First, there was the problem of party dogma. Both the Mensheviks and the SRs adhered rigidly to the belief that in a backward peasant country such as Russia there would have to be a ‘bourgeois revolution’ (meaning a long period of capitalism and democracy) before Russian society, and the working class in particular, would be sufficiently advanced for the transition to a socialist order. As Plekhanov had once put it, there was not yet enough proletarian yeast in the peasant dough of Russia to make the cake of socialism. In the case of the Mensheviks this belief in the two-stage revolution derived from Marxist theory; and in the case of the SRs it derived largely from the Mensheviks. The belief was based on two further assumptions, which both made abstract sense but fell down when applied to the real world. It was a case of trying to impose nineteenth-century Western dogmas on the realities of twentieth-century Russia. For one thing, it was said that the peasants (and the provinces in general) would not support a socialist government in the cities because they were too attached to what the Mensheviks called their ‘petty-bourgeois’ notions of small property. As a result, an urban socialist revolution would either be starved out of existence, like the Paris Commune, or, even worse, would be beaten by a peasant counter-revolution, like the Vendée or the European royalist armies of 1849. But in fact the Russian peasants were even more impatient for a social revolution than, arguably, the workers were. All they wanted was the land and, if ‘socialism’ meant giving the land to the peasants, then they were ‘socialists’. This meant, as the SRs should have realized, that the peasants would not join a counter-revolution so long as that entailed — as it was almost bound to in Russia — a restoration of the gentry on the land. It was also said that the masses were too illiterate and inexperienced politically to assume the tasks of government, and that until this was remedied the support and leadership of the educated classes would remain essential. The Soviets, as class-based organs, might play a role in local government but they lacked the means to run the state. What was needed now, as a preparation for the transition to socialism, was for the masses to go through the school of democracy — which for the workers, in particular, meant following the example of the European labour movements — and this could only be achieved within a liberal framework of political freedom. But this too was to impose a Western model of democracy on a country where the base for it was missing. The ‘direct democracy’ of the Soviets was much closer to the experience of the Russian masses — it was reminiscent of the peasant commune — and it might have served as the starting point for a new and different type of democratic order, one much more decentralized than the liberal democracy of the West, provided the Soviets were somehow combined with the broader representative bodies (e.g. the city dumas, the zemstvos and the Constituent Assembly) in a national political framework.
No doubt the Soviet leaders’ rigid adherence to this dogma was in part the result of their own virginity in government. The bourgeois leaders had years of experience of legislative matters, either in the Duma or in the zemstvos. But the socialists had no real experience of government work, only the long and fruitless years of politics in semi-legal opposition and the underground. Furthermore, their party leaders were all still in exile, and it might be thought of as a ‘colonels’ revolt’ if they assumed power. Yet should this really have been such an obstacle? For all their talk of ‘principles’ and ‘ideology’, in the end it was their instincts and their temperament that held back the Soviet leaders from taking power. They had spent so long in hostile opposition to all governmental authority that many of them could not suddenly become — or even think of themselves as — statesmen. They clung to the habits and the culture of the revolutionary underground, preferring opposition to government.
