The Democratic Conference, called together by Tsereteli and his collaborators towards the end of September, was of an entirely artificial character, consisting, as it did, of a combination of representatives of Soviets with those of the organs of local self-government in such a proportion as to give a preponderance to the coalitionist parties. The offspring of helplessness and confusion, the Conference ended in a pitiful fiasco. The propertied bourgeoisie regarded it with the greatest animosity, seeing in it an attempt to drive it from the position to which it had advanced at the Moscow gathering. On the other hand, the revolutionary working class and the masses of the peasantry and soldiers had condemned in advance the methods of adulteration used in calling the Conference together. The immediate task of the coalitionists was to form a ‘responsible’ ministry. But even this was not attained. Kerensky did not want and would not allow any principle of responsibility, because the bourgeoisie at his back would not allow it. Non-responsibility before the organs of the so-called democracy meant, in effect, responsibility before the Cadets and the Allied embassies. For the present this was sufficient for the bourgeoisie. On the question of coalition, the Conference revealed its complete insolvency. The number of votes cast for the principle of a coalition with the bourgeoisie was only little more than that cast against all coalitions, and a majority of votes was cast against a coalition with the Cadets. But with the exception of the latter, there were no parties among the bourgeoisie worth mentioning with whom a coalition could be entered into. Tsereteli fully explained this to the assembly. If the assembly did not understand this, so much the worse for it! And so, behind the back of the Conference discussions were carried on unabashed with the very Cadets whom it had rejected, it having been decided that the Cadets should be treated not as Cadets, but as public men pressed from the right and from the left, the lower middle-class democrats submitted to all this mockery of themselves and thereby demonstrated their complete political impotence.
A Council was elected from the Democratic Conference, which it was decided should be completed by the addition of some representatives of the propertied classes; and this Provisional ‘Parliament’ was to fill the gap until the meeting of the Constituent Assembly. The new coalition ministry, contrary to Tsereteli’s original plan, but in entire accordance with the plans of the bourgeoisie, was to maintain its formal independence as against the Provisional Parliament. The whole proceeding gave the impression of a pitiful and impotent product of a mind divorced from life, behind which could clearly be seen the complete capitulation of the lower middle-class democrats to that same propertied liberal bourgeoisie which only a month before had openly supported Kornilov’s attempt against the Revolution. The whole thing, then, amounted practically to the re-establishment and the perpetuation of the coalition with the liberal bourgeoisie. There could no longer be any doubt that, quite independent of the composition of the future Constituent Assembly, the government power would be in the hands of the bourgeoisie, since the coalitionist parties, in spite of all the preponderance secured to them by the popular masses, were unalterably bent on a coalition with the Cadets, considering it impossible to form any government without the aid of the bourgeoisie. The popular masses regarded Milyukov’s party with the greatest hostility. At all elections in the course of the Revolution the Cadets invariably suffered severe defeats; yet the very same parties, the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who smote the party at the elections hip and thigh, would, after the elections, invariably reserve for them a place of honour in the coalition cabinet. It was natural in these circumstances that the masses began to perceive more and more clearly that the coalitionist parties were in reality playing the role of bailiffs and office-holders for the liberal bourgeoisie.