The general who offered Russia a “strong hand”
November 1914, a night assault at Takosány: Kornilov leads the charge, captures 1,200 prisoners — and the Austrian general Raft, who says, "Kornilov is not a man, he is a force of nature."
A Cossack soldier’s son risen to commander-in-chief. In August 1917 he sent a cavalry corps against the Soviet, and railwaymen and agitators dissolved it before it arrived. Leading the White Volunteer Army in the early civil war, he was killed by a shell before Yekaterinodar in 1918.
Career Timeline
- 1914–16Divisional commander; escapes Austrian captivity to national fame
- 1917.3Commands Petrograd district; places the Empress under arrest
- 1917.7Appointed commander-in-chief
- 1917.8Moves the corps on the capital; fails, held at Bykhov
- 1917.11–1918.4Escapes to found the Volunteer Army; killed before Yekaterinodar
Related historical events
- 1917.02–07The February RevolutionGeneral of counterrevolutionAs Petrograd Military District commander he sought to suppress the April demonstrations by force, and after July, as supreme commander, he became the rallying point of counterrevolution.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionWhite Army founderHe organized the Volunteer Army in the Don region, opening the armed anti-Soviet struggle in the south, and was killed in April 1918 during the assault on Ekaterinodar.
September 1917: The March on Petrograd
Appointed Supreme Commander by the Provisional Government in July 1917, Lavr Kornilov, a hard soldier of Siberian Cossack origin, saw the soldiers' soviets and dual power as nothing but the disorder bred by revolution. He demanded the restoration of the death penalty at the front and martial law in the rear, and right-wing officers and industrialists found in him the strong hand they had been waiting for.
In early September 1917 (late August Old Style), Kornilov set General Krymov's Third Cavalry Corps and the Savage Division moving toward Petrograd. When his backstage negotiations with Kerensky collapsed, the movement became an open coup. Yet the march fell apart without a single battle: railway workers shunted the troop trains onto sidings and tore up track, telegraph workers cut the transmission of orders, and agitators sent by the soviets talked the soldiers around. Even the men of the Savage Division laid down their arms. Krymov shot himself; Kornilov was imprisoned in the Bykhov monastery.
The chief beneficiary of the coup was the Bolshevik party. The Red Guards armed to defend the capital were never disarmed, the Bolshevik leaders jailed after the July Days were released, and during September the Petrograd and Moscow soviets gained Bolshevik majorities for the first time. The counterrevolution's first sword had only radicalized the revolution.
13 April 1918: A Shell Strikes a Farmhouse at Ekaterinodar
In December 1917 (late November Old Style) Kornilov left the Bykhov monastery and made his way to the Don under the escort of the Tekinsky regiment. At Novocherkassk, together with General Alekseev, he founded the White Volunteer Army: the nucleus of armed anti-Bolshevik struggle in south Russia.
In February 1918, pressed by Red forces, the Volunteer Army of some four thousand men set out on the Ice March, the First Kuban Campaign, across the frozen steppe. Kornilov drove this desperate march with merciless discipline, and his order to take no prisoners hastened the brutalization of the early civil war. At the end of March he resolved to storm Ekaterinodar, capital of the Kuban and today's Krasnodar: a reckless frontal assault on Red defenders several times his strength.
At dawn on 13 April 1918 (31 March Old Style), a single shell struck the riverside farmhouse that housed his headquarters, killing him on the spot. Denikin, taking over command, abandoned the assault and withdrew. Kornilov's hastily buried body was dug up and burned by Red troops entering the city. The counterrevolution's first sword was broken, but the civil war had only begun.