After the October Insurrection and Martov’s renewed command of the party, the Mensheviks rediscovered their radical spirit. Even before October leading Mensheviks like Theodore Dan were attacking Kerensky from the left. At the Extraordinary Congress of the Menshevik party held on 4th December, Dan and Tseretelli acknowledged their mistakes when in office and Dan supported Martov for leader. The Congress elected a new Menshevik Central Committee in which Left Mensheviks predominated. Martov now took the mantle of undisputed Menshevik leader.
Martov understood why the urban working class had switched from Menshevism, so powerful in February, to Bolshevism, but he also sensed that this support was for Soviet power and not for one-party dictatorship. He broadly supported Sovnarcom’s early Decrees although he tried, through the Vikzhel negotiations, to establish Sovnarcom as a Soviet government, accountable to the Soviet Executive and Congress. At the Extraordinary Congress, Martov proposed a programme for the Mensheviks that repeated his line at the Vikzhel talks, i.e. for a socialist coalition government answerable to a Central Council consisting of representatives of the Soviets, the trade unions, and urban and rural local government. Whilst the Mensheviks refused to enter a government that did not implement a democratic programme they refused to support the violent overthrow of the Bolshevik government. It was this programme that they intended to put before the Soviets in the early months of 1918.
CHAPTER TEN
No Power to the Soviets
By January 1918, with most of their opponents’ newspapers suppressed, the Bolsheviks had secured a massive majority on the Soviet CEC, which reduced it to a rubber stamp for Sovnarcom’s policies. If democratic mechanisms had existed to alter the balance of forces on the Executive–i.e. free and fair elections in which other parties could attain a majority and thus, in theory, create a new Sovnarcom–that need not have been a permanent problem. But these mechanisms were being phased out. The first “purge” of Bolshevik dissenters in early November and the subsequent wide use of governmental decrees demonstrated that Sovnarcom was not about to share power.
In the immediate aftermath of 25th October, the State Bank and Treasury refused to recognise Sovnarcom. Civil servants in all ministries went on strike to protest the imposition of a government whose mandate they did not accept. The People’s Commissar for Finance, Menzhinsky, was reduced to arriving at the State Bank with armed soldiers and demanding the transfer of ten million rubles to the government. Even when Sovnarcom established control of the Bank it had very little idea how to run it. Contrary to The State and Revolution, it turned out that ordinary workers and peasants could not take over the existing organs of the state and run them without some level of training and specialist knowledge. Nor could they “smash” them without a viable alternative to put in their place. It took Sovnarcom several weeks to break this resistance. The leaders of the civil-service strike were arrested and imprisoned. Junior civil servants were promoted to follow Sovnarcom’s orders and the banks began to print money as instructed. The immediate threat of a complete stoppage of government services had been averted.
The hopes of those who opposed the Bolsheviks now hinged on the outcome of the national elections being held for a Constituent Assembly. These elections had been long prepared by the Provisional Government (one of the Bolshevik’s most vocal complaints against it was that it had taken so long to hold them) and they were held on a regional “Party List” basis. Voting took place on 12th-14th November in less than ideal circumstances–sporadic fighting was still taking place throughout the Empire and many of the parties participating in the elections could not communicate with the electorate because of press censorship. Nonetheless, the creaking Russian state-machine did its best to deliver a meaningful election.1 The overall result, in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s view, was “the best barometer we have of national popular opinion at the time the Bolsheviks took power”.2
Using Oliver H. Radkey’s definitive reconstruction of the returns, the elections gave the SRs 15,848,004 votes; the Bolsheviks 9,844,637; the Mensheviks 1,364,826; the Trudoviks 322,078; the Kadets (made illegal shortly after the elections) 1,986,601; and the Cossack party 663,112. The Landowner Party secured only 171,245 votes, with a variety of rightist/Orthodox Christian parties getting even less. Added to this were the nationalist branches of the larger parties, which complicated the overall result but did not detract from the general victory of the SRs, mainly because it was nationalist SRs who came top of the regional lists. In Ukraine, the Ukrainian SR Party secured 1,286,157 votes over the Ukrainian Social Democrats (which stood as one party, not split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), who secured only 95,117. The “Ukrainian Socialist bloc” (whose socialism was a fusion of SR land redistribution with added nationalism) secured more than either of these. The Muslim nationalist and socialist parties attracted about half a million votes each in those areas where they stood, although they would have obtained more had they not been banned from standing in the central Asian regions where Muslims predominated.
The urban electorates of Petrograd and Moscow returned Bolshevik majorities. In Petrograd the result was Bolsheviks 424,027; Kadets 246,506; SR 152,231; and Menshevik 29,167. In Moscow it was similar–Bolsheviks 366,148; Kadets 263,859; SRs 62,260; and Mensheviks 21,597. These results emphasised the huge polarisation in the cities between the middle class and the working class, and the marginalising of non-Bolshevik socialists. The Kadets only secured this level of support in the great metropolises of Petrograd and Moscow whilst the SRs, relatively weak here, were in a majority nearly everywhere else. In terms of how the 707 deputies of the Assembly would be divided, the result translated into 370 SRs (with about 40 of these Left SR), 175 Bolsheviks, 17 Kadets, 16 Mensheviks, and 99 others.3
This was a crushing blow to the Bolsheviks, who had “entered with zeal, and sometimes with real enthusiasm, into the election campaign, in which the party militants had shown tremendous activity”.4 They had not expected to lose, and as soon as the results were in they sought to discredit them. The Bolsheviks claimed the overall result did not convey the actuality of post-October Russia as there was a Left SR “party” which was not counted as such. Yet even if it had been recorded as a separate Left SR vote, this would not have increased the Bolshevik vote.5 At the same time they claimed that only those who voted Bolshevik cast meaningful votes anyway, because a vote for Bolshevism derived from advanced class consciousness whilst a vote against them was evidence of lack of class consciousness (except for the Kadets, who did have class consciousness, but of the wrong type). Other votes, whether nationalist, Orthodox, Muslim, Cossack, Jewish socialist, Finnish socialist, Ukrainian socialist etc., were disregarded as backward or misguided.
These were desperate arguments. The result was obvious for all to see. The mainstream SRs–representing a form of popular Narodnik socialism allied to Soviet democracy, a true reflection of the Russian revolutionary tradition of the last fifty years–had won. As Radkey put it, “Three weeks after the October Revolution the Bolsheviks had signally failed to secure popular sanction for their seizure of power and had mustered only one fourth of the electorate behind their banner”.6