By March 1917 a new system of dual powerDual Power The political condition in Russia between February and October 1917 in which power was contested between the Provisional Government (representing the liberal and democratic forces of the February Revolution) and the soviets (councils of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies). It ended when the Bolsheviks seized power in October. The February Revolution of 1917 produced an immediate institutional paradox. The Provisional Government — initially led by Prince Lvov, later by Kerensky — claimed sovereign authority as the successor to the Tsar. The Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies formed simultaneously, held the practical loyalty of the capital’s factory workers and crucially the garrison, which had mutinied against the Tsar. Soviet Order Number One, issued in March 1917, instructed soldiers to obey the Soviet’s orders unless they contradicted the Provisional Government’s — placing the loyalty of the armed forces in an institutional no-man’s-land. For eight months, Russia was governed by this unstable duality: the Provisional Government made decisions the Soviet could block, while the Soviet commanded loyalties it chose not to exercise. The system’s fundamental instability was the question of the war: the Provisional Government committed Russia to continuing the First World War (partly to maintain Allied support and international credibility), while the soviets across Russia increasingly demanded ‘peace, land, and bread.’ The Bolsheviks understood the dual power structure better than anyone and used the Soviet as the institutional base from which to seize power in October, effectively claiming to act on behalf of a Soviet authority rather than seizing the state in their own name. The concept of dual power has influenced revolutionary theory far beyond 1917. It describes a situation that arises in many revolutionary transitions: the collapse of the old order creates a vacuum that cannot be immediately filled by a single authority, and competing power structures proliferate, each with different sources of legitimacy and different social bases. The dual power condition is inherently unstable — the two powers must eventually converge, with one absorbing or destroying the other. In Russia’s case, the outcome was determined by the Provisional Government’s commitment to the war and by the Bolsheviks’ skill in positioning themselves as the instrument of Soviet authority. In later revolutions — Iran in 1979, where Khomeini’s Revolutionary Council coexisted briefly with a provisional government; Egypt in 2011, where the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces coexisted with elected civilian institutions — the dual power phase produced similar instability and similar resolution through the dominance of whichever force controlled armed coercion. had established itself in the capital city Petrograd. The Provisional Government, a group comprised of the Tsar’s former ministers who refused to disband, and the Petrograd Soviet, a meeting of delegates from the committees established in factories and army regiments, existed in an uneasy partnership with one another. This episode of our AQA Revolution and Dictatorship 1917-53 study course explores in depth these two organisations and how their dysfunction provided opportunities for Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

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