You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
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 a succession of cabinets — from Prince Lvov's first liberal coalition to Kerensky's increasingly hollow leadership — 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.
This lesson examines the nature and early promise of the Provisional Government, the system of Dual Power it shared with the Petrograd Soviet, its fatal handling of the war, land and economic questions, and the twin crises of the July Days and the Kornilov Affair that first humiliated and then resurrected the Bolsheviks. The organising question is whether its collapse was inevitable — doomed by the conditions of its birth — or the product of specific, avoidable mistakes. This period is also the most source-rich stretch of the course, making it an ideal training-ground for the AO2 skill that headlines Paper 2 Section A.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 2, Option 2C.2 (Route C depth study): "Russia in revolution, 1894–1924." A depth study rewards close, granular analysis, so command of the eight-month chronology — the April Crisis, the June Offensive, the July Days, the Kornilov Affair — and of the named documents (Order No. 1, the Milyukov Note, the April Theses) is essential. Within our teaching sequence this lesson is the hinge between the fall of tsarism and the Bolshevik seizure of power: only by analysing why the liberal-democratic alternative failed can October be explained as something other than a bolt from the blue.
Because this is a depth study, examiners reward detail used to sustain argument. For the exact assessment weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.
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: a general amnesty for political prisoners and exiles (bringing revolutionaries flooding back to Petrograd); freedom of speech, press, assembly and religion, and full civil equality regardless of class, religion or nationality; abolition of the death penalty (at the front as well) and of the Okhrana and old police; recognition of trade unions and the eight-hour day in many enterprises; and a commitment to elect a Constituent Assembly by universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage.
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 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 |
Key term — 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.
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. Dual Power was, in effect, 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 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 toward 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.
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.
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 implicated the moderate socialists in its failures without giving them power to redirect it. Second, the delay of the Constituent Assembly — the government's entire reason for existing — was politically corrosive: elections were postponed from spring to autumn (eventually held in November, after the Bolsheviks had seized power), so the government's defining promise became the very mechanism of its impotence. It could not solve its problems without either ending the war or redistributing land, and its nature forbade it from doing either — a government, in short, doomed by the circumstances of its birth.
The eight-month chronology of crisis can be fixed in a single timeline (all dates Old Style):
| Month (1917, OS) | Key events |
|---|---|
| March | Provisional Government formed (2 Mar); Order No. 1 (1 Mar); Dual Power begins |
| April | Lenin returns and issues the April Theses; the Milyukov Note is leaked; the April Crisis |
| May | First Coalition formed with moderate socialists |
| June–July | June (Kerensky) Offensive launched 18 June and collapses; the July Days (3–7 July); Bolsheviks suppressed, Lenin flees |
| July | Lvov resigns; Kerensky becomes Prime Minister |
| August | The Kornilov Affair; Red Guards armed to defend Petrograd |
| September | Bolshevik majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets; Trotsky chairs the Petrograd Soviet |
| October | Bolshevik seizure of power (24–26 Oct) |
The summer brought two decisive turning points that, between them, sealed the government's fate. The July Days (3–7 July, OS) saw a spontaneous armed rising of Petrograd workers, soldiers (especially the 1st Machine-Gun Regiment) and Kronstadt sailors demanding that the Soviet take power.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.