‘The factory looked like a camp,’ Rakilov, one of these Red Guards, as they were with increasing frequency known, would remember. ‘When you came in, you could see the fitters at the bench, but they had their packs hanging by them, and their guns were leaning against the bench.’
Forty thousand people swiftly organised into these new roles. They took time to pose for photographs with their units. They steadied their weapons for the cameras with variable skill, their faces set, fretful, excited, determined. Guard after proud guard rigged out not just in work clothes or makeshift militaria but in their very best, as if for church, a wedding, a funeral. They were dressed up for an occasion in those stiff suits, their ties straight and tight, bowlers or homburgs on their heads, kneeling with rifles at the ready. The occasion was self-defence.
The Bolsheviks negotiated their tactical contradictions. They collaborated with moderates, but in such a way that these armed workers were at the vanguard of the defence.
In Petrograd itself, most military school cadets backed Kornilov, but that by no means meant all were willing to fight for him, while the Cossacks remained neutral, refusing to fight for either side. All other units in the city sent detachments to construct defences at its vulnerable points.
In the strained military atmosphere, it was dangerous to show open support for Kornilov. In the streets of the Vyborg district, enraged soldiers murdered several officers who refused to acknowledge the authority of a revolutionary commissar. In Helsingfors, the crew of the battleship Petropavlovsk voted to execute officers who would not pledge their allegiance to ‘democratic organisations’.
The Schlusselburg gunpowder works sent a bargeload of grenades to the capital, for distribution by factory committees. Estonian and Finnish soviets sent word of their solidarity. Throughout Petrograd, soviet posters urged discipline, excoriating the scourge of drunkenness. The city Duma formed a commission to aid with food supplies. And most importantly, it selected deputies to go to Luga, for the purpose of agitating among Kornilov’s troops.
In the south of Petrograd, armed workers erected barricades. They strung barbed wire across the roads, dug trenches in the city’s approaches. The suburbs became military camps.
Initiative was beginning to slip from the right. They could feel it. They pushed back.
In the afternoon of the 28th, Milyukov offered himself as a go-between, in the hopes that he might persuade Kerensky to stand down. The high-ranking Kadet Kishkin pressured Kerensky to resign in favour of Alexeev – who supported Kornilov. A majority of Kerensky’s (acting) ministers were quickly in favour of this proposal, and even foreign representatives were advising him to consider ‘negotiation’.
The Soviet, however, categorically opposed any such move. In view of the sheer scale of revolutionary defence to which the Soviet had swiftly made itself key, and uneasily aware of the likely resistance of workers and soldiers if he went against this opposition, Kerensky had to reject the pressure to negotiate.
On the 28th, Dyusimeter and Finisov quietly set out for Luga. They left Sidorin behind them, with funds from Putilov and the Society for the Economic Rehabilitation of Russia to finance a coup when they sent word. His job would be to concoct a ‘Bolshevik riot’, to justify military repression.
But setbacks for the right began to come faster. That evening, the Ussuriysky Mounted Division was blocked on its approach to the city: it reached Yamburg only to discover that the Vikzhel had got its message through: railway workers had ruined the tracks. They were blocked, wrenched up and bent out of line, splayed. Elements of the Savage Division did get as far as Vyritsa, only thirty-seven miles from the capital. But there that train, too, met torn-up rails. The tracks of the revolution jutted like broken bone.
Kornilov’s troops were cut off – but they were not alone.
Here to meet them where they found themselves stranded were scores of emissaries. They came from the Committee for Struggle, from district soviets, from factories, garrisons, Tsentroflot, from the Naval Committee, the Second Baltic Fleet Crew. And locals had come, too. All stamping across the scrub and through the trees towards that wheezing train. They came with agitation in mind. They came to beg the Savage Division to resist being used by counterrevolution.
By revolutionary fortune, the Executive Committee of the Union of Muslim Soviets was visiting Petrograd when the crisis began. It sent its own delegation to meet the engine – one of whom was a grandson of Imam Shamil. Shamil was a legendary nineteenth-century liberation hero of the Caucasus – including to the men of the Savage Division. Now a man of that celebrated blood was imploring them to stand with the revolution they had been sent to bury.
The soldiers of the Savage Division were, in fact, unaware of the purpose of their transfer. They were not predisposed to support Kornilov, and the more they heard from those pleading with them, the less they were minded to. They listened and argued and considered what they were told as darkness came, and on into the night. Their train and its surrounds became a debating chamber, a gathering of urgent discussions. Their officers despaired.
In Petrograd, alarmed by reports that officers of certain units were aiding Kornilov with their own ca’cannies, sluggish obedience and inadequate resolve, the Committee for Struggle sent commissars to oversee the mobilisation. The city hummed with Red Guards. Three thousand armed sailors arrived from Kronstadt to lend assistance. The Central Soviet of Factory-Shop Committees coordinated preparations. The Union of Metalworkers – by far the most powerful union in Russia – put its money and expertise at the Committee for Struggle’s disposal.
Kerensky’s appointees to the effort, Savinkov and Filonenko, strove to keep watch on the Bolsheviks at least as assiduously as to forestall Kornilov. The notion that these two were in charge of Petrogad’s defences was an obvious fiction. At best, they were onlookers to Soviet and grassroots work.
The Bolsheviks were indispensable to the measures. So much so that when several of their members escaped from detention in the Second District Militia headquarters, the Committee for Struggle agreed, extraordinarily, that ‘in order to participate in the common struggle’ they should remain free.