But if the monarchy was dead politically, it was still alive in a broader sense. The mass of the peasants thought of politics in monarchical terms. They conceived of the state as embodied in the monarch, and projected their ideals of the revolution on to a ‘peasant king’, or some other authoritarian liberator come to deliver their cherished land and freedom. Here were the roots of the cults of Kerensky, Kornilov and Lenin, all of which were attempts to fill the missing space of the deposed Tsar, or perhaps rather the vacuum left by the myth of the Tsar Deliverer. George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, noted this monarchical mentality during the first days of the revolution, when one soldier said to him: ‘Yes, we need a republic, but at its head there should be a good Tsar.’ Frank Golder similarly noted such misunderstandings in his diary on 7 March: ‘Stories are being told of soldiers who say they wish a republic like England, or a republic with a Tsar. One soldier said he wanted to elect a President and when asked, “Whom would you elect?” he replied, “The Tsar.” ’ Soldiers’ letters voiced the same confusion. ‘We want a democratic republic and a Tsar-Batiushka for three years’; ‘It would be good if we had a republic with a sensible Tsar.’ It seems that the peasants found it difficult to distinguish between the person of the monarch (gosudar’) and the abstract institutions of the state (gosudarstvo). Their conception of the democratic order was similarly couched in personalized terms. Sometime during March a Menshevik deputy of the Moscow Soviet went to agitate at a regimental meeting near Vladimir. He spoke of the need for peace, of the need for all the land to be given to the peasants, and of the advantages of a republic over monarchy. The soldiers cheered loudly in agreement, and one of them called out, ‘We want to elect you as Tsar’, whereupon the other soldiers burst into applause. ‘I refused the Romanov crown’, recalled the Menshevik, ‘and went away with a heavy feeling of how easy it would be for any adventurer or demagogue to become the master of this simple and naive people.’67
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‘A miracle has happened’, Blok wrote to his mother on 23 March, ‘and we may expect more miracles.’ People shared a wild excitement and euphoria during the first days of the revolution. It was partly the sense of absolute freedom — ‘the extraordinary feeling’, as Blok put it in his letter, ‘that nothing is forbidden’, that ‘almost anything might happen’. It was also the fact that everything had happened so quickly: a mighty dynasty, three centuries old, had collapsed within a few days. ‘The most striking thing’, Blok wrote in his diary on 25 May, ‘was the utter unexpectedness of it, like a train crash in the night, like a bridge crumbling beneath your feet, like a house falling down.’ There was a strange sense of unreality. People compared the whole experience to ‘living through a dream or a fairy tale’. Things happened too fast for daily life to stop and for people to take it all in. ‘What was really strange’, wrote the artist Yulia Obolenskaya to a friend, ‘was getting your parcel with the dried fruit and coffee on the first day of the revolution, while the street outside was wild with joy and gun carriages with red flags were rolling by … Outside there was a hurricane … Then suddenly — a ring and a parcel containing blackcurrants!68
