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.
Now another Saviour of the world must be born, to save the people from all the calamities in the making here on earth and to put an end to these bloody days, so that no beast of any kind living on the earth created not by princes and rulers but by God-given nature is wiped out, for God is an invisible being inhabiting whoever possesses a conscience and tells us to live in friendship, but no there are evil people who sow strife among us and poison us one against another pushing us to murder, who wish for others what they would not wish for themselves … They used to say that the war was foisted off on us by Nicholas. Nicholas has been overthrown, so who is foisting the war on us now?
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 counterrevolutionary attack appeared genuine.’ Which in any case this supposed one, he implied, was not.
Lenin was wrong.