Concretely, the party’s approach was to push for the maximum possible bottom-up mobilisation against Kornilov, without supporting the Provisional Government. The journalist Chamberlin describes them as defending the government with ‘tongue in cheek’.
And, amid the self-organisation and mass meetings, a familiar demand returned. ‘In view of the emerging bourgeois counterrevolutionary movement,’ insisted a group of pipe factory workers, ‘all power must be transferred to the soviet of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies.’ On the 29th, thousands of Putilov workers announced for rule by ‘representatives of the revolutionary classes’. Workers at the Novo-Admiralteysky shipbuilding plant demanded power ‘be put into the hands of the workers, soldiers and poorer peasantry, and be responsible to the soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants deputies’.
‘All Power to the Soviets’ had definitively returned.
‘No disturbances expected,’ Kerensky wired to Krimov, desperate to keep him away. ‘There is no need for your corps.’
As if, by that point, Kerensky controlled Krimov. But no more did Krimov control his own troops. The Ussuriysky Cossack Mounted Division, still stalled at Yamburg (now known as Kingisepp), was surrounded by crowds from the Narva and Yamburg soviets, military units, mass organisations and local factories, plus a delegation led by Tsereteli. A reading of Kerensky’s proclamation about Kornilov was enough to dampen the Cossacks’ resolve.
Krimov himself, with the First Don Cossacks, was blocked, hemmed in, besieged, by men of the 20,000-strong garrison at Luga. Street orators circled the train endlessly, yelling entreaties through the windows, to the Cossacks’ bewilderment and Krimov’s rage. Kornilov ordered him to push on the last miles to Petrograd, but the Luga garrison would not allow it – and by that time, the Cossacks were not minded to argue. The incensed Krimov could only watch his men shuffle away to various spontaneous mass meetings, their mettle dwindling before his eyes.
Late on the 29th, in Petrograd, the telegram of his co-conspirators Dyusimeter and Finisov at last reached Sidorin. A chilling prod: ‘Act at once according to instructions.’ They were requesting that helpful riot.
But it was too late, as even its supporters on the right had been forced to acknowledge. General Alexeev, seeing that the cause of the coup was hopeless, threatened to commit suicide if the plan to engineer a provocation went ahead.
By 30 August, the Kornilov Revolt had collapsed.
‘Without firing a single shot we were victorious,’ Kerensky wrote, ten years later. The ‘we’ was breathtakingly tendentious.
Lenin received all Russian news after a delay. He was late to the news of the threat, and late to the news that it had been averted. On the 30th, as the CC met in Petrograd, a city now breathing out, he wrote to them in haste.
What Lenin sent was not an explicit mea culpa for claiming that counterrevolution was ‘a carefully thought-out ploy on the part of the Mensheviks and SRs’. Yet the letter perhaps contained an implicit one, in its expression of sheer astonishment at this ‘most unexpected … and downright unbelievably sharp turn in events’. Of course, any such change must entail a shift. ‘Like every sharp turn,’ he wrote, ‘it [the circumstance] calls for a revision and change of tactics.’
In Zurich earlier that year, trying to convert the Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu to revolutionary defeatism, Lenin had coaxed him with what would become a famous phrase. ‘One must always’, he said, ‘try to be as radical as reality itself.’ And what is a radicalism that does not surprise?
Reality, radical, now stunned him.
It has sometimes been insinuated that during the Kornilov Crisis, the Bolsheviks pursued their energetic, effective non-collaborative cooperation with the government under Lenin’s guidance. This is false: by the time his instructions began to arrive, the party had been in the Committee for Struggle for days, and the revolt was largely played out. The course he outlined, however, did amount to a pleasing post factum legitimation.
He did not spell out what he would consider ‘permissible’ cooperation with the Mensheviks and SRs he had so recently denounced as beyond the pale, but he did imply its necessity. And ‘we shall fight Kornilov, of course, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky’, he said, which was, broadly, just how things had been. The very day he wrote, the Moscow Bolshevik Sotsial-demokrat said: ‘The revolutionary proletariat cannot tolerate either the dictatorship of Kornilov or of Kerensky.’
‘We expose his weakness,’ Lenin wrote, by pointing out Kerensky’s vacillation and by making maximalist demands – the transfer of estates to peasants, workers’ control, the arming of workers. That last, of course, had already been met. The approving scribble Lenin appended to his letter before sending it was understandable: ‘Having read six issues of Rabochy after this was written, I must say our views fully coincide.’
On the 30th, Kornilov’s crack Savage Division raised a red flag. The Ussuriysky Cossacks pledged loyalty to the Provisional Government. General Denikin was incarcerated by his own troops. Commanders from other fronts began to announce for the government, against the rightist conspiracy. At Luga, where Krimov received spurious alerts from Finisov and Dyusimeter that ‘Bolshevik disorders’ would break out any moment, the Don Cossacks had become so radicalised that they muttered about arresting him.
That afternoon, an envoy from the government arrived. The man promised Krimov safety, and invited him to meet Kerensky in the capital.
In his ineffectual way, Kerensky wanted to clean house. But, even though it had saved Petrograd, the left frightened him almost as much as the right. For example, while he sacked Savinkov for his proximity to various plotters, he replaced him with Palchinsky, whose politics were extremely similar – and one of whose first actions was to close down the Bolshevik Rabochy and Gorky’s Novaya zhizn. As if to underline the point, as chief of staff Kerensky appointed General Alexeev, a man virtually identical in his views to Kornilov.
The ship sinking, rats began to scurry, shocked, shocked! by any suggestion that they might have supported Kornilov. Rodzianko declared grandly that ‘to start internecine warfare and argument now is a crime against the motherland’. All he knew of the conspiracy, he blustered, was what he read in the papers.
In his cell, the preposterous Vladimir Lvov got word that the tide had turned. He sent Kerensky his hearty congratulations, delighting that he had ‘delivered a friend from Kornilov’s clutches’.
That evening, when Krimov arrived, it was to a quiet city.
On the morning of 31 August, Krimov and Kerensky met for a heated discussion in the Winter Palace. Precisely what was said is unknown.