Eight Months of Nobody Defending Anything

The February revolution was not organised by anybody.

It began with bread queues and a strike in Petrograd, grew over several days into general demonstrations, and was decided on 27 February when the Volynsky regiment, ordered to fire on the crowd, shot its officer instead and joined it. Other regiments followed within hours. Four days later the Tsar abdicated.

The Bolshevik leadership was in Zurich and Siberia and read about it in the newspapers. Lenin had told an audience of young socialists six weeks earlier that his generation might not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.

The thing to take from February is the moment in the street when the soldiers turned. A regime can survive a great deal of disorder for as long as the men holding rifles obey the order to use them, and the entire question of any revolution is why, on a particular morning, they stop. In Petrograd the garrison was made up largely of reservists who did not want to be sent to the front, quartered in the city among the people they were being ordered to shoot, in the fourth winter of a war nobody could explain.

What replaced the monarchy was two things at once, and this is the key to the eight months that follow.

There was a Provisional Government, formed from the Duma, which held legal authority and international recognition. And there was the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, which held the actual loyalty of the workers and the garrison. The Soviet's Order No. 1 instructed soldiers to obey the Provisional Government only where its orders did not conflict with the Soviet's.

Lenin's name for this was dual power: legitimacy sitting in one building and coercive capacity in another. It is inherently unstable, because legitimacy without force is a claim while force without legitimacy is a problem that can be solved by holding an election. Such arrangements last months, not years.

The Provisional Government then made two decisions that guaranteed which way it would resolve.

It continued the war, out of obligation to the Allies and a conviction that a new Russia could not begin by dishonouring its commitments. And it deferred the land question to a future Constituent Assembly, on the entirely reasonable grounds that a temporary government had no mandate to redistribute the property of the empire.

Both are defensible. Both meant that the two things the population actually wanted settled remained unsettled, while soldiers kept dying and peasants kept waiting, and in the summer the peasants stopped waiting and began seizing estates, while soldiers left the front in enormous numbers to be present when the land was divided.

"Peace, land, bread" was effective not because it was eloquent but because it named exactly the three postponements.

October, when it came, was not what the films show. The Bolsheviks occupied the telegraph, the bridges, the stations and eventually the Winter Palace with a relatively small armed force against almost no resistance, in a city where the trams ran and the theatres opened. The storming of the Winter Palace as a mass assault under fire is substantially an image from Eisenstein's film of 1928, made for the tenth anniversary.

The right question about October is not how it was done but why nobody defended the government. The answer is the preceding eight months: by the autumn the Provisional Government had no constituency left that was willing to fight for it, not the soldiers, not the workers, not the peasants, and not the officer corps, which it had alienated during the Kornilov affair.

What then happened to the revolution is mostly the civil war, and this is the part with the longest consequences.

Between 1918 and 1921, against White armies, foreign intervention forces, and peasant risings, the Bolsheviks built an apparatus: grain requisitioning by armed detachments, the Cheka, one-party rule, the militarisation of labour, and in 1921 the banning of factions inside the party itself. Every one of these was introduced as an emergency measure against a real and immediate threat.

None of them was dismantled when the emergency passed.

This is the most portable observation in the whole episode, and it is not specific to Russia. Institutions built for an emergency acquire staff, budgets, habits and constituencies, and those outlive the crisis that justified them. A great deal of what the Soviet state became for the next seventy years is intelligible as the machinery of the civil war, retained after the war ended, by people who had learned to govern that way and knew no other.