The Russian Revolution by Sheila Fitzpatrick

consciousness. Still, the evident vitality of the peasant mir in 1917 came as a shock to many people. The Marxists had been arguing since the i88os that the mir had essentially disintegrated internally, surviving only because the state found it a useful instrument. On paper, the effect of Stolypin's reforms had been to dissolve the mir in a high proportion of the villages of European Russia. Yet for all this, the mir was clearly a basic factor in peasant thinking about the land in 1917. In their petitions, the peasants asked for an egalitarian redistribution of lands held by the nobility, the state, and the Church-that is, the same kind of equal allocation among village households that the mir had traditionally organized with regard to the village fields. When unauthorized land seizures began on a large scale in the summer of 1917, the seizures were conducted on behalf of village communities, not individual peasant households, and the general pattern was that the mir subsequently divided up the new lands among the villagers as it had traditionally divided up the old ones. Moreover, the mir often reasserted its authority over former members in 1917-18: the Stolypin `separators', who had left the mir to set themselves up as independent small farmers in the prewar years, were in many cases forced to return and merge their holdings once again in the common village lands.
    Despite the seriousness of the land problem and the reports of land seizures from the early summer of 1917, the Provisional Government procrastinated on the issue of land reform. The liberals were not on principle against expropriation of private lands, and generally seem to have regarded the peasants' demands as just. But any radical land reform would clearly pose formidable problems. In the first place, the Government would have to set up a complicated official mechanism of expropriation and transfer of lands, which was almost certainly beyond its current administrative capacities. In the second place, it could not afford to pay the large compensation to the landowners that most liberals considered necessary. The Provisional Government's conclusion was that it would be best to shelve the problems until they could be properly resolved by the Constituent Assembly. In the meantime, it warned the peasantry (though to little avail) not on any account to take the law into its own hands.

The political crises of the summer
    In mid-June, Kerensky, now the Provisional Government's Minister of War, encouraged the Russian Army to mount a major offensive on the Galician Front. It was the first serious military undertaking since the February Revolution, as the Germans had been content to watch the disintegration of the Russian forces without engaging themselves further in the east, and the Russian High Command, fearing disaster, had earlier resisted Allied pressure to take the initiative. The Russians' Galician offensive, conducted in June and early July, failed with an estimated 200,000 casualties. It was a disaster in every sense. Morale in the armed forces disintegrated further, and the Germans began a successful counter-attack that continued throughout the summer and autumn. Russian desertions, already rising as peasant soldiers responded to news of the land seizures, grew to epidemic proportions. The Provisional Government's credit was undermined, and tension between government and military leaders increased. At the beginning of July, a governmental crisis was precipitated by the withdrawal of all the Cadet (liberal) ministers and the resignation of the head of the Provisional Government, Prince Lvov.
    In the midst of this crisis, Petrograd erupted once again with the mass demonstrations, street violence, and popular disorder of 3-5 July known as the July Days." The crowd, which contemporary witnesses put as high as half a million, included large organized contingents of Kronstadt sailors, soldiers, and workers from the Petrograd plants. To the Provisional Government,