A Democrat in the Revolution

Abstract

The news of the revolutionary events in Petrograd at the end of February 1917 reached the exiles in Irkutsk a few days later. The Governor-General suppressed all reports of the revolution until the evening of 2nd March, and then, as rumors were to be heard everywhere, he had no alternative but to call together representatives of the local political and social organizations. The socialist parties were represented by a group including Gots and Vointinskii.1 That same evening, a former party colleague of Tsereteli’s in the Second Duma, Gerasim Makharadze, travelled from Irkutsk to Usol’e in order to tell the exiles there of the developments. The news of the success of the revolution was completely unexpected: although there had been high hopes at the beginning of the year of an early revolution, these hopes had benn dashed when the demonstrations at the opening of the Duma on 12th February had come to nothing.2 In the early hours of 3rd March Tsereteli set out for Irkutsk, where he was immediately involved in revolutionary work. Since a bourgeois government had been formed in Petrograd, everyone concluded that in the center of the revolution the revolutionaries themeselves did not support the idea of transferring power to the working class. At Tsereteli‘s suggestion, it was therefore decided to entrust power to a committee in which all important social groups were represented.3