6) Who led the February Revolution and who took power?

"The proletariat and the peasantry voted for the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries not as compromisers, but as opponents of the Czar, the capitalists and the landowners. But in voting for them they created a partition-wall between themselves and their own aims. They could not now move forward at all without bumping into this wall erected by themselves, and knocking it over"

The Soviet ‘Executive Committee’

While the Czar procrastinated and Ivanov tried to gather up his phantom armies, the revolution had been getting on with the job of building new organs of power.

During the 27th, the gaols had been seized, and political prisoners freed. The Bolsheviks, including the Petrograd leaders arrested in the early hours of the 26th, had gone straight to the workers’ districts. They sought to meet up with the workers and soldiers to ensure that the revolution was carried through to the end.

The Mensheviks, like the members of the Military-Industrial committees arrested at the same time, had taken a different line of march. They had set out for the Tauride Palace, home of the Duma, where some of the radical intelligentsia and a few revolutionary officers had been trying to set up a kind of revolutionary headquarters.

Tauride Palace 2012

The Palace was well-placed geographically, being close both to the military districts, containing the barracks, and the Vyborg district, the cauldron of the revolution.

On the evening of the 27th, a stream of workers, soldiers and assorted radicals came to the Palace looking for some kind of leadership. From there detachments of soldiers were sent out to guard key points like the railway stations, and arrested generals, ministers, policemen and so on who were brought to the Palace to be imprisoned.

However, the workers' districts did not need orders from the Tauride Palace and many distrusted these 'leaders' that had suddenly appeared from nowhere. Indeed, the worker-Bolsheviks and the best workers of the other left parties remained at the sharp end, directing the mopping-up operations of the 28th, making arrests and spreading the mutiny to new regiments in the capital and in surrounding areas.

However, while the proletariat and revolutionary soldiers continued the real business of revolution, the petty-bourgeois radicals, true to form, busied themselves with getting hold of positions of leadership.

The freed Mensheviks, together with the Menshevik Duma deputies like Cheidze and Skobelev and other right-wingers like the Trade Union leaders, straight away set about forming a "Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies" (the “E.C.”). It soon filled out with various well-known socialists, including some Bolsheviks, and summoned the workers to elect deputies at once.

The tradition of soviets, which had taken root in the movement thanks to the experience of 1905, together with the presence of old recognised leaders, meant that this E.C. immediately became the focus of all hopes and also all authority for the mass of workers and soldiers.

However, unlike the Soviet of 1905, its representatives were, on the whole, elements who had played little or no role in the revolution. Their views and experiences did not coincide with those of the activists who had actually led the revolution in the streets. However, those revolutionaries had no organisation or well-known leaders with which to stamp their authority on events.

Even in the cauldron of Petrograd, the consciousness of those fresh to the struggle lagged behind events. They had not had time to free themselves fully from old opinions and prejudices during the rapid changes of the war years, let alone in the five days of revolution.

During the insurrection the broad masses had followed the lead of the most revolutionary elements without being actively involved in the struggle themselves. Now, the middle-class officials, lawyers and other radicals elbowed the workers and soldiers to one side, leaning upon the illusions and inexperience of these fresher masses to build their personal positions.

The first session of the Soviet took place in the Tauride Palace on the evening of the 27th, and, with some additions, ratified the E.C. membership.

In the midst of proud and joyful speeches from soldiers' deputies, it was agreed to build on the fraternisation of the days of revolution by uniting the garrison with the workers in a general Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.

This inclusion of the representatives of the overwhelmingly peasant army gave the soviets a much wider base of support than in 1905. From the beginning, the E.C., in the name of the Soviet, acted as the nation's sovereign power. It organised a revolutionary staff and controlled the garrison, food supplies and the State Bank and Printing Office, which it occupied with a revolutionary guard.

However, even in these first days of the victory, those socialists at the head of the Soviet were looking around for those that they felt should really have the power - the bourgeoisie.

As Trotsky had suggested, the leaders of the Soviet E.C. showed their petty-bourgeois inadequacy before the big bourgeoisie. Hiding their cowardice with theoretical arguments about the need to limit the struggle to a "bourgeois" revolution, they looked to the bourgeois leaders in the Duma to take the power from them.

The Duma’s ‘Provisional Committee’

The Duma had in fact been dissolved by the Czar on the 26th - although few beyond the party leaders had ever received the news. So the deputies had gathered on the 27th to be told of the Czar's decision. However, this "revolutionary" class offered neither any resistance to the dissolution nor leadership to the masses.

In fact their leaders were at that very moment trying to fix up a deal with the autocracy to put down the revolution. This involved using Czar Nicholas' brother, Mikhail, as a figurehead for some kind of military dictatorship. The fact that it was refused merely reflected the fact that the bureaucracy knew that the liberal bourgeoisie offered no serious threat to their rule.

Bewildered by exaggerated reports that the masses were marching on the Duma, the deputies in panic hurriedly suggested forming a "Provisional Committee". It was agreed to do so, but without time for a vote, since the majority of these "revolutionaries" had already fled!

It was this Provisional Committee of the Duma that the Soviet E.C. appealed to, demanding that they take power in their hands. However, the Duma leaders tried to stall, fearful of their positions in case the insurrection might turn out, as they still hoped, to be defeated.

In the end, on the 28th, realising that it might be the only way of tearing the revolution away from more threatening leadership, they decided to agree to the Soviet E.C.'s demands. As Trotsky says, their moral was clear: "If the monarchy wins we are with it, if the revolution wins, we will try to plunder it". (43).

The reformist socialist Sukhanov perfectly expressed the joy of the fearful middle-class at the news - "I felt that the ship of revolution, tossed in the squall of those hours by the complete caprice of the elements, had put up a sail, acquired stability ... amid the terrible storm." As Trotsky adds: "What a high-flying formula for a prosaic recognition of the slavish dependence of the petty bourgeois democracy upon capitalistic liberalism! And what a deadly mistake in political perspective. The handing over of power to the liberals not only will not give stability to the ship of state, but, on the contrary, will become from that moment a source of headlessness of the revolution, enormous chaos, embitterment of the masses, collapse of the front, and in the future, extreme bitterness of the civil war" (44).

Moscow only saw an echo of the insurrection in Petrograd. Strikes and demonstrations did not begin until the 27th but soon the revolution spread with regiments mutinying and the prisons being opened. The Polish revolutionary, Dzerzhinsky, addressed the newly-appointed soviet in the Moscow Duma building still wearing the uniform of the hard-labour prison from which he had just been released.

In many other cities the revolution began only on March 1st and only gradually spread to the villages as news filtered in from the towns. In this gentler atmosphere the police chiefs and bureaucrats were often able to simply remove the Czar's portraits from the wall, declare themselves for the revolution, and hold on to their positions.

It was Petrograd that achieved the revolution, the only arena of struggle. The rest of the country followed for there was no force anywhere in the country prepared to fight for the old regime. The capital may only have had 1/75 of the country's population, but played a dominant role. Petrograd, with the largest concentration of the proletariat, expressed most sharply the forces pushing Russia towards a new society.

Who led the revolution?

At first glance, it might appear that the February events contradict the idea that a successful revolution must have a conscious leadership.

Indeed, afterwards the bourgeoisie tried to paint a picture of a spontaneous and bloodless movement in which, almost mystically, the whole people were moved of themselves to remove the old regime. Certainly it was true that acts of revenge by workers and soldiers were surprisingly few and far between but the 1443 killed and wounded in the streets hardly added up to a bloodless transformation.

This conception, of course, allowed the bourgeoisie to pretend that they had got hold of power without the need of an unsavoury insurrection. It also gained popularity amongst some of the Soviet leaders who, having taken no leading role in the revolution, wanted to hope that nobody else had either! However, a five-day struggle against not only the power of the old state but also the opposition of the liberals and social-patriots can hardly be called "spontaneous".

Who took the critical decisions? Who led the struggle? Clearly the bourgeoisie, who were terrified of a revolution which, in any case, they had not seen coming, had not led the uprising. The future "General Administrator" of the revolution's "Provisional Government", the Kadet Nabokov, spent the 27th looking at events from his apartment window "in dull and anxious expectancy" (45)!

Kerensky, a Narodnik intellectual soon to become a revolutionary "Minister of Justice" was reportedly against a revolution in January 1917 in case it took "an extreme leftward channel and this would create vast difficulties in the conduct of the war" (46).

The initiative did not come from here, nor from the Mensheviks, nor from the Social-Revolutionaries to whom "the revolution fell like thunder out of the sky" (47), according to their party president.

As has been shown, even the Bolshevik leaders lagged behind events. Kayurov asserted that on the 26th: "Absolutely no guiding initiative from the party centres was felt. The Petrograd Committee had been arrested and the representative of the Central Committee, Comrade Shliapnikov, was unable to give any directives for the coming day" (48).

In the end, Shliapnikov produced an appeal to the soldiers on the morning of the 27th - but by the time it was distributed the troops had nearly all mutinied already.

In fact Trotsky notes: "We must lay it down as a general rule for those days that the higher the leaders, the further they lagged behind” (49).

It has to be said, in defence of the Bolsheviks, that the party had not yet recovered from its weakened condition of the early war years and that many of its authoritative leaders were abroad or in exile. Those leaders remaining in Petrograd, both Bolsheviks and of other left parties, often did not consider themselves, and were not considered by others, capable of playing a guiding role in events.

The Bolshevik Party had come closest to providing a revolutionary organisation, but an extremely weak and scattered one without central direction. Instead, the search for the leaders of the revolution must be made amongst the countless nameless leaders of groups of workers and soldiers.

Despite the dilution of the Petrograd proletariat during the war, the years of hard-earned experience of the struggles from 1905-17 had not gone entirely wasted. Conscious revolutionary workers and progressive soldiers existed, educated in the past by the left parties, particularly the Bolsheviks who had often stood alone alongside the workers in the years of reaction.

These minor leaders were able to make an estimation of forces and arrive at a strategic decision for themselves. Their role was no less significant simply because their names were never recorded for posterity. However, without a strong revolutionary socialist party: "This leadership proved sufficient to guarantee the victory of the insurrection, but it was not adequate to transfer immediately into the hands of the proletarian vanguard, the leadership of the revolution" (50).

The paradox of February

The paradox of the February Revolution is to understand how a revolution led by the workers and peasants came to surrender power to the bourgeoisie.

It was certainly not inevitable. The revolution found the proletariat at a far higher political level than in previous revolutions where the bourgeoisie had stood on the sidelines and then quietly gathered up the power. It had formed a new organ of revolutionary power, the Soviet, based upon the armed strength of the masses.

Trotsky explained that the solution to the paradox could be found in the contradictory character of the petty - bourgeois democrats and socialists in this leadership of the Soviet. This middle-class layer "had taught the masses that the bourgeoisie is an enemy, but themselves feared more than anything else to release the masses from the control of that enemy" (51).

One of these petty-bourgeois, Sukhanov, later admitted that "the people did not gravitate toward the State Duma, they were not interested in it, and never thought of making it either politically or technically the centre of the movement", and "that the [Soviet] Executive Committee was in a perfect position either to give power to the bourgeois government or not give it" (52).

And yet, the reactionary bourgeoisie, who had fled in terror from the revolution, were turned by these "socialists" into the key to the revolution's success. As Sukhanov went on: "The power destined to replace czarism must be only a bourgeois power ... we must steer our course by this principle. Otherwise the uprising will not succeed and the revolution will collapse" (53).

Yet, on March 1st, Rodzianko, leader of the Provisional Committee that had "taken over" the power was too scared to go to the telegraph office alone to contact the Czar. The telegraph workers would only take orders from the Soviet - it had the real power not Rodzianko's committee.

Rodzianko wanted to contact the Czar to add a further twist to the paradox. As Trotsky put it:"The liberals agreed to take the power from the socialists only on condition that the monarchy should agree to take it from their hands" (54).

They were still attempting to use Grand Duke Mikhail as a "customary symbol of power" to place over a constitutional monarchy. The bourgeoisie hoped that this would safely guarantee their right to make profits for the time-being, while also using the monarchy as a point of support from which to later claw back the gains of the revolution.

Under pressure from his generals, who were also doing their best to save their own skins, the Czar, surrounded by treachery, finally abdicated on March 2nd in favour of Mikhail. Thus the rotten dynasty fell without any remaining support. The Czar complained to his family "there is no justice among men", but, as Trotsky adds: "Those very words irrefutably testify that historic justice, though it comes late, does exist" (55).

Unfortunately for the bourgeoisie, the masses were not prepared to accept their betrayal as easily as they had swallowed that of the Soviet leaders. Guchkov arrived at the station holding the Czar's act of abdication. When he read it out to a crowd of railway workers, ending with the exclamation, "Long Live the Emperor Mikhail!", they even threatened him with execution!

Mikhail himself declined the lofty but risky position offered to him. So the bourgeoisie were forced to give up their plan for a monarchist fig-leaf to cover their treachery. Nevertheless, thanks to the Soviet leaders, the Provisional Committee of the Duma were able to announce on March 2nd the setting-up of the "Provisional Government". It consisted of a handful of the very richest landlords and industrialists.

The Soviet 'socialists' were content - they only wanted to be a left-wing opposition in a bourgeois regime, not the leaders of a people’s uprising. They accepted the new government without a word on the question of war, republic, land, 8-hour day, or any of the other burning issues that the revolution had to deal with. Their only concern was that the left parties should have freedom of agitation! And this when the soldiers listened only to the Soviet and the bourgeoisie still feared to go out alone!

"In giving their confidence to the socialists, the workers and soldiers found themselves, quite unexpectedly, expropriated politically. They were bewildered, alarmed, but did not immediately find a way out. Their own betrayers deafened them from above with arguments to which they had no ready answer, but which conflicted with all their feelings and intentions. The proletariat and the peasantry voted for the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries not as compromisers, but as opponents of the Czar, the capitalists and the landowners. But in voting for them they created a partition-wall between themselves and their own aims. They could not now move forward at all without bumping into this wall erected by themselves, and knocking it over" (56).