these early days, the Soviet socialists attempted oversight of the government. ‘Members of the Provisional Government!’ exhorted the Menshevik paper Rabochaya gazeta. ‘The proletariat and the army await immediate orders from you concerning the consolidation of the Revolution and the democratisation of Russia.’ The masses’ role, then, was to offer the liberal not only support, but obedience – but not unconditional. ‘Our support is contingent on your actions.’ This was support of the government postol’ku-poskol’ku. In so far as. As if that aspiration could be coherent.
In this context, the Soviet’s proclamation of 5 March was telling. This was softening of the contentious Order Number 1 that it had promised the Duma Committee: Order Number 2.
What Guchkov had wanted was an unequivocal assurance from the Soviet that Order Number 1 only applied to troops in the rear. In fact, Order Number 2 was ambiguous on that point. It did stipulate that even in Petrograd, army committees should not intervene in military affairs; soldiers were ‘bound to submit to all orders of the military authorities that have reference to the military service’. But the Ispolkom still implied support for the election of officers.
The following day, it agreed to install its own commissars in all regiments, to complement the link between soldiers and Soviet, and to exercise oversight of the government’s relations with the forces. But with such relations and its own enshrined in documents such as Order Number 2 – equivocal, evasive, attempting to straddle compromise and conviction – the parameters of the commissars’ power would not always be clear.
Far-left opposition to the Provisional Government – on the basis of the class coalition of its make-up, its defencist continuation of the war – was not initially unanimous, even among the Bolsheviks. On 3 March, the party’s Petersburg Committee adopted what leading activists would later term a ‘semi-Menshevik’ resolution: for a republic, but withholding opposition to the Provisional Government postol’ku-poskol’ku – so long as its policies were ‘consistent with the interests … of the people’. Such conciliationism would soon face a severe shock.
Marooned in Zurich, Lenin was urgently amassing information about the homeland where he had spent only a few months in the last fifteen years. On 3 March, he laid out his political position to his fellow Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, a provocative and brilliant thinker on a range of issues, most notoriously on sexual morality, regarding which her attitudes scandalised even many of her comrades.
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