Rodzianko wants
to telegraph the tsar. Fearing arrest by the workers, he asked for an escort to
the telegraph office by deputies of the Soviet.
The Provisional
Committee, on the one hand, accepted the power to form the state that the
revolution had won, but on the other, continued to negotiate with the tsar.
Though the tsar’s ministers had been placed under arrest and brought before the
Duma, he nevertheless proposed a deal that would allow him to continue to fight
the war, while the Provisional Committee would administer all other government
functions. But it was too late for the tsar. Abdication was broached in an
exchange of telegrams that also made the situation in the capital clear to the
tsar. He may have offered to appoint new ministers; he definitely agreed to
submit the question of abdication to his marshals at the front.
For their part,
Miliukov and other bourgeois now being named or naming themselves ministers of
the Provisional Committee did not want to part with the monarchy entirely,
preferring to keep it in name as a shield against the revolution. But the
demand of the Soviet’s Executive Committee when it met with the Provisional
Committee was modest: only to be allowed to continue agitation among the
workers, soldiers, and peasants. The rest of the revolutionary program – land
reform, an end to the war, the eight-hour day, etc. – was not put on the table.
Even the Bolsheviks on the committee went along with this.
Meanwhile the
revolution is complete in Moscow, where the Moscow Soviet holds its first
session. It was also spreading to the provincial cities. At Novgorod, the mayor
made a speech in its favor; political prisoners are freed. The workers of
Samara and Saratov organized Soviets. The chief of police in Kharkov cried,
“Long Live the revolution!”
Back in Petrograd,
Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries of the Executive Committee issued Order
No. 1 for the benefit of the soldiers who had joined the revolution. It called
for each regiment to elect members to the soviets and to form regimental
committees of enlisted men. It also regulated control of weapons and social
interactions with officers, who in every case came from a different social
stratum than the peasant soldiery.
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