The reckoning came a few weeks later. Soldiers in the capital began to refuse to obey orders. Even Cossacks, hitherto the most loyal of servicemen, began to side with the St Petersburg crowd against the police. The Tsar procrastinated, so the Duma formed a provisional government with the support of the self-proclaimed St Petersburg Council (in Russian,
The Provisional Government announced a general amnesty, abolished distinctions based on class, religion and nationality, and proclaimed freedom of speech, assembly and the press. It also began preparing for elections to a Constituent Assembly which was to decide the Empire’s future. But the Provisional Government itself had not been elected, and felt that its chief claim to legitimacy was the recognition of other states, notably Russia’s allies, the Western democracies. Pending elections and the establishment of a popular legitimacy, therefore, it continued the war.
Now people began to whisper that there was to be a distribution of land to peasants, and soldiers began to desert their stations and drift home to make sure they got a share. The rate of desertion grew steadily in the months that followed. Meanwhile, disruptions and dislocations behind the lines continued to sap morale and increase worker militancy. The Provisional Government reconstituted itself more than once in order to reflect what it sensed to be the increasingly radical popular mood; and then the state administration began to crumble. The ministers in St Petersburg became increasingly isolated and ineffectual. Such were the circumstances in which Lenin’s small group of Bolsheviks 44 took over power with the help of elements in the St Petersburg garrison and railway and telegraph workers, who prevented troops from the front arriving to establish a military dictatorship.
Hostilities with Germany, Austria and Turkey were ended by an armistice signed in December 1917 — but too late to save the Empire. Nicholas II had been the last, flawed, keystone of the autocratic system, and without it the edifice collapsed. Elections to the Constituent Assembly held soon afterwards showed that the liberal and democratic elements in the political spectrum had lost popular credibility and that the Bolsheviks — thanks to Lenin’s promises of bread for the cities, land for the peasants, and an end to the war — were fast gaining popularity. However, the hands-down electoral victors were the Social Revolutionaries, another Marxism-influenced party oriented towards the peasants. In any case the Constituent Assembly was not to decide the Empire’s future. Soon after it assembled, Lenin closed it down. By then, however, it was not a question of who would govern Russia, but whether there would be anything to govern.
12The Construction of a Juggernaut
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION has become a traditional dividing line for historians, but its use in this way can be misleading, because it divorces the history of the new regime from its context in war. It was the war, and the costs and dislocations the war created, which allowed Lenin to take over and which helped to mould the culture of the new Soviet state with its coercive, military methods. Too rigid a distinction between the old regime and the new also leads to important continuities being glossed over or ignored. Though it tried to shrug them off, the new Soviet Russia was forced to carry many of the burdens that had weighed its predecessor down, and despite desperate attempts to make over everything as new — abolishing the imperial army and the police, the courts and much of the bureaucracy - it was soon cannibalizing what remained of the old imperial machine to build a new one. It employed thousands of officers and officials who had served the tsars to help run the new army and the new bureaucracy. Experts on trade, banking and other capitalist arts, and even police officials, were also engaged — for even revolutionary regimes need such skills. Historical inertia sometimes exerts more influence than the power of revolution.
