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Reasons Behind the Failure of the Provisional Government Essay

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Reasons Behind the Failure of the Provisional Government

The provisional government was brought about after the fall of the Tsarist government collapsed. This was done purely because of lack of support for the Tsar and being the only major party. They were in power for 8months and after making five serious errors; they were removed from power by force. Kerensky ran the provisional government and it was his lack of judgement, just like the Tsars stupidity and gullibility that let him down.

The first error he made was that he made no attempt to make the provisional government legitimate. It never held a democratic election for fear of losing status. Even though at the start of their reign …show more content…

This left an army that was majorly weakened and people thought that, like the Tsar he was a loser of wars. The populations now have an even worse opinion of him and it was not good for his popularity.

Kerensky underestimated the Bolshevik’s and Lenin. Once he had fought off their uprising with Lenin’s plan of ‘Peace for the Army, Bread for the Workers and Land for the Peasants’, he thought sending Lenin to exile was sufficient. After Lenin accepted that he had lost his chance to become President, an uprising in Petrograd (Kornilov Affair – a point I will go onto in my next paragraph) means Kerensky has to rearm the Bolsheviks in order to retain order. This leaves other countries and supporters of Lenin with a chance to send him back into the country and to try and push the country into another revolution (bringing about communism ideally). Lenin’s plan to try to please as many people as possible could come back into effect and this time it had a substantially negative effect on Kerensky’s position in Russian parliament.

Continuing from my last point, Kerensky’s lack of judgement about the Kornilov affair was a definitive error of his. He thought that the Bolshevik’s were attempting to take over Russia by means of a coup, thus he asked Kornilov to send part of his army to protect him. When they got there,

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