The Bolsheviks made dramatic gains in the city Duma elections of August and September. In Petrograd they increased their share of the popular vote from 20 per cent in May to 33 per cent on 20 August. In Moscow, where the Bolsheviks had polled a mere 11 per cent in June, they swept to victory on 24 September with 51 per cent of the vote, while the SR vote collapsed from 56 per cent to 14 per cent, and the Mensheviks from 12 per cent to 4 per cent. The Kadets, on the other hand, as the only party representing the interests of the bourgeoisie, increased their share of the vote from 17 per cent to 31 per cent. These elections highlighted the political polarization of the country at large — Dan called them the ‘civil war returns’ — as voters swung to the two extremes parties with an overt class appeal. The apathy of the uncommitted — particularly those such as petty clerks, traders and shop assistants, who had no obvious class allegiance or party to vote for — had much to do with the Bolshevik success. Six months of fruitless politics and incessant cabinet crises had not encouraged them to place much faith in the ballot box. The democratic parties ran low-key campaigns and huge numbers of voters stayed away from the polling stations. In the Petrograd elections the turn-out was down by a third since May, while in the Moscow elections it was down by nearly half.88 This of course played into the hands of the Bolsheviks, who were far more hungry — and much better organized — to win power than any other party. How many Communist take-overs have been based on the apathy of the voters in a democracy?
A similar swing to the Bolsheviks took place in the Soviets. Here too grass-roots apathy deprived the Mensheviks and the SRs of their early ascendancy. They had only themselves to blame. To begin with, the Soviets had been open and democratic organs, where important decisions were made by the elected assembly. This made their proceedings somewhat chaotic, but it also gave them a sense of excitement and popular creativity. As the Soviet leaders became involved in the responsibilities of government they began to organize the work of the Soviets along bureaucratic lines, and this alienated the mass of the workers from them. The assemblies began to decline in frequency and attendance as the initiative switched to the executives and their quasi-governmental commissions, whose members were increasingly nominated by the party caucuses. From popular organs of direct self-rule, the Soviets were thus already beginning to be transformed into complex bureaucratic structures, although this process is more commonly associated with the period after 1917. At the time, it seemed a natural development: the workers themselves were deemed to lack the political experience required to take on the responsibilities of government, while the Soviet parties, because of their old camaraderie within the revolutionary movement, were automatically assumed to be exempt from the factional abuse of power which such centralization made possible. This of course was naive — and merely played into the hands of the Bolsheviks, the undisputed masters of factional politics, who increasingly employed such tactics to secure control of the Soviet executives. In dozens of provincial Soviets the Bolsheviks managed to gain a majority on the executive, although they were only a minority in the assembly. This was especially common where a Bolshevik-controlled workers’ section was merged with a section of soldiers or peasants and, because of its ‘leading role’ in the revolutionary movement, given more seats on the executive: in the Samara provincial Soviet, for example, the Bolsheviks made up 75 per cent of the executive but only 26 per cent of the assembly.89
But the Bolsheviks’ growing domination of the Soviets was not solely due to their factional scheming: they worked not just from above but also from below. The Soviets’ bureaucratization had set them apart from the lives of the ordinary workers, who began to reduce their involvement in the Soviets and either lost all interest in politics or else looked instead to their own ad hoc bodies such as the factory committees to take the initiative. This added strength to the Bolshevik campaign, which was largely channelled through these grass-roots organizations, for the recall of the Menshevik and SR leaders from the Soviets as part of Lenin’s drive towards Soviet power. The revitalization of the Soviets in the wake of the Kornilov crisis thus coincided with their radicalization from below, as factories and garrisons recalled the pro-coalition Mensheviks and SRs in favour of those Maximalists (Bolsheviks, Anarchists and Left SRs) calling for the assumption of Soviet power.
