Kerensky
announces a new coalition government, destined to be the last one and
consisting in large measure of substantial capitalists. The Cadet Konovalov was
made Kerensky’s second in command, and given the portfolio for Commerce and
Industry. Kerensky also recruited the president of the Moscow stock exchange
and the president of the Moscow Military Industrial Committee to the cabinet.
Tereshchenko, who drew his wealth from the sugar trade, remained as Foreign
Minister. Several Mensheviks held portfolios, but none of them had been of any
importance in the Petrograd Soviet. A Social Revolutionary was made Minister of
Agriculture.
Kerensky also
mended fences with the Entente, keeping their preferred ambassador to London
and naming a new one, a Cadet, to Paris.
On the same day,
the Petrograd Soviet elected Trotsky as its President. Then it named a new
Executive Committee consisting of thirteen Bolsheviks, six Social
Revolutionaries, and three Mensheviks. Trotsky introduced and passed a resolution
calling on the coalition to resign: the soon to be convened All-Russian
Congress of Soviets would “create a genuinely revolutionary government.”
Thus the
Bolsheviks continued to be quite open about their claims on the state power.
The step missing from Trotsky’s resolution, of course, is armed insurrection.
Trotsky also
adduces evidence about the deterioration of Kerensky’s mental condition during
this time. Miliukov, for example, called it “psychic neurasthenia.” He later wrote
that Kerensky’s friends had observed him pass from “extreme failure of energy”
to “extreme excitement under the influence of drugs” during the course of a
day. Kerensky was under the treatment of his own Minister of Public Welfare, Kishkin,
professionally a psychiatrist, politically a Cadet.
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