Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.65: The Dawn of a New Day

I want to start this week by saying that this is the penultimate episode of the revolutions podcast before Hero of Two Worlds: the Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution publishes on August 24th, 2021. I kinda can’t believe it’s already here. I kind of can’t believe I’ve been doing this for this long and something is finally going to come of it. Uh, I am consumed by nervous anticipation. This is three and a half years in the making. But anyway, this is basically the last time I’ll have to ask you to please pre-order the book before it comes out, and just so you know, all the pre-orders count as transactions on the date of publication, and therefore massing all of those sales in a single week and on a single day, uh, helps put the book on the New York Times bestseller list, if that’s a possibility, and maybe we can help prove that I’m not just a one hit wonder. So if you’re planning on getting the book, please just go ahead and pre-order it right now, thank you very much. Um, now people have asked me, how are we doing on the 10,000 pre-order campaign, and the honest answer is, I have no idea. That is because all the local indie bookshops out there don’t report their pre-order numbers, they just take the order, and then process the resulting sale on publication date. So my big push to get you all to pre-order the book from local stores has left me and the publisher basically blind. But I don’t really care because it sounds like we’ve done exactly what I wanted to do. And I just want to read to you now, some bullet points that were reported from the indie channel rep at the publisher in a recent roundup of how things are going out there for the whole catalog of offerings:

The first one is, "Mike Duncan has done an incredible job driving sales of Hero of Two Worlds to the indies. Accounts are picking up on average five to 20 copies." And then later she said, "Speaking of pre-orders, Mike Duncan is the new hero of independent bookstores everywhere. His pre-order campaign for Hero of Two Worlds sending listeners to our stores has made a big impact." and then the final bit is from a final call-out of things worth focusing on, Hero of Two Worlds. This has been one of the most successful author generated pre-order campaigns. I’ve seen in some time. Almost every indie has commented on how thrilled they are with their advance orders."

So this is exactly what I wanted, exactly what I hoped would happen. And it’s all thanks to you guys out there for doing this the right way. I mean, I already consider the pre-order campaign to be a massive success. We have made a huge, positive impact, it has been noticed, it has been appreciated, and it’s something I think we can all take a great deal of pride in accomplishing. And we did it together; I mean, it says, like, mike Duncan did this and Mike Duncan did that, but all I did was ask you guys to go do something and you did it. So this is really, this is all of us doing this together. And truly, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I really do have the best fan base in the world, and people out there are noticing it. So great job. Really great. Great job.

But enough about us. The last two episodes covered what we call the February Revolution, which took place in the final week of February 1917, according to the old style calendar. But what began in February finally finished in March, and what we’re here to talk about today is all of the stuff that is associated with the February Revolution, and is wrapped up in the memory of glorious February, but which actually happened in March. So today we’re going to run through events in March because after March comes April, and if you’ve read ahead even a little bit, you know, that you know who is coming back in April.

So we’re going to pick things up today with a phone call at six o’clock in the morning on March 3rd, 1917, so just a few hours after Nicholas signed his abdication in a rail car in Pskov. The phone call was placed by the leaders of the rapidly coalescing new provisional government to Nicholas’s younger brother Grand Duke Mikhail. This phone call informed a groggy Mikhail that Nicholas abdicated the throne. And at least according to the paperwork, Mikhail was now tsar of Russia. But this was not a happy call, a congratulations on your promotion and let us know when you want us to come down and pledge fealty to. It was instead, this is where things stand at the moment, but please do come down at your earliest convenience to discuss this with us, because there are some very important things to discuss.

So Mikhail got dressed and went to meet the leaders of the Duma’s provisional executive committee, which as I said, is rapidly transitioning into becoming an official provisional government. When the grand duke entered, he expressed surprise and consternation at his brother’s decision. Like almost everyone else, he expected that if and when Nicholas abdicated, it would be in favor of Alexei, and if anything, Mikhail would be a regent, not the tsar himself. He admitted, he didn’t quite know what to do. The leaders around him, almost to a man, told the grand duke, we think it would be a catastrophic mistake for you to accept the crown. The news has already been spreading that you’re the new tsar. And the response, particularly from the soldiers has been hostile and dissatisfied.

And this gets back to what we talked about last week, which is one of the key points in the agreement between the leaders of the Duma and the leaders of the Soviet is that a constituent assembly would be convened to settle Russia’s post-revolutionary constitution. This is the expectation that was out there in the streets and in the barracks. These people were not going to accept a backroom deal to simply replace one Romanov for another.

Now, almost alone among his colleagues however, Pavel Milyukov told Grand Duke Mikhail that he must accept the crown; that the monarchy itself was still an essential institution, and if Mikhail refused to be tsar, he would guarantee a civil war. But Milyukov was the only one who believed that. After this general discussion, the grand duke was taken aside by Chairman of the Duma Rodzianko who later recorded, "It was absolutely clear to us that the grand prince would reign for only a few hours before enormous bloodshed would occur in the capital. It was clear to us that the grand prince would be murdered immediately and all his supporters with him. He did not have any loyal troops at his disposal, and therefore could not rely on any armed force. He asked point blank whether I could guarantee his life if he accepted the throne. And I was compelled to tell him no."

Mikhail emerged from this meeting and announced to the other leaders surrounding him he would not accept the crown… unless it was offered to him by the anticipated constituent assembly. He drafted a statement to this effect, wherein he also implored everyone to recognize and obey the provisional government. This statement was published the following day in the newspaper alongside Nicholas’s official letter of abdication. And this is how legal political authority passed first from Nicholas to Mikhail and then from Mikhail to the provisional government. And there, it would remain until October.

The new provisional government, which officially marks its beginning to March 2nd, 1917 was drawn from the senior leadership of the progressive block, most of whom had been sitting on the unofficially convened provisional executive committee of Duma delegates. Pavel Milyukov became foreign minister, Alexander Guchkov became minister of war, Alexander Kerensky became minister of justice. Heading up the provisional government was Prince Lvov, the highly effective and well-respected leader of the Zemstvo Union, who became minister of the interior and also prime minister of the new provisional government.

All of these guys took up their post quickly and without very much infighting. The progressive block had been aggressively trying to force Nicholas to accept a new government composed of them for years now. And so the question of who would get what job had long since been settled. For months, newspapers had openly published lists of what leaders would take over which ministries. So while the revolution of course caught them by surprise, they had been expecting to get this call for years now. It’s not like they were totally caught off guard and suddenly rushing to do things they weren’t expecting to be doing. Now, the general public had also been waiting for these guys to become the government for months now, for years now, and when the news finally started to spread, the provisional government enjoyed broad support from the right and from the left, from workers and aristocrats, soldiers and civilians at home and abroad. As I’ve hopefully established by now, just about everyone was ready for a new government by the winter of 1917, and even any lingering shred of loyalty to Nicholas and Alexander out there among conservatives had long since frayed beyond repair. As word spread over the next few hours and days and then weeks, news of the tsar’s abdication, and that Russia was now in the hands of capable leaders was greeted with celebratory. Not the least reason being that these guys were all viewed as patriotic Russians, unlike Empress Alexandra, and the people who surrounded her, who most everybody had long since concluded were like secretly pro German and trying to lead the empire to ruin.

So there were celebrations in city streets, and out in the trenches and in tiny rural villages. A new day was dawning, and the wave of optimistic joy and relief was nearly uniform throughout the empire. With the Russians themselves clearly ready to embrace and recognize the provisional government, Russia’s foreign allies quickly followed suit. On March 9th, the United States became the first power to formally recognize the provisional government as the legitimate government of the Russian Empire, with Britain, France, Italy, and the other allies quickly following. With this final test of legitimacy passed, the provisional government was the government.

So, what were they going to do with their new found power, authority, and legitimacy? Well, they very quickly got to work trying to live up to everyone’s expectations, to deliver on what was generally understood to be the promise of the revolution. And that promise can be distilled down to two essential components: one destructive, the other constructive. And by that, I mean, they needed to dismantle the most abusive parts of the old absolutist regime, while at the same time, fostering something new, a participatory government that included all of Russian society, not just a tiny clique of incompetent sycophants appointed by Nicholas and Alexandra. For years now, decades really, the arbitrary, centralized state apparatus had been a major source of anger and resentment at nearly all levels of Russian society. So to maintain the good will and support of that society, the provisional government knew they were going to have to embark on a rapid program of destruction and construction. On the destructive side, that meant eliminating the most hated parts of the old regime, and on the constructive side, it meant replacing the deeply unpopular, closed up, and arbitrary bureaucratic apparatus with something that was far more open and responsive to the Russian people.

One of the first targets for destruction was the tsar’s police and internal security apparatus. Within days of taking power, the provisional government straight up abolished the ministry of police, the gendarme, and the Okhrana. These forces were the most visible symbol of an unjust and coercive state. The police in Petrograd had been the most staunchly violent defenders of the old regime during the street fighting between February 23rd and March 2nd, and thus abolishing the existing police force had been one of the things the provisional government had promised to do in order to secure support from the Petrograd Soviet. Now, of course it helped that the headquarters of all these police agencies had already been trashed, their senior leaders arrested or lynched, and the rank and file officers dissolved and scattered in the wake of revolutionary victory in the streets. So, announcing that these forces were abolished was merely announcing something that had kind of already taken place. And before we go on, I do want to note with a bit of a wry smile that many revolutionaries destroyed and burned the offices of the Okhrana with particularly meticulous zeal on account of how many of them had been paid agents of the Okhrana for years.

Now in place of these dissolved police forces, the provisional government expected to organize militia companies, drawn from the citizenry and led by elected office. So the idea was not to have no police force, but instead to have a police force by and for the people, rather than by and for the tsar.

The provisional government also move quickly to reorganize provincial administration throughout the empire. The provincial governors enjoyed considerable power in their provinces, and all of them were appointed directly by the tsar. They thus stood as an enormous potential roadblock to expanding the revolution out from Petrograd into the rest of the empire. Leaving them in place would have been a grave political mistake. They had been entrusted with broad discretionary power out in the provinces specifically because they were loyal to Nicholas and Alexandra. These were hardly people who could be trusted to support the revolution. So on March 5th, all governors and deputy governors were summarily dismissed from service. To replace these governors, the provisional government invited local leaders to take control. Specifically, they called on the provincial zemstvos, municipal councils, and other elements in the local professional classes and intelligentsia to step into the vacuum and take over administration. And it’s not like these groups weren’t ready to do the job. The zemstvo had been begging for years to be allowed to play an official role in local government and administration, but had been kept at arm’s length by the paranoid central authorities who feared they were trying to take over. Well, now they got a chance to take over. And over the course of the first few weeks of March, 1917, they moved into government offices and administrative headquarters and all their local capitals and went about the business of governing their provinces.

Meanwhile, back in Petrograd, the provisional government was decreeing all aspects of our well-known list of liberal and democratic reforms, most of which were also included in that eight point agreement with the Soviet we ended on last week. They were announcing freedom of speech and freedom of the press and freedom of assembly and freedom of religion. And since the general critique of the tsar from a liberal perspective was that his arbitrary central authority was unresponsive to the people, the provisional government leaned heavily into a more hands-off and decentralized vision of democratic liberalism. As we just saw, their idea for provincial government was not to replace the centrally appointed governors with somebody else, but to let local elites take up the job for themselves.

Meanwhile, when it came to national minority groups, everybody was promised some kind of autonomy. Finland’s constitution would be absolutely respected; Poland was basically promised self-government after the war was over. All of this fit into the widespread belief that for too long, the great potential of the Russian Empire had been kept bound by the tsar’s shackles. The February Revolution was supposed to set them free. And in March of 1917, that’s exactly what it looked like was happening, that’s what the provisional government is trying to do. They are trying to set the people of the empire free.

But of course the Revolution of 1917 is not just about what the provisional government is doing, because one of the key dynamics of the Revolution of 1917 is this business of dual power. Because growing right alongside the provisional government is the Petrograd Soviet, who sometimes supported, sometimes criticized, and sometimes outright undermined what the provisional government was doing. And in fact, to make sure the interests and goals of the Soviet were protected, its leaders built out their own parallel apparatus of power. And while their official policy was supporting the provisional government, it was very clear that their support was entirely contingent on the provisional government not doing anything that the Soviet opposed. And as the Soviet was an assembly of workers and soliders — which is to say, the mass of people under arms — the leaders of the Soviet believed, not incorrectly, that the provisional government only existed because the Soviet let them. The Soviet could frankly overthrow the provisional government practically anytime they wanted, and both sides were well aware of it.

Now, thanks to holding the trump card in this uneasy power sharing dynamic, the Petrograd Soviet felt free to pursue their own initiatives without bothering to seek the approval of the provisional government. So they would just do stuff. For example, on March 5th, they blew off freedom of the press and announced that no paper could be published without Soviet approval. Now mostly permission was granted, but they specifically named a bunch of reactionary newspapers with known ties to the Black Hundreds and said, yeah, you’re shut down. You can’t publish. Now on the level of principle, this was an opposition to the professed respect for freedom of speech and the press trumpeted by liberals in the provisional government and which was supposed to be one of the goals of the revolution, but the leaders in the Soviet did not care. Their eye was on a very practical ball: if you want a revolution to succeed, don’t let conservative thugs publish anti-revolutionary propaganda in the middle of the revoution.

In the weeks that followed, the Soviet then expanded on what was becoming a loose working policy that whatever happened out there, whether in the streets or in the army or in the provinces, required the stamp of approval from the Soviet. They were now casting themselves as the closest thing to a true expression of popular sovereignty. They sent commissioners out to set up shop in key locations and sectors: telegraph offices, railroad stations, post offices, printing presses, radio stations, industrial factories; the Soviet put commissioners everywhere. The basic idea was that while the provisional government technically wielded power, the Soviet exercised a kind of supreme oversight authority. Representatives of the Soviet told anyone they encountered, you are to obey orders from your superiors or laws from the provisional government, unless they contradict decrees of the Soviet, in which case you are duty bound to disobey them.

One of the examples of the Soviet having more control over things than the provisional government they were allegedly supporting was the fate of Nicholas and Alexandra. After Nicholas signed his abdication, he secured permission from Prince Lvov to go to army headquarters to say goodbye to his office. Then he requested permission to go back home to the Imperial Palace, link up with his family, and from there, they would all hopefully retire to a coastal community until the end of the war. Nicholas received permission to do all this, and the ex-tsar returned to army headquarters to bid tearful farewell to his officers.

But after he departed Pskov, the provisional government talked it over more, and decided they could probably not let the tsar and his family just stay inside Russia. So they sounded out the diplomatic core in Petrograd, and found the British, willing to accept Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children. All of the allies were concerned that if Nicholas and Alexandra settled anywhere in close proximity to the Germans, that they would become a focal point, not just for domestic counterrevolutionary activity that would further destabilize Russia, but that the Germans would be able to get in contact with Alexandra and fund and support such counter-revolutionary activity. In fact, the restoration of the Russian monarchy might become a German war aim. The whole Eastern front could collapse on Russia might very well become a permanent ally of Germany. So, the Imperial family remaining in eastern Europe was not in the national interest of any of the allies, and so the British made logistical arrangements for the imperial family to be put on a British steam ship. King George the Fifth even wrote a personal letter inviting his cousins to come settle in England.

But this whole idea was quickly short-circuited when rumors leaked of the plan. When the leaders of the Soviet found out about it they were incensed. They did not believe Nicholas nor Alexandra should be allowed to simply depart Russia without standing trial for their many crimes. The leaders of the Soviet informed the provisional government that they would not stand by and let the ex-tsar leave the country. The provisional government immediately backed down. They sent four deputies to army headquarters to escort Nicholas back to Tsarskoye Selo where he would be placed under house arrest. The provisional government, also order officers and soldiers that they trusted to go take control of the imperial palaces and make sure no one got in or out without permission. In the midst of all this, the leaders of the Soviet briefly panicked when the ex-tsar was in transit back to Petrograd because they lost track of him, and they believed he was being hussled out of the country. They went so far as to issue radio broadcasting, if you see the tsar, you must arrest him at once, he is a fugitive. But the provisional government had not double-crossed the Soviet, and shortly thereafter Nicholas was deposited back in the Imperial Palace. To be super sure of things though, the Soviet then sent its own company of about 300 infantry men backed by a company of machine gunners under an officer who just so happened to be an SR. Their job was to make sure Nicholas was in fact there, and this officer may have had further orders to either take command of security at the palace or possibly go so far as to take the imperial family into custody and deposit them in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Although what this officer wound up doing was negotiating with the soldiers he found on site and decided not to push the envelope, and instead reported back to the Soviet that he believed the imperial family were under proper custody. So it’s not a hundred percent just the Soviets representatives running roughshod over anybody here. But that said, if the provisional government had had their way, Nicholas and Alexandra and the children would have been safely sent to England. Instead, at the behest of the Soviet, they remained very unsafely in Russia.

As the Soviets claim to their special authority grew, the Soviet itself also grew. After the first week of March, there were about a thousand elected delegates, and within just a few weeks, that number is going to top out at over 3000. Then, the newly forming Soviets out in the provinces and out on the front lines started sending delegates to Petrograd. After a brief debate, the Petrograd Soviet voted to allow these people to come in as full-fledged members, and by the last week of March, they were no longer calling themselves the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies; they were now the All-Russia Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies. Bolstering their claim to be the true representatives of the people, not just the people of the capital, but of the whole empire. As the Soviet grew, the executive committee also grew until it hit more than 70 members, and as this body became increasingly unwieldy, they created another nested committee called the bureau composed of 24 members, mostly Mensheviks SRs, and Trudoviks. General assemblies of all the delegates became infrequent, there were only a handful of full sessions over the course of the rest of the month, and this self-selected group of socialist party leaders in the executive committee and in the bureau made most of the decisions on behalf of the people they claimed to speak for.

Now it would be easy and partly true to cast these socialist leaders as cynically co-opting the sovereignty of the people. But it is worth keeping in mind that the workers and soldiers clearly believed the Soviet represented their interests better than any other institution. And so, if you would ask them at this moment, they would have probably said, yes, the Soviet is the institution of the people, and I support them for that very reason. But that said, it is worth pointing out for the umpteenth time that the vast majority of Russians were peasants, and peasants were not represented at all in the Soviet. No matter how much they might’ve claimed to speak for the people, the Soviet was only reasonably speaking for like 10% of the population, 15% tops. And it’s not like the peasants were just passively inert on the one hand or clamoring to join the Soviet on the other. As we’re going to talk about more down the road, the peasants were having their own revolution. For them, the February Revolution meant agrarian revolution, and they were already taking matters into their own hands on the land front. But in terms of political representation, a bunch of regional SR organizations got the idea of getting the old Peasant Union back together. The Peasant Union had become a major locus of peasant power during the Revolution of 1905, but it had been broken and dispersed in the repressive aftermath. So as we’re going to see with the peasants, they are, again, the vast majority of the population, and they are going to remain aloof from the Soviet and seek to create their own representative institutions where their representatives were representing their interests. So whatever the assumed pretensions of the Soviet, they were never going to be more than what they officially were: a Soviet of workers and soldiers.

But as to this question of who represented the people, and what could be considered an authentic voice of the nation, we’ll end today with a big mistake that the provisional government was making. As we’ve noted several times over the past couple episodes, the final verdict of the February Revolution was always supposed to be rendered by a constituent assembly. Everyone was under the impression the provisional government was just that: provisional. That one of their most important jobs was figuring out when, where, and how to hold democratic elections to convene a national assembly that would hammer out a new constitutional order. An assembly that could truly claim popular legitimacy. But, instead of treating this promised constituent assembly as a matter of vital urgency, the provisional government dragged their feet. They formed a committee to come up with an electoral plan, but this committee got bogged down, either arguing minutiae or getting distracted by minor concerns. So weeks passed, and then months passed, before they even had a preliminary idea of how to hold elections.

So not only was the provisional government failing to fulfill one of their most important promises on a moral level, on a strategic level, their failure to convene the constituent assembly left laying around a very big and very obvious cudgel critics of the provisional government could pick up and beat them with. It is going to become very easy to argue the provisional government was not interested in forging a government of the Russian people, but of simply perpetuating their own power indefinitely.

So, that’s the political situation heading into April 1917: a great deal of promise, a great deal of promises, but with the initial rush of hope and optimism getting its first tinges of suspicious disappointment. There were now multiple power structures forming out there, all of them beginning to truly jostle with one another and no big national assembly that would sort it all out anytime soon. This was the atmosphere into which a train pulled into Finland Station on April the third, 1917. When the train stopped a small group of Russian ex-pats got out, returning home for the first time in more than a decade.

Though before we go, I have to take this second to last opportunity before Hero of Two Worlds comes out to ask you to please pre-order Hero of Two Worlds from your favorite independent bookstore, and if you are so inclined, please join me on August 20th with Jamelle Bouie, August 23rd with Ben Rhodes, August 24th with Alexis Coe or August 31st with Patrick Wyman. Those are going to be the online events that go along with publication week, which is now, my God, just one week away.