Second, the Soviet leaders were afraid that a counter-revolution, perhaps even a civil war, might be the result if they assumed power. The situation was extremely fluid; it was not yet clear whether Alexeev and the Front commanders would carry out the orders of the Tsar to put down the revolution in the capital; nor whether the revolution would spread to the provinces and the forces at the Front. As things turned out, it soon became clear that the Soviet leaders had grossly overestimated the real danger of a counter-revolution. Almost immediately Alexeev called off the planned expedition to put down the revolution in the capital, partly because he was reassured that the Duma leaders rather than the socialists would assume power, and partly because he realized that to use the troops for this would run the risk of the mutiny spreading to the army at the Front. It did not take long, moreover, for the revolution to spread to the Kronstadt Naval Base, several northern garrisons and Moscow itself. Within a few days the monarchy would fall, along with its provincial apparatus, while the army and the Church would both declare their support for the revolution. Of course none of this was yet clear on 1 March. The speed of events took everyone by surprise. As Iurii Steklov, one of the Soviet leaders, explained in April 1917:
at the time when this agreement [to form the Provisional Government] was contemplated, it was not at all clear as to whether the revolution would emerge victorious, either in a revolutionary-democratic form or even in a moderate-bourgeois form. Those of you, comrades, who were not here in Petrograd and did not experience this revolutionary fever cannot imagine how we lived … We expected from minute to minute that they [troops loyal to the Tsar] would arrive.37
Yet it is probably fair to say that in their appraisal of the situation the Soviet leaders once again allowed themselves to be over-influenced by the experience of nineteenth-century Europe. All the socialists were steeped in the history of European revolutions. They interpreted the events of 1905 and 1917 in terms of the history of 1789, 1848 and 1871, and this led them to believe that a counter-revolution must inevitably follow.
Finally, the Soviet leaders were not even certain of their own authority over the masses in the streets. They had been shocked by the violence and the hatred, the anarchic looting and the vandalism displayed by the crowds in the February Days. They were afraid that if they assumed power, that if they themselves became ‘the government’, all this uncontrolled anger might be redirected against them. Mstislavsky claimed that ‘from the first hours of the revolution’ the vast majority of the Soviet leaders were united with the members of the Temporary Committee ‘by one single characteristic which determined everything else: this was their fear of the masses’:
Oh, how they feared the masses! As I watched our ‘socialists’ speaking to the crowds … I could feel their nauseating fear … I felt the inner trembling, and the effort of will it took not to lower their gaze before the trusting, wide-open eyes of the workers and soldiers crowded around them. As recently as yesterday it had been relatively easy to be ‘representatives and leaders’ of these working masses; peaceable parliamentary socialists could still utter the most bloodcurdling words ‘in the name of the proletariat’ without even blinking. It became a different story, however, when this theoretical proletariat suddenly appeared here, in the full power of exhausted flesh and mutinous blood. And when the truly elemental nature of this force, so capable of either creation or destruction, became tangible to even the most insensitive observer — then, almost involuntarily, the pale lips of the ‘leaders’ began to utter words of peace and compromise in place of yesterday’s harangues. They were scared — and who could blame them?38
Who indeed? And yet this fear was also symptomatic of a general cowardice when it came to the responsibilities of power. It was an abdication of statesmanship. Years later Tsereteli said that the Soviet leaders in February had been childish and irresponsible. Many of them welcomed the dual power system — the source of Russia’s chronic political weaknesses in 1917 — because it placed them in a good position. They were given power without responsibility; while the Provisional Government had responsibility without power.
