"Kornilovshchina" as a "Civil War": the Application of the Concept in the Context of a Political Crisis

Abstract

The article examines the application of the concept of “civil war” during the Revolution of 1917. Attention is paid to the so-called “the Kornilov affair”. We use different political dictionaries, periodicals, public appeals of main political actors, and diaries as our main sources. All political forces used the collocation “civil war”, and they utilized the fear of civil war for their own purposes. The exceptions were some radical Socialists, primarily Vladimir Lenin, who, in some of his texts, described the revolution as a civil war that had already begun. On the eve of the Kornilov affair, some contemporaries assumed that the inevitable political crisis could take a form of a civil war. It is not surprising that the conflict between the Supreme Commander and the Provisional Government, which took the form of a confrontation between army formations, was characterized by people of different views as a civil war. This influenced the description of political opponents who at this stage were perceived as enemies. The Bolsheviks were not the only ones who considered it impossible to achieve any compromise with the “Kornilovites” and the “bourgeoisie”. All this made it extremely difficult to create a new coalition government and limited the base of political support for Alexander Kerensky and other supporters of an agreement with the “bourgeoisie”. The “Kornilov case” was an important stage of the “articulation” of the civil war. Subsequently, this created favorable conditions for the preparation of an armed uprising by the Bolsheviks, who used the new discursive situation of legitimizing violence that arose because of this crisis.