1. Immediate amnesty for all political prisoners, including terrorists;
2. Immediate granting of the freedom of speech, association, and assembly, and the right to strike, as promised by the tsarist government in 1906 but never fully implemented;
3. Immediate abolition of disabilities and privileges due to nationality, religion, or social origin;
4. Immediate preparations for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, to be elected on a universal, secret, direct, and equal ballot;
5. All police organs to be dissolved and replaced by a militia with elected officers, to be supervised by local government;
6. New elections to organs of local self-government on the basis of universal, direct, equal, and secret vote;
7. Military units that had participated in the Revolution to keep their weapons and to receive assurances they would not be sent to the front;
8. Military discipline in the armed forces to be maintained, but when off duty soldiers were to enjoy the same rights as civilians.84
This document, drawn up by exhausted politicians in the middle of the night, was to have the direst consequences. The most pernicious were Points 5 and 6, which in one fell swoop abolished the provincial bureaucracy and police that had traditionally kept the Russian state intact. The organs of self-rule—that is, the zemstva and Municipal Councils—which were to replace them had never borne administrative responsibilities and were not equipped to do so. The result was instant nationwide anarchy: anarchy that the new government liked to blame on the old regime but that was, in fact, largely of its own doing. No revolution anywhere, before or after 1917, wreaked such administrative havoc.
Points 1 and 7 were only slightly less calamitous. It was, of course, impossible for a democratic government to keep in prison or exile political activists confined for their opinions. But the blanket amnesty, which covered terrorists, resulted in Petrograd’s being flooded with the most extreme radicals returned from Siberia and abroad. They traveled at the government’s expense, impatient to subvert it. When the British detained Leon Trotsky in Canada as he was making his way home from New York, Miliukov interceded and secured his release. The Provisional Government would issue entry visas to Lenin and his associates returning from Switzerland, who made no secret of the intention to work for its overthrow. The government thus let loose foes of democracy, some of them in contact with the enemy and financed by him—actions difficult to conceive of a more experienced government. And, finally, by allowing the Petrograd garrison to retain weapons and by pledging not to send it to the front, the new government not only surrendered much authority over 160,000 uniformed men but ensconced in the capital city a disgruntled and armed peasantry whom its enemies could turn against it.
Later on March 2, Iurii Steklov, a Mezhraionets, presented on behalf of the Ispolkom the eight-point accord to the Soviet for approval. It was agreed that the Soviet would appoint a “supervisory committee” (nabliudatel’nyi komitet) to keep an eye on the government. After the changes had been renegotiated, the Provisional Committee announced its assumption of power.* At Miliukov’s request, the Ispolkom appealed to the nation to support the new government. The statement was lukewarm in tone and hedged with conditions: democracy should support the new authority “to the extent” that it carried out its obligations and decisively fought the old regime.85
Thus, from the moment of its creation, Russia’s democratic government owed its legitimacy to and functioned at the sufferance of a body of radical intellectuals who, by seizing control of the Soviet executive, had arrogated to themselves the right to speak on behalf of “democracy.” Although this dependence was in some measure conditioned by the need to gain the Soviet’s help in calming the insurgent mobs, the liberals and conservatives who formed the first Provisional Government saw nothing wrong with the arrangement. It is they, after all, who requested from the Ispolkom a declaration in support of the government. They also had few objections to the terms on the basis of which the Ispolkom had consented to back them. According to Miliukov, apart from the two points that had been dropped or revised and Point 7, everything in the declaration drafted by the Ispolkom was not only fully acceptable to the Duma committee or allowed an acceptable interpretation but “flowed directly from the newly formed government’s personal views of its tasks.”86 Indeed, the demands that the Ispolkom draft formulated under Points 1, 5, and 6 the Kadets had presented to Stolypin as early as 1906.87
The new cabinet was hand-picked by Miliukov. Its composition, agreed upon in the evening of March 2, was as follows:
Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Minister of the Interior: Prince G. E. Lvov Minister of Foreign Affairs: P. N. Miliukov Minister of Justice: A. F. Kerensky Minister of Transport: N. V. Nekrasov Minister of Trade: A. I. Konovalov Minister of Public Instruction: A. A. Manuilov Minister of War: A. I. Guchkov Minister of Agriculture: A. I. Shingarov Minister of Finance: M. I. Tereshchenko Controller of State Accounts: I. V. Godnev Procurator of the Holy Synod: V. N. Lvov
All these roles had long been rehearsed, and the names had appeared in the press in 1915 and 1916. The Duma representatives showed the roster of the proposed cabinet to the Ispolkom and asked for approval, but the latter preferred to leave this matter to the discretion of the “bourgeoisie.”88
The fifty-six-year-old Lvov was a well-to-do landlord with long experience in the zemstvo movement. During the war, he had chaired the Union of Zemstva and Municipal Councils (Zemgor). According to Miliukov, he had been chosen to head the cabinet because as chairman of Zemgor he came closest to fulfilling the role of society’s “leader,” but suspicions have been voiced that Miliukov chose him because, aspiring to leadership in the government, he saw in Lvov a convenient figurehead.89 A less suitable individual to direct Russia’s affairs in this turbulent era would be hard to conceive. Lvov not only had no experience in public administration, but he professed an extreme form of Populism rooted in an unbounded faith in the sagacity and goodwill of the “people.” He considered central government an unmitigated evil. On assuming office, he declared: “The process of the Great Revolution is not yet completed, yet each day that we live through strengthens our faith in the inexhaustible creative powers of the Russian people, its political wisdom, the greatness of its soul.”90 Lvov carried democratic and Populist convictions to the point of anarchism. When during the weeks and months that followed, provincial delegations would come to Petrograd for instruction, he received them with invariable attention and respect, but flatly refused to give them directives. When asked to appoint new governors in place of those whom the government had dismissed, he responded: “This is a question of the old psychology. The Provisional Government has removed the old governors and will appoint no one. Let them be elected locally. Such questions must be solved not in the center but by the population itself.”91 He carried this principle to extremes, believing that in a genuine democracy all decisions were made by the people concerned,92 the function of government presumably being confined to record-keeping. Vladimir Nabokov, the cabinet secretary, writes: “I do not recall a single occasion when [Lvov] used a tone of authority or spoke out decisively and definitively … he was the very embodiment of passivity.”93 Devoid of imagination, he was unaware of the magnitude of the events in the midst of which he found himself. But then what could one expect of a man who on a visit to Niagara Falls could think of nothing better to say than: “Really, now, what of it? A river flows and drops. That’s all.”94 He trailed this solemn ennui wherever he went.