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Vacuum of Power. Thus, virtually without bloodshed, nearly 400 years of czardom was swept away in a stroke. But creating from scratch a new government able to rule the vast reaches of Russia proved far more difficult. The Duma committee had included every shade of political color, from socialists to disaffected aristocracy. To head the first provisional government that followed. Prince Lvov, a liberal nobleman, was chosen. The Bolsheviks soon withdrew their tacit support from this "bourgeois" government, and Lenin hurried back to Petrograd to organize his attack. By July 2 he had mounted a sufficiently impressive uprising of sailors and workers to cow Prince Lvov into resigning.
Alexander Kerensky took over and began a race against time and Lenin's Bolsheviks—a race to establish democracy in Russia. A bill of broad political and civil rights was promulgated, religious freedom established, the then radical notion of an eight-hour working day instituted, and plans drawn up for land reform, the most pressing problem of all. Kerensky, who quickly became a national hero, pinned his hopes on elections for a constituent assembly. But his government was torn between those who wanted to opt out of the war and those who felt that Russia's obligations to the Allies should be honored. Hardly anyone experienced in government existed, and all the pre-revolutionary problems remained and multiplied. Above all, Russia still carried the serf's burden of its long, dismal past. Oppressed and kept muzzled for centuries, the Russian people, suddenly and unexpectedly liberated, asked too much of the government that they felt was their own.
All these factors combined to create an uncertainty, a vacuum of aggressive power, that Lenin's hard-eyed coalition of workers and soldiers could exploit. Backed by Trotsky and the youthful Iosif Stalin, Lenin late in October sent his armed Bolsheviks to take over all the main government buildings in Petrograd. Kerensky's government was besieged in the Winter Palace. When it refused to surrender, the cruiser Aurora fired a warning blank, the palace was stormed, and the Cabinet arrested—save for Kerensky, who managed to escape. The coup d'état was complete in Petrograd; democracy in Russia had been executed by Communist hands.
Freedom to Destroy. The Bolsheviks at first tried to provide a façade of popular approval for their takeover. Certain that they would triumph, they permitted Kerensky's elections for a Constituent Assembly to be held. To their chagrin, they got only 175 seats out of 707. The delegates* had met for only 17 hours when Lenin ordered his soldiers to disband the Assembly forever. What Kerensky and the provisional governments' other well-meaning democrats had accomplished in eight months was little more than to provide Lenin with sufficient freedom to destroy them. Kerensky himself went into exile and lives today in New York City, aged 86. He is a humane and civilized monument to what Russia might have been if only the revolution that no one made could have been mastered.
* Czarist Russia then kept time by the Julian calendar, which ran 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used elsewhere in the West. The Communists soon got in step, and thus now celebrate their own October Revolution in November.