A New Government at Sea
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Beginning yesterday, National Review publishes three excerpts in three days from Solzhenitsyn’s about-to-be-released , The Red Wheel, Node III, March 1917, Book 3, translated by Marian Schwartz, available Friday, for the first time in English, from University of Notre Dame Press, from Amazon, or wherever books are sold. (For yesterday’s excerpt, go here.) Today’s selection depicts the first meeting, on March 17, 1917, of the helpless Council of Ministers of the new Provisional Government headed by sundry liberals and socialists. In a matter of hours, they heedlessly sweep away much of the state and police apparatus of a vast empire while Prime Minister Georgi Lvov, a soft and ineffectual left-liberal, muses about how a truly free society shouldn’t need hierarchy or authority.
Click here to read the full chapter at National Review.
“They all realized they had to begin with major issues of principle and then everything else would come clear. But not in a single head, dusted with the fuss, patchiness, and jerkiness of these past few days, did a single issue become clear—not even how to formulate it. Besides, today was just the first night they’d slept, and they weren’t over their exhaustion.
Surely there must have been something, though. Oh, there was.
They sat around the big table, stretching significance over their faces.
Yes, apparently there was a big question, much bigger? The Constituent Assembly!
Specifically: in which building would we convene it?”