The ministry of justice commissars were among the first into action, with Maklakov and Basakov appearing at the ministry on February 28 itself.24 On arrival, Maklakov sought to get the ministry moving again. But he didn’t want to appear to be giving the functionaries orders. The revolt might fail, and those who listened to him might pay dearly for it. He called a meeting of the top officials and other ministry personnel. Great numbers arrived. Ironically, the first was D. D. Ivanov, who as judge had but two years earlier condemned him to prison for his article on the Beilis case. Maklakov resisted the temptation to settle accounts with him, but he saw him as the very emblem of the judges who, out of servility, had created the Beilis affair. The ministry officials came forward with proposals for advancing the revolutionary agenda. The most significant one was to telegraph an order for release of Social Democratic deputies who had recently been arrested and sent to Siberia. The commissars also ordered an amnesty for political prisoners and removal of the ban on enrolling Jewish lawyers as “sworn attorneys.” In the event of counterrevolution, the telegraphed order of release would have irrevocably compromised its sender. But the officials seemed eager to embrace the new regime, and Maklakov saw that embrace as reflecting the public-spirited officials’ conscience and complete loss of confidence in the regime.25
The two elements of the future system of dual power—the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet—took shape virtually simultaneously. (In the provinces, the balance of dual power shifted rapidly toward local majorities more in tune with the Soviet than the Provisional Government, and commonly under the influence of the most impassioned orators.)26 The Soviet’s “Executive Committee” formed itself on February 27. Oddly, the Soviet itself, of which the Executive Committee was in principle the delegate, did not meet until the next day. On March 1, Miliukov, as the most politically astute member of the Duma Committee and its de facto leader, composed a list of ministers for the Provisional Government. Although Rodzianko as chairman of the Duma was a natural for head of the government, Miliukov selected Prince George Lvov, who had been head of the Union of Zemstvos and a leader in Zemgor (a union of the Union of Zemstvos and the Union of Towns), which had supplemented the government as providers of military supplies. Richard Pipes’s characterization of him may be unusually vivid but is far from extreme: “A less suitable individual to direct Russia’s affairs in this turbulent era would be hard to conceive. Lvov not only had no experience in public administration, but he professed an extreme form of Populism rooted in an unbounded faith in the sagacity and goodwill of the ‘people.’ He considered central government an unmitigated evil. . . . Vladimir Nabokov, the cabinet secretary, writes: ‘I do not remember a single occasion on which [Lvov] used a tone of authority or spoke out decisively and definitively . . . he was the embodiment of passivity.’” As these defects seem to have surprised no one, Pipes speculates that Miliukov chose him “because, aspiring to leadership in the government himself, he saw in Lvov a convenient figurehead.”27 It appears, however, that by the time of the February Revolution Lvov had so successfully maneuvered among the key elites that his selection as prime minister was virtually inevitable regardless of Miliukov’s preferences.28 Indeed, the tsar at about the same time was authorizing Prince Lvov to form a government, evidently on the understanding that that choice fulfilled the Duma’s wishes.29 Miliukov named himself foreign minister.
Maklakov was widely expected to be named minister of justice. He appears to have been on most of the “short lists” for the post, along (sometimes) with Nabokov.30 Miliukov in fact chose Kerensky. There were important political reasons for doing so: Miliukov and others of the Duma Committee recognized that the new government needed a link to the Petrograd Soviet and the forces it represented. Of the two leftist members of the Duma Committee, Chkheidze did not want to be a minister, and Kerensky did. As for which post, Kerensky’s reputation as defense counsel for victims of political prosecution made justice suitable. Shulgin (a member of the Duma Committee) argued that the “post has no importance,” which in his view made it a suitable spot for the committee’s opening to the left.31 Maklakov seems never to have expressed resentment at having been passed over, though he told friends that no one had offered him a position.32
But Kerensky’s selection by the Duma Committee was not enough to secure him the post. On the very day of that selection, the Executive Committee voted that no socialist should take part in the government—a decision, of course, that fit the standard Marxist doctrine that a bourgeois revolution should precede a socialist one. But Kerensky recognized that the Executive Committee’s ban, to be final, had to be ratified by the Soviet itself, scheduled to meet on March 2. He accepted the post, counting on his ability to sway the Soviet. And so he did. In an impassioned speech, he justified accepting appointment to the Provisional Government without the Soviet’s approval by falsely saying that he’d been allowed only five minutes to decide (actually, he had had overnight). Then he asserted that immediately on becoming minister of justice he had ordered political prisoners released—thus claiming credit for himself for what Maklakov and his active fellow commissars had done before Kerensky was even offered the ministry. Next he turned to the Executive Committee’s rule against socialists’ being members of the Provisional Government: “I resign from the duties of vice-chairman of the Soviet. But I am ready to accept that title from you again if you acknowledge the necessity of it.” The crowd roared, “We do, we do.” So, with no formal vote, Kerensky manipulated the Soviet to reverse the Executive Committee’s decision.33 In his account of the prisoner release, Maklakov makes no mention of Kerensky’s spurious claim of credit.
The choice of Kerensky as the Provisional Government’s bridge to the Soviet seems an unforced error. In chapter 12, on peasant rights, we saw the generally demagogic character of his oratory. His maneuvers to secure his role as the bridge do nothing to boost our confidence in his character. And, as we’ll see in the next chapter, once he became head of the Provisional Government his character flaws precipitated a convulsion that sealed the government’s fate. Surely the Duma Committee could have found a sturdier bridge.
Kerensky’s position, straddling the Provisional Government and the Soviet, nicely symbolizes the awkwardness of the emerging structure. The bourgeois representatives—the Duma Committee and the Provisional Government—fearing the insurgent masses and intent on a restoration of order, desperately sought approval of the Executive Committee and the Soviet. Neither of the latter was in a position to assume power. Only the Executive Committee was small enough to exert itself continuously. And its, or the Soviet’s, assumption of power would likely have precipitated a counterrevolution by military officers. (Indeed, after the revolution Maklakov contemplated the alternative scenario of the liberals’ refusing to form a government; he speculated that the military would then have stepped forward to scatter the Soviet.)34 So the Executive Committee relatively easily worked out an accord with the Duma Committee: the latter agreed to various policy commitments by the Provisional Government (most of which were already part of the Duma Committee’s plans) in exchange for the Executive Committee’s agreement to have the Soviet issue a proclamation (in fact drafted by Miliukov) calling on the masses to support the new government.
But the Executive Committee proved unable to deliver. First, the Soviet itself issued Order No. 1, which radically altered the country’s military structure. Though it did not literally call for election of officers, it came close. The order provided for election of soldiers’ committees in military units and for control of weapons by company and battalion committees. Plainly the Soviet didn’t contemplate the army as an instrument of the new state in any traditional sense. Second, when the Soviet came to express its position on the Provisional Government, it didn’t use the words negotiated with Miliukov but issued only a “half-hearted, wishy-washy endorsement, which fostered suspicion rather than trust among the masses for the Provisional Government.” The Executive Committee was simply n
ot in a position to control either the insurgents or the Soviet. Hasegawa again: “It would not be unreasonable to assume that the leaders of the Executive Committee found it more comfortable to talk with the representatives of the Duma Committee than to deliver speeches in front of the masses in the general sessions of the Soviet.”35
Also aggravating the new regime’s hazards was Nicholas II’s decision to abdicate in favor of his brother rather than his son. Initially he signed a document abdicating in favor of 12-year-old Aleksei, for whom Nicholas’s younger brother Grand Duke Mikhail would have been regent. Before the abdication could be issued, he had second thoughts. As the new regime would not welcome him in the vicinity of the throne, he recognized that if he issued the first draft he would likely never see his son again. So instead, at 11 p.m. on March 2, he signed an abdication purporting to name Mikhail his successor. (It was backdated to 3 p.m., to avoid the impression that it was a response to pressure from Duma representatives Shulgin and Guchkov, who had arrived in the interim; in fact, it wasn’t.) The purported transfer to Mikhail was of doubtful legality. Nicholas II was not the owner of Russia’s throne, free to give it away as an ordinary person might give away a parcel of land. And transfer to Mikhail rather than Aleksei meant that the monarchy as an institution would forfeit whatever sympathy might have accompanied the accession of a child.
On March 3 members of the Provisional Government and the Duma Committee met to discuss whether Mikhail should abdicate or accept the throne. Kerensky strongly favored abdication; the others present agreed, except for Miliukov. (Maklakov was not present at this meeting or the later meetings with Mikhail himself.) Miliukov argued for the need of a unifying symbol that could attract the support of the masses, who he believed didn’t share the Petrograd insurgents’ radicalism. Miliukov’s opposition at least persuaded the group to leave it up to Mikhail. So the same men met with Mikhail later in the morning, joined by Shulgin and Guchkov. In that conversation only Miliukov and Guchkov favored Mikhail’s taking the throne.36 Mikhail then had a few words alone with Lvov and Rodzianko, and Rodzianko made clear to him that the government could not assure his personal safety. (As we’ll see, Rodzianko’s advice was not disinterested.) Whether his warnings were decisive is contested,37 but in any event Mikhail declined.
Mikhail accompanied his refusal of the throne with a manifesto drafted initially by Nekrasov but completed by Nabokov and Baron B. E. Nolde. Via this manifesto Mikhail accepted the throne only in the event of being asked to do so by a constituent assembly elected by “universal, direct, equal, and secret vote.” He asked the people in the meantime to “submit” to the Provisional Government, declaring it to be “endowed with full authority” until the constituent assembly adopted an alternative form of government.38
According to Mark Vishniak, Maklakov’s left-wing Kadet colleague, Maklakov had lost hope in the February Revolution by March 3.39 Maklakov’s later writings make apparent that the key issues were the failure to pressure Grand Duke Mikhail to accept the crown and the wording of his manifesto. The lack of a monarch pulled the legal rug out from under both the constitution and the Duma: “If a monarch remained, then a constitution survived—laws, institutions, a legal terrain for action; there would be no revolution. If by contrast there was no longer a monarch, then the two legislative bodies were by the same act dispossessed, the Duma included, having no legal existence apart from the monarch; there was then no longer a constitution.”40 Of course when Maklakov says that with preservation of the “legal terrain . . . there would be no revolution,” he means that the immediate events of February 23 to March 3 would not themselves have constituted a revolution—only a coup d’état. But for him the distinction was critical: preservation of the old institutions would have improved the chances for a liberal outcome.
As to the grand duke’s manifesto, Maklakov viewed it as compounding the destructive effects of his abdication. Mikhail had, on the advice of the Duma representatives,
signed a strange and criminal manifesto, which even if he had been a monarch he would have no right to sign. Despite the Constitution, without the consent of the Duma, he declared the throne vacant until the calling of a constituent assembly. He established on his own authority the franchise for this assembly. And until its convocation, despite the Duma and the Constitution, he transferred absolute power, which he himself did not have, to a Provisional Government, which in his expression “was formed on the initiative of the Duma.”41
The drafters indeed appear to have shown little or no interest in legal or institutional continuity, and thus in whatever order or legitimacy it might have supplied. In the grand duke’s manifesto the Provisional Government springs out of the Duma but then miraculously receives “full authority” from the grand duke, and so it is no longer responsible to the Duma at all.42 Or, as Maklakov put it elsewhere, “The government, having issued from the Duma, repudiated it and delivered itself disarmed to its adversaries”43—the radicals in the Soviet and their allies.
To constitute the Provisional Government without legal foundations was also to constitute it without legal limitations. Maklakov drew a contrast between these arrangements and the “despised” constitution of 1906 (the October Manifesto and its implementation through the Fundamental Laws). The latter, he wrote, “introduced into Russian life the idea of lawfulness and of the subjection of authority to law. This crashed in the February Revolution, which restored autocracy, first that of the Provisional Government, then that of the Communist party and its heads, Lenin and Stalin.”44
It may seem extravagant to accuse the feeble Provisional Government of wielding “absolute power” and to analogize it to Lenin and Stalin, but Mikhail’s abdication manifesto implicitly dismissed any notion of legal bounds on the new government’s authority. It completed the process begun a few days earlier by the Duma’s failure to claim authority as an institution: the new institutions were wholly untethered to the old.
Among the challenges facing the Provisional Government was the conflicting nature of its claims to legitimacy. On the one hand it arose from the revolution in the streets. On the other hand, it claimed title, as it were, from Nicholas II’s abdication (under pressure from a despairing military leadership and virtually the entire political elite). Indeed, the Provisional Government’s link to Nicholas was expressed in his abdication manifesto, which exhorted Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich to act in accord with principles to be established by the representatives of the people.45 And shortly before his abdication Nicholas had issued a manifesto—rendered moot by the abdication itself—agreeing to put in place the Kadet dream of a government responsible to the Duma.46
But the Provisional Government’s two claims to legitimacy were anything but mutually reinforcing. As Hasegawa puts it, “The simultaneous pursuit of legitimacy from the revolution as well as from the old regime was logically as well as politically impossible and was doomed to fail.”47 Each source of legitimacy drew on a powerful social element that had as a major characteristic—perhaps its defining characteristic—a lack of experience and skill at working with the other element to negotiate a coherent national policy.
Personal power struggles among the liberals also affected the choices made in February. Rodzianko had a notion that the Duma Committee and the Duma would function (pending creation of a constituent assembly) as Russia’s upper and lower legislative bodies, with the Provisional Government acting as a cabinet responsible to them.48 He was chairman of both and apparently saw them as avenues to fulfillment of his own ambitions. Thus he could easily see a continuing monarchy as a potential threat to his position.49 But Rodzianko’s calculation seems a gross misreading of the nature of parliamentary government. Such regimes typically include a figure largely outside the political hurly-burly, a monarch or president, to symbolize national unity and to smooth transitions from one political coalition to another. Rodzianko’s persuasiveness with Mikhail had eliminated that model, leaving the Duma institutionally orphaned.
In
the early days after February, Guchkov sought to give the Duma a chance, politically, by correcting the taint of the shrunken franchise of June 3. His idea was for the Duma itself to elect new members, a procedure evidently sometimes used by zemstvos and city dumas. The Duma would add back in all available members of the prior Dumas, especially of course those of the first two, elected under a relatively broad franchise. He consulted various people, including members of the Duma Committee and Maklakov. But his proposal evidently received little or no support except from Maklakov and Rodzianko.50 In April Rodzianko called Maklakov to discuss the possibility of reassembling the Duma. (In fact, informal gatherings of these deputies occurred several times during the brief life of the Provisional Government.) But as Mikhail’s abdication had cast aside the Fundamental Laws, Maklakov mused, in whose name might such a summons go out? He noted the irony that in advising Mikhail to abdicate, Rodzianko had perhaps “saved the grand duke’s life but sacrificed that of the Duma.”51
In the course of these discussions Maklakov received a call from Kerensky, asking him whether he was “plotting” against the Provisional Government and saying that summoning the Duma would be an act of hostility; it would cause the Soviet to demand the Duma’s immediate dissolution. Maklakov later argued that the Provisional Government could have used the Duma as a counterbalance to the Soviet. For Kerensky, of course, as the Soviet’s man in the Provisional Government, this wasn’t necessarily an advantage, but for the rest of the Provisional Government it could have been, and Maklakov was in retrospect astonished that its members opposed reassembly of the Duma.52
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