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

In Kostroma, the Bolsheviks had a majority in the Soviet until March 1918. The Kostroma Mensheviks demanded a relaxation of state control over bread prices and removal of the ban on workers travelling out of town to purchase food. The result was that on 23rd May the Mensheviks and SRs gained a majority on the local Soviet. After an internal debate in which some Bolsheviks argued they must respect the people’s wishes and give up their seats on the Executive, a majority refused to do so. Instead, Kostroma’s Bolsheviks issued a bulletin which said they had “taken power without relying on the majority in the Soviet”. It finished, “Since the events of May 23rd we have stopped talking to the Mensheviks and SRs as comrades and we have started talking to them with the language of power”. 30The “language of power” consisted of bringing in armed Cheka units to raid the offices of the local Menshevik newspaper and arrest Kostroma’s leading Mensheviks.

In the industrial city of Tula, dominated by two large armaments factories of 40,000 workers, the Mensheviks were so strong that it took until December 1917 for the Bolsheviks to establish control of the city. Even then the Mensheviks held a majority in the Soviet. A special conference of workers discussed issues ranging from unemployment to wages to how to manage the problems arising from BrestLitovsk. The conference drew up a series of demands, including the re-establishment of a democratic republic, the recall of the Constituent Assembly, measures against unemployment, and organisation of the country to defend against German aggression. This level of independence could not be allowed, and the Bolsheviks quickly shut down the Menshevik paper Narodnyi Golos , raided and smashed up the Menshevik local party’s HQ and a worker’s social club, and made further arrests. 31

In Yaraslavl suppression was even more violent. Since October 1917 the Bolsheviks had held a majority in the city’s Soviet, but they refused to allow new elections. After the Mensheviks kept pressing for elections, the Commander of the Yaraslavl Red Guards publically announced, “Those who are spreading Menshevik counter-revolutionary literature will be shot on the spot”. The intimidation failed, and new elections were called on 9th April, in which the Mensheviks secured 47 seats to the Bolsheviks’ 38 and the SRs’ 13. Following the result, the Bolshevik chair of the Soviet Executive declared the election null and void and the Soviet itself illegal. The reaction of Yaraslavl workers was immediate–a conference was called to defend the Soviet and some workers took strike action in protest at its closure. After these strikers were all dismissed the protest spread to other factories and plants, shops, streetcars, printing shops and the railways. Following this, new elections were held in which the Mensheviks secured four times as many votes as the Bolsheviks. This was the final straw for the Bolsheviks, who closed down the Soviet and declared martial law.

The same pattern was followed in Kovrov, where marches by striking workers demanding new elections were fired upon by Red Guards. And in Roslavl, where in May 1918 after elections returned a Menshevik majority, the Menshevik deputies were refused admittance to the Soviet by armed Red Guards. After a strike by railway workers in protest, the Red Guards attacked a strikers’ rally, then arrested and shot several strike leaders. 32In Rostov-on-Don, a broad-based Bolshevik-led MRC had seized power in the city after 25th October and fought off General Kaledin’s military forces. When Red Guards entered the city in February 1918 and tried to take over, they managed to alienate not just Rostov’s citizens but also the MRC, who had believed that the purpose of the revolution was to transfer “all power to the Soviets”. After Red Guards attempted to shut down the Soviet, the Bolshevik MRC joined forces with Mensheviks and SRs to fight them off. After months of civil strife in the city, the Mensheviks won Soviet elections in April 1918 on a platform of returning to democratic local government, whereupon the Red Guards disbanded the Soviet entirely and declared the Mensheviks and SRs counter-revolutionaries. 33

The final epitaph for the Soviets was delivered in Tambov, when after election to the city Soviet the Mensheviks and SRs held three-quarters of the seats and attempted to form a new Executive. As they sat in session armed Red Guards burst in and demanded they disperse. When asked what mandate they had to do so the commander pulled out his pistol and exclaimed, “This is my mandate!” The next day it attempted to convene again, only to be met by a proclamation from the Red Guards that read, “The Soviet is disbanded forever! The time has come to establish not the power of the Soviets but the dictatorship of the revolutionary parties”. 34

The workers of Yaraslavl, Kostroma, Tambov, Komrov, Tula, Tver, Rostov-on-Don and many other towns and cities now knew how much the Bolsheviks valued their “self-activity”. As a result, many workers began to draw parallels between the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the similar dispersal of local Soviets that returned non-Bolshevik majorities. The Mensheviks secured these majorities not just in the Central Industrial Region but across the Black Earth Region (south of Moscow) and the Upper Volga and Urals Region. In the Lower Volga, Kuban and Don Regions the picture was more complex, with constantly shifting power struggles between Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, Cossacks, anarchist bands and incipient “White” armies (i.e. real counter-revolutionaries, whom the Mensheviks, unlike some of the more protean and undisciplined SRs, refused on principle to work with no matter what the ostensible aim).

Examining the record of Soviet elections in the first half of 1918, one of the most authoritative historians of early Soviet Russia concludes that by June 1918 the Mensheviks could justly claim that “large numbers of the industrial working class were now behind them, and that but for systematic dispersal and packing of the Soviets, and the mass arrests at workers’ meetings and congresses, their party could eventually have won power by its policy of constitutional opposition”. 35This may have been true had constitutional opposition been allowed. But the chance to express genuine dissent that existed in the first half of 1918–when newspapers such as the Mensheviks’ Vperod and Maxim Gorky’s Novaya Zhihn were allowed to publish, and Mensheviks and SRs could sit on the Soviet CEC–was soon extinguished.

Martov, as a member of the CEC, attempted to use that platform to voice criticisms at its packed and rowdy sessions in the Hotel Metropole, until 14th June, 1918 when all Mensheviks and SRs were expelled from the Executive, reducing it to a one-party bloc. At the same time Vperod and Novyi luch , the last remnants of the Menshevik press, were closed down. It was not a coincidence that the Mensheviks were denied these platforms on the eve of both the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, at which they were expected to return a majority, and a planned general strike in Petrograd to protest government policies on the economy and the Soviets.

Petrograd was suffering terrible food shortages, made worse by the loss of Ukraine, which produced more than half of Russia’s grain. The mass demobilisation of the army had swamped towns and cities. This resulted in an unemployment rate of nearly 50% in the capital. Added to this was growing unhappiness with the administration of local and district Soviets, many of whose personnel were amateurs drawn from the Bolshevik Party with little idea how to run the municipal services required by a large metropolis. It did not help the Bolsheviks’ popularity that they chose this moment, March 1918, to transfer the central government to Moscow as German troops advanced on Petrograd. This conveyed the impression to Petrograd workers that they were being abandoned. They were thus receptive to the idea of the Extraordinary Assembly of Delegates from Petrograd Factories and Plants (EAD).