A People's Tragedy (73 page)

The revolution was accompanied by a boom of anti-tsarist pamphlets, postcards, plays and films, as the old laws on censorship were removed. The pamphlets, in particular, were hugely popular, some of them selling in their millions. They all traded in the rumours of the war years: that the Empress was working for the Germans; that she was the lover of Rasputin; that the Tsar had given his throne to this 'holy devil', and so on.

Most of their titles were sexually suggestive —
The Secrets of the Romanovs; The Gay
Days of Rasputin; The Night Orgies of Rasputin
— as was much of their dialogue. In
The Night Orgies,
for example, Protopopov asks Madame Vyrubova if Rasputin has an

'enormous talent'. 'Oh, I know,' she answers, 'an enormous, enormous talent.'64 Many of the pamphlets were semi-pornographic and were illustrated with cartoons of the royals rolling around in bed with Rasputin. By making the link between the sexual corruption of the court and the diseased condition of Russia explicit, this propaganda played a vital role (still to be investigated by historians) in debunking the myth and the mystique of the Tsar as a divine king. During the course of 1917 it shaped the popular image of the monarchy as an alien force of darkness and corruption, an image which ruled out the possibility of a restoration and thus largely undermined the counter-revolution in the years to come.

So, politically, the monarchy was dead. All its main institutions of support — the bureaucracy, the police, the army and the Church — collapsed virtually overnight. It was a sign of how far they had been weakened, and of how far they had become alienated from the Tsar, during the years before 1917. The Tsar was the lynchpin of the monarchy — he was at the same time, as it were, an officer, a priest, a district governor and a policeman — and once he had been removed the whole system came crashing down. The army commanders soon declared their allegiance to the Provisional Government. Many of them had been linked with its leaders through the opposition movement of the war; while those who were opposed to the revolution knew that it would break the army to resist it. The Church was undermined by its own internal revolution.

In the countryside there was a strong anti-clerical movement: village communities took away the church lands, removed priests from the parishes and refused to pay for religious services. Many of the local priests managed to escape this fate by throwing in their lot with the revolution. But the rest of the Church hierarchy was thrown on to the defensive. The Holy Synod, purged of its Rasputinites, appealed to the priesthood to support the new government. Religious freedoms were introduced. Church schools were transferred to the control of the state. And preparations were made for the separation of Church and state. The provincial apparatus collapsed in most places like a house of cards, and it was only very rarely that armed force was needed to remove it. The people simply took to the streets; the governors, without any military means to suppress the disorders, were forced to resign; and
ad hoc
committees of citzens declared themselves in power. In Moscow the regime fell as a result of no more than two days of street demonstrations. 'There was no shooting in the streets and no barricades,' recalled a jubilant businessman. 'The old regime in Moscow fell by itself, and no one defended it or even tried to.' The police state similarly collapsed — the police being replaced by citizens' militias almost overnight. Even the Okhrana was dissolved, although it was later rumoured that many of its agents had found employment in the new government.65

No one really tried to revive the monarchy. It is telling, for example, that none of the White leaders in the civil war embraced monarchism as a cause, despite the efforts of the many monarchists in their ranks. The White leaders all realized that politically it would be suicide for them to do so. For as Trotsky put it with his usual bluntness, 'the country had so radically vomited up the monarchy that it could not ever crawl down the peoples throat again'.66 His prognosis is probably still true, the post-Soviet romance with the tsarist past notwithstanding.*

But if the monarchy was dead politically, it was still alive in a broader sense. The mass of the peasants thought of politics in monarchical terms. They conceived of the state as embodied in the monarch, and projected their ideals of the revolution on to a 'peasant king', or some other authoritarian liberator come to deliver their cherished land and freedom. Here were the roots of the cults of Kerensky, Kormlov and Lenin, all of which were attempts to fill the missing space of the deposed Tsar, or perhaps rather the vacuum left by the myth of the Tsar Deliverer. George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, noted this monarchical mentality during the first days of the revolution, when one soldier said to him: 'Yes, we need a republic, but at its head there should be a good Tsar.' Frank Golder similarly noted such misunderstandings in his diary

* According to an opinion poll in 1995, only 7 per cent of the Russian people favoured the return of the monarchy.

on 7 March: 'Stories are being told of soldiers who say they wish a republic like England, or a republic with a Tsar. One soldier said he wanted to elect a President and when asked, "Whom would you elect?" he replied, "The Tsar." ' Soldiers' letters voiced the same contusion. 'We want a democratic republic and a Tsar-Batiushka for three years'; 'It would be good if we had a republic with a sensible Tsar.' It seems that the peasants found it difficult to distinguish between the person of the monarch
(gosudar'
) and the abstract institutions of the state
(gosudarstvo).
Their conception of the democratic order was similarly couched in personalized terms. Sometime during March a Menshevik deputy of the Moscow Soviet went to agitate at a regimental meeting near Vladimir. He spoke of the need for peace, of the need for all the land to be given to the peasants, and of the advantages of a republic over monarchy. The soldiers cheered loudly in agreement, and one of them called out, 'We want to elect you as Tsar', whereupon the other soldiers burst into applause. 'I refused the Romanov crown', recalled the Menshevik, 'and went away with a heavy feeling of how easy it would be for any adventurer or demagogue to become the master of this simple and naive people.'67

* * * 'A miracle has happened', Blok wrote to his mother on 23 March, 'and we may expect more miracles.' People shared a wild excitement and euphoria during the first days of the revolution. It was partly the sense of absolute freedom — 'the extraordinary feeling', as Blok put it in his letter, 'that nothing is forbidden', that 'almost anything might happen'. It was also the fact that everything had happened so quickly: a mighty dynasty, three centuries old, had collapsed within a few days. 'The most striking thing', Blok wrote in his diary on 25 May, 'was the utter unexpectedness of it, like a train crash in the night, like a bridge crumbling beneath your feet, like a house falling down.' There was a strange sense of unreality. People compared the whole experience to living through a dream or a fairy tale'. Things happened too fast for daily life to stop and for people to take it all in. 'What was really strange', wrote the artist Yulia Obolenskaya to a friend, 'was getting your parcel with the dried fruit and coffee on the first day of the revolution, while the street outside was wild with joy and gun carriages with red flags were rolling by. . . Outside there was a hurricane . . . Then suddenly — a ring and a parcel containing blackcurrents!'68

This was the 'honeymoon' of the revolution. People fell in love with 'February'. Almost instantly, the history of the revolution was reinvented to suit these democratic ideals and mythic expectations. The 'Glorious February Revolution', as it became known, was said to have been a bloodless affair. 'Just imagine,' one contemporary wrote, 'there was a great revolution in Russia and not a single drop of blood was spilled.' It was also said to be a single national act without opposition. 'Our revolution', one Duma agitator informed the sailors

of Helsingfors, 'is the only one in the history of the world to express the spirit of the entire people.' The revolution was portrayed as a spiritual renewal, a moral resurrection of the people. Merezhkovsky called it 'perhaps the most Christian act in the history of the world.' The revolution was itself transformed into a sort of cult. Huge crowds would assemble in the streets to hold prayers and ceremonies in celebration of Glorious February. The burial of the revolution's martyred victims on the second Sunday of the new order (12 March) equally bore the character, although not the rituals, of a religious mass. Many people compared the revolution to an Easter holiday. People in the streets would congratulate each other on the revolution with the Easter blessing: 'Christ has arisen!' (sometimes this was changed to 'Russia has arisen!'). Tsarism was said to have stood for evil and sin (one priest even called it 'the Devil's institution'); it had split the people into rich and poor; but with its downfall, society would be reorganized on the basis of more Christian attitudes. Some idealists even thought that lying and stealing, gambling and swearing, would at once disappear. 'Drunkenness in Russia', declared a peasant congress in Tomsk province, 'was a source of national shame under the old regime. But now in Free and Democratic Russia there can be no place for drunkenness.

And therefore the congress looks upon the manufacture of all alcohol as a betrayal of the revolution, and as a betrayal of the Russian democratic republic' One woman even wrote to the Soviet that the 'Christian mission' of the Russian Revolution should be to abolish all the country's jails, since there was no criminal who could not be reformed.

There were many intellectuals who now claimed that the Russian people would learn to live together in a new
sobornost'
— a universal spiritual community — overriding class or party differences. In the words of Tatyana Gippius: 'The atmosphere has been purified . . . Thank God that
sobornost'
triumphs over
partiinost
'.'69

It was in this same Christian-populist sense that the revolution was also portrayed as a process of national and patriotic reawakening. People echoed Herzen's view that Tsarism was 'alien' to the simple people. It was the 'Gottorp-Holstein dynasty'. Germans had dominated at the court. The Empress ('the German woman') had betrayed Russia.

But the people had arisen, and from this truly national revolution Russia had received a truly national government, behind which it could unite for the defeat of the external enemy. This was to be a 'patriotic revolution'. Or, as someone put it: 'Now we have beaten the Germans here, we will beat them in the field.'70

Many of these ideals were expressed by Prince Lvov in his first interview with the free press. 'I believe', he said, 'in the vitality and the wisdom of our great people, as expressed in the national uprising that overthrew the old regime. It is expressed in the universal effort to establish freedom and to defend it against both internal and external foes. I believe in the great heart of the Russian

people, filled as it is with love for their neighbours, and am convinced that it is the foundation of our freedom, justice, and truth.'71 Such high expectations were soon to be dashed.

9 The Freest Country in the World

i A Distant Liberal State

Nothing in his previous experience had quite prepared Prince Lvov for the tasks that lay ahead of him as the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government. Not that he was unaccustomed to the long hours that such high office demanded of him. His wartime work in the Zemstvo Union had prepared him for that and, although now permanently tired, he was quite able to cope with the extra strain. From early in the morning until at least midnight Lvov was to be found in the Marinsky Palace receiving delegations from all over Russia, meeting foreign diplomats, presiding over cabinet meetings, briefing Civil Servants and giving interviews to the press. Nabokov met him in the early days of March and was 'struck by his sombre, despondent appearance, and the tired expression in his eyes'.1

Nor could one say that the Prince was unprepared for the massive new burden of administration. It was precisely his administrative talent that had won him the universal respect of the wartime opposition and had put him at the top of virtually everyone's list for the prospective leadership of the country. His practical common sense and easy-going manner made him a good team-worker. Prince Sergei Urusov, the former Governor of Bessarabia we met in Chapter 2, who became Lvov's number two at the Ministry of Interior, said that he was an inspiring manager of people, that he encouraged them to take initiatives and that he skilfully arbitrated disputes between them. Although historians have been quick to disparage Lvov as a statesman — Samuel Hoare described him in 1930 as 'a man better qualified to be the Chairman of the London County Council than to be the chief of an unstable Government in the midst of a great revolution' — he was in fact widely esteemed at the time as one of Russia's ablest leaders. Tsereteli thought he was 'a talented organizer with far more experience of state affairs than any of the socialists'. Gorky considered him one of the 'three genuinely talented politicians in the government', along with Kerensky and Nekrasov.2

Yet the Prince was out of place in the new world of party politics. All his previous work had been of the practical, zemstvo kind, where everybody worked together, regardless of class or party interests, for the 'good of the

nation'. At first it was hoped that the Provisional Government would be guided by this same spirit. This was to be a wartime government of national confidence and salvation, not a government of any one party or social class, and this was why Lvov, as a genuinely national figure, had been chosen for its leader. But the revolution had opened the floodgates to party politics, left-wing politics in particular, and it was almost inevitable that they would permeate the government's work. It was this which Lvov was unprepared for. His knowledge of party politics was almost non-existent. Even after several months as Prime Minister he could not really tell the difference between the SRs and the Bolsheviks. The general softness of his character, moreover, left him virtually powerless to cope with the hard cut and thrust of party politics. Coming from the old world of gentlemanly zemstvo activity, he was more inclined to search for compromises than either the party leaders of the capital or the irreconcilable conflicts in the country would ever allow. When his ministers clashed over politics (which was very often) Lvov's instinctive reaction was to look for a means of reconciling them through the implementation of 'practical and constructive' policies. This gave him an image of indecisiveness; and it is true that he tended to be swayed by other politicians with a stronger will. Nabokov, who headed the government's Secretariat, recalled endless