4 - The July Days

Summary

It was to Kronstadt, as to its natural ally, that the First Regiment of Machine-Gunners turned on 3 July when it decided to demonstrate and to force the Central Executive Committee of Soviets to assume power. After all, had not the regiment demonstrated, fully armed, on 28 May, in support of Kronstadt and its defiance of the provisional government, and was it too much to ask it now to reciprocate?

Indeed, in the afternoon of 3 July, while the Kronstadt Executive Committee was busy clipping the wings of commissar Parchevsky who had presumed to publish a news-sheet, Kronshtadt, without the Soviet's permission, it interrupted its session to summon three emissaries from the First Machine-Gun Regiment who had arrived in Kronstadt and had begun to agitate among the troops of the garrison and call them to Petrograd in their support. Two members of the Petrograd Bolshevik Military Organization, I. F. Kazakov and P. Koshelev, and the Anarcho-Communist Pavel Pavlov, the emissaries in question, duly appeared and immediately appealed for armed support for the gunners and the Petrograd garrison which, they claimed, had taken to the streets to urge ‘All Power to Soviets’. Told by Pokrovsky, chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet, that this was impossible unless backed by ‘directives’ from the Central All-Russian Executive Committee of Soviets (elected by the First Congress of Soviets in June), they then accused him of supporting the bourgeoisie and declared that they would take no notice of the Kronstadt Executive Committee, but would appeal directly to the masses.