Kornilov affair

On the afternoon of 8 September 1917 (26 August by the Julian calendar), Vladimir Nikolayevich Lvov, a Duma deputy and former Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod in the first Provisional Government, came to the office of Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky in the Winter Palace. He had come straight from Mogilev, from the headquarters of the commander-in-chief, General Lavr Kornilov. He brought something that Kerensky understood as an ultimatum: the general demanded the introduction of martial law in Petrograd, the transfer to him of all military and civil power, and the resignation of all the ministers. That same evening the premier, convinced that he was dealing with a conspiracy, had Lvov arrested, and during the night he dismissed Kornilov from his post. So began the Kornilov affair, also called the Kornilov revolt or putsch, one of the turning points of the Russian Revolution.

The premier and the general

The conflict had been growing since the end of July, when Kerensky entrusted Kornilov with the supreme command. The general demanded the death penalty in the rear as well, a reduced role for the soldiers’ committees, and the militarisation of the railways and the arms industry. The premier, who had to reckon with the soviets, delayed. At the State Conference in Moscow at the end of August the right greeted Kornilov as a saviour, and he himself warned that without a change of policy Russia would lose Riga. On 3 September the Germans did indeed enter Riga. Some read the fall of the city as proof of the army’s disintegration, others as a pretext for “restoring order”.

Despite their mutual distrust, Kerensky and Kornilov tried to reach an understanding. The intermediary was Boris Savinkov, the de facto head of the war ministry, who was in Mogilev on 5 and 6 September (23–24 August Old Style). He agreed with the general that the Petrograd Military District would be subordinated to the Stavka, but that the capital itself would remain under the government, and that a cavalry corps would come to the city, which would if necessary introduce martial law and defend the government against the Bolsheviks. The government feared a repeat of the July Days. Savinkov asked that the corps should not be commanded by General Aleksandr Krymov, known for his monarchist views, and that the Caucasian Native Cavalry Division, known as the Savage Division, should not be sent. Kornilov, however, did not change his orders. The 3rd Cavalry Corps and the Savage Division, concentrated around Velikiye Luki and Nevel, set off towards Petrograd, and command of the whole expedition was given to none other than Krymov. Under his secret orders, in the event of a Bolshevik rising he was to occupy the capital, disarm the garrison and the population and disperse the soviets. At the Stavka the composition of a new government with Kornilov at its head was already being discussed.

Lvov’s mission

Into this game stepped Lvov, a man of good will but talkative and inclined to overrate his own role. He first visited Kerensky on 4 September (22 August Old Style). He presented himself as the envoy of influential public circles and urged the premier to broaden the government with politicians of the right. What Kerensky said to him remains disputed to this day. The premier later testified that he had only wanted to find out what lay behind Lvov. Lvov claimed that he had been given consent to negotiate a reconstruction of the government. On the evening of 6 September and the morning of 7 September (24–25 August Old Style) he talked in Mogilev with Kornilov, to whom in turn he presented himself as the premier’s personal envoy. The general concluded that Kerensky was ready to step aside. He told Lvov that he saw the way out in martial law in Petrograd and the concentration of all power in the hands of the commander-in-chief, “of course until the Constituent Assembly”. He offered Kerensky the portfolio of minister of justice and Savinkov the war ministry. He added that he could not vouch for their lives in Petrograd and invited both to the Stavka, where he would guarantee their safety.

On his return Lvov came to Kerensky at the Winter Palace. According to the premier, the conversation began a few minutes after five in the afternoon. Lvov presented the general’s words in a form that sounded like an ultimatum and, at Kerensky’s request, wrote them down on a sheet of paper: Kornilov proposed declaring martial law in Petrograd, transferring all military and civil power to the commander-in-chief and dismissing all the ministers, including the premier, until a new cabinet was formed by the commander-in-chief. He also warned Kerensky not to go to Mogilev. Later Lvov insisted that he had passed on only “various wishes in the sense of strengthening the government”.

The conversation on the Hughes apparatus

Kerensky, a lawyer by profession, decided to obtain proof. At about eight in the evening, together with his associate Vasily Vyrubov, he contacted Kornilov by direct telegraph line from the war ministry building. Lvov was supposed to be present but was late. The general had been waiting at the apparatus for over ten minutes, so the premier began the conversation on his own, presenting himself as Kerensky and Lvov at the same time. He asked whether he could act on the information passed on by Lvov, and then, speaking as Lvov, whether the “definite decision” was to be carried out. Kornilov, convinced that they were discussing matters agreed earlier, replied that he confirmed the picture of the situation he had given Lvov and “earnestly asked” the premier to come to Mogilev, preferably together with Savinkov, and “in any case”. Kerensky announced that he would leave the next day. Not once did he name any specific demands.

For the premier the general’s answers confirmed the conspiracy. Kornilov’s supporters later regarded this conversation as a provocation: the general had, after all, confirmed only the invitation to the Stavka, not an ultimatum whose content nobody had quoted in the conversation. Back at the palace, Kerensky had Lvov repeat the whole story in the presence of a witness hidden behind a curtain, a senior official of the capital’s militia, and then, at about ten in the evening, told him that he was under arrest. Lvov spent the night under guard in the next room.

The night session of the government

Kerensky informed Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Nekrasov of everything, and also Savinkov, who urged him in vain to talk to the general directly. During the night he summoned the ministers and called the commander-in-chief’s conduct a mutiny. According to some accounts, the session was stormy and Kerensky demanded extraordinary powers for himself. In the end the ministers gave him full power to master the situation and placed themselves at his disposal. The ministers from the Kadet party, who had already announced their departure, resigned and stopped coming to their offices, unwilling to take part in the reckoning with a general on whom they had been counting.

During the night of 8–9 September an unnumbered telegram, signed simply “Kerensky”, went to Mogilev. The premier ordered Kornilov to hand over his duties immediately to his chief of staff, General Aleksandr Lukomsky, and to come to Petrograd. By law, dismissing the commander-in-chief required a decision of the whole government. At the Stavka, where a few hours earlier there had been a conviction that everything was going smoothly, the telegram was at first taken for a forgery. Kornilov still managed to inform Petrograd that Krymov’s corps would arrive near Petrograd on 10 September (28 August Old Style) and that martial law should be declared a day later.

Conspiracy or misunderstanding

The next day the general refused to give up his command, Lukomsky refused to take it over, and Kornilov called on the nation to save the fatherland from a government which, in his view, was acting “under pressure from the Bolshevik majority of the soviets” in accordance with the plans of the German general staff. Krymov’s cavalry did not stop.

Historians still argue about what actually happened on 8 September. Kerensky presented the affair until the end of his life as a carefully prepared conspiracy of the right, and Soviet historiography spoke of the “Kornilovshchina”, a counter-revolutionary attempt at dictatorship. Richard Pipes, and before him George Katkov, argued instead that it was rather Kerensky who exploited a misunderstanding to get rid of an inconvenient rival and present himself as the defender of the revolution. Many historians, among them William Chamberlin, accept an intermediate version: in Kornilov’s entourage a coup was indeed being prepared, Kerensky himself had summoned the cavalry corps to the capital, and Lvov, passing each side a distorted version of the other’s words, unwittingly broke the threads of a conspiracy he did not fully understand. The American historian Mark Steinberg called the whole affair “a strange mixture of conspiracy and confusion”.