Russian Provisional Government

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian Provisional Government ruled one of the world's largest empires for exactly eight months in 1917, then ceased to exist overnight. It was announced two days before Nicholas II signed away the throne on the 2nd of March, and it collapsed when Bolshevik Red Guards seized the Tsar's Winter Palace on the Neva River bank in late October. In between, it tried to govern a country tearing itself apart, fought a disastrous offensive against Germany, survived an armed sailor uprising, and faced down an attempted military coup. The questions worth sitting with are simple: why did a government that passed arguably the most liberal legislation in Europe at the time fall so quickly? And who or what actually held power in Russia during those eight months?

• 2. A Government Born in Crisis

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  Pavel Milyukov lit the first fuse on the 1st of November 1916, when he attacked the Boris Stürmer government from the floor of the Duma. Two more prime ministers followed Stürmer in rapid succession, each lasting only a few weeks. By the time Nicholas II abdicated on the 2nd of March, Russia had two rival institutions operating from the same building, the Tauride Palace: the imperial State Duma and the Petrograd Soviet, each competing for control.

  Mikhail Rodzianko headed the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, which named twenty-four commissars after Prime Minister Nikolai Golitsyn was forced to resign. Rodzianko suspended the Fourth State Duma and temporarily assumed formal state power. The Provisional Government itself was officially formed on the 15th of March 1917 by the committee working alongside the Petrograd Soviet, over the protests of the Bolsheviks.

  The new government's public announcement, published in Izvestia, promised full political amnesty, freedom of the press and assembly, the abolition of hereditary and religious class restrictions, and the replacement of the police with an elected public militia. It declared preparations for elections to a Constituent Assembly based on universal, equal, and secret vote. The announcement also pledged that military circumstances would not be used as a pretext for delaying any of these reforms.

  Milyukov's committee offered the regency to Nicholas II's brother, Grand Duke Michael, as next tsar. Michael chose not to accept what was described as a poisoned chalice, deferring any decision to the future Constituent Assembly.

• 3. The Problem of Dual Power

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  Minister of War Alexander Guchkov put the situation plainly: "We do not have authority, but only the appearance of authority; the real power lies with the Soviet." The Petrograd Soviet controlled the army and the railroads, giving it the practical means to enforce policy. The Provisional Government, by contrast, lacked the ability to make those same policies stick.

  Local soviets, mostly socialist political organizations, exercised their own judgment about which Provisional Government laws to implement. In rural areas, institutions were quick to apply national laws about peasant use of idle land when those laws aligned with their interests. But that discretion cut both ways: policies that did not serve local interests were simply ignored.

  The political ground beneath the government was also shifting. Before February 1917, the Kadet Party had been the main opposition to the tsar. After the revolution, it became the dominant force inside the new government, effectively transforming from an opposition party into a ruling one. Meanwhile, urban workers who had once supported the moderate Menshevik Party drifted toward the more radical Bolsheviks as the year progressed. In the countryside, the Socialist Revolutionary Party won peasant support with its platform of agrarian land reform. The Kadets, once reformers, found themselves cast as 'new conservatives' by a political spectrum that had moved sharply left.

  Historian Harold Whitmore Williams described the eight months of Provisional Government rule as the history of the steady and systematic disorganization of the army. That disorganization would prove fatal when the government needed military force most.

• 4. The April Crisis and Coalition Shift

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  On the 18th of April 1917, Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov sent a note to Russia's Allied governments promising to continue the war to its 'glorious conclusion.' The reaction was immediate. On the 20th and the 21st of April, massive demonstrations of workers and soldiers erupted across Petrograd demanding Milyukov's resignation. Counter-demonstrations organized in his support followed.

  General Lavr Kornilov, then commanding the Petrograd military district, wanted to suppress the disorders. Premier Georgy Lvov refused to authorize force. The standoff ended with the Provisional Government accepting the resignations of both Milyukov and War Minister Guchkov. In their place came a proposal to the Petrograd Soviet to form a coalition cabinet.

  By the 22nd of April, agreement was reached: six socialist ministers joined the new government. Among them, Alexander Kerensky moved from Minister of Justice to Minister of War and Navy. The cabinet now included Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and non-party figures alongside the remaining Kadets.

  The coalition did not resolve the underlying tensions. Socialist ministers came under fire from their left-wing Soviet colleagues, forcing them into contradictory positions. The Bolsheviks, gaining ground in factory committees across Petrograd's industrial plants, opposed the government outright. The nickname given to Kerensky in this period captures the government's predicament: 'persuader-in-chief.'

• 5. The June Offensive and Its Aftermath

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  Britain and France pressed the Provisional Government to launch an offensive against Germany to relieve pressure on their forces in the west. Within the government, liberals persuaded socialists that a military success was needed to restore army morale, strengthen the government's bargaining position for eventual peace talks, and prevent the humiliation of a unilateral collapse.

  Kerensky, as Minister for War, undertook what was described as a whirlwind tour of the front lines, delivering passionate, near-hysterical speeches urging soldiers to act heroically. He told them, 'we revolutionaries, have the right to death.' The rhetoric worked briefly. Then Kerensky left, and the effect dissolved.

  The June Offensive started on the 16th of June and lasted three days before falling apart. Desertion rates were high. Soldiers mutinied. Some killed their own commanding officers rather than advance. Thousands of Russian soldiers died, and large swaths of territory were lost.

  In Petrograd, the failed offensive produced an immediate political explosion. On the 3rd of July, the machine-gun regiment voted for an armed demonstration, agreeing that marchers should proceed peacefully to the Tauride Palace to present demands. The following day, around twenty thousand armed sailors from the Kronstadt naval base arrived in Petrograd. Lenin addressed the crowd from Bolshevik headquarters but spoke with visible reluctance, his speech uncertain and barely lasting a minute. Violence escalated; Cossacks and Kadets positioned along Liteyny Avenue fired into the crowds; dozens were killed. Workers from the Putilov iron plant broke into the palace demanding full power to the Soviets. Trotsky's intervention, praising the 'Comrade Kronstadters, pride and glory of the Russian revolution,' helped defuse the immediate confrontation.

• 6. Kornilov, Collapse, and the Republic

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  Kerensky became Prime Minister on the 21st of July, following Prince Lvov's resignation. On the 24th of July, a new coalition cabinet composed mostly of socialists formed around him. But the Kadet ministers who had walked out over Ukrainian policy had not returned, and no stable majority held.

  In September 1917, General Lavr Kornilov, the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, moved troops toward Petrograd in what amounted to an attempted coup. Whether Kerensky had initially been part of a deal to bring Kornilov into a military directorship alongside him remains disputed. What happened next is not: Kerensky branded Kornilov's advancing forces counter-revolutionaries and ordered their arrest. The army, seeing this as a betrayal of Kornilov, became finally disloyal to the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks, armed by Kerensky himself because he had few other defenders, used the Red Guard to stop Kornilov's troops. The Soviet was seen as the force that saved Petrograd from military dictatorship. The Bolsheviks kept their weapons.

  Five days after Kornilov's attempted coup was suppressed, on the 1st of September, the Russian Republic was formally proclaimed. Kerensky signed the decree as Minister-President; Alexander Zarudny signed as Minister of Justice. The decree acknowledged that the coup 'spread turmoil in the ranks of the army and in the country' and transferred emergency governing power to a Directorate of five individuals. On the 12th of September, an All-Russian Democratic Conference convened and created a Pre-Parliament, with a Constitutional Assembly chaired by Professor N. I. Lazarev and the historian V. M. Gessen. Four days later, the Duma was formally dissolved by the Directorate.

• 7. The Fall of the Winter Palace

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  On the 24th of October, Kerensky accused the Bolsheviks of treason before the remaining delegates. Red Guard forces under Bolshevik command launched their final assault on the 24th through the 26th of October. Most government offices fell on the 25th. The Winter Palace, the last holdout of the Provisional Ministers, was seized on the 26th.

  Kerensky escaped and fled to Pskov, where he gathered loyal troops and attempted to retake the capital. Those troops captured Tsarskoe Selo but were defeated the following day at Pulkovo. Kerensky spent weeks in hiding before leaving Russia. He went into exile in France and eventually emigrated to the United States.

  A remnant of the government, called the Little Council or Underground Provisional Government, met briefly at the house of Sofia Panina in an attempt to organize resistance. The effort ended on the 28th of November with the arrest of Panina, Fyodor Kokoshkin, Andrei Ivanovich Shingarev, and Prince Pavel Dolgorukov. Panina was then brought to a political trial.

  Scholar Pavel Osinsky argued that the October Revolution reflected the failures of the Provisional Government as much as the strength of the Bolsheviks, describing the outcome as 'socialism by default' rather than 'socialism by design.' Historian Riasanovsky pointed to what he considered the government's worst mistake: delaying elections to the Constituent Assembly while fine-tuning the details of election law, time wasted as Russia descended into anarchy and economic chaos. By the time that Assembly finally met, Riasanovsky wrote, 'the Bolsheviks had already gained control of Russia.'