After an all-night
debate, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets agrees to give Kerensky
“unconditional and unlimited” powers. For their part, the Cadets agreed they too
would join the government. Kerensky used the powers thus granted to appoint a
ministry, the Second Coalition Government, to suit himself alone and without
further negotiation.
Though the
majority of ministers were Menshevik or Social Revolutionary, the ministry was
dominated by Kerensky and his bourgeois friends. Chernov, the Social
Revolutionary who had resigned a few days earlier after being accused of contacts with the Germans, was reappointed Minister of Agriculture.
One of Kerensky’s
first acts was to arrest Trotsky and Lunacharsky. Trotsky had publicly
declared this was the logical thing for the Provisional Government to do (with
respect to himself), as he was as “implacable an enemy” to the government as
Lenin or the other Bolsheviks who had been indicted after the July Days.
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