The February Revolution Reconsidered: Part 2, An Undemocratic Revolution

The February Revolution of 1917 developed its own rich political mythology. Untangling this from the realities of events is one of the key challenges facing History teachers instructing students in this topic today. This is the third of a string of three posts on the February Revolution that attempts to do so.

In my last post, I suggested that the February Revolution – often seen as a largely peaceful event – actually involved very significant violence.

In this post, I’ll propose another interpretation which I think has been underplayed and largely submerged beneath another myth. That myth is that the February Revolution was a fundamentally democratic moment in Russian history. By contrast, the interpretation I’ll propose is that February 1917 in many ways heralded a distinctly undemocratic series of developments, developments which, set against a standard of free, universal, and inclusive politics, fall considerably short of democratic ideals.

The Provisional Government of 1917, in its first iteration. "Elected by the revolution"? Credit: public domain, via Wikimedia commons.

This may well seem alarmingly contrarian. The Russian Provisional Government, which formally took state power at the start of March 1917, had a stated commitment to establishing a democratic, free political system. The leading politician of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, declared Russia to be “the freest country in the world”, “the most democratic country in Europe”, and “the leader of the democratic governments.” Today, it is still commonplace to contrast the antidemocratic order established by Lenin and his Bolsheviks after October 1917 with the short-lived democratic turn Russia had taken in the eight months before then.

Nevertheless, I’ll suggest that the political system which was emerging before the Bolsheviks’ October Revolution was rather less democratic than it might at first seem. From the late-1990s onwards, historians writing about the February Revolution have explored key aspects of the political system it established, deconstructing and reappraising its “democratic” credentials. This work has, unfortunately, been almost entirely overlooked by school textbooks. Yet it is fundamental to understanding how far Russia was actually moving towards democracy in 1917.

 

“Who elected you?” The Provisional Government’s Democratic Deficit

The term “democratic deficit” is used today to describe the failure of ostensibly democratic institutions to fulfil their democratic credentials.

The Provisional Government was in certain ways vigorous in its pursuit of political democracy. Within months of coming to power, it had removed restrictions based on class, religion, and ethnicity, and had extended the vote to women – a full year before any women in Britain, and two years before women in the USA, were granted full voting rights.

Yet the Provisional Government suffered its own profound democratic deficit. It was itself unelected and would remain so for the whole of its existence. In principle, it was a guardian or caretaker administration which was to rule temporarily (although called the “Provisional Government” in English, the most direct translation of its Russian name – Vremennoe pravitel’stvo is “Temporary Government”) until a Constituent Assembly could be elected to set a new constitution. Precisely because it lacked a real democratic mandate, it could not rule permanently. 

This awkward fact was highlighted as early as 2 March 1917, when the Kadet Party leader Pavel (Paul) Milyukov, announcing the establishment of the Provisional Government to crowds outside the Tauride Palace in Petrograd was heckled with the taunt, “Who elected you?” Milyukov’s immediate response was “We were elected by the Russian Revolution.”

Paul (Pavel) Milyukov, Kadet leader. Credit: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

His brilliant rhetorical turn was, in reality, nonsense. No-one had elected the Provisional Government. It was a self-selected organisation established by mostly prominent liberals (at first, the only socialist to join was the moderate Trudovik politician, Alexander Kerensky). Over the course of 1917, as it moved through various iterations and political configurations, the Provisional Government remained unelected, each time constituted by agreement of different parties and individuals.

 

Corporatism or Democracy?

In fact, as historian Daniel Orlovsky argued in an influential article over 20 years ago, insofar as they did involve representatives of society, the political structures established around the Provisional Government more often resembled “corporatism” than universalist democracy.

Corporatism describes a political set-up in which representatives of larger organised groups – such as social classes, interest groups, political parties, trade unions, and civil society organisations – are mobilised, or called up, into state structures to ensure broad representation of the whole of society. In the 1920s, corporatist politics was seen in some countries (perhaps most obviously fascist Italy) as a way of overcoming class conflict and unifying the nation within a cohesive political system.

Several structures established by the Provisional Government in 1917 – ostensibly to strengthen its democratic credentials – actually more closely resembled corporatist politics. Orlovsky points to the Moscow State Conference in August, Democratic Conference in September, and the “Pre-Parliament” of October 1917, into which representatives of different collective groups were mobilised. At a local level, in many towns and cities, new political structures had already been established according to the same principle. Local “public committees” formed to take power at the start of March 1917 chose their members by selecting representatives of different groups and organisations, rather than by election.

This approach originated in the First World War, when organisations such as the War Industries Committees had sought to mobilise different social groups to ensure broad public involvement in the war effort, and has been dubbed by historian Lars Lih as the “enlistment solution”. It promised to ensure broad social representation (something it did, in fact, achieve) and hoped to overcome corrosive sectional interests and conflicts between different social groups (something it largely did not achieve). It was not, however, a genuinely democratic solution to the problem of political authority.

 

“Democratisation” and its Limits

There were, certainly, a number of noteworthy democratic achievements, in which institutions were (re-)established after February 1917 along democratic lines. These have been particularly highlighted by historians including Sarah Badcock and Michael Hickey studying local revolutionary developments in particular villages, towns, cities, and regions.

Firstly, a number of semi-democratic local government organisations were re-organised in 1917 to ensure full and mass democratic participation. These included town dumas and zemstvos, first established under the Tsars but with very restrictive electoral franchises. In the first few months of the revolution, a great many would be re-elected on the basis of universal suffrage – women's as well as men's – in a process commonly dubbed at the time “democratisation” (demokratizatsiia).

Secondly, a huge array of local revolutionary organisations were established from scratch, especially amongst workers, soldiers, and peasants. These included local soviets, factory committees, and soldiers’ councils, and all involved the direct election of representatives by the ordinary people they sought to empower.

Of these two kinds of organisations, however, only re-elected local government bodies really resembled a form of democracy recognisable as such to us today. Revolutionary organisations such as soviets were enormously impressive experiments in representative-cum-direct democracy, but their electoral procedures were often rather chaotic and informal. More importantly, because they were based on social class (for workers, soldiers, and peasants), they only ensured the participation of certain sections of the population and never sought to achieve a universally inclusive democratic ideal. When serious arguments began to be put forward for soviets to take state power, from late spring and summer 1917, they were premised on the idea of a new type of government, controlled by the lower classes and socialist parties. 

 

Different Meanings of “Democracy”

Hidden behind this jumbled picture of new and revamped institutions and practices were multiple, often contradictory, ideas about what “democracy” actually meant.

As historian Boris Kolonitskii put it in a ground-breaking article from 1998, “Including the term democracy in one’s own political lexicon became a must for practically all political forces”. What it actually meant, however, was a matter of considerable contention.

Today, democracy is usually taken as a universalist representative political system in which people of all backgrounds and political persuasions can meaningfully participate. This was, indeed, one understanding of democracy in Russia in 1917, favoured especially by liberals, who wanted to achieve a Rechtsstaat (state based on the universal rule of law and civic equality of all citizens). But it was one of several.

To the political left, many socialists viewed democracy as the organisation or re-establishment of popular organisations, such as the soviets or local dumas and zemstvos, in order to ensure lower-class participation. In this case the primary meaning of democracy was to ensure representation and empowerment of the previously oppressed and marginalised masses.

Another understanding of democracy amongst socialists viewed it not as a political system as such, but as a social category. In this case, “democracy”, or “the democracy”, had a meaning similar to “the people” (in Russian, narod), denoting lower-class “ordinary” people whom socialists sought to empower through democratic reorganisation of political structures. Even Alexander Kerensky, who would later go on to claim to have supported the principle of universalist democracy of all classes, described himself in March 1917 as “a representative of [the] democracy” and “as someone expressing the demands of [the] democracy”.

Of the different understandings of “democracy” in 1917, this last one most obviously clashes with our universalist representative understanding of the word today. For many people in Russia after the February Revolution, it was entirely possible to view a democratic system as one which was established not to represent everyone equally, but to favour certain social classes.

 

Conclusions

Considering the political structures and ideologies prevalent following the fall of Tsarism, the democratic credentials of Russia’s February Revolution quickly begin to wear thin.

In a great many ways, Russia between March and October 1917 was a country undergoing a democratising experiment, in which new institutions and models of political participation were rapidly established. It is impossible to know where this experiment might have led to, had Lenin’s Bolsheviks and their radical-left allies not seized power at the end of October. But already by this point, it was not obviously pointing towards the universalist liberal democracy we today take for granted.

We should therefore treat the idea of the February Revolution as a democratic one with considerable caution.

 

Selected Further Reading

Sarah Badcock, Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History, Cambridge University Press (2007)

Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917, Yale University Press (1999)

Michael C. Hickey, “Local Government and State Authority in the Provinces: Smolensk, February-June 1917”, Slavic Review 55, 4 (1996), pp. 863-881

Boris Ivanovich Kolonitskii, “‘Democracy’ in the Political Consciousness of the February Revolution”, Slavic Review 57, 1 (1998), pp. 95-106

Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921, University of California Press (1990)

Daniel Orlovsky, “Corporatism or Democracy: The Russian Provisional Government of 1917”, in Amir Weiner (ed.), Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework, Stanford University Press (2003), pp. 67-90

Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, Oxford University Press (2017)