka deputy chairman Martin Latsis, occupied the General Post Office and sent out appeals. Yet Popov's detachment of about 800 men only held two buildings and never moved on the Kremlin, and Maria Spiridonova and about 450 Left SR delegates were detained by Yakov Peters's Chekists and Latvian Riflemen in the Bolshoi Theatre where the congress sat.
Lenin gathered Vācietis's Latvian Riflemen, almost the only reliable unit of the Moscow garrison, and on 7 July they shelled the headquarters of Popov's detachment, ending the revolt by about 2 p.m. The Cheka deputy chairman and party member Vyacheslav Aleksandrovich and twelve Chekists from Popov's unit were shot the next day. When the congress resumed on 9 July it condemned the revolt as an attempt to seize power and expelled from the soviets the Left SRs who did not condemn their Central Committee, and the Commissar of the Interior Grigory Petrovsky ordered their expulsion from all local soviets. The Eastern Front commander and party member Mikhail Muravyov rose at Simbirsk on 10 July, arresting the 1st Army commander Mikhail Tukhachevsky among others and declaring war on Germany, but was shot on 11 July while being arrested at a meeting of the provincial executive committee. Historians remain divided over whether the episode was an attempt to take power or an armed demonstration meant to force the Bolsheviks to change course.