Kerensky broke in:
P. N. Miliukov is wrong. By accepting the throne you will not save Russia! Quite the contrary. I know the mood of the masses … the monarchy now is powerfully resented … The question will cause bloody discord. I beg of you, in the name of Russia, to make this sacrifice.142
In an attempt to reconcile the opposing parties and save something of the monarchic principle, Guchkov proposed that Michael assume the title of Regent.143
Around 1:00 p.m., Michael, who had listened to these disagreements with growing impatience, expressed a wish to retire for a private talk with Rodzianko. Everyone assented, but Kerensky wanted assurances that the Grand Duke would not communicate with his wife, who had a reputation as a political intriguer. Smiling, Michael assured Kerensky that his wife was at their residence at Gatchina. According to Rodzianko, the main question which Michael posed to him when they were alone was whether the Duma could guarantee his personal safety: Rodzianko’s negative answer decided the issue.144
When he returned Michael told the ministers that he had made the unalterable decision to abide by the will of the government majority and refuse the crown unless and until the Constituent Assembly were to offer it to him. Then he burst into tears. Kerensky exclaimed: “Your Highness! You are a most noble person. From now on, I shall say this everywhere!”145
Two jurists, Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Nolde, were sent for to draft Michael’s manifesto renouncing the crown. They spent the afternoon on the task, with occasional assistance from the Grand Duke, who insisted that they stress his desire to abide by the will of the Constituent Assembly. At 6 p.m. the handwritten document was submitted for his signature:
A heavy burden has been placed on Me by the will of My Brother, who has handed Me the Imperial Throne at a time of unprecedented war and popular disturbances.
Inspired by the same thought that permeates the nation, that the well-being of our Fatherland is the supreme good, I have taken the firm decision to accept Sovereign Authority only in the event that such will be the desire of our great nation, which, by means of a national referendum, through its representatives in the Constituent Assembly, is to determine the form of government and the new constitution of the Russian State.
For this reason, calling on the Lord to give us His blessing, I request all Russian citizens to submit to the Provisional Government, created on the initiative of the State Duma and endowed with full authority until such time as the Constituent Assembly, convened with the greatest possible speed on the basis of universal, direct, equal, and secret vote, shall, with its decision concerning the form of government, give expression to the people’s will.146
Michael signed the document and handed it to Rodzianko, who embraced him and called him the “noblest of men.”
The following day, March 4, the two abdication manifestos—the one from Nicholas in his and his son’s name, the other from Michael—were published on the same broadsheet. According to eyewitnesses, their appearance was joyfully welcomed by the population.147
Was Miliukov right? Could Michael have saved the country from bloodshed and anarchy had he followed his counsel rather than that of the majority? This is doubtful. The argument that the Russian masses understood statehood only in association with the person of the Tsar was indubitably valid. But this theoretical consideration had been temporarily eclipsed by the mood of the masses, their sense of having been betrayed by the monarchy, to which no one had contributed more than Miliukov himself with his November 1, 1916, Duma speech. Russia would be again ready for the monarchy only after a year of anarchy and Bolshevik terror.
Like the rest of the Imperial family, Michael now withdrew into private life.
The intellectuals who formed Russia’s government had been preparing themselves for this task for many years. It is quite incorrect to say, therefore, as does Kerensky in one version of his memoirs, that the Provisional Government found itself “unexpectedly” at the helm;148 its members had been clamoring for, indeed demanding, the power to form a cabinet since 1905. Nearly all of them belonged to the Progressive Bloc, and their names had appeared on various unofficial cabinet lists published in Russian newspapers for years. They were familiar to the educated public as the leading opponents of the tsarist regime, and they assumed power almost as if by natural right.
But as Nicholas had noted, none had any administrative experience. Such political expertise as they possessed they had gained in the Duma: politics to them meant battling the Imperial bureaucracy in and out of the halls of Taurida, debating legislative proposals, and in a crisis appealing to the masses. Academics, lawyers, and businessmen, they were qualified to grapple with broad issues of public policy, and in a stable parliamentary democracy they might have acquitted themselves well. But a government, of course, does not merely legislate—first and foremost, it administers: “Administrer, c’est gouverner,” Mirabeau is quoted as having said, “gouverner, c’est régner; tout se réduit là.” Of this principle, they understood nothing, having been accustomed all their lives to leaving the ordinary, day-to-day running of the country to the despised bureaucracy. Indeed, in their zeal to do everything differently, they purposefully did the opposite: just as tsarism sought to reduce politics to administration, they wanted to eliminate administration from politics. The attention of the First Provisional Government centered on rectifying the abuses of the old regime, mainly by means of legislative acts, unhampered by the veto of the Tsar and the upper chamber. Throughout its existence, it showed far more zeal in destroying the legacy of the past than in building something to replace it. It never created a set of new institutions to supplant those which had collapsed either of their own weight or under its assault.
This lack of interest in administering and implementing the laws which poured out of their chanceries, the new leaders rationalized with professions of faith in the wisdom of the “people.” Knowledge of politics derived largely from literary sources habituated the Russian intelligentsia to think of democracy, not as an ideal, attained by patient effort, but as a reality inhibited from asserting itself only by the legacy of tsarism. They were convinced—or perhaps needed to convince themselves—that in order to give democracy a chance, it was essential not to govern. In a country that throughout its history had been accustomed to centralized government and obedience to directives from above, the revolutionary government adopted an extreme form of political laissez-faire—and this in the midst of an unprecedented war, inflation, agrarian stirrings, and a host of other pressing problems.
But even under these circumstances it might have been possible to give the country some sort of rudimentary order had the Provisional Government not promoted anarchy by dissolving the provincial bureaucracy and the police. It is quite misleading of Kerensky to say, in self-justification, that it was the Imperial regime that had destroyed the administrative apparatus of Russia.149 In fact, this was mainly accomplished by Points 5 and 6 of the eight-point program which the Provisional Committee had adopted on March 1–2 in its agreement with the Ispolkom.150 On March 5, all governors and deputy governors were dismissed, their authority being transferred to the chairmen of the provincial zemstvo boards (gubernskie zemskie upravy). This action was most perplexing. Although some of the officials had resigned on their own upon learning of the Tsar’s abdication, and others were arrested by local citizens, in many provinces the governors welcomed the new government and took part in ceremonies honoring it.151 The government acted as it did in the belief that the men of the old regime could not be trusted to be loyal to the new order and would sabotage it at the first opportunity.152 This assumption was of dubious validity because the Provisional Government quickly acquired an aura of legitimacy in the eyes of the tsarist bureaucrats, accustomed to obeying central authority. If the government wanted to make certain of their loyalty, it only had to release Nicholas’s farewell address to the armed forces, in which, as we shall note, he urged Russians to obey the Provisional Government—a document the government chose to withhold from the public. The removal of the governors, the traditional mainstays of Russia’s administration, left a vacuum in the provinces. One can understand why the revolutionary government would have wanted to place its own men in these positions, but it is difficult to see why the old governors could not have been retained at their posts for the short time needed to find their replacements. This action resembled the abolition by the French National Assembly in 1789 of the office of intendant, the principal agent of royal absolutism, which had the immediate effect of depriving Paris of nearly all control over the countryside.153 It may even have been modeled on it. But France had much stronger social institutions than Russia as well as a sense of national cohesion that Russia lacked. The effect of these measures in France was, therefore, much less drastic: unlike revolutionary Russia, France never fell apart.