Dual Power

Origins and Theorization

Immediately after the February Revolution of 1917, two centers of power emerged side by side in Russia. One was the Provisional Government, formed by the Temporary Committee of the State Duma: it possessed formal legality and international recognition but lacked democratic legitimacy, having never been elected. The other was the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, above all the Petrograd Soviet, which rested on the actual allegiance of workers and the garrison and secured effective control over the military through Order No. 1.

Lenin analyzed this situation in "The Dual Power" (О двоевластии), published in Pravda on April 9 (Old Style), 1917. He characterized the Soviet as "a power directly based on revolutionary seizure, on the direct initiative of the people from below" and "a state of the same type as the Paris Commune of 1871." Yet this power was still incipient and immature: the Soviet leadership, dominated by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, was voluntarily surrendering positions to the bourgeois Provisional Government. This was the essence of dual power.

How It Functioned

If the Provisional Government was the official power, operating through the cabinet, the bureaucracy, and international treaties, the Soviet was a de facto power that operated through real control of the garrison, railways, telegraph, and printing presses. As Guchkov lamented, "the Provisional Government exists only insofar as it is permitted by the Soviet." Every government decision was enforceable only with the Soviet's tacit consent.

Dual power was not a stable cohabitation but a continuous state of tension. The balance of power shifted through the April Crisis (the Miliukov Note), the June demonstrations, and the July Days (the suppression of the Bolshevik uprising). After July, as the Provisional Government tightened repression and the SR-Menshevik Soviet leadership entangled itself more deeply in coalition with the government, Lenin temporarily withdrew the slogan "All Power to the Soviets." But the Kornilov affair in August revived the Soviets' authority, and once the Bolsheviks won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, dual power tilted back toward revolution.

Historical Significance

Dual power formally ended with the October Revolution and the establishment of undivided Soviet rule. But the concept became an important strategic reference point for the world communist movement. As Lenin wrote in "The Dual Power," "humanity has not yet evolved, and we do not as yet know, a type of government superior to and better than the Soviets." The experience was theorized as the prototype of a proletarian state form distinct from the bourgeois state.

The concept of dual power was subsequently referenced in Mao Zedong's Chinese Revolution and in the establishment of people's democracies in Eastern Europe after World War II. In the late twentieth century it was also reinterpreted by anarchists and libertarian socialists as a strategy for building alternative institutions in opposition to state power.