A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Lenin possesses an imposing wholeness. He seems to be made of one chunk of granite. And he is all round and polished like a billiard ball. There is nothing you can get hold of him by. He rolls with irrepressible speed. But he could repeat to himself the well-known phrase: 'Je ne sais pas ou je vais, mais j'y vais resolument'. Lenin possesses a devotion to the revolutionary cause which permeates his entire being. But to him the

revolution is embodied in his person. Lenin possesses an outstanding mind, but it is a ... mind of one dimension — more than that, a unilinear mind ... He is a man of one-sided will and consequently a man with a stunned moral sensitivity.⁵⁸

Lenin had never been tolerant of dissent within his party's ranks. Bukharin complained that he 'didn't give a damn for the opinions of others'. Lunacharsky claimed that Lenin deliberately 'surrounded himself with fools' who would not dare question him. During Lenin's struggle for the April Theses this domineering attitude was magnified to almost megalomaniac proportions. Krupskaya called it his 'rage' — the frenzied state of her husband when engaged in clashes with his political rivals — and it was an enraged Lenin whom she had to live with for the next five years. During these fits Lenin acted like a man possessed by hatred and anger. His entire body was seized with extreme nervous tension, and he could neither sleep nor eat. His outward manner became vulgar and coarse. It was hard to believe that this was a cultivated man. He mocked his opponents, both inside and outside the party, in crude and violent language. They were 'blockheads', 'bastards', 'dirty scum', 'prostitutes', 'cunts', 'shits', 'cretins', 'Russian fools', 'windbags', 'stupid hens' and 'silly old maids'. When the rage subsided Lenin would collapse in a state of exhaustion, listlessness and depression, until the rage erupted again. This manic alternation of mood was characteristic of Lenin's psychological make-up. It continued almost unrelentingly between 1917 and 1922, and must have contributed to the brain haemorrhage from which he eventually died.⁵⁵

Much of Lenin's success in 1917 was no doubt explained by his towering domination over the party. No other political party had ever been so closely tied to the personality of a single man. Lenin was the first modern party leader to achieve the status of a god: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao Zedong were all his successors in this sense. Being a Bolshevik had come to imply an oath of allegiance to Lenin as both the leader' and the 'teacher' of the party. It was this, above all, which distinguished the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks (who had no clear leader of their own). By comparison with Lenin, all the other leading Bolsheviks were political midgets. Take Zinoviev. He was a brilliant orator but, as his great rival Trotsky put it, he was nothing else. For his speeches to produce results, 'he had to have a tranquillising certainty that he was to be relieved of the political responsibility by a reliable and strong hand. Lenin gave him this certainty.' Or take Kamenev. It was he who led the opposition to the April Theses, and, more than any other Bolshevik, argued the case for a moderate political alternative to Lenin's revolutionary strategy. Yet Kamenev was much too soft to be a real leader. Lunacharsky called him 'flabby'; Stankevich found him 'so gentle that it seemed that he himself was ashamed of his position'; while

George Denike compared him to an old schoolmaster and noted his fondness for wearing slippers. Kamenev was far too weak to stand up against the 'hard men' in the party. He might balk at some of their policies but he always followed them in the end.⁶⁰

Lenin's domination of the party had more to do with the culture of the party than with his own charisma. His oratory was grey. It lacked the brilliant eloquence, the pathos, the humour, the vivid metaphors, the colour or the drama of a speech by Trotsky or Zinoviev. Lenin, moreover, had the handicap of not being able to pronounce his 'r's'.* Yet his speeches had an iron logic, and Lenin had the knack of finding easy slogans, which he crammed into the heads of his listeners by endless repetition. He spoke with his thumbs thrust under his armpits, rocking back and forward on his heels, as if in preparation to launch himself, like a human rocket, into the listening crowd (this is how he was portrayed in the hagiographic portraits painted during the Soviet era). Gorky, who heard Lenin speak for the first time in 1907, thought he 'spoke badly' to start with: 'but after a minute I, like everybody else, was absorbed in his speech. It was the first time I had heard complicated political questions treated so simply. There was no striving after beautiful phrases. He presented every word clearly, and revealed his exact thought with great ease.' Potresov, who had known and worked with Lenin since 1894, explained his appeal by a curious 'hypnotic power':

Only Lenin was followed unquestioningly as the indisputable leader, as it was only Lenin who was that rare phenomenon, particularly in Russia — a man of iron will and indomitable energy, capable of instilling fanatical faith in the movement and the cause, and possessed of equal faith in himself. Once upon a time I, too, was impressed by this will-power of Lenin's, which seemed to make him into a 'chosen leader'.⁶¹

And yet it was more than the dominance of Lenin's personality that ensured the victory of his ideas in the party. The Bolshevik rank and file were not simply Lenin's puppets — he had been in exile too long for that — and their initial reservations about his call for a second revolution were strong enough for him to have to do more than simply lay down the party line for them to support it. The idea that the Bolshevik Party in 1917 was a monolithic organization tightly controlled by Lenin is a myth — a myth which used to be propagated by the Soviet establishment, and one which is still believed (for quite different motives) by right-wing historians in the West. In fact the party was quite undisciplined; it had many different factions, both ideological and geo-

* Gorbachev had a similar handicap. '■■'■•:■. ■ _: -.

graphical; and the leadership, which was itself divided, often proved unable to impose its will on them. Between April and October, and after that in the bitter struggles over Brest-Litovsk, the party was split from top to bottom by a series of ideological conflicts, in which Lenin, at least to begin with, often found himself in a small minority. And if in the end he always got his way, this was due not just to his domination of the party but also to his many political skills, including persuasion, tactful retreat and compromise, threats of resignation and ultimatums, demagogy and appeals to the rank and file.

Three factors worked in Lenin's favour during his struggle for the April Theses — one on the Right, one in the Centre, and one on the Left of the Bolshevik Party. On the Right the effect of the Theses was to impel a number of Bolshevik veterans into the Menshevik camp, where they believed the tenets of orthodox Marxism would be better respected. Some also found refuge in the intermediate group around Gorky's newspaper, Novaia zhizri, of which more later. The Centre, which had rallied around Kamenev to begin with, was gradually won over by Lenin, as he toned down the radical aspects of his April Theses. At the All-Russian Party Conference on 24—9 April he won a majority against Kamenev by accepting that a 'lengthy period of agitation' would be needed before the masses would be ready to follow the Bolsheviks to the next stage of the revolution. He was thus abandoning the call for the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government which many Bolsheviks had seen as the implication of his April Theses and which they had feared would plunge the country into civil war. Meanwhile, the left wing of the party was strengthened in the spring by the massive enrolment of workers and soldiers as new members. It was these lower-class party members who comprised the majority of the Bolshevik delegates at the April Party Conference — 149 of them in all, representing nearly 80,000 members throughout the country. They tended to be more radical than their party leaders. Knowing little of Marxist theory, they could not understand the need for a 'bourgeois revolution'. Why did their leaders want to reach socialism in two stages when they could get there in one? Hadn't enough blood already been spilled in February? And why should they allow the bourgeoisie to strengthen itself in power, if this was only going to make the task of removing them later even harder? The April Theses, with their call for immediate Soviet power, made more sense to them, and Lenin made a conscious effort to take advantage of this by speaking at numerous local party and factory meetings in the capital. He even swapped his Homburg hat for a worker's cap in an effort to make himself look more 'proletarian'.⁶²

The April crisis emphasized Lenin's message among the lower-class rank and file. Miliukov's behaviour seemed to prove his point that peace could not be attained through the 'imperialist' war aims of the Provisional Government. It strengthened the 'us-and-them' mentality of the radical workers and soldiers

towards the 'bourgeois ministers'. Some of the Bolsheviks in the party's Petrograd organization attempted to use the demonstrations of 20—I April as a springboard for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. A Bolshevik activist from the Putilov factory, S. la. Bogdatiev, led the demonstrators on to the streets with revolutionary banners. It is not clear what the role of the Bolshevik leadership was in all of this. The later Soviet version was that Bogdatiev and his comrades acted on their own initiative. But some Western historians have claimed that the Central Committee must have authorized their actions and only distanced itself from them when the putsch failed. There is no real evidence for this claim and its basic assumption — that the party was a tightly disciplined body — is in any case unfounded. The Central Committee had all along been opposed to the seizure of power, and the demonstrations evidently took them by surprise. Lenin, it is true, had favoured the idea of turning the demonstrations into a show of strength. But he could not be sure of the party's support, nor of the support of the masses, should this result in a struggle for power, and so he adopted a wait-and-see approach. No doubt if the Provisional Government had been overthrown, he would have claimed the victory. But as soon as order had been restored he condemned the 'adventurism' of the Petersburg 'hot-heads'. His main concern was to appease the centrist elements at the Bolshevik Conference. He told them on 24 April:

We had only wanted a peaceful reconnaissance of our enemy's forces and not to give battle. But the Petersburg Committee moved 'a wee bit too far to the left'. To move a 'wee bit left' at the moment of action was inept.. . It occurred because of imperfections in our organization. Were there mistakes? Yes, there were. Only those who don't act don't make mistakes. But to organize well — that's a difficult task.⁶³

Lenin's dilemma was this: if the Bolsheviks tried to seize power before the party or its supporters among the masses were properly organized for it, then they ran the risk of defeat and isolation, like the Paris Commune of 1871, whose fate haunted the Bolshevik leaders throughout 1917 and 1918; but if they failed to keep up with their revolutionary vanguard — the Kronstadt sailors, the Vyborg workers and the Petrograd garrison — then they were in danger of losing their sharpest striking force, which would dissipate itself in fruitless outbursts of anarchic violence. The history of the Bolshevik Party and its factional disputes in 1917 revolved around the problem of how to keep the energies of this revolutionary vanguard in line with the rest of the masses.

The Kronstadt Naval Base, an island of sailor-militants in the Gulf of Finland just off Petrograd, was by far the most rebellious stronghold of this Bolshevik vanguard. The sailors were young trainees who had seen very little

military activity during the war. They had spent the previous year cooped up on board their ships with their officers, who treated them with more than the usual sadistic brutality since the normal rules of naval discipline did not apply to trainees. Each ship was a tinderbox of hatred and violence. During the February Days the sailors mutinied with awesome ferocity. Admiral Viren, the Base Commander, was hacked to death with bayonets, and dozens of other officers were murdered, lynched or imprisoned in the island dungeons. The old naval hierarchy was completely destroyed and effective power passed to the Kronstadt Soviet. It was an October in February. The authority of the Provisional Government was never really established, nor was military order restored. Keren-sky, the Minister of Justice, proved utterly powerless in his repeated efforts to gain jurisdiction over the imprisoned officers, despite rumours in the bourgeois press that they had been brutally tortured.

The Kronstadt sailors were young (half of them were below the age of twenty-three), almost all of them were literate, and most of them were politicized by the propaganda of the far-left parties. By the start of May the Bolsheviks had recruited over 3,000 members at the naval base. Together with the Anarchists and the SRs, they controlled the Kronstadt Soviet. On 16 May the Soviet declared itself a sovereign power and rejected the authority of the Provisional Government and its appointed Commissar at the naval base. It was, in effect, the unilateral declaration of a 'Kronstadt Soviet Republic'. The Petrograd Soviet denounced the rebels as 'defectors from the revolutionary democracy'. The bourgeoisie of Petrograd was terrified by the thought that they were now at the mercy of this militant fortress, which at any moment might attack the capital. 'In their eyes', recalled Raskolnikov, one of the sailors' Bolshevik leaders, 'Kronstadt was a symbol of savage horror, the devil incarnate, a terrifying spectre of anarchy, a nightmare rebirth of the Paris Commune on Russian soil.' The Kronstadt Bolsheviks had played a major part in framing the 16 May declaration. But their action was not supported by the Bolshevik leaders in the capital.* Lenin was furious with his Kronstadt lieutenants for failing to observe party discipline. It was premature to think of the seizure of power against the authority of the Soviet, and he ordered them to call him every day for instructions until the crisis was resolved. Tsereteli was sent by the Petrograd Soviet to negotiate a settlement with the Kronstadt leaders, who agreed to accept the authority of the Provisional Government in return for their own elected Commissar. By 24 May

* Trotsky had encouraged the declaration. Speaking in the Kronstadt Soviet on 14 May he had said that what was good for Kronstadt would later be good for any other town: 'You are ahead and the rest have fallen behind.' Trotsky, however, was not yet a member of the Bolshevik Party.

the rebellion was over. Yet the Kronstadt sailors were to remain a threatening source of militancy, as the events of June, July and October were to show.⁶⁴

The other great bastion of Bolshevik militancy was the Vyborg district of Petrograd. The Vyborg party organization had over 5,000 Bolshevik members by the start of May. It was there that the most strike-prone metal factories were located — Russian Renault, Nobel, New Lessner, Erikson, Puzyrev, Vulcan, Phoenix and the Metal Works — and most of them were under the Bolsheviks' sway. These factories contained an inflammable mixture of young and literate metal-workers, who tended to be easily influenced by the Bolsheviks' militant slogans, and the less skilled immigrant workers who had flooded into the cities during the industrial boom of the war, and who consequently had suffered most from the double squeeze of low wages and high rents. Both groups were inclined to engage in violence on the streets. The Vyborg side was also the adopted home of the First Machine-Gun Regiment, the most highly trained and literate and also the most Bolshevized troops in Petrograd, with around 10,000 men and 1,000 machine-guns. During the February Days these machine-gunners had marched from their barracks at Oranienbaum into Petrograd to take part in the mutiny. Militant and self-assertive, they saw themselves as the heroes of the revolution, and refused to return to their barracks so long as the 'bourgeoisie' was 'in power'. In effect, as everyone knew, they were holding the Provisional Government to ransom.⁶³

The left-wing Bolsheviks, with their fighting resolve strengthened by these militant groups, advanced the idea of staging an armed demonstration on 10 June as a show of strength against the Provisional Government. The idea originated in the Military Organization, established by the Bolsheviks in the Petrograd garrison, which promised to bring out 60,000 troops. It soon received the backing of the Kronstadt sailors, who staged a dress rehearsal on 4 June with a march past in military ranks to salute the fallen heroes of the February Days. The Petersburg Bolshevik Committee was also showing signs of coming round in favour. They argued that an outlet had to be found for the soldiers and workers to express their anger at the government's preparations for the new offensive in the war campaign, and that if the Bolsheviks failed to lead the demonstration they might turn away from it and dissipate their anger in undirected violence. The party could not afford to waste the energies of its revolutionary vanguard. But the Central Committee was split, with Lenin, Sverdlov and Stalin (who had turned through 180 degrees since Lenin's return to Russia) in favour of the demonstration, and Kamenev, Zinoviev and Nogin against it on the grounds that the party still lacked sufficient mass support to justify the risks of all but calling for the seizure of power. A final decision was put off until 9 June.

By that time a majority of the Central Committee had come round to

support the idea of an armed demonstration. On 8 June twenty-eight factories had gone on strike in the capital to protest against the government's attempt to expel the Anarchists from their headquarters in the former tsarist minister Durnovo's villa, on the Vyborg side.* Fifty Kronstadt sailors came armed to defend the Anarchists against the government troops. The capital was on the brink of a bloody confrontation, and the moment seemed ripe for an organized show of force. The Mensheviks later argued that the Bolsheviks were prepared to exploit this opportunity for the seizure of power. Sukhanov even claimed that Lenin had worked out elaborate military plans for a Bolshevik coup d'etat, right down to the precise role of specific regiments in the seizure of strategic installations. But there is no evidence for this. It is true that at the First Ail-Russian Soviet Congress on 4 June Lenin had declared his party's readiness 'to assume power at any moment'. But if he was really planning an insurrection, he would hardly have given a public warning of it. Some of the secondary Bolshevik leaders, such as M. la. Latsis of the Vyborg Committee, who had close connections with the First Machine-Gun Regiment, certainly wanted to turn the demonstration into a full-scale uprising. But most of the senior leaders seemed to have viewed it as an exploratory test of strength and as a means of putting pressure on the Soviet Congress to take power itself. When the Soviet banned the demonstration on the evening of 9 June, five of the Bolshevik leaders (Lenin, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Nogin) reconvened to call it off. Their more militant comrades protested furiously. Stalin threatened to resign (an offer that was unfortunately rejected) and accused the Central Committee of 'intolerable wavering'. But Lenin insisted that it was premature for the party to risk everything on a stand against the Soviet. The whole of his strategy in 1917, seen not least in the October seizure of power, was to use the cloak of Soviet legitimation to conceal the ambitions of his party. If the armed demonstration had gone ahead, the Bolsheviks would almost certainly have been expelled from the Soviet and the major strategic thrust of his April Theses — mass agitation for Soviet power — would have been undermined altogether.⁶⁶

On 18 June the Soviet sponsored its own demonstration in Petrograd. The aim was to rally mass support behind the slogan of 'revolutionary unity', a by-word for the Soviet's continued participation in the coalition, and, from the viewpoint of those who were becoming more radicalized, probably a more acceptable slogan to the call for unconditional support of the government. The Bolsheviks resolved to take part in the march with banners calling for All Power to the Soviets!', and most of the 400,000 marchers who came out did so under

* Popular legend had it that the Anarchists had turned the villa into a madhouse, where orgies, sinister plots and witches' sabbaths were held, but when the Procurator arrived he found it in perfect order with part of the garden used as a creche for the workers' children.

this slogan.⁶⁷ Perhaps the supporters of the Soviet leaders had deliberately stayed away, as some of the press later suggested. Or perhaps, as seems more likely, the demonstrators did not understand the ideological differences between the Bolsheviks and the Soviet leaders and marched under the banners of the former on the false assumption that it was a mark of loyalty to the latter. Either way, it was a major propaganda victory for the Bolsheviks and did much to encourage their plans in July for another, far more consequential, armed confrontation with the Provisional Government.

iv Gorky's Despair

Gorky to Ekaterina, 18 June 1917:

Today's demonstration was a demonstration of the impotence of the loyal democratic forces. Only the 'Bolsheviks' marched. I despise and bate them more and more. They are truly Russian idiots. Most of the slogans demanded 'Down with the 10 Bourgeois Ministers!' But there are only eight of them! There were several outbreaks of panic — it was disgusting. Ladies jumped into the canal between the Champs de Mars and the Summer Gardens, waded through the water in their boots, pulled up their skirts, and bared their legs, some of them fat, some of them crooked. The madness continues, but it seems that it is beginning to wear the people out. Although I am a pacifist, I welcome the coming offensive in the hope that it may at least bring some organization to the country, which is becoming incorrigibly lazy and disorganized.⁶⁸

Socialism for Gorky had always been essentially a cultural ideal. It meant for him the building of a humanist civilization based on the principles of democracy and on the development of the people's moral, spiritual and intellectual forces. 'The new political life', he wrote in April, 'demands from us a new structure of the soul.' And yet the revolution, as he saw it, had unleashed an 'anarchic wave of plebeian violence and revenge' which threatened to destroy Russian civilization. There had been no 'social revolution', as Gorky understood the term, but only a 'zoological' outburst of violence and destruction. Instead of heralding a new civilization, the Russian Revolution had brought the country to the brink of a 'new dark age of barbaric chaos', in which the instincts of revenge and hatred would overcome all that was good in the people. The task of the democratic intelligentsia, as he saw it in 1917, was the defence of civilization against the destructive violence of the crowd. It was, in his own Arnoldian terms, a struggle of 'culture against anarchy'.⁶⁹

The violent rejection of everything associated with the old civilization was an integral element of the February Revolution. Symbols of the imperial regime were destroyed, statues of tsarist heroes were smashed, street names were changed. Peasants vandalized manor houses, churches and schools. They burned down libraries and smashed up priceless works of art.

Many romantic socialists saw this iconoclastic violence as a 'natural' (i.e. positive) revolutionary impulse from an oppressed people with much to avenge. Trotsky, for example, spoke in idealistic terms of the revolution, even through the incitement of aggression, arousing the human personality.

It is natural that persons unaccustomed to revolution and its psychology, or persons who have previously only experienced in the realm of ideas that which has unfolded before them physically, materially, may view with some sorrow, if not disgust, the anarchic wildness and violence which appeared on the surface of the revolutionary events. Yet in that riotous anarchy, even in its most negative manifestations, when the soldier, yesterday's slave, all of a sudden found himself in a first-class railway carriage and tore out the velvet facings to make himself foot-cloths, even in such an act of vandalism the awakening of the personality was expressed. That downtrodden, persecuted Russian peasant, who had been struck in the face and subjected to the vilest curses, found himself, for perhaps the first time in his life, in a first-class carriage and saw the velvet cushions, while on his feet he had stinking rags, and he tore up the velvet, saying that he too had the right to a piece of good silk or velvet.

And there were many left-wing intellectuals who saw the violence in similar terms. Some, like Blok, idealized the burning down of the old Russia as an exorcism of its sinful past, and believed that out of this destruction of the old world a new and more fraternal world, perhaps even a more Christian world, would be created. Hence Blok, in his famous poem 'The Twelve' (written in January 1918), portrayed Christ at the head of the Red Guards. Others, like Voloshin, Mandelstam and Belyi, were rather more ambivalent towards the revolutionary violence, welcoming it, on the one hand, as a just and elemental force, while, on the other, expressing horror at its savage cruelty.⁷⁰

But Gorky saw only darkness in the violence. He was appalled by what, he had no doubts, were its inevitable consequences, the moral corruption of the revolution and the people's descent into barbarism. He was, as always, quite uncompromising and outspoken in his condemnations of the violence in his well-known column, 'Untimely Thoughts', which he published in his newspaper Novaia zhizn during 1917 and 1918. He condemned the boom in royal pornography as 'poisonous filth', whose only real effect was to arouse the 'dark instincts

of the mob'. Later, during the Red Terror, he would take up the defence of several Romanovs, including even a Grand Duke, seeing them as the 'poor scapegoats of the Revolution, martyrs to the fanaticism of the times'. He was even more appalled by the 'rise of anti-Semitism, the pogrom mentality of the working class', a class upon which, like all the Marxists, he had placed great faith as a liberating and moral force. Gorky also condemned the vandalism of the peasant revolution. He saw the destruction of the gentry's manors, with their libraries and fine art, as nothing less than an attack on civilization. In March 1917, after hearing rumours that the crowds were about to smash the equestrian statue of Alexander III in Znamenskaya Square, Gorky held a meeting of fifty leading cultural figures in his flat, and out of this was formed a twelve-man commission to campaign for the preservation of all artistic monuments and historic buildings. The 'Gorky Commission' it was often called.⁷¹

Gorky's own beloved Petersburg, the capital of Russia's Western civilization, was, as he saw it, being destroyed and profaned by 'this Asiatic revolution'. On 14 June he wrote to Ekaterina in Moscow:

This is no longer a capital, it is a cesspit. No one works, the streets are filthy, there are piles of stinking rubbish in the courtyards ... It hurts me to say how bad things have become. There is a growing idleness and cowardice in the people, and all those base and criminal instincts which I have fought all my life and which, it seems, are now destroying Russia.⁷²

Twentieth-century Russia seemed to be returning to the barbarism of the Middle Ages. Gorky was especially outraged by the spread of lynch law (samosudy) in the cities. In December 1917 he claimed to have counted 10,000 cases of summary justice since the collapse of the old regime. It seemed to him that these mob trials — in which the crowd would judge and execute an apprehended criminal on the street — utterly negated the ideals of justice for which the revolution had been fought. The Russian people, having been beaten for hundreds of years, were now beating their own enemies with a morbid sensuality.

Here is how the democracy tries its sinners. A thief was caught near the Alexandrovsky Market. The crowd there and then beat him up and took a vote — by which death should the thief be punished: drowning or shooting? They decided on drowning and threw the man into the icy water. But with great difficulty he managed to swim out and crawl up on to the shore; one of the crowd then went up to him and shot him.

The middle ages of our history were an epoch of abominable cruelty,

but even then if a criminal sentenced to death by a court fell from the gallows, he was allowed to live.

How do the mob trials affect the coming generation?

A thief, beaten half to death, is taken by soldiers to the Moika to be drowned; he is all covered with blood, his face is completely smashed, and one eye has come out. A crowd of children accompanies him; later some of them return from the Moika and, hopping up and down, joyfully shout: 'They sunk him, they drowned him!'

These are our children, the future builders of our life. The life of a man will be cheap in their estimation, but man — one should not forget this! — is the finest and most valuable creation of nature.⁷³

Gorky's pessimism was of course the view of a man of letters repulsed by violence in all its forms. He judged the revolution, not in its own terms, but in terms of how far it matched up to his own cultural values and moral ideals. This he made clear in a brave and daring speech, never before published, to commemorate the first anniversary of the February Revolution:

A revolution is only a revolution when it arises as a natural and powerful expression of the people's creative force. If, however, the revolution is simply a release of the instincts of the people accumulated through slavery and oppression, then it is not a revolution but just a riot [bunt] of malice and hatred, it is incapable of changing our lives but can only lead to bitterness and evil. Can we really say that one year after the Russian Revolution, the people, having been liberated from the violence and oppression of the old police state, have become better, kinder, more intelligent, and more honest people? No, no one could say that. We are still living as we lived under the monarchy, with the same customs, the same prejudices, the same stupidity and the same filth. The greed and the malice which were inculcated in us by the old regime are still within us. People are still robbing and cheating one another, as they have always robbed and cheated one another. The new bureaucrats take bribes just like the old ones did, and they treat the people with even more rudeness and contempt. . . The Russian people, having won its freedom, is in its present state incapable of using it for its own good, only for its own harm and the harm of others, and it is in danger of losing everything that it has been fighting for for centuries. It is destroying all the great achievements of its ancestors; gradually the national wealth, the wealth of the land, of industry, of transport, of communications, and of the towns, is being destroyed in the dirt.⁷⁴

There is much that one might admire in Gorky's brave stand against the destruction of the revolution. His despairing voice was an isolated one — which made it all the more noble and tragic. As far as the Left was concerned his 'untimely thoughts' were heretical — they were 'politically incorrect' — because it was the received view that violence and destruction were both natural and even justified by the wider goals of the revolution; and yet Gorky's contacts with the Bolsheviks made them just as unwelcome on the Right. His own circle around Novaia zhizn was not so much a political faction as a loose assortment of disaffected Marxists who had no party they felt they could join. 'I should form my own party,' Gorky wrote to Ekaterina on 19 March, 'but I wouldn't know what to call it. In this party there is only one member — and that is me!⁷⁵

And yet, as Gorky himself acknowledged, his own position was full of prejudices and contradictions which only an intellectual could afford. He made sweeping moral and cultural judgements about the violence of the revolutionary crowd without ever attempting to understand this violence in its historical or social context. In his many writings on the mob trials, for example, he never considered the simple social fact that, with the cities full of crime and violence, and with no police force to uphold the law, these acts of street justice had become the only way for ordinary citizens to protect their property and themselves. Gorky did not really understand the problem; he simply judged it from a moral viewpoint.

Gorky's cultural prejudices were nowhere more apparent than in his efforts to explain the origins of this violence. Of course he saw the need to place it in the context of the legacies of tsarism:

The conditions in which the Russian people lived in the past could foster in them neither respect for the individual, nor awareness of the citizen's rights, nor a feeling of justice — these were conditions of absolute lawlessness, of the oppression of the individual, of the most shameless lies and bestial cruelty. And one must be amazed that with all these conditions, the people nevertheless retained in themselves quite a few human feelings and some degree of common sense.

And he was the first to stress that the barbarism of the revolution was born in the barbarism of the First World War. The mass slaughter of the trenches and the hardships of the rear had brought out the cruelty and brutishness of people, Gorky explained to Romain Rolland, hardening them to the suffering of their fellow human beings. People had developed a taste for violence and few of them, he maintained, had been shocked by the killing of the February Days. The unwritten rules of civilized behaviour had all been forgotten, the thin veneer of civilization had been stripped away, in the revolutionary explosion.⁷⁶

Yet Gorky was always rather more inclined to explain this violence in terms of the Russian national character than in terms of the context in which it took place. 'The environment in which the tragedy of the Russian Revolution has been and is being played out', he wrote in 1922, 'is an environment of semi-savage people. I explain the cruel manifestations of the revolution in terms of the exceptional cruelty of the Russian people.' He never stopped to think that all social revolutions are, by their very nature, violent. Here Gorky's view was prejudiced by his ardent Westernizing sympathies. It was his belief that all human progress and civilization derived from the West, and that all barbarism derived from the East. Socially, historically and geographically, Russia was caught between Europe and Asia. The Petrine state tradition and the Russian intelligentsia were both Westernizing influences; the peasantry were Asiatic; while the working class was in between, derived as it was from the peasantry yet capable of being civilized under the intelligentsia's guidance. The Russian Revolution, which, Gorky realized in 1917, came essentially from the peasant depths, was an Easternizing and barbaric force. He had no illusions, as Lvov did, about the goodness or the wisdom of the simple Russian people. 'I am turning into a pessimist, and, it seems, a misanthrope,' he wrote to Ekaterina in mid-March. 'In my view the overwhelming majority of the population in Russia is both evil and as stupid as pigs.'⁷⁷

The 'savage instincts' of the Russian peasants, whom Gorky hated with a vengeance, were, in his view, especially to blame for the violence of the revolution. The sole desire of the peasants, Gorky often argued, was to exact a cruel revenge on their former masters, and on all the wealthy and privileged elite, among whom they counted their self-appointed leaders among the intelligentsia. Much of the revolutionary violence in the cities — the mob trials, the anarchic looting and the 'carting out' of the factory bosses — he put down, like many of the Mensheviks, to the sudden influx of unskilled peasant workers into cities during the war. It was as if he refused to believe that the working class, which, like all Marxists, he saw as a force of cultural progress, might behave like peasants or hooligans. And yet he often expressed his own deep fear that the urban culture of the working class was being 'dissolved in the peasant mass', that the world of school and industry was being lost to the barbaric customs of the village.⁷⁸

Gorky blamed the Bolsheviks for much of this. Lenin's April Theses had, as he saw it, called prematurely for a new revolution, and in Russia's state of backwardness this was bound to make it hostage to the peasantry. As he wrote in 1924:

I thought that the Theses sacrificed the small and heroic band of politically educated workers, as well as the truly revolutionary intelligentsia, to the

Russian peasantry. The only active force in Russia would be thrown, like a pinch of salt, into the flat bog of the village, and it would dissolve without a trace, without changing the spirit, the life, the history of the nation.⁷⁹

It seemed to Gorky that the cultural ideals of the socialist intelligentsia were being sacrificed by the Bolsheviks in the interests of their own political ends. The Bolsheviks were guilty of stirring up class hatred and of encouraging the 'nihilistic masses' to destroy the old order root and branch.

The violent clashes on the Nevsky Prospekt during the demonstrations of 20—1 April, which many people blamed on the Bolsheviks, filled Gorky with a sense of deep revulsion. His 'untimely thoughts' for the 23rd:

The bright wings of our young freedom are bespattered with innocent blood. Murder and violence are the arguments of despotism .. . We must understand that the most terrible enemy of freedom and justice is within us; it is our stupidity, our cruelty, and all that chaos of dark, anarchistic feelings . . . Are we capable of understanding this? If we are incapable, if we cannot refrain from the most flagrant use of force on man, then we have no freedom ... Is it possible that the memory of our vile past, the memory of how hundreds and thousands of us were shot in the streets, has implanted in us, too, the calm attitude of the executioner toward the violent death of a man? I cannot find harsh enough words to reproach those who try to prove something with bullets, bayonets, or a fist in the face. Were not these the . . . means by which we were kept in shameful slavery? And now, having freed ourselves from slavery externally, we continue to live dominated by the feelings of slaves.⁸⁰

The role of the Bolsheviks in the abortive demonstrations of 10 June also angered him. He wrote to Ekaterina on 14 June:

I have come to the end of my tether. Physically I am still holding out. But every day my anxiety grows and I think that the crazy politics of Lenin will soon lead us to a civil war. He is completely isolated but his slogans are very popular among the mass of the uneducated workers and some of the soldiers.⁸¹

It seemed to Gorky that the 'plebeian anger' aroused by the Bolsheviks' militant slogans might all too easily degenerate into a force of destruction and chaos in a peasant country such as Russia, where the mass of the people were 'ignorant and base'. Hatred of the burzhoois would soon give way to a senseless pogrom, a

class war of retribution, a 'looting of the looters', to adopt the Bolsheviks' own slogan. Distrust of the democratic parties, equally fostered by the Bolsheviks, would soon become a general negation of the intelligentsia and its humanist values.

In a sense it was not just the Bolsheviks but all the political parties which Gorky despaired of in 1917. 'Polities', he wrote on 20 April, 'is the seedbed of social enmity, evil suspicions, shameless lies, morbid ambitions, and disrespect for the individual. Name anything bad in man, and it is precisely in the soil of political struggle that it grows with abundance.' His cri de coeur was based on the belief that the role of the intelligentsia, in which he included the political parties, was to defend the moral and cultural values of the Enlightenment against the destructive violence of the crowd. Its role was to safeguard the revolution as a constructive and creative process of national civilization. Gorky, in this respect, was moving closer to the viewpoint of the liberals and the Soviet leaders, who were just as concerned by the growing tide of anarchy. And like them, during the spring and early summer he was becoming increasingly inclined to view a new offensive on the Front as a galvanizing and disciplining force. For, as Gorky put it on 18 June, 'although I am a pacifist, I welcome the coming offensive in the hope that it may at least bring some organization to the country'.⁸² How wrong he would be.

10 The Agony of the Provisional Government

i The Illusion of a Nation

At their first meeting Kerensky made Brusilov the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army. The new Minister of War had gone down to see Brusilov at his headquarters on the South-Western Front and, after inspecting the troops, had driven with him through the night to the town of Tarnopol. There was a violent storm and the lonely motor-car seemed in constant peril as it trundled along the muddy country roads. Huddled together inside the car, with the rain beating down against the windows and lightning flashing overhead, the two men drew closer together. They started to talk informally, telling each other their private thoughts, as if they were old friends. Both men agreed on the need to launch a summer offensive, and it was this, as he recalled in his memoirs, that made Kerensky decide 'there and then that Brusilov should be given the command of the entire army in time for the opening of the offensive'.¹

Brusilov's appointment was an act of faith in the fighting capacity of the new revolutionary army. It was, above all, his optimism that had won him the post. 'I needed men who believed that the Russian army was not ruined,' Kerensky later wrote. 'I had no use for people who could not genuinely accept the fait accompli of the Revolution, or who doubted that we could rebuild the army's morale in the new psychological atmosphere. I needed men who had lived through the utter folly of the years of war under the old regime and who fully understood the upheaval that had occurred'.² Brusilov fitted the bill. He was perhaps the only senior tsarist general to emerge with honour from the war — and one of the first to throw in his lot with the revolution. Like Kerensky, he hoped the defence of liberty might at last inspire the sort of civic patriotism that Russia needed to continue the war.

Brusilov's support for the democracy, and the soldiers' committees in particular, had won him few friends among the rest of the senior generals. They denounced him as an 'opportunist' and a 'traitor' to the army. The General Staff at Stavka received their new commander with open hostility on 22 May. 'I became aware at once, upon my arrival, of their frosty feelings for me,' Brusilov recalled. Instead of the usual mass ovation, to which he had grown accustomed, Brusilov was met at the station at Mogilev by a small and rather formal delegation

of sullen-faced generals. To make matters worse, Brusilov at once caused grave offence by failing to receive a group of senior officers, who had come to the station to welcome him, and, in a gesture of democracy, turning instead to shake the hands of the private soldiers. The first soldiers were so confused — it was customary for the generals to salute them — that they dropped their rifles or grasped them clumsily in their left arm whilst shaking hands with their new Commander-in-Chief.³

Unlike most of the senior commanders, Brusilov believed in working together with the soldiers' democratic organs. As he saw it, the restoration of the army's morale and the launching of a new offensive could only be achieved in partnership with them. Such optimism in the democratic order contrasted starkly with the scepticism of General Alexeev, the previous Commander-in-Chief, who had so far been doubtful that a successful offensive could be launched with the armed forces in their present revolutionary state. But then Brusilov had always been convinced that God had chosen him to lead Russia's armies to victory. 'Despite all the difficulties,' he wrote to his brother shortly after his arrival at Mogilev, 'I never despair because I know that God has placed this burden on my shoulders and that the fate of the Fatherland lies in His hands. I have a deep faith, as deep as my faith in God Himself, that we shall be victorious in this titanic struggle.'⁴

Ever since the Inter-Allied Conference at Chantilly in November 1915, Russia had been under growing pressure from her Allies to launch a new offensive on the Eastern Front. The Entente leaders wanted 1917 to be the year of final victory, and it was assumed that a combined offensive in the east and the west would be enough to defeat the Central Powers. The legitimacy of the Provisional Government among the Western Powers — and the financial support which it gained from them — rested largely on its declared intention to fulfil this obligation to the Allies. Yet, at the same time, the revolution had increased the already considerable doubts about Russia's fighting capacity. At a meeting of his Front commanders on 18 March Alexeev dismissed the French demand for a new offensive in the spring: the roads were still covered in ice; horses and fodder were in short supply; the reserve units were falling apart; military discipline was breaking down; and the Soviet, which controlled all the essential levers of power, was still reluctant to support anything beyond a purely defensive strategy. Most of the commanders agreed with him that it was impossible to launch a new offensive before June or even July. Brusilov was the only one to support the idea of a spring offensive. In a telegram to the meeting he claimed that his soldiers were eager to fight. It was such an extraordinarily optimistic statement — and no doubt largely the product of his own wishful thinking — that Alexeev asked the Quartermaster-General to check the telegram's authenticity. 'What luck it would be', he scribbled at the bottom of the cable, 'if reality were to justify

these hopes.' Coming as it did from the key South-Western Front, where any attack would have to be launched, Brusilov's message certainly helped to bring the cautious Alexeev around to the idea of an earlier offensive during May. He outlined his reasons to Guchkov on 30 March:

If we fail to go on the attack, we will not escape having to fight but will simply condemn ourselves to fighting at a time and place convenient to the enemy. And if we fail to co-operate with our allies, we cannot expect them to come to our aid when we need it. Disorder in the army will have a no less detrimental effect on defence than it will on offence. Even if we are not fully confident of success, we should go on the offensive. Results of unsuccessful defence are worse than those of unsuccessful offence . . . The faster we throw our troops into action the sooner their passion for politics will cool. General Brusilov based his support on these considerations .. . It can he said that the less steady the troops, the less successful defence is likely to he; hence the more desirable it is to undertake active operations.⁵

It was a terrible gamble. There was no guarantee that the risks of attack would be less than those of defence; and even less reason to suppose, as Alexeev and Brusilov had done, that the fighting spirit of the troops could be galvanized by launching an offensive. With hindsight it is clear that the military and political leaders of the Provisional Government were deluded by their own optimism. They grossly underestimated the likely costs of a new offensive. Alexeev, for one, predicted that the Russian losses would be in the region of 6,000 men; but the actual number turned out to be just short of 400,000, and the number of deserters perhaps even greater. This was a huge human price to pay for a piece of wishful thinking. Politically, the costs were even higher. For there is no doubt that the launching — let alone the failure — of the offensive led directly to the summer crisis which culminated in the downfall of the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October. No doubt the military leaders had assumed that by launching an early offensive they could pre-empt a German attack, which their intelligence had misinformed them was set to take place in the summer. But the Germans had in fact been committed for some time to a 'peace offensive' in the east so that they could release troops for transfer to the west. A defensive strategy thus made much more sense, given the weakness of Russia's army and its rear. But by June, when the offensive was launched, the Russian leaders had become obsessed with the idea of attack — the offensive had come to symbolize the 'national spirit' of the revolution — and they were blind to the possibility that it might end in catastrophe.

More than anything else, the summer offensive swung the soldiers to the Bolsheviks, the only major party which stood uncompromisingly for an

immediate end to the war. Had the Provisional Government adopted a similar policy and opened negotiations with the Germans, no doubt the Bolsheviks would never have come to power. Why was this crucial step never taken? The patriotism of the democratic leaders — which for them was virtually synonymous with a commitment to the Allied Powers as democracies — provides part of the answer. Kerensky considered briefly the option of a separate peace, when he took over as Prime Minister after the July Days and the collapse of the offensive; but he rejected it on the grounds, or so he later claimed, that this would make him responsible for Russia's national humiliation. Perhaps one may accuse him and other politicians of a lack of foresight in their rejection of the separate peace option. Five days before the Bolshevik seizure of power, on 20 October, General Verkhovsky, the Minister of War, declared the army unfit to fight. He recommended that the only way to counteract the growing threat of the Bolsheviks was 'by cutting the ground from under them — in other words by raising at once the question of concluding peace'. Yet Kerensky failed to see the Bolshevik danger and once again refused to act. Fourteen years later, Lord Beaverbrook, whilst lunching with Kerensky in London, asked him whether the Provisional Government could have stopped the Bolsheviks by signing a separate peace with Germany. 'Of course,' Kerensky replied, 'we should be in Moscow now.' Astonished by this response, Beaverbrook asked why they had not done this. 'We were too naive,' Kerensky replied.⁶

Hindsight is the luxury of historians. Given the pressures and doctrines of the time it is not hard to understand why the offensive was launched. The leaders of the Provisional Government took Russia's commitments to the Allies in earnest. They would have liked to negotiate a general peace without annexations or indemnities as the saying went; but Russia's military weakness made their bargaining position extremely weak. The Allies were coming round to the view that the war could be won with or without Russia, especially after the entry of the United States in April. They blocked the Stockholm Peace Conference, organized by the Soviet leaders to bring together all the socialist parties in Europe, and dragged their heels on Russian proposals for a revision of the Allied war aims. In this sense, by scotching the international peace campaign, the Allies did their bit to help the Bolsheviks come to power, although this leaves open the question as to whether a general peace could have been achieved.

Paradoxical though it may seem, the leaders of the Provisional Government thus backed an offensive to strengthen their campaign for a general settlement of the conflict. They went to war in order to make peace. That was also the rationale of the Soviet leaders in supporting the offensive. Tsereteli's Revolutionary Defensism, the rallying of the democracy for the needs of national defence, was the main justification for their entry into the Coalition. It might of course be argued that national defence did not demand that an offensive be

launched. By supporting the primacy of the needs of the army, as they did in signing the coalition's Declaration of Principles on 5 May, the Soviet leaders were in danger of losing sight of their basic aim — the negotiation of a general peace — and thus laying themselves open to the Bolshevik charge of joining the warmongers. But they were carried away by the hope that the defence of democratic Russia might help to rally the people behind them. They compared Russia's situation with that of France on the eve of the war against Austria in 1792: it seemed to them that a revolutionary war would give birth to a new civic patriotism, just as the defence of the pattie had given rise to the national chorus of Aux armes, citoyens'. They were quite convinced that a 'national revolution' had taken place, not just a revolt against the old regime, and that through this upsurge of patriotism, through the popular recognition that the interests of 'the nation' stood higher than any class or party interests, they could restore unity and order.

Kerensky, the Minister of War in the coalition government, was cast as the hero of this new civic patriotism. As a popular and above-party figure, he became the embodiment of the coalition's ideal of national unity. The cult of Kerensky, which had first emerged in the February Days, reached its climax with the June offensive, which indeed the cult had helped to bring about. All the nations hopes and expectations rested on the frail shoulders of Kerensky, 'the first people's minister of war'. Schoolboy poets like Leonid Kannegiser (later to assassinate the Bolshevik Uritsky) portrayed Kerensky as a Russian Bonaparte:

And if, swirling with pain, I fall in the name of Mother Russia, And find myself in some deserted field, Shot through the chest on the ground, Then at the Gates of Heaven, In my dying and joyous dreams, I will remember — Russia, Liberty, Kerensky on a white horse.

Marina Tsvetaeva, who was then herself barely out of school, also felt moved to compare Kerensky with Napoleon:

And someone, falling on the map, Does not sleep in his dreams. There came a Bonaparte In my country.⁷

Kerensky revelled in this role. He had always seen himself as the leader

of the nation, above party or class interests. The adulation went to his head. He became obsessed with the idea of leading the army to glory and of covering himself in honour. He began to model himself on Napoleon. A bust of the French Emperor stood on his desk at the Ministry of War. Although he had never himself been in the army, Kerensky donned a finely tailored khaki tunic, officer's breeches and knee-high leather boots when he became the Minister of War (a semi-military style of dress that many future leaders, including Stalin, would later take from him). The Minister of War took great care over his personal appearance — and it was a huge source of pride for him. Even at the height of the fighting in October, when he appeared before the Cossacks during the battle for Gatchina against the Red Guards, he made sure to wear his 'finest tunic, the one to which the people and the troops had grown so accustomed', and to 'salute, as I always did, slightly casually and with a slight smile'. During his famous tours of the Fronts, Kerensky even wore his right arm in a sling, although there was no record that the arm had ever been hurt (some people joked that he had simply worn it out by too much hand-shaking). It was no doubt a deliberate attempt to suggest that he, like the ordinary soldiers, had been wounded too. Perhaps it was also an attempt to echo the image of Napoleon with his arm tucked into the front of his tunic.⁸

On the eve of his appointment Kerensky had given a melodramatic performance at a Congress of Delegates from the Front. 'I am sorry that I did not die two months ago,' he pronounced with his hand placed solemnly on his heart, 'for then I would have died with the greatest of dreams: that henceforth and forever a new life had dawned for Russia, when we could mutually respect each other and govern our state without whips or clubs.' He appealed to the soldiers to place their 'civic duty' above their own narrow class interests and to strengthen their fighting resolve, since Russia's liberty could only be gained 'as a strong and organized state' and this meant that 'every citizen' had to make a sacrifice for the nation. Under 'the old and hated regime' the soldiery had known how to fulfil their obligations, so why could they not do the same in the name of Freedom? 'Or is it', he asked in a phrase charged with meaning and emotion for the soldiers, 'it it that the free Russian state is in fact a state of rebellious slaves?'⁹ There was uproar in the hall. For the soldiers, in their own self-image, had indeed been 'slaves' before Order Number One, and Kerensky now seemed to be asking whether they were worth their freedom, as 'citizens', if they were not prepared to go to war. The phrase 'rebellious slaves' echoed around the country for weeks. It did much to turn the soldiers against Kerensky. But for the patriotic and the propertied it was just the sort of appeal to discipline and duty that they had long been calling for, and they now rallied behind Kerensky and the idea of an offensive at the Front. It was almost as if they sensed that only a victory could save them now.

The liberal press now joined the right in a national chorus of howling headlines calling on the army to 'Take the Offensive!' The Kadet Party took up the national flag. No doubt they hoped that posing as patriots might reverse their alarming electoral decline. In the city Duma elections during May the Kadets had gained less than 20 per cent of the vote. No longer able to compete with the socialists for mass support, they sought to appeal to the middle classes by calling for the defence of the Fatherland and the restoration of order. Patriotism became the basis of their claim to be a party 'above class'. The democratic intelligentsia, which had always been the main social base of the Kadets, largely followed them into the chauvinist camp. The League of Russian Culture, founded by a group of right-wing Kadets in the midst of this patriotic wave, called on all classes to unite behind the banner of Russia. Even Blok, who called himself a socialist, succumbed to the new mood of patriotism, while Gorky welcomed the offensive as a means of 'bringing some organization to the country'. There was a growing feeling that 'Russia' should be put before everything else, even the revolution itself. 'It is not Russia that exists for the revolution,' Dmitry Merezhkovsky wrote, 'but the revolution that exists for Russia.' It was close to the notion of a national-bourgeois Russia advanced by Struve and the Vekhi group after 1905; and there was indeed a similar equation of the nation with its middle classes. Propertied patriots subscribed to the Liberty Loan, raised by the government to finance the offensive. N. V Chaikovsky, President of the Free Economic Society, declared it 'the duty of everyone to the Motherland, to his fellow citizens and the future of Russia, to give his savings for the great cause of freedom'.¹⁰

This new civic patriotism did not extend beyond the urban middle classes, although the leaders of the Provisional Government deluded themselves that it did. The visit of the Allied socialists — Albert Thomas from France, Emile Vandervelde from Belgium and Arthur Henderson from Britain — was a typical case in point. They had come to Russia to plead with 'the people' not to leave the war; yet very few people bothered to listen to them. Konstantin Paustovsky recalls Thomas speaking in vain from the balcony of the building that was later to become the Moscow Soviet. Thomas spoke in French and the small crowd that had gathered could not understand what he said. 'But everything in his speech could be understood without words. Bobbing up and down on his bowed legs, Thomas showed us graphically what would happen to Russia if it left the war. He twirled his moustaches, like the Kaiser's, narrowed his eyes rapaciously, and jumped up and down choking the throat of an imaginary Russia.' For several minutes the Frenchman continued with this circus act, hurling the body of Russia to the ground and jumping up and down on it, until the crowd began to hiss and boo and laugh. Thomas mistook this for a sign of approval and saluted the crowd with his bowler hat. But the laughter and booing got

louder: 'Get that clown off!' one worker cried. Then, at last, someone else appeared on the balcony and diplomatically led him inside.¹¹

Some middle-class civilians volunteered for the new shock battalions which were formed to revive the army's morale. Most of these were made up of frightened officers, eager to flee their mutinous regiments. Bernard Pares, who attended several patriotic rallies to encourage these volunteers, compared their hysterical atmosphere to that of a revival meeting. On one occasion he was introduced to the soldiers as 'our English comrade, the Professor', a great war hero, who had won the George Cross by beating the Germans single-handed. This was of course a total invention; but when Pares urged his host to shut up, he was told that such tales were needed to raise the morale of the troops.¹²

One of the best-known volunteer units had been formed by women. The Women's Battalion of Death had been organized by Maria Bochkareva, a truly remarkable woman, who had worked before the war as a foreman on factory building sites. After 1914 she had campaigned to enlist in the army and, having petitioned the Tsar himself, had been allowed to fight under General Gurko. By February 1917, she had risen to the rank of sergeant, having spent two years in the trenches with several wounds and a number of medals to prove it. Concerned by the collapse of military discipline, she appealed to Brusilov to let her form a shock battalion of women in the hope that this would shame the rest of the soldiers into fighting. In fact it was to have the opposite effect: the soldiers viewed its formation as a sign of the government's desperate situation and this strengthened their resolve not to fight; while many soldiers, the Cossacks in particular, refused to fight alongside women. But Brusilov did not anticipate this and saw no reason to object. He was keen on the idea, much debated at that time, of establishing a new army based entirely on volunteer units. He saw it as a means of fighting the war on the basis of patriotic duty, and of breaking down the old divisions between the officers and the troops. Since his own wife was working in the medical services at the Front, he did not see why other women should not also go there to fight. The battalion was hastily formed and blessed by the Patriarch Nikon on Red Square in Moscow before their departure for the Front in June. The women shaved their heads and put on standard army trousers, although one was too fat to fit them and had to go into battle in a skirt.¹³

The army commissars were the other great hope of this civic patriotism. Most of them were junior officers of democratic or socialist persuasion. They enjoyed the confidence of their troops yet also understood the need for military discipline. Linde, the young NCO who had led the mutiny of several regiments during the February Days, was a typical case in point: he became the Commissar of the Special Army during the summer offensive. Dmitry Os'kin, the peasant NCO whom we encountered in Chapter 7, also became a military commissar.

The commissars were instituted by the Soviet on 19 March, and made responsible to the Provisional Government on 6 May. They were meant to smooth relations between the officers and the soldiers' committees and, as such, were seen as the basis for a new patriotic partnership between the democracy and the army.

That, too, was the hope of the Declaration 'On the Rights of Servicemen' issued by Kerensky on II May. Kerensky claimed — and he was surely right — that the Russian armed forces were now the 'freest in the world'; and he called on the soldiers to prove 'that there is strength, not weakness, in freedom' in the coming offensive. The Declaration retained the rights of Order Number One, but it also restored the authority of the officers at the Front, including the use of corporal punishment. This was seen in the ruling circles as an essential concession to the military leaders in preparation for the coming offensive. Brusilov was adamant that he would not fight without it. Yet there is no doubt that many soldiers saw the Declaration as an attempt by the government to restore the old system of discipline and this played into the hands of the Bolsheviks. Pravda quipped that the Declaration should really be called a 'Declaration on the Rightlessness of Servicemen'.¹⁴

To raise the morale of the troops Kerensky went on a tour of the Front during May. Here his hysterical oratory reached fever pitch. With his squeaky voice and waving arms, he appealed to the soldiers to make the supreme sacrifice for the glorious future of their Fatherland. At the end of these tirades he would collapse in a state of nervous exhaustion and have to be revived with the aid of valerian spirits. Though these fainting fits were not contrived, or at least not to begin with, they added an extra theatrical effect to Kerensky's performances. Everywhere he was hailed as a hero. Soldiers carried him shoulder-high, pelted him with flowers and threw themselves at his feet. An English nurse watched in amazement as they 'kissed him, his uniform, his car, and the ground on which he walked. Many of them were on their knees praying; others were weeping.'¹⁵ Nothing quite like it had been seen since the days of the Tsar.

Yet all this adulation merely gave Kerensky the false impression that the soldiers were eager to fight. Fifty years later, in his memoirs, he still insisted that a 'healthy mood of patriotism at the Front had become a definite force'.* But this was far from the truth. Kerensky's visits brought him into contact with a very unrepresentative cross-section of the army. The soldiers' meetings which he addressed were mainly attended by the officers, the uniformed intelligentsia and the members of the soldiers' committees. At these meetings Kerensky's

* The leaders of the Soviet and the Provisional Government were deceived by the fact that the soldiets, like the common people, expressed extreme hostility to everything 'German'. But the concept of 'German' was for the soldiers a general symbol of everything they hated — the Empress, the treasonable tsarist government, the war and all foreigners — rather than the German soldiers (for whom they often expressed sympathy) on the other side of the front line.

speeches had a mesmerizing effect: they conjured up the sweet illusion of a victorious end to the war with one more heroic heave. Now a weary soldier might well be tempted to believe in this, even if deep down he knew it to be false, simply because he wanted to. But such illusions were soon dispelled once he returned to the trenches. Outside these meetings, moreover, among the vast majority of the rank and file, the mood of the soldiers was much more negative. Kerensky was frequently heckled by such troops during his trips to the Front, yet he never seemed to register the warning that this conveyed. On one occasion near Riga, a soldier was pushed forward by his mates to question the Minister. 'You tell us we must fight the Germans so that the peasants can have the land. But what's the use of us peasants getting land if I am killed and get no land?' Kerensky had no answer — and there was none — but ordered the officer in command of this unit to send the soldier home: 'Let his fellow villagers know that we don't need cowards in the Russian army.' The soldier could not believe his luck, and at once fainted; while the officer scratched his head in disbelief. How many more men would have been sent home on this basis? It was clear that Kerensky saw the soldier as an exception, of whom he could make an example. He did not seem to realize that there were millions of others just like him.¹⁶

Brusilov, by contrast, was beginning to have second thoughts about the morale of the troops. 'The soldiers are tired,' he wrote to his wife at the end of April, 'and in many ways no longer fit to go on to the offensive.' On taking over the supreme command of the army, he set off on his own tour of the Northern and Western Fronts. In contrast to the soldiers of his own South-Western Front, far removed from the influence of the revolutionary cities, he found the troops in a state of complete demoralization. According to one of his senior aides, Brusilov had to avoid using the words 'offensive' or 'advance' in case the soldiers attacked him. Brusilov was not a natural orator. He would draw the soldiers round him and take off his cap and jacket, holding them — 'democratically' — over his left arm, to create an informal atmosphere. But his speeches failed to convince the soldiers that — as they might have said of Kerensky — 'he is one of us'. On one occasion, for example, whilst addressing a group of particularly Bolshev-ized soldiers near Dvinsk, Brusilov claimed that the Germans had destroyed 'one of the French people's finest properties, the beautiful vineyards that produce champagne'. This of course merely alienated and enraged the soldiers, who began to shout at their Commander-in-Chief: 'Shame on you! You want to spill our blood so that you can drink champagne!' Brusilov became afraid, put his cap back on his head, as if to reassert his old authority, and summoned his protectors to surround him. When the shouts had died down he called on one of the most vociferous soldiers to step forward and state his views. The soldier, a young red-bearded peasant, stood next to Brusilov, leant on his rifle with both arms, and,

looking askance at the Commander, delivered a speech in which he claimed that the soldiers had 'had enough of fighting', that 'for three long years the Russian people had spilled their blood for the imperialist and capitalist classes', and that 'if the general wanted to go on fighting for champagne then let him go and spill his own blood'. The troops all cheered; Brusilov was lost for words, and began to leave; and as he did so the soldier, who was evidently a Bolshevik, read out the declaration of the soldiers' committee calling for the conclusion of an immediate peace. The Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army had been upstaged by a simple soldier.¹⁷

This was only one of many incidents to persuade Brusilov that a new offensive would be ill-advised. On the Northern Front he came across a whole division of men which had driven out its officers and threatened to go home en masse.

When I arrived at their camp I demanded to speak to a delegation of the soldiers: it would have been dangerous to appear before the whole crowd. When these arrived I asked them which party they belonged to, and they replied that before they had been Socialist Revolutionaries, but that now they supported the Bolsheviks. 'What do you want?' I asked them. 'Land and Freedom,' they all cried. And what else?' The answer was simple: 'Nothing else!' When I asked them what they wanted now, they said they did not want to fight any more and pleaded to be allowed to go home in order to share out the land their fellow villagers had taken from the squires and live in freedom. And when I asked them: 'What will happen to Mother Russia, if no one wants to defend it, and everyone like you only thinks of themselves?' they replied that it was not their job to think about what should become of the state, and that they had firmly decided to go home.¹⁸

As Brusilov saw it, the soldiers were so obsessed with the idea of peace that they would have been prepared to support the Tsar himself, so long as he promised to bring the war to an end. This alone, Brusilov claimed, rather than the belief in some abstract 'socialism', explained their attraction to the Bolsheviks. The mass of the soldiers were simple peasants, they wanted land and freedom, and they began to call this 'Bolshevism' because only that party promised peace. This 'trench Bolshevism', as Allan Wildman has called it in his magisterial study of the Russian army during 1917, was not necessarily organized through formal party channels, or even encouraged by the Bolshevik agents. Although both of these were apparent at the Front, neither was as well developed as most of the commanders were apt to assume when they blamed 'the Bolsheviks' or 'Bolshevik

agents' for virtually every setback in the field.* It was more a case of tired and angry soldiers picking up the slogans of the Bolshevik press and using these to legitimize their own growing resistance to the war. Few soldiers belonged to any political party during 1917, and of those who did most belonged to the SRs rather than the Bolsheviks.¹⁹

The soldiers' committees, which many commanders condemned as the principal channel of this trench 'Bolshevism', would discuss the coming offensive and resolve not to fight. 'What's the use of invading Galicia anyway?' one soldier asked. 'Why the hell do we need to take another hilltop,' another added, 'when we can make peace at the bottom?' Many soldiers believed that the Soviet peace plan made further bloodshed pointless. They could not understand why their officers were ordering them to fight when the Soviet leaders had agreed on the need for peace. The question of a democratic peace, 'without annexations or indemnities', was much too complicated for most of them to understand. Many of the troops seemed to be under the impression that Anneksiia and Kontributsiia ('annexations' and 'indemnities') were two countries in the Balkans.²⁰

As the offensive approached, the flood of deserters increased. Knox found the trains from the Front 'constantly stormed' by soldiers on their way home. They travelled on the roofs and hung on to the buffers of the wagons. The actual number of deserters during the offensive was very much higher than the official figure of 170,000. Whole units of deserters took over regions in the rear and lived as bandits. Many of them were family men aged over forty who believed they had been promised a special dispensation to go home for the harvest. In many units it was these older soldiers who led the resistance to the offensive (some of them must have taken part in the mutinies and peasant uprisings of 1905). On the Northern Front thousands ran away from the army and set up their own 'soldiers' republic' at a camp near the Trotters' Racecourse in Petrograd. They paraded through the capital with placards demanding their 'liberation' and were often to be seen in the streets and stations selling cigarettes. Somehow, the leaders of their 'republic' even managed to secure supplies from the government's military depot.²¹

One of the most worrying manifestations of the soldiers' pacifism with which Brusilov had to deal was their fraternization with the enemy troops. It was part of the German campaign to run down the Eastern Front in order to transfer troops to the west. They lured the Russian soldiers from their trenches with vodka, concerts and makeshift brothels set up between the two lines of trenches, and told them, in remarkably similar terms to the Bolshevik propaganda,

* Indeed, by blaming 'the Bolsheviks' for every military defeat, the commanders gave the impression that the Bolsheviks were much more influential than they actually were, and this had the effect of making the Bolsheviks even more attractive to the mass of the soldiers.

that they should not shed any more blood to advance the imperial interests of Britain and France. During the Easter break from fighting thousands of Russians abandoned their trenches and crossed with white flags to the enemy lines. Many swam across the Dniester and Dvina rivers so as to join in the fun. German scouts were welcomed as heroes behind the Russian lines. Lieutenant Bauermeister, for example, gained a huge propaganda victory in the Thirty-Third Army Corps south of Galich, precisely the point where the main Russian blow was supposed to be dealt in the June offensive. While the impotent officers fumed with rage, he told the soldiers that Germany did not want to fight any more and that all the blame for the coming offensive should be heaped on the Provisional Government, which was a hireling of the Allied bankers. 'If what you say is true,' the soldiers' delegates replied, 'we'll throw the Government out and bring in a new one that will quickly give the Russian people peace.' The soldiers even agreed to sign an armistice along the whole of their sector. Bauermeister was astonished. He reminded the Russians that they did not have the legal authority to do this. But the soldiers said that, if they chose not to go on fighting, no one had the power to force them to do otherwise. For several weeks the armistice was enforced, right up until the offensive. Guns were taken out of service and white flags were raised along the Russian lines. The flamboyant Bauermeister, dressed in a white cap, became something of a hero. He even managed to speak in a village three miles behind the Russian Front. It was the headquarters of the Seventh Army.²²

On the eve of the offensive Brusilov warned Kerensky of his growing doubts. Troops were refusing to move up to the Front. Dozens of mutinies had taken place in army garrisons to the rear and even where units were moved up to the trenches three-quarters of the men were likely to desert en route. The front-line soldiers had also mutinied when they discovered what lay ahead. Brusilov had been forced to disband a number of his most reliable units. In the Fifth Army on the Northern Front soldiers refused to carry out orders and declared that Lenin was the only authority they would recognize: 23,000 of them had to be transferred to other units or sent to the rear for military trial. But Kerensky ignored all the warnings of his army chief. 'He paid not the slightest attention to my words,' Brusilov recalled, 'and from that moment on, I realized that my own authority as the Commander-in-Chief was quite irrelevant.'²³ Kerensky and his cabinet colleagues had made up their minds: the offensive was to go ahead and there was no room for last-minute doubts.

On 16 June the offensive began with a two-day heavy artillery bombardment. Kerensky hurried from regiment to regiment giving out orders and trying to raise morale. On 18 June the troops moved forward, encouraged by the sight of the German trenches abandoned under fire. The main attack was aimed towards Lvov in the south, while supporting offensives were also launched on

the Western and Northern Fronts. For two days the advance continued. The German lines were broken and a glorious 'Triumph for Liberty!' was heralded in the patriotic press. Then, on the third day, the advance came to a halt, the Germans began to counter-attack, and the Russians fled in panic. It was partly a case of the usual military failings: units had been sent into battle without machine-guns; untrained soldiers had been ordered to engage in complex manoeuvres using hand grenades and ended up throwing them without first pulling the pins. But the main reason for the fiasco was the simple reluctance of the soldiers to fight. Having advanced two miles, the front-line troops felt they had done their bit and refused to go any further, while those in the second line would not take their places. The advance thus broke down as the men began to run away. In one night alone the shock battalions of the Eleventh Army arrested 12,000 deserters near the town of Volochinsk. Many soldiers turned their guns against their commanding officers rather than fight against the enemy. The retreat degenerated into chaos as soldiers looted shops and stores, raped peasant girls and murdered Jews. The crucial advance towards Lvov soon collapsed when the troops discovered a large store of alcohol in the abandoned town of Koniukhy and stopped there to get drunk. By the time they were fit to resume fighting three days and a hangover later, enemy reinforcements had arrived, and the Russians, suffering heavy losses, were forced to retreat.²⁴

Amidst such chaos, even the shock troops stood little chance of success. Bochkareva's Battalion of Death did much better than most. The women volunteers broke through the first two German lines, followed by some of the sheepish male conscripts. But then they came under heavy German fire. The women dispersed in confusion, while most of the men stayed put in the German trenches, where they had found a large supply of liquor and proceeded to get drunk. Despite the shambles around her, Bochkareva battled on. At one point she came across one of her women having sexual intercourse with a soldier in a shell-hole. She ran her through with a bayonet; but the soldier escaped. Eventually, with most of her volunteers killed or wounded, even Bochkareva was forced to retreat.²⁵ The offensive was over. It was Russia's last.

* * * The collapse of the offensive dealt a fatal blow to the Provisional Government and the personal authority of its leaders. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed. Millions of square miles of territory were lost. The leaders of the government had gambled everything on the offensive in the hope that it might rally the country behind them in the national defence of democracy. The coalition had been based upon this hope; and it held together as long as there was a chance of military success. But as the collapse of the offensive became clear, so the coalition fell apart.

It had been on the cards for some time. God only knows what Lvov

had gone through to keep his government together until at least the start of the offensive. After the socialists' entry into the cabinet, most of the Kadets had moved to the Right. They had given up their old pretence of standing 'above class' and had taken up the defence of property rights, military discipline, law and order and the Russian Empire against the demands of the nationalists. All this had placed them in growing opposition to the socialists, who were under pressure from their own supporters to steer the government's policies further to the Left. Formally, it was the question of Ukrainian autonomy which was to break the coalition and throw the country into crisis. When the government delegation to Kiev conceded a series of autonomous rights to the Rada on 2 July, three Kadet ministers resigned in protest. The Kadets were opposed to granting anything more than cultural freedoms to the 'Little Russians', and insisted that this could only be done by the Constituent Assembly. The concessions of 2 July were thus, in their view, illegal and, as Miliukov put it, amounted to the 'chopping up of Russia under the slogan of self-determination'.²⁶ The Ukrainian question, however, was only the final straw. The breakdown of the coalition was also caused by fundamental conflicts over domestic social reforms. Foremost among these was Chernov's policy on land, which the Kadets accused of sanctioning the peasant revolution by giving the land committees temporary rights of control over the gentry's estates. Then there was the problem of militant strikes, which the Kadets blamed on the Mensheviks in control of the Ministry of Labour. Old class divisions, which had been papered over in the interests of the offensive, were, it seems, returning with a vengeance.

For Lvov the collapse of this 'national alliance' was a bitter disappointment. More than anyone else, he had stood for the liberal hope of uniting the country. As its figurehead, he had symbolized the government's ideal of constructive work in the interests of the nation. Party politics were a foreign land to him and he was increasingly out of his depth in the factional conflicts of his own cabinet meetings. 'I feel like a piece of driftwood, washed up by the revolutionary waves,' he told his old friend from the Japanese war, General Kuropatkin. He cursed both the Kadets and the socialists for placing class and party interests above those of the nation as a whole. The Kadets, he told his private secretary, had behaved like Great Russian chauvinists over the Ukraine; they could not see that some concessions had to be made, if the state was to be saved. But he was equally fed up with the socialists, who he said were trying to impose the Soviet programme on the Provisional Government. Chernov's policy on the land committees seemed nothing less to him, as a landowner, than a 'Bolshevik programme of organized confiscation'. In his view the general interests of the state were being sacrificed to the particular interests of parties and classes, and Russia, as a result, was moving closer to civil war. He felt politically impotent, caught in the cross-fire between Left and Right, and on

3 July he finally decided to resign.* 'I have reached the end of the road', he told his secretary, 'and so, I'm afraid, has my sort of liberalism.' Later that night he wrote to his parents in a rare mood of dark foreboding:

Sweet Father and Mother,

It was already clear to me about a week ago that there was no way out. Without a doubt the country is heading for a general slaughter, famine, the collapse of the front, where half the soldiers will perish, and the ruin of the urban population. The cultural inheritance of the nation, its people and civilization, will be destroyed. Armies of migrants, then small groups, and then maybe no more than individual people, will roam around the country fighting each other with rifles and then no more than clubs. I will not live to see it, and, I hope, neither will you.²⁷

As he wrote these prophetic words, in the midst of the July crisis, the Bolsheviks were preparing for a decisive confrontation with the Provisional Government.

ii A Darker Shade of Red

On the eve of the July uprising the journalist Claude Anet took Joseph Noulens, the new French Ambassador, on an introductory tour of the Russian capital. From the opposite bank of the Neva, outside the French Embassy, he pointed out the Vyborg district, with its factory chimneys and barracks, and explained that the Bolsheviks reigned there as masters: 'If Lenin and Trotsky want to take Petrograd, there is nothing to stop them.' The French Ambassador listened in astonishment: 'How can the government tolerate such a situation?' he asked. 'But what can it do?' replied Anet. 'You must understand that the government has no power but a moral one, and even that seems to me very weak.'²⁸

The barracks of the First Machine-Gun Regiment was without a doubt the most menacing bastion of anti-government power on the Vyborg side. With 10,000 men and 1,000 machine-guns, it was by far the largest unit in the capital. Most of its soldiers had been expelled from their front-line units for insubordination and, as highly literate and militant soldiers, were susceptible to the propaganda of both the Bolsheviks and the Anarchists. The regiment's adopted barracks on the Vyborg side nestled among the most strike-prone metal factories of the capital, right next door to the Bolsheviks' headquarters. So

* His resignation was not formally announced until 7 July.

important was it to the Bolsheviks that their Military Organization had its own special cell in the regiment.

On 20 June the First Machine-Gun Regiment was ordered to send 500 machine-guns with their crews to the Front, where, it was said, they were badly needed to support the offensive. Since the February Revolution not a single unit of the Petrograd garrison had been transferred to the Front. This had been one of the conditions set by the Petrograd Soviet on the establishment of the Provisional Government. The soldiers believed that they had 'made the revolution' and that they therefore had the right to remain in Petrograd to defend it against a 'counter-revolution'. The Provisional Government was all too aware that it lived at the mercy of the garrison's quarter of a million troops. Until now, it would not have dared to try to remove them from the capital. But by June the presence of these machine-gunners had become a major threat to the government's existence; and one of the main aims of the offensive was undoubtedly to transfer them to the Front. The Foreign Minister, Tereshchenko, admitted as much to the British Ambassador when he claimed in June that the offensive 'will enable us to take measures against the garrison in Petrograd, which is by far the worst and gives a bad example to the others'; while Kerensky repeatedly stressed that it was the aim of the offensive to restore order in the rear.²⁹ Lvov's private notes, recently discovered in the Russian archives, confirm that during May and June the government was seriously considering removing the capital to Moscow.³⁰ There were constant rumours that Petrograd was about to be abandoned to the Germans; and many of the 'patriotic' middle classes prayed that they were true (it was a dinner-party commonplace that only the Kaiser could restore order). But if the government's aim was to use the offensive as a pretext to remove the machine-gunners, then this was a very clumsy and a foolish way to go about it. The government could have easily transferred the machine-gunners to the rear, say to some backwater like Tambov province, on the grounds of 'defending the revolution' there. By sending them to the Front, and thus reneging on the Soviet's conditions, it gave credibility to the soldiers' claim — voiced by the Bolshevik and Anarchist agitators in their regiment — that the government was using the offensive to break up the garrison and that it was thus 'counter-revolutionary'. Since the April crisis, the soldiers had viewed the government's efforts to continue the war with growing suspicion — didn't this make them 'imperialists'? — and in this climate of mistrust such conspiracy theories were persuasive.

On 21 June the machine-gunners resolved to overthrow the Provisional Government, if it continued with its threat 'to break up this and other revolutionary regiments' by sending them to the Front. Dozens of other garrison units which had orders to join the offensive passed similar resolutions. The Bolshevik Military Organization encouraged the idea of an armed uprising, and effectively transformed itself into the operational staff for the capture of the capital. But

the Central Committee continued to urge restraint. It was the same policy clash as on 10 June, with the ultra-leftist leaders of the Vyborg Committee and the Military Organization keen to ride to power on the violence of the Petrograd vanguard, and the more cautious national leaders of the party afraid that a failed uprising might give rise to an anti-Bolshevik backlash in the country at large. The provinces, they said, were not yet ready for a socialist revolution and the premature seizure of power in the capital was likely to result in a civil war, in which Red Petrograd, like the Paris Commune, would be defeated by the provinces. So argued Lenin himself at a Conference of the Bolshevik Military Organizations on 20 June. He stressed the need to delay the armed uprising, resisting all provocations by the 'counter-revolutionaries', until the offensive was over and the Bolsheviks had won a majority in the Soviet:

One wrong move on our part can wreck everything ... if we were now able to seize power, it is naive to think that we would be able to hold it. . . Even in the Soviets of both capitals, not to speak now of the others, we are an insignificant minority . . . This is a basic fact, and it determines the behaviour of our Party . . . Events should not be anticipated. Time is on our side.³¹

But Lenin had little control over his lieutenants. On 29 June he departed for a friend's country dacha in Finland complaining of headaches and fatigue. Control of the party slipped out of his hands, as the Military Organization prepared the insurrection. Bolshevik and Anarchist agitators urged the machine-gunners to take to the streets in an armed demonstration on 3 July. A regimental concert in the People's House on the 2nd to bid farewell to the soldiers due to leave for the Front was turned into an anti-government rally, with Trotsky and Lunacharsky (although neither was yet formally a Bolshevik) calling for the transfer of all power to the Soviet. The troops returned to their barracks too excited to sleep. They spent the night and the following morning debating whether to join the uprising. Many were reluctant to come out in force against the orders of the Soviet. But others were eager to join the uprising, seeing in it their last chance to resist the call-up to the Front, or perhaps simply the chance, as one of their slogans proposed, to 'Beat the burzhoois!' They elected a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, headed by the Bolshevik, A. I. Semashko, from the Military Organization, which assumed the leadership of the uprising and despatched emissaries to mobilize support from the rest of the garrison units, the factories in Vyborg, and the Kronstadt Naval Base.³²

During the afternoon a vast grey mass of workers and soldiers moved from the outlying districts to the centre of the city. The streets returned to the look of the February Days, though the mood was now much darker and

the composition of the crowd more solidly proletarian. The suits of the middle-class citizens, the beards of the students and the hats of the lady sympathizers, which had all been so visible in February, were no longer to be seen. The marchers carried Bolshevik slogans and were mostly armed, the soldiers with bayonets fixed to their rifles, the workers, brought out by the Red Guards, with belts of bullets wrapped around their torsos like Latin American bandits. A prominent place in the crowd was occupied by soldiers aged over forty who had marched through the city in armed ranks several times before. The demonstrators overturned trams, and set up pickets at various intersections. At one of these pickets, at the fashionable end of the Nevsky Prospekt, the Red Guards mounted a machine-gun. Its minders soon got bored and amused themselves by firing at the burzhoois in the streets and houses. Lorries and armoured cars hurtled about the city filled with soldiers firing into the air. Groups of armed men halted passing motor-cars, turned out their terrified passengers, and rode about the streets, their bayonets bristling out in all directions. One official tried to stop the insurgents from confiscating his car by showing them a permit signed by Kerensky. But the soldiers merely laughed, claiming (falsely) that Kerensky had already been arrested: 'You might as well show us a permit with the signature of Nicholas II.'³³

The crowd as yet lacked leadership or direction. It did not quite know where it should go, or why. It had nothing but a 'mood' — which wasn't enough to make a revolution. The Bolshevik and Anarchist agitators, who had brought out the insurgent army, failed to set it strategic objectives. 'The street itself will organize us,' the Anarchist Bleichman had claimed. There was an assumption that a large enough show of force was bound to bring the government down, and that the detailed questions of power could somehow be left to sort themselves out later. That, after all, was the experience of the February Days.³⁴

The bulk of the crowd moved towards the Tauride Palace, as it had done in February. Some became involved in gun fights with loyalist and right-wing forces on their way. There was a smell of civil war. The City Council Building on the Nevsky Prospekt was the scene of especially bloody fighting. The Bolshevik leader, Lunacharsky, watched in horror from inside the building. 'The movement developed spontaneously,' he wrote to his wife on the next day. 'Black Hundreds, hooligans, provocateurs, anarchists and desperate people introduced a large amount of chaos and absurdity to the demonstration.' By the early evening, a solid mass of people had assembled in front of the Tauride Palace. The Soviet leaders were in session debating whether to form a socialist government after the collapse of the coalition, and the crowd no doubt hoped to pressurize them into taking power. All Power to the Soviets!' came the roar from the street. The Workers' Section of the Soviet served as a mouthpiece for their demands. That afternoon it had been taken over by the Bolsheviks, who,

although still a minority in the Section, had turned up in one solid body for a hastily convened emergency session and — in a premonition of October — provoked the Mensheviks and SRs into walking out by passing a resolution calling for Soviet power. A Special Commission was elected to provide political organization for the crowds outside. But it proved quite ineffective — Sukhanov, who spent the July Days in the Tauride Palace, could not recall any of its activities. The street was thus deprived of any real leverage over the Soviet. Angry demonstrators called out for the arrest of the Soviet leaders, who had 'surrendered to the landlords and the bourgeoisie!' A delegation from the First Machine-Gun Regiment told Chkheidze that it was 'disturbed by rumours that the Executive intended to enter into a new coalition with the reactionary capitalists', and that they 'would not stand for such a policy' because 'they had already suffered enough'. Some of the soldiers penetrated into the Catherine Hall, where they watched the debate. Yet none of them thought to arrest the Soviet leaders, who were quite defenceless. There was no one to tell the soldiers to do it.³⁵

As darkness fell, the crowd began to disperse. The uprising seemed to be coming to an end. There were rumours that the Provisional Government had already been arrested. But nothing of the sort had taken place. The remnants of the cabinet were having a meeting in Prince Lvov's apartment. At around 10 p.m. a group of armed workers and soldiers burst into the entrance hall, where they announced to the hall porter that they had come to arrest the Ministers. Tsereteli was summoned to negotiate with them, but before he got to the entrance the insurgents had lost their nerve and run away with his car.³⁶

Precisely at this moment the Bolshevik Central Committee was meeting in the Kshesinskaya Mansion to decide on its policy towards the uprising. Although it had so far been urging restraint, afraid to risk all in a premature putsch, there seemed no holding back the movement now. The workers and soldiers had virtually taken over the city, the Kronstadt sailors were on their way, and the vast majority of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks in Petrograd were joining the uprising, leaving the Central Committee on the sidelines. Shortly before midnight it was agreed to call for further demonstrations on the following day. The front page of Pravda, which was due to appear with an article by Kamenev and Zinoviev calling for restraint, had to be altered at the final moment and appeared the next morning with a large blank space. Leaflets were hastily printed and distributed in the streets calling for 'organized' demonstrations and a 'new power' based on the Soviet. Meanwhile, a messenger from the Central Committee sped off in a car to Finland to bring Lenin back to the capital.³⁷

The exact intentions of the Bolshevik leaders have always been a subject of fierce controversy. Some historians have argued that the Bolsheviks were planning to overthrow the Provisional Government by armed force. Richard Pipes, for example, claims that the July affair was orchestrated from the start by

the Bolshevik leaders as 'a power seizure'; it was only when the embarrassing failure of the putsch became clear that they sought to conceal their intentions by depicting the uprising as a 'spontaneous demonstration which they sought to direct into peaceful channels'. This last version of events — as a 'spontaneous demonstration' — was the standard Soviet view. It was supported by the American scholar, Alexander Rabinowitch, in his classic account of the July Days. According to Rabinowitch, the Central Committee only joined the uprising under pressure from its rank and file, and never intended it to go any further than a show of force to pressurize the Soviet into taking power.³⁸

The only real piece of evidence in support of the 'failed putsch' thesis comes from Sukhanov's memoirs, written in 1920. Sukhanov claimed that on 7 July Lunacharsky had told him that, on the night of 3—4 July:

Lenin was definitely planning a coup d'etat. The Government, which would in fact be in the hands of the Bolshevik Central Committee, would officially be embodied in a 'Soviet' Cabinet made up of eminent and popular Bolsheviks. For the time being three Ministers had been appointed: Lenin, Trotsky and Lunacharsky . . . The coup d'etat itself was to proceed in this way: the 176th Regiment.. . from Krasnoe Selo* was to arrest the [Soviet] Executive, and at about that time Lenin was to arrive on the scene of action and proclaim the new Government.

Sukhanov himself was the first to acknowledge that 'some elementary facts' told against this version — namely the Bolsheviks' failure to carry through their seizure of power on 4 July, when there were ample opportunities for them to do so. On the face of the evidence, it does appear that the Central Committee had anything but a clear plan. In a manner underestimated by all historians, the events of 4 July were characterized by almost total confusion. The Bolshevik leaders made everything up as they went along. The mass turn-out of 3 July had caught them unprepared, with their leader on vacation in Finland. They were caught in two minds as to whether they should seek to transform the demonstration into the overthrow of the Provisional Government, or whether they should try to limit it to a political demonstration in order to pressurize the Soviet leaders into taking power themselves. When Lenin returned, in the small hours of the morning, the Bolsheviks badgered him for an answer to this question. According to Kalinin, Lenin's tactics were to 'wait and see what happened', leaving open the option of 'throwing regiments into the battle if the correlation of forces should prove favourable'. This may well have been so. But the Bolshevik leader proved utterly unable to make up his own mind if that

* Formerly Tsarskoe Selo.

moment had come. Zinoviev, who spent the whole of the 4th by his side, recalled a Lenin hopelessly paralysed by indecision. He kept asking himself if this was the occasion 'to try for power'.³⁹ Throughout the critical hours of the uprising the Bolshevik leaders continued to sit on the fence waiting to see what would happen. Yet the organized part of the crowd, which had been brought out by the local Bolshevik organizations, would not seize power themselves without specific instructions from them. It was because of this confusion that the demonstrations appeared so badly organized as an attempted putsch — and ended in fiasco.

Tuesday, 4 July, began with an eerie silence over the city. Heavy thunder clouds hung low over the city and the river was dark and sullen. The shops were shut and the streets deserted — a certain sign that trouble was brewing in the workers' quarters. By mid-morning the centre of the city was once again taken over by crowds of workers and soldiers. A motley flotilla of tug-boats, trawlers, barges and gun-boats from the Kronstadt Naval Base was meanwhile mooring near the Nikolaevsky Bridge: 20,000 sailors disembarked, armed to the teeth with rifles and revolvers, along with their own medical teams and several marching bands. This was without doubt the Bolsheviks' chief weapon, if they were planning to seize power. The sailors were spoiling for a fight with the Provisional Government. Ever since February they had been trying to set up their own semi-Anarchist version of Soviet power at Kronstadt. Raskolnikov, the Bolshevik leader of the sailors, said they had come to Petrograd ready 'at any moment to turn the demonstration into an armed uprising'. It was clear, however, that the sailors had no strategic plan — and only a vague idea of what to do once they disembarked. Bernard Pares, who was on the scene, thought most of them had come for a holiday, to walk the streets with their girls, who were very much in evidence throughout the July Days. 'Sailors with scantily-dressed and high-heeled ladies were seen everywhere.'⁴⁰

Looking for leaders, the Kronstadt sailors set off for the Bolshevik headquarters. Led by their bands, which played the Internationale, they marched in armed ranks along the University Embankment, past the Stock Exchange and through the Alexander Park to the Kshesinskaya Mansion, where they amassed in front of the balcony expecting to receive instructions from Lenin. But the Bolshevik leader did not know where he should lead them. At this point it would have been enough for him to give the command, and the sailors would have marched at once to the Tauride, arrested the Soviet leaders, rounded up the cabinet ministers and proclaimed Soviet power. But Lenin was uncharacteristically hesitant, did not want to speak, and when he was finally persuaded to make an appearance on the balcony, gave an ambiguous speech, lasting no more than a few seconds, in which he expressed his confidence in the coming of Soviet power but left the sailors without orders on how to bring it about. He did not even

make it clear if he wanted the crowd to continue the demonstration and, according to those who were with him at the time, did not even know himself.⁴¹

This was to be Lenin's last public speech until the October seizure of power. It was a telling moment, one of the few in his long career when he was faced with the task of leading a revolutionary crowd that was standing before him. Other Bolshevik leaders were much better at handling the crowd. But Lenin's public appearances had been mostly confined to the congress hall. According to his wife, he became very nervous when forced to address a mass gathering.⁴² Perhaps at this decisive moment, faced with the raw energy of the street, Lenin lost his nerve. True, what could he say? No doubt he was tongue-tied by the realization that, even if the Bolsheviks won Petrograd, they would still be opposed by the rest of Russia. But none the less his crucial hesitation sealed the fate of the July uprising.

Confused and disappointed by the lack of a clear call for the insurrection to begin, the Kronstadters marched off towards the Tauride Palace, where thousands of armed workers and soldiers were already assembling. On the Nevsky Prospekt they merged with another vast crowd of workers from the Putilov plant, perhaps 20,000 in all. Middle-class Petrograders strolling along the Prospekt looked on in horror at their massed grey ranks. Suddenly, as the column turned into the Liteiny, shots were fired by the Cossacks and cadets from the roof-tops and the upper windows of the buildings, causing the marchers to scatter in panic. Some of the marchers fired back, shooting without aim in all directions, since they did not know where the snipers were hidden. Dozens of their comrades were killed or wounded by their own stray bullets. The rest abandoned their rifles and flags and started to break down the doors and windows of the houses. When the shooting stopped, the leaders of the demonstration tried to restore order by reforming ranks and marching off to an up-beat tune from the military bands. But the equilibrium of the crowd had been upset and, as they marched through the affluent residential streets approaching the Tauride Palace, their columns broke down into a riotous mob, firing wildly into the windows, beating up well-dressed passers-by and looting shops and houses. By 4 p.m. hundreds of people had been wounded or killed; dead horses lay here and there; and the streets were littered with rifles, hats, umbrellas and banners. Gorky, who witnessed the terrible scenes, later wrote to Ekaterina in disgust:

The worst of it all was the crowd, the philistines, the 'worker' and soldier, who is in fact no more than a brute, cowardly and brainless, without an ounce of self-respect and not understanding why he is on the streets, what he is needed for, or who is leading him and where. Whole companies of soldiers threw away their rifles and banners when the shooting began and

smashed the shop windows and doors. Is this the revolutionary army of a free people?

It is clear that the crowds on the street had absolutely no idea of what they were doing — it was all a nightmare. Nobody knew the aims of the uprising or its leaders. Were there any leaders at all? I doubt it. Trotsky, Lunacharsky and tutti grandi jabbered something or other, but it was all lost to the mood of the crowd.⁴³

With 50,000 armed and angry men surrounding the Tauride Palace, there was nothing to prevent a Bolshevik coup d'etat. V S. Woytinsky, who was placed in charge of defending the palace, had only eighteen soldiers from the Pavlovsky Regiment at his disposal. There were not even enough soldiers to guard the posts at the entrance to the building, so Woytinsky relied on deception, placing all his men at the huge French windows which spanned the facade of the palace to make it appear as if it was properly defended. To the Soviet leaders inside the palace debating the question of power, it seemed 'completely obvious' that they were about to be stormed. At any moment', recalled the Menshevik, Bogdanov, 'the armed mobs could have broken in, wrecked the Tauride Palace, and arrested or shot us if we refused to take the power into our hands.'⁴⁴ The Provisional Government, or what remained of it, was equally defenceless. During the morning the cabinet ministers had taken refuge in the building of the General Staff opposite the Winter Palace. Apart from a few dozen Cossacks, there were no available forces willing to defend them. Kerensky had run off to the Front, leaving the Warsaw Station only minutes before his Bolshevik chasers arrived there. The Marinsky Palace, the seat of government power, stood wide open for the taking. The strategic points of the city — the arsenals, the telephone exchange, the supply depots and the railway stations — were all undefended. With a single order from Lenin, the insurgents could easily have taken them as the first step towards the seizure of power.

But that order did not come, and the crowd in front of the Tauride Palace, not quite sure of what it should do, soon lost all its organization. The hand of God, in the form of the weather, also contributed to the collapse of the uprising. At 5 p.m. the storm clouds finally broke and there was a torrential rainstorm. Most of the crowd ran for cover and did not bother to come back. But the unruly elements stayed on. Perhaps because they were soaked by the rain, they lost their self-control and began to fire wildly at the Tauride Palace. This caused the rest of the crowd to scream and stampede in panic: dozens of people were crushed. Some sailors began to penetrate into the palace, climbing in through the open windows. They called for the socialist ministers to come out and explain their reluctance to take power. Chernov was sent out to calm the crowd. But as soon as he appeared on the steps angry shouts were heard

from the sailors. The crowd surged forward and seized hold of him, searching him for weapons. One worker raised his fist and shouted at him in anger: 'Take power, you son of a bitch, when it's handed to you.'' Several armed men bundled the SR leader into an open car. They declared him under arrest and said they would not release him until the Soviet had taken power. Chernov had gone one better than his old rival, Kerensky. He was now a real 'hostage of the democracy'.

A group of workers broke into the Catherine Hall and interrupted the session: 'Comrade Chernov has been arrested by the mob! They're tearing him to pieces right now! To the rescue! Everyone out into the street!' Chkheidze proposed that Kamenev, Martov and Trotsky should be sent out to rescue the Minister. But Trotsky was the first to get there. Pushing his way through the shouting crowds, he went straight to the car, where the hatless, dishevelled and terrified Chernov sat under arrest in the back seat, and climbed up on to the bonnet. The Kronstadters all knew the figure of Trotsky and waited for his instructions. Had the Bolsheviks planned for the seizure of power, this was surely the moment to urge the sailors on to the storming of the Tauride, the arrest of the Soviet leaders and the proclamation of a socialist government. Raskolnikov, who was standing by Trotsky, asked Chernov's captors where they were planning to take their hostage. 'We don't know,' they answered. 'Wherever you wish, Comrade Raskolnikov. He is at your disposal.' But Trotsky called for Chernov to be released. 'Comrade Kronstadters, pride and glory of the Russian Revolution!', he began in his clear metallic voice; 'you've come to declare your will and show the Soviet that the working class no longer wants to see the bourgeoisie in power. But why hurt your own cause by petty acts of violence against casual individuals? Individuals are not worthy of your attention.' The sailors shouted angrily at Trotsky: they could not understand why Chernov was to be let go, if the aim of their mission was to overthrow the government. But not knowing what to do on their own, they sullenly agreed to release the Minister. 'Citizen Chernov, you are free,' declared Comrade Trotsky, opening the car door and motioning him to get out. Chernov was half-dead and plainly did not understand what was happening to him. He had to be helped out of the car and led, like a frail old man, back into the Tauride Palace.⁴⁵ A critical moment had passed, one of the most famous in the history of the revolution, and with it had also passed the initiative for a seizure of power.

According to Sukhanov's account of his conversation with Lunacharsky, the key to the Bolshevik 'plan' for the seizure of power was the 176th Regiment from Krasnoe Selo. It was supposed to arrive at the Tauride Palace and arrest the Soviet leaders. At around 6 o'clock it finally appeared, led by its regimental band. The soldiers were tired and soaked by the rain. With their packs and greatcoats on their shoulders, their mess tins and cooking pots clanging as they walked, they settled themselves in the forecourt of the palace and began to

unpack their wet things and prepare their rifles. They had not the slightest idea what they were supposed to do, and only knew that they had been called out to 'defend the revolution'. But where were their leaders? An officer and six men climbed the Tauride steps and asked to see someone from the Soviet. The Menshevik, Dan, came out to greet them. He did not know what the regiment was, or why it had come to the palace, but he soon found a use for it. The 'insurrectionary' soldiers were posted as sentries at various points of the building to protect the Soviet leaders against the insurrection.⁴⁶ Having come to demonstrate against the Soviet leaders, they had ended up defending them against the demonstrators. Such things happen in a revolution, when the crowd does not know its leaders.

From this point on, the insurrection was effectively over. By itself, the crowd was unable to bring about political change. The Soviet leaders, discussing the question of whether to assume power, were all the more determined not to be pushed into it by the mob in the street. 'The decision of the revolutionary democracy cannot be dictated by bayonets,' declared Tsereteli.⁴⁷ Once the Soviet had resolved not to take power, there was nothing the crowd could do. It did not know how to force the Soviet leaders into changing their minds, or how to complete a Soviet revolution without them. If the Soviet leaders were reluctant to take power, how could they give All Power to the Soviet'?

One final event on that day symbolized the powerlessness of the crowd. At around 7 p.m. a group of armed and angry workers from the Putilov plant burst into the Catherine Hall. The Soviet deputies leaped from their seats. Some threw themselves on to the ground in panic. One of the workers, a 'classical sans-culotte' dressed in a blue factory tunic and cap, jumped up on to the speakers' platform. Shaking his rifle in the air, he shouted incoherently at the deputies:

Comrades! How long must we workers put up with treachery? You're all here debating and making deals with the bourgeoisie and the landlords . . . You're busy betraying the working class. Well, just understand that the working class won't put up with it! There are 30,000 of us all told here from Putilov. We're going to have our way. All power to the Soviets! We have a firm grip on our rifles! Your Kerenskys and Tseretelis are not going to fool us!

Chkheidze, the Soviet chairman, was sitting next to the hysterical worker. He calmly leaned across and placed a piece of paper into his hand. It was a manifesto, printed the evening before, in which it was said that the demonstrators should go home, or be condemned as traitors to the revolution. 'Here, please take this, Comrade,' Chkheidze said to him in an imperious tone. 'It says here what you

and your Putilov comrades should do. Please read it carefully and don't interrupt our business.'⁴⁸ The confused worker, not knowing what he should do, took the manifesto and left the hall with the rest of the Putilovites. No doubt he was fuming with anger and frustration at his profound humiliation; and yet he was powerless to resist, not because he lacked the guns, but because he lacked the will. Centuries of serfdom and subservience had not prepared him to stand up to his political masters — and in that lay the tragedy of the Russian people as a whole. This was one of the finest scenes of the whole revolution — one of those rare moments in history when the hidden relations of power are flashed up on to the surface of events and the broader course of developments becomes clear.

As darkness fell, the crowds dispersed. Most of them made their way back home, damp and dejected, to the workers' districts and barracks. The Kronstadt sailors wandered around the city, not knowing where to go. Throughout the night the affluent residential streets reverberated to the sounds of broken windows, sporadic shots and screams, as the last survivors of the failed uprising took out their anger in acts of looting and violence against the burzhoois. The Petrograd military headquarters were inundated with telephone calls from terrified shopkeepers, bankers and housewives. In a last desperate act of defiance, 2,000 Kronstadters seized control of the Peter and Paul Fortress. They did not know what to do with the conquered fortress — it was just a symbol of the old regime which it seemed a good idea to capture as a final hostage of the uprising. The sailors slept in the prisons empty cells, and the following day agreed to leave it on condition that they were allowed to make their own way back to Kronstadt, keeping all their weapons.⁴⁹

By this stage, loyal troops were flocking to defend the Tauride Palace. The Izmailovsky Regiment was the first to arrive, on the evening of the 4th, with a thunderous rendering of the Marseillaise — as if in response to the Internationale of the Kronstadters — from its military band. As they heard the sound of it approaching, the Soviet leaders embraced each other with tears of relief: the siege of the Tauride Palace was finally over. Standing arm in arm, they broke spontaneously into the stirring chorus of Aux armes, citoyens'. It was, as Martov angrily muttered, a 'classic scene from the start of a counterrevolution'.⁵⁰

* * * Like most of the loyalist troops, the Izmailovksy Regiment had been turned against the Bolsheviks by leaflets released that evening by the Minister of Justice Pereverzev accusing them of being German agents. On the next day, 5 July, the right-wing press was full of so-called 'evidence' to that effect. Much of it was based on the dubious testimony of a Lieutenant Yermolenko, who claimed to have been told by the Germans, whilst he was a prisoner of war, that Lenin was

working for them. There is no doubt that the Germans had financed the Bolshevik Party — the Provisional Government had known that since April. But this did not prove Pereverzev's claim, still repeated by many historians, that the Bolsheviks were German agents. For one thing, the actual amount of German finance was not very great, given the party's financial problems during the summer; and, for another, there is no evidence that the Bolsheviks planned their policies to suit Berlin. Yet the timely release of these charges had an explosive effect, turning many soldiers against the Bolsheviks. Acting under orders from Pereverzev, a large detachment of military cadets ransacked the Pravda offices at dawn on 5 July. They only just missed Lenin, who had left for the first of his pre-October hide-outs, the flat of the Bolshevik worker, Sergei Alliluyev,* only minutes before.⁵¹

Lenin had been given early warning of the treason charges by a secret contact in the Ministry of Justice. Hoping to mitigate the xenophobic reaction which was bound to follow, he called for an end to the demonstrations in an article on the back page of Pravda. But it was too late. By the morning of the 5th, the capital was seized with anti-Bolshevik hysteria. The right-wing tabloids bayed for Bolshevik blood, instantly blaming the 'German agents' for the reverses at the Front. It seemed self-evident that the Bolsheviks had planned their uprising to coincide with the German advance. General Polovtsov, who was responsible for the repressions as the head of the Petrograd Military District, later acknowledged that the Bolshevik-baiting contained 'a strong anti-Semitic tendency'; but in the usual way that Russians of his class justified pogroms he put it down 'to the Jews themselves because among the Bolshevik leaders their percentage was not far from a hundred. It was beginning to annoy the soldiers to see that Jews ruled everything, and the remarks I heard in the barracks plainly showed what the soldiers thought about it.'⁵²

Early in the morning of 6 July a massive task force of loyalist troops, complete with eight armoured cars and several batteries of heavy artillery, moved up to liberate the Kshesinskaya Mansion. Amidst the anti-Bolshevik hysteria, there had been outrage in the right-wing press at the thought of the unwashed Bolshevik workers and soldiers rummaging through the velvets and silks of Kshesinskaya's boudoir. Not a single shot was fired in the recapture of the ballerina's former mansion. The 500 Bolsheviks still inside surrendered without resistance, despite the large store of weapons at their disposal. The Bolshevik leaders had been too busy burning party files to organize resistance.⁵³

Later that day, Pereverzev ordered Lenin's arrest, along with eleven other Bolshevik leaders. They were all charged with high treason. Most of them stayed in the open, risking arrest, and in some cases even giving themselves up. But

* His daughter, Nadezhda, would later marry Stalin.

Lenin fled underground — first to a series of safe houses in the capital and then, on 9 July, along with Zinoviev, travelling through the countryside to Finland. Lenin shaved off his beard and wore a worker's tunic and cap to disguise himself. During the following days dozens of houses in the capital were turned over by troops in search of him. Even Gorky's flat was raided. Some 800 Bolsheviks in all were imprisoned, including Kamenev, Lunacharsky, Kollontai and Trotsky — the last not yet a member of the party, though he had declared his allegiance to it.⁵⁴ The Peter and Paul Fortress, whose cells had been empty since the February Revolution, once again began to be filled with 'politicals'.

As Lenin travelled into the northern wilderness, it must have seemed to him that the Bolshevik cause was finished. Before leaving the capital he had handed to Kamenev the manuscript of what was later to become The State and Revolution, with instructions for it to be published if he should be killed. Lenin was always prone to overestimate the physical danger to himself: in this respect he was something of a coward. It cannot be said that his life was ever at direct risk during his summer on the run: at one point he even stayed with the Chief of Police in Helsingfors, who happened to be a Bolshevik sympathizer. After Lenin's death, during the cult of Lenin, fantastic stories would be told of his personal bravery during countless narrow escapes from the police. But none of them was true. One true incident during this summer, although it hardly spoke of Lenin's courage, took place in a village near Sestoretsk on the Gulf of Finland, where Lenin and Zinoviev spent several weeks sleeping in the hay loft of a party worker. One day they saw two men with guns approaching and assumed that they were the police coming to arrest them. The two leaders of the world revolution dived for cover into a haystack. 'The only thing left to do now', Lenin whispered to Zinoviev, 'is to die an honourable death.' The strangers, however, walked right past: it turned out that they were hunting for ducks.⁵⁵

However, given the frenzied anti-Bolshevik atmosphere, it is not hard to see why Lenin should have been so concerned for his personal safety. This was a time of lynch law, and the tabloid press was full of cartoons showing Lenin on the scaffold. Some of the Bolshevik leaders, Kamenev in particular, wanted Lenin to give himself up and stand trial. They thought he could use his appearance in the courts to reject the treason charges and denounce the authorities. By fleeing abroad, they argued, he risked making the workers suspect that he must have had something to hide. Besides, there was a long tradition of socialists making propaganda from the dock: Trotsky had done it quite brilliantly in 1906; and Lenin's own brother had done it at his trial in 1887. But Lenin was not the sort of man to play the role of a revolutionary martyr: his life was much too important for that. As he saw it, there was no question of getting a fair trial (that, he said, was a 'constitutional illusion'), since the rule of law had been suspended and the state itself had been taken over by the 'counter-

revolution'. 'It is not a question of "the courts", but of an episode in the civil war.' Underlying this was a fundamental shift in Lenin's thinking which was to have important consequences. Since the April Theses he had accepted the need to base the party's work on peaceful or political means. But in the wake of the July Days, when, as he saw it, the state had been taken over by 'the military dictatorship', he moved towards the idea of an armed uprising for the seizure of power.⁵⁶ Lenin's refusal to appear in the courts was in effect his own declaration of a civil war.

The Soviet leaders were equally fearful of a right-wing backlash and, although they denounced the July uprising and the part the Bolsheviks had played in it, they were also inclined to defend them against the punitive measures of the government. Gorky summed up the ambivalent views of the revolutionary intelligentsia in a letter to Ekaterina on 10 July:

You will know from the newspapers about the atrocities that have taken place here. My own immediate impression of them is immensely hard to put into words. What has happened and is happening now is repulsively stupid, cowardly and loutish. But it is wrong to assume that everything can be blamed on 'the Bolsheviks' and these so-called German agents, who undoubtedly took no part in the events. The Kadets are to blame here for stirring up trouble, along with the usual philistines and, generally, the whole mass of Petersburg. I am not trying to defend 'the Bolsheviks' — they know themselves there is no justification for what they have done . . . The Bolshevism of the emotions, which played on the dark instincts of the masses, has mortally wounded itself — and that is good. But the Democracy, England, France and Germany, may see the rout of the Bolsheviks as the defeat of the whole Revolution, and that is desperately bad, for it will deflate the revolutionary mood in the West and endlessly prolong the war ... I fear that Lenin has come to an awkward end. He of course is not too bad, but his closest comrades, it seems, are truly rogues and scoundrels. They have all been arrested. Now the bourgeois press is after Novaia zhizri, and will probably get it closed down, And then the campaign will start against you and your SRs. The counter-revolution is no longer some idle intention, but a fact. The Kadets stand at its head, people used to intrigue and not ashamed to use such means of struggle.⁵⁷

The Soviet Executive protested against the arrest of the Bolshevik leaders and dismissed the treason charges against them as Black Hundred slander designed to split the revolutionary democracy. The old traditions of socialist camaraderie — in which there were 'no enemies on the Left!' — died hard. Most of the Soviet leaders continued to view the Bolsheviks as 'comrades'. They

agreed that the witch-hunt against them was in danger of leading to a right-wing backlash against all socialists in general. As Novaia zhizri put it: 'Today they accuse the Bolsheviks; tomorrow they will cast suspicions on the Soviet; and then they will declare a Holy War Against the Revolution.'⁵⁸ The left-wing Mensheviks, many of whom still harboured hopes of reuniting their party with the Bolsheviks, were especially assiduous in their opposition to government repressions; and it was largely due to their efforts that the public trial and commission set up to examine the treason charges lost momentum and came to naught. It was this, more than anything else, that ensured the survival of the Bolsheviks. Because of the reluctance of the Soviet leaders to cut their ties with them, a prime opportunity had been missed to end the Leninist threat once and for all. Twelve months later, when many of these same Soviet leaders sat in Bolshevik jails, they would come to regret it.

The Soviet leaders, in choosing to close ranks with the Bolsheviks, had no doubt overreacted to the threat of a 'counter-revolution'. As in February, they had looked at reality through the distorting prism of history: the shadows of 1849 and 1906 had obscured their vision. It was partly the same fear of counterrevolution which also prevented them, as in February, from taking power themselves. This too would prove a fatal mistake — for only a Soviet government could have filled the power vacuum left by the collapse of the coalition. True, it might not have brought about peace, bread or land; nor could it have ended the spiral into chaos and violence in the country; but at least it would have denied the Bolsheviks the chance to rally mass support under the slogan of All Power to the Soviets!' During the July Days the streets had begged the Soviet leaders to take power. Yet the latter had calmly dismissed this as no more than Bolshevik demagogy. It did not occur to them that such calls might express the wishes of the rest of the democracy. After all, as its self-appointed leaders, wasn't it their task to decide that? 'I have been in the provinces and on the Front,' Tsereteli reassured the Soviet deputies on 4 July, 'and I am stating that the authority of the Provisional Government in the country is extremely great.'⁵⁹ Their rigid party dogma told the Mensheviks and the SRs that a socialist government could not be formed because the 'bourgeois stage of the revolution' had still not been completed. This higher logic drove these philosophers to the conclusion that a new coalition had to be patched together at all costs and that, if the Kadets still refused to join it, then a bloc would have to be formed with other bourgeois groups. 'The coalition is dead! Long live the coalition!'

The reformation of the coalition became inevitable with Kerensky's appointment as the new Prime Minister. He had returned to the capital on 6 July and, on his own insistence, had been met by a lavish guard of honour, with Cossacks and cavalry lining the streets from the Warsaw Station. This was to be the triumphant entry of a national hero, the man who was said to have

saved the country from the Bolshevik menace by rallying loyal troops at the Front. On the next day Prince Lvov resigned and named Kerensky as his successor. For Lvov, it was a great relief. He had already decided to step down, when he had written to his parents on 3 July. He was tired of politics — the burdens of office had turned his hair grey — and he did not have the heart to carry out the repressions demanded in the wake of the July Days. 'The only way to save the country now', Lvov told his old friend T. I. Polner on 9 July, 'is to close down the Soviet and shoot at the people. I cannot do that. But Kerensky can.' Right until the end, the gentle Prince would not use coercion against 'the people'. His life-long faith in their 'goodness and wisdom', however mistaken that may now have seemed, would not allow him to do so. Four days later, he left the capital and retired to a monastery.⁶⁰

Kerensky was hailed as the man to reunite the country and halt the drift towards civil war. He was the only major politician who had a base of popular support yet who was also broadly acceptable to the military leaders and the bourgeoisie. Tsereteli was the senior Soviet leader, to be sure, yet it was precisely this which ruled him out. For if the coalition was to be reformed, it would have to cut its ties with the Soviet programme, or else the Kadets would have nothing to do with it. Kerensky was the ideal figure to bring the coalition back together: as a member of both the Soviet and the Duma circles which had formed the Provisional Government he made a human bridge between the socialist and liberal camps. This placed him in a unique position — and the fate of Russia now seemed to depend upon this one young man. In itself this was a tragic situation, for it was without doubt much too heavy a burden for a man of Kerensky s tender years and rather modest talents.

Kerensky had always liked to see himself as a 'national leader', straddling Right and Left, and his rise to power merely fuelled this vanity. He began to cultivate the image of himself as a man of destiny, summoned by 'the people' to 'save Russia'. This was the high summer of the Kerensky cult. It was engineered with the help of his friends in the Petrograd literary intelligentsia — the Merezhkovskys, Filosofov, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko* — who all eulogized the young Prime Minister as 'the ideal citizen' and the 'embodiment of Russian Liberty'.⁶¹ Success and adulation went to Kerensky's head. He began to strut around with comic self-importance, puffing up his puny chest and striking the pose of a Bonaparte. His offices were transferred to the Winter Palace, where he took over the opulent suite of Alexander III. He slept in the

* Dmitni Merezhkovsky (1865—1941), poet, literary and religious philosopher; Zinaida Gip-pius (1869-1945), writer and essayist, married to Merezhkovsky; Dmitrii Filosofov (1872-1940), literary critic and co-inhabitant with the Merezhkovskys; Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), founder, along with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858-1943), of the Moscow Arts Theatre.

Tsar's enormous bed, and had a photo of himself taken sitting behind his swimming-pool-sized desk which he had distributed in postcard form for publicity. Nicholas II's cherished billiard table, which had been packed up for despatch to Tobolsk, was retained by Kerensky for his own amusement. He also kept on the old palace servants, and changed the guards outside his suite several times a day. As he came and left, the red flag on the palace roof was raised and lowered, just as it had been for the tsars. Was this the man who had called himself the 'hostage of democracy'?

The three-week interregnum between the fall of the First Coalition and the formation of the Second certainly saw Kerensky break his ties with the Soviet movement. As the power broker in the party talks, he was prepared to sacrifice most of the Soviet's basic demands — as expressed in the government's own declaration of 8 July — in the interests of persuading the Kadets to rejoin the coalition. On the insistence of the Kadets, he passed decrees imposing tough restrictions on public gatherings, restored the death penalty at the Front and agreed to roll back the influence of the soldiers' committees. The programme of the new coalition, finally formed on 25 July, was no longer to be based on the principles of the Soviet, as had been agreed in February. The nine socialist ministers, though they comprised a majority, entered the cabinet as private individuals rather than Soviet representatives, and thus, in a formal sense at least, were obliged to recognize the sole authority of the Provisional Government. All the socialist ministers, with the exception of Chernov, came from the right wings of their parties and stood much closer to the liberal Duma circles than the Soviet movement itself. Tsereteli, who as the undisputed leader of the Soviet could not accept this erosion of its influence, had no choice but to step aside. Already suffering from TB, he went into semi-retirement. His resignation marked the demise of the Soviet. On 18 July, on the same day that Kerensky's government moved into the Winter Palace, the Soviet was expelled from the Tauride Palace and transferred to the Smolny Institute, a school for the daughters of the nobility, on the outskirts of the capital. It was both a symbol of the Soviet's decline and of the elevation of Kerensky's government to a position where it stood, like its tsarist predecessors, above and apart from the people.

iii The Man on a White Horse

It was generally believed that Linde's own naive idealism had been to blame for his brutal murder. The young commissar had been warned on his arrival at the Front that the deserters were highly dangerous. For several weeks they had been living as bandits, spreading terror throughout the surrounding region of Lutsk,

and everyone who knew them agreed that it would be wiser to deploy the Cossacks against their rebel camp. General Krasnov had brought up 500 cavalrymen from reserve and, although there were nearly ten times as many deserters, he was sure that the imposing sight of the Cossacks would be enough to disarm them. But Linde was adamant about the power of the revolutionary word. The Cossacks, he insisted, were a remnant of the tsarist past and, on principle, should not be used against the 'freest army in the world'. 'You see, General, I shall make them listen to sense. One has to know how to talk to the soldiers. It's all a question of psychology.'⁶² There was no dissuading the young commissar from his foolish plan — he was carried away by his belief in the power of the revolutionary will — and so he was allowed to go to the camp to try to persuade the deserters to return to battle.

This was not the first time that Linde's overconfidence had got him into trouble. The hotheaded sergeant had twice led his soldiers on to the streets — once in February as a hero of the revolution and once again in the April demonstrations against Miliukov, when he had been condemned as a 'Bolshevik' adventurer attempting to carry out a bloody coup. As a punishment, the Soviet had sent him as a commissar to the Special Army on the Western Front: his skills of leadership of the soldiers were to be employed in the interests of the army command for the coming offensive. Linde took pleasure in his new assignment. The idea of persuading the demoralized soldiers to perform their patriotic duty was perfectly in tune with his own romantic self-image as a revolutionary orator. He quickly became something of a legend on account of his daring missions to those Bolshevized parts of the Front which, by the power of words alone, he seemed to restore to fighting order. Linde was something rare in 1917: a Russian revolutionary with a sense of duty to the nation and the state. He was in this sense a model commissar. 'It is not enough just to achieve freedom,' he explained to a friend on their way to Lutsk. 'Democracy is something that must be defended and fought for.' That was why he had been so determined to make a visit to the deserters' camp: to convince the soldiers of their patriotic duty to defend Russia now that it was free.

The convoy of cars, trucks and mounted Cossacks moved across empty countryside towards the forest, where the rebels had set up their armed camp in a clearing. It was a sunny August afternoon and the fields would normally have been filled with crops, but after three years of wartime neglect they were filled with weeds. Stopping at the edge of the forest, Linde walked on to the camp alone, while a group of officers followed some distance behind, and the mounted Cossacks rode on to surround the camp. The soldiers of the two mutinous regiments, the 443rd and the 444th of the 3rd Infantry Division, were sitting and lying around by their tents in the glade. As the officers approached, they began to stir, rising from the ground like some gigantic prehistoric animal, and

prepared their rifles. Linde noticed two distinct groups — one scattered and amorphous containing the bulk of the troops, the other much smaller and more compact, which he realized from their menacing look contained the hardened core of Bolshevized troops. Jumping on to a pile of timber, he began to speak to the former. It was a stirring speech, full of democratic pathos. 'I, who brought the soldiers out to overthrow the tsarist government and to give you freedom, a freedom which is equalled by no other people in the world, demand that you now give me those who have been telling you not to obey the orders of the commanders.' As he spoke, the sound could be heard of German shells flying over the forest, and this added a dramatic effect to Linde's rhetorical fervour. He pointed in the direction of the enemy's guns and called on the soldiers to defend their Fatherland from them. But the soldiers had heard it all before, and years of wheedling propaganda had made them cynical. They had seen too much of the war to believe any more in fine-sounding phrases, especially from this soft-faced youth, with his tailored officer's tunic, his fine breeches and leather boots, and his foreign accent.

Aware that his words were having no effect, Linde began to shout at the men, calling them 'lazy swine' and 'bastards' who did not deserve their freedom. The deserters grew agitated, and several men from the Bolshevik group began to heckle Linde. They called him a German spy and said that his methods were worthy of the old regime. Watching the scene from a distance, General Krasnov could see that something terrible was about to happen, and he sent in a car to rescue the stranded commissar. But Linde was carried away by the power of his own words, intoxicated by his own heroic self-image, and refused to leave. The soldiers moved towards him — and only then did he try to escape. But it was too late. A burly soldier from the Bolshevik group stepped up and thrust the butt of his rifle into Linde's temple; a second shot him to the ground; and a whole crowd of wildly shrieking soldiers then threw themselves on to him, thrusting their bayonets into his body. Fearing for their own lives, Krasnov and the other officers now sought to retreat, but the soldiers, emboldened by their kill, ran after them through the forest, while the Cossacks struggled to restore order. One of the officers, Colonel Girshfeldt, was stripped naked, hanged upside down from a tree and brutally tortured before the mob shot him. Two other officers were also killed before the convoy made it out of the forest to safety.

Linde's body was brought back to Petrograd and given a hero's burial. The democratic press portrayed the 'fallen fighter of the people's cause' as a shining example of the patriotic revolutionary sentiment which the Russian army now so badly needed. Linde was not the first Soviet leader to be killed by the Bolshevized troops. There had been several similar murders during the previous weeks. Even Sokolov, the famous Soviet leader and author of Order Number One, the founding charter of soldiers' rights, had been beaten up and taken

hostage by a mob of mutinous soldiers whom he had tried to persuade to return to battle. But Linde's brutal murder, coming as it did at the height of the summer crisis, was seen to be of particular significance. It symbolized the end of the idealistic hopes of the first revolutionary months — the ideal of a free state of citizens, who could be persuaded to fulfil their civic duties to Russia and the revolution. The death of Linde had finally confirmed that the time for persuasion had come to an end. The Russian people were not ready to be citizens, and Kerensky's notorious rebuke that the free Russian state would become 'a state of rebellious slaves' seemed to be vindicated by the growing chaos in the country at large. The Russian army was collapsing and in headlong retreat. On 21 August the Germans captured Riga, and it seemed, as Zinaida Gippius noted in her diary, that 'they could take Petrograd at any moment.' The Empire was falling apart, with self-appointed nationalist governments in Finland and the Ukraine declaring their own independence, while each day brought fresh newspaper reports of militant strikes by workers, of anarchy on the railways, of peasant attacks on the gentry's estates and of crime and disorder in the cities. The lesson of all this, which more and more people were beginning to draw, seemed to be that Russia could only be governed by force. Even Tsereteli was obliged to acknowledge that the summer crisis marked the end of the revolution's 'rose-coloured dreamy youth' and the start of a new and 'grim period' when coercive measures would have to be taken to halt the anarchic tide.⁶³

The propertied classes led the call for order. 'The Fatherland in Danger!' became their rallying cry. Hysterical with fear, they gambled vast amounts of money, sold their properties cheaply, and lived wildly for the moment, as if it was the final summer of Russian civilization. Countess Speransky found that in Kiev, 'parties on the river, auto-picnics to chateaux in the neighbourhood, dinners and suppers with gypsy-bands and chorus, bridge and even tangoes, poker, and romances were the order of the day'. The funeral of the seven Cossacks killed by the Bolsheviks during the July Days became a stage for the propertied classes to indulge themselves in a patriotic show of emotion. The funeral began with a sung requiem in St Isaac's Cathedral, followed by a solemn procession through the streets of the capital with each of the seven caskets on a white gilded horse-drawn carriage flanked on either side by liveried Cossacks and incense-waving priests. It was not so much a demonstration of democratic solidarity as a mournful lament for the old regime. There was a growing atmosphere of counterrevolution. Newspapers called for the Bolsheviks to be hanged and the Soviet to be closed down. In the absence of the Bolshevik leaders, Chernov became the new 'German spy' and the bete noire of the Right. Bolshevik workers were beaten up by the Black Hundred mobs. Respectable middle-class citizens flocked to the various right-wing groups which blamed Russia's ills on the Jews and called

for the restoration of the Tsar, or some other dictator, to save Russia from catastrophe.⁶⁴

As the head of the Russian army, who was thus responsible for the failed offensive, Brusilov soon fell victim to this swing to the Right. He had never been liked at Stavka, where the reactionary generals were suspicious of his democratic leanings, and the failure of the offensive now gave them the chance to step up their campaign for his dismissal. Pressure mounted for his replacement by General Kornilov, a well-known advocate of a return to military discipline in the traditional style. The Kadets even made it a basic condition of their joining Kerensky's government. Although the new Premier had himself been the author of the policies pursued by Brusilov, he was quite prepared to ditch them both if that was the price of power. Brusilov sensed he was about to be dismissed when Kerensky called on him to convene a meeting of all the Front commanders at Stavka on 16 July. He made the mistake of sending only an aide-de-camp to meet Kerensky at the Mogilev station: the train had arrived early and he was still involved in strategic decisions affecting the Front. It was not official protocol for the Supreme Commander to meet the War Minister; but Kerensky, who behaved like a Tsar and had come to expect to be treated like one by his subordinates, flew into a rage and sent an adjutant to Brusilov with orders to come to the station in person. 'The whole thing', Brusilov remarked, 'was petty and ridiculous, particularly in view of the tragic situation at the Front which my Chief of Staff and I had been studying.' But Kerensky was a vain man, obsessed with the trappings of power, and this final breach of etiquette was enough to seal the fate of his Commander-in-Chief. On 18 July Brusilov was dismissed. Hurt by the obvious political motives behind his dismissal, he retired to Moscow for a long-earned rest with his wife, who had fallen ill.⁶⁵ It was not until the Bolsheviks came to power that he returned to the army, under quite extraordinary circumstances.

The man who replaced him, General Lavr Kornilov, had already achieved the status of a national saviour in right-wing circles. Small and agile, with a closely shaven head, Mongol moustache and little mousey eyes, Kornilov came from a family of Siberian Cossacks. His father was a smallholder and a soldier, who had risen to become a lower-ranking officer. His mother was allegedly a Buryat. This comparatively plebeian background set Kornilov apart from the rest of Russia's generals, most of whom came from the aristocracy. In the democratic atmosphere of 1917 it was the ideal background for a national military hero. Kornilov's early army career had been spent in Central Asia. He had mastered the Turkic languages of the region and had built up his own bodyguard of Tekke Turkomans, dressed in scarlet robes, who called him their 'Great Boyar'. Kornilov's appointment was hardly merited by his military record. By 1914, at the age of forty-four, he had risen no higher than a divisional

commander in the Eighth Army. Brusilov, his army commander, remembered him as a brave and dashing soldier, well loved by his men, yet inclined to disobey orders. He claimed, not without justification, that Kornilov had cultivated his own 'cult of bravery'; and this cult was certainly behind his meteoric rise to fame. In 1915 Kornilov had been wounded and taken prisoner by the Austrians after refusing to obey Brusilov's command to withdraw his division from the Front. The following year he had escaped from prison and, disguised as an Austrian soldier, had made his way back to Russia by foot, where, instead of being court-martialled, he received a hero's welcome.⁶⁶

It was at this time that Kornilov began to attract powerful political backers in the form of Rodzianko and Guchkov. They secured his appointment as Commander of the Petrograd Military District in March 1917. During the April riots Kornilov had threatened to bring his troops on to the street. The Soviet had opposed this and taken control of the garrison, forcing Kornilov to resign. Various right-wing groups were scandalized by the Soviet's interference in army matters, and looked to Kornilov as a champion of their cause. They were united by their opposition to the growing influence of the Soviet over the government, particularly foreign and military matters, in the wake of the April crisis. Miliukov, who had been forced to step down as Foreign Minister, began to flirt with counter-revolutionary ideas. 'It is obvious that the leaders of the Soviet are deliberately leading us to defeat and economic ruin,' he wrote to a friend at the end of June. 'Deep down we both know that the salvation of Russia is to be found in the restoration of the monarchy, and that what has happened during the past two months has clearly shown that the people were incapable of exercising freedom.'⁶⁷ Business leaders, increasingly opposed to the policies of Skobelev, the Menshevik Labour Minister, and the gentry, equally hostile to Chernov, the SR Minister of Agriculture, were also beginning to rally behind the anti-Soviet cause. The Officers' Union and the Union of Cossacks campaigned for the abolition of the soldiers' committees and the restoration of military discipline. And all these groups came together through the Republican Centre, a clandestine organization of bourgeois patriots, officers and war veterans formed in May above a bank on the Nevsky Prospekt.⁶⁸

Kornilov was the servant, rather than the master, of these political interests. His own political mind was not very developed. A typical soldier, he was a man of very few words, and of even fewer ideas. 'The heart of a lion, the brains of a sheep' was Alexeev's verdict on him. During his time in prison he had read about the life of Napoleon, and he seemed to believe that he was destined to play a similar role in saving Russia.⁶⁹ All that was needed to stem the anarchic tide was a General on a White Horse.

Most of Kornilov's political pronouncements were written for him by Boris Savinkov, Kerensky's Deputy Minister of War. During his youth Savinkov

had been a legendary figure — poet, 'freedom fighter' and gambler — in the SR terrorist movement. He was involved in the assassination of several government figures, including Plehve, at the turn of the century. Like many terrorists, however, he had a strong authoritarian streak: 'You are a Lenin, but of the other side,' Kerensky once told him. After a period of exile abroad, Savinkov returned to Russia in 1917 and attached himself to the movement against the Soviet (which he called the 'Council of Rats', Dogs' and Chickens' Deputies').⁷⁰ It was he who engineered Kornilov's appointment, first, on 8 July, as Commander of the South-Western Front, and then, ten days later, as Commander-in-Chief.

Other than a well-known advocate of military discipline, it is not clear that Kerensky knew what he was getting in his new Commander. Kerensky harboured Bonapartist ambitions of his own, of course, and no doubt hoped that in Kornilov he might find a strong man to support him. But did he realize that Kornilov and his allies had similar plans to use Kerensky? Brusilov later claimed that he had already been asked by Kerensky if he 'would support him in case it was considered desirable to consummate the Revolution by making him [Kerensky] Dictator'. Brusilov had refused, believing Kerensky to be too 'hysterical' for this role. Kerensky had then asked him if he was prepared to become Dictator himself. But once again Brusilov had refused, comparing the idea to 'building a dam when the river is in flood'. Brusilov's refusal was certainly a factor in Kerensky's decision to replace him with a Commander of more primitive instincts. To secure his appointment, Savinkov had wisely advised Kornilov to stress the role of the commissars as a check on the power of the soldiers' committees at the Stavka conference on 16 July. This was a much more moderate stance than that of Denikin and the other generals, who advocated the immediate abolition of the soldiers' committees, and it would enable Kerensky to appease the Right while salvaging the basic structure of his democratic reforms.⁷¹ Thus Kornilov had given the impression that he might be prepared to fit in with Kerensky's plans.

Yet immediately after his appointment Kornilov began to dictate his own terms to Kerensky. During his brief command of the South-Western Front he had managed to force him to restore the death penalty at the Front (Kornilov had already been practising it on his own authority by ordering all deserters to be shot). Now, as a condition for assuming the Supreme Command, he demanded the extension of the death penalty to the rear, while he, as the head of the army, would consider himself responsible only to his 'conscience and to the nation as a whole'. This was, in effect, a challenge to the authority of the Provisional Government, which Kornilov clearly believed was a captive of the Soviet; and although under pressure from Kerensky he was eventually forced to withdraw this ultimatum, the thrust of his intentions remained clear. During the following days he presented Kerensky with a series of reforms drawn up by Savinkov. The

first of these were strictly in the military field: an end to the power of the soldiers' committees; the banning of soldiers' meetings at the Front; and the disbanding of revolutionary regiments. But after 3 August the scope of the reforms was broadened dramatically to include the imposition of martial law throughout the country; the restoration of the death penalty for civilians; the militarization of the railways and the defence industries with a ban on strikes and workers' meetings, under penalty of capital punishment; and compulsory output quotas, with those who failed to meet them instantly sacked.⁷² It was, in effect, a demand for the establishment of a military dictatorship.

One of the most enduring myths of the Russian Revolution is the notion that Kornilov was planning a coup d'etat against the Provisional Government. This was Kerensky's version of events. After his downfall he spent the rest of his long and frustrated life in exile trying to prove it in his voluminous and mendacious memoirs. Soviet historians also pedalled the story because it endorsed Lenin's view that after July the 'military dictatorship' was engaged in a naked struggle for power. But the evidence suggests that Kornilov, far from plotting the overthrow of the Provisional Government, had in fact intended to save it. By pressurizing Kerensky to pass his reforms, he sought to rescue the government from the influence of the Soviet and thus 'save Russia', as he saw it, from the impending catastrophe. Kornilov, in other words, believed that the dictatorship would be 'legitimate' in the sense that Kerensky would support it. It was only when Kerensky began to have his own doubts, on the grounds that the General's plans would undermine his own position, that the 'coup plot' was uncovered by the Prime Minister. Kerensky was determined to play the part of a Bonaparte himself and feared that Kornilov would be a rival. It was, if you like, a question of two men and only one white horse.

None of which is to deny that many of Kornilov's supporters were urging him to do away with the Provisional Government altogether. The Union of Officers, for example, laid plans for a military coup d'etat, while a 'conference of public men' in mid-August, made up mostly of Kadets and right-wing businessmen, clearly encouraged Kornilov in that direction. At the centre of these rightist circles was Vasilii Zavoiko, a rather shady figure — property speculator, industrial financier, journalist and political intriguer — who, according to General Martynov, acted as Kornilov's 'personal guide, one might even say his mentor, on all state matters'. Zavoiko's plans for a coup d'etat were so well known that even Whitehall had heard of them: as early as 8 August the Foreign Ministry in London told Buchanan, its Ambassador in Petrograd, that according to its military sources, Zavoiko was plotting the overthrow of the Provisional Government. Nor is it to deny that Kornilov himself had his own ambitions in the political field — the cult of Kornilov, which he helped to generate, was a clear manifestation of this — and he must have been tempted by the constant

urgings of his supporters, like Zavoiko, to exploit his enormous popularity in order to install himself as a dictator. The Commander-in-Chief despised Keren-sky as 'weak and womanly', and saw his whole administration as hopelessly dependent on the Soviets. Stepun probably summed it up when he described the clash between Kornilov and Kerensky as a clash between two entirely different worlds — the world of the officer corps and the world of the intelligentsia — neither of which could understand the other.⁷³

Kornilov's mistrust of the Provisional Government could only have been increased by Kerensky's vacillation over the adoption of his reforms. On 10 August Kornilov turned up uninvited at the Winter Palace with his own personal bodyguard, equipped with two machine-guns, to persuade Kerensky to adopt his proposals. Kornilov was not allowed to address the whole cabinet, but only the inner 'triumvirate' of Kerensky, Tereshchenko and Nekrasov, who warned him not to expect a quick enactment of his reforms, whereupon he and Kerensky became embroiled in a shouting match, with each accusing the other of leading the country to ruin. Over dinner that evening Kornilov told Rodzianko that if Kerensky refused to pass his reforms he would lead the army against him. On the following day he did indeed instruct III Cavalry Corps, including the notorious Savage Division (so named because it was made up of tribal natives from the Caucasus), to move to the region around Velikie Luki, from where it could be despatched to the capital. It was not quite clear whether Krymov's troops were intended to protect the Provisional Government against a possible Bolshevik revolt once it passed Kornilov's reforms, or whether they were meant to threaten it with a military coup should it decide not to pass them after all. The answer is probably both. Kornilov told General Lukomsky that he had 'no intention of going against the Provisional Government' and hoped to 'succeed at the last moment in reaching an agreement with it', but that if he failed to do so 'it might be necessary to strike a blow at the Bolsheviks without their approval'.'⁴ This was not a confession of his intention to overthrow the government; but it was a threat to rescue it from the Left, even if need be against Kerensky's will.

Yet by the time of Savinkov's visit to Stavka, on 22—4 August, Kornilov was convinced that this would not be necessary. The Deputy War Minister had assured him that Kerensky was about to satisfy his demands within 'the next few days'. He expected that this would lead to the reformation of the Provisional Government as a collective dictatorship — a Council for National Defence, as Kornilov liked to call it — headed by Kerensky himself and including Savin-kov, Kornilov and various 'public men' from patriotic circles. Fearing a Bolshevik revolt — which the Soviet forces might join — against the imposition of martial law, Savinkov also asked Kornilov to move III Cavalry Corps from Velikie Luki to Petrograd itself. There were rumours of a Bolshevik coup planned for the

end of August and it was agreed that 'merciless' action should be taken against it. On 25 August Kornilov ordered Krymov's troops to occupy the capital, disperse the Soviet and disarm the garrison in the event of a Bolshevik uprising. He thought he was acting on Kerensky's instructions to protect the Provisional Government, not to overthrow it.

But Kerensky was still in two minds. His own political strategy since February had been based on the idea of straddling Right and Left: it was this that had made him the central figure of the coalition and brought him to the verge of his own dictatorship. But the summer crisis and the growing polarization between Right and Left made this increasingly difficult: the political centre, upon which Kerensky aimed to stand, was fast disappearing. The Soviet became distrustful of Kerensky's ability — and indeed his willingness — to defend the achievements of the revolution against the 'counter-revolution'; while the Right reproached him for not being firm enough against the Bolsheviks. Kerensky was unable to decide which way he should turn and, afraid of alienating either side, vacillated hopelessly.

Kornilov's reform proposals forced him to decide between Right and Left. It was a tortuous decision for him. On the one hand, if he refused to go along with Kornilov, the Kadets were likely to leave his fragile coalition. There was also the danger of a military coup, which the Men of February, like Kerensky, were always inclined to overestimate, for throughout their lifetime the army had been against the revolution. On the other hand, if he agreed to pass Kornilov's reforms, he would risk a complete break with the Left and lose his claim to be a 'hostage of the democracy'. The restoration of the death penalty had already seriously tarnished his revolutionary credentials: it was such an emotive issue. The Soviet was fiercely campaigning against Kornilov's proposals and, unlike July, might just endorse a Bolshevik uprising if these proposals were enacted. Besides, Kerensky was doubtful that martial law would even prove effective. Where were the forces to carry out such a plan? How many officers had the courage to execute mutinous soldiers? Who would enforce the militarization of the railways and the factories, shooting workers who dared to go on strike? The whole idea seemed quite impracticable.

In a last desperate bid to rally the nation behind him Kerensky summoned a State Conference in Moscow. It was held in the Bolshoi Theatre on 12—14 August. Kerensky hoped that the conference would reconcile Left and Right and, in an effort to strengthen the political centre, upon which he depended, he assigned a large number of seats to the moderate delegates from the zemstvos and co-operatives. Sergei Semenov attended the conference as a delegate of the latter from Volokolamsk. Kerensky's heart must have sunk, however, at the sight of the opening session. The polarization of Russia was exactly mirrored in the seating arrangements in the auditorium: on the right side

of the stalls sat the middle-class parties, the bankers, industrialists and Duma representatives in their frock-coats and starched collars; while on the left, facing them as if in battle, were the Soviet delegates in their workers' tunics and soldiers' uniforms. The scene was reminiscent of the opening of the Duma in 1906; the two Russias had not moved any closer in the intervening years. The Bolsheviks had decided to boycott the conference and called a city-wide strike. The trams did not run and restaurants and cafes were closed, including the theatre's own buffet, so the conference delegates had to serve their own refreshments.

Kerensky had wanted to occupy centre-stage at the conference; but, to his fury, Kornilov stole the show. The General made a triumphant entry into Moscow during the middle of the conference. Middle-class ladies pelted him with flowers at the Alexandrovsky Station. Countess Morozova fell on her knees before him, while the Kadet, Rodichev, called on him to 'Save Russia and a thankful people will crown you.' The Man on a White Horse had arrived. He was carried from the station on the shoulders of some officers and cheered in the street outside by a crowd of right-wing patriots. Seated in an open car, at the head of a motorcade that any twentieth-century dictator would have envied, he then made a pilgrimage to the sacred Iversky shrine, where the tsars had usually prayed on their visits to Moscow. On the following day he entered the conference to a standing ovation from the Right, while the Left sat in stony silence. His speech was a poor one — words were not Kornilov's strength — but it did not seem to matter: it was what he stood for, not what he said, that made him the patriots' hero; and with all his flowery eloquence there was nothing Kerensky could do to stop himself from being eclipsed. His own last speech with which the conference closed went on far too long. The Prime Minister rambled incoherently and seemed to lose his way. It was symbolic of his loosening grip on the country at large, and even Stepun, a loyal supporter, remarked that 'at the very end of his speech one could hear not only the agony of his power, but also of his personality'. It was an embarrassing scene and the audience began to mutter. At one point Kerensky halted for breath and the delegates, as if sensing that the time had come to put him out of his misery, burst into applause and rose from their seats. The conference was over. Kerensky fainted into his chair. He had not finished his sentence.⁷⁵

The Moscow Conference marked Kerensky's moral downfall: the two months between it and the Bolshevik seizure of power were really no more than a long death agony of the Provisional Government. This was the moment when the democratic intelligentsia, which had done so much to create the Cult of Kerensky, finally fell out of love with him. 'Kerensky', Gippius wrote in her diary on 14 August, 'is a railway car that has come off the tracks. He wobbles and sways painfully and without the slightest conviction. He is a man near the end;

and it looks like his end will be without honour.' Kerensky was fully aware of his own demise. 'I am a sick man,' he told Savinkov three days later. 'No, not quite. I have died, and am no more. At the Conference I died.'⁷⁶ It seemed only a question of time before he succumbed to Kornilov. Under growing pressure he promised Savinkov to pass his reforms, aware that they would reduce him to no more than a figurehead to provide legitimation for the military dictatorship.

But then, suddenly, Kerensky found an unexpected way to save the situation. It came in the form of an intervention by V N. Lvov, an Octobrist deputy in the Fourth Duma and more recently the Procurator of the Holy Synod, who took it upon himself to act as a mediator between Kerensky and Kornilov. Lvov was one of those numerous characters in Russian history who seem to have escaped from a novel by Gogol or Dostoevsky. A nobleman of no particular talent or profession, he was convinced of his calling to greatness, yet ended up in the 1920s as a pauper and a madman living on the streets of Paris. After his dismissal from the Holy Synod in July, he had fallen in with the right-wing circles urging Kornilov to assume dictatorial powers. It was in this capacity that he approached Kerensky on 22 August and offered to consult, on his behalf, with Kornilov in the hope of smoothing a path towards the creation of a 'strong government'. Kerensky was frequently visited by such self-appointed 'saviours' of the country, and generally gave them little attention. But this one was different. Lvov had warned him that the General Staff was plotting to kill him. Kerensky had of late been much preoccupied with this potential threat. He had even ordered the guards outside his quarters to be changed every hour. Kerensky later claimed that he had not instructed Lvov to negotiate with Kornilov; but this was not Lvov's impression; and it does seem likely that, if only out of fear for his own life, he did instruct him to find out what Kornilov was on about. It is also possible that Kerensky was already planning to use Lvov for what was about to happen.

Lvov arrived in Mogilev on 24 August and presented himself to Kornilov as an emissary from the Premier. Kornilov did not ask for his credentials and this was to prove a fatal mistake (he later said that he had presumed Lvov to be 'an honourable man'). Lvov claimed that he had been instructed to find out the General's views on how to strengthen the government and, on his own initiative, offered three proposals: the assumption of dictatorial powers by Kerensky; a Directory, or collective dictatorship, with Kornilov as a member; or Kornilov's own dictatorship, with Kerensky and Savinkov holding ministerial portfolios. Taking this to mean that Kerensky was offering him power, Kornilov said he preferred the third of these options, but would readily subordinate himself to Kerensky if that was seen to be for the best. He told Lvov to invite Kerensky to come to Mogilev to discuss this issue and because he said he feared

for his life in the event of a Bolshevik coup in Petrograd. As soon as the interview was finished, Lvov departed for the capital. Kornilov was clearly under the impression that he had begun a process of negotiation with Kerensky to reform the Provisional Government as a dictatorship.

On the following day, 26 August, Lvov met Kerensky again in the Winter Palace. He claimed that Kornilov was now demanding dictatorial powers for himself (he had of course done nothing of the sort) and, on Kerensky's request, listed the three points of his 'ultimatum': the imposition of martial law in Petrograd; the transfer of all civil authority to the Commander-in-Chief; and the resignation of all the ministers, including Kerensky himself, pending the formation of a new cabinet by Kornilov. Kerensky always claimed that when he saw these demands everything instantly became clear: Kornilov was planning a military coup. In fact nothing was clear. For one thing, it might have been asked why Kornilov had chosen to deliver his list of demands through such a nonentity as Lvov. For another, it might have been sensible to check with Kornilov if he really was demanding to be made Dictator. But Kerensky was not concerned with such details. On the contrary, he had suddenly realized — and this is no doubt what he really meant by his lightning-flash of revelation — that as long as everything was kept vague he might succeed in exposing Kornilov as a traitor plotting against the Provisional Government. His own political fortunes would thus be revived as the revolution rallied behind him to defeat his rival.

In order to obtain proof of the 'conspiracy', Kerensky agreed to meet Lvov at the War Ministry later that evening in order to communicate directly with Kornilov through the Hughes Apparatus (a sort of primitive telex machine). Lvov failed to turn up on time, so Kerensky began his own conversation with Kornilov, during which he impersonated the absent Lvov. He asked him to confirm what Lvov had said to him (Kerensky) — without specifying what that was — and repeated the request on Lvov's behalf. Kornilov did so — without knowing what he was being asked to confirm — and urged Kerensky to go to Mogilev at once. Kornilov must have believed that this was simply a prelude to negotiations for the reformation of the government. He had no idea that what he was saying would soon be used by Kerensky to charge him with treason. Later that evening he discussed the situation with General Lukomsky and agreed that Kerensky and Savinkov would have to be included in the cabinet. He also sent out telegrams to various public figures inviting them to come to Mogilev and take part in these negotiations.⁷⁷ Hardly the actions of a would-be dictator.

Armed with the transcripts from the Hughes Apparatus and Kornilov's 'demands', as listed by Lvov, Kerensky called a cabinet meeting for midnight, at which he presented the 'counter-revolutionary conspiracy' as an established fact and demanded 'full authority' to deal with the emergency. No doubt he hoped

to pose as the champion of free Russia, to declare the revolution in danger and rally the nation behind himself in the struggle against Kornilov. Nekrasov recalled that Kerensky had said: 'I will not give them the revolution' — as if it had been his to give. Savinkov, among others, realized that a misunderstanding had occurred and urged Kerensky to communicate once again with Kornilov to ask him if he confirmed that he had made the three specific 'demands' outlined by Lvov. But Kerensky refused, and the rest of the ministers agreed with him that it was too late for any reconciliation. They resigned en masse, thus effectively making Kerensky Dictator — the very thing he had charged Kornilov with plotting to become. With the cabinet adjourned he sent a telegram to Kornilov dismissing him on his own authority; and then, at 4 a.m. on 27th, retired to his suite in the Winter Palace. But Russia's new 'Tsar' was too excited to sleep and, according to Lvov, who had been placed under guard in the adjoining room, paced up and down singing operatic arias.⁷⁸

When Kornilov received the telegram informing him of his dismissal he concluded that Kerensky had already been taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks. Only the full cabinet had the legal authority to dismiss the Commander-in-Chief, whereas the telegram had been signed simply 'Kerensky'. It also made no sense in the light of the agreement he falsely believed he had just concluded over the Hughes Apparatus. Kornilov refused to resign, and ordered Krymov's troops to advance to the capital and place it under martial law. Although this order would later be cited as proof of Kornilov's guilt, it is clear that he gave it on the understanding — and in line with Savinkov's instructions — that Krymov's troops were to rescue the Provisional Government from the Bolsheviks. Various requests were made for clarification of this point through direct communications with Kornilov, and had this been done then the whole crisis might well have been averted. But Kerensky was determined to condemn Kornilov without trial. He was beside himself with excitement and stormed around the palace claiming that Russia was on his side. On Kerensky's orders, a special daytime edition of the press appeared condemning Kornilov as a traitor against the revolution. Kornilov responded with his own appeal to all the Front commanders denouncing the incident with Lvov as a 'grand provocation' by a government that had manifestly fallen under the control of the Bolsheviks and the German General Staff. He, General Kornilov, 'the son of a Cossack', would 'save Russia'.⁷⁹

This at last was mutiny: having been denounced as a rebel, Kornilov chose to rebel. Several senior generals declared their support for him. Now Kerensky had a real 'counter-revolution' to deal with. On 29 August he crowned himself the new Commander-in-Chief, with Alexeev as his Chief of Staff, despite the latter's low opinion of Kerensky ('a nicompoop, buffoon and charlatan').⁸⁰ He cabled Krymov with orders to halt the advance of his troops, some of which

had already reached the southern suburbs of the capital. The Soviet Executive, which had been divided over whether to support the Revolutionary Dictator, swung around to his defence on news of Krymov's advance. It called on its supporters to arm themselves for a struggle against the 'counter-revolution' and transformed Smolny into a command centre directing operations. It was back to the atmosphere of the Tauride Palace during the February Days, when tired soldiers lay around the Soviet building waiting for the generals to attack.

A special Committee for Struggle Against the Counter-Revolution was set up by the Soviet, with three representatives from each of the Menshevik, SR and Bolshevik Parties, to mobilize forces for the defence of the capital. This marked the political rehabilitation of the Bolsheviks after the July Days — and several prominent Bolshevik leaders, including Trotsky, were released from prison shortly afterwards. The Committee for Struggle represented a united front of the whole Soviet movement. But it was effectively dependent on the military organization of the Bolsheviks, without which, in the words of Sukhanov, it 'could only have passed the time with appeals and idle speeches by orators who had lost their authority'. Only the Bolsheviks had the ability to mobilize and arm the mass of the workers and soldiers, and they now worked in close collaboration with their rivals in the Soviets. Throughout the northern industrial regions ad hoc revolutionary committees were formed in line with the Committee for Struggle. Some of them called themselves 'Committees of Public Safety' in emulation of the Jacobins. There was no real leadership of this spontaneous movement. Garrisons placed themselves on alert, and despatched detachments of soldiers to 'defend the revolution'. The Kronstadt sailors, who had last come to Petrograd during the July Days to overthrow the Provisional Government, arrived once again — this time to defend it. The Red Guards and trade unions organized the defence of the factories. Vikzhel, the Railwaymen's Union, set up a bureau to combat Krymov's troops and managed to hold up their progress towards Petrograd by withholding engines and obstructing the line.⁸¹

Meanwhile, Krymov's troops were harangued by Soviet agitators. They had no desire to overthrow the Provisional Government — Kornilov had instructed them to defend it against the Bolsheviks — and once they were told that it was not in danger from the Left, they soon laid down their arms. Contrary to the Soviet myth, no actual fighting took place in the defeat of Kornilov. What would have been the point? Both sides had gone to defend the Provisional Government, and as soon as this was established they began to fraternize. The Savage Division was persuaded not to fight by a delegation of their own countrymen, the Caucasian Muslims, who happened to be at a Soviet congress in Petrograd at the time. The cavalrymen hoisted a red flag inscribed with 'Land and Freedom', arrested their commanders, and sent a delegation to Petrograd with a pledge of loyalty to the government. The train of the 1st Don Cossack

Division, with which Krymov and his staff were travelling, was halted by railway workers at Luga, where deputies from the Soviet harangued them with propaganda through the carriage windows. There was nothing Krymov could do — the Cossacks were joining the Soviet side in droves. On 30 August he agreed to travel to Petrograd with a government representative and, on the following day, met Kerensky. Krymov tried to explain that he had brought his troops to defend the government. But Kerensky would have none of this, and ordered him to be tried by the military courts. Krymov left in despair and went to a friends apartment, where he was heard to say: 'The last card for saving the Fatherland has been beaten — life is no longer worth living.' Retiring to a private room, he wrote a short note to Kornilov, and shot himself through the heart.⁸²

* * * Kornilov's revolt was over. On the following day, I September, Alexeev took control at Stavka, and Kornilov himself was placed under house arrest, and then transferred to the Bykhov Monastery, near Mogilev, where he was imprisoned with thirty other officers suspected of having been involved in the 'counterrevolutionary conspiracy'. But if Kerensky had hoped to bolster his own authority by defeating Kornilov, then he achieved precisely the reverse. The Kornilov Affair, as it came to be known, turned out to be a nail in his own coffin. It merely accelerated the social and political polarization which had been eroding the base of the Provisional Government since the early summer, and in this sense brought the revolution closer to its October denouement.

On the one hand, Kerensky had fatally spoiled his relations with the Right, which by and large remained faithful to Kornilov and condemned Kerensky for betraying his cause. Kornilov became a political martyr for all those who blamed Kerensky's regime for the growing chaos in the country at large. In this respect, the Kornilov Affair had its greatest political impact after it was oyer. The word 'Kornilovite' began to enter the political vocabulary as an out-and-out opponent of the Kerenshchina (Kerensky's rule). The Bykhov Monastery was evidently run by sympathizers with the Kornilov movement, since prison conditions there were extremely relaxed. 'We had the impression that everyone was rather embarrassed at having to act as our "jailors",' Anton Denikin recalled. Kornilov was allowed to retain his faithful Turkoman bodyguards; he issued military orders' to the rest of the prison; the officers' families visited twice a day (Denikin's fiancee practically lived in the jail); and there were even secret links with the General Staff, where the Kornilov movement continued to enjoy much support.⁸³ The Bykhov prisoners were later to become the founding nucleus — and Kornilov and Denikin the leaders — of the Volunteer Army, the major White force of the civil war. It was in Bykhov that the draft programme of the Volunteer Army was written. It was just as much a rejection of Kerensky

as it was of the Bolsheviks. Indeed, during the Bolshevik seizure of power none of these elements came to defend the Provisional Government.

Kerensky's standing on the Left, meanwhile, had been equally weakened. The mass of soldiers and workers who had rallied to the defence of the Provisional Government during the Kornilov crisis nevertheless suspected that Kerensky had himself somehow been involved in the Kornilov movement. Many saw the whole affair as a personal feud between the two would-be Napoleons (and in this they were not far wrong). But others believed that Kerensky had been in league with Kornilov, or else had tried to implement his own 'counterrevolutionary' plans through him. This conviction was strengthened by Kerensky's failure to pursue a more democratic course once the crisis was over. For one thing, there was no real enquiry into the affair, and this merely fuelled the popular suspicion that Kerensky had something to hide. His continued support for a coalition with the Kadets (who had clearly been associated with the Kornilov movement) and his appointment of Alexeev (who was widely suspected of having sympathized with it) were seen as added reasons to suspect Kerensky's intentions. The phantom nature of this 'counter-revolution' only made it seem more powerful, a hidden force behind the government, not unlike the shadow of treason which hung over the tsarist regime in 1916.

The mass of the soldiers suspected their officers of having supported Kornilov, and for this reason a sharp deterioration in army discipline resulted. Hundreds of officers were arrested by their men — some of them were executed or brutally killed — for their alleged involvement in the 'counter-revolution'. The soldiers' assemblies passed resolutions for Soviet power and peace. There was a growing consciousness among the rank-and-file troops, which the Kornilov crisis had helped to create, that peace would not be obtained until the nature of the state itself had been changed. They were no longer prepared to trust in the promises of their 'democratic' leaders, and were starting to demand the right to make decisions for themselves. This was reflected in the growing pressure from below for the army congresses to debate the questions of power and peace. But for vast numbers of soldiers there was also a simpler solution — to vote with their feet by deserting the army. In the weeks following the Kornilov crisis the rate of desertion sharply increased, with tens of thousands leaving their units every day. Most of these deserters were peasants, eager to return to their villages, where the harvest season was now in full swing. They often led the attack on the manors and helped to establish local Soviet power; so these weeks also witnessed a sudden upturn in the agrarian movement. Senior commanders began to acknowledge that with such rates of desertion it was impossible to continue the war. The Kornilov movement, which had aimed to save the army, thus ended up by destroying it altogether.

In the big industrial cities there was a similar process of radicalization

in the wake of the Kornilov crisis. The Bolsheviks were the principal beneficiaries of this, winning their first majority in the Petrograd Soviet on 31 August. Without the Kornilov movement, they might never have come to power at all. On 4 September Trotsky was finally released from prison, along with two other Bolshevik leaders destined to play a prominent part in the seizure of power, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko and P. E. Dybenko. The Bolshevik Military Organization, which had been forced underground after the July Days, could now expand its subversive activities under the guise of its leading role in the Committee for Struggle. Indeed, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which led the Bolshevik seizure of power, was partly modelled on the latter. The Red Guards and the Kronstadt sailors, who were to be the foot-soldiers in October, also emerged strengthened from the struggle against Kornilov. The whole affair was a dress rehearsal for the seizure of power, with the workers, in particular, trained in the art of handling guns. Some 40,000 were armed in the Kornilov crisis, and most of them no doubt retained their weapons after it was over. As Trotsky put it, 'the army that rose against Kornilov was the army-to-be of the October revolution'.⁸⁴

Kerensky's victory over Kornilov was also his own political defeat. He had won dictatorial powers but lost all real authority. 'The prestige of Kerensky and the Provisional Government', wrote Kerensky's wife, 'was completely destroyed by the Kornilov Affair; and he was left almost without supporters.'⁸⁵ The five-man Directory, which was established on I September and served as a fragile structure for Kerensky's own dictatorship until the power question was resolved at the Democratic Conference in mid-September, was made up of unknown mediocrities.* The only achievement of this opera buffa government was to declare Russia a 'republic', though this was formally the prerogative of the Constituent Assembly. It was typical of a government that existed on paper alone: nobody paid any attention to it. Beyond the corridors of the Winter Palace, all Kerensky's decrees were ignored. There was a vacuum of power; and it was now only a question of who would dare to fill it.

iv Hamlets of Democratic Socialism

On s'engage et puis on voit.' Lenin was fond of citing Napoleon's maxim. It perfectly expressed his own revolutionary philosophy: that revolutions did not make themselves, they had to be made by their leaders. History has long ceased to be the record of the achievements of extraordinary men: we are all social

* The 'Directors', apart from Kerensky, were: Tereshchenko (Foreign Affairs); General Verkhov-sky (War); Admiral Verderevsky (Marine); and A. M. Nikirin (Posts and Telegraphs).

historians now. Yet the course of history is full of unexpected turns that can only be explained by the actions of great leaders. This is particularly so in the case of revolutions, when the tide of events can be so easily turned. The October seizure of power is a good example: few historical events in the modern era better illustrate the decisive effect of an individual on the course of history. Without Lenin's intervention it would probably never have happened at all — and the history of the twentieth century would have been very different.

Kerensky's role stands out in stark contrast; he was quite unable to control events. Those who were close to him during these final weeks testify to his growing isolation, his weakness of will, his paralytic fear of the Left, and his fatal indecision in taking suitable measures against it. The constant tension and the sleepless nights of 1917 had taken a heavy toll on him — and he now lived with the help of morphine and cocaine. Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya, the veteran SR and 'grandmother of the revolution', had moved in with Kerensky in the Winter Palace (gossipers called her his 'nanny'). At the end of July the Bolshevik leaders convened in Petrograd for their Sixth Party Conference. She begged Kerensky to arrest them; but he refused, giving the frail excuse that he did not even know where they were meeting. According to David Soskice, Kerensky's private secretary, the grey-haired woman then:

bowed to the ground before Kerensky and repeated several times in solemn imploring tones: 'I beg thee, Alexander Fedorovich, suppress the Conference, suppress the Bolsheviks. I beg thee to do this, or else they will bring ruin on our country and the revolution.' It was a dramatic scene. To see the grandmother of the Russian Revolution who had passed thirty-eight years of her life in prison and in Siberia in her struggle for liberty, to see that highly cultured and noble woman bowing to the ground in the ancient orthodox manner before the young Kerensky. . . was a thing I shall never forget. I looked at Kerensky. His pale face grew still whiter. His eyes reflected the terrible struggle that was proceeding within him. He was silent for long, and at last he said in a low voice: 'How can I do it?' 'Do it, A.F., I beseech thee', and again Babushka bowed to the ground. Kerensky could stand it no longer. He sprang to his feet and seized the telephone. 'I must learn first where the Conference meets and consult Avksentiev', and rang up the Ministry of the Interior. But Avksentiev was not in his office and the matter had to be adjourned for the time. I fancy to Kerensky's great relief.⁸⁶

The conference went ahead without arrests — and three months later the Bolsheviks came to power.

One of the many remarkable facts about the Bolshevik seizure of

power was that it had been expected for so long without anyone taking the measures needed to prevent it: such was the paralysis of the Provisional Government. During the evening of 25 October, as the ministers of the Provisional Government sat in the Winter Palace waiting for the end, many of them were tempted to curse Kerensky for having failed to destroy the Bolshevik Party after the July Days. The legal suppressions against them had certainly failed to reverse their growing influence. But the truth was that the government had neither the means nor the authority to make repressions work against a movement that was starting to grow deep roots in the mass-based organizations.

The social polarization of the summer gave the Bolsheviks their first real mass following as a party which based its main appeal on the plebeian rejection of all superordinate authority. The Kornilov crisis was the critical turning point, for it seemed to confirm their message that neither peace nor radical social change could be obtained through the politics of compromise with the bourgeoisie. The larger factories in the major cities, where the workers' sense of class solidarity was most developed, were the first to go over in large numbers to the Bolsheviks. By the end of May, the party had already gained control of the Central Bureau of the Factory Committees and, although the Menshevik trade unionists remained in the ascendancy until 1918, it also began to get its resolutions passed at important trade union assemblies. Bolshevik activists in the factories tended to be younger, more working class and much more militant than their Menshevik or SR rivals. This made them attractive to those groups of workers — both among the skilled and the unskilled — who were becoming increasingly prepared to engage in violent strikes, not just for better pay and working conditions but also for the control of the factory environment itself. As their network of party cells at the factory level grew, the Bolsheviks began to build up their membership among the working class, and as a result their finances grew through the new members' contributions. By the Sixth Party Conference at the end of July there were probably 200,000 Bolshevik members, rising to perhaps 350,000 on the eve of October, and the vast majority of these were blue-collar workers.⁸⁷