History of the Russian Revolution Vol 1 Part 6

But did the Provisional Government have no other support but this equivocal one of the Soviet leaders? What had become of the possessing cla.s.ses? The question is a fundamental one. United by their past with the monarchy, the possessing cla.s.ses had hastened to group themselves around a new axis after the revolution. On the 2nd of March, the Council of Trade and Industry, representing the united capital of the whole country, saluted the act of the State Duma, and declared itself "wholly at the disposition" of its Committee.

The zemstvos and the town dumas adopted the same course. On March 10, even the Council of the United n.o.bility, the mainstay of the throne, summoned all the people of Rus-sia a language of eloquent cowardice "to unite around the Provisional Government as now the sole lawful power in Russia. Almost at the same time the inst.i.tutions and organs of the possessing cla.s.ses began to denounce the dual power, and to lay the blame for the disorders upon the Soviet-at .rst cautiously but then bolder and bolder. The employers were soon followed by the clerks, the united liberal professions, the government employees. From the army came telegrams, addresses and resolutions of the same character-manufactured in the staff. The liberal press opened a campaign "for a single sovereignty," which in the coming months acquired the character of a hurricane of .re around the heads of the So-viet. All these things together looked exceedingly impressive. The enormous number of inst.i.tutions, well-known names, resolutions, articles, the decisiveness of tone-it had an in-dubitable effect upon the suggestible heads of the Committee. And yet there was no serious force behind this threatening parade of the propertied cla.s.ses. How about the force of prop-erty? said the petty bourgeois socialists, answering the Bolsheviks. Property is a relation among people. It represents an enormous power so long as it is universally recognised and supported by that system of compulsion called Law and the State. But the very essence of the present situation was that the old state had suddenly collapsed, and the entire old sys-tem of rights had been called in question by the ma.s.ses. In the factories the workers were more and more regarding themselves as the proprietors, and the bosses as uninvited guests. Still less a.s.sured were the feelings of the landlords in the provinces, face to face with those surly vengeful muzhiks, and far from that governmental power in whose existence they did for a time, owing to their distance from the capital, believe. The property-holders, deprived of the possibility of using their property, or protecting it, ceased to be real property holders and became badly frightened Philistines who could not give any support to the government for the simple reason that they needed support themselves. They soon began to curse the government for its weakness, but they were only cursing their own fate In those days the joint activity of the Executive Committee and the ministry seemed to have for its goal to demonstrate that the art of government in time of revolution consists in a garrulous waste of time. With the liberals this was a consciously adopted plan. It was their .rm conviction that all measures demanded postponement except one: the oath of loyalty to the Entente.

Miliukov acquainted his colleagues with the secret treaties. Kerensky let them in one ear and out the other. Apparently only the Procuror of the Holy Synod, a certain Lvov, rich in surprises, a namesake of the Premier but not a prince, went into a storm of indignation and even called the treaties "brigandage and swindle "-which undoubtedly provoked a conde-scending smile from Miliukov ("The everyday man is a fool") and a quiet proposal to return to the order of business. The of.cial Declaration of the government promised to summon a Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly at the earliest possible date-which date, however, was intentionally not stated. Nothing was said about the form of government: they still hoped to return to the lost paradise of monarchy. But the real meat of the Declaration' lay in its promise to carry the war through to victory, and "unswervingly carry out the agreements made with our Allies." So far as concerned the most threatening problems of the people's existence, the revolution had apparently been achieved only in order to make the announcement: ev-erything remains as before. Since the democrats attributed an almost mystic importance to recognition by the Entente-a small trader amounts to nothing until the bank recognises his credit-the Executive Committee swallowed in silence the imperialist declaration of March "Not one of.cial organ of the democracy," grieves Sukhanov a year later, "publicly reacted to the Declaration of the Provisional Government, which disgraced our revolution at its very birth in the eyes of democratic Europe."

At last, on the 8th of March, there issued from the ministerial laboratory a Decree of Amnesty. By that time the doors of the prisons had been opened by the people throughout the whole country, political exiles were returning in a solid stream with meetings, hurrahs, military speeches, .owers. The decree sounded like a belated echo from the government buildings. On the twelfth they announced the abolition of the death penalty. Four months later it was restored in the army. Kerensky promised to elevate justice to unheard-of heights. In a moment of heat he actually did carry out a resolution of the Executive Committee intro-ducing representatives of the workers and soldiers as members of the courts of justice. That was the sole measure in which could be felt the heartbeat of the revolution, and it raised the hair on the heads of the eunuchs of justice. But the matter stopped right there. Lawyer Demianov, an important of.cer in the ministry under Kerensky, and also a "socialist," de-cided to adopt the principle of leaving all former of.cials at their posts. To quote his own words: "The policies of a revolutionary government ought never to offend anybody unnec-essarily." That was, at bottom, the guiding principle of the whole Provisional Government, which feared most of all to offend anybody from the circles of the possessing cla.s.ses, or even the czarist bureaucracy. Not only the judges, but even the prosecutors of the czarist rgime remained at their posts. To be sure, the ma.s.ses might be offended. But that was the Soviet's business; the ma.s.ses did not enter into the .eld of vision of the government.

The sole thing in the nature of a fresh stream was brought in by the above-mentioned temperamental Procuror, Lvov, who gave an of.cial report on the "idiots and scoundrels" sitting in the Holy Synod. The ministers listened to his juicy characterisations with some alarm, but the synod continued a state inst.i.tution, and Greek Orthodoxy the state religion. Even the members.h.i.+p of the Synod remained unchanged. A revolution ought not to quarrel with anybody!

The members of the State Council-faithful servants of two or three emperors continued to sit, or at least to draw their salaries. And this fact soon acquired a symbolic signi.cance. Factories and barracks noisily protested. The Executive Committee worried about it. The government spent two sessions debating the question of the fate and salaries of the members of the State Council, and could not arrive at a decision. Why disturb these respectable people, among whom, by the way, we have many good friends?

The Rasputin ministers were still in prison, but the Provisional Government hastened to vote them a pension. This sounded like mockery, or a voice from another world. But the government did not want to offend its predecessors even though they were locked up in jail.

The senators continued to drowse in their embroidered jackets, and when a left senator, Sokolov, newly appointed by Kerensky, dared to appear in a black frock coat, they quietly removed him from the hall. These czarist legislators were not afraid to offend the February revolution, once convinced that its government had no teeth.

Karl Marx saw the cause of the failure of the March revolution in Germany in the fact that it "reformed only the very highest political circles, leaving untouched all the layers beneath them-the old bureaucracy, the old army, the old judges, born and brought up and grown old in the service of absolutism." Socialists of the type of Kerensky were seeking salvation exactly where Marx saw the cause of failure. And the Menshevik Marxists were with Kerensky, not Marx.

The sole sphere in which the government showed initiative and revolutionary tempo, was that of legislation on stock holdings. Hence the degree of reform was issued on the 17th of March. National and religious limitations were annulled only three days later. There were quite a few people on the staff of the government, you see, who had suffered under the old rgime, if at all, only from a lack of business in stocks.

The workers were impatiently demanding an eight-hour day. The government pretended to deaf in both ears. Besides it is war time, and all ought to sacri.ce themselves for the good of the Fatherland. Moreover that is the soviet's business: let them pacify the workers.

Still more threatening was the land question. Here it was really necessary to do some-thing. Spurred on by the prophets, the Minister of Agriculture, s.h.i.+ngarev, ordered the for-mation of local land committees-prudently refraining, however, from de.ning their tasks and functions. The peasants had an idea that these committees ought to give them the land. The landlords thought the committees ought to protect their property. From the very start the muzhik's noose, more ruthless than all others, was tightening round the neck of the February rgime.

Agreeably to the of.cial doctrine, all those problems which had caused the revolution were postponed to the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly. How could you expect these irreproach-able democrats to antic.i.p.ate the national will, when they had not even succeeded in seat-ing Mikhail Romanov astride of it? The preparation of a national representation was ap-proached in those days with such bureaucratic heaviness and deliberate procrastination that the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly itself became a mirage. Only on the 25th of March, almost a month after the insurrection-a month of revolution !-the government decided to call a lumbering Special Conference for the purpose of working out an election law. But the conference never opened. Miliukov in his History of the Revolution which is false from beginning to end confusedly states that as a result of various dif.culties "the work of the Special Conference was not begun under the .rst government." The dif.culties were inherent in the const.i.tution of the conference and in its function. The whole idea was to postpone the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly until better times: until victory, until peace or until the Calends of Kornilov.

The Russian bourgeoisie, which appeared in the world too late, mortally hated the revo-lution. But its hatred had no strength. It had to bide its time and manoeuvre. Being unable to overthrow and strangle the revolution, the bourgeoisie counted on starving it out.

CHAPTER 11.

DUAL POWER.

What const.i.tutes the essence of a dual power? [1] We must pause upon this question, for an illumination of it has never appeared in historic literature. And yet this dual power is a distinct condition of social crisis, by no means peculiar to the Russian revolution of 1917although there most clearly marked out.

Antagonistic cla.s.ses exist in society everywhere, and a cla.s.s, deprived of power in-evitably strives to some extent to swerve the governmental course in its favour. This does not as yet mean, however, that two or more powers are ruling in society. The character of political structure is directly determined by the relation of the oppressed cla.s.ses to the ruling cla.s.s. A single, government, the necessary condition of stability in any rgime, is preserved so long as the ruling cla.s.s succeeds in putting over its economic and political forms upon the whole of society the only forms possible.

The simultaneous dominion of the German Junkers and the bourgeoisie-whether in the Hohenzollern form or the republic-is not a double government, no matter how sharp at times may be the con.ict between the two partic.i.p.ating powers. They have a common social basis, therefore their clash does not threaten to split the state apparatus. The two-power rgime arises only out of irreconcilable cla.s.s con.icts-is possible, therefore, only in a revolutionary epoch, and const.i.tutes one of its fundamental elements.

The political mechanism of revolution consists of the transfer of power from one cla.s.s to another. The forcible overturn is usually accomplished in a brief time. But no historic cla.s.s lifts itself from a subject position to a position of rulers.h.i.+p suddenly in one night, even though a night of revolution. It must already on the eve of the revolution have a.s.sumed a very independent att.i.tude towards the of.cial ruling cla.s.s; moreover, it must have focused upon itself the hopes of intermediate cla.s.ses and layers, dissatis.ed with the existing state of affairs, but not capable of playing an independent ro1e. The historic preparation of 148.

a revolution brings about, in the pre-revolutionary period, a situation in which the cla.s.s which is called to realise the new social system, although not yet master of the country, has actually concentrated in its hands a. signi.cant share of the state power, while the of.cial apparatus of the government is still in. the hands of the old lords. That is the initial dual power in every revolution.

But that is not its only form. If the new cla.s.s, placed in power by a revolution which it did not want, is in essence an already old, historically belated, cla.s.s; if it was already worn out before it was of.cially crowned; if on coming to power it encounters an antagonist already suf.ciently mature and reaching out its hand toward the helm of state; then instead of one unstable two-power equilibrium, the political revolution produces another, still less stable. To overcome the "anarchy" of this twofold sovereignty becomes at every new step the task of the revolution-or the counter-revolution.

This double sovereignty does not presuppose-generally speaking, indeed, it excludes-the possibility of a division of the power into two equal halves, or indeed any formal equi-librium of forces whatever. It is not a const.i.tutional, but a revolutionary fact. It implies that a destruction of the social equilibrium has already split the state superstructure. It arises where the hostile cla.s.ses are already each relying upon essentially incompatible gov-ernmental organisations-the one outlived, the other in process of formation-which jostle against each other at every step in the sphere of government. The amount of power which falls to each of these struggling cla.s.ses in such a situation is determined by the correlation of forces in the course of the struggle.

By its very nature such a state of affairs cannot be stable. Society needs a concentration of power, and in the person of the ruling cla.s.s-or, in the situation we are discussing, the two half-ruling cla.s.ses-irresistibly strives to get it. The splitting of sovereignty foretells nothing less than civil war. But before the competing cla.s.ses and parties will go to that extreme-especially in case they dread the interference of third force-they may feel compelled for quite long time to endure, and even to sanction, a two-power system. This system will nevertheless inevitably explode. Civil war gives to this double sovereignty its most visible, because territorial, expression. Each of the powers, having created its own forti.ed drill ground, .ghts for possession of the rest of the territory, which often has to endure the double sovereignty in the form of successive invasions by the two .ghting powers, until one of them decisively installs itself.

The English revolution of the seventeenth century, exactly because it was a great revo-lution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example of this Alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war.

At .rst the royal power, resting upon the privileged cla.s.ses or the upper circles of these cla.s.ses-the aristocrats and bishops, -is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the circles of the squirearchy that are close to it. The government of the bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament supported by the City of London. The protracted con.ict between these two regimes is .nally settled in open civil war. The two governmental centres-London and Oxford-create their own armies. Here the dual power takes territorial form, although, as always in civil war, the boundaries are very s.h.i.+fting. Parliament conquers. The king is captured and awaits his fate.

It would seem that the conditions are now created for the single rule of the Presbyte-rian bourgeoisie. But before the royal power could be broken, the parliamentary army has converted itself into an independent political force. It has concentrated in its ranks the In-dependents, the pious and resolute petty bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and farmers. This army powerfully interferes in the social life, not merely as an armed force, but as a Praetorian Guard, and as the political representative of a new cla.s.s opposing the prosperous and rich bourgeoisie. Correspondingly the army creates a new state organ rising above the military command: a council of soldiers' and of.cers' deputies ("agitators"). A new period of dou-ble sovereignty has thus arrived: that of the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents' army. This leads to open con.icts. The bourgeoisie proves Powerless to oppose with its own army the "model army" of Cromwell-that is, the armed plebeians. The con.ict ends with a purgation of the Presbyterian Parliament by the sword of the Independents. There remains but the rump of a parliament; the dictators.h.i.+p of Cromwell is established. The lower ranks of the army, under the leaders.h.i.+p of the Levellers the extreme left wing of the revolution-try to oppose to the rule of the upper military levels, the patricians of the army, their own veritably plebeian rgime. But this new two-power system does not succeed in developing: the Levellers, the lowest depths of the petty bourgeoisie, have not yet, nor can have, their own historic path. Cromwell soon settles accounts with his enemies. A new political equilibrium, and still by no means a stable one, is established for a period of years.

In the great French revolution, the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, the backbone of which was the upper levels of the Third Estate, concentrated the power in its hands-without however fully annulling the prerogatives of the king. The period of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly is a clearly-marked period of dual power, which ends with the .ight of the king to Varennes, and is formally liquidated with the founding of the Republic.

The .rst French const.i.tution (1791), based upon the .ction of a complete independence of the legislative and executive powers, in reality concealed from the people, or tried to conceal, a double sovereignty: that of the bourgeoisie, .rmly entrenched in the National a.s.sembly after the capture by the people of the Bastille, and that of the old monarchy still relying upon the upper circles of the priesthood, the clergy, the bureaucracy, and the mili-tary, to say nothing of their hopes of foreign intervention. In this self-contradictory rgime lay the germs of its inevitable destruction. A way out could be found only in the abolition of bourgeois representation by the powers of European reaction, or in the guillotine for the king and the monarchy. Paris and Coblenz must measure their forces.

But before it comes to war and the guillotine, the Paris Commune enters the scene-supported by the lowest city layers of the Third Estate-and with increasing boldness con-tests the power with the of.cial representatives of the national bourgeoisie. A new double sovereignty is thus inaugurated, the .rst manifestation of which we observe as early as 1790, when the big and medium bourgeoisie is still .rmly seated in the administration and in the munic.i.p.alities. How striking is the picture-and how vilely it has been slandered!-of the efforts of the plebeian levels to raise themselves up out of the social cellars and cata-combs, and stand forth in that forbidden arena where people in wigs and silk breeches are settling the fate of the nation. It seemed as though the very foundation of society, tramped underfoot by the cultured bourgeoisie, was stirring and coming to life. Human heads lifted themselves above the solid ma.s.s, h.o.r.n.y hands stretched aloft, hoa.r.s.e but courageous voices shouted! The districts of Paris, b.a.s.t.a.r.ds of the revolution, began to live a life of their own. They were recognised-it was impossible not to recognise them!-and transformed into sec-tions. But they kept continually breaking the boundaries of legality and receiving a current of fresh blood from below, opening their ranks in spite of the law to those with no rights, the dest.i.tute Sansculottes. At the same time the rural munic.i.p.alities were becoming a screen for a peasant uprising against that bourgeois legality which was defending the feudal prop-erty system. Thus from under the second nation arises a third.

The Parisian sections at .rst stood opposed to the Commune, which was still dominated by the respectable bourgeoisie. In the bold outbreak of August 10, 1792, the sections gained control of the Commune. From then on the revolutionary Commune opposed the Legislative a.s.sembly, and subsequently the Convention, which failed to keep up with the problems and progress of the revolution-registering its events, but not performing them-because it did not possess the energy, audacity and unanimity of that new cla.s.s which had raised itself up from the depths of the Parisian districts and found support in the most backward villages. As the sections gained control of the Commune, so the Commune, by way of a new insurrection, gained control of the Convention. Each of the stages was characterised by a sharply marked double sovereignty, each wing of which was trying to establish a single and strong government-the right by a defensive struggle, the left by an offensive. Thus, characteristically-for both revolutions and counter-revolutions-the demand for a dictators.h.i.+p results from the intolerable contradictions of the double sovereignty. The transition from one of its forms to the other is accomplished through civil war. The great stages of revolution-that is, the pa.s.sing of power to new cla.s.ses or layers-do not at all coincide in this process with the succession of representative inst.i.tutions, which march along after the dynamic of the revolution like a belated shadow. In the long run, to be sure, the revolutionary dictators.h.i.+p of the Sansculottes unites with the dictators.h.i.+p of the Convention. But with what Convention? A Convention purged of the Girondists, who yesterday ruled it with the hand of the Terror-a Convention abridged and adapted to the dominion of new social forces. Thus by the steps of the dual power the French revolution rises in the course of four years to its culmination. After the 9th Thermidor it begins-again by the steps of the dual power-to descend. And again civil war precedes every downward step, just as before it had accompanied every rise. In this way the new society seeks a new equilibrium of forces.

The Russian bourgeoisie, .ghting with and co-operating with the Rasputin bureaucracy, had enormously strengthened its political position during the war. Exploiting the defeat of czarism, it had concentrated in its hands, by means of the Country and Town unions and the Military-Industrial Committees, a great power. It had at its independent disposition enormous state resources, and was in the essence of the matter a parallel government. During the war the czar's ministers complained that Prince Lvov was furnis.h.i.+ng supplies to the army, feeding it, medicating it, even establis.h.i.+ng barber shops for the soldiers. "We must either put an end to this, or give the whole power into his hands," said Minister Krivoshein in 1915. He never imagined that a year and a half later Lvov would receive "the whole power"-only not from the czar, but from the hands of Kerensky, Cheidze and Sukhanov. But on the second day after he received it, there began a new double sovereignty: alongside of yesterday's liberal half-government-to-day formally legalised-there arose an unof.cial, but so much the more actual government of the toiling ma.s.ses in the form of the soviets. From that moment the Russian revolution began to grow up into an event of world-historic signi.cance.

What, then, is the peculiarity of this dual power as it appeared in the February revolu-tion? In the events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dual power was in each case a natural stage in a struggle imposed upon its partic.i.p.ants by a temporary correlation of forces, and each side strove to replace the dual power with its own single power. In the revolution of 1917, we see the of.cial democracy consciously and intentionally creating a two-power system, dodging with all its might the transfer of power into its own hands. The double sovereignty is created, or so it seems at a glance, not as a result of a struggle of cla.s.ses for power, but as the result of a voluntary "yielding" of power by one cla.s.s to another. In so far as the Russian "democracy" sought for an escape from the two-power rgime, it could .nd one only in its own removal from power. It is just this that we have called the paradox of the February, revolution.

A certain a.n.a.logy can be found in 1848, in the conduct of the German bourgeoisie with relation to the monarchy. But the a.n.a.logy is not complete. The German bourgeoisie did try earnestly to divide the power with the monarchy on the basis of an agreement. But the bourgeoisie neither had the full power in its hands, nor by any means gave it over wholly to the monarchy. "The Prussian bourgeoisie nominally possessed the power, it did not for a moment doubt that the forces of the old government would place themselves unreservedly at its disposition and convert themselves into loyal adherents of its own omnipotence" (Marx and Engels).

The Russian democracy of 1917, having captured the power from the very moment of insurrection tried not only to divide it with the bourgeoisie, but to give the state over to the bourgeoisie absolutely. This means, if you please, that in the .rst quarter of the twentieth century the of.cial Russian democracy had succeeded in decaying politically completely than the German liberal bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. And that is entirely according to the laws of history, for it is merely the reverse aspect of upgrowth in those same decades of the proletariat, which now occupied the place of the craftsmen of Cromwell and the Sansculottes of Robespierre.

If you look deeper, the twofold rule of the Provisional Government and the Executive Committee had the character of a mere re.ection. Only the proletariat could advance a claim to the new power. Relying distrustfully upon the workers and soldiers, the Compro-misers were compelled to continue the double bookkeeping-of the kings and the prophets. The twofold government of the liberals and the democrats only re.ected the still concealed double sovereignty of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. When the Bolsheviks displace the Compromisers at the head of the Soviet-and this will happen within a few months-then that concealed double sovereignty will come to the surface, and this will be the eve of the Octo-ber revolution. Until that moment the revolution will live in a world of political re.ections. Refracted through the rationalisations the socialist intelligentsia, the double sovereignty, from being a stage in the cla.s.s struggle, became a regulative principle. It was just for this reason that it occupied the centre of all theoretical discussions. Everything has its uses: the mirror-like character of the February double government has enabled us better to under-stand those epochs in history when the same thing appears as a full-blooded episode in a struggle between two regimes. The feeble and re.ected light of the moon makes possible important conclusions about the sunlight.

In the immeasurably greater maturity of the Russian proletariat in comparison with the town ma.s.ses of the older revolutions, lies the basic peculiarity of the Russian revolution. This led .rst to the paradox of a half-spectral double government, and afterwards prevented the real one from being resolved in favour of the bourgeoisie. For the question stood thus: Either the bourgeoisie will actually dominate the old state apparatus, altering it a little for its purposes, in which case the soviets will come to nothing; or the soviets will form the foundation of a new state, liquidating not only the old governmental apparatus but also the dominion of those cla.s.ses which it served. The Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries were steering toward the .rst solution, the Bolsheviks toward the second. The oppressed cla.s.ses, who, as Marat observed, did not possess in the past the knowledge, or skill, or leaders.h.i.+p to carry through what they had begun, were armed in the Russian revolution of the twentieth century with all three. The Bolsheviks were victorious.

A year after their victory the same situation was repeated in Germany, with a different correlation of forces. The social democracy was steering for the establishment of a demo-cratic government of the bourgeoisie and the liquidation of the soviets. Luxemburg and Liebknecht steered toward the dictators.h.i.+p of the soviets. The Social Democrats won. Hil-ferding and Kautsky in Germany, Max Adler in Austria, proposed that they should "com-bine" democracy with the soviet system, including the workers' soviets in the const.i.tution. That would have meant making, potential or open civil war a const.i.tuent part of the state rgime. It would be impossible to imagine a more curious Utopia. Its sole justi.cation on German soil is perhaps an old tradition : the Wiirttemberg democrats of '48 wanted a republic with a duke at the head.

Does this Phenomenon of the dual power heretofore not suf.ciently appreciated contradict the Marxian theory of the ,state, which regards government as an executive com-mittee of the ruling cla.s.s? This is just the same as asking: Does the .uctuation of prices under the in.uence of supply and demand contradict the labour theory of value? Does the self-sacri.ce of a female protecting her offspring refute the theory of a struggle for exis-tence ? No, in these phenomena we have a more complicated combination of the same laws. If the state is an organisation of cla.s.s rule, and a revolution is the overthrow of the ruling cla.s.s, then the transfer of power from the one cla.s.s to the other must necessarily create self-contradictory state conditions, and .rst of all in the form of the dual power. The relation of cla.s.s forces is not a mathematical quant.i.ty permitting a priori computations. When the old rgime is thrown out of equilibrium, a new correlation of forces can be established only as the result of a trial by battle. That is revolution.

It may seem as though this theoretical inquiry has led us away from the events of 1917. In reality it leads right into the heart of them. It was precisely around this problem of twofold power that the dramatic struggle of parties and cla.s.ses turned. Only from a theo-retical height is it possible to observe it fully and correctly understand it.

[1] Dual power is the phrase settled upon in communist literature as an English rendering of dvoevlastie. The term is untranslatable both because of its form twin-powerdom-and because the stem, vlast, means sovereignty as well as power. Vlast is also used as an equivalent of government, and in the plural corresponds to our phrase the authorities. In view of this, I have employed some other terms besides dual power: double sovereignty, two-power rgime, etc. [Trans.]

CHAPTER 12.

THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE.

The organisation created on February 27 in the Tauride Palace, and called "Executive Com-mittee of The Soviet of Workers' Deputies," had little in common with its name. The Soviet of Deputies of 1905, the originator of the system, rose out of a general strike. It directly represented the ma.s.ses in struggle. The leaders of the strike became the deputies of the Soviet; the selection of its members.h.i.+p was carried out under .re; its Executive Committee was elected by the Soviet for the further prosecution of the struggle. It was this Executive Committee which placed on the order of the day the armed insurrection.

The February revolution, thanks to the revolt of the troops, was victorious before the workers had created a soviet. The Executive Committee was self-const.i.tuted, in advance of the Soviet and independently of the factories and regiments after the victory of the revolution.

We have here the cla.s.sic initiative of the radicals-standing aside from the revolutionary struggle, but getting ready to harvest its fruit. The real leaders of the workers had not yet left the streets. They were disarming some, arming others, making sure of the victory. The more far-sighted among them were alarmed by the news that in the Tauride Palace some kind of a soviet of workers' deputies had come into being. Just as in the autumn of 1916 the liberal bourgeoisie, in expectation of a palace revolution which somebody was supposed to put through, had got ready a reserve government to impose upon the new czar in case it succeeded, so the radical intelligentsia got ready its reserve sub-government at the moment of the February victory. Inasmuch as they had been, at least in the past, adherents of the workers' movement and inclined to cover themselves with its tradition, they now named their offspring Executive Committee of the Soviet. That was one of those half-intentional falsi.cations with which all history is .lled, especially the history of popular revolutions. In a revolutionary turn of events involving a break in the succession, those "educated"

155.

cla.s.ses who have now to learn to wield the power, gladly seize hold of any names and symbols connected with the heroic memories of the ma.s.ses. And words not infrequently conceal the essence of things-especially when this is demanded by the interests of in.uen-tial groups. The immense authority of the Executive Committee from the very day of its birth rested upon its seeming continuance of the Soviet of 1905. This Committee, rati.ed by the .rst chaotic meeting of the Soviet, thereafter exerted a decisive in.uence both upon the member-s.h.i.+p of the Soviet and upon its policy. This in.uence was the more conser-vative, in that the natural selection of revolutionary representatives which is guaranteed by the red-hot atmosphere of a struggle no longer existed. The insurrection was already in the past. All were drunk with victory, were planning how to get comfortable on the new basis, were relaxing their souls, partly also their heads. It required months of new con.icts and struggles in new circ.u.mstances, with the consequent reshuf.ing of personnel, in order that the soviets, from being organs for consecrating the victory, should become organs of strug-gle and preparation for a new insurrection. We emphasise this aspect of matter because it has until now been left completely in the shade.

However, not only the conditions in which the Executive Committee and the Soviet arose determined their moderate and compromising character. Deeper and more enduring causes were operating in the same direction.

There were over 150,000 soldiers in Petrograd. There were at least four times as many working men and women of all categories. Nevertheless for every two worker-delegates in the Soviet, there were .ve soldiers. The rules of representation were extremely elastic, and they were always stretched to the advantage of the soldiers. Whereas the workers elected only one delegate for every thousand, the most petty military unit would frequently send two. The grey army cloth became the general ground tone of the Soviet.

But by no means all even of the civilians were selected by workers. No small number of people got into the Soviet by individual invitation, through pull, or simply thanks to their own penetrative ability. Radical lawyers, physicians, students, journalists, representing various problematical groups-or most often representing their own ambition. This obvi-ously distorted character of the Soviet was even welcomed by the leaders, who were not a bit sorry to dilute the too concentrated essence of factory and barrack with the lukewarm water of cultivated Philistia. Many of these accidental crashers-in, seekers of adventure, self-appointed Messiahs, and professional bunk shooters, for a long time crowded out with their authoritative elbows the silent workers and irresolute soldiers.

And if this was so in Petrograd, it is not hard to imagine how it looked in the provinces, where the victory came wholly without struggle. The whole country was swarming with soldiers. The garrisons at Kiev, Helsingfors, Ti.is, were as numerous as that in Petrograd; in Saratov, Samara, Tambov, Omsk, there were 70,000 to 80,000 soldiers; in Yaroslavl, Ekaterinoslav, Ekaterinburg 60,000; in a whole series of other cities, 50,000, 40,000 and 80,000. The soviet representation was differently organised in different localities, but ev-erywhere it put the troops in a privileged position. Politically this was caused by the work-ers themselves, who wanted to go as far as possible to meet the soldiers. The soviet leaders were equally eager to go to meet the of.cers. Besides the considerable number of lieu-tenants and ensigns at .rst elected by the soldiers themselves, a special representation was often given, particularly in the provinces, to the commanding staff. As a result the military had in many soviets an absolutely overwhelming majority. The soldier ma.s.ses, who had not yet had time to acquire a political physiognomy, nevertheless determined through their representatives the physiognomy of the soviets.

In every representative system there is a certain lack of correspondence. It was espe-cially great on the second day of the revolution. The deputies of the politically helpless soldiers often turned out in those early days to be people completely alien to the soldiers and to the revolution-all sorts of intellectuals and semi-intellectuals who had been hiding in the rear barracks and consequently came out as extreme patriots. Thus was created a divergence between the mood of the barracks and the mood of the soviet. Of.cer Stanke-vich, whom the soldiers of his battalion had received back sullenly and distrustfully after the revolution, made a successful speech in the soldiers' section on the delicate question of discipline. Why, he asked, is the mood of the Soviet gentler and more agreeable than that of the battalions? This naive perplexity testi.es once more how hard it is for the real feelings of the lower ranks to .nd a path to the top.

Nevertheless, as early as March 8, meetings of soldiers and workers began to demand that the Soviet depose forthwith the Provisional Government of the liberal bourgeoisie, and take the power in its own hands. Here again the initiative belonged to the Vyborg district. And could there be, indeed, a demand more intelligible and nearer to the hearts of the ma.s.ses? But this agitation was soon broken off, not only because the Defensists sharply opposed it; worse than that, the majority leaders.h.i.+p had already in the .rst half of March bowed down in real fact to the two-power rgime. And anyway, aside from the Bolsheviks, there was no one to bring up squarely the question of power. The Vyborg leaders had to back down. The Petrograd workers, however, did not for one moment give their con.dence to the new government, nor consider it their own. They did listen keenly, though, to the soldiers and try not to oppose them too sharply. The soldiers, on the other hand, just learn-ing the .rst syllables of political life, although as shrewd peasants they would not trust any master who happened along, nevertheless intently listened to their representatives, who in turn lent a respectful ear to the authoritative leaders of the Executive Committee; and these latter did nothing but listen with alarm to the pulse of the liberal bourgeoisie. Upon this system of universal listening from the bottom toward the top everything rested-for the time being. However, the mood from below had to break out on the surface. The question of power, arti.cially sidetracked, kept pus.h.i.+ng up anew, although in disguised form. "The sol-diers don't know whom to listen to," complained the districts and the provinces, expressing in this way to the Executive Committee their dissatisfaction with the divided sovereignty. Delegations from the Baltic and Black Sea .eets announced on the 16th of March that they were ready to recognise the Provisional Government in so far as it went hand in hand with the Executive Committee; in other words, they did not intend to recognise it at all. As time goes on, this note sounds louder and louder. "The army and the population should submit only to the directions of the Soviet," resolves the 172nd Reserve Regiment, sad then immediately formulates the contrary theorem: "Those directions of the Provisional Gov-ernment which con.ict with the decision of the Soviet are not to be obeyed." With a mixed feeling of satisfaction and anxiety the Executive Committee sanctioned this situation; with grinding teeth the government endured it. There was nothing else for either of them to do.

Already early in March, soviets were coming into being in all the princ.i.p.al towns and industrial centres. From these spread in the next few weeks throughout the country. They began to arrive in the villages only in April and May; at .rst it was practically the army alone which spoke in the name of the peasants.

The Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet actually acquired a state signi.cance. The other soviets guided them-selves by the capital, one after the other adopting resolu-tions of conditional support to the Provisional Government. Although in the .rst months the relations between the Petrograd and provincial soviets worked themselves out smoothly, and without con.ict or serious disagreement, nevertheless the necessity of a state organi-sation was obvious in the whole situation. A month after the overthrow of the autocracy a .rst conference of soviets was summoned-incomplete and one-sided in its members.h.i.+p. Although, out of 185 organisations represented, two-thirds were provincial soviets, these were for the most part soldiers' soviets. Together with the representatives of the front organisations, these military delegates-for the most part of.cers-were in an overwhelm-ing majority. Speeches resounded about war to complete victory, and outcries resounded against the Bolsheviks, notwithstanding their more than moderate behaviour. The confer-ence .lled out the Petrograd Executive Committee with sixteen conservative provincials, thus legitimising its state character.

That strengthened the right wing still more. From now on they frightened the malcon-tents by alluding to the provinces. The resolution on regulating the members.h.i.+p of the Petrograd Soviet-adopted March 14-was hardly carried out at all. It is not the local soviet that decides, but the All-Russian Executive Committee. The of.cial leaders thus occupied an almost una.s.sailable position. The most important decisions were made by the Executive Committee, or rather by its ruling nucleus, after a preliminary agreement with the nucleus of the government. The Soviet remained on one side. They treated it like a meeting: "Not there, not in general meetings, is the policy wrought out; all these 'plenary sessions' had decidedly no practical importance" (Sukhanov). These complacent rulers of destiny thought that in entrusting the leaders.h.i.+p to them the soviets had essentially completed their task. The future will soon show them that this is not so. The ma.s.ses are long-suffering, but they are not clay out of which you can fas.h.i.+on anything you want to. Moreover, in a revolutionary epoch they learn fast. In that lies the power of a revolution.

In order better to understand the further development of events, it is necessary to pause upon the character of the two parties which from the very beginning formed a close political bloc, dominating in the soviets, in the democratic munic.i.p.alities, in the congresses of the so-called revolutionary democracy, and even carrying their steadily dwindling majority to the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, which became the last re.ection of their former power, like the glow on a hilltop illumined by a sun already set.

If the Russian bourgeoisie appeared in the world too late to be democratic, the Russian democracy for the same reason wanted to consider itself socialistic. The democratic ide-ology had been hopelessly played out in the course of the nineteenth century. A radical intelligentsia standing on the edge of the twentieth, if it wanted to .nd a path to the ma.s.ses, had need of a socialist colouring. This is the general historic cause which gave rise to those two intermediate parties: Menshevik and Social Revolutionary. Each of them, however, had its own genealogy and its own ideology.

The views of the Mensheviks were built up on a Marxian basis. In consequence of that same historical belatedness of Russia, Marxism had there become at .rst not so much a criticism of capitalist society as an argument for the inevitability of the bourgeois devel-opment of the country. History cleverly made use of the emasculated theory of proletarian revolution, in order with its help to Europeanise, in the bourgeois sense, wide circles of the mouldy "Narodnik" intelligentsia. In this process a very important role fell to the Menshe-viks. Const.i.tuting the left wing of the bourgeois intelligentsia, they put the bourgeoisie in touch with the more moderate upper layers of the workers, those with a tendency towards legal activity around Duma and in the trade unions.

The Social Revolutionaries, on the contrary, struggled theoretically against Marxism-although sometimes surrendering to it. They considered themselves a party which re-alised the union of the intelligentsia, the workers and the peasants-under the leaders.h.i.+p, it goes without saying, of the Critical Reason. In the economic sphere their ideas were an indigestible mess of various historical acc.u.mulations, re.ecting the contradictory life-conditions of the peasantry in a country rapidly becoming capitalistic. The coming rev-olution presented itself to the Social Revolutionaries as neither bourgeois nor socialistic, but "democratic ": they subst.i.tuted a political formula for a social content. They thus laid out for themselves a course halfway between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and con-sequently a position of arbiter between them. After February it might seem as though the Social Revolutionaries did actually approach this position.

From the time of the .rst revolution they had had their roots in the peasantry. In the .rst months of 1917, the whole rural intelligentsia adopted for its own the traditional formula of the Narodniks: "Land and Freedom." In contrast to the Mensheviks who remained always a party of the cities, the Social Revolutionaries had found, it seemed, an amazingly powerful support in the country. More than that, they dominated even in the cities: in the soviets through the soldiers' sections, and in the .rst democratic munic.i.p.alities where they had an absolute majority of the votes. The power of this party seemed unlimited. In reality it was a political aberration. A party for whom everybody votes except that minority who know what they are voting for, is no more a party, than the tongue in which babies of all countries babble is a national language. The Social Revolutionary Party came forward as a solemn designation for everything in the February revolution that was immature, unformulated and confused. Everybody who had not inherited from the pre-revolutionary past suf.cient reasons to vote for the Kadets or the Bolsheviks, voted for the Social Revolutionaries. But the Kadets stood inside a closed circle of property owners; and the Bolsheviks were still few, misunderstood, and even terrifying. To vote for the Social Revolutionaries meant to vote for the revolution in general, and involved no further obligation. In the city it meant the desire of the soldiers to a.s.sociate themselves with a party that stood for the peasants, the desire of the backward part of the workers to stand close to the soldiers, the desire of the small townspeople not to break away from the soldiers and the peasants. In those days the Social Revolutionary members.h.i.+p-card was a temporary ticket of admission to the inst.i.tutions of the revolution, and this ticket remained valid until it was replaced by another card of a more serious character. It has been truly said of this great party, which took in all and everybody, that it was only a grandiose zero.

From the time of the .rst revolution, the Mensheviks had inferred the necessity of a union with the liberals from the bourgeois character of the revolution. And they valued this union higher than cooperation with the peasantry, whom they considered an unsafe ally. The Bolsheviks, on the contrary, had founded their view of the revolution on a union of the proletariat with the peasantry against the liberal bourgeoisie. As an actual fact we see in the February revolution an opposite grouping-the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries come out a close union, completed by their common bloc with the liberal bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks, on the of.cial political .eld, are completely isolated.

This apparently inexplicable fact is in reality wholly in accord with the laws of things. The Social Revolutionaries were not by any means a peasant party, notwithstanding the wholesale sympathy for their slogans in the villages. The central nucleus of the party-what actually de.ned its policies and created ministers and bureaucrats from its midst-was far more closely a.s.sociated with the liberal and radical circles of the cities than with the ma.s.ses of the peasants in revolt. This ruling nucleus-monstrously swelled by the careerist .ood of Social Revolutionaries of the March vintage-was frightened to death by the spread of the peasant movement under Social Revolutionary slogans. These freshly baked "Nar-odniks" wished the peasants all good things, of course, but did not want the red c.o.c.k to crow. And the horror of the Social Revolutionaries before the peasant revolt was paral-leled by the horror of the Mensheviks before the a.s.sault of the proletariat. In its entirety this democratic fright was a re.ection of the very real danger to the possessing cla.s.ses caused by a movement of the oppressed, a danger which united them in a single camp, the bourgeois-landlord reaction. The bloc of the Social Revolutionaries with the govern-ment of landlord Lvov signalised their break with the agrarian revolution, just as the bloc of the Mensheviks with industrialists and bankers of the type of Guchkov, Tereshchenko and Konovalov, meant their break with the proletarian movement. In these circ.u.mstances the union of Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries meant not a cooperation of proletariat with peasants, but a coalition of those parties which had broken with the proletariat and the peasants respectively, for the sake of a bloc with the possessing cla.s.ses.

From what has been said it is clear that the socialism of the two democratic parties was a .ction. But this is far from saying that their democratism was real. It is a bloodless sort of democratism that requires a socialistic disguise. The Russian proletariat had waged its struggle for democracy in irreconcilable antagonism to the liberal bourgeoisie. The democratic parties therefore, in entering a bloc with the liberal bourgeoisie, had inevitably to enter into con.ict with the proletariat. Such were the social roots of the cruel struggle to come between Compromisers and Bolsheviks.

If you reduce the above outlined processes to their naked cla.s.s mechanism-of which of course the partic.i.p.ants, and even the leaders, of the two compromise parties were not thor-oughly conscious-you get approximately the following distribution of historic functions: The liberal bourgeoisie was already unable to win over the ma.s.ses. Therefore it feared a revolution. But a revolution was necessary for the bourgeois development. From the en-franchised bourgeoisie two groups split off, consisting of sons and younger brothers. One of these groups went to the workers, the other to the peasants. They tried to attach these work-ers and peasants to themselves, sincerely and hotly demonstrating that they were socialists and hostile to the bourgeoisie. In this way they actually gained a considerable in.uence over the people. But very soon the effect of their ideas outstripped the original intention. The bourgeoisie sensed a mortal danger and sounded the alarm. Both the groups which had split off from it, the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, eagerly responded to the summons from the head of the family. Hastily patching up the old disagreements they all stood shoulder to shoulder, abandoned the ma.s.ses, and rushed to the rescue of bourgeois society.

The Social Revolutionaries made a feeble and .abby impression even in comparison with the Mensheviks. To the Bolsheviks at all important moments they seemed merely third-rate Kadets. To the Kadets they seemed third-rate Bolsheviks. (The second-rate posi-tion was occupied, in both cases, by the Mensheviks.) Their unstable support and the form-lessness of their ideology were re.ected in their personnel: on all the Social Revolutionary leaders lay the imprint of un.nishedness, super.ciality and sentimental unreliability. We may say without any exaggeration that the rank-and-.le Bolshevik revealed more politi-cal ac.u.men, more understanding of the relations between cla.s.ses, than the most celebrated Social Revolutionary leaders.

Having no stable criteria, the Social Revolutionaries showed a tendency toward moral imperatives. It is hardly necessary to add that these moral pretensions did not in the least hinder them from employing in big politics those petty knaveries so characteristic of inter-mediate parties lacking a stable support, a clear doctrine, and a genuine moral axis.

In the Menshevik-Social Revolutionary bloc the dominant place belonged to the Men-sheviks, in spite of the weight of numbers on the side of the Social Revolutionaries. In this distribution of forces was expressed in a way the hegemony of the town over the country, the predominance of the city over the rural petty bourgeoisie, and .nally the intellectual su-periority of a "Marxist " intelligentsia over an intelligentsia which stood by the simon-pure Russian sociology, and prided itself on the meagreness of the old Russian history.

In the .rst weeks after the revolution not one of the left parties, as we know, had its actual headquarters in the capital. The generally recognised leaders of the socialist par-ties were abroad. The secondary leaders were on their way to the centre from the Far East. This created a mood of prudence and watchful waiting among the temporary leaders, which drew them closer together. Not one of the guiding groups in those weeks thought anything through to the end. The struggle of parties in the Soviet was extremely peaceable in character. It was a question, almost, of mere nuances within one and the same "revolu-tionary democracy." It is true that with the arrival of Tseretelli from exile (March 19) the Soviet leaders.h.i.+p took a rather sharp turn toward the right-toward direct responsibility for the government and the war. But the Bolsheviks also toward the middle of March, under the in.uence of Kamenev and Stalin who had arrived from exile, swung sharply to the right, so that the distance between the Soviet majority and its left opposition had become by the beginning of April even less than it was at the beginning of March. The real differentiation began a little later. It is possible to set the exact date: April 4, the day after the arrival of Lenin in Petrograd.

The Menshevik Party had a number of distinguished .gures at the head of its different tendencies, but not one revolutionary leader. Its extreme right wing, led by the old teachers of the Russian social democracy-Plekhanov, Za.s.sulich, Deutsch-had taken a patriotic position even under the autocracy. On the very eve of the February revolution, Plekhanov, who had so pitifully outlived himself, wrote in an American newspaper that strikes and other forms of working-cla.s.s struggle in Russia would now be a crime. The broader circles of old Mensheviks-among their number such .gures as Martov, Dan, Tseretelli-had inscribed themselves in the camp of Zimmerwald and refused to accept responsibility for the war. But this internationalism of the left Mensheviks, as also of the left Social Revolutionaries, concealed in the majority of cases a mere democratic oppositionism. The February revolu-tion reconciled a majority of those Zimmerwaldists1 to the war, which from now on they discovered to be a struggle in defence of the revolution. The most decisive in this matter was Tseretelli, who carried Dan and the others along with him. Martov, whom the war had found in France, and who arrived from abroad only on May 9, could not help seeing that his former party a.s.sociates had after the February revolution arrived at the same position occu-pied by Guesde, Sembat and others at the beginning of 1914, when they took upon them-selves the defence of a bourgeois republic against German absolutism. Standing at the head of the left wing of the Mensheviks, which did not rise to any serious role in the revolution, Martov remained in opposition to the policy of Tseretelli and Dan-at the same time oppos-ing a rapprochement between the left Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Tseretelli spoke in the name of of.cial Menshevism and had an indubitable majority-pre-revolutionary patriots having found it easy to unite with these patriots of the February vintage. Plekhanov, how-ever, had his own group, completely chauvinist and standing outside the party and outside the Soviet. Martov's faction, which did not quit the party, had no paper of its own and no policy of its own. As always at times of great historic action, Martov .oundered hopelessly and swung in the air. In 1917, as in 1905, the revolution hardly noticed this unusually able man.

The president of the Menshevik faction of the Duma, Cheidze, became almost automat-ically the president of the Petrograd Soviet, and afterwards of its Executive Committee. He tried to consecrate to the duties of his of.ce all the resources of his conscientiousness, concealing his perpetual lack of con.dence in himself under an ingenuous jocularity. He carried the ineradicable imprint of his province. Mountainous Georgia, the land of sun, vineyards, peasants and petty princes, with a small percentage of workers, produced a very wide stratum of left intellectuals, .exible, temperamental, but the vast majority of them not rising above the petty bourgeois outlook. Georgia sent Mensheviks as deputies to all four Dumas, and in all four factions her deputies played the role of leaders. Georgia became the Gironde of the Russian revolution. But whereas the Girondists of the eighteenth century were accused of federalism, the Girondists of Georgia, although at .rst defending a single and indivisible Russia, ended in separatism.

The most distinguished .gure produced by the Georgian Gironde was undoubtedly the former deputy of the second Duma, Tseretelli, who immediately on his arrival from exile took the leaders.h.i.+p, not only of the Mensheviks, but of the whole Soviet majority. Not a theoretician and not even a journalist, but a distinguished orator, Tseretelli remained a radical of the southern French type. In conditions of ordinary parliamentary routine he would have been a .sh in water. But he was born into a revolutionary epoch, and had poisoned himself in youth with a dose of Marxism. At any rate, of all the Mensheviks, Tseretelli revealed in the events of the revolution the widest horizon and the desire to pursue a consistent policy. For this reason he, more than any other, helped on with the destruction of the February rgime. Cheidze wholly submitted to Tseretelli, although at moments be was frightened by that doctrinaire straightforwardness which caused the revolutionary hard-labour convict of yesterday to unite with the conservative representatives of the bourgeoisie.

The Menshevik Skobelev, indebted for his new popularity to his position as deputy in the last Duma, conveyed-and not only on account of his youthful appearance-the impression of a student playing the role of statesman on a home-made stage. Skobelev specialised in putting down "excesses," quieting local con.icts, and in general caulking up the cracks of the two-power rgime-until he was included, in the unlucky role of Minister of Labour, in the Coalition government of May.

A most in.uential .gure among the Mensheviks was Dan, an old party worker, always considered the second .gure after Martov. If Menshevism in general was nourished upon the .esh, blood, tradition, and spirit of the German social democracy of the period of decline, Dan actually seemed to be a member of the German party administration-an Ebert on a smaller scale. Ebert, the German Dan, successfully carried out in Germany a year later that policy which Dan, the Russian Ebert, had failed to carry out in Russia. The cause of the difference however was not in the men, but in the conditions.

If the .rst violin in the orchestra of the Soviet majority was Tseretelli, the piercing clarinet was played by Lieber-with all his lungpower and blood in his eyes. This was a Menshevik from the Jewish workers' union (The Bund), with a long revolutionary past, very sincere, very temperamental, very eloquent, very limited, and pa.s.sionately desirous of showing himself an in.exible patriot and iron statesman. Lieber was literally beside himself with hatred of Bolsheviks.

We may close the phalanx of Menshevik leaders with the former ultra-left Bolshevik, Voitinsky, a prominent partic.i.p.ant in the .rst revolution, who had served at hard labour, and who broke with his party in March on grounds of patriotism. After joining the Mensheviks, Voitinsky became, as was to be expected, a professional Bolshevik-eater. He lacked only Liebear's temperament in order to equal him in baiting his former party comrades.

The general staff of the Narodniks was equally heterogeneous, but far less signi.cant and bright. The so-called Popular Socialists, the extreme right .ank, were led by the old emigrant Chaikovsky, who equalled Plekhanov in military chauvinism but lacked his talent and his past. Alongside him stood the old woman Breshko-Breshkovskaia, whom the Social Revolutionaries called the "grandmother of the Russian Revolution," but who zeal-ously forced herself as G.o.dmother on the Russian counter-revolution. The superannuated anarchist Kropotkin, who had had a weakness ever since youth for the Narodniks made use of the war to disavow everything he had been teaching for almost half a century. This de-nouncer of the state supported the Entente, and if he denounced the dual power in Russia, it was not in the name of anarchy, but in the name of a single power of the bourgeoisie. However, these old people played mostly a decorative although-although later on in the war against the Bolsheviks Chaikovsky headed one of the White governments .nanced by Churchill. The .rst place among the Social Revolutionaries-far in advance of the others, though not in the party but above it-was occupied by Kerensky, a man without any party past whatever. We shall meet often again this providential .gure, whose strength in the two-power period lay in his combining the weaknesses of liberalism with the weaknesses of the democracy. His formal entrance into the Social Revolutionary Party did not destroy Kerenskys scornful att.i.tude toward parties in general: he considered himself the directly chosen one of the nation. But after all, the Social Revolutionary Party had ceased by that time to be a party, and become a grandiose and indeed national zero. In Kerensky this party found an adequate leader.

The future Minister of Agriculture, and afterwards President of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sem-bly, Chernov, was indubitably the most representative .gure of the old Social Revolutionary Party, and by no accident was conside