All-Russian Democratic Conference

The immediate impetus was the Rebellion of Lavr Kornilov and the collapse of the next government coalition, provoked by him;[1] in a telegram inviting representatives of parties and public organizations to take part in the meeting, signed by the chairmen of the Central Executive Committees Nikolay Chkheidze and Nikolai Avksentiev, it was said about "convening in Petrograd a congress of the entire organized Democracy of Russia to create a strong revolutionary power capable of uniting all revolutionary Russia to repulse external enemies and to suppress all attempts at conquered freedom".

The purpose of the meeting, one of its initiators, Fedor Dan, a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, explained as follows: The idea of the Democratic Conference, convened after and in contrast to the National Conference in Moscow, was connected in the minds of its initiators with the consciousness of the need to form a homogeneous democratic government to replace a coalition government, a government with representatives of the bourgeoisie, which clearly began to fall apart after the notorious June offensive at the front and received a mortal wound in days of the Kornilov uprising.

The idea that guided us in convening the Democratic Conference was to try to create a democratic government based not only on those elements of revolutionary democracy, in the close sense of the word, which were concentrated in the Soviets, but also on those that had a solid base in cooperatives and local governments (city councils and zemstvos)... We were encouraged by the successes in rapprochement with this "non-Soviet" democracy, achieved at the State Conference in Moscow: as you know, after long disputes and wrangles, both cooperators and democratic representatives of zemstvos and cities signed a political and economic platform drawn up by the delegation of the Central Executive Committee and announced by Chkheidze on behalf of all democracy at a meeting of the Conference on August 14.

Among the invited were also the Ministers of the Provisional Government (Alexei Nikitin, Alexander Verkhovsky, Dmitry Verderevsky, Kuzma Gvozdev) and members of the diplomatic corps from the Allied powers.

The "Directory", temporarily replacing the disintegrated government, could only guess with whom it should create a coalition approved by the majority of the Conference.

In protest, the Bolsheviks left the meeting hall and began to develop plans to eliminate the "provisional power" and transfer it to the Soviets by establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The attitude to the Pre-Parliament, even during the period of the Democratic Conference, divided the Bolsheviks into "right" and "left": the former, headed by Lev Kamenev, looked for opportunities for the peaceful development of the revolution in it; the second, led by Leon Trotsky, believed that this representation, selected from above, not reflecting the real balance of power, was intended to replace the actual will of the people, to create support for a government that was unable to carry out the necessary reforms and did not want to end the war, and the participation of the Bolsheviks in the Pre-Parliament would not nothing but the support of the Provisional Government.

[9] However, the balance of power changed after Trotsky was supported by Vladimir Lenin, who was hiding in the underground (the leader of the Bolsheviks learned that the issue of boycott was discussed only on October 6, 1917).

Lenin stated that "the [Pre-Parliament's] sole purpose is to distract the workers and peasants from the growing revolution", and on October 12, 1917 called the decision of the Bolsheviks to participate in its work "a shameful" and a "blatant mistake".

During a detailed discussion of the situation with representatives of these groups, it turned out that they look at the program declaration signed in Moscow somewhat differently than I and a significant number of my closest comrades in the Central Executive Committee...