The order gave priority to the power of the Soviet over that of the Duma Committee, and put the weapons of the Petrograd Garrison at the Soviet’s disposal. And yet that Soviet’s Executive Committee, with its strange cocktail of Jesuitical Marxism and political hesitancy, did not want the power thus bestowed. However under-enforced it would go on to be, whatever an embarrassment it might prove to the more cautious, in essence Order Number 1 was a severe rebuke to traditional military authority – and it would remain so, as a clarion.
Its last two points were a military articulation of the insistence on honour, on human dignity, for which the most radical workers had striven since 1905. Soldiers were, up to February, still subject to grotesque humiliations. They could not receive books or newspapers, belong to any political societies, attend lectures or the theatre, without permission. They could not wear civilian clothes off-duty. They could not eat in restaurants or ride in streetcars. And their officers referred to them by humiliating nicknames and using those superior linguistic forms. Hence this fight against belittling familiarity, the class spite of grammar.
Soldiers, like workers and others, demanded to be addressed with the respectful ‘Citizen’, a term spreading so widely it was as if it had been ‘invented just now!’ the poet Michael Kuzmin wrote.
The revolution and its language seduced him: ‘Tough sandpaper has polished all our words.’
General Ivanov and his shock troops arrived late in Tsarskoe Selo, where the tsarina, dressed as a nurse, was tending her measles-infected children. She was fearful that Ivanov’s presence might inflame the political situation, but his mission was already over: word came from Alexeev that he was not to proceed.
A little before 8 p.m., the tsar himself arrived at Pskov. Rodzianko had promised to meet him there, but now he sent apologies. He was, unknown to Nicholas, preparing for negotiations between the Duma Committee and the Soviet.
A General Ruzskii was in command of forces around the medieval city of Pskov. When he came to greet the tsar, the general arrived late, harassed, brusque, and wearing rubber boots. This was a borderline seditious lack of pomp. The tsar forbore. He gave the general permission to speak freely. He asked him for his assessment of the situation.
The old ways, Ruzskii offered carefully, had run their course.
Perhaps, he suggested, the tsar might adopt a formula such as ‘the sovereign reigns and the government rules’.
A constitutional monarchy? The mere insinuation provoked in Nicholas a kind of glazed satori of his own limits. This ‘was incomprehensible’ to him, he muttered. To come around to something like that, he said, he would have to be reborn.
At 11:30 p.m., as the Soviet and Duma committees prepared to meet in Petrograd, Nicholas received a telegram that General Alexeev had sent him hours before, at the same time as he had called off the tsar’s troops.
‘It is impossible’, Nicholas read, ‘to ask the army calmly to wage war while a revolution is in progress in the rear.’
Alexeev begged the tsar to appoint a cabinet of national confidence, imploring him to sign a draft manifesto to this effect, that members of the Duma Committee had been hurriedly formulating and in support of which they had been collecting endorsements – pointedly including one from the tsar’s cousin, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich.
To the tsar, this – from the loyal Alexeev – was a severe blow. He pondered. At last he recalled Ruzskii and ordered him to relay to Rodzianko and Alexeev his consent – that the Duma should form a cabinet. Then he cabled Ivanov, rescinding his command and ordering him not to proceed to Petrograd.
By then, that order, of course, like the man who gave it, was redundant.
At midnight on 1 March, Sukhanov, Chkheidze, Steklov and Sokolov of the Soviet crossed from one side of the Tauride Palace to the other on a mission Sukhanov had initiated, one neither quite official nor quite unsanctioned. They were meeting their Duma counterparts, to discuss terms for the Soviet’s support for the Duma in taking power.
Close to the left of the Mensheviks, Sukhanov was a clever, waspish, sardonic witness of this year, with an uncanny ability to be present at the key moments of history. In his memoirs, that night is vivid.
Below its high ceiling the Duma’s meeting room was foul with cigarette butts, bottles, and the smell from plates of half-eaten food which made the famished socialists salivate. Ten Duma representatives were there, including Milyukov, Rodzianko and Lvov. Technically a Soviet man, Kerensky was also present. He kept uncharacteristically quiet. Rodzianko sulked and obsessively sipped soda water. For the most part it was Pavel Milyukov, of the Kadets, who spoke for the Committee, and Sukhanov who spoke for the Soviet.
The groups gauged the distance between them. On two key political questions, the war and the redistribution of land, they were quite divided. These issues, then, they avoided. Those aside, liberals and socialists – the latter disinclined to dissuade the former from taking power – were pleasantly surprised at how smoothly the negotiations proceeded.
Though he accepted that Nicholas himself must go, the Anglophile Milyukov dreamed of keeping the institution of the monarchy. Could Nicholas, he mused, be persuaded to abdicate in favour of his son, under the regency of the tsar’s brother Michael? As if recollecting the present company of republican leftists, Milyukov hastened to describe the pair as ‘a sick child … and a thoroughly stupid man’. That notion, Chkheidze told him, was unrealistic as well as unacceptable.
It was established that troublesome points could wait until the convening of a Constituent Assembly, so this question, too, was shelved. Point three of the Soviet’s nine, about a ‘democratic republic’, was dropped.
To avoid trouble in the short term, Milyukov, with curled lip, agreed not to relocate the city’s revolutionary troops. What he would not countenance, however, was the election of officers. For the liberals and for the right, what this would mean was the destruction of the army. And what of Order Number 1? Troops to obey the government only in so far as its orders did not conflict with the Soviet’s? The idea was appalling.
Shulgin interjected. He was never as diplomatic as Milyukov. If the Soviet had the power implied in that order, he coldly suggested, they should immediately arrest the Duma Committee and set up government alone.
To actually take power was, of course, the last thing the flustered socialists wanted.
It was at that moment that an agitated group of army officers abruptly arrived to interrupt the discussion. They called Shulgin outside.
The revolution has its mysteries. This perfectly timed intervention is one. The identities of the officers remain unclear, as does their precise message. Whoever they were, they seem to have intimated to Shulgin that opposing Order Number 1, that night, would mean bloodshed. Perhaps even be a massacre of officers.