On the three issues that mattered most—land reform, the Constituent Assembly, and peace—the government acted in a dilatory manner.
Except for the areas adjacent to the large cities, the news of the Tsar’s abdication traveled at a snail’s pace to the rural districts, held in the grip of a savage winter. Most villages first learned of the Revolution four to six weeks after it had broken out, i.e., in the first half of April, with the onset of the spring thaw.174 The peasants interpreted the news to mean they were free to resume assaults on private landed property halted ten years earlier by Stolypin. The Black Repartition got underway once again, as the communal peasants, at first cautiously and then with increasing boldness, raided landed property, first and foremost that belonging to fellow peasants who had withdrawn from the commune and taken title to private land. The earliest reports of agrarian disturbances reached Petrograd in the middle of March,175 but they assumed mass proportions in April. The instigators were often army deserters and criminals released from prison in February; sometimes whole communes fell under their influence. In this initial phase of the agrarian revolution, the peasants attacked mainly isolated households and estates, cutting down trees, stealing seed grain, and chasing away prisoners of war employed as farmhands.176 As in 1905, physical violence was rare. The government appealed on April 8 to the peasants to desist from illegal seizures. It also appointed a commission under A. I. Shingarev, the Minister of Agriculture, to draft a program of agrarian reform for submission to the Constituent Assembly.177
The SRs were busy organizing the peasantry. They reconstituted the Peasants’ Union, destroyed after 1905. The Union was favorable to the Provisional Government and its messages to the peasants urged patience and restraint.178 The appeals from the government and the Peasants’ Union had a calming effect: many peasants concluded that their claim to the land would be more secure if obtained legally rather than by force. But the agrarian disorders subsided only in June, after the socialists had entered the Provisional Government and the SR leader, Victor Chernov, took over the Ministry of Agriculture. Even so, the peasants could not be expected to wait forever: by failing to enact a land reform, the government soon dissipated its popularity with the communal peasantry.
To ensure the cities’ food supply, Petrograd introduced on March 25 a state monopoly on trade in cereals. Under its provisions, peasants were required to turn over to government agents surplus grain at fixed prices. But there were no means of enforcing this law and the peasants ignored it, continuing to dispose of their surplus on the open market.
The early agrarian disturbances had a pernicious effect on the armed forces. News at the front of an imminent Black Repartition stimulated the first mass desertions of soldiers who hurried home from fear of being left out.179
To stabilize the situation nothing was more urgently required than a speedy convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Only a body elected on a democratic franchise would have enjoyed incontestable legitimacy and, as such, been able to beat back challenges both from the extreme right and from the extreme left. The electoral complexities admittedly were daunting. Still, the matter was of such urgency that practiced politicians would have realized it was better to convene an imperfect Assembly immediately than a perfect one later. When the July Monarchy in France collapsed in 1848, a Constituent Assembly met in two months to choose the new government. In Germany in late 1918 after defeat in the war, in the midst of social upheavals, the authorities who took over would manage to convene a National Assembly in less than four months. The Russian Provisional Government could not do it in the eight months that it stayed in office.
On March 25, the government appointed a commission of seventy jurists to work out the electoral procedures. They immediately got bogged down in technicalities; weeks passed by without anything being accomplished. Nabokov says, probably correctly, there were always more urgent matters to attend to.180 By postponing the elections, the government not only violated a provision of the eight-point program but laid itself open to charges that it was playing for time until revolutionary passions subsided.181 Its dilatoriness contributed heavily to the government’s eventual overthrow: as we will note, one of the main pretexts the Bolsheviks would use when seizing power in the name of the Soviets was that only a Soviet government could ensure the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.
Then there was the issue of war and peace. In theory, all the leading parties represented in the government and the Soviet, the Bolsheviks excepted, favored continuation of the war until victory. This stand reflected the mood of the population. Contrary to a widespread belief that the February Revolution was brought about by war weariness, anti-German sentiment ran high. The overthrow of the tsarist regime had been in the first place inspired by the beliefs that it was too incompetent to lead the country to victory, it sought a separate peace, and it even betrayed secrets to the enemy. “In the first weeks [of the February Revolution],” observes Sukhanov, “the soldier mass in Petrograd not only would not listen to talk of peace, but would not allow it to be uttered, ready to bayonet any uncautious ‘traitor’ and anyone who ‘opened the front to the enemy.’ ”182 In March and April, it was common to see soldiers carry placards calling for “War to the End!”183 A French historian who had the opportunity to read the messages sent to the Provisional Government and the Soviet in the first two months of the new regime, confirms Sukhanov’s impression. Worker petitions placed at the head of demands the eight-hour working day; only 3 percent called for peace without annexations and contributions. Twenty-three percent of the peasants’ petitions wanted a “quick and just peace,” but even among them this was a secondary issue. As for the soldiers, their petitions indicated they “were likely to treat proponents of immediate peace as supporters of the Kaiser.”184 The issue was so sensitive that the Bolsheviks, who alone favored such a peace, exercised great caution in public pronouncements. It is indicative of the Petrograd garrison’s animosity toward them because of their war stand that in the elections to the Ispolkom in the Soviet Soldiers’ Section on April 8 no Bolshevik won a seat.185 Much of the violence perpetrated in February and March was directed against individuals who bore German names and for this reason were suspected of treason. Admiral Kolchak, commander of the Black Sea Fleet, reported that the main disturbances under his command were against officers with German names.186 The same held true for the naval base of Kronshtadt. When on February 27 a mob set fire to the Petrograd residence of Count Fredericks, the Tsar’s aide (who happened to be of Swedish ancestry), it did so because his name aroused suspicions of pro-German sympathies.187
47. Officer candidates (iunkers) parading in Petrograd: March 1917. The sign reads: “War for Freedom until Victory.”
Despite the hatred of Germans and the general support of the war against them, the question of war aims acquired great importance in the popular mind due to socialist agitation. It was characteristic of the socialist intellectuals to advocate contradictory policies linked by pious intentions. They wanted war to victory, yet labeled the war “imperialist” and passed legislation (e.g., Order No. 1 and the eight-hour working day) that made the pursuit of the war all but impossible. They wanted national victory, yet in their declarations spoke of the masses of all the belligerent countries sharing a common interest in bringing down the “ruling classes.” In an “Appeal to the Peoples of the World” on March 15, the Ispolkom called on the world’s peoples to rise in revolution: