Lenin, Trotsky, Germany and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk The ...

Lenin, Trotsky, Germany and the Treaty of Brest-Litovskthe acknowledged leader of the Left SR Party, was only a symbol, whose namewas successfully used for propaganda among the bottom ranks. As a party workerand tactician, however, Spiridonova could stand no comparison with Lenin.As we find nothing surprising about the rivalry between the Bolsheviks and theMensheviks, who had initially belonged to a Social Democratic Party, we shouldnot be surprised by the split between the left wing of the SR Party and the SRParty itself. The first signs of this split appeared in 1915 in connection with differingattitudes toward the war. However, these were not the same Left SRs – orat least, these were not always the same Left SRs – who later formed the Left SRParty. Evidently, a party that included such dissimilar individuals as the Right SRMark Vishniak, on the one hand, and the extreme leftist Prosh Proshyan, on theother, could not survive the tumultuous events of 1917 and remain united. “Thehistorical cause of the split... lies far beyond the boundaries our of party,” Kamkovwrote at the time. “It cannot be explained by the details of party politics. We aredealing with a specific, concrete instance of a broader, international phenomenon.The war vividly revealed the fact that contradictory elements had ended upwithin the same party, and they could not but come apart.” 16The present work therefore touches only superficially on the causes for the departureof the left wing from the SR Party. Theoretical disagreements, if we believethat any such disagreements existed, had little relation to the factual splitthat followed the fight for power waged by Left SR functionaries in the local andcentral governments in 1917-18. And it was not an accident that it was preciselythe Left SRs’ recognition of the legitimacy of convening the Second Congress ofSoviets (that is, the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power) that made the split between theLeft SRs and the SR Party final. The struggle waged by the left wing of the SRParty for a place in the revolution and for power made the split inevitable.Nor does the present study investigate factors that might be characterized as “constants.”Among these may be included Russia’s economic collapse, which grewworse with every month under Bolshevik rule; the anarchy due to the absence ofa stable government in the country; the complete defenselessness of the peacefulpopulation in city and village before any armed force, as a result of the anarchy;and the famine and unemployment that spread as a result of the economic collapse.To this list might be added also the danger of engaging in counter-revolutionaryspeech. To a lesser degree before the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs came topower, and to a greater degree after they did so, these phenomena accompaniedthe Russian Revolution (just as they had once accompanied the French Revolution)and were unlikely all that unexpected for Russian revolutionaries. Rather, itmight have seemed that all of these perils should have united Russia’s socialistparties, forcing them to form a “homogeneous socialist government” (which wasadvocated by the SRs, the Mensheviks, and the labor unions, and opposed socategorically by Lenin and Trotsky). However, what Lenin cherished most wasnot the socialist revolution in general, but the socialist revolution under his own14