clared independent. Labor legislation included the introduction of an eight-hour day for some categories of workers.
However, although the Provisional Government demonstrated what liberalism might have done for Russia, it failed to overcome the quite extraordinary difficulties that beset the country, and those who ruled it, in 1917. The new government continued the war in spite of the fact that defeatism spread among the people and that the army became daily less able to fight on. While convinced that all available land should belong to the peasants, it made no definitive land settlement, leaving that to the constituent assembly and thus itself failing to satisfy the peasantry. It proved unable to check inflation, restore transportation, or increase industrial production. In fact, Russian economy continued to run rapidly downhill.
A large part of this failure stemmed from the limited authority and power of the new regime. As already mentioned, it had at all times to contend with the Soviet. It had little in the way of an effective administrative apparatus, the tsarist police in particular having largely gone into hiding. While the high command of the army supported the government, enlisted men remained an uncertain quantity; the Petrograd garrison itself was devoted to the Soviet. What is more, the Provisional Government had to promise the Soviet not to remove or disarm that garrison. Kerensky's derisive appellation, "persuader-in-chief," was in part a reflection of his unenviable position.
The government also made mistakes. It refused to recognize the catastrophic condition of the country and misjudged the mood of the people. Thus, as mentioned, it continued the war, believing that the Russians, like the French at the time of the great French Revolution, would fight better than ever because they were finally free men. In internal affairs, a moderate and liberal position, generally difficult to maintain in times of upheaval, proved quixotic in a country of desperately poor and largely illiterate peasants who wanted the gentry land above all else. The government's temporary, "provisional," nature constituted a special weakness. Its members were deeply conscious of the fact that they had acquired their high authority by chance, that the Duma itself had been elected by the extremely restricted suffrage of 1907, and that the future of Russia must be settled by a fully democratic constituent assembly. Such basic decisions as those involved in the land settlement and in the future status of the national minorities had, therefore, to be left to that assembly. In the suggestive, if controversial, words of a political scientist: "This lack of a representative and responsible parliament helped greatly to distinguish the course of the Russian Revolution from its English, French and American predecessors." Yet, if a constituent assembly meant so much to the members of the Provisional Government, they made perhaps their worst mistake in not calling it together soon enough. While some of the best
Russian jurists tried to draw a perfect electoral law, time slipped by. When a constituent assembly finally did meet, it was much too late, for the Bolsheviks had already gained control of Russia.
The Bolshevik victory in 1917 cannot be separated from the person and activity of Lenin. He arrived, together with some of his associates, at the Finland Station in Petrograd on the sixteenth of April, the Germans having let them through from Switzerland in hopes that they would disorganize the Russian war effort. In contrast to the attitude of satisfaction with the course of the revolution and co-operation with the Provisional Government prevalent even in the Soviet, Lenin assumed an extreme and intransigent position in his "April Theses" and other pronouncements. He declared that the bourgeois revolution had already been accomplished in Russia and that history was moving inexorably to the next stage, the socialist stage, which had to begin with the seizure of power by the proletariat and poor peasants. As immediate goals Lenin proclaimed peace, seizure of gentry land by the peasants, control of factories by committees of workers, and "all power to the Soviets." "War to the palaces, peace to the huts!" shouted Bolshevik placards. "Expropriate the expropriators!"
Although Lenin found himself at first an isolated figure unable to win a majority even in his own party, events moved his way. The crushing burden of the war and increasing economic dislocation made the position of the Provisional Government constantly more precarious. In the middle of May, Miliukov and Guchkov were forced to resign because of popular agitation and pressure, and the cabinet was reorganized under Lvov to include five socialists rather than one, with Kerensky taking the ministries of war and the navy. The government declared itself committed to a strictly defensive war and to a peace "without annexations and indemnities." Yet, to drive the enemy out, Kerensky and General Alexis Brusilov started a major offensive on the southwestern front late in June. Initially successful, it soon collapsed because of confusion and lack of discipline. Entire units simply refused to fight. The Germans and Austrians in turn broke through the Russian lines, and the Provisional Government had to face another disaster. The problem of national minorities became ever more pressing as ethnic and national movements mushroomed in the disorganized former empire of the Romanovs. The government continued its increasingly hazardous policy of postponing political decisions until the meeting of a constituent assembly. Nevertheless, four Cadet ministers resigned in July because they believed that too broad a recognition had been accorded to the Ukrainian movement. Serious tensions and crises in the cabinet were also demonstrated by the resignation of the minister of trade and industry, who opposed the efforts of the new Social Democratic minister of labor to have workers participate in the management of industry, and the clash between Lvov and Victor Chernov, the Socialist
Revolutionary leader who had become minister of agriculture, over the implementation of the land policy. The crucial land problem became more urgent as peasants began to appropriate the land of the gentry on their own, without waiting for the constituent assembly.
The general crisis and unrest in the country and, in particular, the privations and restlessness in the capital led to the so-called "July days," from the sixteenth to the eighteenth of July, 1917, when radical soldiers, sailors, and mobs, together with the Bolsheviks, tried to seize power in Petrograd. Lenin apparently considered the uprising premature, and the Bolsheviks seemed to follow their impatient adherents as much as they led them. Although sizeable and threatening, the rebellion collapsed because the Soviet refused to endorse it, because some military units proved loyal to the Provisional Government, and because the government utilized the German connections of the Bolsheviks to accuse them of treason. Several Bolshevik leaders fled, including Lenin who went to Finland from whence he continued to direct the party; certain others were jailed. But the government did not press its victory and try to eliminate its opponents. On the twentieth of July Prince Lvov resigned and Kerensky took over the position of prime minister; socialists once more gained in the reshuffling of the cabinet.
Ministerial changes helped the regime little. The manifold crisis in the country deepened. In addition to the constant pressure from the Left, the Provisional Government attracted opposition from the Right which objected to its inability to maintain firm control over the army and the people, its lenient treatment of the Bolsheviks, and its increasingly socialist composition. In search of a broader base of understanding and support, the government arranged a State Conference in late August in Moscow, attended by some two thousand former Duma deputies and representatives of various organizations and groups, such as Soviets, unions, and local governments. The Conference produced no tangible results, but underlined the rift between the socialist and the non-socialist approaches to Russian problems. Whereas Kerensky expressed the socialist position and received strong support from socialist deputies, the Constitutional Democrats, army circles, and other "middle-class" groups rallied around the recently appointed commander in chief, General Lavr Kornilov. Of simple cossack origin, Kornilov had no desire to restore the old regime, and he could even be considered a democratic general. But the commander in chief, along with other military men, wanted above all to re-establish discipline in the army and law and order in the country, disapproving especially of the activities of the Soviets.