Russian revolution. A very short introduction

Peasant

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3. Who Has Forgotten His Debt to His Motherland? Merchants address this 2 question to a downcast soldier. The inscription reads 'Little is given, much 5 is exacted.'

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§ resolutions expressed hope that the war would soon be over, but their .2 principal aspiration was to redress the wrong done to them in 1861 by redistributing the gentry's estates. Although there were only about юо.ооо landlord families by 1917, few countries in the world still had estates as large as those in Russia. In the eyes of the peasants, the gentry had no right to these estates since they did not work them. In the moral universe of the peasantry it was an article of faith that only those who made the land productive had a right to it. In one of Tolstoy's fables, the peasants of a village judge strangers by the state of their hands: only if their palms are calloused will they take them in.

Dual power

The two forces that brought down the monarchy -the mass movement

of workers and soldiersand the middle-dass parliamentary opposition -became institutionalized in the new political set-up, the Petrograd

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Soviet keeping a watchful eye over the Provisional Government. The government, headed by Prince С. Е. Lvov, a landowner with a long record of service to the zemstvos, was broadly representative of professional and business interests. It was liberal, even mildly populist, in its politics; the only organized force within it was the Kadet party, once a liberal party but now evolving rapidly in the direction of conservative nationalism. In its manifesto of 2 March, the government pledged to implement a far-reaching programme of civil and political rights and to convoke a Constituent Assembly. Significantly, it said nothing about the burning issues of war and land. The government, which had no popular mandate, saw its principal task as being to oversee the election of a Constituent Assembly, which would determine the shape of the future polity. It believed that only such an assembly had the authority to resolve such pressing issues as land redistribution.

The Petrograd Soviet enjoyed the real attributes of power since it controlled the army, transport, and communications, as well as vital means of information. It also had a popular mandate insofar as 1,200 deputies were elected to it within the first week. A few Bolsheviks, anarchists, and others pressed the Soviet to assume full power, but the moderate socialist intellectuals who controlled its executive committee believed that this was not appropriate to a revolution whose character they defined as 'bourgeois', i.e. as destined to bring about democracy and capitalist development in Russia rather than socialism. In addition, they feared that any attempt to assert their authority would provoke 'counter-revolution'. Consequently, they agreed to support but not to join the 'bourgeois' Provisional Government, so long as it did not override the interests of the people. The radical lawyer A. F. Kerensky alone of the Petrograd Soviet representatives determined to join the government, portraying himself as the 'hostage of the democracy' within it. Thus was born 'dual power'. In spite of the prevailing mood of national unity, it reflected the deep division in Russian society between the 'democracy' and 'propertied society'.

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Outside Petrograd dual power was much less in evidence. In most localities a broad alliance of social groups formed committees of public organizations to eject police and tsarist officials, maintain order and food supply, and to oversee the democratization of the town councils and zemstvos. The government endeavoured to enforce its authority by appointing commissars, most of whom were chairs of county zemstvos and thus representatives of landed or business interests. By summer the parallel existence of the committees, the commissars, the town councils and zemstvos -which by this stage were undergoing democratic election - and the Soviets reflected the deep fragmentation of power in provincial towns and cities. In rural areas peasants expelled land captains, township elders, and village policemen and set up township committees under their control. The government attempted to strengthen its authority by setting uplandand food committees at township level, but these too fell under peasant control. At the very ? lowest level the authority of the village gathering was strengthened by g the revolution, although it became 'democratized' by the participation e of younger sons, landless labourers, village intelligentsia (scribes, jg teachers, vets, and doctors), and some women. The February 1 Revolution thus devolved power to the localities and substantially reduced the capacity of the Provisional Government to make its writ run beneath the county level.

Until autumn the popular organizations everywhere were dominated by the Mensheviks and SRs. The Mensheviks had originated as a faction of the RSDLP in 1903 after they objected to Lenin's model of a vanguard party, fearing that professional revolutionaries would substitute themselves for the working class. As orthodox Marxists, they believed that Russia did not yet have the prerequisites for socialism: a developed industry and a large working class. Because many - possibly most -RSDLP organizations in the provinces had declined to split along factional lines, it is difficult to estimate how many Mensheviks there were in 1917. By May, there were probably around 100,000 - half of them in Georgia - rising to nearly 200,000 by autumn. The SRs, led by

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V. M. Chernov, were by far the largest party in 1917. They rejected the Marxist view of the peasantry as petty-bourgeois, believing that the principles of collectivism inherent in the peasant commune made Russia peculiarly fitted for socialism. For this reason, and because they put so much energy into organizing the peasantry during 1905-7, they were seen as the party of the peasantry. By autumn 1917, however, alongside 700,000 members in the army and in the villages, the SRs had 300,000 members in the towns, making them as significant an urban force as the Bolsheviks. The question of whether or not to support the tsarist government in the war had split both Mensheviks and SRs deeply. These internal splits deepened in the course of 1917, especially among the SRs. Their right wing called for war to victory; their centre faction, led by Chernov, shifted a long way from its principles in pursuit of the coalition with the bourgeoisie; while the left wing, who became the Left SRs, increasingly took up a programme that differed little from that of the Bolsheviks.

Despite the talk of'unity of the vital forces of the nation', the issue of policy on the war put a great strain on the alliance between the Petrograd Soviet and the government. All sections of the populace hoped that the revolution would bring about a speedy peace and most of the moderate socialists on the Soviet executive had been opposed to the war hitherto. The Georgian Menshevik I. G. Tsereteli crafted a policy designed, on the one hand, to press the government to seek a comprehensive peace settlement, based on the renunciation of all annexations and indemnities, and on the other, to persuade soldiers that it was their duty to go on defending Russia until peace came about. The Provisional Government formally accepted this policy, but many of its members favoured war to victory. On 20 April, a note to the Allies from the Foreign Minister, P. N. Miliukov, leader of the Kadets, revealed his support for Allied war aims, as set out in secret treaties, which inter alia promised Russia the straits at the mouth of the Black Sea as the prize of victory. Immediately, outraged soldiers and workers took to the streets of Petrograd to demand Miliukov's resignation. Among them

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