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Between the fall of the Romanov autocracy in March 1917 and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, Russia was governed by a self-appointed liberal authority that promised the freest political order the country had ever known — and collapsed within eight months. The Provisional Government proclaimed civil liberties, released political prisoners, abolished the death penalty at the front, and pledged a freely elected Constituent Assembly to settle Russia's future; yet by the autumn it commanded almost no loyal force in the capital it nominally ruled, and it fell to a comparatively small armed rising with scarcely a shot fired in its defence. Historians have argued ever since about why this liberal experiment failed and, above all, about whether its failure was inevitable — foredoomed by the conditions of its birth, the crippling arrangement of dual power and the unwinnable war it inherited — or contingent, the product of specific and avoidable errors: the decision to continue the war, the refusal to sanction land redistribution, the mishandling of the Kornilov affair. This lesson examines the Provisional Government in depth and, crucially, teaches you to evaluate competing historical interpretations of why it failed — the distinctive skill assessed in this part of the unit.
Unlike the thematic lessons in this course, which develop the AO1 skill of synoptic argument across the whole period, this is a depth lesson focused on a single, closely defined topic and assessed through historical interpretations (AO3). The task is not to narrate the events of 1917 but to weigh how convincing two historians' arguments are, using your own detailed contextual knowledge of the government's eight-month crisis. This is a distinct intellectual discipline: it requires you to identify the criterion each interpretation applies — structural impossibility versus avoidable error — to test each argument against the evidence, and to reach a substantiated judgement about which is the more convincing, and why.
The organising question for this lesson is therefore: how convincingly can the failure of the Provisional Government be attributed to the insurmountable structural conditions of its birth — dual power and the war — and how convincingly to the specific, avoidable decisions and errors of its leaders between March and October 1917? Keep it in view: the events examined below furnish the evidence with which you will evaluate the competing interpretations.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y318 (Thematic study and interpretations): Russia and Its Rulers 1855–1964, a UG3 thematic-study unit. Alongside its thematic essays across the whole period (AO1), Y318 assesses three named depth topics through historical interpretations (AO3): Alexander II's domestic reforms, the Provisional Government of 1917, and Khrushchev in power 1956–64. This lesson develops the second of those depth topics and the AO3 interpretations skill — evaluating how convincing two historians' extracts are, using your own contextual knowledge.
A crucial point about the interpretations assessment: the extracts you evaluate are secondary-historian arguments, and in this style of question provenance is not the object of evaluation. You are not asked to judge the extracts by who wrote them, when, or with what possible bias (that is the AO2 source-evaluation skill assessed elsewhere). You are asked to judge the argument itself — how convincing its claims are when tested against your detailed knowledge of the historical context. The skill is to identify what each interpretation claims and on what criterion, and then to weigh it against the evidence.
Within our own teaching sequence we place this depth lesson after the thematic lessons and after the Alexander II interpretations lesson, so that the failure of Russia's one liberal government is evaluated with the whole century's problem of unaccountable, centralised power already in view — this is our pedagogical decision, not a transcription of the specification's ordering (refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording). The failure examined here connects directly to the thematic threads developed earlier: the recurring problem of legitimacy, the unsolved land question that runs from 1861 to collectivisation, and the observation that the vacuum the Romanovs left in February passed within eight months to a regime that reconstructed centralised power in an entirely new ideological form.
To evaluate the interpretations, you need a secure and detailed command of what the Provisional Government actually was, what it faced, and how its authority drained away. The government is best understood as an authority fatally divided from real power at the moment of its birth, tasked with governing a vast, war-torn empire while lacking the two things any government needs: democratic legitimacy and command of armed force.
The Provisional Government was formed on 2 March 1917 (Old Style) out of the Duma's Provisional Committee, in the same days that the Petrograd garrison mutinied and Nicholas II abdicated. It was self-appointed, not elected, and explicitly provisional — its mandate was only to hold the ring until a Constituent Assembly, chosen by universal suffrage, could settle Russia's permanent constitution. That self-denying character was both its moral claim and its fatal weakness. Because it claimed no popular mandate of its own, it declined to take irreversible decisions on the war, on land, or on the constitution; yet by deferring precisely the questions that moved the population, it forfeited the one means by which it might have won loyalty — actually satisfying the demands for peace, land, and bread.
| Feature of the Provisional Government | Detail |
|---|---|
| First head | Prince Georgy Lvov, a respected liberal zemstvo figure, headed the first cabinet but lacked the force to dominate events |
| Pivotal figure | Alexander Kerensky, the only man who sat in both the government and the Petrograd Soviet, rising to become Prime Minister from July |
| Character | Self-appointed, unelected, and self-consciously "provisional", pledged to a Constituent Assembly it never convened |
| Liberal reforms | Civil liberties, freedom of press and assembly, an amnesty for political prisoners, the abolition of the death penalty at the front, and the dismantling of the old police |
| The self-denying ordinance | A refusal to settle war, land, or the constitution before the Constituent Assembly, which it repeatedly postponed |
For a few weeks Russia was, on paper, among the freest countries in the world. Yet several of these liberal reforms proved double-edged in a revolutionary situation. 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 amnesty returned hundreds of experienced revolutionaries — Lenin among them — to a capital already primed for agitation. These were principled liberal-constitutionalists who treated the rule of law and the sovereignty of the future Assembly as inviolable, a restraint that was crippling when their opponents felt no such scruple.
The government never ruled alone. From 27 February (Old Style) it shared authority with the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, which sat in the same Tauride Palace. This coexistence — the dual power (dvoevlastie) that historians place at the centre of any explanation of 1917 — meant that formal authority and real coercive power were held by two different bodies. The government possessed legal title but could not command the garrison, the railways, or the telegraph; the Soviet possessed the loyalty of the armed workers and soldiers but declined, at first, to take formal responsibility for governing.
| Element of dual power | Effect |
|---|---|
| Formal authority | Held by the Provisional Government, which claimed legal succession to the Duma |
| Real coercive power | Held by the Petrograd Soviet, which commanded the loyalty of the garrison, railwaymen, and workers |
| Order No. 1 | Issued by the Soviet on 1 March, it instructed soldiers to form committees and to obey the government's military orders only where these did not conflict with the Soviet — in effect giving the Soviet a veto over the army |
| The moderate socialists' dilemma | Menshevik and SR leaders in the Soviet initially supported the government "in so far as" it pursued the revolution's aims, sharing responsibility without taking power |
Order No. 1 was the single most consequential document of the period. By subordinating military obedience to the Soviet's approval, it institutionalised the soldiers' refusal to be commanded except through their own committees, corroding military discipline and ensuring that the government could never rely on force. The arrangement became still more unworkable in April with Lenin's return — travelling from Switzerland across Germany in a sealed train — 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 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 exactly what the masses wanted as the moderates' compromises failed. The deadlock at the heart of 1917 was that each authority held precisely what the other needed: legal title without force, force without title. Neither could govern alone, and power leaked steadily downward to factory committees, village land committees, and soldiers' councils across the empire.
Three great unresolved problems destroyed the government's support, and all three were bound up with its decision to continue the war. The choice to fight on was the government's most fateful decision 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 a decisive victory and to its imperial war aims. 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 against the Austro-Hungarian lines in Galicia, touring the front with rousing speeches in the belief that a revolutionary army would recover its fighting spirit. After brief initial gains the offensive collapsed within weeks at heavy cost. The abolition of the death penalty, the soldiers' committees, and general war-weariness combined to dissolve the army's fighting power; through the summer, desertion ran into the hundreds of thousands as peasant-soldiers voted with their feet — many of them leaving to be home for the seizures of land. The offensive's failure did more than any single event to radicalise the garrison and to detonate the July Days.
The land question was equally corrosive. 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 promise of land offered 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. Meanwhile the economy that had broken the Tsar broke his successors too — inflation accelerated as the rouble collapsed, food shortages persisted, factories closed as fuel ran short, and the Petrograd bread ration was cut again in the autumn, the very grievance that had toppled the Romanovs now corroding those who had replaced them.
The summer brought two decisive turning points that, between them, sealed the government's fate. The July Days (3–7 July, Old Style) saw a spontaneous armed rising of Petrograd workers, soldiers, and Kronstadt sailors demanding that the Soviet take power. The Bolsheviks were drawn into a rising they had not planned and could not control; when it collapsed, the government branded them German agents and traitors, jailed several leaders, and drove Lenin into hiding in Finland. The Bolsheviks appeared finished. In reality this was a setback rather than a defeat: the underlying crises of war, land, and bread continued to deepen, and the July Days taught Lenin the lesson he would apply ruthlessly in October — that a seizure of power must be willed and organised by the party, not improvised by a leaderless crowd.
The Kornilov affair of late August then reversed everything. General Lavr Kornilov, appointed commander-in-chief in July 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 in order to stabilise the front, or to establish an outright military dictatorship — and the episode was muddied by a confused 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, releasing imprisoned Bolshevik militants, and arming the Red Guards to defend the capital. Kornilov's advance disintegrated without a battle as railwaymen sidetracked his trains and agitators subverted his soldiers.
| Consequence of the Kornilov affair | Significance |
|---|---|
| The Bolsheviks rehabilitated | Recast as defenders of the revolution against a would-be military dictator, they recovered the standing lost in July |
| The Red Guards armed | The weapons issued to resist Kornilov were never recovered — a ready paramilitary for October |
| Kerensky discredited | Having first flirted with Kornilov and then betrayed him, he was distrusted by the right as a traitor and by the left as a near-dictator |
| The moderate centre destroyed | The affair annihilated the prospect of a stable coalition and left the field to the Bolsheviks |
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 Bolsheviks held majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, Trotsky chaired the Petrograd Soviet, and the government was a hollow shell. When the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet occupied the capital's key points on 25 October (Old Style), the government fell almost without resistance, and the freely elected Constituent Assembly it had promised was dissolved by the Bolsheviks after a single day in January 1918.
The reasons for the Provisional Government's failure are contested because the evidence genuinely supports two different explanations, and because the failure can be measured against different criteria that yield different verdicts. Understanding why historians disagree is the foundation of a strong interpretations answer.
The debate turns on several axes:
These axes do not map neatly onto a simple "structure versus error". A historian might hold that dual power made failure highly probable while insisting that specific choices converted probable failure into actual collapse. The task of evaluation is to identify precisely which claim an interpretation is making, on which criterion, and how well the evidence supports it.
The reasons for the Provisional Government's collapse constitute one of the great debates of twentieth-century history. The interpretations below are paraphrases of the positions taken by real historians — you should be able to characterise these schools of thought, always in your own words, never inventing quotations to place in a historian's mouth.
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