The Russian Revolution полностью

The monarchy played no part in these critical events. Nicholas’s last order of any consequence was his February 25 instruction demanding the suppression of street disorders. Once this order proved unenforceable, the monarchy ceased to matter. After that date, it not only lost control over events but receded into the background as the political conflict began to revolve around the relationship between the Duma and the Soviet.

However, after the Provisional Government had come into being, the question of the monarchy’s future acquired great urgency. Some ministers wanted to retain the monarchy on a strictly limited, constitutional basis. Proponents of this position, mainly Miliukov and Guchkov, felt that some sort of monarchical presence was essential, in part because to the Russian masses the Crown symbolized the “state” and in part because in a multinational empire it was the main supranational, unifying institution. Their opponents argued that the anti-monarchist passions of the crowds had made it unrealistic to expect the monarchy to survive in any form.

The monarchy’s prestige in Russia had reached a nadir in the winter of 1916–17 when even committed monarchists turned against it. Guchkov, for all his royalist sentiments, had to admit that in the first days of the Revolution, “around the throne, there was an utter vacuum.” And Shulgin noted on February 27: “in this whole immense city one could not find a few hundred men sympathetic to the government.”¹⁰⁵ The significance of this fact can scarcely be overestimated: it exerted a critical influence not only on the outbreak of the Revolution but on its whole subsequent course. Centuries of historical experience had inculcated in Russians—that is, the mass of peasants, workers, and soldiers—the habit of viewing the tsar as the khoziain or proprietor of the country. This notion prevented them from conceiving of sovereignty as something distinct from the person of the sovereign. Russia without a true—that is, “terrible” or “awesome”—tsar, let alone without any tsar, in the people’s minds was a contradiction in terms: for them it was the person of the tsar that defined and gave reality to the state, not the other way around. The decline in the prestige of tsardom which had occurred after the turn of the century, as a result of the monarchy’s inability to suppress the opposition and its ultimate surrender of autocratic authority, lowered in their eyes the prestige of the state and its government as well. Without its khoziain, the country, as the people understood it, fell apart and ceased to exist, just as a peasant household fell apart and ceased to exist upon the death of its bol’shak. When this happened, Russia reverted to its original “Cossack” constitution of universal volia, or liberty, understood in the sense of unbridled license, in which the will of the commune was the only acknowledged authority.

In view of this tradition, one might have expected the mass of the population to favor the retention of the monarchy. But at this particular historic juncture two factors militated against such a stand.

The peasantry remained monarchist. Nevertheless, in early 1917 it was not averse to an interlude of anarchy, sensing that it would provide a chance finally to carry out a nationwide “Black Repartition.” Indeed, between the spring of 1917 and the spring of 1918, the communal peasantry would seize and distribute among themselves virtually all the land in private possession. Once this process was completed, its traditional monarchist sentiments would reassert themselves, but then it would be too late.

The other consideration had to do with the fear of punishment on the part of the Petrograd populace, especially the troops. The February events could be seen in different ways: as a glorious revolution or as a sordid military mutiny. If the monarchy survived, even though constitutionally circumscribed, it was likely to view the actions of the Petrograd garrison as mutiny:

The half-conscious revulsion against the monarchy among the [Petrograd] masses seems to have been motivated by a sense of apprehension over what had been done … a revolution that ended with the reestablishment of the old dynasty would essentially turn into a rebellion, participation in which … carried the risk of retribution.¹⁰⁶