The rising fortunes of the Bolsheviks during the summer and autumn were essentially due to the fact that they were the only major political party which stood uncompromisingly for Soviet power.fn9 This point bears emphasizing, for one of the most basic misconceptions of the Russian Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were swept to power on a tide of mass support for the party itself. The October insurrection was a coup d’étât, actively supported by a small minority of the population (and indeed opposed by several of the Bolshevik leaders themselves). But it took place amidst a social revolution, which was centred on the popular realization of Soviet power as the negation of the state and the direct self-rule of the people, much as in the ancient peasant ideal of volia. The political vacuum brought about by this social revolution enabled the Bolsheviks to seize power in the cities and consolidate their dictatorship during the autumn and winter. The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ was a useful tool, a banner of popular legitimation covering the nakedness of Lenin’s ambition (which was better expressed as All Power to the Party). Later, as the nature of the Bolshevik dictatorship became apparent, the party faced the growing opposition of precisely those groups in society which in 1917 had rallied behind the Soviet slogan.
The popular demand for Soviet power had never expressed itself in a preference for the dictatorship of any particular party. The torrent of resolutions, petitions and declarations from the factories, the army units and the villages in support of a Soviet government after the Kornilov crisis invariably called on all the socialist parties to take part in its establishment, and often displayed a marked impatience with the factional disputes between them. Their political language had basically remained unchanged since 1905: the dominant image within them was that of ‘the people’, the narod, in a struggle for freedom against an oppressive regime, the Kerenshchina. The latter, it is true, was now described as ‘bourgeois’, which no doubt reflected the increased influence of the Marxist agitators and the Bolsheviks in particular. But the basic concept of these resolutions, which these agitators merely articulated in the language of class, remained in essence a popular struggle between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the nizy and the verkhi, or the common people and the privileged élite at the head of the government. Their dominant sentiment was one of anger and frustration that nothing concrete had been gained, neither peace, nor bread, nor land, six months after the February Revolution, and that unless a decisive break was made with the bourgeoisie in the coalition there would only be another winter of stagnation.92
What the workers saw in Soviet power, above all, was the chance to control their own factory environment. They wanted to regulate their own shopfloor relations, to set their own wages and working conditions, and combat the ‘sabotage’, the conspiratorial running-down of production by profit-conscious employers, which many workers blamed for the industrial crisis. In this heightened atmosphere of class war, impatience was growing with the Mensheviks’ leadership of the labour movement: their policies of mediating labour disputes and conciliating the employers had failed to stop the rising tide of unemployment. Many workers, especially those under the influence of the Bolsheviks, saw the solution in the sequestration (or nationalization) of their factory by a Workers’ State, called ‘Soviet Power’, which would then set up a management board of workers, technicians and Soviet officials to keep the factory running.fn10 It was part of the growing political consciousness of the workers, the realization that their demands could only be achieved by changing the nature of the state itself.
