Fall of the Golitsyn government

On 13 March 1917 (28 February in the Julian calendar) Russia no longer had a government. The cabinet of Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, whom the Tsar had appointed in January, had ceased to function the day before, when the Petrograd garrison went over to the revolution. On the night of 12–13 March the Provisional Committee of the Duma announced that, in view of “the resignation of the entire membership of the former Council of Ministers”, power had passed into its hands. On 13 March the revolutionaries began arresting the ministers and dignitaries of the old regime. The British chronology of the war records separately under that day the dismissal of the prime minister, Golitsyn, and of the war minister, Belyaev. In reality no one formally dismissed them: the government simply fell apart, and the decisive events took place on 12 March.

The last meeting

As late as the evening of 11 March the ministers decided to prorogue the Duma, hoping that this would calm the situation. On the morning of 12 March it turned out that the army was mutinying. Golitsyn gathered some of the ministers at his home for consultations, and in the evening the cabinet met in the Mariinsky Palace. The war minister, Mikhail Belyaev, concluded that the only way to calm the city even a little was the immediate removal of the hated interior minister, Alexander Protopopov. The prime minister had no right to dismiss a minister, so he asked Protopopov to declare himself officially ill and step down. According to Golitsyn’s testimony, Protopopov agreed, stood up and left. It was about six in the evening.

In the evening the government sent the Tsar at Mogilev a telegram drafted by the foreign minister, Nikolai Pokrovsky, and the finance minister, Peter Bark. In it the ministers described their hopeless position: the army was going over to the workers. They asked for the immediate dismissal of the whole cabinet and for power to be entrusted to a person who would not arouse distrust in broad circles of society. The President of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, and the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, also came to the palace. Golitsyn and Rodzianko urged the Grand Duke to assume a temporary regency, even if it meant exceeding his powers, and to dismiss the government at once. Michael refused to act without his brother’s consent.

The Tsar’s reply came late in the evening. Nicholas II informed the prime minister that he was sending a general with troops to the capital, granted Golitsyn full powers in matters of civil administration and added that he “considered changes in personnel inadmissible in the present circumstances”. By then, however, the ministers had nothing left to govern. Golitsyn later testified that they went about “at a loss” and waited to be arrested. According to him, the meeting in the palace ended at about half past eleven at night. The ministers dispersed, and some of them went into hiding in the city.

Arrests

The first to be arrested was the chairman of the State Council, Ivan Shcheglovitov, a former minister of justice, who was detained on 12 March. On 13 March the remnants of the troops loyal to the Tsar left the Admiralty, and the commander of the military district, General Sergei Khabalov, was arrested. That same day Protopopov presented himself at the Tauride Palace and gave himself up to the revolutionaries. The detained ministers and officials were held in the so-called ministerial pavilion of the palace and then taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Belyaev, who according to Russian biographers had managed to destroy many secret documents before his arrest, was detained on 13 or 14 March, depending on the source.

Golitsyn himself hid for several days. Then he returned to his flat, wrote to Rodzianko that he placed himself at his disposal, and asked at most for house arrest. According to most accounts he was arrested on 13 March, but his testimony before the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry of the Provisional Government shows that Duma deputies came for him only several days later. The foreign minister, Pokrovsky, escaped arrest. On the morning of 13 March he told the ambassadors of France and Britain that most of his colleagues had fled, several had been arrested, and he himself was “awaiting his fate”.

The end of the old government

The Tsar never accepted the resignation of the Golitsyn cabinet. The government simply ceased to exist, and its place was taken by the Provisional Committee of the Duma, which sent its commissars to the ministries. As early as the morning of 13 March the deputy Alexander Bublikov occupied the Ministry of Communications in its name and sent a telegram to every railway station in the empire announcing that the Duma had taken power. Golitsyn was the last prime minister of tsarist Russia, and Belyaev the last tsarist minister of war.