Kerenski put on a show of his old confidence; he resolved to reassert governmental authority and started to send troops to acquire food supplies from the countryside by force. This stiffening of measures enabled him to persuade six Kadets into a Third Coalition on 27 September. Only seven out of the seventeen ministers were socialists, and anyway these socialists had policies hardly different from those of the liberals. The Provisional Government in its latest manifestation would neither offer radical social and economic reforms nor concentrate its diplomacy in quest of a peaceful end to the Great War.
The Democratic Conference proposed to lend a representative, consultative semblance to the Third Coalition by selecting a Provisional Council of the Russian Republic. This Council would include not only socialists but also liberals and would function as a quasi-parliamentary assembly until such time as the Constituent Assembly met. Formed on 14 October, it became known as the Pre-Parliament. To the Pre-Parliament’s frustration, however, Kerenski refused to limit his freedom of decision by making himself accountable to it. And the Pre-Parliament could not steel itself to stand up to him.27 Kerenski could and did ignore it whenever he liked. The long-winded debates in the Pre-Parliament simply brought its main participating parties — Kadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries — into deeper disrepute. Neither Kerenski nor the Pre-Parliament possessed the slightest popular respect.
Lenin, from his place of hiding in Helsinki, saw this disarray as a splendid opportunity for the Bolsheviks. Less words, more action! For Bolsheviks, the course of Russian politics since the February Revolution vindicated the party’s argument that two lines of development alone were possible: ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’. They declared that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had become agents of the bourgeoisie by dint of collaborating with liberal ministers and the magnates of capitalism.
By September Lenin was urging his party to seize power immediately (and he busily composed a treatise on The State and Revolution to justify his strategy). The Central Committee, convening in his absence, rejected his advice. Its members saw more clearly than their impatient leader that popular support even in Petrograd was insufficient for an uprising.28 But the revulsion of society against the Provisional Government was growing sharply. First the factory-workshop committees and the trade unions and then, increasingly, the city soviets began to acquire Bolshevik-led leaderships. In Kronstadt the soviet was the local government in all but name, and the Volga city of Tsaritsyn declared its independence from the rest of Russia in midsummer. By 31 August the Petrograd Soviet was voting for the Bolshevik party’s resolutions. The Moscow Soviet followed suit a few days later. Through September and October the urban soviets of northern, central and south-eastern Russia went over to the Bolsheviks.
Disguised as a Lutheran Pastor, Lenin hastened back to Petrograd. On 10 October 1917 he cajoled his Central Committee colleagues into ratifying the policy of a rapid seizure of power. The Central Committee met again on 16 October with representatives of other major Bolshevik bodies in attendance.29 Lenin again got his way strategically. In the ensuing days Trotski and other colleagues amended his wishes on schedule, insisting that the projected uprising in Petrograd should be timed to coincide with the opening of the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Thus the uprising would appear not as a coup d’état by a single party but as a transfer of ‘all power to the soviets’.
Lenin was infuriated by the re-scheduling: he saw no need for the slightest delay. From his hiding-place in the capital’s outskirts, he bombarded his colleagues with arguments that unless a workers’ insurrection took place immediately, a right-wing military dictatorship would be installed. It is doubtful that he believed his own rhetoric; for no army general was as yet in any position to try to overthrow Kerenski and tame the soviets. Almost certainly Lenin guessed that the Kerenski cabinet was on the brink of collapse and that a broad socialist coalition would soon be formed. Such an outcome would not meet Lenin’s approval. Even if he were to be invited to join such an administration, his participation would unavoidably involve him in compromises on basic issues. Lenin did not fancy sharing power with Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries whom he accused of betraying the revolution.30
Since July, Yuli Martov and the left-wing faction of the Menshevik party had been calling for the Kerenski cabinet to be replaced with an all-socialist coalition committed to radical social reform;31 and the left-wingers among the Socialist-Revolutionaries broke entirely with their party and formed a separate Party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in October. With these groups Lenin was willing to deal. But not with the rump of the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary Parties: they had supped with the capitalist Devil and deserved to be thrust into outer darkness.
The situation favoured Lenin, and he knew it. For just a few months the workers and soldiers and peasants held Russia’s fate in their hands. The Imperial family was under house arrest. Courtiers, bishops and aristocrats were staying out of the public eye. The generals were still too shocked by the Kornilov fiasco to know what to do. The middle classes were sunk in despair. The shopkeepers and other elements in the urban lower middle class had a thorough dislike for the Provisional Government. Thus the main danger for the Bolsheviks was not ‘bourgeois counter-revolution’ but working-class apathy. Even Lenin’s supporters in the Bolshevik central leadership warned him that the Petrograd workers were far from likely to turn out to participate in an insurrection — and perhaps this was yet another reason for Lenin’s impatience. If not now, when?
Yet it was also a crucial advantage for Lenin that the political and administrative system was in an advanced condition of disintegration. Peasants in most villages across the former Russian Empire governed themselves. The military conscripts intimidated their officers. The workers, even if they were loath to take to the streets, wished to impose their control over the factories and mines. Kerenski had lost authority over all these great social groups.
While central power was breaking down in Petrograd, moreover, it had virtually collapsed in the rest of Russia. And in the non-Russian regions, local self-government was already a reality. The Finnish Sejm and the Ukrainian Rada disdained to obey the Provisional Government. In the Transcaucasus, Georgians and Armenians and Azeris created bodies to challenge the Special Transcaucasian Committee appointed by the cabinet in Petrograd.32 An alternative government existed in the soviets in practically every region, province, city and town of Russia. Soviets were not omnipotent organizations. But they were stronger than any of their institutional rivals. They had formal hierarchies stretching from Petrograd to the localities; they had personnel who wanted a clean break with the old regime of Nicholas II and the new regime of Lvov and Kerenski. They could also see no prospect of improvement in political, social and economic conditions until the Provisional Government was removed.