The March Revolution was joyfully accepted throughout the country. A new government formed in May 1917, with the understanding that an elected democratic government, ruling under a new constitution drafted by a future Constituent Assembly, would replace it when circumstances permitted. After generations of authoritarianism, the provisional government established equality before the law; freedom of religion, speech, and assembly; the right of unions to organize and strike; and other classic liberal measures. But the provisional government represented the elite faction of the Russian population, as opposed to the popular masses. Many members were westernized Russians, who looked admiringly at the West for models of modernization, industrialization, and government. There were some socialists among them, but these rejected social (that is, Communist) revolution.

The provisional government soon made two fatal decisions that turned the people against the new government. First, it refused to confiscate large landholdings and give them to peasants, fearing that such drastic action in the countryside would only complete the disintegration of Russia’s peasant army. Second, the government decided that the continuation of war was still the all-important national duty and that international alliances had to be honored. Neither decision was popular. The peasants believed that when the tsar’s autocratic rule ended, so too did the nobles’ title to the land, which was now theirs for the taking. The army believed that the March Revolution meant the end of the war.

From its first day, the provisional government had to share power (dual power) with a formidable rival that represented the popular masses — the Petrograd Soviet (or council) of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Modeled on the revolutionary soviets of 1905, the Petrograd Soviet was made up of two to three thousand workers, soldiers, and socialist intellectuals. This counter-government, or half government, issued its own radical orders, further weakening the provisional government. Most famous of these was Army Order No. 1, issued in March 1917, which stripped officers of their authority and gave power to elected committees of common soldiers.

Order No. 1 led to a total collapse of army discipline. (See “Viewpoints 28.2: Russian Views of War and Revolution.”) Peasant soldiers began “voting with their feet,” to use Lenin’s graphic phrase. They returned to their villages to get a share of the land that peasants were seizing from landowners, either through peasant soviets (councils) or by force, in a great agrarian upheaval. Through the summer of 1917, the provisional government, led from July by the socialist Alexander Kerensky, became increasingly more conservative and authoritarian as it tried to maintain law and order and protect property (such as nobles’ land and factories). The government was being threatened from one side by an advancing German army and from the other by proletarian forces, urban and rural alike, shouting “All power to the soviets!” and calling for an even more radical revolution.