The matter finally resolved itself into the arrival of Commissar Filonenko at Front Headquarters. He informed Kornilov that all his recommendations had been accepted by the Government, in principle, while Cheremissov was placed at the disposal of the Provisional Government. General Balnev was hastily, at random, selected to command the South-Western Front, and Kornilov assumed the Supreme Command on the 27th of July.
The spectre of the “General on the White Horse” became more and more clearly visible. And the eyes of many, suffering at the sight of the madness and the shame now engulfing Russia, were again and again turned to this spectre. Honest and dishonest, sincere and insincere, politicians, soldiers and adventurers, all turned to it. And all with one voice cried out, “Save Us!”
He, the stern and straightforward soldier, deeply patriotic, untried in politics, knowing little of men, hypnotised both by truth and flattery, and by the general longing expectation of someone’s coming, moved by a fervent desire for deeds of sacrifice—he truly believed in the predestined nature of his appointment. He lived and fought with this belief, and died for it on the banks of the Kuban.
Kornilov became a sign and rallying point. To some, of counter-Revolution; to others, of the salvation of their native land.
Around this point a struggle for influence and power was commenced by people who, unaided, without him could not have attained to such power.
A characteristic episode had already taken place on the 8th of July, at Kamenetz-Podolsk. Here, in Kornilov’s entourage, there occurred the first conflict between Savinkov and Zavoiko, the former being the most prominent Russian Revolutionary, leader of the Terrorist fighting group of the Social-Revolutionary Party, organiser of the most notorious political assassinations—those of Plehve, Minister of the Interior, of the Grand Duke Serge, etc. Strong-willed and cruel by nature, completely lacking in the controlling influences of “conventional morality,” despising both the Provisional Government and Kerensky, supporting the Provisional Government from motives of expediency, as he understood it, ready at any moment to sweep them aside—he saw in Kornilov merely a weapon in the fight for Revolutionary power, in which he must have a dominant interest. Zavoiko was one of those peculiar personages who afterwards clustered closely round Kornilov and played such a prominent part in the August days. He was not very well known even to Kornilov. The latter stated, in his evidence before the Supreme Commission of Inquiry, that he became acquainted with Zavoiko in April, 1917; that Zavoiko had been “marechal de noblesse” of the Haisin district of Podolia, had been employed on the Nobel oilfields in Baku, and, by his own statements, had been employed in prospecting for minerals in Turkestan and Western Siberia. He arrived in Czernowitz, enrolled as a volunteer in the Daghestan Mounted Regiment, and was retained at Army Headquarters as personal aide to Kornilov. That is all that is known of Zavoiko’s past.
Kornilov’s first telegram to the Provisional Government was edited by Zavoiko, who “gave it the form of an ultimatum with a concealed threat, in case of non-compliance with the demands presented to the Provisional Government, to proclaim a military dictatorship on the South-Western Front.”[54]
I discovered all this subsequently. During all these events I continued working at Minsk, completely engrossed now, not by the offensive, but by the organisation of any sort of skeleton defence of the half-collapsed Front. There was no information, no rumours even, of what was going on at the head of affairs. Only an increased tension was noticeable in all official relations.