ABSTRACT
In February 1917, the pent-up frustration of workers and soldiers in Petrograd overflowed and swept away the Tsarist regime. The Tsar's ministers, after making the futile gesture of proroguing the Duma, lost their nerve, resigned, and called upon Nicholas to appoint a military dictatorship. The enthusiasm with which workers and soldiers rallied to the Soviet suggested to radical socialists that it was open to the Soviet leadership to establish a revolutionary government. The supreme expression of the tendency was the gulf that opened out between the moderate-socialist dominated Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and popular opinion in factories, trenches and villages. The collapse of traditional authority, together with severe economic disruption and competition for grain, inflamed relations between Great Russians and the minorities, and between one minority group and another. Tereshchenko himself remained obdurately optimistic about Russia's military recovery and that Foreign Ministry officials subtly distanced the Provisional Government from the efforts of the Soviet.
