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I told him I was particularly interested to hear what he could say in answer to the accusations made both by the Mensheviks and by the Extremists on the Left that control by the workers has become a dead letter, and that a time will come when the trades unions will move against the state organizations.
This Conference reaffirmed the revolutionary character of the Russian Trades Unions. At that time the dominant party in the Soviets was that of the Mensheviks, who were opposed to the formation of a Soviet Government, and were supporting the provisional Cabinet of Kerensky. The Trades Unions were actually at that time more revolutionary than the Soviets.
The Communists answer them by insisting that it is to everybody's interest to pull Russia through the crisis, and that if the Trades Unions were for such academic reasons to insist on their complete independence instead of in every possible way collaborating with the Government, they would be not only increasing the difficulties of the revolution in its economic crisis, but actually hastening that change which the Mensheviks, though they regard it as inevitable, cannot be supposed to desire.
Early in the morning the sailors rolled the machine gun with a deafening rumble over the cement floors of the long and half-dark corridors of the building. Out of the doors the frightened faces of the few S. R.'s and Mensheviks were looking and wondering. The Soviet held daily meetings in the Smolny and so did the Garrison Council.
They fear that agitation on these lines might well result in anarchy, which would leave the revolution temporarily defenceless against Kolchak, Denikin, Judenitch or any other armed reactionary. Their non-Communist enemies say of the Mensheviks: "They have no constructive programme; they would like a bourgeois government back again, in order that they might be in opposition to it, on the left"
The Extremists followed Marx and were called Social Democrats; but they had themselves split into two sections, the Bolsheviks or Maximalists and the Mensheviks or Minimalists; the former wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat, a complete inversion of the Tsardom consisting in the substitution of the tyranny of the bottom for the tyranny of the top, while the Mensheviks were willing to recognize the claims of other classes than the proletariat.
The Bolsheviks, as also the Socialists under the leadership of Lenin, with their Press, are taking a definite stand against any such offensive. But a great part of the Mensheviks as well, i.e.
Thus it comes about that the official organ of the Mensheviks, the Rabocaja Gazeta, is forced to take up an intermediate position, and publishes, for instance, frequent articles against the offensive. There is then the Social Revolutionary party, represented in the Cabinet by the Minister of Agriculture, Tschernow.
The Mensheviks object to the identification of the Trades Unions with the Government apparatus on the ground that when this change, which they expect comes about, the Trade Union movement will be so far emasculated as to be incapable of defending the town workers against the peasants who will then be the ruling class.
He said "No," but admitted that there was a danger lest the agitation of the Mensheviks or others might set fire to the discontent of the masses against the actual physical conditions, and end in pogroms destroying Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike. Their general theory was that Russia was not so far developed that a Socialist State was at present possible.
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