Thus, at 4 a.m. on 27 August, the Second Coalition ended.
Once more, Kerensky telegrammed Kornilov. ‘I order you immediately to turn over your office to General Lukomsky,’ he dictated, and the keys tapped out, ‘who is to take over temporarily the duties of commander-in-chief, until the arrival of the new commander-in-chief. You are instructed to come immediately to Petrograd.’
That done, he retired to his rooms, right next door to where Lvov was being held. Kerensky tried to calm his own nerves by bellowing arias. The sound of his voice went straight through the wall, waking his confused informant and keeping him awake all night.
Sunday 27 August, the day of Soviet celebration, dawned warm and clear and tense. ‘Sinister people are circulating rumours of a rising set for today and allegedly organised by our party,’ warned the Bolsheviks’ Rabochy. ‘The CC implores workers and soldiers not to yield to provocations … and not to take part in any action.’ The party’s fears were still more of threats from within, from provocateurs, than of those from without.
And the conspirators waited for their moment. That morning, and for the next two days, Colonel L. P. Dyusimeter and P. N. Finisov of the Republican Centre, and Colonel V. I. Sidorin, their liaison with the Stavka, bar-hopped around the drinking dens of Petrograd, waiting for news of Krimov, ready to unleash their coup.
A little after 8 a.m. on Sunday, Kornilov received Kerensky’s telegram. At first he was stupefied. Swiftly, he was apoplectic.
General Lukomsky, no less blindsided, refused the position Kerensky had thrust on him. ‘It is too late to halt an operation started with your approval,’ he wired back, the bewilderment in the last three words palpable. ‘For the sake of Russia’s salvation you must go with Kornilov, not against him … Kornilov’s dismissal would bring horrors the likes of which Russia has never seen.’
Kerensky put Savinkov in charge of military preparations for defence against the coup, while Kornilov directed the Third Corps under Krimov to occupy the city. Kerensky sent word urging them to stop, assuring the men that there was no insurrection to ‘overcome’ – the supposed pretext for their arrival. They did not pause.
Garbled rumours of a rift between Kornilov and Kerensky began to spread through Petrograd. Those rumours, of course, also implied a pre-rift agreement.
In the mid-afternoon, Soviet leaders and their parties gathered in emergency session. They were not even certain what it was that they needed to discuss or debate. The situation was tense but incomprehensible.
It was only in the early evening that matters became clearer, when Kerensky released a proclamation. Through Lvov, he announced, Kornilov had demanded civil and military power to inaugurate a counterrevolutionary regime. In the face of this grave threat, the government had mandated Kerensky to take countermeasures. For that reason, the announcement made clear, martial law was now declared.
Kornilov swiftly responded to Kerensky’s statement, insisting – truthfully – that Lvov was not his representative.
‘Our great motherland is dying,’ he stated. ‘Under the pressure of the Bolshevik majority in the Soviets, the Provisional Government acts in complete harmony with … the German General Staff … I want nothing for myself, except the preservation of a Great Russia, and I vow to bring the people by means of victory … to a Constituent Assembly, where they themselves will decide their fate.’
Generals Klembovsky, Baluev, Shcherbatov, Denikin and others all pledged their allegiance to Kornilov. The Union of Officers enthusiastically telegrammed army and naval headquarters around the country, proclaiming the end of the Provisional Government and urging ‘tough and unflinching’ support for Kornilov.
Kerensky ineffectually declared battle; Kornilov declared war.
Instantly a plethora of ad hoc committees sprang up to mobilise citizens against the coup, to procure weapons, coordinate supplies, communications, services. Vikzhel, the Menshevik-controlled All-Russian Executive Committee of Railway Workers, formed a bureau for struggle against Kornilov, working with the Interdistrict Conference. Word was dispatched to Kronstadt. The left gathered its forces. At Smolny, party fractions scrambled.
By sour irony, that very night in the Narva District, the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee met for that session scheduled three days earlier – in response to the Vyborg Bolsheviks’ concern at the party’s inadequate attention to the counterrevolutionary threat. The leadership had almost certainly been intending to pooh-pooh such anxieties: now as the thirty-six party officials met, Kornilov’s troops descended on Petrograd. Rarely can doom-mongers have felt so vindicated.
And the Vyborg rank and file were angry not only with the leadership’s tardiness in assessing the baleful situation, but also with the ambiguous tactical resolutions of the recent Sixth Congress. One, ‘On the Political Situation’, encouraged cooperating with all forces combatting counterrevolution – while ‘On Unification’ declared the Mensheviks to be permanent deserters from the proletarian camp, which would preclude cooperation with them. How, then, to proceed?
The meeting was fractious. Andrei Bubnov, a career militant recently arrived from Moscow to join the CC, warned his comrades to trust neither Mensheviks nor SRs. During the Moscow State Conference, he told them, ‘First the government turned to us for help and then we were spat upon.’ He was against collaboration in any self-defence organisations, insisting that the Bolsheviks work alone, to steer the masses against Kornilov and Kerensky both. Against him, Kalinin, from what was still, contra Lenin, the leadership’s mainstream, insisted that if Kornilov really were on the verge of overthrowing Kerensky, it would be absurd not to take the position that the Bolsheviks would have to intervene on Kerensky’s side.
Hostility exploded. Radical speakers slammed party authorities for lack of leadership, for ‘defencism’, for acting as a ‘coolant’ on the masses, for operating ‘in a fog’ during the July Days, and since. The meeting degenerated into a welter of grievances, resentments and generalised attacks. Rage distracted from the urgency of the moment, until at last someone shouted: ‘Let’s get down to concrete defence measures!’