Secretary of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee and the lawyer who drafted Order No. 1
Sokolov sat at the desk writing. Soldiers crowded around him, standing and leaning over the table, half dictating, half suggesting what he should write. ... When the work was done, they put the heading 'Order No. 1' on the sheet. Sukhanov, Notes on the Revolution
Born the son of a court archpriest, he turned to defending revolutionaries and became the lawyer for every radical cause in late imperial Russia. On March 1, 1917, as secretary of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, he chaired the soldiers' section meeting that drafted Order No. 1, the document that democratized the Russian army and signaled the Soviet's de facto supremacy over the Provisional Government. Never a party member, he was among the busiest unofficial leaders of the revolution's first months, then worked quietly as a Soviet legal adviser after the Civil War and died in Yalta.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1885–1896Published articles on law and political economy in Mir Bozhy, Obrazovanie, Zhizn and other journals
- 1894–1898Investigated for Narodnaya Volya ties; arrested for involvement in the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class (1896); exiled to Revel (1898)
- 1905–1909Defence counsel in major political trials: Khrustalev-Nosar, RSDLP military organisation, and others
- 1909–1910Legal adviser to the Social Democratic faction, Third State Duma
- 1910–1916Member, Supreme Council of the Grand Orient of the Peoples of Russia; member of Galpern and Gegechkori lodges
- 1914Sentenced to 8 months in the 'Case of 25 Lawyers' (Beilis protest); commuted to suspension of practice
- 1917.3Secretary, Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee; drafted and edited Order No. 1
- 1917Member of the Pre-Parliament and the Extraordinary Investigative Commission; appointed senator by Kerensky
- 1917–1928Legal adviser to the Soviet government; served in various Soviet institutions
Related historical events
Drafting Order No. 1
On the evening of March 1 (March 14 O.S.), 1917, the Petrograd Soviet merged the workers' and soldiers' deputies into a single body. While the Executive Committee negotiated the transfer of power with the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, a stormy meeting of the soldiers' section chaired by Nikolai Sokolov was underway in the adjoining room. According to the memoirs of the Mensheviks Zaslavsky and Kantorovich, Sokolov led the editing commission, yet in practice several people drafted the text together while unknown soldiers took the rostrum to offer ever more radical proposals. 'It would be a mistake to seek an individual author... it was composed by the faceless mass of soldiers,' they wrote, capturing its collective character. The soldiers' demands became 'Order No. 1,' with Semyon Klivansky, a defencist Menshevik on the Executive Committee, joining Sokolov in the editing.
Order No. 1 rested on three points: elected committees from the lower ranks in every unit and ship; political subordination of units to the committees and the Soviet rather than to officers (clause three); and all weapons placed under the control of the soldiers' committees, never to be surrendered to officers who demanded them. It also proclaimed equality of the lower ranks' civil rights and abolished officer titling. Published in the Soviet's organ Izvestia on March 2, the order was addressed to the entire capital garrison; Verkhovsky recalled that nine million copies were issued.
Assessments of its historical significance split sharply. Soviet historiography treated it as the starting point of the army's democratization, while General Denikin called it 'the first, decisive push toward the collapse of the army.' The non-faction Social Democrat Goldenberg answered: 'Order No. 1 is not a mistake but a necessity. The day we made the revolution we understood that if we did not demolish the old army, it would crush the revolution. We had to choose between the army and the revolution, and we chose the revolution.' The pen Sokolov held became not one man's document but the channel through which the demands of hundreds of thousands of soldiers were compressed into a text.