The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  Chairman of the Council of Ministers

  and Minister of the Interior:

  Prince G. E. Lvov

  Minister of Foreign Affairs:

  P. N. Miliukov

  Minister of Justice:

  A. F. Kerensky

  Minister of Transport:

  N. V. Nekrasov

  Minister of Trade:

  A. I. Konovalov

  Minister of Public Instruction:

  A. A. Manuilov

  Minister of War:

  A. I. Guchkov

  Minister of Agriculture:

  A. I. Shingarov

  Minister of Finance:

  M. I. Tereshchenko

  Controller of State Accounts:

  I. V. Godnev

  Procurator of the Holy Synod:

  V. N. Lvov

  All these roles had long been rehearsed, and the names had appeared in the press in 1915 and 1916. The Duma representatives showed the roster of the proposed cabinet to the Ispolkom and asked for approval, but the latter preferred to leave this matter to the discretion of the “bourgeoisie.”88

  The fifty-six-year-old Lvov was a well-to-do landlord with long experience in the zemstvo movement. During the war, he had chaired the Union of Zemstva and Municipal Councils (Zemgor). According to Miliukov, he had been chosen to head the cabinet because as chairman of Zemgor he came closest to fulfilling the role of society’s “leader,” but suspicions have been voiced that Miliukov chose him because, aspiring to leadership in the government, he saw in Lvov a convenient figurehead.89 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. On assuming office, he declared: “The process of the Great Revolution is not yet completed, yet each day that we live through strengthens our faith in the inexhaustible creative powers of the Russian people, its political wisdom, the greatness of its soul.”90 Lvov carried democratic and Populist convictions to the point of anarchism. When during the weeks and months that followed, provincial delegations would come to Petrograd for instruction, he received them with invariable attention and respect, but flatly refused to give them directives. When asked to appoint new governors in place of those whom the government had dismissed, he responded: “This is a question of the old psychology. The Provisional Government has removed the old governors and will appoint no one. Let them be elected locally. Such questions must be solved not in the center but by the population itself.”91 He carried this principle to extremes, believing that in a genuine democracy all decisions were made by the people concerned,92 the function of government presumably being confined to record-keeping. Vladimir Nabokov, the cabinet secretary, writes: “I do not recall a single occasion when [Lvov] used a tone of authority or spoke out decisively and definitively … he was the very embodiment of passivity.”93 Devoid of imagination, he was unaware of the magnitude of the events in the midst of which he found himself. But then what could one expect of a man who on a visit to Niagara Falls could think of nothing better to say than: “Really, now, what of it? A river flows and drops. That’s all.”94 He trailed this solemn ennui wherever he went.

  Lvov was an utter disaster as Prime Minister, his failure aggravated by the fact that he also took over the Ministry of the Interior. After resigning his post in July, he faded from the picture and in 1926 died in Paris a forgotten man.

  42. Prince G. Lvov.

  Because he was so ineffectual and bland, he was overshadowed by the two most powerful personalities in the cabinet, Paul Miliukov and Alexander Kerensky, Russia’s best known politicians and bitter rivals.

  Born in 1859, Miliukov belonged to an older generation than Kerensky. His major strength lay in inexhaustible energy: he could work round the clock, chairing political meetings and negotiating, and still find the time to write books, edit newspapers, and give lectures. He had a vast store of knowledge—his scholarly studies earned him a secure position as one of Russia’s premier historians. He was also an experienced parliamentarian, neither vain nor emotional. What he totally lacked, and what would wreck his career, was political intuition. Struve said of him that he practiced politics as if it were chess, and if it were, Miliukov would have been a grand master. He would time and again arrive at a political position by the process of deduction and persist in it long after it was obvious to everyone else that it was doomed. As Foreign Minister, his insistence first on retaining the monarchy and then on claiming for Russia Constantinople and the Straits reflected this shortcoming.

  Kerensky was Miliukov’s opposite: if his rival was all theory and logic, he was all impulse and emotion. Thanks to his feel for the popular mood, he emerged early as an idol of the Revolution; thanks to his emotionalism, he proved incapable of coping with the responsibilities which he had assumed.

  Only thirty-six in February 1917, he had long groomed himself to lead the coming revolution. In youth he had displayed no definite ideology: his biography reveals a man of immense ambition in search of a cause. Eventually, he joined the Socialists-Revolutionaries. He first attracted national attention as a defense lawyer in celebrated political trials (e.g., the Beilis case and that of the Lena workers). In the Fourth Duma, he assumed leadership of the amorphous Trudovik faction and thanks to his rhetorical gifts became the spokesman for the entire left. Police reports made public after the February Revolution revealed that in 1915 and 1916 he had led a double life. Taking advantage of parliamentary immunity, Kerensky had traveled throughout Russia to confer with revolutionaries, whom he sought to organize for subversive purposes.95 Long before the Revolution he had been regarded—and regarded himself—as a rising star. Aware of a physical resemblance to the French Emperor, he liked to strike Napoleonic poses. He had great theatrical gifts and resorted to gestures and other devices which cooler heads dismissed as melodrama but which the crowds loved. He could arouse and sway the masses as no one else, but the effect of his rhetoric was short-lived. Contemporaries thought he lacked talent forjudging people, a defect which, combined with an impetuous personality, in the end destroyed him politically.

  Kerensky wanted to build his career in revolutionary Russia by providing a unique link between the two elements of the dyarchy, the “bourgeoisie” and “democracy,” and in this ambition he to some extent succeeded. In drawing up the Duma cabinet, Miliukov set aside two portfolios for socialist deputies in the Ispolkom: his hope was that they would provide a bridge between the cabinet and the Soviet. Chkheidze was offered a specially created post of Minister of Labor. Faithful to the resolution of the Ispolkom to stay out of the “bourgeois” cabinet, he declined. Kerensky, on the other hand, was desperately eager to take over the Ministry of Justice: a cabinet post combined with membership on the Ispolkom would put him (after Chkheidze’s refusal) in an unrivaled position as intermediary between the two central institutions of the new regime. He asked the Ispolkom for authorization to join the cabinet. When his request was denied, Kerensky went over the head of the Ispolkom to the “masses.” In an impassioned speech to the Soviet he pledged that as minister he would never betray democratic ideals. “I cannot live without the people,” he shouted in his pathetic manner, “and the moment you come to doubt me, kill me!” Having uttered these words, he made ready to faint. It was pure melodrama, but it worked. The workers and soldiers gave him a rousing ovation and carried him to the room where the Duma Provisional Committee was in session. Unable to stand up to this display of mass approval, the Ispolkom consented to Kerensky’s accepting the Justice portfolio, but it never forgave him for the blackmail.96 Kerensky now resigned as deputy chairman of the Soviet, but kept his seat on the Ispolkom. In the months ahead, as the authority of the Provisional Government waned, he inexorably rose to the top by virtue of his dual position.

  An urgent responsibility of the Provisional
Government was dealing with ex-tsarist officials, both those who had been taken into custody by vigilante groups and those who had turned themselves in to the Duma seeking protection. On February 28 and March 1, hundreds of such individuals crowded the halls and chambers of Taurida. Here, Kerensky, as Minister of Justice, came into his own. He would allow no violence: “The Duma sheds no blood” was the slogan he launched and managed to make good on in the face of ugly mobs ready to lynch those whom he himself only weeks before had denounced as traitors. He rescued high tsarist officials from certain death by having them taken into custody. Sometimes he personally snatched them from the hands of mobs bent on murder, including Protopopov and Sukhomlinov. He ordered the officials transferred to the Ministerial Pavilion, located next to Taurida and linked to it by a protected passageway. They sat here, under heavy guard, with strict orders not to converse. During the night of March 1–2, with a show of force to impress the crowds, they were transferred to the Peter and Paul Fortress: the diminutive Protopopov seemed shrunk still smaller from terror as he was driven with a guard’s gun pressed to his head. When space in the fortress ran out, the overflow was put into Mikhailovskii Manege. It is estimated that in the first days of the Revolution, 4,000 persons were arrested or placed in protective custody. Many of them would perish in the Bolshevik “Red Terror.”

  43. Alexander Kerensky.

  The February Revolution was relatively bloodless. The total number of killed and wounded has been estimated at between 1,300 and 1,450, of whom 169 were fatalities. Most of the deaths occurred at the naval bases in Kronshtadt and Helsinki, where anarchist sailors lynched officers, often on suspicion of “espionage” because of their German-sounding surnames.*

  The position of the government was unenviable. It had to share power with the Soviet, controlled by radicals determined to advance the revolution and prepared, in the name of social ideals, to sabotage the very war they wanted to pursue. Nor did it have a clear notion of its function. Ostensibly, it was a mere caretaker government, put in place to keep the country together until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. “They believe that authority has fallen from the hands of the legal government,” Zinaida Gippius noted in her diary on March 2, “they have picked it up, will safeguard it, and will turn it over to the new legal authority which will bear no resemblance whatever to the old.”97 But this attitude proved entirely impractical because the government was at once beset by a multitude of problems that would not wait. In other words, it suffered not only from having to share power with another body but also from confusion as to how to use the power that it was allowed to claim.

  Although the Provisional Government had cleared its personnel and program with the Ispolkom, the latter felt no obligation to reciprocate and from the outset legislated on its own. The most striking example of such independence is the notorious Order No. 1, which it issued on March 1 without consulting the Duma, although it concerned the most vital institution of the country in time of war, its armed forces.

  One of the myths of the Russian Revolution is that Order No. 1 was dictated by a crowd of grubby soldiers. Sukhanov has left a vivid picture of the Social-Democratic lawyer N. D. Sokolov seated at a table in Taurida and writing down the demands of the troops. There even exists a photograph which seems to lend visual credibility to this version of the order’s origins.† Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that the document had a less spontaneous origin. It was initially formulated, not by rank-and-file soldiers, but by civilians and garrison delegates picked by the Ispolkom, some of them officers and most of them affiliated with the socialist parties. Shliapnikov leaves no doubt that the principal clauses of Order No. 1 were formulated by socialist intellectuals, eager to secure a dominant influence over the garrison.98 Although the order reflected some genuine soldier grievances, it was first and foremost a political manifesto. Its authors were well versed in the history of revolutions and aware that traditionally the principal counterrevolutionary threat came from the armed forces. Determined not to allow this to happen in Russia, they wanted to reduce the authority of the officers over the troops and to keep weapons out of their hands. Martynov notes that from the first day of the Revolution the Provisional Government and the Ispolkom engaged in a tug-of-war over the army:

  44. N. D. Sokolov drafting Order No. 1: March 1, 1917.

  The Provisional Government leaned on the commanding staff and officers, whereas the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies leaned on the rank-and-file. The celebrated Order No. 1 was, as it were, a wedge inserted into the body of the army, after which it split and began rapidly to fall apart.

  99

  The Ispolkom exploited soldiers’ complaints over their ill treatment by officers as a means of subverting the authority of the officer staff, which was not something the troops asked for. Suffice it to say that of the seven articles in Order No. 1 only the last two addressed themselves to the status of the men in uniform; the remainder dealt with the role of the armed forces under the new regime and had as their purpose depriving the “bourgeois” government of the opportunity to use them as Cavaignac had done in 1848 and Thiers in 1871. Some rank-and-file soldiers and sailors had no difficulty understanding this. A sailor, appropriately named Pugachev, who dropped in at the Merezhkovskiis’ after having taken part in the vote on Order No. 1, told them: “Educated folk will read it differently. But we understood it straight: disarm the officers.”100

  The order was addressed to the “Garrison of the Petrograd Military District,” but it was immediately interpreted as applicable to all the armed forces, at the front as well as in the rear.101 Article 1 called for the election in every military unit, from company to regiment, as well as in the navy, of “committees” modeled on the soviets. Article 2 provided for every company to elect one representative to the Petrograd Soviet. Article 3 stated that in respect to all political actions, members of the armed forces were subordinated to the Petrograd Soviet and their committees. Article 4 gave the Petrograd Soviet the authority to countermand orders of the Provisional Government bearing on military matters. Article 5 stipulated that control over all military equipment (rifles, machine guns, armored vehicles, etc.) was to be assumed by company and battalion committees; they were not to be turned over to officers under any conditions. Article 6 accorded off-duty soldiers the same rights as civilians, relieving them of the obligation of saluting and standing at attention. Article 7 abolished the practice of addressing officers by honorary titles and forbade officers to speak to soldiers in a rude or familiar manner.

  45. Political meeting at the front: Summer 1917.

  It is difficult to believe that when the Ispolkom approved Order No. 1 and distributed it to the armed forces, it did not realize the consequences. It is equally difficult to believe that in approving this extraordinary document it thought it was merely responding to soldier complaints. The order’s inevitable effect was to subvert the authority of the government and the officer corps over the armed forces. As soon as it came to be known to the troops, they formed everywhere, at the front and in the rear, military “committees”: army committees, corps committees, divisional committees, as well as regimental, battalion, and company committees, a bewildering array of overlapping groups. Those functioning at the lower levels (company, battalion, and regiment) were ordinarily staffed by rank-and-file soldiers and resembled, in their structure and procedures, urban soviets. But those operating at the higher echelons immediately fell under the control of Menshevik, Bolshevik, and SR intellectuals, often recently commissioned university students, who used them to advance their political agenda—a military equivalent of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. At every military level there now took place endless meetings with interminable discussions, followed by a flood of mandatory “resolutions.” Senior officers came to be treated as class enemies: as their authority waned, the chain of command broke down.

  No less damaging was Article 4, which read: “The orders of the Military Commission of the State Du
ma are to be carried out only in those instances when they do not contradict the orders and resolutions of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.” This clause struck at the very heart of the government’s responsibility for the conduct of the war. The Ispolkom viewed itself as in charge of the armed forces and the Minister of War as its employee: on one occasion (March 6) it even complained that the Minister of War was “disinclined to subordinate himself” to the decisions of the Soviet.102

  Guchkov, who learned of Order No. 1 only after its publication, sought in vain to have the Soviet retract it. The best he could get was to have the Ispolkom issue Order No. 2, which only compounded the damage. Guchkov wanted the Soviet to state unequivocally that Order No. 1 applied only to the troops in the rear. But Order No. 2, issued on March 5, did not say that. It dealt mainly with the question whether officers should be elected by their men and conveyed the impression that the Ispolkom approved of such a procedure. Nowhere did it state that Order No. 1 did not apply to front-line troops.103

  On March 9, less than two weeks after the new government had been formed, Guchkov cabled General Alekseev:

  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 of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which controls the most essential strands of actual power, insofar as the troops, railroads, [and] postal and telegraph services are in its hands. One can assert bluntly that the Provisional Government exists only as long as it is permitted to do so by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. In particular, in the military department, it is possible at present to issue only such orders as basically do not contradict the decisions of the above-mentioned Soviet.

  104

  The monarchy played no part in these critical events. Nicholas’s last order of any consequence was his February 25 instruction demanding the suppression of street disorders. Once this order proved unenforceable, the monarchy ceased to matter. After that date, it not only lost control over events but receded into the background as the political conflict began to revolve around the relationship between the Duma and the Soviet.