rioting. The army generals reported that it would be pointless to send in any more troops, because they would only join in with the other rioters. The frustrated tsar responded by stepping down from power, ending the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty (Farah, 580). With the tsar out of power, a new provisional government took over made up of middle-class Duma representatives. Also rising to power was a rival government called the Petrograd Soviet of workers and Soldiers Deputies consisting of workers and peasants of socialist and revolutionary groups. Other soviets formed in towns and villages all across the country. All of the soviets worked to push a three-point program which called for an immediate peas, the transfer of land to peasants, and control of factories to workers. But the provisional government stood in conflict with the other smaller governments and the hardships of war hit the country. The provisional government was so busy fighting the war that they neglected the social problems it faced, losing much needed support (Farah, 580). The Bolsheviks in Russia were confused and divided about how to regard the Provisional Government, but most of them, including Stalin, were inclined to accept it for the time being on condition that it work for an end to the war. When Lenin reached Russia in April after his famous sealed car trip across Germany, he quickly denounced his Bolshevik colleagues for failing to take a sufficiently revolutionary stand (Daniels, 88). In August of 1917, while Lenin was in hiding and the party had been basically outlawed by the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks managed to hold their first party congress since 1907 regardless. The most significant part of the debate turned on the possibility for immediate revolutionary action in Russia and the relation of this to the international upheaval. The separation between the utopian internationalists and the ...
