But as Nicholas had noted, none had any administrative experience. Such political expertise as they possessed they had gained in the Duma: politics to them meant battling the Imperial bureaucracy in and out of the halls of Taurida, debating legislative proposals, and in a crisis appealing to the masses. Academics, lawyers, and businessmen, they were qualified to grapple with broad issues of public policy, and in a stable parliamentary democracy they might have acquitted themselves well. But a government, of course, does not merely legislate—first and foremost, it administers: “Administrer, c’est gouverner,” Mirabeau is quoted as having said, “gouverner, c’est régner; tout se réduit là.” Of this principle, they understood nothing, having been accustomed all their lives to leaving the ordinary, day-to-day running of the country to the despised bureaucracy. Indeed, in their zeal to do everything differently, they purposefully did the opposite: just as tsarism sought to reduce politics to administration, they wanted to eliminate administration from politics. The attention of the First Provisional Government centered on rectifying the abuses of the old regime, mainly by means of legislative acts, unhampered by the veto of the Tsar and the upper chamber. Throughout its existence, it showed far more zeal in destroying the legacy of the past than in building something to replace it. It never created a set of new institutions to supplant those which had collapsed either of their own weight or under its assault.
This lack of interest in administering and implementing the laws which poured out of their chanceries, the new leaders rationalized with professions of faith in the wisdom of the “people.” Knowledge of politics derived largely from literary sources habituated the Russian intelligentsia to think of democracy, not as an ideal, attained by patient effort, but as a reality inhibited from asserting itself only by the legacy of tsarism. They were convinced—or perhaps needed to convince themselves—that in order to give democracy a chance, it was essential not to govern. In a country that throughout its history had been accustomed to centralized government and obedience to directives from above, the revolutionary government adopted an extreme form of political laissez-faire—and this in the midst of an unprecedented war, inflation, agrarian stirrings, and a host of other pressing problems.
