recognized structure, the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), and scattered autonomous congregations of such denominations as Lutherans and Methodists, primarily in the Baltic republics, and German Baptists in Siberia. AUCECB claimed to comprise five thousand protestant congregations.
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After 1991, Protestants expanded their activity within Russian society. At the end of 2000 the Russian Ministry of Justice reported that there were about 3,800 officially registered Protestant congregations in Russia, out of more than 20,000 religious organizations in the Russian Federation. These included 1,500 congregations of Baptists, 1,300 Pentecostals, 560 Adventists, and 200 Lutherans. Sociological surveys estimated that Protestants, at approximately one million, constituted about two-thirds of one percent of the total population of the Russian Federation. See also: CATHOLICISM; RELIGION; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH the chief protectress of all connected with Rasputin. And so, in the words of one historian, “a man verging on insanity remained at the head of the Ministry of Interior until the Revolution. This case gives the measure of the decadence of the bureaucratic system.” See also: NICHOLAS II; RASPUTIN, GRIGORY YEFIMOVICH
Ferro, Marc. (1993). Nicholas II: The Last of the Tsars. New York: Oxford University Press. Florinsky, Michael T. (1931). The End of the Russian Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
NICHOLAS V. RIASANOVSKY
Billington, James. (1966). Icon and the Axe. New York: Random House. Heard, Albert F. (1887). Russian Church and Russian Dissent. New York: Harper Brothers. Heier, Edmund. (1970). Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy, 1860-1900: Radstockism and Pashkovism. The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff. Sawatsky, Walter. (1981). Soviet Evangelicals since World War II. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press.
(1866-1918), minister of the interior, 1916-1918.
A member of an upper-class family, mentioned in Russian historical records from mid-sixteenth century, Alexander Dmitrievich Protopopov had an honorable, if not distinguished, career in the zem-stvo (local self- government), and he also served in the third and fourth Duma, indeed as vice president from 1914. A left-wing Octobrist by party affiliation, Protopopov was active in the formation of the Progressive Bloc of deputies. His appointment as minister of the interior in September 1916 was not inappropriate, and it could even be considered as an effort by Nicholas II to go beyond narrow court circle and extreme rightist ideologies. Yet it proved to be a total disaster for two reasons: It foregrounded Protopopov’s connection with the notorious Rasputin, and it coincided with the onset of mental illness. The emperor wanted to dismiss his new minister, but he was blocked by the empress,
PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
The Provisional Government is most often remembered for its weakness and its inability to prevent the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 or to manage the mass movements that ensured the victory of Vladmir Lenin. The experience and meaning of the Provisional Government are not well understood, however, and indeed the same might be said for the February Revolution as a whole. Certain basic facts about the Provisional Government should be stated at the outset. It was the product of a long and intricate process of prerevolutionary party and parliamentary politics that came to a head during World War I just prior to the outbreak of the revolution. It was a government that went through several transformations, from a largely liberal cabinet to a coalition of liberals, socialists, and populists, and finally to a crisis-driven statist cabinet led by Alexander Kerensky that barely could express its moderately socialist ideological underpinnings.
The Provisional Government was formed during the February days as a result of negotiations between the Temporary Duma Committee and the Petrograd Soviet. The Provisional Government was in fact an executive authority, or cabinet, headed by a minister president, that governed through the inherited ministerial apparatus of the old regime. It had legislative authority as well. Although the Provisional Government claimed power and the mantle of legitimacy, it was never clear during its brief eight-month existence whether this legitimacy
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derived from the Revolution or from inherited continuities of power or a mixture of the two. The first Provisional Government was clearly a product of the old regime Duma and its factional politics. But the new government chose not to base its authority on a Duma elected under prerevolutionary laws (its leadership, in any case, did not want to share power with certain Duma eminences and parties), and in official terms, at least, the Duma was pushed to the sidelines with no official status in the new governing structures (though it did continue to operate during 1917).
The First Provisional Government cabinet consisted largely of Cadets (Andrei Shingarev, Paul Miliukov), but it included Progressists (Mikhail Tereshchenko), Octobrists (Alexander Guchkov), and one nominal Socialist Revolutionary, Alexander Kerensky. The minister president was Prince Georgy Lvov, a romantic activist who had made his mark during the war as head of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and Towns and the Red Cross. As minister of foreign affairs, Miliukov stood firmly on the side of the Allies in their demand for Russia’s continued participation in the war. Mil-iukov believed in the war aims of the tsar’s government because he championed the state above all (albeit a rule-of-law state) and detested German authoritarianism and imperialism, so it was no leap to continue fighting alongside the democratic Western powers. Guchkov, as minister of war, shared this view and attempted to stave off what turned out to be a mass army mutiny during the course of 1917.
The first Provisional Government enunciated its revolutionary program in a declaration on March 8. The primary goal was to establish the rule of law and representative government based upon universal suffrage, self- government, and breaking the traditional power of the bureaucracy and police. The declaration also called for freedom of conscience and religion, reform of the judiciary and education, and lifting of the onerous restrictions upon the empire’s nationalities. The final form of Russia’s statehood was to be determined at a Constituent Assembly. The Provisional Government, in its various cabinets, tried to attain these goals. However, the revolution was unforgiving and the range of problems was so great that the government found itself adopting statist positions as it tried to maintain authority, prepare for the late spring offensive promised to the Allies, and adjudicate the multitude of social and political demands unleashed by the revolution. Continuation of the war brought on the first government power crisis in April, and this led to the formation of the first of a series of coalition cabinets that included socialist ministers from the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary parties. Effective Bolshevik propaganda and use of symbolic fields of discourse for revolutionary ends made these more moderate socialists, now co-opted within the boundaries of power, look responsible for the deepening crisis in every sphere of public life. The Provisional Government implemented reforms in self-government, labor relations, and the judiciary. It established a grain monopoly and set the stage for many subsequent Bolshevik administrative and economic policies. Thus it was hardly a “bourgeois” government, but it was made to look so. Perhaps its greatest domestic failures were its inability to solve the land question on short notice and in the midst of revolution and, of course, its weak and perhaps idealistic approach to modern nationalism and the explosive new desires of the empire’s non-Russians for self-determination. Its efforts in these and other areas were inadequate to stem the revolutionary tide.
The government finally collapsed under the strange leadership of Alexander Kerensky. A Socialist Revolutionary, he came to power in July in the midst of what turned out to be a failed military offensive. His leadership was marked by ill-conceived adventurism (the Kornilov Affair) and a clear desire to act as and represent himself as an executive strong man. See also: FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; KERENSKY, ALEXANDER FYODOROVICH; KORNILOV AFFAIR; OCTOBER REVOLUTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abraham, Richard. (1987). Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press. Rabinowitch, Alexander. (1976). The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in
