The fifty-six-year-old Lvov was a well-to-do landlord with long experience in the zemstvo movement. During the war, he had chaired the Union of Zemstva and Municipal Councils (Zemgor). According to Miliukov, he had been chosen to head the cabinet because as chairman of Zemgor he came closest to fulfilling the role of society’s “leader,” but suspicions have been voiced that Miliukov chose him because, aspiring to leadership in the government, he saw in Lvov a convenient figurehead.89 A less suitable individual to direct Russia’s affairs in this turbulent era would be hard to conceive. Lvov not only had no experience in public administration, but he professed an extreme form of Populism rooted in an unbounded faith in the sagacity and goodwill of the “people.” He considered central government an unmitigated evil. On assuming office, he declared: “The process of the Great Revolution is not yet completed, yet each day that we live through strengthens our faith in the inexhaustible creative powers of the Russian people, its political wisdom, the greatness of its soul.”90 Lvov carried democratic and Populist convictions to the point of anarchism. When during the weeks and months that followed, provincial delegations would come to Petrograd for instruction, he received them with invariable attention and respect, but flatly refused to give them directives. When asked to appoint new governors in place of those whom the government had dismissed, he responded: “This is a question of the old psychology. The Provisional Government has removed the old governors and will appoint no one. Let them be elected locally. Such questions must be solved not in the center but by the population itself.”91 He carried this principle to extremes, believing that in a genuine democracy all decisions were made by the people concerned,92 the function of government presumably being confined to record-keeping. Vladimir Nabokov, the cabinet secretary, writes: “I do not recall a single occasion when [Lvov] used a tone of authority or spoke out decisively and definitively … he was the very embodiment of passivity.”93 Devoid of imagination, he was unaware of the magnitude of the events in the midst of which he found himself. But then what could one expect of a man who on a visit to Niagara Falls could think of nothing better to say than: “Really, now, what of it? A river flows and drops. That’s all.”94 He trailed this solemn ennui wherever he went.
Lvov was an utter disaster as Prime Minister, his failure aggravated by the fact that he also took over the Ministry of the Interior. After resigning his post in July, he faded from the picture and in 1926 died in Paris a forgotten man.
42. Prince G. Lvov.
Because he was so ineffectual and bland, he was overshadowed by the two most powerful personalities in the cabinet, Paul Miliukov and Alexander Kerensky, Russia’s best known politicians and bitter rivals.
Born in 1859, Miliukov belonged to an older generation than Kerensky. His major strength lay in inexhaustible energy: he could work round the clock, chairing political meetings and negotiating, and still find the time to write books, edit newspapers, and give lectures. He had a vast store of knowledge—his scholarly studies earned him a secure position as one of Russia’s premier historians. He was also an experienced parliamentarian, neither vain nor emotional. What he totally lacked, and what would wreck his career, was political intuition. Struve said of him that he practiced politics as if it were chess, and if it were, Miliukov would have been a grand master. He would time and again arrive at a political position by the process of deduction and persist in it long after it was obvious to everyone else that it was doomed. As Foreign Minister, his insistence first on retaining the monarchy and then on claiming for Russia Constantinople and the Straits reflected this shortcoming.
Kerensky was Miliukov’s opposite: if his rival was all theory and logic, he was all impulse and emotion. Thanks to his feel for the popular mood, he emerged early as an idol of the Revolution; thanks to his emotionalism, he proved incapable of coping with the responsibilities which he had assumed.
