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The Provisional Government that emerged from the February Revolution faced an impossible inheritance: to govern a vast, war-torn empire without democratic legitimacy, without command of the army, and without the means to satisfy the irreconcilable demands of soldiers (who wanted peace), peasants (who wanted land) and workers (who wanted bread and control of their factories). Across eight months it lurched through four cabinets — from Prince Lvov's first liberal coalition to Kerensky's increasingly hollow Directory — each more dependent on the socialist parties and less able to act. By October it commanded almost no loyal force in the capital it nominally ruled.
Its progressive radicalisation, escalating crises and steady haemorrhage of authority make the period a study in the gap between formal power and real power: the Provisional Government held the former, the Petrograd Soviet much of the latter. Whether its collapse was inevitable — doomed by the conditions of its birth — or the product of specific, avoidable mistakes (continuing the war, postponing land reform, mishandling Kornilov) is among the most debated questions in the historiography, and exactly the causation-and-judgement problem the Section B essay rewards. It is also the most source-rich stretch of the whole course: almost every great document — Order No. 1, the Milyukov Note, the April Theses — survives to be set against the others, making the period an ideal training-ground for the AO2 evaluation skill that headlines Section A.
Key Question: Did the Provisional Government fail because of insurmountable structural problems, or because of the specific decisions and mistakes of its leaders between March and October 1917?
Key Definition: Dual Power (dvoevlastie) — the coexistence after February 1917 of the Provisional Government, which held formal legal authority, and the Petrograd Soviet, which commanded the practical loyalty of the garrison, railwaymen and workers. Neither could govern without the other, and each resented the other's claims — a structural contradiction that paralysed effective government.
This lesson belongs to Component 2N, Part One ('The Russian Revolution and the Rise of Stalin, 1917–1929'), within a Paper 2 DEPTH study. It is the hinge between the fall of Tsarism and the Bolshevik seizure of power: only by analysing why the liberal-democratic alternative failed can the October Revolution be explained as something other than a bolt from the blue. The depth-study emphasis demands granular command of the eight-month chronology — the April Crisis, the June Offensive, the July Days, the Kornilov Affair — and the ability to weigh competing causes of failure.
In Assessment Objective terms, AO1 (knowledge deployed to analyse and judge) carries the greatest weight and dominates Section B, where a typical question asks you to assess why the Provisional Government fell. AO2 — evaluating primary sources in context — is the headline skill of Section A; this period is unusually rich in usable source types (Order No. 1, the Milyukov Note, Kerensky's proclamations, Soviet resolutions). AO3 (historians' interpretations) is examined directly in other components but is a transferable analytical habit that sharpens the judgement Section B requires. Frame everything through the second-order concepts of causation (structural vs contingent), change and continuity (the persistence of the legitimacy and supply crises that destroyed the Tsar), and the relative significance of factors.
A point of orientation: AQA 7042 has no Paper 3 — the qualification is Paper 1 (breadth), Paper 2 (this depth study) and the Historical Investigation (coursework). 'Section A' and 'Section B' here mean the two parts of this Paper 2: a compulsory primary-source question (Section A, 30 marks, AO2) and a choice of depth essays (Section B, 25 marks each, predominantly AO1). The Provisional Government is examinable in both.
The Provisional Government was formed on 2 March 1917 (OS) out of the Duma's Provisional Committee. It was self-appointed, not elected, and explicitly provisional — mandated only to hold the ring until a Constituent Assembly, chosen by universal suffrage, could settle Russia's permanent constitution. That self-denying ordinance was both its moral claim and its fatal weakness: it would not take irreversible decisions on war, land or the constitution because it claimed no right to, yet by deferring them it forfeited the chance to win loyalty by delivering them.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| First leader | Prince Georgy Lvov — a respected liberal zemstvo figure, but without the force to dominate events |
| Political composition | Initially dominated by Kadets and Octobrists; from May, successive coalitions drew in moderate socialists (Mensheviks, SRs) |
| Pivotal figure | Alexander Kerensky — the only man who sat in both the government and the Petrograd Soviet, and from July its Prime Minister |
| Legitimacy problem | Unelected; its authority derived from a Duma itself chosen on a restricted, gerrymandered franchise |
Its early record was nonetheless genuinely liberal — one of the most sweeping bursts of reform in Russian history:
For a few weeks Russia was, on paper, the freest country in the world. The tragedy of the Provisional Government is that these liberties counted for little against the unanswered questions of bread, peace and land. Several reforms were double-edged: abolishing the death penalty at the front and dismantling the old police removed the very instruments of coercion a government might need in a crisis, while the amnesty returned hundreds of hardened revolutionaries — Lenin among them — to a capital primed for agitation. These were liberal-constitutionalists who treated the rule of law and the sanctity of the future Constituent Assembly as inviolable, a principled restraint that was crippling in a revolution where their opponents felt no such scruple.
The government never ruled alone. From 27 February (OS) it shared authority with the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, sitting in the same Tauride Palace.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Formed | 27 February 1917 (OS), reviving the institution of 1905 |
| Composition | Elected delegates of workers and soldiers; initially dominated by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who held to the orthodox view that this was a bourgeois revolution the socialists should not yet lead |
| Order No. 1 | Issued 1 March; instructed soldiers to form committees and to obey the Provisional Government only where its orders did not contradict the Soviet — in effect handing the Soviet a veto over the army |
| Popular legitimacy | The Soviet commanded the practical loyalty the government lacked: the garrison, the railwaymen, the telegraph |
| Conditional support | The Soviet agreed to support the government only 'in so far as' (postolku-poskolku) it pursued democratic ends |
Order No. 1 is the single most consequential document of the period: it institutionalised the soldiers' refusal to be commanded except through their own committees, fatally undermining military discipline and ensuring the government could never rely on force. Rex Wade calls Dual Power an 'unstable equilibrium' — each body needed the other yet resented its rival, a contradiction that could not last.
Why did the Soviet, with the real power in its hands, decline to take it? The answer lies in Menshevik and SR ideology. Orthodox Marxism held that history proceeds through stages: a feudal autocracy must be succeeded by a bourgeois-democratic republic before any proletarian revolution becomes possible. February, on this reading, was the bourgeois revolution; the socialists' duty was to support the bourgeois government and build proletarian strength for a distant future, not to seize a power for which Russia was deemed unready. This self-limiting theory — sincerely held by Tsereteli, Chernov and the Soviet majority — is the deepest reason Dual Power existed at all: the moderate socialists had the strength to govern and the doctrine that forbade them from doing so.
The arrangement was rendered still more unworkable in April by Lenin's return (in the sealed train, via Germany) and his April Theses, which stunned even his own party by demanding 'no support for the Provisional Government', 'all power to the soviets', and an immediate move towards a proletarian revolution. Lenin's audacity was to reject the staged theory the Mensheviks revered: he argued the bourgeois revolution had already been completed in February and that the proletariat, allied to the poor peasantry, must proceed at once to a socialist seizure of power. He alone among the major leaders rejected the logic of Dual Power outright — a stance that looked reckless in April but positioned the Bolsheviks as the one party promising what the masses wanted as the moderates' compromises failed. The deadlock at the heart of 1917 was that each authority held exactly what the other needed: legal title without force, force without title. Neither could govern alone, and so power leaked steadily downwards to the factory committees, village land committees and soldiers' councils taking matters into their own hands across the empire.
The decision to continue the war was the government's most fateful choice and the proximate cause of its first crisis. In April, Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov sent a note to the Allies (the 'Milyukov Note') reaffirming Russia's commitment to the war to 'a decisive victory' and to its imperial war aims, including Constantinople and the Straits. Leaked to the public, it provoked the April Crisis: armed demonstrations against annexationist war aims forced Milyukov and the war minister Guchkov to resign and pushed the government into its first coalition with the socialists — the template for everything that followed, as a government decision collided with mass sentiment in the streets and the government retreated, weaker and more dependent on the Soviet than before.
Worse followed. As war minister, Kerensky staked everything on the June Offensive (the 'Kerensky Offensive'), launched on 18 June against the Austro-Hungarian lines in Galicia, touring the front with electrifying speeches in the belief that a revolutionary army would recover its élan. After brief initial gains it collapsed catastrophically within weeks, costing on the order of 200,000 casualties. The abolition of the death penalty, the soldiers' committees and general war-weariness combined to dissolve the army's fighting power; by the summer, desertion ran into the hundreds of thousands as peasant-soldiers voted with their feet. The offensive's failure did more than any single event to radicalise the garrison and detonate the July Days.
Exam Tip: Frame the war as the government's central dilemma, not merely a blunder. Continuing it was demanded by the Allies and national honour and thought essential to credit and supply; abandoning it meant betraying the Allies and conceding huge losses. There was no costless option — but the choice to continue, and above all to gamble on the June Offensive, accelerated the army's disintegration and was politically fatal.
The government's refusal to sanction land redistribution before the Constituent Assembly was constitutionally principled and politically suicidal. Peasants were already seizing gentry estates through 1917 — recorded rural disorder climbed steeply from spring to autumn — and the insistence that they wait drove them toward the SRs and, increasingly, the Bolsheviks, whose slogan 'Land!' promised immediate satisfaction. The irony cut deep: the SR minister of agriculture, Viktor Chernov, whose party's programme centred on land socialisation, found himself defending delay in the name of legality. Crucially, peasant-soldiers deserted to be home for the land seizures — coupling the land question directly to the collapse of the army.
The economy that had broken the Tsar broke the Provisional Government too. Inflation accelerated as the rouble collapsed and the printing presses ran; food shortages persisted; factories closed as fuel ran short; and workers, organising through factory committees, increasingly asserted workers' control over production. The bread ration in Petrograd was cut in the autumn — the same grievance that had toppled the Tsar now corroded his successors — and each failure burnished the appeal of the one party promising 'Bread' alongside 'Peace' and 'Land'.
Two further structural weaknesses compounded the crisis. First, the government's repeated reconstruction into coalitions — first liberal, then liberal-socialist from May, then under Kerensky from July — produced not strength but paralysis. Each yoked Kadets who wanted to win the war and defend property to socialists who wanted peace and land; on every fundamental question the cabinet was deadlocked, and the entry of Soviet leaders (Tsereteli, Chernov, Skobelev) implicated the moderate socialists in its failures without giving them power to redirect it. The moderates' decision to share responsibility for an unworkable government, rather than take power through the Soviet, is a key reason the centre collapsed and the Bolsheviks — who refused all such compromise — gained by contrast.
Second, the delay of the Constituent Assembly was politically corrosive. The Assembly was the government's entire reason for existing: it alone could legitimately settle war, land and the constitution. Yet elections were postponed from spring to autumn (eventually held in November, after the Bolsheviks had seized power), ostensibly to compile electoral rolls amid war and dislocation. The effect was to leave every great question unanswered for month after month while peasants seized land, soldiers deserted and workers took over factories — so the government's defining promise became the very mechanism of its impotence. The historian Rex Wade concludes that it was 'doomed by the circumstances of its birth': it could not solve its problems without either ending the war or redistributing land, and its nature forbade it from doing either.
The eight-month chronology of crisis can be fixed in a single timeline:
timeline
title The Provisional Government 1917 (Old Style dates)
Mar : Provisional Government formed (2 Mar) : Order No. 1 (1 Mar) : Dual Power begins
Apr : Lenin returns and issues the April Theses : Milyukov Note leaked : April Crisis
May : First Coalition formed with moderate socialists
Jun-Jul : June (Kerensky) Offensive launched 18 Jun and collapses : July Days (3-7 Jul) : Bolsheviks suppressed, Lenin flees
Jul : Kerensky becomes Prime Minister : Lvov resigns
Aug : Kornilov Affair : Red Guards armed to defend Petrograd
Sep : Bolshevik majorities in Petrograd and Moscow Soviets : Trotsky chairs Petrograd Soviet
Oct : Bolshevik seizure of power (24-26 Oct)
Section A asks you to assess the value to a historian of primary sources, weighing provenance, tone, purpose and content-in-context and reaching an overall judgement — remembering that a source's bias is itself evidence, not grounds for dismissal. The disciplined habit is to refuse the 'reliable versus biased' binary and instead ask: given who produced this, when, for whom and why, what is it strong evidence of, and where must it be supplemented?
Worked exemplar — a representative source type: Order No. 1 of the Petrograd Soviet (1 March 1917, OS). Order No. 1 is a foundational, well-attested document; its substance (as the standard accounts record) instructed soldiers to elect committees, place weapons under those committees' control, and obey the Provisional Government's military orders only where these did not conflict with the Soviet. (Characterise it by provenance; do not invent a verbatim text.)
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