The Bolsheviks were also coming round to the idea of a socialist coalition based on the Soviets. Kamenev of course had always been in favour of this. He had been fighting all along to keep the Bolshevik campaign within the Soviet movement and the democratic institutions of the February Revolution. As he saw it, the country was not ripe for a Bolshevik uprising, and any attempt to stage one was bound to end in civil war and the defeat of the party. It would be the Paris Commune all over again. In his view the Bolsheviks had no choice but to continue with the strategy of trying to win support in the Soviets, in the city Dumas, and eventually in the Constituent Assembly through democratic elections. They also had to persuade the Mensheviks and SRs to break with the coalition and join them in a socialist government.
Until the Kornilov crisis, Lenin had been flatly opposed to the idea of any compromise with the Soviet leaders. After the July Days he had given up all hope of coming to power through the Soviets: as he saw it, the Provisional Government had been captured by a ‘military dictatorship’ engaged in a ‘civil war’ against the proletariat; the Soviets had lost their revolutionary potential and were being led, ‘like sheep to the abattoir’, by a group of leaders bent on appeasing the ‘counter-revolution’. The only option left was to give up the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ and stage an armed uprising to transfer power to the rival proletarian organs under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. It was revealing of Lenin’s attitude towards the Soviets, in whose name his regime was to be founded, that whenever they failed to serve the interests of his party, he was ready to ditch them. It is quite mistaken to argue, as Isaac Deutscher once did, that Lenin was planning to make the Soviet Congress the constitutional source of sovereign power, like the English House of Commons, with the Bolsheviks ruling through this congress in the manner of a Western parliamentary party.fn11 Lenin was no Soviet constitutionalist — and all his actions after October testified to this. The Soviets, in his schema, were always to be subordinated to the party. Even in The State and Revolution — supposedly his most ‘libertarian’ work of political theory, which he completed at this time — Lenin stressed the need for a strong and repressive party state, a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, during the period of transition to the Communist utopia when the ‘bourgeois state’ was to be smashed. He barely mentioned the Soviets at all.98
Yet, in the wake of the Kornilov crisis, which had seen the Soviet leaders move to the left, even Lenin was prepared to consider the idea of a compromise with them. Not that he gave up his ultimate aim of a Bolshevik dictatorship. ‘Our party’, he assured its left wing on 1 September in his article ‘On Compromises’, ‘is striving after political domination for itself.’ But the leftward move of the Soviets, which worked to the benefit of the party, opened up the prospect of moving once again towards Soviet power through peaceful means. The Bolsheviks, after all, were now likely to be a dominant force in any government based on the Soviets — and it was this that enabled Lenin to consider what, in essence, as he put it, would be ‘our return to the preJuly demand of all power to the Soviets’. During the fortnight leading up to the opening of the Democratic Conference, on 14 September, when the power question was to be resolved, Lenin supported Kamenev’s efforts to persuade the Mensheviks and SRs to break with the coalition and join the Bolsheviks in a socialist government based on the Soviets. If the Soviet leaders agreed to assume power, the Bolsheviks would give up their campaign for an armed uprising and compete for power within the Soviet movement itself. But Lenin’s implication remained clear: if the Soviet leaders refused to do this, the party should prepare for the seizure of power.99
