19 - 25 November 1917
General Nikolai Dukhonin, last commander of the Tsarist army, killed by revolutionary sailors on 20 November
19 November
In Bykhov the prisoners [generals and officers arrested after the Kornilov
uprising] were kept in better conditions than in Berdichev. The prison was
guarded by the Tekhinsky regiment which was loyal to Kornilov, and this
prevented any unsanctioned reprisals against the arrested generals. The cells
were not locked, the prisoners were allowed to socialize and receive and write
personal letters … on the morning of 17 November 1917 [chair of the
investigative committee] von Raupakh … received a note from Kornilov in
which he said that if action was not taken the Bykhov prisoners could
potentially become victims of reprisals by soldiers fleeing the front …
Von Raupakh took a piece of Commission headed paper and printed an invented
order for their release … On the evening of 19 November 1917 all the
generals and officers at Bykhov prison left Bykhov. [The following day General
Dukhonin was murdered by revolutionary sailors at Mogilev station; Generals
Denikin, Markov, Lukomsky and Romanovsky made their way to the Don region
where, with Kornilov and others, they helped to form the Volunteer Army — the
major White force of the civil war.]
Elena Shirokova, ptiburdukov.ru/История/были _освобождены_быховские_узники
20 November
At the station, despite the efforts of Krylenko, a crowd of red army men
hoisted General Dukhonin on their bayonets. His mutilated body was crucified in
the freight-car, pinned up with nails. A fag-end was stuffed in the corpse’s
mouth, and the whole crowd went to look at the general’s desecrated body,
spitting in his face and hurling abuse at him. It was in this state that his
wife, who had heard of her husband’s murder, found him at the station.
(M. Belevskaya, Headquarters of the Supreme Command in Mogilev, 1915–18:
Personal Reminiscences, Vilno 1932)
In this way the Bolsheviks seized
control of Stavka, and the command of the Russian army was transferred from
General Dukhonin to Ensign Krylenko. What was left of it, anyway, for the
Russian Imperial Army was melting away as soldiers simply packed up and left.
What muzhik wanted to be the last to man his post while the great parcelling
out of the land began back home? This was especially true for minority peoples,
such as Ukrainians, who saw the opportunity of attaining independence. By the
end of November 1917, Ukrainian soldiers had virtually disappeared from the
eastern front. It would not be long, a German spy reported from Kiev, before
Ukraine would move ‘to separate itself from Russia’. On the northern front,
where there were dreams of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian independence, the
situation was no better.
(Sean McMeekin, The Russian Revolution: A New History, New York 1917)
21 November
‘The New Siberian State’
After the declaration of independence by the Caucasus comes the announcement
of the establishment of a Tartar Republic in the Crimea. This is now followed
by the secession of Siberia from European Russia. It is difficult to say where
the process of disintegration will end. It appears to cause little concern to
the politicians in power, who are wholly absorbed by their programme of peace,
followed by a war of classes and social disruption.
(‘From our special correspondent’, The Times)
Nothing is more dangerous for peace
and for the future of Germany at this moment than to suppose that Russia is
finished and can be treated by the victorious Central Powers as a vanquished
foe. It would be madness to mistake the momentary nervous derangement of a vast
country for complete exhaustion … The Bolshevik Government might fall
within a few weeks and give place to another which would tear up the agreements
of its predecessor.
(Report in the German newspaper Mannheimer Volksstimme)
Diary entry of Joshua Butler Wright,
Counselor of the American Embassy, Petrograd
These people are not going to remain in power long — but they are in power
now. It’s like Mexico.
(Witness to Revolution: The Russian Revolution Diary and Letters of J. Butler
Wright, London 2002)
22 November
Diary entry of Louis de Robien, attaché at the French Embassy
The pretext which served to enrage the soldiers [who killed Dukhonin] seems
to have been the disappointment of the Bolsheviks at not finding Kornilov
there. He had been imprisoned at Stavka after his famous attempted coup and had
escaped, with four hundred Cossacks from the Savage Division who had been
ordered to guard him, on the evening before the actual day when the Soviets
arrived at Headquarters. The soldiers claim that this escape took place with
the connivance of General Dukhonin, and they murdered him through hatred of
Kornilov, who to them symbolized the counter-revolution and the continuation of
the war. And during all this time, the theatres of Petrograd are full and I
found it impossible to get a seat for the ballet tonight, when they are doing
Eros ,
La
Nuit d’Egypte , and
Islamet .
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917–1918, London 1969)
'Bolshevist
Visions’
The Petrograd Agency publishes the following: ‘The Workers’ Government has
instituted a Central Economic Council to deal with the economic situation in
Russia … All works and factories will elect their own controlling
bodies … As the Workers’ Council have in their hands the Central State
Bank, and hope in due course to place the private banks successively under the
control of the state, the Government of workers at the top and the workers’
organisations lower down will not only find it possible to understand the
industrial situation and the rate of profit, but they will also be able to
reduce such profit progressively. The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, in
introducing democracy into the administration of the State, is at the same time
making an end of the autocracy of the capitalist in the factory.
(Report in The Times)
23 November
To the Editor of The Times
Sir, — In your leading article on the treachery of the Bolsheviks appearing
today, which will be fully appreciated by all Russian Loyalists for its
sympathy towards the Russian people as a whole, you show fine appreciation of
one of the most serious causes of the development which culminated in the
present Russian crisis, especially in the last paragraph of your article, in
which you say: ‘We have let the Germans flood Russia with their agents and their
propaganda, and have made no organized attempt to counteract the evil work of
the enemy.’ May I carry your idea a few lines further, and say that the need
for British propaganda in Russia has never been greater than it is today,
for … it is not too late to prevent Russia from falling under an economic
domination of Germany…
Yours truly, Zinovy N. Preev, London Correspondent of the Utro Rossii,
Moscow, 359, Strand, WC2
(Letter to The Times)
Diary entry of Louis de Robien,
attaché at the French Embassy
The territories of the Empire are being frittered away … Finland has
proclaimed its independence and has asked the foreign governments to recognise
it … I cannot see why we should deny this people the right to govern
themselves … It is up to us to win the Finns over to our cause by
hastening to give them the recognition which they are asking for before Germany
does.
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917–1918, London 1969)
24 November
‘Trotsky’s idea of peace’
The keynote of Trotsky’s programme is the belief that the whole European
proletariat will insist within the next few weeks upon the conclusion of a
general peace. His statements, so emphatically repeated, that the ‘Government’
repudiates the idea of a separate peace and intends to negotiate a general
peace in concert with the Allies, indicate an illusion of the near approach of
a sudden and simultaneous outburst of pacifism before which all Thrones,
Principalities, and Powers must yield … What will happen if the expected revolutionary
cataclysm fails to take place Trotsky refrained from stating; but the
Ministerial Pravda supplies an answer: ‘We will make a general peace if
possible; if not, a separate peace.’
(‘From our special correspondent’, The Times)
Diary entry of Louis de Robien,
attaché at the French Embassy
Whoever they may be, it is the men who end the war who will be masters of
Russia for a long time…
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917–1918, London 1969)
25 November 2017
We look back on the Kornilovites and the generals who headed south to form the
nucleus of the Volunteer, later White, Army, and see them as men ‘out of time’,
their photographs fading towards an early grave or impoverished exile. They
somehow don’t seem ‘real’ in the way that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and others
continue to imprint themselves on our imagination. Is this simply because they
lost, and the losing side tends to remain in the shadows? Or because they
somehow represent the ‘old guard’, whether they were actually monarchist or
not — men of the nineteenth, rather than twentieth century? As the revolution
centenary recedes and that of the Civil War comes closer, maybe some old wounds
will be reopened. General Denikin, who escaped with Kornilov to the Don region
and succeeded him to the command of the White forces after Kornilov’s death in
April 1918, remained a divisive figure well into exile in France and the United
States. In 2005, on Putin’s instruction, Denikin’s body was repatriated and
buried in Moscow’s Donskoi monastery — an act seen at the time as partly an
attempt to honour the Whites in order to avoid confronting the real legacy of
the Civil War. A feature writer in the Spectator magazine wrote at the time:
‘by celebrating Denikin and [anti-communist philosopher Ivan] Il’in, their
anti-communism, nationalism and Orthodoxy, the Russian state is making a
statement about the country’s future which, for those of us who remember the
Soviet years, is a statement we can only welcome.’ I wonder if he would write
the same today.
