Formation of the Provisional Government

On the afternoon of 15 March 1917 (2 March in the Julian calendar), in the Catherine Hall of the Tauride Palace, the Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov announced the composition of Russia’s new government to a crowd of soldiers and workers. At its head stood Prince Georgy Lvov; Milyukov himself took foreign affairs, and Alexander Guchkov the ministry of war and the navy. The cabinet called itself the Provisional Government, because it was to govern only until a Constituent Assembly elected by the whole nation decided the form of the state. A few hours later, in Pskov, Tsar Nicholas II renounced the throne.

The British chronology of the war records the proclamation of the Provisional Government under 14 March and the appointments of Lvov, Milyukov and Guchkov under 15 March. In reality it was a single process: the composition of the cabinet was agreed on the night of 14–15 March, announced on 15 March, and the programme declaration with the list of ministers was published by the press on 16 March.

From the Duma Committee to a government

After the fall of the Golitsyn government, power in the capital was taken over on the night of 12–13 March by the Provisional Committee of the Duma, chaired by Mikhail Rodzianko. Its members had a list of ministers ready. The liberal opposition had been discussing it since 1915 and had agreed it in detail at the end of 1916. The candidate for prime minister was Lvov, chairman of the All-Russian Zemstvo Union and of Zemgor, the organisation of local governments which during the war supplied the army and cared for the wounded. Summoned from Moscow, he arrived in Petrograd on the morning of 14 March.

The Committee, however, had to reckon with a second centre of power. In the same palace sat the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which most of the mutinous garrison followed. On 14 March it issued Order No. 1, which subordinated the soldiers to it in political matters. Without its consent no government could hold on in the capital.

Night negotiations

Around midnight on 14–15 March representatives of the Duma Committee, the Kadet leadership and the Progressive Bloc sat down to talks with a delegation from the Soviet’s Executive Committee. The socialists, mostly Mensheviks, believed that Russia first faced a “bourgeois” revolution and did not want to join the government. They agreed that the cabinet should be formed by the Duma parties, but they set conditions. Milyukov, who led the negotiations for the Duma side, managed, according to historians, to talk them out of demanding the election of officers by soldiers and the immediate proclamation of a republic. The question of the form of the state was deferred to the Constituent Assembly.

The agreed programme had eight points: a full and immediate amnesty in all political and religious cases, including terrorist attacks, military mutinies and agrarian offences; freedom of speech, of the press, of association, of assembly and to strike, extended to servicemen within the limits allowed by wartime conditions; the abolition of all restrictions based on estate, religion and nationality; immediate preparations for convening a Constituent Assembly by universal, equal, secret and direct suffrage; the replacement of the police by a people’s militia with elected commanders; elections to local government on the same principles; the units that had taken part in the revolution to remain in Petrograd and not be disarmed; and finally, while strict discipline was maintained in the ranks and on duty, the removal of restrictions on soldiers’ exercise of civil rights.

Who joined the government

The cabinet had eleven members. Lvov became prime minister and also minister of the interior, Milyukov foreign minister, and Guchkov minister of war and the navy; Guchkov was the leader of the Octobrists and chairman of the Central War-Industries Committee. The ministries of communications, agriculture and education went to the Kadets Nikolai Nekrasov, Andrei Shingarev and Alexander Manuilov, a former rector of Moscow University. The textile industrialist Alexander Konovalov became minister of trade and industry, the not quite thirty-one-year-old sugar magnate Mikhail Tereshchenko minister of finance, Vladimir Lvov chief procurator of the Holy Synod, and the Octobrist Ivan Godnev (PL) state controller. The Kadets predominated, and Milyukov was in effect its chief architect.

The only socialist was the minister of justice, Alexander Kerensky, a Trudovik deputy and vice-chairman of the Soviet. The Soviet’s Executive Committee had decided earlier that its members would not join the government. So on 15 March Kerensky appealed directly to the Soviet’s assembly. He declared that he had accepted the portfolio because the representatives of the old regime would be in his hands, and that in the government he would be the guardian of the interests of democracy. The delegates gave him an ovation and in effect approved his decision.

Milyukov’s speech

On the afternoon of 15 March Milyukov presented the new government in the Catherine Hall. Someone in the crowd shouted: “Who elected you?” He replied that they had been chosen by the Russian revolution. His speech caused uproar, however, when he announced that the old despot would go and power would pass to a regent, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, on behalf of the heir to the throne, Alexei. In the evening angry officers came to the palace, and in the Soviet and on the streets voices were raised against the dynasty. Milyukov had to declare that he had spoken only for himself. The question of the monarchy was settled a day later, when Michael declined to accept the throne until the Constituent Assembly had decided.

Dual power

The Provisional Government had a double and fragile legal basis. Lvov had been appointed prime minister by Nicholas II himself, in a decree signed in Pskov together with the act of abdication, and in his act of 16 March Michael called on citizens to obey the government which had “come into being on the initiative of the State Duma”. Yet the new cabinet had no real power in the capital. The Soviet announced that it would support it “in so far as” it carried out the agreed programme, and reserved the right to supervise its actions. This arrangement came to be called dual power: formally Lvov’s cabinet governed, but the workers and soldiers stood behind the Soviet.

Even so, the first days brought a wave of support. Over the following days the government was recognised by the generals at the front, the zemstvos and the towns, and soon also by the Holy Synod and the Allied powers. Milyukov assured the Allies that Russia would honour its obligations and wage the war to a victorious end. It soon became clear, however, that it was precisely the question of war aims that most divided the cabinet and the Soviet. Lvov’s first government lasted less than two months. In May, after the crisis caused by Milyukov’s note on war aims, Milyukov and Guchkov left, and the socialists joined the government.