On 3 August, after Japan asserted a right to send as many troops as it deemed necessary, the State Department had released a resume of the aide memoire to the press and with it a ‘most public and solemn’ announcement to the Russian people that the US Government contemplated ‘no interference with the political sovereignty of Russia, no intervention in her internal affairs … and no impairment of her territorial integrity, either now or hereafter’ – and that it ‘understood’ the Japanese Government would ‘issue a similar assurance’.35 62 5 An Armed Camp the revolutionary council of the republic As Lenin was leaving a mass meeting at a Moscow factory on the night of 30 August 1918, two young women approached him, and one of them fired three shots from a pistol, hitting him in the upper chest and left shoulder. That morning a former officer had shot and killed the chief of the Petrograd Cheka, Mikhail Uritskiy. Lenin’s wounds were severe enough to require more than a month’s recuperation but did not impair his control over the party and government. Uritskiy’s assassin was a member of an underground officers’ group, and the woman who shot Lenin, Fanya Kaplan, was an Anarchist turned Social Revolutionary. Although the incidents were probably entirely the work of those two individuals acting independently of each other and the groups with which they were associated, the coincidence, like that of 6 July, intensified the existing crisis atmosphere and provided the pretext for a drastic reaction. On the night of the 30th, Sverdlov addressed a report to ‘All Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ Red Army Men’s Deputies, All Armies, All, All, All!’ telling them there had been ‘an utterly foul assault on Comrade Lenin’ by ‘Social Revolutionary hirelings’ of the British and French to which the working class would ‘respond with merciless, massive terror against all enemies of the revolution’. Three days later, on 2 September, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (see n. 10, Ch. 4) declared a ‘massive Red terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents’.1 Along with the articles in Pravda and Izvestia proclaiming the Red Terror, accounts appeared describing an Anglo-French conspiracy to capture the Council of People’s Commissars and set up a military dictatorship in Moscow. They did not assert a direct connection to the attack on Lenin, but the resolution on the terror had charged ‘agents of degenerate socialism paid by Anglo-French imperialist gold’. Lockhart, as head of the British mission, was named as the chief conspirator. The plotters, had they been successful, were said to have planned to publish forged secret correspondence and treaties between Soviet Russia and Germany ‘in order to create a suitable atmosphere for renewing the war with Germany’.2 On 4 September, the papers published a decree passed in the All-Russia Central Executive Committee two days earlier stating that ‘face to face with imperialist predators … face to face with the yellow banner of treason raised the red army 1918–1941 by the Russian bourgeoisie …: the Soviet Republic is converted into an armed camp’. The decree dedicated the ‘entire strength and resources’ of the country to ‘armed struggle against aggressors’, obligated all citizens to carry out whatever duties were assigned to them for national defense, and specified that a Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic ‘with a single commander in chief’ would be created ‘to head all fronts and all military elements’.3 Trotskiy was in Moscow from 2 to 5 September, and he, no doubt, had much to do with the decrees on the Red Terror and the armed camp, the latter in particular. In it, he exploited the emotional storm then being generated to take the final and politically most controversial step in the transition to a regular armed force. The activation of a general headquarters had been under discussion throughout August. Podvoyskiy had proposed giving command authority to the Supreme Military Council. Yegorov had argued for a commander in chief responsible directly to the Council of People’s Commissars and a headquarters similar to the old Stavka that would serve the commander in chief and not a committee as the staff of the Supreme Military Council did. Trotskiy wanted to appoint a commanderin- chief and give him substantial freedom to exercise his professional judgment under close but restrained political control. At East Front, Trotskiy had found in Vatsetis the sort of man he wanted, energetic, optimistic, imperturbable. The generals in the Supreme Military Soviet, particularly Bonch-Bruyevich, considered Vatsetis, who had done poorly at the imperial general staff academy, unfit to command more than a regiment; but Trotskiy may have held that to have been a point in Vatsetis’s favor since it could immunize him against the peer pressure that was drawing others away from the Bolshevik service.
On 3 August, after Japan asserted a right to send as many troops as it deemed necessary, the State Department had released a resume of the aide memoire to the press and with it a ‘most public and solemn’ announcement to the Russian people that the US Government contemplated ‘no interference with the political sovereignty of Russia, no intervention in her internal affairs … and no impairment of her territorial integrity, either now or hereafter’ – and that it ‘understood’ the Japanese Government would ‘issue a similar assurance’.35 62 5 An Armed Camp the revolutionary council of the republic As Lenin was leaving a mass meeting at a Moscow factory on the night of 30 August 1918, two young women approached him, and one of them fired three shots from a pistol, hitting him in the upper chest and left shoulder. That morning a former officer had shot and killed the chief of the Petrograd Cheka, Mikhail Uritskiy. Lenin’s wounds were severe enough to require more than a month’s recuperation but did not impair his control over the party and government. Uritskiy’s assassin was a member of an underground officers’ group, and the woman who shot Lenin, Fanya Kaplan, was an Anarchist turned Social Revolutionary. Although the incidents were probably entirely the work of those two individuals acting independently of each other and the groups with which they were associated, the coincidence, like that of 6 July, intensified the existing crisis atmosphere and provided the pretext for a drastic reaction. On the night of the 30th, Sverdlov addressed a report to ‘All Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ Red Army Men’s Deputies, All Armies, All, All, All!’ telling them there had been ‘an utterly foul assault on Comrade Lenin’ by ‘Social Revolutionary hirelings’ of the British and French to which the working class would ‘respond with merciless, massive terror against all enemies of the revolution’. Three days later, on 2 September, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (see n. 10, Ch. 4) declared a ‘massive Red terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents’.1 Along with the articles in Pravda and Izvestia proclaiming the Red Terror, accounts appeared describing an Anglo-French conspiracy to capture the Council of People’s Commissars and set up a military dictatorship in Moscow. They did not assert a direct connection to the attack on Lenin, but the resolution on the terror had charged ‘agents of degenerate socialism paid by Anglo-French imperialist gold’. Lockhart, as head of the British mission, was named as the chief conspirator. The plotters, had they been successful, were said to have planned to publish forged secret correspondence and treaties between Soviet Russia and Germany ‘in order to create a suitable atmosphere for renewing the war with Germany’.2 On 4 September, the papers published a decree passed in the All-Russia Central Executive Committee two days earlier stating that ‘face to face with imperialist predators … face to face with the yellow banner of treason raised the red army 1918–1941 by the Russian bourgeoisie …: the Soviet Republic is converted into an armed camp’. The decree dedicated the ‘entire strength and resources’ of the country to ‘armed struggle against aggressors’, obligated all citizens to carry out whatever duties were assigned to them for national defense, and specified that a Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic ‘with a single commander in chief’ would be created ‘to head all fronts and all military elements’.3 Trotskiy was in Moscow from 2 to 5 September, and he, no doubt, had much to do with the decrees on the Red Terror and the armed camp, the latter in particular. In it, he exploited the emotional storm then being generated to take the final and politically most controversial step in the transition to a regular armed force. The activation of a general headquarters had been under discussion throughout August. Podvoyskiy had proposed giving command authority to the Supreme Military Council. Yegorov had argued for a commander in chief responsible directly to the Council of People’s Commissars and a headquarters similar to the old Stavka that would serve the commander in chief and not a committee as the staff of the Supreme Military Council did. Trotskiy wanted to appoint a commanderin- chief and give him substantial freedom to exercise his professional judgment under close but restrained political control. At East Front, Trotskiy had found in Vatsetis the sort of man he wanted, energetic, optimistic, imperturbable. The generals in the Supreme Military Soviet, particularly Bonch-Bruyevich, considered Vatsetis, who had done poorly at the imperial general staff academy, unfit to command more than a regiment; but Trotskiy may have held that to have been a point in Vatsetis’s favor since it could immunize him against the peer pressure that was drawing others away from the Bolshevik service.