State Conference in Moscow

Week Before August 25 – August 12, 1917: Plans for a General Strike. To forestall a Bolshevik plan to denounce the State Conference as counter-revolutionary and then walk out, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets passes a resolution effectively limiting the party’s access to the floor. So the Bolsheviks turned in their credentials.

Then the Moscow Soviet voted, pretty narrowly, against a calling a general strike to welcome the conference delegates. The Bolsheviks took counsel with Menshevik and Social Revolutionary workers in the soviet who had voted for the strike, and with leaders of the trade unions. Together they decided upon a one-day protest strike, in preference to a demonstration that might have made targets of the marchers as during the July Days in Petrograd.

Another secret committee consisting of two Bolsheviks, two Mensheviks, and two Social Revolutionaries made arrangements to prevent the Cavaliers of St. George, with their allies among officers and junkers, from forming a cordon along the line of Kornilov’s expected procession through the city.

Meanwhile, Kornilov sent four divisions of cavalry towards Petrograd, possibly at Kerensky’s request, and a regiment of Cossacks to Moscow. This was a stratagem of counter-revolution rather than of war against Germany.

August 25 – August 12, 1917: State Conference in Moscow. Stage managed by Prime Minister Kerensky, the State Conference opens in Moscow. Delegates had a little trouble getting there: a protest strike called by the Bolsheviks and their left-socialist allies shut down the railroad stations and tramways. Even the waiters in the restaurants joined the strike, and the city lights went out too. Some 400,000 workers were on strike; one-day strikes took place in Kiev, Kostreva, and Tsaritizn as well.  

Poised at the center of the uneasy compromise between the left and right elements invited to the conference, Kerensky made the first speech at about 4:00 p.m. He warned the left (meaning the Bolsheviks, not in attendance) against insurrection, and he warned the right (explicitly naming Kornilov) against counter-revolution. As self-described “supreme head” of the state, he, Kerensky, would know how to deal with any such threats.

Kerensky defended his war policy without attempting to explain the failure of the June offensive. When he invited the delegates to rise and salute the ambassadors of the Entente, only the Menshevik Martov and a few others remained seated, despite catcalls from the officers’ loge.

Miliukov writes in his history of the revolution that despite Kerensky’s efforts to project the power of the office he held, “he evoked only a feeling of pity.”

Other ministers of the Provisional Government then spoke. Among them, the Minister of Industry asked the capitalists to restrain themselves in the matter of profit; the Minister of Finance spoke of his plan to decrease the direct tax on the possessing classes by increasing other indirect taxes. This drew loud cheers from the right. Chernov, the Social Revolutionary Minister of Agriculture, was not permitted to speak. Of course, the Provisional Government had no agrarian policy to talk about.

The dramatic pattern devised by Kerensky for the conference was anticipated by the alternation of left and right speakers who held ministries in the Provisional Government. 

August 26 – August 13, 1917: State Conference in Recess. Apparently, August 13 fell on a Sunday in the old style calendar for 1917 in Russia. So the State Conference went into recess for the day.

Kornilov took a few moments to confide in Miliukov that he felt the (expected) fall of Riga to the Germans would be too great an “opportunity” to pass up. As we will see, he’d already set the date for his insurrection. He let Miliukov know about that too.

August 27 – August 14, 1917: State Conference Concludes. As the second and final session of the State Conference in Moscow begins, the left applauds Prime Minister Kerensky when he enters, and the right applauds General Kornilov. Then Kerensky proposed an ovation for the army, and everyone joined in.

When Kornilov was invited to speak, the delegates rose in thunderous applause. All, that is, except the delegates of the soldiery. A shouting match ensued; Kerensky called for order. Kornilov’s speech blamed the legislation of the Provisional Government for reducing the army to a “crazy mob.” He warned the conference that if Riga (in Latvia, then threatened by the Germans) were taken, was the “road to Petrograd is open.” The Bolshevik paper in Moscow commented that as defeat at Tarnopol “made Kornilov commander-in-chief, the surrender of Riga might make him dictator.”

After a speech by an archbishop of the Church Council condemning the government for unbelief, General Kaledin, representing the Cossack armies, spoke. He endorsed Kornilov’s policies for prosecution of the war: militarizing the railroads and factories, permitting death penalty in the rear, and putting the Petrograd garrison under Kornilov’s command. And he added another one: abolish the soldiers’ committees formed at the company and regimental levels after the February Revolution. The right liked this a lot better than the left.

The left spoke next, in the person of Cheidze, president of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets. He defended the soldiers’ committees and the soviets, but spoke against forcible expropriation of lands by the peasantry. Neither did the next speaker, representing the Executive Committee of the peasants’ soviet, make any contribution to the resolution of the agrarian question. Now the contradictions between left and right had become palpable, and it was becoming possible to perceive the paralysis of the Provisional Government in which these irreconcilable differences were joined.

Proving that the device of putting people in the audience to serve as objects of rhetoric and applause is not new, the prisoners of Schlusselburg were announced. These survivors of the 1905 revolution were thus honored by, among others, their formerly tsarist jailors, now turned bourgeois liberal: Generals Alexiev, Kornilov, Kaledin; the archbishop; Rodzianko and Guchov, next to speak.

Guchov, the Provisional Government’s first war minister, had to admit the government was “the shadow of a power.” Rodzianko, president of the bourgeois-dominated State Duma, recommended that body, on account of its constitutional legitimacy, as a guide to the Provisional Government. This drew laughter from the left, as the legitimacy of the Duma had evaporated when its creator, the tsar, had been deposed.

Then Kerensky read a telegram from President Wilson, who preferred the result of the February Revolution to tsarism, saying the American and Russian governments “are pursuing no selfish aims” in the war.

The agenda swung back towards the left. Tseretilli defended the role of the soviets and the soldiers’ committees in the revolution.

Then back to the right. Miliukov recounted what he considered the “mistakes of the revolutionary democracy,” all of which, it just so happens, had led to the resignations of Cadet ministers. Among the “capitulations” he described were allowing the solders’ committees to be formed, and failing to suppress seizures of land by the peasants. This latter comment was directed at the Minister of Agriculture, Chernov.

The Menshevik Tseretilli spoke again, promising even harsher measures against the Bolsheviks.

After that the pendulum swung right to left and back ceaselessly. General Alexiev, formerly the tsar’s commander-in-chief, called for discipline in the army. He was answered by left-leaning officers who defended Kerensky. Officers crippled by the war speak for the right; crippled enlisted men for the left. The head of the railroad workers’ union spoke against the counter-revolution, and was answered by a magnate of the industry and a bank economist. Trotsky lists many more such pairings.

The conference was reaching the bottom of Kerensky’s agenda. An anarchist, oddly, received the applause of the right. Plekhanov, the oldest of the first Russian Marxists still living, was applauded from both sides. He mentioned, a little prematurely, the “unhappy memory of Lenin.”

That evening a representative of the Union of Horse Breeders (all large landowners, of course) spoke against land reform and in favor of the war. Then, to clamorous applause, Tseretilli shook hands with a railroad magnate. Even Miliukov thought this was insincere, but necessary.

As the end approached, a young Cossack officer pointed out that “the working Cossacks were not with Kaledin,” the Cossack general who had spoken earlier in the day. The right did not like this; an officer called out, “German marks!” This caused an explosion, nearly a fight. But it showed that the split in Russian society so plain at the conference extended even to the Cossack armies.

At last, Kerensky took the floor again. As the man in the middle between left and right, he urged “better understanding” and “better respect.” Then he relapsed into a self-absorbed melodrama reminiscent of Hitler’s maxim, the strong man is strongest when alone, but without the strength. A passage from Miliukov quoted by Trotsky describes the speech; it left “the hall…stupefied, and this time both halves of it.”

August 29 – August 16, 1917: Leftward Movement. A conference of the Social Revolutionary party demands that the League of Officers be expelled from Kornilov’s military headquarters at Moghiliev.

The damage the State Conference caused to Kerensky’s government, by revealing deep differences in Russian society that it was too paralyzed even to patch over, was becoming evident. The masses, Trotsky says, were instead moving to the left.