He points out that the Communards had as their opponents in the National Assembly the monarchists, while we in the Constituent Assembly had against us Socialists, in the persons of the SRs, and the Mensheviks. A complete mental eclipse! Kautsky talks about the Mensheviks and the SRs, but forgets our sole serious foe – the Cadets. It was they who represented our Russian Thiers party – i.e., a bloc of property owners in the name of property: and Professor Miliukov did his utmost to imitate the “little great man.” Very soon indeed – long before the October Revolution – Miliukov began to seek his Galifet in the generals Kornilov, Alexeiev, then Kaledin, Krasnov, in turn. And after Kolchak had thrown aside all political parties, and had dissolved the Constituent Assembly, the Cadet Party, the sole serious bourgeois party, in its essence monarchist through and through, not only did not refuse to support him, but on the contrary devoted more sympathy to him than before.
The Mensheviks and the SRs played no independent role amongst us – just like Kautsky’s party during the revolutionary events in Germany. They based their whole policy upon a coalition with the Cadets, and thereby put the Cadets in a position to dictate quite irrespective of the balance of political forces. The Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik Parties were only an intermediary apparatus for the purpose of collecting, at meetings and elections, the political confidence of the masses awakened by the revolution, and for handing it over for disposal by the counter-revolutionary imperialist party of the Cadets – independently of the issue of the elections.
The purely vassal-like dependence of the SRs and Menshevik majority on the Cadet minority itself represented a very thinly-veiled insult to the idea of “democracy.” But this is not all.
In all districts of the country where the regime of “democracy” lived too long, it inevitably ended in an open coup d’état of the counter-revolution.