Considering the horror which had greeted his proposals barely three weeks earlier, the shift was remarkable. Lenin’s stock was rising in his party, and fast.
The Bolsheviks were hardly monolithic, however. Lenin felt obliged to dilute his motion ‘On the Current Moment’ with concessions to Kamenevism, and still it only passed by seventy-one to thirty-nine votes, with eight abstentions. The Bolshevik right gained four places, one taken by Kamenev, on the nine-seat Central Committee, enough to hold Lenin’s feet to the fire. And on the question of the Second International, which had disgraced itself with its pro-war leanings, Lenin was entirely alone in voting to break with it.
Even so. When the congress closed on 29 April, Lenin could be cautiously pleased with his progress.
On the 26th, the Provisional Government issued a frank, emotional appeal. It admitted, as the April Days had shown, that it was not in control in Russia. It invited ‘representatives of those creative forces of the country which until then had not taken a direct and immediate part’ to join the administration.
This was a direct plea to the Soviet for formal collaboration. It wavered, riven by debates over how to respond.
The positions of Guchkov, the minister of war, and the hated Milyukov had become untenable. They resigned on the 29th.
During all the drama of the month, the Soviet had been attentive to the plights of various revolutionaries stranded abroad, prevented from returning home to Russia, possibly being held in conditions of questionable legality. The Soviet demanded the intercession of the government. One of Milyukov’s last tasks as foreign minister was to intervene with the British and Canadians on the matter of a Russian national detained by the British at a camp in Nova Scotia, considered a threat to the Allies. The prisoner’s name was Leon Trotsky.
Guchkov believed Dual Power was unsustainable, and instead sought a right-wing coalition linking the bourgeoisie in the Provisional Government with those ‘healthy’ parts of the armed forces, such as General Kornilov, along with various business leaders. This, of course, the Soviet would not countenance. But that did not mean it knew what to do with its own whip hand. It was still absurdly committed to ‘watching over’ a government that frankly proclaimed it could not govern.
The same day Milyukov and Guchkov resigned, the Soviet’s Executive Committee rejected coalition with the Provisional Government by a hair: twenty-three to twenty-two. Regional soviets – in Tiflis, Odessa, Nizhni Novgorod, Tver, Ekaterinburg and Moscow, among others – remained firmly set against the participation of socialists in the bourgeois government. Meanwhile, many further to their left, like the Bolsheviks, were growing dismissive of the Provisional Government tout court.
At the same time, however, pressures for collaboration mounted. Representatives of the patriotic socialist parties of the Allied countries, representing the international left wing of the pro-compromisers, agitated strongly for entry into the Russian government. These, in Zimmerwald parlance, were the social patriots. They came to Russia in their numbers, intent on convincing the Russian people to support the war. Albert Thomas from France, Arthur Henderson and James O’Grady from Britain, Emile Vandervelde and Louis De Brouckère from Belgium, France’s Marcel Cachin. They toured the country and the front, joining forces with Russian generals to bolster fighting spirit for what one French socialist, Pierre Renaudel, said it was now possible to describe ‘without blushing’ as ‘the war of justice’.
Most of those they sought to convince, exhausted by the war, ranged between indifference and hostility. To this their visitors seemed blind. In one particularly unedifying moment of theatre, Albert Thomas, addressing a crowd from a balcony, supplemented the French-language exhortations few understood with a ludicrous charade, like a mime at a children’s party. He twirled imaginary Kaiser moustaches, choked an imaginary Russia, and, mistaking his audience’s audible disgust at this buffoonery for praise, closed with a flourish of his bowler hat.
For the workers, peasants and soldiers who supported the soviets, and who were not implacably antagonistic to the government, common sense might suggest that having socialists within that government could only be a good thing. Gradually, certain provincial authorities began to make this argument. Kerensky was already a member of the cabinet, was he not? And Kerensky was popular, was he not? How could more Kerenskys be bad?
In the SR party, the tide began to pull in this direction, manifesting in a widening of the split between the left and right flanks. Rank-and-file soldiers demanded that the government conduct the war ‘in a revolutionary manner’. Military units in Petrograd – even including the pro-Bolshevik armoured car division – now announced in favour of coalition, on such grounds.
And to this species of ‘left’ entryism was, in strange arithmetic, added that of a certain ‘right’ socialism. Where radicals wanted coalition with the government out of faith in the soviets, those to their right, including many of the ‘official’ socialists in the moderate parties and in the soviets themselves, were coming to wonder if those soviets were finished – if power must now revert to more traditional forms.
Within the Petrograd Soviet, despite their numbers, the moderate SRs tended politically to trail the Menshevik leaders. There was diminishing distance between the dominant wings of the two organisations, and Dan, Chkheidze and Tsereteli of the Mensheviks were of a different class in ability to most of the SR figureheads. Since his return, even the esteemed Chernov, traditionally to the SR left, tacked quickly towards former party opponents such as Gots, and ‘revolutionary defencism’. He adopted the moderation of those SR intelligentsia previously to his right, arguing for a consolidation of February’s ‘revolutionary gains’, and against radical moves which might risk reactions. Decrying disorganisation on the left, and holding ‘propertied elements’ as better placed to govern, Chernov espoused socialist–liberal collaboration and support for the Provisional Government.
Excluding the rejectionist anarchists, Bolsheviks, Left SRs and left Mensheviks and maximalists of various traditions, the upshot was that both left-left and right-left began to turn towards coalition.
April ended with a rudderless government, lacking a minister of war, and with socialists in the Soviet committed to the success of a bourgeois revolution from the institutions of which they remained absent, and from which the bourgeoisie themselves were resigning. Small wonder that Kerensky prophesied entropy, confusion, doom. Disorganisation, he warned his Soviet comrades, would spread. The army would soon be unable to fight.
Thus it was with the war as key to the argument that the concerns of revolutionary defencists dovetailed with those of the country’s imperialists. They merged in Kerensky’s predictions of Russia’s impending collapse.
5
May: Collaboration
On 1 May, only two days after its previous vote on the matter, the Soviet Executive Committee turned again to the principle of coalition with the Provisional Government. This time, by forty-four to nineteen, with two abstentions, it voted in favour. In vain did a furious Martov, committed to class independence and abstaining from power as the far left opposition in a bourgeois revolution, cable his Menshevik comrades that participation in coalition government was ‘impermissible’.
Negotiations began immediately. The Soviet set conditions for its support. It insisted on a serious effort to end the war, on the principle of self-determination without annexations; democratisation of the army; a degree of control over industry and distribution; labour protections; taxes on the wealthy; a democratic local administration; an agrarian policy aimed at ‘the passing of the land into the hands of the toilers’; and moves towards the convocation of that much-vaunted Constituent Assembly.
Some of these desiderata might have sounded unacceptably radical to the guardians of bourgeois order imploring the Soviet to join them in ruling, but in fact these conditions were obligingly elastic, their time frames long, often indeterminate. The mainstreams and rights of the Mensheviks and SRs, particularly the leadership a
nd intellectuals – including many a one-time radical terrorist – were coming to feel that the only alternative to coalition with the government was the dangerous current to their left. The culturally weighty SR right undermined the activist Left SRs of Petrograd and the Northern Regional Conference, denouncing them as ‘party Bolsheviks’. Its new paper, Volia naroda, bankrolled by Breshko-Breshkovskaya, wrote that the choice was now ‘openly and definitely between joining the Provisional Government – that is, energetic support to the state revolutionary government – and frankly declining – that is, rendering indirect support to Leninism’.
For their part, as with their debates in February, the liberals and right extracted concessions from the socialists in turn. The Kadets demanded at least four ministers in any cabinet. On the central issue of the war, the Provisional Government insisted that the Ispolkom recognise in it the ultimate authority, the sole source of command of the armed forces.
The Soviet approach to foreign policy and the war was too pacific for Kadet tastes, but the agreed programme accommodated the Kadets in one crucial respect: it allowed the army to prepare offensive, as well as defensive, operations. In fact, with the international prestige of revolutionary Russia severely dented by its equivocal and ineffective military policy, even some within the Soviet were growing less opposed to an offensive.
On 4 May, the final day of negotiations on the composition of a cabinet, the First All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Soviets convened in Petrograd. That same day saw the long-delayed return to the city, with his family, after a protracted, conspiracy-snarled, police- and incarceration-interrupted trip from the US, of Lev Davidovich Bronstein – Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky was remembered as a leader of the Soviet in 1905, and commanded general respect on the left, if not trust. He was much spoken of, but in an uncertain tenor. His maverick theories, bitter and brutal polemics, abrasive personality and inveterate contrariness meant that ‘both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks regarded him with rancour and distrust’, recalled Angelica Balabanoff, the cosmopolitan Italian-Russian Bolshevik. In part, she thought, this was ‘fear of competition’: Trotsky was universally considered brilliant, a painful thorn in the flesh of any opponents, and his only current allegiance was to the scintillating but tiny left group, the Mezhraiontsy. As to what he might do now, no one was certain.
On 5 May, the new government was born: the Second Provisional, or First Coalition, Government. Other than Prince Lvov, who stayed on as president and minister of the interior, it was all change. Among the new ministers were six socialists and ten others, including the Kadet Michael Tereshchenko, a young millionaire sugar manufacturer from Ukraine, replacing Milyukov. Tereshchenko was a known Freemason, and in that febrile, whispering, parapolitical atmosphere, it was easy to suspect conspiracies behind his appointment. Such Mason-obsessed speculation is still rife in discussions of the revolution today. In fact, whether nepotistically advanced or not, Tereshchenko would prove reasonably adept at the impossible task of managing relations with both the Allies and the Soviet.
The cabinet socialists included one from the Populist Socialist Party, A. V. Peshekhonov, in charge of food supplies; two Mensheviks, Tsereteli and Skobelev, for posts and telegraphs and for labour; and three SRs, Chernov himself in agriculture, Perverzev as justice minister, and, by far the most important, the new minister of war (and another noted Freemason): Alexander Kerensky.
At a plenary session of the Petrograd Soviet, the six socialist ministers asked the Soviet for their support in the venture of coalition. This the Soviet granted. The only organised opposition from the left, the Bolsheviks, garnered 100 votes against.
It was now that Trotsky entered the Tauride Palace hall, and the stage of 1917, to enthusiastic applause.
At the sight of him, the new minister Skobelev called out: ‘Dear and beloved teacher!’
Trotsky took the floor. He spoke haltingly at first. The great orator was not himself. Nerves made him shake. The gathering grew quiet to listen to him. He gained in self-assurance as he offered his reading of the situation.
Trotsky eulogised the revolution. He dwelt on the scale of the impact it had had and could still have, too, on the wider world. It was in the international arena, after all, that the revolution must be completed.
Sugar sprinkled, Trotsky then dosed with bitter medicine. ‘I cannot conceal’, he said, ‘that I disagree with much that is going on here.’
Sharply, with growing confidence, he condemned the entry of the socialists into the government, the fallacies of Dual Power. He recited to the gathering ‘three revolutionary articles of faith: do not trust the bourgeoisie; control the leaders; rely only on your own force’. What was needed, what he called for in the silent room, was not a dual but a single power. That of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies.
‘Our next move’, he said, ‘will be to transfer the whole power into the hands of the Soviets.’ The formula could have been Lenin’s.
When he left the hall, Trotsky was applauded far more tepidly than when he had come in. Bolshevik ears, though, had pricked up at his words.
No surprise that five days after his provocative appearance, Lenin offered Trotsky’s Mezhraiontsy a seat on the board of the journal Pravda if they would join the Bolsheviks. He even mooted making the same offer to the left-wing Menshevik–Internationalists. Their leader Martov had, after long delay and without much help from his Petrograd comrades, returned to the city by a similar method to Lenin (in a considerably larger train).
For his part, although Trotsky no longer objected to such joining of forces in principle, he could not accept dissolving into the Bolsheviks. He proposed instead the formation of some new amalgam between the two, tiny as the Mezhraiontsy ranks were compared to those of the Bolsheviks. Lenin declined this arrogant suggestion. He could wait.
From the 7th to the 12th, the Mensheviks held their first All-Russian Conference in Petrograd – midway through which, their left leaders Martov, Axelrod and Martynov arrived to join them.
Martov was appalled by what he described to a friend as his party’s ‘ultimate stupidity’ of joining the government, without even extracting a commitment to end the war. The conference had already validated this the day before he arrived, and now his émigré internationalists were soundly beaten on the question of defencism, too, with Tsereteli speaking forcefully in favour. The tiny Menshevik– Internationalist group refused to be bound by these decisions.
When Martov attempted to speak from the platform, the audience howled contumely on him. The horrified left understood how marginalised they were. Particularly in Petrogard, some on the Menshevik left, like Larin (also a Mezhraionets), argued for a split. Martov decided instead to remain within the party as an opposition bloc, hoping to win over the majority in time for a party congress scheduled for July.
The stakes were high, the mountain to climb even higher. ‘Down with him!’ the delegates had shouted. ‘Out with him!’ ‘We don’t want to hear him!’
These ferocious disagreements on collaboration in the liberal government notwithstanding, both wings of the party were as yet in accord that the workers themselves were in no position to take power. On the ground, this doctrine could give Menshevik organisers, particularly moderates, a certain, somewhat abstract, even quietist political mien.
The young Bolshevik Dune regarded the cadre of Mensheviks within his Moscow workplace with respect, as ‘older, thoughtful and widely read comrades’, ‘the most skilled workers’, a ‘workers’ aristocracy’ with impressive knowledge and experience – but as those whose ‘revolutionary ardour had cooled’. During the post– April Theses factory debates, those Mensheviks of course spoke out against soviet power, at length and with citations, on the grounds that the country was not yet mature, and because ‘before workers could come to power they had to learn a great deal’. As Dune recalled,
The meeting listened carefully to all the speakers but with less attention to [Menshevik] arguments about the socialist and bourgeois–
democratic revolutions, supported by citations from the works of Bebel and Marx … The Bolsheviks spoke in a way that was more comprehensible. We must preserve and strengthen the power we had won during the revolution, not give any of it away to the bourgeoisie. We must not liquidate the soviets as organs of power, but transfer power to them.
Tensions in the country continued to grow as the month stretched on. An uneasiness, a dangerous ill temper escalated among soldiers, workers, and, most dramatically, peasants. For the most part it did not, yet, take explicitly politicised forms, but it was protean, destructive and very often violent.
In the regions, bouts of rural insurgency occurred with ominous and increasing frequency. ‘Russia’, said the Kadet organ Rech, ‘is turned into a sort of madhouse’. Groups of angry peasants, often with soldiers among them, were looting manor houses in growing numbers. Soldiers, despite theatrical imprecations and blandishments from the war minister Kerensky, continued to desert in enormous numbers. Their columns stalked the countryside. They crowded the cities. Traumatised by the war, conspicuous objects of moral panic, on the wrong side of the law, many now broke it to survive, and for darker ends.
They were not the only ones. Crime rates soared: that year came countless more murders in Petrograd than in the last, and some were spectacular and particularly horrific, spreading angst and terror. Deserters broke into a house in Lesnoi, choked a servant to death and savagely beat a young boy before making off with money and valuables. A young woman from the city’s 10,000-strong Chinese minority was found hacked to death, her eyes gouged out. The middle classes in particular were in a panic – they felt more vulnerable than the rich, who could afford protection, or those in the tight-knit working-class areas, where workers’ militias were more effective than was the city’s own. It is no wonder that in this month, the phenomenon of samosudy, lynchings and mob justice, ‘took’, in the words of Petrogradsky listok, ‘a sharp turn’. The Gazeta-kopeika began to run a regular column entitled ‘Today’s Mob Trials’.