The question before us at the time was whether the Socialist Revolutionaries of the Left would follow us along this path. This group was then in the process of formation, which from our party point of view was much too slow and hesitating. At the beginning of the Revolution, the Socialist Revolutionary Party became by far the strongest in the whole political field. The peasants, soldiers, and even the masses of the workers voted for the Socialist Revolutionaries. They themselves had not expected anything of the kind, and more than once it had seemed as though there was a danger that the party might choke in the waves of its own success. With the exception of the purely capitalist and landowning classes and the well-to-do intellectuals, all and everybody flocked to the banners of the Socialist Revolutionaries. And this entirely corresponded to the first stage in the Revolution, when the class boundaries had not yet had time to make themselves visible, when the yearning after a united revolutionary front found expression in the nebulous programme of a party which was ready to shelter alike the workers afraid of losing contact with the peasantry, the peasants seeking land and freedom, the intellectuals anxious to guide both these classes, and the official trying to adapt himself to the new order of things. When Kerensky, who, under the Tsarist government, had belonged to the ‘Group of Toil,’ joined the Socialist Revolutionaries after the victory of the Revolution, the popularity of this party began to grow in correspondence with the advance of Kerensky himself along the road of power. Many colonels and generals, out of respect – not always platonic – for the War Minister, hastened to inscribe their names in the rolls of the party of the erstwhile terrorists. The old Socialist Revolutionaries, belonging to the old revolutionary school, were already at that time regarding somewhat uneasily the ever-growing number of ‘March’ Socialist Revolutionaries, that is to say, those members who had only found their revolutionary souls in March, after the Revolution had overthrown the old regime and had raised the Socialist Revolutionaries to power. In this way, the party contained in its amorphousness not only the internal contradictions of the developing Revolution, but also all the prejudices of the backward peasant masses and all the sentimentalism, instability, and ambitions of the intellectual sections of the population. It was quite evident that the party could not exist long in such a form. In point of ideas it proved to be impotent from the very beginning. It was the Mensheviks who played the leading political role in the first stages of the Revolution. They had passed through the Marxist school, and had derived from it certain methods and habits which had helped them to find their way sufficiently in the political situation to adulterate ‘scientifically’ the real meaning of the present class struggle and to secure, in the highest degree possible under the given conditions, the supremacy of the liberal bourgeoisie. This is the reason why the Mensheviks, who were the direct advocates of the right of the bourgeoisie to power, so quickly spent themselves and were, by the time of the November Revolution, finally reduced almost to a cipher.
The Socialist Revolutionaries were also losing their influence more and more, first among the workers, then in the army, and finally also in the villages. Nevertheless, at the time of the November Revolution they were still numerically a very powerful party. But class antagonisms were undermining it from within. As against its right wing, which in the persons of its most chauvinist elements, such as Avksentiev, Breshko-Breshkovskaya, Savinkov and others, finally went over to the counter-revolutionaries, a left wing was in process of formation, which tried to maintain a contact with the labouring masses. If we bear in mind the fact that the Socialist Revolutionary Avksentiev, in his capacity as Minister of the Interior, was arresting the peasant land committees consisting almost entirely of Socialist Revolutionaries, for their grappling with the agrarian question on their own authority, the amplitude of disagreements within this party will become sufficiently clear.
In the centre stood the traditional leader of the party, Chernov, an experienced writer, well read in socialist literature, an old hand in party struggles, he was the invariable leader of the party at the time when the party’s life concentrated in refugees’ circles abroad. The Revolution, which, in its first indiscriminate onward rush, had raised the Socialist Revolutionaries to a tremendous height, automatically also raised Chernov, but only to show his complete incapability even among the leading political personages of the first period. Those minor qualifications which secured for Chernov a preponderance in the foreign circles of the party proved to be far too light on the scales of the Revolution. He confined himself to abstaining from all responsible decisions, to avoiding and evading all critical issues, to waiting upon events, and to refraining from all positive activity. Such tactics secured to him, for the time being, the position of a centre between the two flanks of the party, the distance between which was growing ever wider and wider. But the unity of the party could no longer be maintained. Savinkov, the erstwhile terrorist, had taken part in the Kornilov plot, was on most cordial terms with the counter-revolutionary circles of the Cossack officers, and was preparing a crushing blow for the Petrograd workers and soldiers, amongst whom were not a few Socialist Revolutionaries of the left. As a sop to this left wing, the centre expelled Savinkov from the party, but it dared not raise its hand against Kerensky.
In the Provisional Parliament, the party showed itself to be hopelessly divided. The three groups acted independently of one another, although all were marching under the same party banner. At the same time, none of these groups had any clear idea as to what it wanted. The formal predominance of this party in the Constituent Assembly would only have meant the continuation of the same political sterility and impotence.