employers abandoned the ailing mines and metallurgical plants, leaving the committees struggling to maintain production. The idea of workers' control had not emanated from any political party, but the willingness of Bolsheviks, anarchists, and Left SRs to support it was a majorfactor in their growing popularity. By contrast, the insistence of moderate socialists that workers' control merely exacerbated chaos in the economy turned workers against them.
In the countryside conflict also began to increase during the summer. The first signs of trouble came when peasants resisted government attempts to get them to hand over grain. The war had seen a fall in the volume of grain marketed - it fell from one-quarter of the harvest before 1914 to one-sixth by 1917 -since peasants had no incentive to sell grain when there were no goods to buy and when the currency was losing its value. Concerned to feed the army and the towns, the government introduced a state monopoly on the sale of grain, but its attempts to induce peasants to sell grain at fixed prices provoked antagonism, peasants preferring to conceal grain or turn it into moonshine. More ominously, peasants grew restive at the slow progress towards solving the land question. The government had set up an unwieldy structure of land committees to prepare the details of the reform, thereby heightening peasant expectations, but was loath to
begin land redistribution while millions of soldiers were still in the field. In addition, it was torn between the Kadets, who insisted that landlords must be fully recompensed for land taken from them, and Chernov, the Ministerof Agriculture, who wished to see the orderly transfer of gentry estates to the land committees. From early summer, peasants began to take the law into their own hands. They acted cautiously at first, unilaterally reducing or refusing to pay rents, grazing cattle illegally, stealing wood from the landlord's forests, and, increasingly, taking over uncultivated tracts of gentry land on the pretext that this would boost the nation's grain supply. In the non- black-earth zone, where dairy and livestock farming were paramount, peasants concentrated on getting their hands on meadowland and pasture. Because of the inability of local authorities to react, illegal acts soared, levelling off somewhat during the harvest, but climbing sharply again from September. By autumn peasants were seizing the land, equipment, and livestock on gentry estates and redistributing them outright, especially in Ukraine. As one peasant explained: 'The
By summer the discourse of democracy put into circulation by the February Revolution was being overtaken by a discourse of class, a shift symbolized by the increasing use of the word 'comrade' instead of 'citizen' as the favoured mode of address. Given the underdevelopment of class relations in Russia, and the key role played in politics by such non-class groups as soldiers and nationalist movements, this was a remarkable development. After all, the language of class, at least in its Marxist guise, had entered politics only after 1905; yet it had been disseminated through endless strikes, demonstrations, speeches, leaflets, newspapers, and labour organizations. The layer of 'conscious' workers, drawn mainly from the ranks of skilled, literate young men, served as the conduit through which ideas of class and socialism passed to the wider workforce. The discourse proved easily assimilable, since it played on a deeply rooted distinction in popular culture between 'them', the
bottom. In 1917 'we' could signify the working class, 'proletarian youth', 'working women', the 'toiling people', or 'revolutionary democracy'. 'They' could signify capitalists, landlords, army generals or, at its most basic,
The discourse of class served to cement two contending power blocs and to articulate fundamentally opposed sets of values and visions of the social order. It was at the root of the process of political polarization that escalated from late summer. Doubtless the salience of this discourse was linked to the way in which the discourse of nation became appropriated by conservatives. Faced with what they perceived to be processes of elemental revolt and national disintegration, the ? Kadets appealed to the nation to cast aside class and sectional interest. g Yet if the class and nation became sharply counterposed, the discourse e of class was in part an attempt to contest the Kadet vision of the nation-g under-siege and to redefine the meaning of the nation in terms of the
The fall of the Provisional Government
Kerensky became prime minister following the July Days, presenting himself as the 'man of destiny' summoned to 'save Russia'. His posturing merely masked his impotence. On 19 July, in a bid to halt the disintegration of the army, he appointed General L. С Kornilov Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Kornilov agreed to take up the post on condition that there was no interference by soldiers' committees in operational orders and that the death penalty was extended from soldiers at the front - already agreed - to those at the rear. Kerensky hoped to use the reactionary general to bolster his image as a strong man and restore the frayed ties with the Kadets, many of whom were openly talking about
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6. General Kornilov
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the need for a military dictatorship to save Russia from 'anarchy*. Kerensky and Kornilov agreed on the need to establish firm government' - code for suppressing the Bolsheviks - and each hoped to use the other to achieve his more particular ends. On 26 August, however, Kerensky lashed out at Kornilov after he received what seemed to be an ultimatum demanding that military and civil authority be placed in the hands of a supreme commander. Accusing Kornilov of conspiring to overthrow the government - and historians dispute as to whether he actually was- he sent a telegram relieving him of his duties. When Kornilov ignored the telegram and ordered troops to advance on Petrograd, he appears to have moved into open rebellion. His attempted coup, however, was poorly planned and the clandestine
counter-revolutionary organizations that had looked to him as their saviourfailed to respond. In a humiliating bid to save his government, Kerensky was forced to turn to the very Soviets he had been planning to bring to heel, since they alone could prevent Kornilov's troops reaching the capital.
Kornilov's rebellion dramatically demonstrated the danger posed by the 'counter-revolution' and starkly underlined the feebleness of the Kerensky regime. No one, however, could have predicted that its immediate consequence would be to allow the Bolsheviks to stage a dramatic recovery, following their defeat in the July Days. On 31 August the Petrograd Soviet passed the Bolshevik resolution 'On Power', and the Moscow Soviets followed on 5 September. In the first half of that month, 80 Soviets in large and medium towns backed the call for a transfer of power to the Soviets, although no one was entirely sure what the slogan 'All Power to the Soviets' - which belonged just as much to anarchists, Left SRs, and Menshevik Internationalists as to the Bolsheviks - actually meant. Whilst in hiding Lenin had written his most Utopian work,
