99

Soviet by a vast majority voted on July 3 for the Soviets to take power; and a delegation of Menshevik workers urged Tseretelli and the Soviet leaders to form a government. Then came the Bolshevik-led armed demonstrations of workers, soldiers, and sailors from Kronstadt demanding that the Executive Committee of Soviets assume power; "Take power, you son of a bitch, when it is given to you,' a worker is reported to have shouted at Viktor Chernov.39 Indeed, the Executive Committee of Soviets was at this time the de facto government: it put down the riots, restored order, brought troops to Petrograd, and received affirmations of loyalty from most garrison units even before the special task force which it had ordered from the Fifth Army had arrived. Yet the Soviet leaders, notably Tseretelli, and also Dan, refused to transform their de facto power into legal power, thereby enabling Kerensky to form another (the second) coalition government on July 24.

When the September crisis of government developed, opposition within the "camp of democracy" to coalition with the bourgeoisie was stronger than ever. At the Democratic Conference that was convoked to meet the crisis, a majority of both the Menshevik and the Soviet sections voted against coalition, and both sections elected Martov their spokesman; a clear majority of the conference voted against coalition with the Kadets. Yet Tseretelli took advantage of a third vote that negated the previous votes and made it possible for Kerenski to form still another (the third) coalition government. The last chance to stop Bolshevism was thus thrown away.

Why this stubborn pursuit of coalition, which Menshevik doctrine prohibited rather than prescribed? Was it due to the Mensheviks' acceptance of the war, which required bouregois allies? Was it because of their fast-growing fear of Bolshevism and Tseretelli's conviction that a showdown with the Bolshevik "military apparatus" was inevitable? 4o Or did the Menshevik leaders, who were urban worker-oriented socialist intellectuals, a majority of Jewish and Georgian origin, simply lack the confidence to confront and govern a postrevolutionary but still largely pre-industrial peasant Russia, where antisemitism was deeply rooted and distrust of non-Russians widespread? Here there are significant straws in the wind: it was, e.g., precisely

39 P. N. Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi russkoi revoliutsii, Vol. I, Part 1, Sofia, 1921, p. 224.

40 Tseretelli, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 247-49.

because he was a Jew that Dan refused to become a minister in the first coalition government and sent M. I. Skobelev instead.11

Whatever the explanations for the Mensheviks'

persistent coalitionism, there can be little doubt that it facilitated the Bolshevik takeover in the name of "all power to the Soviets." For the real alternative in 1917, so it seems to this writer, was not Lenin or Kornilov-i.e., a brutal choice between two forms of dictatorship—but a Soviet government under the democratic auspices of the Menshevik-SR alliance, legitimized by an early convocation of the Constituent Assembly or a Soviet government under Bolshevik auspices. If they had wished to preserve their early achievements in the February Revolution and to consolidate its gains, the Mensheviks would have had to assume power, to be the government. Only thus could they have ensured a speedy convocation of the Constituent Assembly and enaction of Menshevik solutions to the problems of land reform, nationalities, industrial relations, economic controls, and above all war and peace.

It was certainly no easy matter to reconcile Russia's burning interest in peace with the war policy of the Allies, which aimed at the knockout defeat of Germany. Yet whatever the merits or defects of Tseretelli's and Dan's "revolutionary defensism," they could argue that Russia had to stay in the war while pressure was put on the Allies directly (at the planned Paris conference) and indirectly (through the socialist parties of the belligerent and neutral nations at and after the Stockholm conference) to agree to a negotiated peace with the Central Powers on the basis of the Soviet formula, "peace without annexations and reparations." This, however, presupposed a government which was in sympathy with the Mensheviks' peace policy. Ironically enough, Menshevik coalitionism simply produced a succession of Kerensky governments whose permanent foreign minister, M. I. Tereshchenko, did his best to sabotage that policy.

Moreover, even if the Kerensky offensive of June 1917, which the Menshevik leaders supported, had made military sense (which, because of the poor condition of the army, it did not), it was badly timed to make political sense. The offensive was nothing less than Russia's trump card to make the Allies take account of her desperate need for peace.

41 Author's interview with Lydia Dan, New York, 1962.

That card was thrown away when the offensive was launched before an agreement had been reached with the Allies.

It was, then, their underestimation of the importance of state power, their lack of understanding that the assumption of power is an integral part and consummation of revolution-making, which proved to be the Mensheviks' fatal flaw and gave the Bolsheviks their chance. As Saint-Just warned:

Ceux qui font des révolutions à demi ne font que creuser leurs tombeaux.

After November

While the Menshevik performance during the period of the Provisional Government adds up to a sad story of opportunities missed or thrown away, the Mensheviks did finally write a heroic chapter under the Bolshevik regime.

Confronted with the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Mensheviks, now led by Martov and Dan, tried their best to prevent the Bolsheviks from "going it alone" and establishing a minority dictatorship. During the so-called VIKZHEL negotiations of late October and early November 1917,* they campaigned for the creation of an all-socialist coalition

42

government, ranging from the Popular Socialists to the Bolsheviks, and Martov and Raphael Abramovich played a leading part in bringing the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and moderate Bolsheviks together. It is significant that the only "ultimative" condition which the Mensheviks set— and the Bolsheviks promptly rejected—was the "cessation of political terror. "cessation of political terror." 2 The negotiations thus foundered on the intransigence of Lenin and Trotsky, who, in a session described by Lenin as of "historical importance, "43 called the moderate Bolsheviks to task and broke off the negotiations. When the Constituent Assembly was dispersed by armed force on January 18, 1918, the Mensheviks saw their last hopes dashed of mediating between the Bolsheviks, who held state power, and the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had received a majority of votes in the November elections to the Constituent Assembly. Soon the SR-Bolshevik conflict blazed into civil war.

Though in the first stage of the civil war, through the latter part of 1918, the Mensheviks' hearts were undoubtedly on the side of the Socialist Revolutionaries, they remained neutral and tried to halt the fighting, believing that regardless of the justified grievances and indignation of the SRs, "in the given political situation any armed struggle against the Bolshevik state power is adventurism, which can be of benefit only to counterrevolution." "

44

Troianovski, L. M. Khinchuk and last but not least-Andrei Vyshinki, became Soviet dignitaries, and some even surivved under Stalin. But the leading Mensheviks would not even consider such "capitulation," " determined as they were to fight their losing battle to the bitter end. That end came when in 1921 the Menshevik leaders and activists were imprisoned and then exiled.

A Doomed Course

In view of the treatment they received, one wonders what made the Mensheviks support the Bolsheviks in the civil war and in the resistance against foreign intervention, in effect campaigning for the diplomatic recognition of a regime which they themselves denounced as a terrorist dictatorship; such loyalty the Bolshevik masters certainly did not deserve. The answer lies in the limited alternatives open to the Mensheviks. Unless they were prepared to compromise their democratic commitments and surrender to the Bolshevik state (and this was out of the question for a party which had elected Martov its leader), or to join the Socialist Revolutionaries, fighting the Bolsheviks and thus inviting counterrevolution (or so the Mensheviks believed), or to go out of existence as a political party, there was little else the Mensheviks could do but try to find themselves a place in the regime as a semi-loyal, semi-implacable opposition.

These tactics were also in tune with their interpretation of the October Revolution and of the regime that issued from it. They had disapproved of the Bolshevik seizure of power and had warned against the Bolsheviks' "maximalist-utopian" attempt to plunge a backward peasant country into socialism when all the necessary prerequisites were missing. Yet they did not interpret the Bolshevik minority dictatorship and the terror as the work of scoundrels and adventurers who lusted for power. They credited the Bolsheviks, whom they believed they knew intimately, with the determination to use the coercive power of the state to make up for and create the missing industrial and social base for the construction of a socialist order. They believed at the same time that the means which the Bolsheviks used, such as the dictatorship and the terror, doomed that experiment to failure. Still, the Mensheviks did not expect an imminent collapse of the Bolshevik regime, nor did they really wish for it. The only

49 Ibid.

realistic alternative to the Bolshevik regime that the Mensheviks could discern was counterrevolution, and they detested this more than they feared Bolshevism, which, they hopefully believed, was not yet beyond redemption. Thus their only choice was to seek a place in the Soviet system as an opposition party and attempt to democratize it. By 1921 their valiant attempt had foundered on the rock of Soviet state power.

With the Civil War finally won but the country devastated, the Bolsheviks in 1921 adopted the essentials of Menshevik economic policy in the form of the NEP. This was the signal for the final crackdown on the long-harassed Menshevik leaders who were arrested and forced into exile.50 It was a sad moment, and not only for the Mensheviks. It was now brutally clear for all to see that the one-party system and the terror were not the tragi cnecessity of a regime pressed to the wall and fighting for survival, but a new and permanent way of life. The Bolsheviks stood self-condemned when they showed they were incapable of tolerating even the loyal opposition of Martov, their "most sincere and honest opponent," 51 and his band of talented and decent Mensheviks.

While a small underground survived in Russia until the early 1930's, the Menshevik exiles settled in Berlin and, after the advent of the Nazis to power, in Paris. Defeated but not disarmed, they were active in the European socialist movement, published the Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, observed and studied the Soviet scene with infinite care, and made their journal into a treasure house and archive of the Russian revolutionary movement and the Soviet Union.

Like Marx, their teacher, they had set out to change their world and in the end found themselves on the sidelines, condemned to merely interpreting the revolution which, "in the name of liberty," they had helped to make, and which their Bolshevik rivals had captured and changed beyond recognition. Through the years, as they saw many of their worst predictions come true, they were torn between fears that the "revolution" would utterly degenerate and hopes that it might somehow straighten itself out. In a sense, their hopes and fears are still with

us.

50 Martov himself was already out of the country, having left Russia in late 1920 to attend a conference in Germany. Long since ill with a serious disease, he died in a German sanatorium in 1923.

51 See Martov's obituaries in Pravda, April 5, 1923 (unsigned), and in Izvestia, April 5, 1923 (signed by Karl Radek).

By Alfred G. Meyer

bout L. D. Trotsky little if anything can be

said in a short article that has not been said before.1 This is especially true in the case of the present writer, who is not, strictly speaking, a specialist on the man and his works. Still, even a student of the

1 For English-language readers, the handiest reference work on Trotsky is the trilogy of Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast. (London, Oxford University Press, 1954, 1959 and 1963 respectively.) In checking out details, I have used the Vintage Library edition of Deutscher's work, although my viewpoint differs from his. Readers might also wish to refer to Trotsky's autobiography, My Life (New York, Scribner's, 1930) or to Bertram D. Wolfe's chronique scandaleuse of Russian Marxism, Three Who Made A Revolution (New York, Dial Press, 1948). The men and issues of the great controversies are discussed in Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1960) and in Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, Random House, 1959).

Author of many books including Marxism (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1963) and The Soviet Political System (New York, Random House, 1966), Mr. Meyer is now Professor of Government at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor).

Russian Revolution who has not concentrated on Lev Davidovich is inevitably forced to develop some ideas about him and his place in the history of this century.

Without doubt, Trotsky was one of the most dramatic and effective actors on the recent historical stage. Any one of his several triumphs would have sufficed to make him an important political figure: his leadership in the 1905 Soviet; his role in the October uprising and seizure of power; his spectacular success as organizer and commander-inchief of the Red Army. For sheer dash, nerve, and ingenuity, perhaps, one should also list his daring escape from Siberia, a feat that by itself would have been the high achievement of many a man's life.2

2 Trotsky escaped from Siberia twice, once in 1902 after more than four years of prison and exile, and once in 1907. It is the second escape which made headlines throughout the world, after Trotsky had acquired fame as the chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905 and had been sentenced at a public trial to Siberian exile for life. Sent to a prison colony near the mouth of the Ob River, a thousand miles from the nearest railroad station, he escaped daringly across the arctic waste of Siberia. In his autobiography he tells the episode with relish.