Guchkov believed Dual Power was unsustainable, and instead sought a right-wing coalition linking the bourgeoisie in the Provisional Government with those ‘healthy’ parts of the armed forces, such as General Kornilov, along with various business leaders. This, of course, the Soviet would not countenance. But that did not mean it knew what to do with its own whip hand. It was still absurdly committed to ‘watching over’ a government that frankly proclaimed it could not govern.
The same day Milyukov and Guchkov resigned, the Soviet’s Executive Committee rejected coalition with the Provisional Government by a hair: twenty-three to twenty-two. Regional soviets – in Tiflis, Odessa, Nizhni Novgorod, Tver, Ekaterinburg and Moscow, among others – remained firmly set against the participation of socialists in the bourgeois government. Meanwhile, many further to their left, like the Bolsheviks, were growing dismissive of the Provisional Government tout court.
At the same time, however, pressures for collaboration mounted. Representatives of the patriotic socialist parties of the Allied countries, representing the international left wing of the pro-compromisers, agitated strongly for entry into the Russian government. These, in Zimmerwald parlance, were the social patriots. They came to Russia in their numbers, intent on convincing the Russian people to support the war. Albert Thomas from France, Arthur Henderson and James O’Grady from Britain, Emile Vandervelde and Louis De Brouckère from Belgium, France’s Marcel Cachin. They toured the country and the front, joining forces with Russian generals to bolster fighting spirit for what one French socialist, Pierre Renaudel, said it was now possible to describe ‘without blushing’ as ‘the war of justice’.
Most of those they sought to convince, exhausted by the war, ranged between indifference and hostility. To this their visitors seemed blind. In one particularly unedifying moment of theatre, Albert Thomas, addressing a crowd from a balcony, supplemented the French-language exhortations few understood with a ludicrous charade, like a mime at a children’s party. He twirled imaginary Kaiser moustaches, choked an imaginary Russia, and, mistaking his audience’s audible disgust at this buffoonery for praise, closed with a flourish of his bowler hat.
For the workers, peasants and soldiers who supported the soviets, and who were not implacably antagonistic to the government, common sense might suggest that having socialists within that government could only be a good thing. Gradually, certain provincial authorities began to make this argument. Kerensky was already a member of the cabinet, was he not? And Kerensky was popular, was he not? How could more Kerenskys be bad?
In the SR party, the tide began to pull in this direction, manifesting in a widening of the split between the left and right flanks. Rank-and-file soldiers demanded that the government conduct the war ‘in a revolutionary manner’. Military units in Petrograd – even including the pro-Bolshevik armoured car division – now announced in favour of coalition, on such grounds.
And to this species of ‘left’ entryism was, in strange arithmetic, added that of a certain ‘right’ socialism. Where radicals wanted coalition with the government out of faith in the soviets, those to their right, including many of the ‘official’ socialists in the moderate parties and in the soviets themselves, were coming to wonder if those soviets were finished – if power must now revert to more traditional forms.
Within the Petrograd Soviet, despite their numbers, the moderate SRs tended politically to trail the Menshevik leaders. There was diminishing distance between the dominant wings of the two organisations, and Dan, Chkheidze and Tsereteli of the Mensheviks were of a different class in ability to most of the SR figureheads. Since his return, even the esteemed Chernov, traditionally to the SR left, tacked quickly towards former party opponents such as Gots, and ‘revolutionary defencism’. He adopted the moderation of those SR intelligentsia previously to his right, arguing for a consolidation of February’s ‘revolutionary gains’, and against radical moves which might risk reactions. Decrying disorganisation on the left, and holding ‘propertied elements’ as better placed to govern, Chernov espoused socialist–liberal collaboration and support for the Provisional Government.
Excluding the rejectionist anarchists, Bolsheviks, Left SRs and left Mensheviks and maximalists of various traditions, the upshot was that both left-left and right-left began to turn towards coalition.
April ended with a rudderless government, lacking a minister of war, and with socialists in the Soviet committed to the success of a bourgeois revolution from the institutions of which they remained absent, and from which the bourgeoisie themselves were resigning. Small wonder that Kerensky prophesied entropy, confusion, doom. Disorganisation, he warned his Soviet comrades, would spread. The army would soon be unable to fight.
Thus it was with the war as key to the argument that the concerns of revolutionary defencists dovetailed with those of the country’s imperialists. They merged in Kerensky’s predictions of Russia’s impending collapse.
5
May: Collaboration
On 1 May, only two days after its previous vote on the matter, the Soviet Executive Committee turned again to the principle of coalition with the Provisional Government. This time, by forty-four to nineteen, with two abstentions, it voted in favour. In vain did a furious Martov, committed to class independence and abstaining from power as the far left opposition in a bourgeois revolution, cable his Menshevik comrades that participation in coalition government was ‘impermissible’.
Negotiations began immediately. The Soviet set conditions for its support. It insisted on a serious effort to end the war, on the principle of self-determination without annexations; democratisation of the army; a degree of control over industry and distribution; labour protections; taxes on the wealthy; a democratic local administration; an agrarian policy aimed at ‘the passing of the land into the hands of the toilers’; and moves towards the convocation of that much-vaunted Constituent Assembly.