to pay for religious services. Many of the local priests managed to escape this fate by throwing in their lot with the revolution. But the rest of the Church hierarchy was thrown on to the defensive. The Holy Synod, purged of its Rasputinites, appealed to the priesthood to support the new government. Religious freedoms were introduced. Church schools were transferred to the control of the state. And preparations were made for the separation of Church and state. The provincial apparatus collapsed in most places like a house of cards, and it was only very rarely that armed force was needed to remove it. The people simply took to the streets; the governors, without any military means to suppress the disorders, were forced to resign; and
No one really tried to revive the monarchy. It is telling, for example, that none of the White leaders in the civil war embraced monarchism as a cause, despite the efforts of the many monarchists in their ranks. The White leaders all realized that politically it would be suicide for them to do so. For as Trotsky put it with his usual bluntness, 'the country had so radically vomited up the monarchy that it could not ever crawl down the peoples throat again'.66 His prognosis is probably still true, the post-Soviet romance with the tsarist past notwithstanding.*
But if the monarchy was dead politically, it was still alive in a broader sense. The mass of the peasants thought of politics in monarchical terms. They conceived of the state as embodied in the monarch, and projected their ideals of the revolution on to a 'peasant king', or some other authoritarian liberator come to deliver their cherished land and freedom. Here were the roots of the cults of Kerensky, Kormlov and Lenin, all of which were attempts to fill the missing space of the deposed Tsar, or perhaps rather the vacuum left by the myth of the Tsar Deliverer. George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, noted this monarchical mentality during the first days of the revolution, when one soldier said to him: 'Yes, we need a republic, but at its head there should be a good Tsar.' Frank Golder similarly noted such misunderstandings in his diary
* According to an opinion poll in 1995, only 7 per cent of the Russian people favoured the return of the monarchy.
on 7 March: 'Stories are being told of soldiers who say they wish a republic like England, or a republic with a Tsar. One soldier said he wanted to elect a President and when asked, 'Whom would you elect?' he replied, 'The Tsar.' ' Soldiers' letters voiced the same contusion. 'We want a democratic republic and a Tsar-Batiushka for three years'; 'It would be good if we had a republic with a sensible Tsar.' It seems that the peasants found it difficult to distinguish between the person of the monarch
* * * 'A miracle has happened', Blok wrote to his mother on 23 March, 'and we may expect more miracles.' People shared a wild excitement and euphoria during the first days of the revolution. It was partly the sense of absolute freedom — 'the extraordinary feeling', as Blok put it in his letter, 'that nothing is forbidden', that 'almost anything might happen'. It was also the fact that everything had happened so quickly: a mighty dynasty, three centuries old, had collapsed within a few days. 'The most striking thing', Blok wrote in his diary on 25 May, 'was the utter unexpectedness of it, like a train crash in the night, like a bridge crumbling beneath your feet, like a house falling down.' There was a strange sense of unreality. People compared the whole experience to living through a dream or a fairy tale'. Things happened too fast for daily life to stop and for people to take it all in. 'What was really strange', wrote the artist Yulia Obolenskaya to a friend, 'was getting your parcel with the dried fruit and coffee on the first day of the revolution, while the street outside was wild with joy and gun carriages with red flags were rolling by. . . Outside there was a hurricane . . . Then suddenly — a ring and a parcel containing blackcurrents!'68
This was the 'honeymoon' of the revolution. People fell in love with 'February'. Almost instantly, the history of the revolution was reinvented to suit these democratic ideals and mythic expectations. The 'Glorious February Revolution', as it became known, was said to have been a bloodless affair. 'Just imagine,' one contemporary wrote, 'there was a great revolution in Russia and not a single drop of blood was spilled.' It was also said to be a single national act without opposition. 'Our revolution', one Duma agitator informed the sailors
of Helsingfors, 'is the only one in the history of the world to express the spirit of the entire people.' The revolution was portrayed as a spiritual renewal, a moral resurrection of the people. Merezhkovsky called it 'perhaps the most Christian act in the history of the world.' The revolution was itself transformed into a sort of cult. Huge crowds would assemble in the streets to hold prayers and ceremonies in celebration of Glorious February. The burial of the revolution's martyred victims on the second Sunday of the new order (12 March) equally bore the character, although not the rituals, of a religious mass. Many people compared the revolution to an Easter holiday. People in the streets would congratulate each other on the revolution with the Easter blessing: 'Christ has arisen!' (sometimes this was changed to 'Russia has arisen!'). Tsarism was said to have stood for evil and sin (one priest even called it 'the Devil's institution'); it had split the people into rich and poor; but with its downfall, society would be reorganized on the basis of more Christian attitudes. Some idealists even thought that lying and stealing, gambling and swearing, would at once disappear. 'Drunkenness in Russia', declared a peasant congress in Tomsk province, 'was a source of national shame under the old regime. But now in Free and Democratic Russia there can be no place for drunkenness. And therefore the congress looks upon the manufacture of all alcohol as a betrayal of the revolution, and as a betrayal of the Russian democratic republic' One woman even wrote to the Soviet that the 'Christian mission' of the Russian Revolution should be to abolish all the country's jails, since there was no criminal who could not be reformed. There were many intellectuals who now claimed that the Russian people would learn to live together in a new
It was in this same Christian-populist sense that the revolution was also portrayed as a process of national and patriotic reawakening. People echoed Herzen's view that Tsarism was 'alien' to the simple people. It was the 'Gottorp-Holstein dynasty'. Germans had dominated at the court. The Empress ('the German woman') had betrayed Russia. But the people had arisen, and from this truly national revolution Russia had received a truly national government, behind which it could unite for the defeat of the external enemy. This was to be a 'patriotic revolution'. Or, as someone put it: 'Now we have beaten the Germans here, we will beat them in the field.'70
Many of these ideals were expressed by Prince Lvov in his first interview with the free press. 'I believe', he said, 'in the vitality and the wisdom of our great people, as expressed in the national uprising that overthrew the old regime. It is expressed in the universal effort to establish freedom and to defend it against both internal and external foes. I believe in the great heart of the Russian
people, filled as it is with love for their neighbours, and am convinced that it is the foundation of our freedom, justice, and truth.'71 Such high expectations were soon to be dashed.
9 The Freest Country in the World
i A Distant Liberal State
