On 6 March demonstrations in favour of the revolution shook Baku, Azerbaijan, the oil-rich city of Azeris, immigrant Russians, Persians, Armenians and others, a patchwork of medieval and modern edifices, watched over by the steep ziggurats of oil derricks. Fifty-two delegates met for the first session of the Baku Soviet. It was opened by the Menshevik Grigori Aiollo, and voted in as its chair Stepan Shaumian, a Bolshevik popular for his role in the legendary 1914 oil strike. But the Baku Soviet, too, was enthusiastic for social peace, and cooperated with the IKOO (Executive Committee of Public Organisations), the new self-appointed local administration born of the city government.
Such collaboration, as well as that between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in many regions, or simply a certain indifference to the split, would not last. There were already exceptions. The sailors in Kronstadt, for example, disproportionately literate and deeply politicised, tended to join the most radical groups, and taking the most radical positions. The Kronstadt Soviet was controlled by Bolshevik hardliners, anarchists and anti-war Left SRs, already a distinct group.
The organisational infrastructure of the SRs as a whole accelerated, its newspapers, clubs, agitational schools and meetings and committees proliferating. It recruited so fast, by so many thousands, among workers and intelligentsia as well as the peasants and soldiers – ‘peasants in uniform’ – on whom the party traditionally particularly focused, that among some longtime activists ‘March SR’ became a snide shorthand for undependable political newcomers.
Traditional peasant uprisings were never far from the surface in these turbulent days. As early as 9 March, agrarian disorder rocked Kazan Province. On the 17th, the Provisional Government insisted, rather nervously, that ‘the land question cannot be solved by means of any kind of seizure’. That would not be its last such appeal. Eventually, on 25 March, it had to respond to inchoate upheaval on the land by proclaiming a state monopoly of grain, buying up all that was not needed for subsistence, animals or seed at fixed prices.
This could only ever be a stopgap. The land question remained unsolved.
‘Democracy’ was a sociological term in Russia in 1917, denoting the masses, the lower classes, at least as strongly as it did a political method. For many in those heady moments, Kerensky exemplified ‘the democracy’. He was adored. Artists painted him, badges and medals celebrated him, poets immortalised him, in a torrent of kitsch.
‘You personify the ideal of the free citizen, which the human soul has cherished throughout the ages,’ the collective of the Moscow Arts Theatre told him. The celebrated writer Alexander Kuprin called him ‘an inscrutable and divine spiritual receiver, a divine resonator, a mysterious mouthpiece for the people’s will’.
‘For us Kerensky is not a minister,’ read one pamphlet, ‘neither is he an orator for the people; he has ceased to be a simple human being. Kerensky is a symbol of revolution.’ According to the cultish logic of the histrionic dialecticians, Kerensky’s status as ‘minister-cum-democrat’, straddling government and Soviet, was more than mere addition, more even than synthesis. It was apotheosis.
Under Lvov, with pressure from the Soviet, the Provisional Government pursued social measures apace. On 12 March, it abolished the death penalty. The following day, it got rid of courts martial, except at the front. On 20 March, it eradicated legal discrimination on grounds of faith or nationality.
‘A miracle has happened,’ wrote the poet Alexander Blok. ‘Nothing is forbidden … almost anything might happen.’ Every streetcar, every queue, every village meeting hosted political debate. There was a proliferation of chaotic new festivals, re-enactments of the February events. Tsarist statues were torn down, some having been put up for the purpose.
A ‘Liberty Parade’ in Moscow saw hundreds of thousands of marchers of all classes pray and party behind their banners. There was a circus, a camel and an elephant plastered with placards, a wagon bearing a black coffin labelled ‘The Old Order’, a leering dwarf labelled Protopopov, for the hated ex-minister. People read new books, sang various new versions of the Marseillaise and watched new plays – often lewd, crude retellings of the Romanovs’ overthrow. Irreverence as revenge.
Gone was the obsequiousness of 1905. Citizens across the empire waged what Richard Stites called a ‘war on signs’, the destruction of tsarist symbols: portraits, statues, eagles. Revolutionary fever infected unlikely patients. Orthodox nuns and monks adopted radical talk, ousting ‘reactionary’ superiors. High-rankers in the Church complained of a revolutionary mood. The main religious newspaper took an ‘anti-ecclesiastical’ line so radical that one archimandrite, or high-ranking abbot, Tikhon, called it a ‘Bolshevik mouthpiece’. At one monastery there was ‘a little revolution’, wrote the British journalist Morgan Philips Price, where ‘monks had gone on strike and had turned out the abbot, who had gone off whining to the Holy Synod … They had already entered into an arrangement with the local peasantry. They were to keep enough land for themselves to work, and the rest was to go into the local commune.’
Demonstrations voiced existential demands, even at the expense of income. ‘No tips taken here’, said the signs on restaurant walls. Petrograd waiters struck for dignity. They marched in their best clothes under banners denouncing the ‘indignity’ of tipping, the stench of noblesse oblige. They demanded ‘respect for waiters as human beings’.
The government had equivocated over the issue of women’s suffrage. Many even in the revolutionary movement were hesitant, warning that, though they supported the equality of women ‘in principle’, concretely Russia’s women were politically ‘backward’, and their votes therefore risked hindering progress. On her return to the country on the 18th, Kollontai took those prejudices head-on.
‘But wasn’t it we women, with our grumbling about hunger, about the disorganisation in Russian life, about our poverty and the sufferings born of the war, who awakened a popular wrath?’ she demanded. The revolution, she pointed out, was born on International Women’s Day, ‘And didn’t we women go first out to the streets in order to struggle with our brothers for freedom, and even if necessary to die for it?’
On 19 March, a major procession descended on the Tauride Palace demanding women’s right to vote – 40,000 demonstrators, mostly women, but including many men. ‘If the woman is a slave’, banners read, ‘there will be no freedom.’ Pro-war banners swayed above the marchers, too. This was a cross-class, broad-spectrum feminism, working women side by side with women in fine clothes; liberals and SRs and Mensheviks and Bolsheviks – though the latter, to Kollontai’s disappointment, had not prioritised the march. The weather was dreadful, but the marchers were not put off. They came to fill the long street before the palace. There Chkheidze tried to claim that he could not come out to meet them because he had lost his voice.
They would not have it. He for the Soviet and Rodzianko for the Provisional Government had to bow to the movement. They launched a bill for universal women’s suffrage, to be passed in July.