It is likely that Kerensky accused Krimov of mutiny, which Krimov would have unconvincingly denied. Like Kornilov, Krimov was furious at what seemed Kerensky’s duplicity, his inexplicable turnabout. At last too enervated to continue, Krimov agreed to a further interview and repaired to a friend’s apartment.
‘The last card for saving the motherland has been beaten,’ he said to his host. ‘Life is no longer worth living.’
Krimov excused himself to a private room. There he wrote a note to Kornilov, took out his pistol and shot himself in the heart.
The contents of his last letter remain unknown.
Kerensky ordered a commission of inquiry into the attempted coup. But still he tried to ingratiate himself with a right who despised him, limiting the investigation’s remit to individuals, rather than institutions. He proceeded with his plans to set up an authoritarian coalition of right socialists and liberals, strengthening the power of the Kadets.
But on the streets of Petrograd, it was the radical workers and soldiers who had defeated the conspiracy, and they were buoyed with confidence. The failure of the Kornilov Revolt pulled the political lever left again. Soldiers of the Petrograd Garrison proclaimed that ‘any coalition will be fought by all loyal sons of the people as they fought Kornilov’. Now they demanded a government of workers and poor peasants. The Second Machine Gun Regiment insisted that ‘the only way out of the present situation lies in transferring power into the hands of the working people’.
Previously neutral units were beginning to turn, as were workers in plants under the sway of moderates. A plethora of motions – Bolshevik, Left SR, Menshevik-International, unaffiliated – insisted on power to the soviets, left unity, a crackdown on counterrevolution, an exclusively socialist government to end the war. Martov’s comrade Larin reached the limit of exasparation with the pro-coalition Mensheviks, and came over to the Bolsheviks, along with several hundred workers.
Late in the afternoon of the 31st, the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviet debated the government, and its relation to it. Evoking the power and unity the Soviet had shown against Kornilov, its ability to save the city, Kamenev put forward a motion.
In Bolshevik terms, this proposal, like Kamenev himself, was decidedly moderate – but it represented a fundamental leftward break with Soviet practice. A repudiation of compromise. It called for a national government of representatives of the working class and poor peasantry only. The confiscation of manorial land without compensation, and its transfer to the peasants. Workers’ supervision of industry. A universal democratic peace. Albeit Kamenev airily announced that he was not ‘concerned … with the purely technical aspects of forming a government’, his motion was interpreted as a call for all power to the soviets.
At 7:30 p.m. the Executive Committees adjourned without a vote. Shortly after, the Petrograd Soviet itself met in its place. The mass of delegates talked for a long time under the harsh glare of the lamps, as the hands of the clocks reached slowly skyward. They discussed Kamenev’s proposal as August ended and September began, and they continued to discuss it as the world turned towards a new day.
There seemed to be a new, shared will for a government of the left. A pathway to socialist unity. To power.
9
September: Compromise
and Its Discontents
At 5 a.m. on 1 September, after a long, weary debate on Kamenev’s motion and on their relationship to the government in general, the Petrograd Soviet voted.
The SRs suggested the Executive Committees appoint a cabinet responsible to a ‘Provisional Revolutionary Government’, but still insisted that it include some bourgeois groups – though no Kadets. In these post-Kornilov hours, the Kadets were despised for their complicity in the conspiracies.
The SR proposal was rejected. Instead, the meeting voted in favour of Kamenev’s.
Soldiers outnumbered workers in the Soviet two to one, but many were still on duty, so only a relatively small fraction of the membership was present for the tally. And Kamenev’s proposal was ‘moderate’ compared to the ‘Leninism’ of the Sixth Party Congress. All the same, this was a profoundly charged moment.
In March, Bolshevik opposition to the Provisional Government had lost by a humiliating 19 votes to 400. In April, arguing against participation in the cabinet had got them 100 votes against 2,000. But now, even after the debacle of the July Days, months of crisis in government, economy and war, and the dramatic counterrevolutionary attempt, had utterly changed the lie of the political land. Now, with its members supported by left Mensheviks and Left SRs – who were by that point the majority of the SRs in the capital – the Petrograd Soviet for the first time adopted a Bolshevik resolution: 279 for, 115 against, and 51 abstentions.
The vote seemed to signal an opportunity. Perhaps the Bolsheviks and other socialists could find common ground.
Such collaborative aspirations extended to unlikely quarters. In his Finnish hide, Lenin sat down to write his document ‘On Compromises’.
At the Sixth Congress, he had described the soviets as advancing ‘like sheep to the abattoir’ behind their leaders. He had foreclosed any possibility of working with Mensheviks and SRs, insisted on the absolute necessity of a forceful seizure of power. But ‘now, and only now,’ he wrote, in another dizzying shift of perspective, ‘perhaps during only a few days or a week or two’, it appeared there was a chance for a socialist soviet government to be set up ‘in a perfectly peaceful way’.
Struck by the mass opposition to the Kadets, and by the soviets’ impressive mobilisation against Kornilov, Lenin proposed that his party ‘return’ to the pre-July demand, ‘All Power to the Soviets’ – which call had, in any case, returned unbidden. ‘We … may offer a voluntary compromise,’ he suggested, with the moderate socialists.
Lenin proposed that the SRs and Mensheviks could form an exclusively socialist government, responsible to local soviets. The Bolsheviks would remain outside that government – ‘unless a dictatorship of the proletariat and poor peasants has been realised’ – but they would not agitate for the seizure of power. Instead, assuming the convocation of a Constituent Assembly and freedom of propaganda, they would operate as a ‘loyal opposition’, striving to win influence within the soviets.
‘Perhaps this is already impossible?’ Lenin wrote of this appeal, in particular, to the rank and file of the Mensheviks and SRs. ‘Perhaps. But if there is even one chance in a hundred, the attempt at realising this opportunity is still worthwhile.’