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 counterrevolutionary 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 rightwing 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.