By its very nature, a revolution stirs society to the depths, arousing the millions of politically backward and inert masses to political life. Above all in a backward, predominantly peasant country like Russia, this meant the awakening of the peasantry and other layers of the petty bourgeoisie of town and countryside. The pressure of the petty bourgeois masses played a disproportionate role in the early stages. This was expressed in the system of elections in the Soviets. Initially, the workers were entitled to one representative for every 1,000 voters, one soldier elected for every company (rota in Russian) in Petrograd. This voting system gave an overwhelming preponderance to the soldiers, that is to say, the peasants, over the workers’ representatives in the Soviets. There were 2,000 soldiers deputies as against 800 workers. At the beginning of the revolution the Bolsheviks were submerged in this sea of politically untutored and often illiterate peasants. Motivated by the petty-bourgeois spirit, they tended to elect as their representatives ‘intellectuals’ and ‘the gentlemen who know how to speak’. These were overwhelmingly made up of the democratic middle class (many of them junior officers in the army) who gravitated massively to the moderate socialist and reformist parties – the Mensheviks and SRs.
The most prominent Menshevik leaders – Dan, Chkheidze, Tsereteli – were defencists, but there was a small group of Menshevik Internationalists – Martov, Martynov, and others – who opposed the war. These left reformist or ‘centrist’ elements (centrist, in the sense of standing between Marxism and reformism) had initially moved to the left, but, typically, did not want to break completely with the defencists, and therefore subsequently moved back to the right. The line of the Mensheviks in 1917, in contrast to 1905, was dictated by its right wing. The ‘lefts’ played no independent role. Nor could they. The only consistently revolutionary tendency was the Bolshevik Party, which attracted to itself, as Lenin later observed, all the best elements in the Russian labour movement. The best of the left reformists, one way or another, found their way into the ranks of the Bolshevik Party. The rest sunk without trace.
The Menshevik and SR leaders who dominated the Soviet in the beginning were, in practice, self-appointed. But they initially had a number of advantages over the Bolsheviks. They had the ‘big names’ from the Duma group, people known to the masses through the legal press during the war years. They also offered what appeared to be an ‘easy way out’ to the mass of politically untutored workers and peasants who now flooded onto the scene, intoxicated with democratic illusions. These petty-bourgeois leaders were inwardly terrified of the revolution and from the first were anxious to hand power over to the ‘natural’ leaders of society – the bourgeoisie.[2]
There were other reasons why the Mensheviks and SRs came to the fore after February. The Petrograd proletariat, which was solidly Bolshevik in 1912-16, had been seriously diluted by the war. The raw layers who entered the factories did not have the same level of consciousness or tradition as the veterans of 1905 whom they replaced. Trotsky explains:
The hegemony of the lower middle-class intellectuals was at bottom the expression of the fact that the peasantry, suddenly called to take part in organised political life through the machinery of the army, had by sheer weight of numbers pushed aside and overwhelmed the proletariat for the time being. Even more, insofar as the middle-class leaders had been raised to a dizzy height by the powerful mass of the army, the working class itself, with the exception of its advanced sections, could not but become imbued with a certain political respect for them and try to maintain political contact with them for fear of finding themselves divorced from the peasantry. And this was a very serious matter, for the older generation still remembered the lesson of 1905, when the proletariat was crushed, just because the massive peasant reserves had not come up in time for the decisive battles. That is why in the first phase of the new Revolution also the proletarian masses showed themselves highly accessible to the political ideology of the SRs and the Mensheviks – especially as the Revolution had aroused the hitherto slumbering backward masses of workers, and thus made the hazy radicalism of the intellectuals a sort of preparatory school for them. (L. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, in The Essential Trotsky, pp. 27-28.)
The leading figures in the Petrograd Soviet – Chkheidze, Kerensky, the Soviet’s chairman, and Skobelev – were all Mensheviks and defencists. On the Soviet’s executive committee there were 12 others, but only two Bolsheviks: Shlyapnikov and Zalutsky. On a Bolshevik proposal, the EC was broadened to include three representatives from each party: Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and SRs. In this way, Molotov and KI Shutko were added for the Bolsheviks and PI Stuchka from the Latvian Social Democrats. The total number of Bolsheviks in the Soviet, on 9 March, was 40. The army was also represented on the Soviet. Soldier delegates were sent to the Tauride Palace, including men from the front. This meant, in effect, that for the first time the representatives of the peasantry sat alongside their proletarian brethren. This was indeed the practical realisation of the revolutionary unity of the proletariat and peasantry.
The Soviet launched its own publication, Izvestiya (The News), the first issue of which came out on 28 February under the editorship of YM Steklov. Here at last was the parliament of the revolutionary people in arms! No power on earth could prevent it from taking over the land and factories and instituting a genuinely democratic republic of the toilers. It was sufficient that it should will it. There was only one obstacle – that the workers and peasants should be conscious of their power. But such a consciousness was as yet lacking. In this way was born the abortion of ‘dual power’.
The reasons for the dual power regime were explained by Trotsky:
The ‘united front’ of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries dominated the Soviets and actually had power in its hands. The bourgeoisie was completely paralysed politically since ten million soldiers, exhausted by the war, stood fully armed on the side of the workers and peasants. But what the leaders of the ‘united front’ dreaded most of all was to ‘scare off’ the bourgeoisie, to ‘push’ it to the camp of reaction. The united front dared not touch either the imperialist war, or the banks, or feudal land ownership, or the shops and plants. It marked time and spouted general phrases while the masses lost patience. More than that: the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries directly transferred the power to the Cadet party, rejected by the toilers and despised by them. (L. Trotsky, Lessons of October, in Writings 1935-36, pp. 167-68.)
The Mensheviks and SRs clung to the bourgeois liberals. The latter clung to what remained of the old order. The workers and peasants, only recently awakened to political life, were striving to find their way and as yet lacked the experience and self-confidence to rely on their own strength. Lenin grasped immediately the significance of the Soviet as a “real popular government”. But this conception was a book sealed by seven seals to the leaders of all the parties, including, at first, the Bolsheviks themselves. The first concern of the bourgeois liberals was to restore ‘order’ and ‘get things back to normal’. Yet the workers and soldiers, instinctively reluctant to disarm or take a step back, having come so far, looked for guidance and leadership to the Soviet. Increasingly distrustful, a delegation of soldiers and sailors deputies came to the Tauride Palace to present their demands to the Soviet. Two members of this delegation (AM Paderin and AD Sadovsky) were Bolsheviks.
The vacillations of the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd did not reflect the outlook of the rank-and-file Bolshevik workers who were more in touch with the mood in the factories and barracks. The Bolsheviks in the Vyborg district demanded that power be taken over by the Soviet. Naturally, the Soviet leaders refused on the grounds that the revolution was ‘bourgeois’ and the working class was ‘not ready’ to take power. The bourgeois politicians manoeuvred to head off the revolution. The open defencists favoured the entry of the Soviet leaders into a coalition with the bourgeoisie. The shamefaced defencists (Chkheidze, Sukhanov, Steklov) favoured staying out of the coalition, but not the assumption of power. Instead, the Soviet should ‘control’ the bourgeois government from outside. This attempt to combine fire and water anticipated the position later taken by the German centrists who advocated a mixed constitution in which the workers’ councils (soviets) should exist side by side with the bourgeois government. A similar line was taken by Stalin and Kamenev.
The Menshevik policy went against the grain of the masses, but the latter were politically inexperienced, naïve and trusting in their leaders. The Menshevik orators and ‘big names’ overawed them and silenced their doubts. In the name of ‘unity’ and ‘defence of democracy’, unity of all ‘progressive forces’, etc., they used the argument that the working class could not transform society ‘on its own’, and all the dismal litany traditionally rattled off by the reformist leaders to convince the workers that they are powerless to change society, and must forever put up with the rule of capital. They argued the Soviet would ‘put pressure on the bourgeois liberals’ to act in the workers’ interests.
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The Istoriya, which describes the February rising, without the slightest foundation, as a purely Bolshevik affair, is at a loss to explain how the Mensheviks and SRs could be the principal beneficiaries!