This was the ‘honeymoon’ of the revolution. People fell in love with ‘February’. Almost instantly, the history of the revolution was reinvented to suit these democratic ideals and mythic expectations. The ‘Glorious February Revolution’, as it became known, was said to have been a bloodless affair. ‘Just imagine,’ one contemporary wrote, ‘there was a great revolution in Russia and not a single drop of blood was spilled.’ It was also said to be a single national act without opposition. ‘Our revolution’, one Duma agitator informed the sailors of Helsingfors, ‘is the only one in the history of the world to express the spirit of the entire people.’ The revolution was portrayed as a spiritual renewal, a moral resurrection of the people. Merezhkovsky called it ‘perhaps the most Christian act in the history of the world.’ The revolution was itself transformed into a sort of cult. Huge crowds would assemble in the streets to hold prayers and ceremonies in celebration of Glorious February. The burial of the revolution’s martyred victims on the second Sunday of the new order (12 March) equally bore the character, although not the rituals, of a religious mass. Many people compared the revolution to an Easter holiday. People in the streets would congratulate each other on the revolution with the Easter blessing: ‘Christ has arisen!’ (sometimes this was changed to ‘Russia has arisen!’). Tsarism was said to have stood for evil and sin (one priest even called it ‘the Devil’s institution’); it had split the people into rich and poor; but with its downfall, society would be reorganized on the basis of more Christian attitudes. Some idealists even thought that lying and stealing, gambling and swearing, would at once disappear. ‘Drunkenness in Russia’, declared a peasant congress in Tomsk province, ‘was a source of national shame under the old regime. But now in Free and Democratic Russia there can be no place for drunkenness. And therefore the congress looks upon the manufacture of all alcohol as a betrayal of the revolution, and as a betrayal of the Russian democratic republic.’ One woman even wrote to the Soviet that the ‘Christian mission’ of the Russian Revolution should be to abolish all the country’s jails, since there was no criminal who could not be reformed. There were many intellectuals who now claimed that the Russian people would learn to live together in a new sobornost’ — a universal spiritual community — overriding class or party differences. In the words of Tatyana Gippius: ‘The atmosphere has been purified … Thank God that sobornost’ triumphs over partiinost’.’69
It was in this same Christian-populist sense that the revolution was also portrayed as a process of national and patriotic reawakening. People echoed Herzen’s view that Tsarism was ‘alien’ to the simple people. It was the ‘Gottorp-Holstein dynasty’. Germans had dominated at the court. The Empress (‘the German woman’) had betrayed Russia. But the people had arisen, and from this truly national revolution Russia had received a truly national government, behind which it could unite for the defeat of the external enemy. This was to be a ‘patriotic revolution’. Or, as someone put it: ‘Now we have beaten the Germans here, we will beat them in the field.’70
Many of these ideals were expressed by Prince Lvov in his first interview with the free press. ‘I believe’, he said, ‘in the vitality and the wisdom of our great people, as expressed in the national uprising that overthrew the old regime. It is expressed in the universal effort to establish freedom and to defend it against both internal and external foes. I believe in the great heart of the Russian people, filled as it is with love for their neighbours, and am convinced that it is the foundation of our freedom, justice, and truth.’71 Such high expectations were soon to be dashed.
9 The Freest Country in the World
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i A Distant Liberal State
Nothing in his previous experience had quite prepared Prince Lvov for the tasks that lay ahead of him as the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government. Not that he was unaccustomed to the long hours that such high office demanded of him. His wartime work in the Zemstvo Union had prepared him for that and, although now permanently tired, he was quite able to cope with the extra strain. From early in the morning until at least midnight Lvov was to be found in the Marinsky Palace receiving delegations from all over Russia, meeting foreign diplomats, presiding over cabinet meetings, briefing Civil Servants and giving interviews to the press. Nabokov met him in the early days of March and was ‘struck by his sombre, despondent appearance, and the tired expression in his eyes’.1
