We’ve seen revolution in Russia this year; we’ve seen the July Days with the renewed
threat of it, and now, Russia sees an attempted coup- the Kornilov Affair.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week, there was major fighting in Italy and Romania, but far to the north, the German
army took Riga with little resistance.
This week sees an attempt to turn the Russian army on its own people.
Okay, Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky said, in a radio telegram to the whole country September
9th by our calendar, “I hereby announce...
General (Lavr) Kornilov sent to me... a demand for the surrender by the Provisional Government
of all civil and military power, so that he may form, at his personal discretion, a new
government to administer the country.”
He went on to say he had been authorized to remove Kornilov as commander of the army and
to place Petrograd under martial law.
Kornilov sent a telegram in response, which said this is all a lie.
He believes that - under Bolshevik pressure - Kerensky’s provisional government “acts
in complete harmony with the plans of the German general staff”, and was killing the
army.
Kornilov sends three cavalry divisions to capture Petrograd.
Kerensky declared Kornilov a traitor, and was now forced to appeal to the Bolsheviks
of the Petrograd Soviet for support.
From jail, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky advocated supporting Kerensky.
The Bolsheviks began arming the Petrograd workers for self-defense.
The bourgeois think Kornilov will win; the British military mission declares its support
of Kornilov.
The next day, when part of Kornilov’s army reaches Petrograd by train, though, the locals
delay the train and some soldiers are “mistakenly” sent in the wrong direction.
Workers fraternize with the Cossacks, and Alexander Krymov, their commander, afraid
of Bolshevik propaganda, orders his men out of Petrograd to a nearby village.
Even there, though, agitators spring up and the Cossacks begin holding Soviet-style meetings.
The same thing happens to Kornilov’s famed “savage division”, which consisted of
soldiers from the Caucasus regions, and they even raise a red flag and arrest their commander.
By the 11th, there are now 40,000 armed workers in Petrograd - Red Guards who had been given
back the arms confiscated during the July Days - with thousands more support personnel.
Rail workers tear up tracks to prevent Kornilov’s advance, telegraph workers slow down or halt
military communications, sending copies to the Bolsheviks.
Bolshevik soldiers begin arriving from Kronstadt and Vyborg, even as those garrisons mutiny
and shoot officers loyal to Kornilov.
On the 12th, the Soviet announces that Kornilov’s army has been defeated; it simply became demoralized
and quit.
Krymov commits suicide the 13th.
Kornilov is arrested and jailed.
Florence Harper, the first American woman journalist in Petrograd, had this to say of
the situation, “I was filled with blind rage.
We all knew it was the last chance.
The Bolsheviki were armed; the Red Guard were formed.
The split was definite; Kerensky was doomed.”
Embassies in the city began making plans to evacuate their staff and their expats; foreign
nationals were just leaving.
“There is no fear of the Germans coming soon, but a serious Bolshevik uprising is
anticipated, and its success means ANARCHY.”
Just wanna point out that though there were some anarchists who had joined the Bolsheviks,
that wasn’t their agenda at all.
Anarchy in that quote meant simply chaos.
And a side note here - a man arrived in Petrograd this week after travelling from San Francisco
and overland from Vladivostok.
He was an Englishman, a writer, who had been sent by British Secret Intelligence Service
- which is now MI6 - to prevent a Bolshevik Revolution and keep Russia in the war.
Tall order.
His name was Somerset Maugham.
There was some minor disturbance in a western army this week.
On the 9th, at Étaples in France behind the lines, British soldiers retraining after hospital
stays had some fights with the military police.
The skirmishes spread and a bunch of officers were thrown in the river.
More disturbances happened the 12th, again with the MPs, but order was restored when
the rigors of the retraining were to be relaxed.
When the Chinese Labor Corps there also demanded better conditions, the troops suppressed them
firmly with no concessions.
Something that you could call a “disturbance” happened in the skies over the Western Front,
as the legendary French flying ace Georges Guynemer, a national hero with 54 aerial victories
to his credit, disappeared during a mission over Belgium.
He never returned.
And in France, as the second battle of Verdun came to an end with a French victory, a new
infrastructure is being developed.
General John Pershing, the commander of the American forces, who plans American active
participation in the field for next summer, was setting one up, including a communications
line linking his bases with the forward depots and the ports.
He also created a purchasing board, whose first act was to order 5,000 aircraft and
8,500 trucks from the French to be delivered by June.
And it wasn’t just Verdun II - Electric Boogaloo which came to an end.
The 11th Battle of the Isonzo River came to an official end September 12th.
It was the deadliest of those battles, with casualties exceeding even those of the 10th.
The Italians took over 150,000 casualties and Austria-Hungary around 30 or 40 thousands
fewer.
The Empire had lost the Bainsizza Plateau, but they had kept their hold on their new
defensive lines and managed to regain positions this week on Monte San Gabriele with vicious
counterattacks.
Different source have different answers to the question, “who won?” but John MacDonald
calls it an unequivocal Austrian victory in “Caporetto and the Isonzo Campaign”.
“First, the Italians missed two opportunities for a breakthrough and total victory.
At the start of the battle, General Caviglia’s brilliant tactics... caught (Austrian General)
Boroevic completely by surprise.
By the morning of 20 August the Austro-Hungarians were in chaotic retreat... on 22 August the
defense fell apart and on a mile-wide front all that faced the Italians was dead and wounded
Austrian soldiers... the greatest opportunity of the war was lost...
Secondly, the Italian High Command’s view that they had won a great victory with the
capture of the Bainsizza established a mindset of “one more push and we will have won the
war”, and this clouded their vision on other issues... they largely ignored the need to
organize their own defenses...
Thirdly, the deadly cost of attritional warfare... had very seriously damaged the morale of the
Italian soldiers... the 10th Battle had cost the Italian army more than the previous 9
battles put together, and the number of dead in the 11th battle would exceed that of the
10th.
The infantry had fought one battle too many.”
Morale was indeed plummeting.
In the Italian army, like the other armies, the majority of capital sentences were given
for desertion, but punishment was harsher there.
First, it was more widely defined, and included draft dodging, so of the 189,000 soldiers
in total accused of desertion, not much over 5% of that was desertion in the face of the
enemy, and a lot of it was things like returning home late from leave.
Unlike, for example, British military law, Italian didn’t allow you to use your intention
as a defense, the prosecutor simply had to show that you were not with your unit.
Capital sentences were by now mandatory, and for a while you got the death penalty if you
were more than three days late from leave, but last month that was cut to one day.
In other countries, military censors read soldiers’ letters to gauge their moods,
in Italy it was for repression.
It was a crime to write negatively about war operations, mention news that had not been
made public, or write anything which might “lower public spirits”.
It wasn’t just that you had to leave out info that might be sensitive, all criticism
was suppressed and a lot of soldiers got long prison terms from this.
You complain about your rations?
You might get a year in jail.
One private got four years for writing that the newspaper stories about troop morale were
full of lies.
By now, Generalissimo Luigi Cadorna and his High Command believed that responsibility
for low morale at the front was solely because of socialists and pacifists, who wanted Italy
to lose the war, and somehow infiltrated the front with propaganda.
He wrote to Prime Minister Paolo Boselli accusing him of letting Italy’s internal enemies
go merrily about their business, and to match the extreme severity of military justice with
the rest of the country.
This was sort of meaningless, since Italy had been pretty much a martial state for a
couple years and since just this spring, civilians living outside the war zone could be tried
by courts martial.
And the week ends, and with it that 11th battle at Isonzo River, the second battle at Verdun,
the life of Guynemer, and Lavr Kornilov’s hopes for control of Russia.
Kornilov made three mistaken assumptions that ended his coup before it even began.
1) He assumed his soldiers were interested in a revolution in the first place.
2) He assumed they would not have conflicting political ties to parties that opposed a military
dictatorship.
3) He assumed that his soldiers were as nationalistically driven as his command.
“These incorrect assumptions led to dissent in the ranks that turned into all out desertion,
leaving General Kornilov without muscle when he arrived in Petrograd.”
He may not have had muscle, but you can see who now did - the Bolsheviks.
Thousands upon thousands of the Red Guard were now armed and in Petrograd.
That does not bode well.
If you want to learn more about the Italian Front in 1917, I highly recommend the book
by John MacDonald I quoted earlier, there is an affiliate link to that in the description.
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The Merchant of Death.
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