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Updated: June 24, 2025
Early in March, after several days of ominous silence in regard to events in Petrograd, the news of a successful revolution in Russia astonished the world. From March 9 to March 15, it appeared, the Russian people, headed by Michael Rodzianko, President of the Duma, set about cleaning house with quiet but characteristic thoroughness.
The whole administration, the whole administrative machinery, stands still, evidently retrograding every day. Many understand it. Rodzianko is going away south; a man whom they think too old and too much of a reactionary. He is quite depressed, I presume, but likes to look perfectly satisfied.
All factions in the Duma were bitterly opposed to a separate peace. Rodzianko was loudly cheered when he denounced the intrigues against the Allies and declared: "Russia gave her word to fight in common with the Allies till complete and final victory is won. Russia will not betray her friends, and with contempt refuses any consideration of a separate peace.
Then came a committee from these soldiers to the doors of the Duma with the demand: "We have risen and helped the people overturn the autocracy. Down with czarism! Where do you stand?" President Rodzianko, speaking for the Duma, showed them his telegrams demanding a ministry of the czar responsible to the people, and said that they stood for a constitutional democracy. The soldiers were satisfied.
The sitting opened, the President Rodzianko made a speech in which he criticised severely the policy of the Stürmer Government, and everyone realised the seriousness of the situation now that the President of the Duma came out against the Prime Minister. "The Government must learn from us what the country needs," said Rodzianko fiercely.
M. Michael Rodzianko, the President, gravely took his seat on the stroke of two, and the House was crowded. The diplomatic boxes were filled to overflowing, the British, French, Italian and United States Ambassadors, together with the Ministers of most of the neutral countries, being present. The usual prayer was offered, but neither M. Miliukoff nor M. Purishkevitch was in his place!
The president himself, Michael Rodzianko, who hitherto had always been a stanch supporter of the autocracy, being a prosperous landowner and the father of two officers in a crack regiment, arraigned Sturmer as once he had arraigned the revolutionary agitators. But it was left to Professor Paul Milukov, the leader of the Constitutional Democrats, to create the sensation of the meeting.
Neither Rodzianko, president of the Duma, nor Tcheidze, the president of the Council of Workingmen's and Soldiers' Deputies, was represented in the cabinet, though both had taken important and leading parts in the revolution and the organization following. The policy agreed upon was a compromise between the two elements in the new government.
In full consciousness of the responsibility of its decision, the Provisional Committee expresses its trust that the population and the army will help it in the difficult task of creating a new government which will comply with the wishes of the population, and be able to enjoy its confidence. MICHAIL RODZIANKO, Speaker of the Imperial Duma. February 27, 1917.
Rodzianko told Russky that the Duma and the Council of Workingmen's and Soldiers' Deputies had mutually agreed that the czar must abdicate and two deputies Gutchkov, the War Minister, and Shulgin were on their way to demand a document to this effect from Nicholas.
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