A people's tragedy

*

While the Soviet leaders wanted to restore order, most of them had no intention of assuming power. The whole basis of their strategy was to pressurize the Duma leaders into forming a ‘bourgeois government’. Thus there arose what Trotsky later called the ‘paradox’ of February: that a revolution made in the streets resulted in a government made in the salons. This was a recurring pattern throughout the politics of 1917: there were several moments (February, April, July and September) when the Soviet leaders might have taken power, when indeed the crowds came out on to the streets with the express demand that they do just that, but on each occasion they shied away from the responsibilities of government. In this way they missed their chance to resolve the revolution in a democratic and socialist form. The Bolsheviks reaped the benefits.

How are we to explain this political failure? In the context of February, which determined much of the later politics, there were three main lines of reasoning.

First, there was the problem of party dogma. Both the Mensheviks and the SRs adhered rigidly to the belief that in a backward peasant country such as Russia there would have to be a ‘bourgeois revolution’ (meaning a long period of capitalism and democracy) before Russian society, and the working class in particular, would be sufficiently advanced for the transition to a socialist order. As Plekhanov had once put it, there was not yet enough proletarian yeast in the peasant dough of Russia to make the cake of socialism. In the case of the Mensheviks this belief in the two-stage revolution derived from Marxist theory; and in the case of the SRs it derived largely from the Mensheviks. The belief was based on two further assumptions, which both made abstract sense but fell down when applied to the real world. It was a case of trying to impose nineteenth-century Western dogmas on the realities of twentieth-century Russia. For one thing, it was said that the peasants (and the provinces in general) would not support a socialist government in the cities because they were too attached to what the Mensheviks called their ‘petty-bourgeois’ notions of small property. As a result, an urban socialist revolution would either be starved out of existence, like the Paris Commune, or, even worse, would be beaten by a peasant counter-revolution, like the Vendée or the European royalist armies of 1849. But in fact the Russian peasants were even more impatient for a social revolution than, arguably, the workers were. All they wanted was the land and, if ‘socialism’ meant giving the land to the peasants, then they were ‘socialists’. This meant, as the SRs should have realized, that the peasants would not join a counter-revolution so long as that entailed — as it was almost bound to in Russia — a restoration of the gentry on the land. It was also said that the masses were too illiterate and inexperienced politically to assume the tasks of government, and that until this was remedied the support and leadership of the educated classes would remain essential. The Soviets, as class-based organs, might play a role in local government but they lacked the means to run the state. What was needed now, as a preparation for the transition to socialism, was for the masses to go through the school of democracy — which for the workers, in particular, meant following the example of the European labour movements — and this could only be achieved within a liberal framework of political freedom. But this too was to impose a Western model of democracy on a country where the base for it was missing. The ‘direct democracy’ of the Soviets was much closer to the experience of the Russian masses — it was reminiscent of the peasant commune — and it might have served as the starting point for a new and different type of democratic order, one much more decentralized than the liberal democracy of the West, provided the Soviets were somehow combined with the broader representative bodies (e.g. the city dumas, the zemstvos and the Constituent Assembly) in a national political framework.

No doubt the Soviet leaders’ rigid adherence to this dogma was in part the result of their own virginity in government. The bourgeois leaders had years of experience of legislative matters, either in the Duma or in the zemstvos. But the socialists had no real experience of government work, only the long and fruitless years of politics in semi-legal opposition and the underground. Furthermore, their party leaders were all still in exile, and it might be thought of as a ‘colonels’ revolt’ if they assumed power. Yet should this really have been such an obstacle? For all their talk of ‘principles’ and ‘ideology’, in the end it was their instincts and their temperament that held back the Soviet leaders from taking power. They had spent so long in hostile opposition to all governmental authority that many of them could not suddenly become — or even think of themselves as — statesmen. They clung to the habits and the culture of the revolutionary underground, preferring opposition to government.

Second, the Soviet leaders were afraid that a counter-revolution, perhaps even a civil war, might be the result if they assumed power. The situation was extremely fluid; it was not yet clear whether Alexeev and the Front commanders would carry out the orders of the Tsar to put down the revolution in the capital; nor whether the revolution would spread to the provinces and the forces at the Front. As things turned out, it soon became clear that the Soviet leaders had grossly overestimated the real danger of a counter-revolution. Almost immediately Alexeev called off the planned expedition to put down the revolution in the capital, partly because he was reassured that the Duma leaders rather than the socialists would assume power, and partly because he realized that to use the troops for this would run the risk of the mutiny spreading to the army at the Front. It did not take long, moreover, for the revolution to spread to the Kronstadt Naval Base, several northern garrisons and Moscow itself. Within a few days the monarchy would fall, along with its provincial apparatus, while the army and the Church would both declare their support for the revolution. Of course none of this was yet clear on 1 March. The speed of events took everyone by surprise. As Iurii Steklov, one of the Soviet leaders, explained in April 1917:

at the time when this agreement [to form the Provisional Government] was contemplated, it was not at all clear as to whether the revolution would emerge victorious, either in a revolutionary-democratic form or even in a moderate-bourgeois form. Those of you, comrades, who were not here in Petrograd and did not experience this revolutionary fever cannot imagine how we lived … We expected from minute to minute that they [troops loyal to the Tsar] would arrive.37

Yet it is probably fair to say that in their appraisal of the situation the Soviet leaders once again allowed themselves to be over-influenced by the experience of nineteenth-century Europe. All the socialists were steeped in the history of European revolutions. They interpreted the events of 1905 and 1917 in terms of the history of 1789, 1848 and 1871, and this led them to believe that a counter-revolution must inevitably follow.

Finally, the Soviet leaders were not even certain of their own authority over the masses in the streets. They had been shocked by the violence and the hatred, the anarchic looting and the vandalism displayed by the crowds in the February Days. They were afraid that if they assumed power, that if they themselves became ‘the government’, all this uncontrolled anger might be redirected against them. Mstislavsky claimed that ‘from the first hours of the revolution’ the vast majority of the Soviet leaders were united with the members of the Temporary Committee ‘by one single characteristic which determined everything else: this was their fear of the masses’:

Oh, how they feared the masses! As I watched our ‘socialists’ speaking to the crowds … I could feel their nauseating fear … I felt the inner trembling, and the effort of will it took not to lower their gaze before the trusting, wide-open eyes of the workers and soldiers crowded around them. As recently as yesterday it had been relatively easy to be ‘representatives and leaders’ of these working masses; peaceable parliamentary socialists could still utter the most bloodcurdling words ‘in the name of the proletariat’ without even blinking. It became a different story, however, when this theoretical proletariat suddenly appeared here, in the full power of exhausted flesh and mutinous blood. And when the truly elemental nature of this force, so capable of either creation or destruction, became tangible to even the most insensitive observer — then, almost involuntarily, the pale lips of the ‘leaders’ began to utter words of peace and compromise in place of yesterday’s harangues. They were scared — and who could blame them?38

Who indeed? And yet this fear was also symptomatic of a general cowardice when it came to the responsibilities of power. It was an abdication of statesmanship. Years later Tsereteli said that the Soviet leaders in February had been childish and irresponsible. Many of them welcomed the dual power system — the source of Russia’s chronic political weaknesses in 1917 — because it placed them in a good position. They were given power without responsibility; while the Provisional Government had responsibility without power.

For the majority of the Soviet leaders there was a special factor making the negotiation of a Duma government a matter of the utmost urgency. On 1 March the leftwing minority of the Soviet Executive (3 Bolsheviks, 2 Left SRs and 1 member of the Inter-District group) demanded the formation of a ‘provisional revolutionary government’ based on the Soviets. This resolution was supported by the Bolshevik Committee in the Vyborg district, the most proletarian in Petrograd. There was thus a real threat that, unless the Soviet majority imposed a government on the Duma leaders, the streets might impose a government on them.

At around midnight on 1 March a Soviet delegation (Sukhanov, Chkheidze, Sokolov and Steklov) crossed from the left to the right wing of the Tauride Palace to begin negotiations for a government with the Temporary Committee of the Duma. ‘There was not the same chaos and confusion here as with us,’ Sukhanov recalled, ‘but the room nevertheless gave an impression of disorder: it was smoke-filled and dirty, and cigarette butts, bottles, and dirty glasses were scattered about. There were also innumerable plates, both empty and holding foods of all kinds, which made our eyes glitter and our mouths water.’ Sukhanov and Miliukov, ‘the boss of the right wing’, did most of the talking. The enormous Rodzianko, President of the Duma, sulked in a corner drinking soda. Neither Lvov nor Kerensky, the first and the last Prime Minister of the Provisional Government respectively, had a single word to say on its establishment.

Both the Duma and the Soviet sides were pleasantly surprised by the common ground between them. Each had come prepared for a major battle. But in fact there was only one real point of conflict. Miliukov wanted the monarchy retained, albeit with Alexis as Tsar and the Grand Duke Mikhail acting as Regent. Chkheidze pointed out that the idea was ‘not only unacceptable, but also utopian, in view of the general hatred of the monarchy amongst the masses of the people’. But Miliukov did not push his point — for which there was little support among the rest of the Duma leaders — and in the end it was agreed to leave the form of government undecided until the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. Other than that there was little to discuss. Everyone agreed on the need to restore order, and on the need to form a Duma government.

The negotiations were completed in the early hours of the morning. The ‘bourgeois groups’, as Sukhanov put it, would be left to form a government ‘on the view that this followed from the general situation and suited the interests of the revolution’. But the Soviet, ‘as the only organ wielding any real power’, set as the conditions for its support the following principles of government:

1 an immediate amnesty for all political prisoners;

2 the immediate granting of freedom of speech, press and assembly;

3 the immediate abolition of all restrictions based on class, religion and nationality;

4 immediate preparations for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, elected on the four-tail suffrage (universal, direct, secret and equal), to determine the form of government and the constitution of the country;

5 the abolition of all the police bodies and, in their place, the creation of a people’s militia with elected officers responsible to the organs of local self-government;

6 elections to these organs on the four-tail suffrage;

7 a guarantee that the military units having taken part in the revolution would neither be disarmed nor sent to the Front;

8 recognition of full civil rights for the soldiers off-duty.39

No mention was made of the two basic issues (the war and the land) where the aims of the Soviet leaders clashed directly with those of the Duma. Given the bitter political conflicts that later emerged on these two issues (leading to the downfall of the first three cabinets), perhaps this was a crucial mistake.

This, then, was the framework of the dual power system. The Soviet would support the Provisional Government only ‘in so far as’ (postol’ku poskol’ku), to cite the famous phrase, it adhered to these Soviet principles; and it would act as the government’s ‘watchman’ to make sure it did. The effect was to paralyse the Provisional Government. For it could do nothing without the support of the Soviet. Yet at the same time the Soviet’s conditions created a climate of such uncontrolled freedom that there was a crying need for stronger government. As Lenin put it, Russia had become the ‘freest country in the world’ — and he was the first to exploit it.

*

The new cabinet was picked by Miliukov on 2 March, and published in the newspapers the next day, alongside a Soviet appeal ‘To comrades and citizens!’ calling for order and the people’s support of the government. To the crowds outside the Tauride Palace the names of their new rulers were mostly unknown. All of them were from the propertied élite. Most of them had been named in the various ‘ministries of confidence’ proposed by the liberal opposition circles since 1915. Eight of the twelve were deputies of the Fourth Duma (and two more of earlier Dumas); seven were members of either Zemgor or the War Industries Committee; while six belonged to the same Masonic circles,fn4 whose precise role in the February Revolution has long been the subject of historical speculation but little concrete fact.

Prince Lvov, the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior, qualified on all these counts. His wartime work in the zemstvos had won him universal respect among the liberal educated classes. It had made him into a truly national figure and this gave the government at least the pretence of being based on something broader than the Duma. Lvov, moreover, was a good team-worker, a man of practical capabilities and without strong party affiliations, and this embodied the coalition spirit for which the government claimed to stand. This was not a government of any one party — it contained elements ranging from the Octobrists to the SRs — but a government of national salvation. This non-party aspect, combined with the general softness of his character, also made Lvov the ideal figure to conciliate between the real power-brokers in his cabinet — Miliukov and Kerensky — who would otherwise have fallen out and split the government from the start. Each of them was prepared to accept Lvov, if only because it stopped the other from becoming the Prime Minister. Yet when Lvov’s name was announced to the crowds some of them cried out: ‘The privileged class!’ One soldier shouted: ‘You mean all we did was exchange a tsar for a prince?’

The name of Tereshchenko, the new Minister of Finance, was greeted by the crowds with roars of laughter. ‘Who is Tereshchenko?’ people asked. And well might they ask. Even the newspapers knew little about him. All they could say was that he came from the Ukraine, was twenty-nine years old and a multi-millionaire. Shingarev, the Minister of Agriculture, had risen from similar obscurity. A provincial doctor and a Kadet member of the Duma, even his closest friends were forced to admit that he was little more than a decent mediocrity. Not much more was known of Konovalov (Trade and Industry), Nekrasov (Transport) or Manuilov (Education), although Guchkov (War and Navy) and Miliukov (Foreign Affairs) were certainly household names and seemed, at first, to meet with general approval.40

Only the name of Kerensky, the one socialist in the cabinet, met with the approval of the crowd. ‘The mass of the soldiers’, Stankevich recalled, ‘felt that Kerensky was “their” minister.’ As the Vice-Chairman of the Soviet Executive, he should never have accepted — and even less have asked for — the portfolio of the Ministry of Justice. For it was the Soviet’s official policy not to enter the government. Chkheidze had already turned down the offer of the Ministry of Labour. But Kerensky had his heart set on becoming a minister. Young and ambitious (he was still only thirty-five), Kerensky was convinced of his own calling to greatness, and could not bear to see this chance go by. Throughout the previous days he had been a key figure behind the scenes. He alone belonged both to the Soviet Executive and to the Duma’s Temporary Committee. He had run from one wing of the Tauride Palace to the other, making himself indispensable to both. Yet it was clear where his sympathies lay: most of his time had been spent in the right wing, and he only rarely came to the Soviet to make some high-sounding speech about the ‘people’s revolution’. Not once did he venture on to the streets. Although convinced that he was a socialist, Kerensky was in fact a bourgeois radical, a Duma deputy and a democratic lawyer, dressed up as ‘a man of the people’. Formally he belonged to the Trudovik Party. Later, when that became the thing to do, he joined the SRs. But in his heart he was not a socialist. In the Duma he always wore a morning coat with a starched dress-shirt and collar. But when he spoke in the Soviet he ripped off his collar and took off his coat to make himself look more ‘proletarian’. This was not a revolutionary. It was someone, as Trotsky put it, who merely ‘hung around the Revolution’.

Shortly after 2 p.m. on 2 March Kerensky came into the Soviet to deliver what was perhaps the most important speech of his life. He needed the assembly to endorse his decision, taken earlier that morning without its prior approval, to accept the Ministry of Justice. ‘Comrades! Do you trust me?’ he asked in a voice charged with theatrical pathos. ‘We do, we do!’ the delegates shouted. ‘I speak, comrades, with all my soul, from the bottom of my heart, and if it is needed to prove this, if you do not trust me, then I am ready to die.’ A wave of emotion passed through the hall. The delegates broke into prolonged applause, turning into a standing ovation. Seizing this opportunity, Kerensky claimed that he had been obliged to accept the portfolio, since the tsarist ministers ‘were in my hands and I could not let them slip’. He told them that his ‘first act’ as the Minister of Justice had been to order the immediate release of all political prisoners and the arrangement of a hero’s welcome for their return to the capital. The delegates were overcome with emotion and greeted this news with thunderous cheers. Now Kerensky turned to ask them whether they approved of his decision to join the government, offering to resign from the Soviet if the answer should be no. But there were wild cries of ‘We do! We do!’ and, without a formal vote, his actions were endorsed. It was a brilliant coup de théâtre. What might have been the moment of his downfall had in fact become the moment of his triumph. Kerensky was now the only politician with a position in both the government and the Soviet. He was the undisputed leader of the people.41

This was to be the start of the ‘Kerensky cult’. His popularity was truly enormous. ‘There is only one name that unites everyone’, Gippius wrote on 1 March, ‘and that is the name of Kerensky.’ During these first weeks of the revolution the workers in their factories, the sailors on their ships and the soldiers in their barracks would ask the question, ‘What has Alexander Fedorovich to say?’, and invariably the answer would become the final word on any given issue. Kerensky was the darling of the democratic intelligentsia. ‘We loved Kerensky,’ recalled Gippius. ‘There was something alive, something bird-like and childish in him.’ With his pale and young-looking face, his bright, keen eyes and his nervous manner, he was the perfect image of the student radical.

This almost universal adulation cannot be explained in terms of the conventional virtues of a politician. Kerensky had few of these. His career in the Duma had not been especially distinguished: he lacked the stature of Miliukov and the style of Maklakov or Fedor Rodichev. And there were other lawyers better qualified to become the Minister of Justice. But Kerensky was the ideal man for February. As Gippius put it, ‘He is the right man in the right place.’ For one thing, Kerensky was a great orator — not so much in the parliamentary context, which demanded eloquence and intellectual balance, but in the sense that could appeal to the crowds. His speeches were fiery and emotional. They were not concerned with detailed policies but with moral principles and spiritual values. They often sounded more like the preachings of a priest than the prescripts of a politician. In his youth Kerensky had wanted to become an actor. His speeches were full of dramatic pathos, theatrical gestures and even fainting fits (these were genuine but Kerensky somehow managed to time them to coincide with the climax of his speech). All this tugged on the heart-strings of his listeners. Kerensky expressed and came to stand for the sentiment of national unity, for the people’s resurrection, which the February Revolution was supposed to be. He was called the ‘poet of freedom’; the ‘heart of the nation’; the ‘spirit of the people’; the ‘saviour of the fatherland’; and the ‘first love of the revolution’.42

It is perhaps not surprising that such a cult of the personality should have appeared in these first euphoric days of the revolution. People fell in love with ‘the revolution’, and this rubbed off on its ‘leader’, Kerensky. The institutions, the psychology, even the language of democracy had yet to be rooted in Russia’s virgin political soil. Most of the people still conceived of politics in monarchical terms. This, after all, was a land of Tsars. Even before Nicholas’s abdication, the Russian people had their new ‘Tsar’.

iii Nicholas the Last

The Tsar’s diary, 26 February 1917:

At ten o’clock I went to Mass. The reports were on time. There were many people at breakfast, including all the foreigners. Wrote to Alix and went for a walk near the chapel by the Bobrisky road. The weather was fine and frosty. After tea I read and talked with Senator Tregubov until dinner. Played dominoes in the evening.

While Petrograd sank into chaos and the monarchy teetered on the verge of collapse, Nicholas carried on with the peaceful routines of his life at Stavka. There, in the words of one of his entourage, ‘one day after another passed like two drops of water’. Judging from his letters, he was much more concerned by the fact that two of his daughters had gone down with measles than by the latest reports of rioting in the capital. True, Khabalov had not informed him of the gravity of the situation. But would the truth have made a difference? It is doubtful. On the morning of the 27th a cable arrived from the President of the Duma informing the Tsar of the real situation and pleading with him to ‘take immediate steps’ because ‘tomorrow it will be too late’. Nicholas glanced at the message and, turning to Count Fredericks, exclaimed: ‘That fat fellow Rodzianko has again written to me with all kinds of nonsense, which I shan’t even bother to answer.’43

Since the death of Rasputin, Nicholas had turned his back on the capital and retreated into the quiet daily routines of Stavka and his family life at Tsarskoe Selo. Now more than ever he lived in a world of his own delusions, surrounding himself with lackeys of the court who flattered his fantasies of patrimonial power. During the last weeks of his reign numerous advisers pleaded with him to appoint a new government of confidence responsible to the Duma. But none had been able to penetrate the invisible wall of indifference that Nicholas erected around himself. And yet, beneath this outward appearance of calm, he was clearly in the midst of a deep internal crisis. Kokovtsov, who had not seen the Tsar for a year, found him ‘unrecognizable’ at the beginning of February. He was convinced that he was ‘on the verge of a mental breakdown’. Paléologue was equally shocked by the Tsar’s ‘grave, drawn features and furtive distant gaze, the impenetrability of his thoughts, and the thoroughly vague and enigmatic quality of his personality’. It confirmed the French Ambassador in his long-held ‘notion that Nicholas II feels himself overwhelmed and dominated by events, that he has lost all faith in his mission or his work, and that he has so to speak abdicated inwardly and is now resigned to disaster’.44 It was as if his mental crisis consisted of the realization that the autocratic path he had followed for the past twenty-two years had finally come to an end, bringing his dynasty to the brink of disaster, and that the advice which everyone now gave him, to save his throne by handing over executive power to the Duma, was something he simply could not do. His whole life had been dedicated to the maintenance of autocracy, and now that he realized it could no longer be maintained, he gave up on life altogether. Here was the root of his notorious fatalism during the days leading up to his abdication.

In the evening of the 27th news finally reached the Tsar of the mutiny in Petrograd. He ordered General Ivanov, whom he now appointed to replace Khabalov as chief of the Petrograd Military District, to lead a force of punitive troops to the capital and establish a dictatorship there. Nicholas himself set out that night by train for Tsarskoe Selo, ignoring Alexeev’s objections that this would merely hinder the counter-revolution and could endanger his life. His only concern, it appears, was to be reunited with his wife and children. The imperial train did not go directly northwards because Ivanov’s troops were moving on this line but made a large detour to the east, arriving at Malaya Vishera, some 125 miles south-east of the capital, in the early morning of 1 March. There it could proceed no further because the line ahead had been seized by revolutionaries, so it headed west to Pskov, arriving there at 7 p.m. on 1 March. Because of the hasty arrangements, there was no formal ceremony to welcome the Tsar to the town where he was destined to renounce his throne. General Ruszky, Commander of the Northern Front, arrived late to meet him at the station. He was wearing a pair of rubber boots.45

By this time, however, several things had happened to undermine the plans for a counter-revolution. For one thing, the last remaining loyalist forces in the capital had singularly failed to organize resistance. General Khabalov clearly lacked the nerve for a serious fight and did almost nothing, although there was still much that he might have done. From the Admiralty, where he and his entourage had bunkered themselves in, there was a straight path to the three main railway stations (the Baltic, the Warsaw and the Nikolaevsky): loyalist troops, brought in from the Front, might have succeeded in fighting their way through. But Khabalov did not even think of this. Drinking cognacs to keep his hands from shaking, he merely wrote out a proclamation in which he declared the obvious — that the city was in a state of siege. But there was no one with the courage, let alone the brushes or the glue, to post up the printed version in the streets. Instead the leaflets were thrown out of the windows of the Admiralty, and most landed in the garden below. The efforts of Khabalov’s men to link up with the loyalist forces in the other parts of the city centre ended in a similar farce. One detachment fought its way across to the Winter Palace — only to be ordered back by the palace commandant, outraged by the sight of the soldiers’ dirty boots on his newly polished floors. It later turned out that the Grand Duke Mikhail, who had been in the palace at the time, had ordered the soldiers to be turned away because he had been afraid that they might damage its chinaware. And for that he lost an Empire! Demoralized and unfed for several days, most of the soldiers ran off to the people’s side rather than return to the Admiralty.

There was a second development to foil the plans for a counter-revolution on 1 March. Ivanov’s troops had arrived in Tsarskoe Selo to find that the mutiny had even spread to the Imperial Guards, who were garrisoned there. Some of Ivanov’s own troops had already begun to show signs of disaffection, answering in a ‘surly fashion’ when addressed by the Empress during a review. Meanwhile, back in Petrograd, the Temporary Committee had resolved that Nicholas would have to abdicate. Early in the morning on 2 March Guchkov and Shulgin departed for Pskov with instructions to impose the abdication and ensure the Law of Succession with Alexei as Tsar and the Grand Duke Mikhail as Regent. Rodzianko, meanwhile, who still had hopes of persuading the Tsar to make concessions, was prevented from going by a Soviet railway blockade.46

But the most important development was the decision of General Alexeev, as the acting Commander-in-Chief, to order a halt to the counter-revolutionary expedition. One of the reasons for this crucial decision was the assurance Alexeev had been given by Rodzianko on 1 March that the Duma leaders, rather than the Soviet ones, would form the new government in Petrograd. Alexeev himself had long been party to the palace coup plots of the Progressive Bloc. Instinctively he trusted Rodzianko, and seemed to believe that the liberals might still be prepared to negotiate a political settlement which retained the monarchical basis of Russia. But there was another motive for Alexeev’s change of mind: he was afraid that if the army was used to attack the revolutionary capital, it might become engulfed in a general mutiny, leading to the country’s defeat in the war. Already, on 1 March, there were mutinies in several northern garrisons, and there was a real danger that they might soon spread to the units at the Front. He preferred to isolate his front-line soldiers from Red Petrograd rather than send them there and run the risk of having them fall under its revolutionary influence. On 1 March Alexeev ordered General Ivanov to halt his expedition against Petrograd. He then sent a cable to the Tsar begging him to let the Duma form a government for the restoration of order. ‘A revolution throughout Russia’, he warned prophetically, ‘would mean a disgraceful termination of the war. One cannot ask the army to fight while there is a revolution in the rear.’47

The armed services had always held a special place in Nicholas’s heart, and it was the advice of his military chiefs which now persuaded him to abdicate. If on the morning of 1 March Alexeev had considered the appointment of a Duma government sufficient to calm the capital, by the morning of the 2nd he had become convinced that nothing less than the Tsar’s abdication would be necessary. During the small hours of the morning, while Nicholas tossed and turned in his bed, unable to sleep, General Ruzsky conversed with Rodzianko in Petrograd through the Hughes Apparatus and learned from him that the capital was in such a state of chaos that only an act of abdication would be enough to satisfy the crowds. Alexeev was stunned by what he read from the transcripts of their conversation. At 9 a.m. he cabled Pskov with orders to wake the Tsar at once — ‘ignoring all etiquette’ — and to inform him of the contents of the Ruzsky–Rodzianko tapes. It was now clear to him and the other generals at Stavka that Nicholas had no choice but to follow Rodzianko’s advice. But he knew the Tsar well enough to realize that he would not agree to abdicate unless urged to do so by his leading generals. Sending a circular telegram to the Front Commanders with a summary of the situation, he asked them to reply to Pskov in line with his view that Nicholas should step down in favour of his son in order to save the army, the war campaign, the nation and the dynasty.48

At 10 a.m. Ruzsky came to the Tsar’s railway car and handed him the transcripts of his conversation with Rodzianko. Nicholas read them, stood up and looked out of the window. There was a dreadful silence. At last, he returned to his desk, and quietly spoke of his conviction ‘that he had been born for misfortune’. The night before, as he lay in his bed, he had come to realize that it was too late for concessions. ‘If it is necessary that I should abdicate for the good of Russia, then I am ready for it,’ he said. ‘But I am afraid that the people will not understand it.’ A few minutes later Alexeev’s telegram arrived. Ruzsky read it aloud to the Tsar and suggested postponing any decision until he had seen what the other commanders had to say. Nicholas adjourned for lunch. What else could he do? He was a man of habit.

By half-past two the telegrams from the commanders had arrived and Ruzsky was summoned back to the Emperor’s car. Nicholas smoked incessantly as he read the cables. All of them agreed with Alexeev on the need for his abdication. Brusilov, who had long been convinced of the damage caused by the Tsar to the army, declared outright that it was now the only way to restore order in the rear and continue the war. The Grand Duke Nikolai implored his nephew ‘on his knees’ to give up the crown. When he had finished reading Nicholas asked the opinions of his three attendant generals on the imperial train. It was the same. There was a moment of silence before Nicholas spoke. ‘I have made up my mind. I have decided to abdicate from the throne in favour of my son Alexei.’ He crossed himself, the generals also made the sign of the cross, and then he withdrew to his cabin.49

Many of those who were with him on the imperial train were struck by the Tsar’s strange lack of emotion during this ordeal. Right to the end he kept up his stiff Edwardian manners and impeccable sense of decorum. Having made the crucial decision to abdicate, he went for his afternoon walk and appeared in the buffet car as usual for evening tea. Not a word was said of the day’s events. His courtiers carried on with the normal small-talk on the weather, while liveried servants went round the table pouring tea as if nothing had happened. ‘The Tsar sat peacefully and calm,’ recalled one of his aides-de-camp. ‘He kept up conversation and only his eyes, which were sad, thoughtful and staring into the distance, and his nervous movements when he took a cigarette, betrayed his inner disturbance.’50

The truth of the matter was that his abdication probably came as a relief. That night Nicholas would sleep much better than he had done for a long time. As a young man, he had never really wanted to be Tsar. The jovial life of a young Guards officer, followed by the cosy domestic routines of a landed squire, were much more to his liking. But when misfortune had put him on the throne he swore to uphold and pass on to his son the autocratic powers which he had inherited from his beloved and much-feared father. He adhered to this coronation oath with a dogged narrow-mindedness, as if he was terrified that God (or his wife) would punish him if he failed to rule like Ivan the Terrible. As long as he remained Tsar nothing could divert him from this path. For twenty-two years he had ignored the lessons of history, as well as the pleadings of countless advisers, which all pointed to the fact that the only way to save his throne was to grant a government accountable to the people. His motive was always the same: his ‘conscience’ forbade him to do it. Even as late as January 1917, when the Grand Duke Pavel, in a last desperate bid to avert the catastrophe, urged him to concede a Duma ministry, Nicholas replied: ‘I took an oath for Autocracy on the day of my coronation and I must remit this oath in its integrity to my son.’51 In a way, he probably found it easier to abdicate than to turn himself into a constitutional king. That was Nicholas’s tragedy.

Throughout the whole affair Nicholas’s main concern was to be reunited with his family. ‘In my thoughts I am always with you,’ he wrote to Alexandra on 28 February. It was this that led to a final curious twist in the tale of his abdication. During the evening of 2 March, while he waited for Guchkov and Shulgin to arrive from the capital, Nicholas summoned Professor Fedorov, his court physician, and asked him about the prospects for his son’s recovery. He told him of Rasputin’s prediction that Alexei would be cured by the age of thirteen, which, by an ironic turn of fate, he was due to reach in 1917. Fedorov dispelled any such hopes: there was no medical cure for haemophilia and Alexei could not live much longer. He also expressed his doubts that the Tsar would be allowed to stay with his son once he had renounced the throne, for he would surely be expected to go into exile. On hearing this, Nicholas resolved to abdicate not only for himself but also for his son in favour of his younger brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail. ‘I cannot be separated from him,’ he told Guchkov and Shulgin when they arrived. ‘I hope you will understand the feelings of a father.’52

In legal terms this was quite invalid. The Law of Succession made it clear that the Russian throne was ‘not the Emperor’s private property nor his patrimony to be disposed of according to his will’, but descended automatically to his eldest son. To make matters worse, Mikhail had legally barred himself from the throne by marrying a commoner who had already been divorced. But Guchkov and Shulgin were now more concerned with the fact of the Tsar’s abdication than with its strict legality; and in order to achieve it they were ready to make this final concession to his patrimonial will. The Abdication Manifesto, which Nicholas composed in his private car that evening, was technically illegal. Later it was claimed that this might have served as a pretext for his restoration. But at the time it seemed no more than a minor allowance for his natural rights as a father.53

News of the Tsar’s abdication reached Tsarskoe Selo on the following day. It was left to the Grand Duke Pavel to inform the Empress, since no one else in her entourage could find the courage to do so. He found her with the children, in a nurse’s uniform. When he told her the news ‘the Empress trembled and bent down her head, as though she were uttering a prayer’. In a calm voice she explained to him that her husband had evidently ‘preferred to abdicate the crown rather than break the oath which he had made at his coronation’. Then she burst into tears.54

*

The crowds outside the Tauride Palace met the announcement that Nicholas would abdicate in favour of the Grand Duke Mikhail with an outburst of angry indignation. The Catherine Hall echoed to shouts from the street of ‘Long Live the Republic!’ and ‘Down with the Dynasty!’ When Guchkov returned from Pskov he went in triumph to a meeting of railway workers to tell them what had happened. Ending his speech with the rallying call ‘Long Live the Emperor Mikhail!’, he was at once arrested and threatened with execution by the workers. Throughout the capital crowds attacked supporters and symbols of the tsarist order. A huge demonstration of soldiers marched to the Tauride Palace demanding the overthrow of the dynasty. Politically, it seemed, the monarchy was doomed. Yet inside the palace Miliukov continued to defend its existence in legal terms. It was essential, the professor argued, to preserve the monarchy as a symbol of the state. For only it could give legitimacy and a historic continuity to the transfer of power. This was the triumph of hope over reality. The mood of the crowd clearly made the survival of the monarchy impossible. The masses would not tolerate a new Tsar, and if one was imposed then further disorders would ensue, perhaps even leading to a civil war. The republican ministers, led by Kerensky and Nekrasov, eventually got their way. The Provisional Government resolved to persuade the Grand Duke to refuse the crown and thus bring the dynasty to an end.55

It would not take much persuading. Mikhail was a shy and modest man, not much interested in politics, and even less intelligent than his older brother. In different circumstances he might have made a good, if rather dim, constitutional monarch, much like his English cousin, George V. But the rioting in the capital, which he had personally witnessed, had not given him much appetite for monarchical power. He was not in the least bit eager to put his own head on the block — either metaphorically or literally — and was understandably both surprised and annoyed when his brother suddenly and unexpectedly decided to burden him with the crown without even consulting him.

He met the leaders of the Provisional Government on 3 March in the residence of Princess Putiatina, not far from the Winter Palace, where the Grand Duke had taken refuge from the revolution. Lvov and Kerensky put forward the majority point of view in the government that if Mikhail accepted the throne there would be a violent uprising, leading to civil war. Miliukov disagreed, claiming that only the monarchy was recognized by the people as a symbol of authority and that it was now required to save the country from chaos. ‘The Provisional Government on its own, without a monarch’, he argued, ‘is an unseaworthy vessel liable to sink in the ocean of popular unrest.’ All this left the Grand Duke rather confused. He asked for an hour to talk in private with Rodzianko. His main concern, according to Rodzianko, was whether the Duma could guarantee his personal safety if he became Tsar. When Rodzianko said that it could not, he finally made up his mind and, returning to the meeting, announced that he had decided to decline the crown. There was a tear in his eye. Kerensky, whose own emotions often got the better of his senses, rushed up to the Grand Duke, shook his hand and congratulated him with these words of astounding self-importance: ‘Your Imperial Highness, you have acted nobly and like a patriot. From now on, I shall assume the obligation of making this known and of defending you.’56

Two jurists, Nabokov and Nolde, were later summoned to the Putiatina residence to draft the abdication manifesto. This historic document, which brought to an end 300 years of Romanov rule, was written out by them at a school desk in the study of Putiatina’s daughter and then copied out in one of her school notebooks. By 6 p.m. the document was ready. Mikhail signed it in the presence of the ministers and Rodzianko. He then turned to embrace Prince Lvov and wished him good fortune as the Prime Minister of the new Russia.57

*

The end of the monarchy was marked by scenes of rejoicing throughout the Russian Empire. Rapturous crowds assembled in the streets of Petrograd and Moscow. Red flags were hoisted on to the roofs and hung from the windows of nearly every building. In Helsingfors, Kiev, Tiflis and the other non-Russian capitals, where the downfall of the Tsar was associated with the liberation of the nation, national flags were often displayed alongside them. There was hardly a town, however small, that did not celebrate the revolution with jubilant processions, patriotic speeches and the singing of the Marseillaise. Konstantin Paustovsky recalls the night when his little sleepy town, Yefremov in Tula province, first heard of the revolution.

It was one o’clock in the night, a time when Yefremov was usually asleep. Suddenly, at this odd hour, there sounded a short, booming peal of the cathedral bell. Then another, and a third. The pealing grew faster, its noise spread over the town, and soon the bells of all the outlying churches started to ring.

Lights were lit in all the houses. The streets filled with people. The doors of many houses stood open. Strangers, weeping openly, embraced each other. The solemn, exultant whistling of locomotives could be heard from the direction of the station. Somewhere down one street there began, first quietly, then steadily louder, the singing of the Marseillaise:

Ye tyrants quake, your day is over,

Detested now by friend and foe!

The singing brass sounds of a band joined the human voices in the chorus.

The soldiers in the trenches were equally ecstatic, despite the initial confusion caused by the efforts of the officers to withhold the news from the capital. Red flags were raised in the trenches and red ribbons tied to the military trucks, pieces of artillery and the horses. There were parades to celebrate the revolution, military bands played the Marseillaise and soldiers wildly threw their caps into the air. On the naval ships there was a similar outburst of emotion. The red flag was raised on battleships ‘as an emblem’, in the words of the Helsingfors sailors, ‘of our freedom and our unity’.58

In the countryside the news of the abdication filtered down more slowly. Some of the more remote villages did not learn about the events in the capital until the end of March, and in some places, such as in Kazan and Mogilev provinces, where the tsarist forces remained dominant, not until April. Many of the peasants were at first confused by the downfall of the Tsar. ‘The church was full of crying peasants,’ one witness recalled. ‘ “What will become of us?” they constantly repeated — “They have taken the Tsar away from us?” ’ Some of the older peasants, in particular, venerated the Tsar as a god on earth and saw his removal as an attack upon religion — a fact exploited by many priests in their counter-revolutionary agitation. Even among the more ruralized workers the overthrow of the Tsar was sometimes seen as a sin. The American Frank Golder noted in his diary on 15 March:

Talked with one of the workmen (an old muzhik) of the Navy archives. He said it was a sin to overthrow the Emperor, since God had placed him in power. It may be that the new regime will help people on this earth, but they will surely pay for it in the world to come.

In the villages people at first spoke in muted voices about the ‘big events’ in the capital. Until the land captains and the police were removed from power, which took place gradually during March and April, the peasants had no guarantee that they would not be arrested if they spoke their minds. But as the weeks went by, they grew in confidence and began to voice their opposition to the Tsar. A survey by the Duma based upon the reports of its provincial agents for the first three months of the revolution summarized this process:

the widespread myth that the Russian peasant is devoted to the Tsar and that he ‘cannot live’ without him has been destroyed by the universal joy and the relief of the peasants upon discovering that in reality they can live without the Tsar, without whom they were told they ‘could not live’ … Now the peasants say: ‘The Tsar brought himself down and brought us to ruin.’59

Once their initial fear had been removed, the peasants welcomed the revolution. The news from the capital was joyously greeted by huge assemblies in the village fields. ‘Our village’, recalls one peasant, ‘burst into life with celebrations. Everyone felt enormous relief, as if a heavy rock had suddenly been lifted from our shoulders.’ Another peasant recalled the celebrations in his village on the day it learned of the Tsar’s abdication: ‘People kissed each other from joy and said that life from now on would be good. Everyone dressed in their best costumes, as they do on a big holiday. The festivities went on for three days.’ Many villages held religious processions to thank the Lord for their newly won freedoms, and offered up prayers for the new government. For many peasants, the revolution appeared as a sacred thing, while those who had laid down their lives for the people’s freedom were seen by the peasants as modern-day saints. Thus the villagers of Bol’she-Dvorskaya volost in the Tikhvinsk district of Petrograd province held a ‘service of thanksgiving for the divine gift of the people’s victory and the eternal memory of those holy men who fell in the struggle for freedom’. The parishioners of Osvyshi village in Tver province offered, as they put it, ‘fervent prayers to thank the Lord for the divine gift of the people’s victory … and since this great victory was achieved by sacrifice, we held a requiem for all our fallen brothers’. It was often with the express purpose of reciprocating this sacrifice that many villages sent donations, often amounting to several hundred roubles, to the authorities in Petrograd for the benefit of those who had suffered losses in the February Days.60

The February Revolution was, in its essence, a revolution against monarchy. The new democracy to which it gave birth defined itself by the negation of all things tsarist. In the rhetoric of its leaders the Tsar was equated with the dark oppression of old Russia, while his removal was associated with enlightenment and progress. The symbols and emblems of the revolution — printed in the press and the pamphlet literature — were the images of a broken chain, of the radiant sun appearing from behind the clouds, and of a toppled throne and crown.61

The revolution was accompanied by the nationwide destruction of all signs and symbols of imperial power. During the February Days the crowds in Petrograd tore down the imperial double-headed eagles which hung from many buildings (sometimes even blowing them up with explosives);fn5 removed imperial signs from shopfronts and streets; smashed tsarist statues; took out portraits of the tsars from government buildings (Repin’s famous portrait of Nicholas II was torn down from the tribune of the Tauride Palace), and burned all these in bonfires on the streets. The imperial coats of arms on the iron fence around the Winter Palace were covered up with red material — as were all the statues too large to destroy. During March and April many towns held symbolic reenactments of the February Days, usually known as ‘Festivals of Freedom’, in which these tsarist emblems and insignia — sometimes reinstalled especially for the event — were torn down once again. In Moscow the elephantine statue of Alexander III was dismantled by a team of workers using ropes and dynamite. In provincial towns statues of the tsars were also destroyed, although here there were sometimes conflicts when these statues had been paid for out of civic funds and had come to represent a certain civic pride. In Vladimir, for example, there was a dispute between the socialists and the merchants over the town’s statue of Alexander II. ‘After a series of long street debates,’ recalls a local resident, ‘it was decided to strike a compromise: the statue would not be destroyed but, in order not to offend the revolutionary morals of the people, the figure of the Tsar would be covered up with a large brown sack.’ Much of this iconoclasm was carnivalesque. Thus, for example, in the February Days a crowd paraded through the Petrograd streets with a straw effigy of Nicholas II in police uniform which they then burned in a comic ceremony. But such destruction could easily turn violent. A eunuch was lynched by the same crowd simply because such effeminate types were thought to be the lackeys of the court.62

This symbolic revolution was also enacted on the personal level. People made a conscious effort to distance themselves from the old regime and to identify themselves with the new democracy. Soldiers renounced their hard-won tsarist medals, and often sent them to the Petrograd Soviet so that it could melt them down and put the silver to the use of the people’s cause. Hundreds of people with surnames such as Romanov, Nemets (German) or Rasputin, appealed to the Chancellery for the right to have them changed. One such Romanov, Fedor Andreevich, a peasant of Koltovskii village in Penza province, claimed that his surname had become ‘a source of shame’ and wanted it changed to Lvov — the surname of the Prime Minister.63

The revolution was accompanied by a boom of anti-tsarist pamphlets, postcards, plays and films, as the old laws on censorship were removed. The pamphlets, in particular, were hugely popular, some of them selling in their millions. They all traded in the rumours of the war years: that the Empress was working for the Germans; that she was the lover of Rasputin; that the Tsar had given his throne to this ‘holy devil’, and so on. Most of their titles were sexually suggestive — The Secrets of the Romanovs; The Gay Days of Rasputin; The Night Orgies of Rasputin — as was much of their dialogue. In The Night Orgies, for example, Protopopov asks Madame Vyrubova if Rasputin has an ‘enormous talent’. ‘Oh, I know,’ she answers, ‘an enormous, enormous talent.’64 Many of the pamphlets were semi-pornographic and were illustrated with cartoons of the royals rolling around in bed with Rasputin. By making the link between the sexual corruption of the court and the diseased condition of Russia explicit, this propaganda played a vital role (still to be investigated by historians) in debunking the myth and the mystique of the Tsar as a divine king. During the course of 1917 it shaped the popular image of the monarchy as an alien force of darkness and corruption, an image which ruled out the possibility of a restoration and thus largely undermined the counter-revolution in the years to come.

So, politically, the monarchy was dead. All its main institutions of support — the bureaucracy, the police, the army and the Church — collapsed virtually overnight. It was a sign of how far they had been weakened, and of how far they had become alienated from the Tsar, during the years before 1917. The Tsar was the lynchpin of the monarchy — he was at the same time, as it were, an officer, a priest, a district governor and a policeman — and once he had been removed the whole system came crashing down. The army commanders soon declared their allegiance to the Provisional Government. Many of them had been linked with its leaders through the opposition movement of the war; while those who were opposed to the revolution knew that it would break the army to resist it. The Church was undermined by its own internal revolution. In the countryside there was a strong anti-clerical movement: village communities took away the church lands, removed priests from the parishes and refused to pay for religious services. Many of the local priests managed to escape this fate by throwing in their lot with the revolution. But the rest of the Church hierarchy was thrown on to the defensive. The Holy Synod, purged of its Rasputinites, appealed to the priesthood to support the new government. Religious freedoms were introduced. Church schools were transferred to the control of the state. And preparations were made for the separation of Church and state. The provincial apparatus collapsed in most places like a house of cards, and it was only very rarely that armed force was needed to remove it. The people simply took to the streets; the governors, without any military means to suppress the disorders, were forced to resign; and ad hoc committees of citzens declared themselves in power. In Moscow the regime fell as a result of no more than two days of street demonstrations. ‘There was no shooting in the streets and no barricades,’ recalled a jubilant businessman. ‘The old regime in Moscow fell by itself, and no one defended it or even tried to.’ The police state similarly collapsed — the police being replaced by citizens’ militias almost overnight. Even the Okhrana was dissolved, although it was later rumoured that many of its agents had found employment in the new government.65

No one really tried to revive the monarchy. It is telling, for example, that none of the White leaders in the civil war embraced monarchism as a cause, despite the efforts of the many monarchists in their ranks. The White leaders all realized that politically it would be suicide for them to do so. For as Trotsky put it with his usual bluntness, ‘the country had so radically vomited up the monarchy that it could not ever crawl down the people’s throat again’.66 His prognosis is probably still true, the post-Soviet romance with the tsarist past notwithstanding.fn6

But if the monarchy was dead politically, it was still alive in a broader sense. The mass of the peasants thought of politics in monarchical terms. They conceived of the state as embodied in the monarch, and projected their ideals of the revolution on to a ‘peasant king’, or some other authoritarian liberator come to deliver their cherished land and freedom. Here were the roots of the cults of Kerensky, Kornilov and Lenin, all of which were attempts to fill the missing space of the deposed Tsar, or perhaps rather the vacuum left by the myth of the Tsar Deliverer. George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, noted this monarchical mentality during the first days of the revolution, when one soldier said to him: ‘Yes, we need a republic, but at its head there should be a good Tsar.’ Frank Golder similarly noted such misunderstandings in his diary on 7 March: ‘Stories are being told of soldiers who say they wish a republic like England, or a republic with a Tsar. One soldier said he wanted to elect a President and when asked, “Whom would you elect?” he replied, “The Tsar.” ’ Soldiers’ letters voiced the same confusion. ‘We want a democratic republic and a Tsar-Batiushka for three years’; ‘It would be good if we had a republic with a sensible Tsar.’ It seems that the peasants found it difficult to distinguish between the person of the monarch (gosudar’) and the abstract institutions of the state (gosudarstvo). Their conception of the democratic order was similarly couched in personalized terms. Sometime during March a Menshevik deputy of the Moscow Soviet went to agitate at a regimental meeting near Vladimir. He spoke of the need for peace, of the need for all the land to be given to the peasants, and of the advantages of a republic over monarchy. The soldiers cheered loudly in agreement, and one of them called out, ‘We want to elect you as Tsar’, whereupon the other soldiers burst into applause. ‘I refused the Romanov crown’, recalled the Menshevik, ‘and went away with a heavy feeling of how easy it would be for any adventurer or demagogue to become the master of this simple and naive people.’67

*

‘A miracle has happened’, Blok wrote to his mother on 23 March, ‘and we may expect more miracles.’ People shared a wild excitement and euphoria during the first days of the revolution. It was partly the sense of absolute freedom — ‘the extraordinary feeling’, as Blok put it in his letter, ‘that nothing is forbidden’, that ‘almost anything might happen’. It was also the fact that everything had happened so quickly: a mighty dynasty, three centuries old, had collapsed within a few days. ‘The most striking thing’, Blok wrote in his diary on 25 May, ‘was the utter unexpectedness of it, like a train crash in the night, like a bridge crumbling beneath your feet, like a house falling down.’ There was a strange sense of unreality. People compared the whole experience to ‘living through a dream or a fairy tale’. Things happened too fast for daily life to stop and for people to take it all in. ‘What was really strange’, wrote the artist Yulia Obolenskaya to a friend, ‘was getting your parcel with the dried fruit and coffee on the first day of the revolution, while the street outside was wild with joy and gun carriages with red flags were rolling by … Outside there was a hurricane … Then suddenly — a ring and a parcel containing blackcurrants!68

This was the ‘honeymoon’ of the revolution. People fell in love with ‘February’. Almost instantly, the history of the revolution was reinvented to suit these democratic ideals and mythic expectations. The ‘Glorious February Revolution’, as it became known, was said to have been a bloodless affair. ‘Just imagine,’ one contemporary wrote, ‘there was a great revolution in Russia and not a single drop of blood was spilled.’ It was also said to be a single national act without opposition. ‘Our revolution’, one Duma agitator informed the sailors of Helsingfors, ‘is the only one in the history of the world to express the spirit of the entire people.’ The revolution was portrayed as a spiritual renewal, a moral resurrection of the people. Merezhkovsky called it ‘perhaps the most Christian act in the history of the world.’ The revolution was itself transformed into a sort of cult. Huge crowds would assemble in the streets to hold prayers and ceremonies in celebration of Glorious February. The burial of the revolution’s martyred victims on the second Sunday of the new order (12 March) equally bore the character, although not the rituals, of a religious mass. Many people compared the revolution to an Easter holiday. People in the streets would congratulate each other on the revolution with the Easter blessing: ‘Christ has arisen!’ (sometimes this was changed to ‘Russia has arisen!’). Tsarism was said to have stood for evil and sin (one priest even called it ‘the Devil’s institution’); it had split the people into rich and poor; but with its downfall, society would be reorganized on the basis of more Christian attitudes. Some idealists even thought that lying and stealing, gambling and swearing, would at once disappear. ‘Drunkenness in Russia’, declared a peasant congress in Tomsk province, ‘was a source of national shame under the old regime. But now in Free and Democratic Russia there can be no place for drunkenness. And therefore the congress looks upon the manufacture of all alcohol as a betrayal of the revolution, and as a betrayal of the Russian democratic republic.’ One woman even wrote to the Soviet that the ‘Christian mission’ of the Russian Revolution should be to abolish all the country’s jails, since there was no criminal who could not be reformed. There were many intellectuals who now claimed that the Russian people would learn to live together in a new sobornost’ — a universal spiritual community — overriding class or party differences. In the words of Tatyana Gippius: ‘The atmosphere has been purified … Thank God that sobornost’ triumphs over partiinost’.’69

It was in this same Christian-populist sense that the revolution was also portrayed as a process of national and patriotic reawakening. People echoed Herzen’s view that Tsarism was ‘alien’ to the simple people. It was the ‘Gottorp-Holstein dynasty’. Germans had dominated at the court. The Empress (‘the German woman’) had betrayed Russia. But the people had arisen, and from this truly national revolution Russia had received a truly national government, behind which it could unite for the defeat of the external enemy. This was to be a ‘patriotic revolution’. Or, as someone put it: ‘Now we have beaten the Germans here, we will beat them in the field.’70

Many of these ideals were expressed by Prince Lvov in his first interview with the free press. ‘I believe’, he said, ‘in the vitality and the wisdom of our great people, as expressed in the national uprising that overthrew the old regime. It is expressed in the universal effort to establish freedom and to defend it against both internal and external foes. I believe in the great heart of the Russian people, filled as it is with love for their neighbours, and am convinced that it is the foundation of our freedom, justice, and truth.’71 Such high expectations were soon to be dashed.

9 The Freest Country in the World

*

i A Distant Liberal State

Nothing in his previous experience had quite prepared Prince Lvov for the tasks that lay ahead of him as the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government. Not that he was unaccustomed to the long hours that such high office demanded of him. His wartime work in the Zemstvo Union had prepared him for that and, although now permanently tired, he was quite able to cope with the extra strain. From early in the morning until at least midnight Lvov was to be found in the Marinsky Palace receiving delegations from all over Russia, meeting foreign diplomats, presiding over cabinet meetings, briefing Civil Servants and giving interviews to the press. Nabokov met him in the early days of March and was ‘struck by his sombre, despondent appearance, and the tired expression in his eyes’.1

Nor could one say that the Prince was unprepared for the massive new burden of administration. It was precisely his administrative talent that had won him the universal respect of the wartime opposition and had put him at the top of virtually everyone’s list for the prospective leadership of the country. His practical common sense and easy-going manner made him a good team-worker. Prince Sergei Urusov, the former Governor of Bessarabia we met in Chapter 2, who became Lvov’s number two at the Ministry of Interior, said that he was an inspiring manager of people, that he encouraged them to take initiatives and that he skilfully arbitrated disputes between them. Although historians have been quick to disparage Lvov as a statesman — Samuel Hoare described him in 1930 as ‘a man better qualified to be the Chairman of the London County Council than to be the chief of an unstable Government in the midst of a great revolution’ — he was in fact widely esteemed at the time as one of Russia’s ablest leaders. Tsereteli thought he was ‘a talented organizer with far more experience of state affairs than any of the socialists’. Gorky considered him one of the ‘three genuinely talented politicians in the government’, along with Kerensky and Nekrasov.2

Yet the Prince was out of place in the new world of party politics. All his previous work had been of the practical, zemstvo kind, where everybody worked together, regardless of class or party interests, for the ‘good of the nation’. At first it was hoped that the Provisional Government would be guided by this same spirit. This was to be a wartime government of national confidence and salvation, not a government of any one party or social class, and this was why Lvov, as a genuinely national figure, had been chosen for its leader. But the revolution had opened the floodgates to party politics, leftwing politics in particular, and it was almost inevitable that they would permeate the government’s work. It was this which Lvov was unprepared for. His knowledge of party politics was almost non-existent. Even after several months as Prime Minister he could not really tell the difference between the SRs and the Bolsheviks. The general softness of his character, moreover, left him virtually powerless to cope with the hard cut and thrust of party politics. Coming from the old world of gentlemanly zemstvo activity, he was more inclined to search for compromises than either the party leaders of the capital or the irreconcilable conflicts in the country would ever allow. When his ministers clashed over politics (which was very often) Lvov’s instinctive reaction was to look for a means of reconciling them through the implementation of ‘practical and constructive’ policies. This gave him an image of indecisiveness; and it is true that he tended to be swayed by other politicians with a stronger will. Nabokov, who headed the government’s Secretariat, recalled endless ‘agonizing sessions’ of the Council of Ministers in which ‘dissension, and the smouldering or obvious hostility of some individuals toward others’ prevented any progress. ‘I do not recall a single occasion when the Minister-President used a tone of authority or spoke out decisively and definitively … He was the very embodiment of passivity.’ Bublikov, the Duma politician, ridiculed Lvov, with his ‘permanent look of dismay’ and his ‘constant efforts to be nice to everyone’, as ‘a walking symbol of the impotence of the Provisional Government’.3

Throughout his four-month term of office the one thing that sustained Lvov, in the face of all these political problems, was his unshakeable optimism. (Could anyone have tried to govern Russia in 1917 without believing in miracles?) Lvov was convinced, as he often liked to say, that ‘things will turn out in the end’. This optimism was based on his Slavophile and populist belief in the ‘wisdom and the goodness of the Russian people’. ‘The soul of the Russian people’, he declared in a speech in March, ‘turned out by its very nature to be a universal democratic soul. It is prepared not only to merge with the democracy of the whole world, but to stand at the head of it and to lead it along the path of human progress according to the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.’ From his brief acquaintance with the peasants, with his peasant neighbours at Popovka above all, he had naively jumped to the conclusion that all the peasants were just as good. Once the people had been freed from tsarist oppression, he once explained to his secretary, they would learn to rule themselves in the liberal democratic spirit of the West. It had hardly occurred to him, at least not in these early hopeful weeks, that the people’s hatred of the propertied élite and their impatience for a social revolution might not drown the country in blood first.4

Kerensky recalled one of the first meetings of the Council of Ministers. Prince Lvov arrived late with a sheaf of telegrams from the provinces. They all said more or less the same thing: that the local administration had collapsed and that power now belonged to various ad hoc public committees. The ministers sat around for a long time wondering what to do. ‘Here we were in the middle of a war, and large areas of the country had passed into the hands of completely unknown people!’ Speaking ‘with extraordinary confidence’, Lvov then summed up the discussion:

We must forget all about the old administration — any return to it is psychologically quite impossible. But Russia will not go under without it. The administration is gone, but the people remain … Gentlemen, we must be patient. We must have faith in the good sense, statesmanship, and loyalty of the peoples of Russia.

‘And indeed’, recalled Kerensky, ‘we had nothing except this faith in the people.’5

Lvov’s belief in ‘the people’ was typical of the intelligentsia attitudes that characterized the political philosophy of the first Provisional Government (2 March to 5 May). Not every minister succumbed to such high hopes. Miliukov and Guchkov argued from the start for a powerful state to contain the people’s anarchistic instincts and save the country from chaos. But their cold rationalism was always overshadowed by the warmer sentiments of Kerensky, Nekrasov and Lvov. The dominant outlook of the government was shaped by the liberal values of the intelligentsia which, in turn, had emerged from the people’s struggle for freedom against autocracy. Two main beliefs stood at the heart of this democratic political culture: an instinctive mistrust of the state as a coercive power; and a belief in local self-rule. From this it followed that a distant liberal state was all that was required to shepherd Russia through to the civilized world of free nations. Russia’s liberal leaders talked of ruling ‘with’ the people rather than ‘over’ them. They saw themselves as ‘classless’ — ruling in the interests of ‘all the people’ rather than one class — and on this universal promise hoped to build up a sense of legitimacy. They presented themselves as the temporary caretakers of a ‘neutral state’, above party or class interests, until the election of the new sovereign power, the Constituent Assembly, which alone could give a legal sanction to social and political reforms. This, in effect, was to place their trust in the patience of the people to wait for the legal resolution of their problems. It was to place the ‘defence of the state’ above the class or party interests of the revolution. Yet when that state itself was threatened by unrest, as it was in April, July and October, they were unwilling to use force in its defence. Their decent liberal intentions, and their inbred mistrust of state coercion, prevented them from taking the necessary measures to defend their cherished constitutional freedoms against the threat of extremism. They were determined to dismantle the old police regime, the courts and the penal system — which merely tied their own hands in the struggle against rising crime and violence. Even when this violence was Bolshevik-inspired, they were reluctant to repress it. The Men of February — who in their own minds had been brought to power by a ‘bloodless revolution’ — would not have the blood of ‘the people’ on their hands. This weakness, in the end, would bring them down.

The leaders of the Provisional Government saw themselves as reenacting the French Revolution on Russian soil. They compared themselves to the heroes of 1789. Kerensky, for one, liked to think of himself as a Mirabeau (and later as a Napoleon). The leaders of the ‘Great Russian Revolution’ looked for precedents for their policies, and for models for their institutions, in the revolutionary history of France. People called the Bolsheviks Jacobins (which is also how they saw themselves). The Bolsheviks, in turn, called the liberals Girondins. And all democrats warned of the dangers of ‘counter-revolution’ and ‘Bonapartism’.fn1 The provincial commissars, the soldiers’ committees and army commissars, the provincial committees of public safety and the Constituent Assembly itself — all of them were copied from their French equivalents. The old deferential terms of address were replaced by the terms grazhdanin and grazhdanka (‘citizen’ and ‘citizeness’). The Marseillaise — which the Russians mispronounced as the Marsiliuza and to which they added their own different words (there was a ‘Workers’ Marseillaise’, a ‘Soldiers’ Marseillaise’ and a ‘Peasants’ Marseillaise’) — became the national anthem of the revolution. It was played at all public assemblies, street demonstrations, concerts and plays.

We renounce the old world,

We shake its dust off from our feet.

We don’t need a Golden Idol,

And we despise the Tsarist Devil.

Bookshops traded heavily in popular histories of the French Revolution. There was a fit of francophilia. France, after all, was Russia’s nearest Western ally against Germany — the last bastion of autocracy — and the founding member of the European club of democratic nations which Russia was now entering. Lvov’s visiting card was even printed in French — PRINCE GEORGES LWOFF. MINISTRE-PRESIDENT DU GOUVERNEMENT PROVISOIRE — as if to symbolize this graduation to the civilized Western world.6

Yet Russia could not be another France. The constitutional phase of the Russian Revolution — in the classic European tradition of 1789 and 1848 — had already been played out during 1905–14. Political reform had nothing left to offer. Only a fundamental social revolution — one without precedents in European history — was capable of resolving the power questions thrown up by the downfall of the old regime. This was the basic mistake of the Men of February: intoxicated by their own self-image as the heirs of 1789, they were deluded into believing that they could resolve the problems of 1917 by importing Western constitutional practices and policies for which there were no real precedents, nor the necessary cultural base, in Russia.

As if to prove himself the heir of Lafayette, Prince Lvov presided over the passing of a dazzling series of political reforms during the first weeks of the Provisional Government. Russia overnight was effectively transformed into ‘the freest country in the world’. Freedoms of assembly, press and speech were granted. Legal restrictions of religion, class and race were removed. There was a general amnesty. Universal adult suffrage was introduced. The police were made accountable to local government. The courts and the penal system were overhauled. Capital punishment was abolished. Democratic organs of local self-government were established. Preparations were made for the election of a Constituent Assembly. The laws followed upon each other in such rapid succession that it was hard for Russia’s new citizens to keep up with them. One day in the second half of March a delegation of women suffragettes came to Lvov’s office to campaign for the right of women to vote in local government elections. They were obviously expecting a hard battle. Some of the women had prepared long and passionate speeches. It seemed to them that the fate of half of Russia depended on the success of their mission. But as soon as they met Lvov it became clear that they were pushing at an open door. ‘Why shouldn’t women vote?’ he asked them with candid surprise. ‘I don’t see what’s the problem. Surely, with universal suffrage there can be no reason to exclude women.’7

These reforms helped to create a new culture of democracy. It became politically correct to call oneself a ‘democrat’ — sometimes literally: there was a peasant called Durakov (‘Idiot’) who changed his surname to Demokratov. Yet in Russia the word ‘democracy’ was not just a political label. It was also a social one. The Left, in particular, used it to describe the ‘common people’ as opposed to ‘the bourgeoisie’. The language of 1789, once it entered Russia in 1917, soon became translated into the language of class. This was not just a question of semantics. It showed that for the vast mass of the people the ideals of ‘democracy’ were expressed in terms of a social revolution rather than in terms of political reform. The peasants and the workers were used to seeing power based on social domination and coercion rather than on the exercise of law. They saw the revolution mainly as a chance to gain autonomy and turn the tables on their former masters rather than as a chance to reconstruct the power system on universal legal principles. Retribution, not a constitution: that was the people’s first priority.

The revolution of 1917 should really be conceived of as a general crisis of authority. There was a rejection of not just the state but of all figures of authority: judges, policemen, Civil Servants, army and navy officers, priests, teachers, employers, foremen, landowners, village elders, patriarchal fathers and husbands. It was often said at the time — and historians have emphasized this — that only the Soviet had any real authority. Guchkov wrote to Alexeev on 9 March:

The Provisional Government has no real power of any kind and its orders are carried out only to the extent that is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The latter controls the most essential levers of power, insofar as the troops, the railways, and the postal and telegraph services are in its hands. One can assert bluntly that the Provisional Government exists only as long as it is allowed to do so by the Soviet.8

Certainly, the Soviet had much more power than any other body. It had a virtual monopoly on the means of organized violence, while the mass of the workers and soldiers looked upon it as the only legitimate authority in the land. At almost any moment between February and October the Soviet could have taken power and, although a civil war might well have been the outcome, its support was enough to ensure a victory. And yet even the Soviet, based as it was in Petrograd, had only a very limited control over the revolution in the provinces. There was a breakdown of all central power: local towns and regions declared their ‘independence’ from the capital; villages declared themselves ‘autonomous republics’; nationalities and ethnic groups seized control of territory and declared themselves to be ‘independent states’. The social revolution was to be found in this decentralization of power: local communities defended their interests and asserted their autonomy through the election of ad hoc committees (public executive committees, municipal committees, revolutionary committees, committees of public organizations, village committees and Soviets), which paid scant regard to the orders of the centre and which passed their own ‘laws’ to legitimize the local reconstruction of social relations.

The politics of 1917 should thus be understood not so much as a conflict of ‘dual power’ (dvoevlastie) — the division of all power between the government and the Soviet which has so preoccupied historians — but as a deeper problem of the proliferation of a ‘multitude of local powers’ (mnogovlastie). In the provincial towns there was really no ‘dual power’ to speak of at all: the liberal and the socialist intelligentsia, which in Petrograd would have been divided between the government and the Soviet, nearly always worked together in the democratic civic committees between February and October (and in many places afterwards too). Russia, in short, was being Balkanized. It was a recurring pattern that whenever the state’s power was removed, Russia broke down into anarchy and chaos. It happened after the collapse of the tsarist state, as it did after the collapse of Communism. If 1917 proved anything, it was that Russian society was neither strong enough nor cohesive enough to sustain a democratic revolution. Apart from the state itself, there was nothing holding Russia together.

‘Who elected you?’ That was the awkward question someone shouted from the crowd when Miliukov announced the establishment of the Provisional Government. The answer, of course, was that nobody had. The Provisional Government was not a democratic government, in the sense that it had been elected by the people, but a government of ‘national confidence’. It never had the legitimacy which can only come from the ballot box. Its liberal leaders were excessively concerned by this absence of a mandate, and thought that they might earn more respect by calling themselves ‘provisional’. They presented the government as only the temporary guardian of the state until the election of the Constituent Assembly, and always stressed that their legislation was ultimately dependent on the legal sanction of the Assembly. And yet for this reason people questioned why they should obey the government: the word ‘provisional’ did not command respect.

With hindsight it is difficult not to blame the leaders of the Provisional Government for failing to act more quickly to convene the Constituent Assembly, which alone could have given them the democratic mandate they required. Everyone acknowledged the urgency of its convocation. But the liberal leaders allowed their common sense to become clouded by their high ideals. They were overawed by the solemn importance of their task — to construct a national parliament expressing the ‘will of the people’ — and insisted on the most detailed legal preparations to ensure the fairest possible franchise. A council of representatives from various political groups was summoned at the end of March. It took two months to agree on the composition of a second Special Council of over sixty members to draft the electoral law and this, in turn, got bogged down in lengthy deliberations on the various options of proportional representation, the fairest possible methods of redrawing the electoral boundaries, and the best ways of organizing elections in the army and the ethnic borderlands.

By the early summer, as chaos spread through the country and the urgent need for a stronger legal authority became clear, there was growing public concern about the slow progress of the Special Council. Some people argued that it would have been quicker to appoint a smaller commission to draft the electoral law. But F. F. Kokoshkin, a Kadet lawyer and the Chairman of the Special Council, defended its careful approach on the grounds that the new electoral law had to live up to the ‘wishes and interests of all the population’. There were certainly practical problems that made hasty elections inadvisable: millions of people were on the move and it was not clear how their votes were to be counted. But to a certain extent these reservations had become a pretext for delay. The Kadets, in particular, favoured the postponement of the elections, no doubt because they knew they would lose them. Prince Lvov supported Kokoshkin’s procrastination. He, above all, was sold on the ideal of a perfect parliament. ‘The Constituent Assembly’, Lvov told the Special Council, ‘must crown the great Russian revolution. It must lay all the vital foundations for the future order of the free democratic state. It will bear the responsibility for the entire future of Russia. It must be the essence of all the spiritual and mental forces of the people.’9

This was surely placing unrealistic expectations on what, in the context, should have aimed to be no more than a makeshift parliament of national salvation. However imperfect, to begin with, such an assembly might have been, it would at least have established a focus, and a base of legitimacy, for Russia’s fragile new democracy. There are very few examples in history of a long-lasting revolutionary parliament, and, steeped as they were in the history of Europe, the leaders of the Provisional Government should have been well enough aware of this to keep their expectations in realistic bounds. But they allowed their high ideals to cloud their common sense. Perhaps it was a case of too many lawyers and not enough statesmen. The failure of the government to hold the elections enabled the Bolsheviks to sow serious doubts in the people’s minds about its intentions to hold them at all; and this lent weight to their propaganda claims, which were used to justify their own seizure of power, that the government had fallen into the hands of the ‘counter-revolution’. Under growing public pressure, the leaders of the Provisional Government announced in mid-June that the elections would finally be held on 17 September. But everyone knew that at the rate things were going this was out of the question, for the register of electors had not been drawn up and the local government organs, which were supposed to do this, had still not been established. By August little progress had been made and the date of the elections was once again postponed until 12 November. But by this time the Bolsheviks had come to power.

ii Expectations

‘We are living through wild times’, Sergei Semenov wrote to an old friend in the spring of 1917. ‘It is hard for the people of our generation to adapt to the new situation. But through this revolution our lives will be purified and things will get better for the young.’10 The peasant reformer pinned all his hopes on the civilizing mission of the revolution. At last, so he thought, the time had come for the backward Russian village to receive the benefits of the modern world. He welcomed the fall of the old regime in a spirit of optimistic expectation and reconciliation with his mistrustful peasant neighbours in the village commune of Andreevskoe. It was now a full six years since he had ended his long and bitter struggle to separate from them and set up his own private enclosed farm on the outskirts of the village.

During that first hopeful spring Semenov picked up once again from the reforms he had started during 1905. He expanded his work in the agricultural co-operatives; revived the local Peasant Union; opened a ‘people’s club’ in the local market town of Bukholovo; and organized lectures for the peasants on a whole range of progressive subjects, from republican philosophies to the advanced methods of overwintering cows. He even drew up a blueprint for the electrification of the whole of the Volokolamsk district which he presented to the Moscow city duma. Semenov’s daughter, Tatiana, recalls her father’s renewed hopes and energies during the spring of 1917:

We were amazed by our father’s strength — it had literally doubled overnight — and he now looked forward to the future with high expectations. He not only worked in the fields but he also travelled around the villages, looking into every aspect of peasant affairs. He read on everything, and constantly wrote. Sometimes, when we were all asleep, he would still be working in his room. The next morning he was the first up.11

The revolution raised Semenov’s standing among the villagers of Andreevskoe. It also reduced the power of Grigorii Maliutin, the patriarchal elder of the village commune and arch-enemy of Semenov’s reforms. The old power structure upon which Maliutin had depended — the volost elder, the local police and the gentry land captain — was dismantled almost overnight. Within the village the voice of the younger and more progressive farmers was also becoming more dominant, while that of the older peasants, like Maliutin, who saw nothing good in the revolution, was increasingly ignored. The social changes of the past few years lay at the root of this democratization of the village commune. More and more households were being headed by the younger peasants, as a result of household partitions. During the war years, in the absence of their menfolk, many peasant households were headed by women: in many regions up to one-third, and in Andreevskoe itself over a quarter. These younger peasants looked towards Semenov as a champion of reform. He always spoke out at the village assembly against the Church and the patriarchal order. As the most literate peasant in the village, he was also called upon to write its resolutions when the village scribe, a lackey of Maliutin’s, refused to ‘work for the revolution’. But what really raised Semenov’s standing was the success of his long campaign to get six of the poorest villagers released from the army because there was no one else to feed their families. During the autumn of 1916 he had been sentenced to six weeks in jail after Maliutin had denounced him to the authorities for ‘encouraging desertion’. But the villagers had refused to let him go and had held him in Andreevskoe, a hostage and hero of the peasant revolution, until the downfall of the old regime. Two weeks later the six peasants all returned home. Maliutin was discredited, and Semenov emerged as the leader of the village.12

During that spring Semenov broke up his private enclosed farm and returned to the peasant land commune. Most of Stolypin’s peasant pioneers chose to do likewise in 1917. If up to one-third of the peasant households in Russia farmed private holdings on the eve of the revolution, then four years later less than 2 per cent continued to do so. Only the small minority of fully enclosed khutora had to be brought back by force. The semi-enclosed otruba tended to be much weaker economically and, like Semenov’s, generally smaller than the neighbouring communal allotments. The prospect of sharing in the spoils of the commune’s ‘war on the manors’, which started again during the spring, was enough to encourage most of them to return voluntarily.13

This return of the separators reflected a general peasant striving for solidarity within the village commune. ‘Today, in free Russia, everyone should be equal and united,’ declared the peasants of Dubovo-Pobedimov in Bugul’ma. ‘The members of the communes should accept all the separators into their family on an equal basis and should cease all oppressive measures against them, since these only play into the hands of the enemies of the people.’ The village commune was greatly strengthened as a result of the revolution. It revived from its pre-revolutionary state of torpor and decay to become the main organizing force of the peasant revolution on the land. All the main political organs of the revolution in the countryside — the village committees, the peasant unions and the Soviets — were really no more than the peasant commune in a more revolutionary form. The village commune stood for the ideals of land and freedom which had always inspired the peasants to revolt. It defined a circle of ‘insiders’ and defended their interests against ‘outsiders’ — landowners, townsmen, merchants, state officials, even peasants from the neighbouring communes — at a time of great insecurity.

Since the days of serfdom, the land commune had served as a link between its peasant household members (usually within a single village) and a particular landlord’s estate. In 1917 it thus provided these villagers with a historical and a moral right to that estate on the often-stated peasant principle: ‘Ours was the lord, ours is the land.’ During the seizure of the gentry’s estates the members of the commune displayed a remarkable degree of solidarity and organization. It was common for the village assembly to pass a resolution compelling all the members of the commune to take part in the march on the manor, or in other forms of peasant resistance, such as rent strikes and boycotts, on the threat of expulsion from the commune. It was a matter of safety in numbers. Contrary to the old Soviet myth, there were very few conflicts within the village between the richer and poorer peasants. But there were a great many conflicts between neighbouring communes, sometimes ending in little village wars, over the control of the estates.14

This is how the revolution on the land took place. At a pre-selected time the church bells rang and the peasants assembled with their carts in the middle of the village. Then they moved off towards the manor, like a peasant army, armed with guns, pitchforks, axes, scythes and spades. The squire and his stewards, if they had not already fled, were arrested or at least forced to sign a resolution conceding all the peasant demands. During the spring these were usually quite moderate: a lowering of land rents; the redistribution of prisoner-of-war labour; or the compulsory sale of grain, tools and livestock to the commune at prices deemed ‘fair’ by the peasants. The mass confiscation of the gentry’s land did not occur until the summer. Most of the peasants were still prepared to wait for the Provisional Government to pass a new land law transferring the estates to them, just as they had once waited for the Tsar to pass a ‘Golden Manifesto’. They were afraid to attack the estates before it was clear that the old regime would not be restored, as it had been in 1906–7, with the mass executions of the peasants which had followed. It was really only at the start of May, with the appointment of the SR Chernov as Minister for Agriculture, that the peasants had such a guarantee; and it was from this time that the outright confiscation of the gentry’s estates became a nationwide phenomenon. Early May was also the start of the summer agricultural season. If the peasants were to harvest the squire’s fields in the autumn, they would need to plough and sow them now.fn2 So there was an obvious motive for the peasants to seize the land from about this time. The nuns of the Panovka Convent in Serdobsk were some of the more unusual victims of this increasing peasant aggression:

A resolution of the Davydovka volost executive committee on 10 April ordered our convent to rent to the peasants 15 desyatiny of our spring fields. On 19 May we received a communication from the same committee that, for our own needs, we may keep 15 desyatiny of fallow land, but that a further 30 desyatiny of land must be given to the peasants of Pleshcheevka village. Now [in mid-June] the peasants are requisitioning grain from our convent: 600 pud has been taken for the local villagers at 1 rouble 52 kopecks, but grain from the peasants is requisitioned at 2 roubles 50 kopecks.15

The return of soldiers on Easter leave, and indeed of deserters from the army, also had a lot to do with this increased peasant militancy. The peasant soldiers often took the lead in the march on the manors. Sometimes they encouraged the peasantry to indulge in wanton acts of vandalism. They burned the manor houses to drive the squires out; smashed the agricultural machinery (which in recent years had removed much of the need for hired peasant labour); carried away the contents of the barns on their carts; and destroyed or vandalized anything, like paintings, books or sculptures, that smacked of excessive wealth. It was also not uncommon for these soldiers to incite the peasants to attack the squires. In the village of Bor-Polianshchina, in Saratov province, for example, a band of peasants, led by some soldiers, forced their way into the manor house of Prince V. V. Saburov, and hacked him to death with axes and knives. It was a bloody retribution for the role his son had played as the local land captain in 1906, when twelve peasant rebels had been hanged in the village before their screaming wives and children. For three days after the murder the villagers ran riot on the Saburov estate. The manor house, which contained one of the finest private libraries in Russia, was burned to the ground.16

The terrified squires bombarded Prince Lvov with pleas for the restoration of law and order. Isolated in their manors, with nothing to protect them from the surrounding sea of hostile peasants, they were quick to accuse his government of doing nothing to stop the growing tide of anarchy that came ever closer to their gates. ‘The countryside is falling into chaos, with robberies and arson every day, while you sit doing nothing in your comfortable Petersburg office,’ one Tambov squire wrote to him in April. ‘Your local committees are powerless to do anything, and even encourage the theft of property. The police are asleep while the peasants rob and burn. The old government knew better how to deal with this peasant scum which you call “the people”.’17

With letters such as these to deal with, one could hardly blame Lvov for viewing the plight of the squires as a punishment for their ‘boorish and brutal behaviour during the centuries of serfdom’. The revolution was the ‘revenge of the serfs’, he explained one day in June over lunch to some of his ministers. It was the ‘result of our — and I speak now as a landowner — of our original sin. If only Russia had been blessed with a real landed aristocracy, like that in England, which had the human decency to treat the peasants as people rather than dogs. Then perhaps things might have been different.’18 It was a quite remarkable thing for someone of his class and background to say — a wistful admission, if you like, that the whole of the civilization of the gentry, of which the Prince himself was a scion, had never been more than a thin veneer laid over the top of the brutal exploitation of the peasants, from which the revolution had emerged.

Whatever Lvov might have said in private, it was the policy of his government to defend the property rights of the squires. The land question, as it saw it, had to be resolved by legal means, and this meant preserving the status quo in property relations until a new land law was decided by the Constituent Assembly. Yet the government had no real means to prevent the peasants from taking the law — and the gentry’s land — into their own hands. The old police had been dismantled, while the army units in the countryside — even if their peasant recruits agreed to be used for such repressive purposes — were not nearly enough to protect more than a tiny proportion of the gentry’s estates. The temporary volost committees, established by the government on 20 March and designed to uphold the existing order, were soon transformed into revolutionary organs which passed their own ‘laws’ to legitimize the peasant seizures of the gentry’s property. The same thing happened with the volost land committees. The Provisional Government had intended these to protect the gentry’s legal rights, while regulating agrarian relations until the Constituent Assembly. But they were taken over by the local peasants and soon transformed into revolutionary organs on the land, helping to impose fixed rents on the gentry, to account for their land and property, and to distribute it among the peasantry. In an attempt to prevent this subversion of the land committees, the government cut its grants to them; but the peasant communes merely filled the gap, financing the committees through self-taxation, and the committees continued to grow.

This revolution on the land was given a pseudo-legal endorsement by the peasant assemblies which convened in the spring in most of the central black-soil provinces, as well as the First All-Russian Peasant Assembly on 4–25 May. Nothing did more to undermine the government’s authority in the countryside. The SR party activists, who dominated the executives of these assemblies, appealed for the peasants to show patience over the resolution of the land question. But they were soon obliged by the radical mood of the delegates on the floor to sanction the actions of the local communes, and even the seizures of the gentry’s land, as an interim solution. The Kazan provincial peasant assembly resolved on 13 May to transfer all the land to the control of the peasant committees. Twelve days later the Samara peasant assembly followed suit in direct defiance of an order from Lvov ordering the provincial commissar to prevent any further peasant land seizures. The peasants believed that these resolutions by their assemblies carried the status of ‘laws’. They used them to authorize further seizures of the land in the summer months. They did not understand the difference between a general declaration of principle by their own peasant assembly, which was in effect no more than a public organization, and the full promulgation of a government law. They seemed to believe that, in order to ‘socialize’ the land, or in order to transfer the land to the control of the communes, it was enough for a peasant assembly to pass a resolution to that effect. Peasant expectations transformed these assemblies into pseudo-government bodies passing ‘laws’ by simple declaration. And these ‘laws’ then took precedence over the statutes of the government. ‘The local peasantry’, complained the Commissar of Nizhnyi Novgorod, ‘has got a fixed opinion that all civil laws have lost their force, and that all legal relations ought now to be regulated by peasant organizations.’19 This was the meaning of the peasant revolution.

*

As with the peasants, so with the workers: their expectations rocketed during the spring of 1917. Over half a million workers came out on strike between mid-April and the start of July; and the range of workers was much broader than in any previous strike wave. Artisans and craftsmen, laundry women, dyers, barbers, kitchen workers, waiters, porters, chauffeurs and domestic servants — not just from the two capital cities but from provincial towns throughout the Empire — took their place alongside the veteran strikers, such as the metal and textile workers.20 Even the prostitutes went on strike.

Most of the strikers’ demands were economic. They wanted higher wages to keep up with inflation and more reliable supplies of food. They wanted better conditions at work. The eight-hour day, in particular, had assumed an almost sacramental nature. The workers saw it as a symbol of all their rights and of their victory in the revolution. In many factories it was simply imposed by the workers downing their tools and walking out after the completion of an eight-hour shift. Anxious not to jeopardize production, or intimidated by their workers, most employers soon agreed to honour the eight-hour day (without wage reductions), although mandatory overtime was often introduced in the munitions factories as a way to maintain output levels. As early as 10 March 300 Petrograd factory owners announced their acceptance of the eight-hour day after negotiations with the Soviet, and on this basis it was introduced in most other towns.21

Yet in the context of 1917, when the whole structure of the state and capitalism was being redefined, these economic demands were unavoidably politicized. The vicious cycle of strikes and inflation, of higher pay chasing higher prices, led many workers to demand that the state impose more control on the market itself. The workers’ struggle to control their own work environment, above all to prevent their employers from running down production to maintain their profits, led them increasingly to demand that the state take over the running of the factories.

There was also a new stress on the workers’ own sense of dignity. They were now aware of themselves as ‘citizens’, and of the fact that they had ‘made the revolution’ (or had at least played a leading part in it), and they were no longer willing to be treated with any disrespect by either foremen or managers. This was often a spark for violence: offensive factory officials would be symbolically ‘carted out’, sometimes literally in a wheelbarrow, and then beaten up or thrown into the canal or cesspool. Many strikers demanded respectful treatment. Waiters and waitresses in Petrograd marched with banners bearing the demands:

WE INSIST ON RESPECT FOR WAITERS AS HUMAN BEINGS!

DOWN WITH TIPS: WAITERS ARE CITIZENS!

Domestic servants marched to demand that they should be addressed with the formal ‘you’, as opposed to the familiar ‘you’, previously used to address the serfs. Yardmen demanded that their degrading title should now be changed to ‘house directors’. Women workers demanded equal pay to men, an end to ‘degrading body searches’, fully paid maternity leave and the abolition of child labour. As the workers saw it, these were basic issues of morality. Their revolutionary aspirations, as Kanatchikov’s story shows, were inextricably linked with their own personal striving for human dignity and individual worth. Many workers spoke of founding a ‘new moral life’, based on law and individual rights, in which there would be no more drunkenness, swearing, gambling or wife-beating.22

Part of the workers’ new-found dignity was expressed in a new self-assertiveness. The workers claimed the downtown streets as ‘theirs’ by holding mass parades and meetings there. The city became a political theatre, as different groups of workers met to discuss their demands. These rallies were a vital aspect of the revolutionary spectacle. They were ‘festivals of liberation’, to adopt the phrase of Michelle Perrot, which gave the workers a new sense of confidence and collective solidarity. The whole of urban Russia seemed to have been caught up in this sudden craze for political meetings — mitingovanie as people called it. Everyone was talking politics. ‘You cannot buy a hat or a packet of cigarettes or ride in a cab without being enticed into a political discussion,’ complained Harold Williams of the Daily Chronicle:

The servants and house porters demand advice as to which party they should vote for in the ward elections. Every wall in the town is placarded with notices of meetings, lectures, congresses, electoral appeals, and announcements, not only in Russian, but in Polish, Lithuanian, Yiddish, and Hebrew … Two men argue at a street corner and are at once surrounded by an excited crowd. Even at concerts now the music is diluted with political speeches by well-known orators. The Nevsky Prospekt has become a kind of Quartier Latin. Book hawkers line the pavement and cry sensational pamphlets about Rasputin and Nicholas, and who is Lenin, and how much land will the peasants get.

Compared with this, remarked John Reed, ‘Carlyle’s “flood of French speech” was a mere trickle … For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune.’ It was as if the whole of Russia, having been kept silent for hundreds of years, had to express everything on its mind in as short a time as possible. ‘Day and night, across the whole country’, Paustovsky wrote, ‘a continuous disorderly meeting went on from February until the autumn of 1917.’23

This growing political awareness and self-confidence among the workers was reflected in the mushroom growth of labour organizations during 1917. The trade unions and the Soviets resumed from where they had left off in 1905–6. But these were quickly overtaken by the factory committees, an innovation of 1917 which, having been elected on the factory floor, tended to develop faster and be more responsive to the immediate demands of the workers than either the unions or the Soviets, which, being organized at the industrial and city levels respectively, tended to be more bureaucratized. The main aim of the factory committees was to ensure the continuation of production at the plant. Factory closures were a daily occurrence, thousands of workers were being laid off, and many workers suspected their employers of deliberately running down production so as to ‘starve out revolution’ (or, as the capitalist Riabushinsky put it, in a phrase that seemed to confirm these fears, it would take ‘the bony hand of hunger’ to make the workers ‘come to their senses’). The committees set themselves up to fight against ‘sabotage’ by checking up on the work of the management; by taking charge of the supply of raw materials; and by regulating hiring and firing. They took charge of maintaining labour discipline; fought against absenteeism and drunkenness; and organized militias to defend the factory at night. ‘Workers’ control’ was their aim, although by this was meant not so much the workers’ direct management of production as their direct supervision of it, including participation on collective boards of management. As Steve Smith has convincingly shown, this did not make them the anarcho-syndicalist organizations depicted by many historians. It was never the aim of the factory committees to turn their plants into worker-communes and there was nothing in their practice to suggest that they rejected either state power or a centrally planned economy. On the contrary, as organs primarily of workers’ defence designed to keep their factories running in the face of an economic crisis, they often ended up by demanding the nationalization of their plant. It was this, along with the Mensheviks’ domination of the trade unions, that made them the favoured channel of Bolshevik activity in 1917.24

No organization better reflected the growing self-assertiveness of the working class than the Red Guards. Like the factory committees, they were an innovation of 1917, and the initiative for their establishment came essentially from below. During the February Revolution a wide range of workers’ armed brigades had sprung up to defend the factories. They refused to disarm when the government set up its own militias in the cities. So there was a dual system of police — with the city militias in the middle-class districts and the workers’ brigades in the industrial suburbs — which mirrored the dual power structure in Petrograd. Gradually the workers’ brigades were, albeit loosely, unified under the direction of the district Soviets. But from the start it was the Bolsheviks who had the dominant influence on them; and it was a Bolshevik, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, who first used the term ‘Red Guard’. Whereas the Soviet leadership looked upon the Red Guards as a dangerous precedent which threatened to subvert the government, the Bolsheviks, once Lenin had returned, became keen supporters of the arming of the workers and helped to shape the Red Guards’ self-image as a workers’ army, permanently on alert, to defend ‘the revolution’ against any threat. The arming of the workers — and by July there were about 20,000 workers in the Red Guards of Petrograd alone — was a vital aspect of their psychology. These were the workers whom Lenin had in mind when he said that the workers were ‘to the left’ of the Bolsheviks. They were young (over half the Red Guards were under twenty-five), single, highly literate and skilled workers, most of whom had joined the industrial war during the militant strikes of 1912–14, when the Bolsheviks had first gained a hold on the working class of Petrograd and Moscow. Most of them belonged to or at least were sympathetic to one of the maximalist parties — usually the Bolsheviks or the Anarchists — and had an image of themselves as a ‘vanguard of the proletariat’.25

The Provisional Government was quite unable to contain this rise of labour militancy. It was misguided by the liberal industrial ethic of the War Industries Committees, of which its Minister of Trade and Industry, Konovalov, as well as its Minister of Finance, Tereshchenko, had been leading members. Central to this ethic was the (frankly rather bogus) notion of the government as the guardian of a ‘neutral state’, above party or class interests, whose role in industry was to mediate and conciliate between labour and capital. The important thing was to keep production going in the interests of the military campaign. The class war was to be stopped to win the war against Germany.

During the first weeks of Konovalov’s rule there were some signs of this new spirit of industrial partnership. As part of the agreement on the eight-hour day brokered by Konovalov on 10 March, conciliation boards, composed equally of managers and workers, were established in many factories to resolve disputes without costly strikes. The administration of the railways was handed over to local railway committees in which the workers participated alongside the technicians and officials. Konovalov himself arbitrated many industrial disputes and leant on the employers to make concessions — often compensating them in other ways — in the interests of the war economy. V. G. Groman, the Menshevik economist, even began to draw up the outlines for a ‘planned economy’ in which the workers, technicians and employers would come together to regulate the economy under the tutelage of the Soviet and the state.26

Yet this armistice in the class war did not and could not last for very long. The government’s would-be ‘neutral’ stance was itself a major reason for the resumption of hostilities. For each side suspected it of favouring the other. On the one hand, the workers were encouraged by their early gains — there were reports of some workers receiving a five-fold or six-fold pay increase — and this engendered unrealistic hopes of what it was possible to achieve by industrial action. Their expectations were further increased by the Mensheviks’ entry into the government on 5 May (with Skobelev, a Menshevik, the Minister of Labour). It appeared to give them a green light for more strikes and an assurance that they had supporters in the government. Workers came out with new and often excessive strike demands, became disappointed when they lost, and accused the government of backing their employers. It was a disaster for the Mensheviks.

The employers, on the other hand, were becoming increasingly impatient with the workers’ claims, and with the government’s failure to contain them. They blamed the industrial crisis on the workers’ inflationary pay rises, on the reduced length of the working day, and on the constant disruptions to production caused by strikes and factory meetings. They were alarmed by the Menshevik entry into the government: it seemed to signal more regulation and a swing towards the workers’ point of view. From the start of May, they began to move away from Konovalov’s path of industrial compromise. They closed ranks and began to resist the workers’ strike demands, even at the cost of a lock-out and the closure of the factory. Whereas before strikes had been averted by negotiation, now both sides were more ready for a fight, and the resulting strikes were violent and protracted, since neither side could be leant on to back down. The bitter strike at the huge Sormovo plant in Nizhnyi Novgorod, which brought chaos to the country’s biggest defence producer throughout preparations for the offensive in June, was the first real sign of this new climate.27 It put an end to the liberal hopes of spring, and beckoned in a summer of industrial war.

*

As the self-proclaimed guardians of the Russian state, the leaders of the Provisional Government were united on one thing: the need, for the time being, to preserve its imperial boundaries intact. It was, as they saw it, their primary duty to preserve the ‘unity of the Russian state’ until the conclusion of the war and the resolution of the Empire question by the Constituent Assembly. This did not rule out the possibility of conceding, as an interim measure, rights of local self-rule or cultural freedoms to the non-Russian territories. Indeed the liberals thought this was essential. They assumed that the grievances of the non-Russian peoples were essentially the result of tsarist discrimination and oppression, and that they could thus be satisfied with civil and religious equality. They collapsed the question of national rights into the question of individual rights; and believed that on this basis the Russian Empire could be kept together. But defending the ‘unity of the Russian state’ did rule out, as the Kadets put it, giving in to nationalist pressures that would lead to ‘the division of the country into sovereign, independent units’. Even the SR and Menshevik Defensists, who as revolutionaries had declared their support for the principle of national self-determination, lined up behind the Kadet position once they joined them in the government during 1917. As socialists, they still supported federalism; but as patriots, they were reluctant to preside over the breakup of the state in the middle of a war. The SR leader, Mark Vishniak, speaking at the Third SR Congress in May, compared Russia to a huge Switzerland: a decentralized federation, in which the cantons, or republics, would have the maximum national rights (including the right to their own currencies), but with a single unified state.28

This position, like that of Gorbachev during perestroika, was quite inadequate as a response to the growing pressures of nationalism after February 1917. True, not everywhere were the non-Russians bursting to break out of the Empire. Some of the more peasant-dominated peoples were barely aware of themselves as a ‘nation’ as opposed to an ethnic group (e.g. the Belorussians, the Lithuanians, the Azeris, and some might argue the Ukrainians). Others were by and large satisfied with civil and religious rights (e.g. the Jews). Others still combined their ethnic and social grievances in a single national-socialist revolution which looked towards Russia for the lead (e.g. Latvians and Georgians). Armenia, for purely nationalist considerations, looked to Russia for protection against the Turks. Yet elsewhere — and in certain classes of these peoples — the collapse of the tsarist system did result in the rise of mass-based nationalist movements which first demanded autonomy from Russia and then, when this was not granted, went on to call for independence.

The emergence of independence movements was partly the result of opportunity. The coercive power of the old state had collapsed; the persuasive power of the Provisional Government was, to say the least, extremely limited; while the Germans and the Austrians, whose armies occupied the western borderlands, were only too ready to help the nationalists set up mini-states they could control and use against Russia. Yet the nationalists were more than ‘German agents’, even in those countries (e.g. the Ukraine and Lithuania) where independence was achieved with a separate peace and at the price of a German puppet-state. Many of the nationalist parties achieved mass electoral support. In the Ukraine, for example, 71 per cent of the rural vote went to the Ukrainian SRs and the All-Ukrainian Peasant Union during the elections to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917. Socialist parties with a nationalist platform also gained the majority of votes in Estonia, Georgia, Finland and Armenia during elections in 1917.29

To be sure, it is not at all clear — and this remains one of the biggest unanswered questions of the Russian Revolution — what this mass support at the ballot box really tells us about the national consciousness of the peasantry, the vast majority of the population in all these societies. As one would expect, the most active and conscious nationalists were drawn from the petit-bourgeoisie, the petit-intelligentsia and the most prosperous and literate peasants, the peasant soldiers in particular.fn3 After all, as we have seen, the growth of a peasant national consciousness was dependent on the spread of rural institutions, such as schools and reading clubs, peasant unions and co-operatives, which exposed the peasants to the national culture of the urban-centred world; and it was among these literate peasant types that these institutions were most developed. In the traditional political culture of the Ukrainian or Georgian countryside one might well expect the mass of the peasants — and even more so the peasant women, who were voting for the first time — to follow the lead of these rural élites and cast their votes for the nationalists. This was one of the main reasons why the SRs did so well in the elections to the Constituent Assembly: many of the village elders had been involved with the SRs in the past and they often recommended that the whole village vote for the SR list; rather than split the village into two all the peasants agreed to vote for the SRs. Second, all the most successful nationalist parties put forward programmes that combined nationalist with socialist demands, and it is not clear that the peasants were aware of the former separately. It is probable, as Ronald Suny has suggested in the case of the Ukraine, that while the peasantry had a ‘cultural or ethnic awareness’ and preferred ‘leaders of their own ethnicity, people who could speak to them in their own language and promised to secure their local interests’, they did not conceive of themselves ‘as a single nationality’ and were ‘not yet moved by a passion for the nation’.30 In other words, they interpreted the nationalists’ slogans in terms of their own parochial concerns — the defence of the village, its culture and its lands (against the foreign towns and landed élites) — rather than in the terms of a nation state.

Certainly, the nationalists were most successful where they managed to persuade the peasants that national autonomy was the best guarantee of their revolution in the villages. Their policy of land nationalization was particularly successful. In many regions the struggle for the land was also the struggle of a native peasantry against a foreign landowning élite, so when the nationalists spoke of the need to ‘nationalize the land’ it made real and literal sense. In the northern provinces of the Ukraine, where the Ukrainian villages were closely intermingled with the Russian ones, the nationalists were able to mobilize the Ukrainian peasants around the defence of their traditions of hereditary land tenure against the threat of a Russian land reform based on the principles of communal tenure. Mykola Kovalevsky, the leader of the Ukrainian SRs, recalls how their propaganda worked:

The Russians want to impose a socialization of the land upon you, I said to the peasants, that is to transfer the ownership of the land to the village communes and, in this way, to abolish your private farms; you will no longer be the masters of your own land, but will be workers on communal land.

The nationalist campaign for native language rights was equally meaningful to the peasants: their expectations of social advancement were dependent on learning to read their native language and on being able to use it in public life. So was their movement (in Georgia and the Ukraine) for the nativization (autocephaly) of the Church hierarchy: with services conducted in the native language the priests would be brought closer to the peasants, and more peasants would enter the priesthood. Similarly, the establishment of national army units, the demand of military congresses held by nearly all the main non-Russian soldiers, would not only provide these would-be nation states with a ready-made national army but would also open the door for more non-Russians to rise up into the officer corps.31

Whatever its true nature or extent, the appeal of the nationalists was very much stronger than the leaders of the Provisional Government were prepared to allow for. Only in the case of Poland did they make a full retreat before the nationalists, declaring their support for Polish independence from as early as 16 March, and then only because, with Poland occupied by the Germans and the Austrians, there was nothing to be lost by such declarations and, on the contrary, the possibility of winning the support of the Polish population against the Central Powers. Even Brusilov, a Great Russian patriot fighting at that time on disputed Russian-Ukrainian-Polish soil, recognized that ‘we had no other choice but to offer Poland its freedom’.32 But in the two other major conflicts — with the Finnish and Ukrainian nationalists — the Provisional Government refused to make any real concessions; and, largely as a result of this intransigency, these two movements both grew in their mass appeal and, as the government weakened visibly, turned from the demand for more autonomy to the demand for complete independence.

The Finnish problem stemmed from the doubtful basis of Russian rule in Finland after the collapse of the monarchy. The Finns argued, with some justification, that the Tsar had ruled over the Grand Duchy purely on the basis of his personal authority, as the Grand Duke of Finland, with the effect that after his downfall sovereignty should return to the Finnish parliament (Sejm). But in its Manifesto of 7 March the Provisional Government declared itself the full legal inheritor of the Tsar’s authority in Finland and, while it restored the Finnish constitution, thereby ending thirteen years of direct Russian rule, it continued to insist that the government in Helsingfors should remain responsible to the Russian Governor-General, rather than the Sejm, until the future status of Finland had been resolved by the Constituent Assembly.

This was the start of a long and complex constitutional wrangle between the Finns (who refused to recognize the sovereignty of the Provisional Government) and the Russians (who refused to recognize the authority of the Sejm). Tokoi’s coalition government in Helsingfors, a mixture of federal-minded socialists and liberal-minded nationalists, was based on the policy of negotiating a compromise solution, whereby Finland would gain full internal autonomy in exchange for a Russian veto over its foreign and military policy. Had level heads prevailed, the Provisional Government might have recognized this as a feasible temporary settlement of the conflict. But since the proposal entailed a smaller Finnish army for the Russian military campaign, it feared that this would prove to be the first step towards Finland’s departure from the war, and it blocked the progress of the negotiations.

The deadlock continued through the spring, as Tokoi’s government came under growing popular pressure to make a unilateral declaration of Finnish independence, while Petrograd saw in this a reason to stand even more firmly against all the Finnish demands. Both positions were largely determined by the fact that the Bolsheviks, who had taken up the Finnish cause in the hope of gaining an ally against the Provisional Government, were building up a powerful base of support among the sailors of Helsingfors, where they controlled their own Soviet organ of the Baltic Fleet (TsentroBalt). Tokoi underlined this Bolshevik threat in the hope of pressurizing the Provisional Government into making concessions. But the government was determined to stand firm. Even Kerensky, speaking like a true Great Russian patriot as the new Minister of War in May, warned the Finns not to try the patience of the ‘open-hearted Russian people’ by trying to ‘deprive them of their rights to their own national territory’.33

Relations with Russia reached a crisis in June and July. A resolution of the All-Russian Soviet Congress calling on the Provisional Government to negotiate a treaty of independence with Finland at the end of the war was interpreted by the Sejm as a green light for it to pass its own declaration of independence (valtalaki) on 23 June. The valtalaki was greeted by nationwide celebrations. People falsely assumed that it had been supported by the ‘Russian parliament’. But the Soviet was just as outraged by it as the Provisional Government. The valtalaki was a unilateral declaration of Finnish independence, whereas the Soviet resolution had meant it to be the result of bilateral negotiations with the Provisional Government. A Soviet delegation attempted to persuade the Finns to withdraw the valtalaki and, when this failed, the Soviet leaders gave their support to the government’s decision to put down the Finnish movement by military force. Throughout July the Russians built up their troops on Finnish soil, threatening to use them against the Sejm if it did not withdraw its valtalaki. On 21 July the Sejm was dissolved. Most Russian socialists, despite their recognition of Finland’s right to self-determination, accepted the need for this repressive measure and blamed it on the tactics of the Sejm. But others, like Gorky, warned that this action was bound to strengthen Finnish resolve, leading to the ‘deepening of the conflict’ and to the loss of Russia’s democratic prestige in the West. In fact the dissolution did much more than that. By ruling out the possibility of a negotiated settlement, it effectively undermined the government in Helsingfors and pushed Finland along the path that would end in civil war, as the struggle for independence became intertwined with a broader social conflict between the liberal propertied classes, hesitant to make the final break with Russia, and an increasingly Bolshevized mass of workers, sailors and landless labourers, eager to declare independent Finland Red.34

In the Ukraine the February Revolution had immediately given rise to a nationalist movement based around the Rada, or parliament, established in Kiev on 4 March. While the Rada was ultimately committed to the Ukraine’s right of self-determination, it saw its immediate task as the negotiation of cultural freedoms, greater political autonomy, and a radical land reform within a federal Russian state. The issue of land reform was especially important, for although the Rada could be sure of the support of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, it could not be so sure of the peasants, the vast majority of the Ukrainian population, although most of the Ukrainian soldiers, who were simply peasants in uniform, were, it is true, solidly behind the nationalist cause.

In mid-May a Rada delegation presented its demands to the Provisional Government. These demands were moderate — a recognition of the Ukraine’s autonomy, a seat for the Ukraine at the peace settlement, a commissar for Ukrainian affairs, separate Ukrainian army units in the rear, and the appointment of Ukrainians to most civil posts — and the Provisional Government could have easily agreed to them without prejudicing the resolution of the Ukrainian question by the Constituent Assembly. But the Russian government and Soviet leaders dismissed the influence of the Rada — its declaration was not published by a single Russian newspaper — and appeared to assume that if they ignored it the whole problem would go away. Prince Lvov tried to bury the issue by setting up a special commission, packed with Russian jurists, which raised complicated legal questions about the legitimacy of every single Rada demand before concluding, predictably enough, that nothing could be resolved until the Constituent Assembly. It was yet another illustration of the Russian liberals using legal postures to hide from politics.

Yet the result of this ostrich-like reaction was merely to strengthen the nationalist cause and to drive it towards the more radical demand for independence from Russia. Urged by the Second Ukrainian Military Congress to make a unilateral declaration of autonomy, the Rada published its First Universal on 10 June. The Universal was a declaration of the Ukraine’s freedom modelled on the charters of the seventeenth-century Cossack Hetmans, whom the nationalists claimed to be the founders of the ‘Ukrainian nation’, and in the context of 1917 it took on a symbolic role equal to the yellow and light blue flag of the Ukraine. The Universal called for the convocation of a Sejm, or sovereign national assembly, and declared the establishment of a General Secretariat, headed by V. K. Vinnichenko, which effectively assumed executive power, replacing the authority of the Provisional Government in the Ukraine. It was only now that the Ukrainian crisis, coinciding as it did with the Finnish declaration of independence, came to the top of the political agenda. Just as the army was about to launch a fresh offensive in the West, Russia was threatened with the loss of two vital regions behind the Front. Lvov immediately accused the Rada of threatening to ‘inflict a fatal blow on the state’, while Volia naroda expressed the general Soviet view that the Universal was ‘a stab in the back of the Revolution’.35

Yet it was clear that some compromise was needed, and on 28 June the government despatched a three-man delegation (Tereshchenko, Kerensky and Tsereteli) to negotiate with the Rada. On 2 July the two sides reached a makeshift compromise: the Provisional Government broadly recognized the national autonomy of the Ukraine, the popular legitimacy of the Rada and the executive authority of the General Secretariat. This was enough to cool down Ukrainian tempers for the rest of the summer. But it outraged the Russian nationalists in Kiev, Shulgin’s chauvinist supporters in particular, who took to fighting the Ukrainians in the streets. The rightwing Kadets in Lvov’s cabinet took up the cause of the Russian minority in the Ukraine. They refused to endorse the settlement on the grounds that only the Constituent Assembly had the legal authority to resolve such matters, which was really no more than a pretext for the defence of Russia’s imperial interests in the Ukraine. In a conversation with his secretary, Lvov condemned the Kadets for ‘behaving like the worst Black Hundred bastards’ on the issue.36 On 4 July three Kadets resigned from the cabinet. This was the trigger for the start of a protracted political crisis which would end in the collapse of the Provisional Government.

*

Brusilov to his wife on 1 March:

You must know what is happening. I am of course pleased. But I pray to God that this awful crisis, in this awful war, may soon end, so that our external enemy may not reap the benefit of our collapse. The one fortunate circumstance is that it comes at a time of the year when it is very difficult, almost impossible, for the enemy to launch an attack, for this would be a catastrophe. It is all the more important now that we win this war, otherwise it will be the ruin of Russia.

Brusilov’s untiring faith in Russia’s victorious destiny was now, more than ever, a matter of hope against hope. It was, as he later acknowledged, entirely unrealistic to sustain a lengthy military campaign in the midst of a social revolution. And yet he still believed in the will of the people to continue fighting until the end, and, unlike most of the Tsar’s generals, threw in his lot with the revolution in the hope that the defence of Russia’s liberty might at last inspire their patriotism. Monarchists accused him of opportunism; and historians have repeated the charge. But Brusilov had long been persuaded, despite his own sympathies for the monarchy, that without a complete change of government Russia could not win the war. ‘If I have to choose between Russia and the Tsar,’ Brusilov had said in 1916, ‘then I choose Russia.’37

The army of Free Russia was in fact much less willing to go on with the war than the optimistic general had presumed. Order Number One gave the mass of the soldiers a new self-pride as ‘citizens’ on an equal par with the officers, and this soon led to the breakdown of all discipline. The newly established soldiers’ committees, although dominated to begin with by the democratic junior officers and the uniformed intelligentsia, soon became the leaders of this revolution in the ranks. They held meetings on strategy and on whether to obey the officers’ orders. Some soldiers refused to fight for more than eight hours a day, claiming the same rights as the workers. Many refused to salute their officers, or replaced them with their own elected officers. Intimidation of officers was common. Brusilov himself received many letters from his men threatening to kill him if he ordered an advance. When, in May, Brusilov assumed the Supreme Command and reviewed the units on the Northern Front, where the spirit of mutiny was strongest, he found that hundreds of officers had already fled their posts, while more than a few had even been driven to suicide. ‘I remember one case when a group of officers had overheard their soldiers talk in threatening tones of “the need to kill all the officers”. One of the youngest officers became so terrified he shot himself that night. He thought it was better to kill himself than to wait until the soldiers murdered him.’ Their methods of killing officers were so brutal, with limbs and genitals sometimes cut off or the victims skinned alive, that one can hardly blame the officer.38

One young captain wrote to his father on 11 March:

Between us and the soldiers there is an abyss that one cannot cross. Whatever they might think of us as individuals, we in their eyes remain no more than barins (masters). When we talk of ‘the people’ we have in mind the nation as a whole, but they mean only the common people. In their view what has taken place is not a political but a social revolution, of which we are the losers and they are the winners. They think that things should get better for them and that they should get worse for us. They do not believe us when we talk of our devotion to the soldiers. They say that we were the barins in the past, and that now it is their turn to be the barins over us. It is their revenge for the long centuries of servitude.

The peasant soldiers clearly did not share their officers’ language of ‘citizenship’. They did not see the revolution in the same terms of civic rights and duties. Their revolution in the trenches was another version of the social revolution in the countryside. The peasant conscripts naturally assumed that, if only they could overthrow their noble officers, then peace, bread and land would be the result. As one soldier put it at a meeting of his regiment in March to discuss the abdication of the Tsar:

Haven’t you understood? What is going on is a ryvailooshun! Don’t you know what a ryvailooshun is? It’s when the people take all the power. And what’s the people without us, the soldiers, with our guns? Bah! It’s obvious — it means that the power belongs to us. And while we’re about it, the country is ours too, and all the land is ours, and if we choose to fight or not is up to us as well. Now do you understand? That’s a ryvailooshun.39

This assertion of ‘soldier power’ was essential to the spirit of ‘trench Bolshevism’ which swept through the armed forces in 1917. Brusilov described it thus:

The soldiers wanted only one thing — peace, so that they could go home, rob the landowners, and live freely without paying any taxes or recognizing any authority. The soldiers veered towards Bolshevism because they believed that this was its programme. They did not have the slightest understanding of what either Communism, or the International,fn4 or the division into workers and peasants, actually meant, but they imagined themselves at home living without laws or landowners. This anarchistic freedom is what they called ‘Bolshevism’.

From the start of the revolution there was a sharp rise in the rate of desertion, especially among the non-Russian soldiers. Perhaps a million soldiers left their units between March and October. Most of these were soldiers ‘absent without leave’, men who had simply got fed up with fighting or sitting around unfed in the trenches and the garrisons, and had run off to the nearest town, where they ate and got drunk, went to brothels and often terrorized the local population. ‘The streets are full of soldiers,’ complained a Perm official in mid-March. ‘They harass respectable ladies, ride around with prostitutes, and behave in public like hooligans. They know that no one dares to punish them.’40

*

Russia’s war aims occupied the centre-stage of politics during the spring of 1917. Indeed the whole of 1917 could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing the revolution to an end. This was not just a political clash, it was also a social one. Leftwing propaganda made it clear that the war was being waged for different class interests. Enormous mistrust and even hatred of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘imperialist’ or ‘capitalist’ system could be stirred up by the stories of war-profiteering industrialists, merchants, ‘kulaks’ and black marketeers. Supporters of the war were instantly tarnished with the stigma of placing their own ‘imperial’ interests above those of the people. ‘We see’, declared a workers’ resolution of the Dinamo factory in Moscow, ‘that the senseless slaughter and destruction of the war is essential to no one but the parasite bourgeoisie.’41

The Provisional Government had so far shied away from the crucial question of its policy on the war. There were too many conflicting views within the cabinet. Miliukov, with the loose support of Guchkov, saw no reason to give up Russia’s imperial ambitions, contained in the ‘secret treaties’ with the Allies, to gain control of Constantinople. As Russia’s new Foreign Minister, he made this clear to the press and embassies abroad. But his views were sharply at odds with the Soviet peace campaign, launched on 14 March with its Appeal to the Peoples of All the World, in which it renounced the war aims of tsarist Russia and called on the peoples of all the belligerent nations to protest against the ‘imperialist war’. The Soviet peace campaign was immediately endorsed by a series of military congresses; most soldiers declared their allegiance to the Soviet on the basis that it promised peace. Its campaign was also backed by the more liberal ministers in the Provisional Government, once the leftwing idea of a separate peace, favoured in certain Soviet circles, was abandoned, and instead, on 21 March, the Soviet adopted the moderate line of Revolutionary Defensism (national unity for the defence of Russia combined with an international peace campaign for a democratic settlement ‘without annexations or indemnities’).

On 27 March the Provisional Government came out with its own Declaration of War Aims which was broadly in line with the Soviet peace campaign. But Miliukov told the Manchester Guardian that it would not alter Russia’s commitment to her imperial allies. This began a bitter political struggle for the control of the Provisional Government’s foreign policy. Miliukov was accused in democratic circles of speaking without cabinet authority. He was, in the words of one liberal newspaper, no more than a ‘Minister of Personal Opinion’. The Soviet leaders, who saw the declaration of 27 March as a sacred achievement of the revolution, urged the Provisional Government to present it in the form of a diplomatic note to the Allies, which would give it effect as Russia’s practical foreign policy, albeit without the approval of her Foreign Minister. After a great deal of fuss, Miliukov was forced to agree to this plan: the endorsement of the Soviet peace programme by a visiting delegation of French and British socialists had undercut his main objection that it would not be acceptable to the Allies. But when he came to despatch the declaration to the foreign embassies he added a covering note of his own in which he stressed, in contravention of the declaration, that Russia was still firmly committed to a ‘decisive victory’, including, at least by implication, the imperial war aims of the tsarist government.42

The effect of the Miliukov Note was like a red rag to the Soviet bull. Gorky, who had helped to write the Soviet Appeal of 14 March, denounced it as part of a ‘bourgeois assault on the democracy with the purpose of prolonging the war’. Miliukov’s action had, to be sure, greatly strengthened the Soviet message — that only ‘the bourgeoisie’ stood to gain from the ‘imperialist war’ — in the minds of the workers and soldiers. On 20 April thousands of armed workers and soldiers came out to demonstrate on the streets of Petrograd. Many of them carried banners with slogans calling for the removal of the ‘ten bourgeois ministers’, for an end to the war and for the appointment of a new revolutionary government. Linde, who had led the mutiny in February, was outraged by the Miliukov Note. He saw it as a betrayal of the revolution’s fundamental promise, to bring the war to a democratic end. Inclined by nature to spontaneous protest (February had proved that), he led a battalion of the Finland Regiment in an armed demonstration to the Marinsky Palace in the expectation that the Soviet would call for the arrest of the government and the establishment of Soviet power. By the time they reached the palace Linde’s street army had been joined by crowds of angry soldiers from the Moscow and Pavlov regiments, so that it had swollen to 25,000 men. Linde’s show of force was completely improvised — he had not consulted with anyone — but he was clearly under the illusion that the Soviet Executive (of which he was a member) would give its full approval to his actions. He was mistaken. The Executive had passed a resolution condemning Linde’s demonstration on the grounds that it, the Soviet, was not prepared to assume power but, on the contrary, should help the Provisional Government to restore its own authority. It was only the far Left, the Vyborg Bolsheviks and the Anarchists, who had encouraged the demonstrators and had put the wild idea into their heads that they should ‘get rid of the bourgeoisie’. The rightwing press immediately condemned Linde as a ‘Bolshevik’ and depicted his armed demonstration — even though it dispersed peacefully as soon as the Soviet leaders ordered it to — as a bloody attempt to carry out a coup. General Kornilov, the commander of the Petrograd garrison, wanted to disperse the demonstrators with his troops. But the cabinet was reluctant to use force against ‘the people’, and refused him permission. On 21 April fresh demonstrations took place. Angry protestors surrounded Miliukov’s car and pounded it with their fists. Several people were killed when street fights broke out on the Nevsky Prospekt between the demonstrators and a counter-demonstration of rightwing patriots and monarchists.43 The war question had split the capital into two and brought it to the brink of a bloody civil war.

It was this threat of a civil war that finally spurred the Soviet leaders to join the government and bolster its authority. They had been moving towards the idea of a coalition for some time. Two main factors lay behind this. One was Irakli Tsereteli, the tall and handsome Georgian Menshevik with a pale El Greco-like face, who had returned from Siberian exile in mid-March and at once stamped his authority on the leadership of the Soviet. Tsereteli was, in Lvov’s estimation, ‘the only true statesman in the Soviet’. In his rigorously intellectual speeches he always appealed to the interests of the state rather than to class or party interests; and their gradual effect was to inculcate in the Soviet leaders a growing sense of their responsibility. They ceased to think and act like revolutionaries and began to see themselves as ‘government men’. It was Tsereteli who had shaped the policy of Revolutionary Defensism, which united the Soviet leaders with the liberals on the question of the war and which formed the basis of their coalition. The other factor was the influence of the socialist party rank and file, especially in the provinces, who broadly welcomed the prospect of a coalition with the liberals. For a start, they had never been held back by the same ideological obsession as their party leaders in the capital about the need to form a ‘bourgeois government’. They had placed pragmatism before party dogma (what choice did they have with the tiny size of the provincial intelligentsia?) and had joined the liberals in town-hall government from the very first days of the revolution. It was also felt by the rank and file that, if their leaders joined the government, they would gain more leverage over it. Many workers thought that, with the Mensheviks in charge of industry, they would soon gain better pay. Many soldiers thought that, with the SRs in charge of the war, they would soon gain peace.44

The establishment of the coalition, like the formation of the government in March, stemmed from the combined efforts of the Soviet leaders and the liberals to restore order on the Petrograd streets. The Soviet leaders were horrified by the violent demonstrations and the prospect of a civil war. It was they who took the lead in stopping the disorders, taking over control of the garrison and prohibiting any further demonstrations on 21 April. Effectively they were already assuming the responsibilities of government. The next day they issued a joint statement with the ministers condemning the Miliukov Note. This resolved the immediate crisis. But Lvov was now determined that the Soviet leaders should join his government to give it popular credibility. Miliukov’s presence in the cabinet was the biggest obstacle — working with him would expose the Soviet leaders to the charge from the extreme Left that they supported the ‘imperialist war’ — and it was this that led them to reject the idea of a coalition on 28 April. But two days later everything was changed with the resignation of Guchkov, the Minister of War and Miliukov’s only ally in the cabinet, in protest against the confirmation of the soldiers’ rights by a government commission and the Soviet campaign against Miliukov. Lvov, meanwhile, began to plot Miliukov’s removal. He promised Tsereteli that he would force Miliukov out of the cabinet if the Soviet leaders agreed to join a coalition government. This, along with Lvov’s own threat to resign if Tsereteli did not agree, was enough to convince the Menshevik leader that a coalition was now both possible and essential to end the crisis of authority, which the extreme Right or Left might easily exploit, and it was largely the force of his reasoning that finally persuaded the Soviet Executive to vote in its favour on 2 May by 44 votes to 19.45

Three days later the new cabinet was announced. It was agreed, in deference to Menshevik dogma, that the socialists should occupy only a minority of the cabinet posts (they took six out of the sixteen), and that to preserve the liberal conception of the government as a national institution, above party or class interests, they should join the cabinet as private individuals rather than as members of the Soviet. Chernov took Agriculture, Kerensky War, Skobelev Labour, while Tsereteli, whose time was spent mostly in the Soviet, was persuaded to accept the minor post of Posts and Telegraphs, which would allow him to keep one foot in each camp. Chernov called Tsereteli the ‘Minister of General Affairs’, while Sukhanov dubbed him the ‘Commissar of the Government in the Soviet’. It is certainly true that Tsereteli emerged as the central figure of the coalition. Lvov was dependent on him to keep the socialist leaders onside, and he kept him in his ‘inner cabinet’ (together with the five Minister-Free-masons: Kerensky, Tereshchenko, Nekrasov, Konovalov and Lvov) which decided the general strategy.46

The formation of the Coalition, which had been intended to reinforce the democratic centre, had the opposite effect. It accelerated the political and social polarization that led to the outbreak of the civil war in October. On the one hand, most of the provincial rank and file of the Kadets moved with their party leader Miliukov, who had resigned on 4 May, into rightwing opposition against the coalition government. Increasingly they abandoned their liberal self-image as a party of the nation as a whole and began to portray themselves as a party for the defence of bourgeois class interests, property rights, law and order and the Russian Empire. Within the Soviet camp, on the other hand, there was a steady drift towards the Left as the mass of the workers and the peasants became increasingly disillusioned with the failure of the socialists to use their position in the government to speed up the process of social reform or to bring about a democratic peace. The leftwing SRs and Mensheviks, who had been opposed to the coalition, were correct to warn their party colleagues that by entering the government, and by sharing in the blame for its shortcomings, they were bound to lose popular support. For the socialists were henceforth to be ‘statesmen’, they could no longer act like ‘revolutionaries’, and this obliged them to resist what they now called the growing ‘anarchy’ — the peasant seizures of the land, the workers’ strikes and the breakdown of army discipline — in the interests of the state. Instead of using their popular mandate to take power for themselves, as they could have done in the April crisis, the Soviet leaders chose instead to lend their support to a liberal government which had already been discredited. They increasingly became seen as the guardians of a ‘bourgeois’ state, and the initiative for the revolution, for bread, land and peace, was taken up by the Bolsheviks.

iii Lenin’s Rage

The Finland Station, on Petrograd’s Vyborg side, shortly before midnight on 3 April 1917: workers and soldiers, with red flags and banners, fill the station hall; and there is a military band. The square outside is packed with automobiles and tank-like armoured cars; and the cold night air is blue with smoke. A mounted searchlight sweeps over the faces of the crowd and across the façades of the buildings, momentarily lighting up the tram-lines and the outlines of the city beyond. There is a general buzz of expectation: Lenin’s train is due. At last it pulls into the station; a thunderous Marseillaise booms around the hall; and the small and stocky figure of Lenin appears from the carriage, his Swiss wool coat and Homburg hat strangely out of place amidst the welcoming congregation of grey tunics and workers’ caps. An armed Bolshevik escort leads him in military formation to the Tsar’s former waiting-room, where a Soviet delegation is standing by to greet him, the latest returning hero of the revolutionary struggle, after more than a decade of exile abroad.47

For Lenin this was the end of an unexpected journey. The February Revolution had found him in Zurich and, like most of the socialist leaders, it had caught him by surprise. ‘It’s staggering!’ he exclaimed to Krupskaya when he heard the news. ‘It’s so incredibly unexpected!’ Lenin was determined to get back to Russia as soon as possible. But how could he cross the German lines? At first he thought of crossing the North Sea by steamer, as Plekhanov had already done. But the British were hostile to the Russian Marxists: Trotsky and Bukharin had both been detained in England on their way back to Russia from New York. Then he thought of travelling through Germany disguised as a deaf, dumb and blind Swede — until Krupskaya had joked that he was bound to give himself away by muttering abuse against the Mensheviks in his sleep. In a moment of desperation he had even considered hiring a private aeroplane to fly across eastern Europe; but then the thought of the dangers involved put him off this harebrained scheme. When it came to putting himself at physical risk, Lenin always had been something of a coward.fn548

It was Martov who came up with the idea of exchanging the Russian Marxist exiles in Switzerland for the German citizens interned in Russia. With the help of their Swiss comrades, the Russian exiles made contact with the German authorities, who quickly saw the advantage of letting the Bolsheviks, and other socialist groups opposed to the war, go back to Russia to stir up discord there. They even helped to finance their activities, although this should not necessarily be taken to mean, as many people were later to argue, that the Bolsheviks were German agents.49 The Provisional Government was not keen on the idea of an exchange — Miliukov was determined to oppose it in view of Lenin’s well-known defeatist views — and dragged its heels over the negotiations. Martov and most of the Menshevik exiles were prepared to wait. But Lenin and thirty-one of his comrades were impatient enough to go ahead with the German plan without the sanction of the Russian government. On 27 March they left on a German train from Gottmadingen on the Swiss border and travelled via Frankfurt, Berlin and Stockholm to Petrograd. The train, which had only one carriage, was ‘sealed’ in the sense that no inspections of passports or luggage were carried out by the Germans on the way. Lenin worked alone in his own compartment, while his fellow travellers, much to his annoyance, drank and sang in the corridor and the other compartments. Smoking was confined to the lavatory and Lenin ordered that all non-smokers should be issued with a ‘first class’ pass that gave them priority to use the lavatory over the smokers with their ‘second class’ passes. As Radek quipped, it seemed from this piece of minor social planning that Lenin was already preparing himself to ‘assume the leadership of the revolutionary government’.50 The ‘sealed train’ was an early model of Lenin’s state dictatorship.

Lenin arrived a stranger to Russia. Apart from a six-month stay in 1905–6, he had spent the previous seventeen years in exile abroad. Most of the workers who turned out to meet him at the Finland Station could never have seen him before.fn6 ‘I know very little of Russia,’ Lenin once told Gorky. ‘Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, exile — that is all I know.’ During 1917 he would often claim that the mass of the ordinary people were even further to the Left than the Bolsheviks. Yet he had no experience of them, and knew only what his party agents told him (which was often what he wanted to hear). Between 5 July and the October seizure of power Lenin did not make a single public appearance. He barely set foot in the provinces. The man who was set to become the dictator of Russia had almost no direct knowledge of the way its people lived. Apart from two years as a lawyer, he had never even had a job. He was a ‘professional revolutionary’, living apart from society and supporting himself from the party’s funds and from the income of his mother’s estate (which he continued to draw until her death in 1916). According to Gorky, it was this ignorance of everyday work, and the human suffering which it entailed, which had bred in Lenin a ‘pitiless contempt, worthy of a nobleman, for the lives of the ordinary people … Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin. He does not know the ordinary people. He has never lived among them.’51

‘Well there it is,’ Lenin wrote to Kollontai on 2 March. ‘This first stage of the revolution (born of the war) will be neither the last, nor confined to Russia.’ Lenin was already thinking of a second revolution — a revolution of his own. In his five ‘Letters from Afar’, written between 7 and 26 March, he mapped out his party’s programme for the transition from ‘the first to the second stage of the revolution’: no support for the Provisional Government; a clean break with the Mensheviks and the Second International; the arming of the workers; the foundation of Soviet power (the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the poorest peasants’); and the conclusion of an immediate peace. Lenin boiled all this down into ten punchy theses — his famous April Theses — during the train journey from Switzerland and began to agitate for them upon his arrival at the Finland Station. Brushing aside the formal welcome of the Soviet leaders, the returning exile proclaimed the start of a ‘worldwide Socialist revolution!’, and then went out into the square, where he climbed on to the bonnet of a car and gave a speech to the waiting crowd. Above all the noise Sukhanov heard only the occasional phrase: ‘ … any part in the shameful imperialist slaughter … lies and frauds … capitalist pirates …’ Lenin was then taken off in an armoured car, which proceeded with a military band, workers and soldiers waving red flags, through the Vyborg streets to the Bolshevik headquarters — the palace of Kshesinskaya, the former ballerina and sometime mistress of the Tsar.52

On the following day Lenin came with his own armed escort to the Tauride Palace and presented his Theses to a stunned assembly of the Social Democrats. He had turned the Party Programme on its head. Instead of accepting the need for a ‘bourgeois stage’ of the revolution, as all the Mensheviks and most of the Bolsheviks did, Lenin was calling for a new revolution to transfer power to ‘the proletariat and the poorest peasants’. In the present revolutionary conditions, he argued, a parliamentary democracy would be a ‘retrograde step’ compared with the power of the Soviets, the direct self-rule of the proletariat. Theoretically, the April Theses had their roots in the lessons which Lenin had learned from the failure of the 1905 Revolution: that the Russian bourgeoisie was too feeble on its own to carry out a democratic revolution; and that this would have to be completed by the proletariat instead. The Theses also had their roots in the war, which had led him to conclude that, since the whole of Europe was on the brink of a socialist revolution, the Russian Revolution did not have to confine itself to bourgeois democratic objectives.fn7 But the practical implications of the Theses — that the Bolsheviks should cease to support the February Revolution and should move towards the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat — went far beyond anything that all but the most extreme left-wingers in the party had ever considered before. It was still not clear whether Lenin envisaged the violent overthrow of the Provisional Government, and, if so, when this should happen. For the moment, he seemed content to limit the party’s tasks to mass agitation. The Bolsheviks still lacked a majority in the Soviets; and Russia, as Lenin pointed out, was ‘now the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world’. But the sheer audacity of his speech, coming as it did at a joint SD assembly for the party’s reunification, ensured a furious uproar in the hall. The Mensheviks booed and whistled. Tsereteli accused Lenin of ignoring the lessons of Marx and quoted Engels on the dangers of a premature seizure of power. Goldenberg said that the Bolshevik leader had abandoned Marxism altogether so as to occupy the anarchist throne vacated by Bakunin. B. O. Bogdanov condemned the Theses as ‘the ravings of a madman’. Even Semen Kanatchikov, the Bolshevik worker we met in Chapter 3, who had come all the way from the Urals to hear Lenin speak, was flabbergasted by what he saw as the ‘unrealistic nature of his ideas, which seemed to all of us to go far beyond the realms of what it was possible to achieve’. It seemed that Lenin, having spent so many years in exile abroad, had become out of touch with the realities of political life in Russia. Returning from the Tauride Palace that evening, Skobelev, the Menshevik, assured Prince Lvov: ‘Lenin is a has-been.’53

Which is just what he might have become, had it not been for one fact: that he was Lenin. All the odds were stacked against him in his struggle for the party to adopt the April Theses. The majority of the Bolsheviks had already pledged their tentative support for the Provisional Government prior to Lenin’s arrival (Kollontai was the only major Bolshevik to support the April Theses from the start). Only the Vyborg Committee, the stronghold of Bolshevik extremism in the capital, came out in favour of Soviet power. Stalin and Kamenev, who returned from Siberian exile in mid-March and took over control of Pravda, strengthened this cautious approach. Like the Mensheviks, they assumed that the ‘bourgeois’ stage of the revolution still had a long way to run, that the dual power system was thus necessitated by objective conditions, and that the immediate tasks of the Bolsheviks lay in constructive work within the social democratic movement as a whole. Trotsky later accused them of acting more like a loyal opposition than the representatives of a workers’ revolutionary party. The moderate motions of Kamenev and Stalin were adopted at the All-Russian Bolshevik Conference at the end of March: conditional support for the Provisional Government; the continuation of the war; support for the Soviet leaders. The Bolsheviks even agreed to explore the possibilities of reuniting with the Mensheviks. They were already working together, along with the SRs and other socialists, in most of the provincial Soviets. Far away from the factional disputes of their party leaders in the capital, the old camaraderie of the underground remained very strong in the provinces, and Lenin’s combative factionalism was strongly resented and resisted by those provincial Bolsheviks who were either unwilling or simply unable to break their ties with the other leftwing groups.54

Lenin always liked a fight. It was as if the whole of his life had been a preparation for the struggle that awaited him in 1917. ‘That is my life!’ he had confessed to Inessa Armand in 1916. ‘One fighting campaign after another.’ The campaign against the Populists, the campaign against the Economists, the campaign for the organization of the party along centralist lines, the campaign for the boycott of the Duma, the campaign against the Menshevik ‘liquidators’, the campaign against Bogdanov and Mach, the campaign against the war — these had been the defining moments of his life, and much of his personality had been invested in these political battles. As a private man there was nothing much to Lenin: he gave himself entirely to politics. There was no ‘private Lenin’ behind the politician. All biographies of the Bolshevik leader become unavoidably discussions of his political ideas and influence. Lenin’s personal life was extraordinarily dull. He dressed and lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work and leisure. He liked everything to be neat and orderly. He was punctilious about his financial accounts, noting on slips of paper everything he spent on food, on train fares, on stationery, and so on. Every morning he tidied his desk. His books were ordered alphabetically. He sewed buttons on to his pin-striped suit, removed stains from it with petrol and kept his bicycle surgically clean.55

There was a strong puritanical streak in Lenin’s character which later manifested itself in the political culture of his regime. Asceticism was a common trait of the revolutionaries of Lenin’s generation. They were all inspired by the self-denying revolutionary hero Rakhmetev in Chernyshevksy’s novel What Is To Be Done? By suppressing his own sentiments, by denying himself the pleasures of life, Lenin tried to strengthen his resolve and to make himself, like Rakhmetev, insensitive to the suffering of others. This, he believed, was the ‘hardness’ required by every successful revolutionary: the ability to spill blood for political ends. ‘The terrible thing in Lenin’, Struve once remarked, ‘was that combination in one person of self-castigation, which is the essence of all real asceticism, with the castigation of other people as expressed in abstract social hatred and cold political cruelty.’ Even as the leader of the Soviet state Lenin lived the spartan lifestyle of the revolutionary underground. Until March 1918 he and Krupskaya occupied a barely furnished room in the Smolny Institute, a former girls’ boarding school, sleeping on two narrow camp-beds and washing themselves with cold water from a bowl. It was more like a prison cell than the suite of the dictator of the biggest country in the world. When the government moved to Moscow they lived with Lenin’s sister in a modest three-room apartment within the Kremlin and took their meals in the cafeteria. Like Rakhmetev, Lenin did weight training to build up his muscles. It was all part of the macho culture (the black leather jackets, the militant rhetoric, the belief in action and the cult of violence) that was the essence of Bolshevism. Lenin did not smoke, he did not really drink, and, apart from his romantic friendship with Inessa Armand, he was not interested in beautiful women. Krupskaya called him ‘Ilich’, his popular name in the party, and he called her ‘comrade’. She was more like Lenin’s personal secretary than his wife, and it was probably not bad luck that their marriage was childless. Lenin had no place for sentiment in his life. ‘I can’t listen to music too often,’ he once admitted after a performance of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. ‘It makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people … But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.’56

Lenin’s interests in literature were, like everything else, determined by its social and political content. He only bothered with books which he thought might be useful to him. He admired Pushkin for what he simplistically supposed to be his opposition to autocracy, and he liked Nekrasov for his realistic depiction of the oppressed masses. He had read Goethe’s Faust whilst teaching himself German in Siberia, and had even learned some of Mephistopheles’s speeches off by heart; but he never showed any interest in any of Goethe’s other works. He refused to read Dostoevsky, dismissing his novel The Possessed, which had tried to expose the psychotic nature of the revolutionary, as ‘a piece of reactionary filth … I have absolutely no desire to waste my time on it. I looked through the book and threw it away. I don’t read such literature — what good is it to me?’57

The root of this philistine approach to life was a burning ambition for power. The Mensheviks joked that it was impossible to compete with a man, such as Lenin, who thought about revolution for twenty-four hours every day. Lenin was driven by an absolute faith in his own historical destiny. He did not doubt for a moment, as he had once put it, that he was the man who was to wield the ‘conductor’s baton’ in the party. This was the message he brought back to Russia in April 1917. Those who had known him before the war noticed a dramatic change in his personality. ‘How he had aged,’ recalled Roman Gul’, who had met him briefly in 1905. ‘Lenin’s whole appearance had altered. And not only that. There was none of his old geniality, his friendliness or comradely humour, in his relations with other people. The new Lenin that arrived was cynical, secretive and rude, a conspirator “against everyone and everything”, trusting no one, suspecting everyone, and determined to launch his drive for power.’ Chernov also noted his single-minded drive for power in a brilliant satirical portrait of the Bolshevik leader published in Delo naroda:

Lenin possesses an imposing wholeness. He seems to be made of one chunk of granite. And he is all round and polished like a billiard ball. There is nothing you can get hold of him by. He rolls with irrepressible speed. But he could repeat to himself the well-known phrase: ‘Je ne sais pas où je vais, mais j’y vais résolument’. Lenin possesses a devotion to the revolutionary cause which permeates his entire being. But to him the revolution is embodied in his person. Lenin possesses an outstanding mind, but it is a … mind of one dimension — more than that, a unilinear mind … He is a man of one-sided will and consequently a man with a stunned moral sensitivity.58

Lenin had never been tolerant of dissent within his party’s ranks. Bukharin complained that he ‘didn’t give a damn for the opinions of others’. Lunacharsky claimed that Lenin deliberately ‘surrounded himself with fools’ who would not dare question him. During Lenin’s struggle for the April Theses this domineering attitude was magnified to almost megalomaniac proportions. Krupskaya called it his ‘rage’ — the frenzied state of her husband when engaged in clashes with his political rivals — and it was an enraged Lenin whom she had to live with for the next five years. During these fits Lenin acted like a man possessed by hatred and anger. His entire body was seized with extreme nervous tension, and he could neither sleep nor eat. His outward manner became vulgar and coarse. It was hard to believe that this was a cultivated man. He mocked his opponents, both inside and outside the party, in crude and violent language. They were ‘blockheads’, ‘bastards’, ‘dirty scum’, ‘prostitutes’, ‘cunts’, ‘shits’, ‘cretins’, ‘Russian fools’, ‘windbags’, ‘stupid hens’ and ‘silly old maids’. When the rage subsided Lenin would collapse in a state of exhaustion, listlessness and depression, until the rage erupted again. This manic alternation of mood was characteristic of Lenin’s psychological make-up. It continued almost unrelentingly between 1917 and 1922, and must have contributed to the brain haemorrhage from which he eventually died.59

Much of Lenin’s success in 1917 was no doubt explained by his towering domination over the party. No other political party had ever been so closely tied to the personality of a single man. Lenin was the first modern party leader to achieve the status of a god: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao Zedong were all his successors in this sense. Being a Bolshevik had come to imply an oath of allegiance to Lenin as both the ‘leader’ and the ‘teacher’ of the party. It was this, above all, which distinguished the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks (who had no clear leader of their own). By comparison with Lenin, all the other leading Bolsheviks were political midgets. Take Zinoviev. He was a brilliant orator but, as his great rival Trotsky put it, he was nothing else. For his speeches to produce results, ‘he had to have a tranquillising certainty that he was to be relieved of the political responsibility by a reliable and strong hand. Lenin gave him this certainty.’ Or take Kamenev. It was he who led the opposition to the April Theses, and, more than any other Bolshevik, argued the case for a moderate political alternative to Lenin’s revolutionary strategy. Yet Kamenev was much too soft to be a real leader. Lunacharsky called him ‘flabby’; Stankevich found him ‘so gentle that it seemed that he himself was ashamed of his position’; while George Denike compared him to an old schoolmaster and noted his fondness for wearing slippers. Kamenev was far too weak to stand up against the ‘hard men’ in the party. He might balk at some of their policies but he always followed them in the end.60

Lenin’s domination of the party had more to do with the culture of the party than with his own charisma. His oratory was grey. It lacked the brilliant eloquence, the pathos, the humour, the vivid metaphors, the colour or the drama of a speech by Trotsky or Zinoviev. Lenin, moreover, had the handicap of not being able to pronounce his ‘r’s’.fn8 Yet his speeches had an iron logic, and Lenin had the knack of finding easy slogans, which he crammed into the heads of his listeners by endless repetition. He spoke with his thumbs thrust under his armpits, rocking back and forward on his heels, as if in preparation to launch himself, like a human rocket, into the listening crowd (this is how he was portrayed in the hagiographic portraits painted during the Soviet era). Gorky, who heard Lenin speak for the first time in 1907, thought he ‘spoke badly’ to start with: ‘but after a minute I, like everybody else, was absorbed in his speech. It was the first time I had heard complicated political questions treated so simply. There was no striving after beautiful phrases. He presented every word clearly, and revealed his exact thought with great ease.’ Potresov, who had known and worked with Lenin since 1894, explained his appeal by a curious ‘hypnotic power’:

Only Lenin was followed unquestioningly as the indisputable leader, as it was only Lenin who was that rare phenomenon, particularly in Russia — a man of iron will and indomitable energy, capable of instilling fanatical faith in the movement and the cause, and possessed of equal faith in himself. Once upon a time I, too, was impressed by this will-power of Lenin’s, which seemed to make him into a ‘chosen leader’.61

And yet it was more than the dominance of Lenin’s personality that ensured the victory of his ideas in the party. The Bolshevik rank and file were not simply Lenin’s puppets — he had been in exile too long for that — and their initial reservations about his call for a second revolution were strong enough for him to have to do more than simply lay down the party line for them to support it. The idea that the Bolshevik Party in 1917 was a monolithic organization tightly controlled by Lenin is a myth — a myth which used to be propagated by the Soviet establishment, and one which is still believed (for quite different motives) by rightwing historians in the West. In fact the party was quite undisciplined; it had many different factions, both ideological and geographical; and the leadership, which was itself divided, often proved unable to impose its will on them. Between April and October, and after that in the bitter struggles over Brest-Litovsk, the party was split from top to bottom by a series of ideological conflicts, in which Lenin, at least to begin with, often found himself in a small minority. And if in the end he always got his way, this was due not just to his domination of the party but also to his many political skills, including persuasion, tactful retreat and compromise, threats of resignation and ultimatums, demagogy and appeals to the rank and file.

Three factors worked in Lenin’s favour during his struggle for the April Theses — one on the Right, one in the Centre, and one on the Left of the Bolshevik Party. On the Right the effect of the Theses was to impel a number of Bolshevik veterans into the Menshevik camp, where they believed the tenets of orthodox Marxism would be better respected. Some also found refuge in the intermediate group around Gorky’s newspaper, Novaia zhizn’, of which more later. The Centre, which had rallied around Kamenev to begin with, was gradually won over by Lenin, as he toned down the radical aspects of his April Theses. At the All-Russian Party Conference on 24–9 April he won a majority against Kamenev by accepting that a ‘lengthy period of agitation’ would be needed before the masses would be ready to follow the Bolsheviks to the next stage of the revolution. He was thus abandoning the call for the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government which many Bolsheviks had seen as the implication of his April Theses and which they had feared would plunge the country into civil war. Meanwhile, the left wing of the party was strengthened in the spring by the massive enrolment of workers and soldiers as new members. It was these lower-class party members who comprised the majority of the Bolshevik delegates at the April Party Conference — 149 of them in all, representing nearly 80,000 members throughout the country. They tended to be more radical than their party leaders. Knowing little of Marxist theory, they could not understand the need for a ‘bourgeois revolution’. Why did their leaders want to reach socialism in two stages when they could get there in one? Hadn’t enough blood already been spilled in February? And why should they allow the bourgeoisie to strengthen itself in power, if this was only going to make the task of removing them later even harder? The April Theses, with their call for immediate Soviet power, made more sense to them, and Lenin made a conscious effort to take advantage of this by speaking at numerous local party and factory meetings in the capital. He even swapped his Homburg hat for a worker’s cap in an effort to make himself look more ‘proletarian’.62

The April crisis emphasized Lenin’s message among the lower-class rank and file. Miliukov’s behaviour seemed to prove his point that peace could not be attained through the ‘imperialist’ war aims of the Provisional Government. It strengthened the ‘us-and-them’ mentality of the radical workers and soldiers towards the ‘bourgeois ministers’. Some of the Bolsheviks in the party’s Petrograd organization attempted to use the demonstrations of 20–1 April as a springboard for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. A Bolshevik activist from the Putilov factory, S. Ia. Bogdatiev, led the demonstrators on to the streets with revolutionary banners. It is not clear what the role of the Bolshevik leadership was in all of this. The later Soviet version was that Bogdatiev and his comrades acted on their own initiative. But some Western historians have claimed that the Central Committee must have authorized their actions and only distanced itself from them when the putsch failed. There is no real evidence for this claim and its basic assumption — that the party was a tightly disciplined body — is in any case unfounded. The Central Committee had all along been opposed to the seizure of power, and the demonstrations evidently took them by surprise. Lenin, it is true, had favoured the idea of turning the demonstrations into a show of strength. But he could not be sure of the party’s support, nor of the support of the masses, should this result in a struggle for power, and so he adopted a wait-and-see approach. No doubt if the Provisional Government had been overthrown, he would have claimed the victory. But as soon as order had been restored he condemned the ‘adventurism’ of the Petersburg ‘hotheads’. His main concern was to appease the centrist elements at the Bolshevik Conference. He told them on 24 April:

We had only wanted a peaceful reconnaissance of our enemy’s forces and not to give battle. But the Petersburg Committee moved ‘a wee bit too far to the left’. To move a ‘wee bit left’ at the moment of action was inept … It occurred because of imperfections in our organization. Were there mistakes? Yes, there were. Only those who don’t act don’t make mistakes. But to organize well — that’s a difficult task.63

Lenin’s dilemma was this: if the Bolsheviks tried to seize power before the party or its supporters among the masses were properly organized for it, then they ran the risk of defeat and isolation, like the Paris Commune of 1871, whose fate haunted the Bolshevik leaders throughout 1917 and 1918; but if they failed to keep up with their revolutionary vanguard — the Kronstadt sailors, the Vyborg workers and the Petrograd garrison — then they were in danger of losing their sharpest striking force, which would dissipate itself in fruitless outbursts of anarchic violence. The history of the Bolshevik Party and its factional disputes in 1917 revolved around the problem of how to keep the energies of this revolutionary vanguard in line with the rest of the masses.

The Kronstadt Naval Base, an island of sailor-militants in the Gulf of Finland just off Petrograd, was by far the most rebellious stronghold of this Bolshevik vanguard. The sailors were young trainees who had seen very little military activity during the war. They had spent the previous year cooped up on board their ships with their officers, who treated them with more than the usual sadistic brutality since the normal rules of naval discipline did not apply to trainees. Each ship was a tinderbox of hatred and violence. During the February Days the sailors mutinied with awesome ferocity. Admiral Viren, the Base Commander, was hacked to death with bayonets, and dozens of other officers were murdered, lynched or imprisoned in the island dungeons. The old naval hierarchy was completely destroyed and effective power passed to the Kronstadt Soviet. It was an October in February. The authority of the Provisional Government was never really established, nor was military order restored. Kerensky, the Minister of Justice, proved utterly powerless in his repeated efforts to gain jurisdiction over the imprisoned officers, despite rumours in the bourgeois press that they had been brutally tortured.

The Kronstadt sailors were young (half of them were below the age of twenty-three), almost all of them were literate, and most of them were politicized by the propaganda of the far-left parties. By the start of May the Bolsheviks had recruited over 3,000 members at the naval base. Together with the Anarchists and the SRs, they controlled the Kronstadt Soviet. On 16 May the Soviet declared itself a sovereign power and rejected the authority of the Provisional Government and its appointed Commissar at the naval base. It was, in effect, the unilateral declaration of a ‘Kronstadt Soviet Republic’. The Petrograd Soviet denounced the rebels as ‘defectors from the revolutionary democracy’. The bourgeoisie of Petrograd was terrified by the thought that they were now at the mercy of this militant fortress, which at any moment might attack the capital. ‘In their eyes’, recalled Raskolnikov, one of the sailors’ Bolshevik leaders, ‘Kronstadt was a symbol of savage horror, the devil incarnate, a terrifying spectre of anarchy, a nightmare rebirth of the Paris Commune on Russian soil.’ The Kronstadt Bolsheviks had played a major part in framing the 16 May declaration. But their action was not supported by the Bolshevik leaders in the capital.fn9 Lenin was furious with his Kronstadt lieutenants for failing to observe party discipline. It was premature to think of the seizure of power against the authority of the Soviet, and he ordered them to call him every day for instructions until the crisis was resolved. Tsereteli was sent by the Petrograd Soviet to negotiate a settlement with the Kronstadt leaders, who agreed to accept the authority of the Provisional Government in return for their own elected Commissar. By 24 May the rebellion was over. Yet the Kronstadt sailors were to remain a threatening source of militancy, as the events of June, July and October were to show.64

The other great bastion of Bolshevik militancy was the Vyborg district of Petrograd. The Vyborg party organization had over 5,000 Bolshevik members by the start of May. It was there that the most strike-prone metal factories were located — Russian Renault, Nobel, New Lessner, Erikson, Puzyrev, Vulcan, Phoenix and the Metal Works — and most of them were under the Bolsheviks’ sway. These factories contained an inflammable mixture of young and literate metalworkers, who tended to be easily influenced by the Bolsheviks’ militant slogans, and the less skilled immigrant workers who had flooded into the cities during the industrial boom of the war, and who consequently had suffered most from the double squeeze of low wages and high rents. Both groups were inclined to engage in violence on the streets. The Vyborg side was also the adopted home of the First Machine-Gun Regiment, the most highly trained and literate and also the most Bolshevized troops in Petrograd, with around 10,000 men and 1,000 machine-guns. During the February Days these machine-gunners had marched from their barracks at Oranienbaum into Petrograd to take part in the mutiny. Militant and self-assertive, they saw themselves as the heroes of the revolution, and refused to return to their barracks so long as the ‘bourgeoisie’ was ‘in power’. In effect, as everyone knew, they were holding the Provisional Government to ransom.65

The leftwing Bolsheviks, with their fighting resolve strengthened by these militant groups, advanced the idea of staging an armed demonstration on 10 June as a show of strength against the Provisional Government. The idea originated in the Military Organization, established by the Bolsheviks in the Petrograd garrison, which promised to bring out 60,000 troops. It soon received the backing of the Kronstadt sailors, who staged a dress rehearsal on 4 June with a march past in military ranks to salute the fallen heroes of the February Days. The Petersburg Bolshevik Committee was also showing signs of coming round in favour. They argued that an outlet had to be found for the soldiers and workers to express their anger at the government’s preparations for the new offensive in the war campaign, and that if the Bolsheviks failed to lead the demonstration they might turn away from it and dissipate their anger in undirected violence. The party could not afford to waste the energies of its revolutionary vanguard. But the Central Committee was split, with Lenin, Sverdlov and Stalin (who had turned through 180 degrees since Lenin’s return to Russia) in favour of the demonstration, and Kamenev, Zinoviev and Nogin against it on the grounds that the party still lacked sufficient mass support to justify the risks of all but calling for the seizure of power. A final decision was put off until 9 June.

By that time a majority of the Central Committee had come round to support the idea of an armed demonstration. On 8 June twenty-eight factories had gone on strike in the capital to protest against the government’s attempt to expel the Anarchists from their headquarters in the former tsarist minister Durnovo’s villa, on the Vyborg side.fn10 Fifty Kronstadt sailors came armed to defend the Anarchists against the government troops. The capital was on the brink of a bloody confrontation, and the moment seemed ripe for an organized show of force. The Mensheviks later argued that the Bolsheviks were prepared to exploit this opportunity for the seizure of power. Sukhanov even claimed that Lenin had worked out elaborate military plans for a Bolshevik coup d’étât, right down to the precise role of specific regiments in the seizure of strategic installations. But there is no evidence for this. It is true that at the First All-Russian Soviet Congress on 4 June Lenin had declared his party’s readiness ‘to assume power at any moment’. But if he was really planning an insurrection, he would hardly have given a public warning of it. Some of the secondary Bolshevik leaders, such as M. Ia. Latsis of the Vyborg Committee, who had close connections with the First Machine-Gun Regiment, certainly wanted to turn the demonstration into a full-scale uprising. But most of the senior leaders seemed to have viewed it as an exploratory test of strength and as a means of putting pressure on the Soviet Congress to take power itself. When the Soviet banned the demonstration on the evening of 9 June, five of the Bolshevik leaders (Lenin, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Nogin) reconvened to call it off. Their more militant comrades protested furiously. Stalin threatened to resign (an offer that was unfortunately rejected) and accused the Central Committee of ‘intolerable wavering’. But Lenin insisted that it was premature for the party to risk everything on a stand against the Soviet. The whole of his strategy in 1917, seen not least in the October seizure of power, was to use the cloak of Soviet legitimation to conceal the ambitions of his party. If the armed demonstration had gone ahead, the Bolsheviks would almost certainly have been expelled from the Soviet and the major strategic thrust of his April Theses — mass agitation for Soviet power — would have been undermined altogether.66

On 18 June the Soviet sponsored its own demonstration in Petrograd. The aim was to rally mass support behind the slogan of ‘revolutionary unity’, a by-word for the Soviet’s continued participation in the coalition, and, from the viewpoint of those who were becoming more radicalized, probably a more acceptable slogan to the call for unconditional support of the government. The Bolsheviks resolved to take part in the march with banners calling for ‘All Power to the Soviets!’, and most of the 400,000 marchers who came out did so under this slogan.67 Perhaps the supporters of the Soviet leaders had deliberately stayed away, as some of the press later suggested. Or perhaps, as seems more likely, the demonstrators did not understand the ideological differences between the Bolsheviks and the Soviet leaders and marched under the banners of the former on the false assumption that it was a mark of loyalty to the latter. Either way, it was a major propaganda victory for the Bolsheviks and did much to encourage their plans in July for another, far more consequential, armed confrontation with the Provisional Government.

iv Gorky’s Despair

Gorky to Ekaterina, 18 June 1917:

Today’s demonstration was a demonstration of the impotence of the loyal democratic forces. Only the ‘Bolsheviks’ marched. I despise and hate them more and more. They are truly Russian idiots. Most of the slogans demanded ‘Down with the 10 Bourgeois Ministers!’ But there are only eight of them! There were several outbreaks of panic — it was disgusting. Ladies jumped into the canal between the Champs de Mars and the Summer Gardens, waded through the water in their boots, pulled up their skirts, and bared their legs, some of them fat, some of them crooked. The madness continues, but it seems that it is beginning to wear the people out. Although I am a pacifist, I welcome the coming offensive in the hope that it may at least bring some organization to the country, which is becoming incorrigibly lazy and disorganized.68

Socialism for Gorky had always been essentially a cultural ideal. It meant for him the building of a humanist civilization based on the principles of democracy and on the development of the people’s moral, spiritual and intellectual forces. ‘The new political life’, he wrote in April, ‘demands from us a new structure of the soul.’ And yet the revolution, as he saw it, had unleashed an ‘anarchic wave of plebeian violence and revenge’ which threatened to destroy Russian civilization. There had been no ‘social revolution’, as Gorky understood the term, but only a ‘zoological’ outburst of violence and destruction. Instead of heralding a new civilization, the Russian Revolution had brought the country to the brink of a ‘new dark age of barbaric chaos’, in which the instincts of revenge and hatred would overcome all that was good in the people. The task of the democratic intelligentsia, as he saw it in 1917, was the defence of civilization against the destructive violence of the crowd. It was, in his own Arnoldian terms, a struggle of ‘culture against anarchy’.69