The Mensheviks and the February Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the chapter dissects the political dynamics immediately following the February Revolution, arguing that the initial dominance of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) in the Soviets was not a reflection of genuine popular will but a product of the revolution’s specific social composition and the political backwardness of the newly awakened masses. The core narrative thrust is that the sheer weight of the peasantry, flooding into political life through the army and a skewed electoral system that gave soldiers disproportionate representation, overwhelmed the more class-conscious proletariat. This peasant sea, politically untutored and illiterate, naturally gravitated toward the “intellectuals” and “gentlemen who know how to speak” of the moderate socialist parties, submerging the Bolsheviks.
The chapter makes several key claims. First, the Menshevik leadership—Dan, Chkheidze, Tsereteli—was dominated by its right-wing “defencist” faction, which supported the war. The left “Internationalist” wing, represented by Martov and Martynov, was paralysed by its refusal to break with the right and thus played no independent role, with its best elements eventually absorbed by the Bolsheviks. Second, the Mensheviks and SRs were terrified of the revolution’s potential and sought from the first to hand power to the bourgeoisie, the “natural” leaders of society. Third, the Petrograd proletariat itself had been diluted by wartime influxes of raw, inexperienced workers, lacking the traditions of the 1905 veterans. The chapter draws heavily on Trotsky’s analysis, quoting him at length to explain that the proletariat, remembering the isolation of 1905, was susceptible to the SR and Menshevik ideology out of a fear of being divorced from the peasantry.
The chapter’s polemic is directed squarely at the Menshevik and SR leaders, whom it portrays as self-appointed, terrified, and actively sabotaging the revolution. It also polemicises against the “shamefaced defencists” like Chkheidze, Sukhanov, and Steklov, who advocated for the Soviet to “control” the bourgeois government from outside rather than take power—an attempt to “combine fire and water” that anticipated the later German centrist position. This line is explicitly linked to the later positions of Stalin and Kamenev. The argument that the working class could not transform society “on its own” is dismissed as a “dismal litany” used by reformists to convince workers of their powerlessness. The chapter concludes that the “dual power” regime was an “abortion” born of the masses’ lack of consciousness, not of any objective impossibility of the Soviet taking power.