The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
Magnificent chandeliers threw their sparkling light over the severe white columns, the tapestried walls of the large hall in the Smolny Institute in Petrograd. Once this had been a finishing school for the daughters of the Russian aristocracy; now it was the citadel of Russia’s revolution. Some thousand excited delegates-workers, soldiers, sailors-dressed in work clothes, military tunics and peasant garb, were assembled here for an open session of the Soviet Central Executive Committee. It was the night of December 1, 1917.
The October Revolution was in its early phases and was rapidly spreading over the vast expanse of a Russia in turmoil. Political power was in the hands of the Bolshevik Party, but its leaders knew that the Soviet Government, as constituted then, was only temporary. They sought to broaden the Government, to gain a closer bond with the masses of the people. They were requesting the Left Social-Revolutionaries to join the Government.
The tension that held all of Russia, and all of Petrograd in its grip, had been transferred on that night to the hall in the Smolny Institute.
From the stage up front the meeting was conducted by its self-assured, energetic chairman, the Bolshevik Jacob Swerdlov. Behind him on the rostrum I recognized several men whose faces had become familiar in recent months. One of them, small, broad-shouldered and almost entirely bald, sat unobtrusively in the back, only his eyes blinking slyly. That was Lenin. Next to him sat Trotsky-tall, thin, thick black hair tousled, eyes sharp and intense. The chairman called on me. (I had just arrived in Petrograd from Ufa, a city in the Ural Mountains, where I had been elected a member of the Constituent Assembly.)
We were debating a Government-sponsored decree against the Kadets. Everybody knew that the Russian liberal party, the Kadets, which had taken part in the struggle against czarism, had become an outspoken opponent of the October Revolution. They were openly in league with the leaders of the old Russian Army. Therefore, suddenly, on November 28, the Government had issued a harsh decree according to which all leaders of the Kadets were proclaimed “enemies of the people” and were to be arrested at once.
We of the Left Social-Revolutionaries saw in this order an expression of political hysteria unjustified by the general situation. An order for summary mass arrests meant-in the agitation and confusion of revolutionary days-that anyone in the country could persecute, arrest and harm Kadets not for crimes specifically charged against them, but simply because they were Kadets. Here is the full text of the order:
DECREE CONCERNING THE ARREST OF THE LEADERS OF THE CIVIL WAR AGAINST THE REVOLUTION.
“Members of the governing body of the Party of the Kadets are to be arrested as enemies of the people and brought to trial before the revolutionary tribunal. Local soviets are duty- bound to keep the party of the Kadets under special surveillance because of its links to the civil war against the revolution. This decree comes into force at once.”
Petrograd, November 28, 1917 10:30 p.m.
The decree was signed by Lenin, Trotsky, Avilov, Menzinsky, Djugashvili-Stalin, Dybenko and others.
Therefore on the night of December 1, the Government came to the Soviet parliament for ratification of the decree. The party of the Left Social-Revolutionaries decided, however, to protest both against the dangerous content and the fact that the order had been issued behind the back of the Soviet Executive. Our party, which viewed this as a first step in the direction of irresponsible, legalized terrorism, had instructed me to speak in its behalf at the meeting in the Smolny Institute and to express our views on revolutionary violence and the limits of its application.
To the deputies, then, when the chairman called upon me, I said that a victorious revolution had no need to condemn its opponents in summary judgment. We, the victors, were strong enough to apply true justice. If an individual Kadet should be accused of conspiracy against the people, let him personally be brought to open trial, at which time we should have to provide proof and he should have the right to defense. But, I maintained, we could not place an entire group-unspecified anonymous groups of people-outside the pale of human law. We dared not simply and blindly repeat the mistakes of the French Revolution, for after all, we had outgrown it by one hundred and twenty-five years. Withdraw legal protection from the liberals today, and the same is likely to happen to other political groups tomorrow. It is easy to start the terror, but impossible to stop it.
It was very obvious: a large part of those assembled listened attentively to these arguments. I remember how Trotsky rose to reply. Stretched to his full height he stood there on the stage, devouring the audience with his eyes. Pride, power, fury, contempt were in those eyes. He seemed personally insulted.
“There is not the slightest doubt,” he intoned icily, “that the party of the Kadets is organizing the counter-revolution. Everyone of its leaders must be made harmless. They complain-and sentimental socialists join them in the complaint-at being thrown into jail! Let them instead be grateful. In past revolutions their kind was dealt with differently. They would have been taken to the Palace Square and there made ... a head shorter! “ Trotsky threw out the last phrase with vicious fervor-and waited for the storm of applause. Was he not speaking in the name of the people, and for their glory? But the expected did not occur, and the silence spoke louder than any applause. I had the firm impression that there was a murmur of dissent against his bloodthirsty phrases from these simple people, fresh from the battlefields of the revolution. They neither liked nor trusted the bourgeois Kadets, but they disliked no less the vulgarity of their own leader.
Then Trotsky lit into us, who “defended the Kadets.”
“We stand ready,” he thundered, “to march forward together with the comrades of the Left Social-Revolutionaries, but what can we do if every time, at every new step in the struggle, they lag behind? We must keep dragging them to the revolution by a rope ... I am convinced that the proletariat will not be repelled by the measures we are adopting.”
Uttering the last words like a triumphant clarion call, Trotsky stepped back and sat down in back of the chairman. Lenin nodded with satisfaction. Then he, too, made a short speech in which he brushed aside the moral and legal aspects of the issue. Instead, he pounded away at the political danger of the Kadets:
“It is senseless even to discuss the question of legality. The Kadets, brandishing the slogans of democracy, actually instigated the real civil war. Very well then: investigate these our charges against them and see if you can disprove that the Kadet Party constitutes the general staff of the civil war which is already drenching the country in blood. Comrade Steinberg made no attempt to disprove that. . . . Yes, indeed, the great French Revolution never acted as the Left Social-Revolutionaries bid us do: it put the hostile parties outside the law.”
There were several other speakers, and then the vote. Only representatives of factories and garrisons had the right to vote. The Bolshevik-sponsored decree was carried by 150 against 98 votes. The Bolshevik delegates applauded, and the terroristic conscience of their leaders was calmed.
The Left Social-Revolutionaries, however, were not despondent, for on that night they had brought “terror” into open debate for the first time. It was important for Soviet delegates to hear more than one voice of the revolution. It was no less significant that almost one hundred representatives of the people-close to half the delegates-had voted for the voice of their humane conscience.
The Bolsheviks slavishly imitated speech and gesture of the French Jacobins, just as the Jacobins in turn had imitated the heroes of ancient Rome. But they forgot that the French Revolution itself was drowned in bloody defeat precisely because of its terrorism.
Twelve days after this session, on December 12, 1917, that same Soviet Executive confirmed the entrance of seven Left Social- Revolutionaries as members of the Soviet Government. According to my party’s decision, I was to be People’s Commissar of all sections of the people were evidence to the Left Social- Revolutionaries that the separation of the October revolt from the February Revolution was arbitrary, that the far-reaching social program of October, 1917, had-logically and psychologically-already existed in the very first stirrings of the revolution in February, 1917.
By December, 1917, the Left Social-Revolutionaries had parted company with their right-wing comrades because of their demands for fundamental changes in Russia socially, as well as spiritually and morally. They decided to join the Soviet Government, even though they were clearly aware of the differences between themselves and the materialistically minded, fanatically proletarian and state-obsessed Bolsheviks. They hoped, by their participation in the highest governing bodies of the revolution, to give weight and strength to the traditional ideals of the Populists. They would represent the working peasants and intellectuals as well as the urban workers; they would help assure world peace; they would prevent the establishment of one-party rule; and they would stem the tide of the dictatorial tendencies of the Bolsheviks.
According to the agreement between our party and the Bolsheviks, the Council of People’s Commissars, that is, the Soviet Government, was formed. Eleven of the People’s Commissars, headed by Lenin and Trotsky, were Bolsheviks, and seven were Left Social-Revolutionaries. It is worth noting that Felix Dzershinsky, chairman of the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission To Combat Sabotage, Speculation and the Counter- Revolution) which had been established only a short time before these events took place, was not a member of the Government. As Commissar of Justice, it became my lot to fight against Dzershinsky from the very start on this question of priority: law and justice versus security of the revolutionary regime.