Kerensky’s fortunes are in free fall. His military campaign produced a disaster, and a German counteroffensive results in the seizure of Riga and menaces Petrograd. Since July, Kerensky has turned sharply to the right, abrogating the reforms that followed the February Revolution, suppressing the Bolshevik press, and arresting Bolshevik leaders. But his attempt to unite the counterrevolutionary forces behind him at the Moscow State Conference ends in acrimonious failure. As support for Kerensky collapses, so too does support for all of the opportunist and petty-bourgeois parties that had placed themselves at his disposal, including the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.
The elites are deserting Kerensky, throwing their support instead behind the bloodthirsty tsarist general Kornilov, who is plotting to establish a counterrevolutionary dictatorship by means of a military coup. Meanwhile, the masses have had enough of the temporizing of the “moderate” Soviet leaders, and—to the alarm and dismay of all other parties and leaders—they are turning in vast numbers to the Bolsheviks.
August 29 (August 16, O.S.): Bolshevik Central Committee reaffirms subordinate position of the Military Organization
A meeting of the newly elected Bolshevik Central Committee reaffirms the subordinate position of the Military Organization. The Military Organization is allowed to continue publishing its newspaper Soldat (The Soldier), which it has started issuing following the ban on the Bolsheviks’ Rabochii i soldat a few days earlier. However, a member of the Central Committee is placed on the editorial board with a right to veto publications….