From rhapsody to threnody: Russia’s Provisional Government in Socialist-Revolutionary eyes, February–July 1917: Michael S. Melancon

Abstract

Michael Melancon has written widely on the revolution and has been especially important in developing an appreciation for the role of the non-Bolshevik and non-Marxist socialists, the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) in particular. He has also stressed the provisional nature of the Provisional Government, its temporariness. Here he brings the two themes together, arguing that if the majority of SRs never stood solidly behind the government, even after leading SRs entered it, this alters the traditional picture of political and social dynamics in 1917. Most SRs, he contends, viewed the government from the beginning with “suspicious tolerance,” and the tolerance half of that phrase soon evaporated. The famous agreement of the Petrograd Soviet during the February Revolution to support the new Provisional Government “in so far as” it pursued policies of which the Soviet approved had real meaning not only for Soviet leaders, but for their rank and file followers. Moreover, he emphasizes, people took the planks of the various programs announced by successive Provisional Governments seriously and expected them to be fulfilled; the government’s very legitimacy rested on their doing so. He also stresses that suspicion of or open hostility toward a “bourgeois” or coalition government arose not as a result of Bolshevik agitation, but because of initial skepticism reinforced by government failure to meet expectations, and grew with the disasters of 1917. One result was a surprisingly early call for the soviets to take power. The ingredients for a radical shift left among SRs were there from the beginning, he suggests, and once it materialized it produced the radical left blocs and alliances that played such an important role in the October Revolution and attainment of “soviet power” across the country. The Provisional Government, Melancon concludes, “did not founder on the rocks of Bolshevism but on the shoals of a socialist and revolutionary popular culture.” He proceeds to marshall evidence to prove this through analysis of SR actions and resolutions on power. Although the themeis primarily political history, he relies heavily on analysis of “discourse” and language and on examination of a substratum of social relationships, reflecting how various ways of approaching the revolution often merge and how a new political history now incorporates social and linguistic approaches.