When Lenin cabled these instructions to his followers the Provisional Government had been in office only one week and had hardly had the opportunity to reveal its political physiognomy. In any event, far away from the scene and dependent on second- and third-hand accounts from Western news agencies, Lenin could not have known the intentions and actions of the new government. His insistence that it be treated with “complete mistrust” and denied support, therefore, could not have been due to disapproval of its policies: rather it reflected an a priori determination to remove it from power. His demand that the Bolsheviks not cooperate with the other parties indicated that he was bent on filling the ensuing power vacuum exclusively with the Bolshevik Party. This laconic document indicates that barely four days after he had learned of the February Revolution, Lenin was contemplating a Bolshevik coup d’état. His order to “arm the proletariat” suggests that he envisaged the coup as a military insurrection.
The Bolshevik Party in March 1917 was hardly in a condition to carry out such an ambitious plan. Police arrests during the war, culminating in those of February 26, 1917, when the party’s most important entity, the Petrograd Committee, was taken into custody7 had decapitated its apparatus: its leading figures were either in jail or in exile. In a report to Lenin in early December 1916, Shliapnikov described Bolshevik activities in some factories and garrison units during the preceding months under the slogans “Down with the War” and “Down with the Government,” but he also had to admit that the Bolsheviks were so infiltrated by police informers that illegal party activity had become virtually impossible.8 Subsequent Bolshevik claims of having inspired and even organized the February Revolution are, therefore, entirely spurious. The Bolsheviks rode the coattails first of the spontaneous demonstrators and then those of the Mensheviks and their soviets. Their following among the mutinous military units was close to nil and among the industrial workers at this time they had far fewer adherents than either the Mensheviks or the SRs. During the February days their role was limited to issuing appeals and manifestos: at most, they may have had a hand in preparing the revolutionary banners carried by workers and soldiers in the demonstrations of February 25–28.
The Bolsheviks, however, made up for what they lacked in numbers with organizational skills. On March 2, the Petrograd Committee of the party, freshly released from prison, set up a three-man Bureau consisting of Shliapnikov, V. M. Molotov, and P. A. Zalutskii.9 Three days later this Bureau brought out, under Molotov’s editorship, the first issue of the revived party organ,
During March 1917, the Bolsheviks in Russia, cut off from their leader, pursued a course that hardly differed from that of the Mensheviks and SRs. A resolution of the Central Committee passed that month described the Provisional Government as an agent of the “large bourgeoisie” and of “landowners,” but did not advocate that it be opposed. On March 3 the Petrograd Committee, the most powerful of the Bolshevik organizations, adopted the Menshevik-SR position calling for support of the government
