The same intellectual indecisiveness was characteristic of many of the Soviet leaders in 1917 — and in this sense they could all be described as Hamlets of democratic socialism. Chernov was a similarly tragic figure in the SR Party. Like Martov, he was a brilliant intellectual and party theoretician, yet he utterly lacked the qualities required to become a successful revolutionary leader. He did not have that hardness of inner resolve and will, that single-minded determination to carry his policies through, even if this meant splitting his own party, or indeed that basic instinct to judge when the moment was ripe to strike out for power. That was the crucial difference between a Chernov and a Lenin — and upon that difference the fate of Russia turned.
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With Kamenev’s plan for a socialist coalition scotched by the failure of the Democratic Conference, Lenin reverted to his campaign in the party for an immediate armed uprising. He had already begun to advocate this in two letters to the Central Committee written from exile in Finland on the eve of the conference. The Bolsheviks, Lenin had argued, ‘can and must take state power into their own hands’. Can — because the party had already won a majority in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets, which was ‘enough to carry the people with it’ in any civil war, provided the party in power proposed an immediate peace and gave the land to the peasants. Must — because if it waited for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, ‘Kerensky and Co.’ would take preemptive action against the transfer of power, either by giving up Petrograd to the Germans or by delaying the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The Democratic Conference was to be condemned, since it represented ‘only the compromising upper strata of the bourgeoisie. We must not be deceived by the election figures: elections prove nothing … The majority of the people are on our side.’ Reminding his comrades of Marx’s dictum that ‘insurrection is an art’, Lenin had concluded that ‘it would be naive to wait for a “formal” majority for the Bolsheviks. No revolution ever waits for that … History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.’103
These two letters reached the Central Committee on 15 September. They were, to say the least, highly inconvenient for the rest of the Bolshevik leaders (‘We were all aghast’, Bukharin recalled) since the Democratic Conference had just begun and they were still committed to Kamenev’s conciliatory tactics. It was even resolved to burn all but one copy of the letters, lest they should fall into the hands of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks and spark a revolt. The Central Committee continued to ignore Lenin’s advice and printed instead his earlier articles, in which he had endorsed the Kamenev line. Lenin was beside himself with rage. While he was still afraid to return to Petrograd (Kerensky had ordered Lenin’s arrest at the Democratic Conference), he moved from Finland to the resort town of Vyborg, eighty miles from the capital, to be closer. During the following weeks, he assaulted the Central Committee and the lower-level party organizations with a barrage of impatient letters, full of violent and abusive phrases heavily underlined, in which he urged them to start the armed insurrection at once. He condemned the ‘parliamentary tactics’ of the Bolshevik leaders; and welcomed the prospect of a civil war (‘the sharpest form of the class struggle’), which they were trying to avert on the false assumption that, like the Paris Communards, they were bound to be defeated. On the contrary, Lenin insisted, the antiBolshevik forces would be no more than those aligned behind the Kornilov movement, and any ‘rivers of blood’ would give ‘certain victory’ to the party.
