The upsurges of the April Days may have been precipitous in the capital, but all over the country the tide of progress and change was still very strong. Across the immensity of Russian territory, the boisterousness and experiment thrown up by February went on, developing into particular shapes, channelling into more serious, formal investigations of liberation. In the nations and minorities unrest stirred, and moves for autonomy.
The predominantly Buddhist Buryat region of Siberia had seen waves of Russian immigration since the Trans-Siberian Railway reached its main city of Irkutsk in 1898. More than once in subsequent years it had been rocked by Buryat revolts against discriminatory laws, and it had faced chauvinist cultural and political threats from the Russian regime. In 1905 a Buryat congress had called for rights to self-government and linguistic–cultural freedom: it had been suppressed. Now, with the new wave of freedoms, came a new Congress in Irkutsk – which voted in favour of independence.
In Ossetia, in the Caucasus mountains, locals called a congress to establish organs of self-rule in the newly democratic state. In the Kuban, a region of southern Russia on the Black Sea, the local Cossacks in the Rada, its head hitherto appointed by the tsar, declared it the supreme local administrative power. Buoyed by the February revolution, and feeling it vindicated their own programme, members of the progressive, modernising Muslim Jadidist movement set up an Islamic Council in Tashkent, Turkestan, and across the region, helping to dismantle the old government structures – already undermined by the spread of local soviets – and enhancing the role of the indigenous Muslim population. At the end of the month, the council convened the first Pan-Turkestan Muslim Congress in the city. Its 150 delegates recognised the Provisional Government, and unanimously called for substantial regional autonomy.
Nor were such probings towards progress only in the arena of nationhood. The All-Russian meeting of Muslims, called for by Muslim Duma deputies immediately after the February revolution, was fast approaching – but before this, on 23 April, delegates gathered in Kazan in Tatarstan for the All-Russian Muslim Women’s Congress. There, fifty-nine women delegates met before an audience 300 strong, overwhelmingly female, to debate issues including the status of Sharia law, plural marriage, women’s rights and the hijab. Contributions came from a range of political and religious positions, from socialists like Zulaykha Rahmanqulova and the twenty-two-year-old poet Zahida Burnasheva, as well as from the religious scholars Fatima Latifiya and Labiba Huseynova, an expert on Islamic law.
Delegates debated whether Quranic injunctions were historically specific. Even many proponents of trans-historical orthodoxy interpreted the texts to insist, against conservative voices, that women had the right to attend mosque, or that polygyny was only permitted – a crucial caveat – if it was ‘just’; that is, with the permission of the first wife. Unsatisfied when the gathering approved that progressive–traditionalist position on plural marriage, the feminists and socialists mandated three of their number, including Burnasheva, to attend the All-Russian Muslim Conference in Moscow the next month, to put their alternative case against polygyny.
The conference passed ten principles, including women’s right to vote, the equality of the sexes, and the non-compulsory nature of the hijab. The centre of gravity of the discussions was clearly Jadidist, or further left. A symptom of tremulous times.
Petrograd was recovering from Linde’s adventure. From 24 to 29 April, immediately after the April Days, the Seventh All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, the RSDWP – since 1912, the Bolsheviks’ official name – took place. There, Lenin added his new ‘right’ critique of the left to his left critique of the Bolshevik right. The April Days, he said, should not have been a battle. Rather, they were an opportunity for ‘a peaceful reconnaissance of our enemy’s forces’ – that enemy being the Provisional Government. The Petersburg Committee in its enthusiasm had committed the ‘grave crime’ of moving, he said, ‘a wee bit to the left’.
Stalin was one of several who now shifted from their original more moderate position to vote with Lenin. There was continued vocal opposition to the April Theses from the more consistent Kamenev, among others, and from a minority further to the right clinging to the position of ‘watchfulness’ over the Provisional Government. Nonetheless, Lenin’s call for ‘all power to the soviets’, as expounded in a corrective to Bogdatiev and his adventurers, was overwhelmingly adopted. As was Lenin’s position that imperialist war and ‘revolutionary defencism’ should both be opposed.
Considering the horror which had greeted his proposals barely three weeks earlier, the shift was remarkable. Lenin’s stock was rising in his party, and fast.
The Bolsheviks were hardly monolithic, however. Lenin felt obliged to dilute his motion ‘On the Current Moment’ with concessions to Kamenevism, and still it only passed by seventy-one to thirty-nine votes, with eight abstentions. The Bolshevik right gained four places, one taken by Kamenev, on the nine-seat Central Committee, enough to hold Lenin’s feet to the fire. And on the question of the Second International, which had disgraced itself with its pro-war leanings, Lenin was entirely alone in voting to break with it.
Even so. When the congress closed on 29 April, Lenin could be cautiously pleased with his progress.
On the 26th, the Provisional Government issued a frank, emotional appeal. It admitted, as the April Days had shown, that it was not in control in Russia. It invited ‘representatives of those creative forces of the country which until then had not taken a direct and immediate part’ to join the administration.
This was a direct plea to the Soviet for formal collaboration. It wavered, riven by debates over how to respond.
The positions of Guchkov, the minister of war, and the hated Milyukov had become untenable. They resigned on the 29th.
During all the drama of the month, the Soviet had been attentive to the plights of various revolutionaries stranded abroad, prevented from returning home to Russia, possibly being held in conditions of questionable legality. The Soviet demanded the intercession of the government. One of Milyukov’s last tasks as foreign minister was to intervene with the British and Canadians on the matter of a Russian national detained by the British at a camp in Nova Scotia, considered a threat to the Allies. The prisoner’s name was Leon Trotsky.