The February Revolution was relatively bloodless. The total number of killed and wounded has been estimated at between 1,300 and 1,450, of whom 169 were fatalities. Most of the deaths occurred at the naval bases in Kronshtadt and Helsinki, where anarchist sailors lynched officers, often on suspicion of “espionage” because of their German-sounding surnames.*
The position of the government was unenviable. It had to share power with the Soviet, controlled by radicals determined to advance the revolution and prepared, in the name of social ideals, to sabotage the very war they wanted to pursue. Nor did it have a clear notion of its function. Ostensibly, it was a mere caretaker government, put in place to keep the country together until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. “They believe that authority has fallen from the hands of the legal government,” Zinaida Gippius noted in her diary on March 2, “they have picked it up, will safeguard it, and will turn it over to the new legal authority which will bear no resemblance whatever to the old.”97 But this attitude proved entirely impractical because the government was at once beset by a multitude of problems that would not wait. In other words, it suffered not only from having to share power with another body but also from confusion as to how to use the power that it was allowed to claim.
Although the Provisional Government had cleared its personnel and program with the Ispolkom, the latter felt no obligation to reciprocate and from the outset legislated on its own. The most striking example of such independence is the notorious Order No. 1, which it issued on March 1 without consulting the Duma, although it concerned the most vital institution of the country in time of war, its armed forces.
One of the myths of the Russian Revolution is that Order No. 1 was dictated by a crowd of grubby soldiers. Sukhanov has left a vivid picture of the Social-Democratic lawyer N. D. Sokolov seated at a table in Taurida and writing down the demands of the troops. There even exists a photograph which seems to lend visual credibility to this version of the order’s origins.† Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that the document had a less spontaneous origin. It was initially formulated, not by rank-and-file soldiers, but by civilians and garrison delegates picked by the Ispolkom, some of them officers and most of them affiliated with the socialist parties. Shliapnikov leaves no doubt that the principal clauses of Order No. 1 were formulated by socialist intellectuals, eager to secure a dominant influence over the garrison.98 Although the order reflected some genuine soldier grievances, it was first and foremost a political manifesto. Its authors were well versed in the history of revolutions and aware that traditionally the principal counterrevolutionary threat came from the armed forces. Determined not to allow this to happen in Russia, they wanted to reduce the authority of the officers over the troops and to keep weapons out of their hands. Martynov notes that from the first day of the Revolution the Provisional Government and the Ispolkom engaged in a tug-of-war over the army:
44. N. D. Sokolov drafting Order No. 1: March 1, 1917.
The Provisional Government leaned on the commanding staff and officers, whereas the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies leaned on the rank-and-file. The celebrated Order No. 1 was, as it were, a wedge inserted into the body of the army, after which it split and began rapidly to fall apart.99
The Ispolkom exploited soldiers’ complaints over their ill treatment by officers as a means of subverting the authority of the officer staff, which was not something the troops asked for. Suffice it to say that of the seven articles in Order No. 1 only the last two addressed themselves to the status of the men in uniform; the remainder dealt with the role of the armed forces under the new regime and had as their purpose depriving the “bourgeois” government of the opportunity to use them as Cavaignac had done in 1848 and Thiers in 1871. Some rank-and-file soldiers and sailors had no difficulty understanding this. A sailor, appropriately named Pugachev, who dropped in at the Merezhkovskiis’ after having taken part in the vote on Order No. 1, told them: “Educated folk will read it differently. But we understood it straight: disarm the officers.”100
