The Kornilov Affair

An imperfect, but enlightening, parallel to the Prigozhin Affair, taken from those days between the March and October Revolutions, the  Kornilov Affair.

rom The Imaginative Conservative

By Mark Malvasi

Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, the the head of the Wagner Group, advanced on Moscow when the government refused to address his criticisms of the war effort in Ukraine. There is an obscure episode in Russian history that provides a revealing, albeit imperfect, analogue to this recent event: the so-called Kornilov Affair of 1917.

For twenty-four hours the former convict turned hot-dog vendor turned warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin was the most dangerous man in Russia. At the head of the Wagner Group, a private mercenary force that he controls, Prigozhin captured a Russian military outpost at Rostov-on-Don, issued a series of demands, and advanced on Moscow when the government refused to address his criticisms of the war effort in Ukraine or to permit a meeting with the Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, both of whom Prigozhin, in a series of expletive-laden tirades, has accused of incompetence and corruption. The Wagner Group was within 150 miles of the capital when Prigozhin agreed to stand down and go into exile in Belarus.[i] He should rent a flat in Minsk. In all likelihood his residency will be brief.

To clarify the significance of these events, experts looked to the past. They variously invoked Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921, and the failed August coup of 1991. But there is a more obscure episode in Russian history that provides a revealing, albeit imperfect, analogue: the so-called Kornilov Affair.

By July 1917 Russia, in effect, had no government. On March 8, Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated. With the help of the Germans, who provided him with money and transportation, the exiled leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a, Nikolai Lenin, had arrived in Petrograd on April 16. He set to work immediately to undermine the already faltering Provisional Government. To that end, Lenin demanded the transfer of power to the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils, the soviets. In addition, he called for the abolition of the army and the civil service and the withdrawal of Russia from the war.

Lenin had entrusted the organization and execution of the coup to his most faithful and capable lieutenant, Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein). A Ukrainian Jew, Trotsky had been working in the post office in New York City when the Tsar relinquished the throne. Glorying in his status as a revolutionary leader, Trotsky made the overthrow of the Provisional Government his priority. Lenin and Trotsky complimented one another admirably. Lenin had an astute but focused intelligence, a tireless will, and a genius for organization. Trotsky, by contrast, was a charismatic visionary who lacked Lenin’s patience, resolve, and attention to detail.

After enduring a series of military setbacks in July, the Provisional Government descended in chaos. Having obtained Bolshevik majorities in virtually all of the soviets, Lenin decided the moment had arrived to strike. The Bolshevik coup failed after just two days. To protest the callous indifference and stupidity of their commanding officers, Russian troops rioted in the streets of Petrograd. Although the Bolsheviks had neither organized nor encouraged these disturbances, leaders of the Provincial Government targeted members of the party. Accusing them of complicity, they arrested as many Bolsheviks as they could find, Trotsky among them. Lenin, meanwhile, escaped to Finland, where he went into hiding.

The bungled July Revolution nonetheless prompted the resignation of Prince Geogi Lvov as head of the Provisional Government. The Minister of War, Alexander Kerensky, who for some time had been the recognized political authority in Russia, now formally became Prime Minister. A prominent socialist, Kerensky enjoyed some credibility with the Petrograd Soviet. Members of his cabinet and his fellow ministers hoped that he could mollify the radicals, persuading them to support the government. Committed to democratic rule, Kerensky was regrettably a man of limited political intelligence and judgment. He entertained fantastic aspirations and pursued unrealistic policies. Determined to honor his obligations to the Allies, he exhorted Russian troops to keep fighting although it had been clear for months that the army lacked the wherewithal to carry on.[ii] He allowed himself to imagine that winning great victories on the battlefield would unite the Russian people behind the Provisional Government and quell the political dissent and social unrest then sweeping the country.

With anarchy and violence spreading unchecked, an amorphous coalition of army officers, businessmen, landowners, and politicians emerged in August 1917 to halt the rapid disintegration of the government and to restore some measure of order to society. The hopes of this group rested with the flamboyant General Lavr Kornilov, a Siberian peasant, whom Kerensky had appointed Commander in Chief of the Russian army. Kornilov hated the monarchy, distrusted the aristocracy, loathed the socialists, and contemned the Provisional Government, which he regarded as weak and feckless. He vowed to march his troops to Petrograd, seize power, and establish a military dictatorship.

Immersed in the history of the French Revolution, the radical socialists interpreted Kornilov’s oath as the beginning of an inevitable counter-revolution. For his part, Kerensky seems to have so feared Kornilov that he made his peace with the radicals, including ultimately the Bolsheviks, whom he now considered the lesser of two evils. In early September, 1917, satisfied that Kornilov was plotting a coup d’état, Kerensky dismissed him from his command. Kornilov refused to yield. Instead, on September 9, he dispatched troops to Petrograd. Members of the Petrograd Soviet disrupted transportation and communications networks so that Kornilov’s men never reached the capital, and the coup ended before it had begun.

Despite having prevented a military takeover, the situation was hopeless for the government. By allying with the Petrograd Soviet against General Kornilov, Kerensky had alienated a large number of officers without gaining compensatory influence in the Soviet itself. On the contrary, members of the Soviet, regarding themselves as the saviors of Russia, were even less inclined than before to obey the government. If it were possible to do so, Kerensky worsened this state of affairs by releasing from prison the Bolsheviks arrested in July, and enjoined them also to contribute to the defense of Petrograd. Nearly shattered by the failure of their own coup, the Bolsheviks thus re-emerged as a political force. Trotsky wasted no time in taking advantage of Kerensky’s desperate largess. He accused Kerensky of conspiring first with Kornilov and, alternately, with the Germans. To destroy the revolutionary soviets, Trotsky alleged, Kerensky had arranged to surrender Petrograd to one or another of Russia’s enemies.

Although Trotsky’s accusations were utterly false, he insisted that it was the patriotic duty of the workers and soldiers to prevent such treachery. He persuaded the members of the Petrograd Soviet to form, under his chairmanship, the Military-Revolutionary Committee. Ostensibly the purpose of the committee was to organize the defense of the city. In reality, Trotsky intended to use the committee as the instrument by which the Bolsheviks, acting in the name of the soviets, would destroy the Provisional Government and elevate themselves to power.

Judged on its merits, the Kornilov Affair was a travesty. The episode, as George Kennan observed, “in addition to being fouled up with a confused welter of political intrigue, was clumsily prepared. . . . Kornilov had no more real authority than anyone else over the rank and file, and could get few troops to follow him.”[iii] Kerensky need not have worried or given the matter a second thought. Yet, just as Prigozhin is the consequence of Putin’s handiwork, so Kornilov was the troublesome creation of Kerensky. Kerensky agreed with Kornilov’s assessment that the government was hostage to the soviets and at least tacitly encouraged Kornilov to break the stranglehold. Then he lost his nerve and turned against him. By sounding the alarm of counter-revolution, Kerensky shifted his focus and tried to mend relations with, and to attract support from, the soviets. He thereby squandered the already eroding trust of the army and the conservatives alike and, at the same time, commended survival of the Provisional Government to Petrograd Soviet and the Bolsheviks. The wounds that Kerensky inflicted were fatal to the Russian body politic.

When the Russian people learned of Kerensky’s duplicitous intrigues, his reputation suffered and his authority diminished. Its absurd character notwithstanding, the Kornilov Affair also lent credibility to the myth of counter-revolution, which exaggerated the strength of the reactionary forces operating in Russia. To preserve the revolution, workers, soldiers, and activists organized militias that did not disband once the imagined crisis ended. From the outset, these armed gangs posed an additional threat to the Provincial Government and, in time, facilitated the Bolsheviks’ success.

Kerensky was never the master of events as Vladimir Putin has been, or rather as he has appeared to be, for more than two decades. Unlike Putin, Kerensky could not obscure his weaknesses any more than he could dispose of his rivals, who eventually overwhelmed him. Although it came to nothing, the scheming of a general who was both ambitious and desperate contributed to his ruin. Whether, and to what extent, Putin will be harmed by a similarly defiant and increasingly anxious military commander, who until now has done his bidding and served his interests in Ukraine, Syria, and Sudan, remains to be determined. If Prigozhin is to become Putin’s Kornilov, if the abortive coup that he organized leaves Putin impaired and vulnerable, then his days may be numbered, despite the many ruthless expedients to which he is certain to resort. In the stressful months ahead, even the contemplation of history will afford Putin little respite from that haunting prospect. For knowledge of the Russian past will neither send him blissfully to sleep at night nor offer much solace when he wakes.

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Notes:

[i] British intelligence has now confirmed that the Russian government threatened the families of Wagner soldiers, which may have influenced Prigozhin’s decision.

[ii] The Allied governments also pressured Kerensky to keep Russia in the war, showing a remarkable indifference to domestic crisis that he faced. Dependent on the Allies for military and financial support, Kerensky had little choice but to comply with demands to launch another offensive on the Eastern Front.

[iii] George F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (Boston, 1960), 28. Although arrested when the coup failed, Kornilov was subsequently released from prison and fought for the White Army in the Russian Civil War. On April 10, 1918, forces under his command laid siege to Ekaterindor, the capital of the Kuban Soviet Republic. In the early morning of April 13, a shell hit the farmhouse in which Kornilov had established his headquarters and he was killed. Aides buried his body in the nearby village of Gnadau. When, a few days later, the Bolsheviks took control of the village, they unearthed Kornilov’s remains, dragged his corpse through the streets, and set it ablaze on a rubbish heap.