The Activities of the Provisional Government—Internal Politics, Civil Administration—The Town, the Village and the Agrarian Problem.

I will deal in this and in the subsequent chapters with the internal condition of Russia in the first period of the Revolution only in so far as it affected the conduct of the World War. I have already mentioned the duality of the Supreme Administration of the country and the incessant pressure of the Soviet upon the Provisional Government. A member of the Duma, Mr. Shulgin, wittily remarked: “The old rÉgime is interned in the fortress of Peter and Paul, and the new one is under domiciliary arrest.” The Provisional Government did not represent the people as a whole; it could not and would not forestall the will of the Constituent Assembly by introducing reforms which would shake the political and social structure of the State to its very foundations. It proclaimed that “not violence and compulsion, but the voluntary obedience of free citizens to the power which they had themselves created, constituted the foundation of the new administration of the State. Not a single drop of blood has been shed by the Provisional Government which has erected no barrier against the free expression of public opinion....” This non-resistance to evil at the moment when a fierce struggle, unfettered by moral or patriotic considerations, was being conducted by some groups of the population for motives of self-preservation and by others for the attainment by violence of extreme demands, was undoubtedly a confession of impotence. In the subsequent declarations of the second and third Coalition Governments mention was made “of stringent measures” against the forces of disorganisation in the country. These words, however, were never translated into deeds.

The idea of not forestalling the will of the Constituent Assembly was not carried out by the Government, especially in the domain of national self-determination. The Government proclaimed the independence of Poland, but made “the consent to such alterations of the territory of the Russian State as may be necessary for the creation of independent Poland” dependent upon the All-Russian Constituent Assembly. That proclamation, the legal validity of which is contestable, was, however, in full accord with the juridical standpoint of society. With regard to Finland, the Government did not alter her legal status towards Russia, but confirmed the rights and privileges of the country, cancelled all the limitations of the Finnish Constitution and intended to convoke the Finnish Chamber (“Seim”) that was to confirm the new constitution of the Principality. The Government subsequently adhered to their intention to entertain favourably all the just demands of the Finns for local reconstruction. Nevertheless, both the Provisional Government and Finland were engaged in a protracted struggle for power on account of the universal desire for the immediate satisfaction of the interests of the separate nationalities. On July 6th the Finnish Assembly passed a law (by the majority of Social-Democratic votes) proclaiming the assumption by that body of supreme power after the abdication “of the Finnish Grand-Duke” (the official title of the Russian Emperor). Only foreign affairs, military legislation and administration were left to the Provisional Government. This decision corresponded to a certain degree with the resolution of the Congress of Soviets, which demanded that full independence should be granted to Finland before the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, with the above-mentioned restrictions. The Russian Government answered this declaration of the actual independence of Finland by dissolving the Assembly, which met, however, once again in September of its own free will. In this struggle, the intensity of which varied according to the rise and fall of the political barometer in Petrograd, the Finnish politicians, disregarding the interests of the State and having no support whatsoever in the Army, counted exclusively upon the loyalty or, to be more correct, the weakness of the Provisional Government. Matters never reached the stage of open rebellion. The conscious elements of the population kept the country within the limits of reasonableness, not out of loyalty, but perhaps because they feared the consequences of civil war and especially of the sabotage in which the licentious soldiers and sailors would have presumably indulged.

May and June were spent in a struggle for power between the Government and the self-appointed Central Rada (Assembly). The All-Ukrainian Military Congress, also convened arbitrarily on June 8th, demanded that the Government should immediately comply with all the demands of the Central Rada and the Congresses, and suggested that the Rada should cease to address the Government, but should begin at once to organise the autonomous administration of the Ukraine. On June 11th the autonomous Constitution of the Ukraine was adopted and a Secretariat (Council of Ministers) formed under the chairmanship of Mr. Vinnichenko. After the Government envoys—the Ministers Kerensky, Tereschenko and Tzeretelli—had negotiated with the Rada, a proclamation was issued on July 2nd, which forestalled the decision of the Constituent Assembly and proclaimed the autonomy of the Ukraine with certain restrictions. The Central Rada and the Secretariat were gradually seizing the administration, creating a dual power on the spot and discrediting the All-Russian Government. They thus provoked civil strife and provided moral excuses for every endeavor to shirk civic and military duties to the common Mother Country. The Central Rada, moreover, contained from the outset sympathisers with Germany and was undoubtedly connected through the “Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine” with the headquarters of the Central Powers. Bearing in mind the ample material collected by the Stavka, Vinnichenko’s half-hearted confession to a French correspondent (?) with regard to Germanophil tendencies in the Rada, and finally the report of the Procurator of the Kiev Court of Appeal at the end of August, 1917, I cannot doubt that the Rada played a criminal part. The Procurator complained that the complete destruction of the machinery of intelligence and of criminal investigation deprived the Government prosecutors of the possibility of investigating the situation; he said that not only German espionage and propaganda, but the mutinies of the Ukrainian troops, as well as the destination of obscure funds of undoubted Austro-German origin ... could be traced to the Rada.

The Ministry of the Interior, which, in the old days, practically controlled the Autocracy and provoked universal hatred, now went to the other extreme. It all but abolished itself, and the functions of that branch of the administration were divided among local, self-appointed organisations. The history of the organs of the Ministry of the Interior is, in many ways, similar to the fate of the Supreme Command. On March 5th the Minister-President issued an order for the suppression of the offices of Governor and of Inspector of Police (“Ispravnik”), which were to be replaced by the presidents of the Provincial and District self-governing Councils (“Oupravas”), and for the police to be replaced by a militia organised by Social Institutions. This measure, adopted owing to the universal dislike for the agents of the old rÉgime, was, in fact, the only actual manifestation of the Government’s will; because the status of the Commissars was not established by law until the month of September. The instructions and orders of the Government were, on the whole, of an academic nature, because life followed its own course, and was regulated, or, to be more correct, muddled up, by local revolutionary changes of the law. The office of Government Commissars became a sinecure from the very outset. They had no power or authority, and became entirely dependent upon revolutionary organisations. When the latter passed a vote of censure upon the activities of a Commissar, he could practically do nothing more. The organisations elected a new one, and his confirmation in office by the Provisional Government was a mere formality. In the first six weeks seventeen Provincial Commissars and a great many District Commissars were thus removed. Later, in July, Tzeretelli, during his tenure of the office of Minister of the Interior, which lasted for a fortnight, gave official sanction to this procedure and sent a circular to the Local Soviets and Committees, inviting them to send in to him the names of desirable candidates, which were to replace the unsuitable ones. Thus there remained no representatives of the Central power on the spot. In the beginning of the Revolution the so-called “Social Committees” or “Soviets of Social Organisation” really represented a social Institution comprising the union of towns and Zemstvos, of Municipal Dumas, professional Unions, Co-operatives, Magistrates, etc. Things went from bad to worse when these Social Committees were dissolved into class and party organisations. Local power passed into the hands of the Soviets of Workmen and Soldiers and in places before the law had been produced to “democratised” Socialistic Dumas, closely reminiscent of semi-Bolshevik Soviets.

The regulations issued by the Government on April 15th, on the organisation of Municipal Self-Government, comprised the following main points:

(1) All citizens of both sexes, having attained the age of twenty, were given the suffrage in the town.

(2) No domiciliary qualification was established.

(3) A proportional system of elections was introduced.

(4) The Military were given the suffrage in the localities in which the respective garrisons were quartered.

I will not examine in detail these regulations, which are probably the most Democratic ever known in Municipal Law, because the experience gained in their application was too short to afford any ground for discussion. I will only note one phenomenon which accompanied the introduction of these regulations in the autumn of 1917. The free vote in many places became a mockery. Throughout the length and breadth of Russia, all the non-Socialist and politically neutral parties were under suspicion and were subjected to persecution. They were not allowed to conduct propaganda, and their meetings were dispersed. Electioneering was characterised by blatant abuses. Occasionally election agents were subjected to violence and lists of candidates destroyed. At the same time the licentious and demoralised soldiery of many garrisons—chance guests in the town in which, as often as not, they had only appeared a day or two before—rushed to the polls and presented lists drawn up by the extreme Anti-National parties. There were cases when military units, arriving after the elections, demanded a re-election and accompanied this demand by threats and sometimes murders. There can be no doubt that, among the circumstances that affected the August elections in Petrograd to the Municipal Duma, to which sixty-seven Bolsheviks out of two hundred were elected, the presence in the Capital of numerous demoralised garrisons was not the least important. The authorities were silent because they were absent. The Petite Bourgeoisie, the intellectual workers, in a word, the Town Democracy in the widest sense, was the weakest party and was always defeated in that Revolutionary struggle. The mutinies, rebellions, and separations of various Republics—the precursors of the bloody Soviet RÉgime—had the most painful effect on the life of that portion of the community. The “self-determination” of the soldiers caused uneasiness and even fear of unrestricted violence. Even travelling was unsafe and difficult, because the railways fell into the hands of deserters. The “self-determination” of the workmen resulted in the impossibility of obtaining supplies of the most necessary commodities, owing to a tremendous rise in prices. The “self-determination” of the villages produced a stoppage of supplies, and the villages were thus left to starve; not to mention the moral ordeal of the class which was subjected to insults and degradation. The Revolution had raised hopes for the betterment of the conditions of life for everyone except the Bourgeois Democracy, because even the moral conquests proclaimed by the new Revolutionary power—liberty of speech, of the Press and of meetings, etc.—soon belonged exclusively to the Revolutionary Democracy. The upper Bourgeoisie (intellectually superior) was organised to a certain extent by means of the Constitutional Democratic Party, but the Petite Bourgeoisie (the Bourgeois Democracy) had no organisation whatsoever and no means for an organised struggle. The Democratic Municipalities were losing their true Democratic aspect—not as a result of the new Municipal law, but of Revolutionary practice—and became mere class organs of the Proletariat, or the representatives of purely Socialistic parties, completely out of touch with the people.

Self-government in the districts and in the villages in the first period of the Revolution was of more or less the same nature. Towards the autumn there should have been a Democratic system of Zemstvo Administration, on the same basis as that in the municipalities. The District (Volost) Zemstvo was to undertake the administration of local agriculture, education, order and safety. As a matter of fact, the villages were administered—if such a word can be applied to Anarchy—by a complex agglomeration of revolutionary organisations, such as peasant Congresses, Supply and Land Committees, Popular Soviets, Village Councils, etc. Very often another peculiar organisation—that of the deserters—dominated them all. At any rate, the All-Russian Union of Peasants agreed with the following declaration made by the left wing: “All our work for the organisation of various Committees will be of no avail if these Social Organisations are to remain under the constant threat of being terrorised by accidental armed bands.”

The only question that deeply perturbed the minds of the peasantry and overshadowed all other events, was the old, painful, traditional question:

THE QUESTION OF THE LAND.

It was an exceptionally complex and tangled question. It arose more than once in the shape of fruitless mutinies, which were ruthlessly suppressed. The wave of agrarian troubles which swept over Russia in the years of the First Revolution (1905-6) and left a trail of fire and ruined estates was an indication of the consequences that were bound to follow the Revolution of 1917. It is difficult to form an exhaustive idea of the motives which prompted the land-owners to defend their rights so stubbornly and so energetically: was it atavism, a natural yearning for the land, statesmanlike considerations as to the desirability of increasing the productivity of the land by introducing higher methods of agriculture, a desire to maintain a direct influence over the people, or was it merely selfishness?... One thing is certain—the agrarian reforms were overdue. Retribution could not fail to overtake the Government and the Ruling Classes for the long years of poverty, oppression, and, what is most important, the incredible moral and intellectual darkness in which the peasant masses were kept, their education being entirely neglected.

The peasants demanded that all land should be surrendered to them, and would not wait for the decision of the Central Land Committee or of the Constituent Assembly. This impatience was undoubtedly due, to a great extent, to the weakness of the Government and to outside influences, which will be described later. There was no divergence of opinion as to the fundamental idea of the reforms. The Liberal Democracy and the Bourgeoisie, the Revolutionary Democracy and the Provisional Government, all spoke quite definitely about “handing the land over to the workers.” With the same unanimity these elements favoured the idea of leaving the final decision on the reform of the land and legislation on the subject to the Constituent Assembly. This irreconcilable divergence of opinion arose by reason of the very essence of land reform. Liberal circles in Russia stood for the private ownership of the land—an idea which found increasing favour with the peasants—and demanded that the peasants should receive allotments rather than that the land should be entirely redistributed. On the other hand, the Revolutionary Democracy advocated, at all meetings of every party, class and profession, the adoption of the Resolution of the All-Russian Congress of Peasants, which was passed on May 25th, with the approval of the Minister Tchernov on “the transfer of all lands ... to the people as a whole, as their patrimony, on the basis of equal possession without any payment.” The peasants did not or would not understand this Social Revolutionary Resolution, which caused dissensions. The peasants were private owners by nature and could not understand the principle of nationalisation. The principle of equal possession meant that many millions of peasants, whose allotments were larger than the normal, would lose their surplus allotments, and the whole question of the redistribution of the land would lead to endless civil war; because there were innumerable peasants who had no land at all, and only 45,000,000 dessiatines of arable land which did not belong to the peasants to divide among 20,000,000 peasant households.

The Provisional Government did not consider itself entitled to solve the land problem. Under the pressure of the masses, it transferred its rights partly to the Ministry of Agriculture, partly to the Central Land Committee, which was organised on the basis of broad, democratic representation. The latter was entrusted with the task of collecting data and of drawing up a scheme of land reform, as well as of regulating the existing conditions with regard to the land. In practice, the use of the land transfer, rent, employment of labour, etc., were dealt with by the Local Land Committees. These bodies contained illiterate elements—the intellectuals as a rule were excluded—which had selfish motives and had no perception either of the extent or of the limits of their powers. The Central Representative Institutions and the Ministry of Agriculture, under Tchernov, issued appeals against arbitrariness and for the preservation of the land, pending the decision of the Constituent Assembly. At the same time they overtly encouraged “temporary possession of the land,” as seizure of the land was then described, on the excuse that the Government were obliged to sell as much land as possible. The propaganda that was conducted on a large scale in the villages by irresponsible representatives of Socialist and Anarchist circles completed Tchernov’s work.

The results of this policy were soon apparent. In one of his circulars to Provincial Commissars, the Minister of the Interior, Tzeretelli, admitted that complete anarchy reigned in the villages: “Land is being seized and sold, agricultural labourers are forced to stop working, and landowners are faced with demands which are economically impossible. Breeding stock is being destroyed and implements plundered. Model farms are being ruined. Forests are being cut down irrespective of ownership, timber and logs are being stolen, and their shipment prevented. No sowing is done on privately-owned farms, and harvests of grain and hay are not reaped.” The Minister accused the Local Committees and the Peasant Congresses of organising arbitrary seizures of the land, and came to the conclusion that the existing conditions of agriculture and forestry “would inevitably bring about endless calamities for the Army and the country, and threatened the very existence of the State.” If we recall the fires, the murders, the lynchings, the destruction of estates, which were often filled with treasures of great historical and artistic value, we shall have a true picture of the life of the villages in those days.

The question of the ownership of the land by the landlords was thus not merely a matter of selfish class interest, all the more as, not only the landlords but the wealthy peasants were subjected to violence by order of the Committees, and in spite of them. One village rose against another. It was not a question of the transfer of riches from one class or individual to another, but of the destruction of treasures, of agriculture, and of the economic stability of the State. The instincts of proprietorship inherent in the peasantry irresistibly grew as these seizures and partitions took place. The mental attitude of the peasantry upset all the plans of the Revolutionary Democracy. By converting the peasants into a Petite Bourgeoisie, it threatened to postpone to an indefinite date the triumph of Socialism. The villagers were obsessed by the idea of land distribution and by their own interests, and were not in the least concerned with the War, with politics, or with social questions which did not directly affect them. The workers of the village were being killed and maimed at the front, and the village, therefore, considered the War as a burden. The authorities disallowed seizures of the land and imposed restrictions in the shape of monopolies and fixed prices for corn. The peasantry, therefore, bore a grudge against the Government. The towns ceased to supply manufactured goods and the villages were estranged from the towns and ceased to supply them with grain. This was the only real “conquest” made by the Revolution, and those who profited by it grew very anxious as to the attitude of future Governments towards the arbitrary solution of the land question. They therefore actively encouraged anarchy in the villages, condoned seizures and undermined the authority of the Provisional Government. By this means they hoped to bring the peasants over to their side as supporters, or, at least, as a neutral element, in the impending decisive struggle for power.

The abolition of the police by the order issued on April 17th was one of the acts of the Government which seriously complicated the normal course of life. In reality, this act only confirmed the conditions which had arisen almost everywhere in the first days of the Revolution, and were directly due to the wrath of the people against the Executive of the old regime, and especially of those who had been oppressed and persecuted by the police and had suddenly found themselves on the crest of the wave. It would be a hopeless task to defend the Russian police as an institution. It could only be considered good by comparing it with the militia and with the Extraordinary Bolshevik Commission....

In any case it would have been useless to resist the abolition of the police, because it was a psychological necessity. There can be no doubt that the attitude and actions of the old police were due less to their political opinions than to the instructions of their employers and to their own personal interests. No wonder, therefore, that the gendarmes and the policemen, insulted and persecuted, introduced a very bad element into the Army, into which they were subsequently forcibly drafted. The Revolutionary Democracy, in self defence, grossly exaggerated their counter-revolutionary activities in the Army; nevertheless, it is absolutely true that a great many ex-officers of the police and of the gendarmerie, partly, perhaps, from motives of self-defence, chose for themselves a most lucrative profession—that of the demagogue and the agitator. The fact is that the abolition of the police in the very midst of the turmoil—when crime was on the increase and the guarantees of public safety and of the safety of individual property were weakened—was a real calamity. The militia, indeed, far from being a substitute for the police, was a caricature of them. In Western countries the police is placed as a united force under the orders of a Department of the Central Government. The Provisional Government placed the militia under the orders of Zemstvo and Municipal Administrations. The Government Commissars were only entitled to make use of the militia for certain definite purposes. The cadres of the militia were filled by untrained men, devoid of technical experience, and, as often as not, criminals. By virtue of the new law, there were admitted to the militia persons under arrest or who had served a term of imprisonment for comparatively grave offences. The system of recruiting practised by some forcibly “democratised” Zemstvo and Municipal institutions tended quite as much as the new law towards the deterioration of the personnel of the militia.

The Chief of the Central Administration of the Militia himself admitted that escaped convicts were sometimes placed in command of the militia. The villages were sometimes without any militia at all, and they administered themselves as best they could.

In its proclamation of April 25th the Provisional Government gave an accurate description of the condition of the country in stating that “the growth of new social ties was slower than the process of disruption caused by the collapse of the old rÉgime.” In every feature of the life of the people this fact was clearly to be observed.