Opposition

📌 How serious were the challenges facing the Provisional Government?

The Honeymoon of the revolution did not last long. The divisions between different parties and factions soon became apparent. In February 1921 there were 118 separate uprisings according to Cheka sources

The main issues were:

• The war
• Land and the peasants
• the national minorities
• social reform
• the deteriorating economic situation in the cities

The War

• Kadets wanted to continue the war
• They didn't want to lose the support of allies and needed foreign money
• Wanted to keep the Russian empire intact

Socialists were divided by war:

• Moderate socialists supported the continuation of the war and didn't want to see Russia humiliated
• Mensheviks and SRs wanted a negotiated peace
• All agreed they should only fight to defend Russian territory – a defensive war
• Milyukov (Minister of War) wanted an aggressive war and hoped to make territorial gains if the Germans were defeated
• This outraged the Soviet Socialists and there were anti-war demonstrations in Petrograd
• Milyukov was forced into resigning
• The Provisional Gov was reformed on the 5 of May
• Five socialist leaders joined the new coalition government (e.g. the Menshevik leader Tsereteli and the SR leader Chernov)
• This move was hoped to have improved the relations with the Soviet and the workers & peasants. This instead distanced the socialist leaders from their support base and associated them with the conduct of the war. Peasants started leaving the war as they wanted it to end
• The war was putting a huge strain on the economy and prevented the Provisional Gov from resolving issues at home. Army discipline was breaking down and desertions increased as peasants made their way home in hopes of getting a share of the land they thought would be redistributed

July Offensive

• At the beginning of the summer of 1917 the Provisional Gov decided to launch a major offensive against the Germans
• The new Minister for War (Alexander Kerensky) threw himself into a propaganda campaign to mobilise the armed forces and the people for a massive attack
• Kerensky made patriotic speeches and toured the Fronts
• Middle-class civilians volunteered to fight in shock battalions designed to raise the army's morale
• However the soldiers were increasingly unwilling to fight
• The offensive began on 16 June and lasted about three days
• It began to fall apart – thousands of soldiers were killed, and even more territory was lost
• It pushed many soldiers towards the Bolsheviks and led to an armed uprising in Petrograd known as the July days
• Moderate socialist leaders in gov lost their credibility with the soldiers and workers

The land and the peasants

• After the February revolution the peasants saw an opportunity to get remaining estates redistributed without compensation
• They wanted government approval to legitimise the process
• But the government wanted the Constituent Assembly to resolve the land question
• Many of the liberals in gov came from the landed and propertied classes did not want to see their property handed over to peasants
• They wanted landowners to be compensated
• They were worried a land free-for-all would lead to the disintegration of the army as peasant soldiers rushed back to claim their share
• Peasants began taking land without gov sanction
• They looted tools, livestock, timber and anything else they could take from the estates
• This began slowly but gathered speed during the summer

Chernov became Minister of Agriculture in May 1917 – it seemed a better relationship between the government and the peasants might develop. Chernov proposed a scheme where peasants would be given right to use land from private estates (with ownership to be sorted later)

• The Liberals in the Provisional Government blocked this
• During the summer, land seizures increased and 237 cases were reported in July
• Violence increased with attacks on landowners (some revenge) and armed robberies became more frequent
• The Provisional Government did not appreciate the strength of feeling among the peasants and mishandled relations with them in general
• Grain was urgently required for the hungry cities so the Provisional Government tried to make the peasants to agree to fix grain prices
• However with inflation at large the peasants considered the prices too low and refused to send their grain to the towns and cities
• The Provisional Government sent out the army to requisition supplies and suppress disturbances yet this only made the peasants more hostile

The National Minorities

Three Kadet ministers resigned

• When the Tsarist regime collapsed, the national minorities demanded either outright independence (the Finns and the Poles) or more autonomy (the Caucasus)
• This issue exposed more weaknesses in the Provisional Government
• The Kadets were determined to maintain the Empire, they believed Russia had to keep all the regions together in one centrally governed state if it was to remain a great power
• The socialists believed that non-Russians should run their own affairs and have more self-government
• The Provisional Gov was unwilling to see the state break up in the middle of war and wanted to wait for the Constituent Assembly to decide
• The Ukrainians demanded self-government and the moderate socialists in the gov made concessions to them
• The liberals saw this as the first step towards the break-up of Russia and were outraged
• Three Kadet ministers resigned on the 2 of July

Social Reform

• Workers expected social reform after Feb with higher wages, better working conditions, shorter hours and more influence in the workplace
• Some of these aims had been achieved but things were moving slowly
• Wages did increase but prices of things were going up faster
• Strikes increased
• Workers saw themselves as citizens and worthy of respectful treatment from managers so they demanded action on equal pay for women and abolition of child labour
• There was a new sense of assertiveness and factory committees demanded a more active role in the workplace
• The workers had become politicised but economic demands were at the forefront of their concerns
• The Provisional Government could not handle the labour militancy, it was unable to mediate between employers and workers. The employers were angry about the constant strikes and pay demands
• Factories were closing every day due to the deteriorating economic system
• Workers' committees took over some factories completely but did not know how to run them so many closed anyway
• Workers were not getting the reform and improved conditions they expected and class antagonism was growing
• They turned their anger towards the Provisional Government and the moderate socialist leaders in the Soviet

The deteriorating economic situation

• There were food shortages, unemployment and high price problems before the Feb revolution
• The railway system was showing signs of breaking down due to the war
• Shortages of fuel and raw materials led to the factories to cut output or close
• 568 factories closed in Petrograd between Feb and July with the loss of 100,000 jobs
• Prices rose rapidly due to the scarceness of manufactured goods
• There was a temporary respite in the grain crisis after Feb but by the end of summer the situation was critical
• Peasants were reluctant to bring their grain to the cities
• The harvest of 1917 was poor
• In Petrograd grain prices doubled between Feb and June and rose again in autumn
• The Provisional Government seemed unable to do anything to resolve the food shortages
• The workers were convinced that they were being exploited by speculators
• They turned their antagonism to the government
• They demanded price controls, a halt to speculation and the arrest of profiteers
• Liberals in the Provisional Government were under pressure from industrialists not to interfere or fix prices and would not act against them
• It therefore failed to halt the decline in living standards in the cities

The First World War at first glance appears to be the most significant challenge facing the Provisional Government in 1917, however there are other stronger factors that were a greater challenge, like the continuously deteriorating economic situation, social reform and the problems with peasants and the land. The situation within Russia itself was a far greater challenge to the Provisional Government than the external effects of WWI.

Problems at Kronstadt naval base

Why/What?

• The sailors at the Kronstadt naval base supported the strikers in Petrograd
• In March 1921 they mutinied
• This was in hopes of starting a revolt against the Bolsheviks
• Demanded an end to terror, dictatorship, grain requisitioning and one-party rule
• The Naval base was not as Bolshevik as had been claimed
• There were a large number of Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists
• Many sailors were ex-peasants with connections to the countryside
• They supported peasant revolts

Solutions/Responses

• The uprising was condemned by Lenin and Trotsky as a White Plot
• The rebels however were the same sailors who had fought for the revolution
• Lenin called the revolt the 'flash that lit up reality more than anything else'
• The revolt was a powerful argument for a change in economic policy
• The Kronstadt demands would have been readily accepted by the Bolsheviks before they came to power
• Showed how far the Bolsheviks had fallen short in the eyes of the sailors
• The first assault on Kronstadt failed
• Marshal Tukhachevsky was then sent in with 50,000 crack troops
• Rebels fought tooth and nail to defend their base
• 10,000 rebels were killed
• 2,500 rebels were shot by Cheka execution squads
• Hundreds of others were sent to Solovetsky (the first big labour camp) on the White Sea

Internal party divisions

Why/What?

• Within the party, the workers' opposition grew up under Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai
• They wanted workers to be given more control of their affairs
• They supported complaints about the reintroduction of single managers and the militaristic organisation of the workplace
• They criticised Trotsky's plan to make trade unions agencies of the state, with union officials appointed by the state
• The debate caused furious arguments within the party at the end of 1920
• The Democratic Centralists campaigned for more democracy in the Party

Solutions/responses

• 'ban on factions' introduced
• It dealt with splits in the Party and restored discipline
• This meant that once Party policy had been agreed upon by the Central Committee everybody had to accept it and not lobby against it
• The penalty for factionalism was expulsion from the Party
• There was concern that unhealthy elements had joined the Party – those who were insufficiently communist and even outright hangers-on
• The solution was a chistka (cleansing)
• In 1921 220,000 members were purged or left the Party