Provisional Government Russia Quotes

In the last analysis, however, the Provisional Government had expired even before the Bolsheviks finished it off.

San Francisco, Monday, April 23 The newspapers, particularly the Hearst and Roy Howard press, are kicking up an unholy fuss over the deadlock on Poland. Anything for a headline. And strife makes headlines. And attacks on Russia make headlines. The question is: which Polish delegation shall be seated, the London government-in-exile or the “provisional government” in Poland? We and the British recognize the first; Russia the second. The sensation-mongers are predicting the conference may break up over Poland, but I do not believe it. The delegates are here to draw up plans for a world organization, not to deal with the numerous headaches arising from the present state of the war and the world. But an irresponsible press could wreck this meeting.

Lenin's political strength was produced to a great extent by the sincerity of his anti-war attitude and by his oratorical ability in making his sincerity felt. It was evident'.....'when he spoke to soldiers of the Izmailovsky regiment. The Provisional Government, he stated, was continuing the war in the interests of the capitalists, whereas a government of the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies would redistribute the land and remove the incentive for war. He went on: 'Do not allow the police to be re-established, do not let the state power or the administration of the state pass into the hands of the bureaucracy, who are non-elective, undisplaceable, and paid on a bourgeois scale; get together, unite yourselves, trusting no one, depending only on your own intelligence and experience - and Russia will be able to move with a firm, measured, unerring trend toward the liberation of both our own country and of all humanity from the yoke of capital as well as from the horrors of war.

In order to mount a revolution, numbers are never enough. Revolutions are usually made by small networks of agitators rather than by the masses. If you want to launch a revolution, don’t ask yourself, ‘How many people support my ideas?’ Instead, ask yourself, ‘How many of my supporters are capable of effective collaboration?’ The Russian Revolution finally erupted not when 180 million peasants rose against the tsar, but rather when a handful of communists placed themselves at the right place at the right time. In 1917, at a time when the Russian upper and middle classes numbered at least 3 million people, the Communist Party had just 23,000 members.19 The communists nevertheless gained control of the vast Russian Empire because they organised themselves well. When authority in Russia slipped from the decrepit hands of the tsar and the equally shaky hands of Kerensky’s provisional government, the communists seized it with alacrity, gripping the reins of power like a bulldog locking its jaws on a bone.

In just a bony fistful of years, classical Russian food culture vanished, almost without a trace. The country's nationalistic euphoria on entering World War I in 1914 collapsed under nonstop disasters presided over by the 'last of the Romanovs': clueless, autocratic czar Nicholas II and Alexandra, his reactionary, hysterical German-born wife. Imperial Russia went lurching toward breakdown and starvation. Golden pies, suckling pigs? In 1917, the insurgent Bolsheviks' banners demanded simply the most basic of staples - khleb (bread) - along with land (beleaguered peasants were 80 percent of Russia's population) and an end to the ruinous war. On the evening of October 25, hours before the coup by Lenin and his tiny cadre, ministers of Kerensky's foundering provisional government, which replaced the czar after the popular revolution of February 1917, dined finely at the Winter Palace: soup, artichokes, and fish. A doomed meal all around.

The imperial Russian government's ineffectiveness in World War I had forced the tsar to abdicate in 1917. Following the February Revolution in that year the Provisional Government replaced the tsarist regime, but as a result of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks seized power, executing the tsar and his family, and the Russian Empire collapsed. The Ukrainian Central Rada, or governing council, proclaimed Ukraine an autonomous republic, but meanwhile the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, still at war with Russia, drove out the Russian army and occupied Ukraine. The Germans supported a coup led by Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky (1873-1945), who in April 1918 declared himself the Hetman of All Ukraine, a position he held until the following December, when, following the end of the war and the withdrawal of the German army, he was deposed and fled. It is here, in December 1918, that the novel White Guard begins, in a Ukraine damaged by World War I and engulfed in the Russian Civil War, with all of its confusion, violence, and chaos. As the novel unfolds, the Germans have mostly withdrawn and the hetman, essentially a German puppet, is under siege by Ukrainian nationalist and socialist forces led by Semyon Vasilievich Petlyura (1879-1926), who fought unsuccessfully for Ukraine's independence following the Revolution of 1917. Petlyura's nationalism made him an enemy of the Bolsheviks, and his socialist ideas made him an enemy of the Whites, who were opposed to the Communists. The Russian forces (both political and military) who became known as the Whites fought against the Red Army in the Civil War from 1918 to 1921. Their military arm was known as the White Army, or White Guard. Ideologically quite diverse, the Whites were not so much a single army as a confederation of counterrevolutionary forces loosely united by their anti-bolshevism, and to a lesser extent by the idea of preserving and restoring the Russian monarchy and Russian Empire, as well as by their anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. After the events described in the novel, the Soviet army recaptured Ukraine, driving Petlyura out, and held Kiev in 1919 from February 6 until August 31. From August 31 until about December 16, forces under Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), a general in the imperial Russian army before the Revolution and one of the leaders of the Whites in the Civil War, were in charge. Then, from December 16 the Soviet government was back in the city until May 6, 1920, when it was occupied by the Poles, who on June 11 were forced out by the Red Army. Three centers of power, revealing the basic vectors of all the coups, had taken shape in Kiev: the military district headquarters (which included counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, and White Guards), the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (Bolsheviks and other Communists), and the Ukrainian Central Rada (national-ist, independence-oriented, and Petlyurist).

Finally, we will note that the resolution, by making implementation of the minimum program provisional revolutionary government’s task eliminates the absurd, semi-anarchist ideas about giving immediate effect to the maximum program, and the conquest of power for a socialist revolution. The degree of economic development of Russia (an objective condition) and the degree of class consciousness and organisation of the broad masses of the proletariat (a subjective condition inseparably connected with the objective condition) make the immediate complete emancipation of the working class impossible. Only the most ignorant people can ignore the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place; only the most naive optimists can forget how little as yet the masses of the workers are informed about the aims of Socialism and about the methods of achieving it. And we are all convinced that the emancipation of the workers can be effected only by the workers themselves; a socialist revolution is out of the question unless the masses become class conscious and organised, trained and educated in open class struggle against the entire bourgeoisie. In answer to the anarchist objections that we are putting off the socialist revolution, we say: we are not putting it off, but we are taking the first step towards it in the only possible way, along the only correct road, namely, the road of a democratic republic. Whoever wants to reach Socialism by a different road, other than that of political democracy, will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense. If any workers ask us at the given moment why we should not go ahead and carry out our maximum program, we shall answer by pointing out how far the masses of the democratically-minded people still are from Socialism, how undeveloped class antagonisms still are, how unorganised the proletarians still are. Organise hundreds of thousands of workers all over Russia; enlist the sympathy of millions for our program! Try to do this without confining yourselves to high-sounding but hollow anarchist phrases—and you will see at once that in order to achieve this organisation, in order to spread this socialist enlightenment, we must achieve the fullest possible measure of democratic reforms.

Prosecutor Soloviev in 2010 said Kaplan and Viktor Garsky were planning to assassinate Vladimir Alexandrovich Sukhomlinov, the local governor general. Sukhomlinov would later serve as minister of war, 1909–1915, but was sacked for failing to keep the Russian army sufficiently supplied with weapons. The provisional government convicted him of corruption and treason, and sentenced him to life in prison. The Bolsheviks freed him and he fled to Germany. Sukhomlinov dressed in heavily ornate uniforms with medals, plumes, ribbons, and gold braid. The “Sukhomlinov Effect” is named after him. It contends that armies with the most pretentious uniforms lose wars.