What was this? The Provisional Government was not a well-intentioned but hapless bunch that would be undone by unprecedented economic collapse and Bolshevik sedition. The rebellious old-regime insiders had long claimed to want a constitutional monarchy with a “responsible” government, by which they meant a government rooted in parliamentary majorities, but in their great historical moment, they immediately created another central government suspended in the air. When Miliukov had first publicly announced the membership of a Provisional Government in the Tauride Palace’s columned Catherine Hall on March 2, one person had interjected, “Who elected you?” “The Russian Revolution elected us,” Miliukov answered, and vowed to step aside “the moment representatives, freely elected by the people, tell us they wish to give our places to others more deserving of their confidence.”26 No one had elected them, and, crucially, no one would be given the opportunity to un-elect them. To be sure, the self-assigned government did promise the “immediate preparation for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal, equal, direct and secret ballot, which will determine the form of government and the constitution of the country.” The government added that it had not “the slightest intention of taking advantage of the military situation to delay in any way the realization of the reforms and measures.” Such a universal-suffrage Constituent Assembly—which is what rendered their government “provisional”—might seem to have made the Duma superfluous.27 But over the eight months of the Provisional Government’s existence, through four iterations (March, May, July, September), it would fail to bring a constitutional convention into being. Difficult circumstances cannot account for this failure. (In 1848, when France’s July Monarchy fell, a Constituent Assembly was convened within four months.) Rather, Miliukov and the Cadets deliberately stalled on elections for the Constitutional Assembly, privately fearful of the votes by “war-weary” soldiers and sailors, to say nothing of the peasant mass.28 The constitutionalists, who had no constitution, avoided the ballot box. The February Revolution was a liberal coup.
All through the war, some classical liberals in Petrograd as well as Moscow had been clamoring to take power for themselves—and now they had it, or so it seemed.29 The one socialist in the initial Provisional Government, the thirty-six-year-old Kerensky—who served as justice minister, then war minister, and finally prime minister, having held no significant executive office before 1917—would later write that “with abdication of the emperor all the machinery of apparatus of Government was destroyed.”30 True, but Kerensky had been the keenest inside proponent for an end to the monarchy. In addition, the Provisional Government deliberately abetted the Russian state’s disintegration. On March 4, 1917, rather than try to salvage a police force out of the dissolving tsarist police, whose offices in the capital had been ransacked, the Provisional Government formally abolished the Department of Police and okhranka, while reassigning Special-Corps-of-Gendarmes officers to the army. But the newly formed “citizen militias” that were supposed to replace the police failed miserably: looting and social breakdown spread, thereby hurting the poor as much as the rich, and staining the cause of democracy.31 (Some militias, predictably, were headed by former convicts who escaped or were released from prison in the chaos.) On March 5, 1917, the Provisional Government dismissed all governors and deputy governors, almost all of them hereditary nobles, in an attack on “privilege” and preemption of “counterrevolution.” Some of these provincial executives had resigned of their own accord and some had been arrested locally. Still, most governors had participated in ceremonies to inaugurate the new Provisional Government, only to be treated as, ipso facto, disloyal.32 The Provisional Government never acquired local branches, and the “commissars” it dispatched to local governing bodies could be ignored. Those local bodies, meanwhile, took time to get up and running, then often succumbed to economic and governance chaos. The sole major institutions of the “old regime” to survive were the ministerial bureaucracy and the army. But the influence of central state functionaries cratered and, under Kerensky, the Provisional Government would fatally wreck the all-important army, too.33
The new Russia had one organizing principle that could not be ignored and was up for grabs: the lodestar of “the revolution.” Miliukov’s decision not to root the government in the Duma invited the elected Petrograd Soviet to fulfill that crucial parliamentary role. The Soviet, whose reemergence had prompted the Provisional Government into existence, came to occupy more and more of the rooms in the Tauride, symbol of opposition to tsarism and of elected representation.34 And yet, as a hybrid of both representative and direct democracy (like a Jacobin club), the Soviet—eventually with more than 3,000 members—struggled mightily, and, as we shall see, ultimately unsuccessfully, to live up to its popular mandate amid ever more radicalized expectations.35 Indeed, even before the announcement of the Provisional Government’s formation, garrison soldiers, when ordered by the Duma’s Military Commission to return to their nearby barracks and submit to discipline, had stormed into a session of the Soviet on March 1, 1917, and laid out demands. The angry garrison soldiers had first tried to present their case to the Duma, but were rebuffed.36 “I don’t know whom to deal with, whom to listen to,” one soldier deputy to the Petrograd Soviet complained of military authority that day. “Everything is unclear. Let’s have some clarity.”37 What became known as Order No. 1 authorized “committees of representatives elected from the lower ranks” to adjudicate relations between soldiers and their officers, effectively terminating formal discipline in the army. De facto, such a state of affairs already obtained in the rebellious garrison, but now soldiers and sailors at the front, de jure, would have to obey their officers and the Provisional Government only “to the extent that” orders were deemed not to contradict decrees of the Soviet.38 On March 9, the new war minister, Alexander Guchkov, one of the two monarchist Duma representatives sent to obtain Nicholas II’s abdication, had been asked by the tsar whether such abdication would have consequences. Now, Guchkov learned of Order No. 1 for the army only upon its publication. He telegraphed General Alexeyev at front headquarters, reporting that “the Provisional Government has no real power of any kind and its orders are carried out only to the extent that this is permitted by the Soviet,” which controls “the troops, railroads, postal and telegraph services.” Guchkov suggested that the government resign en masse to acknowledge its lack of authority.39
The Provisional Government would last all of 237 days, 65 of which were spent trying to form a cabinet (that was more time than any of its four different cabinets would last). Here was the further rub: the effective authority of the Soviet, too, was widely overestimated. Soldiers’ committees did not see themselves as subordinate to the Soviet. On March 5, the Provisional Government and Soviet had jointly issued Order No. 2, expressly denying the rumored right to elect officers and reaffirming the necessity of military discipline—to no avail.40 Trotsky would famously dub this situation “dual power,” but it more resembled “dual claimants to power”: a Provisional Government without a legislature or effective executive institutions, and a Petrograd Soviet amounting to an unwieldy quasi-legislature that was not legally recognized as such.
A third grouping existed as well: the political right, which initially accepted the head-turning Provisional Government’s replacement of the failed autocracy but which lived in fear as well as hope.41 Around 4,000 officials of the “old regime” suffered arrest during the February Revolution, many turning themselves in to escape being torn to pieces by the crowds. In fact, bloodshed had been relatively minor: perhaps 1,300 wounded and 169 deaths, mostly at the naval bases of Kronstadt and Helsinki, where the rank-and-file lynched officers (amid rumors of their treasonous activities). Still, the post-February press stepped up the vilification of rightist organizations, and revolutionaries assaulted the offices of the most notorious far right group, the Black Hundreds. (The Petrograd Soviet seized some rightist printing presses for its own use.) W
ithin weeks of Nicholas II’s abdication, Vladimir Purishkevich—cofounder of the 1905 right-wing Union of the Russian People, and coassassin of Rasputin—had allowed in a pamphlet, which circulated widely in typescript, that “the old regime cannot be resurrected.”42 By July 1917, however, the extreme right would regain its footing, and Purishkevich would be pointedly listing Russia’s revolutionary Jews by their real names and demanding dissolution of the Petrograd Soviet as well as a “reorganization” of the “cowardly” Provisional Government.43 Over on the less radical right, many believed, with cause, that they had played a significant role in the downfall of Nicholas II and ought to have a place in the new order, but the varied associations of nobles and landowners, business elites, church officials, tsarist state functionaries, rightist military officers and self-styled patriots of all stripes had grave difficulty being accepted into the new order after February 1917. On the contrary, merely for exercising their legal right to organize, traditional conservatives were subjected to charges of “counterrevolution.”44 These accusations against an establishment mostly desirous of continuing to support the February Revolution but essentially not allowed to do so would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And then there was the empire. Upon the removal of the multinational institution of the tsar, many of the imperial borderlands declared themselves national units (not provinces) with “autonomy in a free Russia,” but their streams of urgent telegrams to the Provisional Government in the capital often went unanswered, and the borderlands began edging toward de facto independence—Finland, Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Baltics. “Everybody agrees,” wrote Maxim Gorky in June 1917, “that the Russian state is splitting all along its seams and falling apart, like an old barge in a flood.”45
Of course, to many people this weakening was liberating. Between May 1 and 11, 1917, the Muslim caucus of the defunct Duma convened the first All-Russia Congress of Muslims, an act of religious and communal solidarity, with some 900 attendees (double the number expected) from across the country and political spectrum—only the tiny handful of Bolshevik Muslim activists refused to attend. It opened with recitation of a verse from the Qu’ran, then Professor S. A. Kotlarevsky, head of the foreign religions bureau in the Provisional Government’s interior ministry, made a speech promising freedom of conscience and national educational development, while calling for a single, unified country, rather than federalism based upon ethnoterritorial units. Many Muslim delegates expressed disappointment. Some, especially Tatars, advocated for a single state for all Turkic peoples (under Tatar domination); a few pan-Turkic delegates refused to speak Russian, although no single Turkic language was intelligible to all the delegates. The final resolution on state organization entailed a compromise: “The type of governmental structure that will serve the best interests of the Muslim peoples of Russia shall be a united (federal) republic based on territorial autonomy; for Muslim peoples with no territorial claims, a people’s republic based on national cultural autonomy shall be secured.” Although more than 200 delegates signed a petition of protest over the vote for women’s equal right to inheritance and against polygamy, it passed—making Russia the first country with a large Muslim population to do so.46
Certainly the freedom was intoxicating.47 All the subjects of imperial Russia had broken through to an unprecedented degree of civic liberties that were independent of social station: freedom of association and the press, equality before the law, universal suffrage elections to local bodies, rights that the Provisional Government, dominated by lawyers and intellectuals, fixed in obsessive legal detail.48 Kerensky would jubilantly proclaim Russia the “freest country in the world”—transformed from Europe’s last autocracy to its “most democratic government”—and he was right.49 But freedom without effective governing institutions is, ultimately, not enduring. It is an invitation to all manner of adventurists and would-be saviors.50 February’s delirium of freedom, in just a few months, metamorphosed into a desperate longing for “firm authority.”51 By summer 1917, many prominent classical liberal Constitutional Democrats would join figures on both the traditional right and the radical right in seeing a redeemer in General Lavr Kornilov, the Russian army’s supreme commander.
Kornilov, forty-seven years old in 1917, though very short, thin, and wiry, with Mongol facial features, had much in common with the medium-height, thick-set thirty-nine-year-old Jughashvili-Stalin. Kornilov, too, was a plebeian—in contrast to the minor nobles Lenin and Kerensky—and Kornilov, too, had been born on the imperial periphery, in his case in Ust-Kamenogorsk (Oskemen) on the banks of the Irtysh (a tributary of the Ob). His father was a Cossack, his mother a baptized Altai Kalmyk (a mix of Turkic, Mongol, and other tribes conquered by Mongol overlords); he was raised an Orthodox Christian among the nomad-herders of the empire’s Qazaq steppes. But whereas Stalin sought to downplay his full Georgianness and blend into his Russian environment, Kornilov, who was half Russian, played up his exoticism, surrounding himself with red-robed Turkmen guards who wore tall fur hats, carried curved swords, and called their leader Great Boyar in Turkic (a language Kornilov spoke fluently). In further contrast to Stalin, Kornilov had attended the Russian empire’s military schools. He, too, was an excellent student, and, after postings on the border with Afghanistan—whence he led expeditions to Afghanistan, Chinese Turkestan, and Persia—Kornilov graduated from the General Staff Academy in St. Petersburg. In 1903–4, when Stalin was in and out of Caucasus prisons and Siberian exile, Kornilov was posted to British India, where, under the pretext of language study, he prepared a sharp-eyed intelligence report on British colonial troops. During the Russo-Japanese War, when Stalin was raising hell in Georgian manganese mines, Kornilov was decorated for bravery in land battles in Manchuria, after which he served as Russia’s military attache in China (1907–11). There he again traveled widely on horseback in exploration and met the young Chinese officer Jiang Jieshi, better known as Chiang Kai-shek, who later would unify China after a failed constitutional revolution and rule for some two decades. Intelligent and brave, Kornilov appeared cut from the same cloth as Chiang Kai-shek. During the Great War, Kornilov commanded an infantry division and was promoted to major general. While covering for Brusilov’s retreat in 1915, Kornilov fell captive to the Austro-Hungarian forces, but in July 1916, he managed to escape and return to Russia, to wide acclaim and an audience with the tsar. “He was always out front,” Brusilov noted of his subordinate on the battlefield, “and in this he won over his men, who loved him.”52
Kornilov’s star rose in inverse relation to Kerensky’s. The latter’s family hailed from Simbirsk, in central Russia, the same town as the Ulyanov family. “I was born under the same sky” as Lenin, Kerensky wrote. “I saw the same limitless horizons from the same high bank of the Volga.” Kerensky’s father was a schoolteacher and briefly headmaster at the high school where Lenin and Lenin’s brother Alexander studied; Lenin’s father, in turn, was a school inspector for the province and knew Kerensky pere, before the latter moved his family to Tashkent.53 But whereas Lenin looked set to follow in his father’s footsteps, studying for a law degree (Kazan University) to become a state functionary, only to drop out, Kerensky, eleven years Lenin’s junior, finished his law degree (St. Petersburg) and obtained a real job, serving as legal counsel to victims of tsarist repression in 1905, when he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In the Provisional Government, Kerensky, almost alone, did not fear the masses. He bred a monarchist-like cult of himself as the “leader of the people” (vozhd’ naroda), a kind of citizen king. “In his best moments he could communicate to the crowd tremendous shocks of moral electricity,” wrote Victor Chernov. “He could make it laugh and cry, kneel and soar, for he himself surrendered to the emotions of the moment.”54 The kneeling soldiers and others kissed Kerensky’s clothing, cried, and prayed.55 He took to wearing semimilitary attire—the style Trotsky and Stalin would adopt—yet Kerensky likened himself not to Napoleon but to Comte de Mirabeau, the
popular orator who had sought a middle way during the French Revolution. (When Mirabeau died of illness in 1791, his burial inaugurated the Pantheon; by 1794, however, he was disinterred and his tomb given over to Jean-Paul Marat.) But as Russia descended into anarchy, Kerensky, too, began to speak of the need for “firm authority.” Under him, the Provisional Government would begin to backtrack on civil liberties and release and reengage many of the arrested tsarist interior ministry officials, but “firm authority” remained elusive.56 Hence the spiking fascination with Kornilov. The talk of a “man on horseback,” the Napoleon of the Russian Revolution, alighted upon the Kalmyk savior.57 In the event, the idea of a military “counterrevolution”—an expression of hope on one side, dread on the other—would prove more potent than its actual possibilities.
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