Georgy Lvov

Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov was the most respected figure in Russian local self-government. During the war he headed the All-Russian Zemstvo Union, which set up hospitals, evacuated the wounded and supplied the army wherever the bureaucracy failed. As a result, although he never sought power, he stood at the top of almost every list of a future “government of confidence”. After the February Revolution he became the first prime minister of the Provisional Government. He governed for less than four months, believing that the free Russian people would establish order by themselves. In July 1917, convinced that he could not halt the disintegration of the state, he handed power to Alexander Kerensky.

Before the war

He was born on 2 November 1861 (21 October in the Julian calendar) in Dresden. The Lvovs were an old princely family descended from the Rurikids, but they were not wealthy. He spent his childhood on the Popovka estate in Tula province, a few kilometres from Yasnaya Polyana, and knew the family of Leo Tolstoy well. When the family fell into debt, the Lvov brothers did not sell the estate; instead, working like peasants themselves, they turned it into a profitable fruit farm. Lvov recalled that this experience detached him from “high society” and made him a democrat. In 1885 he graduated in law from Moscow University and then worked in the offices dealing with peasant affairs. In 1893 he resigned in protest against the use of troops against peasants.

He devoted his whole life to the zemstvo, the rural local self-government. From 1900 to 1906 he chaired the board of the Tula provincial zemstvo. During the Russo-Japanese War he went to Manchuria at the head of a medical detachment raised by a dozen or so zemstvos, which numbered several hundred doctors, orderlies and nurses. His help for the wounded made him famous throughout the country. In 1906 he sat in the First Duma for the Kadets, although he never felt at ease in party politics. He then organised relief for the starving and for settlers in Siberia and the Far East, and in 1909 he travelled to the United States and Canada to study settlement. In 1913 the Moscow City Duma elected him mayor, but the interior minister, Nikolai Maklakov, refused to confirm the election. His wife, Countess Yulia Bobrinskaya, died in 1903. They had no children.

The Zemstvo Union

A few days after the outbreak of war, on 12 August 1914 (30 July Old Style), a congress of zemstvo representatives in Moscow founded the All-Russian Zemstvo Union for the Relief of Sick and Wounded Soldiers, and Lvov became its chief plenipotentiary. A similar Union of Towns was formed alongside it. The unions began with hospitals, hospital trains and feeding stations, but soon took on far more: they ordered uniforms and boots for the quartermaster service, dug trenches, fought epidemics, and helped refugees and soldiers’ families. The money came mainly from the state, because its own apparatus could not cope. According to Orlando Figes, in 1916 the union had 8,000 subordinate establishments, hundreds of thousands of employees and a budget of around two billion roubles. In the summer of 1915 the two unions formed a joint committee, known as Zemgor, also chaired by Lvov.

One of the ministers said in the autumn of 1915 that the prince was becoming the chairman of a kind of separate government: at the front people talked only of him, and he supplied the army, fed the hungry, healed the sick and set up barber’s shops for the soldiers. Either all this had to be wound up, or power had to be handed to him. The bureaucracy, and the minister Maklakov in particular, saw the unions as a Trojan horse of the opposition and obstructed their work. Yet the Tsar wrote on one of the memoranda of the right that public organisations must not be touched in wartime.

At the start of the war Lvov wanted above all to reconcile the nation with the government in a common effort. The defeats of 1915, the dismissal of Sukhomlinov and the supply shortages that came to light changed his views. In September 1915, after the Duma had been prorogued and the Tsar had assumed supreme command, he told a congress of the union that society no longer wished to remain in the passive role of the governed. He led a delegation of public organisations that was to ask the Tsar for a government enjoying the nation’s confidence, but Nicholas II refused to receive it. At heart Lvov remained a monarchist. Yet according to the mayor of Tiflis, Alexander Khatisov, at the end of 1916 he used him as an intermediary to sound out Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich on whether he would take the throne once his nephew had been removed. The Grand Duke refused.

Prime minister

When the Petrograd garrison mutinied on 12 March 1917, Lvov’s candidacy for prime minister had long been agreed. Summoned from Moscow, he arrived in the capital on 14 March. The next day Pavel Milyukov announced the composition of the Provisional Government, with Lvov as prime minister and minister of the interior. That same evening in Pskov, together with the act of abdication, Nicholas II signed a decree appointing him chairman of the Council of Ministers. The Tsar is said to have remarked only: “Ah, Lvov… Very well, let it be Lvov.”

Within a few weeks Lvov’s government turned Russia into one of the freest countries in the world. It proclaimed a political amnesty and freedom of speech, of the press and of assembly, and abolished the death penalty and all restrictions based on estate, religion and nationality. It announced elections to a Constituent Assembly by universal suffrage, women included. On 30 March it issued an appeal to the Poles, recognising Poland’s right to independence. Soon the government was recognised by the Allies. As minister of the interior, on 18 March (5 March Old Style) Lvov removed the governors and entrusted their duties to the chairmen of the zemstvo boards as government commissars. In practice power in the provinces passed to haphazard committees. Kerensky recalled that at one of the first meetings, as telegrams poured in from the provinces about the collapse of the administration, Lvov reassured the ministers: there was no administration, but the people remained, and they must be trusted.

That trust became his weakness. Lvov had no grasp of party politics, avoided conflict and always sought compromise. Vladimir Nabokov, head of the government’s chancellery, wrote that he could not remember a single occasion on which the prime minister had spoken firmly, and called him “the embodiment of passivity”. From the outset the government had to share power with the Petrograd Soviet, which controlled the garrison, the railways and the telegraph. The dispute over war aims, smoothed over by the declaration of 9 April, erupted in May as the April Crisis. Lvov then defended Milyukov against the Soviet, but concluded that the government could not survive without the socialists. After the resignations of Alexander Guchkov and Milyukov, on 18 May he formed the first coalition government, with Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks.

The coalition staked everything on an offensive. When the Kerensky Offensive began on 1 July, Lvov replied to a telegram from the war minister that this day had shown the world the strength of the revolutionary army. Two weeks later everything fell apart. On 15 July the Kadets left the government in protest against concessions to the Ukrainian Central Rada, the next day the July Days broke out, and defeat was approaching at the front. When the socialist ministers demanded the adoption of the programme of the congress of soviets, including swift steps on the land question, Lvov resigned on 20 July. He accused his colleagues, especially the Socialist Revolutionary minister of agriculture Viktor Chernov, of prejudging matters that belonged to the Constituent Assembly. The real reason went deeper. He told his friend and biographer Tikhon Polner that the only way to save the country now was to disperse the Soviet and shoot people. “I cannot do that. But Kerensky can.” He withdrew to the Optina Monastery. Kerensky became prime minister.

After the war

After the Bolshevik coup Lvov left for Siberia and settled in Tyumen. At the turn of February and March 1918 a detachment of Red Guards arrested him and took him to prison in Yekaterinburg. After three months he was released pending trial. He fled at once, a few weeks before the murder of the imperial family by the same men, and made his way to Omsk, then held by the Czechoslovaks. The anti-Bolshevik Siberian government sent him to the United States to ask for help for the Whites. In the autumn of 1918 he was received by President Woodrow Wilson, but the war was just ending and nothing came of it. From the end of 1918 Lvov chaired the Russian Political Conference in Paris, which tried to represent anti-Bolshevik Russia at the peace conference, also without success.

He then withdrew from politics. He lived modestly in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, worked on an émigré relief committee, handed the Zemgor funds remaining abroad over to the relief of Russian refugees, and wrote his memoirs. The émigré right saw him as one of those to blame for the revolution, the émigré left as a weak man. He died in his sleep of a heart attack on the night of 6–7 March 1925. The whole Russian emigration came to the memorial service at the Paris cathedral in the rue Daru.

Assessment

Lvov is seen as a symbol of both the hope and the helplessness of Russian liberalism in 1917. Milyukov regarded his appointment as a mistake and mockingly called him a “milksop”. The British politician Samuel Hoare wrote that he would have been better suited to chairing the London County Council than to heading an unstable government in the middle of a revolution. Many historians stress that his naive faith in the wisdom of the people and his reluctance to use force meant that the Provisional Government defended itself neither against anarchy in the countryside nor against the Bolsheviks. Orlando Figes points out, however, that contemporaries, from the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli to Maxim Gorky, valued him as a talented organiser and one of the few truly able politicians in the government, and that the Zemstvo Union was one of Russia’s few successes in this war. The Russian historian Genrikh Ioffe called him a man of high spiritual qualities whom fate had placed in a role for which he was unsuited. Lvov himself said that he had never thought of becoming a minister: “They made me one. Did I want it?”