Russia’s war aims occupied the centre-stage of politics during the spring of 1917. Indeed the whole of 1917 could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing the revolution to an end. This was not just a political clash, it was also a social one. Leftwing propaganda made it clear that the war was being waged for different class interests. Enormous mistrust and even hatred of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘imperialist’ or ‘capitalist’ system could be stirred up by the stories of war-profiteering industrialists, merchants, ‘kulaks’ and black marketeers. Supporters of the war were instantly tarnished with the stigma of placing their own ‘imperial’ interests above those of the people. ‘We see’, declared a workers’ resolution of the Dinamo factory in Moscow, ‘that the senseless slaughter and destruction of the war is essential to no one but the parasite bourgeoisie.’41
The Provisional Government had so far shied away from the crucial question of its policy on the war. There were too many conflicting views within the cabinet. Miliukov, with the loose support of Guchkov, saw no reason to give up Russia’s imperial ambitions, contained in the ‘secret treaties’ with the Allies, to gain control of Constantinople. As Russia’s new Foreign Minister, he made this clear to the press and embassies abroad. But his views were sharply at odds with the Soviet peace campaign, launched on 14 March with its Appeal to the Peoples of All the World, in which it renounced the war aims of tsarist Russia and called on the peoples of all the belligerent nations to protest against the ‘imperialist war’. The Soviet peace campaign was immediately endorsed by a series of military congresses; most soldiers declared their allegiance to the Soviet on the basis that it promised peace. Its campaign was also backed by the more liberal ministers in the Provisional Government, once the leftwing idea of a separate peace, favoured in certain Soviet circles, was abandoned, and instead, on 21 March, the Soviet adopted the moderate line of Revolutionary Defensism (national unity for the defence of Russia combined with an international peace campaign for a democratic settlement ‘without annexations or indemnities’).
On 27 March the Provisional Government came out with its own Declaration of War Aims which was broadly in line with the Soviet peace campaign. But Miliukov told the Manchester Guardian that it would not alter Russia’s commitment to her imperial allies. This began a bitter political struggle for the control of the Provisional Government’s foreign policy. Miliukov was accused in democratic circles of speaking without cabinet authority. He was, in the words of one liberal newspaper, no more than a ‘Minister of Personal Opinion’. The Soviet leaders, who saw the declaration of 27 March as a sacred achievement of the revolution, urged the Provisional Government to present it in the form of a diplomatic note to the Allies, which would give it effect as Russia’s practical foreign policy, albeit without the approval of her Foreign Minister. After a great deal of fuss, Miliukov was forced to agree to this plan: the endorsement of the Soviet peace programme by a visiting delegation of French and British socialists had undercut his main objection that it would not be acceptable to the Allies. But when he came to despatch the declaration to the foreign embassies he added a covering note of his own in which he stressed, in contravention of the declaration, that Russia was still firmly committed to a ‘decisive victory’, including, at least by implication, the imperial war aims of the tsarist government.42
