tsar spent the last day of February wandering a frozen Russia by rail. He meandered in luxury, his train a wheeled palace. Gilded baroque interiors, kitchen carriage, filigreed bedroom, study sumptuous with brown leather, Karelian birchwood, cherry-red carpet, swaying through hard and frosted landscapes until darkness descended. A night arrival at Malaya Vishera Station, barely 100 miles from Petersburg. But Bublikov’s telegram had done its work: the stations along the line were occupied by revolutionary troops.
The railway authorities had orders from the Provisional Committee to divert the train, to try to draw the tsar back by rail, send him if they could to Petrograd where those who had overthrown his regime awaited him. The iron road could turn him. Cautious at the confused (dis)information about the situation they received on their arrival, Nicholas and his party hastily changed plans. With a rushed clattering of points, the royal train set swiftly out again, no longer for Tsarskoe Selo, but for the headquarters of the northern front, the ancient medieval town of Pskov. From there, Nicholas thought, perhaps he might find a route to somewhere more congenial, and perhaps even some loyal military support.
The man dethroned in all but final formality rattled too late into the dark.
In deep night, as the month turned, having cabled with Rodzianko about the situation in the city, General Alexeev sent a telegram to General Ivanov. He ordered him not to advance on the city as planned, because ‘complete peace was restored in Petrograd’.
This was quite untrue. But he and the Duma Committee said what they must to forestall the doomed counterinsurgency. Thus the Romanovian counterrevolution was recalled.
At the Tauride Palace, at 11 a.m. on 1 March, the Soviet Executive Committee met again in a tense session to debate the problem of power. Some on its right argued for coalition with the Duma Committee, since, as per their historical and political theories, the necessity of a transfer of power to the Provisional Government that that committee was forming was not, for them, in dispute. But the Executive Committee’s left-wing minority – three Bolsheviks, two SRs on the hard left of the party, one Mezhraionets – called instead for the formation of a ‘provisional revolutionary government’ without the Duma deputies. This was reminiscent of Lenin’s pre-war position: then, while the Mensheviks had argued that the proletariat and Marxists should abstain from a (necessarily) bourgeois government, Lenin, by contrast, had advocated a provisional, proletariat-led revolutionary government as the best vehicle for the (again, necessarily) bourgeois–democratic revolution.
In fact the Executive Committee minority’s call notwithstanding, the Bolsheviks as a party were not united in their approach either to the Soviet, of which some of their activists remained sceptical, or to questions of government power. That very day, when the left Bolshevik Vyborg District Committee circulated a proclamation in the chaotic streets demanding a provisional revolutionary government, the Bolshevik Party Central Committee clamped down on their ill-disciplined interventions.
The Soviet’s Executive Committee, the Ispolkom, had allowed a single hour to discuss and decide the shape of post-revolutionary power. A ludicrous aspiration. The meeting dragged well over the allotted time. Under the dome of the Tauride Palace’s great hall the hundreds of Soviet delegates, its general assembly, were awaiting the Ispolkom’s report back. Their impatience grew loud. As noon slipped past, the Ispolkom sent the Menshevik Skobelev to plead for more time.
As he spoke, he was dramatically interrupted. The doors to the chamber flew open and a voluble group of uniformed soldiers piled in. As the newcomers clamoured, the Ispolkom got word and rushed to join the throng.
The anxious soldiers had come to ask the Soviet for guidance: how should they respond to Rodzianko’s demands to surrender their arms? What should they do about their officers, against whom the popular mood remained ugly enough that there was a real danger of lynchings? And should they obey the Soviet, or the Duma Committee?
The raucous crowd left them in no doubt that they must keep their arms. That much was simple.
The decision to dissolve the Soviet’s Military Commission into that of the Duma Committee, however, provoked more controversy. The left in the room were hollering, denouncing it as collaboration. For the Ispolkom, Sokolov, a former Bolshevik, defended the move on grounds of the military experience and ‘historic role’ of the bourgeoisie.
Out of the arguments echoing through the hall, a consensus began to emerge. Anti-revolutionary officers were not to be trusted, but the command of ‘moderate’ officers was valid – though only as regards matters of combat. As the back-and-forth continued, one soldier from the Preobrazhensky Regiment explained how he and his comrades had voted in an administrative committee from within their own ranks.
Elected officers. The idea spread roots.
At last the Soviet put together a draft resolution. It stressed that soldiers’ committees were important. It proposed soviet democracy within units, combined with military discipline on duty. The soldiers, the gathering urged, should send representatives to the Duma Committee’s Military Commission, and recognise its authority – in so far as it did not deviate from the opinion of the Soviet.
In that extraordinary conditional clause, radicalism and conciliation swirled together but did not mix.
Newly resolute, the soldiers went to present these decisions to the Military Commission’s Colonel Engelhardt. They demanded that he pass an order for the election of, as he later recalled, ‘the junior officers’. On behalf of the Duma Committee, however, Rodzianko immediately rejected this left compromise, leaving Engelhardt to placate the furious soldiers as best he could.
The jockeying was not yet done: later that evening, mandated by the Soviet, they returned to the Military Commission to request of Engelhardt that regulations regarding military organisation be drawn up, in collaboration with the Duma Committee. When he rejected this further overture, the soldiers took their angry leave.
‘So much the better,’ one exclaimed as they went. ‘We will write them ourselves.’
At 6 p.m., in the Soviet, a packed Executive Committee, soon joined by several new delegates mandated by the soldiers – Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, independents, one lonely Kadet – resumed their discussions on power. Once again, the moderates called for active coalition with the Duma Committee. But the prevailing position, as put by Sukhanov, an independent intellectual close to the left Mensheviks, was that the Soviet’s ‘task’ was, rather, to ‘compel’ the reluctant liberal bourgeoisie to take power. In the Menshevik model, they were the necessary agent, after all, of a necessary, and necessarily bourgeois, revolution. And excessively stringent conditions for compromise, of course, risked dissuading this timorous bourgeois liberalism from fulfilling its historic role.
On such a basis, the Ispolkom thrashed out nine conditions for its support of a provisional government:
1)an amnesty for political and religious prisoners;
2)freedom of expression, publication and strikes;
3)the introduction of a democratic republic by universal, equal, direct, secret – male – suffrage;
4)preparation for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, towards a permanent government;
5)replacement of the police force by a people’s militia;
6)elections
