Architect of Revolutionary Defencism and the man to whom Lenin replied, 'There is such a party!'
At the First Congress of Soviets on 4 June 1917, Tsereteli declared that 'there is no party in Russia that says: give us power.' Lenin rose from his seat and answered: 'There is such a party!'
A Georgian Menshevik leader who championed Revolutionary Defencism in 1917 and served as Interior Minister in the Provisional Government. He is remembered for drawing Lenin's famous retort, 'There is such a party!' After the October Revolution he helped found an independent Georgia.
Career Timeline
- 1900–1902Entered Moscow University law faculty; arrested as student-movement leader, exiled to Siberia
- 1903–1906Joined RSDLP, aligned with Mensheviks; editor of Kvali weekly. Studied in Berlin, returned 1906
- 1907Deputy, Second Duma (Kutaisi); head of SD faction. After dissolution, 5 years' hard labour, Siberian exile
- 1915–1917.2Led Siberian Zimmerwaldism; edited Siberian Journal. Joined Irkutsk Revolutionary Committee
- 1917.3–9Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee; leading voice of Revolutionary Defencism
- 1917.5–8Minister of Post and Telegraph (May–July), concurrently Minister of Interior (July–August)
- 1918–1921Co-signed Georgian independence declaration; Constituent Assembly deputy; Paris Peace Conference delegate
- 1921–1959Exile in France; executive member of the Second International. Moved to USA 1940; died in New York, 1959
Related historical events
Revolutionary Defencism: War, Coalition, and the Failed Centre
When Tsereteli returned from Siberian exile in March 1917, he became the de facto leader of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee within a single week. The policy he championed, Revolutionary Defencism, was a dual project: to defend both the revolution and the nation. Russia had to defend itself against German imperialism. Yet that war must be steered toward a democratic peace with no annexations or indemnities. The position grew out of Zimmerwald internationalism but, after the revolution, elevated defence into a fundamental condition of the revolution itself.
Tsereteli walked a third path between Bolshevik revolutionary defeatism and Miliukov's unlimited war. The resolution he steered through the Soviet conference called for rallying 'all the vital forces of the nation,' and this principle became the ideological basis for entering a coalition government. He joined the Provisional Government on the strength of overwhelming Soviet backing, yet took only the symbolic post of Minister of Post and Telegraph, remaining in the Soviet and serving as a 'liaison officer' between the two bodies. Contemporaries called him both 'the government's commissar in the Soviet' and 'the Soviet's commissar in the government.'
The strategy contained a fundamental contradiction. Tsereteli believed that a socialist-only government would trigger civil war, so he insisted on coalition with bourgeois parties. Yet as the continuation of the war and the delay of land reform exhausted popular patience, the centrist alliance he relied on disintegrated. During the July Crisis his compromise with the Ukrainian Central Rada prompted all Kadet ministers to resign, and his tenure as Interior Minister failed to restore order. By September the Bolsheviks had won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, and a dispirited Tsereteli left for Georgia. Trotsky later judged that 'it took a revolution to prove that Tsereteli was not a revolutionary,' while Plekhanov wrote that 'Tsereteli and his friends, without themselves knowing or desiring it, have been preparing the road for Lenin.'