The position of the Right Social Revolutionaries is a good
deal more complicated than that of the Mensheviks.
In their later declarations they are as far from their
romantic anarchist left wing as they are from their
romantic reactionary extreme right. They stand,
as they have always stood, for a Constituent Assembly, but
they have thrown over the idea of instituting a Constituent
Assembly by force. They have come into closer contact
with the Allies than any other party to the left of the Cadets.
By doing so, by associating themselves with the Czech
forces on the Volga and minor revolts of a reactionary
character inside Russia, they have pretty badly
compromised themselves. Their change of attitude towards
the Soviet Government must not be attributed to any change
in their own programme, but to the realization that the
forces which they imagined were supporting them were
actually being used to support something a great deal
further right. The Printers' Gazette, a non-Bolshevik
organ, printed one of their resolutions, one point of which
demands the overthrow of the reactionary governments
supported by the Allies or the Germans, and another
condemns every attempt to overthrow the Soviet
Government by force of arms, on the ground that such
an attempt would weaken the working class as a whole and
would be used by the reactionary groups for their own
purposes.
Volsky is a Right Social Revolutionary, and was President
of that Conference of Members of the Constituent
Assembly from whose hands the Directorate which ruled in
Siberia received its authority and Admiral Kolchak his
command, his proper title being Commander of the Forces
of the Constituent Assembly. The Constituent Assembly
members were to have met on January 1st of this year, then
to retake authority from the Directorate and organize a
government on an All-Russian basis. But there was
continual friction between the Directorate and the
Conference of members of the Constituent Assembly, the
Directorate being more reactionary than they. In November
came Kolchak's coup d'=82tat, followed by a declaration
against him and an appeal for his overthrow issued by
members of the Constituent Assembly. Some were arrested
by a group of officers. A few are said to have been killed.
Kolchak, I think, has denied responsibility for this, and
probably was unaware of the intentions of the
reactionaries under his command. Others of the members
escaped to Ufa. On December 5th, 25 days before that
town was taken by the Bolsheviks, they announced their
intention of no longer opposing the Soviet Government in
the field. After the capture of the town by the Soviet
troops, negotiations were begun between the
representatives of the Conference of Members of the
Constituent Assembly, together with other Right Social
Revolutionaries, and representatives of the Soviet
Government, with a view to finding a basis for agreement.
The result of those negotiations was the resolution passed
by the Executive Committee on February 26th (see page
166). A delegation of the members came to Moscow, and
were quaintly housed in a huge room in the Metropole,
where they had put up beds all round the walls and big
tables in the middle of the room for their deliberations. It
was in this room that I saw Volsky first, and afterwards in
my own.
I asked him what exactly had brought him and all that he
represented over from the side of Kolchak and the Allies to
the side of the Soviet Government. He looked me
straight in the face, and said: "I'll tell you. We were
convinced by many facts that the policy of the Allied
representatives in Siberia was directed not to strengthening
the Constituent Assembly against the Bolsheviks and the
Germans, but simply to strengthening the reactionary forces
behind our backs."
He also complained: "All through last summer we were
holding that front with the Czechs, being told that there
were two divisions of Germans advancing to attack us, and
we now know that there were no German troops in Russia
at all."
He criticized the Bolsheviks for being better makers of
programmes than organizers. They offered free electricity,
and presently had to admit that soon there would be no
electricity for lack of fuel. They did not sufficiently base
their policy on the study of actual possibilities. "But that
they are really fighting against a bourgeois dictatorship is
clear to us. We are, therefore, prepared to help them in
every possible way."
He said, further: "Intervention of any kind
will prolong the regime of the Bolsheviks by
compelling us to drop opposition to the Soviet Government,
although we do not like it, and to support it because it is
defending the revolution."
With regard to help given to individual groups or
governments fighting against Soviet Russia, Volsky said
that they saw no difference between such intervention and
intervention in the form of sending troops.
I asked what he thought would happen. He answered in
almost the same words as those used by Martov, that life
itself would compel the Bolsheviks to alter their policy or
to go. Sooner or later the peasants would make their will
felt, and they were against the bourgeoisie and against the
Bolsheviks. No bourgeois reaction could win permanently
against the Soviet, because it could have nothing to offer,
no idea for which people would fight. If by any chance
Kolchak, Denikin and Co. were to win, they would have to
kill in tens of thousands where the Bolsheviks have had to
kill in hundreds, and the result would be the complete ruin
and the collapse of Russia in anarchy. "Has not the
Ukraine been enough to teach the Allies that even six
months' occupation of non-Bolshevik territory
by half a million troops has merely the effect of
turning the population into Bolsheviks?"