Some of these desiderata might have sounded unacceptably radical to the guardians of bourgeois order imploring the Soviet to join them in ruling, but in fact these conditions were obligingly elastic, their time frames long, often indeterminate. The mainstreams and rights of the Mensheviks and SRs, particularly the leadership and intellectuals – including many a one-time radical terrorist – were coming to feel that the only alternative to coalition with the government was the dangerous current to their left. The culturally weighty SR right undermined the activist Left SRs of Petrograd and the Northern Regional Conference, denouncing them as ‘party Bolsheviks’. Its new paper, Volia naroda, bankrolled by Breshko-Breshkovskaya, wrote that the choice was now ‘openly and definitely between joining the Provisional Government – that is, energetic support to the state revolutionary government – and frankly declining – that is, rendering indirect support to Leninism’.
For their part, as with their debates in February, the liberals and right extracted concessions from the socialists in turn. The Kadets demanded at least four ministers in any cabinet. On the central issue of the war, the Provisional Government insisted that the Ispolkom recognise in it the ultimate authority, the sole source of command of the armed forces.
The Soviet approach to foreign policy and the war was too pacific for Kadet tastes, but the agreed programme accommodated the Kadets in one crucial respect: it allowed the army to prepare offensive, as well as defensive, operations. In fact, with the international prestige of revolutionary Russia severely dented by its equivocal and ineffective military policy, even some within the Soviet were growing less opposed to an offensive.
On 4 May, the final day of negotiations on the composition of a cabinet, the First All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Soviets convened in Petrograd. That same day saw the long-delayed return to the city, with his family, after a protracted, conspiracy-snarled, police-and incarceration-interrupted trip from the US, of Lev Davidovich Bronstein – Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky was remembered as a leader of the Soviet in 1905, and commanded general respect on the left, if not trust. He was much spoken of, but in an uncertain tenor. His maverick theories, bitter and brutal polemics, abrasive personality and inveterate contrariness meant that ‘both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks regarded him with rancour and distrust’, recalled Angelica Balabanoff, the cosmopolitan Italian-Russian Bolshevik. In part, she thought, this was ‘fear of competition’: Trotsky was universally considered brilliant, a painful thorn in the flesh of any opponents, and his only current allegiance was to the scintillating but tiny left group, the Mezhraiontsy. As to what he might do now, no one was certain.
On 5 May, the new government was born: the Second Provisional, or First Coalition, Government. Other than Prince Lvov, who stayed on as president and minister of the interior, it was all change. Among the new ministers were six socialists and ten others, including the Kadet Michael Tereshchenko, a young millionaire sugar manufacturer from Ukraine, replacing Milyukov. Tereshchenko was a known Freemason, and in that febrile, whispering, parapolitical atmosphere, it was easy to suspect conspiracies behind his appointment. Such Mason-obsessed speculation is still rife in discussions of the revolution today. In fact, whether nepotistically advanced or not, Tereshchenko would prove reasonably adept at the impossible task of managing relations with both the Allies and the Soviet.
The cabinet socialists included one from the Populist Socialist Party, A. V. Peshekhonov, in charge of food supplies; two Mensheviks, Tsereteli and Skobelev, for posts and telegraphs and for labour; and three SRs, Chernov himself in agriculture, Perverzev as justice minister, and, by far the most important, the new minister of war (and another noted Freemason): Alexander Kerensky.
At a plenary session of the Petrograd Soviet, the six socialist ministers asked the Soviet for their support in the venture of coalition. This the Soviet granted. The only organised opposition from the left, the Bolsheviks, garnered 100 votes against.
It was now that Trotsky entered the Tauride Palace hall, and the stage of 1917, to enthusiastic applause.
At the sight of him, the new minister Skobelev called out: ‘Dear and beloved teacher!’
Trotsky took the floor. He spoke haltingly at first. The great orator was not himself. Nerves made him shake. The gathering grew quiet to listen to him. He gained in self-assurance as he offered his reading of the situation.
Trotsky eulogised the revolution. He dwelt on the scale of the impact it had had and could still have, too, on the wider world. It was in the international arena, after all, that the revolution must be completed.
Sugar sprinkled, Trotsky then dosed with bitter medicine. ‘I cannot conceal’, he said, ‘that I disagree with much that is going on here.’
Sharply, with growing confidence, he condemned the entry of the socialists into the government, the fallacies of Dual Power. He recited to the gathering ‘three revolutionary articles of faith: do not trust the bourgeoisie; control the leaders; rely only on your own force’. What was needed, what he called for in the silent room, was not a dual but a single power. That of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies.
‘Our next move’, he said, ‘will be to transfer the whole power into the hands of the Soviets.’ The formula could have been Lenin’s.
When he left the hall, Trotsky was applauded far more tepidly than when he had come in. Bolshevik ears, though, had pricked up at his words.
No surprise that five days after his provocative appearance, Lenin offered Trotsky’s Mezhraiontsy a seat on the board of the journal Pravda if they would join the Bolsheviks. He even mooted making the same offer to the leftwing Menshevik–Internationalists. Their leader Martov had, after long delay and without much help from his Petrograd comrades, returned to the city by a similar method to Lenin (in a considerably larger train).
For his part, although Trotsky no longer objected to such joining of forces in principle, he could not accept dissolving into the Bolsheviks. He proposed instead the formation of some new amalgam between the two, tiny as the Mezhraiontsy ranks were compared to those of the Bolsheviks. Lenin declined this arrogant suggestion. He could wait.
From the 7th to the 12th, the Mensheviks held their first All-Russian Conference in Petrograd – midway through which, their left leaders Martov, Axelrod and Martynov arrived to join them.
Martov was appalled by what he described to a friend as his party’s ‘ultimate stupidity’ of joining the government, without even extracting a commitment to end the war. The conference had already validated this the day before he arrived, and now his émigré internationalists were soundly beaten on the question of defencism, too, with Tsereteli speaking forcefully in favour. The tiny Menshevik– Internationalist group refused to be bound by these decisions.
When Martov attempted to speak from the platform, the audience howled contumely on him. The horrified left understood how marginalised they were. Particularly in Petrogard, some on the Menshevik left, like Larin (also a Mezhraionets), argued for a split. Martov decided instead to remain within the party as an opposition bloc, hoping to win over the majority in time for a party congress scheduled for July.
The stakes were high, the mountain to climb even higher. ‘Down with him!’ the delegates had shouted. ‘Out with him!’ ‘We don’t want to hear him!’