Everyone was clear that it was crucial to mobilise as widely as possible against Kornilov. The Bolsheviks established a communications network, drafted leaflets calling workers and soldiers to arms. Members were allocated to coordinate with mass organisations. And everyone, including Bubnov, agreed that the party must maintain contact with the Soviet leadership’s defence organ – ‘for purposes’, it was vaguely glossed, ‘of information’.
For Bubnov, then, ‘informational’ exchange with the Soviet was indispensable, even while ‘there must be no interaction with the Soviet majority’. This was not a ‘dialectical synthesis’ so much as a holding fudge demanded by the scale of the crisis. Kerensky and Kornilov were equally bad, but at that moment, Kornilov was more equally bad.
At 11:30 p.m., the Soviet Executive Committee met to discuss their relations with government, given the emerging scandal of Kerensky and Kornilov’s recent alliance and its collapse, and given that Kerensky was now calling for a Directory, a small cabinet with authoritarian powers. More urgently, they debated how to preserve the revolution.
For the moderates, Kerensky, even now, and however critically, had to be defended.
‘The only person who can form a government at this time is Comrade Kerensky,’ said the Menshevik Vainshtein. If Kerensky and the government were to fall, ‘the revolutionary cause will be lost’.
The Bolsheviks took the hardest line: that the Provisional Government in toto could not be trusted. They wanted the instigation of democracy in the army, the transfer of land to peasants, the eight-hour day, democratic control of industry and finance, and the devolution of power to revolutionary workers, peasants and soldiers. However. Having made their points, the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Executive Committee, more conciliatory than Lenin or their Vyborg comrades, did not tie up proceedings with a resolution. They kept their oppositionism trenchant but abstract.
Astonishingly, they even abstained on a resolution that, while opposing the Directory he wanted, granted Kerensky power not only to maintain the existing form of government but also to fill cabinet vacancies with carefully chosen Kadets. More astonishingly still, they voted with Mensheviks and SRs to convene (yet) another ‘state conference’ – though this time made up exclusively of ‘democratic elements’, the left – to discuss the government question, and act as overseer until the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.
But when its representatives told Kerensky of this Soviet decision, he remained adamant that he must create a six-man Directory. It was deadlock, and the Soviet’s move.
‘All directories spawn counterrevolution,’ protested Martov in the Soviet, to vigorous agreement. Lunacharsky, too, was magnificent in opposition. He branded both Kornilov and the Provisional Government counterrevolutionary, and demanded the transfer of power to a government of workers, peasants and soldiers – which here meant the soviets. Thus Lunacharsky abruptly reintroduced the content, if not quite the form, of the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’. The very slogan Lenin had decreed obsolete.
But the night brought to the exhausted delegates word that general after general was declaring for Kornilov. Pressed on the government question by what felt increasingly like necessity, the meeting moved slowly rightward.
At last the Executive Committee adopted a resolution from Tsereteli supporting Kerensky, and leaving to him government’s form. This was to rubber-stamp his Directory.
The Bolsheviks in the chamber vehemently contested the resolution. But even so, in dramatic evidence of their moderation, by their party standards, they agreed that if that government were seriously committed to fighting the counterrevolution, they would agree to ‘form a military alliance with it’.
The enemy approached. The Soviet issued emergency orders to provincial soviets, to railway workers and soldiers to the effect that the Stavka must be defied, counterrevolutionary communications disrupted. They called for the Soviet’s orders – and the government’s – to be immediately obeyed.
The collaboration of that night was not all from the Bolsheviks present with those on their right: it flowed the other way, too. When Weinstein, a right Menshevik, proposed a dedicated group to organise military defence, everyone there agreed the Bolsheviks must be integral to it.
On 28 August, Prince Trubetskoy of the foreign ministry telegrammed Tereshchenko from Mogilev. ‘The entire commanding personnel, the overwhelming majority of the officers and the best fighting units … will follow Kornilov,’ he predicted. ‘The entire Cossack host, the majority of the military schools, and the best combat units … Added to this … is the superiority of the military organisation over the weakness of the government organs.’
In Petrograd, mobilisation against the counterrevolutionaries accelerated, but the news was unremittingly bleak. Kornilov’s troops had reached Luga, the city heard, and the revolutionary garrison had surrendered. Nine troop trains had hauled passed Orodezh. Reaction was on its way.
The response from the Soviet and many on the left, Bolsheviks not excluded, was panicked. But, in large numbers, Petrograd’s workers and soldiers reacted differently. Trubetskoy’s glum claim, that ‘the majority of the popular and urban masses have grown indifferent to the existing order and will submit to any cracking of the whip’, was startlingly wrong.
Soldiers mobilised in their thousands against the coming coup. In factories, alarms and whistles blared to summon the workers together. They took stock, reinforced security, organised themselves into fighting detachments.
Some organisations had foreseen the danger. The Petrograd Interdistrict Committee of Soviets, for example, had been warning of such a threat for some time, and it was primed to take prompt action. Vikzhel directed that ‘suspicious telegrams’ be held up and suspect troop movement tracked. By the afternoon of the 28th, the group suggested by Weinstein, the Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution, was operational.
As agreed, the committee comprised representatives of Mensheviks, SRs, Bolsheviks and other democratic organisations. In Sukhanov’s words,
the masses, in so far as they were organised, were organised by the Bolsheviks and followed them … Without [them], the committee was impotent … it could only have passed the time with appeals and idle speeches … With the Bolsheviks, the committee had at its disposal the full power of the organised workers and soldiers … And despite their being in the minority, it was quite clear that … control was in the hands of the Bolsheviks.
The committee liaised with the self-organised, makeshift defence groups that were springing up. One crucial task – and for the Bolsheviks, a condition of participation – was the arming of workers’ militias. A transformation of 40,000 people practically overnight. Toolers, metalworkers, people of all trades becoming an army. The chambers of industrial plants resonated with the sound of inexpert marching, the music of a new militia.