Abstract
The bolshevik seizure of power and the resolution of the Congress of Soviets still left the question of government undecided. By 8 November the position of the Bolsheviks in the Congress was further consolidated. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, whose support of the rising had been somewhat hesitant, and who were strongly in favour of a coalition of all socialist parties, were finally won over to the bolshevik side by the bolshevik decision to adopt and to pass through the Congress their land decree. This complicated decree abolished private ownership for ever and re-distributed the land for the peasants’ use in accordance with a formula designed to secure to all an adequate standard of living. A left socialist revolutionary measure in all its detail,1 the decree ran counter to accepted bolshevik doctrines, in that it recognized that land would be held in usufruct for cultivation by individual peasants, and not as nationalized property by communal or collective bodies. But tactics demanded that the Bolsheviks should not appear to be taking power in complete isolation, and the support of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries was therefore essential to Lenin.2
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Notes
See a telegram of 10 November, quoted in Kostomarov, p. 198. There were also other arrests of socialists. For example, Burtsev, a leading Socialist Revolutionary, was arrested on the very day of the bolshevik revolution. He had not endeared himself by his activity for some months before it in exposing the alleged contacts of the bolshevik leaders with the Germans during the war and after their return to Russia. See V. L. Burtsev, Prestupleniya i nakazanie bol’sheuikov, Paris n.d., p. 65.
Proletarskaya revolyutsiya, no. 10 (1922), pp. 465–70. And cf. Molotov’s report the following day in the Petrograd Committee: ‘In our party only some of our comrades attached importance to these discussions’ (on coalition)—Pervyy Leg. Komitet, pp. 339–42.
The protocol of this meeting was omitted when the collected protocols of the Petrograd Committee for 1917 were published in 1927. The proof sheet immediately reached Trotsky from one of his supporters and he later published it in facsimile in Byulleten’ oppozitsii, no. 7 (1929), pp. 30–2, and reprinted it in his Stalinskaya shkola, pp. 116–31. Comparison of the type with that of the published edition leaves little doubt that it is genuine. The facsimile bears a large fat question mark against a passage in Lenin’s speech which refers with praise to Trotsky’s attitude on coalition. In the same pencil is noted in the corner of the proof sheet ‘scrap’.
Proletarskaya revolyutsiya, no. 10 (1922), p. 476. On Moscow generally, see I. Stukov in Oktyabr’skie dni v Moskve i rayonakh, pp. 18, 22; and Dokumenty velikoy proletarskoy revolyutsii, Vol. I, pp. 140–1. The Moscow City Committee (which was generally right wing and included Rykov and Nogin) supported the Kamenev-Zinoviev view—see Krasnyy arkhiv, Vols. LIV–LV, 1932, pp. 151, 130. They sent Ignatov as delegate to Petrograd to support their view.
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© 1977 Leonard Schapiro
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Schapiro, L. (1977). The Consolidation of Power. In: The Origin of the Communist Autocracy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09509-4_5
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