Moscow State Conference

On the afternoon of 25 August 1917 (12 August in the Julian calendar), in the building of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky opened the State Conference. Called by the Provisional Government, the gathering of about 2,400 representatives of all social classes, parties and organisations was meant to unite the “living forces of the country” around the government. The sessions lasted until 28 August (15 August Old Style). Some studies, among them Orlando Figes, give the dates as 12–14 August Old Style. The conference passed no resolution, and its main event was the arrival of General Lavr Kornilov, commander-in-chief since the end of July, in whom the right saw its hero.

Why the conference

From the start the Provisional Government had no generally recognised representation of the nation behind it. Since the February Revolution the Duma had formally not sat, and the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies represented only part of society. The idea of calling an advisory assembly in which all classes and professions could have their say appeared soon after the resignation of Prince Lvov in July, and was taken up by Kerensky’s second coalition government. The conference had no legislative powers. After the July Days and the defeat in Galicia it was meant to be a demonstration of national unity.

According to the historian of the revolution William Chamberlin and Russian studies, 2,414 delegates came to the conference. The largest group, 488 people, were members of all four Dumas, followed by representatives of the co-operatives (313), trade unions (176), commercial, industrial and banking organisations (150), town dumas (147), zemstvos (118) and the army and navy (117). The soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies and the peasants’ soviets each received about a hundred seats. The organisers tried to balance right and left, but the organisations of the propertied classes received representation disproportionately large in relation to their numbers.

Strike and rumours

The Bolsheviks regarded the conference from the start as a gathering of the counter-revolution. Several of them belonged to the soviet delegation, but its chairman, the Menshevik Nikolay Chkheidze, did not allow them to read out a declaration condemning the conference and to walk out of the hall in protest. The Bolsheviks responded in another way. On the opening day, at their call, most Moscow workers went on strike, even though the Moscow Soviet had voted against the strike by a small majority. According to Russian sources more than 400,000 people stopped work. The trams did not run, restaurants and cafés were closed, including the buffet in the theatre, and the delegates had to see to their own meals.

Even more than the Bolsheviks, however, people feared a coup from the right. Rumours circulated in the city that the conservatives would use the gathering in the old capital to change the government. The Moscow Soviet, dominated by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, even gave Bolshevik agitators access to the barracks for three days. A few days after the conference the authorities placed under house arrest the grand dukes Michael Alexandrovich, brother of Nicholas II, and Paul Alexandrovich, uncle of the former emperor, but for lack of evidence they were soon released.

Kerensky opens the sessions

The auditorium of the theatre, where “Boris Godunov” was being staged, reflected the division of the country. On the right sat generals and officers wearing their decorations, industrialists, bankers and professors, supporters of the Kadets; on the left the leaders of the moderate socialists, trade union activists and soldiers delegated by the front committees. When one side applauded, the other kept silent. Kerensky sat exactly in the middle of the stage.

In his opening speech the prime minister warned above all the conspirators on the right, although for balance he also threatened the Bolsheviks. “Let all who have already once tried to raise an armed hand against the people’s power know that such attempts will be crushed with iron and blood,” he said. He addressed himself even more sharply to those who thought the time had come to overthrow the revolutionary government with the support of bayonets. He painted a grim picture of the country: the state was living through an hour of mortal danger, the cities were starving, transport was collapsing, production was falling, and the wealthy refused to make sacrifices for the state. He recalled that he himself had proposed to the government the partial restoration of the death penalty, but stressed that nobody had the right to present him with unconditional demands on the matter. On the first day ministers also spoke about the state of the country: Nikolai Avksentiev, the minister of the interior, Sergei Prokopovich, minister of trade and industry, and Nikolai Nekrasov, minister of finance.

Kornilov arrives

On 26 August (13 August Old Style) Kornilov arrived in Moscow. At the Alexandrovsky Station he was met by a guard of honour of officer cadets with a band and banners, and by delegations of conservative and military organisations. The general walked through a lane formed by his Turkmen bodyguard. Ladies showered him with flowers, and the Kadet speaker Fyodor Rodichev ended his welcome with the words: “Save Russia, and a grateful people will crown you.” Officers carried Kornilov out of the station on their shoulders. Then the general drove in an open car to pray before the miraculous icon in the Iverskaya Chapel, which the tsars used to visit before their coronation. In the evening there was a sharp exchange with Kerensky, who demanded that the general confine his speech to military matters. Kornilov replied that he would say what he saw fit.

On 27 August (14 August Old Style) the right side of the hall greeted Kornilov with a standing ovation. The left was silent, and the soldiers from the committees did not rise from their seats, for which the right showered them with insults. The speech written for the general by the commissar at the Stavka, Maximilian Filonenko, was not, however, a renunciation of obedience to the government. Kornilov assured his listeners that he was not an opponent of the soldiers’ committees, provided they did not interfere in operational orders. He spoke of falling production in the munitions factories, of the disintegration of the army, and of further defeats being inevitable if the government did not change its policy. “Only an army welded together by iron discipline (…) is capable of victory,” he argued. Best remembered was his warning: “We cannot allow order in the rear to be the result of the loss of Riga, and order on the railways to be bought at the price of surrendering Moldavia and Bessarabia to the enemy.”

Two Russias

The ataman of the Don Cossacks, General Alexey Kaledin, spoke more openly. He boasted that the Cossacks, who had never known serfdom, had not become drunk on the new freedom and had no deserters in their regiments, and he demanded that all soviets and committees be abolished, both in the army and in the rear. The right greeted this with a storm of applause, the left with whistles. Kaledin was answered by a young Cossack officer, Nagayev, a delegate from the Caucasus front, who denied that the ataman could speak in the name of all Cossacks. When someone in the officers’ box shouted “German marks!”, Kerensky demanded that the man identify himself, and when nobody spoke up, he declared that Lieutenant Nagayev and everyone present would have to make do with “the silence of a coward”.

In all, several dozen speakers took the floor. A programme similar to Kornilov’s and Kaledin’s, with the abolition of the soviets and committees, war to a victorious end and the restoration of the death penalty, was put forward by, among others, the Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov and the conservative Vasily Shulgin. The former war minister Alexander Guchkov said that the present government “is sick because it does not exist”, and the industrialist Pavel Ryabushinsky that Russia was ruled by dreams, ignorance and demagogy. In favour of continuing the reforms spoke Chkheidze, who presented the programme of “revolutionary democracy”, the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli and the veterans of the revolutionary movement: Georgi Plekhanov, Peter Kropotkin and the “grandmother of the revolution”, Yekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya. The former commander-in-chief, General Mikhail Alekseyev, also spoke. The few gestures of reconciliation, such as the public handshake between Tsereteli and the industrialist Alexander Bublikov, did not dispel the impression that the country was divided into two hostile camps.

Kerensky’s last speech

Kerensky closed the sessions. His closing speech went down in history as the picture of a man at the end of his strength. The prime minister spoke incoherently and fell into hysterical pathos: “Let my heart turn to stone, let all the strings of faith in man perish (…) I shall throw far away the keys to my heart, which loves people, I shall think only of the state.” A woman’s voice from the hall called out that his heart would not let him. In the end the delegates interrupted him with applause, and when he absent-mindedly started to leave the stage, he had to be called back to close the conference formally. Summing up the sessions, the prime minister stated that representatives of all classes, parties and nationalities had been able to speak openly about how to save the state, and that the conference had come out in favour of continuing the war and of loyalty to the allies.

Significance

The conference was meant to be a demonstration of national unity, and it ended by discrediting it. It showed that Russia had split into two camps that could no longer talk to each other: the propertied classes, officers and liberals, who sought salvation in strong government and discipline, and the moderate socialists, who defended the soviets and the gains of the revolution. Outside the hall remained the workers and soldiers, who were following the Bolsheviks in ever greater numbers. Kerensky, who had tried to balance between right and left, left Moscow weakened, while the right had found in Kornilov its “man on a white horse”. The general’s warning soon came true: on 3 September the Germans took Riga. A few days later the dispute between the prime minister and the commander-in-chief turned into open conflict, known as the Kornilov affair. Soviet historiography presented the State Conference as a conspiracy of the forces of counter-revolution that prepared the “Kornilov revolt”.