October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

8 August: Exile and Conspiracy

In those late days of summer, as the right ruminated a cleansing, there flourished a millennial indulgence. Bands and all-night dances, stained silk dresses and cravats, flies circling warming cake and vomit and spilt drink. Long days, warm orgiastic nights. A sybariticism for the end of a world. In Kiev, said the Countess Speransky, there were ‘suppers with gypsy bands and chorus, bridge and even tangoes, poker and romances’. As in Kiev, so across the cities of Russia, among the dreaming rich.

On 3 August, the Sixth Russian Social Democratic Workers Party Congress – the Bolshevik Congress – unanimously passed a resolution in favour of a new slogan. It was a compromise between the impatient ‘Leninists’, who saw the revolution entering a new post-Soviet phase, and the moderates, who still thought that they might be able to work with the socialists to their right to defend the revolution. Nonetheless, the symbolic importance of the shift in phraseology was immense. The lesson shook out, the calls changed. July had done its work. No longer did the Bolsheviks call for ‘All Power to the Soviets’. Instead they aspired to the ‘Complete Liquidation of the Dictatorship of the Counterrevolutionary Bourgeoisie’.

The Soviet relocated as required. The Smolny Institute was built in the early 1800s, a grandiose neoclassical edifice in the Smolny district east of the city centre, by the Neva. A building of cavernous corridors, white floors, watery electric light. On the ground level was a great mess hall, between hallways lined with offices full of secretaries and deputies and fractions of the parties of the Soviet, their military organisations and committees and conclaves. Piles of newspapers, pamphlets, posters covered the tables. Machine guns protruded from windows. Soldiers and workers packed the passages, sleeping on chairs and benches, guarding gatherings, watched by empty gold frames from which imperial portraits had been cut.

Until just before the revolution, the institute had been a facility for the education of daughters of the nobility. An erstwhile guarantor of state power, the Soviet was demoted to squatting a finishing school. When the full Soviet met, it did so in what had been the ballroom.

On the 3rd, Kornilov came to meet Kerensky, and again made several demands of the man who was technically his boss. These included, in a hardening of his previous attitude, the strict curtailing of the soldiers’ committees. Though they broadly accepted its substance, Kerensky, Savinkov and Filonenko would together rework the document Kornilov presented, so as to disguise its inflammatory contempt. The general’s disgust at the government only increased when, as he prepared to brief the cabinet on the military situation, Kerensky quietly advised him not to be too specific with details. Some of the cabinet’s Soviet members, he insinuated, particularly Chernov, might be security risks.

During their meeting, Kerensky asked Kornilov a curious question.

‘Suppose I should withdraw,’ he said, ‘what will happen? You will hang in the air; the railways will stop; the telegraph will cease to function.’

Kornilov’s reserved response – that Kerensky should remain in position – was less interesting than the question itself. The point behind its melancholy is opaque. Was Kerensky seeking reassurance that Kornilov would support him? Was he, perhaps, tentatively sounding out the possibility of a Kornilov dictatorship?

We are all legion, and Kerensky was more legion than most. His plaintive query may have expressed both horror at and hope in the idea of giving up, of surrendering to the tough-talking commander-in-chief. A political death drive.

Hatred for the war still waxed. From around the country came scores of reports of soldiers resisting transfer.

A propaganda battle intensified around Kornilov, reflecting the growing split between the hard right in the country, to which the Kadets were gravitating, and the dwindling power of the moderate socialists. On 4 August, Izvestia hinted at plans to replace Kornilov with General Cheremisov, a relative moderate who believed in working with soldiers’ committees. To which, on the 6th, the Council of the Union of Cossack Troops responded that Kornilov was ‘the sole general who can recreate the power of the army and bring the country out of its very difficult situation’. They in turn hinted at rebellion if Kornilov was removed.

The Union of Cavaliers of St George gave Kornilov their support. Prominent Moscow conservatives under Rodzianko sent him gushing telegrams, intoning that ‘in this threatening hour of heavy trial all thinking Russia looks to you with hope and faith’. It was a civil war of words.

Kornilov demanded from Kerensky command of the Petrograd Military District. To the delight of a coup-hungry right, he ordered his chief of staff, Lukomsky, to concentrate troops near Petrograd – this would permit their speedy deployment to the capital.

The background to this manoeuvering was not only the catastrophic and worsening economic and social situation, but a conscious and deliberate ratcheting of tensions by sections of the punitive right. At a gathering of 300 industrial and financial magnates in early August, the opening speaker was Pavel Ryabushinsky, a powerful textile businessman. ‘The Provisional Government possesses only the shadow of power,’ he said. ‘Actually a gang of political charlatans are in control… The government is concentrating on taxes, imposing them primarily and cruelly upon the merchant and industrial class… Would it not be better in the name of the salvation of the fatherland to appoint a guardian over the spendthrifts?’

Then came a sadism so startling it stunned the left. ‘The bony hand of hunger and national destitution will seize by the throat the friends of the people.’

Those ‘friends of the people’ he dreamed into the grasp of predatory skeletal fingers were socialists.

It was not only from the right, however, that pressure piled on. Also on the 6th, in Kronstadt, 15,000 workers, soldiers and sailors protested at the arrest of the Bolshevik leaders, of Steklov and Kamenev and Kollontai and the rest. In Helsingfors, a similarly large gathering resolved for a transfer of power to the soviets. Of course that demand was now outdated as far as many Bolsheviks were concerned, but it represented a leftward shift for most workers. Pushed by the Bolsheviks and the militant Left SRs, the next day, the workers’ section of the Petrograd Soviet criticised the arrest of leftist leaders, as well as the return of the military death penalty. They won the vote. Mensheviks and SRs began to complain of defections to their left – to their own maximalist sections, or beyond.

Such signs of left recovery were patchy and uneven: on 10 August, in Odessa elections, for example, the Bolsheviks won only three out of over 100 seats. But in Lugansk municipal elections in early August, the Bolsheviks won twenty-nine of seventy-five seats. In elections in Revel (now Tallinn) they took over 30 per cent of the vote, very nearly the same in Tver, a little later, and in Ivanovo-Vosnessensk their tally was double that. Over the territory of the empire, the trend was definite.

Huddled in his hut, on a day of heavy rain, Lenin was startled by the sound of cursing. A Cossack was approaching through the wet undergrowth.

The man begged shelter from the downpour. Lenin had little choice but to stand aside and let him in. As they sat together listening to the drumbeat of water, Lenin asked his visitor what brought him to this out-of-the-way spot.

A manhunt, the Cossack said. He was after someone by the name of Lenin. To bring him back dead or alive.

And what, Lenin asked cautiously, had this reprobate done?

The Cossack waved his hand, vague about the details. What he did know, he stressed, was that the fugitive was in some way ‘muddled’; that he was dangerous; and that he was nearby.

When the skies lightened at last, the visitor thanked his temporary host and set out through the sodden grass to continue the search.

After that alarming incident, Lenin and the CC, with which he remained in secret communication, agreed that he should move to Finland.

On 8 August, Zinoviev and Lenin abandoned their hut in the company of Yemelyanov; Alexander Shotman, a Finnish ‘Old Bolshevik’; and the flamboyant, extravagantly moustached activist Eino Rahja. The men set out through the lakeside swamp for a local station, on a long, wet, arduous trek punctuated by wrong turnings and ill feeling, hauling themselves out at last by the railway at the village of Dibuny. Their troubles were not over: there on the platform, a suspicious military cadet challenged and arrested Yemelyanov. But Shotman, Rahja, Zinoviev and Lenin swiftly made it onto an arriving train headed to Udelnaya, in Petrograd’s outskirts.

From there, Zinoviev continued into the capital. Lenin’s travels were not yet done.

The next day, train 293 for Finland arrived at Udelnaya Station. The driver was Guro Jalava, railwayman, conspirator, committed Marxist.

‘I came to the edge of the platform,’ he later recalled, ‘whereat a man strode from among the trees and hoisted himself up into the cab. It was, of course, Lenin, although I hardly recognised him. He was to be my stoker.’

The photograph in the fake passport with which Lenin – ‘Konstantin Petrovich Ivanov’ – travelled has become famous. With a cap perched high on a curly wig, the contours of his beardless mouth unfamiliar, wryly upturned, his deep small eyes are all that is recognisable.

Lenin rolled up his sleeves. He set to work, so enthusiastically that the train spewed out generous plumes of smoke. His driver recalled how Lenin shovelled with gusto, feeding the engine, making it run fast, bearing him away on the ties and rails.

When he alighted at last, Lenin the stoker still had a circuitous clandestine journey ahead of him. It was not until 11 p.m. on 10 August that Lenin arrived at a small, homely apartment at 1 Hakaniemi Square, in the north of Helsingfors. This was the Rovio residence. With his wife away visiting family, Kustaa Rovio, an activist for the Social Democrats, had agreed to shelter the Russian Marxist.

A large, imposing man, Rovio’s career had taken a staggeringly unlikely turn. A socialist of long standing, he was also now the head of the Helsingfors Police.

Quite how he came to square this role with his revolutionary commitment is unclear. Of the guest who had, a few years previously, advocated stockpiling ‘bombs and stones, etc., or acids’ to drop on his colleagues, police chief Rovio said: ‘I have never met such a congenial and charming comrade.’

Lenin’s sole demands – and on these he was adamant – were that Rovio should procure him the Russian newspapers every day, and arrange the secret delivery of letters back to his party comrades. This his host did even when, due to the imminent return of Mrs Rovio, Lenin relocated to the apartment of a socialist couple, the Blomqvists, in nearby Telekatu.

Taking her own hazardous routes, hiking on foot through a forest over the border, Krupskaya more than once visited her husband. Lenin himself strolled Helsingfors with remarkable freedom. ‘It is necessary to be quick, Kerensky,’ he declared with relish at the Blomqvists’ kitchen table, reading of the government’s hunt for him, ‘in order to catch me.’

Above all, throughout August, as he had in July and as he would in September, Lenin wrote. Messages and letters and instructions to comrades, and another, longer work. The very first day he lodged with him, Rovio found Lenin asleep at a desk, his head in his arms, a closely written notebook before him. ‘Consumed with curiosity,’ Rovio reported, ‘I began turning over the pages. It was the manuscript of his book The State and Revolution.’

This is an extraordinary, sinewy negotiation of remorseless anti-statism with the temporary necessity of ‘the bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie’, under the proletariat. The historic text, described by Lucio Colletti as ‘Lenin’s greatest contribution to political theory’, was composed on a log by a mosquito-ridden lake, and then on a policeman’s table. It would not yet be quite finished when circumstances changed, and Lenin made his way back to Russia. The text closes with a legendary truncation: ‘It is more pleasant and useful to go through the experience of the revolution than to write about it.’

The same day that Lenin arrived at the Rovios’ flat, on 10 August, Kornilov went again to meet Kerensky in Petrograd, at Savinkov’s insistence. They were to discuss the general’s new demands: now he wanted control of the railways and war industries. He asked, too, peremptorily, for the right to employ extraordinary repression as he considered necessary, including relocating slacking workers to the front.

Mistrust between prime minister and general was such that Kornilov arrived with a substantial and provocative bodyguard. This was a body of Turkmen fighters from the so-called Savage Division of volunteer soldiers from across the Caucasus – heavily mythicised figures, chosen to intimidate. As Kerensky watched in alarm from the Winter Palace, the red-robed warriors came jogging into view down the wide streets, surrounding Kornilov’s car, brandishing scimitars and machine-guns. They took up positions around the palace door like enemies preparing for a parlay.

The meeting was icy. Kornilov had heard rumours that he might be replaced, and he menacingly advised Kerensky against any such step. When Kerensky would not commit to everything he wanted, Kornilov insisted on meeting with the cabinet to put his case; but Kerensky would only convene an informal group, excluding the Kadets, that agreed in principle to most of Kornilov’s demands but were vague about the time frame, and continued to oppose the militarisation of railways and industries. The general left in a severe temper.

In fact, the desperate Kerensky was not altogether opposed even to those rejected measures, given the context of social collapse. He was, however, understandably fearful of the reaction such moves would provoke in the Soviet and beyond. His strategy of ‘balance’ now had him provoking the fury of those to his left and those to his right.

In a strained effort to reconcile widening social divisions, the Provisional Government scrambled to put together a symbolic, consultative gathering. Almost 2,500 delegates would attend the Moscow State Conference, representing trade unions, Dumas, commerce and the soviets. The event was to take place in the splendid neoclassical edifice of the second city’s Bolshoi Theatre, between 12 and 14 August.

Through their membership of the Soviet and VTsIK, the Bolsheviks qualified for delegates. Initially they planned to make a scornful declaration followed by an ostentatious walkout, but Chkheidze got wind, and refused to permit any such thing. The party decided that they would stay away altogether.

The hard-left Bolshevik Moscow Regional Bureau called a one-day strike as the conference opened. The Moscow Soviet, where the mainstream SRs and Mensheviks had a small majority, opposed the move, if narrowly, but after debates and battles in the city’s factories, in a sign of Bolshevik strength, most of the workers stayed out. Delegates descended to streets where streetcars did not run and restaurants were closed. The buffet of the theatre itself was shut: the strike forced the attendees of this showcase of national and cross-class unity to prepare their own food. And to do so in the dark: the gaslights were unlit.

It must be allowed, the Moscow Soviet’s Izvestia wrote, ‘that the Bolsheviks are not irresponsible groups but one of the elements of the organised revolutionary democracy behind whom stand the broad masses’.

Such grudging acknowledgement came amid an unusual degree of Menshevik–SR–Bolshevik cooperation. Not revolutionary collaboration, exactly: it might rather be described as grudging counter-counterrevolutionary collaboration. The moderate socialists were canny enough to understand that, whatever their arguments with those to their left, were the restless reactionaries to triumph in the country the Bolsheviks might be first in the firing line – and that might not even be a metaphor – but they themselves would not be spared.

The fact was that rumours about the intentions of Kornilov and the right had grown so deeply alarming that the Moscow Soviet felt obliged to form a Provisional Revolutionary Committee to defend the government and the Soviet, mobilising the vigilant grassroots. And to it, alongside two Mensheviks and two SRs, it appointed the prominent Bolsheviks Nogin and Muralov. In an astonishing acknowledgement of the limits of its persuasive power compared to theirs, it even gave the party – even so recently after the July Days – temporary access to the Moscow garrison barracks, to argue for this defence.

This was the context of political fear in which the conference set out to smooth tensions between right and left. In this it was not merely unsuccessful: it was grotesquely counterproductive.

The Moscow State Conference opened to a house literally, visibly divided. On the right of the hall, slightly numerically preponderant, were the elite – industrialists, Kadets, business people, career politicians, high-ranking soldiers. On the left were the moderate socialist intelligentsia, Menshevik lawyers and journalists, trade union organisers, lower-ranking officers and privates. And there, sitting with owlish precision exactly in the middle, was Kerensky.

‘Let everyone who has already tried to use force of arms against the power of the people know that such attempts will be crushed with blood and iron,’ he declaimed, and at that broadside against the Bolsheviks, for the first and last time, the whole hall applauded. ‘Let those who think the time is ripe to overthrow the revolutionary government with bayonets’, he continued, ‘be even more careful.’ At this warning to Kornilov, it was only the left who clapped.

For two hours, Kerensky rambled tremulously, hammy and overwrought, transporting himself. ‘He appeared to want to scare somebody and to create an impression of force and power,’ Milyukov reported in contempt. ‘He only engendered pity.’

A naive observer hopeful for social peace might see moments to strike optimism, as when Tsereteli made a point of reaching out to shake hands with the prominent industrialist Bublikov. But they were few and unconvincing. When the Kadet Maklakov demanded that the government ‘take the daring steps necessary… [because] the judgement day is approaching’, the right cheered and the left sat mute. When Chkheidze read out VTsIK’s platform, the left applauded and the right scowled. One side clapped, the other sat like stone. The other cheered, the one booed.

On the 12th, Kornilov arrived in Moscow, flanked again by his Turkmen guards. He was met at the station by a throng of military cadets, a band, and representatives from one of the Womens’ Battalions of Death. These all-female volunteer army units had been set up at Kerensky’s request under the remarkable young Novgorod soldier Maria Bochkareva, who had at the start of the war inveigled royal permission to join the army, and distinguished herself in bloody combat. Kornilov passed through the military escort into a shower of petals scattered by an ecstatic upper-class crowd.

In his welcome speech, the Kadet Rodichev entreated him: ‘Save Russia, and a thankful people will crown you.’ With heavy-handed symbolism, Kornilov’s first stop was at the Iversky shrine, where the tsars had traditionally worshipped. Among the visitors he received that day, more than one debated with him the question of an armed overthrow of the government: the right-wing business group the Society for the Economic Rehabilitation of Russia, for example, represented by Putilov and Vishnegradsky, went so far as to offer funds specifically for an authoritarian regime.

The next day, the 13th, Kornilov came to the Bolshoi to speak.

As he prepared to mount the rostrum of the packed hall of the Moscow conference, Kerensky stopped him. He pleaded with the general to confine his remarks to military matters.

‘I will give my speech’, Kornilov responded, ‘in my own way.’

Kornilov ascended. The right rose in ovation. ‘Shouts ring out,’ states the record. ‘ “Cads!” “Get up!” ’ No one on the left benches obeyed.

To Kerensky’s intense relief, Kornilov, never a confident speaker, gave a speech both inexpert and surprisingly mild. The continuing roars of rightist approval were for him qua figurehead, rather than for anything in particular that he said.

After Kornilov, speaker after speaker excoriated the revolution that had wracked Russia, and hankered loudly for the restoration of order. General Kaledin, the elected leader – ataman – of the Cossacks of the Don region, announced to the delight of the right that ‘all soviets and committees must be abolished’. A young Cossack officer, Nagaev, quickly insisted that working Cossacks disagreed with Kaledin, eliciting corresponding ecstasy on the left.

As he spoke, someone on the right interrupted with shouts of ‘German marks!’ The accusation of treachery provoked bedlam. When the heckler would not identify himself, Kerensky finally declared that ‘Lieutenant Nagaev and all the Russian people… are quite satisfied with the silence of a coward.’ It was a rare moment of good theatre left in the man once considered Russia’s hope.

Kerensky’s concluding speech, by contrast, was an almost incomprehensible, pitiful mix of longueurs and schmaltz. ‘Let my heart turn to stone, let all the chords of my faith in men fade away, let all the flowers of my dreams for man wither and die,’ he wailed. ‘I will cast away the keys to this heart that loves the people and I will think only of the state.’

From the audience, a few sentimentalists obligingly responded in kind – ‘You cannot! Your heart will not permit it!’ – but for the most part the spectacle was merely excruciating. Even one of Kerensky’s diminishing number of loyal supporters, Stepun, uneasily admitted that ‘one could hear not only the agony of his power, but also of his personality’.

Thus the slow death of the Provisional Government continued.

Troops radicalised or gave up hope or both in the grinding war. They wrote bitter, raging letters now to the country’s leaders. One soldier, Kuchlavok, and his regiment sent Izvestia a long, near-glossolalic sermon of despair that their revolution had been in vain, a deflected apocalypse, catastrophe without renewal.

The mass desertions, politicised and other, did not end – and were even announced in advance. With angry courteousness, a group of anonymous soldiers ‘from various regiments’ wrote to Kerensky with due notice: ‘we are going to stay in the trenches at the front and repel the enemy, and maybe even attack, but only until the first days of baneful autumn’. If the war continued beyond that point, they warned, they would simply walk away.

Another group of soldiers sent the Soviet Executive Committee an extraordinary ingenuous query: ‘All of us… ask you as our comrades to explain to us who these Bolsheviks are… Our provisional government has come out very much against the Bolsheviks. But we… don’t find any fault with them.’ They had previously been opposed to the Bolsheviks, they explained, but were now gradually going over to them. But to make sure they understood this choice exactly, they asked the Soviet to send clearer explanations.

Yet more reports came in of peasants seizing land, with greater and uncompromising violence. In some regions they abjured and despised the zemstvos, the local organisations of the Provisional Government. ‘Call our future governance what you will but don’t use the word zemstvo’ was the quote in one newspaper from the depressing travels of local government activists in south-eastern Russia. ‘We have grown disgusted by this word.’ In Kursk, during a trial for land confiscation, the peasants drove away the plaintiff – and the court. ‘Anarchy reigns supreme,’ read an official report on one village from the Tambovsk district. ‘The peasants are storming the gardens and looting.’

Across many regions the push for independence was intensifying. Prices of essentials soared. Petrograd’s food situation went abruptly from grave to desperate.

What centre remained could not hold. The Mensheviks held what they called a ‘Unity Congress’ in Petrograd: its name was a bad joke. Martov’s internationalists had a third of the delegates, but the remaining two-thirds, following the leadership, had moved even further in favour of collaboration – what Tsereteli called ‘cooperation with the living forces of the country’. The chasm was wider than ever, and the right maintained its formal authority.

Mid-August, and a wave of mysterious explosions rocked munitions factories in Petrograd and Kazan. It was seemingly the work of pro-German saboteurs.

In Latvia, Riga tottered as the Germans approached. The city’s chances of withstanding a serious German assault were nil: at the conference, Kornilov warned that without more effort to hold the Gulf of Riga, it would be lost, and the way to Petrograd open to the Germans. Even as he spoke, the Germans were preparing.

Would Petrograd follow Riga? came the whispers.

Indeed, would the government even fight for Petrograd?

Of eleven wealthy Muscovites he met one evening for dinner, ten told the great American journalist John Reed that if it came to it, they would rather have Wilhelm than the Bolsheviks. In the journal Utro Rossii, Rodzianko wrote with astonishing candour: ‘I say to myself, “Let God take care of Petrograd.” They fear that if Petrograd is lost the central revolutionary organisations will be destroyed… I rejoice if all these organisations are destroyed; for they will bring nothing but disaster upon Russia.’

‘I want to take a middle road,’ Kerensky despaired, ‘but no one will help me.’

All rumours of incipient coups notwithstanding, after the Moscow conference, Kerensky was willing to accept the crushing curbs on political rights that Kornilov demanded, hoping they might stem the tide of anarchy. He did not relish the final break with the Soviet that this would inevitably mean, but he was a man who felt he had no choice.

Kornilov pressed his advantage. On 19 August, he telegraphed Kerensky to ‘insistently assert the necessity’ of giving him command of the Petrograd Military District, the city and areas surrounding. At this, though, Kerensky still drew the line.

On the banks of the river Mazā Jugla in Latvia, the legendary Latvian riflemen went into action, in what would come to be known as the Battle of Jugla. They strove with doomed courage to keep Riga from German hands. The next day, the First Don Cossacks and the Savage Divisions moved to Pskov and its environs, threateningly close to a polarising Petrograd.

In the Petrograd city Duma elections on the 20th, the Kadets received 114,000 votes, the Mensheviks a derisory 24,000. The SRs won, with 205,000 votes – but the Bolsheviks were, shockingly, within spitting distance, with 184,000.

‘In comparison with the May elections’, wrote Sukhanov, the SRs’ total did not represent a victory ‘but a substantial setback.’ By contrast, he, no supporter of Lenin’s party, was clear that ‘the sole real victor… was the Bolsheviks, so recently trampled into the mud, accused of treason and venality, utterly routed… Why, one would have thought them annihilated for ever… Then where had they sprung up from again? What sort of strange, diabolical enchantment was this?’

The day after this strange, diabolical enchantment, after hours of German bombardment shook the fairy-tale facades of the Latvian capital, the Russian armies fled. Columns of Germans marched into the city. German submarines took the gulf and shelled the shoreline villages, blasting them from the cold sea.

Riga had fallen.

Watching from his Finnish exile, Lenin was incandescently furious with what he considered the collaborationism of Moscow Bolsheviks. Their sin? To participate in the Soviet’s Provisional Revolutionary Committee alongside the Mensheviks and SRs.

Lenin was scornful of the counterrevolutionary scare with which the committee had justified itself. On 18 August he wrote ‘Rumours of a Conspiracy’, in which he implied that such fears were contrived by the moderates, as part of a campaign to fool the masses into supporting them. ‘Not a single honest Bolshevik who had not taken leave of his senses completely would agree to any bloc’ with the SRs or Mensheviks, he wrote, ‘even in the event that a counter-revolutionary attack appeared genuine.’ Which in any case this supposed one, he implied, was not.

Lenin was wrong.

If anything, the sheer confusion of the moment, scattered and unclear evidence suggests, was in part due to a failure of joined-up counterrevolution – there was more than one conspiracy simmering away on the right.

Various shadowy groups – the Union of Officers, the Republican Centre and Military League – were meeting to discuss plans for martial law. They decided that rallies slated by the Soviet for the 27th, to celebrate six months since February, could be used to justify imposing a regime at the barrels of Kornilovite guns. And if those rallies did not oblige with disorder, the conspirators would use agents provocateurs to ensure it was provided.

On 22 August, the army chief of staff summoned various officers to Mogilev, ostensibly for training. But on arrival they were briefed on the schemes, before being sent on to Petrograd. Exactly how apprised of these specifics Kornilov himself was is unclear: that he was preparing to move on his enemies on the left – and in the government – is not.

And it was not only the hard right considering martial law under Kornilov. In anguish, lugubriously, incoherently, bizarrely, grasping at a possible way out, so was Kerensky himself.

On 23 August, Savinkov, for Kerensky, went to the Stavka to see Kornilov. The meeting opened in an unpromising atmosphere of very bad blood.

Savinkov presented Kornilov with three requests. He asked for his support in the dismantling of the Union of Officers and the political department of the Stavka, both rumoured to be heavily implicated in coup-mongering; for the exemption of Petrograd itself from Kornilov’s direct control; and then, amazingly, for a cavalry corps for Petrograd.

At this last, the startled Kornilov grew markedly more cordial. These mounted soldiers were intended, Savinkov confirmed, for ‘the actual inauguration of martial law in Petrograd and for the defence of the provisional government against any attempt whatever’. As General Alexeev would later attest, ‘the participation of Kerensky [in planning martial law] is beyond question… The advance of the Third Cavalry Corps’s division on Petrograd was made upon Kerensky’s instructions… transmitted by Savinkov’.

Kerensky, it seemed, was offering to sanction the very counter-revolutionary operation that Kornilov was planning.

In so far as it can be reconstructed from the dense murk of the moment, it appears that, agitated at the possibility of Bolshevik uprising, Kerensky was split between opposition to martial law, and a belief in its necessity. Even in the necessity of a collective or individual dictatorship.

And for his part, Kornilov, too, was flexible: perfectly willing to overthrow Kerensky, he was also ready to accommodate him, under certain conditions. Now, reassured by Savinkov that the government had come round to his way of thinking, he was much more relaxed about accepting Kerensky’s other proposals, as well as his opposition, ‘for political reasons’, to putting the hard-right General Krimov at the head of the cavalry corps. Thus Savinkov was reassured that Kornilov was not angling against Kerensky – to whom, when Savinkov probed, the general even, if not very vociferously, pledged loyalty.

It seemed as if compromise could be reached, an acceptable martial law thrashed out. But, unknown to Savinkov and Kornilov, the previous evening Kerensky had received a visitor. And thus had begun reaction’s sinister comedy of skulduggery and errors.

Vladimir Nikolaevich Lvov – not to be confused with the ex-premier – was a dunderheaded Muscovite busybody, an ingenuous ruling-class Pooter. A liberal deputy in the Third and Fourth Dumas, Lvov was part of a network of Moscow industrialists who held that Russia needed a right-wing authoritarian ‘national cabinet’. So far, so usual. What was less common was that he also retained a certain respect for Kerensky. When, therefore, rumours of Stavka conspiracies reached his ears from a party thereto, he hoped he might be able to forestall a clash between Kerensky and Kornilov.

During his meeting with Kerensky, Lvov expounded various platitudes about the necessity of having more conservatives in government, and offered to sound out key political figures to that end. He allowed, portentously, that he represented ‘certain important groups with significant strength’. Beyond that, later testimonies diverge.

Lvov would claim that Kerensky authorised him to be his proxy; Kerensky, rather more lukewarm, that he ‘did not consider it possible to refrain from further discussions with Lvov, expecting from him a more exact explanation of what was on his mind’. By encouraging Lvov to report back from informal discussions, Kerensky thought he might gain insight into some of the plotting at which his visitor hinted. Hence he encouraged Lvov to sound out these mysterious circles.

It may be that Lvov, never the most perspicacious man, misunderstood Kerensky’s encouragement; or that, puffed up with his mission, he convinced himself that he was on official business. Either way, as Kerensky got on with failing to shore up a collapsing state, Lvov bustled off to Stavka.

As he did so, the widespread terror of a coup grew, as did plans on the left to oppose it. On 24 August, the Petrograd Interdistrict Conference of Soviets (an organ led by the left Menshevik Gorin, strongly influenced by Bolsheviks) demanded the government declare Russia a democratic republic, and announced the formation of a ‘Committee of Public Safety’, mobilising armed squads of workers and the unemployed to defend the revolution. Vyborg Bolsheviks, disgruntled at their party’s inadequate response to the threat of counterrevolution, scheduled an emergency meeting of the Petersburg Committee.

This was precisely the kind of thinking that Lenin denounced as scaremongering. And as the activists succumbed to it, Kornilov set an actual counterrevolutionary conspiracy in motion.

Kornilov sent instructions to Krimov to push on to Petrograd in response to a bruited ‘Bolshevik uprising’.

It was as such intrigues swirled that Lvov arrived at Stavka, on the important mission he had invented in his head.

Introducing himself as Kerensky’s emissary, Lvov met with Kornilov and one of his advisors, a tall, stout, greying man named Zavoiko – who was, though Lvov did not know this, an intriguer himself, of a more serious kind. A wealthy hard-right parapolitical hustler, Zavoiko had for months seen in Kornilov a potential dictator, and so made himself the general’s indispensable vizier.

Lvov asked Kornilov for his thoughts on the composition of a new government. Kornilov answered cautiously, but, coming after the request for cavalry, he felt hopeful that Lvov’s question was further evidence that the government was disposed to compromise, and was coming over to his views.

In the wake of that earlier meeting with Savinkov, the right-wingers at Mogilev had begun open discussions about who would take what ministry in their authoritarian government. Now, Kornilov and Zavoiko laid out for Lvov some of that vision – their desiderata. Petrograd must be placed under martial law. No controversy there. The question was, martial law under whom?

Lvov suggested three possibilities: Kerensky could be dictator; there could be a directorate, a dictatorial small cabinet, including Kornilov and, presumably, Kerensky; or Kornilov himself could be dictator.

Judiciously, Kornilov expressed his preference for the third option. After all, it might be simpler if all civil and military authority in the country belonged to the commander-in-chief – ‘whoever’, he modestly added, ‘he might be’.

Kornilov mooted the possibility of positions for Kerensky and Savinkov in this government, and asked Lvov to urge them for their own safety to repair to Mogilev within two days. Lvov remained blithely untroubled throughout the rest of the discussion, suggesting various other figures for a cabinet. But after the meeting had ended and Lvov prepared to board his train back to Petrograd, perhaps misjudging his visitor’s loyalties, perhaps not caring, Zavoiko, with swaggering arrogance, made a shocking, casual pronouncement.

‘Kerensky is needed as a name for the soldiers for ten days or so,’ he said, ‘after which he will be eliminated.’

Lvov sat stunned in his carriage as the train pulled away. He was finally, dimly aware that Kerensky’s aspirations and Kornilov’s might not, shall we say, perfectly overlap.

Kornilov placed the Third Corps – the cavalry requested by Savinkov! – on alert. He had Krimov draft an order for distribution upon his entry to Petrograd, announcing the imposition of martial law, a curfew and the banning of strikes and meetings. Disobedience, the leaflet read, would be harshly met: ‘the troops will not fire into the air’. Yet more soldiers made for Petrograd, in preparation for its forthcoming military occupation and policing.

As previously arranged, Kornilov telegrammed Savinkov, telling him the forces would be in place by the evening of the 28th. ‘I request that Petrograd be proclaimed under martial law on 29 August’: thus, courteously, Kornilov prepared to bring the revolution to an end.

The hard-right press warned of leftist massacres on the 27th. Provocateurs provoked: socialists received multiple reports of ‘strangers in soldiers’ tunics’ trying to whip up insurrection. Kerensky’s intended collaboration with Kornilov did not preclude the continuance of other, chaotic right-wing putschist plans.

The air stank of counterrevolution. On 26 August, the Petrograd Trade Union Soviet and Central Soviet of Factory-Shop Committees jointly endorsed the Interdistrict Conference’s call for a Committee of Public Safety.

This was the cauldron into which Lvov returned. He hastened to the Winter Palace.

Savinkov had just reported to Kerensky on his own cordial meeting with Kornilov when Lvov arrived. Reassured by Savinkov’s account, Kerensky asked Lvov what he had learnt. And then he listened in growing, bewildered horror.

Lvov relayed to Kerensky as demands those preferences Kornilov had expressed from among the options Lvov had put to him – on behalf, Kornilov had believed, of Kerensky himself. Kornilov wanted Kerensky to come to Mogilev, Lvov said, but warned that the invitation was dangerous, as he had heard from Zavoiko’s own mouth. Kerensky, he insisted, must flee.

Kerensky laughed in nervous disbelief.

‘This’, Lvov said, face like flint, ‘is no time for jokes.’

Kerensky struggled to make sense of what he was hearing. He had Lvov put Kornilov’s ‘demands’ in writing. Martial law; all authority including civil to devolve to the commander-in-chief; all ministers, including Kerensky, to resign. What Kornilov had thought was a discussion of possibilities now read as the declaration of a putsch.

Reeling, Kerensky asked Lvov to meet him at the Ministry of War at 8 p.m., to speak directly with Kornilov: he wanted to be absolutely certain of what was afoot. But there was to be a final absurdity. Lvov was late for the appointment. At 8:30, therefore, so agitated he could not wait, Kerensky wired Kornilov and simply pretended that Lvov was with him. And the farce unfolded in clicks and crackles, recording every back-and-forth in the ribbon of text.

Kerensky: ‘Good day, General. V. N. Lvov and Kerensky on the line. We ask you to confirm that Kerensky is to act according to the communication made to him by Vladimir Nikolaevich.’

Kornilov: ‘Good day, Alexander Fedorovich, good day, Vladimir Nikolaevich. To confirm again the outline of the present situation I believe the country and the army are in, which I asked V. N. to convey to you, I declare again that the events of the past few days and those I can see coming make it imperative to reach a definite decision in the shortest possible time.’

Kerensky now impersonated Lvov. ‘I, Vladimir Nikolaevich, ask whether it is necessary to act on that definite decision which you asked me to communicate privately to Alexander Fedorovich. Without your personal confirmation, Alexander Fedorovich hesitates to give me his full confidence.’

Kornilov: ‘Yes, I confirm that I asked you to convey to Alexander Fedorovich my urgent request that he come to Mogilev.’

Kerensky, hollow-chested, had Kornilov verify that Savinkov, too, should come. ‘Believe me,’ Kornilov added, ‘only my recognition of the responsibility of the moment makes me so persistent in my request.’

‘Shall we come only in case of demonstrations, of which there are rumours, or in any case?’ Kerensky asked.

Kornilov: ‘In any case.’

The connection broke, ending the most epochal talking-at-cross-purposes in history.

At his headquarters, Kornilov exhaled mightily in relief. Kerensky, he thought, would now come to Mogilev, and submit to – even join – a government under him.

Kerensky, meanwhile, believed ‘the definite decision’ which Kornilov had just validated was not just that he, Kerensky, should come to him, but that Kornilov would take dictatorial powers. That Kerensky had been given an ultimatum. That he was being dispensed with.

Had Lvov not warned him to run for his life?

When Lvov at last showed up, Kerensky had the startled man arrested.

His own recent plans for martial law had dragged Kerensky so far right he did not know if he could still now turn to the Soviet for support, nor how the Petrograd masses would respond to any of his appeals. At a hasty cabinet meeting, he read out the transcript ‘proving’ Kornilov’s ‘treachery’. He demanded the astonished ministers grant him unlimited authority against the coming danger. The Kadets, deeply imbricated with the Kornilovite milieu, objected, but the majority gave Kerensky a free hand. They resigned as he requested, remaining only in caretaker capacities.

Thus, at 4 a.m. on 27 August, the Second Coalition ended.

Once more, Kerensky telegrammed Kornilov. ‘I order you immediately to turn over your office to General Lukomsky,’ he dictated, and the keys tapped out, ‘who is to take over temporarily the duties of commander-in-chief, until the arrival of the new commander-in-chief. You are instructed to come immediately to Petrograd.’

That done, he retired to his rooms, right next door to where Lvov was being held. Kerensky tried to calm his own nerves by bellowing arias. The sound of his voice went straight through the wall, waking his confused informant and keeping him awake all night.

Sunday 27 August, the day of Soviet celebration, dawned warm and clear and tense. ‘Sinister people are circulating rumours of a rising set for today and allegedly organised by our party,’ warned the Bolsheviks’ Rabochy. ‘The CC implores workers and soldiers not to yield to provocations… and not to take part in any action.’ The party’s fears were still more of threats from within, from provocateurs, than of those from without.

And the conspirators waited for their moment. That morning, and for the next two days, Colonel L. P. Dyusimeter and P. N. Finisov of the Republican Centre, and Colonel V. I. Sidorin, their liaison with the Stavka, bar-hopped around the drinking dens of Petrograd, waiting for news of Krimov, ready to unleash their coup.

A little after 8 a.m. on Sunday, Kornilov received Kerensky’s telegram. At first he was stupefied. Swiftly, he was apoplectic.

General Lukomsky, no less blindsided, refused the position Kerensky had thrust on him. ‘It is too late to halt an operation started with your approval,’ he wired back, the bewilderment in the last three words palpable. ‘For the sake of Russia’s salvation you must go with Kornilov, not against him… Kornilov’s dismissal would bring horrors the likes of which Russia has never seen.’

Kerensky put Savinkov in charge of military preparations for defence against the coup, while Kornilov directed the Third Corps under Krimov to occupy the city. Kerensky sent word urging them to stop, assuring the men that there was no insurrection to ‘overcome’ – the supposed pretext for their arrival. They did not pause.

Garbled rumours of a rift between Kornilov and Kerensky began to spread through Petrograd. Those rumours, of course, also implied a pre-rift agreement.

In the mid-afternoon, Soviet leaders and their parties gathered in emergency session. They were not even certain what it was that they needed to discuss or debate. The situation was tense but incomprehensible.

It was only in the early evening that matters became clearer, when Kerensky released a proclamation. Through Lvov, he announced, Kornilov had demanded civil and military power to inaugurate a counterrevolutionary regime. In the face of this grave threat, the government had mandated Kerensky to take countermeasures. For that reason, the announcement made clear, martial law was now declared.

Kornilov swiftly responded to Kerensky’s statement, insisting – truthfully – that Lvov was not his representative.

‘Our great motherland is dying,’ he stated. ‘Under the pressure of the Bolshevik majority in the Soviets, the Provisional Government acts in complete harmony with… the German General Staff… I want nothing for myself, except the preservation of a Great Russia, and I vow to bring the people by means of victory… to a Constituent Assembly, where they themselves will decide their fate.’

Generals Klembovsky, Baluev, Shcherbatov, Denikin and others all pledged their allegiance to Kornilov. The Union of Officers enthusiastically telegrammed army and naval headquarters around the country, proclaiming the end of the Provisional Government and urging ‘tough and unflinching’ support for Kornilov.

Kerensky ineffectually declared battle; Kornilov declared war.

Instantly a plethora of ad hoc committees sprang up to mobilise citizens against the coup, to procure weapons, coordinate supplies, communications, services. Vikzhel, the Menshevik-controlled All-Russian Executive Committee of Railway Workers, formed a bureau for struggle against Kornilov, working with the Interdistrict Conference. Word was dispatched to Kronstadt. The left gathered its forces. At Smolny, party fractions scrambled.

By sour irony, that very night in the Narva District, the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee met for that session scheduled three days earlier – in response to the Vyborg Bolsheviks’ concern at the party’s inadequate attention to the counterrevolutionary threat. The leadership had almost certainly been intending to pooh-pooh such anxieties: now as the thirty-six party officials met, Kornilov’s troops descended on Petrograd. Rarely can doom-mongers have felt so vindicated.

And the Vyborg rank and file were angry not only with the leadership’s tardiness in assessing the baleful situation, but also with the ambiguous tactical resolutions of the recent Sixth Congress. One, ‘On the Political Situation’, encouraged cooperating with all forces combatting counterrevolution – while ‘On Unification’ declared the Mensheviks to be permanent deserters from the proletarian camp, which would preclude cooperation with them. How, then, to proceed?

The meeting was fractious. Andrei Bubnov, a career militant recently arrived from Moscow to join the CC, warned his comrades to trust neither Mensheviks nor SRs. During the Moscow State Conference, he told them, ‘First the government turned to us for help and then we were spat upon.’ He was against collaboration in any self-defence organisations, insisting that the Bolsheviks work alone, to steer the masses against Kornilov and Kerensky both. Against him, Kalinin, from what was still, contra Lenin, the leadership’s mainstream, insisted that if Kornilov really were on the verge of overthrowing Kerensky, it would be absurd not to take the position that the Bolsheviks would have to intervene on Kerensky’s side.

Hostility exploded. Radical speakers slammed party authorities for lack of leadership, for ‘defencism’, for acting as a ‘coolant’ on the masses, for operating ‘in a fog’ during the July Days, and since. The meeting degenerated into a welter of grievances, resentments and generalised attacks. Rage distracted from the urgency of the moment, until at last someone shouted: ‘Let’s get down to concrete defence measures!’

Everyone was clear that it was crucial to mobilise as widely as possible against Kornilov. The Bolsheviks established a communications network, drafted leaflets calling workers and soldiers to arms. Members were allocated to coordinate with mass organisations. And everyone, including Bubnov, agreed that the party must maintain contact with the Soviet leadership’s defence organ – ‘for purposes’, it was vaguely glossed, ‘of information’.

For Bubnov, then, ‘informational’ exchange with the Soviet was indispensable, even while ‘there must be no interaction with the Soviet majority’. This was not a ‘dialectical synthesis’ so much as a holding fudge demanded by the scale of the crisis. Kerensky and Kornilov were equally bad, but at that moment, Kornilov was more equally bad.

At 11:30 p.m., the Soviet Executive Committee met to discuss their relations with government, given the emerging scandal of Kerensky and Kornilov’s recent alliance and its collapse, and given that Kerensky was now calling for a Directory, a small cabinet with authoritarian powers. More urgently, they debated how to preserve the revolution.

For the moderates, Kerensky, even now, and however critically, had to be defended.

‘The only person who can form a government at this time is Comrade Kerensky,’ said the Menshevik Vainshtein. If Kerensky and the government were to fall, ‘the revolutionary cause will be lost’.

The Bolsheviks took the hardest line: that the Provisional Government in toto could not be trusted. They wanted the instigation of democracy in the army, the transfer of land to peasants, the eight-hour day, democratic control of industry and finance, and the devolution of power to revolutionary workers, peasants and soldiers. However. Having made their points, the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Executive Committee, more conciliatory than Lenin or their Vyborg comrades, did not tie up proceedings with a resolution. They kept their oppositionism trenchant but abstract.

Astonishingly, they even abstained on a resolution that, while opposing the Directory he wanted, granted Kerensky power not only to maintain the existing form of government but also to fill cabinet vacancies with carefully chosen Kadets. More astonishingly still, they voted with Mensheviks and SRs to convene (yet) another ‘state conference’ – though this time made up exclusively of ‘democratic elements’, the left – to discuss the government question, and act as overseer until the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.

But when its representatives told Kerensky of this Soviet decision, he remained adamant that he must create a six-man Directory. It was deadlock, and the Soviet’s move.

‘All directories spawn counterrevolution,’ protested Martov in the Soviet, to vigorous agreement. Lunacharsky, too, was magnificent in opposition. He branded both Kornilov and the Provisional Government counterrevolutionary, and demanded the transfer of power to a government of workers, peasants and soldiers – which here meant the soviets. Thus Lunacharsky abruptly reintroduced the content, if not quite the form, of the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’. The very slogan Lenin had decreed obsolete.

But the night brought to the exhausted delegates word that general after general was declaring for Kornilov. Pressed on the government question by what felt increasingly like necessity, the meeting moved slowly rightward.

At last the Executive Committee adopted a resolution from Tsereteli supporting Kerensky, and leaving to him government’s form. This was to rubber-stamp his Directory.

The Bolsheviks in the chamber vehemently contested the resolution. But even so, in dramatic evidence of their moderation, by their party standards, they agreed that if that government were seriously committed to fighting the counterrevolution, they would agree to ‘form a military alliance with it’.

The enemy approached. The Soviet issued emergency orders to provincial soviets, to railway workers and soldiers to the effect that the Stavka must be defied, counterrevolutionary communications disrupted. They called for the Soviet’s orders – and the government’s – to be immediately obeyed.

The collaboration of that night was not all from the Bolsheviks present with those on their right: it flowed the other way, too. When Weinstein, a right Menshevik, proposed a dedicated group to organise military defence, everyone there agreed the Bolsheviks must be integral to it.

On 28 August, Prince Trubetskoy of the foreign ministry telegrammed Tereshchenko from Mogilev. ‘The entire commanding personnel, the overwhelming majority of the officers and the best fighting units… will follow Kornilov,’ he predicted. ‘The entire Cossack host, the majority of the military schools, and the best combat units… Added to this… is the superiority of the military organisation over the weakness of the government organs.’

In Petrograd, mobilisation against the counterrevolutionaries accelerated, but the news was unremittingly bleak. Kornilov’s troops had reached Luga, the city heard, and the revolutionary garrison had surrendered. Nine troop trains had hauled passed Orodezh. Reaction was on its way.

The response from the Soviet and many on the left, Bolsheviks not excluded, was panicked. But, in large numbers, Petrograd’s workers and soldiers reacted differently. Trubetskoy’s glum claim, that ‘the majority of the popular and urban masses have grown indifferent to the existing order and will submit to any cracking of the whip’, was startlingly wrong.

Soldiers mobilised in their thousands against the coming coup. In factories, alarms and whistles blared to summon the workers together. They took stock, reinforced security, organised themselves into fighting detachments.

Some organisations had foreseen the danger. The Petrograd Interdistrict Committee of Soviets, for example, had been warning of such a threat for some time, and it was primed to take prompt action. Vikzhel directed that ‘suspicious telegrams’ be held up and suspect troop movement tracked. By the afternoon of the 28th, the group suggested by Weinstein, the Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution, was operational.

As agreed, the committee comprised representatives of Mensheviks, SRs, Bolsheviks and other democratic organisations. In Sukhanov’s words,

The committee liaised with the self-organised, makeshift defence groups that were springing up. One crucial task – and for the Bolsheviks, a condition of participation – was the arming of workers’ militias. A transformation of 40,000 people practically overnight. Toolers, metalworkers, people of all trades becoming an army. The chambers of industrial plants resonated with the sound of inexpert marching, the music of a new militia.

‘The factory looked like a camp,’ Rakilov, one of these Red Guards, as they were with increasing frequency known, would remember. ‘When you came in, you could see the fitters at the bench, but they had their packs hanging by them, and their guns were leaning against the bench.’

Forty thousand people swiftly organised into these new roles. They took time to pose for photographs with their units. They steadied their weapons for the cameras with variable skill, their faces set, fretful, excited, determined. Guard after proud guard rigged out not just in work clothes or makeshift militaria but in their very best, as if for church, a wedding, a funeral. They were dressed up for an occasion in those stiff suits, their ties straight and tight, bowlers or homburgs on their heads, kneeling with rifles at the ready. The occasion was self-defence.

The Bolsheviks negotiated their tactical contradictions. They collaborated with moderates, but in such a way that these armed workers were at the vanguard of the defence.

In Petrograd itself, most military school cadets backed Kornilov, but that by no means meant all were willing to fight for him, while the Cossacks remained neutral, refusing to fight for either side. All other units in the city sent detachments to construct defences at its vulnerable points.

In the strained military atmosphere, it was dangerous to show open support for Kornilov. In the streets of the Vyborg district, enraged soldiers murdered several officers who refused to acknowledge the authority of a revolutionary commissar. In Helsingfors, the crew of the battleship Petropavlovsk voted to execute officers who would not pledge their allegiance to ‘democratic organisations’.

The Schlusselburg gunpowder works sent a bargeload of grenades to the capital, for distribution by factory committees. Estonian and Finnish soviets sent word of their solidarity. Throughout Petrograd, soviet posters urged discipline, excoriating the scourge of drunkenness. The city Duma formed a commission to aid with food supplies. And most importantly, it selected deputies to go to Luga, for the purpose of agitating among Kornilov’s troops.

In the south of Petrograd, armed workers erected barricades. They strung barbed wire across the roads, dug trenches in the city’s approaches. The suburbs became military camps.

Initiative was beginning to slip from the right. They could feel it. They pushed back.

In the afternoon of the 28th, Milyukov offered himself as a go-between, in the hopes that he might persuade Kerensky to stand down. The high-ranking Kadet Kishkin pressured Kerensky to resign in favour of Alexeev – who supported Kornilov. A majority of Kerensky’s (acting) ministers were quickly in favour of this proposal, and even foreign representatives were advising him to consider ‘negotiation’.

The Soviet, however, categorically opposed any such move. In view of the sheer scale of revolutionary defence to which the Soviet had swiftly made itself key, and uneasily aware of the likely resistance of workers and soldiers if he went against this opposition, Kerensky had to reject the pressure to negotiate.

On the 28th, Dyusimeter and Finisov quietly set out for Luga. They left Sidorin behind them, with funds from Putilov and the Society for the Economic Rehabilitation of Russia to finance a coup when they sent word. His job would be to concoct a ‘Bolshevik riot’, to justify military repression.

But setbacks for the right began to come faster. That evening, the Ussuriysky Mounted Division was blocked on its approach to the city: it reached Yamburg only to discover that the Vikzhel had got its message through: railway workers had ruined the tracks. They were blocked, wrenched up and bent out of line, splayed. Elements of the Savage Division did get as far as Vyritsa, only thirty-seven miles from the capital. But there that train, too, met torn-up rails. The tracks of the revolution jutted like broken bone.

Kornilov’s troops were cut off – but they were not alone.

Here to meet them where they found themselves stranded were scores of emissaries. They came from the Committee for Struggle, from district soviets, from factories, garrisons, Tsentroflot, from the Naval Committee, the Second Baltic Fleet Crew. And locals had come, too. All stamping across the scrub and through the trees towards that wheezing train. They came with agitation in mind. They came to beg the Savage Division to resist being used by counterrevolution.

By revolutionary fortune, the Executive Committee of the Union of Muslim Soviets was visiting Petrograd when the crisis began. It sent its own delegation to meet the engine – one of whom was a grandson of Imam Shamil. Shamil was a legendary nineteenth-century liberation hero of the Caucasus – including to the men of the Savage Division. Now a man of that celebrated blood was imploring them to stand with the revolution they had been sent to bury.

The soldiers of the Savage Division were, in fact, unaware of the purpose of their transfer. They were not predisposed to support Kornilov, and the more they heard from those pleading with them, the less they were minded to. They listened and argued and considered what they were told as darkness came, and on into the night. Their train and its surrounds became a debating chamber, a gathering of urgent discussions. Their officers despaired.

In Petrograd, alarmed by reports that officers of certain units were aiding Kornilov with their own ca’cannies, sluggish obedience and inadequate resolve, the Committee for Struggle sent commissars to oversee the mobilisation. The city hummed with Red Guards. Three thousand armed sailors arrived from Kronstadt to lend assistance. The Central Soviet of Factory-Shop Committees coordinated preparations. The Union of Metalworkers – by far the most powerful union in Russia – put its money and expertise at the Committee for Struggle’s disposal.

Kerensky’s appointees to the effort, Savinkov and Filonenko, strove to keep watch on the Bolsheviks at least as assiduously as to forestall Kornilov. The notion that these two were in charge of Petrogad’s defences was an obvious fiction. At best, they were onlookers to Soviet and grassroots work.

The Bolsheviks were indispensable to the measures. So much so that when several of their members escaped from detention in the Second District Militia headquarters, the Committee for Struggle agreed, extraordinarily, that ‘in order to participate in the common struggle’ they should remain free.

Concretely, the party’s approach was to push for the maximum possible bottom-up mobilisation against Kornilov, without supporting the Provisional Government. The journalist Chamberlin describes them as defending the government with ‘tongue in cheek’.

And, amid the self-organisation and mass meetings, a familiar demand returned. ‘In view of the emerging bourgeois counter-revolutionary movement,’ insisted a group of pipe factory workers, ‘all power must be transferred to the soviet of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies.’ On the 29th, thousands of Putilov workers announced for rule by ‘representatives of the revolutionary classes’. Workers at the Novo-Admiralteysky shipbuilding plant demanded power ‘be put into the hands of the workers, soldiers and poorer peasantry, and be responsible to the soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants deputies’.

‘All Power to the Soviets’ had definitively returned.

‘No disturbances expected,’ Kerensky wired to Krimov, desperate to keep him away. ‘There is no need for your corps.’

As if, by that point, Kerensky controlled Krimov. But no more did Krimov control his own troops. The Ussuriysky Cossack Mounted Division, still stalled at Yamburg (now known as Kingisepp), was surrounded by crowds from the Narva and Yamburg soviets, military units, mass organisations and local factories, plus a delegation led by Tsereteli. A reading of Kerensky’s proclamation about Kornilov was enough to dampen the Cossacks’ resolve.

Krimov himself, with the First Don Cossacks, was blocked, hemmed in, besieged, by men of the 20,000-strong garrison at Luga. Street orators circled the train endlessly, yelling entreaties through the windows, to the Cossacks’ bewilderment and Krimov’s rage. Kornilov ordered him to push on the last miles to Petrograd, but the Luga garrison would not allow it – and by that time, the Cossacks were not minded to argue. The incensed Krimov could only watch his men shuffle away to various spontaneous mass meetings, their mettle dwindling before his eyes.

Late on the 29th, in Petrograd, the telegram of his co-conspirators Dyusimeter and Finisov at last reached Sidorin. A chilling prod: ‘Act at once according to instructions.’ They were requesting that helpful riot.

But it was too late, as even its supporters on the right had been forced to acknowledge. General Alexeev, seeing that the cause of the coup was hopeless, threatened to commit suicide if the plan to engineer a provocation went ahead.

By 30 August, the Kornilov Revolt had collapsed.

‘Without firing a single shot we were victorious,’ Kerensky wrote, ten years later. The ‘we’ was breathtakingly tendentious.

Lenin received all Russian news after a delay. He was late to the news of the threat, and late to the news that it had been averted. On the 30th, as the CC met in Petrograd, a city now breathing out, he wrote to them in haste.

What Lenin sent was not an explicit mea culpa for claiming that counterrevolution was ‘a carefully thought-out ploy on the part of the Mensheviks and SRs’. Yet the letter perhaps contained an implicit one, in its expression of sheer astonishment at this ‘most unexpected… and downright unbelievably sharp turn in events’. Of course, any such change must entail a shift. ‘Like every sharp turn,’ he wrote, ‘it [the circumstance] calls for a revision and change of tactics.’

In Zurich earlier that year, trying to convert the Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu to revolutionary defeatism, Lenin had coaxed him with what would become a famous phrase. ‘One must always’, he said, ‘try to be as radical as reality itself.’ And what is a radicalism that does not surprise?

Reality, radical, now stunned him.

It has sometimes been insinuated that during the Kornilov Crisis, the Bolsheviks pursued their energetic, effective non-collaborative cooperation with the government under Lenin’s guidance. This is false: by the time his instructions began to arrive, the party had been in the Committee for Struggle for days, and the revolt was largely played out. The course he outlined, however, did amount to a pleasing post factum legitimation.

He did not spell out what he would consider ‘permissible’ cooperation with the Mensheviks and SRs he had so recently denounced as beyond the pale, but he did imply its necessity. And ‘we shall fight Kornilov, of course, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky’, he said, which was, broadly, just how things had been. The very day he wrote, the Moscow Bolshevik Sotsial-demokrat said: ‘The revolutionary proletariat cannot tolerate either the dictatorship of Kornilov or of Kerensky.’

‘We expose his weakness,’ Lenin wrote, by pointing out Kerensky’s vacillation and by making maximalist demands – the transfer of estates to peasants, workers’ control, the arming of workers. That last, of course, had already been met. The approving scribble Lenin appended to his letter before sending it was understandable: ‘Having read six issues of Rabochy after this was written, I must say our views fully coincide.’

On the 30th, Kornilov’s crack Savage Division raised a red flag. The Ussuriysky Cossacks pledged loyalty to the Provisional Government. General Denikin was incarcerated by his own troops. Commanders from other fronts began to announce for the government, against the rightist conspiracy. At Luga, where Krimov received spurious alerts from Finisov and Dyusimeter that ‘Bolshevik disorders’ would break out any moment, the Don Cossacks had become so radicalised that they muttered about arresting him.

That afternoon, an envoy from the government arrived. The man promised Krimov safety, and invited him to meet Kerensky in the capital.

In his ineffectual way, Kerensky wanted to clean house. But, even though it had saved Petrograd, the left frightened him almost as much as the right. For example, while he sacked Savinkov for his proximity to various plotters, he replaced him with Palchinsky, whose politics were extremely similar – and one of whose first actions was to close down the Bolshevik Rabochy and Gorky’s Novaya zhizn. As if to underline the point, as chief of staff Kerensky appointed General Alexeev, a man virtually identical in his views to Kornilov.

The ship sinking, rats began to scurry, shocked, shocked! by any suggestion that they might have supported Kornilov. Rodzianko declared grandly that ‘to start internecine warfare and argument now is a crime against the motherland’. All he knew of the conspiracy, he blustered, was what he read in the papers.

In his cell, the preposterous Vladimir Lvov got word that the tide had turned. He sent Kerensky his hearty congratulations, delighting that he had ‘delivered a friend from Kornilov’s clutches’.

That evening, when Krimov arrived, it was to a quiet city.

On the morning of 31 August, Krimov and Kerensky met for a heated discussion in the Winter Palace. Precisely what was said is unknown.

It is likely that Kerensky accused Krimov of mutiny, which Krimov would have unconvincingly denied. Like Kornilov, Krimov was furious at what seemed Kerensky’s duplicity, his inexplicable turnabout. At last too enervated to continue, Krimov agreed to a further interview and repaired to a friend’s apartment.

‘The last card for saving the motherland has been beaten,’ he said to his host. ‘Life is no longer worth living.’

Krimov excused himself to a private room. There he wrote a note to Kornilov, took out his pistol and shot himself in the heart.

The contents of his last letter remain unknown.

Kerensky ordered a commission of inquiry into the attempted coup. But still he tried to ingratiate himself with a right who despised him, limiting the investigation’s remit to individuals, rather than institutions. He proceeded with his plans to set up an authoritarian coalition of right socialists and liberals, strengthening the power of the Kadets.

But on the streets of Petrograd, it was the radical workers and soldiers who had defeated the conspiracy, and they were buoyed with confidence. The failure of the Kornilov Revolt pulled the political lever left again. Soldiers of the Petrograd Garrison proclaimed that ‘any coalition will be fought by all loyal sons of the people as they fought Kornilov’. Now they demanded a government of workers and poor peasants. The Second Machine Gun Regiment insisted that ‘the only way out of the present situation lies in transferring power into the hands of the working people’.

Previously neutral units were beginning to turn, as were workers in plants under the sway of moderates. A plethora of motions – Bolshevik, Left SR, Menshevik-International, unaffiliated – insisted on power to the soviets, left unity, a crackdown on counterrevolution, an exclusively socialist government to end the war. Martov’s comrade Larin reached the limit of exasparation with the pro-coalition Mensheviks, and came over to the Bolsheviks, along with several hundred workers.

Late in the afternoon of the 31st, the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviet debated the government, and its relation to it. Evoking the power and unity the Soviet had shown against Kornilov, its ability to save the city, Kamenev put forward a motion.

In Bolshevik terms, this proposal, like Kamenev himself, was decidedly moderate – but it represented a fundamental leftward break with Soviet practice. A repudiation of compromise. It called for a national government of representatives of the working class and poor peasantry only. The confiscation of manorial land without compensation, and its transfer to the peasants. Workers’ supervision of industry. A universal democratic peace. Albeit Kamenev airily announced that he was not ‘concerned… with the purely technical aspects of forming a government’, his motion was interpreted as a call for all power to the soviets.

At 7:30 p.m. the Executive Committees adjourned without a vote. Shortly after, the Petrograd Soviet itself met in its place. The mass of delegates talked for a long time under the harsh glare of the lamps, as the hands of the clocks reached slowly skyward. They discussed Kamenev’s proposal as August ended and September began, and they continued to discuss it as the world turned towards a new day.

There seemed to be a new, shared will for a government of the left. A pathway to socialist unity. To power.