Jen Roesch describes one of
the decisive turning points in the 1917 revolution.
July 12, 2013
THE BOLSHEVIKS' popularity
grew through late July and August. By its Sixth Congress that began July 26,
the party claimed 240,000 members.
This popularity was fed by the
growing sentiment that the second coalition government, led by Alexander
Kerensky, wasn't prepared to defend the revolution against the right. Kerensky
was viewed as too conciliatory to the generals and the capitalists. Many saw
the soviets themselves as compromised and weak, as Kerensky took more power
into his own hands.
Bolshevik resolutions began to
be passed in the soviets. Peasant seizures of land increased. Soldiers
continued to desert in large numbers, and the militancy of Russia's factory
workers grew.
These developments deeply worried
both the liberals and conservatives among the capitalist class, the officers
and the landowners. Many had hoped an alliance of the moderate parties could
constrain and channel the revolution into the formation of a stable bourgeois
government. But these forces, too, were becoming impatient, and began to look
to a military solution.
Their view was stated simply
by Pavel Milyukov, the leader of the Kadets. He told his party's central
committee, "We should no longer commit ourselves to the revolution. Quite
the opposite: we need to prepare and accumulate the strength to fight it."
Kerensky found himself in a
difficult position. He feared that attempts at repression would only draw the
masses back into the streets and threaten to bring down the government. At the
same time, he couldn't unite his government around a reform program that could
blunt the anger of the workers, soldiers and peasants.
So he attempted a difficult
balancing act. Kerensky found himself increasingly isolated. On one side stood
the Bolsheviks, who increasingly spoke for the mass of workers and soldiers. On
the other was the capitalists, officers and landowners, who were rapidly
turning their back on his government.
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THESE DYNAMICS were revealed
with great clarity at the Moscow State Conference, held August 12-14, which
Kerensky had called as a consultative body designed to rally support.
Series: The Russian
Revolution
In 2007, Socialist Worker
marked the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 with a yearlong
series outlining its course and consequences.
The Bolsheviks called for a
general strike to protest the conference. Though narrowly opposed by the Moscow
soviet, the strike was still enormously successful. A member of the Bolsheviks'
Moscow Committee recorded that "the strike came off magnificently. There
were no lights, no tramcars; the factories and shops were closed, and the
railroad yards and stations; even the waiters in the restaurants had gone on
strike."
Miliukov confirmed: "The
delegates coming to the Conference could not ride on the tramways, nor lunch in
the restaurants."
As Leon Trotsky described:
"In spite of the resolutions of the soviets...the masses followed the
Bolsheviks. Four hundred thousand workers went on strike in Moscow and the
suburbs upon the summons of a party, which for five weeks had been under
continual blows, and whose leaders were still in hiding or in prison."
Inside the conference, the
forces of the right dominated. Gen. Kornilov emerged as the leading figure
around which the right-wing forces were gathering.
Kerensky himself had appointed
Kornilov commander of the armed forces in early July. Kornilov had attracted
the attention of the right when he re-imposed the death penalty in the army. He
also sought to extend harsh measures away from the front lines, calling for
martial law in the factories, railways and the mines.
Kornilov was rightly seen by
the masses as the face of counter-revolution. Kerensky had embraced Kornilov's
strict measures within the military, but shied away from a full assault on the
soviets, which is what Kornilov's program would have amounted to.
Kerensky departed the
conference isolated and dejected. As a result, he moved away from the road of
the middle ground. On August 17, he gave the order for Kornilov's demands to be
implemented.
This set the stage for a
confrontation between the forces of the revolution and those of the
counter-revolution.
Kornilov began to station his
forces on the road to the capital of Petrograd, with Kerensky's approval. At
the last moment, however, Kerensky belatedly realized that Kornilov's victory
would mean not only the defeat of the Bolsheviks, but also of his own
government.
On August 27, he issued a
proclamation announcing that Kornilov was moving against Petrograd with the aim
of establishing a dictatorship. He demanded that Kornilov immediately resign
his post. He then shut himself behind closed doors with advisers and demanded
power to form an all-powerful six-man directory.
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AMONG THE masses, a different
process was unfolding: the practical defense of Petrograd through a popular
mobilization.
On August 27, the soviet
executive committee met all night. It discussed two questions: what position to
take on Kerensky's government given his obvious collusion with Kornilov and the
defense of Petrograd. The executive committee formed a military defense body,
the Committee for Struggle against the Counter-Revolution.
Whether or not the Bolsheviks
would form an alliance with the parties that had persecuted and jailed them was
a decisive question. The Menshevik Sukhanov explained:
The committee, making defense
preparations, had to mobilize the worker-soldier masses. But the masses,
insofar as they were organized, were organized by the Bolsheviks and followed
them. At that time, theirs was the only organization that was large, welded
together by an elementary discipline, and linked with the democratic lowest
levels of the capital. Without it, the committee was impotent.
Without the Bolsheviks, it
could only have passed the time with appeals and idle speeches by orators who
had lost their authority. With the Bolsheviks, the committee had at its
disposal the full power of the organized workers and soldiers.
In a letter written while in
hiding, Lenin advised the Bolsheviks: "We shall fight, we are fighting
against Kornilov, just as Kerensky's troops do, but we do not support Kerensky.
On the contrary, we expose his weakness. There is the difference...the war
against Kornilov must be conducted in a revolutionary way, by drawing the
masses in."
However sharp and clear these
guidelines, the fact is that they arrived after the crisis had passed. In the
intervening days, the Bolsheviks and the working class of Petrograd had thrown
themselves into the struggle.
With the official government
paralyzed, the Committee for Struggle became the command center for the defense
of Petrograd. To this was joined an extraordinary mobilization of the masses
from below. Ad-hoc revolutionary committees sprang up everywhere. Between
August 27 and 30, more than 240 were created across Russia. Local organizations
led the fight in every arena.
The Bolsheviks demanded the
arming of the workers and formed workers' militias. Lines of workers signed up
to become "Red Guards," and the Bolshevik Military Organization took
the lead in their training and deployment. Unarmed workers dug trenches,
erected barbed wire fencing around the approaches to the city and built
barricades.
At the Putilov works, workers
labored through the night to finish construction of weapons that were then sent
to the field without testing. Metal workers accompanied the weapons to the
field and adjusted them on the spot.
The railway and telegraph
workers played a particularly decisive role. Trotsky writes:
The railroad workers in those
days did their duty. In a mysterious way, echelons would find themselves moving
on the wrong roads. Regiments would arrive in the wrong division, artillery
would be sent up a blind alley, staffs would get out of communication with
their units...The telegraphers also held up the orders of Kornilov. Information
unfavorable to the Kornilovists was immediately multiplied, distributed, pasted
up, passed from mouth to mouth.
As Trotsky commented,
"The generals had been accustomed during the years of war to think of
transport and communications as technical questions. They found out now that
these were political questions."
Teams of agitators were sent
out to argue with Kornilov's troops. Many of the soldiers had not been told why
they were being sent towards Petrograd, and they turned on their officers. In
one division, the troops raised a red flag inscribed "Land and
Freedom" and arrested their officer.
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WITHIN FOUR days, the Kornilov
plot had collapsed. His forces disintegrated as the workers and soldiers again
took the center stage of revolution. Trotsky explained the astonishing collapse
of the coup:
Their number seemed enormous
to judge by telegrams, speeches of greeting, newspaper articles. But strange to
say, now when the hour had come to reveal themselves, they had disappeared.
In many cases, the cause did
not lie in personal cowardice. There were plenty of brave men among the
Kornilov officers. But their bravery could find no point of application. From
the moment the masses got into motion, the solitary individual had no access to
events. Not only the weighty industrialists, bankers, professors, engineers,
but also students and even fighting officers, found themselves pushed away,
thrown aside, elbowed out. They watched the events developing before them as
though from a balcony.
The historian Alexander
Rabinowitch described the defense of Petrograd against Kornilov as a
spontaneous mass upheaval, "It would be difficult to find, in recent
history, a more powerful, effective display of largely spontaneous and unified
mass political action," he wrote.
Trotsky, too, describes the
moment as one in which the mass, democratic character of the revolution was
regenerated:
The lower soviet organizations
in their turn did not await any summons from above. The principal effort was
concentrated in the workers' districts. During the hours of greatest
vacillation in the government, and of wearisome negotiations between the
executive committee and Kerensky, the district soviets were drawing more
closely together and passing resolutions: to declare the inter-district
conferences continuous; to place their representatives in the staff organized
by the executive committee; to form a workers' militia; to establish the
control of the district soviets over the government commissars; to organize
flying brigades for the detention of counter-revolutionary agitators.
In the total, these
resolutions meant an appropriation not only of very considerable governmental
functions, but also of the functions of the Petrograd soviet. The logic of the
situation compelled the soviet institutions to draw in their skirts and make
room for the lower ranks. The entrance of the Petrograd districts into the
arena of the struggle instantly changed both its scope and its direction.
Again, the inexhaustible
vitality of the soviet form of organization was revealed. Although paralyzed
above by the leadership of the compromisers, the soviets were reborn again from
below at the critical moment, under pressure from the masses.
But within this
"spontaneous" uprising, it was revealed that the Bolshevik organizers
were prepared to take the initiative to defend the revolution. As working-class
leaders, they played a key role in uniting workers and soldiers in the defense
of the city.
Trotsky records that
"everywhere, committees for revolutionary defense were organized, into
which the Bolsheviks entered only as a minority. This did not hinder the
Bolsheviks from assuming the leading role...They smashed down the barriers
blocking them from the Menshevik workers and especially from the Socialist
Revolutionary soldiers, and carried them along in their wake."
When a group of sailors
visited Trotsky and other imprisoned revolutionaries, they asked if it was not
time to arrest Kerensky. "No, not yet," was the answer. "Use
Kerensky as a gun-rest to shoot Kornilov. Afterward, we will settle with
Kerensky."
With the defeat of Kornilov, a
radicalized and mobilized working class confronted the question of the
direction and aims of the revolution. Throughout the crisis, the Bolsheviks had
never stopped pointing out that it was Kerensky who had paved the way for
Kornilov. Many workers and soldiers saw with their own eyes that it was the
Bolsheviks who had most resolutely and energetically defended the city.
On September 1, the day when
Kornilov was arrested, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies
adopted a resolution calling for a transfer of power to the revolutionary
proletariat and peasants, and the proclamation of a democratic republic. The
stage was set for the next and final stage of the revolution.
This article first appeared in
the September 7, 2007, edition of Socialist Worker.
