Kerensky recalled one of the first meetings of the Council of Ministers. Prince Lvov arrived late with a sheaf of telegrams from the provinces. They all said more or less the same thing: that the local administration had collapsed and that power now belonged to various ad hoc public committees. The ministers sat around for a long time wondering what to do. ‘Here we were in the middle of a war, and large areas of the country had passed into the hands of completely unknown people!’ Speaking ‘with extraordinary confidence’, Lvov then summed up the discussion:
We must forget all about the old administration — any return to it is psychologically quite impossible. But Russia will not go under without it. The administration is gone, but the people remain … Gentlemen, we must be patient. We must have faith in the good sense, statesmanship, and loyalty of the peoples of Russia.
‘And indeed’, recalled Kerensky, ‘we had nothing except this faith in the people.’5
Lvov’s belief in ‘the people’ was typical of the intelligentsia attitudes that characterized the political philosophy of the first Provisional Government (2 March to 5 May). Not every minister succumbed to such high hopes. Miliukov and Guchkov argued from the start for a powerful state to contain the people’s anarchistic instincts and save the country from chaos. But their cold rationalism was always overshadowed by the warmer sentiments of Kerensky, Nekrasov and Lvov. The dominant outlook of the government was shaped by the liberal values of the intelligentsia which, in turn, had emerged from the people’s struggle for freedom against autocracy. Two main beliefs stood at the heart of this democratic political culture: an instinctive mistrust of the state as a coercive power; and a belief in local self-rule. From this it followed that a distant liberal state was all that was required to shepherd Russia through to the civilized world of free nations. Russia’s liberal leaders talked of ruling ‘with’ the people rather than ‘over’ them. They saw themselves as ‘classless’ — ruling in the interests of ‘all the people’ rather than one class — and on this universal promise hoped to build up a sense of legitimacy. They presented themselves as the temporary caretakers of a ‘neutral state’, above party or class interests, until the election of the new sovereign power, the Constituent Assembly, which alone could give a legal sanction to social and political reforms. This, in effect, was to place their trust in the patience of the people to wait for the legal resolution of their problems. It was to place the ‘defence of the state’ above the class or party interests of the revolution. Yet when that state itself was threatened by unrest, as it was in April, July and October, they were unwilling to use force in its defence. Their decent liberal intentions, and their inbred mistrust of state coercion, prevented them from taking the necessary measures to defend their cherished constitutional freedoms against the threat of extremism. They were determined to dismantle the old police regime, the courts and the penal system — which merely tied their own hands in the struggle against rising crime and violence. Even when this violence was Bolshevik-inspired, they were reluctant to repress it. The Men of February — who in their own minds had been brought to power by a ‘bloodless revolution’ — would not have the blood of ‘the people’ on their hands. This weakness, in the end, would bring them down.
The leaders of the Provisional Government saw themselves as reenacting the French Revolution on Russian soil. They compared themselves to the heroes of 1789. Kerensky, for one, liked to think of himself as a Mirabeau (and later as a Napoleon). The leaders of the ‘Great Russian Revolution’ looked for precedents for their policies, and for models for their institutions, in the revolutionary history of France. People called the Bolsheviks Jacobins (which is also how they saw themselves). The Bolsheviks, in turn, called the liberals Girondins. And all democrats warned of the dangers of ‘counter-revolution’ and ‘Bonapartism’.fn1 The provincial commissars, the soldiers’ committees and army commissars, the provincial committees of public safety and the Constituent Assembly itself — all of them were copied from their French equivalents. The old deferential terms of address were replaced by the terms grazhdanin and grazhdanka (‘citizen’ and ‘citizeness’). The Marseillaise — which the Russians mispronounced as the Marsiliuza and to which they added their own different words (there was a ‘Workers’ Marseillaise’, a ‘Soldiers’ Marseillaise’ and a ‘Peasants’ Marseillaise’) — became the national anthem of the revolution. It was played at all public assemblies, street demonstrations, concerts and plays.
We renounce the old world,
We shake its dust off from our feet.
We don’t need a Golden Idol,
And we despise the Tsarist Devil.
