Those peasants who moved actively against the monarchy were soldiers in the Petrograd garrison, who resented the poor food and the severe military discipline and were growing reluctant to carry out orders to suppress disorder among other sections of society. Matters came to a head with the resumption of industrial conflict in February 1917. Wages for workers in the Petrograd armaments plants probably rose slightly faster than inflation in 1914–15; but thereafter they failed to keep pace – and the pay-rates in the capital were the highest in the country. It is reckoned that such workers by 1917 were being paid in real terms between fifteen and twenty per cent less than before the war.17 Wages in any case do not tell the whole story. Throughout the empire there was a deficit in consumer products. Bread had to be queued for, and its availability was unreliable. Housing and sanitation fell into disrepair. All urban amenities declined in quality as the population of the towns swelled with rural migrants searching for factory work and with refugees fleeing the German occupation.
Nicholas II was surprisingly complacent about the labour movement. Having survived several industrial disturbances in the past dozen years, he was unruffled by the outbreak of a strike on 22 February 1917 at the gigantic Putilov armaments plant. Next day the women textile labourers demonstrated in the capital’s central thoroughfares. The queuing for bread, amidst all their other problems, had become too much for them. They called on the male labour-force of the metallurgical plants to show solidarity. By 24 February there was virtually a general strike in Petrograd.
On 26 February, at last sensing the seriousness of the situation, Nicholas prorogued the State Duma. As it happened, the revolutionary activists were counselling against a strike since the Okhrana had so easily and ruthlessly suppressed trouble in the factories in December 1916. But the popular mood was implacable. Army commanders reported that troops sent out to quell the demonstrations were instead handing over their rifles to the protesters or simply joining them. This convinced the local revolutionaries – Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries – that the monarchy could be overthrown, and they resumed the task of agitating and organizing for such an end. The capital had become a maelstrom of revolt; and by closing down the Duma, the Emperor had effectively thrust conservatives and liberals, too, into a posture of outright opposition.
The Emperor was given dispiriting counsel by those whom he consulted. The Duma speaker, the Octobrist Mikhail Rodzyanko, who fancied his chances of becoming prime minister by mediating among the Duma’s politicians, urged Nicholas to agree that his position was hopeless. The Emperor would indeed have faced difficulties even if he had summoned regiments from the Eastern front; for the high command stayed very reluctant to get involved in politics. It is true that the monarchy’s troubles were as yet located in a single city. Yet this limitation was only temporary; for Petrograd was the capital: as soon as news of the events spread to the provinces there was bound to be further popular commotion. Antipathy to the regime was fiercer than in 1905–6 or mid-1914. The capital’s factories were at a standstill. The streets were full of rebellious soldiers and workers. Support for the regime was infinitesimal, and the reports of strikes, mutinies and demonstrations were becoming ever more frantic.
Abruptly on 2 March, while travelling by train from Mogilëv to Petrograd, the Emperor abdicated. At first he had tried to transfer his powers to his sickly, adolescent son Alexei. Then he offered the throne to his liberally-inclined uncle, Grand Duke Mikhail. Such an outcome commended itself to Milyukov and the right wing of the Kadets. But Milyukov was no more in touch with current realities in Petrograd than the Emperor. Appearing on the balcony of the Tauride Palace, he was jeered for proposing the installation of a constitutional monarchy.18
Nicholas’s final measure as sovereign was to abdicate. State authority was assumed by an unofficial committee created by prominent figures in the State Duma after the Duma had been prorogued in February. The formation of the Provisional Government was announced on 3 March. Milyukov, an Anglophile and a professor of Russian history, became Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the War Ministry was occupied by the ebullient Guchkov. But the greatest influence was held by men at the centre and the left of Russian liberalism. This was signalled by the selection of Lvov, who had led Zemgor, as Minister-Chairman of the Provisional Government. It was also evident in Lvov’s invitation to Kerenski, a Socialist-Revolutionary, to head the Ministry of Justice. Lvov and most of his colleagues, while celebrating the removal of the Romanovs, argued that government and ‘people’ could at last co-operate to mutual advantage.
Under direct pressure from the socialist leaders of the anti-Romanov demonstrations in Petrograd, the cabinet announced a series of radical reforms. Universal and unconditional civil freedoms were promulgated: freedoms of opinion, faith, association, assembly and the press. Religious and social privileges were abolished. In addition, elections were promised for a Constituent Assembly and all adults over twenty-one years of age, including women, were to have the vote. These measures immediately made wartime Russia freer than any other country even at peace.
Although they had not secured the post of Minister-Chairman for their leader Milyukov, the Kadets were the mainstay of the first Provisional Government.19 Before 1917 they had tried to present themselves as standing above class and sectional aspirations. In particular, they had aspired to resolve the ‘agrarian question’ by handing over the gentry-owned estates to the peasantry and compensating landlords in cash. But in 1917 they argued that only the Constituent Assembly had the right to decide so fundamental a question and that, anyway, no basic reform should be attempted during the war lest peasant soldiers might desert the Eastern front to get their share of the redistributed land. It is true that the Provisional Government initially condoned the bargaining between striking workers and their employers over wages and conditions; but rapidly the need to maintain armaments production took precedence in the minds of ministers and any industrial stoppage incurred official disapproval.
And so the Kadets, as they observed a society riven between the wealthy élites and the millions of workers and peasants, chose to make common cause with the interests of wealth. Nor did they see much wrong with the expansionist war aims secretly agreed by Nicholas II with Britain and France in 1915. Thus the Provisional Government was not pursuing a strictly defensive policy which would maintain the willingness of soldiers to die for their country and of workers to work uncomplainingly in deteriorating conditions. The Kadets were taking a grave risk with the political dominance they had recently been donated.
They overlooked the fact that they had benefited from the February Revolution without having played much part in it. The heroes on the streets had been Petrograd’s workers and garrison soldiers, who believed that Russia should disown any expansionist pretensions in the war. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries shared this feeling and elaborated a policy of ‘revolutionary defencism’. For them, the defence of Russia and her borderlands was the indispensable means of protecting the civic freedoms granted by the Provisional Government. Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had great political authority. Even before Nicholas II had abdicated, they had helped to create the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and established themselves in its leading posts. And they obtained dominance in the soviets which were established in other cities. Without the consent of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Provisional Government could never have been formed.
Lvov had been given his opportunity because Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, recognizing that workers were a tiny minority of the population, made the judgement that any campaign for the immediate establishment of socialism would lead to civil war. They had always contended that Russia remained at much too low a level of industrialization and popular education for a socialist administration to be installed. On his return from Siberian exile, the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli gave powerful expression to such opinions in the Petrograd Soviet. Mensheviks and Socialist-R
evolutionaries concurred that, for the foreseeable future, the country needed a ‘bourgeois government’ led by the Kadets. Socialists should therefore offer conditional support to Prince Lvov. Even several leading Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd were of a similar mind.
At the same time neither Mensheviks nor Socialist-Revolutionaries renounced their struggle on behalf of the working class; and, through the Petrograd Soviet, they wielded so large an influence that ministers referred to the existence of ‘dual power’. The cabinet could not have been created without the sanction of the Soviet, and the Soviet acted as if it had the right to give instructions to its own supporters – mainly workers and soldiers – which then became mandatory for the entire local population. Order No. 1, issued by the Petrograd Soviet on I March, abolished the code of military discipline in the Petrograd garrison and enjoined troops to subject themselves to the authority of the Soviet.20 This was the most famous of the early derogations from the Provisional Government’s capacity to govern. Other such orders introduced the eight-hour day and various improvements in factory working conditions. Lvov and fellow ministers could do nothing but wring their hands and trust that things would eventually settle down.
Of this there was no likelihood. The crisis in the economy and administration traced a line of ineluctable logic so long as Russia remained at war. Milyukov understood this better than most ministers; but on 18 April he displayed a wilful stupidity unusual even in a professor of Russian history by sending a telegram to Paris and London in which he explicitly affirmed the cabinet’s commitment to the secret treaties signed with the Allies in 1915. The contents of the telegram were bound to infuriate all Russian socialist opinion if ever they became publicly revealed. Just such a revelation duly happened. The personnel of Petrograd telegraph offices were Menshevik supporters to a man and instantly informed on Milyukov to the Petrograd Soviet. The Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks organized a street demonstration against the Provisional Government on 20 April. Against this assertion of the Petrograd Soviet’s strength, the Provisional Government offered no resistance, and Milyukov and Guchkov resigned.
After such a trial of strength, Lvov despaired of keeping a liberalled cabinet in office. His solution was to persuade the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries to take up portfolios in government. Both parties had huge memberships in mid-1917. The Mensheviks had 200,000 members and the Socialist-Revolutionaries claimed to have recruited a full million.21 On 5 May, a second cabinet was created. The Socialist-Revolutionary Alexander Kerenski was promoted to the War Ministry; and the Mensheviks Irakli Tsereteli and Mikhail Skobelev and the Socialist-Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov became ministers for the first time.
Their inclination had once been to let the Kadet ministers stew in their own juice; but they now agreed to join them in the pot in an attempt to take Russian politics off the boil. They did not do this without exacting substantial concessions. Skobelev’s Ministry of Labour pressed for workers to have the right to impartial arbitration in cases of dispute.22 Firmer state regulation of industry was also ordered as part of a governmental campaign against financial corruption. And Chernov as Minister of Agriculture allowed peasants to take advantage of the rule that any land that had fallen into disuse in wartime could be taken over by elective ‘land committees’ and re-allocated for cultivation.23 There was also a modification of governmental policy on the non-Russian regions. Tsereteli, Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, went outside his specific cabinet brief by insisting that broader autonomy for self-government should be offered to Ukraine.24
These adjustments in policy might have worked reasonably well for the liberals and the more moderate socialists if peace had reigned. But society and economy continued to be dislocated by the war. Class antagonisms lost none of their volatility, and the situation in factory, garrison and village was a powder-keg that might be ignited at any time.
Workers in most places desisted from outright violence. But there were exceptions. Unpopular foremen in several Petrograd factories were tied up in sacks and paraded around their works in wheel-barrows.25 Some victims were then thrown into the icy river Neva. Violence occurred also in the Baltic fleet, where several unpopular officers were lynched. Such was the fate of Admiral Nepenin in Helsinki. The dissatisfaction with the old disciplinary code made the sailors indiscriminate in this instance; for Nepenin was far from being the most authoritarian of the Imperial Navy’s commanders. Most crews, at any rate, did not resort to these extreme methods. In both the Imperial Army and Navy the tendency was for the men to restrict themselves to humiliating their officers by behaviour of symbolic importance. Epaulettes were torn off. Saluting ceased and the lower ranks indicated their determination to scrutinize and discuss instructions from above.
The defiant mood acquired organizational form. Workers set up factory-workshop committees, and analogous bodies were established by soldiers and sailors in military units. The committees were at first held regularly accountable to open mass meetings. A neologism entered Russian vocabulary: mitingovanie. If a committee failed to respond to its electors’ requests, an open meeting could be held and the committee membership could straightaway be changed.
The example set by workers, soldiers and sailors was picked up by other groups in society. The zeal to discuss, complain, demand and decide was ubiquitous. People relished their long-denied chance to voice their opinions without fear of the Okhrana, and engaged in passionate debate on public policy and private needs. Indeed politics embraced so large an area that the boundary disappeared between the public and private. Passengers on the trains of the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok elected carriage councils (‘soviet’!). They did this not out of ideological fanaticism but from the consideration that the train would need to pick up and distribute food on the journey. Each carriage needed to ensure it received its fair share. Thus the practical requirements of subsistence were in themselves a stimulus to popular participation.
The country’s cultural customs also had their effect. The village land communes of Russia and Ukraine had traditionally enabled peasants to speak their mind on questions of local importance. This practice had been transmitted to those many industrial workers who hired themselves to factories not as individuals but as members of work-groups (arteli); and soldiers and sailors operated in small units under their terms of service. The apparent ‘modernity’ of politics in 1917 had a past which stretched back over centuries.
The various sectional groups became more assertive after perceiving the cabinet to be tardy in holding elections to a Constituent Assembly. In the absence of an elected government, it was every group for itself. Employers regarded ‘wheel-barrowing’ as the beginning of a Red Terror. They were over-reacting. But there was realism in their claim that the militance of the workers was having a deleterious impact on the economy. Strikes undoubtedly lowered productivity. Even more alarming to owners in Petrograd, from May 1917 onwards, were the instances of factory-workshop committees instituting ‘workers’ control’ over the management of enterprises.26 This was direct action; it was no longer merely forceful lobbying: managers were not allowed to do anything that might incur the disapproval of their work-force. Such a turnabout had its rural equivalent. Already in March there were cases of peasants seizing gentry-owned land in Penza province. Illegal pasturing and timber-felling also became frequent.27
The middle classes, dismayed by what they saw as the cabinet’s indulgence of ‘the masses’, contributed to the embitterment of social relations. They, too, had an abundance of representative bodies. The most aggressive was the Petrograd Society of Factory and Works Owners, which had encouraged a series of lock-outs in the capital in summer 1917.28 Nor was the atmosphere lightened by the comment of the Moscow industrialist P. P. Ryabushinski that only ‘the bony hand of hunger’ would compel workers to come to their senses. Even the owners of rural estates were bestirring themselves as their Union of Landowners campaigned against peasant demands in the countryside.
> Yet there were few gentry owners who still lived on their estates and none of them dared to emulate the capital’s industrialists by making a personal challenge to ‘the masses’. Instead they tried to recruit the richer peasants into the Union of Landowners.29 In reality it would have made little difference if they had succeeded in expanding their membership in this fashion. For the influence of any given class or group depended on its ability to assemble cohesive strength in numbers in a given locality. Not even the Petrograd industrialists maintained their solidarity for very long; and this is not to mention the chaotic rivalries across the country among the industrialists, financiers and large landowners. Demoralization was setting in by midsummer. Savings were transferred to western Europe; the competition for armaments-production contracts slackened; the families of the rich were sent south by fathers who worried for their safety.
Their concern had been induced by the somersault in social relations since February 1917, a concern that was also the product of the collapse of the coercive institutions of tsarism; for the personnel of the Okhrana and the local police had been arrested or had fled in fear of vengeance at the hands of those whom they had once persecuted. The provincial governors appointed by Nicholas II were at first replaced by ‘commissars’ appointed by the Provisional Government. But these commissars, too, were unable to carry out their job. What usually happened was that locally-formed committees of public safety persuaded them to stand down in favour of their recommended candidate.30
The main units of local self-assertion were the villages, the towns and the provinces of the Empire. But in some places the units were still larger. This was the case in several non-Russian regions. In Kiev a Ukrainian Central Rada (or Council) was formed under the leadership of socialists of various types; and, at the All-Ukrainian National Congress in April, the Rada was instructed to press for Ukraine to be accorded broad powers of self-government. The same idea was pursued by the Finns, whose most influential party, the social-democrats, called for the Sejm (parliament) to be allowed to administer Finland. Similar pressure was exerted from Estonia – which had been combined into a single administrative unit by the Provisional Government itself – and Latvia. In the Transcaucasus the Provisional Government established a Special Transcaucasian Committee; but the Committee operated under constant challenge from the socialist parties and soviets established by the big local nationalities: the Georgians, Armenians and Azeris.31
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 7
