PISTOLS FOR TWO, COFFEE FOR ONE
IT would be a superficial understanding of the facts in the case, and a futile explanation of the Second Russian Revolution, to picture the next scene in the Finland Station as the triumph of a Jewish conspiracy or as the entry of a mere unprincipled adventurer in the pay of German military opportunists. The garlands, the streamers, and the pennants that gave to the platform a holiday color were not all symbols of Israel — though Jewry was as much in evidence at Lenin’s arrival as it would be, under similar conditions, at Paddington, St. Lazare, or at Forty-Second Street, New York. The military and naval detachments that stood stiffly at salute in the square before the station had not been drafted from Potsdam ; nor can the tens of thousands of enthusiastic citizens who rushed the incoming train be described as German sympathizers. The shabbily dressed exile who stepped blinking into the glare of the searchlights and fumbled awkwardly with a bouquet thrust into his hands owed allegiance neither to Germany nor to a Hidden Council of Elders of Sion. Exponent of a denationalized idea and prophet of a rationalistic religion, he would have alighted at Friedrichstrasse in Berlin or at the Ostbahnhof of Vienna as confidently as now he entered upon the conquest of Russia’s soul. It was a fortune of war and an accident — a very welcome accident to be sure — that made Russia the first laboratory for his social experimentation. Certain difficulties of approach might have had to be overcome elsewhere, language problems might have been more annoying, and psychological barriers based on racial prejudices might have been harder to overcome, but the essential procedure in all cases was identical and the objective clearly laid down, irrespective of the territory in which it was to be achieved.
Participants in that extraordinary greeting, which assumed the proportions of a triumphant procession as it flowed through the streets, noted that Lenin seemed surprised at the sea of faces before him. But during Tcheidze’s address of welcome he had time to decide upon his next and characteristically daring move.
“Comrade Lenin,” said the Representative of the Soviet, “we welcome you to Russia in the name of the Soviet of Workmen and Soldiers’ Deputies and of the whole Revolution. . . . But we think that the main task of the Revolutionary Democracy is the defense of the Revolution against external and internal dangers. . . . We hope you will pursue, together with us, the same aims.”
With his eyes fixed, not on the spokesman of the official delegation, but wandering from the insignia of the Tzar, which decorated the waiting room, to the throng outside, Lenin’s active mind leaped over the heads of the decorous group before him and fixed itself upon the massed workers. He was never to let go. . . . He knew his Russia.
“The piratical, imperialistic war is the beginning of civil war in all Europe,” he replied, and turned his back on Tcheidze. “The dawn of the World Socialist Revolution is breaking. . . . All Germany is boiling. . . . Any day the collapse of the entire European Imperialism may come.”
The same speech was repeated at a dozen street corners on the way to the Soviet headquarters, in the sumptuous palace of Kshesinskaia, the ballet dancer and former favorite of the Tzar.
L’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.
That evening two hundred representative members of the Bolshevist Party sat down in the hall of the palace to hear the first pronouncement of their returned leader. “I will never forget,” writes Sukhanov, the only outsider present, “that thunderlike speech which shook and amazed not only me, an accidental heretic, but all the orthodox Bolsheviki. I assert that no one expected anything like it. It seemed as if the elements had been let loose from their depths and a spirit of all-destruction, knowing no obstacles, doubts, human difficulties, and calculations, was sweeping through the hall of Kshesinskaia’s house over the heads of the spellbound disciples.
“Lenin is generally a very good speaker, not an orator of the finished, round phrase, or the striking figure, or gripping pathos, or clever pun, but an orator of tremendous driving force, dissolving complicated problems into their most simple elements.
“A year and a half afterward, changed from a demagogue and a rebel into a statesman, a defender of statutes, a guardian of his governmental property, Lenin lost his force and individuality as an orator. His speeches were all alike, all harping on the same subject, with trivial variations. But all happened as a result of being in power. In the early days Lenin could shake one thoroughly. But he moved the entire Bolshevist audience then. Not only with his eloquence, but with the unheard-of contents of his speech. Lenin spoke for about two hours. He sharply attacked the Soviet as belonging to the enemy’s camp. This alone was enough to make the most radical hearers dizzy.”
If a direct challenge to the Provisional Government, this opening manifesto was no less astounding to the conservative members of his own party. The eight months which followed witnessed fluctuations, complications, defeats, and victories that would merit a series of separate volumes for adequate historical treatment and stand an enduring monument to the crystal clearness of programme, the inflexible will, and the superhuman driving power of one man. For a solid month Lenin stood alone in his demands for the immediate assumption of political power by the Soviet, meaning always the controlling wing of the Soviet, the Bolshevist Party. Opposed on prudential grounds by Kamenev, Rykov, Nogin, Zinoviev, and Trotsky, — who had arrived after his brush with the British authorities at Halifax, — he beat against the opposition with telling argument, scorn, personal ridicule, and flaming appeals to the revolutionary instincts of the mob. In May was held the First National Conference of the Bolshevist Party, attended by one hundred and forty delegates. The test came and Lenin won. His theses were adopted. It was to be Socialism, not by evolution, but by revolution. It was not to be Fabianism, but Socialism hic et nunc. From the balcony of Kshesinskaia’s palace he proclaims his panacea in four simple, understandable, and wonderfully hypnotic phrases : immediate peace, the land to the peasant, the factories to the workers, all power to the Soviets.
Already, on March 27, the Petrograd Soviet had sent a wireless message to all the peoples of the world appealing for an immediate peace, instructing the populations of belligerent countries to act over the heads of their governments. Seizing time by the forelock, but giving Comrade Lenin a fair margin behind the lines, German propaganda planes began to shower down on the Russian trenches multitudinous offers of separate peace : “ The Russian Revolution wants peace. Then why tarry ?” The enemy promised, too, that not another shot would be fired by the Germans unless provoked by the Russians.
Harassed by the unending demands made upon their resources and ingenuity by the crushing burden of creating a new administrative machinery to replace the old governmental personnel that had simply vanished overnight throughout the empire, the Provisional Government was faced with a task which the sequel showed to be beyond their endurance and outside their foresight. From each province, city, and village, telegrams came pouring into Petrograd making frantic demands for competent officials to direct into orderly channels the tempest of irresponsibility whipped up by the intoxicating winds of the new-found freedom. Upward of one hundred and seventy million people, prone to spontaneous anarchy, left without a visible organized government ! These telegrams, Mr. Kerensky reports, seemed written by the same hand. “They all told the same story the old administration, from the governor to the last town policeman and village bailiff, had disappeared without trace, and everywhere were being formed, instead, all sorts of selfappointed organizations — Soviets, committees of public safety, conferences of public leaders, etc., etc.”
In despair, Prince Lvov, the Premier, authorized the chairmen of the local zemstvo organizations to assume, temporarily, the functions of governors ; it was a case of naming the first honest man who walked the road as executive and the first strong man or the village blacksmith as chief of police. The result was foreordained by the nature of things. Conservative men held office for a week and gave way to assertive and unscrupulous adventurers. Villages ruled themselves. The scum began to rise to the surface as the aroused peasantry made a mad rush for the land and the nearest manor.
From one village comes a telegram asking for a picture of the new sovereign, Revolutzia. They imagined him some new, benevolent Tzar.
Paralleling the domestic ferment ran the external menace. The war was not abandoned outright, but indecision and demoralization prevailed ; drills and military operations were replaced by political meetings in the trenches as the centre of interest shifted. The troops were no longer concerned with the common enemy, — who, on his part, sent over an occasional invitation to fraternize, — but with reports from home.
“What is happening in our village on the Volga ?”
“Has the division of land begun while we remain rotting here in the swamps ?”
A Russian soldier creeps out toward the German lines, unmolested by the watchful enemy. He reaches a crude post-box, set up near the German position, and takes out the latest number of The Russian Messenger (printed in Berlin or Vilna, then in German hands), and plods sullenly back to the trenches. He reads aloud from the “news” sheet : “The English want the Russians to shed the last drop of their blood for the greater glory of England, who seeks her profit in everything. . . . Dear soldiers, you must know that Russia would have concluded peace long ago had not England prevented her. . . . The Russian people demand it ; such is their sacred will.”
An oath is heard from the corner of a trench.
“Don’t you wish for peace ? They make peace, the ——; we shall die here, without getting our freedom.”
From the trenches rises a solid roar : —
“To the devil with the war ! Let us go home.”
Guns were thrown down, and the great katabasis began. Deserters swarmed over every road leading to Petrograd and the provinces. The Russian front grew stiller and stiller ; the German High Staff applauded and began to transfer divisions to the Western Front. The Allies cable to Washington, “Hurry, hurry.” And his foreign colleagues ask General Pershing, “When will you be ready to attack ?”
The Allies grow anxious and ask Mr. Milyukov for a statement of Russia’s intentions. The Foreign Minister replies with a pronouncement that advanced the Bolshevist cause enormously and paved the way for the first governmental crisis. After reiterating the Government’s unshakable concurrence with the common cause, he continues : —
As it is known, President Wilson on the question of the Straits did not only take the position of their possible neutralization, but also their transfer to Russian control. In the establishment of Russian domination over the Straits there must be in no wise seen a manifestation of tendencies of conquest, but exclusively the existence of a national objective — the necessity of commanding the gate to Russia without which it is impossible to guarantee the safety of the Black Sea. When this gate shall have been firmly fortified, we shall not be obliged to increase the defenses of the shores of the Black Sea or to maintain a powerful battle fleet. As far as the neutralization of the Straits is concerned, this solution of the questions would give access to the Black Sea to foreign battleships, which is precisely the consideration impelling Russia to prefer to a neutralization the retention of the Straits in the hands of a weak Power. Occupying Constantinople as mere parasites and ruling by the sole force of conquest, the Turks cannot, in opposition to the Russian claims, allege their national rights.
This declaration of war aims proved to be a boomerang. It furnished Lenin with a new pretext for mounting the balcony of the Kshesinskaia palace and shouting, “Imperialism — capitalistic warfare ! No annexations — no exploitation of the working classes !”
A storm of opposition broke out in the Soviet. Crowds demonstrated, and even loyal regiments paraded in the streets ; cries of “Down with the Government !” “Down with Milyukov !” were heard on all sides. Counter-demonstrations, organized by anti-Leninites, supported the Government, and on the Nevsky several people were killed. For the first time, blood was flowing within the Revolution.
Anxious times begin. The Soviet’s claim to possess exclusive right to dispose of the government troops gives rise to Prince Lvov’s epigrammatic description : —
The Government is an authority without power and the Workmen’s Council a power without authority.
Unable to tolerate the dual control, Gutchkov, Minister of War, resigns, describing the Provisional Government as being “perpetually under domiciliary arrest”; General Kornilov, military commander of Petrograd, follows suit, declining to accept further responsibility for the maintenance of discipline. Kerensky assumes the portfolio of War ; the leaders of the Provisional Government drop into their usual frame of mind, and a compromise is voted to be the order of the day : the Soviet is too powerful to be ignored and the Government is unwilling or unable to accept its challenge. A coalition Cabinet is suggested ; three Socialists, Tzeretelli, Chernov, and Skobelev, come over from the Soviet and take equal rank with the members of the Provisional Government. Milyukov refuses to be relegated to the post of Minister of Education and follows the example of Gutchkov and Kornilov. Tereschenko becomes Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Allies grasp at the forlorn hope that harmony and confidence have been restored.
Lulled possibly by a sense of false security, and responding to the moral pressure of the Allies, Mr. Kerensky now begins preparations for a grandiose Russian offensive and starts in person for the front. He finds “neither the crack of machine guns nor the exchange of artillery fire.” “The trenches,” he writes, “were deserted. All preparatory work for offensive operations had been abandoned. With their uniforms in ludicrous order, thousands of troops were devoting their time to interminable meetings. Most of the officers seemed completely confused. The local Galician population was looking on in surprise and amusement.”
With admirable energy the Minister of War flits from the Galician front to Odessa and Sebastopol, thence to Kiev and Dvinsk and Moscow, patching up quarrels, restoring morale, and galvanizing, with his ringing oratory, the war-weary legions into willingness for one final heave of their bodies against the German gun. His tasks are varied : —
We entered a dugout, unobservable from the enemy’s position, and called a number of troops from the trenches.
Weary, growling faces surrounded us in a ring. We began to converse. Standing aloof, the little soldier (agitator), who had won the ears of his regiment, made no effort to reply. His comrades thereupon pushed him forward. (Voices : “Well, what is the matter ? Here’s your chance to speak in the presence of the Minister himself.”) Finally, the little soldier spoke up : “What I want to say is this : You say we must fight so that the peasants may have the land, but of what use is the land to me, for instance, if I am killed ?”
I realized immediately that all discussion and logic were of no use in this case. What confronted me here was the dark inside of a human being. The case was one in which personal interest, in its most naked form, was being preferred to sacrifice for the common good. The desirability and wisdom of such sacrifice does not lend itself to proof by word or reason. It can only be felt. The situation was rather difficult. To leave the little soldier without a reply was unthinkable. Where the logic of reason seems powerless it was necessary to resort to the logic of emotion.
Silently I took a few steps forward in the direction of the little soldier.
Turning to Radko-Dmitriev, I said : —
“General, I order you to remove this soldier immediately ; pack him off at once to his village. Let his fellow villagers know that the Russian Revolution has no need of cowards.”
My surprising reply created a moving impression on all those present. The little soldier himself stood trembling, dumb and pale. And then he fell in a deep faint. Soon after I received a request from his officer to countermand the order for his removal. A profound change had now come over him. He was now an example to others.
But Lenin is losing no time. He too is mobilizing his forces in step with the Minister of War at the front.
In June an All-Russian Congress of Delegates of Soviets was summoned ; representatives from Workmen’s Councils throughout Russia were invited to Petrograd for the purpose of transforming the local Petrograd Council into a national organization. Lenin, with all proletarian Russia as an auditor before him, delivered an impassioned attack upon the Provisional Government in phrases which subsequent comparison revealed as taken word for word from the latest German wireless propaganda.
On the second of July, the long-prepared offensive was launched on the Southwestern Front. On July 8, General Kornilov routed the Austrians at Halicz and Kalusz ; optimism ran high, and the fortunes of the Provisional Government rose with the rise of the national pride.
This is not the place to enter upon a technical history of the ultimate failure of this last heroic effort of the Russian army ; it must suffice for our present purpose to record the outstanding fact that optimism gave way to chronic pessimism when, on July 18, the enemy counter-attacked, broke the Russian front, and completed the disintegration already prepared by the clandestine activities of the Bolshevist emissaries in the ranks.
General Denikin again describes what he saw : —
Afterward ?
Afterward, “the molten element” overflowed its banks completely. Officers were killed, burned, drowned, torn asunder, and had their heads broken through with hammers, slowly, with inexpressible cruelty.
Afterward — millions of deserters. Like an avalanche the soldiery moved along the railways, waterways, and country roads, trampling down, breaking, and destroying the last nerves of poor, roadless Russia.
Afterward — Tarnopol, Kalusz, Kazan. Like a whirlwind, robbery, murder, violence, incendiarism, swept over Galicia, Volhynia, Podolsk, and other provinces, leaving behind them everywhere a trail of blood and arousing in the minds of the Russian people, crazed with grief and weak in spirit, the monstrous thought : “Oh, Lord ! If only the Germans would come quickly.”
Retreat became general rout, and the standards of the Leninites advanced one step nearer their domestic goal in Petrograd.
Was it the opportune moment for a decisive frontal attack on the Provisional Government ? The very streets invited a Bolshevist coup d’état, filled, as they were, with masses of parading regiments on the verge of revolt and Red Guards (armed workmen mobilized by the Soviet) demanding the overthrow of the Government. Motor lorries packed with unidentified soldiers dashed in apparent confusion through the streets ; a red banner appeared with the inscription, “The first bullet for Kerensky.” Twenty thousand sailors are landed from Kronstadt and thirty thousand strikers arrive from the enormous Putilov works, converging upon the centre of the city and threatening the Tauride Palace, seat of the Duma.
The Ides of March have returned. Only now the Revolution has turned on its own creators and demands their heads.
An all-night parley is going on in the Soviet. Curious enough, it is Lenin himself who wavers, wondering if it be really his destined hour. He might indeed have taken the power, but could he hold it ? Kerensky, absent at the front, was yet to be heard from, and might return with enough loyal troops to crush the insurrection. . . . Lenin’s caution prevails, and a proclamation in the Pravda calling for an uprising on July 17 was deleted at the last moment — the matrix was cut out — and the Bolshevist organ carried a gaping blank space on the first page of its morning edition.
Kerensky, advised by telegrams of the mutiny, returns on July 19 and orders the arrest of all the Bolshevist leaders, beginning with Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev (who escaped), Kamenev and Madame Kollontai. But when the arresting party arrives at Lenin’s lodgings they find that he too has forestalled them and is on his way across the Finnish border. He will not appear publicly again until he enters the Smolny Institute as undisputed master of Petrograd, on November 7.
On July 20 the gentle Prince Lvov resigns in despair from the Cabinet, and Kerensky becomes Premier, still retaining, however, his post of Minister of War and Marine. The new Government sets about to emancipate itself from control of party factions, whether Soviet or bourgeois, and declares itself a coalition, pledged to represent all creative forces in the country, irrespective of party affiliations. The Soviet admits tactical defeat in the frank statement of Tzeretelli, in the next meeting of the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Congress of the Soviets : —
We have just experienced not only a Cabinet crisis, but a crisis of the Revolution. A new era in the history of the Revolution has begun. Two months ago the Soviets were stronger. Now we have become weaker, for the correlation of forces has changed to our disadvantage.
The State had triumphed and could afford now to be magnanimous. Premier Kerensky ordered the release of Mr. Trotsky and all the Bolshevist prisoners. They promptly resume their attack, but in the old, underground fashion. Contact is established with their absent leader in Finland, and the agents sent from Petrograd find Lenin on a farm pitching hay by daylight and drawing up plans for a new campaign by night.
The phase upon which the Revolution now enters is comparable only to the buoyant period that followed the abdication of the Tzar. It was the second honeymoon of the Revolution. To meet the popular impatience for a Constituent Assembly, the convocation of which had been postponed until December 16, a National Conference is called for August 26, to be held in ancient Moscow, better suited to recall Muscovite traditions than the surcharged political atmosphere of Petrograd. “Held in the Bolshoi Theatre, it presented,” writes Mr. Kerensky, “a most pleasing picture. Running from the stage to the main entrance was the middle aisle, dividing the conference into two equal sides : on the left was Democratic, peasant, Soviet, socialist Russia, and on the right was Liberal, bourgeois, capitalist Russia. The army was represented on the left by army committees and on the right by members of the Commanding Corps. Exactly opposite the main entrance on the stage sat the Provisional Government. My seat was precisely in the middle. On my left were the Democratic-Socialist Ministers. On my right were the Ministers from the bourgeoisie. The Provisional Government was the only centre uniting both Russias into one. In this centre I was the mathematical point of unity.”
It was precisely that straight line of demarcation running down the main aisle that drove a wedge into these foundations of unity, split the state organization into a right and left faction, and nullified the effects of that mid-July victory by transforming the final struggle into a three-cornered contest.
Adroitly, persistently, and with all the art of seasoned fishers in troubled waters, the underground Bolshevist emissaries undermined confidence in the coalition government and played on the quick suspicions and volatile emotions that flare into hot passion when nerves are frayed and quivering. They found an excellent target in that “mathematical centre of unity” provided by Kerensky, between the two opposing wings.
From his Finnish G.H.Q. in the hidden but at Razliv, Lenin poured revolutionary tracts into Petrograd ; armed with his torrents of words, indefatigable lieutenants penetrated factories, workshops, and barracks, disseminating dissatisfaction and whispering seductive reasons for revolt against “the dictator, Kerensky” — “the servant of the bourgeoisie” — “the traitor to the working classes.”
Winter was approaching with all its old hardships — and the enemy, too. On the first of September the Germans broke the Russian lines on the Dvina and threatened Petrograd. Mr. Kerensky decided to transfer the seat of government to Moscow and issued a proclamation to that effect. A storm of protest resulted and tension was increased. Then came the final blow, from within, from the Right, in the shape of the Kornilov uprising.
The inner history of this cause célèbre still remains obscure, although copious explanations are available, ranging from unqualified defense of the attempt by monarchist and bourgeois apologists to bitter denunciations of its folly by Kerensky. To the former, Kornilov is the incarnation of Russian patriotism, stabbed in the back by Mr. Kerensky, as he rose in one final, desperate effort to save the country from anarchy ; to Mr. Kerensky, on the contrary, Kornilov is the villain in the piece, the last guard of reactionary monarchism whose treasonable thrust at Petrograd threatened the very life of the revolution and foreshadowed a restoration of the Tzarist régime. But to the Bolsheviki Kornilov was an open blessing, and his name should be a benediction ; he engaged their chief adversary in civil war and raised a new, distracting issue while they stood, tertium gaudens, on the side lines sharpening their swords to slit the throat of the exhausted victor, whichever it might be.
It appertains to the historian of Russian military operations to unfold the complete record of that revolution within a revolution. In our account of the fall of the Provisional Government it is but an episode, though the last and most characteristic one, as it concentrates within itself all known elements of misunderstanding, distrust, indecision, compromise, and tactical blundering.
General Lavre Kornilov, a brave and popular Cossack officer, fifty years of age, had long been a heroic figure in public life, his popularity dating from the days of his captaincy, when, alone and in the disguise of a traveling merchant, he penetrated the contiguous buffer State of Afghanistan — forbidden then to foreigners — in quest of military information. It was said at Petrograd that he could speak eighteen of the languages that made Russia a polyglot empire. Appointed by Kerensky Commander in Chief of the Russian Armies, on August 1, 1917, the General rapidly became a symbol of nationalism and was presumably the one dominating personality capable of commanding the personal loyalty of the army at the front. His direct, soldierlike speech at the Moscow Conference still remains its outstanding feature and increased his prestige enormously, much to the annoyance of Mr. Kerensky. Around him from that day centred the conservative elements, army leaders, Constitutional Democrats, financiers, and the industrialists, all of whom sensed in Kerensky that perpetual conflict of will between his duties as head of the anti-Bolshevikt movement and his known instincts as a Socialistic idealist.
At a Cabinet meeting held in Petrograd on August 16, the bluff and forthright General laid before the Ministers his views on the military situation, which was then none too hopeful. But he was prepared to attack along certain designated sectors where he believed his troops were sufficient and willing. It is related by E.H. Wilcox, a war-time correspondent in Petrograd, that when Kornilov reached the point of naming the specific sectors where he intended to launch his attack Kerensky leaned over to him and in a whisper advised that that question should be treated with caution. “Simultaneously,” writes Wilcox, “Savinkov [Deputy Minister of War] passed across to Kerensky a slip of paper on which was written, ‘Is the President sure that our state secrets and those of the Allies communicated by Kornilov will not become known to the enemy by way of comradeship ?’
“The effect which this incident had on Kornilov may be given in his own words : ‘I was astounded and horrified that, at a sitting of the Council of Ministers of Russia, the Commander in Chief could not without danger touch on questions of which, in the interest of national defense, he thought it necessary to place the Government in cognizance.’ ”
The mutual distrust between the Premier and the Commander in Chief rapidly hardened into ill-concealed and reciprocated enmity. Kerensky, conceding the soldierly qualities of his own appointee, suspected him of ambitioning the Napoleonic role of dictator ; Kornilov, schooled to direct action in camps and on firing lines, chafed at the dilatory tactics of the Premier and, spurred on by the Right, was all for crossing swords with the Bolsheviki and forcing a decision once for all. Two Russias were thus in the field, drawn up against each other at a moment when two equally determined foes were closing in on the Fatherland. Riga was taken by the Germans, and Lenin was soon to slip back to the scene of action, losing himself in the Viborg Quarter, Petrograd’s St. Antoine.
The final rupture was hastened by the misunderstanding caused, deliberately or unintentionally, by Vladimir Lvov, who acted as Kerensky’s delegate in the negotiations with the recalcitrant Commander in Chief. Sent by the Premier to Kornilov with an invitation to discuss various possibilities for ensuring order in the Capital, Lvov, according to the account published by Savinkov, laid three courses before Kornilov. The bluff General received the proposals in good faith as coming from Kerensky : —
1. Kornilov to form a Government, with Kerensky and Savirkov respectively Ministers of Justice and War.
2. A triumvirate, with dictatorial powers, composed of Kerensky, Kornilov, and Savinkov.
3. Kornilov to declare himself dictator.
Lvov, on returning to Petrograd on Saturday, September 8, reported to Kerensky that Kornilov had decided on the third course and would declare himself dictator ; he furthermore informed Kerensky that Kornilov desired the Premier to come to Mohilev, the General Headquarters, as he wished Kerensky to serve as Minister of Justice under his Dictatorship, and Savinkov should accompany him, as it was desirable that he should serve as Minister of War. Kerensky interpreted this message as an ultimatum ; Kornilov probably intended it merely as a proposal.
To assure himself of the authenticity of Lvov’s report, Kerensky established telegraphic connections with Kornilov at the front. The record of this conversation, preserved on the ribbon of a Hughes recording instrument, is a valuable document revealing the curious formalism that had replaced frank confidence : —
KERENSKY : Here is the Minister-President Kerensky. He awaits General Kornilov.
KORNILOV : General Kornilov is at the apparatus.
KERENSKY : Greetings, General ! At the telephone are Vladimir Nicolaievich Lvov and Kerensky. We beg you to confirm that Kerensky may act in conformity with the communication transmitted by Vladimir Nicolaievich.
KORNILOV : Greeting, Alexander Feodorovich ! Greeting, Vladimir Nicolaievich ! Once more confirming my sketch of the position of the country and the army as it appears to me, — a sketch made by me to Vladimir Nicolaievich, with the request that he would report it to you, — I again declare that the events of the past few days, and those which are becoming apparent, imperatively demand an absolutely definite decision within the shortest possible term.
KERENSKY : I, Vladimir Nicolaievich [Kerensky pretends Lvov is now speaking]; ask you : Is it necessary to carry out that definite decision as to which you requested me to inform Alexander Feodorovich only quite privately ? Without this confirmation personally from you, Alexander Feodorovich hesitates to trust me fully.
KORNILOV : I confirm that I begged you to transmit to Alexander Feodorovich my urgent request to come to Mohilev.
KERENSKY : I, Alexander Feodorovich, understand your answer as a confirmation of the words communicated to me by Vladimir Nicolaievich. To-day it is impossible to do that and leave. I hope to leave to-morrow. Is Savinkov needed ?
KORNILOV : I urgently beg that Boris Victorovich [Savinkov] should come with you. What I say to Vladimir Nicolaievich applies in like measure to Boris Victorovich. I fervently beg you not to postpone your departure beyond to-morrow. I beg you to believe that only my sense of the responsibility of the moment compels me to importune you.
KERENSKY : Should we come only in the event of the rising, of which rumors are in circulation, or in any case ?
KORNILOV : In any case.
KERENSKY : Au revoir ! We shall soon see one another.
KORNILOV : Au revoir !
It will be recalled that the Tzar, — also speaking from Mohilev, — once held an important conversation by telephone with the Tzarina, on the eve of his abdication. The decisions he took as a result of that pourparler made the Russian Revolution inevitable. So this parley between Kerensky and Kornilov was the prelude to Bolshevism. For, convinced that his own Commander in Chief intended to proclaim himself dictator, Kerensky, on September 9, sought and obtained authority from the Government to deprive Kornilov of his command and order him back to the Capital. On September 10 the morning papers of Petrograd published a proclamation from the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet, declaring Kornilov a traitor to his country and the Revolution and calling on the army to resist his orders. The fat was in the fire, and the Provisional Government added fuel to the flame ; next day their official proclamation denounced Kornilov and, for the first time, used officially the word “treason.”
Kornilov replied with his Orders of the Day, which he posted at Mohilev on September 10 and 11, in which he disclaimed all personal ambition, or intentions of a one-man dictatorship, or a projected restoration of the monarchy ; but he refused to surrender to the Government, which had, he maintained, requested him, through Savinkov, to concentrate the Third Cavalry Corps in the environs of Petrograd. Furthermore, he recounted his belief that treasonable agencies in Petrograd “working for German money and exercising influence on the actions of the Government . . . intended to seize power, if only for a few days, and declare an armistice . . . take the decisive and irretrievable step toward the conclusion of a shameful peace, and consequently destroy Russia.”
He ended by refusing to surrender his position and ordered General Krimov to advance with his “wild division” of Cossacks on Petrograd. Kerensky declared the Capital in danger of a counter-revolutionary attack, proclaimed a state of siege, brought in reënforcements of sailors from Kronstadt, and distributed arms to additional workmen’s units, thereby increasing the power of the Red Guards. He was to hear the ironic barking of those rifles — later pointed in his own direction.
The advance of Krimov’s Cossacks was a fiasco ; hesitating between two masters, confused and perplexed by subtle agitators in their ranks, and finally convinced that they were but pawns in an unpopular game, they were turned back without a shot being fired. Krimov committed suicide ; Kornilov was arrested and court-martialed.
But it was a barren victory for the Kerensky Government. New enemies were created and old foes strengthened. “General Kornilov,” announced Lenin, “has opened for us quite unexpected perspectives. We must act at once.” The first action came on September 18, six days after Kornilov’s failure, when the Petrograd Soviet swept out its Moderate and Menshevist members and put the Bolshevist faction in supreme control. Trotsky was instructed to redouble his efforts to win over the garrison troops. Hopeless chaos resulted within the Government as disorders, strikes, lockouts, massacres of landowners, seizure of estates, breakdown of transportation, and rumors of a bread famine developed in waves throughout the country. Left alone by the increasing resignation of his colleagues, Premier Kerensky resorted to a Directorate in which he and the Minister of War, Verkhovsky, were the principal members, its mandate consisting in a charge to conduct negotiations with all parties with a view to a new coalition. The Soviet declined to recognize its authority and drove straight for its own unchanging goal — “all power to the Soviet.”
In the middle of September occurred that last futile gesture by the Provisional Government, ordinarily lost sight of in this confused and anarchic period of disintegration a Republic was declared on September 15 in order to assure Russia that the Revolution had come to stay. This explains the references to a subsequent “Council of the Republic” which now begin to appear.
A General Congress of Soviets had been convoked by the Bolsheviki for the month of November, and elections for the Constituent Assembly had been announced by the Provisional Government for November 25 ; the first session was scheduled for December 13. Lenin’s strategy, however, required him to anticipate both.
“It is necessary to seize power as soon as possible,” he wrote, “otherwise it will be too late. . . . History will never forgive us if we do not take power now. . . . To wait for a formal majority is naive ; no Revolution ever waits for this.... We shall come out victorious without doubt.”
With his finger on the feverish pulse of the nation, he knew how much more persuasive it would be to confront both Congress of Soviets and Constituent Assembly with a fait accompli than with a petition for authority to execute a coup d’état. The date for the uprising was set for October 28 ; though technical difficulties caused a postponement. But not for long. On October 23 a German squadron penetrated the Gulf of Riga and engaged the remnants of the Baltic Fleet. The Provisional Government prepared to evacuate Petrograd ; the Soviet press seized on the opportunity to shout “Treason !”
The Government is abandoning the Red Capital in order to weaken the Revolution. Riga has been sold to the Germans ; now Petrograd is being betrayed.
Rodzianko, leader of the Right Wing of the Constitutional Democratic Party contributed to the irritation.
“Petrograd is in danger,” he wrote. “I say to myself, ‘Let God take care of Petrograd.’ They fear that if Petrograd is lost the Central Revolutionary organization will be destroyed. To that I answer that I rejoice if all these organizations are destroyed ; for they will bring nothing but disaster upon Russia. . . . With the taking of Petrograd the Baltic Fleet will also be destroyed. . . . But there will be nothing to regret ; most of the battleships are completely demoralized.”
The same night, the Bolshevist General Staff held a most important council of war. Present : Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Sverdlov, Dzherzhinsky, Uritzky, Buvnov, Sokolnikov, Lamov, and two women, Kollontai and Yakovleva, the latter of whom acted as secretary : “Lenin arrived when all were present, and was beyond recognition [he still wore his Finland disguise]. Smoothly shaved, in a wig, he resembled a Lutheran Minister. . . . I was entrusted with keeping the secretarial minutes, but on account of the conspiratory nature of the meeting they were very brief.”
The session lasted all night. The final resolution was written in pencil by Lenin himself and reads as follows : —
The Central Committee recognizes that the international situation of the Russian Revolution (the mutiny in the German navy and the extreme signs of growth throughout Europe of the universal socialist revolution, finally the threat of peace among the imperialists for the purpose of strangling the Russian Revolution) and the military situation (the unquestionable decision of the Russian bourgeoisie and of Kerensky and Co. to surrender Petrograd to the Germans), as well as the majority gained in the Soviets by the party of the Proletariat, all this in connection with the peasant risings and the turn of popular confidence toward our party (the elections in Moscow) ; finally, the obvious preparation of a second Kornilov stroke (the removal of the Petrograd Garrison, the dispatch of Cossacks to Petrograd, the encircling of Minsk by Cossacks, and so forth) — all this makes an armed revolt the question of the day.
Having recognized thus that an armed revolt is inevitable and the time fully matured for it, the Central Committee proposes to all the party organizations to be guided by this fact and to consider and decide all questions (the conventions of the Northern Soviets, the removal of the Petrograd Garrison, and the demonstration of Moscow and Minsk Workers) from this viewpoint.
The execution of the revolt was committed to Trotsky, and Lenin returned to his hiding place to continue work on his pamphlet, Will the Bolsheviki Retain Power ?
Mr. Kerensky, realizing that the fate of the Provisional Government was sealed, counted his forces — and made a serious miscalculation. He relied on the Cossack troops, whose loyalty was traditional, but was deceived. They had already declared their neutrality — they had not forgotten that Kornilov was a Cossack — and the last pin was knocked from under the already tottering regime. But one hope remained — the army in the field. The sequel proved that on this count Kerensky was equally deceived.
His decision to leave Petrograd in a last effort to mobilize sufficient troops outside the city to justify battle with the Bolsheviki has exposed his next move to the scorn of his adversaries. They describe it as “flight,” and his “temporary absence” as “abandonment of his post.” The accounts of his exit from the city on November 7 are obscure. His own version follows : —
I do not know how it happened, but the news of my proposed departure reached the Allied Embassies. Just as we were about to leave, representatives of the British and, as far as I can remember, of the American Embassy arrived saying that the Allied envoys desired that I be accompanied by an automobile flying the American flag. Although it was more than evident that the American flag could not save me and my companions in the event of our failure, and that, on the contrary, it would only attract unnecessary attention to our passing through the city, I accepted the suggestion as evidence of the interest of the Allies in the Russian Provisional Government and their solidarity with it.
Shaking hands for the last time with Kishkin, who took upon himself the direction of the defense of the Capital in my absence, I went out into the yard of the Staff Building, together with my companions. We entered my car. Close at hand was the American machine. One of my officers, unable to find room in my car, decided to travel alone, but on the condition that in passing through the city he was to keep his machine, flying the American flag, at a respectful distance from ours. Finally we moved. We followed closely all the details of my daily travel through the city. I occupied my usual seat — on the right. I wore my customary semimilitary uniform, which had become so familiar to the population and to the troops. The automobile moved at the usual city speed.
A somewhat different version is given by Mr. Francis, the American ambassador : —
Shortly after receipt of this message [a routine communication from the Foreign Office], Secretary Whitehouse rushed in in great excitement and told me that his automobile, on which he carried an American flag, had been followed to his residence by a Russian officer, who said that Kerensky wanted it to go to the front. Whitehouse and his brother-in-law, Baron Ramsai, who was with him, accompanied the officer to General Headquarters in order to confirm his authority for making this amazing request. There they found Kerensky — the Headquarters are across the square from the Winter Palace, where he lived, surrounded by his staff. Everyone seemed to be in a high tension of excitement and all was confusion. Kerensky confirmed the officer’s statement that he wanted Whitehouse’s car to go to the front. Whitehouse asserted “This car is my personal property and you have (pointing across the square to the Winter Palace) thirty or more automobiles waiting in front of the Palace.” Kerensky replied : “Those were put out of commission during the night and the Bolsheviki now command all the troops in Petrograd except some who claim to be neutral and refuse to obey my orders.”
Whitehouse and Ramsai, after a hurried conference, came to the proper conclusion that, as the car had virtually been commandeered, they could offer no further objection. After they had left the Headquarters, Whitehouse remembered the American flag, and, returning, told the officer who had originally asked for the car that he must remove the American flag before using the car. He objected to doing this, and after some argument Whitehouse had to be content with registering a protest against Kerensky’s use of the flag, and left to report the affair to me.
In the face of this perplexity the present writer can do no more than fall back upon the phrase of a certain commentator on the French Revolution : “Il n’est rien de plus honorable pour un historien que de dire, ‘ Je ne sais pas.’ ”
Through the Moscow toll gate at breakneck speed Mr. Kerensky flies, headed for Gatchina, twenty-nine miles from Petrograd, leaving the firing and manœuvring Bolshevist troops behind. Then follows a mad hunt for loyal troops, supposedly en route from Mohilev to Gatchina, in answer to the Premier’s appeals for help. But the local commandant of the town knows nothing of their arrival. . . . Thence to Pskov, — some hundred miles and more away, — under a shower of bullets from an automobile flying a Red flag ; a tire is pierced and the chauffeur wounded. At Pskov, the general in command replies coldly that he is not inclined to associate his fate with a “doomed Government.” He adds incisively that he cannot be responsible for Mr. Kerensky’s life if he remains longer in the vicinity. . . . At last General Krassnov reluctantly supplies a paltry force of six hundred Cossacks and a few cannon. . . . It was the handwriting on the wall.
Returning to Gatchina with his corporal’s guard of the Imperial Russian Army, Kerensky finds himself faced by a new and ominous condition. General Krassnov’s attitude changes and his replies become evasive. The reenforcements from the front ? They were either on the way or about to leave. And would Mr. Kerensky please not remain on the battlefield. . . . His presence was interfering with the military operations . . . and disturbing the officers. . . . Mr. Kerensky, looking about, notices that the Cossacks are forever “saddling their horses,” but never advancing.
After thirty-six hours of agony, during which some slight reenforcements dribble through from the front, light dawns on Mr. Kerensky. He has been trapped ! Gatchina had become his Philippi where the memory of Kornilov hung over the Cossack tents. He writes a farewell letter to M.D. Avksentiev, President of the Council of the Republic, transferring to him the rights and duties of Premier of the Provisional Government ; then in company with one loyal aide, Lieutenant Vinner, he shuts himself in one of the upper chambers, — there were six hundred rooms in the Palace, — prepared to “settle accounts with life by means of our revolvers. At that time, on the morning of November 14, 1917, this resolve seemed quite simple, logical, and inevitable.”
Below stairs the Cossacks are bargaining with the Bolsheviki as to the terms on which they will turn over their prisoner. While the conditions are being arranged, two unknown and unidentified figures, a soldier and a sailor, slip into the room where Kerensky and Lieutenant Vinner are waiting for the end ; they hand Mr. Kerensky a sailor’s coat, a sailor’s hat, and a pair of automobile goggles. This “masquerade attire” strikes Mr. Kerensky as supremely ridiculous ; when clothed in it he remarks, “I certainly do look ludicrous.” But it serves ; one of the unknown rescuers whispers that an automobile is waiting at the Egyptian Gates. After a passage of breathless suspense across an open space, — where another unknown friend faints and falls to the ground in order to distract the attention of a suspicious guardsman, — the automobile is located. A moment later, as a delegation of Cossacks mounts the stairs to deliver to the victors the price of their amnesty, Mr. Kerensky is safely on his way to Paris, London, and New York.
On November 7, Lenin, still disguised, — his face bandaged with a large handkerchief as if suffering from a toothache, — enters the Bolshevist Headquarters in the Smolny Institute, leaving the street fighting to his Field Marshal, Trotsky. The members of the Provisional Government are bombarded out of the Winter Palace and imprisoned, one after another, in the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul ; the Women’s Battalion has made its last, ineffectual stand, and the students of the Military Academy, refusing to surrender, are overwhelmed and hundreds of them massacred by the Red Guards.