Sean Tarjoto						Prof. McMeekin
May 9, 2002						History of Revolutionary Socialism
		A Whisper without an Echo: The Failure of the Provisional Government
	The Februrary revolution of 1917 was distinguished from other revolutions by its hostile political character of the masses against the Provisional Government. A political struggle arose through a violent character that drove a wedge between the classes, and what was designed as the voice of the proletarian discontent was too soft a whisper to echo in the halls of power. The Bolsheviks understood the nature of revolutionary potential of the workers and soldiers, and opposed the liberal reformism that, in practice, believed the foundations of the institutions it sought to reform as unshakable. In reforming the status quo, some of its power is made use of and the habits and rules of incumbent power are used as the tools of change. Many times they are wielded by the wrong hands, or at least incompetent ones. After 1917, these hands would be chained, shackled and severed away from the walls of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
	Tsarist Russia lacked the advanced forms of capital to sustain itself after the October Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg, the Spartacists leading theorist and Lenin's closest rival, ran on the February 1917 elections to found the Constiuent Assembly, a common dream of the Left and liberals, believing that the factories and soldiers committees would jump start the principles of democratic centralism. Luxembourg was not prepared for the results, as 42 percent landed in the hands of the Social Revolutionaries, and 24 percent in the Bolsheviks.  Regardless the radical left parties could rely on SRs and the Provisional Government to institute a series of paper reforms. All men and women, all ethnic groups and religions were declared equal. The property rights of owners of large estates were dissolved and divided among the needy families and people with the right connections. Military formality, ranks, salutes, decorations were eliminated from the army and soldiers elected their own officers and each order lay in the hands of the officers committees.   
	The infant democracy would find difficulty flourishing under the tyrannical economic conditions of 1917. The Russian Social Democratic Worker’s Party (the Bolsheviks), would use the failure of the Provisional Government’s reform policies to their own advantage. Within the workers and soldiers councils (soviets), the political character of the Russian peasant or factory worker would advance their revolutionary nature, and the red army would take power through direct intervention. This was the deepest interaction the Bolsheviks would have with democratic power. The proletariat's will to die for their freedom was the power that the revolutionary vanguard desired to harness. Their choices were either direct seizure of political power through the revolutionary military committees or political compromise with Duma officers to reform the remains of the Romanov monarchy. 
	The workers’ insurrection in February was followed by the mutiny within the armed forces.  The soviets, self-selfed revolutionary lower classes elected their own organs of power, while the middle and upper classes, existing state-bureacracy, military officers, and intellegensia identified with the Provisional Government composed mostly by self-appointed members of the Duma. Though the soviets were nursing a newborn form of cooperation and democracy, they were not, prepared for the call to “internationalism” that the Left had opposed the war, much more for Lenin’s principle of “defeatism” that called for the Russians to lose the war, for the sake of escalating international solidarity for the Russians against the possibility of the advancing German army. 
	In the nation least expected to bring form to the theory of Socialist revolution, these uprisings produced a political schism that seemed to mirror the dialectic of the conflict between the classes.   Although suspicious of the upper classes in general, the workers and soldiers were unprepared to take power. The war was raging on and the economy plummeting, but the revolutionary workers were more interested in gaining greater control of their own lives than in ruling the country.  While they despised the sources of authority that had ruled over their daily lives, foremen, police, and officers of the state bureacracy, they believed that the new politicians would work in their interests alongside those of the modestly wealthy. The Bolshevik party was a minority, leading the working class in an overwhemlingly peasant country, with an incoherent mixture of tactics called Leninism. They could not institute a democracy based on the will of the majority and maintain power.

Bibliography
Ronald Grigor Suny. The Soviet Experiment. Oxford University Press, New York, 1998. 
Leon Trotsky. The Russian Revolution. Trans. Max Eastman. Doubleday, New York 1959.