To avoid trouble in the short term, Milyukov, with curled lip, agreed not to relocate the city’s revolutionary troops. What he would not countenance, however, was the election of officers. For the liberals and for the right, what this would mean was the destruction of the army. And what of Order Number 1? Troops to obey the government only in so far as its orders did not conflict with the Soviet’s? The idea was appalling.
Shulgin interjected. He was never as diplomatic as Milyukov. If the Soviet had the power implied in that order, he coldly suggested, they should immediately arrest the Duma Committee and set up government alone.
To actually take power was, of course, the last thing the flustered socialists wanted.
It was at that moment that an agitated group of army officers abruptly arrived to interrupt the discussion. They called Shulgin outside.
The revolution has its mysteries. This perfectly timed intervention is one. The identities of the officers remain unclear, as does their precise message. Whoever they were, they seem to have intimated to Shulgin that opposing Order Number 1, that night, would mean bloodshed. Perhaps even be a massacre of officers.
Whatever the source of the opaque intercession, it proved vital. On his return to the room, Shulgin agreed that the Soviet need not rescind Order Number 1, but that it would issue a second order to soften it.
The Duma Committee had its own demands. The Soviet Executive Committee, it insisted, must restore order and re-establish contact between soldiers and officers. Much as the fact might stick in the conservative craw, it was clear that the Ispolkom was the only body that might have the power to do this. And the Ispolkom must proclaim the Provisional Government, agreed between itself and the Duma Committee, legitimate.
Milyukov had girded himself for struggle on such points. He was agreeably surprised by the Soviet representatives’ ready – even eager – acquiescence.
It was 3 a.m. on 2 March when the meeting adjourned. Not everyone, though, could afford to sleep: some still had other urgent business.
It was very soon thereafter that a strange truncated two-car train hauled out from Petrograd’s Warsaw Station, shedding light into the night. Escorted by guards, it carried Shulgin and Alexander Guchkov, a conservative Octobrist politician, on a mission to reshape history. The two right-wingers had taken on themselves an unpleasant task: they had volunteered to go to meet the tsar, to try to persuade him to abdicate.
At station after station along the route, the platform and their train were invaded by crowds of soldiers and civilians, ignoring the cold, buoyed by insurgency, desperate for details, all in excited debate. At Lugin and Gatchina rebellious soldiers greeted the travellers enthusiastically: as representatives of the Duma, and thus, in many minds, of the revolution itself, Guchkov and Shulgin had to give speech after brief speech.
The early morning dragged, then the day, as the agitated, impatient men prepared for their task, not knowing it was already superfluous.
One reason the tsar had chosen to go to Pskov was its connection by wire to the capital. In a communications room deep in the Tauride Palace, there was a Hughes machine. Invented more than a half-century previously, this telegraphic apparatus was an intricate tangle of brass wheels, wires and wood, its lettered black and white keyboard designed to mimic a piano’s. At such machines, as the print wheel turned, virtuoso operators would ‘play’ the text of messages, and at the other end of the connection, a long ribbon of words would emerge.
Russia’s was an extensive empire of wires, running mostly through post offices and alongside railways. Along them passed events and opinions, information, dissent, order, confusion and clarity, spreading out in the staccato clatter of keys struck and unspooling paper, each party dictating one sentence at a time to trained operators at their keyboards.
At 3:30 a.m., very soon after Guchkov and Shulgin left, Rodzianko connected to Pskov on the Hughes machine. At the other end, through his own telegrapher, a bleary Ruzskii conveyed the good news that Nicholas, then fretfully scribbling in his diary in his private train carriage, had agreed at last to form a responsible ministry.
‘It is obvious’, responded Rodzianko, ‘that His Majesty and you do not realise what is going on here.’
Stunned, Ruzskii watched Rodzianko’s devastating message chatter out, word by word. The opportunity had been missed. The time for ministries was over.
Accordingly, at 5 a.m., with Rodzianko still only halfway through that momentous exchange, Milyukov met the lawyer Sokolov and the independent leftist Sukhanov from the Soviet, to formalise their collaboration.
The proclamation, Milyukov would later crow, enjoined the people to restore order, which was ‘almost the same thing that [he, Milyukov] … had been telling the soldiers from the platform of the regiment barracks. And it was accepted for publication in the name of the Soviet!’ There was no reference to the election of officers. Nor did the Soviet’s Executive Committee interfere with the selection of the new cabinet. The Duma Committee offered positions to the two members of the Soviet to whom it had already made overtures, Chkheidze and Kerensky. Such government roles the Soviet had already in principle refused.
This decision would soon be dramatically overturned.
The long exchange between Rodzianko and Ruzskii continued. As was usual, it was also relayed to other relevant parties on the lines. The calamitous information spread out. At 6 a.m., one of the recipients, General Danilo of the northern front, ordered telegraphists to forward it to Mogilev, to General Alexeev.
Alexeev instantly understood the magnitude of what he read. At 8:30 a.m., he ordered Pskov staff to wake the tsar and relay to him the conversation’s contents.
‘All etiquette must be ignored,’ he insisted. His urgency was not shared. The tsar, he was coldly informed, was sleeping.
Alexeev knew it would take representations from the army, one of the few institutions Nicholas respected, to make him understand, to bow to the inevitable. The general sent the text of the explosive discussion on to the commanders of Russia’s fleets and fronts, asking them to respond with their recommendations to the tsar.
It was not until after 10 a.m. that the hapless Ruzskii at last brought to the tsar the transcript of his conversation with Rodzianko. He handed it over. The tsar read. When he was done, he gazed at the ceiling for a long time. He murmured that he was born for unhappiness.
Ruzskii, pale and terrified, read aloud Alexeev’s mass telegram to the generals. There could be no mistaking its implication. The tsar must abdicate.
Nicholas remained silent.
Ruzskii waited. The tsar stood up at last. Apocalypse glowered. The tsar announced that he was going for lunch.
Some 1,400 miles away in Zurich, Lenin turned to page 2 of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. There, a short report informed of a revolution in Petrograd. Lenin, too, looked up in thought, his eyes wide.
That morning, Milyukov came to the Tauride Palace’s huge Ekaterina Hall to announce the Provisional Government to the revolutionary crowd gathered there. As he listed the cabinet, the room jeered in bewilderment at the names that were unfamiliar, and in disgust at those they knew.
There was one appointment, though, that drew applause: the role of justice minister had been filled by that popular SR (as he now declared himself) Alexander Kerensky. This despite the fact that the Executive Committee of the Soviet had agreed that its members would not take cabinet positions.
Milyukov was adroit. He deployed a few revolutionary slogans to win over his sceptical audience, fielding their barbs with aplomb. When the shout came, ‘Who elected you?’ he responded immediately: ‘It was the Russian Revolution that elected us!’ One thing, however, he could not sell: the continuation of the royal dynasty. When he announced ‘only’ Nicholas’s abdication – to which, of course, Nicholas himself had not yet agreed – the incandescent crowd roared.
The tsar’s departure was, of course, a calamity to some in the country. As Milyukov sparred with the revolutionaries, across