The dissolution of the old provincial bureaucracy proved immensely popular with the intelligentsia, whose rhetoric about the “masses” and “democracy” camouflaged strong careerist impulses. In city after city, usually under the auspices of the local soviet, they set up their offices, complete with staffs of assistants and secretaries, telephones, stationery, and rubber stamps. However, lacking the experience of those whom they replaced, they merely mimicked them.
More understandable, although in the long run no less destabilizing, was the dissolution of the police and gendarmerie, symbols of state authority for the mass of the country’s population. This decision implemented Point 5 of the eight-point accord. The Department of Police was abolished on March 4: the act was a mere formality, since it had ceased to operate on February 27, when a mob sacked its headquarters. On the same day, the government ordered the dissolution of the Okhrana and Corps of Gendarmes. The day after, it sent instructions to the local authorities to form citizens’ militias commanded by elected officers and operating under the authority of zemstva and Municipal Councils. Such militias, to the extent that they were constituted, enjoyed no authority: Nabokov notes that in a number of areas they were even taken over by criminal elements.154 Two weeks after the Revolution, Russia was without a police force of either a political or a civil kind. When, in April 1917, the government found itself challenged by Bolshevik-led mobs, it had no force on which to rely.
Thus, a task immensely difficult to begin with—to govern a country at war and in the grip of revolutionary euphoria—was rendered impossible by rash actions dictated by a doctrinaire vision of democracy, belief in the wisdom of the people, and distaste for the professional bureaucracy and police. Russia in the spring of 1917 may well represent a unique instance of a government born of a revolution dissolving the machinery of administration before it had a chance to replace it with one of its own creation.
Initially, however, this was not apparent. In the first weeks after its assumption of power, the Provisional Government enjoyed overwhelming support. The entire country swore allegiance to it, including the grand dukes, the generals, and thousands of junior officers. Even the ultras of the United Gentry, headed by the archreactionary Alexander Samarin, voted in its favor.155 Foreign powers promptly accorded it diplomatic recognition, beginning with the United States (March 9), followed by Britain, France, Italy, and the other Allies. But this display of support from the population and foreign powers was deceptive, encouraging the new cabinet in the illusion that it was firmly in control, whereas it was floating on thin air. Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his memoirs of the Provisional Government: “I primarily remember an atmosphere in which everything experienced seemed unreal.”156
One of the difficulties in understanding the course of the February Revolution lies in the ambivalent nature of dvoevlastie, or dual power (dyarchy).
In theory, under dvoevlastie the cabinet functioned as the combined executive and legislative, being in both capacities subject to the veto power of the Soviet as represented by the Ispolkom. But in practice, the Soviet not only controlled the Provisional Government but legislated on its own. With Order No. 1, it assumed effective control over the armed forces. As we shall see, it also dictated Russia’s war aims. Thus the government was not even allowed authority in the realm of military and foreign policy. In more mundane matters, such as food supply and labor relations, transport and communications, the Ispolkom acted as the ultimate authority without bothering to coordinate with the government.
The leaders of the Soviet made no secret of the fact that the Provisional Government existed only at their sufferance. At the All-Russian Consultation of Soviets on March 29, Tsereteli, the Menshevik chairman of the Ispolkom, said that the Provisional Government owed its existence to an agreement which the Petrograd Soviet concluded with “the bourgeois privileged [tsen-zovye] elements of society.”157 Another member of the Ispolkom, the Trudovik V. B. Stankevich, boasted that the Soviet had the power to dismiss the Provisional Government in fifteen minutes by giving it appropriate orders over the phone.158 The apologists for the system of “dual power” later claimed that the leaders of the Soviet did all they could to bolster the government: far from subverting it, they are said to have provided it with its principal source of support.159 The historical record does not bear out this claim. It indicates that even as it intervened to help it suppress disorders, the Ispolkom ceaselessly undermined the government’s authority and prestige.
Its leaders delivered speeches which humiliated the government and lowered its standing in the eyes of a population accustomed to seeing authority treated with respect. A good example is the speech of Chkheidze on March 24 to a delegation of students who came to the Soviet with a banner hailing the Provisional Government. Chkheidze addressed them as follows:
I see on your banner the slogan “Greetings to the Provisional Government,” but for you it can be no secret that many of its members, on the eve of the Revolution, were trembling and lacked faith in the Revolution. You extend greetings to it. You seem to believe that it will carry high the new standard. If this is so, remain in your belief. As for us, we will support it for as long as it realizes democratic principles. We know, however, that our government is not democratic, but bourgeois. Follow carefully its activity. We shall support all of its measures which tend toward the common good, but all else we shall unmask because at stake is the fate of Russia.160
Such remarks by the second most influential political figure in the Soviet and a leading candidate for President of the Russian Republic give lie to the claims of the apologists for the Soviet that they loyally supported the government. By treating it as an inherently counterrevolutionary institution, kept honest only by the Soviet, they played directly into the hands of their enemies on the left who would argue that if that was the case, then the government should be removed and the Soviet assume full authority.