25.09.1997

The Kornilovs at home and abroad

From ‘The Call’, paper of the British Socialist Party, September 20 1917

The adventure of the brave général has ended in complete fiasco.

The Russian Revolution has proved its strength, and emerges, let us hope, from the crisis more consolidated and more energetic than ever. It was a critical situation, but no more than an episode in the struggle of classes which the Revolution unchained almost on the day of its triumph.

For Kornilov ... was but an instrument in the hands of the capitalist and landlord classes who hate the Revolution much more than the [text corrupted in archive file] imperialist greed, today make separate peace with the central empires if they could thereby get rid of the revolutionary democracy and restore the monarchy with all that it implies to them, as the real power behind the throne.

But they have been over-hasty. Their own savage campaign against the Revolution and its organs, the soviets, on the one hand, and the unmistakable opportunism of the chief revolutionary leaders who had been weak enough to join in the persecution of the internationalists, to sanction the restoration of the death penalty, to agree to a postponement of the meeting of the constituent assembly, to refrain from transferring to the peasants the land of the private landowners, and to abstain from all real pressure upon the Allies with a view to ending this endless massacre called war on the other hand - these factors had created in the Russian bourgeoisie, which since the Revolution had become in the words of Marx “one reactionary mass”, an impression that the time had arrived to come out in the open and to challenge the Revolution by armed force.

Their estimation of the situation proved a mistake, and the enterprise to which Kornilov - the “most popular general”, as he had all along been called by the capitalist press - miscarried.

Though the leading revolutionists were weak, the Revolution itself was strong and the common masses, in and out of uniform, saved the situation.

... We in this country have been the accomplices of Kornilov and his band. Look how the section of the press which is the mouthpiece of the British capitalist classes and of the government itself has unblushingly supported Kornilov’s endeavour, how pleasurably it anticipated his victory and the subsequent crushing of the soviets and all the hated institutions of the Revolution ...!

Here is the lesson for the British working class, which still thinks that the danger to democracy can only come from Germany, that the only Junkers and reactionaries are to be found across the North Sea, and that a revolution is only needed in Germany!

The British working class knows now what value it has to attach to the daily calls from the columns of the British press for the German people to rise, and it knows what will happen to itself if it were to rise in defence of its rights.

The Kornilovs are in our own midst as well as in Russia, and if we do not dispose of them now, we may be too late tomorrow.