Growth of Popular Discontent

• Through factory committees, trade unions, Workers Militia and strike action, direct pressure could be put on employers by workers
• As food shortages grew, the strike movement became more centred around factories where less bargaining power

  • turned to extreme means as wages became worthless w. inflation
• Increased political agitation and organisation of workers intensified class consciousness, turned to Soviet and Socialist press

  • increasingly directed their demands to govt themselves
  • to punish hoarding, control prices, ban lockouts
• Became clear that local authorities could no longer rely on troops to quell uprisings in the countryside

  • large increase in unrest in areas of large private landholdings
• From September 1917, peasants became more violent

  • seized land, stole timber, livestock, machinery and crops from private landholdings
• Soviets above village level were dominated by members of provincial intelligentsia due to high levels of illiteracy

  deeply sympathetic, to an extent
• In May 1917, All Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets endorsed the peasant demand for abolition of private land ownership w.o compensation, but condemned arbitrary seizures and believed that they should be done legally
• SRs historically alligned w peasants and were supportive of radical moves but wanted to wait for CA
• PG used force in countryside to quell unrest
• PG set up Land Committees to gather information for eventual use by CA - wanted to wait to redistribute
• Chernov Minister of Agri May - August wanted more radical govt policy to concede peasant demands and empower land commissions

  • met with obstruction from senior officials in Ministry and Cabinet refused o back it
  • denounced by Lvov
• Petrograd employers made use of lockouts and broadcasted their resentment for worker uprisings in the press
• Liberal ministers in PG were susceptible to pressure from industrialists against more workers rights
• Economic decline and administrative disruption meant that there was a decline in tax receipts, leading to lobbying from industrialists

  • therefore couldn't raise direct taxes
  • massive deficit spending
  • Between Feb and Oct the money supply doubled
• PG was poorly equipped in administrative terms to fund the far-reaching economic programmes urged by Mensh economists