In a moment of rage, which he must have agonised over for the rest of his life, Martov shouted, 'Then we'll leave!' and walked out of the hall - and into the political wilderness. It was past two o'clock in the morning and it only remained for Trotsky, who was now clearly doing the work of Lenin, to propose a resolution condemning the 'treacherous' attempts of the Mensheviks and SRs to undermine Soviet power. In effect, this would be to give a Soviet stamp of approval to a Bolshevik dictatorship. The mass of the delegates, who probably did not grasp the political import of what they were doing (weren't they in favour of Soviet power?), raised their hands in support of Trotsky's resolution.
There was one more chance to force Lenin to accept a united government based on all the parties in the Soviet. On 29 October (11 November New Style), as forces loyal to Kerensky's government fought against the Red Guards on the outskirts of Petrograd as well as in the centre of Moscow, the leaders of the railwaymen's union (Vikzhel) issued an ultimatum demanding that the Bolsheviks begin talks with the other socialist parties to form an all-socialist government, threatening to bring the railways to a halt if they did not. Lenin's government could not survive if food and fuel supplies to the capital were cut. It depended on the railways for its military campaign against Kerensky's forces in Moscow and Petrograd. Without victory in Moscow, even Lenin recognised that the Bolsheviks could not stay in power on their own. The inter-party talks would have to go ahead. Kamenev was authorised to represent the party in the negotiations on the basis of Soviet power, as passed at the Congress. The right wings of the Menshevik and SR parties were unlikely to accept this, and confident that the Bolshevik regime could not last long, set exacting terms for their involvement in any government: the release of Kerensky's ministers; the abolition of the MRC; the transfer of the Petrograd garrison to the control of the Duma; and the involvement of Kerensky in the formation of the government, which was to exclude Lenin. They softened their position when Kerensky's offensive in Petrograd collapsed, offering to take part in a coalition with the Bolsheviks, provided that the leadership of the Soviet was broadened. Kamenev agreed, suggesting, in a moment of naive credulity, that the Bolsheviks would not insist on the presence of Lenin or Trotsky in the cabinet.
Lenin and Trotsky had different ideas. They had always been opposed to the Vikzhel talks: only the prospect of military defeat had brought them to negotiations. With the defeat of Kerensky's troops, and the fight for Moscow moving towards victory for the Bolsheviks, they set out to undermine the inter-party talks. At a meeting of the Central Committee on 1 November Trotsky condemned the compromise agreed by Kamenev and demanded at least 75 per cent of the cabinet seats for the Bolshevik party. There was 'no point organising the insurrection if we don't get the majority,' he argued.16 Lenin advocated leaving the talks altogether and demanded the arrest of the Vikzhel leaders as 'counter-revolutionaries' - a provocation meant to wreck the talks. Despite the objections of Kamenev, Zinoviev and others, the Central Committee agreed to present Trotsky's demand as an ultimatum to the inter-party talks and abandon them if it was rejected. The Mensheviks and SR would never accept this, as Lenin and Trotsky knew only too well. The seizure of power had irrevocably split the socialist movement in Russia, and no amount of negotiation could hope to bridge the gap. The Vikzhel talks broke down.
Perhaps there had never been much chance of a coalition Soviet government. There was a brief period in the wake of the Kornilov crisis when that might have been achieved - if only the Mensheviks and SRs had broken off emphatically from the Kadets. This was a time when Lenin was prepared to go along with Kamenev's conciliatory politics towards the other socialists. But that chance did not last long. From the middle of September Lenin was determined to seize power in an insurrection whose ulterior motive was to drive a wedge between the Bolsheviks (as the defenders of 'the Revolution') and those socialists who opposed them (as 'counter-revolutionaries') along with the Kadets, the monarchists and the White Guards.
Without an insurrection by the Bolsheviks, Martov's resolution would have stood and a government made up of all the parties in the Soviet would have been established on 25 October. Bitter political differences between the socialists would have made this coalition unstable and difficult. No doubt there would have been many conflicts over the relationship between the Soviet government, the Constituent Assembly, and other democratic bodies such as the Dumas. Lenin would have been opposed to any coalition with the Right SRs and Mensheviks, which might have split the Bolsheviks. In all probability, there would still have been a civil war, albeit one not on the scale of the military conflict that engulfed Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1921. While Kerensky and the White Guards were bound to organise a military force against a Soviet government, their resistance was unlikely to last long.
From the October insurrection and the establishment of a Bolshevik dictatorship to the Red Terror and the Civil War - with all its consequences for the evolution of the Soviet regime - there is a line of historical inevitability. But Lenin's victory on 25 October was itself the outcome of an accident. For if that 'harmless drunk' had been recognised by the government patrol, history would have turned out differently.
THE SHORT LIFE AND EARLY DEATH OF RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY: THE DUMA AND THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY
January 1918 tony brenton
THE BACKGROUND
Russia does not have a rich democratic tradition. The 'Mongol Yoke' (1237-1480) imposed thoroughgoing despotism on the Russian lands even while contemporary Western Europe saw the emergence of embryonic consultative and representative institutions. The most cited example of a medieval Russian city whose civic liberties approached those of its Western analogues, Novgorod the Great, lost those liberties as soon as it fell under the sway of Muscovy in 1478 (and the city's still insufficiently subservient inhabitants were then massacred a century later by Ivan the Terrible). Throughout the tsarist period the full title of the ruler began 'By the grace of God, Tsar and Autocrat of all the Russias This was no mere verbal flourish. Russian Tsars exercised genuinely autocratic authority. They had, and used, the power of life and death unmediated by any independent judicial or legislative authority. Early Western visitors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were astonished at the readiness of the most powerful aristocrats to abase themselves before their ruler. Those who wanted to modernise
Russia, notably Peter the Great, saw autocracy as the means to do it. Peter made the peasants serfs and the nobility state servants. Society became a barracks, the Orthodox Church a department of state. Even Catherine the Great, an enlightened modern-minded German princess, abandoned her thoughts of constitutionalism with the weary observation 'I will be an autocrat; that is my job. The Good Lord will forgive me; that is his.'1 The prevailing metaphor, right up to the end of the regime, was of the tsar as father to his often unruly and in need of discipline, but essentially loving, children.
Russia's official ideology for much of the nineteenth century was explicitly 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality'. Only in the middle of that century was the 'Liberator Tsar', Alexander II, able to abolish the system under which the vast majority of Russians were directly owned either by the state or by the land-holding class, and to introduce a limited form of representative local government. In one of history's more fascinating might-have-beens, he was also in 1881 moving towards introducing a very limited representative element into Russian central government. He had no compunction about describing this plan as a 'constitution' - implying real legal limits on the tsar's power. But his assassination that year cut the initiative off, and confirmed his successor in the view that autocracy was the only way to rule Russia. Thus, when Alexander's grandson, Nicholas II, became tsar in 1894, he inherited the title and power of 'Unlimited Autocrat'. His war minister nicely summarised the regime view of the world when he wrote, 'Only before God and History are sovereigns responsible for the paths they choose to take for the wellbeing of their people.'2