Since they planned to hold the Fifth Congress of Soviets early in July (the Fourth Congress having been held in March to ratify the peace treaty with Germany), the Bolsheviks had to hold elections to the soviets. These took place in May and June. The outcome exceeded their worst expectations: had they any respect for the wishes of the working class, they would have given up power. In town after town, Bolshevik candidates were routed by Mensheviks and SRs: “In all provincial capitals of European Russia where elections were held on which there are data, the Mensheviks and SRs won the majorities in the city soviets in the spring of 1918.”147 In the voting for the Moscow Soviet the Bolsheviks emerged with a pseudo-majority only by means of outright manipulation of the franchise and other forms of electoral fraud. Observers predicted that in the forthcoming elections to the Petrograd Soviet the Bolsheviks would find themselves in a minority as well148 and Zinoviev would lose its chairmanship. The Bolsheviks must have shared this pessimistic assessment, for they postponed the elections to the Petrograd Soviet to the last possible moment, the end of June.
These stunning developments meant not so much an endorsement of the Mensheviks and SRs as a rejection of the Bolsheviks. The electors who wanted to turn the ruling party out of power had no alternative but to vote for the socialist parties since they alone were permitted to put up opposition candidates. How they would have voted had they been given a full choice of parties cannot, of course, be determined.
The Bolsheviks now had an opportunity to practice the principle of “recall,” which Lenin had not long before described as “an essential condition of democracy,” by withdrawing their deputies from the soviets and replacing them with Mensheviks and SRs. But they chose to manipulate the results, by using the Mandate Commissions, to declare the elections unlawful.
To distract the workers, the authorities had resorted to class hatred, inciting them this time against the “rural bourgeoisie.” On May 20, the Sovnarkom issued a decree ordering the formation of “food supply detachments” (
Petrograd workers were not taken in by this diversion. Their plenipotentiaries on May 24 rejected the idea of food supply detachments on the grounds that it would cause a “deep chasm” between workers and peasants. Some speakers demanded that workers who joined such detachments be “expelled” from the ranks of the proletariat.149
On May 28, the excitement among Petrograd workers rose to a still higher pitch when the workers of Putilov demanded an end to the state’s grain monopoly, guarantees of free speech, the right to form independent trade unions, and fresh elections to the soviets. Protest meetings which passed similar resolutions took place in Moscow and many provincial towns, including Tula, Nizhnii Novgorod, Orel, and Tver.
Zinoviev tried to calm the storm with economic concessions. He apparently persuaded Moscow to allocate to Petrograd additional food shipments, for on May 30 he was able to announce that the daily bread ration of workers would be raised to eight ounces. Such gestures failed to achieve their purpose. On June 1, the meeting of plenipotentiaries resolved to call for a city-wide political strike:
Having heard the report of the representatives of factories and plants of Petrograd concerning the mood and demands of the worker masses, the Council of Plenipotentiaries notes with gratification that the withdrawal of the mass of workers from the government that falsely calls itself a government of workers is proceeding apace. The Council of Plenipotentiaries welcomes the readiness of workers to follow its appeal for a political strike. The Council of Plenipotentiaries calls on the workers of Petrograd vigorously to prepare the worker masses for a political strike against the current regime, which, in the name of the worker class, executes workers, throws them into prison, strangles freedom of speech, of press, of trade unions, [and] of strikes, which has strangled the popular representative body. This strike will have as its slogan the transfer of authority to the Constituent Assembly, the restoration of the organs of local self-government, the struggle for the integrity and independence of the Russian Republic.150
