The Russian Revolution полностью

But even under these circumstances it might have been possible to give the country some sort of rudimentary order had the Provisional Government not promoted anarchy by dissolving the provincial bureaucracy and the police. It is quite misleading of Kerensky to say, in self-justification, that it was the Imperial regime that had destroyed the administrative apparatus of Russia.¹⁴⁹ In fact, this was mainly accomplished by Points 5 and 6 of the eight-point program which the Provisional Committee had adopted on March 1–2 in its agreement with the Ispolkom.¹⁵⁰ On March 5, all governors and deputy governors were dismissed, their authority being transferred to the chairmen of the provincial zemstvo boards (gubernskie zemskie upravy). This action was most perplexing. Although some of the officials had resigned on their own upon learning of the Tsar’s abdication, and others were arrested by local citizens, in many provinces the governors welcomed the new government and took part in ceremonies honoring it.¹⁵¹ The government acted as it did in the belief that the men of the old regime could not be trusted to be loyal to the new order and would sabotage it at the first opportunity.¹⁵² This assumption was of dubious validity because the Provisional Government quickly acquired an aura of legitimacy in the eyes of the tsarist bureaucrats, accustomed to obeying central authority. If the government wanted to make certain of their loyalty, it only had to release Nicholas’s farewell address to the armed forces, in which, as we shall note, he urged Russians to obey the Provisional Government—a document the government chose to withhold from the public. The removal of the governors, the traditional mainstays of Russia’s administration, left a vacuum in the provinces. One can understand why the revolutionary government would have wanted to place its own men in these positions, but it is difficult to see why the old governors could not have been retained at their posts for the short time needed to find their replacements. This action resembled the abolition by the French National Assembly in 1789 of the office of intendant, the principal agent of royal absolutism, which had the immediate effect of depriving Paris of nearly all control over the countryside.¹⁵³ It may even have been modeled on it. But France had much stronger social institutions than Russia as well as a sense of national cohesion that Russia lacked. The effect of these measures in France was, therefore, much less drastic: unlike revolutionary Russia, France never fell apart.

The dissolution of the old provincial bureaucracy proved immensely popular with the intelligentsia, whose rhetoric about the “masses” and “democracy” camouflaged strong careerist impulses. In city after city, usually under the auspices of the local soviet, they set up their offices, complete with staffs of assistants and secretaries, telephones, stationery, and rubber stamps. However, lacking the experience of those whom they replaced, they merely mimicked them.

More understandable, although in the long run no less destabilizing, was the dissolution of the police and gendarmerie, symbols of state authority for the mass of the country’s population. This decision implemented Point 5 of the eight-point accord. The Department of Police was abolished on March 4: the act was a mere formality, since it had ceased to operate on February 27, when a mob sacked its headquarters. On the same day, the government ordered the dissolution of the Okhrana and Corps of Gendarmes. The day after, it sent instructions to the local authorities to form citizens’ militias commanded by elected officers and operating under the authority of zemstva and Municipal Councils. Such militias, to the extent that they were constituted, enjoyed no authority: Nabokov notes that in a number of areas they were even taken over by criminal elements.¹⁵⁴ Two weeks after the Revolution, Russia was without a police force of either a political or a civil kind. When, in April 1917, the government found itself challenged by Bolshevik-led mobs, it had no force on which to rely.

Thus, a task immensely difficult to begin with—to govern a country at war and in the grip of revolutionary euphoria—was rendered impossible by rash actions dictated by a doctrinaire vision of democracy, belief in the wisdom of the people, and distaste for the professional bureaucracy and police. Russia in the spring of 1917 may well represent a unique instance of a government born of a revolution dissolving the machinery of administration before it had a chance to replace it with one of its own creation.