Nos. 6–7 Speeches at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies

6–22 June 1917

No. 6

‘On Relations with the Provisional Government’1 Session of 6 June 1917 (Evening)

Comrades! A great deal has been said here about dif- ferent anarchies, about various republics, our ­minister- socialists have spoken, and I would like to share a small historical recollection of the time when the cur- rent minister Tsereteli was not yet a minister, when he was in Irkutsk and was chairman of public organi- sations. At that time a government-commissar – with the same name as mine, Preobrazhensky – was on his way from here to Irkutsk, and today’s minister Tsereteli took part in drafting a programme sent to the Provi- sional Government that said they had no need for a commissar and that they requested he be returned. When my namesake went there and understood what had happened, he returned to Petrograd. Comrades, in the language of today’s minister Tsereteli, this is called anarchy. And I think, comrades, that minister Tsereteli

1. [From Rakhmetov (ed.) 1930, pp. 217–19.] 278 • The Preobrazhensky Papers: Archival Documents and Materials should have remembered this more frequently when he went to Kronstadt and there struggled against what he himself had done when he was not yet a minister. But that is trivial. In that same Irkutsk, whose representative, comrade Troitsky, spoke here, the eight-hour working day was enacted by a decree of the public organisations in which the current minister Tsereteli participated as chairman. This measure was also upheld by comrade Nikol’sky, who has so criticised the unfortunate here. This measure was implemented in all institutions, not only those working on defence, but the others too. It was implemented by way of a decree extending to the whole of Irkutsk province. There was a resolu- tion passed to raise wages by 50 percent. This was done not on the scale of the state, but by local anarchy: it was done in the local Irkutsk Republic. Comrades, you can judge what we are facing now on the basis of who did this. If people said of the previous government that we trust it ‘insofar as’, then let me tell you that there are many places in Russia where, even if they do not distrust the present ministry absolutely, they still say: ‘No support and no trust’. If in Tiflis, where comrade Zhordaniya is chairman of the of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, they say: we show this government support ‘insofar as’ – if there, out of local considerations, they find it necessary to implement a series of revolutionary measures, then how will the present government relate to them when this socialist screen of ministers shields it from pressure on the side of democracy? It will call this anarchy. This historical recollection says a great deal. It says that maybe we are on the eve of a decisive moment, on the eve of that moment when there is a beginning of so-called calming, the calming, after which, sometime and somewhere, we were promised reforms. I think that we are on the eve of a turning point in the and, perhaps, we will soon and definitively have to say that the Russian Revolution has ended, that the Russian Revolution has given the maximum that it can give. There is only the consolidation of isolated details, the nitpicking, as was said by one of the speakers, from which there is no moving forward. I am not a prophet and cannot make predictions, but on the basis of the situation that we see before us, I will say this: the threatening symptoms, this striving to direct all forces into a struggle against the Left, not paying attention to all that threatens from the Right – this circumstance worries me. People referred, here, to the example of the Great French Revolution. If you will peer into the past, then I say: there was a decisive victory there for revolu- tionary democracy, but how did it happen, and upon whom did this revolution- ary democracy depend in conducting its decisive measures? This revolutionary democracy was a genuinely revolutionary democracy, not the one that minis- ters are talking about in vain from this podium. This revolutionary democracy