From October to Brest-Litovsk | Page 6

was the call
addressed by the workingmen of Petrograd to the
Socialist-Revolutionists and Mensheviki in control of the Soviet
parties.
I recall the session of the Executive Committee which was held on the
2nd of July. The Soviet ministers came to report a new crisis in the
government. We were intensely interested to learn what position they
would take now that they had actually gone to pieces under the great
ordeals arising from coalition policies. Their spokesman was Tseretelli.
He nonchalantly explained to the Executive Committee that those
concessions which he and Tereshchenko had made to the Kiev Rada
did not by any means signify a dismemberment of the country, and that
this, therefore, did not give the Cadets any good reason for leaving the
Ministry. Tseretelli accused the Cadet leaders of practising a
centralistic doctrinairism, of failing to understand the necessity for
compromising with the Ukrainians, etc., etc. The total impression was
pitiful in the extreme: the hopeless doctrinaire of the coalition
government was hurling the charge of doctrinairism against the crafty
capitalist politicians who seized upon the first suitable excuse for
compelling their political clerks to repent of the decisive turn they had
given to the course of events by the military advance of June 18th.
After all the preceding experience of the coalition, there would seem to
be but one way out of the difficulty--to break with the Cadets and set
up a Soviet government. The relative forces within the Soviets were
such at the time that the Soviet's power as a political party would fall
naturally into the hands of the Social-Revolutionists and the
Mensheviki. We deliberately faced the situation. Thanks to the
possibility of reelections at any time, the mechanism of the Soviets
assured a sufficiently exact reflection of the progressive shift toward

the left in the masses of workers and soldiers. After the break of the
coalition with the bourgeoisie, the radical tendencies should, we
expected, receive a greater following in the Soviet organizations. Under
such circumstances, the proletariat's struggle for power would naturally
move in the channel of Soviet organizations and could take a more
normal course. Having broken with the bourgeoisie, the middle-class
democracy would itself fall under their ban and would be compelled to
seek a closer union with the Socialistic proletariat. In this way the
indecisiveness and political indefiniteness of the middle-class
democratic elements would be overcome sooner or later by the working
masses, with the help of our criticism. This is the reason why we
demanded that the leading Soviet parties, in which we had no real
confidence (and we frankly said so), should take the governing power
into their own hands.
But even after the ministerial crisis of the 2nd of July, Tseretelli and his
adherents did not abandon the coalition idea. They explained in the
Executive Committee that the leading Cadets were, indeed,
demoralized by doctrinairism and even by counter-revolutionism, but
that in the provinces there were still many bourgeois elements which
could still go hand in hand with the revolutionary democrats, and that
in order to make sure of their co-operation it was necessary to attract
representatives of the bourgeoisie into the membership of the new
ministry. Dan already entertained hopes of a radical-democratic party
to be hastily built up, at the time, by a few pro-democratic politicians.
The report that the coalition government had been broken up, only to
be replaced by a new coalition, spread rapidly through Petrograd and
provoked a storm of indignation among the workingmen and soldiers
everywhere. Thus the events of July 3rd-5th were produced.

THE JULY DAYS
Already during the session of the Executive Committee we were
informed by telephone that a regiment of machine-gunners was making
ready for attack. By telephone, too, we adopted measures to check
these preparations, but the ferment was working among the people.
Representatives of military units that had been disciplined for
insubordination brought alarming news from the front, of repressions
which aroused the garrison. Among the Petrograd workingmen the

displeasure with the official leaders was intensified also by the fact that
Tseretelli, Dan and Cheidze misrepresented the general views of the
proletariat in their endeavor to prevent the Petrograd Soviet from
becoming the mouthpiece of the new tendencies of the toilers. The
All-Russian Executive Committee, formed in the July Council and
depending upon the more backward provinces, put the Petrograd Soviet
more and more into the background and took all matters into its own
hands, including even local Petrograd affairs.
A clash was inevitable. The workers and soldiers pressed from below,
vehemently voiced their discontent with the official Soviet policies and
demanded greater resolution from our party. We considered that, in
view of the backwardness of the provinces, the time for such a course
had not yet arrived. At the same time, we feared that