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Between the fall of the autocracy in February 1917 and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, Russia was governed by the Provisional Government — an unelected body drawn from the Duma that inherited an impossible situation and lost, over eight months, whatever authority it had begun with. Alongside it stood the Petrograd Soviet, the workers' and soldiers' council reborn from 1905, which commanded the practical loyalty the government lacked. This arrangement, known as dual power, was the defining feature of 1917, and its internal contradictions did much to determine the outcome. By October the Provisional Government commanded almost no loyal force in the capital it nominally ruled, and a disciplined party under Lenin and Trotsky was able to seize power in the name of the Soviet with remarkably little resistance.
The analytical interest of 1917 lies in two linked questions. First, why did the liberal, democratic experiment of February fail so quickly? The answer turns on weighing the structural impossibility of the Provisional Government's position against the specific choices — to continue the war, to postpone land reform, to mishandle the Kornilov Affair — that hastened its fall. Second, what was the nature of the October Revolution? It has been read as a genuine popular revolution, as a military coup by a conspiratorial minority, and — by most modern scholarship — as an irreducible combination of the two. The contrast between the spontaneous, leaderless February and the planned, disciplined October is one of the richest the unit offers, and it bears directly on the question of whether the revolutions were "made" or simply "happened".
The organising question is therefore this: did the Provisional Government fall — and the Bolsheviks succeed — because of insurmountable structural conditions, or because of specific decisions and contingent events that abler leadership might have avoided? How one answers determines whether October is read as the inevitable outcome of February's unfinished business or as a seizure of power that turned on the choices and gambles of a few months.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y219 (Non-British period study): Russia 1894–1941. Within our own teaching sequence it opens the revolution-and-Bolshevik-power thread, tracing how the democratic promise of February gave way to the Bolshevik seizure of October. We have organised the material around the analytical problem of structure versus contingency — whether the Provisional Government was doomed or defeated by its own choices — rather than following the specification's own listing order, because that problem is the key to explaining both the government's fall and the Bolsheviks' rise. This arrangement reflects our pedagogical judgement, not a transcription of the specification. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Because Y219 is a period study, examiners reward command of change over time and judgements that reach across the eight months rather than settling into the description of a single episode. Keep asking how each crisis altered the balance of power between the government, the Soviet, and the Bolsheviks, and how a reforming movement came to be overthrown by a disciplined party.
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 |
| Composition | Initially dominated by Kadets and liberals; from May, successive coalitions drew in moderate socialists (Mensheviks and 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 genuinely liberal — a sweeping burst of reform that made Russia, briefly, one of the freest countries in the world. It granted a general amnesty for political prisoners (bringing revolutionaries, Lenin among them, flooding back to Petrograd), proclaimed freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion, abolished the death penalty and the old police, recognised trade unions, and committed itself to elect a Constituent Assembly. But these liberties counted for little against the unanswered questions of bread, peace, and land, and several of the reforms were double-edged: abolishing the death penalty at the front and dismantling the police removed the very instruments of coercion a government might need in a crisis.
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 SRs |
| 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: by subordinating military obedience to the Soviet's approval, it ensured that real coercive power lay with the Soviet from the very beginning, while formal responsibility lay with the government. The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick captures the resulting situation by describing dual power as inherently unstable — one body possessing authority without power, the other power without responsibility. Why did the Soviet, holding the real power, decline to take it? The answer lies in Menshevik and SR ideology: orthodox Marxism held that a feudal autocracy must be succeeded by a bourgeois-democratic republic before any proletarian revolution became possible, so February was the bourgeois revolution and the socialists' duty was to support the bourgeois government, not to seize a power for which Russia was deemed unready. This self-limiting theory 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 proletarian revolution. Lenin 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 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 and to its imperial war aims. Leaked to the public, it provoked the April Crisis: armed demonstrations 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. Worse followed when, as war minister, Kerensky staked everything on the June Offensive against the Austro-Hungarian lines, in the belief that a revolutionary army would recover its élan. After brief initial gains it collapsed catastrophically, and 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.
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, and the insistence that they wait drove them toward the SRs and, increasingly, the Bolsheviks, whose slogan "Land!" promised immediate satisfaction. Crucially, peasant-soldiers deserted to be home for the land seizures, coupling the land question directly to the collapse of the army. Meanwhile the economy that had broken the Tsar broke his successors too: inflation accelerated, food shortages persisted, factories closed for want of fuel, and the bread ration in Petrograd was cut in the autumn — the same grievance that had toppled the Tsar now corroding those who had replaced him.
The historian Rex Wade concludes that the Provisional Government 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. Yet the counter-argument insists that its choices — to fight on, to gamble on the June Offensive, to defer land reform — turned a difficult inheritance into a fatal one. Weighing structural impossibility against contingent error is exactly the causation problem a part (b) essay on 1917 rewards.
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, and Kronstadt sailors demanding that the Soviet take power. Its trigger was the collapse of the June Offensive and the soldiers' terror of transfer to the front. The demonstrations were largely leaderless and chaotic; the Bolsheviks, judging the moment premature, half-led and half-restrained a movement they had not started and could not control. The government seized the opportunity: it published documents alleging Lenin was a German agent, raided the Bolshevik press, and arrested leaders including Trotsky and Kamenev. Lenin fled to Finland in disguise, the Bolsheviks were branded traitors, and Kerensky became Prime Minister.
The Bolsheviks appeared finished. In reality this was a setback, not a defeat: the underlying crises of war, land, and bread continued to deepen, and the discrediting proved short-lived. The July Days also taught Lenin a lasting lesson — that a seizure of power must be willed and organised by the party, not improvised by a leaderless crowd — which he would apply ruthlessly in October.
The Kornilov Affair of late August reversed everything. General Lavr Kornilov, appointed commander-in-chief with a brief to restore discipline, moved troops toward Petrograd. His precise intentions remain one of the genuine puzzles of 1917 — whether to crush the Bolsheviks and the Soviet or to establish an outright military dictatorship — and the episode was muddied by an erratic intermediary whose garbled relay of messages left Kornilov and Kerensky each believing the other was demanding a coup. Whatever the truth, Kerensky, fearing he was about to be overthrown, dismissed Kornilov, declared him a traitor, and turned in desperation to the very forces he had just suppressed in July — appealing to the Soviet and the Bolsheviks, releasing imprisoned militants, and arming the Red Guards to defend the capital. Kornilov's advance disintegrated without a battle: railwaymen sidetracked his trains and agitators subverted his soldiers.
The consequences were transformative, and are best grasped as a balance sheet.
| Consequence | Significance |
|---|---|
| Bolsheviks rehabilitated | From accused traitors in July to defenders of the revolution in August; their popularity surged |
| Red Guards armed | The Bolsheviks kept the weapons issued to resist Kornilov — a ready paramilitary for October |
| Kerensky discredited | He had first flirted with Kornilov, then betrayed him; the right saw him as a traitor, the left as a near-dictator |
| Soviet radicalised | By September the Bolsheviks held majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets; Trotsky became chairman of the former |
| Moderate centre destroyed | The Mensheviks and SRs, tied to the failing coalition, lost credibility; the field was cleared for Bolshevik "soviet power" |
As Alexander Rabinowitch argues, the Kornilov Affair destroyed the last hopes for a democratic coalition and made October possible. The deepest irony of 1917 is that the most serious attempt to save the order from the left handed the left its decisive opportunity: Kerensky armed the Bolsheviks to stop a general and never disarmed them.
By the autumn the political balance had shifted decisively toward the Bolsheviks. The soviets now had Bolshevik majorities; the Red Guards were armed; the garrison would not fight for Kerensky; and the government was friendless. Against this backdrop the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" acquired real force.
From his Finnish hiding-place Lenin bombarded the Central Committee with letters of mounting urgency, insisting that delay was fatal and that the party must seize power before the Second Congress of Soviets so as to present the country with an accomplished fact. He slipped back into Petrograd around 10 October and won the decision for an armed seizure by a vote of 10 to 2. Crucially, the insurrection was opposed from within: Kamenev and Zinoviev cast the dissenting votes and then aired their opposition in the non-party press, arguing that the Bolsheviks should advance through the Congress of Soviets and the coming Constituent Assembly rather than risk a premature armed gamble. Their dissent is doubly important — it shows that the party was not a monolith, and it demonstrates that the line which prevailed was specifically Lenin's, carried against serious internal resistance. This is strong evidence, in the "coup versus revolution" debate, for the willed, party-driven character of the seizure.
Trotsky was the organisational genius of October. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet he used the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) — ostensibly a defensive organ of the Soviet — to organise the takeover, thereby cloaking a party operation in soviet legitimacy and presenting any resistance as counter-revolution. When, on 24 October, Kerensky ordered the closure of Bolshevik newspapers and the raising of the bridges, he handed the MRC the perfect pretext to act "in defence" of the revolution.
| Date (OS) | Event |
|---|---|
| 24 October | Red Guards and pro-MRC soldiers occupy key points — telephone exchange, telegraph, railway stations, bridges, the State Bank — against virtually no resistance |
| 25 October (morning) | Lenin proclaims the Provisional Government deposed — premature, since the Winter Palace has not yet fallen |
| 25 October (evening) | The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets convenes with a Bolshevik majority; the Mensheviks and right-wing SRs walk out |
| 26 October (early hours) | The Winter Palace is taken — barely defended by cadets, Cossacks, and the Women's Death Battalion; the "storming" was far less dramatic than later Soviet mythology portrayed |
| 26 October | Lenin announces the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), and the Congress passes the Decrees on Peace and Land |
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