The uprising’s ripples were still spreading across the country.
Closest, and most crucial, was Kronstadt. Kronstadt was Petrograd’s protective naval base, a fortified town of 50,000 – naval crews, soldiers and young sailors, a few merchants and workers – encircled by forbidding batteries and forts on the tiny island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland. Its officers were notoriously sadistic and brutal. Only seven years before, several hundred sailors had been executed during an attempted revolt. That memory was raw.
Now the sailors got word of the uprising. They were close enough to see the smoke from fires and hear shooting across the water. They swiftly decided that they, too, would have a revolution.
Late evening on 27 February, and in Petrograd’s enormous Marinsky Palace, on the south side of St Isaac’s Square, the tsar’s council of ministers met for the last time. The city was now firmly in the hands of the revolution: they recognised this fait accompli, ending their inglorious tenure, submitting their resignations to the tsar. A meaningless formality.
Kerensky, a fine speaker with the moral authority of the left, an energetic and ambitious man still only in his mid-thirties, was making himself invaluable to the Duma Provisional Committee. He took a leading role in establishing a kind of military order, announcing that a revolutionary staff had been established at the State Duma, and setting out to drive frantically through Petrograd, declaring to groups of exhilarated insurgent soldiers that the Duma was with them.
The die was cast. Faced with anarchy, fearful of where it might lead, the Duma Committee felt compelled – notwithstanding the hesitance and tenacious loyalty to the regime of many of its members – to assume power. It declared that it would ‘take into its hands the restoration of state and public order and the creation of a government corresponding to the desires of the population’.
Rodzianko was one of several of its members to feel deeply uneasy about this turn. But the situation was clearly summarised by V. V. Shulgin, a smart and unsentimental conservative deputy. ‘If we don’t take power,’ he said, ‘others will, those who have already elected some scoundrels in the factories.’
He referred, of course, to the neighbouring committee a few doors down, also taking on the tasks of organisation, of power: the Soviet. The tumultuous coexistence of these two conflictual, overlapping, imbricated politics, philosophies and social forces had begun.
The hallways of the Tauride Palace, usually a place of pristine bureaucracy disturbed by nothing more untidy or chaotic than a dropped memorandum, had by now become a military camp. In the main Circular Hall lay the corpse of a soldier. Hundreds of his living comrades camped in the palace corridors, squatting at makeshift stoves, drinking tea, smoking and rubbing their eyes, ready to face down the counterrevolution everybody feared was coming. The corridors stank of sweat, dirt, and gunpowder. Offices had become messy storerooms for food and arms. One large meeting room was full of looted sacks of barley. Slung across them a dead pig lay bleeding.
Rodzianko, always a fastidious man, his colleague Stankevich would recall, squeezed past a knot of dishevelled soldiers, ‘preserving a majestic dignity but with an expression of deep suffering frozen on his pale face’. He edged by the rubbish propped against walls and piled at the junctions of corridors. In his memoirs, Shulgin was explicit with his own feelings about this situation. The masses who had overthrown the regime and who now had the temerity to share his palatial workplace were ‘stupid, animal, even devilish’.
‘Machine guns!’ he fantasised. ‘That’s what I wanted. I felt that only the tongues of machine guns could talk to the mob.’
Such were sentiments that underlay the future relationship between Shulgin’s Duma Committee and the Soviet – of which these rough corridor-squatters were the constituency. This would be a foundation of what would, misleadingly, come to be known as dvoevlastie – Dual Power.
Almost as quickly as the Duma deputies, the Soviet created its own military commission, issuing orders to the city’s ad hoc brigades, preparing them for the anticipated battle against the tsar’s forces. But at 2 a.m. on the 28th, Rodzianko and the Octobrist Colonel Engelhardt, of the Duma Committee’s Military Commission, crossed the corridors to announce to the Soviet their intention to place the functions of its Military Commission under their own.
Many on the Soviet side were angry at the presumption, and profoundly uneasy about handing over power to these representatives of the bourgeoisie. It was during this tense standoff that Kerensky reappeared.
He, of course, was a man of both camps, and he was in his element. In he came, tense but confident, holding the attention of the room with a fervid speech begging the Soviet to acquiesce to this coalition, reassuring them, guaranteeing them supervision of the Duma’s commission by representatives of the revolution.
And his argument found fertile ground. The truth was that most on the nascent Soviet commission had an analysis and sense that history was not yet theirs. That in this context there were, must be, limitations to and necessary brakes on their own role, their own power. As yet inchoate, this would be the start of a strange strain of self-limiting politics.
In the early hours of 28 February, the Soviet Committee distributed a leaflet.
The Provisional Committee of the State Duma with the help of the Military Commission is organising the army and appointing chiefs of all military units. Not wishing to disturb the struggle against the old power, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet does not recommend that the soldiers reject the existence of this organisation and subordination to its measures and appointments of chiefs.
‘Not wishing to disturb the struggle against the old power’: here was the hesitancy of those whose socialism taught that a strategic alliance with the bourgeoisie was necessary; that, however messily events proceeded, there were stages yet to come; that it was the bourgeoisie who must first take power, and precluded too vigorous a socialist mobilisation in this, their own unready country.
Decorously glossing this historical anxiety with the convoluted double negative of ‘not recommending rejection’, the Soviet Military Commission was thus swallowed into the Duma’s. So it was the Duma Committee, with this new, grassroots-linked authority, that issued the orders to mutinying soldiers to return to their garrison and recognise their officers.