September 27 – September 14, 1917: Democratic Conference Convenes

Given their failures in the Soviet, the Compromisers cast about for a means to recover lost ground. After the Kornilov insurrection was defeated, they settled on a “Democratic Conference,” which was to be packed in such a way as to prevent the Bolsheviks from carrying their program.

For this purpose, a new constituency was heard from: the Cooperators. Ostensibly representing the peasantry, they in fact petit bourgeois administrators of agriculture who happened to live in the same villages as the peasants. The Compromisers credentialed some 150 of them.

Lenin and Zinoviev were also credentialed, but the Compromisers did not give them safe-conducts. All Kerensky would promise was that he would not arrest them in the hall where the conference was being held. He’d arrest them at the entrance. Safe-conduct or not, Lenin did not plan to attend; he opposed Bolshevik participation altogether.

The conference convened on September 14 (September 27, new style) in a Petrograd theater. Kerensky decided to attend. When he greeted the praesidium, the Bolsheviks on it refused to shake hands. So did the Kornilovists. Kerensky seems to have pretended they did.

Then Kerensky spoke extemporaneously, knowing he would have to address his role in the Kornilov conspiracy. “I knew what they wanted,” he said incautiously. “Before they went to Kornilov they came to me and suggested I take the same course.” The left of course wondered who “they” were, and what they had “suggested,” but Kerensky shifted topics rather than answer their shouted questions.

Kerensky committed another verbal blunder in response to another shouted question, this one about the death penalty. Both the Petrograd Soviet and the Menshevik party had passed resolutions against restoration of the death penalty in the military. Kerensky responded that he hadn’t ordered any executions, and when he did, “then I will permit you to curse me.” Of course this admitted that the death penalty was not necessary; nor did it make sense to restore the death penalty based on Kerensky’s unspoken promise not to use it. In a later speech, Trotsky pointed this out to anyone who might have missed it.

What the Bolsheviks would do was on everybody’s mind, including Kerensky’s. He expected “the forces of the democracy” to support him in case of an insurrection, warning, “Do not think that I am hanging in the air,” and claiming that he could stop the railroads and the telegraphs. The Bolsheviks in the hall just laughed: what an odd expression, “hanging in the air,” for a dictator to use of himself!

Tseretilli said he thought the government, meaning in particular Kerensky, was getting “a little dizzy” on the heights.

At one point, after a number of speeches by individuals who were part of the government, Trotsky observed, “I have not heard a single speaker here who would...[defend] the directory or its president.” Nor could any of these speakers articulate the policies of the government; nothing was being done to revive the economy, to end the war, or anything else.

The Bolsheviks called on Trotsky to read their declaration of the policy of the party and Central Committee. Tseretilli had framed the issue in one of his speeches: instead of putting the Soviet forward, why don’t the Bolsheviks take the power themselves? This challenge was whispered on the praesidium and repeated in the lobbies. Ten days before, the Cadet paper printed an editorial theorizing that maybe the Bolsheviks could best be got rid of if they were given the power. They would fail and fade to insignificance.

The Bolshevik declaration was neither evasive nor misleading. The party would not seize power “against the organized will of the majority of the toiling masses of the country.” This meant that if the soviets, in many of which the Bolsheviks were now the majority, willed it, the party would seize the power. The declaration also refused to recognize any decision of the Democratic Conference that was not subsequently ratified by the next All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

When they heard the declaration’s call for arming the workers, members of the centrist majority cried in alarm, “What for?” Trotsky replied they would be the revolutionary country’s best defense against both imperialism and counter-revolution.

The Bolshevik attitude towards the future of the Russian state being known, the conference proceeded to debate which policy it would endorse.

Meanwhile it had fallen to Stalin, as liaison between the party and Lenin, to bring Lenin's letters from Finland to Petrograd. Lenin had taken a position against participation in the conference. His first letter on insurrection, addressed to the Bolshevik Central Committee and the committees of Petrograd and Moscow, took the party by surprise. It was just a sketch of points he would continue to make in the weeks to come. But the Central Committee, on Kamenev’s motion but over Stalin’s objections, decided to burn it anyway. (One copy was kept for posterity.)

In another letter, written at about the same time, Lenin begins to add detail to his plan of insurrection, and grounds it in Marxist theory. Trotsky expresses part of the plan this way: “To leave the Alexandrinsky Theater [scene of the Democratic Conference] with an ultimatum and return there at the head of the armed masses.”