Provisional Government
History has judged the Provisional Government harshly, but one must remember that it ruled during a raging war and profound social cataclysm. Eight months afforded little time to build a new state, wage war, and resolve acute social and political questions that had accumulated over many decades.
Its ministers included the leading figures in the Progressive Bloc and public organizations. Most prominent were the Kadet Party leader, P. N. Miliukov (Minister of Foreign Affairs) and the Octobrist leader, A. I. Guchkov (Minister of War). Other appointments proved fateful—in particular, the choice of Prince Georgii Lvov as Minister-President and Minister of Internal Affairs. Although Lvov distinguished himself as head of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and Towns, he was a weak leader and ill-equipped to lead a democratic revolutionary state. At best he exuded a dreamy Slavophile faith in ‘the people’ (narod); at worst he refused to use the instruments of power to restore public order or instil respect for the rule of law that he so cherished. Some appointments were surprising, especially the choice of A. I. Konovalov (a Moscow industrialist) as Minister of Finance and an obscure Kievan sugar magnate, M. I. Tereshchenko, as Minister of Trade and Industry. Although socialists in the Petrograd Soviet declined to join the cabinet, one did agree to serve: Alexander Kerensky a radical SR and Duma deputy, became Minister of Justice.
On 8 March the Provisional Government announced its ‘Programme’ of democratic principles and goals, which envisioned a revolutionary transformation on liberal principles, with appropriate guarantees of civil rights and more autonomy for minorities. The government also vowed to establish the rule of law and later appointed a juridical commission to give counsel on legislation and inculcate respect for the judicial order. But the most far-reaching plank in this Programme was its promise to end bureaucratic hegemony over political life and to create self-government at every level, down to the township (volost’) level. In effect, the government refashioned the pre-revolutionary structure (provincial administration, zemstvos, and town dumas) into a new system of zemstvos and town dumas now elected on the basis of democratic suffrage. The new bodies were to assume the powers of police and administration that had long been identified with autocracy itself. The Programme promised to convoke a constituent assembly ‘democratically’ elected and empowered to resolve the questions of legitimacy and to determine the form of the new Russian state. It was a heady agenda, one not easily realized, especially in the throes of war and social upheaval.
The February Revolution produced not only a liberal, reformist government, but also the soviets, supported by popular forces committed to ‘democracy’. The Petrograd soviet formally recognized the Provisional Government, but immediately began to encroach on its authority. The most famous instance was ‘Order No. 1’: a harbinger of social revolution in the army, it established the soviet’s authority over army units and created soldiers’ committees to check the regular command hierarchy, thereby unleashing a radical ‘democratization’ in the army itself. The military committees, nominally obliged to maintain order, fanned revolutionary and anti-war sentiments among soldiers and officers.
In the provinces the revolution was greeted with jubilation and a replication of ‘dual power’. As word spread from Petrograd, local activists seized power from tsarist administrators and police, who silently melted away. The new structure emerged with astonishing rapidity. Committees of Public Organizations, usually centrist, took formal authority. Chairmen of the old zemstvo boards briefly replaced tsarist governors until ‘commissars’ were sent. Simultaneously, workers and soldiers created soviets in towns, while peasants formed their own village organs—volost committees, peasant unions, and even peasant soviets.
‘Democratization’ extended to the grass roots, blanketing the Russian landscape with township and village committees, factory committees, and every imaginable variety of soviet, union, and professional organization. These organs—manned sometimes by plebeians, but often by white-collar workers—filled the power vacuum left by the ancien régime. As the revolution unfolded, better organized, often antagonistic social groups emerged as the main actors.
Amidst this ‘democratization’, the Provisional Government endeavoured to rule and reform. It granted virtual independence to Poland (in any event, under occupation by the Central Powers) and autonomy to Finland, freed political prisoners, drafted legislation on self-government, made plans for judicial reform, and established countless committees to consider other critical issues. Indeed, the government contemplated or initiated reform in virtually every imaginable sphere—in education (democratization of access and administration), labour relations (the eight-hour day and arbitration chambers), corporate law, and religion (secularization of schools, liberalization of divorce, and separation of Church and state).
It proved far easier, however, to appoint committees than to reform. Apart from the magnitude of its agenda, the government had to rely on the old tsarist bureaucracy and to operate in the absence of an elected, authoritative legislature. Typically, the government established a committee, with great fanfare, collected data and drafted laws, but inevitably elected to defer the main issues for resolution by the constituent assembly. Still, given its narrow timeframe, the government addressed a broad range of critical issues.
Meanwhile, the revolution did not stand still. Within a few weeks, it was clear that the Provisional Government must immediately address new problems (especially food shortages and greater industrial production) as well as old ones (such as land and labour reform). Ultimately, the government was driven to nullify its liberal Programme and adopt very different social and economic policies, essentially more corporatist and socialist than liberal. On 25 March, for example, the government established a grain monopoly to regulate prices for cereals and mandate deliveries to the state—in effect, declaring all grain to be state property. To manage this monopoly, it created a new hierarchy of provisioning committees and ultimately a Ministry of Food Supply. When the government entrusted provisioning (and much of consumer supply) to co-operatives, it undermined not only the market for foodstuffs but also the established commercial infrastructure of the empire. Thus a regime professing liberalism and tarred as ‘bourgeois’ asserted state authority over the economy, shoving aside entire business firms and an entire class. But in the case of land reform the government acted with less abandon: consigning this matter to resolution by the constituent assembly it merely created a Main Land Committee to ‘study’ the issue and directed local land committees to gather information and adjudicate land disputes over such matters as rents and competing land claims.
In the interim, the question of war eroded the foundations of ‘dual power’. At issue were war aims and hence the terms for stopping the carnage. On 14 March the Petrograd Soviet issued an ‘Appeal to All the Peoples of the World’, repudiating expansionist war aims and espousing instead ‘revolutionary defencism’, i.e. to prosecute the war only in defence of Russia and its revolution against German authoritarianism and imperialism. It became clear, however, that the government had not abandoned the tantalizing gains promised by its allies. To allay soviet apprehensions, on 28 March the Provisional Government issued a ‘Declaration on War Aims’ renouncing territorial claims, but on condition that peace cause neither humiliation nor the deprivation of ‘vital forces’. In fact, the government retained its original war aims: in a note to the allies on 18 April, the Foreign Minister (Miliukov) ascribed the government’s Declaration to domestic politics and reaffirmed its determination to observe all treaty obligations, with the implication that the allies must also honour their promises, especially on Constantinople and the Straits.
News of this note ignited a new political crisis in Petrograd, with mass demonstrations on 23–4 April protesting against the government’s foreign policy. The worker and soldier demonstrators carried banners demanding peace and ‘Down with the Bourgeois Government’, and ‘Down with Miliukov and Guchkov’. The Provisional Government
refused to deploy troops and use force to restore order. After the two most unpopular ministers (Guchkov and Miliukov) resigned, the government invited the Petrograd soviet to help form a coalition. The soviet leaders reluctantly agreed, a decision that instantly blurred the lines of dual power and made them culpable for the policies of the Provisional Government. This first coalition, which included six socialist ministers (including Viktor Chernov as Minister of Agriculture), avowed a commitment to ‘revolutionary defencism’ in foreign policy, state regulation of the economy, new taxes on the propertied classes, radical land reform, and further democratization of the army.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks
Prior to Vladimir Lenin’s return in the famous ‘sealed train’ in early April, the Bolsheviks had already undergone a radical shift in party policy. At the outbreak of the February Revolution, the radical underground activists who dominated the Petrograd apparatus rejected the ‘bourgeois Provisional Government’ and demanded a revolutionary soviet government. But the ranking Bolshevik leaders (including Iosif Stalin) who returned to the capital in early March overruled the radicals and not only joined other socialists in supporting bourgeois rule, but even sought reconciliation with the Mensheviks. This initial crisis revealed deep internal differences that would persist throughout 1917 and beyond.
The differences emerged again in the ‘April crisis’ following Lenin’s return on 3 April. Such divisions made Lenin’s role decisive: his powerful drive, and obsessive belief in revolution overcame the internal party fissures and gave the Bolsheviks a decisive edge over moderate socialists and the Provisional Government. Lenin’s ‘April Theses’ promised peace, bread, land, and workers’ control—that is, not only to end the unpopular war and food shortages, but also to satisfy long-standing grievances. Most controversial of all, he demanded the elimination of dual power and transfer of ‘all power to the soviets’. The ‘professional revolutionaries’ in the party were aghast; it took all Lenin’s energy and personal authority to overcome their caution and to unite the party behind his vision.
His vision drew on mass radicalism and his own ideological utopianism. It also offered a strategic alternative to the discredited ideologies of autocracy and liberalism, which were splintered, politically ineffective, and without a deep social base. The language of socialism and class conflict became the idiom of public discourse for the press, rally, public meeting, and all manner of political propaganda. Lenin projected a strong vision of transforming through technocratic change, of reshaping consciousness, and of making the proletariat a true universal class—for itself and, if need be, in spite of itself.
The All-Russian Crisis
The first coalition quickly exposed the gulf between liberalism and socialism—and the government’s inability to bridge that chasm. The conflicts in the coalition correlated directly with the declining authority of the Provisional Government (and, by contrast, to the surge in Bolshevik influence). On a whole range of issues the coalition could neither agree internally nor satisfy the spiralling expectations of various social groups.
Disagreement in the coalition was profound, especially on central questions like economic regulation, labour, and land. Liberal and socialist ministers agreed on the need for government regulation of the economy, but for radically different ends: liberals sought to preserve the market in wartime, socialists imagined the beginnings of socialist planning. The two sides also differed on the land question: liberals wanted to uphold private property and legality, whereas the left sought to sanction peasant land seizures and local ‘initiative’ regardless of legal niceties. As to workers’ demands (for higher wages, shorter hours, and worker control), the liberal ministers supported factory owners in the patriotic production for the war. Socialists were in a quandary: as state officials supporting labour discipline and resumption of work, they risked appearing as capitalist stooges and becoming easy targets for Bolshevik attacks.
The war itself was divisive. It made liberals illiberal, disposed to defer elections and constituent assembly until more propitious times; they were also under pressure from the allies to keep fighting. The war also invited attacks from the left; neither ‘revolutionary defencism’ nor the ‘renunciation of territorial claims’ stopped the carnage or defused popular discontent. The fact that non-Bolshevik socialists actively supported the war effort (even the June offensive) was grist for Bolshevik propagandists, who identified their own anti-war stance with popular will and tarred all war advocates, especially socialists, as enemies of the people. The disastrous June offensive had no effect on German lines and only hastened the demise of the Russian army, shattering the fragile truce between officers and soldiers and unleashing a wave of mass insubordination and desertion.
Equally explosive was the nationality question. The revolution was a powerful catalyst for the development of national consciousness, encouraging entire peoples to demand autonomy and independence and calling into question the very existence of the Russian Empire. Although national movements varied considerably, most demanded democratization and self-government and drew their leadership from the intelligentsia and ‘semi-professions’—white-collar personnel employed by the co-operatives, zemstvos, schools, and the like. In Finland and Ukraine, for example, activists created national equivalents of the class-based soviets that became centres of growing national consciousness and power. Even the ‘backward’ Muslims organized a Muslim Congress in May to proclaim their hostility to Russian colonialism and to demand autonomy.
Shaken by these anti-Russian movements, neither socialists nor liberals were prepared to comprehend, let alone control, the national revolutions of 1917. In essence, their term ‘imperial’ (vserossiiskii, ‘all-Russian-empire’) connoted ‘Russian’ (russkii), denying any special status for non-Russian peoples; their term ‘statehood’ (gosudarstvennost’) subsumed empire, not just state. Believing that the revolution and new state were a ‘democratic’ antithesis to tsarism, the Provisional Government naïvely assumed that by definition this state could not oppress minority nationalities, that their programme of self-government and democratization would satisfy the aspirations of national minorities, that the latter would be only too grateful. They thus tended to hypostatize the Russian state and to insist that national groups support the democratic revolution and its government. The ministers dimly understood modern nationalism, perhaps because it was so flaccid among Russians themselves. They failed to anticipate that national strivings would quickly escalate into demands for autonomy and independence, and that as minority and Russian interests diverged, the government inevitably would tread in the footsteps of the tsars. Surprised and dismayed, the Provisional Government and much of Russian public opinion accused the minorities of stabbing Russia in the back and undercutting its democratic revolution.
Still more menacing was the threat from lower classes in the Russian heartland—above all, the workers. Some historians have revived an earlier tendency to denigrate the workers’ role in the revolution and even discount it altogether. Recent works by Richard Pipes and Martin Malia, for example, deny that the revolution had any significant social dimension and claim that the prime mover was ideology, the intelligentsia, or some primal Russian obsession with power and authoritarianism. While this ‘un-revisionism’ rightly suggests that the revolution involved more than working-class aspirations, it revives the anti-Bolshevik stereotypes of ‘working-class backwardness’—hence Bolshevik manipulation, hence the illegitimacy and ‘un-Marxian’ character of the 1917 Revolution. Ironically, this conservative view derives from Menshevik sour grapes: to account for their own failure to attract workers, Mensheviks claimed that the workers were just green peasants easily seduced by cunning Bolsheviks.
Beyond the Mensheviks’ confession of their own political ineptness, this thesis has little to commend it: collective action of workers profoundly shaped the politics of 1917. Indeed, the aggressive measures of factory owners and the government’s inability to mediate or satisfy minimal demands contribut
ed to the steady radicalization of the workers. The result, as S. A. Smith has shown, was the growing importance of organizations such as factory committees, as a powerful force for ‘democratization’ demanding workers’ control and self-management and as hotbeds of Bolshevik activism. These organizations enabled Bolsheviks to offer an alternative to the trade unions and to outflank their Menshevik rivals. Nor can any serious account of 1917 ignore strikes and their impact. According to Diane Koenker and William Rosenberg, the eight months of revolution in 1917 witnessed 1,019 strikes involving 2,441,850 workers and employees, led by metal and textile workers (as before), but reinforced by printers and service personnel. It was all a clear expression of dissatisfaction with the Provisional Government and moderate socialists.
Revolution also swept across the countryside, where peasants now found little to prevent the realization of long-standing claims and aspirations. Their maximalist expectations were evident early, as in a resolution from Riazan: ‘The revolution is already three weeks old and nothing has happened yet’—a transparent allusion to the all-important land question. Although the government initially dampened expectations of immediate repartition of land, by early summer the peasant movement had gathered a full head of steam, with a steady increase in disorder, violence, and collective seizure of land. The peasants shared a fundamentally revolutionary, not liberal, conception of law and justice: land should belong to those who actually cultivate it, not the landlords and speculators who merely prevented this rational distribution of land. The war redoubled their feeling of injustice: while city folk obtained draft exemptions and special concessions, the long-suffering village sacrificed its men for slaughter at the front.
Russia A History Page 32