Beyond this, in 1917 Lenin's prerevolutionary conception of a small, professional, conspiratorial party was discarded and the doors opened wide to tens of thousands of new members who were by no means without influence, so that to a significant degree the party was now both responsive and open to the masses.
This is not to minimize Lenin's importance in the development of the revolution. It is almost as difficult for me as it has been for virtually all of my predecessors who have written about the revolution to envision the triumph of the Bolsheviks in Lenin's absence. For all the lively debate and spirited give-and-take that I find to have existed within the Bolshevik organization in 1917, the Bolsheviks were doubtless more unified than any of their major rivals for power. Certainly this was a key factor in their effectiveness. Nonetheless, my research suggests that the relative flexibility of the party, as well as its responsiveness to the prevailing mass mood, had at least as much to do with the ultimate Bolshevik victory as did revolutionary discipline, organizational unity, or obedience to Lenin.
I should add that in attempting to reconstruct the events with which this book deals, I have tried to let the facts speak for themselves; it is left for the reader to judge whether my conclusions are warranted by the evidence.
When Lenin returned to Petrograd in April 1917 and sounded the call for immediate social revolution, moderate socialists and Bolsheviks alike were unresponsive to his militant appeals. These were still the euphoric first weeks following the February revolution. The patriotic, liberal democratic Provisional Government, which was to rule until a representative Constituent Assembly could be popularly elected to establish a permanent political system, appeared to have the blessings and good wishes of practically everyone. Included in this government were some of the most talented and best known figures in the Russian liberal movement. The new prime minister was Prince Georgii Lvov, a much respected, progressive zemstvo leader (the zemstvos were institutions of limited local self-government created in 1864). Foreign minister and dominant figure in the government was Pavel Miliukov, a professor of history and the leading spokesman of the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats, the main Russian liberal party); alongside him in the cabinet were other prominent Kadets such as Nikolai Nekrasov, Andrei Shingarev, and Alexander Manuilov, ministers of transportation, agriculture, and education, respectively. The key Ministry of War was headed by the powerful industrialist and founder of the right-liberal Oc- tobrist Party, Alexander Guchkov; as chairman of the Central War Industries Committee, Guchkov had already acquired considerable experience in helping to direct the war effort. The minister of finance was a self-made
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Members of the first Provisional Government, formed at the beginning of March 1917. Bottom row, left to right: A. I. Konovalov, P. X. Miliukov, G. E. Lvov, A. I. Guchkov, X. V. Xekrasov. Top row : M. I. Tereshchenko, A. A. Manuilov, A. F. Kerensky, A. I. Shingarev, V. X. Lvov.
tycoon, Mikhail Tereshchenko. The new minister of justice was the young lawyer Alexander Kerensky. Prior to the revolution Kerensky had made a name as the flamboyant defense attorney in widely publicized political trials and as an outspoken leftist deputy in the Third and Fourth Dumas.
The long-time American consul general in St. Petersburg, John Harold Snodgrass, no doubt expressed the views of most contemporary observers when he commented in the New York Times of Sunday, March 25, 1917: "Nowhere in their country could the Russian people have found better men to lead them out of the darkness of tyranny. . . . Lvov and his associates are to Russia what Washington and his associates were to America when it became a nation."
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Of course most friends of Russia abroad believed that because the new ministers had been selected by the Duma, the pale copy of a Western-style parliament that had been established in tsarist Russia following the revolution of 1905, they could speak for the entire population. This was not an altogether valid assumption. The Fourth Duma, in session in 1917, had been elected in 1912 under regulations that excluded the bulk of the population from the franchise. During the February days there also sprang up in Petrograd a soviet (council) of workers' and soldiers' deputies modeled after spontaneously created organs that had had a brief existence in Russia during the revolution of 1905. In the spring and summer of 1917, soviets were
established in each of the districts of Petrograd, and, concomitantly, similar institutions of grass roots democracy came into being in cities, towns, and villages throughout Russia. In May an All-Russian Congress of Peasants' Soviets was convened in Petrograd, and in June representatives of workers' and soldiers' soviets gathered in the capital for their first nationwide congress. These national conventions formed permanent АН-Russian Executive Committees (the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, and the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Peasants' Deputies), which, taken together, were numerically more representative and, by virtue of the loyalty that they commanded among factory workers, peasants, and particularly soldiers, potentially more powerful than the Provisional Government.
Until the fall of 1917 the central organs of the All-Russian Soviets were dominated by leaders of the moderate socialist parties—the social democratic Menshevik Party and the neopopulist Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs). These leaders contented themselves with acting as guardians of the revolution and demonstrated no interest in challenging the Provisional Government as the lawful supreme political authority. This was, at least in part, for doctrinal reasons; the Mensheviks remained committed to the orthodox Marxist assumption that a "bourgeois revolution," which the overthrow of the autocracy appeared to represent, had necessarily to be followed by an indefinite period of bourgeois democratic rule. For their part, SRs in the Executive Committees, while not prevented by ideology from taking power into their own hands, shared with many Mensheviks the conviction that collaboration with military commanders and commercial and industrial groups was absolutely essential for Russia's survival in the war and as a bulwark against counterrevolution.
The situation that confronted Lenin upon his return to Russia in April, therefore, differed disappointingly from what he had anticipated. Among workers and soldiers, Bolshevik influence was relatively weak. The Mensheviks and SRs had overwhelming majorities in the soviets, which Lenin now considered the embryonic institutions of a workers' government. Under moderate socialist direction the soviets supported the Provisional Government and, pending arrangement of a negotiated peace, endorsed the Russian defense effort. If that were not sufficient cause for discouragement, the influence of moderately inclined Bolsheviks led by Kamenev had created a strong mood of compromise toward the government and of support for reconciliation with the Mensheviks within Lenin's own party.13