This symbolic revolution was also enacted on the personal level. People made a conscious effort to distance themselves from the old regime and to identify themselves with the new democracy. Soldiers renounced their hard-won tsarist medals, and often sent them to the Petrograd Soviet so that it could melt them down and put the silver to the use of the people’s cause. Hundreds of people with surnames such as Romanov, Nemets (German) or Rasputin, appealed to the Chancellery for the right to have them changed. One such Romanov, Fedor Andreevich, a peasant of Koltovskii village in Penza province, claimed that his surname had become ‘a source of shame’ and wanted it changed to Lvov — the surname of the Prime Minister.63
The revolution was accompanied by a boom of anti-tsarist pamphlets, postcards, plays and films, as the old laws on censorship were removed. The pamphlets, in particular, were hugely popular, some of them selling in their millions. They all traded in the rumours of the war years: that the Empress was working for the Germans; that she was the lover of Rasputin; that the Tsar had given his throne to this ‘holy devil’, and so on. Most of their titles were sexually suggestive — The Secrets of the Romanovs; The Gay Days of Rasputin; The Night Orgies of Rasputin — as was much of their dialogue. In The Night Orgies, for example, Protopopov asks Madame Vyrubova if Rasputin has an ‘enormous talent’. ‘Oh, I know,’ she answers, ‘an enormous, enormous talent.’64 Many of the pamphlets were semi-pornographic and were illustrated with cartoons of the royals rolling around in bed with Rasputin. By making the link between the sexual corruption of the court and the diseased condition of Russia explicit, this propaganda played a vital role (still to be investigated by historians) in debunking the myth and the mystique of the Tsar as a divine king. During the course of 1917 it shaped the popular image of the monarchy as an alien force of darkness and corruption, an image which ruled out the possibility of a restoration and thus largely undermined the counter-revolution in the years to come.
So, politically, the monarchy was dead. All its main institutions of support — the bureaucracy, the police, the army and the Church — collapsed virtually overnight. It was a sign of how far they had been weakened, and of how far they had become alienated from the Tsar, during the years before 1917. The Tsar was the lynchpin of the monarchy — he was at the same time, as it were, an officer, a priest, a district governor and a policeman — and once he had been removed the whole system came crashing down. The army commanders soon declared their allegiance to the Provisional Government. Many of them had been linked with its leaders through the opposition movement of the war; while those who were opposed to the revolution knew that it would break the army to resist it. The Church was undermined by its own internal revolution. In the countryside there was a strong anti-clerical movement: village communities took away the church lands, removed priests from the parishes and refused to pay for religious services. Many of the local priests managed to escape this fate by throwing in their lot with the revolution. But the rest of the Church hierarchy was thrown on to the defensive. The Holy Synod, purged of its Rasputinites, appealed to the priesthood to support the new government. Religious freedoms were introduced. Church schools were transferred to the control of the state. And preparations were made for the separation of Church and state. The provincial apparatus collapsed in most places like a house of cards, and it was only very rarely that armed force was needed to remove it. The people simply took to the streets; the governors, without any military means to suppress the disorders, were forced to resign; and ad hoc committees of citzens declared themselves in power. In Moscow the regime fell as a result of no more than two days of street demonstrations. ‘There was no shooting in the streets and no barricades,’ recalled a jubilant businessman. ‘The old regime in Moscow fell by itself, and no one defended it or even tried to.’ The police state similarly collapsed — the police being replaced by citizens’ militias almost overnight. Even the Okhrana was dissolved, although it was later rumoured that many of its agents had found employment in the new government.65
No one really tried to revive the monarchy. It is telling, for example, that none of the White leaders in the civil war embraced monarchism as a cause, despite the efforts of the many monarchists in their ranks. The White leaders all realized that politically it would be suicide for them to do so. For as Trotsky put it with his usual bluntness, ‘the country had so radically vomited up the monarchy that it could not ever crawl down the people’s throat again’.66 His prognosis is probably still true, the post-Soviet romance with the tsarist past notwithstanding.fn6
