ABSTRACT
All the limitations on civil rights and liberties that had existed during the Duma era were swept away by the February Revolution. The State Duma was established not by the will of the government, as it could have been in the 1810s or the 1860s, but in the flame and turmoil of the 1905 Revolution. The Duma was therefore right in the middle of a conflict that had been raging for over half a century between the government and the people. The Provisional Government, formed on March 1, 1917, by the Provisional Executive Committee of the State Duma, was headed by the chairman of the All-Russian Zemstvo Union, Prince Prince Georgii Lvov. The Civil War in Russia was generally a calamity for the rural population. The White movement and the peasant uprisings were, as experience has shown, merely the beginning of popular resistance to totalitarian power in Russia.
