Even had the White military and political leadership been able to forge a more unified front, the Entente allies, too, quarrelled among themselves over the post-war order; both their leaders and their local representatives had little understanding of the local conditions or national political forces where they chose to intervene, and they also faced war-weary populations backhome and in their overseas colonies. The relatively insignificant material contributions of the foreign supporters of intervention in Russian affairs nonetheless helped to prolong the violence and fighting of the civil war for at least three years after the formal end of the world war itself in November 1918. And it provided the Bolshevik state with one of its most powerful founding myths, that of 'capitalist encirclement'. The Russian Soviet Republic declared itself an armed camp and began to build its own form of socialist state under the pressures of wartime mobilisation of economy and society. This was to be only one of many lasting legacies of this brutal, modern, total world war.
The Revolutions of 1917-1918
s. A. SMITH
On 23 February 1917 thousands of female textile workers and housewives took to the streets of Petrograd to protest against the bread shortage and to mark International Women's Day.[59] Their protest occurred against a background of industrial unrest - only the day before, workers at the giant Putilov plant had been locked out - and their demonstration quickly drew in workers, especially in the militant Vyborg district. By the following day, more than 200,000 workers were on strike. The leaders of the revolutionary parties were taken by surprise at the speed with which the protests gathered momentum, but experienced activists, who included Bolsheviks, anti-war Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and non-aligned Social Democrats, gave direction to the movement in the working- class districts.[60] By 25 February students and members ofthe middle classes had joined the crowds in the city centre, singing the Marseillaise, waving red flags and bearing banners proclaiming 'Down with the War' and 'Down with the Tsarist Government'. Soldiers from the garrison proved reluctant to clear the demonstrators from the streets. On Sunday, 26 February, however, they were ordered to fire on the crowds and by the end of the day hundreds had been killed or wounded. The next day proved to be a turning-point. On the morning of 27 February, the Volynskii regiment mutinied and by evening 66,700 soldiers had followed their lead. Demonstrators freed prisoners from the Kresty jail, set fire to police stations, 'blinded' portraits of the tsar and 'roasted', that is, set alight, the crowned two-headed eagle, symbol of the Romanov dynasty.[61]Despite orders from Tsar Nicholas II - with apparent support from the high command - to crush the uprising, the military authorities were unable to summon sufficient loyal troops to do so.
On 27 February pro-war Mensheviks associated with the Workers' Group of the War Industries Committee moved to assert their authority by calling on all factories and military units to elect delegates to a soviet, or council, designed as a temporary organ to direct the revolutionary movement. Within a week 1,200 deputies had been elected to the Petrograd Soviet.[62] On the night of 27 February, the tsar's cabinet resigned, after proposing that the tsar establish a military dictatorship. The liberal politicians in the Duma, who had hitherto reacted to the insurgency with indecision, now formed a temporary committee to restore order and realise their long-standing aspiration of a constitutional monarchy. They endeavoured to persuade the military high command that only the abdication of Nicholas in favour of his son could ensure the successful prolongation of the war. The generals did not need much persuading. Only two corps commanders would offer their services to the tsar, and only a couple would later resign rather than swear loyalty to the Provisional Government. Among the tens of thousands of officers promoted during the war, there was general sympathy for the revolution. Faced with the loss of confidence of his generals, Nicholas abdicated in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail. It did not take much to persuade Mikhail that the masses would not accept this outcome and, as a result, on 3 March the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty came to an end.[63] Few bemoaned the passing of tsarism. The Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905 had shattered popular faith in a benevolent tsar, and residual loyalty to Nicholas had been swept away during the war by rumours of sexual shenanigans and pro-German sympathies at court.
The two forces that brought downthemonarchy-themovement ofworkers and soldiers and the middle-class parliamentary opposition - became institutionalised in the post-revolutionary political order, which soon became known as 'dual power'. The Duma committee, which had formed on 27 February, was acutely aware that it had no authority among the masses. Only on 2 March, after political infighting, did it draw up a list of members of a Provisional
Government. Headed by Prince G. E. L'vov, a landowner with a record of service to the zemstvos, it was broadly representative of professional and business interests and liberal, even mildly populist in its politics. The only organised political force within the new government were the Kadets, a liberal party increasingly defined by its intransigent defence of the imperial-national state. In its manifesto of 2 March, the Provisional Government committed itself to a far-reaching programme of civil and political rights, promising to convoke a Constituent Assembly to determine the shape of the future polity It said nothing, however, about the burning issues of war and land. This was in keeping with the Kadet view that the February events constituted a political but not a social revolution.
In a bid to widen their base of support, the Duma politicians pressed the Petrograd Soviet to join the new government. Only Aleksandr Kerensky, a radical lawyer, agreed to do so, proclaiming that he would be hostage of the 'democracy' within the bourgeois government. The rest of the left-wing Mensheviks and SRs on the Executive Committee (EC) of the Soviet rejected the invitation to join the government since they believed Russia was undergoing a 'bourgeois' revolution and was destined to undergo a long period of capitalist development and parliamentary democracy before it would be ripe for socialism. At the same time, they rejected calls, such as that which came from the Vyborg district committee of the Bolshevik Party, to make the Soviet the provisional government, since they feared that this might provoke conservative elements in the army to crush the revolution.[64] On 2 March, therefore, the Soviet agreed that it would support the Provisional Government in so far as it carried out a programme of democratic reform but would not be bound by its domestic or foreign policies.[65] Thus was born 'dual power', wherein the Provisional Government enjoyed formal authority but the Soviet EC enjoyed real power, by virtue of its influence over the garrison and workers in transport and communications and general support among the populace. Some have cast doubt on the adequacy of the 'dual power' formulation, correctly pointing out that even at this stage real power lay with the workers and soldiers rather than the EC.[66] Nevertheless, it has the merit of reminding us that from the outset the new revolutionary order expressed the deep social division between the 'democracy' and propertied society.
59
The following is based on: Tsuyoshi Hasegawa,
60
Michael Melancon,
61
Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii,
62
Iu. S. Tokarev
63
Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalev,
64
David A. Longley, 'Divisions in the Bolshevik Party in March 1917',
65
66
T. Hasegawa, 'The Problem of Power in the February Revolution',