A People's Tragedy (69 page)

* * * The main aim of the leaders in the Tauride Palace — both in the left wing and in the right — was to restore order on the streets. There was a real danger of the revolution degenerating into anarchy. Thousands of drunken workers and soldiers were roaming through the city looting stores, breaking into houses, beating up and robbing people in the streets. The revolutionary struggle against the police and the army officers was breaking down into uncontrolled violence and retribution. 'Unless all this is brought to a halt,' warned one deputy in the Soviet, 'the revolution will end in defeat and shame.'

One cause for concern was the safe and orderly detention of the tsarist ministers and officials. On the evening of the 27th the Council of Ministers had held its last meeting in the Marinsky Palace and formally submitted its resignation to the Tsar. At one stage in the meeting the lights had gone out and it was assumed that the revolutionaries were about to storm the palace. In fact it was just a power-cut and when the lights came back on after a few minutes, several of the ministers were found hiding under the table. None the less, their

panic was not without cause. Some 4,000 tsarist government officials were seized by the crowd in the February Days, and the fate of many of them was not one that anyone would envy. The Temporary Committee of the Duma ordered the arrest of all ex-ministers and senior officials, and their delivery to the Duma 'for justice', partly to save them from the horrors of 'mob law'. It was fitting and symbolic that Shcheglovitov, the former Minister of Justice, should have been the first to be brought by the crowds to the Tauride Palace. There he was met by Kerensky, shortly to become the next Minister of Justice, who, clearly aware of the drama of the situation, announced to the prisoner:

'Ivan Grigorievich Shcheglovitov, you are under arrest! Your life is not in danger!' And then with irony added the words: 'Know that the State Duma does not shed blood.'

Several ex-ministers even turned themselves in to the Duma rather than run the risk of being captured by the crowds. Protopopov was among these. He tried to save himself by turning evidence against the Tsar and, when this failed, broke down into tears and whined pathetically. Sukhomlinov, the ex-Minister of War, arrived on I March with his own armed escort, causing wild excitement among the soldiers. They were only just dissuaded from executing him on the spot. But they did succeed in tearing off his epaulettes as a rejection of the old military order.'14

All these fallen officials were detained in the Ministerial Pavilion of the Tauride Palace and then transferred to the Peter and Paul Fortress for interrogation and imprisonment.

It was one of those small but nicely symbolic ironies of the revolution that the man who was placed in charge of escorting the ministers to the Peter and Paul should have been a man, Viktor Zenzinov, who had himself once been a prisoner there. He recalls what must have been a very strange sensation as he, now a government official, arrived at the prison gates with Shcheglovitov, once the Minister of Justice himself, but now just another 'political':

We drove through the gates, did a turn or two, went under the arch and came to a stop in front of the door. Just the same guards stood there now as I remembered from seven years before. Then out came to meet us — I could scarcely believe my eyes — Captain Ivanishin, the same Captain Ivanishin, who seven years before had run the Trubetskoi Bastion, where the solitary confinement prisoners were kept and where I had been kept under him in a damp stone cell for six months during 1910 . . . Now he was conducting himself politely with me. I have no doubt that Ivanishin recognized me immediately, just as I recognized him, but he did not give any sign of recognition.

On Zenzinov's request, Kerensky ordered the removal of Ivanishin. But the order was not carried out. It was only later, after several weeks, when Ivanishin was found guilty of accepting bribes from the imprisoned ministers, that he was finally dismissed.35

A second cause for concern in the Tauride Palace was how to get the troops to return to their barracks. This was essential to restore order. On the 28th the Military Commission

— now under the control of the Temporary Committee — ordered the soldiers who had mutinied to return to their garrisons and to recognize the authority of their officers. But the soldiers were afraid that they would be punished for their participation in the mutiny, and demanded guarantees of their immunity before they returned. Most of them mistrusted the Temporary Committee — some of them called it 'counter-revolutionary'

because it supported the officers — and turned to the Soviet to protect them. The result was Order Number One, perhaps the most consequential document to be written as a result of the February Revolution. It was a list of the soldiers' demands and conditions for their return to the garrisons. It provided for the establishment of soldiers' committees as a democratic counterbalance to the authority of the officers. It declared that the soldiers would recognize only the authority of the Petrograd Soviet, and that the orders of the Duma's Military Commission would be executed only in so far as they did not conflict with the Soviet's. When they were not on military duty, soldiers were to enjoy the rights of citizens, including the right not to salute their officers. Rudeness by the officers towards the soldiers, including the use of the familiar 'you'
(tyi),
associated with children and serfs, was henceforth to be prohibited as an insult to the soldier's dignity.

The honorific titles of the officers, such as 'Your Excellency' and 'Your Honour', which the peasant soldiers, in particular, resented as a remnant of serfdom, were to be replaced by new and democratic forms of address, such as 'Mister General' or 'Mister Colonel'.

The Order was a popular creation in the full sense of the term. Sukhanov watched as Sokolov sat a table:

surrounded on all sides by soldiers, standing, sitting, and leaning on the table, half dictating and half suggesting to Sokolov what he should write . . . There was no agenda and no discussion of any kind, everyone spoke, and all were completely absorbed in the work, formulating their collective opinion without any voting . . . When the work was finished they put a heading on the sheet: 'Order No. I'.

A few minutes later the Order was read out before the Soviet, then in session in the Catherine Hall, and passed unanimously to the thunderous applause of the soldiers. This crucial document, which did more than anything else to

destroy the discipline of the army, and thus in a sense brought the Bolsheviks to power, had taken only a few minutes to pass.36

***

While the Soviet leaders wanted to restore order, most of them had no intention of assuming power. The whole basis of their strategy was to pressurize the Duma leaders into forming a 'bourgeois government'. Thus there arose what Trotsky later called the

'paradox' of February: that a revolution made in the streets resulted in a government made in the salons. This was a recurring pattern throughout the politics of 1917: there were several moments (February, April, July and September) when the Soviet leaders might have taken power, when indeed the crowds came out on to the streets with the express demand that they do just that, but on each occasion they shied away from the responsibilities of government. In this way they missed their chance to resolve the revolution in a democratic and socialist form. The Bolsheviks reaped the benefits.

How are we to explain this political failure? In the context of February, which determined much of the later politics, there were three main lines of reasoning.

First, there was the problem of party dogma. Both the Mensheviks and the SRs adhered rigidly to the belief that in a backward peasant country such as Russia there would have to be a 'bourgeois revolution' (meaning a long period of capitalism and democracy) before Russian society, and the working class in particular, would be sufficiently advanced for the transition to a socialist order. As Plekhanov had once put it, there was not yet enough proletarian yeast in the peasant dough of Russia to make the cake of socialism. In the case of the Mensheviks this belief in the two-stage revolution derived from Marxist theory; and in the case of the SRs it derived largely from the Mensheviks.

The belief was based on two further assumptions, which both made abstract sense but fell down when applied to the real world. It was a case of trying to impose nineteenth-century Western dogmas on the realities of twentieth-century Russia. For one thing, it was said that the peasants (and the provinces in general) would not support a socialist government in the cities because they were too attached to what the Mensheviks called their 'petty-bourgeois' notions of small property. As a result, an urban socialist revolution would either be starved out of existence, like the Paris Commune, or, even worse, would be beaten by a peasant counterrevolution, like the Vendee or the European royalist armies of 1849. But in fact the Russian peasants were even more impatient for a social revolution than, arguably, the workers were. All they wanted was the land and, if

'socialism' meant giving the land to the peasants, then they were 'socialists'. This meant, as the SRs should have realized, that the peasants would not join a counter-revolution so long as that entailed — as it was almost bound to in Russia — a restoration of the gentry on the land. It was also said that the masses were too illiterate and inexperienced politically to assume the tasks of government, and that until this was remedied the support and leadership of the educated classes would remain essential. The Soviets, as class-based organs, might play a role in local government but they lacked the means to run the state. What was needed now, as a preparation for the transition to socialism, was for the masses to go through the school of democracy — which for the workers, in particular, meant following the example of the European labour movements

— and this could only be achieved within a liberal framework of political freedom. But this too was to impose a Western model of democracy on a country where the base for it was missing. The 'direct democracy' of the Soviets was much closer to the experience of the Russian masses — it was reminiscent of the peasant commune — and it might have served as the starting point for a new and different type of democratic order, one much more decentralized than the liberal democracy of the West, provided the Soviets were somehow combined with the broader representative bodies (e.g. the city dumas, the zemstvos and the Constituent Assembly) in a national political framework.

No doubt the Soviet leaders' rigid adherence to this dogma was in part the result of their own virginity in government. The bourgeois leaders had years of experience of legislative matters, either in the Duma or in the zemstvos. But the socialists had no real experience of government work, only the long and fruitless years of politics in semi-legal opposition and the underground. Furthermore, their party leaders were all still in exile, and it might be thought of as a 'colonels' revolt' if they assumed power. Yet should this really have been such an obstacle? For all their talk of 'principles' and

'ideology', in the end it was their instincts and their temperament that held back the Soviet leaders from taking power. They had spent so long in hostile opposition to all governmental authority that many of them could not suddenly become — or even think of themselves as — statesmen. They clung to the habits and the culture of the revolutionary underground, preferring opposition to government.

Second, the Soviet leaders were afraid that a counter-revolution, perhaps even a civil war, might be the result if they assumed power. The situation was extremely fluid; it was not yet clear whether Alexeev and the Front commanders would carry out the orders of the Tsar to put down the revolution in the capital; nor whether the revolution would spread to the provinces and the forces at the Front. As things turned out, it soon became clear that the Soviet leaders had grossly overestimated the real danger of a counter-revolution. Almost immediately Alexeev called off the planned expedition to put down the revolution in the capital, partly because he was reassured that the Duma leaders rather than the socialists would assume power, and partly because he realized that to use the troops for this would run the risk of the mutiny spreading to the army at the Front. It did not take long, moreover, for the revolution to spread to the Kronstadt Naval Base, several northern garrisons and Moscow itself. Within a few days the monarchy would fall, along with its provincial apparatus, while the army and the Church would both declare their support for the revolution. Of course none of this was yet clear on I March. The speed of events took everyone by surprise. As Iurii Steklov, one of the Soviet leaders, explained in April 1917:

at the time when this agreement [to form the Provisional Government] was contemplated, it was not at all clear as to whether the revolution would emerge victorious, either in a revolutionary-democratic form or even in a moderate-bourgeois form. Those of you, comrades, who were not here in Petrograd and did not experience this revolutionary fever cannot imagine how we lived . . . We expected from minute to minute that they [troops loyal to the Tsar] would arrive.37

Yet it is probably fair to say that in their appraisal of the situation the Soviet leaders once again allowed themselves to be over-influenced by the experience of nineteenth-century Europe. All the socialists were steeped in the history of European revolutions.

They interpreted the events of 1905 and 1917 in terms of the history of 1789, 1848 and 1871, and this led them to believe that a counter-revolution must inevitably follow.

Finally, the Soviet leaders were not even certain of their own authority over the masses in the streets. They had been shocked by the violence and the hatred, the anarchic looting and the vandalism displayed by the crowds in the February Days. They were afraid that if they assumed power, that if they themselves became 'the government', all this uncontrolled anger might be redirected against them. Mstislavsky claimed that

'from the first hours of the revolution' the vast majority of the Soviet leaders were united with the members of the Temporary Committee 'by one single characteristic which determined everything else: this was their fear of the masses': Oh, how they feared the masses! As I watched our 'socialists' speaking to the crowds ...