As the delegates
to the Council of the Republic, or Pre-Parliament, prepare to assemble, its
President, the Social Revolutionary Avksentiev, visits with Trotsky to ask what
is going to happen. (Rumors had been circulating about the Bolsheviks
withdrawing.) Trotsky says he answered, “A mere nothing, a little shot from
a pistol.”
Problems for the Pre-Parliament
had appeared on the horizon. Kerensky said long before that the Provisional
Government would determine its organization and staff in its own discretion.
The new
Coalition Government was now a fait
accompli. So much for the resolution
of the Democratic Conference reserving to its permanent body the sanction
of those choices. Moreover, if they had their way, the Cadets would not give
the Pre-Parliament legislative powers either. But they feared the powers of a
constituent assembly even more, such was their standing among the mass of
voters. Note that, at this point, both the Bolsheviks and the Cadets still supported,
at least verbally, holding elections for a constituent assembly, an
organization that would normally have powers to form a constitution.
The delegates
expected at the Mariinsky Palace were aligned by party as follows:
·
120 Social Revolutionaries
·
60 Mensheviks
·
66 Bolsheviks
·
156 from the bourgeois parties, half of them
Cadets.
Some of them may
have noticed that the Bolshevik seat on the five-member praesidium went
unoccupied.
Kerensky gave the
opening speech. Though the government, he said, possessed “the fulness of
power,” he was nevertheless willing to listen to “any genuinely valuable
suggestion.” This was, of course, more polite than it was democratic.
Under rules of
order adopted from the now-defunct State Duma, the Bolsheviks were accorded ten
minutes to address the council. Trotsky began by questioning the purpose and
composition of the Pre-Parliament. He accused the bourgeoisie of plotting to
“quash the Constituent Assembly.”
Pleased with the
response to this, Trotsky continued with his prepared text. He denounced the
policies of the Provisional Government as effectively “compelling the masses to
insurrection,” and the government’s proposal to abandon Petrograd to the
Germans as a step in a “counter-revolutionary conspiracy.”
This got an even
bigger reaction. Finally Trotsky announced the withdrawal of the Bolsheviks
from the Pre-Parliament. In his peroration he warned, “Petrograd is in danger!
The revolution is in danger! The people are in danger! …We address ourselves to
the people. All power to the soviets!” And he and the other Bolsheviks left the
hall, leaving behind only a few as observers.
Foreign Minister Tereshchenko
telegraphed the embassies of the Entente that the withdrawal of the Bolsheviks
was “a mere scandal.” In his history of the revolution, the Cadet Miliukov more
insightfully wrote that the Bolsheviks spoke and acted “like people feeling a
power behind them.”
There followed in
the Pre-Parliament three days of discussion on the war. The American journalist
Reed says he heard Martov speak in favor of at least raising the “question of
peace,” but the debate ended lamely with a request that the Pre-Parliament be
included in the delegation to the coming Paris Conference of the Entente. They planned
to send the Menshevik Skobelev with instructions: no indemnities, no
annexations, no secret diplomacy; neutralization of canals and straights,
including those of Panama and Suez; gradual disarmament. Believing Skobelev
would be ignored, the Cadets made no objection to these instructions.
This was also the
day that General Cheremissov, the commander of the Northern Front, summoned
representatives of the Petrograd Soviet to a meeting at Pskov. At lot was to
happen before the meeting could take place. Meanwhile Cheremissov was in
nominal command of the Petrograd garrison.
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