Chapter 13
in which Irakli Tsereteli tries to turn Russia into a parliamentary democracy and Vladimir Lenin stands in his way
HOLED UP IN SWITZERLAND
“We old-timers might not live to see the decisive battles of the coming proletarian revolution. But I have great confidence that the young people of the socialist movement will have the good fortune not only to fight it, but to win it,” a Russian émigré tells a group of young Swiss Marxists. It is late February 1917, a couple of weeks before Russia is hit by revolution.
The man has been living in Switzlerland for almost eleven years and signs his name as “Nikolai” Lenin. The leader of the Bolshevik Party, over the past seventeen years he has changed his name so many names it is hard to keep track: Ilyin, Petrov, Frey. He is still fanatically devoted to the revolutionary cause and is sure that it will happen one day. Yet the forty-seven-year-old Vladimir Ulyanov (his real name) is psychologically prepared for the fact that that he may not live to see the day.
Russian émigrés in Switzerland are cut off from what is happening back home. Most of them left Russia more than fifteen years earlier and have no idea what the Russian people are saying or thinking. The émigré community has turned into a sect, and even a number of warring sub-sects. They have come to despise their compatriots who remained in Russia, whom they view as traitors or compromisers. Almost all émigrés believe that they are the only true bearers of the ideas of the Russian revolution—only they are real; everyone else is a fraud. This messianic approach, however, is a psychological defense mechanism. They want to believe that their dull, shabby existence in a European backwater is a noble sacrifice. Lenin’s self-hypnosis is the most complete of all.
For a decade-and-a-half he has not felt like a Russian politician—his debating opponents are all Swiss or German Marxists. What very little he hears from Russia does not interest him. His “pen pals” (his closest friend, Grigory Zinoviev, and mistress, Inessa Armand) also live in Switzerland.
By 2 March, the revolutionary events in Russia seem to be ending. The tsar has abdicated and the Provisional Government is in place. Yet Ulyanov still knows nothing about it. He and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, are having dinner when a Polish neighbor comes running, asking breathlessly if they have heard the news from Russia. Lenin throws on his coat and dashes to a newspaper stand. That same day he writes to Zinoviev in Bern, asking him to travel to Zurich immediately.
The revolution wakes Ulyanov out of his stupor. He feverishly analyzes the political situation, but cannot get a hold on it. For one thing, he is sure that the tsar has escaped and is preparing a counter-revolution. Then he assumes that the revolution could not possibly have gone so smoothly had it not been the result of a conspiracy by the English and French in order to continue their imperialist war and prevent the tsar from concluding a peace treaty.
Despite his hazy view of the situation, he instructs his friend Alexandra Kollontai, who is able to travel to Petrograd from her position in Norway, not to offer Bolshevik support for the Provisional Government.
The main problem for all Russian émigrés in Switzerland is that they cannot get out. Switzerland is surrounded on all sides by belligerent countries. This common problem temporarily unites the warring socialist factions. A discussion is held, the tone of which is set by Julius Martov. This is logical, for his party comrades, the Mensheviks, are the ones in charge of the Petrograd Soviet. Ulyanov does not attend the meeting, but sends Zinoviev as his representative. Martov suggests two options for returning home: via Germany or via England.
Martov looks at both and concludes that England is too difficult. He, like Lenin and all other Russian émigrés, is a pacifist (i.e., antiwar, not anti-murdering Russian officials). Under martial law, antiwar propaganda is a crime. A couple of months previously Leon Trotsky was arrested in France and deported to Spain, and then to the United States, for such an offense. Traveling through France to England (and then by steamship to Sweden and onwards to Russia by train) is an option only for revolutionaries who publicly support the war: for example, the old leader of the Marxists, Plekhanov, who in one of his last interviews urged Russian women not to marry their soldier fiancés until they have returned victorious from the front. Martov and his comrades make fun of the sixty-year-old Plekhanov’s newfound jingoism. Yet they are envious, because they cannot go to Russia.
The second option suggested by Martov is also highly dubious. Safe passage through Germany, which is at war with Russia, seems impractical. But Martov can call upon an influential comrade in Russia: Nikolai Chkheidze, the Menshevik chairman of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet. He wants the new Russian government to exchange German prisoners of war in Russia for revolutionaries holed up in neutral Switzerland. Martov fears that, in the turmoil of the revolution, his fellow party members now in power will forget about their émigré comrades. He writes letter upon letter, including ones to Gorky, Korolenko, and other illustrious acquaintances requesting assistance to get back to Russia.
Unlike Martov, Ulyanov does not have high-placed friends at home in Russia. The few Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet have absolutely no influence whatsoever and cannot help their stranded leader.
Nadezhda Krupskaya recalls that her husband is losing sleep as he obsesses about how to escape from Switzerland. Flying by plane is impossible without the right documents. Another of Ulyanov’s ideas is to obtain Swedish passports for himself and Zinoviev. But he and Zinoviev do not know a word of Swedish, so they would need the passports of deaf-mute Swedes. It is no joke. Ulyanov even sends a photograph to his comrade Yakub Ganetsky, who lives in Stockholm, asking him to find a Lenin-lookalike, deaf-mute Swede whose passport (indicating deaf-mute status) could be stolen. Krupskaya pokes fun at her husband: “Who are you kidding? You might start talking in your sleep. You’ll dream about the Kadets* and start swearing.”
A third option involves a fellow party member (and potential lookalike) Vyacheslav Karpinsky. Ulyanov proposes that Karpinsky give him his passport to travel to Russia and lie low for a couple of weeks in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. He even promises to pay all accommodation expenses. Karpinsky refuses.
In desperation, a fourth option is mooted, reviving Martov’s idea of traveling through Germany. But the plan this time is to contact the Germans directly, without relying on the Mensheviks in Petrograd. For this, Lenin dispatches another comrade, Karl Radek, to meet with the German ambassador in Switzerland. Radek conveys Lenin’s terms to the ambassador: “The German government shall let [the revolutionaries] through without asking their names, and the transit passengers shall have the privilege of extraterritoriality.” The ambassador is taken aback: “Sorry, but I believe that Mr. Ulyanov and his associates are asking for permission to travel through Germany. If that is the case, the terms and conditions of passage shall be set by us.” Nevertheless, he conveys the Bolsheviks’ demands to Berlin.
BACK FROM SIBERIA
Most of the convicts exiled by the tsarist authorities to Siberia learn about the revolution no earlier than the Swiss emigrants. On that same day, 2 March, when Lenin and Krupskaya are avidly reading the newspapers at a kiosk near Lake Geneva, news of the revolution arrives in Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia. Crowds of people waving red flags pour onto the streets: rallies are held, and speeches are made. The atmosphere “vividly evokes the spirit of 18 October 1905 in St. Petersburg,” recalls one of the exiles. “It was the same intoxication, the same uncertainty, the same vague anxiety. But there was also one significant difference: this time the troops were with the people.”
Having learned about the revolution, the thirty-six-year-old former State Duma deputy Gerasim Makharadze runs to the nearest rail station. He is in a hurry to get to the village of Usolye to tell his friend Irakli Tsereteli, Russia’s most famous political prisoner, about what has happened. The two of them, Tsereteli and Makharadze, were once members of the Second Duma from the Georgian city of Kutaisi. In 1907, both were accused by Stolypin of attempting a coup, and both were exiled to Eastern Siberia, six thousand kilometers from Georgia. Makharadze quickly finds Tsereteli, and the following day they enter the city as conquerors. Irkutsk is Russia’s “premier” political prison. It is here, in the early nineteenth century, that a group of leading aristocratic officers, known as the Decembrists, were exiled for their dreams of turning Russia into a constitutional monarchy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the resident Social Democrats, among them Tsereteli, dream of making Russia a democratic republic. Hitherto, they have gathered here illegally to discuss the latest news. But on 3 March they meet in order to set up the Irkutsk Soviet of Workers’ Deputies—the new authority in town. Irakli Tsereteli and another exile, the Socialist-Revolutionary Abram Gotz, the brother of the party’s late ideologist Mikhail Gotz, speak to the soldiers, who greet them with cries of “Long live the free Russia!” and “Long live the free soldiers!”
The very next day Tsereteli has to intervene in a conflict between Irkutsk soldiers and officers. “We are the predominant force,” say the soldiers, stating that they will no longer obey the officers. “Yes, you are,” agrees the exiled deputy Tsereteli, “because you are carrying out the will of the people. But the moment you place your own desires above the will of the people, you will become an insignificant bunch of rebels.” His resoluteness makes a deep impression on the soldiers, and the conflict is settled.
Tsereteli stays a week in Irkutsk until the situation finally stabilizes. On 10 March he, along with other exiles, boards a train bound for Petrograd. Decorated with flags and posters, “the train of the Second Duma” stops at every station along the way, where the passengers alight to speak to the locals.
Tsereteli himself does not leave the train, for he is ill. He remains inside his compartment, perusing the papers and pondering his plans. The main task ahead is to unite all the former oppositionists, leave all disputes behind, and build a new Russian democracy together. To this end, Tsereteli tells his fellow passengers that he must meet with Lenin face to face in order to explain to him the folly of “maximalist experiments”* and convince him of the need for joint action.
At the same time, another living legend is departing from Krasnoyarsk. She is “Babushka” Breshko-Breshkovskaya. The most striking thing for her is that officialdom everywhere seems to have evaporated, yet law and order prevail: “The mood was respectful. People were confident that justice had finally arrived.” Unlike the former deputies, however, she is not in a hurry to get to Petrograd. The legendary convict spends an entire month travelling around all the major towns and cities from Krasnoyarsk to Petrograd, where thousands of people come out to pay homage to their “queen.”
MINISTRY OF ARTS
Meanwhile, many in Petrograd sense that the time is nigh. Swift action is needed to make the most of the unprecedented and long-awaited opportunities opened up by the revolution.
On the morning of 4 March, the telephone rings at the house of the artist Alexander Benois. It is his colleague Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, urging Benois to go to Gorky’s place immediately, for a gathering of the creative intelligentsia is set to take place to elect a new minister of the arts. According to Petrov-Vodkin, the obvious candidate is Sergei Diaghilev. Benois rings around other friends, and all are infected with the same enthusiasm. The artist Konstantin Somov says that in view of the effective abolition of the Ministry of the Court, which oversaw the Imperial Academy of the Arts, action must be taken.
After dinner everyone gathers at the home of Gorky. His small living room is packed to the rafters. Benois recalls that the meeting was something of a muddle. Gorky repeats several times that artists themselves must assume responsibility for protecting museums, while his wife, Maria Andreyeva, appeals to Chaliapin to save the Russian theatre. All the while the “great oaf” Vladimir Mayakovsky (future greatest poet of Communist revolution, now wearing a simple soldier’s uniform) is swearing his head off. In the end, Benois, Gorky, Chaliapin, Roerich, and other artists are chosen as delegates to attend the Duma the following day.
On the way back from Gorky’s home, Benois is struck by the calm in the city: “A few patrols sat around campfires. No screaming or swearing. No drunks at all. It’s all a bit surreal. You have to pinch yourself and ask: are Russians really so mature?”
The next day the stellar delegation goes to the Duma, where it finds a huge crowd through which they miraculously make their way thanks to Gorky’s “magic” pass. After spending half a day in crowded reception rooms, they are informed that the chairman of the Council of Ministers has issued a decree to set up a special police unit to protect monuments and museums, which “only remains to be signed.” At the same time, it turns out that the Provisional Government has relocated to the building of the Interior Ministry, where the delegation now goes. This time Chaliapin is the “pass,” since everyone either knows or wants to know him. The young finance minister, Mikhail Tereshchenko, approaches the group (“with the demeanor not of a democratic minister, but of a gracious prince,” writes Benois, “speaking in a husky voice”). It turns out that Tereshchenko’s dream is to create a separate Ministry of the Arts headed by Diaghilev: “We must put it in writing right away, Alexander Nikolayevich!” he says to Benois.
Finally, the delegation makes the acquaintance of the star of the Provisional Government—Alexander Kerensky, whom Benois initially considered to be an “overzealous clerk.” Kerensky takes the delegates to the next room and says that, as the justice minister, he has already visited the Winter Palace and Tsarskoye Selo and posted guards there. Moreover, he is sure that the Winter Palace is wholly inappropriate as a venue for the constituent assembly.
“The man had clearly not slept for many nights,” recalls Benois. “Having encountered so much mediocrity and inborn Russian apathy, Kerensky made a fine impression. He exudes talent, willpower and watchfulness. A born dictator!”
It transpires that Kerensky is a step ahead and has already secured Prime Minister Lvov’s signature on the decree to set up a police unit to protect the palaces. He thanks the delegation, saying that he relies on the support of such artistic luminaries. Then, without saying goodbye, he dashes from the room on urgent business.
The next day the newspapers publish a report on the creation of a new arts commission, which includes Gorky, Benois, Petrov-Vodkin, Roerich, Chaliapin, and other celebrities. Young artists and poets are against this “dictatorship of stars.” They demand a congress of artists, which convenes at the Mikhailovsky Theatre on 12 March, presided by Professor Vladimir Nabokov Sr. The theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the young poet Vladimir Mayakovsky are in a tempestuous mood, the latter demanding a “constituent council of artists,” not some “ministry of arts.”
Perplexed, Benois and Nabokov leave the meeting. Benois calls Elena Diaghileva, Sergei’s stepmother, to find out his current address and urge him “to return to Russia for the sake of the common task” (and lead it, most likely). Elena is sure that Sergei will agree because great opportunities beckon. Benois admits that he is somewhat concerned for Diaghilev, should he return: “Let him be spared from partaking of the bitter cup of our machinations.”
HEAVE-HO
In March 1917 a new season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes begins in Rome. When Igor Stravinsky arrives from Switzerland, the whole team is already assembled: the choreographer Leonid Myasin leads the rehearsals, while Léon Bakst and Pablo Picasso are putting the finishing touches to the stage set. The Rome program includes Stravinsky’s Firebird and Fireworks. All performances traditionally begin with the orchestra performing the Russian national anthem, but Diaghilev considers “God Save the Tsar” to be no longer appropriate. Instead, he instructs Stravinsky to arrange—and the orchestra to play—a stirring rendition of the traditional ballad “Ey, ukhnyem” (literally “Heave-ho,” more commonly known as “The Song of the Volga Boatmen”)—the song of the “barge haulers” (laboring men dragging barges on rivers), probably the most deprived members of society.
Having received Benois’s telegram, Diaghilev does not take long to refuse. He is finishing work on a new grandiose staging of Erik Satie’s ballet Parade, with scenery once more by Picasso. Diaghilev’s previous seasons have not been very successful, and this time he is hoping for a breakthrough.
“I’ve been working abroad for too long,” Vaslav Nijinsky’s wife, Romola, recalls the words of Diaghilev, whom, incidentally, she detests. “I wouldn’t survive in the new Russia and prefer to remain in Europe.” Benois eventually accepts his point of view: “Let Sergei remain abroad. We’ll all have to emigrate too when everything turns sour.”
Back in Russia, the lack of a national anthem is a problem. As the “official” anthem of the revolution, the French Marseillaise is normally chosen for formal occasions. Yet Russian composers are eager to write a new tune. Alexander Grechaninov, Alexander Glazunov, and Sergei Prokofiev all compose versions of their own. Grechaninov asks the poet Konstantin Balmont to write some words. He pens the following:
Long live Russia—land of the free!
Free and elemental, great is your story.
O mighty power, o shoreless sea!
The mist is dispelled by your fighters of glory.
Zinaida Gippius and Valery Bryusov are also rumored to try their hand at composing a verse or two.
The new country still has no symbols or traditions. The first ritual needed is for the funerals of victims of the revolution, so-called “festivals of freedom.” The Petrograd Soviet seriously considers the idea of burying its fallen comrades in Palace Square, with the fraternal grave crowned by a grandiose monument.
But members of the “commission for the arts” are horrified. Benois is worried that hundreds of thousands of people will attend the ceremony and make a dash for the Winter Palace and the treasures of the Hermitage. He asks Gorky to go to the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and use his influence to suggest that the burial take place, for instance, in front of Kazan Cathedral—the site of numerous clashes with police under the former regime. But the Petrograd Soviet insists on Palace Square, and work begins to dig it up.
However, it proves impractical due to the frozen ground and crisscrossing pipes. In the end, the decision is taken to hold the mass funeral for victims of the revolution at the Field of Mars, a spacious park named after the Roman god of war. On 23 March an immense procession of almost a million people takes place (“Two million,” says Gippius, “and no Khodynka tragedy”). The fact that such a vast memorial service passes without incident is praised even by skeptics, such as the French ambassador to Russia, Maurice Paléologue: “Innumerable crowds escorted the slow-moving red coffins—an extraordinarily magnificent spectacle. The tragic effect was intensified by once-a-minute cannon fire. Russians have an innate sense of the dramatic.”
WITHOUT PRIESTS
Non-religious funerals come as a great shock for many residents of the capital. “No priest, no icons, no prayers, no cross. Only one song: the Marseillaise,” the French ambassador continues. “Only yesterday peasants, soldiers and workers could not walk past an icon without doffing their caps. What a contrast to today!”
The lack of priests at funeral ceremonies is the talk of the town, not least at the home of the Merezhkovskys. Zinaida Gippius, the founder of her own “domestic church,”* is indignant. “How can they just bury people without even singing the Memory Eternal?” she asks guests seated around her kitchen table.†
“Why not?” responds one of her soldier guests. “There was a choir from every regiment. They sang in a comradely manner. Why bother with priests? If the other side had won, the victims would now be swinging on the gallows.” Gippius concurs, recalling that the Russian Orthodox Church forbade prayers for the saintly Tolstoy, while the devil-incarnate Rasputin’s burial service was performed by the metropolitan himself.
The church itself tries to show loyalty to the new government. “It is God’s will. Russia has embarked on a new path,” announces the Holy Synod three days after the abdication of Nicholas II. “The Holy Synod prays that the Almighty bless the deeds of the Provisional Government.”
The Provisional Government is busy developing its own secular rituals. Kerensky, for his part, believes that Russia “needs more fine gestures.” Benois does not really know what he means, but agrees all the same. The next “fine gesture” of the new government is a gala concert at the Mariinsky Theatre in honor of the revolution.
At the theatre, members of the Provisional Government and the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet sit in the stalls. All eyes are trained on the royal box, which is now full of thirty people: old men and a few old women with gaunt yet strangely expressive faces glancing around in surprise at the audience. They are terrorist heroes and heroines, who only returned from Siberia a few weeks ago, including the legendary Vera Zasulich and Vera Figner of People’s Will.
“I was horrified to think of all the physical and mental suffering they had endured in silence. What an epilogue to Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead,” says the French ambassador, moved by the scene.
To the delight of the audience, Justice Minister Kerensky appears on stage. He is followed by the aforementioned sixty-five-year-old Vera Figner. In 1881, she was the only member of People’s Will who managed to avoid arrest after the assassination of Alexander II. But not for long. Two years later she was captured and sentenced to death, later commuted to lifelong hard labor. But in 1906 she was humanely released for medical treatment abroad, where she founded the committee for political prisoners, the first human rights organization in Russian history (based in Paris). Now she is on stage at the Mariinsky Theatre, speaking on behalf of “the innumerable army of all those who sacrificed their lives for the Revolution, who died anonymously in prison and in Siberia.” “A whisper of sympathy and reverence, a kind of silent ovation, swept through the hall,” recalls Paléologue. Her speech is followed by a funeral march, and the room starts to weep.
“IT’S NOT EVERY DAY THAT TSERETELI ARRIVES”
On 18 March the Petrograd Soviet is in a flutter: tomorrow the “train of the Second Duma” is set to arrive, bringing with it the legendary revolutionaries and leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social Democrats from Siberian exile. The most famous of them is Tsereteli. The Petrograd Soviet arranges a guard of honor made up of soldiers and sailors, an orchestra, and an official delegation for his arrival. Some want to tone down the occasion for fear of provoking a stampede. “It’s not every day that Tsereteli arrives, you know,” replies Moisei Uritsky, a member of the executive committee. In less than a year’s time, now on the side of the Bolsheviks, it is Uritsky who will be responsible for dispersing the Constituent Assembly and persecuting Tsereteli in his role as head of the Petrograd Cheka, the security agency set up to fight enemies of the new regime.
The red carpet is indeed rolled out (along with red flags), setting a precedent for greeting other newly arrived “great revolutionaries.” The heroes are borne aloft by the crowd and taken to the Tauride Palace, where more triumphant speeches are delivered.
For Tsereteli, returning to the Tauride Palace is a symbolic moment. It was here, a decade before, that he listened to his sentence being read out, with the approval of the then-deputies Guchkov, Milyukov, and Rodzianko, who now sit in the new government. Tsereteli makes a speech in which he forgives his erstwhile enemies and states his willingness to work with them for the sake of Russian democracy.
“We, more than anyone else, know the price of the bourgeoisie. On our bones, on the crypt of the Social Democrats of the Second State Duma, the Fourth Duma was raised,” he says, presenting himself as a martyr. Tsereteli argues that power should lie in the hands of the Provisional Government and that strict discipline should be enforced in the ranks of the proletariat, effectively announcing that his goal is to curb the Petrograd Soviet and put an end to the revolutionary chaos. He explains this task from a Marxist viewpoint: “The time has not yet come to implement the end objectives of the proletariat,” these “bright ideals will be implemented through the joint efforts of the world proletariat,” but for now the Russian working class “hand in hand with the progressive bourgeoisie” must build a new democratic state and “defend freedom from the forces of darkness.”
Lastly, Tsereteli boldly declares that the “great schism” in the ranks of the Russian Social Democrats is over: “For years we have rebelled against each other in fratricidal warfare. Not any more. Today we stand as representatives of the Social-Democratic faction, which has united the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks as a single whole.”
Meanwhile, the Bolshevik and Menshevik ideologists themselves, Lenin and Martov, are also trying to unite to return to Russia, unaware that many of their comrades no longer need them all that much.
The Bolshevik Party is experiencing an internal transformation: among the returning exiles are the famous revolutionaries Lev Rosenfeld and Joseph Dzhugashvili. They are received into the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet and immediately seize editorial control of the party newspaper Pravda in a coordinated “raid.” Rosenfeld and Dzhugashvili are better known by their pseudonym surnames Kamenev and Stalin. Brutal-sounding pseudonyms are in vogue among the Bolsheviks: Stalin (from the Russian word for “steel”), Kamenev (“stone”), Molotov (“hammer”), Lomov (“crowbar”).
Dzhugashvili, according to one of his so-called colleagues, is like a “gray, indistinct spot.” The new party line is set by Kamenev, who renounces Lenin’s intransigence in the spirit of Tsereteli, who believes that the stability of the new democracy must be ensured. Kamenev and Tsereteli see eye to eye. Moreover, they know each other from their school days back in Tbilisi (then Tiflis).
Many top positions inside the Petrograd Soviet are occupied by Georgians. In 1917 no one is bothered by it, since they all claim to be patriots of Russia and uninterested in the issue of Georgian autonomy.
In the spirit of universal reconciliation, the legendary Babushka makes a triumphant tour of the country. Arriving at long last in Moscow, she is taken in the once imperial carriage to the Moscow Duma. Then, on moving to Petrograd, she is met at the train station by Kerensky himself and taken to the buildings of the Petrograd Duma and the Petrograd Soviet. She gives speeches at both. Kerensky lodges the seventy-three-year-old Babushka in his own apartment.
Benois, however, believes that the hero-worship of convicts is excessive: “They’ve overegged it. Babushka is spoilt forever.” Benois thinks that the humble Breshko-Breshkovskaya, who once roamed the villages, is now a living museum exhibit. Yet the Provisional Government does not turn her into a propaganda tool. She simply lives at Kerensky’s apartment, seemingly more fascinated by him than he is by her. Speaking in public, she never fails to extol his virtues.
KERENSKY THE SAVIOR
Babushka is not the only one enamored of the young justice minister, Alexander Kerensky. Every woman in Russia, it seems, is in love with him, while men speak of him in reverential terms as the savior of the Fatherland. Less than a month after the tsar’s abdication, in a country without television and radio, talk of the superhero minister is spreading like wildfire.
Kerensky is walking on air and his energy knows no bounds. He is literally everywhere and said to be the only member of the new government who never sleeps. Foreign journalists are amazed that Kerensky gives interviews at 7 a.m. Despite looking tired, he still manages to infect others with his enthusiasm.
“I really want to be in close contact with him. I could be useful to him,” Alexander Benois writes in his diary after his first meeting with Kerensky. “What unbridled rapture his appearance aroused,” Ekaterina Peshkova remembers a speech by Kerensky. “It was such a joy to listen to him and realize that such a person exists.” “Who’s our savior? Kerensky!” Benois’s daughters and maids chant in unison in the family kitchen.
Kerensky’s appeal reaches far beyond the capital. “I worship Kerensky, the leader of our revolution.… My darling, wonderful Kerensky!” writes the Odessa music teacher Elena Larier in her diary. “There is only one person who can save the country,” states the British military attaché Alfred Knox, who expects nothing good to come of the revolution.
On 12 March Kerensky pays a visit to his old friend Zinaida Gippius, and asks her husband Merezhkovsky to write a pamphlet about the Decembrists to be published with a circulation of one million copies. Kerensky explains that the work is needed to quell the soldiers’ hatred of their officers and show that the Russian revolution began with an uprising among the nobility and aristocracy back in 1825.
The ever-cynical Gippius listens to Kerensky and recalls how two years previously, at a meeting of the Religious-Philosophical Society, she saw Kerensky next to a portrait of Nicholas II and was struck by the likeness: “I’ll never forget it. Who’d have thought that today the mutineer would be a minister and the tsar under arrest?”
Kerensky leaves the Merezhkovskys as hastily as he came, asking for the visit to be kept secret. “Kerensky is now the only one,” writes Gippius in her diary. “It’s scary. He may be brilliant, but not all-powerful. The task could swallow him.”
Two months later Merezhkovsky puts the finishing touches on his book, The Firstborns of Freedom, and devotes it to “the successor of the Decembrist cause: A.F. Kerensky.”
THE DUUMVIRATE
Kerensky is indeed the most active and most popular politician in the new Russia, but Gippius is right that he is far from being all-powerful. The most popular word in Russia in the spring of 1917 is dvoyevlastiye, meaning duumvirate or dual power. It appears endlessly in newspapers, diaries, and memoirs. The fact is that since the beginning of the February Revolution, both the Provisional Government and the Soviets (in Petrograd, Moscow, and hundreds of cities all over the country) have been functioning simultaneously. They are not opposed to each other, but their very coexistence is confusing for society.
The new system that emerged after the abdication of the tsar is well understood in the twenty-first century, when the division of power into legislative and executive branches is commonplace. But in the early twentieth century, for Russian society accustomed to rigid, top-down, one-man rule, the mere existence of two centers of power seems unnatural and dangerous. The ordinary citizen has no concept of checks and balances or how such a system should work. Throughout its twelve-year existence of opposition, the State Duma has never had an opportunity to influence political decisions, let alone form a government.
Yet the Petrograd Soviet does not claim to be an organ of supreme state power (the slogan “All power to the Soviets” will sound much later from the archenemy of the existing system, Lenin). Nikolai Chkheidze, the chairman of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet, admits in one of his speeches that only once did the Petrograd Soviet permit itself to intrude into the realm of executive responsibility: in the first days of the revolution, fearing that the tsar would raise an army and lead a counter-revolution, members of the Soviet wanted to send soldiers to have him arrested. However, they later ceded the executive function to the Provisional Government.
According to Chkheidze, the Soviet exercises civilian, or parliamentary, control over the activities of the government. The majority inside this quasi-parliament belongs to the left-wing socialist opposition, with the liberal government being more to the right.
The democratic nature of such a system is a moot topic: the Soviets are elected by labor collectives of enterprises and military units, not by the entire population. However, the previously elected bodies—the Duma and the zemstvos—were also far from being truly democratic, because the requirement to own property largely ruled out peasants, workers, and soldiers. Now it is the workers and soldiers who have assumed the role of choosing the new representative bodies. The fact that the Petrograd Soviet sits at the Tauride Palace, the building of the State Duma dissolved by the tsar, is symbolic.
The system of checks and balances between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government swings into action when Tsereteli arrives in Petrograd. He does not occupy public office yet, but he is the ideologist and “spiritual leader” of the Petrograd Soviet.
An unofficial body of power is taking shape around Tsereteli, which his detractors call the “star chamber”—a group of likeminded individuals, Socialist-Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks, who dominate the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Every morning they gather for breakfast at the flat of Duma deputy Skobelev, also home to Tsereteli, who does not have his own apartment. Also present are Chkheidze, Abram Gotz, Fyodor Dan (one of the Menshevik leaders), and several others. Tsereteli uses these morning briefings to instruct his comrades.
The reason for Tsereteli’s potent influence is that he alone has a clear plan; all other politicians are lost. According to his colleague Voitinsky, the more complex the political situation and the more hesitant those around him, the more Tsereteli is sure of himself. In terms of self-belief, Tsereteli has only one rival—Lenin.
AN INEFFECTIVE MANAGER
The fact that the Provisional Government feels squeezed by the Petrograd Soviet is not surprising. The former has no leader and no effective management: the super-popular Kerensky is more a lone wolf than a team player, and the formal leader, Prince Lvov, does not want to hog the limelight. He is in no hurry to establish relations with the regions. As the new interior minister, Lvov dismisses all former governors, replacing them with the heads of provincial zemstvos (i.e., elected officials are vested with power, not appointees). However, they tend to be local noblemen respected in their own circles, but removed from the common folk and slightly afraid of them.
At the same time, the government does not regulate or hinder the emergence of local self-government bodies—an endless number of committees and soviets (councils). In the opinion of Prince Lvov, there is no need for a special program to set up local authorities, since they are self-generating and already exist in embryonic form, preparing the people for future reforms.
At first this is not a problem. As recalled by the leader of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Viktor Chernov, “the popular enthusiasm about the fall of the old regime was so great that its heirs literally choked on the stream of telegrams expressing sympathy, support and unlimited hope.”
But within a month, there is discontent among the people, which the Provisional Government fails to notice because it does not have its ear to the ground. Its members are surprised to learn that working people consider them bourgeoisie.
Neither does the “Tolstoyan” Provisional Government of Prince Lvov know how to deal with the police. With the old tsarist police disbanded, most of its leaders are behind bars. No one is responsible for law enforcement, and throughout the country there is a sharp increase in crime. Local soviets respond by creating their own volunteer worker and student militias. Only a month later does the Provisional Government issue a decree to legitimize them.
A BUTTERFLY ON THE WHEEL
The former tsar and his family have been living under arrest now for two weeks. Nicholas spends his time clearing snow from around the palace and keeping the ponds free of ice. The guards mock him, saying, “Hey, colonel, you’re not allowed over there,” and shove him around with their rifle butts. But overall, the two weeks have been calm. Nicholas and Alexandra’s attention is mainly on their children, who are only just beginning to recover from their illness—all except Maria, who now has pneumonia.
On 21 March, the calm inside the palace is disturbed by the arrival of Justice Minister Kerensky. His first port of call is Anna Vyrubova:
“Are you Ms. Anna Vyrubova?”
“Yes,” she answers, barely audibly.
“Get dressed and follow me.”
Vyrubova is silent.
“What the devil are you doing in bed?” inquires Kerensky.
“I’m sick,” she whimpers.
Kerensky turns to the accompanying officer. “Put a guard on the door. I’ll go and speak to the doctors. No one is to enter or leave this room without my permission.” He then swiftly proceeds to the quarters of Nicholas and Alexandra. “I’m Kerensky, you probably know my name,” he says. They are silent. “You must have heard of me? I don’t know why we are standing up. Let’s sit down, that will be more comfortable.” The former empress pointedly ignores all the minister’s questions, so he asks her to leave him alone with Nicholas. Alexandra runs out of the room. “Mum, what’s going on?” ask her worried elder daughters Olga and Tatiana.
“Kerensky insisted that I leave him alone with the Sovereign,” replies Alexandra. “They’ll probably arrest me.”
However, Kerensky takes into custody only Alexandra’s two friends—Anna Vyrubova and Lili Dehn—on suspicion of political conspiracy. He is acting largely under the influence of the press, which every day publishes new lurid details about the lives of the imperial family. Such publications are no secret to Vyrubova. On the morning of the day of her arrest, for instance, she reads in the papers that she and Dr. Badmaev allegedly tried to “poison the Sovereign and the heir.”
Vyrubova sobs all the way to Petrograd. But once in the capital, curiosity takes over. For the first time, she sees the revolutionary city, the crowds of soldiers, the long queues, and the “dirty red rags” on all the buildings.
“You see, Lili. After the revolution, things are no better,” she says to her friend.
“Not a single policeman,” writes Dehn. “Law and order ceased to exist, but groups of strange people were gathered on the street corners. No doubt the loiterers were Jews.… It’s no wonder that Petrograd acquired a small-town mentality.”
In the pre-trial detention cell, Dehn takes the remaining letters from Vyrubova. There was no stove in the house, so she tore the ones she could find into small pieces and flushed them down the lavatory, so that the jailers would not find anything “compromising.”
The soldiers and officers who arrested Alexandra’s ladies-in-waiting are surprised to discover that the renowned Vyrubova is not a wanton high-society belle, but an invalid on crutches who looks much older than her thirty-two years.
“We must give them their due. The soldiers were very gentle with this butterfly that had fallen under the wheels of a car,” notes Dehn ironically.
After one night in prison together, they part company: Vyrubova is taken to the Trubetskoy Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress—one of Russia’s worst jails, where political prisoners were detained in the days before the revolution. As for Dehn, a few days later Kerensky demands her release. For a start, she has never engaged in politics, and besides, she has a seven-year-old child at home. She is set free.
THE PRISON POET
On 26 March Alexander Blok arrives in Petrograd from the front line. He is thirty-six years old, the same age as Kerensky, and for several years has been one of the most famous poets in Russia. The last few months he has spent in the swamplands of Belarus, serving as an army clerk.
As it happens, his arrival in the capital coincides with the burial of victims of the revolution at the Field of Mars. Blok wanders the streets and looks at the “joyous, mellowed people” in the unswept, police-free streets. To him, it seems like the first of many miracles: “There is nothing to be afraid of here. The city is like a dream world.”
He goes to see the Merezhkovskys, who receive him kindly and bring him up to speed on the revolution. Their story further convinces him that something supernatural has occurred.
On his first day back in the capital, an old acquaintance offers Blok a job as a secretary at the newly created investigative commission, which is tasked with interrogating all arrestees of the old regime and unpicking their crimes. The chance to be close to history in the making appeals to Blok: “I’ll be in the Winter Palace at the heart of government business,” he explains to his mother. He accepts the post.
Meanwhile, the Peter and Paul Fortress is filling up with persons whom the new government suspects of crimes: in addition to Vyrubova, there is the head of the Union of Russian People Dubrovin, the corrupt former palace commandant Voeikov, the former war minister Sukhomlinov and his wife, the former prime ministers Stürmer and Goremykin, and the former interior minister Protopopov. Just a few days after the revolution, almost all former ministers, high-ranking police officers, and other undesirables of the former regime find themselves under arrest.
They are kept in terrible conditions. When Vyrubova is brought to her cell, the soldiers remove the mattress from the bed and an extra pillow, tear off the gold crucifix from around her neck, and confiscate her icons and gold rings. “The crucifix and icons fell into my lap. I cried out. One of the soldiers punched me and spat in my face. They left, slamming the iron door behind them,” Vyrubova describes her first few moments in the cell.
The head warden comes to see her. He is Andrei Kuzmin, a former ensign who, after the Russian-Japanese War, spent two weeks as the “president of the Krasnoyarsk republic.”* Vyrubova knows nothing of his past, except that he did fifteen years’ hard labor in Siberia. “I tried to forgive him, knowing that he was just taking out his grievances of the past years on me; but how hard it was to endure such cruelty on the very first evening!” recalls Vyrubova.
It only gets worse. Vyrubova says that she soon fell ill with pleurisy from the dampness.
Suffering from a severe fever, she cannot rise for weeks. On the floor in the middle of her cell is a huge puddle, and sometimes she falls off her bunk in a slumber right into it and wakes up dripping wet. The prison doctor, she says, is a sadist, who enjoys mocking the prisoners.
“I literally starved. Twice a day they brought half a bowl of slop, which the soldiers often spat and put pieces of glass in. It often stank of rotten fish. I held my nose and swallowed a little, so as not to die of hunger. The rest I poured down the toilet.… It was a slow death penalty.”
The cells are occasionally visited by investigators, including the new secretary of the investigative commission, Alexander Blok. Despite being a refined romantic (the “lunar poet” in the words of his friend Zinaida Gippius), Blok feels no compassion for the prisoners. “This feeble-minded harlot lies with her crutches all day long in bed,” Blok writes to his mother about Vyrubova. “She is thirty-two years old and might even be beautiful, but there is something terrible in her.…”
Almost all the prisoners provoke Blok’s disgust: “An insignificant creature” (about Voeikov); “a hideosity with a greasy mug, a plump tummy and a new jacket” (about Prince Andronnikov); “a pathetic, sick monkey” (about the gendarme Sobieschansky); “what foul eyes” (about Dubrovin). Put simply, Blok is a real revolutionary investigator: “I would hang Madame Sukhomlinov, although the death penalty has been abolished. This gold-digging, bribe-taking spouse [of former War Minister Sukhomlinov] has forever ruined his reputation,” the poet writes to his mother.
The dampness in the cells soon makes all the prisoners ill. Voeikov writes that his belly is swollen from hunger. So it continues until Ivan Manukhin, a renowned doctor who treated Gorky’s tuberculosis, as well as a neighbor and close friend of the Merezhkovskys, joins the medical staff of the investigative commission. Manukhin insists that the prisoners be fed normally and forbids the use of the freezing-cold punishment cell: “Prisoners were never treated as harshly under the old regime or during the first few months after the October revolution,” Manukhin recalls. In her memoirs, Vyrubova describes the doctor as her savior.
A TERRIBLE SOCIALIST
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in New York, a former prisoner of the Peter and Paul Fortress is about to return home. On learning about the revolution in Russia, Leon Trotsky hurries to the Russian consulate, where they have already taken down the portrait of Nicholas II. He is issued documents, and soon he and his family are on board a Norwegian steamer bound for Europe. However, at the port of Halifax in eastern Canada, British security officials interrogate the “terrible socialist.” On 3 April he and his family are taken off the steamer for further questioning and subjected to a search far more humiliating that anything he ever experienced at the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Trotsky is unaware, of course, that the British ambassador in Petrograd, Buchanan, is at that very moment asking Russian Foreign Minister Milyukov about what to do with the exile in Canada. Milyukov, the former leader of the Kadets, is well aware that Trotsky is a socialist and a pacifist. For him, all pacifists are enemies and traitors, so he asks Buchanan to keep Trotsky in custody. Only two weeks later, under pressure from Kerensky and his colleagues, does he ask the British to release the detainee.
While Trotsky is at the Amherst internment camp in Nova Scotia (which he describes as a “concentration camp”), a crucial event happens: the United States enters the war on the side of the Entente powers. It seems to many that this will decide the outcome.
A “RED LINE” IN CHALK
Germany agrees to give passage to the revolutionaries “willingly, even too willingly,” worries the Marxist Anatoly Lunacharsky. The German Foreign Ministry and General Staff come to the conclusion that it is in their interests to hand over the pacifist revolutionaries to Russia. The political decision has been made, yet it remains to be implemented on the ground.
Lenin wants to set off immediately. Krupskaya tries to dissuade her husband: in Germany they risk arrest, while in Russia they face accusations of treason. He tries to secure the signatures of Swiss and French socialists in support of his passage through Germany to prove that he is not a German spy.
At noon on 9 April, Lenin and Zinoviev draw up a list of those requesting passage to be presented to the authorities. According to the agreement, they are not required to show passports. Lenin tries to fill the list with as many non-Bolsheviks as possible, so that not only his party is accused of having ties with Germany. He does not succeed all that well: only four of the thirty names do not belong to Lenin’s Bolsheviks. At 3:30 p.m. they all go to the station, where they are awaited by a crowd of enraged compatriots, all shouting “German spies!” Yet many of the people shouting would like to be on the train to Russia.
The train starts rolling. Lenin with Krupskaya and his mistress Inessa Armand, Zinoviev with his ex-wife and his current wife, and another twenty-four people set off for their homeland.
The border crossing is a nerve-wracking affair. All the passengers are taken out of the carriage and into the customs hall—the men and women are separated. They are sure that they will now be arrested, and Lenin is to be the first. To protect their leader, they surround him on all sides, shielding him from the German border guards. But after half an hour of waiting, the emigrants are unexpectedly allowed to continue their journey.
Under the terms and conditions laid down by Germany, the passengers are not to communicate with anyone and avoid the slightest contact with German people, so as not to fuel accusations of spying for Germany.
The “sealed carriage” has since become the stuff of legend. In fact, it is not entirely sealed: there is a door leading to the other carriages, but Fritz Platten, the main organizer of the trip, draws a line on the floor in chalk that no one, Russian or German, is allowed cross except him. This chalk line serves as a boundary between the Bolsheviks and Germany.
From the start, Lenin turns the carriage into a microcosm of the Russian state that he wants to build. After the nervy border crossing, the passengers relax and smoke cigarettes, but Lenin bans smoking inside the carriage. A queue forms outside the single toilet (where smoking is allowed), and Lenin introduces “toilet passes,” which he issues personally.
ARMORED CAR IN THE SPOTLIGHT
After resting in Stockholm, the Bolsheviks leave aboard a train to Petrograd. But even now Lenin is very afraid that they will be arrested—in Russia. At Beloostrov Station on the Russian border, he is greeted by some comradely faces: his sister Maria, his friend Alexandra Kollontai, and Kamenev (whom he chastises for the overly moderate tone of the party newspaper, Pravda, which he oversees).
But the first question Lenin asks is: Will he be arrested? They smile back. The workers who have met Lenin at the border station give him an ovation and carry him aloft into the waiting room. Lenin does not understand what is going on and thinks that he is about to be torn to pieces. He does not give a speech and instead limits himself to a couple of slogans.
Soviet textbooks will describe Lenin’s triumphant arrival at Finland Station in Petrograd itself on 16 April as something unique. In fact, it is just one of many “revolutionary homecomings”: Tsereteli, Babushka, Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, Vera Figner, the Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) leaders Chernov and Savinkov, the anarchist Kropotkin, and the leader of the Mensheviks Martov are all greeted by enthusiastic crowds.
A guard of honor welcomes Lenin with a rendition of the Marseillaise. He is handed a huge bouquet of flowers and taken to the royal pavilion to meet a delegation from the Petrograd Soviet. The head of the Petrograd Soviet, the Menshevik Chkheidze, delivers a welcoming speech, which sounds more like a warning. He urges Lenin to collaborate with his comrades from other parties and to help rally all political forces in support of the nascent democracy. But Lenin, the head of the most radical Marxist party and the enfant terrible of the revolution, seems not to hear. “Comrades, soldiers, sailors, workers!” he shouts. “The predatory imperialist war marks the start of civil war across Europe.… The sun of the global socialist revolution has risen. In Germany the soil is ripening. We will observe the gradual collapse of European imperialism.… Long live the global socialist revolution!”
Lenin is carried to a crowded square, illuminated by spotlights. A day earlier this journalist and political theoretician from Zurich was barely known; now he is greeted as a revolutionary hero.
Lenin is raised aloft and placed in an armored car. His slogans are drowned in the noise of the crowd. But what happens to Lenin himself at this moment? A month ago he described himself as an old man who would not live to see his dream. Three days ago he was mortally afraid that he would be shot by German soldiers. An hour ago he was sure that he would be arrested on the station platform. He, the authoritarian leader of a small sect, suddenly turns into a superstar. He stands in the spotlight and is applauded by everyone in the giant square. It is unlikely that Lenin ever expected such a triumph (so far completely undeserved), but the greeting at the station gives him confidence. Lenin is taken from the armored car to the mansion of Matilda Kschessinskaya, which now serves as the Bolsheviks’ headquarters.
LIVES OF THE FORMER ONES
The euphoria of the February revolution continues in Petrograd for several months. However, many are horrified by what is happening—not only members of the old government who have ended up in prison, but also all the former elite, the former beau monde of Petrograd. Their symbol is Matilda Kschessinskaya, Russia’s most famous ballerina.
Forced to flee from her house with her son Vova, Kschessinskaya is now in hiding at the apartment of the actor Yuryev, who is currently playing the lead role in a monumental production of Meyerhold’s Masquerade. The apartment is inspected by soldiers and sailors, but they do not know Kschessinskaya in person and so leave her alone. There are rumors in the city that she has been killed. When the revolution comes to an end, she meets with Kerensky and asks to be allowed to return to her house. She also writes to the Petrograd Soviet, but to no avail.
The life of the imperial family also changes forever. In addition to Nicholas and Alexandra, Miechen is also under house arrest, as well as her two sons and Grand Dukes Andrei and Boris, in the town of Kislovodsk. They are not charged with any crimes. Miechen’s eldest son, Kirill, the first member of the imperial family to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government, remains in Petrograd. He gives an interview to the Petrograd Gazette in which he disassociates himself from the former regime.
None of the Romanovs is able to preserve their former way of life. The emperor-not-to-be Mikhail still lives at Gatchina. On one occasion, in response to a request for a private train from Petrograd to his residence, the Ministry of Railways replies that Citizen Romanov can buy a ticket at the booking office like everyone else. Even the little Princess Maria, the former tsar’s cousin, who worked as a nurse in a military hospital in Pskov, is forced to quit and move to Tsarskoye Selo—the authorities say that Pskov is no longer safe for her.
Grand Duke Dmitry, exiled to Persia for the murder of Rasputin, decides not to return to his homeland. “Am I supposed to go back and calmly observe the unfolding chaos and be subjected to insults for bearing the name of Romanov? This I cannot do,” he writes to his father and relocates instead to the Persian capital, Tehran.
However, another of Rasputin’s assassins, Felix Yusupov, returns from exile to Petrograd immediately after the tsar’s abdication.
EXECUTION IN KIEV
Empress Dowager Maria Feodorovna, having said goodbye to her son in Mogilev, returns to Kiev, where she moved a year ago. She is in a state of shock. Her son-in-law, Grand Duke Sandro, tries to persuade the sixty-nine-year-old former empress to leave Kiev for his Crimean estate, but she refuses, saying that she would prefer to be “arrested and imprisoned.”
Yet the revolution in Kiev is bloodless. The most notable incident is a symbolic execution on Dumskaya Square (now Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square). There stands a monument to former Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, who was killed six years earlier at the Kiev Opera House. On 16 March a ceremonial trial of Stolypin (as a symbol of the old regime) is held, during which he is sentenced to death by hanging. A gallows-like structure is set up and used to drag the statue from its pedestal.
Petrograd looks kindly upon Ukrainian self-determination: in March the Provisional Government authorizes Kiev to offer teaching in the Ukrainian language, with the proviso that Russian-language tuition would still be available.
Regular rallies are held in Kiev, which members of the imperial family who live in the city find disturbing. Grand Duke Sandro recalls a demonstration under the slogans: “Bring our sons and husbands back from the front!” “Down with the capitalist government!” “We want peace and an independent Ukraine!”
In late March the Provisional Government finally decides to send Maria Feodorovna, along with her daughters Xenia and Olga, and her son-in-law Sandro, from Kiev to Crimea. The decision saves all their lives.
In April, in Crimea, their dwellings are searched by a group of commissioners, who turn up at 5:30 a.m. when everyone is asleep. The search lasts five hours, during which Maria Feodorovna’s papers are all confiscated. Above all, she bemoans the loss of her deceased husband’s letters and a Danish copy of the Bible, a present from her mother.
Maria Feoderovna and her daughters live at the Ai-Todor estate, owned by Sandro. Nearby, at the Dulber estate, lives the retired supreme commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, with his brother Peter and their Montenegrin wives.
PRISONERS OF TSARSKOYE SELO
The imperial family members cooped up at Tsarskoye Selo have no idea of the behind-the-scenes wrangling in Petrograd and elsewhere over their future. The papers continue to publish revelations, as if making up for years of censorship. Before the revolution, the only permissible object of political satire was Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II. Now Nicholas, Alexandra, Rasputin, and any member of the imperial family and the court are fair game.
On 1 April the press publishes Alexandra’s final telegrams to her husband, in which she urges him to be tough. “The empress seems scared. The public agitation against her is rising,” recalls her lady-in-waiting Elizaveta Naryshkina.
The imperial family’s relocation to England seemed a done deal a month ago. However, King George V now has cold feet. Despite being Nicholas’s maternal—and Alexandra’s paternal—cousin, the British monarch is more concerned with the domestic political situation in England than any sense of moral or familial duty. The British press is closely following the events in Russia and publishes reports from Russian newspapers. George V fears that the appearance of the Romanovs will provoke unrest, ruin his reputation, and destabilize the shaky (in his view) British monarchy.
On 5 April the king’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, writes to Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour with a request to withdraw the invitation to Nicholas and Alexandra. He argues that the arrival of the disgraced Russian monarch and his family is opposed not only by the aristocrats inside their private clubs, but also by the Labour Party in the House of Commons and the man in the street. “The King believes that the presence of the Russian imperial family (especially Empress Alexandra) in this country will cause numerous complications,” he writes. “I am sure that you understand how difficult this situation will be for our royal family.”
The government does not demur. “Perhaps we should suggest Spain or the south of France as more suitable destinations for the tsar?” says Lord Balfour.
The imperial family at Tsarskoye Selo knows nothing of this. Their only link with the outside world is via Justice Minister Kerensky, who visits them from time to time. Soon enough, even the imperial family falls under Kerensky’s spell. Naryshkina regrets that Nicholas did not surround himself with people like Kerensky when he was on the throne: “If the Sovereign had rid himself of the cult of autocracy, both mystical and political, and encircled himself with sensible minds, instead of a bunch of scoundrels, everything would have been different.” Nicholas himself takes a liking to Kerensky.
The former emperor’s diary in the spring of 1917, after his abdication, reads like that of a bored gardener. Nicholas does not yet know that his cousin George V has abandoned him. In fact, he knows nothing about his future at all. He has no idea how long his family will remain at Tsarskoye Selo, or whether they will be allowed to join their relatives in Crimea.
THE END OF LENIN’S CAREER
Having arrived from Finland Station to Kschessinskaya’s mansion, Lenin greets the crowd from the balcony, after which he returns inside the mansion and delivers a keynote address to a group of his most ardent supporters. His speech is like that of an alien who has just fallen to Earth. Charismatic as always, Lenin cajoles his listeners, but what he says is beyond the realm of fantasy. For the crowd, the collapse of the monarchy and the revolution are a blessing. But Lenin maintains the opposite: there is nothing good about the revolution or the new democratic government. The new regime is already growing weak and should be replaced, he says. The defense of the Motherland, in his view, is only about protecting one gang of capitalists from another. The imperialist war (against Germany) must turn into a civil war (against Russia’s own capitalists). The defensive war must be stopped, the land and banks nationalized, and the property of the landowners and aristocrats confiscated, whereupon the peoples of other countries will immediately join the Russian revolution. It is during this speech that he proposes renaming his political organization the “Communist Party.”
“I felt like I was being hit over the head with a chain,” recalls Nikolai Sukhanov, a member of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet. “One thing was clear: I, a free man, did not see eye to eye with Lenin.”
The next day the Tauride Palace hosts a meeting of the All-Russian Conference of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies—the new quasi-parliament now includes delegates from all over the country. Lenin goes there, having barely slept. His speech, which becomes known as the “April Theses”—shocks the entire assembly. He proposes to stop the war, even in self-defense, to destroy the state, including the army (replacing it with “armed people’s units”), the bureaucracy, the police, and the banks, to overthrow the Provisional Government and to transfer power to the Soviets. It sounds like the end of the world. The last point about the Soviets should, in theory, be well received, but after all that has gone before the audience looks at Lenin as if he is deranged and dangerous. Lenin is desperate to prevent the unification of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, because in this case he will become an ordinary party figure inside a huge party led by Tsereteli.
There is pandemonium. Tsereteli mounts the podium and adopts a rather affable and conciliatory tone. Citing Marx, he says that lone figures can make mistakes, but not the people. He is willing to forgive Lenin’s errors of judgment and to offer him his hand. After Lenin’s hysterical speech, Tsereteli’s assured manner wins the day. Lenin leaves the building angrily, accompanied by many, but by no means all, fellow party members. Some Bolsheviks prefer the more constructive Tsereteli to their own leader.
“Deny the revolution if you want to, but the rest of us here will continue along this path,” says the presiding Nikolai Chkheidze in Lenin’s wake.
“Yesterday Lenin completely failed in front of the Soviet,” Milyukov gleefully reports to Ambassador Paléologue. There follows what Krupskaya describes as “baiting.” All the papers quote his “defeatism” and, recalling that he and his comrades returned to Russia with the consent of the German emperor, call him a German spy. The commander of the sailors’ detachment tells reporters that he is ashamed that he greeted “Lenin the traitor” at Finland Station. Anti-Lenin crowds gather beneath the windows of the Bolsheviks’ headquarters. He goes out on the balcony to speak to them, but ends up having to hide inside the building. It seems that his political star has begun to wane after just one day.
NO ANNEXATIONS OR INDEMNITIES
The war remains an acute problem and the most polarizing factor in society. Nobody argues against the need to continue it (except Lenin), but there is no consensus inside the Provisional Government as to how it should end. Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov and War Minister Alexander Guchkov are piously sure that the centuries-old dream of starry-eyed Russian imperialism is to be fulfilled, and that Russia is destined to seize Constantinople. However, the idea is not shared by all. Kerensky, for instance, is convinced that the war should be purely defensive—Russian territory should be freed from German occupation, but nothing more than that. He is against new conquests and “annexations and indemnities.” The words “annexations and indemnities” are on everyone’s lips—in trams, theatres, and soldiers’ barracks.
Tsereteli and, hence, almost all the socialist deputies share Kerensky’s opinion. They believe that the war should be conducted only in self-defense to liberate Russian soil from German troops with no further offensives or assistance to France to regain Alsace-Lorraine or to Britain to win even more colonies. In other words, the new democratic government must reject any secret agreements made between the tsarist regime and the Entente powers, say the socialists.
In mid-March the Petrograd Soviet adopts its “Appeal to the peoples of the world”—the foreign policy doctrine of the new Russian state. It states that the revolution will not allow Russia to be crushed by hostile military forces, and that there will be “no annexations or indemnities,” only the “free self-determination of peoples.” Since the Russian democratic state genuinely considers itself to be the most progressive in the world, it wants to set an example to all. Such values will enter the global mainstream only after the Second World War. The “Appeal to the peoples of the world” is ahead of its time; its principles are exactly the same as those outlined in the Helsinki Accords, signed in 1975.
A split appears in the Provisional Government: seven of the twelve ministers are on the side of Kerensky and the Petrograd Soviet, including Prime Minister Lvov, Finance Minister Tereshchenko, and Industry Minister Konovalov. Against are Guchkov and the Kadets, led by Foreign Minister Milyukov. Milyukov tells French Ambassador Paléologue that he will stand his ground—if the government rejects its commitments to its allies and abandons its claim to Constantinople, he will immediately resign.
“EAT, DRINK, RUN”
Alexandra, the favorite daughter of Leo Tolstoy, works as a frontline nurse during the spring of 1917. She describes some of the arguments among the soldiers: “Why the hell do we need this revolution?! Instead of the tsar, we’ve got these Lvovs and Kerenskys. All the same, we’re still sat in the trenches, covered in dirt and lice,” complain shell-shocked soldiers in the hospital, smearing muddy tears across their faces.
“Enough of fighting the Germans. It’s time to fight the bourgeoisie and take the land from the landowners and the factories from the factory owners,” says a paramedic.
“You’re all cowardly bastards. You want to sell your homeland to the Germans. A soldier’s duty is to fight for Russia until the bitter end,” responds a platoon commander.
The paramedic is a Bolshevik agitator, and his argument seems convincing to many soldiers.
Petrograd is plagued by the same doubts. Whereas today peace and human life are universal values (at least on paper), their equivalents a century ago are war and debt. Refusing to fight is considered shameful not only by the officer corps, but by most members of the intelligentsia as well. Gippius is outraged by the “stupid, ignorant” and “cynical, naive” deserters: “They have no glimmer of conscience. They are guided by three instincts: eat, drink, run,” she writes. Gippius wants the war to end, of course, but with dignity, for that is the “only way to redeem the past, preserve the future and recover one’s senses.”
The poetess hopes that her friend Kerensky will be sufficiently firm and resolute. She fears that he is not up to the task.
People from various political camps believe that victory is the main objective of the war, including another friend of Gippius, the former terrorist Boris Savinkov. Savinkov arrives by boat from France, along with his fellow SR party member Viktor Chernov. Their paths immediately diverge. Chernov joins the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet (and Tsereteli’s “star chamber”), becoming one of its leaders. Savinkov, to the surprise of many, departs for the front line as a commissioner of the Provisional Government to campaign for “war to the bitter end.”
“WE ARE NO LONGER ABLE TO”
Gippius’s archenemy, someone she has long despised as a symbol of all things vile and cowardly, is Maxim Gorky. “Weak, pitiful and dull-witted” are among the epithets she attaches to him.
The Merezhkovskys’ apartment on Shpalernaya Street and Gorky’s home on Kronverksky Avenue can be regarded as the two oppositely charged poles of Petrograd. Gippius, Merezhkovsky, and Filosofov live near the Tauride Palace, and their abode is the headquarters of the liberal movement, a place often frequented by ministers. Gorky and Andreyeva live in the middle class district, next to the house of Kschessinskaya and the Peter and Paul Fortress. Their guests and associates are socialists and members of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet.
Yet both Gorky and Gippius have doubts about the war: “Tens of millions of the healthiest, most able-bodied people have been severed from their productive existence to go and kill each other,” writes Gorky. He is horrified by the outbreak of violence in the country after the revolution and hopes that the “outpouring of spiritual filth” and the “festering storm” are, in fact, signs of healing. Gorky preaches in an almost Tolstoyan spirit, calling for non-violence—the only difference being that he does not believe in God, but in education: “Politics and religion divide people; nothing rectifies the human soul as swiftly as the influence of science and art.”
On 13 March Alexander Benois, Gorky’s friend, pays a visit to Paléologue. “The war cannot go on,” says Benois, who, as his name suggests, is of French origin. “I know that Russia’s honor is linked to its alliances. But necessity is the law of history. No one is obliged to perform the impossible.”
In response, the French ambassador lectures the artist on modern geopolitics. France and Britain are rich enough to wage war until victory is secured, especially now that America has entered the war. For them, “domination of the seas and control over Mesopotamia, Thessaloniki and Germany’s colonies” are at stake. If Russia pulls out of the war, it stands to lose Kurland, Lithuania, Poland, Galicia, and Bessarabia at the very least, not to mention its prestige in the East and the prospects of winning Constantinople. According to Paléologue, it is not just a question of Russia’s honor and well-being, but also its “national existence.”
Perplexed, Benois tearfully says that he does not disagree, but Russia cannot continue the war: “Really, we are no longer able to.”
He is not exaggerating. In early April German troops suddenly break through the Russian lines at the Stokhod River in western Ukraine. It is a particularly painful blow, for this is the site of the Brusilov Offensive of 1916, a great victory for Russia. Now, a year later, the Russian army has been defeated at exactly the same spot, with another twenty-five thousand men killed or captured. Moreover, it is the first battle since the revolution took place, and it demonstrates that the army has lost the will to fight.
ARMY IS SICK
Guchkov, the new war minister, tries to boost morale and discipline in the army by setting up a commission that includes members of the Petrograd Soviet as well as officers. Guchkov appoints his old friend Alexei Polivanov, the former war minister, as its head. To Guchkov’s dismay, the commission soon drafts a “Declaration of soldiers’ rights,” granting them the civil rights to join a political party, send correspondence confidentially, and wear civilian clothes when off duty. The generals believe that the declaration spells the end of all discipline. Polivanov throws up his hands, saying that he could do nothing to prevent it.
In mid-April the conflict between Kerensky and Milyukov over their opposing war aims reaches a climax. Kerensky (without consulting Milyukov) tells the press that the government plans to clarify its war objectives in respect of Russia’s wartime alliances. The very next day Milyukov denies it, saying that nothing of the sort is planned. Rumor has it that Foreign Minister Milyukov is about to be sacked and replaced by the “thinker” Plekhanov.
Under pressure from the Petrograd Soviet and his ministerial colleagues, Milyukov publishes a formal appeal to Russia’s allies, which formulates the country’s rejection of the idea of capturing Constantinople and its readiness for peace without annexations or indemnities. But, at the last minute, he cannot help adding a short preface of his own, saying that the “popular desire” in Russia is to see the war through to the bitter end, to secure “sanctions and guarantees” that will make future wars impossible, and to “fulfill Russia’s obligations to its allies.”
The note is signed on 18 April, the day when the rest of the world is celebrating Workers’ Day (1 May, according to the Gregorian calendar). By decision of the Petrograd Soviet, the Russian capital hosts its own “May Day” demonstration.
Prince Lvov sends the note to the Petrograd Soviet. Tsereteli recalls that the content stunned everyone who read it. “Milyukov is the evil spirit of the revolution,” whispers Chkheidze.
The very next day Milyukov’s note is published. There is uproar. “The revolutionary Russian democracy plans to shed blood not only for the restoration of Belgium and Serbia, but to give England more colonies in Africa, as well as Palestine and Baghdad, give France the left bank of the Rhine, and give Italy Dalmatia and Albania, because everyone knows that these are Russia’s ‘obligations to its allies,’” storms the left-wing publicist Razumnik Ivanov. The Petrograd Soviet flies into a rage. Milyukov has hoodwinked everyone. Kerensky is accused of knowing about and approving what becomes known as the “Milyukov note.” Kerensky considers resigning.
On the morning of 20 April, Prince Lvov meets Tsereteli for urgent talks. News has arrived that soldiers from several regiments are on their way to the Mariinsky Palace to arrest the Provisional Government. It comes as a surprise, even to the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet—everyone is angry with Milyukov, but no one is planning an armed uprising.
It turns out to be the handiwork of Lenin. Milyukov’s note has restored yesterday’s political corpse to life. He and his Bolshevik agitators have always said that the Provisional Government is “bourgeois,” “imperialist,” and waging war in the interests of foreign capitalists, not their own people. Milyukov’s note has merely confirmed what they knew all along.
Coincidentally, the Provisional Government is saved from arrest by Guchkov. Because of his illness, the ministers adjourn to his apartment on the Moika River. The insurgent soldiers and sailors, having reached the Mariinsky Palace, discover it to be empty. Members of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet go to meet them to clarify the situation, and to make sure that Milyukov’s note is not a pretext to overthrow the government. The regiments disperse, and the first Bolshevik coup ends in failure.
That same evening, the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government meet to discuss their future plans. Prince Lvov says that he has no desire to cling to power and is ready to hand it to the Petrograd Soviet if its leaders are confident that they will cope better with the situation. But the socialists do not want to form a new government, knowing that it will be much more difficult for them to consolidate society, for example, to find a common language with the officer corps and big business. They do not demand the resignation of the entire government, only Milyukov.
Guchkov delivers an impassioned speech in which he says that he, a devout monarchist, was forced to choose between his sovereign and his country, for he was sure that the weak emperor was the main obstacle to victory in the war. He and many officers forswore their oaths and joined the revolution to save Russia. But a month later it seems to have been in vain, for victory is now an even more remote prospect.
The meeting ends with no decision taken. The next day, a new demonstration takes place at the Mariinsky Palace, this time in support of Milyukov and Guchkov, and in favor of continuing the war. Milyukov delivers a balcony speech in which he says that the shouts of “Down with Milyukov” really mean “Down with Russia.” The crowd cheers and applauds.
On 21 April the government holds a meeting at the Mariinsky Palace until late into the night. Milyukov, Rodzianko, and the head of the Petrograd Military District, General Kornilov, speak from the balcony, trying to calm the crowd. Rumors are circulating that a massacre is about to begin; Kornilov is alleged to have summoned government-loyal troops from Tsarskoye Selo to Petrograd.
The main item on the government’s agenda is how to pacify the crowd. Guchkov says that he has at his disposal several thousand very reliable soldiers. He admits that they should not be used to suppress the unrest, but if an armed attack were to be launched on the government, there would have to be some kind of resistance. “Alexander Ivanovich [Guchkov], I warn you that I shall resign if one drop of blood is spilt,” he is told by Alexander Konovalov, Russia’s industry minister and a childhood friend. Konovalov has the backing of almost all the other ministers: any use of weapons would deprive the Provisional Government of its moral authority and set it on the path of tsarist repression.
That same evening the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet, for a period of three days, bans all demonstrations and forbids the military from leaving its barracks without the consent of the Soviets. This also applies to Kornilov’s units and the ones the Bolsheviks tried to use to “arrest the Provisional Government.” The disorder immediately comes to an end.
DICTATOR, COALITION, AND HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
Thus, the Petrograd Soviet demonstrates its ability to control the situation and calm the unrest provoked by the Bolsheviks, making the executive authorities look feeble by comparison. General Kornilov resigns. Prince Lvov, a true democrat, says that if the Petrograd Soviet enjoys such authority, it should be invited into the government.
The same idea is suggested by Kerensky. He is thoroughly fed up with the incessant reproaches and complaints coming from members of the Petrograd Soviet. But things are not so simple. Tsereteli does not want to enter the government, for he believes that his place is in the Petrograd Soviet. The executive committee rejects the proposal.
The government crisis deepens with every passing day. Milyukov departs for the front line, and the next government session turns into a demonstration against him. Guchkov listens in silence to the insults addressed to his absent colleague. In years gone by, he would have challenged the offenders to a duel, but now he just leaves the room and writes a resignation letter to Lvov. To make it final, he sends a copy to a newspaper. After resigning, Guchkov immediately leaves Petrograd to serve at the front as a simple warrant officer.
The Provisional Government is only two months old, but its authority is already undermined. On the day of Guchkov’s resignation, the former emperor Nicholas, isolated in his palace at Tsarskoye Selo, mentions politics in his diary for the first time since his abdication. “Yesterday I learnt about Gen. Kornilov’s departure from the post of commander of the Petrograd Military District, and tonight about the resignation of Guchkov,” writes Nicholas, who blames the Soviets for both. “What is Providence preparing for poor Russia? May God’s will reign over us.” After this brief digression, he returns to domestic issues. That day, for instance, he notes that he has been reading The Hound of the Baskervilles to his children.
Kerensky, meanwhile, is continuing talks on cooperation with the Petrograd Soviet, which Guchkov’s resignation should facilitate. Prince Lvov holds parallel talks with Tsereteli, which bear fruit: the executive committee votes to enter the government by forty-four votes to nineteen.
Milyukov promptly resigns, and exhausting negotiations begin with the Petrograd Soviet on who will take which position. The socialists and liberals manage to come to an agreement. Tsereteli, according to Milyukov, “sacrifices himself” to avert a civil war by accepting the minor post as head of the Ministry of the Post Office and Telegraph, which will allow him to continue his work in the Petrograd Soviet. The leader of the SR Party, Viktor Chernov, becomes the new agriculture minister, responsible for agrarian reform. The question of filling the post vacated by Guchkov is assigned by Prince Lvov to Commander-in-Chief Alekseyev, who, having consulted the generals, nominates Kerensky. As a result, Kerensky is appointed the new war minister. The socialists (the Mensheviks and the SRs, including Kerensky, now a member of the latter) get six seats. Hence, the new government can claim legitimacy by representing all political forces, except for the Bolsheviks. The political crisis is resolved peacefully.
THERE IS NO SUCH PARTY
On 4 June the first Congress of Soviets—the parliament of the Russian revolution—is convened in Petrograd, including representatives of hundreds of soviets from all across Russia. Tsereteli addresses the congress, saying that hitherto the supreme representative body of revolutionary power in the country was de facto the Petrograd Soviet, but now it should hand over its authority to the congress. The congress should then elect its own executive committee and hold a vote of confidence on its predecessors, who are now part of the Provisional Government.
Sitting there in the hall is Lenin, who is effectively the target of Tsereteli’s speech when he accuses the Bolsheviks of “agitation” to applause from the audience.
In response to Lenin’s demand to stop the war, Tsereteli says that a separate peace is impossible, because the war cannot be ended unilaterally. As for the accusation of being unable to solve the country’s pressing problems, he says that in two months no one could. A key point in Tsereteli’s speech concerns the “unification of all living forces” (i.e., the government should allow its opponents to operate freely, not just its supporters).
At the same time, the government should be strong enough to “resist the reckless experiments that threaten the future of the revolution, challenge the authorities and risk sowing the seeds of civil war.”
“At the moment, there is no political party in Russia which is prepared to take full power on itself,” says Tsereteli. “Yes, there is!” shouts Lenin from his seat. “There is not a single party able to lay claim to power,” continues Tsereteli, “but there have been statements to that effect from irresponsible groups on both the right and the left.”
In his view, Lenin is a fringe counter-revolutionary. The audience applauds. The next day it will be Lenin’s turn to speak from the podium, and the audience will laugh when he says that the Bolsheviks are in fact ready to seize power at any moment.
Tsereteli’s proposals receive the most votes, and Lenin’s are rejected. The Congress of Soviets issues a vote of confidence in the Provisional Government, the Petrograd Soviet, and Tsereteli’s strategy. It seems that democracy has passed its first test.
A PARADE IN PARIS
In April, Diaghilev’s troupe moves from Rome to Paris. They have heard bits and pieces about what is happening in Russia, and are infected with the revolutionary spirit. They instigate a revolution of their own—in the world of art and ballet.
Having suffered greatly under the imperial regime, Diaghilev has reason to rejoice at its downfall. However, his main opponents in recent years have been show-business magnates who have stolen his artists, wrecked his plans, and ruined the public’s artistic tastes with low-quality entertainment. Diaghilev wants to lead his own revolution against the lowest common denominator, against mass culture. The forty-five-year-old Diaghilev enlists the help of some younger associates: his new set designer is the thirty-six-year-old Pablo Picasso, his script writer is the twenty-eight-year-old Jean Cocteau, and his choreographer (and male lover) is the twenty-year-old Leonid Myasin.
Cocteau wants to add circus-like elements to the ballet, while Picasso is keen to design the sets and costumes in the new Cubist style. Most of all, Diaghilev likes Picasso’s idea of depicting French and American capitalists in the form of animated, rectangular billboards representing the vulgarity of the magnates and show business itself. In creating the American skyline, Picasso paints a collage with a skyscraper, a mosaic of faces, and a flashy billboard with the word “Parade”—which becomes the title of the production they are creating.
Before the premiere of Parade in Paris, Diaghilev’s troupe stages their trademark Firebird by Stravinsky. The ballet finale usually sees the appearance on stage of the Russian folk hero Ivan Tsarevich wearing a crown. But in view of the new political realities, this time Diaghilev decides that he should don a red cap and hold a red flag. Diaghilev is sure that in republican France such a salute to the Russian revolution will be received enthusiastically. He would be advised to follow the news more closely.
The Russian revolution was indeed popular in Paris, but not for long. The French public had hoped that it would not interfere with Russia’s war effort. But the debacle at the Stokhod River—the Russian army’s only battle in the spring of 1917—showed that it was ill prepared. The emboldened Germans, fighting on two fronts, feel able to deploy massive forces to the West and put up unexpectedly strong resistance to the Franco-British Nivelle Offensive: in one month the French lose one hundred and eighty thousand men, the British one hundred and sixty thousand, and the Germans another one hundred and sixty thousand.
The Russian “betrayal” and the terrible losses are the main topics of the French papers. In this context, the red flag in the hands of Ivan Tsarevich incenses the patriotic Parisian public. Afterwards, Diaghilev tries to explain in an interview that the red flag is just a symbol of the struggle for freedom. But he is slated by the press and theatre critics, and his business partners threaten to tear up his contract and torpedo Parade. For the next performance of Firebird, Diaghilev makes sure that Ivan Tsarevich wears a crown.
However, the real scandal lies ahead. The premiere of Parade on 18 May comes at the most inopportune moment: the Nivelle Offensive has failed and patriotic Parisians are ready to be offended by anything. They believe that they are being mocked by Picasso’s Cubist scenery and Cubist costumes. The last straw for the audience is the onstage appearance of a Cubist horse with a Cubist muzzle. The audience hurls insults at Picasso and Diaghilev, calling them Germans. That is followed by the chant “Death to the Russians!” People in the stalls go up to the stage and bang their fists on it, demanding the curtain to come down.
However, for Parisian bohemians, Parade is a resounding success. Claude Debussy tries to contact Diaghilev to congratulate him on his artistic, if not political, triumph, but “it is easier to get in touch with the Lord our God,” says the composer.
PERSUADER-IN-CHIEF
Kerensky, the new war minister, does what Guchkov refused to do: he signs the “Declaration of soldiers’ rights.” He does not believe that the war should end, however. On the contrary, he wants to show that under his command Russia can achieve victory and save France and the Western Front from the German onslaught. According to Kerensky, the German command plans to “paralyze the Russian Front through peaceful propaganda and fraternization, so as to concentrate the full might of the German army on the Western Front and deliver a crushing blow before the arrival of American troops.” To thwart this plan, someone in Russia needs to take the initiative and resume hostilities.
On 14 May Kerensky publishes an order to attack along with a pathos-filled proclamation addressed to the soldiers: “In the name of saving the free Russia, go where your leaders and government take you.…” Kerensky then sets off on a nationwide tour in his new role as war minister. He visits army units, confident that his charisma will work wonders. It does not let him down: even his detractors admit that Kerensky is an accomplished propagandist.
Kerensky is compared to both Napoleon and Joan of Arc. He travels around by any means of transport there is: plane, car, foot. He greets war heroes and bandages wounds himself. Skeptical officers call him the “persuader-in-chief,” but he is not offended.
The plan to go on the offensive was approved before the revolution by Nicholas II. The main strike is to be aimed at the Southwestern Front under the command of General Brusilov—just like the year before.
The offensive begins on 18 June, and Kerensky is there at the frontline command. Following the first successful attack, the Petrograd press praises Kerensky and the military to the skies. In the space of three weeks, Kalush and Galich (then part of Austria-Hungary, today in Ukraine) are occupied, thousands of Austrians are captured, and the front line advances thirty kilometers to the west. The Russian military loses around forty thousand men. On the one hand, it is not much compared to the French losses on the Western Front or during the Brusilov Offensive (which killed ten times as many). But the fallen soldiers belong to elite units, which are the only ones still committed to the cause. Almost immediately the advance starts to stall.
“NEITHER REBELLION NOR SUBMISSION”
In early July, Kerensky, who now spends almost all his time at the front, goes instead to the rear—to Kiev to hold talks with the Ukrainian Central Rada.* A serious problem is brewing between Kiev and Petrograd. For several months, the Central Rada has been developing plans for Ukrainian autonomy. On 16 May a Ukrainian delegation headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko had travelled to Petrograd, but was not received by any ministers. The Ukrainian question was postponed until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly.
In Petrograd there is no consensus about how Russia should be structured. The Kadets believe that the country should be indivisible, while the SR leader Chernov suggests creating a “United States of Eastern Europe, Siberia and Turkestan.” Either way, the Provisional Government prefers to hide behind the promise of the Constituent Assembly, without deciding anything.
So Kiev opts for more decisive action. In early June, at the height of mobilization, and contrary to a ban imposed by Kerensky, the First All-Ukrainian Military Congress is held in Kiev, at which the creation of a separate Ukrainian army is put forward as a key demand. At the same time, the Central Rada publishes the First Universal—the main policy document and manifesto of the new Ukraine. It is a constitution in everything but name, drafted according to the principle of “neither rebellion nor submission” propounded by Vynnychenko.
On 28 June a top-level delegation from the Provisional Government arrives in Kiev: Tsereteli, Foreign Minister Mikhail Tereshchenko (who was born in Kiev), and War Minister Kerensky. The negotiations are successful. The Provisional Government agrees that Ukraine should be granted autonomy, but only when the issue of the Russian Constituent Assembly has been decided. The Central Rada promises not to proclaim autonomy unilaterally.
The negotiators depart from Kiev with a sense of accomplishment. On 1 July, Kerensky, Tereshchenko, and Tsereteli return to Petrograd. But even before their arrival back in the Russian capital, it becomes apparent that the agreement with Ukraine could bury the Provisional Government. The Kadet ministers put forward an ultimatum: they will leave the government if the agreement with Ukraine is approved.
THE END OF THE LIBERAL DREAM
The Russian liberals (i.e., the Kadets) are reeling. Four months ago they were the Russian opposition and the main force behind the “progressive bloc” in the Duma. They were the ones who made the February Revolution—or at least picked up the pieces of power that had fallen from the hands of Nicholas II. The Kadet leader, Pavel Milyukov, drew up the first list of names of the Provisional Government virtually on a napkin and read it out for the first time to soldiers gathered in the foyer of the Tauride Palace.
However, four months later the situation has changed so much that the liberal Kadets now seem like conservatives: many of them would prefer a constitutional monarchy to a republic, but if a republic is inevitable, they would at least like it to be based on established practices.
In the post-revolution period, yesterday’s main opposition is too moderate to be popular. In late June, elections are held in Moscow to the Duma, which are seen as “primaries” ahead of the elections to the Constituent Assembly. Moscow has always been a bastion of liberals, in particular the Kadets, in contrast to Petrograd, where the political mood in the street is set by the one-hundred-thousand-strong garrison.
Throughout June, a pre-election campaign runs in Moscow under the slogan “Like in Europe.” The seven parties involved plaster campaign posters over fences and drop leaflets from airplanes. The Kadets’ campaign is sluggish, and their wealthy voters are more passive than those of the left-wing parties. They seem to think that they will win because the party is listed first on the ballot paper.
In the end, the SRs score a convincing victory in Moscow, winning 116 seats out of 200 (57.98 percent of the vote). The liberal Kadets come second with 34 seats (16.85 percent of the vote). The remaining seats are divided between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, with 11 percent each.
The Kadets are the only party without leftist convictions. However, it is not their economic beliefs, but their international policy that marks them out. The liberals of the early twentieth century are imperialists. They want Russia to be free and democratic, yet remain an empire. They oppose regional self-determination, condemn Finland for its “betrayal,” and are outraged by the behavior of Ukraine.
The next day the Provisional Government votes by a majority to ratify the agreement with the Central Rada. Four Kadet ministers announce their resignation, and a fifth, Nekrasov, withdraws from the party. Kerensky returns to the front in a calm state of mind, not realizing that the departure of the liberals from the government marks the start of a new revolution.
* Members of the Constitutional Democratic Party.
* In the words of Tsereteli’s friend Vladimir Voitinsky.
* The so-called “Brotherhood of Three” composed of herself, her husband, and Dmitry Filosofov.
† A eulogy sung at the end of Orthodox funerals.
* He led an armed uprising in the region against the imperial regime.
* The Ukrainian parliament.
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