Second coalition government in Russia

On 6 August 1917 (24 July by the Julian calendar) the second coalition government was constituted in Russia. Alexander Kerensky remained at the head of the Provisional Government and also kept the Ministry of War and the Navy, and the Kadets returned to the cabinet after three weeks’ absence. The socialists had a slight numerical majority in it, but they joined it as private individuals, not as representatives of the soviets. This is the date given by Russian sources and most accounts. Some historians, among them Orlando Figes, give 25 July Old Style, that is 7 August.

Three weeks of bargaining

Kerensky had become prime minister on 21 July, after the departure of Prince Georgy Lvov, but he headed a cabinet reduced to socialists and a few non-party ministers. The Kadets, who had left the government in mid-July, set hard conditions for their return: the government was to be answerable only to its own conscience and not to the soviets, the war was to be waged in complete unity with the Allies, discipline had to be restored in the army, and all social reforms were to be postponed until the Constituent Assembly. The leaders of the soviets, for their part, demanded that the government stick to the programme announced on 21 July: an Allied conference on war aims, elections to the Constituent Assembly in September and the preparation of land reform. The right-wing press meanwhile waged a violent campaign against the Socialist Revolutionary minister of agriculture, Viktor Chernov, whom it accused of defeatism and even of contacts with the Germans.

Kerensky later recalled that all the parties together wanted to work with him, but each separately set conditions unacceptable to the others. Meanwhile at the front the retreat from Galicia was under way, and on 3 August the Russians lost Czernowitz. That same day (21 July Old Style) Kerensky resigned all his offices, handed current business over to the deputy prime minister, Nikolai Nekrasov, and secretly left for Tsarskoye Selo.

A night in the Malachite Hall

The resignation had the effect of a shock. That same evening representatives of the parties on which the government rested, the Kadets, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, the Popular Socialists and the Radical Democrats, met in the Malachite Hall of the Winter Palace. The meeting lasted all night and ended at about four in the morning. No one wanted to take power upon himself. The participants decided to entrust Kerensky once again with forming a government and to leave him a free hand in choosing ministers, without pressure or demands from the parties. Kerensky accepted this decision. In a letter to Nekrasov he wrote that, in the face of the threat of internal disintegration and the break-up of the state, he could not evade the duty laid on him by the representatives of the main socialist, democratic and liberal parties. According to his memoirs, he put the new cabinet together within a day.

Composition of the government

Nekrasov, who in July had left the Kadet party and moved to the small Radical Democratic Party, became deputy prime minister and minister of finance. Foreign affairs remained with the non-party Mikhail Tereshchenko. The Socialist Revolutionary Nikolai Avksentiev, chairman of the executive committee of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies, succeeded the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli as minister of the interior. Chernov remained minister of agriculture, and the Menshevik Matvey Skobelev minister of labour. The Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs was taken over by the Moscow Menshevik Aleksei Nikitin, justice by the lawyer Alexander Zarudny of the Trudovik current, and food supply, as before, by the Popular Socialist Aleksei Peshekhonov. Trade and industry were headed by the non-party economist Sergei Prokopovich, and social welfare by the Radical Democrat Ivan Yefremov.

There were four Kadets. The orientalist Sergei Oldenburg, secretary of the Academy of Sciences, became minister of education, Pyotr Yurenev minister of communications, the lawyer Fyodor Kokoshkin state controller, and the church historian Anton Kartashev Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod. Tsereteli did not join the government. The informal leader of the soviets could not lend his name to a cabinet that no longer depended on them, and stepped aside.

Kerensky himself stressed that the ministers had been released from all dependence on party committees and soviets and were henceforth answerable “only to the country and their own conscience”. According to him, only two members of the government, Chernov and Skobelev, were closely linked to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. The socialists in the new cabinet came mostly from the right wing of their parties. The only radical was Chernov. The Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov admitted that the supporters of bourgeois democracy had the real majority in it.

A government at a crossroads

The new government aroused no enthusiasm. The executive committees of the soviets promised it their support on condition that it carried out the July declaration. The Kadets emphasised their own conditions: war to the end alongside the Allies, discipline in the army and strong government without interference from the soviets. Milyukov argued to his party colleagues that the coalition had to be supported because there was no other way out. The real head of the Ministry of War, whose formal chief remained the prime minister, was at this time the former Socialist Revolutionary terrorist Boris Savinkov, an advocate of a firm hand in the army.

The government’s most difficult problem became the new commander-in-chief, General Lavr Kornilov, who since his appointment at the end of July had been demanding the death penalty in the rear as well, a reduction in the role of the soldiers’ committees and a free hand in command. Kerensky wavered between him and the soviets. A State Conference in Moscow, called for the second half of August, was to be an attempt to unite the country around the government. The second coalition government lasted little more than a month: it fell apart at the beginning of September, during the Kornilov affair.