"The first Bolshevik slogans were met half-laughingly. But these same slogans were repeated again and again. 'Down with the Ten-Minister Capitalists!’, ‘Down with the Offensive!’, ‘All Power to the Soviets!’. The ironical smiles froze, and then gradually disappeared. The triumph of the Bolsheviks was too obvious"
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| 'Down with the Ten Minister-Capitalists' - June 1917 |
Compromisers’ support weakens
In May, Lenin stated his opinion that “the ‘country’ of workers and poorer peasants is a thousand times farther to the left than the Chernovs and Tseretellis, and a hundred times farther than we” (128).
Lenin knew that the masses’ support for the Compromisers was just a temporary stage on the road to revolution. A deep radicalism was growing in the depths of the oppressed classes greater than even most Bolsheviks had yet imagined.
The Compromisers had gained their position in part due to the unusually dominant influence of the peasant army during wartime and in part due to the weakening of the proletariat and its party through the mobilisation of workers to the front.
The war had led to an even greater concentration of workers in large factories, with 335,000 of Petrograd’s 400,000 workers being found in just 140 giant plants by 1917. This fresh and cautious workforce was now learning rapidly through exploitation, strikes and revolution - and a revolution teaches fast.
The army too were learning through the experience of the offensive and their struggle with the czarist command. The peasantry was being driven into struggle by economic ruin and the lack of action to solve the agrarian problem. Under the surface, molecular processes were shifting the consciousness of the masses to the left.
The soldiers in words hated the Bolsheviks and yet more and more often were taking up Bolshevik slogans, perhaps without even realising it. Trotsky relates how a clerk reported that after reading the bourgeois press “the soldiers would abuse some sort of unknown creatures called Bolsheviks, and then immediately take up the necessity of stopping the war, seizing the land from the landlords, etc.” (129).
“Every soldier who expressed a little more boldly than the rest what they were all feeling, was so persistently shouted at from above as a Bolshevik that he was obliged in the long run to believe it. From peace and land the soldiers’ thoughts began to pass over to the question of power. Responsiveness to the scattered slogans of Bolshevism changed into a conscious sympathy for the Bolshevik Party” (130).
The Volynsky regiment, who had initiated the mutiny on February 27th, had resolved in April to arrest Lenin as a German stooge, but by June supported the Bolsheviks. After the collapse of the offensive, Kerensky became utterly hated in the army, while the Bolsheviks, who alone had spoken out in advance against the offensive, gained enormously in popularity.
The Bolsheviks' papers were very hard to come by and most soldiers were only able to read the lying bourgeois press. “But it was just these patriotic papers which gave the Bolsheviks an incomparable popularity. Every case of protest from the oppressed, of land seizure, of accounts squared with officers, these papers attributed to the Bolsheviks. The soldiers concluded that the Bolsheviks are a righteous folk” (131).
At the other extreme, the officers and bourgeoisie began to organise right-wing groupings that started to build for a military plot, putting forward Admiral Kolchak as their candidate for dictator.
The coming storm was revealed by the crisis provoked when the soviet on Kronstadt, the island fortress guarding Petrograd, resolved on May 13th that ‘the sole power in Kronstadt is the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’. The soviet contained not even a third of declared Bolshevik delegates, yet these revolutionary sailors had already seen through the phantom nature of the government power.
The sailors organised a regime of workers’ control with brothels closed, and drunkenness in the streets banned under threat of ‘confiscation of property and banishment to the front’. These sailors were determined to show that they were worthy of the revolution and dragged people to Kronstadt to see the new life they were building. Of course, this was not the kind of revolution that the government and its deposed commissar in Kronstadt were hoping for!
The press launched a vicious campaign against the Kronstadters who, in return, refused to back down. The Petrograd Soviet denounced the sailors despite a speech by Trotsky where he warned Tseretelli that “when a counter-revolutionary general tries to throw a noose around the neck of the revolution, the Kadets will soap the rope, and the Kronstadt sailors will come to fight and die with us” (132).
Telephone links were then cut with the island and a food blockade threatened. The bourgeoisie were clearly after a bloody solution to the crisis but Trotsky managed to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Kronstadt soviet that left their forces intact for the real battles ahead. After this event Kronstadt sent agitators all over Russia where, attentively listened to by the sympathetic masses, they helped to spread the ideas of revolution and Bolshevism. In this way the Kronstadt sailors gained a significant revenge for their temporary retreat.
The agrarian struggle mounts
“The subsoil of the revolution was the agrarian problem. In the first weeks after the February revolution, the village remained almost inert. Those of the most active age were at the front. The elderly generation left at home too well remembered how revolutions end in punitive expeditions. The village was silent, and therefore the city was silent about the village. But the spectre of a peasant war hung over the nests of the landlords from the first March days'' (133).
The landlords tried to manoeuvre in advance of any coming land reform by selling off land to rich kulaks or by artificially dividing their property into small allotments with dummy owners. The small plots were assumed to be below the size that would be set for expropriation, while the kulaks felt that, as peasants, they would avoid any legislation against their land.
The peasants saw through this trickery and began to demand a decree stopping all land sales. The peasants channelled their anger into the land committees set up by Shingarev, which, to the alarm of the government, began to become instruments of the peasant movement.
Towards the end of March the first reports of direct peasants’ action against the landlords began to be heard, often at the initiative of soldiers returning from the front. Different areas adopted different tactics, some arresting landlords, some persecuting the separate farmers and kulaks that were seen as a point of weakness for the whole commune.
In some areas the peasants began to prevent surveys of the land in order to stop sales, in many provinces confiscation of the landlords’ weapons became widespread. In Siberia, where there were no landlords, the peasants took possession of the church and monastery lands.
Trotsky reports how “in March the agrarian movement had arisen with more or less strength in only 34 counties. In April it had seized 174 counties; in May, 236; in June, 280; in July, 325. These figures, however, do not give a complete picture ... because in each county the struggle assumed from month to month a more and more stubborn and broad mass character'' (134).
To start with most peasants tried to act in a semi-legal way, avoiding open seizures of the land, feeling out the ground, measuring the resistance of the enemy. They would instead, for example, force the landlord to rent or sell the land - but at a price fixed by the peasants. “The attempt to disguise its first steps with legality, both sacred and secular, has from time immemorial characterised the struggle of every revolutionary class, before it has gathered sufficient strength and confidence to break the umbilical cord which bound it to the old society'' (135).
Trotsky notes: “The peasants gave the February revolution approximately three months’ grace on the promissory notes of the Social Revolutionaries, after which they began to collect in their own way” (136).
The direct pressure of the peasants began to force a split in the Social Revolutionaries between its genuinely revolutionary elements and the careerists. The peasants, taking to heart the S-R slogan of ‘land to the people’, began to wonder why the provincial commissars, also Social Revolutionaries, complained about their land seizures!
Of course, when the richer kulaks had voted at the Peasant Congress in May for ‘Conversion of all land into national property for equal working use’, they had been thinking of equal rights to own land with the landlord, not equality with the poor peasants and labourers. “The Peasant Congress had not had time to disperse, when complaints began to arrive that its resolutions were being taken seriously in the localities and that peasants were going about the business of appropriating the land and equipment of the landlords. It was simply impossible to hammer into these stubborn peasant skulls the difference between words and deeds” (137)!
The Social Revolutionaries’ leaders tried to call a retreat, calling at their Moscow congress in June for an end to land seizures until the Constituent Assembly made a decision. The S-R Minister, Chernov, was after all busy gathering endless data and statistics in order to introduce reform once his exercises were finished. As an elderly worker had said to a liberal lawyer standing in front of the burning District Court building in Petrograd during the February revolution itself: ''We will be able to divide the houses and lands ourselves, and without your archives” (138).
The S-R leadership's resolution did not hold back the agrarian movement, particularly since many of the rank-and-file left S-R's were themselves helping the struggle. In some areas the land was transferred to the land committees, in others the rents were lowered and then ordered to be paid not to the landlords but the committees. ''This was not a lawyer's but a muzhik’s way - that is, a serious way, of postponing the question about land reforms until the Constituent Assembly” (139).
When Lenin had spoken on May 20th at the Peasant Congress most of the deputies were hostile to the Bolsheviks, yet they listened with some sympathy to the Bolshevik program. Trotsky quotes the words of Lenin in a speech made some weeks earlier – “We favour an immediate transfer of land to the peasants, with the highest degree of organisation possible. We are absolutely against anarchist seizures. Why, then, are we unwilling to wait for the Constituent Assembly? For this reason: The important thing for us is revolutionary initiative; the laws should be the result of it. If you wait until the law is written, and do not develop revolutionary energy, you will get neither law nor land” (140)
As Trotsky points out: ''The weakness of the Bolsheviks in relation to the peasantry was temporary, and due to the fact that the Bolsheviks did not share the peasant illusions. The village could come to Bolshevism only through experience and disappointment. The strength of the Bolsheviks lay in the fact that on the agrarian question, as on others, they were free of divergence between word and deed” (141).
The tangle of land ownership in the village, combined with the demands of a capitalist economy, meant that the peasant could only escape from the mess by a thoroughgoing agrarian revolution with no half-measures. Of course, the hope of each toiler having their ‘right to land’ at the same time as retaining a capitalist market economy was totally Utopian, typical of the confused beliefs of the Narodniks.
Lenin was striving to build on the progressive tendency within the peasant movement, now united in action through the land committees, to show them that their only real hope of freedom was to link with the workers in the struggle against capitalism.
Crisis in the Cities
Conditions in the cities were getting rapidly worse. The agrarian movement had added to the food crisis, particularly since many of the frightened landlords had not bothered to sow their fields in the spring.
What food that existed rarely got to the towns due to the breakdown of transport, particularly the railways, so that Moscow, Petrograd and other industrial centres were receiving only 10% of what they needed. The transport problems contributed to higher prices and a lack of raw materials and supplies for industry.
The factories were geared to the war, but without any strong central regulation and with the future of the war uncertain, “profits were falling off, dangers growing, the bosses losing their taste for production under the conditions created by revolution. The bourgeoisie as a whole was entering upon a policy of economic defeatism. Temporary losses and deficits due to economic paralysis were in their eyes the overhead expenses of a struggle with the revolution” (142).
The bosses remembered that in 1905 a well-organised lockout had helped to break up the workers’ strike movement. Without any strong state support, and with the workers and soldiers now being armed, the bosses could not risk a clear lockout, which could also have been seen as a treacherous attack on the supplies for the front. Instead, they embarked on a gradual ‘creeping lockout’, blaming the closures on the revolution which had, of course, to be stopped.
In March and April 129 small plants involving 9,000 workers were shut down, but by June it was 125 plants with 38,000 workers. By July, it was 206 plants with 48,000 workers thrown onto the streets. The banks similarly threatened the government with a ‘financial lockout’ of stopping loans and transferring capital abroad if any radical financial reforms were attempted.
In some cases the sabotage was so obvious, with there being so transparently no reason to close the factories, that the industrialists were forced by the agitation of the workers’ committees to reopen the plants. The E.C. also came under pressure to take steps against the bosses and to introduce state regulation of industry.
The Soviet advisers were forced by the crisis to recommend a program of state control of the trusts, banks, trade and food supply. In other words, the revolution was revealing that there was no way forward except by taking on a socialist program of public ownership.
Konovalov certainly got the message because he immediately resigned as Minister of Trade and Industry, only to be replaced by another capitalist. Lenin wrote: “ ‘The programme is excellent. It is necessary to recognise the programme of ‘frightful’ Bolshevism, for no other programme and no other way out of the actually threatening terrible collapse can be found’. However, the whole question was: Who was to carry out this excellent programme?” (143).
Of course, the socialists did not even dare to seriously suggest this program to their bourgeois Coalition colleagues. The government for its part countered with a program of transferring Petrograd factories into the country, partly to keep them safe from the Germans, partly to bring them nearer to the raw material resources, but largely to break up the workers’ movement. However, the plan failed in the face of the workers’ opposition.
The crisis continued to get worse. The food shortages bordering on starvation, coupled with the lack of any prospect of improved conditions, gave rise to a stormy strike movement. Throughout June the less traditionally militant layers like the unskilled workers, clerks and laundry workers were striking. However, the more advanced layers like the metal-workers, having gained the eight-hour day, were now pausing in the struggle. They realised that in the given economic conditions, individual economic strikes could yield little lasting improvement, but began to think of more radical socialist solutions to the crisis.
Demands increased for the state to take control of factories facing closure but the Compromisers opposed it. The workers, therefore, began to change their allegiance. For example, the giant Putilov factory, stronghold of the Social Revolutionaries in February, was by June supporting the Bolsheviks.
Bolshevism gains support
“The growth of strikes, and of the class struggle in general, almost automatically raised the influence of the Bolsheviks. In all cases where it was a question of life-interests the workers became convinced that the Bolsheviks had no ulterior motives, they were concealing nothing, and that you could rely on them”. (144).
It was the active workers that moved towards the Bolsheviks first. This is why in June, a conference of factory and shop committees in Petrograd overwhelmingly supported the Bolshevik resolution, by 335 out of 421 votes, although the Soviet itself was still then dominated by the Compromisers.
The trade unions had grown enormously with at least 250,000 unionised workers in Petrograd by June, and within them the Bolsheviks had grown even more rapidly.
“All the by-elections to the soviets showed a victory for the Bolsheviks. By the 1st of June in the Moscow Soviet there were already 206 Bolsheviks against 176 Mensheviks and 110 S-R’s. The same shifts occurred in the provinces, only more slowly. The membership of the party was growing steadily. At the end of April the Petrograd organisation had 15,000 members. By the end of June, over 32,000. The workers’ section of the Petrograd Soviet had at that time already a Bolshevik majority. But at a joint session of both sections the soldier delegates overweighed the Bolsheviks. Pravda was more and more insistently demanding general elections: ‘The 500,000 Petrograd workers have four times fewer delegates in the Soviet than the 150,000 soldiers of the Petrograd garrison’ ” (145).
The armed workers were now acting more and more often as the ‘armed bodies of men’ of the state, arresting bosses and forcing them to appear before the local soviet to negotiate. At the June congress of the Soviets, Lenin had demanded that the biggest millionaires be arrested for as long as it took for them to reveal their hidden profits and secret lockout plans. The workers in many factories had succeeded in forming a militia, controlled by the factory committees and hence by the Bolsheviks.
“Only the Bolsheviks enjoyed sufficient authority to make it possible for them to restrain the workers and soldiers from scattered action. But the impatience of the masses was already sometimes directed even against the Bolsheviks. Anarchists appeared in the factories and in the fleet. They revealed their bankruptcy for the most part by encouraging petty flare-ups. The economic blind alley and the growing embitterment of the Petrograd workers gave certain points of support to the anarchists … ready to regard every little impulse from below as the last stroke of salvation, they sometimes accused the Bolsheviks of irresolution and even of compromism. But beyond grumbling they usually did not go. The response of the masses to the action of the anarchists sometimes served the Bolsheviks as a gauge of the steam pressure of the revolution'' (146).
The June Soviet Congress
The revolutionary organisations, however, still lagged behind the revolution. The soviets lagged behind the factory committees who, in turn, lagged behind the workers. Even the Bolsheviks lagged behind, especially in the provinces where many Bolshevik groups did not separate from the Mensheviks until May or even June. The party took time to reconstruct itself after the misorientation during the war and under the March leadership.
Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks were taking over the leadership of the active masses, winning elections in the factories and regiments. However, just as the active layers were turning to the Bolsheviks, the small town people were beginning to stir into life. They, of course, first turned to the Compromisers. So in the elections to the Moscow Duma in June the S-R's got over 60% of the vote. This did not reflect a growing support for the Compromisers but rather the last glow of a dying tendency.
This lagging behind of the leadership was clearly shown in the first All-Russian Soviet Congress, opening in Petrograd on June 3rd. As Trotsky notes: “The congress consisted for the most part of people who had registered as socialists in March but got tired of the revolution by June. Petrograd must have seemed to them a town gone mad” (147).
There were 820 delegates with voting rights and 268 with just speaking rights. They represented 305 soviets that organised over 20 million people, plus 50 or so soldiers’ and peasants' groups. Of the 777 delegates declaring an allegiance, 285 were S-R's, 248 Mensheviks and 105 Bolsheviks. So the left-wing of the Bolsheviks and the Menshevik-lnternationalists, led by Martov, made up less than 20% of the total delegates.
Trotsky attended as a delegate of the Mezhrayontsi [‘Inter-District group’], an organisation representing about 4,000 Petrograd workers, which he remained in so as to win over the group to the Bolsheviks. This eventually happened in August. Trotsky was then immediately elected to the Bolshevik C.C., being in fact one of the four candidates with the highest vote. In reality, he had been looked on as being, to all intents and purposes, a Bolshevik comrade since his return to Russia.
Despite the Compromisers’ majority, the congress proceeded cautiously knowing that the masses were dissatisfied and that the Bolshevik support was much greater, particularly in Petrograd, than the congress suggested.
The debates revealed that the revolution had made no changes in the czarist education system and the congress was still unwilling to dissolve either the State Duma or even the czarist State Council. The Menshevik Bogdanov tried to excuse their timidity by saying that these organisations were dead anyway to which Martov answered: “Bogdanov proposes that we should declare the Duma dead but not make any attempt upon its life” (148)!
The Coalition was ratified by 543 votes to 126, with 52 abstentions, after Tseretelli had again expounded on how the bourgeoisie must not be pushed away from being a friend of the people. He used the same excuse to make sure the congress voted down a decree in favour of the eight-hour day. It went on to sanction Kerensky's offensive.
During his speech on June 4th, revealing the cowardice of the petty-bourgeois, Tseretelli remarked: “In Russia at the present moment there is not one political party which would say, 'Give us the power in our hands’ ” (149). Lenin uncharacteristically interrupted, shouting ‘There is!’.
Of course, Lenin was not suggesting a ‘coup’, he knew the task was still to gain the confidence of the masses. “Lenin’s reply … had only one meaning: We, the Bolsheviks, are ready to take the power even today if the workers and soldiers give us their confidence; in this we are distinguished from the Compromisers, who, possessing the confidence of the workers and soldiers, dare not take the power” (150).
With this in mind, the Bolsheviks, under pressure from the Petrograd masses to challenge the congress, decided that they should organise a demonstration to show resistance to the government.
Some of the Bolsheviks feared that the mood could turn nasty while others definitely hoped it might lead to a seizure of power. However, it was decided that a demonstration must be called, or the soldiers might simply come out armed and disorganised onto the streets, but that it should raise slogans clearly aimed at pressurising the Soviet leaders, not at overthrowing the government. “The manifestation was to raise the banner of ‘Power to the Soviets’. The fighting slogan ran: ‘Down with the Ten Minister-Capitalists’. That was the simplest possible expression for a break-up of the coalition with the bourgeoisie” (151).
The planned march to the congress on the 10th had been prepared in secret, to avoid the chance of counter-agitation from the Compromisers. When the Pravda of June 9th announced the demonstration, the Soviet E.C. reacted with alarm, demanding the Bolsheviks call it off. The Bolsheviks countered that the Soviet had no right to stop a peaceful demonstration.
The congress passed a resolution forbidding all demonstrations for three days (in doing so, again having to take on the role of the sovereign power!). In addition, several hundred delegates were organised in groups of tens to go to the factories and barracks to prevent the demonstration.
“If the mountain was not allowed to come to the prophet, the prophet at least went to the mountain. The meeting proved instructive in the highest degree. A Menshevik correspondent paints the following picture: ... The congress had no authority in a good many of the factories and shops, and also in several regiments of the garrison. The members were frequently met in a far from friendly manner, sometimes hostilely, and quite often they were sent away with insults’ ” (152). The pacifiers returned to the congress sleepless and demoralised.
Nevertheless, fearing the demonstration could now turn into a disorganised half-insurrection, the Bolshevik C.C. decided to postpone their action. This was agreed to by the masses but not without protest, some factories adopting resolutions of censure against the C.C. Some even resigned from the party. This was a clear warning of the difficulties in choosing the right path when confronted with the widely differing moods amongst the broad masses.
Meanwhile the panicked congress leaders raged about a Bolshevik conspiracy, Tseretelli talking of ‘disarming’ the Bolsheviks, which of course actually meant disarming the revolutionary workers and soldiers.
''In other words, that classic moment of the revolution had arrived when the bourgeois democracy, upon the demand of the reaction, undertakes to disarm the workers who had guaranteed the revolutionary victory” (153).
The meeting was stunned by Tseretelli's frenzied attack and in the end the congress stepped back from the idea of disarming the workers. As Trotsky notes: “To carry out the Compromise policy through to a successful end - that is, to the establishment of a parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie - demanded the disarming of the workers and soldiers. But Tseretelli was not only right. He was besides that powerless. Tseretelli was already without forces. He could procure them, if at all, only from the hands of the reaction. But they, in the case of a successful crushing of the Bolsheviks, would have immediately taken up the job of crushing the Compromise soviets” (154).
The Congress further decided that they too could try and influence the masses with a demonstration, but one intended to show the strength of the democracy. However, alarmed by their experiences when visiting the workers and soldiers, they resolved now to abolish the State Duma and put forward the slogans of ‘Universal Peace’, ‘Immediate Convocation of a Constituent Assembly’ and ‘Democratic Republic’. Of course, there was no word about the offensive or the coalition - the E.C. knew that they could not dare to ask the masses to give confidence to the government of which they themselves were members.
Tseretelli remarked to the Bolsheviks: “Now we shall have an open and honest review of the revolutionary forces. Now we shall see whom the majority is following, you or us” (155). The Bolsheviks were more than ready for the challenge.
The June Demonstration
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| Mars Field in 2012 |
About 400,000 paraded, considerably fewer than in that March funeral procession because the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia were missing. Few but the factories and barracks marched.
''The first Bolshevik slogans were met half-laughingly. But these same slogans were repeated again and again. 'Down with the Ten-Minister Capitalists!’, ‘Down with the Offensive!’, ‘All Power to the Soviets!’. The ironical smiles froze, and then gradually disappeared. Bolshevik banners floated everywhere. The delegates stopped counting the uncomfortable totals. The triumph of the Bolsheviks was too obvious'' (156).
Only three small groups carried banners supporting the Provisional Government - Plekhanov's patriotic group, a group of Jewish intellectuals, and a Cossack detachment. The first two groups wisely lowered their banners, the Cossacks had theirs torn from them and destroyed.
The Vyborg section of the march flooded through under thousands of Bolshevik banners. “One of the factories carried a placard: ‘The Right to Life is Higher than the Rights of Private Property’ ” (157).
The delegates were forced to concede that the Bolsheviks had won in Petrograd, but not in the provinces or at the front. “That's all right, answered the Bolsheviks, your turn will soon come” (158).
“It was a great victory, and moreover it was on the arena and with the weapons chosen by the enemy. While sanctioning the offensive, recognising the coalition, and condemning the Bolsheviks, the soviet congress had called the masses on its own initiative into the streets. They came with the announcement: We don't want either offensive or coalition; we are for Bolshevism” (159).
Not all the workers and soldiers of Petrograd took part in the demonstration, not all those who marched were Bolsheviks. However, the victory of the Bolsheviks on June 18th helped to draw the masses towards them. In many other cities similar demonstrations had also shown the growth of influence of the Bolsheviks.
On the 19th a small Kadet demonstration paraded on the Nevsky in support of the offensive. Unlike April, the two hostile camps paraded without a direct clash. However, that clash was soon to come.
June in Petrograd finished in commotion with protests and calls from workers and soldiers for demonstrations and even attacks on the government. The Bolsheviks understood the mood of the active masses - they were right when they now understood that a demonstration was not enough but a revolution was needed. However, the leadership knew that the right moment for insurrection was still far from reached.
“A battle hovers in the air. The Bolshevik press explains and restrains. The patriotic press gives away its fright with an unbridled baiting of Bolsheviks. On the 25th, Lenin writes: ‘This universal wild cry of spite and rage against the Bolsheviks is the common complaint of Kadets, Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks against their own flabbiness. They are in a majority. They are the government. They are all together in a bloc. And they see that nothing comes of it. What can they do but rage against the Bolsheviks?’ ” (160).
“A revolution teaches and teaches fast. In that lies its strength. Every week brings something new to the masses. Every two months creates an epoch. At the end of February, the insurrection. At the end of April, a demonstration of the armed workers and soldiers in Petrograd. At the beginning of July, a new assault, far broader in scope and under more resolute slogans. At the end of August, Kornilov's attempt at an overthrow beaten off by the masses. At the end of October, conquest of power by the Bolsheviks” (161).
“Before the proletariat came to power all the other variants of the political development were subjected to the test of life and thrown aside as worthless. The government of the liberal bourgeoisie with Kerensky as a democratic hostage, proved a total failure.
The ‘April Days’ were the first candid warning addressed by the October to the February revolution. The bourgeois Provisional Government was replaced after this by a Coalition whose fruitlessness was revealed on every day of its existence.
In the June demonstration ... the February revolution tried to measure strength with the October and suffered a cruel defeat. Unmistakable signs testified that all the rest of the country, although with an inevitable delay, would catch up with Petrograd.
Thus by the end of its fourth month the February revolution had already exhausted itself politically. The Compromisers had lost the confidence of the soldiers and workers. A conflict between the leading soviet parties and the soviet masses now became inevitable. After the manifestation of June 18th, which was a peaceful test of the correlation of forces of the two revolutions, the contradiction between them must inevitably take an open and violent form” (162).
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