22. Miliukov, Vospominaniia, II: 299; Shul’gin, Dni, 182; Nabokov, Vremennoe pravitelstvo, 67–8. Miliukov appears to have decided, on his own, not to root the Provisional Government in the Duma partly in order to exclude Duma president Mikhail Rodzyanko. This was also the Duma of Stolypin’s 1907 electoral “coup,” which the Cadets had denounced. In 1920, Miliukov would come to regret his decision to sideline Rodzyanko in favor of the non-entity Prince Lvov. In 1920, Rodzyanko emigrated to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, where four years later he died penurious at age sixty-four.
23. Kakurin, Razlozhenie armii, 25–7; Burdzhalov, Russia’s Second Revolution, 179.
24. Storozhev, “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia 1917 g.”; Nabokov, Vremennoe pravitelstvo, 39–40; Startsev, Vnutrenniaia politika, 114–6. In the event, the Provisional Government retained all tsarist laws not expressly overturned or amended until such time as a Constituent Assembly might be convoked.
25. The state subsidized publication of Duma “resolutions” in hundreds of thousands of copies. A June 1917 Congress of Soviets voted to “abolish” the Duma; in fact, the Provisional Government formally abolished the Duma on October 7, as announced in the newspapers. Vladimirova, Kontr-revoliutsiia, 72; Drezen, Burzhuaziia i pomeshchiki 1917 goda, 4–5; Gal’perina, “Chastnye soveshchanii gosudarstvennoi dumy,” 111–7.
26. Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi, I/i: 51; The Russian Revolution, I: 36.
27. Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, I: 135–6.
28. Kochan, “Kadet Policy in 1917.” See also Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi, I/i: 51; Miliukov, The Russian Revolution, I: 36.
29. Gaida, Liberal’naia oppozitsiia. An earlier portrait of the wartime liberals portrayed them as not power-hungry and cowardly: Pearson, The Russian Moderates.
30. Hoover Institution Archives, Aleksandr F. Kerensky papers, box 1, folder 19: “The February Revolution reconsidered,” March 12, 1957, with Leonard Schapiro (typescript with crossouts); Schapiro is admiring of Kerensky. See also Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization, 25. The last okhranka chief admitted that his agency had had Kerensky under surveillance, but “unfortunately” their target “was protected by his immunity as a member of the Duma”; Vasilyev wrote to the tsarist justice minister asking to revoke Kerensky’s immunity—but before the answer came, Kerensky was himself justice minister and read Vasilyev’s request. “In his [new] capacity,” added Vasilyev, Kerensky “took cognizance of the proposal that I had made to restrict his liberty.” Vasilyev, Ochrana, 213–4. Vasilyev died in Paris in 1928.
31. Zviagintseva, “Organizatsiia i deiatel’nost’ militsii Vremmenogo pravitel’stva Rossii”; Hasegawa, “Crime, Police and Mob Justice,” 241–71. At least one great okhranka cryptographer-analyst escaped to Britain and helped London break Soviet codes through the 1920s.
32. Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, I: 73; Medlin and Powers, V. D. Nabokov, 62–3, 83–4; Dubentsov and Kulikov, “Sotsial’naia evoliutsiia vysshei tsarskoi biurokratii,” 75–84; Orlovsky, “Reform During Revolution,” 100–25; Rosenberg, Liberals, 59. On the February revolution in the provinces, see Ferro, La revolution de 1917, 126–31. For Moscow, see Burdzhalov, “Revolution in Moscow.” For Turkestan, Khalid, “Tashkent 1917.”
33. Kulikov, “Vremennoe pravitel’stvo,” 81–3; Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 3. On armies in political crises and revolution, see Finer, Man on Horseback.
34. Melancon, “From the Head of Zeus.”
35. Chernov, Great Russian Revolution, 103. The Soviet poorly mapped onto party affiliations, frustrating not only Chernov.
36. Boyd, “Origins of Order Number 1”; Shlyapnikov, Semnatsadtyi god, I: 170; Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 189.
37. Hasegawa, February Revolution, 396.
38. Izvestiia, March 2, 1917; Golder, Documents of Russian History, 386–7; Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, II: 848–9; Shliapnikov, Semnatsadtyi god, I: 212–3; Zlokazov, Petrogradskii Sovet rabochikh, 58–62; Miller, Soldatskie komitety russkoi arm, 25–30. See also the slightly different version in Pravda, March 9, 1917.
39. Medlin and Powers, V. D. Nabokov, 88; Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god, II: 236; Gapoenko, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, 429–30. Guchkov himself would go in May.
40. Golder, Documents of Russian History, 386–90; Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, II: 851–4. Order No. 2 was not published in the main Soviet organ. Order No. 3, which was published, reiterated the ban on officers’ elections. Izvestiia, March 8, 1917.
41. Prince E. N. Trubetskoi, a member of the Cadets, captured elite hopes, too, writing that “everyone has participated in the revolution, everyone has made it: the proletariat, the military, the bourgeoisie, and even the nobility.” Rech’, March 5, 1917. On elite fears, see Pipes, Russian Revolution, 289.
42. Purishkevich, Bez zabrala, 3–4. It was also printed in Moscow and Mogilyov, and circulated in typescript to the army and fleet.
43. Purishkevich, Vpered!; Moskovskie vedmoosti, July 23, 1917: 1–3. See also P. Sh. Chkhartishvili, “Chernosotentsy v 1917 godu,” Voprosy istorii, 1997, no. 8: 133–43.
44. Rendle, Defenders of the Motherland.
45. Novaia zhizn’, June 29, 1917. Gorky had worked on a barge.
46. Daulet, “The First All-Muslim Congress of Russia”; Davletshin, Sovetskii Tatarstan, 64–5; Rorlich, Volga Tatars, 127–9; Dimanshtein, Revoliutsiia i natsional’nyi vopros, III: 294–5.
47. “The great task is accomplished!” the Provisional Government declared on March 6, 1917. “A new, free Russia is born.” Vestnik vremmenogo pravitel’stva, March 7, 1917, in Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, I: 158; Rech’, March 8, 1917: 5; Stepun, Byvshee i nebyvsheesia, II: 48–9.
48. Leonard Schapiro, “The Political Thought of the First Provisional Government,” in Pipes, Revolutionary Russia, 97–113; White, “Civil Rights,” 287–312.
49. Rechi A. F. Kerenskogo (Kiev, 1917), 8. In April 1917 Kerensky said to frontline soldiers, “We can play a colossal role in world history if we manage to cause other nations to traverse our path.” A. F. Kerenskii ob armii i voine (Odessa, 1917), 10, 32; Rech’ A. F. Kerenskogo, voennogo i morskogo ministra, tovarishcha predsedatelia Petrogradskogo Soveta rabochikh i sol- datskikh deputatov, proiznesennaia im 29 aprelia, v soveshchanii delegatov fronta (Moscow, 1917), 3; Pitcher, Witnesses, 61. Irakli Tsereteli, Soviet leader, envisioned “the final victory of democracy inside the country and beyond its borders.” Tsereteli, Vospominaniia, I: 147.
50. “At present,” observed the eminent scholar and Cadet politician Vladimir Vernadsky in May 1917, “we have democracy without the organization of society.” Holquist, Making War, 49 (citing Rech’, May 3, 1917).
51. Classical liberals, too, quickly rediscovered the importance of “state consciousness” (gosudarstvennost’). Rosenberg, Liberals, 134–69; Holquist, Making War, 49–51.
52. Anton Denikin, who fought side by side with Kornilov in Habsburg Galicia, remarked that “he was extremely resolute in conducting the most difficult and even apparently doomed operations. He had uncommon personal bravery, which inordinately impressed his soldiers and made him extremely popular with them.” Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, 145–6. See also Kerensky, The Catastrophe, 297.
53. Kerensky, “Lenin’s Youth—and My Own,” 69. Later, Kerensky would go so far as to claim that “after old Ulianoff’s death, my father, by virtue of his close association with the Ulianoff family, had become the family’s guardian.” Kerensky, The Catastrophe, 79.
54. Chernov, Great Russian Revolution, 174.
55. Kolonitskii, “Kerensky,” 138–49; Kolonitskii, “‘Democracy’ in the Consciousness of the February Revolution”; Stankevich, Vospominaniia, 65.
56. Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek, 48
; White, “Civil Rights,” 295.
57. “To him came the honest and the dishonest, the sincere and the intriguing, political leaders, and military leaders, and adventurers,” wrote General Denikin, “and all with one voice cried: Save us!” Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution [1961], 463.
58. Fitzpatrick, “The Civil War,” 57–76 (at 74).
59. Daniels, Red October, 12–3.
60. Sigler, “Kshesinskaia’s Mansion”; Hall, Imperial Dancer; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, III; 58–61. Armed bands seized the property in March 1917. Krzesinska’s lawyer appealed to the Provisional Government for redress, to no avail, but she did win a favorable ruling from the courts (the order for eviction of the Bolsheviks did not come until June and it was not immediately enforced).
61. Kshesinskaia, Vospominaniia, 191.
62. Reacting to rumors that the villa had become a nest of orgies, witches’ Sabbaths, and gun stockpiling, the police, with agreement of the Petrograd Soviet, evicted the occupants. “Numbering in all about a hundred, they were the lowest dregs of humanity from the slums of Petrograd, clad in tatters and with evil-looking faces bearing every sign of debauchery and vice,” recalled Boris Nikitin, the head of the Counter-Intelligence Bureau, which was itself subject to scurrilous rumor. He added: “Most of them had obviously not used soap and water for years. . . . Among the prisoners were about thirty who might, from their clothing, have been women.” Nikitin, Fatal Year, 82–98; Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, II: 386–8.
63. Vestnik istorii, 1957, no. 4: 26.
64. Bennigsen and Wimbush, Muslim National Communism, 16.
65. Wade, “Why October?”
66. The Provisional Government, in March, had discussed whether, if Lenin were to return, to allow him in the country. Medlin and Powers, V. D. Nabokov, 143.
67. Lenin’s trip across the front lines was arranged by Jacob Furstenberg, alias Ganetsky, an Austrian-Polish socialist with a smuggling business who worked for Alexander Helphand, known as Parvus, a Minsk-born Jew, German Social Democrat, holder of a doctorate, and a war profiteer. Yevgeniya Sumenson, who was arrested in July 1917 by the Provisional Government counterintelligence, confirmed she handled money, including receiving more than 2 million rubles all told from Ganetsky. After February 1917, Lenin’s correspondence with Ganetsky is said to have been exceeded only by letters with Inessa Armand. Shub, Lenin, 182; Mel’gunov, “Zolotoi nemetskii klyuchik,” 157; Hahlweg, Lenins Ruckkehr nach Russland, 15–6; PSS, XLIX: 406; Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin, II: 200–12. Ganetsky continued to run financial errands for Lenin once the Bolsheviks were in power, but in 1937 he was arrested, tortured, and executed as a Polish-German spy and Trotskyite; in fact, Stalin had sent Ganetsky to Poland in September 1933 to retrieve a Lenin archive. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 127–8. The idea of approaching the Germans may originally have been Martov’s.
68. Scheidemann, Memoiren enies Sozialdemokraten, 427–8; Freund, Unholy Alliance, 1.
69. At the German border, the passengers switched to a two-carriage train (one for the Russians, one for their German escorts), for a trip to a Baltic port, boarded a Swedish steamer for Sweden, whence by train they headed for Finland, traveled across the Finnish border in sledges, and boarded a final train for twenty miles to Petrograd. Platten, Die Reise Lenins, 56; Zinov’ev, God revoliutsii, 503; Hahlweg, Lenins Ruckkehr nach Russland, 99–100; Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda, II: 77–8; Karl Radek, Living Age, February 25, 1922: 451; Senn, Russian Revolution in Switzerland, 224–8. Radek remained in Stockholm through October.
70. Martov and his Menshevik comrades waited for official Russian foreign ministry permission and landed back in Russia around a month after Lenin, May 9, 1917, leaving other Mensheviks already in Russia to respond to the challenge of Lenin’s April theses. Getzler, Martov, 147–50.
71. Katkov, “German Foreign Office Documents.”
72. G. Ia. Sokol’nikov, “Avtobiografiia,” in Sokol’nikov, Novaia finansovaia politika, 39–50 (at 42).
73. Paleologue, La Russie, III: 305, 307–8. Much later, Miliukov would write in his memoirs that at the time, he had no knowledge of Lenin’s “new” stance. Miliukov, Vospominaniia, I: 337.
74. Andreev, Vospominaniia, 52–5.
75. Pallot, Land Reform in Russia; Pozhigailo, P. A. Stolypin. Those who argue that on the eve of the war the land question in Russia was being ameliorated have a point. Frank, “The Land Question.”
76. Less than half of the gentry (perhaps one or two of every five) lived on the land in 1914. Becker, Nobility and Privilege, 28.
77. One scholar observed that “the generals seemed to be talking and acting like revolutionaries.” Yaney, Urge to Mobilize, 418.
78. Kotel’nikov and Mueller, Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie; Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire; Ivan Sobolev, Bor’ba s “nemetskim zasiliem.” The Orthodox Church and the crown (imperial household) also owned considerable land.
79. Shanin, Awkward Class, 145–61.
80. Keller and Romanenko, Pervye itogi agrarnoi reformy, 105.
81. “The Peasants’ Revolution,” in Daniels, Russian Revolution, 87–91. Perhaps the most intriguing rendering of the peasant revolution can be found in the fictional Zamyatin, “Comrade Churygin Has the Floor,” 193–203.
82. Antsiferov, Russian Agriculture, 290–6; Keep, Russian Revolution, 211–2.
83. Figes writes of a localized and locally oriented response to an urban-based, largely unsympathetic government. He also notes that the peasants drove out the gentry via land seizures but did not overturn the traditional institutions of local governance. Figes, Peasant Russia, 42, 66–7.
84. Channon, “Tsarist Landowners.” By late 1927, upward of 10,750 former gentry still lived on their estates in the RSFSR, but more than 4,000 were evicted, placing more land in peasant hands. Danilov, Rural Russia, 98.
85. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 717–8; Kim, Istoriia Sovetskogo krest’ianstva, 16; Danilov, Pereraspredelenie zemel’ nogo fonda Rossii, 283–7; Atkinson, End of the Russian Land Commune, 178–80; Maliavskii, Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie.
86. Harding, Leninism, 92–5.
87. “Protokoly i rezoliutsii Biuro TsK RSDRP (b) (mart 1917 g.),” Vestnik istorii KPSS, 1962, no. 3: 143; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 163; Ulam, Stalin, 132–4.
88. Pravda, March 15, 1917. Molotov would recall that Kamenev and Stalin “expelled me because they had more authority and were ten years older.” Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 91.
89. Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god, I: 219–20; Slusser, Stalin in October, 46–8. Stalin later apologized for his “mistaken stance” upon arriving back in the capital in March 1917. Sochineniia, VI: 333.
90. Raskol’nikov, Krosnshtadt i piter, 54.
91. Lih, “The Ironic Triumph of ‘Old Bolshevism.’”
92. Kamenev, Mezhdu dvumia revoliutsiiami.
93. Burdzhalov, Vestnik istorii, 1956, no. 4: 51; Poletaev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, 15–6; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 168.
94. PSS, XXXI: 72–8; Slusser, Stalin in October, 60; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution [1961], 312–3. The day after publication, April 8, a meeting of the Bolshevik Petersburg City Committee voted 13 to 2 to reject Lenin’s position. (The Bolshevik committee in the capital did not change its name to Petrograd.)
95. Tsapenko, Vserossiiskoe soveshchanie soveta rabochikh; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, I: 114, 162–3. “It’s simply shit!” Lenin shouted, while in exile reading a speech by Chkheidze, head of the Petrograd Soviet. “Vladimir, what language!” Krupskaya supposedly interjected. Lenin: “I repeat: shit!” Futrell, Northern Underground, 154.
96. Sukhanov, Zapiski, III: 26–7, VII: 44.
97. “Russia at the moment,” Lenin stated, “is the freest of all the belligerent coun
tries in the world,” and the revolutionaries had to use this liberty to their advantage. PSS, XXXI: 113–6; Daniels, Red October, 4; Service, Lenin, II: 157.
98. Leninskii sbornik, VII: 307–8. No transcript of either the speech or discussion survives, but we have Lenin’s notes for the speech: Leninskii sbornik, XXI: 33. See also Raskol’nikov, Na boevykh postakh, 67.
99. Abramovitch, Soviet Revolution, 30.
100. Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, I: 287.
101. Uglanov, “O Vladmire Iliche Lenine.” Back in 1905, Martov had allowed that in the coming bourgeois revolution, the socialists could take power, but only if the revolution were in danger. In 1917, Martov twisted himself in knots trying to distinguish between a struggle for power (vlast’) and for government (pravitel’stvo). Getzler, Martov, 167 (citing Iskra, March 17, 1905, and Rabochaia gazeta, August 22, 1917).
102. Service, Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 53–7. Many provincials were not in the least Leninist and had to be browbeaten to set aside their desire to reunite with Mensheviks.
103. Ulricks, “The ‘Crowd’ in the Russian Revolution”; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution [1961], 124–66 (esp. 130–1).
104. No contemporary source places Stalin there. Trotsky, who was not yet a Bolshevik, also was absent. Slusser, Stalin in October, 49–52; Trotsky, Stalin, 194. Only later was Stalin inserted, either in the group who had boarded Lenin’s train on the Russian side of the Finnish-Russian border (Beloostrov), or as head of the welcoming party at the Finland Station. On Stalin’s later insertion, see Zinoviev, “O puteshestvii,” Pravda, April 16, 1924; Yaroslavsky, Landmarks, 94; and Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 93. Molotov, late in life, was perhaps “remembering” the Soviet painting of Lenin alighting on the platform with Stalin behind him.
Stalin, Volume 1 Page 113