October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

  Kornilov mooted the possibility of positions for Kerensky and Savinkov in this government, and asked Lvov to urge them for their own safety to repair to Mogilev within two days. Lvov remained blithely untroubled throughout the rest of the discussion, suggesting various other figures for a cabinet. But after the meeting had ended and Lvov prepared to board his train back to Petrograd, perhaps misjudging his visitor’s loyalties, perhaps not caring, Zavoiko, with swaggering arrogance, made a shocking, casual pronouncement.

  ‘Kerensky is needed as a name for the soldiers for ten days or so,’ he said, ‘after which he will be eliminated.’

  Lvov sat stunned in his carriage as the train pulled away. He was finally, dimly aware that Kerensky’s aspirations and Kornilov’s might not, shall we say, perfectly overlap.

  Kornilov placed the Third Corps – the cavalry requested by Savinkov! – on alert. He had Krimov draft an order for distribution upon his entry to Petrograd, announcing the imposition of martial law, a curfew and the banning of strikes and meetings. Disobedience, the leaflet read, would be harshly met: ‘the troops will not fire into the air’. Yet more soldiers made for Petrograd, in preparation for its forthcoming military occupation and policing.

  As previously arranged, Kornilov telegrammed Savinkov, telling him the forces would be in place by the evening of the 28th. ‘I request that Petrograd be proclaimed under martial law on 29 August’: thus, courteously, Kornilov prepared to bring the revolution to an end.

  The hard-right press warned of leftist massacres on the 27th. Provocateurs provoked: socialists received multiple reports of ‘strangers in soldiers’ tunics’ trying to whip up insurrection. Kerensky’s intended collaboration with Kornilov did not preclude the continuance of other, chaotic right-wing putschist plans.

  The air stank of counterrevolution. On 26 August, the Petrograd Trade Union Soviet and Central Soviet of Factory-Shop Committees jointly endorsed the Interdistrict Conference’s call for a Committee of Public Safety.

  This was the cauldron into which Lvov returned. He hastened to the Winter Palace.

  Savinkov had just reported to Kerensky on his own cordial meeting with Kornilov when Lvov arrived. Reassured by Savinkov’s account, Kerensky asked Lvov what he had learnt. And then he listened in growing, bewildered horror.

  Lvov relayed to Kerensky as demands those preferences Kornilov had expressed from among the options Lvov had put to him – on behalf, Kornilov had believed, of Kerensky himself. Kornilov wanted Kerensky to come to Mogilev, Lvov said, but warned that the invitation was dangerous, as he had heard from Zavoiko’s own mouth. Kerensky, he insisted, must flee.

  Kerensky laughed in nervous disbelief.

  ‘This’, Lvov said, face like flint, ‘is no time for jokes.’

  Kerensky struggled to make sense of what he was hearing. He had Lvov put Kornilov’s ‘demands’ in writing. Martial law; all authority including civil to devolve to the commander-in-chief; all ministers, including Kerensky, to resign. What Kornilov had thought was a discussion of possibilities now read as the declaration of a putsch.

  Reeling, Kerensky asked Lvov to meet him at the Ministry of War at 8 p.m., to speak directly with Kornilov: he wanted to be absolutely certain of what was afoot. But there was to be a final absurdity. Lvov was late for the appointment. At 8:30, therefore, so agitated he could not wait, Kerensky wired Kornilov and simply pretended that Lvov was with him. And the farce unfolded in clicks and crackles, recording every back-and-forth in the ribbon of text.

  Kerensky: ‘Good day, General. V. N. Lvov and Kerensky on the line. We ask you to confirm that Kerensky is to act according to the communication made to him by Vladimir Nikolaevich.’

  Kornilov: ‘Good day, Alexander Fedorovich, good day, Vladimir Nikolaevich. To confirm again the outline of the present situation I believe the country and the army are in, which I asked V. N. to convey to you, I declare again that the events of the past few days and those I can see coming make it imperative to reach a definite decision in the shortest possible time.’

  Kerensky now impersonated Lvov. ‘I, Vladimir Nikolaevich, ask whether it is necessary to act on that definite decision which you asked me to communicate privately to Alexander Fedorovich. Without your personal confirmation, Alexander Fedorovich hesitates to give me his full confidence.’

  Kornilov: ‘Yes, I confirm that I asked you to convey to Alexander Fedorovich my urgent request that he come to Mogilev.’

  Kerensky, hollow-chested, had Kornilov verify that Savinkov, too, should come. ‘Believe me,’ Kornilov added, ‘only my recognition of the responsibility of the moment makes me so persistent in my request.’

  ‘Shall we come only in case of demonstrations, of which there are rumours, or in any case?’ Kerensky asked.

  Kornilov: ‘In any case.’

  The connection broke, ending the most epochal talking-at-cross-purposes in history.

  At his headquarters, Kornilov exhaled mightily in relief. Kerensky, he thought, would now come to Mogilev, and submit to – even join – a government under him.

  Kerensky, meanwhile, believed ‘the definite decision’ which Kornilov had just validated was not just that he, Kerensky, should come to him, but that Kornilov would take dictatorial powers. That Kerensky had been given an ultimatum. That he was being dispensed with.

  Had Lvov not warned him to run for his life?

  When Lvov at last showed up, Kerensky had the startled man arrested.

  His own recent plans for martial law had dragged Kerensky so far right he did not know if he could still now turn to the Soviet for support, nor how the Petrograd masses would respond to any of his appeals. At a hasty cabinet meeting, he read out the transcript ‘proving’ Kornilov’s ‘treachery’. He demanded the astonished ministers grant him unlimited authority against the coming danger. The Kadets, deeply imbricated with the Kornilovite milieu, objected, but the majority gave Kerensky a free hand. They resigned as he requested, remaining only in caretaker capacities.

  Thus, at 4 a.m. on 27 August, the Second Coalition ended.

  Once more, Kerensky telegrammed Kornilov. ‘I order you immediately to turn over your office to General Lukomsky,’ he dictated, and the keys tapped out, ‘who is to take over temporarily the duties of commander-in-chief, until the arrival of the new commander-in-chief. You are instructed to come immediately to Petrograd.’

  That done, he retired to his rooms, right next door to where Lvov was being held. Kerensky tried to calm his own nerves by bellowing arias. The sound of his voice went straight through the wall, waking his confused informant and keeping him awake all night.

  Sunday 27 August, the day of Soviet celebration, dawned warm and clear and tense. ‘Sinister people are circulating rumours of a rising set for today and allegedly organised by our party,’ warned the Bolsheviks’ Rabochy. ‘The CC implores workers and soldiers not to yield to provocations … and not to take part in any action.’ The party’s fears were still more of threats from within, from provocateurs, than of those from without.

  And the conspirators waited for their moment. That morning, and for the next two days, Colonel L. P. Dyusimeter and P. N. Finisov of the Republican Centre, and Colonel V. I. Sidorin, their liaison with the Stavka, bar-hopped around the drinking dens of Petrograd, waiting for news of Krimov, ready to unleash their coup.

  A little after 8 a.m. on Sunday, Kornilov received Kerensky’s telegram. At first he was stupefied. Swiftly, he was apoplectic.

  General Lukomsky, no less blindsided, refused the position Kerensky had thrust on him. ‘It is too late to halt an operation started with your approval,’ he wired back, the bewilderment in the last three words palpable. ‘For the sake of Russia’s salvation you must go with Kornilov, not against him … Kornilov’s dismissal would bring horrors the likes of which Russia has never seen.’

  Kerensky put Savinkov in charge of military preparations for defence against the coup, while Kornilov directed the Third Corps under Krimov to occupy the city. Kerensky sent wor
d urging them to stop, assuring the men that there was no insurrection to ‘overcome’ – the supposed pretext for their arrival. They did not pause.

  Garbled rumours of a rift between Kornilov and Kerensky began to spread through Petrograd. Those rumours, of course, also implied a pre-rift agreement.

  In the mid-afternoon, Soviet leaders and their parties gathered in emergency session. They were not even certain what it was that they needed to discuss or debate. The situation was tense but incomprehensible.

  It was only in the early evening that matters became clearer, when Kerensky released a proclamation. Through Lvov, he announced, Kornilov had demanded civil and military power to inaugurate a counterrevolutionary regime. In the face of this grave threat, the government had mandated Kerensky to take countermeasures. For that reason, the announcement made clear, martial law was now declared.

  Kornilov swiftly responded to Kerensky’s statement, insisting – truthfully – that Lvov was not his representative.

  ‘Our great motherland is dying,’ he stated. ‘Under the pressure of the Bolshevik majority in the Soviets, the Provisional Government acts in complete harmony with … the German General Staff … I want nothing for myself, except the preservation of a Great Russia, and I vow to bring the people by means of victory … to a Constituent Assembly, where they themselves will decide their fate.’

  Generals Klembovsky, Baluev, Shcherbatov, Denikin and others all pledged their allegiance to Kornilov. The Union of Officers enthusiastically telegrammed army and naval headquarters around the country, proclaiming the end of the Provisional Government and urging ‘tough and unflinching’ support for Kornilov.

  Kerensky ineffectually declared battle; Kornilov declared war.

  Instantly a plethora of ad hoc committees sprang up to mobilise citizens against the coup, to procure weapons, coordinate supplies, communications, services. Vikzhel, the Menshevik-controlled All-Russian Executive Committee of Railway Workers, formed a bureau for struggle against Kornilov, working with the Interdistrict Conference. Word was dispatched to Kronstadt. The left gathered its forces. At Smolny, party fractions scrambled.

  By sour irony, that very night in the Narva District, the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee met for that session scheduled three days earlier – in response to the Vyborg Bolsheviks’ concern at the party’s inadequate attention to the counterrevolutionary threat. The leadership had almost certainly been intending to pooh-pooh such anxieties: now as the thirty-six party officials met, Kornilov’s troops descended on Petrograd. Rarely can doom-mongers have felt so vindicated.

  And the Vyborg rank and file were angry not only with the leadership’s tardiness in assessing the baleful situation, but also with the ambiguous tactical resolutions of the recent Sixth Congress. One, ‘On the Political Situation’, encouraged cooperating with all forces combatting counterrevolution – while ‘On Unification’ declared the Mensheviks to be permanent deserters from the proletarian camp, which would preclude cooperation with them. How, then, to proceed?

  The meeting was fractious. Andrei Bubnov, a career militant recently arrived from Moscow to join the CC, warned his comrades to trust neither Mensheviks nor SRs. During the Moscow State Conference, he told them, ‘First the government turned to us for help and then we were spat upon.’ He was against collaboration in any self-defence organisations, insisting that the Bolsheviks work alone, to steer the masses against Kornilov and Kerensky both. Against him, Kalinin, from what was still, contra Lenin, the leadership’s mainstream, insisted that if Kornilov really were on the verge of overthrowing Kerensky, it would be absurd not to take the position that the Bolsheviks would have to intervene on Kerensky’s side.

  Hostility exploded. Radical speakers slammed party authorities for lack of leadership, for ‘defencism’, for acting as a ‘coolant’ on the masses, for operating ‘in a fog’ during the July Days, and since. The meeting degenerated into a welter of grievances, resentments and generalised attacks. Rage distracted from the urgency of the moment, until at last someone shouted: ‘Let’s get down to concrete defence measures!’

  Everyone was clear that it was crucial to mobilise as widely as possible against Kornilov. The Bolsheviks established a communications network, drafted leaflets calling workers and soldiers to arms. Members were allocated to coordinate with mass organisations. And everyone, including Bubnov, agreed that the party must maintain contact with the Soviet leadership’s defence organ – ‘for purposes’, it was vaguely glossed, ‘of information’.

  For Bubnov, then, ‘informational’ exchange with the Soviet was indispensable, even while ‘there must be no interaction with the Soviet majority’. This was not a ‘dialectical synthesis’ so much as a holding fudge demanded by the scale of the crisis. Kerensky and Kornilov were equally bad, but at that moment, Kornilov was more equally bad.

  At 11:30 p.m., the Soviet Executive Committee met to discuss their relations with government, given the emerging scandal of Kerensky and Kornilov’s recent alliance and its collapse, and given that Kerensky was now calling for a Directory, a small cabinet with authoritarian powers. More urgently, they debated how to preserve the revolution.

  For the moderates, Kerensky, even now, and however critically, had to be defended.

  ‘The only person who can form a government at this time is Comrade Kerensky,’ said the Menshevik Vainshtein. If Kerensky and the government were to fall, ‘the revolutionary cause will be lost’.

  The Bolsheviks took the hardest line: that the Provisional Government in toto could not be trusted. They wanted the instigation of democracy in the army, the transfer of land to peasants, the eight-hour day, democratic control of industry and finance, and the devolution of power to revolutionary workers, peasants and soldiers. However. Having made their points, the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Executive Committee, more conciliatory than Lenin or their Vyborg comrades, did not tie up proceedings with a resolution. They kept their oppositionism trenchant but abstract.

  Astonishingly, they even abstained on a resolution that, while opposing the Directory he wanted, granted Kerensky power not only to maintain the existing form of government but also to fill cabinet vacancies with carefully chosen Kadets. More astonishingly still, they voted with Mensheviks and SRs to convene (yet) another ‘state conference’ – though this time made up exclusively of ‘democratic elements’, the left – to discuss the government question, and act as overseer until the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.

  But when its representatives told Kerensky of this Soviet decision, he remained adamant that he must create a six-man Directory. It was deadlock, and the Soviet’s move.

  ‘All directories spawn counterrevolution,’ protested Martov in the Soviet, to vigorous agreement. Lunacharsky, too, was magnificent in opposition. He branded both Kornilov and the Provisional Government counterrevolutionary, and demanded the transfer of power to a government of workers, peasants and soldiers – which here meant the soviets. Thus Lunacharsky abruptly reintroduced the content, if not quite the form, of the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’. The very slogan Lenin had decreed obsolete.

  But the night brought to the exhausted delegates word that general after general was declaring for Kornilov. Pressed on the government question by what felt increasingly like necessity, the meeting moved slowly rightward.

  At last the Executive Committee adopted a resolution from Tsereteli supporting Kerensky, and leaving to him government’s form. This was to rubber-stamp his Directory.

  The Bolsheviks in the chamber vehemently contested the resolution. But even so, in dramatic evidence of their moderation, by their party standards, they agreed that if that government were seriously committed to fighting the counterrevolution, they would agree to ‘form a military alliance with it’.

  The enemy approached. The Soviet issued emergency orders to provincial soviets, to railway workers and soldiers to the effect that the Stavka must be defied, counterrevolutionary communications disrupted. They called for the Soviet’s order
s – and the government’s – to be immediately obeyed.

  The collaboration of that night was not all from the Bolsheviks present with those on their right: it flowed the other way, too. When Weinstein, a right Menshevik, proposed a dedicated group to organise military defence, everyone there agreed the Bolsheviks must be integral to it.

  On 28 August, Prince Trubetskoy of the foreign ministry telegrammed Tereshchenko from Mogilev. ‘The entire commanding personnel, the overwhelming majority of the officers and the best fighting units … will follow Kornilov,’ he predicted. ‘The entire Cossack host, the majority of the military schools, and the best combat units … Added to this … is the superiority of the military organisation over the weakness of the government organs.’

  In Petrograd, mobilisation against the counterrevolutionaries accelerated, but the news was unremittingly bleak. Kornilov’s troops had reached Luga, the city heard, and the revolutionary garrison had surrendered. Nine troop trains had hauled passed Orodezh. Reaction was on its way.

  The response from the Soviet and many on the left, Bolsheviks not excluded, was panicked. But, in large numbers, Petrograd’s workers and soldiers reacted differently. Trubetskoy’s glum claim, that ‘the majority of the popular and urban masses have grown indifferent to the existing order and will submit to any cracking of the whip’, was startlingly wrong.

  Soldiers mobilised in their thousands against the coming coup. In factories, alarms and whistles blared to summon the workers together. They took stock, reinforced security, organised themselves into fighting detachments.

  Some organisations had foreseen the danger. The Petrograd Interdistrict Committee of Soviets, for example, had been warning of such a threat for some time, and it was primed to take prompt action. Vikzhel directed that ‘suspicious telegrams’ be held up and suspect troop movement tracked. By the afternoon of the 28th, the group suggested by Weinstein, the Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution, was operational.