Part 6 (2/2)

[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”

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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

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