A People's Tragedy (97 page)

An extraordinary delegation of conference members was hastily convened to resolve the government crisis. It was dominated by the SR and Menshevik leaders in favour of a coalition and, contrary to the clear vote of the conference, immediately opened negotiations with the Kadets. On 24 September agreement was reached, and the following day Kerensky named his cabinet. It was in essence the same political compromise as the Second Coalition of July, with the moderate socialists technically holding a majority of the portfolios and the Kadets in control of the key posts. But the Third Coalition had none of the ministerial talent — slight though that had been — of its predecessor. It was made up of second-rate Kadets and obscure provincial Trudoviks without any real experience of government at the national level.

The socialists had wanted to make it responsible to the Preparliament — a bogus and ultimately impotent body appointed by the Democratic Conference in the vain hope of giving the Republic some form of legitimacy until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly (Plekhanov called it 'the little house on chicken's feet'). But the Kadets had forced them to give up this demand as the price for their involvement in the coalition.

The Provisional Government was thus to remain
de jure
the sovereign power until the Assembly convened.100 But would this new
opera buffa
cabinet even last that long?

Without
de facto
power, it proved incapable of passing meaningful legislation and only hoped to cling on to office until the November elections. Survival for six weeks — that was the sum of its minuscule ambitions — and yet it lasted only four.

The failure of the Democratic Conference was a public confession of the political bankruptcy of the Soviet leaders. After this final admission of their reluctance to assume power, there was a sudden and sharp collapse in the support for the Mensheviks and SRs. The Menshevik Party had practically ceased to exist in Petrograd by the end of September: the last all-city party conference was unable to meet for lack of a quorum. It was not just their rigid Marxist dogma that had kept the Menshevik leaders within the coalition, but a much more fundamental failure to recognize the social and political forces which had been unfolding during 1917. Almost from the outset', writes Leo Haimson, the foremost historian of the Mensheviks, 'they had found themselves valiantly trying to master a chaos that had gradually overwhelmed them. Nothing about the experience had proven familiar, or run according to expectations.' They had failed to see that their own base of support, the industrial workers, was becoming radicalized, and that only a Soviet government could hope to command any real authority among them. Blinded by their own commitment to the state, which had made them defend the coalition principle at all costs, they ceased to act or think like revolutionaries and dismissed the workers' growing radicalism and support for the Bolsheviks as a manifestation of their 'ignorance' and 'immaturity'; and this confirmed them in their dogmatic belief that the Soviets were not ready for power.101 The SR leaders were guilty of similar self-deception in their naive belief that the peasantry's demand for a fundamental land reform, upon which the SR Party had been built, could be put off until the end of the

war and the resolution of the power question at the Constituent Assembly. The peasants were increasingly indifferent to the outcome of the war and to the form of the national government: all they wanted was peace, land and freedom, as expressed in the
volia
of their own autonomous village committees and Soviets. This would be proved by the ill-fated SR struggle during 1918 to reverse the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and to rally the Volga peasants behind the defence of the Constituent Assembly, after it had been closed by the Bolsheviks.

The failure of the SRs, like that of the Mensheviks, was above all a failure of leadership.

Both parties were hopelessly split on the two fundamental issues of 1917: what to do with the war and where to draw the balance between the political and social revolutions.

Their right-wing leaders were Defensist and placed greater stress on the political revolution; while their left-wing comrades were firmly committed to peace and radical social reforms. Given Russia's historical legacy and the huge cultural gulf between the intelligentsia and the masses, there was perhaps no real prospect, at least in 1917, of sustaining a political revolution in the European tradition. But a socialist democracy might just have been stabilized, if the Soviet leaders had agreed to form a coalition with the Bolsheviks in September — and if Lenin had subsequently agreed to respect such a coalition. These, of course, were very big 'ifs'. The Left SRs did eventually form a lonely alliance with the Bolsheviks in October, though by that stage Lenin had no intention of treating them as an equal partner. As for the left-wing Mensheviks, they were hopelessly stranded. Martov, their leader, could not bring himself to join any sort of alliance with his old rival Lenin, although this was the logical outcome of his quarrel with the Defensists, as most of his supporters recognized. A party loyalist to the end, Martov remained on board the sinking ship of Menshevism.

Trotsky described Martov as the 'Hamlet of Democratic Socialism' — and this is just about the sum of it. Like so many of the veteran socialist leaders who found themselves at the head of the Soviet movement in 1917, Martov was much too good an intellectual to be a successful politician. He was always held back by his own integrity and philosophical approach to politics. He tended to choose his allies by the coherence of their general world-view rather than the timeliness or even the practicality of their policies. It was this that made him stick with the Mensheviks rather than switch to a tactical alliance with the Bolsheviks in September: he placed greater importance on the basic Marxist principles of the Mensheviks than on the purely political arguments for such an alliance. This high-minded approach has since won Martov many plaudits among the socialist intelligentsia: even Lenin was said to have confessed in 1921 that his single greatest regret was 'that Martov is not with us. What an amazing comrade he is, what a pure man!' Yet such noble principles are a fatal burden for the revolutionary leader, and in Martov's case they made him soft and indecisive when just the opposite was required.102

The same intellectual indecisiveness was characteristic of many of the Soviet leaders in 1917 — and in this sense they could all be described as Hamlets of democratic socialism. Chernov was a similarly tragic figure in the SR Party. Like Martov, he was a brilliant intellectual and party theoretician, yet he utterly lacked the qualities required to become a successful revolutionary leader. He did not have that hardness of inner resolve and will, that single-minded determination to carry his policies through, even if this meant splitting his own party, or indeed that basic instinct to judge when the moment was ripe to strike out for power. That was the crucial difference between a Chernov and a Lenin — and upon that difference the fate of Russia turned.

* * * With Kamenev's plan for a socialist coalition scotched by the failure of the Democratic Conference, Lenin reverted to his campaign in the party for an immediate armed uprising. He had already begun to advocate this in two letters to the Central Committee written from exile in Finland on the eve of the conference. The Bolsheviks, Lenin had argued, 'can and
must
take state power into their own hands'. Can — because the party had already won a majority in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets, which was

'enough to carry the people with it' in any civil war, provided the party in power proposed an immediate peace and gave the land to the peasants. Must — because if it waited for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, 'Kerensky and Co.' would take preemptive action against the transfer of power, either by giving up Petrograd to the Germans or by delaying the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The Democratic Conference was to be condemned, since it represented 'only the compromising upper strata of the bourgeoisie. We must not be deceived by the election figures: elections prove nothing . . . The majority of the people are on our side.' Reminding his comrades of Marx's dictum that 'insurrection is an art', Lenin had concluded that 'it would be naive to wait for a "formal" majority for the Bolsheviks. No revolution ever waits for
that. . .

History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.'103

These two letters reached the Central Committee on 15 September. They were, to say the least, highly inconvenient for the rest of the Bolshevik leaders ('We were all aghast', Bukharin recalled) since the Democratic Conference had just begun and they were still committed to Kamenev's conciliatory tactics. It was even resolved to burn all but one copy of the letters, lest they should fall into the hands of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks and spark a revolt. The Central Committee continued to ignore Lenin's advice and printed instead his earlier articles, in which he had endorsed the Kamenev line. Lenin was beside himself with rage. While he was still afraid to return to Petrograd (Kerensky had ordered

Lenin's arrest at the Democratic Conference), he moved from Finland to the resort town of Vyborg, eighty miles from the capital, to be closer. During the following weeks, he assaulted the Central Committee and the lower-level party organizations with a barrage of impatient letters, full of violent and abusive phrases heavily underlined, in which he urged them to start the armed insurrection at once. He condemned the 'parliamentary tactics' of the Bolshevik leaders; and welcomed the prospect of a civil war ('the sharpest form of the class struggle'), which they were trying to avert on the false assumption that, like the Paris Communards, they were bound to be defeated. On the contrary, Lenin insisted, the antiBolshevik forces would be no more than those aligned behind the Kornilov movement, and any 'rivers of blood' would give 'certain victory' to the party.

Finally, on 29 September, at the high point of his frustration, Lenin scribbled an angry tirade against the Bolshevik leaders, in which he denounced them as
'miserable traitors
to the proletarian cause.
They had wanted to delay the transfer of power until the Soviet Congress, due to convene on 20 October, whereas the moment was already ripe for the seizure of power and any delay would merely enable Kerensky to use military force against them. The workers, Lenin insisted, were solidly behind the Bolshevik cause; the peasants were starting their own war on the manors, thus ruling out the danger of an Eighteenth Brumaire, or a 'petty-bourgeois' counter-revolution, like that of 1849; while the strikes and mutinies in the rest of Europe were 'indisputable symptoms . . . that we are
on the eve of a world revolution.
To 'miss such a moment and "wait" for the Congress of Soviets would be
utter idiocy,
or
sheer treachery
', and if the Bolsheviks did so they would 'cover themselves with shame and destroy themselves as a party'. As a final ultimatum, he even threatened to resign from the Central Committee, thereby giving himself the freedom to take his campaign for an armed uprising to the Bolshevik rank and file, scheduled to meet at a Party Conference on 17 October. 'For it is my profound conviction that if we "wait" for the Congress of Soviets and let the present moment pass, we shall
ruin
the revolution.'104 Lenin's infamous 'rage' was reaching fever pitch.

Why was Lenin so insistent on the need for an armed uprising
before
the Congress of Soviets? All the signs were that time was on the side of the Bolsheviks: the country was falling apart; the Soviets were moving to the left; and the forthcoming Congress would almost certainly endorse the Bolshevik call for a transfer of power to the Soviets. Why stage a premature uprising and run the risk of civil war and defeat? Many Bolshevik leaders had stressed the need for the seizure of power to coincide with the Soviet Congress itself. This was the
view
of Trotsky and several other Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet — and since they were closely informed about the mood in the capital and would have to play a leading role in any uprising, their point of view was highly influential

in the party at large. While these leaders doubted that the party had sufficient support to justify an insurrection in its own name, they thought that it might be successfully carried out in the name of the Soviets. Since the Bolsheviks had conducted their campaign on the slogan of Soviet power, it was said that they needed the Congress to legitimize such an uprising and make it appear as the work of the Soviet as a whole, rather than one party. By taking this line, which would have delayed the uprising by no more than a few days, Lenin could have won widespread support in the party against those, such as Kamenev and Zinoviev, who were flatly opposed to the idea of an uprising. But Lenin was adamant — the seizure of power had to be carried out
before
the Congress convened. He continued to insist on this right up until the eve of the Congress itself.

Lenin justified his impatience by the notion that any delay in the seizure of power would enable Kerensky to organize repressive measures against it: Petrograd would be abandoned to the Germans; the seat of government would be moved to Moscow; and the Soviet Congress itself would be banned. This of course was nonsense. Kerensky was quite incapable of such decisive action and, in any case, as Kamenev pointed out, the government was powerless to put any counter-revolutionary intentions into practice.

Lenin, it seems from some of his other writings at this time,* was deliberately inventing the danger of a clamp-down by Kerensky in order to strengthen his own arguments for a pre-emptive insurrection, although it is possible that he had become so out of touch with the real situation in Russia, having been in Finland since July, that he himself believed it. There were certainly rumours in the press that the government was planning to evacuate the capital in early October; and these no doubt reinforced his conviction that a civil war had begun, and that military victory would go to the side which dared to strike first. 'On s'engage et puis en voit.'