In fact the Executive Committee minority’s call notwithstanding, the Bolsheviks as a party were not united in their approach either to the Soviet, of which some of their activists remained sceptical, or to questions of government power. That very day, when the left Bolshevik Vyborg District Committee circulated a proclamation in the chaotic streets demanding a provisional revolutionary government, the Bolshevik Party Central Committee clamped down on their ill-disciplined interventions.
The Soviet’s Executive Committee, the Ispolkom, had allowed a single hour to discuss and decide the shape of post-revolutionary power. A ludicrous aspiration. The meeting dragged well over the allotted time. Under the dome of the Tauride Palace’s great hall the hundreds of Soviet delegates, its general assembly, were awaiting the Ispolkom’s report back. Their impatience grew loud. As noon slipped past, the Ispolkom sent the Menshevik Skobolev to plead for more time.
As he spoke, he was dramatically interrupted. The doors to the chamber flew open and a voluble group of uniformed soldiers piled in. As the newcomers clamoured, the Ispolkom got word and rushed to join the throng.
The anxious soldiers had come to ask the Soviet for guidance: how should they respond to Rodzianko’s demands to surrender their arms? What should they do about their officers, against whom the popular mood remained ugly enough that there was a real danger of lynchings? And should they obey the Soviet, or the Duma Committee?
The raucous crowd left them in no doubt that they must keep their arms. That much was simple.
The decision to dissolve the Soviet’s Military Commission into that of the Duma Committee, however, provoked more controversy. The left in the room were hollering, denouncing it as collaboration. For the Ispolkom, Sokolev, a former Bolshevik, defended the move on grounds of the military experience and ‘historic role’ of the bourgeoisie.
Out of the arguments echoing through the hall, a consensus began to emerge. Anti-revolutionary officers were not to be trusted, but the command of ‘moderate’ officers was valid – though only as regards matters of combat. As the back-and-forth continued, one soldier from the Preobrazhensky Regiment explained how he and his comrades had voted in an administrative committee from within their own ranks.
Elected officers. The idea spread roots.
At last the Soviet put together a draft resolution. It stressed that soldiers’ committees were important. It proposed soviet democracy within units, combined with military discipline on duty. The soldiers, the gathering urged, should send representatives to the Duma Committee’s Military Commission, and recognise its authority – in so far as it did not deviate from the opinion of the Soviet.
In that extraordinary conditional clause, radicalism and conciliation swirled together but did not mix.
Newly resolute, the soldiers went to present these decisions to the Military Commission’s Colonel Engelhardt. They demanded that he pass an order for the election of, as he later recalled, ‘the junior officers’. On behalf of the Duma Committee, however, Rodzianko immediately rejected this left compromise, leaving Engelhardt to placate the furious soldiers as best he could.
The jockeying was not yet done: later that evening, mandated by the Soviet, they returned to the Military Commision to request of Engelhardt that regulations regarding military organisation be drawn up, in collaboration with the Duma Committee. When he rejected this further overture, the soldiers took their angry leave.
‘So much the better,’ one exclaimed as they went. ‘We will write them ourselves.’
At 6 p.m., in the Soviet, a packed Executive Committee, soon joined by several new delegates mandated by the soldiers – Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, independents, one lonely Kadet – resumed their discussions on power. Once again, the moderates called for active coalition with the Duma Committee. But the prevailing position, as put by Sukhanov, an independent intellectual close to the left Mensheviks, was that the Soviet’s ‘task’ was, rather, to ‘compel’ the reluctant liberal bourgeoisie to take power. In the Menshevik model, they were the necessary agent, after all, of a necessary, and necessarily bourgeois, revolution. And excessively stringent conditions for compromise, of course, risked dissuading this timorous bourgeois liberalism from fulfilling its historic role.
On such a basis, the Ispolkom thrashed out nine conditions for its support of a provisional government:
1)an amnesty for political and religious prisoners;
2)freedom of expression, publication and strikes;
3)the introduction of a democratic republic by universal, equal, direct, secret – male – suffrage;
4)preparation for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, towards a permanent government;
5)replacement of the police force by a people’s militia;
6)elections to local administrative bodies as per point three;
7)abolition of discrimination based on class, religion or nationality;
8)self-government of the army, including election of officers;
9)no withdrawal from Petrograd or disarmament of revolutionary army units.
Crucially, as befitting its self-perceived role as overseer, the committee also voted, thirteen to eight, that its members should not serve in the cabinet of the provisional government the Duma Committee would create.
These were moderate demands. The left in the room was mostly quiet: all the upheaval had left the Bolsheviks, in particular, floundering somewhat, uncertain as to how to iterate their differentia specifica of consistent anti-liberalism.
The most radical points in the list were those concerning the army. These came from the soldiers’ representatives, furious at Engelhardt’s intransigence. And their anger was not yet spent.
The exhausted executive delegated a small group to join the soldiers in formalising their particular demands. They crowded together into a small room, Sokolov hunched at a dark desk, scribbling for them, translating into legalese. Half an hour later they emerged with what Trotsky would call ‘a charter of freedom of the revolutionary army’, and ‘the single worthy document of the February Revolution’, one put forward not by the Soviet Executive but by the soldiers themselves – Order Number 1.
Order Number 1 consisted of seven points:
1)election of soldiers’ committees in military units;
2)election of their representatives to the Soviet;
3)subordination of soldiers to the Soviet in political actions;
4)subordination of soldiers to the Military Commission – in so far, again and crucially, as its orders did not deviate from the Soviet’s;
5)control of weapons by soldiers’ committees;
6)military discipline while on duty, with full civil rights at other times;
7)abolition of officers’ honorary titles and of officers’ use of derogatory terms for their men.