General Alexeiev.
General Kornilov.
Our parting was not quite so frigid; but a couple of days went by and there were no results. I lived in a railway carriage, and did not go to the office or to the mess. As I did not intend to tolerate this silly and utterly undeserved position, I was preparing to leave Petrograd. On March 28th the War Minister came to the Stavka and cut the Gordian knot. Klembovski was offered the command of an army or membership of the War Council. He chose the latter, and on April 5th I took charge as Chief of the Staff. Nevertheless, such a method of appointing the closest assistant to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, practically by force, could not but leave a certain trace. A kind of shadow seemed to lie between myself and General Alexeiev, and it did not disappear until the last stage of his tenure of office. Alexeiev saw in my appointment a kind of tutelage on the part of the Government. From the very first moment I was compelled to oppose Petrograd. I served our cause and tried to shield the Supreme C.-in-C.—and of this he was often unaware—from many conflicts and much friction, taking them upon myself. As time went by friendly relations of complete mutual trust were established, and these did not cease until the day of Alexeiev’s death.
On April 2nd the General received the following telegram: “The Provisional Government has appointed you Supreme Commander-in-Chief. It trusts that, under your firm guidance, the Army and the Navy will fulfil their duty to the country to the end.” My appointment was gazetted on April 10th.
The Stavka, on the whole was not favoured. In the circles of the Revolutionary Democracy it was considered a nest of counter-Revolution, although such a description was utterly undeserved. Under Alexeiev there was a loyal struggle against the disruption of the Army. Under Brussilov—opportunism slightly tainted with subservience to the Revolutionary Democracy. As regards the Kornilov movement, although it was not essentially counter-Revolutionary, it aimed, as we shall see later, at combatting the Soviets that were half-Bolshevik. But, even then, the loyalty of the officers of the Stavka was quite obvious. Only a few of them took an active part in the Kornilov movement. After the office of Supreme Commander-in-Chief was abolished, and the new office created of Supreme Commanding Committees, nearly all the members of the Stavka under Kerensky, and the majority of them under Krylenko, continued to carry on the routine work. The Army also disliked the Stavka—sometimes wrongly, sometimes rightly—because the Army did not quite understand the distribution of functions among the various branches of the Service, and ascribed to the Stavka many shortcomings in equipment, organisation, promotion, awards, etc., whereas these questions belonged entirely to the War Ministry and its subordinates. The Stavka had always been somewhat out of touch with the Army. Under the comparatively normal and smoothly working conditions of the pre-Revolutionary period this circumstance did not greatly prejudice the working of the ruling mechanism; but now, when the Army was not in a normal condition, and had been affected by the whirlwind of the Revolution, the Stavka naturally was behind the times.
Finally, a certain amount of friction could not fail to arise between the Government and the Stavka, because the latter constantly protested against many Government measures, which exercised a disturbing influence on the Army. There were no other serious reasons for difference of opinion, because neither Alexeiev nor myself, nor the various sections of the Stavka, ever touched upon matters of internal policy. The Stavka was non-political in the fullest sense of the word, and during the first months of the Revolution was a perfectly reliable technical apparatus in the hands of the Provisional Government. The Stavka did but safeguard the highest interests of the Army, and, within the limits of the War and of the Army, demanded that full powers be given to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. I may even say that the personnel of the Stavka seemed to me to be bureaucratic and too deeply immersed in the sphere of purely technical interests; they were not sufficiently interested in the political and social questions which events had brought to the fore.