From Mogilev, Nicholas issued requests with stiff dignity. He asked the Provisional Government for permission to join his family at Tsarskoe Selo until his children were well, then to leave the country. Prime Minister Lvov sounded out the British about providing asylum.
But the Soviet and the people wanted the Romanovs brought to justice. The Provisional Government capitulated to this popular fury. At 3 p.m. on 8 March, four government representatives arrived at Mogilev station, to be greeted by a large and enthusiastic crowd, while Nicholas waited in his imperial train. He surrendered to the newcomers without resistance. ‘Looking ashen,’ one observer wrote, ‘the tsar saluted, fingered his moustache as was his habit, and returned to his train to be taken by escort to Tsarskoe Selo where his wife was already under arrest. His entourage stood in silence on the platform as the train pulled out of the station.’
Some of the many onlookers saluted these new commissars of the revolutionary government. Others stared, pining, at the dethroned ruler.
Modernity was insurgent. The old machinery had stalled. The Provisional Government would impound the imperial train at Peterhof, for its finery to moulder on the sidings. It was soon to be overlooked by a new sculpture, an extravagantly expiring double-headed imperial eagle, its two necks craned, suspended, above a supremacist blast. Autocracy thrown down by a poised modernist explosion.
On 9 March, the United States became the first power to bestow the benediction of recognition on the Provisional Government. Britain, France and Italy soon followed. Such validation overstated certain realities. On the very day of the US recognition, Guchkov shared his frustration with Alexeev, who was now the reluctant commander-in-chief, complaining bitterly that ‘the Provisional Government possesses no real power and its orders are executed only in so far as this is permitted by the Soviet … which holds in its hands the most important elements of actual power, such as troops, railway and postal and telegraph service’.
The Soviet itself remained ambivalent about the power it held. Such uncertainty notwithstanding, the revolution, and the soviet form, spread in patchwork but accelerating fashion. On 3 March, one sixty-four-year-old resident of Poltava, Ukraine, recorded in his diary that ‘people arriving from Petrograd and Kharkov reported that on 1 March there was revolution … For us in Poltava it’s quiet’. Less than a week later, his tone had changed: ‘Events have been racing with such swiftness that there’s no time to discuss or even simply write them down.’
The Moscow Soviet gathered as early as 1 March, more than 600 deputies, overwhelmingly working-class in composition, under a bloated seventy-five-person executive committee in which the Bolsheviks were a substantial left wing, and a seven-person presidium. In more inaccessible areas of the empire, the news, and new institutions, might take a long time to arrive. In remoter parts of the Volga countryside, it was only in the second half of March that rumours from telegraphs and conversations began to make real headway. Small communities dispatched messengers to travel to nearby towns to clarify details of the upheaval of which they were hearing. Villagers gathered into assemblies to begin, for the first time, considering not only local issues, but also national ones: the war, the Church, the economy. Ad hoc local committees sprang up in dizzying variety. A chaos of decentralisation. Some villages, towns and territories unconvincingly announced their independence. Very soon, countless soviets existed in the country, and their numbers were growing, but talk of ‘the Soviet’ usually designated the originatory, Petrograd Soviet.
The realities of the local soviets and of ‘Dual Power’ did not always obey the moderates’ blueprints. In Izhevsk, in the Udmurt Republic, shop stewards set up a powerful soviet on 7 March, which quickly came to dominate local politics. In the provincial capital of Saratov, 60 per cent of the city’s industrial workers elected deputies to their own hastily arranged soviet, which, by the end of the month, hammered out an ad hoc arrangement with the local Duma – which soon, however, faded into insignificance and stopped meeting. Dual, here, gave way to single power – that of the (moderate) soviet.
Sometimes political confrontation was obviated in a short-lived post-revolutionary burst of class camaraderie – what the journalist and historian William Chamberlin, soon to arrive in Russia, would call ‘an orgy of sentimental speechmaking and fraternisation’. On 10 March, in Petrograd, the Soviet agreed with the factory owners that long-demanded eight-hour day, as well as the principle of worker-elected factory committees and a system of industrial arbitration. Such agreements were as much expressions of bosses’ anxiety and workers’ confidence as of consensus, of course: in many places, people were simply refusing to work longer than eight hours anyway, and were policing their new authority with direct action. Unpopular foremen were shoved in wheelbarrows and tipped into nearby canals. When the Moscow bosses resisted the eight-hour day, on 18 March the Moscow Soviet, recognising what workers were instituting as a fait accompli, simply decreed it, bypassing the Provisional Government. And their decree stood.
In Latvia, both radicalism and conciliation were visible: by 7 March the Riga Soviet comprised 150 delegates from thirty organisations, and the executive committee it voted in on 20 March consisted (temporarily) entirely of Bolsheviks. Their local line, though, was not yet as militant as that of their émigré Latvian Bolshevik comrades in Moscow. The Riga Bolshevik Committee – to their Moscow comrades’ appalled shock – stated on 10 March that it ‘fully submits to all decisions of the new government’ reached in agreement with soviets, and that any ‘attempts to create chaos’ were the work of saboteurs.