Who led the February Revolution?

It was Petrograd that achieved the revolution, the only arena of struggle. The rest of the country followed, because there was no force left anywhere in the country prepared to fight for the old regime. Petrograd, with the largest concentration of the proletariat, expressed most sharply the forces pushing Russia towards a new society.

Moscow only saw an echo of the insurrection in Petrograd. Strikes and demonstrations did not begin until the 27^th but soon the revolution spread with regiments mutinying and the prisons being opened. In many other cities the revolution began only on March 1^st, then only gradually spreading to the villages as news filtered in from the towns. In this gentler atmosphere, the police chiefs and bureaucrats were often able to simply remove the Tsar's portraits from the wall, declare themselves for the revolution, and hold on to their positions.

At first appearances, the February Revolution seems to be a bit of a puzzle. For example, did the February events contradict the Marxist principle that a successful revolution must have a conscious leadership?

Trotsky explains that the bourgeoisie certainly tried to paint a picture of a spontaneous and bloodless movement in which the whole people were moved of themselves to remove the old regime. This, of course, allowed the bourgeoisie to pretend that they had got hold of power without the need of an ‘unsavoury’ insurrection. He points out that this false illusion also gained popularity amongst some of the Soviet leaders who, having taken no leading role in the revolution, wanted to hope that nobody else had either!

Certainly, it was true that acts of revenge by workers and soldiers were surprisingly few and far between but a five-day struggle against the power of the old state, and the 1443 killed and wounded in the streets, hardly added up to a bloodless transformation. Someone must have led those struggles and made the key decisions when they were required to defeat the forces of reaction. But who?

Clearly the bourgeoisie, who were terrified of a revolution which, in any case, they had not seen coming, had not led the uprising. Neither had the Mensheviks, nor the Social-Revolutionaries to whom “the revolution fell like thunder out of the sky", according to their party president Zenzinov. [Chapter Eight of the ‘History of the Russian Revolution’ ¹⁷]

As has been shown, even the Bolshevik leaders lagged behind events. Kayurov asserted that on the 26^th: "Absolutely no guiding initiative from the party centres was felt. The Petrograd Committee had been arrested and the representative of the Central Committee, Comrade Shliapnikov, was unable to give any directives for the coming day". [Chapter Eight ¹⁷ ]

In defence of the Bolsheviks, the party had not yet recovered from its weakened condition of the early war years and many of its authoritative leaders were abroad or in exile. Those leaders remaining in Petrograd, both Bolsheviks and of other left parties, often did not consider themselves, and were not considered by others, capable of playing a guiding role in events. In the end, Shliapnikov produced an appeal to the soldiers on the morning of the 27^th - but by the time it was distributed the troops had nearly all mutinied already.

Trotsky notes: "We must lay it down as a general rule for those days that the higher the leaders, the further they lagged behind” [Chapter Eight ¹⁷ ]

The Bolshevik Party had come closest to providing a revolutionary organisation, but it was at that stage an extremely weak and scattered one, without central direction. Instead, the search for the leaders of the revolution must be made amongst the countless nameless leaders of groups of workers and soldiers.

Despite the dilution of the Petrograd proletariat during the war, the years of hard-earned experience of the struggles from 1905-17 had not gone entirely wasted. Conscious revolutionary workers and progressive soldiers existed, educated in the past by the left parties, particularly the Bolsheviks who had often stood alone alongside the workers in the years of reaction.

These minor leaders were able to make an estimation of forces and arrive at a strategic decision for themselves. Their role was no less significant simply because their names were never recorded for posterity. However, without a strong revolutionary socialist party: "This leadership proved sufficient to guarantee the victory of the insurrection, but it was not adequate to transfer immediately into the hands of the proletarian vanguard, the leadership of the revolution" [Chapter Eight ¹⁷ ]

The Mensheviks and SRs take advantage

But it was Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries that dominated the intelligentsia, and who also had the staff and spokespeople that helped them to win an overwhelming majority amongst the working-class at first in elections to the soviet. These elections also encompassed a much broader layer of the population than those who had actually battled in the streets in the ‘five days’.

Trotsky notes that even in the elections to the soviet of the Vyborg district, worker-Mensheviks won the leadership at first: “Bolshevism in that period was still only simmering in the depths of the revolution. Thus, the official Bolsheviks, even in the Petrograd Soviet, represented an insignificant minority, who had moreover none too clearly defined its tasks”. [Chapter Nine ¹⁶ ]

The Social Revolutionaries also got considerable backing from the votes of the soldiers. That’s because the voices speaking up most clearly against the monarchist officers were the clerks, the young war-time officers from the intelligentsia and so on, who oriented towards the rather amorphous SRs.

As Trotsky says “The representation of the garrison thus turned out to be incomparably more moderate and bourgeois than the soldier masses. But the latter were not conscious of this difference: it would reveal itself to them only during the experience of the coming months. The workers, on their part, were trying to cling as closely as possible to the soldiers, in order to strengthen their blood-bought union and more permanently arm the revolution. And since the spokesmen of the army were predominantly half-baked Social Revolutionaries, this fact could not help raising the authority of that party along with its ally, the Mensheviks, in the eyes of the workers themselves. Thus resulted the predominance in the soviets of the two Compromise parties.”  [Chapter Nine ¹⁶ ]

So, these two ‘Compromise’ parties dominated the Soviet at first, and they sought to hand power over to the bourgeois. But Trotsky makes clearly that this was certainly not an inevitable outcome of the February Revolution. The Russian working class in 1917 was at a far higher political level than in previous revolutions where the bourgeoisie had, similarly, stood on the sidelines and then quietly gathered up the power. The workers had formed a new organ of revolutionary power, the Soviet, based upon the armed strength of the masses, through which they could have taken power in their own hands in February.

Just to give one example, when, on March 1^st, Rodzianko, leader of the Provisional Committee that had supposedly ‘taken over’ power, needed to reply to the Tsar, he was too scared to go to the telegraph office alone! The telegraph workers would only take orders from the Soviet – as stressed previously, it was the Soviet that had the real power, not Rodzianko's committee.

No, the reason that power was handed over to the bourgeoisie lay in the contradictory character of the petty-bourgeois democrats and socialists who took initial the leadership of the Soviet. Trotsky explains that this middle-class layer "had taught the masses that the bourgeoisie is an enemy, but themselves feared more than anything else to release the masses from the control of that enemy" ” [Chapter Nine ¹⁶ ]

And yet, the reactionary bourgeoisie, who had fled in terror from the revolution, were turned by these "socialists" into the key to the revolution's success. In line with the theoretical excuses of Menshevism discussed previously, the reformist Sukhanov put it as follows: "The power destined to replace Tsarism must be only a bourgeois power ... we must steer our course by this principle. Otherwise the uprising will not succeed and the revolution will collapse." [Chapter Nine ¹⁶ ]

The Provisional Government is installed

In reality, these supposedly ‘revolutionary’ bourgeois were busy trying to hand power on one step further again, hatching plans to use Grand Duke Mikhail as the head of a constitutional monarchy, from which to later claw back the gains of the revolution.

The Tsar finally formally abdicated on March 2^nd in favour of Mikhail. Unfortunately for the bourgeoisie, the masses were not prepared to accept their betrayal as easily as they had swallowed that of the Soviet leaders.  So, the bourgeoisie were forced to give up their plan for a monarchist fig-leaf to cover their treachery. Nevertheless, thanks to the Soviet leaders, the Provisional Committee of the Duma were able to announce, on March 2^nd, the setting-up of the ‘Provisional Government’.

It consisted of a handful of the very richest landlords and industrialists. The Soviet 'socialists' were content - they only wanted to be a left-wing opposition in a bourgeois regime, not the leaders of a people’s uprising. They accepted the new government without any answers being given to the questions of war, republic, land, the eight-hour day, or any of the other burning issues.

Trotsky explains the paradox of the February Revolution with the follow lines:

"In giving their confidence to the socialists, the workers and soldiers found themselves, quite unexpectedly, expropriated politically. They were bewildered, alarmed, but did not immediately find a way out. Their own betrayers deafened them from above with arguments to which they had no ready answer, but which conflicted with all their feelings and intentions. The proletariat and the peasantry voted for the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries not as compromisers, but as opponents of the Tsar, the capitalists and the landowners. But in voting for them they created a partition-wall between themselves and their own aims. They could not now move forward at all without bumping into this wall erected by themselves, and knocking it over" [Chapter Nine ¹⁶ ]