That the Mezhraiontsy at last entered the party felt like little compensation for the retrenchment. Even some local Bolshevik groups came out against their own leadership. The Executive Committee of the party in Tiflis and, of all places, in Vyborg pledged full support to the Soviet, and demanded that the Bolshevik leadership turn themselves in.
Amid the setbacks came a few triumphs. None were more important than the left-moving Latvia, where the Bolsheviks held the workers’ soviets and landless peasants’ soviets, and cleaved to an uncompromising line. There, the July Days had their echo in a confrontation in Riga between Latvian riflemen and one of the ‘Death Battalions’, shock troops of the regime, that had left several dead on both sides. The Fifth Latvian Social Democratic Conference took place immediately after, from 9 to 19 July, and the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold, exercising measures of control over society at large – food distribution, local administration, and so on. The Latvian party already acted like a government-in-waiting. In possessing such confidence, though, it was an outlier.
Most ominous across the country was a certain rise of ultra-right, antisemitic pogromists. A group called Holy Russia put out Groza – Thunderstorm – with repeated calls to violence. Street-corner agitators fulminated against the Jews.
From his hide, throughout these bad days, Lenin sent articles to his comrades, and repeatedly proclaimed his innocence of spying. He received contacts who made the trek to the lonely shore, Yemelyanov’s son standing guard by the dark water, ready to make the bird-call sound that was an alarm if strangers appeared.
Lenin prepared for death at the hands of reaction. ‘Strictly entre nous,’ he wrote to Kamenev, ‘if I am done in, please publish my notebook “Marxism and the State”.’
He was not done in, and soon, in Finland, he would have a chance to develop that notebook on the state and revolution.
The street-fighting right may have been stronger immediately after the July Days, but the Provisional Government was not. On the contrary, the schisms at its heart were still intractable.
On 8 July, in the face of the gulf between himself and the cabinet socialists, Prime Minister Prince Lvov resigned. To replace him, he invited the only figure who seemed even remotely able to bridge that gap, a man of both the Duma and the Soviet – Kerensky.
Kerensky, of course, accepted. He began the unenviable process of putting together a new unity government.
In the demented early days of the Kerensky cult, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva recast the object of devotion as Napoleon:
And someone, falling on the map,
Does not sleep in his dreams.
There came a Bonaparte
In my country.
Now, Lenin too, months later, argued in Rabochy i soldat that Kerensky’s rule was Bonapartism – but from him that was not a flattering description. He used the term much as Marx and Engels had, in a technical way, to describe ‘the manoeuvring of state power, which leans on the military clique … for support, between two hostile classes and forces which more or less balance each other out’. For Lenin, Kerensky’s degenerating Bonapartism was a balancing act between opposed social forces.
The catastrophe at the front could no longer be hidden. The day he became prime minister, Kerensky made the redoubtable General Kornilov commander of the south-western front, where Russian troops were disintegrating at the most dramatic rate. In this move he was strongly encouraged by the government representative to that front, the extraordinary Boris Savinkov.
Savinkov played an important political role in those turbulent months. He was a man who had undergone a dramatic political journey. Not only an SR but, in the years leading up to the 1905 revolution, a flamboyant and notorious activist within the SR’s terrorist wing, its Battle Organisation, he had been involved in the killings of several tsarist officials. After 1905, he had become a writer of sensationalist novels. The advent of the war aroused in him a boundless chauvinism and militarism: in exile, he had joined the French Army, returning to Russia in April 1917, where he grew close to Kerensky. Though he believed in the judicious use of the commissars, the people’s representatives, to mediate between officers and soldiers, in his fervidly authoritarian patriotism, Savinkov was also an advocate of utterly ruthless measures against ill discipline – up to and including, it seems, military dictatorship.
On his appointment, Kornilov, the iron disciplinarian, demanded the authority to execute fleeing soldiers. Even before receiving his less than deferential request, in fact, Kerensky had already authorised commanders to fire on retreating soldiers, and within days the government reinstituted capital punishment at the front, as demanded. Still, when the details of Kornilov’s confrontational exchange with Kerensky were leaked to the press, Kornilov’s reputation as a hard man of the right soared, among both enemies and friends.
On 16 July, Kerensky, accompanied by Savinkov and his close collaborator Maximilian Filonenko, the right SR commissar of the Eighth Army, met with the Russian high command at Stavka, in Mogilev, to take stock of the military situation. Kornilov was not present – tellingly, the chaos and disintegration of the troops in his area would not permit it – and he telegraphed in his own, rather mild, report. Most of those generals who did attend, however, including Alexeev, Commander-in-Chief Brusilov, and Denikin of the western front, were nothing like so restrained.
Denikin in particular poured vitriol on the revolution, blaming it for the army’s collapse. He blasted the commissars to the stunned Kerensky, railed against Order Number 1, denounced the undermining of authority. The generals insisted that all such features of Dual Power be overturned.
On the train back to Petrograd, where he would preside with his usual histrionics at the funeral of Cossacks slain in the July Days, the shaken Kerensky decided that the gravity of the situation made it imperative to replace Brusilov with Kornilov as commander-in-chief. Within two days, he had taken the army away from a thoughtful, relatively open-minded career officer and delivered it to a hard-line, ambitious counterrevolutionary.
Emboldened by recent developments, disgusted at the state of the country, malcontents on the right pined for reaction, dreaming ever more loudly of a dictatorship.
On 18 July, Kerensky’s government moved into the Winter Palace. In an unsubtle snub, it requested the Soviet leave the Tauride Palace to make way for the Fourth State Duma. This was not a request that could be declined.