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 théatre, 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.