‘All etiquette must be ignored,’ he insisted. His urgency was not shared. The tsar, he was coldly informed, was sleeping.
Alexeev knew it would take representations from the army, one of the few institutions Nicholas respected, to make him understand, to bow to the inevitable. The general sent the text of the explosive discussion on to the commanders of Russia’s fleets and fronts, asking them to respond with their recommendations to the tsar.
It was not until after 10 a.m. that the hapless Ruzskii at last brought to the tsar the transcript of his conversation with Rodzianko. He handed it over. The tsar read. When he was done, he gazed at the ceiling for a long time. He murmured that he was born for unhappiness.
Ruzskii, pale and terrified, read aloud Alexeev’s mass telegram to the generals. There could be no mistaking its implication. The tsar must abdicate.
Nicholas remained silent.
Ruzskii waited. The tsar stood up at last. Apocalypse glowered. The tsar announced that he was going for lunch.
Some 1,400 miles away in Zurich, Lenin turned to page 2 of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. There, a short report informed of a revolution in Petrograd. Lenin, too, looked up in thought, his eyes wide.
That morning, Milyukov came to the Tauride Palace’s huge Ekaterina Hall to announce the Provisional Government to the revolutionary crowd gathered there. As he listed the cabinet, the room jeered in bewilderment at the names that were unfamiliar, and in disgust at those they knew.
There was one appointment, though, that drew applause: the role of justice minister had been filled by that popular SR (as he now declared himself) Alexander Kerensky. This despite the fact that the Executive Committee of the Soviet had agreed that its members would not take cabinet positions.
Milyukov was adroit. He deployed a few revolutionary slogans to win over his sceptical audience, fielding their barbs with aplomb. When the shout came, ‘Who elected you?’ he responded immediately: ‘It was the Russian Revolution that elected us!’ One thing, however, he could not sell: the continuation of the royal dynasty. When he announced ‘only’ Nicholas’s abdication – to which, of course, Nicholas himself had not yet agreed – the incandescent crowd roared.
The tsar’s departure was, of course, a calamity to some in the country. As Milyukov sparred with the revolutionaries, across the city ten-year-old Zinaida Schakovsky and her classmates were at assembly in the hall of the Empress Catherine Institute for Young Ladies of the Nobility. Zinaida was confused: the older pupil leading the school prayers seemed to have skipped the usual wishes for the tsar and his family. Now she was stumbling over unfamiliar replacement words, unsure how to pronounce ‘Let us pray for the Provisional Government.’ The girl paused and began to cry. And as a bewildered Zinaida looked on, the teachers took out their handkerchiefs and wept too, and so did all the girls around her, and so did she, without knowing what it was she mourned.
No such sobs echoed through the Tauride corridors. Word began to reach the palace that soldiers were looting the houses of the rich and arresting any they considered royalists. Nicholas’s intransigence was threatening national stability.
The workers thronging the corridors, fresh from Milyukov’s announcement, hunted Soviet representatives, demanding to know from them whether it was true that the monarchy was still in place. And making it very clear that, if so, the task was unfinished.
That afternoon, the Petrograd Soviet gathered to debate what its Executive Committee had agreed with the Duma Committee. But not long after the stormy general session began, at 2 p.m., the proceedings were interrupted by a commotion. Kerensky. He came striding in, raising his voice, begging to speak. Chkheidze, in the chair, hesitated, but the gathered delegates demanded he allow the intervention.
Kerensky mounted the platform. He projected for the crowd. ‘Comrades,’ he said, ‘do you trust me?’
Yes, the crowd shouted, yes, they trusted him.
‘I speak, comrades, with all my soul,’ he continued, tremulous. ‘And if it is needed to prove this, if you do not trust me, then I am ready to die.’
Again, the crowd cheered his theatrics.
Kerensky had, he informed the room, just then received an invitation to be minister of justice in the Provisional Government. And he had been given five minutes to decide. Without time to consult the Soviet, with no choice but to grab history by the tail, he had agreed. And now he had come to ask his comrades’ approval.
As the historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has remarked, this was an extremely long five minutes: Kerensky had in fact received the invitation the previous day, and accepted earlier that morning.
His first act as minister, Kerensky exclaimed, had been to release all political prisoners – a measure which, in reality, had been agreed earlier by the Executive Committee with their Duma counterparts. Of course, having no formal Soviet authorisation to accept the position, he told the room, he hereby respectfully resigned his post as Soviet vice chair. However! He would – provided only that his comrades, and the masses for whom they spoke, wished him to do so – take up that role again. The choice was theirs.
Cheers. Ecstasy. He should, indeed, the delegates hurrahed, keep his Soviet position, too.
A few more histrionics later, Kerensky left, too rapidly for any challenge from his bewildered, outmanoeuvred colleagues on the executive. He had shrewdly banked on their unwillingness to risk a fight. With this mendacious coup de théâtre, his breach of the Ispolkom’s directive post factum was mandated, and his position in the government backed by the Soviet assembly.
With many of their militants now released from jail, the so-called Russian Bureau of the Bolsheviks’ Petersburg Committee, set up by Shlyapnikov in 1915 and recently reconstituted by him (despite the obstruction of police spies), began to function as something of an ersatz Central Committee. Initially under three members – Shlyapnikov, Molotov and Zalutsky – this operation continued while most of the formal members of the actual CC, including Lenin, Zinoviev, Stalin, Kamenev and others, were abroad or in Siberia.
In the Soviet, the Russian Bureau promptly introduced a resolution declaring the new Provisional Government to be ‘representative of the grand bourgeoisie and big landowners’, and thus incapable of realising revolutionary aims. It appealed again, somewhat nebulously, for a ‘provisional revolutionary government’. The motion was slapped down.
And despite such radical declarations from some Bolsheviks – especially those in the Vyborg ward of Petrograd – when the vote to accept the transfer of power to the unelected Provisional Government came, of the forty Bolsheviks in the Soviet General Assembly, only fifteen voted against. This illustrates the political confusion, the degree of vacillation and moderation on the revolution’s left flank in those heady early days.
2 March, 2:30 p.m. The tsar paced the platform of the Pskov station. Hovering at a respectful distance, keeping anxious watch, an entourage of nobles and sycophants.
Nicholas turned to them. He requested the presence of Generals Ruzskii, Savic and Danilov. And they should bring, he said, all the generals’ telegrams.
He received the men in his private carriage. As the tsar walked restlessly up and down, Grand Duke Nikolaevich begged him ‘on his knees’ to surrender the crown. All the generals cursed the ‘bandits’ of the Provisional Government, excoriated their perfidy, railed against them – but, that denunciation done, they admitted they faced a fait accompli.
Speak freely, the tsar urged them. They told him he must go. There was no other option, Danilov said. Savic stammered, struggled to speak, concurred.
The tsar stopped by his desk and turned away to stare out of the window at the winter. He was silent for a very long time. He grimaced.
‘I have made up my mind,’ he said at last, turning. ‘I have decided to abdicate the throne in favour of my son.’
The tsar crossed himself. His companions did the same.
‘I thank you for your excellent and loyal service,’ Nicholas said. ‘I trust it will continue under my
son.’ He dismissed them, so he might compose the necessary telegrams to Alexeev and Rodzianko.
Count Vladimir Frederiks hurried through the carriage to tell the tsar’s waiting retinue the news. They were thunderstruck. Some began to weep. Admiral Nilov decided that Ruzskii was to blame, and swore that he would execute him. Vladimir Voeikov, Commandant of Court, and Colonel Naryshkin rushed to the Hughes apparatus to stop the keys and wires doing their work, to demand the return of Nicholas’s telegrams. But their world had passed: Ruzskii informed them that they were too late.
He was at least half-lying. He had sent the tsar’s telegram to Alexeev, and, receiving it, the general immediately commissioned a manifesto of abdication. But when Ruzskii heard that the Duma men Guchkov and Shulgin were on their way, he kept back Nicholas’s message to Rodzianko. It seems he wanted to hand it to them personally.
While his hangers-on floundered in rearguard action, the tsar himself was engaged in an urgent private conversation. His doctor was telling him plainly that the young haemophiliac Alexei, on whom the burden of the crown was now set to fall, was unlikely to live long.
Ruzskii gave orders for Guchkov and Shulgin to be brought to him without delay. But when at 9 p.m. they finally arrived, carrying a makeshift abdication act that Shulgin had scrawled en route, in one final spasm of court infighting and machination they were taken instead directly to the imperial salon car, without Ruzskii’s knowledge. There commenced a last, bleak, Romanovian comedy.
Guchkov began to hold forth to Nicholas about the threat facing Russia. In tones verging on menace, he told the tsar there was only one course left. As he spoke, Ruzskii entered. He was aghast to see the two newcomers, let alone to realise that they were trying to persuade the silent tsar to do what he had already agreed to do.
Ruzskii interrupted, blurting out this information to the stunned men. As he spoke, Ruzskii handed Nicholas his signed, unsent telegram for Rodzianko – and his stomach pitched to see the tsar fold it up and put it absently away. To do with it who knew what?
‘I deliberated during the morning and was ready to abdicate the throne in favour of my son, in the name of good, peace, and the salvation of Russia,’ the tsar said. Ruzskii’s heart lurched. ‘But now, reconsidering the situation, I have come to the conclusion that because of his illness, I must abdicate at the same time for my son as well as for myself, since I cannot part with him.’
And to the bewilderment of all present, he named his brother Michael as his successor.
Shulgin and Guchkov floundered. Shulgin and Guchkov rallied. ‘Your Majesty,’ Guchkov said, ‘the human feelings of a father have spoken in you, and politics has no place in the matter. Therefore we cannot object to your proposal.’
They must, though, they insisted, have a signed declaration. Embarrassed at the sight of Alexeev’s professional abdication draft, Shulgin withdrew his own scrappy version. The details were finessed: ‘Not wishing to be separated from Our beloved son, We hand Our succession to Our brother, Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich.’ The declaration was backdated by hours, to avoid any implication that Nicholas had acted under pressure from the Duma Committee. As indeed he had. At 11:40 p.m., the tsar signed, and ceased to be tsar.
At 1 a.m. on 3 March, Nicholas Romanov’s train left Pskov for Mogilev.
In a rare glimpse of something like an inner life, the erstwhile autocrat confided to his diary that he was suffering from ‘gloomy feelings’.
Guchkov and Shulgin rushed back to Petrograd, where word of Nicholas’s decision had set off a storm of intrigue among their colleagues. When their train arrived at the capital in the early light, they experienced the anti-monarchist mood first-hand.
The station was full of milling soldiers, eager for information. They surrounded the returnees and pressed them into yet another speech. Shulgin held forth. He read out Nicholas’s abdication impassionedly. But when he concluded, ‘Long Live Emperor Michael III!’ what cheers he provoked were distinctly underwhelming. Just then, in a moment of cruel, broad irony, he was called to the station telephone, where a cautious Milyukov begged him not yet to make public exactly the information he just had.
Guchkov, meanwhile, was also trying to drum up enthusiasm – to a meeting of militant railway workers. When he told them of Michael’s ascension, the reaction was of such violent hostility that one speaker demanded his arrest. It was only with the help of a sympathetic soldier that he escaped.
Shulgin and Guchkov hurtled by car across the city to 12 Millionnaya, the sumptuous apartments of the Grand Duke’s wife Princess Putiatina. There, at 9:15 a.m., Nicholas’s brother met with the exhausted members of the Provisional Government and Duma Committee that had shaped it.
By now, it was only Milyukov – invoking Greater Russia, courage, patriotism – who was still bent on retaining the monarchy. Given the insurrectionary mood in Petrograd, most others were opposed to the Grand Duke’s accession: when Shulgin and Guchkov arrived, their station stories gave the naysayers more weight. If he were crowned, Kerensky told the Grand Duke, ‘I cannot vouch for the life of Your Highness.’
That morning, as at Tsarsko Selo Alexandra in her nurse’s uniform was informed of her husband’s abdication, and, weeping, she prayed that the ‘two snakes’, ‘the Duma and the revolution’, would kill each other, her brother-in-law debated with the first snake over how best to defeat the second.
At about 1 p.m., after hours of discussion and a long moment of solitude, of private soul-searching, Michael returned to his unwelcome guests. He asked Rodzianko and Lvov, another Kadet, whether they could vouch for his safety if he became tsar.
They could not.
‘Under these circumstances,’ he said, ‘I cannot assume the throne.’
Kerensky leapt out of his chair. ‘Your Highness,’ he burst out, ‘you are a noble man!’ The other participants sat numb.
It was lunchtime, and the Romanov dynasty was finished.
That morning, the press, including the new Soviet paper Izvestia, proclaimed the new Provisional Government, constituted on the basis of the eight points agreed between Soviet and Duma Committee. Izvestia called for its support ‘in so far as the emerging government acts in the direction of realising [its] obligations’.
‘In so far as’: in Russian, ‘postol’ku-poskol’ku’. A formulation key to Dual Power, and to its contradictions.
Here, in the smoke of the wretched devil’s sabbath
In the noisy reign of petty demons
They said, ‘There are no fairy tales on earth.’
They said, ‘The fairy tale has died.’
Oh, don’t believe it, don’t believe the funeral march.
A burst of re-enchantment. On 4 March, to the transported delight of vast swathes of the populace, the press made public Nicholas’s abdication and Michael’s refusal of the throne. This was the day that Delo naroda, the SR newspaper, told its readers that they had been lied to, that not only were fairy stories real but that they were living through one.
Once upon a time, it continued, ‘there lived a huge old dragon’, which devoured the best and bravest citizens ‘in the haze of madness and power’. But a valiant hero had appeared, a collective hero. ‘My champion’, wrote Delo naroda, ‘is the people.’
The hour has come for the beast’s end,
The old dragon will coil up and die.
It was a new, post-dragon world. There came a flurry of far-reaching reforms, unthinkable scant days before. The Provisional Government abolished the loathed police department. No more Pharaohs. It began to dismiss Russia’s regional governors. Cautiously, it probed concessions to and accommodations with the empire’s regions and minorities. Within days of the revolution, the Muslims in the Duma formed a group calling for a convention on 1 May, to discuss self-determination. On 4 March, in Kiev, Ukrainian revolutionaries, nationalists, social democrats and radicals formed the Ukrainian Central Rada, or council. On 6 March the Provisional Government restored partial self-rule to Finland, reinstating th
e Finnish constitution after thirteen years of direct rule, and announced that a forthcoming Constituent Assembly would finally decide relations – such deferral emerging as the favoured technique for evading political difficulties. On the 16th it granted independence to Poland – though Poland being occupied by enemy powers, this was a symbolic gesture.
In 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.