All-Russian Democratic Conference

Background

After the suppression of General Lavr Kornilov's rebellion in August 1917, the coalition government that included the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) collapsed. On September 1 (O.S.), a five-member Directory headed by Kerensky was formed as a temporary measure, but it lacked legitimacy. On September 3, a joint meeting of the Soviet Central Executive Committee (chairman Nikolai Chkheidze) and the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Council of Peasant Deputies (chairman Nikolai Avksentiev) decided to convene a congress of "all of organized Russian Democracy," in deliberate contrast to the Moscow State Conference of August 1917. Invitations went not only to the revolutionary democracy grouped around the Soviets but also to cooperatives, zemstvos, army committees and city dumas, with the stated aim of deciding the question of power and finding a way out of the crisis.

There were disagreements among the initiators about its purpose. Menshevik Fedor Dan aimed to create a homogeneous democratic government excluding the bourgeoisie, while his party comrade Irakli Tsereteli argued that a homogeneous democratic government would not be viable and instead formulated the task of creating a representative body to which the Provisional Government would be accountable until the Constituent Assembly. Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov wrote that the Conference thereby became higher than the government and that Tsereteli's plan was essentially complete capitulation to the plans of Lenin and Trotsky, while Trotsky retorted that on the contrary the plan aimed to paralyze the Bolshevik struggle for Soviet power, with the Compromisers distributing votes to secure an undoubted majority.

Composition and Proceedings

The Russian edition states the Conference was scheduled to open on September 12 (25) but actually opened late at the Alexandrinsky Theatre on September 14 (27), once more than 1,000 delegates had arrived; the English edition gives the scheduled opening as September 25 and the opening as September 27. Nikolai Avksentiev was elected chairman. According to Izvestia, 1,582 delegates took part: 230 from Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, 230 from Soviets of Peasant Deputies, 100 from trade unions, 300 from city self-government, 200 from zemstvos, 125 from army and navy organizations, 120 from general cooperation, 38 from working cooperation, 60 from national organizations and 35 from Cossack organizations. By party the SRs had the largest representation at 532, then 172 Mensheviks, 136 Bolsheviks, 55 Trudoviks, 28 representatives of other national socialist parties, 23 Ukrainian SRs and 15 Bundists, with another 400 delegates registered as non-partisan. Among the invited attendees were Provisional Government ministers (Nikitin, Verkhovsky, Verderevsky, Gvozdev) and members of the Allied diplomatic corps.

Two issues dominated. First, should the new government be a homogeneous democratic one or a coalition including the Kadets, who were accused of sympathy for and complicity with Kornilov? Agreement proved impossible: contradictory votes nullified each other, with a majority voting for a coalition with the bourgeoisie but a majority also voting for a coalition without the Kadets, the main and only truly influential bourgeois party. Under the influence of Tsereteli's and Kerensky's speeches a resolution was ultimately adopted accepting the admissibility of a coalition with the Kadets, and the Bolsheviks left the hall in protest.

Second was the creation of a representative body, the Pre-Parliament. The draft resolution supported creating it and Kadet participation and referred to the Provisional Government's accountability to the Pre-Parliament; in the final resolution that accountability disappeared. On September 20 (October 3) 1917 the All-Russian Democratic Council (Pre-Parliament) was formed at a meeting of the Conference's presidium, and after the Provisional Government enlarged its composition with representatives of 'qualified' organizations (Kadets, trade and industrial associations, etc.), the Bolsheviks received only 58 seats out of 555. The body became one designed to authorize the formation of the government and thereafter serve as an advisory organ.

Lenin's Response and Historical Significance

The attitude to the Pre-Parliament divided the Bolsheviks during the Conference itself into 'right' and 'left': the former, led by Lev Kamenev, sought in it possibilities for the peaceful development of the revolution, while the latter, led by Leon Trotsky, held that this representation was assembled from above, did not reflect the real balance of forces, was meant to substitute for the actual will of the people and to create support for a government unable and unwilling to carry out reforms and end the war, so that Bolshevik participation would mean nothing other than support for the Provisional Government. Inside the Bolshevik Central Committee the vote was roughly evenly split; on September 20 (October 3) the question went to the Bolshevik faction together with members of the Petrograd Committee, where supporters of boycott were in the minority (50 against 77). From hiding, Lenin argued in 'From a Publicist's Diary: The Mistakes of Our Party,' written September 22–24, that the Party committed a mistake by participating in the so-called Democratic Conference and should have boycotted it. Placing the question in a sequence of boycott precedents, the successful boycott of the Bulygin Duma of 1905 and the incorrect boycott of the Third Duma of 1907, he held that the Pre-parliament was in substance a Bonapartist fraud whose only aim was to trick the masses, deceive the workers and peasants and distract them from the new upsurge of the revolution, and called for boycotting it with the slogan 'disperse the Bonapartist gang of Kerensky and his fake Pre-parliament.' After Lenin, who learned only on September 23 (October 6) that boycott had been discussed, backed Trotsky, he called the decision to participate 'shameful' and a 'blatant mistake' on September 29 (October 12) 1917; the English edition dates the boycott vote and Lenin's criticism to October 3 and October 12, 1917.

On October 7 (20) 1917, the opening day of the Pre-Parliament, Trotsky on behalf of the Bolshevik faction read a declaration stating that a power had been created in which and around which open and secret Kornilovites played a leading role, that 'qualified elements' had entered the Provisional Council in numbers they had no right to, and that 'with this government of popular betrayal we have nothing in common'; the Bolsheviks left the hall in protest. The final outcome was on one side the creation of a new centrist coalition government and on the other the creation of a Pre-Parliament boycotted by the Bolsheviks. The powers of both the Conference and the Pre-Parliament were doubted on the right (Kadets and those further right) and on the left (Bolsheviks, left SRs, left Mensheviks), and the initiators themselves, the right socialists, were dissatisfied: Fedor Dan wrote that a democratic government did not come out of the Democratic Conference and that the result was 'not even a coalition government, but some kind of coalition scoundrel' with no prominent socialist leaders and only 'wild' capitalist ministers.