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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.67: The April Crisis

So I apologize for this episode being a few days late. Pub week for Hero of Two Worlds has been insanely hectic. But I have done a bunch of other podcast interviews, uh, including Based on a True Story, My History Can Beat Up Your Politics, Tides of History, Chris Rambax [???] conversations podcast as well as a thing on the radio, which is also up on YouTube with KPFA, for their Letters and Politics show. I have even more interviews upcoming, including one with Ben Franklin’s World, Deeper Social Studies and Lit Hub’s Keen On podcast. So, even though I’m a little late on this podcast episode, if you go out to anyone else’s podcast episodes, you’ll probably find me popping up. And for all the ones that I’ve just mentioned that are already out, I’ll drop the links to it in the show notes, and you can listen to it at your leisure.

I also won’t belabor this point, but it has been a great week; I’m just so excited and thrilled that Hero of Two Worlds is finally out there and everybody can get their hands on it. Uh, people have been sharing photos of them with the book, and I can promise you, I will never get tired of looking at those photos. I have an insatiable appetite for all genres of book pictures, including Hero of Two Worlds in front of the indie bookstore where it was purchased at; Hero of Two Worlds with your adorable family pet; Hero of Two Worlds with your alcoholic beverage of choice, that’s a particularly popular one; and of course Hero of Two Worlds in an appropriately beautiful, natural setting. I love them all. I thank you all very, very, very, very much. And with that, on with the show. 

Now last time, we brought Lenin back into the fold, ending with him getting off the train at Finland Station with his fellow emigre Bolsheviks on April 3rd, 1917. When he returned, he was clutching a draft of what became known as The April Theses, a blunt, 10 point plan that he believed should guide the party now that the February Revolution was an accomplished fact. Now, as we’ve seen nearly all the revolutionary socialist leaders in Petrograd during the February Revolution wound up going along with the general plan of coming together inside the Soviet while nominally supporting the provisional government as the legitimate government. Even the Bolshevik’s paper Pravda, which had recently passed into the editorial hands of a guy we haven’t introduced yet named Kamenev, and then, a guy we have introduced, Joseph Stalin, acknowledged the strategic value of allying with the other socialist parties and recognizing the legitimacy of the provisional government, at least for the time being. When they received Lenin’s first letter from afar, they heavily edited it to take out all the parts recommending intransigent hostility to the government and then published it. When the second letter appeared, they read it and did not publish it at all. Concerned that Lenin’s attitude was disastrously out of touch with the real situation in the capital. And there’s a fun anecdote where Lenin disembarks at Finland Station and he sees Kamenev and he waves a copy of Pravda that Lenin had gotten his hands on and said, “what nonsense is this I’m reading.”

The next day, Lenin delivered a speech to an assembly of all Social Democrats at the Tauride Palace — not just Bolsheviks, but also Mensheviks and other unaligned independents — because as I mentioned, there was a lot of talk at this point of reuniting the party and ending the formal Bolshevik/Menshevik rift. Lenin, as usual, was very interested in party unity, as long as that party unity happened under his new 10 point plan, which he believed they must put into effect immediately. Now point one tackled the question of the war head on: it said, “in our attitude towards the war, which under the new government of Lvov and company, unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government and not the slightest concession to revolutionary defensivism is permissible.” Point three bluntly said, “no support for the provisional government.” And this was a direct contradiction of the agreed policy of, like, everybody in the room. Point 5 said that backing a constituent assembly that would likely enshrine a parliamentary system would be an unacceptable step. He said, “to return to a parliamentary Republic from the Soviet of worker’s deputies would be a retrograde step.” Because in Lenin’s mind, the future basis of revolutionary socialism in the hands of the workers and the peasants was already in place with the Soviet.

Now, all of this flew in the face of the conventional Marxist interpretation of history, and Lenin was constantly interrupted by booing and cat calls. The audience positively hooted at Point 2, which said, “the specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.” Now is Lenin out here saying that the entire democratic bourgeois stage of history, which is surely supposed to take years, or even decades, is already over after a matter of weeks? One fellow Bolshevik called it nothing less than the ravings of a madman. Even Krupskaya appears to have been somewhat surprised to find out what her husband had been so busily working on during the train rides from Switzerland to Russia. She remarked to a comrade, “it seems Ilyich is out of his mind. Even years later, she wrote in her memoirs, “the comrades were somewhat taken aback for the moment. Many of them thought that Ilyich was presenting a case in too blunt a manner, and that it was too early to speak of a socialist revolution. When new foreign minister Pavel Milyukov got a report of the speech, he was delighted to hear Lenin was blowing up all his credibility. Milyukov said, “Lenin made his case with such an effrontery and lack of tact that he was compelled to stop and leave the room amidst a storm of booing. He will never survive it.”

With the general consensus that Lenin had revealed himself to be an out of touch lunatic who could be safely ignored, the real leaders of the Russian Revolution went back to work. And they were now joined by many other older emigre leaders. Lenin was not the only one getting off a train. In their desire to prove that Russia was turning a page from despotism to freedom, the provisional government issued a more or less blanket amnesty for Russian exiles, and they all started streaming home. On April 8th. For example, the great SR leader and intellectual Victor Chernov arrived. A few days later, the positively legendary SR leader Breshkovskaya returned. Mensheviks like Martov and Axelrod would whine their own way home in the first week of May, and then Trotsky, who was off in New York, would get temporarily jammed up for a month by the British authorities until the Russian provisional government, under pressure from the Soviet, told the British that they should release Trotsky and allow him to come home.

As these emigres streamed home, the dual power arrangement that had sprung up in the immediate wake of the February Revolution was about to crash into its first major reef. And it was not over the question of political freedom or land reform or workers’ rights, but foreign policy. The question that consumed the leaders of both the Soviet and the provisional government in April 1917 was how does the revolution affect this giant war, we’re still mired in? Are we still going to do the war? Are we going to change the nature of the war? Are we going to change our aims in the war? Are we going to sign a separate peace? Are we going to March on Berlin?

At first, the revolution meant… nothing. Nothing changed. Pavel Milyukov took over the foreign ministry under the assumption that the revolutionary energy that had carried him to power was mostly generated by a kind of outraged patriotism. That the revolutionary break had come because Nicholas and Alexandra were losing the war, not because the war itself was bad. So when he took up office, he cabled the allies on March 4th, saying Russia is going to continue to meet all its existing treaty obligations and redouble its efforts to win the war. This meant honoring all agreements the tsar had made with Britain and France about colonial annexations and financial indemnities that they planned to impose on the central powers when the war was won. It also meant maintaining the tsar’s own official war aim of claiming Constantinople and the Turkish Straits for the Russian Empire. In Milyukov’s mind, the only thing about the war that the revolution changed was how well it was waged.

But Milyukov plan to leave the tsarist war policy effectively untouched was not going to fly with the leaders of the Soviet. Nor even his fellow ministers in the provisional government, most especially Alexander Kerensky. The revolution could not mean nothing changes about the war. Now, to be very clear, none of these guys are antiwar, or defeatists, or eager to sign a separate piece with Germany. But they did want to reorient wartime policy to reflect that the brutal stalemate everyone was stuck in needed to end, and more importantly, it needed to be ended by the people of Europe, not by the chauvinistic capitalist imperialists who had gotten them all into this. 

On March 14th, the Soviet issued an “appeal to the peoples of the world,” in which they said, “Russian democracy has shattered in the dust, the age old despotism of the tsar, and enters your family of nations as an equal, and as a mighty force in the struggle for our common liberation.” It went on to say, “conscious of its revolutionary power, Russian democracy announces that it will, by every means, resist the policy of conquest of its ruling classes, and it calls upon the people of Europe for concerted decisive action in favor of peace. We are appealing to our brother proletarians of the Austro-German coalition, and first of all, to the German proletariat. From the first days of the war, you were assured that by raising arms against autocratic Russia, you were defending the culture of Europe from Asiatic despotism. Many of you saw in this a justification of that support which you were giving to the war. Now, even this justification is gone. Democratic Russia can not be a threat to liberty and civilization.”

And then more broadly the Soviet addressed everyone: “We hold out to you the hand of brotherhood across the mountains of our brothers corpses, across rivers of innocent blood and tears, over the smoking ruins of cities and villages, over the wreckage of the treasuries of civilization. We appeal to you for the reestablishment and restrengthening of international unity. In it is the firm pledge of our future victories and the complete liberation of humanity.”

So, what they’re calling for here is for the people of Europe on both sides to turn to their governments and say, we must end this war. And when the war ends, we must do it without conquest, without victors. It must be a negotiated peace where no one wins and no one loses. That the colonial imperial ambitions of the powers that started this war must be abandoned in the interest of peace. And that for its part, the people of Russia would not let their government continue to wage a war on the basis of the tsar’s bloody-minded imperialist ambitions. 

Now, as I said, the leaders of the Soviet are not defeatist, nor are they peacenik, and they’re not going to unilaterally quit the war. And in fact, they stood ready to support ongoing fighting if the leaders of Germany and Austria continued to threaten Russia. But, this new statement put them at direct odds with Milyukov’s vision of totally unaltered war aims, symbolized most of all by the continued claim to Constantinople. 

Milyukov’s vision in fact put him at odds with just about everybody, even the genial prime minister prince Lvov. Lvov had been involved in the war effort from day one and knew full well the alleged dream of annexing Constantinople was not just impractical, it was probably impossible. So when the Soviet started leaning on the provisional government to change its war policy, Prince Lvov was a hundred percent interested in maintaining the tenuous alliance with the Soviet, which he thought indispensable to the functioning of the government, and 0% interested in wrecking that alliance for the sake of Milyukov’s impossible dream of Constantinople. Under unanimous pressure from his fellow ministers, Milyukov drafted a new statement of war aims for Russia, which announced that Russia rejected annexations and indemnities as war aims, at least for itself, but it reiterated the need to maintain their treaty obligations.

Now, this does not go nearly as far as the Soviet’s appeal. In fact, it wasn’t clear it went anywhere at all, especially because Milyukov gave a press conference on March 23rd welcoming the United States into the war and echoing President Wilson’s call for the Allies to orient the future peace in the direction of national self-determination. Milyukov floated the novel argument that Russia claiming Constantinople did not fall under the category of Imperial annexation at all, but would instead be an act of liberation for the native Orthodox Christians from the foreign occupying Muslim Turks, who had been squatting in the city for 500 years. It was also noticeable that Milyukov addressed his allegedly revised declaration of war aims to the people of Russia, rather than making it an official statement of policy from the Russian foreign ministry to the other governments of Europe. So, when this was published on March 27th, his watered down formulations weren’t even policy yet, they were just words.

The leaders of the Soviet read this and determined that at a minimum they could not let Milyukov get away with this no annexations or indemnities policy not actually being policy. For the next two weeks they exerted pressure on the provisional government to circulate Milyukov’s March 27 declaration as an official statement of policy. When Milyukov held out, Kerensky leaked to the press that the provisional government was on the verge of making it policy. Which wasn’t true, but he hoped that it would force Milyukov to cave. Which is more or less what happened. Even though the other ministers were furious at this misinformation Kerensky had leaked to the press, none of them wanted to die on the hill of Constantinople. So on April 18th, they gathered to draft a revised revised declaration of war aims that Kerensky said he believed should have satisfied the most violent critics of imperialism.

But in reiterating its commitment to winning the war, the statement also said that the allied war aims were liberatory in nature and thus compatible with the aims of the Russians. It also pledged to recognize, and I’m quoting here, “those guarantees and sanctions which are necessary for the prevention of new bloody conflicts in the future.”

When the leaders of the Soviet got a copy of this draft, they were not mollified, they were not satisfied. They were angry. This revised revised draft was just a giant exercise in obfuscation. It recast British and French post-war plans as liberations not annexations, and redefined indemnities and sanctions not as punitive and vengeful extensions of the imperial conflict, but as some kind of medicine that would prevent future wars from breaking out. Nothing was changing here. The text was not well received by the military sections especially, who felt, not unjustifiably, that the government is trying to hoodwink them into resuming the war on behalf of the same old capitalist imperialists, and not on behalf of the freedom and peace of Europe. 

So this brings us to the April Crisis. The first true task for the provisional government. The first true test for the Soviet. The first true test of the revolution.

Now possibly the April Crisis was also Lenin and the Bolshevik’s first attempt to seize power. But the record is so muddled and everyone so thoroughly and immediately declaimed responsibility that whatever evidence exists for this is circumstantial and hearsay and it’s hard to make a definitive determination as to the premeditated involvement of Lenin and the Bolshevik central committee. But what we do know, is that on April 20th, 1917, the revised war aim started getting published in the paper, and a member of the Soviet’s military section went around stirring up angry discontentment and saying we need to march in the streets to protest this. And not only that, we need to march out under arms, so they know that we’re not kidding. Those who came out tended to come from areas and sections where the Bolshevik presence was strong, and once it got going, Bolshevik party members were quick to get out in front and encourage others to join the protests. But where are Lenin and the other members of the central committee? They stay off the streets and well away from events. So opponents of Lenin are going to say, absolutely, this was his first attempt at a coup and it didn’t work while defenders of Lenin are gonna say, wow, this is just something the Bolsheviks kind of got caught up with that was spontaneous, and went to land and himself did not orchestrate as a power grab.

But what’s not in dispute at all is that starting on April 20th, armed protesters are marching through the streets of Petrograd and that’s a major test for the legitimacy of the provisional government and also of the Soviet. Now the new military governor of Petrograd, General Kornilov, wanted to bring out his own troops to restore order, but the prime minister Prince Lvov and the rest of the provisional government did not want to resort to the same old tsarist tactics. They wanted instead to rely on persuasion and popular cooperation to diffuse the demonstration, at least disarm it. What good was a revolution if it just turned around and started murdering its own people? Events then became very complicated when, a few hours later, a counter demonstration showing support for Milyukov also spontaneously formed and started marching around Petrograd. Events like this convinced Kerensky that in his estimation, the two greatest dangers to the Russian Republic were, and I’m quoting here, “followers of Milyukov and those of Lenin.” Koretsky believed they now represented the two radically uncompromising poles of the revolution that would wreck everything while everyone else was trying to make a good faith effort to reach a unified compromise. 

That night, the leaders of the Soviet and the provisional government met to figure out how they could resolve the polarizing conflict. The general sense on both sides was Milyukov needed to back down. All they needed to do to resolve the crisis was let the revolution be a thing and revolutionize Russia, not just domestically, but internationally. I mean, why not commit to peace without annexations and indemnities, especially if not making that commitment would wreck revolutionary unity and invite their collective downfall?

Viktor Chernov, who was there at this meeting, made a joke that everyone could nod along with, that Constantinople was a question of geography, best left to the minister of education, not a question of statecraft in the hands of the foreign minister. They came to no firm resolution that night, but when the armed demonstrations continued the next day and in fact got worse, they recognized it as a challenge not just to the authority of the provisional government, but to the Soviet’s authority as the sovereign voice of the people. With clashes breaking out all over the city and a couple people winding up dead, the Soviet issued an order declaring these protests did not have the Soviet sanctions and they must cease at once. They instructed all citizens to disarm and go home, and that everyone must maintain order, peace, and discipline. And this mostly did the trick: the workers and the soldiers did believe the Soviet had some kind of legitimate authority. And then, if we follow the story that Lenin and his comrades were behind all of this, their own line was that the Soviet was the legitimate authority, and to rack that legitimate authority by contesting the order would have long-term strategic consequences. Lenin wanted to take over the Soviet, not wreck it. 

So the two days of armed demonstrations in Petrograd came to an end. 

When the crisis passed, the provisional government issued a declaration on April 25th, emphasizing that they did not want to have to turn to tsarist tactics to keep order, and they were essentially pleading with the people to please remain orderly and peaceful. “The provisional government,” the statement read, “believes that the power of the state should not be based on violence and coercion, but on the consent of free citizens to submit to the power which they themselves created. Not a single drop of blood has been shed through its fault, nor have restrictive measures been established against any trend of public opinion.”

They also warned of the dangers of allowing the destructive and chaotic impulses of the people to get the better of them. “They should avoid the path,” and I’m quoting here, “well known to history, leading from freedom through civil war and anarchy to reaction and the return of despotism.” 

Now, this is a path that we hear on the Revolutions podcast also know quite well, but in this case is specifically referring to the French Revolution, which everybody who’s involved in the Russian Revolution knows all about. The provisional government concluded with a promise to bring in more constructive elements into the government to focus on fulfilling the promise of the revolution and earning the trust of the people. But in the meantime, everybody should be patient. If given a chance, everyone will see that everything is cool and good and on track.

Now what they meant by bringing more constructive elements into the government was something the leaders of the Soviet had been resisting since day one: a coalition government of socialists and liberals. Remember, for the past eight weeks, the leaders of the socialist parties have been purposefully trying to stay out of the government, both for the ideological reason that the bourgeoisie are supposed to rule, so you guys rule, but also for the very practical reason that the government was bound to make itself unpopular, and they didn’t want to be the ones being blamed when things went badly, they wanted to be the ones doing the blaming. But after the April Crisis, prince Lvov went back to the Soviet and pressed them to join a coalition that would unite the liberal and socialist wings of the revolution, end dual power, and hopefully prevent the collapse of the revolution. The SRs now took this offer seriously and believed they could do a great deal with the power being offered to them. The Mensheviks were more reserved, as they still really liked the idea of letting the liberal bourgeoisie have power during their appointed historical hour, so that later the socialists could overthrow them and have power during their appointed historical hour. And most of the Bolsheviks though not all of them were hostile to the notion of a coalition government as Lenin was busy making his program the program of the whole party. When the executive committee of the Soviet voted, they voted against forming a coalition. 

Alexander Kerensky, meanwhile, who had been trying to be the bridge between the two sides was now starting to despair. He had kept his head down during the April Crisis, but now re-emerged having lost some of his energetic optimism. He gave a speech where he despaired at the chances of the Russian people peacefully coming together rather than violently breaking apart. He said, “at the present moment with the victory of new ideas and the establishment of a democratic state in Europe, we can play a colossal part in world history if we can encourage other peoples to follow our path, if we oblige our friends and our enemies to respect our freedom. But if like worthless slaves we are not an organized strong state then a dark and bloody period of internecine strife will ensue, and our ideas will be cast under the maxim of state: might is right.”

He then went on to the more famously quoted portion of the speech where he says, “I regret that I did not die then, two months ago. I would have died with the great dream that a new life had been kindled in Russia once and for all, that we could respect one another in the absence of whips and sticks and could administer our own state not as the former despots ruled it.” 

He was no longer sure that was possible, and he said, “comrades, you could be patient and silent for 10 years. You were able to carry out your obligations imposed on you by the old hated government. Why do you have no patience now? Surely the free Russian state is not a state of rebellious slaves.” 

Over the next few days, the leaders of the Soviet received many telegrams, petitions and letters from comrades and supporters across the empire, all of those provisional Soviets that had been forming out there, for example, and they were all saying, we should form a United coalition government. That’s what we want you to do. That’s what’s best for the revolution. That’s what’s best for Russia. So on May the first, the executive committee of the Soviet reconvened, and this time they voted 44 to 19 in favor of forming a coalition with the liberals. They hoped this would offer the necessary legitimacy to the government that would get them all through to the constituent assembly, which remember everyone still expects to be the great national democratic assembly that would settle the permanent constitution for post-revolutionary Russia. In fact, ensuring the constituent assembly wasn’t put off indefinitely was one of their key demands for joining a coalition government. Another of their demands was of course changing the Russian government’s war aims, which they now insisted would be pursuing a general peace as relentlessly as possible without signing a separate peace with Germany.

Meanwhile, the liberal Kadets had their own demands, one of which is that they wanted to maintain a majority inside the ministry. And the Mensheviks in particular leapt at the opportunity to agree to this demand, because it meant that when things went bad — and things would go bad — they could say, hey, we’re not the majority here. It’s not our fault.  

The two sides spent the next several days hammering out a deal and assigning new seats in the ministry. Many of the existing ministers remained inside the government, they just switched portfolios. The most consequential switch was Kerensky moving from minister of justice to minister of war. Prince Lvov had sounded out the front commanders about this and determined that they were on board. Kerensky had given several speeches clearly advocating for continuing and winning the war, and his name meant something to the rank and file in the army and in the navy. The position of the senior commanders was that Kerensky at the ministry of war meant that they would be able to reassert something like discipline on the rank and file.

The most important new member of the government was the SR party leader Victor Chernov. After decades in the revolutionary underground, he was now suddenly made minister of agriculture, a pretty great place for an SR to be, as they always wanted to win over the peasants and implement the kind of truly revolutionary land redistribution that they’d been talking about for more than 20 years. 

The biggest departures from the government were Alexander Guchkov, the progressive bloc leader who had played such a huge part of the opposition movement that ousted the tsar; he resigned believing that Russia was now headed for disaster. The other was Pavel Milyukov. His bumbling of the foreign policy question had gotten this whole mess going in the first place, and he resigned from the government after being asked to move from the foreign ministry to the education ministry, where the matter of Constantinople was best addressed. After a lifetime in politics and a lifetime of trying to carry out a liberal revolution in Russia, Pavel Milyukov was spat out the other side in exactly eight weeks. 

In total, the first government of post-revolutionary Russia lasted for just about two months before it fell into this new coalition government, which is going to last for almost exactly the same amount of time before it too collapses in the wake of the July Crisis. Because if there’s one thing you can say about 1917, it’s that the engine of the revolution runs on two month cycles. Every two months, there’s a peak and a crash, a peak and a crash. And this will continue from now until October.