the moderates find themselves losing the credit they had gained as opponents of the old regime, and taking on more and more of the discredit associated by the hopeful with the status of heir of the old regime. Forced on the defensive, they make mistake after mistake, partly because they are so little used to being on the defensive.
Emotionally unable to bear thinking of themselves as “falling behind in the revolutionary process” and to break with rivals on the left, they satisfy no one and are ready to give way to better-organized, better-staffed, more determined rivals.79
In May and June 1917, the Bolshevik Party still ran a poor third to the other socialist parties: at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in early June, it had only 105 delegates as against 285 for the SRs and 248 for the Mensheviks.* But the tide was running in its favor.
The Bolsheviks enjoyed many advantages. In addition to their unique position as the sole alternative to the new Provisional Government and their determined and power-hungry leadership, there were at least two others.
The Mensheviks and SRs spouted socialist slogans, but they would not push them to their logical conclusions. This confused their constituency and helped the Bolsheviks. They insisted that since February 1917 Russia had a “bourgeois” regime which they controlled through the soviets: but if this was so, why not be rid of the “bourgeoisie” and vest full power in the soviets? The socialists called the war “imperialist”: if it was so, why not lay down arms and go home? “All Power to the Soviets” and “Down with the War,” though still unpopular slogans in the spring and summer of 1917, had about them a certain inexorable logic—they made “sense” in the context of ideas which the socialists planted in the mind of the population. Because the Bolsheviks had the courage to draw from the common socialist premises the obvious conclusions, the socialists could never really stand up to them: to have done so would have been tantamount to denying themselves. Time and again, whenever the followers of Lenin brazenly challenged democratic procedures and struck for power, the socialists would try to talk them out of it, yet, at the same time, they would prevent the government from reacting. It was difficult to stand up to the Bolsheviks if their only sin was seeking to reach the same goal by bolder means: in many ways, Lenin and his followers were the true “conscience of the Revolution.” Their intellectual irresponsibility combined with the moral cowardice of the socialist majority created a psychological and ideological environment in which the Bolshevik minority battened and grew.
But perhaps the single greatest advantage the Bolsheviks enjoyed over their rivals lay in their total unconcern for Russia. The conservatives, the liberals, and the socialists, each in their own way, sought to preserve Russia as a national entity, in defiance of the particular social and regional interests that the Revolution had unleashed and that were pulling the country apart. They appealed to the soldiers to maintain discipline, to the peasants to wait for the land reform, to the workers to keep up production, to the ethnic minorities to hold in abeyance demands for self-rule. These were unpopular appeals because the absence in the country of a strong sense of statehood and nationhood encouraged centrifugal tendencies and favored the advancement of special interests at the expense of the whole. The Bolsheviks, for whom Russia was no more than a springboard for a world revolution, had no such concerns. It suited them very well if spontaneous forces “smashed” existing institutions and destroyed Russia. For this reason, they encouraged to the fullest every destructive trend. And since these trends, once unleashed in February, were difficult to restrain in any event, they rode the crest of a swelling wave; by identifying themselves with the inevitable, they gained the appearance of being in control. Later on, when in power, they would in no time renege on all their promises and reconstruct the state in a more centralized, autocratic form than the country had ever known: but until then, their indifference to the fate of Russia proved for the Bolsheviks an immense, perhaps decisive asset.
