Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October - Platypus

Leon Trotsky 31clash on this question was a prelude to the struggle over the question ofboycotting the Pre-Parliament. On September 24, i.e., after the DemocraticConference, Lenin wrote:”The Bolsheviks should have walked out of the meeting in protestand not allowed themselves to be caught by the conferencetrap set to divert the people’s attention from serious questions.”5The discussion in the Bolshevik fraction at the Democratic Conference overthe question of boycotting the Pre-Parliament had an exceptional importancedespite the comparatively narrow scope of the issue itself. As a matterof fact, it was the most extensive and, on the surface, most successfulattempt on the part of the rights to turn the party onto the path of ”completingthe democratic revolution.” Apparently no minutes of these discussionswere taken; in any case, no record has remained; to my knowledgeeven the secretary’s notes have not been located as yet. The editors of thisvolume found a few scanty documents among my own papers. ComradeKamenev expounded a line of argument which, later on, was developed ina sharper and more defined form and embodied in the well-known letter ofKamenev and Zinoviev (dated October 11) to the party organizations. Themost principled formulation of the question was made by Nogin:the boycott of the Pre-Parliament is a summons to an insurrection,i.e., to a repetition of the July days. Other comrades basedthemselves on general considerations of social democratic parliamentarytactics. No one would dare-so they said in substancepropose that we boycott the Parliament; nevertheless, a proposalis made that we boycott an identical institution merelybecause it is called a Pre-Parliament.The basic conception of the rights was as follows: the revolution must inevitablylead from the soviets to the establishment of bourgeois parliamentarism;the ”Pre-Parliament” forms a natural link in this process; therefore,it is folly to refuse to take part in the Pre-Parliament in view of our readinessto occupy the left benches in the Parliament itself. It was necessaryto complete the democratic revolution and ”prepare” for the socialist revolution.How were we to prepare? By passing through the school of bourgeoisparliamentarism; because, you see, the advanced country shows thebackward country the image of its own future. The downfall of the tsaristp.485 CW, Vol.26, ”Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks” (September 22, 1917),