The Bolshevik Party had been watching the Kornilovite preparations for some time. Forced underground by the Government of Cadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, it nevertheless kept warning the workers that a plot was being hatched and, on the first news of the revolt, sounded the alarm. Knowing that the government was implicated in the counter-revolutionary plot, the Party appealed to the masses to take action, not, however, in defence of Kerensky, but in defence of the revolution against Kornilov and his bands.
The Bolshevik Party mustered all its forces against the Kornilovites.
On August 27 an extraordinary meeting of the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party decided that the members of the Committee should maintain night-and-day watch duty in rotation, and that similar watch duty should be instituted by the members of the district committees of the Party and representatives of the factory Party organisations. Party speakers were mobilised in all the city districts. The Party called upon the workers to resist.
The call of the Party was answered by the entire working class of Petrograd, which had become convinced that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were playing a treacherous game. Until then the organisation and training of the Red Guard had been carried on secretly; now they were carried on openly.
The Bolsheviks joined the People’s Committee for Combating Counter-revolution set up by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, but only on condition that the workers were armed and that all persons arrested for participation in the July demonstration were released. These demands were immediately conceded.
A similar situation prevailed in Moscow and the provinces, which responded to the call to resist the counter-revolutionary generals. Armed squads of workers were formed everywhere. Revolutionary committees were set up in a number of places. The workers demanded the liberation of the arrested Bolsheviks and the transfer of the entire power to the Soviets.
Detachments of the Red Guard were hurled against the Kornilovites. Trenches were dug and defences thrown up around Petrograd. Arms were hastily procured and companies formed. Leaflets were printed in millions of copies.
The Bolsheviks also called upon the Petrograd garrison to resist. In response, the regiments of the garrison expelled their Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik Commissars and replaced them by Bolsheviks. The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks learnt to their horror that the Bolsheviks had the support not only of the Petrograd garrison but also of the majority of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet. Sensing the danger, Kerensky pathetically announced that he placed himself under the protection of the Bolsheviks, to which the Bolsheviks replied that they had more important business to attend to.
Propaganda was started among Kornilov’s troops.
The railwaymen demolished the track and took every possible measure to prevent Kornilov’s troop-trains from proceeding to Petrograd. Near Luga, whence it was intended that the Kornilovites should march on Petrograd by foot, a delay occurred. The Luga Soviet rejected General Krymov’s ultimatum and demanded that his Cossacks should avoid Luga in their march on Petrograd.
The vigorous resistance put up by the workers started a process of disintegration among the troops of the conspirators. On August 30, Cossacks from the Don Division came to the Luga Soviet and proposed to arrest General Krymov and to submit to the orders of the Provisional Government. The Corps Commander was saved from arrest only by the arrival of a representative from Kerensky, with whom Krymov immediately left for Petrograd. Convinced that the soldiers absolutely refused to act against the revolutionary detachments, Krymov blew out his brains in despair.
The advance of the “Savage Division” ended in exactly the same way as the advance of the Cossack regiments. A Moslem delegation was sent to meet the “Savage Division.”
The idea of sending a Moslem delegation was conceived by S. M. Kirov, who in 1917 was active in Vladikavkaz. In August 1917 Kirov went to Petrograd on the instructions of the Bolshevik organisation and of the Soviet Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies of Vladikavkaz. He was in Moscow when the Kornilov revolt broke out. Learning that the “Savage Division,” which contained regiments of Caucasian mountaineers, was participating in the Kornilov revolt, Kirov suggested to the Moscow Soviet that steps should be taken to have a delegation sent to the “Savage Division” from the Central Committee of the Mountain Peoples in Vladikavkaz. The Moscow Soviet got in touch by telegraph with Vladikavkaz.
The delegation arrived and set out to explain to the soldiers sent by Kornilov what the real intentions of their commanders were. This was sufficient to render the “Savage Division” absolutely harmless to the revolution.
Failure dogged the Kornilovites in Petrograd. The officers who had been sent there in advance indulged in orgies in public restaurants, dissipating the money assigned for organising the revolt. Denikin writes in his memoirs.
“Colonel S., the Chief of the Petrograd military organisation, was searched for diligently but unsuccessfully. It turned out later that from fear of arrest he had taken refuge in Finland, carrying away with him the last remnants of the organisation’s funds, some 150,000 roubles.”(1)
Another Kornilovite, the Cadet Milyukov, tells the same story.
Complete disintegration set in at General Headquarters.
It was now isolated and uneasily awaiting the end. Even the St. George Battalion refused to support Kornilov. At the front and at General Headquarters, Generals Denikin, Markov, Lukomsky, Romanovsky and others who had openly supported Kornilov were arrested by order of the army committees.
The end of the Kornilov revolt was in sight. On August 30 the Provisional Government dismissed Kornilov from his post of Supreme Commander and had him charged with mutiny. The post of Supreme Commander was assumed by Kerensky. General Alexeyev, a former Chief of Staff under the tsar, the man who at the time of the Council of State had discussed with Kornilov who should be the dictator, was appointed Chief of Staff.
The Kornilov revolt collapsed. The landlords and the bourgeoisie failed to smash the revolution. But the civil war begun by the generals caused a distinct change in the balance of forces.
Summing up the result of the Kornilov affair, Lenin wrote:
“The historic significance of the Kornilov revolt is that it opened the eyes of the masses of the people with extraordinary force to the truth that had been and still is hidden under the compromising phrases of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, namely, that the landlords and the bourgeoisie, headed by the Cadet Party, and the generals and officers who are on their side have organised themselves, and that they are now ready to commit, and are committing, the most outrageous crimes, such as surrendering Riga (and afterwards Petrograd) to the Germans, laying the war front open, putting Bolshevik regiments under fire, starting a mutiny, leading troops against the capital with the ‘Savage Division’ at their head, etc.—all in order to seize power and place it in the hands of the bourgeoisie, to consolidate the power of the landlords in the villages and to drench the country in the blood of workers and peasants.”(2)
The rank and file of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were carried away by the general fervour. The petty-bourgeois leaders fussed about, trying to conceal their connection with the Kornilovites. They tried by their activity to assure the people that the compromising parties were also helping to fight counter-revolution. The Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders joined the committees which were preparing to resist Kornilov, passed thunderous resolutions and vowed their fidelity to the revolution.
But the struggle proceeded without the compromisers and in spite of them. The Soviets once again became fighting mass organisations of the workers and peasants as in the days of the February Revolution. The Soviets revived and began to develop. Might once more proved to be on the side of the Soviets; the workers once again obtained possession of arms. A situation had again arisen in which it proved possible to a certain degree to apply the old, pre-July tactics. Lenin wrote in the press proposing to the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks that the Soviets should take over the whole power, on condition, however, that the Bolsheviks be allowed complete freedom of agitation and that new elections to the Soviets be freely held.
However, the return to the old tactics aiming at a peaceful transfer of power to the Soviets proved possible only for a very brief period. The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks rapidly recovered from the intoxicating fumes of revolution. They were too closely bound to the bourgeois government, and after the defeat of the Kornilov revolt they again slunk back into the bourgeois kennel.
The government of the country was temporarily entrusted to a Directory consisting of A. F. Kerensky, M. I. Tereshchenko, A. I. Verkhevsky, who had recently been appointed Minister of War, D. N. Verderevsky, Minister of Marine, and A. M. Nikitin, Minister of Post and Telegraph.
The last attempt of the Bolsheviks to secure the peaceful transfer of the whole power to the Soviets by peaceful means proved unsuccessful. But this attempt once more showed that power could be secured only by an insurrection against the bourgeois government and the petty-bourgeois bloc. The slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” once again came to the fore. But it had now acquired a different meaning, because the Soviets themselves were different.
“The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ was again put forward. But now this slogan no longer signified what it did in the first stage. Its content had been radically changed. Now this slogan meant a complete rupture with imperialism and the passing of power to the Bolsheviks, for the majority in the Soviets were already Bolshevik. Now this slogan meant that the revolution must march directly towards the dictatorship of the proletariat by means of insurrection. More than that this slogan now signified the organisation and fashioning of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a State.”(3)
[1] A. I. Denikin, Sketches of the Russian Revolt, Vol. II, Paris, 1922, p. 65.
[2] Lenin, “Draft Resolution on the Political Situation,” Collected Works (Russ. ed.), Vol. XXI, pp. 138-39.
[3] J. Stalin, “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists,” Leninism (Eng. ed., 1935), Vol. I, p. 128.
Previous: The Bourgeoisie Starts Civil War
Next: Capitalist Sabotage