Russian Revolution

IV

The February Revolution

Strikes and work stoppages in Petrograd accelerated in the first weeks of 1917, triggered by war-weariness, extreme cold and privation, and growing worker activism. Police judged the strikes to be increasingly “political” because of anti-war demands. On Wednesday, March 7 (or February 22 Old Style) a strike and lock-out began at the huge Putilov metal works in the south-west industrial quarter of Petrograd. It was followed the next day (International Women’s Day, March 8) by women’s marches to the centre of the capital demanding bread. Crowds continued to demonstrate on Friday March 9, again moving from outlying industrial districts into the heart of the city, where the ministries and Duma were concentrated. Troops sought to repel the crowds without using force. On Saturday March 10 the capital was brought to a standstill by a general strike; moreover, individual police were killed and there were incidents of Cossack troops refusing to help police clear streets of demonstrators.

Having by now received reports from Petrograd, Nicholas ordered the immediate suppression of disorders by any means necessary. Military commanders planned a show of force for Sunday March 11. That day saw commanders ordering troops to fire on the crowds. The Volynsky regiment of trainee officers killed dozens of demonstrators at Znamenskaya Square and machine gunners shot at crowds from rooftops. Hundreds died that day.

The effect that the violence had on the soldiers of the Volynsky regiment turned the disorders into a revolution. On the morning of Monday March 12 they disobeyed orders, killed their commander, and dispersed to other barracks to muster support. During the day, rebellious soldiers, workers, and students commanded the streets. By nightfall, 70,000 government troops had mutinied. The tsar’s forces in the capital lost all authority.

On Sunday and Monday (March 11 and 12), members of the Duma met privately at the Tauride Palace, where parliament sat, to discuss the crisis. Reluctant to be seen as initiators of a revolution these leaders nevertheless recognized the need “to take responsibility for restoring state and public order”. They established a “Temporary Committee of the State Duma” (or Duma Committee) that soon formed the Provisional Government.

Simultaneously, leaders of the moderate socialist parties, including many with experience of the 1905 Revolution, discussed the revival of the St Petersburg Soviet, or council of workers’ deputies. By Monday afternoon a group of Mensheviks and others, meeting in another wing of the Tauride Palace, established a committee to organize elections among workers and soldiers for a new soviet. That evening a gathering of some 250 intellectuals, workers, and soldiers constituted itself as the new Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies (two days later, “Soldiers” was added to the title). Throughout that night and during Tuesday March 13, the Petrograd Soviet and the Duma Committee struggled to restore order in the streets, take command of the city’s troops and police force, and safeguard its infrastructure. Elections to the Soviet took place and new delegates, including soldiers’ delegates, streamed to the palace.

On Wednesday March 14 soldiers reacted stormily to the Duma Committee’s attempts to return them to barracks. Their representatives flooded the Petrograd Soviet and compelled the moderate leadership to accept Order No. 1, a decree subordinating soldiers only to those orders endorsed by the Soviet, and permitting soldiers to set up committees inside the army to monitor decision-making. With command of the armed forces in the balance, the moderate Soviet leadership and the Duma Committee agreed that the latter should form a Provisional Government, without recalling the Duma. That parliament was now seen as irreparably compromised by the undemocratic electoral system; instead, the new government pledged to hold elections for a Constituent Assembly to settle Russia’s political future. By Thursday March 15, the Provisional Government began operations, with liberal Prince Lvov as prime minister.

On the same day, in transit from the front to Petrograd, the Army High Command confronted Tsar Nicholas and advised him to abdicate. He did so for himself and in the name of his haemophiliac son, Alexei, in favour of his brother Grand Duke Michael. After talks with the Provisional Government on Friday March 16, Michael abdicated, and the 304-year-old Romanov dynasty came to an end. Soon Nicholas and his family were under arrest. News of the Petrograd events spread rapidly via rail and telegraph around the Empire, and the revolution arrived in provincial Russia. Local authority mirrored arrangements in the capital, with “temporary committees” assuming leadership, shadowed by local soviets.

Russia’s new government was a “dual power” compromise between the Provisional Government, a collection of Kadet and other liberal politicians who saw themselves as assuring continuity with the tsarist state, and the Petrograd Soviet, whose moderate socialist leaders monitored government decisions without themselves wishing to assume power. The new government quickly abolished censorship and the hated tsarist police, gave women the vote, and revoked discriminatory laws based on religion and nationality. It also reassured Britain and France that it would continue the war, although the aims of the new Russia were to become a source of deep division. The Soviet’s moderate socialists proclaimed their adherence to “revolutionary defencism”—the principle that the war’s sole legitimate purpose was to defend the revolution from invaders, and that no victorious nation should annex territory.

A

Lenin’s Return and the April Crisis

The Bolsheviks played a minor role in the February revolution. Their leaders in Petrograd followed the moderate socialist compromise of dual power and deference to the Provisional Government, including the “defencist” war aims. The Bolsheviks’ paramount leader, Vladimir Lenin, was in exile in Switzerland when the revolution broke out. He travelled to Russia after negotiating passage by “sealed train” across Germany with a group of radicals, arriving at Petrograd’s Finland Station on April 16. The next day he launched a drive to realign the Bolsheviks as the radical alternative to moderate socialism with his April Theses.

Lenin attacked the Menshevik and SR leaders’ revolutionary defencism, demanding an immediate end to the war, no socialist cooperation with the Provisional Government, and a turn to the “second stage” of the revolution, when the Soviets themselves would take power. Such ideas failed to match the mood of optimistic unity most Russians, including many grassroots Bolsheviks, felt after the February Revolution, but Lenin’s ideas would attract support once disappointment with dual power grew.

The first significant challenge to the dual-power system came within weeks (in April according to the Julian calendar, hence the label “April Crisis”) when the Soviet and Provisional Government clashed over Russia’s aims in the war. Britain and France had quickly recognized the Provisional Government in a bid to keep Russia in the war. Secret treaties had promised tsarist Russia the city of Constantinople, a prize offering unfettered access to the Mediterranean.

Kadet Pavel Milyukov, the government’s foreign minister, opposed Soviet attempts to impose its defencist war aims in a diplomatic note being prepared for the Allies. On May 1 (April 18 old style) the Provisional Government sent a “defencist” declaration largely authored by the Soviet, covered with a note written by Milyukov affirming tsarist aims and hinting that annexations were still anticipated.

When, on May 3, Milyukov’s note was published, anti-war demonstrators poured into the streets to denounce the foreign minister. A counter-demonstration, defending Milyukov, by middle-class supporters of the Provisional Government took place the following day; violence resulted in the loss of lives. The stark class division implicit in dual power was exposed. Confidence in the Provisional Government’s ability to speak for the whole country plummeted.

Soviet leaders Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli and SR Vasily Chernov feared that popular pressure could topple the Government and ignite civil war. They were persuaded to enter the Provisional Government, as ministers of post and telegraphs, and of agriculture, respectively, in a Cabinet of “all the vital forces” of the country, along with other members of the Soviet, including Aleksandr Kerensky, a right-wing socialist who moved from the ministry of justice in the first government, to become minister of war. A young, left-leaning industrialist, Mikhail Tereshchenko, became foreign minister. This first coalition of liberals and socialists lasted from May 18 until July 15. Coalition with the Provisional Government’s liberal ministers diluted the moderate socialists’ ability to satisfy their supporters. Meanwhile radical Bolsheviks, Left SRs (who would later split from the PSR), and anarchists now seemed to offer the clearest opposition to the Government and its policies.

B

A Deepening Revolution

The social tensions that ignited revolution were scarcely soothed by coalition in the Provisional Government. As in 1905, peasants, workers and soldiers spontaneously, and with encouragement by political activists, embarked on a transformation of their own lives.

Emboldened by the Socialist Revolutionary Chernov’s rise to the post of agriculture minister, peasants began seizing lands belonging to the gentry, crown, and church, as well as those of the independent farmers of the Stolypin reform. Setting up village committees to redistribute land according to traditional egalitarianism, by summer many rural areas were effectively under self rule as in 1905. While the pace of land seizures accelerated, manor houses were burnt down, modern machinery destroyed, and the local intelligentsia attacked. The share-out of the land exerted a significant pull on peasant soldiers, tempted to desert their posts rather than miss out on gains in their villages. The PSR leadership in the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government, committed to deferring land reform until the Constituent Assembly met, could not arrest the slide into peasant revolution.

Workers enjoyed some gains from the February revolution, but deep divisions with industrialists soon re-emerged. In the spring, the Provisional Government accepted in principle the eight-hour working day and minimum wages; it implemented the rationing of key foodstuffs. Factory committees elected by the workforce enforced workers’ control, reviewing and sometimes making production decisions. Some factory committees assisted owners with supply bottlenecks and labour disputes, but most committees were centres of revolutionary agitation especially by Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the left wing of the SRs. Factory meetings gave socialist activists opportunities to hear popular grievances and channel them into committee decisions. As 1917 wore on, economic conditions deteriorated and worker discontent increased. Inflation rose dramatically and by the summer many factories closed due to shortages, unprofitability and desertion by owners. Workers experienced unemployment and their demands grew more radical.

Soldiers and sailors were disaffected by the Provisional Government’s determination to continue the war to a “decisive victory”. The fever for committees swept through the ranks after the February revolution, and the Petrograd Soviet’s Order No. 1 endorsed a radical revision in military relations. On March 25 the Provisional Government abolished capital punishment, removing the ultimate disciplinary measure in the army. The army committee network helped to circulate the revolutionary defencism of the Menshevik-SR leadership to the grassroots soldier. The struggle between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government for clear war aims was reflected at the front by a virtual truce as all parties waited to see if the Soviet’s early peace efforts would bear fruit. Mutinies and violence against unpopular officers proliferated. When the first coalition Provisional Government, including Menshevik-SR ministers, redefined “revolutionary defencism” to justify a new offensive against the Germans, soldiers would turn against moderate socialists and find the immediate peace offered by Bolsheviks and the Left SRs more palatable.

Sailors of the Imperial Baltic Fleet, with bases in Helsinki and on the island fortress of Kronshtadt near Petrograd, were among the most radical revolutionaries of early 1917. The Provisional Government quickly lost control of Kronshtadt. Sailors organized committees—eventually, a soviet—that governed there, as well as setting up the usual committees aboard their ships, and at naval ports. By April-May the Baltic Fleet was under the authority of Tsentrobalt, the Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet, an executive body dominated by Bolsheviks, Left SRs, and radicals. The proximity of Tsentrobalt to Petrograd gave radical socialists a powerful base from which to operate.

C

National Revolutions Within the Russian Empire

The many nationalities of the multi-ethnic Russian Empire responded to the fall of the tsar in varying ways. Revolution came at different speeds to the “national”, ethnic, and religious communities on the periphery of empire. The Kadets and most moderate socialists were unsettled by the strongest demands from non-Russian national movements, and they intended to preserve “Russia one and indivisible”.

Poland was a special case. Germany occupied Russia’s Polish territory before the February Revolution, and the Provisional Government quickly recognized Poland’s right to self-determination. This concession made later demands for national freedom difficult to refuse, but the Provisional Government argued that such questions must be left to the Constituent Assembly.

Ukraine presented a complexity that prevailed, to varying degrees, in many other national homelands. Ukraine was the largest embryonic nation in the empire aside from Russia (22 per cent of the population) and a major economic and geopolitical asset. The Ukrainians were torn between political movements for socialism and those promoting a nationalist change to Ukraine’s relationship with the Russians.

The February Revolution in Ukraine resulted in the establishment of a Ukrainian Rada (council) composed of local parties (Ukrainian Social Democrats, Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries, Socialist Federalists, and others). On June 23 the Rada issued its first “Universal” or proclamation, stating that Russia should become a federation within which Ukraine should have its own government to promote its language and culture.

In Petrograd the Provisional Government was alarmed by this development and Tereshchenko (a Ukrainian), Kerensky, and Tsereteli were sent to Kiev, to talk with the Rada. On July 14 they agreed to allow the Rada authority to govern provisionally in Ukraine and to defer the status of Ukraine to the decisions of the Constituent Assembly. Even this compromise went too far for Petrograd’s Kadet ministers, and they resigned on July 15, prompting the collapse of the first coalition and a prolonged government crisis.

Nationalists, aware of Ukraine’s complex demography, did not call for outright independence. Ethnic Ukrainians were primarily peasants, while in towns, Russians and Jews predominated in industry, the professions, and among the educated groups normally responsive to nationalism. Russians in Ukraine, like Petrograd politicians, generally wanted a unitary Russian state rather than a federal one rendering them a minority in an autonomous Ukraine. Ukraine’s peasants were uninterested in nationalism but eager to seize land like their Russian counterparts. Land hunger in the countryside mobilized Ukraine’s peasantry, and the allegiance of this group would fluctuate during the Civil War before Ukraine fell to Soviet power.

Other regions displayed similar reactions to February. Finland ultimately declared its independence on December 19. Estonia and Latvia achieved full independence, along with Lithuania, after the Bolsheviks came to power. In the Caucasus region, the ancient nations of Armenia and Georgia yielded distinct vehicles for national self-rule: the Armenian Dashnaktsutyun and Georgia’s Mensheviks. Bolshevik forces would eventually defeat both movements. Meanwhile in oil-rich but ethnically diverse Azerbaijan religious and ethnic divisions favoured Russian—eventually, Soviet—domination.

Turkistan (today’s Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) had cities run by Russian settlers dominating Muslim townspeople while the countryside was populated by Muslims. Turkistan’s Russians replicated the February Revolution in Toshkent and other towns, while the Muslim leadership divided between modernizing Jadid and traditionalist Ulāma movements. A single Islamic response to revolution did not emerge in 1917, but the rupture ignited a series of confrontations between Russian settlers and Muslim “natives” that turned on religion, social aspirations, and ethnic tensions. These conflicts were only settled after years of civil war.

D

Kerensky’s Offensive and the July Days

The first coalition Provisional Government decided to launch a new offensive against Germany. The new war minister, Kerensky, toured the front to persuade troops that the offensive was necessary to save the February Revolution. On July 1, the Russian army moved against the Germans in Galicia and initially overwhelmed them with superior firepower. However the Russians did not sustain the attack, with many units returning to their trenches, holding meetings to debate the offensive, or deserting. The offensive—and with it the Provisional Government’s revived war effort—was already collapsing when on July 15 the news of the agreement on Ukrainian autonomy prompted the resignation of Kadet ministers and Prime Minister Lvov. The first coalition of the Provisional Government ended over the national question, but its end coincided with the collapse of the Kerensky offensive and with days of violence and disorder in Petrograd, the “July Days”.

From July 16 to 18 popular discontent and political agitation in Petrograd fed a series of anti-war demonstrations and calls for a socialist government based on a national Congress of Soviets. Late on July 16, regiments due to be transferred to the front combined with striking workers to move on the city centre. Tens of thousands surrounded the Tauride Palace, demanding a Soviet government, but the moderate socialist leadership rebuffed the demonstrators and the meeting ended inconclusively. The Bolshevik leadership, initially hesitant, gave qualified support to continued street action for Soviet power. On July 17 the demonstrators again surrounded the Tauride Palace and berated Soviet leaders for refusing to take the power being handed to them. The July Days came to a halt because of moderate socialist refusal to seize power, the Provisional Government’s denunciation of the Bolsheviks as German agents, and the arrival of loyal troops, who dispersed the demonstrators at a cost of 400 lives.