Immediately on arriving in the city on the 21st, Tsereteli gave a speech that was admirably clear with a right-Menshevik analysis of history and the party leadership’s position on the Soviet’s relationship to the government. It also sounded a warning about his attitude to excessive radicalism. He congratulated the workers for not attempting proletarian revolution – he considered this an achievement as great as overthrowing tsarism: ‘you weighed the circumstances … you understood that the time has not yet come’.
‘You understood that a bourgeois revolution is taking place,’ he continued. ‘The power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie. You transferred this power to the bourgeoisie, but at the same time you have stood guard over the newly gained freedom … The Provisional Government must have full executive power in so far as this power strengthens the Revolution.’
The Mensheviks commanded the respect and affiliaton of many activists, and Tsereteli, Chkheidze, Skobolev and the top brass did not by any means speak for them all. Within two weeks, insinuations of their move towards conciliationism, ‘defencism’ and political moderation would leave Martov, the great left Menshevik, still in exile, ‘plagued by doubts’ and hoping that the rumours were ‘questionable’.
Within Petrograd, however, it was Tsereteli’s proposal of unity that the Bolsheviks considered.
The day after the party workers’ conference opened in Petrograd, so did an All-Russian Conference of Soviets, bearing impressive witness to the spread of the soviet form: 479 delegates from 138 local soviets, seven armies, thirteen rear units and twenty-six front units were represented.
Nomenclature was tangled: Russia that year was riddled with committees, caucuses, congresses, permanent and semi-permanent, standing and not-standing. Meetings proliferated ad well-minuted infinitum. This first conference of soviets was intended in part to plan the first congress of soviets, to take place in June. The Petrograd Soviet, now with delegates countrywide, technically became the All-Russian Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. After the conference, the growing Ispolkom, the Soviet Executive Committee responsible for day-to-day decisions and administration, now including representatives from the provinces, was formally renamed the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, or VTsIK. Any and all of these names might be used.
For the Mensheviks, it was at the soviet conference that Tsereteli made his mark, coordinating discussions, instilling a new professionalism, solidifying the positions of postol’ku-poskol’ku and a muscular revolutionary defencism. Until the peoples of other countries, he declared, overthrew their own governments or compelled them to change tack, ‘the Russian Revolution should fight against the foreign enemy with the same courage which it showed against the internal forces’. For the Bolsheviks, Kamenev instead put forward a version of the party’s internationalist insistence not on defence of the nation, but on the necessary export of the revolution, transforming the Russian experience into ‘a prologue for the uprising of the peoples of all the warring countries’.
His position was an affair of nuance and aspiration rather than an expression of any stark, concretely distinct policy. Even so, it was defeated by 57 votes to Tsereteli’s 325. Nevertheless, while Bolshevik powerbrokers tacked right, some other socialists in the Soviet tacked left, enabling both camps to meet in the middle. On relations between the Soviet and the Provisional Government, the official Soviet position, moved by the Menshevik Steklov, insisted so sternly on vigilant oversight that a satisfied Kamenev withdrew the alternative Bolshevik resolution.
Such convergence had only a very few days left to run.
On 29 March, the ‘sealed train’ arrived in Berlin via Stuttgart and Frankfurt. From there it headed coastward. All the way through Germany, Lenin wrote. Secluded in his cabin, fortified by refreshments from the unlikely restaurant car, he scribbled on as trees and towns rushed past. Thus, in March, in a stateless train, were born what would become known as the April Theses.
By the wild shores of Germany’s Jasmund peninsula, at the town of Sassnitz, a Swedish steamer awaited the travellers. It was dusk when they stumbled down the swaying gangplank into Sweden’s southernmost town of Trelleborg. Their journey had become news, and journalists trailed them. The mayor of Stockholm welcomed the party before it continued on to the Swedish capital, where Lenin went shopping for books, scorning his comrades’ pleas that he buy new clothes, and found time to attend a meeting of Russian leftists.
On the last day of the first full month of revolutionary Russia, the comrades climbed into traditional Finnish sleighs, and slipped across the crisp snow out of Stockholm towards Finland – Russian territory.
4
April: The Prodigal
In the muck, ideologues and true believers like the murderous Black Hundreds – ultra-monarchist pogrom enthusiasts, proto-fascists and mystics of hate – skulked and schemed behind closed doors, biding their time. The early days of the revolution were remarkable for how submerged and scattered that hard right was. Most of its high-profile figures had left the country or been arrested after February. Only the erratic Purishkevich remained at large, more or less powerless, tolerated and toothless. The political integument of Petrograd in particular had lurched leftward, repositioning radicals as moderates and moderates as right-wingers. In those days everyone was, or claimed to be, a socialist. No one wanted to be bourgeois.
Until the eve of revolution, the Kadets were a party of occasionally even bracing liberalism, harried by reaction, not without heroes. They entered April 1917 fresh from their congress, committed to a democratic republic. But now, history – revolution – made them conservatives. On the party’s right, Milyukov was an early outlier of this trend, a function of the strong tactics of weak liberalism in fractious times.
For now, though, as April began, not even the far left had unanimously declared itself an enemy of the Provisional Government. That was to come, with the train from Finland.