At first, helped by a secret subscription of four million rubles, the Society tried to influence and direct political events covertly but, in the summary of Marc Ferro, it soon became clear that “There would have to be a military dictatorship. Kornilov was the obvious choice”. Kornilov himself was tutored in his duties by his political advisor V.S Zavoysko, a member of both the Cabinet and the Society, and a Director of the Russian-Asiatic Bank. The Society worked in close alliance with ultra-right groups such as the sinister Republican Centre with its motto “Order, Discipline, Victory”.1
In August, Kerensky invited Kornilov to address a “State Conference” in Petrograd of delegates from all political parties, employers’ federations and trade unions (the Bolsheviks boycotted it and there was general strike in the city that day in protest). This raised his political prestige and encouraged those on the right who wished to see a military dictatorship with Kornilov as its puppet ruler. Kerensky walked straight into this conspiracy when he issued orders to Kornilov that capital punishment in the army, abolished in February, be reinstated, and that troops loyal to the government be dispatched to Petrograd. Kornilov misunderstood what was being requested (messages between Kerensky and Kornilov relayed by a third party appear to have been garbled) and the General responded by “accepting” what he thought was an offer to become the temporary dictator of Russia, with Kerensky standing down to serve in an Octobrist-Kadet cabinet. When Kerensky heard this he panicked and ordered Kornilov to resign and return immediately to the capital.
At this point Kornilov, urged on by the Society and reactionaries at Army HQ, began to plan a military coup. After informing his soldiers that the Bolsheviks were attempting an insurrection he ordered the Savage Division to advance on the capital and to depose the Soviet. No sooner was this known than the Soviet formed a “Committee of Struggle against Counter-Revolution”, composed of three representatives each from the Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and SRs. Similar committees sprung up throughout the northern region of European Russia. The most active elements were the Bolsheviks, whose Red Guards were armed, organised and ready to defend the capital. The Kronstadt sailors again crossed the Gulf of Finland to Petrograd, this time at the request of the Soviet that they defend it from attack.
With the defence secure the Committee of Struggle sent out agitators to talk to soldiers closing in on the city. In the meantime, the militant All-Russian Union of Railwaymen blocked railway tracks and sent carriages with Kornilov’s troops off in different directions. This gave time for Red Guards to reach the foot soldiers and to explain that they had been lied to and there was no Bolshevik coup. The Savage Division disintegrated, some refusing to advance and some simply deserting. When Kornilov realised that his power play had failed he resigned from his post and was arrested. Not one shot had been fired.
Militant workers, mostly Bolshevik, had saved Kerensky’s government, and he had little choice but to quietly release the jailed Bolshevik leaders. In the wake of the failed military coup a wave of reprisals against the officer corps swept the army and navy, with officers in many cities arrested. According to the Bolshevik militant Podvoysky:
As a result of the Kornilov revolt the propaganda of the military organisation and pro-Bolshevik soldiers, which had been temporarily quelled after the July reaction, now spread with renewed energy among the troops and found a most receptive audience in the nervously exhausted mass of soldiers who refused to wait, who would not consider anything or listen to anyone.2
At Kronstadt three generals and a colonel, arrested on the orders of the Soviet Executive, were dragged to the bridge of one of the ships, thrown off, and gunned down in the water. In all eleven officers were murdered at the naval base. At the height of the drama one of the Kronstadt sailors asked Trotsky if now was not the time to press on and depose Kerensky. He replied, “No, not yet. Use Kerensky as a gun-rest to shoot Kornilov. Afterward we will settle with Kerensky”.3
In one stroke the Kornilov “coup” reversed the fortunes of the Bolsheviks and fatally weakened the Provisional Government and its supporters in the Soviet Executive. Suspecting (rightly) that Kerensky had originally intended to use Kornilov against the Soviet, a plan which then backfired, socialist ministers such as Skobelev, Tseretelli and Chernov had no choice but to resign from the government. They were replaced by lesser figures in their parties. This was fatal. In refusing to distance themselves completely from Kerensky, the Mensheviks and SRs lost all credibility with most of the workers in the cities. In the words of Trotsky, the attempted coup “created an abrupt shift in the situation in our favour”, although even before the Kornilov affair the Bolsheviks had already won majorities in the Soviets of Kronstadt, Ekaterinburg, Tsaritsyn, Samara and Ivanovo-Voznesensk.
On 31st August the Petrograd Soviet for the first time passed a Bolshevik resolution, by 279 votes to 115. The resolution demanded a government be formed from “the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry”, and that this be accompanied by immediate peace negotiations, workers’ control of industry and the complete confiscation of the remaining large landed estates. A few days later, on 5th September, the entire Menshevik-SR Executive resigned. The newly elected Executive had a Bolshevik majority with Trotsky as Chair. A resolution from workers at the Petrograd Admiralty yards summed up the new atmosphere. It explicitly condemned the coalition government as “a government of bourgeois-landlord dictatorship” with a policy of “ruinous compromise with the propertied classes”.4 The effect on the Bolshevik Party was electric. Membership of its Petrograd branch alone jumped from 16,000 in April to 43,000 in October. Many of the new recruits were disillusioned Mensheviks and SRs.
Kerensky knew that his government, never having been elected, lacked legitimacy. In the absence of a properly elected Constituent Assembly, elections to which the government had postponed to November because of the immense logistical difficulties involved, he proposed a “Democratic Conference” of all left parties, cooperative bodies and Zemstvos to appoint a Provisional Council or “Pre-Parliament”. The Pre-Parliament would, in theory, command wide-spread support on the left, thus stabilising the government until the elections to the Constituent Assembly. Lenin sensed the danger of this plan and urged that the Bolsheviks boycott the conference. Other Bolsheviks, primarily Lenin’s senior lieutenant Lev Kamenev, disagreed. Kamenev wished for the Bolsheviks to attend the Democratic Conference and then to act as a radical left opposition in the Pre-Parliament in alliance with Martov and the Left Mensheviks. Lenin, still in hiding in the Finnish capital Helsinki, sent fierce letters to the Bolshevik Central Committee urging an immediate insurrection against a weakened Provisional Government.
Dogged by Lenin’s accusations that those who wished to work with the Democratic Conference were “unprincipled”, the Central Committee gave Trotsky permission to attend the conference as long as he did so solely to denounce Kerensky and announce that the Bolsheviks would have nothing to do with the Pre-Parliament. Lenin and Trotsky quickly divined that (as Trotsky later put it), “the struggle for our participation in the Pre-Parliament was the struggle for the ‘Europeanization’ of the working class movement, for directing it as quickly as possible into the channel of a democratic struggle for power, i.e. into the channel of social democracy”.5 The Democratic Conference went ahead but it did not have the effect Kerensky had hoped for.
By the end of September, the government was on its last legs. More landed estates were being seized by the peasants. The supply of food to the cities began to break down. Militarily the Germans threatened Petrograd itself, with the German navy roaming freely in the Gulf of Finland, while conservatives like former Duma President Rodzianko admitted they would “rejoice” if the German army took Petrograd and “restored order”.