John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

The Kronstadt Soviet’s political demands between February and October were not simply party slogans, and certainly not Bolshevik ones. Although it desired a “decisive rupture” with capitalism and a transfer of power to revolutionary workers and peasants, it also wanted a “democratic republic” and a broad socialist government. Reflecting the sailors’ demands, independent socialists like Trotsky echoed the call for a radical socialist government. What that government might be or what exact form it might take was unclear. Although there was much debate on the Russian left about a future socialist government, no one in any faction or party advocated one-party rule.

Menshevik policy at the time was that the working class should establish a radical democracy with a freely elected Constituent Assembly, but not proceed beyond that or seek direct control of the production process. The Mensheviks’ under-estimation and disregard of the Factory Committees deeply damaged their relationship with militant workers. In contrast, the Bolsheviks appeared to support workers’ control. There were good reasons for Factory Committee militants to back the Bolsheviks in the escalating political crises that led to October. They could not foresee the future. Nonetheless, it was a massive mistake.

By the early summer of 1917, Lenin’s new policies and slogans–“Peace, Bread and Land” and “All Power to the Soviets!”–began to attract the support of workers and soldiers who wanted economic justice and an immediate end to the war. Had the Provisional Government offered these things, they would have supported it. If it did not, they would support those who did offer them. These realignments came to a head in June at the 1st All-Russian Congress of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, a three-week-long gathering in Petrograd of elected delegates from Soviets across the country.

In the absence of a Constituent Assembly (whose delay in convocation was one of the main complaints of the radical left, including the Bolsheviks) the Congress was the first mass-based national democratic forum to convene since the overthrow of the Tsar. 820 delegates, representing Soviets of over 25,000 people, had a vote; 265 delegates, representing Soviets of between 10,000-25,000 people, had a right to speak but no vote. Delegates represented 305 local Soviets plus a wide variety of popular bodies, such as soldiers’ organisations at the front, and some peasant bodies not attached to rural Soviets. Its electoral procedures were erratic but it was nevertheless a rough gauge of popular feeling in June 1917, mid-way between the February and October revolutions.

About 80% of delegates were from the broad democratic left, i.e. the Mensheviks, SRs and Trudoviks, with a substantial “left opposition” (mostly Bolsheviks and Left Mensheviks) sent from working-class heartlands such as the Putilov works and the Nevsky district. Although many had no specific party membership, being simply an active part of the great social upheaval, of 777 delegates who provided party affiliations 285 were SRs, 248 Mensheviks and 105 Bolsheviks. 1The delegates elected a new 250-member Soviet Central Executive Committee, the overwhelming majority of whom were SRs and Mensheviks. In reality, though, the All-Russian Central Executive tended to be dominated and led by the Petrograd Executive. It had the fame and the glory and it sat in the capital. It was also much more inclined to the Bolsheviks than Soviets in provincial towns and cities.

At this stage the focus of debate was not the overthrow of the Provisional Government but how to shift it to the left. The foremost concern was the war. Kerensky, as Minister of War, had committed the Russian army to a new offensive against the Germans. Bedazzled by his own oratory, Kerensky had taken to touring the front in Napoleonic mode, exhorting the soldiers to one more glorious offensive to save the revolution. At the Soviet Congress Trotsky pointed out that whereas the army would not fight for outdated imperialist war aims, it might do so for more revolutionary ones. “What is the crux of the matter?” he asked the Congress:

It is this. No such purpose that would rally the army exists now. Every thinking soldier asks himself: for every five drops of blood which I am going to shed today, will not one drop only be shed in the interest of the Russian Revolution, and four in the interests of the French Stock Exchange and of English Imperialism? 2

Responding for the government, Tseretelli told the delegates, “In taking upon itself the fight for universal peace, the Russian Revolution has also to take over the war, begun by other governments”. He tried to differentiate the war aims of the Provisional Government from those of its predecessorw but in doing so he could only assert, as if he himself were not a part of the government, “it must say clearly and emphatically that it has broken with the old imperialist policy, and must propose to the Allies that the first question in order of importance is to re-examine on a new basis all agreements made until now”. Addressing the issue of making a separate peace, he told the congress, “The worst thing that could happen to us would be a separate peace. It would be ruinous for the Russian Revolution, ruinous for international democracy”.

Tseretelli said such a peace would impel Russia to transfer allegiance from France and England to Germany, and it would thus end up fighting for German Imperialism. After promising that “the land question” would be settled by the Constituent Assembly in due course, Tseretelli finished by surveying the immense challenges faced by the Provisional Government. He declared, “At the present moment there is not a single political party which would say ‘Hand the power over to us, resign, and we will take your place’”. 3From the floor of the Congress Lenin interrupted that there was such a party–the Bolsheviks. Most delegates simply laughed at the presumption.

But the wind was changing. Support for the Bolsheviks grew as they opened their ranks, decentralised their operations and adapted their slogans and policies to attract peasantsoldiers as well as working-class militants. This began a process of what Trotsky called the “de-Bolshevisation” of Lenin’s party. In January 1917 the Bolshevik Party had about 23,600 members. Such was the momentum of revolutionary change unleashed by February that by the time of the Bolshevik conference in April it had nearly 80,000. By August it would have somewhere between 200,000 and 240,000 (estimates vary), with 41,000 members in Petrograd alone and 50,000 in the Moscow region. 4

The rapid increase in membership reflected what Marcel Liebman called a “metamorphosis” of the Bolshevik Party, so much so that the party that carried out the successful October Revolution and had a genuine claim–for a brief time at least–to speak for most of the Russian proletariat, had very little in common with the centralised party of professional revolutionaries created by Lenin in 1903. Liebman’s conclusion is that in 1917 the party “opened itself to the life-giving breeze of democracy”, and as result of its transformation it was “dubious, even false, to identify without qualification the party of the revolution, the party that ‘made’ the October Revolution, with the party that prepared the way for it under the Tsarist regime”. 5

This was a new Bolshevik Party with a new constituency. It was the vital factor that anti-Bolshevik socialists failed to appreciate. Even Martov, more attuned to the shift in popular feeling since the fall of the Tsar, confined himself to working inside the Menshevik Party and the trade unions. As his sympathetic biographer Israel Getzler concedes:

Whilst Martov and the Menshevik-internationalists were busy arguing with fellow intellectuals, trying to convert a party whose mass support was dwindling away at frightening speed, the Bolshevik leaders and activists by-passed the intellectuals, to the point of dropping even their Marxist jargon, in an allout effort to pander to the primitive needs, class instincts and hatreds of the masses and to win them over to their side. 6