As the second and
final session of the State Conference in Moscow begins, the left applauds Prime
Minister Kerensky when he enters, and the right applauds General Kornilov. Then
Kerensky proposed an ovation for the army, and everyone joined in.
When Kornilov was
invited to speak, the delegates rose in thunderous applause. All, that is,
except the delegates of the soldiery. A shouting match ensued; Kerensky called
for order. Kornilov’s speech blamed the legislation of the Provisional
Government for reducing the army to a “crazy mob.” He warned the conference
that if Riga (in Latvia, then threatened by the Germans) were taken, was the
“road to Petrograd is open.” The Bolshevik paper in Moscow commented that as
defeat at Tarnopol “made Kornilov commander-in-chief, the surrender of Riga
might make him dictator.”
After a speech by
an archbishop of the Church Council condemning the government for unbelief, General
Kaledin, representing the Cossack armies, spoke. He endorsed Kornilov’s
policies for prosecution of the war: militarizing the railroads and factories,
permitting death penalty in the rear, and putting the Petrograd garrison under
Kornilov’s command. And he added another one: abolish the soldiers’ committees
formed at the company and regimental levels after the February Revolution. The
right liked this a lot better than the left.
The left spoke
next, in the person of Cheidze, president of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets. He defended the soldiers’ committees and the soviets, but
spoke against forcible expropriation of lands by the peasantry. Neither did the
next speaker, representing the Executive Committee of the peasants’ soviet,
make any contribution to the resolution of the agrarian question. Now the
contradictions between left and right had become palpable, and it was becoming
possible to perceive the paralysis of the Provisional Government in which these
irreconcilable differences were joined.
Proving that the
device of putting people in the audience to serve as objects of rhetoric and
applause is not new, the prisoners of Schlusselburg were announced. These
survivors of the 1905 revolution were thus honored by, among others, their
formerly tsarist jailors, now turned bourgeois liberal: Generals Alexiev,
Kornilov, Kaledin; the archbishop; Rodzianko and Guchov, next to speak.
Guchov, the
Provisional Government’s first war minister, had to admit the government was
“the shadow of a power.” Rodzianko, president of the bourgeois-dominated Duma,
recommended that body, on account of its constitutional legitimacy, as a guide
to the Provisional Government. This drew laughter from the left, as the
legitimacy of the Duma had evaporated when its creator, the tsar, had been
deposed.
Then Kerensky
read a telegram from President Wilson, who preferred the result of the February
Revolution to tsarism, saying the American and Russian governments “are
pursuing no selfish aims” in the war.
The agenda swung
back towards the left. Tseretilli defended the role of the soviets and the
soldiers’ committees in the revolution.
Then back to the
right. Miliukov recounted what he considered the “mistakes of the revolutionary
democracy,” all of which, it just so happens, had led to the resignations of
Cadet ministers. Among the “capitulations” he described were allowing the
solders’ committees to be formed, and failing to suppress seizures of land by
the peasants. This latter comment was directed at the Minister of Agriculture,
Chernov.
The Menshevik
Tseretilli spoke again, promising even harsher measures against the Bolsheviks.
After that the
pendulum swung right to left and back ceaselessly. General Alexiev, formerly
the tsar’s commander-in-chief, called for discipline in the army. He was answered
by left-leaning officers who defended Kerensky. Officers crippled by the war
speak for the right; crippled enlisted men for the left. The head of the
railroad workers’ union spoke against the counter-revolution, and was answered
by a magnate of the industry and a bank economist. Trotsky lists many more such
pairings.
The conference
was reaching the bottom of Kerensky’s agenda. An anarchist, oddly, received the
applause of the right. Plekhanov, the oldest of the first Russian Marxists still
living, was applauded from both sides. He mentioned, a little prematurely, the
“unhappy memory of Lenin.”
That evening a
representative of the Union of Horse Breeders (all large landowners, of course)
spoke against land reform and in favor of the war. Then, to clamorous applause,
Tseretilli shook hands with a railroad magnate. Even Miliukov thought this was
insincere, but necessary.
As the end
approached, a young Cossack officer pointed out that “the working Cossacks were
not with Kaledin,” the Cossack general who had spoken earlier in the day. The
right did not like this; an officer called out, “German marks!” This caused an
explosion, nearly a fight. But it showed that the split in Russian society so
plain at the conference extended even to the Cossack armies.
At last, Kerensky
took the floor again. As the man in the middle between left and right, he urged
“better understanding” and “better respect.” Then he relapsed into a self-absorbed
melodrama reminiscent of Hitler’s maxim, the strong man is strongest when alone, but without the strength. A passage from Miliukov quoted by Trotsky describes the speech; it left “the
hall…stupefied, and this time both halves of it.”
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