April Crisis

On 3 May 1917 (20 April in the Julian calendar) the Petrograd newspapers printed the note that Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov had sent to the Allied governments two days earlier. In it he gave assurances that the revolution had not weakened Russia’s part in the common struggle and that the Russian people wished to carry the war on “to a decisive victory”. In the barracks and factories this was read as a betrayal of the promises the government had made a month earlier. That same day armed units of the garrison marched on the seat of the Provisional Government, demanding Milyukov’s resignation. So began the April Crisis, named after the Julian date, the first great upheaval after the February Revolution.

The note of 1 May

The dispute over war aims had been going on since March. The declaration of 9 April, a compromise between the government and the Petrograd Soviet, had been addressed only to the citizens of Russia. When the Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov returned from exile in April, he brought the news that no one in the West had noticed it. The Soviet therefore demanded that the government communicate it officially to the Allies. The Soviet leaders, as the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli later recalled, assumed that the note would contain only the text of the declaration, and did not even ask about its wording.

Milyukov, however, attached a covering note of his own to the declaration. On 1 May (18 April Old Style), the day on which Petrograd for the first time openly celebrated May Day according to the Western calendar, he instructed the Russian representatives in the Allied capitals to hand the note to the governments there. He wrote that the enemy was spreading “absurd” reports of Russia’s readiness for a separate peace with the Central Powers, and that the attached document refuted them best. The government’s principles, in his view, were in keeping with the ideas proclaimed by the statesmen of the Allied countries, especially by the president of the “great trans-Atlantic republic”. He went on to state that the nationwide determination to bring the world war to a decisive victory had only grown stronger, and that the government, in defending the rights of the country, “will fully observe the obligations assumed towards our allies”. Finally he expressed his conviction that the democracies would find the means to obtain the “guarantees and sanctions” needed to prevent new bloody clashes in the future. The government adopted the text unanimously.

The note did not say a word about Constantinople. For the socialists, however, it was clear that the assurance of keeping obligations covered the secret agreements of tsarism, including the promise of the Straits, and that “guarantees and sanctions” might mean annexations and indemnities. The Executive Committee of the Soviet received the text on the evening of 2 May and debated it until the morning. Chernov recalled that the note “literally shook” the majority of the Soviet, and Tsereteli believed that had Milyukov wanted to bring about a break between the Soviet and the government, he could not have found a better means. The committee, however, did not dare to stop its publication.

Soldiers at the Mariinsky Palace

On the morning of 3 May, when the note appeared in the papers, meetings began in the factories. The first to move were the soldiers of the reserve battalion of the Finland Life Guard Regiment. They were led onto the streets by Fyodor Linde, a member of the Executive Committee of the Soviet, a Social Democrat convinced that the war must go on, but in the name of democracy, not conquest. The battalion surrounded the Mariinsky Palace, the seat of the government, under the slogan “Down with Milyukov”. During the day other units of the garrison and sailors joined it, and towards evening banners reading “Down with the Provisional Government” appeared in the crowd of many thousands.

The ministers were not in the palace. According to Richard Pipes, they were meeting that day at the War Ministry because the minister, Alexander Guchkov, was ill. The commander of the Petrograd Military District, General Lavr Kornilov, arrived there and offered to disperse the demonstration by force. The ministers thought this unnecessary. Members of the Executive Committee, the Menshevik Matvei Skobelev and the Socialist Revolutionary Abram Gotz, went to the square in front of the palace, and Kornilov himself with them. They managed to persuade the soldiers to return to barracks. The chairman of the Soviet, the Menshevik Nikolay Chkheidze, is said to have repeated in the Tauride Palace at every piece of bad news that day: “That’s what he has done with his note!”

On 3 May the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks adopted a resolution by Vladimir Lenin, who had been in Petrograd since mid-April. The note, the resolution declared, proved that the Provisional Government was a government of capitalists, incapable of a peace without annexations, and that the way out was for the soviets to take all power. In the evening it was the government’s supporters who gathered at the Mariinsky Palace. A meeting between the ministers and a delegation of the Executive Committee went on there until late at night. The prime minister, Prince Georgy Lvov, rejected the Soviet’s charges, and the ministers painted a grim picture of the collapsing economy. Milyukov declared that a new note to the Allies was out of the question, and Lvov added that the government would rather give up power than agree to it. Chkheidze and Tsereteli finally agreed to settle for an explanation of the note’s contents for the citizens of Russia.

Shots on Nevsky Prospekt

On 4 May (21 April Old Style) more people came out onto the streets than the day before. The Kadets, Milyukov’s party, called on citizens to support the government against “anarchy”, and their supporters marched with slogans of confidence in the government and “Down with Lenin”. From the workers’ districts, especially the Vyborg Side, columns of the government’s opponents set off towards the centre. Chkheidze tried in person to turn the workers back, but without success. Some members of the Petrograd committee of the Bolsheviks put forward the slogan of the immediate overthrow of the government. On Nevsky Prospekt the two sides clashed and shots were fired. These were the first fatalities since the February Revolution, three people according to Pipes. Demonstrations also took place in Moscow and several other cities.

That day there was also an incident that showed where power in the capital lay. Kornilov ordered two batteries from the Mikhailovsky Artillery School to be sent to Palace Square, but a meeting of the school’s officers and men refused to carry out the order. The Executive Committee of the Soviet demanded that the general recall the troops and sent an appeal to the barracks that soldiers should not go out with arms without its consent. The garrison obeyed it. A few days later Kornilov resigned his post, not wishing, as he explained, to witness the disintegration of the army by the Soviet, and took command of the Eighth Army on the South-Western Front.

Explanation and agreement

On the evening of 4 May the Executive Committee considered the explanation sent by the government. In it decisive victory meant only the achievement of the aims of the declaration of 9 April, and “guarantees and sanctions” meant such means of preventing wars as the limitation of armaments and international courts. The left in the committee argued that this did not settle the dispute, but by a majority of 34 votes to 19 the “incident” was declared closed. The same evening a meeting of the Soviet attended by more than two thousand delegates adopted this resolution by an overwhelming majority, despite the opposition of the Bolsheviks, on whose behalf Lev Kamenev and Alexandra Kollontai spoke. Almost unanimously it also banned all meetings and street demonstrations for two days. The press published the explanation on 5 May, and the demonstrations stopped at once.

Significance

The crisis showed that the government had no force of its own in the capital, while the Soviet could bring crowds onto the streets with one vote and take them off again with another. Lenin later admitted at a party conference that the Petrograd committee of the Bolsheviks had “taken a little too far to the left” and that its slogan of overthrowing the government had been premature. The most important consequence, however, was the conviction that the government could not survive without the participation of the socialists. On 9 May Lvov’s cabinet announced that it wished to broaden its membership with representatives of forces that had so far not taken part in government. In mid-May Guchkov and Milyukov left it, and on 18 May the first coalition government with the participation of socialists was formed, in which Alexander Kerensky took the post of minister of war.