The rapid spread of the revolutionary spirit among the proletarians and working peasants helped to undermine and destroy the social foundation on which the petty-bourgeois parties rested.
After the suppression of the Kornilov revolt the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders, driven by the general rise of the revolutionary movement, appeared at the Winter Palace and demanded in the name of their parties that the Cadets should be removed from the government. But the mass movement had already gone beyond the bounds of what was acceptable to the petty-bourgeois parties: the expulsion of the Cadets from the government could not stop the rise of the revolution, which demanded “All Power to the Soviets!” The organising force of this slogan was firmly uniting the masses. The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks decided hurriedly to build another dam to check the revolutionary movement and later to divert it into a safer channel.
On September 1 a joint session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets and the Executive Committee of the Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies was held. The leaders of the petty-bourgeois parties, scared by the revolution, countered the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” by the demand for a general democratic congress.
“To take the entire power into our own hands would be a crime against the revolution,”(1)
the Menshevik leader Skobelev declared at the joint session, while Tsereteli, who only two hours earlier had demanded that Kerensky should remove the Cadets from the government, once more spoke in defence of coalition with the bourgeoisie.
In his eagerness to dissociate himself from the revolution, Avksentyev, the Socialist-Revolutionary leader, attacked the commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, which had summoned troops from Finland to fight Kornilov, and vigorously opposed the arming of the workers. In a fit of panic, Avksentyev blurted out the fact that the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries were training in the rear of the revolution and had taken part in the fight against Kornilov only because they were afraid of being left behind by the masses.
The session adopted a decision to summon a congress—
“of all the organised democracy and the democratic organs of local government to settle the question of the formation of a government capable of leading the country to a Constituent Assembly.”(2)
A democratic congress—this was to be the dam which was to check the revolutionary tide, or to divert it.
This congress, or, as it was called, the Democratic Conference, met on September 14. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries did all they could to lessen the representation from the workers and peasants by increasing the number of delegates from the various petty-bourgeois and bourgeois organisations. The Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies sent 230 delegates, and almost as many mandates (200) were given to the non-democratic Zemstvos. The trade unions were granted 100 mandates, while the co-operative societies, which were entirely under the sway of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Cadets, received 120 mandates. The various organisations of the huge army at the front were allowed 83 mandates in all, while the reactionary Cossacks were given 36 mandates. Invitations to the Conference were extended to representatives of the officers, the priests and the “Inter-Party Alliance,” whose very name betrayed it as a definitely reactionary group. In a word every possible method of shuffling the Democratic Conference was resorted to in order to ensure that the revolutionary elements would be in a minority.
But despite all the efforts of the “heroes of the swindle”—the term by which Lenin branded the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks who had stacked the Conference—the dam did not prove strong enough. At the Conference 766 delegates voted in favour of coalition with the bourgeois parties, 688 delegates voted against, while 38 delegates abstained from voting.
Furthermore, two amendments on the subject of coalition were submitted:
1. “The coalition shall not include elements either of the Cadet Party or of the other parties who were implicated in the Kornilov conspiracy.”
2. “The coalition shall not include the Party of National Freedom.”(3)
The adoption of the first amendment would have entirely precluded the possibility of a coalition with the bourgeoisie, because there was not a single bourgeois party which had not been in one way or another implicated in the Kornilov conspiracy. In search of a loophole, and to leave their hands free for future manœuvres, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries decided to vote for the second amendment. But the manœuvre failed: an overwhelming majority of votes—798—were cast in favour of the first amendment and 139 votes were cast against; there were 196 abstentions.
The Conference was obviously swinging towards the Left. When the resolution was voted as a whole, only 183 delegates voted in favour, 813 voted against, while 80 abstained from voting.
All the pettifogging manœuvres were in vain: the mass of the people had moved so far to the Left that even the stacked Democratic Conference declared against coalition with the Cadets.
The politicians then decided to take the refractory Conference by siege.
Delegates were canvassed, coaxed, promised one thing and another, invited to agree to a compromise—only to drag some sort of concession from them. Finally, the presidium of the Democratic Conference held a meeting on September 20 together with representatives from the parties and groups, at which the political acrobats decided to put the crowning touch to their circus performance. But again, 60 votes were cast against coalition and only 50 votes for.
The delegates had to be canvassed all over again. The petty-bourgeois politicians staged one more “turn.” The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks temporarily called off the attack over the question of coalition and proposed instead that a permanent representative body should be appointed from among the delegates to the Democratic Conference to be known as the Democratic Council, to which the government was to be accountable. The meeting agreed to this. On the proposal of the Mensheviks, the presidium of the Democratic Conference decided by a majority vote that all the groups and parties should be represented on the new body on a proportional basis. Thereupon, the slick “Lieberdans”—as the workers called the Mensheviks after the names of two of their leaders, Lieber and Dan—submitted another amendment, to the effect that if bourgeois Ministers should be allowed in the new Provisional Government, then bourgeois parties should be allowed on the representative body—the Democratic Council. The trick of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks succeeded: the amendment was adopted by 56 delegates against 48, with 10 abstentions. That evening Tsereteli had this resolution passed at the Conference, gilding it for greater certainty by a third clause stipulating that the majority on the future body should be secured for the democratic elements.
The resolution was passed, true in a somewhat clipped form, but the lackeys had carried out the wishes of the bourgeoisie by getting the idea of a coalition endorsed, even if in a masked form. For the rest, the bosses had no misgivings as to the loyalty of their lackeys. Even while the Democratic Conference was in progress, Kerensky was conducting negotiations with prominent representatives of the bourgeois parties—Kishkin, Buryshkin, Konovalov and Tretyakov—and inviting them to join the government. These individuals demanded the formation of a “strong government.”
The Central Committee of the Cadet Party, which stood behind the bargainers, instructed Kishkin and Konovalov to join the Cabinet on condition that the future representative body be appointed by the government and not elected by the Soviets and other public political bodies. The Provisional Government, convinced of the complete loyalty of the Democratic Conference, and before the resolution of the “Lieberdans” in favour of a coalition had even been passed, accepted the conditions laid down by the Cadets. At this very moment the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were promising the direct opposite in their resolution, which stated that the government was to be accountable to the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic, or the Pre-parliament, as the new body set up by the Democratic Conference was called. Upon receiving the resolution on coalition which the “Lieberdans” had concocted with such great effort at the stacked Conference, the Provisional Government used it solely to further its own plans. Kerensky came to terms with the Cadets and supplemented the Provisional Government with the following persons: A. Konovalov—Minister of Commerce and Industry and Vice Premier; K. Gvozdyev (Menshevik)—Minister of Labour; P. Malyantovich (Menshevik)—Minister of Justice; S. Prokopovich—Minister of Food; Professor M. Bernatsky—Minister of Finance; S. Salazkin—Minister of Education; N. Kishkin (Cadet)—Minister of Poor Relief; S. Smirnov (Cadet)—Comptroller-General; A. Kartashov (Cadet)—Minister of Worship; A. Liverovsky—Minister of Ways of Communication; S. Tretyakov—Chairman of the Economic Council of the Provisional Government; S. Maslov (Socialist-Revolutionary)—Minister of Agriculture.
The government ordained that the Pre-parliament—
“shall consist of 555 members appointed to the Council by the Provisional Government on the nomination of public and political organisations.”(4)
The Pre-parliament was empowered to discuss only laws “on which the Provisional Government shall deem it necessary to secure the opinion”(5) of the Pre-parliament.
The result was that, carefully stacked though the Democratic Conference was, and subtle though the manœuvres of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were, the Conference revealed the political impotence of the compromisers and their loss of all support among the masses: the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks proved to be isolated from the people.
But the movement of the masses towards the Left did not stop there. Mass desertions from the petty-bourgeois parties affected the composition of the parties themselves. A split began in the ranks of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. A stormy meeting of the Menshevik fraction was held on the very eve of the Democratic Conference, September 13. The bankrupt leaders accused each other of political mistakes, flagellated themselves for blunders committed, and argued and quarrelled over the causes of the collapse of Menshevism and the rapid spread of Bolshevik ideas. The Menshevik fraction represented not a untied party but at least three groups, each sharply opposed to the others. After a discussion lasting two days, 75 members of the fraction voted against coalition and 65 for coalition. Consequently, when Tsereteli officially spoke in favour of coalition at the Democratic Conference he did so in flagrant violation of the instructions of his party.
The dissension within the ranks of the Socialist-Revolutionaries was even more acute. At their Seventh Petrograd Provincial Conference, held on September 10, 1917, the Left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries criticised the work of the Central Committee of their party and, in the elections to the Provincial Committee, obtained a majority of seats.
The Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary parties were splitting into two parts: the rank and file were going over to the revolution, while the leaders openly avowed their loyalty to the bourgeoisie.
The worker and peasant members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party began to desert it en masse. Discipline within the party rapidly declined. Whole groups refused to obey party instructions. The Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party demanded that Savinkov should appear before it and give an account of his relations with Kornilov. But Savinkov refused and was supported in this by a large group of Socialist-Revolutionaries headed by the notorious “revolutionary” Breshko-Breshkovskaya.
The Left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries steadily gained strength. At the Third Congress of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, held in May 1917, a small group of Lefts published a protest against the compromising policy of the majority. Without breaking with the party the Left wing virtually began from May onward to conduct a policy independent of the Central Committee. The Lefts were led by several prominent figures: Spiridonova, Kolegayev, Proshyan, Bitsenko, Natanson, Schreider and Kamkov.
The Left and Right wings of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party chiefly differed over the question of the Provisional Government and the land question. The Lefts were opposed to a coalition with the bourgeoisie, although they did not advance the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” They regarded the Soviets as controlling bodies, thereby sharing the error of the Left Mensheviks. They took up a more resolute position on the agrarian question, advocating the immediate break-up of the landed estates.
The Socialist-Revolutionary Party tried to conceal its state of utter disintegration and endeavoured in every way to retain those who were splitting away. When the Left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary fraction in the Pre-parliament branded the policy of their party as treachery and withdrew from the meeting, the Central Committee of the party declared that although the Lefts had withdrawn from the fraction they still remained members of the party. But this could not save Socialist-Revolutionaries: their influence among the workers and peasants rapidly declined. The desertion of the masses from the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks was accelerated by the new elections to the Soviets, which as a rule ended in the compromisers being driven out and the Soviets going over to the Bolsheviks.
The manœuvres of the compromisers were obviously doomed to failure.
[1] “Plenary Session of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and the Executive Committee of the Peasants’ Deputies—Skobelev’s Speech,” Izvestia of the Central Executive Committee and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, No. 160, September 2, 1917.
[2] “Plenary Session of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and the Executive Committee of the Peasants’ Deputies—Resolution of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries,” Izvestia of the Central Executive Committee and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, No. 161, September 3, 1917.
[3] “The Progress of the Session,” Izvestia of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, No. 176, September 20, 1917.
[4] “Decisions of the Provisional Government—Statutes of the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic,” Vestnik of the Provisional Government, No. 167, October 3, 1917.
[5] Ibid.
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