A second cause for concern in the Tauride Palace was how to get the troops to return to their barracks. This was essential to restore order. On the 28th the Military Commission — now under the control of the Temporary Committee — ordered the soldiers who had mutinied to return to their garrisons and to recognize the authority of their officers. But the soldiers were afraid that they would be punished for their participation in the mutiny, and demanded guarantees of their immunity before they returned. Most of them mistrusted the Temporary Committee — some of them called it ‘counter-revolutionary’ because it supported the officers — and turned to the Soviet to protect them. The result was Order Number One, perhaps the most consequential document to be written as a result of the February Revolution. It was a list of the soldiers’ demands and conditions for their return to the garrisons. It provided for the establishment of soldiers’ committees as a democratic counterbalance to the authority of the officers. It declared that the soldiers would recognize only the authority of the Petrograd Soviet, and that the orders of the Duma’s Military Commission would be executed only in so far as they did not conflict with the Soviet’s. When they were not on military duty, soldiers were to enjoy the rights of citizens, including the right not to salute their officers. Rudeness by the officers towards the soldiers, including the use of the familiar ‘you’ (tyi), associated with children and serfs, was henceforth to be prohibited as an insult to the soldier’s dignity. The honorific titles of the officers, such as ‘Your Excellency’ and ‘Your Honour’, which the peasant soldiers, in particular, resented as a remnant of serfdom, were to be replaced by new and democratic forms of address, such as ‘Mister General’ or ‘Mister Colonel’.
The Order was a popular creation in the full sense of the term. Sukhanov watched as Sokolov sat a table:
surrounded on all sides by soldiers, standing, sitting, and leaning on the table, half dictating and half suggesting to Sokolov what he should write … There was no agenda and no discussion of any kind, everyone spoke, and all were completely absorbed in the work, formulating their collective opinion without any voting … When the work was finished they put a heading on the sheet: ‘Order No. 1’.
A few minutes later the Order was read out before the Soviet, then in session in the Catherine Hall, and passed unanimously to the thunderous applause of the soldiers. This crucial document, which did more than anything else to destroy the discipline of the army, and thus in a sense brought the Bolsheviks to power, had taken only a few minutes to pass.36
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While the Soviet leaders wanted to restore order, most of them had no intention of assuming power. The whole basis of their strategy was to pressurize the Duma leaders into forming a ‘bourgeois government’. Thus there arose what Trotsky later called the ‘paradox’ of February: that a revolution made in the streets resulted in a government made in the salons. This was a recurring pattern throughout the politics of 1917: there were several moments (February, April, July and September) when the Soviet leaders might have taken power, when indeed the crowds came out on to the streets with the express demand that they do just that, but on each occasion they shied away from the responsibilities of government. In this way they missed their chance to resolve the revolution in a democratic and socialist form. The Bolsheviks reaped the benefits.
How are we to explain this political failure? In the context of February, which determined much of the later politics, there were three main lines of reasoning.
