Just as the bombardment was getting under way, at 10.40 p.m., the Soviet Congress finally opened. The great hall of the Smolny was packed; the delegates stood in the aisles and perched on window-sills. The air was thick with blue tobacco smoke, despite repeated calls from the tribune for ‘the comrades’ not to smoke. The majority of the delegates were workers and soldiers in their tunics and greatcoats; their unwashed and dirty look contrasted sharply with the clean suits of the old executive members, the Mensheviks and SRs, seated on the platform for the final time. Sukhanov remarked that the ‘grey features of the Bolshevik provinces’ had a clear preponderance among the Congress delegates. He was shocked by their ‘dark’, ‘morose’ and ‘primitive’ appearance, and thought it reflected a ‘crude and ignorant people whose devotion to the revolution was spite and despair, while their “Socialism” was hunger and an unendurable longing for rest’. This of course was a Menshevik speaking, but, even if we ignore his value-laden terms, there is no doubt that the mass of the delegates were indeed less cultured than the urbanized, skilled and educated types who had hitherto made up the majority of the Soviet movement.
The Bolsheviks did not have an absolute majority, as Sukhanov had thought, though with the support of the Left SRs they could push through virtually any motion they liked. Although precise numbers are difficult to determine, the Credentials Committee of the Congress reported that 300 of the 670 delegates were Bolsheviks, 193 SRs (of whom more than half were Left SRs), while 82 were Mensheviks (of whom 14 were Internationalists). Because of the lax regulations for the selection of delegates and their own superior party organization, the Bolsheviks had managed to secure rather more than their fair share of seats. The northern industrial Soviets, where the influence of the Bolsheviks was dominant both in the towns and the semi-industrial villages, sent more representatives than was warranted by their size; whereas those of the Volga and the agricultural south, where the SRs were dominant, sent fewer and in some cases even boycotted the Congress altogether. There was a similar imbalance among the delegates of the armed services, with the Bolshevized north far better represented than the non-Bolshevized south. The Latvians, the most Bolshevized troops of all, made up more than 10 per cent of the delegates.22
In accordance with these voting strengths, the old Soviet leaders vacated their seats on the platform; they were replaced by 14 Bolsheviks and 7 Left SRs. The Mensheviks declined to take up the 4 seats allocated to them.
The mandates of the delegates showed an overwhelming majority in favour of a Soviet government. It was up to the Congress to decide how this should be formed. Martov proposed the formation of a united democratic government based upon all the parties in the Soviet: this, he said, was the only way to avert a civil war. The proposal was met with torrents of applause. Even Lunacharsky was forced to admit that the Bolsheviks had nothing against it — they could not abandon the slogan of Soviet Power — and the proposal was immediately passed by a unanimous vote. But just as it looked as if a socialist coalition was at last about to be formed, a series of Mensheviks and SRs bitterly denounced the violent assault on the Provisional Government. They declared that their parties, or at least the rightwing sections of them, would have nothing to do with this ‘criminal venture’, which was bound to throw the country into civil war, and walked out of the Congress hall in protest, while the Bolshevik delegates stamped their feet, whistled and hurled abuse at them.23
Lenin’s planned provocation — the preemptive seizure of power — had worked. By walking out of the Congress, the Mensheviks and SRs undermined all hopes of reaching a compromise with the Bolshevik moderates and of forming a coalition government of all the Soviet parties. The path was now clear for the Bolshevik dictatorship, based on the Soviet, which Lenin had no doubt intended all along. In the charged political atmosphere of the time, it is easy to see why the Mensheviks and SRs acted as they did. But it is equally difficult not to draw the conclusion that, by their actions, they merely played into Lenin’s hands and thus committed political suicide. Writing in 1921, Sukhanov admitted as much:
We completely untied the Bolsheviks’ hands, making them masters of the whole situation and yielding to them the whole arena of the Revolution. A struggle at the Congress for a united democratic front might have had some success … But by leaving the Congress, we ourselves gave the Bolsheviks a monopoly of the Soviet, of the masses, and of the Revolution. By our own irrational decision, we ensured the victory of Lenin’s whole ‘line’.24
