Democratic Conference

September 14 – September 1, 1917: The Bolshevik Resolution in Petrograd. The Petrograd Soviet passes a Bolshevik resolution calling for a government of workers and peasants. The margin was so great that the praesidium felt compelled to resign.

On the following day, a joint session of the Russian soviets of Finland passed a resolution demanding a government of soviets.

September 16 – September 3, 1917: “On Compromises”. In Rabochy Put (Worker’s Way), a successor to the shuttered Pravda, Lenin writes of an opening for the proletarian revolution created by the defeat of Kornilov’s insurrection. He argued in “On Compromises” that if the Soviet were to reject proposals for coalition with the Cadets in the government, the way would be open for an all-socialist government incorporating the system of soviets.

He described the compromise this way: “The compromise on our part is our return to the pre-July demand of all power to the Soviets and a government of [Social Revolutionaries] and Mensheviks responsible to the Soviets.” And in return: “The Mensheviks and S.R.s, being the government bloc, would then agree … to form a government wholly and exclusively responsible to the Soviets, the latter taking over all power locally as well.”

Of course, as we’ll see, the right-socialists never opened this window.

September 17 – September 4, 1917: Trotsky Released. Having placed the former War Minister, Guchov, under arrest on suspicion of complicity in Kornilov’s plot, and then released him, the Directory is compelled to address the situation of Bolsheviks arrested after the July Days. Not wanting simply to release them, the Directory instead set bail. Trotsky was released on a “modest” 3,000 rubles bail raised by the trade unions. Other imprisoned Bolsheviks were also freed.

Also on this day, Kerensky ordered the Military Committee set up to oppose Kornilov to halt its activities. This much the compromisist committee might be willing to do, but it nevertheless refused to dissolve itself. It continued “to work with its former energy and restraint.” Kerensky would have to be satisfied with this.

September 18 – September 5, 1917: The Bolshevik Resolution in Moscow. The Moscow Soviet votes in favor of a Bolshevik resolution of no confidence in the Provisional Government. The resolution also condemned the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets for its policy favoring coalition with the Cadets in the government. In Moscow, as before in Petrograd, the praesidium of the Soviet therefore resigned.

Bolshevik resolutions of similar import were also passed by regional conferences of soviets in Siberia on this day and in Kiev a few days later. The Baltic Fleet did the same.

September 21 – September 8, 1917: Peasant Revolt. The Provisional Government not having addressed the agrarian question, peasants of Tombov province burn landlord manors – a sign that their revolt was escalating. It’s not possible to give a chronological account of these widespread, often spontaneous actions. This particular action, however, went beyond the usual takings of harvests, firewood, farm animals, and implements. Others like it, not excluding murders, continued to occur as the October Revolution approached.

Meanwhile in Petrograd, the soldiers’ section of the soviet adopted a resolution demanding the return of the garrison units that had been transferred after the July Days.

September 22 – September 9, 1917: Rising Tide in the Petrograd Soviet. The Petrograd Soviet convenes to reconsider the resolution voted on September 1 (September 14, new style). Each party’s whips made sure all their members attended; at stake was the substitution of the Bolshevik party line for that of the Compromisers.

The Bolsheviks moved to make representation on the praesidium proportional to the party’s share of the vote in the Soviet. This tactic was not favored by Lenin – still proscribed and therefore not present – but in the event Tseretilli would not entertain the motion.

So the Soviet was asked to declare that the resolution of September 1 did not accord with the Soviet’s line (i.e., that of the Compromisers) and that the Soviet still had confidence in its praesidium (consisting mostly of Compromisers). Note that the Bolshevik resolution precluded coalition government with the representatives of the bourgeoisie.

Trotsky, just released from prison, made an observation: Kerensky was missing from the praesidium. He asked whether the prime minister was still a member. The praesidium, seeing where Trotsky was going with this, reluctantly answered that he was. Trotsky answered that this was not what the Bolsheviks expected. “We were mistaken. The ghost of Kerensky now sits between Dan and Cheidze.” Then he reminded the Soviet that a vote for the policies of the resolution was also a vote for the policies of Kerensky, then among those subject to the Soviet’s investigation for complicity in the plot of Kornilov and the bourgeoisie.

The atmosphere was so tense that it was decided to take the vote by absence or presence. Those against the resolution were to signify opposition by leaving the hall.

It took over an hour, as workers’ and soldiers’ deputies drifted towards the exits amid whispers and shouts. The Bolsheviks thought they would be about 100 votes short of a majority. But when the praesidium made the count, it was 414 for the resolution, 519 against, with 67 abstentions…! Tseretilli offered a parting shot as he left the platform with the rest of the praesidium: After six months, the banner of the revolution had passed into the hands of the Bolsheviks; “We can only express the wish that you may be able to hold it in the same way for half as long!” Taking the chair, Trotsky offered and passed a special resolution denouncing those responsible for the slander against the Bolsheviks of conspiring with the Germans.

Trotsky says, “The Bolsheviks now entered on their inheritance.” But the inheritance did not include the organization’s infrastructure: printing presses, funds, transportation, even the typewriters and inkwells, had all been appropriated to other uses by the former occupants of the praesidium.

This vote was the culmination of increasing Bolshevik strength in the soviets, as well as on the factory committees, in the trade unions, and on the soldiers committees. The party had recovered all it had lost after the July Days and the slander of conspiracy – and more besides. Trotsky devotes two chapters, with much anecdotal evidence, to this account; I have given several of the more prominent examples in separate entries.

September 24 – September 11, 1917: Against Coalition. The Menshevik Dan speaks in the Petrograd Soviet in favor of coalition government, Trotsky for government of the soviets. Dan’s motion garnered only 10 votes from the hundreds of deputies present.

A resolution against repression of the Bolshevik party passed the Moscow Soviet unanimously on the same day.

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.”

September 28-October 3 – September 15-September 20, 1917: Resolutions of the Conference. The Democratic Conference debates several alternatives to Kerensky’s Directory over the next few days.

The Compromisers had drawn back from earlier statements, of the kind that inspired an offer of a deal from Lenin, that the Cadets might be excluded from a new formulation of the Coalition Government. At the conference, Trotsky argued against their inclusion because, as a party, they had not unambiguously denounced the Kornilov insurrection while it was taking place. The response was that, if it was a mistake to blame the whole Bolshevik party for the actions of a few during the July Days, it was also a mistake to blame the whole Cadet party for the actions of those members who abetted Kornilov. Trotsky answered by making a distinction: it is not a question of inviting individual Cadets “into the jails,” but of inviting the party as a whole “into the ministry.” The conference should do the former, but because the bourgeois press either “openly welcomed” Kornilov or “kept mum,” it should not do the latter.

A sailor from the Baltic Fleet spoke even more directly to this point, saying, “Against the creation of a Coalition Ministry the sailors have raised their battle flag!”

Trotsky expresses the alternatives before the conference this way: the centrists wanted a coalition, but without the Cadets; delegates on the right favored Kerensky and wanted to bring the Cadets into the government; the left, including the Bolsheviks, called for a government of the soviets, or at any rate a ministry of socialists – to the exclusion of the Cadets. These positions, of which that of the centrists was the most unstable, governed the formulation of the resolutions placed before the conference.

A centrist resolution in favor of a coalition passed, 766 to 688, but then a left amendment for excluding the Cadets also passed, 595 to 493. When the question was on the resolution as amended, the right and left joined in voting against it with 813 votes, leaving only 133 centrist votes in favor.

The organizers of the conference were at a loss. They convened a rump committee of party leaders, but their vote was also disappointing: 50 for coalition, 60 against. The committee was able to agree, unanimously, that whatever government should happen to be formed, should be responsible to the Democratic Conference. It then resolved that the conference should become a permanent body. Finally it voted to add members of the bourgeois parties to that body, 56 to 48.

Then Kerensky turned up again and told the conference he would not take part in a government of only one party or group of parties. Note that this involves admitting that he would not be able to sustain his Directory if the conference should prefer a new coalition.

October 1 – September 18, 1917: Centroflot Dissolved – Not! President of the Directory Kerensky issues an order dissolving the central committee of the Baltic Fleet. Centroflot replied that the order was unlawful and demanded that it be withdrawn. A few days later the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets arranged a pretext under which Kerensky could do so.

October 3 – September 20, 1917: Bolshevik Boycott? 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!”

October 4 – September 21, 1917: Democratic Conference Adjourns. Before it adjourns, the Democratic Conference completes the two remaining items on its agenda. The first was to pass a resolution, any resolution, to influence the configuration of the next government. The second was to populate the conference’s permanent version, to be called the Council of the Republic, “Pre-Parliament” for short.

To the first end, Tseretilli offered a resolution that appeared not to endorse a coalition in the government with the Cadets, but in fact made exactly this possible. It called on the Pre-Parliament to “cooperate in the creation of a government,” for the existing government to sanction the Pre-Parliament for that purpose, and for the Pre-Parliament to sanction the government thus created. The resolution passed, 829 to 106.

But, Trotsky says, Tseretilli’s resolution was a “disguised capitulation.” For one thing, it left Kerensky in the driver’s seat; the conference had not voted itself any leverage over him. For another, the composition of the government would depend on the composition of the Pre-Parliament, that is, on the second item on the agenda. The conference, in which a majority in favor of including the Cadets in a coalition government could not be had, was to name 350 of its delegates, about 15%, to the Pre-Parliament. They would be joined by 120 delegates to represent the bourgeoisie, and the government would name 20 Cossacks. A body so constituted might be able to form a consensus for naming some Cadet ministers. Thus “disguised capitulation.”

The Pre-Parliament was to convene about two weeks later. Trotsky observes that as an attempt by the Compromisers to recover lost power and prestige, the Democratic Conference was the functional equivalent of Kerensky’s State Conference in Moscow. It was also about equally successful.

Meanwhile, on Trotsky’s motion, the Petrograd Soviet demanded that the All Russian Congress of Soviets be convened. It had been agreed at the first congress, in June, to reconvene every three months. Now, the resolution said, the Congress was necessary for “self-defense” of the soviets against renewed efforts by the counter-revolution. Moreover it would give the Bolsheviks a position of strength vis a vis the Pre-Parliament. The resolution also called on the soviets to retain the official, governmental, and managerial functions they had up to then acquired and were exercising.

October 4 – September 21, 1917: At the Winter Palace. Despite what the Democratic Conference could try to do or say it would do, matters concerning the make-up of the new government are being discussed and settled at the Winter Palace. Kerensky had offered ministries to two Cadets: the industrialist Konovalov was to be Vice President and Minister of Trade and Industry, and Kishkin was to be Minister of Public Welfare. The Cadet central committee thought they should accept, because, they said, the proposal had originated with the British ambassador, Buchanan. A coalition acceptable to the Entente was very important to the big bourgeoisie who did business with them.