Russian revolution. A very short introduction

could be seen Bolshevik banners proclaiming 'Down with the Provisional Government'. On 2 May Miliukov was forced to resign and Prince Lvov insisted that members of the Soviet executive join a coalition government to resolve the crisis.

Having entered the government to speed the conclusion of peace, the six socialists who sat alongside eight'bourgeois' ministers found themselves embroiled in preparations for war. Kerensky, the new War Minister, was determined to see the Russian army launch a new offensive out of a desire to see Russia honour her treaty obligations to the Allies. It was clear, however, that many units were reluctant to go on the attack. Kerensky toured the fronts frenetically, whipping up support. In the event only 48 battalions refused to go into action. The offensive quickly turned into a rout. Losses amounted to 400,000 men and the number of deserters was even greater. From now on indiscipline ? turned into organized disobedience, as the committees fell increasingly g under the sway of principled opponents of the war such as Left SRs and e Bolsheviks. In retrospect - although this was not evident at the time -jg this can be seen as the beginning of the end for the Provisional 1 Government, since no government can long survive without control over the armed forces.

Until June the Bolsheviks remained on the margin of politics. On 3 April Lenin, the party's founder and undisputed leader, returned after almost 16 years in exile. He was a man of iron will and self-discipline, personally modest yet supremely self-confident and intolerant of opponents. His politics were rooted in Marxist theory, which he sought to adapt to Russian conditions, yet he had a capacity to make sharp adjustments to policy and to take tough decisions. Upon his return, his contempt for liberalism and parliamentarianism, his implacable opposition to the 'imperialist'war, and his appreciation of the mass appeal of Soviets caused him to take up what appeared to be very extreme positions. In fact his extremism oriented him well towards the underlying realities of politics. L. B. Kamenev and I. V. Stalin, upon their return from Siberian

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4. Russian soldiers demonstrating in Petrograd, April 1917

exile on 12 March, had committed the party to conditional support for the Provisional Government, a revolutionary defencist position on the war, and to negotiations with the Mensheviks to reunify the RSDLP. In his April Theses Lenin denounced each of these policies, insisting that there should be no support for the government of 'capitalists and landlords', that the character of the war had changed not one jot, and that the Bolsheviks should campaign for power to be transferred to the Soviets. Crucially, Lenin concluded that the revolution was moving from its 'bourgeois' stage towards the socialist stage, the First World War having convinced him that capitalism was in its death throes and that socialism was now on the agenda internationally. Trotsky, who had clashed swords with Lenin on many occasions in his Menshevik past, welcomed this conversion to views closer to his own.

In 1917 the Bolshevik party was very different from the tightly knit conspiratorial party advocated by Lenin in 1903. Though more unified than the SRs, Mensheviks, and anarchists, the Bolsheviks were a diverse lot and even after Lenin's April Theses became official policy, the gradualist views of Kamenev and С. Е. Zinoviev (dubbed 'Lenin's mad dog' by the Mensheviks) continued to enjoy strong support. Alongside cadres who had endured years of persecution, tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, and sailors flooded into the party, knowing little Marxism, but seeing in the Bolsheviks the most committed defenders of the working class. Bolsheviks were indefatigable in agitating for their policies in factories and on street corners. The result was that party membership rose from perhaps 10,000 in March to nearly 400,000 by October.

On the afternoon of 3 July, soldiers of the First Machine-Gun Regiment, angry at the failure of the June offensive and determined not to be sent to the front, took to the streets to demand that power be transferred to the Soviets. Joined by 20,000 Kronstadt sailors and thousands of workers, they precipitated the severest crisis of the government to date, known as the July Days, a crisis compounded by the resignation of the

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5. Troops firing on Bolsheviks in July demonstrations

Kadet ministers from the government. Rank-and-file Bolsheviks, including members of the party's Military Organization, were involved

in calling the demonstration, but the Central Committee was alarmed at the initiative, since it did not believe that the time was ripe for the overthrow of the government. When the movement showed no sign of abating, however, it resolved to lead it. On 4july a semi-insurrection got underway, as armed soldiers surrounded the headquarters of the government. However, the latter was able to bring in reliable military units and scattered the insurgents. Tsereteli anguished that 'it fell to me as Minister of Internal Affairs to apply repressive methods against those who in the past had been my comrades in the struggle for freedom.' Kerensky ordered 'severe retribution' against the Bolsheviks whom he branded 'German agents'. Orders were issued for the arrest of Lenin, Trotsky, and other leading Bolsheviks, causing Lenin to flee to Finland and the others to be jailed. It looked as though the Bolsheviks were a spent force. Kerensky delighted in his triumph.

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The nationalist challenge

The 1897 census revealed that Russians comprised only 44% of the total population of the empire. The more accurate 1926 census recognized the existence of 194 different ethnic groups, varying enormously in size, language, religion, culture, and level of socio-economic development. Nationalist movements had first posed a challenge to the autocracy in 1905 and during the war many became radicalized as the peripheral regions of the empire experienced foreign occupation and evacuation, as Polish and Latvian regiments were formed within the tsarist army, and as