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.