demonstration — even though it dispersed peacefully as soon as the Soviet leaders ordered it to — as a bloody attempt to carry out a coup. General Kornilov, the commander of the Petrograd garrison, wanted to disperse the demonstrators with his troops. But the cabinet was reluctant to use force against 'the people', and refused him permission. On
It was this threat of a civil war that finally spurred the Soviet leaders to join the government and bolster its authority. They had been moving towards the idea of a coalition for some time. Two main factors lay behind this. One was Irakli Tsereteli, the tall and handsome Georgian Menshevik with a pale El Greco-like face, who had returned from Siberian exile in mid-March and at once stamped his authority on the leadership of the Soviet. Tsereteli was, in Lvov's estimation, 'the only true statesman in the Soviet'. In his rigorously intellectual speeches he always appealed to the interests of the state rather than to class or party interests; and their gradual effect was to inculcate in the Soviet leaders a growing sense of their responsibility. They ceased to think and act like revolutionaries and began to see themselves as 'government men'. It was Tsereteli who had shaped the policy of Revolutionary Defensism, which united the Soviet leaders with the liberals on the question of the war and which formed the basis of their coalition. The other factor was the influence of the socialist party rank and file, especially in the provinces, who broadly welcomed the prospect of a coalition with the liberals. For a start, they had never been held back by the same ideological obsession as their party leaders in the capital about the need to form a 'bourgeois government'. They had placed pragmatism before party dogma (what choice did they have with the tiny size of the provincial intelligentsia?) and had
joined the liberals in town-hall government from the very first days of the revolution. It was also felt by the rank and file that, if their leaders joined the government, they would gain more leverage over it. Many workers thought that, with the Mensheviks in charge of industry, they would soon gain better pay. Many soldiers thought that, with the SRs in charge of the war, they would
soon gain peace.44
The establishment of the coalition, like the formation of the government in March, stemmed from the combined efforts of the Soviet leaders and the liberals to restore order on the Petrograd streets. The Soviet leaders were horrified by the violent demonstrations and the prospect of a civil war. It was they who took the lead in stopping the disorders, taking over control of the garrison and prohibiting any further demonstrations on 21 April. Effectively they were already assuming the responsibilities of government. The next day they issued a joint statement with the ministers condemning the Miliukov Note. This resolved the immediate crisis. But Lvov was now determined that the Soviet leaders should join his government to give it popular credibility. Miliukov's presence in the cabinet was the biggest obstacle — working with him would expose the Soviet leaders to the charge from the extreme Left that they supported the 'imperialist war' — and it was this that led them to reject the idea of a coalition on 28 April. But two days later everything was changed with the resignation of Guchkov, the Minister of War and Miliukov's only ally in the cabinet, in protest against the confirmation of the soldiers' rights by a government commission and the Soviet campaign against Miliukov. Lvov, meanwhile, began to plot Miliukov's removal. He promised Tsereteli that he would force Miliukov out of the cabinet if the Soviet leaders agreed to join a coalition government. This, along with Lvov's own threat to resign if Tsereteli did not agree, was enough to convince the Menshevik leader that a coalition was now both possible and essential to end the crisis of authority, which the extreme Right or Left might easily exploit, and it was largely the force of his reasoning that finally persuaded the Soviet Executive to vote in its favour on 2 May by 44 votes to 19.45
Three days later the new cabinet was announced. It was agreed, in deference to Menshevik dogma, that the socialists should occupy only a minority of the cabinet posts (they took six out of the sixteen), and that to preserve the liberal conception of the government as a national institution, above party or class interests, they should join the cabinet as private individuals rather than as members of the Soviet. Chernov took Agriculture, Kerensky War, Skobelev Labour, while Tsereteli, whose time was spent mostly in the Soviet, was persuaded to accept the minor post of Posts and Telegraphs, which would allow him to keep one foot in each camp. Chernov called Tsereteli the 'Minister of General Affairs', while Sukhanov dubbed him the 'Commissar of the Government in the Soviet'. It is certainly true that Tsereteli emerged as the central figure of
the coalition. Lvov was dependent on him to keep the socialist leaders onside, and he kept him in his 'inner cabinet' (together with the five Minister-Freemasons: Kerensky, Tereshchenko, Nekrasov, Konovalov and Lvov) which decided the general strategy.46
The formation of the Coalition, which had been intended to reinforce the democratic centre, had the opposite effect. It accelerated the political and social polarization that led to the outbreak of the civil war in October. On the one hand, most of the provincial rank and file of the Kadets moved with their party leader Miliukov, who had resigned on 4 May, into right-wing opposition against the coalition government. Increasingly they abandoned their liberal self-image as a party of the nation as a whole and began to portray themselves as a party for the defence of bourgeois class interests, property rights, law and order and the Russian Empire. Within the Soviet camp, on the other hand, there was a steady drift towards the Left as the mass of the workers and the peasants became increasingly disillusioned with the failure of the socialists to use their position in the government to speed up the process of social reform or to bring about a democratic peace. The left-wing SRs and Mensheviks, who had been opposed to the coalition, were correct to warn their party colleagues that by entering the government, and by sharing in the blame for its shortcomings, they were bound to lose popular support. For the socialists were henceforth to be 'statesmen', they could no longer act like 'revolutionaries', and this obliged them to resist what they now called the growing 'anarchy' — the peasant seizures of the land, the workers' strikes and the breakdown of army discipline — in the interests of the state. Instead of using their popular mandate to take power for themselves, as they could have done in the April crisis, the Soviet leaders chose instead to lend their support to a liberal government which had already been discredited. They increasingly became seen as the guardians of a 'bourgeois' state, and the initiative for the revolution, for bread, land and peace, was taken up by the Bolsheviks.
iii Lenin's Rage
The Finland Station, on Petrograd's Vyborg side, shortly before midnight on 3 April 1917: workers and soldiers, with red flags and banners, fill the station hall; and there is a military band. The square outside is packed with automobiles and tank-like armoured cars; and the cold night air is blue with smoke. A mounted searchlight sweeps over the faces of the crowd and across the facades of the buildings, momentarily lighting up the tram-lines and the outlines of the city beyond. There is a general buzz of expectation: Lenin's train is due. At last it pulls into the station; a thunderous Marseillaise booms around the hall; and
the small and stocky figure of Lenin appears from the carriage, his Swiss wool coat and Homburg hat strangely out of place amidst the welcoming congregation of grey tunics and workers' caps. An armed Bolshevik escort leads him in military formation to the Tsar's former waiting-room, where a Soviet delegation is standing by to greet him, the latest returning hero of the revolutionary struggle, after more than a decade of exile abroad.47
For Lenin this was the end of an unexpected journey. The February Revolution had found him in Zurich and, like most of the socialist leaders, it had caught him by surprise. 'It's staggering!' he exclaimed to Krupskaya when he heard the news. 'It's so incredibly unexpected!' Lenin was determined to get back to Russia as soon as possible. But how could he cross the German lines? At first he thought of crossing the North Sea by steamer, as Plekhanov had already done. But the British were hostile to the Russian Marxists: Trotsky and Bukharin had both been detained in England on their way back to Russia from New York. Then he thought of travelling through Germany disguised as a deaf, dumb and blind Swede — until Krupskaya had joked that he was bound to give himself away by
