A naive observer hopeful for social peace might see moments to strike optimism, as when Tsereteli made a point of reaching out to shake hands with the prominent industrialist Bublikov. But they were few and unconvincing. When the Kadet Maklakov demanded that the government ‘take the daring steps necessary … [because] the judgement day is approaching’, the right cheered and the left sat mute. When Chkheidze read out VTsIK’s platform, the left applauded and the right scowled. One side clapped, the other sat like stone. The other cheered, the one booed.
On the 12th, Kornilov arrived in Moscow, flanked again by his Turkmen guards. He was met at the station by a throng of military cadets, a band, and representatives from one of the Womens’ Battalions of Death. These all-female volunteer army units had been set up at Kerensky’s request under the remarkable young Novgorod soldier Maria Bochkareva, who had at the start of the war inveigled royal permission to join the army, and distinguished herself in bloody combat. Kornilov passed through the military escort into a shower of petals scattered by an ecstatic upper-class crowd.
In his welcome speech, the Kadet Rodichev entreated him: ‘Save Russia, and a thankful people will crown you.’ With heavy-handed symbolism, Kornilov’s first stop was at the Iversky shrine, where the tsars had traditionally worshipped. Among the visitors he received that day, more than one debated with him the question of an armed overthrow of the government: the right-wing business group the Society for the Economic Rehabilitation of Russia, for example, represented by Putilov and Vishnegradsky, went so far as to offer funds specifically for an authoritarian regime.
The next day, the 13th, Kornilov came to the Bolshoi to speak.
As he prepared to mount the rostrum of the packed hall of the Moscow conference, Kerensky stopped him. He pleaded with the general to confine his remarks to military matters.
‘I will give my speech’, Kornilov responded, ‘in my own way.’
Kornilov ascended. The right rose in ovation. ‘Shouts ring out,’ states the record. ‘ “Cads!” “Get up!” ’ No one on the left benches obeyed.
To Kerensky’s intense relief, Kornilov, never a confident speaker, gave a speech both inexpert and surprisingly mild. The continuing roars of rightist approval were for him qua figurehead, rather than for anything in particular that he said.
After Kornilov, speaker after speaker excoriated the revolution that had wracked Russia, and hankered loudly for the restoration of order. General Kaledin, the elected leader – ataman – of the Cossacks of the Don region, announced to the delight of the right that ‘all soviets and committees must be abolished’. A young Cossack officer, Nagaev, quickly insisted that working Cossacks disagreed with Kaledin, eliciting corresponding ecstasy on the left.
As he spoke, someone on the right interrupted with shouts of ‘German marks!’ The accusation of treachery provoked bedlam. When the heckler would not identify himself, Kerensky finally declared that ‘Lieutenant Nagaev and all the Russian people … are quite satisfied with the silence of a coward.’ It was a rare moment of good theatre left in the man once considered Russia’s hope.
Kerensky’s concluding speech, by contrast, was an almost incomprehensible, pitiful mix of longueurs and schmaltz. ‘Let my heart turn to stone, let all the chords of my faith in men fade away, let all the flowers of my dreams for man wither and die,’ he wailed. ‘I will cast away the keys to this heart that loves the people and I will think only of the state.’
From the audience, a few sentimentalists obligingly responded in kind – ‘You cannot! Your heart will not permit it!’ – but for the most part the spectacle was merely excruciating. Even one of Kerensky’s diminishing number of loyal supporters, Stepun, uneasily admitted that ‘one could hear not only the agony of his power, but also of his personality’.
Thus the slow death of the Provisional Government continued.
Troops radicalised or gave up hope or both in the grinding war. They wrote bitter, raging letters now to the country’s leaders. One soldier, Kuchlavok, and his regiment sent Izvestia a long, near-glossolalic sermon of despair that their revolution had been in vain, a deflected apocalypse, catastrophe without renewal.
Now another Saviour of the world must be born, to save the people from all the calamities in the making here on earth and to put an end to these bloody days, so that no beast of any kind living on the earth created not by princes and rulers but by God-given nature is wiped out, for God is an invisible being inhabiting whoever possesses a conscience and tells us to live in friendship, but no there are evil people who sow strife among us and poison us one against another pushing us to murder, who wish for others what they would not wish for themselves … They used to say that the war was foisted off on us by Nicholas. Nicholas has been overthrown, so who is foisting the war on us now?
The mass desertions, politicised and other, did not end – and were even announced in advance. With angry courteousness, a group of anonymous soldiers ‘from various regiments’ wrote to Kerensky with due notice: ‘we are going to stay in the trenches at the front and repel the enemy, and maybe even attack, but only until the first days of baneful autumn’. If the war continued beyond that point, they warned, they would simply walk away.
Another group of soldiers sent the Soviet Executive Committee an extraordinary ingenuous query: ‘All of us … ask you as our comrades to explain to us who these Bolsheviks are … Our provisional government has come out very much against the Bolsheviks. But we … don’t find any fault with them.’ They had previously been opposed to the Bolsheviks, they explained, but were now gradually going over to them. But to make sure they understood this choice exactly, they asked the Soviet to send clearer explanations.
Yet more reports came in of peasants seizing land, with greater and uncompromising violence. In some regions they abjured and despised the zemstvos, the local organisations of the Provisional Government. ‘Call our future governance what you will but don’t use the word zemstvo’ was the quote in one newspaper from the depressing travels of local government activists in south-eastern Russia. ‘We have grown disgusted by this word.’ In Kursk, during a trial for land confiscation, the peasants drove away the plaintiff – and the court. ‘Anarchy reigns supreme,’ read an official report on one village from the Tambovsk district. ‘The peasants are storming the gardens and looting.’
Across many regions the push for independence was intensifying. Prices of essentials soared. Petrograd’s food situation went abruptly from grave to desperate.
What centre remained could not hold. The Mensheviks held what they called a ‘Unity Congress’ in Petrograd: its name was a bad joke. Martov’s internationalists had a third of the delegates, but the remaining two-thirds, following the leadership, had moved even further in favour of collaboration – what Tsereteli called ‘cooperation with the living forces of the country’. The chasm was wider than ever, and the right maintained its formal authority.
Mid-August, and a wave of mysterious explosions rocked munitions factories in Petrograd and Kazan. It was seemingly the work of pro-German saboteurs.
In Latvia, Riga tottered as the Germans approached. The city’s chances of withstanding a serious German assault were nil: at the conference, Kornilov warned that without more effort to hold the Gulf of Riga, it would be lost, and the way to Petrograd open to the Germans. Even as he spoke, the Germans were preparing.
Would Petrograd follow Riga? came the whispers.
Indeed, would the government even fight for Petrograd?
Of eleven wealthy Muscovites he met one evening for dinner, ten told the great American journalist John Reed that if it came to it, they would rather have Wilhelm than the Bolsheviks. In the journal Utro Rossii, Rodzianko wrote with astonishing candour: ‘I say to myself, “Let God take care of Petrograd.” They fear that if Petrograd is lost the central revolutionary organisations will be destroyed … I rejoice if all these organisations are destroyed; for they will bring nothing but disaster upon Russia.’
‘I want to take
a middle road,’ Kerensky despaired, ‘but no one will help me.’
All rumours of incipient coups notwithstanding, after the Moscow conference, Kerensky was willing to accept the crushing curbs on political rights that Kornilov demanded, hoping they might stem the tide of anarchy. He did not relish the final break with the Soviet that this would inevitably mean, but he was a man who felt he had no choice.
Kornilov pressed his advantage. On 19 August, he telegraphed Kerensky to ‘insistently assert the necessity’ of giving him command of the Petrograd Military District, the city and areas surrounding. At this, though, Kerensky still drew the line.
On the banks of the river Mazā Jugla in Latvia, the legendary Latvian riflemen went into action, in what would come to be known as the Battle of Jugla. They strove with doomed courage to keep Riga from German hands. The next day, the First Don Cossacks and the Savage Divisions moved to Pskov and its environs, threateningly close to a polarising Petrograd.
In the Petrograd city Duma elections on the 20th, the Kadets received 114,000 votes, the Mensheviks a derisory 24,000. The SRs won, with 205,000 votes – but the Bolsheviks were, shockingly, within spitting distance, with 184,000.
‘In comparison with the May elections’, wrote Sukhanov, the SRs’ total did not represent a victory ‘but a substantial setback.’ By contrast, he, no supporter of Lenin’s party, was clear that ‘the sole real victor … was the Bolsheviks, so recently trampled into the mud, accused of treason and venality, utterly routed … Why, one would have thought them annihilated for ever … Then where had they sprung up from again? What sort of strange, diabolical enchantment was this?’
The day after this strange, diabolical enchantment, after hours of German bombardment shook the fairy-tale facades of the Latvian capital, the Russian armies fled. Columns of Germans marched into the city. German submarines took the gulf and shelled the shoreline villages, blasting them from the cold sea.
Riga had fallen.
Watching from his Finnish exile, Lenin was incandescently furious with what he considered the collaborationism of Moscow Bolsheviks. Their sin? To participate in the Soviet’s Provisional Revolutionary Committee alongside the Mensheviks and SRs.
Lenin was scornful of the counterrevolutionary scare with which the committee had justified itself. On 18 August he wrote ‘Rumours of a Conspiracy’, in which he implied that such fears were contrived by the moderates, as part of a campaign to fool the masses into supporting them. ‘Not a single honest Bolshevik who had not taken leave of his senses completely would agree to any bloc’ with the SRs or Mensheviks, he wrote, ‘even in the event that a counter-revolutionary attack appeared genuine.’ Which in any case this supposed one, he implied, was not.
Lenin was wrong.
If anything, the sheer confusion of the moment, scattered and unclear evidence suggests, was in part due to a failure of joined-up counterrevolution – there was more than one conspiracy simmering away on the right.
Various shadowy groups – the Union of Officers, the Republican Centre and Military League – were meeting to discuss plans for martial law. They decided that rallies slated by the Soviet for the 27th, to celebrate six months since February, could be used to justify imposing a regime at the barrels of Kornilovite guns. And if those rallies did not oblige with disorder, the conspirators would use agents provocateurs to ensure it was provided.
On 22 August, the army chief of staff summoned various officers to Mogilev, ostensibly for training. But on arrival they were briefed on the schemes, before being sent on to Petrograd. Exactly how apprised of these specifics Kornilov himself was is unclear: that he was preparing to move on his enemies on the left – and in the government – is not.
And it was not only the hard right considering martial law under Kornilov. In anguish, lugubriously, incoherently, bizarrely, grasping at a possible way out, so was Kerensky himself.
On 23 August, Savinkov, for Kerensky, went to the Stavka to see Kornilov. The meeting opened in an unpromising atmosphere of very bad blood.
Savinkov presented Kornilov with three requests. He asked for his support in the dismantling of the Union of Officers and the political department of the Stavka, both rumoured to be heavily implicated in coup-mongering; for the exemption of Petrograd itself from Kornilov’s direct control; and then, amazingly, for a cavalry corps for Petrograd.
At this last, the startled Kornilov grew markedly more cordial. These mounted soldiers were intended, Savinkov confirmed, for ‘the actual inauguration of martial law in Petrograd and for the defence of the provisional government against any attempt whatever’. As General Alexeev would later attest, ‘the participation of Kerensky [in planning martial law] is beyond question … The advance of the Third Cavalry Corps’s division on Petrograd was made upon Kerensky’s instructions … transmitted by Savinkov’.
Kerensky, it seemed, was offering to sanction the very counter-revolutionary operation that Kornilov was planning.
In so far as it can be reconstructed from the dense murk of the moment, it appears that, agitated at the possibility of Bolshevik uprising, Kerensky was split between opposition to martial law, and a belief in its necessity. Even in the necessity of a collective or individual dictatorship.
And for his part, Kornilov, too, was flexible: perfectly willing to overthrow Kerensky, he was also ready to accommodate him, under certain conditions. Now, reassured by Savinkov that the government had come round to his way of thinking, he was much more relaxed about accepting Kerensky’s other proposals, as well as his opposition, ‘for political reasons’, to putting the hard-right General Krimov at the head of the cavalry corps. Thus Savinkov was reassured that Kornilov was not angling against Kerensky – to whom, when Savinkov probed, the general even, if not very vociferously, pledged loyalty.
It seemed as if compromise could be reached, an acceptable martial law thrashed out. But, unknown to Savinkov and Kornilov, the previous evening Kerensky had received a visitor. And thus had begun reaction’s sinister comedy of skulduggery and errors.
Vladimir Nikolaevich Lvov – not to be confused with the ex-premier – was a dunderheaded Muscovite busybody, an ingenuous ruling-class Pooter. A liberal deputy in the Third and Fourth Dumas, Lvov was part of a network of Moscow industrialists who held that Russia needed a right-wing authoritarian ‘national cabinet’. So far, so usual. What was less common was that he also retained a certain respect for Kerensky. When, therefore, rumours of Stavka conspiracies reached his ears from a party thereto, he hoped he might be able to forestall a clash between Kerensky and Kornilov.
During his meeting with Kerensky, Lvov expounded various platitudes about the necessity of having more conservatives in government, and offered to sound out key political figures to that end. He allowed, portentously, that he represented ‘certain important groups with significant strength’. Beyond that, later testimonies diverge.
Lvov would claim that Kerensky authorised him to be his proxy; Kerensky, rather more lukewarm, that he ‘did not consider it possible to refrain from further discussions with Lvov, expecting from him a more exact explanation of what was on his mind’. By encouraging Lvov to report back from informal discussions, Kerensky thought he might gain insight into some of the plotting at which his visitor hinted. Hence he encouraged Lvov to sound out these mysterious circles.
It may be that Lvov, never the most perspicacious man, misunderstood Kerensky’s encouragement; or that, puffed up with his mission, he convinced himself that he was on official business. Either way, as Kerensky got on with failing to shore up a collapsing state, Lvov bustled off to Stavka.
As he did so, the widespread terror of a coup grew, as did plans on the left to oppose it. On 24 August, the Petrograd Interdistrict Conference of Soviets (an organ led by the left Menshevik Gorin, strongly influenced by Bolsheviks) demanded the government declare Russia a democratic republic, and announced the formation of a ‘Committee of Public Safety’, mobilising armed squads of workers and the unemployed to defend the
revolution. Vyborg Bolsheviks, disgruntled at their party’s inadequate response to the threat of counterrevolution, scheduled an emergency meeting of the Petersburg Committee.
This was precisely the kind of thinking that Lenin denounced as scaremongering. And as the activists succumbed to it, Kornilov set an actual counterrevolutionary conspiracy in motion.
Kornilov sent instructions to Krimov to push on to Petrograd in response to a bruited ‘Bolshevik uprising’.
It was as such intrigues swirled that Lvov arrived at Stavka, on the important mission he had invented in his head.
Introducing himself as Kerensky’s emissary, Lvov met with Kornilov and one of his advisors, a tall, stout, greying man named Zavoiko – who was, though Lvov did not know this, an intriguer himself, of a more serious kind. A wealthy hard-right parapolitical hustler, Zavoiko had for months seen in Kornilov a potential dictator, and so made himself the general’s indispensable vizier.
Lvov asked Kornilov for his thoughts on the composition of a new government. Kornilov answered cautiously, but, coming after the request for cavalry, he felt hopeful that Lvov’s question was further evidence that the government was disposed to compromise, and was coming over to his views.
In the wake of that earlier meeting with Savinkov, the right-wingers at Mogilev had begun open discussions about who would take what ministry in their authoritarian government. Now, Kornilov and Zavoiko laid out for Lvov some of that vision – their desiderata. Petrograd must be placed under martial law. No controversy there. The question was, martial law under whom?
Lvov suggested three possibilities: Kerensky could be dictator; there could be a directorate, a dictatorial small cabinet, including Kornilov and, presumably, Kerensky; or Kornilov himself could be dictator.
Judiciously, Kornilov expressed his preference for the third option. After all, it might be simpler if all civil and military authority in the country belonged to the commander-in-chief – ‘whoever’, he modestly added, ‘he might be’.