Collapse of the Kornilov affair

On 14 September 1917 (1 September in the Julian calendar), in Mogilev, General Mikhail Alekseyev, the new chief of staff to the commander-in-chief, formally arrested General Lavr Kornilov and his closest associates. The day before, in Petrograd, General Aleksandr Krymov, commander of the troops sent against the capital, had shot himself. The revolt that a week earlier had shaken Russia ended without a single shot being fired. The British chronology of the war records the collapse of the revolt under 13 September and Kornilov’s surrender under 14 September.

The cavalry that melted away

From the start Krymov’s expedition was badly prepared. The cavalry trains were strung out over eight railway lines, and there was a shortage of field telegraph, food and fodder. The Caucasian Native Cavalry Division, the “Savage Division”, numbered according to Chamberlin only 1,350 horsemen and was short of 600 rifles. Kornilov himself did not set out with the troops and stayed in Mogilev. Railwaymen tore up the tracks and diverted the troop trains onto sidings, and at every station agitators from the soviets, from the local garrisons and from Bolshevik organisations were waiting. They told the soldiers that they were being led against the lawful government, that Kerensky had given them freedom and that Kornilov wanted to bring back the officer’s stick and the death penalty. Few people in 1917 wanted to die, still less in a civil war.

The Savage Division was stranded at Vyritsa station, where the tracks had been torn up. On 11 September a Muslim delegation organised by the soviets arrived there, including a grandson of Imam Shamil, the hero of the Caucasian highlanders. Its speeches in the languages of the Caucasus quickly undermined the horsemen’s trust in their officers. On 12 September the division’s commander, Prince Dmitry Bagration, ordered all action against government troops to cease, and on 13 September a delegation in Caucasian dress assured the government in Petrograd of its loyalty. It was the same with the Cossacks of the 3rd Cavalry Corps, stationed in the area of Luga. Power in the regiments was taken over by soldiers’ committees, which hastened to give assurances of obedience to the Provisional Government.

The only ones who did not fail were those on whom Kornilov had not been counting. The conspirators from the Petrograd officers’ organisations, who were to have provoked disturbances in the capital, vanished, some of them, as Chamberlin wrote, together with the funds. The ataman of the Don Cossacks, Aleksey Kaledin, on whose support the general had been counting, had to flee arrest by a roundabout route to Novocherkassk. The commander of the South-Western Front, General Anton Denikin, and his chief of staff, General Sergei Markov, were imprisoned by the front committee on 11 September in Berdichev.

Krymov’s death

When defeat was already obvious, Krymov accepted an invitation to Petrograd, passed to him by a former subordinate, Colonel Sergei Samarin, head of the war minister’s office. On 13 September (31 August Old Style) he presented himself to Kerensky, who accused him of deliberate mutiny. The course of the conversation is not known exactly. Soon after it Krymov shot himself in the chest. According to Chamberlin he did so in the flat of one of his officers, according to other accounts immediately after leaving the prime minister’s office. He died a few hours later in the Nikolayevsky Military Hospital. Denikin wrote that the hospital staff tore the bandages off the dying general, hurling abuse at him. There were also rumours that Krymov had not committed suicide at all, but none of them was ever confirmed. His widow was permitted only a night-time funeral, attended by no more than nine people.

Arrest at the Stavka

The matter of Mogilev remained to be settled. On 12 September Kerensky himself took the post of commander-in-chief and appointed Alekseyev chief of staff. The old general, who sympathised with Kornilov’s programme but did not believe his undertaking could succeed, accepted the post above all so that the liquidation of the revolt would be as lenient as possible for those involved. Kornilov rejected urgings to flee. He told the officers of the shock regiment loyal to him to remain calm, because he did not want “a single drop of fraternal blood to be shed”. At the same time, as the documents show, during the negotiations with Alekseyev he still sent Krymov an instruction to act independently as far as possible.

Alekseyev came to the Stavka urged on by Kerensky, who was in turn under pressure from the soviets demanding a ruthless reckoning with the conspirators. On 14 September he arrested Kornilov, his chief of staff General Aleksandr Lukomsky, the quartermaster-general Ivan Romanovsky and Colonel Yuri Pluschevsky-Pluschik. A day later an investigating commission arrived, headed by the military-naval prosecutor Józef Szabłowski, which made further arrests. According to Lukomsky, its members treated the prisoners kindly from the start. Soon the arrested men were taken to a former monastery in nearby Bykhov, where they were joined by the generals arrested in Berdichev.

The revolution turns left

The revolt claimed few victims, but there were lynchings. In Vyborg, according to Chamberlin, soldiers drowned ten officers suspected of sympathising with Kornilov, and in Helsinki the sailors of the battleship Petropavlovsk shot four officers who had refused to sign a declaration of loyalty to the government. The officers felt betrayed by the prime minister, who had first himself summoned the cavalry to the capital and then imprisoned the commander-in-chief and several of the most senior commanders. The soldiers began to see a “Kornilovite” in every officer. What was left of discipline in the army fell apart.

The biggest winners turned out to be the Bolsheviks. It was they who had organised the defence of the capital most effectively, and the Red Guard kept the weapons issued for the fight against Kornilov. On the night of 13–14 September (31 August–1 September Old Style) the Petrograd Soviet for the first time adopted a Bolshevik resolution, calling for immediate peace negotiations, the confiscation of landed estates and workers’ control in industry. According to Chamberlin, 279 delegates voted for it, 115 against, and 51 abstained. There were, however, few delegates in the hall, and the moderate socialists still hoped to regain their majority. Within a few weeks the Bolsheviks took over the soviets of both capitals. Kerensky, who emerged from the Kornilov affair as the victor, had in reality lost the confidence of both right and left.