The Provisional Government and Dual Power
The Government Nobody Voted For
When Nicholas II abdicated on 2 March 1917, the country needed a government. What it got, by 3 March, was the Provisional Government — a group of Duma politicians who put themselves in the empty Tsar’s chair and promised, in due course, to organise free elections to a Constituent Assembly. Almost every problem of 1917 grew out of those two facts. The new government had no popular mandate; and it kept postponing the only elections that could have given it one. Eight months later it was finished.
Four decisions ruined the Provisional Government: continuing the war (the failed June Offensive); deferring land reform to the Constituent Assembly; postponing those elections; and arming the Bolsheviks during the Kornilov Revolt. None of these failures was inevitable — each followed from the same political weakness.
Composition: Liberals and a Lone Socialist
The first cabinet was led by Prince Georgy Lvov, a wealthy liberal landowner. Pavel Milyukov of the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) was Foreign Minister; Alexander Guchkov, an Octobrist, was War Minister. The only socialist in the cabinet was Alexander Kerensky, a young Socialist Revolutionary lawyer who held the Justice portfolio — and who also sat on the Petrograd Soviet’s Executive Committee. He was the personal bridge between the two halves of Dual Power.
Dual Power and Soviet Order Number 1
In the corridor of the Tauride Palace, two governments now lived. The Provisional Government held formal authority — it dealt with foreign powers, signed decrees and ran the ministries. But the Petrograd Soviet commanded the loyalty of the railwaymen, the postal workers, the factories and, fatally for the new ministers, the garrison. On 1 March the Soviet had issued Order Number 1, which declared that soldiers should obey the Provisional Government only when its orders did not contradict those of the Soviet, and that every military unit should elect its own committee. Discipline at the front began to dissolve almost immediately. By June, deserters were trickling home in their thousands.
The Provisional Government was self-appointed from the Duma’s Provisional Committee. It was not elected by anyone. The only nationwide free election in 1917 was for the Constituent Assembly — and the Provisional Government repeatedly postponed it, partly because of the war and partly because the Kadets feared the result. By the time elections were finally held in November 1917, the Bolsheviks were already in power. They allowed the Constituent Assembly to meet for one day in January 1918 and then dispersed it by force. Strong answers do not assume the Provisional Government had a popular mandate — that is precisely what it lacked.
The War Continues: The Milyukov Note and the June Offensive
Russians wanted out of the war. The Provisional Government wanted to keep its alliances and its loans. In April 1917 Milyukov sent a secret note to Britain and France promising to fight to victory and to keep Russia’s war aims, including Constantinople. When the note was leaked, it was a public relations disaster. Milyukov and Guchkov resigned in May. A new coalition cabinet brought in more socialists, including Kerensky as War Minister. He toured the front giving speeches to revive morale and, in June 1917, ordered a major offensive against the Austro-Hungarians in Galicia. The June Offensive collapsed in days. Casualties were heavy, the front broke open, German counter-attacks recaptured ground, and units that had been fragmenting under Order Number 1 now openly mutinied.
The July Days
In early July 1917 anger boiled over in Petrograd. Sailors from the Kronstadt naval base and soldiers of the First Machine Gun Regiment, fearing they would be sent to the front, marched into the city demanding ‘All power to the Soviets’. The Bolsheviks were caught flat-footed. They half-led, half-followed the protests. Kerensky’s government, by now headed by Lvov in name and Kerensky in fact, leaked documents alleging Lenin was a German agent paid to take Russia out of the war. Lenin fled to Finland; Trotsky and Kamenev were arrested; the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda was shut. By late July it looked as if the radicals had been crushed.
Students sometimes write that Kerensky was a Bolshevik or a left-wing radical. He was neither. Kerensky was a moderate Socialist Revolutionary who built his career on standing between the liberal Kadets and the revolutionary left. In July 1917 he repressed the Bolsheviks, leaked the ‘German agent’ allegations against Lenin, and arrested Trotsky and Kamenev. Two months later, in the Kornilov Affair, the same man armed those Bolsheviks to defend Petrograd against the right. The pattern is the giveaway: Kerensky kept trying to balance, and ended up trusted by neither side.
The Kornilov Revolt of August 1917 was meant to crush the Bolsheviks; it ended up rearming them. Kerensky released Bolshevik prisoners, distributed weapons to the Petrograd Soviet’s Red Guards, and exposed himself as a leader who could not be trusted by either left or right.
The Kornilov Revolt, August 1917
In August 1917 General Lavr Kornilov, the commander-in-chief, decided the Provisional Government needed saving from itself. He ordered loyal cavalry units to march on Petrograd to restore order and crush the Soviet. Kerensky panicked. He denounced Kornilov as a counter-revolutionary, dismissed him from command and turned to the Petrograd Soviet for help defending the capital. Bolsheviks were released from prison; the Soviet’s Red Guards were armed; railway and telegraph workers stalled Kornilov’s troop trains; and his soldiers began to desert. The revolt collapsed within days — without a fight.
The political costs for Kerensky were huge. The Petrograd Soviet now had its own armed force. The Bolsheviks, who had been routed in the July Days, were the heroes of the city’s defence. Soldiers and workers concluded that the Provisional Government would happily ally with reactionary generals if frightened enough. Through September, Bolshevik membership swelled and they won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets. The path to October ran through the Kornilov Affair.