The order was addressed to the “Garrison of the Petrograd Military District,” but it was immediately interpreted as applicable to all the armed forces, at the front as well as in the rear.101 Article 1 called for the election in every military unit, from company to regiment, as well as in the navy, of “committees” modeled on the soviets. Article 2 provided for every company to elect one representative to the Petrograd Soviet. Article 3 stated that in respect to all political actions, members of the armed forces were subordinated to the Petrograd Soviet and their committees. Article 4 gave the Petrograd Soviet the authority to countermand orders of the Provisional Government bearing on military matters. Article 5 stipulated that control over all military equipment (rifles, machine guns, armored vehicles, etc.) was to be assumed by company and battalion committees; they were not to be turned over to officers under any conditions. Article 6 accorded off-duty soldiers the same rights as civilians, relieving them of the obligation of saluting and standing at attention. Article 7 abolished the practice of addressing officers by honorary titles and forbade officers to speak to soldiers in a rude or familiar manner.
45. Political meeting at the front: Summer 1917.
It is difficult to believe that when the Ispolkom approved Order No. 1 and distributed it to the armed forces, it did not realize the consequences. It is equally difficult to believe that in approving this extraordinary document it thought it was merely responding to soldier complaints. The order’s inevitable effect was to subvert the authority of the government and the officer corps over the armed forces. As soon as it came to be known to the troops, they formed everywhere, at the front and in the rear, military “committees”: army committees, corps committees, divisional committees, as well as regimental, battalion, and company committees, a bewildering array of overlapping groups. Those functioning at the lower levels (company, battalion, and regiment) were ordinarily staffed by rank-and-file soldiers and resembled, in their structure and procedures, urban soviets. But those operating at the higher echelons immediately fell under the control of Menshevik, Bolshevik, and SR intellectuals, often recently commissioned university students, who used them to advance their political agenda—a military equivalent of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. At every military level there now took place endless meetings with interminable discussions, followed by a flood of mandatory “resolutions.” Senior officers came to be treated as class enemies: as their authority waned, the chain of command broke down.
No less damaging was Article 4, which read: “The orders of the Military Commission of the State Duma are to be carried out only in those instances when they do not contradict the orders and resolutions of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.” This clause struck at the very heart of the government’s responsibility for the conduct of the war. The Ispolkom viewed itself as in charge of the armed forces and the Minister of War as its employee: on one occasion (March 6) it even complained that the Minister of War was “disinclined to subordinate himself” to the decisions of the Soviet.102
Guchkov, who learned of Order No. 1 only after its publication, sought in vain to have the Soviet retract it. The best he could get was to have the Ispolkom issue Order No. 2, which only compounded the damage. Guchkov wanted the Soviet to state unequivocally that Order No. 1 applied only to the troops in the rear. But Order No. 2, issued on March 5, did not say that. It dealt mainly with the question whether officers should be elected by their men and conveyed the impression that the Ispolkom approved of such a procedure. Nowhere did it state that Order No. 1 did not apply to front-line troops.103
On March 9, less than two weeks after the new government had been formed, Guchkov cabled General Alekseev:
The Provisional Government has no real power of any kind and its orders are carried out only to the extent that this is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which controls the most essential strands of actual power, insofar as the troops, railroads, [and] postal and telegraph services are in its hands. One can assert bluntly that the Provisional Government exists only as long as it is permitted to do so by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. In particular, in the military department, it is possible at present to issue only such orders as basically do not contradict the decisions of the above-mentioned Soviet.104
