The leadership
committee of the Democratic Conference having agreed to assemble a permanent
body (which would be known as the Pre-Parliament) from its numbers, the
Bolsheviks meet to decide whether they will participate. The Central Committee,
the Petrograd Committee, and the Bolshevik delegates to the Democratic
Conference attended.
Lenin had written that, if a parliamentary body reflects the actual
correlation of forces during a revolution, it is possible for the revolutionary
party, by participating, to advance its cause. But this was not the case,
Trotsky argued, with the Pre-Parliament, in which the bourgeoisie would be
over-represented, and the masses under-represented. In essence, the proletarian
revolution would be subjecting itself to forms prescribed by the recently
discredited (i.e., by Kornilov’s counter-revolution) bourgeoisie.
Trotsky moved and spoke for
the boycott; Rykov, who would become Commissar for the Interior after the
October Revolution, against. The motion failed by a vote of 77 to 50. Trotsky
observes that this was not just tactics; it was a strategic issue of the first
magnitude, like the ones the party faced when it adopted Lenin’s April Theses,
and the ones it would face when it decided on the October Revolution.
From his hiding
place in Finland, Lenin gave Trotsky a “Bravo!”
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