The failure of the Democratic Conference was a public confession of the political bankruptcy of the Soviet leaders. After this final admission of their reluctance to assume power, there was a sudden and sharp collapse in the support for the Mensheviks and SRs. The Menshevik Party had practically ceased to exist in Petrograd by the end of September: the last all-city party conference was unable to meet for lack of a quorum. It was not just their rigid Marxist dogma that had kept the Menshevik leaders within the coalition, but a much more fundamental failure to recognize the social and political forces which had been unfolding during 1917. ‘Almost from the outset’, writes Leo Haimson, the foremost historian of the Mensheviks, ‘they had found themselves valiantly trying to master a chaos that had gradually overwhelmed them. Nothing about the experience had proven familiar, or run according to expectations.’ They had failed to see that their own base of support, the industrial workers, was becoming radicalized, and that only a Soviet government could hope to command any real authority among them. Blinded by their own commitment to the state, which had made them defend the coalition principle at all costs, they ceased to act or think like revolutionaries and dismissed the workers’ growing radicalism and support for the Bolsheviks as a manifestation of their ‘ignorance’ and ‘immaturity’; and this confirmed them in their dogmatic belief that the Soviets were not ready for power.101 The SR leaders were guilty of similar self-deception in their naive belief that the peasantry’s demand for a fundamental land reform, upon which the SR Party had been built, could be put off until the end of the war and the resolution of the power question at the Constituent Assembly. The peasants were increasingly indifferent to the outcome of the war and to the form of the national government: all they wanted was peace, land and freedom, as expressed in the volia of their own autonomous village committees and Soviets. This would be proved by the ill-fated SR struggle during 1918 to reverse the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and to rally the Volga peasants behind the defence of the Constituent Assembly, after it had been closed by the Bolsheviks.
The failure of the SRs, like that of the Mensheviks, was above all a failure of leadership. Both parties were hopelessly split on the two fundamental issues of 1917: what to do with the war and where to draw the balance between the political and social revolutions. Their rightwing leaders were Defensist and placed greater stress on the political revolution; while their leftwing comrades were firmly committed to peace and radical social reforms. Given Russia’s historical legacy and the huge cultural gulf between the intelligentsia and the masses, there was perhaps no real prospect, at least in 1917, of sustaining a political revolution in the European tradition. But a socialist democracy might just have been stabilized, if the Soviet leaders had agreed to form a coalition with the Bolsheviks in September — and if Lenin had subsequently agreed to respect such a coalition. These, of course, were very big ‘ifs’. The Left SRs did eventually form a lonely alliance with the Bolsheviks in October, though by that stage Lenin had no intention of treating them as an equal partner. As for the leftwing Mensheviks, they were hopelessly stranded. Martov, their leader, could not bring himself to join any sort of alliance with his old rival Lenin, although this was the logical outcome of his quarrel with the Defensists, as most of his supporters recognized. A party loyalist to the end, Martov remained on board the sinking ship of Menshevism.
Trotsky described Martov as the ‘Hamlet of Democratic Socialism’ — and this is just about the sum of it. Like so many of the veteran socialist leaders who found themselves at the head of the Soviet movement in 1917, Martov was much too good an intellectual to be a successful politician. He was always held back by his own integrity and philosophical approach to politics. He tended to choose his allies by the coherence of their general world-view rather than the timeliness or even the practicality of their policies. It was this that made him stick with the Mensheviks rather than switch to a tactical alliance with the Bolsheviks in September: he placed greater importance on the basic Marxist principles of the Mensheviks than on the purely political arguments for such an alliance. This high-minded approach has since won Martov many plaudits among the socialist intelligentsia: even Lenin was said to have confessed in 192l that his single greatest regret was ‘that Martov is not with us. What an amazing comrade he is, what a pure man!’ Yet such noble principles are a fatal burden for the revolutionary leader, and in Martov’s case they made him soft and indecisive when just the opposite was required.102
