Читать книгу October - China Miéville - Страница 12

In deep night, as the month turned, having cabled with Rodzianko about the situation in the city, General Alexeev sent a telegram to General Ivanov. He ordered him not to advance on the city as planned, because ‘complete peace was restored in Petrograd’.

This was quite untrue. But he and the Duma Committee said what they must to forestall the doomed counterinsurgency. Thus the Romanovian counterrevolution was recalled.

At the Tauride Palace, at 11 a.m. on 1 March, the Soviet Executive Committee met again in a tense session to debate the problem of power. Some on its right argued for coalition with the Duma Committee, since, as per their historical and political theories, the necessity of a transfer of power to the Provisional Government that that committee was forming was not, for them, in dispute. But the Executive Committee’s left-wing minority – three Bolsheviks, two SRs on the hard left of the party, one Mezhraionets – called instead for the formation of a ‘provisional revolutionary government’ without the Duma deputies. This was reminiscent of Lenin’s pre-war position: then, while the Mensheviks had argued that the proletariat and Marxists should abstain from a (necessarily) bourgeois government, Lenin, by contrast, had advocated a provisional, proletariat-led revolutionary government as the best vehicle for the (again, necessarily) bourgeois–democratic revolution.

In fact the Executive Committee minority’s call notwithstanding, the Bolsheviks as a party were not united in their approach either to the Soviet, of which some of their activists remained sceptical, or to questions of government power. That very day, when the left Bolshevik Vyborg District Committee circulated a proclamation in the chaotic streets demanding a provisional revolutionary government, the Bolshevik Party Central Committee clamped down on their ill-disciplined interventions.

The Soviet’s Executive Committee, the Ispolkom, had allowed a single hour to discuss and decide the shape of post-revolutionary power. A ludicrous aspiration. The meeting dragged well over the allotted time. Under the dome of the Tauride Palace’s great hall the hundreds of Soviet delegates, its general assembly, were awaiting the Ispolkom’s report back. Their impatience grew loud. As noon slipped past, the Ispolkom sent the Menshevik Skobelev to plead for more time.

As he spoke, he was dramatically interrupted. The doors to the chamber flew open and a voluble group of uniformed soldiers piled in. As the newcomers clamoured, the Ispolkom got word and rushed to join the throng.

The anxious soldiers had come to ask the Soviet for guidance: how should they respond to Rodzianko’s demands to surrender their arms? What should they do about their officers, against whom the popular mood remained ugly enough that there was a real danger of lynchings? And should they obey the Soviet, or the Duma Committee?

The raucous crowd left them in no doubt that they must keep their arms. That much was simple.

The decision to dissolve the Soviet’s Military Commission into that of the Duma Committee, however, provoked more controversy. The left in the room were hollering, denouncing it as collaboration. For the Ispolkom, Sokolov, a former Bolshevik, defended the move on grounds of the military experience and ‘historic role’ of the bourgeoisie.

Out of the arguments echoing through the hall, a consensus began to emerge. Anti-revolutionary officers were not to be trusted, but the command of ‘moderate’ officers was valid – though only as regards matters of combat. As the back-and-forth continued, one soldier from the Preobrazhensky Regiment explained how he and his comrades had voted in an administrative committee from within their own ranks.

Elected officers. The idea spread roots.

At last the Soviet put together a draft resolution. It stressed that soldiers’ committees were important. It proposed soviet democracy within units, combined with military discipline on duty. The soldiers, the gathering urged, should send representatives to the Duma Committee’s Military Commission, and recognise its authority – in so far as it did not deviate from the opinion of the Soviet.

In that extraordinary conditional clause, radicalism and conciliation swirled together but did not mix.

Newly resolute, the soldiers went to present these decisions to the Military Commission’s Colonel Engelhardt. They demanded that he pass an order for the election of, as he later recalled, ‘the junior officers’. On behalf of the Duma Committee, however, Rodzianko immediately rejected this left compromise, leaving Engelhardt to placate the furious soldiers as best he could.

The jockeying was not yet done: later that evening, mandated by the Soviet, they returned to the Military Commission to request of Engelhardt that regulations regarding military organisation be drawn up, in collaboration with the Duma Committee. When he rejected this further overture, the soldiers took their angry leave.

‘So much the better,’ one exclaimed as they went. ‘We will write them ourselves.’

At 6 p.m., in the Soviet, a packed Executive Committee, soon joined by several new delegates mandated by the soldiers – Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, independents, one lonely Kadet – resumed their discussions on power. Once again, the moderates called for active coalition with the Duma Committee. But the prevailing position, as put by Sukhanov, an independent intellectual close to the left Mensheviks, was that the Soviet’s ‘task’ was, rather, to ‘compel’ the reluctant liberal bourgeoisie to take power. In the Menshevik model, they were the necessary agent, after all, of a necessary, and necessarily bourgeois, revolution. And excessively stringent conditions for compromise, of course, risked dissuading this timorous bourgeois liberalism from fulfilling its historic role.

On such a basis, the Ispolkom thrashed out nine conditions for its support of a provisional government:

1)an amnesty for political and religious prisoners;

2)freedom of expression, publication and strikes;

3)the introduction of a democratic republic by universal, equal, direct, secret – male – suffrage;

4)preparation for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, towards a permanent government;

5)replacement of the police force by a people’s militia;

6)elections to local administrative bodies as per point three;

7)abolition of discrimination based on class, religion or nationality;

8)self-government of the army, including election of officers;

9)no withdrawal from Petrograd or disarmament of revolutionary army units.

Crucially, as befitting its self-perceived role as overseer, the committee also voted, thirteen to eight, that its members should not serve in the cabinet of the provisional government the Duma Committee would create.

These were moderate demands. The left in the room was mostly quiet: all the upheaval had left the Bolsheviks, in particular, floundering somewhat, uncertain as to how to iterate their differentia specifica of consistent anti-liberalism.

The most radical points in the list were those concerning the army. These came from the soldiers’ representatives, furious at Engelhardt’s intransigence. And their anger was not yet spent.

The exhausted executive delegated a small group to join the soldiers in formalising their particular demands. They crowded together into a small room, Sokolov hunched at a dark desk, scribbling for them, translating into legalese. Half an hour later they emerged with what Trotsky would call ‘a charter of freedom of the revolutionary army’, and ‘the single worthy document of the February Revolution’, one put forward not by the Soviet Executive but by the soldiers themselves – Order Number 1.

Order Number 1 consisted of seven points:

1)election of soldiers’ committees in military units;

2)election of their representatives to the Soviet;

3)subordination of soldiers to the Soviet in political actions;

4)subordination of soldiers to the Military Commission – in so far, again and crucially, as its orders did not deviate from the Soviet’s;

5)control of weapons by soldiers’ committees;

6)military discipline while on duty, with full civil rights at other times;

7)abolition of officers’ honorary titles and of officers’ use of derogatory terms for their men.

The order gave priority to the power of the Soviet over that of the Duma Committee, and put the weapons of the Petrograd garrison at the Soviet’s disposal. And yet that Soviet’s Executive Committee, with its strange cocktail of Jesuitical Marxism and political hesitancy, did not want the power thus bestowed. However under-enforced it would go on to be, whatever an embarrassment it might prove to the more cautious, in essence Order Number 1 was a severe rebuke to traditional military authority – and it would remain so, as a clarion.

Its last two points were a military articulation of the insistence on honour, on human dignity, for which the most radical workers had striven since 1905. Soldiers were, up to February, still subject to grotesque humiliations. They could not receive books or newspapers, belong to any political societies, attend lectures or the theatre, without permission. They could not wear civilian clothes off-duty. They could not eat in restaurants or ride in streetcars. And their officers referred to them by humiliating nicknames and using those superior linguistic forms. Hence this fight against belittling familiarity, the class spite of grammar.

Soldiers, like workers and others, demanded to be addressed with the respectful ‘Citizen’, a term spreading so widely it was as if it had been ‘invented just now!’ the poet Michael Kuzmin wrote.

The revolution and its language seduced him: ‘Tough sandpaper has polished all our words.’

General Ivanov and his shock troops arrived late in Tsarskoe Selo, where the tsarina, dressed as a nurse, was tending her measles-infected children. She was fearful that Ivanov’s presence might inflame the political situation, but his mission was already over: word came from Alexeev that he was not to proceed.

A little before 8 p.m., the tsar himself arrived at Pskov. Rodzianko had promised to meet him there, but now he sent apologies. He was, unknown to Nicholas, preparing for negotiations between the Duma Committee and the Soviet.

A General Ruzskii was in command of forces around the medieval city of Pskov. When he came to greet the tsar, the general arrived late, harassed, brusque, and wearing rubber boots. This was a borderline seditious lack of pomp. The tsar forbore. He gave the general permission to speak freely. He asked him for his assessment of the situation.

The old ways, Ruzskii offered carefully, had run their course.

Perhaps, he suggested, the tsar might adopt a formula such as ‘the sovereign reigns and the government rules’.

A constitutional monarchy? The mere insinuation provoked in Nicholas a kind of glazed satori of his own limits. This ‘was incomprehensible’ to him, he muttered. To come around to something like that, he said, he would have to be reborn.

At 11:30 p.m., as the Soviet and Duma committees prepared to meet in Petrograd, Nicholas received a telegram that General Alexeev had sent him hours before, at the same time as he had called off the tsar’s troops.

‘It is impossible’, Nicholas read, ‘to ask the army calmly to wage war while a revolution is in progress in the rear.’

Alexeev begged the tsar to appoint a cabinet of national confidence, imploring him to sign a draft manifesto to this effect, that members of the Duma Committee had been hurriedly formulating and in support of which they had been collecting endorsements – pointedly including one from the tsar’s cousin, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich.

To the tsar, this – from the loyal Alexeev – was a severe blow. He pondered. At last he recalled Ruzskii and ordered him to relay to Rodzianko and Alexeev his consent – that the Duma should form a cabinet. Then he cabled Ivanov, rescinding his command and ordering him not to proceed to Petrograd.

By then, that order, of course, like the man who gave it, was redundant.

At midnight on 1 March, Sukhanov, Chkheidze, Steklov and Sokolov of the Soviet crossed from one side of the Tauride Palace to the other on a mission Sukhanov had initiated, one neither quite official nor quite unsanctioned. They were meeting their Duma counterparts, to discuss terms for the Soviet’s support for the Duma in taking power.

Close to the left of the Mensheviks, Sukhanov was a clever, waspish, sardonic witness of this year, with an uncanny ability to be present at the key moments of history. In his memoirs, that night is vivid.

Below its high ceiling the Duma’s meeting room was foul with cigarette butts, bottles, and the smell from plates of half-eaten food which made the famished socialists salivate. Ten Duma representatives were there, including Milyukov, Rodzianko and Lvov. Technically a Soviet man, Kerensky was also present. He kept uncharacteristically quiet. Rodzianko sulked and obsessively sipped soda water. For the most part it was Pavel Milyukov, of the Kadets, who spoke for the Committee, and Sukhanov who spoke for the Soviet.

The groups gauged the distance between them. On two key political questions, the war and the redistribution of land, they were quite divided. These issues, then, they avoided. Those aside, liberals and socialists – the latter disinclined to dissuade the former from taking power – were pleasantly surprised at how smoothly the negotiations proceeded.

Though he accepted that Nicholas himself must go, the Anglophile Milyukov dreamed of keeping the institution of the monarchy. Could Nicholas, he mused, be persuaded to abdicate in favour of his son, under the regency of the tsar’s brother Michael? As if recollecting the present company of republican leftists, Milyukov hastened to describe the pair as ‘a sick child … and a thoroughly stupid man’. That notion, Chkheidze told him, was unrealistic as well as unacceptable.

It was established that troublesome points could wait until the convening of a Constituent Assembly, so this question, too, was shelved. Point three of the Soviet’s nine, about a ‘democratic republic’, was dropped.

To avoid trouble in the short term, Milyukov, with curled lip, agreed not to relocate the city’s revolutionary troops. What he would not countenance, however, was the election of officers. For the liberals and for the right, what this would mean was the destruction of the army. And what of Order Number 1? Troops to obey the government only in so far as its orders did not conflict with the Soviet’s? The idea was appalling.

Shulgin interjected. He was never as diplomatic as Milyukov. If the Soviet had the power implied in that order, he coldly suggested, they should immediately arrest the Duma Committee and set up government alone.

To actually take power was, of course, the last thing the flustered socialists wanted.

It was at that moment that an agitated group of army officers abruptly arrived to interrupt the discussion. They called Shulgin outside.

The revolution has its mysteries. This perfectly timed intervention is one. The identities of the officers remain unclear, as does their precise message. Whoever they were, they seem to have intimated to Shulgin that opposing Order Number 1, that night, would mean bloodshed. Perhaps even be a massacre of officers.

Whatever the source of the opaque intercession, it proved vital. On his return to the room, Shulgin agreed that the Soviet need not rescind Order Number 1, but that it would issue a second order to soften it.

The Duma Committee had its own demands. The Soviet Executive Committee, it insisted, must restore order and re-establish contact between soldiers and officers. Much as the fact might stick in the conservative craw, it was clear that the Ispolkom was the only body that might have the power to do this. And the Ispolkom must proclaim the Provisional Government, agreed between itself and the Duma Committee, legitimate.

Milyukov had girded himself for struggle on such points. He was agreeably surprised by the Soviet representatives’ ready – even eager – acquiescence.

It was 3 a.m. on 2 March when the meeting adjourned. Not everyone, though, could afford to sleep: some still had other urgent business.

It was very soon thereafter that a strange truncated two-car train hauled out from Petrograd’s Warsaw Station, shedding light into the night. Escorted by guards, it carried Shulgin and Alexander Guchkov, a conservative Octobrist politician, on a mission to reshape history. The two right-wingers had taken on themselves an unpleasant task: they had volunteered to go to meet the tsar, to try to persuade him to abdicate.

At station after station along the route, the platform and their train were invaded by crowds of soldiers and civilians, ignoring the cold, buoyed by insurgency, desperate for details, all in excited debate. At Lugin and Gatchina rebellious soldiers greeted the travellers enthusiastically: as representatives of the Duma, and thus, in many minds, of the revolution itself, Guchkov and Shulgin had to give speech after brief speech.

The early morning dragged, then the day, as the agitated, impatient men prepared for their task, not knowing it was already superfluous.

One reason the tsar had chosen to go to Pskov was its connection by wire to the capital. In a communications room deep in the Tauride Palace, there was a Hughes machine. Invented more than a half-century previously, this telegraphic apparatus was an intricate tangle of brass wheels, wires and wood, its lettered black and white keyboard designed to mimic a piano’s. At such machines, as the print wheel turned, virtuoso operators would ‘play’ the text of messages, and at the other end of the connection, a long ribbon of words would emerge.

Russia’s was an extensive empire of wires, running mostly through post offices and alongside railways. Along them passed events and opinions, information, dissent, order, confusion and clarity, spreading out in the staccato clatter of keys struck and unspooling paper, each party dictating one sentence at a time to trained operators at their keyboards.

At 3:30 a.m., very soon after Guchkov and Shulgin left, Rodzianko connected to Pskov on the Hughes machine. At the other end, through his own telegrapher, a bleary Ruzskii conveyed the good news that Nicholas, then fretfully scribbling in his diary in his private train carriage, had agreed at last to form a responsible ministry.

‘It is obvious’, responded Rodzianko, ‘that His Majesty and you do not realise what is going on here.’

Stunned, Ruzskii watched Rodzianko’s devastating message chatter out, word by word. The opportunity had been missed. The time for ministries was over.

Accordingly, at 5 a.m., with Rodzianko still only halfway through that momentous exchange, Milyukov met the lawyer Sokolov and the independent leftist Sukhanov from the Soviet, to formalise their collaboration.

The proclamation, Milyukov would later crow, enjoined the people to restore order, which was ‘almost the same thing that [he, Milyukov] … had been telling the soldiers from the platform of the regiment barracks. And it was accepted for publication in the name of the Soviet!’ There was no reference to the election of officers. Nor did the Soviet’s Executive Committee interfere with the selection of the new cabinet. The Duma Committee offered positions to the two members of the Soviet to whom it had already made overtures, Chkheidze and Kerensky. Such government roles the Soviet had already in principle refused.

This decision would soon be dramatically overturned.

The long exchange between Rodzianko and Ruzskii continued. As was usual, it was also relayed to other relevant parties on the lines. The calamitous information spread out. At 6 a.m., one of the recipients, General Danilo of the northern front, ordered telegraphists to forward it to Mogilev, to General Alexeev.

Alexeev instantly understood the magnitude of what he read. At 8:30 a.m., he ordered Pskov staff to wake the tsar and relay to him the conversation’s contents.

‘All etiquette must be ignored,’ he insisted. His urgency was not shared. The tsar, he was coldly informed, was sleeping.

Alexeev knew it would take representations from the army, one of the few institutions Nicholas respected, to make him understand, to bow to the inevitable. The general sent the text of the explosive discussion on to the commanders of Russia’s fleets and fronts, asking them to respond with their recommendations to the tsar.

It was not until after 10 a.m. that the hapless Ruzskii at last brought to the tsar the transcript of his conversation with Rodzianko. He handed it over. The tsar read. When he was done, he gazed at the ceiling for a long time. He murmured that he was born for unhappiness.

Ruzskii, pale and terrified, read aloud Alexeev’s mass telegram to the generals. There could be no mistaking its implication. The tsar must abdicate.

Nicholas remained silent.

Ruzskii waited. The tsar stood up at last. Apocalypse glowered. The tsar announced that he was going for lunch.

Some 1,400 miles away in Zurich, Lenin turned to page 2 of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. There, a short report informed of a revolution in Petrograd. Lenin, too, looked up in thought, his eyes wide.

That morning, Milyukov came to the Tauride Palace’s huge Ekaterina Hall to announce the Provisional Government to the revolutionary crowd gathered there. As he listed the cabinet, the room jeered in bewilderment at the names that were unfamiliar, and in disgust at those they knew.

There was one appointment, though, that drew applause: the role of justice minister had been filled by that popular SR (as he now declared himself) Alexander Kerensky. This despite the fact that the Executive Committee of the Soviet had agreed that its members would not take cabinet positions.

Milyukov was adroit. He deployed a few revolutionary slogans to win over his sceptical audience, fielding their barbs with aplomb. When the shout came, ‘Who elected you?’ he responded immediately: ‘It was the Russian Revolution that elected us!’ One thing, however, he could not sell: the continuation of the royal dynasty. When he announced ‘only’ Nicholas’s abdication – to which, of course, Nicholas himself had not yet agreed – the incandescent crowd roared.

The tsar’s departure was, of course, a calamity to some in the country. As Milyukov sparred with the revolutionaries, across the city ten-year-old Zinaida Schakovsky and her classmates were at assembly in the hall of the Empress Catherine Institute for Young Ladies of the Nobility. Zinaida was confused: the older pupil leading the school prayers seemed to have skipped the usual wishes for the tsar and his family. Now she was stumbling over unfamiliar replacement words, unsure how to pronounce ‘Let us pray for the Provisional Government.’ The girl paused and began to cry. And as a bewildered Zinaida looked on, the teachers took out their handkerchiefs and wept too, and so did all the girls around her, and so did she, without knowing what it was she mourned.

No such sobs echoed through the Tauride corridors. Word began to reach the palace that soldiers were looting the houses of the rich and arresting any they considered royalists. Nicholas’s intransigence was threatening national stability.

The workers thronging the corridors, fresh from Milyukov’s announcement, hunted Soviet representatives, demanding to know from them whether it was true that the monarchy was still in place. And making it very clear that, if so, the task was unfinished.

That afternoon, the Petrograd Soviet gathered to debate what its Executive Committee had agreed with the Duma Committee. But not long after the stormy general session began, at 2 p.m., the proceedings were interrupted by a commotion. Kerensky. He came striding in, raising his voice, begging to speak. Chkheidze, in the chair, hesitated, but the gathered delegates demanded he allow the intervention.

Kerensky mounted the platform. He projected for the crowd. ‘Comrades,’ he said, ‘do you trust me?’

Yes, the crowd shouted, yes, they trusted him.

‘I speak, comrades, with all my soul,’ he continued, tremulous. ‘And if it is needed to prove this, if you do not trust me, then I am ready to die.’

Again, the crowd cheered his theatrics.

Kerensky had, he informed the room, just then received an invitation to be minister of justice in the Provisional Government. And he had been given five minutes to decide. Without time to consult the Soviet, with no choice but to grab history by the tail, he had agreed. And now he had come to ask his comrades’ approval.

As the historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has remarked, this was an extremely long five minutes: Kerensky had in fact received the invitation the previous day, and accepted earlier that morning.

His first act as minister, Kerensky exclaimed, had been to release all political prisoners – a measure which, in reality, had been agreed earlier by the Executive Committee with their Duma counterparts. Of course, having no formal Soviet authorisation to accept the position, he told the room, he hereby respectfully resigned his post as Soviet vice chair. However! He would – provided only that his comrades, and the masses for whom they spoke, wished him to do so – take up that role again. The choice was theirs.

Cheers. Ecstasy. He should, indeed, the delegates hurrahed, keep his Soviet position, too.

A few more histrionics later, Kerensky left, too rapidly for any challenge from his bewildered, outmanoeuvred colleagues on the executive. He had shrewdly banked on their unwillingness to risk a fight. With this mendacious coup de théâtre, his breach of the Ispolkom’s directive post factum was mandated, and his position in the government backed by the Soviet assembly.

With many of their militants now released from jail, the Russian Bureau of the Bolsheviks’ Central Committee, set up by Shlyapnikov in 1915 to represent the party leadership in Russia itself and recently reconstituted by him (despite the obstruction of police spies), began to function as something of an ersatz Central Committee tout court. Initially under three members – Shlyapnikov, Molotov and Zalutsky – this operation continued while most of the formal members of the actual CC, including Lenin, Zinoviev, Stalin, Kamenev and others, were abroad or in Siberia.

In the Soviet, the Russian Bureau promptly introduced a resolution declaring the new Provisional Government to be ‘representative of the grand bourgeoisie and big landowners’, and thus incapable of realising revolutionary aims. It appealed again, somewhat nebulously, for a ‘provisional revolutionary government’. The motion was slapped down.

And despite such radical declarations from some Bolsheviks – especially those in the Vyborg ward of Petrograd – when the vote to accept the transfer of power to the unelected Provisional Government came, of the forty Bolsheviks in the Soviet General Assembly, only fifteen voted against. This illustrates the political confusion, the degree of vacillation and moderation on the revolution’s left flank in those heady early days.

2 March, 2:30 p.m. The tsar paced the platform of the Pskov station. Hovering at a respectful distance, keeping anxious watch, an entourage of nobles and sycophants.

Nicholas turned to them. He requested the presence of Generals Ruzskii, Savic and Danilov. And they should bring, he said, all the generals’ telegrams.

He received the men in his private carriage. As the tsar walked restlessly up and down, Grand Duke Nikolaevich begged him ‘on his knees’ to surrender the crown. All the generals cursed the ‘bandits’ of the Provisional Government, excoriated their perfidy, railed against them – but, that denunciation done, they admitted they faced a fait accompli.

Speak freely, the tsar urged them. They told him he must go. There was no other option, Danilov said. Savic stammered, struggled to speak, concurred.

The tsar stopped by his desk and turned away to stare out of the window at the winter. He was silent for a very long time. He grimaced.

‘I have made up my mind,’ he said at last, turning. ‘I have decided to abdicate the throne in favour of my son.’

The tsar crossed himself. His companions did the same.

‘I thank you for your excellent and loyal service,’ Nicholas said. ‘I trust it will continue under my son.’ He dismissed them, so he might compose the necessary telegrams to Alexeev and Rodzianko.

Count Vladimir Frederiks hurried through the carriage to tell the tsar’s waiting retinue the news. They were thunderstruck. Some began to weep. Admiral Nilov decided that Ruzskii was to blame, and swore that he would execute him. Vladimir Voeikov, Commandant of Court, and Colonel Naryshkin rushed to the Hughes apparatus to stop the keys and wires doing their work, to demand the return of Nicholas’s telegrams. But their world had passed: Ruzskii informed them that they were too late.

He was at least half-lying. He had sent the tsar’s telegram to Alexeev, and, receiving it, the general immediately commissioned a manifesto of abdication. But when Ruzskii heard that the Duma men Guchkov and Shulgin were on their way, he kept back Nicholas’s message to Rodzianko. It seems he wanted to hand it to them personally.

While his hangers-on floundered in rearguard action, the tsar himself was engaged in an urgent private conversation. His doctor was telling him plainly that the young haemophiliac Alexis, on whom the burden of the crown was now set to fall, was unlikely to live long.

Ruzskii gave orders for Guchkov and Shulgin to be brought to him without delay. But when at 9 p.m. they finally arrived, carrying a makeshift abdication act that Shulgin had scrawled en route, in one final spasm of court infighting and machination they were taken instead directly to the imperial salon car, without Ruzskii’s knowledge. There commenced a last, bleak, Romanovian comedy.

Guchkov began to hold forth to Nicholas about the threat facing Russia. In tones verging on menace, he told the tsar there was only one course left. As he spoke, Ruzskii entered. He was aghast to see the two newcomers, let alone to realise that they were trying to persuade the silent tsar to do what he had already agreed to do.

Ruzskii interrupted, blurting out this information to the stunned men. As he spoke, Ruzskii handed Nicholas his signed, unsent telegram for Rodzianko – and his stomach pitched to see the tsar fold it up and put it absently away. To do with it who knew what?

‘I deliberated during the morning and was ready to abdicate the throne in favour of my son, in the name of good, peace, and the salvation of Russia,’ the tsar said. Ruzskii’s heart lurched. ‘But now, reconsidering the situation, I have come to the conclusion that because of his illness, I must abdicate at the same time for my son as well as for myself, since I cannot part with him.’

And to the bewilderment of all present, he named his brother Michael as his successor.

Shulgin and Guchkov floundered. Shulgin and Guchkov rallied. ‘Your Majesty,’ Guchkov said, ‘the human feelings of a father have spoken in you, and politics has no place in the matter. Therefore we cannot object to your proposal.’

They must, though, they insisted, have a signed declaration. Embarrassed at the sight of Alexeev’s professional abdication draft, Shulgin withdrew his own scrappy version. The details were finessed: ‘Not wishing to be separated from Our beloved son, We hand Our succession to Our brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich.’ The declaration was backdated by hours, to avoid any implication that Nicholas had acted under pressure from the Duma Committee. As indeed he had. At 11:40 p.m., the tsar signed, and ceased to be tsar.

At 1 a.m. on 3 March, Nicholas Romanov’s train left Pskov for Mogilev.

In a rare glimpse of something like an inner life, the erstwhile autocrat confided to his diary that he was suffering from ‘gloomy feelings’.

Guchkov and Shulgin rushed back to Petrograd, where word of Nicholas’s decision had set off a storm of intrigue among their colleagues. When their train arrived at the capital in the early light, they experienced the anti-monarchist mood first-hand.

The station was full of milling soldiers, eager for information. They surrounded the returnees and pressed them into yet another speech. Shulgin held forth. He read out Nicholas’s abdication impassionedly. But when he concluded, ‘Long Live Emperor Michael III!’ what cheers he provoked were distinctly underwhelming. Just then, in a moment of cruel, broad irony, he was called to the station telephone, where a cautious Milyukov begged him not yet to make public exactly the information he just had.

Guchkov, meanwhile, was also trying to drum up enthusiasm – to a meeting of militant railway workers. When he told them of Michael’s ascension, the reaction was of such violent hostility that one speaker demanded his arrest. It was only with the help of a sympathetic soldier that he escaped.

Shulgin and Guchkov hurtled by car across the city to 12 Millionnaya, the sumptuous apartments of the Grand Duke’s wife Princess Putiatina. There, at 9:15 a.m., Nicholas’s brother met with the exhausted members of the Provisional Government and Duma Committee that had shaped it.

By now, it was only Milyukov – invoking Greater Russia, courage, patriotism – who was still bent on retaining the monarchy. Given the insurrectionary mood in Petrograd, most others were opposed to the Grand Duke’s accession: when Shulgin and Guchkov arrived, their station stories gave the naysayers more weight. If he were crowned, Kerensky told the Grand Duke, ‘I cannot vouch for the life of Your Highness.’

That morning, as at Tsarskoe Selo Alexandra in her nurse’s uniform was informed of her husband’s abdication, and, weeping, she prayed that the ‘two snakes’, ‘the Duma and the revolution’, would kill each other, her brother-in-law debated with the first snake over how best to defeat the second.

At about 1 p.m., after hours of discussion and a long moment of solitude, of private soul-searching, Michael returned to his unwelcome guests. He asked Rodzianko and Lvov, another Kadet, whether they could vouch for his safety if he became tsar.

They could not.

‘Under these circumstances,’ he said, ‘I cannot assume the throne.’

Kerensky leapt out of his chair. ‘Your Highness,’ he burst out, ‘you are a noble man!’ The other participants sat numb.

It was lunchtime, and the Romanov dynasty was finished.

That morning, the press, including the new Soviet paper Izvestia, proclaimed the new Provisional Government, constituted on the basis of the eight points agreed between Soviet and Duma Committee. Izvestia called for its support ‘in so far as the emerging government acts in the direction of realising [its] obligations’.

‘In so far as’: in Russian, ‘postol’ku-poskol’ku’. A formulation key to Dual Power, and to its contradictions.

Here, in the smoke of the wretched devil’s sabbath

In the noisy reign of petty demons

They said, ‘There are no fairy tales on earth.’

They said, ‘The fairy tale has died.’

Oh, don’t believe it, don’t believe the funeral march.

A burst of re-enchantment. On 4 March, to the transported delight of vast swathes of the populace, the press made public Nicholas’s abdication and Michael’s refusal of the throne. This was the day that Delo naroda, the SR newspaper, told its readers that they had been lied to, that not only were fairy stories real but that they were living through one.

Once upon a time, it continued, ‘there lived a huge old dragon’, which devoured the best and bravest citizens ‘in the haze of madness and power’. But a valiant hero had appeared, a collective hero. ‘My champion’, wrote Delo naroda, ‘is the people.’

The hour has come for the beast’s end,

The old dragon will coil up and die.

It was a new, post-dragon world. There came a flurry of far-reaching reforms, unthinkable scant days before. The Provisional Government abolished the loathed police department. No more Pharaohs. It began to dismiss Russia’s regional governors. Cautiously, it probed concessions to and accommodations with the empire’s regions and minorities. Within days of the revolution, the Muslims in the Duma formed a group calling for a convention on 1 May, to discuss self-determination. On 4 March, in Kiev, Ukrainian revolutionaries, nationalists, social democrats and radicals formed the Ukrainian Central Rada, or council. On 6 March the Provisional Government restored partial self-rule to Finland, reinstating the Finnish constitution after thirteen years of direct rule, and announced that a forthcoming Constituent Assembly would finally decide relations – such deferral emerging as the favoured technique for evading political difficulties. On the 16th it granted independence to Poland – though Poland being occupied by enemy powers, this was a symbolic gesture.

In these early days, the Soviet socialists attempted oversight of the government. ‘Members of the Provisional Government!’ exhorted the Menshevik paper Rabochaya gazeta. ‘The proletariat and the army await immediate orders from you concerning the consolidation of the Revolution and the democratisation of Russia.’ The masses’ role, then, was to offer the liberal not only support, but obedience – but not unconditional. ‘Our support is contingent on your actions.’ This was support of the government postol’ku-poskol’ku. In so far as. As if that aspiration could be coherent.

In this context, the Soviet’s proclamation of 5 March was telling. This was softening of the contentious Order Number 1 that it had promised the Duma Committee: Order Number 2.

What Guchkov had wanted was an unequivocal assurance from the Soviet that Order Number 1 only applied to troops in the rear. In fact, Order Number 2 was ambiguous on that point. It did stipulate that even in Petrograd, army committees should not intervene in military affairs; soldiers were ‘bound to submit to all orders of the military authorities that have reference to the military service’. But the Ispolkom still implied support for the election of officers.

The following day, it agreed to install its own commissars in all regiments, to complement the link between soldiers and Soviet, and to exercise oversight of the government’s relations with the forces. But with such relations and its own enshrined in documents such as Order Number 2 – equivocal, evasive, attempting to straddle compromise and conviction – the parameters of the commissars’ power would not always be clear.

Far-left opposition to the Provisional Government – on the basis of the class coalition of its make-up, its defencist continuation of the war – was not initially unanimous, even among the Bolsheviks. On 3 March, the party’s Petersburg Committee adopted what leading activists would later term a ‘semi-Menshevik’ resolution: for a republic, but withholding opposition to the Provisional Government postol’ku-poskol’ku – so long as its policies were ‘consistent with the interests … of the people’. Such conciliationism would soon face a severe shock.

Marooned in Zurich, Lenin was urgently amassing information about the homeland where he had spent only a few months in the last fifteen years. On 3 March, he laid out his political position to his fellow Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, a provocative and brilliant thinker on a range of issues, most notoriously on sexual morality, regarding which her attitudes scandalised even many of her comrades.