But, in fact, Kerensky did see a means of bringing both factions together! Despite the fact that the Petrograd Soviet, together with the mass of the population, wanted – demanded – an end to the war, with its costly toll of death, misery and despair, he put into action an ambitious offensive in Galicia. He was fully aware of the mass desertion and growing discontent then taking place within the army, but he saw this campaign – dubbed “the Kerensky Offensive” – not only as a means of fulfilling Russia’s obligations to the Allied cause, but also as a way of restoring the spirit of the army, and uniting the nation in it’s desperate hour of need. A decisive victory against the forces of Austria-Hungary and Germany would recreate confidence in the country’s armed forces, and, just as importantly, unite the politicians in the task of creating an acceptable form of government. He was not alone in this view. The military hierarchy were generally in favour of the campaign, and many members of the Provisional Government sought to regain something of Russia’s imperial glory. In reality, however, the whole undertaking proved to be an unmitigated disaster. In effect, the war machine was to be fed by the scarce resources so desperately needed to relieve the country’s intense suffering. For this, a high price was going to be paid.
General Aleksei Brusilov was put in command of the offensive. As we have seen, he had achieved a large measure of success in Galicia in the summer of 1916, but this was to be quite a different matter. The Kerensky Offensive, launched in mid-July, was the last Russian offensive of the war and proved to be the most disastrous. Taking the Central Powers somewhat by surprise by both its strength and width, it proved remarkably successful in the opening days, especially against the Austro-Hungarian forces. Many prisoners were taken, together with a number of guns. The primary attack was opened by two days of artillery fire, and three armies were involved along a frontier some 240 miles long. Predominantly aimed at seizing the railway junction of Lemburg – thereby cutting the major line from Germany to Austria-Hungary – it made impressive inroads early on (see map).
But that was as far as it went. The Germans, having received six battle-hardened divisions from the Western Front, were now ready to go on the offensive. A week later, they launched a ferocious counter attack, and put their enemy to flight, retaking lost ground and pushing them back a distance of some 150 miles. Some 400,000 Russian troops were killed or wounded, and the Central Powers acquired millions of square miles of territory. For the Russian Army it was the end of the road. There was no way back. The Russians had shown a lack of artillery coordination at times, and committed a number of tactical errors, but, unquestionably, the prime cause for their decisive defeat was the break down of morale among the vast majority of their troops. This had been feared and this had been realised. There was a small fraction of soldiers who, as of old, remained loyal to their commanders, and were dedicated to their country’s cause, but the vast majority were thoroughly sick and tired of the war, its toil and its bloodshed. And, strange to relate, their lack of loyalty was aided and abetted by the “Order No.1”, issued by the Petrograd Soviet on the 14th March. In the interests of “democratisation”, this declared that soldiers and sailors should only obey the orders of their commanders if these orders did not go against Soviet policy. Committees were set up in every army and naval unit (“soldiers’ and sailors’ Soviets”), to decide on such matters (often delaying or interrupting military action!), and this seriously undermined military authority. Furthermore, the confusion this caused played into the hands of those soldiers who were bent on quitting. It is estimated that by the Autumn some two million soldiers had deserted and made for home, many using their weapons to seize land from local landowners. Others stayed on, but refused to take-up frontline trenches, and several units openly called for an end to the war. As Lenin later put it, the Russian soldiers had “voted for peace with their legs”.
Thexfailure of the Kerensky Offensive not only broke the army, but also undermined further the validity of the government itself, widening the gap between the ruling elite and an impoverished and downtrodden population crying out for change. Some protest was inevitable and it came without delay. The so-called July Days Uprising of the 16th to the 20th, a direct result of this military humiliation and the continued shortage of basic food, marked the beginning of an armed demonstration by thousands of protestors. Soldiers, sailors and workers came out on the streets of Petrograd, demanding the overthrow of the Provisional Government. The Soviet, increasing in strength and beginning to receive support from Soviets across the country, took over the control of power from the Provisional Government in all but name, and many Bolsheviks played a part in the uprising. However, Lenin and Trotsky acted cautiously, deciding to avoid direct action at this stage, not being prepared to stake the party’s future on a disorganised mob. And, likewise, the Petrograd Soviet considered that a greater degree of support was needed to seize outright power. Lacking any clear objective or positive leadership, the uprising was finally suppressed by government troops. Some 700 demonstrators were killed.
Incidentally, among the protestors were sailors from the nearby island fortress of Kronstadt.
Earlier they had taken over control of their base, murdering more than 40 officers and setting up their own form of democratic rule.
With the uprising suppressed, Kerensky was then able to deal with the Bolshevik Party, seen as the instigator of the revolt. As noted earlier, Lenin, accused of being in the pay of the Germans, managed to escape to Finland (disguised as a fisherman), but more than a thousand Bolsheviks were arrested or forced into exile, and all the major leaders were imprisoned. It was, indeed, a setback for the Bolsheviks (and seen by some as the death blow), but Lenin had learnt a valuable lesson. He remained in favour of a purely Bolshevik revolt, but had come to see that the Soviets – increasing in membership by the day – could be used as a recruiting centre and a rallying point for such a revolt. Further more, a Soviet, composed as it was of many peasants and industrial workers, was more democratic, in fact, than the most democratic of governing bodies! To his slogan “Peace, Land and Bread” was added “All Power to the Soviets”. It was to prove a winning formula.
Thexoverthrow of the July Uprising and (as it then appeared), the virtual destruction of the Bolshevik Party, was seen as a victory by Kerensky, now serving as prime minister of the Provisional Government, but it was far from that. The uprising had shown the increasing unrest and demand for change amongst the common people in rural areas and industrial centres across the whole country. And Lenin, on the contrary, was seeing the growing unrest as an ever increasing opportunity for his Marxist revolution, aided and abetted by the Soviets. In fact, Kerensky was virtually overthrown the following month via what came to be known as “The Kornilov Affair”, leaving the way open for a revolution on a grand scale. This was an attempt by General Lavr Kornilov, whom Kerenski had appointed in the place of Brusilov, to overthrow the Provisional Government and impose a military dictatorship under his leadership. On August 25th, calling for the abolition of “Soldiers’ Soviets” and political regiments, he ordered Cossack troops to occupy Petrograd and disperse the Soviet and the Government, but his coup d’état failed. Reaching the outskirts of the capital at the end of August they were met by Soviet leaders and the “Red Guards”, a Bolshevik force under Trotsky’s command (now released from prison), and they laid down their arms without a shot being fired. They had no desire to fight their own countrymen.
With Kornilov’s defeat, and the Provisional Government virtually moribund, the scene was now set for the October Revolution (old style), to be followed by a three-year civil war, and the emergence of Lenin’s Communist Russia. With Lenin in Zurich, directing policy by mail and telegram, it had been Trotsky who, for the main part, had led the Bolshevik Party in Russia. After his release from prison in September, he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, and lost no time in setting up a Military Revolutionary Committee. Other Soviets followed suit. This gave the Bolsheviks the brute force required to overthrow the government and meet the demands of the people …. on Party terms. Lenin returned secretly to Petrograd, and on the evening of the 23rd October attended a private meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee. After a ten-hour heated debate, he won over the majority of the committee in favour of an armed take-over of government. The Russian Revoluton was under way.
Incidentally, and ironically, Trotsky – a major architect, as we have seen, of the revolution – was released from prison in September (along with many other Bolsheviks) as part of Kerensky’s desperate efforts to muster as much support as he could against Kornilov’s attempt at a military coup! It did not prove the wisest of decisions!
AlexanderxKerensky (1881-1970), the Russian lawyer and revolutonary statesman, was born at Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk). After studying law at St. Petersburg, he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1905 and, following the fall of Czar Nicolas II, was appointed Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government. In this office he introduced a number of civil liberties, including the freedom of the press and the abolition of racism, and he drafted plans for the introduction of universal suffrage. He soon became renowned for his stirring, passionate oratory, but his popularity suffered a great deal when he came out strongly in favour of continuing the war against the Central Powers, prolonging the overwhelming ordeal of the soldier on the battlefield and the peasants and workers on the home front. Appointed Minister of War at the beginning of May, his ambitious offensive in Galicia, as we have seen, ended in the virtual collapse of the Russian army. Elected as the prime minister early in July, he did manage to suppress the inevitable uprising that followed – the so called July Days Uprising – and this did afford him the opportunity to crush, as he saw it, the menace of Bolshevism, but, come the attempt at a military dictattorship by General Kornikov, it was the Bolsheviks, in fact, via the Soviets, who saved the day. By then, Kerensky’s days were numbered. As an ardent patriot he was determined that Russia continue the war but, at the same time, he laboured to combat the forces of disorder in order to stop Russia descending into anarchy. They were laudable aims in themselves, but in no way could they be accomplished together. As we shall see, come the October Re
volution, his government was overthrown in the first week of November. He managed to escape to France and then Britain. In the Russian Civil War he did not give his support to the White Movement because he felt it was under the influence of General Kornikov. He eventually settled in the United States, and it was there, in New York, that he died in 1970.
Incidentally, thexfamous English novelist, playwright and short-story writer, Somerset Maugham, was a British secret agent during the First World War, and worked for some time in Russia. On one occasion, it would appear (much was left to conjecture in the field of espionage!), he was required to devise a plan that would keep Russia in the war and prevent the Bolsheviks from seizing power. He claimed that he would have achieved that had he been given sufficient time! On another occasion, he was tasked with assisting thousands of Czech soldiers, stranded in Russia at that time, in preparing to wage war against the new Communist state should Lenin be successful. He met Kerensky and his cabinet members on a number of occasions. They were ever anxious that their western allies should raise an army specifically aimed at defeating the Bolsheviks. In Maugham’s 
opinion there was nothing glamorous about being a secret agent. In general, he confessed, life was “monotonous and uncommonly useless”. In 1923, Maugham wrote a collection of stories based on a spy named Ashenden, and it has been suggested by some that, in the 1950s, the English writer Ian Flemming based his famous hero (“Bond …. James Bond”) on the strength of those stories.
Following its decisive defeat of the ill-timed Kerensky Offensive – the final step towards the outbreak of the Russian Revolution – the German Army now turned its attention to Riga in the north, a long term objective of the German high command. The capture of this vital port on the Baltic Sea – once fully secured by the seizure of a number of islands within the West Estonian Archipelago – would threaten the Russian naval bases in the Gulf of Finland and, indeed, provide access to Petrograd, the Russian capital itself. Riga was to be well worth the taking.
