This, of course, was what the Mensheviks had been waiting for: workers, disenchanted with Bolsheviks, striking for democracy. Initially they did not favor the plenipotentiary movement because its leaders, suspicious of politicians, wanted independence from political parties. But by April they were sufficiently impressed to throw support behind the movement: on May 16, the Menshevik Central Committee called for the convocation of a nationwide conference of workers’ representatives.* 151 The SRs followed suit.
If the situation were reversed, with the socialists in power and the Bolsheviks in opposition, the Bolsheviks undoubtedly would have encouraged worker discontent and done all they could to topple the government. But the Mensheviks and their socialist allies had strong inhibitions against such behavior. They rejected the Bolshevik dictatorship and yet felt beholden to it. The Menshevik
It is essential, above all, to take into account the tragic fact that any violent liquidation of the Bolshevik coup will, at the same time, result inevitably in the liquidation of all the conquests of the Russian Revolution.152
After the Bolsheviks had disposed of the Constituent Assembly, the Menshevik organ lamented:
We did not belong and do not belong to the admirers of the Bolshevik regime, and have always predicted the bankruptcy of its foreign and domestic policies. But neither have we forgotten nor do we forget for an instant that the fate of our revolution is closely tied to that of the Bolshevik movement. The Bolshevik movement represents a perverted, degenerate revolutionary striving of the broad popular masses …153
Such an attitude not only paralyzed the Mensheviks’ will to act but made them into allies of the Bolsheviks, in that instead of fanning the flames of popular discontent, they helped put them out.*
When the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries reassembled on June 3, the Menshevik and SR intellectuals opposed the idea of a political strike, on the familiar grounds that it would play into the hands of the class enemy. They persuaded the workers’ representatives to reconsider their decision and, instead of striking, send a delegation to Moscow to explore the possibility of founding a similar organization there.
On June 7, a delegate from Petrograd addressed a gathering of Moscow factory representatives; he accused the Bolshevik Government of pursuing anti-labor and counterrevolutionary policies. Such talk had not been heard in Russia since October. The Cheka viewed the matter very seriously, for Moscow was now the country’s capital and unrest there was more dangerous than in “Red Petrograd.” Security agents seized the Petrograd delegate when he finished speaking, but were forced to release him under pressure from fellow workers. It transpired that Moscow labor, although sympathetic, was not yet ready to form its own Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries.154 This may be explainable by the fact that the labor force in Moscow and surrounding areas had lower skills and weaker traditions of trade unionism than the workers in Petrograd.
The process of worker disengagement from the soviets, begun in Petrograd, spread to the rest of the country. In many cities (Moscow was soon among them) where the local soviets were prevented from holding elections or where the elections had been disqualified, workers formed “workers’ councils,” “workers’ conferences,” or “assemblies of workers’ plenipotentiaries” free of government control and unaffiliated with any political party.
Faced with a rising tide of discontent, the Bolsheviks struck back. In Moscow on June 13, they took into custody fifty-six individuals affiliated with the plenipotentiary movement, all but six or seven of them workers.155 On June 16, they announced the convocation in two weeks of the Fifth Congress of Soviets, and in this connection instructed all soviets to hold new elections once again. Since such elections would certainly have again yielded Menshevik and SR majorities and placed the government in the position of an embattled minority at the Congress, Moscow moved to disqualify its rivals by ordering the expulsion of SRs and Mensheviks from all the soviets as well as from the CEC.156 At the caucus of the Bolshevik faction of the CEC, L. S. Sosnovskii justified the decree with the argument that the Mensheviks and SRs would overthrow the Bolsheviks just as the Bolsheviks had toppled the Provisional Government.* The only choice offered the voters, therefore, was among official Bolshevik candidates, Left SRs, and a broad category of candidates without party affiliation known as “Bolshevik sympathizers.”
