October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

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 and 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,

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’.

No less angry than the soldiers, though generally more politicised, was the mood among the workers. Strikes multiplied, as did those wheelbarrow-to-canal journeys for abusive overseers. And not only in Petrograd, or among the industrial workers most commonly associated with such agitation: in the town of Roslavl in Smolensk province, for example, it was milliners who made a stand. These mostly young Jewish women, with a tradition of militancy stretching back to 1905, came out for the eight-hour day, a 50 per cent wage increase, a two-day weekend plus paid holidays, and other demands. And they did so with no obsequious niceties.

On 13 May, the Kronstadt Soviet declared itself the only power on the naval island. It announced that it would not recognise the Coalition Government, and would deal only with the Petrograd Soviet. This radical repudiation of Dual Power, though heavily influenced by local Bolsheviks, was slapped down as adventurism by the Petrograd Bolshevik Central Committee. It was not the time, the CC insisted, for such toytown insurrectionary power grabs. The Bolsheviks, wrote Lenin in one pamphlet, must ‘set [themselves] free from the prevailing orgy of revolutionary phrase-mongering and really stimulate the consciousness both of the proletariat and of the mass in general’. The party’s task was to explain their reading of the situation ‘skilfully, in a way that people would understand’. Accordingly, the CC summoned to Petrograd the leading Kronstadt members, Raskolnikov and Roshal.

Lenin remonstrated with them. To no avail. Nor did an appeal from the Petrograd Soviet itself to the Kronstadt forces on 26 May resolve the matter. It would, in fact, require the intercession of Trotsky, on the 27th, to broker a compromise that allowed the Kronstadt Soviet to back down with dignity. Even after that, it remained the only effective government on the island.

In those heady days, as the Coalition Government struggled not to lose control of the country, its critics on the left had trouble controlling their own supporters.

The subordinated nations of the empire were stretching, feeling out new possibilities.

Between 1 and 11 May, Moscow hosted the convention demanded by Muslim Duma deputies in February. Nine hundred delegates from Muslim populations and nations arrived in the city – Bashkirs, Ossets, Turks, Tatars, Kirghiz and more.

Almost a quarter of those present were women, several fresh from the Women’s Muslim Congress in Kazan; one of the twelve-person presidium committee was a Tatar woman, Selima Jakubova. When one man asked why men should grant women political rights, a woman jumped up to answer. ‘You listen to the men of religion and raise no objections, but act as though you can grant us rights,’ she said. ‘Rather than that, we shall seize them!’

The conference was riven on several axes. But a powerful programme of women’s rights was adopted, and, as the left at the Women’s Congress had advocated, polygyny was banned, if only symbolically. Against the plans of the powerful Tatar bourgeoisie for extraterritorial cultural–national autonomy, and against pan-Islamic aspirations, the conference advocated a federalist position of cultural autonomy. This could, and indeed would, mature into calls for national liberation.

Similar demands were on the rise. On 13 May, a Kirghiz–Kazakh congress sent greetings and solidarity to the Petrograd Soviet from Semipalatinsk, a province on the border with China with a largely nomadic population. This congress likewise asserted its right to ‘cultural–national self-determination’ and ‘political autonomy’. In Finland, February had energised a push for autonomy, and perhaps more. The government in Petrograd implored the Finns to wait for a Constituent Assembly: they were setting a bad example for other nationalities. In Bessarabia, there was a contest for the souls of Moldovan peasants. The left took on the fractious new Moldovan National Party, whose leaders demanded the ‘broadest autonomy’. Between 18 and 25 May, Kiev hosted the First Ukrainian Military Congress. Over 700 delegates attended, representing nearly a million people, from the fronts, the rear, and the fleets. A voice for national self-determination.

According to the Menshevik journal Rabochaya gazeta, now, post-revolution, ‘the Provisional Government [had] cut itself off completely from imperialist influences’ and was racing towards ‘universal peace’. On 6 May, the Soviet’s Izvestia, though heavy-hearted that Russian soldiers must continue to fight, asserted that they could at least do so ‘with all their energy and courage… in the firm belief that their heroic efforts will not be used for evil… [but] serving one and the same goal – the defence of the revolution from destruction and the earliest possible conclusion of universal peace’.

Alongside such appeals to the war’s new legitimacy, the Coalition Government knew that its international standing, certainly among the Allies, was heavily dependent on whether it was seen to be doing its bit to win the war – and doing so on those Allies’ decidedly unsocialist terms. Some were clear-sighted that this was a contradiction, and, continuing to laud the anti-imperialist necessity of the war’s continuation, they were entirely cynical. Among the many socialists who were not, who were sincere, the mental contortions were unbearable and tragic. And they grew more painful as the government prepared the army for an offensive.

On 11 May, Kerensky published the document ‘On the Rights of Soldiers’. The edict retained much of the content of Order Number 1 – a necessary sop to popular opinion – but, crucially, reinstated the authority of officers at the front. This included the right to appoint and remove lower-ranking officers without recourse to the soldiers’ committees, and the right to use corporal punishment. The Bolsheviks immediately derided this degrading return of traditional hierarchies as the ‘Declaration of the Rightlessness of Soldiers’.

Kerensky was a born performer. He set out to rally troops for a massive push, the offensive for which everyone was braced. It was a quixotic and grotesque campaign.

In the bomb-swept wilds of the front, the ‘persuader-in-chief’, as he was known, called on all his showmanship. He trudged smiling through the shit, mud and blood of battle lines, attired in immaculate quasi-military outfits. He assembled the soldiers, praised them warmly, met their eyes. He pressed a great deal of flesh. Standing on boxes and stumps and the bonnets of battered military cars, he delivered his shrill oratory to the massed troops, demanding sacrifice, working himself up into such a passion that he would sometimes faint.

And in limited fashion, for a limited time, these interventions worked. When Kerensky arrived, soldiers threw flowers. They carried the beaming leader on their shoulders. When he called for them to do so, they hurrahed. One last push, he exhorted the soldiers, would mean peace. At these words, they prayed and wept.

Or some of them did. The testeria of the reception was genuine, but it was neither deep nor lasting. Kerensky sincerely convinced himself that the army was ready and eager for an offensive. It was not. Perspicacious officers, like the thoughtful General Brusilov, with whom Kerensky replaced Alexeev as commander-in-chief on 22 April, knew this.

Besides, Kerensky only orated before certain troops. He was kept away from those where to attempt it would have been to invite injury or worse. Where he did speak, he soon left, and when the brief narcotic of his sermons ebbed, the soldiers were still stuck scant yards from enemy lines, in freezing filth, in the sights of machine guns. His best speeches notwithstanding, at several stops Kerensky was heckled. The rates of desertion remained astounding, the habits of mutiny assertive. Anti-war agitation, Bolshevik and other, did not abate.

The old guard at the army’s top were deeply bitter at the direction of the war and the erosion of old nostrums. On his first day in charge, Brusilov went to greet the staff at Stavka high command. Their ‘frosty feelings’, he said, were palpable. For these stiff and unreconstructed officers, his willingness to work with soldiers’ committees made Brusilov a traitor. He appalled the senior officers with a cack-handed attempt to show his democratic credentials, greeting the privates on arrival, reaching out to shake their hands. The startled men fumbled with their weapons to respond.

Still, irrespective of plunging morale, distrust at the top and desertion at the bottom, the momentum towards an offensive would not slow. No more would counterpressure for rebellion.

The First All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Soviets took place in Petrograd over almost the entirety of May. Reflecting the overlap between peasantry and soldiery, close to half the 1,200 accredited delegates were from the front.

A sizeable minority of delegates (329) had no affiliation. The majority of the 103 Social Democrats were Mensheviks. The SRs, predictably in this peasant country, dominated, with 537 representatives. Even without an absolute majority, they were able to push through their policy of support for coalition with the Provisional Government, their positions on war and peace and the nationalities question. But it was a reflection of the fractious and hardening mood in the country that such triumphs did not always come easily.

Despite the Bolsheviks’ tiny presence – a minuscule group of nine, accompanied by a caucus of fourteen ‘non-party’ delegates who tended to vote with them – their influence was growing. This was, in particular, because of their harder, more coherent and clearly expressed positions on the two key questions of war and land, as laid out in an open letter from Lenin to the Congress on 7 May.

On the 22nd, he addressed the delegates in person, hammering home his support for the poorest peasants and demanding the redistribution of land. Seemingly in response to this upstart stealing the thunder of the peasant party from the left, the SRs hurriedly added to their programme a provision that ‘all lands must without exception be placed under the jurisdiction of the land committees’. Later, Lenin would not hesitate to filch policies from the left wing of the SRs: for now, he provided the party with material.

It was a reflection of the fractiousness within the SRs that at their own Third Congress, held late that month, Chernov came under bitter assault from high-profile Left SRs like Boris Kamkov, Mark Natanson and the celebrated Maria Spiridonova herself. Spiridonova, after eleven brutal prison years, was freed in February, and had recently arrived in Petrograd in dramatic and triumphal style. Promptly elected mayor of Chita in Siberia, near where she had served time, on getting out, she immediately ordered the blowing up of the prisons. Now she and the other Left SRs accused Chernov of having ‘mutilated’ the party programme. They put forward their own proposals for land seizures, immediate peace and socialist government.

The left’s groundswell of support – 20 per cent of the delegates, and up to 40 per cent on some votes – could not win them more than one place (Natanson) on the Central Committee, and it was the moderates’ policies that the party officially represented at the Congress of Peasants’ Soviets. The SR radicals quietly inaugurated an ‘informational bureau’ to coordinate their activities. When rumours of this reached an alarmed Chernov, the Left SRs formally and falsely assured him that they had set up no such thing.

The assiduous push of Lenin and the Bolshevik radicals (not counting the party’s most adventurist wing) for intransigent political positions was starting to bear fruit, including among seemingly unlikely constituencies. That month, Nina Gerd, the organiser of the Committee for the Relief of Soldiers’ Wives in the Vyborg district, a liberal but an old friend of Krupskaya, surrendered to her the organisation. Three years before, in the recollection of one philanthropist, the soldatki had been ‘helpless creatures’, ‘blind moles’, pleading with the authorities for help. Now, as she relinquished the committee, Gerd told Krupskaya that the women ‘do not trust us; they are displeased with whatever we do; they have faith only in the Bolsheviks’. Soon the soldatki were self-organising in their own soviets. And this dauntless spirit was spreading.

At the time, though, for most of the empire, it is fair to say that local conditions, complicated as they often were by national questions and often steered by moderate activists, encouraged less radical positions than the Bolshevik hardliners would like. At the start of May, for example, the Georgian Bolsheviks Mikha Tskhakaya and Filipp Makharadze arrived from Petrograd in Tiflis, Georgia, to urge their comrades to break immediately with ‘collaborationist’ Mensheviks, and unite only with the left Menshevik–Internationalists. Their injunctions were received with scepticism.

In Baku, too, the local Bolsheviks worked with the Mensheviks, and Lenin’s April Theses still caused consternation: discussion of them in the Social Democratic press was hedged with disclaimers. A citywide conference of Social Democrats in mid-May, with a pro-Bolshevik majority, did oppose the Coalition Government, but would not vote to support a position of ‘all power to the soviets’. And in the Baku Soviet itself, resistance to leftist positions remained stiff. On 16 May, the Bolshevik Shaumian’s no-confidence resolution in the new government was roundly defeated: by 166 to nine, with eight abstentions, the soviet passed a Menshevik–SR–Dashnak (a leftist Armenian party) resolution supporting the inclusion of Petrograd Soviet members in the Provisional Government.

Among the most important exceptions to the tendency of regional moderation was Latvia. In the early days, its Bolsheviks, influenced in part by a strong tradition of local unity with Mensheviks, had taken a mild position, as with the Riga Committee’s ‘submissive’ statement of March. Since then, chivvied by their harder, Russia-based Central Committee, their ranks swelled by the return of more militant émigrés, attitudes had changed. The sheer dominance of the local Bolshevik party in the soviets, its outmanoeuvring of liberals within provisional elected councils, gave it so powerful a hand that, in the words of the historian Andrew Ezergailis, ‘the peculiarity of the institutional framework emerging in Latvia after March was that… the concept of dual power simply did not obtain’.

Key to this shift were the Latvian riflemen. The soviet of these soldiers had moved very rapidly leftward in only a few weeks, and at a congress on 15 May, it passed a resolution on the ‘Present Situation’ which laid out a Leninist position on the war, the Provisional Government, and the soviets. Julijs Danisevskis, who moved the document, pre-prepared it with his Bolshevik comrades in Moscow, from where he had only recent arrived. Two days after it passed, the soldiers elected a new Executive Commitee, of which only one member was not a Bolshevik.

Notwithstanding Brusilov’s sincere efforts to embrace certain democratic norms, Kerensky’s reimposition of traditional military discipline, combined with the ongoing threat of transfer to the front, provoked immense anger among soldiers. This was particularly true of those in revolutionary Petrograd – among whom Bolshevik influence was slowly increasing.

The First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was scheduled for 3 to 24 June, in the capital. The prospect of an opportunity to show its military strength appealed to the hard-left Bolshevik Military Organisation (MO). It prepared to flex its muscles. On 23 May, the MO agreed that several regiments – the Pavlovsky, Izmailovsky, Grenadier and First Reserve Infantry – were ‘ready to go out on their own’, to come onto the streets in a large armed demonstration against Kerensky’s military measures.

In the discussion that ensued among the MO activists, the question was never whether the demonstration should occur – on that there was no disagreement – but only how, under what parameters, whether it needed to attract the majority of the soldiers. The organisers decided to hold a meeting with representatives from Kronstadt early the following month. On the basis of that they would decide how and when this show of force should take place.

The repercussions of this decision would be profound.

On 30 May, yet another conference opened: the First Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees, the Fabzavkomy. Such committees had sprung up at the start of the February Revolution, mostly in the publicly owned defence plants, from where they had spread to private industry. In the early, heady post-February days, managers had agreed with the Soviet Ispolkom to introduce them to all plants in Petrograd, and in April they had been empowered to represent workers.

Initially they had tended to issue relatively moderate economic demands, along the kind of radical trade unionist lines that the socialist left might term ‘syndicalist’. Then, as shortages continued and social tension ratcheted up, the Fabzavkomy turned left, hard. While Mensheviks controlled most of the national trade unions, already in May it was the Bolsheviks who commanded more than two-thirds of the delegates to the Factory Committee Conference. Now those committees provocatively demanded that workers be given a decisive vote in factory management, and access to the firms’ accounting books.

The industrial working class as a whole was growing militant more quickly than were the peasants and soldiers. On the 31st, in the Workers’ Section of the Petrograd Soviet, a symptomatic motion was won by 173 to 144 votes, insisting that all power should be in the hands of the Soviets.

Such a vote would not have passed in the Soviet as a whole. Nonetheless, this Bolshevik formula was a slap in the face to advocates of Dual Power and to the moderates in the Soviet itself, let alone to the Coalition Government.