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How far could the historian make use of Sources 1 and 2 together to investigate the nature of the relationship between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet Feb-Oct 1917?$8.40
How far could the historian make use of Sources 1 and 2 together to investigate the nature of the relationship between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet Feb-Oct 1917?
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Course
Unit 1E - Russia, 1917-91: from Lenin to Yeltsin
Institution
PEARSON (PEARSON)
An A grade answer to a piece of home work. Source Questions are quite difficult to answer, and this essay demonstrates fairly well how to integrate the tests for sources.
How far could the historian make use of Sources 1 and 2 together to investigate the nature of
the relationship between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet Feb-Oct 1917?
These sources together cannot be used very usefully to investigate the flailing nature of the
relationship between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet within this time
frame. Source 1 has a much more negative emphasis than source 2, stressing that the
relationship suffers from a major power imbalance that causes even more strain between the
two than before. Source 2 however, focuses on the distrustful nature of their relationship, but
emphasises that it is still workable, unlike source 1.
The sources somewhat agree that the Petrograd Soviet had more power than the Provisional
Government did, but to different extents and for different reasons. Source 1 claims that "the
Provisional Government has no power of any kind”, Guchkov saying that the Provisional
Government feels helpless, that it can only carry out its orders if ‘permitted’ by the Petrograd
Soviet. In comparison, Source 2 maintains that the Petrograd Soviet does not have utter control
over the Provisional Government, but conversely they don’t have control over the Soviet either.
The source claims that “[the Soviet] will support [the Government] for as long as it realises
democratic principles.” This implies that despite, in theory, the government having ultimate
power, the Provisional Government had no real control over the Soviet, as they didn’t believe
that they were a fitting or democratic government: ‘our government is not democratic but
bourgeois’. This also gives the historian a brief explanation of the ideological differences
between the Government and the Soviet that stoked the conflicts to come, which source 1 does
not do. Moreover, both sources fail to mention the great effect that the Bolsheviks had on the
relationship between the two groups. The return of the Bolsheviks began immediately after the
tsar’s abdication in March 1917, and although Lenin didn’t return until after these sources were
written, he was still running things from exile. In March 1917 he published his ‘Letters from Afar’
in which he urged that the Bolsheviks infiltrate the armies of the fighting nations in WW1 to start
a true Marxist class war. Also in these letters, he instructed the Bolsheviks to follow non-
accommodationism - to not work with any other parties within the Provisional Government. The
combination of inciting class violence and non-accommodationism put a lot of pressure on the
relationship between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, and as both fail to
mention the great effect of the Bolshevik party on the state of Russian politics in early 1917,
they can be considered fairly limited and therefore not very useful for this investigation.
The sources disagree that there was no possible way of cooperation between the Soviet and
the Government. Source 1 claims that the Provisional Government was at the mercy of the
Petrograd Soviet because they controlled so many vital aspects of governance. Guchkov writes,
“[the P.S] controls the most essential strands of actual power … railways and post and
telegraph services are in its hands”. This gives a sense of an imbalanced relationship between
the Government and the Soviet that doesn’t appear so strongly in source 2. Indeed, the Soviet
Order Number 1 passed on 1st March 1917 gave the Petrograd Soviet control of the Petrograd
Garrison - whose membership of armed sailors and soldiers added to the power imbalance - as
well as stating that the soldiers would only obey the orders of the Provisional Government if the
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