by DANIEL GAIDO
Political demonstration on June, 18, 1917, at Petrograd. The left banner reads “Peace to the Whole World — All Power to the People — All Land to the People” and the right banner reads: “Down with the minister-capitalists”; these were Bolshevik slogans.
The Bolsheviks wanted to avoid the Paris Commune’s fate. That’s why they didn’t take power in July 1917.
In 1917, Russia had more than 165 million citizens, only 2.7 million of whom lived in Petrograd. The capital city held 390,000 factory workers — a third women — 215,000 to 300,000 garrisoned soldiers, and around 30,000 sailors and soldiers stationed at the Kronstadt naval base.
Following the February Revolution and Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication, the soviets, led by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, ceded power to an unelected provisional government bent on continuing Russia’s involvement in World War I and delaying agrarian reform until after the Constituent Assembly election, the date of which was soon indefinitely postponed.
Those same soviets had also called for the creation of soldiers’ committees and instructed them to disobey any official orders that ran counter to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’ orders and decrees.
These contradictory decisions produced a shaky, dual power structure marked by regular government crises.
The first of these crises broke out in April 1917 over the war and ended after the main bourgeois political leaders — Pavel Milyukov from the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party and Alexander Guchkov from the Octobrist Party — were ousted. Further, it revealed the government’s impotence in the Petrograd garrison: troops responded to the Petrograd Soviet’s Executive Committee rather than to then-commander General Lavr Kornilov.
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