And so it fell to elements in the army to take up the cause of the political right. Most Russian military commanders were steadily losing any respect they had for Kerenski. Initially Kornilov and Kerenski had got on well together, and had agreed on the need for greater governmental control over the soviets and for the reintroduction of capital punishment for military desertion. Both called for the restoration of ‘order’. But Kerenski was soon irked by Kornilov, who allowed himself to be greeted ecstatically by right-wing political sympathizers on his visits from the Eastern front. Kerenski, having summoned Kornilov to Petrograd to stiffen the Provisional Government’s authority, changed his mind and countermanded the transfer of any troops. On 27 August, Kornilov decided that this was a sign of the cabinet’s ultimate abandonment of the programme of necessary action already agreed with him. He pressed onwards to Petrograd in open mutiny.18
Kerenski stood down the Second Coalition and governed through a small inner group of trusted ministers. The emergency was made even more acute by the bad news from the Eastern front, where Riga had fallen to the Germans only five days before. Kerenski had no choice but to turn for assistance to the very Petrograd Soviet which he had lately been trying to bring to heel. The response was immediate and positive. Bolsheviks as well as Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries went out to confront Kornilov’s troops and persuade them to abandon their mission to Petrograd. The efforts of this united front of socialist activists were crowned with success. The troops halted their own trains from moving further towards Petrograd and General Kornilov was put under arrest. His mutiny had ended in fiasco.
Meanwhile popular discontent increased as conditions in the country worsened. Soldiers wanted peace, peasants wanted land, workers wanted job security and higher real wages. Not only the working class but also the large number of ‘middling’ people faced a winter of hunger. Shopkeepers, carriage-drivers and providers of various other services shared the fear that bread and potatoes might soon become unobtainable; and their small businesses were disrupted by the general economic chaos.19 Moreover, the urban cost of living rose sharply: the price index more than doubled between March and October.20 The wage-rises negotiated after Nicholas II’s abdication did not keep pace with inflation. Unemployment, too, was becoming widespread; and there was no state welfare for those thrown out of work. All workers in factories, mines and other enterprises felt the adverse effects of a collapsing economy. They formed a united front against their employers.
Kerenski could not begin to satisfy these desires except if he withdrew from the war. And yet if he were indeed to withdraw from the war, he would be castigated by all parties — including the Bolsheviks — for betraying Russia’s vital interests. As it was, he was being subjected to Lenin’s wholly unfair accusation of plotting to hand over Petrograd to the Germans.21 Nor did Kerenski stand much chance of surviving in power once the elections to the Constituent Assembly were held. Again Lenin made charges of malpractice. Kerenski, he claimed, was deliberately delaying the elections. In fact a huge administrative task, especially in wartime, was entailed in the accurate compilation of voters’ rolls. Nevertheless Kerenski’s prospects were far from good once the process had been completed.
Already the Provisional Government was confronted by direct social disruption. Peasants in each village put aside their mutual rivalries. The wealthier among them joined with the poor against the gentry landlords. Their activity took the form of illegally using arable land, grabbing crops and equipment, cutting timber and grazing livestock. But already in March there were three cases of outright seizure of land owned by gentry. In July, 237 such cases were reported. Admittedly there were only 116 cases in October;22 but this was not a sign that the peasants were calming down. A truer index of their mood was their increasing willingness to attack landowners and burn their houses and farming property. Whereas there had been only five destructive raids of this sort in July, there were 144 in October.23 After the harvest had been taken in, the peasantry was delivering a final warning to both the government and the landed gentry that obstruction of peasant aspirations would no longer be tolerated.
Simultaneously the slogan of ‘workers’ control’ gained in appeal to the working class. In most cases this meant that elective committees of workers claimed the right to monitor and regulate managerial decisions on finance, production and employment. In a few cases the committees completely removed their managers and foremen and took over the enterprises. Such a step was taken most often in Ukraine and the Urals, where owners had always been uncompromising towards the labour movement. Miners in the Don Basin, for example, went as far as taking their managers captive, releasing them only after Kerenski sent in army units. But even the less extreme versions of ‘workers’ control’ involved a massive interference with capitalist practices. In July it was in force in 378 enterprises. By October it had been spread to 573 and involved two fifths of the industrial working class.24
The sailors and soldiers, too, were self-assertive. First they elected their committees in the garrisons, but quickly after the February Revolution committees were also set up by troops at the front. Commands by officers were subject to scrutiny and challenge with increasing intensity. The hierarchy of military command was no longer fully functional, especially after the Kornilov mutiny in August. Furthermore, troops caused a problem not only collectively but also as individuals. The combined effect of the unpopularity of the June offensive and the news that land was being seized in the villages induced tens of thousands of conscripts to desert. Peasants-in-uniform wanted their share of the redistributed property of the gentry. Leaping into railway carriages with their rifles over their shoulders, they added to the disorder of transport and public governance.25
In trying to deal with such a crisis, the Provisional Government lacked the aura of legitimacy that a popular election might have conferred upon it. Ministers since February 1917 had perforce relied upon persuasion to control the populace. For the disbanding of the tsarist police limited Kerenski’s scope for repression. So, too, did the unwillingness of the army garrisons to give unstinted obedience to the Provisional Government’s orders.
Kerenski for some weeks after the Kornilov mutiny ruled by means of a temporary five-man Directory consisting of himself, the two armed service chiefs, the obscure Menshevik A. M. Nikitin and the recent Minister for Foreign Affairs M. I. Tereshchenko. But this was an embarrassing mode of rule for a government claiming to be democratic and Kerenski badly needed to widen the political base of the government. On 14 September he therefore agreed to the convocation of a ‘Democratic Conference’ of all parties and organizations to the left of the Kadets; and Kerenski himself agreed to address the opening session. But the Conference turned into a shambles. The Bolsheviks attended only in order to declare their disgust with Kerenski. Quite apart from their opposition, the Conference remained too divided to be able to supply a consensus of support for Kerenski.26
Kerenski put on a show of his old confidence; he resolved to reassert governmental authority and started to send troops to acquire food supplies from the countryside by force. This stiffening of measures enabled him to persuade six Kadets into a Third Coalition on 27 September. Only seven out of the seventeen ministers were socialists, and anyway these socialists had policies hardly different from those of the liberals. The Provisional Government in its latest manifestation would neither offer radical social and economic reforms nor concentrate its diplomacy in quest of a peaceful end to the Great War.
The Democratic Conference proposed to lend a representative, consultative semblance to the Third Coalition by selecting a Provisional Council of the Russian Republic. This Council would include not only socialists but also liberals and would function as a quasi-parliamentary assembly until such time as the Constituent Assembly met. Formed on 14 October, it became known as the Pre-Parliament. To the Pre-Parliament’s frustration, however, Kerenski refused to limit his freedom of decision by making himself accountable to it. And the Pre-Parliament could not steel itself to stand up to him.27 Kerenski could and did ignore it whenever he liked. The long- winded debates in the Pre-Parliament simply brought its main participating parties — Kadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries — into deeper disrepute. Neither Kerenski nor the Pre-Parliament possessed the slightest popular respect.
Lenin, from his place of hiding in Helsinki, saw this disarray as a splendid opportunity for the Bolsheviks. Less words, more action! For Bolsheviks, the course of Russian politics since the February Revolution vindicated the party’s argument that two lines of development alone were possible: ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’. They declared that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had become agents of the bourgeoisie by dint of collaborating with liberal ministers and the magnates of capitalism.
By September Lenin was urging his party to seize power immediately (and he busily composed a treatise on
