Kerensky declares Kornilov a traitor

On 10 September 1917 (28 August in the Julian calendar) the morning newspapers, and before them special editions on the evening of 9 September, brought the news that the Prime Minister, Alexander Kerensky, and the commander-in-chief, General Lavr Kornilov, were in a state of open war. The press printed the Prime Minister’s proclamation, according to which Kornilov, through the deputy Vladimir Lvov, had demanded that he be handed “the entire fullness of civil and military power” and be allowed to form a new government at his own discretion. The Provisional Government had therefore authorised Kerensky to take firm steps in defence of the country, of freedom and of “the republican order”, had dismissed Kornilov, and had declared Petrograd and its surroundings under martial law. That day Kerensky telegraphed a further appeal to the population and forbade the railways to carry out any orders of the “former” commander-in-chief. Kornilov himself later wrote that on 10 September the government declared him a traitor to the fatherland. Russian sources state that in these days (28 or 29 August Old Style) Kerensky also sent the Senate a decree removing the general and his closest associates from their posts and committing them for trial “for mutiny”. The British chronology of the war records under this date that Kerensky assumed a dictatorship in Russia. In fact the ministers had already handed him extraordinary powers on the night of 8–9 September, when the conflict broke out.

A day of wavering

Kornilov did not give way. His chief of staff, General Aleksandr Lukomsky, refused to take over the command, and on the night of 9–10 September the railway telegraph spread across the country the general’s proclamation, which began with the words: “The Prime Minister’s telegram no. 4163 is, in the whole of its first part, a lie.” In it Kornilov claimed that it was not he who had sent Lvov to the government, but Lvov who had come to him as the Prime Minister’s envoy, and accused the government of acting, under Bolshevik pressure, in accordance with the plans of the German General Staff. The front commanders declared for the general. Anton Denikin of the South-Western Front telegraphed that he “would not go” with a government that was once again destroying the army, and the commander of the Northern Front, Vladislav Klembovsky, refused to take over the supreme command.

Ever more alarming news came from the front. According to press reports, in the afternoon Kornilov’s troops occupied Luga and disarmed its garrison, and in the evening the Savage Division reached the station of Vyritsa, about 40 kilometres from Tsarskoye Selo. It went no further, because the tracks had already been torn up. On the stock exchange share prices rose: the propertied classes had no doubt of the general’s victory. Kerensky remembered this day as the hardest, the day of “the greatest wavering”. As early as the small hours his entourage tried to present the whole affair as a misunderstanding. Leon Trotsky wrote that the Prime Minister even wanted to withdraw his proclamation from the newspapers, but it was already too late. In the evening the Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov came to the Winter Palace with an offer of mediation. He argued that strength was on Kornilov’s side and suggested as a solution handing power to General Mikhail Alekseyev, to whom Kornilov would submit. Even the Prime Minister’s close associates, Mikhail Tereshchenko and Nikolai Nekrasov, advised him to step down or to seek a compromise. Late in the evening the British ambassador, George Buchanan, on behalf of the representatives of all the Allied powers, offered the government their good offices to avert civil war. Tereshchenko rejected the offer the next day.

The soviets to the defence

The outcome, however, was decided by what was happening outside the palace. The news of the cavalry’s march on the capital acted on the soviets like an electric shock. On the evening of 9 September the joint executive committees of the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies and of peasants’ deputies set up the Committee for the People’s Struggle against Counter-Revolution, with three representatives each of the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks, together with delegates of the soviets and the trade unions. When on the evening of 10 September the candidacy of Alekseyev was already being considered in the Winter Palace, a delegation of the committee came to the Prime Minister and demanded that the revolt be crushed without mercy. The compromise plan collapsed, and the Kadets finally left the government.

The Bolsheviks, only recently accused of treason and hunted down after the July Days, suddenly became indispensable. Lenin, in hiding in Finland, summed up their tactics in the words: “We will fight Kornilov, but we will not support Kerensky.” The committee agreed to the formation of an armed workers’ militia, which in practice meant the revival and arming of the Red Guard. According to Chamberlin about 25,000 volunteers enrolled in it within a few days. Railwaymen held up the trains carrying cavalry and shunted them into sidings and tore up the tracks, telegraphists would not pass on the generals’ dispatches, and agitators went out to the troop trains to explain to the soldiers that they were being led against the lawful government. Kerensky entrusted the defence of the capital to Boris Savinkov, appointed Governor-General of Petrograd on the night of 8–9 September.

No one yet knew that the issue would be settled without a single shot. On 12 September Kerensky himself took over the supreme command and appointed Alekseyev his chief of staff. A few days later, on 17 September (4 September Old Style), Trotsky, who had been arrested at the beginning of August, walked out of Kresty prison on bail.