The fruits of this were shown in such measures as:
- An amnesty for political prisoners
- The recognition of trade unions
- The introduction of an eight-hour day for industrial workers
- The replacement of the tsar’s police forces with a ‘people’s militia’
- The granting of full civil and religious freedoms
- A commitment to the convening of a constituent assembly
However, the agreed changes did not touch on the critical issues of the war and the land. It would be these that would destroy the always tenuous (fragile) partnership of the dual authority, and it would be Lenin who would begin the process of its destruction.
2: Lenin’s Return in April
What impact did Lenin’s return have on the situation in Petrograd?
Once the exiled Bolsheviks learned of Nicholas’ abdication they rushed back to Petrograd. Those, like Stalin, who had been in Siberia were the first to return in March. Another group with Lenin at their head arrived from Switzerland in April. Lenin’s return was a remarkable event. In the hope that the tsar’s fall would be the prelude to the collapse of Russian armies, the German government arranged for Lenin to return to Russia
In a sealed train across occupied Europe.
Since the outbreak of war in 1914 Lenin’s opponents had continually accused him of being a German agent. Their charge had weight. Between 1914 and 1917 the German Foreign Office had given regular financial support to Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the hope that if they achieved their revolutionary aims they would pull Russia out of the war. As Krupskaya observed, Lenin did not really care what the attitude of the Germans was. It just so happened that, for quite different reasons, what they wanted – the withdrawal of Russia – was precisely what he wanted. However, it made no difference to anti-Bolsheviks that the German reasons were military and Lenin’s were political. They considered the German government and the Bolshevik Party to be co-operating in a common cause, the defeat of Russia.
There is no doubting the great significance of Lenin’s return to Petrograd. Before then, the Bolsheviks had accepted the events of February, leading to the formation of the dual authority as part of a genuine revolution. They had been willing to work with the other revolutionary and reformist parties.
Lenin changed that. In his speech on his arrival at Petrograd’s Finland Station on 3 April, he declared that the February Revolution, far from giving Russia political freedom, had created a ‘parliamentary-bourgeois republic’. He condemned the Provisional Government and called for its overthrow in a second revolution. The following day he issued his ‘April Theses’, in which he spelt out future Bolshevik policy.
Lenin insisted that the Bolsheviks abandon all compromise with other parties and work for the true revolution entirely by their own efforts. The role of the Bolsheviks was not to extend freedom to all classes, but to transfer power to the workers. This was a reaffirmation of his basic belief that only the Bolshevik party represented the forces of proletarian revolution.
Lenin had ulterior motives in demanding power for the soviets. Although he rejected much of what they had done, he saw the soviets as a power-base. In practice they had become an essential part of the structure of the post-tsarist government. Lenin calculated that the soviets – the Petrograd Soviet in particular – offered his small Bolshevik Party the means by which it could obtain power in the name of the proletariat. The Bolshevik takeover of the soviets would be the prelude to Bolshevik takeover of the state.
Main Points in Lenin’s April theses:
- Ferbruary had not been a genuine class revolution but a palace coup, which had simply given authority to the bourgeoisie.
- The soviet was the sole body with the right to govern.
- The Provisional Government was simply the old, class-ridden, duma in a new garb.
- It was the task of the Bolsheviks not to co-operate with the Provisional Government but to overthrow it.
The essence of Lenin’s argument was summed up in a set of provocative Bolshevik slogans: ‘Peace, Bread and Land’ and ‘All Power to the Soviets’, These proved to be more than just mere slogans. They identified the chronic food shortage, and the disruption in the countryside. It was the Provisional Government’s failure to cope with these difficulties that was to bring about its collapse.
From the outset, the position of the Provisional Government was precarious. The dominant problem was the war. For the Provisional Government after February 1917 there was no choice but to fight on. Unless it did so it would no longer receive the supplies and the war-credits from the western allies on which it had come to rely. Tsardom had left Russia virtually bankrupt. No Russian government at the time could have carried on without large injections of capital from abroad.
Foreign bankers were among the first to visit Russia after Nicholas’ abdication to ensure that the new regime was committed to pursuing the war.
The strain that this obligation imposed on the Provisional Government finally proved unsustainable. Its preoccupation with the war prevented it from dealing with Russia’s social and economic problems. It was a paradoxical situation: in order to survive the PG had to keep Russia in the war, but in doing so it destroyed its own chances of survival.
The question of the war brought about the first serious rift between the Petrograd Soviet and the PG. On 14 March the Soviet had issued an ‘Address to the people of the whole world, declaring for peace without annexations and indemnities (reparations). Nonsense was made of the government’s acceptance of the ‘Address’ by the repeated assurances of Milyukov, the foreign minister, and that Russia would continue to play its full military role as one of the allies.
Late in April, a series of violent demonstrations occurred in Petrograd against Milyukov. These resulted in his resignation and that of Guchov, the war minister, early in May. In the reshuffled cabinet, Kerensky became the war minister and places were found for leasing Mensheviks and SRs. It was hoped that this apparent leftward shift of the PG would ease its relationship with the Soviet.
In fact, the opposite happened. The socialists in the government tended to become isolated from the Soviet. This was because in joining the government they had to enter into coalition with the Kadets, which opened them to the charge that they were compromising with the bourgeoisie. Lenin wrote of them as ‘those despicable socialists who have sold out to the government.
Some individuals within the PG had misgivings about continuing the war, but at no time did the government as a body contemplate withdrawing from the war. This would have mattered less had the Russian armies been successful, but the military situation continued to deteriorate, eroding such support as the government had initially enjoyed.
Lvov stayed as nominal head of the government, but it was Kerensky who increasingly became the major influence. As war minister, he urged that Russia should embrace the conflict with Germany as a struggle to save the Revolution, requiring the total dedication of the nation. He made a number of personal visits to the front to deliver passionate speeches to the troops.
This attempt to turn the war into a revolution crusade took no account of the real situation. The fact was that Russia had gone beyond the point where it could fight a successful war. Yet Kerensky persisted. In June, a major offensive was launched on the south-western front. It failed badly. With their already low morale further weakened by the Bolshevik sebversion, the Russian forces were no match for the Germans, who easily repelled them and inflicted heavy losses. Whole regiments mutinied or deserted. General Kornilov, the commander on the south-western front, called on the Provisional Government to halt the offensive and direct its energies to crushing subversives at home. The government took up this appeal for a tougher policy. Lvov stood down as prime minister, to be replaced by Kerensky. Kornilov became commander-in-chief.
The government’s troubles were deepened by events on the island of Kronstadt , the naval base situated 15 miles west of Petrograd in the Bay of Finland. Sailors and workers there defied the central authorities by setting up their own separate government. Such developments tempted a number of revolutionaries in Petrograd into thinking that the time and opportunity had come for them to bring down the Provisional Government. The attempt to do so became known as the ‘July Days’.
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The July Days, 3-6 July 52 pages
By the summer of 1917 it did, indeed, seem that the government’s authority was irreparably breaking down. The…
- Spread of soviets
- Worker-control of the factories
- Widespread seizure of land by the peasants
- Creation of independent national minority governments, most notably the Ukraine
…Suggested that the Provisional Government was no longer in control of events. It was the Ukraine question that helped to provoke the July Days crisis. When the Kadet ministers in the coalition learned in late June that a Provisional Government delegation in Kiev had offered independence to the Ukraine, they resigned, protesting that only a constituent assembly could properly decide such matters.
This ministerial crisis coincided with large-scale street demonstrations in Petrograd. Public protests were not uncommon; they had been almost a daily occurrence since February. But in the atmosphere created by the news of the failure of the southwestern offensive and the government’s mounting problems the demonstrations of early July turned into a direct challenge to the Provisional Government.
It is not entirely clear who initiated the rising of 3-6 July. A month before, at the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lenin had declared that the Bolshevik Party was ready to take power, but the delegates had regarded this as rhetoric rather than clear intention. It is also the case that there were SRs and other and other non-Bolshevik revolutionaries in the Soviet who for some time had been demanding that the Petrograd Soviet supersede the PG.
The rising itself was a confused, disorderly affair. In the course of the three days the demonstrators fell out amongst themselves; those members of the Soviet who seemed reluctant to make a real bid for power were physically attacked. This disunity made it relatively easy for the Provisional Government to crush the rising. Troops loyal to the government were rushed from the front. They duly scattered the demonstrators and restored order.
Trotsky later referred to the July Days as a ‘semi-insurrection’ (revolution) and argued that the Mensheviks and SRs had begun it. In saying this, he was trying to absolve the Bolsheviks from the blame of having started a rising that failed. The explanation offered afterwards by the Bolsheviks was that they had come heroically to the aid of the workers who had risen spontaneously against the government.
The opposite point of view was put at the time by Nikolei Chheidze, the Menshevik chairman of the Soviet. He argued that the Bolsheviks, having been behind the rising from the beginning, later tried to disclaim responsibility.
The results of the unsuccessful July rising revealed a number of important facts:
- The opposition forces were disunited
- The Bolsheviks were still far from being the dominant revolutionary party
- The PG still had the strength to be able to put down an armed insurrection
This last revelation did much to raise the spirits of the government, and brought much credit to Kerensky, the war minister. Two days after the rising had been crushed, he became prime minister. He immediately increased the pressure on the Bolsheviks. Pravda was closed down and many of the Bolshevik leaders, including Trotsky and Kamenev, were arrested. Lenin fled to Finland. Kerensky also launched a propaganda campaign in which Lenin and his party were branded as traitors and agents in the pay of the German high command.
A fortnight after the July Days, the Bolshevik Party appeared to have been broken as a political force in Russia. What enabled the Bolsheviks to survive was the critical misjudgement made by the PG over the land question and the Kornilov affair.
- The Land Question
Land-shortage had been a chief cause of peasant unreast since the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The February Revolution had led the peasants to believe that they would be the beneficiaries of a major land redistribution. They had expected that the estates of the landlords would be appropriated and given to them. When this did not happen, the peasants took the law into their own hands and seized the property of local landlords. Disturbances in the countryside occurred daily throughout 1917. It would not be an exaggeration to describe this as a national peasants’ revolt.
Neither the PG nor the Bolsheviks had a real answer to the land problem. The PG had set up a Land Commission with the object of redistributing land, but this body made little headway in handling a massive administrative task.
It was doubtful, moreover, whether the govt’s heart was ever really in land reform. The majority of its members came from the propertied classes. They were unlikely to be enthusiasts for a policy that would threaten their own position. They had supported the February Revolution as a political change, not a social upheaval. They were quite willing for the estates of the fallen monarchy to go to the peasants, but they had no intention of losing their own possessions in a general land redistribution. This had been the thrust of Lenin’s assertion in the ‘April Theses’ that tsardom had been replaced by a bourgeois, not a revolutionary regime.
Yet there was a sense in which the land issue was equally difficult for the Bolsheviks. As a Marxist party, they had dismissed the peasantry as, in Trotsky’s words, “the pack animal” of history lacking true revolutionary initiative. By definition, the proletarian revolution was an affair of the industrial working class. Lenin, on his return in April, declared: “It is not possible for a proletarian party to rest its hopes at this time on a community of interest with the peasantry”. However, faced with the fact of peasant land-seizures throughout Russia, Lenin was quite prepared to make a tactical adjustment. Appreciating that it was impossible to ignore the disruptive behaviour of four-fifths of the population, he asserted that the special circumstances of post-tsarist Russia had produced a situation in which the peasants were acting as a truly revolutionary force. This modification of Marxist theory thus allowed Lenin to add Russian peasants to the proletarian cause.
‘Land to the Peasants’, a slogan lifted from the programme of the SRs, became the new Bolshevik catchphrase. What this meant in mid-1917 was that the Bolsheviks recognised the peasant land-seizures as a fait accompli. Lenin declared that what the peasantry had done was wholly in keeping with ‘revolutionary legality’.
This produced a considerable swing to the Bolsheviks in the countryside. It had the further effect of splitting the SRs, a significant number of whom began to align themselves with the Bolsheviks. Known as the Left SRs, they sided with the Bolshevik Party on all major issues.
