On 26 February, at last sensing the seriousness of the situation, Nicholas prorogued the State Duma. As it happened, the revolutionary activists were counselling against a strike since the Okhrana had so easily and ruthlessly suppressed trouble in the factories in December 1916. But the popular mood was implacable. Army commanders reported that troops sent out to quell the demonstrations were instead handing over their rifles to the protesters or simply joining them. This convinced the local revolutionaries — Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries — that the monarchy could be overthrown, and they resumed the task of agitating and organizing for such an end. The capital had become a maelstrom of revolt; and by closing down the Duma, the Emperor had effectively thrust conservatives and liberals, too, into a posture of outright opposition.
The Emperor was given dispiriting counsel by those whom he consulted. The Duma speaker, the Octobrist Mikhail Rodzyanko, who fancied his chances of becoming prime minister by mediating among the Duma’s politicians, urged Nicholas to agree that his position was hopeless. The Emperor would indeed have faced difficulties even if he had summoned regiments from the Eastern front; for the high command stayed very reluctant to get involved in politics. It is true that the monarchy’s troubles were as yet located in a single city. Yet this limitation was only temporary; for Petrograd was the capitaclass="underline" as soon as news of the events spread to the provinces there was bound to be further popular commotion. Antipathy to the regime was fiercer than in 1905–6 or mid-1914. The capital’s factories were at a standstill. The streets were full of rebellious soldiers and workers. Support for the regime was infinitesimal, and the reports of strikes, mutinies and demonstrations were becoming ever more frantic.
Abruptly on 2 March, while travelling by train from Mogilëv to Petrograd, the Emperor abdicated. At first he had tried to transfer his powers to his sickly, adolescent son Aleksei. Then he offered the throne to his liberally-inclined uncle, Grand Duke Mikhail. Such an outcome commended itself to Milyukov and the right wing of the Kadets. But Milyukov was no more in touch with current realities in Petrograd than the Emperor. Appearing on the balcony of the Tauride Palace, he was jeered for proposing the installation of a constitutional monarchy.18
Nicholas’s final measure as sovereign was to abdicate. State authority was assumed by an unofficial committee created by prominent figures in the State Duma after the Duma had been prorogued in February. The formation of the Provisional Government was announced on 3 March. Milyukov, an Anglophile and a professor of Russian history, became Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the War Ministry was occupied by the ebullient Guchkov. But the greatest influence was held by men at the centre and the left of Russian liberalism. This was signalled by the selection of Lvov, who had led Zemgor, as Minister-Chairman of the Provisional Government. It was also evident in Lvov’s invitation to Kerenski, a Socialist-Revolutionary, to head the Ministry of Justice. Lvov and most of his colleagues, while celebrating the removal of the Romanovs, argued that government and ‘people’ could at last co-operate to mutual advantage.
Under direct pressure from the socialist leaders of the anti-Romanov demonstrations in Petrograd, the cabinet announced a series of radical reforms. Universal and unconditional civil freedoms were promulgated: freedoms of opinion, faith, association, assembly and the press. Religious and social privileges were abolished. In addition, elections were promised for a Constituent Assembly and all adults over twenty-one years of age, including women, were to have the vote. These measures immediately made wartime Russia freer than any other country even at peace.
Although they had not secured the post of Minister-Chairman for their leader Milyukov, the Kadets were the mainstay of the first Provisional Government.19 Before 1917 they had tried to present themselves as standing above class and sectional aspirations. In particular, they had aspired to resolve the ‘agrarian question’ by handing over the gentry-owned estates to the peasantry and compensating landlords in cash. But in 1917 they argued that only the Constituent Assembly had the right to decide so fundamental a question and that, anyway, no basic reform should be attempted during the war lest peasant soldiers might desert the Eastern front to get their share of the redistributed land. It is true that the Provisional Government initially condoned the bargaining between striking workers and their employers over wages and conditions; but rapidly the need to maintain armaments production took precedence in the minds of ministers and any industrial stoppage incurred official disapproval.
And so the Kadets, as they observed a society riven between the wealthy élites and the millions of workers and peasants, chose to make common cause with the interests of wealth. Nor did they see much wrong with the expansionist war aims secretly agreed by Nicholas II with Britain and France in 1915. Thus the Provisional Government was not pursuing a strictly defensive policy which would maintain the willingness of soldiers to die for their country and of workers to work uncomplainingly in deteriorating conditions. The Kadets were taking a grave risk with the political dominance they had recently been donated.
They overlooked the fact that they had benefited from the February Revolution without having played much part in it. The heroes on the streets had been Petrograd’s workers and garrison soldiers, who believed that Russia should disown any expansionist pretensions in the war. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries shared this feeling and elaborated a policy of ‘revolutionary defencism’. For them, the defence of Russia and her borderlands was the indispensable means of protecting the civic freedoms granted by the Provisional Government. Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had great political authority. Even before Nicholas II had abdicated, they had helped to create the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and established themselves in its leading posts. And they obtained dominance in the soviets which were established in other cities. Without the consent of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Provisional Government could never have been formed.
Lvov had been given his opportunity because Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, recognizing that workers were a tiny minority of the population, made the judgement that any campaign for the immediate establishment of socialism would lead to civil war. They had always contended that Russia remained at much too low a level of industrialization and popular education for a socialist administration to be installed. On his return from Siberian exile, the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli gave powerful expression to such opinions in the Petrograd Soviet. Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries concurred that, for the foreseeable future, the country needed a ‘bourgeois government’ led by the Kadets. Socialists should therefore offer conditional support to Prince Lvov. Even several leading Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd were of a similar mind.
At the same time neither Mensheviks nor Socialist-Revolutionaries renounced their struggle on behalf of the working class; and, through the Petrograd Soviet, they wielded so large an influence that ministers referred to the existence of ‘dual power’. The cabinet could not have been created without the sanction of the Soviet, and the Soviet acted as if it had the right to give instructions to its own supporters — mainly workers and soldiers — which then became mandatory for the entire local population. Order No. 1, issued by the Petrograd Soviet on 1 March, abolished the code of military discipline in the Petrograd garrison and enjoined troops to subject themselves to the authority of the Soviet.20 This was the most famous of the early derogations from the Provisional Government’s capacity to govern. Other such orders introduced the eight-hour day and various improvements in factory working conditions. Lvov and fellow ministers could do nothing but wring their hands and trust that things would eventually settle down.