The October Days 1917 - THE SECOND KORNILOV PLOT

THE OCTOBER DAYS 1917
The instigators of the second Kornilov plot could thus count on from 200,000 to 250,000 men. With the existence of an army at least ten million strong, a quarter of a million would on the surface of it not appear to be of decisive account. But by that time the army was no longer an efficient fighting force. Two hundred thousand soldiers massed in a single driving force could compel wavering regiments to act on its side. It was on this that Kornilov was banking. Such were the plans of the counter-revolutionaries.

The historians who endeavored to reconstruct the picture of the second Kornilov plot were faced with a difficult task, for no documents on the second Kornilov plot were to be found in any of the archives. No records whatever existed. Those who had participated in the plot had left practically no traces. It was necessary to proceed in a roundabout and fairly tortuous way that promised much labor and no few disappointments.

First of all they set about studying the daily orders that had been issued by the General Staff during the months of September and October 1917. At first glance it seemed an almost hopeless task to find the necessary clue in the tedious batch of marching orders issued to the various units. But one particular circumstance struck the investigators. In the latter part of September, Cossack regiments and occasionally entire divisions had begun to be withdrawn from the front and transferred to the rear. The official reason for this movement was everywhere the same frequently repeated statement: “Shortage of fodder at the front.”

But when further investigation revealed where the Cossack units were being dispatched, it became clear that it was not at all a matter of fodder. Two divisions had been sent to Finland, one division to the Donbas and one to Bryansk. There was not even a hint of fodder in these districts. The fact was that from Finland it was possible to reach Petrograd in forty-eight hours, while from Bryansk and the Donbas it was possible to move on the North and cut off the road connecting Moscow with the Ukraine and the southwestern front.

The disposition of the cavalry contingents clearly disclosed the reason for their movements: the cavalry was being put in readiness to fight against the revolution.

In this way the clue was discovered, differing from the mythical clue of Ariadne’s in that instead of leading from the labyrinth it was a guide to its very depths. A closer study was made of the movements of the regiments and the nature of the newly formed units. The so-called Shock Battalions were examined more thoroughly. This was the name given to the battalions of Cavaliers of the Cross of St. George, of kulaks’ sons, undergraduates, etc., formed in 1917. Again according to the official version these battalions had been organized to assist the regular army, with a view to reinforcing the regiments that showed a disinclination to fight, and thus welding the disintegrating army together.

Nevertheless, despite the official declarations, the Shock Battalions had not been dispatched to the front where they were needed, but strangely enough had been moved closer to Petrograd. More than forty such battalions had been grouped along the northern and western fronts in such a way as to enable them to reach Petrograd or Moscow in a day or two, cut off all communication between the two cities, and between these cities and the front line troops.

THE NEW PHASE OF STRUGGLE

Thus, step by step, the picture of the military forces at the disposal of the counter-revolution was reconstructed and the plot itself established. Lenin did not have all this detailed information at his disposal – it was only recently that the data came to light through research in the archives. At that time Lenin was compelled to live in hiding. But the force of the great theory of Marxism-Leninism and the brilliant insight of Lenin as a leader showed themselves in the fact that Lenin divined the plans of the adversary. With his thorough knowledge and understanding of the laws of social development, the master dialectician was able to see through to what underlay the shifts taking place in the camp of the enemy, and drew the proper conclusions therefrom.

Hounded by spies and circumscribed as he was by the difficulties of life in hiding, Lenin nevertheless followed the course of events with the closest attention. As if he were seated high up in a watchtower, the leader of the Party cast his glance over the whole of the enormous country, over the whole world, analyzed every step of the revolution and gave militant and operative directions to the Bolshevik Party and its General Staff – the Central Committee.

In just the three months from August to November 1917 Lenin penned over sixty articles and letters, constituting an entire volume when they were subsequently published. Among these were such works as “State and Revolution,” “The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It,” “The Crisis Has Matured,” “Will the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?,”[1] letters on the uprising, and numerous additional documents of enormous international import.

In his brilliant articles, written so simply that every worker could comprehend them, Lenin laid bare the most intricate weavings of the bourgeois, Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik press, tore the mask from the faces of the Kornilovite Socialists – Kerensky and Co. – mercilessly castigated the traitors to the revolution, criticized the slightest manifestation of vacillation in the ranks of the Bolsheviks and at every stage of the revolution pointed out the path and methods of struggle for the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Lenin providentially saw that the bourgeoisie was adopting a new form of struggle, that it was making preparations for a civil war against the workers and peasants.

Civil war is the highest form of class struggle. In it all the inherent antagonisms of the class struggle become more acute and the class struggle develops into an armed conflict. Civil war is the acutest form of class struggle; all society is divided into two hostile camps, and the question of power is decided by force of arms.

Continuing and further developing Marx’s doctrine, Lenin wrote as follows about the essence of civil war:

“...experience... shows us that civil war is the sharpest form of the class struggle; it is that point in the class struggle when clashes and battles, economic and political, repeating themselves, growing, broadening, becoming acute, turn into an armed struggle of one class against another class.” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. XXI, p. 231).

And it was precisely this acute stage that the Russian revolution reached in September-October 1917.

This was confirmed by the radical changes in the forms of struggle of all classes of the population.

First of all, the proletariat’s strike form of struggle underwent a radical change. Even before the Kornilov affair the proletariat, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, had engaged in strikes that had constantly assumed larger dimensions. Economic strikes had grown into political strikes, becoming interwoven with the latter and displaying an unswerving tendency to spread, accumulating, as it were, the forces for a decisive blow. But after the counter-revolutionary Kornilov revolt was suppressed a new feature appeared in the working class strikes, as illustrated by the following: the workers of the Helferich-Sade Works in Kharkov declared a strike, drove out the plant management and took over the running of the plant themselves. In a number of leather works in Moscow the workers removed their managers, bosses, etc., and elected strike committees which were entrusted with keeping production going. The new feature in the strike movement was that the proletariat not only went on strike, but drove out the capitalists, took over the factories and ran them themselves.

Today upon looking over the various documents relating to the year 1917 on the question of the labor movement, one can find thousands of facts bearing out this state of affairs. Lenin, of course, had no such reference documents. He knew only of isolated instances which had somehow found their way into the press. But on the basis of these facts the great revolutionary leader arrived at the general conclusion that the strikes of the workers had already arrived at the stage of insurrection and that the proletarian struggle was already faced with the question of power.

In the same way the form of the peasant movement also changed radically. The peasants had waged a struggle against the landlords before the Kornilov revolt. In various parts of the country they had mown down the landlord’s meadows, seized the fields and felled the trees on the landed estates, but this struggle had been comparatively peaceful. The Kornilov revolt showed the peasants that if Kornilov had been victorious the landlords would have returned to their well-feathered noblemen’s nests together with him. The peasants everywhere had gone over to a new form of struggle: they had begun to seize the estates, set fire to them and appropriate the farm property. As if they were endeavoring to finish up what had been left undone in the 1905 Revolution, when approximately 2,000 noblemen’s manors had been wrecked, the peasants all over the country proceeded in common to seize the manors.

Greatly alarmed by this state of affairs, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks tried to assuage themselves and their friends by fabricating false data intended to hide the true situation.

These petty-bourgeois “bookkeepers of the revolution” cooked up reassuring data about the peasant movement. Lumping all forms of the movement together, they arrived at the “reassuring” conclusion that in September the peasant movement as a whole was on the decline. Take, for instance, the records of the bourgeois militia, which show the increase in the trampling down of landlords’ fields, arbitrary harvesting, refusals to pay rent and wrecking of manors. Passing from these general figures to a detailed analysis one immediately becomes aware of the dishonesty of these figure-juggling “bookkeepers of the revolution,” for they have lumped both the peaceful and the violent forms of struggle under one heading. Look at the figures for the trampling down of landlords’ fields, arbitrary harvesting, etc., apart from the wrecking of manors, and it is at once apparent that while the peaceful forms of struggle increased from February to August, from September they decreased with an accompanying increase in the violent forms: seizure of estates, burning of manors, and division of farm implements and livestock. At present we are in possession of numerous statistical compilations and documents which confirm this change in the form of the peasant struggle. Here again is shown the brilliant penetration of Lenin, who without all this data which we now have, was able to arrive at the conclusion that the peasant movement had evolved into a peasant insurrection.

An acute change in the nature of the movement for national emancipation also took place. Beginning with February this movement had been headed by the bourgeois nationalists, who for a short time had succeeded in duping and occasionally even directly forcing a definite part of the masses to follow their lead.

After the suppression of the Kornilov revolt the nature of this movement changed most decidedly. The working people of the oppressed nations tried to extend a hand to the peasants and workers of Russia over the heads of their “leaders,” so that together they could march against the Provisional Government. The masses of the people began to understand that the only way they could destroy the old tsarist “prison of nations” was under the leadership of the Bolsheviks.

In September, 1917, a spontaneous movement flared up in Tashkent. The representatives of the Provisional Government fled. For a time the working people were masters of the city. This does not mean that Soviet power was victorious in Tashkent before Petrograd. Such an assertion would be incorrect if only for the fact that the movement in Tashkent was not in the hands of the Bolsheviks. What, then, did the Tashkent events indicate? They indicated that all the contradictions had become intensely aggravated, finally reaching a climax in those places where they were most rife – in the national and colonial districts. It is of interest to note that on the eve of the February Revolution, too, it was in Central Asia, where the contradictions were particularly acute, that they came to a head. On the eve of the October Revolution, the events in Tashkent indicated that the movement for national emancipation had adopted a new form of struggle for power.

Finally, a radical change took place in the movement in the army, where the Bolsheviks had been carrying on an enormous amount of work to open the eyes of the soldiers, to win them over to their side. In numerous regiments and divisions the soldiers had driven out their old officers, electing new commanders from their own ranks and taking over command of the units themselves. Such instances had been known previously also, but they were isolated cases and did not bear a mass character. After the Kornilov revolt had been put down, millions of soldiers realized that the rebellion of the generals aimed at the restoration of the monarchy and hence the prolongation of the war. The soldiers were seized with horror at the thought of the possibility of having to spend a fourth winter in the trenches. They went over to the new form of struggle with a vengeance: kicked out the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik windbags from their regiments, re-elected their committees, voted for the Bolsheviks, drove out their officers and in many places, in the Navy, even killed them. More than that – the soldiers came out as agitators for a peasant uprising. In thousands of letters sent from the front, the soldiers advised the peasants to drive out the landlords and seize the land. Behind the lines the soldiers themselves initiated such movements. The soldiers’ movement clearly manifested a tendency to merge with the peasant movement.

It was this change in the form of struggle that permitted the brilliant dialectician, Lenin, to draw the conclusion that the revolutionary crisis, foretold at the Sixth Congress of the Party in August 1917, was at hand, making it possible for the Bolsheviks to raise the question of overthrowing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

[1] Cf. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. XXI, International Publishers, New York. All references unless otherwise stated are from books published by International Publishers, New York. – Ed.

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