Of this there was no likelihood. The crisis in the economy and administration traced a line of ineluctable logic so long as Russia remained at war. Milyukov understood this better than most ministers; but on 18 April he displayed a wilful stupidity unusual even in a professor of Russian history by sending a telegram to Paris and London in which he explicitly affirmed the cabinet’s commitment to the secret treaties signed with the Allies in 1915. The contents of the telegram were bound to infuriate all Russian socialist opinion if ever they became publicly revealed. Just such a revelation duly happened. The personnel of Petrograd telegraph offices were Menshevik supporters to a man and instantly informed on Milyukov to the Petrograd Soviet. The Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks organized a street demonstration against the Provisional Government on 20 April. Against this assertion of the Petrograd Soviet’s strength, the Provisional Government offered no resistance, and Milyukov and Guchkov resigned.
After such a trial of strength, Lvov despaired of keeping a liberalled cabinet in office. His solution was to persuade the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries to take up portfolios in government. Both parties had huge memberships in mid-1917. The Mensheviks had 200,000 members and the Socialist-Revolutionaries claimed to have recruited a full million.21 On 5 May, a second cabinet was created. The Socialist-Revolutionary Alexander Kerenski was promoted to the War Ministry; and the Mensheviks Irakli Tsereteli and Mikhail Skobelev and the Socialist-Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov became ministers for the first time.
Their inclination had once been to let the Kadet ministers stew in their own juice; but they now agreed to join them in the pot in an attempt to take Russian politics off the boil. They did not do this without exacting substantial concessions. Skobelev’s Ministry of Labour pressed for workers to have the right to impartial arbitration in cases of dispute.22 Firmer state regulation of industry was also ordered as part of a governmental campaign against financial corruption. And Chernov as Minister of Agriculture allowed peasants to take advantage of the rule that any land that had fallen into disuse in wartime could be taken over by elective ‘land committees’ and re-allocated for cultivation.23 There was also a modification of governmental policy on the non-Russian regions. Tsereteli, Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, went outside his specific cabinet brief by insisting that broader autonomy for self-government should be offered to Ukraine.24
These adjustments in policy might have worked reasonably well for the liberals and the more moderate socialists if peace had reigned. But society and economy continued to be dislocated by the war. Class antagonisms lost none of their volatility, and the situation in factory, garrison and village was a powder-keg that might be ignited at any time.
Workers in most places desisted from outright violence. But there were exceptions. Unpopular foremen in several Petrograd factories were tied up in sacks and paraded around their works in wheel-barrows.25 Some victims were then thrown into the icy river Neva. Violence occurred also in the Baltic fleet, where several unpopular officers were lynched. Such was the fate of Admiral Nepenin in Helsinki. The dissatisfaction with the old disciplinary code made the sailors indiscriminate in this instance; for Nepenin was far from being the most authoritarian of the Imperial Navy’s commanders. Most crews, at any rate, did not resort to these extreme methods. In both the Imperial Army and Navy the tendency was for the men to restrict themselves to humiliating their officers by behaviour of symbolic importance. Epaulettes were torn off. Saluting ceased and the lower ranks indicated their determination to scrutinize and discuss instructions from above.
The defiant mood acquired organizational form. Workers set up factory-workshop committees, and analogous bodies were established by soldiers and sailors in military units. The committees were at first held regularly accountable to open mass meetings. A neologism entered Russian vocabulary: mitingovanie. If a committee failed to respond to its electors’ requests, an open meeting could be held and the committee membership could straightaway be changed.
The example set by workers, soldiers and sailors was picked up by other groups in society. The zeal to discuss, complain, demand and decide was ubiquitous. People relished their long-denied chance to voice their opinions without fear of the Okhrana, and engaged in passionate debate on public policy and private needs. Indeed politics embraced so large an area that the boundary disappeared between the public and private. Passengers on the trains of the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok elected carriage councils (‘soviet’!). They did this not out of ideological fanaticism but from the consideration that the train would need to pick up and distribute food on the journey. Each carriage needed to ensure it received its fair share. Thus the practical requirements of subsistence were in themselves a stimulus to popular participation.
The country’s cultural customs also had their effect. The village land communes of Russia and Ukraine had traditionally enabled peasants to speak their mind on questions of local importance. This practice had been transmitted to those many industrial workers who hired themselves to factories not as individuals but as members of work-groups (arteli); and soldiers and sailors operated in small units under their terms of service. The apparent ‘modernity’ of politics in 1917 had a past which stretched back over centuries.
The various sectional groups became more assertive after perceiving the cabinet to be tardy in holding elections to a Constituent Assembly. In the absence of an elected government, it was every group for itself. Employers regarded ‘wheel-barrowing’ as the beginning of a Red Terror. They were over-reacting. But there was realism in their claim that the militance of the workers was having a deleterious impact on the economy. Strikes undoubtedly lowered productivity. Even more alarming to owners in Petrograd, from May 1917 onwards, were the instances of factory-workshop committees instituting ‘workers’ control’ over the management of enterprises.26 This was direct action; it was no longer merely forceful lobbying: managers were not allowed to do anything that might incur the disapproval of their work-force. Such a turnabout had its rural equivalent. Already in March there were cases of peasants seizing gentry-owned land in Penza province. Illegal pasturing and timber-felling also became frequent.27
The middle classes, dismayed by what they saw as the cabinet’s indulgence of ‘the masses’, contributed to the embitterment of social relations. They, too, had an abundance of representative bodies. The most aggressive was the Petrograd Society of Factory and Works Owners, which had encouraged a series of lock-outs in the capital in summer 1917.28 Nor was the atmosphere lightened by the comment of the Moscow industrialist P. P. Ryabushinski that only ‘the bony hand of hunger’ would compel workers to come to their senses. Even the owners of rural estates were bestirring themselves as their Union of Landowners campaigned against peasant demands in the countryside.
Yet not only did few gentry owners live on their estates but also none of them dared to attempt the sort of open challenge to ‘the masses’ delivered by the capital’s industrialists. Instead they tried to recruit the richer peasants into the Union of Landowners.29 In reality it would have made little difference if they had succeeded in expanding their membership in this fashion. For the influence of any given class or group depended on its ability to assemble cohesive strength in numbers in a given locality. Not even the Petrograd industrialists maintained their solidarity for very long; and this is not to mention the chaotic rivalries across the country among the industrialists, financiers and large landowners. Demoralization was setting in by midsummer. Savings were expatriated to western Europe; the competition for armaments-production contracts slackened; the families of the rich were sent south by fathers who worried for their safety.