*Suspicions that the whole Kornilov Affair was a provocation are buttressed by Nekrasov’s uncautious remarks to the press. In a newspaper interview given two weeks after the event he praised Lvov for exposing Kornilov’s alleged plot. Distorting Kornilov’s answer to Kerensky to make it sound as if it confirmed Lvov’s ultimatum, he added: “V. N. Lvov helped save the Revolution: he exploded a prepared mine two days before it was to go off. There undoubtedly was a conspiracy and Lvov only discovered it prematurely”: NZh, No. 55 (September 13, 1917), 3. These words suggest that Nekrasov, possibly with Kerensky’s connivance, used Lvov to destroy Kornilov.
*Crane Brinton in his Anatomy of Revolution (New York, 1938, 185–86) observes that it is common in revolutionary situations for ordinary citizens to grow bored with politicking and to leave the field to extremists. The influence of the latter increases in proportion to the public’s disenchantment and loss of interest in politics.
*Cited in Lenin, PSS, XXXIII, 28. Lenin underscored the concluding sentence.
*Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b) (Moscow, 1958), 55–62. This, the only presently available record of the meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee from August 4, 1917, until February 24, 1918, first came out in 1929. It was meant to discredit Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, whom Stalin had defeated for party control, and for this reason must be used with extreme caution. According to the editors of the second edition: “The texts of the protocols are published in full, without omissions, except for matters of conflict [konfliktnye dela] removed, as in the first edition, for reasons of inadequate explanation of these questions in the text of the protocols” (p. vii), whatever that may mean.
†It cannot be excluded, of course, that Lenin’s advice was turned down and the fact censored from the published version of the minutes.
*Lenin, PSS, XXXIV, 281–82. Lenin here inadvertently concedes that on July 3–5 the Bolsheviks had, indeed, attempted a power seizure.
*Revoliutsiia, V, 23. According to Kerensky, these discussions were secret, but they immediately leaked to the press: Ibid., V, 81.
*Lazimir later joined the Bolshevik Party. He died in 1920 of typhus.
†N. Podvoiskii in KL, No. 8 (1923), 16–17. Trotsky wrote in 1922 that even if his life were at stake he would not be able to recall the makeup of the Milrevkom: PR, No. 10 (1922), 54.
*Lenin mistakenly believed that Zinoviev had joined Kamenev in the interview with Novaia zhizn’: Protokoly TsK, 108.
*Lenin, PSS, XXXIV, 435–36. Verkhovskii had been dismissed from his post the day before (October 23) for demanding at a cabinet meeting that Russia make immediate peace with the Central Powers: SV., No. 10, June 19, 1921, 8.
*Dekrety, I, 1–2. Kerensky’s wife was arrested and detained for forty-eight hours the following day for tearing down this declaration: A. L. Fraiman, Forpost Sotsialisticheskoi Revoliutsii (Leningrad, 1969), 157.
*N. M. Kishkin, a Kadet and member of the last Provisional Government, was placed in charge after Kerensky had left the Winter Palace.
*Dekrety, I, 20–21; W. Pietsch, Staat und Revolution (Köln, 1969), 50; Lenin, PSS, XXXV, 28–29. Trotsky was the only Jew in the Sovnarkom. The Bolsheviks seemed to have been afraid of accusations that they were a “Jewish” party, setting up a government to serve the interests of “international Jewry.”
12
Building the One-Party State
On October 26, 1917, the Bolsheviks did not so much seize power over Russia as stake a claim to it. On that day they won from a rump Congress of Soviets, which they had convened in an unlawful manner and packed with adherents, only limited and temporary authority: the authority to form yet another Provisional Government. That government was to be accountable to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Congress and retire in a month, upon the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. It took them three years of civil war to make good this claim. Notwithstanding their precarious position, they proceeded almost at once to lay the foundations of a type of regime unknown to history, a one-party dictatorship.
