The Soviet leaders, in choosing to close ranks with the Bolsheviks, had no doubt overreacted to the threat of a ‘counter-revolution’. As in February, they had looked at reality through the distorting prism of history: the shadows of 1849 and 1906 had obscured their vision. It was partly the same fear of counter-revolution which also prevented them, as in February, from taking power themselves. This too would prove a fatal mistake — for only a Soviet government could have filled the power vacuum left by the collapse of the coalition. True, it might not have brought about peace, bread or land; nor could it have ended the spiral into chaos and violence in the country; but at least it would have denied the Bolsheviks the chance to rally mass support under the slogan of ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ During the July Days the streets had begged the Soviet leaders to take power. Yet the latter had calmly dismissed this as no more than Bolshevik demagogy. It did not occur to them that such calls might express the wishes of the rest of the democracy. After all, as its self-appointed leaders, wasn’t it their task to decide that? ‘I have been in the provinces and on the Front,’ Tsereteli reassured the Soviet deputies on 4 July, ‘and I am stating that the authority of the Provisional Government in the country is extremely great.’59 Their rigid party dogma told the Mensheviks and the SRs that a socialist government could not be formed because the ‘bourgeois stage of the revolution’ had still not been completed. This higher logic drove these philosophers to the conclusion that a new coalition had to be patched together at all costs and that, if the Kadets still refused to join it, then a bloc would have to be formed with other bourgeois groups. ‘The coalition is dead! Long live the coalition!’
The reformation of the coalition became inevitable with Kerensky’s appointment as the new Prime Minister. He had returned to the capital on 6 July and, on his own insistence, had been met by a lavish guard of honour, with Cossacks and cavalry lining the streets from the Warsaw Station. This was to be the triumphant entry of a national hero, the man who was said to have saved the country from the Bolshevik menace by rallying loyal troops at the Front. On the next day Prince Lvov resigned and named Kerensky as his successor. For Lvov, it was a great relief. He had already decided to step down, when he had written to his parents on 3 July. He was tired of politics — the burdens of office had turned his hair grey — and he did not have the heart to carry out the repressions demanded in the wake of the July Days. ‘The only way to save the country now’, Lvov told his old friend T. I. Polner on 9 July, ‘is to close down the Soviet and shoot at the people. I cannot do that. But Kerensky can.’ Right until the end, the gentle Prince would not use coercion against ‘the people’. His lifelong faith in their ‘goodness and wisdom’, however mistaken that may now have seemed, would not allow him to do so. Four days later, he left the capital and retired to a monastery.60
Kerensky was hailed as the man to reunite the country and halt the drift towards civil war. He was the only major politician who had a base of popular support yet who was also broadly acceptable to the military leaders and the bourgeoisie. Tsereteli was the senior Soviet leader, to be sure, yet it was precisely this which ruled him out. For if the coalition was to be reformed, it would have to cut its ties with the Soviet programme, or else the Kadets would have nothing to do with it. Kerensky was the ideal figure to bring the coalition back together: as a member of both the Soviet and the Duma circles which had formed the Provisional Government he made a human bridge between the socialist and liberal camps. This placed him in a unique position — and the fate of Russia now seemed to depend upon this one young man. In itself this was a tragic situation, for it was without doubt much too heavy a burden for a man of Kerensky’s tender years and rather modest talents.
