Bolsheviks were making mischief in Petrograd. They had tried to hold their own separate demonstration against the cabinet earlier in June — and only a last-minute intervention by the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets stopped them. The inhabitants of Petrograd were gripped by the uncertainty of the situation.
The Bolshevik Central Committee drew encouragement from the crisis, and planned to hold yet another armed demonstration in the capital on 3 July. Evidently if things went his way, Lenin might opt to turn the crisis into an opportunity to seize power.11 The Provisional Government quickly issued a banning order. Unnerved by this display of political will, the Bolshevik Central Committee urged the assembled workers and troops, who had sailors from the Kronstadt naval garrison among them, to disperse. By then Lenin had absented himself from the scene, and was spending his time at a dacha at Neivola in the Finnish countryside. But the crowd wanted its demonstration. The sailors from the Kronstadt naval garrison were prominent among the more unruly elements, but local workers and soldiers were also determined to march through the central streets of Petrograd. The Provisional Government ordered reliable troops to break up the demonstration by firing on it. Dozens of people were killed.
Ministers held the Bolshevik Central Committee responsible for the clashes even though it had refrained from participating in the demonstration. Ministry of Internal Affairs officials claimed that the Bolsheviks had received money from the German government. Lenin and Zinoviev managed to flee into hiding in Finland, but Trotski, Kamenev and Alexandra Kollontai were caught and imprisoned. In Petrograd, if not in most other cities, the Bolshevik party reverted to being a clandestine party.
These complications were too much for Prince Lvov, who resigned in favour of his War Minister, Kerenski. Russia’s ruin was ineluctable, according to Lvov, unless her socialists agreed to take prime responsibility for the affairs of state. Certainly Kerenski was already a master of the arts of twentieth-century political communication. He wore his patriotism on his sleeve. He was a brilliant orator, receiving standing ovations from his audiences and especially from women who were enraptured by his charm. He had a picture designed of himself and printed on tens of thousands of postcards; he had newsreels made of his major public appearances. Kerenski was temperamental, but he was also energetic and tenacious. He had carefully kept contact with all the parties willing to lend support to the Provisional Government, and had avoided favouritism towards his own Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries. Kerenski believed he had positioned himself so as to be able to save Russia from political disintegration and military defeat.
His elevation had been meteoric since the February Revolution. Born in 1881 in Simbirsk, he was just thirty- six years old when he succeeded Prince Lvov. By training he was a lawyer and had specialized in the defence of arrested revolutionaries. He also was acquainted with many leading figures in Russian public life through membership of the main Freemasons’ lodge in Petrograd; but he had no experience in administration. And he was thrust into power at a time of the greatest crisis for the country since the Napoleonic invasion of 1812.
His delight at being invited to replace Prince Lvov was followed by weeks of difficulty even in putting a cabinet together. The rationale of his assumption of power was that socialists ought to take a majority of ministerial portfolios; but Tsereteli, the leading Menshevik minister under Lvov, stood down in order to devote his attention to the business of the soviets. Most Kadets, too, rejected Kerenski’s overtures to join him. Not until 25 July could he announce the establishment of a Second Coalition. It is true that he had managed to ensure that ten out of the seventeen ministers, including himself, were socialists. Even the Socialist-Revolutionary leader Chernov agreed to stay on as Minister of Agriculture. Moreover, three Kadets were persuaded to ignore their party’s official policy and join the cabinet. Nevertheless Kerenski was exhausted even before his premiership began, and already he was sustaining himself by recourse to morphine and cocaine.
He focused his cabinet’s attention on the political and economic emergencies in Russia. Diplomatic discussions with the Allies were not abandoned, but there was no serious planning of further offensives on the Eastern front. Nor did Kerenski place obstacles in the way of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who sought to bring the war to an end by convoking a conference of socialist parties from all combatant countries in Stockholm.12 In fact the conference was prevented from taking place by the intransigence of the Allied governments, which stopped British and French delegates from attending. It had been a doomed effort from the start, as Lenin was pleased to note.
The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries retorted that there was no greater plausibility in Lenin’s plan to bring the military struggle to a halt by means of a ‘European socialist revolution’; they contended that the Bolsheviks overlooked the will and the capacity of both the Allies and the Central Powers to fight it out to the war’s bitter end. In the interim Kerenski had two priorities. First, he wanted to reimpose the government’s authority in the towns and at the front; second, he aimed to secure a more regular supply of food from the countryside. He signalled his firmness by appointing General Lavr Kornilov, an advocate of stern measures against unruly soviets, as Supreme Commander of Russian armed forces. He also refused — at least initially — to accede to the peasants’ demands for increased prices for their products. A complete state monopoly on the grain trade had been announced in March and comprehensive food rationing in April. Kerenski gave an assurance that his cabinet would bring a new efficiency to the task of guaranteeing the availability of bread for urban consumption.
But he could not keep his promises. Foreign financial support became harder to obtain; and although a ‘Liberty Loan’ was raised at home, this still had to be supplemented by an accelerated emission of banknotes by the Ministry of Finances.13 An accelerated rate of inflation was the inevitable result. It was of little comfort to Kerenski that the harvest of 1917 was only three per cent lower than the total for 1916.14 Peasants continued to refuse to release their stocks until there was a stable currency and an abundance of industrial products. On 27 August the cabinet reluctantly licensed a doubling of prices offered for wheat. But little improvement in food supplies followed. In October, the state was obtaining only fifty-six per cent of the grain procured in the same month in the previous year, and Petrograd held stocks sufficient only to sustain three days of rations.15
The military situation was equally discouraging. After repelling the Russian offensive in June, the German commanders drew up plans for an offensive of their own on the northern sector of the Eastern front. Russia’s prospects were grim. Her soldiers had become ill-disciplined and had begun to ask whether the war was worth fighting, especially when they suspected that the Provisional Government might still be pursuing expansionist aims. They were agitated, too, by talk that a comprehensive expropriation of the landed gentry’s estates was imminent. Desertions occurred on a massive scale. The German advance met with the weakest resistance since the start of the war. Riga was lost by the Russians on 22 August. No natural obstacle lay in the five hundred kilometres separating the German army and the Russian capital. The Provisional Government could no longer be confident of avoiding military defeat and territorial dismemberment.
The fortunes of war and revolution were tightly interwoven; Kerenski’s chances of surviving as Minister- Chairman depended in practice upon the performance of Allied armies on the Western front. Were the British and French to lose the battles of the summer, the Germans would immediately overrun Russia. The obverse side of this was the possibility that if the Allies were quickly to defeat Germany, they would relieve the Provisional Government’s position because Russia would gain prestige and security as a victor power. Unfortunately for the Provisional Government, the Central Powers were nowhere near to military collapse in summer and autumn 1917.
Trepidation about the situation led to a rightward shift in opinion among the middle and upper social classes. Their leading figures were annoyed by Kerenski’s manoeuvres to maintain support among the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries; they had come to regard even the Kadets as hopelessly weak and inept. The problem for middle-class opinion was that the other anti-socialist organizations were weaker still. The Union of the Russian People had virtually ceased activity and its leaders had gone into hiding. Their close association with the monarchy before the February Revolution left them discredited. While most citizens endorsed political freedom and national tolerance there was no chance that the traditional political right would make a comeback — and citizen Nikolai Romanov said nothing that might encourage monarchists: he and his family lived as unobtrusively as they could in sleepy Tobolsk in western Siberia from July 1917.16
Even the Russian Orthodox Church, freed at last from the constraints of tsarism, resisted the temptation to play the nationalist card. Bishops and priests dedicated their energies to internal debates on spirituality and organization. When an Assembly (
