The Russian Revolutionary Provisional Government:
From the Second Russian Revolution to the October Soviet Revolution,
1917fe27:1917oc25

Table of Contents
Formation of the Provisional Committee of the Fourth State Duma

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1917fe27:Petrograd| Formation of the Provisional Committee of the Fourth State Duma

Vasilii Shul'gin had been a delegate to the Second, Third and now Fourth State Dumas and was appointed to the new Provisional Committee. He described first-hand the dramatic event that stretched into the wee hours of the next day.

Duma delegates of widely different political persuasions expressed general approval of a proposal that the Duma create a committee with dictatorial powers to carry Russia through the growing crisis. An overwhelming majority elected the following committee =

Chkheidze (SDs)
Kerenskii (Trudovik)
Efremov (Progressive Bloc)
Rzhevskii (Progressive Bloc)
Miliukov (KDs)
Nekrasov (KDs)
Shidlovskii,Sergei (Left Octobrist)
Rodzianko (Zemstvo Octobrist)
L'vov,Vladimir (Center)
Shul'gin (Nationalist, Progressive Bloc)

Here is part of Shul'gin's own description of events =

Fear of the street drove Shulgin and Chkheidze into one "kollegium". [...] But the street was advancing and suddenly broke upon them.... This crowd of thirty thousand which had been threatening since morning was no myth, no figment of our fears... And it came exactly like a landslide, like a flood... They say (I did not see it myself) that Kerenskii tried to take the first bunch of soldiers who crept into the porch of the Taurida Palace and make them into "the first revolutionary guard"...

"Citizen-soldiers, a great honor has fallen to your lot: to protect the State Duma... I declare you to be the first revolutionary guard!...

But this "first revolutionary guard" did not even last the first minute... It was immediately overrun by the crowd... I don't know how it happened... I can't recall... I do remember that instant when the black-grey mass pressing at the doors inundated the Duma in an unbroken, bursting torrent... Soldiers, workers, students, intellectual, just plain people... In a living, viscous, human stream they poured into the bewildered Taurida Palace and filled up hall after hall, room after room... That which we had feared so much, which we had wished to avoid at any coast, was already a fact. The revolutionary had begun.

From this moment the State Duma, properly speaking, ceased to exist.

 [VSB,3:880-1]