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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.