As agreed, the committee comprised representatives of Mensheviks, SRs, Bolsheviks and other democratic organisations. In Sukhanov’s words,
the masses, in so far as they were organised, were organised by the Bolsheviks and followed them … Without [them], the committee was impotent … it could only have passed the time with appeals and idle speeches … With the Bolsheviks, the committee had at its disposal the full power of the organised workers and soldiers … And despite their being in the minority, it was quite clear that … control was in the hands of the Bolsheviks.
The committee liaised with the self-organised, makeshift defence groups that were springing up. One crucial task – and for the Bolsheviks, a condition of participation – was the arming of workers’ militias. A transformation of 40,000 people practically overnight. Toolers, metalworkers, people of all trades becoming an army. The chambers of industrial plants resonated with the sound of inexpert marching, the music of a new militia.
‘The factory looked like a camp,’ Rakilov, one of these Red Guards, as they were with increasing frequency known, would remember. ‘When you came in, you could see the fitters at the bench, but they had their packs hanging by them, and their guns were leaning against the bench.’
Forty thousand people swiftly organised into these new roles. They took time to pose for photographs with their units. They steadied their weapons for the cameras with variable skill, their faces set, fretful, excited, determined. Guard after proud guard rigged out not just in work clothes or makeshift militaria but in their very best, as if for church, a wedding, a funeral. They were dressed up for an occasion in those stiff suits, their ties straight and tight, bowlers or homburgs on their heads, kneeling with rifles at the ready. The occasion was self-defence.
The Bolsheviks negotiated their tactical contradictions. They collaborated with moderates, but in such a way that these armed workers were at the vanguard of the defence.
In Petrograd itself, most military school cadets backed Kornilov, but that by no means meant all were willing to fight for him, while the Cossacks remained neutral, refusing to fight for either side. All other units in the city sent detachments to construct defences at its vulnerable points.
In the strained military atmosphere, it was dangerous to show open support for Kornilov. In the streets of the Vyborg district, enraged soldiers murdered several officers who refused to acknowledge the authority of a revolutionary commissar. In Helsingfors, the crew of the battleship Petropavlovsk voted to execute officers who would not pledge their allegiance to ‘democratic organisations’.
The Schlusselburg gunpowder works sent a bargeload of grenades to the capital, for distribution by factory committees. Estonian and Finnish soviets sent word of their solidarity. Throughout Petrograd, soviet posters urged discipline, excoriating the scourge of drunkenness. The city Duma formed a commission to aid with food supplies. And most importantly, it selected deputies to go to Luga, for the purpose of agitating among Kornilov’s troops.
In the south of Petrograd, armed workers erected barricades. They strung barbed wire across the roads, dug trenches in the city’s approaches. The suburbs became military camps.
Initiative was beginning to slip from the right. They could feel it. They pushed back.
In the afternoon of the 28th, Milyukov offered himself as a go-between, in the hopes that he might persuade Kerensky to stand down. The high-ranking Kadet Kishkin pressured Kerensky to resign in favour of Alexeev – who supported Kornilov. A majority of Kerensky’s (acting) ministers were quickly in favour of this proposal, and even foreign representatives were advising him to consider ‘negotiation’.
The Soviet, however, categorically opposed any such move. In view of the sheer scale of revolutionary defence to which the Soviet had swiftly made itself key, and uneasily aware of the likely resistance of workers and soldiers if he went against this opposition, Kerensky had to reject the pressure to negotiate.
On the 28th, Dyusimeter and Finisov quietly set out for Luga. They left Sidorin behind them, with funds from Putilov and the Society for the Economic Rehabilitation of Russia to finance a coup when they sent word. His job would be to concoct a ‘Bolshevik riot’, to justify military repression.
But setbacks for the right began to come faster. That evening, the Ussuriysky Mounted Division was blocked on its approach to the city: it reached Yamburg only to discover that the Vikzhel had got its message through: railway workers had ruined the tracks. They were blocked, wrenched up and bent out of line, splayed. Elements of the Savage Division did get as far as Vyritsa, only thirty-seven miles from the capital. But there that train, too, met torn-up rails. The tracks of the revolution jutted like broken bone.
Kornilov’s troops were cut off – but they were not alone.
Here to meet them where they found themselves stranded were scores of emissaries. They came from the Committee for Struggle, from district soviets, from factories, garrisons, Tsentroflot, from the Naval Committee, the Second Baltic Fleet Crew. And locals had come, too. All stamping across the scrub and through the trees towards that wheezing train. They came with agitation in mind. They came to beg the Savage Division to resist being used by counterrevolution.
By revolutionary fortune, the Executive Committee of the Union of Muslim Soviets was visiting Petrograd when the crisis began. It sent its own delegation to meet the engine – one of whom was a grandson of Imam Shamil. Shamil was a legendary nineteenth-century liberation hero of the Caucasus – including to the men of the Savage Division. Now a man of that celebrated blood was imploring them to stand with the revolution they had been sent to bury.
The soldiers of the Savage Division were, in fact, unaware of the purpose of their transfer. They were not predisposed to support Kornilov, and the more they heard from those pleading with them, the less they were minded to. They listened and argued and considered what they were told as darkness came, and on into the night. Their train and its surrounds became a debating chamber, a gathering of urgent discussions. Their officers despaired.
In Petrograd, alarmed by reports that officers of certain units were aiding Kornilov with their own ca’cannies, sluggish obedience and inadequate resolve, the Committee for Struggle sent commissars to oversee the mobilisation. The city hummed with Red Guards. Three thousand armed sailors arrived from Kronstadt to lend assistance. The Central Soviet of Factory-Shop Committees coordinated preparations. The Union of Metalworkers – by far the most powerful union in Russia – put its money and expertise at the Committee for Struggle’s disposal.
Kerensky’s appointees to the effort, Savinkov and Filonenko, strove to keep watch on the Bolsheviks at least as assiduously as to forestall Kornilov. The notion that these two were in charge of Petrogad’s defences was an obvious fiction. At best, they were onlookers to Soviet and grassroots work.
The Bolsheviks were indispensable to the measures. So much so that when several of their members escaped from detention in the Second District Militia headquarters, the Committee for Struggle agreed, extraordinarily, that ‘in order to participate in the common struggle’ they should remain free.
Concretely, the party’s approach was to push for the maximum possible bottom-up mobilisation against Kornilov, without supporting the Provisional Government. The journalist Chamberlin describes them as defending the government with ‘tongue in cheek’.
And, amid the self-organisation and mass meetings, a familiar demand returned. ‘In view of the emerging bourgeois counter-revolutionary movement,’ insisted a group of pipe factory workers, ‘all power must be transferred to the soviet of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies.’ On the 29th, thousands of Putilov workers announced for rule by ‘representatives of the revolutionary classes’. Workers at the Novo-Admiralteysky shipbuilding plant demanded power ‘be put into the hands of the workers, soldiers and poorer peasantry, and be responsible to the soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants deputies’.
‘All Power to the Soviets’ had definitively
returned.
‘No disturbances expected,’ Kerensky wired to Krimov, desperate to keep him away. ‘There is no need for your corps.’
As if, by that point, Kerensky controlled Krimov. But no more did Krimov control his own troops. The Ussuriysky Cossack Mounted Division, still stalled at Yamburg (now known as Kingisepp), was surrounded by crowds from the Narva and Yamburg soviets, military units, mass organisations and local factories, plus a delegation led by Tsereteli. A reading of Kerensky’s proclamation about Kornilov was enough to dampen the Cossacks’ resolve.
Krimov himself, with the First Don Cossacks, was blocked, hemmed in, besieged, by men of the 20,000-strong garrison at Luga. Street orators circled the train endlessly, yelling entreaties through the windows, to the Cossacks’ bewilderment and Krimov’s rage. Kornilov ordered him to push on the last miles to Petrograd, but the Luga garrison would not allow it – and by that time, the Cossacks were not minded to argue. The incensed Krimov could only watch his men shuffle away to various spontaneous mass meetings, their mettle dwindling before his eyes.
Late on the 29th, in Petrograd, the telegram of his co-conspirators Dyusimeter and Finisov at last reached Sidorin. A chilling prod: ‘Act at once according to instructions.’ They were requesting that helpful riot.
But it was too late, as even its supporters on the right had been forced to acknowledge. General Alexeev, seeing that the cause of the coup was hopeless, threatened to commit suicide if the plan to engineer a provocation went ahead.
By 30 August, the Kornilov Revolt had collapsed.
‘Without firing a single shot we were victorious,’ Kerensky wrote, ten years later. The ‘we’ was breathtakingly tendentious.
Lenin received all Russian news after a delay. He was late to the news of the threat, and late to the news that it had been averted. On the 30th, as the CC met in Petrograd, a city now breathing out, he wrote to them in haste.
What Lenin sent was not an explicit mea culpa for claiming that counterrevolution was ‘a carefully thought-out ploy on the part of the Mensheviks and SRs’. Yet the letter perhaps contained an implicit one, in its expression of sheer astonishment at this ‘most unexpected … and downright unbelievably sharp turn in events’. Of course, any such change must entail a shift. ‘Like every sharp turn,’ he wrote, ‘it [the circumstance] calls for a revision and change of tactics.’
In Zurich earlier that year, trying to convert the Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu to revolutionary defeatism, Lenin had coaxed him with what would become a famous phrase. ‘One must always’, he said, ‘try to be as radical as reality itself.’ And what is a radicalism that does not surprise?
Reality, radical, now stunned him.
It has sometimes been insinuated that during the Kornilov Crisis, the Bolsheviks pursued their energetic, effective non-collaborative cooperation with the government under Lenin’s guidance. This is false: by the time his instructions began to arrive, the party had been in the Committee for Struggle for days, and the revolt was largely played out. The course he outlined, however, did amount to a pleasing post factum legitimation.
He did not spell out what he would consider ‘permissible’ cooperation with the Mensheviks and SRs he had so recently denounced as beyond the pale, but he did imply its necessity. And ‘we shall fight Kornilov, of course, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky’, he said, which was, broadly, just how things had been. The very day he wrote, the Moscow Bolshevik Sotsial-demokrat said: ‘The revolutionary proletariat cannot tolerate either the dictatorship of Kornilov or of Kerensky.’
‘We expose his weakness,’ Lenin wrote, by pointing out Kerensky’s vacillation and by making maximalist demands – the transfer of estates to peasants, workers’ control, the arming of workers. That last, of course, had already been met. The approving scribble Lenin appended to his letter before sending it was understandable: ‘Having read six issues of Rabochy after this was written, I must say our views fully coincide.’
On the 30th, Kornilov’s crack Savage Division raised a red flag. The Ussuriysky Cossacks pledged loyalty to the Provisional Government. General Denikin was incarcerated by his own troops. Commanders from other fronts began to announce for the government, against the rightist conspiracy. At Luga, where Krimov received spurious alerts from Finisov and Dyusimeter that ‘Bolshevik disorders’ would break out any moment, the Don Cossacks had become so radicalised that they muttered about arresting him.
That afternoon, an envoy from the government arrived. The man promised Krimov safety, and invited him to meet Kerensky in the capital.
In his ineffectual way, Kerensky wanted to clean house. But, even though it had saved Petrograd, the left frightened him almost as much as the right. For example, while he sacked Savinkov for his proximity to various plotters, he replaced him with Palchinsky, whose politics were extremely similar – and one of whose first actions was to close down the Bolshevik Rabochy and Gorky’s Novaya zhizn. As if to underline the point, as chief of staff Kerensky appointed General Alexeev, a man virtually identical in his views to Kornilov.
The ship sinking, rats began to scurry, shocked, shocked! by any suggestion that they might have supported Kornilov. Rodzianko declared grandly that ‘to start internecine warfare and argument now is a crime against the motherland’. All he knew of the conspiracy, he blustered, was what he read in the papers.
In his cell, the preposterous Vladimir Lvov got word that the tide had turned. He sent Kerensky his hearty congratulations, delighting that he had ‘delivered a friend from Kornilov’s clutches’.
That evening, when Krimov arrived, it was to a quiet city.
On the morning of 31 August, Krimov and Kerensky met for a heated discussion in the Winter Palace. Precisely what was said is unknown.
It is likely that Kerensky accused Krimov of mutiny, which Krimov would have unconvincingly denied. Like Kornilov, Krimov was furious at what seemed Kerensky’s duplicity, his inexplicable turnabout. At last too enervated to continue, Krimov agreed to a further interview and repaired to a friend’s apartment.
‘The last card for saving the motherland has been beaten,’ he said to his host. ‘Life is no longer worth living.’
Krimov excused himself to a private room. There he wrote a note to Kornilov, took out his pistol and shot himself in the heart.
The contents of his last letter remain unknown.
Kerensky ordered a commission of inquiry into the attempted coup. But still he tried to ingratiate himself with a right who despised him, limiting the investigation’s remit to individuals, rather than institutions. He proceeded with his plans to set up an authoritarian coalition of right socialists and liberals, strengthening the power of the Kadets.
But on the streets of Petrograd, it was the radical workers and soldiers who had defeated the conspiracy, and they were buoyed with confidence. The failure of the Kornilov Revolt pulled the political lever left again. Soldiers of the Petrograd Garrison proclaimed that ‘any coalition will be fought by all loyal sons of the people as they fought Kornilov’. Now they demanded a government of workers and poor peasants. The Second Machine Gun Regiment insisted that ‘the only way out of the present situation lies in transferring power into the hands of the working people’.
Previously neutral units were beginning to turn, as were workers in plants under the sway of moderates. A plethora of motions – Bolshevik, Left SR, Menshevik-International, unaffiliated – insisted on power to the soviets, left unity, a crackdown on counterrevolution, an exclusively socialist government to end the war. Martov’s comrade Larin reached the limit of exasparation with the pro-coalition Mensheviks, and came over to the Bolsheviks, along with several hundred workers.
Late in the afternoon of the 31st, the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviet debated the government, and its relation to it. Evoking the power and unity the Soviet had shown against Kornilov, its ability to save the city, Kamenev put forward a motion.
In Bolshevik terms, this proposal, like
Kamenev himself, was decidedly moderate – but it represented a fundamental leftward break with Soviet practice. A repudiation of compromise. It called for a national government of representatives of the working class and poor peasantry only. The confiscation of manorial land without compensation, and its transfer to the peasants. Workers’ supervision of industry. A universal democratic peace. Albeit Kamenev airily announced that he was not ‘concerned … with the purely technical aspects of forming a government’, his motion was interpreted as a call for all power to the soviets.
At 7:30 p.m. the Executive Committees adjourned without a vote. Shortly after, the Petrograd Soviet itself met in its place. The mass of delegates talked for a long time under the harsh glare of the lamps, as the hands of the clocks reached slowly skyward. They discussed Kamenev’s proposal as August ended and September began, and they continued to discuss it as the world turned towards a new day.
There seemed to be a new, shared will for a government of the left. A pathway to socialist unity. To power.
9
September: Compromise
and Its Discontents
At 5 a.m. on 1 September, after a long, weary debate on Kamenev’s motion and on their relationship to the government in general, the Petrograd Soviet voted.
The SRs suggested the Executive Committees appoint a cabinet responsible to a ‘Provisional Revolutionary Government’, but still insisted that it include some bourgeois groups – though no Kadets. In these post-Kornilov hours, the Kadets were despised for their complicity in the conspiracies.
The SR proposal was rejected. Instead, the meeting voted in favour of Kamenev’s.
Soldiers outnumbered workers in the Soviet two to one, but many were still on duty, so only a relatively small fraction of the membership was present for the tally. And Kamenev’s proposal was ‘moderate’ compared to the ‘Leninism’ of the Sixth Party Congress. All the same, this was a profoundly charged moment.
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution Page 25
