These second-ranking leaders chased after events in the February Days. They telephoned from one apartment to another trying to find out what was happening on the streets. Gorky’s apartment on the Kronversky served as a central telephone exchange. Leaders would assemble there to share their impressions and make enquiries. Gorky himself had connections throughout Petrograd. It was only on the 27th, when the revolution had already become an established fact, that the party leaders sprang into action and assumed the leadership of the uprising on the streets. It was a classic example of ‘We are their leaders, so we must follow them.’
Everything was focused on the Tauride Palace, seat of the Duma and citadel of democracy. By the early afternoon of the 27th a crowd of 25,000 people — many of them soldiers from the nearby Preobrazhensky and Volynsky barracks — had gathered in front of the palace. They were looking for political leaders. The first to appear were the Mensheviks Khrustalev-Nosar (Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet in 1905), and Gvozdev and Bogdanov (leaders of the Workers’ Group), escorted by the crowd that had just released them from the Kresty jail. In the palace they met Chkheidze, Skobelev and Kerensky, and then announced to the crowds outside that a ‘Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies’ had been established. They appealed to the workers to elect and send their representatives to the first assembly of the Soviet scheduled for that evening. The appeal was printed in a makeshift first issue of Izvestiia, the only newspaper to appear that day, and widely circulated in the streets.
Despite its name, there were very few workers among the fifty voting delegates and 200 observers packed into the smoke-filled Room 12 of the Tauride Palace for that first chaotic session of the Soviet. Most of the workers were still on the streets and were either drunk or completely unaware of the Soviet’s existence. Their voting places were largely occupied by socialist intellectuals. Sokolov assumed the preliminary chairmanship of the meeting, which immediately proceeded to set up an Executive Committee of 6 Mensheviks, 2 Bolsheviks, 2 SRs and 5 non-party intellectuals. It was not so much a democratic body as a self-appointed one made up of the various socialist factions and then superimposed on the Soviet. The next day, as 600 Soviet deputies were elected by the workers and soldiers of Petrograd, two more representatives from each of the major socialist parties — the Trudoviks, the Popular Socialists, the SRs, the Bund, the Mensheviks, the Inter-District groupfn3 and the Bolsheviks — were added to the Executive Committee. The effect was to strengthen its right wing, those who were most opposed to taking power. The voice of the workers, who might well have demanded that they did take power, was not heard. There was not a single factory delegate on the Soviet Executive — and that in a body claiming to represent the working class.
Chkheidze was appointed Chairman with Skobelev and Kerensky Vice-Chairmen. But there was really no order to the meeting. Executive members were summoned every minute to meet delegations outside the hall. Business was constantly interrupted by ‘urgent announcements’ or ‘emergency reports’. All sorts of unelected groups — post and telegraph officials, zemstvo employees, doctors’ and teachers’ representatives — demanded admission and sometimes got in to declare their allegiance to the Soviet. Then there were the soldiers’ delegations, whose demands for the floor to make their reports were warmly welcomed by the delegates. Standing on stools, their rifles in their hands, they told in simple language of what had been happening in their garrisons and declared the allegiance of their regiments to the Soviet. The delegates were so enthralled, greeting each declaration with thunderous applause, that it was resolved unanimously, without even taking a formal vote, to create a united Soviet henceforth known as the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.
