*Revoliutsiia, IV, 99. According to Savinkov, between 9 and 10 p.m.—that is, before the cabinet had met—Kerensky told him it was too late to reach an understanding with Kornilov because the telegram dismissing him had already gone out: Mercure de France, No. 503 (June 1, 1919), 439
*Golovin, Kontr-revoliutsiia, I, Pt. 2, 35. Nekrasov, the eminence grise of Kerensky’s regime and a thoroughly sinister figure, throughout 1917 pushed the Prime Minister leftward. A professor of engineering at the Tomsk Polytechnic and a leading figure on the left wing of the Kadet Party, he was involved on January 1, 1918, in an unsuccessful attempt on Lenin’s life. The would-be assassins were pardoned, following which Nekrasov went into Bolshevik service under an assumed name. His identity was eventually discovered and he seems to have been imprisoned (N. Iakovlev, I Avgusta 1914, Moscow, 1974, 226–32).
†A businessman with political ambitions, Zavoiko was the counterpart of Nekrasov, pushing Kornilov toward the right: on him, see Martynov, Kornilov, 20–22.
*Zinaida Gippius thus depicts the encounter between Kornilov’s cavalry and the units sent from Petrograd to intercept them: “There was no ‘bloodshed.’ Near Luga and in some other places, the divisions dispatched by Kornilov and the ‘Petrograders’ ran into each other. They confronted each other, uncomprehending. The ‘Kornilovites’ were especially amazed. They had gone to ‘defend the Provisional Government’ and encountered an ‘enemy’ who had also gone to ‘defend the Provisional Government.’ … So they stood and pondered. They couldn’t understand a thing. But recalling the teaching of frontline agitators that ‘one should fraternize with the enemy,’ they fervently fraternized”: Siniaia kniga (Belgrade, 1929), 181; diary entry of August 31, 1917.
*Kerenskii, Delo Kornilova, 75–76, Revoliutsiia, IV, 143; Martynov, Kornilov, 149–51. Krymov left a suicide note for Kornilov, which Kornilov destroyed: Martynov, Kornilov, 151. No reactionary monarchist, Krymov had participated in 1916 in plots against Nicholas II.
*Suspicions that the whole Kornilov Affair was a provocation are buttressed by Nekrasov’s uncautious remarks to the press. In a newspaper interview given two weeks after the event he praised Lvov for exposing Kornilov’s alleged plot. Distorting Kornilov’s answer to Kerensky to make it sound as if it confirmed Lvov’s ultimatum, he added: “V. N. Lvov helped save the Revolution: he exploded a prepared mine two days before it was to go off. There undoubtedly was a conspiracy and Lvov only discovered it prematurely”: NZh, No. 55 (September 13, 1917), 3. These words suggest that Nekrasov, possibly with Kerensky’s connivance, used Lvov to destroy Kornilov.
*Crane Brinton in his Anatomy of Revolution (New York, 1938, 185–86) observes that it is common in revolutionary situations for ordinary citizens to grow bored with politicking and to leave the field to extremists. The influence of the latter increases in proportion to the public’s disenchantment and loss of interest in politics.
*Cited in Lenin, PSS, XXXIII, 28. Lenin underscored the concluding sentence.
*Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b) (Moscow, 1958), 55–62. This, the only presently available record of the meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee from August 4, 1917, until February 24, 1918, first came out in 1929. It was meant to discredit Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, whom Stalin had defeated for party control, and for this reason must be used with extreme caution. According to the editors of the second edition: “The texts of the protocols are published in full, without omissions, except for matters of conflict [konfliktnye dela] removed, as in the first edition, for reasons of inadequate explanation of these questions in the text of the protocols” (p. vii), whatever that may mean.
†It cannot be excluded, of course, that Lenin’s advice was turned down and the fact censored from the published version of the minutes.
*Lenin, PSS, XXXIV, 281–82. Lenin here inadvertently concedes that on July 3–5 the Bolsheviks had, indeed, attempted a power seizure.
*Revoliutsiia, V, 23. According to Kerensky, these discussions were secret, but they immediately leaked to the press: Ibid., V, 81.
*Lazimir later joined the Bolshevik Party. He died in 1920 of typhus.
†N. Podvoiskii in KL, No. 8 (1923), 16–17. Trotsky wrote in 1922 that even if his life were at stake he would not be able to recall the makeup of the Milrevkom: PR, No. 10 (1922), 54.
*Lenin mistakenly believed that Zinoviev had joined Kamenev in the interview with Novaia zhizn’: Protokoly TsK, 108.
*Lenin, PSS, XXXIV, 435–36. Verkhovskii had been dismissed from his post the day before (October 23) for demanding at a cabinet meeting that Russia make immediate peace with the Central Powers: SV., No. 10, June 19, 1921, 8.
*Dekrety, I, 1–2. Kerensky’s wife was arrested and detained for forty-eight hours the following day for tearing down this declaration: A. L. Fraiman, Forpost Sotsialisticheskoi Revoliutsii (Leningrad, 1969), 157.
*N. M. Kishkin, a Kadet and member of the last Provisional Government, was placed in charge after Kerensky had left the Winter Palace.
*Dekrety, I, 20–21; W. Pietsch, Staat und Revolution (Köln, 1969), 50; Lenin, PSS, XXXV, 28–29. Trotsky was the only Jew in the Sovnarkom. The Bolsheviks seemed to have been afraid of accusations that they were a “Jewish” party, setting up a government to serve the interests of “international Jewry.”
12
Building the One-Party State
On October 26, 1917, the Bolsheviks did not so much seize power over Russia as stake a claim to it. On that day they won from a rump Congress of Soviets, which they had convened in an unlawful manner and packed with adherents, only limited and temporary authority: the authority to form yet another Provisional Government. That government was to be accountable to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Congress and retire in a month, upon the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. It took them three years of civil war to make good this claim. Notwithstanding their precarious position, they proceeded almost at once to lay the foundations of a type of regime unknown to history, a one-party dictatorship.
On October 26, the Bolsheviks had a choice of three options. They could have declared their party to be the government. They could have dissolved the party in the government. And they could have kept party and government as separate institutions, and either directed the state from the outside or else meshed with it on the executive level, through interlocking personnel.1 For reasons that will be spelled out, Lenin rejected the first and second of these alternatives. He hesitated briefly between the two variants of option three. Initially, he leaned toward variant one: rather than head the state, he preferred to govern as head of the party, which he saw as the incipient government of the world proletariat. But, as we have seen, his associates thought he was trying to evade responsibility for the October coup, which many of them had opposed, and forced him to give it up as well.2 As a result, in the political system that came into being within hours of the coup d’état, party and state retained distinctive identities, meshing not institutionally but personally on the executive levels, first of all in the cabinet (Council of People’s Commissars or Sovnarkom) in which the leaders of the party took all the ministerial posts. Under this arrangement, the Bolsheviks, as party officials, made policy decisions and executed them as heads of the state departments, using for this purpose the bureaucracy and the security police.