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By the time the Democratic Soviet, its ranks filled up with professional elements, became a Pre-Parliament, readiness to break with this institution had matured in our party. We were confronted with the question whether the S. R.'s would follow us in this path.
But they did not take into account a fact which had resulted from the Kornilovist insurrection: the natural distrust of the working masses in presence of all the non-Socialists, of those who not being in immediate contact with them placed themselves, were it ever so little, more on the right. The Democratic conference resulted in the formation of a Pre-Parliament.
In the Pre-Parliament Kerensky delivered a great speech, in which, stormily applauded by the bourgeois wing, he endeavored to conceal his impotence behind clamorous threats. The Staff made its last attempt at opposition. To all units of the garrison it sent out invitations to appoint two delegates to conferences concerning the removal of troops from the capital.
As a sacrifice to the left wing, the Center expelled Savinkof from the party, but hesitated to raise a hand against Kerensky. In the Pre-Parliament, the party showed signs of extreme disruption: three groups existed independently, though under the banner of one and the same party, but none of the groups knew exactly what it wanted.
Our party's declaration, proclaimed from the Pre-Parliament rostrum and explaining why we were breaking with this institution, was greeted with a howl of hatred and impotence on the part of the majority groups. But the point is that this is just what we intended. The prosecutors for the liberal bourgeoisie were right, when accusing us of striving to create a revolutionary situation.
Prominent Mensheviks and S. R.'s came to us as intermediaries, exhorted, threatened and foretold our doom and the doom of the Revolution. At this period the Smolny building was already completely in the hands of the Petrograd Soviet and of our party. The Mensheviks and the S. R.'s transferred their political activity to the Maryiinsky Palace, where the infant Pre-Parliament was already expiring.
The formal domination of this "party" in the Constituent Assembly would have meant only a continuation of political prostration. Before withdrawing from the membership in the Pre-Parliament where, according to Kerensky's and Tseretelli's political statistics, we were entitled to some half a hundred seats, we arranged a conference with the left S. R. group.
The bourgeois-fusionist press accused us of striving to kill prematurely the Pre-Parliament, for the very purpose of creating a revolutionary situation. At our faction meeting in the Pre-Parliament, it was decided to act independently and not wait for the left S. R.'s.
Their method of working through an artificially picked Pre-Parliament and a conjectural Constituent Assembly, had to be opposed by our political method of mobilizing the forces around the Soviets, through the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and through insurrection.
There the relations, between the forces in presence of each other, were about the same. Besides the Bolsheviki soon abandoned the Pre-Parliament, for they were already preparing their insurrection which curtailed the dissolution of that institution. "We are on the eve of a Bolshevik insurrection" such was, at this time, the opinion of all those who took part in political life.
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