With letters such as these to deal with, one could hardly blame Lvov for viewing the plight of the squires as a punishment for their ‘boorish and brutal behaviour during the centuries of serfdom’. The revolution was the ‘revenge of the serfs’, he explained one day in June over lunch to some of his ministers. It was the ‘result of our — and I speak now as a landowner — of our original sin. If only Russia had been blessed with a real landed aristocracy, like that in England, which had the human decency to treat the peasants as people rather than dogs. Then perhaps things might have been different.’18 It was a quite remarkable thing for someone of his class and background to say — a wistful admission, if you like, that the whole of the civilization of the gentry, of which the Prince himself was a scion, had never been more than a thin veneer laid over the top of the brutal exploitation of the peasants, from which the revolution had emerged.
Whatever Lvov might have said in private, it was the policy of his government to defend the property rights of the squires. The land question, as it saw it, had to be resolved by legal means, and this meant preserving the status quo in property relations until a new land law was decided by the Constituent Assembly. Yet the government had no real means to prevent the peasants from taking the law — and the gentry’s land — into their own hands. The old police had been dismantled, while the army units in the countryside — even if their peasant recruits agreed to be used for such repressive purposes — were not nearly enough to protect more than a tiny proportion of the gentry’s estates. The temporary volost committees, established by the government on 20 March and designed to uphold the existing order, were soon transformed into revolutionary organs which passed their own ‘laws’ to legitimize the peasant seizures of the gentry’s property. The same thing happened with the volost land committees. The Provisional Government had intended these to protect the gentry’s legal rights, while regulating agrarian relations until the Constituent Assembly. But they were taken over by the local peasants and soon transformed into revolutionary organs on the land, helping to impose fixed rents on the gentry, to account for their land and property, and to distribute it among the peasantry. In an attempt to prevent this subversion of the land committees, the government cut its grants to them; but the peasant communes merely filled the gap, financing the committees through self-taxation, and the committees continued to grow.
This revolution on the land was given a pseudo-legal endorsement by the peasant assemblies which convened in the spring in most of the central black-soil provinces, as well as the First All-Russian Peasant Assembly on 4–25 May. Nothing did more to undermine the government’s authority in the countryside. The SR party activists, who dominated the executives of these assemblies, appealed for the peasants to show patience over the resolution of the land question. But they were soon obliged by the radical mood of the delegates on the floor to sanction the actions of the local communes, and even the seizures of the gentry’s land, as an interim solution. The Kazan provincial peasant assembly resolved on 13 May to transfer all the land to the control of the peasant committees. Twelve days later the Samara peasant assembly followed suit in direct defiance of an order from Lvov ordering the provincial commissar to prevent any further peasant land seizures. The peasants believed that these resolutions by their assemblies carried the status of ‘laws’. They used them to authorize further seizures of the land in the summer months. They did not understand the difference between a general declaration of principle by their own peasant assembly, which was in effect no more than a public organization, and the full promulgation of a government law. They seemed to believe that, in order to ‘socialize’ the land, or in order to transfer the land to the control of the communes, it was enough for a peasant assembly to pass a resolution to that effect. Peasant expectations transformed these assemblies into pseudo-government bodies passing ‘laws’ by simple declaration. And these ‘laws’ then took precedence over the statutes of the government. ‘The local peasantry’, complained the Commissar of Nizhnyi Novgorod, ‘has got a fixed opinion that all civil laws have lost their force, and that all legal relations ought now to be regulated by peasant organizations.’19 This was the meaning of the peasant revolution.
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