Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October - Platypus

30 The Lessons of OctoberThe Kornilov events, which created an abrupt shift in the situation in ourfavor, acted to soften the differences temporarily; they were softened butnot eliminated. In the right wing, a tendency manifested itself during thosedays to draw closer to the soviet majority on the basis of defending the revolutionand, in part, the fatherland. Lenin’s reaction to this was expressedin his letter to the Central Committee at the beginning of September.”It is my conviction that those who become unprincipled arepeople who. . . slide into defencism or (like other Bolsheviks)into a bloc with the S.R.s, into supporting the Provisional Government.Their attitude is absolutely wrong and unprincipled.We shall become defencists only after the transfer of power tothe proletariat. . . . Even now we must not support Kerensky’sgovernment. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren’t wegoing to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But this isnot the same thing; there is a dividing line here, which is beingstepped over by some Bolsheviks who fall into compromise andallow themselves to be carried away by the course of events.” 4The next stage in the evolution of divergent views was the Democratic Conference(September 14-22) and the Pre-Parliament that followed it (October7). The task of the Mensheviks and the SRS consisted in entangling the Bolsheviksin soviet legality and afterwards painlessly transforming the latterinto bourgeois parliamentary legality. The rights were ready to welcomethis. We are already acquainted with their manner of portraying the futuredevelopment of the revolution: the soviets would gradually surrender theirfunctions to corresponding institutions-to the Dumas, the Zemstvos, thetrade unions, and finally to the Constituent Assembly-and would automaticallyvanish from the scene. Through the channel of the Pre-Parliament,the political awareness of the masses was to be directed away from the sovietsas ’temporary” and dying institutions, to the Constituent Assemblyas the crowning work of the democratic revolution. Meanwhile, the Bolshevikswere already in the majority in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets;our influence in the army grew, not from day to day, but from hour to hour.It was no longer a question of prognosis or perspective; it was literally aquestion of how we were to act the next day.The conduct of the completely drained conciliationist parties at the DemocraticConference was the incarnation of petty vileness. Yet the proposalwhich we introduced to abandon the Democratic Conference demonstratively,leaving it to its doom, met with decisive opposition on the part ofthe right elements of the fraction who were still influential at the top. The4 CW, Vol.25, ”To the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.” (August 30, 1917), pp.285-86