"people," meaning the broader, democratic classes.

When the anarchy resulting from the incompetence, stupidity and perhaps
treason of the old bureaucracy reached such an acute stage in the first
weeks of March that the leaders of the Russian public saw that some action
must be taken by some one, it was the Duma that assumed the initiative,
acting in a revolutionary manner, through an executive committee. The
municipal and provincial councils, organized in unions for war-work, and
the war-industry committees, turned without delay to the revolutionary
parliament, in which many of their leading workers were members. The
leaders of the cooeperative movement could not act with such rapidity and
precision. They had not been permitted to organize a central committee,
to coordinate the work of the thousands of small and scattered societies.
These first leaders of the revolution felt justified in taking the
initiative because they alone were organized. Also they thought they could
speak in the name of all classes, including the most democratic, because
the institutions through which they acted did include representatives of
all classes. To emphasize its special anxiety that the more democratic
groups feel their direct participation in the movement of which it had
taken the leadership, the Executive Committee of the Duma not only accepted
but encouraged the development of the revolutionary institutions of the
second category, of which the first to emerge was the Petrograd Council of
Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies.

This Council was organized during the very first days of the revolution;
it was in fact the resurrection of a revolutionary body of the 1905
revolution. The Duma invited the Council to share its own convenient
quarters. Perhaps the invitation was an afterthought, for the workmen and
soldiers of Petrograd in revolt had gravitated toward the Duma, had calmly
entered and taken possession of the large corridors of the palace. The