Not even Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s estate in Tula, escaped the wrath of the peasants he had once idolized. Sonya, Tolstoy’s widow, who was now old and blind, cabled Kerensky for help, while her daughters packed their father’s books and manuscripts into wooden boxes and piled them up in the salon, where they waited in darkness for the plundering mob to come. They had armed themselves with knives and hammers to fight for their lives if need be. But the marauding peasants, seeing the house unlit, assumed it had already been destroyed and moved on to the next estate.95
This final reckoning with the squires usually took place at the same time as the establishment of the Soviet in the village or the volost township. The peasants saw the Soviets as the realization of their long-cherished volia, the direct self-rule of their villages free from the intervention of the gentry or the state. The village Soviets were really no more than the communes in a more revolutionary form. The Soviet assembly was indistinguishable from the open gathering of the communal skhod, except perhaps that the white-bearded patriarchs were now overshadowed by the younger and more literate peasants, such as Semenov, who helped to establish the Soviet in Andreevskoe. The peasant Soviets often behaved like village republics, paying scant regard to the orders of the central state. Many of them employed their own police forces and set up their own courts, while some even had their own flags and emblems. Nearly all of them had their own volunteer militia, or Red Guard, organized by the younger peasants straight out of the army to defend the revolutionary village and its borders.96
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The mass of workers and peasants were moving inexorably towards their own localist conceptions of Soviet rule. Only a Soviet government could hope to command any real authority in the country at large. This had been the case since the February Revolution. But time and again the Soviet leaders had chosen to ignore it — their dogmatic faith in the need for a ‘bourgeois stage of the revolution’ had tied them to the hopeless task of trying to keep the coalition going — and every time the streets had arisen to the cry of Soviet power they had chosen to cover their ears. And yet at last, in the wake of the Kornilov crisis, it seemed that the moment had come for the socialist parties to make the decisive break and form a government of their own. The Kadets, the major bourgeois partner of the coalition, had been thoroughly discredited by their support for the ‘counter-revolutionary’ general; while the socialist parties were being pulled by their own rank-and-file supporters towards Soviet power. The possibility was beginning to emerge during the first half of September that all the major socialist parties, from the Popular Socialists on the right to the Bolsheviks on the left, might come together for the formation of a government based exclusively on the Soviets and the other democratic organizations. It was a unique historical moment, a fleeting chance for the revolution to follow a different course from the one that it did. If this opportunity had been taken, Russia might have become a socialist democracy rather than a Communist dictatorship; and, as a result, the bloody civil war — which by the autumn of 1917 was probably inevitable — might have lasted weeks instead of years.
The three main Soviet parties were all moving towards the idea of a socialist government, or at least a decisive break with the bourgeoisie, in the weeks following the Kornilov crisis. Martov’s leftwing Menshevik faction, which favoured an all-socialist government, was steadily gaining supporters among the rank and file of the party. Under their pressure, the Menshevik Central Committee pledged itself to the formation of a ‘homogenous democratic government’ on 1 September. The Left SRs were also gaining ground, effectively emerging as a separate party after the crisis. Their three major policies — a socialist government based on the Soviet, the immediate confiscation of the gentry’s estates and an end to the war — could not have been better tailored to suit the demands of the SR rank and file, the mass of the peasants and soldiers, though such was their disillusionment with Kerensky and Chernov that many of them abandoned the SRs altogether and moved directly to the Bolsheviks. The provincial Soviet in Saratov, home of the SRs, went Bolshevik during September.97
