The die was cast. Faced with anarchy, fearful of where it might lead, the Duma Committee felt compelled – notwithstanding the hesitance and tenacious loyalty to the regime of many of its members – to assume power. It declared that it would ‘take into its hands the restoration of state and public order and the creation of a government corresponding to the desires of the population’.
Rodzianko was one of several of its members to feel deeply uneasy about this turn. But the situation was clearly summarised by V. V. Shulgin, a smart and unsentimental conservative deputy. ‘If we don’t take power,’ he said, ‘others will, those who have already elected some scoundrels in the factories.’
He referred, of course, to the neighbouring committee a few doors down, also taking on the tasks of organisation, of power: the Soviet. The tumultuous coexistence of these two conflictual, overlapping, imbricated politics, philosophies and social forces had begun.
The hallways of the Tauride Palace, usually a place of pristine bureaucracy disturbed by nothing more untidy or chaotic than a dropped memorandum, had by now become a military camp. In the main Circular Hall lay the corpse of a soldier. Hundreds of his living comrades camped in the palace corridors, squatting at makeshift stoves, drinking tea, smoking and rubbing their eyes, ready to face down the counterrevolution everybody feared was coming. The corridors stank of sweat, dirt, and gunpowder. Offices had become messy storerooms for food and arms. One large meeting room was full of looted sacks of barley. Slung across them a dead pig lay bleeding.
Rodzianko, always a fastidious man, his colleague Stankevich would recall, squeezed past a knot of dishevelled soldiers, ‘preserving a majestic dignity but with an expression of deep suffering frozen on his pale face’. He edged by the rubbish propped against walls and piled at the junctions of corridors. In his memoirs, Shulgin was explicit with his own feelings about this situation. The masses who had overthrown the regime and who now had the temerity to share his palatial workplace were ‘stupid, animal, even devilish’.
‘Machine guns!’ he fantasised. ‘That’s what I wanted. I felt that only the tongues of machine guns could talk to the mob.’
Such were sentiments that underlay the future relationship between Shulgin’s Duma Committee and the Soviet – of which these rough corridor-squatters were the constituency. This would be a foundation of what would, misleadingly, come to be known as dvoevlastie – Dual Power.
Almost as quickly as the Duma deputies, the Soviet created its own military commission, issuing orders to the city’s ad hoc brigades, preparing them for the anticipated battle against the tsar’s forces. But at 2 a.m. on the 28th, Rodzianko and the Octobrist Colonel Engelhardt, of the Duma Committee’s Military Commission, crossed the corridors to announce to the Soviet their intention to place the functions of its Military Commission under their own.
Many on the Soviet side were angry at the presumption, and profoundly uneasy about handing over power to these representatives of the bourgeoisie. It was during this tense standoff that Kerensky reappeared.
He, of course, was a man of both camps, and he was in his element. In he came, tense but confident, holding the attention of the room with a fervid speech begging the Soviet to acquiesce to this coalition, reassuring them, guaranteeing them supervision of the Duma’s commission by representatives of the revolution.
And his argument found fertile ground. The truth was that most on the nascent Soviet commission had an analysis and sense that history was not yet theirs. That in this context there were, must be, limitations to and necessary brakes on their own role, their own power. As yet inchoate, this would be the start of a strange strain of self-limiting politics.
In the early hours of 28 February, the Soviet Committee distributed a leaflet.
The Provisional Committee of the State Duma with the help of the Military Commission is organising the army and appointing chiefs of all military units. Not wishing to disturb the struggle against the old power, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet does not recommend that the soldiers reject the existence of this organisation and subordination to its measures and appointments of chiefs.
‘Not wishing to disturb the struggle against the old power’: here was the hesitancy of those whose socialism taught that a strategic alliance with the bourgeoisie was necessary; that, however messily events proceeded, there were stages yet to come; that it was the bourgeoisie who must first take power, and precluded too vigorous a socialist mobilisation in this, their own unready country.
Decorously glossing this historical anxiety with the convoluted double negative of ‘not recommending rejection’, the Soviet Military Commission was thus swallowed into the Duma’s. So it was the Duma Committee, with this new, grassroots-linked authority, that issued the orders to mutinying soldiers to return to their garrison and recognise their officers.
In those dark hours, in a fug of cigarettes, the exhausted men of the Duma Committee continued dealing with the exigencies of rule, torqued by history into machinating against the tsar and his system, forced to be a revolutionary government. Urgently, they appointed commissars to various vacant ministries.
The Committee had heard of the tsar’s orders to Ivanov. They must prevent his counterrevolutionary forces reaching the capital. Nor could Nicholas himself be allowed to reach Tsarskoe Selo, the town in Petersburg’s suburbs where the Romanovs had a residence and to where Nicholas had already set out to join his wife and family.
By 3:20 a.m., the Military Commission had rushed to take control of the Petrograd stations, and the train lines along which passed people and goods, weapons and fuel and food, information and rumour and politics. Those tracks were sinews of power.
The 28th was a day, Trotsky said, ‘of raptures, embraces, joyful tears’. The sun rose on a changed city.
Not that the fighting was all done. Staccato bursts of gunfire continued to sound. It was on this last, lost day for the old regime’s defenders that some of the ugliest violence occurred.
In the General Staff building, in the Admiralty, in the huge and splendid Winter Palace itself, guarded by its bevy of blank-eyed rooftop statues, holdouts remained. In the Astoria Hotel, senior officers and their families dug in, protected by trusted men. When jubilant crowds gathered in the streets outside, rumours spread of snipers in the hotel. Confusion. A phase-shift of delight to rage. Shouts that someone was shooting down from the windows. Was it true? Too late: true or not, revolutionary soldiers were smashing the glass and walls with their own volleys. Their comrades broke into the hotel’s gilded vestibule, firing, and loyalist soldiers fired back.
A long and spectacular battle, a storm of ricochets, flying plaster chips, gold splinters and cordite, bullets pounding the walls, blood exploding across brocade and stiff-creased jackets. When the smoke and blare ebbed at last, several dozen officers were dead.
The Military Commission occupied the central telephone station and took the post office and central telegraph office. Bublikov, a member of the Duma, took fifty soldiers to the Ministry of Transport and placed everyone there under arrest, including the former minister, Kriger-Voinovskii, unless they pledged allegiance to the Duma Committee. That done, he tapped the iron network, sending a telegram to all the railway stations in Russia. In spurts of electricity, a clicking code following the paths of trains, he informed them that the revolution had taken place. And urged railway workers to come onside with ‘redoubled energy’.
In fact, the Duma Committee had nothing like the power at its disposal that Bublikov implied. His message was a speech act, a performance, and it had a powerful effect. Though it would take several days to reach the furthest reaches of the vast territory, with the news of the revolution spread the revolution itself.
Groupuscules and gatherings formulated plans. Latvians and Finns and Poles and others, in their diasporas and in their homelands, debated political forms. Moscow, close by, second only to Petrograd in political and cultural sway, was most immediately and crucially affected. There, having bee
n late to commence, the revolution seemed eager to catch up. From a more-or-less standing start the previous day, now a general strike rocked the city. Workers seized weapons from police stations and arrested the officers. Crowds sacked jails and set the prisoners free.
‘To call it mass hypnosis is not quite right,’ said Eduard Dune, in 1917 a Moscow teenager just engaging with radical politics, ‘but the mood of the crowd was transmitted from one to another like conduction, like a spontaneous burst of laughter, joy, or anger.’ Most there, he thought, ‘that morning had been praying for the good health of the imperial family. Now they were shouting, “Down with the tsar!” and not disguising their joyful contempt.’
On the Yauza Bridge, police gamely tried to block a huge mass of demonstrators. A metalworker called Astakhov shouted for them to withdraw, and a hot-headed officer replied with lethal fire. Moscow’s February had claimed its first, one of its vanishingly few, martyrs.
The enraged horde stormed the blockade, routed the police, hurled the murderer into the waters of the Yauza, and continued to the city centre. Muscovites gathered there to celebrate the new order. ‘The old regime in Moscow in truth fell all by itself,’ reported the Kadet businessman Buryshkin, ‘and no one defended it or even tried to.’
There was class differentiation in the very liberation. Hawkers ran out of red calico for ribbons that night. ‘Well-dressed people wore ribbons almost the size of table napkins,’ said Dune, ‘and people said to them: “Why are you being so stingy? Share it out among us. We’ve got equality and fraternity now.”’
In Petrograd, the Duma Committee ordered the arrest of ex-ministers and senior officials. That ‘order’ was implicitly a plea, in fact, directed at the revolutionary crowds. And those crowds often had no need to hunt: fearful of the emerging order, representatives of the old rule tended to believe that the newly self-appointed leaders were more likely to keep them alive than was the rough street justice. Tsarist ministers such as the loathed Protopopov, previously minister of the interior, made their own way to the Tauride Palace, in a hurry to hand themselves in. Police officers queued outside its walls, begging to be taken into custody.
And as the Duma Committee took tentative power early on the 28th, as the city lurched, more and more factories and military units assembled and voted representatives to the Petrograd Soviet – a body by then formulating its own plans and powers.
The new delegates overwhelmingly represented moderate socialist groups – fewer than 10 per cent of votes went to the Bolsheviks, the most revolutionary, maximalist wing of the SRs, or to the small militant group, the Mezhraiontsy.
The extraordinary Mezhraiontsy, the Interborough or Interdistrict Group, was a recent radical formation. Dismayed by the hardening split in Russian Marxism, its founders Konstantin Yurenev, Bolsheviks Elena Adamovich and A. M. Novosyolov, the Menshevik Nikolai Egorov and others fostered collaboration. They built goodwill and membership among workers and intellectuals including Yuri Larin, Moisei Uritsky, David Ryazanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Trotsky himself.
Lunacharsky was an unorthodox, erudite and sparkling critic, writer and orator. A gentle man, admired for his sensitivity as well as his brilliance, he had long been opposed to traces of stageism and mechanistic orthodoxy, for which he criticised Plekhanov and the Mensheviks. He argued instead for an ethical, aesthetic Marxism, even advocated ‘God-building’, an atheistic religion of godlessness, of humanity itself. For this and other theoretical sins Lenin had previously attacked him, but by 1917 he and his comrades were all but an external faction of the Bolsheviks.
To the Mezhraiontsy, unity had fast become secondary to the key issue of the war: they gave no quarter to ‘defencism’. With many quick and independent thinkers among their ranks, they were ‘the only organisation’, Yurenev would proudly recall, ‘publishing leaflets in the opening skirmishes of the revolution’. As early as the 27th, their agitators encouraged workers to elect representatives to a soviet – about which they were considerably more enthusiastic than were the Bolsheviks at this point.
The rough-and-ready representative mechanisms of that Soviet meant that soldiers would rapidly be overrepresented. For those soldiers, still giddy with freedom, the Soviet was their organisation: Kerensky’s interventions notwithstanding, many did not trust the Duma Committee, speaking as it did for the officers against whom they had mutinied.
The Duma Committee itself, that semi-reluctant power, was split as to what it wanted. It included those still aspiring to a constitutional monarchy; those for whom history had removed that possibility, whether it had been once preferable or not; and those who considered a republic not only necessary but desirable.
It was not a day of raptures and joyful tears in Kronstadt. In that tiny island town, it was the 28th that was the day of the revolution.
Soldiers of the Third Kronstadt Fortress Infantry marched out of a barracks in Pavel Street, their band playing the Marseillaise. Their comrades from the Torpedo and Mining Training Detachment followed them, shooting an officer dead as they advanced. Then came the First Baltic Fleet Depot. Then the garrison. Sailors joined the throng. The crews of the training ships in the iron-hard harbour came out in mutiny. ‘Do not find it possible to take measures for pacification with personnel from the garrison’, Commander Kurosh tersely reported to his superiors, ‘because there is not one unit I can rely on.’
Men demonstrated in the streets and in the main Anchor Square; they ranged through their sprawling base and barracks, bayonets in hands, following the paths of those executed mutineers. A few respected officers they protected: others they dragged to the square, hurled into a ditch, and shot dead in the dirt. Perhaps fifty in all were put to death. Many more fled or were thrown in Kronstadt’s jail.
The sailors did not know that they lagged a day behind the mainland, that they were joining a revolution already made. They expected a loyalist assault, and their savagery was revenge, yes, but also exigency and urgency in the face of that dreaded battle in a war – a class war. No officer could re-establish discipline now.
‘This is not a mutiny, comrade admiral,’ shouted one sailor. ‘This is a revolution.’
In September of 1916, Governor-General Viren had reported to his superiors that ‘one tremor from Petrograd would be enough and Kronstadt … would rise against me, the officers, the government and anyone else. The fortress is a powder magazine in which a wick is burning down’. Less than half a year later, in the small hours between February and March, Viren was hauled out of his villa in nothing but a white shirt.
He drew himself up and bellowed a familiar order: ‘Attention!’ This time the men just laughed.
They marched him to Anchor Square, shivering in his underclothes in the sea winds. They told him to face the great monument to Admiral Makarov, engraved with his motto: ‘Remember war’. Viren refused. When the Kronstadt soldiers bayonetted him he made them meet his eyes.
The tsar spent the last day of February wandering a frozen Russia by rail. He meandered in luxury, his train a wheeled palace. Gilded baroque interiors, kitchen carriage, filigreed bedroom, study sumptuous with brown leather, Karelian birchwood, cherry-red carpet, swaying through hard and frosted landscapes until darkness descended. A night arrival at Malaya Vishera Station, barely 100 miles from Petersburg. But Bublikov’s telegram had done its work: the stations along the line were occupied by revolutionary troops.
The railway authorities had orders from the Provisional Committee to divert the train, to try to draw the tsar back by rail, send him if they could to Petrograd where those who had overthrown his regime awaited him. The iron road could turn him. Cautious at the confused (dis)information about the situation they received on their arrival, Nicholas and his party hastily changed plans. With a rushed clattering of points, the royal train set swiftly out again, no longer for Tsarskoe Selo, but for the headquarters of the northern front, the ancient medieval town of Pskov. From there, Nicholas thought, perhaps he might find a route to somewhere more congen
ial, and perhaps even some loyal military support.
The man dethroned in all but final formality rattled too late into the dark.
3
March: ‘In So Far As’
In deep night, as the month turned, having cabled with Rodzianko about the situation in the city, General Alexeev sent a telegram to General Ivanov. He ordered him not to advance on the city as planned, because ‘complete peace was restored in Petrograd’.
This was quite untrue. But he and the Duma Committee said what they must to forestall the doomed counterinsurgency. Thus the Romanovian counterrevolution was recalled.
At the Tauride Palace, at 11 a.m. on 1 March, the Soviet Executive Committee met again in a tense session to debate the problem of power. Some on its right argued for coalition with the Duma Committee, since, as per their historical and political theories, the necessity of a transfer of power to the Provisional Government that that committee was forming was not, for them, in dispute. But the Executive Committee’s left-wing minority – three Bolsheviks, two SRs on the hard left of the party, one Mezhraionets – called instead for the formation of a ‘provisional revolutionary government’ without the Duma deputies. This was reminiscent of Lenin’s pre-war position: then, while the Mensheviks had argued that the proletariat and Marxists should abstain from a (necessarily) bourgeois government, Lenin, by contrast, had advocated a provisional, proletariat-led revolutionary government as the best vehicle for the (again, necessarily) bourgeois–democratic revolution.
In fact the Executive Committee minority’s call notwithstanding, the Bolsheviks as a party were not united in their approach either to the Soviet, of which some of their activists remained sceptical, or to questions of government power. That very day, when the left Bolshevik Vyborg District Committee circulated a proclamation in the chaotic streets demanding a provisional revolutionary government, the Bolshevik Party Central Committee clamped down on their ill-disciplined interventions.
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