It was a new, post-dragon world. There came a flurry of far-reaching reforms, unthinkable scant days before. The Provisional Government abolished the loathed police department. No more Pharaohs. It began to dismiss Russia’s regional governors. Cautiously, it probed concessions to and accommodations with the empire’s regions and minorities. Within days of the revolution, the Muslims in the Duma formed a group calling for a convention on 1 May, to discuss self-determination. On 4 March, in Kiev, Ukrainian revolutionaries, nationalists, social democrats and radicals formed the Ukrainian Central Rada, or council. On 6 March the Provisional Government restored partial self-rule to Finland, reinstating the Finnish constitution after thirteen years of direct rule, and announced that a forthcoming Constituent Assembly would finally decide relations – such deferral emerging as the favoured technique for evading political difficulties. On the 16th it granted independence to Poland – though Poland being occupied by enemy powers, this was a symbolic gesture.
In these early days, the Soviet socialists attempted oversight of the government. ‘Members of the Provisional Government!’ exhorted the Menshevik paper Rabochaya gazeta. ‘The proletariat and the army await immediate orders from you concerning the consolidation of the Revolution and the democratisation of Russia.’ The masses’ role, then, was to offer the liberal not only support, but obedience – but not unconditional. ‘Our support is contingent on your actions.’ This was support of the government postol’ku-poskol’ku. In so far as. As if that aspiration could be coherent.
In this context, the Soviet’s proclamation of 5 March was telling. This was softening of the contentious Order Number 1 that it had promised the Duma Committee: Order Number 2.
What Guchkov had wanted was an unequivocal assurance from the Soviet that Order Number 1 only applied to troops in the rear. In fact, Order Number 2 was ambiguous on that point. It did stipulate that even in Petrograd, army committees should not intervene in military affairs; soldiers were ‘bound to submit to all orders of the military authorities that have reference to the military service’. But the Ispolkom still implied support for the election of officers.
The following day, it agreed to install its own commissars in all regiments, to complement the link between soldiers and Soviet, and to exercise oversight of the government’s relations with the forces. But with such relations and its own enshrined in documents such as Order Number 2 – equivocal, evasive, attempting to straddle compromise and conviction – the parameters of the commissars’ power would not always be clear.
Far-left opposition to the Provisional Government – on the basis of the class coalition of its make-up, its defencist continuation of the war – was not initially unanimous, even among the Bolsheviks. On 3 March, the party’s Petersburg Committee adopted what leading activists would later term a ‘semi-Menshevik’ resolution: for a republic, but withholding opposition to the Provisional Government postol’ku-poskol’ku – so long as its policies were ‘consistent with the interests … of the people’. Such conciliationism would soon face a severe shock.
Marooned in Zurich, Lenin was urgently amassing information about the homeland where he had spent only a few months in the last fifteen years. On 3 March, he laid out his political position to his fellow Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, a provocative and brilliant thinker on a range of issues, most notoriously on sexual morality, regarding which her attitudes scandalised even many of her comrades.
‘The first stage of the revolution’, Lenin wrote to her, ‘will not be the last.’ And to that prediction he added: ‘Of course, we shall continue to oppose the defence of the fatherland.’
This was not a given: many on the left, including plenty of former ‘defeatists’, saw the inauguration of a socialist-overseen democratic government as fundamentally changing the nature of the war. They would no longer oppose the defence of Russia. For Lenin, by contrast, revolutionary defeatism was constitutive of his anti-imperialism. And since Russia, he held, was still imperialist, its new government could not alter his opposition to its war. His ideas were hard but not unique in the party: it was in a similar vein, on the 7th, that the Russian Bureau of the CC – on the party’s left – stated its own continuing defeatism, on grounds that ‘the war is an imperialist one and remains so’. On 4 March, Lenin started to publicise his views in several theses co-written with Zinoviev, a member of the Bolsheviks since the 1903 split – an ‘Old Bolshevik’, as such activists were called – and one of Lenin’s closest collaborators.
Lenin was desperate to return home, though he could not be sure of his reception there. He concocted madcap schemes to get through the war zone, to pass through Sweden to Russia; secret aeroplane flights; carrying a false passport, posing as a deaf mute, to avoid the dangers of speaking. As he schemed, he sharpened his political positions.
On 6 March, he cabled the CC in Petrograd: ‘Our tactics: complete mistrust, no support for the new government. We especially suspect Kerensky’ – who was, by freakish coincidence, the son of Lenin’s old headmaster. ‘The arming of the proletariat provides the only guarantee. Immediate elections to the Petrograd [Municipal] Duma. No rapprochement with the other parties.’
Between the 7th and the 12th, starting a week after the tsar’s abdication, Lenin expounded his positions in a series of documents that would become known as the ‘Letters from Afar’. These circulated in Switzerland, but what he most wanted was to disseminate them in Russia, among his Petrograd comrades, in their newly revived journal Pravda.
In Oslo, his comrade Kollontai was eager for word from him. ‘We must get direction to the party in our spirit,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘we must immediately draw a sharp line between us and the Provisional Government along with the defencists … I am waiting for directives from Vladimir Ilyich.’ As soon as he had finished the first of his ‘Letters from Afar’ laying out his intransigent perspective, Vladimir Ilyich – Lenin – sent it to her. It arrived on the 15th, and Kollontai, ‘thrilled’, she cabled him to say, ‘by his ideas’, set out on the long journey through Sweden, Finland, and on to Russia.
Lenin was not the only émigré anxious to return. Martov, then based in Paris, had come up with a scheme somewhat less eccentric than any of Lenin’s, though in certain ways even more fraught. Through Swiss intermediaries, Martov suggested that exiled Russians ask the German government for safe passage across its territory, in exchange for the release of German and Austrian internees in Russia. This proposal was for what would soon become legendary as the ‘sealed train’.