Even symbolically it failed. Instead of a show of patriotic unity, the State Conference (as Miliukov would observe) confirmed “that the country was divided into two camps between which there could be no reconciliation.”192 Worse, not just Stalin but the entire leftist press—observing the display of assembled nobles, industrialists, and military men—sounded even more hysterical alarms over a supposedly heightened threat of imminent “counterrevolution.” Kerensky, the person behind the gathering, drew the same conclusion. “After the Moscow Conference,” he would recall, “it was clear to me that the next attempt at a coup would come from the right, and not the left.”193
Kerensky had himself to blame for raising expectations for bold solutions that were instantly dashed. A full collapse at the front continued to threaten the very survival of the Russian state, and many constitutionalists—Miliukov, Lvov, Rodzyanko—leaned toward a military coup by Kornilov, even if they worried he lacked mass popular support and ignored the practical aspects of power. The idea, or fantasy, was to have Kornilov “restore order” by force, possibly with a military dictatorship and, later, to summon a constituent assembly under favorable conditions.194 Similar thoughts of imposing order had occurred to General Alexeyev, Vice Admiral Alexander Kolchak (commander of the Black Sea fleet until June), and others who were in conversations with Kornilov. The latter certainly contemplated a coup against both the Provisional Government and the Soviet in order to suppress an anticipated Bolshevik coup, hang Lenin and his associates, disband the Soviet, and maybe install himself in power, at least temporarily.195 But this appeared to be a worse option. A would-be military conspirator had no secure communications: chauffeurs, orderlies, telegraph operators would report suspicious activities to the soldiers’ committees and the Soviet.196 So Kornilov worked with the Provisional Government. The latter, he rightly concluded, was incapable of mastering the situation. Still, Kerensky did tell Kornilov he wanted a “strong authority,” and working with the government allowed the legal movement of troops. Back on August 6–7, with Kerensky’s approval, Kornilov had ordered Lieutenant General Alexander Krymov, commander of the Third Cavalry Corps, to relocate his troops from the southwest (Romanian front) up to Velikie Luki (Pskov province). Krymov’s troops, some of whom were known as the Savage Division, included Muslim mountaineers from the North Caucasus (Chechens, Ingush, Dagestani) who were viewed as the most reliable in the whole army, and had been used for political enforcement at the front.197 On August 21, Riga fell—just as Kornilov had warned at the Moscow State Conference—and Kerensky authorized Kornilov to move the frontline troops near Petrograd to defend the capital and suppress an anticipated coup by the Bolsheviks, presumed agents of the Germans. This action remained secret.
The moderate socialists were still arguing for neither/nor: neither truck with the extreme right counterrevolution, nor truck with the extreme left seizure of power.198 But the Bolsheviks embraced the polarization as welcome and inevitable. “Either, or!” Stalin wrote on August 25, 1917. “Either with the landlords and capitalists, and then the complete triumph of the counterrevolution. Or with the proletariat and the poor peasantry, and then the complete triumph of the revolution. The policy of conciliation and coalition is doomed to failure.”199
The movement of Krymov’s troops, at Kornilov’s command, with Kerensky’s apparent approval, in order to preempt a presumed Bolshevik coup and strengthen political authority in the name of the hopelessly limp Provisional Government, erupted in a showdown between Kerensky and Kornilov. From the moment it was under way, between August 26 and 31, 1917, and ever since, analysts have divided over two ostensibly opposed interpretations.200 First, that it was a putsch by Kornilov to make himself dictator, under the guise of protecting the Provisional Government. Second, that it was a monstrous provocation by Kerensky to oust Kornilov and make himself dictator. Both interpretations are correct.201
Around midnight on Saturday, August 26—after a series of very convoluted messages, messengers, and pseudo-messengers between Kerensky and Kornilov—the prime minister called an emergency cabinet meeting and requested “full authority [vlast’]” to fight off a counterrevolutionary plot. The Provisional Government ministers all resigned.202 Right about then, on Sunday, August 27, at 2:40 a.m., Kornilov telegraphed the government to the effect that to put down the anticipated Bolshevik rising in the capital, as agreed, Lieutenant General Krymov’s army “is assembling in the environs of Petrograd toward evening August 28. Request that Petrograd be placed under martial law August 29.”203 At 4:00 a.m., Kerensky telegraphed Kornilov, dismissing him. At headquarters, the general staff viewed the order either as a forgery or a sign that Kerensky had been taken hostage by extreme leftists. Kornilov had Krymov speed up. In the capital, various naïve personages sought to mediate the “misunderstanding,” but Kerensky rejected them. On August 27–28, the newspapers published special editions with an accusation of treason on the part of the supreme commander signed by Kerensky.204 Enraged, Kornilov telegrammed all frontline commanders, branding Kerensky a liar who was acting under Bolshevik pressure “in harmony with the plans of the German general staff.” The public counterappeal by Kornilov pointedly called himself “the son of a peasant Cossack” and asserted a desire “only to save Great Russia. I swear to lead the people through victory over the enemy to the Constituent Assembly, where it will decide its own destiny and choose its new political system.”205 Kerensky turned to the Soviet to muster forces to subvert the “counterrevolution.” On the rail lines, workers and specially dispatched Muslim agitators harassed Krymov’s Savage Division forces. Trotsky would write that “the army that rose against Kornilov was the army-to-be of the October Revolution.”206 In fact, no fighting took place.207 Krymov entered Petrograd by automobile on the night of August 30–31 under a guarantee of personal safety from Kerensky, and answered a summons by the prime minister, who told him to report to a military court. Krymov then went to a private apartment and shot himself.208
Stalin rejoiced at the “breaking of the counter-revolution,” but warned that its defeat remained incomplete. “Against the landowners and capitalists, against the generals and bankers, for the interests of the peoples of Russia, for peace, for freedom, for land—that is our slogan,” he wrote on August 31. “The creation of a government of workers and peasants—that is our task.”209 In captivity, the ex-tsar Nicholas II privately expressed disappointment in the failure of Kornilov to establish a military dictatorship. “I then for the first time heard the tsar regret his abdication,” recalled the court tutor Pierre Gilliard.210 In any attempted coup, even many on the inside remain confused and uncertain, and support mostly materializes if and when the coup begins to appear successful.211 The entente, on August 28, indicated it would support efforts in Russia to “unify” the country as part of the joint war effort; Russian business interests would have backed Kornilov. But Kornilov never even left front headquarters at Mogilyov.212 It was an odd military coup that depended on the cooperation of Kerensky, who effectively betrayed Kornilov before Kornilov had any chance to betray him.213 But Kerensky’s August move against Kornilov constituted his own second failed coup, following his aborted July coup against Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
Whether a genuinely mass movement on the right existed in summer 1917 to be galvanized and perhaps eventually consolidated can never be known. Still, some insight about the masses may lie in the story of a rightist periodical, the Little Newspaper (for the “little” or ordinary person), founded in 1914 and published by Aleksei A. Suvorin (Poroshin), the son of a famous conservative Russian pundit. A vulgar and grammatically challenged broadsheet that delivered brilliant real-life chronicles in real-life prose, the Little Newspaper won a mass following among Petrograd’s lower orders: workers, soldiers, war invalids, the jobless, those lacking rent money, those shortchanged by traders—in short, much of the wartime capital. Bringing readers to tears of laughter over sketches of quotidian life, but also skewering political cowardice a
mong elites, the Little Newspaper opposed Russia’s socialist parties and demanded Lenin’s arrest before the Provisional Government had issued a warrant. It hammered the Provisional Government and Kerensky for ineptitude and gutlessness, blustered about even bolder war annexations and demanded that government leadership pass to strongmen (especially Vice Admiral Kolchak). It also published the percentages of Jews in soviets, using familiar code like “Rabinovich.” The Petrograd Soviet deemed the Little Newspaper a “pogrom-publication” and urged print workers not to print it. But by June 1917, the Little Newspaper’s circulation rose to 109,000, more than Pravda’s, and reached readers in the capital’s garrison, nearby naval bases, and factories. That said, it remains impossible to know whether its popularity derived primarily from its scurrilous entertainment or its calls for a “strong hand.”214
After the Kornilov flameout, the broadsheet lost its popularity. Even before then, however, the Little Newspaper had started to label itself “socialist,” almost like proto-national socialists, albeit without much conviction in terms of the socialism. This telling, if halfhearted embrace demonstrated that any aspiring movement on the right now had to be “socialist.” Socialism in some form was an unavoidable structure in the political landscape. Socialism was also one of the prime evils that motivated Kornilov and others on the political right, however. The war that helped make the aspiration for socialism nearly universal vastly narrowed the Russian right’s options. And the very instrument that Kornilov wanted to use to restore order—the army—was now more than ever the key instrument of socialist revolution.215
THE VANISHING ACT
Unhappy Kerensky. Despite comprehending the dire necessity of strengthening central authority, he had played a double game that forced him into a devil’s choice: embrace either the general staff (indispensable to prevent a leftist coup) or the democratically elected Soviet (meaning, in his mind, the masses, whose favor he so craved).216 With his embrace of the Soviet and disgracing of Kornilov, however, establishment figures abandoned the Provisional Government for good; a few even began to hope for a foreign intervention to save Russia.217 Two generals at frontline headquarters declined Kerensky’s urgent requests to replace the dismissed Kornilov. The utterly bankrupt prime minister—without even his own government, let alone a parliament—was compelled to direct the Russian army to obey Kornilov’s orders. “A Supreme Commander, accused of treason,” Kornilov observed of himself, “has been ordered to continue commanding his armies because there is no one else to appoint.”218
Some insiders urged Kerensky to resign in favor of General Alexeyev. Instead, the thirty-six-year-old lawyer appointed himself military supreme commander and named General Alexeyev—whom Kerensky had recently dismissed as “defeatist”—to the position of chief of staff. This was the same arrangement that had obtained under Nicholas II. Alexeyev took three days to assent to Kerensky’s request; nine days after appointing Alexeyev, Kerensky sacked him.219 The original eleven-man suspended-in-the-air Provisional Government had narrowed to just one man. Kerensky appointed himself head of a new Council of Five, evoking the five-person Directory of the French Revolution (1795–99) that had aimed to occupy the political middle against far right and far left; Russia’s pretend “Directory” would nominally last a few weeks.220 Kerensky’s actions beginning in June 1917, particularly his military offensive, and now in August 1917 had shifted the entire political landscape, pulverizing the right, energizing the left, and helping to shove the entire left much further leftward.
Back in July, Bolshevism had sunk to a low ebb.221 The newly minted Bolshevik Trotsky, like Kamenev, was in prison, while Lenin, like Zinoviev, was in a Finnish barn. That left Sverdlov and Stalin. Whether this duo—without the hiding Lenin and the imprisoned Trotsky—could have led the Bolshevik party to power seems doubtful. Stalin wrote for and edited Workers’ Path, the Bolshevik mouthpiece that had replaced the shuttered Pravda, while Sverdlov worked to keep an organization together, cajoling provincials to submit concrete examples of their party work (copies of leaflets, membership details), then sending them instructions.222 But leading the entire revolution, which was a street and trench phenomenon?
There could be no doubt about the policital direction of events. Despite the successful staging of the 6th Party Congress in late July and early August, the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” had been shelved, but then—poof: the long-anticipated “counterrevolution” had suddenly materialized in late August.223 The slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” was reinstated in a summons to change the class power. The ruling classes were said to be failing to drive the bourgeois-democratic revolution (necessary for socialism); on the contrary, they were now openly counterrevolutionary. Generals would not bring peace. Bankers would not bring economic reforms. Landowners would not bring land redistribution. The bourgeoisie was turning out to be too weak. Class power would have to be seized, or all the gains, the entire revolutionary process, would be lost. Workers and peasants would have to lead the revolution.224 The leftmost wings of the Socialist Revolutionaries and even of the Mensheviks, for the first time, now accepted this program, too. “In the days of Kornilov,” Workers’ Path, edited by Stalin, would explain, “power had already gone over to the soviets.”225
The Kerensky-Kornilov debacle completely reversed the Bolshevik slide.226 Even as Kornilov and many other high-ranking officers submitted to arrest at Mogilyov headquarters, virtually all imprisoned Bolsheviks who did not break out on their own were freed, including, most crucially, Trotsky (released on 3,000 rubles’ bail on September 3). On September 25—the same day that Kerensky’s ridiculous “Directory” idea was retired—Trotsky became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. This ascension, from prison to the top of the popular organ, reflected the stunning newfound Bolshevik majority in that body. (The Bolsheviks also achieved a majority of delegates in the Moscow soviet.) No less striking, a great many of the 40,000 guns Kerensky had ordered distributed to resist Kornilov went to factory workers—before this, workers by and large had not been armed—and many of these “Red Guards” would now end up on the Bolshevik side. Stalin, writing on September 6, 1917, publicly acknowledged the gift of the Kerensky-Kornilov affair: “Marx explained the weakness of the 1848 revolution in Germany with the absence of a powerful counter-revolution that might have whipped up the revolution and strengthened it in the fire of battle.”227 In Russia, Stalin underscored, the appearance of counterrevolution in the person of Kornilov had confirmed the need for “a final break with the Cadets,” meaning the Provisional Government. On September 16, in yet another lead editorial, Stalin issued a full-throated demand for the immediate transfer of all power to the soviets. “The fundamental question of revolution is the question of power,” he explained. “The character of a revolution, its path and outcome, is completely determined by which class is in power,” so in the name of the proletariat class, the socialists ought to seize the direction of Russia’s revolution.228
After the bitter failure of the “July Days,” after which Bolsheviks had been subjected to mass arrests, many lacked confidence in any sort of insurrection, fearing possible complete destruction. From hiding in Finland, however, Lenin sent manic directives demanding an immediate coup, arguing that “a wave of real anarchy may become stronger than we are.”229 Russia’s stock market had crashed. Deserters and criminals pillaged. “In Rostov the town hall is dynamited,” explained one Moscow newspaper that fall. “In Tambov province there are agrarian pogroms. . . . In the Caucasus there are massacres in a number of places. Along the Volga, near Kamyshinsk, soldiers loot trains. . . .”230 Long queues reappeared for bread, as in February 1917.231 Food supply officials discussed demobilization of the army, because they could not feed it.232 Kerensky, along with a nominally revived Provisional Government cabinet of ministers, relocated to the more secure setting of the Winter Palace, availing himself of the former apartments of Alexander III, sleeping in the tsar’s bed and working at his desk; his personal af
fectations became subject to still greater ridicule, and not just by the livid right, which spread false stories of his Jewish origins and clandestine work for the Germans.233 Soon there were also rumors, Rasputin style, of an affair between Kerensky and one of Nicholas II’s daughters. (Kerensky had separated from his wife.) All this incited Lenin. “We have thousands of armed workers and soldiers in Petrograd who can seize at once the Winter Palace, the General Staff building, the telephone exchange and all the largest printing establishments,” he insisted again on October 7. “Kerensky will be compelled to surrender.”234 Stalin reproduced Lenin’s message for public audiences, hammering on the point that the workers, peasants, and soldiers had to expect a new Kerensky-Kornilov strike. “The counter-revolution,” Stalin urged in an article published on the morning of October 10, “is mobilizing—prepare to repulse it!”235
The Central Committee was stalling, however, and Lenin risked the trip from Finland to Petrograd sometime between October 3 and 10; on the latter day, in a safe-house private apartment, wearing a wig and glasses, and without his beard, he attended his first meeting with the Central Committee since July. Of its twenty-one members, only twelve were present. Sverdlov gave the report, citing supposedly widespread popular support for an insurrection. After nearly all-night browbeating, Lenin won the votes of ten of the twelve for an immediate coup; Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed. Stalin joined Lenin in voting for the resolution, written with pencil on a sheet of paper torn from a children’s notebook, to the effect that “an armed uprising is inevitable and the time for it is fully ripe.” No date was set, however. (“When this uprising will be possible—perhaps in a year—is uncertain,” Mikhail Kalinin would note on October 15.)236 On October 18, Zinoviev and Kamenev, in a small-circulation newspaper, published word of their opposition to a coup—essentially revealing one was being planned.237 Lenin wrote a furious letter, calling them “strike breakers” and demanding their expulsion.238 Stalin, in the main Bolshevik newspaper he edited, allowed Zinoviev to publish a conciliatory response, and appended an editorial note. “We, for our part, express the hope that with the declaration by Zinoviev . . . the matter may be considered closed,” the anonymous note stated. “The sharp tone of Lenin’s article does not alter the fact that, fundamentally, we remain of one mind.”239 Zinoviev and Kamenev were perhaps potential allies to counteract Trotsky’s newfound power.
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