Читаем Russia. A History полностью

The year 1917 was a complex story of ‘dual power’, the Provisional Government representing ‘Society’, the soviet representing workers, peasants, and soldiers. With the approval of the soviet, the Duma Committee established a ‘Provisional’ Government, its cabinet drawn largely from liberal Duma circles. Thus the ‘bourgeois’ government required by socialist theory had finally emerged. It vowed to hold free elections for a Constituent Assembly and, in the interim, was to exercise the plenitude of executive, legislative, and even judicial power of the ancien régime. From the outset the Provisional Government had an uncertain status: the Duma committee had simply usurped power, and the soviet agreed to give its support ‘only in so far as’ the government followed the ‘democratic’ script for the Revolution.

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.