Avowed monarchists and such mild reformers and liberals as Lafayette were thus excluded from power, and France became a republic. But the final and critical defeat of the moderates in France is better placed on June 2, 1793. In matters of this sort, as in any splitting up of historical events into periods, there may be legitimate differences of interpretation. Conservatives, moderates, and radicals and extremists are not in any of our societies absolutely clear-cut and definite groups, nor is the transference of power from one to another very often a single event agreed upon by all to be such. You may feel that no moderate could have voted the end of the French monarchy. None the less it would seem that the right wing of the republicans, known to history as the Girondins, and to their contemporaries as the Brissotins, were really moderates upon whom circumstances forced actions to them disagreeably radical and extreme. Notably they did not wish the death of the King. They were mostly prosperous bourgeois, lawyers and intellectuals, and after the trial of the King in January, 1793, they became very sure that the revolution had gone far enough, that it ought to be stopped. Whatever their past, they had now become moderates. By the early months of 1793 they had lost control of the Paris Jacobin Club and with it most of the other revolutionary clubs and the whole network of organizations which had helped the radicals achieve their ends in the early days of the revolution. They could not command the support of the hesitating and more or less neutral mass of deputies in the Convention who were called the Plain. Their enemies were better organized, more aggressive, and perhaps more unscrupulous. They were certainly more successful.
Just as with the Presbyterians in England, there came the demand that these now moderate leaders be excluded from the Convention and brought under arrest. In a test of strength in the Convention on June 2, 1793, the extremists took care to surround the meeting-place of that body with sympathetic Parisian militiamen, back of whom assembled a large and hostile crowd. The Convention tried to stand on their representative dignity and to refuse to permit the arrest of the twenty-two members demanded by the Mountain. Headed by their president, they solemnly marched out to ensure that their position be respected as the embodiment of the will of the people. The deputies made the circuit of the gardens, finding an unyielding row of bayonets at every gate, and a “people” with a temporary will of its own. They returned indoors and voted the arrest of the twenty-two Girondins. The radical Montagnards were now in undisputed command.
Events moved rather faster in Russia, but their sequence is almost identical with those in England and in France. The first provisional government headed nominally by Prince Lvov, really by Miliukov, was made up mostly of Kadets, the left wing of middle-class groups in the old Duma, but no more than “progressives,” “liberals,” or “democrats” in Western political terminology. There were several representatives of more conservative groups, and only one Socialist, Kerensky. After a life of less than two months, this government broke down over the question of continuing an “imperialist” war on the side of the allies. Miliukov was forced out for too great compliance with the imperialism of the allies, and a number of Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries accepted positions in the new government. In July Kerensky took the formal leadership after a crisis, and in September the Kadets finally withdrew altogether, leaving Kerensky at the head of a very shaky moderate Socialist government.
The Socialists who thus consented to co-operate with bourgeois governments in the prosecution of the war were christened by the Bolsheviks “compromisist.” Such Socialists came from almost all the fractions into which this political faith had split in twentieth-century Russia, where the usual doctrinal differences within Marxism were complicated by those which looked back into Russian history for a peculiarly deep-seated Slavic village-communism. In the specific Russian situation, these Social-Revolutionaries, Trudoviks, Narodniks, Mensheviks, must be called moderates. They did not hope to introduce the dictatorship of the proletariat. They wanted to win the war, and they were willing to make use of parliamentary methods to secure social reforms. They had long been distrustful of the Kadets, but under the pressure of events they consented to co-operate with them. The Kadets themselves suffered the fate of the Puritan Episcopalians and the Feuillants; they were pushed out by their collaborators to the Left.
The Bolsheviks refused to take part in any of these governments. They insisted that the bourgeois revolution of February must sooner or later be followed by the proletarian revolution Marx had preached and predicted. Lenin, who returned from a Swiss exile in April to enjoy a few months of bourgeois freedom, decided that the proletarian revolution might be brought off in Russia. His party was by no means unanimously agreed, but his leadership kept the small band together, and the blunders of the compromisists, together with the heritage of defeat and disorganization, played into his hands. In July a premature rising of workers in Petrograd was apparently given local and reluctant leadership by some of the party, and its failure sent Lenin into hiding, and Trotsky and Lunacharsky to prison. The subsequent swing of the pendulum to the Right ended with the abortive attempt of General Kornilov to march on Petrograd, and in this whole process the Bolsheviks gradually acquired new courage and a new following. Lenin from hiding held a guiding hand. Trotsky was released, and elected president of a Petrograd soviet now in Bolshevik control. Lenin, back secretly in Petrograd, presided at a final meeting of the party Central Committee, and an insurrection was decided upon. In a masterly exhibition of revolutionary technique, a military revolution committee made sure of the Petrograd garrison, other groups contrived to hamstring the press and communications, and on the agreed day the Bolsheviks took over Petrograd with astonishingly little difficulty and almost no bloodshed. Even the siege of the Winter Palace, which forms the high point of the uprising, has a comic-opera touch. The October revolution in Petrograd was almost as bloodless as Pride’s Purge or June 2, 1793, the corresponding events in the English and French revolutions. In Moscow there was real fighting, but there, too, the Bolsheviks were successful within a week. Kerensky fled, and the rule of the moderates in Russia was over.
_III. Dual Sovereignty_
The Russian revolution affords the neatest example of a uniformity that lies beyond the somewhat superficial uniformity of sequence of power from conservatives to moderates to extremists, from Right to Center to Left. This is at once an institution and a process; or better, a process that works through a very similar set of institutions. Theorists and historians of the Russian revolution refer to it as the _dvoevlastie_, a word usually translated as dual power, but containing overtones that make it better translated, perhaps, as dual sovereignty. We must go briefly into the general situation to which this word refers.
The problem of sovereignty has long been in itself sufficient to keep hundreds of political philosophers busy and happy. Here once more, having other work to do, we must resign ourselves to abstention from these philosophical delights. In a normal Western society, it may well be difficult or impossible to locate any one person, or group of persons, who possesses the final, authoritative power to decide questions concerning what the society is to do. The pluralists would seem to be, from the point of view of description of social processes, quite right. Even the broader political policies of a modern state seem to be arrived at by so elaborately natural a process of adjusting the desires of conflicting groups, that to say that a single and identifiable “sovereign” determines these policies is nonsense. And yet in a normal society there is at least one co-ordinated chain of institutions through which conflicting groups do finally adjust their conflicts, for the moment at least, in action. That co-ordination may seem inefficient and irrational when academically analyzed, and it may well be so complicated that even the politicians who make it work do not understand it. For men are as often as not unaware of how they do things they do very successfully.
But it does work, and through it questions at issue are decided--or forgotten, which is also a kind of deciding. Those who do not like the decision may try to alter it by a very great variety of action, from agitation to conspiracy or sabotage. Socially powerful or numerous groups may under favoring conditions even go so far as to nullify a given decision: the example of the Eighteenth Amendment in the United States will occur to everyone. On the whole, however, the decisions become law, and overt disobedience becomes criminal.