Soviets across Russia were shifting to the left. In Astrakhan, a meeting of soviets and other socialists voted 276 to 175 against Menshevik/SR appeals for unity – including with groups that had been involved with Kornilov. Delegates instead backed the Bolshevik call to transfer power to workers and poor peasants.
In mid-September, military intelligence reported ‘open hostility and animosity … on the part of the soldiers; the most insignificant event may provoke unrest. Soldiers say … all the officers are followers of General Kornilov … [and] should be destroyed’. The war minister reported to the SRs ‘an increase of attacks on officers by soldiers, shootings, and throwing of grenades through the windows of officers’ meetings’. He explained the soldiers’ fury thus: ‘On the heels of declaring Kornilov a rebel, the army received instructions from the government to continue to execute his operative orders. Nobody wanted to believe that an order in such contradiction to the preceding instruction could be true.’
It was. Such was Kerensky’s crumbling government.
The festival feeling of March and April was replaced by the sense of a closing, an ending, and not in peace but in catastrophe, the mud and fire of war.
The renovated language of the early days seemed drowned out by bestial gibbering. ‘Where are they now, our deeds and our sacrifices?’ begged the writer Alexey Remizov of this apocalyptic world. He could find no answers. Only visions. ‘Smell of smoke and the howling of apes.’
On 14 September, the Democratic Conference opened in Petrograd’s famous Alexandrinsky Theatre. The hall was vivid with red banners, as if to express a unity of left purpose that was very much lacking. On the stage beyond the presidium’s table was the set of a play: behind the speakers were artificial trees, and doors to nowhere.
The hopes of radicals for the conference, never high, sank as attendees declared their affiliations. Some 532 SRs were present, only seventy-one of the party’s militant left wing; 530 Mensheviks, fifty-six Internationalist; fifty-five Popular Socialists; seventeen unaffiliated; and 134 Bolsheviks. The conference was heavily skewed in the moderates’ favour. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks were committed to trying to use the gathering to push for compromise, socialist government.
In their party caucus, Trotsky aspired to the transfer of power to the soviets; whereas Kamenev, unconvinced of the readiness of Russia for transformation and hoping to gain a wider base for workers’ rule, argued instead for the transfer of state power, ‘not to the Soviet’, but to a socialist coalition. The differences between these two positions bespoke distinct conceptions of history. But for the party delegates in that moment they were minor strategic nuances. Either way, the point was that Bolsheviks were fully engaged with the conference, poised to put the case for cooperation with the moderate left parties, for coalition and the peaceful development of the revolution – just as Lenin himself had argued since the start of the month.
So it was like a thunderbolt when, on the conference’s second day, the Bolshevik leadership received two new letters from their leader-in-hiding.
Now, hard as a stone, he upended all his recent conciliatory suggestions.
‘The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies in both capitals,’ began the first communication, ‘can and must take state power into their own hands.’ Lenin pilloried the Conference as ‘the compromising upper strata of the petty bourgeoisie’. He demanded Bolsheviks declare the necessity of ‘immediate transfer of all power to revolutionary democrats, headed by the revolutionary proletariat’, and then walk out.
Lenin’s comrades were utterly aghast.
Paradoxically, it was the continuation of the leftward shift of Russia itself, the trend that had raised in Lenin hopes of cooperation, that now changed his mind. Because with that tendency had come those triumphs for Bolsheviks in the two main cities’ soviets, and Lenin grew fretful about what would happen if the party did not act on its own. He feared revolutionary energies might dissipate, or the country slide on into anarchy – or that brutal counterrevolution might arise.
Unrest was shaking the German army and society. Lenin felt sure the whole of Europe was growing ripe for revolution, towards which a full-scale Russian revolution would be a powerful shove. And he was very anxious – for good reason, and in this he was not alone – lest the government surrender Petrograd, the red capital, to the Germans. If they did so, Bolshevik chances, he said, would be ‘a hundred times less favourable’.
The party had been right, he repeated, not to move in July, without the masses behind it. But now it had them.
Here again was one of those switchbacks that so discombobulated his comrades. It was not mere caprice, however, but the results of minute attention to shifts in politics, and exaggerated responses to these. Now, he insisted, with the masses behind it, the party must move.
Late on 15 September, a group of Bolshevik grandees left the Alexandrinsky and made for their HQ. There, in utmost secrecy, they discussed Lenin’s terrifying letters.
There was not a scintilla of support for his demands. He was utterly isolated. And, further, it was imperative to his comrades that his voice be muted, his message not get to Petrograd workers, or Petrograd or Moscow Bolshevik committees. Not because they would think Lenin wrong: because they might think him right. If that happened, Lomov would later explain, ‘many would doubt the correctness of the position adopted by the whole CC’.
The leadership delegated members to the MO and Petersburg Committee to make sure no calls for action reached workplaces or barracks. The CC readied themselves for conference business, as previously agreed.
Lenin’s new position was, literally, unspeakable. The CC voted to burn all but a single copy of each letter. As if they were pages from some dreadful grimoire. As if they would have liked to bury the ashes and sow the ground with salt.
Lenin’s scepticism about the potential of the starkly divided conference was vindicated. Throughout it, most Mensheviks and SRs remained as adamantly committed as ever to coalition with the bourgeoisie – which meant giving the despised and tottering Kerensky his head.
On the 16th, blithely dissimulating, the Bolshevik leadership published Lenin’s words – of two weeks before. They put out his amelioratory essay ‘The Russian Revolution and Civil War’.
Its author’s fury can be imagined: as far as he was concerned, that piece was now a fossil. On the 18th, the party’s formal conference statement on the government modelled itself on another of their leader’s antediluvian relics, ‘On Compromises’. Yes, the Bolsheviks did mobilise a demonstration outside the theatre, demanding a socialist government, but this rather dutiful intervention was far from the militant, armed, insurrectionary ‘surrounding’ of Alexandrinsky for which Lenin had just called.